by David Storey
The boys were kicking a football; the girls wandered towards the headland, picking up shells, Catherine holding up her skirt, Elise paddling in her rolled-up jeans.
Sheila’s gaze was fixed on the expanse of sea directly ahead; to their left a boat manoeuvred in the harbour, its funnel visible above the roofs of the offices and the fish warehouse that lined the harbour wall. Beyond the harbour, lit by the morning sun, loomed an overhanging cliff at the crest of which stood the sharply-ascending walls of a castle and, on the highest prominence of the overhanging cliff, the square-shaped shell of the keep.
The beach was deserted, the road beyond devoid of traffic; apart from the figure of a man and a dog, Catherine and Elise were the only people in sight.
Sheila turned and, her skirt held absently before her, splashed back to the sand: Keith ran off as the football bounced along the beach in the direction of the harbour.
Lorna, picking up a spade, began to dig.
‘It’s too cold to sit,’ Sheila said when they reached the blanket which they’d set out on the sand. ‘It’s madness to have come on a day like this.’ She gestured to where the girls, in the distance, against the sun, had been joined by the man with the dog. ‘We’re the only people here.’
‘Come and have a game of football,’ Attercliffe said.
They put down two coats and shot the ball in, first at Keith, then at Bryan and, finally, at Attercliffe himself; Sheila, after scraping out a hole with Lorna, eventually got up, kicked at the ball, ran after it, attempted to dribble it, then to intercept it, then shot at the goal as the ball was passed to her first by Keith and then by Bryan: breathless, she ran to and fro, her cheeks flushed, laughing.
‘You go in goal, Mum,’ Bryan said, and shot the ball at her.
Attercliffe ran off to fetch it; he kicked the ball high: it passed over Sheila’s head. Lorna, shielding her eyes, watched its progress, her face, as she turned in Attercliffe’s direction, a distant speck yet showing in a smile.
Sheila, too, was looking up, ‘Did you see how high it went?’, then laughed as the ball bounced along the water’s edge, Keith darting off, flat-footed, sending up splashes as he ran through the pools. ‘Don’t get wet,’ she called and added, turning, ‘Just like you to start showing off.’
The ball coiled back across the sand, kicked by one of the girls returning – Catherine, running in her skirt, kicking at the ball again, missing, turning, lashing with her foot in a spray of water, the ball coiling off, once more, at an angle, the boys groaning, and calling, ‘Throw it! Don’t kick it!’ while, laughing, she lashed at it again.
The ball rose, fell, was kicked on by Bryan, was caught by Sheila and, tossing it in the air, she kicked at it herself, missed, fell down, her head bowed, and as the boys called, ‘Mum! Oh, kick it!’ she rose and, round-shouldered, kicked at it again.
It flew off at an angle.
‘Kick it straight.’ (Keith.)
‘I can’t.’ (Sheila.)
‘You kick it too quickly.’ (Bryan.)
‘I kick it the best I can.’
‘Just like a woman.’ (Keith.)
‘What’s matter’ (Sheila), ‘with being a woman?’
Her bare feet flapped against the sand.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Catherine said. In her jersey, clutched to her, she held a collection of shells. ‘It only puts Mum back in the state she was before.’
‘I don’t want a lecture,’ Attercliffe said.
‘The forecast is for rain.’ She indicated clouds above the headland – below which Elise could be seen as a dot, still walking, her back to them, along the water’s edge. ‘Nobody believes in this any more. It’s weird. You’re insisting on a structure that no longer exists.’
The shells rattled in her jersey.
‘It’s better than her staying at home on her one day out from hospital.’
‘Why didn’t you go off on your own? I despise the blackmail involved in getting us to come.’
‘Sheila knows,’ Attercliffe said, ‘you’re doing it for her.’
‘Precisely,’ Catherine said.
‘In which case,’ he went on, ‘to hell with all your theories.’
‘Doesn’t Oscar Wilde say something about betraying with a kiss?’
‘Oscar Wilde,’ he said, ‘didn’t have five children.’
‘Nor did Christ, but,’ she said, ‘it didn’t devalue his judgment.’
‘It did in my book,’ Attercliffe said. ‘He’d never have been a saviour with a family to support.’
‘The family,’ Catherine said, ‘is a reversion to a time when conformity was all that mattered. Individuals now can be what they like, without the compromise of this.’
She gestured to her mother, as she moved away, the shells rattling in her jersey, and perhaps it was this gesture alone that – once the ball had been kicked and she had been replaced in the goal by Keith – prompted Sheila to come across and ask, ‘What was that about?’
‘Families,’ Attercliffe said, ‘are a vestige of the past.’
By Lorna’s hole Catherine disgorged her shells and her sister, kneeling, picked them up, dropping one suddenly as Catherine laughed and called, ‘Honestly, it wouldn’t bite!’
‘I’m glad we came,’ Sheila said. ‘Though even then,’ she went on, ‘Catherine could be right. It isn’t very real. More an insistence on your part,’ she concluded, ‘than anybody else’s.’
‘I can’t believe,’ Attercliffe said, ‘that I’m alone. I still believe,’ he went on, ‘that a part of this still matters.’
‘And for that,’ she said, ‘we ought to live together?’
‘Because of that,’ he said, ‘we can’t.’
Far off, Elise was waving; her shouts echoed along the beach: the man with the dog had disappeared.
Sheila dug her toe at the sand. ‘You don’t have to sell the house,’ she said. ‘With your money from the paper you could live somewhere else for a year before you get another job.’
‘We’re selling the house,’ Attercliffe said, ‘splitting the proceeds, and sharing,’ he went on, ‘the lives of the children.’
‘The family,’ she said, ‘is all I want. I won’t ask you,’ she added, ‘for anything else.’
Attercliffe said, ‘I’m offering to share everything we have.’
‘You’ve always got the chance of going on to something else,’ she replied.
‘I’ve brought us out here,’ he said, ‘not to argue, but to spend some time together.’
‘The girls resent it.’ She indicated where Catherine had joined the boys and, standing in the goal, was – ineffectually – trying to stop them shooting in.
‘I need a home for the children,’ he said. ‘You need a home for them as well. I’m not asking you to have anything less than what I’m hoping to have myself.’
‘They don’t want to live with you,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve asked them.’ She added, ‘It’s only your insistence that keeps us all together. You have to let go,’ she concluded, ‘of what you never had.’
‘It’s me,’ Attercliffe said, ‘who’s provided a home for the past two and a half years while you went off and did what you wanted. It’s the home,’ he continued, ‘that you’ve come back to.’
‘The material side of my life is over,’ she said. ‘Whereas you have the opportunity to start your life again.’
‘Start again,’ he said, ‘at forty-seven?’
‘Society is geared,’ she said, ‘to the requirements of a man. Not to the requirements of a woman.’
‘Are you two arguing?’ Catherine picked up the ball from behind the goal. ‘I thought we’d come out to enjoy ourselves.’
‘We have,’ Attercliffe said and – picking up the ball as she kicked it towards him – called, ‘IOP to anyone who can catch me,’ and set off running across the sand. In the car, going back, Lorna fell asleep, lying in Sheila’s lap, Catherine squeezed between her and Attercliff
e in the front, the boys and Elise silent in the back. It was growing dark by the time they reached the house. They had a meal; Attercliffe lit a fire.
Later, at the door to the hospital, Catherine had embraced her mother then waited in the car while Attercliffe took Sheila up to her ward. But for the cacophony from the television sets, the place was silent: she began to cry, turning from Attercliffe when he took her arm. ‘It doesn’t seem right. The only freedom a woman has is the freedom to end up like this.’
He took her back to her bed; she opened a locker, put in the parcel that they’d brought, nodded to a nurse who passed at the door, and sat on her bed, her feet by her slippers.
‘If it wasn’t for men I wouldn’t be in here,’ she said. ‘Men have done this to me. Not deliberately. But by being what they are.’
‘I don’t want to leave you angry,’ Attercliffe said.
But for one other person, already in bed, and asleep, the ward was empty: only the noise of the television came from the adjoining room.
‘I’ve enjoyed today,’ she said, ‘but,’ she gestured round, ‘it’s coming back to this that’s spoilt it.’
It was the slippers, Attercliffe suspected, that distressed her most: she pushed them first to one side, then the other.
‘I was wrong to go off in the first place.’
‘I’m glad you went,’ he said.
‘It’s not what you said at the time.’
‘I had other things on my mind. My own feelings,’ he said, ‘as well as the children’s.’
She said nothing for a while; the counterpane covering her bed was ruffled by her sitting down: she smoothed it with her hand.
‘I enjoyed today,’ she said again. ‘I’m glad we went. That all of us went.’
The nurse came in at the door: she carried a plastic container and, on a tray, a beaker of water.
‘Had a good day, Mrs Attercliffe?’ she said, and added, without waiting for an answer, ‘Evening rations, dear.’
Sheila took the pill, swallowed it, sipped the water, and the nurse passed on to the occupied bed, roused the figure lying there who, moaning, dragged herself on to her elbow, took a pill, followed it with a drink and, still moaning, lay back again.
‘Supper’s over,’ the nurse called as she walked over to the door. ‘You should have come in sooner. Visitors out, as well, by now.’
In the car, as they drove out of the gates, Catherine said, ‘You have no choice but to give her the house. It’s the least,’ she added, ‘you can do for her.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Attercliffe said.
‘Since Maurice threw her over, then Gavin, her attempt to intimidate you was her last chance to salvage something out of the ruin.’
‘According to you,’ he said, ‘she’s about to succeed.’
‘It’s only right,’ she said. ‘In addition to which, she ought to have the children. It’s the only chance she’s got, living the life that she had before. The only consolation,’ she concluded, ‘is that her daughters will have learnt her lesson.’
‘I have more hopes of her,’ Attercliffe said. ‘There’s more in Sheila than meets the eye. Difficult to get out but, despite her children’s and her own misgivings, it’s in there all the same.’
They drove through the darkened town and out through the suburbs to Walton Lane; gazing out, solemnly, through the windscreen, it might, Attercliffe reflected, have been a facsimile of Sheila sitting beside him, and when he said, as they approached the house, ‘You’ve always supported the opposite view, independence, rights and self-assertion,’ she replied, ‘Mum’s too old to go on fighting. She’ll only be crushed all over again.’
‘You might wash your hands of Sheila, I haven’t,’ Attercliffe said, and, when the car stopped, and he turned off the lights, she answered, ‘You’re a very odd man,’ and added, ‘You go on fighting for values that don’t exist. And in a way,’ she went on, ‘that isn’t true of anyone else I know.’ She gestured to the house. ‘Everything you’ve built has been destroyed, your marriage, your family, your job, your friendships – even, considering your age, your prospects – yet you go on pursuing values that have been discarded for over a generation. If you lived in America you’d be a joke, an irrelevance, once the novelty of what you’re doing had been exploited. Fidelity, trust, honour: I can’t make you out. You’re trying to light a fire when no one wants it. They have central heating and electric cookers and the boy-scout morality you’re insisting on passed out with the horse and cart.’
She got out of the car and slammed the door: he could hear her stamping up the stairs as he came into the kitchen and Elise, looking up from the sink where – surprisingly – she was washing up, inquired, ‘Had a good evening? I told you she shouldn’t have gone,’ and hummed a tune which was playing on the radio propped on the draining-board beside her.
‘I walked a good three steps today. I reckon tomorrow I’ll manage a dozen. A week from now I’ll be out of here.’
Fredericks raised his head to indicate the confines of this, the fourth ward in which Attercliffe had visited him.
‘You can see I’m getting better. They’re moving me round like a yo-yo.’
‘Do you do your walking in here?’ Attercliffe asked for, with the several screens around the bed, and between Fredericks’s bed and the others, there appeared to be no space to move at all: the chair he was sitting in had been placed at the foot of the bed and he was facing Fredericks along the length of it.
‘They lift me out of here and set me in a metal apparatus and let me loose like a clockwork mouse. “See how far you can run,” they tell me. I’ll give them their due. They’ve got more faith in me at present than the nurses have.’
He addressed this last remark to a uniformed figure passing by his bed; the woman smiled, tucked in his cover, and said, ‘Swanking again, Mr Fredericks.’
‘I’ll swank you when I get out of this bed.’ Fredericks endeavoured to rise then, having thrust down his hands, subsided.
‘Your girlfriend,’ the woman said, ‘will be very jealous.’
‘Jealous,’ he said as the woman passed on. ‘The one they’ve foisted on me can’t be a day over seventy-five. It’s these young ’uns,’ he went on, ‘they go for.’ He indicated three considerably older figures in the adjoining beds: one was asleep, one reading, and one was attached to a machine from which, periodically, he detached a transparent plastic mask.
Attercliffe realised, for the first time, that all the patients in this ward were dying.
Fredericks’s face was yellow, his eyes glazed, his movements slow; periodically, his hand reconnoitred the bed, fingered a fold of the cover, a book, a box of tissues, a sheet of paper, paused, passed on, then paused again.
‘I’ve heard about your job. Pippy Booth came in and told me. You’ll be better off wi’out it.’
‘Financially, or otherwise?’ Attercliffe asked.
‘On all counts.’ He laughed, the sound rumbling in his throat. ‘There’s nought like being in a rut. And nought like being at an age when you can still do summat about it. You ought to be grateful, say good riddance, shake Butterworth’s hand, and bless the good fortune that’s enabled you to start again.’ His eyes, glazed, took in the blankness of the screens. ‘Butterworth told me. Not so much you’d be going but that you and a lot of others might.’ He gestured round. ‘Do summat meaningful with the time you’ve left. Thy’s been offered a reprieve. Summat,’ he went on, ‘I never had. When you see what lies at the end of the line every second that you’ve got takes on a different meaning. The most valuable thing a man can have is to have something in his life that transcends his limitations. I mean to look into that myself,’ he concluded, ‘the moment I get out.’
The dolorous inhalations of the man with the mask punctuated the silence of the room; all they could hear, apart from that, was the cacophony of the television in the adjoining room, an area – like the one adjoining Sheila’s ward – given over to the set and a rank of upholstered, wood
en-armed chairs.
‘How’s Sheila?’
‘Recovering.’
‘Got her own way?’
‘I have great hopes of her,’ Attercliffe said. ‘Just as I have,’ he continued, ‘of you.’
‘I can tek care of myself,’ Fredericks said. ‘In here especially. Don’t look behind. Start afresh. I can’t tell you the relief it gives me to feel I’ve turned a corner.’
‘Why did you never mention I might be fired?’
‘That’s why I suggested an interview with Phyllis. Not a solution in itself, but an indication,’ he concluded, ‘of something different.’
‘It’s certainly proved to be that.’
‘That way, in my view, lies your future. More than it does for me in here.’
‘It’s not something tangible I’m looking for,’ Attercliffe said. ‘Sheila wants to go back to a past she feels she can cope with. I’m still hoping,’ he went on, ‘to bring her into the present.’
He told Fredericks this in order to distract him from the rasping of the man with the mask behind his back, and to distract him, too, from the irrefutable evidence of the swing-doors, the black-and-white tiled floor, the blank, round-cornered walls, the screens, the other beds.
‘Phyllis, and what she represents, has put you,’ Fredericks said, ‘on the proper lines, a reminder, perhaps that the way you’ve seen things in the past is not the way you should see them in the future.’
His head sank back, its momentum as he made this assertion accompanied by a spurt of saliva and a watering of his eyes.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Attercliffe said.
‘That’s right.’ He added, ‘You might, if you like, look in at the flat.’
‘I’ve been there once,’ he said, ‘already.’
‘Did you turn off the gas?’
‘I did.’
‘How about the electric?’
‘I switched it off at the mains.’
‘I never liked living there. Looking out at that bloody church. Religion’s based on despair, tha knows. Listen to the music, never mind the words.’