The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 all of this, were incidents of a different kind: but there had to be three or four of them before they were seen as a pattern.

      Dorothy had taken over the management of the flat, though Mark and Martha had offered to run it with the house. Dorothy was, or had been, an efficient woman. During the war she had managed a factory that made parts of bombs: she had had about forty women working under her. Becoming normal, for Dorothy, meant once more learning to be competent. It was she who got in a charwoman, ordered food, sometimes went shopping – managed. Then something went wrong, a little thing, like a tap, or the telephone. Dorothy contacted the machinery of the outside world. A week or so later, Martha would find one of the women carrying water downstairs in a bucket, or coming up to use the telephone. When the affair finally came into her hands, or Mark’s, Dorothy would supply a piece of paper on which was written something like this:

Friday evening.	Lynda said the tap was dripping. I rang five plumbers. Three didn’t answer. This in spite of the fact they advertised to ring after six. The fourth said he would come at nine. He never came at all. The fifth said he would come on Saturday morning at ten.
Saturday morning.	We waited for the plumber. When he had not turned up by twelve, I went out shopping. Lynda went to sleep. The man came while I was out. I telephoned him that afternoon. There was no reply.
Saturday evening.	I telephoned him. His wife answered. She said it was the week-end. Her husband did not work over week-ends. She suggested I ring Mr Black of Canonbury. His wife said he worked at week-ends. I left a message.
Sunday morning.	I rang Mr Black. He was out. His wife said she would try to get him to come in the afternoon. I stayed up instead of going to sleep.
Sunday afternoon.	Mr. Black telephoned. He said if it wasn’t urgent he would come on Monday. I told him off. I told him if he was so slack he wouldn’t be any good as a workman.
Monday morning.	I telephoned the first plumber. His wife said he would come that afternoon.
Monday afternoon	He did not come.
By then the tap was leaking badly. I turned off the main.

      The question is: are we in a position to sue for loss of time and damage and inconvenience? When he turned up at last on Wednesday afternoon, he had the nerve to say he was going to send in an account for the first visit (see under Saturday morning), so I told him where he got off.

      This, or something like it, happened fairly often, as it does in every household. Dorothy was always in the right. Each time she got herself into a state of furious, helpless irritation which ended in her having to go to bed, where Lynda nursed her.

      Mark dealt with each new crisis, and this brought him into contact with Lynda for several days, while Dorothy was ill. The reason why Dorothy would never, until some situation was desperate – no water, no gas, no electricity – come for help upstairs, was that it meant bringing in Mark, or Mark’s deputy, Martha. It meant that she, Dorothy, had failed Lynda. It meant a collapse into inadequacy in a dark bedroom, and oblivion in drugs.

      Mark and Lynda, with Dorothy asleep in her bedroom, achieved some hours of companionship, even gaiety.

      The telephone, or tap, restored to normal – Lynda went back to the basement and the door was locked.

      Mark made a visit to Martha’s room. When he did this it meant something of importance, something he found hard to talk about; which, perhaps, he had been working himself up to talk about all that day, or even, several days.

      She had been sitting in the dark, looking out of the window at the ragged sycamore tree, thinned by late autumn. The knock on the door was abrupt, but soft.

      ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ He switched on the light, and saw, as he always did, a succession of rooms in this one, back to where young children played in it, he among them.

      He took hold of the present, where a woman in a red house-coat, with untidy hair, sat by a dark window, looking out, a cat asleep beside her.

      The cat woke, stalked across to him, looked up into his face, and miaowed. He sat down, the cat on his knee. He was in his dressing-gown. They were like an old married couple, or a brother and sister.

      This thought passed from her to him, and he said: ‘This is no sort of life for you.’ ‘Or for you.’

      ‘Don’t you ever think of marrying?’

      ‘Yes. Sometimes.’ The worry on his face was to do with her: not what he had come about. ‘People have been saying I’m after you?’

      He coloured up at once, changed position: the cat jumped down, annoyed. ‘Yes. Do you mind?’ ‘No. Yes, a little. Not much.’

      ‘It was stupid of me. I’d forgotten completely that – well, what with everything else ‘You СКАЧАТЬ