Four Gated City (73 page)

‘Don’t you want to get rich? ’ she would inquire. ‘All you clever new people seem to find it so easy? ’

‘Not in the least, ’ Francis would reply. ‘Shouldn’t you be after Paul, not me? ’

‘I’m sorry if you think I’m after anyone …’

Paul, not yet twenty, was well on his way to being rich. The third floor where he still lived was more than ever a repository for beautiful and strange objects which he might use briefly to sleep on, sit on, dress from, but which were always in the process of being bartered or sold. From this enterprise he had put in the bank about three hundred pounds. But he announced he was looking for ways to make some ‘real’ money.

He was very much a part of the new young London, concerned, or so it seemed, more about clothes and furniture than anything at all. Clothes and furniture were Paul’s meat and drink-so it seemed. A dress shop? Décor? He considered these, but settled for neither. Meanwhile he had met a girl at a party-very young, pretty, and newly in London. Her name was Molly Grinham and she wanted to be a singer. She sang well enough, with her looks and her quality of put-upon bravery which he told her was marketable. He was fond of her. He dressed her, changed her hair, organized singing lessons-or rather, voice production lessons, not the same thing, and gave her a new name, Sally-just that, suggesting an orphan child with big lost eyes. Her parents were grocers in Tunbridge Wells. Paul had just introduced her to a new pop group and it seemed she might be offered a job with them, when another intending impresario saw her and suggested a deal. There was no reason for Paul to lose his head: his rival had no more to offer than he had. But he lost it badly. He wrote her a letter full of reproach: our friendship, what I’ve done for you, etc. It included the sharp frightened phrase: ‘…
and in the terms of our contract
…’ At no point had Paul suggested any return for what he was doing for her; for one thing, this was not how he felt, when he was at his best. But the girl, upset and frightened, showed the letter to her new admirer. This youth took the letter to a lawyer-one of the just-within-the-law dealers that were making a fortune in this new London. Paul got a vaguely threatening letter. He found a lawyer of his own: sharp, semi-shady lawyers licked their lips. The first Mark heard of it was when Paul came to ask for £200. If he, Paul, paid £200 into the hands of a certain lawyer, then ‘the matter would not be proceeded with’. What ‘matter’? What had Paul done? But he was in a panic, a little boy again, petulant, vituperative, out
of control. Mark saw his own lawyer. It appeared that Paul had in fact behaved stupidly. He had turned up outside Sally’s flat in the middle of the night, shouting about betrayal, the police, goodness knows what. After kicking the door a bit, and bursting into tears, he had run away. Mark said to Paul he was being blackmailed and should do nothing whatsoever. But the affair had gone beyond any sort of sense. Paul wanted £200. Paul felt that if he gave the lawyer £200, he, Paul, would be safe. Safe from what? Paul could not say. Besides, Paul ‘heard’ that if Sally had £200 her new promoter could more easily get her a job with … But, pointed out Mark, Sally would not get anything like £200. It would more likely be £50, by the time the lawyers had taken their cuts. It was no good. Money is never anything but a fantasy currency: it doesn’t exist. Never was this truth shown more clearly than in this affair of Paul’s £200 which, as he said afterwards, ‘started him on his way’. For one thing, he already had £300 in the bank. But that money was the result of some years of patient work; buying and selling with expertise. It wasn’t fairy gold, like the £200 which never even reached the point of being figures on a cheque.

Mark, at last, said to Paul that if he wanted to throw £200 away, knowing that he was throwing £200 away, to line the pockets of crooks, then he, Mark, would give him £200. Paul dissolved into an effusion of gratitude. He rushed about, saying everywhere that he was saved, his uncle was saving him. Sally meanwhile was practically a prisoner in her flat, bereft of Paul who after all had done everything for her, had virtually created her. She reflected that she was the instrument for fleecing Paul of £200. By now she felt ashamed: her new protector was a nasty character, and the law and vague threats had become the air she breathed. She sneaked out of her flat in the middle of the night and rang Paul. The two had met secretly, in a Lyons Corner House. They wept together. She then returned to her protector to say that if he took £200 off Paul she would leave him. This cost her all her courage: she imagined prison, at least. That she had not signed any contracts was irrelevant to her: she was dealing, like Paul, in a very different currency. The youth magnanimously agreed to pay the lawyer’s fees himself, but in return she should bind herself to him. She felt this was the least she could do. Paul therefore got a letter saying he need not pay the £200. Paul felt he had made £200.

Paul had two different sums of money, of two different kinds. One was £300, in the bank: he felt this to be connected somewhere with gold bars, something like that; the work he had put into getting it made it honest stuff. The other £200 was, so he felt, the ‘real’ money he had been waiting to get his hands on.

It was in this way, that Paul was made to understand money: its fantastic nature. During the few weeks after he had ‘made’ that £200 he blossomed and burgeoned and went about as if he had laid hands on a map of hidden treasure.

With three other young men, he bought a hairdressing shop in a dull suburb which was full of young people wanting to enjoy the benefits of new London. The point of this deal was that at no time did he, Paul, actually use money: that is, through a series of feints, delays, devices, he did not actually sign a cheque for the two hundred pounds which was what he contributed to the deal. Yet the sum existed-for when the shop was sold six months later for twice what they had paid, Paul’s share was £400. Paid to him by cheque.

From absolutely nothing-at-all, or rather, some words,
two hundred pounds
, and how people saw Paul, felt Paul; another nothing-at-all, namely, a piece of paper with four hundred pounds written on it, had come into his possession, was his … at this moment of enlightenment anything was possible: Paul might very well have taken off into the higher reaches of finance, become an adviser to governments on Money-or turned to honest crookery.

But it was as if the act of being made free, suddenly, of how the finances of the entire world are in fact run, was enough for him.

He enjoyed many dreams of what was possible, but what he did was, to use his £400, this time conventionally, by writing and signing cheques, to buy another hairdressing shop with his group of friends. They all had flair, taste, panache-at the end of a year after Paul’s first £200, he had £1, 000. One thousand pounds, in fairy gold.

And now, for some weeks he sat like a hen on a golden egg, coddling it, then rolling it around under him, treading it, warming it. He spent hours talking to Mark, Martha, Lynda (she was once again a real friend whom he loved), about money. Or rather, they listened: not being part of this world of quick chances, quick profits, quick deals-fairy gold, where the last thing any sensible person did was to have an honest job and work.

‘I don’t know why you look like that, Martha-I don’t break the law do I? And Uncle doesn’t like it either. Why not? And Lynda laughs at me-oh I know when people are laughing at me-1 don’t mind, I love Lynda, if she wants to laugh. But what would you rather I did, tell me that? ’

Quite soon he bought half a house in an area which no one else had seen was ‘coming up’. He furnished it improbably but beautifully with the stuff in his rooms. And now, after boasting for weeks about the steady income he was going to derive from this gold mine, paying tribute in what already seemed a way profoundly out of the character, to the real stuff (gold bars and the rest), he installed in the top floor of the house-his old friend Zena. Whom he had never lost sight of, or ceased to help. She had left Radlett Street of her own accord. Out of pride, Paul said. But he tracked her down and helped her into a room with some friends. Then she went into a mental hospital for a time. When she came out, it was back to Radlett Street. And so it went on: she was a brave girl, trying hard, and never quite able to manage without help. Which Paul gave her.

When he put her into his new house, he knew she would not pay rent, and that this ‘gold mine’ would be so much less of one. And he promised her she could stay there: this meant he could not sell it for quick profit. In short, right at the heart of his peoccupation, his secret joy, his growing-point, money, the romance of it, was what none of his elders and mentors had given him the credit of possessing-and he was good-naturedly derisive about it. ‘You thought I was going to turn into a sort of sordid old landlord, didn’t you, Lynda? Didn’t you, Martha? Oh, I know! Well, how do you know I won’t after all!’

Into this house soon came another waif, a friend of Zena’s, or perhaps a lover; somebody at any rate like Zena, not able to live normally. Very soon there lived partly at Paul’s expense half a dozen young people who for one reason or another had no parents, or who did not get on with them, and who needed a home.

But Paul’s capital was locked up. At which point he asked Mark to lend him some. ‘No, I don’t want the money. I just want you to say I can have it. It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? ’

Mark had a thousand pounds in trust, which he had never told Paul, from the sale of his father’s goods when he vanished to Moscow. He gave Paul this money now. Paul received it with the
quizzical tolerance due to likeable fools. Quite clearly, he could not conceive of anyone sensible having a thousand pounds, and letting it breed only five per cent. Three months later he came back to say he had trebled it. How, they wanted to know? Legally, they hoped! He received this with amusement. Ah, how old-fashioned they were. How absurd!

And he was buying another house. Fairy gold was not for Paul, except as a means, or as an enjoyment. Bricks, mortar, earth, antique furniture and pictures-this was how he spent his time. Incredibly handsome, with his flashing dark-eyed, white-teethed good looks, beautifully dressed, amiable, alert, he was busy, busy, busy, all the day; and in the evenings he went to parties and was seen with the newest pretty girl. He did not sleep with anybody though, boy or girl. He liked it to be thought that he did. He would bring some sleek, good-looking creature home, having made a remarkable exit from a party, and they would spend the night in a great four-poster bed picked up for ten shillings in a country market-they would spend it holding hands, or in each other’s arms, tender, protective of each other’s loneliness, but sexless.

A sign of the time
. At a conference in London to discuss an esoteric interpretation of
Hamlet
half a hundred grown men and women talk for a whole day,
Hamlet
being forgotten in more urgent business, about the ‘youth’ and in terms exactly identical with those used by a committee of middle-class social workers about slum dwellers, or a white farmers’ meeting in Rhodesia about their black farm labourers. At no point during the day of sullen, resentful or tolerant comment, was there any suggestion of a reminder that the people they were talking about lived in the same houses, ate at the same tables, were, at least possibly, their own children.

Another sign of the time
: Elizabeth, James Coldridge’s daughter, having, after her affair with Graham, married an ambitious solicitor in Bristol and produced two children, had suddenly written a letter to Mark demanding the real name and address of his ‘City’. She wished to live there. On being informed that ‘as he thought should be obvious’ it was imaginary, she wrote to ask why he didn’t arrange, or make, a similar one. ‘And in that case, just let me know and I’ll help.’ Meanwhile she was leaving her husband, and proposed to assist drug addicts. For drug addiction has just succeeded to teenage violence as that cause which should absorb every citizen.

This was by no means the first time Mark had had letters inquiring about this city. In Algeria perhaps? Arabia? He perhaps had contacts who might help the sincere inquirer?

On the whole though, this book had become invisible-it was profoundly not of the time. So with the war book-the Second World War was ‘in’ but only in its aspect of adventure, hair-raising escapes from prison, etc. Mark’s novel was wrong in tone. He had written another which had caused annoyance. The play about Aaron and Rachel had finally died: warm-hearted protest was absolutely out. But the doomed brother and sister lingered with Mark, refused to die. Brooding, about them, about Sally-Sarah, about Martha’s manuscript from Thomas, there had been born another person, a composite of all these people; (but, Mark claimed, more Thomas’s child than anyone) a boy who had not died in the concentration camps of the Second World War, had survived the Dispossessed Persons Camps, and had grown with just one idea in his mind, to get to Israel. There he had become one of the generation who turned their backs on everything traditionally Jewish, the religion, the history, the talent for suffering. He was a soldier, that and nothing more, hating more than any other the creed of turning one’s cheek, of patience, of tolerance, of endurance. His creed was, simply to fight, to strike back hard when struck, for any reason at all. His life was an expression of one need: to struggle out of the dark blood-sacrifice that was what Jewishness had meant to his parents. Yet he was a man seeking death, trained, equipped and waiting for it. He had become the mirror image of his parents and his ancestors; and his future, like theirs, was planned as death in a holocaust.

This novel was short, dry, and its conclusions were implicit, not stated. Mark’s publisher had demurred about publishing it: it might be considered anti-Semitic. Paul was given it to read, for his mother, a still fertile ghost was after all in the book. But he did not enjoy reading. He would watch television for hours, complaining that the programmes were moronic; he went critically to the pictures. But he read like a child of seven, word after word, and was glad when the drudgery of it all was over. He said to Mark he thought all this stuff about Jewishness was silly. He said that ‘it was obvious to everyone’ that the Germans were Germans because of their being locked up in the middle of Europe-that was their history and therefore that was being German. And Mark’s book
wrote of Jews locked up in the Middle East, Jews on the defensive-so why use words like Jew and German, he thought everyone was silly, he preferred watching television.