by David Storey
‘But don’t you feel that you’re obscuring something which is personal by giving it this cloak of objectivity, by theorising? And that you’ve done this consistently in all the behaviour you’ve described with Tolson? That, in fact, you are so aware of what occurred that you can only overcome your sense of distaste and guilt by explaining it in terms of the general corruption of society?’
‘No! No, it was the other way around!’
‘Why then did you kill him?’
‘Because I had to!… Whatever we did we destroyed. Everybody! Everything!’
‘What does that mean?’
Leonard had turned away. He seemed senseless. ‘Oh, God!’ he cried, shaking his fists at the court. ‘I wanted something huge and absolute! I wanted an absolute! I wanted an ideal! I wanted an order for things!’
‘But what does that mean?’ the prosecutor said, singularly unmoved by this display.
‘I wanted to love him. Everything: it was to love him. And as a man, as a human being.’
‘Not just as a man, physically?’
‘No … no. It was for everyone. I wanted to love him for everyone.’
Shortly after this the court was recessed and the Judge called the two opposing counsel to his chambers.
It seemed to Leonard, afterwards, that the trial had only been incidental. The hugeness by which he was now surrounded enveloped everything that had preceded it, so that even Tolson’s death was only a detail of the vast structure by which he was enclosed. It had a completeness, a wholeness, that dazed him, making him so exultant he could scarcely breathe. It contained everyone and everything. It was complete.
As he listened to the closing speeches of the trial he appeared calm and reflective, only turning his head slightly at certain phrases as though he caught some fragment of their implication. ‘… A guilt so monstrous that, like all the other emotions his puritanical mind finds intolerable, it is manufactured into some heartless theory about the destiny of men in general.… He has asked us to look at his crime as if it were the simple illustration of an elaborate theory which he is holding up for our approval.… Asking us to approve of his sensations: sensations he has twisted into a logic that would not only explain with indifference the death of seven people, but seventy, seven thousand, seven million. Every action that this man has ever committed has been a blind attempt to deny his own intolerable conscience.’
After a while, he seemed quite impervious to the voices and sat with hunched shoulders, slightly bored, gazing down at his feet. Only when a verdict of diminished responsibility had been returned and he was asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed did he stand up and look uncertainly around him, like someone waking from a dream.
He gazed at the wall opposite him for a while, then started speaking slowly, as though repeating something he had carefully rehearsed.
‘Whatever my limitations or my weaknesses,’ he said, his eyes moodily fixed on the insignia above the Judge’s head, ‘whatever they are and however misunderstood I have been, I’m absolutely sure that men desire above all things a moral authority. And that it was from a will for moral authority that I acted, and with a sense of moral authority that I saw everything. You’ve tried to judge my actions as though they were subject to the Common Law of the land, whereas the moral ground on which my struggle with Tolson took place was at a level outside that of Common Law. And this is its vulnerability, that the Common Law is separate from and only coincidental with morality. Its single quality is its expediency and not its justice. It is only by chance that what is morally right coincides with what is judicially expedient. What happens when a moral man has to act politically.…’
As the Judge attempted to intervene, Leonard added more vehemently, even drowning his voice, ‘This has been a trial before men when it should and could have been a trial before God. To have found me insane is insanity itself, for you should have tried to determine whether I acted in accordance with a corrupt world, or against the principles of an uncorrupt world. I’m condemned not because of what I am but because of what you are. My crime is clear. It is that you have been content!’
He was suddenly so overcome with a fit of coughing, one in which his face turned a bright crimson, that he had to be helped into a chair.
A short while after his trial, Leonard began to feel that he’d been released. Something now was so complete and whole as to be unbreakable. He was surrounded by solidity, by the heaviness of things. Even the thick, featureless walls of the prison confirmed it. Clouds roared intermittently across the sky, great nervous sheets of vapour, convulsed by freakish disturbances of the air; then periods of stillness, so that all the human sounds that came to his ears, of voices, of feet shuffling, completely enraptured him. Whenever he saw people, particularly someone he had not met before, a new warder, a new doctor, a new minister, he was frequently overcome with breathlessness, as though he could scarcely contain his sense of them, his feeling for them. He touched them, smiling at them reconcilingly. He could touch everything.
Some while later he was transferred to a mental institution for criminal defectives. His behaviour had become so eccentric that it amounted to the continual and open soliciting of other prisoners, and to fits of incoherent moralising whenever he was confined for his behaviour.
In this new institution he was carefully segregated from the other inmates and only allowed to mix with them under supervision for short periods of each week. He became thinner, and increasingly intense, didactic and apologetic by turn in conversation; and frequently, when alone in his cell, given to long bouts of preaching in which he confirmed his discovery of the brotherhood of man.
His behaviour became even more extreme. Unless restrained, he tended to rush at people, flinging himself upon them in violent attempts to embrace them. He would hurl himself against the walls and the door of his cell, and had often to be secured to his bed before any attempt could be made to console him. Here, while waiting for the injection, he would lie straining and crying at his bonds, and shouting the word ‘Love!’ until he was finally subdued.
One night, when it seemed his fragile and emaciated body could no longer contain the violence which possessed it, he suffered a haemorrhage of the brain and, shortly after his parents reached him the following morning, he died.
He was thin and barely recognisable. The bone had almost penetrated the skin and even in death his body seemed contorted by some incredible power. He had a beard and his hair was long, almost white, the face itself so narrow and pale that it was like some deeply-carved piece of stone. The resemblance to their son was so remote that his parents appeared to suffer little remorse or pain at seeing him; more, a sense of distaste.
The combination of horror and shock had the effect of turning his father aside from normal life. He became silent, self-absorbed and unapproachable. He scarcely slept and was haunted by such strange visions that whenever someone spoke to him he was apt to stare at them with an expression of naked terror. Finally, at Alex’s suggestion, Stella was encouraged to take the old man away to the South.
Elizabeth, at her own insistence, was left with Austen and Isabel. She had become a determined and confident woman. In the summer her child was born. It was a boy, with a physique peculiar for a Radcliffe in its size and strength. It had, however, unmistakable Radcliffe eyes, dark and enigmatic. Occasionally, as she watched it, Elizabeth saw in its face the gaze of her brother, quiet and uncompromising. But then some energetic movement of its body would dispel the brief impression and, as it grew, its look of confidence, its peculiar independence, became a source of consolation to her.
There had been some suggestion that Austen should take over John’s place at Beaumont, but after considering various municipal schemes, it was eventually agreed that it should be pulled down.
Elizabeth, Austen and Isabel moved to the South, and were never heard of in the district again.
For a year the Place stood empty, crumbling under the fingers of vandals by day, and by nig
ht under its own aged momentum. It grew more derelict and forbidding, its blackness no longer relieved by occasional lights and gleams from its windows, its grounds no longer maintained by patient and persistent hands. Beyond its fringe of trees and shrubs it seemed to be waiting, crouched, its stone shielded by those dark trunks that grew about it like limbs. Sometimes at night the inhabitants of the nearer houses heard crashes echoing from its empty rooms. But each morning it still stood there whole and complete. It was almost as if it were struggling unseen within itself.
When the workmen came, tractors tore effortlessly at the old stonework. Steel hawsers were clamped round the walls and pillars, and within a few days the building that, in its older parts, had stood for nearly five hundred years was levelled to the ground.
The church too was demolished, its foundations pronounced to be dangerous from subsidence due to the mining beneath; the cost of renovation was too high. Its various treasures were distributed amongst local museums, though the sculptured effigies themselves were broken up. A more serviceable church of brick was constructed and, although equally deserted, it was larger, cleaner and uncluttered by decoration.
The housing estate that had previously enclosed the Place on all sides seized quickly on this last piece of ground; a crescent was laid out where it had stood, and council houses, erected on either side, finally linked the two avenues that had flanked it and its denuded grounds for two decades. All this happened within two years, so that now there is no evidence, except for a slight undulation of the ground, that the Place stood on this particular spot, or that a family, whose history extended over six centuries, had ever made its mark on this hard and indomitable landscape. Occasionally, as men dig in the gardens of the new houses, they unearth fragments of carved stone. These they stack to one side against the low fences, or use to decorate their rockeries.
About the Author
David Storey was born in 1933 in Yorkshire, England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. His novels have won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of fifteen plays and is a fellow of University College London. Storey lives in London with his wife and four children.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1963, 1991 by David Storey
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Alice Ferrebe
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1511-0
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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