The Four-Gated City

They had been to eat very late at midday; and it was not yet six in the evening. ‘I was lying on the bed, feeling all my bones. Sometimes when I lie still like that, I’m a skeleton: I can’t feel the flesh anywhere, just bones. I’ve got to get some flesh on me.’

They went back to the Indian restaurant, through late afternoon streets. A meagre sunlight; people rushing back from work along the ugly street. In the restaurant, the Indian who had served them their lunch, was still on duty. He was from Calcutta, had been sent for by an uncle who owned another, much smarter restaurant, in Earl’s Court. This was a new, small restaurant, the bottom floor of an old house. The Indian from Calcutta, working for a pittance in a cold foreign country to escape from his family’s poverty, welcomed them with white-teethed affability, and for the second time that day, served them with enormous quantities of food. Then they returned to Jack’s house. They were both sad and low, and gentle with each other. When they went in, the door was open into the room where the grinning boy lived. He was sitting with his back to the wall, cross-legged, playing patience with a candle alight beside him. He nodded and grinned and waved. They nodded, leaving his smile behind to fade on the dark stuffy air of the stairs.

They lay on the bed with their arms around each other.

‘You won’t come and live here, Martha?’

‘No. I can’t, Jack.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t. I suppose that’s why I was afraid to bring it up – I didn’t want to hear you say no.’ ‘Somebody else will, I expect.’

‘Yes. But I would have liked it if you could have trusted me.’ He was nearly crying again.

‘Have you ever thought – we make decisions all the time: but how? It’s always in reference to – we make them in obedience to something we don’t know anything about?’

‘No. I make decisions!’

‘Ah, you’re master of your fate.’

But one did not tease Jack, he could not be teased.

‘Don’t laugh at me, Martha!’

‘I’m not. But looking back, we think we’ve made decisions – it’s something else that makes them.’

‘Ah, Martha,’ he said suddenly, rough: ‘You’re not coming back to me, you aren’t going to stay with me!’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No? I don’t know why, but that’s what I thought you were saying.’ ‘No.’

‘You’ve got to believe I want you to. I know what you’re thinking – you’re a woman! He’s got so many girls, he doesn’t care. But it’s not true. I’m not promiscuous, I don’t like changing and having new girls. I want girls who’ll always come back, the same girls. I’m very faithful, Martha, you’ve got to believe me.’

Soon he fell asleep. She was not sleepy. She lay holding his body, the long thin cage of bones, over which such a light shelter of flesh lay breathing. She felt how he was alert, ready to wake at a sound or a touch, even though he seemed to be deeply asleep. She would have got up and dressed and gone, if she could have done it without waking him. But she knew he would start up if she so much as slid her arm away from beneath his head. Her hand lay on his back, feeling the bones branch off from the central column of bone. Past his shoulder she looked into the recess where the window was that had to be kept shuttered because of the odours from the canal. Beneath that window, a scene of littered back garden, unkept hedges, rubbish bins, a slope of dirty soil to a low weed-grown canal. On a hot afternoon during the vanished heatwave, she had sat in the window watching children brown from six weeks of that sun, dive and swim like water-rats among the weeds. From time to time a woman shrieked from a window: Tommy! Annie! Where are you? You’re not to swim in that water! The children cowered in the water, looking up at the windows. The women knew that the children were in the water, and that there was no way of stopping them: they had swum there themselves when they were sleek brown rats among water-weeds.

The candle on the floor near this window sunk, shook wildly and went out. The man in Martha’s arms slept, his face, a boy’s face, tear-marked, a few inches from hers. The candles on the mantelpiece burned for a while longer. Then the room was a pit of dark. Then Martha herself dropped into the pit. She dreamed. That picture, or vision, she had seen behind her eyes of the house with the sad children, came again but now it was not a sharp image, a ‘still’, or a series of ‘stills’; but a long moving dream. A large London house – but not this one. There was traffic outside it, but also the presence of trees. Full of people. Children. Half-grown children. Sad. It was a sad, sad dream. But not a nightmare: no fear came with it. Martha was in the dream, she was responsible for the children. She was worried, anxious: but she held the fort, she manned defences.

They woke very early, having slept so early. It was just light – about five. Jack cooked them breakfast on his spirit stove. Then she kissed him and left. The door off the hall was still open, and in the low grey light, the mad youth lay asleep on the floor beside the candle that had burned itself out. Outside, a young morning, with a low wet sun. With luck, it would be a fine day. Martha set off towards Iris and Jimmy across the river, locked inside Mrs Van’s coat.

Chapter Three (#ulink_a5d3f0fd-398f-500b-9eea-4785c70d68c9)

She rode high in a red bus over streets tinted by damp sunlight, crossed a strongly ebbing river with gulls at eye-level – flashing white wings, seen through dull glass; and descended to earth or street-level as Big Ben said it was seven. But it would not do to reach Joe’s café before eight. That household had two starts to its day, one at about five, when Iris, Jimmy still asleep, rose to feed cornflakes, toast, scrambled powdered egg and tea to some young lorry drivers from a lodging house down the street whose landlady would not feed them so early; another at nine, when the side of the card that said OPEN was turned in invitation to the pavement. With the apprentice lorry drivers were a couple of older men, among them Iris’s cousin Stanley, whom she had fancied for Martha; and some charwomen, their early office-cleaning over, who dropped in for a cup of tea before going home to feed breakfast to their families. Between five and eight that café was a scene of bustling, steaming animation, of intimacy. If Martha were to go in now, unexpected, after two unexplained nights, she could only do so as ‘Matty’. And she was damned if she would. If Iget taken over by her, then I’ll have her riding me for the rest of the day, and I won’t have her around when I’m lunching with Phoebe.

Early sun flashed on a thousand windows and on the gulls’ wings. The great buildings on either side of the river stood waiting, empty; not empty: for at this hour an army of women were at work with their vacuum cleaners, making them hum and vibrate like beehives. They stopped to gossip along corridors where soon, but not for two hours yet, men still fighting for another few minutes’ sleep in surburban bedrooms ten, fifteen, twenty miles away, would come hurrying in, Good morning, good morning, good morning, diverging into rooms where the waste-paper baskets had been emptied. In they’d flow, to be flung out again by the sound of Big Ben striking five, as thousands of telephones went silent, all at once. Martha dawdled, lost her way in a mesh of little streets, and hit the street of the café a hundred yards down from the bombed site. Turning right, she greeted the slab or hulk of timber. In the less than two days since she had seen it, a minute yellow flower had emerged from a crevice. That great salty, sour, more-stone-than-wood monument had put out a coronet of green leaves and a flower. A small wind tugged at it, but the flower held firm, its roots being well dug in. Martha peered through a wire door that had the death’s head and No Children on it, and saw the lock was loose in its socket. She pushed and went in. Deserted: too early for the children. But no, a small girl wearing an ancient black jersey over a white dress that looked as if it had been starched for a party sat on a brick in the dust. She kept still. ‘Good morning,’ said Martha cheerfully and the child’s eyes concentrated in terror. Then she fled, jumping like a cat over a far wall into safety away from the woman in the black coat. If this were a ruined city, a poisoned city, what would the excavators a hundred years later deduce from what they saw here? Facing Martha, the surface of a jagged wall, three stories of it, rose up sharp from the low edges of rubble. There were three fireplaces, one above another. Each level of wall was tinted a different colour, as if by moss or lichen: wallpaper soaked and dried, soaked and dried, again and again. Pale green. Above that, pinkish shaggy brown. Above that dim yellow. Coming closer, it could be seen, where a long strip had been torn away off the green, that beneath was a darker green. Martha got up on to an edge of wall, and slid her fingernails under the edge of paper. A thick sog of paper: layers of it, now stuck together. Once each had been a loving and loved skin for the walls, which held the lives of people. But they were fused together, like a kind of felt. Martha pulled. A lump came away. Picking at the layers, she counted thirteen. Thirteen times had a man stood on trestles, or perhaps a table (these were small cheaply built houses, with low ceilings, and probably the kitchen table would have been high enough) and stretched new clean paper over the stains and dirts of the layer beneath. Thirteen times had a wife, or children said: Yes, that’s very nice, I like that, dad; or had said No, we chose wrong. The two papers at the very bottom were rather beautiful, judging from the inch or so she had to look at: they got progressively uglier as the decades slid by. The one at the top was hideous, must have been an acid green, with a bad jangling pattern. In the middle was a rather pretty sprigged pattern, like a Victorian young lady’s morning dress … voices from the street. Precisely as the little girl had done, Martha froze: authority! She ought not to be here. She sneaked down off the wall, pushing the wadge of coagulated paper into Mrs Van’s pocket; and hid behind a heap of bricks until it seemed safe to go out into the street.

Against the dim muslin that screened the café, shapes of bodies; the lively intimacy of the early morning session shed warmth on to the pavement. She was too early after all. Martha went around into the side street where, this house being on a corner, was a side door into a yard. The door was of slats of wood held with two cross-boards. It had been painted once, for there was crumbling greenish pigment in the cracks. But now it was a greyish colour. ‘From before the war,’ Iris had said. When Iris said something was from before the war, this meant, something that would have been replaced, or mended or painted, if there had not been a war. She would not, for instance, have said that the wall which was a single yellow brick’s thickness surmounted at the height of a tall man’s head by a litter of broken glass, was from before the war. Martha unlatched the door and was in – a neat, tended garden. Hidden behind these street fronts, tucked in among wastes of brick and cement, were gallant little gardens. This one, the size of a large room, had a pear tree, an old wooden bench recently painted a new bright green by Jimmy; and an ancient rose ambled over the back of the house. It was in full pink bloom and it scented all the air. In the corner of this patch of garden was a privy: the house did not have an indoor lavatory. It was like a little sentry box, and to it was a flagged path with musky plants growing in crevices. Beyond the window into the kitchen, Iris sat, at a table framed by pink roses. When she had finished with the early morning stint, she took what she said was a bit of a kip: she slumped in a tortoise condition, her hand stretched towards a flagon of tea, her eyes open, but not really seeing anything. Meanwhile Jimmy had got up and had taken over the café. He was not in the kitchen now. Martha pushed open the back door and was received by a sleepy stare from the surface of Iris’s eyes. Then, she said vaguely, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Martha sat down, and Iris gestured towards a brown teapot and yawned. ‘We’ve used your ration,’ she said. ‘You didn’t come, did you?’ Martha poured tea. Iris smiled: but she resented being made to wake up.

The kitchen was small. Along one wall was apparatus for the café: the frying machine for the fish and the chips; and an electric stove which Jimmy had filched from the ruins down the road after the bomb had fallen. There was also an old-fashioned wood stove, which was used as a cupboard, or larder.

‘So you’re off?’ said Iris.

‘Yes. I’ve come to get my things.’

‘They’re ready. And I’ve put your ration book and your coupons on your case. Upstairs.’ ‘Thank you, Iris.’

‘Stanley’s next door, if you want to see him.’ Martha had not wanted to see Stanley, evidence of her bad heart though this undoubtedly was; and Iris’s tone said that see him she ought, even if Stanley did not particularly want to see her. But now, since it was clearly up to her to go through and make her presence known to the man whom Iris had decided would suit her as a husband, Martha actually got as far as the door before rebelling. Why should she? Whatever debts she would leave behind her, Stanley was not one of them. She sat down again, in silence. The two women confronted each other: Martha determined not to apologize, plead guilty, or evade, Iris now awake, exuding a stubborn determination to suffer betrayal.

‘I don’t think Stanley and I are suited,’ said Martha.

‘Well, I suppose one of these days he’ll make his bed,’ said Iris, full of grievance.

‘Yes, but not with me,’ said Martha.

Iris measured herself a small sour glimmer in reply to this invitation to laugh; and then, against her will, laughed out, and slammed her hand palm down on the table.

She continued to laugh, laughter ebbing from her like water: it was like crying.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but a man’s a man, and when the war’s out of his blood, he’ll settle well enough.’

According to Iris, Stanley had been uprooted by war; which was why he had chosen the lorry run to Birmingham five days a week, and spent weekends doing labouring work – he couldn’t rest. Martha thought it was nothing to do with the war, it was his nature. And she knew, though Iris did not (for she and Stanley had come to an understanding, had made a pact against matchmakers) that there was a woman in Birmingham with whom he spent nights. He did not want to marry. Certainly not Martha. Though he liked her well enough to suggest a job as secretary to the firm he worked for.

Iris now got up, defying Martha, or, more likely, asserting her right to choose her cousin a wife; and called through the hatch: ‘She’s here!’

She sat down again, saying to Martha, ‘You’ll want to say goodbye, won’t you then?’

In a moment Stanley came in. He was about forty, a lean, narrow, slouching man with hard blue eyes.

‘I’m due to be off,’ Stanley said generally. ‘My mate’s already at the bus. So you’ve got yourself a job then, have you?’ He did not look at Martha but at his cousin: and towards her a warning, or a resentment, was directed. Not at Martha: he was a fair man and proud of it.

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Martha.

‘You’re all right then,’ said Iris, hostile.

‘See you some time,’ said Stanley, and, on his way out, turned to give her a good warm smile, snubbing Iris with a cool nod.

‘He’s a case,’ said Iris, grieving. ‘There was a girl at the laundry who fancied him, but not him no.’

‘How do you know he hasn’t got a girl of his own already?’

‘Well, if he’d do a thing like that!’ said Iris bitterly, highlighting for Martha some area of family grievance, bonds, or bondage, that she’d never now, with the time left, be able to understand. Tears were in Iris’s weak blue eyes, and she stirred her tea savagely.

In came Jimmy, wearing a striped apron, full of a contained reproach.

‘So you don’t want that job, then?’

‘She’s got a job,’ said Iris. ‘Up West.’

‘Up West is it?’