Four Gated City (17 page)

‘Well? ’ said Joanna, in a fine, steady anger. Her eyes shone, her cheeks glowed very pink.

‘I spent my time in the gym, ’ said Jack.

‘Yes. But it was like a-I can’t explain. Everything was just like ordinary life, only more so. It was a nightmare, sitting with that girl. Her name was Lily Maxwell and she came from one of the mining suburbs outside Johannesburg. I swear we were the only two people among the passengers who weren’t-hypnotized. We sat and watched. But for me, it was a new feeling, and for her-she had lived with it for a long time. She was dying. I think so, anyway. She was sitting looking at living people. She was quite alone, all the time, you see. And I was with her, but she was waiting for me to crack. Cynically. She knew I would. She sat very quietly, watching me looking at the men, and the men looking at me. So then that was it. It took four days. A nice farmer from the Orange Free State. Oh everything very civilized and in order. And I was permanently heavy and dead and gone with food, alcohol and sex.’

‘I don’t see the point of that, ’ said Joanna.

‘Oh yes, you do, ’ said Martha rudely. ‘I know you do. But I wasn’t quite lost, because all the time I was hanging on to just one thought: that I was drugged and hypnotized and that I didn’t have to be. And above all that I mustn’t be afraid of being-obvious.’

‘Well it is, isn’t it? ’ said Joanna. She got up. She wanted to leave.

‘Yes. But what then? Quite so. I want to be sunk in the obvious. It seems to me that there’s a sort of giant conspiracy, and it’s all our fault. There are people who know quite well that they are drugged and asleep, but there’s a weapon against that-you mustn’t be obvious. It’s a cliché. Oh I know perfectly well that there’s nothing new in what I said, but I
felt
it new then and I feel it now. But I’m not going to be laughed out of it by people who are afraid of words like cliché, or obvious, or banal. I learned that before. Funny, where was it? Who? Somebody-I’ve forgotten. We keep learning things and then forgetting them and so we have to learn them again.’

‘You just want to be a bohemian, ’ said Joanna, ‘to be different. Well, I watched all that during the war.’

‘No. The opposite. I remember finding out some time before-that that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way. But there’s a pressure on us all the time to go on to something that seems new because there are new words attached to it. But I want to take words as ordinary as bread. Or life. Or death. Clichés. I want to have my nose rubbed in clichés.’

Joanna was swinging her shoulder bag over her handsome came) coat. She wanted to leave. Jack was standing near her, watching her. He was afraid he had lost her. Martha thought that he probably had. He had not ‘heard’ what she had said. Not with his mind. But Martha knew that with his body he could have answered her. And that understanding, really a new one, that there were people who simply did not operate or function through their minds, was as if Jack had stepped towards her from dark to light. She knew that if they had been free to make love now, it would be in a different way, because Jack had caught, sensed, felt, what she had said. But if he were now asked to put into words what Martha had said, he would answer: Martha’s tired, she’s upset. People were really so very different from each other. She was always forgetting it. Jack’s way of experiencing the world, and hers, they did not touch.
Except when they made love. He understood, and communicated, through the body.

A ring from downstairs. Jack’s face had for one second the look of someone caught out: both women saw it, and even exchanged small ironic glances, so strong is the force of custom. Because neither really felt it. Jack went running downstairs, and they were alone.

Joanna said: ‘I know what you are saying, but what’s the point of all that? There’s nothing we can do, is there? So what’s the use? ’

Voices on the stairs in energetic exchange and Jack entered first, saying: ‘It’s Jane!’ with a look of appeal at them both. Now Martha and Joanna asked each other silently if both knew about Jane: both did. And they knew the rules of the game said they should leave. They nodded at Jack, who went out, and came back with a pretty little blonde thing who, however, had the stormy, sparkling, reddened look of a baby who has been crying enjoyably from temper. Some grief of love had struck her into a splendidly tempestuous need, and she hardly saw Jack’s two women visitors who stood ready to leave.

They left together, side by side, and were let out by the crazy youth who grinned his congratulations that they were in such numerous and desirable company.

The two walked down the streets where Joanna would never have set foot if it had not been for Jack. Her clean, impeccable country clothes made a space all around her.

‘I think I’ll take the train home, ’ remarked Joanna. ‘I’ve had enough of interesting experiences for the time being.’ She was still very hostile.

‘Are you coming to Jack again? ’ For it seemed to Martha that Joanna would not.

‘I don’t know. It’s not what I bargained for. I simply don’t want things to be all-interesting and dramatic.’

‘I’m sorry for my part of it, then.’

‘It’s partly my fault. I shouldn’t have come in that time-curiosity. It serves me right.’

Deepening her accent, making her manner frank and easy, because the colonial could ask personal questions a fellow Englander could not, Martha inquired, risking a snub: ‘Will you go on sleeping with Jack after you are married? ’

‘I expect so. Perhaps. I don’t see why not.’ This with a short gruff
laugh. ‘But not if I’m going to get involved in … I’m not interested in Jack as a person.’

Martha risked it and said: ‘You talk about Jack as men talk about prostitutes.’

‘Really? I don’t think I’ve ever discussed prostitution with a man. Well, what’s wrong with it? I hate sex, ’ she went on coolly. ‘I mean, I can’t stand all the fuss and bother. During the war, there was nothing but sex and people being desperate for each other. But I like being satisfied, I suppose.’

And now Martha had to be silent, because being satisfied was not how she was able to think about sex with Jack. Joanna said: ‘We’re just animals, that’s all. Why pretend anything different? Jack satisfies me. It’s simple and quick and it’s all over with. That’s what I like.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, ’ said she, with her short gruff laugh, ‘you’re not going to tell me you love him or something piffling like that, are you? ’

‘Certainly not, ’ said Martha, laughing equally. The question then was: ‘Did Jack say to himself, I give Joanna satisfaction, short and simple and quick, because that’s what she wants, and I give Martha-whatever were the words he used for it; or did he respond simply out of his marvellous sure instinct?

They had reached the bus stop. They stood together in the half-light of the summer evening. ‘Anyway, ’ said Joanna, ‘that’s that. I want to get married, have children, and lots of money and never have to think again about-all that. And if you’d been here during the war you’d know. It seems to me that a lot of people who weren’t in the war, like Jack and you, you are trying to be part of it, you felt you missed something.’

‘Jack wasn’t in the war? He was minesweeping, didn’t you know? He was sunk.’

‘Oh yes, but I didn’t mean that. I mean, being here, in England. That was different.’

‘I see.’

Here the bus arrived. Joanna smiled cool and formal at Martha, and stepped quietly on to the bus, from where she remarked: ‘I expect we may meet again one of these days.’ The bus went off. Martha now remembered that all of them, Jack, Joanna and herself, had forgotten the money that she needed. Quite right: money was not what she had gone to Jack’s for. But she now had about two
pounds. She could go to a cheap hotel, the suitcase being her passport, and ring up Mark in the morning to make an appointment to confirm terms, in the English manner.

But she was too tired. Besides, she remembered those moments when they had understood each other-oh yes, only too well, and thought: what’s the point? I know perfectly well I’m going to move in. She went to a telephone box. It was about nine o’clock.

When Martha arrived, the house seemed to have nobody in it. Then at last he came down the stairs. He was working, he said. He supposed that Martha would rather wait until tomorrow before starting work, otherwise he’d be only too pleased … But she was too tired for anything but bed. He carried her suitcase up to the second floor, and into a large quiet room. He had made the bed. Or somebody had. He left her saying that the kitchen was downstairs if she wanted to make herself coffee in the night-as he often did.

She closed her eyes on a room whose presence was so strong, so confident, that she was saying as she went to sleep: I’ll stay for just a while, just a short time. A couple of months …

Chapter Four

She was rising towards light, through layers of sleep, fighting against being sucked down again by the backwash. Light was on her eyelids. She opened them. The room was full of pure brittle sunlight. The black branches of the tree across the street held a glitter of water. A cold black tree, framed by domestic curtains, grey and pink: a tree on a stage. A white counterpane dazzled. On the white, near the window, the black cat sat in the sunlight, washing its face. On the opposite corner, a black fly cleaned its head with its arms. Cat and fly used the same movements. Cautious, so as to frighten neither, Martha reached out for a brush, sat up, brushed her hair. Behind her, a shadow on the white wall attended to its head. Fly, cat, woman, their images were shaped in no-light. The cat’s shadow was a steady movement of dark on white. On the side of the fly away from the window a small darkening, but the movement of the fly’s working forelegs was not visible. If she were fly-size, would she then be able to observe the working shadow from those energetic hairy arms? The cat was watching its moving shadow as it cleaned its face with its paw. Was the fly looking at its shadow as it cleaned itself?

Sunlight in London brought an emphasis: shadow. For the most part a day was clear, sunless light, like water, that contained objects: houses, trees, a stone, people. But in hot countries, everything was underlined, everything had its image. The light was draining away off the counterpane back through the window. The cat, jetty-black in sunlight, now showed the variations of colour in its fur. It was dark brown, with a gloss of black, and it had white hairs on its chin. The fly seemed weightless. The white wall behind Martha showed its need for repainting. The black tree stood sodden; it had lost its glitter. And the sky was grey.

There was no need to get up. Not for hours yet, if she felt like staying in bed. While every moment of her attention was claimed
by Mark, her employer, from lunchtime onwards, which was when he returned from his factory, often until two, three, in the morning, he would not have her working in the morning: he said it lessened his guilt. Nor would he have her doing anything about the house, which badly needed it. This morning for instance she knew that there were no eggs, no butter, and that the plumber should be summoned to the water-taps. But she could do none of these things. This was part, not of protecting Martha, but of protecting Mark against his family.

She thought: Well I’m leaving so soon anyway. If I broke the rules just for one day? For that matter, if I spent the two weeks before I leave just getting everything fixed up, would it matter? The housewife in her yearned to do it. She had not told Mark that she was leaving. He knew she wanted to. To leave just before Christmas! That was heartless-yet she intended to, she had to, she must … Good Lord, she cried to herself, had been exhorting herself for weeks now, there is no reason in the world why you should feel guilty. None. It’s not rational. It’s not your responsibility, it never was.

Mark was hoping, though of course he would never say so, that she would stay until after Christmas. Because of Francis. If Martha stayed, then the child could come for the holidays. Possibly they would let Lynda out of the hospital. There would be a sort of a Christmas, enough to use the word to Francis. Otherwise, Mark would take Francis to his mother, which he most passionately did not want to do.

I’ve got to go, I must. Now. Or I’ll never be able to leave this
.

This
, particularly, was the room, which had become, in the last six months, her home. The moment of greatest pleasure in every day was waking in it, beneath the window, which framed the tree whose leaves she had seen stand in solid leaf, then thin, then fall. It was a sycamore tree. The cat slept on her bed. Which was how she saw it: but the cat always slept on that bed, he did not care who was in it. The cat saw the bed and room as his. When she left, the cat would sleep just there, on the corner of the bed nearest the window; would wash itself, just there, watching its shadow or the birds in the tree; would roll over on its back in sunlight, a black plush cat, all purring warmth.

A terrible pang-a real pain. Oh no, she must go, and fast, Christmas or no Christmas, particularly as a good part of her fear
of going was that London had no more space in it for her now, as it had had months ago, when she had arrived. She did have some money now though, thanks to Mark-over two hundred pounds. She never seemed to have anything to spend her salary on. She would leave-in the next days, take a room, or a small flat, and risk her chances with all the other waifs and strays of London who had no family at Christmas. Waifs and strays! Once she could not have thought of herself like that-oh no, she had got soft, and badly so, it was time to move on, even though she would never live in such a room again. The whole house was like it, of a piece, a totality: yet no one could set out to create a house like it. It had grown like this, after being furnished by Mark’s grandmother at the end of the last century by what Martha would have called when she first came as ‘antiques’. Nor was this room assertive or bullying as she had first thought: on the contrary, it was quiet, it had tact, it served. But it certainly absorbed. Money? For weeks when first here she had moved around the room, the house, like a cat, feeling for corners, and essences, and odours and memories, trying to isolate just that quality which no other place she had ever been in had had. Solidity? Every object, surface, chair, piece of material, or stuff, or paper had-solidity. Strength. Nothing could crack, fray, fall apart. A chair might break, but if so it would be put together as a surgeon does a body. The curtains had a weight in your hands. The carpet and the rugs lay thick on the boards of the floor which were beautiful enough to lie bare, if there were not so many rugs and carpets. Nothing in this house believed in the possibility of destruction. Imagine being brought up in such a house, to be the child of it … a child’s voice sounded across the passage. It was Sally’s little boy. Martha had the room Sally used, when she came to stay but Sally, here for a few nights, had not thought it worth dispossessing Martha from it. She was in James’s room, used as a spare room because James was dead.