by David Storey
‘He’s everything, at one time, you used to despise,’ she interrupts. ‘“The socialiser,” you described him.’
‘The outsider,’ I tell her, ‘isn’t outside by choice. He’s longing, if not to be asked, to find a way back in. Because the everyday world was never for me, I could see the value it had for other people. Charlie is enhanced by fitting in. He brings an expansiveness to it which is normally associated only with those who don’t, or can’t fit in at all. He’s unique. Just as,’ I conclude, ‘you used to think I was.’
“It’s very cold, as a matter of fact,” [Bea had written], “and I don’t spend every day sitting on the beach. I’m doing, you’ll be pleased to hear, a great deal of swotting. Father says I’m not here solely to enjoy myself – something with which, incidentally, I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve got reams and reams of schoolwork and am currently writing an essay entitled, ‘The Starving Third of the World’. Plenty, or even a sufficiency, is not something I shall ever take for granted. I thought your description of sitting on the toilet, writing, was a form of childishness which characterises everything you’ve written. I hope the same quality is not evident in your novel. Don’t you have a bedroom? Don’t tell me you paint your pictures sitting there as well. The sun has not been hot. It has rained for several days, while the people with whom we are staying are often drunk (though Daddy, who gets drunk as well, merely describes them as ‘merry’). They sit for hours at meal-times telling the most incomprehensible stories (in French) which Daddy pretends to understand (largely because he knows that Mummy does). Most of them are to do with the Second World War which, if you lived here, you’d think was still going on. Monsieur Duffon is Mayor of this village and it appears to give him rights to do almost anything he wants. I am longing to get back. Sally, my horse at the stables at Monk Bryston where I ride, has given birth to a foal. It’s going to be named after me – Beattie – and apparently is most beautiful to look at. (Not like me, of course, at all.)
Mummy is having a wonderful time. The men ogle her, not least our host. Daddy says it’s flattering and the way men are down here, which is where she came from, but if I were a man I wouldn’t stand for my wife to be ogled at as brazenly as that. She says, of course, she doesn’t notice. Isn’t it awful? That men only see one thing in a woman. Despite Mummy’s age she has, I can see, a wonderful figure. Her bosom, though not large, is very compact, her waist very slim, and her hips still slim enough to fit inside my costume. I’ve come to admire her very much, largely because she doesn’t care what anyone says or thinks. She wears clothes, for instance, quite old and worn and, in one or two instances, belonging to my Aunt Veronica, her older sister, and Aunt Clare, her younger one, who lent them to her before we left.
I shall write again if I’ve time. Hope everything is well with you. Aren’t you making too much of living on a council estate and being an ‘artist’? Are you sure, in giving up your university career, and turning your back on ‘society’, you’re not acting, to some extent, from spite? Since you see yourself as an artist and, as you put it, only concerned with the ‘truth’, I thought I ought to mention it.
Yours sincerely,
Beatrice Corcoran.”
‘What time is Charlie coming back?’ I ask as, having antagonised Etty back to life, I help her out in the kitchen.
She wipes her wrist beneath each eye – onions: the only item that afternoon she hasn’t troubled to prepare. ‘Any time,’ she says, and adds, ‘I said we’d have a meal.’
‘You don’t have to be an outsider,’ I tell her. ‘“You can’t all be like your father.”’ I laugh, for this was Bea’s most frequent complaint when, in their ’teens, the children ‘revolted’.
‘I am not,’ she says. ‘Nor was I ever.’
‘Nor feel,’ I go on, ‘that my illness is infectious. There’s no evidence of it in you, nor,’ I go on, ‘in any of the others.’
‘Don’t fight me back to life,’ she says.
‘You make me sound,’ I say, ‘quite healthy.’
‘Only you can tell me that.’ Standing at the stove she stirs a pan with a wooden spoon.
Isabella, with her capacity to absorb herself in tasks of little importance – sewing, gardening, playing with the children – the grass set out with cups and saucers, a jug of water standing in for tea – would often look the same: the same pose, and much the same expression.
‘Charlie and I were thinking of having another child. One never seemed enough. Three has an imbalance which I prefer to the symmetry of two.’
‘If it doesn’t stop you writing.’
‘I can hardly do research up here.’
Not for the first time I have the suspicion she has not invited me up here for my sake but to formulate something within herself. That, too, I reflect, is like the old days.
‘Why not?’
‘Your work,’ she says, ‘is out of fashion.’
‘It was never in. I’ve never been an author in the way the middle class would understand, nor working-class in the way a popular audience would listen to. A humanist in an age of neurosis and romance is bound to go unnoticed.’
She laughs, turning from the pan and brushing back her hair. ‘An author who writes books which no one reads, who produces plays which no one troubles to revive. A painter who paints pictures which are plagiarised by others.’
‘Much of the work I did as a student became de rigueur with aficionados of the art world two decades after I was kicked out of the Drayburgh for doing it,’ I tell her.
‘Were you kicked out?’
‘I was never invited back for my final year. When I enquired why not they said I had “matured beyond their expectations”.’
“Dear Bea, I don’t have a bedroom to work in because I share it with my younger brother who, when I should be in there writing, is using it to study, or to sleep. Having explained to you why I’ve gone the way I have, and refused to be railroaded into a conventional life, I thought you at least would understand. It’s easy to make fun of what I’ve done, particularly from the perspective of where you are at present, but I don’t think you can be aware of what it feels like to have a father who works in the conditions that mine does throw his ‘sacrifice’ at you. Art is my life, whether you like it or not. I don’t put any ‘value’ on it, no more than I would on the bloom of a rose, or the song of a bird. Because it has no political or commercial or, in this context, social worth, it’s all the more valuable to me. Perhaps it’s better we don’t write. I have enough to put up with already. Furthermore, I don’t believe the Riviera is as wet or as cold as you make out. As for your pony: I suggest you change its name, unless you wish to condemn it to a life of supercilious self-regard.
Yours,
R. Fenchurch.”
‘You must have been a handful,’ she says, flinging over her shoulder another disparaging look.
The suggestion, I can see, has entered her head that by pretending to an interest in my work she’ll be doing me a favour.
‘A favour’ is Maidstone’s phrase – or so she tells me. Asking him, by telephone, if taking me back would be ‘a positive step’, he’d declared, ‘It will do your father a favour. He will go to pieces living on his own, particularly in that house in Taravara Road. Isn’t the place infested with drugs?’
She has taken me with her, whatever her other motives, out of love, and because, or so she says, she can’t bear to see me ‘a second time going mad’.
She is hoping to retrieve me single-handed: I can feel, already, a certain calm returning. I like, for instance, seeing her cook: I like seeing Charlie come in from work: I like his avuncular commitment to everything he does – big-hearted, generous, unthinking; I like seeing the children rush in from school – and rush out again to play with their friends – into the same garden that their mother rushed out to with her sister and brothers.
What I hate are the shadows I can’t arrest and, where not the fear, the terror.
‘I have always been in trouble,�
�� I tell her. ‘My damascene conversion to art at the age of fifteen not only made me enemies but lost me most of my friends. I felt indisposed to the world in which I found myself to a degree which, nowadays, it’s impossible to describe. Particularly now the dangers we are faced with loom so large and safety, even in opposition, is only found in numbers. Being alone in opposition was, to me, a positive step. Because I was alone I knew I must be right. If someone, for instance, has to stick it out, it might as well be me.’
‘Hubris.’ Etty moves across the kitchen to collect a bowl, emptying the contents of the pan inside then turning off the gas.
‘That wasn’t freedom, of course,’ I tell her, ‘merely the use I made of it.’
‘The renegade,’ she says.
‘The renegade,’ I tell her, ‘is all there is, for the world I would have wished to live in has now completely vanished.’
6
She is standing in the evening light outside the Army and Navy stores, the shutters of which the proprietor – conscious of her standing there – is putting up: her coppery hair and her turquoise suit attract not only his but everyone’s attention: the stockinged legs, the high-heeled shoes, the knee-length skirt.
‘You’re looking very well,’ I tell her.
She smiles: her teeth, against the Riviera tan, are starkly white. ‘So are you,’ she says.
‘You’d better ignore my letters,’ I tell her. ‘I had no one else to talk to.’
She laughs.
‘It’s too nice an evening,’ I add, ‘to spend inside.’
‘Sure.’ A handbag on her wrist, she places her hands in the pockets of her suit.
‘You’re more changed,’ I tell her, ‘than I’d expected.’
‘So are you,’ she says again. ‘You’ve lost,’ she goes on, ‘the schoolboy look.’
‘I’m beginning to feel,’ I tell her, ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
‘That’s all right,’ she says, and adds, ‘My mind, I’m afraid, is somewhere else. I’m not really, mentally, here at all.’ A moment later she goes on, ‘I met someone on the Riviera. He’s coming up to see me. He lives in Reading.’ With the same aimlessness she continues, ‘He has a car. What I told him about the place intrigued him. It doesn’t stop me, of course, from seeing you,’ and, since we are now strolling through the central streets of the town, she enquires, ‘Have you decided where to go?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I tell her. The cinema had been our intended goal.
‘You’re not despondent?’
‘No.’ I shake my head.
We walk towards the municipal park, away from the central hill of the town: the park where, over the years, I have met more girls than I remember: something of an earlier, carefree self returns. I talk of the past – anything, I reflect, to avoid the dilemma I am facing now.
‘Is Otterton still around?’ she asks.
‘In the army.’
‘And Jenny?’
‘She went abroad.’
The treed slopes of the park’s central, castle hill confront us.
‘I’m back at school next week. I can’t wait,’ she says, ‘to get it over. I can’t wait,’ she goes on, ‘to get to college.’
‘To do what?’ I ask.
‘Save life. My grandfather did the same when he was young. During the war he developed a food to supplement the diet.’
‘Not Kell Cakes?’ I enquire.
‘They were named after him,’ she says, and adds, ‘He’s living with us now. My mother’s father.’
‘They came out like rubber mats,’ I tell her. ‘“Any fool can make them,” someone once wrote on the packet. “And most of the bloody idiots do.” My father fried up thousands.’
‘Did Mum react to your ideas of the renegade?’ Etty asks.
‘The first time I met her for a date I took her to Thrallstone Park. The sun was setting. She’d just come back from the Riviera. It was the first time she’d been courted by someone like me. We sat on the grass. Before us lay a view of the river, reflecting gold in the setting sun – not unlike the colour of her hair: so potent an image I fell in love. I wanted, in that instant, to paint a picture, to set her in it, behind her a blaze of red and gold. We talked – until, that is, the cold got to me. I’d put my jacket on the grass in order not to spoil her suit. “Are you all right?” she said, and touched my arm. It wasn’t until we’d left the park – by a hole in the wall I knew, for the gates were closed – that I kissed her – formally – as we waited for her bus. I was reluctant, for an instant, to let her go. “She’ll be mobbed,” I thought, “at the other end.” I sat in the bathroom half the night, the only place in the house I could be alone, my mother saying, after I’d vacated it, “That seat is very hot,” to which I replied, “I’ve got diarrhoea,” to which, amazingly, she said, “Just like those Kell Cakes during the war,” I unable, for reasons even now I don’t wholly understand, to tell her that Kells and I were, that evening, through Bea, sensationally related.’
Do you remember that night lying on the hill in the Park with the strand of the river reflecting the setting sun – silhouetting, when it finally descended, the contour of the Pennine hills – while all around the trees grew dark, the rooks grew quiet, the grass grew damp and my excitement, as much as the chilling of the air, caused me, as you observed, to shiver?
I find – I’m not sure how it happens – I’m talking to myself, Etty in the dining-room, setting the table. When I go through and offer to lay out the knives and forks she says, not having listened to a word I’ve said, ‘Eating so late will give you indigestion.’
‘What about you?’ I ask for she has, since my arrival, complained of the same.
‘I’m used to it. Charlie and I often eat late,’ she says, leaving me to arrange the table while she goes back to the kitchen, calling, ‘What were you saying?’
‘She didn’t respond to what you’d describe as my bolshieness. She was all for the world as it might become. She never succumbed to my vision that progress is illusory. Our worst quarrels were to do with what she described as my “negative nature” and when I used to say, “But why do you think I paint these pictures, write these books, put on these plays if I didn’t think at heart that life is worth it?” she’d cry, “It has to be improved! We don’t have any choice but to try and do it!” And I – I, in those days, would say, “That is genuine despair, my dear.”’
‘What did she say to you working as a labourer?’ She brings into the room a bottle of wine – one of Charlie’s exemptions from their otherwise ascetic life – the wood-panelled room in which, with ‘Nan’ and Grandfather Kells, and Bella and Freddie – and Bea – I have shared so many meals in the past.
‘She refused to understand it.’
‘But came to accept it.’
The room, too, in which the redoubtable Rose caught Isabella and I kissing beneath the mistletoe – with a recklessness that left all three of us embarrassed.
‘We only met on one subsequent occasion after that evening in the park. For Kells,’ I tell her, ‘was taken ill and nearly died and the family was in turmoil for over a month, during which this youth in his motor-car came up – the son of a biscuit-manufacturer near Reading – and knowing they occasionally came to town, for we still communicated by telephone as well as letter, I hung around one evening at the cross-roads which, coming in from Ardsley, they would have to pass and, as if by telepathy, that Saturday night, this youth drove by, your mother beside him – looking more radiant, I thought, than ever – and, glancing out, though they didn’t stop, she saw me. Years later she confided that that was the moment she fell in love. “Like,” she said, ‘Your conversion to art: the difference, I suppose, between ‘want’ and ‘need’.”’
‘She fell in love from another man’s car. Destiny was in it, after all,’ she says.
‘Like you and the book,’ I tell her. ‘The Fenchurch File. Generations will be grateful for what you did.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘How
could something,’ I enquire, ‘that began like that, end up in the way it did? The Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Health: that youth from Reading all over again. Class. Conformity. Wealth.’
‘She’s seen how,’ Etty says, ‘all you set out to do has ended. In the psychiatric ward of the North London Royal, and in the long-term residential unit at Boady Hall.’
‘I was driven there,’ I tell her.
Having placed the food in the oven, she closes the door. ‘Were you?’ she enquires and, turning, declares, ‘You drove yourself.’
I sleep little, if at all, that night: perhaps it’s the food, however well prepared; or perhaps it is the house and the silence of the village, a place of perpetual noise in the time of Isabella; or perhaps it’s the conversation which, at the end of the meal, concludes with Etty declaring, ‘I’m not sure it’s a good thing to start dragging up the past. What we must do is look to the future.’
‘Not to acknowledge the past is not something,’ I tell her, ‘I can easily do. We go into the past, not to be detained, but to bring it into the present. It’s only when it retrieves us, and not us it, that it’s never any use. Moving forward in the way you’ve described is entirely out of the question.’
‘You’ve got past loving Mother,’ Etty says as she sees me up to bed, not sure, I suspect, whether her remark is a statement or a question.
When I say, ‘Do you get “past” loving anyone?’ she replies, ‘I’d say so,’ and adds, ‘As soon as it becomes a habit, as it did with you and Mum.’
‘Or a need,’ I tell her, suspecting this idea comes not from her but Bea.
‘We’re all in need of love,’ she says, ‘but not in love with need,’ and, intent on cheering me up, one platitude following another (one more liability of family life), she adds, ‘It’s what you saw in Mum. She saw her need in you, not, as you’ve been led to believe, the other way around.’
After she has gone I begin to fret that the pills I have brought with me are under lock and key in her and Charlie’s bedroom.