Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 8 (The Four-Gated City 2)

Martha Quest soon becomes part of the Coldridge household.  She is like a substitute mother to Mark Coldridge's son, Francis, and his nephew, Paul.  Paul's father, who is Mark's brother is a prominent scientist who defects to the Soviet Union in 1951 after selling them nuclear secrets that enable them to manufacture nuclear weapons.    His son Paul's mother reacts by gassing herself to death.  All the journalists of Fleet Street besiege the Coldridge household to get the full scoop of this prominent member of the British establishment running off to the communists.  Paul, who is part Jewish from his mother, grows up to be a self-absorbed angry narcissist.  Francis is well-behaved and conventional. The two boys hate each other.

Mark's wife, Linda, moves home from the mental hospital and she and Martha develop a close bond.  She often has relapses and tends to hallucinate and not take care of herself and absolutely refuses to sleep with her husband.  She moves to the suite in the basement where she inadvertently sets up a thriving community of mental health sufferers and psychics.

Meanwhile, in solidarity with his brother who defected to the Soviet Union, Mark Coldridge joins the British communist party and his house becomes a hub of subversive political activity.  Martha, being an ex-communist is no longer trusted and kept at arms length.  Cold War hysteria is high and many lives and reputations are destroyed.  Mark writes a couple of novels.  One, before his communist phase, is about Martha's vision of the fabled city.  As a communist he writes another book, a novel about class struggle which does rather badly and is also badly written.   Eventually his ties with communism dissipate, he falls into a depression as does Martha and they become for the first time lovers.

Martha is concerned that she has lost entirely a dimension of spiritual lucidity that she discovered during her first month "freebooting around in London."  She found that if she ate little, slept little and walked much that her mind would clear and that she would be transported into a transcendent state.  She yearns for this heightened consciousness and throughout the rest of the novel strives through various forms of experimentation to recover it.