by David Storey
‘That’s right, Mr Chamberlain,’ the two men said.
‘They leave it all to me, my faither and my uncles. Teks a man wi’ brains to do the setting-up. Isn’t that right, then, lads?’
‘That’s right, Mr Chamberlain,’ the two men said.
‘Bloody champions, these two,’ Chamberlain said.
“The men, after four years at Chamberlains, are used to me, and Harry (the owner, now his uncles and father have retired) sets me off with a gang on my own to put up the smaller marquees. I’ve a feeling, in a week or so, he’ll let me loose on a larger one. The other day I couldn’t help contrasting this with the first day I came here: we’d arrived at a house on the outskirts of Linfield with a view to putting up a wedding marquee. The garden was enormous and the tent had to be carried down several flights of steps to a lawn at the back. Because of the weight of the pieces the men grew fractious. One of them, Dalton – a foul-mouthed character of enormous proportions whose place I’d taken in the cab – took objection to the, in his view, minimal amount I carried and picked a quarrel. ‘I don’t like college-boys,’ he said. ‘Do you know what I do with them?’ at which he picked me up with one arm and dropped me in a bed of nettles. Pulling out a garden stake I ran at him. Hearing me coming, he swung aside and – laughing as he’d walked away with two of his chums – hit me such a blow I fell into a hole at the side of the path which, fortunately, full of compost, softened my fall.
I stank like a sewer and screamed like a child but quickly climbed out and ran at him again. He fought me then as he might a man, picking his blows (holding me, at one point, with one hand and beating me round the head with the other). It was only when Chamberlain came across – he’d watched the incident from a distance – and said, ‘Hit him again, Dolly, and thy’ll be hitting me,’ (he had arms like pit-props and legs to match), ‘and you hit Dolly, college-boy, and you’ll have to tek me on.’
The next fight I had I was more prepared, and though I was given something of a beating, I gave as much of a beating back, and the man who picked the fight is working with me now and asks me occasionally for the spelling (and meaning) of ‘difficult words’, not because, he says, he ‘wants to know’ but because ‘he likes to hear my voice’,
The place we’re in is a municipal park in a town you’ve never heard of. The ground is rock solid. In groups of six we stand in a circle to drive in the stakes, our hammers, each with a fourteen-pound head, striking up a rhythm, each hammerhead no sooner on the stake and lifted than the next in line descends. The canvas is laid out, secured to the principal poles by metal rings, raised slightly from the ground, then laced together. Finally, in groups of four, we secure the guys and haul the canvas up, insert the side-poles and hang the walls. As darkness falls the tents loom like animals around what, before we arrived, had been a featureless arena.
Things at home are much the same. I hand in a wage which, with overtime, is the same, after deductions, as my father’s. How are things on the Riviera?”
Bea gives place to Isabella (née Kells), her father the embryologist turned Government dietician who, during the Second World War, created the infamous Kell Cake which, according to my father (who, between 1943, when they were introduced, and 1946, when they finally disappeared, must have fried up several thousand), was comprised of granulated coal, senna pods and a sprinkling of vitamins A and D (the latter, it was subsequently discovered, an antidote to certain types of depression).
A tall, rangey man, with a tongue of white hair that flicked to and fro across his brow, his original claim to fame had been his publication in the 1920s of The Life of the African Locust: the study of a central nervous system, in which, digressing from his theme – that there was, in each cell, an imprint of its previous existence – he had offered the suggestion that golf was the one activity in life that would unite the middle and the working classes: ‘on the links and in the club-house are where true spirits meet.’ The son of a Dorsetshire labourer – the son himself of an Irish navvy – he had worked his way to Oxford and, from there, during the war, to the Ministry of Health – returning to post-war academic life to discover that his proposition that change was exclusive of environment had grown increasingly out of fashion and from where he retired, finally, to the home of his daughter and son-in-law, the ‘Ardsley Ubiquitarian’, as he described him, and where, in addition to playing golf, he spent much of his time teaching science to Bea – the principle influence, apart from myself, on Bea’s life.
‘Mum, initially, was against you coming.’ Etty offers me a drink (which I refuse), Charlie upstairs seeing Lottie to bed (‘He tells her a story, just like you, but is not so long about it’). The curtains are drawn, the fire lit – something which, while the children are being put to bed, I’ve been inclined to do myself (fetching logs from the yard at the back, or, since that supply is now depleted, from beneath the trees themselves). ‘She doesn’t like you coming,’ (facing me across the hearth, curiously on edge whenever she and I are together and Charlie is around). ‘Ever since your illness.’
‘I wasn’t aware of that.’ I add, ‘She loved this place. Especially as a child.’
‘You ought to let Ardsley go,’ she says. ‘Don’t think you have to hold on to it because of her.’
‘I don’t,’ I tell her, and continue, ‘Her father was a labourer’s son, of Irish descent who won his way to Oxford and, believe it or not, into insect physiology. During the Second World War he was drafted into the Ministry of Health and became a dietician. He invented Kell Cakes, “the working-man’s Yorkshire Pudding”.’
‘I thought Yorkshire Pudding was the working-man’s Yorkshire Pudding,’ she says, and laughs, having heard this story a thousand times, and adds, ‘In any case, you’re talking about Gran’s father, not Mum’s.’
‘Bed-time, Lottie!’ Charlie commands, halfway down the stairs, his feet returning to the children’s door.
‘In the first years of our marriage we came here every month. Certainly every summer,’ I tell her.
‘“He was always begging to come up,” Mum says. “To see his mother-in-law,”’ Etty tells me, imitating less Bea’s voice than her tone.
‘What mother-in-law?’
‘“His beloved Isabella. It embarrassed all of us at times. She, of course, pretended not to notice. Father, of course, was always in the yard, or out driving on a lorry.”’
‘In addition to being a quarter Irish,’ I lean back in my chair, ‘your mother is Lebanese.’
‘An eighth Sardinian,’ Etty says.
‘Her grandfather was Irish, her mother the daughter of a Lebanese tart.’
‘The daughter of a Lebanese who, as was the custom at the time, happened to have had three wives. His daughter by his second marriage, to a Sardinian, she came over here to study science – for the daughter of a Lebanese merchant, far ahead of her time.’
‘Corcoran met Isabella on the Riviera between the First and Second World Wars,’ I tell her, ‘and seduced her beneath a palm tree. As a child he took her back there and said, “That’s where you were born,” the tree itself still standing. At least, after one of her post-war holidays there, that’s what your mother told me. It’s what,’ I go on, ‘induces her moods, that mixture of the Mediterranean and the bogs of Connemara.’ My eyes fixed on a space above Etty’s head, I suddenly declare, ‘It’s what drove her back to science. Once she’s discovered a cure for cancer in the non-coagulant properties of the moorland leech she’ll turn to something else. Her and that bloody Albert, “the people’s friend”. Has she asked you to go and see him?’
‘On several occasions,’ Etty says.
‘Before he met your mother he lived with another woman.’
‘Rose.’
‘She came to see me and asked me, would you believe it, if “I couldn’t control my wife”.’
She sips her drink, disinclined to talk about her mother ‘behind’, as she once told me, ‘Mummy’s back’.
‘We used to sit in here for ho
urs, Kells and I,’ I tell her. ‘I told you about his idea that golf was potentially the greatest unifier of mankind since time began. Something to do with the limitation, at any given time, on the numbers who could play it, the space required, and the utter fatuity of the exercise. He was, in my view, locusts apart, completely off his head. It’s only now, in the last few years, that I’ve come to appreciate what a remarkable man he was. He never got on with your Grandfather Corcoran’s mother. “Nan”, as everyone was obliged to call her. A local woman with a ravaged face who lived to be nearly a hundred. The two of them shared a bathroom. The one you never use at the back. And used to call to each other through the door whenever they found it locked. “Are you going to be in there all day, woman?” and she’d shout back, “Go and eat your Kell Cakes!” Corcoran and Isabella and your mother would sit down here, laughing by the hour.’
As Charlie takes a drink already poured for him by Etty from a table behind the door, I add, ‘I was telling Etty how Isabella’s Lebanese and Celtic background may well have affected her blood. The sands of Araby.’
‘Freddie’s still talked about,’ Charlie says, ‘in the village. I don’t think a meeting goes by without his name, in one form or another, coming up. “I wonder what he’d think now if he could see The People’s Palace?” as they come grinning through the door.’
‘I always liked Grandpa,’ Etty says. More than any of our children (who, on the whole, responded more warmly to my father), she would cling to the burly, large-fisted man who, with his lorries and his yard (and, for relaxation, his ‘Liberal Club’), had scarcely any time for her at all.
‘Fighting his drivers,’ Charlie says, ‘if they offered him abuse.’
‘He was driven,’ Etty says, ‘by the poverty he came from.’
‘Like his son-in-law,’ I tell her.
‘His background,’ Etty says, ‘was a great deal worse than yours. He started out with a horse and cart as a youth and worked up,’ she goes on, ‘to a place like this. If anything, his father-in-law despised him.’
‘Your Great-Grandfather Kells,’ Charlie says, ‘fell out with a fellow-Mick. Didn’t Freddie’s father have a horse and cart, and didn’t Freddie himself take over? When he came from Linfield to Ardsley he moved into lorries.’
‘I’ve a letter I ought to write,’ I suddenly announce. ‘And notes I ought to make. If Etty is going to write her book I intend to give her every help.’
‘I’m writing nothing of the sort,’ she says.
‘I keep telling her,’ says Charlie. ‘She ought to write something. You know what they say about Ardsley? “First thy frizzles, then thy fries, then, if thy still hast nowt, thy dies.”’
‘That’s when the pit was closed,’ she says. ‘We’re not in that situation, my dear, ourselves.’
‘I’ve a meeting at the Club,’ he says, ‘at nine.’ (The Labour Club, ironically, is next door to the former Liberal Club in the village).
‘What about this time?’ Etty says.
‘Do we oppose the Regional Health Board in the closing down of the Fever and Isolation at Sneighton or the Maternity and Lying-In at Swanley?’
‘The Fever and Isolation. Life before death,’ Etty tells him.
‘Wait till we have the fever and need the isolation,’ Charlie says, stooping to embrace her.
I see a bulky figure stooping over Isabella before he goes off with her father to golf (the old man was playing at the age of eighty-seven, ‘determined,’ as he put it, ‘to outlive that bloody Nan’), kissing her not on the mouth but the top of her head, nestling his black moustache in her coppery hair, while Isabella’s eyes, unfathomed, gaze at me: ‘Will you be long?’
‘Just give it a knock-about, Bella,’ Corcoran says, calling, ‘Are you ready, Father?’ as Kells, dragging his bag (‘That bloody woman’s in the bathroom’), comes grumbling down the stairs.
‘I liked him,’ Etty says. ‘Everything about Grandpa was larger than life, and therefore, of course,’ she goes on, ‘more real. Whatever we disliked about his views, unlike some he earned them.’
“You won’t believe this, of course, as you float on your lilo (is it called?) and pedal your pedallo (is it called?) and drink in the sun (is it called?), along with the young men’s looks (are they called?), but most evenings now I’m working on a novel – about a woman longing to escape from industrial confinement – a surrogate, no doubt, you’ll say, for me. Since the house is crowded with brothers, parents and me, I write it on the toilet (the only place to sit in the bathroom, and the only place I can be alone). In addition, I am painting (when everyone has gone to bed) on pieces of tenting canvas purloined from Chamberlains. Everyone, of course, complains of the smell, just as they complain of the time I spend in the bathroom (of my giving up my ‘career’, of my consorting with ‘riff-raff’) – of, in short, as I’m told every day, ‘ruining my life’.
P.S. I have forfeited a paragraph of The Fox and the Hounds to write all this – not, I’m sure, a promising title, but I’m sure you will appreciate how far, for you, I am prepared to go.”
‘I don’t know what you’ve to complain about,’ I tell her. ‘He’s on the Regional Health Board. He’s Chairman of the Constituency Labour Party. He’s on the parents’ committee at Lottie’s school, is about to become a governor, and has been asked to stand for parliament when the present member retires, or they’ve even offered to kick him out and put Charlie in at the next election.’
Her face is flushed: my presence in the house, where I notice so much, oppresses her. ‘Get rid of me,’ I tell her, ‘in a book,’ to which she replies, ‘All it would do is tie me closer,’ at which, to my surprise, she dashes from the room.
When I go to her room I find her lying on her bed (as I used to in the old days, after one of our ‘discussions’ to do with school or work or friends or, more potently – and acrimoniously – with ‘ideas’): on this occasion, however, it’s not face down.
‘Would you like me to leave?’ I ask, and when she doesn’t reply, I add, ‘I’d welcome going back. Taravara will be lost without me. The street’s full of burglars, prostitutes and drug-dealers. As far as the council’s concerned I’m the only one who gives it respectability.’
‘You’re not supposed,’ she says, ‘to live on your own.’
‘Who says?’
‘Bryan.’
‘Who’s Bryan?’
‘Our G.P.’ She turns, her red-flushed cheeks half-hidden by the bed. ‘The doctor who examined you.’
‘All he knows of me,’ I tell her, ‘is from the one examination.’
‘He’s been briefed on the phone. And Maidstone,’ she says, ‘has faxed him your notes.’
‘I’m stronger,’ I tell her, ‘than Maidstone makes out. He’s simply using comparable models. Such-and-such had symptoms like you and look what happened to him.’
‘If you leave me alone,’ she says, ‘I’ll be all right.’
‘What about a book on Donatello? Viklund said your doctoral thesis was the best he’d ever read. Or Fra Angelico. Or della Francesca who, like Rossini several centuries later, inexplicably gave up at the height of his career. Or Domenchino, whose gentility aroused the wrath of everyone who knew him. Not unlike one or two I could mention today. Or the Perfect Draughtsman, Andrea del Sarto. Fra Lippo Lippi. Or Signorelli.’
To each, however, she shakes her head.
‘I know what I can do, and I’m doing it to the best of my ability,’ she says.
In this room lay Isabella, married for forty-five years to a man whom, though she loved, she considered a ‘privateer’ (‘my brigadoon, my monster’).
‘Alternatively, your whole career leads up,’ I tell her, ‘to the illumination you can throw on your mercurial and much-gifted Dad.’
‘If your work’s failed,’ she says, ‘to achieve the recognition it deserved, what will mine be worth in fifty years?’
Sitting on the bed I say, ‘You can’t judge things like that.’
‘You ha
ve in the past. You still do,’ she tells me.
‘Failure of that sort,’ I tell her, ‘doesn’t count.’
We can hear Glenda and Lottie stir in their sleep, and the passing of a car in the road below the house. ‘In those years,’ I add, ‘I was showing off. In the past five years,’ I go on, ‘I’ve had to pay the price.’
Something in my voice causes her, after a while, to turn her head: she looks at me directly. She wipes her wrist against her cheek and, reluctant to give her the handkerchief from my pocket, unwashed for several weeks, I pull out a corner of the sheet and give her that.
‘Price?’
‘There is no greater crime,’ I tell her. ‘All religions are based on it.’
She shakes her head, with the same dark, liquefacient eyes she had, as a child, when she listened to my stories.
‘You children are the most positive thing that has happened in my life. I can’t bear to see you unhappy,’ I add.
She bites her lip – an habitual gesture – whitening the skin beneath her mouth.
‘I’m not clinging on,’ I tell her. ‘I’m all for you standing on your own two feet. It’s merely the impatience of the shipwright, wishing to see his vessel afloat. I was exactly the same with plays and novels, paintings and drawings. You’ve read the last poems of Buonarroti? “Evil has prevailed,” he came to the conclusion, despite the Dying Slave, despite the Sistine Chapel. Despite the Dead Christ and His Mother.’
She lay back on the bed.
‘That sounds very much,’ she says, ‘like God.’
‘Freewill is a very big thing in my book, Etty. For years I went round as if the price exacted had been too much. “The train to Buchenwald,” I said. Now, of course, I shake my head.’
An owl hoots from the Rectory roof (across the old wall against which, in the old days, peaches grew). Down in the village, at the Labour Club, Charlie, I presume, is chairing his meeting.
‘I’m very proud of you,’ I tell her. ‘I’m very proud of Charlie.’