by David Storey
‘Are you,’ the man asks me, ‘mad?’ (more statement, I reflect, than speculation).
‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I am going to Linfield.’
For there, not one hundred yards from the side of the road, where the bus has pulled up to allow a figure not unlike Isabella to ascend, is the wood – or remains of it – where, on many a weekday afternoon and on an occasional summer evening, she and I – hidden from the road yet able to see, through a barricade of leaves, the approach of this, the Ardsley bus – had lain, if not on my familiar, paint-flecked raincoat, on a bed of cushioning leaves. By a curious coincidence the woman coming into the bus – easing her way between the seats – is of the same age as Isabella (of those days): greying at the temples, her face lined, her hands (the backs) marked by tiny blotches, her breasts subsiding above the belted waist of her coat (her abdomen no doubt flecked with post-natal creases, her legs with varicose veins – scarcely, of course, like Bella at all), she takes her seat, as the bus moves off, diagonally across from where I am sitting and, prompted by a desire to re-acquaint myself with those distant times, I smile, and feel an involuntary lurch (an alarming spasm as, without any prevarication, she smiles directly back): a pleasant, rotund face, unlike the austere sanguinity of Bella’s, but nevertheless, in that instance, the embodiment of a love that, no sooner had I won, I lost. By the same extraordinary coincidence, outside, on the road, stands a youth – of nineteen, perhaps twenty years – who waves and she, as the bus departs, having acknowledged me, waves back, her head ducked down in that inimitable fashion (love! love!). ‘Linfield,’ the man beside me says.
‘Not much to write home about,’ I tell him, for the familiar headgears, waste-heaps and coal-black ponds which stood like sentinels on either side of the road have been displaced by uniformly cambered slopes on which, asymmetrically (deceiving no one as to their spontaneity), have been planted tiny, posted trees and shrubs, the equally anonymously distributed grass sprinkled with daffodils and tulips.
‘It’s not a bad place,’ the man replies, and adds, ‘Particularly the market,’ I distracted by the woman, her body (her body!) twisted to wave to the youth in the road behind (no doubt, her son) – reminding me less and less of Isabella than of the feelings she inspired.
The station is lit by a single lamp: I take down my hold-all and clamber out – stiff, aching (the confinement of the carriage), scarcely able to stand. In the shadow of a hut, beyond a tiny barrier – the shadow cast by the single lamp – not Isabella but Bea is waiting: a summer dress, a summer coat: white ankle socks and flat-heeled shoes.
We kiss.
‘Are you all right?’ She takes my hand (my hold-all in the other).
‘How far do we have to go?’
‘Not far,’ darkness all around, the train, a string of lights, tracing its course along, it appears, the bed of a valley. Disparate lights, scattered across a slope, blend, imperceptibly, into the darkness overhead. ‘Are you all right?’ she says again.
‘I think so.’
A country lane gives way to a residential road: as if on stilts, the tallness of the houses heightens the effect of the steepness of the climb: driveways run up past terraced lawns: flowerbeds cascade with shadowed blooms.
Her aunts – one small and slender (Clare), the other short and stout (‘Venny’) – are waiting at the door.
‘How are you, Richard?’ Each shakes my hand.
Bea’s mother comes out from a room at the rear (a coal-lit fire, a shaded lamp). ‘We wondered where you’d got to.’
‘The train was late,’ Bea tells them.
‘Full of holiday crowds,’ I add, Isabella clad not in a summer but a woollen dress: sweetness, as I kiss her cheek, is in her breath (restraint, however, in her manner).
A tray of food is laid by the hearth.
‘We’ve got your supper ready.’
We sit by the fire: a slender woman, a less slender one, a less slender one still – and Bea. We talk about the journey (‘longer than I expected’: we are in the Derbyshire hills) and move on to the arrangements the two aunts and Isabella have made for the following day: a taxi has been booked: breakfast will be early: chores are assigned for making beds, preparing breakfast, washing-up: the room grows warm after the relative chill outside: four women all of whom, because of their inter-action with the one, I love.
I am shown upstairs: an attic window looks out to the roof and the unlit windows of an adjoining house (to a starlit sky, to the flank of a hill, to the silhouette of trees ascending precipitously a steepening slope). I fall asleep, tossed, at intervals, into wakefulness by the strangeness of the bed. I am wakened finally by Bea (‘Don’t stay in the bedroom, pet,’ from one of the aunts on the landing outside): she has brought me a cup of tea and, with a kiss to my cheek, departs.
The taxi arrives: having made the beds, breakfasted, cleaned the house, I carry the cases out with Bea. Her mother (I have never seen Isabella so early in the day – as, on the previous evening, rarely seen her so late at night) is radiant beyond belief (what, I reflect, has she in mind?). My heart leaps as she hands me her case (the softness of her fingers, the harshness of her ring) and, with an impetuosity comprised of foolishness as much as love, I kiss her cheek, she drawing back and saying, ‘We’ll still be together this evening, dear,’ as much bewildered as startled by the gesture.
A genial companionship continues throughout the day, Bea and I opposite each other beside the window, the three women chatting to one another across the carriage, I in love (in love!) with two of them, enamoured of the third (the doe-eyed Clare), infatuated with the fourth (the placid if curious Veronica: what on earth, her look suggests, does she suspect is going on?).
We reach the coast: a taxi takes us to our two hotels – one earmarked for me (modest), the other (family Edwardian) for the rest. My room is small, filled day and night by the sound of running water. I move the following day, at Bea’s suggestion, to one around the corner (‘Mummy will pay the difference,’ which I refuse): a view of the sea, the fold of a cliff, a clump of pine, the room adjacent occupied by a honeymoon couple, their activities, and conversation, scarcely filtered by a thin partition.
We venture, one morning, into the sea: the sky is clear, the breeze warm: a ball is thrown: much spray and screaming: my arm on Bella’s: ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Much, Richard, thank you,’ while, from Venny, ‘Leave that man alone!’
Evenings walking on the front, trips along the coast in the afternoons (mornings on the beach): breakfasts alone (watching the honeymoon couple kiss, hold hands beneath the table, whisper, head to head, over a newspaper or the menu): dinner (my solitary table immediately beside the dining-room door), a copy of Don Quixote propped on the salt cellar before me (six hundred and sixty-eight pages still to go), the problems of the amorous knight infinitesimal beside my own: nights spent listening to the sounds – much laughter – and attempting not to imagine the activities of the honeymoon couple next door: ‘You haven’t tried it!’ ‘When?’ (‘What?’) ‘Is it bigger than you thought?’
And evenings (‘Back at nine, Bea,’ Bella. ‘I don’t want you starting any habits,’ and, ‘We’ve been in love, you know, before,’ her aunts), lying on a pine-strewn slope, the sea below us, rising and falling: ‘What does it matter? I can’t stand life being so prescribed. (We’ll go to Paris. I’ll become an artist.)’
We picnic on the sand, play croquet on the Edwardian lawn (waiters in the hall and on the terrace, squirrels in the pine trees, parasols and tennis, shaded tables: teas carried out on white-linened trays): ‘We’ve got to know one another, Richard, on this holiday, so well,’ (Venny). ‘It’s been, apart from one or two anxieties which, I’m sure, when you grow older, you’ll understand, an enormous pleasure to have you with us,’ (Clare).
‘Perhaps I will see you later?’ (Isabella).
‘Where?’ (as I am leaving).
‘The gate of our hotel.’
‘When?’
‘Say, ten?’
‘There you are,’ she says, and adds, ‘I hope you’ve missed me,’ her look both matter-of-fact and full of mischief.
‘I’ve waited for this moment,’ I tell her, ‘since we arrived.’
‘And all those afternoons and evenings with Bea.’
‘Only,’ I lie, ‘as a substitute for you.’
‘I’ve seen how much you look at her. So have Venny and Clare,’ she adds.
We walk along the chine: the trees, from the moon above the sea, throw shadows up the slope.
‘Why haven’t you been in touch?’ I ask.
She waves her arm. ‘It had to come to an end,’ she says. ‘The whole thing,’ she goes on, ‘was quite absurd.’
‘I don’t see why.’ She is, I see now, throwing me at Bea, the whole thing – the holiday, the aunts – a device.
‘Divesting me,’ I say aloud, and as she adds, ‘Of what?’ I announce, ‘There’s not one day gone by when I haven’t been tempted to get on a bus and come and see you, Freddie or no Freddie, Bea or not.’
‘Oh, that.’ She waves her arm again. ‘It wasn’t real. Coming here, with Clare and Venny, seeing me with women as old or older than myself, I thought, at the very least, would help. That’s why,’ she adds, ‘I had to see you. To make it clear it’s at an end. Given time, we’ll both relate to one another,’ she concludes, ‘as we should have done from the start.’
At the summit of the chine I turn her to me: I trace the contour of her cheek, her nose: I press my hand against her mouth.
It must have been midnight when I took her back: after ringing the night porter’s bell, I stepped back in the shadows and watched her let into the lighted hall: her legs were bare, her coat, I could see now, stained with grass: a last look round, followed by a smile, blinded by the light.
13
‘I worked at that pit,’ the man declares.
‘So did my father.’
‘What years were that?’ The saliva re-appears at the corner of his mouth: coal-dust darkens the tissue above each eye: like the bark of a silver birch, scars, horizontally, cross his brow.
‘Until,’ I tell him, ‘the end of the Second World War. After that he taught D.P.s – Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles. Then he came home and got a job at Onasett.’
‘Fenchurch?’
‘Right.’
‘I never knew him.’ Shakes his head. ‘That hill they have yonder wa’re a pit heap ten year ago. That little lake you see down theer, wi’ boats on, were the pithead baths.’
‘Vivienne, of course, when I brought her here, enthused about the place,’ I tell him, ‘no end. As for my father – he was still alive and living in a house at Notton End – he couldn’t understand a word she said. She had this accent which came out in private whenever she wished to make an impression. On stage, however, as clear as a bell. “What the bloody hell is she talking about?” he said. “I thought you were married to somebody called Bea.”’
‘Bea?’ the man says.
‘I said, “This is Vivienne Wylder, the actress that I wrote you about and, if all goes well, I hope to marry. The second,” I told him, “Mrs Fenchurch.”
‘“Mrs Fenchurch,” my father says, “is dead,” adding to the putative Mrs Fenchurch, “She died before I did.”
‘“He’s talking about my mother,” I said.
‘“The finest woman that ever lived!”’
The finest woman, I might have concurred, had it been a mother I could write home about. She took him to live in the south of England, away from the millstone grit and the pits and the valleys and he faded like a flower. You wouldn’t think of this place as light, but in his case the light up here was the light he was used to. Today, with the coal-dust gone, the manufactories reduced to rubble, with service facilities littering the place, there’s nothing to come back to. Except a presentiment of what this place was like.’
‘Like,’ says the man, the bus cresting a rise at the top of the Common, before us, on an opposing hill, a view which, from a different direction, I knew as a child, coming down the hill from church (on Sundays), school (on weekdays): a rampart of buildings, black with soot: the dog-toothed spire of All Saints church, the chisel-shaped profile of the Town Hall tower, the rotundity of the County Hall dome – a cornucopia of cornices and pediments, friezes and roofs – as, for instance, we see them now, from a different perspective though a similar distance: ‘A softer profile, I have always thought, when viewed,’ I tell him, ‘from the top of the Common,’ the bus speedily descending. ‘Nevertheless, one which, at this late stage in my career, returning as an Old Linfieldian (“Floreat Linfieldia! Floreat Edwardia!”), a proselytiser of this indentured place, I very much appreciate. To the extent, as you can see, that this view of my native heath – this Common on which I have won and lost (if only at the Easter Feast) much of what I cherish most in life – brings tears to my eyes. Tears that remind me not only of the women I have loved, the men I most admired, the parents who, having borne me, tore me apart, but, specifically, of my wife, of Isabella, who was not my wife, of Vivienne who, to put it mildly, was the revelation of my later years, an amalgam of Bea and Isabella whom if I’d met – for these things do occasionally happen – as a younger man I would have married, if only to my cost, unable to accommodate her ferocities which, unique to her, were antagonistic to my own. I loved and lost – and lost. And lost.’
‘Are you all right?’ the man enquires.
‘Perfectly,’ I tell him, for my voice has carried to the front of the bus (we are sitting – a precaution one always takes on public transport these days – at the rear) and heads have turned (shoulders raised, I further notice, to the conductor). ‘I have never felt better,’ I go on, ‘even if, between ourselves, if the truth were known,’ I lower my voice, ‘I have been in and out of a certain institution which – again, between ourselves – I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Boady Hall,’ I breathe the name, ‘is not a place to write home about. It contains people who destroy themselves, and though Vivienne and I had that in common – she a genius of gigantic proportions (the greatest Mrs Macbeth in years), with flaming hair – admittedly, the effect of dye – and ludicrous make-up – though scarcely any in later years – we struggled – separately as well as jointly – to overcome the ravages wreaked upon those who travel, whether by vocation or not, across what is euphemistically referred to as “inner space” – a maelstrom of a place, without form or purpose, the black hole into which the mind descends, transcending all laws and known experience, superseding hope (and joy and love), and for which the human imagination has yet to provide a word. I’ve been there, pal!’ I slap his arm. ‘I’ve got to admit that Vi – Vivienne, as I previously described her – got to me in ways that no one else quite has. She – like I was – should have been confined. She went to a private clinic in the south of London, visited, fatefully, a similar place outside New York, a third in the suburbs of Los Angeles, a fourth in San Francisco, and came here, finally, would you believe it, and begged me to minister to her myself. I – like Our Lord – who could not save himself. One evening, returning to the house, I found her gone. Along with her luggage and a bottle of bleach. An innocuous-looking liquid which I didn’t miss for days. Until, one morning, I went out to the yard. Stoned, she might have been, before she took it. “How,” you are beginning to ask, “could a man, nurtured in these parts, loved by the mother, as it happened, of his future wife, who made his fortune from books and plays, and, latterly, pictures, incur the hatred of his children and the contempt of his wife?” Reason is one thing, existence another. In reality, of course, they are both the same. You have, without your being aware of it, been sitting next to a man who, in the halls of misfortune, is virtually unique.’
‘Are you going to Li
nfield?’ the man enquires and, by way of answering, I reply, ‘So you worked at that pit?’
‘For twenty-five years.’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Fifteen afore that at New Rawlston.’
‘Weren’t twenty-five men killed there in the nineteen-fifties?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Eighteen.’
‘My cousin, by marriage, was one of them.’
‘My uncle, on my father’s side, the youngest one I had, was killed at Arnhem. The largest parachute drop in recorded history. I had a photograph of him, years ago, on Linfield Station, standing with a group of men who were painting the wrought ironwork above the platform. A doughty, good-natured, adventurous fellow who was turned into something little short of a bandit. Times, of course, have changed since then. Qualities like those are not required. His nephew, who inherited from him, if you like, his appetite for painting – not railway stations, I might add, but pictures – for not dissimilar reasons, acquired not dissimilar characteristics. In struggling against, if you like, a not dissimilar opposition he became something of a bandito himself, dropping out of the skies onto something little short of a cultural desert, a plain of middle-class sentiment, virtue and ambition. My uncle did it as one of ten thousand, I as one of four or five, most of whom expired on landing or, if not on landing, shortly after. The heat and dryness burnt them up, the peculiar desolation, not to mention isolation, in which, surrounded by good intentions, they found themselves. Unlike them, however, or even my uncle, I had a more peculiar training. Enigmatic …’