Free Four Gated City by Doris Lessing Page B

of black and white. There were Jack’s pictures on the walls. Not many: enough, as he had said, to show he was a painter. And there was an easel and some painting things in a corner. The pictures were mostly abstract, and mostly black and white or grey or brown. Some of them had been made out of queer materials-bits of sack glued on to board; brick rubble mixed with paint smeared on board; paint mixed with sand. Jack had become a painter because at the end of the war he had not wanted to go back to a settled life. He needed a label. What was more respectable than to be a painter? Years before he would have had to fool himself that he was a painter, in order to live the life he wanted under that label. But the war had taught him that there wasn’t time for anything but essentials, he said. In the war he had learned that you must take what you wanted and then fight for it. If you were an artist you could get away with anything. You should either be very rich or an artist or a criminal. He had acquired some canvas and an easel and some paints, and had bought a lot of old pictures from a junkshop which he kept stacked about the walls for the sake of their atmosphere. He did a few days’ work with sand, rubble, bits of sack and some glue and some paint, and behold, he was an artist, with a label he could use on passports and forms.
    In 1947, a sailor discharged from the purposes of war, he had been walking down this street in which he had found a room, and had seen this house, then a wreck, a ruin, a shell, with a collapsed roof. He had gone into the open door and to the top of the house. He had spent a day in the house, not really making plans or decisions, but it seemed they had been made without his knowing about it, for the next thing he knew was, he had gone out and brought back a bucket, a scrubbing brush, and soap. With the roof still open above him, he had cleared rubble and scrubbed until he felt rain on his back and realized the roof ought to be mended. He mended the roof. He was just finishing it when Garibaldi Vasallo the Maltese had come in. He was a large swarthy man who looked as if he ought to have gold rings in his ears. But he wore a striped businessman’s suit.
    ‘What are you doing, son? ’
    ‘Mending the roof, ’ said Jack.
    ‘It’s my house, do you know that? ’
    ‘Well I’m living in it, aren’t I? ’
    Garibaldi Vasallo went down to the water-filled basement, inspected every floorboard and inch of plaster in the decaying place, and returned to under the roof, having decided to buy it. Previously he had decided it was in too bad a state to buy, like all the bomb-shaken houses of this terrace. But he watched Jack at work for a few minutes and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’
    ‘You can’t do that, I’m a protected tenant.’
    ‘How’s that? ’
    ‘I live here.’
    ‘Since when? ’
    ‘Have a cigarette.’
    Jack came down from the roof and sat cross-legged on the damp floorboards, and Garibaldi Vasallo sat opposite him and they smoked and discussed the war. Garibaldi Vasallo had been in the Merchant Navy. Jack had been in a minesweeper. If Jack had been in a minesweeper throughout the war, then he could not have been living in this house as he continued to claim that he had. He continued to make this claim, affably, while he talked of his minesweeping years with Garibaldi Vasallo, who for his part, continued to say that this was his house. And so it went on for some hours, and then Garibaldi went off to buy the house. It cost him £450. He bought two others at the same time for £500 each. Then, lacking further capital for the time being, made it his business to sniff out possible other buyers (very few, the terrace being in such dilapidation), letting them know that ‘the blacks were moving in’. He now had no money at all. He dropped over to watch Jack’s work on the top floor of the house, and began work himself on the roof of one of his other houses. Meanwhile Jack had brought in