The Four-Gated City

The two looked at each other, then studied Martha, arranging cakes, and Mark, playing trains.

The large man said: ‘Take it easy, son, take it easy. Your mummy’s not coming, you know.’

‘Why not, why not?’ screamed Paul, and flung himself down. Lying face down, he banged his head hard on the floor while his face exploded tears.

‘Is this Colin Coldridge’s boy?’ asked the sullen man, bending to examine him for describable details.

Mark now scrambled up off his knees, and advanced on the journalists. Yesterday’s man was suspiciously angry. The large man was smiling, ingratiating. The child continued to bang his head, crying noisily. Mark, with his eyes wide, his mouth open, his face white, appeared comic.

‘Take it easy,’ said the large man again, and backed away, in a parody of fear: he was making fun of Mark.

The self-righteous man was now making mental notes about the kitchen. Having done this, he returned his attention to Paul, who was writhing at his feet, and said accusingly: ‘Why didn’t you tell the boy about his mother?’

At which Paul shot off the floor and grasped his uncle around the knees, so violently that Mark staggered and leaned sideways to catch hold of a chair-back. ‘Tell me what?’ screamed Paul.’ Where’s my mummy?’

‘Your mummy’s …’ The journalist stopped; unable to say ‘dead’ to the child’s face.

With a mutter of inarticulate disgust, he backed out of the door. The goodfellow, smiling deprecatingly, said: ‘Here’s my card.’ He laid a piece of card on the table by the cake. Miles Tangin. The Daily – ‘If you’d co-operate, Mr Coldridge,’ he suggested, ‘then it would be better.’

‘I’ll complain to your editor,’ said Mark over Paul’s head. The child was sobbing noisily, and gripping Mark’s knees, so that Mark had to hold himself upright with one hand on the chair-back while with the other he tried to soothe Paul.

‘You do that,’ said the first man, all contemptuous bitterness.

The two went out together.

Mark carried the sobbing child up to bed.

In bed he was quieter, whimpering a little, while he watched them both. He was waiting.

‘Where’s my mummy?’ he asked at last. Martha said: ‘She’s dead, Paul.’

Paul took it. It was a fact which marched with the events of the last week. ‘And is my daddy dead too?’

‘No,’ said Mark, with emphasis. But both he and Martha knew that of course he would not believe them. They had been lying to him: they were probably lying again.

‘He’s away,’ said Martha. ‘He’ll come back.’

Paul said nothing. He lay staring at them, with his black, untrusting eyes. Then he turned his face to the wall, and shut them out. They stayed with him. Hour after hour passed. He was not asleep. He kept dropping off, but he whimpered in his sleep, and this woke him. It was nearly morning when at last he fell into a deep sleep.

Their days were now spent with Paul, the child who could not trust them. He had gone silent, evasive, listless. He spent hours curled in a chair in the kitchen, sucking his thumb. He usually did not answer when Martha or Mark spoke to him. This did not look as if he were trying to be a baby again, wanting to be fed; but as if he really could not take in the existence of food, of mealtimes. He would sit listening, or apparently listening, if they read to him or told him stories. He sat quietly for the children’s programmes on the radio. Put to bed, he slept. When he looked out of the back windows, the front windows, and saw the groups of reporters waiting there, he examined them, then looked at Mark and Martha for explanations. It seemed he was afraid to ask questions. But they wouldn’t have known how to answer.

In the evenings, the two sat in Mark’s study. Mark’s white face had acquired a staring mask-like look; as if wide-eyed at the incredible, the impossible. He did not believe what was happening. This was because he was Mark Coldridge, to whom such things could not happen.

Yet he was also Mark Coldridge who had written that book about war which came from the heart of an understanding of how such things happened – must happen. Martha was waiting to talk to the man who had written that book: but he was not there.

Mark was saying things like: ‘We must get Paul to school so that he can get over it.’ Or: ‘When it’s blown over, I’ll take Francis and Paul for a holiday somewhere.’

He was still talking in terms of a situation normal enough to blow over. He could not bear to see that a deep harm had been done; and that they, or at least, he, must expect the results of it, and that the results were for life.

But how could Martha blame Mark when she caught herself thinking several times a day: Before Sally killed herself, before Colin went away – the double event which her nerves, geared to laziness, still felt as a water-shed. And it was as much her fault as Mark’s that Paul had not been told the truth (as much truth as could be told to a child of six) so that now he trusted no one; it was as much her fault that the affair had been handled so that the truth had come through journalists scavenging for news.

And what was the use of feeling guilt, blaming herself and Mark, when they still did not know how to act, still sat night after night in the quiet book-lined study, with a decanter of old brandy on the desk, and when they did act, absurdity or worse came of it. For they had lost a sense of the ordinary machinery of life.

One afternoon they had watched through the windows a couple of Press men rummaging through their dustbins in search of incriminating documents.

One of them was Miles Tangin. Mark telephoned the editor to protest, could not get through, left a message that he would like to be rung back, was rung back by – Miles Tangin. The telephone number then had to be changed again.

Martha suggested that he should ask the police to guard front and back entrance, to keep the journalists off.

Mark was furious. ‘I’m not being guarded by police in my own house in my own country because of a lot of … I’ll get Margaret to tell the editor what’s going on. She must know him.’

He rang his mother’s home in the country. It was only when it had been ringing for some minutes that they realized it was after two in the morning. After a long wait, John came to the telephone. He was polite of course. Mark spoke to the colourless husband of his mother, a man whom he despised, though of course, he had never been anything less than polite to him. Martha sat on an old brown sofa, feeling velvet rub soft under her fingers. She was watching Mark clutch the telephone as if the machine itself could come up with sense, or protection. In the last couple of weeks he had lost over a stone. His clothes were hanging on him. His fingers were stained with nicotine to the knuckles. He looked half crazy.

John said that Margaret was asleep after a hard day. The Press had been out to the house, and the telephone was never silent.

‘I want to speak to her,’ said Mark.

‘I’ll tell her in the morning that you rang.’

‘Then tell her to get hold of those editors and call off their dogs,’ said Mark.

A short affronted laugh.

‘Perhaps if you were prepared to make some sort of announcement to the Press? suggested Margaret’s husband.

‘What announcement would you suggest?’

Another short laugh. ‘As things stand, your mother, my wife, is the mother of a man who has escaped behind the Iron Curtain, suspected of being a spy, and of another who refuses to dissociate himself from him.’

‘But he happens to be my brother,’ said Mark. Again, he sounded incredulous. It was precisely here: what he could not believe was happening, or could happen – to him.

‘But what can they expect me to do?’ he asked Martha again. And he listened with his wide fascinated look as if this time he might understand what previously he had failed to understand.

She said, again: ‘They expect you to make a public announcement that you repudiate your brother and all his works. And to make a public affirmation of loyalty to this country.’

‘But good God,’ he said softly, ‘I mean – but they can’t – but this is this country, it’s not … I mean, the Americans or the Russians or people like that, but not He was looking at her with dislike.

‘Don’t tell me that’s what you think I should do! He’s my brother,’ he insisted. As if it were she who was his enemy. ‘You keep asking me what they want.’

His eyes were hot and dark with refusal. He sat locked in himself. Then he understood he was making an enemy of an ally, smiled, though stiffly, and poured her a brandy.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Next morning Margaret rang. It was very early. Mark was half-asleep. He came up to Martha’s room to say that he thought his mother had gone mad. She had telephoned about the basement and about Mrs Ashe.

They could not understand it. Martha said that this was perhaps Margaret’s way of preserving normality. She was probably right: to worry about letting basements was better than what they were all doing. It was even reassuring of her.

As they spoke, the telephone rang again. Mark went to it. Mark did not come back, so Martha went down to him. He was sitting, looking very white, by the telephone.