by David Storey
Then, once more, the thought comes to me: they have brought me here to die.
7
‘My mother would like to meet you,’ Bea said at the end of our first encounter after the youth and his car had gone back to Reading.
‘How about your father?’ I asked.
‘He leaves these things,’ she said, ‘to Mum. If she approves,’ she added, ‘he invariably approves as well.’
‘Did they,’ I enquired, ‘approve of Keith?’ (the name of the youth with the car).
‘Father did. Mother thought him nice.’
‘Nice?’
‘She thinks he could do with growing-up.’
‘What, in that case,’ I said, ‘is she going to think of me?’
‘It’s mandatory,’ she said (a peremptoriness in her nature of which I was only slowly becoming aware: we were sitting in a café, eating food I couldn’t afford, despite it being the cheapest on the menu: when I hesitated in replying she suddenly went on, ‘They won’t let me come again until you and she have met.’).
I went the following Saturday. It was dusk: for the first time in my life I came through the garden door at which we’d dropped off Bea on the night of the Allgrave party.
We walked, at her prompting, hand in hand, the path flanked, beneath the trees, by knee-length grass amongst which grew cowslips, buttercups and daisies. The silence was intense and evoked in both of us a sudden apprehension.
We approached a flight of balustraded steps leading to a stone-built terrace: a path, dividing from our own, led to a wicket-gate: beyond lay an area of unmown grass across which were scattered several trees, their branches bowed – and in one or two instances broken – with unpicked fruit. Pears and apples, glowing, caught by the evening light, lay scattered in the grass.
Glancing back I saw how the place itself was like a wood: the garden door, the winding path and, beyond the trees, the lights of the village: the sound of the colliery dynamo was audible from below.
The house, a low, stone-built structure with a balustraded roof and tall, square chimneys, was visible beyond an intervening hedge, our path, consisting of irregular paving-stones, leading directly to a lawn into which had been set innumerable irregularly shaped beds of flowers: their scent was discernible in the darkening air along with the dampness of a suddenly descending dew.
One of several gravelled paths led to a pedimented porch, itself approached by a shallow flight of steps. A light shone in two of the downstairs windows, its beams illuminating, in two broad swatches, the ground immediately in front of the house and, attached to the dark façade, fronds of yellow roses.
I caught a glimpse, in the first of the windows, of a wood-panelled room and then, in the second, of a woman: she appeared to be sewing, her head bowed, her shoulders stooped. A needle came up, her head, in profile, drawn up as well. Magenta-coloured hair was secured in a coiled plait above her ear, her neck, arched forward, delicate and thin.
The light, suspended in a tasselled shade above her head, obscured her features until, hearing our steps on the gravel, she glanced up.
Her look was one of such benignity – green eyes made dark by the angle of the shade – that, caught by Bea’s hand, I stood transfixed. I had never seen anything so beautiful: the slender boning of the face, the tautened cheeks, the broadening mouth: the gentleness, the candour.
‘Come on.’
Bea’s feet dragged at the gravel.
‘There’s Mum.’
The woman must have risen: as we approached the door it was unlocked inside and, a double-featured design, one half of it drawn open.
‘You’re late.’ Her hand extended, Bea’s mother came to greet us.
‘The bus,’ Bea said.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You haven’t the car.’
She took my arm and when she enquired, ‘Are you all right?’ glancing, as she did so, at my face, I found I couldn’t speak.
I heard Bea exclaim, ‘He’s shy!’ at which, leading us into the room in which we had glimpsed her, with a not dissimilar exclamation, her mother declared, ‘But I wouldn’t frighten anyone!’
‘Mum’s very odd,’ Bea said later, as she walked me to the bus. ‘It’s to do with being foreign.’
‘Foreign?’ I said.
‘Less Irish, of course, than Middle East. She doesn’t know what effect she has.’
‘Effect,’ I said, less in enquiry than exclamation.
‘She’s oblivious of her beauty. Curious when, normally, she’s so tuned in to men.’
‘Is she beautiful?’ I said.
‘But you couldn’t keep your eyes off her!’ she said. ‘And she, for entirely different reasons,’ she went on, ‘could scarcely keep her eyes off you. We shouldn’t,’ she concluded, ‘have any trouble now.’
‘I suppose,’ I suggested, ‘she’s old.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But very handsome.’
‘In you,’ I said, ‘it’s something else.’
‘What?’
We waited at the bus-stop, her arm in mine, a sudden and, on my part, a heartening confederacy between us.
‘You’re younger,’ I said, ‘and more unspoilt.’
‘Am I unspoilt?’ She paused. ‘Keith said that.’
‘He’s right.’
I no longer felt challenged by the other youth: all I chose to recall of the evening was the touch of her mother’s hand when, on parting, she’d said, ‘I hope we’ll meet again.’
We had sat and talked in that lamp-shaded, wood-panelled room, and had had a meal. ‘What do you mean by art?’ she had said after listening to one of my self-proclamatory confessions and when, immediately, Bea had responded, her mother’s look, turned from me to her, had calmly suggested, ‘You don’t have to impress me, my dear. I am impressed enough, as it is, already. If he has to be turned away it won’t, I can assure you, be because of me.’
‘How old do you think she is?’ Bea said.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, her age, calculated in this fashion, of no interest to me, either then or later.
‘She’s fifty-two.’
‘As old as that?’
‘Lots of men still fall for her.’
‘I see.’
‘Lots.’ The mystery of her mother endlessly eluded her: a lifelong antagonism, a lifelong complaint. ‘I’m sure she’ll speak glowingly to Dad.’
‘You think so?’
‘She told me as much before we came out, and you went into the hall to fetch your coat. She’s not put off,’ she added, ‘by your being poor.’
‘Am I poor?’ I said.
‘You will be!’ She laughed, the bus plunging down the hill towards us and lighting up the queue, the majority of whom, I noticed for the first time, were, where not almost, completely drunk.
From the first-floor window I gaze out at the moonlit garden: many of the fruit trees, closer to the house, have been replaced, their staked stems invisible in the darkness – a darkness where, on summer evenings, Isabella and I would pick the fruit, careless or so it seemed, on her part, whether we could be seen from the house or not, giving vent to those feelings which, in me, had been provoked by the sight of her upward-straining figure – the tautness of her blouse, her skirt, the delicacy of her hand as, first, she fingered, then unloosed the fruit.
Bea’s father, the redoubtable ‘Freddie’, I met on my second visit: a stocky, broad-shouldered, balding man, with dark, thickset features, he reminded me of Harry Chamberlain, my equally redoubtable employer: as I came in the room he clasped my hand, enquiring, ‘Are you the artist?’ as if Bea’s admirers were both too numerous and too confusing either to identify or to count.
In loving Isabella I came, of course, to love him, too: at a different time, and if not exactly in his prime, he also had fallen for this woman. I observed how, whenever he passed her in the house, he touched her hair – her arm, her hand, her back, her thigh – as a man, in passing, might make obeisance in church, a desire not only to express but to invoke
a feeling which otherwise could not be conveyed.
‘Come out to the yard,’ he said on that first occasion, as much a desire for something to do as a wish to test or examine me, leading me to the, in those days, muddy enclosure at the side of the house where, for the better part of two hours, we hoisted hundredweight sacks of coal from the back of one lorry, which had broken down, onto the back of another.
‘What about this art?’ he said when we finished and he invited me into a shed he used as an office.
‘What about it?’ I asked, the invitation accompanied by a request I ‘look at this’.
The ‘this’ he showed me – all the while examining me (something restricted on the back of the lorry) – was a picture he had bought – at, I discovered later, Bea’s instigation – with a view to presenting it to Isabella on her birthday.
The colours, such as they were, had been put on with a palette knife, the overall effect, where not ‘expressionistic’, effusive: nothing in it, as I was quick to tell him, ‘added up’: the excrescences of paint, at a distance, suggested a line of orange rocks about to be engulfed by cream-topped waves (intimations, I suspected, of the ‘Mediterranean’); recognising a look, not unfamiliar where ‘art’ and ‘artists’ were concerned, if not of disappointment, outright rage (‘short-changed’ was the phrase he used when subsequently describing his ‘final feelings’ to Bea), I added, ‘I’m sure Mrs Corcoran will agree, it’ll add a touch of colour.’
‘I can add a touch of colour mesen,’ he said. ‘And at a tenth the price of this,’ adding, ‘You go in for this art, then, do you?’ sitting further back behind his desk, the shed, apart from a cabinet and a second chair, on which the picture was propped, furnished with little else: his ‘work-office’, apart from his ‘yard-office’, unknown to me at that point, was located in the house.
‘It’s like,’ I told him, ‘the calling of a priest.’
‘A priest.’ Pulling himself forward, he propped his elbows on the desk before him, his hands, clenched together, held in front of his mouth, a gesture – uncharacteristic of him, I was to discover – of uncertainty in anyone else. ‘A priest is paid a salary. He has,’ he paused before deploying the word, ‘a job.’
‘I don’t mean painting pictures but anything creative,’ I said.
‘Creative.’ The word roamed in his mouth, it seemed, for several seconds: not only tasteless but indigestible.
‘Like writing.’
‘Writing.’ Another serving of the same.
‘Or …’ I might have added, ‘Music,’ realised, under his scrutiny – a darkening of his expression – I was steadily digging my grave and, unable to think of anything else, slowly waved my hand.
Black, I discovered, like his, with coal-dust (a smear across his mouth).
‘We can all be creative,’ he suddenly announced, ‘if some other bastard pays for it,’ adding, with an unconvincing hint of propriety, ‘Excuse my language. You’ve heard worse, I’m sure, at Chamberlains.’
‘Much,’ I said in the hope that, like the unloading and reloading of the lorries, this suggestion of confederacy might draw us closer together.
‘I could give you a job in the yard.’
He indicated the black-painted lorries with their metal-lined insides (‘Corcoran & Co. Contractors’ inscribed in yellow paint above the cabs).
‘You wouldn’t be doing much different to what you’re doing now.’
His hands, coal-black and massive, were lowered to the desk: there, fisted, they lay side by side as if, curiously, divested of his body. ‘We each lay down our lives for you,’ they appeared sensationally to announce – fingers, thumbs, knuckles – white-bared – prominent through the dust.
There was no intention, I realised, I should take the job, merely a desire to point out the incongruity of what I was doing – of his life and mine and, by inference, of my life and Bea’s.
‘I’m happy as I am,’ I said.
‘I know Harry Chamberlain. Funny firm to work for.’
‘It is.’
His eyes examined mine.
‘You won’t have much time for painting pictures.’
‘No.’
‘Nor for writing books.’
‘No.’
‘He works them very hard.’
‘He does’ I paused. ‘I intend to find the time,’ I added.
‘He lays them off each winter. There’s nought going on until the spring. Apart from his bunch of regulars. Not much to show for all those years at King Edward’s.’
‘No.’
‘Beattie’s going to college,’ he suddenly declared. ‘She wants to take up where her grandfather left off. You’ve heard of Kell Cakes? She wants,’ he concluded, ‘to save the world.’
He returned his hands to his chin.
‘What do your parents think?’ he enquired.
Later Bea told me he had been ‘pumping’ me to see if, as he’d expressed it, ‘this boyfriend of yours is off his head.’ ‘He thought you might have been,’ she said, ‘because of something in your eye.’ When I asked her, ‘What?’ she answered – her eyebrows lowered, her hands thrust up in front of her mouth (her father’s expression transmogrified), ‘He said, when you talked about art, your eyelids never fluttered, something which he’s read is an infallible sign of madness.’
‘He thinks I’m after your money.’
‘Not a bit of it.’ She smiled. ‘When he dies, he always says, his debts will equal his credit.’
‘They’re not very pleased,’ I told him.
‘I bet they’re not,’ he said. ‘Your father, Bea tells me, is down the pit.’
‘He has been,’ I said, ‘for thirty years.’
‘Thirty years,’ he said, ‘is the time I’ve been in business. Me and commonsense. You’ve heard of commonsense? Common-sense is a gentleman few of us can do without.’
‘I mentioned thirty years,’ I said, ‘to indicate he started work long before I gave up what you would describe as my education.’
Something in my expression – whether ‘mad’ or not – appeared to reassure him: in a curious voice – so inconsequential that, hadn’t I been watching him, I might have assumed it to have come from someone else – he said, ‘I’m not usually wrong about men. Women, of course, are a different matter,’ a suggestion in it of a vulnerability both surprising and endearing.
I liked him; I liked him, above all, for loving Isabella, but also, I suspected, for his careless way with things: in his business, Bea once informed me, he was as likely to change his mind as hours in the day, being convinced he ought to sell in the morning, buy at midday, and do nothing by the evening. ‘His evening thoughts,’ she said, ‘invariably prevail.’
From that first interview onwards he paid me little if any attention. I visited the Old Hall from time to time but principally Bea came to town for our weekend meetings. ‘Daddy says I ought to be meeting other boys,’ she said on one occasion. ‘Of course,’ she added, ‘there’s always Keith. And once I get to college,’ she concluded, ‘there’s bound to be lots of others.’
Whenever I dream of the Hall and Ardsley it is Isabella, however, not Bea, who comes to mind: I see her stooping in the garden, her figure poised, half-balanced, leaning to a plant – her arm outstretched, her head half-bowed: the straightening of her back as, conscious of my approach, she finally turns: the smiling, green, half-questioning eyes – and my enquiry, misleadingly uninvolved, ‘Is Bea around?’
‘She’s in the house. Give a shout. I’m sure she’s there,’ Bea observing us on one occasion and afterwards remarking, ‘You go together, in a curious way: the way your heads come down when you’re not quite sure what the other one has said. As if,’ she paused, ‘you’ve known her,’ she paused again, ‘longer even than I have.’
I spent most of my time, when not at Chamberlains, writing and painting, the former in an exercise book (one of several which, on leaving, I’d stolen from school), the latter on pieces of Chamberlain canvas subtracted from
the sheds. ‘You mean you’ll earn a living painting fucking pictures?’ a fellow-employee asked me returning one evening to Linfield on the back of a Chamberlain truck.
‘I don’t have to, necessarily,’ I said. ‘I can carry on doing this.’
‘And write a fucking book?’
‘Why not?’
‘About this place!’ He gestured round: the pits, the slag-heaps, the terrace streets, the railway arches, the advertising hoardings, and the barge-laden canal by which, at that moment, we happened to be passing. ‘I can’t see anybody buying a fucking picture or reading a fucking book based on a dump like this!’
He laughed, encouraging our comrades to join him.
‘Shouldn’t it be about London?’
‘London?’
‘Or some fucking place like that!’
It was but one of several low-key exchanges which characterised the summer. My only response was to re-apply myself to writing, to painting – and to seeing or visiting sea (the last a pretext, carefully disguised, for seeing Isabella: Her smile, the inconsequential touch, the drawing of my arm to hers as she pointed out her roses).
The summer shows – agricultural, horticultural, industrial – were coming to an end as, with the first signs of autumn, were most of the weddings. The summer ‘casuals’, amongst whom, initially, I’d counted myself, began, one by one, and then in groups, to disappear: we’d see them, as we went off on the backs of the Chamberlain lorries to the last of the jobs, drifting aimlessly around the centre of the town: we’d wave: they’d wave in return, at first cheerily, than, later, offering scarcely any acknowledgement at all. Between Bea and I something, too, began to fade: her schoolwork now was making demands and, as my first rejecting notices began to arrive, a certain disillusionment was evident in me: was the species of self-expression I was involved with worth the isolation that, I could see now, inevitably came with it? In addition to which, Bea was being courted – ‘passionately’, as she described it – by the Head Boy at King Edward’s: a boarder (one of a privileged group of twenty-three) and always on hand (much fancied – she much envied by her friends). He had a car; his father arrived to watch him play in the First Fifteen and the First Eleven, and compete in the Athletics Team, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, with a fur-clad wife who led, in turn, a coiffeured poodle on a jewelled lead – Bea much flattered by their and the boy’s attention.