The Four-Gated City

Supposing Ottery Bartlett had not come, had not been to see the Butts, would Mark have remained Mark, talking sardonically about ‘the comrades’, whom he couldn’t trust farther than he could kick them? Very likely.

After a week or so of being ill, and semi-drunk, he rang up a man who had been a friend of his brother Colin, a communist. He went to see him, for a long week-end. The week-end after, Freddie Postings came to stay, and several of his friends spent Sunday afternoon and evening in Mark’s study. Martha was not present. She was being treated with cool friendliness. Mark had suffered a conversion, sudden and dramatic, and Martha was able to follow it through its rapid stages, since it was identical as far as she could see, with the one she had undergone ten years before. As if scales had fallen from his eyes, Mark was looking at defects in his own country that previously he had not noticed, minimized, or thought could not exist. His previous self he was regarding as hypocritical, or wilfully blind and certainly as callous to the sufferings of others. He had a new viewpoint, a new vocabulary, new friends. He was undergoing in his own person, through his own experience, that process which can affect nations or parties, or people, when everything that is good in oneself is identified with a cause, and everything bad identified with the enemy. But the interesting thing about Mark’s conversion was that this was not the time to see the cause as perfect; nor, judging from the little Martha saw of the half-dozen or so men and women now visiting the house, were they the kind of communist likely so to see it. Yet Mark was, when they met over breakfast, over conversations about Lynda or the children, using language identical with hers of ten years ago. He had walked into a personality; or, if you like, a state of mind, and he was inhabiting it.

And, just as if he had never protested to Martha that he could not stand political over-simplifications, or the taking of sides, as if he had never written the novel in which what was represented by Hilary Marsh and Ottery Bartlett was taken for granted – he had become ‘The Defender’. Martha saw that this aspect of herself, already weakened when she came to this house, then brought briefly to life in discussions with Mark, had been taken over by him. She looked, when she looked at him, at herself of the past: hot-eyed, angry, violent, unable to listen.

They had changed roles.

During the time, some months, when Mark was in this condition, she was, minimally, his secretary; she kept the house; she tried, inadequately, to befriend the children; and was able to save the novel about the city in the desert from being destroyed.

He wanted to tear it up. He could not understand how he had written such ‘ivory tower rubbish’.

Martha went over the manuscript. He had achieved a final version before ‘The Defender’ had come into the picture. It was a cool, detached account, like a history, of the existence of the city, and the principles on which it was run; and of the alien envious growth outside which eventually overran it, destroyed it, and set up the debased copy of what had been destroyed. This needed some minor tidying up, nothing very much. But recently ‘The Defender’ had been making some additions. These were rough, and wild, and emotional, written in snatches, and inserted into the typed pages in the form of handwritten additions. He had taken episodes from the story and enlarged them, giving certain characters a psychological depth. ‘I tried to put some life into the damned thing,’ said he to Martha, ‘the damned thing didn’t have any guts.’ The trouble was, ‘life’ not to mention ‘guts’ had no place in that story, or at least not in this form. Reading the story, with its recent additions, was like watching a battle between two personalities, one trying to take over another.

She said this to Mark and he said: ‘I’m not interested in subjective criticism.’ This phrase meant nothing, in this context; it was a phrase in use around left-wing circles at this time: by Phoebe as much as, let’s say, Stalin.

Now Martha remembered that other old manuscript, or heap of ant-eaten notes which she had brought to England because she could not think of anything else to do with it. It had been lying in a suitcase in the loft. She took it down, and laid it beside the manuscript of A City in the Desert. Thomas’s last testament. Mark’s book. And what was interesting was this: the insertions into the original manuscript made by Mark, the clumsy hot emotionalism of them, were the same in ‘feel’ as a good part of Thomas’s writing. They had come from the same place, the same wavelength. Somewhere, those two extraordinarily different people, Mark, Thomas, inhabited the same place, made contact there. A small place perhaps: because the sardonic anger, the nihilism, that was Thomas’s strongest trait, was not in Mark. Mark’s insertions, which were going to have to be thrown out, because of fidelity to a whole, were in scrawled red ink. Thomas’s additions and riders, in red pencil. From here, this place, Thomas had gone down into madness and to death. Mark? Well, this was one kind of a descent, of an entering in. To write books like A City in the Desert, or the war book, cool, abstract, detached, one had to earn that; one had to be that kind of person. Mark was not. Not yet, at least. Probably, next, he would write a clumsy raw kind of book. When people open up a new area in themselves, start doing something new, then it must be clumsy and raw, like a baby trying to walk … Here a nerve of memory sounded: she had thought this before, when? Or something like it. Jack; she was reminded of Jack. She had been walking somewhere – to Jack? She had understood once before that the new, an opening up, had to be through a region of chaos, of conflict. There was no other way of doing it.

She said to Mark that unless he specifically forbade her to send the manuscript to the publishers, she would do so, having removed the clumsy additions first.

He did not, merely muttered that he supposed it was no worse than most, and so she sent it off. She had expected him not to want to be involved in the business of proofs, details of publication, etc.; but he did this work himself, and apparently with interest. Certainly, with the furious energy that he brought to everything through the bad time. For months, he scarcely slept. He was up every morning by five, to read and study. He was appallingly ignorant, he said: he knew nothing. He studied economics and that kind of history which is still unofficial history, that is to say, still vital – not yet taught, or quoted or represented by a school of academic thought. His study was full of books by journalists, the novels that are reportage, newspapers, statistics arranged from a certain point of view, and those documents, usually badly cyclostyled or typed, put out by political groups whose viewpoints are not popular. And, as Martha had done, a decade before, he was acquiring a grasp of recent history which was the shadow, or reverse side of what was taught – what had been taught, even, at his own school, ‘progressive’ as it was.

At the same time, during the hours while everyone else was still asleep, he was trying to find a subject to write a new novel about – one that he could approve of. ‘I want to write about something real!’ he said, fierce, to Martha. With antagonism: for she was the enemy within the gates who was responsible for the ‘unreal’ book A City in the Desert, the proofs of which he was correcting with such energy. With Martha, the enemy, he discussed possible subjects. He was thinking about a novel which had Mary and Harold Butts as a theme. For he was seeing them as victims of the oppressing Coldridges. But after a week-end with the Butts and his son Francis, he came back saying there was no point in writing about such damned feudalistic rubbish: this was an industrial country. He was spending his mornings at the factory with Jimmy, partly in the talk which was the oil for Jimmy’s inventive genius, but also in considering his employees. He was convinced that he had never considered them before. One morning he saw the foreman and the six workmen who had been with him since the business started, and thanked them for their class solidarity. Jimmy, recounting this tale to Martha, in his smiling way, did so, as she could see, not so much because he wanted to be enlightened, but because he wanted to be reassured. For him, Mark’s new preoccupation was a waste of time; and anyway, Mark’s speech had not been correctly understood: the support given to him by the foreman and the men was not because of his socialist allegiances, but because they liked Mark. Mark saw this – and with regret: feudalism again, he said. He spent hours walking around the streets near the factory, which was in a slummy area in North London. It was not that he hadn’t seen them before; not that he had not recognized the existence of poverty; he hadn’t imagined it, hadn’t felt part of it. He did now, and for a while thought of a novel set in those grim streets. His new friends, however, discouraged him by pointing out that such novels, produced by the hundred in and near the socialist parties, were exactly what that current in the communist movement which they represented, were trying to get away from: the proletarian novel was dead. Mark, in the grip of early conviction when everything was new, argued against them. He even wrote a couple of chapters. The purest logic said he should. The and, and, and; therefore, therefore, therefore; a,b,c,d, of communist logic is always irrefutable because while that particular Person, Personality, absorbs, to shoot out facts, figures, convictions, like a machine, its substance is in fact all emotion. And timeless, or within the bounds, let’s say, of 1917 and – but we don’t yet know its end. Half a dozen decades of impassioned socialist polemicizing about Art went for nothing: click, click, click, went the machine, oiled by anger, therefore, therefore, therefore – out comes The Proletarian Novel.

Out came two chapters of Mark’s working-class novel called, Working Hands. Neither the new friends nor Martha had to tell him they were appalling. And, late at night, after the friends had gone, he came to Martha, ready to talk still, to talk until morning if she were ready to stay up. But while he was driven direct from that source of emotional power which is all pure, perfect conviction, Martha was all lethargy. The bad time for her was a slump into exhaustion. She slept too long, she ate too much, she was all heaviness and division: and watched Mark as if she were watching her own young self. And came to realize something she had not before: her memory had gone cloudy. Only ten years ago – and what was ten years? But it was as if her past had become fused with Mark’s present. Almost, or as if Mark was herself, or she Mark. Saying to herself: Yes, I did that, I thought that, I read that book too, I used exactly that vocabulary – she was not able to put herself back there, in that place in herself where she had been; for that place was inhabited by Mark.

In Mark, now, there were at least half a dozen different people, all operating apparently with perfect efficiency, side by side, and not recognizing the existence of the others. For ‘The Defender’ did not, after all, prevent him from talking to the enemy Martha, even taking her advice. It did not prevent him visiting Harold and Mary Butts, where he behaved as he always had: feudally. It did not prevent him talking for hours every day with Jimmy, in the way that Jimmy needed, the humorous, fanciful, creative play which resulted, extraordinarily, in the models of this or that machine which littered Mark’s study. Nor was he less patiently Lynda’s potential or past husband, in cold storage though that person was. Yet neurosis, mental trouble of any kind, was by definition, at that time, in the communist party, reactionary and bourgeois.

And he tried, patiently, clumsily, indeed, pathetically, to be Francis’s father, even while he said to Martha, in language she knew she had used, that the family was doomed.

He tried, too, to be a father to Paul: but Paul would have none of him. The child came home for holidays, and spent his time with Lynda, his friend. Two years of being an orphan had changed Paul into a lively, aggressive, self-contained little boy who was clever at school, but, as the school reports said, ‘made inadequate social relationships’. He certainly had no relationship with Mark; it really was as if Mark did not exist for him. Mark would offer visits to the zoo, walks in the park, a story: Paul did not seem to hear him. Mark said that sometimes he felt as if he were invisible. For it was not rudeness. Paul looked through him, or said to Martha: ‘Can I go down to Lynda now?’

When Paul was at home, the house was open, the door to the basement always ajar. Never when he was not: then the basement became a separate, almost secret establishment.

But Francis was a different matter. His mother was ‘at home’ – and not in a mental hospital, which was helpful at his school, as Lynda had said. But he did not bring his friends home.

The very first holidays after Paul’s mother’s death, Francis came home after a bad time at school. He had changed. Previously silent, serious, watchful, he had suddenly become – something Martha recognized, with pain. He was the clown. In a reaction to what had been brutal teasing, if not worse, his father being a traitor and his uncle under a cloud; accused of being a communist, a red, a commy – he clowned being one. He had joked; adopted, jokingly, communist phrases which he had got out of the papers. Well, there was the mechanism, for Martha to see: yet in herself she could not remember what had created ‘Matty’. ‘Matty’ had joked, claimed exemption by clumsiness, made fun of herself; Francis joked, guyed, bought himself off by a boisterous clownishness. In this condition, he visited his mother and the watchful friend of his mother, in the basement. He was noisy; he racketed about the basement: he badly tired the two sick women.

Then came the time, and very soon, when he returned home to find his father’s friends all communists. They were not figures of fun, but people. His clowning communism stuttered and failed. There were wild scenes of rage, temper, hysteria. It was after that period of holidays that the school reported his work was suddenly very bad, he was at the bottom of the class. Not being a ‘progressive’ school, they said he was lazy and bad-mannered. His father ought to give him a talking to. Mark went to the school to talk to Francis, but the child was locked in a silent hostility, very polite, saying yes Sir, no Sir.

When the time came around again for holidays, Francis said he wanted to spend them with Nanny Butts. Since then, that is where he always went. Mark visited him there, returning to say painfully to Martha: ‘He’s like me – I could never bear coming home either.’

At the Butts’s, Francis was able to be the clown, without conflict: his school personality and his holiday personality were one. Nanny Butts was not upset. She wrote: ‘Francis is a very cheerful little boy, always having his fun. It’s a blessing, when you think of his poor mother.’

But once, when Martha was down in the village, for she was to take Francis back to school, there was a glimpse of another Francis.

It was late evening, summer, and time for Francis to go to bed. Martha went out, through the cottage garden, into the long field beyond, which sloped down to a stream. Francis was walking up towards her, with a little girl. He was still a short stocky boy, his black head on the level of the frothy white of the half-ripe oats. He held the little girl’s hand, and was bending towards her with the gentle protectiveness an adult uses towards a child. A path led through a birch wood to a half-seen cottage. Francis led the child to the path, and there she ran away home, looking back to wave at Francis. He stood to wave at her smiling. The smile faded. He turned, and walked slowly along the edge of the field, serious, thoughtful, running one hand along the feathery tops of the oats. Then he saw Martha was waiting there. A moment when you could see the mechanism work: a startled defensiveness, then the smile fitting down on to the face: Francis raced up to Martha, hilarious, grinning, and as he reached her, shouted: ‘Supper, jolly good!’ and cartwheeled up through the garden into the cottage.

In between Paul’s visits, when the door to the basement was shut, the two upstairs had learned not to go down, unless asked. It was Lynda who telephoned from one part of the house to the other, to ask if they would like a cup of coffee. And she never asked Mark by himself. This meant, when you thought about it, that she must be watching through the windows to see how people came in and out. Also, when you thought about it, that the invitation was the result of some conflict with Dorothy. For on these occasions Dorothy would sit silent, rather apart, watching. And Lynda would slide her small defiant, guilty looks, like a girl who has won a victory over her parents. Mark was polite to Dorothy. It was not that he wished her ill, or even wished her away: if Lynda wanted her there, then that is what Lynda should have. But there was no connection between himself and Dorothy: he was courteous to his wife’s friend. The emotional reality of Dorothy and Lynda, whatever that was, was not real for him. He was Lynda’s husband, tenderly protective, attentive to Lynda. The four of them would sit for an hour or so in the extraordinary room, which now had an incongruity built into its very substance. The beautiful furniture, every piece of which was a museum-keeper’s dream, the rugs, Lynda’s small belongings, a favourite lamp from her own home, books – this was one world, Lynda’s. But every inch of the walls, every surface, was crammed with Dorothy – a magpie schoolgirl who had crushes on Royalty and film stars. The curtains were always drawn: they lived in artificial light. There was a low stuffy smell of sickness and drugs. The four sat drinking coffee, and Mark talked to Lynda, while Martha tried to talk to Dorothy; who, however, never took her sad anxious gaze off Lynda.

A tension that was all anxiety slowly built and built. Lynda smoked furiously, scattering ash. Then Mark would jump up, and say: ‘How about drawing the curtains for a bit?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Lynda would most eagerly assent, but with a hasty glance towards Dorothy – to reassure her that they would soon be alone again.

Mark drew back the curtains, and let in the cold day. There sat two ill women, exposed, smiling their fortitude.

Lynda’s fur coat, her handbag, a scarf, dark glasses, lay at random on chairs.

‘Lynda, wouldn’t it be better if …’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘Yes, Mark …’ And she hung up the coat in the hall, and rushed off the other items into the bedroom, which, glimpsed through the open door, was a total disorder. She shut the door on the mess and sat smiling pathetically. By now they longed for him to leave.

Once, after they left, they heard how the two women started a violent quarrel before they had even got up the stairs. Then, weeping. Whose? They could not make out.

But Mark did not give up. For a while he asked them up to dinner once or twice a week. On these nights his new friends did not come, and Martha and he took trouble over the food.

There sat Lynda and Dorothy, with their handbags near them, on their best behaviour.

Mark remained a husband. All of his best qualities, qualities he had not known until then he possessed, had gone into Lynda, when he discovered he had married a sick woman: for months, then years, while Lynda fell to pieces, he had used a loving strength which (and this was the point) he simply could not believe she did not need now. But she had not been able to stand it then and she could not stand it now.

At the end of one of these dinner parties she said, suddenly, in a low fierce voice, but smiling still, so afraid was she of her own violence: ‘Leave me alone, Mark. You’re killing me.’

And she ran off down to the basement in tears, Dorothy lumbering after her.

Throughout all of this, were incidents of a different kind: but there had to be three or four of them before they were seen as a pattern.

Dorothy had taken over the management of the flat, though Mark and Martha had offered to run it with the house. Dorothy was, or had been, an efficient woman. During the war she had managed a factory that made parts of bombs: she had had about forty women working under her. Becoming normal, for Dorothy, meant once more learning to be competent. It was she who got in a charwoman, ordered food, sometimes went shopping – managed. Then something went wrong, a little thing, like a tap, or the telephone. Dorothy contacted the machinery of the outside world. A week or so later, Martha would find one of the women carrying water downstairs in a bucket, or coming up to use the telephone. When the affair finally came into her hands, or Mark’s, Dorothy would supply a piece of paper on which was written something like this:

The question is: are we in a position to sue for loss of time and damage and inconvenience? When he turned up at last on Wednesday afternoon, he had the nerve to say he was going to send in an account for the first visit (see under Saturday morning), so I told him where he got off.

This, or something like it, happened fairly often, as it does in every household. Dorothy was always in the right. Each time she got herself into a state of furious, helpless irritation which ended in her having to go to bed, where Lynda nursed her.

Mark dealt with each new crisis, and this brought him into contact with Lynda for several days, while Dorothy was ill. The reason why Dorothy would never, until some situation was desperate – no water, no gas, no electricity – come for help upstairs, was that it meant bringing in Mark, or Mark’s deputy, Martha. It meant that she, Dorothy, had failed Lynda. It meant a collapse into inadequacy in a dark bedroom, and oblivion in drugs.

Mark and Lynda, with Dorothy asleep in her bedroom, achieved some hours of companionship, even gaiety.

The telephone, or tap, restored to normal – Lynda went back to the basement and the door was locked.

Mark made a visit to Martha’s room. When he did this it meant something of importance, something he found hard to talk about; which, perhaps, he had been working himself up to talk about all that day, or even, several days.

She had been sitting in the dark, looking out of the window at the ragged sycamore tree, thinned by late autumn. The knock on the door was abrupt, but soft.

‘Do you mind if I come in?’ He switched on the light, and saw, as he always did, a succession of rooms in this one, back to where young children played in it, he among them.

He took hold of the present, where a woman in a red house-coat, with untidy hair, sat by a dark window, looking out, a cat asleep beside her.

The cat woke, stalked across to him, looked up into his face, and miaowed. He sat down, the cat on his knee. He was in his dressing-gown. They were like an old married couple, or a brother and sister.

This thought passed from her to him, and he said: ‘This is no sort of life for you.’ ‘Or for you.’