The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

of boarding-schools; and spent an orphan’s life with his grandmother, who found the little boy a burden; with Sally-Sarah and Paul (Colin was always working, he was seldom at home); with the other brother’s family. Arthur’s – Arthur was Phoebe’s ex-husband, now re-married. And sometimes he stayed with Phoebe. Sometimes he was alone with Mark in this house.

      There were photographs of Lynda in his room and in Mark’s room. Lynda’s clothes hung in Mark’s cupboards. It was all wrong – the family were right. It had that stamp of excessiveness, of unreality which – indicated a passion. Indicated, in short, the growing-point, that focus in a person’s life which so few people are ever equipped to see, and which is why lives remain, even to the nearest and dearest, so often dark, obscure; lit only by these flashes of what seems an unhealthy-gleaming light: a passion. But if Martha were the family she would do the same, feel the same, and try every way fair or foul, to make Mark see that he could not spend the rest of his life as if he were married to Lynda. Who, it was clear, was unmarriageable. The family were right about that. Lynda had never been a wife, never been a mother. She could not be, Mark ought never to have made her either – so said the family. And here it was that a close secret nerve ached and nagged in Martha: she had not met Lynda, save through improbably beautiful photographs, but she knew her, oh yes, very well, though she and Martha were not alike, and could not be, since Martha was not ‘ill’ and in the hands of the doctors. But for a large variety of reasons, Lynda Coldridge, who was in a very expensive mental hospital because she could not stand being Mark’s wife, and Francis’s mother, came too close to Martha. Which was why Martha had to leave this house, and soon.

      She went down to the kitchen. A note on the table said in green pencil; ‘Martha! No eggs! No butter! The left tap is leaking! I shall bring back food when I come. Love. Sarah.’ She submitted – for what alternative did she have? – to being Sally in this family, but she always signed herself, Sarah.

      There was a letter on the table. A child’s hand. It was from that nasty school – a cold, heartless military camp of a school.

      Dear Martha, How are you? I am very well. I need football boots. I don’t like football. But I do like cricket. I hope you will be there for Christmas. With sincere greetings. Francis. P.S. Please tell Daddy about the boots. Last time he got the wrong size. I want a chemistry set for Christmas. A real one, not a baby’s one, please tell Granny I want a real one. With sincere greetings, Francis. See you at Christmas, what a hope, ha ha!

      Now Mark came into the room in his dressing-gown. He seemed annoyed: he had been disturbed by Sally-Sarah? He looked at the note on the table: eggs, butter, tap. He was helplessly annoyed.

      ‘I’ll have coffee,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll make it.’

      Martha handed him his son’s note. When he had read it she said: ‘I’ll stay for Christmas. But I must go afterwards.’ They looked at each other.

      ‘It would be good of you to stay,’ he said, appealing, and hating himself for it.

      ‘No. I want to. But, Mark, after Christmas I’ve got to go.’ ‘Of course. You are absolutely right. Absolutely.’

      Six weeks later, on a bitter day, Martha was dressed in layers of sweaters, clearing and arranging the basement. This was for the housekeeper that Mark had at last agreed he should have. The business of the basement had been going on since Christmas, a groundbass to so many apparently pre-eminent themes, apparently a minor thing, an annoyance, a question of organization merely. In fact she could see now that it had been the most important, it was the one theme that had possibilities of development, of movement: a growing point in this stagnant mess. Before Christmas she had gone to Mark’s study, late, braving his reluctance ever to be confronted, and pointed out that a housekeeper would give him all the advantages of a Martha, and none of the disadvantages. He did not want to see it. He liked her, he said: how was he to know he would like this housekeeper? – He wouldn’t until he had engaged her!

      He did not want a strange person! – Yes, but she, Martha, had been strange until she arrived.

      Where was she to live, this housekeeper? – Why, where Martha lived of course, why not?

      Yes, but – There was the basement, why not use that? It was simply a question of …

      Yes, yes, yes, he muttered, he would. But first he must just …

      He had been unable to stand any more. Martha could see that, and went down to survey the basement. It had been used as an overflow depot for years, both from upstairs, and from the house in the country, when that was sold. It was stacked with furniture, carpets, pictures. Some of it had to be sold; Mark could not bear, he said, to see the furniture of his childhood carted off to salerooms; but there was no help for it. He came briefly down, indicated the pieces that were valuable and should be kept, and for the rest, a dealer had come and taken things away. And now Martha was to arrange the place as she pleased, since they were not to know the taste of the future housekeeper, who would be getting a luxury flat when she came. The walls had been done for damp; cupboards had been put in; a bathroom and a kitchen were ready – almost, since although they were employing a firm which charged high prices for efficiency, it was impossible to get anything done well. Meanwhile, since workmen were in, workmen might as well attend to the rest of the house. As Martha was leaving, had actually put down a deposit on a flat, she felt free to take the house in hand. It was in a dreadful state beneath its surface of order. If it hadn’t been built to stand attrition, it would have been a slum. Mark having done no more than engage in a holding operation (his phrase) since Lynda’s illness. Workmen dug everywhere into floors and walls and filled the place with the smell of new colour. The roof was mended – or would be, these things took time. Carpets and curtains were cleaned – patience, there had been a war on.

      Martha dealt with men and their employers, while the people whose home this was were clutched in such fearful anxiety, and it seemed to her that yet again she had walked on to that stage where two or three different types of plays were running together, for it did not seem possible that such discordant events could be sharing a texture of time or place, except in a dream-like capacity to change into something else, like the flamingoes into croquet sticks. Margaret, for instance, took to storming in, rather regally, in order to drop well-chosen words about if-a-thing’s-worth-doing-at-all-it-is-worth-doing-well, like a white housewife to her black ‘boy’, while the workman so addressed would put on that act of a humble yet self-respecting servant deferring to his better. Then Margaret would depart. Martha was a foreigner, and not a member of the British ruling classes, and besides she knew one of the useful languages, the dialect of trades unionism, and therefore the workmen did not bother to put a show on for her. Not one of them was prepared to do a minute’s more work than he had to, or do it better than he could get away with, for the most basic of reasons; he would get nothing out of it if he did, while the people who employed him were interested only in making money, which it was their business to do. And besides there had been a war on. There wasn’t one job these men did that wouldn’t have to be done again and very soon, so badly was it done and so poor the materials. There were frightful, but good-natured battles of wills, since both sides knew the limits of such battles, and Martha cajoled and argued and bargained and made small gains. Meanwhile newspapers flooded into the house which trumpeted the destruction of Britain by socialism (internal, the Labour Party) and by communism (external), as manifested by people like Colin Coldridge’s colleague, working for Russia.

      Meanwhile, Mark spending his days for the most part with his brother, or in his factory, since he could not endure to see his home under attack, spent his nights talking to Martha in his study, mostly about his childhood and about Lynda. He was not a person who found it easy to talk, she discovered; but it had been easier since Christmas, which had laid so much open.

      Christmas had been dreadful. First, Lynda, allowed home by her doctors on condition she was returned to them the moment she showed signs of strain. Then, Francis home from his school – to spend Christmas with his father and mother. So he had been told by his house-master. ‘I’d like that,’ he said, or quoted, cautiously, in his way of testing out phrases, words, used by others about his situation. ‘I must be careful,’ he went on, his wide painful eyes fixed on Martha’s face so that she could