by David Storey
‘I don’t think you’re like you describe at all,’ I said. ‘There’s not a day goes by when I don’t set off for college, walking, without an image of you in mind. I love your breasts, your face, your thighs. There’s nothing about you I don’t love to touch. Like now. Like this,’ until, with a sigh, she arrests my hand. ‘You shouldn’t diminish yourself in the way you do. My whole life,’ I tell her, ‘is geared towards you …’ repeating these words as, walking in the wood at the back of Ardsley Hall, I look up at the spring-bared starkness of the trees, reminded of the times, at dusk, or on a summer afternoon, on the pretext of there being something, to do with her gardening, I ought to see, we embraced beneath these trees, on this now litter-strewn slope, her head couched against the grass, her hand arresting mine before, with a groan, often with a cry, she solemnly yielded (her dark eyes watching mine as, in the depths, she imagined – preternaturally evoked – what, in the next few moments, was going to happen).
The afternoon by Winnington Pond and, later, by the lower pond, was something of a revelation: we stayed until dark; then, in the dusk, as we undressed and, having undressed, slid in the water – swimming out to a raft, made of metal, moored at the centre – we talked, peculiarly, of getting married, me insisting, she, with a tearful vehemence, declining; and then, having reached the raft, and hoisting her beside me, her nakedness gleaming in the light of a newly-risen moon, I suggested we ran away; that we didn’t go back – she to Ardsley, I to Onasett; with whatever money we had, with whatever clothes we had, we set off ‘hitching’ to the south. ‘The south, full,’ I misquoted, ‘of the blissful sun. We’ll find a cottage. You can grow plants. I’ll paint. I’ll write. Pictures no one’s dreamed of. Novels no one has even imagined …’ lying there for hours until, shivering, the moon, like a baleful presence, reflected in the surface of the pond, we slid back in the water and returned to the bank.
I dressed her; I dried her – I consumed her in that following hour, and yet, towards midnight, as we stumbled through the moonlit wood, she cried, leaning against a tree, her head cradled in her hand. ‘How could this have happened?’ she said. ‘I was a happily married woman. I was,’ she told me, ‘so content. I loved my husband. I loved my child. I feel like a killer of both of them.’
Later, she described that day as ‘our honeymoon’. It was the early hours of the morning when she got home; strangely, I never asked her what she’d told Corcoran, or Bea, to explain her absence. It was in reference to an altogether different incident that Bea mentioned ‘the night my mother came home delirious. My father said drunk. He’d phoned the police twice before going to bed, and had driven round the village more times than I remember and even, would you believe it, to Linfield and back, the buses having, by that time, finished running, then to the railway station thinking she’d be waiting there. Then, singing to herself, he said, she came up the garden. She’d met a friend, she told him, in Linfield, whom she hadn’t seen for years. “Not since school,” she told him. They’d talked, of course, forgotten the time, and when they remembered the friend had driven her back. As I saw when I got up, she was deliriously happy, and when I suggested she’d been out with a man, Daddy laughed. “You don’t know much about women,” he said. “Which is just as well. As for your mother,” – she’d kissed him quite passionately on the lips as he told me – with a directness I’d never seen before, and which, I have to confess, I’ve never seen since, “she’d be behaving quite differently if she had.”’
‘The Harem?’ I couldn’t help reflecting at the time: the legacy, not so much of Connemara as the Lebanon, the Sardinic fringe. For it was true, because of the irregular and vehement nature of our love-making, it affected, in a positive and, to her, bewildering way, Isabella’s relationship with Corcoran, he overwhelmed by the passion which, he assumed, he had aroused in her himself. ‘Mummy,’ Bea told me on one occasion, ‘for the past few weeks, has been hanging round Daddy’s neck. He gets irritated by her stroking his hair, particularly in the evening when he sits by the fire and smokes a cigarette and tries to listen to the wireless or read a paper. And I get embarrassed, I can tell you, by the number of times she goes up to him, even when Mrs Hopkins is present, let alone me, and says, brazenly, “I love you!” or, “Darling Freddie!” looking into his eyes like those awful girls at the back wall at school look over at the boys from King Edward’s.’
When I mentioned this to Isabella she said, smiling, ‘How can I help the way I am?’ and then, ‘I have duties as a wife. They preceded the feelings – which don’t amount to duties – that I have for you.’
‘How can you love two people at once?’ I asked, and when she said, ‘Isn’t it the same as you and Bea?’ I added, ‘Physically. How can you allow him in you?’
She cried (allowing me, after that, intimacies in places which, previously, she had proscribed: in trains, in doorways, in buses, even in cafés: I became exacting about the way she sat, her legs, whether stockinged or bare, displaced towards me, allowing, with as little impediment as possible, access to my hand – recalling an occasion, even, when I required her to wear a particular dress – fastened at the side and providing entry to her underclothes and breast).
She grew disturbed at my audacity. ‘Aren’t you putting your mark on me?’ she said after one disagreeable incident on the back seat of a bus, and when I asked her to explain, she added, ‘Making me submit to indecencies in places where genuine intimacy is out of the question. I don’t like that side of it. It’s brought out something cruel.’
‘Because,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t go away with me?’ at which, to my surprise (we were standing in a bus queue), she slapped my face – so hard I felt the force of it long after the bus itself (she on it) had departed and I was walking home.
Late teens, approaching twenty, childish in thought as well as need: it was shortly after this I suggested she allow me to draw her (‘for posterity,’ I reasoned, ‘if nothing else’), and hired a ‘studio’ – a room above a barber’s, near the centre of the town, full of discarded boxes – an attic used by a fellow-student who had ambitions, misplaced, to be a painter. One afternoon a week I absconded from college and drew her – first in the dresses that she chose then, after much persuasion, without them. I’m not sure why none of these drawings – and, with one exception, paintings – succeeded: the intention was to use them in my application to the Drayburgh, which had a reputation for drawing and painting from life – even (an unspoken codicil) it would provide the means by which I could give full expression – not to my love (on that, to say the least, both of us could count) – but to a talent, if not a genius which hitherto had been proscribed by the regime of the college. She would lie – at first with decorum – on a mattress on the floor; at an intermediate stage with her dress and perhaps one undergarment removed (her beautiful stockinged thighs), but finally, after infinite persuasion, with nothing on.
She would turn her head and watch, anxious at being exposed, the ambiguity of her purpose affecting, or so it seemed, the movement of my pen (later on, my brush): needless to say, at some point, I would divest myself of my own clothes and, drawing down the blind (for, though in the corner where she posed she couldn’t be seen, the room was overlooked by a departmental store across the road) I would cross to the mattress and lie beside her – or beneath her as, by her choice, was frequently the case.
A bird flies from the shrub ahead: I recognise a chaffinch (another debt unpaid). ‘Chaffinches,’ Bea once told me – she, too, indebted to Isabella for her fascination with birds – ‘acquire a regional accent, so much so that one taken, as an egg, from the Orkneys, sings a different tune when it’s hatched in Essex. Like you and me,’ she concluded, ‘are children of the north, and Mum,’ she’d paused, ‘the child of somewhere else,’ my interest in the bird re-igniting my memory of standing at the window of our house in Belsize Park and watching a firecrest which I had never seen before darting around the root of a rhododendron bush, a minuscule bird, mistaken for a wren (a
nd then a goldcrest) until I identified the strand of orange dashed along its head.
It was the window at which I would stand when I couldn’t work, gazing at the old-world garden – the buttressed wall, an ancient fig tree coiled against it, its sinuous, light grey branches masked by the dark green plates of its leaves, the grey-green fronds of the buddleia with its tentacles of purple flowers in June, the roses – ancient and modern – variegatedly coloured against the darkness of the creepers (the numerous shrubs and plants whose names – despite Isabella’s teaching – I never retained), the japonica in spring, the lilac in the summer, the ‘chrysanthemum shrub’ in autumn – and the birds (my bird-book and binoculars – presents from Isabella – by the window), the rare glimpses of a fieldfare (twice), the firecrest (once), a spotted woodpecker (three times), the finches, redpolls, siskins and linnets; the flycatchers, nesting by that selfsame window, the chiffchaffs (perhaps, more nearly, chiff-willows), the tits (willow, blue, great, coal, long-tailed and – once – bearded), the magpies, rooks, the perpetual pigeons, the dunnocks, wrens and starlings; the house-martins, swifts and swallows; the wagtails, blackcaps and the regular winter redwing – the tawny owl – the thrushes (song and mistle), the blackbirds and, throughout one summer, the (presumably escaped) perpetually mimicking myna bird that perched on the chimney and whistled alternately like a blackbird and a telephone bell.
‘Birds are my recreation,’ I would say – without conviction – to Bea; and when, years later, I would, in parenthesis, add, ‘Like leeches are with you,’ she would laugh, eyes querulous (startled, too, at times), her mouth flung open as if, even in the middle of her laugh, she still held back, half-confused by her own amusement. ‘Leeches are my work, like writing is with you. Is recreation quite the word?’ she’d ask and, if I were in the mood (which, in truth, I seldom was) to pursue the subject, her penultimate response would be, ‘It’s more a reaction, wouldn’t you say (‘to Mum’, I was always tempted to say) to life,’ her ultimate and invariably unanswered rejoinder, ‘Birds, when they’re frightened, fly away.’
It was the beginning of my ‘loneliness’, as Etty once described it. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so lonely,’ she said at one of my first nights – she in her ‘teens. ‘The author of the piece, and no one speaks to you, nor you to them. It’s to Liam,’ (the director), ‘that they flock. Haven’t you anything to tell them?’ While others, too, would come up and complain, Vivienne – the turbulent Vivienne – at the height of her fame, too, at that time, her dyed hair blended seamlessly with that of her cascading wig (bedecked with ribbon and tiny flowers), announcing, in her dressing-room, backstage at the Globe (champagne glass in one hand, bottle in the other), ‘I’ve never seen a sadder man,’ leaning forward, her tempestuous, tortured, turbulent blue eyes narrowed with their particular pain, ‘What are you afraid of?’
It’s true: more afraid than I dare express: the wringing of hands, the endless weeping (the cowering on the floor, the involuntary spasms).
Vivienne terrified me more than any person – let alone woman – I had ever known: fiendish, electric – sensational when (as was not unusual) treated with contempt. A robust, venal, undiscriminating woman, besotted by her love for Melvyn, the neophyte actor who rose to stardom, so she alleged, while in her hands, Melvyn Zygorski, an out of work (out of trousers) hustler she seduced into notoriety – one which, to her chagrin, outshone her own (a pedlar of drugs on his way to the top, a free dispenser – tragically, for Vivienne – when he finally got there).
Smaller in stature though larger in presence than Bea (or Isabella), with a peculiar skin which varied, alarmingly, according to her mood (foul-mouthed, loose-tongued), the daughter of a minister of the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church, she might, had she stayed in Glasgow, have survived the vicissitudes of her middle life (‘my beauty and my lovers gone, what else is there to live for?’) holding up the bottle (of her native drink) that played as much a part in her decline as her ‘Hollywood diets’, her mystic chums, her free-loading psychiatrist: ‘Now there is a man, if you want one, Richard: a genius from the Gorbals,’ a fellow-Scot and alcoholic.
The path winds off to the left: I recognise the contour of the land – the layout of the bushes, much overgrown, and crushed, dramatically, close to the summit of the slope, by a fallen tree. An attempt has been made to saw off its branches: scatterings of white dust lie at intervals beside the trunk: no doubt the work of intruders. Skirting it, along a track recently worn, I come to the foot of Sugden’s Bank up which, over forty years ago, I scrambled on that memorable day with Isabella.
On all fours, I scramble up again: the rabbit holes, the tufts of grass, the decimated shrubs and bushes. A wire fence, just beyond its summit, divides the grounds of ‘The People’s Palace’ from the still-cultivated farmer’s field beyond. The slope, at the foot of the field, is lined by the recently-constructed houses which form the self-enclosed enclave of Ardsley End, the Swansons’ original concrete structure obscured not only by the tall brick wall but by trees: the severity of its façade, overlooking a flourishing garden, has been ameliorated by covering it with, if not synthetic, symmetrically-featured stone.
‘I am here to make amends. Not,’ I add the codicil, ‘to hate the past (to bring that hatred into the present).’ Amends for what? Being what I was: what biological determinism has made me (demonstrated, alas, for all to see)? To make amends with Etty – the child who, in a sense, is older than myself (wiser, more contained), the last love of my life, perhaps – the inspiration, conceivably essential, to make me move again.
11
Hand in hand, walking, finally, past Thrallstone Park – the Chamberlain tents put up for a summer feast – passing beneath a railway bridge, over the canal (a barge locked in the basin beneath, smoke rising from its metal chimney, a line of washing from stem to stern) and over the adjoining river. Beside this second, larger bridge lay a crumbling, cliff-like excrescence, covered in shrubs and, where its grey surface was not exposed, by a smooth, round-bladed moorland grass: the waste-heap, not from a local pit but a soapworks. Perhaps it had been the prospect of London – departure, new worlds, destiny – which induced her to ‘vouchsafe’ me – as, once, Isabella described a similar if not identical occasion (‘the final sacrifice a woman can give’: in reality, of course, the first): the warmth of the day, the softness of the grass, the enclosure of the artificially-constructed, crag-like slopes, the shelter of the shrubs, the murmur of insects on the clover and daisies by our heads: the feeling we were embarked on a course from which, foreseeably, there was no return: those physical, moral, if not artistic considerations (not to mention psychological) induced by a recklessness which nothing in our natures, at that juncture of our lives, was in the least way inclined to discourage. Perhaps the precedent set by her mother persuaded me to pursue a course with Bea which had already been prescribed – she, her mother, an experienced woman: physically, the demands made on her, she told me on one occasion, had been extreme: ‘Three times a night he would climb on top,’ (weeping into her hand and adding, ‘I don’t know why I tell you this,’) – my own efforts, on more than one occasion, having been greeted with a laugh – unique for her at such a delicate moment: ‘You don’t know much about it, love,’ guiding my hand to a particular spot where, teeth bared, eyes fluttering, she carefully deployed it.
With Bea it was my first experience of – as I tentatively explained it – ‘God’: the greenness of the grass (the blueness of the sky): the bees, the roar – over a shoal of rocks – of the hidden river (the unblemished thigh, the pubescent breast).
‘I had a feeling,’ I said, ‘of Christ.’
‘Christ?’ (her dress drawn up above her thigh).
‘For the first time in my life,’ I said, ‘I feel in touch with God.’
‘I didn’t feel that at all,’ she said, and added, ‘I’m so glad you enjoyed it.’
With Isabella it happened, invariably, at night – and, on one of the earliest occasions, beneath th
e trees at the back of the house. Which trees, and precisely in which spot I never found out: we had gone, absurdly, to look for an owl – heard hooting from the wood and since, I declared, I’d never seen one, she had said, ‘I must show you, Richard. We see it here quite often,’ pulling on her coat, Bea – and Corcoran – if not contemptuous, disinclined to join us. ‘Off you go, Bell,’ Corcoran had said. ‘If we come out we’ll frighten it,’ adding, ‘Once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.’
We had stumbled in the dark, she finding my hand, a peculiar perversity gripping both of us. Without a word she lowered me to the ground and moments later allowed what she described as ‘our vouchsafing’: the pallor of her face against the grass – featureless, alarmingly, in the dark – the enclosure of her arms – the guidance as her hand reached down – the speed, the brevity: moments later we were returning down the slope, she dusting down her coat, I, bemused, some distance behind (not only bemused, I thought, but mad) – sceptical that Corcoran wouldn’t deduce what, in the darkness, had taken place (three times a night, I thought, for him) – he, as it was, glancing up (smoking his pipe beside the fire), enquiring, ‘Did you see it?’ to which Isabella, shaking out her hair from a headscarf, had said, lightly, ‘For a second, Freddie. Nothing else.’