The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing
the girl five years her junior. Eventually Marjorie had escaped from Phoebe, had had to, to gain herself. But: sitting opposite Phoebe, who spoke in Marjorie’s voice, who was so like Marjorie, how could one not wonder: who was Marjorie? She was not her voice; not her face; not her body; not her eyes or her hair. Her manner then? But Marjorie’s breathless, defensive, agitated charm – that was all younger-sister. So had she won breathing space from Phoebe through their childhood. Marjorie was just – the younger sister? Of course not.
But who, what? Martha had no idea.
Martha sat opposite the brisk, pretty efficient Englishwoman, who was Phoebe, consciously preventing herself from talking to Marjorie. She was ashamed. She had never known Marjorie. As always, she had been lazy, unimaginative: she had never done more than talk to the younger sister. Well, if she wasn’t careful, she wouldn’t do more than talk to the older sister! For that manner was so strong in Phoebe, it was hard to imagine one could get past it.
‘Of course, I’d be prepared to advise,’ said Martha.
‘There are always plenty of people ready to do that,’ said Phoebe at once; then, seeing that she contradicted herself, looked irritated, and suddenly very tired. ‘We do need help,’ she said.
‘Phoebe, have you felt caged, shut inside an atmosphere?’
‘Well, frankly yes,’ said Phoebe, meaning the war again.
‘No I didn’t mean the war,’ said Martha, clumsily, for Phoebe’s reproach was so strong.
‘I can’t imagine myself not working for what I believe in – frankly, I can’t.’
‘Does one actually have to work in some organization! Well I can see why you are annoyed. You’re not an employment agency! I don’t know why I imagined.’
Phoebe’s glance at the words ‘employment agency’ betrayed that that was exactly what she had been thinking.
‘Well, I do always seem to know of jobs that need filling … let me see then.’
‘I suppose what it comes to – I’ve had enough of organized politics for the time being.’
Phoebe was silent for some time. Martha knew why. Without Mrs Van’s recommendations, Phoebe would have set her down as one of the people whose reforming energies had come out of passionate identification with Russia, the pure and the perfect: just another red with a broken heart, a weak reed, a neurotic, a washout. But Mrs Van had said differently. Therefore Phoebe sat, eating jammy sponge with a teaspoon, her eyebrows drawn together. She looked so like Marjorie that Martha experienced a variety of awe, or panic. It seemed inconceivable that she could not say: Marjorie! and that the person opposite would respond out of ten years of – friendship?
‘Mrs Van Bylt said you had done research – that kind of thing?’ ‘Yes. Tell me, Phoebe, do you and Marjorie ever write to each other?’
‘We are neither of us very good correspondents. How is she? She’s had another baby, she said. That’s four now?’
In her voice the shadow of a pain, something personal, ‘And I’ve never met her husband of course.’
‘He’s a nice man. A quiet kind of man. He’s a civil servant.’
‘So she said,’ said Phoebe, making it clear what she thought of civil servants: reminding Martha that she herself had married a crusading firebrand from the left. She lifted her face and smiled at Martha: who felt as she had that morning with Iris and her Stanley: an area of family emotion had been highlit, touched on.
Suppose I said to her: ‘Your sister’s a very unhappy woman. She’s bored with her nice reliable husband. She had children out of a compulsion. She’s living in a permanent nervous breakdown’ – no, of course she could not say this. This woman did not understand despair – or rather, the admission of it. And besides, such information, if it were not diagnosed – and it would be – as a symptom of Martha’s own identification with the neurotic weakness of this world, would be confirmation of the younger sister’s always expected failure.
‘Is it a success – that sort of thing?’
‘Well, yes; I think the four small children are a bit of a handful at the moment.’
‘I don’t see that. After all, you have plenty of servants out there, don’t you?’ She snapped this out, her face in high colour, and said everything about her own life, which was doing a hard poorly paid job, and being responsible, and bringing up two small girls without a father – without help, without servants.
‘I think I know something for you,’ said Phoebe, pushing aside the personal, while her face still flamed red, and her fingers clutched her purse. ‘There’s my brother-in-law. My ex-brother-in-law. He wants some help. He’s a writer. Of a kind, of course. It’s a hobby really. He’s got some sort of a business or other.’
‘What sort of a writer?’
A silence. Phoebe took a mouthful of weak coffee while Martha registered an old atmosphere: oh yes, she had been here before, and very much so. ‘He did get a book published.’ Another sip. ‘It got quite good reviews.’ One could see that the good reviews were not only a surprise, but a disappointment. She disliked the man, or disliked the book? No, the atmosphere was so strong that Martha waited for the next phrase with confidence. ‘I haven’t any time for books that aren’t about something real, have you?’
So Marjorie might have said; or Anton. Among a selection of similar phrases, she could also have used: I’m not interested in ivory tower writing. No, that would probably be too literary a choice of words for Phoebe.
Martha tried: ‘What was it about?’ ‘Oh, just personal emotions.’ ‘Well, I need a job.’
Here Phoebe looked, lips tight, at Martha’s suitcase. ‘Where have you left your luggage?’
Almost Martha let ‘Matty’ say for her, humorous, deprecating, charming: All I’ve got in the world! ‘That’s my luggage.’
‘You must be a very efficient packer,’ said Phoebe, making a virtue of poor material.
‘What sort of help does he want? What’s the job?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – he’s always running about, you know, he’s got so many irons in the fire. He lives rather near here, actually. I was thinking, we could drop in if you’ve time?’
‘Yes. Good.’
‘Dropping in’, so much not what Martha had experienced of London – that is, the London where people actually lived in houses, had organized lives, as distinct from the wanderers and campers – meant that Phoebe had a special relation with this man?
‘I’ll telephone,’ said Phoebe.
One didn’t ‘drop in’ without telephoning first.
Phoebe went across to the waiter, conferred, and disappeared into a door marked ‘Private’. She came back to say: ‘Mark says we can come round. He’ll be free at two-thirty for an hour.’
Yes, that was more like it: one was free by appointment for an hour. What made the difference? Of course, servants! With servants, plentiful and cheap, one could drop in, drop by, stay for meals, develop large casual acquaintanceships.
Around the corner meant Bloomsbury.
Martha’s arms were both wrenched by the suitcase to a condition of permanent ache. She suggested a taxi. Phoebe never used taxis. They went by bus.
The house was not part of one of the famous squares, but nearly so: from the front door, it seemed as if the trees and plants of the square claimed the house. Tall, narrow, formal, it was like the houses of the squares; and the whole neighbourhood, now that the different shades of ‘white’ chosen by their owners before the war had dimmed into an unremarkable but uniform grey, had the unity of its original design: houses, terraces, grassy squares full of old trees. Here, in short, one