The Four-Gated City

‘I saw you through the shutter.’

‘Thanks, is Jack in?’

He laughed, but without sound, shaking his shoulders to mark that he laughed, watching for her reaction from anxiously serious eyes. She smiled, turning her face so that the heavy ceiling light could show her smile.

‘They come and go,’ he said.

Martha now felt afraid for the first time this night of walking alone through dark streets. She went slowly towards the stairs, feeling how he followed her, close.

‘Mind you. I’ve known worse places. During the war.’ He was right up against her back.

‘Are you a friend of Jack’s?’

‘I live here, don’t I?’

On the bottom stair she turned to offer him her smile; he stood grinning, his face on the level of hers.

‘I’ll show you my place.’ He tugged, grinning, at the sleeve of Mrs Van’s coat: Martha followed him into a room off the hall, which had once been a reception room. It was long, high, with the remains of some fine mouldings in the ceiling. The windows were shuttered; but there was a crack, and against the crack was set a chair: an observation post. There was a camp-bed, with dingy blankets, and against the wall a painter’s ladder, with hooks up the sides that held shirts, a jacket, and two pairs of shoes tied by their laces. There was a candle in a bottle near the camp-bed: and by it, a mess of comics.

‘They lived under the rubble in Germany,’ he said.

‘So I read.’

‘I was there.’

Now she looked at him, understanding his wildly grinning face, his staring eyes, his perpetual soundless laugh; it was quite simple, he was crazy.

‘In Poland they lived in the sewers.’

‘You were there too?’ she asked politely.

He laughed, shaking his shoulders, and his black eyes narrowed into a frenzy of suspicion. ‘I didn’t say so, did I?’ ‘No.’

‘I was. In the sewers. I fought.’

Martha now found that she was not only afraid, but tired. Her legs were stones under her. Her head was heavy. A very long way was she now from the light, easy-walking creature of only half an hour ago, whose head was like a lighthouse or a radio set. She thought: I must remember, I must, I must; but stood back, as the young man came a step nearer, grinning and staring. His hands had come out to grasp – not her, but her wandering attention. They were young, thin, sad hands, rather grubby.

‘If you are interested in other things, then I’m very, very sorry,’ he said. ‘Very!’

‘The thing is, I’m rather late.’

‘The other one left at eleven. I let her out. It is now one-nineteen precisely.’

‘In that case, I really must go up, Jack’ll be waiting.’

She smiled and turned and went out, feeling him immediately behind her, and his grin somewhere just behind her head. But she walked steadily up the stairs, saying as he turned into the landing: ‘Thanks for showing me your place.’

‘It’s all you need. With bell, book and candle. The church across the canal has a bell. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard it. Goodnight.’

She stood in a breathing dark, in front of her a door that had light behind it, while below she heard him shuffle back into his place. Martha knocked softly on the door. There was no answer. What she stepped into was a quiet room with fresh white walls, a glossy dark floor with rugs on it, and candles burning on the handsome mantelpiece. And it was warm: the heaters glimmered. On a large bed under the window, Jack lay sleeping. He was naked under a blanket, and was on his back, his cheek on his hand as if he were thinking. As he almost might be: he was lightly, alertly asleep. Martha slid off her shoes and into a chair to rest a moment; if she had not sat down then, she would have fallen; she was thinking, what nonsense, if I’d had to walk another five miles I would, and not been tired till the end of them. Now she sat; for a moment half-conscious. Her back was to the shutter that kept off the smells from the canal below. Above this floor, a floor was empty: rooms that had been open to the sky for a year, receiving wet and wind and snow, and letting the wet seep down, of course, to the white fresh ceiling she now stared at. It had been, Jack said, flaking and cracked, and crumbling and soaked a dark mouldy brown. Then Jack had mended the roof to keep the weather out, and removed the rubble. Below this floor was another, dry, unaffected by the war, but empty, unpainted for years and smelling of mice or rats. Below that, the room in which the young crazy man had made his camp. But on the side of the hall opposite him, a large empty room, beautiful, but the shell of its inside was flaking and falling away. And under the whole tall house, a basement which had had water in it for years. Then, when Jack had drained it, it had damp rubble and old boards. Now it was empty, slowly drying out, he hoped; but sending through the entire house an odour of old damp. But this room was all clean: the old blackout curtains had been left, to add to the theme of black and white. There were Jack’s pictures on the walls. Not many: enough, as he had said, to show he was a painter. And there was an easel and some painting things in a corner. The pictures were mostly abstract, and mostly black and white or grey or brown. Some of them had been made out of queer materials – bits of sack glued on to board; brick rubble mixed with paint smeared on board; paint mixed with sand. Jack had become a painter because at the end of the war he had not wanted to go back to a settled life. He needed a label. What was more respectable than to be a painter? Years before he would have had to fool himself that he was a painter, in order to live the life he wanted under that label. But the war had taught him that there wasn’t time for anything but essentials, he said. In the war he had learned that you must take what you wanted and then fight for it. If you were an artist you could get away with anything. You should either be very rich or an artist or a criminal. He had acquired some canvas and an easel and some paints, and had bought a lot of old pictures from a junkshop which he kept stacked about the walls for the sake of their atmosphere. He did a few days’ work with sand, rubble, bits of sack and some glue and some paint, and behold, he was an artist, with a label he could use on passports and forms.

In 1947, a sailor discharged from the purposes of war, he had been walking down this street in which he had found a room, and had seen this house, then a wreck, a ruin, a shell, with a collapsed roof. He had gone into the open door and to the top of the house. He had spent a day in the house, not really making plans or decisions, but it seemed they had been made without his knowing about it, for the next thing he knew was, he had gone out and brought back a bucket, a scrubbing brush, and soap. With the roof still open above him, he had cleared rubble and scrubbed until he felt rain on his back and realized the roof ought to be mended. He mended the roof. He was just finishing it when Garibaldi Vasallo the Maltese had come in. He was a large swarthy man who looked as if he ought to have gold rings in his ears. But he wore a striped businessman’s suit.

‘What are you doing, son?’

‘Mending the roof,’ said Jack.

‘It’s my house, do you know that?’

‘Well I’m living in it, aren’t I?’

Garibaldi Vasallo went down to the water-filled basement, inspected every floorboard and inch of plaster in the decaying place, and returned to under the roof, having decided to buy it. Previously he had decided it was in too bad a state to buy, like all the bomb-shaken houses of this terrace. But he watched Jack at work for a few minutes and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’

‘You can’t do that, I’m a protected tenant.’

‘How’s that?’

‘I live here.’

‘Since when?’

‘Have a cigarette.’

Jack came down from the roof and sat cross-legged on the damp floorboards, and Garibaldi Vasallo sat opposite him and they smoked and discussed the war. Garibaldi Vasallo had been in the Merchant Navy. Jack had been in a minesweeper. If Jack had been in a minesweeper throughout the war, then he could not have been living in this house as he continued to claim that he had. He continued to make this claim, affably, while he talked of his minesweeping years with Garibaldi Vasallo, who for his part, continued to say that this was his house. And so it went on for some hours, and then Garibaldi went off to buy the house. It cost him £450. He bought two others at the same time for £500 each. Then, lacking further capital for the time being, made it his business to sniff out possible other buyers (very few, the terrace being in such dilapidation), letting them know that ‘the blacks were moving in’. He now had no money at all. He dropped over to watch Jack’s work on the top floor of the house, and began work himself on the roof of one of his other houses. Meanwhile Jack had brought in his belongings, at that stage a camp-bed (now being used by the mad youth downstairs), and a candle in a bottle. He had about a thousand pounds from the war. So far he had spent none of it, and mending the roof had cost nothing, since he had borrowed tools and used available materials from near-by bombed houses. Now he cleaned and painted the second floor, and in the evenings Mr Garibaldi Vasallo dropped in to see what Jack was doing and how he did it. For while being in the Navy was a fine training in inventiveness and small skills, he knew nothing about building, and building had been one of the ways Jack had earned a living. When this floor was all painted out and clean, Jack bought a large bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and some rugs at a street market. Total cost, five pounds. Jack was now at home. But there was no electricity in the place and no plumbing. He used candles and went to the public bath-house and the lavatory at the old cinema at the corner, in payment for which he mended cracked windows for the proprietor.

Now Garibaldi asked Jack if he’d like to go into business, for Jack had seen that he knew about the thousand pounds. Garibaldi was desperate for even half that amount, a quarter: he could buy another bomb-damaged house, or do one up good enough to sell at double what he had paid for it: the thought of the thousand pounds made Garibaldi desperate.

‘Yes, well,’ said Jack, ‘but I think I’m happy as I am.’

And now Garibaldi stood in the middle of the newly black-painted floor, a stout Mediterranean man with hot Mediterranean eyes, and went off into a great storm of rage while Jack laughed and scraped old varnish off a chest of drawers. Laughing, Jack stormed and raged back, while the fat speculator threatened. At last Garibaldi shouted out what he had meant to ask, shrewdly, and as a probe. ‘And there isn’t any electricity here, it’s illegal.’

‘True, the whole place needs re-wiring,’ said Jack.

‘And the plumbing is disgusting, no one but an animal would live in a house without plumbing.’

Jack then offered to do the wiring and some plumbing, the minimum, for a half-share in the house, for two hundred and twenty-five pounds. At which Garibaldi raged and stormed again, and said that the house had already appreciated, it was worth double by now; and Jack shouting and laughing said that was only because he, Jack, had repaired it. Garibaldi went off, shouting to the front door, but was silent outside it: already too many of the people in the street knew about him, watched him, meant him harm.

Next time he came in, Jack had seen him through the window, and was at work on the wiring.

‘You give me five hundred pounds,’ said Garibaldi.

‘Two hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ said Jack.

After some weeks this agreement was come to, but it took another six months to get Garibaldi to the lawyers, of whom he was deadly afraid. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ said Jack, insisting on a respectable lawyer, with real offices, in the West End. ‘You’re all right with me. You’re nothing but a dirty little dago and a crook, but I’m a gentleman and they’ll know I’m all right.’

Which was how Jack had become half-owner of this great shattered house which now had some plumbing and some electricity, and where one floor, this one, was the kind of place Martha could enter and feel …