The Four-Gated City

If she did not now ring Henry, she would take a bus to Bayswater and spend the evening drifting in and out of the pubs with the other visitors, migrants, freebooters. They would talk about England. That is, for a lot of the time, about Henry Matheson and what he stood for; and Iris and Stella and what they stood for. Someone would have a newspaper that jittered about the advent of red socialism in Britain, and how the working classes grew fat and luxurious, and how the upper classes dwindled into poverty. The aliens would look at the newspaper and talk about Iris and Stella, whom it appeared literate natives did not meet.

She rang Henry’s office. He was, said the telephone girl, just about to leave. This girl’s voice was a careful London suburban (Martha could already place it) and was exactly why she, Martha, if she accepted that job, would be working, not where she dealt with people on the telephone, but in an office where her merits would be of benefit to her fellow-workers and not, or at least not immediately, to the public.

Henry came to the telephone. ‘But my dear Martha, where have you been? I was just about to send out a search party!’ She laughed; convivial buccaneer with secrets she was prepared to share; and calculated whether she would be able to get away with just saying, even if for the third time: Henry, I’ve decided I don’t want that job.

‘Henry, I was ‘phoning to say I’ve done some serious thinking and thanks ever so much, I don’t think I’ll take the job.’ A pause. The two ‘wrong’ phrases, carefully planted into this arrangement of words to emphasize what Henry must find so hard to take in her, were doing their work. ‘Well, Martha … if you’re sure, but we would be so pleased to have you.’ ‘Yes, I’m sure …’ and now she made a mistake, from nervousness. ‘I’ve been working, as a matter of fact …’ Too late to think of a satisfactory lie, she had to go on, ‘In a pub.’ Silence. ‘How very enterprising of you. You did promise to ring, Martha. Look, how about a bite and a sup. Have you time?’ ‘Yes, I’d love to.’

‘How about Baxter’s? Do you know it?’ This meant, as Martha knew perfectly well, are you properly dressed for it?

‘Of course, how should I not know? It’s in all those novels about the twenties?’

‘Is it? Dear me. How very well read you are – so much, better than I am. Well then, if you get there before I do, tell old Bertie – he’s the head man, you know, that you’re supping with me.’

‘I’ll do that. In about an hour?’

‘Yes, we can have a drink first and you can tell me all your adventures.’

It was now raining hard: a dirty rain. Martha would have stayed in the box, but a girl was knocking on the door. Martha opened it. The girl had a wet headscarf and a thick, damp mackintosh. Beneath this disguise she was a pretty dapple-cheeked English girl. ‘Did you want to get out of the rain, or to telephone?’ A short offended laugh. ‘Actually to telephone.’ ‘In that case, I’ll leave.’ Another, but an appeased laugh. She watched Martha, wary, offering her smile like a shield. These were people totally on the defensive. The war? Their nature? But Martha was so clearly an outsider, breaking the rules with a smile in an alien accent, that had she persisted, talked, broken barriers, the girl would have enjoyed it, would have been grateful to have the defences broken, but also resenting, also wary, like an animal accepting overtures but ready to bite at a clumsy movement.

It was pouring. Martha went into a cigarette shop. The woman behind the counter raised eyes to Martha’s face and then looked at Martha’s feet. Water dripped from Mrs Van’s coat to the floor, which was already smeared and wet.

And now Martha thought – although it meant she would have instantly to leave the shop and go out into the rain, asked: ‘Can I have a dozen boxes of matches?’

Sullen: ‘You can have one box.’

‘Oh, I’d like a dozen. Half a dozen?’

‘There’s been a war on, you know.’

Martha had asked for three boxes of matches in a kiosk during her first week. Since then, she had made a point of asking for a dozen, in kiosks in every area of London.

‘There’s been a war on, you know.’

And with what hostility, what resentment. And what personal satisfaction. ‘I’m sorry, I was forgetting.’ ‘I suppose some people can.’

Martha got one box of matches in return for her tuppence, and smiled into a frozenly angry face. But the face said she must leave, must get soaked in punishment for her heartless indifference to the sufferings of her nation.

Martha left. A bus looked as if it might have room. She jumped on, and the conductor said: Hold on then, love. She smiled, he smiled. Disproportionate relief! She had discovered, swapping notes with other aliens in pubs, that it was not only she who had to fight paranoia, so many invisible rules there were to break, rules invisible to those who lived by them, that was the point. Warming herself at the conductor’s smile, the journey was made up Fleet Street, invisible behind cold rain, past Trafalgar Square, where lions loomed in a cold grey steam, and up to Piccadilly Circus, where the conductor sent her on her way with smiles, a wink, and an injunction to look after herself and enjoy her holiday.

It was with Henry that she had first seen this place, on a clear gold evening, the sky awash with colour. She looked at the haphazard insignificance of it, and the babyish statue, and began to laugh.

‘My dear Martha?’

‘This,’ she tried to explain, ‘is the hub of the Empire.’

For him a part of London one passed through, he attempted her vision, and smiled his failure: ‘Isn’t that rather more your problem than it is ours?’

‘But, Henry, that’s so much the point, can’t you see?’ For this exchange seemed to sum up hours of their failure to meet on any sort of understanding; during which nagged the half memory of a previous failure – what, who, when? Yes, as a child, when her mother had laid down this attitude, this dogmatism, this ‘It’s right, it’s wrong’ and Martha, reacting, had examined, criticized, taken a stand, brought back a stand to the challenger – who had lost interest, was no longer there, had even forgotten.

‘Well, it’s quite a jolly little place, isn’t it?’ he inquired, uncomfortably facing her – but only just.

‘Well, I suppose it’s the war again,’ she said at last, ‘all that myth-making, all that shouting, the words – but you can’t say things like “jolly little place”.’

‘You’re a romantic,’ he said, sour.

‘Ah, but you’re having it both ways, always – having it both ways, sliding out …’ She had, for a moment, been unable to conceal a real swell of painful feeling, all kinds of half-buried, half-childish, myth-bred emotions were being dragged to the surface: words having such power! Piccadilly Circus, Eros, Hub, Centre, London, England … each tapped underground rivers where the Lord only knew what fabulous creatures swam! She tried to hide pain, Henry not being a person who knew how to share it.

She supposed she did hide it, for in a moment he was urging her into a pub, buying her drinks, talking about the war, and radiating relief that nothing was to be asked of him.

‘You know, Henry, after one’s been a week here, one simply wants to put one’s arms around you – oh no, not you personally.’

‘Oh dear, I was rather hoping …’ said he, laughing with relief that he would have to suffer no such demonstration. He had even involuntarily glanced around to see if there was anyone near that he knew.

‘No, the whole island, all of you.’

‘Oh but why? Do tell me!’

‘If I could, you see, there’d be no need to feel that.’

The exterior of Baxter’s was in no way more distinguished than that of Joe’s. A modest brown door had Baxter’s on it – just the word, nothing more. There was a window completely covered by white muslin that needed washing. Martha stood outside for a moment, holding this delicious moment known only to newcomers in a city: behind this door, which was just like so many others, what will there be? A southern courtyard with a lemon-tree beside a fountain and a masked Negro lute-player asleep? A man with a red blanket slung across his shoulder, stands by a black mule? A pale girl in sprigged muslin goes upstairs with a candle in her hand? Two old men in embroidered skullcaps play chess beside a fire? Why not? Since what actually does appear is so improbable. Last week she had opened a door by mistake on a staircase in Bayswater and a woman in a tight black waspwaisted corset, pearls lolling between two great naked breasts, stood by a cage made of gold wire the size of a fourposter bed, in which were a dozen or so brilliantly fringed and tinted birds. Martha said: ‘I’m sorry.’ The woman said: ‘If you are looking for Mr Pelham, he’s in Venice this week.’

She went in. A man in shabby dinner clothes and sleeked-down dandruffy hair came forward, already disapproving. Through his eyes, she saw a young woman with damp hair, a damp coat, and a stretched smile. For Martha was suddenly bloody-minded, because of this man’s automatic bad manners, though she knew they were the stuff of his life and what he earned his wages for. A subordinate man, a waiter, came to stand by the first, the headwaiter. Together they surveyed her with a cold skill that cracked her into speaking first. ‘I am meeting Mr Matheson,’ she said, awkward. The two conferred, in a long silence and a swift glance. The first man turned away, to other business; and the second, having not said a word, took her, without going through the main room, to a table which was turned to one side. He pulled out a chair in which she would face a wall. He had not asked her to take off her coat. She did so, shrugging it on to the back of her chair. A lean, elderly man, whose whole life had been dedicated to the service of such minutiae, he again flicked his eyes fast over her and again with an arrogance of bad manners that astounded her, so naked did it seem to her. Her sweater and skirt were adequate. But wrong? Why? She did not know, but he did. He left her to wait.

The place was still half full, since it was early for dinner. The people were middle-aged, or gave an appearance of being so. She saw, glancing with difficulty backwards, that there were two young people, but their youth was damped into the staid middle-aged air of the atmosphere. They, and the waiters, fitted into the décor which was designed, according to unwritten invisible rules, to fit them. The place was muted, dingy, rather dark; and no single object had any sort of charm or beauty, but had been chosen for its ability to melt into this scene. And the people had no sort of charm or flair. Yet, looking closely, things were expensive: money had been spent obviously, and since the war, to keep the restaurant exactly as it had always been: in an expensive shabbiness, dowdiness. The girl – the only one present apart from Martha, wore a black crêpey dress. It was ugly. Martha recognized this dress because before leaving ‘home’ Marjorie had told her what she would need – she gave her a list of clothes she would need, not for utility or warmth, but for occasions. ‘A uniform!’ Martha had exclaimed. This dress was part of that uniform, relating to no standard of charm or sexuality; doing nothing for the girl who wore it: it was a black dress worn with pearls, and it had a cousinship with the restaurant, its furnishings, and the people in it, who, when you looked, were good-looking, even well-built, certainly well-fed and easy. But now Martha could see perfectly well why her clothes, every bit as expensive, and certainly more attractive, that is, if clothes are to be judged by what they can do for the appearance of who wears them, would not do, and why the black dress did: she was not in the right uniform.

The point was, not a word of what she thought could be told to Henry: he would not understand it: but when she met Jack tonight, she would only need to mention the girl’s dress, her pretty artless face and hair, the dull-flowering wall-paper, the men’s emphatically assured faces – and he would laugh and understand. And Jack would understand perfectly well when she said (though she would not need to say it) – The trouble is, you have to choose a slot to fit yourself to, you have to narrow yourself down for this stratum or that. Yet although the essence of Henry’s relation to me is that I should choose the right slot, find the right stratum, he would not understand me if I said that: he’d be embarrassed, irritated, if I said it.

Yes, because Jack had chosen a life that freed him, he would understand all this: but he could not understand her other preoccupation, and the trouble was, the only person she had so far met who did, was Marjorie’s sister – Phoebe.

Henry came in. Silent communications had already taken place between him and the headwaiter, because his face was prepared whimsically to accept her unsuitability for this restaurant. And all this because the weather had changed! A month ago, in another expensive dingy restaurant, she had been wearing, because of the heat, a slip-dress of black linen, and had been perfectly conformable – though much better dressed than anyone else in the restaurant, because they were over-dressed, being people who could not dress for the sun. Henry had been showing her off: slightly embarrassed, since her simplicity was challenging; and partly because, when the sun shines in England, a licence comes into power with it.

He sat down. ‘My dear Martha, how very well you look.’

‘I know that my hair is wet: but I was not asked if I wanted to use the ladies – if they’ve got one at all.’

This challenge caused him to send her a quick thoughtful look, before he looked past her head at some brown varnished wood and said: ‘I remember, about two years ago, my Aunt Maynard sent me a protégée – from Cape Town I think she was. She was very combative you know.’

‘My problem is, what part of Rome is one going to choose to combat?’

‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘And I had no idea Aunt Maynard’s fief extended as far as Cape Town.’ ‘Oh, one of those places.’

Martha sat checking herself like an engine: had she eaten, had she slept, was she over-tired – no, no, yes: because her flare of anger was really so very strong. That aspect of ‘Matty’ which was brought into being by Henry was pure childish aggression. If she chose and was in control enough not to be aggressive or show hostility, then ‘Matty’ was bumbling, charming – apologetic by implication. She preferred aggression: it was a step better than the infant clown.

Henry was looking past Martha at a man who had just come in. He was like Henry; all open good looks, charm, assurance. He smiled at Henry, and was about to come forward, but Henry smiled differently, and the man sat down behind a menu-sheet across the room.

‘Your partner?’

His look was very quick now: ‘Yes.’

‘You had asked him to look me over, but you find I’m not lookoverable at the moment, so you’ve radared him that you’d rather he didn’t?’

‘He was going to eat here in any case: why shouldn’t I want him to meet you?’

‘Ah, but why not now?’

Here came the waiter with the card which he held before Martha.

She ordered some pâté and the fish, but Henry said: ‘If you’ll take my advice, the coquille is excellent. Not, of course, that their pâté isn’t.’ Here he offered a small humorous grimace to the grey old waiter, who accepted it.

‘Of course,’ she said, and changed her order.

She asked for a dry sherry. The wine waiter brought a bottle of semi-sweet sherry, because in such places a lady would be expected to drink sweet sherry. Henry was given an Amontillado.

She drank hers. He drank his.

‘Martha, have you heard from your mother?’

Martha noted how this ancient goad to rage now had no effect on her at all: by putting several thousands of miles of sea between her and her mother she was saved? H’mmmm — possibly.

‘No, but I expect I shall.’

‘You said you thought of taking a job?’

‘I had one in a pub down by the docks.’

‘Ever such a lark of course – but not for long surely?’

‘I’ve also been offered the job as a secretary for a firm which hires out lorries.’ In one of the lorries Iris’s cousin worked: the man she had intended for Martha.

He waited. She would not help him.

‘You’d be living near your work?’

Almost she said: ‘Why not?’ But lost interest. What was the use?

Here came the scallop shells filled with lumps of cod covered with a cheese-coloured white sauce. That this was a restaurant where people ate, not to eat well, but to eat conformably she had understood from what she had seen on the plates near her; and she knew that when she tasted the fish it would be rather worse than she had been eating at Joe’s, with Iris and Jimmy.

‘It’s very nice,’ she said hastily; to Henry’s inquiring eyebrows.

‘Delicious,’ he affirmed, so that she could make a note of what was admirable.

She could fault, even as a housewife, a dozen points on this table: the bread rolls were not fresh; the tablecloth only just clean; the parsley on the fish limp; the peppermill was nearly empty; the roses sagged; everything was second-rate. But Henry did not care, he was at home, cosy with his kind.

Claustrophobia filled her like a fever; and she took herself in hand: Be quiet, steady – you’ll be out of it for good when this meal is over.

‘I really do see.’ he prompted, ‘what fun it must be, sl … experimenting, for a time.’

‘Ah, but you see, one has to be brought up in this country to be able to see it as slumming.’

He had coloured.

‘Now, look, Henry – you’re right. I couldn’t for long stay in those jobs – but for exactly the same reason that I couldn’t take yours, that’s what you ought to be able to see. Can’t you really understand that?’

‘Well, frankly, no.’

On the chair by him a folded evening newspaper; and even from where she was, she could see, peering over, that the headlines and editorials were to do with the red, socialist, classless, etc., Britain.

They had finished their fish. Henry had ordered some blanquette of veal for both of them. It wasn’t bad. The wine, however, was very good indeed, marvellous; and Martha was drinking it, although she knew that drinking it might lead to an exchange every word of which she could recite even before it happened. She smiled, offered him scraps of travellers’ tales from the strange land across the river, to which he listened, with the air of a potential traveller choosing possible landscapes for adventure.

At last he said: ‘If it’s a question of your being a restless sort of person, that you’d want to move on after a year or two, I think we do rather expect that from our staff, the war has unsettled people, including me, I’m afraid.’

‘No, it’s not a question of being restless.’

Determined that the tedious exchange, imminent, would not take place, she reached for her wine glass – and knocked it over. The waiter being away, she dabbed at the stain with her napkin. Then the imp took over.

‘I’d like another serviette,’ she said.

Henry called to the waiter with his eyes.

‘If you could bring another napkin,’ he said.

Martha suddenly laughed. He frowned incomprehension.

‘I don’t know why it is,’ he said, ‘but I do know that girls are so much cleverer than men at … picking things up. You could, you know, if you tried. For instance, we had a girl in our office. She was only … her father was under me during the war, a very good type of man … well, she came to us as a typist and inside a year she had picked up … now you really can hardly tell her from … she takes over on the switchboard for instance … for some reason men don’t do it so well, they aren’t so adaptable. But if you listened to how other people talk, you could learn very easily … that sort of thing.’

The gaps in this homily which had been delivered, half with irritation that he was being forced to verbalize his position even partially; half with genuine concern for her future, for which, the Lord knew why, he felt himself responsible, she now filled in, summing them all up.

‘I could learn to pass,’ she said.

He sat back in his chair, his handsome, fair, well-bred face all dark with annoyance.

It was not the slightest use. But the imp had control.

‘Henry, if I told you that this meal we are eating is going to cost you over £5, in spite of the fact you are supposed to be restricting yourself because of the war – and that the people I’ve been with don’t spend that on food in a week – and then ask you to look at that newspaper … oh, I don’t know, what is the use!’

‘Very poor, are they?’ he said quickly.

‘Very. But that isn’t the point.’

He leaned back. ‘Well, aren’t we all, these days?’

‘I should have said not.’

‘You weren’t here during the war,’ he said emotionally. ‘I’ve learned that, after that, there’s nothing to be said.’ ‘You must see, Martha, that it’s going to take time to get this poor old country on its feet again.’ ‘Of course.’

‘God knows we’re poor – but what more do you people want? You’ve got your Labour Government in, they’re not my thing, far from it. I’m more of a Liberal I suppose, though I vote Tory, but they’re in, they’re doing a job – you’ve got your socialism. Of course there are people who think that five years of Labour Party has ruined this country. I’m not one of those, but there is no class left in this country. What do you want?’

‘But, Henry – well, I really don’t know, how can you say – or believe … Henry, if those people I’ve been with – if they turned up here at this restaurant, they wouldn’t be admitted …’ He froze, attacked, undermined: here was precisely where he could not think or look, therefore it was in bad taste. ‘Not that they would turn up, of course, they know better. After all, I wouldn’t have been admitted, probably. They’d have said the place was full. It was only because I gave your name.’

‘If they did turn up, I for one’d be only too proud – the salt of the earth. We learned that in the war.’

‘Not to mention the other war.’

There now was rolled towards them the sweets trolley. Henry chose for her and for him, a trifle, though it had another name. Throughout the restaurant, people were eating nursery puddings, under French names.

‘I really don’t know what it is you people want,’ he said pettishly.

‘To have things called by their proper names, that’s all. Did you ever actually meet your Uncle Maynard?’

‘No, well of course, he was rather the black sheep, so one gathers.’

‘Justice Maynard? Well, I’ve been remembering something he said to me. Ten years ago, more. He said that he couldn’t stick England because no one called a spade a spade. So now he administers law and order in the colonies, where one can. I’ve only just recently understood what he was talking about.’

‘Hypocrites,’ said Henry quickly. ‘Of course, they’ve always called us that.’

‘No, no, if you were hypocrites that would be something. A hypocrite is somebody who maintains a virtuous position knowing it to be false. You all seem to me to be – you’re drugged, you’re hypnotized, you don’t seem to be able to see facts when they’re in front of you – you’re the victim of a lot of slogans.’

Here the wine waiter offered the lady a sweet liqueur and Henry brandy. The lady insisted on asking for brandy. The wine waiter offered Henry a look of commiseration, so far had complicity grown between them. But Henry frowned at him and told him to bring brandy. Martha and the brandy changed the note or current: Henry was able to let slide away any chance there was of their meeting on at least the possibility of there being something in what she said: Martha, gay buccaneer, adventuress, warmed by wine, enabled him to wave over his partner. There arrived at the table John Higham, as charming and as handsome as he, his face presented towards Martha in a look almost transparently eager to taste this phenomenon, who was outside the rules of ordinary politeness – for he examined her openly, boldly: exactly as the dockers, before being made to know by Stella that she was, temporarily, one of their women, were able to call across a street: Hello, darling. She had been outside their circle of humanity. Martha was outside John Higham’s. For a moment the two men sat, united, opposite Martha, eyeing her. It was ugly: behind them, the waiter, and behind him the headwaiter: very ugly. And again, she never would be able to explain why; they would not know what she meant. They were savages, masters and servants both.