Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City

For a few weeks she had been anonymous, unnoticed, – free. Never before in her life had she known this freedom. Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one’s self behind a mask. Coming to a big city for those who have never known one means first of all, before anything else, and the more surprising if one has not expected it, that freedom: all the pressures are off, no one cares, no need for the mask. For weeks then, without boundaries, without definition, like a balloon drifting and bobbing, nothing had been expected of her.

But since she had taken the room upstairs over the café, had been accepted into the extraordinary kindness and delicacy of this couple, she had made a discovery: ‘Matty’ was reborn. And after how many years of disuse? ‘Matty’ now was rather amusing, outspoken, competently incompetent, free from convention, free to say what other people did not say: yet always conscious of, and making a burnt offering of, these qualities. ‘Matty’ gained freedom from whatever other people must conform to, not so much by ignoring it, but when the point was reached when conformity might be expected, gaining exemption in an act of deliberate clumsiness – like a parody, paying homage as a parody does to its parent-action. An obsequiousness in fact, an obeisance. Exactly, so she understood, had the jester gained exemption with his bladder and his bells; just so, the slave humiliated himself to flatter his master: as she had seen a frightened African labourer clown before her father. And so, it seems, certain occupants of recent concentration camps, valuing life above dignity, had made themselves mock those points of honour, self-respect, which had previously been the focus-points of their beings, to buy exemption from the camp commanders.

Between ‘Matty’ and such sad buffoons, the difference was one of degree. Somewhere early in her childhood, on that farm on the high veld, ‘Matty’ had been created by her as an act of survival. But why? In order to prevent herself from being – what? She could not remember. But during the last few years before leaving ‘home’ (now not where she was, England, previously ‘home’, of a sort, but that town she had left), ‘Matty’ had not existed, there had not been a need for her. Martha had forgotten ‘Matty’, and it was painful to give her house-room again. But here she was, just as if she had not been in abeyance for years, ready at the touch of a button to chatter, exclaim, behave with attractive outrageousness, behave like a foolish but lovable puppy. In this house. With Jimmy and Iris. (Not with Stella down the river, not at all.) Here. Why? For some days now Martha had been shut inside this person, it was ‘Martha’ who intruded, walked into ‘Matty’, not the other way about. Why? She was also, today, shut inside clothes that dressed, she felt, someone neither Martha, nor ‘Matty’.

For the weeks of her being in London the sun had shone. Strange enough that she could now see it like this. In a country where the sun is always so evident, forceful, present; clouds, storms, rain, briefly disguise the dominating, controlling presence of the sun; one does not say: ‘Today the sun shone,’ for it always does. But after a few weeks in England, she could say ‘The sun shone today’ and only by putting herself back on that other soil felt the truth that the sun never stopped shining. Even in the middle of the night, the sun blazed out, held in its blaze all planets and the earth and the moon, the earth having merely turned away its face, on its journey around away from light and back.

All the warnings of the seasoned about the hideousness of the English climate, had for those weeks, while the sun shone, seemed like the croakings of the envious, or like those exaggerated tales created to terrify greenhorns, by the experienced. The sun had shone, day in and day out, not with the splendid golden explosiveness of Africa, but had shone, regularly, from a blue high sky; not as deeply, as solemnly, as brazenly blue as the skies she had been bred under – but blue, and hot and almost cloudless. Martha had worn the brief bright dresses of that other wardrobe, which she had almost left behind altogether. She had worn brown bare arms, brown legs, and hair still burnt a rough gold from the other sun. Just as if she had not left home and its free-and-easiness for ever, she had been carried by that current of people, that tide, which always flows in and out of London through the home-owners, the rate-payers, the settled: people visiting, holidaying, people wondering if they should settle, people looking for their ancestors and their roots, the students, the travellers, the drifters, the tasters, the derelicts and the nonconformists who must have a big city to hide themselves in because no small one can tolerate them.

From room to room, cheap hotel to hotel, a bed in the flat of a man whose name she could not remember though she remembered him with warmth, nights spent walking with men and women as enjoyably vagrant and as footloose as she, nights with Jack – so she had lived, for hot blue sunny weeks, and then, suddenly – two days ago, the skies had descended in a greyish brown ooze of wet, and Martha wore a thick skirt, a sweater, stockings, and a black coat given to her before she left by Mrs Van der Bylt out of (so Martha accepted it) concern because of Martha’s refusal to believe just how terrible the English climate was. But really the old woman was giving Martha much more than a coat when she had handed the young woman about to leave, the thick black matronly garment which now hung over the back of a wood chair painted greasy daffodil colour in Joe’s café.

She had put it there an hour ago. She ought to get up and say to Jimmy and to Joe’s mother, Iris. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes. I want to go for a walk.’ Ought. She ought to make this statement, put on the coat, go out, walk for the sake of clearing her head into decisions, come back, telephone and then act on what she had decided. Ah yes, but to do what one ought – and then there was the enemy ‘Matty’ so very much stronger than she would have been prepared to believe.

Martha stood up, and at once two pairs of eyes, both pale blue, surfaced with non-committing goodwill, but inwardly hungry for sensation, fastened themselves on her. Martha said, putting on the heavy black coat which had encased Mrs Van through several Zambesian winters: ‘I am going for a short walk.’ At once the two bodies subtly froze: disappointment. Then, suspicion. Of course, and quite rightly: had not ‘Matty’ been here for weeks now, the freakishly ‘charming’ visitor from such different worlds, had not she even worked behind the counter to earn the rent for her room upstairs, and always half the buffoon, at least the willing-to-be-teased, self-confessedly inefficient if full of goodwill, always offering honesty about what she was doing, to these so gently avid hosts? They were now in the right to feel that she shut them out, rejected them, by saying, coldly – so they must feel it – ‘I am going for a walk.’ That would not do, now, after letting them have ‘Matty’ for so long. ‘It’s nice to tell other people your troubles,’ Iris had said, waiting to hear Martha’s – invented, or at least exaggerated, to please her.

Martha now said, with a small rueful laugh: ‘It’s all too much for me, I need a good think,’ and as she pushed back her chair she banged her leg and said, in a half groan ‘Oh damn it!’

‘Oh mind your nylons, dear,’ said Joe’s mother, softening at once, and even exchanging palliated glances with Jimmy as he leaned forward, smiling, to watch Martha rub her leg.

Martha continued to rub it, gasping with pain-infused laughter, until she was able to make her escape to the door, the fee having been paid, passing the telephone on the counter which, if she were to do as she ought, she had used before this.