The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

of hundred little boys, guarded by men. ‘The little ones’ (Francis’s description of the boys younger than himself) had a matron, but ‘the big ones’ had men. They all slept in dormitories, were made to play games, were bullied by those older than themselves, exactly as these institutions have been described, mostly by their victims, for decades. It all went on, as things do, out of the inertia of what is in existence. Francis wore a tight grey flannel suit, with a tie and a collar; he was obsessed with his shoe-laces, which were always getting themselves untied, and his brown wide eyes were always on the alert, for fear he might be doing something he should not.

      Three days before Christmas Sally telephoned to ask if she could come with her child for the holiday, her husband being ‘impossible, Martha! He’s as stubborn as a horse. I’m not going to stay where I’m not wanted!’ His impossibility apparently, was that he would not talk to his wife about what preoccupied him. He was spending all his waking time with his superiors, being cross-examined about his possible links with international espionage, and his relationship with his friend and superior, now awaiting trial. The police were making visits too. He would not talk to his wife; but he came to London to talk to Mark. The brothers had spent all afternoon together; and then Martha joined them for dinner and the evening.

      Colin announced almost immediately that he was ‘not a communist but a marxist’.

      Martha kept sounding notes to which he could not help responding if – he were not trying to hide something? Not a man numbed by terror. How to account for this lack of resonance? Unless, of course, he was not a communist and never had been one. But she had not before met this type of person who, because he admires a certain communist country, or a communist achievement, or to annoy Aunt Authority, will call himself, herself, a communist or a marxist without ever going near the communist party. They are pretty common at times when the heat is off and to admire communism not dangerous – during the war, for instance, or during the later ‘fifties and the ‘sixties. But this kind of platonic admiration, at the height of the Cold War was quixotic or simply – crazy. Unless to be a Coldridge absolved one from the necessity for caution, which is what Martha was beginning to believe.

      For Colin did not seem to be frightened in the least. Of course, in Mark’s calm, storm-excluding study, it was hard to believe in danger. Nor did he seem to want to conceal anything. On the contrary, he talked all evening about his principal, now awaiting trial, whom he had visited frequently, obviously despising (or ignorant of?) the danger of doing this, and in spite of the entreaties of his wife who had begged and wept. The man was his friend, he had said; just as Mark was to say later: Colin is my brother.

      It was, obviously, a relief to get away from his wife – not that he said so, of course. But Sally-Sarah was present throughout the evening, in silences and looks exchanged by the two men; and afterwards Martha saw that it was on this evening that they had decided, without actually saying so, that she must be here for Christmas.

      When she came, she spent her time in James’s room, with her child, weeping or sleeping. The little boy came downstairs from time to time, his face still wan from hours of tears, to say: ‘Mummy’s asleep.’ When Martha went up with tea, coffee, she found Sally-Sarah curled up under an eiderdown, thumb in her mouth, like a child, but not asleep. She stared at the wall, or traced out the pattern on the wallpaper with a finger. ‘I wish I was dead,’ she said to Martha. ‘I do. I wish I was dead.’

      Lynda arrived on Christmas Eve. The photographs said she was beautiful. Martha knew, too, that she would have beautiful clothes, because the bills for her clothes were enormous: one of the points of self-respect, return towards normality, was that she must always be perfectly dressed. Mark willingly paid the bills.

      Lynda arrived in Margaret’s chauffeured car, and stepped into her home like a visitor. She smiled, cool, at her husband and was about to smile, cool, at her son, when she reminded herself, and kissed the child’s cheek, murmuring: ‘Darling!’ as he froze in pain and embarrassment. She was tall, very thin with a face strained by the effort of not being ‘upset’. She smiled steadily, while great grey eyes stared out of brownish hollows. But she was staring inward at the place where she kept her balance. She was enveloped in a great pale fur coat. Her hands, long and white and lovely, ended in nails bitten to the quick: there were rusty stains around the cuticle. Her hair, just done, was a soft gleaming gold: all her health seemed to be in her hair. At once she asked to be taken to her room – to wash, she said; but she stayed there all evening.

      The room had been a problem. Since this Christmas occasion was designed, primarily, for Francis, for normality; and since mother and father shared a room, or at least should appear to share one, Lynda was put into the married room, Mark’s own, on the first floor. But Mark had a bed put into the dressing-room, because as he told Martha, curt, giving necessary information, Lynda could not stand having him near her. It would be necessary, if she were not to upset, that the door between the bedroom and dressing-room should be locked. They had to have a new lock made.

      The Christmas Eve dinner was eaten by Mark, silent, but smiling a determination to present normality to his son; Sally-Sarah, miserable, and making no attempt to hide it; her son, near tears; Francis, his wide anxious eyes on his father’s face; and Martha. During the meal, Paul had climbed on to his mother’s lap and the two had sat enwrapping each other, her cheek on his head. Francis watched: he was looking at a mother and her little boy. After dinner he shook his father’s hand goodnight. Later still, Martha heard him crying. His room was next to hers. She went in to comfort him. He held his breath, held back tears, while she put her arms around him. He would not respond. As she shut the door she heard the great burst of breath and tears and Go away and leave me alone. Christmas dinner was the same, a kind of endurance test. Lynda sat at the foot of the table, serving the food cooked by Martha: her son watched her. Colin, exhorted by his wife that ‘It was the least he could do’ came for just that meal, and sat grimly through it, while Sally-Sarah kept her great dark eyes on him in tearful reproach, and spoke reproach to him through his son. He left the moment it was finished.

      ‘We’ve got that over, thank God,’ said Mark to Martha, as he helped her clear uneaten food into the refrigerators.

      There was another week of getting it over, spent by Martha for the most part with workmen, and in the basement with dealers. Meanwhile the family suffered in separate rooms of the house and Martha felt the ridiculousness of furniture, leaking roofs and plumbing. It felt almost as if an underground guerrilla war went on, the fabric of the house as battleground, while amiably incompetent men came and went, carpets vanished and appeared, the sounds of banging and hammering shook walls and floors. She invited Mark to inspect the future housekeeper’s flat; but he left it to her. Lynda should not know about the basement, the sale of the furniture, he said. Yet one afternoon, when Martha was in the basement with a dealer, Lynda had appeared in her pale furs, and was competent about values and prices: seeing her thus, Martha found it hard to believe she was ill. This would be a nice flat, Lynda had said; she wouldn’t mind living in it herself. She had retired up the stairs with the remark that Martha must not tell Mark that she, Lynda, had been doing this. ‘I don’t think he’d like it,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t, you know.’

      One afternoon, Lynda spent with her son. They sat in ‘Margaret’s room’, the drawing-room, on a big sofa. She asked him questions, gentle, detached, about his school. She was answered by a child who measured everything he said against the minutest signs, the tiniest reactions, of his mother’s face; as if a word, a phrase, from him, could harm, or ‘upset’ her. And indeed, at the end of this interview (for that was what it seemed) Lynda announced, suddenly, she felt ill and must lie down, and Francis sat alone, near a Christmas tree with coloured bulbs alight on it. Mark and Martha, across the passage in the dining-room, heard muffled crying.

      Mark burst out: ‘I can’t stand it, it’s a mistake – we’ve got to get her back to the hospital. Or is this better than nothing?’

      ‘Perhaps it is, I suppose so.’

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘No, of course I’m not sure!’ And now Martha wept, or nearly did, understanding exactly how Francis must feel: one did not weep, show strain, with people who were so palpably suffering