Four Gated City (47 page)
*
Various remarks about the weather
from school textbooks
1956, as everyone knows, was a climactic year, a water-shed, a turning-point, a cross-roads; it has become one of the years one refers to: oh yes, that year, of course! As if years were pegs in a wall, on which one hangs a certain type of memory, or gives stars to, like hotels and restaurants. 1956 was a five-star year, classed with 1942: Stalingrad; or 1949: the birth of Communist China. Or-well, other parts of the world might look at it differently; or even other people in the same part. Harold Butts, for instance, tended to say things like:’ That was the year the marjoram did so well’; and Iris across the river would say:’ Let me see, that was the year we got that new bit of carpet in the front room.” 1956 was particularly easy to see and to remember as extraordinary because of that one week when coincidentally the Hungarians rose against their Russian masters (impossible) and in Britain thousands of people made their ideas known about a view of Britain’s role referred to as‘Suez’: unlikely, for no one had protested about anything for so long.
‘Hungary’;‘Suez’; violently juxtaposed, one of those moments when that other pattern briefly becomes visible, manifested in coincidence; as when, in the underground, in a part of London you visit once in three years, you find sitting next to you a man not seen or even thought of for months. But you thought about him last night. Not odd at all, then, that there he is with his brief-case, in the next seat:’ You live here, do you?’ says he; ‘I don’t think I’ve been in this part of London for let’s see, four or five years.’ Or, those remarkable meetings that come under the heading of:’ It’s a small world, isn’t it?’ Or all those other hints and indications that the laws which operate have in fact nothing at all to do with, for instance, the way of thinking that gives 1956 five stars for importance, except that perhaps it is, just here, that we pay tribute to the other pattern, momentarily visible.
Subtract the words Suez, Hungary, with their associations of communism, revisionism, imperialism, etc. etc., what there is left is … that a great many people, in one way or another said: No, enough, no more of that. And they milled about in open places in this city and that, with guns and hand grenades or without, shouting or silent, with policemen and troops in control or not, and, as a result of this activity, then there followed that-but about what followed no two people are likely to agree. It was a year of protest and activity and lively disagreement, though, that is certain. So that now, looking back, the people who lived through it say, for the sake of speed and easy understanding: 1956, and what is conveyed is the idea of change, breaking up, clearing away, movement.
Yet the air had cleared well before 1956.
When a very bad time is over there is no moment when one can say: this is it, now it’s finished. In an atmosphere where everything is slow, dark, sluggish, where every event is soaked in suspicion and dislike and fear then suddenly there intrudes an event of a different quality. But one looks at it with distrust, distrust being one’s element at the time, like being deep under filthy water. The river suddenly floats down flowers-but you wouldn’t dream of touching them, they are probably poisoned, a trap.
Years later one says no, no, it wasn’t like that at all, that was the moment when …
Apparently nothing very much changed in the house in Radlett Street. It had ceased to be so totally isolated when Phoebe and Arthur and Mary became visitors. They had come because they were under siege, disliked and feared in their own country, just as Mark was. And for some time, when they met, they exchanged news about the anonymous letters they got, or a visit from the police, or that Arthur was threatened with expulsion from his own Party. They continued to discuss how their letters were being opened and their telephones tapped and how, ‘taking the matter up’ with this body or that, nothing came of it but polite denials or statements that Britain, like any other state had the right to protect itself from Trojan horses. And conversations with Phoebe, Arthur, Mary continued to be full of tricky places which had to be negotiated, just as conversations with Gerald Smith, Patty, and Bob Hasty, visiting Radlett Street because there were still few places where they could visit with comfort, had to be handled carefully.
Patty, although over her breakdown, was particularly complicated. She had switched into a happy-go-lucky anarchism which everyone found irritating, even though they did see a self-protecting mechanism at work. For, any reminder that she had held (and only a few months before) the opinions she had in fact held, might cause her to break into angry tears. The ex-communists (for they had been expelled from, or had resigned from, the Communist Party) had been informed by the Mother of Communism that they were revisionists, and were now engaged in analysing their position in a way satisfying to themselves and honourable to the new term Revisionist. But they were not easy company, did not get on with that part of the left represented by Arthur and Phoebe, and were of no help to Mark who was engaged in his own process of self-discovery-which once again was to spend hours talking to Martha in order to find out what it was he thought.
Through all this Elizabeth, James’s daughter, came often. For a long time it was hard to discover why: she said so little and did not seem fond of anyone. It turned out she was engaged in a late adolescent battle with her conservative family. Once again it was salutary to discover how very little the storms of political life affected’ ordinary people’. Mark Coldridge according to them, Elizabeth’s family, country people from Norfolk, was a traitor. Recent shifts of the wind had not reached them: probably in a decade or so they might be surprised to learn that Mark was something else. Meanwhile, to visit Mark was to be the essence of defiant nonconformity. Elizabeth would wait patiently until Mark was alone, and then needle him slowly to get out of him remarks or definitions which she could take home to annoy her parents. In return she quoted to Mark what they said about him, mostly that he should be shot or deported. This went on for months and months: she was nearly thirty and had had one of the most expensive educations the country can provide. It was Elizabeth more than anything else that prevented Mark from realizing how deeply things had changed.
They were delivered from Elizabeth by young Graham, transmogrified from a mannered undergraduate into a jazz musician. Or rather, he did not play himself or even, one suspected, particularly listen to jazz; it was that he had visited America at just the time that jazz was’taking’, and there he had acquired a new vocabulary
and set of attitudes. These were all to do with patient long-suffering, tolerance of other people’s disabilities, loyalty to one’s intimates, a contained despair: the qualities, in short, of a beleaguered minority, expressed in a highly stylized and formalized language. It sounded, in people who had no reason for the attributes of defence, like the romanticism of despair. Not since the days of
Werther
has there been so sentimental a cult. In Graham its acquisition was as if he continued to wear scarlet cloaks lined with leopard skin-for he was vigorous, energetic, confident, capable and with irons in a dozen fires. One of them was the film industry. He had written a script, according to a then acceptable formula, about a Russian communist girl in love with a capitalist boy with a mutual passion for traditional jazz which they listened to in some bistro in Paris until … (This plot was plentifully and variously used during the brief period of the break-up of the Cold War.) Graham’s did not look as if it would become a film, but he thought that if his uncle’s name was on it as co-writer, there would be a better chance for it. This aim he expressed to Mark with candour; perhaps more as if conferring a benefit. His whole upbringing had taught him that people would always be ready to assist him on his way; in fact, this is practically a definition of his education. In his new tongue, but with his old accent, he confessed that he was a little low on the artistic thing, but the ideas he had were fine, just fine, and if Mark could spare a few weeks-and besides it would be just fine to take a trip to Paris and choose the ground. He was not able to see that Mark’s ideas were not his, because he was incapable of listening to anybody. For weeks he haunted Mark’s house, waiting for Mark to announce that he was ready to start. But there he met Elizabeth, a kind of cousin, or niece, and she found his relaxed phrases about sex, drugs, race and so on more useful in her guerrilla war with her family than Mark’s politics could ever be. Graham and Elizabeth floated out of the house on the wings of a love affair that was publicized in the papers and which caused a great many angry telephone calls from her father to Mark.
Meanwhile Mark had been going out, at first with reluctance, to a dinner party here, a party there. For him it was not all enjoyable until he saw that the way he was seeing them, his hosts, his fellow guests, was not at all as they saw themselves. His practised suspicion that there must be more to it all was-simply, not useful.
Or not useful now. What he had learned, that when you are in a tight spot you are lucky to have half a dozen friends, must be kept in reserve until, as it was bound to, it again became useful. Well, of course, it is no more than what ‘everyone’ knows; since a thousand old saws, mottoes, bits of folk wisdom, proclaim this truth. Yes, but he had learned it. This new London that was coming into being after the long freeze, where everyone was so charming, so loving, so friendly, and so
very
tolerant, and where-so it seemed-everyone suffered from severe amnesia, it did well enough, it did for its purposes, none of them serious.
But, having learned not to take it seriously, he went more often, and with more pleasure. He would return late at night from a party to drop into Martha’s room with remarks about this and that person, or the food, or the clothes, as one does from parties.
The air had cleared, lifted, lightened, without there being any point where they could say it had. It was some time early in the five-star year that Mark said to Martha over the breakfast-table:’ Good God, Martha, that was an awful time, wasn’t it?’
Saying it put it in the past. They looked back at a bad time. They had got through it. Fear had moved away, somewhere else. Fear was no longer nakedly manifest in events-or not the events that affected them. Five years, six, had been endless to live through. But now they slid together in memory and became a phrase or a set of words, like a peg on a wall on which one hung certain memories.
At a dinner party someone might say: One day we’ll find out just how close we were to war then. (A real war, not skirmishes like Korea, Kenya, Cyprus, Berlin.) Or: Thank God the Soviet Union has got the bomb at last, that gives us a breathing space. Or even: That’s just American propaganda, you can’t believe that … In short, the most respectable people were making the kind of remark which as recently as the three-starred years, 1954, 1955, had been treasonable, and had not been made out of the circles of the extreme left. Where, for the time being at least, had set in a distrust for the processes of any government anywhere-anarchy, in short; a bitter nihilism.
People had forgotten. Already? Was it possible? Margaret for instance, just as in the old days, was dropping in and out of the house. That Mark tended to be ironical in manner, she chose to put down to the fact that Lynda (‘she always did!’) had put Mark
against her. ‘Why did she always hate me so much?’ she cried, her fine eyes misting. Mark had waited for weeks after it became evident that Margaret again considered herself his mother, for some word of explanation if not apology. She did once remark that now that man Stalin was dead, perhaps people would be sensible again. The end of an epoch. A matter for pain? Incredulity? Roars, in the end, of laughter, bursting out between Martha and Mark at the breakfast-table. Margaret had telephoned, a brisk call, the third in a week, to ask if Mark would like some plants for the house. Yes, he would be delighted, of course … he had put down the telephone, and looked at Martha, his face alive with the readiness for indignation, anger-anything. In the end he had flung himself down at the head of a table where
The Times
lay folded waiting for his attention, as it had for his father, and had roared with laughter. Martha joined him. They had laughed until they stopped, knowing they would cry if they didn’t. The end of an epoch. But Mark had lost innocence, naivety-according to how one saw it. Had become-cynical, if that’s a word you use.
Martha thought: he’s become stripped, he’s been flayed. For somewhere about this time an image became very real to her-born perhaps in a dream? A stupid, ignorant, half-drunk cook, a solid ox of a woman, stands on two planted legs by a rather dirty kitchen table. In her hand she holds a bunch of root vegetables, just dragged out of the garden. She has a hand on one bulky hip. With the other she thrashes the bunch of roots against the table edge: dirt flies off. A turnip rolls under the table. The woman throws turnips, carrots, parsnips on to the table, and carelessly chops off the tops. A great boot cracks down on the fallen turnip. She looks. She hesitates, then picks up the bruised turnip, and into the soup pot it goes with the rest.
Mark was alone. The days of the self-constituted committee were over. All over London, indeed, all over Europe, new groupings, new societies, people talking, fresh versions of the unconstituted committees. But for Mark this was no longer possible.
In his study he had put up two enormous maps of the world: this at random, and without, or so it seemed, knowing what he was going to do with them when he had them up. When Martha asked what they were for, he said: Well, he thought perhaps it might be an idea to see what was really happening-you know,
really
happening.
One wall was soon devoted to atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, large bombs, small bombs (what one committee in the States had christened ‘kitten bombs’) and the establishments which developed them, made them, and sold them. Soon the wall was covered with little red flags, such as his father might have used to mark the course of battles in various parts of the world. With black flags, on the same map, were marked the factories and laboratories which researched, made and sold, materials for germ warfare, chemical warfare, and drugs used in the control and manipulation of the brain. With yellow flags, on this map, were marked areas of air, soil and water contaminated by bomb-blasts, fall-out, the disposal of radioactive waste, concentrations of chemicals used for spraying crops, and oil discharged from ships. From collecting and studying material for the proper disposal of all these little markers, Mark soon learned how very little indeed was known by the men who used these various techniques. For instance, the movement of the air around our globe, which might carry poisons of different kinds into the lungs and flesh of humans and beasts, was not well understood. Therefore this map could never be anything more than approximate and rough: not only was information hard to get, guarded by officialdom, hidden-in a word, lied about-but the basis was ignorance.
