Four Gated City (64 page)

Well, that wasn’t so easy; but they did their best. There were a great many doctors’ reports to show him. Again he listened, nodded, went off, and thought about it. Having thought he came back, wanting to know if they didn’t agree that it would be good if Lynda had to make the effort to dress and see him-regularly, let’s say, every day.

It was extremely important to him: to them, it meant they suffered at the idea of
his
suffering if he saw Lynda looking like a sick witch, or worse. But again they transmitted the message to Lynda who received it in an angry panic. She wanted to be left alone, left alone, left alone, she muttered, and growled and shouted. The shout was meant to reach the ears of Francis-and possibly it did. But he was dogged: he knew what he thought; he was convinced he was right. Lynda said no, not every day but yes, she would try … so she got dressed, when Francis sent a message down, or rang her up. She put a smile on, and sat at the table waiting for him.

The point was, she was able to do it. In the past, it had been assumed by all of them that it was as if a variety of switch were
turned, and then Lynda slid away from herself; then she had to suffer it out, and at some point, got better. They remembered that last time, sent off to a flat with a nurse, she had stayed there only a short while, and behaved quietly (a surprise to them all) and had come home much better than usually after such a time.

Throughout this spell, or bout, she had thought of Francis, intermittently, but responsibly.

As for him, it was during this time that he grew up. For a few days he had talked of leaving home, throwing up his job, going off somewhere, probably Australia, but he didn’t go, he stuck it out. The change in him reached to the physical: there was nothing left of the wildly beautiful boy. He was a solidly built, quiet, contained young man, with steady brown eyes, he suggested patience, doggedness, strength. He was Mark all over again, but Mark said that he was much better and stronger than he had been at that age. The two, recognizing likenesses, tried to talk, to be together: they knew they loved each other, but usually their attempts broke down in stiff politeness.

And Mark did not have much of a reserve, after spending what he did on Lynda. For, controlled and good she may have been with her son, but with her husband, she was abominable, she did not try at all.

For a time Martha thought Mark might very well crack himself: he thought so too. The three of them, Mark, Martha, Lynda, were in a tight knot together of shared tension, all ordinary life suspended; for Martha was deep in it, though she hardly saw Lynda. Mark’s attitude was that it was he who had decided Lynda should stay at home instead of going to hospital; and therefore it should be he, not Martha, who must take the strain. But it turned out that he couldn’t manage by himself.

A week or so after Lynda’s breakdown, Mark had come upstairs at four in the morning to wake Martha. He was almost sick with exhaustion, with holding himself in one piece while Lynda went to pieces. But it wasn’t just an exhaustion, ordinary tiredness. He came to Martha for sex. Sex not for pleasure, nor for comfort, nor for fantasy, nor for friendship. It was for the explosion of an intolerably psychic tension. She was being used, if she cared to look at it like that, as a safety valve. He came to her as she had not ever seen him before: nothing in him now of Mark the white knight, Mark the friend, Mark the old lover. He was all a hard violent
desperation, as if he were holding in himself a kind of charge or current that might shake him to bits if it got loose. And more of him was involved in this sex than ever before-or so it seemed. She did not know him.

They could not use her bedroom. Her daylight role as Martha the holder of the fort, house-mother, friend of the young, meant among other things that she had no privacy. Her bedroom could be entered at any time. If she locked the door, people banged on it until it was opened. Paul and Francis allowed her some leeway-the girls none. Nor did she like going to his bedroom, which remained in spite of everything and after all these years, the room where Mark was married to Lynda. It was no use his saying not; she heard what he thought, what he remembered.

They went to his study, which no one entered without formality. On the walls multiplied the charts of the death factories, the poison factories, the factories that made instruments for the control of the mind: the maps of Hunger, Poverty, Riot and the rest; the atlases of poisoned air and poisoned earth and the places where bombs had been exploded under the sea, where atomic waste was sunk into the sea, where ships discharged filthy oil into the sea, where inland waters were dead or dying.

On the thick pile of a carpet in the room which had once been Mark’s father’s study, the two lay behind locked doors, two bodies that exploded into each other, before Mark had to sleep a little, dress freshly, and go down to the basement again to be with his wife. A silent, desperate act of-survival? It seemed so. Mark said he was afraid. They lay in each other’s arms, their faces running with the tears of their shared tension, and rested, under the maps of the poisoned world, in a silent house. Somewhere upstairs, Paul or Francis might be playing music, late. Or Paul crept down with Zena to eat in the kitchen, alone. Or Lynda woke again: they heard her moving about below them in a slow dragging sort of movement, while she muttered and sang and knocked things about.

‘What are we doing it for? Lynda’s just one woman.’

‘But what else can any of us do?’

‘I sit down there and I think, Lynda’s just one woman.’

‘We can’t think like that.’

‘I am thinking like that-more and more. There’s something we ought to be doing, something else, not just waiting for us all to be poisoned … or perhaps I’m as crazy as she is, perhaps that’s it.’

‘It won’t last long. Nothing ever does.’

‘Sometimes it’s as if… I don’t know how to explain it… it’s as if … not that
she
is mad, but there’s madness. A kind of wavelength of madness-and she hooks into it and out, when she wants. I could hook into it just as easily. Or it could hook into me-it’s in the air.’

‘Or into me, ’ said Martha. She lay, her head on his spent arm.

‘Well, yes. Well-but what can I do? Go off to a prostitute? I couldn’t do that. I never have.’

Martha could have said, of course. ‘Oh, have it on me,’ or: ‘You’re making use of me!’ or ‘Who do you think I am ’—she could have made use of any of the remarks lying around suitable for such occasions. But she didn’t feel them. They passed through her mind, as it were showing themselves to her, to be rejected or not.

What she did feel, she couldn’t tell Mark, because what help would it have been, either to him or to Lynda?

She was full of an irritable tension that was new to her. It had nothing to do with being’satisfied’ or ‘unsatisfied’. It had nothing much to do, she suspected with sex. Day by day, or night by night, as Mark came up from the basement, when Lynda was briefly asleep, to take hold of Martha and link her in to his high energy, she became charged with a feverish electricity-if that was the word for it. She did not know what to do with it. She did not know what it was. She was desperate. But what was being created in her was not the never-to-be-sated ‘woman in love’, ‘wife’, ‘mistress’, etc. etc. Sex … What is sex? We keep using all these words, and what do they mean after all? The word sex has to do for so many different experiences, and like the word energy, it is what you make of it… movement, she needed movement. She put on a dull coat and scarf over her head and walked through dark streets. London after midnight is not pleasant to walk in, if you are a woman. Even if you are not charged with an energy that makes you a centre for all the furtive prowlers looking for sex. The big cities of the world do not accommodate women walking at night: better forests, or a moor: less dangerous, less frightening. After midnight in a city a woman is a woman is a woman even if masked in an old coat that had once belonged to Mrs. Van der Bylt, and an unbecoming headscarf.

She thought: If I were a man I’d go to a prostitute.

But Mark didn’t.

She thought: Ought I to be angry with a man who puts me into this state? What state?

She telephoned Jack. ‘Martha! Believe me, I’m glad to hear your voice. Yes. When? Just a tick then, I’ll see if…’

She waited. He sounded the same, a country boy all simple and straightforward enthusiasms. Yet he
didn’t
sound the same … Martha listened to the stillness while he checked with some woman, or looked in his engagement book and felt uneasy. Because why was she doing this at all?

He came back and asked:’ Three o’clock would be better than two-is that all right?’

‘Yes. Fine’.

‘Believe me, Martha, it’s fine to hear you. I’ve thought of you often, do you believe me?’

‘Yes … of course.’ She felt
very
uneasy. It sounded as if he were checking something, finding out, or trying to?

‘And our paths have never crossed all these years.’

‘I suppose they have without us knowing it.’

‘Yes, I’m sure they have! Martha, I’ll be looking forward so much to the moment I see you-you do believe me, don’t you?’

When the conversation was over, she nearly rang up to say it was a mistake, she was off to the South Pole-anything. She had been left tingling with a warning-
don’t
.

Next night, she walked down a quiet middle-class street where only two or three windows still shone yellow in a strong white moonlight. Decorous little trees, like children allowed to stay up late, stood in patches of garden that defined individual front doors, each on its best behaviour, shining knocker, letter slit, bell. Each house, shored internally under paint and plaster by a thousand makeshifts, looked solidly desirable: behind them the canal lay quiet, discreetly reflecting moonlight. Elsewhere the moon rocked oceans in their beds, stuffed pillows full of uncomfortable dreams, made doctors double their dosage of sedatives for sad lunatics in hospitals, set dogs howling and drew fish up to goggle at the streaming white light.

Jack’s door, black, had a wolf’s head on it for a knocker, and a spy-hole. Martha looked at a tiny globe, and knew that through it, somebody saw all of her. Nearly she walked away. The door opened. Jack, not a day older, a country boy in a green sweater that had a tear in the elbow, stood on bare feet on a thick dark carpet.
Behind him was the hall, all solid thick expensive white paint and dark pile and an octagonal table mosaiced with coloured woods.

‘Martha, ’ he said, ‘I’m so very happy, I’ve been missing you, do you believe that?’

Brown eyes in a smooth brown face. He was waiting to see what she would do. Of course, he always had. She walked on. past the room where once the crazy youth had sat on guard. The door was open. It was-the word for it, was salon. She switched on the light and looked at a room which had been inspired by a room in a château: it was not English. It was elegant, formal, but also enticing-there was something sly about it.

‘Do you like it? Do you like what I’ve done?’

The house was all like that, a surface of solid, indeed, gloomy formality; under it, something else. It was a fantasy house: rather, a house for the setting of fantasy. The room on the first floor hadn’t changed. Stark with its oil heaters and darkened windows, the bed set for action. Martha said it reminded her of an engine-room in a luxury ship. He looked at her carefully, suspiciously-he did not laugh. Then, he set himself an allowance of laughter, used it up, and sat cross-legged on the bed watching her.

Martha who knew she should not have come, yet did not go. Curiosity. Curiosity would kill the cat yet.

She kept thinking: My memory is playing me tricks, I’m remembering what it was like, all wrong-I must be. But she knew she was not. Jack had changed. He had changed fundamentally and vitally.

The years since she had come here to make love, she had spent above all in the exercise of holding on to what is permanent in people; while moods, phases, stages flowed past; what else is the business of bringing up children? She had had an education in recognizing a person’s permanence. When she was here last, she could have sworn it, she was in contact with Jack, all of him in communication with what he was. But now, she kept reaching out, probing, waiting for Jack to talk, to talk to her. It was like being with Jimmy Wood-only in so far, of course, as this business of waiting for a resonance or an echo went; she kept addressing remarks to Jack, but Jack did not answer.

He sat on his bed, waiting. She sat on a rather nice old wooden chair by the heater. She sat holding a mug of cocoa, looking across bare boards to Jack. He was waiting for her to come and sit by him.
but he wasn’t going to suggest it. There was a feeling in the room of-waiting. More, a watchful, intent, urgent waiting. Jack watched, without seeming to, every move she made, seeing them as towards him, or away from him. She could feel his will encompassing her.

‘Tell me about the house. Jack-you forget I don’t know.’

‘I’d like to tell, you. I will

‘You are here by yourself?’

‘You know how I want to live. I haven’t changed.’

‘You want all your women under one roof?’

He nodded. Tears stood in his eyes. He had not meant them to be there-but he didn’t blink them away: he held them for her inspection.

‘Aren’t you ill any longer?’

‘No.’

‘Really? It’s all gone?’

‘Are you afraid I’ll infect you?’ He sounded wronged.

This startled her: he would never have said that once.

‘No. I’m sure you wouldn’t let anyone get anything-but you don’t catch tuberculosis like that, do you?’

‘No. I don’t know. I’m cured. I’ve been cured for years. I have to be careful.’

Joking she said:’ You mean, eating regularly and going to sleep early!’

He seemed to suffer, sat with bowed head. Softly he said:

‘I am always waiting for trust. Believe me, Martha, that’s what I spend my life waiting for.’

It was all discordant-off key. She got up, prepared to go. He had turned his head slightly so he could watch her without seeming to.