by David Storey
It was against this background that the turning-point came in my relationship with Isabella (‘Of your life,’ Maidstone remarked when I first described it). She and Freddie were dressed up one evening to go out to a dinner of the Inner Wheel at which Freddie, who was visibly nervous, was to give a speech. Uneasy at the prospect of Bea and I spending the whole of the evening in the house together, he had suggested that Rose might be asked to stay behind, ‘In case there was anything you might need,’ and when the absurdity of this was pointed out by Bea (‘I can easily make a cup of tea’) he offered, uniquely, to pay for us to go to the Ardsley Essoldo, a flea-pit of a cinema in the terminal stages of decay – and to which he had forbidden her to go on every previous occasion. It was at this point (‘smiling her Gioconda smile,’ as Bea put it) that Isabella declared, ‘Surely, Freddie, we can trust the two of them together,’ stooping, as she did so, to kiss Bea on the cheek and, crossing directly to the chair, beside the fire, where I was sitting, stooping to kiss my cheek as well.
I saw her shoulders, bare within the low-cut velvet collar; I felt her lips: I watched her turn across the room – joining Corcoran at the door where, her arm on his, she called goodnight. I watched her hips, I watched her thighs, I watched her ankles: I watched the high-heeled shoes which gave so much shape to her calves. I trembled. Years later, when I asked her if she had been aware of the effect she had had that evening – I had, for instance, never seen her dressed formally before, her shoulders bare, her breasts – fuller than I had imagined – visible, sensationally, as she stooped, within the looseness of her collar – she was, astonishingly, offended: ‘You don’t honestly think I’d lead you on?’ her displeasure at the interpretation I’d put on the incident so profound that it blighted our relationship for months. Long afterwards she would bring it up and when I sullenly enquired, ‘What distresses you so much?’ she’d cry, obscurely, ‘You seeing me like that!’
‘But I loved that moment more,’ I often told her, ‘than life itself. You don’t realise,’ I’d go on, ‘how beautiful you are. More beautiful than anyone I’ve ever known. Sensationally, organically, ethereally,’ brought to tears on more than one occasion when, unbeknown to her, I’d glimpsed her in the street, or across a room, or, at one of our later rendezvous, standing at a window. ‘Those are the most important moments of my life when I’m aware how much I love you.’
‘I hate it,’ she’d say. ‘It’s voyeuristic. I wish that evening had never happened.’
‘To me,’ I told her on one occasion, ‘there’s never been another like it.’
‘Not even,’ she paused, ‘when you first made love to B.’
I may have misheard her: conversely, she may have intended to say ‘me’ but, during that pause, retracted.
‘Not even then,’ I told her.
‘When was that moment?’ she asked.
‘That’s something,’ I said, ‘between Bea and I.’
‘Why?’ she said, increasingly obtuse.
‘Just as it is between you and Freddie.’
‘Freddie is my husband.’
‘Bea is my wife.’
The irony struck her, too – not to say, the wickedness and, as at all such moments, faced incontrovertibly with what we’d done, we instinctively retreated.
‘Bella sees you as her son,’ Freddie said on more than one occasion, seeking to explain, if only to himself, what, if he didn’t suspect, he might, if a more imaginative man, have sensed was going on. He liked, perhaps because of this explanation, to see the two of us together. ‘Freddie doesn’t mind!’ she said on one occasion, laughing, when she’d pointed out Freddie watching us from the living-room window. ‘He likes to see us holding hands!’ – something she did, and not only with me, without a second thought, as impetuous in this respect as she was in so much else. ‘Tell me how much you love me,’ she would say in later years when Bea and I came up with the children, adding, in the same loud voice, ‘I’m taking Richard for a walk. He looks so pale. The air up here will do him good. It’s what, after all, he’s used to.’
It had not been long after that ‘memorable’ evening that the second incident occurred that drew us, in retrospect, if not closer, irretrievably together.
I had gone over to the house one afternoon to find Bea swotting for an examination: Isabella, who was busy in the kitchen, and hating to see anyone idle, said, ‘Come and look at our new neighbour. It’s in the Ardsley Express,’ adding, as she got on her coat and put on a woolly hat (it was autumn), ‘As an artist you can tell me what you think!’
She called to Bea, ‘I’m taking Richard to look at the Swansons’,’ closing the back door and leading the way across the yard. A backward glance revealed Bea at her bedroom window, waving and, assured of my attention, levelling her palm and blowing me a kiss.
We passed along a footpath enclosed on one side by a hedge and on the other by a quarry. Holding back the branches, I went ahead. At one point, where the path divided, I took the broader of the two and heard her call, ‘This one, Richard!’ turning to find her close behind me, her cheeks aflame, her eyes alight (our breaths rising in the chilly air). With the same impetuosity which characterised so many of her actions, she took my hand – at one point, pretending an obstruction, I grasping hers more firmly.
With the subtlest – and, because the subtlest, the most sensual pressure, she responded, our bodies stooped, our heads bowed and, because of the encroaching branches, almost touching.
We emerged, finally, at the foot of a steep embankment. The soil was loose, its surface pitted with rabbit holes: I scrambled up, reached the summit and, as she followed, took both her hands.
I drew her to me.
How long we stood there I’ve no idea, our arms around each other’s waists.
‘Are you all right?’ she finally enquired.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘I wouldn’t have got here,’ she said, ‘without your help. It’s just as well you came.’
We drew apart.
‘That’s the Swansons’ house,’ she added.
Almost as an afterthought, or so it seemed, her hand slipped back in mine.
Immediately below us, at the foot of the slope, a concrete structure had been erected, into the sides of which had been inserted several rectangular and oval holes intended, I assumed, to serve as windows: the site was encroached upon by builders’ debris – stacks of bricks and piles of sand and mounds of ochre-coloured timber – themselves encroached upon by the woods which came up the slope from the back of the Hall and over the crest of the embankment on which we were standing. A brick wall was in the process of construction to separate the two.
Hand in hand, her head imperceptibly but, as far as I was concerned, unmistakably inclined to mine, we stood side by side discussing the impropriety of someone building a concrete edifice in a landscape which, where it was not characterised by woods and fields and hedges, was only distantly encroached upon by the encircling pits.
The coat she wore had a brown fur collar, the coat itself a bottle green – one she invariably slipped on when she went to the village, shopping: the texture of the fur (I allowed her remarks to turn her to me) highlighted the colour of her cheek – a pinkness which extended to her brow where, deepening, it was absorbed within the magenta of her hair.
‘He’s an architect,’ she suddenly declared. ‘It’s been in all the papers. Though which ones, apart from the Express, I can’t recall.’
She turned.
‘Are you all right?’ she added.
‘I feel,’ I said, ‘a little dizzy.’
‘I thought you were,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with all that bending.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said, ‘in a minute.’
‘Have you had these spells before?’ she asked.
‘I have,’ I said, ‘since adolescence. They very soon pass,’ on the verge of confessing to something else entirely, and hastily concluding, ‘I feel much better already.’
> ‘What do you think to the house?’ she said, intending to distract me.
‘It looks more like an office,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought!’ The exclamation drew us closer: linking her arm in mine, she added, ‘The view, I suppose, will be nice.’
‘It will,’ I said.
‘Looking the other way!’ She laughed: the purpose of the brick wall – to prevent the house from being overlooked from the grounds of the Hall – was obvious to both of us. ‘In addition to which,’ she went on, ‘he’s installing central-heating.’ (An unheard-of luxury in Ardsley at that time.) ‘By oil.’
The logistics of this enterprise – quantities of oil transported to a private dwelling at least twelve miles distant from the nearest town – provoked a second burst of laughter.
As far as I was concerned, the conversation, as, indeed, the view of the concrete house itself, was merely a distraction from what Maidstone was to describe, years later, as my ‘principal perception’: the realisation I had fallen in love with a woman thirty-four years older than myself.
The first time I described this incident to him I had produced a photograph, creased, from an inside pocket – over which he had stooped, frowning, for several minutes, the photograph itself (he invariably sat in a chair set, incongruously, in the corner of the room, between a filing cabinet and his desk) laid on my file which, in turn, was propped on his crossed legs. ‘She is,’ he said, after a while, ‘a beautiful woman,’ a clinical assessment, or so it seemed, to which he appended, glancing up, ‘What would you say were her imperfections?’
‘It was, incongruously,’ I said, ‘the accumulation of imperfections that rendered in her, uniquely, the possibility of perfection. In his Journal, Delacroix observes that it is the imperfections of a work of art which give it its vitality. Poe, echoing Byron, says much the same about men and women.’
After the second burst of laughter, for several seconds, neither of us spoke, gazing down at the windowless hulk: it was as if that side of my body had been ignited, her cheek so close to mine I could feel its heat.
I moved.
‘Looking out, from the inside, you won’t be able to see the house at all,’ she added, ‘and, if the wall weren’t too high, you could see up to our wood.’
She indicated, with her head, the trees below.
‘But if the wall is too high,’ she went on, ‘you’ll have the view the other side, of Fernley Pit.’
As I listened to her laughing she took my hand, her fingers enclosing mine without, it seemed, a second thought; perhaps, I reflected, she was used to the importuning demands of men other than her husband, accommodating them in such a manner that it seemed, to the importuning agent, she had scarcely noticed them at all: a graciousness, I further reflected, that only added to her charm.
‘We ought, I suppose,’ she continued, ‘to be getting back,’ as if the propriety of our coming here had not yet been settled in her mind and the immediacy of returning, therefore, still in doubt.
She drew her coat about her.
‘At least you’ve seen it now. And your opinion, I can see,’ she concluded, ‘agrees with mine.’
Her hand now clenched in mine, she began to descend the slope behind us.
Our return along the path was conducted in silence. I watched her back, her feet, her calves (the woollen hat which covered scarcely half her head and from beneath which her hair, unplaited, tumbled out), her head, her hands (her delicate neck): ‘Are you all right?’ she asked as we reached the yard, using this enquiry to release my hand yet, moments later, when, having turned to me, she had watched me nod my head, she took my arm and led me to the porch where, with a peculiar excitement, she suddenly exclaimed, ‘That was a grand adventure!’
A moment later, her coat off, she had returned to her chores in the kitchen – her hat, forgotten, still on her head – while, from overhead, came Bea’s shout, ‘I shan’t be long!’ to which Isabella, absorbed already in her tasks, called, ‘Don’t rush that work, young woman!’ glancing up, abstracted, to where, half-stunned, I stood against the wall and, with a smile, announcing, ‘Richard and I can wait!’
“Dear Bea, my mind wanders these days from the subject in hand; in hand, literally, on this occasion as I held your mother’s on Sugden’s Bank (as I later came to know it), my arm, folded in hers, cushioned, moments later, against her breast – the breast which, as she turned to make a remark, moved from me and then, as she listened to my response, came softly back; the breast which, months later, I enclosed within my hand as we sheltered one evening beneath a tree – hidden by its shadow – in the cul-de-sac at the back of your school. I’d met her from a meeting in town – ‘by accident,’ I told her. ‘I happened to be passing,’ offering to walk her to her stop (it was before she acquired a licence to drive your father’s car and, later, the absurd sports model he went and bought her: he enjoyed seeing her as a flighty figure, seeing it, I suppose, as flattering him). I said I wanted to talk about you and we strolled, not in the direction of the stop, in the centre of town, but up the footpaths that led to your school: a married woman (someone who, in the ensuing years, was not infrequently mistaken for my mother). I can’t, no matter how hard I try, remember how ‘the moment’, as I described it to Maidstone, came about. ‘I am a perverse and wicked fellow,’ I said. ‘I am devious in all things and seldom to be trusted.’ Yet I remember Sugden’s Bank so clearly – my arm enclosed within your mother’s, the turning of her face to mine, our returning to the house, the descent of the bank, our going indoors, your call from the stairs and, ‘What did you think to the Swansons’?’ when you finally came down. And what I recall most clearly is her face as, once in the kitchen, removing her coat, she turned to me and, for an instant, as I held its collar and helped her to withdraw her arms, I felt convinced, if I had lowered my head, she would, sensationally, have raised hers – as involuntarily as, finally, she did on the evening I met her and we strolled up the cul-de-sac at the back of your school – discussing you (initially) and then, absurdly, prompted by the darkness, her. I say ‘involuntarily’ for I don’t recall any precipitating gesture, merely passing into the shadows between the lamps until, in the midst of one such shadow (the quietness of the evening, the singing of a bird), I turned – as fortuitously, it must have seemed, as she to me and, for reasons neither of us, either at that moment or later, could understand, she raised her face to mine and when, after the closest scrutiny, she closed her eyes, I took that as her signal …
Why I did what I did I can’t make out. Something indecent – against a brick wall – white with salt and bevelled from age – shaking so violently I could scarcely stand …”
The moon shines in the garden below: the garden in which the ghost of Isabella wanders, tending her roses (waiting for me): the garden in which the four of us – Bea and I, Corcoran and Isabella – would, in the summer months, often talk for hours: art as opposed to business, pragmatism and empiricism (the meaning of love), Corcoran bored by such discussions but bemused by the animation they aroused in his daughter and his wife, a broad, phlegmatic smile on his otherwise sombre features: ‘What does it add up to? You end with what you began!’
‘What’s that?’ (from a sulky Bea).
‘Work!’ (inexplicably) ‘is the only thing that counts!’
The garden is much neglected – by comparison with the care lavished on it by Isabella. She had, in those days, the assistance of a man who came in several days a week, an enthusiast, if not an eccentric, known both for his gardening skills and an idiosyncratic selection of gardens in which he chose to work: Isabella, not the garden – its soil or the disposition of its vegetation – was the principal influence in his choice of the Hall. He loved, like I did – he covertly – to see her red-haired figure move amongst the flowers, raising his head from his digging or raking, his weeding or pruning, his tying back or staking, to watch the juxtaposition of coppery red, or fiery magenta, with lilac, lemon, a reciprocal red, a glowing purple –
with the crimson and pink, the yellow and orange of the climbing roses which hung in festoons across the front of the house (drowning the windows, drenching the porch). Once, coming upon Isabella and myself in the garden shed at the back where, our heads together, we were examining the dahlia roots, wrapped in newspaper, stored for the winter, he had hastily stepped outside, aware – despite the fact that no intimacy was taking place – that there was an unseen quality – an unseen presence – which, while not evoked separately by either one of us, was immediately apparent the moment the two of us came together – a vibrancy which he, Mr Rawlston, was by no means the only one to notice and which, over the years, was commented upon openly by Bea as much as by Corcoran himself – a ‘peculiarity’, as the latter described it, ‘as if you were Bella’s child.’
I’ve a feeling Etty looks after the garden herself, with the help of a man who, as the mood takes him (a retired miner), comes in once a week: periodically a firm of contractors appears and lops the trees and cuts back the hedges and gives a perfunctory mowing to the lawns, and hoes the more accessible beds, but, as her grandmother did before her, Etty, at odd moments, dressed in a smock, cuts at the plants and ties back the branches and, whenever they accompany her, allows the children to dig and run about almost anywhere.
It’s cold; I’m cold, yet disinclined to return to bed: a cry, from the back of the house, echoing along the landing, comes from one of the children: each night one, or perhaps both of them, calls out, disturbed by dreams which, evidently, never wake them. Once I went along to their room, startled by the sound, but both dark-haired figures were asleep, Glenda snorting (like Etty) with her thumb stuck in her mouth. As with her mother, when I drew it out, it immediately went back in.
I take a chair; I pull a blanket around myself – drawn, after much exertion, from under the heavy quilted cover of the bed – and sit in the window: the lights of the village show beyond the trees and I half-envisage in the darkness the contours of the pit – the steam, the crepitation of distant feet, the whistle, the occasional siren, the murmur of a forgotten village life.