Rita arrived sometime in 1996, the Maynards' granddaughter and Martha's newest charge. The young woman's inability to fit into the various scenes of fashionable London made her an instant hit. Paul, the nephew, fell in love with her and tried to alter her image to fit the dictates of fashion. She resisted, and because Paul was asexual despite being wildly handsome, spurned him since she really wanted to get properly laid. She eventually conquered Mark his uncle, they became an item and soon she was, at the end of the novel, pregnant by him.
Francis, Mark's son, despite his conventionality and gift for common sense became involved in theatre arts and soon a commune formed around him that also involved some of his cousins and their friends. They moved out of London to a place in the country.
Martha could feel a new change coming her way, as though her life was once again about to blow itself into a new shape. She was no longer needed so much and began to consider making preparations to live independently. She didn't feel jealous of Rita and really did not seem to be one to accommodate jealousy. She was really more preoccupied with getting the job done while studiously examining and exploring her own inner life.
The novel comes to a conclusion when Mark's now ancient mother, Margaret, throws a huge evening garden party at her new estate by the River Thames, inviting celebrities, authors, royalty, sitting politicians, and business magnates and prominent figures in the arts. It is there that Doris Lessing delineates the growing political influence and power, in 1969, of the great corporations and global business empires over national and international affairs.
Following the novel's end we are treated to appendices that leap into an apocolyptic future. There has been somewhere in England and in other parts of the developed world a series of nuclear accidents or attacks. Great Britain and much of Europe and North America are evacuated and quarantined. Mark with help from Martha, Rita and others, has been setting up a network of refugee camps in North Africa, trying to model them after the fabled city of Martha's vision that he also made a novel about. It has been largely through Martha's and Lynda's psychic experiences and experimentation that they have been warned to prepare for this global catastrophe. Martha, one of the few survivors, is now very elderly and with a group of other survivors finds refuge in some uninhabited islands in the North Atlantic. They set up a commune there and manage to eke out a subsistence survival. Her telepathic gifts are by now highly developed and she finds herself communicating psychically with Francis and others who are living in Africa, Asia or South America.
This is where Doris Lessing delineates the idea that humankind never learns from their mistakes and that the tendency towards war and brutality is sure to be our downfall. She balances this despair with a modest hope that some of us are evolving into a new kind of human: people with ample mental and psychic and spiritual gifts and generous and loving hearts. The tragedy is that these same people are already damaged, sidelined and ostracized by society and can best offer up their gifts from broken vessels.
During a particularly severe winter, Martha, now eighty years old, dies and the novel ends with a postscript lament from a very aged Mark Coldridge.
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