The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

man called Mr Bartlett. They had been distressed by the visit. Mary Butts had written a letter to Mark: ‘He seemed a nice enough gentleman, but Mr Butts thought it was not his place to ask questions about you behind your back. Mr Butts said to him, you should be asking Mr Coldridge such things. He said it to him straight. Our love to little Francis. Yours respectfully, Mary Butts.’

      Before this letter reached Mark, he had already been visited by Mr Bartlett who used the ordinary forms of social life to arrive for tea in the drawing-room. He said he had been an old friend of James, the dead brother. Mark, offering tea, and cake, talked to a man who had known James at Cambridge. He had also visited Margaret. He was an old chum of Margaret’s – well, who was not? Ottery Bartlett talked of recent meetings with Margaret, and Mark, who was not by nature a suspicious man, waited for him to come to the point. He was interested in literature perhaps? Needed help with a book he had written? Mr Bartlett talked about Colin. They discussed pleasantly, for some time, the gap between the way Colin was being seen, as a spy, and the way Colin saw what he had done (if he had), which was a proper exchange of scientific information between colleagues.

      Tea-time passed into a drinks-time, which soon was dinner-time. Martha cooked and served an informal kind of dinner, and was present. She was preoccupied with other things, and did not think about Mr Bartlett except that it was nice for Mark that at least one of the old friends of the family was prepared to visit him. For Mark was obviously touched by it: his warmth with Mr Bartlett told Martha how much he had been feeling his isolation. During dinner they talked about Sally-Sarah and Mark’s relation to Paul. Mr Bartlett was sympathetic about Lynda – he had known her, long ago; and was sympathetically interested in Martha’s presence in the house. After dinner Martha left the two men with their brandy. Late that night Mark burst into her room, when she was nearly in bed, demanding that she must come down to the study at once. It had just dawned on him: it had just made sense. He, Mark, was the most incredible fool: a hundred times during the afternoon and evening he could have seen what Ottery Bartlett was, if he had been awake. He now needed Martha to retrace the conversation with him. He had gone past ordinary anger into a state of sick quivering rage where he kept bursting into inarticulate exclamation and protests. They could not follow any train of thought. They could not discuss anything that night: Mark drank himself silly. What was upsetting Mark worst was that the man had used James, the family, to come here.

      Next day, came the letter from Nanny Butts, and fresh anger. When this cooled, they were able to discuss what had happened.

      The man was probably from the Foreign Office, but could be from any one of the six or so secret services that operate in Britain. He had mentioned Hilary Marsh once, but that proved nothing. Anyway, it was not important. They (who?) thought that Mark knew where his brother was. If not, that he was at least in contact with him. And that he was probably a secret member of the Communist Party. If so, he might drop useful information about the Communist Party. (And if he had been he certainly would have done, so incredibly obtuse Mark had been for the whole of an afternoon and an evening.) Finally, Mark, if handled right, might be prepared to become an agent for Britain, whether a member of the Communist Party or not. This last point was not reached by Mark and Martha for some days. But, going over and over the talk of that day, they could put their fingers on a dozen moments where it had been reached – very delicately of course, only hinted at. ‘A spy!’ said Mark. ‘Me! A spy!’

      And so, Martha could see, Colin had probably reacted, when with his version of Ottery Bartlett: What! me! Colin Coldridge! A spy!

      And for some hours, Mark went over and over, back and around that incredible fact: Hilary Marsh, Ottery Bartlett, were gentlemen. Yet they were prepared to do such work. He could not believe it. He certainly did not understand it.

      It was this incident that sent him off into another week of silent misery in his study, with bottle after bottle of cognac. And it was that incident, the visit of Ottery Bartlett, that had given birth to a new personality. Before that, he had been Mark Coldridge as Martha had first known him – under stress of course; miserable, out of his depth, but himself.

      There is a certain kind of Englishman who, on learning that his country (like every other) employs spies; or (like every other) taps telephones, opens letters and keeps dossiers on its citizens; or (like every other) employs policemen who take bribes, beat up suspects, plant information etc. – has a nervous breakdown. In extreme cases, such a man goes into a monastery, or suffers a sudden conversion to whatever is available.

      An Englishman of this type has of course been the subject of amused and indeed affectionate speculation among other countries for generations. Though sometimes not so amused, or affectionate.

      During the course of that week, Martha went into the study, where Mark, red-eyed and half-drunk, was walking up and down and around and around, to tell him the following story which had once come her way.

      Sometime in the course of the Second World War, a certain member of a certain British Secret Service had been instructed to go to (let us say) Istanbul to find out the probable intentions of the Russians in regard to something or other. The place where he would most likely get this information, he was told, was the bed of the wife of a British official. She had proved in the past a mine of information, being indiscreet as well as beautiful. For she could never resist a Russian. The hero of this anecdote departed to the city in question in pursuance of duty, but did not return when expected. He was summoned. Back in London, interviewed by his principals, he confessed that he had learned nothing. Yes, the lady was beginning to attract him, he said. But he found her morals distasteful, and besides he had known her husband for years.

      Mark did not find this amusing. ‘He was quite right,’ he said. And went back to his brandy, his anger – and his illness. He was having migraines, for the first time in his life.

      Martha returned to her consideration of Mark’s character. When Hilary Marsh had come to the election party, he had done so using old friendship – to be a spy. Mark had been angry, but more with his mother than with Hilary Marsh. When Hilary Marsh had used his mother and old friendship to try and install the widow Ashe in Mark’s basement, to spy on Mark – Mark had been angry. But it had taken the actual visit of Ottery Bartlett, using old friendship, to Mark’s house – to make him more than angry.

      Supposing Ottery Bartlett had not come, had not been to see the Butts, would Mark have remained Mark, talking sardonically about ‘the comrades’, whom he couldn’t trust farther than he could kick them? Very likely.

      After a week or so of being ill, and semi-drunk, he rang up a man who had been a friend of his brother Colin, a communist. He went to see him, for a long week-end. The week-end after, Freddie Postings came to stay, and several of his friends spent Sunday afternoon and evening in Mark’s study. Martha was not present. She was being treated with cool friendliness. Mark had suffered a conversion, sudden and dramatic, and Martha was able to follow it through its rapid stages, since it was identical as far as she could see, with the one she had undergone ten years before. As if scales had fallen from his eyes, Mark was looking at defects in his own country that previously he had not noticed, minimized, or thought could not exist. His previous self he was regarding as hypocritical, or wilfully blind and certainly as callous to the sufferings of others. He had a new viewpoint, a new vocabulary, new friends. He was undergoing in his own person, through his own experience, that process which can affect nations or parties, or people, when everything that is good in oneself is identified with a cause, and everything bad identified with the enemy. But the interesting thing about Mark’s conversion was that this was not the time to see the cause as perfect; nor, judging from the little Martha saw of the half-dozen or so men and women now visiting the house, were they the kind of communist likely so to see it. Yet Mark was, when they met over breakfast, over conversations about Lynda or the children, using language identical with hers of ten years ago. He had walked into a personality; or, if you like, a state of mind, and he was inhabiting it.

      And, just as if he had never protested to Martha that he could not stand political over-simplifications, or the taking of sides, as if he had never written the novel in which what was represented by Hilary Marsh and Ottery Bartlett was taken for granted – he had become ‘The Defender’. Martha saw that this aspect of herself, already weakened when she came to this house, then brought