The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

at the back of her mind the thought held: it was here, it was here, it was – just because you can’t get anywhere near it now, that doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist. She got off the bus, her legs weak, and almost staggered with the heavy case past the canal where children splashed in a dull sunlight. She arrived at Jack’s door to lean against it, breathing deeply, to recover herself. In the street men in singlets dug up the street, standing to their waists in a greasy yellow earth.

      The door was opened, before she had rung, by the grinning youth: he had been watching through the panes.

      ‘There’s one up there already,’ he said, delighted.

      ‘Yes, I know. Thanks.’ She went past, hearing his idiot’s chuckle. Good Lord, she couldn’t possibly live in this house with an idiot and a … Jack came smiling down the stairs to meet her. And at the sight of him her revulsion dissolved into simple affection. Everything she had felt was the result of exhaustion and she was not to be trusted. A young man in sloppy blue trousers and a heavy blue pull-over chosen to disguise the thinness which was his shame and his terror, he took her case, and pulled her close inside the circle of bone that was his arm. He kissed her and said: ‘Hey there, Martha, what’s up?’

      She shook her head, nearly crying, and went before him into the black and white room where Joanna sat, dressed, on the chair near the window. Either she had not undressed, or she had dressed for Martha. She wore her perfect clothes: a beige well-hung skirt, beige pull-over, long legs in silk, not nylon, and highly polished low brown shoes. Her camel-hair coat was folded over the back of another chair. She looked as neat and shiny as a newly-washed child. Smiling, she nodded at Martha. ‘Would you like to lie down?’ Still held inside the bony circlet, she was being urged towards the bed.

      ‘No. I don’t want to sleep – not yet.’

      There was only one decent chair, and Joanna was on it. She got up and sat on the bed, and Martha took the chair. Jack turned his back to make coffee on the spirit stove: he was leaving it to them, to the two women, to define the situation, to handle it.

      ‘Was the job no good?’ he inquired, as neither spoke.

      And suddenly Matty exploded through Martha’s mouth in a storm of half-giggling tears. ‘Oh yes, it’s just my style. Just up my street …’ Her voice rose in a wail of laughter. ‘You’d be surprised, it’s tailor-made for me. I tell you, it’s been sitting there waiting for me for years – everything as sick and neurotic and hopeless as you can imagine … and a dominating mamma over all, and a wife in a mental hospital, and a man just sitting waiting for some sucker like me to cope with everything.’

      Jack’s blue back was still bent over his cups and spoons: he was alertly waiting. And behind the cool little face of Joanna’s upbringing was dislike and upset. And the cool Martha, who watched giggling tearful Matty with as much detachment as either Jack or Joanna, knew that it was Jack who would earn Joanna’s dislike of this situation – not Martha. This thought pulled her together. She sniffed, wiped her hands across her eyes and cheeks, for she had no handkerchief, and sat silent, recovering.

      ‘There’s plenty of jobs in London,’ commented Jack, turning with three filled mugs – black, black, coffee. On the farms of his tradition, great black cauldrons stood always simmering on the back of wood stoves, with coffee grounds in them inches deep, coffee being added daily to make a brew which depth-charged the nervous system at first sip. This black liquid in the cup Martha held would be too much in her present state. She sat holding the cup.

      ‘Anyone who wants to live in London …’ said Joanna; ‘What for? Why don’t you live in the country. You can live there like a human being.’

      ‘Joanna can lend you some money, Martha. A fiver?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Joanna. ‘But if I were you I’d get on to the first train out of London.’

      ‘But you look all in. Man – why don’t you lie down on the bed and sleep a little. Joanna and I can go out for some supper – Joanna?’

      ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Joanna, sipping her thick black coffee and watching Martha.

      Martha thought: neither of them heard what I said. Joanna dislikes Jack now because she’s been subjected to my being hysterical, and Jack is feeling: Martha’s upset.

      Jack now lowered himself to the floor. First he put his cup down on it, and then felt the floor, as it were greeted earth: the way an African villager might touch the earth with one hand, assessing it, before squatting down. Jack squatted, his hand flat on the floor beside him. Martha thought: If he and I were alone, we would make love, and what I said, what I felt, would be answered with how he made love. This seemed to her an extraordinary discovery.

      ‘What sort of work do you want?’ said Joanna.

      ‘It’s not the work as such I care about. But I do know exactly what I want.’ For she did. In the last few minutes, something had happened, a balance had shifted. She knew.

      ‘I want,’ said Martha, ‘to live in such a way that I don’t just – turn into a hypnotized animal.’

      Jack, smiling with affectionate hope that he would soon know what Martha was so excited about, kept his palm flat on the floor – earth. But Joanna was saying with abrupt hostility: ‘Oh no. I had quite enough of all that during the war.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ asked Jack, turning the antennae of his sensitivity towards Joanna.

      ‘I know what I mean. And I’ve had enough of it. I simply won’t have any more,’ said Joanna.

      ‘It was on the boat. I understood on the boat,’ said Martha.

      ‘Martha didn’t like the trip over,’ Jack explained to Joanna. ‘But all the same, Martha, it must have been all right, just sitting there with your girl friend and watching everyone. When I came back as a passenger it was the same …’ Now he was talking like a host, soothing Martha’s smarts away. ‘But I spent all my time in the gym. I wasn’t going to mix myself up.’

      ‘Oh, but I did, I did, and that’s the point.’

      ‘You said you sat with that sick girl and watched – it’s always awful, a lot of people crammed together, just animals.’

      ‘No.’ Martha was in the grip of a necessity to explain, even to claim an ally in Joanna, and in the face of Joanna’s hostile negation of her, Martha’s, vital discovery. ‘Before I left … home? I used to dream about the sea. All the time. It was an obsession. When I got off the train at Cape Town, I thought, the sea, but we were put straight on to the boat, and the sea was harbour water full of ships.

      And the boat – I swear everything was designed to make you forget the sea was anywhere near. And if you stood at night on the deck and looked at it, or walked around the deck, someone would say, Moon-gazing! Or: I’ve got to get my weight down too. You know … hundreds of people, some of them had been waiting the whole war for this trip. There was this girl. She was sick. Dying I think. A blood disease. She was a pale thin girl – sickly. We teamed up. But she didn’t accept me. I was healthy, you see. I kept catching her eye on me, sceptical and hostile – like you sometimes, Joanna.’ ‘I wasn’t aware of it.’

      ‘Yes. Yes. Where was I, yes. We two were a challenge to the men, not joining in. She thought that’s why I was doing it. Well, and perhaps – or put it around the other way, it was that that dragged me back in again, so perhaps she was right. In a way. But all the time she was polite, and rather cynical, watching to see how long I’d stick it out with her, instead of joining with the others.’

      Joanna said: ‘You should have locked yourself in your cabin.’ She said it fierce and angry.

      ‘I was sharing a cabin with four others. Not everyone can afford private cabins – oh damn it, that’s childish.’

      ‘Yes it is,’ said Joanna.

      ‘I know how Martha feels,’ said Jack. ‘There’s been times in my