by David Storey
‘You hated the place,’ Maidstone would tell me, at which I would explain, ‘It’s in my blood. It’s part of me. It’s not merely a perversion that impels me to love it. It’s the way – perhaps the only way – I can come to love myself.’
At which our talk of Ardsley would deteriorate into one of our endless discussions about ‘reclamation’: was it, as I frequently declared, a hubristic impulse and therefore self-defeating, or was the desire to retrieve the past and bring it into the present a ‘condition for living’ – living, as opposed to the ‘morassic ingenitive’ which was how Maidstone identified existence for the majority today. When, after his third or fourth use of the phrase, I informed him that it was taken from To Die with the Philistines (the first play I’d written), and much bandied about in the press at the time, our relationship took on a new dimension (‘I thought I’d heard it somewhere’: he was, after all, he confided, writing a book himself, of which the provisional title was, indeed, The Morassic Ingenitive: the inevitable dissolution of the human race) and, for the better part of a year, if I recall, we talked of little else.
8
“I have a problem. From time to time I am engulfed by terror …”
I have picked up a school exercise book (“King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys” imprinted on the cover) which is lying on the window ledge, and which I must have placed there with a view to showing Etty. Numbed, if not bemused by re-invoking the colliery scene outside – all that is actually visible, beyond the trees, are rows of lights, irregular and inter-laced, marking the roads of the commuter estates – I turn on the lamp which stands on the nearby table (the one on which Etty is convinced I should do some work) and read the entry, written in a post-schoolboy scrawl (I was, after all, writing a novel at the time).
“… or something akin to terror which not only I can’t describe but am driven to hide. Am I alone in this, or is it something that goes on and, by a hidden or implicit imperative – conceivably a subliminal understanding – no one mentions? In which case, to have mentioned it, if only here, makes me a coward …”
I re-align the book.
“Where it comes from I’ve no idea. I thought, at first, it was induced by things I saw. Now I’ve discovered that what I see is merely coincidental with what I feel (but afterwards becomes irredeemably associated with it: a face, a person, a place: a tree, the shape of a leaf, a branch). The attacks come most frequently when I am on my own, or away from familiar surroundings; but they also come in the night – and, most violently of all, when I wake in the morning. Nothing specifically appears to arouse them – the unfamiliarity of a place, for instance, can often raise my spirits – as can the sight of a tree, or a face, or a person, or a place not associated with a previous attack. I am afraid. What I am afraid of I have no idea. As a test of my courage I force myself into situations where the fear is bound to erupt – such a test, of course, is Chamberlains, but the greatest test of all …”
I pause: after all these years I recall the reluctance to write it down – not simply fear, but prudence. Below, in a formal script, is inscribed, “The Linfield College of Art” and, at the foot of the page, as if in code, “is a bell a challenge superseding all.”
The art school stood near the centre of the town, separated from the High School (and King Edward’s) by an area of unpaved private lanes flanked by large, detached, brick-built houses, the lanes interspersed with cul-de-sacs and narrow, gas-lit alleys. I would meet Bea here, occasionally, from school for, the summer over at Chamberlains, I had saved enough money to take time off to write and paint and, over the autumn, attend classes at the college.
The place had been constructed in the previous century – from funds raised by an ‘industry and crafts’ exhibition when the town – a former river port, trading with Russia (the Czar’s armies clad in Linfield worsted) – was at the height of its prosperity. The school reflected the aspirations of the local burghers: two large rooms on the first floor, with windows looking to the north, provided the facilities for, in one room, drawing and painting from the model, in the other for drawing from the antique. Smaller rooms provided facilities for lithography, etching, pottery and printing, and what was euphemistically described as ‘industrial design’: there was a section for carving in wood and casting in metal, for dyeing cloth, and for baking pots. Over the years, at the rear of the premises, a technical college had been constructed – not in the original stone, but brick – its function gradually superseding that of the original college: its students, on most days (the majority on day-release from local industry) would pass through the original, sienna-tiled entrance hall – flanked by Greek caryatids and figures symbolising the ascendancy of arts and crafts – to the classrooms and workshops at the rear from where, throughout the remainder of the day, came the whine of machinery and the banging of metal.
The art-students, conspicuous by their appearance if nothing else (a raffish bohemianism as parochial as it was absurd) slunk in and out of the building, subdued by the more numerous and invariably younger students who, demonstrably, had a purpose to their labour: out of their studies would come the electricians, the engineers, the mechanics, the plumbers, the carpenters, the machine-operators, the miners, the factory technicians – the inheritors, in short, of a post-nineteenth-century ideal: out of the art school came nothing but art; or, at least, the provincial, twentieth-century substitute for it. Painting and sculpture were largely ‘out’ – adjunct studies to the more relevant pursuit (cf. the technical college) of industrial design: posters, record-sleeves and advertising were much discussed, along with the prospect of teaching teachers to teach prospective teachers like those teaching there themselves.
Into this atmosphere of purposive endeavour stepped – or latterly intruded – Richard Fenchurch, a self-confessed apostle of non-purposive creativity – a youth who, on his road to Damascus, had seen art as the salvation not only of his own but of ‘purposive’ existence in general: this mentor of his own and other people’s ills – the involuntary offspring of mines and mills, of factories, of waste-heaps – polluted streams, pestilential rivers, odorous lakes and ponds and becks – stepped through the door of the Linfield College of Arts and Crafts and proceeded to lay about him with a spiritual stick – a stick which, if it didn’t break (hardened on Keats, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Wordsworth, Dickens – Van Gogh, Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Prokofiev – Beethoven, Shakespeare, Kafka, Lawrence) became, nevertheless, a little twisted – opposed by sticks hardened by more accessible (and immediate) fervours (like earning a living, supporting a wife, educating children, financing a house). ‘So what are you going to do in your attic,’ Wormald, the teacher of industrial design (record-sleeve covers, food packages, saloon motor-cars and domestic irons) would ingenuously enquire, ‘while others labour in coal-mines, mills and factories to supply you with heat and food and light – direct or indirect, I have to add – not to mention adequate transport, armed services to defend your freedom to express yourself in any way you like, and one or two other irrelevances, like a health and dental service, which you may have overlooked? While we all work, what value, Harry,’ (a nickname he bestowed on me to indicate the fly nature of my enterprise) ‘would you bestow on the products of your labour? You’re not’ (gesturing to the guffawing room in general) ‘suggesting you’re a genius!’
‘Yes,’ – to more guffaws, for who is the first to know of genius but the genius himself – the first mark of paint, the first paragraph, the first sentence: the sensational effect of the unpredictable coming from nowhere but within oneself?
‘Harry,’ was Wormald’s only response (a provincial boor, a provincial berk, apotheosised as provincial jerk).
Wormald, poor Wormald, was not alone: Bairstow, the Principal, Dawlish, his acolyte, a phalanx of subsidiary teachers (Cass, who taught drawing from life and modelling in clay, whose metropolitan artistic ambitions had foundered in the inertia of the Linfield College of Art – ambitions bred in a similarly shallow stream wh
ose water ran away as soon as not, disappearing into God knows where but, most probably, a hole in the ground) – and not least of all the students themselves – guffawers to a man (and woman) – proclaiming that ‘Harry’ was, to say the least, an affected fellow – proclaiming ‘art’ and ‘self-expression’, not to mention ‘spirituality’, have precedence over, if not industry, commerce and doing-what-you-can, life itself.
‘Have you slept, Father?’ Etty coming in the door, having knocked and entered with scarcely a pause between. ‘I didn’t hear you moving about,’ (suspecting, no doubt, I’d died in the night).
The light has come up behind the trees – as on the morning Bea came in the room – this selfsame room – and said she’d been to bed with a fellow student. The news, at the time, had cut me in two: we’d gone into the wood: I’d lit a fire: over the smouldering flames she told me, at my insistence, the details of the incident (the ejaculation which, I could sense, had caught her by surprise, the swallowing of his semen): the sickness that came to me as I rose from the fire (the wood was wet, the fire half out, the drift of its odorous smoke amongst the trees: the distant glimpse of Ardsley Dam). ‘Didn’t I deserve it?’ I asked myself, yet all I felt was – how should I describe it? – a spread of blood from a wound which, after all this time, has never healed.
‘I was awake,’ I tell her yet realise, from my dishevelment, and the unobserved intrusion of the light in the room, I must have been sitting here for hours. ‘It was the most terrible moment of my life,’ I add, and when, perplexed, Etty enquires (her housecoat loosely wrapped around her, a cup of tea, I notice, in her hand), ‘What was?’ I merely shake my head and remark, ‘The day your mother came in here, when we were up, as students, one Easter break and confessed something which even now I can’t acknowledge,’ covering my face and, to my surprise, involuntarily weeping.
‘You’ve been sitting there too long,’ she says. ‘You’ve been told,’ she goes on, ‘not to dwell on the past.’
‘How can I fail to,’ I tell her, ‘in a place like this? It comes back without any warning.’
‘I thought you’d got over Bea,’ she says, identifying her less as her mother than my wife.
‘Long ago,’ I tell her. ‘But how do you get over so much pain?’
‘What did she tell you?’ she enquires.
‘Nothing,’ I tell her behind my hands: tears – at least, the coldness from them – fall from my cheeks and dampen my chest.
‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘You ought to be in bed,’ and then, ‘At least you’ve started writing,’ for, on the table, before me, in front of the window, and only inches from where I’m sitting, are my glasses and my fountain pen and the sheets of paper which Etty, thoughtfully, had provided, and, written on the topmost sheet, a blur which I assume to be the beginning of a sentence.
‘I can’t remember writing anything,’ I tell her and, instinctively, cover it up; then, confused – realising this has been a device merely to get me to lower my hands – I add, ‘It’s how I started my first novel, the first, at least, to get into print, sitting at a table, like this, in my student lodgings in London, a fountain pen – no glasses – an old school exercise book, its pages numbered,’ while, in the process of telling Etty this, I put on my glasses and to my surprise discover I have written, “His mind was in pieces: the normal flow of associations was no longer available to him.”
That’s all there is left to write: the process of the mind, for the cinema and television have taken over the province of appearance. Actuality is the beginning of appearance, and appearance stands merely on the threshold of reality – the threshold, without the capacity to look inside. ‘If Bea were here she’d despise me,’ I tell her, rising, taking off my glasses – and, to my dismay, in putting them on the table, placing them in the space beside it and dropping them on the floor.
Etty stoops to pick them up; fresh tears obscure my vision.
‘If only you knew how often, and not only in dreams, Bea has come to me in this room,’ I tell her. ‘Slim, as when I first knew her, dressed in her blue dress with its turned-down, round-winged collar, a rim of white against her neck, the buttons down the front, the line of which, in the most erotic way imaginable, divided her breasts, a thin blue belt outlining her waist. Gone. Without the least compunction. Innocence,’ I pause, ‘destroyed,’ and add, ‘Nothing to replace it.’
I am sitting sideways on the bed, reluctant to get in or be put inside.
‘This room,’ I tell her, ‘is like a coffin. Once in, I fear, I’ll never be let out.’
‘You’re free to go wherever you like,’ she says, endeavouring to lift my legs (clearly beyond her) at which I get into bed without her assistance.
‘Back to London?’ I enquire.
‘Raynor doesn’t advise it. Neither,’ she goes on, ‘does Maidstone.’
‘Maidstone’s retired. To write the definitive life of Rossini. Have you,’ I enquire, ‘heard anything more ridiculous?’ aware, once inside the blankets and covered by their weight, how cold I really am. I immediately begin to shiver. ‘Why he gave up at the height of his career. Piero della Francesco, of course, was the same. Rimbaud, too, another,’ and, anticipating her look of boredom (the children, I can hear, are stirring – with one or two yells – at the back of the house), I add, ‘In your case it would have a definitive edge. I’m prepared to spill the beans on everything.’
‘Everything?’ she asks, more in provocation than with interest, I conclude, for she knows how notorious I am for covering my tracks, or, more nearly, leaving totally misleading signals.
‘After all, what have I to hide?’ I tell her.
‘A great deal, I would have thought,’ she says, and adds, ‘A child, after all, shouldn’t know everything about its parents.’
‘Even when it’s grown?’ I ask.
‘Are we ever grown?’ she says, with a look in my direction: she is tucking in the blankets and the sheet. Before I can respond, she adds, ‘What is knowledge but a half-truth, and often, at best, not even that?’
‘If I don’t talk, and you don’t write, how will we know anything?’ I ask. ‘Isn’t knowing something better than knowing a little?’
‘It depends what you mean by “know”,’ she says. ‘Knowledge is rarely matched by a facility for expression.’
Sullen with early waking, her face, her eyes half-closed, her cheeks bloated, is turned away: she is anxious, after all, to see what I have written (it’s five years since I wrote anything at all). Moving across the foot of the bed, she tucks in the blankets on the other side, passing closer by the table.
‘I could write a great deal,’ I tell her, ‘if I had an inducement.’
‘What?’
‘An audience.’
‘You have.’
‘Inattentive.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Not always applauding, either,’ I go on. ‘Nor necessarily appreciative. All I want, after all,’ I conclude, ‘is to turn subject into object.’
‘Those whom we love remain subjects for as long as we are here to love them,’ she says.
‘And be loved by them.’
‘And be loved by them,’ she says. ‘Though that, in the past, has often been difficult to detect.’
‘Did Boswell love his subject less for turning him into the subject that we know today?’ I ask.
She hasn’t glanced at the paper for, turning to the table, she picks up the cup of tea she’s brought.
‘Do you want this, Dad?’ she says, so unaffectedly that, to hide my distress, I turn away.
‘You can put it by the bed,’ I tell her, not wishing to be left alone and, as she re-approaches the bedside table on which she has already placed my glasses, I add, ‘The past isn’t that bad. Think of the illustrations, the paintings and drawings, the shots from films and plays. None of the trivia of domestic life,’ at which, unexpectedly, she laughs and, lightened by her mood, I enquire, ‘Did you say I could go to London?’
&nb
sp; ‘There’s nothing to stop you,’ she says. ‘Charlie isn’t inclined to, and Raynor is unlikely to section you in the way that Maidstone did.’
‘What can be disposed of so easily by someone like that leaves a great deal to be questioned,’ I tell her, ‘regarding his judgement.’
‘Maidstone wasn’t a fool,’ she says and, having placed the tea beside me, retreats to the door.
‘He was tired,’ I tell her, ‘and overworked. The psychiatric department of a National Health hospital is not the best place,’ I add, ‘to form definitive judgements. No wonder,’ I go on, ‘he took early retirement. No doubt he’s sitting on a terrace in Majorca writing something to the effect that it was depression conjoined with anxiety neurosis that obliged the greatest composer of his age – renowned above Beethoven, in his time – to give up his extraordinary creativity at the height of his career, whereas, as I told him, it was nothing of the kind. He was granted a bursary by the French Government on the sole proviso he spent a certain part of each year in Paris. Money, Etty. Money.’
‘Is that,’ she says, ‘the same with you?’ while, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ comes from the landing from where Lottie and Glenda have heard her as they dash to the bathroom.
‘Hello, Grandpa!’ they exclaim as, round-eyed, they cling to her housecoat.
‘Money was not my downfall,’ I tell her. ‘Even though I earned a lot. After all,’ I go on, ‘there was no one who wasn’t, to some degree, rewarded. There are painters in London who never earned a penny to whom I handed cash I never even had. As for the family …’
She is, however, already outside the door: ‘Grandpa is resting. Now go to your room.’
She has, before departing, drawn the curtains and now, with a perfunctory, ‘I’ll see you later, Father,’ from beyond the door, she closes it behind her: her voice and those of the children, still clamouring, fade to the back of the house.