Four Gated City (91 page)

Lynda had had another very bad time. She had left Mark and the house to move into the room in Paul’s house, to see if she could be self-sufficient. Mark had taken it very badly-which misery coincided with the arrival of Rita. There Lynda had found not solitude, but many friends. And, since she longed to make up for a life which she saw as totally selfish, and misspent, she was soon busy with Olive’s baby, Bob’s personality clashes, Molly’s and Rose’s breakdowns. She cracked, not under the strain of solitude, but because she wore herself out. Then, by misfortune, she became involved with a crisis of Paul’s. This house he half-owned with a young businessman of good family and orthodox habits, who had flitted into smart young London but then had flitted out again. This excursion had involved him with Paul. He had imagined the house was being let on ordinary business lines. He discovered that half the inhabitants lived there rent-free, others paid very little. He was disturbed by the atmosphere of the place when he dropped in one afternoon. For one thing, he found Lynda in a bad spell, sitting on the floor banging her head against the wall and singing to herself. He diagnosed drugs, and got into a panic because of the police. Paul, on being challenged, said that Lynda was his stepmother. Further, he said that if the house was not earning much in rents, it had doubled in value-so what was he, Percy Dodlington, complaining about? Percy threatened the law. Paul lost his head and wrote a letter: our friendship … trust … in terms of our contract … will sue if… as he had, alas, so often before. Lynda then found herself in the middle of a row that threatened to reach the courts. Paul found her in bed, weeping that she ruined everyone, she was useless, she ought to be dead. Martha was away seeing Nanny Butts about looking after the three babies (Harold Butts had died), and Mark was off on an organized trip with Rita. Paul took Lynda to Dr Lamb. Dr Lamb arranged for her to go into a fine new wing of an old hospital and there Lynda had been very sick indeed. The doctor this time was of the new non-didactic flexible school who refuse to use any of the old jargon; and he supplied her with a drug which he said was new and wonderful. Lynda took it eagerly: she wanted only to get back to trying to be normal, and this drug, said Dr
Bentin, would do it. She began having new symptoms which terrified her. Asked what they were, she said she kept ‘seeing things’. She was soothed and comforted; it seemed this drug didn’t suit her, they said, but another new one would. The symptoms continued.

Round about then Martha came back from visiting Nanny Butts who said that while there was nothing she would like better than to take on the three dear little babies, she felt she was really getting too old, being well over seventy now: might she suggest her niece Pauline, a very good girl. (Pauline moved into the flat in North London and became nurse to the three infants and the girl-friend of Gwen’s boy-friend, Gwen and he having separated.) Lynda was in a large room painted a shiny mustard colour that made Martha queasy, and was watching television with half a hundred patients and nurses. She was curt and listless with Martha. Martha asked if she could see her alone: Lynda came, with bad grace, to sit on her bed, with the white-sheeting curtains drawn-privacy. Lynda towards Martha was as if two totally different attitudes had been stirred together to that point where they nearly coalesced, like the ‘marble pudding’ of childhood. She alternatively snubbed her, shrank, blocked herself off, and immediately afterwards, or at the same time, seemed to yearn and beg for help and for forgiveness.

The doctor had told Martha that Lynda was hallucinating badly.

Martha reminded Lynda of their joint experiences. The Lynda who remembered them was either not there, or was frightened to admit she was there.

Lynda had had, for the space of several days, a series of visions or pictures (on the inner television set) and the dreams like stills from the visions. These showed landscapes that were all known to Lynda, like the country around Nanny Butts’s cottage, and around Margaret’s house, and from her childhood. They looked as if a kind of frozen dew had covered everything so that at first glance she had cried out that ‘England has been poisoned, it looked like a poisoned mouse lying dead in a corner’. For everything had appeared as a faintly phosphorescent or begemmed stillness. They had given her larger doses, had taken her off to a small room for a couple of days of deep sleep. But when the sleep had worn off, she began dreaming again. England was poisoned, she cried; some enemy was injecting England with a deathly glittering dew.

Young Dr Bentin had been very kind; had explained that what
she was doing was to project her own loathing of herself, her self-hatred, outwards on to her country. Lynda had been very ready to accept this, God knew she loathed herself: she knew she was useless, debased, ñt for nothing.

They lessened the drugs; she had another few days of the hallucinations; this time, she kept quiet, remembering the past.

But, she had decided she wanted to stay in hospital. She had met Sandra, who (Lynda knew this very well) was dependent on Lynda, while giving the appearance of looking after her; Sandra, without Lynda, could expect nothing but a room alone somewhere: she had no money, children who had grown up and did not like her. It was a most common story.

Lynda wished to stay in the hospital, with Sandra as a friend and companion. But a new dispensation had set in: no one was encouraged to stay in hospitals if they could go out. Lynda and Sandra begged and asked and tricked, played every game they knew, to stay in, but without taking drugs. But no, Dr Bentin gave them a time limit, four weeks, to leave: he would see that the supplies of drugs were adequate. It was an absolute clash.

Lynda did not want to come back to Radlett Street. She felt as if she were beginning again on an old cycle. Over fifteen years ago she had ‘come home’ with Dorothy and prescription for drugs-different drugs, it was true. She did not believe she would ever get herself free of these that she was taking now. Besides, she did not want to ‘see things’ again. Hearing them was bad enough. Therefore, for the whole of an afternoon with Martha, she listened, while hanging her head, turning herself away, sighing in dramatic exasperation, and Martha pointed out that ‘seeing things’ did not have to be frightening … had Lynda entirely forgotten? No, Lynda had not; for she would, while sulking or grinding her teeth at Martha, suddenly reach out a dirty hand and stroke Martha’s timidly, as if to say: Take no notice, here I am; as a cat puts out a paw saying: Have you forgotten me?

And when Martha said: ‘You’ve simply gone under for a bit, that’s all, ’ she nodded quickly up and down, while her eyes filled with tears. But a moment later she shot Martha a melodramatic sideways hating look.

Lynda had come home, with Sandra, to the basement, less than six months after she had left it to learn independence.

She was now packing to move out again.

When asked how she was, she said: ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you!’ with a small trembling toss of the head. But to Martha it seemed as if Lynda had at last been defeated. She did not talk now at all of doing without the drugs: she did not say: ‘I know what I know’ and ‘You have to keep silent’ - or make any of her small gestures of self-respect. She went once a week, as Sandra did, to see Dr Bentin or an associate, and just as she and Dorothy had done, the two made a tight defensive alliance which no one could penetrate. The taking of medicines, sedatives, pep-pills and sleeping pills regulated their days and nights.

Across the landing in Mark’s bedroom, Rita was packing for him: they were off to North Africa in a few days. Martha had been listening (as she added pennies to pennies, shillings to shillings, pounds to pounds and-as this was money to do with the new Coldridge-Esse Perkins Scheme-hundreds of pounds to hundreds of pounds) while Rita sang, over and over again in a cradle-rocking croon: ‘Pack your bags and
get
, Ferreira, pack your bags and
go
.
‘
But there had been silence for some time; from which Martha concluded they were making love. As Rita said, often enough: ‘Can you blame him! I mean, when you think his wife was never a true wife to him!’

Before Rita arrived Martha had dreamed-she couldn’t make head or tail of it, though it was extremely vivid-that she went into Mark’s bedroom and found Maisie naked, sitting up in bed by Mark, who was asleep. This was the Maisie of before the war, a fresh plump girl with tendrils of gold hair on a lush neck. ‘Martha, ’ said this young corn goddess, ‘your trouble is, you’ve never given Mark what he wanted.’ ‘I know that, Maisie, ’ dream-Martha had meekly replied. ‘But don’t you see, I had to hold things together-don’t you see that? ’ ‘Well, it’s lucky you’ve got me, isn’t it? ’ had said Maisie, lying on frilled pink pillows (in the most appalling taste) and extending a majestic white arm to curve around Mark. ‘Yes, thank you very much, ’ had said dream-Martha. And woke, full of the wild painful grieving that only a dream can contain, full of memories of Thomas.

At the airport, what had walked through the barriers at Customs was a tall strong dark girl with short black hair in curls. The straight dark eyes, the strong black brows, of the Maynards, gave Rita an arresting uncomfortable beauty. She was altogether too decisive in style for the taste of the ‘sixties, which was for dollies,
kittens, babies, schoolgirls, kewpies, space girls, little things of one sort and another. So Paul had told her the very first evening. ‘You’d better let me take you in hand, ’ he said; to which she had replied: ‘Why? ’

And indeed, why? And what was upsetting Mrs. Maynard? If Rita’s clothes were wrong for London, then it was because they were painfully conventional, and too long, and had no fantasy. Her voice was heavily accented, but then it was bound to be. She wasn’t at all elegant in any way-but when had the Maynards ever been that? In short, Martha found herself again brooding (exactly as she had when she was a girl) about the private standards the Maynards must set themselves and which no one else could be expected to share, and which had nothing at all to do with beauty, or kindness, or charm, or intelligence, and which, for the Maynards, were the only excellence that mattered. It was not conceivably possible that the Maynards were hoping to turn Rita into a lady?

Were they criticizing her for not being one? It was only when Martha actually saw Rita that she realized how strong must be that obsession which she privately referred to as ‘The Blood of the Maynards’. For getting on for twenty-five years, what dreams had been dreamed, what hopes encouraged, what lacks and needs felt, to make of Rita someone who needed urgent improvement?

She solved Martha’s problem about how to greet a person she had not seen since babyhood, by putting down her suitcase and flinging her arms around Martha’s neck and kissing her. Almost she might have murmured: ‘At last, I’ve come home!’ On the drive back to the house she talked-giving news after a long separation. She walked into the house with a look of such delighted fulfilment that it was impossible to tell her so soon it was probably going to be pulled down. And indeed, when she did hear this news, it was clear that it would be Rita who would suffer most about its death.

Mark was there for her first meal at the house, but he was self-absorbed in misery at that time, for he had just heard that Lynda planned to leave him. He hardly spoke, and it did not seem that Rita had taken much account of him.

Paul came in that evening, as handsome and as poised as usual, and after she had said: ‘Why? ’ the following dialogue took place.

‘Because you won’t do as you are.’

‘Do for what? ’

‘You could be absolutely super, I mean it!’

She looked at him. On to her face slowly came a look of purest, frankest, most confiding, sexual confidence, like a page or two from a True Love Confessions Magazine. He blushed, became pettish, and said spitefully: ‘You’re quite sexy I suppose.’

‘Thank you, ’ said Rita, laughing heartily; for as she told Martha afterwards, she had not met anyone like him before.

‘Well if you won’t change your hair and get some clothes
I’m
not going to take you out, ’ said Paul.

Delicacy prevented her from saying that if he didn’t, experience told her there would always be those who would.

He misunderstood her smiling silence, and pressed on: ‘I’ll take you to see Madeleine tomorrow: she’ll cut your hair.’

Madeleine was London’s second-most-fashionable hairdresser, and a personal chum.

He now observed that she was embarrassed: but for him. It was not that he had not encountered before this kindly embarrassment in a girl-he often did. But in Rita it was stunningly open, like a reproach from Demeter, or a young Boadicea.

He stood before her, as it were crying out: But I’m the epitome of what every sensible girl could want!

And she stood smiling her: You’re very handsome but…

The two continued thus all evening, but in the end, rather kindly, she did agree to be taken shopping by him-no, not tomorrow because she was busy, ‘but soon, I promise’.

Francis and Jill came to meet her; and invited her to visit them. She went. She had become part of the family. Mark said: ‘She’s welcome to it, but it’s as if she were coming home.’

Yes, it was; and in her manner, all the time, whatever she said or did, or whether she chatted away to Martha or to Mark or patronized Paul, there was a secret delighted confidence, as if she wore a magic talisman which she knew could not fail her.

Martha thought at first that her manner, the warm quick ease of it, was simply Maisie’s being given-so to speak-its head, room to grow in sympathetic surroundings. For being brought up in that awful little mining town could have been no joke. And there was no doubt that her nature was all Maisie’s, if her looks were all Maynard.

But Martha was wrong. She did not understand how wrong for some time, though she even tried something she always avoided (it
was like eavesdropping or reading someone’s letters!). She tried to overhear what Rita was thinking. It was difficult: she was simply not on Rita’s wavelength. And when she did manage to catch some phrases they sounded like dialogue from an old-fashioned romantic novel, all to do with ‘being found’, ‘coming into her own’, ‘her secret destiny’, and so on.