by David Storey
‘Yet Christ was a man,’ Leonard insisted, staring at the Provost with a peculiarly threatening expression. ‘He was flesh, and He was blood.’
‘Yes.’
‘How then could He be a man different from other men? Physically, I mean. Physically!’
The Provost was staring at Leonard’s hands. Both of them were now spread nervously over his raincoat, the garment itself rolled so tightly that he might have been holding a swab over a particularly painful wound. ‘Jesus Christ was the Spirit first,’ he said, ‘only secondarily was He the Body. He invested, if you like, the physical apparatus of a man.’
‘Ah, then you can separate a man! You can separate someone physically from what they are?’ Leonard went on with mounting excitement.
‘The Church does so to the extent that a man’s soul is never irredeemable.’
‘But if you say Christ invested the physical apparatus of a man, just how much of it did He invest? How much? And where did He draw the line? Did He decide to invest so much, and then no more?… Surely He never suffered as a man. As a man condemned to his body.’
‘Christ suffered as a man. And Christ died as a man. There’s no doubt of that.’ The Provost’s attention, however, was divided between the curious play of Leonard’s hands with his raincoat, now a totally unrecognisable bundle, and his face, which had such an acute look of self-absorption that it seemed impossible that he could be speaking at the same time with such animation and energy. Their audience, by its silence, might not have existed for either of them.
‘If He could bleed and sweat and be exhausted why couldn’t He feel equally the natural desire for a woman, or for another man? What is it that a man wants from such love that Christ Himself had no need of? How on earth can we accept Him as an example when He was only half a man Himself?’
‘A man, from human love, requires a bond and a reassurance, which, as a man, he can only approach or fully comprehend through his body. Christ, as the Son of God, had such communion with the Spirit that such a relationship for Him would be meaningless.’ The Provost stroked his face, his fingers delving into the loose skin.
‘But if Christ came to earth as a man why didn’t He come as a man that we know? Why didn’t He use His sex? Isn’t it from sex that all our problems and confusion rise, yet He refused even to acknowledge it by His own example? What a pitiable and feeble thing He must have thought our earthly love was. Something He didn’t even bother to experience, to invest even, though He took on, as you say, the physical apparatus of a man. What can He tell us about our lives when He didn’t even bother to acquaint Himself with the half of it that oppresses and confuses us the most? What a wretched and irrelevant thing He must have thought our physical love. He had no need of it.’
But Leonard was no longer talking to the Provost, or to anyone else in the room. He had sunk down on a chair and seemed in absolute despair, bending forward and nursing the coat, tears beginning to run down his face.
‘What a contemptible and putrid thing the body is,’ he said in a reflective tone. ‘It does nothing but destroy us, hanging on us like a sickness, devouring us until we’re assimilated by it, and die with it.… And Christ was separate. He destroyed His body, showed his contempt for it, hung it up like a bit of canvas. He cast it in the face of men who have to live within their bodies, taunting them with salvation, His spiritual grace.’
He was staring at the Provost as if he had lost completely any sense of where he was and as if he were trying passionately to recollect some thought or feeling which persistently slipped his memory.
‘What a trivial thing you’ve made of Christ. You’ve cut His body away from His soul, and condemned us to live with the body and to be ever wanting for the soul. You’ve condemned us to be separate things when our only salvation lies in wholeness and completeness. When the body and the soul are the one thing.’
‘God is our vision of everything that transcends our own physical lives,’ the Provost said quietly, no longer interested in the theoretical interpretation of his own beliefs but in trying to control Leonard’s outburst by his own calmness and manner. ‘Our physical nature is an impediment to that state of Grace, to the spiritual world which, in one form or another, we all long for. To separate the Body from the Soul was Our Lord’s gift to man. He freed the soul from the human body and gave us the true gift of immortality.’
‘His gift! It was His damnation!… His curse!’ Leonard sprang up, the sweat running freely from his forehead and his eyes filmed with tears. ‘To make us free of our bodies was to despise everything we are, to despise our only hope of salvation. And now that Christ is dead, what are we left with? What is the legacy of this magnificent corpse? We’re left with His scepticism of the human body. His relegation of it to sacrifice! But that isn’t our life. He never even lived our life. Our lives are committed wholly and completely to our bodies. What could He know of that if He never loved!’
He began to move hurriedly about the room disregarding the people who watched him with embarrassment and dismay. Several of the women rose to their feet.
He reached the door and suddenly began to look around him in confusion. Then, apparently seeing his aunt coming towards him, he lurched to the stairs, the coat now being nursed at his side like a broken limb.
For some time after he had vanished, the occupants of the room sat in silence, the room itself darkening under the sombre clutch of the night and the mist.
When Leonard reached the street Blakeley was standing on the opposite side, almost hidden against the high wall of privet that surrounded the church. For a while he followed Leonard, walking abreast on the opposite side of the road until, as they reached the narrow lane that led like the neck of a noose from the square to the main road beyond, Blakeley crossed quickly towards him. Neither of them spoke. Leonard walked with a determined stride and with an expression that had none of the wildness of a few moments before. Strangely, he appeared quite composed. He gave no sign that he recognised or even noticed Blakeley. They walked side by side in silence.
Evening traffic crashed by on the main road. As they approached the noisy stream Blakeley stopped, stretching out his arm to delay Leonard, and nodding his head slightly as if in confirmation of some private opinion.
‘I wanted to ask you something. I suppose you realised … you knew that I’d followed you.’ His face still held the look of heavy resignation which had been Leonard’s last glimpse of him. ‘I wanted to ask you if you’d come and see me tonight … see me perform. I promise you, it’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you to do.’
He laid such peculiar stress on this phrase that Leonard, who had submitted to being waylaid, glanced at him with a sudden expression of alarm, almost as if his own thoughts had been pierced. Yet even after he had hurriedly agreed and noted the name and the address of the club where he was to appear, Blakeley continued to hold rigidly to his arm and to stare anxiously into his face. Then, without a word, he hurried off into the growing darkness.
27
A dull redness suffused the smoke and outlined the packed shapes of darkly dressed men hunched tightly together in the narrow spaces between the tables. The long, broad trough of the room was like a huge stained window, one that had crashed intact from a high wall. As one of the components of this sombre mosaic, Leonard stared up at the white pool of light over the stage where Blakeley, in his costume of genial imbecility, tapped his cigarette into the top of his pouched trousers and sang a song which, over the murmur of conversation and laughter, could scarcely be heard. His toothless mouth was held open as if sucking in the air of his audience’s amusement. As he interrupted his song to recite a joke, they laughed, a dolorous, hard sound like the crushing of stone; then they watched, moodily reflective, their eyes turned dangerously onto his slight figure. He beat his fists against his thighs, stooping towards them. Their laughter withdrew, then surged forward, an impatient, temperamental tide. Waiters pushed between the groups of men, trays poised on their raised arms. Across t
he room Leonard saw Alex.
His uncle’s bronzed face was turned up to the stage with a questioning eagerness, absorbed in the grotesque figure and the smouldering laughter around him. He talked animatedly to the men crouched at his table and they laughed, diffidently, relaxed. One of them banged his back. Then, from a quick look in his direction, Leonard realised that he too had been observed. The men at Alex’s table drew back, turning towards the white figure on the stage. The lights were intensified to a crescendo of music as Blakeley stood there singing.
Some laughed still; it seemed, despite that pleading voice, he had been consumed, dissolved by the light. Others stared blindly into the brightness, trying to discover some focus within it. The club had a reputation for its lighting displays; innumerable effects were obtained from expensive batteries of lamps which normally would have been sufficient to illuminate a stage several times its area. Gentler lights now sprang down like sprays and the dazzling concentration was broken, then turned off. In the sudden darkness of the stage a slight figure could be seen stumbling, slightly dazed, towards a door at the rear. Above it, a faint red neon sign outlined the word, ‘Artists’. The hall was lit up.
‘So you’re not above coming here,’ Alex said after struggling across the room. He seemed pleased to have discovered Leonard in such surroundings, and alone. ‘It’s the second night I’ve been here. I’ve really enjoyed myself. There’s nothing quite like this, Leonard, where I come from.’ He watched his nephew acutely. ‘That last performer they’ve had both nights I’ve been here. He seems rather strange, though. What do you think?’
Leonard scarcely glanced at his uncle. After a short silence he said, ‘When are you going back down south?’
‘I’ve still a few more days leave yet.’
‘From making cars?’
‘I intend to see your father first, Leonard. Before I go back.’ His nephew was suddenly thrust forward as several men pushed between the tables.
‘I was hoping to see you at Isabel’s,’ Alex went on. ‘But apart from that Provost, I was the only male guest there, so I found some excuse to come away. He’s a fool. The Provost, I mean.’
He looked at Leonard as though expecting some sort of affirmation, but Leonard continued to gaze uninterestedly at his uncle, almost bored. Men’s voices suddenly roared, and a large group began to press in through the double doors at the end of the room opposite the stage. Red canvas curtaining shielded the five windows down one side.
‘Have they heard any more about the old man, yesterday?’ Alex said, and when Leonard shook his head with the same aloofness he added, ‘You know, I haven’t been above catching certain references these last two days about me and … what shall we say? The manufacture of cars. As though, through working in industry, I’m somehow not as complete a person as those who don’t. Or at least, as those who don’t have to.’
Over Leonard’s shoulder he suddenly caught sight of the man who, the day before, he had expelled from the grounds of the Place. Tolson was staring at them with a moody, vaguely threatening expression, and seemed unconcerned whether he had been observed or not. Alex glanced at Leonard but he appeared completely unaware that they were being overlooked.
‘What references do you mean?’ Leonard said, staring down at the plastic surface of the table.
‘Oh, your father’s for one.’
‘He probably resents your success, and ascribes it no doubt to a lack of any real conscience or feeling.’
‘Why should he do that? He’s scarcely in a position to criticise anyone, let alone someone who …’
‘It’s the nature of your work that antagonises him. At least, we must assume that it is. After all, cars aren’t much for a man to have as the end of his life. And he’s very much like that, I’m afraid, always looking for some justifiable end.’
For a while Alex watched his nephew in silence. Then he gazed almost abstractedly across the room at Tolson.
‘I’m not very good at arguing. Finding reasons for what I do,’ he said. ‘Though I am – although I say it myself – a good negotiator. But coming here, to a place like this, it means something to me. These men. This is something I can understand. And looking at it another way …’ He continued to stare beyond Leonard’s shoulder. ‘You can’t change men’s nature, only the context it has to work in. It’s that that makes for better things. The context of a man’s life, rather than the man himself. The man himself, that’s something different.’
‘Oh, I agree with that,’ Leonard said amicably.
‘And the manufacture of cars, or of any consumer goods for that matter. I realise perfectly well that they’re only a commodity, a means to an end. But simply looking at it as crudely as you can, without the manufacture and the export of cars this country would go to the dogs.’
‘Yes, I understand that,’ Leonard said with increasing friendliness, even beginning to smile. ‘You see, I’m only trying to suggest something of the way in which my father feels.’
Alex clenched his hands and pushed them onto the edge of the table. ‘I’m not so sure how to describe it,’ he said, ‘but I’ll admit that by isolating himself, even though I don’t understand the reasons, your father’s found for himself some sort of authority. Or power, if you like. I mean, you tend to listen more to what he says than you would to somebody who lived a more ordinary life. But the fact is, it’s made him a bit potty as well. All of you. And I don’t mind. No, I mean that. People tend to be too much like one another these days. But your father even thinks, for example, that Austen organised yesterday’s affair just in order to humiliate him.’
‘But didn’t he?’
‘No … no. Certainly not as far as I’m aware. I don’t think Austen could do that sort of thing, anyway.’
‘Don’t you? You don’t know Austen. What a merciless and frustrated ambition for power he’s got. I mean, did you know that he still believes in the divine right of kings? If you mention it to him he’ll laugh, of course. But inside him, he believes it. And something as absurd as that. He’s a fantasist of the strangest sort.’
Alex looked at Leonard seriously a moment. Then slowly he began to smile. He glanced quickly across the room, then said, ‘No, the only power I understand is the power of men like this who, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, work and live together for their common good. Because they know that’s the way they can survive, all or nothing. That’s power. When you can share it in the bottom of a mug of ale after a day’s work.’
‘You mean the only way for them to survive,’ Leonard said with the same friendliness of tone – one so unnatural, it seemed, that Alex began to look at him with sudden suspicion. ‘But what of those who won’t.… No, let’s just say, those who can’t reduce themselves to the lowest common denominator? What’s to become of them? And in any case, this isn’t only power you’re talking about. It’s force.’
‘Force? What force?’ Alex said, and with a certain preparatory movement, for Tolson had risen from his seat and, despite the thick crowd separating them, was clearly intending to come over.
‘Do you remember the York Room at the Place where we had the meal?’ Leonard said with the same friendly tone. ‘And the carved figure over the fireplace? Do you know what the figure is? Imagine this as the room. There’s the double doors. Those are the five windows, and at the end, where the stage is, stands the fireplace, and in the centre that carved figure.…’
Several things, however, happened all at once, distracting Alex from the curious parallel Leonard was tracing. Just as Tolson reached them the lights were suddenly dimmed and from the shadow of the stage, at which Leonard was gazing as though suddenly in a trance, appeared a huge and hideous face.
It was so large and misshapen, and so white, that there was no possibility that it could be human. Each feature was wildly distorted, the nose bulging forward like a corrugated trunk, and the mouth pulled back from twin rows of deformed and giant teeth. Deep crevices grooved the skin like wounds. As the spotlight retreated
slightly, it glistened on a black flange of hair, almost metallic in its luminous sheen, and indicated beneath the face, like a narrow and exhausted stalk, the figure of a man. A belated roar of laughter hardly concealed the disturbing effect this apparition had had. One or two women had screamed, and a single voice called out in a kind of bated defiance.
Then, at the humility of the voice that suddenly emerged from this grotesque vision, the men laughed. It was a heavy, stinging crash, dispelling their apprehension.
‘I’ve come. And to prove it, I’m here. You didn’t think I looked like this without my make-up on, did you, love? No. But did you guess? It’s what my wife calls her going-away face. Every time she sees it.… Yes! You’ve got it! That’s right!’
The face, completely motionless and inexpressive, reflected nothing of the feelings which lay behind it. A burnt sound of self-amusement, a metallic laugh, slid from the same swollen lips which, a few moments before, had suggested a melancholic disaffection. It was as if the face were detachedly resigned to its appearance.
‘Now don’t look at me like that, love. Because I’m not as pretty as you it doesn’t mean I haven’t got feelings. I feel, I do.’ Another, more relaxed kind of laughter broke out at this preposterous idea. ‘I feel, I do. I might have an ugly front but I’ve got a lovely behind.’