The Four-Gated City

‘Well, who knows, perhaps I will.’

A couple of weeks ago Martha and Jack had been sitting as they were now when a girl walked in. She was tall and fair, with solemn brown eyes. She wore an elegant camel coat, in spite of the heat, and had long silk-covered English legs. She had seen the two of them as she came in and turned around slowly to close the door to give herself time to know what she wanted to do. Then her face came back into view with a smile on it, and she advanced smiling to the bed. Martha, introduced, nodded and smiled. Jack said: ‘Joanna, come and join us.’

‘Not altogether, if you don’t mind,’ said Joanna, with a short amused laugh. Composed, she pulled up a hard chair and sat quite close. The three smiled at each other.

‘I was passing,’ she said; at which Jack and Martha laughed, and then, after a while, she laughed too, for this was not an area where she could possibly have been passing.

‘I wanted to set eyes on one of the others,’ she said, gruff and abrupt, making a confession with difficulty.

‘Well, here I am.’

Joanna gave Martha a slow once-over.

‘You’re very pretty,’ she said.

‘I’m sure that I’d think the same of you!’

Meanwhile Jack sat, not at all embarrassed, or amused, or annoyed. He was pleased and interested. He was never amused, never ironic, never felt a shock of improbability. He was delighted, pleased – or so unhappy he could not move but lay face down on his bed suffering till a weight lifted off him.

‘Shall I make you some cocoa?’ he asked.

She shook her head, smiling.

‘The thing is, Jack, either we both have to get dressed, or Joanna has to be undressed.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ said Joanna in her brisk fair English way. Jack wanted Joanna to get undressed. Afterwards he had said to Martha: the tears positively drowning his eyes: ‘If she had trusted me so much: if she had taken her clothes off – then I swear, I’d have been so happy, I can’t make you feel how happy I’d have been. But not yet. She will though. I am sure she will.’

He left it to them, the two women, to decide when to trust him. Martha began to dress. That had been during the heatwave, and she had put on, but not too fast, while they watched, bra, pants, slip and a narrow blue linen dress. Joanna had admired the dress. Then Jack had got dressed and they had all gone out to eat lunch at the Indian restaurant.

Joanna was engaged to a second cousin who had been in the Guards and who had a big house in the country. She intended to marry him although he had not done more than kiss her aggressively when taking her home after the theatre once. He had been rather drunk. She came to Jack, once or twice a week, to make love. She was not young: that is, she was not a girl, for she had the war behind her. From the war she had got one thing, a need for security. The security was the cousin. Jack was for her.

‘I was too close to it in the war,’ she had said to Martha, not feeling that she needed to explain. ‘And love doesn’t last, does it?’

‘Love may not last, but sex does,’ said Jack, when Martha reported what Joanna had said. And he rang up Joanna in the country to say the same to her. ‘I’ll be here, always,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’

For Joanna ‘it’ was poverty. That was the edge she was afraid of.

For Jack? He had spent the whole war, he said, dreaming about women. And so here he was, receiving girls, one, two, three a day, making love for hours every day. And he painted. For instance he had painted a picture while Garibaldi watched him. He was only serious about sex.

But he’s not serious, thought Martha. He can’t spend the rest of his life … but why shouldn’t he? Why on earth not? Considering the way most people did spend their lives.

The boy downstairs was mad. About time? Death. And Jack was mad. About women. Death. Joanna was mad – she proposed to spend her life with a man she didn’t much like because she was afraid of – poverty? And she, Martha – but she would be lunching with Phoebe tomorrow. In a few hours, now.

‘If I asked her to meet you, would you come?’

‘Would she?’

‘If she actually met you … if I could get her to do that … when women are jealous, I’ve discovered, they aren’t when they’ve actually met the girl they’ve been thinking all those thoughts about. But men don’t realize that, do they?’

That’s only because you aren’t serious, Jack. We don’t take you seriously. Why not?

‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Martha?’

‘I was very, not now.’

He looked at her again: centre, breasts, back down to her thighs, back up to her eyes – smiling. But the smile dimmed. ‘You’re not with me, you’re not …’ He nearly touched her breasts, but withdrew his hand and enclosed hers again with it. ‘Martha, I won’t mind if you say yes – but have you been with another man?’

‘No-really not!’

‘Because if that’s it, tell me, and we’ll try something else. I’ve noticed with my girls, when they’ve been with a man, even their husband, this one doesn’t work – something gets switched off. Then you just have to start again, you have to have a good ordinary fuck to make the contact again. But that’s not as good as when you can let it slowly build up like this …’ He was in a fever of anxiety, as he leaned forward, explaining to her, comrade in the fields of love: his expertise was all urgency; he looked as if something might be taken away from him, had been taken away. Did he know that she had thought: I won’t be coming back again?

‘This little one tonight, Jane, she was with a man this afternoon, and I was sitting with her like this, and she said to me, all wide-eyed and wanting to know: Jack, I don’t feel for you the way I did last Thursday, what’s wrong with me. I don’t want you to touch me.’

‘She’d been making love?’ ‘Yes. All afternoon.’

She laughed; then so did he, to keep her company.

‘But not me, I haven’t.’

‘Well then, we’ll wait until it’s right.’

‘Who is she – Jane?’

‘She’s English – a sweet, gentle, wide-eyed little English girl. You know.’

‘Indeed yes. There was one in the restaurant I was in tonight. She was so pretty. And she wore that black dress, that uniform, you know it? The little crêpe dress. With an awful brooch. Just there, you know – the whole thing, so wrong, so ugly, so nastily smart …’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’ he said, delighted, laughing.

‘There was no relationship between that dress and that girl. And then another came in. They knew each other. And she had a black little dress with a little square of white neck. Like plump little Teddy bears. Everyone was playing nurseries. It was an upper-middleclass restaurant – I’m coming on, I can tell the difference. And I looked at those girls and they broke my heart, and I thought: well at least I can tell Jack, he’ll understand!’

‘To hell with it, Martha, you’re sad, I don’t like that.’

She rested on his smooth naked shoulder. But it was not a shoulder for comfort, not a body for support: it was a body for love. She rested against him, for his sake. On the arm that did not hold her, but lay on his knee, she saw the fine gold hairs stand up, each in a pucker of flesh. Then his body, an instrument more sensitive that any she had known, shivered. Then she knew why: it had started to rain, to rain heavily, and the roof was sounding with it. The house was an empty shell reverberating to the rain: his thin lithe body was alert and anxious, like an animal’s, and he put back his head and sniffed, like an animal when there is rain or smoke on the wind. They rolled over, together, and lay side by side, both shivering in the warm room because of the booming rain, looking at each other. Now as he looked, and she looked, began the ceremony for whose sake he had put all the passion of his life into women: for here was where he fought with time, wrestled with it, held it, understood it: here, the gates were held.

The two bodies lay face to face, held loosely together by arms and legs; one long and white, all narrow bone and muscle, one solidly fleshed; these two separate organisms were connected by a steady interchanging gaze, eye to eye. Now he waited for her fingers to touch and annul the long scar on his neck. Diving off a ship that slanted into the water, he had slid past, under the heave of a wave, something jagged which had ripped away from his shoulder, a flap of flesh. This, while treading water and holding on to a floating baulk of timber, he had found drifting in the water, with a hand numbed by the loss of blood, and thought it was weed or debris, to be pushed away. ‘Think of it, Martha – there I was, holding on with one hand. I told that hand hold on, hold on there man, that’s what I said to it, and then I swear I forgot that hand, I didn’t think of it again, it just went on holding on without my thinking of it again. And the other hand kept coming on a bit of weed or something. It irritated me, and then I looked and there was a sort of flap lying in the water. Like a bit of filleted fish. There was my shoulder, the shoulder bones I was looking at white bone with some gristle on it and I thought: that’s like a bone a dog’s been at and left, and then I realized, it’s my shoulder bone. And the bit of weed or something was the flesh of my shoulder. It was nothing – skin with some red blood vessels inside – hell, but I’d never known before how thin I was, it scared me. That’s why I eat so much. I eat and eat, because of that flap of skin. I made the swimming hand bend up and hold the flap down on my neck, and pressed down to stop the blood all going into the sea. The funny thing was. I had no feeling in that hand, but I made it do what I wanted. And the hand which was holding on to the bit of timber – that held on too, but it was numb – dead. That’s where I learned about the body, you can make it do what you want, and it’s where I first learned about sex. That’s funny, isn’t it. You can tell your body what to do and it does it. There I was for a whole day, watching the sun go right across the sky and down, and the water was red all round me. Sometimes I passed out and then I came to myself and there was the sun, filling the sky, everything hot and glittering, and I thought I was dead already, because there was no sensation in my body anywhere. Then I thought of sharks, coming for us, because all the sea was full of red. But there was so much meat in the sea that day I suppose they didn’t need me. And when I was picked up they had to force my arm back away from holding my shoulder flesh in place: it was bent and set hard in a crook.’

This scar was a long white weal that slanted down into the armpit. Martha stroked it with her fingers while he remembered that afternoon in a sea full of rubbish and the dead and the dying: she stroked and thought of it with him. Then he, having kissed the fingers that held the memory, contained it, ran his fingers along the minute marks on her groin and upper thighs made by pregnancy, tiny silver marks on white skin, and she thought of a small baby, any baby born to any woman, and its absolute perfection. That is why women cry when their children fall for the first time and scar a knee or an elbow: that perfect body, with not a mark on it, well, now it is claimed by the world – that is the moment when a woman cedes her child away from her, to time. She thought of Caroline, the perfect little female body that had issued from her body which now held and always would the scars of pregnancy, and it was hard to tell whether she was Martha, or her mother who had given birth to her, or Caroline, who would give birth; and meanwhile Jack touched and understood the scars, lifting his head to look at them, and on his face was the awe of his love of the flesh and his terror at what ate it.

She lay and watched the strong bony boy’s face with the boy’s brown eyes just above hers, and the face dissolved into time: his hard straight mouth and the eyes were those of the little tyrant, his father; his nose, his falling brown hair, his mother’s, the frightened farm girl’s; and when he smiled, letting his head fall back on the pillow beside hers, she slid down her hand to the back of thighs which under the pads of her fingers were grooved and marred, and his brown eyes narrowed into a tension of memory. He was the son of a farmer in the Orange Free State, a small poor farmer with a large family: two sons, a cowed wife, and three daughters whom he adored and terrorized, and (so Jack claimed) had raped, just once, all three of them. The marks he had left on Jack and the other boy were across the backs of their thighs. He whipped them with his leather thong all through their childhood, and the moment Jack got free of him was when he went to the local Indian store and bought a pair of long khaki trousers: man’s trousers. He was twelve, and he had to roll up the bottoms more than a foot. Then he had gone to the veranda where his father was sitting at sundown with his silent wife, and had stood there – a man. And when the father had stood up, anger swelling in the veins of his neck, Jack had picked up a big stone from the earth outside the house, and had stood there, stone poised at shoulder level ready to throw. Not one word had been said. There he had stood, a thin child in a man’s long trousers that hid the scarred backs of his thighs for ever from his father; the setting sun was hot on his back and made for a long shadow right across the sand to the brick veranda where the man his father stood up to go inside and fetch his whip. But he stopped, because as he moved, the stone in the boy’s hand moved while the narrowed brown eyes (replicas of his own) took aim. The man had sat down. He had not beaten the older son again, but went on beating the younger. He did this until Jack took the eleven-year-old into the local store and with money he had stolen from the tobacco bag hidden under his father’s mattress, bought him a pair of man’s trousers. The two boys had confronted the father together. And again, not a word. Never a word spoken while the two boys stood side by side at evening looking in at the veranda where their parents sat drinking coffee. The mother had gone indoors, unable to stand it: and four females had stood in the room behind, watching the scene outside, too afraid even to cry.

A year later Jack left the farm early one morning when the sun was coming up over the edges of the sand, taking with him money he had stolen from under the mattress. He boarded the train to Port Elizabeth. ‘And there I suddenly understood, Martha – I was mad. I’d been mad all my life, ever since I could remember being a little kicker. I had spent every moment of my life hating my father. I stood on the edge of the sea, and that was something, the sea, for the first time. I had hardly known the sea existed. No one ever mentioned it, not really. God it makes you want to cry, man, sometimes it does make me cry, all the little kickers black and white all over the Fatherland, and they’ve never seen the sea, and Port Elizabeth and Cape Town and Durban and Johannesburg are the big cities. I stood throwing stones at the sea and crying. Because I’d understood – my father was nothing. It made me feel like nothing. All my life spent hating a poor little tyrant on a few morgen of poor soil, and he’d never known anything else. I knew I had to beat hating him. I knew if I went back to the farm I’d be finished, I’d kill him, I knew I would. I had spent most of my childhood working out ways how to kill the old man. So I said I was eighteen and got a job on the docks. But the hatred – it’s there. It comes back into me when I don’t expect it. It’s my enemy. I can’t hate that poor little nothing of a backveld farmer, how can I, what am I hating? But I do … I can’t help it.’

So Martha stroked the backs of his thighs, following with her fingers marks made by an oxhide whip held by a little tyrant now dead and lying under a thorn tree under the red sand, while Jack closed his eyes, and let hatred rise in him so that he could hold it and control it. He lay trembling with the force of his hatred, his lashes pressed hard against his cheek, until, with a gasp, the tension held, he opened his eyes and he smiled into her face.

Her face which was – whose? For her eyes were her father’s, and her mouth too; and her nose and the shape of her face and even where the lines showed how they would fall, and a mole, her mother’s. Yet it was Martha who lay now, endowed with these features which were not hers at all, merely from stock, the storehouse of the race, and smiled at Jack? Who smiled? Who smiled back, who, what? – When Martha smiled at Jack, Jack at Martha, in these shapes of flesh that had come together as if a sculptor had flung noses, eyes, hands, mouths together. And was it Jack then, who bent her head back so that he could see where the thirty years of her life were written into the soft place just under her chin. Just there and nowhere else on her body did the wear of time show. He touched with soft fingers the soft crinkling place, and kissed it, tears in his eyes because of the anguish of time eating. Jack comforted Martha. Martha took comfort from Jack.

And now, the ritual was complete. They lay, taut with power held and controlled. Ready. But if things had not gone right, if the hatred had built up and exploded, as sometimes it did, so that he gasped and jumped away from her, to beat his fists on the wall, swearing and crying and trembling; if he had gone white and cold remembering the terror of his being in the sea with his blood leaking away; if she had let herself go away from him into the anonymity of an ancient femaleness, something indifferent to men, even hostile, self-sufficiently female; if she had let herself go into the great indifference of sorrow, thinking how soon her body would sag down over her bones in a gutter of flesh, so that what delight there could be now was not worth the making of it, since it so soon would be in the past – if they went away from each other off a finely achieved and held point, then Jack would kiss her, jump up and say: Well, that’s not right, it’s not working this time – and make them both cocoa. This achievement of control which was so hard, could not tolerate a second best, or a falling away: sex that was an explosion of force, or a weakening of it, was not possible, or too damaging to let happen.

‘Martha, do you know what I’ve discovered – making love? I understood what hating is. You say all your life “I hate” “I love”. But then you discover hatred is a sort of wavelength you can tune into. After all, it’s always there, hatred is simply part of the world, like one of the colours of the rainbow. You can go into it, as if it were a place. Well, right at the beginning when I was using sex to beat me hating my father, then I suddenly understood. If you can get beyond “I hate” – then you find – there is hatred, always there. You can say I am going into hatred now, it’s just a force. That’s all, it’s not anything, not good or bad. You go into it. But man! – you have to come out again fast, it’s too strong, it’s too dangerous. But it’s like a thousand volts of electricity. And sex. Well, Martha, I don’t have to tell you. But that’s what I discovered. Do you know what I mean?’

Listening to him, listening to his words, had not been any use to her at first: since it had not been something she had discovered for herself. But, listening to him, she thought back – but no man apart from Thomas had been relevant. Making love with Thomas – that had been sometimes ‘the thousand volts’, but that had shattered, they had not been able to stand it; they had sometimes broken away from each other and sat talking, hardly touching, or even had not met for a couple of days. Somewhere there, Martha and Thomas had stumbled on to something, near some knowledge, but had not been able to use it, benefit.

But some instinct, or some accident or experience, a coming into knowledge, had made this man, Jack, an embodiment of something she had not ever experienced, nor had she imagined existed. She had come near it, merely, but failed to understand. Sex, with Jack, was never an explosive, or the simple satisfying of a need, or rather, if that is what it became, because of tiredness, or failure of control, then it was a failure, and he shrugged his shoulders and waited for and prepared for the next time. Sex was the slow building up, over hour after hour, from the moment of meeting the woman he was to make love with – a power, a force, which when held and controlled, took both up and over and away from any ordinary consciousness into an area where no words could be of use.

Now, this night, with the rain still enclosing the empty softly drumming house, in this long white room with the candles burning down low, the two bodies on the bed lay in a state of high relaxed control, and Martha, looking at his face, the country boy’s face, knew from its absorbed concentration that now they could go on, reach for the next stage: tonight there was no need to confess failure, make sex for the sake of satisfaction, break off, for a new attempt. He joined with her and they lay still, sensing and aware of the different rhythms at work in their bodies, the pulse of the blood – blood washing back and forth; the breath, and its movement; the two movements at first out of tune with each other, till they adjusted themselves and became one, first in each separate body and then across the boundaries of separate flesh, the two bodies together. Then, slow, slow, a building up till a different rhythm, a high, fine beat of nerves took over, took control. All the time quite still, not a movement, but lying absolutely still, in a high alert tension, eyes closed, while the separate rhythms emphasized their separateness with a high strong emphasis, till they flowed into higher more powerful rhythm. So that the first movement of body in body was not a willed one, from his side or from hers, but came from, was impelled by, was on, the rhythm of blood-beat and breath. Eyes closed, listening, almost, to their bodies, slow. And now Martha distinguished, through the high tension of the superior rhythm, the different centres of her body – and through hers, Jack’s. Sex: sensation pulsing on the currents of blood and breath. Heartbeat – heart: separate. Heart with its emotion, ‘love’, but isolated and looked at like this, a small thing, a pulse of little feeling, like an animal impulse towards another, a warmth. Sex, heart, the currents of the automatic body were one now, together: and above these, her brain, cool and alert, watching and marking. Body, a surge like the sea, but the mind above not yet swung up, absorbed into the whole. And then mind dimmed and went, and Martha was swung up and away: and as she went she thought, trying to hold a flash of it before it did go: Good God, yes, I had forgotten, why is it we don’t remember, with Jack there’s this special place: nothing to do with Jack the person, he’s the instrument that knows how to reach it: but you can’t ‘remember’ it. Yes, exactly, like walking down the street in a high vibrating place: you can’t ‘remember’ it – it’s the same place … Her mind cleared, emptied, little thoughts like small trains darting across a vast landscape went by. An empty dark mind: pictures were flashing across her eyes, in front of her eyelids, extraordinary scenes, or perhaps ordinary ones made extraordinary by the solemn intensity and emphasis of their presentation to her: places she had not been to, faces she had never seen, gardens, rivers, the flash of a city she had never been in, then voices came into the empty dark place where her mind was. The vibration shifted and heightened: all her body was in a fine high vibration like a wire at very high tension: as she shifted up into this other state, she saw in front of her eyelids a picture of a man and a woman, walking in a high place under a blue sky holding children by the hand, and with them all kinds of wild animals, but they were not wild at all: a lion, a leopard, a tiger, deer, lambs, all as tame as house-pets walking with the man and the woman and the lovely children, and she wanted to cry out with loss: but it was a loss there was no focus to, there was no holding it. And then, out of the pain of loss, came another picture accompanied by a shift of mood or place: she saw a large layered house, not foreign or out of another climate, but London, it had a London feel to it, and it was full of children, not children, half-grown people, and their faces as they turned them towards her were tortured and hurt, and she saw herself, a middle-aged woman, thickened and slowed, with the face of a middle-aged woman. An anxious face, a face set to endure, to hold on – there was such pain in this vision, such hurt, and she heard herself crying: she had dropped back fast through layers of herself to find Jack holding her, the movements of their love-making stopped. Martha, Martha, Martha. Wake up, Martha, what is it, you are crying – come back what’s wrong?