The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  It was the little girls who ended the thing; though it would be hard to say exactly how. Later of course they would be saying: God, I was so awful when I was a girl… But it was bad luck for Phoebe that their period of awfulness coincided with Jim Troyes. First, they patronized him: they were dreadful little snobs. He brought Phoebe boxes of chocolates, but they were the wrong brand; he brought her large bunches of flowers, with which they made elaborate ‘arrangements’ all over the flat; he bought tickets for the theatre, but not for the plays ‘everyone’ was talking about. He did not at first realize he was being patronized; and when he did he took them to task, pleasantly and firmly, and they began to respect him.

  Then they flirted with him. He was enchanted. These two pink and white little morsels with their honey-thick hair and their great blue eyes seemed deliciously touching. Poor fatherless girls, he thought; if they had had a proper father they wouldn’t be behaving like this at all-and perhaps he was right. But every time Phoebe came into a room, it seemed that Jill was on the arm of a chair and that Jim was in the chair; or that Gwen sat at his feet staring up at him adoringly. And {ill took to kissing him goodnight and flinging her arms around his neck in a little-girl fashion that she must have got out of some film. Phoebe could not stand it. She privately thought Jill was sly and cruel. She was sixteen-not a little girl at all. Also, Phoebe had the benefit of Jill’s diaries, left around for her to see, and she knew what Jill thought of Jim and of her, Phoebe.

  But while she was angry, she was also self-distrustful: her own bleak but rigid honesty told her she was envious of her daughters. When she was young there hadn’t been pretty clothes and makeup and she hadn’t kissed a man till she was over twenty. She was genuinely glad for the girls now that they had such a good time, and that they could be pretty and free. But she resented it too.

  She began losing her temper. She lost her poise, her confidence. She quarrelled with Jim over the girls. He went back to Bradford for a short holiday, and while he was there she wrote breaking the thing off. And as soon as she had done so Jill began taunting her because she ‘couldn’t keep her man, poor old mummy, she hasn’t got what it takes, etc.’.

  This was where Phoebe had cracked: She did not know where to turn, whom to see. She went to her daughter’s headmistress, who said the girls were both very lazy, but not much worse than most; yes, Jill seemed a perfectly normal little girl to her, girls at that age were difficult, etc. At the end of the interview Phoebe was feeling very guilty; the headmistress had spoken as if she, their mother, were lacking in sympathy for her daughters. Phoebe began lying awake at night to see where she had gone wrong with the girls. But she could not: unless it was that she should have married one of the people who had asked her? Yes, of course she should have married, for the girls’ sake … but the fact was, she had loved Arthur Coldridge and no one had ever seemed half as good. Certainly not Jim Troyes, who himself regarded Arthur as a kind of hero.

  Jill’s diary, which for months she had ignored, since one didn’t read other people’s letters and private papers, until at last it had arrived on her dressing-table, open at key passages, told her she was selfish and neurotic and cold:’ a failure as a woman and as a mother’.

  She went to Martha, and to Mark, who said that she would ‘grow out of it’. It was all very well for them, they made no pretence at an ordinary life, ordinary relationships; and now the girls were there most of the time, and she, Phoebe, might just as well have not tried to give them an ordinary decent life, any kind of crazy set-up would have done. But the sad truth was, she was delighted when the girls were in Radlett Street, for she had come to dread that moment when, going to the dressing-table, or even the sink, or lying on her pillow, she would find Jill’s diary, open at some deadly message which cut her so that she could hardly breathe for a time, had to lie down and rest.

  She went to her doctor who sent her to a psychotherapist. This was a woman. The relationship lasted for a couple of confused months. The central fact here was glaringly obvious, like the sun in the tropics: both women were stupid about people and their relationships with each other. Both were perfectionists, and managing, and dogmatic by nature. Mrs. Johns was a Freudian, and knew all about Phoebe from her first interview with her. Phoebe believed in self-control, doing one’s duty, and behaving well even when others did not-she could not see what was wrong with this.

  The thing is, no one ever gets to that point of moral confusion where one finds oneself sitting before a human being privileged to pronounce on one’s state of being without having wondered and suffered and doubted … Phoebe knew well enough that she was a sadly rigid soul. But here she was, seated opposite another! Who was Mrs. Johns to pronounce on her, Phoebe? Phoebe kept wishing that Mrs. Johns would come to the point: there must be one, surely? For it was implicit in her manner that truths were there to be seen, but every time a truth or the intimation of one emerged, Phoebe thought it was suspect. For instance, Mrs. Johns seemed to think there was something odd about her long friendship with Arthur and his wife, Phoebe’s successor. The way Phoebe saw it, her decision to maintain this relationship had been the hardest of her life: she had had to swallow pride and misery to do it: she would much rather have cut Arthur out of her life altogether. But then, there were the two girls, and it was hard on them to be deprived of a father. Sometimes she had thought that if she had not seen so much of Arthur, her husband (she thought of him as such-she had never had another after all!) she might have found it easier to marry someone else. Had she been wrong? Mrs. Johns thought so. Phoebe was not prepared to agree.

  Then there was the business of Phoebe’s politics. Mrs. Johns said politics did not come into this, and Phoebe tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. But for Mrs. Johns politics was voting once every five years, and being tactful about other people being Labour; Phoebe supposed that being so ignorant about what went on in her own country did not matter to superior insights about mother-daughter relationships? Then it emerged that Phoebe’s long career in politics was’masculine’, she was competing with men; she wished to be one. Phoebe agreed at once that of course, had she been given the choice, she would have chosen to be a man, because they had so much easier a time of it-but wouldn’t every woman say the same, if she’ was honest? Mrs. Johns found this an admission of importance; but Phoebe could not see why. Yes, of course having been brought up without a mother had been hard for her, yes of course it had been hard never having pretty clothes or being allowed to make up, yes of course she had felt unluckier than other girls. Of course. She waited for Mrs. Johns to come to the point, while she felt more and more ill, and did not sleep at all-she was convinced. She seemed to ache all over. But it didn’t do to give in, to slacken, to indulge oneself. She put a good face on everything; and continued her usual busy life.

  Why did she work so hard? asked Mrs. Johns.

  Well, it’s the kind of person I am, said Phoebe.

  She despised people who didn’t work hard, didn’t she? No, Phoebe didn’t think so: but she did go back again’to the beginning’ which for her was the divorce with Arthur Coldridge, and wonder if she had been right to choose such hard work.

  Because of course she could have earned a great deal of money; could have had a much easier life. But it had never even been a temptation: she was not interested in an easy life. Now it seemed that perhaps her daughters had suffered? Jill complained that ‘You always put your career before us!’ It was true? She ought to have become a real career woman of some kind? The sort that earns a lot of money and is ambitious? ’Neglected as I have been …’ an entry of Jill’s might begin.

  For years Phoebe had got up every morning at six, cleaned the flat, got breakfast for the girls and herself. Until they grew older and had understood that not everybody spent a couple of hours before the day started over breakfast, they had enjoyed that meal with their mother. She then took them to school, went to work. She shopped for the family during her lunch-hour. In the afternoons arrangements were made for
the girls to go somewhere, or for somebody to go to the flat with them. Phoebe came home to cook them supper, and see them into bed or to their homework, before she went out again to some committee meeting. She had lived like that for years. No holidays, except with the children-sometimes she had taken a week-end off to go down to Nanny Butts’s by herself while the girls went with their father. But she had seen they had pretty clothes, plenty of friends, and parties when other children did-she had always taken trouble over their food. She was an excellent cook.

  About two months after starting with Mrs. Johns, she had to put off a session, because she was cooking a big dinner for some visiting Americans interested in Africa; it was a question of getting some American Fund to give money to build schools in an area where there weren’t any schools.

  Next day, Mrs. Johns asked her about the dinner, and Phoebe described the food; she did not mention the object of the dinner, for Mrs. Johns would not have responded. Mrs. Johns then congratulated her on her new step towards femininity. Phoebe asked what she meant: it appeared that Mrs. Johns saw the cooking of the dinner as a feminine pursuit and therefore good, by definition.

  Phoebe did not understand. At last she pointed out that she always had cooked well, had always enjoyed it. Mrs. Johns murmured encouragingly:’ Good … that’s really very good indeed.’

  Phoebe went home, in the grip of a suspicion that after all, it was simple: Mrs. Johns wasn’t very bright; or, if she was, lived in some remote world where women didn’t cook, do housework, bring up children, hold down jobs, mend the plumbing and the electricity and in their spare time make clothes and garden.

  She made inquiries. It turned out Mrs. Johns had a husband who was a lecturer in physics, three children, a house, and one au pair girl. Mrs. Johns’s life was very similar to Phoebe’s, in fact; except that the au pair girl did most of the cooking.

  Phoebe gave up trying to understand Mrs. Johns or psychotherapy.

  Hearing that Phoebe proposed to’terminate the experience’, Mrs. Johns said that Phoebe’s trouble was, she didn’t like to admit that she, Mrs. Johns, was brighter than she was.

  Phoebe replied she didn’t think Mrs. Johns was brighter than she was; but that wasn’t the reason. She thought that they weren’t getting on very well.

  First she was hysterical about it, and wept. Then she was dry and humorous. But on the whole it hadn’t done her much good-insights and ‘psychology’ having failed her, she returned to her old self. The ‘breakdown’ over she was more Phoebe than ever. If only she had been able to hold the ‘breakdown’, to explore it, develop it. use it; turning her back on it, she refused a chance to open and absorb. She became, instead, more rigid, more controlled.

  The crisis with her daughters came to an end, or seemed to, when Jill turned up at her home after a week’s absence at Mark’s, and was told by Phoebe in a hurry to go out to a conference, that if she didn’t come home and stay home she, Phoebe, was going to get rid of the flat and get a smaller one: she saw no reason why she should run a large and expensive flat for children who were never there. She had a week to make up her mind, said Phoebe, and departed.

  When the diary arrived on her dressing-table that evening, with passages underscored in red, Phoebe dropped the diary into the garbage can.

  Jill moved all her things into Mark’s house. Gwen followed her example. Then they heard that Phoebe had in fact put the flat up for sale; it was no game. They went home, sulking and tempestuous, to a mother who was not playing games: she was locked away from them in a disapproving determination that they should be’sensible’. It was all dreadful: everyone knew it. When the girls came to visit Radlett Street, they were miserable; they complained that ‘our mother hates us’. They felt hated. Phoebe felt hated. The three females hardly spoke to each other. From time to time one of them would ring up Radlett Street, or drop in, to ask for advice, wait for suggestions. It is built into us all that there must be solutions to problems. If Mark said this, or if Martha said that: then Phoebe would say or do this or that, and then Jill or Gwen could be or become that and this … There’s a button somewhere, and you can push it-so we tend to think. But in fact things continued as they were.

  And in Radlett Street Lynda worked her way through to the end of being silly.

  It was Francis who had touched her off: but everyone, including Lynda, was concerned that he shouldn’t suspect it. But after all, he wasn’t a child now; he was almost a young man. Told that on the whole it would be better if he didn’t go near his mother for a while, he nodded, talked of something else-and came back a couple of days later with the statement:’ About Lynda; it was partly her fault for not telling me I was putting too much on her. But I don’t think she ought to swing back to the other extreme. For her own sake, she ought to let me go down sometimes.’

  This message was transmitted to Lynda, a bedraggled slut who sat swaying on the floor with her back to Mark who guarded her, hour after hour. It reached her. After a while she said Francis should come down that evening. She then had a bath, dressed, did her hair, and sat waiting for him. It was afternoon; and Francis was upstairs watching time go past until evening. He came down, sat opposite her, said gently:’ Hello, Lynda, how are you?’

  ‘Not terribly well.’

  She smiled, pathetically. His smile was as painful. They talked a few minutes, then she asked him to go:’ It’s embarrassing for me, you see, ’ she said.

  He kissed her and went. He was crying. He had not seen Lynda before when she was badly ill. He locked himself up in his attic, and came down a couple of days later to confront Mark and Martha with a demand for a serious talk. He wanted to know the whole history of his mother’s illness ‘right from the beginning’.

  Well, that wasn’t so easy; but they did their best. There were a great many doctors’ reports to show him. Again he listened, nodded, went off, and thought about it. Having thought he came back, wanting to know if they didn’t agree that it would be good if Lynda had to make the effort to dress and see him-regularly, let’s say, every day.

  It was extremely important to him: to them, it meant they suffered at the idea of his suffering if he saw Lynda looking like a sick witch, or worse. But again they transmitted the message to Lynda who received it in an angry panic. She wanted to be left alone, left alone, left alone, she muttered, and growled and shouted. The shout was meant to reach the ears of Francis-and possibly it did. But he was dogged: he knew what he thought; he was convinced he was right. Lynda said no, not every day but yes, she would try … so she got dressed, when Francis sent a message down, or rang her up. She put a smile on, and sat at the table waiting for him.

  The point was, she was able to do it. In the past, it had been assumed by all of them that it was as if a variety of switch were turned, and then Lynda slid away from herself; then she had to suffer it out, and at some point, got better. They remembered that last time, sent off to a flat with a nurse, she had stayed there only a short while, and behaved quietly (a surprise to them all) and had come home much better than usually after such a time.

  Throughout this spell, or bout, she had thought of Francis, intermittently, but responsibly.

  As for him, it was during this time that he grew up. For a few days he had talked of leaving home, throwing up his job, going off somewhere, probably Australia, but he didn’t go, he stuck it out. The change in him reached to the physical: there was nothing left of the wildly beautiful boy. He was a solidly built, quiet, contained young man, with steady brown eyes, he suggested patience, doggedness, strength. He was Mark all over again, but Mark said that he was much better and stronger than he had been at that age. The two, recognizing likenesses, tried to talk, to be together: they knew they loved each other, but usually their attempts broke down in stiff politeness.

  And Mark did not have much of a reserve, after spending what he did on Lynda. For, controlled and good she may have been with her son, but with her husband, she was abominable, she did not try at all.

  For a ti
me Martha thought Mark might very well crack himself: he thought so too. The three of them, Mark, Martha, Lynda, were in a tight knot together of shared tension, all ordinary life suspended; for Martha was deep in it, though she hardly saw Lynda. Mark’s attitude was that it was he who had decided Lynda should stay at home instead of going to hospital; and therefore it should be he, not Martha, who must take the strain. But it turned out that he couldn’t manage by himself.

  A week or so after Lynda’s breakdown, Mark had come upstairs at four in the morning to wake Martha. He was almost sick with exhaustion, with holding himself in one piece while Lynda went to pieces. But it wasn’t just an exhaustion, ordinary tiredness. He came to Martha for sex. Sex not for pleasure, nor for comfort, nor for fantasy, nor for friendship. It was for the explosion of an intolerably psychic tension. She was being used, if she cared to look at it like that, as a safety valve. He came to her as she had not ever seen him before: nothing in him now of Mark the white knight, Mark the friend, Mark the old lover. He was all a hard violent desperation, as if he were holding in himself a kind of charge or current that might shake him to bits if it got loose. And more of him was involved in this sex than ever before-or so it seemed. She did not know him.

  They could not use her bedroom. Her daylight role as Martha the holder of the fort, house-mother, friend of the young, meant among other things that she had no privacy. Her bedroom could be entered at any time. If she locked the door, people banged on it until it was opened. Paul and Francis allowed her some leeway-the girls none. Nor did she like going to his bedroom, which remained in spite of everything and after all these years, the room where Mark was married to Lynda. It was no use his saying not; she heard what he thought, what he remembered.