Читать книгу The Four-Gated City - Doris Lessing - Страница 11

A bad time is announced by an event. A woman gasses herself because her will to survive is exhausted. This event is different in quality from previous events. It is surprising. But it should not have been surprising. It could have been foreseen. One’s imagination had been working at half-pressure … Martha had been here before.

When a bad time starts, it is as if on a smooth green lawn a toad appears; as if a clear river suddenly floats down a corpse. Before the appearance of the toad, the corpse, one could not imagine the lawn as anything but delightful, the river as fresh. But lawns can always admit toads, and rivers corpses … Martha had been here before.

When Sally said she was going back to her flat for a day or so, leaving her little boy, that was so unlike her, so improbable, that if Martha had been alert, she would have – but what? Called the police? The doctors? There was no set of words which Martha could imagine herself using. ‘Sally, you’re not thinking of …? Oh, please don’t! – You’ll feel better in a few days … Lie down for a little and we’ll get you a sedative. Sally, you’re a coward! How can you think of … And what about your little boy, he won’t be able to live without you –’

(People are infinitely expendable, feel themselves to be, or feel themselves to be now.)

‘Sally, we’ll lock you up until you come to your senses!’

Sally had gone back to her flat to become Sarah. What had she really felt when the family which had taken her in, had done so only under the passport of Sally? ‘They’ve always called me Sally,’ she said, once, exchanging with Martha a look which the family itself could not be expected to understand. If she had refused to be Sally, had insisted on remaining Sarah, would she then have had to make the journey alone to her empty home where she could turn on the gas?

Before that double event; Colin’s departure, Sally’s death, the quality of life was different; seemed almost, looking back on it as – no, not happiness. Happiness, unhappiness, these were not words that could be used anywhere near this family, every member of which held the potentiality for – disaster? But that had been true before the double event. How then had it been possible for Martha to feel that ‘the holding operation’ could in fact hold off what had been so loudly heralded? Something had been bound to give. Yet to look back from the day after Sally’s death, to even the day before it, it was as if a bomb had gone off.

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality into which warlike events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains. Events and the life in which they are embedded have the same quality. But since it is not possible that events are not part of the life they occur in – it is not possible that a bomb should explode into a texture of life foreign to it – all that means is that one has not understood, one has not been watching.

And, the bomb having exploded, the heralding (or so it seems) event having occurred, even then the mind tries to isolate, to make harmless. It was Martha’s concern, and Mark’s, to try and minimize the double event as if they felt it to be an isolated thing, without results, as it had had no causes. Or at least, that was what it seemed they felt; for with the little boy Paul playing upstairs, his mother dead, his father gone, they were discussing how to soften and make harmless. ‘How to break it’ – as Mark put it.

Paul was going to be six next week. He had plans for his birthday. His mother had talked of a party. Some sort of a party there must be.

‘Is my mother going to be here?’ asked Paul.

‘I expect so,’ said Mark – and turned away from the child’s acutely-fearful black eyes. Paul had never been separated from his mother, not even for one day. And now his uncle said: ‘I expect so.’ Paul became very gay, manic. He rushed all over the big house, bouncing on the beds, teasing the cat, standing to look out of all the windows, one after another. Through one of them, he would see his mother come. He turned, saw Mark and Martha watching him; and pulled the heavy curtains so that he was hidden from them. He took the black cat to bed with him, where he hugged and kissed the beast, which suffered it. But he did not like Martha touching him, nor Mark. Particularly not Mark. He was not used to contact with a man; his father having been kindly, but concerned (he had even said so) to make up for the emotionalism of the unfortunate Sally-Sarah by being cordial, but restrained.

Mark and Martha were prisoners in the house, because the reporters patrolled outside. Paul asked to go for a walk. He did not say that he hoped to catch a glimpse of his mother in the streets. He was told that no one was going for walks. Through the windows he saw men trying to peer in; and asked who they were. He tried to slip out of the back door, but found a smiling man on the doorstep, listening to Martha answering the telephone. No, Mr Coldridge was not in; no, he could not come to the telephone; no there was no comment about Mr Coldridge’s brother.

‘Is Mr Coldridge’s brother my daddy?’ he inquired.

The exchange was asked to alter the number. This was done; and for a couple of days there was peace. But then a reporter got the new number from Jimmy Wood at the factory. Jimmy Wood had been asked not to give it. In explanation he said that the man sounded ‘as if he really wanted it’. The number was changed again. Jimmy was again asked not to give it. But he did: he thought, he explained, the man asking for it was an electronics expert. After all, he had said he was. Jimmy’s part through the long siege was simply – not ever to understand it. Mark asked Jimmy to come to the house, so it could all be explained to him. He must be careful of the journalists, he was told. He arrived at the front door, and was enclosed by a group of news-hungry men. To them, smiling, he told everything he knew. Not much, not more than Mark knew; but affable and willing, he chatted, and entered the house, still smiling. But then, he always smiled. Some time in his life he had decided that life must be faced with his smile, and he never switched it off. A defence? An explanation? Who knew? But this small, wispy man with his great head covered in baby hair – smiled, as if he could not help it. They said to him: Please be careful, please don’t expose us, please don’t talk to the Press, and he smiled. Almost at once he began talking about affairs at the factory. It seemed he could not see the necessity for all this fuss.

But he agreed, not so much impatiently, as with tolerance, not to give the telephone number to anyone at all.

For a while, then, it was quiet. But Margaret telephoned from her country home. She had not been near them since the election party. She was concerned about Francis. ‘You ought to get him back home,’ she said. ‘He must be having a dreadful time at that beastly school.’

‘But it would be worse here with the journalists.’ ‘You think so? I don’t know. Mark could get rid of them, easily, if he wanted to.’ ‘Yes, but I don’t think he’d want to do that.’ ‘You ought to make him.’ ‘Perhaps you’d like to talk to him?’

‘No. No. I really haven’t got any more patience with … have you let the basement?’ ‘The basement!’ ‘Mrs Ashe still wants it.’ ‘But, Margaret, for God’s sake …’

Margaret had sounded embarrassed, about the basement. Now she hurried on: ‘But he always was so wrong-headed. Always.’

‘I think you ought to be discussing that with him.’

‘Well, yes, but – and don’t forget about Mrs Ashe, I must really ring off, I’m really very …’ She rang off.

This was so odd, struck such a discordant note, that Martha was unable to think about it, forgot to tell Mark.

It was Mark who took the next call from his mother.

Margaret had telephoned Francis’s school, and the headmaster said Francis was all right. As far as he knew the news had not reached the school. ‘But he’s such a fool,’ Margaret said. ‘I asked him if he banned the newspapers there, and he said, he was sure his boys understood the meaning of esprit de corps.’

‘Perhaps you could take Francis for a week or two?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – anyway, I’m off to America next week.’

‘You could take him until then, couldn’t you?’

‘I don’t really think …’

She then went on to talk about Mrs Ashe.

Mark said he really hadn’t time to worry about being a landlord, and rang off. It was so extraordinary of Margaret that Mark, like Martha, let it slide.

Paul had listened to this from outside the study door.

‘Why should Francis go and live with his granny?’ he asked.

‘She’s your granny too.’

‘No. She isn’t. She doesn’t like my mummy.’

‘Well, it would only be for a little time.’

She tried to pick him up. He was a heap of heavy limbs. The black frightened eyes, already lit by cunning, held Martha’s face, while he held himself rigid in her arms. She put him down.

‘I don’t want Francis’s granny to come to my party.’

‘She’s not coming.’

His birthday was the day after the next.

‘I want my party. I want my party,’ he sobbed, from the floor. He was saying, I want my mother.

Next morning, Martha put on a headscarf, and Mrs Van’s old coat, and got out of the house by eight in the morning, by the back door. Only two journalists had arrived, and they were at the front of the house. She went across London to Harrods, and bought a cake and presents for the party. When she arrived at the back door, it looked unoccupied. But before she could get in, a man ran up.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘I work for Mr Coldridge. I do the cleaning.’

She had the key in the door, but she was gripped by her other arm which clutched parcels.

His face was alive with suspicion, but also with the delights of the chase.

‘What’s going on in there?’

‘I work for Mr Coldridge. I do the cleaning.’

The clothes were right, but her voice was not. His face was hard, self-righteous. He was a man seeking to unmask evil. He took five pounds from his pocket. He hesitated. Five pounds was more than enough for a charwoman, but not for a friend or mistress or fellow-conspirator of Mark Coldridge. Hesitating, he lost his force of purpose; Martha slipped her arm away, and shot indoors, scattering parcels on to the floor of the kitchen. Through the back window his face appeared, in an angry teeth-bared scowl. Framed thus, emphasized, it was almost yes, funny. He looked like a bad actor in a melodrama: my prey has escaped.

One of the aspects of a bad time, before one has entered into its spirit, is that everything has a feel of parody, or burlesque. Martha stood in the kitchen, looking at the ugly, threatening face, and had to suppress laughter. Nervous laughter, certainly, and when he shook his fist at her, it was ugly and she was afraid. That evening, among the pile of newspapers that came from the newsagent, brought past the reporters by the newsagent’s boy, was one which carried a story about a mysterious woman, who had entry to Mr Coldridge’s house, and who would not give her name.

Next day was the birthday. In the morning Paul was given presents which he opened. Mark and Martha watching. He tore through them, throwing them aside, one after another: he was looking for evidences of his mother. He had not mentioned his mother for some days. Clearly the birthday had become for him the talisman which could produce his mother. The presents had not, but there was still the party.

After breakfast he went to Mark’s study and stood by the desk watching Mark pretending to work. By now they were waiting for him to ask: Where is my mother, so that they could tell him the truth. Which they should have done before. But the right time had gone past, and they did not know what to do. Everything was wrong, the ‘party’ absurd, the presents a mistake.

But now they did not know how not to have the party.

Martha laid a party-spread on the table in the dining-room. But Paul demanded that it should be in the kitchen. Nothing came in the front door, only sheaves of newspapers, falling through the letter-slot. But the back door could admit. It was through the back door that he expected his mother.

Martha spread out the cake, with its six candles on the kitchen table, and some biscuits and little cakes. While Martha moved about in these pathetic preparations, Paul stood just inside the kitchen door, watching them: Mark, trying to engage Paul’s attention, played with a wooden train on the floor. From time to time the two grown-up people exchanged glances of helplessness, and of shame, because things could have been allowed to reach this point.

There was a heavy knock on the back door; and the little boy, crying ‘There she is! There’s my mummy!’ rushed to open it. Two men stood there. One was the journalist of yesterday, looking angrily sullen. The other was a large smiling man.

‘Where’s my mummy?’ shouted Paul.

The two looked at each other, then studied Martha, arranging cakes, and Mark, playing trains.

The large man said: ‘Take it easy, son, take it easy. Your mummy’s not coming, you know.’

‘Why not, why not?’ screamed Paul, and flung himself down. Lying face down, he banged his head hard on the floor while his face exploded tears.

‘Is this Colin Coldridge’s boy?’ asked the sullen man, bending to examine him for describable details.

Mark now scrambled up off his knees, and advanced on the journalists. Yesterday’s man was suspiciously angry. The large man was smiling, ingratiating. The child continued to bang his head, crying noisily. Mark, with his eyes wide, his mouth open, his face white, appeared comic.

‘Take it easy,’ said the large man again, and backed away, in a parody of fear: he was making fun of Mark.

The self-righteous man was now making mental notes about the kitchen. Having done this, he returned his attention to Paul, who was writhing at his feet, and said accusingly: ‘Why didn’t you tell the boy about his mother?’

At which Paul shot off the floor and grasped his uncle around the knees, so violently that Mark staggered and leaned sideways to catch hold of a chair-back. ‘Tell me what?’ screamed Paul.’ Where’s my mummy?’

‘Your mummy’s …’ The journalist stopped; unable to say ‘dead’ to the child’s face.

With a mutter of inarticulate disgust, he backed out of the door. The goodfellow, smiling deprecatingly, said: ‘Here’s my card.’ He laid a piece of card on the table by the cake. Miles Tangin. The Daily – ‘If you’d co-operate, Mr Coldridge,’ he suggested, ‘then it would be better.’

‘I’ll complain to your editor,’ said Mark over Paul’s head. The child was sobbing noisily, and gripping Mark’s knees, so that Mark had to hold himself upright with one hand on the chair-back while with the other he tried to soothe Paul.

‘You do that,’ said the first man, all contemptuous bitterness.

The two went out together.

Mark carried the sobbing child up to bed.

In bed he was quieter, whimpering a little, while he watched them both. He was waiting.

‘Where’s my mummy?’ he asked at last. Martha said: ‘She’s dead, Paul.’

Paul took it. It was a fact which marched with the events of the last week. ‘And is my daddy dead too?’

‘No,’ said Mark, with emphasis. But both he and Martha knew that of course he would not believe them. They had been lying to him: they were probably lying again.

‘He’s away,’ said Martha. ‘He’ll come back.’

Paul said nothing. He lay staring at them, with his black, untrusting eyes. Then he turned his face to the wall, and shut them out. They stayed with him. Hour after hour passed. He was not asleep. He kept dropping off, but he whimpered in his sleep, and this woke him. It was nearly morning when at last he fell into a deep sleep.

Their days were now spent with Paul, the child who could not trust them. He had gone silent, evasive, listless. He spent hours curled in a chair in the kitchen, sucking his thumb. He usually did not answer when Martha or Mark spoke to him. This did not look as if he were trying to be a baby again, wanting to be fed; but as if he really could not take in the existence of food, of mealtimes. He would sit listening, or apparently listening, if they read to him or told him stories. He sat quietly for the children’s programmes on the radio. Put to bed, he slept. When he looked out of the back windows, the front windows, and saw the groups of reporters waiting there, he examined them, then looked at Mark and Martha for explanations. It seemed he was afraid to ask questions. But they wouldn’t have known how to answer.

In the evenings, the two sat in Mark’s study. Mark’s white face had acquired a staring mask-like look; as if wide-eyed at the incredible, the impossible. He did not believe what was happening. This was because he was Mark Coldridge, to whom such things could not happen.

Yet he was also Mark Coldridge who had written that book about war which came from the heart of an understanding of how such things happened – must happen. Martha was waiting to talk to the man who had written that book: but he was not there.

Mark was saying things like: ‘We must get Paul to school so that he can get over it.’ Or: ‘When it’s blown over, I’ll take Francis and Paul for a holiday somewhere.’

He was still talking in terms of a situation normal enough to blow over. He could not bear to see that a deep harm had been done; and that they, or at least, he, must expect the results of it, and that the results were for life.

But how could Martha blame Mark when she caught herself thinking several times a day: Before Sally killed herself, before Colin went away – the double event which her nerves, geared to laziness, still felt as a water-shed. And it was as much her fault as Mark’s that Paul had not been told the truth (as much truth as could be told to a child of six) so that now he trusted no one; it was as much her fault that the affair had been handled so that the truth had come through journalists scavenging for news.

And what was the use of feeling guilt, blaming herself and Mark, when they still did not know how to act, still sat night after night in the quiet book-lined study, with a decanter of old brandy on the desk, and when they did act, absurdity or worse came of it. For they had lost a sense of the ordinary machinery of life.

One afternoon they had watched through the windows a couple of Press men rummaging through their dustbins in search of incriminating documents.

One of them was Miles Tangin. Mark telephoned the editor to protest, could not get through, left a message that he would like to be rung back, was rung back by – Miles Tangin. The telephone number then had to be changed again.

Martha suggested that he should ask the police to guard front and back entrance, to keep the journalists off.

Mark was furious. ‘I’m not being guarded by police in my own house in my own country because of a lot of … I’ll get Margaret to tell the editor what’s going on. She must know him.’

He rang his mother’s home in the country. It was only when it had been ringing for some minutes that they realized it was after two in the morning. After a long wait, John came to the telephone. He was polite of course. Mark spoke to the colourless husband of his mother, a man whom he despised, though of course, he had never been anything less than polite to him. Martha sat on an old brown sofa, feeling velvet rub soft under her fingers. She was watching Mark clutch the telephone as if the machine itself could come up with sense, or protection. In the last couple of weeks he had lost over a stone. His clothes were hanging on him. His fingers were stained with nicotine to the knuckles. He looked half crazy.

John said that Margaret was asleep after a hard day. The Press had been out to the house, and the telephone was never silent.

‘I want to speak to her,’ said Mark.

‘I’ll tell her in the morning that you rang.’

‘Then tell her to get hold of those editors and call off their dogs,’ said Mark.

A short affronted laugh.

‘Perhaps if you were prepared to make some sort of announcement to the Press? suggested Margaret’s husband.

‘What announcement would you suggest?’

Another short laugh. ‘As things stand, your mother, my wife, is the mother of a man who has escaped behind the Iron Curtain, suspected of being a spy, and of another who refuses to dissociate himself from him.’

‘But he happens to be my brother,’ said Mark. Again, he sounded incredulous. It was precisely here: what he could not believe was happening, or could happen – to him.

‘But what can they expect me to do?’ he asked Martha again. And he listened with his wide fascinated look as if this time he might understand what previously he had failed to understand.

She said, again: ‘They expect you to make a public announcement that you repudiate your brother and all his works. And to make a public affirmation of loyalty to this country.’

‘But good God,’ he said softly, ‘I mean – but they can’t – but this is this country, it’s not … I mean, the Americans or the Russians or people like that, but not He was looking at her with dislike.

‘Don’t tell me that’s what you think I should do! He’s my brother,’ he insisted. As if it were she who was his enemy. ‘You keep asking me what they want.’

His eyes were hot and dark with refusal. He sat locked in himself. Then he understood he was making an enemy of an ally, smiled, though stiffly, and poured her a brandy.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Next morning Margaret rang. It was very early. Mark was half-asleep. He came up to Martha’s room to say that he thought his mother had gone mad. She had telephoned about the basement and about Mrs Ashe.

They could not understand it. Martha said that this was perhaps Margaret’s way of preserving normality. She was probably right: to worry about letting basements was better than what they were all doing. It was even reassuring of her.

As they spoke, the telephone rang again. Mark went to it. Mark did not come back, so Martha went down to him. He was sitting, looking very white, by the telephone.

Margaret’s second call was hysterical. She had shouted that Mark was ruining her life. The very least he could do was to have Mrs Ashe. On being asked please, to explain Mrs Ashe, Margaret had muttered, after a silence, something about Hilary Marsh – restoring confidence in that quarter. And at last it had all become clear to Mark, but so suddenly that he had simply put down the receiver.

Hilary Marsh, the correct unnoticed gentleman from the election party, had been Margaret’s friend for many years. He was in the Foreign Office. Weeks ago he had been to Margaret, to ask what she knew about her son Colin’s connections. Margaret knew nothing. She had said that Mark did, but Mark would never talk to her, he was always so wrong-headed, always had been. Hilary Marsh had suggested that it might be a good idea if a very old friend of his, Mrs Ashe, lived in the basement. She was a sensible sort of woman, and could keep an eye on Mark for both of them.

Mark having digested this, he rang back his mother to ask how she proposed to explain this attempt to spy on him. She said, cold: ‘You have no right to talk to me about spying!’ Then, as he remained silent, she had screamed: ‘You’ve ruined my life. You’ve ruined John’s career!’ And had rung off.

It turned out that John Patten, in his capacity as representative of British Culture, had been going on a lecture tour to America. But the Americans had not been happy about this, since he was the husband of the woman who had given birth to Colin Coldridge. They had made unofficial and tactful representations to the body who employed John Patten. This body had been excessively apologetic and had quite understood America’s feelings in the matter. After a long committee meeting, someone had suggested that it would be better if nothing were made public, but that the lecture tour on Contemporary British Literature might be postponed. Everyone agreed. The chairman telephoned John Patten while the meeting was still in progress. He asked them to wait while he thought it over – which would only take a few minutes. He asked Margaret what she thought. Margaret rang her old friend Hilary Marsh, who thought this procedure would be best for everyone concerned.

Mark offered these facts to Martha; sat waiting for her to explain them. He looked extremely ill. He was trembling. He kept dropping his cigarettes. The gap between what a Coldridge believed was possible, and what was happening, had widened to the point that he was in a kind of collapse. Martha suggested he should go back to bed and stay there that day. He went.

It was time to get Paul up. He was sitting cross-legged on his pillow, waiting for her. He said: ‘Am I going to live here now?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to, Paul.’ This was almost cool: her mind was with Mark, so near a breakdown. It was not a tone anyone had used with Paul before.

He gave her a very long thoughtful stare. Then he got out of bed. Sally’s child had not been good at dressing himself. He dressed himself, slowly but competently, while she sat and watched.

‘Now we’ll have breakfast,’ she said. Obedient, he came down to the kitchen. He sat, obedient, while she cooked. He was looking at the window, which showed nothing. Martha went to see if the attendant journalists were there. But no, only a box of groceries left on the step by the delivery people.

She was about to open the door to fetch them in when Paul said: ‘I want to go for a walk.’

‘We can’t go for walks yet,’ said Martha.

‘You don’t want them to tell me my daddy is dead,’ he said. Then he pushed the plate of eggs off the table, laughed as it crashed, and ran upstairs crying to his bedroom.

Martha opened the door to get in the groceries, and found Miles Tangin there.

‘Good morning,’ he said affably.

She tried to shut the door, but his foot was in it.

‘Nothing new to tell me?’ he inquired.

‘Nothing.’

‘May I ask who you are?’

‘Certainly, I’m working for Mr Coldridge.’

‘Living here?’ he inquired. There were two expressions on his face, superimposed, as it were. At any rate, he managed to convey simultaneously a camaraderie of understanding for her situation: he was a man of the world, after all! – and the salaciousness with which he proposed to tell the story to the public. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Find out. It’ll give you something to do.’

‘Come, come,’ he said. ‘You’re not in any position to use that tone, you know.’

He was now propped against the door-frame, holding the door open. He was looking past her at the mess of broken eggs and bits of china on the floor.

‘His wife’s in a loony-bin, I hear?’

She remembered that on the stove was the frying-pan, with hot fat in it. She fetched the frying-pan and stood facing him.

‘In your face if you don’t get out,’ she said.

‘Temper, temper, temper!’ he said softly. He was arranging on his face the smile that says: I admire a woman of spirit. Then, seeing she meant it, he looked ugly. She came nearer, with the pan poised.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘while you’ve been chasing this juicy story, have you ever thought of that child?’

And now a great wash of sentiment: the blond, goodfellow’s face was all soft and sad. ‘But I’m only doing my job,’ he said. ‘But I can tell you, that poor little chap keeps me awake at nights.’

‘And I shall do mine if you don’t get out.’

He went, and she locked the door.

That evening the Coldridge story acquired a new element, in a piece by Miles Tangin. The previously mentioned sinister female figure now appeared as some sort of watchdog or guardian of Mark Coldridge. There were links, hinted at, with the Soviet Embassy. She had a foreign accent. She was under orders of silence. For some days, the vigilance of the reporters was redoubled: it had shown signs of slackening off. Martha had to be careful to move around the house so that she could not be seen from the windows.

Upstairs in one room Paul lay on his bed, playing with the cat. She brought food to him there. And in another room, Mark lay in the dark, smoking and thinking. After a while he got up, went down to the study and very carefully read all the newspapers from the start of the affair until the present time. There were several weeks of them; and they included the serious newspapers, the popular Press, and the high-class magazines that were studying the subject of treason in depth, and in articles that had a very high intellectual tone.

When he had done this, Mark said that he had finally understood the meaning of the old saying that the last refuge of a scoundrel was patriotism.

He sounded rather cool about it. He was still ill though, or at least, looked ill. But he was in possession of himself. And he had made a decision. He was going down to the country, to stay with his old nurse, who had looked after himself and Colin, and he would take Paul with him.

‘And what about Francis, it’s going to be holidays again in a month?’

‘He can come to Nanny Butts’s too – it’ll be quiet there. And perhaps things will have blown over.’

When he and Paul were ready, suitcases packed, he said: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be a decoy.’

Martha put on a coat, made herself seem indifferent, and walked openly out of the front door. A group of men waiting there at first seemed stunned. At her impertinence, at daring them? At any rate, she had gone several yards before they chased after her. One of them offered her a hundred pounds for the story. She smiled. He put it up to two hundred. She smiled again. She went around the corner and into a café. They all came in with her. She kept them there, discussing the possible sale of her revelations about the Coldridge household, until she judged Mark and Paul had got well away. Then she walked back to the front door. The car had gone. Mark Coldridge had gone. ‘Nice work,’ said one of them, laughing. But others, professionally hating, scowled and muttered, like parodies of journalists in a bad film, or in a comedy.

Inside the house, was now only Martha. She went openly in and out, smiling politely at two hopeful journalists who remained. Then at one. But he went too. Then, peace, until Miles Tangin knocked at the front door and asked to be admitted. He had a proposition, he said. She was angry. He was affable. His manner was that of a wronged man concerned to give explanations. There was a genuine reproach for her lack of understanding. She should have retired to sharpen her anger, and set it on guard. But she let him in. Curiosity had a lot to do with it. Curious, she sat listening while he offered her one thousand pounds for the story of Mark’s mistress. He accepted her refusal with the remark that everyone had their price, but that the story was not worth more. He seemed to expect she would feel belittled by this; he even made a consoling remark: If Mark had a larger reputation, then more than one thousand pounds would have been forthcoming. Of course, if there were any justice, his reputation would be larger. It turned out that he admired Mark for having written the best novel for his money – Miles Tangin’s – since All Quiet On The Western Front. If he, Miles Tangin, were a critic, that would be put right, but for his sins, he was a journalist. Only for the time being: he was writing a novel. He also admired Mark for (he hoped Martha would not take this amiss) his taste. The house must be empty, if Mark was away? He did not think Martha ought to take it like that, all was fair in love and war. Anyway, he’d be making the suggestion again later: she was his cup of tea, all right. Meanwhile he was busy, he was off to the country to find Mark Coldridge. There’s a lot of Britain,’ said Martha.

‘No, dear, there isn’t. When one of these upper-class types go to the ground he’s at an old teacher’s, or nanny. I know how their minds work.’

He left, affable.

She telephoned Mark, to warn him. But a journalist had already appeared at Nanny Butts’s cottage. Mark was coming back to London.

He came that evening. He had been to his old school, explained the situation to the headmaster, and Paul was already installed.

And now, said Mark, they are welcome to me. He dictated a short piece for the Press saying that he stood wholeheartedly behind his brother in whatever action he had seen fit to take. Asked if he was a communist, he said he was, if that made him one.

And now, silence.

Mark was in his study. He stayed there. What sort of a state he was in, she did not know. His manner was cold, abrupt, but agitated.

She was in her room trying to see what was likely to happen next, trying not to be taken by surprise by events. The immediate facts were that Francis would be home soon, after what must be an awful time; Mark had been writing the usual weekly letters, but had not mentioned the sensational news which every paper had carried for weeks: Francis must surely have seen the newspapers. Paul, in a state of shock, had been dumped in a school which, ‘progressive’ or not, was still a boarding-school. Mark, as far as she could see, was in a state of shock. He certainly wasn’t dealing with the problem, now pressing, of finance.

The bills for Lynda’s hospital were unpaid. There was Francis’s school – very expensive, and there would now be Paul’s school. Ideally, Mark ought to find, in the next month, a couple of thousand pounds. He could not find so many shillings.

The factory? But she did not like to interfere with something she understood nothing about. Then Jimmy Wood arrived one afternoon to see Mark. Mark’s door was locked. Martha therefore talked to Jimmy.

Or she tried to. They were in the kitchen, and they drank tea and ate cake – everything that was normal and reassuring. There he sat, smiling, as usual. And there she sat, opposite him, trying to understand him. She had seen that he was a human being constructed on a different model from most, but this did not help. Making contact with Jimmy, or trying to, one understood how one meshed with others. They were angry, they were pleased, they were sad, they were shocked. They might be several things in the course of an afternoon, but at any given moment one talked to an angry man, a frightened man, etc.; one contacted a state, an emotion. But Jimmy Wood? There he sat, smiling, while he heartily ate cake and asked for more, and even got up to refill the kettle and put it on the ring. All this went on, the activity of a man enjoying his tea. He had come to this house because he wanted to say something. Mark not being available he was saying it to Martha. But what? He was disturbed about something. His movements were those of an agitated man. His eyes were hidden behind the great spectacles and his mouth, a thin, pink, curved mouth, smiled.

He was upset by Mark calling himself a communist? Martha tried this note – but no. There was no resonance. Yes, that was what was throwing her off balance: where other people resounded, he did not. He wanted to leave the factory and find work elsewhere. But he said this without emotion – it was a fact that emerged after an hour or so. Why? He talked about two contracts that had not been renewed. Did he know why? – He thought it was because of the ‘fuss about Mark in the papers’. But that was not his point. Did he think the factory was going to have to shut down? No, not necessarily. They could coast along for months, even a year or so. But there was a job that would suit him in a factory in Wales. Martha suggested that Mark would be upset if he, Jimmy, left. They had worked together for years. From what she could make out of the mask-face, this embarrassed Jimmy. She pressed on: ‘He’s very fond of you,’ and was faced by the great baby-head and the round glinting spectacles, and the pink smiling mouth. She felt extremely uncomfortable. He poured himself more tea, and energetically dotted up loose currants on the end of a wetted forefinger.

Martha sat, going back in her mind over the various points that had come up. Not politics – no. To him, the greatest of irrelevancies. Not money – the business would survive temporary difficulties. At random she said: ‘I expect Mark will be back at work in a few days. Perhaps sooner.’ And now, just as if Jimmy had not said he would leave, he began talking about a machine he and Mark had planned to start making. It was as if she touched a switch, which had caused him to work again. From his remarks, all random, even disconnected, a picture emerged of Mark and him, spending days at a time in the office at the factory, with blueprints and scientific papers and their own imaginations – talking. Was it that, some sort of machine himself (or so she could not help feeling), he needed this, had been deprived of it, had felt deprived of something, but he did not know what – and now, knowing that this need to talk would at some time in the near future be met, was prepared to go on as before? At any rate, after three hours or so he left, smiling, with the remark that the foreman had said he’d like to see Mark sometime, to give him his assurance that he and the men thought he had been shockingly treated – they were going to stand by him.

Martha wrote on a piece of paper: ‘I don’t understand your Jimmy Wood. But he says the foreman wants to stand by you. I think Jimmy will leave if you don’t go and talk to him soon.’ This she pushed under the door of the study.

The financial problems had not been solved.

One thing could be done at once: which was to let the basement.

Martha pushed another note under the door saying that Mark must at once write to Lynda’s hospital asking for time to pay: the last account had been peremptory.

Mark telephoned. The doctor suggested that perhaps Mrs Coldridge might come home for the week-end: she had a plan for her future which would involve Mark’s co-operation, and which might help Mark financially. For his part, said Dr Lamb, he was prepared to say Lynda was better; not cured, but better.

Lynda came home for the week-end. She was like a guest. Mark came out of his study and was like a host. She said she wanted to leave the hospital, and live in the basement. No, she was not well enough to be by herself but she could share it with a friend from the hospital. She said with a laugh that she did not think Mark would like her friend, who was called Dorothy. Sometimes she didn’t like her either. But they got on.

Mark said he would of course do anything she wanted.

A moment later she took up her little box of pills and went up to bed.

Later, when Martha was ready for bed, her sense of things that were waiting to be said was strong enough to send her down to the kitchen. There sat Lynda in her dressing-gown with a spread of cards in front of her.

‘If I came to live here,’ said Lynda, continuing the conversation, ‘it wouldn’t cost so much, would it? Oh – I don’t mean I want to be Mark’s wife, I couldn’t be that. But if I were here in the house, then it would be better, wouldn’t it? Then they couldn’t say you were taking him away from me?’

‘Why, are people saying that?’

‘They are bound to be saying something, aren’t they?’

‘I suppose so. We’ve been too busy about this other thing.’

‘Oh, politics. Oh well, I don’t care about that. That’s just nothing at all. But Dorothy’s got some money of her own. She could pay some rent. It would help, wouldn’t it?’

She shuffled the cards, humming cheerfully for a time. ‘Of course, there’s Francis. But he hasn’t a mother anyway. I thought it would be better to have me in the house, than not at all – for what he has to say to his friends, I mean.’

More shuffling of cards, more humming.

‘And about clothes. I’ve all that money for clothes in my bank account. You must make him take it. That’s what he wants you see – that I shall be beautiful all the time.’

‘Yes, but I don’t think he’d take it.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if he divorced me. I know that would be best really. But he wouldn’t ever divorce me. I know that.’ ‘No, he wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t care about all that – all that’s not what I care about.’

And now she looked, very close, at Martha, studied her. She leaned forward, her chin in her hand, looking. As if she were trying to find out something? Was it that she wanted to know if Martha could guess what she did care about? She looked disappointed. She even sighed, and made a small pettish gesture of disappointment as she returned to the cards.

‘You can go to bed, if you like,’ she said. ‘I’m all right by myself, you know.’

That was on the Friday. Next morning early Paul’s new headmaster telephoned to say that he would consider it a good thing if the child came home for the week-end: he and the staff thought it might help him.

His name was Edwards. He sounded very competent. He sounded in control. Martha felt that he and the staff would have every reason not to feel in control, with Paul in the state he was. She felt he might well have been entitled to say more than, ‘Paul seems rather confused.’

Paul was put on the train at the village station fifty miles away, and was met by Mark. When Paul got out of the car, a pale, spiky, black-eyed waif, he was already in the uniform of a progressive school – jeans and sweater. He came into the drawing-room where Lynda sat, like a visitor in her pale fur coat, smoking and guarding her little box of pills.

She studied Paul, for a while, while he wriggled about in a chair opposite her. Then she smiled at him, her wide, beautiful smile. He, slowly, smiled back, a rather tentative offering. Slowly he approached Lynda, sidled around her, then tried to climb on her lap. But she held him off.

‘I don’t like being touched,’ she said. ‘But you can sit here.’ She indicated the patch of sofa beside her. He sat close, snuggling, as he would have done with his mother. But Lynda, at the touch, shrank from him. He felt it, and moved away, examining her face as a guide to how far he must go. Side by side they sat, a space between them.

Martha and Mark were busy with tea things. This ought probably not to happen at all. But then nothing of this ought to be happening.

‘Why don’t you like being touched?’

‘Because I’m ill.’

‘My mother liked it.’

‘But I’m not like your mother.’ ‘She’s dead.’

‘She killed herself,’ said Lynda. ‘Why did she?’

‘Some people don’t like living.’ ‘Didn’t she like me?’ ‘Very much,’ said Lynda.

‘I don’t think she liked me. Or she wouldn’t have killed herself.’

‘That doesn’t follow.’ ‘Yes it does.’

Lynda had moved where she sat, so that she was looking at Paul with a direct, cool smile. And he was leaning forward, gazing up into her truth-telling face.

‘Didn’t my daddy like living?’

‘You say that because you think he is dead.’

‘Yes, he’s dead.’

‘No, I don’t think he’s dead.’

‘He is! He is! I know he is!’

Tears were imminent, but Lynda made no attempt to stop them. ‘No. Perhaps he is, but we don’t think so. And he may come back.’

‘He won’t come back, because he doesn’t like me.’

‘You are making yourself much too important,’ said the sick woman to the desperate child. ‘Your daddy had work to do. It was important. If he went away it wasn’t because of you and your mother.’

‘Did my mother kill herself because he went away?’ ‘No. He went away and she killed herself – the two things at the same time.’ ‘How did she kill herself?’ ‘She made herself stop breathing.’ ‘Could I?’

‘Yes, if you wanted to.’ ‘Do you want to?’ ‘Sometimes.’ ‘Are you going to?’ ‘No.’

‘Why aren’t you?’

‘Because every time I think I will, then I decide to stay alive and see what happens next. It is interesting.’

He gave a scared laugh, and snuggled closer. His hand, meeting hers, felt hers go away. He put his two hands carefully on his knees.

‘At the school, the other children have mothers and fathers for the holidays.’ ‘Well, you haven’t.’ ‘Why haven’t I?’ ‘I’ve told you.’

They observed that his face had gone red, and his mouth was pinched up.

Lynda slapped him. ‘Stop it. You don’t die by holding your breath.’ ‘I shall if I want.’

‘Anyway, it’s silly. You’re unhappy now. But later you might be happy, who knows?’ ‘Am I unhappy?’ ‘Yes, you’re very unhappy.’ ‘I don’t want to be.’ ‘I dare say. But you are.’

She smiled, and got up. At the tea-tray she took a cup of tea, and sugared it. She went towards the door, with the cup. ‘Why are you going? Can I come too?’ ‘No. I can’t be with people for long. I’m ill, you see.’ ‘What sort of ill?’

And now a bad, twisted moment, a jar. ‘I have to be careful. I have to be on guard,’ she said, ‘so that’s why I’m ill.’ He had rushed to her, stood near, looking up. She bent down and widened her eyes at him, smiling secretly, straight into his face: ‘I know things, you see. They don’t like it.’

He looked afraid, shrank. The small boy stood, pathetic, staring up at the tall woman. And she felt that she had made a mistake. Her smile faded. She looked sick and anxious.

But he needed her too badly to be afraid of her. Before she got out of the door, he was after her. Careful not to touch, he stood as close as he could get.

‘Lynda. Lynda. Are you my mother now?’

‘No. You have no mother.’

‘Are you Francis’s mother?’

‘Yes. No. I suppose so. Not really. I’m not much good at being that kind of person. Some people aren’t.’

He drooped away, his finger in his mouth.

‘But, Paul, I’m your friend. Do you want that?’

He nodded, merely, not looking at her. Then he gave her a scared glance, and saw her wonderful smile. He smiled, slowly.

She went to her room. Later that day, Paul went to her, was admitted. He was there for about half an hour. They did not know what was said, or felt; but Paul was cheerful through his supper, and he asked Mark to tell him a story. When that was over, he said he would like to go back to the school next morning.

Mark took him back in the car. When he arrived back at the house he found Lynda establishing herself in the basement.

He telephoned the hospital.

Mark said to her: ‘They say you’ve made a remarkable recovery.’

He was watching Lynda and Martha arrange the bed for Lynda. What he was really saying was: You still might get quite better and be my wife again.

But Lynda smiled at him and said: ‘What awful fools they are. What fools! Well, thank God, they are.’ She laughed, was scornful. She continued to smile, scornfully, during the evening, but muttered once or twice: ‘But I must be careful though.’

She did not feel able to stay alone in the basement. Martha moved down, and slept in the living-room for a couple of nights. But then Dorothy, Lynda’s friend, came to live with her. She was a Mrs Quentin, but it seemed that her husband was living with another woman somewhere in Ireland. She was a large, dark, slow-moving woman, anxiously watchful of the impression she might be giving, with a tendency to make jocular remarks. She had a large quantity of jackdaw possessions, which she set out all over the flat before even unpacking her clothes. She was not the person either Mark or Martha could associate easily with Lynda.

But Lynda was pleased to have her there, did not mind the embroidered velvet hearts, the magazine covers tacked to the walls, the dolls; did not mind her friend’s possessiveness. It seemed that she liked Dorothy telling her to do this, and to do that; liked it when Dorothy said to Mark: ‘I think it’s time Lynda went to bed now.’

Mark did not like it. There was a moment when Lynda, being ordered to take her pills by Dorothy, looked across at Mark’s hostile face and openly laughed. It was in a kind of triumph.

Lynda wanted Dorothy here as a protection against Mark, against having to be Mark’s wife.

When Mark, or Martha, descending to the basement to offer help, or their company, the two women became a defensive unit, which excluded everybody. They exchanged private jokes, and made references to the hospital. There was something about them of two schoolgirls engaged in a world-hating friendship.

In short, having Lynda back in the basement, with a friend who had money and would pay some rent, would make a difference to the finances of the household; but not to much else.