‘So had they started before we left?’
‘I’m sure they had. There were notices warning the students never to go out unaccompanied in the evenings.’
The paving-slabs were hollowed-out by weathering and footsteps. They were unevenly cracked and fissured. A puttying of moss had swollen out from between the flags.
‘Why?’ I asked, aware of the surface being broken. ‘That’s the question they never seem to answer.’
‘Denial. It’s denial. You know, the people at Belle Vue House didn’t believe it had happened, even after we went back for the trial. They thought I was drawing attention to myself. At least that’s the line the psychoanalyst at consultation took. You see it couldn’t have been a rape, as if even a girl like me must have been asking for it. I was speechless; I couldn’t believe a professional like him would have had such an archaic attitude. Sometimes it strikes me the responses I got were harder to cope with than the rape itself.’
Not that long before, you had mentioned, almost with equanimity, how for years after coming back, you half-wanted to have been killed. You would find yourself imagining that the night’s events were running like a film projected on your face—so that people who glanced at you in passing could see exactly what had happened. Flinching at your saying ‘the rape itself’, I also saw how my objectless affections had attached themselves haplessly and without hope of response to near-strangers. Reactions to small failures and criticisms would incapacitate me for months. They would make the outer world of sunlight, ruffled grass and shifting clouds almost an irrelevance, like a dying ember, a seeming affront or token of what was lost, now perhaps forever. The detail and sequence of events, occasional phrases, glimpses in darkness one September in the rain, and its residual feelings remained trapped inside me. And there was the decisive moment of our lives, formed like an unspeakable absence, a social embarrassment, an apparent affront to others’ sensibilities. Even the concern for my poor mother’s moods had prevented me confiding in her. Her entire ignorance of what happened that night was one she would take to her grave.
‘You know, I’ve never been able to talk about it to anyone …’
You were waving your hand to suggest we take a left at the corner, round towards the university campus.
‘Maybe it was easier for me,’ you said. ‘After all, I was the “victim”, the innocent one. No, I’m not suggesting you were guilty. You weren’t. But, anyway, you know what I mean. You have to let it go.’
A stiff wind was rustling the leaves surviving on the branches of the badly scorched trees. Your short-cut dark hair, a few traces of grey in its fringe, lifted slightly in the quickening breeze. The last of your smile seemed to come back more warmly. Mortar had crumbled away between stones of the wall we were walking beneath. It bulged unnervingly. The capstones, not sandblasted, leaned away above. A patch of dust had appeared on the toes of my shoes.
‘Somehow it’s like it could have been me. Even wanting to make amends, you feel like an aggressor.’
‘No, no,’ you said. ‘No. The motives are different. It couldn’t be the same. You know you shouldn’t hang yourself up on that hook now.’
The campanile of the Mill reappeared on the skyline. But just which Italian town was that bell tower supposed to recall?
‘More ruined lives, more wasted, ruined lives,’ I said, thinking out loud.
The distant moors were variegated with large patches of shifting shadow, the sky overcast in that direction, the wind quicker, clouds moving rapidly towards us. Now a layer of slate grey cloud covered the whole township. The temperature suddenly dropped. Separate spots of a darker tone began to pattern the pavement all around. There was a faint whispering in the foliage. But, as we approached the university area that day, the rain was no more than a passing shower. We were quickening our pace as you reached out a cupped palm.
‘Just spitting,’ you said.
And already the clouds were breaking up, their edges tinged with sunlight, patches of blue about to re-appear. Relishing the cool spots hitting my cheek, I could almost touch just how much that September in the rain had made us what we were. Coming back to England that time all those years before: it hadn’t been anything like melting away because you couldn’t stop crying, or being transformed into birds as if a relief from unendurable suffering. Death had cuffed us across the cheek; it had let us both go with a warning.
The cloudburst was already over. Refreshed, the air hung still again, the street silent and deserted.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever said this,’ I started.
We were almost at the stairs to Jean’s block.
‘But, you know, I’m grateful.’
The shower over, grass around our friend’s flat was a deeper, glistening green. You moved closer and curled your fingers around my arm.
‘For what?’ you asked.
‘You saved my life. The worst thing that ever happened to me, well, it happened to you.’
‘But,’ you said, knocking on Jean’s flat door, ‘you know very well it happened to us both.’
The tramway was creaking and grinding up a sunlit moor-side. It was a short chain of open carriages rattling on their rusty, uneven track. The frayed cable slid along rollers that guided its movement up the centre of the rails. Some of the rollers were rusted solid and the wire scraped stiffly across them. The cable would tauten, and then inflexibly go slack. The lines ahead were almost enveloped in grasses and rosebay willow herb. The cable disappeared into a bower of sunlight and undergrowth towards which the insecure transport was noisily moving.
‘Relax,’ said Jean, ‘I’m sure it’s quite safe.’
She was wearing her uniform of green dungarees and cowboy boots, her frizzy red hair alight in the wind and sun.
‘Can’t think why we never came here before.’
‘Probably wasn’t working,’ the playwright suggested. ‘I bet it’s got a preservation society. They’ll have come along after your time and got the thing running again.’
From the tracks up to the hilltop the tenuous line of the cable ran obscurely through patches of shade ahead. It beckoned, as if drawing us further on towards the young people we once were, people for years thought far better dead. The train slowed into its upper station. Between simple wooden souvenir booths, we followed the hilltop path through woods. Brief bursts of a heavily distorted music came echoing through the September leaves.
‘By the way, what happened round Mount Pleasant?’ you asked. ‘I don’t mean the Ripper. But wasn’t there some kind of riot?’
‘There could have been, things being that bad round here,’ said Jean. ‘Actually a garage pump exploded and set the whole area alight.’
Now we were approaching a tiny, run-down fairground. There was something attractive in the roundabouts’ amateur paintwork: long since faded through the bitter northern winters, these bright swirls and curlicues were like a child’s dream of immediate pleasure. And in fact there was one little boy, about three or four years old, playing among the attractions. He was kicking a soft yellow ball with black patches painted onto it, like a World Cup football. The child, with chuckling face, would get something into his head and toddle off in an inexplicable direction, then turn and run back. Toppling over on the cinders, he would pick himself up, his face on the point of tears, decide he wasn’t hurt, and then zigzag back over towards his parent.
‘Just kick the ball to your dad, son,’ the half-attentive man called out.
I was sitting on a flaked wooden bench. Its green paint had been chipped away to show the rutted, weathered-grey wood underneath. You were studying the boy with a curious look. It was almost a smile, with wrinkles at the corners of your eyes, but your top teeth were biting slightly into your lower lip, as if you were trying to imagine a possibility but couldn’t. Then you had glanced across at the father and practically scowled.
Jean came over and
began to tell us about how Heathcliff, an orphan discovered in Liverpool, as she said, might well have been an Irish tinker’s child. We had driven out late that morning and looked around the Brontë parsonage straight after lunch.
Not far off, a couple of lads were fiddling with a loudspeaker on one of the rides. Suddenly it started up, rumbling distortedly: ‘The leaves of brown came tumbling down, remember …’ But the sound cut out once more. There was a small wooden hut at the end of the fairground. It was a refreshment kiosk, where a woman sat knitting. On the counter stood a row of large glass domes. Inside were a few stale cakes and scones, hermetically sealed for eternal preservation as if in some bizarre experiment.
One of the amusements was a toy train on its circular track. And there was the same little boy seated inside the engine driver’s cabin. His father was resting against a low wall on the far side of the rails. The man was making smoke rings for a minute’s peace. The boy was absorbed in the circular motion of the train. It was how he was steering it caught my attention, for however much the little boy turned his wheel, the train just kept going on round and round.
Now he was restlessly glancing and twisting to where his dad stood smoking. But the father seemed caught in a dream of his own. The boy had quickly reached the point of boredom, and began to shout at his parent, calling to be released from the seemingly endless reiteration. At his shrill cries, his crescendo of anguish, I suddenly felt a terrible nausea like that lost desire, rising as if in sympathy with the little lad, to be anywhere else but here, to be hurrying home across the park and going in through the back door under the washing line.
‘Why don’t we go and look round Saltaire?’
‘In a minute, we’ve only just arrived,’ you were saying, both women evidently wondering whatever had got into me.
‘They’re planning a motorway link that will cut this place in two,’ said Jean, stepping down from the lower station.
You had finally agreed to leave the fairground, and after descending by the Shipley Glen Tramway with postcards and souvenir pencils, we were crossing parkland behind council houses with their lines of washing fluttering in the direction of Saltaire itself.
‘One of the proposed routes,’ Jean went on, ‘goes right through the middle of Salt’s village. There’s a preferable one that would circumvent it, passing not far from these fields right here.’
‘And an ideal one would be not to build it at all,’ you said. ‘Has a decision been made?’
‘No, I think they’re still at the planning stage, or it may have got to the public inquiries, the petitions, re-applications, all that. You might have seen the Saltaire Defence Committee’s posters: Over Our Dead Bodies!’
Gazing down towards the village, its mill and canal, a habitable space removed from careering cocoons of cars and lorries, I could imagine the carriageways with their steep scrub slopes, the rumble of continuous wheels, an isolated hurrying mobile world, its flickering mirages of glass and lights, the service stations with their cuddly toys in plastic bags, and lay-bys and emergency phones. A question began to form itself. It hung suspended in the air. You and Jean were pursuing the line of your conversation, getting onto environmental damage and air pollution, passing close by a family engaged in a game of French cricket.
Now we were entering the groves of rhododendron bushes that formed a part of Titus Salt’s parkland. And here was the statue they had raised, some time after his death, to commemorate the work of this philanthropic industrialist. Surely there was much more graffiti bespattering it now than when we had visited the place all those years before? Yet there he was still, the frock-coated Victorian dignitary with his eyes uplifted towards the moors.
From whence cometh my help … and the memory of that psalm brought back one more lost picture of mine. It was a large canvas, five feet by three, completed during the last summer at university. Titus Salt’s stone eyes, which gazed up away from his mill and village, were painted as if yearning after a more anarchic life than the one that he had set apart from those Yorkshire moors through his organizational skills, the power of accumulated capital, and a commitment to civic virtue. Salt, in the lost canvas, was gazing towards a landscape of impossible fulfilment, the sodden mildewed cobbled streets of Howarth, just a short journey by car from here. There was a deep satisfaction in the rocks beneath over-furred with slippery moss, but in the painting Salt’s civic order was played off against the allure of Bramwell Brontë’s emotional chaos. Though we might feel an affinity with the graveyard atmosphere of the parsonage, it was to Titus Salt’s world we would always be obliged to return. That was what the picture had meant to convey.
Those years before, the paternalism of Saltaire had seemed to suffocate its inhabitants: a life regimented around the little streets of worker’s cottages, the enormous Nonconformist chapel, the mill, and, across the river, a playing field in which, at this very moment, a school cricket match was in progress—the warm afternoon had brought people out to picnic and relax. But why did my landscape have to dramatize such mutually exclusive and equally self-thwarting opposites? Saltaire seemed far less restricting now than it did those years before. Why had it turned out this way? True, things were going better now for me at the College. Soon our weekend up North would be over; the working week ahead was already beckoning. In less than an hour, we would have to drive back south to King Alfred Terrace as fast as we dared, making enough time to finish your various presentations for that Monday morning.
How many years was it now since I stopped carrying round an artist’s sketchbook? Those untouched white cartridge pages were the last stage in the fading away of that youthful ambition. There was always going to be time to work up the studies, the bits and pieces cut from magazines, which might one day make a canvas or a collage. Artists made time. They stayed up all night retouching their pentimenti. But it hadn’t happened for me. For so many years, after what had been witnessed, the minutely detailed appearance of things no longer seemed to matter. It was unbearable to look and look so hard, to gaze hour after hour at some marks on a flat, textured surface trying to fathom how they might be amended. Those days in the living room at Belle View House, trying to paint the Little Venice Basin and the flats beyond, I could feel the old impulse drain away. Besides, studies at the Courtauld required so much time and concentration. As the months went by, I got used to the habit of absorbing information about provenance, digesting theories of representation, mugging up the history of aesthetics, checking the sizes and materials in catalogue raisonnés, deciphering pre-war x-rays and the like.
You and Jean were continuing on while I hung back under Titus Salt’s statue staring blankly at the well-supported cricket game. Still deep in conversation, you were heading around the far end of the pitch, passing behind a small group of players and parents who were avidly watching the innings. Slow left-arm round the wicket bowling was regularly foxing the young batsman, probably a tail-ender. Or perhaps not, for at that very moment the receiver made contact and with a loud crack the polished red ball flew off towards the boundary nearest the scoreboard.
‘Nobody’s going to reach that one,’ a voice said from somewhere.
The scoreboard frame, on which the black plates with large white numerals were hung, was now being manually updated. There came some well-deserved applause. The boys had run a three. You and Jean were strolling on together by the river. As I was about to catch up at the bridge, two girls came walking past me from the opposite direction. They were dressed in what seemed ethnic peasant costume. One was pushing a light baby carriage, a child inside the transparent plastic canopy. The other was carrying a bat, ball, and other playthings. Each wore a straw hat fastened underneath the chin with thin white elastic, and each had on a maroon pinafore-style dress over an embroidered white blouse. From the snatch of conversation passing between them, it seemed they weren’t British. But whatever were they doing here? Could the child be one of theirs?
Crossing the grey-painted wrought-iron bridge across the Aire, it felt as if something had suddenly made itself apparent. But was it only one more hankering, another restless yearning to be anywhere else but here? Or did it perhaps promise some miraculous change, as if there were still someone else inside me calling to be allowed into the light? Suddenly here again was the need to relive it all, to have the entire thing happen inside, the events unfold once more with a meaning and sense of their own.
We stepped down towards an old boathouse on the riverbank. It had recently been converted into a café and restaurant, its white-painted bargeboard gleaming there in the afternoon sun.
‘Shall we have a pot of tea?’ Jean asked.
‘Why not a cream tea?’ you suggested.
‘Go on, be a dear, and order us one,’ Jean said to me.
You were sitting at a table outside on the terrace when I returned, and had started on a different theme. Jean’s drama residency would come to an end at Christmas—but, ever resourceful, she already had quite a few irons in the fire.
‘Keep this to yourself,’ she said, ‘but last week I was interviewed by the Bolton Octagon for the post of writer-director.’
‘How did it go?’ you asked.
‘Well, they certainly expressed an interest in all my ideas for revitalizing the place: community workshops, travelling shows for clubs and schools, that sort of thing, and they seemed impressed by the need for fresh scripts with a more up-to-date flavour, picturing the multicultural realities. I’m thinking of doing something about the motorway proposals,’ said Jean. ‘And I can bring in the northern tourist industry.’
Everyone has a book inside, as they say; Jean, it seemed, had a library in her. She was just then complaining about the innumerable scripts she would have to turn down about happy miners off to the seaside in a charabanc.
‘I can well imagine,’ you said. ‘And did they offer you the job?’
September in the Rain Page 20