by David Storey
The moment they have gone I get out of bed and stare at the sheet of paper and, beside it, the school exercise book. “What am I? Who am I?” I have written in the latter. “Isn’t what I am doing counter-productive to what I intend to be? Sometimes, walking from Onasett to the art school – a distance of two miles – I pretend to be blind, stepping along the pavement, panicking after a while, glancing down, continuing again, my ears attuned to the traffic, to the sound of approaching feet, inducing – my head bowed, seemingly downcast – a state of mind from which, in a curious way, I feel I’ll never be released …’
I am standing by the window, looking down the slope, beyond the garden, the trees, the intervening wall, to the village – a smear in the morning light against the mist-drenched hills – and recall Etty remarking on the morning after my arrival, ‘The past, I’m afraid, didn’t do you any good.’
‘Yet we’re standing here,’ I’d told her.
‘We are,’ she’d said, without expression.
‘What I’m looking for,’ I’d said, ‘is a way to carry on. To disinter the past has become less of a prerequisite,’ I’d added.
‘Look at the way,’ she’d said, ‘your work is written off, or, worse,’ she had gone on, ‘not even mentioned,’ and, suspecting she might have gone too far, she added, ‘It should be enough to rouse you to composing something else,’ and then, her gaze returning to the window, ‘I envisaged you going out with easel and paints and starting again from scratch.’
‘The peculiar thing,’ I told her, ‘about the village is I drew it very often. The number of paintings I have of the pit. Not to mention sketches. Of a place,’ I continued, ‘that doesn’t exist. I put it into novels, descriptions of the streets, the houses, the appearance of the people, the twin winding-gears above the roofs, the colliery engine hauling trucks, the engine hidden in the cutting, visible only as a cloud of smoke, of steam …’
And am sitting in Maidstone’s room at the North London Royal, he confiding, ‘You’re written out. It’s better to acknowledge that than go on tormenting yourself with dreams that in the future your material and gift will come flooding back. Why don’t you teach? It’s better than sitting on your own, with or without Vivienne, endeavouring to recapture a fame and a fortune which, let’s face it, have gone for good.’
‘I don’t believe,’ I’d told him, ‘I’ve even touched on the things I intended to touch on when I first set out,’ and when he enquired, half-smiling, ‘What are those?’ I replied, ‘The malevolence of the family I came from, not to mention, of course, the world around,’ and, in that instant, recall walking the lanes and alleyways at the back of Bea’s school, her summer dress, her sun-flecked features, the patches of shadow beneath the copper beeches (each garden of each house possessing at least one), the entanglement of their coiling branches, smooth, grey-sheened, flecked with cicatricial scars of rotting wood: the dust stirs at her heels – her white-socked ankles, her thin-strapped, low-heeled shoes which nevertheless enhance the slimness of her calves. Tall, she has her mother’s grace but not the fulness of her figure (the same porcelain-delicacy around her cheeks – her eyes, her nose): much of our time we spend avoiding teachers from her school: ‘That boy isn’t doing you any good,’ which, years later, she pointed out, came close to coinciding with the truth: ‘A girl’s education is more important than a boy’s, for he acquires his by the volition of his sex whereas a girl’s, in those days, at least, had to be prescribed.’
We are walking, hand in hand, along Cliff Lane, a winding, narrow track, formerly a drovers’ back-route into town, above us the sooted sandstone of the town’s principal buildings – towered, steepled, domed, irregular and daunting – and come to a gap in a tall brick wall which allows us a glimpse of the hill below the town on which I have lived the previous eighteen years, a scree, as it appears, of red-tiled roofs. ‘That, at least,’ I announce, ‘will soon be gone.’ It is the summer of our escape to London, she to college, I to the Drayburgh: applications have gone in the previous spring and, in both our cases, been accepted, she to a college in Regent’s Park, I to one off the Euston Road …
‘You haven’t got dressed.’ Moving from the door, Etty pulls back the covers from the bed. ‘What’s that you’re writing?’ plumping up the pillows, constraining herself from looking, while, seated at the table, the pen falls from my hand.
‘I can’t cope,’ I tell her, ‘with interruptions,’ and add, ‘I thought I’d take a trip.’
‘Where?’
‘Onasett.’
‘Why?’
‘See how the old place is.’
‘Do you want a lift?’ (more alarmed by this, I believe, than anything previously I might have said).
‘I’ll go on the bus. I haven’t been back for years. I wonder if it’s changed.’
An ache, beginning in the region of my stomach, rises, like an outstretched hand, to grip my heart – to squeeze then wrench it from its vascular mountings.
‘For the worse.’ Etty pounds the pillow. ‘We passed by it, not long ago. It looks run down. The motorway comes out above it. It’s not like it was in the old days.’
‘You didn’t know it in its prime,’ I tell her – and am back inside this house with the rattle of carts and wagons and the revving of trucks from the yard next door, and Corcoran calling from the hall, ‘I’ll be over in the office, Bella,’ she, moments later, appearing in the door, a cup of tea or coffee in her hand, her ingenuous, ‘I thought you were going out to paint …’
‘In those days,’ I tell her, ‘it was full of life,’ yet wonder if, in reality, it was or, retrospectively, I am provisioning it with certainties which were lacking at the time – and which, in reality, are lacking now. ‘The people, of course, were innocent. They’d come up from the river – the streets and alleyways around the docks, with the outside toilets, the periodic floodings when the polluted water came over the banks, the stench from the malt-kilns. You’ve no idea how oppressive a smell like that can be. The odour, too, from the mills, the effluent from the factories,’ and, before I know what I’m doing, I’m standing in the door, forbidding her departure, declaring, ‘Onasett was freshly built, the contractors’ lorries still moving up the slope, the piles of bricks and the stacks of timber, the lorry loads of tiles, the houses interspersed amongst the grey ash spoil-heaps of the ancient pits – gin-pits, themselves overgrown with silver birch and occasional sycamore and alder, like tumuli scattered up the steepening slope, strewn with its coiling crescents, avenues and roads, the brick-built school and the stone-built church bastions at its summit,’ breathless, ‘to the south, the river, coiling across its formerly lake-bedded valley floor, the gorge to the west silhouetted, at sunset, like a cavernous eye. The great days, Ett, the people stunted dwarfs creeping from the alleys, the mud-flats and wasteland by the river, breathing, reaching out – in effect, new people entirely, the residue of the industrial revolution re-born. At one time I had a photograph: my father, in waistcoat, shirt-sleeves and trousers, in the field at the back of the house – the houses behind him half-completed – Raymond, my eldest brother, in his arms, the gardens unfenced, the moorland, long-grassed and crisscrossed by the tracks of the builders’ lorries, running to the back doors and low living-room windows …’
‘Shouldn’t I come with you?’ Etty shoulders past. ‘We could drive there and back within the hour. Give it two,’ she says, ‘to look around. The bus,’ she is about to go on, ‘isn’t regular,’ but when I declare, ‘It wouldn’t be the same with another person (no matter,’ I add, in parenthesis, ‘how loving and caring, and even indulgent she may be’), she slips out to the landing and without a word (other than, ‘Your breakfast’s been ready for over an hour’), descends to the hall from where comes the sound of Mrs Otterman singing (having foolishly been persuaded by Etty she has a pleasant voice: ‘I like to hear something going on in the house’ – in this instance a song recently made popular, on television, by an (alleged) castrato, and improved in no disc
ernible way by Mrs Otterman’s interpretation) – an indication that, in her irredeemably casual way, she has started ‘dusting’. ‘He’ll be down in a minute,’ I hear Etty call out (everyone, of course, equal in this house: formal address always in front of the servants – except, curiously, where I am concerned, ‘Richard’ and ‘Grandpa’ disseminated like the name of a dog), ‘Mrs Otterman.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ I tell her when I finally get down, ‘is where the miners have got to. Some, I know, are in the new drift mine at Wharnley, and some have gone east to the deep mine at Thornton, but where are those who sat on their haunches in front of the Miners’ Welfare, and the Labour Club and the Ardsley bus-stop waiting to go out to that ghastly estate they built at Ashworth? They were the salt of the earth. At least, at the very least, the grit in the oyster from which the pearl of enlightenment was supposed to come – the enlightenment, I might add, of industrial progress,’ only, of course, she doesn’t answer for, moments before, I have heard her call Raynor (and having difficulty locating or being allowed to speak to him), enquiring, finally, ‘Is it safe to allow him out alone?’
‘Not to mention,’ I tell her, ‘social justice, for the fact of the matter is the third Industrial Revolution took place without our being aware of it, except, of course, by omission,’ (she is peeling potatoes at the sink when, in reality, she ought to be in her study preparing notes for The Life and Times of Richard Fenchurch, the life and times of a modern saint). ‘Places, not only pits, are disappearing, their entire surface workings with them, so that all we are left with is the residue of a pre-industrial landscape across which is scattered a post-industrial fenestration of streets and houses which have, apparently, no industrial, commercial or – how should I describe it? – ontological support. The landscape is bereft – bereft of all but the people living on it. No one,’ I go on, ‘appears to work.’
‘Are you going to Onasett?’ she asks and when I enquire, ‘What did Raynor say?’ she replies, ‘He insists I go with you.’
‘In that case,’ I tell her, ‘there’s no point in going. It begins to sound as if he’s inclined to section me already.’
‘Nothing of the sort!’ she cries and turns to add, ‘Why do you look for the worst interpretation? The best is close enough!’
Tears, and not only recently, I can see, have sprung to her eyes.
‘I’m not sure why I’m here,’ I tell her. ‘Is it because I should have been locked up and it’s something Bea couldn’t bear to see? Am I to be treated as a prisoner, not for my sake, but the benefit of others? After all,’ I tell her, ‘I’m not quite mad. I never was, despite what Bea and others might have said. It’s the world out there that has gone quite wrong while I, a freak of nature, have remained, throughout this maelstrom, Bea, untouched.’
‘My name isn’t Bea,’ she says.
‘Etty.’
‘Doesn’t it come to something,’ she goes on, ‘when you confuse me with your former wife?’
She isn’t, after all, peeling vegetables but potting plants: something with which she has become increasingly preoccupied, according to Charlie, since I arrived in the house: they stand, their stems green-leafed and largely flowerless, in tiny plastic bowls and urns along the window ledge before her, on the draining-board and, I further notice, the kitchen table. ‘They remind me of your mother. It must,’ I tell her, ‘have confused me. She was always preoccupied with plants.’
‘Instead of you.’ Back stooped, head bowed, fingers blackened to the knuckles. ‘I don’t think you’re even half-aware of how much concern has gone into looking after you. Raynor says Maidstone gave you priority over all his other patients, and Raynor, no doubt, will do the same.’
‘I don’t believe he did,’ I tell her. ‘On one occasion, when I arrived, as per appointment, he was nowhere to be found. I was at the time, in an abject state. You’ve no idea …’
‘And Mum.’
‘Mum?’
She transfers several potted seedlings to a fibre tray.
‘All the care she gave you.’
‘Was directed to her leeches. Have you seen her in her lab?’
‘Often.’
‘You never told me.’
‘You never asked. I’ve seen a great deal of her the last two years.’ Her next words are obscured by the sound of running water.
‘While all the while I was going mad.’
You’ve been recovering the past two years,’ she says.
‘Maidstone wrote me off completely.’
‘He did not.’
‘“Lithium, Fenchurch,” he said, “or nothing.” I refused to take it. What you see behind you, for you refuse to look me in the face, is someone who defies, and has defied, the laws of science. Defined, I might add, by medical knowledge which sees chemicals as the solution to all our ills.’
‘As it happens,’ her back still to me, ‘the subject doesn’t seem half as important to me as it did before.’
‘Why come and rescue me?’ I ask.
A feeling of lightness – invariably preceding a delirious attack – absorbs me entirely: instead of sitting down I stand by the sink, gaze into the discoloured water collected there, and at the welter of uprooted, thread-like seedlings – like the whitened nerve-endings of the mind itself – and add, ‘Or were you worried about the money?’
‘Money?’
‘Mine.’
‘You gave it all away, you said.’
‘Which didn’t stop Bea from asking for half. She has a harebrained scheme, when her Medical Research Council grant runs out, of financing her own laboratory. “The proceeds from one of your plays,” she said, “will be enough. All the equipment I need I can get into a shed.” “What shed?” I asked. “The one on the farm I intend to buy. Didn’t Etty tell you? I’ve thought of a scheme for marketing leeches. Apart from the research demand, they’re back in fashion.” When I made the inevitable response, “Leeches are the one thing you and I have in common,” she threw the electric fire at me.’
‘Fire?’
‘I’m surprised she didn’t tell you. It cut my head from above one eye to behind my ear. I had to have thirteen stitches.’
‘Liar.’
She lays down a potting-tool – a wooden spatula – and kneads in the soil around a root.
‘What are these going to be?’ I ask.
‘Sunflowers.’
‘From seed.’
‘What alternative is there?’ she enquires, brushing, as she does so, the back of her wrist against her brow – ironically, in the same spot that the first of the thirteen stitches was inserted when I ducked into the fire which, rather than hurled, was tossed at me by Bea.
‘I’m surprised she hasn’t told you. On the many occasions,’ I go on, ‘you’ve been to see her.’
‘She’s been up here more often,’ she says.
‘She doesn’t like the place,’ I tell her.
‘She’s getting to hate it less now that she and Albert are married,’ she says.
‘You can imagine the field-day the cartoonists had with a wife who grew leeches. “Political Leech” was hardly in it.’
The fibre tray, beside the sink, is full: she carries it to the door and, moments later, is visible in the yard, crossing to the recently-constructed greenhouse – erected on what, in the old days, was the tennis-court and is now an area of tussocky grass. I follow – seeing not Etty but Isabella striding there: her tennis dress and tennis hat (she discoloured disagreeably in the sun), standing with Corcoran on their side of the net (he in white flannels and a short-sleeved shirt) while Kells, like an emaciated stick, sat by the net on a chair to keep the score, Bea and I – she attired in a pleated skirt, I in my paint-stained trousers – knocking the ball back with the sole intention of not, by winning, driving Corcoran to distraction.
‘Is that the reason she suggested I come here? To get to hate my past?’
‘It was one idea,’ she says.
The musty air of the greenhouse has
a deleterious effect: seeing an upturned box, I remove a pair of gloves and sit – more heavily than I intended.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks.
‘Perfectly,’ I tell her, and add, ‘As for the care expended on me, I don’t suppose you’ve seen her staining her leeches, her eyes pressed to her microscope more intently than they were ever focused on me. Did she tell you about the times we spent up here?’
She is running water from a tap into a watering-can with a preternaturally long spout to which is attached a, proportionately, even larger rose.
‘What she didn’t tell me, you have,’ she says, and adds, ‘Apart from your relationship with Gran.’
‘Oh, Gran.’ I dismiss it with a wave of my hand. ‘In the last years of our relationship the whole of her time and energy were spent in re-learning the art of staining cells. Cancer cure or not – and I have my doubts – there was more in her absorption than meets the eye. To have been fifteen years away from research and to go back in with, as she described it, an open mind and a facility she inherited from Kells – his cakes aside – to discover what she has, reputedly, discovered, speaks for itself. She had no time for anything else. Not even Albert when he arrived. She only got her hooks on him when she thought her grant might be running out and the publicity and celebration went to her head.’
‘Mother is a remarkable woman,’ Etty says and, if briefly, I glimpse something of her own discontent: ‘If my mother can achieve all this, what challenge is there left for me?’ she must have asked. ‘Another treatise on Renaissance art transposed, let’s say, to an artist of today? Even with two children, and Charlie as a husband, how does that compare with the achievements of my mother, with her menopausal research, her ten years’ younger lover and a husband who, if divorced, was once described as the leading writer of his generation?’
‘She’s one of a team,’ I tell her, reading – or so I think – her mind, but she adds, ‘I’ve been growing these all winter, but the heating went for a time and I doubt if they’ll recover,’ pouring the water from the can over a row of withered stems which, alone amongst the trays and boxes, appear in need of her attention.