Four Gated City (65 page)

‘I can see you are going, Martha. I’m sorry, believe me. But I would like you to let me tell you about the house …’

She sat down. She could feel his will relax. He began speaking in a soft, considered voice about how he had slowly paid for, acquired the house, done it up-but he did not say where the money had come from. He said: ‘I let that part of the house until I had the money to do it up and then … I want to tell you about that room you saw-you liked it, I could see you did. Well, I did that room for Jeanne. I never knew what to do with it. She is from the Loire. She came to London as an au
pair
girl. And her mother worked in one of those châteaux. When Jeanne was a girl she used
to go up with her mother to help her work, she was a charwoman. Jeanne had always dreamed of a room like that. I made it for her.’

‘Did she live in it? Where did she live?’

He waited a little. Not looking at her, but missing nothing of any reaction she had, he went on:’ She isn’t here. She came here to visit. But that was her room-you understand me, Martha?’

‘Yes. I do.’ And again talking to the old Jack, she said smiling:’ Well if you decorate a room afresh for every woman you sleep with-’

But he was listening for something else: a theatrically humble smile appeared on his face, and he said:’ Believe me, Martha, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do, nothing, for any woman I love-you know that. But it’s not what I want, that women should just come and go, I want any women I have to stay with me for ever, you know that.’

He was looking at her direct now, willing her to come over to him. She did not want to, but she did. He sat on the bottom of the bed. She remembered sitting there before; and he had sat where he was now. He could not suppress a smile of pleasure that she had come: and it was a smile of triumphant pleasure, like a small boy who has been allowed to get his way. He began talking, slowly, about the room and Jeanne. He was watching every one of her reactions. He described Jeanne, slowly, with details of every asset, visible and invisible. Once he would have described a girl with a need to share his pleasure in her beauty. But now it was to rouse Martha. Knowing this, watching and listening, she was roused. He went on to describe the exact use of various pieces of furniture in the room downstairs; and how Jeanne, at first reluctantly, then with pleasure, took part in this or that posture or pursuit on sofa, footstool or table.

Martha, manipulated and watching herself being manipulated, was waiting. She was waiting (as she realized afterwards) for the’real’ Jack to come back, so that they could return to where they had left off. She was waiting for him to begin the slow ritual of rousing by atmosphere, eye, tension. But he went on talking about Jeanne, with breasts so and so, crotch so and so, armpits thus. And then about another girl, Olive. And slowly the geography of the house, in terms of sexual fantasy, was mapped. For instance there was a hexagonal room on the ground floor, with six alcoves or niches. He imagined that six naked girls (‘all of them of their own
accord, Martha, believe me, there’d be no pleasure in it otherwise’) were chained in the alcoves. Then a specially-trained Alsatian dog would lick the girls into sexual excitement. Meanwhile he stood watching: he would be fully dressed. Then, at last, he would undress, and, fondling the dog, he would allow the girls to beg for him. He imagined how they would scream and cry and plead. He might or might not comply. ‘I might just walk away smiling. Imagine it, Martha-me, quite naked, walking away with the dog, while they screamed and called me filthy names.’

Time was going fast towards morning. He, no doubt, continued to live without reference to the clock. But she would have to be back home before morning. She slid into bed with Jack at that point when she understood that he had forgotten what he had been, that this was what he was.

Now she knew in what way he had changed. He had become cruel, hard, driving; all domination and hurt.

It was like being with a man she had not known before.

It was like an endurance test. On her side:
how much can I stand
? On his:
how much can Iget her to stand
?

When it was nearly morning, she said she must go. He did not ask when she was coming back. Instead he talked, watching her with an almost theatrical cunning (so obvious that it confused her) of another girl, of how she liked this and that, and how she, this girl, had come to see that he. Jack, was right in insisting on her submission to this or that whim of his.

Before she left she asked:’ Jack, do you ever make love the way you used to-do you remember?’

He studied her in his new sideways sly way which was at the same time open, meant to be seen. He was trying to work out what she meant. He had forgotten.

‘I’ve always liked it with you, Martha, you know that.’

‘Yes but-you’re different. Did you know that?’

In his new manner of mingled arrogance and humility he said:’ There’s always new things to learn.’

‘No I didn’t mean … oh well, perhaps I’m different too.’ She said this to be able to slide away from the subject, but now he was alerted and alarmed. ‘Oh no, you’re not, believe me you’re not!’ He was genuinely upset at the idea that she might think she was different. This confused her again.

‘Do you mean, you’re different because you’re older? I don’t care
about that. You don’t know me if you think that matters to me. Oh, if only you’d trust me.’

He was almost weeping-that was genuine.

She left along the resurrected street as the sun came up red beyond the canal.

She had no idea at all what to think. Except for one thing, that Jack of ten years ago and Jack now were not the same person. But really not, literally not. What did that mean? She did not know.

And she knew that what had taken place with him, in his house, which was an elaborate stage or setting for fantasies of perverse sex, had nothing to do with the other electric tension she carried from Mark. Yet both were called’sex’.

She had gone to Jack because of a restless drive she had got from Mark, who had brought it up from the basement, where Lynda was ill. But Jack was not on that wavelength. She was physically tired, physically satisfied. She was also as alert and alive as a high tension wire and might just as well never have gone to Jack.

So, then, it was of no use going to see Jack again. She decided she would not go. But she went. For one thing, if a woman goes to bed with a man then certain psychological rules start working, things have to play themselves out. A development or aspect of these rules was the process unrolling itself of his needing to see how far she would go, of her waiting to see how far she would go: it was an aspect of male-command-and-female-submission.

Besides, when she went away from him, it was always with the same thought: where is Jack? She would think: I must be imagining that he is like this now. For she could remember so very clearly what he had been. Or she would think the opposite: I must be inventing what he was ten years ago. But she knew she hadn’t invented it. Once he had been all a subtle physical intelligence. Now he had become stupid. Now his body was entirely a servant to a kind of cunning, which needed to get a woman under its will, in order to degrade her-but degrade her morally. It was an absolutely clear process, without ambiguity. He needed that his mind, his will, using the clumsiest of techniques for interesting, then arousing a woman, should bring her physically into a position where she had to submit to bullying. But the point was not the physical bullying at all-she could swear that was not what interested him. It was the breaking down that got her there which he needed. The need for this was what he had become.

One was able to watch while he used a kind of clumsy psychological technique to raise one’s sexual and emotional temperature. The point was, other women must watch too: only a very stupid woman or an inexperienced one could remain unaware of what he was doing.

Or half aware; it was his clumsiness, the theatricalness of it, that was confusing. She could swear that all those years ago he had been neither theatrical nor cunning.

For all those years, while Martha had been in Mark’s house, jack had been here, creating a house which was like a perverted millionaire’s brothel, and sitting like a spider while women came and went.

Also, of course, he had been ill. Very ill. His painfully thin body, which had always frightened him, had put him into bed for months in a sanatorium, and for months in the bare-boarded black-windowed room on the first floor of his house.

Jack said that she, Martha, had not changed at all. He needed to believe this. When he repeated and insisted that she had not, it was the only time that he had been straightforward, non-theatrical, not playing games-with her, or with himself.

It was probable that some time while he had been ill the old Jack had simply died, or gone away, and this new person had walked in and taken possession.

Chapter Four

Easter Monday. Knightsbridge. Four, five abreast, they came past, under the black and white banners, the black-on-white posters, escorted by darkly-uniformed policemen. Banners, pennants, symbols, pamphlets, broadsheets, badges, said what they said in white and black. For the rest, this crowd shambled along in variegated colour. They had been passing for three hours-impressive. From above, television helicopters had seen in England’s hedgy landscape a road along which wound a moving column of little people five miles long, and had hovered low to make the most of this ‘national’ phenomenon, just as reporters making estimates had put them high, at twelve thousand, rather than low, at six thousand, the ungenerous figure. The publicity people were making the most, rather than the least. Why? It would be easy to say ‘nothing succeeds like success’; unless of course one chose to remember the original aim of the March which was not only to put an end to war conducted by means of nuclear weapons; but to put an end to nuclear weapons; to put an end to war.

Also, these impressive figures (more probably somewhere in the middle, at eight thousand, rather than twelve, or six) were not so impressive when one remembered that any communist or a Labour Party May Day Parade might attract five, eight, ten thousand people; but these figures were usually lowered by unsympathetic editing to ‘a few hundred’ if the Marches were mentioned at all: which thought naturally led one to speculations about the nature, not only of ‘news’ but of facts.

For there was no doubt that to have been ‘on’ a March unmentioned by the Press or television was a very different experience from this one, where for the whole of the Easter holiday one could count on all newspapers and the television programmes ‘covering’ the March.

Not only that; it was a different kind of a fact altogether, reading
a column of print which began:’ The Aldermaston Marchers set out today in sun/fog/snow/rain, two/three/four/five thousand strong …’ horn seeing a picture of several thousand people under the magpie-coloured banners; as different again as from walking several miles in procession under this or that set of banners without seeing a word of it mentioned afterwards in a newspaper or photographed on to a television screen.

There were some among this crowd who had been walking across this or that part of the British Isles under banners for decades. Sometimes these walks, or excursions, had been public facts, like The Hunger Marches; some had remained almost private, like a nice ramble among friends.

From time to time, people in crowds feel impelled to express feelings of one sort or another by marching in company along roads to some goal, carrying devices and banners: the Crusaders (to stretch time a little) of course, had no other means of locomotion but their own feet, or horses. But feelings about the use of nuclear energy for destruction were not expressed by rushing across continents in express trains, or circling the globe in jets, or even by driving an automobile across countries, but by putting one foot after another across earth. Strange that. Suppose none of these people had read about those earlier Marches, the Crusades? Or about the pilgrimages to holy places, on foot, across landscapes? Would they, we, still be putting one foot before the other across earth to say: Down With … or Ban the … or More Money for … Well, yes, it seems more than likely. To move from one point to another on one’s feet, as a means of expressing communal feeling about something or other seems basic.

In other parts of Britain on that Easter Monday, groups of young people, mostly young men, were engaged in violently rushing from place to place, in gangs, either on motor-bikes, or on their feet, but what they were for or against was not clearly stated or understood. They, too, were reported widely, given, in fact, as much as or more space than Peace Marches-for homosexuality had dropped out of the spotlight of Morality, and had been succeeded by Teenage Violence.

Most of these people on this March were teenagers … probably three-quarters. Some of them were violent. To move fast along the March, from the back to the front, or to stand still and let it flow past one, was to feel oneself in a sort of river, sometimes quiet,
sometimes tumultuous. In parts it ran fast-violent; people shouted slogans, and generated anger; the temperature was high. A few minutes later it ran quiet again. Those, by no means all teenagers, who needed the high temperature, were attracted to the parts of the column where the slogan-shouting and the aggressive singing took place. Others moved away to parts where people chatted, or sang indifferently. The fact was, the people on this March, united by the black and white banners, were extremely different from each other, had little in common except for the leaven of organizers.

This thought, like many others, was better kept quiet, or shared with a friend of one’s own age. Martha leaned against a tree waiting for Lynda who said she would be there. She waited, also, for Mark, who was bound to be at the end of the March. As usual he had nearly not come at all. The week before, by a coincidence, he had had two visits, one from an American, and one from a Hungarian, both under the impression that the well-known Marxist Mark Coldridge was a leading light in the anti-Bomb movement. Mark had tried to refer them both to his brother Arthur, but as everyone knows, writers are more attractive as exemplars than politicians. Why? To answer that means to answer why writers are employed by universities to give lectures on ‘creative writing’, when no creative writing ever comes out of this process. It means, being able to answer why writers are asked to give lectures at all. It means, to understand why writers …