Four Gated City (80 page)

Martha sat, or gently walked; she was listening, receptive, waiting. And Lynda sat on the carpet, swaying, sometimes humming or crooning, nursery songs mostly, and sometimes silent. The two took no notice of each other at all.

Martha could easily hear what Lynda was thinking. Being more sensitive now, by far, than normally, she heard better: normally she could hear an odd phrase, or a key word, or a sentence or two, summarizing what was going on in somebody’s head: now it was not far off being inside Lynda’s head, for the jumble of connected words and phrases linked together by past experience, which is how we ‘think’, most of the time (a mechanical association of notions, like strings of sausages), this stream ran through her mind beside her own stream, or sometimes displaced it. Lynda was
thinking not of the present, but of what her life would have been if she had not got ill-had not (Martha heard the words) ‘been so silly as to tell what I know’. Lynda was thinking, not violently, or even with grief, but dispassionately, how she would have liked to grow up quietly in the country, with brothers and sisters, and a simple relationship with parents, and then to marry a farmer, or a gardener, and have a large family. It was a fantasy so plain and wholesome, like Nanny Butts’s butter cake, so divorced from anything that happened now, that it had the effect of making Lynda seem capricious and spoiled, as if she had said: ‘I want to live in a marzipan house.’ And then her thoughts ran on Mark: if only Mark had not sent her to the doctor, if only Mark had trusted her-and then, earlier than that, if only her father had not made her see the doctor, and if only she, Lynda, had not said what she knew, if only she had known enough then to keep quiet…

Behind these rivulets of words was a great chaos of sound. Martha could just hear it. She thought, or wondered: is it in Lynda’s head or in mine? And, with a shock of impatience against her own obtuseness (for surely she had been here often enough not to have to ask, or wonder): well, of course, it is not a question of ‘Lynda’s mind’, or ‘Martha’s mind’; it is the human mind, or part of it, and Lynda, Martha, can choose to plug in or not. Which she had known, had known well-this business of charting the new territory meant a continual painful effort of discovery, of trying to understand, to link, to make sense, and then falling back again, ‘forgetting’; and then an effort forward again—a baby trying to walk, that was what she was; but surely there was no need for it, it was inefficient, for obviously it was not possible that Lynda, Martha, were the only two people who tried to make maps of these territories. It must be a question of looking for, and finding, the right guides.

It was as if a million radio sets ran simultaneously, and her mind plugged itself in fast to one after another, so that words, phrases, songs, sounds, came into audition and then faded. The jumble and confusion were worse when she allowed the current that pumped through her to get out of control, to rise and jerk and flood; the sea of sound became more manageable as she held herself quiet and contained. Yet even so, it was all she could do to hold on; Martha rode the current, a small boat on a fast river, or a tiny aircraft in a storm, her own body bucking and rolling under her; and words,
shrieks, gunfire, explosions, sentences, came in, faded, or stayed. When something stayed then it, they, might develop or grow loud and accumulate around it other words, sounds, phrases, of the same kind or texture, like a bit of metal attracting to it particles of substances of a certain nature, so that a word, ‘bread’ proliferated into the phrase ‘bread of life’, burst into a pure high song like a thrust, from the Ninth Symphony, then jangled into banality with
You can’t have bread with one meat ball
, gave snatches of recipes for loaves as they were once made on a hearth, leered, jeered, threatened, on a wavelength of mockery, until suddenly-while Martha understood (again) how the words, phrases, sounds, came in from that sound-length in an exact relation to some mood or impulse in herself (as faint and as fleeting as you like) she realized that she was being taken over; she was taken over because she had allowed herself to become frightened. Her whole body, organism, vibrated, shook, was being shattered to bits, by the force with which the sea of sound entered her. Her head was a jar, a bedlam; but, as she was about to cry out, scream, let go of control, perhaps bang her rioting head against the walls, she looked at Lynda sitting quiet on her part of the carpet, and remembered that some days before, during Lynda’s long progress around and around the walls, she had remarked: ‘I must get through the sound barrier. Here is the sound barrier. I must get through it.’ As Martha remembered Lynda saying this, Lynda said, ‘You can, but it’s difficult. If you let it take over, then it is hard to make it go away again. Be careful.’ These words threw Martha first into a panic; then, as she flung herself down on the floor beside Lynda, thinking that it was not possible to ‘get through’ and that she was doomed forever to be shattered by sounds as powerful as pneumatic drills at work inside her brain, her whole person, apparently on the point of explosion and shaking and trembling, resisted the invasion, clenched itself in self-defence, and held, contained, gripped tight, calmed. Martha dropped off to sleep suddenly, totally, but probably not for more than a few moments, the space of some heartbeats. When she woke, or came to, her body was rested and her mind back at that point where it was soft and clear and listening, with the ocean of sound a low retreating booming noise safely far away.

She rested, face down on the carpet, eyes closed, her mind empty, as if she rocked on long waves inside a reef beyond which crashed the roaring sea.

Resting, refusing to admit the sea of sound, she saw that the small moving pictures ran before her eyes. Was it then that when in this heightened condition one was closer to, or vulnerable to that more perceptive or intelligent place in oneself that (who?) could communicate through sound, or through the small moving pictures, or. if one was in a phase of sleeping well and alertly, dreams? Was it that something that needed, that
had
to get itself communicated simply found, like water, the easiest channel through the lump of incomprehension which was Martha in her daylight or normal condition?

Lynda said: ‘I keep trying to find people who know but I haven’t yet. But they must be somewhere.’

She was humming lightly to herself.
How many miles to Babylon
?
Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight
?
Yes, and back again
. These lines seemed full of information, just beyond Martha’s reach, but which she would one day be able to grasp. Meanwhile, before her eyes were displayed gardens rising vertically in receding banks till the plumes of fountains moved among moving white cloud; and water fell, trickled, ran, splashed, sang. She smelled sun on wet foliage.

Now Martha saw Lynda in a pale shaggy coat sitting in a kind of tea-room or self-service place, opposite a fattish, smiling Indian gentleman.

‘I can see you with an Indian in a restaurant, ’ said Martha.

Oh, yes, that’s right. It must be the flower guru, you know, he was here. I heard of him through all those books, you know. I met him in a Lyons. He kept sitting there smiling and saying God is Love. And I kept saying yes I’m sure that’s true-because I don’t feel people like us have the right to talk about God, Martha.’

Martha, watching this scene and not wanting it to be shaken away by her speaking, said nothing.

‘He gave me a large pink rose and he said, “This is Love.” So I put it in my frock.’

‘No you didn’t, you sat holding it in your hand, ’ said Martha, speaking in a fast monotone, to keep the scene steady.

Oh. did I? I thought I-then I said, “I don’t know anything about love. Other people have to look after me. I’ve never known how to love anybody. I loved my child but I couldn’t look after him. I can’t even love my husband. I’ve made him miserable for years and years because I can’t bear him to touch me.” Then he said, the Great
Mother had perhaps chosen me as one of her daughters who had been freed of the tyrannies of the flesh-lust, he said. I said, nuts to that. I said, if I could go to bed with my husband and let him be happy I’d feel I’d made a step forward to love. He said, I was a victim of Western thinking. I said, if God is a rose, then God is sex. East, West, home’s best. He sat there smiling and smiling, knowing quite well in his heart that I’d see it his way as I matured-like Dr Lamb. So I got up and left.’

‘You handed him back the rose, ’ said Martha.

‘Did I? Was it then when I…? ’

Martha laughed; it was sad and funny, the soft round smiling Indian man, while Lynda stood there tall and smiling politely, holding her great pale fur around her with one hand, clutching the pink rose. Then she suddenly leaned forward to hand it to him, not meaning to, but feeling she ought to be polite, like a little girl.

Lynda walked out of the restaurant, and the scene switched off.

‘Machines, ’ remarked Lynda.

‘Yes. But how many? ’

‘What we want, I suppose

Martha was certainly a radio: so was Lynda. Martha was a television set, only, unlike a television set, not bound by time. She was a camera: you could take pictures of any object or person with your eyes, and bring it out afterwards to examine it-that is, depending on how you had concentrated when you looked at it. What else?

Lynda said: ‘In that first hospital where Dorothy was ill first she had a friend. She was Hortense. Hortense knew what moods the doctors were in, by the colours in the air around them. The doctor before Dr Lamb was very bad, he was always an awful dirty yellow colour, like fog, or bad breath, and when he was angry it got streaked with red.’

‘I saw red, ’ said Martha. ‘It was when I was angry.’

‘Well, so she used to scream when he came near, she said she felt suffocated. So he put the machines on her head. After she’d had the machines a few times, she didn’t see colours any more. And I used to see pictures, before the machines on my head.’

‘I wonder what colour Dr Lamb would be? ’

‘Oh, I don’t want to know. Grey. Cold. A bright cold grey-there was a nurse in that hospital, and she was always a sooty black, so said Hortense, for feet around her, the air was sooty black, except
when she was giving injections-she’d stand there smiling, and the black started to have flames through it, like fires in hell, but the thing is, we’ve got it all wrong, we say men invent machines, but we make machines to do what we can do ourselves. If we didn’t have the machines and someone told us, You don’t need machines, it’s in your minds, you don’t need computers, there are human computers, perhaps we’d never have to make the machines. What do we need machines for? To dig ditches and make roads, but our brains could be rockets and space probes, if they can be radios and television sets.’

All this in a fast low voice, a murmur, while she swayed back and forth from side to side. It was the monotone self-absorbed murmur of madness, for she did not really care if Martha answered her or not. Or perhaps the even monotonous tone was a way of keeping herself on an even keel, as Martha did not speak, or maintained her voice on a level, so as not to jar away the pictures. Or perhaps the murmur was a way of saying to Martha: Don’t interrupt, this way of talking is a way of thinking, I find out what I think when I talk.

But if Lynda had spoken thus before a nurse in a mental hospital, before a psychiatrist, they would have said: ‘Mrs. Coldridge is badly confused today.’

Martha said: ‘But if the human brain could be a space probe or a moon-walker or a radar, it could also be a bomb or a disintegrator, and people would use it to destroy, they aren’t fitted.’

Martha lay face down, eyes closed, watching gardens, fantastic gardens, beautiful gardens … never had she imagined such gardens, she wanted to cry because of their beauty: Nurse, nurse, I’m seeing such lovely gardens!

‘Are you, dear? You’re a bit hallucinated-just take this pill and go to sleep.’

Lynda said: ‘Like a man who has lost a hand, he uses a machine-hand instead. But you must be careful, Martha, careful, you mustn’t say what you know, they’ll lock you up, they want machines, they don’t want people … but you can do it. Once I thought I could do it, but I can’t. I am ruined you see. My mind was ruined by all the drugs, my mind is no good now, and then there was that electric shock machine they put on my head when I was a girl, ever since then I’m not what I was. I pretend to myself I am sometimes but
I’m not, but you could do it, you can find out, I am sure there are people somewhere who know.’

The word
drug
had snagged on Martha’s attention. She thought: if drugs could cause the clarity, heighten it, make the pictures deeper, open the door to … her feet had taken her off the floor and into the bathroom. Lynda’s drugs were in bottles ranged from end to end along a four-foot shelf. If she took … she was gripped by her arms from behind, and pills, already in her hand, fell into the bath. But she had half-expected Lynda to follow her; had even invited it, relied on it: as a child provokes a parent into showing attention. Lynda pushed Martha away, and got on to her knees to pick up the sweet-like pills that had fallen to the floor. These she flung into the bath too, turned the taps on, and washed them all away. Then, without looking at Martha she went back to her place on the floor, Martha returned to lie beside her.

Lynda said: ‘You only did that because you were afraid when I said you had to do it, had to get out. You know it will be very hard, and so you thought, if I take drugs I’ll have an excuse not to try, because I’ll be ruined-that’s what you were thinking.’

Martha was tired. Yet she was restless. She wanted to go out and walk, as she had not walked, since those months when she first came to this city. She must walk: but, when she pulled aside the curtain and looked out it was the dead time of the night, about two in the morning.

‘I’m going to walk when it’s light, ’ she announced, and plunged down to the floor again, dropping off to sleep, saying to herself. Wake me at nine.

Her sleep was drenched with golden light, like the clear light immediately after a storm, when the sun comes out, and sky, leaves, earth, clouds shine and glitter, and the few last drops from the flying depleted cloud explode in tiny splashes of gold. Her dreams had been all of happiness: that far high hunger, yearning, which is so intense that it is soaked with the quality of beauty that it longs for, so that longing and what is longed for merges into a sharp sweet pain. To wake from such a sleep, which is all a light, a delight, and a promise, to such a day … Martha woke with a sob: she was weeping because she had to wake, and saw Lynda seated with her face to the wall, swaying back and forth, back and forth, so that her forehead bumped regularly against the wall, like a child dispelling tension. Martha remembered that in her dream, beside
her in a sweet golden light, had walked Lynda, a smiling girl, and they went towards a man whose face was all strong confidence and welcome. This was Mark. Martha, awake, saw a dirty, sour-smelling bedraggled hag who sat and banged her forehead against a wall that was rusty with tiny bloodstains. The light was showing in strong outline around the curtains. It was nine o’clock.