The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Your father loved his brother, ’ said Martha.

  ‘I don’t understand it, ’ said Francis flatly.

  Martha now suffered that violent emotional surrender that is imposed when the young take possession of one’s past, nullify it, if you like: or at least, jerk it out of the shape it has had.

  She rejected: There is no reason at all why you should, and said mildly:’ Mark is rather consistent really: he has always followed his Own line-there’s an emotional logic in it. What changes is the-Zeitgeist, whatever word you want.’

  ‘Well, yes, ’ he said, violently.‘But it’s just a bloody joke.’

  ‘It could very easily have not been a joke, ’ she said, warning, out of her knowledge, the knowledge of her generation as to what is possible. But he looked at her vaguely, this not being remotely his point, and after a while, took up the book, the case for the prosecution, as Martha called it to herself in a sad private joke, and went out with it.

  Next day, due to go back to his school, he said he wanted them to make a list of schools that were neither public schools, nor ‘aggressively’ progressive.

  He also said that he would be coming home for the holidays in the future. ‘I’ll have to some time, I suppose, ’ he said, in his forlorn way of outlining his position.‘But I can’t go to a day school. I can only take this in small doses. It’s too much of a good thing.’

  That he was able to talk like this, comparatively open, and straight, showed what the short period of the holiday had done in bringing him towards Paul’s openness.

  Francis then, went back for his last term at Eton.

  And Paul came home, since his school’s holidays were starting. He had spent nearly a month, either sitting on his bed, or defying authority by stalking around the school as if he were entitled to, and going to meals. He had not gone to classes-but then, at that school children did not have to, though all did, except at moments of crisis like this; and he had insisted on going to the school church services, which were a kind of amalgam of a dozen different Christian sects conducted by a teacher. He had never gone near these religious exercises before, but during that month he had not missed one. The school was not likely to have failed to see his message to them. He came home, since the holidays began; and everyone was going home. He had not been expelled; and, although ‘asked to leave’ could say that he had not left.

  However, he was not going back; he knew that sooner or later he had to go to another school.

  He was in a mood of violent, electric aggression. The school, his home, was no longer there for him: it had let him down, or so he felt it. And he had heard through the bush telegraph that links the young from school to school, that Francis had been home for all the holidays: which he had not done once before.

  As soon as he arrived, Paul went down to the basement to see Lynda. He found her in bed with a migraine. She was hardly able to speak. Paul understood it very well. He shrieked at her:’ All right then, I hate you, I hate you too!’ And he rushed back upstairs to lock himself in his room.

  Lynda went on being ill. She was not more ill than she was very often: but Dorothy, who felt betrayed and sacrificed to Francis, would not help her. Previously, when Lynda was ill, Dorothy nursed her, suffered with her, sat by her: now Dorothy made a demonstration of having many things to do.

  Lynda, for whom Francis’s presence had been a torture of ineffective guilty love, and who had tried harder than she had ever done over anything in her life, had been longing for the moment when he would go back to his school. But she told Martha that she was happier than she had ever been. She knew that because Francis was trying too, was no longer treating her and the basement as forbidden territory, ‘unclean, like lepers’ - she could learn to be with him, not to feel ill, not to be upset. Next holidays, she felt, things would be much better. Now she needed to rest.

  And she did not have the energy for Paul. She was sacrificing Paul, her playmate, for her son; she was quite clearminded about it. And when Paul, after remaining in his room for a couple of days, descending secretly at night to get food, retreating before he could be met and talked to, rushed down again to the basement to storm and entreat and accuse, she simply locked her bedroom door and pulled the covers over her head.

  A few days after Paul came home, Lynda crept out of the house one morning, went to Dr Lamb, and demanded to be put back into a hospital. If he didn’t do this, she said, she thought she would probably kill Dorothy. She did not want to go back to the hospital she had been in before: she wanted to save Mark expense. An ordinary State hospital would do. She went straight to the hospital from Dr Lamb’s office; and Martha sent on some clothes. Dorothy was in a heap of misery in the basement, in a kind of breakdown of her own.

  It became evident that it was Lynda who had supported Dorothy; not what they had imagined, that Dorothy kept Lynda together. At any rate, Dorothy who had had a job, had kept her sad gentlemen dangling, and from time to time considered marrying her co-manager, now stayed in the basement, for the most part in bed.

  Martha and Mark, descending to the basement, met, not a unit of two women guarding their precarious balances, but Dorothy, voluble, betrayed, vindictive.

  All kinds of things were made clear. For one thing, drugs. In the last year Lynda had given up drugs. She had made a decision that if she couldn’t do without them, there was no point in living. For living with the drugs the hospital gave her, the sleeping pills, the sedatives, the pep-pills and the rest, meant that she was never ‘herself. ‘It is not that they are habit-forming, it is just that one can’t do without them, ’ explained Dorothy, in the sour humour that was the note of the basement when it was ‘well’ as distinct from ‘ill’ and violent. Giving them up, Lynda had slept badly, been frail and on edge: she had gone back to them, several times, and had again given them up. Into this battle had come Francis’s determination to reclaim his mother and his home. Still Lynda had not gone back to the chemicals. Then the conflict over Paul: she loved Paul, but had to betray him. Dorothy, betrayed, was urging her back on drugs. Dorothy could not do without them. At first she had aided Lynda, supported her: she, Dorothy, was not strong enough for this battle, but if Lynda could be … then, she switched, and Lynda found boxes of pills everywhere she went, put there by Dorothy who knew her every weakness, the exact moments when she was most vulnerable, Dorothy was taking more drugs, larger doses. Living with Lynda inside a cocoon of drug-induced euphoria, or lethargy, was one thing, but quite another, when Lynda was shrill, sleepless and jumpy. At any rate, drugs had been the battleground where their many accumulated differences had been fought out.

  Dorothy did not want to stay without Lynda. She asked Dr Lamb to send her to the same hospital; Dr Lamb thought otherwise. For one thing, Lynda did not want it. Dorothy visited Lynda in the hospital, but Lynda, inside a drug-created calm, would hardly speak to her.

  Dorothy saw, or felt she did, that Lynda wished to be rid of her. She was convinced that the household wished to be rid of her.

  From time to time she came up the stairs, in her dressing-gown, and shouted, or remarked, or wheedled, according to her mood, saying that they all wished her to go.

  They reassured her; but the truth was, of course, they did.

  They were having to keep Paul away from her, and her away from Paul. She had been heard screaming at him that he was a ‘Jewish brat’.

  Paul said:’ She’s jealous because I live here and she doesn’t.’

  But he was talking of a woman who had been a kind of mother to him, while Lynda had been playmate. His school had gone; Lynda had gone; now Dorothy called him names.

  The young take precedence: if Dorothy was going to ‘upset’ Paul, then…

  About a month after Lynda went into hospital, Dorothy slashed her wrists, to an adequately alarming depth; and was taken off to another hospital, not Lynda’s.

  Meanwhile, a conversation with Paul.

  The direction of this had in fact been indicated by Dorothy. Living with the m
entally ‘upset’ is a lesson in our own splits, discords, contradictions. No one was more intelligent about Paul than Dorothy, provided he was not in the same room. She had said:’ What you’ve got to make him see is, he’s not entitled to get away with it. Otherwise he’s going to be ever so surprised to find himself in prison.’

  Martha:’ When the term starts you’ve got to start school.’

  Paul: ‘I don’t want to.’

  Martha:’ It’s the law.’

  Paul: ‘I shall stay here. I don’t want to go to that school.’ (Paul had been accepted by the local council school.)

  Martha:’ If you had listened to what we said, if you had believed it, you’d still be at your own school.’

  Paul:’ If I promised not to do it again, would they take me?’

  Martha:’ No. It’s too late.”

  Paul: ‘I don’t want to go to school any more, why should I?’

  Martha:’ You’ve got to go to school for at least another three years. That’s the law. I didn’t make the law. Your uncle didn’t make the law. The law is, you must go to school until you are fifteen. Are you listening, Paul?’

  He wore a scarlet jersey and tight black pants. He sat huddled in a big chair under the kitchen window, on the defence, clutching the bars of the chair and looking over them at her.

  Martha:’ If you aren’t listening then you are being as stupid as when you didn’t listen about your school. We said exactly what would happen-but you didn’t believe it. You’d better believe it

  He was grinding his teeth and hating her: great, forlorn, black eyes stared at the cruel world, at Martha. But he was, she thought, listening.

  Martha:’ If you weren’t in this house, if you weren’t Mark’s nephew, privileged, one of the privileged ones, it would be Borstal, police courts. But you are privileged. You’ve got some leeway. But not much. If you refuse to go to school, then you’ll hang about here a little, and then the officials will start coming. The machinery will go into motion. Once it is in motion, then-you’d better think about it. For you it wouldn’t be Borstal and children’s officers. It would be psychiatrists and a school chosen because you are special. Well, if you want that, you can have it.’

  Paul sat twisted, gripping the bars of the chair with both hands, and his long look at her was both full of hate, and masked with cunning.

  Once in the zoo Martha had seen a baboon, with its back to the people, squatting on the floor, rubbing something on the cement. Scrape, scrape, went the object it held. Mark joked:’ He’s sharpening a stone.’

  It was not a joke. The animal had got hold of a pebble from somewhere. How? Leaned down out of its cage to reach up a stone that had been thrown at it by a child, perhaps? At any rate, it had a pebble, and was trying to sharpen it. Sad, painful: it was a round smooth pebble. But it was the only thing the animal had. After some minutes of labour it turned itself, its back still kept to possible watching enemies and spies, and sawed with that very round. smooth pebble at the wire of its cage. It worked, and rubbed and tried and laboured. Then dejected, defeated it sat down, having carefully hidden the pebble under some straw and moved itself around to face the watching people: Martha and Mark. The look in its eyes was the look in Paul’s eyes now. What fantasies or plans of revenge, or hate, or escape did that poor baboon harbour, as it sat there with its round pebble, its only weapon, only possession, pushed behind some straw?

  Martha said:’ Paul, the term starts in ten days. If you’re sensible you’ll be there at school on the first day. And in the meantime you’d better do some thinking: there’s a limit to what your uncle can do. And don’t let yourself be caught up in that machinery: there’s a big impersonal machine out there-sensible people keep clear of it.’

  He remained silent, watching her. Then he slipped out of the chair and went up to his room.

  There was a telephone call from Lynda: would Martha please go and see her? Previous messages had said that Lynda did not want to see either Mark or Martha.

  The hospital was near a country town. Martha got on to a train, and travelled through the neat English countryside. Then off the train on to a bus; she travelled through nice suburban respectable England, little gardens, little houses, the families, mummy, daddy, and one, two, three children, all going to school till they were fifteen (the under-privileged) or till twenty-three or so, if destined for university. On the outskirts of the little town, a birch wood, then, a large long high red brick wall. She entered the wall through well-painted green iron gates, and was in something like a park, with trees, shrubs and flowerbeds among which were scattered all kinds of buildings, some large, some small, some like cottages, others like barracks, or prisons. For this mental hospital was huge and catered for many thousands, from the very ill, in the barracky prison buildings, about whom the others joked: Abandon hope all ye who enter here, to the fortunate like Lynda. Lynda was not in a cottage, but in a medium sized block. It was approached through tidily arranged rose-beds, where some patients were working. They could be recognized as patients because of their slow-moving indifferent condition. Martha walked through clean glittering corridors, and rooms where people sat smoking, watching television, talking together, playing cards, in that unmistakable atmosphere of the mental hospital, where everything is in slow motion, movements, voices, air, sensations. Drugs. The smell of drugs. Drugged, slowed people: as if they had entered a watery dream world, and moved there in a different dimension, hypnotized.

  Lynda was in a ward, or room which had six other beds in it. It was very neat and bright. It had a mad tidiness about it. Each bed had a locker, and there was a chair for every other bed.

  Lynda sat on her bed. She wore a greyish dressing-gown, which was rather grubby. And her beautiful hands had blood-stains around the finger-tips.

  ‘Martha, ’ she said at once, hurriedly, but with an effort, as if against the sluggishness of the drugs:’ I’ve got to get out of here.’

  Martha sat on the chair near the bed. The bed was very high; a hospital bed. The chair was very low. She looked up at Lynda, whose face seemed somewhere up near the ceiling. She got out of the chair and climbed on the bed close to Lynda.

  ‘But, Lynda, you’re not committed, are you?’

  This was stupid. Too sensible. For some moments, entering this world, one was always too sensible. She had to adjust.

  ‘They said they’d commit me, they’d lock me up-last time I was silly.’

  Martha knew, Lynda knew, that this was a threat merely; part of the game: naughty child, bad child, behave or else.

  ‘What is Mark saying?’ inquired Lynda, bringing her face close to Martha’s: the lovely, ill face, the great, ill eyes were a few inches from Martha’s. She moved back a little. So did Lynda, who exclaimed peevishly:’ Everyone from outside is so … you’re all scared of landing up here yourself, that’s why!’

  She sat, trembling, angry.

  ‘Mark would like to come and see you, ’ said Martha.

  Lynda trembled, turned away, looked for a box on her locker-top, found a pill, swallowed it.

  ‘I got violent, ’ she said. ‘I do, sometimes. They give me injections and pills-then I fight and get violent. Then they say they’ll put me in Abandon Hope. I keep asking them, don’t give me pills, I can do without them. But they do. You remember when you said about you getting your memory back, you couldn’t have done that if you were drugged to the eyes, could you? No. I said to them, I’ve got a friend, she lost her memory, but she got it all back again. That goes to show, doesn’t it? But they thought I was talking about myself. I’d forgotten, you’ve got to be careful about what you say. I expect it’s in the dossier by now, that I’ve lost my memory.’

  ‘Lynda, why don’t you just come home?’

  ‘I know Mark doesn’t want me home.’

  ‘That isn’t true, ’ said Martha, at once and with conviction.

  Lynda, trembling, leaned forward to search Martha’s face, her weight on her two hands. A nurse appeared. She was a yo
ung professional-looking woman. She drew a curtain across, and adjusted a blanket lying on the foot of a bed. She did not look at Lynda directly, nor at another young woman who sat dozing in a chair, but she had absorbed the atmosphere, whether Martha was ‘upsetting’ Lynda, and she knew what she had to report to matron and to doctors. She went past, with a smile at Lynda’s visitor, a nod at Lynda, and disappeared.

  ‘This business of my losing my memory-the doctor goes on and on. They don’t believe me now. The funny thing is, now I think: I can’t remember that and that. Well, most people can’t remember things. But I keep having to tell myself, it’s quite normal if I can’t remember this and that. I’ve got to get out of here …’ She started to cry. ‘I can’t help crying, it’s these bloody pills.’

  ‘Lynda, do you want to leave? To come home?’

  Lynda sighed, relaxed, stopped crying.

  ‘That’s the point. Do you know why I came? I knew they’d drug me up to the eyeballs as soon as I came in. Then it would be their fault. Not my fault. That’s why. But I discovered something. I’ve been off for a whole year. And I hadn’t realized that I had improved-because I had, you know, really. I had forgotten what it was like to be full of muck all the time. I kept thinking, what’s the use, I might as well take them. But when I got back in here and I started in again then I realized how different I was. You don’t have any will, you don’t want anything, you just want to sit about. But now I’m scared. If I come home … there’s no point if I come home and go on taking pills. I might as well be here. Dorothy’s not going to be there now, you know.’

  What it amounted to was, Lynda was saying she was going to be alone. She didn’t want to be alone.

  ‘You could come home and try to be-part of everything.’

  Lynda came to life, responded. This was the point.

  ‘Yes, but Francis? What about Francis? It’s all right for you and Mark, you’re used to me.’