Four Gated City (9 page)

She stripped off her clothes, fast, knowing that by doing it she put herself farthest from what she had been, walking alert and alone in the streets. She sat on the foot of the bed, back in that area
of herself where she was not much more than a warm easy body. She looked at Jack, his back turned, a tall, a very thin man, very white, with brown forearms like long gloves, and brown hair falling straight: he wore his hair rather long. When he turned with two mugs of cocoa, he came smiling across to the bed, stepping in big bounding strides, and sat close, smiling into her face. He was altogether delighted. ‘You’ve been walking again. I can see.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘God man, Martha, I do envy you, I do, when you first come to London, the whole place is yours, I don’t know how to explain it. I remember that, I think of it often, but now I’m a householder and that’s the end of that. I’m sorry. But believe you me, I like to think of you doing it.’

‘Not for long, ’ said Martha.

‘No. You go to a new place and for a while it’s fine, and then it gets you. You should move on then.’

‘You’re not going to!’

‘But I tell you, Martha, when I saw that old woman sitting in that chair, it gave me a scare, I thought, who’s that old woman in my room? ’

‘Then that’s why it’s over for me, ’ said Martha, ‘I’ve got to get a job so I can get a coat so you won’t think I’m an old woman.’

They were sitting so their knees touched: prickles of electricity ran from one to another, while they smiled, drinking cocoa, and looking with pleasure into each other’s faces. Now, after a questioning look, which she answered, to find out if it was time, he looked, smiling at her centre, so that it livened and became the centre of herself. Slowly he let the pressure of his eyes go up to her stomach, then wait, then to one breast, and wait, then to the other-her breasts lifted and tightened, and he laughed. Now she looked, smiling, at his genitals: they tightened and began to lift. She put out a hand to touch him; he touched her; then they joined these hands, so that current ran through them, through knees and hands. Now, set together in rising rhythm, they could sit and talk, or be silent, for a half hour, an hour, or through the night, and everything they said, or their silences, would flow up into the moment when they began to make love. If they touched too soon, then it was too strong, set a too urgent current. The looking, slow and pleasurable, was like the perfect meshing of the right gears.

‘I haven’t seen you for so long, Martha-what is it, it seems weeks? And I’ve been thinking about you.’

This, ‘I’ve been thinking about you’ was true. He thought, deliberately, about his girls, maintaining that in this way he kept them connected to him. But he said it because of a necessity he felt to keep, hold, reassure, be reassured. He meant,
in spite of the other girls, I think of you
. ‘What have you been doing, Martha? ’

‘I’ve discovered that I’ve got to get a job.’

But this went past him. Women had jobs, but for him that was not important. Women got jobs to buy clothes, to make themselves pretty for him, for themselves, for their men. It did not matter what jobs they had. What lives they had outside this room, he did not care, provided they came back. He wasn’t serious, not really!

‘I was thinking a lot about how it was the last time: I swear it, Martha, that with you there’s something I haven’t with the others.’

She was delighted. If he said it, it was true; but it didn’t matter: he felt like saying it.

‘Who was the girl who was let out at eleven? ’ She said this deliberately, in order to see if she would feel jealous. All kinds of emotions she had considered hers had retreated during the last few weeks. For instance, Henry mentioning her mother: in the past, what resentment, what fear had flared up, taken hold. But now, it didn’t touch her. And a slight pang of jealousy faded at once: they were emotions without force behind them, like jets of water without pressure.

‘He’s a bit crazy, Martha. He’s got a thing about time. He’s got a chart: he marks every day off in hours and crosses off every hour.’

And now, his face hardened and clenched: for he above all had time riding him: suddenly he lifted her hand and pressed it tight to his eyes: she could feel the round pressure of his eyeball against the ball of her thumb.

‘Is that why he’s here? ’

‘Yes, you’re right, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s why. I was saying to myself it was because-well for one thing it tests Vasallo. And for another, if the police pick him up again he’ll be back in the loony bin.’

He sat quiet, eyes shut, holding her hand so tight the bones hurt. He was sitting inside his living breathing body, assuring himself of it. Jack had done four years in the minesweeper and had been in continual danger. He had been sunk twice. Once he had spent twelve hours in the water. What he had been left with was an awe of the flesh. The existence of his body now was a miracle: he never
ceased to feel it. Time bled away from him in every pulse beat. Thomas had had that too.

She was thinking of Thomas. Again? With Jack, she found herself thinking of Thomas. She did not think of her two husbands, Knowell and Hesse, she thought of Thomas.

Thomas Stern. Thomas. Who was Thomas that she had to go on thinking of him?

Thomas was a soldier. Thomas was a gardener. Thomas was a tradesman. He was the husband of his wife and the father of his little daughter. He was an exile, Thomas Stern, Polish Jew from Sochaczen, tossed out of Europe and into Africa by a movement of war. When they put his name on documents to make him part of the Medical Corps, Zambesia, they wrote: Thomas Stern, Pole,
alien
. When the Germans killed his family in the Warsaw Ghetto, they might have written (did they keep records?) ‘Sarah Stern, Abraham Stern, Hagar Stern, Reuben Stern, Deborah Stem, Aaron Stem …’ Thomas was the son and the brother of these dead people. Thomas was a man who killed another man deliberately because he had gone mad and chosen to believe in revenge for revenge’s sake. Thomas was a man who had chosen to live with some particularly ‘backward’ Africans on the edge of the Zambesi River in a tract of land now covered feet deep by the waters of the Kariba Dam. These Africans (now dispersed to other areas chosen by the white man and dead as a tribe) had thought of Thomas Stern: A crazy white man with a good heart who lives with us and who sits in his hut scribbling words on paper. Martha had thought of Thomas who was her lover and not her husband: ‘With this man I am always at home.’ Martha Quest (then Martha Knowell, then Martha Hesse) had thought, still thought of Thomas.

Thomas had lived inside his body as if it were an always dissolving reforming shell or shape with many different names and times. At the end, Thomas’s way of living, or being, had wrenched his body from large blonde solidity into a lean dark bitterness of purpose. Thomas’s flesh breathed time and death; but his mind and his memory moved along another line parallel to it.

That was why she had been with Thomas.

That’s why she was with Jack?

I couldn’t be with a man who hadn’t got it
:
time moving in one’s breath
.
I suppose once you ‘ve entered into some kind of knowledge, then you can’t go back on it
…

Suddenly she saw something: all Jack’s girls had it. Of course, that was how he chose them, while he thought he was choosing a smile or the promise of a body.

‘What’s she like, this new one? ’

‘She’s lovely, a little fair thing, whitey-gold all over, her hair, skin, everything. She sits on my bed like a little whitey-gold statue. I wish you could see her.’

‘Well, who knows, perhaps I will.’

A couple of weeks ago Martha and Jack had been sitting as they were now when a girl walked in. She was tall and fair, with solemn brown eyes. She wore an elegant camel coat, in spite of the heat, and had long silk-covered English legs. She had seen the two of them as she came in and turned around slowly to close the door to give herself time to know what she wanted to do. Then her face came back into view with a smile on it, and she advanced smiling to the bed. Martha, introduced, nodded and smiled. Jack said: ‘Joanna, come and join us.’

‘Not altogether, if you don’t mind, ’ said Joanna, with a short amused laugh. Composed, she pulled up a hard chair and sat quite close. The three smiled at each other.

‘I was passing, ’ she said; at which Jack and Martha laughed, and then, after a while, she laughed too, for this was not an area where she could possibly have been passing.

‘I wanted to set eyes on one of the others, ’ she said, gruff and abrupt, making a confession with difficulty.

‘Well, here I am.’

Joanna gave Martha a slow once-over.

‘You’re very pretty, ’ she said.

‘I’m sure that I’d think the same of you!’

Meanwhile Jack sat, not at all embarrassed, or amused, or annoyed. He was pleased and interested. He was never amused, never ironic, never felt a shock of improbability. He was delighted, pleased-or so unhappy he could not move but lay face down on his bed suffering till a weight lifted off him.

‘Shall I make you some cocoa? ’ he asked.

She shook her head, smiling.

‘The thing is, Jack, either we both have to get dressed, or Joanna has to be undressed.’

‘Yes, of course, ’ said Joanna in her brisk fair English way.

Jack wanted Joanna to get undressed. Afterwards he had said to
Martha: the tears positively drowning his eyes: ‘If she had trusted me so much: if she had taken her clothes off-then I swear, I’d have been so happy, I can’t make you feel how happy I’d have been. But not yet. She will though. I am sure she will.’

He left it to them, the two women, to decide when to trust him. Martha began to dress. That had been during the heatwave, and she had put on, but not too fast, while they watched, bra, pants, slip and a narrow blue linen dress. Joanna had admired the dress. Then Jack had got dressed and they had all gone out to eat lunch at the Indian restaurant.

Joanna was engaged to a second cousin who had been in the Guards and who had a big house in the country. She intended to marry him although he had not done more than kiss her aggressively when taking her home after the theatre once. He had been rather drunk. She came to Jack, once or twice a week, to make love. She was not young: that is, she was not a girl, for she had the war behind her. From the war she had got one thing, a need for security. The security was the cousin. Jack was for her.

‘I was too close to it in the war, ’ she had said to Martha, not feeling that she needed to explain. ‘And love doesn’t last, does it? ’

‘Love may not last, but sex does, ’ said Jack, when Martha reported what Joanna had said. And he rang up Joanna in the country to say the same to her. ‘I’ll be here, always, ’ he said. ‘Remember that.’

For Joanna ‘it’ was poverty. That was the edge she was afraid of.

For Jack? He had spent the whole war, he said, dreaming about women. And so here he was, receiving girls, one, two, three a day, making love for hours every day. And he painted. For instance he had painted a picture while Garibaldi watched him. He was only serious about sex.

But
he’s
not serious, thought Martha. He can’t spend the rest of his life … but why shouldn’t he? Why on earth not? Considering the way most people did spend their lives.

The boy downstairs was mad. About time? Death. And Jack was mad. About women. Death. Joanna was mad-she proposed to spend her life with a man she didn’t much like because she was afraid of-poverty? And she, Martha-but she would be lunching with Phoebe tomorrow. In a few hours, now.

‘If I asked her to meet you, would you come? ’

‘Would she? ’

‘If she actually met you … if I could get her to do that… when women are jealous, I’ve discovered, they aren’t when they’ve actually met the girl they’ve been thinking all those thoughts about. But men don’t realize that, do they? ’

That’s only because you aren’t serious, Jack
.
We don’t take you seriously
.
Why not
?

‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Martha? ’

‘I was very, not now.’

He looked at her again: centre, breasts, back down to her thighs, back up to her eyes-smiling. But the smile dimmed. ‘You’re not with me, you’re not …” He nearly touched her breasts, but withdrew his hand and enclosed hers again with it. ‘Martha, I won’t mind if you say yes-but have you been with another man? ’

‘No-really not!’

‘Because if that’s it, tell me, and we’ll try something else. I’ve noticed with my girls, when they’ve been with a man, even their husband, this one doesn’t work-something gets switched off. Then you just have to start again, you have to have a good ordinary fuck to make the contact again. But that’s not as good as when you can let it slowly build up like this …’ He was in a fever of anxiety, as he leaned forward, explaining to her, comrade in the fields of love: his expertise was all urgency; he looked as if something might be taken away from him, had been taken away. Did he know that she had thought: I won’t be coming back again?

‘This little one tonight, Jane, she was with a man this afternoon, and I was sitting with her like this, and she said to me, all wide-eyed and wanting to know: Jack, I don’t feel for you the way I did last Thursday, what’s wrong with me. I don’t want you to touch me.’

‘She’d been making love? ’

‘Yes. All afternoon.’

She laughed; then so did he, to keep her company.

‘But not me, I haven’t.’

‘Well then, we’ll wait until it’s right.’

‘Who is she-Jane? ’

‘She’s English-a sweet, gentle, wide-eyed little English girl. You know.”

‘Indeed yes. There was one in the restaurant I was in tonight. She was so pretty. And she wore that black dress, that uniform, you know it? The little crêpe dress. With an awful brooch. Just
there
, you know-the whole thing, so wrong, so ugly, so nastily
smart
…’

‘Yes, yes, yes, ’ he said, delighted, laughing.

‘There was no relationship between that dress and that girl. And then another came in. They knew each other. And she had a black little dress with a little square of white neck. Like plump little Teddy bears. Everyone was playing nurseries. It was an upper-middleclass restaurant-I’m coming on, I can tell the difference. And I looked at those girls and they broke my heart, and I thought: well at least I can tell Jack, he’ll understand!’