The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

it.’ ‘Not for long,’ said Martha.

      ‘No. You go to a new place and for a while it’s fine, and then it gets you. You should move on then.’ ‘You’re not going to!’

      ‘But I tell you, Martha, when I saw that old woman sitting in that chair, it gave me a scare, I thought, who’s that old woman in my room?’

      ‘Then that’s why it’s over for me,’ said Martha, ‘I’ve got to get a job so I can get a coat so you won’t think I’m an old woman.’

      They were sitting so their knees touched: prickles of electricity ran from one to another, while they smiled, drinking cocoa, and looking with pleasure into each other’s faces. Now, after a questioning look, which she answered, to find out if it was time, he looked, smiling at her centre, so that it livened and became the centre of herself. Slowly he let the pressure of his eyes go up to her stomach, then wait, then to one breast, and wait, then to the other – her breasts lifted and tightened, and he laughed. Now she looked, smiling, at his genitals: they tightened and began to lift. She put out a hand to touch him; he touched her; then they joined these hands, so that current ran through them, through knees and hands. Now, set together in rising rhythm, they could sit and talk, or be silent, for a half hour, an hour, or through the night, and everything they said, or their silences, would flow up into the moment when they began to make love. If they touched too soon, then it was too strong, set a too urgent current. The looking, slow and pleasurable, was like the perfect meshing of the right gears.

      ‘I haven’t seen you for so long, Martha – what is it, it seems weeks? And I’ve been thinking about you.’

      This, ‘I’ve been thinking about you’ was true. He thought, deliberately, about his girls, maintaining that in this way he kept them connected to him. But he said it because of a necessity he felt to keep, hold, reassure, be reassured. He meant, in spite of the other girls, I think of you. ‘What have you been doing, Martha?’

      ‘I’ve discovered that I’ve got to get a job.’

      But this went past him. Women had jobs, but for him that was not important. Women got jobs to buy clothes, to make themselves pretty for him, for themselves, for their men. It did not matter what jobs they had. What lives they had outside this room, he did not care, provided they came back. He wasn’t serious, not really!

      ‘I was thinking a lot about how it was the last time: I swear it, Martha, that with you there’s something I haven’t with the others.’

      She was delighted. If he said it, it was true; but it didn’t matter: he felt like saying it.

      ‘Who was the girl who was let out at eleven?’ She said this deliberately, in order to see if she would feel jealous. All kinds of emotions she had considered hers had retreated during the last few weeks. For instance, Henry mentioning her mother: in the past, what resentment, what fear had flared up, taken hold. But now, it didn’t touch her. And a slight pang of jealousy faded at once: they were emotions without force behind them, like jets of water without pressure.

      ‘He’s a bit crazy, Martha. He’s got a thing about time. He’s got a chart: he marks every day off in hours and crosses off every hour.’

      And now, his face hardened and clenched: for he above all had time riding him: suddenly he lifted her hand and pressed it tight to his eyes: she could feel the round pressure of his eyeball against the ball of her thumb.

      ‘Is that why he’s here?’

      ‘Yes, you’re right, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s why. I was saying to myself it was because – well for one thing it tests Vasallo. And for another, if the police pick him up again he’ll be back in the loony bin.’

      He sat quiet, eyes shut, holding her hand so tight the bones hurt. He was sitting inside his living breathing body, assuring himself of it. Jack had done four years in the minesweeper and had been in continual danger. He had been sunk twice. Once he had spent twelve hours in the water. What he had been left with was an awe of the flesh. The existence of his body now was a miracle: he never ceased to feel it. Time bled away from him in every pulse beat. Thomas had had that too.

      She was thinking of Thomas. Again? With Jack, she found herself thinking of Thomas. She did not think of her two husbands, Knowell and Hesse, she thought of Thomas.

      Thomas Stern. Thomas. Who was Thomas that she had to go on thinking of him?

      Thomas was a soldier. Thomas was a gardener. Thomas was a tradesman. He was the husband of his wife and the father of his little daughter. He was an exile, Thomas Stern, Polish Jew from Sochaczen, tossed out of Europe and into Africa by a movement of war. When they put his name on documents to make him part of the Medical Corps, Zambesia, they wrote: Thomas Stern, Pole, alien. When the Germans killed his family in the Warsaw Ghetto, they might have written (did they keep records?) ‘Sarah Stern, Abraham Stern, Hagar Stern, Reuben Stern, Deborah Stern, Aaron Stern …’ Thomas was the son and the brother of these dead people. Thomas was a man who killed another man deliberately because he had gone mad and chosen to believe in revenge for revenge’s sake. Thomas was a man who had chosen to live with some particularly ‘backward’ Africans on the edge of the Zambesi River in a tract of land now covered feet deep by the waters of the Kariba Dam. These Africans (now dispersed to other areas chosen by the white man and dead as a tribe) had thought of Thomas Stern: A crazy white man with a good heart who lives with us and who sits in his hut scribbling words on paper. Martha had thought of Thomas who was her lover and not her husband: ‘With this man I am always at home.’ Martha Quest (then Martha Knowell, then Martha Hesse) had thought, still thought of Thomas.

      Thomas had lived inside his body as if it were an always dissolving reforming shell or shape with many different names and times. At the end, Thomas’s way of living, or being, had wrenched his body from large blonde solidity into a lean dark bitterness of purpose. Thomas’s flesh breathed time and death; but his mind and his memory moved along another line parallel to it.

      That was why she had been with Thomas.

      That’s why she was with Jack?

      I couldn’t be with a man who hadn’t got it: time moving in one’s breath. I suppose once you’ve entered into some kind of knowledge, then you can’t go back on it …

      Suddenly she saw something: all Jack’s girls had it. Of course, that was how he chose them, while he thought he was choosing a smile or the promise of a body.

      ‘What’s she like, this new one?’

      ‘She’s lovely, a little fair thing, whitey-gold all over, her hair, skin, everything. She sits on my bed like a little whitey-gold statue. I wish you could see her.’

      ‘Well, who knows, perhaps I will.’

      A couple of weeks ago Martha and Jack had been sitting as they were now when a girl walked in. She was tall and fair, with solemn brown eyes. She wore an elegant camel coat, in spite of the heat, and had long silk-covered English legs. She had seen the two of them as she came in and turned around slowly to close the door to give herself time to know what she wanted to do. Then her face came back into view with a smile on it, and she advanced smiling to the bed. Martha, introduced, nodded and smiled. Jack said: ‘Joanna, come and join us.’

      ‘Not altogether, if you don’t mind,’ said Joanna, with a short amused laugh. Composed, she pulled up a hard chair and sat quite close. The three smiled at each other.

      ‘I was passing,’ she said; at which Jack and Martha laughed, and then, after a while, she laughed too, for this was not an area where she could possibly have been passing.

      ‘I wanted to set eyes on one of the others,’ she said, gruff and abrupt, making a confession with difficulty.

      ‘Well, here I am.’

      Joanna gave Martha a slow once-over.

      ‘You’re very pretty,’ she said.

      ‘I’m sure that I’d think the same of you!’

      Meanwhile