The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

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       Chapter One

      A bad time is announced by an event. A woman gasses herself because her will to survive is exhausted. This event is different in quality from previous events. It is surprising. But it should not have been surprising. It could have been foreseen. One’s imagination had been working at half-pressure … Martha had been here before.

      When a bad time starts, it is as if on a smooth green lawn a toad appears; as if a clear river suddenly floats down a corpse. Before the appearance of the toad, the corpse, one could not imagine the lawn as anything but delightful, the river as fresh. But lawns can always admit toads, and rivers corpses … Martha had been here before.

      When Sally said she was going back to her flat for a day or so, leaving her little boy, that was so unlike her, so improbable, that if Martha had been alert, she would have – but what? Called the police? The doctors? There was no set of words which Martha could imagine herself using. ‘Sally, you’re not thinking of …? Oh, please don’t! – You’ll feel better in a few days … Lie down for a little and we’ll get you a sedative. Sally, you’re a coward! How can you think of … And what about your little boy, he won’t be able to live without you –’

      (People are infinitely expendable, feel themselves to be, or feel themselves to be now.)

       ‘Sally, we’ll lock you up until you come to your senses!’

      Sally had gone back to her flat to become Sarah. What had she really felt when the family which had taken her in, had done so only under the passport of Sally? ‘They’ve always called me Sally,’ she said, once, exchanging with Martha a look which the family itself could not be expected to understand. If she had refused to be Sally, had insisted on remaining Sarah, would she then have had to make the journey alone to her empty home where she could turn on the gas?

      Before that double event; Colin’s departure, Sally’s death, the quality of life was different; seemed almost, looking back on it as – no, not happiness. Happiness, unhappiness, these were not words that could be used anywhere near this family, every member of which held the potentiality for – disaster? But that had been true before the double event. How then had it been possible for Martha to feel that ‘the holding operation’ could in fact hold off what had been so loudly heralded? Something had been bound to give. Yet to look back from the day after Sally’s death, to even the day before it, it was as if a bomb had gone off.

      So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality into which warlike events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains. Events and the life in which they are embedded have the same quality. But since it is not possible that events are not part of the life they occur in – it is not possible that a bomb should explode into a texture of life foreign to it – all that means is that one has not understood, one has not been watching.

      And, the bomb having exploded, the heralding (or so it seems) event having occurred, even then the mind tries to isolate, to make harmless. It was Martha’s concern, and Mark’s, to try and minimize the double event as if they felt it to be an isolated thing, without results, as it had had no causes. Or at least, that was what it seemed they felt; for with the little boy Paul playing upstairs, his mother dead, his father gone, they were discussing how to soften and make harmless. ‘How to break it’ – as Mark put it.

      Paul was going to be six next week. He had plans for his birthday. His mother had talked of a party. Some sort of a party there must be.

      ‘Is my mother going to be here?’ asked Paul.

      ‘I expect so,’ said Mark – and turned away from the child’s acutely-fearful black eyes. Paul had never been separated from his mother, not even for one day. And now his uncle said: ‘I expect so.’ Paul became very gay, manic. He rushed all over the big house, bouncing on the beds, teasing the cat, standing to look out of all the windows, one after another. Through one of them, he would see his mother come. He turned, saw Mark and Martha watching him; and pulled the heavy curtains so that he was hidden from them. He took the black cat to bed with him, where he hugged and kissed the beast, which suffered it. But he did not like Martha touching him, nor Mark. Particularly not Mark. He was not used to contact with a man; his father having been kindly, but concerned (he had even said so) to make up for the emotionalism of the unfortunate Sally-Sarah by being cordial, but restrained.

      Mark and Martha were prisoners in the house, because the reporters patrolled outside. Paul asked to go for a walk. He did not say that he hoped to catch a glimpse of his mother in the streets. He was told that no one was going for walks. Through the windows he saw men trying to peer in; and asked who they were. He tried to slip out of the back door, but found a smiling man on the doorstep, listening to Martha answering the telephone. No, Mr Coldridge was not in; no, he could not come to the telephone; no there was no comment about Mr Coldridge’s brother.

      ‘Is Mr Coldridge’s brother my daddy?’ he inquired.

      The exchange was asked to alter the number. This was done; and for a couple of days there was peace. But then a reporter got the new number from Jimmy Wood at the factory. Jimmy Wood had been asked not to give it. In explanation he said that the man sounded ‘as if he really wanted it’. The number was changed again. Jimmy was again asked not to give it. But he did: he thought, he explained, the man asking for it was an electronics expert. After all, he had said he was. Jimmy’s part through the long siege was simply – not ever to understand it. Mark asked Jimmy to come to the house, so it could all be explained to him. He must be careful of the journalists, he was told. He arrived at the front door, and was enclosed by a group of news-hungry men. To them, smiling, he told everything he knew. Not much, not more than Mark knew; but affable and willing, he chatted, and entered the house, still smiling. But then, he always smiled. Some time in his life he had decided that life must be faced with his smile, and he never switched it off. A defence? An explanation? Who knew? But this small, wispy man with his great head covered in baby hair – smiled, as if he could not help it. They said to him: Please be careful, please don’t expose us, please don’t talk to the Press, and he smiled. Almost at once he began talking about affairs at the factory. It seemed he could not see the necessity for all this fuss.

      But he agreed, not so much impatiently, as with tolerance, not to give the telephone number to anyone at all.

      For a while, then, it was quiet. But Margaret telephoned from her country home. She had not been near them since the election party. She was concerned about Francis. ‘You ought to get him back home,’ she said. ‘He must be having a dreadful time at that beastly school.’

      ‘But it would be worse here with the journalists.’ ‘You think so? I don’t know. Mark could get rid of them, easily, if he wanted to.’ ‘Yes, but I don’t think he’d want to do that.’ ‘You ought to make him.’ ‘Perhaps you’d like to talk to him?’

      ‘No. No. I really haven’t got any more patience with … have you let the basement?’ ‘The basement!’ ‘Mrs Ashe still wants it.’ ‘But, Margaret, СКАЧАТЬ