The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Nearly a month had been spent in the basement. The ordinary world was extraordinary: lovely or grotesque, everything shone out in recognition to their newly washed eyes.

  They wished to surprise Mark by their return to humanity but he was not in the study.

  Lynda’s hair, in a graceful chignon, was coloured strawberry-roan. Her eyes, enormous now, were enhanced by silver, jade-green, ash-grey salves. Her make-up made the most of the prominent facial bones of her skull. The weeks of near starvation had rendered her breastless and removed her buttocks, but in a ‘twenties dress that had been her mother’s, of sage-green chiffon whose skirt descended from her knee on one side-the right, to her ankle on the other, in a diagonal of jagged points, like the serrated edge of a leaf, and with a foot-long cigarette holder in pale silver that matched her elbow-length silver-grey gloves, she looked both extremely fashionable, and beautiful in an intriguingly damaged way.

  Martha’s hair was light brown, cut as was the new mode since she had been immolated in the basement, in a short glossy helmet shape. A look of health had always, she felt, suited her; and her face was tinted with a very faint rose with a hint of apricot. Her eyes were emphatic with gummed-on eye-lashes an inch and a half long, in mink-colour, and her eye-paint was pale cinnamon and black. Making the most of every minute of her being excessively thin, with great hollows about her collar bones and hips, she wore an Edwardian blouse with a boned collar in cream net, and a trailing garnet-coloured skirt in taffeta, so tight she could only stand or sit gingerly on the edge of chairs; the waist was twenty inches. This had belonged to Margaret’s elder sister. She had to stuff her bra with rolled stockings in order to achieve the authentic low nursing bosom.

  While waiting for Mark, they drank his best brandy, and studied various new dispositions of the material on his walls. Mostly to do with the spread of mental illness and the lack of facilities for dealing with it. The leaves from Dorothy’s diaries had been moved to the areas near the ceiling from whence it seemed, rockets and space ships took off to chart stars and/or study the possibilities of how to kill and damage as many human beings as possible. By standing on a chair Martha read: ‘Again rang the Gas Board. Said they would send a man. Time spent on getting a connection: twelve minutes. Told them to ring before coming. Nobody came. Next Day. Rang to ask when man was coming. Time to get through, eight minutes. Girl said she did not know: once she had reported work, out of her hands. I had to go out. Was out two hours: man came while away. Lynda asleep-not well. Rang Gas Board. Girl said she would remind. Asked them to telephone first. Next day. Man came nine o’clock. Looked at freezing cabinet door. Said he would report it. Went. Next day, rang Gas Board. Girl said would inquire. Afternoon another man came. Said would inform makers of fridge, not their responsibility. Would take two weeks. Three weeks later. Rang Gas Board to ask. (Their line engaged, took twenty minutes’.) Girl said once firm informed out of her hands. Suggested I ring Firm. Rang Firm. Could not get anybody. Said branch that sent men around in Eating. Would remind. Asked them to ring before coming. Two days later. Man came when Lynda and I out. Rang Gas Board and firm. Five days later. Man came from Firm. Said would supply new door to freezing cabinet. Cost thirty shillings. Asked why should pay for new door to cabinet, shouldn’t have broken, only three years old. He said, off record, this design obsolete, no good, fridge redesigned. Suggested I buy a new one. I said no. He said he would bring new door when ordered. Ten days later. Came with door: wrong size. Suggested I should run fridge without door to freezing cabinet: would work without, but more expensive to run. I said no, must have door. Two days later. Came with door. Next day. Door wrongly done. Fell off, and cracked. Rang firm. No record of transaction. Tried Firm’s branch. Said young man transferred to branch Acton. Told them. Said would send a man …’

  This fragment was stuck next to an account of some rocket in the States that had failed to leave a launching pad.

  There was one epic, poor Dorothy’s masterpiece, which was fifty-odd pages single-spaced foolscap detailing the matter of the new cooker that had been delivered with a defective door, and which involved the visits of twenty-odd men, three months of time and a near explosion when a mechanic switched on something that a previous mechanic had just connected wrongly.

  There was accumulated mail.

  A letter said the house was going to be compulsorily purchased for demolition, or redevelopment.

  Another from Maisie said:

  ‘My dear Matty! Remember your old pal? Yes, it’s me! Life is much the same. But I’m at Gokwe now. Did you hear-I was married? What do you know! Well, when you’re married you wish you weren’t married and you forget all your loneliness when you had no one to hold and cherish. Are you all right these days? This is to say my Rita is coming to visit England. Can she stay with you? If inconvenient, do not hesitate to say so. She is a good girl if I say it myself. She is looking forward very much to meeting you. I often tell her about the old days and all the good times we had when we were young.

  Well, that’s all for now.

  Maisie Canfield

  (His name is Denis, Denny for short.)

  There were also some sheets of paper on Mark’s desk headed: Memorandum to Myself. But he had only got so far with it:

  ‘It is now clear that in the next decade or two it will be a question of the human race’s survival-but survival from certain hazards not at the moment envisaged, since the coming catastrophe is as little foreseen in the form which it will actually take, as the previous wars. We can assume that governments will react as in the past; and that it will be the responsibility of individuals to forecast, plan, make provision for …’

  That was as far as he had got. Soon Paul came in, agreeably surprised to see them: Uncle Mark had asked him to keep an eye on them for him, as he had gone off on some urgent trip-to Scotland he thought.

  They both looked absolutely enchanting: had they been at health farms? No? They really must allow him to take them both out to dinner that very moment.

  Paul was just the person Martha wanted to see: if she was to achieve some weeks in privacy to be as eccentric as she pleased, without benefit of society’s watchdogs, then she needed someone with a house, or a flat.

  He took them to the Café Royal-dressed like that, said he, they could go nowhere else: they would be a sensation. They looked as if they were characters from two different novels: Lynda he thought, had a look of Women in Love, while Martha looked like a New Woman from Bernard Shaw.>

  Chapter Three

  Among Martha’s contemporaries there was no single person, or group of people to whom she could say: Give me privacy to explore my own being: promise not to summon doctors and psychiatrists, policemen. Who then were these younger people to whom she could say, and so easily, just that?

  Paul’s house was now full. (So was another of his-also partly owned, as was this.)

  There were about twenty people in it, mostly single though there was a married couple with two children in the basement. He had been an alcoholic, from time to time still was, and this made it hard for him to keep jobs. He earned his living as a carpenter, since his real career, which was to be an architect had foundered in alcoholism. He paid Paul no rent, but looked after the house. His name was Briggs; he had the careful watchful manner of those who have an inner enemy on a tight chain; and his face (pleasant, friendly, though permanently tinged with a reminiscent flush, like a sunset sky) changed not at all when she told him her requirements. Paul had of course already asked that she should be left alone. He thought she wished to experiment with drugs, and offered the remark that he was sorry drugs had not been ‘the scene’ when alcohol had beguiled him. She said no, she was not interested in drugs; but he nodded as if to say: Quite right, one has to be careful what one admits. This turned out to be the passport under which she was able to travel in this house: person after person came to her to say that they had smoked marijuana, hash; or taken LSD or mescalin; or took them sometimes; or, proposed to try these th
ings out when circumstances were favourable; or had friends who did. She was given a great deal of friendly advice, and offers of help. The people who were on the same floor and beneath (she was at the top of the house) were naturally of greatest interest. Under her were two young women with jobs in market research. Both had breakdowns from time to time, when they looked after each other, under the care of a doctor who kept them supplied with sedatives. One was Rose, one was Molly; they both looked drained, tired: they were people who found even the ordinary processes of life too much to manage; they did manage, but with nothing much left over. They said to Martha that if she wanted anything she must knock on the floor three times, but otherwise she would be left alone. It turned out that she did once, on a peak of terror because of the Self Hater, knock on the floor, but luckily they were not in. She did not see them again until she went to thank them as she left.

  Sharing a room in the young women’s flat was a sad and polite couple, a boy and a girl. But it turned out they were married. She had been pregnant at school. This boy had married her: he loved her, he said, and would be happy to bring up the child. This baby was born into a bed-sitting-room in Islington. It never stopped crying. The boy one night hit the baby. It died a week later. A welfare worker and a doctor hushed the thing up. The boy became a Roman Catholic. The girl was again pregnant (from intention, not by accident) and they were both pleased: they loved children, they kept explaining to everyone. They were not yet twenty years old. He worked as a packer in a chemical firm. During Martha’s progress through the Stations of the Cross towards the end of her stay in this house, he came into the room and was satisfied by what she said about her inner processes that she must be a convert like himself. She had to be careful to substitute the name of God for the Devil who in fact accompanied her on her journey; so much value there is in one word. That God hated, tormented, and punished her so seemed to him a sign of Grace: that the Devil might frighten him into an offer to call a priest.

  In the large room across the landing lived Zena. Paul had paid for lessons in voice production. She sang sometimes in a club or at a private party. Not very well: it was herself she cleverly produced and marketed; herself that other people needed so much she did not have to do more than be there, on öfter. Her effaced obliterated quality, her frightened sexuality, a brave passivity, was so much to a current taste that she was known to ‘everyone’. She was in fact a type of courtesan. Many gentlemen prepared to pay highly for their pleasures paid to accompany her to parties, to be seen publicly with this girl who was The Victim incarnate. She might even sleep with them, but without any pretence of enjoyment. Her attitude was: If you enjoy what so wearies me then please, I should be delighted … Given presents of money or jewels she spent or used, or gave away, or left lying about, or lost. She did not care. Caring about absolutely nothing, she drifted, smiling her sweet lost smile. This room was her private refuge, her own room. No one came here but Paul. Several times during Martha’s stay in the house she came in late at night with a cup of coffee. ‘Paul asked me to see if you were all right, Martha? Good-I’ll go then.’

  Also across the landing was Bob Parrinder who was altogether more prepared to be involved. He was about twenty-seven, tall, and very thin … but it is easier to say that if Lynda were male, she would look like him; if he were female, he would look like Lynda. He had had three years or so in the hands of psychiatrists, and had decided to give them up at the price of being very ill from time to time, when one of his girls looked after him. In between, he earned his living on the fringes of the film industry in a variety of ways. He had an immediately arresting personality, and a good deal of authority: people were attracted to him. He gave advice, help, took responsibility, had girls one after the other. He was a type very common indeed in this half-hidden or rather, hiding, stratum of London. He was a sort of self-appointed prophet or mentor who attracted all kinds of people, not all of them weak-minded, as hangers-on and disciples. To Martha, who said only that she wished for a time of ‘retreat’ - she chose the word since his bias was towards Christianity, he offered a very great deal of advice about the inner life, but said that his girl, Olive, would be only too pleased to do her shopping and keep an eye on her while he was out working. Olive, a beautiful dark girl with a baby not his, had that look of ecstatic self-immolation which such young men tend to evoke in certain young women: but it was too excessive to last, Martha thought, and already showed signs of wearing off. To wash Bob’s socks was one thing; to serve Martha, very naturally, another, even if Bob did command it. She said the baby took a lot of her time, and if Martha wanted anything, she should simply knock.

  In fact it was all very satisfactory, and Martha was able to shut herself into a large room which, because she had asked Paul for it, had a thick carpet on the floor to deaden sound. There was a large brass four-poster bed; Paul wanted so much money for this that he could not sell it. He was keeping it: the value was bound to rise. There were some chairs and a good fake Queen Anne writing desk which Paul maintained would shortly be worth a good deal: when the antiques were all bought up, their copies (if old enough) would have value; and, no doubt, and in due course, their copies would …

  She had about three months. Not very long, but Maisie’s Rita was due to arrive. There was no saying how long Rita would be in London; and since it is always later than one thinks, and the house in Radlett Street did not seem to need her much, she might as well do it now.

  Lynda was well: she was occupied with Francis and Jill and various new complications. Poor Mark was quarrelling finally with Jimmy Wood. Mark was all hot tempestuous rages and violence, interspersed with locked inward-growing misery. He had discovered that Jimmy had for the last ten years been supplying machines, designed by himself, whose function was to destroy parts of the human brain by electric charges. These machines were developments of those already in use for legitimate purposes. Jimmy’s had all kinds of interesting possibilities, and he was selling them to the research institutes and departments of hospitals where they were being used at the moment on animals. He had also perfected (on request) a development of this machine whose use was by governments, to destroy the brains of people they felt to be dangerous, and who were weak, helpless, or unknown, and could vanish without protest, or much protest, being aroused. Jimmy had already sold a dozen or so of these, but under arrangements and conditions which had made it hard for Mark, always bored with paper-work, to trace them in the books. Jimmy was on the point of selling (the difficulty was that people did not seem to believe it would have a use-but war departments are always more forward looking than any other section of an official apparatus) a machine, or device, for stimulating, artificially, the capacities of telepathy, ‘second sight’, etc. All kinds of hints found by him in old manuscripts or dubious ‘esoteric’ books had gone into the creation of this device; but the trouble was, as he was only too prepared to point out, ‘there seemed to be evidence for suggesting’, that brains stimulated in such ways (Jimmy was afraid the machine was still very clumsy) might very well be destroyed. So what it amounted to was that interested governments, or departments, must have a large supply of expendable human material, and material that was will-less, or treated to be will-less, for these extensions of humankind’s machinery would ‘burn out’ very fast and must be constantly replaced. Jimmy visualized a bank of people, housed probably in some kind of barracks or building, well fed and cared for, of course, with every amenity of sport and entertainment, whose sole function would be, when needed, to be taken into the room of a certain building, and to be treated by this, Jimmy’s machine, when, for a short space of time, they would be able to act as a variety of radio, or telephone. Asked what was the point, first by an unnamed War Department, and then by Mark-why bother with human beings when there were machines? -Jimmy showed all the agitation of an organism frustrated in its functioning. Surely situations could be envisaged very easily where it would be more convenient to have a human being with such capacities rather than a machine?
For instance, imagine a group of people spying in foreign territory-to have such a person with them would be invaluable! Of course, that this person might very well be as good as a zombie, could (in circumstances) be a handicap, but the whole project was still in the experimental stage. He, Jimmy Wood, was prevented by laws of all kinds from doing research, but everyone knew that in wartime, or even in peace-time with the inmates of some mental hospitals, certain kinds of research could go on. Jimmy, talking in a soft, agitated way (for hours and hours, while Mark listened), wove what sounded like the basis for another of his space fiction novels. The unnamed gentleman from the not-to-be-mentioned War Office had said, in joke, that he thought Mr. Wood was taking space fiction for fact. But he had asked to be kept posted of developments.

  In short, for years now, Jimmy had been engaged in activities which Mark was bound to find abhorrent; and had been engaging them openly, had not tried to deceive Mark at all. For instance, walking around the factory, he might say: ‘This is for Project 25A-you know, I told you.’ Or, in the ledgers, Mark would see entries: Research on 25A.

  The talk about this went on for days and days. Mark sat in the office where, for years and years now, he had sat, feeding Jimmy Wood with his fuel, talk, and talked now (feeling ill, angry, self-reproachful. etc.. but being as calm as possible), trying to. as he said to Martha, ‘get inside Jimmy’s skin’. The point was, Jimmy never met Mark on his ground-which was, Mark supposed, if he was entitled to the word at all, an ethical one. Asked about Project this-and-that, device that-and-this, Jimmy would talk, expound, go on in his jerky, soft, informative way until stopped-or switched off. Asked if Jimmy thought it was a good thing for human beings to be made zombies, or treated in this or that way, without (presumably) being asked, he might reply that: ‘But if you stimulate that area-look on the model, Mark, there-it seems likely that function will superimpose on function X-do you see, Mark? ’