by David Storey
‘At times you appal me – more than any other person I know. You, with your talk of repressions and guilt. It’s terrifying.’
‘Why, don’t you believe in psychoanalysis?’
‘This fashionable and frivolous self-exposure. What is there beneath that elegant suit, Austen? Just an equally elegant and fashionable soul? A psychological soul?’ John turned abruptly away from Austen: ‘You patronise other people’s experience as well as your own. It’s obscene!’
John had, in fact, reached a stage which, at some earlier point in his life, might have made him more adaptable. He was now able to externalise the disabilities of his own temperament and to attach them securely to the society around him. He brooded much more on his situation as if, still walking determinedly in a circle, he were deliberating in which direction he would finally decide to move.
If Leonard noticed the disruption he had created between his father and his uncle he showed no awareness of it. As if to break the aloofness that existed between the three of them, Austen now began to encourage Leonard’s other uncles to visit the Place; one of them, Thomas, more than the other two.
Thomas was a small man, unusually small for a Radcliffe, with a gaunt face and large, staring eyes, like two brutally exposed nerves; in his youth he had suffered from a tubercular complaint. Quiet, and with a kind of modest intensity, he seemed after his first visit to be as much a part of the Place as either Leonard or his father. He was a clerk in a local government department, yet never mentioned his work other than to point out how ill-health had continually jeopardized his chances of promotion and how he was continually under the supervision of inferior men. His wife, a large, cheerful woman, seemed always apprehensively on the verge of some delightful experience.
They had two children who had died early in life, and in face of this tragedy Thomas himself had quietly withdrawn from events and now pursued, not so much his own existence as that of his fellows with a relentless and unabating sympathy. It had a frightening tenacity. For a while he and John discovered some sort of mutual attraction in one another; and although they had scarcely known each other since they were boys, when Thomas was a mischievous younger brother, they now walked about the Place and the grounds wrapped in conversation as though since their youth no moment of privacy had gone unrevealed.
Yet simply because he provided such a patient and sympathetic audience John soon began to tire of and then, even, to avoid him. Nodding his head slowly and continuously as each fact or opinion was revealed, his hands held appreciatively together in slow gestures of condolence, Thomas suggested a kind of faceless commiseration behind which John began to suspect a parasitic attitude that fed on adversity as instinctively as a leech on blood. After a while, no longer provided with sustenance from John, and discovering no such source in Leonard, Thomas’s visits to the Place became less frequent and subsequently stopped altogether. His wife continued to come, and with an increasing frequency. As if encouraged by the dissolution of their husbands’ relationship, she and Stella formed a securer and more intimate one of their own.
Matthew, the next to the youngest of Leonard’s uncles, made regular, well-spaced visits to the Place, usually with his wife, a blonde, smartly-dressed woman who was a celebrated hostess in the rural region to the east. By profession an accountant, and therefore morbidly addicted, Thomas had earnestly stated, to the assessing of other people’s incomes, Matthew had recently been appointed to a directorship in an important firm of mining engineers. Usually his visits occurred while he was on his way to or from some more important business, and invariably ended with a heated discussion with John over his ideas of leasing, converting or of selling the Place altogether. Tall, elegantly dressed, with a bony face and rather large, importuning eyes, he presented the kind of functional exterior which, John discovered, had earned him the title of ‘The Fridge’ amongst his colleagues. His visits left John with a feeling of total helplessness, a satellite ineffectually circling its parent body.
If Austen had any particular motive in introducing Leonard’s uncles to the Place, it was most clearly realised in the infrequent though boisterous visits of the youngest, Alex. The Radcliffes varied curiously in height. John, Austen and Matthew were all tall; Thomas, Isabel and Alex were small. Alex lived some distance away to the south and his visits usually lasted two or more days. Crew-cut, dogmatic, extremely energetic, so that his body was continually occupied in unnecessary action, he always seemed like some critical though well-intentioned intruder in the passive household. He was in charge of industrial relations in a giant corporation of motor manufacturers, and appeared to be a man who in the service of some higher ideal rode over his own feelings as much as those of others with a nerveless energy which caused Leonard, whenever he came into contact with him, to shy away as though he had been confronted with a wild beast.
For a while Austen appeared to satisfy himself by arranging these visits of his brothers to the Place; they were like carefully planned assaults which he directed on some stubbornly resisting citadel. Then, as a kind of mutual incomprehension settled on both sides, blunting even Alex’s insistent demands that Leonard should get a job, that they should move out of the Place, that even John himself should look for some more worthwhile employment, he began to grow increasingly frustrated, so that occasionally he would flare up in strident and uncharacteristic arguments, railing against John, and against Leonard. His behaviour was as incomprehensible to himself as it was to John; and for a while he stayed away from the Place altogether and the only news they ever had of him was through Isabel.
For a time he formed a friendship with a man whom he had first seen singing in a club in town. He was a coal-miner who now made his living exclusively from performing in various halls and institutions and it was as if in the man’s oddly ravaged features Austen recognised something of his own unspoken distress. What oblique need for companionship drove him into this relationship he had no idea.
‘Men undergo a change of life in the same way as women,’ he had told Isabel, who in turn had told John – ‘except in men it’s less physical and therefore perhaps more subtle and devastating in its effects.’
‘But what can you have in common with a miner?’ Isabel had said, antagonised by what she interpreted as a reference to her own increasing years.
‘I’ve no idea. Though he’s not a miner. He sees himself as some sort of artist. Perhaps it’s because I see him as a man trying to escape his predicament. You see, he’s completely self-educated.’
Yet in Austen himself, although this relationship was confined to endless arguments, not dissimilar to those he held with John, but conducted, strangely, with the energy of a much younger man, he felt that beneath the surface there was a desire to know this tortured man so completely that in the end it would have to include some sort of physical embrace. It was this that apparently led him on. There was in this new acquaintance a gauche and passionate sense of enquiry and speculation, a wilfulness and abandonment, that attracted him considerably. They were both quite elderly men.
One day when his friend failed to turn up at an appointed time Austen went in search of him with a recklessness that not only surprised but profoundly excited him, visiting pubs and institutions where in the previous few weeks he had watched him singing, enquiring for his address. When, some time later, he heard that the man had been arrested and subsequently imprisoned for a kind of behaviour which, tormentedly, had been at the back of his own mind, he felt that a part of his body had been torn away.
His immediate reaction had been drastic: he decided to sell his business and to leave the district. At first, undecided where to go, he had visited his brothers, finally arriving at Alex’s. He was more than ordinarily frustrated. If at first Austen had found Alex’s energy and nervelessness exciting, he was now completely intimidated by it. If this was at last his ‘guilty man of action’ then it was one whose purpose and intentions he could neither condone nor appreciate. After a while, growing more and more restless, he we
nt abroad.
For two years he travelled aimlessly across Europe, visiting the northern fringes of Africa and the Middle East, but always returning to some centre close to the main capitals. Invariably alone, the solitary occupant of rooms and restaurant tables, there were in all this time scarcely a dozen people whom he could later with any clarity recollect having met. His mind was in an extraordinary state. It was as if it were a vessel gradually being emptied. Slowly it poured itself away in these unknown, unfelt places until, when it seemed that the last drop had gone, he rose early one morning and took the most direct passage home. He had only one thought, a quiet determination and sense of purpose regarding his nephew, Leonard.
Almost at the same time as Austen’s departure Isabel had begun to interest herself in religious activities. Belief had always been latent in her energetic character, and for a while she had attended a spiritualist church before embracing the more orthodox Anglican faith. At first Leonard had played something of the role of catalyst in the initial alarming process of her conversion, but as she subsided into a less fervent and more practical acceptance of her new faith, Leonard found himself discarded, first as an encumbrance, then as an embarrassment in the company which now frequented his aunt’s drawing-room. ‘The Prince’ had now become a silent Jester, and eventually he was discouraged from attending court altogether.
He continued to produce his strange miniatures, some so small that they were indecipherable to his father who occasionally brought himself to examine them. Afterwards, looking back on these years of isolation, Leonard himself was surprised by their purposelessness. He had no recollection of them other than of vague, ominous dreams induced largely by his aunt’s religious fanaticism. They seemed an increasingly misty void marked only by a bewildering debris of drawings. He was now the most familiar person on the estate. Whether followed by a jeering band of school-children or walking alone in some stooped attitude of self-absorption, his slim, raincoated figure attracted the immediate attention of every passer-by.
Whether despite Austen’s absence or because of it, he began to discover certain things about himself. His mind, for example, worked in a rather extraordinary way. He was strangely pleased by the discovery: it seemed that he tended to see things in separate camera-like impressions. He had never appreciated this before. The difference was, however, that whereas a film ran at a predetermined speed, animating each individual picture by its sustained momentum, in him the feelings that normally might have provided this motor-force, uniting several separate sensations in a single image, were frequently absent or functioned only intermittently. If he saw himself as such a projector and the life he absorbed as a film, then the screen of his consciousness was interspersed with long periods of flickering, incoherent light, alternating with sudden, extremely vivid impressions. It was the disconnectedness that made these intermittent pictures so alarming and gave him a feverish anxiety to know exactly what had occurred in between to cause them. It was this, he decided, which gave rise to his alternate bouts of elation and depression.
He was very absent-minded. He had a memory which his parents found both bewildering and irritating. Many apparently obvious events he would completely forget or, it seemed, show no awareness of their having occurred. Others, which to his parents might have appeared more obscure or elusive, he could recall with a remarkable clarity and precision. If this were some form of unconscious censorship, it had a persistence which not only bewildered his parents but appeared also to distress Leonard himself. The excisions were prompted so obscurely that his state of mind began to assume the dignity of a mystical condition.
Frequently he discovered a discrepancy between the images and the sensations that accompanied them, as if the soundtrack and the film were running at different speeds. Yet, because he could recognise this inconsistency so clearly, he assumed it was not so much a disorder as a heightening of his perceptiveness which, until he should grow more familiar with it, would remain unintelligible. He began to look upon this strange phenomenon with the interest of a spectator. His life was a series of enigmatic fragments, a roomful of discarded and arbitrary drawings. Soon they would be arranged to some purpose.
When Austen suddenly returned Leonard wondered for the first time about his absence, yet his curiosity was never sufficiently aroused either by this or by other slightly unusual circumstances to question it. There was some change in Austen which he couldn’t explain: a purposefulness and energy, a certain intensity which he could not be sure had existed before. The immediate effect of his arrival was a renewal of affability in his father, and a slight sharpening of animosity in Isabel. It was as if she were resisting something.
For a while Austen lived at the Place, and during this time Leonard became aware of the hardening in his uncle’s temperament, an urgent sort of militancy and anxiety. Then Austen found a flat in town and a job similar, though inferior, to his previous occupation; the original shop had quietly closed shortly after his disappearance. For several weeks, in fact, Leonard worked as his uncle’s assistant in the shop – the branch of a large national retailer of furniture – and appeared to be very much at the centre of Austen’s concern until, at the end of this period, Austen declared that he would have to find him a more suitable occupation. His enquiries amongst his numerous acquaintances in the town absorbed him completely. Then, after three weeks of exploration, Austen suddenly announced that he had found Leonard a job.
5
When he first saw the tent contractor’s yard Leonard was immediately struck by its similarity to that at the rear of the Place. A low-lying block of offices and workshops represented the main building, and from it an L-shaped wing of sheds and storerooms enclosed a large rectangular area of red ash opening on its only exposed side into a larger paddock formed by the intersection of two high railway embankments. Here several derelict lorries slumped wheelless in the thick grass and huge expanses of greying canvas hung drying on a network of poles. It was a bay of sinking ships, their masts and sails arrested above the confused surface.
Forty or fifty men were crouched down in a narrow shaft of sunlight that came over the long row of sheds. Their backs resting against the dark woodwork, they leaned forward waiting silently like men around a fire. Under the overhanging eaves of the main shed stood five red-painted lorries and two 15 cwt. trucks: all were converted army vehicles brutally stripped down to their minimum weight. The name ‘EWBANK’ was painted in dark blue on a shield mounted above each of the cabs.
The men looked up as the contractor came into the yard from the central doors of the office block. He was a tall, thin man, dressed in a black suit, his red, sunburnt face overshadowed by the broad brim of a black shallow-crowned hat: his tiny eyes were virtually concealed, yet they glistened like decorative buttons pinned either side of his long and slender nose. He walked with sharp, hurried strides, his short arms moving busily either side of his stubborn projecting chest. His feet seemed to crunch excessively loudly in the morning air. There was something about him, whether deliberately implanted there or not, which suggested the conventional image of the solitary cowboy.
Leonard, dressed in work clothes, the strap of a haversack containing his lunch slung across his narrow body, walked slightly behind Ewbank and to one side. The men watched him in silence; then, smiling slowly, several stood up. They began to light cigarettes and to talk.
The contractor pinned up a list on the wall of the shed nearest the lorries and the men gradually moved over towards it. Their names were divided into five columns at the head of each of which were typed their place of destination and, in capital letters, the name of their foreman. The first two columns were linked by a bracket to indicate a common destination. At the bottom of the fifth list ‘Radcliffe’ was written in pencil. At the top of the column was typed the name ‘TOLSON’.
Ewbank directed the new man to one of the lorries where, taking off his bag and his coat, he began to help in the loading of the canvas. He worked quickly, urgently following each inst
ruction given him by the men, and hurrying with short, stumbling strides under the heavy loads. Soon he was breathless, his pale face deeply flushed; yet at the same time he laughed and smiled at the inquisitive remarks of the men. As he dropped each load on the back of the truck he scarcely looked up at the tall, darkly-burned figure who stood there directing and arranging the loading. Only at a sharp and irritated command did he glance up and with a sudden, repeated backward look see a face which gradually grew into certain memorable and familiar features. The moment of recognition was like a heat pressing over his nervous body, a fur-like warmth that spread over his back and across his neck. It absorbed his shoulders and his head. His body fell into the warmth and disappeared. Tolson watched him shyly. He was confused. To Leonard, his figure seemed to grow larger, suddenly huge and overwhelming, suffocatingly warm.
They acknowledged each other briefly. During the next few days they scarcely spoke or even confirmed their recognition. Each morning they drove to a showground several miles from the town where they were erecting a large number of marquees; several times they found themselves working alongside one another yet treating each other with the deference of men newly acquainted. They were cautious and deliberate; it gave them the appearance of a clumsy amicability. They spoke formally and within the restricted reference of their work. To begin with, Ewbank drove Leonard to the site each morning in his car, apparently glad of someone reputedly educated to talk to. But gradually these lifts became more infrequent and eventually Leonard was making the daily journeys with the rest of the men in the back of the truck.
Over the summer a restrained friendship developed between Leonard and Tolson which the men watched with half-concealed amusement; their curiosity was never openly revealed. And a change had come over Leonard himself. His narrow, whitish face filled out, his cheeks reddened in the sun, and his eyes were suddenly warm and nervously alight. His movements took on a spontaneity which, though familiar to his mother, came as a reassuring revelation to his father. Neither of them had known of the renewal with Tolson, and when Austen eventually confided it to them their immediate sense of unease scarcely diminished their general relief.