Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City

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?

He was holding her as if she were a child in a nightmare, comforting her. She was back in herself, with the man comforting her, in a room where it was now dark: the candles had burned right down; and beyond the lowered blackout curtain a greying of light – morning.

‘Oh God, Jack, it was like a nightmare,’ she wept in his arms. ‘What, tell me, what was it?’ ‘Do you see pictures, Jack? Do you hear voices?’ ‘I see scenes sometimes – do you mean the pictures like scenes from a film?’

‘Yes, but, oh my God, Jack, this time it really was awful.’ ‘Tell me then, tell me, tell me …’

But the house had gone with its load of half-grown children and the woman who was responsible for it, for them. She could not ‘remember’ it: she only knew it had been there, because of the fearful sadness that filled her now.

‘I don’t know. It’s all gone. And it was silly …’ She sat up, Jack with her, she was back in her day-time self and it was silly. She was soaked with her tears. All her face and her breasts were wet with tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘You gave me such a scare, Martha. I was right away, and then I heard you crying, and I wondered, who’s that crying? And then it came to me, yes, it must be Martha. So I brought us down again.’

They sat side by side on the crumpled hot bed. Behind the blackout curtains, the light was already stronger: the sun must be up over the roofs and treetops of London.

‘Look, Martha, you were terribly tired last night, you were upset. Perhaps this was really just a time for us both to come and then off to sleep. Shall I make you come properly, Martha, and then we’ll sleep a bit?’

‘Oh, Jack, I feel so sad, there was something awful, but I’ve just remembered, there was something lovely as well: a lovely picture, like the golden age, men and women and animals and children all together walking along. I want to cry.’

When she woke up, he was making coffee at the spirit stove. He stood naked with his back to her. A tall thin man – a body. A woman lying on the bed, a body.