The Four-Gated City by Doris Lessing

Author:Doris Lessing [Lessing, Doris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-06-204794-6
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1969-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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