Present Times

by David Storey

  Accompanied by an equally red-faced woman, invisible until now, he strode across the parquet floor and out of the door at the other end: his feet and the woman’s echoed, with the intermittent squeaking of a pram, in the corridor beyond.

  ‘Any other inquiries?’ The Headmaster looked round the room less with a smile than a grimace.

  A man got to his feet and, with the aid of a walking-stick, set aside one of the two vacated chairs now visible in the centre of the audience, and declared, ‘I, too, was in the war. Not in the manner of our previous speaker, nor were my experiences in any way like his. I am not even a native of this country, and haven’t even fought for it.’

  Round-shouldered, squat, he gazed at the back of the person in front.

  ‘Most of the war years I spent in a camp. I grew up used to having someone standing over me, telling me to do this, do that. I have had two children late in life. They are both at this school. A boy and a girl. In answer to the previous speaker, and in answer to the gentleman there,’ he pointed his walking-stick in Attercliffe’s direction, ‘I do not wish to have people standing over my children telling them what to learn and when. I want them to learn of their own free will, and the things I want them to learn are not derived from books, but from their contacts with their fellow pupils. These things are to do with friendship and equality. Nor do I want them, in the evening, to come home burdened with work which they have to sit down to, and over which I have to stand in order to make sure they do it. I want them to come home to freedom. I don’t want them to look back on their childhood as on a purgatory in which they were obliged to do things they had no wish to. There are many things in life that we are obliged to do, and I see no point in insisting that our children toe the line when they are at a stage when to enjoy life is still the one privilege they have, a privilege which, the way the world is at present, will be over for them far too quickly. No homework, no racialism, no corporal punishment, no learning by order. Life, and our children, are not for that.’

  He sat down to a burst of applause which started, as before, at the back and spread to the front.

  The Headmaster, smiling, raised his hand.

  ‘Any more inquiries?’ He took out his pipe, sucking at the stem before, getting out a lighter, he flicked up the flame and applied it to the bowl. He, too, like Miss Harrington, had crossed his legs: one thick, wool-stockinged calf was contrasted with her booted one.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Attercliffe said, ‘a more formal approach wouldn’t be beneficial to our children, bearing in mind the two extremes we’ve been presented with.’ Adopting the accent, even the intonation, of the previous speaker, he added, ‘How can they exercise their gifts if they haven’t been provided with the means to do so? I have here one of my children’s exercise books. It has an exercise corrected not by the teacher but by my son and, on the teacher’s instructions, he has awarded himself twelve marks out of twelve. Eight of these twelve answers are incorrect and, not only that, contain serious syntactical errors. My son is unaware he has made them. I can illustrate this example from his schoolwork over and over again, and it seems to me, in respect of the supervision of classwork, as well as in the setting of homework, the school is absolving itself of its educative function in order to embrace a more accessible sociological one.’

  ‘Fascist,’ came a call from the back, and ‘Gestapo,’ came a cry, if less audible, and less sharply pronounced, from the figure with the walking-stick seated near the front.

  ‘As Miss Harrington and I have already mentioned, I don’t think we can generalise,’ the Headmaster said, ‘from one specific instance. If,’ he went on, ‘there are no further questions, I’d like to thank you all for providing us with an evening which I hope has been as illuminating to you as it has been to Miss Harrington and myself, and to which I can only add,’ he took out his pipe, ‘coffee and biscuits are available on the librarian’s desk at the back.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why you bother with it,’ Wilkins said.

  Elise stood at the window, gazing out, while Wilkins, standing at the door, the baby in his arms, shook his head at her and added, ‘I keep telling your father but he doesn’t listen. He hasn’t cottoned on,’ he concluded, ‘to what this society is all about.’

  ‘What is it all about?’ Elise inquired.

  She had come over from college, at lunchtime, in order, Attercliffe imagined, to borrow money: no sooner had she arrived, however, and gone into the kitchen to put on the kettle, than Wilkins tapped at the door and, after opening it, came inside.

  ‘This society,’ Mr Wilkins said, ‘is one which, in its decay, wills everyone in it to grab all they can. That is what each one of us is doing, presided over by the unions – who want their share before the cake is finished – the well-to-do – who hold on to what they already have – and people like us who scrabble for the crumbs and end up under the table. Your father,’ he gestured with the baby’s dummy, ‘is a moralist. He tries,’ he went on, ‘to see the decent angle, the one which, in his opinion, will do most people good.’

  Elise had a painted face – so uniformly covered in white (with nothing but the orifice of her mouth and the darkened apertures of her eyes to relieve it) that, when Attercliffe had answered the door, he had failed to recognise her, inquiring, ‘Yes?’ before she, with the same fatuous expression, had responded, ‘Can’t I come inside?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s very moral,’ she said.

  Mr Wilkins inserted the dummy in the baby’s mouth; its eyes closed: it sucked. ‘He goes on about your education as if any of it matters.’ He gestured to the window. ‘All this talk of social concern. The only thing,’ he went on, ‘that turns this world around on its pivot is the same thing that prompts you to eat your food, get up on a morning, go to bed at night, defecate, breathe. In short, chemical necessity.’

  ‘Even love.’

  ‘Love,’ Mr Wilkins answered, ‘has nothing to do with anything except self-interest.’

  Elise, behind her apertured mask of cream and paint and powder, frowned.

  ‘What’s the most terrible thing in life?’ Mr Wilkins eased the baby to his other arm.

  ‘Dying,’ Elise suggested.

  ‘To be more precise,’ Mr Wilkins listened to the squelching of the baby’s dummy, ‘pain. In order to obviate pain, mental or physical, spiritual or material, personal or communal, we make ourselves as comfortable as we can. One of the methods we use is love. Love gives us gratifying feelings. The opposite to everything we’re seeking to avoid. Consequently we ascribe to it a significance which exceeds the significance we ascribe to any other feeling. It takes us out of ourselves. It relieves pain. We give it, even, a divine status.’ He raised his one free hand. ‘But all it amounts to is an impulse to take us away from ourselves and, by so doing, to obviate our feeling pain. It has no significance other than as a characteristic of the species, like, for instance, the colouration of a leaf, or the spots on an animal’s back.’

  Elise put her finger in her mouth.

  ‘Life,’ Mr Wilkins continued, ‘is an egotistical exercise. Some achieve their absolution by self-sacrifice, some by offering no sacrifice at all, but, in the final analysis, their motive is the same: to distract themselves from pain, even if,’ he raised his hand again, ‘it involves, and, for some, particularly if it involves, an absorption in the pain of others.’

  ‘Loving and caring for someone,’ Elise inquired, ‘is just the way we are?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Mr Wilkins sat, the baby’s head couched against his bicep; perhaps for the first time Elise was aware of his apron, a flower-patterned garment which covered his trousered legs like a skirt.

  She smiled and, crossing from the window, sat down herself.

  ‘If our need to love is biological it doesn’t mean we have to dismiss it,’ Mr Wilkins said. ‘It lays us open to all sorts of possibilities. Everything becomes clearer.’

  His gaze remained fixed on Elise’s painted face – t
he scarcely-visible brows, the buttoned pupils, the colourlessly-painted mouth – then rose to her fanged and spirallingly-convoluted hair, sank to her shoulders, her scarcely-buttoned blouse, her tightly-fashioned jeans, her denimed waist, her tie-dyed, splatter-patterned denimed calves, the fringe of denim threads and tatters around her ankles, the fluorescent pink of her socks inside the unlaced fronts of her patterned plastic ankle-boots – and, taking all this in, he added, ‘Life without illusions.’

  His laughter, shaking his arm, woke the baby which, with a bolt-like opening of its pale-blue eyes, a spasming of its tiny hands at the ends of its wool-sheathed arms, suckled more fiercely on its dummy: its eyes closed, one less slowly than the other, a glimmer remaining beneath each lid; it sneezed, the dummy dropping out, its head rising before, without looking down, Mr Wilkins retrieved the teat and slid it back inside the mouth.

  ‘That’s the tea,’ Elise said. ‘I’ll go and make it.’

  She disappeared to the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll have to be going.’ Mr Wilkins rose. ‘I have to cook lunch for one of the young ’uns.’ He added, ‘A remarkable daughter. I can see great things for her in the future.’

  ‘What as?’ Attercliffe asked.

  ‘Qualities like that,’ he said, ‘don’t need a label. My home study course,’ he continued, ‘is enough to tell me that. I’m reading The Poor Man’s Guide to the Universe at present.’ He closed the door.

  ‘What a horrible man,’ Elise declared as she came back in.

  She set down a plate, sat, then rested the plate on her knees. From the pocket of her jeans she took out a knife and fork: a mug of tea she placed on the floor beside her.

  ‘Did you want a cup?’ she asked.

  When Attercliffe didn’t answer she looked up and said, ‘I’ll get you one if you like.’ Her feet were turned towards one another as she balanced the plate on her knees: a mixture of tinned beans, cold meat, coleslaw and spaghetti.

  ‘Did you come to borrow money?’

  ‘A pound,’ she said, ‘if you’ve got it.’

  ‘Hasn’t your mother got any to lend you?’

  ‘She hasn’t.’ She ate quickly, her gaze, half-abstracted, turned to the window. ‘I didn’t understand a word he said.’

  ‘He’s a self-educated man,’ Attercliffe said.

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘No. Not like me,’ Attercliffe said. He added, ‘Not exactly.’

  She ate noisily: the sounds of mastication were not all that different from the suckling of the baby on the dummy.

  From below came the sound of a television set.

  ‘You don’t sound as bad as that.’ She chewed again. ‘I think everything he says comes out of a book.’

  ‘What do you do,’ he asked, ‘if, at the age of forty-five, you find you’ve another thirty years to live and you haven’t any occupation to perform that will be of any use to anyone?’

  ‘Do what Mum does.’

  ‘He’s chosen to study books.’

  She dug her fork into the mound on her plate, raised the food to her mouth, chewed, then declared, ‘She was asking Maurice for money.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘Mum. She said he owed her it. She was using your phone in the bedroom.’

  ‘It’s not my phone,’ he said.

  ‘That’s how she sees everything at present. “Your father’s furniture”. “Your father’s house”. “Your father’s telephone”. We can hardly sit down without her telling us how much it’s going to cost.’

  ‘It does cost money,’ Attercliffe said.

  ‘And how.’

  She wiped her knife around the plate, licked the blade, smacked her lips, put the plate down, picked up the tea, sipped, frowned, then drank more deeply.

  ‘She said he’d promised her everything and given her nothing. I don’t think she knew I was in the house. Are you keeping her short on purpose?’

  ‘I’m not keeping her short at all,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to your allowance?’

  ‘I’m spinning it out.’ She finished her tea, set it by her feet, wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse, and asked, ‘Until the house is sold we’re broke, is that the situation?’

  ‘Not broke,’ he said, ‘but will be.’

  She crossed her legs, sat back, and picked a piece of food from between her teeth.

  ‘I’ll have to look round for something smaller.’

  ‘Wilkins won’t be pleased.’

  ‘He won’t.’

  ‘Strange seeing a man behaving like a woman. Well, like you are, too, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘It’s the price,’ Attercliffe said, ‘we have to pay.’

  ‘The denaturing of men and the reinvigorating of women, though I don’t think Mum would agree with that. She says liberation’s a con put up by men to get women off their backs and turn them into the whores they really are.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Attercliffe said, ‘what she says to me.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Elise said, ‘what she says to the boys, but what she tells us when we’re on our own.’

  ‘Did she get any money from Maurice?’ he asked.

  ‘A hundred pounds. She sent it back.’

  ‘Changed her mind,’ he said, ‘or because it was too little?’

  ‘Because it was too little she changed her mind.’

  He laughed; she laughed herself: leaning back in the chair, she added, ‘It’s an object lesson to her daughters.’

  ‘Don’t you feel you can help her?’ Attercliffe asked.

  ‘We belong to a different generation, Dad. She talks to Cathy and me as if we were all in this together.’

  ‘You could suggest,’ he said, ‘that she looked round for a job.’

  ‘She’d never leave the house. It’s all she’s got. She tells us that more often than she tells us about how much everything costs.’ She kicked out her legs, her body arched, her hips thrust up, her head flung back, her face, with its peculiar powder-and-cream-and-paintwork, turned towards the ceiling: she laughed. ‘I can scarcely believe she’s Mum at all. I look at her and think, “Did I come from that? And Cathy, and Keith, and Bryan and Lorna?”’ She straightened in her chair. ‘You must admit it, Dad. You’ve screwed her up no end.’

  She knocked the plate with her foot, pushed it to one side, then said, ‘You’ve lost your job, you’re too old to play football, you’ve lost Mum, you’ll soon be broke. No one out there,’ she indicated the window, ‘cares about anything any longer, like that awful man said. It’s materialism gone mad, and, day by day, it gets shoddier and shoddier. How do you keep going?’

  ‘I thought you’d come,’ Attercliffe said, ‘to cheer me up. Apart from borrowing money.’

  ‘Despite everything that’s happened you don’t seem either to get depressed or even to disapprove. It’s as if you’re teaching us a lesson, but one which neither Mum nor I, nor Cathy, nor the boys can understand. Cathy was astonished by the way you didn’t react when she was taken in.’

  ‘What do you believe in, Elise?’ he asked.

  ‘Having a good time.’ She ran her hand through her hair.

  ‘You don’t strike me as a good-time girl,’ he said.

  ‘Not good time in a frivolous sense,’ she said. She added, ‘But good time in the sense that working for a living doesn’t matter. Now that it’s cheaper to use labour in poorer lands to make the things we used to make ourselves, the only value left is to spend our energy in living every minute. Like that man said: everything takes on a different meaning.’

  She thrust herself up, crossed her legs and, glancing down, picked at a thread on her blouse: she drew it out, her chin pressed against her chest, her eyes closely focused; smoothing the cloth, smiling, she announced, ‘Having a good time places a value on what you are. That’s the dilemma Mum is in.’ The lower lip was pouted as she examined the blouse again. ‘It’s why you never like my music.’ She laughed, got up, and concluded, ‘I’ll have to be going.’

  ‘Will a p
ound be enough?’

  ‘Unless you’ve got two.’

  ‘That puts you in the same state of dependency as the one you say you despise in your mother.’

  ‘That’s your moral nature speaking,’ she said and – as he got up – took the pound and then the second, kissed him on the cheek, turned to the door, opened it, and was already running down the stairs by the time he reached the landing.

  19

  The school, academically, is badly run. Below you will find an account of work that has never been marked and, leading on from this, of errors that have been persisted in through a lack of supervision.

  He put the pen down and speculated on whether it might be better to type it out: he picked up the pen again.

  Keith has played for the school at football. On each of the occasions that I’ve gone to watch there has been no teacher from the school to sort out the intermittent squabbles, to offer the team advice, or even to cheer it on. I have taken this duty upon myself but the prevailing feeling that the children have is that the school is as little interested in encouraging them as they are in representing it. From a team which, on its first outing, played with spirit, enterprise, and not a little skill, it had, by the end of the third game, degenerated into a quarrelling rabble – greeting my own intervention, as a parent, with a mixture of contempt, disinterest and disbelief: ‘If the school isn’t interested,’ was their attitude, ‘why are you?’ I’ve endeavoured to counter this reaction on subsequent occasions, and I think to some effect, but the point I wish to make is that the same lack of involvement on the part of the staff is reflected in this same staff’s attitude to the academic work done throughout the school: marking is intermittent, the setting of homework non-existent, the supervision of classwork perfunctory. If your own child were at the school would you be content to leave things as they are?

  ‘I was hoping we could settle it without solicitors,’ Attercliffe said. ‘We’ve managed all this time.’

  ‘I’ve already consulted mine,’ she said.