Radcliffe

by David Storey

  Opposite him was the door to Tolson’s living-room, slightly ajar and sending out a thin strip of light. It fell like a luminous rope over his shoes.

  It was at this strip of light that he was staring when, like some perverse echo of his own agitation, the sudden sound of an alarm bell rang in the air all around him. He was thrust forward by the sound, stepping across the landing as though flung at the door. When he entered the room, Tolson was sitting in an armchair with his eldest son dressed in pyjamas between his knees. They were examining an alarm clock in Tolson’s hand, and even as he paused in the doorway a second ringing echoed through the building. Gradually it died to a slow thudding.

  ‘You see,’ Tolson said in a peculiarly grieved voice, ‘it’s time to go to sleep.’

  As Leonard stepped back, Tolson suddenly glanced up. He recognised him with a look of complete dismay, and started to rise. The boy, half-asleep, his eyes almost closed over a glass of milk between his hands, turned his head briefly at his father’s movement. For a moment Leonard stood gazing emptily at Tolson, then, with his right hand concealed behind his back, he retreated onto the landing.

  He stood waiting. A moment later Tolson came out with his arm round the boy and, without looking up, led him into the bedroom at the end of the landing. Leonard could hear him talking to the boy as he tucked him into bed, and when he’d closed the door and returned along the landing Leonard followed him into the room.

  ‘Why have you come back?’ Tolson said bitterly.

  He went straight to the chair he had just vacated and sat down. He seemed overwhelmed, leaning forward, cradling his forehead in his hand. By his feet was the half-emptied glass of milk.

  ‘The whole thing … I don’t know.’ It sounded as though he were in tears as Leonard strode over to where he was sitting. ‘Why do we go on like this? The whole thing, if we just treated each other gently. I know that’s it.’

  He looked up, his expression swiftly changing to astonishment as he saw the raised arm above his head. He bowed forward slightly, his eyes closed, as the hammer descended. Almost, it seemed, as if he were confident that his skull could withstand the blow. His head shuddered as the hammer struck.

  He opened his eyes and frowned. He looked round, frowning. Then he tried to get up.

  Leonard lifted the hammer again, twisting the handle, and brought the head down with all his strength. The claws on the reverse side bit through Tolson’s hair. He gave a low, private cry, and continued to pull himself to his feet. He rose so slowly that Leonard had time to drag the hammer free and bring it down again on the same spot.

  The bone crumbled and a fountain of blood spurted through the dark knots of Tolson’s hair. He stood up with great alacrity, the hammer embedded in his head, and began to fling himself about the room, uprooting the furniture. He turned blindly to Leonard, his arms outstretched, and caught hold of his coat, pulling him towards him. Blood sprang up the hammer shaft as though accelerated by the action itself; it poured down through his hair, seeping more slowly across his nose and his eyes. His head was ribboned with violet streams, his eyes reddened crevices, brimming over. ‘What have you done?… What have you done?’ he called out, half-astonished, clutching Leonard’s arm between his hands so that for a moment Leonard was flung about with Tolson’s own convulsions. ‘What have you done?’

  Someone was running up the stairs. Immediately Tolson released him and stumbled, searching for the door. He crashed against the wall, his hands groping wildly across the flower-patterned surface before he found the entrance and dragged himself towards it. The hammer fell from his head, releasing a fuller stream of blood.

  ‘Audrey!… Audrey! Look what they’ve done to me!’ he shouted. ‘Look what they’ve done!’

  Leonard had retrieved the hammer. It seemed that he was about to strike Tolson again, but he stopped, confused, staring at the head of the stairs.

  ‘Audrey.… Look what they’ve done to me,’ Tolson said. He began to fall to his knees, crying, his hands groping uncertainly to his head. His figure, in the half-darkness, was huge.

  It was Blakeley who stepped out of the shadows and stooped over him, and Blakeley who was now crying, ‘Vic … Vic.… Oh, Vic.’

  It seemed a decisive moment. Leonard leaned towards Blakeley, peering into his face, then he hastily stepped back. For a second the hammer was half-raised in the air. Then, before Blakeley could move, he brought it down with all his strength on Tolson’s head.

  Tolson made a final effort to stand, to see and to clear his eyes. He crouched in the narrow landing murmuring to himself, his figure burdened by his huge ambition to rise. Then he sat down, slowly, leaning on his thigh and his arm as if, negligently, he were resting. Within a few seconds his arm began to bend, folding slightly, and he lay down with a peculiar care on the floor. Thick gouts of blood oozed from the crown of his head with a rhythmical impulse. For a while he lay without moving. Then, with an immense effort, he tried to rise again as a crescendo of hammer blows struck this time on the side of his head.

  With a massive muscular contraction he heaved himself to his knees, his face upturned for a moment, speaking, its bloodied features turning like a bizarre flower. Then it seemed to disintegrate as the hammer descended on his forehead. He shuddered, absorbing the sudden force, his shoulders shaking and his arms rising until, under a succession of blows, he pitched forward like someone leaping but whose feet are securely embedded in the ground.

  Leonard rushed to the stairs. He glanced back to see Blakeley standing over the low silhouette. Their two figures made a single shape against the lighted room beyond, as if Blakeley were touching the lower mound with his face. Then Leonard dropped down the stairs and hurried out.

  It was a misty autumn night and the moon was now massive, orange and complete above the summit of the estate. Immediately above his head was a faint penetration of stars. He was still carrying the hammer quite openly in his hand.

  His attention was initially caught by a light burning in the church, which loomed up in the mist beyond its hedged perimeter of grass. A frieze of colours, swirling and convoluting, glowed from the darkness. Contained by the slim tracery of the windows, they whirled beneath the massive spindle of the moon, an oval stain magnified by its proximity to the earth.

  Leonard was immediately arrested by this extraordinary juxtaposition of light. At first he seemed about to pass the church. Then as he paused, something emerged from the open porch of the building. It seemed, at first, some secretion of the building itself, a dark and nervous ejaculation. The next moment he recognised it as a large dog.

  It stood a short distance away, braced forward on its legs, its head pointed acutely towards him, scenting the fringe of his coat. It was extremely large, its upper lip curled back slightly from its teeth. A low growl periodically escaped from its throat. Only when he turned up towards the Place did he glance back. The dog had disappeared.

  Walking hurriedly, he set off up the last slope of the rise. The moon slid behind a thin bank of cloud, giving a sulphurous glow to the Place, drawing it out from its stranglehold of trees. He bolted the main doors behind him, listening, then moved quietly up the stairs to the first floor.

  A stream of cool and invigorating air entered the York Room through the still-opened window. When he bent down into the fireplace and looked up, the sky was visible as a comparatively bright illumination at the end of the long, winding funnel. A vague, white movement of cloud animated the aperture. He reached up with his fingers and after a while discovered a suitable crevice. Into it he pushed the hammer.

  When he reached his own room he undressed and, very quickly, like someone preparing excitedly for a journey, dropped onto the bed and almost immediately fell asleep.

  33

  Several hours later John was woken by a strange sound. At first he thought it was the murmur of an engine hauling through the tunnel beneath the escarpment. Then he had the impression that someone was in his room. As he rose from the bed, however, it became
apparent that the noise came from the door. There was someone standing there, waiting. The sound was that of breathing, but so heavy and deliberate that it could scarcely be human. It was more like an animal scenting. As he peered across the darkened room he gradually distinguished the door set in faint relief by the illumination on the landing. It was across the tiny cracks of light that a shadow periodically moved.

  He watched and listened for some time, transfixed first by a sense of terror, then more certainly by the idea that what he was watching could not be real. Then, as he moved towards the door, the movements abruptly ceased and a second later the shadow disappeared altogether. He paused, then opened the door very slowly.

  The landing itself was deserted although he could see now that the illumination came from a light in the kitchen reflected up the stairs to his right. Further along, at the darkened end of the landing, it seemed that the door leading into the main part of the Place was slightly ajar.

  Certain unrecognisable sounds came from the kitchen and John went to the head of the stairs. As he did so he noticed that Elizabeth’s door was also open; suddenly filled with the worst apprehensions, he rapidly descended the stairs.

  As he reached the kitchen he saw Elizabeth at the opposite end of the room. She was standing perfectly still and appeared to be completely absorbed by a voice which filled the room. At the same moment he realised that the greater part of the illumination of the room came, not from the solitary bulb above Elizabeth’s head, but from the fire. An unnatural and extravagant brightness flickered continuously across her bewitched face. A moment later she looked up and stood silently regarding him across the length of the room. The voice had grown louder and more excited.

  Then there was a huge and terrifying cry, as Leonard’s figure leapt from a chair at the side of the room directly towards the fire. With a second cry he plunged both arms into an inferno of flames and pulled out a single blazing mass which, as he tried to carry it across the room, disintegrated in his hands.

  John instantly moved forward, flinging the burning debris aside so wildly that Leonard himself was knocked to the floor. He lay on his side unmoving as John stamped out the flames.

  ‘But why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you call me?’ he said to Elizabeth as he lifted Leonard into a chair. ‘Why didn’t you call me, love?’ He seemed scarcely able to control his agitation. ‘You’d better fetch your mother.… Are you all right? Do you feel all right?’

  Elizabeth hurried out. John pulled Leonard more comfortably into the chair and took a piece of soap from the sink in the corner and began to rub it over Leonard’s hands. He was completely preoccupied with this task, almost massaging the hands, when Stella came down followed at some distance by Elizabeth.

  ‘He’ll be all right now,’ John said to her. ‘If you can just take care of Elizabeth. She shouldn’t have come down. She shouldn’t have come down with him.’

  Leonard, pale and staring abstractedly at the ceiling, had suddenly turned in the chair. ‘No, don’t go, Elizabeth … Elizabeth is so silent, father. She frightens me. She says so little. Why did he touch her? Why did he? Why did he? Wasn’t it enough that he had me?’

  As they tried to distract him he turned away in frustration, looking at none of them, more at the walls and the ceiling. ‘What can a woman say? A woman does. A woman says nothing. Women are preachers in their silences, men in their actions. All the time. Then there are castles.’

  Neither John nor Stella interrupted him; he was sinking back, looking round at them calmly.

  ‘If I could have lived in a castle. Surrounded by moorland … how complete that would have been. Or in a tent.…’ He laid his head against the arm of the chair and almost immediately fell asleep.

  After a while John said, ‘I’ll carry him up.’

  He stooped forward, listening to his regular and undisturbed breathing; then he lifted him quickly and lightly and took him up to his room.

  As he laid him down on his bed and removed his jacket, some weight in the pockets attracted his attention. From the side pocket of the jacket Leonard had been wearing John took out first the metal clasp of a belt, then several large buttons. He took them down with him to the kitchen.

  ‘But what was he burning?’ he asked Elizabeth, laying these objects on the table.

  ‘His raincoat.’ She seemed distracted still, gazing about the room as though Leonard were still there.

  ‘His coat?’

  ‘I heard some sort of noise. And when I came down, he was crouched in front of the fire with my sewing scissors, cutting the buttons and the buckle from his raincoat. He just cut them off. I couldn’t do anything.’

  ‘But what was he doing with the coat?’ her mother asked.

  ‘I don’t know … I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t he say anything?’ John said.

  ‘I think he’d had the coat in the fire already. There were holes burned in it. When he saw me he finished cutting the buttons off and pushed the coat back in the fire. He kept asking me, “What will they think? What will they think?”’

  John stood at the table fingering the buttons, turning them over in his hand. ‘But why was he burning it?’ he said, then suddenly stood back from the table as though forewarned before a prodigious crash echoed through the Place.

  All three cried out. It seemed to shake the walls of the building as though a weight had been hurled against them; and scarcely had its echo disappeared than a second and louder crash, a massive percussion, shook the entire room. As John moved instinctively towards the outside door, taking Stella and Elizabeth with him, a third and even heavier blow fell against the walls followed almost immediately by a loud cry.

  Leaving the two women to escape by the kitchen door, John ran back up the stairs to the landing. Leonard’s door was open and his room deserted. Numerous drawings lay scattered over the bed and across the floor as though flung there in rage. As he re-emerged onto the landing he saw that the door into the Place was now fully open. Flurrying to his room for a torch, he entered the main part of the building.

  He went from room to room, briefly exposing each to the beam of light, working his way quickly along the first floor. There was a strange smell of decomposition, though nowhere any sign of damage. Only when he reached the York Room did any sort of hysteria overtake him. As his torch swept erratically around the shuttered interior Leonard was suddenly revealed lying on the floor at the opposite end, immediately beneath the fireplace.

  He lay in fact within the stone base of the fireplace, his right arm extended as though he had fallen in the act of reaching up. As John hurried into the room he was suddenly aware of an unnatural warmth of the air, and the now almost stifling smell of decomposition. He bent down over his son’s body and at the same moment heard behind him a hoarse and deliberate breathing, and the movement it seemed of some heavy and resilient weight.

  For a moment the torch swung weirdly across the room illuminating first the shuttered features of the windows, then the wild vortex of mouldings that composed the ceiling. Then it shone on a massive creature pinioned to the wall. It was like a slug, struggling out from the smooth surface, its bulbous features glistening in the light. Even as John recognised the relief, wildly animated now in the agitated beam of light, he was lifting Leonard and hurrying with him to the door.

  Once in the passage, however, he was compelled to lay him down. For a while he knelt over his son, panting and scarcely able to regain his breath. It was as though some peculiar weight had entered Leonard’s body, for when he lifted him again it was as if he were carrying a muscular and heavy man. When he looked at him more closely he saw that, in fact, Leonard was breathing quite deeply and seemed perfectly relaxed.

  He laid him on his bed, went back and secured the partition door. Then he called Stella and Elizabeth from below. They stayed together in Leonard’s room for some time, scarcely speaking, watching his calmly sleeping figure and occasionally glancing at one another like people waiting impatiently for some
event to begin.

  34

  A remarkable state of affairs developed during the following day. An anonymous telephone call late the previous evening had summoned the police who arrived at Tolson’s house several minutes after Audrey’s own return home. They discovered her in an extreme state of shock, neither speaking nor, it seemed, able to understand any of their enquiries. Tolson lay just outside the wrecked living-room, his two children standing dumbly beside him.

  Preliminary enquiries were begun amongst Tolson’s neighbours; Sugdeon was questioned the closest. He had in fact returned home with his wife some time after Tolson’s body had been removed from the house and, although his account of a visit to relatives was readily confirmed, the fact that there was no evidence of theft or any other obvious motive made him the one on whom initially suspicion centred. The pathologist’s first report indicated that death had been caused more by the persistence rather than the strength of the blows, and this led to the suggestion that the assault might have involved a woman. The utter prostration of Tolson’s wife consequently came to be viewed with some suspicion.

  Throughout the day enquiries were pursued with a gradually increasing intensity, night falling with police searches of the neighbouring gardens for the murder weapon and the beginning of house-to-house questioning. Then, the following morning, all official activities suddenly ceased. The estate, already a hubbub of speculation, seemed about to explode. The immediate evidence, the continuous passage of police vehicles, the coming and going of numerous uniformed and plain-clothes strangers, were suddenly discontinued. An unnatural silence fell over the affair. It was in such an atmosphere that the family began to arrive at the Place.

  They were, apart from Austen, unaware of Tolson’s death, and they accepted John’s subdued mood as a serious token of their meeting. They talked amicably amongst themselves until the arrival of Cubbitt, the trustees’ solicitor, when they decided that for the purpose of their discussion they would go up to the York Room. Overcoming John’s protests, Austen led the way, leaving only Isabel behind who, immediately on her arrival, had taken Elizabeth to one side and engaged her in intense conversation. It appeared that Austen had not kept his news completely to himself.