The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing
was a pause while Mark recovered himself. Then: ‘She’s left her gloves, damn it.’ He picked them up and carried them to the door where he saw them into his mother’s hand. Good-byes were said again. He came back.
‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘My wife’s in a mental hospital.’ He paused, not looking at her, while it sank in. ‘My mother’s had the brunt of Francis for quite a bit and she feels that if there were a woman in the house, it would make it easier – during school holidays, for instance.’
There was so much information here that Martha remained silent, digesting it, while he waited for her. And as she thought it out, she saw before her eyes the child’s face as he turned to leave: it was a long, curious, hopeful look.
Oh no, said Martha to herself. Oh no, no, no!
At last she looked at Mark and waited and he said: ‘But you mustn’t think that if you did work for me – for a while, you’d be in any way responsible for Francis, or that you’d have to live here.’
‘Who does live here?’
‘A good question,’ he said, laughing at last. ‘Yes. Well, I should have told you before. The thing is, it’s often hard to know. Well, I do, basically. And my wife – when she’s well …’ A long pause. ‘That’s not likely to be … she’s not very … it doesn’t look as if she’ll be home for some time. Or if she is, she’s not … My mother has the use of the room you saw downstairs. She sometimes likes to entertain in town. And there are the rooms upstairs. They all seem to belong to someone. Or did. We are a large family. We were.’
‘I see’.
‘Yes, I supposed that you had.’ This was an appeal as well as an apology. Martha felt as if she were being swept fast over an edge, and by her own emotions; for the first time since she came to London, she was unfree. She wanted to run out of the house – anywhere. She was extraordinarily upset. So was he.
‘The job itself,’ he said at last. ‘It is pretty straightforward. But you see, my difficulty is, I’ve got to have someone who isn’t going to be upset by – tricky situations.’
She saw very clearly. Martha was thinking: She had no money left. If she were to go to a hotel or find a room she must ask Mark Coldridge for an advance on salary (not yet mentioned). The room upstairs (who was Sally?) would be a godsend, until she could find a place of her own. But that would mean landing herself even deeper in this terrible involving situation which had already involved her; the child’s face haunted her. Why had she been so stupid to leave herself without any money? To work here, living somewhere else – that would be safe enough, probably. (Would it?) She could borrow money. Who? Jack. She must ask Jack.
‘Can I think it over?’ she said; and he said, cold with disappointment, interpreting it, as she almost meant, as a polite refusal: ‘Of course, you’re quite right.’
‘It’s not that I don’t like the idea of working with you … it’s just that …’
‘I do understand.’
And that moment could have been the end of it: she might have walked away and been free. But she said, unable to prevent herself: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I am really so desperately sorry.’
‘Look, you could either live – anywhere, where you please. Or here. But there’s nearly always someone else here. It wouldn’t be a question of being alone with me. Sally’s so often here. Sally’s my brother’s wife. But in either case it wouldn’t have to be a question of hours you didn’t like. But I’d pay you twelve pounds a week, whether you lived in or out.’
His tone was saying that this was generous – and indeed it was; much more than the market rate.
Martha got up. So much emotion was now swilling around the room that she couldn’t stand it. ‘I’ll let you know before today’s out. Will that do?’
His face was suddenly alive: friendly, delighted.
‘Oh good, good,’ he said. ‘I do so hope … but I don’t want to put any pressure on you. And you mustn’t mind – you see, for some weeks, now, I’ve been beset by Phoebe’s choices, and most of the time they are so very definitely not mine.’
‘She’s very forceful, certainly.’
Smiling over Phoebe’s so useful force, they went down the stairs, while Martha remembered how people had smiled over Marjorie: a different smile. Odd: one could never smile, for Phoebe, the smile one used for Marjorie!
Martha left him, resisting his suggestion that she should leave the suitcase and pick it up later.
Where could she go while she made a decision?
Where was there for her to go, but Jack’s? And now, walking down through the lovely square, where the summery trees waved their branches in a cool air, she was free of that house, of that man, of that haunted child. She would go to Jack’s and ask if she could, after all, live in the floor beneath his. Just for the time at least. She went to the telephone to ring Jack.
When he heard it was Martha, the voice of his first impulse was a rise into a warm relief: ‘Oh, Martha, I’m so happy – I really did think I’d never hear from you again. I don’t know why I did.’ Then a pause, and the judicious voice, low, of his present situation. Joanna was with him. He offered Martha this fact, waiting for her to see that Joanna, put off twice for Martha, had earned the preference now. Martha saw it. ‘Look, Jack, can you lend me some money? I need about ten pounds. Five would do.’ And now a very long pause. At last: ‘Well. Martha, you see, I don’t keep money here.’ He was silent, waiting for her to think of another resource. Martha found herself taken over by the thought: Of course, he’s so mean … and with such violence that she discarded the judgement. All the same, he did keep money there: like the old farmers of his tradition, in a bag under the mattress. Quite a lot of it. Then she understood that this demand for money meant in fact that she didn’t want to be in the rooms beneath him, she wanted to go to a hotel: she was asking Jack for money to escape from any pressure he might put on her. And he felt it: he was feeling it.
‘Perhaps Joanna could lend me some money?’ said Martha; urgent, her voice on a high pitch of desperation.
‘Wait a minute, Martha.’
Martha stood in the telephone box, watching the people pass outside: it was the rush hour again, and the sky held the dark of imminent rain. She was in a panic. Funk. This was a danger-point in her life: she was being taken over. Had been taken over? Jack’s voice again measured: ‘If you come over now, Martha, then we could talk about it, hey?’
‘Good. Thank you. Thank Joanna.’
‘Are you coming by taxi, or walking?’
‘Bus.’
‘See you.’
He had been asking: How long have we, Joanna and I, got before you come? All the talents for minute organization of a talented housewife went into the organization of his women … Martha was raging with spite against him. She had known before that Jack was careful about money – if that was the word for it. But she had judged him generously: he was guarding the thousand pounds that were his freedom. Never before had she felt dislike or repulsion for him or his way of life. Now she felt both. And also for the household she had been in that afternoon – a parcel of sickly neurotics, and Phoebe a humourless bigot … hatred burned through her veins. She had to stop it – had to, must … she boarded a bus headed west, in a jostle of people who smelled sour with sweat this muggy afternoon. She was tired. The weeks of not sleeping, not eating enough, the restless walking, had caught up: she was ready to collapse finally into tears. She wished she could be in a dark room and pull covers up over her. The bus was charging down the Bayswater Road. A couple of nights ago, here Martha had walked light and easy and alert. That was the night when, walking, she had understood … but she could not remember now what it was she had understood. And she had a violent reaction against that too – posturing around, she thought; making yourself important, imagining all kinds of great truths when