Four Gated City (50 page)

‘But that isn’t all she is, Francis.’

He was searching her face, leaning forward to do it.

‘And she didn’t choose to be.’

‘I can’t help that, can I? If Paul had gone down in that uniform … Lynda would have thought it was funny wouldn’t she?’

‘Lynda didn’t like you in that uniform?’

‘I don’t think she likes it. But if Paul had it, they’d make a game of it.’

‘Yes, but then Paul isn’t her son.’ She insisted on this; she leaned forward, offering her face to his gaze, to emphasize it.

‘I think I make her worse, ’ he said, very pale. It seemed that he felt sick. He went to the window for air.

‘Well, why don’t you try for a bit-give her a chance?’

‘All right, ’ he said.‘But just for the holidays.’

For three weeks then, Francis tried. And so did Lynda. Francis did not like Dorothy; Lynda therefore asked Dorothy not to be there when Francis came down. This went so far as asking Dorothy to have engagements for the evening; to go for a walk, or to the cinema. There were frightful scenes between the women: they could be heard screaming at each other. There were the sounds of tears and of things breaking.

Francis would come up to Martha, and sit watching her face, as
if the pressure of his misery would force her into a comment that could dissolve the knot, make it vanish.

‘I think you’d do right to stick it out, ’ said Martha.

‘All right, I will.’

When Mark came home, Francis stayed a little, transferring his acute, wry gaze to the face which was so like his own, and. like his own, a guard against emotion. After a while he made an excuse to go to his room.

One evening, when Mark was not there, he came to Martha’s room carrying a large book. This he spread out on a table, and he stood beside it, turning the pages. She went to stand by him. It was a book of blank pages in which there were press cuttings and his photographs.

He wanted her to look: she turned the pages to see.

‘You subscribe to a press cuttings service?’

‘Yes.’

‘For how long?’

‘Since it all started.’

They began in 1949. Page after page of the great book was filled with what the newspapers had said about Mark, during the bad time. There was nothing there that wasn’t painful: and for a small boy, reading about his father, it was not possible to imagine the cumulative effect of the thing. Martha was shocked-she was not able to take it all in at once. She sat down, lit a cigarette and it was her turn to look helplessly at him, waiting for aid.

Meanwhile he stood turning the pages. He still wanted her to look. As she did not get up, he took the book to her, to spread it open in her lap, at the last filled pages, the reviews of the recent book, which he had pasted in under his heading:
The Indian Summer of a Tory Hostess
. Under that he had put a sub-heading: My Grandmother.

These reviews were those which said, for the most part, that Mark was out of tune with his times, reactionary, and so on.

‘Has my father changed his mind?’

‘What about, Francis?’

‘About communism?’

‘I don’t think his mind has changed-what he thinks. What he feels has, though.’

He looked inquiringly at her.

‘But he’s not a communist now?’

‘He never was.’

He took the book away, closed it tidily together, and sat on the foot of her bed, looking out at the tree. The old black cat, too large for a narrow lap, curled by him. The cat was the same age as Francis: taken into the household when he was born. It was Francis’s cat. He stroked the cat with one hand, and looked forlorn.

‘Your father loved his brother, ’ said Martha.

‘I don’t understand it, ’ said Francis flatly.

Martha now suffered that violent emotional surrender that is imposed when the young take possession of one’s past, nullify it, if you like: or at least, jerk it out of the shape it has had.

She rejected: There is no reason at all why you should, and said mildly:’ Mark is rather consistent really: he has always followed his Own line-there’s an emotional logic in it. What changes is the-
Zeitgeist
, whatever word you want.’

‘Well,
yes
, ’ he said, violently.‘But it’s just a bloody
joke
.’

‘It could very easily have not been a joke, ’ she said, warning, out of her knowledge, the knowledge of her generation as to what is possible. But he looked at her vaguely, this not being remotely his point, and after a while, took up the book,
the case for the prosecution
, as Martha called it to herself in a sad private joke, and went out with it.

Next day, due to go back to his school, he said he wanted them to make a list of schools that were neither public schools, nor ‘aggressively’ progressive.

He also said that he would be coming home for the holidays in the future. ‘I’ll have to some time, I suppose, ’ he said, in his forlorn way of outlining his position.‘But I can’t go to a day school. I can only take this in small doses. It’s too much of a good thing.’

That he was able to talk like this, comparatively open, and straight, showed what the short period of the holiday had done in bringing him towards Paul’s openness.

Francis then, went back for his last term at Eton.

And Paul came home, since his school’s holidays were starting. He had spent nearly a month, either sitting on his bed, or defying authority by stalking around the school as if he were entitled to, and going to meals. He had not gone to classes-but then, at that school children did not have to, though all did, except at moments of crisis like this; and he had insisted on going to the school church services, which were a kind of amalgam of a dozen different
Christian sects conducted by a teacher. He had never gone near these religious exercises before, but during that month he had not missed one. The school was not likely to have failed to see his message to them. He came home, since the holidays began; and everyone was going home. He had not been expelled; and, although ‘asked to leave’ could say that he had not left.

However, he was not going back; he knew that sooner or later he had to go to another school.

He was in a mood of violent, electric aggression. The school, his home, was no longer there for him: it had let him down, or so he felt it. And he had heard through the bush telegraph that links the young from school to school, that Francis had been home for all the holidays: which he had not done once before.

As soon as he arrived, Paul went down to the basement to see Lynda. He found her in bed with a migraine. She was hardly able to speak. Paul understood it very well. He shrieked at her:’ All right then, I hate you, I hate you too!’ And he rushed back upstairs to lock himself in his room.

Lynda went on being ill. She was not more ill than she was very often: but Dorothy, who felt betrayed and sacrificed to Francis, would not help her. Previously, when Lynda was ill, Dorothy nursed her, suffered with her, sat by her: now Dorothy made a demonstration of having many things to do.

Lynda, for whom Francis’s presence had been a torture of ineffective guilty love, and who had tried harder than she had ever done over anything in her life, had been longing for the moment when he would go back to his school. But she told Martha that she was happier than she had ever been. She knew that because Francis was trying too, was no longer treating her and the basement as forbidden territory, ‘unclean, like lepers’ - she could learn to be with him, not to feel ill, not to be upset. Next holidays, she felt, things would be much better. Now she needed to rest.

And she did not have the energy for Paul. She was sacrificing Paul, her playmate, for her son; she was quite clearminded about it. And when Paul, after remaining in his room for a couple of days, descending secretly at night to get food, retreating before he could be met and talked to, rushed down again to the basement to storm and entreat and accuse, she simply locked her bedroom door and pulled the covers over her head.

A few days after Paul came home, Lynda crept out of the house
one morning, went to Dr Lamb, and demanded to be put back into a hospital. If he didn’t do this, she said, she thought she would probably kill Dorothy. She did not want to go back to the hospital she had been in before: she wanted to save Mark expense. An ordinary State hospital would do. She went straight to the hospital from Dr Lamb’s office; and Martha sent on some clothes. Dorothy was in a heap of misery in the basement, in a kind of breakdown of her own.

It became evident that it was Lynda who had supported Dorothy; not what they had imagined, that Dorothy kept Lynda together. At any rate, Dorothy who had had a job, had kept her sad gentlemen dangling, and from time to time considered marrying her co-manager, now stayed in the basement, for the most part in bed.

Martha and Mark, descending to the basement, met, not a unit of two women guarding their precarious balances, but Dorothy, voluble, betrayed, vindictive.

All kinds of things were made clear. For one thing, drugs. In the last year Lynda had given up drugs. She had made a decision that if she couldn’t do without them, there was no point in living. For living with the drugs the hospital gave her, the sleeping pills, the sedatives, the pep-pills and the rest, meant that she was never ‘herself. ‘It is not that they are habit-forming, it is just that one can’t do without them, ’ explained Dorothy, in the sour humour that was the note of the basement when it was ‘well’ as distinct from ‘ill’ and violent. Giving them up, Lynda had slept badly, been frail and on edge: she had gone back to them, several times, and had again given them up. Into this battle had come Francis’s determination to reclaim his mother and his home. Still Lynda had not gone back to the chemicals. Then the conflict over Paul: she loved Paul, but had to betray him. Dorothy, betrayed, was urging her back on drugs. Dorothy could not do without them. At first she had aided Lynda, supported her: she, Dorothy, was not strong enough for this battle, but if Lynda could be … then, she switched, and Lynda found boxes of pills everywhere she went, put there by Dorothy who knew her every weakness, the exact moments when she was most vulnerable, Dorothy was taking more drugs, larger doses. Living with Lynda inside a cocoon of drug-induced euphoria, or lethargy, was one thing, but quite another, when Lynda was shrill, sleepless and jumpy. At any rate, drugs had been
the battleground where their many accumulated differences had been fought out.

Dorothy did not want to stay without Lynda. She asked Dr Lamb to send her to the same hospital; Dr Lamb thought otherwise. For one thing, Lynda did not want it. Dorothy visited Lynda in the hospital, but Lynda, inside a drug-created calm, would hardly speak to her.

Dorothy saw, or felt she did, that Lynda wished to be rid of her. She was convinced that the household wished to be rid of her.

From time to time she came up the stairs, in her dressing-gown, and shouted, or remarked, or wheedled, according to her mood, saying that they all wished her to go.

They reassured her; but the truth was, of course, they did.

They were having to keep Paul away from her, and her away from Paul. She had been heard screaming at him that he was a ‘Jewish brat’.

Paul said:’ She’s jealous because I live here and she doesn’t.’

But he was talking of a woman who had been a kind of mother to him, while Lynda had been playmate. His school had gone; Lynda had gone; now Dorothy called him names.

The young take precedence: if Dorothy was going to ‘upset’ Paul, then…

About a month after Lynda went into hospital, Dorothy slashed her wrists, to an adequately alarming depth; and was taken off to another hospital, not Lynda’s.

Meanwhile, a conversation with Paul.

The direction of this had in fact been indicated by Dorothy. Living with the mentally ‘upset’ is a lesson in our own splits, discords, contradictions. No one was more intelligent about Paul than Dorothy, provided he was not in the same room. She had said:’ What you’ve got to make him see is, he’s not entitled to get away with it. Otherwise he’s going to be ever so surprised to find himself in prison.’

Martha:’ When the term starts you’ve got to start school.’

Paul: ‘I don’t want to.’

Martha:’ It’s the law.’

Paul: ‘I shall stay here. I don’t want to go to that school.’ (Paul had been accepted by the local council school.)

Martha:’ If you had listened to what we said, if you had believed it, you’d still be at your own school.’

Paul:’ If I promised not to do it again, would they take me?’

Martha:’ No. It’s too late.”

Paul: ‘I don’t want to go to school any more, why should I?’

Martha:’ You’ve got to go to school for at least another three years. That’s the law. I didn’t make the law. Your uncle didn’t make the law. The law is, you must go to school until you are fifteen. Are you listening, Paul?’

He wore a scarlet jersey and tight black pants. He sat huddled in a big chair under the kitchen window, on the defence, clutching the bars of the chair and looking over them at her.

Martha:’ If you aren’t listening then you are being as stupid as when you didn’t listen about your school. We said exactly what would happen-but you didn’t believe it. You’d better believe it

He was grinding his teeth and hating her: great, forlorn, black eyes stared at the cruel world, at Martha. But he was, she thought, listening.

Martha:’ If you weren’t in this house, if you weren’t Mark’s nephew, privileged, one of the privileged ones, it would be Borstal, police courts. But you are privileged. You’ve got some leeway. But not much. If you refuse to go to school, then you’ll hang about here a little, and then the officials will start coming. The machinery will go into motion. Once it is in motion, then-you’d better think about it. For you it wouldn’t be Borstal and children’s officers. It would be psychiatrists and a school chosen because you are special. Well, if you want that, you can have it.’

Paul sat twisted, gripping the bars of the chair with both hands, and his long look at her was both full of hate, and masked with cunning.

Once in the zoo Martha had seen a baboon, with its back to the people, squatting on the floor, rubbing something on the cement. Scrape, scrape, went the object it held. Mark joked:’ He’s sharpening a stone.’