Four Gated City (69 page)

It was essentially a process of degradation. But not a straightforward one. It would not have done, for instance, to take some girl and beat her up, or rape her, or force her into a brothel or into a compliance with this or that act. The girl had to be taken step by
step along a road where she half understood and submitted to her own degradation. It was a process of psychological breaking-down. When Jack described blow by blow how such and such an innocent girl (virgins were best) was led to voluntarily agreeing to stay in the brothel, this description was a breaking-down of Martha, in so far as she was prepared to listen and accept. Because it was calculated, measured, to affect Martha.

He would see or hear of some girl new in the neighbourhood, working in a laundry or shop. She was probably provincial, or from Ireland, or perhaps from the Continent. He would drop into where she worked, was always formal, dignified, gravely interested. She usually remarked at this stage that she liked his manner, it was respectful: unlike most young men’s. But during this stage he would drop in a couple of remarks or gestures quite out of character with this correctly formal person. He would suddenly belch a string of four letter words; or goose her; it didn’t matter what-the point was, whatever he did or said was quick, and instantly concealed again behind the grand seigneur manner, which (since he was a farm boy from the high veld) sat on him like a top hat on a farm labourer. There was something insultingly wrong about it-and purposefully so.

The girl would wonder if she had imagined the rude words, the gesture. If she referred to them, he might look surprised or shocked and say, ‘What do you mean?’

At some point he said something like: ‘I have a friend who would be interested to meet you.’ She would suggest a local café; he, his house. (But he would say my friend’s house-or my flat-anything that was
not
the truth.)’Don’t you trust me?’ he would inquire in his melancholy resigned way when she demurred at coming to his house. She went, in the end. There she would find Jack dressed up as a Turk or perhaps an Arab. When she said:’ Why Jack, what are you doing in that costume?’ he would reply: ‘I think you are mistaken. I am Abdulla-something or other.’ She would giggle nervously; he would be gravely distant, suggesting she was bad-mannered. They would have Turkish coffee (‘flown in from my homeland’), or perhaps Turkish delight, or something of the kind. The whole purpose of this interview was to make the girl fall in with his charade. Which might vary. For instance, he would be his own younger brother. Or perhaps there might be someone else there: another girl induced to act as his sister; or one of the other
men associated with the brothel pretending to be something that he obviously was not.

She would return, confused, to her work, thinking continually about the incident, half-intrigued, half-insulted and angry. He would not come in to see her immediately-not for some days. When he came he would not refer to the occasion until she did. She would say:’ But, Jack, why were you pretending the other afternoon?’ Or:’ Was that really your sister?’ Again, he would be gravely reproachful. Yet at some point (exactly as he had used the discordant language or gesture) he would, and with sudden vulgarity, say something like:’ Oh, you can see through me, I like a girl you can’t fool.’

Even while she was smiling, flattered, very relieved that the farce was over, furious that he thought her stupid, he would have retreated back to his grand-opera dignity. He would leave her alone for a time. Not until he and whatever incident he had staged had become a memory that had more humiliation in it than pleasure, would he again drop into the shop or laundry or whatever it was. He would arrive in a state of moral indignation; at first playing a determination to preserve a wounded dignity, then (as if it were being forced out of him) reproach her for not trusting him, for listening to gossip and so on. She, naturally, protested innocence. But in order to show she trusted him, she had to go to his house (or flat or room or friend’s place) again. She went, feeling herself both falsely accused and deeply in the wrong. In Jack’s house, she was taken to one of the ambiguously furnished rooms. Nothing very much was said: the atmosphere, however, was very strong. Something might be lying around-a riding whip, or a hangman’s noose in nylon rope. ‘A friend of mine hanged himself last week-I was so fond of him.’ Meanwhile she was offered tea on a silver tea-tray, brought in by a girl, or young man, pretending to be a servant. She would probably crack and leave at this point. But he would do nothing to stop her beyond saying:’ You’re going? I am so very, very sorry. You do believe me, when I say how very sorry I am?’ She might leave altogether, and push it out of her mind: rare, that. It would appear that there aren’t so many strong-minded women; or perhaps it was that his original choices were good. She might leave the house, but find herself returning, full of incongruous emotion-she was in the wrong, she had behaved rudely. But this emotion would be in violent conflict with suspicion,
unease, fear. Or she would get to the door and simply turn around and come back:’ I’m sorry, Jack, ’ she might say. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m just silly.’

She was now ready for the next stage. Over this Jack would spend a lot of thought, for it was enjoyable to choose just exactly that degree of ‘wrongness’ for a particular girl. As he said:’ You can get a raw girl from Western Ireland for instance, and if you can get her to neck just past her limit under a crucifix that would do the trick. Mind you, you have to choose the right size and style of crucifix.’

It could be any such incident. For instance, there had been a girl who prided herself on her broad-mindedness and lack of convention. She had in the middle of a formal tea cried:’ Where’s your loo, Jack. I’ve simply got to spend a penny.’ With gravity he escorted her to the door of the lavatory, held it open for her, and then went in with her. As she hesitated, he remarked, ‘I always know whether my girls really love me or not by whether they will show they are mine by letting me stay with them.’ This threw her into total confusion. First, she had not known she was ‘one of his girls’. Or that love came into it, or was going to. She might ask him to leave the room; or hesitate then squat down, smiling.

Soon the girl would be wondering why she was not being kissed, for probably she had not been. He talked a great deal about his sex life, in vaguely horrifying terms, but he treated her formally except for the lightning flashes of filth or the sudden gesture. It would be the girl who would, out of nervousness or curiosity, make the first move. And at this point Jack went into a great emotional act of some kind, it didn’t matter what. That he loved her‘But not like that’. Or he did love her sexually but realized she was the sort of girl who would not be satisfied with ‘just sex’. Or he had five girls already, and would not be able sexually to meet her needs. She would then reassure him, and they got into bed, in his remarkable room, all black and white austerity in the middle of his house which was like a brothel. (It was not a brothel: the brothel was elsewhere; this was a breakdown area.) Again, she would be manipulated into accepting some posture or act or technique, it didn’t matter what, which was just one degree beyond what she considered right. When the act was over, she would have been continually assured that this particular act was not only the essence of real sexuality, and that Jack was its exponent, and that her talent
for it was extraordinary, but that it was considered beyond the pale by the conventional world (left undefined-but’them’ as distinct from ‘us’ was introduced at this point). She would have enjoyed an extreme of sexual pleasure; mixed or not, according to her disposition with pain; but also mixed with moments of angry rebellion and humiliation which
she
, not he, had overcome.

Soon she would, to show she trusted Jack, sit in the room while he made love (usually quite differently from the way he did it with her), or make love with him while some man or girl watched.

After each such act, she would suffer violent reactions against him against what she had done. But he never approached her, persuaded her, forced her, except in ways such as that he would appear outside the window of the shop where she was working, looking pale, distressed, a tragic ghost among men, and stand there for an hour, two hours, sending her speaking looks. Then vanish without a word. If she rang him up, or dropped in, she would hear: ‘I can’t live without you, you know that.’ Five minutes later, he would say with a vulgarly casual laugh:’ And you can’t live without … (some vividly disgusting phrase, or one she would consider disgusting). Can you? Oh, I know you.’

After some months of this treatment, her will was broken, she would do anything he asked, and she began to go on the streets, but only in a very refined sort of way to start with. To show that she trusted him. He would choose a man for her, wait outside some room until the act was over, and take her back home with him, thanking her humbly all the way. He would not take the money at first. It was often she who suggested the second act, because he would not: perhaps a faint suggestion had been left that she had not done well, the customer was not satisfied. In due course she moved into the house, owned by Jack and a man from Glasgow. There were several girls there. They catered for men and women whose tastes were as much for psychological sadomasochism as for the physical. In fact, the girls might come to Jack for a ‘normal screw’ because of the perverts that used the house, which was extremely profitable and had many highly respected citizens as customers. Jack frequented public occasions of all kinds to find customers and new girls.

He did not keep the one he had found among the Marchers-or it looked as if he hadn’t. Outside Lyons, she went away, leaving him alone. Now he glanced towards Martha, and wondered
whether to acknowledge that he had seen her. But he had decided that she was without profit. That is, a battle of wills had resulted in stalemate. Having understood that her anger because ‘he was so stupid he didn’t see that she saw through every move he made’ was in fact part of the mechanism towards submission; she had said she would make love so-and-so but not such-and-such. He had said she was
un-feminine
-always a sure ploy with emancipated women. Characteristically, she was made to feel herself unfeminine for desiring to enjoy feminine satisfactions; everything was stood on its head and became its opposite in Jack’s house.

But he could only enjoy the process of
breaking down
.

The one thing she had never found out was, how consciously he used these techniques, which were identical with those used in torture; and in certain armies, and some religious orders where the novice’s will has to be broken: and in some brands of psychoanalysis? The common factor in all these is that a part or area of the person manipulated has to be made an accomplice of the person who manipulates.

Martha had learned that she would do well to be frightened-not of Jack. So they had separated, after a brief encounter.

He was examining Lynda carefully. He would be attracted by Lynda’s look of illness, and by her country lady’s clothes. Martha could see it was a toss-up whether he would come over. She wondered what sort of approach he was thinking about … a taxi came and she stopped it. He turned slightly to watch the two women get in. When Lynda was looking the other way he smiled a conspirator’s smile at Martha, as it were saying: get her for me. She managed a cool nod and smile, at which he could not prevent a small grimace of admiration, which was nevertheless mixed with annoyance: he would spend some minutes inventing humiliations for her. As the taxi turned a corner, he went back in search of fresh prey in the park where hundreds of people still waited to leave. The head of the column must have reached Trafalgar Square long ago.

When Martha got back home, she found Mark had forgotten about people coming, and he had gone up to work. But Patty was upset, Lynda was upset: Mark and Martha would therefore have to cook dinner, organize an unknown number of baths, provide clothes for those who had got wet … in a frazzle of bad temper they did these things, while the unsightly image of Patty bewailing
the end of love upstairs made it impossible for them to look at each other, two middle-aged people, with kindness, for they were in that condition where not only any possible present loves were made pathetic, but their past loves were nullified too. They could not believe that Mark, Martha, or indeed anybody else, could have lain in young arms, rocked on their own heartbeats, and not been thinking all the time of-Patty upstairs.

But this, the most lamentable of middle-aged ills, has its antidote in the young with their immortal flesh; and as soon as the house was flooded with what seemed to be at least two dozen youngsters demanding baths and a lot to eat, even Patty came downstairs, sensible, and with a washed face and tidy hair.

After supper, they all went up to Mark’s study: it had become a’tradition’. This had become true after the second of the Marches, and while they all joked about a tradition three years old, nevertheless, to the study they went.

The study no longer looked anything like a room. Perhaps more like a medieval tent or pavilion decorated or hung with tapestries that had a theme: at any rate, there were no empty walls left. Not even a ceiling, which now had on it, printed in black ink, by Mark who got on to a stepladder to do it, dates and facts about space travel, such as: 16 September 1959:
A rocket launched from the earth lands on
the
moon
. And this fact, or statement, would have fixed by it a star, or marker, in some colour (Mark used about a dozen of them) which connected it with one, or several facts, or statements in different parts of the room. For instance, the first moon rocket had (among other symbols) a mauve triangle by it; the mauve triangle occurred in other parts of the room, stuck by facts objective and subjective, one of them being a typed statement:
Night of 14th 1959: Lynda dreams that a great glaucous eye which is struggling to maintain life, receives in it a dart, or arrow: rains of tears from the eye, flooding everything below in a dark stain
. Another mauve triangle connected with an entry on the fourth wall:
According to the finding of Soviet scientists the moon is a breathing organism
. And another:
Must be careful next week: full moon. Always sets me off
. (Dorothy’s handwriting).