The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ may not last, but sex does,’ said Jack, when Martha reported what Joanna had said. And he rang up Joanna in the country to say the same to her. ‘I’ll be here, always,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’

      For Joanna ‘it’ was poverty. That was the edge she was afraid of.

      For Jack? He had spent the whole war, he said, dreaming about women. And so here he was, receiving girls, one, two, three a day, making love for hours every day. And he painted. For instance he had painted a picture while Garibaldi watched him. He was only serious about sex.

      But he’s not serious, thought Martha. He can’t spend the rest of his life … but why shouldn’t he? Why on earth not? Considering the way most people did spend their lives.

      The boy downstairs was mad. About time? Death. And Jack was mad. About women. Death. Joanna was mad – she proposed to spend her life with a man she didn’t much like because she was afraid of – poverty? And she, Martha – but she would be lunching with Phoebe tomorrow. In a few hours, now.

      ‘If I asked her to meet you, would you come?’

      ‘Would she?’

      ‘If she actually met you … if I could get her to do that … when women are jealous, I’ve discovered, they aren’t when they’ve actually met the girl they’ve been thinking all those thoughts about. But men don’t realize that, do they?’

       That’s only because you aren’t serious, Jack. We don’t take you seriously. Why not?

      ‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Martha?’

      ‘I was very, not now.’

      He looked at her again: centre, breasts, back down to her thighs, back up to her eyes – smiling. But the smile dimmed. ‘You’re not with me, you’re not …’ He nearly touched her breasts, but withdrew his hand and enclosed hers again with it. ‘Martha, I won’t mind if you say yes – but have you been with another man?’

      ‘No-really not!’

      ‘Because if that’s it, tell me, and we’ll try something else. I’ve noticed with my girls, when they’ve been with a man, even their husband, this one doesn’t work – something gets switched off. Then you just have to start again, you have to have a good ordinary fuck to make the contact again. But that’s not as good as when you can let it slowly build up like this …’ He was in a fever of anxiety, as he leaned forward, explaining to her, comrade in the fields of love: his expertise was all urgency; he looked as if something might be taken away from him, had been taken away. Did he know that she had thought: I won’t be coming back again?

      ‘This little one tonight, Jane, she was with a man this afternoon, and I was sitting with her like this, and she said to me, all wide-eyed and wanting to know: Jack, I don’t feel for you the way I did last Thursday, what’s wrong with me. I don’t want you to touch me.’

      ‘She’d been making love?’ ‘Yes. All afternoon.’

      She laughed; then so did he, to keep her company.

      ‘But not me, I haven’t.’

      ‘Well then, we’ll wait until it’s right.’

      ‘Who is she – Jane?’

      ‘She’s English – a sweet, gentle, wide-eyed little English girl. You know.’

      ‘Indeed yes. There was one in the restaurant I was in tonight. She was so pretty. And she wore that black dress, that uniform, you know it? The little crêpe dress. With an awful brooch. Just there, you know – the whole thing, so wrong, so ugly, so nastily smart …’

      ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ he said, delighted, laughing.

      ‘There was no relationship between that dress and that girl. And then another came in. They knew each other. And she had a black little dress with a little square of white neck. Like plump little Teddy bears. Everyone was playing nurseries. It was an upper-middleclass restaurant – I’m coming on, I can tell the difference. And I looked at those girls and they broke my heart, and I thought: well at least I can tell Jack, he’ll understand!’

      ‘To hell with it, Martha, you’re sad, I don’t like that.’

      She rested on his smooth naked shoulder. But it was not a shoulder for comfort, not a body for support: it was a body for love. She rested against him, for his sake. On the arm that did not hold her, but lay on his knee, she saw the fine gold hairs stand up, each in a pucker of flesh. Then his body, an instrument more sensitive that any she had known, shivered. Then she knew why: it had started to rain, to rain heavily, and the roof was sounding with it. The house was an empty shell reverberating to the rain: his thin lithe body was alert and anxious, like an animal’s, and he put back his head and sniffed, like an animal when there is rain or smoke on the wind. They rolled over, together, and lay side by side, both shivering in the warm room because of the booming rain, looking at each other. Now as he looked, and she looked, began the ceremony for whose sake he had put all the passion of his life into women: for here was where he fought with time, wrestled with it, held it, understood it: here, the gates were held.

      The two bodies lay face to face, held loosely together by arms and legs; one long and white, all narrow bone and muscle, one solidly fleshed; these two separate organisms were connected by a steady interchanging gaze, eye to eye. Now he waited for her fingers to touch and annul the long scar on his neck. Diving off a ship that slanted into the water, he had slid past, under the heave of a wave, something jagged which had ripped away from his shoulder, a flap of flesh. This, while treading water and holding on to a floating baulk of timber, he had found drifting in the water, with a hand numbed by the loss of blood, and thought it was weed or debris, to be pushed away. ‘Think of it, Martha – there I was, holding on with one hand. I told that hand hold on, hold on there man, that’s what I said to it, and then I swear I forgot that hand, I didn’t think of it again, it just went on holding on without my thinking of it again. And the other hand kept coming on a bit of weed or something. It irritated me, and then I looked and there was a sort of flap lying in the water. Like a bit of filleted fish. There was my shoulder, the shoulder bones I was looking at white bone with some gristle on it and I thought: that’s like a bone a dog’s been at and left, and then I realized, it’s my shoulder bone. And the bit of weed or something was the flesh of my shoulder. It was nothing – skin with some red blood vessels inside – hell, but I’d never known before how thin I was, it scared me. That’s why I eat so much. I eat and eat, because of that flap of skin. I made the swimming hand bend up and hold the flap down on my neck, and pressed down to stop the blood all going into the sea. The funny thing was. I had no feeling in that hand, but I made it do what I wanted. And the hand which was holding on to the bit of timber – that held on too, but it was numb – dead. That’s where I learned about the body, you can make it do what you want, and it’s where I first learned about sex. That’s funny, isn’t it. You can tell your body what to do and it does it. There I was for a whole day, watching the sun go right across the sky and down, and the water was red all round me. Sometimes I passed out and then I came to myself and there was the sun, filling the sky, everything hot and glittering, and I thought I was dead already, because there was no sensation in my body anywhere. Then I thought of sharks, coming for us, because all the sea was full of red. But there was so much meat in the sea that day I suppose they didn’t need me. And when I was picked up they had to force my arm back away from holding my shoulder flesh in place: it was bent and set hard in a crook.’

      This scar was a long white weal that slanted СКАЧАТЬ