by David Storey
For a while he could remember little. He accepted people with the same lack of sensation with which he received injections or other medicinal treatment. He saw his parents and Elizabeth quite frequently but once they’d gone could recollect little of what they had said. Whenever he looked round from his bed at the other people in the ward it was with a half-formed expression of apology, a disjointed look of commiseration. Only during one of his father’s early visits, when he suggested that Leonard should be moved to a room of his own where he could read or draw in private, did any strong feeling rise up in him, briefly yet so intensely, that it was agreed he should remain in the public ward until he himself should demand a change.
When he was relaxed he tended to watch the people around him with an exhausted and defeated air, as though any activity in itself bewildered him. He appeared to have little impression of time, one mood of feeling separated from the next by sleep. He was also left with a certain deafness, the delayed effect, it was suggested, of the hammer blow a few weeks previously.
He was encouraged to walk. He moved amongst the other patients silently at first and with heavy, deliberate gestures. Then, when he began to take notice of the various conversations around him, he would stand listening with a slight though intent inclination of his head, occasionally nodding reflectively and gazing at some distant object in the room. When asked something directly he would look at his questioner with a half-curious, almost imperious look, then walk away without answering.
Frequently he would go to one particular window at the end of the ward and stand looking out at the top half of a lime tree directly facing him. Sometimes, usually in the early morning or the late evening, the sunlight caught its spindly arrangement of twigs and he would stand watching the elaborate network of glowing filaments as though within its luminous tracery he detected the contours and perhaps even the shape of the thing which eluded him.
He showed no overt curiosity either in the people around him or in himself, though he gave all his attention to whatever was demanded of him; whenever he asked any questions it was as if to reassure himself of some opinion he had already formed.
Yet there was a curious, enigmatic attractiveness about him extending far beyond his moodiness that affected those who came directly into contact with him. In the ward itself it was identified as a certain patience and generosity of manner, almost an attribute of breeding and refinement.
Austen, who surprisingly showed little interest in seeing Leonard, made several regular though well-spaced visits to the hospital, staying considerably less than the permitted time and scarcely concealing behind his urbane exterior a certain impatience. He was like a man determinedly waiting for a climax which others assumed had already taken place. Leonard’s mother and, curiously, Isabel saw in Leonard’s condition the result of that solitariness and isolation which in the past they themselves had tried unsuccessfully to breach. Leonard had in this sense passed beyond them, and both found it difficult and excessively wearying to speak to him.
Only one person seemed detached. Having returned to his work in the South, Alex came back one week-end to stay with Isabel and, after a long meeting with Cubbitt, went to visit Leonard. Having seen and spoken with him for some time, and been to some extent irritated by his slight deafness, Alex was reluctant to admit to Isabel what his real reactions were. It was only several days later, in the taxi on the way to the station, that he confessed that he now found Leonard a pathetic though quite harmless imbecile.
Nevertheless, it was only a short while after this that Leonard was allowed to return home.
He returned to the Place with the lack of curiosity of someone making his daily return from work. And he had been there scarcely an hour before the family began to think of his absence as the least curious episode of the previous few weeks. For several days in fact they saw little of him. Unobtrusive and very quiet, he went out alone walking a great deal, chiefly across the upper ridges of moorland which fringed the vast area of collieries and mills to the north. From the summits of these remote escarpments the Place could occasionally be glimpsed like some tiny black shell laid on a flank of rock. Late in the day, when the sun hung low in the sky, a dull red flash of light frequently shot from its windows, a momentary beam splaying across miles of undulating countryside. His mother traced these journeys by inspecting his coat pockets and examining the different colours of the bus tickets she extracted. This was the only way they could keep track not only of his daily pilgrimages but, it seemed, of his recovery as well.
The weather was cold and sunny with the clear skies of early winter, the sun low and heavy, a cumbersome thing. Each evening Leonard returned with drawings. They intimidated his father. There was something familiar now in these sheets of contained violence, hard and stark and black. Neither Austen’s enthusiasm nor his mother’s hatred of what he was doing seemed to impinge in any way on his preoccupation. He drew continuously; large complex constructions of the landscape, and small, almost engraved miniatures of Elizabeth, of her face, her hair, and her hands. He drew with people around him, either in the kitchen or outside, as though it were a conversation he held. Elizabeth he returned to continuously, tracing out her slender face with its oval and precise features again and again as though it were not something he examined but something he chose to confirm. Occasionally as he looked at her his expressionless features would suddenly be charged with a smile. ‘Why are you so serious?’ he said whenever he saw no change in the intent way she submitted to him. But she never replied.
Late one afternoon as he was returning up the drive he heard a violent activity in the shrubbery on his left-hand side. It was now almost completely dark. Then, a short distance ahead, where the drive ran onto the terrace, a large black dog emerged from the bushes and, after pausing a second, its head drooping towards the ground, it moved on and disappeared under the trees on the opposite side.
Later that evening, after he had been drawing Elizabeth for some time in the kitchen, his father and Austen sitting silently by the fire, his mother working, Leonard suddenly looked up at her and said, ‘Are you pregnant, Liz?’
She gazed back at him, surprised that he should ask about something which had become increasingly obvious since his return home.
‘Yes.’
He went on drawing for a short while, the eyes of the family upon him. Eventually he looked up at Austen and said with a half-amused expression, ‘Well, Austen, do you think I am the avenging angel?’ And when Austen offered no answer, he added, ‘Why does my father allow you to go on coming here when he thinks of you as the perpetrator of a plot … one of which I’m alleged to be the victim?’
‘If you don’t want Austen to be here,’ his father said, ‘you’ve only to say so.’
‘But why are you so acquiescent? Doesn’t it matter? I mean, have you, for example, decided to sell the Place?’
‘Yes.’
Leonard looked briefly at Austen, then added, ‘How long shall we go on living here?’
‘Perhaps a year,’ said his father. ‘It could be less.’
Leonard allowed his gaze to remain on his uncle. ‘Do you still think of this place as a castle, Austen, and see me striding through these northern lands like the Lord Protector, striking down the enemies of God? In this particular instance such enemies being made to include the lower and middle classes.’
Austen seemed heavily amused. ‘Cromwell’s war wasn’t a war of class, Leonard. His was a war of feeling. A war of sensibility.’
‘Well, then, which of us has won!’ Leonard turned triumphantly to his father. ‘Perhaps you haven’t understood Austen at all, father, his Caroline temperament.’
‘And what does that mean?’ John said, looking at his son with an unusual intensity.
Leonard laughed at his father’s confusion: it seemed that he was anticipating another fit.
‘You’ve understood absolutely nothing at all! Didn’t you realise that Austen has fought out the fate of our heritage under your very nose, an
d that even now he’s congratulating himself on his complete and undisputed victory? One army has fought against the other, and both have been destroyed. Austen is about to step up once more to the throne and take his place.’
He laughed more loudly, amused more than ever by his father’s bewilderment. ‘Why!… Why, when you sell the Place as Austen has planned you should all along, you’ll wake up next morning and find the anonymous bidder was in fact representing your own brother! Here! Here! This is where Austen wishes he had spent his life like you!’
He looked at his uncle with a wild expression of triumph. ‘Even now … even now he’ll have all the money raised from various sources just in case the sale goes through earlier than expected!’
Leonard did not stay to see the effect of these words. Yet the next day as he went off down the drive, setting out on his day’s drawing, his father came after him, prepared, it seemed, to accompany him wherever he went. As they passed the church he took Leonard’s arm and suggested they should go inside.
He pushed open the gate and allowed Leonard to go in before him. The interior was dark and very cold. Once inside he led the way to the nearest pew and sat down, moving along from the carved boss at the end to allow Leonard to sit beside him. At the far end of the building rose the successive tiers of Radcliffe effigies.
‘I used to come in here a great deal while you were away, in hospital,’ he said. ‘Oh, not for the reason you’re thinking. No, it’s very simple. I came in here because for the first time I felt at home.’
He glanced sideways at Leonard, who sat clutching his drawing paper under his arm, gazing up at the ceiling. Then he moved his head closer as though determined that, despite Leonard’s deafness, he would not have to repeat anything.
He sat silently a moment longer, then added, ‘I’ve never mentioned my father to you, have I? And there’s no point, of course, in starting now. But he was quite an elderly man by the time I got to know him, and used to a life I suppose which had its viciousness like ours but which also had its certain leisure and grace. It seems to me, Leonard, that we’ve retained the cruelties and the viciousness and dispensed with the rest. At least we’ve done one thing. We’ve made the descent into Hell more democratic.’
Leonard watched his father while he spoke, but absent-mindedly, a familiar expression of detachment, though now perhaps touched with pity.
‘I was brought up, Leonard, to believe that the right political and economic institutions could bring happiness and uplift to the majority of mankind. Even transform the very character of human beings. But now, in these days, those are only the sentiments of the very young.’
Leonard had moved suddenly in his seat as though he had observed something in the shadows at the opposite end of the church, close to the altar. It was a momentary sensation of alarm. Then he stared down into the pitch blackness between his feet.
‘When I was younger, your age in fact,’ his father added, ‘I suddenly made what I thought was a discovery: that you have only two choices, either to live in isolation or to be absorbed. Well, I made my choice. And it was the wrong one. I never realised that you must be absorbed. That you must take your part, and that then you must fight. But subversively, with all the cunning, the mischievousness, the intelligence, the perverseness, the deception, the duplicity, with every essence and every sense in your body. I never realised. I never realised. We are all partisans now. We are all saboteurs. Every one.’
For a while his voice continued to echo in the place, as if the stone whispered. It came out of the darkness, fading. John leaned back. He was sweating profusely. Leonard stared down to the far end of the church, to where the effigies glistened. Then he said, ‘Why should you tell me this?’ And when his father made no answer, he added, ‘Is that the sum total of your experience? Shall I tell you what your disease really is? You’ve spent your life making a virtue of feeling, yet in all that time you’ve never actually felt one tiny thing.’
‘Leonard, this is wrong.…’
‘Is it? Is it? You never even realised how much I loved Tolson. You can’t begin even to imagine what he meant to me!’
His father gazed at him bitterly. ‘I think I do know, Leonard.’
But Leonard interrupted him with a growing wildness. ‘How could you know? Don’t talk to me! Don’t talk to me about choices and your intellectual saboteurs!’
He suddenly looked closely at his father, peering it seemed into the texture of his skin. ‘Austen knew,’ he whispered, ‘and he used his knowledge to his own ends.’
He had begun to move away, towards the door. Then he swayed, as though physically waylaid. ‘You’ve never realised. You never have! The only real politics is art. Art is the only real politics. And the rest. The rest is just sentiment!’ He called in a loud voice, ‘You are a fool! A fool! A maggot crawling in a carcase! And you bred a maggot for a son!’
His father sprang forward to take his arm.
‘Do you think I don’t know?’ Leonard shouted. ‘Don’t you think I realised? Everything! Everything!’ He pulled his arm free with a cry of pain, as though his father’s fingers had closed over a wound. He hurried out to the gate and onto the road leading down through the estate. As John watched him he was shocked to see that quite suddenly it had started to snow.
It fell for several days. Clouds lay like vast ribs against the sky, suspended over that whitened cage where the snow followed the latticed intricacies of streets and buildings. Across the jagged ridges it brought out strange faces and the long, crushing delineation of huge bodies, black giants dormant within the bony contours of the rock. The snow seemed to confirm an unnatural silence about the land.
Each morning Leonard went out to draw. In the afternoons he had started to paint in the York Room. The whiteness emphasised the heavy declivities of the rock and stone, whether it was a small knoll seen from many miles away or a weathered protuberance on the church or the Place: it gave a strange, strutting power to the figures that moved between these black and massive blocks.
There were periods now, usually when he was painting, when he could hear nothing at all, and others when his hearing was apparently unimpaired. If his family detected a certain perverseness in this they never allowed it to anger them as they might have done when Leonard was younger. To the people on the estate, now that the immediate storm of gossip had died down, his behaviour, his paint-stained hands and clothes, his air of absorption, confirmed a reputation which had begun to grow many years before.
The snow thickened. It drifted from low, grey bulks of cloud during the day, and at night the sky cleared and a heavy frost sprang down, tightening its white hold on the land. Then, gradually, the clouds began to fall away, and throughout most of the day a red flushed sun lowered hugely between the trees, tracing a course close to the horizon and safely away from this cold centre.
Some time later Leonard stopped drawing. He began to spend all his time painting. At night the York Room was garishly lit by an eccentric arrangement of lamps, their long flexes held in place by a network of string. One end of the room by the fireplace was illuminated like a stage, the rest merging virtually into darkness. It was in this bright pool of light that he painted.
He worked very quickly. Stacks of paintings began to mount against the walls. The two largest were laid on the floor and he stood over them to work, stooping down in swift, darting actions as if painting itself involved some intense, personal antagonism. One of them was a landscape from the windows of the York Room, looking out over the broad, descending sweep of the estate to the flattened valley bottom. Beyond, it rose to the ragged crust of rock that curved like an arm over the rim of the city. A dark shape like a crown forced its way above the jagged silhouette and penetrated a clouded sky. It was like a body moving frustratedly within its confines of muscle.
The second large painting had been incoherent for a long time: the paint was massed thickly, with the same vicious massivity as in the landscape. It was only gradually that a figure began to emerge
from the cyclopean contours above its head. Beyond it was the strained, stony relief of the fireplace. Five shafts of sunlight fell into the room, huge falling pillars, whitish-yellow springing out determinedly from under the sombre passivity of the darkened ceiling. This interior of the York Room was carved out of the paint itself, a ravaged hollow, the figure pinioned by the violent columns of light. Austen, who periodically came up to examine the paintings and drawings in Leonard’s absence, had identified the single figure from the beginning as himself.
One night as he was working, Leonard saw a dog standing at the darkened end of the room. It moved amongst the clutter of paintings and drawings as though unaware of his presence, only halting when it approached the pool of light.
For a while he continued working, perhaps for an hour, but the dog, apart from relieving itself over some of his work, showed no disinclination to vary its constant, circular inspection of the room. It was a large, black animal, and after a time a pungent smell began to fill the air. Leonard was compelled to stop working. He seemed stifled. Only now, in his stillness, did the animal show any awareness of his presence. It had paused, its eyes glinting redly in the light, to stare at him from the opposite end of the room.
He seemed increasingly tormented by the dog, by its stillness and by the odour that permeated the room. Suddenly he turned round and went to the door and, after some hesitation, continued down the landing and started climbing the main stairs.
He climbed without pause to the top. It was completely dark within this shuttered section, yet he moved familiarly about the interior, hurrying along the upper landing to the gallery where the mullioned windows admitted a feeble light. Here, several parallel beams of moonlight fell on the blank gallery wall. He stood listening for a while. Then, hearing a soft movement and the heavy sound of breathing further down the landing, he stepped into the doorway of the next room.