Дорис Лессинг – The Four-Gated City (страница 13)

Next time he came in, Jack had seen him through the window, and was at work on the wiring.

‘You give me five hundred pounds,’ said Garibaldi.

‘Two hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ said Jack.

After some weeks this agreement was come to, but it took another six months to get Garibaldi to the lawyers, of whom he was deadly afraid. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ said Jack, insisting on a respectable lawyer, with real offices, in the West End. ‘You’re all right with me. You’re nothing but a dirty little dago and a crook, but I’m a gentleman and they’ll know I’m all right.’

Which was how Jack had become half-owner of this great shattered house which now had some plumbing and some electricity, and where one floor, this one, was the kind of place Martha could enter and feel …

Yes, but that was an uncomfortable point. Down in Stella’s territory, or with Iris, or walking through streets she did not know, she was skinned, scaled, vulnerable, an alien, always fighting in herself that inner shrinking which was the result of surroundings that did not know her, until, fought, it became the strength which set free. She had only to walk in here, to be greeted by skins of white, of black paint, and instantly, she was at home. She was very definitely Martha: the dullness, the inertia, of being at home took over. And very far was she from the open-pored receptive being who hadn’t a name. People like her, for some reason, in this time, made rooms that were clean and bare and white: in them they felt at home, were safe and unchallenged. But she did not want to feel like this- in that case why had she rung Phoebe?

Jack still lay asleep. He breathed lightly but steadily: probably deeper asleep than she had thought. Well, of course, he’d spent the earlier part of the evening making love with the girl who had been let out at eleven. She should take off her clothes, very quietly, and get quietly under the blanket with him and sleep. Ah, but she was so tired, she would descend into a gulf of sleep and she did not want that. Sooner or later, she would have to. She stood up to take off her coat, and that small movement made Jack open his eyes. His head was turned towards her, but she wondered what he saw in the soft light of the candles: his face was hostile. ‘Who …?’ he began, and sat up, shaking his head free of sleep.

‘Martha. Hell, man – but …’ She had taken off Mrs Van’s coat, and now he smiled. ‘You looked like an old woman.’ He came over, naked, and putting two hands on her shoulders stared into her face. ‘Hell, Martha, but that gave me a scare.’ Now he kissed her cheek as if tasting it, and laid his face against hers. ‘Martha,’ he said, and went off to the spirit stove he used for cooking. ‘I’ll make some cocoa, hell you look tired, Martha.’

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 Stern, Aaron Stern …’ 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.