Four Gated City (88 page)

There now remained the question of the house. Margaret cried out to Mark that he sat there, he did not seem to mind, but after all, he lived in the house, didn’t he? He said, briefly, that he doubted
very much that it mattered whether one lived in this house or that-the future was likely to be too barbaric for that. Appealed to, Lynda came back from a long way off, smiled and said: She was sure Mark was right. Margaret obviously had not meant to appeal to Martha publicly, as she certainly would privately, but now she did.

Martha, listening with one ear to the Devil’s angry sneer about her callousness, eating avocado pear while the world burned, said it was not her house. This was as outrageous in its way as Paul’s saying the same thing. The family looked at her, Mark’s mistress (?) or at least his companion, with reproach held in check.

She said, ‘My usefulness is over, isn’t it? I’m not contributing anything now.’

In her ear the Devil sneered:
If you ever did
.

Mark shot her a warning look: discuss it with me, not in front of the others.

‘Don’t any of you care? ’ said Margaret.

‘Of course we care, ’ said Lynda absently. ‘It’s always been a lovely house.’

‘Well, where are you all going to live? ’ asked Margaret.

Here Lynda’s, Mark’s, and Martha’s eyes enmeshed: this contact was a comfort to them. The three were infinitely apart from each other, and grieved that they were. A sense of imminent partings was strong.

The others, seeing this instinctive affirmation of a continuing need, did not press.

Now it was time to order again.

Margaret had
Canard
. Pheobe had
Filet en croûte
. Martha had
Bœuf Stroganoff
. Mary said she would skip that course, but ordered
Bœuf
to please them. John had
Coq
au
vin
. Mark had
Poulet
. Arthur ordered grilled salmon. Lynda ordered, but did not eat, salmon.

‘What about the children? ’ asked Margaret. ‘Why aren’t they here? ’

‘Elizabeth’s here, ’ said Mark, trying to be kind.

Elizabeth said with bitterness that she had never had a home and it looked as if she never would.

Lynda, appealed to about Francis, said it seemed as if he proposed to continue living with Jill.

Phoebe said: ‘Then more fool him.’

Martha, appealed to about Paul, said that they all forgot Paul was a houseowner himself, even though he was not much over twenty.

‘He’ll probably be putting us all up, ’ said Margaret, bitter, bitter, her eyes full of brilliant tears.

‘What about your children? ’ said Phoebe to Arthur and Mary.

‘Oh
them
, ’ said Mary, bitter. ‘Selfish little beasts. I can’t wait till they get to our age, and see how they do, they really are …’

Scene of the time
: a room full of middle-aged people, eating hard, preoccupied half the time about weight problems, always on diets of one sort or another, most of them smoking, a lethal habit as they were told at the top of every publicity voice there was, most of them on sleeping pills and sedatives, all of them drinkers and some of them drunk-talking about the youth.

The young took drugs. They were irresponsible. They were selfish. They were dirty. They were self-indulgent. They had no interest at all in politics-that was Phoebe, who kept demanding: If they’d only go out and canvass for the Party, they’d have a purpose in life and they wouldn’t need to take drugs.

Margaret, Phoebe, Arthur, Mary, found themselves in perfect agreement on this theme, and while the plates were being cleared, started drafting a letter to
The Observer
about why the youth were not interested in politics. Margaret said it was because they had not suffered when children, they had had it too easy. Arthur agreed.

During the coffee, this draft was completed, and then Lynda asked Mark if they could go home. At once Mark said yes … infinitely relieved. Martha was all too ready to go.

‘But we haven’t settled anything, ’ Margaret kept saying, pathetic, bewildered, looking from one to the other of this trio Mark, Martha, Lynda, while she held a silver and turquoise pencil over the draft letter.

Elizabeth, ill, had to come with them.

Martha asked to be dropped back at Paul’s house.

Lynda said to her: ‘One would think that if there was a Devil there’d be a God.’

Martha said: ‘I don’t know how you stick it, going on all the time. I’d kill myself.’

Lynda said: ‘You can get used to anything.’

Mark said to Martha: ‘When are you coming back? ’

‘Well, how about in six weeks? ’

‘Couldn’t you make it sooner, there are things …’ He meant Elizabeth, sitting beside him, her profile turned to him. In the half-dark of the car’s interior, her slightly parted lips, her calm round forehead gave her the look of a venturing girl. Perhaps that was how she saw herself at that moment. But she was well over thirty, and in the light, looked more.

Lynda said: ‘Elizabeth, have you left your husband and children? ’

‘Of course not, ’ said Elizabeth, indignant. ‘I’ve decided to find some place where they can really
live
, that’s all. I just like the sound of Mark’s city, that’s all.’

‘I’ll make it a month, ’ said Martha.

Lynda said: ‘Mark wants you sooner than that.’

‘Oh no, ’ said Mark hastily, ‘please, Martha, not if…’

‘If I loved somebody, really really loved somebody, I wouldn’t leave him, not for one moment!’ said Elizabeth.

‘All right, three weeks, ’ said Martha.

Inside her head, during this exchange, titan battles had taken place: she wanted very much to stop now. Oh how tired she was, how confused, how frightened … she felt she had the best possible excuse to say to Paul: Thanks, but that’s enough, for the time being at any rate-and go back home.

What home? It wouldn’t be here, within a few months.

Besides, three weeks of absolute privacy, good Lord, what sort of a fool would throw that away, not knowing when the next chance would come.

With half her need she stayed in imagination with Mark in his home, poor Mark who would now spend a night trying to hold together his crazy niece Elizabeth, and who had no friend there to help him. With the rest of her she was being driven to return to her retreat as fast as she could.

Inside her room she checked her body, the instrument, the receiving device. She had eaten a lot; she had drunk enough. It would take twenty-four hours at least to get herself back into a sensitive state.

Sensitive to what?

One always assumed that … the point was, she knew nothing, and was taking such risks: she might very well end up in the hands of Dr Lamb-why not?
It can’t happen to me
: Everyone says that, all the time. It could happen to her. It was happening to her. If she
now went into Dr Lamb’s room and said these and these and such and such are my symptoms-that would be that.

Luckily she knew better.

But she did not know the first thing about what really was going on in this machine, mechanism, system, organism. Who did? Did anyone? Not Dr Lainb!

If she didn’t understand she could describe, she could record. Above all, she could remember.

Time out from the Devil had lessened him after all, as she saw when she was able to compare the mental furniture of the room with what it had been before she went out.

She was able to hold him back, hold back her collapse into tears and screaming self-pity for a while. Meanwhile, like a baby who has drawn a deep breath for a yell of temper, but is holding out for a greater effect, she knelt by the table and scribbled notes fast, fast, before (as she knew she must) she would collapse into self-abasement.

Works like this. Thought comes into mind. If conscious, thought is in words. If not, if ordinary association-thought then it isn’t words. Words are when one stands back to look. This first word then sprouts into other words and ideas like a flash of lightning. No, like water suddenly lifting limp branch off sea bottom. Words proliferate so fast you can’t catch them.A word:then an idea suggested by that word.(Who suggested the word?) You think: my idea? Whose? Make the first word or phrase or idea stay still so you can look at it. Then you can ask:is that an overheard thought? Whose? Why? Or is it something fed by the invisible mentor? If you stop thought, make it go out of mind altogether, it can retreat and make its way back in sound. This sound can get louder. It can use different voices, known and unknown. If known probably you associate that thought with that person. That thought can also come from the corner of a room or another part of your body or a chair or something. Mind is also a ventriloquist. Devil for instance before I went to dinner-from corners of the room
.

Essential be conscious the moment thought comes into mind otherwise it is a lost thought
.

Here we go again:if you don’t know something you can’t know it. You can only learn something you already begin to know.‘I can’t tell you something you don’t know. ‘

And again:Every attitude, emotion, thought, has its opposite held in balance out of sight but there all the time. Push any one of them to an extreme, and boomps-a-daisy, over you go into its opposite
.

I am good and kind and intelligent.I am bad and cruel and stupid
.

All right, all right, all right. You just keep off a minute
.

The young man in Virginia Woolf’s story who was mad. He heard the birds talking in ancient Greek
.

Onomataopoeia. Think about it
!

An emotion. Fear for instance. You can see how it converts into a thought-if you are quick enough
.

A body is a machine, for the conversion of one kind of energy into another
.

Here Martha succumbed again to the Devil.

Hell (one of them?) is hot. It has a harsh light. There is a sticky clinging feel to it. MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL it has a beat. Both regular and irregular. Like a mad clock, like the way paraffin lamps flare up before going out, but it flares with a regular irregularity. A wild hysterical sort of beat yet regular. Yet at the same time small and unimportant. A harshness of black and white. A sticky feel. Light without shadow. Monsters. First you see just people, you and I. Then you see, they, we, are deformed, our faces twisted with greed and anger. Man from grocery, a portly slow-moving man, high-coloured in face. In hell he leers-you see that he has dogteeth, fangs, is sub-human. Faces like embryos, half-formed. A gallery of faces of people. Devils. Ordinary people. Faces are blanks which can take masks, good or bad. Hate, envy, greed, fear, slide over people’s faces so fast you can only just catch them
.

It was at that stage that Martha was conducted through the Stations of the Cross by the Devil. She knew nothing of this ritual, had never been instructed in it, nor had known well enough to affect her people who performed it. Yet it was as if she knew it, knew its meaning. From the moment when Pontius Pilate washed his hands to the time when she, Martha, who was also the Devil, prepared to be bound on the Cross, because of the (rightfulness of her crimes, she was as it were whipped through the ritual by the hating scourging tongue of the Devil who was herself, her hating, self-hating self. Yet though she was not able to refuse obedience to this ritual, she was quite able to protect herself from the boy who visited her during it: the boy who had killed, without meaning to,
the baby he had said he would protect and who was now doing penance for the sin he had committed. He was a slight fair boy, who looked much younger than his nineteen years. He looked like an earnest schoolboy. He sat on the edge of the big four-poster bed, wringing his hands together and weeping, while he explained to Martha how God was punishing him out of love; and how if Martha was being punished, it was out of the love of God. When he had gone-he had to get up pretty early to be at his packing work at the chemical firm in Tottenham, Martha continued taking instruction from the Fiend, until the play was played out. ‘But I’ve done that, I’ve finished with that, ’ she said crossly to the Devil, refusing further instruction, and lay down to sleep for a while.

Martha was now unable to leave Hell. So she thought. Exhausted, she would say ‘enough’, and lie down to sleep in Hell. In sleep the most dreadful nightmares followed her. But she remembered that when she was a child there had been a long period when she had been frightened to sleep because of nightmares, and had used all kinds of tricks and techniques to outwit them. She remembered these now, used them. It occurred to her that she thought she was finally lost, was cast for ever into this sea, but all the same she could say, I’m tired, I will sleep-and did. Or, asleep, say: I am in Hell, wake up, and did. Or performed the rituals before sleep that could ward off nightmares which she had learned through necessity as a child.

This thought lessened the grip of the Devil and of Hell.

But did not send them away: she was still curious.

If all these sub-human creatures are aspects of me, then I’m a gallery of freaks and nature’s rejects
.

See above. Fool. Don’t you ever learn. These things are there. Always. I can choose to be them or not. I can collect them the way dust gets collected on a magnetically treated duster. Or not
.

In Hell the light is on all the time
.

In prison cells and in the torture cells and in the locked wards of mental hospitals light burns always
.

Man understands the devil very well. The devil has taught him all he knows
.

All dark or all light. Monsters and sadists create these conditions. Monsters and sadists live in them
.

The face of Bob Parrinder. He hasn’t grown into his own face yet. He is a self-important little boss. His face like a landscape before sun rises. Shadows and light will fill it. If I held the mask of self-importance in front of him, as last night when he said, Oh yes of course, I understand all that, he’d die with shame. Olive’s face: what she is
.