Four Gated City (3 page)

What would be the words used to sentence her? She did not know, and it did not matter: what people actually said in that café was the least of what they were able to convey. But she had done it, she had not clowned or apologized in the wrong way. She had done it, if she had done it badly. And Iris would be slowly replacing the receiver, pushing the telephone back into its niche, and saying to whoever was there that afternoon, in one of her repertoire of tones which made her sparse vocabulary so rich an instrument: ‘That was our young lady. She’s off.’ ‘She’s off, is she? ’ And that would be that.

Well, that was one door shut behind her; which proved that she would find the strength of mind to shut the others. Martha retied the coat, while tears ran down her face, cool on hot. She went on, crying, to the river. A ginger-moustached cloth-capped man passed, with a sideways furtive look that became knowing, diagnosing exploitable weakness. She frowned at him, and wiped the tears off-he went on his way. A moment later a young head came out of yet another hole in the ground where repairs were being made to subterranean London and a young voice said: ‘Cheer up, love.’

‘I don’t see why I should, ’ said Martha, and he leaped up out of his hole. Martha smiled, friendly. He was tall and gangly, raw in bone and finish. Using a yardstick discovered since she had come to England, she mentally fitted him into the uniform of an officer of the RAF. Impossible. Impossible even if he hadn’t spoken and revealed his status in his voice? Impossible. She fitted him into the uniform of an aircraftman-yes.

Ever since she had come, she had used memories of the two nations which had descended on Zambesia at the beginning of the war to fit men into their appropriate class. She had not been wrong often. What was it? Not only bad feeding-this one had deprivation bred into him; it was something in the way of standing, the gestures, the eyes. And as for him. if she hadn’t spoken and shown she was from abroad and therefore outside his system of tabus, he would not have climbed up out of his hole. He had rather raffish blue eyes; and a come-and-get-me-smile evolved for such occasions.
But all that was put on, he was a gentle and serious soul. ‘Come and have a cuppa? ’ he suggested, chancing it. Nearly Martha said: ‘Yes, I’d like to, ’ but-couldn’t, having decided on the end to such enjoyable chances. ‘I’d like to but I can’t, ’ she said, straight. He looked carefully into her face, placing her according to some rules of his own. Liking each other they stood, about to part for ever. Then he said, ‘Right then, another time, ’ and he nipped back into the earth.

‘Ta ta, ’ he said, picking up his shovel.

‘Bye, ’ said Martha, walking on.

Now, in front of her, the river. For Martha, the river was still the point of reference in the chaos of London. Lost several times a day, she made for the river.

A few days after her arrival in London she had been wandering among the wharfs and the docks, three, four miles lower down the South Bank, in a world of black greasy hulls, dark landing stages, dark warehouses, grey dirty water, gulls, and the smell of driven salt, when she had come on a landing stage where a mushroom shape of rusting iron held thick coils of rope which tethered a flat barge that had a lorry on it. On this she sat, until an official came from a shed and said she should not be there. She was about to leave when to her came Stella, a gipsy of a woman in a striped grey apron, with greying black hair falling in wisps over a sallow face which was all shrewd black eyes. This woman had been watching her through the windows of her house twenty yards away. Martha, in green linen, sandals and sunburn, had tickled the imagination of this watchdog of her clan, and she asked her to tea; and, nosing out inside a few minutes that Martha was ready to stay anywhere she was welcome, let her a room over her parlour.

Stella was the wife, mother and daughter of dockers: and in her kitchen Martha drank tea, ate chips and bacon and fried bread several times a day and listened to the talk of a race every moment of whose lives had to do with the landing and unloading of ships. They talked about the war and about the government-and about the war. They were fiercely and bitterly working-class, class conscious, and trade union. Labour Party? That remained to be seen, they did not love government and almost five years of a Labour Government had done nothing to win the trust of these people who trusted nothing. In that kitchen Martha suppressed any knowledge she might ever have had about politics; for she knew how amateur
it would sound among these warriors for whom politics, in its defensive and bread-and-butter aspect, was breath. Besides, they, rather Stella, were not interested in Martha’s interest in England. Stella took Martha to her bosom because of an unfed longing for travel and experience which was titillated every moment by the river, by the ships that swung past her windows, by the talk of foreign countries. She said herself that her blood must run from some visiting sailor from a Southern place, Spanish she thought, Portuguese? -so strong a fancy did she have for those parts. And she read: all her life she had nosed out books, comics, magazines which might have a story or an article about the sea. Her sons and her husband teased her, there’d be no room for them soon, they said; she had old trunks crammed with sea-treasure. If there was a film about the sea, she went, might see the same film through a dozen times if it had ships or sails or mutinies or pirates; and when there was someone to go with her, visited the naval museum at Greenwich where she knew all the sailing ships, their histories and the men who had captained them. Well… so Stella wanted Martha to talk about foreignness; and Martha, feeling that nothing in her experience could match up to such an appetite for the marvellous, made a discovery: that it was enough to say, the sun shines so, the moon does thus, people get up at such an hour, eat so and so, believe such and such-and it was enough. Because it was different. Martha’s so ordinary experience was magicked by Stella’s hunger into wonders, and when her money had run so low she said she must get a job, Stella got for her a job in a pub, for she could not bear to lose her. The pub was Stella’s brother’s wife’s pub and it was a couple of hundred yards inland. So they talked of territory not immediately on the Thames’s banks. For a couple of weeks then, Martha had lived inside the area which was policed invisibly by the spirit of Stella, and under her protection. For instance, walking to work in the bar one evening, a group of men coming from loading a ship started the usual whistles and catcalls and Stella emerged from some kitchen where she was visiting, put her hands on her hips, and shouted across the street that this was Martha, her friend, and if they knew what was good for them … and a man who felt that Martha might make a suitable wife, approached Stella, as if Stella were Martha’s mother, to ask if she would approve the match.

It was not until Martha left Stella, left the water’s edge, and had
got to know the café people, that she was able to compare and ask questions. For instance, why had ‘Matty’ never once come to life with Stella and her clan? Admittedly another imposed personality had, the hip-swinging sexually gallant girl-or rather, had until Stella rescued her from the necessity of it. And again, why had she not felt bad about leaving Stella, though Stella had not wanted her to leave? She had not let her down, as she was letting the café people down. And then there was Stella herself, the matriarchal boss of her knot of streets, among the body-proud, work-proud men who earned their wages by physical strength and who judged everyone by strength and their capacity for work-was Stella the only Boadicea among the masculine communities of the river’s edges? And then, there was this business of ‘the working classes’, of ‘socialism’, which, before she had crossed the river had not been what interested Martha.

The newspapers never stopped, not for a moment, informing the nation and the world that Britain, in the grip of red-handed socialists, was being ruined, was being turned into a place of serfs without individuality or initiative and rotted by ease-in the tone of some pamphleteer at work while heads rolled under the guillotine. So irrelevant were these newspapers to anything she found she could not believe that anyone read them seriously, nor that anyone could be paid enough to write them. For what she had found on the other side of the river, let alone in the streets around the café and around the docks, was something not far off conditions described in books about the thirties. What had changed, that the public opinion men (who presumably believed what they wrote) could so write? Were Stella and her people poor? Very. They were better off, they said; but thêir demands were small and had not grown larger. Were Iris and Jimmy poor, though they owned their café on mortgage and ate well? Very: they expected so little. These were all people who had no right to expect much. Had the editors and journalists never met Iris and Jimmy and Stella, did they know nothing of what they could find out by getting on to a bus, crossing the river, and living for a week or so with Stella or with Iris? It seemed not. It was not credible-but no. But to read the newspapers, absorb the tone of the editorializing of that time-it was unreal, afflicted her with a sense of dislocation. And this was her real preoccupation, what absorbed her: this was a country absorbed in myth, doped and dozing and dreaming, because if there was one
common fact or factor underlying everything else, it was that nothing was as it was described-as if a spirit of rhetoric (because of the war?) had infected everything, made it impossible for any fact to be seen straight. Nor would she, had she not by chance crossed the river some weeks before (during one of the looping bus-rides she had taken around, across, through, and over London-by the simple device of getting on buses and staying on them till they returned to their starting points) and stayed with first Stella and then Iris, now be able to pick up a newspaper or listen to the radio without feeling as if she were in the middle of the Russian revolution, or something not far from it in cataclysmic thoroughness. She would not have been able to hold on to the simple fact that, in essence, nothing much had changed in this country-you had only to listen to the people in the docks and in the café to know it hadn’t … which was why more than any other person it must be Phoebe, Marjorie’s sister, that she should telephone-when? Today. Yes.

The tide was out. Gulls squawked in their sea voices over the low marsh of water between smelling mud banks in search, not of fish in these polluted waters, but of refuse. White preened wings balanced over diluted chemical, between grey cement walls that held such a weight of building. And it was so ugly, so ugly: what race was this that filled their river with garbage and excrement and let it run smelling so evilly between the buildings that crystallized their pride, their history. Except-she could not say that now, she was here, one of them; and to stay. It was time she crossed the river. But it was hard to leave it. But she must leave it. She came so often to lean with elbows on damp concrete looking down at ebbing or racing or swelling or lurking waters because here she was able to feel most strongly-what she had been before she had left ‘home’ to come ‘home’. In a street full of strangers, on the top of a bus in a part of London all barren little houses and smoking chimneys-who was she? Martha? Certainly not ‘Matty’. She became lightheaded, empty, sometimes dizzy. But by the river, looking down at the moving water, she was connected still with-a feeling of being herself. She was able to see herself as if from a hundred yards up, a tiny coloured blob, among other blobs, on top of a bus, or in a street. Today she could see herself, a black blob, in Mrs. Van’s coat, a small black blob beside a long grey parapet. A tiny entity among swarms: then down, back inside herself, to stand.
arms on damp concrete: this was what she was, a taste or flavour of existence without a name. Who remembered. Who noted. And not much more.

A stranger last week had said: ‘What’s your name? ’ Her mind dizzying, Martha had said: Phyllis Jones. For an afternoon and an evening she had been Phyllis Jones, with an imaginary history of war-time work in Bristol. And just as it was enough to offer to Stella phrases like ‘the sun is overhead at midday’ to evoke for her all the stimulation of a new country, so now it did not matter she had never been to Bristol, even when talking about it to a man who knew it well. Enough to say: Ships, terraces, and Yes, I know so and so, I’ve been to so and so. In such a conversation she was just as much Phyllis Jones as she was Martha with Stella. People filled in for you, out of what they wanted, needed, from-not you, not you at all, but from their own needs. Phyllis Jones, a young widow with a small boy, an object of great interest and compassion to Leslie Haddon, a clerk from Bristol, a man uncomfortably married and in search of a ‘congenial female companion’ - spoke through Martha’s mouth for some hours, until, pleading maternal duties and an inviolable memory of her dead husband, she left him in the pub. And left Phyllis Jones. And-interesting this-a week later, when another stranger, had said, What’s your name, she had nearly offered Phyllis Jones, but it was the wrong name. This person, a woman on a train, was wrong for Phyllis Jones, did not evoke her. So Martha had been someone called Alice Harris instead. Why not?

For a while at least. What difference did it make to her, the sense of identity, like a silent statement ‘I am here’, if she were called Phyllis or Alice, or Martha or Matty; or if her history were this or that? But for a while only. Because she knew that ringing up Phoebe was not only because now she must earn money, and become responsible to her fellow human beings. Something (a sense of self-preservation?) could not tolerate much longer her walking and riding and talking the time away under this name or that, this disguise or that; calling strange identities into being with a switch of clothes or a change of voice-until one felt like an empty space without boundaries and it did not matter what name one gave a stranger who asked: What is your name? Who are you?

Martha crossed the river, left it, moved among streets that looked as if they had just survived an earthquake, and came to the rubble of damage left by the bomb that had fallen on St Paul’s. To Iris,
‘where the bomb fell across the river’. She had been to visit the scene the day after. So had Stella and some of her men. City workers emerged everywhere from doorways, hurried off to buses and tubes. This day was ending-and where was she going to sleep tonight? Another telephone box, orangy-pink and faded, stood ahead. She went into it, to ring Phoebe. Soon, on the pile of telephone books, there were bits of paper with telephone numbers on them-Phoebe’s among them. And the café’s number. If she rang there now, saying, even as Martha, ‘I’m coming back tonight, ’ Jimmy or Iris would say: ‘You’re coming back then, are you? ’ And she would walk in, and, after a moment to judge whether she brought pain with her, a snub, they would smile. Extraordinarily kind they were; kindness was stronger than their anxious need to hold, to keep.