The Four-Gated City

And he turned his back, picked up a book, and stood looking at the book, his taut back saying simultaneously that he wished Martha to go on, but proposed to resist what she said. She braced herself, and went on, there being no way of bringing up fraught subjects with Mark without barging in, breaking in, battering. Never had she known a man so armoured, so defensive. As pain-laden subjects came near him, his dark face, whose predominant expression was, in fact, one of dogged inquiry, a need to know, to find out – closed up, his mouth tightened, and he turned away.

To his back Martha cried out: ‘But, Mark, what sort of logic or common sense is it! Let alone any decent ordinary humanity! You say you are pleased you weren’t sent to a public school, you say being sent to America was the best thing that happened to you – you carry on about the upper classes like a socialist in Hyde Park – and now you are sending Francis through that mill. What for?’

His back still turned he said: ‘They have some kind of a strength. I haven’t got it. I want him to have it.’

What strength? Who has it?’

‘Oh … some of them. Oh I dare say it’s a kind of narrowness. They’re blinkered. If you like. But it is a strength. One’s got to have something.’

His dead brother (and Mark was the last person, as his writing proved, to see a death in war as arbitrary, unconnected with what a person was), had been, when war broke out, on the point of throwing up his job, or jobs, as chairman of companies, to go farming in Kenya. Hardly an evidence of unconformity to his own type, but his reason for wanting to do this was that England was no longer a place to bring children up in, people cared for nothing but making money. The second brother was Colin. Then Mark. Then Arthur, left-winger and regarded by the Coldridge family as not much better than a street agitator.

‘Well, all right then,’ said Mark. His back was still firmly turned to her. ‘Take Arthur. He talks red revolution all right. But put him beside that communist party scum and you see the difference.’

‘What scum?’

‘I wouldn’t trust that lot farther than I could kick them. But Arthur – well, if he says a thing, you know that’s it. You understand? You can trust him.’

And now Martha could not reply: he was saying that Arthur was a gentleman.

Unable to reply, she sat down, and waited. As usual, it was long after midnight, and the street outside was quiet. This room was quiet. It had two focuses, or areas of interest. One was the desk with piles of notes, notebooks, a typewriter. The other was a table on which stood all kinds of models, and prototypes, stacks of diagrams and blueprints, to do with the machines made in the factory. Mark’s business, started by him after the war, manufactured electronic devices used in hospitals, in medical work generally. He worked with a man called Jimmy Wood. The money made on one or two regular lines was used by them in experimenting and inventing and paying for how the two men seemed to spend most of their time: sitting in the office in the factory talking their way to new ideas.

At last Mark did turn around. It was with an effort. And when he sat down, facing her, he had to make himself.

‘I suppose I’m inconsistent?’

‘I just keep thinking of Francis crying half the night.’

‘He’s never going to have the ordinary thing, a mother, that kind of thing? So he could have the other thing to hold on to?’

‘You couldn’t compromise?’ she suggested, ‘humorous’, through necessity. ‘I mean, do you have to choose a school that’s like a caricature? Aren’t there any that aren’t like that?’

‘My brothers went there.’

‘Then that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

‘Margaret’s on your side. She wanted me to send him to my old place.’ ‘Why didn’t you?’

Now he hastily got up and went to the window, to examine the curtains. They had been cleaned. Last time he had made that movement, to evade an emotional point, he had muttered: ‘They need cleaning.’ Then he had turned to say: ‘I have a talent for tragic love affairs.’ For he had had a couple of hopeless passions before Lynda.

The reason why Mark did not want Francis to go to his own school, the compromise progressive school where, after all, he had been happy, was that in his own mind he was a failure: or so Martha worked out was likely. Mark felt he had let his educators down; exactly as he might have felt, had he gone to Eton like his older brother James, if he had embezzled funds. His school was dedicated to emotional balance and maturity – etc. Well, he had not made that grade. If he sent Francis there, Francis would go as the son of a failure – it seemed that Mark felt something like this.

But that talk did bear fruit; for Mark went to see his mother, who came to see Martha. The meeting took place in ‘Margaret’s room’; and Margaret sat on the edge of one of her pretty chairs with her gloves in her hand, and smiled at Martha.

‘But you’ve been so good for Mark. What a pity you have to go off like this!’

‘I dare say. But I do have to.’

‘Of course. What did you say you had to do? I forget.’

To withstand this kind of accomplished insolence it was necessary to have had the kind of education Mark was now providing for Francis. To withstand it gracefully, that is. Ungracefully, Martha held out.

‘What is Mark writing at the moment?’ ‘You should ask him.’

‘Has he done any work since you’ve been here?’

‘But he always does work hard.’

‘I meant, a new book. Anyone can play about with those electric toys.’

‘I don’t think he sees them like that.’

‘Hmm. Well. I do hope you’re not going to go off when he’s in the middle of something. People will be asking if that book was just a flash in the pan.’

Knowing very well that her silence now must look like a kind of sulk – Martha kept silent.

‘Very well then. Let’s see what you’ve been doing with the basement.’

Martha was very pleased to see Margaret in the basement flat. For even when it was polished, dusted and arranged, it did not look at all like the rest of the house. It was charming; it was comfortable – and it had no life in it. For rooms to look like those upstairs, it was necessary that a person, after feeling (for months, perhaps) that there was something wrong with that chair, that table, should move it two inches, just there, where it would catch the light, just so, or stand in an exact relation to a rug, a cornice? Martha half expected that Margaret’s being in the flat, walking around it, would supply its missing quality.

But Margaret said: ‘Yes, very nice. It needs to be lived in.’ And went upstairs again.

Before leaving she said: ‘Do see that he’s not left in too much of a muddle, there’s a good girl.’

These words, so much more offensive than others she had used, were in fact the most appealing: of such importance is a tone of voice. But they missed the point of what Mark in fact needed from a ‘secretary’; what his relationship to his work was; and what Martha could contribute to it.

When Martha first came to be his ‘secretary’ and waited for typing work, something of that sort, she found that they were sitting in his study, talking. It took time for her to understand that he was trying to define his own attitudes through other people’s – hers, since here she was. Nor did she easily understand how hard it was for him to talk. He prompted and prodded her into words, listened, came back with comments, though sometimes not for days. Partly, this was a way of talking about his life: it seemed he had never had people to talk to. Not at school? Well, yes, but he had had no close friends. Not since? Well, there had been Colin.

And of course there had been Lynda and others. ‘But one doesn’t talk to the people one is in love with, does one?’ All this Martha found hard, her experience, as good as a dozen universities, having been in the talking shops of socialism.

Mark had asked Martha to read his novel; and it was typical of him that he had not expected her to have read it, and to have thought about it. He had, he said, just re-read it himself.

This novel, a short one, had been published in 1948. But it had been written in 1946, while Mark was waiting to be demobilized with the occupation forces in Austria. The book had been, as they say, widely noticed. This was because, Mark said, giving the fact without emphasis, he was a Coldridge. Exploring this (unfair! she judged it, in the face of his amusement that she should) it became clear that the literary editors, the reviewers, the people who ran the arts in England at that time, had been at school, or at university with – not Mark, but his brothers, and ‘knew’ Margaret, or at least all knew each other. No literature-fed person comes from outside Britain without expecting to find some marvellous free marketplace of the arts, internationally fed, high-minded, maintained by disinterested devotees drawn from wherever they can be found. All that excellence, the high standards – surely they were not maintained by Tom and Dick and Harry who had gone to school with Mark’s brothers and who ‘knew’ Margaret? Well, why not? Mark demanded, when he finally saw that what he took for granted, she took with incredulity. Why not? If it works?

Mark had sent the manuscript from Austria, to Jack, a friend of Colin’s, once a guest of Margaret’s: he was now a partner in a publishing firm. He had taken it for granted that the book would be ‘noticed’; would not vanish, scarcely mentioned, as do half of the novels published in Britain. No, what troubled him was the note, or tone of the reviews: cold, disliking, even hostile. He did not understand the reason for it.

‘I suppose they were hedging their bets,’ he said, scornful. ‘They never condemn a dark horse – a cowardly lot!’

One reviewer complained that the book had been written as if the war had been over a hundred years instead of in its miserable aftermath. It was fatalistic, they said. It was pessimistic, it was deterministic. It had no compassion and it was cold.

‘It’s because you aren’t indignant. You aren’t shocked.’

‘What about?’

‘Look at the writing that’s come out of this war – there isn’t much of it as yet of course. And that’s pretty unforgivable in itself – getting a novel out before the guns have even stopped firing. Positively callous!’

‘I didn’t have anything to do. None of us did.’

‘But in what has been written, there’s a note – protest. Disgust.’