The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Later it turned out that neither Patty nor Gerald were communists-they had stopped being. In which case why were they so violent about it all, and why had they gone to that awful theatre? But Patty said she had decided to work there, because it needed someone there who wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. Mrs. Quest’s head was aching again. She was thinking that it was a pity she hadn’t said what she had thought earlier, instead of saying yes, very nice, very interesting. Honesty was after all the best policy; and she took an opportunity to say to Mark that she did not think his novel about that idealized city in Iraq or wherever it was an honest picture of communism. Mark said politely that he entirely agreed with her. Did that mean that he had seen the light about communism too?

  Mrs. Quest felt that she might have made another blunder, but could not put her finger on why. They were all talking about Africa-as if they knew anything about it! She soon went up to bed, where she tried to sleep. But she had slept all that afternoon, and decided instead to have it out with Martha about not asking her to help with the supper. And what was wrong with her? She went downstairs, and quietly opened the door to see if Martha was asleep. She saw the room was dark; and was about to withdraw when she noticed that two shapes were outlined against the window, and the glow of cigarettes showed Martha and Mark, side by side on the bottom of the bed. She withdrew, hoping she had not been seen.

  Next day she said severely that she hoped, next time Martha didn’t feel well, she would trust her mother enough to help her. Martha said she would.

  Mrs. Quest thought she couldn’t face another of those long confusing evenings again-not for a time at least. She started on a round of visits, for an evening, a day, a week-end, to old friends, with whom she had been exchanging letters for thirty years.

  Once there had been a group of bright young people ‘with all their lives in front of them’. They had had musical evenings and amateur theatricals and excursions to the theatre; they had studied for exams and flirted but had not married each other: they had all married rather late when they could afford it. That remarkable process which transforms any batch of nice ordinary middle-class youngsters into people who organize other people, had done its work; they had all become civil servants, and sea-captains and judges and matrons of hospitals. For the most part, out of England. Most had spent their working lives out of their own country in what they had called the Empire and in places like Japan and China. What was left of them now? A dozen or so old ladies living with relatives, or in flats that were parts of houses once their own. With these old ladies Mrs. Quest was at ease, and there were no problems of communication; and they exchanged throughout evenings and week-ends the phrases of their own short-hand, while they caught up on the gossip of half a century.

  When one of them said that young people nowadays had no sense of responsibility, and that England was being ruined by all these foreigners, and that the lower orders (a phrase used freely among themselves though they would never dare use it to their children) were spoiled and showed no respect, each knew exactly what was meant. And, since no time was wasted on definitions and on seeing other people’s points of view, they were able to exchange their real emotions, which was why they needed to meet. They felt a puzzled sorrow, a bewilderment: how was it that overnight (so they felt it) they had been transformed from people with responsibility and power into mendicants begging for the privilege of doing a granddaughter’s shopping, or coaching a cousin’s niece for her English O-Levels?

  Mrs. Quest felt about these visits as her own grandmother felt when she was able to take off her corsets after a dinner party, but all the time she was brooding, worrying: if Martha was ill, she needed help, and she, Mrs. Quest, was the person to help her. But for some reason she did not dare ask openly what was wrong with Martha. This business of illness-and had not her whole life been involved with it? -was not as simple as it seemed. As for Martha’s being ill, Mrs. Quest had unpleasant memories that went back to her adolescence. The old lady could not quite remember the incident, the words, but lying awake at night rehearsing conversations that had taken place-(might have taken place?)-she heard herself saying: That’s not true, you are always accusing me? How can I make you ill? Why should I want to make you ill? All I want is to look after you, what is my life for if it isn’t to sacrifice it for you?

  She was able to help when Francis came home for two days at the beginning of his holidays. Everything about Francis was reassuring. The school had not changed at all: friends of her brother had gone there; she had visited there for sports days as a girl. Francis was very polite, clean, good-mannered, as a boy should be from a school with such a name. His room was a boy’s room, with cricket bats, a silver cup for high jumping; boys’ books. She offered to take him to the zoo, but realized he was perhaps too old? He asked, polite, if she would take him to a Schoolboys’ Exhibition at Earls Court. The trip wore her out, they must have walked miles, but she took him to tea, and was even able to ‘pull his leg’ a little. He blushed and writhed and hung his head: so she remembered her brother’s friends doing-even doing herself, when they were subjected to that process known as ‘ragging’, or ‘being brought down a peg or two’. Francis’s scarlet-faced torments of embarrassment, his bare clean knees, made her yearn to put her arms around him.

  Francis was to spend his holidays in the country-which seemed odd. particularly as his cousin Paul was coming home.

  Martha said the two didn’t get on.

  Mrs. Quest remarked how sad it was: Martha replied with precisely that brand of grim humour which Mrs. Quest was always looking for in her, but always missed:’ that they were all stuck with that one, weren’t they?’

  Mrs. Quest, trying to keep the moment, said, meaning to compliment, that Francis was really such a nice well-behaved little boy. Martha said, ‘True, he’s stuck with that too, poor boy.’

  Rage surged in Mrs. Quest and she snapped out that Paul, from what she had seen of him was quite different, not at all like Francis.

  She disliked Paul intensely, loud, shrill, intense, Jewish-but the word was censored before she could say it.

  Was her disliking Paul so obvious, an embarrassment? For it was suggested she might go to the country with Francis? She went, bitter, and the fortnight she spent there was what she remembered afterwards as the best part of her trip to England. She spent her time with Harold Butts talking about flowers and plants: it was hard to say which of them knew more, loved more. And she talked to Mary Butts about the Coldridges.

  Mrs. Butts was the essence of discretion, but Mrs. Quest learned enough to make her even more determined to help Martha. She even wondered if Martha had not been drugged by the communists, or brain-washed in some way, as possibly Mark had been too?

  She saw little of Francis during the fortnight: as a healthy boy should, he spent his time in the woods and the fields, and was silent at mealtimes.

  When she returned to the house in Radlett Street, Paul had gone off to stay with school-friends. Because she, Mrs. Quest, was there?

  But she did not mind. It was obvious Martha was not well, for she spent so much time in her room. Once or twice Mrs. Quest knocked but there was no reply: the door was locked. Mark was not at his factory, but locked in with Martha making love? Martha was pretending to be asleep? Martha had gone out and locked the door so as to prevent her mother examining her room?

  Mrs. Quest examined the whole house and concluded that it was shockingly badly run: it was bound to be, for when she was a girl, such a house had needed a cook, two housemaids, and a cleaning woman. This one had Mrs. Coles, a shocking old slattern, and Martha. Mrs. Quest turned out the floor she was on, had the curtains cleaned, and the carpets done. She turned out the attics, in which she found much to interest in the way of clothes and papers and letters. Then, one day, when Martha was out, she found the door unlocked and went into Martha’s room and examined it. Nothing to disturb except an indefinable aroma of secrecy, of things concealed. But Mrs. Quest took all the clothes out of a ward
robe and mended what needed to be mended. She took armfuls of clothes to the cleaners. She then gave the room a thorough turn out. No one said anything at all, though she waited for a reprimand. Then, forcing herself, she descended a floor and cleaned every inch of Mark’s room and even Mark’s study. Meanwhile Mrs. Coles did her usual minimum and remarked that if some people wanted to make work, they were welcome. This caused Mrs. Quest days of fury; she, as usual!-was forced to be a servant because servants would not work, and their employers spoiled them. Mrs. Coles gave notice. Mrs. Quest told Mark and Martha, defiantly, that there was no need to look for another charwoman: she, Mrs. Quest, would engage one. She hoped she knew how to engage a cleaning-woman.

  In the meantime she worked. She worked. From seven in the morning, for she was waking early, she cleaned and washed and scrubbed, avoiding Martha, who seemed very busy, or at least, either locked herself in her room or was out of the house. She worked until after lunch when she slept all afternoon and, refusing all invitations from Mark and Martha for a dinner or an outing somewhere, visited friends in the evenings, or stayed in her room writing letters. She once descended to the basement, and spent a confusing afternoon with Mrs. Coldridge who said that if she, Mrs. Quest, started cleaning it, she was afraid Dorothy would kill her. Later a woman called Mellendip told her fortune from a teacup. She prophesied a trip by air in the near future. She also saw (or so she claimed) gardens and mountains and roses among the dregs in her cup. The woman Mellendip (definitely not a lady, whatever else she might be!) also made some offensive remarks about old age, such as, that it was a time for serenity and reflection and’the eating of stored honey’. Or rather, the offensiveness of it only struck Mrs. Quest later: at the time she had felt they were having a nice talk. Mrs. Quest was twenty years older than Mrs. Mellendip-at least! She was old enough to be that lady’s mother. Yet there she had sat, listening to impertinent advice from someone who would have done better to listen to her … she did not go again to the basement. For one thing, there was Dorothy, unbelievably common; and what that nice Mrs. Coldridge could see in her, she really couldn’t…

  Martha came up to her mother’s room one evening during a letter-writing session, sat down, lit a cigarette, and said:’ Mother, look, Mark can perfectly well afford charwomen, you know.’

  This declaration of war caused Mrs. Quest to burst into frightened and confused tears. Martha, after remaining quiet for a moment, looking very pale, put her arms around her mother, though Mrs. Quest could feel that it was not a’real’ embrace. She said:’ Please, you really must try and see …’ Mrs. Quest repeated that she just wanted to help, she wanted to be of use, what else was there for her in life? Soon Martha lit another cigarette and went downstairs again.

  Mrs. Quest, weeping, wrote to her son. She was not feeling well. She was very tired. She was much too old to be on her knees scrubbing floors, and standing on ladders cleaning windows. A few days in bed was what she needed, she really didn’t feel…

  Martha brought trays at mealtimes, but her mother jerked up from her pillows, looked guilty, scrambled into a dressing-gown, insisted on going down to the kitchen to cook herself food. So she was neither ill, nor not ill; yet in bed she lay with arms and legs stretched out, unable to move them because of the arthritis.

  In Dr Lamb’s room the dialogue, or monologue, or process which was the shadowy accompaniment to that which was unfolding itself in Radlett Street, came to a climax.

  ‘You know that you have to tell her to go.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘She’ll go anyway, ’ Martha muttered.

  ‘A sort of passive resistance, that’s what you are doing?’

  ‘If I did what you wanted, shouted and screamed at her-that’s what you want me to do, isn’t it?’

  ‘You haven’t, have you? Not ever in your life?’

  ‘No. If I did that, it would be healthy, I would be saved?’

  ‘Why don’t you try it?’

  ‘Who would I be shouting at? It would be like hitting a child.’

  ‘Excepting that she isn’t, is she?’

  ‘I keep looking at her face, that face, that awful, miserable old face…’

  He was silent as this cycle came around again for what, the tenth time?

  ‘What you say, what you keep saying it’s no good, it’s no use-if it’s intellectualizing to wonder all the time, what’s wrong with us all-because it’s not just me. You fight your parents-everyone does-you have to do that? If you don’t then you’re sunk. So I didn’t fight, not the right way. But that isn’t the point. What is the fight? Who’s fighting what? Why is it that we all of us have to get out from under awful parents who damage us? Because what are they? She’s a pathetic old woman. All my friends, everyone I’ve known. It’s taken for granted. And it’s true-one has to. But was it always like this?’ (Martha, listening to her own voice, knew it was like the voice of her mother, during one of those muttering monologues to which she listened, appalled, fascinated, helpless.)‘Because there’s another point, all the time: if either I or my brother said: Right, we give in, do run our lives for us, she’d never have another day’s illness-she’d live till she was ninety or a hundred. But if I kick her out I sign her death warrant. I know that.’

  ‘So you feel guilty that you are murdering your mother?’

  ‘No, I don’t feel guilty. It’s not my fault. If it were my fault that would be easy. Or if it were her fault. But I wish I didn’t always know what’s going to happen. It’s like watching Paul and Francis-you know what’s going to be eating them in twenty years’ time. It’s not their fault, it’s not Lynda’s fault, it’s not Mark’s fault…’

  ‘But it’s your fault?’

  ‘No. You’re on the wrong track, I tell you …’

  Am I?’

  ‘Yes. If I wallowed around mea culpa, that would be a good mark? That’s not intellectualizing? No, that’s easy enough. No. And if you say one shouldn’t be asking the other questions-why? Was it always like this? What’s gone wrong with us? Then you’re wrong, you’re wrong, what question is there to ask? Or are we just children, and not responsible at all, ever, for what we live in?’

  ‘You need a historian perhaps, or a sociologist?’ The sarcasm, carefully measured as always, no longer affected Martha.

  ‘All right then-a different expert for every different type of question. But it’s the same question always.’

  ‘Mrs. Hesse, what you want is for me to kick your mother out because you haven’t the courage to do it.’

  ‘Yes, yes, ’ muttered Martha. ‘I do. I know that. But what difference does it make who actually does it? Because she’ll go anyway-she’s not getting what she wants, so she’ll have to go … Will you see her?’

  ‘I’ve already suggested that, I think. But you said no.’

  ‘I’ll try to get her to come.’

  ‘If you can’t do it, make yourself do it.’

  ‘She’ll break her leg, something like that.’

  ‘There are hospitals.’

  ‘Hospitals and old age homes. What’s wrong with us all?’

  ‘I have time at ten o’clock on Thursday.’

  Mark and Martha lay in each other’s arms, in a cave of soft protective dark.

  ‘If you like, I’ll talk to her, ’ said Mark, infinitely kind.

  ‘It’s my battle, it’s not yours.’

  ‘Well, Martha, speaking as an onlooker …’ Here they both laughed, helplessly, and then she began crying. ‘The fact is, that your mother’s upstairs in one room, in one bed, and you are downstairs in another. If neither of you can break it, then I’m going

  to.’

  ‘No. No. Of course I must.’

  Martha sat in her room, remembering how a few weeks ago she had fought, fought for her own memory-such energy! Where was it now? She made herself go upstairs to her mother’s room. She stood outside
it. From inside came the old voice, in its painful monologue. She made herself open the door and go in. The voice went on.

  Mrs. Quest lay, her painful arms stiff on the covers. Her eyes very bright with anger. ‘Filthy creatures, ’ she was saying, or remarking. ‘Sex. That’s all they think of. That’s all they do. Well, I could live in this house too if I was ready to earn my living with my legs in the air.’

  ‘Mother, ’ said Martha.

  Mrs. Quest looked at her daughter-or rather, looked at her differently, for she had been looking at her while she delivered her monologue. ‘Oh, is that you?’ she inquired cheerfully.

  Martha said:’ You don’t mean a word of it-why do you say it?’

  She stared at her mother, at the miserable old woman, trying to speak to the person in her who didn’t mean one word of it.

  Mrs. Quest began singing:’ Lead, Kindly Light.’

  ‘I want you to see a friend of mine, ’ said Martha.

  ‘Who, dear? “

  ‘His name is Dr Lamb.’

  Here we go, thought Martha, one of these idiotic conversations-well, we’ve been having them ever since I can remember.

  ‘I don’t remember your mentioning a Dr Lamb.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘I’ve seen too many doctors. I’m afraid I’ll have to live with it. After all, a lot of old people have arthritis.’

  A pause. Martha looked at the innocent, frightened old face on the pillow.

  ‘I don’t think I want to, really.’

  ‘I think it might be a help.’

  ‘Well perhaps, if I’m well enough.’

  ‘I’ve ordered a taxi for half past nine tomorrow. I’ll come up and help you dress.’

  ‘Very well, dear, if that’s what you want.’