The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing
on it.’
Every word of this being true, why did Martha feel uneasy: the intensity Jack put into his pleas, exactly as if it were a false case, was that it? ‘Why didn’t you simply go and buy it? He bought it for £500. You’ve got £1,000 tucked away.’
‘No, I’m not going to waste that. It’s my future. I’ve got to have that money. And this is my house. I’m in my rights if I say you can come and live here.’
‘But, Jack – you’ll live up here on this floor, and I’ll live on the floor beneath?’
And now he was crying: the fearful intensity of his need was wringing his body, making tears spill from his brown eyes. ‘What’s wrong with that? You don’t trust me, Martha.’
‘Look, Jack, you must see it’s one thing coming here – by appointment, to make love – but surely you wouldn’t want me or any woman just beneath you? What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over!’
‘Oh, I hate that. I hate that attitude. That’s what I mean by not trusting me. I’d not tell lies to any girls who came here. I don’t tell lies. Well, not unless I’ve got to – only if there’s a girl who wouldn’t come to me if I didn’t – they’d know that you lived here.’
‘A sort of senior wife?’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that. You don’t want to get married, do you? I mean not really married.’
‘No. I don’t think I do.’ She nearly asked: ‘And what about children?’ But the nightmare vision of the house with the children and herself in it came back, and she shivered.
‘You’re cold, Martha. I’ll start the heaters.’ He got up, glad to be able to take his tears away; and she was glad to have the pressure farther away for a few moments.
He knelt by the paraffin heaters, first one, and then the other. His back was to her. From the set of his shoulders she knew something important was coming: what had gone before was not after all what mattered: the tears, the apprehension were for what he was about to say now.
‘There’s something else, Martha. I can’t say it easily though. Give me a minute. There – we’ll be warm. Listen Martha – oh, hell man, I’m afraid of saying because I don’t want you to take it wrong. But would you like to have a baby? I mean, let me give you a baby?’
And now she was silent because she was shocked. That she ought to be, if not flattered, at least warmed, she knew. But he had taken flight somewhere away from any kind of reality she understood. Because this was the point. His point. She had not expected it.
‘Why not, Martha? You could bring the baby up here. You could get some sort of job. Some job or other.’
‘Babies need fathers,’ said Martha, her voice coming dry despite herself. His body froze, was set in a tension of anger, his back was still turned to her.
‘I could kill you for that, Martha.’ It came out between teeth clenched in anger. She remained still. He came back to the bed and sat on it, close, looking right into her face from a face that had gone a bluey-white. His eyes were small and black.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t only me, is it? You’d like to give all your girls babies, wouldn’t you? That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Put cuckoos in nests?’ ‘Yes.’
Now they were hating each other. But as he brought his face up against hers, black with hate, a wave of anguish swept from him to her: she refused to give way, to soften, and he flung himself face down on the bed, arms outstretched, stiff: in agony. So she had seen him before. This was the shape his black moods set him in, rigid; and how he might lie for hours, without moving.
‘Listen, Jack. When I left my little girl, Caroline, do you know what I was thinking? I thought, I’m setting you free, I’m setting you free …’
‘Well all right, I’m not talking about mothers, a child needs a mother, that’s what I’m saying, isn’t it? But fathers, no, I won’t inflict myself on any child. I won’t. I couldn’t. I’m scared – scared, of my old man, I tell you, that’s what scares me. I don’t suppose he thought when he put me into my mother that he’d hate me, and then my brother, and have to screw my sisters.’
‘I had a sort of silent pact with that child,’ Martha went on. ‘As if she were the only person who understood why I was doing it. I was setting her free. From me. From the family.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ came from the bed. ‘It’s true.’
‘No, it was so terribly not true. I was mad.’
‘You were right, Martha. Don’t go back on it now.’
‘I was mad. So how can I say to you now: You’re mad? I know how you feel. But it was such nonsense, when I think of it now …’ And Martha began to cry, but silently, so that he wouldn’t turn around again. ‘All of us lot, we were communists, we felt the same …’
‘Everyone was a communist,’ came the muffled angry voice from the bed. ‘What’s that got to do with it? I was one, for a time in the war. It was all that stuff about the Atlantic Charter – it turned us up, we were reds, what of it?’
‘Oh, sometimes I think communism, for people who weren’t in communist countries, it was a kind of litmus paper, a holdall – you took from it what you wanted. But for us it went without saying that the family was a dreadful tyranny, a doomed institution, a kind of mechanism for destroying everyone. And so …’ Martha was crying uncontrollably, but trying to make the roughness in her voice sound like deliberate ‘humour’: ‘And so we abolished the family. In our minds, and when the war was over and there was communism everywhere, the family would be abolished. You know – by decree. Clause 25 of a new Magna Carta. “We decree the family at an end.” And then there would be the golden age, no family, no neurosis. Because the family was the source of neurosis. The father would be a stud and the mother an incubator, and the children handed at birth to an institution: for their own good, you understand, to save them from the inevitability of their corruption. All perfectly simple. We were all corrupted and ruined, we knew that, but the children would be saved.’ Now her voice cracked, and she wept, loudly and violently. He did not move. He lay in his face-down position, listening.
When she had stopped, he said: ‘You were right.’
‘We were not right. Isn’t it funny? Do you know how many people have become communists simply because of that: because communism would do away with the family? But communism has done no such thing, it’s done the opposite.’
‘I want you to have my baby. And I want Joanna to marry her guardsman and I’ll give her a baby. She can tell him, I don’t care. I wouldn’t mind in his place: what does it matter who puts a baby into a woman? And I want the little Jane to have a baby. We can get married if she likes. And I want Nancy and Joan and Melinda to have my babies. I’ll see them, I’ll give them presents. But I won’t be a father. I wouldn’t do that to any human being.’
There was now a very long silence. Martha cried a little, feebly out of helplessness. He lay silent, his face hidden. On the black of the curtains rough edges of light. Outside this long black and white room where small candles burned, was an afternoon blazing with sunlight. Briefly: when she looked again, the glow behind the black had faded. She had once felt something that was wrong so violently! She had acted from the feeling – what point now in saying what she ought to have done? She would probably do the same again, in the same position. So what did it matter what one felt? Or believed? It was the action that mattered. And now Jack felt this so strongly that if she wished, she could have a baby: and if he later felt, ‘I was wrong then, my feelings were wrong’ – what difference would that make? There would be the child.
At last she said: ‘There isn’t any family I’ve ever seen that doesn’t seem to me all wrong. But what right have I to feel like