The Four-Gated City Read online

  She could be weak and say something like: I’ll think it over. But she must not. And she must not buy forgiveness with ‘Matty’. With a great effort, she said (abruptly, and without grace, but she said it straight). ‘Look. Please believe me. I’m not taking the job. Thank you very much-but I don’t want it.’

  ‘What have you got lined up instead? ’ asked John Higham. He was annoyed.

  ‘She’s thinking of being a barmaid, ’ said Henry with a laugh to indicate, not that she would not, but that she was only too capable of it.

  ‘Really, are you? ’ said John Higham. ‘Of course, it is a way of-getting around? ’ he inquired. One does see that.’

  ‘The thing is, ’ said Martha, again furious, trying not to be: ‘I wouldn’t see the job as you do-as something extraordinary. You simply don’t understand-all of you, you talk of the people you call “the working class” as if they were-people from the moon. Not that you use words like “the working class” of course-Oh, I don’t know, ’ she concluded, in real despair, ‘one can’t even talk about it with you.’

  Glances were again exchanged between Henry and John, and again as if she were not present. ‘Well, ’ said John, ‘that is precisely why we are so keen to have you-you see a great many of the people we deal with have had a rather rough time, and one does need someone to handle them who knows what they are talking about.’

  ‘Perhaps, ’ said Martha, ‘having had a rough time as a refugee would include rather more than would be covered by having experience as a barmaid? ’

  She was now really angry. Really discouraged. Even frightened. After all, such people ran this country, no matter what the papers said. And when you came anywhere near the Maynards and their kind this is what happened. It was like talking to-well, the blind, people blinkered from birth. Which is what they were. What was the point of… one simply had to get out of their way.

  The waiter was bringing the bill. The restaurant was full now. it was about ten o’clock, and had more than ever the atmosphere of a family, of people who were at one with each other. And they were off guard now, with a licensed childishness about them, as if, threatened outside, here they found refuge. Across the room, a man with a heightened colour and a rakish look flicked bread pellets at a girl in a fluffy pink sweater, who flicked them back, giggling, while waiters watched indulgently.

  The bill was for six pounds.

  ‘Where are you going, can we lift you? ’

  ‘Thank you, I’d like to walk.’

  Henry pushed back his chair. The waiter had three people by him who wanted this table. Getting out and away fast, which was what she wanted, was easy for her.

  She walked down Oxford Street; that is, eye-level goods confined behind lit glass moved past her: above were dark weights of masonry. The goods, clothes mostly, were as bad and as tasteless as everything else. This is the greatest city in the world, she kept saying, loitering, but not obviously so, among people window-shopping. The biggest city, the biggest, and this one of the streets whose name I’ve been brought up on, like Piccadilly Circus. The labels of these shops are covetable, sewn on clothes-there was not one object or article she would have cared to own. Of course, there had been a war on. Of course, even five years after such a war, buildings and streets must be propped and shored and patched and unpainted, and cloth must be thinned and impoverished. Of course. But even a yard of war-impoverished cloth can be woven with more sense or art. Good Lord, she found herself thinking, for the thousandth time, what kind of a race is this that chooses. inevitably and invariably, or so it seemed, the ugly, the graceless? Well, here she was and to stay.

  The shops ended and sky opened above the trees of Hyde Park. Now here was something different, oh yes, when it came to trees and gardens, then everything was as it ought to be. She walked down the pavements of the Bayswater Road, with the park on one side, balances and patterns of leaf dramatically green where the street lights held them, retreating into mysterious shadow beyond, with the lit moving sky over them. On her right hand, the great ponderous houses that stood so assertively on damp soil. Great ugly grey houses. They were boarded up or empty or in makeshift use; no longer houses; all in a condition of transformation towards being hotels. And unpainted. Ugly. Even in this changing racing wild light, ugly. But she was under the trees that edged the pavement, and they seemed like an extension of the trees of the park, so that it was as if the traffic that poured down the street was riding through softly lit trees which ended here; the grey cliff of buildings on her right being the start of the city. There were now few people. There had begun, from the moment she had left Oxford Street and the shops, that heightened wary atmosphere which meant she must walk careful of her eyes, because in this stretch of the Bayswater Road, men prowled after women. Invisible boundaries, invisibly marked territories: just as, across the river a boundary could be marked by an old hulk of timber with riversalt in its seams, so that one side of it was the riverbank, the other a landlubber’s country, here the corner of a street, or the hour of day could say: Here a certain kind of order ends.

  Martha now walked fast, protected by the thick ugliness of Mrs. Van’s coat; but she was a ‘young woman’, category ‘young woman’ - yes, she must remember that she was, and that along these pavements, a category of being, ‘man’, prowled beside or behind her. That was what she must be for a few minutes, not Martha or ‘Matty’, only ‘young woman’. A man veered up beside her, muttered an anxious aggressive invitation and dropped behind when she presented to him her aloof lifted profile. He fell back, muttering words she was meant to hear. The greatest city in the world … if only I could understand that it’s a question of trying to see things steadily all the time, then perhaps I could understand it. Martha’s daytime brain had become detached, wary, watchful, on guard-to protect another part of it which had just started to wake, to listen, because of the fast walk through the moving, lit streets. And when this happened-and she never knew when it would-nothing mattered but to protect, to keep the irrelevant at bay. It was this business of having to divide off, make boundaries-it was such a strain. Jimmy and Iris’s café, the bombed streets, the river city where Stella was, this hunters’ street, the great stained damp houses where Henry Matheson’s and John Higham’s parents and grandparents might have lived, one family to a house: even to begin to understand it was … but one’s daytime brain was slotted, compartmented, pigeon-holed …

  Now she slowed, almost stopped in surprise at a cool hard getaway look from a young woman who stood with her back to a hedge. Of course, she had passed another invisible boundary. From here until Queensway, the pavements were lined with prostitutes, standing singly or in pairs, dozens of them, along the pavements. But Martha was freer here than she had been in that other territory she had only just left, whose boundary was simply a bisecting street. She was protected precisely by the line of girls for sale, who knew she wasn’t one of their trade union and because their hostile warning faces that said go away, you shouldn’t be here, kept her safe from being accosted. Three kinds of animal here. The women, standing with their backs to the hedges, on sale. The ordinary traffic of the pavement-but a slight traffic, mostly couples hurrying past the marketplace, keeping close under the lights, looking embarrassed, as if they were here by a mistake, yet glancing furtively at the buying and bargaining. The customers, men of all ages, walking slowly past the women, or standing under the trees smoking, making choices. And across the street, policemen, spaced out with twenty or thirty yards between each couple, not looking directly at the haggling and dealing, but observing it sideways to make sure that it went on without incident. Martha walked more slowly than she had had to walk in the part of the street she had left. All the way down the street, by lit airy trees, they stood. Although it lightly drizzled, they wore summer dresses, bare necked, bare shouldered; and high thick sandals with bared insteps; and sometimes they held a jaunty umbrella. But there was no elegance here either. They weren’t well-dressed. They shared the national disposition t
owards gracelessness. There has been a war on. Suppose one of these men who was making up for the starvation of the war (like Jack, still obsessed by it), approached one of the girls saying: I’d like you to wear … whatever was his fantasy, would she snap back: There’s been a war on, you know? Yes, very probably … Martha found herself imagining rooms where furniture, curtains, objects had charm, had flair, and a girl with charm, flair, undressed slowly to show off wittily charming underclothes-a man’s fantasy? Perhaps in all this city it was only these girls’s rooms where there was anything attractive, gay, rightly made? Well, not from the way they were dressed as they stood on the pavement.

  She had left the street of prostitutes behind. She was getting towards Notting Hill. And now, although she had headed this way with an intention to loiter and look, to spend time until midnight when she might safely reach Jack’s, she had to brace herself before turning off the main road into an area which was worse than anything. The little streets across the river had never been other than small and thin and poor. The ‘West End’ was a market only, with what was full-fed and comfortable in it hidden from the pavements. The enormous piles along the Bayswater Road had been and would be again, a climate of money. But the streets, from here to the canal, were depressing and lowering: irredeemable by fantasy.

  She waited for glimpses of a scene created by light out of the dark that pressed houses into the soil, houses that were cracked and leaning and dirty and wet, streets and streets and streets of them, and among them, the boarded-up spaces full of rubble or water-filled craters, or damp earth cleared for re-building. She was walking along a long low street with dark trees along it, and low pools of yellowish light at intervals, consciously bracing herself against depression, when she understood that in fact that part of her mind whose intimations she courted had spread, was swallowing the rest: she was on the verge of a sensation-no, wrong word, but what words were right? -a state then, that had been in fact the surprise of her being in London, its real gift to her. She had learned that if she walked long enough, slept slightly enough to be conscious of her dreams, ate at random, was struck by new experience throughout the day, then her whole self cleared, lightened. she became alive and light and aware.

  Her practical self checked her physical condition: the meal in the restaurant was the first proper meal for days; the wine the first alcohol for weeks; she had scarcely slept last night, because of the noise from the café downstairs, which closed at midnight and started again at about five. And she had been walking and alert all day: the conditions were right, then. First, before the lit space, a terror: but slight, nothing that could overwhelm, less fear than the reluctance to acknowledge her condition of being so alien, of walking always as a watchful critic. This was loneliness? Yes, she supposed so. But, if so, what else had she ever known? So that was a gift too: people said ‘loneliness’ speaking of an ultimate dread; and she had once said ‘loneliness’ meaning a blow of fate that might make her alone among her fellow creatures: something that in the future might claim her.

  But no, since she had been in London, she had been alone, and had learned that she had never been anything else in her life. Far from being an enemy, it was her friend. This was the best thing she had known, to walk down streets interminably, to walk through mornings and afternoons and evenings, alone, not knowing where she was unless she walked beside the river: sometimes walking so long she did not even know what part of London she was in, her feet tired, but conscious of strength in their tiredness, her head cool, watchful, alert, waiting for the coming of the visitor, silence. And her heart… well, that was the point, it was always her heart that first fought off the pain of not belonging anywhere, and then, resisted, told to be quiet, it quietened and stilled. Her heart as it were came to heel: and after that, the current of her ordinary thought switched off. Her body was a machine, reliable and safe for walking; her heart and daytime mind were quiet.

  This then was what she had discovered, had been given, rather; and was so reluctant to give up. This was why she did not want to choose this slot or that, this or that job, this or that person, to become a tactful assistant to Henry and John Higham; or an addition to the people across the river. If only she could go on like this, walking for ever through the interminable, damp, hostile street of this doomed city, all cracked and thinned and darkened by war-if only she could stay here, in this area of herself she had found … her mind was swinging slowly from light to dark, dark to light. Into it came impressions: a tree, an intensely variegated mass of light; a brick wall picked out in a flood of glowing orange by a slant of light from a window; a face that looked out briefly from behind glass before a curtain twitched across. Her mind was a soft dark empty space. That was what she was. ‘Matty’ was an intolerably tedious personage she could think of only with exhausted nausea and fear that she might ever again be afflicted by her. Martha-well, ordinary Martha too had moved away, could be looked at: she did well enough, was not important. As for ‘Hesse’, it was a name acquired like a bracelet from a man who had it in his possession to be given to a woman in front of lawyers at the time of the signing of the marriage contract. But who then was she behind the banalities of the day? A young woman? No, nothing but a soft dark receptive intelligence, that was all. And if she tried-but not too hard, a quick flash of effort, a light probe into a possibility, she could move back in time, annulling time, for the moment of the effort, and stand in another country, on another soil. Walking down damp smelling pavements under the wet London sky in the summer of five years after the war, she was (but really became, as if nothing had intervened), Martha Quest, a young girl sitting under the tree from where she could see a great hot landscape and a sky full of birds and clouds. But really, not in imagination-there she sat. Or she was the Martha who had pushed a small child under leafy avenues with the smell of roses coming off town gardens. But really, there she was: she was, nothing to do with Martha, or any other name she might have had attached to her, nothing to do with what she looked like, how she had been shaped. And if she were able to go on walking, as she was now, day after day, night after night, down this street, up that, past houses, houses, houses, passing them always, with their shuttered and curtained eyes behind which a dull light hid, if she were able only to do that…

  And now, into the quiet, came something she had forgotten-one always did forget. She had forgotten what could happen when the dark deepened and one thought it would remain, being so strong. It was as if behind the soft space was a maniac ready to dance inwards with idiotic words and phrases. Words and phrases and fragments of music were niggling at the back of her mind somewhere. But she had really forgotten that this idiot was there, who accompanied the gift of the quiet swinging dark, and whose words did not seem to mean anything. They came out of dark, floated for a while on the space and went on into dark. Then the words of songs and tunes-yes, of course, during the past few weeks she had become familiar with this phase, or stage. First, the quiet empty space, behind which stood an observing presence. Then, into the quiet space, behind it, an enemy, a jiggling fool or idiot. Humiliating! Absurd! Again and again she had won, with such difficulty, the quiet; and then encountered this silliness. She had resisted it. Again and again she had descended from the quiet because of this silly enemy. Tonight, she did not resist: she was too tired. And besides, she was remembering that she had made a discovery, found a new thought-rather a thought had floated in with the silly words and bits of music: that somewhere in one’s mind was a wave-length, a band where music jigged and niggled, with or without words: it was simply a question of tuning in and listening. And she had made the discovery, and then forgotten it, that the words, or tunes, were not all at random: they reflected a state or an emotion. Because the words of the songs, or the phrases, had a relevance: one could learn from them, if one did not shy off, indignant, annoyed, because of the banality, the silliness, the jumble of this band of sound just behind (beside?) the empty space. For, as Martha had told the wave-length, or the station, before to
night (and had forgotten that she had), you have a very poor sense of humour, you have no taste at all. For instance, a couple of weeks before, walking by the river, first achieving the quiet, then reaching or being afflicted by the band of sound, she had discovered that far from not caring about having no money, and reaching the end of what she had, she was worried, frightened in fact, because the tune that jigged there was ‘the best things in life are free’ over and over and over again, like a sardonic, squalling baby, grinding into her day-time consciousness that she must stop now, must look for work, must get back a condition of earning money. And because night after night she had reached this place, and been informed over and over again by this appallingly frivolous and silly voice that she was in fact scared stiff, she had taken the decision to put her life into responsibility, to leave the drifting and floating. So why resent the method if the information was of use? How did she want useful information to be given? In crashing chords no doubt, or with trumpets? That particular part of her brain did not work like that, and if she resented it, shied off, fled away, made a decision to descend, resisted, she also lost information she needed. The most interesting discoverings were made through banalities. Now, jiggling away there on the edge of the empty space was the announcement that she was tired and wanted to go home. True: but her feet had been telling her that loudly for more than an hour. It was not her feet, her body that were tired-but another part of herself: she understood that in fact she was under great strain: and in a flash of foreseeing, realized the plunge into inert exhaustion that would follow this height. But who, what, was tired, that she needed to be told she was?