The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

up.

      Lynda slapped him. ‘Stop it. You don’t die by holding your breath.’ ‘I shall if I want.’

      ‘Anyway, it’s silly. You’re unhappy now. But later you might be happy, who knows?’ ‘Am I unhappy?’ ‘Yes, you’re very unhappy.’ ‘I don’t want to be.’ ‘I dare say. But you are.’

      She smiled, and got up. At the tea-tray she took a cup of tea, and sugared it. She went towards the door, with the cup. ‘Why are you going? Can I come too?’ ‘No. I can’t be with people for long. I’m ill, you see.’ ‘What sort of ill?’

      And now a bad, twisted moment, a jar. ‘I have to be careful. I have to be on guard,’ she said, ‘so that’s why I’m ill.’ He had rushed to her, stood near, looking up. She bent down and widened her eyes at him, smiling secretly, straight into his face: ‘I know things, you see. They don’t like it.’

      He looked afraid, shrank. The small boy stood, pathetic, staring up at the tall woman. And she felt that she had made a mistake. Her smile faded. She looked sick and anxious.

      But he needed her too badly to be afraid of her. Before she got out of the door, he was after her. Careful not to touch, he stood as close as he could get.

      ‘Lynda. Lynda. Are you my mother now?’

      ‘No. You have no mother.’

      ‘Are you Francis’s mother?’

      ‘Yes. No. I suppose so. Not really. I’m not much good at being that kind of person. Some people aren’t.’

      He drooped away, his finger in his mouth.

      ‘But, Paul, I’m your friend. Do you want that?’

      He nodded, merely, not looking at her. Then he gave her a scared glance, and saw her wonderful smile. He smiled, slowly.

      She went to her room. Later that day, Paul went to her, was admitted. He was there for about half an hour. They did not know what was said, or felt; but Paul was cheerful through his supper, and he asked Mark to tell him a story. When that was over, he said he would like to go back to the school next morning.

      Mark took him back in the car. When he arrived back at the house he found Lynda establishing herself in the basement.

      He telephoned the hospital.

      Mark said to her: ‘They say you’ve made a remarkable recovery.’

      He was watching Lynda and Martha arrange the bed for Lynda. What he was really saying was: You still might get quite better and be my wife again.

      But Lynda smiled at him and said: ‘What awful fools they are. What fools! Well, thank God, they are.’ She laughed, was scornful. She continued to smile, scornfully, during the evening, but muttered once or twice: ‘But I must be careful though.’

      She did not feel able to stay alone in the basement. Martha moved down, and slept in the living-room for a couple of nights. But then Dorothy, Lynda’s friend, came to live with her. She was a Mrs Quentin, but it seemed that her husband was living with another woman somewhere in Ireland. She was a large, dark, slow-moving woman, anxiously watchful of the impression she might be giving, with a tendency to make jocular remarks. She had a large quantity of jackdaw possessions, which she set out all over the flat before even unpacking her clothes. She was not the person either Mark or Martha could associate easily with Lynda.

      But Lynda was pleased to have her there, did not mind the embroidered velvet hearts, the magazine covers tacked to the walls, the dolls; did not mind her friend’s possessiveness. It seemed that she liked Dorothy telling her to do this, and to do that; liked it when Dorothy said to Mark: ‘I think it’s time Lynda went to bed now.’

      Mark did not like it. There was a moment when Lynda, being ordered to take her pills by Dorothy, looked across at Mark’s hostile face and openly laughed. It was in a kind of triumph.

      Lynda wanted Dorothy here as a protection against Mark, against having to be Mark’s wife.

      When Mark, or Martha, descending to the basement to offer help, or their company, the two women became a defensive unit, which excluded everybody. They exchanged private jokes, and made references to the hospital. There was something about them of two schoolgirls engaged in a world-hating friendship.

      In short, having Lynda back in the basement, with a friend who had money and would pay some rent, would make a difference to the finances of the household; but not to much else.

       Chapter Two

      The bad time had been going on for – but one of the qualities of a bad time is that it seems endless. Certainly everything that happened, the events, had long ago ceased to stand out as unpleasant incidents, or harbingers. The texture of life was all heaviness, nastiness, fear. When Martha tried to put her mind back into places, times, when things had been normal (but what did she mean by that?) she could not. Her memory was imprisoned by now. And when she tried to look forward, because after all, this was going to change, since everything changed, she could see nothing ahead but a worsening. The poisoned river would plunge down, yes, explode over a fall of rocks – but not into any quiet place. There was probably going to be war again. Yet that she could think like this at all meant she had learned nothing at all from the war so recently finished. A war was going on, at that moment, in yet another place no one had heard of before there was a war. Korea. A nasty war. If she were a Korean she would not now be saying: there is going to be a war. And if she were in America – well, from there England would seem all sun and sanity. In America she would have certainly lost her job, would probably be in prison. She would be wanting to emigrate, that is, if she could get a passport, which was doubtful. To a liberal country like England. Which so many Americans were finding such a refuge.

      But they were not in houses like this one.

      There was nothing to stop Martha leaving. She had only to pack her cases and go. Well, why didn’t she? She couldn’t – any more than she could not have come here in the first place. Besides, where was she to go to? For instance, several times she had been to Mark’s old nurse’s home in the country, to visit Francis, or to take him there, or to bring him back home. That house, in its old village, with its quiet people, was England, as one had always imagined it. Except that ten miles away was a war place where new atomic weapons were being developed, in secret; and forty miles away in another direction was a factory for the manufacture of gases and poisons for use in war. Mary Butts and Harold Butts, gardened, grew vegetables, kept chickens, made presents of fresh eggs and flowers to Francis to take back to the big city London: which they disliked, it was too noisy, they said. They were a couple in their fifties. Harold Butts had always been a gardener; for many years with Margaret. Mary Butts had always been a children’s nurse. They had served the Coldridges while they worked, and served them still in their retirement. They were infinitely kind and good people. To Martha, a friend of young Mark’s, they were kind, and they asked her to stay. In a little cottage bedroom that smelled all through the summer of the flowers Harold Butts grew, Martha lay and thought, yes, this is England, this was what they meant when they said England. This is what my father meant: he grew up in a place like this. The Butts never mentioned the death factories so close to them. For one thing, England is not a small country for those who have never left it, and ten miles, forty miles, are large distances. For another, these were people who did not understand … what? Harold Butts had fought in the First World War. In France. But horror, anarchy, happened in other countries, not in England.

      If Martha had lived in that cottage, she could not have forgotten those factories. Lying awake in a flower-scented bedroom, the Butts gently asleep past one wall, and Francis asleep past another, she was made to think of the difference between herself and them. Being what she was, it would make no difference if she stayed with the Butts, found work in the pretty village. She might as well go back to the house in London. The Butts were a refuge, reminders that sanity could exist. Nastiness simply bounced off