The Four-Gated City

Back in the white and black room, new candles were lit. They were quite alone in the big house. The room was stark and bare now, the bed had a brown blanket stretched over it. There was only one chair; so Martha and Jack sat on a rug by the bed, leaning against it. He seemed nervous. ‘What’s the matter, Martha?’

‘I don’t think I’m going to be a good partner for you today. Perhaps you should have let Joanna come.’

‘Joanna’s gone off racing with her cricketer. What’s the matter? I can see there is something wrong. Perhaps it’s my fault. I’ve had a thought in my mind all this time and I didn’t tell you. If you’re with a woman and you are holding some thought back, then it breaks the contact. That’s why you keep going away from me.’

‘Perhaps.’ But Martha had in her mind a hundred thoughts she could not share with Jack. He really was a boy, after all. He sat there, his strong face above his brown sweater, brown eyes anxious, intense; a boy with a boy’s fear that he’s not strong enough to keep what he holds. He was nearly thirty-five. Yet she could have believed him to be twenty-five. Meeting him somewhere for the first time, she would have thought: a strong, simple boy, rather naive. That’s what she had thought, allowing herself to be picked up by him on the underground. Everything he knew was in his body: it never reached his face, which was stiff with the fear that she would not accept the thought he wanted to share with her: with Thomas they had not set out to ‘share’ thoughts. With Jack, you set up a simple communion of the flesh, and then your mind went off by itself – that was all right, what was wrong with it? If she couldn’t have Thomas … do you know what you’ve done, said Martha to herself in despair: I’ve become one of those women that used to frighten me! I’ve got a dead man. Like my mother. Like Mrs Talbot. Like Maisie. I say to myself ‘Thomas’ as if that were the end of it! What does it mean? I say ‘Thomas’ and – play with Jack! Except you can’t possibly use the word play, for anyone as desperately singleminded as Jack. All right then – imagine Jack dead, would I then be saying ‘Oh Jack!’ and playing with someone else? No. I took Thomas seriously. I don’t take Jack seriously. Why? It doesn’t matter why.

‘Martha, I don’t know how to tell you what I’ve been thinking. I don’t know how you’ll take it. Why don’t you come and live here. No, don’t say no, think about it – there’s the floor under this one. You could live there. The wiring’s done, and the plumbing and the telephone’s in.’

‘You mean, live with you? But how?’

‘Well, why not?’ he muttered, already rejected, sullen. ‘You ask it as if – you don’t trust me, that’s it, that’s what I was afraid of.’

‘But what would Garibaldi Vasallo make of it?’ – trying to joke.

‘What could he say? You don’t understand. I’ve got the whip-hand. He didn’t want to give me a half-share of this house at all. But he did – I made him. Besides, he knows I know how he operates, with all his dirty tricks.’

‘Blackmail?’

His face darkened, clenched, was ugly. ‘Blackmail! That’s a word you use for decent people, not a dirty little dago.’

‘I hate that word.’ She was discouraged: all her energy had leaked away; she wished now that she could wrap a blanket around her head, like an African, and turn her face to the wall and sleep. ‘When I left home I really thought I’d be free of the race thing. Isn’t that funny? There’s no end to our being stupid. One’s always making up day-dreams about places somewhere else. But since I’ve been here – things are just as ugly as they are back home, but people don’t know, it’s all hidden. And now you start talking about dagoes.’

‘That’s not racialism! That’s just – accurate. That’s what he is, a nasty little dago. A crook. You deal with crooks in their own coin. If he plays me up, I’ll go to the police with what I know about him. I’m not taking anything from him that isn’t fair. By the time I’ve finished with this house it will be a real house, and it’ll have cost him nothing. If he’d paid a builder, it would have cost hundreds – he knows that. So why is what I’m doing wrong? This house is my house. When I came into it that day and saw it, and started work on it – I knew it was mine. It’s my house because I’ve worked on it.’

Every word of this being true, why did Martha feel uneasy: the intensity Jack put into his pleas, exactly as if it were a false case, was that it? ‘Why didn’t you simply go and buy it? He bought it for £500. You’ve got £1,000 tucked away.’

‘No, I’m not going to waste that. It’s my future. I’ve got to have that money. And this is my house. I’m in my rights if I say you can come and live here.’

‘But, Jack – you’ll live up here on this floor, and I’ll live on the floor beneath?’

And now he was crying: the fearful intensity of his need was wringing his body, making tears spill from his brown eyes. ‘What’s wrong with that? You don’t trust me, Martha.’

‘Look, Jack, you must see it’s one thing coming here – by appointment, to make love – but surely you wouldn’t want me or any woman just beneath you? What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over!’

‘Oh, I hate that. I hate that attitude. That’s what I mean by not trusting me. I’d not tell lies to any girls who came here. I don’t tell lies. Well, not unless I’ve got to – only if there’s a girl who wouldn’t come to me if I didn’t – they’d know that you lived here.’

‘A sort of senior wife?’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that. You don’t want to get married, do you? I mean not really married.’

‘No. I don’t think I do.’ She nearly asked: ‘And what about children?’ But the nightmare vision of the house with the children and herself in it came back, and she shivered.

‘You’re cold, Martha. I’ll start the heaters.’ He got up, glad to be able to take his tears away; and she was glad to have the pressure farther away for a few moments.

He knelt by the paraffin heaters, first one, and then the other. His back was to her. From the set of his shoulders she knew something important was coming: what had gone before was not after all what mattered: the tears, the apprehension were for what he was about to say now.

‘There’s something else, Martha. I can’t say it easily though. Give me a minute. There – we’ll be warm. Listen Martha – oh, hell man, I’m afraid of saying because I don’t want you to take it wrong. But would you like to have a baby? I mean, let me give you a baby?’

And now she was silent because she was shocked. That she ought to be, if not flattered, at least warmed, she knew. But he had taken flight somewhere away from any kind of reality she understood. Because this was the point. His point. She had not expected it.

‘Why not, Martha? You could bring the baby up here. You could get some sort of job. Some job or other.’

‘Babies need fathers,’ said Martha, her voice coming dry despite herself. His body froze, was set in a tension of anger, his back was still turned to her.

‘I could kill you for that, Martha.’ It came out between teeth clenched in anger. She remained still. He came back to the bed and sat on it, close, looking right into her face from a face that had gone a bluey-white. His eyes were small and black.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t only me, is it? You’d like to give all your girls babies, wouldn’t you? That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put cuckoos in nests?’ ‘Yes.’

Now they were hating each other. But as he brought his face up against hers, black with hate, a wave of anguish swept from him to her: she refused to give way, to soften, and he flung himself face down on the bed, arms outstretched, stiff: in agony. So she had seen him before. This was the shape his black moods set him in, rigid; and how he might lie for hours, without moving.

‘Listen, Jack. When I left my little girl, Caroline, do you know what I was thinking? I thought, I’m setting you free, I’m setting you free …’

‘Well all right, I’m not talking about mothers, a child needs a mother, that’s what I’m saying, isn’t it? But fathers, no, I won’t inflict myself on any child. I won’t. I couldn’t. I’m scared – scared, of my old man, I tell you, that’s what scares me. I don’t suppose he thought when he put me into my mother that he’d hate me, and then my brother, and have to screw my sisters.’

‘I had a sort of silent pact with that child,’ Martha went on. ‘As if she were the only person who understood why I was doing it. I was setting her free. From me. From the family.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ came from the bed. ‘It’s true.’

‘No, it was so terribly not true. I was mad.’

‘You were right, Martha. Don’t go back on it now.’

‘I was mad. So how can I say to you now: You’re mad? I know how you feel. But it was such nonsense, when I think of it now …’ And Martha began to cry, but silently, so that he wouldn’t turn around again. ‘All of us lot, we were communists, we felt the same …’

‘Everyone was a communist,’ came the muffled angry voice from the bed. ‘What’s that got to do with it? I was one, for a time in the war. It was all that stuff about the Atlantic Charter – it turned us up, we were reds, what of it?’

‘Oh, sometimes I think communism, for people who weren’t in communist countries, it was a kind of litmus paper, a holdall – you took from it what you wanted. But for us it went without saying that the family was a dreadful tyranny, a doomed institution, a kind of mechanism for destroying everyone. And so …’ Martha was crying uncontrollably, but trying to make the roughness in her voice sound like deliberate ‘humour’: ‘And so we abolished the family. In our minds, and when the war was over and there was communism everywhere, the family would be abolished. You know – by decree. Clause 25 of a new Magna Carta. “We decree the family at an end.” And then there would be the golden age, no family, no neurosis. Because the family was the source of neurosis. The father would be a stud and the mother an incubator, and the children handed at birth to an institution: for their own good, you understand, to save them from the inevitability of their corruption. All perfectly simple. We were all corrupted and ruined, we knew that, but the children would be saved.’ Now her voice cracked, and she wept, loudly and violently. He did not move. He lay in his face-down position, listening.

When she had stopped, he said: ‘You were right.’

‘We were not right. Isn’t it funny? Do you know how many people have become communists simply because of that: because communism would do away with the family? But communism has done no such thing, it’s done the opposite.’

‘I want you to have my baby. And I want Joanna to marry her guardsman and I’ll give her a baby. She can tell him, I don’t care. I wouldn’t mind in his place: what does it matter who puts a baby into a woman? And I want the little Jane to have a baby. We can get married if she likes. And I want Nancy and Joan and Melinda to have my babies. I’ll see them, I’ll give them presents. But I won’t be a father. I wouldn’t do that to any human being.’

There was now a very long silence. Martha cried a little, feebly out of helplessness. He lay silent, his face hidden. On the black of the curtains rough edges of light. Outside this long black and white room where small candles burned, was an afternoon blazing with sunlight. Briefly: when she looked again, the glow behind the black had faded. She had once felt something that was wrong so violently! She had acted from the feeling – what point now in saying what she ought to have done? She would probably do the same again, in the same position. So what did it matter what one felt? Or believed? It was the action that mattered. And now Jack felt this so strongly that if she wished, she could have a baby: and if he later felt, ‘I was wrong then, my feelings were wrong’ – what difference would that make? There would be the child.

At last she said: ‘There isn’t any family I’ve ever seen that doesn’t seem to me all wrong. But what right have I to feel like that? Where do I get the idea from that something better is possible? I keep thinking and thinking about it – why? Perhaps it’s always like this, it has always been like that? Ugly. But that’s how I do see things. I used to worry and nag at myself: there’s something wrong with me that I do see what’s going on as ugly. As if I were the only person awake and everyone else in a kind of bad dream, but they couldn’t see that they were. That’s how I felt on the ship coming over – you know, pleasure. Several hundred people “living it up”, “whooping it up” – enjoying themselves. Of course, you know ships from a different angle, you’ve worked on them, that’s different. But that voyage – it was like being in a nightmare. People who had saved up money. From all over Africa. Just for that trip – years of saving. Pleasure – eating three times a day like pigs, no five times a day, getting drunk, always just a little drunk, just to make this tolerable. Flirting, sex for titillation. There wasn’t one person on that boat – except for one girl. And she was ill. She was coming to England for treatment. We used to sit by ourselves and watch. They called us spoil-sports. It was like watching a lot of people who had been hypnotized.’

From Jack nothing. He might be asleep. She went on: ‘For some reason, I’ve had that all my life. What’s the use of thinking there must be something wrong with me? One’s got to stand by what one is, how one sees things. What else can you do? And I’ve had the other thing too, the mirror of it: all my life I’ve believed that somewhere, sometime, it wasn’t like that, it needn’t be like this. But why should I? Last night again – the nightmare. But at the same time, the marvellous family walking with their friendly animals. The golden age. Why? But I’ve been thinking, Jack. What’s the use of imagining impossibly marvellous ways of living, they aren’t anywhere near us, are they? You’ve got to accept … parents have no choice but to be the world for their children. And if the world is ugly and bad for that time, then parents have to take that burden on themselves, they are ugly and bad too.’ She started crying again. This time it was hysteria: it would be easy for her now to switch over into being ‘Matty’, then to make fun of herself, apologize … ‘Matty’ had always been an aspect of hysteria? She steadied herself to finish: ‘Babies are born into this, what there is. A baby is born with infinite possibilities for being good. But there’s no escaping it, it’s like having to go down into a pit, a terrible dark blind pit, and then you fight your way up and out: and your parents are part of it, of what you fight out of. The mistake is, to think there is a way of not having to fight your way out. Everyone has to. And if you don’t, then it’s too bad, no one’s going to cry for you, it’s no loss, only to yourself, it’s up to you …’ Hysteria arose again in a great wave: she was trembling, shaking with it. She was saying what she really believed and it was to a man who was asleep. She laughed and she cried, trembling. At last she stopped. Silence. Jack had turned his head: his face was visible. He was listening, with his eyes closed. The hand that lay stretched out was in a tight fist and it trembled.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sober. ‘I know you hate – fuss.’ Jack did not say anything. ‘But in a way it’s a compliment. I could have chosen not to be hysterical. But I’ve discovered something, Jack. About hysteria. It can be a sort of – rehearsal.’ She was thinking of last night, walking. She could not ‘remember’ the lit, alive space; though she knew it had been there; but she could remember the approach to it: something giggly, silly, over-receptive – hysterical. ‘When you get to a new place in yourself, when you are going to break into something new, then it sometimes is presented to you like that; giggling and tears and hysteria. It’s things you’ll understand properly one day – being tested out. First you have to accept them like that – silly and giggly … Jack?’ She knelt close up to him. ‘Jack?’ She had to stop herself saying: ‘Are you angry?’ like a little girl-like ‘Matty’.

‘I’ve been listening,’ he said. ‘And do you know what I was thinking? Is this just Martha’s way of being a woman, of getting her own way over being married and having a child. But I can see it wasn’t that.’ He sat up. He looked beat: pale, ill, and under his eyes, dark bruises. ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t follow what you were saying. It didn’t mean anything to me. I know you mean it for yourself and that’s good enough for me.’ He got off the bed. He was shivering. ‘Martha, I’m so hungry I’ve got to eat.’