by David Storey
He waited for two men to pass. They came down the road talking, their bodies pushing urgently against one another. They shouldered into the privet hedges lining the gardens. One of them lay back, couched and swaying in the leaves. He laughed, his hands held up helplessly as he drowned. His friend pulled him up, bending to exaggerate his effort. They giggled together and punched each others’ shoulders. One of them laughed again and said, ‘Ah, she’ll never forget.’
Leonard crossed the road quietly and pushed open the thick wooden gate with his toe. The concrete path he followed went round the side of the house, passing the entrance to the lower flat, and continuing to the back. The motor-bike stood on a narrow strip of lawn, a toy. Beneath it the grass was matted with a long accumulation of oil; all round the machine stretched a black pond of earth. Beyond, as far as the railings that backed onto the gardens of the opposite houses, the ground had been massively dug. Nothing grew there.
The machine leaned slightly on its stand, its rear wheel missing. The chain hung down through the forks in a loose coil.
He climbed the steps to the back door with a sudden weariness, virtually exhausted. When he knocked footsteps immediately ran down the stairs and the door was pulled open as if he were expected. Yet Tolson’s wife stared at him in surprise.
‘Oh … Len!’ Her full, matronly figure stood hesitantly in the doorway.
‘Audrey. Is Vic in?’
‘Yes.’ She stood to one side, holding the door. It was someone else she’d expected. She watched him as he strangely lowered his head, stooped, and entered. He went through the small kitchen and up the stairs as though in fear of the ceiling.
Tolson was crouched forward on an easy chair with his eldest son, Peter, naked between his thighs. The boy stood in a bowl of hot water and a thin steam rose round their two figures. Tolson, washing him, looked up at Leonard without surprise.
‘Hallo, mate. What time did you get back, then?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘Have a seat. I’ll just finish the little lad first.’ Peter was seven, a muscular, dark-haired boy.
Audrey came into the room. A second boy had just been bathed and stood behind a large chair in a corner of the room. Audrey lifted him, a sturdy child of four years, and nodding to Leonard carried the struggling boy into their bedroom to be dressed.
Tolson silently bathed the elder boy. He did it with a strange lightness of his thick arms, turning him round in his large hands, washing his back and shoulders, squeezing the water over his neck. The boy watched Leonard gravely, twisting his head quickly whenever he was moved so that he could gaze uninterruptedly at the visitor. Beyond Tolson, leaning against the wall, was the rear wheel of the motor-bike.
‘Why, you’ve seen Len before,’ Tolson said. He washed the boy carefully and thoroughly, glancing up at Leonard to smile, then stooping forward and rubbing the boy’s legs, holding him as he lifted first one foot out of the water then the other. From the next room came the enquiring voice of the younger child, almost complaining, ‘When’s Uncle Denis coming?’, then Audrey’s deeper answering tone.
Tolson ran his hand roughly through the boy’s hair as Peter stepped out of the bath. His father pushed it aside with one foot and wrapped a towel tightly round him. He rubbed the boy through the towel, then gave him it to dry himself. He watched him smilingly, nodding his head with some knowledge of his son’s nature. When he was dry he helped him dress in a short vest and his pyjamas, taking the clothes from in front of the coal fire and feeling them on his cheek.
Tolson lifted the bowl and carried it out. The boy, standing by the empty chair, watched Leonard a moment. Then, when it seemed Leonard was about to speak, he suddenly ran out into the next room. Leonard could hear him crying and Audrey irritatedly reassuring him.
He sat alone. Tolson was talking to the boy in the next room, threatening then suddenly angry, his voice calling out. The child was quiet. No sound came from the house. Opposite Leonard was the bike wheel standing on a newspaper gritted and stained with oil. A rag hung through the spokes. The furniture rested like huge rocks in the room.
When Tolson came in he picked up the wheel and sat down in the easy chair. He balanced the wheel under one hand while he pushed newspaper beneath it. He started to clean the shining metal round the hub. ‘They’re going off to bed soon,’ he said. ‘They’re a bit late but I hadn’t seen them for a few days. I’ve been giving them one or two games.’ He cleaned the wheel with delicacy, an adroitness and quickness of his large hands. Leonard watched them, his lips parted.
‘What happened to you this morning, Vic?’ he said.
Tolson glanced up at him casually and recognising Leonard’s intense expression said, ‘I couldn’t sleep at nights in that tent. I don’t know what it was.’
Audrey had come in. After putting toys into a cardboard box and folding the boys’ clothes she sat down facing Leonard. She was several years older than Tolson, a large featured woman, almost forty. Her tawny hair was luminous in the electric light; it swirled, loosely coiled, round her head and the heavy features of her face, the stubby nose and the blue, fleshy eyes. Her arms were folded determinedly under her large breasts.
‘I got up early,’ Tolson said, glancing at her. ‘I felt that bit restless. I took the tents down and came on home on the bike … I thought you’d heard me. You rolled over a couple of times when I pulled the bike out.’ He seemed wearied by it and gave all his attention to the wheel.
‘I didn’t wake up until Ewbank came with the men.’
‘Ewbank.’ Tolson laughed without looking up. ‘I can just imagine what he said.’
Leonard watched him calmly. A boy’s voice had called from the next room and after a moment’s hesitation Audrey got up. ‘They’ll have finished their prayers,’ she said and went out.
They could hear her talking quietly next door, the creaking of the bed, then the door closing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Tolson said, ‘I’ll let Ewbank know about it all when we go in tomorrow.’
‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’
‘Why not? There was nothing wrong with the tents. I took them all down properly. I worked like a pig, I did. There wasn’t a mark on them.’ He looked concernedly at Leonard, aggrieved.
‘Why did you go without telling me?’
‘I’ve told you. I got browned off stuck out in that tent. I didn’t mean to drive all the way back home. Isn’t that right, love?’ he said as Audrey came back in, closing the door. ‘I just went to drive round a bit and before I knew where I was … That’s right, Audrey, isn’t it? I’ve told you.’
‘I wouldn’t let it upset you so much,’ she said to Leonard. She looked at him indulgently. ‘What did Ewbank say?’
Leonard shook his head. ‘He was annoyed.’
‘Annoyed? Why annoyed? I worked like a bloody nigger on those tents. He can thank me for all the double-time he’s saved. You watch, when I go back in that yard tomorrow he won’t say a word. He’ll just look at me over that bleeding cheroot and say nothing.’ He bounced the wheel under his hand, shaking the room, then rolled it over and propped it against the wall.
Leonard sat silently staring at the floor.
‘Do you want some tea, we’re just making some?’ Tolson said. ‘We can’t go out, or we could go to the pub. They’re out downstairs, Sugdeons, and we’re keeping an eye on their kids in bed.’
‘You could go out,’ Leonard said.
Tolson didn’t answer. Then Audrey said, ‘Will you have some tea, Len?’ She waited until he’d answered her, then went downstairs to the kitchen they shared.
They listened to her moving below. Tolson picked mud from the tyre with a screwdriver. ‘Where did you leave my case and the portable?’ he asked.
‘At the yard.’
He looked at Leonard. The light fell coarsely on his features. He bent down and collected the greased newspapers and screwed them together. He pushed them into the fireplace and they flared up.
‘Wh
y did you go without me?’ Leonard said.
‘Are you upset about it?’
Leonard didn’t move.
‘Ewbank couldn’t blame you for aught. I did whatever there was done and he’ll say nothing to me.’
Leonard looked slowly round the room. The bulbous suite and square table filled it. Large rose patterns pressed the walls inwards, reducing the room. The ceiling was low. From it hung a broad yellow lampshade. Everything was as if inflated to fill a space several times this size.
‘What do you want me to do, then?’ Tolson said. ‘Fall on my knees and say I’m sorry? What’s all the can about?’
‘The girl came back to the field this morning, looking for you.’
‘Forget it.’ He went to the bike wheel and lifted it, about to take it down to the yard. Then he dropped it back on the floor. The room shook.
‘What’s the matter with me going?’ he said. ‘If you don’t like it you know what you can do.’
‘Don’t you think it’s strange you rushing off like that? I wouldn’t have minded if you’d told me you were going. Did you feel guilty or ashamed about something?’
Tolson didn’t answer.
‘Are you frightened of me?’ Leonard said.
‘I don’t give a sod about you.’
‘No …’ Leonard looked away, blushing. ‘Do you care about anything really, anything at all?’ He gestured round at the room. ‘Except this and the few sticks and stones you’ve collected together.’
‘It’s a family and a home. I’ve got two kids in there. I care about them. Nobody else does. What have you got?’
‘I’ve got my family and home.’
Tolson laughed. ‘Yeh. Well, that’s true.’
‘Why are you frightened of me?’
‘I’m not frightened.’
‘Ashamed, then. I’m not ashamed of knowing you.’
‘I’m not frightened and I’m not ashamed.’
‘Why did you run away, then?’
‘Who ran away? I didn’t run away. If I want to do anything why should I have to ask you all the time?’
‘You know why.’
Tolson flushed and turned away. He seemed huge and desperate, towering in the room.
‘And it isn’t ask,’ Leonard said. ‘If you’d just told me. That girl … I wouldn’t have minded, if you hadn’t been so underhand about it. Why do you do things like that? Why? You make everything obscene and grotesque just to get some sort of revenge. But revenge for what?’
‘The girl – she was nothing.’
‘I don’t care! I don’t care!’ Leonard cried, standing up. ‘If you’d only been open about it. I don’t care what you do like that, honestly I don’t care, if you’d only be honest and open about it. Don’t you understand?’
‘You’re soft. You’re just too soft. You don’t take these things as you should. You should laugh at it.’
‘No. You didn’t laugh at it when it was something you wanted.’
‘I don’t want to be owned by anybody, that’s all!’
‘I don’t own you.’
‘No. You don’t. And doesn’t that just make you mad?’
‘Vic! You just make it like this. You know it’s not true.’
‘How do I know?’
‘I only want one thing. For everything to be completely honest. Not playing with people, then running away. You – you make everything into some sort of battle.’
‘Well that’s how things are.’
‘It isn’t!’
‘Look. I’m getting tired. I just got fed up of that place and came away.’
‘You didn’t. It was meant to mean something. I understand why you went away.’ Leonard turned aside, his hands clenched tightly together.
‘You’re insane coming here,’ Tolson said suddenly and in despair. ‘What’re you trying to do? Tell her?’
The back door had slammed downstairs and there was the sound of Audrey’s and a man’s voice.
Someone was already mounting the stairs. A man called out, ‘Vic …?’ His feet sounded irregularly as if he climbed with difficulty.
‘You see! You see!’ Tolson whispered. ‘What kind of trouble are you trying to cause?’
Leonard suddenly made an incoherent sound. He hurried out of the room onto the darkened landing. Behind him the children’s door was slightly open and the crying of the youngest boy broke out as the man, now almost at the top of the stairs, called, ‘Come on, Vic. It’s no good your hiding yourself up here.’
It wasn’t Sugdeon, the man who lived below. The visitor climbing the stairs was limping, one hand held out from his raincoat and clutching the banister.
Tolson stood in the door of the living room looking at Leonard in the darkness.
‘I’ll see you at work,’ Leonard said.
‘Why, who’s this here?’ The visitor jumped aside as Leonard started past him.
Leonard dropped down the stairs, past Audrey, and reached the back door.
‘What was that, then? The cat?’ he heard the man say.
But whatever Tolson’s reply, it wasn’t in answer to the question. He heard them laughing as he stepped into the fresh air.
At the gate he paused and looked up at the lighted windows. The yellow curtains hadn’t moved. He walked across the road to the tree. As he did so he counted the number of steps he was taking as if deep within him he were making an important calculation.
He waited in the shadow. The road now was lit solely by the lamps and was unaffected by the light still glowing faintly in the distant parts of the sky. After a while a van drew up at the gate. The Sugdeons got out: a stubby middle-aged couple. The wife went down the path and her white dress disappeared at the side entrance of the house. Sugdeon himself, dressed in a suit, locked up the doors of the van, his small stocky figure slowly circling the vehicle, coughing over a cigarette. Leonard could see the dark patch of his moustache over the glow of it. The lights went on in the lower half of the house. The faint crying of a child started, then as suddenly stopped. Sugdeon’s feet crunched across the pavement, he pushed open the heavy wooden gate and walked down to the side entrance. The door closed and the road was silent.
Lights glowed from the mass of houses either side. Leonard stared up at the curtains across which shadows occasionally moved: Audrey’s or the visitor’s, too small for Tolson’s. Stray thoughts moved through his mind. Beneath them he was aware of an obscure but relentless kind of calculation. Three windows of the neighbouring house overlooked the foot path down the side of Tolson’s house; the privet hedge on that side of the road hid anyone arriving or leaving. By the gate was a lilac tree that had spread into a broad, thick bush growing over the lawn at the front of the house and concealing anyone from the house who opened or closed the gate. They would have to walk three paces before they came briefly into view of the lower windows.
Normally provided for one family, the house had been divided into two flats: this thought persisted irrelevantly as he glanced from the overlooking windows of the next house to the bush by the gate, and from the tall, ranging line of privet to the yellow curtains at the plain lighted windows below. After a while he seemed so confused by these rootless observations that he turned away, pushed his hands into his pockets and began to walk up and down in the limited space of the tree’s shadow. He was sweating, yet glancing up at those yellow windows coolly, almost impersonally, as if he looked up at one which he’d chosen quite arbitrarily for some definite purpose.
The houses now were so dark that they formed a single line like a long cliff curving away from the corner where he stood, the lamps laid as separate pools along the foot of the rock. Then, as he was on the point of breaking his meaningless vigil, he heard several voices opposite, and standing in mid-stride he eventually recognised Tolson and the visitor as they came up the side of the house. They stood a moment at the gate murmuring together and concealed by the van. Then Tolson called out, ‘Good night … good night, Denis. Sorry I can’t give you a lift.’
The gate squealed then softly thudded as it met the post. The visitor limped off down the road. As he passed through the lamplight Leonard had the impression of a tall, bony man in a raincoat who walked as if one leg were artificial or completely paralysed.
He’d been staring at the man so intensely that he didn’t see Tolson until he was half way across the road. It was the vague silhouette of his massive figure suddenly standing there that caught his attention. It seemed several moments before he realised that Tolson wasn’t in fact moving, but simply standing in the middle of the road staring in at the shadows. Yet it was as if he had discovered him: the tight grip on his arm and the triumphant voice: ‘What are you doing here?’
The sweat burst from his face. Tolson looked directly at him as if simply waiting for him to step out of the shadows and make some confession. Leonard stood rigidly, his feet astride, with no sound or movement.
Tolson turned away. His feet grated on the road, were silent for two paces on the grass verge, then grated again as he banged through the gate and down the side of the house.
Leonard hadn’t moved. He heard the back door shut. Down the road he could still see the lame man arcing his body through the distant pools of light. He seemed to have been there for hours, pinioned by the light.
He stepped onto the footpath and set off home. He glanced back at the yellow curtains but they were still undisturbed, and with the sweat drying coldly on his face he strode quickly, almost triumphantly, through the darkness, his mind suddenly indifferent to whether Tolson had seen him or not, and locked even further inside certain meaningless observations which he felt were somehow involved with something he’d already decided to do.
12
His father was sitting in a tall, upholstered chair, his features sheathed in the red light of a reading lamp. The narrow ligaments of the ancient chair framed his erect body. He’d been reading as Leonard came into his bedroom.