The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

‘She wanted to be saved?’

      ‘Yes. Yes! Exactly that!’ He was excited because she saw it. ‘Sometimes I thought, my God, am I murdering this woman! Did you hear that, when she said, Mark, you’re killing me.’

      ‘Yes, but that …’

      ‘No. That meant something. It made sense. She used to say, “Save me, Mark, save me!” Well, I had a jolly good try!’ ‘Yes.’

      ‘And now what? What is one supposed to do? Just let her – drown?’

      He sat, white, stiff, his eyes full of tears.

      With this man one could not easily use the ancient balm of arms, warmth, easy comfort. She pulled a chair near his, took his hand, held it. The tears ran down his face.

      ‘Mark, listen. She’s not going to be your wife. She’s not ever going to be. Sometime, you’ve got to see it.’

      ‘You mean, I should look for another wife? Oh, I’ve had plenty of that sort of advice recently, I assure you. They’ve even said, I should marry you!’

      ‘Well, God knows I’m not one to say that one should marry for the sake of being married. But, Mark, you’ve got to give up Lynda. I mean, you’ve got to stop waiting for her to be different.’

      ‘If I can’t have her, I don’t want anybody.’

      ‘All right. Then you’ll have nobody.’

      ‘But why? The other afternoon, when that dreadful woman was not there, it was as if – it was like when we were first married.’ After a long time, when she did not say anything, his taut hand went loose in hers, and he stood up. The look he gave her was hurt: she had not helped him, not said what he wanted to hear.

      Next day, he asked Lynda if she would go away with him for a week-end, to stay at Mary and Harold Butts’s. She had always loved Nanny Butts.

      ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Lynda. ‘I’d love to. What a lovely idea.’

      They were to leave by car on Friday afternoon. In the morning there were voices shouting in anger from the basement, screams that wailed off into tears. Objects crashed against walls, doors slammed.

      Mark packed a suitcase, and went downstairs at the time he had appointed, to fetch his wife. Lynda was sitting on her bed in a dressing-gown, with a desperate trembling smile that was directed generally, not at Mark, but at life. Dorothy sat knitting in the other room. She was making a tea-cosy, of purple and red wool. Lynda’s clothes were on the floor, in a heap beside the suitcase.

      Then Lynda stood up, still smiling, walked out of the bedroom, and went up the stairs, with her husband following her. In Mark’s bedroom, on the table by his bed, stood a photograph of a radiant young beauty who smiled back at the soiled, ill, sour-smelling Lynda.

      The sick woman ground her teeth with rage, picked up the photograph, looked at it with hatred, then flung it down to break into a mess of glass and wood. Then she went into the study. On a long table against one wall stood Jimmy’s models of possible electronic machines. One of them was a development of existing machines that could chart the human brain in terms of electric impulses. These machines she systematically smashed. Then she went downstairs again, locking the door into the basement behind her.

      Late that night Martha, on her way up to bed, saw the study door open. Mark was sitting by his desk, and the face he lifted was the white black-eyed mask.

      ‘Martha, will you get rid of that – picture? I can’t.’

      She went to the bedroom, swept up the glass and the bits of frame, and took up the photograph of young Lynda – undamaged. It was hard to tear up that beautiful face, but she tore it up, and disposed of it all in the rubbish bin.

      As she passed the study for the second time, Mark called her in.

      ‘I’m going to see if I can find my brother,’ he said.

      This could have been foreseen, if she had been awake? Possibly. It was a shock. She sat down, opposite his challenger’s face, to challenge him.

      ‘You can’t.’

      ‘I’m going to.’

      ‘What did you have in mind? That you’d turn up in Moscow and say, “Where is my brother?”?’ ‘Yes.’

      ‘But he might be anywhere – not necessarily Russia. And you wouldn’t get a visa.’

      ‘I know people during the war who got in and out of Nazi Germany. My brother James did once. He was on some sort of secret mission.’

      ‘Your brother James was working for a secret service?’

      ‘Well, that was the war. A lot of people did.’

      ‘If you get killed then Francis won’t have a father. And what will happen to Paul?’

      The white face and the black bitter eyes seemed all there was of him. Then a switch turned somewhere, and he went red, and he said: ‘Capitalist propaganda. You’re an ex-communist. That’s how you are bound to talk.’

      ‘Never mind about communism and capitalism for the moment. But if you go bouncing about behind the Iron Curtain being a nuisance, you’ll find yourself in jug. Or worse.’

      A sneer. The communist sneer. Indistinguishable of course from a sneer of any kind. But melodramatic, improbable. Particularly on this face, in this quiet study, in this house. And in Radlett Street, Bloomsbury, London.

      ‘Or don’t you read the newspapers?’

      ‘Well, really,’ he said, with a laughing sneer.

      ‘All right then, ask the comrades – you just ask them if you can go to an Embassy and say: I want to get a visa to let me travel to Russia so I can find my brother who has defected East because …’

      ‘Because he’s a spy? He’s not a spy. I tell you it’s not possible.’ ‘You’ve just said your brother James was.’ ‘That’s not … if you can’t tell the difference, then …’ ‘Probably what happened was Colin got a visit from somebody like Hilary Marsh and he got into a panic.’ ‘Colin is not the kind to scare easily.’

      ‘Then he was a fool not to be scared. You were scared. So was I. I’m scared now.’

      ‘I’ve got a lot of time for you, Martha, you know that. But when you start talking like the gutter Press, then I’m sorry.’

      ‘Have you actually asked any of the comrades about it? Why don’t you?’

      ‘I shall. Goodnight.’ And he dismissed the enemy.

      She remained the enemy for some weeks. Night after night he asked his friends in, or went to their homes. She was not introduced to them: they met on the stairs with nods and smiles. Then, as a result of Mark’s inquiries, Patty Samuels came to the house, on a proper, formal interview, to see Mark. They were together for an hour or more. Martha inquired what the advice had been.

      Mark said, briefly, that ‘on the whole it was considered inadvisable’. Then, with an apologetic laugh and glance: ‘What a war-horse!’

      But he had liked her, or had been intrigued by her. She came again, became one of the people who dropped in, by herself, or with others, in the evenings. She was a lively vital woman in her early thirties, and a veteran of the Party, absolutely unlike anyone Mark had ever met, but like dozens Martha had met – and like what she herself had been for a brief period.

      Patty was the opposite, in every way, of Lynda.

      And this time, Martha was able to foresee what would happen.

      While Mark developed an affair with Patty, Lynda, in the basement, had a relapse, a falling back. For a time it was touch and go whether she would have to go back to hospital.

      Dorothy came up to Martha, a few days after the incident of the photograph, to ask if Martha