Читать книгу The Four-Gated City - Doris Lessing - Страница 9

She was rising towards light, through layers of sleep, fighting against being sucked down again by the backwash. Light was on her eyelids. She opened them. The room was full of pure brittle sunlight. The black branches of the tree across the street held a glitter of water. A cold black tree, framed by domestic curtains, grey and pink: a tree on a stage. A white counterpane dazzled. On the white, near the window, the black cat sat in the sunlight, washing its face. On the opposite corner, a black fly cleaned its head with its arms. Cat and fly used the same movements. Cautious, so as to frighten neither, Martha reached out for a brush, sat up, brushed her hair. Behind her, a shadow on the white wall attended to its head. Fly, cat, woman, their images were shaped in no-light. The cat’s shadow was a steady movement of dark on white. On the side of the fly away from the window a small darkening, but the movement of the fly’s working forelegs was not visible. If she were fly-size, would she then be able to observe the working shadow from those energetic hairy arms? The cat was watching its moving shadow as it cleaned its face with its paw. Was the fly looking at its shadow as it cleaned itself?

Sunlight in London brought an emphasis: shadow. For the most part a day was clear, sunless light, like water, that contained objects: houses, trees, a stone, people. But in hot countries, everything was underlined, everything had its image. The light was draining away off the counterpane back through the window. The cat, jetty-black in sunlight, now showed the variations of colour in its fur. It was dark brown, with a gloss of black, and it had white hairs on its chin. The fly seemed weightless. The white wall behind Martha showed its need for repainting. The black tree stood sodden; it had lost its glitter. And the sky was grey.

There was no need to get up. Not for hours yet, if she felt like staying in bed. While every moment of her attention was claimed by Mark, her employer, from lunchtime onwards, which was when he returned from his factory, often until two, three, in the morning, he would not have her working in the morning: he said it lessened his guilt. Nor would he have her doing anything about the house, which badly needed it. This morning for instance she knew that there were no eggs, no butter, and that the plumber should be summoned to the water-taps. But she could do none of these things. This was part, not of protecting Martha, but of protecting Mark against his family.

She thought: Well I’m leaving so soon anyway. If I broke the rules just for one day? For that matter, if I spent the two weeks before I leave just getting everything fixed up, would it matter? The housewife in her yearned to do it. She had not told Mark that she was leaving. He knew she wanted to. To leave just before Christmas! That was heartless – yet she intended to, she had to, she must … Good Lord, she cried to herself, had been exhorting herself for weeks now, there is no reason in the world why you should feel guilty. None. It’s not rational. It’s not your responsibility, it never was.

Mark was hoping, though of course he would never say so, that she would stay until after Christmas. Because of Francis. If Martha stayed, then the child could come for the holidays. Possibly they would let Lynda out of the hospital. There would be a sort of a Christmas, enough to use the word to Francis. Otherwise, Mark would take Francis to his mother, which he most passionately did not want to do.

I’ve got to go, I must. Now. Or I’ll never be able to leave this.

This, particularly, was the room, which had become, in the last six months, her home. The moment of greatest pleasure in every day was waking in it, beneath the window, which framed the tree whose leaves she had seen stand in solid leaf, then thin, then fall. It was a sycamore tree. The cat slept on her bed. Which was how she saw it: but the cat always slept on that bed, he did not care who was in it. The cat saw the bed and room as his. When she left, the cat would sleep just there, on the corner of the bed nearest the window; would wash itself, just there, watching its shadow or the birds in the tree; would roll over on its back in sunlight, a black plush cat, all purring warmth.

A terrible pang – a real pain. Oh no, she must go, and fast, Christmas or no Christmas, particularly as a good part of her fear of going was that London had no more space in it for her now, as it had had months ago, when she had arrived. She did have some money now though, thanks to Mark – over two hundred pounds. She never seemed to have anything to spend her salary on. She would leave – in the next days, take a room, or a small flat, and risk her chances with all the other waifs and strays of London who had no family at Christmas. Waifs and strays! Once she could not have thought of herself like that – oh no, she had got soft, and badly so, it was time to move on, even though she would never live in such a room again. The whole house was like it, of a piece, a totality: yet no one could set out to create a house like it. It had grown like this, after being furnished by Mark’s grandmother at the end of the last century by what Martha would have called when she first came as ‘antiques’. Nor was this room assertive or bullying as she had first thought: on the contrary, it was quiet, it had tact, it served. But it certainly absorbed. Money? For weeks when first here she had moved around the room, the house, like a cat, feeling for corners, and essences, and odours and memories, trying to isolate just that quality which no other place she had ever been in had had. Solidity? Every object, surface, chair, piece of material, or stuff, or paper had – solidity. Strength. Nothing could crack, fray, fall apart. A chair might break, but if so it would be put together as a surgeon does a body. The curtains had a weight in your hands. The carpet and the rugs lay thick on the boards of the floor which were beautiful enough to lie bare, if there were not so many rugs and carpets. Nothing in this house believed in the possibility of destruction. Imagine being brought up in such a house, to be the child of it … a child’s voice sounded across the passage. It was Sally’s little boy. Martha had the room Sally used, when she came to stay but Sally, here for a few nights, had not thought it worth dispossessing Martha from it. She was in James’s room, used as a spare room because James was dead.

The door opened and Paul wriggled in, smiling shyly. The cat jumped down to wind around his legs and the fly buzzed away. He was five, or six, a small lively dark boy all charm and warmth.

‘Paul!’ came his mother’s peremptory voice: ‘Paul, you are not to worry Martha!’

Paul grinned at Martha and sidled to the bed, glancing at the door where his mother was due to appear. And now Sally’s beautiful dark head showed around the door. She gave a great dramatic sigh of ‘Oh!’ at the sight of the disobedient child; and then she curled herself into an armchair. She was in a striped purple and yellow silk dressing-gown. Her hair hung down on either side of her small apricot-tinted face in black braids. Her soft black eyes shone. She was, as the family never said, but never ceased to make evident, Jewish. That is, if put down anywhere near the Mediterranean, she would seem at home. In this room she seemed almost perversely an exotic. Now she put out a small hand towards the child who ran to her, climbed on her lap, and cuddled. She sniffed him, with pleasure. Wound together, they breathed contentment. Almost she licked him like an animal with her cub.

‘I’m going to make breakfast,’ she announced.

‘I don’t eat breakfast.’

‘Well then, some tea?’ She wanted company downstairs.

‘I don’t get up yet,’ said Martha. This was partly to obey Mark: he feared Sally’s encroachment even more than he did his mother’s. ‘And besides, I like this time of the day here.’

‘Ah yes, the room,’ cried Sally. ‘When I came into it, after there, you understand?’ Martha understood. And Sally knew that she did. They shared the knowledge of outsiders. Sally had been Sarah Koenig ten years ago, when she was a refugee from Germany. This being the kind of family which served, had civic responsibility, and took on burdens – at its height, it had been that above all – naturally they put up refugees. Sarah had come, with half a dozen other refugees, from Europe. Here she had met Colin, Mark’s brother: and here she had married him.

‘Are you going to stay here for Christmas?’ she asked, going straight to the point as always. ‘I want to know. Because Mark could come to stay with us. With Francis. That would be nice for Paul.’ Here she squeezed Paul, with a chiding pouting downwards glance, to make him agree. He buried his face in her silken bosom.

Mark said that Francis and Paul did not get on. Mark would never go for Christmas to his brother Colin: not because he didn’t like Colin, but because of Sally. She did not seem to know this; or if she did, conducted her life from standards which made it irrelevant. For one thing, when she had married Colin, she married the family: she had no family of her own. In terms of Anton’s grim definition, her Jewishness was absolute: she had no relatives alive. So this was her family: the Coldridges. Therefore she loved them and they must love her. They did not dislike her so much as they were pleased when she was somewhere else. Nor would any of them have said that it was a pity Colin had married her: particularly as not only Colin, but Mark too had made a marriage that was so palpably a pity. But they were upset by her. Which Martha could understand: she was upset by Sally, who always lived inside her own emotional climate with apparently never a suspicion that there might be others.

She said: ‘And a family Christmas would be good, I have told him, instead of all this nonsense about spies! Politics and communism – nonsense!’

Colin was a physicist. He worked at Cambridge on something to do with the bomb. The man he worked under had been arrested and charged with spying. Colin was naturally under suspicion. The family was behaving as if this was – well, not far from a joke. Of course, if one lived in such houses, filled with such furniture, knowing ‘everybody’ in England, then spying was – a joke. Or rather, the idea that they could be suspected of it. Colin was a communist, they said; though from the words Mark used of him Martha could recognize nothing of communism as she had experienced it: but then of course she knew nothing about England. She found it disagreeable that they talked about his communism as a kind of eccentricity, but tolerable because it was his, a Coldridge’s – as if he stammered, or bred pythons. They had a big family’s possessiveness to it, everyone had their funny ways, their traits, and that was Colin’s. This was not true of Mark, who loved his brother and was with him against the family. The two brothers were isolated in this: and Sally-Sarah was excluded, and suffered and had been complaining Mark hated her … There she sat in the great warm chair, a colourful little beauty with her pretty little boy, all warm tactlessness, warm claims, warm insistence, a challenge to the Coldridges who had seemed never to do much more about her than to insist on calling her ‘Sally’. Well, if she was tactless, they were intolerable, arrogant: when she made a scene that they ‘had stolen her name from her’ they had only laughed; and her husband still called her Sally.

And it was all Martha could do not to call her, sometimes, Stella, she was so like that other warm-shored beauty of ten years before who, however, had been transformed by matrimony and right living into a pillar of good works and righteousness.

And in due time, Sally-Sarah too would become a handsome and portly matron?

Meanwhile she suffered and everyone in the family had to suffer with her. ‘Is Colin worried?’

‘No, not he,’ said Sally-Sarah scornfully. ‘Not he. I keep telling him, Darling, you are mad. Why communism? Communism for the English? They know nothing at all. Isn’t that so? You agree with me?’

‘Yes,’ said Martha.

‘Yes. It is so. Playing. Little games. I tell him, you’re like a little boy.’

Colin, Mark’s elder brother, the eldest son now that James was dead, killed in the war, was a solid, serious, painstaking man. Dedicated. According to his brother Mark, the only serious member of the family, meaning by this, a single-mindedness; meaning, too, a criticism of his own many-sidedness. Colin, devoted to science, was devoted to communism because for him communism meant internationalism, meant the sharing of science. Colin had decided that science was his destiny at the age of eleven and had thought of nothing else, ever since. Except, perhaps occasionally, for Sally-Sarah? He could not have relished being told he was a little boy playing games.

‘I tell him, Colin, if you knew anything about what politics can do – like I do, oh yes I do, Martha, believe me, do you believe me? …’ Since she was not likely to go on until Martha had said she did. Martha said she did, and Sally-Sarah then continued: ‘But if you did, Colin, I say, then you would not play with fire.’

She was crying. Curled in the great chair, a small, dark girl wept, her face all frail white terror. And in her arms, her son unhappy now and crying too, sucking his thumb like a baby.

‘Mark says it will be all right,’ said Martha. ‘After all, they must have cleared Colin by now, or they would have arrested him too.’

‘Mark. What does he know! What? He’s a literary man. And he plays with his electric machines. They are always playing these people. The police often do not arrest until later. Meanwhile they watch and lay traps.’

‘Well, but I don’t think …’

‘You think! What do you think? I know. You’re like them all, it doesn’t happen here? Yes! But it is happening here, isn’t it? They are looking for traitors in the civil service – a purge. It happens now. They dismiss people from shops if they might be a communist. And in the BBC – no communists.’

‘Yes. I know, but I don’t think it’s as bad as …’

‘Bad? What do you know! You talk like them. People losing jobs for politics. I know that. A purge in the civil service. I know that. A purge among the teachers I know that. You think it makes it different to call it by another name? No. It is no different. It is the same. People are afraid. I know that too, I know it.’

She buried her face in her child’s hair, and shook with sobs. The little boy was weeping noisily.

‘I’ll make you some breakfast,’ Martha said.

‘No. I don’t want breakfast. I want nothing, only that at last there is an end to … but no, there is no end to it. Never. But thank you, Martha.’ She got up and carried the child out of the room.

Doors slammed. Drawers slammed. A few moments later her voice chided the child, as they descended to the kitchen on the ground floor. From her bed, Martha followed the progress of breakfast being made: well, let’s hope that Mark was at the factory today and not being disturbed by it.

I shall tell Mark that I’m leaving. Today. I don’t want to be involved in all this … She meant, this atmosphere of threat, insecurity and illness. Who would have thought that coming to this house meant – having her nose rubbed in it! Yes, but that wasn’t what she had meant, when she had demanded from life that she must have her nose rubbed in it. Something new, surely, not what she had lived through already, was what she ought to be doing? Why was she here at all? If you start something, get on a wave-length of something, then there’s no getting off, getting free, unless you’ve learned everything there is to be learned – have had your nose rubbed in it? There was something really terrifyingly creepy, about the fact that the job heard about from Phoebe at a lunch designed to hook her into quite another job had led her here, back into what she already knew so very, very well! No, she would leave, probably in about a week, certainly before Christmas, and approach Phoebe for a job. She might very well take that secretary’s job in ‘the thing for the liberation of the colonies’. If politics were inescapable, and they seemed to be, then let her at least be practical, on the simplest day-to-day level. Besides, hearing the English – and that included people like Phoebe, well-informed as she was, talk about African politics, was enough to tell her how very useful she could be. She felt as Sally-Sarah must feel when listening to the people of these islands talk about invasion, or the loss of national identity. There was no substitute for experience. Put Phoebe in Africa, in what she called ‘a progressive movement’, and in five minutes she’d be suspected as an enemy not because of her opinions, but because of the tone of her voice. And as for Sally-Sarah’s terrible knowledge, nowhere in London, not even in suspicious dockland, or in the poor streets, or among the waifs and strays, had she met one person who understood, as Sally-Sarah understood, insecurity. These people still lived inside the shadow of their war, they were still rationed, their buildings were still thinned or ruinous, men had been killed, men had not come back from fighting: but that face which Sally-Sarah lifted from the chair where she sat clutching her child as if she were the child and he some kind of shield or support, that frail terrorized face with great dark eyes – well, Britain, did not understand that face. And Sally-Sarah was quite right; anything, anything at all that made it possible, was a mistake. There ought to be one country in the world without that experience. This house should be treasured because in it such experience was inconceivable. Yet it was from this house that Colin had come, at this moment under threat of being considered a spy. And Mark’s identification with his brother was a drive to understand, to participate?

Mark was the one among the four brothers to have had an unconventional education. Their father, Henry, had been a conservative member of Parliament: he was conservative by tradition, it was in the blood, as Mark emphasized, to make Martha understand that there were two kinds of Tory, those like his father constitutionally incapable of understanding that the country could be run by anybody else; and the Tories by intellectual conviction, whom Mark found intolerable. But he had loved and admired his father. The four sons had been brought up here, in this house, and in a house in the country, sold at the father’s death because of duties. This house belonged to the sons. Margaret Coldridge had then married for love (Mark claimed she had not loved his father, but had been married off to him), Oscar Enroyde, a financier; and for the four years the marriage lasted Margaret had inhabited the world of international money, which it seemed had been an unpleasant surprise to her. Not because she disapproved of it, but because she was indefatigably English, and was hardly ever able to be in England. The sons, being educated, were for the most part in England, while their mother was mostly in America. She described her second marriage’s break-up as: ‘I couldn’t stand dear Oscar’s friends.’ Mark said his mother was fundamentally a hostess, and one of a certain kind: she needed to attract, then domineer, guests. Married to Oscar Enroyde, she had found her guest-list already established, and she spent most of her energies heading people off one of the world’s very rich men. And besides, she was a woman of multifarious talents, none of them now useful. If a chair, for instance, was broken, she knew just that one little man, in Kent, who understood that kind of chair, and she liked to take it herself, and exchange talk with minute professionalism about the chair’s history, condition and needs. She hated being waited on.

During the war James was killed. There was a daughter, Elizabeth, now absorbed into the wife’s second marriage. This girl, about fourteen now, sometimes came to stay.

After the war Margaret married again – improbably to everyone but Mark. Her third husband was an amiable country gentleman, an amateur of the arts, vaguely a publisher, who served on a sort of semi-official body to do with the arts. He adored Margaret. Oscar Enroyde had not adored Margaret, she had adored him. Now Margaret entertained a good deal. Mark said his mother had an infallible instinct, unrecognized even by herself, for what was the next thing, what was in the air, and this marriage proved that the arts would soon be fashionable: unlikely as this seemed in grey, colourless, restricted post-war Britain.

Mark neither liked nor disliked this husband, John Patten, but he violently disliked him in his role of patron of the arts. This was a tension between son and a mother who wished that Mark, now that he was a ‘writer’, not only potential but published, would attend her weekend parties or at least an occasional dinner-table. If Mark had to go down for Christmas, he would hate it. But he would go, because of his concern for the child, for Francis’s Christmas. Yes, but that was not Martha’s affair. Unless the mere fact that she was here, had arrived here by what seemed such a slight chance, made it her affair? Had she ever, by any hint, or lapse of behaviour made it seem likely (to Mark, to Margaret) that she felt it was her affair? Yesterday Margaret had telephoned, apparently about some set of spare curtains, but really to find out if Martha intended to be there for Christmas. It appeared from her tone, gaily casual, that she both wished that Martha would not be there, so that Mark would be available for a Boxing Day Party, and wished that Martha would be there looking after Francis, because there would be no other children at the Pattens, and she, Margaret, was afraid the little boy would be lonely among so many adults. Margaret had not mentioned Lynda, so much in both her and Martha’s thoughts. She had, however, said she hoped that supplies would be laid in for Christmas because if she, Martha, did not attend to it, who would?

Martha now decided that she should get up. Downstairs was quiet. Sally-Sarah would have gone out shopping. Margaret was right, she, Martha, should arrange for food and supplies before she left: not to do so was positively neurotic. Today however, she would be careful not to notice the absence of butter and eggs.

For the first week of her being here Mark had been stubbornly resistant to her doing any housekeeping at all. But when she had understood the situation, and said that she did, they had established a defensive pact against the whole family. Who wished that Mark would divorce his wife Lynda and marry again. Not, of course, Martha, equally unsuitable. But Martha in the house, housekeeping, being kind to the little boy, was a kind of bridge from Mark’s previous condition of total womanlessness to the possibility of a new marriage. Because before this he had always refused to have any sort of woman around at all, even a secretary. For he was married to Lynda. The house was ready for her return. She was only temporarily away, temporarily in the hands of the doctors. She would – perhaps not soon, return to a house kept empty and waiting for her and to a child waiting for his mother.

This had been going on for three, four years.

Francis had been sent to a boarding-school, though Mark did not approve of boarding-schools; and spent an orphan’s life with his grandmother, who found the little boy a burden; with Sally-Sarah and Paul (Colin was always working, he was seldom at home); with the other brother’s family. Arthur’s – Arthur was Phoebe’s ex-husband, now re-married. And sometimes he stayed with Phoebe. Sometimes he was alone with Mark in this house.

There were photographs of Lynda in his room and in Mark’s room. Lynda’s clothes hung in Mark’s cupboards. It was all wrong – the family were right. It had that stamp of excessiveness, of unreality which – indicated a passion. Indicated, in short, the growing-point, that focus in a person’s life which so few people are ever equipped to see, and which is why lives remain, even to the nearest and dearest, so often dark, obscure; lit only by these flashes of what seems an unhealthy-gleaming light: a passion. But if Martha were the family she would do the same, feel the same, and try every way fair or foul, to make Mark see that he could not spend the rest of his life as if he were married to Lynda. Who, it was clear, was unmarriageable. The family were right about that. Lynda had never been a wife, never been a mother. She could not be, Mark ought never to have made her either – so said the family. And here it was that a close secret nerve ached and nagged in Martha: she had not met Lynda, save through improbably beautiful photographs, but she knew her, oh yes, very well, though she and Martha were not alike, and could not be, since Martha was not ‘ill’ and in the hands of the doctors. But for a large variety of reasons, Lynda Coldridge, who was in a very expensive mental hospital because she could not stand being Mark’s wife, and Francis’s mother, came too close to Martha. Which was why Martha had to leave this house, and soon.

She went down to the kitchen. A note on the table said in green pencil; ‘Martha! No eggs! No butter! The left tap is leaking! I shall bring back food when I come. Love. Sarah.’ She submitted – for what alternative did she have? – to being Sally in this family, but she always signed herself, Sarah.

There was a letter on the table. A child’s hand. It was from that nasty school – a cold, heartless military camp of a school.

Dear Martha, How are you? I am very well. I need football boots. I don’t like football. But I do like cricket. I hope you will be there for Christmas. With sincere greetings. Francis. P.S. Please tell Daddy about the boots. Last time he got the wrong size. I want a chemistry set for Christmas. A real one, not a baby’s one, please tell Granny I want a real one. With sincere greetings, Francis. See you at Christmas, what a hope, ha ha!

Now Mark came into the room in his dressing-gown. He seemed annoyed: he had been disturbed by Sally-Sarah? He looked at the note on the table: eggs, butter, tap. He was helplessly annoyed.

‘I’ll have coffee,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll make it.’

Martha handed him his son’s note. When he had read it she said: ‘I’ll stay for Christmas. But I must go afterwards.’ They looked at each other.

‘It would be good of you to stay,’ he said, appealing, and hating himself for it.

‘No. I want to. But, Mark, after Christmas I’ve got to go.’ ‘Of course. You are absolutely right. Absolutely.’

Six weeks later, on a bitter day, Martha was dressed in layers of sweaters, clearing and arranging the basement. This was for the housekeeper that Mark had at last agreed he should have. The business of the basement had been going on since Christmas, a groundbass to so many apparently pre-eminent themes, apparently a minor thing, an annoyance, a question of organization merely. In fact she could see now that it had been the most important, it was the one theme that had possibilities of development, of movement: a growing point in this stagnant mess. Before Christmas she had gone to Mark’s study, late, braving his reluctance ever to be confronted, and pointed out that a housekeeper would give him all the advantages of a Martha, and none of the disadvantages. He did not want to see it. He liked her, he said: how was he to know he would like this housekeeper? – He wouldn’t until he had engaged her!

He did not want a strange person! – Yes, but she, Martha, had been strange until she arrived.

Where was she to live, this housekeeper? – Why, where Martha lived of course, why not?

Yes, but – There was the basement, why not use that? It was simply a question of …

Yes, yes, yes, he muttered, he would. But first he must just …

He had been unable to stand any more. Martha could see that, and went down to survey the basement. It had been used as an overflow depot for years, both from upstairs, and from the house in the country, when that was sold. It was stacked with furniture, carpets, pictures. Some of it had to be sold; Mark could not bear, he said, to see the furniture of his childhood carted off to salerooms; but there was no help for it. He came briefly down, indicated the pieces that were valuable and should be kept, and for the rest, a dealer had come and taken things away. And now Martha was to arrange the place as she pleased, since they were not to know the taste of the future housekeeper, who would be getting a luxury flat when she came. The walls had been done for damp; cupboards had been put in; a bathroom and a kitchen were ready – almost, since although they were employing a firm which charged high prices for efficiency, it was impossible to get anything done well. Meanwhile, since workmen were in, workmen might as well attend to the rest of the house. As Martha was leaving, had actually put down a deposit on a flat, she felt free to take the house in hand. It was in a dreadful state beneath its surface of order. If it hadn’t been built to stand attrition, it would have been a slum. Mark having done no more than engage in a holding operation (his phrase) since Lynda’s illness. Workmen dug everywhere into floors and walls and filled the place with the smell of new colour. The roof was mended – or would be, these things took time. Carpets and curtains were cleaned – patience, there had been a war on.

Martha dealt with men and their employers, while the people whose home this was were clutched in such fearful anxiety, and it seemed to her that yet again she had walked on to that stage where two or three different types of plays were running together, for it did not seem possible that such discordant events could be sharing a texture of time or place, except in a dream-like capacity to change into something else, like the flamingoes into croquet sticks. Margaret, for instance, took to storming in, rather regally, in order to drop well-chosen words about if-a-thing’s-worth-doing-at-all-it-is-worth-doing-well, like a white housewife to her black ‘boy’, while the workman so addressed would put on that act of a humble yet self-respecting servant deferring to his better. Then Margaret would depart. Martha was a foreigner, and not a member of the British ruling classes, and besides she knew one of the useful languages, the dialect of trades unionism, and therefore the workmen did not bother to put a show on for her. Not one of them was prepared to do a minute’s more work than he had to, or do it better than he could get away with, for the most basic of reasons; he would get nothing out of it if he did, while the people who employed him were interested only in making money, which it was their business to do. And besides there had been a war on. There wasn’t one job these men did that wouldn’t have to be done again and very soon, so badly was it done and so poor the materials. There were frightful, but good-natured battles of wills, since both sides knew the limits of such battles, and Martha cajoled and argued and bargained and made small gains. Meanwhile newspapers flooded into the house which trumpeted the destruction of Britain by socialism (internal, the Labour Party) and by communism (external), as manifested by people like Colin Coldridge’s colleague, working for Russia.

Meanwhile, Mark spending his days for the most part with his brother, or in his factory, since he could not endure to see his home under attack, spent his nights talking to Martha in his study, mostly about his childhood and about Lynda. He was not a person who found it easy to talk, she discovered; but it had been easier since Christmas, which had laid so much open.

Christmas had been dreadful. First, Lynda, allowed home by her doctors on condition she was returned to them the moment she showed signs of strain. Then, Francis home from his school – to spend Christmas with his father and mother. So he had been told by his house-master. ‘I’d like that,’ he said, or quoted, cautiously, in his way of testing out phrases, words, used by others about his situation. ‘I must be careful,’ he went on, his wide painful eyes fixed on Martha’s face so that she could confirm or deny: ‘My mother isn’t very well, you see. I mustn’t upset her.’

An awful school. A couple of hundred little boys, guarded by men. ‘The little ones’ (Francis’s description of the boys younger than himself) had a matron, but ‘the big ones’ had men. They all slept in dormitories, were made to play games, were bullied by those older than themselves, exactly as these institutions have been described, mostly by their victims, for decades. It all went on, as things do, out of the inertia of what is in existence. Francis wore a tight grey flannel suit, with a tie and a collar; he was obsessed with his shoe-laces, which were always getting themselves untied, and his brown wide eyes were always on the alert, for fear he might be doing something he should not.

Three days before Christmas Sally telephoned to ask if she could come with her child for the holiday, her husband being ‘impossible, Martha! He’s as stubborn as a horse. I’m not going to stay where I’m not wanted!’ His impossibility apparently, was that he would not talk to his wife about what preoccupied him. He was spending all his waking time with his superiors, being cross-examined about his possible links with international espionage, and his relationship with his friend and superior, now awaiting trial. The police were making visits too. He would not talk to his wife; but he came to London to talk to Mark. The brothers had spent all afternoon together; and then Martha joined them for dinner and the evening.

Colin announced almost immediately that he was ‘not a communist but a marxist’.

Martha kept sounding notes to which he could not help responding if – he were not trying to hide something? Not a man numbed by terror. How to account for this lack of resonance? Unless, of course, he was not a communist and never had been one. But she had not before met this type of person who, because he admires a certain communist country, or a communist achievement, or to annoy Aunt Authority, will call himself, herself, a communist or a marxist without ever going near the communist party. They are pretty common at times when the heat is off and to admire communism not dangerous – during the war, for instance, or during the later ‘fifties and the ‘sixties. But this kind of platonic admiration, at the height of the Cold War was quixotic or simply – crazy. Unless to be a Coldridge absolved one from the necessity for caution, which is what Martha was beginning to believe.

For Colin did not seem to be frightened in the least. Of course, in Mark’s calm, storm-excluding study, it was hard to believe in danger. Nor did he seem to want to conceal anything. On the contrary, he talked all evening about his principal, now awaiting trial, whom he had visited frequently, obviously despising (or ignorant of?) the danger of doing this, and in spite of the entreaties of his wife who had begged and wept. The man was his friend, he had said; just as Mark was to say later: Colin is my brother.

It was, obviously, a relief to get away from his wife – not that he said so, of course. But Sally-Sarah was present throughout the evening, in silences and looks exchanged by the two men; and afterwards Martha saw that it was on this evening that they had decided, without actually saying so, that she must be here for Christmas.

When she came, she spent her time in James’s room, with her child, weeping or sleeping. The little boy came downstairs from time to time, his face still wan from hours of tears, to say: ‘Mummy’s asleep.’ When Martha went up with tea, coffee, she found Sally-Sarah curled up under an eiderdown, thumb in her mouth, like a child, but not asleep. She stared at the wall, or traced out the pattern on the wallpaper with a finger. ‘I wish I was dead,’ she said to Martha. ‘I do. I wish I was dead.’

Lynda arrived on Christmas Eve. The photographs said she was beautiful. Martha knew, too, that she would have beautiful clothes, because the bills for her clothes were enormous: one of the points of self-respect, return towards normality, was that she must always be perfectly dressed. Mark willingly paid the bills.

Lynda arrived in Margaret’s chauffeured car, and stepped into her home like a visitor. She smiled, cool, at her husband and was about to smile, cool, at her son, when she reminded herself, and kissed the child’s cheek, murmuring: ‘Darling!’ as he froze in pain and embarrassment. She was tall, very thin with a face strained by the effort of not being ‘upset’. She smiled steadily, while great grey eyes stared out of brownish hollows. But she was staring inward at the place where she kept her balance. She was enveloped in a great pale fur coat. Her hands, long and white and lovely, ended in nails bitten to the quick: there were rusty stains around the cuticle. Her hair, just done, was a soft gleaming gold: all her health seemed to be in her hair. At once she asked to be taken to her room – to wash, she said; but she stayed there all evening.

The room had been a problem. Since this Christmas occasion was designed, primarily, for Francis, for normality; and since mother and father shared a room, or at least should appear to share one, Lynda was put into the married room, Mark’s own, on the first floor. But Mark had a bed put into the dressing-room, because as he told Martha, curt, giving necessary information, Lynda could not stand having him near her. It would be necessary, if she were not to upset, that the door between the bedroom and dressing-room should be locked. They had to have a new lock made.

The Christmas Eve dinner was eaten by Mark, silent, but smiling a determination to present normality to his son; Sally-Sarah, miserable, and making no attempt to hide it; her son, near tears; Francis, his wide anxious eyes on his father’s face; and Martha. During the meal, Paul had climbed on to his mother’s lap and the two had sat enwrapping each other, her cheek on his head. Francis watched: he was looking at a mother and her little boy. After dinner he shook his father’s hand goodnight. Later still, Martha heard him crying. His room was next to hers. She went in to comfort him. He held his breath, held back tears, while she put her arms around him. He would not respond. As she shut the door she heard the great burst of breath and tears and Go away and leave me alone. Christmas dinner was the same, a kind of endurance test. Lynda sat at the foot of the table, serving the food cooked by Martha: her son watched her. Colin, exhorted by his wife that ‘It was the least he could do’ came for just that meal, and sat grimly through it, while Sally-Sarah kept her great dark eyes on him in tearful reproach, and spoke reproach to him through his son. He left the moment it was finished.

‘We’ve got that over, thank God,’ said Mark to Martha, as he helped her clear uneaten food into the refrigerators.

There was another week of getting it over, spent by Martha for the most part with workmen, and in the basement with dealers. Meanwhile the family suffered in separate rooms of the house and Martha felt the ridiculousness of furniture, leaking roofs and plumbing. It felt almost as if an underground guerrilla war went on, the fabric of the house as battleground, while amiably incompetent men came and went, carpets vanished and appeared, the sounds of banging and hammering shook walls and floors. She invited Mark to inspect the future housekeeper’s flat; but he left it to her. Lynda should not know about the basement, the sale of the furniture, he said. Yet one afternoon, when Martha was in the basement with a dealer, Lynda had appeared in her pale furs, and was competent about values and prices: seeing her thus, Martha found it hard to believe she was ill. This would be a nice flat, Lynda had said; she wouldn’t mind living in it herself. She had retired up the stairs with the remark that Martha must not tell Mark that she, Lynda, had been doing this. ‘I don’t think he’d like it,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t, you know.’

One afternoon, Lynda spent with her son. They sat in ‘Margaret’s room’, the drawing-room, on a big sofa. She asked him questions, gentle, detached, about his school. She was answered by a child who measured everything he said against the minutest signs, the tiniest reactions, of his mother’s face; as if a word, a phrase, from him, could harm, or ‘upset’ her. And indeed, at the end of this interview (for that was what it seemed) Lynda announced, suddenly, she felt ill and must lie down, and Francis sat alone, near a Christmas tree with coloured bulbs alight on it. Mark and Martha, across the passage in the dining-room, heard muffled crying.

Mark burst out: ‘I can’t stand it, it’s a mistake – we’ve got to get her back to the hospital. Or is this better than nothing?’

‘Perhaps it is, I suppose so.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, of course I’m not sure!’ And now Martha wept, or nearly did, understanding exactly how Francis must feel: one did not weep, show strain, with people who were so palpably suffering much more than she could.

‘I’m sorry,’ pleaded Mark – she must not cry, he was saying silently. ‘But there’s no way of doing anything right, is that the point?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. Isn’t this better than not having a mother at all?’

‘Or a wife?’ said Mark. ‘But that isn’t what you think, is it?’ ‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’ ‘It isn’t what they think!’ ‘I know that!’

‘My mother hasn’t been near us. It’d make her happy if Lynda was committed.’ ‘Probably.’

‘Oh all right, all right – you’re leaving. I keep forgetting.’

Unfairly, outrageously, she felt – this was all ironical reproach. So, doing what she could, where so little could be done, she continued with taps, cupboards, floorboards.

Every night she heard Francis crying. She would creep to the door, open it – try to force herself to go in, in another attempt at comfort … where there could be no comfort. Once he felt her there and sat up: ‘Who’s that?’ he said. Martha knew he hoped it was his mother.

‘It’s Martha. Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly all right, thank you very much.’ And he laid himself down, silent, to endure: exactly as he would in that dormitory of his where he would not be able to cry without being overheard by a couple of dozen little boys.

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 find the 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.

Mark went after her, giving Martha a hasty goodnight.

Lynda stayed over an extra day, but Francis did not see her again. He was taken off by his grandmother in the big chauffeured car for the other week of his holidays. He took with him a chemistry set, a proper grown-up one, from Martha; a foot ball from his father; and a great heap of toys from his mother, ordered by her on the telephone from Harrods.

Before Lynda went back to hospital, she made another visit to the basement. Martha found her there, telling a workman who was about to put in a cupboard, that he was using the wrong kind of wood. If he had any pride in his work, she was saying, he would refuse to use the wood supplied by the foreman, which anyone could see was going to warp inside a year, because it hadn’t been properly seasoned. The workman was saying yes, he knew that, but he was only being paid to do the job, it wasn’t for him to reason why.

Martha took over the altercation from Lynda; tackled the foreman, who said it was not his fault if the firm chose to do a bad job, then the owners of the firm, who said it was the fault of the workman. As a result of this, and many similar battles, the basement, by the end of January, was at least within sight of being occupiable. Who was going to live in this basement? What the situation needed was some kind of sensible ‘body’ – a young one rather than an old one; but Martha could not see Mark choosing such a one. Phoebe, he said, was sure to come up with somebody: Martha could give Phoebe a ring perhaps?

Martha did no such thing. For, now the flat was ready – well, nearly; and Martha’s departure only four weeks off, she was concerned to see that the woman who did come would be good for Francis. Because if one thing was essential, it was to see that Francis left that school of his. He would not be able to do this if there were not the right kind of woman in the house. The housekeeper should be a good deal more than a housekeeper. The flat must be properly tenanted. Martha was imagining how Francis, returning from his sensible, human day-school, would come down to this flat to the woman who would live here, for talk, supper, homework – warmth. It was simply a question of getting Mark to see …

She faced Mark with it. Or tried to. He countered with being busy, with needing his attention for his work, with irritation, with embarrassment – then finally, in a great burst of explanation, the first time he had been able to say this to anyone, apparently, of how all his childhood he had felt different from other people and he did not want to inflict discomfort on his son.

As has been said, he was the only one of the four not educated normally for his class. The other three boys had gone to public school and university. Mark had been odd man out, a silent, watchful, uncomfortable child – this by nature; and Margaret, currently under the influence of friends who were educational reformers, had sent him to Neill’s school. Not for long: it was too extreme, she had decided. Mark remembered enjoying the school, but finding it painful, adjusting that world to his own when he went for holidays. Margaret had then sent him to a ‘progressive’ school, based on Neill’s lines, but less ‘extreme’. There Mark had found his two worlds more easily aligned; but he was still cut off from his brothers; who thought him and his school (any kind of school but their own being beyond the pale) odd, a challenge to them. He tended to go for his holidays, when he could, to school friends. He was seldom at home. Then his father died, the country house was sold, and Margaret married her financier. Mark spent holidays in America. It was there that he had got to know his brother Colin and the two had become friends. Mark had not gone to university. His education, his experience, had put him at an angle to his class. Now he said he did not want this for Francis, who already had too much to bear.

And he turned his back, picked up a book, and stood looking at the book, his taut back saying simultaneously that he wished Martha to go on, but proposed to resist what she said. She braced herself, and went on, there being no way of bringing up fraught subjects with Mark without barging in, breaking in, battering. Never had she known a man so armoured, so defensive. As pain-laden subjects came near him, his dark face, whose predominant expression was, in fact, one of dogged inquiry, a need to know, to find out – closed up, his mouth tightened, and he turned away.

To his back Martha cried out: ‘But, Mark, what sort of logic or common sense is it! Let alone any decent ordinary humanity! You say you are pleased you weren’t sent to a public school, you say being sent to America was the best thing that happened to you – you carry on about the upper classes like a socialist in Hyde Park – and now you are sending Francis through that mill. What for?’

His back still turned he said: ‘They have some kind of a strength. I haven’t got it. I want him to have it.’

What strength? Who has it?’

‘Oh … some of them. Oh I dare say it’s a kind of narrowness. They’re blinkered. If you like. But it is a strength. One’s got to have something.’

His dead brother (and Mark was the last person, as his writing proved, to see a death in war as arbitrary, unconnected with what a person was), had been, when war broke out, on the point of throwing up his job, or jobs, as chairman of companies, to go farming in Kenya. Hardly an evidence of unconformity to his own type, but his reason for wanting to do this was that England was no longer a place to bring children up in, people cared for nothing but making money. The second brother was Colin. Then Mark. Then Arthur, left-winger and regarded by the Coldridge family as not much better than a street agitator.

‘Well, all right then,’ said Mark. His back was still firmly turned to her. ‘Take Arthur. He talks red revolution all right. But put him beside that communist party scum and you see the difference.’

‘What scum?’

‘I wouldn’t trust that lot farther than I could kick them. But Arthur – well, if he says a thing, you know that’s it. You understand? You can trust him.’

And now Martha could not reply: he was saying that Arthur was a gentleman.

Unable to reply, she sat down, and waited. As usual, it was long after midnight, and the street outside was quiet. This room was quiet. It had two focuses, or areas of interest. One was the desk with piles of notes, notebooks, a typewriter. The other was a table on which stood all kinds of models, and prototypes, stacks of diagrams and blueprints, to do with the machines made in the factory. Mark’s business, started by him after the war, manufactured electronic devices used in hospitals, in medical work generally. He worked with a man called Jimmy Wood. The money made on one or two regular lines was used by them in experimenting and inventing and paying for how the two men seemed to spend most of their time: sitting in the office in the factory talking their way to new ideas.

At last Mark did turn around. It was with an effort. And when he sat down, facing her, he had to make himself.

‘I suppose I’m inconsistent?’

‘I just keep thinking of Francis crying half the night.’

‘He’s never going to have the ordinary thing, a mother, that kind of thing? So he could have the other thing to hold on to?’

‘You couldn’t compromise?’ she suggested, ‘humorous’, through necessity. ‘I mean, do you have to choose a school that’s like a caricature? Aren’t there any that aren’t like that?’

‘My brothers went there.’

‘Then that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

‘Margaret’s on your side. She wanted me to send him to my old place.’ ‘Why didn’t you?’

Now he hastily got up and went to the window, to examine the curtains. They had been cleaned. Last time he had made that movement, to evade an emotional point, he had muttered: ‘They need cleaning.’ Then he had turned to say: ‘I have a talent for tragic love affairs.’ For he had had a couple of hopeless passions before Lynda.

The reason why Mark did not want Francis to go to his own school, the compromise progressive school where, after all, he had been happy, was that in his own mind he was a failure: or so Martha worked out was likely. Mark felt he had let his educators down; exactly as he might have felt, had he gone to Eton like his older brother James, if he had embezzled funds. His school was dedicated to emotional balance and maturity – etc. Well, he had not made that grade. If he sent Francis there, Francis would go as the son of a failure – it seemed that Mark felt something like this.

But that talk did bear fruit; for Mark went to see his mother, who came to see Martha. The meeting took place in ‘Margaret’s room’; and Margaret sat on the edge of one of her pretty chairs with her gloves in her hand, and smiled at Martha.

‘But you’ve been so good for Mark. What a pity you have to go off like this!’

‘I dare say. But I do have to.’

‘Of course. What did you say you had to do? I forget.’

To withstand this kind of accomplished insolence it was necessary to have had the kind of education Mark was now providing for Francis. To withstand it gracefully, that is. Ungracefully, Martha held out.

‘What is Mark writing at the moment?’ ‘You should ask him.’

‘Has he done any work since you’ve been here?’

‘But he always does work hard.’

‘I meant, a new book. Anyone can play about with those electric toys.’

‘I don’t think he sees them like that.’

‘Hmm. Well. I do hope you’re not going to go off when he’s in the middle of something. People will be asking if that book was just a flash in the pan.’

Knowing very well that her silence now must look like a kind of sulk – Martha kept silent.

‘Very well then. Let’s see what you’ve been doing with the basement.’

Martha was very pleased to see Margaret in the basement flat. For even when it was polished, dusted and arranged, it did not look at all like the rest of the house. It was charming; it was comfortable – and it had no life in it. For rooms to look like those upstairs, it was necessary that a person, after feeling (for months, perhaps) that there was something wrong with that chair, that table, should move it two inches, just there, where it would catch the light, just so, or stand in an exact relation to a rug, a cornice? Martha half expected that Margaret’s being in the flat, walking around it, would supply its missing quality.

But Margaret said: ‘Yes, very nice. It needs to be lived in.’ And went upstairs again.

Before leaving she said: ‘Do see that he’s not left in too much of a muddle, there’s a good girl.’

These words, so much more offensive than others she had used, were in fact the most appealing: of such importance is a tone of voice. But they missed the point of what Mark in fact needed from a ‘secretary’; what his relationship to his work was; and what Martha could contribute to it.

When Martha first came to be his ‘secretary’ and waited for typing work, something of that sort, she found that they were sitting in his study, talking. It took time for her to understand that he was trying to define his own attitudes through other people’s – hers, since here she was. Nor did she easily understand how hard it was for him to talk. He prompted and prodded her into words, listened, came back with comments, though sometimes not for days. Partly, this was a way of talking about his life: it seemed he had never had people to talk to. Not at school? Well, yes, but he had had no close friends. Not since? Well, there had been Colin.

And of course there had been Lynda and others. ‘But one doesn’t talk to the people one is in love with, does one?’ All this Martha found hard, her experience, as good as a dozen universities, having been in the talking shops of socialism.

Mark had asked Martha to read his novel; and it was typical of him that he had not expected her to have read it, and to have thought about it. He had, he said, just re-read it himself.

This novel, a short one, had been published in 1948. But it had been written in 1946, while Mark was waiting to be demobilized with the occupation forces in Austria. The book had been, as they say, widely noticed. This was because, Mark said, giving the fact without emphasis, he was a Coldridge. Exploring this (unfair! she judged it, in the face of his amusement that she should) it became clear that the literary editors, the reviewers, the people who ran the arts in England at that time, had been at school, or at university with – not Mark, but his brothers, and ‘knew’ Margaret, or at least all knew each other. No literature-fed person comes from outside Britain without expecting to find some marvellous free marketplace of the arts, internationally fed, high-minded, maintained by disinterested devotees drawn from wherever they can be found. All that excellence, the high standards – surely they were not maintained by Tom and Dick and Harry who had gone to school with Mark’s brothers and who ‘knew’ Margaret? Well, why not? Mark demanded, when he finally saw that what he took for granted, she took with incredulity. Why not? If it works?

Mark had sent the manuscript from Austria, to Jack, a friend of Colin’s, once a guest of Margaret’s: he was now a partner in a publishing firm. He had taken it for granted that the book would be ‘noticed’; would not vanish, scarcely mentioned, as do half of the novels published in Britain. No, what troubled him was the note, or tone of the reviews: cold, disliking, even hostile. He did not understand the reason for it.

‘I suppose they were hedging their bets,’ he said, scornful. ‘They never condemn a dark horse – a cowardly lot!’

One reviewer complained that the book had been written as if the war had been over a hundred years instead of in its miserable aftermath. It was fatalistic, they said. It was pessimistic, it was deterministic. It had no compassion and it was cold.

‘It’s because you aren’t indignant. You aren’t shocked.’

‘What about?’

‘Look at the writing that’s come out of this war – there isn’t much of it as yet of course. And that’s pretty unforgivable in itself – getting a novel out before the guns have even stopped firing. Positively callous!’

‘I didn’t have anything to do. None of us did.’

‘But in what has been written, there’s a note – protest. Disgust.’

‘I don’t see protest. Things happen.’

‘And the novels from the First World War, elegies for lost paradises, or anger.’

‘Well what’s the point of still feeling like that?’

‘But you ought to be able to see why other people are offended!’

The novel’s attitude was as if humanity (the earth and its people) were a variety of living organism, a body, and war was a boil breaking out on it – and could be expected to break out. It was written out of the attitude, implicit, not described, that war was bound to happen, that nothing could have prevented it, and that forms of war would erupt again. This was not at all the atmosphere of the late ‘forties when governments, politicians and the Press talked, not only as if war, the next one, was preventable, but as if the actions they were engaged in would prevent it.

But Mark saw the activities of Press, politicians, and generals as the dust games of children. As he had thrown away in a couple of paragraphs, as being too obvious to need more, throughout the ‘thirties the coming war had been organized, planned for, expected; the nations had intrigued and aligned and deployed and bargained – but the salient fact of that war, the one which had shaped it, no one had foreseen, which was that Bolshevik Russia would be fighting alongside Britain and America. This although the powerful energies of the most powerful groups in our nation and in America, had been working in the opposite direction. No need even to develop that: it was so obvious. It had not mattered what they planned, since human beings were the prisoners of events. Yet, the moment the war had worked its way to its end, as a disease runs its course, governments, generals, newspapers, again started making plans, authoritative statements, and prognostications, proving that they were incapable of seeing the most obvious fact when it was in front of their noses. They were not to be taken seriously.

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 1939 and 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.

And Margaret complained to Martha that Mark was as stubborn as a mule, as close as a clam. No, she had no intention of putting Martha in any false positions, but that reviewer had put his finger on it – dear Bertie. Martha knew Bertie Worth perhaps? No? He used to visit the old house before it was sold. But Bertie had said in The Times that Mark had no moral sense. He lacked a feeling for essential values. And she departed, emphatically.

To return, less emphatically, indeed, with a curious evasiveness, to say she had just the right person to live in the basement. She was a Mrs Ashe, the widow of a Major Ashe, ex-Indian Army. It turned out she was nearly seventy and difficult. The right person to run that house, to give Francis what he needed? Put thus, Margaret cried out that she was really such a dear old thing. She looked quite extraordinarily guilty. She’s up to something – again. Mark said. What?

Margaret retired. Temporarily. Telephone calls and visits pursued the cause of Mrs Ashe. Why? There was something odd about it, something wrong. They could not define it. Particularly as everything, the texture of life itself seemed wrong, ugly, with so much hinted at and hidden – waiting to explode. Yes, they were waiting. They were sitting time out. Or, Mark was: Martha only until she must leave.

Before she left, she could at least try and do something about Mark’s finances: he asked her to ‘make suggestions’. Mark’s father had left money, but not much. The upkeep of this house, which belonged jointly to the three brothers, was paid by Mark, who lived in it. He spent nothing on himself, but Lynda and Francis cost a great deal. And so did Martha and her salary, as she pointed out. But that would not be for long.

The publisher who had been a friend of the family had signed with Mark a contract that conceded nothing to friendship. There had been an advance of one hundred and fifty pounds and he had earned not much more than that on the war novel before it had stopped selling. He had contracted for three more books on the same terms. A ridiculous contract, which he should not have signed. But he had no agent. A second novel had been begun and abandoned: he had ideas for others. He said he was not particularly interested in writing another book. He was not a writer, he said. He supposed, one day, he would write another book.

The factory made money on the machines for hospitals. It could make more. But Mark said he was not interested in the business from that point of view. If he could not use the profits for what he called ‘having fun with new ideas’ then he wouldn’t bother with the factory at all.

If he were able to sell the war novel in America?

An American agent arrived to see Mark, who received her in his study. She was a woman of about thirty-five, well turned-out, full of professional friendliness. For her benefit (indeed, one could do no less) Mark offered ‘the writer’ and ‘the writer’s secretary’ – Martha.

Miss Sayers sat at ease, conducting with relaxed efficiency this interview which was only one, after all, in a tour of British writers. She said she liked Mark’s novel, for what it was, but that kind of thing, the protest novel, was dated.

She saw his novel as a protest novel?

War was not a good thing, and therefore a novel about war was a protest novel – her mind seemed to work in this way. Or perhaps she had not read it? At least she was able to use with familiarity the name of the chief character.

Perhaps she was one of the people who don’t know how to read. Very few do, after all.

However that was, she explained that the war novel was hard to sell in her country at that time. But she was interested in Mark’s second. That was why she was here: she would be so very privileged to think she could handle Mark’s second book which she was sure would be an advance on his first. And what was his new book about?

‘Life,’ said Mark, bland, intending to be rude. ‘Well,’ she cried, gaily, ‘of course, it is bound to be.’ But if Mark could give her some idea, she would then be in a position to … ‘You are an agent, you say?’

‘Yes, that is so. And I think you’ll find one of the best known.’

‘I see. Well perhaps it would be better to wait until the book is finished? Otherwise I might find myself altering it in the hope that you might handle it?’

‘Well, now, Mark. I really wouldn’t like you to think that I’d be capable of putting any pressure at all on my authors, but it is true that I feel myself a friend to my authors, I do like to think they take my advice.’

‘And what might that be?’

Here she began a short lecture, frowning, like a teacher concerned to remember words from notes made. It was a lecture given, that was clear, many times already.

What Mark should understand, said she, was that only second-rate writers dealt with social conditions, or politics, or concerned themselves in any way at all with public affairs or …

‘Oh I don’t know … there was Tolstoy, and Balzac, and Dickens and …’

Her face glazed, at the effort of associating these names, ‘classics’ (she had read them?), with her subject.

‘All that kind of thing,’ she insisted with authority. ‘The real great artist creates truth and beauty from within himself, he deals with the eternal truths …’ And so on.

It took about fifteen minutes. Mark and Martha listened, in silence, fascinated, to the opinion currently in vogue in America, being put so trippingly in this alien tongue.

Finally she asked if Mark would be prepared to sign a document giving her first refusal of his new book, when finished. She was not prepared to pay anything for this: his return would be, that he had an agent and a friend.

She left, having asked if she could use the telephone: she needed to check if her interview with her next author, a young man from Wales about whom she asked if the opinion (it was Mark’s opinion too, she supposed) that he was the finest poet since Auden, was still viable.

This visit raised interesting questions … One was: if Mark’s novel had been published now, instead of 1948, what reception would it have got? Two, three years, had changed the climate completely. ‘Out’ was the humanitarianism, warmth, protest, anger. What was ‘in’ was the point of view put by the able Miss Sayers. Why? Very simple indeed. The ‘cold war’ was spreading, had already spread, from politics, to the arts. Any attitude remotely associated with ‘communism’ was suspect, indeed, dangerous. Few intellectuals had not been associated with the left, in some form of it, during the ‘thirties and the ‘forties. Precisely these intellectuals were now running, in one way and another, the arts. Tom, Dick and Harry, they were now peddling, for all they were worth, a point of view summed up by the slogan: The Ivory Tower. This was admirable, subtle, adult, good, and above all, artistic. Its opposite was crude, childish, bad, inartistic.

In America a period of political reaction can be foretold as much when publishers and agents and editors, those most sensitive of barometers, talk about Art in capital letters as when panels of psychoanalysts issue statements that political rebellion on the part of the youth is a sign of emotional immaturity. In Britain hard times are on the way when there are rashes of articles on Jane Austen and Flaubert. ‘Jane Austen vs. Thomas Hardy’; ‘Flaubert the Master, Zola the Journalist.’

‘Besides Sappho, Jane Austen and Firbank, who could be deemed fit inhabitants of that Ivory Tower which …’

If the war novel had been published now, it would have fitted neatly inside the Ivory Tower.

It might even have made some money?

As things were, Mark had an overdraft of a thousand pounds, his bank manager protesting; and large unpaid bills for Lynda’s hospital and Francis’s school.

Something ought to be done.

Not knowing what, they talked. To good effect, so it turned out.

On a crucial evening they were in his study. It was after twelve. The curtains were drawn on a cold and sodden night. The light was low. Mark, wearing slacks and sweater, lay on his couch – his place. Martha sat at the desk – hers. They were drinking brandy, were a little tipsy, felt safe for the time, the sense of threat shut out. This was, after all, a warm, gay room. Once it had been a warm and gay house. Mark, seen thus, could be imagined as a warm, easily responsive young man. Even now his face was relaxed, and was smiling as he teased Martha.

‘Well, how do you want to live then? Everything you say, all the time, implies there is another way to live? Did you know that?’

‘There isn’t then? Everything has to go on and on, as it does. Nothing better is possible?’

‘Very well then. But you haven’t said, you know.’

‘I don’t want to have to split myself up. That’s all …’ He maintained a quizzical smile. ‘Yes. Any sort of life I’ve been offered in London – I’d have had to put half of myself into cold storage. Pretend part of me didn’t exist.’

‘And here?’

And now it was necessary to evade, sidestep. Because it was fantastic he could ask it all: a measure of how much of himself was shut away, or, more accurately, put into cold storage with Lynda.

It would not have been necessary to have this conversation with Thomas, she could not prevent herself thinking.

Several times, late, after one of these evenings of talk and friendship, sex had approached – of course. But not straightforwardly, honestly. Slightly tight, they would have got into bed, enjoyed themselves or not, and in the morning, there would have been a note of apology, even of embarrassment. The point being, that they would have made love because they were a man and a woman sometimes alone in this house. Well, that would have been right with some men. But not with Mark. He did not see this, rather, feel it?

One evening, before Christmas, she had telephoned Jack. A voice she did not know said that Jack was in hospital somewhere in the north. He had trouble with his lungs. No, he did not want his address known. He did not want letters forwarded. Of course not: Jack, all his pride in his body would not wish to do anything but crawl into a dark hidden place, until it got better.

‘Well,’ he said, and again with the unfair reproach: ‘You’re going off. You’re right.’

‘I’m not what’s needed here!’

‘Yes, but what is! Oh, very well – I don’t want to … so you’re going off to find … do you know what it is you’re really wanting, Martha?’

And he proceeded to tell her. She was seeking, without knowing it for the mythical city, the one which appeared in legends and in fables and fairy stories, and (here he laughed at her, but affectionately) it was a hierarchic city, which is why she refused even to consider it. He proceeded to describe it, as clearly as if he had lived there; and she, laughing affectionately at him, who knew this archetypal city so well yet said he believed in nothing but a recurring destruction and disorder joined him in a long, detailed, fantastic reconstruction which, by the time they had finished, was as good as a blueprint to build.

Great roads approached the city, from north and south, east and west. When they had fairly entered it, they divided into arcs, making a circling street, inside which were smaller ones: a web of arcs intersected by streets running in to a centre. All these streets were wide, paved with stone, lined by trees. The centre was planted with trees and had buildings in the trees. These were schools and libraries and marketplaces, but their functions were not over-defined. People might teach in the market; and in what looked like a temple, or a place of worship, goods could be bought or bartered for. Carpets for instance, or jewellery, or poems. There was no central building to the city, yet the people maintained that somewhere in it was such a lode-place or nodal point – under the city perhaps; perhaps in some small not apparently significant room in one of the libraries, or off a market. Or it could have been that the common talk about this room was another way of putting their belief that there existed people, in this city, who formed a kind of centre, almost a variety of powerhouse, who had no particular function or title, but who kept it in existence. The city had been planned as a whole once, long ago: had been built as a whole. It had not grown into existence, haphazard, as we are accustomed to think of cities doing. Every house in it had been planned, and who would live in each house. Every person in the city had a function and a place; but there was nothing static about this society: people could move out and up and into other functions, if they wished to. It was a gardened city. A great number of the inhabitants spent their lives on the gardens, and the fountains and parks. Even the trees and plants were known for their properties and qualities and grown exactly, in a relation to other plants, and to people and buildings; and it was among the gardeners, so the stories went, that could be found, if only one could recognize them, most of the hidden people who protected and fed the city.

‘And all this,’ said Mark, stating his position, ‘went on for thousands of years – until, one day, there was an accident, something as senseless and stupid as an earthquake which swallowed the city, or a meteor from space.’

‘Oh no,’ said Martha, stating her position, ‘around that city, just like all the cities we know, like Johannesburg for instance, grew up a shadow city of poverty and beastliness. A shanty town. Around that marvellous ordered city, another one of hungry and dirty and short-lived people. And one day the people of the outer city overran the inner one, and destroyed it.’

Next day Mark did not go to the factory. He sat in his study, and by evening had produced a short story, a sketch merely, of this city. It was for Martha. He was excited by it and so was she. They thought it should be longer. He took back the pages, and went to work.

The second version was quite long – longer than a short story. In the first version sudden dust storms had buried the city. In the second, outside the central gardened city rose the encircling shadow city of people who looked enviously in at the privileged one. They always talked of attacking it. But they were afraid to – they didn’t know why. Centuries passed. The outer city was growing rich and strong. It was even built on the plan of the inner city, in emulation of it. It had gardens and fountains and – a temple, with a hierarchy of priests. But the outer city was not like the inner one, no matter how often or loudly it claimed it was. Inside was harmony, order – joy. Outside people fought for power and money and recognition, they were soldiers, and a constant growing and overthrowing of dynasties based on the army. Then, one of the ruling families, wanting an advantage over the others, sent envoys into the centre, asking to buy their secret. But the reply came back that the secret could not be sold, or taken: it could only be earned, or accepted as a gift. The rulers of the outer city were angry: they did not understand this answer. They overran the inner city, killing everyone. They looked for the hidden people, of whom the legends had reached the outer city. They could not find them. When the sacking of the city was complete, a story started, they said among the soldiers, that someone had indeed found an octagonal white room under a library. Something about this room, no one could say what, had made an impression. They tore down the roof, pulled up the floor – but there was nothing there. It was empty.

Now the new rulers announced that everything would go on as before: this was the magical city, it was open to everyone. They were going to run it, with their priests and their soldiers.

But of course, they hadn’t the secret, and now the old city of the legend became exactly as the outer city had been. But it was from this time that the city in fact reached history – before that it had not been known, except to the people who lived in it and around it. Now it reached a great climax of fame and power; and it spread out into a kingdom and then an empire, which attacked other cities and countries. It had a fine literature, and an art of its own, and was envied for its richness and achievements. And a whole branch of its learning was to do with the history, based on legends which persisted, of the old lost city; and this particular aspect of its culture was in the hands of a priesthood.

In this version the original city was built in a desert, in North Africa perhaps, or in Asia. Nothing but hundreds of miles of sand under a blazing sun. Then the oases became more frequent. Then, starting in the desert, so that the great roads running inwards began, literally, in sand, was the city.

Travellers coming in from the desert found it hard to say when the exact moment was when their feet found the right road. Then trees appeared, on either side; then in the distance, the first houses of the city. For leagues of hot dusty travelling, a silent yellow sand, and then the white city, with its sharp black shadows and its shaded gardens, and over it, a blue sky where birds wheeled, into which rose domes and spires and the sounds of voices.

Mark was pleased with the second version, and Martha began to type it. Then he asked her to stop. He wanted to do more work on it. It turned out that he planned to turn it into a kind of novel: something much more worked out, detailed. But she was leaving in less than a fortnight.

She heard that the flat on which she had paid a deposit was not ready. It was in a big new block of flats built on a bombed area near Notting Hill Gate. It was not going to be ready for at least another month.

Francis was going to be home for a half-term. It would be nice if Martha could be there.

Martha suggested that she should stay on another month. It was agreed that at the end of March, she would leave.

Meanwhile it was still February. There wasn’t very much for her to do. She wrote some business letters, dealt with accounts, kept the house, put linen and cutlery and so on into the basement. A great deal of her time was spent in her room, with the black cat whose attitude so clearly was, as he arched his back under her hand, and settled at the foot of her bed, that she was a visitor, in this, his home.

She was waiting again! Always waiting for something! – so she discovered herself muttering crossly.

On the whole it seemed that her job was to protect Mark – from journalists, from people ringing up on this or that pretext – from anybody who didn’t understand the pressure Mark was under.

Which was why she protested when Margaret rang up to say she planned an election party: an election was due in a couple of weeks.

Martha said: ‘I don’t think Mark would feel up to it,’ and stopped herself from saying: ‘But don’t tell him I said so.’

‘I dare say,’ said Margaret, ‘but I do feel that we ought to try and behave normally, don’t you?’

Which left Martha to think it over that in this family behaving normally meant holding election parties, for it appeared that Margaret always had them. Then why didn’t she hold a party in her own home? As Mark demanded, angrily, when told of the plan. But Margaret felt it would be nicer to have it in London, where people could drop in and out on their way to and from election stations, voting stations, parties at hotels, etc. etc. But this was not the real reason. She had bought a television set, a new toy, and it was not working well in Sussex, unfortunately. She proposed to watch the election on television in Mark’s house.

This was to be the first real television election.

Margaret arrived with the set and an engineer to install it. Mark was in Cambridge.

Martha stayed in her room, listening to Margaret’s loud and capable voice giving instructions to the engineer. Then she watched the man depart along the pavement below her window. She braced herself, for she knew what was going to happen.

There were steps on the stairs – firm steps. Then a knock on the door – a confident knock. In came Margaret, smiling. The trouble was, Martha rather liked her, once she had got past that enemy: the capable middle-aged matron coping with everything by sheer force of long experience.

‘Oh, how hard it is to be a middle-aged woman, who has to stand in for everyone’s difficult mother, and who has to take – and return – looks from younger women examining their futures, exactly as one used to do oneself, and who are thinking, what a short time I’ve got left. Oh how tiresome – and how tiring! – to be the target for such complicated emotions, none of which has anything to do with oneself.

Margaret sat on the foot of the bed before remembering that she ought to ask Martha if she could. Remembering too late, she decided to say nothing. But she looked defiant as she stroked the old cat. ‘Poor old Starkie,’ she said. ‘Well, you look pleased with yourself. Really, you are a spoiled beast.’

Martha had sat herself on a chair across the room.

‘Where’s Mark?’ demanded Margaret.

‘He’s in Cambridge.’

‘He always did this you know – he gets himself involved.’ She was talking as if Colin, her son, were less than a son than Mark?

Continuing, she said: ‘After all, if Colin is going to insist on being silly, then he shouldn’t expect one to – why should he stand up for that man? What’s-his-name? He was only working with him wasn’t he?’ Here she waited to see if Martha could tell her anything. Martha couldn’t. ‘And, of course, Mark has to get on a high horse over it. He always did. Mark’s stubborn. So’s Colin. In different ways. And, of course, there’s Arthur – he’s not likely to be a spy for Russia, that’s something, when he hates them so much. So one is thankful for small mercies.’

Margaret had once been a fine-boned graceful English beauty like Lynda. She was now a tall, handsome, grey-eyed woman with elegant hands. Martha watched the subtlety of the hands as they caressed the cat. The cat started to purr loudly. Margaret picked the animal up and put her ear to it, like a child, to listen to the purring. But the cat didn’t like being picked up, and stopped purring.

‘What do you feel about Mark?’ demanded Margaret.

And now Martha could not help laughing – out of annoyance, really. Also, she supposed, from affection. Margaret smiled a strained readiness to be told why Martha laughed. She put the cat down, who rolled over and began purring. Margaret stroked the cat. She had tears in her eyes.

The tears were very weakening. ‘Listen. Margaret. There’s just one thing that none of you seem able to see. Mark loves Lynda. I do understand why you all – but there it is.’

‘But it’s ridiculous. It always has been. And before Lynda there was an American, a cousin of Oscar’s. Hopeless – a hopeless girl. And she cared nothing about Mark, and he ran around after her like a little dog.’

‘Well, haven’t you ever loved anyone ridiculous and hopeless?’

The cat had moved off, and sat licking its ruffled fur to rights.

The grey look Martha now got from Margaret held irritation. Martha recognized it easily as that emotion one feels when another hasn’t seen that truth obvious to oneself.

‘Yes, I have. I was in love with Oscar. I adored him. But one has to live, you know – one has to. I do know. I could have stayed married to Oscar. But I don’t like – suffering, I suppose. I hate it. Some people enjoy being treated badly. I wasn’t Oscar’s first wife and I won’t be his last – by a long chalk. I’m told the woman he’s going to marry is getting the treatment. Just as I did. Look, Martha dear – I really must – haven’t you any influence at all with Mark?’

The tears poured out, and, as Martha could see, were unchecked because Margaret had noticed Martha was influenced by tears. Martha was now very angry. Months of resentment came pouring out.

‘I know you are much older than me, and ever so experienced, and you’ve always been able to do exactly as you like. But you seem to me like a little girl. You can’t always have your own way. You always have had it, haven’t you? You can’t stop people doing things just because you think it’s no good for them.’

Margaret stared at Martha, not so much surprised, as wary. Then she turned away her wet face and dabbed at it. Martha looked at a reassuring calm back. Martha had even more strongly the feeling that she was an instrument being played upon. When that face was turned to her again, what look would be placed upon it?

No, she was being unfair. Probably Margaret was acting out of instinct – if that made it any better!

Once again, Martha was sitting in the presence of a strong elderly woman, herself a seethe of conflicting emotions, which she could not control. Some time she was going to have to learn to control them.

Margaret turned to her a quiet sobered face.

‘I don’t agree with you,’ she said. ‘If someone’s doing something that’s simply silly, you try and stop them. I wish you’d try and stop Mark. He ought to leave the country for a bit. He could take Francis. He might fall in love with someone that’s some use.’

Martha laughed with resentment. ‘You can’t see that he could never do it? It’s not the kind of thing he could do?’

‘No. I wish you’d try.’

‘No. I’ve got no right – one hasn’t. Not unless you get right into something and – get your hands dirty too. Only if you fight.’

‘And you won’t?’

‘Why should I? It’s not my mess!’

‘You want to get married again I suppose?’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ Martha was becoming incoherent. ‘I don’t want to get married for the sake of it! You talk like a – fortune-teller or something.’

‘Oh! I don’t see why? Why not, if that’s what you want?’

‘Well one doesn’t say, I want to get married and then go out looking – isn’t that what you meant?’

Margaret was almost smiling: she was humouring Martha.

Who now stood up, confronting Margaret. Who stood up, ready to leave. The women were furious with each other.

‘If Mark divorced Lynda, it wouldn’t make any difference. He’d either go pining after Lynda, or he’d be in love with someone else ridiculous and hopeless. Or you’d think she was. Can’t you see that?’

‘Well no,’ drawled Margaret. ‘Frankly, I don’t. But I must bow to your superior wisdom.’

At the door she said: ‘The man’s got the television to work. It’ll be rather fun, watching it on television.’ She laughed, and apparently genuinely. She was looking forward to the evening. ‘In the old days, when I had an election party I had to be careful to keep the left and the right apart – now it’s the left and the left. I suppose Colin wouldn’t come – he can’t, with the case just starting?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh well, if you just lump people into a room, they’ll have to behave. But I must say, if Colin’s coming, then it will be tricky with Phoebe and Arthur and Arthur’s wife. I really can’t imagine why they hate the bolshies so much when they’ve got precisely the same aims. If they had their way, this country’d be as bad as Russia – it’s not so far off as it is.’

With this, she went downstairs again, to arrange drinks and food for her party.

By evening the big room, which Martha had only seen as dead and shrouded in enveloping dust-sheets, was full of flowers, and it had a buffet at one end, the television set at the other. Now it presented itself, discreetly festive, as a setting for parties. People started coming early, the attraction being the television set, as much as the election. Most had not got one, or refused to get one, or might get one if this seemed satisfactory. The set was, in short, the focus of the party, almost its chief guest. Margaret was the only person who adored it. Most people seemed apprehensive: in fact one could more or less work out someone’s political bias from the attitude he took towards television.

By ten or so there must have been fifty people in the room in an atmosphere rather like a sweepstake, or the races; and although outside this room, which imposed a truce, they stood for violent antagonisms. Bets were being made, victories and defeats were cheered or booed, everything went on in the greatest good humour.

The Tories were represented by Margaret herself, and by a man who made an appearance early, a formally good-mannered quiet man who was taken down by Margaret to see the basement. Another tenant for it who she thought would be suitable? The man, Mr Hilary Marsh, was easily overlooked and not remarked much by Martha: afterwards she wished she had paid more attention. There was also strongly present the spirit of Margaret’s first husband; and for her sake even opponents hoped that the Conservative who now held his seat would continue to hold it: he did. The Conservative people held the view that five years of Labour Government had ruined the country by the introduction of red and ruinous socialism, but the electors (they hoped this evening) would see their mistake and where their ingratitude towards their natural governors had led them, and reintroduce the Conservatives.

That section of the Labour Party which actually held the reins (a couple of Ministers were present) was represented by Margaret’s present husband, John, a pleasant man, without much force but with nothing to dislike about him either. He was smilingly attentive to the guests (Margaret’s rather than his, one could not help feeling) and kept the television set working. There was something about him damped down, held back, kept in check – whatever he was, there was a slight uneasiness, hard to put your finger on. Martha felt it: he presented to her the surface merely of an extraordinary control, while he asked the politest kind of question about Mark’s well-being, about Colin. She was pleased when he moved on.

These, the Labour incumbents, held the view that the country had been in such a bad condition after the war, and particularly after years of Tory rule, that they could not have been expected to do better than they had: and that most of their election pledges had remained unfulfilled through no fault of theirs: ‘The Country’ (a phrase that resounded all evening) would understand this and return them to power with a larger majority than before.

The Labour left was represented by Phoebe, by Phoebe’s ex-husband Arthur, and by his present wife, Mary. Phoebe arrived early with her little girls, pretty blonde creatures excited by being up late for the first time in their lives. His wife came early with the two little children from the new family. Phoebe and Mary, who were great friends, and had been for many years, together greeted Arthur who arrived late with a great mass of supporters. He had kept his seat in South London, with a reduced majority. They were all very excited, and he was a hero that evening. Martha wondered if yet again she would be faced with a shape of flesh like one already known – Mark, Colin, the picture of their dead father – whose spirit was yet utterly different; but Arthur did not look like his brothers, or his father. He was a vigorous-looking man, with an open face, blue eyes open to inquiry, a rocky, rugged, craggy man. An agitator. An orator. A troublemaker. His half-hour’s visit did in fact cause some tension in the general well-being, and people seemed pleased when he left, taking with him his wife, his children; and his previous wife and her children. These, the Labour left, all believed that a Labour Government in power after such a war and after years of Tory misrule, needed to be what it was accused of being by people like Margaret and practically the entire Press – vigorously socialist. They despised the larger part of the party they belonged to for cowardice, pusillanimity, for being unsocialist. They believed, however, that the electorate would vote back the Labour Party, because of the existence, in the Labour Party, of people like Arthur, who might yet force it to be what it should be.

Mark was not there. Colin was not there. Invisibly and very strongly present that night was ‘communism’ – a threat. Everyone knew that Mark was with his brother and that his brother was in bad trouble. People either asked sympathetically after them, or – mostly – did not mention them at all.

If Mark and Colin represented communism, then they represented the view that the Labour Party had always been, would always be, could never be anything else but, a function of capitalism, the force, or trend, in the British nation which made capitalism work, saved it, bolstered it – and could be no more than that even if the Labour Party were composed entirely of Arthurs. (Who, of course, hated the communists, local and international with a bitter passion.) The Labour Party had got in because capitalism (The Tories) being in a jam after the war, it was the right time for it to get in. It had fulfilled none of its election pledges because it could not possibly do so – only a communist government was in a position to change anything radically. And here presented itself an interesting paradox, or political anomaly. For a century at least communism had defined socialist non-communism as bound to fulfil this function; the fatalism, the determinism, which is so oddly rooted in that revolutionary party’s heritage must have it that Labour, or social democracy, by its nature could do no more than what capitalism would allow it do. Q.E.D. Why, then, so much abuse, the gutter criticism, the emotionalism – why such a crying out against the inevitably-behaving and conditioned function, the Labour Party? One might almost believe it a form of love, or of hope; as if, rooted right there, at the heart of an ‘inevitability’, of something determined, there had always been, in fact, half a hope, that perhaps, after all – the Labour Party could be socialist.

Among the guests there was also, but not for long (politics bored him he said) Jimmy Wood, Mark’s partner. He was a short, fair man. Wispy. He had soft baby’s hair on his large head. He had a carefully kept, almost scared, smile. He moved about, with a glass of whisky in his hand, listening, and looking, always on the edge of a group, always with his half-smile. He did not look at the television set, only at the other guests, and as if he were a stranger doomed to be one. He talked briefly to Martha, smiling, or rather, grinning and clutching his glass. He wore strong spectacles. Behind them were small, strained-looking eyes. Mark said he was a variety of scientific genius.

Half through the evening Mark called from Cambridge to say that Martha should get James’s room ready for Sally: she was coming back with him. Paul too.

Martha therefore was away from the party for some time. When she came back, they were saying that even if Labour did get back, it must be with a reduced majority. Margaret and some Tory friends who had come in from a near-by hotel drank to the defeat of the Reds (Labour). Those ‘Reds’ near them drank an opposition toast – everything was very jolly. Mark had sounded harried, even rather frightened. Jimmy Wood went, on hearing that Mark would not be there for at least two hours. Mark said that Jimmy and he talked – days at a time. Mark said Jimmy was a lonely man; and so little given to talking about personal affairs, he did not know to this day if he were married.

In the room were two new people. Young men. One was Graham Patten, John’s son by a former marriage. He had a friend with him. Both were in their last year at Oxford. They stood on the side of the noisy scene and despised it. They were also at pains to despise television. Politics were unfashionable among the undergraduates of Britain at that time: Graham and Andrew thought politics were derisory. Dandyism was fashionable: they wore embroidered waistcoats and would not surrender their cloaks, one black lined with scarlet, one scarlet lined with leopard skin. They both maintained supercilious smiles, until someone, unable to stand their frustration, went up to them, when they delivered themselves of a great many observations on a large variety of subjects. They were a bit better when they got drunk, if not very endearing.

Margaret was heard to apologize for them: they would grow out of it, she said.

Mark had told Martha that he would take Sally and the child straight up to the room. She listened for him to come in, and went quietly out into the hall when he did. But Margaret was there seeing some guests out. Afterwards Martha kept the clearest picture of that brief scene.

At the door were a group of noisily tipsy people on their way back to the hotel where they proposed to celebrate Labour’s so greatly reduced majority. Margaret was saying ‘Good-bye! Goodbye!’ to them; but she was watching Mark, who stood on the stairs with Sally-Sarah, who had Paul in her arms. By Margaret was Hilary Marsh, observing them all – a quietly smiling, unnoticed man. Sally-Sarah looked ill. The little boy had his thumb in his mouth and stared over his mother’s shoulder with large, blank, shocked eyes. The two were wrapped in a travelling rug Mark had taken from the car. In this cheerful din (the noise from the big room was shattering, when one listened to it from outside) they had the look of refugees, of people in flight.

Mark summoned Martha with his eyes. She went to Sally-Sarah, while Margaret came forward saying: ‘Sally! Is Colin here? What’s the matter?’

Martha led the two up and away from Margaret and her party, while Mark stayed. Sally-Sarah was quite passive. She was trembling. In the big bedroom on the second floor, she stood until Martha suggested she might sit; and sat, staring until Martha said she might like to get into bed. Martha took the child and undressed him. Sally-Sarah was undressing herself like an automaton. Offered tea, coffee, milk, she did not hear. Martha put them both in the same bed.

When she left them, Sally-Sarah had not said one word.

Downstairs the big room was emptying fast, because of Mark’s presence. He stood with his back to a wall, grave, anxious, looking past the two undergraduates who stood in front of him. It was now clear why they had come to this party: to meet the writer. It appeared that some tutor or teacher had said that Mark’s novel was influenced by Kierkegaard. Andrew had his clever young face, now rather flushed by drink, close to Mark’s, and he was unloading a series of observations: he did not agree with the tutor, it seemed. He was explaining to Mark why the novel was to be compared with Stendhal’s The Red and The Black. Mark was not listening. Close to this group Hilary Marsh stood, observing. Martha went forward to rescue Mark. She listened while the two young men, unwillingly accepting her as substitute, continued their ingenious literary game, their eyes not on her, but past her, on Mark. Hilary Marsh was expressing concern, to Mark about his brother Colin. After a few moments Mark said: ‘Yes. Yes. Excuse me …’ and went out of the room.

It now occurred to the two young men that Mark might be upset about his brother Colin whose name had been all over the newspapers that day. When Martha left the party finally they were being witty about spies to Hilary Marsh, who, it seemed, was quite prepared to listen to them.

Upstairs Martha found Mark in Sally-Sarah’s room. She was not asleep. She was curled up in bed, like a child, her child asleep beside her. Her eyes were shocked.

She said, ‘Thank you. Thank you. You are very kind. Thank you. Thank you.’ Mark and Martha left her.

‘I’ll tell you in the morning,’ said Mark, ‘I must get rid of …’ He went downstairs.

Colin’s principal, the man with whom he had worked for years, had been sentenced to fourteen years in prison for giving scientific information to the Russians. Next day Mark stayed in his room. Sally stayed in her room. Martha kept buying newspapers. Late that afternoon it was announced that Colin Coldridge son of – etc. etc., brother of the writer Mark Coldridge, and of Arthur Coldridge the well-known left-wing member of Parliament, had fled the country, presumably to Russia, leaving behind his wife and his son.

Martha took the newspaper to Mark. ‘Did you know?’ she asked. ‘I knew he was going to.’ ‘Are we to look after Sally?’ ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’ ‘Didn’t he say anything about her?’

‘I didn’t see him yesterday. I couldn’t get hold of him. I had a telephone call from him in the hotel. He was in a call box. All he said was, that he would be away for a time. He rang off.’

Sally-Sarah came down to supper with her little boy. She wore her purple and gold striped dressing-gown. On the whole she seemed composed. The telephone rang continuously from Mark’s study, but they were not answering it. Outside the house, newspapermen stood in groups. They did not tell Sally-Sarah this, but after supper she went to a window and looked out at the group of men in their raincoats, with their cameras and their notebooks.

She then asked Mark and Martha if they would look after Paul for a day. She wanted to go back to Cambridge to fetch some things. They dissuaded her: she must not go by herself they said. She appeared to agree. Late that night, going up to see if she needed anything, they found she had slipped out of the house, though it was hard to see how she had done it without alerting the newspapermen.

In the morning Martha got Paul and told him stories. His mother had gone back to fetch something; his father had gone for some work somewhere. Paul was not concerned about his father; he had seen so little of him. He asked once or twice about his mother, but on the whole played quite happily.

When Sally did not come back by lunchtime, Mark telephoned the flat in Cambridge. There was no reply. Shortly afterwards, as Mark was preparing to go to Cambridge to find her, the police telephoned. Sally-Sarah had gone to the flat, and gassed herself. She had left no message – nothing.

And now, though there was no need at all to say it, Mark said: ‘You can’t go, Martha. I don’t see how you can.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘I don’t think Colin intends to come back. He never said anything – not directly. But I understand some things I didn’t at the time.’

Martha rang up the estate agent to say she would not be taking the flat, now nearly ready. The churlish gracelessness that was the spirit of the time spoke through him as he said: ‘Well, if you don’t want the flat, there are plenty that do. You do realize your deposit isn’t returnable?’

Life frayed into a series of little copings-with; dealings-with; details, details, journalists; newspapers; telephone calls; threatening letters.

Paul had to be looked after, Francis had to be told – something. What?

One thing became clear at once. Mark was going to be isolated. By refusing to condemn his brother, or inform, or to ‘co-operate’ with the police – very insistent they were that he should – he was tarred with Colin – a traitor.

Margaret rang up. Having inquired about Paul she then started talking about the flat downstairs. Mark said his mother must have become unhinged by the crisis. She wanted Mrs Ashe, the widow from India, to live in the flat. She wanted this, apparently, so much, that she was prepared to bring Mrs Ashe herself, and settle her in. She went on ringing up about Mrs Ashe and the basement, until Mark lost his temper.

She then wrote a letter about Mrs Ashe. It was an extraordinary letter, entreaty, threat, apology – Martha was ready to agree that Margaret was temporarily off balance. But they did not have time to worry about Margaret.

Mark said: ‘I think it’s going to be a bad time.’

It was already a bad time, all muddle and misery and suspicion and doubt.