Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City» — ознакомительный отрывок электронной книги совершенно бесплатно, а после прочтения отрывка купить полную версию. В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: unrecognised, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Four-Gated City: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Four-Gated City»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.‘The Four-Gated City’ finds Martha Quest in 1950s London and very much part of the social history of the time: the Cold War, the anti-nuclear Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. Daring to go a step further – as Lessing so often has in her career – the novel ends with the century in the throes of World War Three.In the four previous novels of the ‘Children of Violence’ series, Lessing explored the end of an epoch. Here she trains her gaze on the present – and the future. The disquieting power of her vision revealed across this series finds its culmination in this brave and visionary work.

The Four-Gated City — читать онлайн ознакомительный отрывок

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Four-Gated City», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

A couple of nights before Lynda was due to leave, Martha, unable to stand the sound of the muffled weeping from the next door, went down to the kitchen to make coffee. It was about three in the morning. Lynda sat at the big kitchen table, with a spread of cards in front of her. In a little heap to one side of the cards were some pills. Lynda wore an old-fashioned high-necked nightdress, all lace and tucks and frills. She saw Martha and ignored her, went on playing cards humming a small sad tune to herself. Martha made some coffee and sat down at the other end of the table. Lynda had not been to the hairdresser during the last week, and her hair hung in lank colourless strands. She seemed all great staring eyes and skull. The illness, or the pills she took so many of, made her sweat a lot: she smelled sour. Nowhere in this sick creature could Martha findthe competent woman who had assisted her planning the basement. She drank coffee, silently, while Lynda sat swaying and humming.

‘You’re going, you think,’ she remarked.

‘Yes. In March.’

‘No, you’re not,’ said Lynda, rude as a child. Now she peered into her cards, and said: ‘It’s coming out!’ Angry, she pushed the cards together: apparently her own internal rules would be broken if the patience came out.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she now demanded.

Martha handed her a packet. Lynda took one, then scooped out three more with a bland sly smile and laid them side by side, near the pills.

‘If I take these now, I shall have to go back to the hospital tomorrow, not the day after, because I won’t have enough pills,’ she explained. Smiling, challenging Martha, or some authority, she separated a couple of pills from the heap, a small yellow one, and a big yellow one.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she announced, looking up and smiling at Martha – direct now, personal, charming. Oh yes, one could see how beautiful she was or could be. ‘Well, you’re right. But what’s the use of being right?’

Martha said nothing.

Lynda pushed the two pills back into the heap. ‘I’ll stay over the other day. But what for?’ She put her head into her hands, and sat swaying and humming. A pause. ‘No,’ she said, violently, and sat up. ‘It’s not true, I couldn’t come out and try. How could I?’

Martha said nothing.

Lynda was now leaning forward and peering into Martha’s face, as if listening.

‘Why can’t you accept it? Some people are just no good. Useless! No good. Not for ordinary life. I keep telling you. I told Mark when he married me. I told him. Why do you want to make everyone like yourselves? I know what I know!’

Martha said nothing and drank coffee. The big kitchen was like a ruin. Curtains, taken down to be washed, were bundled on top of a step-ladder. Floorboards had been taken up and pipes lay exposed near the wall. The tiles behind the sink had been ripped away; but the man had forgotten to put them back – he would have to be telephoned in the morning. Last morning he had arrived at eight o’clock to be paid: putting the tiles back was not his job, he had said, but somebody else’s. The argument had woken Mark. Mark’s dressing-room was over the kitchen. Was Mark awake over their heads now?

‘Mark’s asleep,’ said Lynda. ‘When Mark’s asleep he sleeps. I am happy when he’s asleep; then I know I’m not tormenting him. Sometimes I want to kill him, because if he was dead then I’d know he wasn’t unhappy because of me. Do you see? When I came down to the kitchen now I went to look at him. I like looking at him when he’s asleep. When I was married to him, I used to wake up at night so that I could see him asleep.’

‘You are married to him now,’ said Martha.

‘There’s no need to say anything,’ said Lynda. ‘You said that because you thought you ought. If I were asleep now, you wouldn’t have to say anything, would you? That’s why I like sleeping. I wish I could sleep all my life. But they won’t give me enough pills. I tell them, all right, if you won’t let me have what I know, why can’t I sleep? What’s the difference between being kept silly, because they keep you silly, you see, and being asleep? I’m no use to anyone, so I might as well be asleep. You see,’ she said, once again offering her intimate, enchanting smile, all of her there for a moment, ‘I’d kill myself, but I’m afraid. After all, we don’t know, do we? It might be worse there than it is here. You don’t believe in God, do you?’

‘It’s a word,’ said Martha.

‘Yes, but the devil is a word too. I know there’s a devil. He talks to me.’

One of Lynda’s symptoms was, she heard voices. But the doctors had told Mark that this symptom had abated. Which was why Lynda was allowed out for Christmas.

Now Lynda screwed up her face, so that she suddenly looked like a malevolent old witch, and leaned forward to peer at Martha.

‘Don’t tell them I said so. I keep quiet about what I know. I have to, you see.’ She sat swaying back and forth, back and forth. Then: ‘That’s freedom, isn’t it? Everyone has a bit of freedom, a little space …’ She traced a small circle on the wood of the table, about an inch in diameter. She looked down, peered close. ‘That wood is nice, isn’t it? I chose that table, did Mark tell you? I got it off a street market in Guildford. It cost ten shillings. An old kitchen table, yes, like the one we had at home. It was in the kitchen. The servants ate off it. Nicer than ours. The grain of this wood – look.’ Martha came nearer to look at whorls of hard grain around which the soft fleshy part of the wood had been worn or scrubbed away. They looked at the cross-cut of a spiral that had once been a growing-point in the wood. Lynda sat tracing it with her finger – contented. That is freedom,’ she said. ‘That’s mine. It’s all they let me have. They wouldn’t let me keep that if they knew how to take it away. But if I say to them: I don’t hear voices, you’ve cured me, the voices have gone … they can’t prove anything. That’s my freedom. But I suppose they’ll develop machines – they always do, you know. They won’t be able to stand that, that amount of freedom. So they’ll make a machine and clamp it to our heads and they’ll be able to say: You’re lying, we can measure the shape of the voices on this machine. What are you trying to hide? What do you hear? …’ She swayed, swayed back and forth, in an increasingly rapid rhythm. ‘But they haven’t made that machine yet. I’m still free. I know what I know. You do believe me, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Martha.

Threatening, Lynda leaned forward, ready to hit or to strike; her white grubby hand was clenched around an imaginary knife. ‘Yes, but what do you believe, Martha?’

Her eyes shifted past Martha to the door behind. Martha turned. Mark stood in the door. He looked weary and frightened.

She cackled: ‘Look at him. He wants me in prison. He doesn’t want me to have my freedom. He wants me cured.’

‘Lynda,’ he said desperate – and all wrong. A man, a husband, all warm and responsible, he said: ‘Lynda, this is Mark!’

At this pressure on her she smiled, became evasive, went inside herself and stood up. Her hand went out to the pills. She was smiling like a disobedient schoolgirl. She pretended to put the pills in her mouth, then let her hand drop and stood shaking with laughter. ‘You’ve persuaded me,’ she said to Martha. ‘You’re right.’ She now carefully, neatly, soberly, filled a glass with water, swallowed two pills, and put the rest into a cup, with the cigarettes. This she held before her, and went out of the kitchen, carrying the cup with the pills and the cigarettes as if it were a candle. In her old-fashioned frilly nightdress, she looked like a good child going up to bed.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Four-Gated City»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Four-Gated City» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «The Four-Gated City»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Four-Gated City» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x