by David Storey
‘Are you going to eat them now,’ Leonard said, ‘or later?’
Shaw gazed at him a moment longer. The skin crept like insects round his eyes; the black pupils vanished. His eyes closed. He gazed at Leonard blindly for several seconds, then swung round and walked away through the sludge. The flies roared at his intrusion, settling on his head and feet, and on his hands which he held peculiarly flattened and stretched out by his sides. He didn’t look back.
Leonard went down to the river. The water crashed loudly over the exposed rocks: the level had sunk from the day before. Leonard was in tears. Hearing feet behind him and thinking it was Shaw, he turned round.
‘I saw all that,’ Ewbank said. ‘Why did you have to do it?’
Leonard didn’t answer. The contractor took out a cheroot from a tin and belched as he lit it. He threw the match into the river and tried to follow its passage in the turbulent water.
‘What’s happened then between you and Tolson?’ he said calmly, looking slightly to one side of Leonard’s eyes.
Leonard walked away. Ewbank watched him, his head nodding. Then he sauntered towards the centre of the field, his hands in the small of his back, looking up at the hills and the moor side. He picked up a loose stake and a guy-line and flung them into the back of the truck, walked on a few paces then stopped to gaze up at the green fields and the rocks, softened by the bright sunlight. He took off his black hat and stroked his head gently. He was bald. He glanced at his watch, replaced his hat and went across to the men, chatting with them a few minutes.
Within an hour the three lorries were parked in a line across the field, their tall loads roped up and tarpaulined. The men stood about silently, smoking, while Ewbank walked round the worn showground minutely inspecting it for equipment. He picked up several fragments of pegs, a strand of rope, a twisted metal stake, and threw them in the back of the truck. He shouted across to the drivers and the lorries began to move off. They swayed over the field like stricken beasts, their backs burdened with long poles and banks of canvas, sagging from side to side as they sank into ruts and groaned over the low hummocks.
The men hardly spoke. They watched as Leonard put Tolson’s gramophone and battered suitcase, his own suitcase and the two camp beds into the back of the truck. He lifted up the tent and pushed it in himself.
Ewbank stood at the gate, by his car, and watched the first lorry through. Its rear wheels slid into the gate-post, drove hard against it and drew it under its tyres. The following lorry rode over the gate as it dropped into its path. The wood splintered into fragments. Ewbank stepped back. He stopped the third lorry and the vehicle was immediately bogged down in the deep ruts.
He secured the tow rope himself, leaning awkwardly over it then standing hurriedly back with the men as the two heavy vehicles fought one another, their engines tearing, the huge apparatus shuddering and vibrating, burning the ground. The loads swayed, jarred, and the tyres crunched against the lips of the ruts. The thick treads broke open the hard clay, and slowly the blunt noses rose and screamed over the banking onto the road. The men climbed into the cabs and into the back of the 15 cwt., still parked in the middle of the field. The small vehicle bumped its way to the broken gate, trundled over the remnants and ran up onto the road behind the line of trucks.
In the corner of the field was the watchman’s caravan. Apart from an occasional trail of thin smoke from its slender chimney there’d been no sign of life from the old man at all. Now, however, the narrow door opened and he appeared, gazing round at the deserted arena.
Towards the far end of the field and growing steadily towards the middle, a dark stain of earth had spread out in an irregular shape. In the centre two broken laths stood upright, bedded firmly in the ground. It was towards these that, the moment it was released from the caravan, the watchman’s black dog bolted. It was a large animal; running swiftly, it darted excitedly about the pool, its curiosity aroused simultaneously in several directions. Only when it reached the two posts did it momentarily pause. It raised its hind leg and, thrusting forward slightly, urinated on them both.
‘Have you got your own and Tolson’s luggage?’ Ewbank called into the back of the truck. Leonard nodded. The contractor stared in at him, then at the men. Someone offered him a cigarette. He slid it into his top pocket and returned to the gate.
‘We must have lost two or three pounds apiece today,’ a man said.
A voice called outside, ‘There’s that young tart yonder, the one Pilkington nobbled.’
Enid had come down the lane from the village. She watched Ewbank and the two men at the gate.
‘I bet Tolson’s shot his load with her,’ Pilkington said. ‘Isn’t that right, Radcliffe?’
Leonard didn’t answer.
Pilkington pushed past Leonard and leaned out of the back of the truck.
‘Go on, Sammy,’ someone said. ‘We’ve got five minutes to spare.’
Ewbank shouted down to the first lorry. Its engine roared and it began to move off. The two men at the gate hurried to the truck and scrambled in. Shaw, in the corner, had begun to laugh quietly as the convoy rolled slowly forward.
Enid stood by the broken gate. Behind her the field smouldered in the heat. The showground was empty. Bare patches of earth, areas of yellowed grass and mounds of refuse marked the site of the previous day’s activity. Wetherby’s four cans stood alone in the centre. She walked across it, inspecting the outlines of the marquees. The dog had turned, and begun to run towards her.
The field disappeared through the fringe of trees. Leonard sat stiffly, swaying with the truck, his gaze fixed on the scene behind. For a while he could see the castle silhouetted several miles away, marking the spot; then the heavier, smoother shoulders of the lower valley rose up. The road dropped suddenly and they ran between the first bands of stone terraces. The green and white strands vanished, and the brown shadow of the valley bottom closed over the line of speeding trucks.
Houses, perched on the rocky outcrops, clung to the terraced edge of the moors. Somewhere, running among them, was the river; its smell came into the truck as they followed its hidden course. Then they rose into the sun again, the valley cleared below and the river flowed through a narrow strip of woods and over a ridge of shallow falls. They rode with it for some time, then swept down again, the country levelling out. The strings of houses enveloped the valley, first one side then the other, growing into a broader elongation of brick and stone, thickening, deepening, then darkening.
Ewbank stopped twice to pick up wooden pegs which, unknown to him, had been purposely dropped from the truck. Then his car caught up with them again, and cruised behind.
The lorries slowed. Familiar structures filled the scene from the back of the truck. Leonard, leaning forward over his case, seemed morose, nervously resigned. Buildings of black stone were massed on a steep hill thrust up from the northern side of the valley. Old, built in bursts of a forgotten energy, they rose against the sky like fortresses; their silhouettes varied, alternately breaking then confirming the steep contours of the hill, a citadel of dark and eroded stone that loomed above the valley. The whole landscape had been gathered into the silhouette of the central hill: spires and towers, squat domes and high, pointed roofs thrust up anciently above the close horizons, breaking the stranglehold of rock.
They moved below it, amongst the long, low structures by the river. Like shapes spun out from the central vortex of stone, estates of houses flanked the valley, rising up the slopes in vast screes of dull red rock. They groped out from the core of the city, enclosing between them an outcrop of older buildings, a small heathland village of weathered stone, surrounding it, pulling it into their embrace and breaking it down within their own fabric of brick and slate. Beyond them, further south, like waves pushed out by their encroachment, the ground rose awkwardly and abruptly to a mass of chimneys and colliery headgears, ranges of slag mounted like black froth on their summits.
The tyres whined on the smooth road. As the
y passed the Beaumont estate, Leonard saw the black roof of the Place rising steadily above the narrow shapes of the brick houses. The lines and apexes of the surrounding roofs formed a moving pattern of curves and figures with the droning vehicle, so that only the Place itself seemed constant. He was relieved: it pleased him that the familiar point of his own home should be the only constant, the only absolute in that vast geometric confusion of other people’s houses.
10
In the afternoon heat the estate was quiet, its empty, lime-planted roads curled like tired limbs over the slopes. As Leonard walked up between the houses, rooks drifted over the roofs, swaying in the wind, their fierce shapes like torn segments of cloud. Driven up by the wind, they swept in its eddy; then shuddering, stiffened by the stream of air, they glided smoothly over the symmetrical roofs. The estate was covered by the broken cloud, the birds flung like debris over the carefully planted houses.
Leonard walked quickly beneath the flowing flocks of birds. They drove ceaselessly over his head, wave after wave, as he climbed up the steepening crescents and roads. A clock boomed from the crown of the city across the valley. At this altitude he could hear the wind as it pressed among the leaves on either side, a body bending and folding to an unrhythmical pressure. He was sweating, carrying his suitcase; the weight, pulling at his arms, made him walk with a slight limp.
He tugged the case through the gap between the gates and hurried up the heavily-shadowed drive. At the point where it broadened onto the terrace at the front of the Place he turned off along a path that ran round the side of the building. From the jungle of fruit trees, rhododendrons and elders rose the encrusted trunks of oak trees, stunted, bent down as if oppressed invisibly from above. The air was cool and heavy with the scent of wet stone. Cries of children and the thudding of a ball rose from between the estate houses. A car engine started. The sounds reached all round the house from beyond the wall of trees.
At the back it was quieter. The projecting wing of dilapidated outbuildings enclosed a lawn and garden which was flanked on its only exposed side by a row of walnut trees. In incongruous contrast to the decaying stone, the lawn had recently been cut. It was smooth and clean. In the centre was a blackbird. It was nervously tearing out a worm, poised back, tugging at the stretched tendon. A swarm of sparrows chattered wildly across the far side of the outbuildings. They flew up, tiny blown shadows, as Leonard came round the side of the house. The blackbird sprang along the ground, leapt up and darted forward, swaying low between the trees with its warning chatter. An old mowing machine, its blades still damp with grass, stood on the part of the lawn shadowed by the building.
The sounds of the estate were filtered now: voices calling and screaming, and the distant roar of engines. The yard was secluded, even the light itself, for the shadow of the house angled over the low roofs of the outbuildings and the lawn. Under the row of walnut trees hollyhocks had flowered, pointing up narrowly into the whitish-green leaves.
The gravel path had been raked and weeded, the pebbles still wet with disturbance. As if this evidence of recent energy disturbed him, Leonard hurried over to the kitchen entrance, glancing back once at the tall columns of flowers before pushing open the door.
His father stood up quickly as Leonard entered, as if he had been disturbed in the middle of his thoughts or at the climax of a conversation.
‘Why, Leonard!’ John said, his tall figure pushing slowly from the table where he’d been sitting.
Leonard put down his case and felt his hand taken between his father’s strong, nervous fingers.
‘Your mother said you wouldn’t be back until late today. And here I am. I’ve just been gardening.’ He indicated his old clothes with a helpless gesture. ‘You’re looking a deal browner. You haven’t carried that all the way up, have you?’
John studied him cautiously before releasing his hand, then watched with a sudden smile as Leonard offered some brief explanation of his early arrival.
‘You’ve just got back, then? Now come on, sit down. I thought I saw Vic this morning on the estate. On his bike.’
‘He came back earlier, on his own.’
‘Ah, yes. I see.…’
As though vaguely aware of someone else in the room, Leonard had turned around. A figure stepped from the shadows beyond the large range.
‘And what’s Austen doing up here, father? Has he been tormenting you again?’ His humour, like a wounded bird, never quite cleared the ground. The two older men laughed.
As if to confirm his presence Austen laid his yellow woollen gloves on the table. Already lying there were his walking-stick, a well-brushed though faded Homburg hat and a newspaper. A thin black overcoat lay carefully folded over the back of a chair.
‘As a matter of fact I’ve only just arrived myself, Leonard.’
He nodded slightly, an odd, genteel parody of politeness. ‘He still refuses to buy a single newspaper and I have to keep him informed of the goings-on of our diminutive world.’ As if at this touch of sympathy, and in deprecation, Leonard smiled at his uncle.
‘Ah, now …’ his father said.
‘And I arrived, of course, to find him cutting the lawn.’ Austen sat down at the long plainwood table. He laughed. His hands for a moment rose to his hair, then, as if wounded, collapsed into his lap. With a reflective, slightly affected grace, his head tilted to one side, he stared speculatively at his nephew.
‘Have you had anything to eat, Leonard?’ John asked. His hands rested anxiously on his thighs. ‘Elizabeth and your mother are out at the church, but I can get you something easily enough.’ His concern was betrayed by a slight formality of manner.
‘It’s all right. I’ll wait till we eat. How’s the furniture shop, Austen?’
Austen moved slowly, crossing his legs and allowing one hand to play idly on the table. He seemed amused, yet uncertain whether he was being provoked into defending his job or whether the question came purely from Leonard’s obvious unease.
‘Oh, well enough. And how’s your work? How did you get on?’
He didn’t look at Leonard but at John, and with a gesture of his slim hand he added lightly, ‘Six days in the wilderness don’t seem to have changed his impervious temperament.’
Leonard, still smiling, gazed intensely at Austen’s expression: in the muted light of the room each feature of his uncle’s face seemed deliberately moulded to the skull and not merely formed there by the incidence of nature. There was in Austen, unlike his father, a superficial sense of ease bordering, at times, on indifference. Nevertheless both now looked at him with concern.
‘Have you been trying to make too much of it again?’ John said.
An exhausted expression had crept over Leonard’s face since his entry, one that seemed more than the result of carrying his heavy case and the long walk through the estate.
‘No.’ He made no concealment of his tiredness. ‘Vic did most of the work.’
‘And how is Vic?’
‘He’s fine.’ Leonard turned listlessly away: he was suddenly absorbed by the shadows of the room. ‘It’s very fine countryside.’
‘I thought I’d noticed a certain farmyard redolence since you came in,’ Austen said, then stood up immediately as Leonard suddenly went out. ‘You’ll come down, Leonard, before I go?’
‘Yes, I’ll come down.’
Austen watched him with an almost frantic look of grievance. But Leonard climbed quickly up the narrow stairs and didn’t look back.
A tall side window which illuminated the landing was shaded from the late afternoon light. The broad passage was deep in shadow, its several dressers and wardrobes looming forward like protrusions of the building itself. The partition door at the opposite end of the landing, which separated the renovated section from the principal part of the Place, was completely obscured. He gazed round at the several doors as if the significance of their entry into his, Elizabeth’s and his parents’ rooms had eluded him. He seemed uncertain towards which to move when sudden
ly he hurried to the one furthest from the window and, overcome by a fit of coughing, closed the door behind him.
He secured it firmly and dropped onto his bed. The light, reflected from the trees and the outbuildings, glided into the tall room. He stared up at its cracked, moulded ceiling for some time, then turned sharply on his side to gaze at the innumerable drawings pinned to the wall.
Yellowing, they were held together like remnants of wallpaper, their intermittent production marked distinctly in their varied discolouring. They were landscapes, but of a scale disproportionate to their minute size, and animated by small, fragile figures, tiny creatures overwhelmed by huge surfaces of rock. No sooner had he seen them than he turned awkwardly onto his back and stared up again at the distant ceiling. His coughing had ceased.
Flies droned in the room. Birds chattered under the broken eaves of the outbuildings, and from above came the faint, anonymous sounds of the empty rooms. His father’s voice murmured from the kitchen below.
He lay on the bed calmly. Apart from turning occasionally from side to side, as if unconsciously he were enjoying the softness of the bed, there was no outward indication of his struggle to contain his feelings. This divorce of his body from his thoughts was something which he seldom noticed, but on this occasion it intensified his senses to such an extent that he felt as if he were looking down on an empty shell or the lifeless branch of a tree. Then it seemed that out of this exhaustion he began to sense the Place as an extension of his own mind.
It was as if he, lying in this room, were one central component. The faint voice of his father now represented the working of some distant cell, and the broad window through which flowed that even light was the opening to some incoherent brightness which only within the context of the room could be defined and given meaning. His habitation of the Place was like his habitation of his own brain, its cellular structure disposed around him as the endless ramifications of his thoughts. The identity of the building itself, its size and the scale of its architecture, its sense of duration, seemed to be that exact image he now possessed of his own mind. As he took on the identity of the Place, and became the building in the sense that all his feelings were invested in it, the aristocratic form of its dark shape became that essence which occupied every cell and atom of his brain.