The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Throughout the Quest tenancy of that other farm, there had been one consistent note struck. ‘Getting off the farm; when we get off the farm; getting away from all this.’ But young Jonathan, once free from the army, had headed straight back not to the same farm, but to one much worse: it had not been ‘opened up’, it was nothing but hundreds of acres of-nothing. Among mountains. At one point Mrs. Quest had produced figures to prove that with the same amount of money (small, but of course they started on loans like everyone else) they could have bought a developed farm nearer town. At which they had looked-embarrassed. They liked this farm. This is what they liked. And they did not mind borrowing money; they did not have to build a great stone house with far too many rooms, when a smaller one would have done. Stone costs nothing, they said.

  Why start a dairy herd, up here: there wasn’t another for miles? That was the point, they said. Why build a dozen tobacco barns when a couple would have done, to start with, anyway? Jonathan evaded, conciliated, Mrs. Quest understood what he was not saying: that he was determined not to be like his father, happily, or at any rate dreamily, content to muddle along hoping for good things another year. The young couple felt themselves pioneers. Mrs. Quest was watching the birth of a really large farm, and a large family. Well, she muttered at last, if they want to kill themselves in the process I suppose it’s their affair.

  There started another phase, after that row. Mrs. Quest was avoiding Bessie. Bessie avoided her. The old lady heard, with closed critical lips, that they were employing a couple of black children to act as nurses to the white children: she continued to believe that black flesh should not contact white. She said nothing, though it nearly killed her. She then started a flower garden: the couple hadn’t time for it. If there was one thing she understood, it was gardens. She planted, on a rocky hillside that looked across a vale to the mountains, a garden that became, very soon, all roses, bougainvillaea, Jacarandas, cypress, jasmine, plumbago, and lilies. Then she started a vegetable garden. These under control, and a new windmill being installed, she suggested adding ducks to the chickens. She was already running the chickens. Then she asked if Bessie would like her to supervise the dairy herd? She expected a rebuff but Bessie agreed at once. Had she been waiting for the old lady to suggest it? This started a new nasty suspicion: had Bessie gone out of the house to do farmwork in the first place just to get away from her, her mother-in-law?

  She did not know. She thought it was so. At any rate, Bessie spent more time in the house, which is where she ought to be, and Mrs. Quest, an old lady of sixty-five, then sixty-six, then sixty-seven-goodness, she would soon be seventy, rose at six, with relish, made herself a snack of breakfast, got out of the way of the family, and was off around her gardens and livestock while the sun was still new.

  She worked. She worked. She had never worked so hard. And in the evenings, just as they did, she was off to bed by nine. Mrs. Quest hardly saw the children. Was Bessie keeping them away from her? They were always in the hands of those dirty black …

  Sometimes at meals she studied Bessie’s face, and thought: Why this girl, why this one particularly? Bessie was a short, plump, dark woman, with cheeks that had been rosy but now were pale. She had brown eyes-rather small, Mrs. Quest thought. She was all right, the old lady supposed. Sometimes, as their paths crossed in the day, Mrs. Quest would turn to watch, eyes narrowed under her great shady straw hat, a plump dark woman walk in her brisk determined way to pantry, or storeroom and think: she’s the wife of my son. Why this one? Mrs. Quest could not remember ever exchanging more than politeness with her, they had never really talked, or opened to each other.

  Lonely, she brooded, over the children, over the past. She worried over Martha, whose letters said nothing, and particularly nothing about getting married.

  There was another row if you could use that word for the awful cold, brisk, conciliatory discussions, with the three of them paled by tension and anxiety. Logical-that is what Jonathan was. and his wife. For, when she complained that she was getting on for seventy, and that she worked all day, of course she did not want to stop working, she wanted only to be loved and praised for working.

  As a result of this, but not at once, there was a change. Shortly, Jonathan announced he was getting an assistant. He would like the assistant in the house-more convenient, he said. He suggested building the old lady her own house. She listened, bright-eyed, disbelieving. They were kicking her out! That was the truth, but of course, this cold logicality couldn’t allow the truth.

  They built her a two-roomed house with a large veranda, about a hundred yards from their own, turned towards the mountains, and with windows cut down almost to the floor, so that the rooms admitted mountains, mountains, everywhere you looked. She liked the house. She moved into it with a quiet, grim smile, saying how much she did like it. No, she would prefer to do her own cooking; yes, she would sometimes come for family meals, perhaps on Sundays-no, of course she wouldn’t be formal about it. Yes, she understood that the assistant would look after the dairy herd. Was she to be allowed to keep the chickens and the ducks? The outrageousness of this quiet question in view of her outburst about her exploitation-I’m nothing but an unpaid servant-did not strike her as such, because she had never meant it. She did not deserve, she knew, their look of furious exasperation.

  They entreated, begged, implored her, not to tire herself, and when she said she was quite capable of doing the ducks and chickens and the gardens, they sent to her, as personal assistant, Steven.

  Steven was a child of twelve. His real name she never knew. He had been christened Steven by another farmer where he had been working before he came here. She said she did not want Steven; they did not argue, merely instructed Steven to stay with her. There followed an absurd and painful period when Mrs. Quest went about chickens, ducks, gardens, with a set, angry face, followed by Steven who tried to help her, and was snubbed every time he asked:’ What shall I do, missus?’

  Steven seemed to her a final insult. She lay awake at night raging and storming, talking to herself aloud, that at the end of her life she. May Quest, was being put aside like an old dog with a black keeper, called Steven.

  Two years later, when Mrs. Quest left to visit England, she wept, and she knew it was not for her son, or grandchildren she wept for, but for Steven.

  For weeks she saw him through a cloud of anger: she saw a young black face, always watching hers. He was a tall child, very thin, obviously under-nourished. She began scolding him about washing himself; and made him eat bread and vegetables from her little kitchen. It had occurred to her that he was a child, that he was three hundred miles from his village, that he had no one but some kind of ‘brother’ near him, and he was on a farm twenty miles away, and that she, May Quest, was the only human being with whom he had any sort of contact. He spent all his time with her-left at ten o’clock at night to go to the compound. When told he could go earlier, he replied simply, that he preferred to stay with her, he had no ‘brothers’ in the compound. He preferred to stay with a cross ugly old woman (Mrs. Quest had seen her face in the glass reflecting the thoughts she had over Steven) rather than be with his own people? She thought, at last, that he was twelve, alone, lonely. She began to talk with him.

  They sat on the little veranda, looking towards the mountains. She sat in a grass chair, very upright, knitting. The child sat on the edge of the veranda with his bare feet in the dust, tracing pictures in the dust with his forefinger, or tossing a pebble from one hand to the other. He talked about his village. He said he had a grandmother. He missed his grandmother. Mrs. Quest, being compared to an old black woman in a native village felt a reminiscent surge of anger, but it carried no conviction. She found herself amused. She began to knit him a jersey: he possessed one pair of shorts, one singlet, and a blanket-that was all.

  Sometimes they sat quietly, perhaps watching how the four white children played under trees a couple of hundred yards away with the two black children watching them. Mrs. Quest
asked if perhaps Steven would like to make friends with them? He said quickly that no, they were not from his tribe, they had no language in common but English. Anyway, he said, his brows knitting, ‘I like it with you, missus.’ This hurt the old lady. She suffered that she had been so unkind. She was suffering more than that: she had been in the country for thirty years and she had never talked to a black person before-not like this, as she was now. She had not thought before of the hundreds of black people that had been on the old farm and were on this one, that they might not be able to talk to each other because they did not share a language, or that a child might be lonely and miss his old grandmother-or that a black person might be solitary by nature. For it was clear that Steven was. He had, he confided, always liked being by himself in the village. They had teased him about it. They had called him: Go-by-himself. Mrs. Quest told Steven the story about the Cat Who Walked by Himself. He laughed, was delighted. Mrs. Quest, secretly, got hold of a copy of the Kipling tales so that she could refresh her memory of them, and told him others. In return, he told her tales from his village, and he sang her songs.

  When Mrs. Quest woke in the morning, she lay smiling, waiting for when she would hear first his bare feet on the bricks of the veranda, the soft slur of the door over cement, the sounds of his movements in the kitchen, then see his bright face as he opened the door, very softly, to see if she was awake and he could bring in the tea. She hurried through bathing and dressing, to get back to the veranda, where she would sit with her friend and talk. He said one day:’ You have a black heart, missus, you are my mother.’ Mrs. Quest could not speak: she was crying. One morning, when she made an exclamation of pain as she moved her leg-her old arthritis was coming back-he leaped across and began rubbing her knee. She sat, suffering as waves of repugnance rose in her, then ebbed and went. A black child was rubbing her knee as, so he said, he had often rubbed his granny’s legs for her, when they had pain in them. She could not bear to think of what she was feeling now, what she had felt: she was having bad headaches, slept badly, was full of a low grieving emotion that she knew was probably remorse.

  When, one Sunday she was lunching with the family and the new assistant, they asked if she liked Steven, or if she’d prefer another boy, she said No, he seemed a nice enough boy, she didn’t mind him. And, speaking like this, she realized how far she had moved from the woman who would have said once, he was cheeky, he was dirty, he was-black. She was ashamed of her new friend, tried to keep a watch out for her son or his wife who might discover her telling Steven a story or talking to him. Once or twice they did: questions were asked. They said they hoped she was not spoiling him. She said, with appropriate severity, that she hoped she knew how to treat kaffirs after all this time. They made jokes that it was bad these days, to say kaffirs, or munts, one should say Africans, those loud-mouthed politicians in town who spoiled the blacks said so. She remarked, for it seemed to her utterly irrelevant, that if they wanted, she would call them Africans. Wasn’t she an African, after all this time? she inquired.

  After nearly two years, a man passing through the compound brought a message from Steven’s father: they wanted him back home, if he had earned enough for his tax. Steven assured the old lady that though he must go home, he would be back again.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh, perhaps they want me for the planting, it will be the rains soon.’

  ‘Will you come back after the planting?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, missus, I will come back.’

  Of course, blacks, kaffirs, Africans, have no sense of time. She knew she could not ask. She knew she must not-what right had she? And besides, she was alarmed at the distance she had moved from her old self, that she could grieve because a black boy was going back to his village. This alarm was switched into a grievance against her son and his wife: if only they weren’t so cold, so unfeeling!-they had white hearts, she found herself thinking. She thought how, with this child, it would be inconceivable to conduct one of the cold logical exchanges where there was no feeling, no heart, only a kind of word-fencing where no emotions could be admitted. She thought: very well, they find me a tiresome old woman. Of course, it’s natural. Well why don’t they tease me for it then, make a game of it, instead of this therefore and because and if and but. When I’m bad tempered with Steve, he teases me, he jokes.

  She thought that, with these black people, it was natural that an old woman was difficult, needed the tact that comes from the heart. Steven had talked of old people who were cross, or a bit crazy, or even hit other people-they were old, his manner suggested; they were entitled, had a right, to be difficult. But Mrs. Quest was not, not with her own children.

  She said that perhaps she might go to England to visit Martha. Yes, of course she would come back. She heard in her voice the same vague note that had been in Steven’s: yes, I’ll come back after the rains. He was not coming back. Why should he? He was fourteen years old. On this farm, the pet, or servant, of an old white woman he earned one pound a month, and-this was the point, saw nothing of the world. He said he wanted to go to a big town, a real town, like Salisbury. He had not ever seen a big white man’s city. Of course. It was natural. But when Mrs. Quest returned to her little house, where she had been pensioned off, from England, she would be alone again. No, she would see if Martha … after all, time changed people … time had changed her, May Quest… she had been told by a black boy that she had a black heart! Let Martha put that in her pipe and smoke it!

  Steven left one Sunday morning, with his blanket rolled up over his shoulder, and in it a jersey knitted by Mrs. Quest, and an old shirt of Jonathan’s. His possessions. He was going to walk back home with some brothers who were going that way. He lingered, smiling, on the veranda. Mrs. Quest, lingered, smiling. Then she said briskly:’ Well, Steven, we will both have travelled a long way before we meet again

  ‘Yes, missus, goodbye, missus.’ He went off down the path into the trees and Mrs. Quest lay on her bed and wept.

  Now, after Steven, there was Marie, the coloured girl. She brought the little boy from his nursery school, gave him lunch, and then cleaned the house while he took a nap. Then she prepared food, darned, made tea for Mrs. Quest. She was a brisk little thing, who looked about eighteen. She had two children, cared for by her mother while she worked. Mrs. Quest suspected them of being illegitimate. Marie was religious. Mrs. Quest, religious, found Marie’s religion altogether too much of a good thing. Marie could not smoke, drink, go to the pictures, dance or-Milly said yes, the children were illegitimate. Milly did not appear to be upset by this. She and her husband were liberals; they hated the nationalists; they took it for granted that Mrs. Quest, like themselves, must regard apartheid as criminal. Marie, staying late to baby-sit, slept in a spare room, and she sat down to eat with them if she was there at mealtimes. Mrs. Quest thought: well, it’s all right for them they don’t understand our problems. Milly and her husband had been five years in the Cape, and proposed to return to England when they could.

  It was not that Mrs. Quest disliked Marie, on the contrary. She was a very good kind of girl, clean, and responsible with the child. Once when Mrs. Quest had a headache, Marie put her to bed in a dark room, and laid strips of cloth soaked in vinegar on her forehead. Marie talked a great deal about her own two children, about her mother, and about God, who rewarded patience in this vale of tears. Mrs. Quest, listening, thought that her own faith was less, but had once been like this. She remarked, with the quietly grim humour which she knew upset some people, though not Milly, who shared it, that: She did so hope so, but there didn’t seem to be much evidence of it. Marie sighed, smiled, said she would pray for Mrs. Quest. Spending her afternoons with Marie, the old lady thought of Steven, whom she would probably never see again and reminded herself that in England she would be free of colour problems. She made a note never to discuss them with Martha: she really must remember not to.

  Her pleasant intimacy with Milly ended when Milly’s husband Bob returned from America.
He was very clever, well-informed, energetic. A short, spry, gingery man whose hands always seemed to be full of papers and newspapers, he seemed to Mrs. Quest to be not good enough for Milly. In the evenings, when he was not at his newspaper, he made a great many pronouncements about everything in the world, particularly America, which country he did not admire. He was opinionated about Africa, about the policy of her own country’s government. Mrs. Quest tried very hard to be tactful, to say yes, and no; and not to disagree.

  It was from him she learned that her daughter’s employer Mark Coldridge, was a well-known communist writer. She was given a novel to read which she found cold, and intellectual. It described an ideal communist city somewhere in the Middle East. But it was a very dishonest book, sly: it did not mention communism. Discussing the novel with Bob, or rather, listening to his opinions, she agreed with him: communist propaganda was dangerous because it was so dishonest. No communist city was like the one he described, nor had ever been. But naive people or backward people (like the Africans), might very well read the book and believe it. Bob did not believe in censorship, but he did think some kinds of propaganda ought to be forbidden: this novel, for instance.

  Was her daughter a communist, he inquired? Mrs. Quest said she supposed she must be.

  She remembered a letter from Martha in which she had said she was not. Mrs. Quest had a cardboard box with all Martha’s letters in it. She spent one evening reading back through the letters, which said so very little, until she found the one she looked for, dated about two years back. The relevant sentences were: You know I’m not a communist; don’t you think it would be a good idea if we kept off politics?

  But she was probably lying: they were sly.

  Mrs. Quest shut away Martha’s letters, feeling panicky, bewildered. She could not remember writing to Martha about politics at all. What had she written about? She had been writing a lot recently, of course, but that was only because she did not want to be a trouble when she arrived, she wanted to have things clearly understood.