The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Raw material: two women in their forties. Lynda’s body was born for fashionable clothes; when stripped all bones and hollows, but thin, tall, pliable. Martha, was shorter, more stocky. But she was in a thin phase again. She would do. Martha’s greying hair, short, blondish, was dyed to a dull silver, as if she were choosing to go white: rather amusing really. And Lynda’s dry mass of near grey hair was transformed into a sleek bronze mane.

  Yes, they would both do. They stood in Paul’s room, before Paul’s great mirror, and looked at themselves as neither had done for a long time, using that special eye which is not focused towards what a lover, a husband, friends may enjoy, or want you to wear, but outwards to fashion.

  It was Paul who pointed out that Lynda had clothes put away dating back for three decades, and that to buy clothes was absurd. For already, in the early sixties, London had begun that extraordinary whirling dance, as if the fashions of fifty years had been flung up in the air together, like dead leaves in a wind, and it did not matter what anyone wore; or, if you like, it was like a newsreel cut to come together anyhow, picking out fashions of the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the Edwardians, the Victorians at random, and without any logic but that inner desperation which was the real appetite of the time. Clothes parodied, reminisced, were like private fantasies; they mocked, peacocked, and joked; and Lynda and Martha handed half a hundred dresses to Paul, who told a dressmaker what to do with them.

  Thus, though briefly, they became fashionable women.

  Now all they needed was guests.

  About guests and hosts: it is an interesting fact that there are very few of either. If one says to a man who one has heard has spent every evening for months with the current fashionable people: ‘I hear you’re an “in” person these days, ’ he is almost bound to reply: ‘Me? Goodness no, I’m almost a hermit…’ For whatever forays he has made into fashionable haunts have been in search of information, like a detached sociologist; or in pursuit of a new mistress; or to save a friend’s soul from perdition: ‘Really, oughtn’t you to be working rather than … forgive me, but admiring your talent as I do …’ Which is why for nearly a decade foreigners made pilgrimages to London to share its brief moment of glitter and style, but seldom found it, for the half a thousand people who composed it were only spending their time agreeably with intimate friends.

  Similarly, there are few real hostesses. Margaret arranged her life, her marriages, her houses, to accommodate people who, temporarily, had clinging about them that light which is generated by other people’s envy: but she was angry with anyone who suggested this. ‘I never had in my house anyone I didn’t like and I hope I never will!’

  For the half-dozen months then, when the house in Radlett Street became a place where people were invited, it could be said that the Coldridges were among the very few real or deliberate hosts in London.

  Their guests were (but the house became known as a place where one never knew who one was going to meet): Margaret’s old friends, the literary warriors of the Cold War, already back ‘in’ chiefly because of the cachet that now attached to possibly having been friendly with, or at least having known, or met, one of the famous spies; her new friends, the ‘wave’ or ‘wind’ or impulse from the late fifties; the pop-singers and impresarios, the hairdressers and the restaurateurs-through Paul; the columnists and commentators from Press and television, the semi-literary, semi-political figures-through Graham Patten; the solid stratum of left-wing politicians, through Phoebe, and Phoebe’s ex-husband Arthur; with the organizers of this or that protest, March, Relief Fund, Famine Relief Organization … all these people, flowed together, in and out of this house and the dozen or so houses like it, which had, like private extensions, the half-dozen restaurants, clubs, bars, which they frequented, had put up money for, and were run by friends.

  Certain beliefs united them. One was that they were all absolutely unlike each other, since they came from various classes and one or two countries. This meant that they met with that curiosity held in check by well-exercised aggression that is the first requisite for falling in love. Another was that social history had begun in 1956, or 7, or 8 (the starred years that had given birth to this epoch), for already the new film makers, playwrights, cinema stars, editors who had risen on that wave dominated everything and the rapidness and ease of this ascent had created a mood of good-natured optimism about the future: it was extraordinary that this mood infected even people who had every reason to know better-Phoebe, for instance; the responsible left. Thirdly, they tended to see the whole world, let alone all of Britain, through themselves, or behaved as if they did. It was a kind of self-hypnosis; as if the city were an enchanted wood, and anyone entering it lost his senses. The fact that outside these few thousand people London had not changed, was forgotten as one stepped inside the magic wood.

  Where, as in fairy stories, the most extraordinary contradictions lived side by side. Graham Patten, for instance, was still a Marxist, and fond of saying that ‘everything is run by the dozen men who were in my year at Oxford and Cambridge’. He said this with pride. As his father might have said, or as Mark’s father might have said. Which did not prevent him and everybody else saluting the new classlessness, which meant that some talents from the provinces or from the lower classes had been attracted to London and had been absorbed-exactly as has always happened.

  For what distinguished this stratum of a few thousand people was its uniformity: in approaching it, you had to become like everyone else. It was a sub-society working like one of those great drums where pebbles are jarred and shaken together to smooth and polish them into likeness; it was like homogenized milk.

  Apparently it was a scene of debate, competition, violently clashing interests. Great business entities fought: but they worked together behind the scenes, and employed the same firms, or people. The newspapers that remained might call themselves Right, Left, or Liberal, but the people who wrote for them were interchangeable, for these people wrote for them all at the same time, or in rapid succession. The same was true of television: the programmes had on them the labels of different companies, or institutions, but could not be told apart, for the same people organized and produced and wrote and acted in them. The same was true of the theatre. It was true of everything.

  The rubbing down process went so fast, everything went so fast, it was as if somewhere, invisibly, a time switch had been altered, for processes were speeded up that previously worked slowly through years. Once, for instance, a word, a phrase, or an idea, might be ‘in the air’ and then take five years or so to move through Press, dinner-tables, radio, book reviews, jokes. Now the opinion, the catch-phrase, the idea, might appear one week, and have blazed itself out by the next. Meanwhile hundreds of mouths proclaimed this new truth with the same solemn, soft, sincere gaze; for it was an opinion bound to reflect the highest credit on the beholder, everyone being at this time so impeccably high-minded.

  Indeed, inside the enchanted circle it was hard to believe that unpleasantness could exist anywhere else, let alone exist here ever again.

  Oh how charming everything was! How urbane! How tolerant! What enchanting clothes people wore! What good cooks we were, what food we ate! How delightful that in any room were bound to be half a dozen black or coloured people, exactly the same as ourselves, and half a dozen working-class people, all as talented and as progressive, everyone effortlessly harmonious … which fact in itself seemed to proclaim the truth that soon, when the Labour Party got in, anybody at all, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, man, woman, Negro or docker, would have all the benefits of society that previously were associated with somebody like Mark Coldridge or like Graham Patten.

  But it was Graham Patten, of all the personalities around London in that decade, who was most consistently its exemplar. As affable, as witty as ever, he was around not only ‘London’ but the similar strata of New York, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, all of which valued that quality so peculiarly his, of being the social equivalent of a p
iece of litmus paper, or a geiger counter. Which is not to say that he was a chameleon-rather that, on achieving young manhood, he had foreseen the London which he was to personify, and had become that before London sensed its destiny. Other people, styles, modes, adapted to him. Since he was fifteen, he had been a dandy: it was not long before men everywhere became peacocks and cavaliers and dandies; ‘London’ became socialist, which he remained. Following him, ‘London’ became tenderly tolerant of absolutely everything. And. having understood that what he had once considered a failing was in fact his strength, he developed his versatility. He put on plays, directed them, acted in them; he advised other directors what to put on and criticized them when they erred. He wrote books, some witty and heartless, others sincere and forward-looking. He started a restaurant, where one of his mistresses cooked, called ‘The Daisy Chain’; and had money in many boutiques. His emotional life was as vivid, for besides having been married a couple of times, he was continually most painfully in love with the newest arrival in London, of whatever sex or colour.

  But his real forte was television for which he tended to apologize. ‘Yes, I know, but one must take it for what it is …’ Yet it was here that he really touched the pulse of now, where he offered what no one else had ever done, or could, particularly in a programme which consisted of discussions with various of his friends, well-known and associated with the arts. It was here, in this programme and the many variations of it, that there was reached the culmination of that attitude towards the arts born in the first half of the nineteenth century which was essentially a need to identify with the life of the artist. Hard to see how much better this particular need can be fed than to be able to watch, week after week, artists of every kind, writers, painters, musicians, and so on (or when the supply of these failed, ‘personalities’ of one sort or another), sitting around in a make-believe drawing-room, playing a charade which consists of pretending the cameras don’t exist, but that they are a group of close friends living for free, passionate, liberal inquiry and that they have chosen just this moment to discuss their thoughts aloud. Here, people who had met half an hour before in the preliminary discussion about the programme, or under the make-up girl’s hands (How do you? How do you? -in the mirror), called each other by their first names and discussed the most private details of their lives as if alone with intimates. They were like privileged children at a party where poor children looked through a window to marvel and envy. But the watching children no longer envied, on the contrary, it was a form of contempt, for it was they who paid for the party, and chose these performers who would act out for them their fantasies; and if the performers were prepared to use their own lives (a form of sacrifice) in the acting of the fantasies-so much the better, and what did it matter?

  For it was on television that had been created a continuous commentary or mirror of ‘real’ life. To switch on the set when the day’s viewing started, with one’s mind slightly turned down, or in a bit of a fever, or very tired, and to watch, steadily, through the hours, as little figures, diminished people, dressed up like cowboys or like bus drivers or like Victorians, with this or that accent, in this or that setting, sometimes a hospital, sometimes an office or an aircraft, sometimes ‘real’ or sometimes imaginary (that is to say, the product of somebody’s, or some team’s imagination), it was exactly like what could be seen when one turned one’s vision outwards again towards life: it was as if an extreme of variety had created a sameness, a nothingness, as if humanity had said ‘yes’ to becoming a meaningless flicker of people dressed in varying kinds of clothes to kill each other (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) or play various kinds of sport, or discuss art, love, sex, ethics (in ‘play’ or in ‘life’). For after an hour or so, it was impossible to tell the difference between news, plays, reality, imagination, truth, falsehood. If someone—from a year’s exile in a place without television, let alone a visitor from Mars, had dropped in for an evening’s ‘viewing’ then he might well have believed that this steady stream of little pictures, all so consistent in tone or feel, were part of some continuous single programme written or at least ‘devised’ by some boss director who had arranged, to break monotony, slight variations in costume, or setting (office, park, ballet, school, aircraft, war), and with a limited team of actors-for the same people had to play dozens of different roles.

  It was all as bland and meaningless as steamed white bread; yet composed of the extremes of nastiness in a frenzy of dislocation, disconnection, as if one stood on a street corner and watched pass half a dozen variations of the human animal in a dozen different styles of dress and face, as little Amanda Coldridge (who would soon be Francis’s legal stepdaughter) might experience a walk down the street to the shops, flick flick flick, the great lumbering many-dressed creatures walked or ran or talked their way past among a clatter and a roar of metal objects while á four-legged furry creature higher than she was that smelled strong and rank ran between their legs and lifted one of its own to spurt out a yellowish smelly liquid on a corner of damp brick. A minute child with enormous dark eyes fringed by curling black lashes in a face of brown cream (she was all shades of delicious brown set off in a white dress and white shoes) hung tight on the hand of a fair-haired. blue-eyed roses-and-milk English girl who pushed a pram with her other hand; and people passing flicked their eyes down at her, then up at her mother, eyes suddenly narrowed or sharp or commenting, or bent to smile with all their lips and teeth offered to her, flick flick flick, they passed by; and it was the same inside at home, when Amanda sat in the great chair opposite that part of the wall where pictures flicked past all day. Her mother sat near nursing the new baby. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, ’ she cried, ‘look at me, take notice of me, smother or throw away that baby that I love so much, ’ and Jill said: ‘Look at that lovely horse on the telly, darling, ’ as she swung the new baby from one large sweet breast to the other. Then in came Francis who was not her daddy. ‘No, he’s not your daddy, Frankie’s your daddy, ’ and Francis came over, swung her up, and held her with a great spurt of tender love that enclosed them safe, safe, while they sat together watching the little pictures flick past. ‘Goodness, ’ said Jill, ‘he’s in form tonight, ’ as Arthur Coldridge, cut-and-thrusting, bending forward in the energy of argument, came and went among the pictures on the screen. ‘Who’s that? ’ ‘That’s my daddy.’ ‘My daddy? ’ ‘No, my daddy the bastard.’ Or, as a face appeared whose mouth twisted and moved and combated: ‘Phoebe Coldridge, one of the candidates for …’ ‘Goodness, look at her, ‘ said Jill; and Francis-not-her-daddy who loved her said quickly: ‘I think she’s doing it rather well.’ ‘Oh she always does, the old cow, ’ and as the baby started crowing or laughing somewhere in the room behind the great chair, ‘Oh God, tum that damned machine oft, ’ and Amanda sets up a wail, ‘No, no, no, I want, I want to …’ ‘Oh leave it then, I’ve got to make her supper anyway. Are you staying for supper, Francis? ’ ‘No, I’ve got to be back at the theatre.’ ‘See you then, ’ ‘See you, love.’ Off goes Francis the man who comes and goes, he’s gone, flick, but in comes, flick, a tall lady who smells like sweets and jam, she’s-your-granny-Lynda, and she drops chocolates, bottles of fruit syrup, frozen chickens, flowers, just like the adverts on the telly, in a heap on a table and then off she goes, flick. ‘Where’s my granny, Mummy? ’ ‘She’s gone home, darling.’ Flick, flick, faces, people, animals. dressed, undressed, carrying cauliflowers or drinking milk out of mugs with telly pictures on them or killing each other with guns or kissing, the same faces over and over again, as if at an enormous fancy dress party the hostess had asked all the guests to put on the same mask at the door, just very slightly different, so that one twisted in a grimace can be either LAUGHTER or TEARS or ι LOVE YOU or DIE, flick, flick, like the faces of the people who for that short period before Lynda cracked up again came to luncheons and dinners and teas at Radlett Street, ghosts tossed up like foam on the top of a wave, charming, urbane, friendly intelligent ghosts, so beautifully dressed
, so marvellously equipped for a life of good talking and good living and good thinking.

  Food, food, food-and clothes. Clothes and furniture. Make-up and clothes and food and the decoration of houses.

  Fifteen, ten, seven, years before, Martha (and those like her) had patrolled a London which was full of damped-down, deprived, graceless people and watched for a gleam of colour, or flash of taste, or panache, or flair; had dreamed of just that one restaurant where real food was served, of clothes even half as good as one could imagine. Now she wondered to what extent this hunger had been responsible for ‘London’ in the ‘sixties, which thought, or so it seemed, of nothing, ever, but food and clothes.

  Discussing food, clothes, art, and politics, the three hosts blended with their guests and were in no way astonishing to anyone but themselves. Lynda, particularly, was the success. She was accepted as normal by people who, who if they had heard of her at all, knew of her as a painful half-secret.

  ‘You see, Lynda, you’ve been such a dark horse, but I’ve told them, you’re just a little nutty sometimes, you shouldn’t mind, because everyone is, these days …’ That was Paul, smoothing her way.

  But even if being nuts from time to time is a part of everyone’s life these days it was odd that these highly talented and insightful people were able to take Lynda entirely on the level she chose to present. She was a tall, rather silent, smiling woman, who wore extravagantly beautiful clothes and, invariably, long coloured gloves (very smart, that) and if she departed from her own party for half an hour, to make a telephone call, that was what she was doing; and her look of wide strain … well, she had drunk too much, very likely. Yes, certainly Lynda must drink. But then, who didn’t?

  On one or two occasions, she did not crack so much as fray slightly, and became rather scatty and pattering in speech; but, covering up, Mark and Martha discovered that there was no need to cover up. A discovery not without importance.