Radcliffe

by David Storey

  The book lay in his lap, his long fingers caught round its edges and the sleeves of his woollen jacket rolled back as if the task of reading were in itself a physical effort. As the door closed he turned towards Leonard with the gleam of the lamp fully in his eyes, the skin corrugated into minute ripples by the intense shadow.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Nearly eleven … I saw your light under the door.’

  ‘Your mother’s been waiting up for you.’

  ‘I’ve just seen her. She’s coming up to bed.’

  John rubbed his narrow thighs, displacing the book. It turned sideways on his knees, released from his hands. The light exposed the bony structure of his face.

  ‘Did you see Tolson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  The room was sparsely furnished with lean, simple furniture, old and well-kept. Leonard moved familiarly about its shadowed spaces. As he sat down his father’s head was silhouetted against one of the two paintings in the room; a pale shape of water cascaded between dark rocks, like a tongue springing from his narrow skull.

  Leonard’s mother and Elizabeth moved in their separate rooms. The timber creaked perpetually through the building. Then faintly came a regular, mounting beat. It thudded hollowly in the rock beneath them, growing steadily and sending a dull vibration through the room like a lifeless pulse: fractured sounds came from the stone walls and the intervening wooden frames. It was huge and intrusive, muffled by the rock, and pounding: a train in the tunnel beneath the Place.

  The engine passed slowly beneath them, a heavy rhythmic shudder. Then the sound decreased and the clacking of metal echoed and faded through the rock.

  They looked at one another in silence. His father’s hands, holding one another, showed whitely against his tall figure, and his head, turned towards Leonard, was flushed with the light glowing through the thin fringe of hair.

  ‘Have you quarrelled with him, then?’ John said almost inaudibly.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Leonard looked away into the darker spaces of the room. His father’s book had dropped; out of the corner of his eye Leonard saw the awkward movement of his legs as he tried to arrest it, then his clumsy stoop to retrieve it.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ his father asked.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  Then John said frustratedly, ‘Isn’t it something that you can talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Leonard suddenly added, ‘It’s just that I expect too much.…’

  ‘Too much of whom?’

  ‘Of them! Them!’

  John’s head turned slowly from side to side as if he were searching the room, forgetful.

  ‘All along I’ve tortured myself thinking it was me who was at fault. That it was me. That somehow I had to blunt my senses, disregard my better feelings. But Tolson …’

  ‘Whatever thing it is that’s upset you, you shouldn’t let it overwhelm you like this,’ John said, still looking about the room as though refusing to accept Leonard at all.

  ‘But don’t you see? Tolson, all the time, has to try and belittle me.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Not because of himself. But because of what he is. A workman. He has to bring me down to that before he’ll accept me.’

  Leonard got up and began to walk the room, almost distractedly, his hand touching each piece of furniture as he passed. ‘And the worst thing is, half of me wants it. To be like that. But the other … there’s a part of me that won’t be reduced.’

  ‘Perhaps you should leave him,’ John said, looking down at his book. He turned a page, then ran his hand over the print as if it were set in relief.

  ‘But I can’t. I don’t know what it is. But with him I have a hold on things I’d never have otherwise. You just don’t know … you don’t know how ugly and spiritless he is. Working …’ He suddenly stopped to gaze in tears at his father. ‘Working men are the most thoughtless and lifeless people that have ever lived. And not because they are workmen, but because of what they are themselves. They become workmen because of what they are. Caterpillars. Caterpillars!’

  His father looked up at him lifelessly. ‘There’s nothing I can say, really, is there? I hoped that with Tolson, well … that you’d begin to look out at things a bit. Not that you’d just stay with him, but that he might lead you to other things and people. You see, I’m not so sure that you’re not condemning Tolson, not because of some deficiency in him, but because of something in yourself. That you’re rationalising something. When you talk about “workmen” …’

  ‘No. No! You don’t understand what it is.’

  ‘It’s rationalising! Believe me. I know how things can be reduced in this way.’

  ‘Then why did you encourage me? If it wasn’t that you saw in Tolson exactly that touch of the commonplace which you always insinuate is the one quality I lack.’ He suddenly strode across to the wall and switched on the main light. ‘I’m not frightened of Tolson. And I’m not frightened of how people regard me. Elizabeth … Elizabeth treats me as a madman to be humoured. Austen as though I’m something to be provoked inside a cage. And you. God alone knows how you see me. But all this. All this …’ He swung his arm round at the room, then stood gazing emptily at his father as though he had forgotten completely what it was he’d intended to say.

  John, blinded by the glare, stood up. His hand moved up to shield his eyes. Leonard continued to stare at him without any expression at all, except perhaps one of mild consternation. Then he said quietly, ‘Don’t you see? Vic’s the only real touch I have on things.’

  John didn’t answer. He turned away, with a negligent movement, as if he’d suddenly been reminded of something more important. When he turned back Leonard was staring at him with a half-broken, demanding expression.

  ‘You can’t really help me, can you?’ he said. ‘You’ve made me, but you can’t really help me. For you can’t really help yourself.’

  John didn’t answer. The book was still in his hand. He heard Leonard go to the door, and thought he heard it close. When he looked up, however, his son was still gazing in at him.

  ‘What was it that Austen wanted?’ Leonard said.

  ‘Austen?’

  ‘He came to see you about something. Or so he said.’

  ‘Oh. It’s just an idea he has. Of inviting the family back here for a day.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’d better ask him. I believe he has some vague idea.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That the family should ask the trustees to sell the house. But really, that’s just his excuse for inviting them here. For his party.’

  ‘Doesn’t anything ever strike you as strange about Austen?’

  His father didn’t answer. He seemed suddenly impatient for Leonard to leave.

  ‘Have you noticed the intentness with which Austen does everything now? The way he got me a job at Ewbank’s. And now his “idea”.’ He watched his father a moment longer, then added, ‘Will you agree to his so-called party?’

  ‘I don’t know.… Perhaps now I will.’

  Leonard turned to go. His father stood in the middle of the room. The light was directly above his head. He stooped slightly as though bored, absent-minded. His eyes were concealed by shadow.

  ‘With Vic, it’s not something I can let go. Not until it’s finished and at an absolute end.’ His father nodded. His head seemed broken by the light. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ John looked up at him. ‘Perhaps he’ll just debase you. Destroy you.’

  ‘No. You’re wrong. Because he cares as well. If he didn’t, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. But he does. And the thing’s very simple. Either to be loved or to be destroyed.’

  ‘Or to be loved and destroyed.’ His father sank down in the chair.

  ‘That’s their decision, isn’t it?’ Leonard said. ‘Them.’

  He watched his father a moment. Then he closed
the door. A thin strip of red light glowed from beneath it. He stood on the landing for a while uncertainly, as though hopelessly undecided what exactly he had intended to do. Then, swinging clumsily around, he went to his room.

  He lay down on the bed, restless, his head flung from side to side. A small reading lamp was alight, and within this pool of illumination his head shone. In the tunnel beneath the house a train rumbled again. It hauled along, pounding in the rock. The noise mounted, pulsing and vibrating, a rhythmic thunder. Long after the sound had disappeared it echoed through the place. It beat in his ears, the sunken percussion of his blood.

  He lay, quite still now, with his eyes open, the faint night glow of the estate reflected on the ceiling and meeting the glare from his own lamp. It seemed to him that his senses gradually extended from him until he experienced once again that strange projection of his body. The building was like the vast instrument of his thoughts. It mounted in him until, by some deeper extension, he was absorbed by the vast flange of rock itself, that eroded escarpment upon which both the estate and the Place rested. He sprawled across the land like a giant, his limbs and body colossal ligaments of the earth. It seemed he lay there not asleep but waiting.

  Yet, the next moment, his head was raised up, hoisted by some monumental articulation of his neck, like a hill rising from the ground. Beneath the blackened sky appeared the dark sweep of the valley and, above, the furnace of the sun. It jettisoned colossal wreaths across the sky beneath which, along the upper ridges of the valley on either side, smoked the stacks and heaps of innumerable collieries, transfused by the light itself, and from which were torn vast, curling sheets of steam and smoke. Fluorescent yellow flares glowed through the misty apertures illuminating pitty fields of waste, pocked craters torn out flank by flank, the swirls of coaly clay spun out by the light on endless spirals into the night.

  In the valley, like a silver mesh across the swinging contour of the land, stretched rows of armoured men, the light glinting fiercely on the white metal of limbs and the cylinders of strange and innumerable weapons. They curled across the valley like the strata of rock itself, bared luminous nerves splattered from the earth. Row after row of giant men encased in multiple sheaths of steel, heads like metal foliage on metal trunks, rose one by one and advanced, twin columns face to face, the ground spewed up in the wake of metal feet, growing and mounting towards each other like opposing breakers in a sea.

  And as they met the sky divided at the metallic clash, the rasp and screech of metal man on man, and he heard his own voice cry out. In the sky, above the roaring band, appeared a figure, springing down, alighting and, from across the valley, pausing with outstretched hands to survey the scene.

  It rose, poised, a limb of the earth itself, and above the roaring of the armies and the cries he heard a voice boom out, the echoed fall of metal flange on flange, ‘Radcliffe! Radcliffe! Radcliffe!’ and, feeling the heat flash through his giant limbs, he too rose, springing up, and across the screaming chasm faced the giant that had called his name.

  He looked up. Out of the red glow of his room his father’s face peered down, huge and, it seemed, surrounded by knots of flaming hair. Then, more clearly, he recognised him concernedly leaning down.

  ‘Are you all right? I heard you calling out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Leonard rose from the bed to reassure him and, after a certain hesitation, his father went out.

  He lay back. Through the window the sky was pale with a hidden moon and full of the rush of bulbous clouds.

  13

  The road swung from side to side, narrowly accommodating the truck in its lean width and crushing the howling tyres against the roots of hawthorn-scrub and the white, clayey fringes of the tarmac. The men swayed, the loose equipment thudding against their backs and legs and the worn planks, without any of them speaking. Leonard had watched the road unfolding behind for some time: the factories and houses on either side had disappeared, and the shape of the countryside grown unfamiliar. He felt himself relaxing; seeing it expanding rearward, he could greet it fatalistically like a traveller watching an unknown but predestined landscape appear. If nothing else now, this line of unfolding hills expressed his determination to be with these men and to be undefeated by them.

  The truck swung off the road and entered a deep valley, a gulch of green, close-cropped grass. It narrowed abruptly, one wall brushing the side of the vehicle and the engine growling with a penned-in wildness. It darkened, the rock mounting over them: its creviced surface filled the back of the truck. They were climbing. For a moment they clung to the rock face, then the road suddenly left them, swinging behind in an arc, and they were running on straight, smooth tarmac.

  It darkened; they shot under an archway, then between low barbed-wire fences. The arch stood behind them, isolated, something surprised, a huge circular eye blank against the sky.

  ‘What’s this, then?’ Shaw said. ‘What’s this?’ He leaned over, gripping the tailboard and staring out at the flocks of white sheep. They were laid like models in the mounded fields. Long, dark banks of woods were fastened up against the sky.

  ‘It’s Meerstone Park,’ Pilkington said, and began taking off his neatly polished shoes and pulling on his cut-down Wellington boots. Shaw fell back, felt round for his bag and unwrapped his sandwiches, examining them carefully before replacing them in their greaseproof paper. He glanced quickly at Leonard and smiled.

  The road ran straight and flat from the distant eye of the arch, the woods dropping down to the road in swinging curves. The truck rose suddenly, slowing abruptly and jarring with the pressure of a slope, and for the first time they heard the whine of the loaded lorry in front. The trees clipped the canvas hood. Then came the heavy scent of pines.

  The sound of the two vehicles grew to a steady scream, the track winding steeply, and for a second the men caught sight of Ewbank’s car leading the small convoy. Suddenly the sounds were obliterated by an onslaught of branches and leaves torn off by the heavy load in front. The scent of pines was drowned in a deeper smell of fern. They squeezed between sharp, precipitous hills, a wake of crushed branches and leaves strewn behind them, then slowed onto loose gravel between two broad smooth lawns. The grass lay like a lake at the bottom of a large hollow. They stopped and for some time there was absolute silence.

  The door banged on Ewbank’s car. His tiny feet crunched over the gravel. The men began to climb stiffly down. The lorries were parked in front of a large stone building, ivy-covered, and completely surrounded by steep, wooded hills rising from the edge of the lawns and garden. The building’s mellowed stone grew out of the bare rock, a natural protrusion of the sharp, conical hills, its thin coils of smoke curling up like an airy vegetation. The men scarcely moved, standing round the vehicles their bags dangling from their hands, staring up at the tall windows set crisply with white paint in the eroded skin of the house. Ewbank had disappeared round a path at the side, and a bell rang faintly in some deep recess.

  At a french window, surrounded by roses, a young man was standing with his hands in his pockets looking out at the men and the two battered vehicles. His mouth moved slightly as if he were talking to someone who preferred to remain out of sight. Shaw stared in at the window with an amicable grin as he ate his sandwiches, his eyes occasionally moving sideways as though furtively to convey a message. The young man moved further back into the room’s shadow, bent down and picked up a newspaper; then glanced out of the window once again to find Shaw still gazing in at him. Yet Shaw was seeing nothing; he always appeared preoccupied in this strange way whenever he had food in his mouth.

  Pilkington, his trousers tucked in his Wellington boots, had taken off his shirt, his red, hirsute chest inflamed as he leaned against the back wheel of the truck relieving himself. He gazed up hopefully at the sky.

  Somewhere in the house a dog barked, then several others. The men wandered about the drive, starting to eat. A middle-aged man came rou
nd the corner of the building with Ewbank. He was in flannels and a check sports coat, a yellow scarf tucked in the open collar of his red shirt. Three whippets darted round his legs, racing off across the lawn towards Leonard, who had crossed to the opposite side, and sweeping back in swift, dancing leaps.

  ‘Come on,’ Ewbank shouted. ‘Get that cover off. Get them onto it, Tolson.’

  He added something to the middle-aged man and they both stood smiling, watching the men laying down their food and starting to work.

  The sun shone directly into the hollow. Throughout the morning the house itself was silent, the windows deserted. The barking of dogs soon died down. The men were the only moving things, trampling the neat lawns and the small shrubberies and borders to squeeze in the white mushroom of new canvas. Inside they raised a lining of pink and white striped muslin and, before they broke off for lunch, laid out the battens inside the marquee as the foundation of a dance floor.

  Occasionally Shaw had wandered off to the truck to inspect or to consume his remaining sandwiches. He was just completing his lunch as the men filed past him to collect their bags, and he followed them with his empty sandwich papers as they sat down in the shade of the tent awning.

  ‘Nay, you can’t expect any of mine if you’ve eaten your dinner already,’ Pilkington said to him.

  Ewbank had gone to his car; he slid in behind the wheel and lowered the window, to which he clipped a plastic tray. He unwrapped his lunch, laying it out in separate sections neatly divided by a knife, his Thermos and a small ivory tooth pick he kept in his wallet. He ate thoughtfully, gazing ahead through the windscreen at the blank wall of trees, and occasionally twisting round to unscrew his Thermos and pour himself a cupful of tea.

  Leonard sat down amongst the men. They turned to watch him take off the elastic bands from his lunch packet and unravel two sheets of tissue paper. Pilkington had started to laugh and Leonard looked up. He took out his sandwiches and glanced round at the men. They gazed up at the house unconcernedly. Tolson crouched against a tent-pole slashing the ground with a pen knife.