by David Storey
‘Did she ring tonight?’
‘She rang at the weekend.’
‘You never told me.’
‘You were out at the paper.’
‘On Sunday?’
‘On Sunday.’
He hesitated to turn off the television in case this would provoke her into leaving the room.
‘The least you could do,’ he said, ‘is to let me know what’s going on.’
Children’s footsteps rushed up and down, padding, on the concrete road outside: their screams and shouts (years ago, those of his own children, reassuringly, would have been amongst them) echoed amongst the detached ‘executive’ dwellings – echoed, too, no doubt, across the field, to the ramparts of the castle, and out, too, in the opposite direction, to the dark bulwark of earth, of rock, and shale, at the open-cast mining-site between Walton Lane and the river.
‘I have let you know.’
‘It’s two days since your mother rang.’
‘Why don’t you call her Sheila?’
‘I see her in terms of your mother at present.’
She eased herself into a sitting position.
‘You can’t see her as a person.’
‘I see her as someone who is using you in order to lay claim to things she has no right to.’
‘That’s the problem with men of your generation. Women have no life except as a function of male fantasy.’
Elise was studying ‘A’ Levels at the Morristown Sixth-Form College; having failed to have found anything of interest in any of her other subjects during her earlier five years at Walton Middle School (Mixed), she was presently studying Sociology, Political Science and Home Economics. Art, for a short while, had attracted her attention but that, too, she had discovered was dominated by masculine preconceptions. Recently she had relaxed into a subjectivist view of human nature derived, he understood, from Marx, in which humanity was seen as a blank page upon which society wrote its incorrigible message – forgoing, he was surprised to discover, the initial step that indicated society was created by people in the first place. Now, her gaze fixed on the pulp of someone’s beaten head, she said, ‘It’s the reason why she left.’
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘why is she coming back?’
‘I don’t see why she should have to live in squalor just so you can assert your rights. Why,’ she glanced in his direction, ‘you’ll be telling her next she was wrong to leave. I don’t see why she shouldn’t be as free as you are, to come and go as she chooses.’
‘I wouldn’t describe living in a six-bedroomed house, with servants, four cars and holidays in the Canaries at the summer and winter solstices as living in squalor,’ Attercliffe said.
‘I’m talking about the time when she is no longer interested in Maurice.’ Once more she allowed her eyes to drift from the screen: like her mother, she was morbidly fascinated by successful men – particularly those who had been successful in areas she affected to despise – and, but for Sheila’s qualms about having her teenage daughters living in close proximity to her promiscuous lover, both she and her sister would have been living at Maurice’s two and a half years before, a natural enough arrangement, he had assumed, on Sheila’s departure, the two boys and Lorna remaining at home with him.
‘Even Maurice,’ she went on, ‘has had his prejudices formed for him by society at large. If anything,’ she continued, ‘Mum has more right than you have to come back here. At least you can earn a living, whereas Mum, after five children, is debarred from supporting herself in a style to which she might have grown accustomed, and to which, incidentally, in the light of everything she has, in the past, put into this house, she fully deserves. Why should she be punished because of her sex?’
‘You think I ought to move?’
‘Why not?’
‘It happens, half of it, to be my house.’
‘You could, should you wish, have another family. Mum can’t. Not after the menopause.’
‘Would you mind if I turned the television off?’
‘If you have to.’
She got up, turned it off, and added, ‘It had just reached, as a matter of fact, a compassionate moment,’ and went out to the kitchen.
He heard her filling the kettle.
Simultaneously, a door banged overhead and Catherine’s feet tumbled down the stairs.
‘Do you want a cup?’ Elise’s voice inquired and Attercliffe was about to respond when Catherine answered, ‘Yes,’ and, a moment later, appeared in the living-room door. ‘Back, Dad?’ she added.
‘Just before you went upstairs.’
She, like her sister, was dressed in jeans and her hair, once more, was fastened in plaits. Coming further into the room, she announced, ‘I’ve been up there all evening.’
‘I thought you’d been down here.’
‘Do I have to work all night?’
Catherine would take her ‘O’ Levels this year; eight of them, in six of which she was expected to excel: having no complaint with her in this respect, Attercliffe gazed at the fire (the weekend ashes still intact), and said, ‘I hear Sheila rang.’
‘Why don’t you call her our mother?’
‘I’ve been instructed not to.’
‘I don’t see why you can’t acknowledge her as the mother of your children. I mean, we haven’t been fathered by someone else?’
‘With your mother,’ Attercliffe said, ‘you could never be sure. She was always attracted by other men. Particularly those,’ he added, ‘with money.’
‘According to the father of a girl at school you were one of the most highly-paid footballers of your time.’
‘I never earned much more than the down-payment on a house like this. And that was a feat,’ Attercliffe said, ‘considering how I started.’
‘Maurice started with nothing.’
‘He had more initiative than me.’
‘More everything.’
‘He didn’t have more children, that’s a fact.’
She sat on the arm of the settee and said, ‘Why didn’t you beat him up?’
‘I was told it was insulting to your mother. I was told it was an expression of pride. I was told I’d be hitting an older man. I was even told it wasn’t enlightened.’
‘Who by?’
‘Your mother.’ A figure had come in with two swilling mugs of tea and – about, Attercliffe thought, to give one of them to him – walked past him, retaining one herself and handing the other to Catherine. ‘Did you want one?’ she asked across her shoulder.
‘No thanks.’
‘I’ll get you one if you like.’
‘No thanks.’
‘No need to sound martyred.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I think he’s being unfair to Mum. She has as much right to live here as he has.’
Catherine made no comment.
‘You might,’ Attercliffe said, ‘have told me she’d rung.’
‘She asked us not to,’ Catherine said.
‘You approve of her coming back?’
‘I don’t see why she should. You’d only have rows. Seven of us.’ She gestured overhead. ‘It’d be just as bad as it was before.’
‘Was it bad before?’ he asked.
‘Terrible.’
Elise said, ‘I don’t remember it being bad. It only got bad,’ she continued, ‘after Sheila left.’
‘You don’t support her coming back?’ he asked.
‘I’d love to have Lorna,’ Catherine said. ‘I’m not very keen on Keith and Bryan.’
‘They won’t mind,’ he said, ‘as long as their mother is happy.’
‘I can see you’re going out of your way to spoil it,’ Catherine said.
‘I can’t see that I have much choice,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to leave home,’ Elise said.
‘They can hardly share the same bedroom,’ her sister said. ‘In which case,’ she added, ‘we’ll be back to sharing.’
This was a facet of their mother�
��s independence which Elise had not considered: not only would she have to share with Catherine, but, if Attercliffe were to have a separate room as well, with Lorna: no more records late at night, no more pouting, painting, primping, posing, gazing at herself in her full-length mirror.
‘Dad wouldn’t want to stay.’
‘He’s got as much right to stay as she has.’ Spilling tea, Catherine sat down in the well of the settee.
‘I don’t see, just because he has an economic superiority, he should have priority over someone else. Sheila has more rights, if anything. After all, it’s out of her body we were born.’
‘He has kept us,’ Catherine said.
‘That’s his privilege,’ Elise said. ‘It doesn’t,’ she continued, ‘give him rights. After all,’ she concluded, ‘the world is on his side.’
‘You make it sound,’ Attercliffe said, ‘as if I’m redundant.’
‘When babies can be born by the transference of cells, men will be dispensable,’ Elise replied.
He wondered what heading this information came under in Elise’s studies at the Morristown Sixth-Form College – Political Science, Sociology or Home Economics. ‘What about things like love?’ he asked.
‘A conditioned reflex based on biological necessity,’ Elise replied.
Cathy picked her teeth: her gaze, abstracted, was focused on the hearth.
‘It creates a pretty horrific picture. Self-propagating individuals wandering around in a world where no one, in any real sense, needs anyone else.’
‘Need to you,’ Elise said, ‘is subservience for a woman. A world where reproductive necessity is no longer required of women is a world where everyone can be free of the false mystique of marriage, free of subservience to parents, free of domesticity based on the ascendancy of one sex over the other, free of the hypocrisy of love.’
‘In other words,’ Attercliffe said, ‘I should leave you and your mother to get on with it, while I go on paying the mortgage and financing your education, as well as,’ he continued, ‘my wife’s infidelities with Gavin.’
‘Infidelity is one of the old taboos, so primitive, Dad,’ Elise replied, ‘I’m surprised you should even mention it.’
He was growing old: so old he could scarcely remember the vicissitudes of his youth – the austerity, the circumspection, the deprivation, the challenge – even the fervour linked to enterprise, initiative and aspiration. He examined his daughter – propped on the arm of the settee, beside her sister, massaging her cup of tea – and wondered (a) if he had had anything to do with her education whatsoever, and (b) if he played any organic part in her life at all. Perhaps even that one immemorial fuck was an aberration, a conditioned reflex, a residual spasm.
‘Dad’s a dinosaur,’ Elise continued. ‘Certainly Sheila,’ she went on, ‘has left him behind. As for the children: do you remember all the stories he used to tell us? All that fighting for “what was right”.’ She laughed. ‘All that fighting “merely to survive”.’
‘What,’ Attercliffe said, ‘if it happens to be true?’
‘Where has it got you?’
‘It’s got you to where you are at present. It’s got Cathy. It’s even got Sheila. As for myself, I do get satisfaction out of having fathered you. I do care about you and it’s largely on those grounds that I’ll insist on giving your mother, as I’ve offered to already, half the value of this house.’
Elise got up from the settee and, placing her cup on the bookcase, yawned: she glanced at her records, picked one up, was about to make an inquiry of her sister, when she looked at Attercliffe and said, ‘She’s given up her prospects of a career so that you can have a place like this, and when, finally, she behaves like a human being all you see in it is not equity but possession.’
‘I ought to have nothing.’
‘You have nothing, Dad, other than what Sheila has provided. She has no chance to acquire possessions, other than those allowed to a woman of her age and prospects. The world is receptive to the assertiveness of a man, but it’s not to a divorcée approaching the age of fifty.’
‘She’s forty.’
‘Even thirty. Women don’t initiate the way a society is run and, until they are freed from biological necessity, they never will.’
Catherine kicked her heels at the rug; having placed her cup on the floor, she thrust her hands in the pockets of her jeans and pressed her chin against her chest: she jarred her teeth together, her lower jaw tensed, her lips apart.
Attercliffe glanced at Elise. ‘I should start again,’ he said, ‘from scratch.’
‘You’ve still got us. You’re financially responsible. It’s understandable you should turn our dependency into moral blackmail. Sheila’s resisting it as much as she can. I want to help her. It doesn’t mean I want to cut you off. I’ll come and see you whenever you like. But you have no right to insist on staying here if Sheila says she wants to come back.’
‘What do you think, Cathy?’
‘You won’t wriggle out of it,’ Elise said, ‘by asking Cathy.’
Catherine dug her heels at the floor more briskly. ‘Don’t you realise,’ she said, ‘that Dad has to forgo freedoms just as much as Mum? It seems to me they have more in common than sets them apart, except that Mum can’t control her appetite for men. It’s because Dad was manly that she married him.’ She flushed a deeper shade than had Elise, who was reacting silently at present to this sisterly confession. ‘Mum exploits her opportunities and turns them – as she always has – to her advantage, whereas Dad has always given us a chance. All you’re saying,’ she concluded, ‘is that he should allow her to walk all over him.’
Elise leaned on the mantelpiece and examined her sister with an expression – raised eyebrows, flushed cheeks, glaring eyes, a turned-down corner of her mouth – which was intended, Attercliffe imagined, to signify contempt.
‘Men provide one sort of freedom for women, just as women provide another sort for men. It’s a reciprocal relationship, whereas all you’re saying is men should forgo their right to breathe.’
It was a blessing, Attercliffe knew, to have two contentious daughters whose education, to a large extent, was superior to his own. Superior in looks, superior in intelligence, superior in sex, his daughters – if evolution had anything to look forward to – were a credit to him and a recompense for the anguish involved in bringing them up.
‘You spend too much time with Benjie,’ Elise replied. ‘You want to find out what it’s really like. And,’ she swept her arm at the room, ‘if you don’t think men abuse their freedom, and use the tyranny of their economic servility to exact an even more onerous tyranny on the next in line, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Look around you.’ She swung her arm back. ‘Refusing Sheila a home because she revolted against the tyranny of being a wife and mother.’
Cathy kicked her heels again; she picked her teeth, jarred her jaw against her chest, flushed more deeply still, and said, ‘If you turn everything upside down, then it’s bound to look as silly as you say it does.’
‘How is it upside down?’ Elise picked up a record, contemplated the design on the sleeve, and put it down.
‘We’re just studying,’ Catherine announced, ‘how women were discouraged in the last century. The odd thing is the majority of the best novelists in this country in the nineteenth century were women, because, rather than men, they were the ones who led a more privileged life. Even if there were a bias against them, it wasn’t one which, in real terms, and specifically in terms of their novels, did them any harm. For instance,’ she raised her head, ‘the art schools for over a hundred years have been populated principally by women students yet, for all their freedom of expression, there never has been and most likely never will be a woman painter of any interest. It’s something to do with their natures.’
‘What’s to do with their natures?’
‘The fact that women don’t paint great pictures, compose great music, design great buildings, conceive religions, thin
k up new philosophies. It’s not,’ she continued, ‘in a woman’s nature.’
‘You’ve learnt all that from school.’
‘I’ve learnt it from reading Virginia Woolf who says in this half-baked middle-class fashion that women have never had a chance. “Give me five hundred pounds a year and a room.” What’s she want: icing on it?’
‘I’ve acquired my experience,’ Elise glanced at Attercliffe, ‘from life.’
‘All you’re spouting at me are fashionable ideas thought up by a lot of well-heeled women, the majority of whom, in their private lives, turn out to be nothing less than tarts.’
‘You should know. Look at your boyfriend,’ Elise responded.
‘What’s Benjie got to do with it?’ Catherine inquired.
‘Two generations out of the jungle.’
‘Abusing Benjie is not any kind of argument,’ Catherine said.
‘You told me he’s a moron.’
‘I said he wasn’t intelligent. Not our kind of intelligence. He’s intelligent in different ways.’
‘In thieving from shops and using knives.’
‘You said you liked him.’
‘I do like him. He’s full of spirit. Spirit,’ she concluded, ‘and stupidity.’
‘There are other qualities in life, apart from intelligence,’ Catherine said.
‘Such as?’
‘A capacity to give pleasure, to entertain, to live. Simply to be what he is. That’s more than can be said for your stuck-up snobs.’
‘Alex,’ Elise said, mentioning a name Attercliffe had never heard before, ‘happens to be a socialist.’
‘Precisely.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Who’s Alex?’ Attercliffe inquired.
‘Benjie can’t help it if he reacts against oppression,’ Catherine said.
His eldest daughter, still leaning against the mantelshelf, glanced at Attercliffe again.
‘I approve of him,’ she said. ‘I believe in the instinctual life. It’s what the future is moving us towards. All I’m asking is that you don’t use the rationality of male aggression against someone of your own sex. There’s enough on their side, without fighting their battles for them.’