Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City

When she had stopped, he said: ‘You were right.’

‘We were not right. Isn’t it funny? Do you know how many people have become communists simply because of that: because communism would do away with the family? But communism has done no such thing, it’s done the opposite.’

‘I want you to have my baby. And I want Joanna to marry her guardsman and I’ll give her a baby. She can tell him, I don’t care. I wouldn’t mind in his place: what does it matter who puts a baby into a woman? And I want the little Jane to have a baby. We can get married if she likes. And I want Nancy and Joan and Melinda to have my babies. I’ll see them, I’ll give them presents. But I won’t be a father. I wouldn’t do that to any human being.’

There was now a very long silence. Martha cried a little, feebly out of helplessness. He lay silent, his face hidden. On the black of the curtains rough edges of light. Outside this long black and white room where small candles burned, was an afternoon blazing with sunlight. Briefly: when she looked again, the glow behind the black had faded. She had once felt something that was wrong so violently! She had acted from the feeling – what point now in saying what she ought to have done? She would probably do the same again, in the same position. So what did it matter what one felt? Or believed? It was the action that mattered. And now Jack felt this so strongly that if she wished, she could have a baby: and if he later felt, ‘I was wrong then, my feelings were wrong’ – what difference would that make? There would be the child.

At last she said: ‘There isn’t any family I’ve ever seen that doesn’t seem to me all wrong. But what right have I to feel like that? Where do I get the idea from that something better is possible? I keep thinking and thinking about it – why? Perhaps it’s always like this, it has always been like that? Ugly. But that’s how I do see things. I used to worry and nag at myself: there’s something wrong with me that I do see what’s going on as ugly. As if I were the only person awake and everyone else in a kind of bad dream, but they couldn’t see that they were. That’s how I felt on the ship coming over – you know, pleasure. Several hundred people “living it up”, “whooping it up” – enjoying themselves. Of course, you know ships from a different angle, you’ve worked on them, that’s different. But that voyage – it was like being in a nightmare. People who had saved up money. From all over Africa. Just for that trip – years of saving. Pleasure – eating three times a day like pigs, no five times a day, getting drunk, always just a little drunk, just to make this tolerable. Flirting, sex for titillation. There wasn’t one person on that boat – except for one girl. And she was ill. She was coming to England for treatment. We used to sit by ourselves and watch. They called us spoil-sports. It was like watching a lot of people who had been hypnotized.’

From Jack nothing. He might be asleep. She went on: ‘For some reason, I’ve had that all my life. What’s the use of thinking there must be something wrong with me? One’s got to stand by what one is, how one sees things. What else can you do? And I’ve had the other thing too, the mirror of it: all my life I’ve believed that somewhere, sometime, it wasn’t like that, it needn’t be like this. But why should I? Last night again – the nightmare. But at the same time, the marvellous family walking with their friendly animals. The golden age. Why? But I’ve been thinking, Jack. What’s the use of imagining impossibly marvellous ways of living, they aren’t anywhere near us, are they? You’ve got to accept … parents have no choice but to be the world for their children. And if the world is ugly and bad for that time, then parents have to take that burden on themselves, they are ugly and bad too.’ She started crying again. This time it was hysteria: it would be easy for her now to switch over into being ‘Matty’, then to make fun of herself, apologize … ‘Matty’ had always been an aspect of hysteria? She steadied herself to finish: ‘Babies are born into this, what there is. A baby is born with infinite possibilities for being good. But there’s no escaping it, it’s like having to go down into a pit, a terrible dark blind pit, and then you fight your way up and out: and your parents are part of it, of what you fight out of. The mistake is, to think there is a way of not having to fight your way out. Everyone has to. And if you don’t, then it’s too bad, no one’s going to cry for you, it’s no loss, only to yourself, it’s up to you …’ Hysteria arose again in a great wave: she was trembling, shaking with it. She was saying what she really believed and it was to a man who was asleep. She laughed and she cried, trembling. At last she stopped. Silence. Jack had turned his head: his face was visible. He was listening, with his eyes closed. The hand that lay stretched out was in a tight fist and it trembled.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sober. ‘I know you hate – fuss.’ Jack did not say anything. ‘But in a way it’s a compliment. I could have chosen not to be hysterical. But I’ve discovered something, Jack. About hysteria. It can be a sort of – rehearsal.’ She was thinking of last night, walking. She could not ‘remember’ the lit, alive space; though she knew it had been there; but she could remember the approach to it: something giggly, silly, over-receptive – hysterical. ‘When you get to a new place in yourself, when you are going to break into something new, then it sometimes is presented to you like that; giggling and tears and hysteria. It’s things you’ll understand properly one day – being tested out. First you have to accept them like that – silly and giggly … Jack?’ She knelt close up to him. ‘Jack?’ She had to stop herself saying: ‘Are you angry?’ like a little girl-like ‘Matty’.

‘I’ve been listening,’ he said. ‘And do you know what I was thinking? Is this just Martha’s way of being a woman, of getting her own way over being married and having a child. But I can see it wasn’t that.’ He sat up. He looked beat: pale, ill, and under his eyes, dark bruises. ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t follow what you were saying. It didn’t mean anything to me. I know you mean it for yourself and that’s good enough for me.’ He got off the bed. He was shivering. ‘Martha, I’m so hungry I’ve got to eat.’

They had been to eat very late at midday; and it was not yet six in the evening. ‘I was lying on the bed, feeling all my bones. Sometimes when I lie still like that, I’m a skeleton: I can’t feel the flesh anywhere, just bones. I’ve got to get some flesh on me.’

They went back to the Indian restaurant, through late afternoon streets. A meagre sunlight; people rushing back from work along the ugly street. In the restaurant, the Indian who had served them their lunch, was still on duty. He was from Calcutta, had been sent for by an uncle who owned another, much smarter restaurant, in Earl’s Court. This was a new, small restaurant, the bottom floor of an old house. The Indian from Calcutta, working for a pittance in a cold foreign country to escape from his family’s poverty, welcomed them with white-teethed affability, and for the second time that day, served them with enormous quantities of food. Then they returned to Jack’s house. They were both sad and low, and gentle with each other. When they went in, the door was open into the room where the grinning boy lived. He was sitting with his back to the wall, cross-legged, playing patience with a candle alight beside him. He nodded and grinned and waved. They nodded, leaving his smile behind to fade on the dark stuffy air of the stairs.

They lay on the bed with their arms around each other.