Four Gated City (83 page)

She had been afraid to approach this mass of material-which, when she had at last dealt with it, had given up so much more than she had expected. (For one thing, a reminder of how easily we are made afraid.) Everywhere in it were gleams of life, the authentic note or throb of vitality, the unmistakable pulse. Yet, while all of it had the same message, or central statement, using different styles, sets of words, terms, historical associations, disciplines, nowhere was the door which Martha knew must be somewhere. Or rather, there were too many doors.

And so felt Lynda, whom she had asked to read these books. Lynda said that ‘she’d done all that’ in the early days with Rosa Mellendip; she didn’t see the use of it, it wasn’t for her.

When Mark was asked, he took half a dozen of the books. Read them at least partially, brought them back to Martha in that closed-in reluctant state that says as clear as words: I’m impervious to this, and said: ‘Yes, but what’s the point even if any of it were true? ’; for he was already preoccupied, if you like, obsessed; with the immediate future-of humanity and was spending his time in his study with his charts, his figures, his maps, the pages torn from Dorothy’s diary, and Thomas’s manuscript.

‘When the bones of our people’s ancestors rot beneath the waters that will fill this place; and the spirits are drowned, their mouths filled with water and no longer able to guard and cherish the tribe who fed them in death so that they may be kept alive-then will the tribe be taken in lorries to a high dry place hundreds of miles from here, the white police and the black police guarding them. That will be the death of this tribe when the ancestors and the children are separated by water. Afterwards fire will come across the high ground to the new village and destroy it. Many will be burned. Many will have no heart to live after that night. The new village built by the white men will be a place of death. So will our people die.’
Thomas’s note to this
: ‘The old man, brother of the
Chief’s wife spoke last night. He was in some kind of trance. It was after a beer dance. He said that he foresaw a flood or some kind of inundation in this part of the valley. These savages believe the spirits of the dead are fed by thoughts of the living: the spirits in return protect their own, by warning them against dangers and so on. There is a tree near a rock a mile from here: this is a sacred place. The medicine man puts beer and kafñr corn there when the moon changes. Last full moon a herd of eland came to this place and knocked over the crocks; their hoof-prints in the beer-wet earth hardened. The wind blew the corn into the prints. Dew sprouted the corn. The spoor of the animals under the sacred tree were marked in green. Green on dry ground. A sign: the harvest will be good this season.’ Across this diagonally in red pencil:
I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine
.

Note by Mark: This was written nearly ten years before the Kariba dam was finished and the valley flooded.

When Martha did not look at Lynda, but lay listening, the regular thud-thudding of her head on the wall, the irregular breathing which accompanied her rapid mutter, made quite a different kind of message from what Martha heard when she listened to the low muttering by itself. But Martha knew that the thudding, like the sound made by women pounding grain, was for Lynda not sound so much as the sensation in her head as she banged it: and most of the muttering too, was for Lynda herself. The way Lynda was experiencing this, was that everything, thudding, breathing, and the low talking, was private-all except for an odd loud, or louder word which she put in with the intention of communicating with Martha, which sometimes Martha understood and sometimes not. Like ‘Mad’, repeated in a crescendo: mad, mad, Mad, MAD, MAD-which Martha understood perfectly. Yet while Lynda meant just this occasional word as her bridge across to Martha, Martha was, whether looking at Lynda or listening, able to understand Lynda, what Lynda was at the moment, by everything, a whole, the sight, sound, smell, the
feeling
of Lynda.

Lynda was inside herself, trying to be private, because she was arguing with someone.

She was defending herself against someone, something: Martha realized, suddenly, that Lynda always lived in a world of sound, or near it, threatened by it. Trying to imagine this, Martha felt terror. Good God!-to come even for a while close to that sea of sound,
close enough for it to threaten an invasion-was enough to frighten her. But Lynda was often inundated by it: sometimes she lived under the ocean of sound for days and days. And not only Lynda-how many people?

There were people whose machinery had gone wrong, and they were like radio sets which, instead of being tuned in to one programme, were tuned in to a dozen simultaneously.
And they didn’t know how to switch them off
. Even to imagine the hell of it was enough to make one want to run, to cover one’s ears. Martha couldn’t run. She knew that sometime she must take risks and explore. Because she had not even begun to ask the questions. She did not know what questions to ask. Before knowing she would have to take risks.

She lay, listening with her ordinary ears to ordinary sounds. Lynda’s mutter, her breathing, then her own breathing, became extraordinarily loud; then she heard sounds from the street outside as if they were in the room, footsteps, voices, a drill at work breaking up the street. Even the regular sliding rasp of her dress sleeve moving with her breath on the carpet became like an iron file on her nerves-then the outside sound went, deadened. The inner sea of sound came up, loudened: and as she came near it, or allowed it to come up into her, there came the enemy she remembered from so long ago, a need to laugh, to cry, to shout, a welter of emotion shaken out of her by stretched nerves. Yes-hysteria. This country, the country, or sea of sound, the wavelength where the voices babble and rage and sing and laugh, and music and war sounds and the bird song and every conceivable sound go on together-was approached, at least for her, or at least at this time, through hysteria. Very well then, she would be hysterical. She held herself tight, exactly as if she were about to switch on strong volts of electricity, while she listened hard and did not care that she would be hysterical-for who was her companion after all?-poor Lynda who would not be frightened. Martha was crying out-sobbing, grovelling; she was being racked by emotion. Then one of the voices detached itself and came close into her inner ear: it was loud, or it was soft; it was jaunty, or it was intimately jeering, but its abiding quality was an antagonism, a dislike of Martha: and Martha was crying out against it-she needed to apologize, to beg for forgiveness, she needed to please and to buy absolution: she
was grovelling on the carpet, weeping, while the voice uttered accusations of hatred.

Lynda had come from the wall and was kneeling by her, looking down. Leaning over Martha was a creature all bone, with yellowish, smelling flesh, with great anxious globes of water tinted blue stuck in its face. Lynda was saying: ‘Don’t Martha, don’t, don’t, don’t, Martha, ’ like a stuck gramophone.

But for a moment Martha could not stop. Then she saw Lynda scramble off to the door, to the hatch between this and the upper world. She was going to fetch Mark. Now Martha sat up, snapping off the connection to the sea of sound. She was shaking all over, as if she were machinery built to carry voltage, but a bit of machinery had jarred loose. She said: ‘Lynda, it’s all right.’

Lynda came back and said: ‘Are you sure? ’ With a peremptory nod, she said: ‘You mustn’t do that, Martha. I can’t bear it.’ And she sat down again in her place by the wall. Martha was angry: but she understood that yes, of course it was reasonable, Lynda was not as strong as she was. If she, Martha, were going to find out about the sound-ocean, then she must be alone, by herself.

Lynda said: ‘You mustn’t get locked up, Martha. I can’t do it, but you can. And when you do it, you’ll do it for me too.’

This message was perfectly intelligible to Martha. She nodded. Of course: Those who could had a responsibility for those who could not. She would do it for Lynda. But-first things first. Now she must be normal, because Lynda must not be upset by her losing control. It was a question of finding some place somewhere in which she could be alone, and not upset people. But later: when Lynda was willing to be better again.

For once she asked, or stated, among the muttering words: Shall we stop now, Martha? Yes, I think so-soon. Not just yet-and on she went with her private conversation, or argument.

Lynda’s antagonist, as Martha suddenly understood, having just had a small taste of him, it, her, before having to come back and be responsible, was the same as the jeering disliking enemy who-it was clear now-was not personal to Martha, but must be in a lot of people. Everyone? Everyone of this particular culture? One had to meet him, it, her, confront him, come to terms, or outflank him? There was a way round him? or not? Who was he? Why? These were the questions she would put to herself-when she was able to. But not now. First she must wait for Lynda.

With her mind set ahead, to that time when she could explore on her own account, she listened to Lynda; postponing, as it were, herself, she tried to hear, to make sense of Lynda’s monologue. It was as if the louder isolated words were being thrown at her as clues, or hints.
Mad
was one.
Doctor
another.
Scapegoat
…
frightened
…
alone
… until it was like that game where one is given a dozen words and invited to make a story around them. She listened. Suddenly she began to understand-she realized this was one of the moments in one’s life after a period of days, or hours, of months, of years, of handling in one’s mind, brooding about, wrestling with, material-then suddenly it all begins to click into place, to make sense.

Instead of passively idling, like an engine, while the current of Lynda’s talk went by, she became a part of it, and the clues or signals clicked into place: she understood what it was that Lynda was saying, what she had been saying, trying to say, poor Lynda, for years.

For one thing, it occurred to Martha that the words or the atmosphere pervading them were not of Lynda now, but of a girl. A young girl. A young girl, inside this smelly bedraggled female argued with-the antagonist. Was it possible that Lynda had been forced to confront that antagonist in her (in everyone) too soon, or alone, and had never defeated him? Was it possible that one could be worsted in that battle and be forever, like Lynda, ‘ill’, ‘unfit for ordinary life’ because of having to confront that buried self-hater when one was not strong enough?

All these years that Martha had been here, in this house, part of Lynda’s life, and her marriage, and her child, she had been a clod, and a lump, not understanding the first thing about Lynda which was-that she need never have been ill at all. She looked at this poor damaged creature, with the great eyes that, like Thomas’s once, were full of depths of light into which one could lean, like pools, or clouds or trees-and was invaded by great washes of understanding, insight, knowledge; ideas came in one after another so fast she could not keep up.

What had happened to Lynda was something like this: her father was a young man in the London after the First World War, when to be young was to have value, and for the same reason as now-when life is threatened, the young acquire the glamour of pathos and are licensed for enjoyment. In gay party-going London, he had
married Lynda’s pretty mother. For years they had been poor, as all their kind were, after that war, and they had a child, Lynda, who was the showpiece for the marriage which was not a success. They ‘adored’ her, and did not separate or divorce for her sake. Lynda had acquired, before she could talk, that sharpness, the acuteness, of the child with parents at loggerheads, who are putting on a front, and quarrel over a teapot rather than over the central difference, because quarrelling over a teapot is safe. Lynda’s antenna for atmospheres and tensions and what was behind words was her first-developed organ. The marriage, uncomfortably continuing, had settled into a pattern where Lynda’s mother spent a lot of time with her parents, country people: ‘It is nice for a child to grow up in the country.’ Lynda had been a country girl and ridden horses and when her parents met watched them, all her senses alert for storm signals. She knew exactly what they were thinking about each other. When she was eleven her mother died. Lynda preferred to live with her grandparents rather than with her father in London; but her father wished to be a good father, and wanted to make a home for his daughter. He fell in love with a woman in every respect suitable for a second marriage, a First World War widow, charming, kindly, intelligent. But she had been afraid of marrying a man with a daughter, or had felt she ought to be, or at any rate had made too much of it, for Lynda had felt herself an obstacle to her father’s happiness. They spent a holiday together in Somerset, the three of them. Lynda said at the end of it that the new woman did not like her. She had told her father so, and her father was angry. He knew that his proposed wife
did
like Lynda; she had said she did and she was not an untruthful woman. But Lynda knew exactly what the woman was thinking: that she was spoiled and ‘difficult’.

Lynda said that it didn’t matter, she would go on living with her granny and her grandpa. ‘They like me, ’ said she, ‘and I’ll be grown-up soon anyway.’ This had been said reasonably: Lynda had felt it to be reasonable. But her father had been angry, for he thought what she said was an accusation. A great scene of tears, confrontations, angers. Lynda was fourteen-a difficult age as everyone agreed. It was not true that Rosemary did not like her. They would all go for another holiday, this time in France and really get to know each other. And so they went for a holiday to France. Lynda was at very first silent and well-behaved. Then she
became hysterical and cried out that she knew Rosemary hated her and wished her dead: she had heard her thinking so. This remark had sent her father into an angry panic. ‘What did she mean, she had heard her thinking so, was she mad? ’ and so on. Rosemary was frightened away altogether.