Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City

‘Martha, I don’t know how to tell you what I’ve been thinking. I don’t know how you’ll take it. Why don’t you come and live here. No, don’t say no, think about it – there’s the floor under this one. You could live there. The wiring’s done, and the plumbing and the telephone’s in.’

‘You mean, live with you? But how?’

‘Well, why not?’ he muttered, already rejected, sullen. ‘You ask it as if – you don’t trust me, that’s it, that’s what I was afraid of.’

‘But what would Garibaldi Vasallo make of it?’ – trying to joke.

‘What could he say? You don’t understand. I’ve got the whip-hand. He didn’t want to give me a half-share of this house at all. But he did – I made him. Besides, he knows I know how he operates, with all his dirty tricks.’

‘Blackmail?’

His face darkened, clenched, was ugly. ‘Blackmail! That’s a word you use for decent people, not a dirty little dago.’

‘I hate that word.’ She was discouraged: all her energy had leaked away; she wished now that she could wrap a blanket around her head, like an African, and turn her face to the wall and sleep. ‘When I left home I really thought I’d be free of the race thing. Isn’t that funny? There’s no end to our being stupid. One’s always making up day-dreams about places somewhere else. But since I’ve been here – things are just as ugly as they are back home, but people don’t know, it’s all hidden. And now you start talking about dagoes.’

‘That’s not racialism! That’s just – accurate. That’s what he is, a nasty little dago. A crook. You deal with crooks in their own coin. If he plays me up, I’ll go to the police with what I know about him. I’m not taking anything from him that isn’t fair. By the time I’ve finished with this house it will be a real house, and it’ll have cost him nothing. If he’d paid a builder, it would have cost hundreds – he knows that. So why is what I’m doing wrong? This house is my house. When I came into it that day and saw it, and started work on it – I knew it was mine. It’s my house because I’ve worked 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.