The Four-Gated City

Martha had walked past the telephone box: she had walked past it fast, to get it behind her. It was as if hands took hold of her and turned her around. In the telephone box she rang Phoebe, whose voice came out of a world of tedious and ridiculous duties and responsibilities: it was nearly midnight and Phoebe was working on a report. Yes, Martha would meet her tomorrow. Tomorrow lunchtime? Mother, must I go on dancing? Tomorrow evening, Phoebe? Can’t you make lunch? said Phoebe, cross, saying with her voice that Martha had nothing to do with her time and should be prepared to fit herself in busy and responsible Phoebe’s life. Yes, I’ll meet you for lunch. Very well then, lunch at one, Martha. Phoebe rang off: she had another two hours of paper-work to get through before she could go to bed. Mother, must I go on dancing?

Martha went on, to Jack’s place.

Chapter Two

The street ran low and dark between dark terraces that were set back behind hedges. There was no light in the houses and the street light outside Jack’s house made a pool of yellowish haze about its hooded shaft. Between it and the next blur of yellowish haze a hundred yards down, was dark. The street was up, and a small red eye showed the edge of a crater. Behind the terrace was a canal, unused by commerce, where children swam. From its dirty waters that received old chairs, refuse, unwanted litters of kittens, mattresses, rose into the air of this area a foul clinging smell that no wind ever seemed strong enough to lift away. Behind the small hedge, near the front door, was a heap of brick and rubble from inside the house. A cat sat on the rubble, its eyes gleaming green at Martha, who put out a hand. But the cat slunk away. Looking up at the second floor, a chink of light showed at the window, so perhaps behind other walls of this black street, people were awake to tend a baby, or to make love, or to read.

Martha knocked, gently, and at once the front door opened inwards into a hall where a dull light showed bare boards, flaking walls, a cracking ceiling. There was an awful smell of rotting wood. A young man stared at Martha. A thin body like a coat-hanger held a dark blue dressing-gown from which lanky white legs protruded below, and a thin neck and a thin wild face above. He had black shock-hair, and black eyes.

‘I saw you through the shutter.’

‘Thanks, is Jack in?’

He laughed, but without sound, shaking his shoulders to mark that he laughed, watching for her reaction from anxiously serious eyes. She smiled, turning her face so that the heavy ceiling light could show her smile.

‘They come and go,’ he said.

Martha now felt afraid for the first time this night of walking alone through dark streets. She went slowly towards the stairs, feeling how he followed her, close.

‘Mind you. I’ve known worse places. During the war.’ He was right up against her back.

‘Are you a friend of Jack’s?’

‘I live here, don’t I?’

On the bottom stair she turned to offer him her smile; he stood grinning, his face on the level of hers.

‘I’ll show you my place.’ He tugged, grinning, at the sleeve of Mrs Van’s coat: Martha followed him into a room off the hall, which had once been a reception room. It was long, high, with the remains of some fine mouldings in the ceiling. The windows were shuttered; but there was a crack, and against the crack was set a chair: an observation post. There was a camp-bed, with dingy blankets, and against the wall a painter’s ladder, with hooks up the sides that held shirts, a jacket, and two pairs of shoes tied by their laces. There was a candle in a bottle near the camp-bed: and by it, a mess of comics.

‘They lived under the rubble in Germany,’ he said.

‘So I read.’

‘I was there.’

Now she looked at him, understanding his wildly grinning face, his staring eyes, his perpetual soundless laugh; it was quite simple, he was crazy.

‘In Poland they lived in the sewers.’

‘You were there too?’ she asked politely.

He laughed, shaking his shoulders, and his black eyes narrowed into a frenzy of suspicion. ‘I didn’t say so, did I?’ ‘No.’

‘I was. In the sewers. I fought.’

Martha now found that she was not only afraid, but tired. Her legs were stones under her. Her head was heavy. A very long way was she now from the light, easy-walking creature of only half an hour ago, whose head was like a lighthouse or a radio set. She thought: I must remember, I must, I must; but stood back, as the young man came a step nearer, grinning and staring. His hands had come out to grasp – not her, but her wandering attention. They were young, thin, sad hands, rather grubby.

‘If you are interested in other things, then I’m very, very sorry,’ he said. ‘Very!’

‘The thing is, I’m rather late.’

‘The other one left at eleven. I let her out. It is now one-nineteen precisely.’

‘In that case, I really must go up, Jack’ll be waiting.’

She smiled and turned and went out, feeling him immediately behind her, and his grin somewhere just behind her head. But she walked steadily up the stairs, saying as he turned into the landing: ‘Thanks for showing me your place.’

‘It’s all you need. With bell, book and candle. The church across the canal has a bell. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard it. Goodnight.’

She stood in a breathing dark, in front of her a door that had light behind it, while below she heard him shuffle back into his place. Martha knocked softly on the door. There was no answer. What she stepped into was a quiet room with fresh white walls, a glossy dark floor with rugs on it, and candles burning on the handsome mantelpiece. And it was warm: the heaters glimmered. On a large bed under the window, Jack lay sleeping. He was naked under a blanket, and was on his back, his cheek on his hand as if he were thinking. As he almost might be: he was lightly, alertly asleep. Martha slid off her shoes and into a chair to rest a moment; if she had not sat down then, she would have fallen; she was thinking, what nonsense, if I’d had to walk another five miles I would, and not been tired till the end of them. Now she sat; for a moment half-conscious. Her back was to the shutter that kept off the smells from the canal below. Above this floor, a floor was empty: rooms that had been open to the sky for a year, receiving wet and wind and snow, and letting the wet seep down, of course, to the white fresh ceiling she now stared at. It had been, Jack said, flaking and cracked, and crumbling and soaked a dark mouldy brown. Then Jack had mended the roof to keep the weather out, and removed the rubble. Below this floor was another, dry, unaffected by the war, but empty, unpainted for years and smelling of mice or rats. Below that, the room in which the young crazy man had made his camp. But on the side of the hall opposite him, a large empty room, beautiful, but the shell of its inside was flaking and falling away. And under the whole tall house, a basement which had had water in it for years. Then, when Jack had drained it, it had damp rubble and old boards. Now it was empty, slowly drying out, he hoped; but sending through the entire house an odour of old damp. But this room was all clean: the old blackout curtains had been left, to add to the theme of black and white. There were Jack’s pictures on the walls. Not many: enough, as he had said, to show he was a painter. And there was an easel and some painting things in a corner. The pictures were mostly abstract, and mostly black and white or grey or brown. Some of them had been made out of queer materials – bits of sack glued on to board; brick rubble mixed with paint smeared on board; paint mixed with sand. Jack had become a painter because at the end of the war he had not wanted to go back to a settled life. He needed a label. What was more respectable than to be a painter? Years before he would have had to fool himself that he was a painter, in order to live the life he wanted under that label. But the war had taught him that there wasn’t time for anything but essentials, he said. In the war he had learned that you must take what you wanted and then fight for it. If you were an artist you could get away with anything. You should either be very rich or an artist or a criminal. He had acquired some canvas and an easel and some paints, and had bought a lot of old pictures from a junkshop which he kept stacked about the walls for the sake of their atmosphere. He did a few days’ work with sand, rubble, bits of sack and some glue and some paint, and behold, he was an artist, with a label he could use on passports and forms.

In 1947, a sailor discharged from the purposes of war, he had been walking down this street in which he had found a room, and had seen this house, then a wreck, a ruin, a shell, with a collapsed roof. He had gone into the open door and to the top of the house. He had spent a day in the house, not really making plans or decisions, but it seemed they had been made without his knowing about it, for the next thing he knew was, he had gone out and brought back a bucket, a scrubbing brush, and soap. With the roof still open above him, he had cleared rubble and scrubbed until he felt rain on his back and realized the roof ought to be mended. He mended the roof. He was just finishing it when Garibaldi Vasallo the Maltese had come in. He was a large swarthy man who looked as if he ought to have gold rings in his ears. But he wore a striped businessman’s suit.

‘What are you doing, son?’

‘Mending the roof,’ said Jack.

‘It’s my house, do you know that?’

‘Well I’m living in it, aren’t I?’

Garibaldi Vasallo went down to the water-filled basement, inspected every floorboard and inch of plaster in the decaying place, and returned to under the roof, having decided to buy it. Previously he had decided it was in too bad a state to buy, like all the bomb-shaken houses of this terrace. But he watched Jack at work for a few minutes and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’

‘You can’t do that, I’m a protected tenant.’

‘How’s that?’

‘I live here.’

‘Since when?’

‘Have a cigarette.’

Jack came down from the roof and sat cross-legged on the damp floorboards, and Garibaldi Vasallo sat opposite him and they smoked and discussed the war. Garibaldi Vasallo had been in the Merchant Navy. Jack had been in a minesweeper. If Jack had been in a minesweeper throughout the war, then he could not have been living in this house as he continued to claim that he had. He continued to make this claim, affably, while he talked of his minesweeping years with Garibaldi Vasallo, who for his part, continued to say that this was his house. And so it went on for some hours, and then Garibaldi went off to buy the house. It cost him £450. He bought two others at the same time for £500 each. Then, lacking further capital for the time being, made it his business to sniff out possible other buyers (very few, the terrace being in such dilapidation), letting them know that ‘the blacks were moving in’. He now had no money at all. He dropped over to watch Jack’s work on the top floor of the house, and began work himself on the roof of one of his other houses. Meanwhile Jack had brought in his belongings, at that stage a camp-bed (now being used by the mad youth downstairs), and a candle in a bottle. He had about a thousand pounds from the war. So far he had spent none of it, and mending the roof had cost nothing, since he had borrowed tools and used available materials from near-by bombed houses. Now he cleaned and painted the second floor, and in the evenings Mr Garibaldi Vasallo dropped in to see what Jack was doing and how he did it. For while being in the Navy was a fine training in inventiveness and small skills, he knew nothing about building, and building had been one of the ways Jack had earned a living. When this floor was all painted out and clean, Jack bought a large bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and some rugs at a street market. Total cost, five pounds. Jack was now at home. But there was no electricity in the place and no plumbing. He used candles and went to the public bath-house and the lavatory at the old cinema at the corner, in payment for which he mended cracked windows for the proprietor.

Now Garibaldi asked Jack if he’d like to go into business, for Jack had seen that he knew about the thousand pounds. Garibaldi was desperate for even half that amount, a quarter: he could buy another bomb-damaged house, or do one up good enough to sell at double what he had paid for it: the thought of the thousand pounds made Garibaldi desperate.

‘Yes, well,’ said Jack, ‘but I think I’m happy as I am.’

And now Garibaldi stood in the middle of the newly black-painted floor, a stout Mediterranean man with hot Mediterranean eyes, and went off into a great storm of rage while Jack laughed and scraped old varnish off a chest of drawers. Laughing, Jack stormed and raged back, while the fat speculator threatened. At last Garibaldi shouted out what he had meant to ask, shrewdly, and as a probe. ‘And there isn’t any electricity here, it’s illegal.’

‘True, the whole place needs re-wiring,’ said Jack.

‘And the plumbing is disgusting, no one but an animal would live in a house without plumbing.’

Jack then offered to do the wiring and some plumbing, the minimum, for a half-share in the house, for two hundred and twenty-five pounds. At which Garibaldi raged and stormed again, and said that the house had already appreciated, it was worth double by now; and Jack shouting and laughing said that was only because he, Jack, had repaired it. Garibaldi went off, shouting to the front door, but was silent outside it: already too many of the people in the street knew about him, watched him, meant him harm.

Next time he came in, Jack had seen him through the window, and was at work on the wiring.

‘You give me five hundred pounds,’ said Garibaldi.

‘Two hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ said Jack.

After some weeks this agreement was come to, but it took another six months to get Garibaldi to the lawyers, of whom he was deadly afraid. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ said Jack, insisting on a respectable lawyer, with real offices, in the West End. ‘You’re all right with me. You’re nothing but a dirty little dago and a crook, but I’m a gentleman and they’ll know I’m all right.’

Which was how Jack had become half-owner of this great shattered house which now had some plumbing and some electricity, and where one floor, this one, was the kind of place Martha could enter and feel …

Yes, but that was an uncomfortable point. Down in Stella’s territory, or with Iris, or walking through streets she did not know, she was skinned, scaled, vulnerable, an alien, always fighting in herself that inner shrinking which was the result of surroundings that did not know her, until, fought, it became the strength which set free. She had only to walk in here, to be greeted by skins of white, of black paint, and instantly, she was at home. She was very definitely Martha: the dullness, the inertia, of being at home took over. And very far was she from the open-pored receptive being who hadn’t a name. People like her, for some reason, in this time, made rooms that were clean and bare and white: in them they felt at home, were safe and unchallenged. But she did not want to feel like this- in that case why had she rung Phoebe?

Jack still lay asleep. He breathed lightly but steadily: probably deeper asleep than she had thought. Well, of course, he’d spent the earlier part of the evening making love with the girl who had been let out at eleven. She should take off her clothes, very quietly, and get quietly under the blanket with him and sleep. Ah, but she was so tired, she would descend into a gulf of sleep and she did not want that. Sooner or later, she would have to. She stood up to take off her coat, and that small movement made Jack open his eyes. His head was turned towards her, but she wondered what he saw in the soft light of the candles: his face was hostile. ‘Who …?’ he began, and sat up, shaking his head free of sleep.

‘Martha. Hell, man – but …’ She had taken off Mrs Van’s coat, and now he smiled. ‘You looked like an old woman.’ He came over, naked, and putting two hands on her shoulders stared into her face. ‘Hell, Martha, but that gave me a scare.’ Now he kissed her cheek as if tasting it, and laid his face against hers. ‘Martha,’ he said, and went off to the spirit stove he used for cooking. ‘I’ll make some cocoa, hell you look tired, Martha.’

She stripped off her clothes, fast, knowing that by doing it she put herself farthest from what she had been, walking alert and alone in the streets. She sat on the foot of the bed, back in that area of herself where she was not much more than a warm easy body. She looked at Jack, his back turned, a tall, a very thin man, very white, with brown forearms like long gloves, and brown hair falling straight: he wore his hair rather long. When he turned with two mugs of cocoa, he came smiling across to the bed, stepping in big bounding strides, and sat close, smiling into her face. He was altogether delighted. ‘You’ve been walking again. I can see.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘God man, Martha, I do envy you, I do, when you first come to London, the whole place is yours, I don’t know how to explain it. I remember that, I think of it often, but now I’m a householder and that’s the end of that. I’m sorry. But believe you me, I like to think of you doing it.’ ‘Not for long,’ said Martha.

‘No. You go to a new place and for a while it’s fine, and then it gets you. You should move on then.’ ‘You’re not going to!’

‘But I tell you, Martha, when I saw that old woman sitting in that chair, it gave me a scare, I thought, who’s that old woman in my room?’

‘Then that’s why it’s over for me,’ said Martha, ‘I’ve got to get a job so I can get a coat so you won’t think I’m an old woman.’

They were sitting so their knees touched: prickles of electricity ran from one to another, while they smiled, drinking cocoa, and looking with pleasure into each other’s faces. Now, after a questioning look, which she answered, to find out if it was time, he looked, smiling at her centre, so that it livened and became the centre of herself. Slowly he let the pressure of his eyes go up to her stomach, then wait, then to one breast, and wait, then to the other – her breasts lifted and tightened, and he laughed. Now she looked, smiling, at his genitals: they tightened and began to lift. She put out a hand to touch him; he touched her; then they joined these hands, so that current ran through them, through knees and hands. Now, set together in rising rhythm, they could sit and talk, or be silent, for a half hour, an hour, or through the night, and everything they said, or their silences, would flow up into the moment when they began to make love. If they touched too soon, then it was too strong, set a too urgent current. The looking, slow and pleasurable, was like the perfect meshing of the right gears.

‘I haven’t seen you for so long, Martha – what is it, it seems weeks? And I’ve been thinking about you.’

This, ‘I’ve been thinking about you’ was true. He thought, deliberately, about his girls, maintaining that in this way he kept them connected to him. But he said it because of a necessity he felt to keep, hold, reassure, be reassured. He meant, in spite of the other girls, I think of you. ‘What have you been doing, Martha?’

‘I’ve discovered that I’ve got to get a job.’

But this went past him. Women had jobs, but for him that was not important. Women got jobs to buy clothes, to make themselves pretty for him, for themselves, for their men. It did not matter what jobs they had. What lives they had outside this room, he did not care, provided they came back. He wasn’t serious, not really!

‘I was thinking a lot about how it was the last time: I swear it, Martha, that with you there’s something I haven’t with the others.’

She was delighted. If he said it, it was true; but it didn’t matter: he felt like saying it.

‘Who was the girl who was let out at eleven?’ She said this deliberately, in order to see if she would feel jealous. All kinds of emotions she had considered hers had retreated during the last few weeks. For instance, Henry mentioning her mother: in the past, what resentment, what fear had flared up, taken hold. But now, it didn’t touch her. And a slight pang of jealousy faded at once: they were emotions without force behind them, like jets of water without pressure.

‘He’s a bit crazy, Martha. He’s got a thing about time. He’s got a chart: he marks every day off in hours and crosses off every hour.’

And now, his face hardened and clenched: for he above all had time riding him: suddenly he lifted her hand and pressed it tight to his eyes: she could feel the round pressure of his eyeball against the ball of her thumb.

‘Is that why he’s here?’

‘Yes, you’re right, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s why. I was saying to myself it was because – well for one thing it tests Vasallo. And for another, if the police pick him up again he’ll be back in the loony bin.’

He sat quiet, eyes shut, holding her hand so tight the bones hurt. He was sitting inside his living breathing body, assuring himself of it. Jack had done four years in the minesweeper and had been in continual danger. He had been sunk twice. Once he had spent twelve hours in the water. What he had been left with was an awe of the flesh. The existence of his body now was a miracle: he never ceased to feel it. Time bled away from him in every pulse beat. Thomas had had that too.

She was thinking of Thomas. Again? With Jack, she found herself thinking of Thomas. She did not think of her two husbands, Knowell and Hesse, she thought of Thomas.

Thomas Stern. Thomas. Who was Thomas that she had to go on thinking of him?

Thomas was a soldier. Thomas was a gardener. Thomas was a tradesman. He was the husband of his wife and the father of his little daughter. He was an exile, Thomas Stern, Polish Jew from Sochaczen, tossed out of Europe and into Africa by a movement of war. When they put his name on documents to make him part of the Medical Corps, Zambesia, they wrote: Thomas Stern, Pole, alien. When the Germans killed his family in the Warsaw Ghetto, they might have written (did they keep records?) ‘Sarah Stern, Abraham Stern, Hagar Stern, Reuben Stern, Deborah Stern, Aaron Stern …’ Thomas was the son and the brother of these dead people. Thomas was a man who killed another man deliberately because he had gone mad and chosen to believe in revenge for revenge’s sake. Thomas was a man who had chosen to live with some particularly ‘backward’ Africans on the edge of the Zambesi River in a tract of land now covered feet deep by the waters of the Kariba Dam. These Africans (now dispersed to other areas chosen by the white man and dead as a tribe) had thought of Thomas Stern: A crazy white man with a good heart who lives with us and who sits in his hut scribbling words on paper. Martha had thought of Thomas who was her lover and not her husband: ‘With this man I am always at home.’ Martha Quest (then Martha Knowell, then Martha Hesse) had thought, still thought of Thomas.

Thomas had lived inside his body as if it were an always dissolving reforming shell or shape with many different names and times. At the end, Thomas’s way of living, or being, had wrenched his body from large blonde solidity into a lean dark bitterness of purpose. Thomas’s flesh breathed time and death; but his mind and his memory moved along another line parallel to it.

That was why she had been with Thomas.

That’s why she was with Jack?

I couldn’t be with a man who hadn’t got it: time moving in one’s breath. I suppose once you’ve entered into some kind of knowledge, then you can’t go back on it …

Suddenly she saw something: all Jack’s girls had it. Of course, that was how he chose them, while he thought he was choosing a smile or the promise of a body.

‘What’s she like, this new one?’

‘She’s lovely, a little fair thing, whitey-gold all over, her hair, skin, everything. She sits on my bed like a little whitey-gold statue. I wish you could see her.’