Four Gated City (56 page)

When Francis came home for the holidays mother and son built up, slowly, a friendship. For they were like two very old friends who had been separated and were now allowed to be together. They were patient, tactful, considerate. For days, a week or so, a month, things would go well, then, suddenly, Lynda would be sitting stiffly, smiling too brightly, watching everything with a minute alertness, every gesture and smile and glance exposed overcarefully to everyone’s inspection, while they felt their exposure to her; and then Francis would become very pale, and go off to his room. There, he cried. As he had done as a little boy, he
cried now, and would descend, unashamed, to a meal with eyes that showed it. And Lynda, in her basement, cried.

Then, with the strain and the tension cried out, for both of them, they set themselves to try again.

In the two months since Mark came back from Moscow Paul had been-but words like better and worse seemed inapplicable. One of the experts consulted had said that the naughtier Paul was, the better: obedience, quietness, malleability, all these were bad. By this yardstick then, Paul was good, and Francis bad. Certainly Francis’s extreme good behaviour had always been upsetting-but could not this also be a form of self-protection, a guard behind which Francis quietly grew and prospered? But Francis’s manner, his way of life, discouraged such questions, particularly when always and all the time there was Paul who took up so much time, so much emotional energy. Judged by what he was demanding from the adults, he was much worse. He was abominable.

When Mark came back from Moscow he had for a time not mentioned the gramophone records-he felt ashamed, on his brother’s behalf. Then Martha and he and Lynda sat trying to work out whether a present of gramophone records and a vague invitation to drop over to Moscow were better than nothing or the ultimate in cruelty. The discussion, the uncertainty, went on for some days. Whatever effect it all had on Paul remained doubtful, but for the three the incident highlit their condition at that time. Outside, everything was so jolly and easy and liberal, tides of happy warriors flowed in and out of the house, a friendly optimism was the atmosphere; yet this was a world in which they, at least, felt that it might very well be a better education to say: My dear Paul, you, like everyone else, are expendable, and you are lucky to get even a message from your father-after all, so many people’s fathers are dead. And compared with nine-tenths of the world’s population you have nothing whatsoever to complain about … Instead, careful, insightful adults sat around, talking, planning, worrying about the balance and health of this tiny favoured few.

Should one be thinking like this at all? Oh, very probably not. How was one to know? And, feeling themselves to be in an air, or on a wavelength, at any rate differently orientated to the world than as other people seemed to experience it, was it their responsibility to inflict this on Paul, on Francis? They should rather be protected? Even when one did not believe, not for one moment,
that their future experience was likely to be protected, or anything but precarious and violent!

The records were put in brown paper, and concealed while they waited for Paul to ask a question-after all, he knew Mark had been in Moscow. But Paul said nothing.

At last Mark went up to Paul’s room, where the television was now installed.

Paul had been watching a programme much too young for him, and had continued to watch it after he knew his uncle had come in.

‘Paul, there’s something I want to say …’

He had to repeat it, and then Paul turned off the programme.

‘What is it?’

‘I saw your father in Moscow.’

Not a word from Paul. He stared at the blank television screen.

‘He sent you these.’

Mark put the records on a table, and Paul glanced at them, nodded, and turned on the television again.

But he had been playing the folksongs ever since.

The house throbbed with recorded emotion; until the others were forced to wonder if he was saying to them: This is what I feel.

He did not mention Mark’s trip, or his father, or ask for any details of his father’s new life.

His schoolwork, always erratic, plunged again, and there was a letter from his teacher.

When he first got to this new school, he allowed himself to be brilliant, for as long as it took to demonstrate that he could come first any time he liked. Then he lost interest. He continued to say that the moment he was legally able to leave school, he would.

Mark thought that he should be forced to stay; Lynda that he should be allowed to leave. Meanwhile, Martha fought him.

But he tried to avoid battles with Martha: he liked to fight with Lynda, who got upset, who might shout at him-and then he could feel ill-treated.

Returning from any trip away from the house, Martha, Mark, would be met by Lynda’s guilt: she had quarrelled with Paul again.

This afternoon she said:’ Paul came down for a glass of milk.’ It sounded as if she were announcing crime.

‘Was he rude again?’

‘No. But I think I’ll go downstairs for supper after all. I tell you, one of these days I’m going to hit him so hard …’

‘Did he say anything about homework?’

Oh, Martha-who cares about homework! I never did any in my life!’

The kitchen was full of good warm smells; a cauldron of soup bubbled. A loaf of bread a yard long lay down the middle of the old table. Salad stood ready to mix. Mark often came in these days to say:’ This kitchen is like what it used to be …’ though of course in those days they never ate in the kitchen. And Mark would stand, waiting,
not
looking at Lynda, to see if she would stay for the meal, recreate the family, sit at the end of the table, serve soup. And,
not
looking at Mark, so often she went away. But she cooked. She cooked well and carefully and enjoyed it.

‘Did you say to Paul it didn’t matter?’

‘I always say to Paul it doesn’t matter. That’s what makes him angry.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘But, Martha, I don’t know what it is-1 simply want to-why do I dislike him so much now?’

Some months before, Lynda had been talking about an earlier time, when she had loved Paul, and Paul had spent so much time with her.

One afternoon there had been a violent quarrel between Dorothy and Lynda, with Paul there. Lynda and Paul had been in the bedroom, playing one of their fantastic games, words, music, silence, their images in the looking-glasses, all going to make up some story no outsider could understand. Dorothy was shut out, as always, because she was too matter-of-fact, she spoiled it. This game had gone on too long, or she was in a bad mood, but she had called out through the door that Lynda was forgetting-she was nothing but a child.

Apparently, Lynda had said to one of Dr Lamb’s subsidiaries that if she was good for nothing else, she knew how to be with children. The doctor had said:’ That’s because you are a child yourself; you feel safe with children. They don’t make any demands on you.’

Lynda had argued that this was true, she knew it; but surely it was worth something? The doctor had suggested it was a form of regression, a way of refusing to grow up.

At any rate, for a time every descent of Paul to the cellar had
called forth from Dorothy an attack on Lynda for being nothing-but-a-child.

She had never been able to feel easy and released with Paul after that-so she claimed now. She agreed she might be back-dating a nearer emotion.

But in the evening when Martha went down to visit, and Lynda talked about the children, she came back to this again and again-and stopped there. She fought with herself everywhere else but here, where it was as if there was a snarl or knot in her emotions. She hated Paul, and it was Dr X’s fault; she could not even remember the doctor’s name.

‘Martha do you know what I think? You and Mark had better be careful, I swear one of these days you’ll come back and find Paul and I have killed each other …” She lowered her voice, though her face was lit with a vicious enjoyment, glancing at the half-open door, where, as everyone knew, Paul so often stood to eavesdrop. ‘And there’s something else. I’d
love
it-and so would he. I’d like to kill him slowly, really nastily, you know. I never understood torture before, until Paul said to me, Lynda you’d like to torture me, wouldn’t you? And, of course, he is right. I’d enjoy every bit. There’s something about that sort of glossy, soiled look he’s got-you know, as if he had boils on his pretty bum, and he uses the pus to grease his hair? I’d like to suffocate him slowly with a pillow and watch him writhe, or throttle him, or … and he feels exactly the same about me …’ In the middle of this, which she delivered fast, in a low smiling bright-eyed monologue, she went across to the door, quite unconsciously, and closed it, in case someone might hear-she was protecting them, anyone, probably Paul from herself. ‘And do you know why? Oh it’s all quite obvious when you come to think of it, it’s because he’s so damned unhappy. He’s such a poor, sick creature, crippled-like me. Nobody can stand us. No one. That’s the truth, I tell you-what people really want to do is to blot us all out-the healthy would like to just take us all and … only there are so many of us, they can’t … sweep us all up and into the gas ovens, yes

‘Interesting when we come to define who is healthy, ’ said Martha in a flat, almost bored voice, which was the right voice to use when Lynda took off like this. So she had learned.

Lynda came back to herself, and stood, rather flushed, breathing
fast. ‘Well, ’ she said, ‘But for all that, there’s something in it, isn’t there? Are you coming down to talk after supper?’

‘If everyone goes off in time.’

‘Poor Martha, ’ said Lynda with a vague callousness, and her marvellous gay smile.‘But I know what you are thinking. You were thinking you ought to see that Graham didn’t get up to mischief with Jill and Gwen. Well, why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t they all? And why shouldn’t I torture Paul to death if… why not

She stopped as Francis came in with his friend Nick.

‘Are you having supper with us, Lynda?’ asked Francis.

‘No-I don’t think-not tonight … goodnight, dear …” She escaped. Francis, disappointed, made himself recover from it.

‘I’m going to see Paul, ’ said Martha. ‘Will you make sure there are enough places for everybody and tell them

‘I tell you something, Martha, if Paul’s rude to Nicky again I’m going to beat him up.’

‘After me, ’ said Nicky pleasantly.

He was a tall, light, graceful, English-looking boy, rather older than Francis, about seventeen. Never had anyone seen him angry, out of face, anything but calmly polite. However, as he talked of Paul his eyes narrowed in a quick relish of hate.

‘Oh dear, ’ said Martha, ‘everyone wants to beat up Paul this evening … half an hour Francis and we’ll eat.’

She went up the stairs, through a house separated with the people who inhabited it, into areas or climates, each with its own feel, or sense of individuality: Mark’s rooms, unmistakable, even with one’s eyes shut, even with sound shut oft, because of their atmosphere of something closed in, enduring, stubborn; Francis’s room, which was kept as it had been for years-a boy’s room, with cricket bats and butterflies in cases; Martha’s room, inside the sycamore’s microclimate which acted like a room-stat, adjusting from outside the house rather than in, setting the flow of air, moisture, heat, light; then Paul’s area. But even the flight of stairs that approached Paul’s floor emanated electric storm, for here not even silence, or sleep could be the quiet of peace. Even from the street, raising one’s eyes, one expected that the apertures of the third floor would shoot out a baleful blue ray, and was surprised to see a pair of neat and pretty windows, in the pattern of windows that opened the tall narrow house to the light.

On the flight that approached Paul’s room, one waited a moment,
took in breath and balance … what an extraordinary business it is, being a middle-aged person in a family; like being a kind of special instrument sensitized to mood and need and state. For, approaching Paul one needed this degree of attention; approaching Francis, that one; and for Lynda and for Mark, quite different switches or gauges set themselves going, but automatically. Not always automatically: on Paul’s stairs one paused to take in breath and balance knowing exactly why one did it.

And standing here, feeling herself (or rather, the surface of herself) to be a mass of fragments, or facets, or bits of mirror reflecting qualities embodied in other people, she looked at the ascending stairs, much narrower and steeper here than lower in the house, and at the edges of each stair, and noted that the carpet needed renewing. But it was not yet five years old … and the banisters of the stairs had had a bad quality varnish put on, which had gone thick and gluey, and needed to be scraped off and renewed. And the paint of the walls had streaked. But this part of the house had been redecorated three years before.

All the house was like this, nothing obviously breaking or peeling, but everywhere was shoddiness and shabbiness, and there seemed to be no centre in the house, nothing to hold it together (as there had been once when it was a real family house?). It was all a mass of small separate things, surfaces, shapes, all needing different attention, different kinds of repair. This was the condition of being a middle-aged person, a deputy in the centre of a house, the person who runs things, keeps things going, conducts a holding operation. It is a perpetual battle with details. Yet the house had been done up twice, thoroughly, since Martha had come into it-but still nothing was right, everything second rate and shoddy. This was the real truth of what went on not only here but everywhere; everything declined and frayed and came to pieces in one’s hands … a mass of fragments, like a smashed mirror. She opened the door on a television din. Men fought all over the screen and guns blasted her ears. Paul saw her and turned the machine at once over to a small child’s programme. He sat down again in his chair, with his back to her. He sulked, vividly and, as it were, professionally. He wore kingfisher colours, and his room, in extreme disorder, with small areas where objects and articles were displayed precisely, was all violent colour. Examined, the bones or frame of the room were plain, down-to-earth chairs, beds,
cupboards. But the things he collected were always shining and brilliant. And he collected all the time, from school, from markets, in barter with friends. He seldom came home without some trinket or cushion or bit of silk.