The Four-Gated City

  Martha, her stomach a pit of terror because of what was approaching, behaved normally, and was astounded that she could. To reassure Mark, she cooked some rather good meals; they even went out once or twice to restaurants; she bought some dresses and had her hair done. In the mirror she saw a solid, competent-looking woman with a fresh light make-up and hair that gleamed an attractive dark gold. The dark eyes, made-up, seemed unchanged.

  Meanwhile, she read. She read. She read. She searched and sampled and dipped and extracted what she needed. She emerged from this equivalent of a university course with one essential fact. That these practitioners of a science, or an art, agreed about absolutely nothing.

  A hundred years ago, or something like that, this way of looking at the human being had not existed. A human being was what he seemed. Then, hey presto! into being had sprung the great exemplars, and a human being was an iceberg. But, a century later, now, a large variety of emphatic people had very emphatic opinions about which they argued inexhaustibly in print and at conferences all over Europe and America. Not over Russia and China, however: where this view of things was suspect.

  Well then, it was into no cage of dogma that Martha was going to allow herself to be led; because by definition there were no grounds for dogma.

  She went down to the basement again, to see Lynda, not caring whether her cronies were there or not. Lynda sat smoking on her bed. In the living-room, Dorothy wound dark blue wool while a grey little man held his hands apart to support wool. Meanwhile, he gazed at Dorothy, whom he wished to marry. Dorothy concentrated on the wool, ignoring him.

  Martha sat by Lynda on the bed.

  She said:’ What is Dr Lamb like as a person?’

  Oh, they are all the same!’

  ‘They can’t be!’

  ‘Well, that’s one of their points you see: it shouldn’t matter what they are like as people.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I shouldn’t if I were you.’

  ‘I could stop if it were no good.’

  Here Lynda gave Martha a rather sour look: amusement gone bad. ‘You get hooked in.’ she said.

  ‘What would you do, then?’ asked Martha.

  And now Lynda made one of her very sharp switches; one moment, she was a listless tired-looking woman, smiling or not, polite, normal, or more or less so; the next she was near-virago. She jerked herself up, her great eyes dilated and stared.

  ‘Me? I’m a nothing-but!’ she said.

  This phrase was part of the jargon of the basement. Affectionately, or angrily, or spitefully, Dorothy would call Lynda, Lynda would call Dorothy, ‘a nothing-but’. Sometimes, hysterically. Lynda screamed that she was a ‘nothing-but’, and had to be left alone.

  A’nothing-but’ could not be asked for anything.

  ‘That’s what they want, ’ said Lynda, between clenched teeth. ‘That’s what they aim for: to make you a nothing-but.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will then!’

  And Lynda flung herself back on the bed, and turned her face away in a sharp dismissing movement, her chin averted, as if the turned chin were a kind of closed door, excluding Martha. Her eyes stared, over the chin at the wall-blank. Martha must go.

  Next door Martha sat by Dorothy and her attentive would be husband. Dorothy now stacked balls of blue wool into a raffia basket, made by herself.

  ‘What does this nothing-but mean?’ asked Martha.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a joke we have, ’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Please tell me.’

  Dorothy gave a theatrically peremptory look at her swain, who stood up apologetically, and with an apologetic nod and smile, shambled away.

  ‘He gets on my nerves, ’ said Dorothy. ‘I keep telling him, you get on my nerves, but he just keeps coming back for more.’

  He must have heard this, or part of it-he had not got farther than the hall. But he put his head in, and said fretfully:’ I’ll see you tomorrow, Dorothy. You are a naughty girl you know!’ She shrugged, magnificently, eyes proud; he withdrew his mouse-like head.

  ‘Marry!’ said Dorothy. ‘I mean, what would happen to Lynda for a start?’

  ‘This nothing-but, ’ said Martha.

  Oh, well, it’s not much, it’s just a joke we had in the hospital. You know, it’s that point when they get all pleased because they can say: You’re nothing but-whatever it is. They’ve taken weeks and weeks to get to that point, you know, and it’s, you’re nothing but Electra. You know, that girl who killed her mother?’

  Martha said, ‘Yes, ’ and Dorothy nodded. It was a placid domestic sort of nod. Now the man had gone, all drama had ebbed. A large, sad soft woman sat sorting balls of wool, chatting ordinarily as if it were eggs and butter and bread she was concerned with.

  ‘It’s nothing-but you want to sleep with your father. Nothing-but your brother. Nothing-but. nothing-but. nothing-but …’ This sounded like a croon or counting-rhyme. ‘I’m nothing-but a depression.’

  ‘What is Lynda?’

  ‘Well Lynda’s always more tricky, you see.’ This was with pride: Dorothy was proud of Lynda’s complexities. ‘Sometimes Lynda’s one thing, and sometimes she’s another. But that isn’t the point. Whatever nothing-but you are, at the time, that’s it, you see, until there’s another nothing-but. Lynda was nothing-but Cassandra the last time I heard, but who knows by now?’

  Martha telephoned Dr Lamb for an appointment. The secretary inquired after Mrs. Coldridge: Martha said it was for herself. An appointment was made for two weeks away. Martha observed, with interest, that she was resentful because it could not be tomorrow. Martha having lain awake all night deciding to make this great step, then of course Dr Lamb should be available the moment she had decided. Towards her rushed crisis and misery-her mother’s visit; Dr Lamb was irresponsible, if not callous: there was no time to waste.

  Two weeks. She set herself not to go back to bed, and not to worry Mark. The calmest of confidence was offered to him, and he accepted it with relief. She marvelled at her ability to do it. Meanwhile, not to waste time, she sat in the chair, not on the bed, which might drag her like a quicksand into its depths, and tried to resurrect her lost past. Every day more of it was slipping away. Sometimes she felt like a person who wakes up in a strange city, not knowing who he, she, is. There she sat, herself. Her name was Martha-a convenient label to attach to her sense of herself. Sometimes she got up and looked into the mirror, in an urgency of need to see a reflection of that presence called, for no particular reason, Martha. In the mirror was a pleasant-faced woman whose name was Martha. She had dark eyes. She smiled, or frowned. Once, bringing to the mirror a mood of seething anxiety, she saw a dishevelled panic-struck creature biting its nails. She watched this creature, who was in an agony of fear. Who watched?

  She sat in the chair. Outside the elegant tall window with its graceful frame and panes, a tree. Nothing was more extraordinary and marvellous than that tree, a being waving its green limbs from a grey surface. Beneath the surface was a structure of roots whose shape had a correspondence with the shape and spread of its branches. This curious being that stood opposite the window, was a kind of conduit for the underground rivers of London, which rushed up its trunk, diffusing outwards through a hundred branches to disperse into the air and stream upwards, to join the damp cloud cover of the London sky. She felt she had never seen a tree before. The word’tree’ was alien to the being on the pavement. Tree, tree, she kept saying, as she said Martha, Martha, feeling the irrelevance of these syllables, which usurped the reality of the living structure. And, as if she had not lived in this room now, for four years, everything in it seemed extraordinary, and new, and when the old black cat rose, arching its back, from the white spread, the delight of that movement was felt in Martha’s back.

  She went down to the basement to see Lynda: there was no one else who could understand her.

  ‘Lynda, do you know who you are?’

  ‘Me, ’ said Lynda.
br />   ‘Do you see that when you look in the mirror?’

  ‘No. Not often. Sometimes.’

  When?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. There are times, you know.’

  ‘Are you always someone who watches yourself?’

  ‘Sometimes more, sometimes less.’

  Lynda was sitting on her bed, in a white frilled négligée, doing her toenails, giving this process all her attention.

  She now waggled her toes, which had bright pink shell-shapes on their ends. She laughed with delight, looking at Martha, who saw exactly what she meant by it, and laughed with her.

  ‘All the same, ’ said Lynda, ‘you’d better be careful, you mustn’t tell them that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About the two people. Sometimes you are more the one that watches, and sometimes that one gets far off and you are more the one who is watched. But they look out for that, you see, and when you make a mistake and say it, then that proves it. You’re a schiz.’

  ‘Nothing-but?’

  ‘Well, that depends. That’s what I was for a long time with a doctor when Dr Lamb was in America, but Dr Lamb had other ideas. But you shouldn’t tell them, you see, you should be on guard. It’s very difficult though, because they trap you.’

  ‘The point is, if that’s what I am now, that’s what I’ve always been. But now more than before.’

  ‘Well, if they trap you into saying it, then you’d better say it’s the other way around: it’s less than it was. Because the way they see it, it’ll mean you’re better and not worse.’

  Martha understood that for years she had been listening, half-listening, to talk in the basement which she had thought was too crazy to take as more than pitiable. Now she was understanding it-or a lot of it. She was even learning the language. Several of the visitors to the basement had been in mental hospitals, or were under some sort of treatment. One of them was Dorothy’s would-be husband, the grey little man who seemed all loving, pleading, dog-like eyes. He was schizophrenic, they said: or at least, was so off and on. Sometimes when he felt bad, he went around to his doctor, and was readmitted for a few weeks. He was given a great many pills, got better, and left the hospital.

  For years, all her life, the world of mental illness, and the doctors who dealt with it, had been alien. Not even frightening: it was too distant from her. Looking back, she was able to remember people: a friend, the husband of a friend, someone’s mother, who had ‘a breakdown’ of some kind. But she hadn’t thought about it. Fear? She had been afraid? No. Because, from the moment it was said: so-and-so is mentally ill, so-and-so is having a breakdown, then it no longer concerned her: the words, the labels, had removed them from her, whisked them out of her experience. Yet all her life she had lived in atmospheres of strain, stress, neurosis, which were freely admitted, freely discussed. People were neurotic. People said they were neurotic. Other people said people were neurotic. Once upon a time, it had been said of people, So-and-so’s unkind, or bad-tempered, or intolerant, or a bully. Now, they were neurotic. Yet, between this climate, the ordinary air in which one had always lived, and that other, where people were under psychiatrists, had been an absolute separation.

  Yet, now, suddenly, because she was experiencing it, she felt as if she had been blind. For, suddenly, far from mental illness (as distinct from neurosis) being something that happened somewhere else, it was all around her; and, which was odder, had been all around her for a long time. Not only Lynda and Dorothy, there were their friends, formerly thought of as people who had unfortunate leanings towards Rose Mellendip. Martha remembered that Gerald Smith, one of the comrades (he had already become an ex-comrade), had a wife in a mental hospital. She inquired of Mark what was the matter with the wife. She, Martha, had not met her: Mark had. Mark said merely that she seemed a nice enough girl, a bit harassed. What was wrong with her? She had been depressed; but she had been given shock treatment, and was, they thought, a bit better. Gerald said she might be coming home soon, but in the meantime they were trying more shock treatment. There was Patty Samuels, from whom Martha got desperately jolly letters from Essex: Patty wanted to know, of course, about Mark, and Martha told her. Patty had said in one of the recent letters that she thought that perhaps she was a bit screwy, ‘I’d better admit it, and be done with it.’ She was going to a psychiatrist in Norwich. And, coincidentally, there was Mavis Wood: it turned out that Jimmy had been married since he was twenty. Mavis Wood was unhappy about her marriage. She had been to see her mother and her two married sisters, who had asked her, if Jimmy was a good provider-the mother; if he fulfilled his marital duties-one sister; if he was kind to the children-the other sister. Mavis had said yes, to all three; and was left plunged in guilt. Clearly, it was all her fault that she was miserable. Pressed by Mark to say what she felt was wrong, she could only weep that sometimes she thought Jimmy wasn’t all there, but, of course, it must be her fault if Mark said that he was.

  Mark brought this to Martha, who said that of course Jimmy wasn’t all there: though God only knew what part of him wasn’t. Mark, who continued Jimmy’s devoted admirer, said that geniuses were notoriously difficult to live with, and anyway Mavis was obviously not very bright. Poor Mavis had, last week, started screaming, and had continued to scream for two solid days, while Jimmy bobbed and smiled around the house, asking her what was the matter. Mavis had gone into hospital, and the two children were being looked after by one of the sisters-the one who had asked if he was kind to the children. Jimmy, said Mark, must be very upset, but he didn’t have time to be, luckily: there was so much to do in the factory, and anyway it turned out that he had taken to writing. He was writing space fiction: that was what it was called though Mark couldn’t see why’space’, but he supposed one word did as well as another.

  There were only two days to go before the appointment with Dr Lamb. The letters from Mrs. Quest were now arriving in batches, every day. Martha forced herself to read them. Even the act of reaching out her hand to pick up a letter, and to rip open the envelope, started up in Martha, as if buttons had been pressed, or sluice gates opened, two violent, but opposing emotions. One was pity, strong, searing, unbearable. The other was a wild need to run-anywhere. Under the bedclothes if there was nowhere to run. Therefore she sat and raged useless rebellion. Against what? A poor, lonely old woman whose life had never given her anything she wanted, or never for long. But, and this was the point, as she sat and raged, she was able to revive a part of her past that had got lost. She remembered herself as the violent, aggressive adolescent, who had reached out on all sides to grab up anything at all as a weapon in the fight for survival: her own body manipulated into a challenging attractiveness, clothes, ideas, thoughts, books, people-anything. That person she had certainly been, and was now, as she read the pathetic, heartbreaking letters. And as she sat, being that adolescent girl, she remembered that even then, there had been that other person, the silent watcher, the witness. Nothing else was permanent. She returned to the mirror and remembered the face of that girl: she saw it again, a shadow behind the face she saw now, two faces, the present face and one of the faces of the past. They were connected by the eyes.

  Then something happened which seemed impossibly cruel. Dr Lamb’s secretary telephoned to say that Dr Lamb was ill, he had very bad ’flu. They would make a provisional appointment for two weeks ahead.

  Martha collapsed. She crawled back under the covers. Her mother was going to arrive before she could grab hold of that baulk of floating timber in an angry sea, Dr Lamb. She was abandoned, defenceless, and Dr Lamb was cruel, he was letting her down. (But a part of her watched these so predictable reactions, described so graphically in the books she had recently read.) Watching, she smiled; reacting, she wallowed and panicked and wept.

  A letter came from Mrs. Quest saying that she had postponed her sailing date for a couple of months. She was staying with friends in Cape Town. At the time Martha grabbed at just this one fact: she was saved. Later, reading this let
ter, she saw that Mrs. Quest, as terrified of this visit as Martha, had put it off to give herself time to face the pain which she knew (somewhere or other inside her) was coming. But Mrs. Quest had not admitted to herself that this was what she was doing. The fear of pain, the foreknowledge of it, twisted and became a flood of reproaches against Martha, who was unkind and uncaring: why had she not answered the last two letters? And she had said nothing about the vests which Mrs. Quest asked her to buy. Well, it was perfectly plain to see that Mrs. Quest would have to get them herself, though surely it had not been too much to hope …

  The ordeal was postponed: but it was on its way. Dr Lamb, the cruel betrayer, might betray again. And Martha lay in the dark, not moving.

  Later she believed that this double postponement was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her. If it had not happened, if Dr Lamb had not had ’flu, and Martha had gone to him unprepared, without learning anything of what she could do for herself-well, she believed she would have been lost. Perhaps. Perhaps not. And perhaps there’s no such thing as luck, as there’s no such thing as coincidence.

  But as things were, Dr Lamb did not get back to his work for a month, and Mrs. Quest stayed on with her friend in Cape Town, where the oak trees reminded her of England, and the slopes of the mountains were covered with vineyards, and where she could see the ships coming in and out of Cape Town harbour from her bedroom windows high above the slopes of the lower town.

  Martha crawled out of bed. She sat looking at the tree. Once she had lain above rough boards through which rose the smell of freshly-watered earth: the boughs of a tree showed through a high square of window, carrying loads of wet, smelling of wet, carrying sun-scented air. She tried to put herself back into that other small high room, see the boughs of that other tree: what she saw was this one, the sycamore. She tried. Two shapes of tree fought in her mind’s eye, and the sycamore dissolved into a tree glowing orange under an African sun. It went, dissolved back into the sycamore. She fought. She was in the loft, or rather, was in a warm compost of scents, wet growth, soaking dust, tree-air, roses. The loft took shape. Into the loft climbed Thomas a strong brown man with farmer’s hands. She held it. She held Thomas. Holding Thomas, using his strong presence as guide, she moved out of the loft, into the café with its smell of the army, and hot fat, and floor polish. She let the great room and its eating people come back, with Athen, with Solly and joss and Jasmine; holding them, she moved up into the avenues and the gardened house where her mother … and now pain came in a hot sear, and it all collapsed.