Four Gated City (74 page)

Francis read the book, but inquired as usual with his old patient endurance of anxiety: Would
they
like it? No, no, he was not suggesting that Mark ought to write books to be liked but … and he hunched his shoulders as if taking on a burden and sharpened a defensive chin, as a small boy of eight or nine years old had done, reading what journalists said of his father.

The book was reviewed rather coolly: it was suggested for instance that Mr. Coldridge was not Jewish; he would do better to write about subjects he understood. It was also suggested that perhaps he was too lightweight a writer to take on such weighty subjects-for the meantime Mark’s book which he considered the nearest he had written to a pot boiler had hit, belatedly and unexpectedly, exactly the mood of the time.
The Way of a Tory Hostess
had been reissued, made into television, serialized in a newspaper, and there was talk of it becoming a musical. Mark’s secretary, then, was again very busy, and this happened not more than a few months after discovering that the children were grownup and she had very little to do.

In these months, six or seven of them, she made an interesting discovery. For a long time she had been saying: When I’m not so busy I suppose I shall stop dreaming? By this she meant that when she was no longer under pressure, it would not be necessary for the invisible mentor to talk, explain, exhort, develop, through dreams, because she would have time and energy for other methods. What methods? But she did not know. The qualities she had developed during that long past period of fighting to drag herself out of a pit were presumably still there and could be called on; though she often marvelled at the memory of that time, could not believe it had really happened.

For years, while all her inner effort (not hers, her mentor’s) had gone into dreams, she had charted that tempting, dangerous glamorous territory lying just behind or interfused with this world where landscapes, shores, countries forbidden and countries marked Open, each with its distinctive airs and climates and inhabitants living and dead, with its gardens and its forests and seas and lakes, had come so close, so familiar, that a texture or flavour of dream might suffuse or interpenetrate a scene of ordinary
life at a turn of a head or at a scent or a phrase or a smile horn a person passed in the street who seemed as if she, he, might have stepped at that moment from a landscape visited only in sleep.

And sure enough, when the months of comparative leisure began, the dreaming lessened. But she did not know where else to look; for Lynda was not available for ‘working’; she was on an adventure of her own. Then, a period of new busyness began for Martha and she assumed that so would the dreams. But no, it turned out that after all for the time being she had done all she could there. She knew by the signs that show whenever we have finished with some thing, or with a person, a love, a country, a pattern of behaviour. There was a quality of resistance there. Entering (not
again’
, the dream’s texture seemed to complain) a dream garden where she had been at home; or recognizing the next instalment of a serial dream, there was a heaviness, a lack of flow. It was as if matter sulked, had become sullen, like a smile of welcome that has become mechanical. No, for the time being the road on was not there, through that country slippy with illusion and deliciously free from the logic of gravity of the ordinary body, where even pain seemed to hold an impatient longing that was its own promise.

There was no movement on in sleep, and her days were too busy for that process of patient waiting and watching that is essential for the netting of the rare birds, the infrequent visitors. She worked for Mark, and she worked for Lynda, in
her
adventure, which, poor Lynda, had to be yet another attempt at being ordinary, at being normal.

Years before Lynda had started to cook some meals, though as often as not she went downstairs while other people ate them. Then, when the house was not so full of young people, and meals were less demanding, she cooked them and stayed for them. Soon she was ordering meals, and might even go out to buy food from the shops. She thought that perhaps she might some day take over the running of the house.

This step forward she had achieved having given up drugs of all kinds, having thrown even the sleeping pills away. When the routine prescriptions arrived from her doctor, she gave them to Mark or Martha to lock up with instructions not to give them to her ‘even if she cried for them’.

Martha’s task then had become a tactful withdrawal, allowing Lynda to become Mark’s wife, or at least as much of a wife as was
consistent with not bearing to be touched, for she still always went downstairs to sleep.

What Mark wanted does not need to be said: what Lynda attempted next, was to be ordinarily social. She said she would like to try a dinner party, to go out to the theatre, to accept Francis’s and Paul’s invitation to visit their London.

She made this demand almost impersonally: on behalf so to speak of her illness, or of an effort which they must applaud; just as she had announced in the past that she ‘was going to be silly’ again and therefore would need a nurse or Mark’s attendance.

The kitchen became a kitchen; was no longer the heart of the house. The dining-room, unused for so long, was opened and the long polished table cleared of the books and papers that had accumulated there. Linen was taken out of chests; silver and china that had never been used by that married couple, Lynda and Mark, was got ready for use. An extra charwoman was engaged, and Lynda and Martha considered clothes.

Raw material: two women in their forties. Lynda’s body was born for fashionable clothes; when stripped all bones and hollows, but thin, tall, pliable. Martha, was shorter, more stocky. But she was in a thin phase again. She would do. Martha’s greying hair, short, blondish, was dyed to a dull silver, as if she were choosing to go white: rather amusing really. And Lynda’s dry mass of near grey hair was transformed into a sleek bronze mane.

Yes, they would both do. They stood in Paul’s room, before Paul’s great mirror, and looked at themselves as neither had done for a long time, using that special eye which is not focused towards what a lover, a husband, friends may enjoy, or want you to wear, but outwards to fashion.

It was Paul who pointed out that Lynda had clothes put away dating back for three decades, and that to buy clothes was absurd. For already, in the early sixties, London had begun that extraordinary whirling dance, as if the fashions of fifty years had been flung up in the air together, like dead leaves in a wind, and it did not matter what anyone wore; or, if you like, it was like a newsreel cut to come together anyhow, picking out fashions of the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the Edwardians, the Victorians at random, and without any logic but that inner desperation which was the real appetite of the time. Clothes parodied, reminisced, were like private fantasies; they mocked, peacocked, and joked; and Lynda
and Martha handed half a hundred dresses to Paul, who told a dressmaker what to do with them.

Thus, though briefly, they became fashionable women.

Now all they needed was guests.

About guests and hosts: it is an interesting fact that there are very few of either. If one says to a man who one has heard has spent every evening for months with the current fashionable people: ‘I hear you’re an “in” person these days, ’ he is almost bound to reply: ‘Me? Goodness no, I’m almost a hermit…’ For whatever forays he has made into fashionable haunts have been in search of information, like a detached sociologist; or in pursuit of a new mistress; or to save a friend’s soul from perdition: ‘Really, oughtn’t you to be working rather than … forgive me, but admiring your talent as I do …’ Which is why for nearly a decade foreigners made pilgrimages to London to share its brief moment of glitter and style, but seldom found it, for the half a thousand people who composed it were only spending their time agreeably with intimate friends.

Similarly, there are few real hostesses. Margaret arranged her life, her marriages, her houses, to accommodate people who, temporarily, had clinging about them that light which is generated by other people’s envy: but she was angry with anyone who suggested this. ‘I never had in my house anyone I didn’t like and I hope I never will!’

For the half-dozen months then, when the house in Radlett Street became a place where people were invited, it could be said that the Coldridges were among the very few real or deliberate hosts in London.

Their guests were (but the house became known as a place where one never knew who one was going to meet): Margaret’s old friends, the literary warriors of the Cold War, already back ‘in’ chiefly because of the
cachet
that now attached to possibly having been friendly with, or at least having known, or met, one of the famous spies; her new friends, the ‘wave’ or ‘wind’ or impulse from the late fifties; the pop-singers and impresarios, the hairdressers and the restaurateurs-through Paul; the columnists and commentators from Press and television, the semi-literary, semi-political figures-through Graham Patten; the solid stratum of left-wing politicians, through Phoebe, and Phoebe’s ex-husband Arthur; with the organizers of this or that protest, March, Relief Fund, Famine Relief Organization … all these people, flowed together, in and out of
this house and the dozen or so houses like it, which had, like private extensions, the half-dozen restaurants, clubs, bars, which they frequented, had put up money for, and were run by friends.

Certain beliefs united them. One was that they were all absolutely unlike each other, since they came from various classes and one or two countries. This meant that they met with that curiosity held in check by well-exercised aggression that is the first requisite for falling in love. Another was that social history had begun in 1956, or 7, or 8 (the starred years that had given birth to this epoch), for already the new film makers, playwrights, cinema stars, editors who had risen on that wave dominated everything and the rapidness and ease of this ascent had created a mood of good-natured optimism about the future: it was extraordinary that this mood infected even people who had every reason to know better-Phoebe, for instance; the responsible left. Thirdly, they tended to see the whole world, let alone all of Britain, through themselves, or behaved as if they did. It was a kind of self-hypnosis; as if the city were an enchanted wood, and anyone entering it lost his senses. The fact that outside these few thousand people London had not changed, was forgotten as one stepped inside the magic wood.

Where, as in fairy stories, the most extraordinary contradictions lived side by side. Graham Patten, for instance, was still a Marxist, and fond of saying that ‘everything is run by the dozen men who were in my year at Oxford and Cambridge’. He said this with pride. As his father might have said, or as Mark’s father might have said. Which did not prevent him and everybody else saluting the new classlessness, which meant that some talents from the provinces or from the lower classes had been attracted to London and had been absorbed-exactly as has always happened.

For what distinguished this stratum of a few thousand people was its uniformity: in approaching it, you had to become like everyone else. It was a sub-society working like one of those great drums where pebbles are jarred and shaken together to smooth and polish them into likeness; it was like homogenized milk.

Apparently it was a scene of debate, competition, violently clashing interests. Great business entities fought: but they worked together behind the scenes, and employed the same firms, or people. The newspapers that remained might call themselves Right,
Left, or Liberal, but the people who wrote for them were interchangeable, for these people wrote for them all at the same time, or in rapid succession. The same was true of television: the programmes had on them the labels of different companies, or institutions, but could not be told apart, for the same people organized and produced and wrote and acted in them. The same was true of the theatre. It was true of everything.

The rubbing down process went so fast, everything went so fast, it was as if somewhere, invisibly, a time switch had been altered, for processes were speeded up that previously worked slowly through years. Once, for instance, a word, a phrase, or an idea, might be ‘in the air’ and then take five years or so to move through Press, dinner-tables, radio, book reviews, jokes. Now the opinion, the catch-phrase, the idea, might appear one week, and have blazed itself out by the next. Meanwhile hundreds of mouths proclaimed this new truth with the same solemn, soft, sincere gaze; for it was an opinion bound to reflect the highest credit on the beholder, everyone being at this time so impeccably high-minded.

Indeed, inside the enchanted circle it was hard to believe that unpleasantness could exist anywhere else, let alone exist here ever again.

Oh how charming everything was! How urbane! How tolerant! What enchanting clothes people wore! What good cooks we were, what food we ate! How delightful that in any room were bound to be half a dozen black or coloured people, exactly the same as ourselves, and half a dozen working-class people, all as talented and as progressive, everyone effortlessly harmonious … which fact in itself seemed to proclaim the truth that soon, when the Labour Party got in, anybody at all, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, man, woman, Negro or docker, would have all the benefits of society that previously were associated with somebody like Mark Coldridge or like Graham Patten.

But it was Graham Patten, of all the personalities around London in that decade, who was most consistently its exemplar. As affable, as witty as ever, he was around not only ‘London’ but the similar strata of New York, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, all of which valued that quality so peculiarly his, of being the social equivalent of a piece of litmus paper, or a geiger counter. Which is not to say that he was a chameleon-rather that, on achieving young manhood, he had foreseen the London which he was to personify, and had become
that before London sensed its destiny. Other people, styles, modes, adapted to him. Since he was fifteen, he had been a dandy: it was not long before men everywhere became peacocks and cavaliers and dandies; ‘London’ became socialist, which he remained. Following him, ‘London’ became tenderly tolerant of absolutely everything. And. having understood that what he had once considered a failing was in fact his strength, he developed his versatility. He put on plays, directed them, acted in them; he advised other directors what to put on and criticized them when they erred. He wrote books, some witty and heartless, others sincere and forward-looking. He started a restaurant, where one of his mistresses cooked, called ‘The Daisy Chain’; and had money in many boutiques. His emotional life was as vivid, for besides having been married a couple of times, he was continually most painfully in love with the newest arrival in London, of whatever sex or colour.