Radcliffe

by David Storey

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s something I want too,’ John said. ‘An event. To see people in the Place after all these years. If you feel it’s something surreptitiously designed – to what end, I don’t know – then no doubt you’ll find greater satisfaction in staying away.’

  John stared at Leonard a moment as though expecting some sort of answer, then went to the door. He paused there, waiting, then hurried out into the passage. They could hear his feet moving down to the stairs.

  ‘What is it that he wants after all this time?’ Leonard said. ‘A crusade?’

  ‘Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is,’ Austen answered, smiling at his nephew.

  ‘And what do you hope to gain by it?’

  ‘Oh, now, Leonard.’ Austen laughed. He closed the shutters on the second window, looking down from the darkened end of the room to where Leonard was standing beneath the fireplace examining the carving. ‘Do you know what that figure is?’ he asked. It projected heavily into the room, into the oblique angle of the light. ‘The one downstairs, if you remember, is Jehu. This, this one, is supposed to be Samson.’

  He slammed the final shutter into place. The room was suddenly in complete darkness. Austen stood still, as though in some way confused by his own action and trying to locate Leonard across the room.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ he said after a moment, ‘as your eyes grow accustomed to the dark you begin to feel that this is the natural light and that those tiny bright cracks round the shutters are unnatural? You feel this is the natural light, yet it’s almost completely dark in here.’

  Leonard was indiscernible against the staggered shadows and crevices of the huge fireplace. Austen waited a moment, then said, ‘You see, Leonard, there are two kinds of puritan temperament. The liberal and the coercive. After spending nearly the whole of his life as the one, your father’s decided that all along he really intended to be the other. The evangelical, I mean.’ Austen paused. ‘Can you see me from where you’re standing?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  He listened to the tone of Leonard’s voice. ‘But you are looking in my direction?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Suddenly Leonard’s voice asked with a kind of ludicrous anxiety, ‘Austen, have you any idea of the time?’

  Austen paused again. Then he said, ‘It must be somewhere between two and three.’

  They stood in silence for a while. Then Austen went on slowly, ‘Your father’s predicament is not so unusual, you know. He’s got to solve a problem which he knows to be insoluble. Not only won’t the first line of the equation work, but the factors themselves are almost unrecognizable. He begins to doubt, not whether the problem exists – his despair and misery more than confirm that – but whether his will to discover a solution is right. Who willed us? Who instructed us? His intelligence provides him with no escape from this extraordinary predicament. In fact, only one thing ever will. His intuition. And it is specifically this that his puritan temperament denies. This is his real conflict. The thing he’s never realised until now, is that his puritanism is that of a practical ascetic, one whose battles take place in public, not here in this cloister. That’s why he’s throwing open the door. Now he’s waiting, almost insisting even, that something should happen, that something should arrive.’

  Austen stood listening for a while. He had thought in fact that he heard Leonard moving, but all was now completely silent and still. He began to move forward, identifying in several places the possible silhouette of his nephew.

  ‘Do you understand that?’ he said into the silence. ‘It means that you are his image, and he’s searching round now for a suitable setting in which to present it. Otherwise … otherwise he’s reduced to a very simple thing. To seeing his misery and his despair as in some way his only achievement.’

  Austen had now almost reached the fireplace. It rose massively before him in the faint light. Then he realised quite suddenly that Leonard was no longer there. That in fact, as his search quickly revealed, he was not even in the room.

  As he turned to the door he gave a loud sob, but whether of frustration, or anger, or grief, it was impossible, even for him, to tell.

  19

  That same morning Leonard had come down rather late to find his mother waiting for him in the kitchen. Looking up from the table where she was working she had smiled at him and handed him a thick blue envelope.

  Though unstamped, his name and address had been written across it, the letters large and shaped with unusual care. It was this, he assumed, that had amused his mother, and after examining it a moment, turning it over several times as though uncertain whether to accept it, he had glanced at her severely and taken it with him back to his room.

  The letter had been unsigned, and composed in the same laborious handwriting. It alluded in detail to his conversation in the park with Kathleen, even to the encounter with Tolson, yet was written with a rhetorical affectation he associated more with Blakeley than with anything that he knew of his daughter. Its general tone of apology was abruptly terminated by a demand that he should call at the house at a specific time in the afternoon. No mention was made of the coat.

  When, some time later, he returned to the kitchen it was to discover Austen already there; and although his mother made no direct reference to ‘the little messenger’, as she’d called the boy who had delivered the letter, it was clear that the subject had been more than thoroughly discussed. It was a relief when Austen had begun to announce his arrangements for the party and it was only after lunch, when he and Austen and his father had gone up to the York Room to assess its possibilities, that he remembered the letter again. Without thinking, he hurried out of the room and was already well on his way to Blakeley’s house before he even realised the circumstances in which he had left his uncle.

  He reached the end of the road where Blakeley lived at what he judged to be several minutes before three o’clock, the hour stated in the letter, and taking another turning that led more circuitously to his destination, he walked up and round a crescent and down a second avenue to arrive at the opposite end of the same road. He walked slowly along to the house and arrived there, he surmised, several minutes late.

  For a while there was no answer to his knocking. He waited indecisively on the top step, glancing up to reassure himself of the number. The road, in mid-afternoon, was completely silent and deserted. Then from the rear of the house he thought he detected whispered voices and a hurried, hastily-suppressed shuffling of feet. A moment later the door was pulled open and Kathleen stood looking down at him, her face slightly flushed and creased in that now familiar sardonic smile.

  ‘So you decided to come twenty minutes early,’ she said. ‘And confound us all.’

  ‘Early?’

  ‘It’s only twenty minutes to three. But then, perhaps you didn’t read the letter very closely.’

  ‘I was just guessing the time,’ he said as though he were about to go. ‘I’d no real idea.’

  Suddenly she laughed. ‘Come in. Come in. You don’t think I’ll make you walk up and down outside until the proper moment arrives do you?… Come in. There’s no need to look so guilty. I’ve got your coat waiting already.’

  She had to take his arm before he actually entered the hallway, and then push him forward slightly in order to close the door. As she did so he had the impression of voices and feet on the path outside hurrying round from the rear of the house.

  ‘I suppose, really, I’m surprised you have come,’ she said once they were in the living-room and the door finally shut. His coat lay folded neatly over the arm of a chair. He went to stand by it, uncertainly. ‘And now you have come I suppose you’ll take it, say thank you, and leave straight away.’

  ‘There was no mention of the coat in the letter,’ he said blankly, staring down at it as if so patent a device for their meeting could now only embarrass him.

  ‘The letter? No.’ She came purposely to stand quite close to him. ‘What did you think to th
e letter? Didn’t you think it was cleverly composed?’

  He suddenly turned away from the coat, and rather confidently went to the wall and began to examine the numerous photographs pinned there. They were all of Blakeley caught in some amusing climax to one of his acts; in each the costume and expression were different. In only one had he been pictured with someone else.

  ‘Why did you come?’ she added. And when he gave her no answer she hastily went on, ‘I suppose you heard all the discreet sounds of departure when you came in. Enter Radcliffe, the hero of forlorn aspect; exit family of the opposite disposition. I must say you were very clever. You caught us very nicely. Denis mustering them all through the back door with stifled expletives while you stood gazing innocently around on the front step.’

  He’d looked up at her. It was the first time he recollected hearing her refer to her father by his first name. The tone of familiarity surprised him.

  She glanced away. Then suddenly sat down.

  He looked back at the photographs. The central one was of Kathleen and Blakeley, staring solemnly before them. Their hands rested on the shoulders of the three young children. They too shared the same expression of solemnity. The camera, presumably, had been held by Blakeley’s wife.

  ‘You’re always revealing things,’ he said suddenly. ‘Particularly those things which most people would take every trouble to conceal. In fact, things which your father obviously does go to a great deal of trouble to conceal. And all the time you’re pulling the curtain aside to reveal him in his little act.’ He swung round hastily, and abruptly went to sit in a chair. It was a particularly clumsy action. ‘Yet I feel the whole time that these endless revelations are only to conceal something much huger.’

  ‘You’re very clever. And what huge thing can it be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well. You better take your coat, then, I suppose. That’s what you came for, isn’t it?’ When he didn’t answer, but merely looked uncomfortably around him, she began to fumble with her skirt, an absent-minded and vaguely absurd gesture, for she added, ‘What did you think to the letter?’ and before he could answer went on, ‘I suppose you realised by its tone and its quaint omission of a signature that it wasn’t in fact composed by me at all but by my well-intentioned father.’

  ‘I did think it was.’

  ‘Oh, you did think it was,’ she said. ‘Then the fact that you have come after all must surely mean something. Well?… Was it to spite Tolson? To show him?’

  He looked at her with a blank, undisturbed stare.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  Then Kathleen added viciously, ‘You’ll laugh at this. No. Perhaps you won’t. Most likely it’ll frighten you. But can’t you guess why he wrote it?’ She stared at him with a triumphant expression, her hands pressed forward on her knees. ‘Why, it’s the traditional tactics of the father in marrying off his daughter. Didn’t you guess? But you must have done, of course. All his furtive attempts to have the house empty when you arrived you must have found particularly encouraging. Why, he’s created what he believes are the “ideal circumstances” for a proposal of marriage! He wants you to marry me!’

  If this revelation itself confused him, what was more intimidating was the tone in which it was expressed, one both of despair and outrage. It was as if she taunted him with something of his own pessimism. He stood up and in a very unnatural voice shouted absurdly, ‘What! Are you determined never to be saved!’

  ‘From what?’ she said, smiling slightly.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.… Your only real contact with people comes from intimidating them.’

  ‘Does it embarrass you? I mean the real reason for you being asked here. My father’s reason.’

  ‘I don’t understand you. Not at all.’

  ‘No. But then I doubt if you understand women at all, do you? Or men, for that matter. Do you honestly see anything of what goes on around you?’ She watched him with the same frozen smile, as though the expression were bitterly imposed on her face.

  They were silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘What would you do if I suddenly started showing my legs to you? Or taking off my blouse?’ She watched him acutely, for she was already drawing her skirt over her knees. ‘No, you needn’t be frightened,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to give you a peep show. I’ve no doubt at all what you’d do. Run for the door and I’d never see you again.’

  ‘Why do you abase yourself in this way?’ he said, rigid in his chair. They were still sitting facing one another, Leonard’s terrified eyes glancing from her to the photographs on the wall. ‘It’s as if you and your father were rotten with the same disease.’

  She sat watching him without expression; with a seriousness that for the first time left a peculiar calmness on her face. She slowly pulled her skirt down. Then she began to smile, half-ugly, derisive.

  Leonard sat still, his hands clenched over the arms of the chair. The next moment, however, he stood up and with extraordinary slowness, as though his actions imitated those of a much larger man, he crossed the room and bent over her. He stooped down and kissed her lightly on the mouth. He was awkwardly supported by one hand. Her face was quite aged, with numerous small lines springing outwards from the corners of her eyes. He kissed her again. Then he stood up. He was extremely pale, ashen.

  ‘You better take your raincoat,’ Kathleen said, tonelessly and unmoving. Leonard stood gazing down at her.

  ‘You accuse me of aloofness,’ he said. ‘But look at this! Look at you now!’ He seemed in absolute despair at her passivity.

  ‘Now you know why my father thought we’d be suitable for one another. Two equally resistant people. You internally, me … well, something a bit different.’ And when he didn’t answer, but stood there watching her with aimless violence, she added, ‘Doesn’t it offend you? Knowing why you were sent for?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What? Are you so desperate?’ She looked up at him swiftly, but no longer with contempt or amusement. More, it was a look of challenge.

  ‘If we’ve nothing but deprivation in common, why did you see me? You could have left with the rest of them. In five minutes I’d have gone away. Why are you like this? The whole time. Why have me here if it’s only to take something out of me? You can do that anywhere, anytime. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you.’ He had returned to the same wildness of manner and voice, his hands shaking helplessly at his sides. ‘When I first met you I thought all this was deliberate. That it was a deliberate insult. But now. It just seems pathetic. That’s all it is.’

  Kathleen stood up. ‘You better go,’ she said quietly. ‘It was a mistake you coming. I can’t apologise. I know I should. But I can’t. You’ve been taken advantage of, that’s all.’

  ‘But why did you agree? The letter – it mentioned everything we’d talked about yesterday. You must have told him everything. Why?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. But then you shouldn’t have tried to spite Tolson. And I shouldn’t have told him. He was just trying to do his best for me. Do you understand?’

  Leonard didn’t answer. He gazed at her as though this were yet another attempt to ridicule him.

  ‘It’s as simple as that. He just happens to think that you’d make me the ideal husband.’ Suddenly she began to laugh, almost the same maundering cry Leonard had witnessed before, an hysterical confusion of relief and distress. ‘That’s how simple, how elemental he is.’

  Leonard stared once more at the numerous images of Blakeley on the wall. Then he said despairingly, ‘You might as well have been Tolson for all the mindlessness you have at your disposal.’

  ‘No. No! It’s not that! Don’t you see? It’s he who is in love with Tolson and wants you out of the way!’

  He had begun to move towards the door.

  Immediately she stepped forward and put her arms across his shoulders, tentatively at first but as he paused gripping him with a kind of ferocity. It was as if she had physically encountered him in the darkness of
a room, unexpected, half-frightened. She buried her face against his with such a wildness that he cried out, more in shock than alarm, for the next moment she wrenched him against her in a sudden gesture of despair.

  Her mouth hurried over his face until, with an extension of the same compulsive movement, she pulled down at his shoulders; they subsided first against a chair, then more slowly to the floor. Her hands struggled with his clothes. Then, as her fingers closed over his nakedness, she lay back thrusting her legs apart. It was almost a swimming-like motion of her body as she worked him against her, drawing him down more forcefully, insensibly against her hips. Finally she pulled him in against her with both her hands and very slowly began to arch her back up from the floor.

  Looking up through half-blinded eyes, Leonard saw directly above him a window in the centre of which, looking in, was the face of Tolson. It hung there like a painted cloth, an hallucinatory pattern vaguely composed in the features of a grinning man.

  Leonard buried his head in the shoulder beneath him, his body curving as though in this act alone he could gain concealment. The movement of his hips became more sporadic, erratic shudders that passed into the tormented figure below.

  When she eventually turned her head aside, lying back, Kathleen said, ‘You look lost. Like somebody lost on a journey.’

  She was breathless, distraught, her head twisted to one side in some strange detachment. Then suddenly she thrust her hand down between them. ‘Why! Didn’t you feel anything?’ she said. ‘Why. You didn’t do anything!’

  ‘Tolson. Tolson was here.’ He buried his head again in her shoulder.

  ‘You didn’t do anything!’

  ‘Tolson’s here!’

  Her hand still feverishly gripped him. She seemed scarcely to hear, was scarcely even concerned.

  ‘He was there.’

  Leonard had begun to draw himself up on his hands, raising himself, but she still gripped him.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘Look. You never did anything!’

  He flung himself away, fumbling at his clothes as she released him, and struggled to his feet.