by David Storey
Leonard felt stifled by the incident. As they came out of the room he suddenly experienced a moment of complete terror. It was as if Austen’s meticulous description of these carved figures and Tolson’s final snigger were outcomes of the same event: one that had just taken place and from which he had been strangely excluded. In some way they had formed an alliance that derided him. This disturbing sense of conspiracy accompanied him as he followed them to the first floor.
Tolson watched Austen now with the friendly expectancy he might have afforded a clown. He walked alertly beside him as they mounted the broad central staircase, glancing back to grin mischievously at Leonard, then finally running ahead into the York Room.
This was the largest and most important room in the house. Its five tall windows, rising from floor to ceiling, overlooked the huge sweep of the estate as it fell, first gradually then with increasing abruptness into the valley. The crenellated silhouette of the city faced it on the opposite ridge. The room’s high, sculptured ceiling had disintegrated in several places and fragments had recently been removed: it was a surging and senseless mass of broken figures and plaster volutes that hung over the airless space.
At one end was a mantelpiece similar to that in the Braganza Room below but cruder and larger, occupying almost the entire width of the room. Over the fireplace itself, and set between pairs of thick columns, was a carved and apparently incomplete figure, half-crouched, with the equally incomplete outline of a massive architectural structure beyond, of columns mounting like rocks to a thick, overhanging entablature above. That had been how Austen had described it; but to Leonard, who had often wondered about such a monstrous piece of stone, the incompleteness of the carving had never occurred to him. Still slow and in fact reluctant to recognise objects in the disassociated way peculiar to Austen and most adults, he saw the incoherence of the carving as part of the violence of the figure itself.
Tolson stood gazing at its jagged texture for some time, obviously unable to recognise any shape at all. Then, as Austen’s slim hand traced out the contour of the bowed figure, Tolson’s mouth dropped open in a grimace of recognition and almost at the same moment he turned round and went to the opposite end of the room. There he skulked in silence until Austen, looking up from his absorption in the panel, saw Leonard’s glowering expression and Tolson’s apparent indifference. Perhaps sensing at last that there might have been an intrusion on his part, he made some sort of excuse and a few moments later left the room.
Hearing a movement behind him Leonard turned to see a remarkable sight. Already half way across the floor and running at full speed was Tolson, his face lit in an excited and triumphant expression. It was a private look of exultation. A burst of terror seized him in the moment before Tolson struck him and sent him crashing into the fireplace. Before he could struggle up Tolson leapt upon him and, sitting astride his chest, caught his head between his hands and forced open his mouth.
Immediately above his head Leonard could see a bright circular disc. It seemed a long time later before he recognised it as the inside of the chimney silhouetted against the sky. Numerous shelves and crevices were outlined along its interior. Still in his ears was the crashing of Tolson’s running feet, while Tolson’s fingers were like a clamp around his jaw. The impression he had of Tolson’s face was vaguely that of someone surprised and even embarrassed by their own violence. The next moment Tolson suddenly laughed down at him and said through clenched teeth, as though mocking his peculiar action, ‘I could kill you now if I wanted.’ It was an almost childish assertion yet expressed with an adult, physical conviction. Tolson had in fact become completely unrecognisable to Leonard; it was as if the stone relief itself or some impersonal weight had fallen on him. The most bewildering moment of all, however, was when, after Tolson had suddenly, almost shyly released him and he had struggled to his feet, he saw standing in the doorway Austen himself, watching the incident in silence. As Leonard recognised him he turned away and vanished.
By the time Leonard had come to his senses Tolson had run out of the room and disappeared. The building was completely silent. Leonard was left standing in front of the fireplace with the impression of the chimney’s cavernous interior still in his mind and yet as if nothing had actually occurred. When he went back down the broad staircase and out of the still open door, he found Tolson waiting for him in the sunshine, kicking his feet in the gravel and looking about him with a bored and disinterested expression.
They walked down the curving roads of the estate, to Tolson’s house, in silence. Then, as they neared his home, Tolson suddenly fell. He blundered slightly against Leonard and deliberately collapsed onto his hands and knees. Almost as a reconciliatory gesture he lowered himself onto his stomach.
‘You tripped me!’ he said in a startling, babyish voice which Leonard had never heard before; and looking up with an embarrassed anger. ‘You tripped me up!’
Leonard shook his head, surprised and denying. He was shocked, overwhelmed by the accusation.
‘You tripped me,’ Tolson said. He had burst into tears and now lay crying on the ground in an attitude of complete despair, his face buried in his arms, his hands protecting his head.
He lay there for some time completely forgetful of Leonard, it seemed, and crying heartfully. But as an elderly man came along the road leading a dog he hurriedly stood up. Leonard saw with a renewed sense of alarm that there was in fact a large bruise on Tolson’s forehead. It was from beneath this self-inflicted wound that Tolson looked at him, passionately and full of reproach.
After the old man had passed them, trailing the large black dog, and nodding at Tolson in some vague, absent-minded gesture of commiseration or perhaps abuse, he said, ‘You did trip me, didn’t you?’ His tears streaked his face like a ferocious mask.
‘No.’
‘You did trip me.’ Tolson looked at him aggrievedly. Then suddenly he seized his arm. ‘You did trip me. Didn’t you?’
Leonard wilted, appalled at his wilful desperation.
‘You tripped me, then?’ Tolson insisted.
‘Yes.’
Tolson stood gripping his arm and nodding, peering into Leonard’s face. Then as tears slowly came back into his eyes and his body began to be shaken by heavy, violent sobs, he released him uncertainly; when Leonard reached the scullery door at the back of the house, he found Tolson showing his wound to his mother and describing to her how it had been caused. When, later, his brothers started to play on the lawn, Tolson joined in for the first time, yet playing with a deliberate restraint as if determined that his excessive strength should not be asserted. His mother, a small, silent and tenacious woman, stood at one side of the lawn watching him intently. The sun lit up her face in a fixed, obsessive frown.
Moments like these, violent and inexplicable, and burned into Leonard’s memory, were nevertheless embedded in long periods of amicability and genuine, conciliatory friendship. Times when to rush from the restrained atmosphere of the Place to that of Tolson’s small and crowded home became a regular and compulsive feature of his life. Even his mother succumbed to Tolson’s heavy, self-amused charm, as when he would laugh at his own clumsiness or, leaning over the pram where Leonard’s sister lay sleeping, he would stare intently at her calm face with a monstrous look, then turn towards them smiling unselfconsciously, half-confused. He frequently watched the baby with shy consternation as if in its peculiar stillness and the delicacy of its features he traced the antithesis of his own impetuous life.
Certainly Leonard, seeing the effect that his sister had on Tolson, felt that here his powerful friend was truly admonished. It was these moments of confusion that Leonard longed to see, when he felt that everything in Tolson was accessible to him and the frenzied rivalry forgotten. It was moments such as these that Tolson himself came to recognise and promote, a sort of innocence to which he surrendered helplessly whenever he recognised the look of delight on his audience’s face. As if cautiously excited by the humour he could arouse, he s
truggled to promote it: there was deep in Tolson the ferocious anxiety of the professional clown.
4
After almost three years at the council school, when their friendship had reached its most intriguing stage, Leonard gained a scholarship to the grammar school. It happened almost without his knowing it so that he felt in some way that he’d been deceived. When his name was read out in the short list of successful candidates and he suddenly realised that he was to be uprooted again, he felt himself the victim of a conspiracy. Partly out of anger and partly out of his own sense of deception he avoided Tolson throughout the morning of the announcement, and at dinner-time he stayed in the lavatories until the playground was deserted. Only then did he venture out to take the news home. He was half way across the asphalt arena when he heard someone running quickly and lightly behind him and, before he could turn, he was knocked to the ground by an indescribable strength. The next thing he knew he was lying on his back looking up at his class-teacher’s face. She was the only person in sight. He was taken home in her car and he never discovered whether she had seen what had happened or not.
Afterwards it seemed strange to him that he had never objected; that he never in fact refused to accept the scholarship. It was as if he acceded to events in this way because they came from some vague source of authority he knew had to be obeyed. It was this, rather than the assault itself, which finally determined him that he would never see Tolson again. And as if to test out the strength of his determination, once he had recovered from the attack he went to Tolson’s house for the last time. Getting no answer to his knocking he realised that the entire family were somehow involved in his betrayal. Several weeks later, when he arrived at the grammar school, he felt a great sense of relief, as if in some way he’d been released.
Yet, strangely, the grammar school broke him in two. Without the compensation and protection of Tolson he found himself even more isolated than in his first year at the elementary school. The physical health and assurance which he’d acquired were rapidly displaced by that white-faced recluseness which he had considered to be a forgotten part of his life. Now he became the victim of a persecution more subtle and intense than that of mere physical assault, and since he never tried to appease his new tormentors it seemed to them that he secretly invited it. It was as if he recognised within himself the working of a virtually implacable pessimism, for he neither opposed these assaults nor felt the least inclination to deplore his situation. His despair, however acute, never drove him to action, and he began to suspect – and with the slowest yet profoundest shock of his life – that what in fact so hugely dominated his existence, to the extent that he could scarcely recognise it, was an inscrutable sense of guilt.
This suspicion, prompted quite suddenly by a conversation with Austen, came at the moment when he realised he had survived the more vigorous attacks on his nature. During the six years he spent at the grammar school he re-discovered the anomaly of his intelligence and his continued facility for drawing. There was an abnormality about his gifts. That this wretched figure should possess an intelligence and a talent which people of a healthier and more sociable disposition had to do without, bred a sort of incoherent resentment which even the masters themselves did not trouble to hide. The opposition to Leonard was complete, and varied only in subtlety and direction according to his detractor’s age. It was as if, both by his indifference to his gifts and to the animosity they aroused, he were commenting not so much on his own deficiencies as on those of the people around him. The instinct to disown everything within him which he felt to be unusual made him an ideal target for persecution.
It was because of this that he turned to drawing, as if to detach himself from something he could not understand. All he was aware of was a morbid self-preoccupation, something to which he was helplessly bound, and yet which he despised. Closeting himself in some distant room of the Place, he would spend hours gazing at fragments of paper, the minute size of which seemed an indication of his resentment. At times he found his pencil moving ferociously over a fragment no larger than a stamp: yet it seemed in this way that the absurdity of his situation was expressed to his own satisfaction. The tiny rectangles answered a solemn and anonymous reproach, and the minute figures and landscapes tempered his unease. He derived an obscure satisfaction from the drawings; he threw none of them away, but pinned them to the wall of his room much as a grocer might affix bills due to him at some indeterminate time in the future. Austen vociferously approved of them; his father was sceptical. His mother hated them.
Certain childhood illnesses began to re-occur. These were brief fits, similar to fits of anger in naturally volatile people: a sudden flushing of his face, a slight protrusion of his eyes and a trembling of his limbs. But the emotion which normally might have accompanied such symptoms was completely absent in him.
None of these disturbances ever amounted to the full, rampaging disorder of a fit; there was even a certain calmness and restraint about them which, as they recurred, persuaded his father that they might be wilfully induced. It was his father who, strangely, was the more disturbed by them. These moments of rageless anger, however, distracted his mother from her absorbed attention in her daughter, and she turned now to Leonard with anxious, maternal indulgence, stroking his arms and legs and his face with a kind of solemn tenderness which soon allayed the more distressing symptoms.
If these illnesses never seriously alarmed his parents – they seemed, after all, almost natural expressions of his sensitive nature – what did disturb them was his growing self-absorption. Although his mother hated his drawings, as though they were almost evidence of demonic possession, his father never displayed anything more than an irritable suspicion; what antagonised him so fiercely was Leonard’s self-preoccupation and the recluseness that produced them. Whenever he was on one of his constant journeys of repair around the Place and found Leonard drawing in some distant room, his anger would break out violently. As at school, Leonard’s reaction to these outbursts was only a slight tensing of his figure and a sudden flushing of his cheeks. No one could tolerate such abject humility.
Gradually he took to being absent from school. After a while it seemed he had never been there. All the evidence of his six years’ attendance was contained in several drawings and paintings hoarded amongst numerous others by a sympathetic though incredulous art master. The intermittent absences occasioned by his slight fits developed into more prolonged periods when he began to suffer from mild yet lingering asthmatic attacks. It seemed as though he were physically disintegrating and that his sporadic attendances were belated and futile attempts to satisfy some vague, lost ambition. For a while he was too ill to do anything. Until he was twenty he was virtually confined to the Place by alternate bouts of depression and nervous, convulsive elation, venturing out only occasionally to visit Austen’s shop, where he would sit moodily watching the customers coming and going and discussing their purchases; or to Isabel’s house where, in the same attitude of dejected aloofness, he would listen to the earnest debates of her numerous visitors and to his aunt’s highly emotional charges. As if his detachment were contagious, his father succumbed to a similar aloofness, becoming increasingly absorbed in the maintenance of the Place to the exclusion of everything else.
In his early twenties Leonard began to get jobs. Physically if not temperamentally unsuited to the kind of work he found for himself, his absences were as frequent as they had been from school, and he seldom retained his employment long. There was now an undeniable wilfulness in his behaviour, as if he sought some way of evading his difference from other people and taking upon himself the conventional identity of a workman. If he was trying sincerely to touch on those ordinary experiences of life from which he felt excluded, it seemed to those people who superficially observed him that he was assuming the guise of an idiot. For several years he drifted aimlessly from job to job and brought upon himself an increasing reputation for idiocy. By children, who continued to exert their unique and pri
mitive instincts, he was openly abused; he was often followed or pursued down the roads and crescents of the estate by a chanting host who had no cause for fear, since he still preserved a remarkable opacity, and reluctance for action.
Austen occasionally reproved John now for his lack of interest and indifference towards his son. But never with any great force: more, he seemed curious about his own loss of conviction in Leonard, though he still encouraged him in his drawing.
‘But what can I do?’ John said on what proved to be the last occasion that Austen so reproached him. ‘He’s a man now. I give him all the affection he appears to need. There’s no real necessity for him to work. I’d even be some sort of friend to him if he ever showed any inclination for friendship.’
‘Do you think he needs treatment? I mean, attention of a different sort.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you feel anything real for him?’
‘Not what I imagine one should for a son. He seems to be beyond help.’
‘Or even sympathy?’
‘Or sympathy. He carries his disillusionment around with him, it seems to me. It’s as if all the time he’s reproving you for showing any interest. Worse. It’s as if he reproves himself for arousing people’s interest. He seems determined not to exist. He’s like a person of no importance, interest or significance whatsoever. He’s nothing at all like Elizabeth. I used to think it was something in me. But she – she’s got such a happy temperament.’ He looked at Austen sharply. ‘Well, and where does guilt enter into all this?’
Austen shrugged and didn’t answer.
‘I thought Leonard was your hero. Your guilty man of action. Your Cromwell.’ John laughed ferociously at the allusion.
‘This is the chrysalis,’ Austen said eventually. ‘We’ve yet to see whether it’s to be an ugly or a beautiful moth that emerges.’