The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  It was here that people like Phoebe took punishment, where it did them real damage: for if they could not believe in ‘the people’ what could they trust in? The Conservatives never pretended to believe in ‘the people’. So their cynicism proclaimed. But the Labour Party, the Labour movement, was, could be nothing else, of the people—who, or so it seemed, did not care what lies they were told, how often they were betrayed, or how the country slid into a slough of incompetence. One must have belief! One must believe in wells of strength and integrity in the people: one must hold fast to knowing that the people, ‘given a chance’, will believe and trust. At the heart of the Labour movement, where its strength is, is this weakness, or at least an ambiguity.

  For this ‘History of the Labour Movement’ (let’s say 1910 to 1965, for argument’s sake), which leaves out the two world wars, also tends to leave out the other great surges of mass feeling: communism and fascism. The fact is, anybody who has been tempered at all by the politics of the last fifty years is in a state of mortal funk because of ‘the people’ and what they (we) are capable of. The history of the twentieth century as far as we’ve got with it is of sudden eruptions of violent mass feeling, like red hot lava, that destroy everything in its path-First World War, fascism, communism. Second World War. There isn’t an administrator or politician anywhere that isn’t playing whatever hand he holds with one terrified eye always on the next emanation from ‘the people’ - yet he appears to hide it even from himself.

  Phoebe might look at a sheet of paper on which the figures were written, the billions and billions and billions and billions of pounds spent on war, on preparations for war, or weapons that within a year become obsolete (but had fulfilled their purpose which was to create and use, money), on the machines which (if anything went wrong and things were always going wrong) would poison air, seas, soil, people; she would spend hours calculating, figuring, marvelling, over such formulas, as mysterious as those used for distances expressed in light-years, and, thinking that the minutest fraction of that sum would educate the people of the world, would feed the hungry, she would still mutter to herself like an incantation: When the people put us in, then …

  And she sharpened her conscience, examined her own state of integrity, of readiness for office. She had not sold out! She had had plenty of opportunities! When the devil is laying bait for your soul he does not whisper: You are wasting your opportunities on that work: I’ll pay you ten times as much! He says: What you have that is irreplaceable is your integrity! Oh no, no, I know I could never buy that. It’s priceless. What are you getting paid now? £3, 000? Well, I’ll offer you £4, 000 (the cost of living is going up) and all I want is your fine feeling for values, for what is real …

  Phoebe and her friends were experts on scenting out variations of this bait, on visualizing themselves in five years’ time, if they left their strait path. Goodness, look at the history of their Party!

  When Phoebe looked at the in-fighting and the gossip-swapping and the sheer nasty-minded malice of those late days at the end of the Tories’ thirteen years, and could not prevent herself wondering: When we get in, how on earth are we going to pull together as a team? -then she remembered the dozen or so responsible jobs she had turned down: she thought of the high crusading temper of Arthur Coldridge, stomping the country to purvey the truth instead of bringing light and integrity to the upper reaches of the Tory Press; she thought of the hard-working, devoted, quietly faithful journeymen of the Labour Movement up and down Britain, and she thought: When we get in …

  This was a time when everything conspired to confirm the advisability of behaving well, of having behaved well. For instance, her standing as a candidate in a random by-election. She knew that in another kind of party, someone like herself with thirty years of hard work and expert knowledge behind her would expect, and get, a safe seat. She was put in to fight a marginal constituency: it was taken for granted that Phoebe Coldridge would be ready to sweat it out in a hard campaign knowing she would lose, for the sake of the Party. But she got in, against everyone’s expectations. And she would make a good Member of Parliament, she knew that; yet she had not asked for it, nor ever expected it.

  And there was the business of ‘her’ Africans, so many of whom filled government posts in countries where they had been five, ten years before, exiled, jailed, forced underground (by, of course, the Tories: any lapses in this direction by her Party, she softened as minor faults), and where now, she, Phoebe, visited, a welcome guest, and the more welcome for understanding where welcome must end. Cool, friendly, ready with advice when asked for it, she accepted invitations to official teas from men she had fed, given money, found lodgings; for whom she had organized legal advice, and got abortions for their girl friends. Of course: in helping people whose cause was just, she had never imagined rewards or punishments. She contrasted her own conduct for instance with the exile joss Cohen, whose quality of sardonic dedication she found unappealing (once a communist always a communist!) and who now was suffering from (Martha’s joke, funny she could suppose, if she tried-but once a communist always a communist) ‘withdrawal symptoms’. Joss, unwillingly in England for years, having been deported from his territory for sedition and associated misdemeanours, was now able to go back to Africa, and did so-frequently. He always returned from this area or that, for another spell in Phoebe’s office, rather silent about his visits. It turned out that he had not understood that the half a hundred white people like himself, who had made the African cause all their own, were as much of an embarrassment to Africans, once in power, as returned heroes are to governments after a war. He had imagined goodness knows what futures for himself, as journeyman, or adviser, or in the government of this or that African territory: and in approaching men whose comrade he had been in times of trouble, he had done so exactly as if they had not in the meantime become Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers, while he remained rather dubious material, of the kind any government, anywhere, must suspect.

  His heart had been broken. To use that phrase which is used when the forward direction of a person’s life is blocked. And he could not believe it! To Phoebe, listening with discretion, he would describe how, ringing up old friend X he was answered by a member of the old Colonial Civil Service, who had imprisoned not only himself, but old friend X and who was now serving X as if the African cause had always been his own, ‘I am very sorry-what did you say your name was? Mr. X is too busy at the moment-perhaps you’d care to write? ’

  Phoebe smiled: she could not help it; Joss could not smile: that is what comes of-not behaving well, which is how Phoebe saw it.

  ‘Phoebe, ’ he said, ‘all right then-but how would you feel if let’s say for argument’s sake, Aneurin Bevan had ever been Prime Minister and you telephoned him to have a glass of beer or a nosh-up and the Home Secretary of the previous Tory government who for some reason had become his personal secretary, said: “He’s too busy to see you"? ’

  And at her smile, this time meant for his perusal, he cried out: ‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be shocked? ’

  Phoebe privately taking her stand on ‘the people’, said, dry, that she did not think, he, Joss (who had spent twenty years dramatically in politics), was suited to ordinary bread and butter politics-and for her money, no other kind mattered. She said, further, that if he wanted to be useful, he could start combating race prejudice in Brixton or Liverpool or Notting Hill Gate; he didn’t have to go to Africa; she said finally, that if people went into politics for any other reason but the desire to serve, she had no time for them.

  In the last few months before that election when the Labour Party had at last got back in, Phoebe, like some others, was rather like dough that had been left too long to rise beside the fire. She had ‘never had time’ for people who did not face facts: she prided herself on being able to see them, and face them no matter how bad. Yet, whole areas of fact were being blotted out, or at least, softened a little.

  For instance, the Labour Party had
never in the past got in except at times of acute crisis whose severity prevented them from doing anything of what they wanted or had promised the electorate: it was clear that this was such a time of crisis.

  And again: the country had no idea at all of the state things were in: ‘Tory propaganda’ had seen to that; before anything could be done, the people who were voting them in for, she suspected, the wrong reasons, would have to be educated into the right ones-which, always took time.

  And again: the whole of the Labour Party did not consist of people like herself, forward-looking, modern in outlook, scientifically-orientated, sober, cool, and, for the most part, young, ten or fifteen years younger than Phoebe, who herself was much younger than most Tory Members of Parliament. No: and when the Party became Government, it was not only people like Phoebe who would govern-far from it; many of them were worse than Tories, she thought.

  And again, the temper or the mood of ‘the people’ seemed to her particularly unsuited for a Labour administration; no one cared about anything but enjoying themselves or making money: the young people were all absolutely demoralized-by the long Tory government, of course. Look at Francis-who said he didn’t care whether the Reds or the Tories were in, they were alike. And look at Paul-but Paul seemed to her particularly deplorable. Look at her daughters! Both talked about the processes of government worse than irresponsibly. Look at-who could you find among the youth with one reasonable idea in his, or her, head?

  Phoebe found herself softening what she thought about the youth: she chose words, temporized. But ought she to? Was she being corrupt in this?

  The young people she knew were irresponsible, but when the Labour Party got in … She had dreams of new armies of young people with red banners in their hands and sober common sense in their hearts. She drove around Britain on a long electioneering trip with Arthur and Mary, and she had never felt closer to her husband (that was how she still thought of him, she could not help what Mrs. Johns’s diagnosis might be), and when they stopped the car outside a school, one of the dreadful slum schools which officially did not exist, or a ‘college’ that wasn’t fit for pigs, wasn’t a college at all, she knew, for she knew him so well, that he was thinking, as she was, with a great heart-swelling warmth of emotion that included not only these children, but all the children of the British Isles: ‘Just wait-when we get in we’ll change all this … when the people put us back in then …’

  Chapter Two

  Martha who had not attended Lynda during one of her bad times, asked Mark how she ought to behave. He supposed that the thing was, to be as sensible as possible.

  Sense: yes, yes, of course. After all, when is it not a good thing to be sensible?

  But there were those who said that Mark’s continuing marriage with Lynda was not sensible; others who complained that for a busy man with responsibilities (to art, letters, literature and so on), to spend months at a time with a mad woman instead of depositing her in a place set up to deal with madness was not sensible. Dismissing these, as Mark did, and descending to a particular, one might ask if Mark had forgotten how he had been driven upstairs by Lynda’s nonsense, as it were, to earth himself in Martha? She probed. Mark now used these words of that time: ‘I wouldn’t have been able to do that and stay sane if you hadn’t stood by me.’ What it amounted to was Mark hadn’t forgotten: he didn’t want to think about it. (The same thing? Perhaps it was?) He didn’t want, or hadn’t been able to, let go of ordinariness, holding on to sense, had not been able to ask: ‘What is it? Why? What is driving me now? ’ But if Martha wished to let go, sink herself, then that was her business. He said that he had done Lynda no good, so his example wasn’t much use, was it? In short, he was busy, was in some new phase of his own. A book, he kept saying it was; but it didn’t seem to be a book or even the plans for one. He had dropped out of social life again. He had stopped frequenting the pubs were the ‘science fiction’ writers gathered. He spent a great deal of time at the factory; and was engaged in some kind of battle with Jimmy Wood, for brisk telephone calls were being exchanged.

  ‘I should have thought that…’

  ’ Well in that case why

  Lynda said: ‘Mark’s up to something-oh yes, he is!’ This was on a day when she was being sensible. That is, one could talk to her as one talked to anybody, even if she was distraught and ill. Another day she might be out of reach, and did not hear, or heard only what she chose. Yet all this was odder than it looked. After all, she hadn’t cracked into being silly until the guests had all gone, and the time was right. And now, presumably, that person who had licensed another to be ‘silly’ was there, somewhere behind the wide, strained eyes that Lynda held before Martha like a shield on which was written: No, no, I’m not to be reached! Even, No, there’s no one here at all.

  Her flat wore the same aspect of guile, or doublefacedness. It was still solidly beautiful. As Lynda had once said, or complained: ‘Really, it is a kind of Ideal Antique Flat, as if Christie’s or Sotheby’s had done it.’ And they built to last when those tables and chairs and cupboards had been made: all Lynda’s and Dorothy’s ill-treatment of them had done very little harm. Martha went back inside an old thought with: A week of painting, and mending and doing up-and no one would be able to guess the horrors and miseries that have gone on here.

  No; if someone walked into that place for the first time they would be charmed, put at ease, by the serenity of the furniture and the thickness of the rugs and carpets; only to be seized by an uneasiness that didn’t at once explain itself.

  For instance, around the walls there was a clear space or runway, as if there were a second invisible wall against which a table, chairs, bookcases were arranged, a yard or so inside the visible wall. And again, all around the walls to the height of about five feet, the paper had an irregularly smudged and rusty look, which turned out to be bloodstains from Lynda’s bitten finger ends. And yet again, a pair of shoes apparently left forgotten on a chair, if you examined them carefully, took on the significance of a travelling gipsy’s or an Indian’s sign to friends or tribesmen: one shoe would be set at an exact right-angle to the other. Or one of poor Dorothy’s embroidered cushions that had God is Love on it, was put in juxtaposition to a theatre advertisement showing a conventionalized hell. And so on: after a few moments, what had seemed a perfectly normal set of rooms, had become a place to get out of as fast as possible-either that, or a place to study, to make sense of, to sink oneself into.

  Lynda wore a old flannel dressing-gown that she had put on like working clothes or a uniform. It was tied neatly at the waist with a cord, and turned up at the wrists as one does to scrub a floor or do the washing-up. Her mass of shining auburn hair that had coarse grey pushing up into it, was tied behind her head in a ribbon. Thus had she prepared herself for the task or challenge of being ill.

  She moved around the space between the two walls visible and invisible, with her back to the room. She moved slowly, staring, directing the pressure of her gaze up and down and around the area of wall she faced; and she pressed her palms against it in a desperate urgent way, as if doing this would cause it to fall outwards and let her step out of the room over rubble and brick. Or the movement of her hands had a testing feel: how solid is it? Or: What is it really made of-are you sure it isn’t soft? Or she would turn her back to it, and face into the room; and keeping herself in a straight line from head to buttocks, bumped herself against it in short regular bursts of thud, thud, thud, thud; and this movement seemed to say ‘I must go on doing this, must go on with some kind of activity, until it creates enough energy to let me turn myself about and go on …’ After a short recuperative time of such almost-resting, or meditative movement, she would turn herself about and continue on her progress around the wall, feeling, pressing, banging-around and around and around. When she reached the window, across which the curtains had been pulled, making a tall wide pasture of deep green velvet, she sensed her way across with subtler gentler touches of her fingers; and during the
se parts of her journey one had to ask if-since this was a window, an opening-her pressing and pushings at the wall did mean: Can I get out? How strong are you? For perhaps they meant something quite different.