The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  I went to bed in good humour, full of optimism. I woke up as I had done the day before, sullen and raging, like a trapped animal. I was amazed at my reaction. I reminded myself of the day before, but that did not help today. I hated my mother and I hated Martha, in waves of a pure resentful hatred that seemed to come out of the air, flow over me, and fade out leaving behind my usual wry affection for them. The last two evenings seemed like excursions into mania and yet I couldn’t see them as fantasy, or ‘imagination’ or speculation, because both old ladies had said, had repeated, that this is what they had asked me to talk about. But it was only when I cajoled or manipulated my own mind into saying: ‘Well, it’s an agreeable sort of game’, that I was able to push aside the hatred, and go on with what I wanted to do-think about it all quietly. For I knew what the hate was. I had spent so much of my time fighting; to run our community was hard enough, because of the increasingly authoritarian pressures from outside; and behind me was always my early childhood, which even now I can’t remember without pain. But I knew very well what it was Lynda and Martha wanted. And I didn’t want to have to fight, and expose myself and take risks-yes, I’m sure you are smiling, as you look back at what has happened. But I was hating them for reminding me that there was still fighting to be done, and I knew that was why.

  Through the afternoon I sat by a window looking out over a soft English meadow with elm trees standing above an invisible river. On the table where the maid had put the tea-tray was a newspaper with its usual load of savagery, violence and horror. There was no connection between that soft English scene and the newspaper: or none that I could make. But sitting here I reminded myself that the euphoric talk of the night before had begun with their asking me to consider how a contemporary government would react on finding out that a number of its citizens had mental capacities which for a start (and considering nothing else) made all ‘official secrecy’ obsolete. They had not asked me to enjoy an adolescent hour or so of imagining the overthrow and discomfiture of authority. Well, I sat and considered. And what I was able to foresee frightened me.

  Again I went to dinner with them sulking. They teased me. We discussed my psychological reactions of the day before, and of that day, and the reasons for them. My mother pointed out to me that accepting the evidence of her own senses against a climate of orthodoxy had cost her her health and, for long periods at a stretch, her sanity. It had taken her most of a lifetime. Martha said that in her case it had taken a decade of private experimenting without anything to guide her but hunches and a naturally tough constitution. But she thought she had been lucky not to damage herself permanently.

  I had been subjected to ‘dangerous thoughts’ for only three days … I saw they were apologizing. They were tender. They were humorously appealing-there wasn’t much time, there wasn’t time, they kept repeating. Time for what? But I didn’t ‘catch’ this plea for attention to what they really wanted to say. We went on talking on the lines of the previous evening instead, considering previous periods of history when governments, churches, or courts might have suppressed certain evidence and why. (Again, these ideas will be commonplace to you: I am reminding you that in the mid-’seventies they came as a shock to an ‘educated’ person.) We spent time on the suppression of witchcraft in England. The old ladies had interesting things to say about it. (Check Key.) We drifted off again into a long fantasy about what would happen if any street in London were taken-it should be a fairly short one, where people knew each other at least by sight-and a rumour was spread that in such and such a house lived people who could hear what others thought, could see through walls, ‘knew’ when lies were told. I remember we talked about this as if it were a novel my father might have written, if he had not given up writing novels. We concluded it would not be long before this household found they had to move, if they were not locked up on some pretext-probably for creating public unrest and disorder.

  I understood that my mentors were quite pleased the conversation had got on to these lines when my mother asked if I thought that they (herself, her associates) were wrong to work in secrecy. I agreed after difficulty that they were right; knowing that without the slow process of the last three days, when I was told things bit by bit, while my whole organism reacted against it, I would have immediately made statements about irresponsibility, about sharing information for progress, etc., and.

  That night, they told me that a certain scientist working on orthodox lines on ESP had been approached by his government, which wished to employ potential telepaths in espionage. And it was in the early ‘sixties that the Russians were already talking about the use of astronauts with telepathic powers-legitimate, but what government was likely to stop at that?

  They told me that ‘all of us’ - meaning not only the doctors and people working quietly in the hospitals, but friends outside, regarded their work, their experiments on themselves as a kind of trust vested in them on behalf of mankind. No vow or promise or oaths were asked for or given: but it was assumed among them that the nature of authority in our time was such that it could not be trusted with such a temptation. Not only for their own sakes, but to protect others (people who perhaps did not know their own potentialities) from danger, they must keep quiet, work in silence, secrecy and trust, to protect a developing human capacity from the wrong sort of attention.

  It was an appeal for my secrecy. So I understood it. I remember that I would have been childishly pleased if they had asked for promises, vows, that kind of thing. They asked me to consider that every kind of secret cult or group, let alone institutions like armies, law courts, religions, asked for oaths and promises: betrayal is implicit in formal oaths. Promises had value only between friends, when they did not need to be made at all: an oath that was worth anything had already been proved unnecessary.

  I went to bed exhalted: I woke like an animal stung by wasps. Now I expected the reaction and was able to study it. My mind watched my emotions rage, as happens when one falls into a fit of being in love, or disliking someone, against one’s will.

  Towards the hour of dusk over the water meadows, I regained my common sense and began thinking about what might seem to you the most interesting thing of all… that I had asked no questions, not even the ones that screamed out to be asked. I had been informed, with details, that in my own country, under my own nose, groups of people amounting by now to several dozen, had been seriously experimenting for years in what used to be known as the ‘occult’. Had they come up with anything interesting, I might have asked; particularly as no week passed then without forecasts of Armageddons or freshly minted Paradises.

  I hadn’t asked because it was as if my brain had been numbed or jammed with an excess of new information: each meeting with my mother and Martha was a switchback ride through new information and my own emotions.

  That night at dinner I asked the obvious question, and was answered simply by my mother: well yes, for one thing, it looks as if this country is going to have some kind of accident-probably fairly soon, but we don’t know when.

  We discussed this for the rest of the evening. I remember (with interest, to put it mildly) my state of mind. I thought: ‘Well, of course, it was bound to happen somewhere, sometime.’ And: ‘Everyone has been unconsciously expecting something of the sort.’ And ‘Right, well in that case one ought to …’

  My mother, as far as she knew, was the first to have this premonition, in the shape of a ‘vision’. Then others had had it too. The trouble was while the ‘visions’ or the dreams, were consistent with each other, the time was hard to pinpoint. ‘This region of the mind knows nothing about our scale of time.’ It looked as if the catastrophe would involve radio-activity. The country would be uninhabitable for some time. There would be great loss of life.

  I went to bed making vague plans for my friends and family; and woke up in the morning, in a state that wasn’t (like the previous three mornings) a sullen anger; but of astonishment at myself. I could not believe what I had been told. It is simpl
e to write that. I don’t mean that I thought Lynda and Martha were lying, or that they were misguided. I mean, specifically, that while I accepted what they said, I couldn’t take it in. Nine-tenths of me, at least, did not believe in it, because they had not heard what Lynda had said, and what I replied. I was helped by remembering Dostoievsky’s account of the man who was to be hanged next morning. He slept well, and dreamed with enjoyment. He ate breakfast and was taken to the scaffold watching the sky. the streets about him. as if he had all the time in the world. He felt as if he had plenty of time. And when he was reprieved, all his resolutions on the way to the scaffold to live differently, to maintain this sense that time was a treasure-house and every minute precious-were forgotten. He returned at once to humanity’s usual somnolent condition.

  Several of the persons that made up his personality had never heard the news that he was to be hanged. Probably they would still be ‘enjoying themselves’ as the trap fell.

  As an interesting psychological fact I tell you that throughout the day after I heard from Lynda-who I trusted and believed-that my country had at best a handful of years to live, I was considering (which I had been doing for some weeks now) how to buy a cottage across the lane from us as extension for the infants’ nursery, and what local sales it would be useful to attend so as to furnish it cheaply.

  At the same time I was thinking of what I had heard, trying to ‘take it in’.

  Well, I didn’t take it in for some time. I kept saying to myself: what you look at now will, fairly soon, be as dead as the corpse of a poisoned mouse-Lynda’s phrase. Meanwhile I was happily admiring tree, sky, the flowers in old Butts’s garden when I went to visit my cousin Gwen and her children. I found myself discussing the breeding of a new stock of cows on one of our farms. I remember how I spent a whole morning putting a splint on a puppy’s front paw: then suddenly I found myself crying. At least part of me had ‘taken it in’. It began to hit slowly, as the news seeped through to all parts of me.

  It was this problem that I took back. I and Martha; who had told me that four people among us had been working quietly, and were ready to help in the task of telling our friends what was likely to happen in a way that would forestall panic, or the kind of derision that is a cousin to panic and stops people thinking.

  We didn’t use any of the currently acceptable methods, like calling a meeting, or sending out a circular. For this kind of thing was not in the spirit of ‘movement’ which wasn’t one; and which people ‘joined’ by liking one of us, and settling somewhere close and sharing a house. After a period of not knowing what to do, we behaved as we would for any other problem, and simply began talking to friends. I don’t know what I expected, or was afraid of. Some sort of rushing about perhaps, or an angry rebellion at Fate. But nothing happened. Quite soon we were talking about a probable contamination of our country, what to do, how to save people. But there were a lot of cults and movements active during the last days; a lot of ‘prophecies’ and forecasts, some accurate, some not, were in the air. When you came to talk to people, you found a great many confidently expected some form of disaster, but were not doing anything about it. Well, what could one do? That is, if one was trying to get more people to listen than just one’s friends.

  And there were the authorities to consider. It really is hard to convey a ‘feel’ of those authorities. Now everything is so stratified and codified and hard-necessary, of course, when half the world is waste land, and there are so many millions of the homeless, contaminated and hungry to handle. We have an administration which is in feet exactly the same from country to country, though the divisions between them are so sharp and hostile. The administration is privileged and comparatively free. The hordes of human refuse have nothing but what charity can do for them. But we do all know more or less where we are. Then the Government, or any kind of authority, had to be handled like a hysterical person, or a mentally feeble one. It was touchy. It took umbrage. It bestowed favours and withdrew them! The one thing we could not expect from it was consistency or ordinary common sense.

  And with the authorities (even worse than with oneself and one’s friends) one would be up against that reaction I had experienced when I was wondering how to buy a new cottage economically and furnish it cheaply, the morning after I had heard of the coming disaster. This psychological reaction would be of necessity a hundred times worse in an authority, a body of people, than in individuals or small groups. And besides, we couldn’t say anything more definite than: it looks as if this disaster will take place in between five and ten years’ time; that it will be pretty bad; but that nearer the time accuracy will be greater because some of what people have ‘gathered’ indicates that a good many will listen and escape with their families.

  Practically and immediately: we wanted to see that on the west coast of Ireland there were places where people might go when the time came. The west because the prevailing winds are from west to east. We bought a holiday place for the children and a family moved in to caretake while we looked for other places.

  And now started a ludicrous and frustrating time. We couldn’t get people to move, to do anything but talk. We were helped by chance. It was to do with the buying of the first house in Ireland. There had been a rift between Paul and ourselves. Not a serious rift, more a weakening of sympathy. He might visit us for a week-end, and we would meet in London. But we joked that we had drifted apart. I told him if he spent more time with us, he wouldn’t feel estranged. But his life was in Fashionable London, seeing dozens of people a week. He had married a childhood sweetheart, who was later a sort of prostitute, model ‘sixties and ‘seventies. Not really a prostitute: sex was not the essence of what they offered or what was wanted from them. Girls like Zena were prized for their style, a highly dramatized and self-conscious ‘I am a lost soul’ quality. They drifted listlessly, displaying their psychological wounds like medals, or as if saying: this is what you have made of me. But I bear you no grudge. Please hit me again! (You’ll see I didn’t like her-that antipathy is alive still! And for a woman who is dead … Paul died with her. He died trying to get her out of the contaminated areas, but she wouldn’t go.) When married they lived in two different halves of the same house and I don’t think they met oftener than before they married. Of course they didn’t have children! Paul took her out to big parties or theatre nights: there were photographs in the papers: Mr and Mrs. Paul Coldridge. They were fantastically handsome, like a pair of gorgeous butterflies mounted side by side on a twig. When he came to see us (always without her), he’d say that our simplicity was what he longed for; but after two or three days he’d always go back to London. He was very rich:

  He had joined my father and Willy Perkins in the Coldridge-Esse Perkins rescue enterprises very early. But public philanthropy and getting rich went hand in hand. He kept giving it away: it flooded back to him. I’ve never known anyone as generous. He’d give money to everyone he even heard of who needed it. He’d give away hundreds to friends of ours when he came for the week-end-particularly if they had children.

  And suddenly I got a letter from him which was-mad. It was a mad letter. I took it to Martha. She said to take no notice, something triggered it off in him, always had. It would pass. Meanwhile I should go and see him. Before I could leave for London there was another letter. He accused us of making off with funds, cooking books, goodness knows what. Buying the house in Ireland was ‘behind his back’. We had betrayed him. In London I telephoned him: he was shrilly abusive. I was served with a summons in the hotel. The thing had become crazier still. Paul was wanting to be repaid half the original sum of money he had given us when we started. From this had been deducted arbitrary sums for staying with us ‘one dozen days in 1971’ and ‘sums for fresh fruit and cream during 1973’. That kind of thing. The point was that the sum he wanted was nothing to him, it was five thousand pounds by the time his deductions had been made. ‘£374 19s 6d for repainting my old friend Jack Sumerson’s house in 1970.’ Mad. I saw a lawye
r though I knew what he’d say. If the thing was allowed to get into court it would be one of the cases where everyone concerned would look a fool. We had never accounted for his money separately-or anybody’s, for that matter. It wasn’t in the spirit of the thing. People put money in-and that was it.

  Before returning to Wiltshire I managed to see him. He was not himself, but he wasn’t the person who had instructed a lawyer to send me that insane document. He was low, and sulky, and looked as people do when they’ve had a bad headache for days. I realized this was another example of that phenomenon-someone taking leave of their senses for an hour, a day, or a week. I knew he would recover. He did. He came down to Wiltshire full of apologies and consternation. Meanwhile it was in all the newspapers. Paul was a high-minded philanthropist given to whimsically impulsive generosity, which had been abused by his pack of seedily eccentric relations. We were presented as some kind of sinister secret society which believed in the imminent end of the world, and which spread alarm and despondency for undefined private ends. We were supposed to take money from victims to line our own pockets. Reporters came down, and detectives. All this was fairly routine mud-slinging, nothing new or even surprising about it. It was run-of-the-mill too because charges were vague and could not be answered; accusations were levelled, withdrawn, re-levelled, changed-all this created an atmosphere of unpleasantness and distrust.

  It would have been easier if we had some label, some guise. What drove the investigators into a frenzy of suspicion was that we had none. We went through unpleasant weeks. It was a war of nerves. I recognized it from childhood experiences during the long forgotten Cold War. The intention was, to frighten us. Government in Britain in times of stress has always been by threat. And not even threat of prison or physical ill-treatment-social ostracism, social disapproval has been enough. What they wanted of us was some sort of recantation on the model of so many recent ones. We should publicly promise to be good, as it were, abjure former evil thoughts, that kind of thing. We did not. Suddenly the Government issued an order for our dispersal. We had not expected this. For one thing, legally it would have taxed them to discover who ‘we’ were. We hardly knew ourselves. How would they define it? While we were still absorbing this, and its implications-the Order was signed by Phoebe Coldridge, your grandmother-it was as arbitrarily withdrawn.