The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

isn’t that we mind our girls getting married – far from it. We welcome it, they tend to stay,’ said Henry.

      ‘And a large part of our practice is out of this country – we’ve been doing a lot of work with refugees for instance. Tidying up after the war – that sort of thing. And we really do need someone with – a wider experience than most English girls have.’

      Now Martha had to be silent. This last point reached her. And, besides, she was exactly in the same position here as she had been, still was, with Iris and Jimmy. She had promised, or had seemed to promise, without knowing she was doing it, more than she had ever meant. She had never, not for one moment, considered working for Henry, had said, in every way she knew: No, no, no. Yet both men now expected her to say yes: were in fact counting on her. A manner which was assumed as a mask, a defence, appearing to be a half-flirtatious consideration of possibilities, had been felt as so much more? Or was it that being in a situation at all, being involved with people, was a promise of more? That was more like it, that was the truth: oh yes, there was something intolerable, unforgivable, about the drifters, the testers, the samplers, she was only just beginning to see it. But it was unjust, unfair! She had been in this country for not much more than a quarter of a year, had seen it as time out of responsibility. She was not going to be allowed to taste and drift and knock about. The genuine feeling of betrayal shown by her friends of Joe’s café (though not by Stella of the docks – why not?), and the expectation shown by Henry and John, proved that she must have made promises implicitly; she, Martha, had something in her which forbade her to drift and visit and slide out. Other people might: she could not. Otherwise why, after such a very short time out of responsibility (what was four months after all?) were the nets closing in? Which was how she felt it. The net had been set from the moment she saw Henry’s politely charming face outside the Customs when she arrived. It was probably, though she did not want to recognize this, that her temperament shared more than she liked with Marjorie; and with Marjorie’s sister Phoebe, an earnestness, a readiness to be involved and implicated, and this temperament was in itself a promise, made promises and offered.

      She could be weak and say something like: I’ll think it over. But she must not. And she must not buy forgiveness with ‘Matty’. With a great effort, she said (abruptly, and without grace, but she said it straight). ‘Look. Please believe me. I’m not taking the job. Thank you very much – but I don’t want it.’

      ‘What have you got lined up instead?’ asked John Higham. He was annoyed.

      ‘She’s thinking of being a barmaid,’ said Henry with a laugh to indicate, not that she would not, but that she was only too capable of it.

      ‘Really, are you?’ said John Higham. ‘Of course, it is a way of – getting around?’ he inquired. ‘One does see that.’

      ‘The thing is,’ said Martha, again furious, trying not to be: ‘I wouldn’t see the job as you do – as something extraordinary. You simply don’t understand – all of you, you talk of the people you call “the working class” as if they were – people from the moon. Not that you use words like “the working class” of course – Oh, I don’t know,’ she concluded, in real despair, ‘one can’t even talk about it with you.’

      Glances were again exchanged between Henry and John, and again as if she were not present. ‘Well,’ said John, ‘that is precisely why we are so keen to have you – you see a great many of the people we deal with have had a rather rough time, and one does need someone to handle them who knows what they are talking about.’

      ‘Perhaps,’ said Martha, ‘having had a rough time as a refugee would include rather more than would be covered by having experience as a barmaid?’

      She was now really angry. Really discouraged. Even frightened. After all, such people ran this country, no matter what the papers said. And when you came anywhere near the Maynards and their kind this is what happened. It was like talking to – well, the blind, people blinkered from birth. Which is what they were. What was the point of … one simply had to get out of their way.

      The waiter was bringing the bill. The restaurant was full now, it was about ten o’clock, and had more than ever the atmosphere of a family, of people who were at one with each other. And they were off guard now, with a licensed childishness about them, as if, threatened outside, here they found refuge. Across the room, a man with a heightened colour and a rakish look flicked bread pellets at a girl in a fluffy pink sweater, who flicked them back, giggling, while waiters watched indulgently.

      The bill was for six pounds.

      ‘Where are you going, can we lift you?’

      ‘Thank you, I’d like to walk.’

      Henry pushed back his chair. The waiter had three people by him who wanted this table. Getting out and away fast, which was what she wanted, was easy for her.

      She walked down Oxford Street; that is, eye-level goods confined behind lit glass moved past her: above were dark weights of masonry. The goods, clothes mostly, were as bad and as tasteless as everything else. This is the greatest city in the world, she kept saying, loitering, but not obviously so, among people window-shopping. The biggest city, the biggest, and this one of the streets whose name I’ve been brought up on, like Piccadilly Circus. The labels of these shops are covetable, sewn on clothes – there was not one object or article she would have cared to own. Of course, there had been a war on. Of course, even five years after such a war, buildings and streets must be propped and shored and patched and unpainted, and cloth must be thinned and impoverished. Of course. But even a yard of war-impoverished cloth can be woven with more sense or art. Good Lord, she found herself thinking, for the thousandth time, what kind of a race is this that chooses, inevitably and invariably, or so it seemed, the ugly, the graceless? Well, here she was and to stay.

      The shops ended and sky opened above the trees of Hyde Park. Now here was something different, oh yes, when it came to trees and gardens, then everything was as it ought to be. She walked down the pavements of the Bayswater Road, with the park on one side, balances and patterns of leaf dramatically green where the street lights held them, retreating into mysterious shadow beyond, with the lit moving sky over them. On her right hand, the great ponderous houses that stood so assertively on damp soil. Great ugly grey houses. They were boarded up or empty or in makeshift use; no longer houses; all in a condition of transformation towards being hotels. And unpainted. Ugly. Even in this changing racing wild light, ugly. But she was under the trees that edged the pavement, and they seemed like an extension of the trees of the park, so that it was as if the traffic that poured down the street was riding through softly lit trees which ended here; the grey cliff of buildings on her right being the start of the city. There were now few people. There had begun, from the moment she had left Oxford Street and the shops, that heightened wary atmosphere which meant she must walk careful of her eyes, because in this stretch of the Bayswater Road, men prowled after women. Invisible boundaries, invisibly marked territories: just as, across the river a boundary could be marked by an old hulk of timber with riversalt in its seams, so that one side of it was the riverbank, the other a landlubber’s country, here the corner of a street, or the hour of day could say: Here a certain kind of order ends.

      Martha now walked fast, protected by the thick ugliness of Mrs Van’s coat; but she was a ‘young woman’, category ‘young woman’ – yes, she must remember that she was, and that along these pavements, a category of being, ‘man’, prowled beside or behind her. That was what she must be for a few minutes, not Martha or ‘Matty’, only ‘young woman’. A man veered up beside her, muttered an anxious aggressive invitation and dropped behind when she presented to him her aloof lifted profile. He fell back, muttering words she was meant to hear. The greatest city in the world … if only I could understand that it’s a question of trying to see things steadily all the time, then perhaps I could understand it. Martha’s daytime brain had become detached, wary, watchful, on guard – to protect another part of it which had just started to wake, to listen, because of the fast walk through the moving, lit streets. And when this happened – and she never knew when it would – nothing mattered but to protect, to keep the irrelevant at bay. It was this business of having to divide off, make boundaries