Radcliffe

by David Storey

  ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘Not long. Only a few weeks.’

  Austen sat waiting, his back still to Leonard. Eventually he said, ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘Tolson.’

  ‘Tolson?’

  ‘He introduced us.’ And when Austen made no response to this but continued to stare down at his feet in, for him, an unusual attitude of dejection, Leonard added, ‘He says that he used to know you. About two years ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ Austen said without looking up.

  ‘He does an incredible imitation of you,’ Leonard went on, now quite red, his excitement twitching his face into a vague smile.

  ‘An imitation?’

  John had turned to watch Leonard, but as if in a reverie. ‘The amazing thing,’ Leonard went on, ‘is that he doesn’t realise it’s an imitation. He carried on as if it were all his own thoughts and feelings. Don’t you think that that’s rather frightening? Unusual, I mean?’ And when it seemed that Austen was about to reply to this, turning round in his seat to look up at his nephew with a hard and agonised expression, Leonard suddenly added to his father, ‘Is that how the doctor described it? Delayed hysteria? Did he say what had caused it?’

  ‘Well, we explained about yesterday. The circumstances of the old man’s death,’ John said. ‘He said it was undoubtedly that.’

  ‘And Liz? How is she?’

  ‘She’s very quiet now. He’s given her a sedative.’

  Leonard suddenly sat down. But only for a moment. It was as if desperately to gather together wildly dispersed energies and feelings.

  He stood up almost immediately, just as Austen said, ‘Isabel rang me this morning. She had some party this afternoon which she couldn’t put off, otherwise she would have come with me. But she was wondering, Leonard, if you could go along and see her. It would only be for a short while.’ He stood up now as if to dismiss him. ‘It will mean leaving almost straight away if you’re to catch her.’

  ‘But why should she want me?’

  ‘It’s something she wants to ask you, I believe. Alex will be there too.’

  Leonard went to the window. The mist drifted slowly by. Beads of dull, leaden moisture stretched across the black fringes of the stone.

  ‘I shall have to take my raincoat,’ he said, even more thoughtfully, rubbing his hand nervously against his face. ‘And there’s Blakeley still waiting out there. I’d better leave by the front.’

  He turned and went quickly to the stairs. Then he paused as though reconsidering his decision. He glanced at his father’s face a moment, swung round, and continued up the stairs as if this unexpected invitation to his aunt’s had coincided with a more urgent and compelling errand.

  26

  A tall, ornately built church stood in a Georgian square, its stone a sooted scroll of rock sprung from the deep bed of the houses. The mist trailed in uneasy pennants from its tower, its swirled descent reflected in the swerving stone itself. Tombs hung like massive fruits amongst the stunted trees. The place was sucked down by stone, the black trunks of the trees the veins of its heavy body.

  Leonard walked purposely as if, by exaggerating each mechanical movement, he could compensate for a lack of substance. It was at his raincoat – a fawn light-coloured garment folded neatly over his left arm – that his aunt stared when she opened the door. Leonard stood facing her at the top of a broad flight of steps. He was frowning slightly, and sombre-faced.

  ‘But why haven’t you put your raincoat on?’ she said. A film of moisture had settled over his clothes and the exposed parts of his body. His eyelashes glistened with the damp.

  ‘You’ll be soaking.’ She closed the door and picked up a clothes-brush from a hall stand. ‘I hope you’re in a good mood if you’re going upstairs.’ She indicated the open door on the first floor, facing the head of the stairs, from which emerged the low murmur of voices. ‘There are several people who’d like to meet you. But there’s no need for you to go up.’

  She swept the moisture from his shoulders and back. A thin shower fell on the thick, dark blue carpet covering the hall floor. The furniture here was of pale, unvarnished wood. The strokes of the brush on Leonard’s shoulders suggested a muted elation on the part of his aunt: they were almost absent-mindedly ferocious.

  ‘Austen said that you wished to see me.’ He stood facing the stand. In the centre was a mirror in which he was clearly reflected.

  ‘I can’t imagine why you didn’t wear your raincoat. It’s ridiculous. Yes. There is something. We can go in here to discuss it.’ She indicated a comfortably furnished sitting-room, lined with books, which opened off to the right of the hall. Several reading lamps relieved the gloom of the afternoon.

  Leonard hadn’t moved. He still held his raincoat over his arm, and seemed preoccupied with the sounds that came from the top of the stairs. His head was lifted in acute attention.

  ‘Can’t we talk about it here? I hate to go into different rooms to do different things.’

  His aunt brushed her small hands over her dark velvet dress. A few drops of moisture gleamed on its heavy surface. ‘Do you know why Austen has gone to see your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s to try and persuade him into leaving the Place. It’s so obviously the best thing for him to do. But now he refuses completely. Before, he was seriously considering it. But yesterday’s events seem to have changed his mind. For some reason he now says he’ll only go if he’s forced out.’

  ‘And what do you want me to do?’

  ‘If you asked him, explained to him, then I’m sure he’d agree.’

  ‘I can’t see any reason why he should leave, though,’ Leonard said, glancing again in the direction of his aunt’s sitting room above. ‘In any case, where would he go now?’

  ‘We would take care of that. If necessary he could go south. With Alex.’

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘He’s entirely behind the idea.’

  ‘Is he here, then?’

  ‘He went out. Apparently he couldn’t tolerate my guests.’

  ‘Is that the Provost’s voice I can hear?’

  ‘If it’s so important you can go up there in due course. All I’m asking you to do, Leonard, is to think carefully about this. Your father’s not growing any younger, or happier, by staying on at the Place. The sooner he leaves the better. I can’t understand why you don’t want to help.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ Leonard said, looking at his aunt with some surprise, and as if intrigued that she shouldn’t realise it. ‘If you want to drive him out, then well and good. There’s probably nothing anyone can do to stop you. But I’m not going to ask him to leave. It’s like asking a man to dismantle the whole of his life. And in any case, it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late? But what do you mean?’

  ‘Shall we go up?’ He moved to the foot of the stairs, stepping aside to allow his aunt to precede him.

  ‘But aren’t you concerned with what’s happening to your father?’

  ‘Concerned?’ The idea seemed to bewilder Leonard.

  ‘Or is that something you can’t feel?’

  ‘You are an extraordinary woman, Isabel! Why should I be concerned about all this?’ He looked at his aunt in amazement, then suddenly burst out laughing.

  She regarded him in silence, no less astonished herself. ‘Don’t you feel anything for him?’ she said slowly.

  ‘Feel? Yes, I feel things about him. For example, at the moment I feel I could kill him.’ He was still laughing, and watching her through tear-filled eyes. ‘He’s a weak and feeble man. Do you want to take away his last crutch and support?’

  ‘He’s not a feeble man. He’s not a weak man, either.’

  ‘Then there’s no need to worry.’

  Leonard was laughing so openly at Isabel that she seemed both unable to understand or to take seriously anything he was saying.

  ‘I’ve told you, it’s too late. If you’d wanted to help him you should
have done so when he first went there. Are we going? I’m standing here like some lousy gentleman just to give you the privilege of leading me up.’ This was stated with such evident bitterness that his aunt stared at him in alarm, then suddenly stepped past him without another word and immediately began to climb the stairs.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know how seriously to take you,’ she said. ‘But it’s not only your father. There’s your mother. And there’s Elizabeth.… And there’s you.’

  ‘The Provost is here, isn’t he?’ Leonard said. ‘Things run through my mind and I can’t remember them two minutes together. You did say that? The fact is, it’s really him I was hoping to see.’

  Isabel was being driven up the stairs, so closely was she pursued by Leonard. When she glanced round she saw that he still held the raincoat clutched tightly over his left arm.

  ‘You won’t discuss it then with your father?’ she persisted.

  ‘Look! Will you leave me alone!’ Leonard suddenly pushed past her, violently thrusting her to one side. ‘Will you leave me alone! Will you stop! I can’t do anything about him. It’s too late.’

  Yet, despite his agitation, he appeared to enter the room before her quite calmly and relaxed. As he did so the shaft of a hammer momentarily protruded from the lining of his coat.

  ‘I’d say it was a thin, round shape with grooves scored in the side so that a hollow shape with corresponding grooves inside would fit onto it … the alternate grooves binding together.’

  Several people murmured to one another but the Provost’s voice dominated them all. As Leonard and his aunt entered he continued his analysis although his head, and the heads of eight or nine other people, turned towards the door.

  The room was high, with three tall windows overlooking the square. As Leonard was introduced, several people continued talking as if to accommodate a certain uneasiness at his entry. Placed centrally on each of the three unbroken walls of the room was an eighteenth-century Radcliffe portrait, full-length and in shape reflecting the proportions of the windows. Dark, with pale, narrowly-boned faces, they appeared in the muted light like so many reflections of Leonard himself.

  His aunt took him to one side of the room where a sideboard was laden with half-full plates of food. He shook his head, gazing round at the seated figures, and beginning to play restlessly with the folds of his coat. He was becoming increasingly excited, and when his aunt tried to take the coat from him he snatched it away as though he were being attacked. She let her arms drop and looked away, turning her attention to the Provost. He was still speaking, his lips set like a navel in the belly of his face, his mouth scarcely moving as it accommodated the most cumbersome words. He was the only other man in the room. ‘I wouldn’t say that clearly defined it,’ he said.

  ‘Then, a cylinder with a continuous and unbroken groove along the whole of its length.’

  ‘A circular groove.’

  ‘And not necessarily the whole of its length surely?’

  ‘How would this be, then? A solid, cylindrical shape with a continuous, circular groove starting from one end.’

  ‘And ending where?’

  ‘At any distance from its beginning. That’s fair enough.’

  The people laughed. Leonard had begun to nod rather eagerly.

  ‘Definition is a marvellous thing,’ the Provost said.

  ‘But surely not one required in your trade,’ Leonard said. Yet no one turned in his direction.

  ‘And how difficult,’ a woman continued.

  ‘The most difficult and yet apparently the easiest. There is, of course, a certain allegory to be made there, Provost.’

  ‘Yet the thing is, once an object has been defined, however wrongly, it’s very difficult to think of it in different terms.’

  ‘Can there be a wrong definition? Isn’t it either accurate or misleading? One of the two.’

  ‘Accurate to what?’

  ‘Well, to our sense of it.’

  ‘But doesn’t a thing exist irrespective of our perception of it?’ The Provost’s face was so remarkably ugly when he spoke that it clearly held a certain fascination for these women. As though aware of it the Provost had turned to Leonard to ask, ‘Can you tell us what it is we are trying to describe?’

  ‘Trying to define, surely, Provost,’ a woman said, smiling at Leonard.

  ‘To define.’

  They waited, relaxing, regarding Leonard with a subdued interest. His face was covered in a thin sweat and his eyes glistened as if reflecting some distant and intermittent light. He held the raincoat even more rigidly against his side. Since coming into the room he had in fact grown extremely pale, and had gradually moved away from the wall to stand some distance towards the centre of the floor, a shadowed projection it seemed of those tall portraits which flanked him on three sides.

  ‘I imagine it’s some sort of void. A spiritual vacuum,’ he said eventually. They glanced up at him uneasily, though one woman had begun to laugh.

  ‘What thing? What object?’ his aunt said deliberately.

  ‘Admitting, of course, that it is of no importance whatsoever,’ the Provost said as though genially attributing some humour to Leonard’s remark, ‘what in fact do you think it is?’

  ‘But why aren’t you outside, preaching and administering the gospel?’ Leonard said with a sudden burst of animation, glancing round anxious that they should recognise the ease with which he had discovered the solution.

  ‘Ah, now,’ the Provost went on, apparently unsurprised, ‘you mustn’t try and amuse yourself at everyone’s expense, Leonard. One can discriminate in one’s criticism of people just as I can in the way I choose to spread Our Lord’s word. Do you understand what I mean?’

  Leonard had begun to fumble with his coat. Draped over his left arm, his left hand was concealed now by its folds. There was a sudden agitation beneath them; then, after a moment’s hesitation, he said, ‘Christ is a flame, an element of our imaginations, not a religious ornament. Tell me. How many cars have you got? What’s your salary? Then tell me where you keep your vision, inside the boot or on the back seat?’

  ‘Now, Leonard.…’ The Provost looked round reassuringly at the women; they seemed disturbed not so much by the remark as by the disjointed and obscure manner in which it was presented. They scarcely looked at Leonard.

  ‘I don’t think this aggressiveness is directed at me personally so much, is it?’ He glanced up at Isabel to see what she might advise in the face of this behaviour. ‘But just to keep everything as simple as possible, what do you think it was, Leonard, that we were trying to define?’

  For a while he didn’t answer. He glanced behind him once at his aunt, then at the portrait directly opposite him as if he had forgotten there was anyone else in the room. The colour which during the previous moments had mounted rapidly to his cheeks, just as quickly faded and his face assumed its original pallor. Then, quite suddenly, he said, ‘If I answer correctly … correctly mind you, and in no way else, can I ask you a question in return?’

  The Provost leaned back, his small mouth depressed at its corners. ‘Well, yes.’ He smiled with a certain shyness.

  ‘Exchange is no robbery,’ said the woman who had laughed initially at Leonard’s behaviour.

  ‘Indeed not.’

  ‘But it’s with a provision,’ Leonard added with a growing intensity, corresponding, it seemed to a suddenly resumed agitation of his raincoat. Several of the women now watched his almost feverish movements with some embarrassment. ‘I want you to answer my question with the same care and attention which you used in reaching your definition.’

  The Provost nodded. ‘If it deserves that amount of interest, Leonard, of course we shall. Do you know what it was we were attempting to define?’

  Leonard looked round at their curious faces. Several glances cautiously avoided his slow look. ‘I think it’s a screw.’

  ‘Ah.…’

  ‘You see.’

  ‘We should have someone come in each tim
e at this point to see if they can recognise the definition.’

  ‘Yes, it was a screw.’

  ‘It’s extremely good. It just goes to show.’

  ‘But didn’t you decide on the object before you tried to define it?’ Leonard said. ‘Where’s the communication in that?’

  His aunt said. ‘It’s just a game we were playing.’

  It seemed that now she wanted him out of the room; for her, at least, his behaviour was not unfamiliar. It was merely a nuisance that had to be removed.

  And it appeared in fact that Leonard was about to comply. He bundled his coat tightly under his arm and glanced round at the apprehensive faces with a rather apologetic look. But suddenly he moved away from the door towards the windows and began to stare down into the square. He stood there for some time, an uncomfortable murmur rising behind him. Then, as his aunt began to move decisively towards him, he appeared to recognise someone in the street below and turned back to the room with a half-frightened expression, coming almost face to face with Isabel herself.

  ‘What I wanted to know,’ he said, staring at the Provost with the same alarmed look, ‘is, did Christ ever make love to a woman?’

  His aunt had begun slowly to walk across the room as if she might have been moodily deliberating on subjects which had no relevance or interest here. The movement itself appeared to deflect any immediate reaction, and when someone began faintly to protest the Provost said, ‘Well, I think one must assume that such a question is not posed mischievously but more out of genuine naïvety.’

  ‘Do you know?’ Leonard said impatiently.

  He glanced once more out of the window, as if the justification for his question lay there. Gas lamps were being lit round the perimeter of the square, and their yellow glow melted faintly through the mist close to the windows. Then he moved across the room towards the door. The frightened expression had still not faded from his face.

  ‘He never knew a woman physically, if that’s what you mean,’ the Provost said. ‘And as to what is now a not uncommon rejoinder – was Christ a homosexual? – the answer is again in the negative.’ He seemed familiar with this particular text, speaking with a calm vigour and confidence. ‘You see, these are old and famous heresies, Leonard, and are far more frivolous than, say, trying to define correctly a natural object. Do you understand? The best work for the Kingdom of God is done from a background of either of two things, a prophetic temperament, or a contented and stable mind. And I’m afraid, Leonard, mine is one of the latter. As to your question, one cannot talk of Our Lord in these terms. Purely physical attributes may have a certain sensational significance, but I can assure you it’s far more important to me to try and define a nut and bolt as a nut and bolt, and Christ as Christ, than to try and overlap the two.’