The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  The affair did not come to any dramatic end. For one thing, it was embedded in Mark’s social life: the people who came to visit him, were her friends; when he went to their homes, she was often there.

  Chapter Three

  The bad time continued. It was expressed in a number of separate events, or processes, in this or that part of the world, whose common quality was horror; and a senseless horror. To listen, to read, to watch the news of any one of these events was to submit oneself to incredulity: this barbarism, this savagery, was simply not possible. And, everywhere in this country, in the world, people like oneself sat reading, looking, watching, in precisely the same condition: this is not possible; it can’t be happening; it’s all so monstrously silly that I can’t believe it… The war in Korea was at the height of its danger for the world, the propaganda on both sides had reached a point where no one sensible could believe a word of it, and for months it looked as if nothing could stop America using’the Bomb’ there. In America the hysteria had grown till that great nation looked from outside like a dog driven mad by an infestation of fleas, snapping and biting at its own flesh; and a man called Joe McArthy, who had no qualities at all, save one, the capacity to terrorize other people, was able to do as he liked. Throughout Africa various countries fought in various ways against the white man, but in Kenya there was a full-scale war, both sides (as in Korea! fighting with a maximum of nastiness and lies.

  In the communist countries things went from bad to worse. In South America-but first things first; whole continents, let alone countries have to be overlooked when the future of the human race balances on what seems to be needle-points somewhere in Korea, Berlin, Vietnam … As for Kenya, it was ugly, it was a turning point and a cross-roads (etc. etc.) for Africa, but it was not of vital importance. No world war was likely to start there. It affected, nastily, the atmosphere in Britain, which was already craven and corrupted because of breathing the poisoned winds from across the Atlantic. It affected, for instance, Arthur Coldridge and his ex-wife Phoebe.

  When Martha became a friend of Patty Samuels and ceased to be a traitor and an enemy, she was admitted, through her, to the group of comrades, who met nightly, in Mark’s house, or in a café or a pub. She was admitted to-talk, discussion, debate. It was a long time since she had been in an unconstituted committee. She was joining it, as she immediately saw. as it was about to disintegrate. For two, three years, it had been a tight defensive little group: Mark, Patty Samuels, Freddie Postings, a physicist and friend of Colin, Gerald Smith, Marxist historian from a provincial university, Bob Hasty, an economist, one or two others. Mark was the only non-communist. Of these, not one would be a communist in two, three years. Meanwhile, they were under violent fire from their own side, which they criticized-but never publicly, since everyone else did that; and submitted to the subtle, creeping, crooked pressures that characterized the time, from outside.

  For instance, Freddie Postings, due for advancement in his job, had not been given it; had been transferred to work he was not interested in and where he could not advance, because, as his superior had told him one night when drunk, of his past association with Colin. Gerald Smith had lost his wife into a mental hospital: she had been unable to stand the social isolation of being his wife, an isolation which was never explained, put into words, defended; just slowly deepened, till she cracked. Bob Hasty-but, one way and another, it was the same for all of them. In America they would be defending themselves before committees, would be deciding whether or not to betray friends and associates: here nothing of the sort was asked of them: they were just having a very bad time. This group was where they were able to relax, where they created the energy to go on, where there was a breathable air. But what was this air? Remarkably enough, if it was one part faith in humanity, it was two parts pure nihilism, a kind of painful, despairing, angry denial of faith: as if, threatened from outside both from friends and enemies by bad faith and destruction, they had to create the same qualities here, in a homeopathic dosage. It was the nihilism of Thomas’s last testament. Here it was. Here? Why? Sometimes Martha felt as if Thomas had walked in, a thin bitter man, burned nearly black by his river-valley sun, and was leaning by the door, smiling: he had been drawn by the atmosphere, so much his own.

  But it did not last long, jimmy Wood took to dropping in. Even a few months ago this would have been impossible: his politics, or rather, his lack of them, would have excluded him. But things were breaking up: here was Martha, an enemy, here was Jimmy. Why did he come? For a while people talked and talked, of Korea and America and freedom; of Stalin and freedom; of Kenya and war and freedom; of Berlin and Russia and freedom; he was bored, sat smiling his baby smile, waited. As soon as he could, he came in with his own passion-no, that word could never be used of Jimmy Wood. His interest, then. He came to this house, it began to become evident, because Mark was not often enough at the factory. Mark was not talking enough to Jimmy. Jimmy was here to get his allowance of fuel-which was talk. Probably he was quite unconscious why he came; but could not help coming; and if Mark had not given it to him off he would go.

  Until Martha saw this, she did not really see it-to use the way of speech current in the basement. Nor did she see it at once. For a while, there was Jimmy, inexplicably, even embarrassingly, a rather silent, but smiling visitor, among people who talked, or ingested politics. He turned his face, or rather, his spectacles, towards one speaker after another, until Mark started to talk. Then in dodged Jimmy, suddenly all attention and energy, like a sheepdog in a flock of sheep. He was isolating Mark, bringing him out towards himself. And in a moment, it would be Jimmy and Mark talking-not necessarily about scientific matters, not at all. It could be anything, even politics. Then, while the others listened, silenced by the little man’s extraordinary detachment from them, for it was really as if they did not exist, as if only Mark existed, the talk was swung towards something close to factory matters. Soon, Freddie Postings, the physicist, came in. Politics were being pushed aside; the talk was of physics; but not for long, not so that Mark could not stay in it. It did not matter what the subject of the talk was, Martha saw; it mattered that Mark was in an exchange of talk with Jimmy. Jimmy had probably quite unconsciously manoeuvred the subject of the talk so as to gain Mark’s maximum participation in it. That is what he needed. It is what he came for. It is what he got. Why? He was no stronger, no more intelligent, no more well-informed than anybody else. Jimmy dominated the group, the unconstituted committee. Jimmy destroyed it. He did this by dominating it. He continued to dominate even when Phoebe and Arthur came.

  Their coming was extraordinary: indeed, until it happened, impossible. For two, three years, the brothers had been so opposed that they had communicated through brief business letters, if at all. Arthur, Phoebe, that section of the Labour Party they belonged to, were busy, like everyone else, crusading against communism. Then when the war began in Kenya, Arthur and Phoebe were of that small number of people in Britain who supported the African side and agitated for Britain to withdraw. They became increasingly unpopular.

  They continued to hate communism, but this seemed irrelevant when a large newspaper was running a campaign against the Coldridge family, den of traitors, spies, and destroyers of Britain. ‘How long will the authorities allow these enemies within our gates …’’The Coldridge family continues its work of undermining those liberties which etc. etc.

  This being not the first time Mark had dealt with newspaper suggestions that he should be locked up, he revived previous plans, which this time included Arthur and Phoebe. True that Arthur was a Member of Parliament, and true that Phoebe’s work in her various organizations was above-board and open to anybody’s inspection. Whatever divided them, they knew one simple thing: that in times of public hysteria anything was possible. Whole nations went mad overnight. It had happened in Stalin’s Russia. It had happened in Germany. It had happened in the England of the First World War. It was happening now in the States. The tiniest turn of the screw
one way or the other, and anybody could be locked up, lose their jobs, be put into prison, interned. Or, possibly, killed.

  It was just here, when the bad time was in fact ending, or soon to end, that it reached its climax of nastiness. It was a question of living from day to day, trying to make plans for possibilities they could only guess at. They were a group of isolated individuals, with very little in common, forced together because of danger: their differences became sharper because of the tension. Phoebe seemed in a permanent state of near hysteria: she snapped and was rude and unpleasant. Mark was sullen and withdrawn. Martha was listless. Arthur, aggressive by temperament, was luckiest, but he fell into a depression-unusual for him.

  The question was, who was there to look after the children if they were all locked up? Not Martha, as vulnerable as anybody. Not Lynda, since she might at any moment crack up again. Margaret was on speaking terms with neither Arthur nor Mark: that is, if the phrase was taken literally. She wrote them letters, appealing for their better judgement: the blacks in Kenya were all filthy savages-she enclosed various articles about Mau Mau; Mark was destroying democracy. On the evidence of past behaviour one could assume she would support their being locked up, if she did not actually organize it.

  Eventually Mary and Harold Butts were asked if they would come and live in the house and look after Paul and Francis and keep an eye on Lynda and Dorothy. This they agreed to do, with equanimity, even when the responsibility stretched to taking on all Arthur’s children as well, and possibly Phoebe’s.

  In the unconstituted committee the discussion of politics had become impossible, now that Arthur and Phoebe were so often there, and so very hostile to communism. Discussion about politics is, after all, only possible when people agree, or have at least something in common. They all agreed about Africa, about Kenya. They agreed about-a large number of matters, but not about what had constituted this group’s chief reason for existence in the first place. The meetings became fewer, then stopped.

  Mark spent more time with Arthur-the brothers had always liked each other. His children came to play with Paul. So did Phoebe’s little girls. There was a holiday down at Nanny Butts’s with all the children, seven of them, and Mark and Martha and Phoebe and Arthur and his wife. Patty did not see Mark for two weeks: she wasn’t feeling well, she said. She had been called in by superiors in the Party and talked to about her political line-unsatisfactory, they said it was. She had been openly threatened with expulsion, but she had to think out her position; what she was going to do. At Nanny Butts’s final arrangements were made for looking after the children in the event of their entire complement of adults vanishing into prison or internment. When Arthur Coldridge was driving to the House, one night, the car was stopped and a couple of men in masks told him that if he didn’t ‘Lay off the whites in Kenya and forget the blacks’ - they would see to it he had a nasty accident. He reported this to the police; his garage was blown up, but there was no way of proving who had done it. The atmosphere was worsening-could it get worse? Even down in the village, there was a feeling of being under siege. They stayed in the cottage, tried not to go out into the garden, because there always seemed to be people staring over the hedges. Nanny Butts got some poison-letters; the children found their village friends were unable to play with them.

  Then, things began to shift. The change began for Mark with the publication of A City in the Desert. On the whole he had ignored this, for he still did not know whether he regretted writing it or not. The reviews were pretty good. The literary world was still in its stance of ’non-engagement’, it was still claiming all virtue for the interior of the ivory tower. A City in the Desert fulfilled every requirement of this mood. It did not deal with anything controversial, or political, or social. It could be put aside safely as allegorical, and above all, it could not possibly be approved of by the communists. It was a safe book to praise and it was praised, although Mark had been described as a communist for four years now.

  The point was, in this small, incestuous world where everyone had known Mark, or Margaret, or Mark’s brothers, where everyone knew, and so very thoroughly, what’the score’ was (how not, since everyone had been red, or pink?), they knew that there would come a time when Mark, just as they had, would see the light and repudiate communism. A City in the Desert was taken as a proof of a change of heart: no communist could possibly have written it.

  Patty Samuels, for instance, regarded it as shockingly reactionary. The affair was finally breaking up: the appearance of this novel and the good reviews hastened the process.

  Not that this meant Mark saw less of her-he was seeing more. She was having a breakdown. Stalin had died, the communist world was in chaos, and Patty in chaos with it. The trouble was, nervous breakdowns were not considered possible for progressive people. Socialist circles were not admitting the possibility that mental troubles existed, or were only just beginning to, and Patty’s illness was being claimed as purely physical: her doctor was a communist party member. She had bad headaches, and her heart gave her trouble: when Mark suggested that she might be under stress, she snapped, ‘Thanks, who are you calling neurotic?’ She wrote him an emotional and abusive letter about A City in which she said among other things he was a cowardly rat, and talked about ships that sank or did not sink and could be patched up, etc. He was very concerned about her. Mark had gone to Patty, seeing her a representative of a sane and dedicated life. Now, for the second time, he found he had a woman in breakdown on his hands. Once again, it called out the best in him. Martha saw him as he must have been with Lynda when she was first ill: he was all gentleness and strength. But he was very unhappy. Not because of Patty-for him, that was all over. Nor, at the moment, because of Lynda, who maintained a kind of balance.

  No, it was because he did not understand what was happening. To say he was becoming an anti-communist was impossible. For one thing, that would have meant betraying his brother: so he saw it, or rather, felt it. But he had, at a very emotional time, met a group of people who had been calm, judicious, unhysterical. Now they were in fervours of doubt, conflict, emotionalism, and over Stalin, whom Mark had never seen as more than a useful kind of warlord, ‘rather like Churchill’. Mark had never been more of a Coldridge than over Stalin. Such people had to be, he supposed; ‘one had to have politicians’. But, putting forward such views, in such language, to people separating rapidly into Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, proved more than ever, if it needed proving, that he, Mark, had never known the score.

  But he had not changed, he felt: he, his views were the same. Yet, suddenly, having been ostracized for four years, he was being invited to dinner parties. The telephone, silent for so long a time, had come to life, with old friends ringing up as if nothing whatever had happened. The intellectual weeklies asked him for articles and reviews. Vast sums of money were offered for his ’confessions’ about the communist party by, among others, Miles Tangin, who had changed his newspaper but not his attitude that he, Miles Tangin, had no connection with what he wrote. The newspaper was The Evening X instead of the Daily Y, but both were running articles headed: ‘I worked for Stalin’ or ‘Fifteen Years in the Communist Hell’, etc., being the public breast-beating not of the people who had been in communist hells, but who had been members of the communist party in Britain. The letter in which Miles offered Mark £500 for his confessions included a request to be introduced to Harry Pollitt (presumed to be a close friend of Mark’s) because ‘I hear he is a decent sort of chap’.

  Mark seemed to be feeling, not so much that people were inconsistent-they could be expected to be, but that they had no sense of humour. He had not used this word for some time. He was using it again. He was using it as if nothing whatsoever had happened.

  In short, his diversion from himself into communism was over. He had had a dose of çommunism. Some people can fall in love often and violently, but it doesn’t affect them. When it’s over they haven’t changed. Similarly, some people get doses of this or that kind of
politics or religion: but it doesn’t really affect them.

  Mark was not changed: it had never gone deep. It was very likely only the fact that his brother was presumably a communist stopped him from saying again that you couldn’t trust a communist farther than you could kick him.

  Instead he said that there was no honour left in public life.

  In which case, Martha wondered, why did he spend so much time with Jimmy? She had once said to Mark that if someone came to Jimmy and asked him to design an improved instrument of torture, he would at once do so: the ethical aspects of the thing being dismissed with that vaguely embarrassed grimace which he offered to Mark’s political and personal problems. Mark said yes, yes, very likely, he was like that. Mark did not, then, expect ‘Honour’ from Jimmy. But he did from Miles Tangin?

  They discussed this: discussing honour and politics in this way, they resumed their evening sessions in the study. They drank brandy, smoked, were together a great deal. Patty had gone off to visit a sister in Essex, that flat country; the sea winds, the marshes, the birds, were all considered likely to do good to her heart and to her headaches.

  ‘Thank God for you, ’ said Mark to Martha, ‘you are always so calm.’

  Mark, then, had always seen Martha as calm? But he chose a moment to use the word which turned a spotlight on what a calm could mean.

  Some weeks before the publication of A City in the Desert, that is, before Mark’s return to public respectability, Martha had had a letter from Mrs. Quest, announcing her intention to come to England. Well, why not? Nothing could be more natural. Putting down that letter, Martha understood she was shaking from head to foot. She sat there, the letter in her hand, calm. But she trembled. A week later, when a second letter arrived announcing a date, Martha understood she had been in bed, not getting up at all except for the nightly sessions with Mark-for a week. She had not been able to get up. She lay in a half-dark, in a kind of half-sleep, like a thing waterlogged. Yet she could not say she was unhappy. She was calm. But she could not get out of bed.