The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

the humorous, fanciful, creative play which resulted, extraordinarily, in the models of this or that machine which littered Mark’s study. Nor was he less patiently Lynda’s potential or past husband, in cold storage though that person was. Yet neurosis, mental trouble of any kind, was by definition, at that time, in the communist party, reactionary and bourgeois.

      And he tried, patiently, clumsily, indeed, pathetically, to be Francis’s father, even while he said to Martha, in language she knew she had used, that the family was doomed.

      He tried, too, to be a father to Paul: but Paul would have none of him. The child came home for holidays, and spent his time with Lynda, his friend. Two years of being an orphan had changed Paul into a lively, aggressive, self-contained little boy who was clever at school, but, as the school reports said, ‘made inadequate social relationships’. He certainly had no relationship with Mark; it really was as if Mark did not exist for him. Mark would offer visits to the zoo, walks in the park, a story: Paul did not seem to hear him. Mark said that sometimes he felt as if he were invisible. For it was not rudeness. Paul looked through him, or said to Martha: ‘Can I go down to Lynda now?’

      When Paul was at home, the house was open, the door to the basement always ajar. Never when he was not: then the basement became a separate, almost secret establishment.

      But Francis was a different matter. His mother was ‘at home’ – and not in a mental hospital, which was helpful at his school, as Lynda had said. But he did not bring his friends home.

      The very first holidays after Paul’s mother’s death, Francis came home after a bad time at school. He had changed. Previously silent, serious, watchful, he had suddenly become – something Martha recognized, with pain. He was the clown. In a reaction to what had been brutal teasing, if not worse, his father being a traitor and his uncle under a cloud; accused of being a communist, a red, a commy – he clowned being one. He had joked; adopted, jokingly, communist phrases which he had got out of the papers. Well, there was the mechanism, for Martha to see: yet in herself she could not remember what had created ‘Matty’. ‘Matty’ had joked, claimed exemption by clumsiness, made fun of herself; Francis joked, guyed, bought himself off by a boisterous clownishness. In this condition, he visited his mother and the watchful friend of his mother, in the basement. He was noisy; he racketed about the basement: he badly tired the two sick women.

      Then came the time, and very soon, when he returned home to find his father’s friends all communists. They were not figures of fun, but people. His clowning communism stuttered and failed. There were wild scenes of rage, temper, hysteria. It was after that period of holidays that the school reported his work was suddenly very bad, he was at the bottom of the class. Not being a ‘progressive’ school, they said he was lazy and bad-mannered. His father ought to give him a talking to. Mark went to the school to talk to Francis, but the child was locked in a silent hostility, very polite, saying yes Sir, no Sir.

      When the time came around again for holidays, Francis said he wanted to spend them with Nanny Butts. Since then, that is where he always went. Mark visited him there, returning to say painfully to Martha: ‘He’s like me – I could never bear coming home either.’

      At the Butts’s, Francis was able to be the clown, without conflict: his school personality and his holiday personality were one. Nanny Butts was not upset. She wrote: ‘Francis is a very cheerful little boy, always having his fun. It’s a blessing, when you think of his poor mother.’

      But once, when Martha was down in the village, for she was to take Francis back to school, there was a glimpse of another Francis.

      It was late evening, summer, and time for Francis to go to bed. Martha went out, through the cottage garden, into the long field beyond, which sloped down to a stream. Francis was walking up towards her, with a little girl. He was still a short stocky boy, his black head on the level of the frothy white of the half-ripe oats. He held the little girl’s hand, and was bending towards her with the gentle protectiveness an adult uses towards a child. A path led through a birch wood to a half-seen cottage. Francis led the child to the path, and there she ran away home, looking back to wave at Francis. He stood to wave at her smiling. The smile faded. He turned, and walked slowly along the edge of the field, serious, thoughtful, running one hand along the feathery tops of the oats. Then he saw Martha was waiting there. A moment when you could see the mechanism work: a startled defensiveness, then the smile fitting down on to the face: Francis raced up to Martha, hilarious, grinning, and as he reached her, shouted: ‘Supper, jolly good!’ and cartwheeled up through the garden into the cottage.

      In between Paul’s visits, when the door to the basement was shut, the two upstairs had learned not to go down, unless asked. It was Lynda who telephoned from one part of the house to the other, to ask if they would like a cup of coffee. And she never asked Mark by himself. This meant, when you thought about it, that she must be watching through the windows to see how people came in and out. Also, when you thought about it, that the invitation was the result of some conflict with Dorothy. For on these occasions Dorothy would sit silent, rather apart, watching. And Lynda would slide her small defiant, guilty looks, like a girl who has won a victory over her parents. Mark was polite to Dorothy. It was not that he wished her ill, or even wished her away: if Lynda wanted her there, then that is what Lynda should have. But there was no connection between himself and Dorothy: he was courteous to his wife’s friend. The emotional reality of Dorothy and Lynda, whatever that was, was not real for him. He was Lynda’s husband, tenderly protective, attentive to Lynda. The four of them would sit for an hour or so in the extraordinary room, which now had an incongruity built into its very substance. The beautiful furniture, every piece of which was a museum-keeper’s dream, the rugs, Lynda’s small belongings, a favourite lamp from her own home, books – this was one world, Lynda’s. But every inch of the walls, every surface, was crammed with Dorothy – a magpie schoolgirl who had crushes on Royalty and film stars. The curtains were always drawn: they lived in artificial light. There was a low stuffy smell of sickness and drugs. The four sat drinking coffee, and Mark talked to Lynda, while Martha tried to talk to Dorothy; who, however, never took her sad anxious gaze off Lynda.

      A tension that was all anxiety slowly built and built. Lynda smoked furiously, scattering ash. Then Mark would jump up, and say: ‘How about drawing the curtains for a bit?’

      ‘Yes, yes,’ Lynda would most eagerly assent, but with a hasty glance towards Dorothy – to reassure her that they would soon be alone again.

      Mark drew back the curtains, and let in the cold day. There sat two ill women, exposed, smiling their fortitude.

      Lynda’s fur coat, her handbag, a scarf, dark glasses, lay at random on chairs.

      ‘Lynda, wouldn’t it be better if …’

      ‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘Yes, Mark …’ And she hung up the coat in the hall, and rushed off the other items into the bedroom, which, glimpsed through the open door, was a total disorder. She shut the door on the mess and sat smiling pathetically. By now they longed for him to leave.

      Once, after they left, they heard how the two women started a violent quarrel before they had even got up the stairs. Then, weeping. Whose? They could not make out.

      But Mark did not give up. For a while he asked them up to dinner once or twice a week. On these nights his new friends did not come, and Martha and he took trouble over the food.

      There sat Lynda and Dorothy, with their handbags near them, on their best behaviour.

      Mark remained a husband. All of his best qualities, qualities he had not known until then he possessed, had gone into Lynda, when he discovered he had married a sick woman: for months, then years, while Lynda fell to pieces, he had used a loving strength which (and this was the point) he simply could not believe she did not need now. But she had not been able to stand it then and she could not stand it now.

      At the end of one of these dinner parties she said, suddenly, in a low fierce voice, but smiling still, so afraid was she of her own violence: ‘Leave me alone, Mark. You’re killing me.’

      And she ran off down to the basement in tears, Dorothy lumbering after her.

      Throughout