by David Storey
He closed his eyes.
Attercliffe took his hand.
‘Don’t forget,’ Fredericks said, ‘what I’ve told you. This is a door opening, and good riddance to the one that shuts behind.’
15
‘The will,’ Norton said, ‘leaves everything to you. Including,’ he went on, ‘the lease of the flat. It has,’ he continued, ‘another twelve years to run. Read it if you like. It’s addressed to you.’
He handed him the sheet of paper, folded down the middle.
‘You might tell my legatee,’ Attercliffe read, ‘that I’ve decided to sign him on to my team. It’s not a large team, and doesn’t put up a great deal of collateral (seven or eight thousand, or thereabouts), but it is, I can assure him, very select. Moralising has always been my strongest suit and I hope he will excuse this lifelong indulgence and take the dough in the spirit in which it is given. Tell him to keep alert, stay fit and, when he comes off the field, I shall want to know the score.’
‘He was in a great deal of pain,’ the solicitor said.
Looking no older than Elise, or, on second thoughts, Attercliffe reflected, scarcely older than Catherine, long-haired – more so than either of his daughters – wearing a dark suit, a long-winged collar, a tie with a knot as large as his hand, he leaned across the desk to take back the sheet of paper and announced, ‘He talked all the time of living.’
‘What about his relatives?’ Attercliffe asked.
‘A nephew.’
‘Shouldn’t he,’ Attercliffe said, ‘be taken into account?’
‘It’s mentioned in the second paragraph. Mr Fredericks paid him a substantial sum of money some years ago in lieu of what he would leave him.’
‘If he decided to contest it,’ Attercliffe said, ‘I’d not oppose it.’
The solicitor smiled. ‘The nephew has been made provision for. He won’t protest. Mr Fredericks,’ he went on, ‘took care of that.’
Attercliffe got up, glanced across to the window and the activity of the street outside – only a short distance from the paper’s office – and, as the solicitor extended his hand, shook it, turned to the door and asked, ‘What about the furnishings?’
‘All yours.’ He added, ‘I understand there are lots of papers. Juvenilia, he described them, but he’s left them to your care.’
‘It’ll take some time,’ Attercliffe said, ‘to sort them out.’
‘Do with them, Mr Attercliffe, what you like. The flat, its contents, and the residue of Mr Fredericks’s estate are yours.’ Adding, ‘If there are any problems you’ll let me know,’ he closed the door behind him.
Sunset and opening-time
And one clear call for me:
May I not be intemperate
At the Buckingham Brasserie.
Going further back in the notebook he read, ‘I don’t think anyone knows I have a brother. Perhaps my mother and father were mad ever to have come together, she intransigent, self-contained, self-reliant, self-composed, he ebullient, contentious, fractious; she censorious, he licentious; she educated, he scarcely at all. My brother’s resentment of his mother for having produced a second son grew, over the years, into a resentment of me – to the extent of his imitating everything his younger brother did. He even, for a while, got a job on a paper (albeit on the strength of my reputation). In his later years he involved himself in the writing of a book which – worthless except as a symptom of his delusion – took up his life entirely, and for the writing of which, surreptitiously, he sacrificed the welfare of everyone around him. He died – I scarcely need to add – as nutty as the day we met.’
A letter from a solicitor announced the intention of Fredericks’s nephew to contest the will: it was followed by a letter from the nephew himself proposing that he and Attercliffe might meet and suggesting as a suitable rendezvous the Brasserie Bar at the Buckingham Hotel. At the appointed time the nephew walked in – balding, bearded, stocky; dark-eyed, red-cheeked, protuberantly-nosed, thick-lipped (in age perhaps ten to fifteen years younger than Attercliffe himself) – and, having sat down and accepted a drink, announced, ‘So this is where it all went on. I heard a lot of it from Freddie.’
Overcoated, dark-suited, his beard thrust down over a tightly-knitted scarf, he reminded Attercliffe of what Fredericks might have looked like before his disillusionment with television had been announced, three to four years before he’d met him.
‘I realise,’ the nephew said, ‘this is unofficial, but I wanted you to know there’s nothing personal in my contesting the will. The family,’ he went on, ‘isn’t – to me – something you can put down in black and white.’ A small, square fist was thumped against his chest. ‘It’s a question of blood, and the mystery of where you come from.’ He sipped from his drink, sitting sideways to the table, his legs thrust out.
‘Freddie never mentioned he had a brother,’ Attercliffe said.
‘My father made a mess of his life. He was eaten up with jealousy and tried to contain it by imitating everything my uncle did. It’s a familiar pattern, envy of a more gifted younger brother, but it was odd to see the way it finally consumed my father’s life. He tried to become a reporter himself, and spent his last years preoccupied entirely by writing a book which no one in their right minds would have wanted to read – assuming, that is, he’d got it published.’
‘I’m surprised,’ Attercliffe said, ‘you’d want to revive the past.’
‘I want to reclaim it,’ the nephew said. ‘When everything’s said and done, he was my uncle. I have two sons. It’s for their sake that I’m contesting the will. They never knew their great-uncle, though I’ve told them about him from time to time. If there is an inheritance, they ought to have it.’
He finished his drink and, raising his arm, he ordered another, paying for Attercliffe’s when the barman came across, laying the money out from his overcoat pocket, counting the coins, taking one back, then replacing it with another – a tip calculated, in a manner reminiscent of Fredericks himself, with a slow movement of his lips.
‘It comes down to this, Mr Attercliffe. Legally, although you have a case, morally, I’ve a better one. He was my uncle, and he was my father’s only brother. Blood, as they say, is thicker than water.’ He sipped from his glass. ‘It’ll cause a lot of bad feeling,’ he went on, ‘which I don’t mind. I’m doing this, as I say, for my sons. My father sacrificed me in pursuing his fantasy of being a writer. I have a right to some recompense for the family squabble. I mean,’ he continued, ‘you could say my life was screwed up in the past by my father’s preoccupation with rivalling his younger brother and, now they’re both dead, I am morally entitled to whatever recompense there happens to be going.’
‘I’ve no intention,’ Attercliffe said, ‘of disputing Freddie’s will.’
‘You haven’t?’
‘None at all.’
‘He wrote it,’ the nephew said, ‘when he was mentally disturbed.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It was shortly before he died.’
‘Did you see him before he died?’
‘I didn’t hear about it until after the funeral.’
‘I understood he made provision for you before he knew he was dying.’
‘That’s the point,’ the nephew said. ‘If he’d known he was dying he might have arranged it another way.’
‘I think the legality of the will,’ Attercliffe said, ‘is beyond dispute. It’s not my reason for not contesting it.’
The nephew sipped from his drink again, glanced up, and inquired, ‘You’ll be putting that in writing?’
‘You can have the whole of the estate,’ Attercliffe said.
‘That’s very handsome of you.’ He extended his hand. ‘I know Freddie,’ he went on, ‘would appreciate this gesture. Not wanting to cut you out but, at the same time, knowing what you were, how you might react to your knowing he had an obligation.’ He added, ‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is. I’ve been made redundant a m
onth ago and, as far as I can see, I shan’t find another job.’
‘I know the feeling.’ Attercliffe got up from the table.
‘Shake hands on it?’ he asked.
He stood up as well, shook Attercliffe’s hand and, as he turned to the door, added, ‘If there’s ought of his possessions you’d like, I don’t mind you taking summat.’
‘He’s appointed me his literary executor,’ Attercliffe said. ‘If there’s anything in his papers of financial value I’ll let you have it at the appropriate time.’
‘That’s very fair of you,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard,’ he went on, ‘you’re a very fair man. You were a player, weren’t you, at one time yourself?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ve never watched the game, but I’ve heard about it,’ he added, ‘from Freddie.’
At the door, when Attercliffe left, the nephew turned back inside the bar and, some time later, when Attercliffe drove past, he saw him coming out with a woman, arm in arm, the two of them laughing, his flushed face thrust down to kiss her cheek.
‘The man hasn’t a leg to stand on,’ Norton said. ‘His solicitor’s letter will tell you that. All he’s doing,’ he bridged his hands beneath his chin, his elbows resting on the desk before him, ‘is exploiting your regard for his uncle. I can’t possibly advise you not to contest it and, frankly, if you don’t, you’ll have to write me a disclaimer saying it’s against my advice.’ He added, ‘I couldn’t sleep a wink without.’
As bemused by Attercliffe’s reaction as he had been by Fredericks’s nephew’s solicitor’s letter, the contents of which, leaning forward, he began to re-read, he announced, ‘His father was a sponger. It’s in the accounts. I’ve had to go through them. The brother did well out of Mr Fredericks, and the nephew, apparently, is going to do better. With your collusion. It’s not what Mr Fredericks intended and any court of law will say the same.’
‘His only claim,’ Attercliffe said, ‘is because of the family.’
‘If he’d wanted there to be a provision for them he would have said so.’
‘He made a mistake,’ Attercliffe said.
‘How?’
‘His duty to his family was one thing. His loyalty to me,’ Attercliffe said, ‘was another.’
Norton came with him to the door; in a manner reminiscent of Fredericks’s nephew, he laid his hand on Attercliffe’s shoulder, and declared, ‘I never saw you play, but I doubt even in those days that you’d pass the ball to the opposition.’
‘The rules of this game,’ Attercliffe said, ‘are different.’
The flat Attercliffe had found was not much larger than a cupboard. In the main room he arranged his bed, a desk and two easy chairs; two single beds occupied the second room and, in the tiniest, he set a divan.
When the two boys and Lorna came to stay, the first weekend of his occupation, they scarcely spoke; the two girls, having come to see the flat, departed in the evening, Lorna taking her place on the tiny divan and the two boys occupying the single beds. Although they had gone out to the pictures after the girls had left, when, finally, they returned to the tiny kitchen, which adjoined the even tinier bathroom, Lorna, weeping, asked to go home.
Having nursed her to sleep Attercliffe came out to find the two boys sitting by his bed examining the walled-up fireplace.
‘There’s Mum,’ Bryan said, ‘with our bedroom empty,’ for Sheila, the week previously, had returned from the hospital, and radiant with health, was now in occupation of the house. ‘Couldn’t you sleep downstairs?’ he asked.
‘Where?’
‘In the living-room.’
‘It’s hardly a living-room if it’s a bedroom as well,’ Attercliffe said.
‘This is a bedroom as well,’ Keith said.
He was very close to tears; the foreignness of the flat – converted from a semi-detached house, the ground-floor of which was occupied by a family of seven – together with the bleakness of the district (on the outskirts of the town) would, Attercliffe imagined, have oppressed anyone who had come from their own detached, ‘executive’ dwelling, not to mention Pickersgill’s six-bedroomed, neo-Elizabethan mansion: the division of the family into its component parts had never, even in recent times, looked as irreversible as this.
‘It’s not one you have to share every day,’ he said.
‘How often,’ Bryan asked, ‘will we have to come?’
‘You don’t have to come at all,’ Attercliffe said. As they scrutinised the brown tiles surrounding the fireplace, and the magenta-coloured walls with their rectilinear pattern of cabbage-shaped roses, he added, ‘There’s no compulsion about it, Bryan.’
‘I don’t like seeing you here,’ Keith said.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t like seeing you living like this. It doesn’t seem fair. It makes us feel,’ he went on, ‘we’ve thrown you out.’
‘Your mother’s doctor recommends her living at home,’ Attercliffe said.
‘You’ve done nothing wrong.’
He covered his eyes, stooped, leaned forward, and cried.
‘Look here, Keith,’ Attercliffe said. ‘This isn’t the way to go about it. When I’ve looked round,’ he went on, ‘we’ll find a better place than this.’
‘I want you to come home.’
‘I can’t come home,’ Attercliffe said.
‘I want you to.’
He buried his face in his hands.
‘We’ve been through rougher times than this,’ he said. ‘Things, after this, can only get better.’
‘Or,’ Keith said, ‘go on as they are.’
‘Will you get a television?’ Bryan asked.
‘I suppose I shall.’ He indicated the floor. ‘In any case, we can hear most of it up here,’ he added.
‘If you’re out at a match on Saturday and Sunday we don’t want to be stuck in here by ourselves.’
‘After next week I’ll be on the dole,’ he said. ‘The house will be on the market, and we’ll all,’ he continued, ‘be looking for somewhere else to live.’
‘Mum says she’ll never leave.’ Keith blew his nose. He added, ‘She went berserk when she heard about the will.’
‘What will?’
‘Mr Fredericks’s.’
‘Who told her about it?’
‘She opened one of your letters.’ Taking a folded envelope from one of his pockets, he added, ‘I’ve got it here.’
The letter – from Attercliffe’s solicitor – was accompanied by a copy of a letter from Fredericks’s nephew’s solicitor acknowledging the disclaiming of the will.
‘She says you must be mad.’
‘So do all slaves,’ Attercliffe said, ‘when they consider a free man’s actions.’
‘I don’t see much freedom here,’ Bryan said. ‘This place is like a prison.’
It was with this thought that they went to bed; he could hear their voices murmuring in the other room and, after a while, Bryan came back in.
‘We can’t get to sleep for the television noise,’ he said.
Attercliffe said, ‘You get to sleep with the same noise at home.’
‘It’s louder here.’
‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ he said.
Yet when Keith came in a little later to make the same complaint, Attercliffe put on his dressing-gown and went downstairs.
A partition divided the entrance hall in half; after ringing the outside bell the door to the flat was opened by a man wearing a raincoat over a pair of pyjamas: small, balding, with a fringe of greying hair, he gazed out with the air of someone disturbed in the midst of a meal.
‘The children,’ Attercliffe said, ‘are finding it hard to sleep.’
‘That’s their look-out,’ the man replied.
‘The cause,’ Attercliffe said, ‘is the excessive noise from your television.’
‘We’ve always played it like this,’ the man announced.
‘I wonder if you could turn it down?’ Attercliffe inquired.
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The door was closed.
Attercliffe went back upstairs.
‘Has he turned it down?’ Keith leant from his secondhand bed, his head to the floor; Bryan, his head wrapped in blankets, didn’t stir.
The sound, after diminishing, returned to its previous level.
‘You can sleep in my bed,’ Attercliffe said.
‘That’s all right,’ Keith said. ‘I’ll get used to it in the end.’
Voices shouted in the room below.
A fresh crescendo came from the television.
Attercliffe glanced in Lorna’s room: the light, gleaming into the alcove, showed her curled up, almost in a ball, beneath the secondhand covers.
He returned to the boys’ room, put out the light, and went back to his own.
The sound, as the night quietened, reverberated more loudly from the flat below; the occasional altercation of voices continued, a man’s, a woman’s, perhaps a second man’s, then a child’s.
When a little later, Attercliffe’s room door opened and Keith came in, Attercliffe got out of bed and said, ‘I’ll go back down,’ pausing, however, for the television suddenly, below, had been turned off: there was still another hour until closedown.
‘I suppose,’ Keith said, ‘when you were younger, you’d have beaten him up.’
‘That would have been my first response,’ Attercliffe said. ‘Nowadays it’s all I can do to remember.’
‘After Gavin beat you up.’
‘He didn’t beat me up exactly.’
‘Maurice said he did.’ He sat on the edge of Attercliffe’s bed. ‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘when you get too old you have to resort to other things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Lawyers.’
‘The law,’ Attercliffe said, ‘is a world unto itself. It exists apart from reality. I shall never get tangled in that.’
‘Have you seen those people,’ Keith said, ‘with earphones in the street?’
‘Better than playing it aloud,’ Attercliffe said.
His son’s youthful figure was coiled up on the bed, his arm thrust out, supporting his weight. ‘Other people’s noise,’ Attercliffe added, ‘is always worse. We seldom, if ever, notice our own.’