Four Gated City (79 page)

And now Lynda sat swaying, and singing little songs to herself, nursery rhymes and children’s songs, while Martha cleared up the swamps in the bathroom and washed Lynda’s sweat-soaked gown. Then she came and sat down. Time passed: days and nights. They did not sleep. Or they slept in snatches, but it was not a real healthful sleep. Lynda drank water. She would not eat. But Martha observed her dabbing at some crumbs on the kitchen shelf, and so brought down packets of biscuits from the other kitchen upstairs. Mark came from his study to meet her there. She noted that she now observed him, not with hostility, but critically, from a distance where she also observed an abstracted-looking woman in a faded blue cotton overall and fingers stained with nicotine to the knuckles, who moved in a climate of stale air and smoke. A shaved, clean, strong man, with intelligent eyes, put arms around this woman, and inquired: ‘Are you all right? ’

She listened carefully: What he said sounded extraordinary, every word had a weight to it which compelled attention-she had never heard them before, certainly never thought about them. She
understood suddenly that when Lynda muttered, protecting her words from Martha, it was because she was listening to them, to how they sounded; and knew that if Martha handled them, used them, it would be destructive of their real sense. She had not answered Mark, and now she saw alarm on his face. In this alert, clear state she was in, this look, alarm like other emotions, or reactions, was printed on his features as clear and fresh as if she saw alarm, concern, for the first time in her life. But she had to speak; and finding a normal smile and the right words, she said: ‘Yes, I’m all right and I think she will be soon.’ As she spoke, what she said seemed ridiculous: the sounds the human race made when communicating among itself, they were absurd: why did these creatures put up with them? For the fact was, if Mark and she, this lean woman vibrant with a nervous tension that derived from some finer, or at least, more potent air, had not said one word during this encounter, they could have communicated well enough: Mark knew she was all right, in spite of her exhaustion, and the way the flesh was going off her frame of bones: he had known as soon as he had set eyes on her-the rest was a formality paid to custom.

He kissed her. Lips, a slit in the flesh of a face, were pressed against a thin tissue of flesh that saved them from pressing a double row of teeth which had lumps of metal in them. Then these lips moved to touch her own slit through which she was equipped to insert food or liquid, or make sounds. A kiss. That part of Martha which observed this remarkable ritual was filled with a protective compassion for these two ridiculous little creatures-as if invisible arms, vast, peaceful, maternal, were stretched around them both, and rocked them like water.

The observer and Martha went downstairs with biscuits and a slab of fruit cake. Yes, she had indeed gone a long way inside of Lynda’s country. Yet she was-sane? In control, certainly. And not afraid. She was curious, and angry with herself that she had not done this before-good God, this door (like so many others, she must suppose) had been standing here, ready for her to walk in any time she wished. And she had not, she had not.

Lynda ate some biscuits. She drank water. She had a bath. How long after the first? How long had Martha and Lynda been at work? They could not be bothered to calculate. They did not sleep. Martha believed she had forgotten how to sleep. She regarded, with incredulity, that world where people lay down to sleep at regular
intervals-but she had been here before. When? Many years ago. Where? Yes, it was on a boat, a ship. She could feel the swing and the sway of the vessel and smell salt air. On the boat she had felt this: how extraordinary that people could voluntarily, indeed, eagerly, throw away their precious lives in sleep.

She knew very well this area of the human mind where the machinery of ordinary life seemed more than absurd, seemed a frightening trap. And she knew it from before the boat. When? Where? Her mind seemed to be a thin light texture through which other textures, feelings, sensations kept passing. Oh, it had been long before the voyage to England … suddenly Martha was in a room she had forgotten, looking at enormous people, giants, engaged in … yes, she had been a child, she had felt this as a tiny child, looking at grown-up people, as they sat around a table, dressed in clothes that made them seem like her dolls, talking and smiling to each other with put-on false smiles and looks. For they did not mean what they said. They were afraid of each other, or at least had to placate each other: the small child had called this activity ‘lies’. She had watched (how old? Small enough for a knee to seem large and dangerous, like a horse’s trampling legs), and judged these giants as cowards and liars, engaged-incredibly-in meaningless activities and rituals of dressing and undressing and eating and talking, and their fear of each other, their wariness, was so great that two of them could not meet without going stiffly on guard and stretching their mouths and making movements which said: I won’t hurt you if you won’t hurt me-look, I’m so nice and kind, don’t hurt me … Martha had seen all this, understood it, had even said to herself in an anguish of fear that she would be swallowed up: Don’t let yourself be sucked in, remember, remember,
remember
-but she had not remembered, she had been sucked in, she had become a liar and coward like the rest.

Martha wept bitterly for the wasted years. And Lynda, sitting on the floor, looked up and smiled her a knowledgeable smile-which Martha now understood very well. It was not sour; it was not even critical. It was sad. Martha cried: and Lynda sat quiet until she had finished crying. Then Lynda said ‘Yes-but how to get out, get out, get
out
…’ And she began again on her circumambulation.

Martha was sitting there saying to herself, exactly as she had when she was-how old? Remember,
remember
, don’t forget, when you go back to ordinary life, don’t forget-but she was also
frightened. For she had said this before, awake; and had been poisoned and hypnotized; and what was to stop it happening again? She sat watching Lynda. Now she understood very well what it was Lynda was doing. When she pressed, assessed, gauged those walls, it was the walls of her own mind that she was exploring. She was asking: Why can’t I get out? What is this thing that holds me in? Why is it so strong
when I can imagine, and indeed, half remember, what is outside
? Why is it that inside this room I am half asleep, doped, poisoned, and like a person in a nightmare screaming for help but no sounds come out of a straining throat?

Lynda moved around and around because she had said to herself once, long ago perhaps, perhaps when she was a child? -Remember, don’t let yourself go to sleep; and if you go on always, testing the walls for weakness, for a thin place, one day, you will simply step outside, free.

It will be as if the walls, in that one place, have crumbled and gone. And the room will seem like a horrible little cell that an animal fouled.

Lynda was sitting on the floor, swaying. Back and forth, and from side to side. From side to side and … on and on. She crooned or sang, then was silent. Then said, aloud, a word, and listened to it. Martha listened too. Lynda said: ‘Bread, ’ and listened. Martha listened and the word reverberated with inner messages, each one precious, as if the word itself contained little depth charges that went off in the mind: bread, bread. Bread. Or Lynda said, ‘Wine, ’ and listened.

The words kept dropping into the listening space that was Martha’s mind. She knew that if a person were to take one word, and listen; or a pebble or a jewel and look at it, the word, the stone, would give up, in the end, its own meaning and the meaning of everything. But she had known that before, and had let it slide away … Her limbs, her body kept twitching with restlessness. She was being swept by small storms, waves of-what? It was a current that made her limbs want to jerk and dance. Lynda sat swaying, back and forth, round and round, and it seemed as if Lynda’s sitting there, moving, made a force, an energy, which got into Martha and prickled along her limbs and made her want to dance, to move, to … do something, she could not remember what.

She understood that it was this that had sent Mark up to Martha,
to make love. What an extraordinary phrase that was, ‘make love’. Love, love … Martha sat listening, while the word, love, exploded and bred; and thought of the act in which she had engaged so very many times and with different people: she could see Martha, in different shapes, and sizes, according to the time, her limbs moving and enlaced with this man. that man. always the same way. or so it looked from where she was now, but subjectively, putting herself back inside the act, it was not possible to use the same words for what she had felt. Mark, when he had come upstairs, possessed by the same explosive force which gripped her now, and had made love, made sex, made something; had used a very different energy from what Jack had used, all that time ago when he had made their two bodies like conductors or conduits for the force which moved them and lifted them to-she could not remember where, only that if she did not find a way of getting back there, it would be a self-betrayal. And there was Thomas: oh yes, but that was not a name she could use even now without an emotion shooting across her like a flame from a flame-thrower … She was sitting and muttering as she had years before: We don’t understand the first thing about what goes on, not the first thing. ‘Make love.’ ‘Make sex.’ ‘Orgasms.’ ‘Climaxes.’ It was all nonsense, words, sounds, invented by half-animals who understood nothing at all. Great forces as impersonal as thunder or lightning or sunlight or the movement of the oceans being contracted and heaped and rolled in their beds by the moon, swept through bodies, and now she knew quite well why Mark had come blindly upstairs to the nearest friendly body, being in the grip of this force-or a force, one of them. Not sex. Not necessarily. Not unless one chose to make it so.

Jack had once said: ‘the thousand volts’. He had been talking of hate. ‘The thousand volts of hatred.’ A thousand volts of love? A thousand volts of-compassion? of charity?

When she, Martha, had gone to Jack, as Mark had come to her, to earth his force; and found that Jack had, in the intervening years, become possessed, had succumbed (to what? she didn’t know-unless one chose to use shorthand words like evil, to be done with thinking about it), then she had simply, because she had had to, found that place in herself where the force could be dammed, contained, held. She had had to. But she had forgotten since that time that she had learned to do this because she had had to learn it.

Mark ‘plugged in’ to Lynda, had come to Martha; Martha, ‘plugged in’ to Mark, had gone to Jack. But Jack had moved away, taken a step sideways as it were (any such term would have to do) into a fresh field, on to a different ground. There were plenty of ways one could describe it, or think about it. One was: Jack had allowed himself to be taken over by a low and degraded form of mind, almost like a medieval imp or entity. In the Middle Ages they would have said he was possessed. It was as good a description as any. Or one could say: Jack had become a sadist … good, fine! And what then? This was about as much use as saying that he was possessed. It was a description.

But the point was (her point) with this new Jack (or the old Jack’s shadow side, turned outwards?), she was able to separate off in herself various strands or levels or layers simply because he had gone off into an extreme, and she was therefore forced to define, as an act of self-protection. There was woman coming to man for sex, and her reactions, which were expected, known, understood. There was woman experiencing this new thing; sadism, masochism-succumbing to it then holding it off, refusing it, looking at it. And, different from either, an impersonal current which she brought from Mark, who had it from Lynda, who had it from … the impersonal sea.

But she had known very well that bringing this current to Jack, who was now plugged in (a term that did as well as another) to hate, as he had once years before feared he could be, she was in danger. She had known she was in danger. The impersonal sea could become the thousand volts of hate as easily as it could become love-much more easily, human beings being what they are.

She had left because she had to leave. Having to leave, she had learned to contain what Mark brought from Lynda and what she experienced first as a drive to move-a need for any kind of movement at all, whether dancing, or walking, or exercising; and this before she had thought (and acted); ‘Sex-who, though? Yes, Jack.’ Leaving Jack, returning to Mark, she contained. She had forgotten that she had learned to contain. Yet, forgetting, forgetting again and again, life brings one back to points in oneself, to that place where the check is, over and over again in different ways, saying without words: this is a place where you could learn if you wanted to. Are you going to learn this time or not? No? Very well
then, I’ll wait for you. If you’re not ready now, too bad! I’ll find ways of bringing you back to it again. When you are ready then …

Martha sat still in her chair, feeling herself shake, almost shake apart with the force of whatever power it was that was being generated in that room, and made herself remember what she had learned through leaving Jack. Essentially, it was keeping still, holding, waiting. She sat still; and instead of letting her limbs, or even her imagination-the same thing? move her around the walls, crave for movement, sway like Lynda, back and forth, and around and around, instead of spilling, or using, this energy in any way whatsoever, she let it accumulate—yes, that was it, of course, she had learned that too, and had forgotten it-you must let it build up…

Her head became very clear, very light, receptive, a softly lit bubble above the violence of a body whose limbs wanted to move, to jerk, even to dance; whose sex was alert, ready to flare up, and demand; where waves of-what? came and went, running and ebbing as from another invisible sea of power. If she sat quite still, or walked steadily up and down, the space in her head remained steady, or lightening and darkening in a pulse, like the irregular pulse of the sea. She had known this lightness and clarity before-yes, walking through London, long ago. And then too, it had been the reward of not-eating, not-sleeping, using her body as an engine to get her out of the small dim prison of every day. But how could she have allowed herself to forget and not have spent every moment of her time since trying to regain it, to get back here where at least one could begin to see the way out, and forward?