The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Mark, at last, said to Paul that if he wanted to throw £200 away, knowing that he was throwing £200 away, to line the pockets of crooks, then he, Mark, would give him £200. Paul dissolved into an effusion of gratitude. He rushed about, saying everywhere that he was saved, his uncle was saving him. Sally meanwhile was practically a prisoner in her flat, bereft of Paul who after all had done everything for her, had virtually created her. She reflected that she was the instrument for fleecing Paul of £200. By now she felt ashamed: her new protector was a nasty character, and the law and vague threats had become the air she breathed. She sneaked out of her flat in the middle of the night and rang Paul. The two had met secretly, in a Lyons Corner House. They wept together. She then returned to her protector to say that if he took £200 off Paul she would leave him. This cost her all her courage: she imagined prison, at least. That she had not signed any contracts was irrelevant to her: she was dealing, like Paul, in a very different currency. The youth magnanimously agreed to pay the lawyer’s fees himself, but in return she should bind herself to him. She felt this was the least she could do. Paul therefore got a letter saying he need not pay the £200. Paul felt he had made £200.

  Paul had two different sums of money, of two different kinds. One was £300, in the bank: he felt this to be connected somewhere with gold bars, something like that; the work he had put into getting it made it honest stuff. The other £200 was, so he felt, the ‘real’ money he had been waiting to get his hands on.

  It was in this way, that Paul was made to understand money: its fantastic nature. During the few weeks after he had ‘made’ that £200 he blossomed and burgeoned and went about as if he had laid hands on a map of hidden treasure.

  With three other young men, he bought a hairdressing shop in a dull suburb which was full of young people wanting to enjoy the benefits of new London. The point of this deal was that at no time did he, Paul, actually use money: that is, through a series of feints, delays, devices, he did not actually sign a cheque for the two hundred pounds which was what he contributed to the deal. Yet the sum existed-for when the shop was sold six months later for twice what they had paid, Paul’s share was £400. Paid to him by cheque.

  From absolutely nothing-at-all, or rather, some words, two hundred pounds, and how people saw Paul, felt Paul; another nothing-at-all, namely, a piece of paper with four hundred pounds written on it, had come into his possession, was his … at this moment of enlightenment anything was possible: Paul might very well have taken off into the higher reaches of finance, become an adviser to governments on Money-or turned to honest crookery.

  But it was as if the act of being made free, suddenly, of how the finances of the entire world are in fact run, was enough for him.

  He enjoyed many dreams of what was possible, but what he did was, to use his £400, this time conventionally, by writing and signing cheques, to buy another hairdressing shop with his group of friends. They all had flair, taste, panache-at the end of a year after Paul’s first £200, he had £1, 000. One thousand pounds, in fairy gold.

  And now, for some weeks he sat like a hen on a golden egg, coddling it, then rolling it around under him, treading it, warming it. He spent hours talking to Mark, Martha, Lynda (she was once again a real friend whom he loved), about money. Or rather, they listened: not being part of this world of quick chances, quick profits, quick deals-fairy gold, where the last thing any sensible person did was to have an honest job and work.

  ‘I don’t know why you look like that, Martha-I don’t break the law do I? And Uncle doesn’t like it either. Why not? And Lynda laughs at me-oh I know when people are laughing at me-1 don’t mind, I love Lynda, if she wants to laugh. But what would you rather I did, tell me that? ’

  Quite soon he bought half a house in an area which no one else had seen was ‘coming up’. He furnished it improbably but beautifully with the stuff in his rooms. And now, after boasting for weeks about the steady income he was going to derive from this gold mine, paying tribute in what already seemed a way profoundly out of the character, to the real stuff (gold bars and the rest), he installed in the top floor of the house-his old friend Zena. Whom he had never lost sight of, or ceased to help. She had left Radlett Street of her own accord. Out of pride, Paul said. But he tracked her down and helped her into a room with some friends. Then she went into a mental hospital for a time. When she came out, it was back to Radlett Street. And so it went on: she was a brave girl, trying hard, and never quite able to manage without help. Which Paul gave her.

  When he put her into his new house, he knew she would not pay rent, and that this ‘gold mine’ would be so much less of one. And he promised her she could stay there: this meant he could not sell it for quick profit. In short, right at the heart of his peoccupation, his secret joy, his growing-point, money, the romance of it, was what none of his elders and mentors had given him the credit of possessing-and he was good-naturedly derisive about it. ‘You thought I was going to turn into a sort of sordid old landlord, didn’t you, Lynda? Didn’t you, Martha? Oh, I know! Well, how do you know I won’t after all!’

  Into this house soon came another waif, a friend of Zena’s, or perhaps a lover; somebody at any rate like Zena, not able to live normally. Very soon there lived partly at Paul’s expense half a dozen young people who for one reason or another had no parents, or who did not get on with them, and who needed a home.

  But Paul’s capital was locked up. At which point he asked Mark to lend him some. ‘No, I don’t want the money. I just want you to say I can have it. It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? ’

  Mark had a thousand pounds in trust, which he had never told Paul, from the sale of his father’s goods when he vanished to Moscow. He gave Paul this money now. Paul received it with the quizzical tolerance due to likeable fools. Quite clearly, he could not conceive of anyone sensible having a thousand pounds, and letting it breed only five per cent. Three months later he came back to say he had trebled it. How, they wanted to know? Legally, they hoped! He received this with amusement. Ah, how old-fashioned they were. How absurd!

  And he was buying another house. Fairy gold was not for Paul, except as a means, or as an enjoyment. Bricks, mortar, earth, antique furniture and pictures-this was how he spent his time. Incredibly handsome, with his flashing dark-eyed, white-teethed good looks, beautifully dressed, amiable, alert, he was busy, busy, busy, all the day; and in the evenings he went to parties and was seen with the newest pretty girl. He did not sleep with anybody though, boy or girl. He liked it to be thought that he did. He would bring some sleek, good-looking creature home, having made a remarkable exit from a party, and they would spend the night in a great four-poster bed picked up for ten shillings in a country market-they would spend it holding hands, or in each other’s arms, tender, protective of each other’s loneliness, but sexless.

  A sign of the time. At a conference in London to discuss an esoteric interpretation of Hamlet half a hundred grown men and women talk for a whole day, Hamlet being forgotten in more urgent business, about the ‘youth’ and in terms exactly identical with those used by a committee of middle-class social workers about slum dwellers, or a white farmers’ meeting in Rhodesia about their black farm labourers. At no point during the day of sullen, resentful or tolerant comment, was there any suggestion of a reminder that the people they were talking about lived in the same houses, ate at the same tables, were, at least possibly, their own children.

  Another sign of the time: Elizabeth, James Coldridge’s daughter, having, after her affair with Graham, married an ambitious solicitor in Bristol and produced two children, had suddenly written a letter to Mark demanding the real name and address of his ‘City’. She wished to live there. On being informed that ‘as he thought should be obvious’ it was imaginary, she wrote to ask why he didn’t arrange, or make, a similar one. ‘And in that case, just let me know and I’ll help.’ Meanwhile she was leaving her husband, and proposed to assist drug addicts. For drug addiction has just succeeded to te
enage violence as that cause which should absorb every citizen.

  This was by no means the first time Mark had had letters inquiring about this city. In Algeria perhaps? Arabia? He perhaps had contacts who might help the sincere inquirer?

  On the whole though, this book had become invisible-it was profoundly not of the time. So with the war book-the Second World War was ‘in’ but only in its aspect of adventure, hair-raising escapes from prison, etc. Mark’s novel was wrong in tone. He had written another which had caused annoyance. The play about Aaron and Rachel had finally died: warm-hearted protest was absolutely out. But the doomed brother and sister lingered with Mark, refused to die. Brooding, about them, about Sally-Sarah, about Martha’s manuscript from Thomas, there had been born another person, a composite of all these people; (but, Mark claimed, more Thomas’s child than anyone) a boy who had not died in the concentration camps of the Second World War, had survived the Dispossessed Persons Camps, and had grown with just one idea in his mind, to get to Israel. There he had become one of the generation who turned their backs on everything traditionally Jewish, the religion, the history, the talent for suffering. He was a soldier, that and nothing more, hating more than any other the creed of turning one’s cheek, of patience, of tolerance, of endurance. His creed was, simply to fight, to strike back hard when struck, for any reason at all. His life was an expression of one need: to struggle out of the dark blood-sacrifice that was what Jewishness had meant to his parents. Yet he was a man seeking death, trained, equipped and waiting for it. He had become the mirror image of his parents and his ancestors; and his future, like theirs, was planned as death in a holocaust.

  This novel was short, dry, and its conclusions were implicit, not stated. Mark’s publisher had demurred about publishing it: it might be considered anti-Semitic. Paul was given it to read, for his mother, a still fertile ghost was after all in the book. But he did not enjoy reading. He would watch television for hours, complaining that the programmes were moronic; he went critically to the pictures. But he read like a child of seven, word after word, and was glad when the drudgery of it all was over. He said to Mark he thought all this stuff about Jewishness was silly. He said that ‘it was obvious to everyone’ that the Germans were Germans because of their being locked up in the middle of Europe-that was their history and therefore that was being German. And Mark’s book wrote of Jews locked up in the Middle East, Jews on the defensive-so why use words like Jew and German, he thought everyone was silly, he preferred watching television.

  Francis read the book, but inquired as usual with his old patient endurance of anxiety: Would they like it? No, no, he was not suggesting that Mark ought to write books to be liked but … and he hunched his shoulders as if taking on a burden and sharpened a defensive chin, as a small boy of eight or nine years old had done, reading what journalists said of his father.

  The book was reviewed rather coolly: it was suggested for instance that Mr. Coldridge was not Jewish; he would do better to write about subjects he understood. It was also suggested that perhaps he was too lightweight a writer to take on such weighty subjects-for the meantime Mark’s book which he considered the nearest he had written to a pot boiler had hit, belatedly and unexpectedly, exactly the mood of the time. The Way of a Tory Hostess had been reissued, made into television, serialized in a newspaper, and there was talk of it becoming a musical. Mark’s secretary, then, was again very busy, and this happened not more than a few months after discovering that the children were grownup and she had very little to do.

  In these months, six or seven of them, she made an interesting discovery. For a long time she had been saying: When I’m not so busy I suppose I shall stop dreaming? By this she meant that when she was no longer under pressure, it would not be necessary for the invisible mentor to talk, explain, exhort, develop, through dreams, because she would have time and energy for other methods. What methods? But she did not know. The qualities she had developed during that long past period of fighting to drag herself out of a pit were presumably still there and could be called on; though she often marvelled at the memory of that time, could not believe it had really happened.

  For years, while all her inner effort (not hers, her mentor’s) had gone into dreams, she had charted that tempting, dangerous glamorous territory lying just behind or interfused with this world where landscapes, shores, countries forbidden and countries marked Open, each with its distinctive airs and climates and inhabitants living and dead, with its gardens and its forests and seas and lakes, had come so close, so familiar, that a texture or flavour of dream might suffuse or interpenetrate a scene of ordinary life at a turn of a head or at a scent or a phrase or a smile horn a person passed in the street who seemed as if she, he, might have stepped at that moment from a landscape visited only in sleep.

  And sure enough, when the months of comparative leisure began, the dreaming lessened. But she did not know where else to look; for Lynda was not available for ‘working’; she was on an adventure of her own. Then, a period of new busyness began for Martha and she assumed that so would the dreams. But no, it turned out that after all for the time being she had done all she could there. She knew by the signs that show whenever we have finished with some thing, or with a person, a love, a country, a pattern of behaviour. There was a quality of resistance there. Entering (not again’, the dream’s texture seemed to complain) a dream garden where she had been at home; or recognizing the next instalment of a serial dream, there was a heaviness, a lack of flow. It was as if matter sulked, had become sullen, like a smile of welcome that has become mechanical. No, for the time being the road on was not there, through that country slippy with illusion and deliciously free from the logic of gravity of the ordinary body, where even pain seemed to hold an impatient longing that was its own promise.

  There was no movement on in sleep, and her days were too busy for that process of patient waiting and watching that is essential for the netting of the rare birds, the infrequent visitors. She worked for Mark, and she worked for Lynda, in her adventure, which, poor Lynda, had to be yet another attempt at being ordinary, at being normal.

  Years before Lynda had started to cook some meals, though as often as not she went downstairs while other people ate them. Then, when the house was not so full of young people, and meals were less demanding, she cooked them and stayed for them. Soon she was ordering meals, and might even go out to buy food from the shops. She thought that perhaps she might some day take over the running of the house.

  This step forward she had achieved having given up drugs of all kinds, having thrown even the sleeping pills away. When the routine prescriptions arrived from her doctor, she gave them to Mark or Martha to lock up with instructions not to give them to her ‘even if she cried for them’.

  Martha’s task then had become a tactful withdrawal, allowing Lynda to become Mark’s wife, or at least as much of a wife as was consistent with not bearing to be touched, for she still always went downstairs to sleep.

  What Mark wanted does not need to be said: what Lynda attempted next, was to be ordinarily social. She said she would like to try a dinner party, to go out to the theatre, to accept Francis’s and Paul’s invitation to visit their London.

  She made this demand almost impersonally: on behalf so to speak of her illness, or of an effort which they must applaud; just as she had announced in the past that she ‘was going to be silly’ again and therefore would need a nurse or Mark’s attendance.

  The kitchen became a kitchen; was no longer the heart of the house. The dining-room, unused for so long, was opened and the long polished table cleared of the books and papers that had accumulated there. Linen was taken out of chests; silver and china that had never been used by that married couple, Lynda and Mark, was got ready for use. An extra charwoman was engaged, and Lynda and Martha considered clothes.