Four Gated City (18 page)

The door opened and Paul wriggled in, smiling shyly. The cat jumped down to wind around his legs and the fly buzzed away. He was five, or six, a small lively dark boy all charm and warmth.

‘Paul!’ came his mother’s peremptory voice: ‘Paul, you are
not
to worry Martha!’

Paul grinned at Martha and sidled to the bed, glancing at the door where his mother was due to appear. And now Sally’s beautiful dark head showed around the door. She gave a great
dramatic sigh of ‘Oh!’ at the sight of the disobedient child; and then she curled herself into an armchair. She was in a striped purple and yellow silk dressing-gown. Her hair hung down on either side of her small apricot-tinted face in black braids. Her soft black eyes shone. She was, as the family never said, but never ceased to make evident, Jewish. That is, if put down anywhere near the Mediterranean, she would seem at home. In this room she seemed almost perversely an exotic. Now she put out a small hand towards the child who ran to her, climbed on her lap, and cuddled. She sniffed him, with pleasure. Wound together, they breathed contentment. Almost she licked him like an animal with her cub.

‘I’m going to make breakfast, ’ she announced.

‘I don’t eat breakfast.’

‘Well then, some tea? ’ She wanted company downstairs.

‘I don’t get up yet, ’ said Martha. This was partly to obey Mark: he feared Sally’s encroachment even more than he did his mother’s. ‘And besides, I like this time of the day here.’

‘Ah yes, the room, ’ cried Sally. ‘When I came into it, after
there
, you understand? ’ Martha understood. And Sally knew that she did. They shared the knowledge of outsiders. Sally had been Sarah Koenig ten years ago, when she was a refugee from Germany. This being the kind of family which served, had civic responsibility, and took on burdens-at its height, it had been that above all-naturally they put up refugees. Sarah had come, with half a dozen other refugees, from Europe. Here she had met Colin, Mark’s brother: and here she had married him.

‘Are you going to stay here for Christmas? ’ she asked, going straight to the point as always. ‘I want to know. Because Mark could come to stay with us. With Francis. That would be nice for Paul.’ Here she squeezed Paul, with a chiding pouting downwards glance, to make him agree. He buried his face in her silken bosom.

Mark said that Francis and Paul did not get on. Mark would never go for Christmas to his brother Colin: not because he didn’t like Colin, but because of Sally. She did not seem to know this; or if she did, conducted her life from standards which made it irrelevant. For one thing, when she had married Colin, she married the family: she had no family of her own. In terms of Anton’s grim definition, her Jewishness was absolute: she had no relatives alive. So this was her family: the Coldridges. Therefore she loved them and they must love her. They did not dislike her so much as they
were pleased when she was somewhere else. Nor would any of them have said that it was a pity Colin had married her: particularly as not only Colin, but Mark too had made a marriage that was so palpably a pity. But they were upset by her. Which Martha could understand: she was upset by Sally, who always lived inside her own emotional climate with apparently never a suspicion that there might be others.

She said: ‘And a family Christmas would be good, I have told him, instead of all this nonsense about spies! Politics and communism-nonsense!’

Colin was a physicist. He worked at Cambridge on something to do with the bomb. The man he worked under had been arrested and charged with spying. Colin was naturally under suspicion. The family was behaving as if this was-well, not far from a joke. Of course, if one lived in such houses, filled with such furniture, knowing ‘everybody’ in England, then spying was-a joke. Or rather, the idea that they could be suspected of it. Colin was a communist, they said; though from the words Mark used of him Martha could recognize nothing of communism as she had experienced it: but then of course she knew nothing about England. She found it disagreeable that they talked about his communism as a kind of eccentricity, but tolerable because it was his, a Coldridge’s-as if he stammered, or bred pythons. They had a big family’s possessiveness to it, everyone had their funny ways, their traits, and that was Colin’s. This was not true of Mark, who loved his brother and was with him against the family. The two brothers were isolated in this: and Sally-Sarah was excluded, and suffered and had been complaining Mark hated her… There she sat in the great warm chair, a colourful little beauty with her pretty little boy, all warm tactlessness, warm claims, warm insistence, a challenge to the Coldridges who had seemed never to do much more about her than to insist on calling her ‘Sally’. Well, if she was tactless, they were intolerable, arrogant: when she made a scene that they ‘had stolen her name from her’ they had only laughed; and her husband still called her Sally.

And it was all Martha could do not to call her, sometimes. Stella, she was so like that other warm-shored beauty of ten years before who, however, had been transformed by matrimony and right living into a pillar of good works and righteousness.

And in due time, Sally-Sarah too would become a handsome and portly matron?

Meanwhile she suffered and everyone in the family had to suffer with her.

‘Is Colin worried? ’

‘No, not he, ’ said Sally-Sarah scornfully. ‘Not he. I keep telling him, Darling, you are mad. Why communism? Communism for the English? They know nothing at all. Isn’t that so? You agree with me? ’

‘Yes, ’ said Martha.

‘Yes. It is so. Playing. Little games. I tell him, you’re like a little boy.’

Colin, Mark’s elder brother, the eldest son now that James was dead, killed in the war, was a solid, serious, painstaking man. Dedicated. According to his brother Mark, the only serious member of the family, meaning by this, a single-mindedness; meaning, too, a criticism of his own many-sidedness. Colin, devoted to science, was devoted to communism because for him communism meant internationalism, meant the sharing of science. Colin had decided that science was his destiny at the age of eleven and had thought of nothing else, ever since. Except, perhaps occasionally, for Sally-Sarah? He could not have relished being told he was a little boy playing games.

‘I tell him, Colin, if you knew anything about what politics can do-like I do, oh yes I do, Martha, believe me, do you believe me? …’ Since she was not likely to go on until Martha had said she did. Martha said she did, and Sally-Sarah then continued: ‘But if you did, Colin, I say, then you would not play with fire.’

She was crying. Curled in the great chair, a small, dark girl wept, her face all frail white terror. And in her arms, her son unhappy now and crying too, sucking his thumb like a baby.

‘Mark says it will be all right, ’ said Martha. ‘After all, they must have cleared Colin by now, or they would have arrested him too.’

‘Mark. What does he know! What? He’s a literary man. And he plays with his electric machines. They are always playing these people. The police often do not arrest until later. Meanwhile they watch and lay traps.’

‘Well, but I don’t think …’

‘You think! What do you think? I
know
. You’re like them all, it doesn’t happen here? Yes! But it is happening here, isn’t it? They
are looking for traitors in the civil service-a purge. It happens now. They dismiss people from shops if they might be a communist. And in the BBC-no communists.’

‘Yes. I know, but I don’t think it’s as bad as …’

‘Bad? What do you know! You talk like them. People losing jobs for politics. I know that. A purge in the civil service. I know that. A purge among the teachers I know that. You think it makes it different to call it by another name? No. It is no different. It is the same. People are afraid. I know that too, I know it.’

She buried her face in her child’s hair, and shook with sobs. The little boy was weeping noisily.

‘I’ll make you some breakfast, ’ Martha said.

‘No. I don’t want breakfast. I want nothing, only that at last there is an end to … but no, there is no end to it. Never. But thank you, Martha.’ She got up and carried the child out of the room.

Doors slammed. Drawers slammed. A few moments later her voice chided the child, as they descended to the kitchen on the ground floor. From her bed, Martha followed the progress of breakfast being made: well, let’s hope that Mark was at the factory today and not being disturbed by it.

I shall tell Mark that I’m leaving. Today. I don’t want to be involved in all this … She meant, this atmosphere of threat, insecurity and illness. Who would have thought that coming to this house meant-having her nose rubbed in it! Yes, but that wasn’t what she had meant, when she had demanded from life that she must have her nose rubbed in it. Something new, surely, not what she had lived through already, was what she ought to be doing? Why was she here at all? If you start something, get on a wave-length of something, then there’s no getting off, getting free, unless you’ve learned everything there is to be learned-have had your nose rubbed in it? There was something really terrifyingly creepy, about the fact that the job heard about from Phoebe at a lunch designed to hook her into quite another job had led her here, back into what she already knew so very, very well! No, she would leave, probably in about a week, certainly before Christmas, and approach Phoebe for a job. She might very well take that secretary’s job in ‘the thing for the liberation of the colonies’. If politics were inescapable, and they seemed to be, then let her at least be practical, on the simplest day-to-day level. Besides, hearing the English-and that included people like Phoebe, well-informed as
she was, talk about African politics, was enough to tell her how very useful she could be. She felt as Sally-Sarah must feel when listening to the people of these islands talk about invasion, or the loss of national identity. There was no substitute for experience. Put Phoebe in Africa, in what she called ‘a progressive movement’, and in five minutes she’d be suspected as an enemy not because of her opinions, but because of the tone of her voice. And as for Sally-Sarah’s terrible knowledge, nowhere in London, not even in suspicious dockland, or in the poor streets, or among the waifs and strays, had she met one person who understood, as Sally-Sarah understood, insecurity. These people still lived inside the shadow of their war, they were still rationed, their buildings were still thinned or ruinous, men had been killed, men had not come back from fighting: but that face which Sally-Sarah lifted from the chair where she sat clutching her child as if she were the child and he some kind of shield or support, that frail terrorized face with great dark eyes-well, Britain, did not understand that face. And Sally-Sarah was quite right; anything, anything at all that made it possible, was a mistake. There ought to be one country in the world without that experience. This house should be treasured because in it such experience was inconceivable. Yet it was from this house that Colin had come, at this moment under threat of being considered a spy. And Mark’s identification with his brother was a drive to understand, to participate?

Mark was the one among the four brothers to have had an unconventional education. Their father, Henry, had been a conservative member of Parliament: he was conservative by tradition, it was in the blood, as Mark emphasized, to make Martha understand that there were two kinds of Tory, those like his father constitutionally incapable of understanding that the country could be run by anybody else; and the Tories by intellectual conviction, whom Mark found intolerable. But he had loved and admired his father. The four sons had been brought up here, in this house, and in a house in the country, sold at the father’s death because of duties. This house belonged to the sons. Margaret Coldridge had then married for love (Mark claimed she had not loved his father, but had been married off to him), Oscar Enroyde, a financier; and for the four years the marriage lasted Margaret had inhabited the world of international money, which it seemed had been an unpleasant surprise to her. Not because she disapproved of it, but
because she was indefatigably English, and was hardly ever able to be in England. The sons, being educated, were for the most part in England, while their mother was mostly in America. She described her second marriage’s break-up as: ‘I couldn’t stand dear Oscar’s friends.’ Mark said his mother was fundamentally a hostess, and one of a certain kind: she needed to attract, then domineer, guests. Married to Oscar Enroyde, she had found her guest-list already established, and she spent most of her energies heading people off one of the world’s very rich men. And besides, she was a woman of multifarious talents, none of them now useful. If a chair, for instance, was broken, she knew just that one little man, in Kent, who understood that kind of chair, and she liked to take it herself, and exchange talk with minute professionalism about the chair’s history, condition and needs. She hated being waited on.

During the war James was killed. There was a daughter, Elizabeth, now absorbed into the wife’s second marriage. This girl, about fourteen now, sometimes came to stay.

After the war Margaret married again-improbably to everyone but Mark. Her third husband was an amiable country gentleman, an amateur of the arts, vaguely a publisher, who served on a sort of semi-official body to do with the arts. He adored Margaret. Oscar Enroyde had not adored Margaret, she had adored him. Now Margaret entertained a good deal. Mark said his mother had an infallible instinct, unrecognized even by herself, for what was the next thing, what was in the air, and this marriage proved that the arts would soon be fashionable: unlikely as this seemed in grey, colourless, restricted post-war Britain.

Mark neither liked nor disliked this husband, John Patten, but he violently disliked him in his role of patron of the arts. This was a tension between son and a mother who wished that Mark, now that he was a ‘writer’, not only potential but published, would attend her weekend parties or at least an occasional dinner-table. If Mark had to go down for Christmas, he would hate it. But he would go, because of his concern for the child, for Francis’s Christmas. Yes, but that was not Martha’s affair. Unless the mere fact that she was here, had arrived here by what seemed such a slight chance, made it her affair? Had she ever, by any hint, or lapse of behaviour made it seem likely (to Mark, to Margaret) that she felt it was her affair? Yesterday Margaret had telephoned, apparently about some set of spare curtains, but really to find out if Martha intended to be
there for Christmas. It appeared from her tone, gaily casual, that she both wished that Martha would not be there, so that Mark would be available for a Boxing Day Party, and wished that Martha would be there looking after Francis, because there would be no other children at the Pattens, and she, Margaret, was afraid the little boy would be lonely among so many adults. Margaret had not mentioned Lynda, so much in both her and Martha’s thoughts. She had, however, said she hoped that supplies would be laid in for Christmas because if she, Martha, did not attend to it, who would?