by David Storey
Leonard climbed down onto the drive. The ground was unusually wet, as if it had been raining for hours. In the cab Ewbank sat with his hat pushed to the back of his head. He gazed fixedly ahead through the windscreen to where a figure was humped just inside the tent.
It looked as though Shaw were praying. He was crouched down on the wrecked dance floor, the rain thundering on the canvas over his head. As he stood over him Leonard could hear Shaw’s broken voice, singing. Only then did he gradually decipher a single repetitive phrase: ‘What’ve I done?’ Shaw moaned. ‘What’ve I done?’
Leonard stood watching him for some time. His crouched back heaved intermittently as if his chest revolted at the bony pressure of his knees.
The rain slackened. A wind swept it up from the hollow, shaking it free of the pines. The canvas swayed, billowing on the poles, and water cascaded over the eaves of the drooped tent. The wind surged under the roof and inflated the canvas body until the stakes tore the ground and the ropes rose vertically in the air. Leaves and paper were sucked into the tent.
Leonard touched the crouched figure with his foot. It was shuddering slightly now, chilled by the sudden upsurge of air. The canvas groaned, then cracked in vicious waves from the rising wind. Inside the tent the air was bitterly cold.
‘Come on, Shaw. Get up.’
He touched the huddled figure again with his foot and it drew itself in closer, in a sly movement of protection. Leonard kicked him gently.
‘Come on. Get up.’
Shaw buried his skull under his large, square hands. His back had suddenly stiffened, arching up, no longer shuddering.
Leonard gazed down at the tensed shape with growing exasperation.
‘Come on, Shaw. Get up!’ He seemed almost in tears, stooping slightly as if his words could prise open the clenched figure. ‘For Christ’s sake get up, Shaw!’ He kicked him again, gently; then, when he didn’t move, more wildly.
Shaw’s body seemed to settle more comfortably between its broad arms. They were like a single protective claw to the shell of his body. Leonard began thrusting his foot against Shaw’s body, rapidly at first, then more slowly as each blow took on greater weight and intention. His foot thudded again and again into the body. ‘For Christ’s sake, Shaw! Get up!’
It was the lack of movement, the passivity, that incensed him.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon Ewbank pushed open the door of the cab and climbed stiffly down. He winced as each foot touched the ground. It was still raining. He pulled a macintosh and a sou’wester from under the seat and put them on; then, holding to the side of the truck, walked round the back and ordered the men out. Pilkington and a second man were asleep and couldn’t be wakened. The rest eventually scrambled down and stumbled across to the shelter of the tent.
Leonard was stooping down at the far end. He was working rapidly, taking up the square sections of the dance floor and stacking them wildly on either side. Almost the entire dance floor had been lifted and laid out in this way.
‘Ah, well, at least somebody’s working,’ Ewbank said, frowning. He rubbed his temples and stared across at the active figure. ‘The rest of you, get on with the battening and the tables. I want it all up in an hour.’
Suddenly he laughed, rubbing his head more vigorously and, going over to the nearest of the three poles that supported the tent, he unfastened the thin rope that secured the remnants of the muslin lining. The pink and white cloth floated down like a ragged mist. It fell over Shaw who was still crouched motionless on the floor of the tent.
‘Shaw?’ Ewbank glanced across at the mounded figure as he loosely wrapped the torn lining. ‘Shaw?’
Mummified by the thin cloth the old man seemed one more part of the detritus. As they lifted it from him the men were laughing, holding their heads painfully and kneeling down as they tried ineffectually to uproot the floor. ‘Bloody Shaw!’
Ewbank packed the muslin into a large hessian bag, looking back at the old figure now and shaking his head. A lorry had begun to whine up the narrow drive between the trees. As it emerged from under the wet foliage the men stood up cheering.
Tolson leapt down from the cab. He was in shirt sleeves and dungarees, and darted through the rain to the tent where he stood shaking himself.
‘What’s been happening here?’ he said slowly.
Ewbank had come to stand in the middle of the half-uprooted floor, gazing at the lorry as if disappointed in some way by its arrival.
‘We’ve had a right pissing time,’ a man said. ‘You should’ve been here. They buggered up the tent and left four bottles of stuff lying around.…’
Tolson seemed scarcely to listen: he was looking up at the far end of the tent where Leonard stood with the last unassembled sections of the dance floor. Half way between them lay the buried figure of Shaw.
‘And where have you been all day?’ Ewbank said, adding as if Tolson had answered, ‘Well just get these chairs loaded up, then. And you, Tolson, had better help this lot with the floor. They’ve been on with it all day. Just pulling out two nails.’
Tolson had gone across to Shaw. He spoke quietly to him a moment, then bent down.
The men had started laughing again, kneeling once more by the half-uprooted floor.
‘What’s happened to him? Has he fallen?’ Tolson called out. And as Ewbank turned towards him he asked, ‘What’s this blood on him?’
‘Ah, it’s old Radcliffe,’ a man said. ‘He’s been giving the lad some boot.’
Tolson stared at a stain on his hand. He glanced up at Leonard, but so swiftly that it was like a meaningless flick of his head. He plunged his hands under Shaw’s arms and seemed to fling him to his feet. The old man groaned, then cried out. Tolson carried him out and sat him on a chair. He bent over him as if searching him, the rain falling steadily on their two figures. Then he lifted him into the back of the truck.
They both stayed there for some time, hidden from the men. When Tolson reappeared he went straight into the tent, calling briskly to the men, and began to lift up the floor in large sections, tearing its nailed members apart with a hammer. He worked silently, ruthlessly dismembering the work which a few days before he’d so patiently assembled. He ignored Leonard completely.
Throughout the remainder of the afternoon the men worked intently. The stained site of yellowed grass was gradually revealed as the floor was taken up and stacked on the lorry. The tables, the flooring, the walling and the muslin bags were loaded on top and the long battens laid in the crevice between the evenly distributed sides. Eventually only the roof remained, tightened by the rain and swaying in the wind; and soon that too succumbed to Tolson’s restless energy: it was lowered, unlaced and packed into its separate bags, bulky and soggy with rain.
Leonard now worked slowly at the fringe of this hurried activity. He helped to rope the lorry’s high load, tugging lifelessly at each slip knot. The vehicle swayed and creaked as the net of ropes compressed the irregular and stubborn shape. Leonard seemed forgetful.
It was almost dark by the time the lorry was driven away, boring two tracks through the flooded gravel. The men waited by the small truck while Ewbank walked slowly round the lawn, stooping, occasionally retrieving a stake or a piece of rope. Several lights had come on in the house throwing confused beams onto the lawn; it now looked like the drained bed of a lake.
Ewbank glanced up at the house, then went to the edge of the lawn. He uprooted several plants from the flower-bed, wrapped them in loose pieces of paper and brought them back to the truck. He laid them carefully in the cab.
In the back, Shaw was crying as the men climbed in beside him.
When Leonard started to follow, Tolson, who was standing in the drive, laid a hand on his arm. ‘Those sandwiches with the shit inside,’ he said, waiting, closely watching Leonard’s recollection of the event. ‘The sandwiches you thought Shaw had done. I did it. I shoved that crap inside. It was my shit.’ He continued to watch Leonard with an almost appealing stare
, half-enraptured, dazed. ‘It was my shit you ate! Mine!’
There was a stiffening of Leonard’s body, scarcely perceptible, a slight discarding movement, negligible as he pulled gently away from his grasp.
‘I thought I better tell you. It wasn’t Shaw, then. It was me.’
Leonard stood by the tailboard, quite still but for an odd, slight swaying of his arms. Tolson lifted up the last of the equipment into the truck, several loose pieces of walling, a few stakes and four hammers. He lifted the hammers in last, swinging them up by their heads so the men could grab the handles and pull them inside. The last hammer he swung by the handle itself, forcefully. He swung it up to his shoulder. The steel head rammed up sharply from the gravel and drove directly into Leonard’s face. It crunched against his cheekbone.
His face split open. He swung round carelessly as his body fell against the tailboard. Blood sprang out in a large rose on his cheek.
Tolson tossed the hammer into the truck. The men had scarcely moved. Then the engine started, and Ewbank was banging on the door of the cab.
‘Are you ready?’ he called back. The truck’s lights sprang out across the drive. ‘Are you ready in there?’
Someone banged in answer and the engine revved. Tolson half-dragged, half-lifted Leonard into the back. The truck reversed across the lawn and flower beds, then swung round through the ploughed earth and accelerated erratically down the drive.
Leonard no longer heard the vehicle’s roar. He clutched the metal struts on either side as if determined that neither of his hands should acknowledge the source of pain. Blood oozed like grease along his face. But he was invisible; he could see neither the men nor the vehicle as he swayed with its motion.
Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he gradually distinguished the large, bowed shape opposite. Lying on the floor between them Shaw’s flung figure rolled with the truck’s momentum. Faintly the vehicle’s sounds returned, a distant echo, and someone crying still.
He seemed to see Tolson rear up towards him, enveloping him like a shadow, something springing out of the vehicle’s motion, rising and curling over like a wave. Then he realised it was some eccentricity of his sight accompanying the sudden restoration of his hearing.
Now he could see Tolson clearly, and hear Shaw’s endless and peculiarly inexhaustible wailing.
17
He thought he saw a figure, even several figures, that he vaguely recognised. It was just a moment of recognition, interrupted by the trees and shrubbery that characterised this part of the park. It was a bright, luminous day with a thin ceiling of cloud, low down, that magnified the light. The smoothly eroded hills of the park and the undulating grass seemed to glow. From the craggy outcrop of buildings the park spread like a surface of green stone, the trees the remnant of a deliberate and cultured wildness.
As he passed each isolated trunk, its shadow – or simply some trick of its formal spacing – clicked in his mind like a ratchet. Something seemed to fall as each wooden column passed on his left-hand side. He was now walking up the central hill and, as if his own physical momentum corresponded to some clock-like insistence of mood, he began to feel alternately alert and bemused.
Between each tree he endured a curious sensation of deafness. The blood pounded in his ears. His body swayed with a peculiar heaviness. These bouts were interspersed with moments of extraordinary alertness when even the distant noises of the city, of individual vehicles and engines, were as dear as the nearer sounds of children running and shouting, and the single, calling voice of a woman, half-protesting, half-laughing. As he approached the summit of the hill and the last of the trees he began to sense a further and corresponding alternation of the light itself. It seemed to darken and grow misty as his deafness increased. Then it expanded with an almost explosive radiance as the city and the park became audible again.
He was just beginning to wonder whether this was a subjective distortion, or whether it was simply the effect of exhaustion, or even a complete illusion altogether when, half way between two trees, he heard a voice say, ‘I can imagine why you’ve come up here today … they’re working just over the other side of the hill.’
At first he thought he recognised Enid: a distant, cauterised memory, so that his mind tumbled back in a hazy confusion of marquees, a burning lamp, the bed breaking under his and Tolson’s weight. The torn fringe of rock scar. Then he recognised the sharp, questioning features of Blakeley, of Kathleen. Beyond her were the three running figures of the children. They seemed to spin round a large bush.
‘I’ve been watching you come up the hill,’ she said. She was laughing, glancing across at the children, then looking into his face with puzzled amusement. ‘What an aloof sort of look you have. What an air of detachment.’ She leaned towards him with a mixture of irritation and reproach, a scarcely suppressed frustration. ‘You look exhausted. Are you always so tired?’
‘No.’ He shook his head confusedly at her.
‘I know your sort. Trying to look interesting all the time, making people think you possess some huge secret. I’m very familiar with that sort of game.’ She watched his expression with a private amusement of her own.
‘What are you doing up here?’ he said. It was like a long conversation that had been resumed.
‘Oh, just giving them a run. We’ll be going down there soon.’ She pointed to the foot of the hill which Leonard had just climbed. A vast, asphalted recreation ground was animated by numerous scurrying figures. Yet no sound of the playing children reached the top of the hill. It seemed very far away.
She said nothing for a while, staring across to the opposite crown of the city and the encroaching flank of the estate. It was as if she had been produced by the extraordinary effort of his climb.
‘Well, have you recovered?’ she said eventually.
‘It’s a steep climb.’ It was almost a tone of complaint.
‘No. I mean your accident.’ She looked directly at him, vaguely angered. ‘I heard all about it.’
‘I’ve been ill for the past few days. I still feel a bit strange.’
‘Oh?’ She suddenly called to the children. ‘Colin! Colin! We’re going this way now.’
She didn’t wait for him, but started moving slowly along a path that circuited the top of the hill. The summit itself was a concentric series of ridges rising to a point of dense shrubbery. It was through this that the children crashed, shouting confusedly from separate places. The mound was the site of a Norman fort. Nothing remained but these symmetrical swellings of the grass.
‘I heard about your accident. How is your face?’
Leonard turned his cheek towards her. A green and purple bruise surrounded a large scab on his right cheek-bone. His eye was also discoloured.
‘It’s better now. The swelling’s gone down.’ He laughed. ‘My face was like a balloon.’
‘Did it do any actual damage?’
‘No.’ He glanced reassuringly at her, as if she were seeking consolation. ‘The bone was bruised, but apparently nothing’s broken. I had some terrible headaches. But they’ve gone now as well.’
She walked on in silence. They were circuiting the summit of the hill. Below them appeared the fringe of an arena.
‘How did it happen?’
‘It was an accident.’
‘Ah, yes.… And when are you going back to Ewbank’s then?’
‘I don’t know. I think I’ve finished there for good. I don’t think I’ll go back.’ He spoke out of some deep preoccupation, staring at the ground just in front of his moving feet.
She said, ‘You haven’t been there long,’ then laughed.
‘No.’
‘And Tolson? What will he do?’ He didn’t answer, and she added, ‘He was a drifter until he got that job. Then he settled down. He seems to like it for some reason. Putting up then taking down those elephantine things.’ She looked at him acutely. He seemed to be walking along oblivious of her. ‘Is that why you came up here today?’ She said
it with a skilful note of irritation.
Leonard blushed slightly and shrugged his shoulders.
‘I’ve been expecting to see you up here,’ she said, ‘I’ve been bringing the kids here for the past three days. Watching them.’
She indicated the arena which was now coming into full view below. On a broad circle of smooth grass was set out a familiar flotilla of marquees: they ran in an arc round one side of the arena and onto the slope itself above the terrace. Here, on the side of the hill, people were standing watching the men working. The steady and rhythmic crackling of hammers on steel stakes reached the top of the hill; a group of five men stood in a circle, their hammers rising in a staggered and regular wave.
‘He’ll be down there,’ Kathleen said, watching Leonard now as a certain anxiety came into his face. Then she added, ‘Probably with the same hammer.’
Leonard suddenly smiled, ‘It’s strange. You always make me feel I owe you something. Do you always put people under an obligation to you when you first meet them?’ He took her look of surprise with a shy smile; and with a slow forgetful gesture of his hand added, ‘I realise it’s your defensiveness … your way of resisting people. But do you do it irrespective of, well, your real feeling for someone?’ He laughed. ‘You seem too embittered to be true. Do you think I’m being unfair?’
‘No.’
‘This sort of aggressiveness you have – behind it, there’s a morbid, inward-looking thing.’
‘And you don’t have it?’
He laughed again, with a peculiar simplicity. ‘Ah, yes. But not so completely. You see. I’m not aggressive.’
He had turned away now to look down at the tents with an expression almost of arrogance, an assured look of satisfaction. She saw that he’d suddenly identified Tolson’s figure below. He looked almost prim.
She glanced round and called to the children; the only evidence of their presence was the occasional movement of the leaves. She called again, then stared down at the arena. Several figures were moving quickly round a white shroud of canvas. Slowly it was lifted into the air, like an animal rising, first on its knees, then its rear legs, then swaying and eventually standing. Two tents were being raised simultaneously; the second opened with a uniform and corresponding growth.