The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

she? Whatever debts she would leave behind her, Stanley was not one of them. She sat down again, in silence. The two women confronted each other: Martha determined not to apologize, plead guilty, or evade, Iris now awake, exuding a stubborn determination to suffer betrayal.

      ‘I don’t think Stanley and I are suited,’ said Martha.

      ‘Well, I suppose one of these days he’ll make his bed,’ said Iris, full of grievance.

      ‘Yes, but not with me,’ said Martha.

      Iris measured herself a small sour glimmer in reply to this invitation to laugh; and then, against her will, laughed out, and slammed her hand palm down on the table.

      She continued to laugh, laughter ebbing from her like water: it was like crying.

      ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but a man’s a man, and when the war’s out of his blood, he’ll settle well enough.’

      According to Iris, Stanley had been uprooted by war; which was why he had chosen the lorry run to Birmingham five days a week, and spent weekends doing labouring work – he couldn’t rest. Martha thought it was nothing to do with the war, it was his nature. And she knew, though Iris did not (for she and Stanley had come to an understanding, had made a pact against matchmakers) that there was a woman in Birmingham with whom he spent nights. He did not want to marry. Certainly not Martha. Though he liked her well enough to suggest a job as secretary to the firm he worked for.

      Iris now got up, defying Martha, or, more likely, asserting her right to choose her cousin a wife; and called through the hatch: ‘She’s here!’

      She sat down again, saying to Martha, ‘You’ll want to say goodbye, won’t you then?’

      In a moment Stanley came in. He was about forty, a lean, narrow, slouching man with hard blue eyes.

      ‘I’m due to be off,’ Stanley said generally. ‘My mate’s already at the bus. So you’ve got yourself a job then, have you?’ He did not look at Martha but at his cousin: and towards her a warning, or a resentment, was directed. Not at Martha: he was a fair man and proud of it.

      ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Martha.

      ‘You’re all right then,’ said Iris, hostile.

      ‘See you some time,’ said Stanley, and, on his way out, turned to give her a good warm smile, snubbing Iris with a cool nod.

      ‘He’s a case,’ said Iris, grieving. ‘There was a girl at the laundry who fancied him, but not him no.’

      ‘How do you know he hasn’t got a girl of his own already?’

      ‘Well, if he’d do a thing like that!’ said Iris bitterly, highlighting for Martha some area of family grievance, bonds, or bondage, that she’d never now, with the time left, be able to understand. Tears were in Iris’s weak blue eyes, and she stirred her tea savagely.

      In came Jimmy, wearing a striped apron, full of a contained reproach.

      ‘So you don’t want that job, then?’

      ‘She’s got a job,’ said Iris. ‘Up West.’

      ‘Up West is it?’

      ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Martha.

      ‘Then you don’t need any job we can get you, do you then?’ He took a big scrubbing brush and went back into the café, saying, ‘Want some breakfast, help yourself if you do.’

      On the shelf over the old wood stove were set out the week’s rations. Each person’s separately: that week’s four ounces of butter, three times, the bacon and two eggs each, on a big dish. And tea. Martha’s had gone.

      Iris watched Martha out of a practised interest in the unfairness of the world, to see if she would take eggs, butter, bacon. Martha did not like the butter anyway: a hard salty grease. But Iris had a large china bowl of dripping, the aromatic distillation of a dozen Sunday dinners.

      ‘Oh, you’re back to my dripping?’ said Iris, friendly again; and she smiled as Martha fried bread in the delicious crumbling scented fat, for herself, for Iris, and they sat eating and drinking tea while the sound of Jimmy’s scrubbing brush went on next door.

      He did not come back in: he was not going to forgive her. Martha said good-bye to Iris; was invited to drop in when she felt inclined; and she went upstairs while Iris joined Jimmy in the café.

      In the minute room which was already cleaned and impersonal, over the café, her case stood ready for her near the door, with the ration book on it. She took out a summer dress, bundled Mrs Van’s coat and the sweater and skirt into the case; and prepared for the summer day which it was fairly doubtful that the day would remain. She left through the little rose-scented garden.

      In was ten in the morning. In the great buildings along the river that administered London, men and their secretaries arrived for work. In three hours, the feeling of the city had changed. The great market that was London had opened: a dispersed, scattered, diversified market, so that in every street was a corner, a block, a centre, where it seemed as if wealth had swum together just here, to offer concealed money, furs, carpets, silver, gold, robes, but like icebergs, only a fraction of them visible in a sign of the name of a banker, or the glass case full of embroideries, or luscious furs; for above all, it was a sense of hidden wealth: and walking over the damp grey pavements it was to feel that under one’s feet stretched invisible warehouses of luxury and richness and beauty – miles of them, caverns of them. And, to the dealers and merchants who owned them, it was not important to sell, or to display, or to offer. A secret city. A hidden city. And, if instead of walking past doors, showcases, the proffered sample, one pushed open a door, passed the rather inferior items for sale, or challenged an inner door, which only needed to be pushed, for so little did the owners expect temerity on the part of docile customers that there was no doorkeeper and – suddenly, hey presto! a great descending stairway to the underground city beneath London where were stored for miles and miles the most fabulous carpets and tapestries and silks in the world.

      Martha ought to buy something to wear. Imagining she had a hundred pounds to spend, she stalked clothes up and down the rich streets in Knightsbridge. But if she had had a hundred pounds, she would not have been able to spend a penny of it. The point was, she understood at last, that she did not know for whom, for what, she was dressing. If she had stayed in the streets across the river with Jimmy, Iris, and Stanley, with Stella and her clan, there would have been no problem: the working girls had a style and dash of their own. But it was only necessary to imagine wearing, with Henry, what they wore, to see its impossibility: a tight skirt, a shirt, a sweater: no, no, on to his face would come the look that meant that here was something attractive, and licensed – outside his codes. Was he aware of it? Probably not. Or, she could choose the uniform of a lady: plenty of these, unmistakable, in shops that sold nothing else. But she did not ‘fancy’ as Iris would say, that particular uniform. What then? For there were streets full of clothes, ‘utility’ from the war, hideous and dull and tasteless. For whom? Who were the men, the women, who deliberately sat down, and on to drawing-boards sketched such clothes?

      No, not if she had a thousand pounds to spend, was there anything to buy – until she knew what she was going to have to be. Her suitcase in her hand, she dawdled, wasting time until it was one o’clock and time for Phoebe.

      The restaurant off the Strand was a lower-level version of Baxter’s; a large room dotted with small tables each with four Windsor chairs. There were dull floral curtains, and wallpaper of a pinkish floral design. The standard to which both related was the same; somewhere behind both was a country house, or a large farm house: the country, at any rate, with centuries of a certain kind of taste behind it. If Fanny’s and Baxter’s had to do without paint or new curtains for fifty years, they would still present themselves to the world with impermeable self-esteem. The menu of Fanny’s offered the same kind of food, but plainer, without sauces, and much cheaper.

      When Phoebe arrived, she nodded at the waiter, who knew her; and had inspected Martha thoroughly before even sitting down, though from different standards to Henry’s. Martha’s