by David Storey
‘I love you both,’ I tell her.
‘Do you?’
She waits to be convinced.
‘I love you more than Bea.’
‘More?’
‘Much.’
‘How much?’
‘In ways I can’t express.’
‘It’s those ways I’d like to hear about,’ she says, revealing a ruthlessness which, until this moment, I have scarcely if ever glimpsed. She sees me as an opportunist, I suddenly reflect, dissuaded only from this view by what she suspects may be my talent.
‘If I can’t express them I don’t see how I can describe them,’ I tell her. ‘I like to love you in ways that neither you nor I can understand. That,’ I pause, ‘is the heart of it.’
The colour deepens round her eyes – around her eyes and despite her make-up.
‘I was never aware of anything,’ she repeats ‘anything! – until I touched your hand.’
‘When?’
‘When you went the wrong way up Sugden’s Bank.’ Gesturing to the grounds at the back of the house, she adds, ‘It was all so wrong.’
‘Wrong?’
‘Terribly.’
The word, used in isolation, brings out a smile.
The ring: nothing entrances me so much as when – its thin gold strand – I persuade her (refusing to touch it myself) to take it off: more erotic, for instance, than her removing her clothes (the mechanical way she draws off her blouse, or, half-twisting, first unfastens then lowers her skirt, unclips her stockings, releases her breasts: the nonchalant way she introduces, with a casual raising of her hips, the ‘vouchsafing’ which, afterwards, she confesses means more to her than she suspects (incorrectly) it does to me. ‘There is,’ I always tell her, ‘no condescension in it. I’m sure not on your part and certainly not on mine.’).
Re-crossing her legs, she says, ‘I don’t know where we go from here,’ while, her own gaze fixed on mine, mine seeks the wall behind her back (a photograph of Kells standing beside a war-time bomber: a visit to a nearby aerodrome arranged by a colleague engaged, he subsequently told me, on radar research).
‘Unless,’ I tell her, ‘we call a halt.’
‘A woman old enough,’ she smiles (a familiar refrain), ‘to be your mother. Certainly,’ she continues, ‘twice your age.’ Her hand reaches out and covers mine. ‘And yet,’ she smiles again, ‘a whole day goes by and, at the end of it, all I have thought about is you.’
She stands.
‘Don’t you ever wear a hat?’
‘Never.’
‘I suppose you did at school.’
‘A cap.’
‘A cap.’ She caresses my head. I smell her scent. ‘The whole thing,’ she says, ‘is quite ridiculous.’
‘My ring as well?’ she says. ‘I feel quite naked already,’ retaining her skirt as well as her stockings until unbuttoning her blouse (‘I chose high-necked, my dear, on purpose’) I persuade her to remove them. ‘I’ll take off what you like. All I wanted,’ she goes on, ‘is just one time in bed,’ recalling each incident as I return home on the bus. ‘A betrayal of Bea as well as Corcoran,’ I announce. ‘Not to mention Kells and Nan.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ the man beside me says and I am gazing at the curve of a hedge, the shape of a tree familiar from almost forty years before – glimpsed like this, fleetingly, from the window of a passing bus.
‘Not at all.’ I ease my feet – absurdly, I discover, in my slippers – aware of the draught from the bus’s open door.
The hulk of Ardsley Priory appears – a black, stone building, tall and square, and surmounted by a balustrade whose silhouette is pierced by chimneys: beyond a battlemented gatehouse a drive winds off across a tree-strewn park. A wall, bowed and buttressed, its brickwork less dark than the house itself, obliterates the view: we cross a hump-backed bridge: a lake, enclosed by trees, appears.
Lying on her bed, her ring removed, the curtains drawn: ‘O, my dearest love,’ she said.
I walked this road – the familiar fields, the familiar hedges, the hidden declivities, the sudden promontories – grey-heaped and silver-birched – that marked the medieval gin-pits: walked the twelve miles from Onasett to Ardsley (I was running out of money, that summer before our move to London). At the end of the journey I limped to the door and spent the best part of the following hour sitting in the kitchen, talking to Isabella (occasionally to Bea as she darted to her room, to study, and darted back), my foot in a bucket of water. Periodically Isabella would take the foot and massage the swollen ankle (her ringed finger passing to and fro across the tendon). ‘You do too much,’ she said. ‘That’s half your trouble.’
‘I need experience,’ I told her.
‘Of what?’
‘All sorts of things you can’t imagine.’
‘Such as?’
‘Love. Hatred. A tent erector,’ I told her, ‘is nothing to be sneezed at.’
‘You and your tents!’ (in much the same manner as she might have said, ‘You and your kisses!’).
‘Are you two fraternising?’ Bea said, coming in, unaware, as always, of what, in reality, was going on.
‘If I am going mad,’ I said, ‘at least I am going mad in style,’ at which the man beside me, turning further round, enquires again, ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I spend my days and nights in what I can only describe,’ I tell him, ‘as a maelstrom of despair,’ while at the art school, leaning over my design for a record sleeve for Haydn’s ‘Creation’, the graphics teacher and vintage car enthusiast observes, ‘It’s too much like a painting.’
‘That’s what I like,’ (a vortex of swirls and whirls in variegated colours).
‘This is graphics,’ Wormald declares. ‘Painting is finished,’ he goes on. ‘I had a friend at college who now earns his living like everyone else, and who, whenever he wanted to paint a picture, closed his eyes and painted it in his head. Not only does it save money and paint and canvas but time.’ He waves his leather-elbowed, tweed-jacketed arm.
But what, after all, I mentally enquire, drew me to self-expression? A feeling – as grave, as inspiriting, as falling in love: as predictable – and as simple – as reading aloud, ‘Who is the happy warrior, who is he, whom every man in arms would wish to be?’ gained momentum with, ‘How oft, on moonlit nights,’ and reached a climax with, ‘The violin sobs of the autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor …’
Or wasn’t it, I reflected (sitting upstairs on the bus on which, downstairs, I am sitting now), my gazing at the familiar landscape of field and wood and hill and dell – the rolling countryside between Ardsley and Linfield – and specifically at the colliery tracks leading from the massive Culloden Pit (a phalanx of coke ovens along one side) endeavouring, beneath the industrial dereliction, to identify the contour of the original fields; or those early mornings in camp at Broughton Woods, looking out from our tree-enclosed clearing (approached, up the slope, like a castle mound) with its view of the iron-workings of the medieval monks on the opposite valley side, and the mounds of the more recent gin-pits covered in moor grass and silver birch; the grandeur of that mist-strewn valley that formed a boundary to Broughton Springs (the sun gilding the trees still wet with dew and, in the furthest distance, the Pennine hills: where the limestone uplands meet the sandstone valleys), the wood-smoke rising from the roped-off fire, the smell of bacon and mushroom frying, the sound of the earliest risers washing in the stream below, the towel-draped figures emerging from the game keeper’s cottage which, ruined, provided us with our alternative earth-closet?
Or singing round the fire at night, the moon pinioned to the branches overhead; or those afternoons when, shrieking, we mounted the truck on the tiny, narrow-gauged timber-merchant’s rails and rattled and swayed to the wood-shed below (the draped shape of the circular saw: the scoured texture of its metal sides, the angularity of its savage teeth: the smell of wood and the sensuous mounds of resinous dust): that sensation of release, evoked in the bowels, that came with those feel
ings of beauty and peace?
‘Aren’t you a romantic?’ Wormald enquires, leaning over my ‘Creation’ design – the lettering of ‘Haydn’ not all that grand: couldn’t I have chosen an orchestra shorter than the ‘Philharmonic’?
‘What’s romantic?’ I enquire.
‘Do you mean, what is the romantic comprised of, Harry, or what is romantic in you?’
‘In me.’
‘By definition,’ he says, ‘they’re both the same. Take, for instance, your addiction to art,’ (pronounced with a scarcely silent prefix ‘f’ and an indefinite extension of the vowel). ‘Aaaart has been superseded by life. Who, for instance, is the most significant painter of our time?’ voice raised to reach my fellow students scattered, on stools, around the design-room tables, each listening with an interest verging on obsession to this putting down of ‘Harry’: ‘Picasso!’ comes up their single cry.
‘Who is a parodist,’ Wormald says. ‘Who, half a century before you did, Harry, got the message. When the philistine public – condemned by people like yourself – say that modern art is rubbish, they are, in reality, speaking the truth. Why paint a landscape or a figure when a camera can do it for you, in a matter of seconds, and, further, if required, can make it move?’
Discussions of this nature are ‘rationalisations’, as Maidstone would put it, of Wormald’s antipathy to me as a person, viz: ‘Your determination to turn every student exercise into a work of art, to eschew not only propriety but common sense, will condemn you to obscurity for the rest of your life. Or do you extol the virtue of living in a garret? Have you ever known an artist in a garret? I knew one in London who used to speak like you – until he ended up having to eat his candle.’
Wormald is my antagonist: blue-eyed, fair-haired, axe-wielding (philistine): a Saxon type. His attitude, if more perniciously expressed, is endorsed by the pipe-toting Principal, Bairstow, who not only talks but looks like a miner: short, stocky, with bowed legs. ‘What dost think thy’s doing, Pisschapel?’ on a painting I’ve stuck on a wall. ‘Thy’s only here to study,’ (not, he was about to go on, to paint bloody pictures).
‘My name’s Fenchurch,’ I tell him.
‘Fenchurch, Pisschapel, thy’s only here for one thing,’ adding to Dawlish, his second-in-command, ‘They all look alike to me.’ Balding, with a head like a boulder lying, centuries-smoothed, in a Pennine stream, he stalks the rooms of his cultural outpost as might a Roman his beleaguered fort on the outermost fringes of his northern empire: the barbarian hosts have worn him down (assimilated him into their barbarian culture – ‘culture’, as he might otherwise have known it, a pernicious reminder of all he has left behind in the sundrenched streets of Rome: days of love and wine and roses – refinement, taste, and self-expression). Much of the beleaguered man of action is evident in his attitude to me: the look which declares, ‘You think you’re destined for the capital, do you? (Afternoons in the Colosseum, nights at the Baths of Caracalla). I’ll be buggered if you’ll get away, my friend (Pisschapel or Fenchurch), while I’m condemned to stay in this benighted fucking hole. You’ll stick it out like I do. As for art …’). He comes into the design-room and, reminded of who I am, remarks, ‘You’re the artist, are you?’ adding to the much-tried Dawlish as he walks away, ‘We’ll knock that bloody nonsense out. We don’t want a place of pussy-footing pansies here.’
My philosophy takes root in opposition.
‘I beg your pardon?’ the man beside me says again.
I find relief in Isabella: I meet her sometimes once a week: the cost of the ‘studio’, when it becomes too much (refusing her offer to finance it), obliges us, once more, to resort to a field outside the town – lying beside the road along which the Linfield–Ardsley bus comes twice within the hour: we meet in wind and sun and rain, something monstrous – insatiable, demonic, malign – in everything we do.
‘I’m not sure,’ she had said on the day I had visited her at Ardsley, ‘that it means as much to me as it does to you. That is to say,’ she suddenly declared, lying against the pillow as she watched me dress, ‘I could go on seeing you without this happening. I do it,’ she went on, ‘because it means so much to you. To see you so moved and raptured, raptures and moves me, too.’
We are, as it happens, mistaken more and more often for mother and son (‘Would your son like another cup of tea?’ in the café: ‘Your son got your ticket for you, missis,’ if we are separated on the bus). She is terrified of being recognised by one of Corcoran’s drivers (or, indeed, by anyone from the village: ‘I’d like to tell everyone how I feel. There’s so much I’d like to confess. But there is, of course,’ she’d go on, ‘no one.’).
On one occasion she didn’t turn up.
‘Has your mother been ill?’ I asked Bea the next time we met.
She shook her head. ‘She’s been quite perky recently,’ she said. ‘Over and above her usual self. I’ve never seen her quite so loud. I suppose,’ she went on, ‘it’s the middle-age crisis, but she’s happier than I’ve known her all my life. She’s always asking, of course, after you. ‘You must look after Richard,” she says. As if you were an invalid. “He has,” she often says, “a very hard life.”’
‘She’s not been ill?’
‘Far from it.’
‘I thought I saw her in town the other day. It must,’ I tell her, ‘have been someone else.’
‘If she was looking ill,’ she smiles, ‘it must have been someone else.’
‘In any case,’ I tell her, ‘you must give her my love.’
‘Oh, I shall,’ she says. ‘She knows how much you admire her.’
‘How?’ I ask.
‘A woman’s instinct, Richard!’ She laughs. ‘As for she and I,’ she laughs again, ‘one woman to another.’
I didn’t see her, nor did I hear from her for several days: I kept away from Ardsley, meeting Bea at the weekend and most schooldays in town. I felt, alternately, relief and alarm – relief that, at last, the relationship was coming to an end (had conceivably, already ended), alarm that, if not the whole of it, something of what had been going on had been discovered – and if not by Corcoran, someone else (Bea still in the dark). It was, I reflected, so unlike her not to keep in touch; although I wrote to her each day – ‘I miss you’ (platitudinously) ‘more than I can say’ – re-discovering, in her absence, she meant more to me than often she did when the two of us were together – I tore each letter up. I wrote appraisals of her figure – her eyes, her nose her mouth: her waist, her hips: I imagined her, as Wormald would have recommended, in my head, then drew her naked as I had many times before (several of which drawings I placed in my folder to take to the Drayburgh). ‘If I’ve nothing else to show for it, I might as well,’ I thought, ‘keep these.’
Then came Bea’s message, as I saw her off to Ardsley one evening, ‘Mummy leaves for Clare’s and Veronica’s tomorrow,’ (the two widows living together). ‘I’m to follow at the weekend. So are you. She’s already bought, she says, the tickets’. I astonished the following day to find a message at the college, a ticket attached, ‘I’ve gone ahead with Mummy. Come as soon as you can. I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful time, all five of us together. I’ll meet you if you ring,’ a telephone number and an address scrawled beneath with, ‘Mummy sends her love.’ In brackets: ‘Not as much as I.’
12
The train moves steadily to the south: I sit by a window, hemmed in by a boisterous family, their suitcases piled with my hold-all in the rack above my head. A sense of desolation (arguments at home about my leaving, arguments about the cost, set against my Chamberlains earnings) is lightened by the prospect of meeting Bea but, more potently, being reunited with Isabella (what, I am endlessly reflecting, is she up to: are we, in future, only to meet in the company of other people?). A branch line (the sun is setting); shadows come down from a range of unfamiliar hills (a chilling of the air inside the carriage). I imagine, as the shadows lengthen – coalesce and deepen – I am going beyond the unknow
n village where Bea and her mother and her aunts are waiting – beyond the south coast where (evidently) our holiday is booked, beyond the English Channel, beyond the coast of France – to a world of art and self-expression.
‘I beg your pardon?’ the man beside me says again and, shuffling my feet inside my slippers, I gaze at a landscape of ploughed fields and copses, and the unreclaimed, perpetual gin-pits standing up like tumuli from the cultivated ground: we breast a rise: overhung by cloud are the steeples, the domes and the towers of Linfield – in silhouette, not unlike the profile of a castle.
‘I was recalling,’ I tell him, ‘the time I came this way before and saw, as I’m seeing now, the town of Linfield, laid out like a ghost.’
‘A ghost?’ The man has a pouting lower lip: saliva occupies each corner of his mouth. His nose is long, his eyes – how much, I idly reflect, have I told him? – inquisitive and strong: his nails – his adjacent hand gripping the seat in front, the barrier of his arm between us – need cleaning.
‘Visited by Defoe, Doctor Johnson and – when he caught the wrong train from London – Wordsworth,’ the buildings caught in the midday light with, on the slope beyond them, the dull, red glow of Onasett (tiled roofs, brick and pebble-dashed walls) with, at the summit, the short, square tower of Onasett church, the pyramidal roof of the church hall beside it, the long, low structure of Onasett school and, at the highest point of all, the forbidding walls and block-like structures of the isolation hospital. (O happy land!)
‘I lived there as a child, a youth.’ Beyond the cathedral spire, the County Hall dome, the Town Hall tower – in the shadow of which resided the Linfield College of Art (now closed, its site occupied by a college of technology) – beyond, too, the gothic turrets that marked the site of the former Parochial School and which is now occupied by the renowned King Edward’s. ‘I am an Old Edwardian, of course, myself and yearly receive the Edwardian magazine in which some of my more celebrated feats have been set down, amongst the other sensations of Edwardian life, like the redoubtable feat, last season, of the First Fifteen and the First Eleven having never lost a match – a precedent which was created when I played in the First Fifteen myself. It’s not for nothing that my name is Fenchurch, though my books are never on sale in the town, nor have my plays been performed in the theatre, nor my paintings exhibited in the gallery. I have often reflected that a Freeman of Linfield is the very least I might have expected – a golden key to a golden city – but, I’m afraid, apart from an occasional demand for money on behalf of a charity, not a tinkle. I was telling Maidstone, a man of not immodest achievement himself, Sub-Dean of the medical school and Professor of Psychiatry at the North London Royal – the largest teaching hospital in Europe, second only to the Konecki Foundation in New York for the progressive treatment of, amongst many other animadversions, anxiety neurosis conjoined with clinical depression – that, despite a lifetime of artistic endeavour, most of it centred on, if not inspired by this very town and my experiences in it, it has failed to raise a cloud in anything that might be discerned as my direction: not one hand raised to a furrowed brow to give this returning son of home a signal of approbation.’