Radcliffe

by David Storey

  ‘I was sure I wasn’t going to see you again,’ Leonard suddenly stated.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your father – I think he frightens me. It’s not his manner. It’s a kind of tenacity, the hold he takes on things.’

  Leonard started walking. At last the sound of the men’s voices reached the top of the hill.

  ‘And why have you? Seen me, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, this is an accident,’ he said quickly.

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s no accidents in your life.’

  ‘Aren’t there?’ He ignored her tone. ‘I’ve been in bed nearly a week. I see things differently now.’ He stated it almost inconsequentially, yet began to walk more quickly. They were gradually returning to the point where they’d first met.

  ‘Apparently you told my father that you knew Tolson when you were boys.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s strange he’s never mentioned it. Tolson. He’s usually so full of it when he’s talking about you.’ Then she added immediately, ‘I’m not going on walking at this pace even if you are. So we’d better say goodbye.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.…’ He seemed genuinely apologetic, even alarmed. ‘I get carried away.’ He looked about him suddenly as if surprised to discover where he was.

  ‘It must have been a shock. To meet him again so suddenly,’ she said, as though taking advantage of his vague mood. He was frowning and looking up at the trees in confusion.

  ‘Yes.… But it was all arranged.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He brushed his hand against his face.

  ‘How long was it since you’d last seen him, though?’

  ‘I don’t know. I knew him when I was ten or twelve.’

  ‘You must have had a lot to talk about.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Weren’t you interested in what he’d been doing all that time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You met his wife, though, I gather. What did you think to her?’

  ‘She’s the kind of woman I imagined.’

  ‘Don’t you think she’s rather old for him? I mean, she’s nearly forty. Ten years older. It’s rather strange. Such an older woman. And you never talked about the past? Even when you went camping?’

  Leonard had blushed again and turned away from her questioning. His moods and feelings changed quickly. They were almost as subtly irregular as the light itself.

  ‘You met each other again after all this time, worked together without hardly speaking, then suddenly went camping together. And you didn’t talk about the past?’ Leonard didn’t answer. ‘Vic’s wife was married before, you know. Her husband left her. Then she met Vic. Both the children are Vic’s. It’s very strange. I wonder he never mentioned it.’

  Leonard had started to move away. At the same moment the three children came crashing through the bushes by his side and cascaded round him. He staggered and almost fell. Strangely, the accident seemed to cheer him. He looked back at Kathleen and smiled.

  ‘Come on, we’re going down to the Rec now,’ she called to them, and immediately they began running down the hill, screaming, their feet pounding heavily on the steep slope. They ran in long jarring strides. ‘Are you coming with us? Or are you going over to watch them?’ she said.

  Leonard thrust his hands into his pockets and after standing indecisively a second started down the slope, walking at an angle in order to negotiate the steepness. One of the children had fallen. He rolled some distance before springing up and running after the others.

  ‘What do you think of them?’ Kathleen said, following just behind him. ‘The children, I mean. My father probably told you otherwise, but all three are mine.’

  Leonard had already stopped by the nearest tree, his hand raised to the bark. Now he looked up at her with a startled, frozen look. The children still plunged down the slope in hugely unnatural strides.

  ‘I suppose he told you my mother … that I was their sister, in fact.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can’t blame him. Though he knew that you’d find out soon enough. I shall have to go down. They can’t go far without one of them falling or crying.’

  She started down the hill and a moment later he followed. Half way down she stopped and waited for him and they continued to the foot of the hill together.

  In the playground several women were supervising the children. They looked up at Leonard with curiosity but he scarcely appeared to notice them. He sat on a bench and, after playing with the children for a while, Kathleen came to join him.

  ‘Don’t be frightened of my father,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I mean, don’t look down on him. He’s a strange sort of man. But he’s not trying to mislead you.’ He smiled and shook his head. The skin over his cheek bones had reddened slightly which, with the wound, gave him an expression of a private, bewildered self-absorption. ‘He just fights out these huge fictional battles with himself,’ Kathleen said, as though thoroughly roused by Leonard’s solemnity. ‘I know it’s a bit bewildering if you’re just looking on. But if you saw more of him I think you’d understand.’

  She wasn’t sure, then, that he had heard her. He was gazing down at the asphalt close to his feet.

  Then he said, ‘All that he says about Tolson, then – all that about being persecuted – is that fiction as well?’

  Kathleen didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, ‘Don’t you realise what Tolson is?’ She watched him minutely: he was still gazing at the asphalt as though making important calculations about its composition. ‘He collects “afflicted” people. What he thinks are afflicted people. Like my father. Like you.’ When she saw that, curiously, his expression hadn’t changed, she added, ‘How long have you known him? Scarcely three months. Don’t tell me he hasn’t played any of his famous tricks on you.’

  ‘But then, I think you’re the same,’ Leonard said quietly, out of the same mood of absorption. ‘Collecting “afflicted” people, I mean.’ His face had a shy, pursed look of cunning. ‘Are they really your children?’ he said.

  For a moment he wasn’t sure what emotion was about to explode on her face. Then she burst out laughing. ‘Yes, but I don’t expect you to believe it!’ It was an exaggerated, slightly indulgent humour.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why?’ She looked at him with the same, exaggerated surprise.

  ‘I do believe they’re yours.’

  ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to.’

  ‘Don’t I? I know now why you’re so aggressive.’

  She looked away at the angular skeletons that inhabited the playground. The metal armatures were swollen into life by the crowded bodies of children.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ she said tonelessly. ‘But they are mine, and I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

  She leaned forward suddenly. Then he saw that she was crying to herself, quietly and moodily, and almost without tears. It was like the sudden maundering crying of her father.

  ‘This’s what comes of talking to an idiot,’ she said bitterly. ‘A fool, a defective, a madman.’

  Leonard, it seemed, had not penetrated her feelings at all, but simply her method of feeling. It was alarming. As if he, at the centre, felt nothing.

  ‘I’ve always had a very excitable sort of nature,’ he said, as though this were a completely different conversation. ‘Very inconsistent, that is. Sometimes scarcely controllable and at other times so inert as to be almost depressing.’ He laughed at his own peculiarity; it was as if he were now trying to amuse and cheer her. ‘And yet not at all demonstrative. Sort of inside. Well, you’ll know what I mean. None of it ever shows.’ He laughed again with a fresh sort of bewilderment. ‘It makes it all sound a bit strange. But there’s never been any real need for me to work.’

  She looked at him with a sudden slyness. Then she stood up and went across the playground. It was now almost deserted. The three children were playing
on a roundabout, two hanging precariously to the metal struts and the third sitting clutching the wooden seat, crying. She brought this youngest child back with her, standing it between her knees and wiping its face.

  After a while she said, ‘Do you know the real way Tolson afflicts people?’ She held the child now with a remote kind of strength, gripping it impersonally between her thighs. She stared across the yard at the two laughing children. ‘He makes them humourless.’

  When Leonard didn’t answer she looked at him quickly and said, ‘That’s another way, of course, of saying that he sucks people dry. He exhausts them. Do you know the kind of person who takes that sort of strength away from people? Isn’t that what he does to you?’

  Leonard showed no sign that he’d even heard. He gazed abstractly at the barricade of trees which separated the park from the street beyond. His expression had the same seriousness as before, an aged look of intentness. Then he said, ‘He doesn’t have the same effect on everybody. With the men, at Ewbank’s, he’s very popular.’

  ‘But aren’t they a bit frightened of him?’ She said it as if she were talking to the child, and looked anxiously into his face.

  ‘Yes. But then he doesn’t oppress them. Not directly, that is.’

  ‘No. Not directly. He doesn’t need to.… Those he oppresses directly are only afflicted people. Like my father said, those people afflicted by a “spiritual temperament”.’

  Leonard sat watching the boy between her knees. The child stood perfectly still, yet relaxed, looking across at the other two children still playing on the roundabout. Its arms hung over Kathleen’s thighs. In appearance, and in that particular resigned pose, he looked astoundingly like Blakeley himself.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t really understand the intensity with which Tolson chooses his victims,’ she went on. ‘When he senses, when he finds – whatever process he goes through in discovering such a person – he pursues them until they are finished. Until they’re completely destroyed. He has this passion to do things absolutely.… And the amazing thing is, he does it with a kind of dignity. The most peculiar dignity you can imagine.… So that dignity itself becomes an obnoxious thing. And the only thing you have left is a belief in your own nothingness. That you are nothing. That you’re nothing at all. And you’re satisfied with that.’

  ‘But why did he do this to you?’ Leonard said quietly.

  ‘To me?’ She turned to him in genuine surprise. Then she went on more hurriedly, ‘And the really amazing thing is that the victim is always the last person to realise. Don’t you think that that’s incredible? However many people tell her, however much she sees and experiences, the really terrible thing is the victim never knows she’s a victim until it’s too late. The reason being, of course, that they think all Tolson’s actions are governed by some sort of affection he has for them, which … and I hope you can understand this … which he really has!’ She burst out laughing, profoundly amused by this ironical analysis. ‘He really has an affection for them. It’s as if he massacres them just to spite himself. There, what a monster you’ve tangled yourself up with. A man who destroys things out of his affection for them.’

  She glanced at Leonard now with a hardened reproach, as if he were directly responsible for what she had been saying. But he was gazing fixedly towards the trees. At the opposite side, on the path that skirted the playground, stood Tolson himself. He had evidently been coming away from work with several of the men, and now he stood peering across at them with what appeared, at this distance, to be a sombre smile of surprise. The men, after seeing Leonard and making some joke about his companion, were walking on towards the gates, glancing back now and again as if to re-animate their laughter.

  Tolson stubbed his boots against the low metal fence that circuited that half of the playground. For a moment he seemed completely preoccupied, as if methodically cleaning off the mud. When he looked up again it was with a grimace so intense that neither of them spoke. Leonard noticed that Kathleen had blushed deeply: she was unable to turn her eyes away from the heavy figure, who now appeared to be about to move towards them. Yet Tolson did not move. Only when the two children playing on the roundabout let out a cry and ran towards him, familiarly, did he suddenly turn round and walk hurriedly away. He seemed to exaggerate his actions, so that to Leonard he appeared to be neither running nor walking, but simply moving with an authoritative and compulsive gesture towards the gates.

  The two children were now running towards them. ‘It was Uncle Vic! Uncle Vic!’

  ‘You see,’ Kathleen said, still flushed, ‘It’s not something that children recognise. To him innocence is just another utensil.’

  Yet Leonard seemed unsurprised, as if reassured by Tolson’s sudden appearance, something he’d anticipated and hoped for. He even seemed pleased and excited. After a while they themselves started off towards the gates.

  ‘What happened to their father, then?’ Leonard said, nodding at the children.

  ‘He left me. Went away,’ she answered immediately.

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘I’ve just said it. He went away.’ She was suddenly brusque and angry.

  ‘Because of Vic?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, if you like.’

  ‘Do you love him, then?’ he said casually, and as if it were of no importance, nor even of any interest to him. And when she didn’t answer he walked on, following the children, as though he hadn’t asked the question or as if, if he had, he had forgotten about it completely.

  In fact, for no reason at all, he had started thinking in his usual disturbed vein. Quite suddenly he felt strangely exultant. He hardly even heard Kathleen when she said, ‘I forgot. You left your raincoat at our house. Perhaps some evening or afternoon you’d like to collect it.’

  18

  ‘Thomas,’ Austen said, ‘is like the little man you used to see following the horses up and down the streets with a bucket and a shovel.’

  John laughed, yet as though in some way the remark had hurt him.

  ‘Well, almost. Except that he only collects emotional droppings,’ Austen added, seeing his brother’s pained expression with surprise.

  John immediately stepped in front of him and opened the double doors of the York Room. A thin cone of yellow light came through a gap in one of the shutters and faintly illuminated the large interior. They waited a moment while Leonard came along the passage, then entered together.

  ‘Matthew, on the other hand,’ Austen went on, speaking into the darkness, ‘is altogether different. It isn’t so much that you can scarcely distinguish between what part of him is him, and what part is the computer, but that he is quite content that you shouldn’t separate the two.’

  The cone of light was broken in two. It stretched across the bare floorboards, then snapped against the wall, rising vertically as a triangle, leaning slightly to one side. Its apex rested just beneath the decorative frieze which, interrupted only by the five tall windows, circled the entire room.

  ‘And Alex?’ John said.

  ‘Alex moves through things so rapidly … well, things and people, that if he ever stopped you’d feel that his arms, his legs and finally his head would slowly drop off and roll away. And even then, roll away with a gradually increasing acceleration.’ He paused to look at Leonard. ‘I suppose Alex is the last flame of the Radcliffe fire.’

  Leonard had in fact come to stand in the middle of the room and was staring up at the ceiling. Its interlocking figures surged in a formless complexity, colourless and crude; they hung like giants in an obtuse perspective. He gazed up, as though awaiting the climax of a huge event. Then suddenly he stood revealed in a pool of light. The two men were pulling back the shutters.

  ‘And Leonard?’ Austen said. ‘What about you? I suppose you are the thing that appears after the fire has gone out.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ John asked.

  ‘The vision, the blurring, whatever it is that overcomes the senses immediately a light has disappeared.’ Aust
en crashed back the shutters into their recesses, then coughed and dusted down his suit. He looked up at Leonard. ‘No? You don’t think it’s true?’

  Leonard turned to the windows. The estate stretched below in a large and ordered pattern, slow arcs intersecting the receding ground. The houses spiked the smooth contour of the hill. Beyond the final ridge of houses was the undulating level of the valley, its long rows of buildings splayed like ribs across the slopes. And facing them on the opposing ridge was the black crown of the city’s central hill, its old buildings groping up from the hard outline of rock, fingers clutched above the skyline, trailing at their summits a thin and ebbing wreath of mist. Low clouds hung over the land.

  ‘I think this room will suit us splendidly,’ Austen said.

  ‘It needs cleaning.’

  ‘Of course. I don’t mind that. But the whole thing. It’ll be quite impressive.’

  Leonard was very pale, the large, matted bruise at the side of his head giving his face the broken appearance of a mask, disused, almost forgotten, only the eyes piercing through. He moved past the windows, the third and the fourth, and paused at the one nearest the fireplace. It was streaked on the outside with dried courses of rain. The hard, red knots of the houses were clenched now like fists beneath the bony shield of the sky. The landscape was heavy, reddened.

  ‘Don’t let Austen rush you into something you don’t want, father,’ he said quite suddenly.

  ‘No. Of course not. Why should he?’

  ‘I don’t know. Except that I feel he’s not the person to plan such a family party without having something in mind.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Some purpose.’

  John glanced at Austen apologetically.

  ‘And what purpose would that be?’ Austen said.