Four Gated City (33 page)
The studio room had not changed. Jack was propped up in the bed, and there was an atmosphere of illness. The blonde girl returned to her chair by the bed. Jack opened his eyes and said: ‘Hello, Martha, ’ and began coughing. The coughing roused him. He tried to sit up, failed, collapsed back, and lay holding Martha’s
hand, and the blonde girl’s. He had lit, wild eyes, a feverish glow on the bones of his face; was very thin.
Martha stayed for a time, until he went back to sleep.
In the hall, as Martha left, the blonde girl, Betty, said that Jack had insisted on leaving the sanatorium, against the advice of the doctors, and that she was nursing him. But she was persuading him to go back there: if he would only stick it out in the sanatorium, he would be cured, they said. But Jack was very worried about leaving the house: Mr. Vasallo, a not very nice man, took unfair advantage-Martha was an old friend, please would she come again?
Martha, cured, left that house and returned home.
But she was not cured of anger, of hatred.
Λ few weeks ago, she had sat watching Lynda and Dorothy pursuing their fortune-telling, their astrology; and Mark and Patty Samuels, with their communism. She had watched, interested, as if there was no more to be said than: Well, that’s what they are doing, that’s how they are.
Now, she found herself in the grip of violent distaste for the preoccupations of the basement; and disgust for Mark and his politics.
Even a few weeks ago, she had been reading the newspapers that flooded into the house from left, right, and centre; observing a process of interlocking, inter-reacting currents. Now she read the right-wing Press as if every word had been written by herself: and it was not only with fear, but with hatred that she read the papers of the left. She was able only to maintain enough objectivity to recognize the depth of the fear. She was being threatened with another conversion. She could see that. But seeing it was not enough to shift it, to chase away the disgust. A phrase used by Mark, from the communist jargon, or an insensitively jolly competence observed on Patty’s face, flooded her with an angry irritation.
Yet, while she was in this condition, a set of phrases or sentences from the armoury of the right which objectivized precisely what she was feeling, so that she could see the crude ugliness of it, was enough to switch her over-not to any position where she could include, hold, tolerate, understand-but to an extreme leftism, just as if she had never left there.
For some days she kept switching from one viewpoint to the
other; one day she was violently ‘anti-communist’ - and self-righteously so. The next, she was a pure, dedicated, self-righteous communist. The two states had no connection at all-apparently.
In this condition she had a dream which, while she could not clearly remember it, woke her with a warning. She was muttering: ‘If I let myself do this, I’ll have to live through it again, I’ll be made to do it again.’ She went back to sleep and woke in a clear morning, summer outside, the sky all sunlight and fresh white clouds, knowing that she had made a shift in her sleep. She knew, as if someone had told her so, that if she now allowed herself to hate Mark, to hate Patty Samuels, to hate the comrades, she would be doing worse than hating a younger self. She would be threatened with more than ‘Having to do it all over again’. Inside her would be lying in wait what she hated, to emerge in ogreish disguises she could not now imagine. And this would be the same if she returned to being a communist. Shapes of hatred much larger than she could envisage waited like the shadows on a nursery wall for fear to fill and move them.
But, knowing what she had to do, she could not do it. The energy it needed, the effort-she could not find it. Brought again and again by herself to that point in her where she had to untie knots of violent emotions, she shied away, baulked. No, no, no: she could not. For days she was locked in that condition which is called a sulk, turning herself away, saying no, no.
Then, one night, she had a dream of Patty Samuels, who was also her younger self. Patty approached her smiling. But Martha turned angrily away. Patty Samuels, multiplied into an army, in the shape of a nation which was all sinister threatening power, encompassed Martha, threatened her with death. This was a nightmare and it woke Martha completely. She sat in the dark room whose walls had the shadow of the tree moving on them-shadows on a shadow, and she listened to the dream. She could not sleep. The moon rose. Light came into the room and the tree’s shadow dissolved. Over the earth’s shoulder the moon was catching light from the sun. A quietness came into the room, with the vision of the little world, one half bathed in moonlight, the other in sunlight.
Next day, meeting Patty Samuels in the kitchen, she was able to smile at her younger self. A stiffness went from her face; muscles went loose all over her body that she had not known were knotted.
Patty Samuels wore a brisk blue skirt and white shirt, and had a
pile of papers in a suitcase. She was cool with Martha, then, after a hesitation, warmed. Because, as Martha saw, Patty felt that Martha had changed. In the kitchen, observing each other, Patty made coffee, Martha made coffee, and neither was in a hurry to leave. Soon they sat drinking coffee at the table, allowing goodwill to do its work.
Patty had at first met Martha with the hard shell of contempt that went with the words ‘ex-communist that has sold out’. She had once muttered, so Martha could hear: ‘Well, of course people leave when the heat’s turned on …’
Patty Samuels had become a communist when she was twenty, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Her life had been spent organizing. She had been a secretary, or assistant, to communist officials, had been an official herself, though on an unimportant level. She was now ‘doing Culture’. She used the phrase now with irony; five years before she would have regarded irony as treachery. A great part of her time was spent wrestling with Soviet and other East European countries in order to get their ideas of efficiency over visas for delegations, and so forth, to coincide with hers. This was a task which had reduced the strongest to nervous breakdown; and Patty, a strong woman, was showing strain. Also, by the nature of things she was bound to know a great many of the people in Russia and in other communist countries who had disappeared into prison or were dead; and most of her friends in Britain and in America were under suspicion, passportless, or in one sort of trouble or another.
The relation between herself and Martha was a curious one, based on the closest of understandings born of shared experience, yet full of antagonism. For there was no person more hated, vilified, and distrusted by the comrades, at that particular time, than people like Martha.
What Patty Samuels wanted, Martha realized, had been wanting for a long time-was to talk about Mark. They did not talk about Mark during this first reconnaissance over the coffee cups, but as their cautious friendship developed, Patty began to talk, and obsessively, about Mark, his friends, his way of life.
She suspected, of course, that Martha was in love with Mark. ‘All’s fair in love and war, ’ she said, once, accepting a rivalry as natural. But she was much more worried about Lynda, whom she
had not yet met; it was some time before Lynda entered their conversations.
She did not understand Mark. ‘These upper-class types? ’ she would say, or inquire; or ‘People like him? ’ or ‘These political demivierges!’
The affair was in bad difficulties.
‘Do you know what I sometimes think, Martha? I do believe that Mark thinks that one of these days in the extremes of passion I’m going to divulge the truth about his brother-he keeps coming back to it. I keep saying I don’t know anything, I mean, why should he think that I should? He simply doesn’t know the score …’
Knowing the score: the painful phrase at that time, for the grim realities of communism, which was so shortly to become absorbed into that other phrase: ‘Stalinsim’. Soon, trusting Martha, the enemy, she began discussing, or rather, suggesting at, or talking around, what was going on inside communism. A great deal did not need to be said: there being no substitute for experience. Martha, for the most part, listened: for the most part, when with one’s younger self, one listens; one hears, bouncing off oneself, one’s younger voice. Painful. But not to be rejected, or repudiated, without asking for bad trouble.
Very painful, for both of them, these times when they drank coffee, or Patty came up to Martha’s room. Patty was in the grip of an aspect of herself she had not known existed, and which she feared and despised.
Mark was the enemy: he was a capitalist, member of an old upper-class family, and an intellectual, to cap it all. Yet she was fascinated by all this, and knew it. She would have been delighted to be introduced to this world. But even she, who had every reason to understand, from her own experience, the realities of isolation, did not understand how cut off Mark was from his own kind. She believed that Mark was deliberately excluding her from his real life, his friends. Once she asked: ‘Tell me, is Mark mean with housekeeping money? I mean, is he careful? ’ She did not at all see that her attraction for him was-her world, which she was tired of, had grown out of. The fact that for years she had lived in bed-sitting-rooms, eaten badly if at all, in cafés, and cheap restaurants; had not taken holidays, had worked like a horse for so little money, was, in short, dedicated, seemed to Mark-not romantic, but admirable. He admired her. He enjoyed tasting this life for which
he knew he had no capacity. He liked to turn up at her shabby room near King’s Cross, late at night, to find her still at work for her cause. And he did not see, as Martha did, that she was due to break. He thought the reason she did not want to discuss ‘The Party’ with him, was because of secretiveness, possibly even because she was concealing facts about his brother. But the truth was, for her he was a relief from the monotony of her life and work.
Underneath all that jolly competence was a very tired woman. And a frightened one. After all, she was getting on for thirty-five. She had been married and divorced; but that was some time ago. She had had some affairs. She wanted children. She was beginning to see that Mark would never marry her. And now she brought up Lynda. ‘Surely he ought to divorce her? ’ she kept saying.
One day she met Lynda, who had come up for something. She saw a very thin, untidy woman, with strained wide eyes, in a dress that looked as if it had been slept in.
The encounter changed Patty.
‘You say he loves her? ’ she inquired, in a way which was characteristic of her at that time, troubled but determined to know.
‘Yes, I think he does.’
‘Well, that’s not my idea of love. I mean, what’s the point of being in love with someone who can’t ever give you anything? ’ She looked scared, hearing herself say this: for she had announced an intention, and knew it. She laughed, at last. ‘I’m not getting any younger, am I? ’ and, finally: ‘I mean, love ought to be a partnership.’
The affair did not come to any dramatic end. For one thing, it was embedded in Mark’s social life: the people who came to visit him, were her friends; when he went to their homes, she was often there.
The bad time continued. It was expressed in a number of separate events, or processes, in this or that part of the world, whose common quality was horror; and a senseless horror. To listen, to read, to watch the news of any one of these events was to submit oneself to incredulity: this barbarism, this savagery, was simply not possible. And, everywhere in this country, in the world, people like oneself sat reading, looking, watching, in precisely the same condition: this is not possible; it can’t be happening; it’s all so monstrously silly that I can’t believe it… The war in Korea was at the height of its danger for the world, the propaganda on both sides had reached a point where no one sensible could believe a word of it, and for months it looked as if nothing could stop America using’the Bomb’ there. In America the hysteria had grown till that great nation looked from outside like a dog driven mad by an infestation of fleas, snapping and biting at its own flesh; and a man called Joe McArthy, who had no qualities at all, save one, the capacity to terrorize other people, was able to do as he liked. Throughout Africa various countries fought in various ways against the white man, but in Kenya there was a full-scale war, both sides (as in Korea! fighting with a maximum of nastiness and lies.
In the communist countries things went from bad to worse. In South America-but first things first; whole continents, let alone countries have to be overlooked when the future of the human race balances on what seems to be needle-points somewhere in Korea, Berlin, Vietnam … As for Kenya, it was ugly, it was a turning point and a cross-roads (etc. etc.) for Africa, but it was not of vital importance. No world war was likely to start there. It affected, nastily, the atmosphere in Britain, which was already craven and corrupted because of breathing the poisoned winds from across the Atlantic. It affected, for instance, Arthur Coldridge and his ex-wife Phoebe.
When Martha became a friend of Patty Samuels and ceased to be a traitor and an enemy, she was admitted, through her, to the group of comrades, who met nightly, in Mark’s house, or in a café or a pub. She was admitted to-talk, discussion, debate. It was a long time since she had been in an unconstituted committee. She was joining it, as she immediately saw. as it was about to disintegrate. For two, three years, it had been a tight defensive little group: Mark, Patty Samuels, Freddie Postings, a physicist and friend of Colin, Gerald Smith, Marxist historian from a provincial university, Bob Hasty, an economist, one or two others. Mark was the only non-communist. Of these, not one would be a communist in two, three years. Meanwhile, they were under violent fire from their own side, which they criticized-but never publicly, since everyone else did that; and submitted to the subtle, creeping, crooked pressures that characterized the time, from outside.
For instance, Freddie Postings, due for advancement in his job, had not been given it; had been transferred to work he was not interested in and where he could not advance, because, as his superior had told him one night when drunk, of his past association with Colin. Gerald Smith had lost his wife into a mental hospital: she had been unable to stand the social isolation of being his wife, an isolation which was never explained, put into words, defended; just slowly deepened, till she cracked. Bob Hasty-but, one way and another, it was the same for all of them. In America they would be defending themselves before committees, would be deciding whether or not to betray friends and associates: here nothing of the sort was asked of them: they were just having a very bad time. This group was where they were able to relax, where they created the energy to go on, where there was a breathable air. But what was this air? Remarkably enough, if it was one part faith in humanity, it was two parts pure nihilism, a kind of painful, despairing, angry denial of faith: as if, threatened from outside both from friends and enemies by bad faith and destruction, they had to create the same qualities here, in a homeopathic dosage. It was the nihilism of Thomas’s last testament. Here it was. Here? Why? Sometimes Martha felt as if Thomas had walked in, a thin bitter man, burned nearly black by his river-valley sun, and was leaning by the door, smiling: he had been drawn by the atmosphere, so much his own.
