by David Storey
Try as I may, however, I can’t keep the objects near me in focus: I look through the distorting panes of glass and see Mrs Otterman hoovering in the children’s bedroom, passing to and fro, her head stooped, her arm thrust at an angle, and am reminded again of Isabella, for there is scarcely a door or a window of this house in which I can’t or haven’t pictured her – as I was, for instance, moments before, watching her agile figure alongside Corcoran’s immobile one: her excited laugh as, running in front of her stationary husband, she flicks the ball past Bea and calls, ‘Our game, darling!’
The water hisses against the plants, drums on the wood planking of the shelves and on the plastic rims of the pots.
‘What has she done when she’s been here?’ I ask.
‘Walked. Gone into the village.’
‘To do what?’
‘See people.’
‘Who?’
‘From the old days. There are still one or two. She brought a few back for tea, one day. Rose, who used to clean and who, when I was here, looked after me.’
‘Did she bring Albert?’
‘Once or twice. She wanted him to see it. “The place,” she told him, “where I grew up.”’
‘And fell in love.’
‘With a man from Reading whose parents manufactured biscuits.’
‘Boasting.’
‘She said she gave him up, not because she didn’t love him, but because she thought you needed her more.’
In endeavouring to rise I miss my step, clutch at a seed-tray (intending to clutch at the plank shelf itself) and find myself a moment later lying on the brick-lined floor; more pertinently, with my head immersed in a mound of compost: “potting compost” – the words on a plastic bag pass, in a series of horizontal hieroglyphics, in front of my eyes.
‘You seemed to do it,’ she says, ‘on purpose,’ but I realise this is a response she conjures up whenever she foresees an incident occurring, involving the two of us, over which she suspects she will exercise little if any control.
‘You don’t think I’m lying here for fun?’ I ask her and, without her assistance, attempt to rise. My head falls back against an unseen wooden batten holding up the banks of plants.
‘Are you all right?’ her figure stooping by me, the pressure of her hand beneath my arm.
‘Ever since I got up I’ve felt a little strange,’ I tell her.
‘Not your tachycardia?’ she says. ‘You haven’t taken any of the pills since you arrived.’
‘My blood pressure, by all accounts,’ I tell her, ‘is coming down. I don’t need medication for anything.’
I am – should anyone come upon us – on my knees in a position not altogther indistinguishable from that of praying, my hands together, my fingers intertwined: a feeling of alarming despondency overwhelms me: is this, I mentally enquire, how Richard Fenchurch is going to end?
‘I swam, you know, each morning, at the Kentish Town baths, eight o’clock, a dozen lengths, which isn’t bad for someone who, unlike you, the family swimmer, sinks like a brick unless he’s lifted out. I struggled, Etty, for every stroke.’ Invigorated by this thought I add, getting to my feet, ‘Why your mother should say that I’ve no idea. She idolised me in those early years, if not for a few years after.’
I am standing in a sea of glass: a greenish haze intercedes between me and everything around.
‘It’s not the past she came here to hate,’ I suddenly conclude. ‘But me.’
‘I’m sure you were included,’ Etty says, leading me, within the confines of the greenhouse, to the door.
‘You don’t accommodate the past by attempting to re-write it. The only past you have is the present,’ I announce. ‘Though syllogistic exercises of that nature,’ I further pronounce, ‘are quite beyond her,’ she leading me, my hands still clenched, to the yard outside. ‘It was the smell of that manure,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not very good at confined spaces. I recall flying to Los Angeles for the first time – a mad scheme by a producer to film one of my books – and they had to carry me from the aircraft. The moment it moved at Heathrow, knowing I was to be enclosed inside it for the next thirteen hours, I had the most appalling attack of nerves, something which, until that time – I was twenty-seven – I had never had before. Not precisely in those terms. Something no doubt was telling me that a journey of that length, with a purpose of the sort I have just described, represented an unacceptable compromise with the standards I’d pursued with such integrity throughout my life. “This is wrong”, my mind announced, and endeavoured, in the most sensational manner, to take leave of the issue in the only way it could. I feel that now, or, rather,’ breathing in more deeply, ‘did until a moment ago,’ at which Etty says, ‘These attacks of verbiage are part of the pattern, I take it?’
We are standing, her arm around me, in the yard while, from overhead, I have no doubt, Mrs Otterman is gazing down, the vacuum cleaner still in her hand (more refuse to dispose of).
‘This compulsive talking. I’ve noticed, and so has Charlie, you do it increasingly. Even Lottie and Glenda have mentioned it.’
“Dear Bea, how could I describe those moments when I met you after school without re-writing the past and bringing it into the present with the most disreputable credentials?”
‘It’s something to do,’ I tell her, ‘with being on my own. All my previous associates, for whom, in one way or another, I did so much, where not dead, will have nothing to do with me. “Failure”, after all, is the most frightful thing to happen to someone who is geared, as I was, to “success”. Of a kind, I might add, I prayed for, for, in all those early years, when your mother was living here and I at Onasett, I prayed each night, “Dear God, may it be Thy will I become an artist, for what is the purpose of suffering to leave even part of it unexpressed?” to which I had an immediate response: “You are an artist. Isn’t it evident in your susceptibility to love?” I watched my hand acquire a skill in drawing – something which, until that moment, I’d scarcely had at all.’
‘You talk as if your life is over,’ she says, leading me to the house but, disengaging myself, I announce, ‘I’ve had that impressed upon me in no uncertain manner. She says it is, she with her much publicised research and even more publicised – if I have anything to do with it – lover. It’s far from true she loved that youth from Reading. It was me – me alone. She told me at the time.’
We are standing face to face: what anyone, observing us, might have assumed we were discussing, is beyond my imagination: the state of the nation, the merits of one plant food over another: compost is scattered about my clothes and, in an aimless manner, she begins to brush me down.
‘I’ll walk about the grounds,’ I tell her. ‘I feel much better for saving that.’
‘You’ve only got your slippers on,’ she says.
‘You water your geraniums,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll get my shoes.’
‘And put on a coat.’
‘I’ll put on a coat,’ I tell her. ‘You unwrap your dahlias. They ought to be planted by now.’
9
I love this house: it stretches forty-five feet exactly from its front façade, forming, at the rear, a kitchen/scullery wing – enclosing, in the process, the stone-flagged yard. In its sunny half, secluded by a privet hedge – one of the few vegetal survivors from the old days – stands the greenhouse on the remnants of the tennis lawn – catching the morning and, in the summer, the midday as well as afternoon sun, a bank of baize-like calmness against the darkness of the stone.
The back of the house is stained where the drainpipes and the guttering in recent years have leaked (the place, for two decades, let to – on the whole – uncaring tenants); and where the accretion of soot was unchecked by the prevailing wind and rain, the yellow sandstone acquiring a greenish tinge. The windows are mis-aligned, the subsidence irregular: one end of the L-shaped façade – that furthest from the scullery wing – declines towards that side of the garden where the old stone arch, with its pitted keysto
ne, surmounted by a painted stork, opens into what, in the old days, was the stable yard and, later, the parking bays for Corcoran’s lorries. In the days before I knew him he kept horses here for hauling carts – square, high-sided, two-wheeled creations, as well as low-sided, rectangular, four-wheeled ones – the teams of horses hauling, not in pairs, but single file. The old harnesses, when I first knew Bea, were still hanging in one of the mouldering buildings, and several of the old two-wheeled and several of the four- (and one curious six-) wheeled ones were parked, rotting, in the field, and former grazing pasture, behind the stable wing itself. Now houses occupy ‘Ardsley Close’, small, three-bedroomed terrace dwellings bought by professional couples whose children often come into the grounds to play with Lottie and Glenda, but whose school, a private one, in Linfield, they don’t attend.
The sale of the stable wing and the construction of the houses was one of Corcoran’s final ‘investments’: not many years after Bea and I were married he re-leased the Hall, sold off his business and – in the manner he had foreseen, and prepared for, the nationalisation of coal and its transport – moved his capital into land. On most of it he built ‘executive’ dwellings: having started off as a colliery stable-lad, his final creation, via horse-drawn transport, motor transport, property and land (he was, for a while, in the insurance business), was the industrial estate which, hidden from Ardsley, dominates the vista of rolling fields and woods that lie between the village and Linfield. ‘I’ve come,’ he told me, ‘a full revolution. From towing up muck from a hole in the ground I’ve filled it up and levelled it off and put buildings o’er the top of it. Now, that’s what I call creative,’ (a glint in the eye which as much as said, ‘I don’t know what an artist would think of it,’ not much caring, with this as with other things, whether I responded).
The grounds at the back of the house are much overgrown: the old tennis-court apart, the once meticulously maintained woodland, with its ancient quarry – shaped over the years into a smooth-lawned, shrubby dell (a rock-strewn pool, festooned with lily-pads, at its centre) – is indistinguishable from the woodland which, owned by a neighbouring farmer, and much neglected, adjoins it further along the slope. As for the Swansons’ flat-roofed house (known as ‘The Pillbox’ to the villagers), it has been joined, beyond the summit of the slope, by a number of imitations, none of them as austere, and the majority built in brick and stone, or an injudicious blend of both, a string of such creations, each tree-enclosed and garden-walled, standing on the edge of a recently broadened road and acquiring, because of their common size and close location, the district name of ‘Ardsley End’ – a southern sobriquet which is echoed, perhaps evoked, by their suburbanised appearance.
The grounds I walk in, therefore, are somewhat circumscribed and the route through them obscured, where not by fallen trees or untrained hedges, by weeds and grasses and occasional mounds of refuse – most of it of domestic origin – carried here at night and dumped by trespassers from the village: probably, Charlie has declared, relatives of those miners whom he allowed into ‘The Wood’ to cut timber for burning during the final miners’ strike and most of which was used not by the wives for cooking but burning in the braziers at the colliery gates. ‘I may have been mistaken, but one Iorryload was used to block a lane at Winnington Pit when half a dozen scabs went back to work. The police came here to check it. Contrary to popular belief an “evolutionist’s” life is not a simple one.’
It was here that I often wandered with Bea – and, more often still, with Isabella; for it was easier – it appeared a natural and casual extension of domestic life – while I waited for Bea to complete her ‘prep’, as Corcoran called it, for her to offer to show me a recently discovered nest (she was uniquely fond of birds), a hitherto unknown flower (we bought a book to discover their names), or the latest change to the ‘choreography’ of the wood or garden – achieved with the help of the gardener, but more often on her own, by cutting back a hedge, removing a bush, or planting something new and, invariably, exotic. Little evidence of her efforts remains: here and there I recognise a shrub, a hedge, a declivity or hollow (the site of an ambitious excavation to uproot a tree), but most, if not all, are overgrown: animals – rats – scurry away in the undergrowth, and in one particular spot where we often embraced – a patch of grass screened by rhododendron – someone, recently, has lit a fire: smoke from a clump of ashy twigs, and, on the flattened ground, the ends of several cigarettes, drifts among the trees.
It was Isabella, after all, I loved: a woman turned fifty – a woman reconciled (it seemed, at the time, supremely) to the kind of life she led: the kind of life she had always led. Much to my surprise, years later, I discovered that what she had told me at the beginning – that this was the only infidelity, on her part, in her marriage – happened to be true: what, I asked myself, ecstatically, each night, could a woman of her age – almost three times my own – want with someone like myself; someone who, uniquely, presented so much danger and could offer her so little, unless our short embraces, our hurried kisses, the frenetic caressing that took place not only in this wood but in alleyways and shop doorways and at street corners in town could be described as ‘wanted’ – tokens of a love which, at that time, and often later, I told her went deeper than anything I had ever known.
When she complained of being old – ‘So old, at times, I daren’t think,’ – I would cry, ‘I love you old! I like you old!’ and, ‘I wouldn’t have you any other way! You’re sacred to me: when I’m on my own and think of you my hands, would you believe it, begin to shake. My legs, at times, won’t hold me up,’ for, on occasion, when we met – particularly after an interval of several days (and once, torturedly, after she’d been abroad, on holiday, with Corcoran, after an interval of several weeks) – I would shake so violently she would grow afraid, holding me at arm’s length, while I – I struggled only to draw her to me.
Everything about her – her clothes, her hair, her gestures, her expressions, her appearance – her voice, her manners – entranced me: ‘It’s not me at all you love,’ she would say – she did say – lying on the ground on which I’m standing now: a fifty-four-year-old woman and a twenty-year-old youth. ‘It’s a fantasy you have of me. And I, of course,’ she had gone on, ‘must have about you.’
‘Is that different,’ I’d asked, ‘from anyone else?’ adding, ‘Anyone else,’ caressing her intently. ‘What do we have, after all, but projections – elucidations of how we feel which we see reflected in other people, and which, in my case, I see so deeply and profoundly reflected in you?’
‘But what am I?’ she would ask, her eyes darkened by a fear I seldom saw on any other occasion. ‘A wife, a mother, a woman old enough to have given birth to you – a woman who has given birth to a girl you say you love and who, I haven’t any doubt, is in love with you. This would shatter Bea if she knew. It would shatter me. It would shatter all of us, even an inkling of what was going on.’
Her stupefaction would drive her to despair – and to almost unapproachable silences: we got in touch, for instance, by the most tortuous arrangement. I would ring Ardsley at a particular time – one she had chosen when, she assumed, Corcoran and Rosie (Mrs Hopkins) would be out, Kells and Nan otherwise engaged. Sometimes – more often than not – it didn’t work, so that I would find myself holding a conversation with Mrs Hopkins or, disengagingly, with Nan, or, confusedly, with Kells – or even Corcoran himself, enquiring about a pen or a book or a drawing I may (deliberately) have left behind, Isabella summoned finally to offer her suggestions – a whispered time and place between more loudly-offered phrases, or a vehement, but still whispered (and frightening) ‘No!’
I never lost my nerve: not even when Corcoran, on one occasion, in the darkness, came blundering down the garden path and Isabella, whom I had met, moments before, by arrangement, by the garden gate, was caught in my embrace, the shadow of the hedge alone concealing us.
Oh, Bella!
10
She
wore a flowered dress: blue-patterned, the flowers, broad-petalled, within a green enclosure; white buttons secured the lapelled collar, the declivity between her breasts incisively pronounced. Her legs bare, she lay back in the grass, the skirt of the dress unbuttoned, the petticoat beneath it raised above her thighs. We had spent the afternoon by the side of Winnington Pond, a reservoir, enclosed by woods, from which a stream wound down, through a rock-strewn, narrow valley, to a smaller, shallower pond beneath. Children – we could hear their voices – played in the stream while on the pond itself a man, throughout the afternoon, motionless, had sat in a boat, fishing, glancing – as far as we were aware – only once in our direction. The bed of the pond was muddied, laced through by a network of weeds and grasses amongst which shoals of tiny, silver-coloured fish darted to and fro. Isabella, allegedly, had been in Linfield, shopping and now, having followed the path down by the playing children, we were lying on a bank beside the lower, deserted pond. A mist, as the afternoon passed and the first chill of the evening came across the unruffled water, caused her to shiver and, as I drew out her dress, to push down her hand and fasten it.
‘Let me do it for you,’ I said.
I slid each button into its hole more slowly than I had, earlier that afternoon, removed it.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said, I, ignoring this threat, as I always did, proceeding with my task.
‘How much I love you,’ I said, lowering my head to kiss her.
She presented me her cheek.
‘Ever since I’ve met you,’ she said as, after several seconds, I withdrew, ‘I’ve lived in two worlds. Heaven, like this afternoon, and misery the rest of the time. My hair is grey, my figure unattractive, my skin has “gone”, my breasts have sunk, my thighs, I know, are flecked with veins. When you aren’t there, I long – I can’t tell you how much I long – for you to touch me. And when you do, I go to pieces. I cry – sometimes when I’m on my own, sometimes with other people. I don’t know why. Like this afternoon, you lying there, asleep, so peaceful. It’s as if I didn’t mind that anyone might see. You know how weak I am, how naive in many ways. No woman I know would have responded in the way I did when I first saw you. I didn’t even know myself until long after it was over.’