Four Gated City (22 page)

And Mark could not see that this attitude, at that time, was likely to offend. For him it was all self-evident. And Martha, explaining,
came to represent that naivety, that inability to draw conclusions from obvious facts, that he found so hard to understand.

Meanwhile, Martha was making a discovery-unexpected. ‘Matty’ was being summoned back into existence. ‘Matty’ had not been in evidence in this house, she had made no appearance. Another person had: and it took time to see that this was merely an aspect of the hydra, Matty. This was-at first Martha christened her ‘The Communist’ but had to widen it to ‘The Defender’, since it was a mask shared, for instance, by Marjorie’s sister Phoebe. This person got shrill, exclamatory, didactic, hectoring, and went off at a word into long speeches. ‘I’m not interested in speeches!’ Mark had said, early on in his relationship with this orator. Martha had not been aware she made speeches. Between the clumsy self-denigrating clown, and ‘The Defender’ was a link: Martha was beginning to see it. She had plenty of opportunity for study of it, since the novel stung ‘The Defender’ into such lively existence.

At Mark’s statement that in a hundred years’ time (if anyone was alive in a hundred years’ time), people would not describe the Second World War as people did in 1950-the year that had just started, Martha said: ‘Well, of course not.’

But they would not judge it as a victory of good over evil, they would not see Hitler’s armies as worse than those they fought. They would say, only: war expressed itself thus and thus in the years between 1939 and 1945. Moralizing was never more than the justification of willing belligerents.

But here Martha suffered. Mark had, during the last year of the war, seen one of the concentration camps opened-just as Thomas’s friend had done, writing Thomas a letter which had been the cause of Thomas’s subsequent development. Or so it had seemed.

‘What am I supposed to say? ’ Mark inquired. ‘Those bloody Huns? Or what? ’

‘Well what do you say? ’ demanded Martha.

‘If I go on and say something about Russia, we’ll swap atrocities. I can’t stand that conversation! You say, gas chambers. I say, collectivization of the peasants. You say, master race. I say, Purges. You say, Freedom. I say, Freedom. What is the point? ’

At which ‘The Defender’, night after night, had argued, quoted figures, emphasized, while he sat listening. ‘So there’s no progress, it doesn’t matter what attitudes one takes up, one might just as well have fought for Hitler?’

‘If one is going to draw up a balance sheet of atrocities-of course.’

‘What then? ’

That’s all.’

‘Ah no, I’ve been here before. When? I must have been twenty-not much more. Nothing mattered, a tale told by an idiot. That was a man called Mr. Maynard.’

‘We’ve got some second cousins called Maynard. Was he from Wiltshire? ’

I don’t know
. But I do know fighting him was the best thing I ever did.’

‘Fighting, ’ said Mark with distaste.

‘Well then, if that’s true why bother about Colin? ’

But here it was Mark turned away, fiddled with drawers, pencils, the lamp-switch, became angry, bitter. Watching her own enemy personalities at war, she was easier able to see his.

One, that cool observer who was able to see events as they might appear a hundred years from now. Always? Mark had gone through that war able to see it like that? Hmmm-possibly.

And, at the mention of his brother, a cold angry man, the brother to The Defender’.

‘Progress, ’ muttered this angry man-hardly to Martha, more to himself, a conversation with himself possibly, of the kind one has alone, when other people are asleep. ‘That’s not my thing. I don’t care about it. If things do improve, then it’s not because one nation fancies itself better or more humane than another. That’s a farce-it always was. The way people see themselves-that’s for children. Look what’s going on now! The Cold War! What a phrase. What kind of thinking is it? The tune changes, from one year to the next-well why not, it always does-but am I expected to take it seriously? Is Colin? Colin’s stand is that he was an ally of the Soviet Union for years and during all that time he was fighting to share scientific information-they all were, the scientists …”

‘Because the governments of this country and America were doing everything not to share it, because they hated being allied to Russia.’

‘Granted. Of course. But the same went for the Russians. But Colin is a scientist. He’s not a politico. He stands for the internationalism of science. So, the tune has changed and suddenly he’s a traitor. Well, I stand by my brother.’

‘Then it’s childish to be upset about words like traitor.’

‘Upset! I’m scared stiff. I never thought that would be possible-in this country. As far as I can see Colin isn’t scared. As far as he is concerned it’s all perfectly clear-they are in the right and that’s that.’ By ‘they’ Mark meant Colin and his superior, the man now awaiting trial. ‘They say America wants to start a war with Russia. America wants to destroy Russia. Before Russia gets the atom bomb. Well, of course America wants to destroy Russia, you’ve only to read the newspapers. Colin says, it’s about communism. I think, nations need to go to war. If it wasn’t Russia it would be another country. But if
they
were able to supply Russia with information about the bomb, so they could make one, Russia would get equal with America, and then America would be afraid to start a war.’

‘Is that what Colin says he’s been doing? Because if so you should keep quiet about it.’

‘No, it’s not what he says he has done. It’s what he says is logical. It’s his point of view. He’s entitled to it.’

‘All the same, you’d better keep quiet.’

‘Why? This is my country. Or I used to think so. But what scares me is-that I’m scared stiff. I think words like traitor and treason and all that stuff are childish. Rubbish. They’ve never been anything but stuff to scare the populace into behaving. Suddenly I’m scared. I read the newspapers from the States-well, they’re always going in for pogroms over there, it’s part of their thing. But it’s starting here. I read our newspapers and see the word Traitor in big black letters and I realize I’m cold-literally cold with fright. What about you? ’

‘Yes.’ He had never asked her if she would, in Colin’s position, hand over information about the bomb to the Russians. He talked around it, and about, coming back to this point where he looked at her, as if waiting for her to clarify where she stood. She had been frightened to: reading the newspapers which she did, every morning, for hours, left her without courage.

‘What it amounts to is. thank God, thank anything you like, that I’m not in Colin’s position, believing that it is my duty to give Russia information. I don’t think I’d have that much guts.’

‘Yes. That’s about it. There but for the grace of… but he’s my brother. I’ll back him through anything.’ And, saying this, he was all bitter, locked determination.

Another person came into existence when his mother entered the house. Again a man who turned away-but, Martha judged,
some years younger. When Margaret, having telephoned-she never arrived unannounced, because, as she would announce, loudly: one ought not to drop into one’s grown-up children’s houses without warning-emerged from her car, for lunch, tea or dinner, Mark who had not been able to work before she came, seemed to shrink, and grow younger. He was rude to her, or abrupt. She, these days, came to discuss Colin: who was always too busy to see her, she complained. And Mark would say: ‘I don’t know, I have no idea. Well, then, why don’t you ask him? ’ Meanwhile he watched her, with a helpless fascinated look, as if there was a force which no act, or word of his could propitiate. He behaved, in fact, as if he were about fifteen, a boy newly defending his manhood against his family.

And Margaret complained to Martha that Mark was as stubborn as a mule, as close as a clam. No, she had no intention of putting Martha in any false positions, but that reviewer had put his finger on it-dear Bertie. Martha knew Bertie Worth perhaps? No? He used to visit the old house before it was sold. But Bertie had said in
The Times
that Mark had no moral sense. He lacked a feeling for essential values. And she departed, emphatically.

To return, less emphatically, indeed, with a curious evasiveness, to say she had just the right person to live in the basement. She was a Mrs. Ashe, the widow of a Major Ashe, ex-Indian Army. It turned out she was nearly seventy and difficult. The right person to run that house, to give Francis what he needed? Put thus, Margaret cried out that she was really such a dear old thing. She looked quite extraordinarily guilty. She’s up to something-again. Mark said. What?

Margaret retired. Temporarily. Telephone calls and visits pursued the cause of Mrs. Ashe. Why? There was something odd about it, something wrong. They could not define it. Particularly as everything, the texture of life itself seemed wrong, ugly, with so much hinted at and hidden-waiting to explode. Yes, they were waiting. They were sitting time out. Or, Mark was: Martha only until she must leave.

Before she left, she could at least try and do something about Mark’s finances: he asked her to ‘make suggestions’. Mark’s father had left money, but not much. The upkeep of this house, which belonged jointly to the three brothers, was paid by Mark, who lived in it. He spent nothing on himself, but Lynda and Francis cost a
great deal. And so did Martha and her salary, as she pointed out. But that would not be for long.

The publisher who had been a friend of the family had signed with Mark a contract that conceded nothing to friendship. There had been an advance of one hundred and fifty pounds and he had earned not much more than that on the war novel before it had stopped selling. He had contracted for three more books on the same terms. A ridiculous contract, which he should not have signed. But he had no agent. A second novel had been begun and abandoned: he had ideas for others. He said he was not particularly interested in writing another book. He was not a writer, he said. He supposed, one day, he would write another book.

The factory made money on the machines for hospitals. It could make more. But Mark said he was not interested in the business from that point of view. If he could not use the profits for what he called ‘having fun with new ideas’ then he wouldn’t bother with the factory at all.

If he were able to sell the war novel in America?

An American agent arrived to see Mark, who received her in his study. She was a woman of about thirty-five, well turned-out, full of professional friendliness. For her benefit (indeed, one could do no less) Mark offered ‘the writer’ and ‘the writer’s secretary’ - Martha.

Miss Sayers sat at ease, conducting with relaxed efficiency this interview which was only one, after all, in a tour of British writers. She said she liked Mark’s novel, for what it was, but that kind of thing, the protest novel, was dated.

She saw his novel as a protest novel?

War was not a good thing, and therefore a novel about war was a protest novel-her mind seemed to work in this way. Or perhaps she had not read it? At least she was able to use with familiarity the name of the chief character.

Perhaps she was one of the people who don’t know how to read. Very few do, after all.

However that was, she explained that the war novel was hard to sell in her country at that time. But she was interested in Mark’s second. That was why she was here: she would be so very privileged to think she could handle Mark’s second book which she was sure would be an advance on his first. And what was his new book about?

‘Life, ’ said Mark, bland, intending to be rude.

‘Well, ’ she cried, gaily, ‘of course, it is bound to be.’

But if Mark could give her some idea, she would then be in a position to …

‘You are an agent, you say? ’

‘Yes. that is so. And I think you’ll find one of the best known.’

‘I see. Well perhaps it would be better to wait until the book is finished? Otherwise I might find myself altering it in the hope that you might handle it? ’

‘Well, now, Mark. I really wouldn’t like you to think that I’d be capable of putting any pressure at
all
on my authors, but it is true that I feel myself a friend to my authors, I do like to think they take my advice.’

‘And what might that be? ’

Here she began a short lecture, frowning, like a teacher concerned to remember words from notes made. It was a lecture given, that was clear, many times already.

What Mark should understand, said she, was that only second-rate writers dealt with social conditions, or politics, or concerned themselves in any way at all with public affairs or …

‘Oh I don’t know … there was Tolstoy, and Balzac, and Dickens and …’

Her face glazed, at the effort of associating these names, ‘classics’ (she had read them?), with her subject.

‘All that kind of thing, ’ she insisted with authority. ‘The real great artist creates truth and beauty from within himself, he deals with the eternal truths …’ And so on.

It took about fifteen minutes. Mark and Martha listened, in silence, fascinated, to the opinion currently in vogue in America, being put so trippingly in this alien tongue.

Finally she asked if Mark would be prepared to sign a document giving her first refusal of his new book, when finished. She was not prepared to pay anything for this: his return would be, that he had an agent and a friend.

She left, having asked if she could use the telephone: she needed to check if her interview with her next author, a young man from Wales about whom she asked if the opinion (it was Mark’s opinion too, she supposed) that he was the finest poet since Auden, was still viable.

This visit raised interesting questions … One was: if Mark’s
novel had been published now, instead of 1948, what reception would it have got? Two, three years, had changed the climate completely. ‘Out’ was the humanitarianism, warmth, protest, anger. What was ‘in’ was the point of view put by the able Miss Sayers. Why? Very simple indeed. The ‘cold war’ was spreading, had already spread, from politics, to the arts. Any attitude remotely associated with ‘communism’ was suspect, indeed, dangerous. Few intellectuals had not been associated with the left, in some form of it, during the ‘thirties and the ‘forties. Precisely these intellectuals were now running, in one way and another, the arts. Tom, Dick and Harry, they were now peddling, for all they were worth, a point of view summed up by the slogan: The Ivory Tower. This was admirable, subtle, adult, good, and above all, artistic. Its opposite was crude, childish, bad, inartistic.