The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

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      ‘I don’t see the point of that,’ said Joanna.

      ‘Oh yes, you do,’ said Martha rudely. ‘I know you do. But I wasn’t quite lost, because all the time I was hanging on to just one thought: that I was drugged and hypnotized and that I didn’t have to be. And above all that I mustn’t be afraid of being – obvious.’

      ‘Well it is, isn’t it?’ said Joanna. She got up. She wanted to leave.

      ‘Yes. But what then? Quite so. I want to be sunk in the obvious. It seems to me that there’s a sort of giant conspiracy, and it’s all our fault. There are people who know quite well that they are drugged and asleep, but there’s a weapon against that – you mustn’t be obvious. It’s a cliché. Oh I know perfectly well that there’s nothing new in what I said, but I felt it new then and I feel it now. But I’m not going to be laughed out of it by people who are afraid of words like cliché, or obvious, or banal. I learned that before. Funny, where was it? Who? Somebody – I’ve forgotten. We keep learning things and then forgetting them and so we have to learn them again.’

      ‘You just want to be a bohemian,’ said Joanna, ‘to be different. Well, I watched all that during the war.’

      ‘No. The opposite. I remember finding out some time before – that that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way. But there’s a pressure on us all the time to go on to something that seems new because there are new words attached to it. But I want to take words as ordinary as bread. Or life. Or death. Clichés. I want to have my nose rubbed in clichés.’

      Joanna was swinging her shoulder bag over her handsome camel coat. She wanted to leave. Jack was standing near her, watching her. He was afraid he had lost her. Martha thought that he probably had. He had not ‘heard’ what she had said. Not with his mind. But Martha knew that with his body he could have answered her. And that understanding, really a new one, that there were people who simply did not operate or function through their minds, was as if Jack had stepped towards her from dark to light. She knew that if they had been free to make love now, it would be in a different way, because Jack had caught, sensed, felt, what she had said. But if he were now asked to put into words what Martha had said, he would answer: Martha’s tired, she’s upset. People were really so very different from each other. She was always forgetting it. Jack’s way of experiencing the world, and hers, they did not touch.

      Except when they made love. He understood, and communicated, through the body.

      A ring from downstairs. Jack’s face had for one second the look of someone caught out: both women saw it, and even exchanged small ironic glances, so strong is the force of custom. Because neither really felt it. Jack went running downstairs, and they were alone.

      Joanna said: ‘I know what you are saying, but what’s the point of all that? There’s nothing we can do, is there? So what’s the use?’

      Voices on the stairs in energetic exchange and Jack entered first, saying: ‘It’s Jane!’ with a look of appeal at them both. Now Martha and Joanna asked each other silently if both knew about Jane: both did. And they knew the rules of the game said they should leave. They nodded at Jack, who went out, and came back with a pretty little blonde thing who, however, had the stormy, sparkling, reddened look of a baby who has been crying enjoyably from temper. Some grief of love had struck her into a splendidly tempestuous need, and she hardly saw Jack’s two women visitors who stood ready to leave.

      They left together, side by side, and were let out by the crazy youth who grinned his congratulations that they were in such numerous and desirable company.

      The two walked down the streets where Joanna would never have set foot if it had not been for Jack. Her clean, impeccable country clothes made a space all around her.

      ‘I think I’ll take the train home,’ remarked Joanna. ‘I’ve had enough of interesting experiences for the time being.’ She was still very hostile.

      ‘Are you coming to Jack again?’ For it seemed to Martha that Joanna would not.

      ‘I don’t know. It’s not what I bargained for. I simply don’t want things to be all – interesting and dramatic.’

      ‘I’m sorry for my part of it, then.’

      ‘It’s partly my fault. I shouldn’t have come in that time – curiosity. It serves me right.’

      Deepening her accent, making her manner frank and easy, because the colonial could ask personal questions a fellow Englander could not, Martha inquired, risking a snub: ‘Will you go on sleeping with Jack after you are married?’

      ‘I expect so. Perhaps. I don’t see why not.’ This with a short gruff laugh. ‘But not if I’m going to get involved in … I’m not interested in Jack as a person.’

      Martha risked it and said: ‘You talk about Jack as men talk about prostitutes.’

      ‘Really? I don’t think I’ve ever discussed prostitution with a man. Well, what’s wrong with it? I hate sex,’ she went on coolly. ‘I mean, I can’t stand all the fuss and bother. During the war, there was nothing but sex and people being desperate for each other. But I like being satisfied, I suppose.’

      And now Martha had to be silent, because being satisfied was not how she was able to think about sex with Jack. Joanna said: ‘We’re just animals, that’s all. Why pretend anything different? Jack satisfies me. It’s simple and quick and it’s all over with. That’s what I like.’

      ‘I see.’

      ‘Well,’ said she, with her short gruff laugh, ‘you’re not going to tell me you love him or something piffling like that, are you?’

      ‘Certainly not,’ said Martha, laughing equally. The question then was: ‘Did Jack say to himself, I give Joanna satisfaction, short and simple and quick, because that’s what she wants, and I give Martha – whatever were the words he used for it; or did he respond simply out of his marvellous sure instinct?

      They had reached the bus stop. They stood together in the half-light of the summer evening. ‘Anyway,’ said Joanna, ‘that’s that. I want to get married, have children, and lots of money and never have to think again about – all that. And if you’d been here during the war you’d know. It seems to me that a lot of people who weren’t in the war, like Jack and you, you are trying to be part of it, you felt you missed something.’

      ‘Jack wasn’t in the war? He was minesweeping, didn’t you know? He was sunk.’

      ‘Oh yes, but I didn’t mean that. I mean, being here, in England. That was different.’ ‘I see.’

      Here the bus arrived. Joanna smiled cool and formal at Martha, and stepped quietly on to the bus, from where she remarked: ‘I expect we may meet again one of these days.’ The bus went off. Martha now remembered that all of them, Jack, Joanna and herself, had forgotten the money that she needed. Quite right: money was not what she had gone to Jack’s for. But she now had about two pounds. She could go to a cheap hotel, the suitcase being her passport, and ring up Mark in the morning to make an appointment to confirm terms, in the English manner.

      But she was too tired. Besides, she remembered those moments when they had understood each other – oh yes, only too well, and thought: what’s the point? I know perfectly well I’m going to move in. She went to a telephone box. It СКАЧАТЬ