Four Gated City (70 page)

This particular area of the room had begun with some notes found among Dorothy’s belongings after her death. There were boxes of papers, which included loose sheets, notebooks, etc. It seemed that these had begun with a sort of diary, but of the most
routine domestic sort, and that Dorothy had used this to try and keep herself on an even keel, to balance herself into normality.’Must remember to order new light bulbs’ - that sort of memorandum. These had developed into accounts of domestic transactions, first as an aid to exact memory, apparently to be used in possible controversies with firms, or even in legal cases, and then had become, in a soured frustration, a way of letting off steam, like letters to herself.

‘3rd March, 1955. Men delivered telephone directories, only for upstairs, not for us. Told them another set needed. They said would bring “tomorrow”. 4th March. No directories. Rang exchange. They said no record of this number. I pointed out
this was not possible
. Said would look into it. 5th March. No word from exchange. Asked Mark to exert authority. He offered me old directories.
This is not the point
. Rang Exchange. Waited for connection for fifteen minutes. Got woman who had no record of previous call. Said would inquire. Would ring back. Did not. 6th March. Rang Exchange. Was told I had been ringing the wrong department from the beginning. “We have some new staff here.” Was given another number. Rang it: A Mr. Getnert said would ring back. Did not. 7th March. Wrote to Centre. 8th March. Acknowledgement of letter from Centre. 10th March. A man came around to investigate “a complaint”. I asked for new telephone directories. He said he would look into it. 11th March. A man delivered a directory. Only Α-D. Asked him for the other three. Said he had run out, would drop some in “tomorrow”. 12th March. No directories. Rang the number that they said was the correct one. No record of any previous calls. Asked Mark to intervene. All right, but if that is being difficult why bother
to expect anything at all
. Are we paying for this service or aren’t we? He offered me the three missing directories. Took them. 20th March. Telephoned for a taxi for Rosa last night. Had not used that taxi rank for some time. Got telephone call from Exchange saying complaints from the number I had been ringing, no longer taxi rank, but private house, a woman woken from early night. Exchange: “Why don’t I use up to date telephone directories? “I told her why not. Said she would look into it.”

This was one of the succinct entries. Some covered months.

When’the left wall’ had been begun, it was considered a joke, or in bad taste, or some private act of retribution on the part of Lynda
towards poor Dorothy. But it was Mark who continued, doggedly, to adorn, or fill the wall; and with seriousness, so that they had to consider, in seriousness, what he said: which was that this wall represented factor X; that absolutely obvious, out-in-the open, there-for-anybody-to-see fact which nobody was seeing yet; the same whether it was a question of a rocket failing to get itself off a launching pad, or the breakdown of an electric iron the first time it is used, or a block of flats or cooling towers collapsing.

And, if they, ‘the children’, were to say ‘yes, of course’ without going on to consider its extensions and ramifications then, why did they, ‘the children’, think that he, Mark, spent so much time on manipulating this damned room? For himself? -well, partly, it got one’s mind clear, it helped to fit one fact with another, which, say what one liked, was the hardest possible thing to do-but no, he did it for them. He was supposed to be bringing them up, wasn’t he? God knows he (and here he switched to the collective),
they
; he, and Lynda and Martha, weren’t making so much of a job of it, but if he could not transfer to them
this
, what this room signified, in its potentialities for glory and horror, then he might just as well not have troubled to have them taught to read and write at all.

After supper, the first person up in the study was Paul, still in a flush, not merely of healthful effort, but of accomplishment, because he had won an invitation from Karl Holdt to visit him and to spend a week. This had been announced at supper, and everyone had cheered-half-ironically of course, though Paul could never see why his achievements were greeted with this reservation. But underneath his pleasure was a worry: which was why he came fast to the ‘grown-ups’ - Martha, Mark, Lynda, who sat in the big study chairs, among and under the diagrams and charts, drinking brandy, like travellers lingering together briefly before starting on a very dangerous journey.

He sat on the floor, and looked at them.

‘You are upset, ’ said Lynda, ‘because Karl Holdt says you can’t bring Zena to Germany too?’ Paul nodded. ‘And you want us to look after her while you are gone, but that isn’t the point?’

‘Well, ’ he said, ‘I’ve only just understood …’ Here, suddenly, his eyes filled with tears. He had not meant them to-such weakness was for him the worst of self-betrayals. Aggressively, then, he brought out:’ All right then, all right, but do you realize, Zena and I have been
together
, for over two years?’

‘What did Herr Holdt say?’ asked Martha.

‘But…’

‘Well, who else? You’ve been with him all day! And he’s obviously made an impression!’

‘What’s the matter with him!’

‘Nothing, who said there was?’

Oh I thought-you’re all so anti-German. I thought … yes you
are
, you
are
, all of you, you keep pretending not to be … I’d rather Karl Holdt than you-today has been one of the real days, it’s been an important day, ’ he said, leaning forward as if he were trying to impress this on them with his good looks. But his looks were dazzling. He was not quite eighteen, a boy, all physical, a glossy, beautiful boy. His charm took one’s breath. It was not at all that light of beauty which had visited good-looking but after all quite ordinary Francis, though only briefly: no, it was built in, into aquiline features, dark liquid eyes, movements like an animal’s. Yet he moved through London where a beautiful boy was a dozen times more in danger than even the most marvellous girl, quite safe because-he was not interested? He still maintained that he and Zena had never done more than kiss. He maintained it shrilly, as a point of self-esteem. He spent hours on his clothes, on his appearance: yet was shrilly contemptuous of people who found him attractive. And in moments like these, when trying to impress on others the importance of a stage of growth in his understanding, he both leaned forward all dark dissolving eyes and imperious charm, yet seemed to wish that he could dissolve or exorcize his beautiful self by an act of will-for otherwise who would take him seriously?

‘Today I’ve seen something, not only about Zena.’

‘Well then, tell us?’ That was Lynda.

‘You’re the one I don’t think I’d have to tell, ’ said Paul, as if in

Oh?’

‘If you hadn’t had a rich husband-well money then, if there wasn’t Martha, what would have happened to you?’

Lynda took in breath; and kept Mark, ready to comfort, or assuage, quiet with a nod.

‘Of course I’ve thought, ’ she said. ‘My guess is, I’d probably be in-Abandon Hope. Joke, ’ she added. ‘I mean, I’d be sunk-destroyed.

A wreck, cracked with drugs in some mental hospital. They’d say I was badly “deteriorated” or …’

‘All right, ’ said Paul. For her voice had risen and shaken.

‘I didn’t mean to … Karl Holdt said-he was in a concentration camp as a boy, did you know?’

‘We don’t know him.’

‘Yes. Two years in the camp. Then five in a Displaced Persons Camp. He got out when he was eighteen-that’s my age.’

‘Yes.’

‘He might have been my mother. I mean, if she hadn’t been a woman and got to England

‘Yes.’

‘When he saw I would like to bring Zena to Hamburg, he said, no, he was sorry.’

A violence of grief was ready to shake tears out of Paul; he was red with keeping them in.

Lynda said:’ What you are saying is, you know you can’t look after Zena for ever: and you don’t think we will-and you think she’ll… not be happy, ’ she ended lamely.

‘Thanks!’ he said, savage. ‘Happy-brilliant word. Without me …
She hasn’t anything but
me … yes, but Karl was talking to me, he was being
kind-he
was explaining something, he said. All over the world there’s a layer of people-like a stain in water-like a coloured seaweed-of people out of the concentration camps and the labour camps-those places. And what they know about life is so awful no ordinary people can stand them-so they keep quiet. They have to. Karl said, if they didn’t shut up, ordinary people would lock them up again.’

‘Like Zena?’ said Lynda.

‘He said, we were corrupt. No, everybody. He said, we are all so corrupt, that we’ve got past seeing it. He said, the two World Wars, particularly the Second World War,
your
War, have corrupted everybody … I said, but what will happen to Zena? He said, the worms are having fun.’

‘That’s very German, ’ said Mark with an instant distaste.

‘What does that mean?’ said Paul, cold. ‘My mother was German! She lived in Germany … German, Jewish …’ He saw them struck and pressed on:’ Well, go on then, tell me? I think your generation simply invented Jewishness for purposes of your own …’ He was getting hysterical now, yet knew he had a point, and hammered
on, his fists banging together - ‘Germany, Germany-but it’s just across the channel there, it’s a couple of hundred miles away, and the rest of the world didn’t stop them, so why Germany, Germany?’

‘Don’t get so … worked up.’ begged Lynda, ‘it’ll start me off again.’

‘Yes.’ said Paul, bitter. ‘You can say that-but Zena can’t. Karl said “Your young friend will likely come to drugs. She is the type”. RIP.’

‘All right, ’ said Mark.‘But you sound as if it’s our fault. Do you realize that? If you go to Hamburg and we watch over Zena, that won’t help-she knows perfectly well…” He stopped.

‘All right, I know, ’ said Paul, cold again. ‘You think that I want to leave her. But I don’t. It’s just that I…’ Floods of tears suddenly. ‘Oh Christ, ’ he said, ‘the others …’ He jumped up and jammed a chair against the door, and when it wouldn’t jam, stood with his back to it.

Mark came over, set him aside, stood on guard. Paul, in anguish, stood at the window with his back to them fighting not to cry.

‘He said it, ’ said Paul at last, holding his voice steady. ‘He said: “You have to understand that there are people you can do nothing with-they are beyond ordinary life …” but I’ve been thinking, that’s what I understood …’ He turned to face them. ‘There are, there must be, as many people who can’t cope with ordinary life-as ordinary people. Well, just think of the people we know for a start… and that’s what Karl meant by corruption, I saw it
after
he went off-he went off to some posh dinner. He meant,
corrupt
. Broken. Spoiled. Unable to cope. RIP.’

Feet on the stairs. Jolly voices-here came the ‘children’. Mark stood aside from the door. Paul said, lowering his voice and speaking fast, to get it all in: ‘I know what you think-I’ll go to Munich and have a good time and too bad for Zena-but I’m not going to do it … do you hear me? I don’t know how I’ll manage, but I’ll look after her. I’ll do it somehow … or at any rate, ’ he concluded, ‘if I go, I only go for two days, well, three days, and she can stay here till I get back?’

‘Well, she has before, hasn’t she?’

The door opened, admitting the others.

Paul hastily removed his face to a darkened corner. In a moment, he was able to turn, smiling, a bit swollen, perhaps.
Crying is a funny thing: what’s it for
?

He remained quiet for the rest of the evening, watching everyone curiously, and betraying his state of mind by this distance: for our fellow human beings only seem remarkable when in a heightened state oneself. Long afterwards he would refer to that night: You remember, the night I decided to hell with all of you: Or: Karl Holdt’s night.

Patty came in, accompanied by her young man who had decided he had been hasty: he was subdued, though the resentment felt by the young when forced into being targets of emotion they haven’t bargained for, showed in inadequately controlled glances and tones of voice. Also, he was curious about Patty, trying to sense his way to understanding the change in her. In the half-dozen hours, since he had gone off from Hyde Park, Patty had passed the point of no return: which did not mean she might not again succumb to this, or another youth. In her manner was already the irony which is the beginning of that ambiguous austerity where possessing no loves of the flesh, you possess them all since there are no eyes, mouths, you have not kissed, having become all eyes, mouths, hands, kisses.

They were a dozen or so people in the little room, all in the mood of let-down that accompanies the end of an exalted public occasion. They were aware that for four days they had slept very little, eaten haphazardly if at all, had been wakefully energetic, had accomplished in every twenty-four hours five or six times what they did normally; and tomorrow they would re-enter the cage of habit. Last year, four youths who had joined the March ‘for a laugh’ had gone off to enlist in the army a week later, because’they wanted to be taken out of themselves’. At the supper-table Francis had dismayed them by saying that he could see why: sometimes he thought he would do the same. He sounded serious. Jill was upset by this. Snuggling up to him she had said:’ We won’t let you go for a soldier.’ She said it with indulged petulance, ‘spoiled-child’ style. But also as if she had the right to say it. So the older people noted. Francis did not, or so it seemed. It looked as if he thought he was humouring a young girl. Gwen and Jill, on either side of their cousin, no longer looked like rather smudged water-colour sketches of the same girl who was also the model for Phoebe, Marjorie or even unborn and unachieved variants of the same. Gwen was still a freshly plump girl. Jill was thin, rather beautifully haggard: a woman who looked adoringly at Francis.

Jimmy Wood had been there for supper; and had come upstairs to the study, one felt for the same reason that he had gone, just for one day, to the March: he was passing it, he had said, and it had come into his head to join in.