The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

regarded sex as the drainer, the emptier, instead of the maker of energy. They did not know. But why was it that people didn’t know? There was a knowledge that was no part of our culture, hinted at merely; you could come across references. Or you could stumble on it. Like Jack, who had said to a hand numbed by a loss of blood and cold: hold on, and it held on because it had been given orders, for twelve hours. A moment of extremity in war had taught Jack a simple law about his own body. Supposing he had not had that chance, could Jack have become one of the men who regard sex as a kind of currency to be measured out. Well, whatever Jack could have been, it had to be an extreme, that was certain. Jack could as easily have been a sex-hating bigot, he could have been as violently afraid of sex as he now passionately pursued the knowledge of its laws, of its control and understanding. He would have been violent and extreme whatever course he had taken – or been set on, by the accidents of his experience.

      But now, Jack and Martha, having made love for hours, came to themselves light and easy, and as if they had been washed through and through by currents of energy. She felt as if she had been connected to a dynamo, the centre of her life. But Jack could not be the centre of her life – he would not be the centre of any woman’s life. Why not? And as she came around again to this warning thought, she opened her eyes, smiling, to hide that she was thinking it. They lay there washed up side by side, smiling and delighted and rested.

      At half past twelve she rang Phoebe to say she could not make lunch that day, it would have to be tomorrow: and heard Phoebe’s gruff but business-like reproaches knowing that she had earned them. And he rang Joanna to say that he could not see her today, but he would love to see her tomorrow. ‘You see, Joanna, Martha’s here, and we don’t want to stop yet.’ The conversation went on, amiable and brotherly on his side; but Martha could not make out from the tones of Joanna’s voice what she was feeling: she probably didn’t know herself.

      ‘She’ll come tomorrow,’ said Jack with satisfaction.

      They began to dress, so as to go out and eat. ‘You are an extraordinary man,’ she said, and he kissed her gratefully. But she was thinking: Then, why don’t we take you seriously? But this thought, when with him she was initiated into so much knowledge about the capacities of her own body, kept her silent and pondering; while he was silent, because he was so hungry he felt almost crazy with it. Hunger hit Jack like a mania, a fever: when he had to eat it was, he said, as if he were being eaten alive by a nestful of ants. He cut a hunk of bread and gnawed it, feeding hunger, while she finished dressing and thought: Is it because for Jack it is an end in itself, is that it? But she could not go on with this – for what ought to be an end then? She had gone way out past any buoys, lighthouses, or charted points in her knowledge of herself: and that meant that moments of criticism must be resisted, they would probably be nervous reactions, that was all.

      They walked out into the ugly street, where now workmen clustered around a crater in the road; and went up the channel between flaking dingy houses which was Rogers Street in the daytime, until they came to a new Indian restaurant about a mile away, spent an hour or so eating a great deal, for they were both very hungry, and then strolled back to his house again. They hardly spoke. They had reached a condition that made speaking irrelevant. Yet for her it was not a contented silence. For now, as she and Jack returned to his room for another afternoon and night of making love, she began to feel bad about letting Phoebe down; she ought to have gone to lunch! All this was a delaying, a putting-off of something she had to do. She could spend weeks in Jack’s country and still at the end of it she must go to Phoebe and whatever it was she represented. If she had gone to lunch with Phoebe then she would not now be facing with Jack – but what? Why was she so uneasy? Tired? No. Flat? No – this condition of light well-being was not anywhere near that. But anguish lay somewhere just beneath the surface and threatened to well up: it was the pain that had accompanied the scene of the London house and the sad children. There had been the lovely picture of the golden age, the golden man, the woman and their children and animals; but the joy which had accompanied that was not as strong as the pain that came with the other. Oh, if she wasn’t careful she was going to cry and cry – and that wouldn’t do, not this afternoon when she had to be so strong. A decision or something of the kind lay ahead, she could feel it.

      Back in the white and black room, new candles were lit. They were quite alone in the big house. The room was stark and bare now, the bed had a brown blanket stretched over it. There was only one chair; so Martha and Jack sat on a rug by the bed, leaning against it. He seemed nervous. ‘What’s the matter, Martha?’

      ‘I don’t think I’m going to be a good partner for you today. Perhaps you should have let Joanna come.’

      ‘Joanna’s gone off racing with her cricketer. What’s the matter? I can see there is something wrong. Perhaps it’s my fault. I’ve had a thought in my mind all this time and I didn’t tell you. If you’re with a woman and you are holding some thought back, then it breaks the contact. That’s why you keep going away from me.’

      ‘Perhaps.’ But Martha had in her mind a hundred thoughts she could not share with Jack. He really was a boy, after all. He sat there, his strong face above his brown sweater, brown eyes anxious, intense; a boy with a boy’s fear that he’s not strong enough to keep what he holds. He was nearly thirty-five. Yet she could have believed him to be twenty-five. Meeting him somewhere for the first time, she would have thought: a strong, simple boy, rather naive. That’s what she had thought, allowing herself to be picked up by him on the underground. Everything he knew was in his body: it never reached his face, which was stiff with the fear that she would not accept the thought he wanted to share with her: with Thomas they had not set out to ‘share’ thoughts. With Jack, you set up a simple communion of the flesh, and then your mind went off by itself – that was all right, what was wrong with it? If she couldn’t have Thomas … do you know what you’ve done, said Martha to herself in despair: I’ve become one of those women that used to frighten me! I’ve got a dead man. Like my mother. Like Mrs Talbot. Like Maisie. I say to myself ‘Thomas’ as if that were the end of it! What does it mean? I say ‘Thomas’ and – play with Jack! Except you can’t possibly use the word play, for anyone as desperately singleminded as Jack. All right then – imagine Jack dead, would I then be saying ‘Oh Jack!’ and playing with someone else? No. I took Thomas seriously. I don’t take Jack seriously. Why? It doesn’t matter why.

      ‘Martha, I don’t know how to tell you what I’ve been thinking. I don’t know how you’ll take it. Why don’t you come and live here. No, don’t say no, think about it – there’s the floor under this one. You could live there. The wiring’s done, and the plumbing and the telephone’s in.’

      ‘You mean, live with you? But how?’

      ‘Well, why not?’ he muttered, already rejected, sullen. ‘You ask it as if – you don’t trust me, that’s it, that’s what I was afraid of.’

      ‘But what would Garibaldi Vasallo make of it?’ – trying to joke.

      ‘What could he say? You don’t understand. I’ve got the whip-hand. He didn’t want to give me a half-share of this house at all. But he did – I made him. Besides, he knows I know how he operates, with all his dirty tricks.’

      ‘Blackmail?’

      His face darkened, clenched, was ugly. ‘Blackmail! That’s a word you use for decent people, not a dirty little dago.’

      ‘I hate that word.’ She was discouraged: all her energy had leaked away; she wished now that she could wrap a blanket around her head, like an African, and turn her face to the wall and sleep. ‘When I left home I really thought I’d be free of the race thing. Isn’t that funny? There’s no end to our being stupid. One’s always making up day-dreams about places somewhere else. But since I’ve been here – things are just as ugly as they are back home, but people don’t know, it’s all hidden. And now you start talking about dagoes.’

      ‘That’s not racialism! That’s just – accurate. That’s what he is, a nasty little dago. A crook. You deal with crooks in their own coin. If he plays me up, I’ll go to the police with what I know about him. I’m not taking anything from him that isn’t fair. By the