Present Times

by David Storey

  His metal-capped boots were tapped together.

  ‘If I wasn’t here I wouldn’t have believed it. To have plucked’ – he raised one hand above his head – ‘something out of the air.’ He laughed. ‘A once in a lifetime chance!’

  ‘She can make it difficult,’ Norton said, ‘for a very long time.’

  His hands clasped on the top of his head, he sat behind his desk in a manner reminiscent of Towers – though without his feet propped up before him.

  The clatter of a typewriter, together with the ringing of a telephone, came from the outer office.

  ‘Her solicitor,’ he went on, ‘will advise her to stall for as long as she can. The debatable point being how much and to what degree a redundancy payment constitutes an income. That,’ he lowered his hands to the folder before him, ‘could take as long as a year.’

  Attercliffe said, ‘By which time I’ll be broke and she’ll have to leave the house.’

  Folding back his hair – a frothy mass through which the light from the window shone (a view of the street leading to the eponymous Norton Square) – he said, ‘It pays her to procrastinate in the hope you’ll get another job.’ He added, ‘And in the knowledge that, the longer she stays there, the more difficult it’s going to be for you to get her out.’ He tapped the folder. ‘She’s suggested, for instance, you could easily travel the country looking for work while she looks after the children.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to argue on my behalf?’ Attercliffe asked.

  ‘You know her situation. Although she’s agreed to give you a key she is in her rights not to allow anyone to come to the house with a view to buying it without her permission.’

  The telephone rang on his desk; he picked it up, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and, turning in his chair, still speaking, gazed directly to the window.

  ‘She’s a very determined woman.’ He replaced the receiver. ‘She’s acquired a great deal of your obduracy,’ he went on. ‘I suppose you shouldn’t complain.’

  ‘Her occupation of the house,’ Attercliffe said, ‘increases her morbidity. She sees herself sitting there, being kept by me, until the children have left. Which, in Lorna’s case, will be another fifteen years.’

  ‘Divorce her.’

  ‘Divorce,’ Attercliffe said, ‘is not what I wanted.’

  ‘You’ll have to make your mind up,’ Norton said. ‘Something you haven’t done for the past three years.’

  Voices came from the outer office.

  ‘The sooner we finalise that,’ he added, rising, ‘the sooner you can get her out.’

  21

  The floor of the room was marked out with tape; it ran off in two directions: a girl, stooped, in jeans and a sweat-shirt, was cutting a last strand of it with scissors, and sticking it down.

  A table and chairs were arranged along one side of the room: it was from here Attercliffe had watched Towers rehearsing with Phyllis Gardner; the interior was a windowless crypt, with a trampled yard outside.

  There were twenty-two actors and three stage-staff: a square-shouldered, close-cropped figure wearing a corduroy skirt and a cardigan who was sitting beside Attercliffe at the table writing notes in a script, the girl in the sweat-shirt sticking down the tape, and Meg, in jeans and a sweater.

  Towers could be heard in the hallway speaking on a telephone, his voice obscured by the roar of the traffic since, evidently, the outer doors had not been closed.

  The actors, moving around the chairs, came to the table, inquired about the text, consulted the corduroy-skirted assistant, talked to Meg, and drifted off to the alcove at the side where the sweat-shirted girl, having completed her taping of the floor, had started to supervise the making of coffee.

  Towers came in; he was wearing, in addition to his metal-capped boots, a pair of corduroy trousers, a three-quarter-length jacket with a fur-lined hood, and, beneath the jacket, a Fair Isle sweater.

  ‘The designer won’t be here for us to look at the set. His car has failed to start this morning.’ He shook Attercliffe’s hand and added, ‘Have you had a cup of coffee?’ then called to the room, ‘Gather round and we’ll look at Jenny’s floor-plan.’

  A chart was opened on the table: the items drawn on the plan were pointed out by Towers, a grubbily-nailed finger indicating the entrances and exits, the position of the masseur’s table, the benches, the bath. He crossed to the tapes on the floor, paced along each one in his metal-capped boots, suggested where the principal playing-areas for each of the scenes might be, returned to the table, took off his jacket, took off, also, one of his boots, felt in the sole, then, receiving a cup of coffee from the sweat-shirted girl, invited the actors to sit in a ring of chairs set around the table and proposed that each one of them, in turn, should announce his name and the character he was playing. He introduced himself, his corduroy-skirted assistant, whose name was Jenny, the sweat-shirted girl, whose name was Ann – and finally Meg who, picking up a file, called, ‘If there’s nothing else I’ll go back to the theatre,’ at which point Towers, leaning over the table, took up a script, opened it and began to talk about the play.

  He described the action – before and during and after a match – the nature of the game itself, the characters it attracted, the attitudes of mind it encouraged, asked if there were any questions – several of which he invited Attercliffe to answer – and, replacing his boot, suggested they might open the scripts and begin the play’s first reading.

  As they read, Towers gazed to the space behind the actors’ backs, and at the area of the floor between the taped-off sections of the set itself. The largest and the oldest of the actors, a dishevelled-looking man with tiny eyes and a minuscule nose, appeared, as the reading continued, to fall asleep; periodically, his head jerked upwards.

  When it came to the occasion when he was obliged to read, the voice of Jenny called, ‘Felix,’ and as his head came up and a script – much creased and thumbed and folded – was opened on his knees he called, ‘“Hope I’m not intruding, Danny. Thought I’d have a word.”’

  The actors laughed; the assistants laughed: Attercliffe laughed himself.

  Phlegm rattled in the speaker’s throat: the intonation of his voice was deep.

  ‘“Chilly in here. That fire could do with a bit of stoking.”’

  The actors laughed again; Towers laughed: Jenny and Ann joined in.

  ‘“Just to wish you good luck, lads.”’

  ‘“Thanks,”’ several of the actors said together.

  ‘“Fair play, tha knows, alus has its just rewards.”’

  The actors laughed again.

  ‘“Play like I know you can play.”’ The mouth, as tinily-featured as the nose, was pursed. ‘“There’ll not be one man disappointed.”’ The reddened eyes glanced up. ‘“Any grunts and groans? Any complaints? No suggestions?”’

  ‘“No, sir,”’ several of the actors answered.

  ‘“The club secretary here’ll be in his office afterwards, if there’s anything you want. Play fair. Play clean. May the best team win.”’ He raised a small, short-fingered hand and revealed the frayed cuff not only of his overcoat but of the shirt beneath. ‘“Good luck.”’

  Lowering his hand, he thumbed through his script, found a passage, inserted his finger, closed his eyes – and appeared once more to fall asleep.

  ‘What I like about your play – I am speaking, I take it, to the author? You are the man who wrote it? You must tell me if I’ve been misled – is the variety of its characters. You don’t often get that in contemporary drama, which goes in much more for social types – young, old, rebellious, and so forth. Whereas all yours, as far as I can see, first and foremost, are human beings.’ He leant on the bar: folds of fat projected from beneath his sharply-pointed chin and above the velvet collar of his overcoat.

  Other figures jostled at the bar, including, further along, the bulky figure of Towers talking to Meg, Ann and Jenny, but Attercliffe’s companion appeared as oblivious to them as he was to his surroundin
gs.

  He belched, tapped his chest, and added, ‘Richness is the key to life. I am speaking of cash as well as the theatre.’ He belched again, drank and, as he emptied his glass and Attercliffe offered him another, announced, ‘I could see you were a sport when you came in the room. I’m not often wrong on first impressions.’

  Workers from the nearby offices of the Metropolitan District Council pressed to the bar, or sat at the crowded tables in the space between the bar itself and the door.

  Felix, his overcoat unbuttoned and revealing a stained, double-breasted, pin-stripe suit, a light-grey tie and a wrinkled shirt, the collar of which – obtruded upon by his swelling neck – was dark with grease, replaced his empty glass and, picking up a full one, said, ‘I made a fortune once, and lost it, not in a day, but in under a year. That was when I was young and idealistic. I ran a theatre. In the provinces. Actor-managers went out of fashion. The ones that could manage could never act, and the ones that could act could never manage. I – my name is Mason – fell between.’ He lowered his glass, took a drink, took a second, took a third, swallowing loudly, and added, ‘Whereas I could act as well as I could manage, or, conversely, manage as well as I could act, I could never do the two together: “To beer or not to beer”, and all the time I was gazing at the stalls: “Twelve in the ten and sixpennies, sixteen in the eight and nines, and twenty-four in the five and eights. That comes to how much altogether?” and afterwards, in the manager’s office, instead of adding the accounts, I was giving notes: “Too close in that scene, and too distant in the other”, whereas what I should have been doing was seeing how much was not left over from twenty-five pounds, sixteen shillings and twopence threefarthings when my expenses came to twenty-seven pounds, two shillings and eight.’

  He drained his glass, set it down and announced to the barman, ‘Same again for my friend and me,’ and, to Attercliffe, continued, ‘My wife was an actress. She was a demon.’ He tapped his head. ‘Mentally afflicted.’

  He turned to the bar, looked along it, tapped a coin on the counter, and called, ‘Over here, barman, when you’ve got the time.’

  ‘We lived,’ he added to Attercliffe, ‘like cat and mouse for twenty-five years. I tried to kill her seventeen times. Once with a knife, twice with poison, three times with gas, four with electricity, and a countless number of occasions by strangulation. The problem was, I have very small hands while she, unfortunately, had a very thick neck. Once,’ his gaze reverted to the ceiling, ‘I hit her with a bottle, another time, having wrapped her in a carpet, I drowned her in a bath. I had just rung up the police to inform them she had had a serious accident when she walked into the room and shouted down the telephone, “He tried to kill me.” I had a hell of a job explaining that.’

  The barman approached along the counter; the drinks were poured: the coin in the actor’s hand was laid on the bar.

  The barman repeated the price.

  ‘That’s all I’ve got on me, steward.’ The actor’s hand was fisted now beside his glass.

  Attercliffe laid a note on the counter.

  ‘My friend,’ the actor said, ‘has come up trumps. It’s a good job,’ he went on, ‘I had him with me,’ and added, ‘This is the well-known playwright whose name I can’t recall but whose reputation you will hear about in a very short time,’ and, signalling with his glass to Attercliffe, drank, laid the glass down, gasped, belched, and declared, ‘The murder of one’s wife is the easiest crime to get away with. Opportunity? Always there. Alibi? Always loved her. Gain? Immeasurable. 99.9 per cent of all domestic crime is husbands murdering their wives yet, because of the circumstances, you never hear a word about it.’

  Walking beside Attercliffe, rapping his metal-tipped toes on the pavement, Towers said, ‘Been telling you about his wife?’ and added, ‘It’s all part of his one coin tapped on the counter routine. “That’s all I’ve got, barman.” Quite a card.’

  ‘Isn’t he too drunk to work this afternoon?’ Attercliffe asked.

  ‘I won’t get to him till the end of the week. That’s why he’s started. He’ll have sobered up by then.’

  ‘Has he killed his wife?’ he asked.

  ‘She died a few years ago. In a car crash. Felix himself was driving.’

  They re-entered the crypt where the actors who started the first act were drinking coffee.

  The scripts were reopened; the play began: the club-cleaner came in and prepared the jerseys. The first of the players arrived to change for the match.

  He woke in a sweat; the air, nevertheless, was cool, the top of the window was open.

  The flat was small; how small the quietness of the night made clear: he could hear the children breathing – the stuffiness of Loma’s nose, the murmur of Keith as he talked in his sleep.

  The telephone rang downstairs; he heard the banging of a door, and he had already reached the landing when a figure emerged from the flat below: crossing the hall it lifted the receiver, called, ‘Yes?’ and, aware of Attercliffe approaching on the stairs, added, ‘You know what time it is?’

  Wilkins’s daughter, clad in a nightdress, laid the receiver on top of the coin box and, returning to the flat door, shouted, ‘It’s not me they’re ringing but your friend upstairs,’ whereupon a light went on inside the flat, followed, a moment after that, by the sound of the baby crying.

  ‘Is that you?’ Sheila’s voice inquired as the door slammed behind Attercliffe’s back. ‘I’ve just had a call from Cathy.’

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Some place she’s gone to live at.’

  ‘What place?’

  She said, ‘That’s why I’m ringing. She’s gone with Benjie.’

  ‘Did she give you an address?’

  ‘She says no one is to go there.’ A sheet of paper rustled at the other end.

  ‘I haven’t got a pencil,’ Attercliffe said. ‘I shan’t be a minute.’

  As he went upstairs a further altercation took place inside the flat: crockery ricocheted across a floor.

  ‘What’s all the noise?’ Sheila said when he picked up the phone again.

  ‘That’s the disturbance,’ he said, ‘caused by your call,’ and as she dictated the address he added, ‘Did she say she was leaving school?’

  ‘She says she will live exactly as she does at home.’

  ‘What about school?’

  ‘She says she intends to go on with that.’

  ‘I’ll go and see her tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘She asked that you didn’t.’

  ‘She prefers you to go?’ he asked and, to the sound of someone colliding with the back of the flat door – at which the banisters, the stairs and the wall of the house vibrated – he repeated the question.

  ‘Neither of us is to go,’ she said.

  ‘What does she expect us to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Understand.’

  ‘I do understand.’

  The voices of Wilkins and his daughter, together with those of several others inside the flat, obliterated Sheila’s answer.

  ‘Has she taken her pills?’

  ‘What pills?’

  ‘Her anti-reproduction pills.’

  ‘She’s taken everything,’ she said, ‘apart from her clothes.’

  ‘If she hasn’t taken her clothes she can’t be serious in leaving,’ he said.

  ‘She’s not interested in clothes,’ Sheila said, her voice drowned, once more, by the voices from the flat. ‘She’s taken what she wanted.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll steal any clothes she needs.’

  ‘That’s likely.’

  ‘And food. And books. And medication. Even the money she needs at school for dinners. If it’s a depressed area there must be plenty of old women knocking about. Probably the best day to visit her is pension day, then Benjie might be busy and not present to distract her.’

  ‘Are the children safe?’

  ‘What children?’

  ‘Our children!’ her voice screamed at the other end. ‘
What are they doing?’

  ‘The children are asleep,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t you find somewhere else to live?’

  ‘It’s difficult,’ he said, ‘so long as my wife insists on tying up all our resources in a house, the occupation of which she reserves exclusively for herself.’

  There was silence at the other end: there was silence, too, in the flat behind.

  ‘What’s going on, Dad?’ came Bryan’s voice as, pyjamaed, flat-footed, he appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Attercliffe said, at which Sheila said, ‘What’s all right?’

  ‘I’m talking to Bryan,’ he said.

  ‘I thought he was asleep!’ her voice wailed from the other end.

  Attercliffe said, ‘He’s woken up.’

  ‘If anything happens to those children I shall hold you responsible,’ she said. ‘They’ve told me about that horrible flat and the horrible people who live downstairs.’

  The door behind him opened; Wilkins came out – dressed in his shirt, his trousers and his coat, and carrying a pair of shoes.

  Opening the outer door, he nodded, drew on the shoes, closed the door, and set off down the street.

  ‘Elly’s asleep,’ Sheila said. ‘I’ve no one here to talk to.’

  ‘Call up Maurice,’ Attercliffe said.

  There was no answer at the other end.

  ‘Or Gavin.’

  There was still no answer.

  ‘I’ll ring you in the morning,’ he said as the light went out beneath the door of the flat and in the glazed panel which formed the upper quarter of the hall partition.

  ‘Are you going to see her?’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘Who’ll look after the children?’

  ‘I’ll leave Keith and Bryan in charge.’