by David Storey
Leonard had blushed and seemed about to get up when Kathleen came back into the room. It was as if all Blakeley’s vaguely feminine characteristics had been suddenly projected and clearly defined in her; he gazed up at her as if it were she who had been speaking.
‘My mother’ll be down in a few minutes. What’s he been telling you?’ She looked from Leonard to her father and back with the same antagonistic expression.
‘You mind your own business,’ Blakeley said. ‘Is there anything in to drink?’
‘I’ll put the kettle on for some tea, if that’s what you mean. There’s nothing else.’ She turned directly to Leonard, standing over him. ‘I want to hear what you thought of his act first, though.’
‘I didn’t like it at all,’ Leonard said with such evident simplicity that she started smiling, then suddenly giggled, glancing at her father and turning away.
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘He thinks I’m obscene. I belittle myself,’ Blakeley said. ‘And it’s quite true, I do. What was it you said? I pander to them. Stoop down to them. Perhaps he thinks I should be satirical and witty, and sing folk songs with a guitar.’ Apparently recognising himself in this role, Blakeley burst out laughing. ‘I’ve come, and to prove it I’m here!’ he said.
Kathleen laughed with her father; they were curiously alike, except that the woman was harder and firmer, even physically stronger than her father.
‘Perhaps you’re a bit above it all,’ she said to Leonard. Then added, with her father’s deprecating gesture, ‘No, I’m wrong. It is sickening, isn’t it? I can never watch it. I don’t know why he goes on doing it, feeding himself to them, and they sit there like fat ducks in the pond. If it wasn’t him, it’d be someone else. There’s no point to it. But you’ll be surprised,’ she said, looking at her father, who was smiling at her with some sort of enjoyment, ‘surprised how much pleasure he gets out of it. He can even make it all look fine and noble if you let him talk long enough about it. And there’s only one thing you can really say for him. And that’s that he can sing. He’s got a lovely tenor voice. But he’s just given in.…’
‘Given in, she calls it,’ Blakeley cried.
‘Well, I’m glad Leonard’s told you.’
Blakeley laughed more loudly, genuinely pleased with his daughter, and glancing at Leonard now with relief. ‘What do you think to her? Don’t you think she should go up instead of me?’
‘A woman would never do what you do. Stoop … grovel.’
‘Ah, don’t you be too sure,’ Blakeley said, some scarcely concealed feeling suddenly passing between them. ‘My own flesh and blood,’ he added indulgently. ‘What do you think they’ll invent next after children?’ His hand beat unconsciously against his side as he laughed. Kathleen looked away as someone else came into the room. Leonard stood up.
‘Nay, don’t get up for me, love,’ Blakeley’s wife said. A heavily-built woman, red-faced with greyed, almost white hair, she pushed indifferently between the furniture as if by disregarding Leonard she could make him feel at home.
‘I’ve put the kettle on. Kathleen can make it when it boils. We’ve got all the pyjamas in the wash. They’re wrapped up in all sorts of stuff.’ She laughed at her husband but her eyes, small and tired, had an undiminished look of anxiety, as if some deep and early concern about him had never been arrested. The real child of the family was Blakeley.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘she never asks me how I got on.’
‘I don’t need to, love. I can always tell,’ she said, not looking at him and sinking into a chair. But a moment later she pulled her heavy frame up and started to tidy the room. She picked up several fragments of food and numerous small, broken toys.
‘Nothing stays in one piece for long in this house,’ Blakeley said, watching her. ‘Not even the people. We get broken up amongst one another. Don’t you think that …’
‘So you work with Tolson, then,’ Kathleen said with the aggressiveness that accompanied even her slightest gestures.
‘Why do you say it in that tone?’ Leonard said.
‘What tone? Was there a tone? I thought if there’s one person I’m detached about it’s Vic.’
‘You see, like the rest of us,’ her father said, ‘she’s also had some experience of Victor.’ He held his hand to the side of his face as if simulating concern.
‘I was asking for his opinion not yours,’ she said harshly, almost childishly.
Leonard had put on an oppressed, stifled expression as if now he were completely bewildered. Kathleen seemed to take it as a look of shyness or embarrassment: provocatively she added, ‘I suppose my father’s told you what sort of regard … what sort of pernicious regard Tolson holds you in.’
‘No.… No, I don’t think …’
‘Perhaps you don’t realise just how destructive Tolson is? No, I can see in your face that you know well enough. After all, why would he choose you if he didn’t see that you were so vulnerable?’
‘No, you’re wrong!’ Leonard said angrily. ‘I don’t know why you should be so malicious. If you understand why he behaves in the way he does then you’ll find that …’ He shook his head, stammering slightly as if he’d suddenly lost his train of thought altogether. ‘You’ll see that there are ways of directing him.’
‘And what sort of understanding is it then that’s required?’ Kathleen said, but with such a wildness that he only stared at her in silence. ‘Go on, I’m listening. What sort of understanding is required?’
‘You’ve got to see that he’s a big person, and intensely lonely,’ Leonard said, but so subduedly that it seemed only Kathleen, leaning accusingly towards him, actually heard.
‘What was that? He’s a what person …?’ Blakeley said.
Kathleen had turned away. ‘Oh, so that’s how it’s done,’ she said quietly, but it was a tone of disappointment rather than contempt.
‘Ah, now.’ Blakeley had stood up as if only now realising that some quarrel had to be mended. ‘Perhaps Leonard’s experience of Tolson isn’t quite ours. As I’ve said to Kathleen before we ever met you, perhaps you’re a stronger character than any of us imagine.’
But Kathleen hadn’t stayed to listen; she’d gone into the scullery, and a few moments later her mother followed her, her apron scooped up to contain the large amount of debris she’d collected.
Blakeley sat down again, but more alertly. They could hear the two women talking rapidly and intensely in the next room.
‘You see, I don’t know how well you know Tolson, Leonard. But in our experience, well, his influence has always been destructive. And there are lots of people with much the same sort of experience. He’s such a strong sort of person. He doesn’t see perhaps how he knocks other people over. But you: you think there are ways of handling him, then?’
Leonard couldn’t be certain that Blakeley wasn’t looking at him mischievously or whether it were simply a more genuine expression of concern than he’d seen before.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You see,’ Blakeley went on, ‘Vic sees everything in terms of victories, of his assimilation of other people. He consumes people.’
‘I don’t see why you should be so malicious about him,’ Leonard said, his body twisting narrowly. He rubbed his face tormentedly. ‘I don’t know. I feel that you’ve got me here just to …’ He shook his head.
‘Perhaps it’s simply that you’re a bony piece that won’t digest,’ Blakeley said, as if recognising and encouraging Leonard’s bewilderment.
‘What is it? Do you feel that you’ve been destroyed by Tolson or something? I don’t see anything extraordinary in him at all.’
Blakeley, as if both alarmed yet intrigued that he had attracted Leonard’s attention in this way, waved his hand across his face as if brushing, almost pushing, some obstruction away. ‘As you say, perhaps the best thing is to give in to him straight away and let him use you. After all his only real pleasure comes from overpowering people, swamping them, a
nd after that he can just patronise them. Perhaps it’s best then simply to be patronised.’
‘But I never said that!’
‘I thought that’s what you meant when you said there are ways of directing him. I mean, why do you think he introduced us? He knew I’d take you off for a long talk. He worked up my interest in you, talking of you as some sort of artist, a prince! all that sort of nonsense. Why, us talking here, us reacting here is all the result of a deliberate plan of Tolson’s.… Not deliberate in the way you’re thinking. That’s the worst part about it. He doesn’t plan it on paper or anything like that. No, it’s all intuition. He’s hardly aware of it himself, although he does it. That’s the really monstrous, the really destructive part of it! Intuition!’
Leonard had stood up and begun to glance round the room. His face had hardened as if having recognised this nightmare he were prepared to accommodate it if only it would allow him to move his body casually round the room. He went across to the table just as Kathleen came in carrying a large, steaming tea-pot and a bottle of milk. As he moved several things aside, she glanced at him bitterly and said, ‘Has my father told you about what he calls “our Spanish Heritage”?’
She laughed, but Blakeley himself added, ‘Oh, now, we can leave that alone for once.’
‘Why should we? It was the real reason you asked Leonard back here tonight.’ She turned to Leonard accusingly. ‘You see, it was about the first thing that he told Tolson and we’ve never heard the last of it since.’
Blakeley’s wife came in and put down several cups and saucers.
‘That’s enough, Kathleen,’ he said. ‘It’s going to your head.’
‘You’ll know, of course, about the Peninsular War and how the Duke of Wellington went out there with an English army.’ She nodded reprovingly at her mother, then turned all her attention on Leonard. ‘How he went out to fight Napoleon. Such big names! Well, one of the officers, believe it or not, was called Blakeley. And he married a Spanish lady. A princess related to the Spanish royal family. Now can you see how it all ties up? This talk of princes. He thinks we’re related to Spanish aristocracy, and that you, being a Radcliffe … a Radcliffe, that you both have something in common.… And we live like this! He’s spent nearly all his life down the pit and so did his father before him, and he only came out because of his lungs. Yet he insists that we’re aristocrats! You ask him! You ask him! He knows your family’s entire history, the whole history of the Place. Down to what year? 1470 and the Wars of the Roses! Do you see how Tolson must be laughing. Two aristocrats meeting for the first time!’ She broke into a breathless sort of laughter, while she tried to set out the tea things on the table.
‘That’s why he calls himself an artist – to impress himself that he’s got better feelings, that he’s more sensitive. That he’s elevated above the rest of the herd. Even the doctor, when he was pensioned off from the pit, even the doctor said the trouble with his lungs was largely self-induced.’
‘He didn’t. That’s wrong,’ Blakeley said very formally. ‘He said it was aggravated by a nervous temperament.’
‘No such bloody thing! Rubbish!’ Kathleen was now giggling helplessly, both hands laid on the table.
‘Well, you’ll be able to understand one thing,’ Blakeley said. He was still sitting by the fire. His wife poured out the tea as if nothing had happened. ‘We educated Kathleen thinking she’d be the only child we’d have. She didn’t leave school till she was eighteen.’ He had leaned back in his chair and suddenly started to cry, his mouth dropping open in a huge, maundering leer and his eyes closing with tears. Yet the tone of his voice was peculiarly calm, as if he were unaware that he was crying at all. Only a kind of whine at the back of his throat had made his wife look up and go across to him. ‘As you can see,’ he went on, ‘she can express herself quite clearly. She’s an intelligent girl. An intellectual, you know. The only trouble is she doesn’t see that she only gets worked up about these things out of an affection for me. She just doesn’t see that.’
‘Oh, now you’ll get the complete performance,’ Kathleen said wildly as though this were quite simply a private remark directed solely at her. ‘This’s what usually happens. He’s such a sensitive soul.’ She stood watching the large figure of her mother stooping silently over her father with a strange look of envy. ‘I’m sorry. But why did he have to bring Radcliffe back here? He should have known.’ She shook her head angrily and turned back to the table. But she finished the pouring out of the tea which her mother had left uncompleted.
‘I think I’d better go,’ Leonard said. He had stood back in the corner of the room while the argument flared, but now he moved towards the chair where his coat lay.
‘No … no, you must stay,’ Blakeley said, getting up urgently from beneath the figure of his wife. ‘You see how it is. One thing leads to another. We’re just that bit excited. Nervous at you being here.’ He’d come to hold Leonard’s arm.
‘Yes,’ Kathleen said, ‘I don’t blame you. It’s that my father makes himself so vulnerable. He’s no protection against somebody like Tolson.’
‘But why do you let Tolson tyrannise you?’ Leonard said despairingly. ‘I don’t understand it.…’
‘Ah, but then you don’t know the half of it,’ Blakeley said, sounding disappointed that Leonard hadn’t understood. ‘Do you realise, for example, that it’s spiritual things Tolson seeks to possess most of all. Things he can’t acquire through his own temperament. He’s bound to attack, to consume people in whom he recognises some sort of spiritual quality. And naturally, they’re the ones who are most vulnerable to his physical sort of energy.’
‘I’ll have to go,’ Leonard said and immediately went to the door, pushing it open and groping around in the darkened hall. He found the handle of the front door and pulled it open. A stream of cold air rushed into the over-heated room.
‘Now wait! I’ll come with you,’ Blakeley called. ‘To the end of the avenue.’ He pulled on his jacket as he hurried after him.
They walked in silence. Leonard felt himself drinking in the cold air, clearing the confusion in his mind. Somewhere he had the impression that Blakeley was no longer limping, that he walked beside him quite naturally, but the idea never penetrated sufficiently to cause him to look. After glancing round to see if anyone were waiting in the street, he allowed himself to be lulled by the cold air and the rhythm of his walk and to become completely absorbed by his own thoughts.
‘What I really wanted to say,’ Blakeley said as they reached the road junction, ‘was that … the sort of performance I gave tonight, it wasn’t so much me as a person, but me reflecting them – the audience. Do you know what I mean? It’s important to me, is this. It’s my job to reflect what they are. That’s the theory I wanted to ask you about. After all, this is how I see it: I am them. If I wasn’t they wouldn’t have me there. I’m there by their permission.’
He was clinging to Leonard’s sleeve and trying to turn him so that he could see into his face. No lamp stood directly at the corner and in the faint light he could only recognise Leonard’s face as a pale mask. ‘Don’t you see? It’s their humour, not mine. But I’m not apologising for them. Nor for myself. At some other club I do something entirely different. Just singing straight ballads. But I want you to understand: this is all they’ve got.’
He wasn’t sure that Leonard had even heard him, but he went on explaining more earnestly until Leonard suddenly turned round to him and said quietly, ‘There’s one thing I realise. That there are certain people … certain families who invite people to their homes simply so that they can become a vehicle, a sort of catalyst for all that family’s troubles and quarrels. They’re of no account themselves. It’s simply that they become a receptacle.…’
‘Do you think I’ve done that?’ Blakeley said in a strange voice.
‘Oh, I’m not blaming you,’ Leonard added. ‘It’s entirely my own fault. I’m very slow at understanding certain things … situations. It’s entire
ly my fault. I should have seen. I seem to go into things with my eyes completely shut.’ And when Blakeley seemed about to interrupt he went on more excitedly, ‘I mean, the absurd thing is that although I don’t know what Tolson’s told you about me, the fact is that we knew each other as boys. We were very good friends for two or three years even.’
‘But is that true? Are you sure? But of course you must be sure or you wouldn’t say it like that. And in that tone of voice. It must be true.’ Blakeley appeared to walk off by himself, moving several paces in one direction, then another, until he returned to his original position. ‘That’s very strange,’ he said, looking carefully at Leonard’s faintly illuminated face. ‘I wonder why he never told me. For he knew I was bound to find out when we met. Do you notice any change? Any change in him, I mean, between then and now.’
‘I shall have to go now,’ Leonard said. ‘It’s just that I wanted you to realise how absurd the situation is.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I realise that now. I see that. We’ve both been deceived. But why?’
Leonard had turned to go, but with a sudden movement Blakeley took hold of his arm and pulled it against him.
‘Has Tolson told you anything about us? About me, I mean. Or Kathleen?’ he said. Then before Leonard could answer he added in an extremely pleased and relaxed voice, ‘What do you think to Kathleen? She’s a great admiration for you, you know. That’s to say, she’s intimidated by you. Don’t be put off by that aggressiveness. She’s always like that when she feels drawn to a person. I’m afraid it’s the unfortunate result of her past experience.’ He now gripped Leonard’s arm and shoulder in both his hands, and for a moment held him in silence. ‘I’m sorry if I disappoint you,’ he said quietly.