Radcliffe

by David Storey

  He waited, panting from his recent exertion. The entrance to the tiny room was faintly illuminated by the light reflected from the gallery. The dog growled a short distance away down the landing.

  The animal came in very quickly, as though suspecting he had escaped. For a moment it wheeled round the black interior, its head brushing damply against his hand before he rushed into the passage and pulled the door to after him. A second later the dog hurled itself against the door. Then a second and a third time, the air roaring through its throat as it struck the thick panelling. Leonard listened to its efforts for some time, then, confirming that the door was securely fastened, he returned through the darkened building to the York Room.

  For a while he walked indecisively about the room until, drawn by the brightness of the moon, he went to the windows and looked down. A vast tracery of trees stretched across the moonlit snow, a black intaglioed relief. Then, as he drew away, he saw a figure emerge from the shadows of the nearest trunks and walk across the unbroken snow on the terrace. It had evidently been standing there for some time, for it now moved as though determined to restore the circulation of its frozen blood, stamping its feet and flinging its arms. He only had time to identify it as an elderly man before it disappeared in the deeply etched shadows that sprawled across the drive. He turned towards the door, surprised rather than alarmed, as though vaguely he might have recognised someone. The next day he cleared up the paintings and the drawings in the room.

  He stacked them neatly at the opposite end and brought up a mirror from the kitchen. For the rest of the day, and far into the night, he sat painting himself. He worked more quickly than before, occasionally going to the door or onto the stairs from where, faintly, he could hear an intermittent barking. He painted several small heads at first in bright colours then, the following day, started on a painting sufficiently large to absorb him completely for several days. He alternated his visits to the stairs and, later, to the top landing, with brief vigils at the window. It was as though he were expecting someone.

  The figure in the painting was crouched forward, urgent, buried under the weight of paint that he forced onto the surface. The head, turned slightly from the narrow pivot of the body, grew out of the heavy green of its background, a whitish, faded pink face expanding centrifugally around the blackened shells of its eyes. The hair was scattered round the head in a virulent red. It grew there like horns.

  Shortly after this, in a newspaper brought to the Place by Austen, John read a report that, partly due to information provided by a man recently released from a mental institution and who had previously been employed at Ewbank’s, various aspects of Tolson’s death were to be re-examined.

  The following day Leonard stopped painting, so suddenly that it was as if he had completely forgotten the one thing that had occupied him so intensely for the past few months.

  He spent the greater part of each day in his room, occasionally emerging to wander about the building, though most frequently on the top floor. The barking, which John, whenever he had heard its faint echoes, had put down to his imagination, had now ceased. No sound at all came from the small room.

  Several nights later, towards dawn, John was woken by an appalling stench and by the sounds of burning. He rushed through into the main part of the building to find the floor of the York Room already well alight. At the centre of the fire was a tightly-packed pile of Leonard’s drawings and paintings, from the top of which protruded the huge head of a dog. Already encased in flames which sprouted from its skull like curls of hair, it seemed curiously alive, its eyes open, its jaws hanging fully apart, its teeth gleaming. It seemed poised there in the very act of springing. Periodically its body twisted as one by one the flames consumed its painted supports.

  As morning broke the fire was brought under control. It had, surprisingly, done relatively little damage, penetrating only to one other room, Austen’s so-named Braganza Room beneath. Its ceiling was damaged beyond repair. The Jezebel Mantelpiece, its wooden supports consumed, had crashed to the floor and disintegrated.

  Sections of burning shutter had fallen from the windows into the snow, leaving isolated pools of water on the terrace. The five gutted windows of the York Room gave the Place a sudden and final look of dereliction.

  Leonard himself was missing, but by the time he might have begun to worry seriously about his absence, John had already been informed that he had gone to the city’s police station several hours before and volunteered a statement concerning the death of Tolson that contained information which could not easily be ignored.

  36

  Leonard appeared before the magistrates court the same morning and was remanded in custody for a week charged with the murder of Tolson.

  The most impressive and convincing part of his confession was that which described the interior of Tolson’s room at the time of the attack, accounting for details which Blakeley had not included, amongst them a broken glass of milk, an alarm clock and Tolson’s belt which had all been concealed beneath the upturned furniture. It was as if, in its clarity, he described a particular drawing for which he had had a long affection. In addition he had explained Blakeley’s presence at the scene and had produced, finally, the weapon itself. Between its claws were embedded the remains of hair and tissue which, several days later, were confirmed as having been torn from Tolson’s skull. This corroborated the evidence provided by Shaw who, at the initial hearing, stated that he had seen Leonard steal the hammer while it was still in Tolson’s use at Ewbank’s. The contractor’s name was stencilled on the shaft. Shaw also described in some detail the nature of the relationship that had existed between the accused and the victim, and a week later, when this latter evidence had been confirmed by several others, including Audrey and Ewbank himself, Leonard was sent for trial to the local Assizes.

  Now that he was alone for the greater part of each day, his solitude only interrupted at predetermined times, Leonard found that he was less obsessed by thoughts and ideas that normally preoccupied him and more absorbed by certain images and visions. Even when his parents visited him he would turn aside their enquiries to describe to them the large figures hurtling through space by which he was now surrounded. His descriptions of these giants, white and black and trailing red flanges of cloud, and of massive shapes of flame and metal plunging from the sky, were interrupted with demands from his father to explain the circumstances of the confession and the delay between it and Tolson’s death. For John still believed in Leonard’s innocence, and saw his predicament as some hellish aberration of that plot fomented originally by Austen. Yet Leonard persisted in his descriptions, as though he were somehow instructing, advising them.

  Then, one morning shortly before the trial, John visited him alone, making such demands for an explanation that Leonard, who had been absorbed in his heated description, looked up and said quietly, ‘You don’t realise at all, do you, how much I am on my own.… You don’t realise … and not just now but always. How I’ve always been so much on my own.’

  ‘But there’s been no need. It isn’t as if you’ve gone without love or affection,’ John said, more wretched himself as he saw that Leonard was almost in tears. ‘All these things have been available to you.’

  ‘I don’t know what it is. I think there’s something in me which, however sympathetic people might be at the beginning, eventually alienates them. Even frightens them. As if the more I need their affection and spontaneous interest the more sombre and menacing, the more threatening I become. It’s terrible. It’s a terrible thing. It’s like being damned before you’ve even been given a choice. Or like being shown what salvation is the moment after you’ve been told it’s no longer yours.’

  For a while they sat in silence, Leonard looking at his father directly. Then he added, ‘I think there’s an element in us which refutes and condemns our understanding of ourselves, as if perversely we’re determined to be damned. I think that’s the key to everything.’

  Such an outright rejec
tion struck so deeply into John that he turned away, his face averted as though he had been physically assaulted.

  ‘It isn’t something for you to reproach yourself with,’ Leonard said. ‘I think all my ambition, what I’ve had, has been for something huge and impassive. Perhaps to that extent I’ve inherited it from you. I’ve always looked for something like that, something cold and northern and precise.’

  Despite his distress, John was profoundly moved. For the first time he had come so close to Leonard that he felt he could now touch him. Even feel through him. When he asked him about the trial, Leonard said, ‘I don’t want you to worry on account of my loneliness. The strange thing is I’ve found something through it which is irreplaceable and couldn’t have been discovered in any other way. When I was younger, before I met Vic, I can’t tell you what it was like. The absolute loneliness, so that even the houses, the buildings I passed seemed to exude something that contaminated you and made you lonely. So sombre and remorseless. It terrifies me. At times I still can’t bear to look at certain things because they’re so black. As if they’re drained of life. And not just drained, but as if everything that appears to live, that attempts any sort of life is simply imitating some distant and incoherent ideal. Imitating. And it’s the sense of imitation that’s so forbidding. The whole impression of people playing. As though it’s all a deception, and the only person it doesn’t deceive is me. That’s what it is. The feeling that you’re isolated simply because you can’t be deceived.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. How can any compensation arise out of that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it must be the security of suffering. Despair breeds a kind of warmth which is intolerable yet a confirmation of something absolute, something final and secure. Beyond it you can see clearly where the end lies. It’s all blackness to me. Everything. But there are points of blackness so intense and absolute that it’s there I can feel a kind of joyless reassurance.’

  He watched his father carefully a moment, then added, ‘I don’t think you realise what it was I found in Vic. What I almost found. But it was the separateness, the separateness of everything that lay between us. It wasn’t that one of us was good and the other bad, but that we were both these things because we were separate. Vic was my body, and I was his soul. We were one. Or could have been.… It’s the division that separates everything in life now, everything.’

  Although such incoherence frightened John, he asked, ‘If you did kill Tolson … why have you waited so long to confess?’ He was now more than ever convinced of Leonard’s innocence, of the perversion of his son’s mind, through having witnessed the event; that it was, in fact, Blakeley’s crime.

  ‘Why have I waited? It was because I wanted a long, slow pain which I could control.’

  ‘But what do you mean?’ John said.

  ‘I couldn’t have tolerated a sharp pain. Tolson’s pain. One that overwhelmed all the senses. I wanted a slow pain, however intense, so that I could think while I had to endure it. So that I would know. That’s why Christ had to die slowly.’

  John left in distress, though knowing that he would see Leonard immediately before the trial in the cells under the court room.

  When he returned to the Place Stella, after watching his wretchedness for longer than she could bear, said wildly, ‘Why do you torment yourself so much with him?’

  ‘But can you cut yourself off so completely?’

  ‘How can I cut myself off?’ she said. ‘How can I? He’s the only person I’ve ever known who has gone through the whole of life without forming one single human relationship. You can’t cut yourself off from that. How can you separate yourself from something that doesn’t exist?’ And recognising the despair of her logic John could find no way of answering.

  The trial created intense interest. Each morning large crowds of women surrounded the entrance to the court building, and on the fourth day, due to a mistake over the allocation of seats, there were angry scenes in the forecourt. Several women were injured, others arrested, and the hearing postponed for an hour until some who had managed to get into the building were rounded up and expelled.

  The prisoner’s awareness during the trial appeared to fluctuate enormously. At one moment he would follow the proceedings with concentration, and at the next he would gaze up abstractedly at the glass dome of the ceiling as though the room were deserted. When matter-of-fact details were being given to the court he would unexpectedly blush and look utterly confused, whereas when accounts of the intensity of his relationship with Tolson were being provided he would look down on witness and officials alike with a scornful composure. This was particularly obvious when evidence was provided by Colonel Wetherby and the girl Enid who described between them what they had observed of the five days he and Tolson had spent alone looking after the marquees. When several drawings and paintings, provided by Austen, were submitted to the court, he listened blushing to his counsel’s description of them as unmistakable indications of mental derangement. He bowed his head, his hands clutched tightly between his knees.

  The medical report submitted by the defence stated that Radcliffe was a psychotic who under duress became insane: there was an egotism, a concealed obsessive sexuality, and a mania for detail which were only associated with the insane, even an ability to explain all his own vagaries of feeling and action in terms of an irreducible and terrifying logic.

  The report submitted by the prosecution stressed his rationality and intelligence, his strongly defined sense of independence, a thoughtful and careful attention to detail, and a sense of reasoning and argument that was both highly articulate and persuasive. Duress acted as a stimulus to these qualities, sharpening his perceptiveness and self-awareness to a point where it might reasonably be assumed that he could deceive most people. There was no physical evidence of homosexual practices.

  The last witness to appear was Leonard himself. Until now he had shown no signs of real fear, even when listening to the evidence of Ewbank, Shaw, Pilkington and Audrey. Yet as he was led across the court to the witness box he seemed suddenly to become aware of sounds above his head; in the balcony, below which he had been seated throughout the hearing, was a solid crowd of women. They seemed to cling like a huge corporeal emblem to the wall of the room, a giant, prostrated bat. For a moment he faltered, filled with genuine dismay, even turning to one side as if he would go back. Then, flushed and responding to the pressure of the warder at his side, he crossed the room and climbed slowly into the stand. In the illumination that fell directly into the room from the glassed dome in the ceiling he appeared absurdly small and emaciated.

  He answered his counsel’s questions with a curious lifelessness, as if he were either too embarrassed or too uninterested to speak. His expression alternated between boredom and momentary bouts of confusion. Occasionally when the barrister could not make himself heard, questions were written on a piece of paper and passed up to Leonard to read. At other times when, quite factually and in a toneless voice, he recounted incidents between Tolson and himself that had led up to the murder, and particularly one that had taken place immediately before the killing, and he witnessed the sensation they caused both in the gallery and in the court around him, he appeared quite dazed. And when asked to clarify what he had just said, he stared round the courtroom as though he had lost all sense of his situation and was privately speculating on some other problem. Such pauses became more frequent as the hearing progressed, but in no way discouraged his counsel who, if anything, took advantage of the laborious and repetitious method necessary to communicate with his client.

  Only under cross-examination did he suddenly reveal any emotion, when the prosecutor questioned his description of Blakeley as a man suffering from intermittent fits of ‘histrionic schizophrenia’. Then he cried out, ‘I’ve read books! I know how to diagnose things of this sort. He was an evangelist. And like all evangelists he was incapable of distinguishing between destruction and sacrifice.’

  Then later, wh
en he was trying to describe the relationship that had existed between Tolson and himself, he said, almost in tears, ‘The battle was so intense between us because we could see something beyond it. It was the split between us that tormented us; the split in the whole of Western society.’

  When it was suggested that he was trying to obscure something which was intensely personal and distasteful to him by giving it an air of objectivity, by disguising it in terms of some general theory, he stated vehemently, ‘You’ve got to accept that there is a love that exists between men which is neither obscene nor degrading, but is as powerful and as profound, and as fruitful, as that love which bears children. The love that men have for other men, as men, may be beyond some people’s powers of comprehension. But it has a subtlety and a flexibility, a power that creates order. Politics, art, religion: these things are the products of men’s loving. And by that I mean their hatred, their antagonism, their affection, as men, and their curiosity in one another as men. It isn’t that women have been deprived of these things, but simply that they can’t love in this way. They have been given something less abstract, more physical, something more easily understood. Law, art, politics, religion: these are the creation of men as men.’

  After a considerable silence following this outburst, the prosecutor said quietly, ‘Do you think it’s unusual, or exceptional for men to kiss one another?’

  ‘This is wrong,’ Leonard said, incensed. ‘It wasn’t physical satisfaction I looked for, and it wasn’t something personal either. I’ve tried to explain. It was something almost communal and impersonal. You’re deliberately trying to misunderstand me.’