Four Gated City (60 page)

In short, the door had opened, as it tends to do, just under Martha’s eyes, where it had been standing open for a long time now, unobserved, if she had only cared to look just there, had not looked in the wrong places.

But, having made that step, what then-another blank wall, another check.

Martha descended night after night, when the day’s business was over, to talk to Lynda, during that part of the day when they could be alone and undisturbed.

They called it ‘working’.

But they did not know what to call it, nor how to go about it.

Questions. It was a private, diffident pursuit of-but if they had known what to call it, then at least they would have known where to start. And they had to be secret; not because of any decision made or taken, but because circumstances ordained it.

Mark could not be upset; Mark found it all very upsetting.

The children must not be diverted from their proper education, must not be allowed to feel any more unusual than they were bound to be anyway.

The old cronies of the basement, Mrs. Mellendip and the rest, had dispersed with the going of Dorothy: though Lynda did sometimes see Rosa Mellendip, who at least did understand what they were talking about when they talked about what interested them. But Rosa was busy; she was rather successful in her career these days. And then, like all specialists, she tended rather to become impatient, or worse, tolerant, if they wished to speculate outside her field-fortune-telling by palms, cards, and horoscope.

Somewhere, and this was certain, there would be people who they could talk to.

They chased hunches, gleams of insight, wrote letters to people who dropped remarks on television or in newspapers that seemed hopeful; wrote to authors; cross-questioned people they met who might say something which sounded like the promise of an
unlocked door. They used their dreams, their slips of the tongue, their fantasies, not at all as a Dr Lamb might have wished them to do, but as maps or signposts for a country which lay just beyond or alongside, or within the landscape they could see and touch.

They ordered all kinds of periodicals which had to be hidden from everybody. with names like
Destiny
, or
Startime
, and examined them for those gleams of information which might appear in the most unlikely places. But here, in this region, already known, or at least partly known, through Rosa and the cronies of the old days, was something too easy, too complaisant. That door could so easily be opened into an area where people knew each other so very well, were very cosy, and all in an atmosphere of the initiated minority sharing truths denied to the outside world-repulsive; though one had to beware of losing opportunities to learn this and that, through finding anything distasteful.

And then there had been the business of Jimmy Wood. He had now had published two very successful’space fiction’ novels. The plots of both these novels depended on the existence of people who had more senses than are considered normal. The last one had been about a conflict between a race who had inner vision and hearing, and a race that duplicated these capacities with machines. The machine-race killed out the others, on the grounds that they were abnormal.

Martha, having read this with excitement, side-tracked Jimmy to the kitchen for a talk. There he sat, smiling as always, while she tried to get out of him where he got his ideas for the plots-a question which he seemed to find naïve. ‘They were in the air, ’ he said at last. And went on to say that ‘all of us’ wrote about such ideas. He meant, by ‘all of us’ other space fiction writers. He then went on to describe a new machine which he was working on that could stimulate or destroy areas of the brain, and not through anything crude like putting wires into the brain with electric charges, but by using frequencies of sound, or vibrations which, said Jimmy, could be used with great sensitivity. Already he was within reach of aiming at an area of the brain of the size of a pea …

Yes, said Martha, but supposing there were no machines. This race of people he had written about for instance, had he ever himself experienced anything which might …? but he was not listening. Not listening in the sense that he could not listen: his
experience did not connect with what she said. He was not able to hear.

Mark often went with Jimmy Wood to a certain pub where science fiction writers congregated. He found their company stimulating because the ideas in their books usually did not appear in the books of accepted and ‘literary’ writers.

He would have been as polite as Jimmy was, however, if Martha had asked if he went there because of any personal conviction or experience. Martha went with them to this pub. Twenty or so men, one or two women, discussed their craft. Martha kept approaching one after another, with questions kept tentative. Odd in itself that this had to be so: a man has written half a dozen books about people with this or that sense out of the normal; but he is embarrassed when asked if people might in fact have this or that sense. More than odd, when you thought about it … But Martha had to come back and report to Lynda that she had drawn a blank. They drew blanks everywhere.

Yet in their own inner experience this was a time of possibility. It was as if doors kept opening in their brains just far enough to admit a new sensation, or a glimmer of something-and although they closed again, something was left behind. Just for Lynda and Martha, not for the other people they met and so anxiously, if carefully, questioned? Yet poetry, drama, old plays-everywhere, were full of hints and suggestions about what they looked for! During this period both read, or rather re-read poems, authors not read for years: they understood what it meant that’scales should fall from one’s eyes’ - scales had fallen. Where passages, lines, words had been obscured, or dark, or simply skipped over, suddenly there was light. What they wanted, looked for, searched for was everywhere, all around them, like a finer air shimmering in the flat air of everyday. But to lay hands on it, to net it, that was different. It was as if the far-off sweetness experienced in a dream, that unearthly impossible sweetness, less the thing itself than the need or hunger for it, a question and answer sounding together on the same fine high note-as if that sweetness known all one’s life, tantalizingly intangible, had come closer, a little closer, so that one continually sharply turned one’s head after something just glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, or tried to refine one’s senses to catch something just beyond them …

They called it, working.

Yet they might sit all night alone in Lynda’s living-room hardly saying a word, yet listening, trying to be receptive, to be alert. An idea might come out of it; or perhaps not. Or they might sound out this or that word, or phrase, or thought, by letting it lie on the air where they could get a sense of it, a feel, a taste; so that it might accumulate other sounds, words, ideas, like it.’ Sometimes they talked, trying not to talk too rationally or logically, merely letting talk flow, since in the spaces between words, sentences, something else might come in. They did not really know what they were doing, or how, really, they did it. Yet out of all this, material gathered, they began to get glimpses of a new sort of understanding.

They had no word for that either. Talking about it, or around it, they tended to slip back into talking about Lynda’s being mad.

Perhaps it was because if society is so organized, or rather, has so grown, that it will not admit what one knows to be true, will not admit it that is, except as it comes out perverted, through madness, then it is through madness and its variants it must be sought after.

An essential fact was that if Lynda had not been mad, had not tested certain limits, then some of the things they discovered would have frightened them so badly they would not have been able to go on.

Chapter Three

The house continued, if not divided against itself, at least layered in atmospheres or climates. A slight reshuffle: Francis had moved upwards when he had left school; so now, from top to bottom it was Francis, Paul, Martha, Mark, Lynda.

A few weeks before A Levels, Francis came home and demanded ‘a top-level conference’. This was his phrase, (humorous), for such sessions, which might go on, often did, half the night. This time he wanted to know why they wanted him to take the exams. All the commonsensical reasons for doing so having been offered by Mark, Martha, Lynda, while he listened, not without an appearance of judicious thought, he said he proposed to leave school at once. None of them had needed degrees to live their lives by, he said; they all despised examinations and what they stood for; and anyway, he kept meeting people just down from university and who would want to be like that? And there was that ass Uncle Graham, he was the kind of thing universities produced at their best.

He went back to school to pack up his things and come home. They half believed it was all due to examination nerves, and he would take them after all: the teachers said he would pass satisfactorily.

But he came home. He was very moody; desperately gay, then silent. He kept dropping in to his father’s study, but they still could not talk easily; to Martha’s room where, having hung about as if hoping she might say something useful, he proceeded to entertain her with impersonations of his teachers and classmates. Then down to Lynda. He spent hours with her, wanted to take her out to theatres, restaurants; demanded she should buy new clothes. She wasn’t doing justice to herself: everyone said how beautiful she was. Lynda became desperate too: he was treating her like a girlfriend, and she couldn’t understand why, when he had his own girl-friends.

They none of them knew what to do. Having spent nights considering the illogicalities, inconsistencies and the general unsatisfactoriness of the position, the adults gave up: after all, you can’t make a person study. Later of course they were able to see where all these deliberations had been at fault: they had been thinking of Francis as an isolated case. But he was only one of many thousands who decided the education they were offered was not for them. When a young person feeling himself to be alone and helpless fights pressures he believes are almost invincible, the fight is always oblique, desperate, ruthless. (Long ago Martha had made the same decision, had fought with cunning, ruthlessness, desperation, hardly knowing what it was she was doing, except that she was saying, no, no, I won’t.)

Now, through Patty, Francis got himself a job backstage in a theatre where he proceeded to work very hard. He had always worked hard. Within a few weeks of leaving school he was earning (as he took pains to point out) what many men in these islands were expected to keep families on.

They continued to discuss his decision; talked their way into a kind of interim report, which went something like this: it was taken for granted by most people who came anywhere near that house that anything taught in school, except for a few minor techniques, like learning to read, write and use reference books, was a waste of time; that anything learned under the heading of history, or art, or literature, was particularly dangerous, since by definition it couldn’t be true-was necessarily the product of derivative minds representing temporary academic attitudes congealed into temporarily rigid formulae. Anyone who wanted to learn anything, could do so by himself in a library, or with a tutor in a few weeks, instead of the years demanded by schools and colleges. Education in modern societies was primarily an education in conformism. These beliefs, or attitudes, were so deeply theirs it was hardly necessary to state them. They were implicit. From time to time they had been set forth as warnings, or instructions, to Francis in words like these: Well, you’ve got to do it, so just get through with it somehow, get it over with, but don’t take it seriously. In other words, from his family he had been asked to work hard, or at least adequately, while at the same time holding in his mind that what he worked at was unimportant if not
dangerous. Saints had been asked to do no less. The school-semi - ‘progressive’ - was as confusing. Like all the dozen or so schools of its kind, it both deplored the examination system and what that stood for; insisted that what it offered its pupils was much higher, better, wider and deeper than any study for examinations could be; yet, because of the’system’ it was forced to spend as much time and effort on pushing its pupils through examinations as did any ordinary school.

These, then, were the lines of the ‘interim report’ - filed and forgotten when they saw how wide a movement it was that Francis had belonged to, without knowing it.

Much later still, Francis came out with an incident that occurred when he was about thirteen, and which, he claimed, was a turning-point for him. Mark could not remember it. Alas, parents so often cannot remember these moments which children carry with them like scars.

Francis had brought home from his new school (the semi-progressive one) some’mock’ examination papers in history and English. Being Francis, he had not taken them to his father, or to Martha, to ask what they thought, but had left them lying on the kitchen table where Mark must see them at breakfast. Mark had taken one look at the English paper and demanded if this was meant as a joke-perhaps it was a parody of some kind? Francis had said nothing, had listened. He had done rather well in this particular paper. Mark had not gone on-apparently he found the paper so ridiculous it wasn’t worth doing more than to say so. The history paper (‘The Ancient World-Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome’) got the same treatment. Mark subscribed to a magazine that reported archaeological discovery: he told Francis not to waste time on school history. It was after this incident that Francis had dropped English and history as special subjects, and decided to do mathematics, chemistry and biology, areas where he hoped, facts could be eternal truths.

His coming home changed the house. The attic was large, accommodating not only Francis, but also Nicky, who stayed there most of the time: he didn’t get on with his parents. Jill and Gwen might as well have moved in: they were still at school, but were doing badly-on principle, Phoebe claimed.