The Four-Gated City

  Martha left him, resisting his suggestion that she should leave the suitcase and pick it up later.

  Where could she go while she made a decision?

  Where was there for her to go, but Jack’s? And now, walking down through the lovely square, where the summery trees waved their branches in a cool air, she was free of that house, of that man, of that haunted child. She would go to Jack’s and ask if she could, after all, live in the floor beneath his. Just for the time at least. She went to the telephone to ring Jack.

  When he heard it was Martha, the voice of his first impulse was a rise into a warm relief: Oh, Martha, I’m so happy-I really did think I’d never hear from you again. I don’t know why I did.’ Then a pause, and the judicious voice, low, of his present situation. Joanna was with him. He offered Martha this fact, waiting for her to see that Joanna, put off twice for Martha, had earned the preference now. Martha saw it. ‘Look, Jack, can you lend me some money? I need about ten pounds. Five would do.’ And now a very long pause. At last: ‘Well, Martha, you see, I don’t keep money here.’ He was silent, waiting for her to think of another resource. Martha found herself taken over by the thought: Of course, he’s so mean … and with such violence that she discarded the judgement. All the same, he did keep money there: like the old farmers of his tradition, in a bag under the mattress. Quite a lot of it. Then she understood that this demand for money meant in fact that she didn’t want to be in the rooms beneath him, she wanted to go to a hotel: she was asking Jack for money to escape from any pressure he might put on her. And he felt it: he was feeling it.

  ‘Perhaps Joanna could lend me some money? ’ said Martha; urgent, her voice on a high pitch of desperation.

  ‘Wait a minute, Martha.’

  Martha stood in the telephone box, watching the people pass outside: it was the rush hour again, and the sky held the dark of imminent rain. She was in a panic. Funk. This was a danger-point in her life: she was being taken over. Had been taken over? Jack’s voice again measured: ‘If you come over now, Martha, then we could talk about it, hey? ’

  ‘Good. Thank you. Thank Joanna.’

  ‘Are you coming by taxi, or walking? ’

  ‘Bus.’

  ‘See you.’

  He had been asking: How long have we, Joanna and I, got before you come? All the talents for minute organization of a talented housewife went into the organization of his women … Martha was raging with spite against him. She had known before that Jack was careful about money—if that was the word for it. But she had judged him generously: he was guarding the thousand pounds that were his freedom. Never before had she felt dislike or repulsion for him or his way of life. Now she felt both. And also for the household she had been in that afternoon-a parcel of sickly neurotics, and Phoebe a humourless bigot’ … hatred burned through her veins. She had to stop it-had to, must… she boarded a bus headed west, in a jostle of people who smelled sour with sweat this muggy afternoon. She was tired. The weeks of not sleeping, not eating enough, the restless walking, had caught up: she was ready to collapse finally into tears. She wished she could be in a dark room and pull covers up over her. The bus was charging down the Bayswater Road. A couple of nights ago, here Martha had walked light and easy and alert. That was the night when, walking, she had understood …but she could not remember now what it was she had understood. And she had a violent reaction against that too-posturing around, she thought; making yourself important, imagining all kinds of great truths when all it was really … well of course, if you’re going to not-sleep and not-eat properly and then make love for hours and hours with a bloody … she saw herself, a young woman in a matron’s black coat, walking through the dark dirty streets with an idiotic smile on her face: but somewhere at the back of her mind the thought held: it was here, it was here, it was-just because you can’t get anywhere near it now, that doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist. She got off the bus, her legs weak, and almost staggered with the heavy case past the canal where children splashed in a dull sunlight. She arrived at Jack’s door to lean against it, breathing deeply, to recover herself. In the street men in singlets dug up the street, standing to their waists in a greasy yellow earth.

  The door was opened, before she had rung, by the grinning youth: he had been watching through the panes.

  ‘There’s one up there already, ’ he said, delighted.

  ‘Yes, I know. Thanks.’ She went past, hearing his idiot’s chuckle. Good Lord, she couldn’t possibly live in this house with an idiot and a … Jack came smiling down the stairs to meet her. And at the sight of him her revulsion dissolved into simple affection. Everything she had felt was the result of exhaustion and she was not to be trusted. A young man in sloppy blue trousers and a heavy blue pull-over chosen to disguise the thinness which was his shame and his terror, he took her case, and pulled her close inside the circle of bone that was his arm. He kissed her and said: ‘Hey there, Martha, what’s up? ’

  She shook her head, nearly crying, and went before him into the black and white room where Joanna sat, dressed, on the chair near the window. Either she had not undressed, or she had dressed for Martha. She wore her perfect clothes: a beige well-hung skirt, beige pull-over, long legs in silk, not nylon, and highly polished low brown shoes. Her camel-hair coat was folded over the back of another chair. She looked as neat and shiny as a newly-washed child. Smiling, she nodded at Martha. ‘Would you like to lie down? ’ Still held inside the bony circlet, she was being urged towards the bed.

  ‘No. I don’t want to sleep-not yet.’

  There was only one decent chair, and Joanna was on it. She got up and sat on the bed, and Martha took the chair. Jack turned his back to make coffee on the spirit stove: he was leaving it to them, to the two women, to define the situation, to handle it.

  ‘Was the job no good? ’ he inquired, as neither spoke.

  And suddenly Matty exploded through Martha’s mouth in a storm of half-giggling tears. ‘Oh yes, it’s just my style. Just up my street…’ Her voice rose in a wail of laughter. ‘You’d be surprised, it’s tailor-made for me. I tell you, it’s been sitting there waiting for me for years-everything as sick and neurotic and hopeless as you can imagine … and a dominating mamma over all, and a wife in a mental hospital, and a man just sitting waiting for some sucker like me to cope with everything.’

  Jack’s blue back was still bent over his cups and spoons: he was alertly waiting. And behind the cool little face of Joanna’s upbringing was dislike and upset. And the cool Martha, who watched giggling tearful Matty with as much detachment as either Jack or Joanna, knew that it was Jack who would earn Joanna’s dislike of this situation-not Martha. This thought pulled her together. She sniffed, wiped her hands across her eyes and cheeks, for she had no handkerchief, and sat silent, recovering.

  ‘There’s plenty of jobs in London, ’ commented Jack, turning with three filled mugs-black, black, coffee. On the farms of his tradition, great black cauldrons stood always simmering on the back of wood stoves, with coffee grounds in them inches deep, coffee being added daily to make a brew which depth-charged the nervous system at first sip. This black liquid in the cup Martha held would be too much in her present state. She sat holding the cup.

  ‘Anyone who wants to live in London …’ said Joanna; ‘What for? Why don’t you live in the country. You can live there like a human being.’

  ‘Joanna can lend you some money, Martha. A fiver? ’

  ‘Yes, ’ said Joanna. ‘But if I were you I’d get on to the first train out of London.’

  ‘But you look all in. Man-why don’t you lie down on the bed and sleep a little. Joanna and I can go out for some supper-Joanna? ’

  ‘I’ve got to go, ’ said Joanna, sipping her thick black coffee and watching Martha.

  Martha thought: neither of them heard what I said. Joanna dislikes Jack now because she’s been subjected to my being hysterical, and Jack is feeling: Martha’s upset.

  Jack now lowered himself to the floor. Fir
st he put his cup down on it, and then felt the floor, as it were greeted earth: the way an African villager might touch the earth with one hand, assessing it, before squatting down. Jack squatted, his hand flat on the floor beside him. Martha thought: If he and I were alone, we would make love, and what I said, what I felt, would be answered with how he made love. This seemed to her an extraordinary discovery.

  ‘What sort of work do you want? ’ said Joanna.

  ‘It’s not the work as such I care about. But I do know exactly what I want.’ For she did. In the last few minutes, something had happened, a balance had shifted. She knew.

  ‘I want, ’ said Martha, ‘to live in such a way that I don’t just-turn into a hypnotized animal.’

  Jack, smiling with affectionate hope that he would soon know what Martha was so excited about, kept his palm flat on the floor-earth. But Joanna was saying with abrupt hostility: ‘Oh no. I had quite enough of all that during the war.’

  ‘What do you mean? ’ asked Jack, turning the antennae of his sensitivity towards Joanna.

  ‘I know what I mean. And I’ve had enough of it. I simply won’t have any more, ’ said Joanna.

  ‘It was on the boat. I understood on the boat, ’ said Martha.

  ‘Martha didn’t like the trip over, ’ Jack explained to Joanna. ‘But all the same, Martha, it must have been all right, just sitting there with your girl friend and watching everyone. When I came back as a passenger it was the same …’ Now he was talking like a host, soothing Martha’s smarts away. ‘But I spent all my time in the gym. I wasn’t going to mix myself up.’

  Oh, but I did, I did, and that’s the point.’

  ‘You said you sat with that sick girl and watched-it’s always awful, a lot of people crammed together, just animals.’

  ‘No.’ Martha was in the grip of a necessity to explain, even to claim an ally in Joanna, and in the face of Joanna’s hostile negation of her, Martha’s, vital discovery. ‘Before I left … home? I used to dream about the sea. All the time. It was an obsession. When I got off the train at Cape Town, I thought, the sea, but we were put straight on to the boat, and the sea was harbour water full of ships. And the boat-I swear everything was designed to make you forget the sea was anywhere near. And if you stood at night on the deck and looked at it, or walked around the deck, someone would say, Moon-gazing! Or: I’ve got to get my weight down too. You know … hundreds of people, some of them had been waiting the whole war for this trip. There was this girl. She was sick. Dying I think. A blood disease. She was a pale thin girl-sickly. We teamed up. But she didn’t accept me. I was healthy, you see. I kept catching her eye on me, sceptical and hostile-like you sometimes, Joanna.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of it.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Where was I, yes. We two were a challenge to the men, not joining in. She thought that’s why I was doing it. Well, and perhaps-or put it around the other way, it was that that dragged me back in again, so perhaps she was right. In a way. But all the time she was polite, and rather cynical, watching to see how long I’d stick it out with her, instead of joining with the others.’

  Joanna said: ‘You should have locked yourself in your cabin.’ She said it fierce and angry.

  ‘I was sharing a cabin with four others. Not everyone can afford private cabins-oh damn it, that’s childish.’

  ‘Yes it is, ’ said Joanna.

  ‘I know how Martha feels, ’ said Jack. ‘There’s been times in my life I could have killed you for your money. And that’s the truth. There were times in Port Elizabeth I used to look at the rich tourists and I tell you, if I could have killed you safely I would.’

  ‘But I wasn’t there, ’ said Joanna, almost amused.

  ‘On that boat I used to think that for millions of people I was a rich person. All over Africa, there are people who know that a trip on a passenger boat is heaven-always beyond them. Imagine that. Because I’d only been on the boat a couple of days and I realized that really everyone was hating it. I used to wake early and watch the other three women wake up-lying half asleep, not wanting to wake up, then groaning awake and reaching for cigarettes. Bodies on bunks, wishing they could sleep all day, but the day had started. The whole ship hill of groaning people not really wanting to get up, and shaved and washed and dressed. And the holiday clothes. The women had spent months or fortunes on those clothes, just for that trip. Then breakfast. Everyone eating enormous meaty breakfasts, making jokes about greed. They didn’t want to eat it, but they had to, because it was there and they had paid for it. The stewards running around after us like a lot of nursemaids, and people making jokes, you know, about the stewards earning so little. The one thing South Africans, all of us from down there, understand-it’s making jokes defensively and throwing money at people. After breakfast, people making jokes as they went down to the lavatories. And an hour later, around came the stewards with soup. And everyone had soup. Then the real drinking started: at last they could begin to drug themselves. They were knocked over the head already by all that food, but now the alcohol. And then lunch: two hours of food, everyone eating and eating and drinking. And then down to sleep. Thank God they could get rid of two hours of being alive in sleep. But some of them were running around in the sun playing games and making jokes about keeping their weight down. And then tea. People coming up from their bunks in different clothes. Tea and masses of cakes. And then dark came and the sexing up and the drinking. All over the boat, people sexing it up and not liking their partners much because what they were doing didn’t come up to the months and months of fantasies about the trip. And music coming out of every pore of the ship. Everyone on the boat but the crew drugged with food and drink and sex. And then bed. But going to bed very fast, either because you were sexing it up with someone or because you were a bit drunk. Back to the pyjamas and the nightdresses. Back to oblivion-thank God.’

  ‘Well? ’ said Joanna, in a fine, steady anger. Her eyes shone, her cheeks glowed very pink.

  ‘I spent my time in the gym, ’ said Jack.

  ‘Yes. But it was like a-I can’t explain. Everything was just like ordinary life, only more so. It was a nightmare, sitting with that girl. Her name was Lily Maxwell and she came from one of the mining suburbs outside Johannesburg. I swear we were the only two people among the passengers who weren’t-hypnotized. We sat and watched. But for me, it was a new feeling, and for her-she had lived with it for a long time. She was dying. I think so, anyway. She was sitting looking at living people. She was quite alone, all the time, you see. And I was with her, but she was waiting for me to crack. Cynically. She knew I would. She sat very quietly, watching me looking at the men, and the men looking at me. So then that was it. It took four days. A nice farmer from the Orange Free State. Oh everything very civilized and in order. And I was permanently heavy and dead and gone with food, alcohol and sex.’

  ‘I don’t see the point of that, ’ said Joanna.

  ‘Oh yes, you do, ’ said Martha rudely. ‘I know you do. But I wasn’t quite lost, because all the time I was hanging on to just one thought: that I was drugged and hypnotized and that I didn’t have to be. And above all that I mustn’t be afraid of being-obvious.’

  ‘Well it is, isn’t it? ’ said Joanna. She got up. She wanted to leave.

  ‘Yes. But what then? Quite so. I want to be sunk in the obvious. It seems to me that there’s a sort of giant conspiracy, and it’s all our fault. There are people who know quite well that they are drugged and asleep, but there’s a weapon against that-you mustn’t be obvious. It’s a cliché. Oh I know perfectly well that there’s nothing new in what I said, but I felt it new then and I feel it now. But I’m not going to be laughed out of it by people who are afraid of words like cliché, or obvious, or banal. I learned that before. Funny, where was it? Who? Somebody-I’ve forgotten. We keep learning things and then forgetting them and so we have to learn them again.’

  ‘You just want to be a bohemian, ’ said Joanna, ‘to be different. Well, I watched all that during t
he war.’

  ‘No. The opposite. I remember finding out some time before-that that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way. But there’s a pressure on us all the time to go on to something that seems new because there are new words attached to it. But I want to take words as ordinary as bread. Or life. Or death. Clichés. I want to have my nose rubbed in clichés.’

  Joanna was swinging her shoulder bag over her handsome came) coat. She wanted to leave. Jack was standing near her, watching her. He was afraid he had lost her. Martha thought that he probably had. He had not ‘heard’ what she had said. Not with his mind. But Martha knew that with his body he could have answered her. And that understanding, really a new one, that there were people who simply did not operate or function through their minds, was as if Jack had stepped towards her from dark to light. She knew that if they had been free to make love now, it would be in a different way, because Jack had caught, sensed, felt, what she had said. But if he were now asked to put into words what Martha had said, he would answer: Martha’s tired, she’s upset. People were really so very different from each other. She was always forgetting it. Jack’s way of experiencing the world, and hers, they did not touch. Except when they made love. He understood, and communicated, through the body.

  A ring from downstairs. Jack’s face had for one second the look of someone caught out: both women saw it, and even exchanged small ironic glances, so strong is the force of custom. Because neither really felt it. Jack went running downstairs, and they were alone.

  Joanna said: ‘I know what you are saying, but what’s the point of all that? There’s nothing we can do, is there? So what’s the use? ’

  Voices on the stairs in energetic exchange and Jack entered first, saying: ‘It’s Jane!’ with a look of appeal at them both. Now Martha and Joanna asked each other silently if both knew about Jane: both did. And they knew the rules of the game said they should leave. They nodded at Jack, who went out, and came back with a pretty little blonde thing who, however, had the stormy, sparkling, reddened look of a baby who has been crying enjoyably from temper. Some grief of love had struck her into a splendidly tempestuous need, and she hardly saw Jack’s two women visitors who stood ready to leave.