A Serious Man

by David Storey

With Bea, paradise, or so it seemed, was in the grass, in the murmur of the insects, in the sheltering shrubs (in the warmth of the sun), in the enclosure of the cliff-like crag, in the roar of the river, in the depths of the sky – in the peculiar opacity of the blue itself.

  With Isabella, that summer, it happened most frequently in the wood behind the house where, ‘for peace of mind’, as she told Corcoran at the time, she strolled each evening, the ‘reflection’, she assured him, ‘did her good’, while he, after several weeks, according to Bea, had enquired, jokingly, one evening, ‘You’re not meeting a lover, Bell?’ and had even, still jokingly, offered to accompany her. ‘I should meet him,’ he told her. ‘We might have a lot in common.’

  ‘What do you do out there, Mummy?’ Bea had asked.

  ‘Think my thoughts, dear,’ her mother replied.

  We moved, on some occasions, further afield, meeting on afternoons I took off from college, discovering a wood on the bus route between Ardsley and Linfield where, in the fields fringing it, we would lie with my paint-flecked raincoat beneath us. There was a perfunctory quality to these, as to all our encounters, not least on account of my ‘inexperience’, as she described it (ejaculating, on one occasion, merely at the sight of her waiting at the stop, I subsequently to be coaxed by the – then unique – deployment of her mouth. When I enquired, ‘Do you do that with Freddie?’ she had cried, ‘Don’t ask me anything about him again!’).

  She was, as she told me frequently – and sincerely believed – ‘happily married’. ‘I wouldn’t change Freddie for anyone,’ she often announced. ‘Not even for me?’ I finally enquired. ‘Not even you,’ she said, ‘for you’ll leave me in the end.’

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘You know nothing.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a sketchbook?’ Etty had said as I came out of the house and, standing on the embankment, I find it and a pencil in my hand. I sit by a rabbit hole and, opening the book, begin to draw. My nerve, over the past five years, has gone, the feeling for line, the feeling for feeling, disappeared: there is nothing but dizziness, palpitation, dispiritation – and, worse than all these combined, dread.

  ‘What is dread?’ Maidstone would enquire.

  ‘Fear and dispiritation,’ I’d tell him, ‘combined.’

  ‘Where do you feel it?’ (without a smile).

  ‘In the heart,’ I’d tell him.

  ‘The heart, dear boy,’ he’d tell me, ‘is in the head, and – the great discovery of the century – the head is merely a physiological entity. Which is why lithium, in your case, is indispensable. If you don’t agree to it now you’ll be obliged to do so later. When,’ he’d pause, his features quizzically distorted, ‘you’ll be much worse. Much, much,’ he’d pause again, growing paler, continuing, finally, with the softest exhalation, ‘worse.’

  The houses take shape: the line of the field; the trees which have much engulfed the scene in the past ten years, the saplings in the gardens tinged with buds, if not with blossom. Beyond: the pattern of fields and copses and, like Giza without the pyramids, Aswan without the temple, those quaint omissions where the collieries stood – and can see, in the distance, the declivity of Winnington Pond, though not the pale disc of its water, lost in the darkness of the woods where, on alternate evenings, hand in hand, I had walked with Bea and her mother.

  I queried five years ago why I drew or wrote: the pictures (even the sculptures), the books, the plays (the poems, the novels), the notes, the diary – ‘why?’ displaced by the question ‘how?’ (What was the point in going on?). ‘Would you be happy,’ Maidstone had ingenuously enquired, ‘doing anything else?’

  ‘I’d be happy doing anything,’ I equally ingenuously responded, ‘that made me happy.’

  ‘A mechanical job?’

  ‘Anything which, at the end of the day, left me with myself.’

  A quiet afternoon – an interregnum between visits to the wards or the demands – announced directly by a hammering on the door: ‘Are you in there, Professor?’

  ‘Go away. I’m busy.’

  ‘I want to ask you one thing!’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘One thing!’

  ‘Go away!’

  The pin-striped suit (creased at the back from hours of sitting), the starched shirt collar, the college tie (Balliol: a likeable conceit), the small, square, short-fingered hands, the fountain pen held quaintly between his middle fingers: the ‘thousands and thousands of pictures and millions and millions of books’ to which I was adding. ‘For what? What,’ I enquired, ‘is the point of it all?’

  ‘Isn’t the point of the point,’ he ingenuously persisted, ‘that the point of the point is a circle?’

  Diagonal strokes of the carbon from top right-hand to bottom left: with parallel lines of varying length I shade in the woods and Winnerton Pond (shade in Bea and Isabella); shade in where Fernley and Dorrington collieries stood; shade in the furthest line of hills which, beneath a grey-hulked sky, loom above the streets, the yellow sandstone buildings – the towers, the domes, the steeples (the housing blocks, the polluted Lin) – of the invisible city of Linfield – its presence suggested by a drift of smoke from its soon-to-be-disassembled coal-fired power-station.

  ‘An abundance of riches. Gifted,’ Maidstone says, ‘in so many ways. Yet all it amounts to is self-referral.’

  ‘A romanticist,’ I tell him. ‘A layman. Can’t you see that art has led me to the psychiatric department of the North London Royal and the delusion to which I wake each morning that I am about, not to be sentenced, but executed for a crime I didn’t commit or which, even though I don’t know what it is, I know I have committed?’

  ‘Art is a physiological phenomenon, too,’ Maidstone says. ‘Perhaps you ought to see your friend, the maverick Mackendrick.’

  ‘The two great M’s in my life,’ I declare.

  ‘How about a third?’ he says. ‘How about your mother?’

  ‘Mother’s been very odd,’ Bea says.

  We are walking, hand in hand, down through the town, from school, to the station.

  ‘In what way?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh,’ she tells me, ‘very strange. She says I need a holiday.’

  ‘Perhaps you do,’ I tell her.

  ‘Not just me but her. She’s invited Veronica and Clare, her two incredible sisters.’ (Both widowed, one with a son, the other a daughter – both married – living overseas.)

  She paused.

  ‘She’s invited you as well.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Daddy isn’t going.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He says he’s too much work.’ She clasped my hand more firmly. ‘In the old days, when Daddy was very busy, particularly during the war, we often went away – Veronica and Clare and my two cousins. Their husbands, during the war, were both called up. It’ll be like the old days. It was always jolly. On holiday,’ she concluded, ‘Mum is such a wheeze.’

  I am drawing a copper beech. Where? Not on the slope above the house. I have vacated the spot on Sugden’s Bank (Swanson, Etty has told me, after being imprisoned for corruption – paying backhanders to Council officials for municipal contracts – is currently out on parole) and must, I conclude, be at the far corner of Charlie’s and Etty’s ‘kingdom’: a gate, behind my back, leads between familiar old stone buildings, the one-time yard of Oldroyd’s farm (from where Etty, in the old days, when we were up here on a visit, used to go round with old Oldroyd’s father, delivering milk): an architect, however, has transformed the yard (but for the buildings themselves) out of recognition: a Mercedes shooting-brake stands there now and, beside it, a sports car whose make, like most makes nowadays, I fail to recognise – me a one-time Mercedes-Jaguar-Alvis owner – all sold, as a (failed) means of enticing Bea (back) with the prospect of a laboratory at the bottom of our Belsize Park garden. The grey, coiling branches of the copper beech are not unlike those of the fig tree – statelier, stiffer – an arthritic a
rticulation of ageing wood, bowed where the weight of a branch and the swaying of the equinoctial winds have brought the branch itself against the ground: pale filigrees of lemon mark the beginning of the early leaves, spiked, irregular, pointing into and outwards from the dome-like head.

  ‘I am visited by a vacuity of mind,’ I explain to Maidstone, ‘which I can never explain nor wholly describe. The whole self-system comes apart and in its place a vacuum conveys its presence by a feeling I can only describe as terror. Indefinitely prolonged, it creases the body – the victim stoops, his arms across his stomach, and bows to ease the pain. Your other patients, though less articulate, must surely describe identical symptoms. It gives an insight, on the other hand, into the structure of the mind. How, under stress, it comes apart. The Quinary or Pentadic Theory. When I’ve written the book I’ll ask you to check it. Once published, assimilated, and understood, it will revolutionise psychiatry.’

  Two evenings before Bea had told me of her mother’s invitation I had come out of the art school to find Isabella waiting in much the same fashion as I had waited for her outside the City Women’s Institute on the evening of our first intimate embrace. Her face was tense, her habitual tenderness displaced by apprehension, a look which announced, ‘There’s nothing left for either of us if you don’t give me what I want.’ ‘I had a meeting in town. I happened to be passing. Perhaps,’ she said, ‘you could come to the house.’

  A luminous light in the windows of the offices and shops, and the less prepossessing windows of the college, etherealised, or so it seemed, the street – less a place, I thought, than a vision.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll be at college.’

  ‘Take the afternoon off.’ She added, ‘You’ve done it often before.’

  ‘They’re beginning to notice,’ I said, and asked, ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Bea will be at school. Freddie away. Rose I’ve given the afternoon off. I’d like,’ she said, ‘to see you in private. Not,’ she went on, ‘a place like this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s something,’ she said, ‘I’d like to ask.’ She paused, her look more direct – and curious – than on any previous occasion. ‘You’re not afraid of coming?’

  More than a challenge, I reflected, was implicit in her look: a right was being asserted – one she had earned and to which I’d acceded. ‘I’ll take the afternoon off,’ I said.

  I am standing at the Linfield stop: one or two people are waiting with me: it is the middle, I assess, of the afternoon, and realise I have eaten nothing since breakfast (hadn’t Etty, moments before, been standing at the sink, peeling potatoes, potting plants?) and concluded it must have been mid-morning. It is warm: traffic comes down the steep slope of the hill, past the church, to the cross-roads at the bottom: here five roads meet around what, at one time, would have been the village green, a rectangular tarmacked area dominated by the employment exchange (housed in a former primary school building) and a piece of cultivated ground equally divided between grass (denuded) and flowerbeds. Here Bea and I have met on numerous occasions, getting off buses, getting on; here, in the past, Etty, her sister and her brothers, have bought ice-creams; here, in the dark I have quarrelled with and subsequently consoled Isabella. Immediately ahead is the principal road leading through the village – and the declivity, some distance away, where the railway crossed from the colliery yard: the ghosts of steam engines whistle in my ear and, in my otherwise vacuous head, the winding gear and slag heap rise, once more, above the roofs: boots shuffle in a cobbled yard; carts, pulled by horses (‘Corcoran & Co Contractors’ inscribed, yellow paint on black, along the side), come groaning down the hill, the ejaculations of the drivers, the cracking of a whip, the steam from the horses’ backs and mouths, the rasp of the metal-rimmed wheels against the tarmac, of the brake blocks against the wheels themselves (the rattle of chains as the blocks are deployed). ‘Her father, they say, went off his head.’ I hear the words quite clearly. ‘He was certified for over a year, believed he’d been condemned to death and woke each morning expecting the sentence to be carried out. Nothing would console him.’

  ‘If I have gone out of my mind it’s quite all right by me,’ I said. ‘Who wouldn’t go nuts in a place like this?’ to which a woman beside me says, ‘It’s alus late.’

  ‘Late?’

  ‘The bus to Linfield.’

  ‘Linfield.’

  ‘Aren’t you Mrs Stott’s father?’ she suddenly enquires.

  ‘I was,’ I tell her, ‘but left, in fact, some time ago.’

  ‘I’ve seen you on television.’

  ‘Television?’

  ‘Years ago. I don’t get much time,’ she adds, ‘for reading. I go to my daughter’s to look after the children. She works. Her husband,’ she goes on, ‘is unemployed but has no flair with the kiddies. Sits and mopes, when he’s not on drugs. Ten years ago he was down the pit, drunk each night and happy as a lord.’

  ‘Not much to choose between the two,’ I tell her.

  ‘Give me drunk every time,’ she says. ‘At least when he was he wa’re alus singing.’

  The woman is old: her hair, beneath a headscarf, is fastened in pins: a scarf wrapped beneath a bright check coat: stout, double-chinned, rouged cheeks: between two vivid streaks of lipstick she smiles: teeth more vivid than the lipstick itself, eyes brighter, more vivid than the teeth.

  ‘Children keep you going,’ to the others in the queue beyond her.

  I am on my way to Onasett (via Linfield): o happy land!

  Lunch is laid on the table when I arrive; and has been waiting I assume, for several hours (I’m late) – a table at which I’ve eaten with her husband and her daughter, talking of war, politics, art and religion, on none of which Corcoran has any views other than those conjured up in opposition to Isabella’s (and Bea’s): called up during the war he was offered an immediate commission, because of his ‘transport experience’, in the Army Ordnance Corps.

  The day is chill (it is raining as I walk from the bus to the house): she wears a suit – a loosely-cut jacket and a pleated skirt: dove grey, it is relieved at the throat by the lace collar of a high-necked blouse: I have never seen her look more lovely. Her colour is high.

  I have seen her setting and re-setting the table as I’ve come up the path through the garden: the neatness of her hair, the squareness of her shoulders, the trimmed-in waist, the flaring hips. ‘I don’t feel hungry,’ I tell her, she, having departed to the kitchen, returning with food she’s kept hot in the oven.

  ‘I thought you’d have an appetite,’ she says. ‘Working,’ she goes on, ‘all morning.’

  ‘I don’t feel hungry,’ I tell her again, not sure that my arrival has gone unnoticed: from the yard, through the archway, it’s possible to see the house and the garden: any amount of men are working there, lorries being backed, loaded, fuelled.

  She shrugs: her hair is brightly ribboned: it has, as on most occasions when I see her, been fastened in a bun (she intoxicates me with her dress, her make-up, her preparation – above all, with her circumspection: so she might prepare, a headmistress, to interview a parent about a child).

  ‘I thought it was better,’ she says, ‘to talk like this, not like we always do, in a side-street doorway, or on the back seat of a bus, or in a café, or beneath a hedge.’

  ‘I like those places,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t tell you how much those doorways and buses and cafés and hedges mean. I sometimes go by them and, prompted by what went on there, think of you all day.’

  ‘At no expense,’ she says, ‘to yourself,’ and adds, before I can respond, ‘At least, in here, we’re not overlooked. At least,’ she goes on, ‘we can talk in private,’ (gesturing to the window – the murmur of engines, the cawing of rooks, the panting of the pit, the rattle of the sorting plant, the whistle of the engine – the shuffle – the shuffle of thousands of feet).

  She smiles (sitting sideways at the table he
rself).

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’

  Fenchurch is what people assume he isn’t: malevolent, uncaring, demonic, unkind: the graffitist of the notorious Benedict Ward at the North London Royal, named after a benefactor who came to no good (not unlike the clothing manufacturer who gave his name to Boady Hall, the even more notorious rehabilitation centre in North London).

  I, too, sit sideways at the table: hungry I might have been – it is three-quarters of an hour by bus from Linfield – but apprehension – an awful apprehension – grips not only my stomach but my intestines; and not only my intestines but, finally, my heart: I am here, I have concluded on my three-quarters of an hour journey on the bus, to be cast off.

  ‘In many respects, all I want to do,’ she says, suddenly, ‘is to see you sitting there.’ (I can gaze at her for hours, entranced, besotted, entwined.) ‘Like an artist,’ she continues, ‘sits for an indefinite time, or so you tell me, before his subject. I imagine,’ she goes on, gazing at me with glistening eyes – enigmatic, in the extreme, ‘you’ve done that lots of times yourself.’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘You’re my model.’ She smiles again. ‘But,’ she continues, ‘in a different art entirely.’

  ‘Which art is that?’ my voice disappearing, huskily, halfway down my throat.

  ‘The art – would you call it? – of growing old.’

  ‘You don’t look old, in the least,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’m sure.’ She laughs. ‘Which is why I’ve spent the best part of the morning getting ready.’ She glances at the food, her arm laid on the table beside her: my gaze – her fingers, slightly raised, are tapping at the cloth – is directed to her ring.

  Her knee, her legs crossed, gleams beneath the hem of her pleated skirt: her foremost shoe, high-heeled, has drifted from her foot.

  ‘I’ve given you,’ she adds, ‘a terrible weapon.’

  ‘How?’

  We sit at adjacent sides of the table: by reaching out, I speculate, I could touch her hand.

  ‘By competing with my daughter. You could destroy both of us,’ she adds.