Among Martha’s contemporaries there was no single person, or group of people to whom she could say: Give me privacy to explore my own being: promise not to summon doctors and psychiatrists, policemen. Who then were these younger people to whom she could say, and so easily, just that?
Paul’s house was now full. (So was another of his-also partly owned, as was this.)
There were about twenty people in it, mostly single though there was a married couple with two children in the basement. He had been an alcoholic, from time to time still was, and this made it hard for him to keep jobs. He earned his living as a carpenter, since his real career, which was to be an architect had foundered in alcoholism. He paid Paul no rent, but looked after the house. His name was Briggs; he had the careful watchful manner of those who have an inner enemy on a tight chain; and his face (pleasant, friendly, though permanently tinged with a reminiscent flush, like a sunset sky) changed not at all when she told him her requirements. Paul had of course already asked that she should be left alone. He thought she wished to experiment with drugs, and offered the remark that he was sorry drugs had not been ‘the scene’ when alcohol had beguiled him. She said no, she was not interested in drugs; but he nodded as if to say: Quite right, one has to be careful what one admits. This turned out to be the passport under which she was able to travel in this house: person after person came to her to say that they had smoked marijuana, hash; or taken LSD or mescalin; or took them sometimes; or, proposed to try these things out when circumstances were favourable; or had friends who did. She was given a great deal of friendly advice, and offers of help. The people who were on the same floor and beneath (she was at the top of the house) were naturally of greatest interest. Under her were two young women with jobs in market research. Both had breakdowns from time to time, when they looked after each other, under the care of a doctor who kept them supplied with sedatives. One was Rose, one was Molly; they both looked drained, tired: they were people who found even the ordinary processes of life too much to manage; they did manage, but with nothing much left over. They said to Martha that if she wanted anything she must knock on the floor three times, but otherwise she would be left alone. It turned out that she did once, on a peak of terror because of the Self Hater, knock on the floor, but luckily they were not in. She did not see them again until she went to thank them as she left.
Sharing a room in the young women’s flat was a sad and polite couple, a boy and a girl. But it turned out they were married. She had been pregnant at school. This boy had married her: he loved her, he said, and would be happy to bring up the child. This baby was born into a bed-sitting-room in Islington. It never stopped crying. The boy one night hit the baby. It died a week later. A welfare worker and a doctor hushed the thing up. The boy became a Roman Catholic. The girl was again pregnant (from intention, not by accident) and they were both pleased: they loved children, they kept explaining to everyone. They were not yet twenty years old. He worked as a packer in a chemical firm. During Martha’s progress through the Stations of the Cross towards the end of her stay in this house, he came into the room and was satisfied by what she said about her inner processes that she must be a convert like himself. She had to be careful to substitute the name of God for the Devil who in fact accompanied her on her journey; so much value there is in one word. That God hated, tormented, and punished her so seemed to him a sign of Grace: that the Devil might frighten him into an offer to call a priest.
In the large room across the landing lived Zena. Paul had paid for lessons in voice production. She sang sometimes in a club or at a private party. Not very well: it was herself she cleverly produced and marketed; herself that other people needed so much she did not have to do more than be there, on öfter. Her effaced obliterated quality, her frightened sexuality, a brave passivity, was so much to a current taste that she was known to ‘everyone’. She was in fact a type of courtesan. Many gentlemen prepared to pay highly for their pleasures paid to accompany her to parties, to be seen publicly with this girl who was The Victim incarnate. She might even sleep with them, but without any pretence of enjoyment. Her attitude was: If you enjoy what so wearies me then please, I should be delighted … Given presents of money or jewels she spent or used, or gave away, or left lying about, or lost. She did not care. Caring about absolutely nothing, she drifted, smiling her sweet lost smile. This room was her private refuge, her own room. No one came here but Paul. Several times during Martha’s stay in the house she came in late at night with a cup of coffee. ‘Paul asked me to see if you were all right, Martha? Good-I’ll go then.’
Also across the landing was Bob Parrinder who was altogether more prepared to be involved. He was about twenty-seven, tall, and very thin … but it is easier to say that if Lynda were male, she would look like him; if he were female, he would look like Lynda. He had had three years or so in the hands of psychiatrists, and had decided to give them up at the price of being very ill from time to time, when one of his girls looked after him. In between, he earned his living on the fringes of the film industry in a variety of ways. He had an immediately arresting personality, and a good deal of authority: people were attracted to him. He gave advice, help, took responsibility, had girls one after the other. He was a type very common indeed in this half-hidden or rather, hiding, stratum of London. He was a sort of self-appointed prophet or mentor who attracted all kinds of people, not all of them weak-minded, as hangers-on and disciples. To Martha, who said only that she wished for a time of ‘retreat’ - she chose the word since his bias was towards Christianity, he offered a very great deal of advice about the inner life, but said that his girl, Olive, would be only too pleased to do her shopping and keep an eye on her while he was out working. Olive, a beautiful dark girl with a baby not his, had that look of ecstatic self-immolation which such young men tend to evoke in certain young women: but it was too excessive to last, Martha thought, and already showed signs of wearing off. To wash Bob’s socks was one thing; to serve Martha, very naturally, another, even if Bob did command it. She said the baby took a lot of her time, and if Martha wanted anything, she should simply knock.
In fact it was all very satisfactory, and Martha was able to shut herself into a large room which, because she had asked Paul for it, had a thick carpet on the floor to deaden sound. There was a large brass four-poster bed; Paul wanted so much money for this that he could not sell it. He was keeping it: the value was bound to rise. There were some chairs and a good fake Queen Anne writing desk which Paul maintained would shortly be worth a good deal: when the antiques were all bought up, their copies (if old enough) would have value; and, no doubt, and in due course, their copies would …
She had about three months. Not very long, but Maisie’s Rita was due to arrive. There was no saying how long Rita would be in London; and since it is always later than one thinks, and the house in Radlett Street did not seem to need her much, she might as well do it now.
Lynda was well: she was occupied with Francis and Jill and various new complications. Poor Mark was quarrelling finally with Jimmy Wood. Mark was all hot tempestuous rages and violence, interspersed with locked inward-growing misery. He had discovered that Jimmy had for the last ten years been supplying machines, designed by himself, whose function was to destroy parts of the human brain by electric charges. These machines were developments of those already in use for legitimate purposes. Jimmy’s had all kinds of interesting possibilities, and he was selling them to the research institutes and departments of hospitals where they were being used at the moment on animals. He had also perfected (on request) a development of this machine whose use was by governments, to destroy the brains of people they felt to be dangerous, and who were weak, helpless, or unknown, and could vanish without protest, or much protest, being aroused. Jimmy had already sold a dozen or so of these, but under arrangements and conditions which had made it hard for Mark, always bored with paper-work, to trace them in the books. Jimmy was on the point of selling (the difficulty was that people did not seem to believe it would have a use-but war departments are always more forward looking than any other section of an official apparatus) a machine, or device, for stimulating, artificially, the capacities of telepathy, ‘second sight’, etc. All kinds of hints found by him in old manuscripts or dubious ‘esoteric’ books had gone into the creation of this device; but the trouble was, as he was only too prepared to point out, ‘there seemed to be evidence for suggesting’, that brains stimulated in such ways (Jimmy was afraid the machine was still very clumsy) might very well be destroyed. So what it amounted to was that interested governments, or departments, must have a large supply of expendable human material, and material that was will-less, or treated to be will-less, for these extensions of humankind’s machinery would ‘burn out’ very fast and must be constantly replaced. Jimmy visualized a bank of people, housed probably in some kind of barracks or building, well fed and cared for, of course, with every amenity of sport and entertainment, whose sole function would be, when needed, to be taken into the room of a certain building, and to be treated by this, Jimmy’s machine, when, for a short space of time, they would be able to act as a variety of radio, or telephone. Asked what was the point, first by an unnamed War Department, and then by Mark-why bother with human beings when there were machines? -Jimmy showed all the agitation of an organism frustrated in its functioning. Surely situations could be envisaged very easily where it would be more convenient to have a human being with such capacities rather than a machine? For instance, imagine a group of people spying in foreign territory-to have such a person with them would be invaluable! Of course, that this person might very well be as good as a zombie, could (in circumstances) be a handicap, but the whole project was still in the experimental stage. He, Jimmy Wood, was prevented by laws of all kinds from doing research, but everyone knew that in wartime, or even in peace-time with the inmates of some mental hospitals, certain kinds of research could go on. Jimmy, talking in a soft, agitated way (for hours and hours, while Mark listened), wove what sounded like the basis for another of his space fiction novels. The unnamed gentleman from the not-to-be-mentioned War Office had said, in joke, that he thought Mr. Wood was taking space fiction for fact. But he had asked to be kept posted of developments.
In short, for years now, Jimmy had been engaged in activities which Mark was bound to find abhorrent; and had been engaging them openly, had not tried to deceive Mark at all. For instance, walking around the factory, he might say: ‘This is for Project 25A-you know, I told you.’ Or, in the ledgers, Mark would see entries: Research on 25A.
The talk about this went on for days and days. Mark sat in the office where, for years and years now, he had sat, feeding Jimmy Wood with his fuel, talk, and talked now (feeling ill, angry, self-reproachful. etc.. but being as calm as possible), trying to. as he said to Martha, ‘get inside Jimmy’s skin’. The point was, Jimmy never met Mark on his ground-which was, Mark supposed, if he was entitled to the word at all, an ethical one. Asked about Project this-and-that, device that-and-this, Jimmy would talk, expound, go on in his jerky, soft, informative way until stopped-or switched off. Asked if Jimmy thought it was a good thing for human beings to be made zombies, or treated in this or that way, without (presumably) being asked, he might reply that: ‘But if you stimulate that area-look on the model, Mark, there-it seems likely that function will superimpose on function X-do you see, Mark? ’
All this was still going on when Martha kissed Mark goodbye (but only temporarily, for she would certainly drop into Radlett Street from time to time), and left for her period of ‘retreat’.
Very extraordinary indeed was the human mind. Mark, a man of integrity if there was ever one, had worked for nearly twenty years with a man whose actions (he did not have beliefs) contradicted everything Mark held dear; but, for some reason Mark had not thought that this was so, or had not-what? Troubled? Cared? If Jimmy Wood was arrested tomorrow on charges of almost pathological indifference to any ordinary ideas of decency, then Mark would be (or should be) arrested with him. But of course Jimmy would not be arrested, nor suffer in any way at all, because he was merely ‘contributing to human knowledge’. All the same, if the case were to be put to Mark as a hypothetical one, with himself in it, but masked, he would hate and despise himself. But for twenty years he had gone along with it, had not ‘put two and two together’.
Martha, living cheek by jowl with Lynda for years, and in what she had imagined to be the closest sympathy with her, had not seen what was screaming out to be seen-though Lynda had so little belief in its being seen by anyone, even Martha, that its manifestation was mostly in moments of self-defence seen by others (and even herself) as aggressive violence; could only communicate it through ‘gibberish’ to be deciphered by someone (Martha) who at last had reached the same place in experience.
It was at least interesting that these discoveries, hers in connection with Lynda, Mark’s in connection with Jimmy Wood, and the reflections they gave rise to, coincided with Martha’s determination to challenge her own mind.
Alone in the empty room, high over noisy streets that were full of humanity, yet held in a carpeted space where no one would come if she did not call them, she-was extremely afraid. She had not expected it. Quite one thing to say: Yes of course it’s dangerous, very risky; another to actually go into danger.
And she did not really know how to do it, except that she knew from the past that if she did not eat, slept very little, kept alert, she sharpened and fined down. But both times in the past had been unplanned, she had not intended anything.
Now she stopped eating, though she drank tea and coffee, and stopped sleeping, and walked up and down, up and down, on the heavy carpet which protected Molly and Rose under her feet from annoyance.
She knew there were areas she was likely to have to go through: there would be the stratum of sound for instance. She was more than likely to become hysterical: she had in the past. There were rewards-oh yes, she remembered there were, though not clearly at all, except as a fact. Looking back on that time when she was first in London, and then again on the recent time with Lynda, what she remembered was an intensity of packed experience-which she longed to have again. But there was nothing in particular that she expected.
She walked, she walked, she walked up and down, smoking, drinking coffee, waking herself as she drifted off to sleep.
She was thinking of poor Lynda-washes of soft pity came with it. She thought of Mark, poor Mark alone in his house without his friend Martha, and without Lynda who (though he did not know it) he was going to lose altogether very soon-Lynda was leaving him. Oh poor Mark. How cruel she, Martha, was; how unkind to do this, to say: Mark, it’s your bad luck you have nothing but eccentric women, but I’m off for a brief trip into a totally uncharted interior! No, she had not said that, she had concealed and softened. All the same, how could she treat Mark so-and how appallingly had she always treated poor Mark! How coldly, how finally, all those years ago, had she dismissed him from her life, from love, poor Mark who had had such a bad time with Lynda, poor Mark who had so little warmth in his life and who had been sent off by her, Martha, into a series of minor love affairs which bored him … it was all her fault! She was callous and …
As she entered the country of sound she encountered head-on and violently the self-hater … yes, of course, she had half-expected it, was even hoping to; but oh, how powerful an enemy he was, how dreadfully compelling, how hard to fight … the days passed. Someone observing Martha would have seen a woman lying on the floor, beating her head on it, weeping, crying, complaining, calling out to a large variety of deities, official and unofficial; accusing an unknown assailant of cruelty and of callousness; lying prone on the floor for a few moments, apparently asleep, then jumping up as if galvanized by conscience or command into some kind of frenzied but absurd activity, such as sweeping the floor, or energetically washing up coffee cups in the kitchen, or even doing violent exercises, while tears streamed down her face and she muttered and argued: not a sight to instruct or to edify. A sight, rather, to frighten, or upset-but this would depend on who came in. This turned out to be a man not yet met by her who lived on the second floor and who had heard she was ‘on a trip’ and had come to see if she was all right. Martha found to her surprise that she was not so far gone that she did not instantly pull herself together and converse with calm and with sense. She said it was LSD (anything for a quiet life as she muttered to herself) and that she was well used to it. Off he went, and she resumed.
She was completely in the grip of this self-hating person, or aspect of herself. Remorse? No, it was more that her whole life was being turned inside out, so that she looked at it in reverse, and there was nothing anywhere in it that was good; it was all dark, all cruel, all callous, all ‘bad’. Oh, she was bad, oh she was wicked, oh, how very evil and bad and wicked she was.
Time passed.
It was the most banal and ordinary of considerations that saved her-she had been here for two weeks, and she was squandering precious time. After all, for a human being in this our society of the nineteen-sixties, to achieve three months of perfect solitude and without interference, was so rare … and here she was squandering it. Because, right ahead of her (and she now saw how very lucky that was) was Rita’s visit, for which she must be normal and competent.
It could not be said that she was able to defeat the self-hater all at once, or completely-no. He, she (it?) was too strong. But push him aside she did, for periods, writing as she did so on sheets of paper that she had arranged for this purpose on a table in a corner of the room.
The self hater. This is where Lynda was defeated. She is never free of this.
Beside this entry were a whole forest of underlinings, exclamation marks, and signs of all kinds that Martha put there in a sort of despair: they were there to remind her, afterwards, that this series of words said so very little of what she wanted to say, were a thin scratching on a rock, a pathetic shorthand, for what she knew. For the complexity of what was going on (later she said it was as if she had crammed a dozen years of intensive living into a few weeks) and the speed at which she was learning, was such that she was all the time in the grip of an anguished fear she would forget, forget, forget all this she was learning. For she remembered that one did forget. Oh yes, one forgot appallingly. This was the third time for instance that she was charting the country of sound (although this time she was accompanied by the self-hater), and she only remembered when she was doing it what she had learned before.
However, defective though her experiments were, terrified though she was, totally inadequate in every way for what she was trying to do, she was encountering previously known states of mind (regions, boxes, areas, wavelengths, countries, places) and in them were recognizable features. So this was not all chaos, it was not just a jumble: one could, in fact, make some kind of sense of all this by using one’s ordinary faculties of memory, judgement, comparison, understanding. In short, one could use one’s common sense here, in this uncommon area, just as one could in ordinary life.
And, using one’s common sense …
But, looking at Martha from outside (a woman lying crying on the carpet, or sitting in an intense thought which knotted her muscles), it might be hard to credit her with the calmness of mind which she was in fact using … better perhaps to skip the detailed blow by blow account of this ‘work’ which Martha was doing, and to rely on her notes.
Which of course must be inadequate; but then so would an attempt at a description.
The woman lying on the carpet crying: which would be more subjective? -to see thus, describe her thus, or to describe the contents of her thought?
The woman scribbling with agonized speed, to get everything down fast before it flew by: more subjective to describe her knotted pose, her clenched face, or to transcribe the notes?
Better, perhaps, the notes, like small signposts, or footmarks, for other people who may or may not find them useful.
The first entry after the one about the self-hater was: Why couldn’t Lynda get out from under? I can make him weaken, I can fíght him off. Strong emotions, thought, can make a kind of gtoove in the brain, and if you do that you can’t get out of it? I am scared. Suppose I can never send him away?
But soon sheets and sheets of paper were scrawled and scribbled over as the notes and remarks accumulated, were put down so fast that she did not have time to make them more legible.
You’ve got to be alert enough to catch a thought as it is born. That is how to distinguish. There are different qualities in thoughts. (The word qualities was ringed around and boxed and made to stand out in Martha’s attempt to remember it, to emphasize it.) Very slight differences in quality. One should be able to learn how to tell an overheard thought or words from the self-hater, for instance.
Yes. Into a mind comes different qualities of … Hearing a thought of Lynda is different. How? No emotion. Remember this, remember it. Words trickling through your head with no emotion: that’s likely to be overheard, someone else’s thought. There is emotion in the self-hater. Go away, go away, oh please God go away, I can’t bear it, just imagine, people live all their lives with you in their heads, poor, poor, poor Lynda, how does she bear it, a life sentence in hell. Go away.
Suddenly, yes, today’s been Jack. This is where Jack was defeated. His body got taken over. His body is fine. Body is neutral. Something to use. Body can’t be bad. A bad low cunning mind uses his body. His body says, I don’t want to be cruel. If his body wanted to be cruel, then what he does anyway would be enough. (This underlined and scored and emphasized.) It is his mind likes hurting. A nasty little mind, like boys pulling wings off flies.
For two days Martha jibbed. She would not go on. She was being brought face to face with certain aspects of her own character-to do with sadism, masochism, the pleasure in hurting. Physically. But going on in this way seemed to be the price of going on at all-the jeering, hating, mocking tormentor in her head sulked, and like a schoolchild said: Oh if you won’t play I’m going to go … and went, or was silent. Martha, crying, weeping, in an agony of shame and reluctance to remember, at last went on.
She wrote: For days now … very well then, now I know. Next time I read that a man has strangled and raped a child, I know. Or why the death penalty was once public and is still desired by most of the British public. DON’T FORGET THAT YOU KNOW.
She wrote: Three days on, I think. The Tortured and the Torturer. Am being both. Am not just the pain-maker. Pictures on the television set: smoke from a gas-chamber in concentration camp. Then fírst separate but becoming the same, the ragged bit of refuse (me) pushed into the gas-chamber and the uniformed woman (me) who pushed.
Very economical this editor in my brain. He cuts film beautifully…
On the screen half a dozen personalities, symbolized. For instance, one of them, Carroll’s old knitting sheep. Beside it, clumsy trampling horny bull The bull of Bashon. (Very funny, you make very bad puns No, no, no, of course, some of them are brilliant.) Bash-on. Ha ha.
Must be days later. Suddenly understood. He (who) is showing me characteristics (mine) and their opposites (mine). I am so dense. It was perfectly obvious a week ago, if only I’d got it. And now remember it.
For some time now Martha was stuck. What was happening was something like this. She would discover herself uttering sloganlike phrases, or feeling emotions, which were the opposite of what she, the sane and rational Martha believed. For instance, she would find herself using the languages of anti-semitism, first the sly subtle approaches to anti-semitism, which then worsened, so that for a few hours she was sounding like Goebbels. In a panic she floundered about in a total loss of her own personality. For she would retrieve from her own depths a phrase or an idea which embodied what she thought, but it would at once be swallowed by its shadow. This plunged her into a violent state of fright and shame. Then she saw this was more like an embarrassment, almost a social embarrassment, as if she were being caught out in a social gaffe, which she was afraid of people discovering. She became ashamed (really ashamed) of her own triviality. Before this could be understood, and worked through, she was switched off into a hatred against black people. Then, fast, she watched herself using the languages and emotions of hatred of black people for white people, and of white people for black; of Germans and of Jews, and of Arabs and of the English-etc. etc. Until her chattering mind and the ‘television set’ was like a hate programme arranged for the pleasure of some international lunatic.
Why is it that it takes so long for me to understand something perfectly obvious? I’m so stupid. Of course: I am switched in to Hating, which is the underside of all this lovely liberalism. But just because we are all such lovely liberals it doesn’t mean … well why does he (who?) tell me that? Don’t I know it already? … Why, I don’t … it’s because I keep forgetting I can’t say, reasonable, civilized, etc. etc. Thinking that I am. I am what the human race is. I am ‘The Germans are the mirror and catalyst of Europe’ and also: ‘Dirty Hun, Filthy Nazi ‘.
Oh God, I’m so tired, I’m so tired. How many volts all the time?
Shrieking self-pity and hysteria.
Is this what all those books call ‘the pairs of opposites’?
Love, hate, black, white, good, bad, man, woman.
Somewhere here in came Bob Parrinder. Martha was lying crying on the floor. His pretty girl-friend stood behind in the door, with her baby in her arms. She wore tight faded jeans, brown sweater, a mass of long drowning hair. He smiled. Martha looked up at this immensely tall, tall, tall man whose head was near the ceiling. She sat up, and it lowered.
He was sympathetic. His eyes were hungry to share. He was here, Martha understood, because of some argument or tiff or something with his girl-if he came to her, Martha, commanded her in some way, it would prove something to the girl? The girl, Martha thought, wasn’t really a very nice girl. (Ten minutes, or ten hours ago she had abolished words like nice, nasty.) Martha did not like the slow, stupid, obstinate face. She did not like the young man’s usurping of authority either, but she thought: Underneath all that nonsense, he is nice, he’s a person.
Martha, sitting with her legs stretched out, her arms behind her, resting her weight on her palms, said to him: ‘Do you know what it is you are really wanting? ’
The man now kneeled by her, became a very thin, gently-smiling man with soft-falling fair hair. But she knew he wanted to dominate and control.
‘Are you sure, ’ he said, ‘that you oughtn’t to have a rest or something? ’
‘Yes, I am, ’ said Martha crossly.
‘Well, if you are sure …’
‘Do you know what it is you really want? ’ inquired Martha. For now it seemed extremely urgent that she should tell him, that he should understand, and that he should by this be saved from his own varieties of foolish behaviour. She could do this by simply telling him. (Just as if what she had been learning, basically, was not that one has to experience to understand.)
‘No, you tell me, ’ he said, smiling.
‘You want someone to boss you. To dominate you.’
His mouth fell in out of his smile and became determined not to show annoyance.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I know so.’
At the door, the indolent girl crossed her legs differently, and laughed, so as to demonstrate her agreement.
‘That is quite true, I think, Bob, ’ she said, in purest Kensington.
‘It is not at all true.‘
‘Yes, ’ said Martha. ‘All you young block leaders, you simply can’t wait to hand yourselves and your disciples over to the nearest guru or gauleiter. Blind leading the blind.’
‘I am sure you’d feel better for a cup of soup or something. Olive, how about some of that soup we made for lunch? ’
‘Do you want some soup? ’ Olive asked Martha.
The baby began to complain. Olive parked him on one beautiful hip, and jiggled the hip. It looked like a kind of dance-a onesided or crippled shimmy. Her breasts swayed and marched, one, two, one, two.
Martha fell back on the floor and laughed. She laughed, and laughed.
Stopping laughing, she noted that Bob waited, smiling, to be told why she laughed. Behind his head, a ceiling moulding looked like a square halo. She laughed again.
‘Do you know what a halo is? ’ she inquired. For she had understood in exactly that moment what a halo was.
‘Certain people have haloes. They have white light or yellow light around their heads. Instead of dirty-breath green or angry red or efficiency grey.’
‘That’s interesting, ’ he smiled.
The baby began to half-laugh, half-cry the way babies do when they are being jollied along by mother or somebody and they feel obliged to laugh but really they are angry and would like to have been allowed to hit, or bite, or scratch. A sobbing laugh. A laughing sob.
‘I don’t want to be rude, ’ said Martha, with extreme, and indeed finicky politeness, ‘but I haven’t got all that much time, because Rita is coming soon. She’s Maisie’s daughter. No, of course, you wouldn’t know Maisie. And I’ve got to get through this lot without putting myself into a loony-bin-time’s running out.’
‘Ah, ’ he said, ‘I do see.” He unfolded his legs upwards under him and again became a beanstalk reaching to the ceiling.
Martha saw that he would go off, quarrel with the girl, who would not bring her soup (now she saw this she was sorry, her stomach raged with hunger) and that they would not, or not soon, come back. They felt that she, Martha, was probably in need of help; they did not want to break their own code of social behaviour by calling doctor or police or the carpenter from downstairs who would, or might do this: so it would be simplest if they did not come back to see Martha too soon. Blessed are the cowards and the indolent: what a lot of trouble they save.
The interruption into the room’s activity changed it. The Hater retreated a bit.
I’m in Bosch country. I know where Bosch got his pictures. Good Lord, look at that…
Is it always here? (There? Where.) I can see why those books say you should not get too interested in this. You could spend your life just watching television.
Bosch country. If I could paint, and I painted this I would be a forger. Are forgers people who plug into Bosch country?
Why am I so stupid. Have understood. If I didn’t know better and I plugged into Hater by accident, I’d stay a Hater. Did Hitler plug into Hater by accident? (For instance.) A nation can get plugged into-something or other? A nation can get plugged in through one man, or group of men into-whatever it might be. Here is Martha. I’m plugged in to hate Jew, hate black, hate white, hate German, hate American, hate. Now not plugged. Might be plugged again in ten minutes’ time.
This is Dali landscape.I’m plugged into Dali mind. If I could draw, paint, then I’d paint this, Dali picture. Why does only Dali plug into Dali country? No Dali and me. Therefore Dali and-plenty of others. But nurse says, delusions. If ignorant, does not think:This is Dali country. Thinks: That’s a silly picture. If educated, knows, thinks:I am a copycat. Or, that must be a Dali picture I haven’t seen? (Perhaps it is.)
He couldn’t have painted so many. Why not?
Plagiarism. (Think about this after when time.) Mark writes something. Then it’s floating in the air. Someone can plug in.A City in the Desert is photostatted in the photosphere. (Oh, very funny. Ha. You only deserve half a laugh for that one.)
One of them is rather weak.
And one of them is very meek.
And one of them is just a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.
One of them would like to strangle,
Hurt and tear and bite and mangle.
And one of them is rather crude, And one of them is just a prude.
And one of them …
For God’s sake stop, sobbed Martha, clutching her ears as this awful da-da-da-da-da ground into her ear-drums.
Lying face down, nose in a thick plush of carpet which smelled faintly of dust, the sea of sound came down, swallowed her.
Almost.
One of them is rather bright.
One of them just must be right.
One of them is…
Eyes shut, she watched the pictures pass in front of her eyes that went with the jigging rhymes, like a child’s picture book with verses. One of them is rather meek’ was Lewis Carroll’s shawled and knitted sheep.
And sometimes you are very kind,
But often you are cruel, you’ll fìnd.
God I’m so stupid. Obvious. Me. What makes up me …
Martha, kneeling by the low table, scribbled and scribbled notes, words-memoranda to herself for later, but listened to the jigging rhymes and kept shutting her eyes so as to miss as little as possible of the television programme.
Martha, a breathing individuality of faceted green, reflecting sky, house, pavement, cloud, man, woman and dog, a gaunt, wretched woman in an old towelling bathrobe, watched the facets of her personality march past-watched, and scribbled, remember.
For God’s sake. Don’t forget. Or you ‘11 have to do it again.
It’s later than you think.
Girls and boys come out to play.
The moon is shining as bright as day …
I am the creation of my own mind.
lam the creation of my own mind.
I am…
Words, words, words, words. If the words come, the reality will afterwards.
Paul came in. She was asleep on the floor. Incredibly handsome as usual; beautiful, in clothes that managed to combine elegance with a half-laugh at it, he sat on the edge of his four-poster bed, looking quizzically at Martha.
She snapped into common sense, in the habit of alarm: here was one of the ‘children’ - she was not being responsible.
‘It’s only me, ’ he said.
She lay back again. He lit a cigarette and gave it to her.
‘You aren’t looking your best, ’ he remarked. ‘However I suppose you know what you are doing.’
She had been slipping into a region of terror: one new to her. She was relieved that he had come, and that his coming steadied her.
She sat up, made him tea, talked: all with the aim of testing out to what an extent she could present normality to him. Inside her head the world of sound, conducted like an orchestra by the self-hater, rang, hammered, drilled. Soon, being with Paul subdued it.
Because it did, she was able to send back with him to Mark a message that, yes, she would be able to come to the restaurant tonight. Margaret was very upset about the house being bought by the Council; she intended plans, campaigns-at least a family conference. She had already pulled several strings.
Asked if he was to be at this dinner, Paul said gracefully: ‘Well, I’m not entitled to it, am I? It’s not my house.’
This was not a plea, or a complaint, or from bitchiness. He felt this. After all, he had this house-half of it; and half of another like it.
Was Francis to be there? He had been asked, but said he was sure the grown-ups would do everything for the best.
Martha put on a suit, made herself up, and saw in the mirror that no one could possibly guess that she was, by any yard-stick this society used, a raving lunatic. The self-hater had become, logically enough, the Devil, and commented, or exclaimed or jeered, or criticized her every move, thought, memory. Her will went into not succumbing, while at the same time, she listened, trying to be neither frightened nor resentful. She was going to take the Devil to the restaurant, and it was necessary that no one should guess this. That Paul had not, was a good omen.
The restaurant was one of the small expensive ones, French, doing good classic food. The décor was modestly pretty, and reminded of French provincial hotels.
The guests: Mark. He was silent, sombre, occupied with his own thoughts.
Martha. She was accompanied by the Devil.
Lynda, silent, looking rather ill: she had now definitely decided to leave Mark and to ‘be a real person without props’. Extending her activities she had found she was not as strong as she had thought. She had had a week on sedatives and was badly set back. In short, she was very frightened about her future.
Margaret. She was full of angry unhappiness.
Her husband, John, who was tight. He had been drinking a lot recently, having fallen in love with the newsagent’s assistant in Marleybridge, which passion he was fighting with alcohol.
Phoebe, now a sub-minister with various responsibilities in the new Government. Everything the Government did went from bad to worse, as if the whole world (she felt) conspired against it, and she, too, was angry. Also extremely tired, being overworked. She, having not had a proper meal for days, had had a sherry while waiting and was a bit tipsy.
Arthur, who had not been given a job in this Government, because he was too left-wing. He was in exactly the same position he had always been in: nothing of what he believed, or stood for or had ever campaigned for was being attempted by this, his Labour Government, so he did not feel he had been challenged. He was still waiting, a vigorous handsome man of nearly sixty, for the future to begin.
His wife Mary, who had fallen in love this week with a charming boy, the carpenter who was putting new shelves into the bathroom. Understanding by this that she was now definitely middle-aged, she had rushed out in a psychological crise, had bought herself a grandmother’s woollen dress, and was wearing it. Her Arthur had said he did not think the dress suited her-she reflected that this clever man had never understood her-nor ‘anything to do with the emotions’. This thought was enshrined in the small dry smile on a pretty face smudged by long crying. It stayed there unaltered until the theme of The Youth was introduced.
And there was Elizabeth, who had spent the afternoon with Mark, to set up an ideal community ‘somewhere in a new free country’. She had been drinking brandy all afternoon and was tight-and sizzling with frustration. She simply could not understand Mark who had described a perfect city and was not prepared to make one. She had burst into tears several times that afternoon and had been very rude. Mark, realizing that she was in the middle of a breakdown, had rung Dr Lamb, who was going to see her tomorrow. She kept her hungry eyes on Mark.
This was a family conference.
They were here because of Margaret. First they ordered food, while she held her fire.
One order of Pâté Maison, one of Pâté Campagne, two of moules, two of melon, two of artichoke, one avocado pear. They were all drinking muscadet except Arthur, who was drinking Scotch.
Margaret said it was a disgrace that the house should be taken over, even if it was (as she had heard was likely) to be used, with minor alterations, for administration. She had a petition ready and they must all sign it. She produced from her bag a petition, and a selection of others, one on behalf of Fidel Castro’s exiles in America, one on behalf of some prisoners in South Africa, one for Oxfam, and a letter to The Times about some writers sentenced to imprisonment in the Soviet Union. At which Phoebe, without speech, produced some petitions from her handbag. She had the South African one, and the letter to The Times; but also a draft letter about political imprisonment and torture in Portugal, and a statement or affirmation, designed for the New Statesman, about the behaviour of the police.
They all signed all of Phoebe’s, except for Margaret, who would not sign the complaint about the police-the Government’s recent report (Tory) made it clear that their behaviour was impeccable and complaints against them the work of troublemakers. They all signed all of Margaret’s, with the exception of the petition about Fidel Castro’s victims, which was signed only by Elizabeth.
There now remained the question of the house. Margaret cried out to Mark that he sat there, he did not seem to mind, but after all, he lived in the house, didn’t he? He said, briefly, that he doubted very much that it mattered whether one lived in this house or that-the future was likely to be too barbaric for that. Appealed to, Lynda came back from a long way off, smiled and said: She was sure Mark was right. Margaret obviously had not meant to appeal to Martha publicly, as she certainly would privately, but now she did.
Martha, listening with one ear to the Devil’s angry sneer about her callousness, eating avocado pear while the world burned, said it was not her house. This was as outrageous in its way as Paul’s saying the same thing. The family looked at her, Mark’s mistress (?) or at least his companion, with reproach held in check.
She said, ‘My usefulness is over, isn’t it? I’m not contributing anything now.’
In her ear the Devil sneered: If you ever did.
Mark shot her a warning look: discuss it with me, not in front of the others.
‘Don’t any of you care? ’ said Margaret.
‘Of course we care, ’ said Lynda absently. ‘It’s always been a lovely house.’
‘Well, where are you all going to live? ’ asked Margaret.
Here Lynda’s, Mark’s, and Martha’s eyes enmeshed: this contact was a comfort to them. The three were infinitely apart from each other, and grieved that they were. A sense of imminent partings was strong.
The others, seeing this instinctive affirmation of a continuing need, did not press.
Now it was time to order again.
Margaret had Canard. Pheobe had Filet en croûte. Martha had Bœuf Stroganoff. Mary said she would skip that course, but ordered Bœuf to please them. John had Coq au vin. Mark had Poulet. Arthur ordered grilled salmon. Lynda ordered, but did not eat, salmon.
‘What about the children? ’ asked Margaret. ‘Why aren’t they here? ’
‘Elizabeth’s here, ’ said Mark, trying to be kind.
Elizabeth said with bitterness that she had never had a home and it looked as if she never would.
Lynda, appealed to about Francis, said it seemed as if he proposed to continue living with Jill.
Phoebe said: ‘Then more fool him.’
Martha, appealed to about Paul, said that they all forgot Paul was a houseowner himself, even though he was not much over twenty.
‘He’ll probably be putting us all up, ’ said Margaret, bitter, bitter, her eyes full of brilliant tears.
‘What about your children? ’ said Phoebe to Arthur and Mary.
‘Oh them, ’ said Mary, bitter. ‘Selfish little beasts. I can’t wait till they get to our age, and see how they do, they really are …’
Scene of the time: a room full of middle-aged people, eating hard, preoccupied half the time about weight problems, always on diets of one sort or another, most of them smoking, a lethal habit as they were told at the top of every publicity voice there was, most of them on sleeping pills and sedatives, all of them drinkers and some of them drunk-talking about the youth.
The young took drugs. They were irresponsible. They were selfish. They were dirty. They were self-indulgent. They had no interest at all in politics-that was Phoebe, who kept demanding: If they’d only go out and canvass for the Party, they’d have a purpose in life and they wouldn’t need to take drugs.
Margaret, Phoebe, Arthur, Mary, found themselves in perfect agreement on this theme, and while the plates were being cleared, started drafting a letter to The Observer about why the youth were not interested in politics. Margaret said it was because they had not suffered when children, they had had it too easy. Arthur agreed.
During the coffee, this draft was completed, and then Lynda asked Mark if they could go home. At once Mark said yes … infinitely relieved. Martha was all too ready to go.
‘But we haven’t settled anything, ’ Margaret kept saying, pathetic, bewildered, looking from one to the other of this trio Mark, Martha, Lynda, while she held a silver and turquoise pencil over the draft letter.
Elizabeth, ill, had to come with them.
Martha asked to be dropped back at Paul’s house.
Lynda said to her: ‘One would think that if there was a Devil there’d be a God.’
Martha said: ‘I don’t know how you stick it, going on all the time. I’d kill myself.’
Lynda said: ‘You can get used to anything.’
Mark said to Martha: ‘When are you coming back? ’
‘Well, how about in six weeks? ’
‘Couldn’t you make it sooner, there are things …’ He meant Elizabeth, sitting beside him, her profile turned to him. In the half-dark of the car’s interior, her slightly parted lips, her calm round forehead gave her the look of a venturing girl. Perhaps that was how she saw herself at that moment. But she was well over thirty, and in the light, looked more.
Lynda said: ‘Elizabeth, have you left your husband and children? ’
‘Of course not, ’ said Elizabeth, indignant. ‘I’ve decided to find some place where they can really live, that’s all. I just like the sound of Mark’s city, that’s all.’
‘I’ll make it a month, ’ said Martha.
Lynda said: ‘Mark wants you sooner than that.’
‘Oh no, ’ said Mark hastily, ‘please, Martha, not if…’
‘If I loved somebody, really really loved somebody, I wouldn’t leave him, not for one moment!’ said Elizabeth.
‘All right, three weeks, ’ said Martha.
Inside her head, during this exchange, titan battles had taken place: she wanted very much to stop now. Oh how tired she was, how confused, how frightened … she felt she had the best possible excuse to say to Paul: Thanks, but that’s enough, for the time being at any rate-and go back home.
What home? It wouldn’t be here, within a few months.
Besides, three weeks of absolute privacy, good Lord, what sort of a fool would throw that away, not knowing when the next chance would come.
With half her need she stayed in imagination with Mark in his home, poor Mark who would now spend a night trying to hold together his crazy niece Elizabeth, and who had no friend there to help him. With the rest of her she was being driven to return to her retreat as fast as she could.
Inside her room she checked her body, the instrument, the receiving device. She had eaten a lot; she had drunk enough. It would take twenty-four hours at least to get herself back into a sensitive state.
Sensitive to what?
One always assumed that … the point was, she knew nothing, and was taking such risks: she might very well end up in the hands of Dr Lamb-why not? It can’t happen to me: Everyone says that, all the time. It could happen to her. It was happening to her. If she now went into Dr Lamb’s room and said these and these and such and such are my symptoms-that would be that.
Luckily she knew better.
But she did not know the first thing about what really was going on in this machine, mechanism, system, organism. Who did? Did anyone? Not Dr Lainb!
If she didn’t understand she could describe, she could record. Above all, she could remember.
Time out from the Devil had lessened him after all, as she saw when she was able to compare the mental furniture of the room with what it had been before she went out.
She was able to hold him back, hold back her collapse into tears and screaming self-pity for a while. Meanwhile, like a baby who has drawn a deep breath for a yell of temper, but is holding out for a greater effect, she knelt by the table and scribbled notes fast, fast, before (as she knew she must) she would collapse into self-abasement.
Works like this. Thought comes into mind. If conscious, thought is in words. If not, if ordinary association-thought then it isn’t words. Words are when one stands back to look. This first word then sprouts into other words and ideas like a flash of lightning. No, like water suddenly lifting limp branch off sea bottom. Words proliferate so fast you can’t catch them.A word:then an idea suggested by that word.(Who suggested the word?) You think: my idea? Whose? Make the first word or phrase or idea stay still so you can look at it. Then you can ask:is that an overheard thought? Whose? Why? Or is it something fed by the invisible mentor? If you stop thought, make it go out of mind altogether, it can retreat and make its way back in sound. This sound can get louder. It can use different voices, known and unknown. If known probably you associate that thought with that person. That thought can also come from the corner of a room or another part of your body or a chair or something. Mind is also a ventriloquist. Devil for instance before I went to dinner-from corners of the room.
Essential be conscious the moment thought comes into mind otherwise it is a lost thought.
Here we go again:if you don’t know something you can’t know it. You can only learn something you already begin to know.‘I can’t tell you something you don’t know. ‘
And again:Every attitude, emotion, thought, has its opposite held in balance out of sight but there all the time. Push any one of them to an extreme, and boomps-a-daisy, over you go into its opposite.
I am good and kind and intelligent.I am bad and cruel and stupid.
All right, all right, all right. You just keep off a minute.
The young man in Virginia Woolf’s story who was mad. He heard the birds talking in ancient Greek.
Onomataopoeia. Think about it!
An emotion. Fear for instance. You can see how it converts into a thought-if you are quick enough.
A body is a machine, for the conversion of one kind of energy into another.
Here Martha succumbed again to the Devil.
Hell (one of them?) is hot. It has a harsh light. There is a sticky clinging feel to it. MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL it has a beat. Both regular and irregular. Like a mad clock, like the way paraffin lamps flare up before going out, but it flares with a regular irregularity. A wild hysterical sort of beat yet regular. Yet at the same time small and unimportant. A harshness of black and white. A sticky feel. Light without shadow. Monsters. First you see just people, you and I. Then you see, they, we, are deformed, our faces twisted with greed and anger. Man from grocery, a portly slow-moving man, high-coloured in face. In hell he leers-you see that he has dogteeth, fangs, is sub-human. Faces like embryos, half-formed. A gallery of faces of people. Devils. Ordinary people. Faces are blanks which can take masks, good or bad. Hate, envy, greed, fear, slide over people’s faces so fast you can only just catch them.
It was at that stage that Martha was conducted through the Stations of the Cross by the Devil. She knew nothing of this ritual, had never been instructed in it, nor had known well enough to affect her people who performed it. Yet it was as if she knew it, knew its meaning. From the moment when Pontius Pilate washed his hands to the time when she, Martha, who was also the Devil, prepared to be bound on the Cross, because of the (rightfulness of her crimes, she was as it were whipped through the ritual by the hating scourging tongue of the Devil who was herself, her hating, self-hating self. Yet though she was not able to refuse obedience to this ritual, she was quite able to protect herself from the boy who visited her during it: the boy who had killed, without meaning to, the baby he had said he would protect and who was now doing penance for the sin he had committed. He was a slight fair boy, who looked much younger than his nineteen years. He looked like an earnest schoolboy. He sat on the edge of the big four-poster bed, wringing his hands together and weeping, while he explained to Martha how God was punishing him out of love; and how if Martha was being punished, it was out of the love of God. When he had gone-he had to get up pretty early to be at his packing work at the chemical firm in Tottenham, Martha continued taking instruction from the Fiend, until the play was played out. ‘But I’ve done that, I’ve finished with that, ’ she said crossly to the Devil, refusing further instruction, and lay down to sleep for a while.
Martha was now unable to leave Hell. So she thought. Exhausted, she would say ‘enough’, and lie down to sleep in Hell. In sleep the most dreadful nightmares followed her. But she remembered that when she was a child there had been a long period when she had been frightened to sleep because of nightmares, and had used all kinds of tricks and techniques to outwit them. She remembered these now, used them. It occurred to her that she thought she was finally lost, was cast for ever into this sea, but all the same she could say, I’m tired, I will sleep-and did. Or, asleep, say: I am in Hell, wake up, and did. Or performed the rituals before sleep that could ward off nightmares which she had learned through necessity as a child.
This thought lessened the grip of the Devil and of Hell.
But did not send them away: she was still curious.
If all these sub-human creatures are aspects of me, then I’m a gallery of freaks and nature’s rejects.
See above. Fool. Don’t you ever learn. These things are there. Always. I can choose to be them or not. I can collect them the way dust gets collected on a magnetically treated duster. Or not.
In Hell the light is on all the time.
In prison cells and in the torture cells and in the locked wards of mental hospitals light burns always.
Man understands the devil very well. The devil has taught him all he knows.
All dark or all light. Monsters and sadists create these conditions. Monsters and sadists live in them.
The face of Bob Parrinder. He hasn’t grown into his own face yet. He is a self-important little boss. His face like a landscape before sun rises. Shadows and light will fill it. If I held the mask of self-importance in front of him, as last night when he said, Oh yes of course, I understand all that, he’d die with shame. Olive’s face: what she is.
Mr. Briggs the Carpenter says: A letter for you, Mrs. Hesse. His face like a caulifíower going yellow and rotten at fringes. Underneath tired and very frightened.
Paul’s face: Sally-Sarah’s little Paul, when he sucked his thumb and put his face on his mum’s silk breast.
For a week Martha wrote nothing. She was too far gone in Hell. Yet not so far that she didn’t watch the days pass: five days, four days left, and so on. Inside her head hammered the enemy: or, voices might come from a wall or a chair (not accidentally, she began to see; she directed this, but did not yet know how. But there was no time to learn how). She had wished to return to the house in Radlett Street in a shape of competence, but would have to do so still undermined by the Devil. At this stage she believed she would never lose him-that, like poor Lynda, she would carry him with her for always. She thought that the last few weeks had taken her right over the edge into a permanent stage of being plugged into the sea of sound; and that its main, persistent, hammering, never-sleeping voice, was the Devil’s, the voice of the self-punisher.
She bathed. Drank tea. Ate toast. She tidied the room which looked as if a cyclone had been through it. She dressed and examined herself.
She was again much too thin. She looked haggard. However, there were three weeks before Maisie’s daughter arrived and in the meantime doubtless Mark and Lynda would put up with her. She would go to the hairdresser’s tomorrow … thinking these practical thoughts, hell retreated a step or two.
She collected all her notes and scribbles together and before bundling them into a box for future examination she wrote:
1. This sort of thing is not only very dangerous, but extremely inefficient. There must be other ways of doing it. And not drugs either. I’ve sent myself over the edge.
2. If a dictator wishes to control a Party, or a country; if a hierarchy of priests wish to control their flock; if any power-seeker anywhere wants to create a manipulated group-he, she, has to embody the self-hater. It is as easy as that. And it is very easy to do.
3. I’ve been turned inside out like a glove or a dress. I’ve been like the negative of a photograph. Or a mirror image. I’ve seen the underneath of myself. Which isn’t me-any more than my surface is me. I am the watcher, the listener …
Finally the central fact. If at any time at all I had gone to a doctor or to a psychiatrist, that would have been that. I’m over the edge. But even if I stay here I can manage (like Lynda). Why? Because I know just that small amount about it not to let myself be stampeded. If at any moment I’d given in during this session I’d have been swept away. Without knowing what I know, through Lynda, I’d not have been able to hold on. Through hints and suggestions in all the books, through my own experience, through Lynda-but without these, a doctor or a psychiatrist would have needed only to use the language of the self-hater and that would have been that. Finis, Martha! Bring out your machines. Bring out your drugs! Yes, yes, you know best, doctor, I’ll do what you say: I’m too scared not to.
Classic definition of Paranoia: ‘A feeling of being slighted … favours the secret nurturing of ideas of great power … such an individual may come into conflict with the law, either as a direct actionist (e.g. murder) or as a petitioner (law suits) a development which he regards as the natural outcome of his great but unrecognized importance, and of the envy and malice of an indifferent world … an impressive façade of reasonableness, earnestness and “normality” may cloak this psychopathology to an alarming degree. ’
The house was empty. Lynda had left a note that she was staying with Jill and Francis. Jill believed she was pregnant again, she did not know by whom. Mark’s message said he had taken Elizabeth to Nanny Butts’s: the doctors said a few weeks of rest on the drugs prescribed would probably send her back to her husband and children in a reasonable frame of mind.
There was a letter from Maisie, giving the date of Rita’s arrival, in about a month’s time.
On Mark’s desk was The Memorandum to Myself now rather longer.
‘… it will be the responsibility of individuals to forecast, plan, make provision for contingencies whose outlines are already visible.
1. We are all hypnotized by the idea of Armageddon, the flash brighter than a million suns, the apocalyptic convulsion, the two-minute war, instant death. Populace more than government; but governments as well. Everyone is stunned by an approaching annihilation like an animal hypnotized by the powerful dazzle of an approaching car.
‘2. This prevents preparation, psychological, and physical, for what is likely. Which will be local catastrophic occurrences-the poisoning of a country, or of an area; the death of part of the world; the contamination of an area for a certain period of time. These events will be the development of
‘3. What is already happening. A bomber carrying nuclear warheads crashes in Spain. All kinds of denials, evasions are made. It can be taken as an axiom that all governments everywhere lie-it is inevitable. Naive people think that conspiracies are seven men around a table in a Machiavellian plot: a conspiracy is an atmosphere, or a frame of mind in which people are impelled to do things, perhaps those things that they could never do as individuals, or couldn’t do at other times when the atmosphere is different. Ever since the last war governments have stockpiled every conceivable weapon of attack and defence, and there have been innumerable accidents, mostly minor ones, or threats of accidents-but the populace have never heard of them, nor would they find out except by accident, or by a member of the “conspiracy” (government department, commission, factory, etc.) not being sufficiently brainwashed into secrecy and spilling the beans, or when something happens like a bomber crashing carrying radioactive live warheads. What will happen is a development of what is already happening and what has been accelerating, out of control, since 1914 and the green light for mass extermination. Areas of the world are already being poisoned, contaminated, threatened, etc. In five years, ten, fifteen, twenty, something “unforeseeable” will happen, such as that a mysterious disease will decimate a country, emanating from a factory which manufactures disease, or that a container full of some poison, or destructive material sunk in the sea-bed in an (indestructible) container will be washed up or explode or release its contents, or that in a moment of extreme crisis between countries one side will by accident, in a fit of hysteria, release weapons which will totally destroy its oppponent or even itself-something like that.
‘4. It can be taken absolutely as an axiom that the populace will not be told the truth, nine-tenths because the governments concerned won’t know what is the truth, will be as much in the dark as anybody else, and one-tenth out of panic, greed, hysteria, fear of their own citizenry.
‘5. Therefore groups of people aware of this situation should set themselves to …’
Here the Memorandum broke off.
Martha rang Lynda.
Who said that Jill said she wouldn’t have an abortion again ‘just to please all of you’. Francis had said that she must do as she wanted.
The point was, said Lynda, where was everybody going to live? There were Francis, Jill, the children. Gwen had moved in with her sister. There were two new campers or squatters. One was Nicky Anderson from the old Aldermaston days. He had had a bad breakdown after a spell in prison. He had been told that he was paranoic. This had seemed convincing at the time-the ‘classic’ definition of paranoia could scarcely fail to convince an unprepared person-and in any case he was very weakened by one thing and another. Then, coming out of the doctor’s hands into those of his old friend Francis, it occurred to him that after all there wasn’t a revolutionary or reformer in history who could not have been dismissed or discouraged by such methods. It had not been easy to maintain this rallying towards self-esteem except with Francis’s help, and he had asked if he could stay with the couple. He had a girl-friend who had been kind to him when ill, having been ill herself. His parents had cast him off (or so he felt-they would welcome him back into the bosom of the family as a penitent paranoic, but not otherwise), and he said he wished to live with this girl. She had moved in too. He had no money, so she had been keeping him. There seemed no signs of this couple leaving Francis’s and Jill’s flat.
‘They are really all so very sad, ‘ said Lynda. ‘But I suppose their teeth have been set on edge. And my teeth have been set on edge. Perhaps my poor papa’s teeth were set on edge too? He used to go on about that war all the time … But it’s not only Jill now, it’s Gwen. Gwen has a job as a bunny because she says she’s sick of sex. And Jill won’t sleep with Francis, she says she hates sex. And she says that something comes over her when she’s with some man in a pub, and then because she doesn’t have a contraceptive, she gets pregnant.’
‘Poor Francis, ’ said Martha.
‘And poor Mark, ’ said Lynda. ‘I’m a wicked woman, I know that.’
‘Lynda, are you sure you haven’t been doing too much? ’
‘How could I ever, ever, ever do too much-after all the misery I’ve inflicted on everyone? ’
Martha went to fetch Lynda, to get her to come home and rest; she recognized only too clearly the person who was speaking through Lynda.
Lynda did come, but said it would only be for a short time. If she was going to crack up altogether by staying out in the world, working, then she would. She was not going to live her life out on the terms that either Mark or Martha must look after her. She was violent, weepy, self-punishing.
Martha’s devil-haunted head rang with echoes from Lynda.
Soon, however, she noted that because she was very busy, very worried over Lynda, her own devil retreated. From being too terrified to listen too closely, in case she provoked him into worse, frightened to use or think words, phrases that might ‘bring him on’ (like an attack of malaria!), she became careless of him. Soon, the Devil, once histrionic, flamboyant, accusing, violent, had become a silly little nagging voice, which became swallowed in the sea of sound-was just one little voice among many. And soon, the thing was all over-finished. Her mind was her own.
She was as sane as the next one.
But before Rita’s arrival, there appeared the Maynards, in the form of a letter which Martha even now could not help seeing as a summons instructing her to meet them for lunch next day at such and such a restaurant in Chelsea. The letter was from a hotel: food for thought here, since the Maynards had so many relatives in England. And the choice of the restaurant too; for it was one of the half-dozen ‘in’ restaurants of swinging London.
She had of course heard from time to time of the Maynards, but not much more than that Judge Maynard had retired, and that Binkie Maynard, who had remained married to his war widow, was an alcoholic, or not far from one, and was running an important government department.
Facts: 1. They must be well over seventy by now. 2. There could be only one reason for wanting to see her-Rita. 3. Whatever they had heard of her way of life, they were bound to disapprove of it.
The restaurant was called Charlie’s and Johnny’s Eataria: Charlie’s for short. When Martha went in, she saw the Maynards, two very old people sitting at a not very good table. They looked through her, not recognizing her. The thing was, she was making the most of her post-retreat thinness, and wore a ‘wand’ of white linen, with chestnut hair, and dark glasses.
She went up to them, greeted them, sat down, putting on a pretence of ease to cover up their look of-not merely surprise but affront, which, Martha could see, was due not so much to her, personally, as to a London which produced so prodigally unpleasant phenomena.
They were indeed old, and seemed more so in this scene set for youth, or for people who wanted to appear young, or who wanted to feed themselves on the aromas of youth. They were attended by a charming little waiter, probably Italian, wearing a strawberry-coloured cavalier’s muslin shirt, with ruffles, and a minuscule striped cotton apron with hills half-concealing, half-displaying what tight white pants were designed to emphasize. All the waiters had pretty little bums, glossy urchin hair, the look of well-used tarts in a good house.
The food had names like ‘Bobby’s Own Stew’, Our Own Bread’, ‘Salade Nikkioise’, ‘Tommy’s Pie’, and was very good, when it came.
The Maynards, two shrunken old people with their strong dark faces gone to bone, in clothes which they could have worn in London fifty years ago, looked out from their corner and made nothing of what they saw.
They ate steak and cheese and drank claret, and said very little to Martha, beyond asking her questions like: ‘Do you travel a lot? ’ and ‘I hear you’ve been having some good weather? ’ In short, they needed help to begin-which fact, naturally, flung Martha into disorder, since it was so difficult for her to believe that this was possible.
She should revive ‘Matty’ perhaps, hard though this was, after such a long time? But striking a note or two of ‘scattiness’, of wilful humour, she was met by long sorrowful stares-not of criticism, but of non-comprehension.
‘Of course, ’ said Mrs. Maynard, petulant, ‘when everything is for the youth, one feels one ought to go off into a corner and die.’
Martha saw that she, middle-aged woman, was being seen by them as ‘youth’.
She therefore made a great deal of small talk, and thought that she was wishing she could put her arms around them both, her old enemies. Yes, here they were, who had had such a very powerful influence on her that, looking back, she could say that of all her educators these had been the most valuable. He, Mr. Maynard, had done her the inestimable service of putting strongly before her, so that she could not possibly mistake it, that most deadly of weapons against what every young person (for a time at least) needs, wants, longs for: he had shown her disbelief, in the shape of an accomplished and withering irony: he had toughened her against ridicule. She, Mrs. Maynard, had shown her power at its ugliest, when it is indirect, subtle, hidden, since she who wielded it knew so perfectly that she must always be in the right and never doubted herself.
Ah, but what a very good job had the drunken cook made of the Maynards, stripped, stripped down to a sullen old age with nothing left of all their years of power. Indeed, one could not easily imagine how much more bitterly and painfully things might have been arranged for them.
Mrs. Maynard had always governed, intrigued, managed, by virtue of Government House, and powerful relatives in England. But now Government House was the enemy for her, must be, although she hated the Government in her country which was composed only of the second and third generations of Zambesians whom she despised, found raw, crude, unfit for responsibility. They had no touch of ‘home’ about them; yet ‘home’ (England) was what both Maynards had repudiated decades ago-and what, revisiting it now, had changed so that they could find nothing in it to admire or like. When their country (theirs, when it was run by yahoos unfit and unable to govern even themselves?) had cut itself off from their country (which was being run by unscrupulous socialist agitators who knew nothing about the blacks); when, looking around the continent of Africa (their home), they could not see one state anywhere, white or black, run in the way they believed states ought to be run-then they had thought (but only briefly and weakly) that perhaps somewhere in England (Devon perhaps, there were cousins there) they might find a sympathetic soil. Therefore had they come to visit with a half-brother, Richie Maynard, large farmer in Devon, and at the first weekend, a granddaughter had arrived from one of the new universities with a West Indian boy-friend with whom (or so it appeared) she had spent the night.
Mr. Maynard had taxed the half-brother, who had replied that his policy was, a tight rein made for a short run; the gal would get tired of it and settle down with someone of her own colour, and luckily Peregrine (the son), father of the girl, ‘had the sense to see it’.
This was putting a coloured boy from a slum in Trinidad on the same plane as once, fifty years ago, he, Mr. Maynard, had been put for Myra. Black sheep from some remote colony, he had courted Myra who had been given a long rein-they were going back home next week, they told Martha.
‘The thing is, ’ said Mrs. Maynard, with a hint of her old trumpet power, ‘people have no idea at all about service now, they are only for themselves. I have been seeing my grandnieces and nephews. They take no thought for the future at all.’
Now Martha found herself watching Mr. Maynard, who was tasting claret as if it, too, could not be what it had been: she was waiting for what, after all, she had always relied on from him, an unfailing urbanity, his need to deflate.
He had subsided back into his chair, head lowered, jowls on his chest, his hand about his claret glass.
‘We are neither of us, ’ said Mrs. Maynard decisively, ‘as young as we once were-my husband has to be careful of his heart, for instance.’
‘Oh, it’s not bad, not bad at all, ’ he said angrily.
‘No, but all the same, my dear …’ Her eyes were on his wine glass, and he sat back and allowed the little waiter to trip away with it and the half-empty wine bottle poised in a wicker basket.
‘I have a touch of arthritis, ’ she said, taking Martha into her confidence. ‘But I don’t do much these days-I garden. Gardening is my exercise.’
The meal was nearly over.
‘How is Maisie-do you see her at all? ’ asked Martha.
The two old people’s eyes met in a look.
‘She is quite deplorable, ’ said Mrs. Maynard. ‘But one would not expect anything else from her.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, ’ muttered Mr Maynard.
Guiltily? It sounded like it; Martha was not sure.
‘And Rita? ’
‘My husband sees her sometimes but she does not appear to care for me, ’ said Mrs. Maynard.
‘Well, my dear Myra, ’ protested Mr Maynard, blowing out his cheeks, protecting some delightful private secret.
‘Yes, ‘ she said. ‘But I hear she is coming to stay with you? ’
‘In a couple of days, ’ said Martha.
‘Well we have been thinking of coming Home for some time and we thought The look she gave Martha was all appeal. Unfair! An old Martha judged it. What right had she? But it was no use: Mrs. Maynard leaned forward with her old command, her white hair falling in wisps about her face, yet her flashing dark eyes and trembling lips made her all gallant, reckless girl.
She was plunging a ringed hand about in her handbag. Wads of notes appeared.
‘We were wondering. Perhaps you could persuade her. A finishing school? ’
A waiter raised eyebrows at a heap of five-pound notes, and brushed crumbs away from around it, in a delightful little play. Out went Mrs. Maynard’s hand to weight the pile until he had finished.
But how old is Rita? ’ asked Martha.
‘That is not the point. She has no idea. None at all. And her accent …’ Mrs. Maynard’s voice, which not even fifty years of colonial vowels had been able to incriminate, rang out.
Martha was silent. She looked to Mr Maynard for help.
‘Does Rita know? ’ she asked, when the old man said nothing.
‘Goodness knows what she knows!’ said Mrs. Maynard, with a look of pathetically brave accusation at her husband. Again he blew up his cheeks and let them deflate, pop, pop, pop, through his lips. His wife disdained the old man’s trick, stared him out.
He reached out his hand for his glass.
‘Brandy, ’ he said to Nikki, or Colin or Bobby, whoever it was now standing with another, a twin, against the wall. Both watched the scene with a frankly humorous interest.
‘Sure, sure!’ cried one; and ‘Mais certainement” the other, materializing brandy bottle and glasses.
‘Me too, ’ said Martha, allying herself with him; while she, Mrs. Maynard, as always in the right, said: ‘If you want another heart attack
‘Alcohol opens the arteries, ’ he said firmly, putting back his head and swallowing the lot. Bobby, or Ivor, refilled his glass.
‘Or if she won’t go to finishing school, ’ said Mrs. Maynard, ‘you could perhaps …’ She pushed a ream or so of money towards Martha.
Martha said: ‘But what does she want? ’
‘Ah, ’ said Mr Maynard, ‘now you’ve hit it. But Myra won’t see…’
‘I see everything, ’ said she. ‘But we all of us have to do things we don’t like sometimes. But whatever she sees fit to do or not, something must be done about her. Her clothes for instance.’
Here she darted a look at Martha’s clothes, remembered how unsuitable she had invariably thought them, and then that it was Martha or nothing.
‘The life she’s been leading, dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, ’ she cried. ‘Dancing every night, and she’s mad about boys, dreadful.’
‘Myra, she’s well over twenty, well over, ’ said her husband.
Tears washed down Mrs. Maynard’s old face. Nikki, or Colin, standing by with the cognac, went tck, tck with his tongue, and shook his head and sighed in sympathy as he smiled at her with a charm which made her sit up and straighten and glare back.
‘Well, I really don’t know, ‘ said he, in BBC English. Then, in cockney, ‘Reely, Hai don’t knaow. Some people …’
He went off affronted.
‘The most extraordinary people, ’ said Mrs. Maynard. ‘And they’re everywhere you go.’
‘How long have you been here? ’ asked Martha.
‘Two weeks. It’s more than enough. This country is …’ And now, at last, she said what she thought.
‘What is going on here? I mean it isn’t just the clothes, I suppose when I was a gal I wore clothes too. Gals will be gals, but one does feel that… and … and … and …” This went on for some minutes and ended with: ‘And to think you were going to invade us. You invade us.‘
‘And still might, ’ said Mr Maynard to Martha.
‘I somehow doubt it, ’ said Martha.
They looked at her suspiciously: she had perhaps changed? All three decided on diplomacy, and Mr Maynard said quickly: ‘But we’re out of all that. I’m retired you know.’
‘And it’s not only here, it’s everywhere, ’ said Mrs. Maynard, her lips trembling.
‘Go on, have some brandy, do you good, Myra, ’ said her husband. He looked around for a waiter, but saw two pointedly turned backs.
‘No, ‘ she said, and looked for her things, to put an end to the possibility of brandy.
‘The bill please, ’ said Martha to one of the turned backs. He nodded, cold: his charm, his real self, having been refused, he proposed to go on sulking.
Martha pushed the heap of notes back to Mrs. Maynard.
‘No, keep it. Keep it for her.’
‘We can leave it to her in our will, ’ said Mr Maynard.
‘Yes, but let us hope that it won’t be of benefit to her just yet, ’ said Mrs. Maynard.
‘I’m sure she’ll find something to spend it on, ’ said Mr Maynard, defying his wife, who glared at him through tears.
They left the restaurant.
Outside Mrs. Maynard said to Martha: ‘Perhaps you’d like to let us know how Rita does get along? ’ This was an appeal she hated to make; it came out peremptory, but her eyes pleaded and sorrowed.
‘Yes of course I will, ’ said Martha, intending to.
Mrs. Maynard nodded at her husband and they turned themselves about and faced the pavements. An orange-coloured London sun poured down a hot glitter into the gulf between the buildings all selling wigs, clothes, food, jewels, furniture, every item of which had the stamp of the moment, which was not to take itself seriously. The old people kept their eyes straight in front of them, as they went away among throngs of youth who were either wittily-dressed boys and girls who had the world for their bargain counter; or tasteless exhibitionists with over-developed naked thighs, yards of false hair, faces hidden behind dark glasses, or whiskers, or beards-anything that concealed. According to how you looked at it.
The two ex-consuls did not look at all: they fled past as if anything they saw must undo them.
Martha watched them out of sight, and went home with her handbag forced open because of all the money in it. Counted, it turned out there were eight hundred pounds ready for Rita (Maynard’s) education.
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