The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

he said: ‘Lynda, this is Mark!’

      At this pressure on her she smiled, became evasive, went inside herself and stood up. Her hand went out to the pills. She was smiling like a disobedient schoolgirl. She pretended to put the pills in her mouth, then let her hand drop and stood shaking with laughter. ‘You’ve persuaded me,’ she said to Martha. ‘You’re right.’ She now carefully, neatly, soberly, filled a glass with water, swallowed two pills, and put the rest into a cup, with the cigarettes. This she held before her, and went out of the kitchen, carrying the cup with the pills and the cigarettes as if it were a candle. In her old-fashioned frilly nightdress, she looked like a good child going up to bed.

      Mark went after her, giving Martha a hasty goodnight.

      Lynda stayed over an extra day, but Francis did not see her again. He was taken off by his grandmother in the big chauffeured car for the other week of his holidays. He took with him a chemistry set, a proper grown-up one, from Martha; a foot ball from his father; and a great heap of toys from his mother, ordered by her on the telephone from Harrods.

      Before Lynda went back to hospital, she made another visit to the basement. Martha found her there, telling a workman who was about to put in a cupboard, that he was using the wrong kind of wood. If he had any pride in his work, she was saying, he would refuse to use the wood supplied by the foreman, which anyone could see was going to warp inside a year, because it hadn’t been properly seasoned. The workman was saying yes, he knew that, but he was only being paid to do the job, it wasn’t for him to reason why.

      Martha took over the altercation from Lynda; tackled the foreman, who said it was not his fault if the firm chose to do a bad job, then the owners of the firm, who said it was the fault of the workman. As a result of this, and many similar battles, the basement, by the end of January, was at least within sight of being occupiable. Who was going to live in this basement? What the situation needed was some kind of sensible ‘body’ – a young one rather than an old one; but Martha could not see Mark choosing such a one. Phoebe, he said, was sure to come up with somebody: Martha could give Phoebe a ring perhaps?

      Martha did no such thing. For, now the flat was ready – well, nearly; and Martha’s departure only four weeks off, she was concerned to see that the woman who did come would be good for Francis. Because if one thing was essential, it was to see that Francis left that school of his. He would not be able to do this if there were not the right kind of woman in the house. The housekeeper should be a good deal more than a housekeeper. The flat must be properly tenanted. Martha was imagining how Francis, returning from his sensible, human day-school, would come down to this flat to the woman who would live here, for talk, supper, homework – warmth. It was simply a question of getting Mark to see …

      She faced Mark with it. Or tried to. He countered with being busy, with needing his attention for his work, with irritation, with embarrassment – then finally, in a great burst of explanation, the first time he had been able to say this to anyone, apparently, of how all his childhood he had felt different from other people and he did not want to inflict discomfort on his son.

      As has been said, he was the only one of the four not educated normally for his class. The other three boys had gone to public school and university. Mark had been odd man out, a silent, watchful, uncomfortable child – this by nature; and Margaret, currently under the influence of friends who were educational reformers, had sent him to Neill’s school. Not for long: it was too extreme, she had decided. Mark remembered enjoying the school, but finding it painful, adjusting that world to his own when he went for holidays. Margaret had then sent him to a ‘progressive’ school, based on Neill’s lines, but less ‘extreme’. There Mark had found his two worlds more easily aligned; but he was still cut off from his brothers; who thought him and his school (any kind of school but their own being beyond the pale) odd, a challenge to them. He tended to go for his holidays, when he could, to school friends. He was seldom at home. Then his father died, the country house was sold, and Margaret married her financier. Mark spent holidays in America. It was there that he had got to know his brother Colin and the two had become friends. Mark had not gone to university. His education, his experience, had put him at an angle to his class. Now he said he did not want this for Francis, who already had too much to bear.

      And he turned his back, picked up a book, and stood looking at the book, his taut back saying simultaneously that he wished Martha to go on, but proposed to resist what she said. She braced herself, and went on, there being no way of bringing up fraught subjects with Mark without barging in, breaking in, battering. Never had she known a man so armoured, so defensive. As pain-laden subjects came near him, his dark face, whose predominant expression was, in fact, one of dogged inquiry, a need to know, to find out – closed up, his mouth tightened, and he turned away.

      To his back Martha cried out: ‘But, Mark, what sort of logic or common sense is it! Let alone any decent ordinary humanity! You say you are pleased you weren’t sent to a public school, you say being sent to America was the best thing that happened to you – you carry on about the upper classes like a socialist in Hyde Park – and now you are sending Francis through that mill. What for?’

      His back still turned he said: ‘They have some kind of a strength. I haven’t got it. I want him to have it.’

      What strength? Who has it?’

      ‘Oh … some of them. Oh I dare say it’s a kind of narrowness. They’re blinkered. If you like. But it is a strength. One’s got to have something.’

      His dead brother (and Mark was the last person, as his writing proved, to see a death in war as arbitrary, unconnected with what a person was), had been, when war broke out, on the point of throwing up his job, or jobs, as chairman of companies, to go farming in Kenya. Hardly an evidence of unconformity to his own type, but his reason for wanting to do this was that England was no longer a place to bring children up in, people cared for nothing but making money. The second brother was Colin. Then Mark. Then Arthur, left-winger and regarded by the Coldridge family as not much better than a street agitator.

      ‘Well, all right then,’ said Mark. His back was still firmly turned to her. ‘Take Arthur. He talks red revolution all right. But put him beside that communist party scum and you see the difference.’

      ‘What scum?’

      ‘I wouldn’t trust that lot farther than I could kick them. But Arthur – well, if he says a thing, you know that’s it. You understand? You can trust him.’

      And now Martha could not reply: he was saying that Arthur was a gentleman.

      Unable to reply, she sat down, and waited. As usual, it was long after midnight, and the street outside was quiet. This room was quiet. It had two focuses, or areas of interest. One was the desk with piles of notes, notebooks, a typewriter. The other was a table on which stood all kinds of models, and prototypes, stacks of diagrams and blueprints, to do with the machines made in the factory. Mark’s business, started by him after the war, manufactured electronic devices used in hospitals, in medical work generally. He worked with a man called Jimmy Wood. The money made on one or two regular lines was used by them in experimenting and inventing and paying for how the two men seemed to spend most of their time: sitting in the office in the factory talking their way to new ideas.

      At last Mark did turn around. It was with an effort. And when he sat down, facing her, he had to make himself.

      ‘I suppose I’m inconsistent?’

      ‘I just keep thinking of Francis crying half the night.’

      ‘He’s never going to have the ordinary thing, a mother, that kind of thing? So he could have the other thing to hold on to?’

      ‘You couldn’t compromise?’ she suggested, ‘humorous’, through necessity. ‘I mean, do you have to choose a school that’s like a caricature? Aren’t there any that aren’t like that?’

      ‘My brothers went there.’

      ‘Then that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

      ‘Margaret’s on your side. She wanted me to send him to my old place.’ ‘Why