The Four-Gated City

And now a look which, if he had not been a man to whom such devices were foreign, if he had been anybody else, Martha would have said was cunning. No: but here was something hidden, tucked away.

‘Well. I’ve a deadline – that’s the word they use for it. And I’ve got to …’ He let all that drift away. Sitting half-way on to a writing-table, his legs held up, as if they rested on a stool, or chair – but they rested on air, he looked at her as if around a corner. Everything was out of scale, disproportionate – discordant. Martha understood she was repelled, not by him, whom she could say she liked; but by a situation. There was one. Anything here, in this house, she understood, would be the absolute opposite of everything she had hoped to find.

She rallied and said firmly: ‘I am looking for a job for a limited period. I don’t want to be tied down to anything. And I did hope, regular hours.’

His face had remained steady during the first condition, but it definitely darkened at her last.

‘Oh, very reasonable of course. But I was rather hoping … you see I work irregularly myself. Mostly at nights. I’ve got an office to go to in the day …’

Here there was a commotion outside, as of an entrance being set or arranged: then a firm knock, and then, before Mark could say anything, there came in a lady, holding a small boy by the hand.

‘Ah!’ said Mark, hopelessly. He got off the desk. To the small boy he said: ‘Well old chap?’ and the child, a round, dark, very pale boy with extraordinarily defensive dark eyes pathetically smiled. He looked around for somewhere appropriate to sit, and sat, while the woman watched to see if he did it right.

‘This is my mother,’ said Mark. ‘Margaret Patten. And this is my son, Francis. And this is Mrs Hesse.’

Martha felt that she knew the lady only too well; since she was large, light, buoyant, and seemed much younger than she must be to be this man’s mother. She wore an ample flowered silk dress and carried gloves, which she now laid down on Mark’s desk and, without looking at them, patted and fitted into a finger-matching pair one above the other, as if they still lay on a display counter, or as if she wished they did. Meanwhile she took in a variety of physical facts about Martha, age, dress, presence, style, and could be heard thinking loudly: Hesse? German? A German name? She’s not German, no. But she’s not English either … Mark looked increasingly annoyed.

‘Well, I do so hope that you’ve found someone at last,’ she announced. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ she said to the child, who had got up, to come closer to his father. He sat again, promptly, his feet side by side, watching the hostile grown-up world from which, so those eyes said so terribly clearly, he could expect nothing that wasn’t painful. Martha found her heart was aching. That little boy Francis was unbearably painful. Meanwhile, Mrs Patten was most frankly summing her up; while her son Mark watched her do it and resented it.

‘Mrs Hesse has only just this moment arrived and we have not agreed about anything at all.’

‘Oh,’ said Margaret Patten, smiling at Martha across her son, as if behind his back.

‘In fact we are engaged in a sort of mutual interview.’

‘Oh well then, we must leave you to it, mustn’t we, Francis?’ She held out her hand and Francis instantly rose to grasp it.

‘If she does stay,’ said Mrs Patten, ‘it’s lucky the big room will be empty for a bit – that is, if dear Sally can bear to keep away!’

He said nothing. Martha said nothing. She was angry for a variety of reasons: mostly pressures from the past, and strong ones. She resented Mrs Patten on her own account and on Mark’s. And on the child’s. Francis now offered his father a smile, which Mark returned: like prisoners of fate they were, condoling briefly before inevitable parting. Then Mrs Patten removed him from the room.

There was a pause while Mark recovered himself. Then: ‘She’s left her gloves, damn it.’ He picked them up and carried them to the door where he saw them into his mother’s hand. Good-byes were said again. He came back.

‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘My wife’s in a mental hospital.’ He paused, not looking at her, while it sank in. ‘My mother’s had the brunt of Francis for quite a bit and she feels that if there were a woman in the house, it would make it easier – during school holidays, for instance.’

There was so much information here that Martha remained silent, digesting it, while he waited for her. And as she thought it out, she saw before her eyes the child’s face as he turned to leave: it was a long, curious, hopeful look.

Oh no, said Martha to herself. Oh no, no, no!

At last she looked at Mark and waited and he said: ‘But you mustn’t think that if you did work for me – for a while, you’d be in any way responsible for Francis, or that you’d have to live here.’

‘Who does live here?’

‘A good question,’ he said, laughing at last. ‘Yes. Well, I should have told you before. The thing is, it’s often hard to know. Well, I do, basically. And my wife – when she’s well …’ A long pause. ‘That’s not likely to be … she’s not very … it doesn’t look as if she’ll be home for some time. Or if she is, she’s not … My mother has the use of the room you saw downstairs. She sometimes likes to entertain in town. And there are the rooms upstairs. They all seem to belong to someone. Or did. We are a large family. We were.’

‘I see’.

‘Yes, I supposed that you had.’ This was an appeal as well as an apology. Martha felt as if she were being swept fast over an edge, and by her own emotions; for the first time since she came to London, she was unfree. She wanted to run out of the house – anywhere. She was extraordinarily upset. So was he.

‘The job itself,’ he said at last. ‘It is pretty straightforward. But you see, my difficulty is, I’ve got to have someone who isn’t going to be upset by – tricky situations.’

She saw very clearly. Martha was thinking: She had no money left. If she were to go to a hotel or find a room she must ask Mark Coldridge for an advance on salary (not yet mentioned). The room upstairs (who was Sally?) would be a godsend, until she could find a place of her own. But that would mean landing herself even deeper in this terrible involving situation which had already involved her; the child’s face haunted her. Why had she been so stupid to leave herself without any money? To work here, living somewhere else – that would be safe enough, probably. (Would it?) She could borrow money. Who? Jack. She must ask Jack.

‘Can I think it over?’ she said; and he said, cold with disappointment, interpreting it, as she almost meant, as a polite refusal: ‘Of course, you’re quite right.’

‘It’s not that I don’t like the idea of working with you … it’s just that …’

‘I do understand.’

And that moment could have been the end of it: she might have walked away and been free. But she said, unable to prevent herself: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I am really so desperately sorry.’

‘Look, you could either live – anywhere, where you please. Or here. But there’s nearly always someone else here. It wouldn’t be a question of being alone with me. Sally’s so often here. Sally’s my brother’s wife. But in either case it wouldn’t have to be a question of hours you didn’t like. But I’d pay you twelve pounds a week, whether you lived in or out.’

His tone was saying that this was generous – and indeed it was; much more than the market rate.

Martha got up. So much emotion was now swilling around the room that she couldn’t stand it. ‘I’ll let you know before today’s out. Will that do?’

His face was suddenly alive: friendly, delighted.

‘Oh good, good,’ he said. ‘I do so hope … but I don’t want to put any pressure on you. And you mustn’t mind – you see, for some weeks, now, I’ve been beset by Phoebe’s choices, and most of the time they are so very definitely not mine.’

‘She’s very forceful, certainly.’

Smiling over Phoebe’s so useful force, they went down the stairs, while Martha remembered how people had smiled over Marjorie: a different smile. Odd: one could never smile, for Phoebe, the smile one used for Marjorie!

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.