Four Gated City by Doris Lessing

don’t understand-all of you, you talk of the people you call “the working class” as if they were-people from the moon. Not that you use words like “the working class” of course-Oh, I don’t know, ’ she concluded, in real despair, ‘one can’t even talk about it with you.’
    Glances were again exchanged between Henry and John, and again as if she were not present. ‘Well, ’ said John, ‘that is precisely why we are so keen to have you-you see a great many of the people we deal with have had a rather rough time, and one doesneed someone to handle them who knows what they are talking about.’
    ‘Perhaps, ’ said Martha, ‘having had a rough time as a refugee would include rather more than would be covered by having experience as a barmaid? ’
    She was now really angry. Really discouraged. Even frightened. After all, such people ran this country, no matter what the papers said. And when you came anywhere near the Maynards and their kind this is what happened. It was like talking to-well, the blind, people blinkered from birth. Which is what they were. What was the point of… one simply had to get out of their way.
    The waiter was bringing the bill. The restaurant was full now. it was about ten o’clock, and had more than ever the atmosphere of a family, of people who were at one with each other. And they were off guard now, with a licensed childishness about them, as if, threatened outside, here they found refuge. Across the room, a man with a heightened colour and a rakish look flicked bread pellets at a girl in a fluffy pink sweater, who flicked them back, giggling, while waiters watched indulgently.
    The bill was for six pounds.
    ‘Where are you going, can we lift you? ’
    ‘Thank you, I’d like to walk.’
    Henry pushed back his chair. The waiter had three people by him who wanted this table. Getting out and away fast, which was what she wanted, was easy for her.
    She walked down Oxford Street; that is, eye-level goods confined behind lit glass moved past her: above were dark weights of masonry. The goods, clothes mostly, were as bad and as tasteless as everything else. This is the greatest city in the world, she kept saying, loitering, but not obviously so, among people window-shopping. The biggest city, the biggest, and this one of the streets whose name I’ve been brought up on, like Piccadilly Circus. The labels of these shops are covetable, sewn on clothes-there was not one object or article she would have cared to own. Of course, there had been a war on. Of course, even five years after such a war, buildings and streets must be propped and shored and patched and unpainted, and cloth must be thinned and impoverished. Of course. But even a yard of war-impoverished cloth can be woven with more sense or art. Good Lord, she found herself thinking, for the thousandth time, what kind of a race is this that chooses.inevitably and invariably, or so it seemed, the ugly, the graceless? Well, here she was and to stay.
    The shops ended and sky opened above the trees of Hyde Park. Now here was something different, oh yes, when it came to trees and gardens, then everything was as it ought to be. She walked down the pavements of the Bayswater Road, with the park on one side, balances and patterns of leaf dramatically green where the street lights held them, retreating into mysterious shadow beyond, with the lit moving sky over them. On her right hand, the great ponderous houses that stood so assertively on damp soil. Great ugly grey houses. They were boarded up or empty or in makeshift use; no longer houses; all in a condition of transformation towards being hotels. And unpainted. Ugly. Even in this changing racing wild light, ugly. But she was under the trees that edged the pavement, and they seemed like an extension of the trees of the park, so that it was as if the traffic that poured down the street was riding through softly lit trees which ended here; the grey cliff of buildings on her right being