Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City

And Mark could not see that this attitude, at that time, was likely to offend. For him it was all self-evident. And Martha, explaining, came to represent that naïvety, that inability to draw conclusions from obvious facts, that he found so hard to understand.

Meanwhile, Martha was making a discovery – unexpected. ‘Matty’ was being summoned back into existence. ‘Matty’ had not been in evidence in this house, she had made no appearance. Another person had: and it took time to see that this was merely an aspect of the hydra, Matty. This was – at first Martha christened her ‘The Communist’ but had to widen it to ‘The Defender’, since it was a mask shared, for instance, by Marjorie’s sister Phoebe. This person got shrill, exclamatory, didactic, hectoring, and went off at a word into long speeches. ‘I’m not interested in speeches!’ Mark had said, early on in his relationship with this orator. Martha had not been aware she made speeches. Between the clumsy self-denigrating clown, and ‘The Defender’ was a link: Martha was beginning to see it. She had plenty of opportunity for study of it, since the novel stung ‘The Defender’ into such lively existence.

At Mark’s statement that in a hundred years’ time (if anyone was alive in a hundred years’ time), people would not describe the Second World War as people did in 1950 –the year that had just started, Martha said: ‘Well, of course not.’

But they would not judge it as a victory of good over evil, they would not see Hitler’s armies as worse than those they fought. They would say, only: war expressed itself thus and thus in the years between 1939and 1945.Moralizing was never more than the justification of willing belligerents.

But here Martha suffered. Mark had, during the last year of the war, seen one of the concentration camps opened – just as Thomas’s friend had done, writing Thomas a letter which had been the cause of Thomas’s subsequent development. Or so it had seemed.

‘What am I supposed to say?’ Mark inquired. ‘Those bloody Huns? Or what?’

‘Well what do you say?’ demanded Martha.

‘If I go on and say something about Russia, we’ll swap atrocities. I can’t stand that conversation! You say, gas chambers. I say, collectivization of the peasants. You say, master race. I say, Purges. You say, Freedom. I say, Freedom. What is the point?’

At which ‘The Defender’, night after night, had argued, quoted figures, emphasized, while he sat listening. ‘So there’s no progress, it doesn’t matter what attitudes one takes up, one might just as well have fought for Hitler?’

‘If one is going to draw up a balance sheet of atrocities – of course.’ ‘What then?’ ‘That’s all.’

‘Ah no. I’ve been here before. When? I must have been twenty – not much more. Nothing mattered, a tale told by an idiot. That was a man called Mr Maynard.’

‘We’ve got some second cousins called Maynard. Was he from Wiltshire?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know fighting him was the best thing I ever did.’

‘Fighting,’ said Mark with distaste.

‘Well then, if that’s true why bother about Colin?’

But here it was Mark turned away, fiddled with drawers, pencils, the lamp-switch, became angry, bitter. Watching her own enemy personalities at war, she was easier able to see his.

One, that cool observer who was able to see events as they might appear a hundred years from now. Always? Mark had gone through that war able to see it like that? Hmmm – possibly.

And, at the mention of his brother, a cold angry man, the brother to ‘The Defender’.

‘Progress,’ muttered this angry man – hardly to Martha, more to himself, a conversation with himself possibly, of the kind one has alone, when other people are asleep. ‘That’s not my thing. I don’t care about it. If things do improve, then it’s not because one nation fancies itself better or more humane than another. That’s a farce – it always was. The way people see themselves – that’s for children. Look what’s going on now! The Cold War! What a phrase. What kind of thinking is it? The tune changes, from one year to the next – well why not, it always does – but am I expected to take it seriously? Is Colin? Colin’s stand is that he was an ally of the Soviet Union for years and during all that time he was fighting to share scientific information – they all were, the scientists ‘Because the governments of this country and America were doing everything not to share it, because they hated being allied to Russia.’

‘Granted. Of course. But the same went for the Russians. But Colin is a scientist. He’s not a politico. He stands for the internationalism of science. So, the tune has changed and suddenly he’s a traitor. Well, I stand by my brother.’

‘Then it’s childish to be upset about words like traitor.’

‘Upset! I’m scared stiff. I never thought that would be possible – in this country. As far as I can see Colin isn’t scared. As far as he is concerned it’s all perfectly clear – they are in the right and that’s that.’ By ‘they’ Mark meant Colin and his superior, the man now awaiting trial. ‘They say America wants to start a war with Russia. America wants to destroy Russia. Before Russia gets the atom bomb. Well, of course America wants to destroy Russia, you’ve only to read the newspapers. Colin says, it’s about communism. I think, nations need to go to war. If it wasn’t Russia it would be another country. But if they were able to supply Russia with information about the bomb, so they could make one, Russia would get equal with America, and then America would be afraid to start a war.’

‘Is that what Colin says he’s been doing? Because if so you should keep quiet about it.’

‘No, it’s not what he says he has done. It’s what he says is logical. It’s his point of view. He’s entitled to it.’

‘All the same, you’d better keep quiet.’

‘Why? This is my country. Or I used to think so. But what scares me is – that I’m scared stiff. I think words like traitor and treason and all that stuff are childish. Rubbish. They’ve never been anything but stuff to scare the populace into behaving. Suddenly I’m scared. I read the newspapers from the States – well, they’re always going in for pogroms over there, it’s part of their thing. But it’s starting here. I read our newspapers and see the word Traitor in big black letters and I realize I’m cold – literally cold with fright. What about you?’

‘Yes.’ He had never asked her if she would, in Colin’s position, hand over information about the bomb to the Russians. He talked around it, and about, coming back to this point where he looked at her, as if waiting for her to clarify where she stood. She had been frightened to: reading the newspapers which she did, every morning, for hours, left her without courage.

‘What it amounts to is, thank God, thank anything you like, that I’m not in Colin’s position, believing that it is my duty to give Russia information. I don’t think I’d have that much guts.’

‘Yes. That’s about it. There but for the grace of … but he’s my brother. I’ll back him through anything.’ And, saying this, he was all bitter, locked determination.

Another person came into existence when his mother entered the house. Again a man who turned away – but, Martha judged, some years younger. When Margaret, having telephoned – she never arrived unannounced, because, as she would announce, loudly: one ought not to drop into one’s grown-up children’s houses without warning – emerged from her car, for lunch, tea or dinner, Mark who had not been able to work before she came, seemed to shrink, and grow younger. He was rude to her, or abrupt. She, these days, came to discuss Colin: who was always too busy to see her, she complained. And Mark would say: ‘I don’t know, I have no idea. Well, then, why don’t you ask him?’ Meanwhile he watched her, with a helpless fascinated look, as if there was a force which no act, or word of his could propitiate. He behaved, in fact, as if he were about fifteen, a boy newly defending his manhood against his family.