Four Gated City (36 page)

Rosa got up, smiling. Smiling she stood looking out of the window at the tree. Then she nodded, smiled, and went.

Martha felt disproportionate relief, as if a threat had gone. Which was a danger in itself. The basement flat, its occupants, were isolating themselves in her mind, as if it was a territory full of alien people from whom she had to protect herself, with whom she could have no connection. What was happening in fact was exactly the same process as when some months ago she watched ‘communism’, meaning Patty, Mark and their friends, becoming separated from herself, becoming alien so that for two pins she could have become a hater. For two pins now she could switch into an enemy of the shadow world of the basement. She could watch the mechanisms at work in her mind, see how Rosa Mellendip became surrounded by a light first ridiculous, then menacing. She became something to be destroyed, like a witch in the Middle Ages. Sweep it under the carpet! Sweep it out of sight! Save poor Lynda, save poor Dorothy, save all the weak-minded fools from the power-loving fateful woman …

What an extraordinary household this was, after all, this entity, containing such a variety of attitudes, positions! A whole. People in any sort of communion, link, connection, make up a whole. (She was feeling that again, as she had before, in a heightened, meaningful way, as if a different set of senses operated in her to enable her to feel, even if briefly, the connection between them all.) Mrs. Mellendip, who was capable of saying: Dorothy, you should be careful all day on Thursday, you are going to be accident-prone. And the comrades, who … yes, but that pole, or opposition point had shifted, was dissolving.

Mark regarded Rosa Mellendip as ridiculous. For her, and her influence over Lynda, he had a sort of snort of offended amusement, that was also disgust. What pressure, what small switch could change that uneasy amusement into the person who could light the
faggots, set up the gallows? Looking into the movement of her own mind, Martha could say: A very small pressure, a very easy switch. There was Jimmy Wood. But here Martha failed. Even to think of Jimmy made her uneasy and she did not know why: and to imagine him and Rosa Mellendip together was to give up: one had to shrug one’s shoulders. Jimmy Wood would have to wait, she must get herself on her feet, get herself working again. And not through Rosa Mellendip-simply because it would be so easy for her, Martha, to become a person who wouldn’t step outside the door on Wednesday, if the stars threw the wrong sort of shadow.

Martha got up, dressed; before she had finished she knew what she was going to do. She put on a coat, took up a couple of very large shopping baskets, and departed to those streets of London whose façades are showcases for the millions of books they contain.

Somewhere in Martha’s life it had been instilled into her, or she knew by instinct, that one should never read anything until one wanted to, learn anything until one needed it. She was in for another of the short intensive periods of reading, during which she extracted an essence, a pith, got necessary information, and no more. She was looking for books which would tell her about that area of knowledge referred to in the house in Radlett Street as’Dr Lamb’. She knew nothing, had read nothing. Yet, so much was it ‘in the air’ that she knew roughly the right books, the right authors to ask for. The two great exemplars, forming as they did the two faces or poles of the science, or art, were easy. ‘Freud’ and ‘Jung’ were easy. She sniffed and nosed and smelled her way in the country in between and returned at nightfall with her baskets full, and dozens more books on order. These books were now spread out over her room, and she settled down with them. Mark came in at night, saw her there, sat for a while to watch, or comment, and was relieved. Because she was up and doing
something
•, what she was doing was another matter. A man who had spent so many hundreds of pounds on hospitals and on Dr Lamb to cure poor Lynda, was not likely to be anything but dubious. But Martha was normal: his friend was back to ordinary life, and so he was relieved.

Martha, her stomach a pit of terror because of what was approaching, behaved normally, and was astounded that she could. To reassure Mark, she cooked some rather good meals; they even went out once or twice to restaurants; she bought some dresses and
had her hair done. In the mirror she saw a solid, competent-looking woman with a fresh light make-up and hair that gleamed an attractive dark gold. The dark eyes, made-up, seemed unchanged.

Meanwhile, she read. She read. She read. She searched and sampled and dipped and extracted what she needed. She emerged from this equivalent of a university course with one essential fact. That these practitioners of a science, or an art, agreed about absolutely nothing.

A hundred years ago, or something like that, this way of looking at the human being had not existed. A human being was what he seemed. Then, hey presto! into being had sprung the great exemplars, and a human being was an iceberg. But, a century later, now, a large variety of emphatic people had very emphatic opinions about which they argued inexhaustibly in print and at conferences all over Europe and America. Not over Russia and China, however: where this view of things was suspect.

Well then, it was into no cage of dogma that Martha was going to allow herself to be led; because by definition there were no grounds for dogma.

She went down to the basement again, to see Lynda, not caring whether her cronies were there or not. Lynda sat smoking on her bed. In the living-room, Dorothy wound dark blue wool while a grey little man held his hands apart to support wool. Meanwhile, he gazed at Dorothy, whom he wished to marry. Dorothy concentrated on the wool, ignoring him.

Martha sat by Lynda on the bed.

She said:’ What is Dr Lamb like as a person?’

Oh, they are all the same!’

‘They can’t be!’

‘Well, that’s one of their points you see: it shouldn’t matter what they are like as people.’

‘But that’s ridiculous.’

‘I shouldn’t if I were you.’

‘I could stop if it were no good.’

Here Lynda gave Martha a rather sour look: amusement gone bad. ‘You get hooked in.’ she said.

‘What would you do, then?’ asked Martha.

And now Lynda made one of her very sharp switches; one moment, she was a listless tired-looking woman, smiling or not,
polite, normal, or more or less so; the next she was near-virago. She jerked herself up, her great eyes dilated and stared.

‘Me? I’m a nothing-but!’ she said.

This phrase was part of the jargon of the basement. Affectionately, or angrily, or spitefully, Dorothy would call Lynda, Lynda would call Dorothy, ‘a nothing-but’. Sometimes, hysterically. Lynda screamed that she was a ‘nothing-but’, and had to be left alone.

A’nothing-but’ could not be asked for anything.

‘That’s what they want, ’ said Lynda, between clenched teeth. ‘That’s what they aim for: to make you a nothing-but.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You will then!’

And Lynda flung herself back on the bed, and turned her face away in a sharp dismissing movement, her chin averted, as if the turned chin were a kind of closed door, excluding Martha. Her eyes stared, over the chin at the wall-blank. Martha must go.

Next door Martha sat by Dorothy and her attentive would be husband. Dorothy now stacked balls of blue wool into a raffia basket, made by herself.

‘What does this nothing-but mean?’ asked Martha.

‘Oh, it’s just a joke we have, ’ said Dorothy.

‘Please tell me.’

Dorothy gave a theatrically peremptory look at her swain, who stood up apologetically, and with an apologetic nod and smile, shambled away.

‘He gets on my nerves, ’ said Dorothy. ‘I keep telling him, you get on my nerves, but he just keeps coming back for more.’

He must have heard this, or part of it-he had not got farther than the hall. But he put his head in, and said fretfully:’ I’ll see you tomorrow, Dorothy. You are a naughty girl you know!’ She shrugged, magnificently, eyes proud; he withdrew his mouse-like head.

‘Marry!’ said Dorothy. ‘I mean, what would happen to Lynda for a start?’

‘This nothing-but, ’ said Martha.

Oh, well, it’s not much, it’s just a joke we had in the hospital. You know, it’s that point when they get all pleased because they can say: You’re nothing but-whatever it is. They’ve taken weeks and weeks to get to that point, you know, and it’s, you’re nothing but Electra. You know, that girl who killed her mother?’

Martha said, ‘Yes, ’ and Dorothy nodded. It was a placid domestic sort of nod. Now the man had gone, all drama had ebbed. A large, sad soft woman sat sorting balls of wool, chatting ordinarily as if it were eggs and butter and bread she was concerned with.

‘It’s nothing-but you want to sleep with your father. Nothing-but your brother. Nothing-but. nothing-but. nothing-but …’ This sounded like a croon or counting-rhyme. ‘I’m nothing-but a depression.’

‘What is Lynda?’

‘Well Lynda’s always more tricky, you see.’ This was with pride: Dorothy was proud of Lynda’s complexities. ‘Sometimes Lynda’s one thing, and sometimes she’s another. But that isn’t the point. Whatever nothing-but you are, at the time, that’s it, you see, until there’s another nothing-but. Lynda was nothing-but Cassandra the last time I heard, but who knows by now?’

Martha telephoned Dr Lamb for an appointment. The secretary inquired after Mrs. Coldridge: Martha said it was for herself. An appointment was made for two weeks away. Martha observed, with interest, that she was resentful because it could not be tomorrow. Martha having lain awake all night deciding to make this great step, then of course Dr Lamb should be available the moment she had decided. Towards her rushed crisis and misery-her mother’s visit; Dr Lamb was irresponsible, if not callous: there was no time to waste.

Two weeks. She set herself not to go back to bed, and not to worry Mark. The calmest of confidence was offered to him, and he accepted it with relief. She marvelled at her ability to do it. Meanwhile, not to waste time, she sat in the chair, not on the bed, which might drag her like a quicksand into its depths, and tried to resurrect her lost past. Every day more of it was slipping away. Sometimes she felt like a person who wakes up in a strange city, not knowing who he, she, is. There she sat, herself. Her name was Martha-a convenient label to attach to her sense of herself. Sometimes she got up and looked into the mirror, in an urgency of need to see a reflection of that presence called, for no particular reason, Martha. In the mirror was a pleasant-faced woman whose name was Martha. She had dark eyes. She smiled, or frowned. Once, bringing to the mirror a mood of seething anxiety, she saw a dishevelled panic-struck creature biting its nails. She watched this creature, who was in an agony of fear.
Who
watched?

She sat in the chair. Outside the elegant tall window with its graceful frame and panes, a tree. Nothing was more extraordinary and marvellous than that tree, a being waving its green limbs from a grey surface. Beneath the surface was a structure of roots whose shape had a correspondence with the shape and spread of its branches. This curious being that stood opposite the window, was a kind of conduit for the underground rivers of London, which rushed up its trunk, diffusing outwards through a hundred branches to disperse into the air and stream upwards, to join the damp cloud cover of the London sky. She felt she had never seen a tree before. The word’tree’ was alien to the being on the pavement. Tree, tree, she kept saying, as she said Martha, Martha, feeling the irrelevance of these syllables, which usurped the reality of the living structure. And, as if she had not lived in this room now, for four years, everything in it seemed extraordinary, and new, and when the old black cat rose, arching its back, from the white spread, the delight of that movement was felt in Martha’s back.

She went down to the basement to see Lynda: there was no one else who could understand her.

‘Lynda, do you know who you are?’

‘Me, ’ said Lynda.

‘Do you see that when you look in the mirror?’

‘No. Not often. Sometimes.’

When?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. There are times, you know.’

‘Are you always someone who watches yourself?’

‘Sometimes more, sometimes less.’

Lynda was sitting on her bed, in a white frilled négligée, doing her toenails, giving this process all her attention.

She now waggled her toes, which had bright pink shell-shapes on their ends. She laughed with delight, looking at Martha, who saw exactly what she meant by it, and laughed with her.

‘All the same, ’ said Lynda, ‘you’d better be careful, you mustn’t tell them that.’

‘What?’

‘About the two people. Sometimes you are more the one that watches, and sometimes that one gets far off and you are more the one who is watched. But they look out for that, you see, and when you make a mistake and say it, then that proves it. You’re a schiz.’

‘Nothing-but?’

‘Well, that depends. That’s what I was for a long time with a doctor when Dr Lamb was in America, but Dr Lamb had other ideas. But you shouldn’t tell them, you see, you should be on guard. It’s very difficult though, because they trap you.’

‘The point is, if that’s what I am now, that’s what I’ve always been. But now more than before.’

‘Well, if they trap you into saying it, then you’d better say it’s the other way around: it’s less than it was. Because the way they see it, it’ll mean you’re better and not worse.’

Martha understood that for years she had been listening, half-listening, to talk in the basement which she had thought was too crazy to take as more than pitiable. Now she was understanding it-or a lot of it. She was even learning the language. Several of the visitors to the basement had been in mental hospitals, or were under some sort of treatment. One of them was Dorothy’s would-be husband, the grey little man who seemed all loving, pleading, dog-like eyes. He was schizophrenic, they said: or at least, was so off and on. Sometimes when he felt bad, he went around to his doctor, and was readmitted for a few weeks. He was given a great many pills, got better, and left the hospital.