The Four-Gated City

  They went to his study, which no one entered without formality. On the walls multiplied the charts of the death factories, the poison factories, the factories that made instruments for the control of the mind: the maps of Hunger, Poverty, Riot and the rest; the atlases of poisoned air and poisoned earth and the places where bombs had been exploded under the sea, where atomic waste was sunk into the sea, where ships discharged filthy oil into the sea, where inland waters were dead or dying.

  On the thick pile of a carpet in the room which had once been Mark’s father’s study, the two lay behind locked doors, two bodies that exploded into each other, before Mark had to sleep a little, dress freshly, and go down to the basement again to be with his wife. A silent, desperate act of-survival? It seemed so. Mark said he was afraid. They lay in each other’s arms, their faces running with the tears of their shared tension, and rested, under the maps of the poisoned world, in a silent house. Somewhere upstairs, Paul or Francis might be playing music, late. Or Paul crept down with Zena to eat in the kitchen, alone. Or Lynda woke again: they heard her moving about below them in a slow dragging sort of movement, while she muttered and sang and knocked things about.

  ‘What are we doing it for? Lynda’s just one woman.’

  ‘But what else can any of us do?’

  ‘I sit down there and I think, Lynda’s just one woman.’

  ‘We can’t think like that.’

  ‘I am thinking like that-more and more. There’s something we ought to be doing, something else, not just waiting for us all to be poisoned … or perhaps I’m as crazy as she is, perhaps that’s it.’

  ‘It won’t last long. Nothing ever does.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s as if… I don’t know how to explain it… it’s as if … not that she is mad, but there’s madness. A kind of wavelength of madness-and she hooks into it and out, when she wants. I could hook into it just as easily. Or it could hook into me-it’s in the air.’

  ‘Or into me, ’ said Martha. She lay, her head on his spent arm.

  ‘Well, yes. Well-but what can I do? Go off to a prostitute? I couldn’t do that. I never have.’

  Martha could have said, of course. ‘Oh, have it on me,’ or: ‘You’re making use of me!’ or ‘Who do you think I am ’—she could have made use of any of the remarks lying around suitable for such occasions. But she didn’t feel them. They passed through her mind, as it were showing themselves to her, to be rejected or not.

  What she did feel, she couldn’t tell Mark, because what help would it have been, either to him or to Lynda?

  She was full of an irritable tension that was new to her. It had nothing to do with being’satisfied’ or ‘unsatisfied’. It had nothing much to do, she suspected with sex. Day by day, or night by night, as Mark came up from the basement, when Lynda was briefly asleep, to take hold of Martha and link her in to his high energy, she became charged with a feverish electricity-if that was the word for it. She did not know what to do with it. She did not know what it was. She was desperate. But what was being created in her was not the never-to-be-sated ‘woman in love’, ‘wife’, ‘mistress’, etc. etc. Sex … What is sex? We keep using all these words, and what do they mean after all? The word sex has to do for so many different experiences, and like the word energy, it is what you make of it… movement, she needed movement. She put on a dull coat and scarf over her head and walked through dark streets. London after midnight is not pleasant to walk in, if you are a woman. Even if you are not charged with an energy that makes you a centre for all the furtive prowlers looking for sex. The big cities of the world do not accommodate women walking at night: better forests, or a moor: less dangerous, less frightening. After midnight in a city a woman is a woman is a woman even if masked in an old coat that had once belonged to Mrs. Van der Bylt, and an unbecoming headscarf.

  She thought: If I were a man I’d go to a prostitute.

  But Mark didn’t.

  She thought: Ought I to be angry with a man who puts me into this state? What state?

  She telephoned Jack. ‘Martha! Believe me, I’m glad to hear your voice. Yes. When? Just a tick then, I’ll see if…’

  She waited. He sounded the same, a country boy all simple and straightforward enthusiasms. Yet he didn’t sound the same … Martha listened to the stillness while he checked with some woman, or looked in his engagement book and felt uneasy. Because why was she doing this at all?

  He came back and asked:’ Three o’clock would be better than two-is that all right?’

  ‘Yes. Fine’.

  ‘Believe me, Martha, it’s fine to hear you. I’ve thought of you often, do you believe me?’

  ‘Yes … of course.’ She felt very uneasy. It sounded as if he were checking something, finding out, or trying to?

  ‘And our paths have never crossed all these years.’

  ‘I suppose they have without us knowing it.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure they have! Martha, I’ll be looking forward so much to the moment I see you-you do believe me, don’t you?’

  When the conversation was over, she nearly rang up to say it was a mistake, she was off to the South Pole-anything. She had been left tingling with a warning-don’t.

  Next night, she walked down a quiet middle-class street where only two or three windows still shone yellow in a strong white moonlight. Decorous little trees, like children allowed to stay up late, stood in patches of garden that defined individual front doors, each on its best behaviour, shining knocker, letter slit, bell. Each house, shored internally under paint and plaster by a thousand makeshifts, looked solidly desirable: behind them the canal lay quiet, discreetly reflecting moonlight. Elsewhere the moon rocked oceans in their beds, stuffed pillows full of uncomfortable dreams, made doctors double their dosage of sedatives for sad lunatics in hospitals, set dogs howling and drew fish up to goggle at the streaming white light.

  Jack’s door, black, had a wolf’s head on it for a knocker, and a spy-hole. Martha looked at a tiny globe, and knew that through it, somebody saw all of her. Nearly she walked away. The door opened. Jack, not a day older, a country boy in a green sweater that had a tear in the elbow, stood on bare feet on a thick dark carpet. Behind him was the hall, all solid thick expensive white paint and dark pile and an octagonal table mosaiced with coloured woods.

  ‘Martha, ’ he said, ‘I’m so very happy, I’ve been missing you, do you believe that?’

  Brown eyes in a smooth brown face. He was waiting to see what she would do. Of course, he always had. She walked on. past the room where once the crazy youth had sat on guard. The door was open. It was-the word for it, was salon. She switched on the light and looked at a room which had been inspired by a room in a château: it was not English. It was elegant, formal, but also enticing-there was something sly about it.

  ‘Do you like it? Do you like what I’ve done?’

  The house was all like that, a surface of solid, indeed, gloomy formality; under it, something else. It was a fantasy house: rather, a house for the setting of fantasy. The room on the first floor hadn’t changed. Stark with its oil heaters and darkened windows, the bed set for action. Martha said it reminded her of an engine-room in a luxury ship. He looked at her carefully, suspiciously-he did not laugh. Then, he set himself an allowance of laughter, used it up, and sat cross-legged on the bed watching her.

  Martha who knew she should not have come, yet did not go. Curiosity. Curiosity would kill the cat yet.

  She kept thinking: My memory is playing me tricks, I’m remembering what it was like, all wrong-I must be. But she knew she was not. Jack had changed. He had changed fundamentally and vitally.

  The years since she had come here to make love, she had spent above all in the exercise of holding on to what is permanent in people; while moods, phases, stages flowed past; what else is the business of bringing up children? She had had an education in recognizing a person’s permanence. When she was here last, she could have sworn it, she was in contact with Jack, all of him in communication wit
h what he was. But now, she kept reaching out, probing, waiting for Jack to talk, to talk to her. It was like being with Jimmy Wood-only in so far, of course, as this business of waiting for a resonance or an echo went; she kept addressing remarks to Jack, but Jack did not answer.

  He sat on his bed, waiting. She sat on a rather nice old wooden chair by the heater. She sat holding a mug of cocoa, looking across bare boards to Jack. He was waiting for her to come and sit by him. but he wasn’t going to suggest it. There was a feeling in the room of-waiting. More, a watchful, intent, urgent waiting. Jack watched, without seeming to, every move she made, seeing them as towards him, or away from him. She could feel his will encompassing her.

  ‘Tell me about the house. Jack-you forget I don’t know.’

  ‘I’d like to tell, you. I will

  ‘You are here by yourself?’

  ‘You know how I want to live. I haven’t changed.’

  ‘You want all your women under one roof?’

  He nodded. Tears stood in his eyes. He had not meant them to be there-but he didn’t blink them away: he held them for her inspection.

  ‘Aren’t you ill any longer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really? It’s all gone?’

  ‘Are you afraid I’ll infect you?’ He sounded wronged.

  This startled her: he would never have said that once.

  ‘No. I’m sure you wouldn’t let anyone get anything-but you don’t catch tuberculosis like that, do you?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. I’m cured. I’ve been cured for years. I have to be careful.’

  Joking she said:’ You mean, eating regularly and going to sleep early!’

  He seemed to suffer, sat with bowed head. Softly he said:

  ‘I am always waiting for trust. Believe me, Martha, that’s what I spend my life waiting for.’

  It was all discordant-off key. She got up, prepared to go. He had turned his head slightly so he could watch her without seeming to.

  ‘I can see you are going, Martha. I’m sorry, believe me. But I would like you to let me tell you about the house …’

  She sat down. She could feel his will relax. He began speaking in a soft, considered voice about how he had slowly paid for, acquired the house, done it up-but he did not say where the money had come from. He said: ‘I let that part of the house until I had the money to do it up and then … I want to tell you about that room you saw-you liked it, I could see you did. Well, I did that room for Jeanne. I never knew what to do with it. She is from the Loire. She came to London as an au pair girl. And her mother worked in one of those châteaux. When Jeanne was a girl she used to go up with her mother to help her work, she was a charwoman. Jeanne had always dreamed of a room like that. I made it for her.’

  ‘Did she live in it? Where did she live?’

  He waited a little. Not looking at her, but missing nothing of any reaction she had, he went on:’ She isn’t here. She came here to visit. But that was her room-you understand me, Martha?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’ And again talking to the old Jack, she said smiling:’ Well if you decorate a room afresh for every woman you sleep with-’

  But he was listening for something else: a theatrically humble smile appeared on his face, and he said:’ Believe me, Martha, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do, nothing, for any woman I love-you know that. But it’s not what I want, that women should just come and go, I want any women I have to stay with me for ever, you know that.’

  He was looking at her direct now, willing her to come over to him. She did not want to, but she did. He sat on the bottom of the bed. She remembered sitting there before; and he had sat where he was now. He could not suppress a smile of pleasure that she had come: and it was a smile of triumphant pleasure, like a small boy who has been allowed to get his way. He began talking, slowly, about the room and Jeanne. He was watching every one of her reactions. He described Jeanne, slowly, with details of every asset, visible and invisible. Once he would have described a girl with a need to share his pleasure in her beauty. But now it was to rouse Martha. Knowing this, watching and listening, she was roused. He went on to describe the exact use of various pieces of furniture in the room downstairs; and how Jeanne, at first reluctantly, then with pleasure, took part in this or that posture or pursuit on sofa, footstool or table.

  Martha, manipulated and watching herself being manipulated, was waiting. She was waiting (as she realized afterwards) for the’real’ Jack to come back, so that they could return to where they had left off. She was waiting for him to begin the slow ritual of rousing by atmosphere, eye, tension. But he went on talking about Jeanne, with breasts so and so, crotch so and so, armpits thus. And then about another girl, Olive. And slowly the geography of the house, in terms of sexual fantasy, was mapped. For instance there was a hexagonal room on the ground floor, with six alcoves or niches. He imagined that six naked girls (‘all of them of their own accord, Martha, believe me, there’d be no pleasure in it otherwise’) were chained in the alcoves. Then a specially-trained Alsatian dog would lick the girls into sexual excitement. Meanwhile he stood watching: he would be fully dressed. Then, at last, he would undress, and, fondling the dog, he would allow the girls to beg for him. He imagined how they would scream and cry and plead. He might or might not comply. ‘I might just walk away smiling. Imagine it, Martha-me, quite naked, walking away with the dog, while they screamed and called me filthy names.’

  Time was going fast towards morning. He, no doubt, continued to live without reference to the clock. But she would have to be back home before morning. She slid into bed with Jack at that point when she understood that he had forgotten what he had been, that this was what he was.

  Now she knew in what way he had changed. He had become cruel, hard, driving; all domination and hurt.

  It was like being with a man she had not known before.

  It was like an endurance test. On her side: how much can I stand? On his: how much can Iget her to stand?

  When it was nearly morning, she said she must go. He did not ask when she was coming back. Instead he talked, watching her with an almost theatrical cunning (so obvious that it confused her) of another girl, of how she liked this and that, and how she, this girl, had come to see that he. Jack, was right in insisting on her submission to this or that whim of his.

  Before she left she asked:’ Jack, do you ever make love the way you used to-do you remember?’

  He studied her in his new sideways sly way which was at the same time open, meant to be seen. He was trying to work out what she meant. He had forgotten.

  ‘I’ve always liked it with you, Martha, you know that.’

  ‘Yes but-you’re different. Did you know that?’

  In his new manner of mingled arrogance and humility he said:’ There’s always new things to learn.’

  ‘No I didn’t mean … oh well, perhaps I’m different too.’ She said this to be able to slide away from the subject, but now he was alerted and alarmed. ‘Oh no, you’re not, believe me you’re not!’ He was genuinely upset at the idea that she might think she was different. This confused her again.

  ‘Do you mean, you’re different because you’re older? I don’t care about that. You don’t know me if you think that matters to me. Oh, if only you’d trust me.’

  He was almost weeping-that was genuine.

  She left along the resurrected street as the sun came up red beyond the canal.

  She had no idea at all what to think. Except for one thing, that Jack of ten years ago and Jack now were not the same person. But really not, literally not. What did that mean? She did not know.

  And she knew that what had taken place with him, in his house, which was an elaborate stage or setting for fantasies of perverse sex, had nothing to do with the other electric tension she carried from Mark. Yet both were called’sex’.

  She had gone to Jack because of a restless drive she had got from Mark, who had brought it up from the basement, where Lynda was ill. But Jack was not on that wavele
ngth. She was physically tired, physically satisfied. She was also as alert and alive as a high tension wire and might just as well never have gone to Jack.

  So, then, it was of no use going to see Jack again. She decided she would not go. But she went. For one thing, if a woman goes to bed with a man then certain psychological rules start working, things have to play themselves out. A development or aspect of these rules was the process unrolling itself of his needing to see how far she would go, of her waiting to see how far she would go: it was an aspect of male-command-and-female-submission.

  Besides, when she went away from him, it was always with the same thought: where is Jack? She would think: I must be imagining that he is like this now. For she could remember so very clearly what he had been. Or she would think the opposite: I must be inventing what he was ten years ago. But she knew she hadn’t invented it. Once he had been all a subtle physical intelligence. Now he had become stupid. Now his body was entirely a servant to a kind of cunning, which needed to get a woman under its will, in order to degrade her-but degrade her morally. It was an absolutely clear process, without ambiguity. He needed that his mind, his will, using the clumsiest of techniques for interesting, then arousing a woman, should bring her physically into a position where she had to submit to bullying. But the point was not the physical bullying at all-she could swear that was not what interested him. It was the breaking down that got her there which he needed. The need for this was what he had become.

  One was able to watch while he used a kind of clumsy psychological technique to raise one’s sexual and emotional temperature. The point was, other women must watch too: only a very stupid woman or an inexperienced one could remain unaware of what he was doing.

  Or half aware; it was his clumsiness, the theatricalness of it, that was confusing. She could swear that all those years ago he had been neither theatrical nor cunning.

  For all those years, while Martha had been in Mark’s house, jack had been here, creating a house which was like a perverted millionaire’s brothel, and sitting like a spider while women came and went.