by David Storey
‘Linfield,’ the man says as we pass over the river, visible above the parapet of the concrete bridge: barges were once drawn up above the concrete weir, moored in ranks, the river front, with its cobbled wharf, overlooked by warehouse buildings, malt kilns, cranes and derricks, dockside offices and chandlers’ stores (boat-builders’ yards and the hulks of barges). The shiny black coal slip and the rusted metal gantries on the coal-wharf, which stood closest to the bridge (on the site of Much the Miller’s mill in the legendary accounts of Robin Hood), have gone: a tree-lined walk, relieved by rockeries and stone embankments (a children’s playground) and by stone-paved footpaths, following the contour of the river, winds off in the direction of the one remaining mill. The tang of the river is still the same, as is the view on the opposite side of the bridge: an expanse of sky where the valley of the Lin, taking leave of its stone embankments and its gorge-like exit below the town, winds across the shoals of Ferry Ford where the Romans made their earliest crossing.
Beyond the bridge, the bus enters the narrowing streets of the town.
‘I get off here.’ The man gets up beside me (I feel the warmth of his body). ‘Is anybody looking after you?’ he adds.
‘Lots,’ I tell him. ‘There’ll be a queue.’
‘You’re going to the bus station, are you?’ signalling to the conductor.
‘If I don’t get off before.’
The bus pulls up: several passengers, preceding the man, descend.
‘He’s getting off at the bus station,’ he says to the conductor. ‘You may need the help of a bobby.’
He disappears; at least, I lose sight of him as he steps down to the pavement: more people than I might reasonably have anticipated are milling about outside.
I nod at the woman across the aisle. ‘A friend of mine. He worked,’ I tell her, ‘at New Rawlston, but is presently unemployed.’
‘He looks old enough to be retired,’ she says.
‘That as well,’ I tell her, and add, ‘Your name isn’t Isabella, by any chance?’
‘It isn’t,’ she says, refraining from informing me what it is.
‘You look like a Mrs Corcoran,’ I tell her, ‘whose maiden name was Kells.’
‘Not me.’ She smiles.
‘You have the same eyes, if not the same mouth. Your hair,’ I go on, ‘is different. Hers was red, or, to be precise, a curious magenta, a mixture of the celt and the latin. She had, when I knew her, a striking warmth, of personality, that is, as well as manner, which your eyes and your mouth remind me of. In addition,’ I indicate these features by pointing at a spot beneath my eye, ‘a high, arched nose and glancing cheekbones which, in her daughter’s face, was characterised by convergent brows, indicating, in their obtrusiveness, a predisposition, I’ve been told, to paranoia. That wasn’t your son, by any chance, who saw you off at the bus-stop?’
‘My nephew.’
‘Nephew.’
I am about to add, ‘A new one on me,’ when she continues, ‘My sister’s son. They live at Wrainthorpe,’ (a village close to the stop where the bus picked her up: how often had Isabella said, ‘The Wrainthorpe stop,’ on her journeys from Ardsley to me).
‘Linfield,’ I tell her, ‘is a curious place. On the site of the cathedral, for instance, which we’re passing now,’ (its cleaned sandstone façade visible through the windows on her side of the bus), ‘was a sacred grove, in pre-historic times, and, subsequent to that, in Roman times, a temple to Diana. That wouldn’t, by any chance, be your name?’
The woman has dark hair: it obtrudes upon her collar in a way which, once I had released it, Isabella’s did, cascading down in shiny bright waves; her features, like Bella’s, are set widely apart (she may, in effect, be not much older than myself), creating an impression of openness and candour, and – not to be sneezed at in a woman – humour.
‘No,’ she says.
‘And it isn’t Isabella.’
‘I’m a housewife,’ she says (the bus coming to a halt, passengers, with glances in our direction, getting off).
‘That’s the greatest calling on earth,’ I tell her. ‘Like “miner” is for men. Where would we be,’ I go on, ‘without you?’ she, however, already rising (the bus in the Bull Ring and, having circuited Queen Victoria’s statue on its central island, entering the bus station). ‘My friend, the one I mentioned, Isabella, and I haunted this place. A veritable companion,’ I tell her, ‘in my hour of need. There were thirty years or more between us,’ calling over the shoulders of the passengers between us, she already some distance down the aisle. ‘More an obstacle in her eyes than it was, of course, in mine, age, inevitably, a preoccupation when appearances are all that count. Yet age, in her case,’ raising my voice, ‘was her one credential. It informed not only her appearance but her thoughts. Everything she said was imbued with grandeur, with the ineffable mystery of – how otherwise could I describe it – being in love.’
I am talking – as far as I can discern – to the concrete pavement onto which – the final passenger to leave the bus – I have now descended. Only the conductor – and, with the conductor, his attention having been attracted, the driver – contemplate my struggle for, in descending, having lost one slipper, I am searching for it in the gutter between the side of the bus and the exceptionally high kerb of the bus station’s pavement.
‘Perhaps,’ I tell the conductor, ‘I have lost it inside,’ and having re-entered the vehicle, discover it, as I’d anticipated, beneath my seat (so anxious to engage my fellow-passenger’s interest: what more, I reflect, have I to lose?). On the seat itself are my sketchbook and pencil. ‘Good job I came back,’ I add. ‘Bringing the great indoors outdoors is invariably, I’ve discovered, the corollary of wearing one’s indoor footwear in the street. Normally, to move at all, I require a stick. As it is, from the moment I got up this morning I felt my hour had come. I must do today what I cannot put off any longer. “I will go outside,” I said, “and draw a tree.”’
Across the bus station I see the woman.
‘That’s not the Onasett stop she’s waiting at?’ I ask, to which the conductor replies, ‘The opposite end,’ and then, ‘Do you want me to put you back on the one to Ardsley?’
‘My family live at Onasett,’ I tell him. ‘Or did. Previous to that, of course, myself.’
The bus doors hiss to behind my back.
I cross to the queue where the woman is waiting and, with a geniality which had, I assume, characterised my previous remarks, enquire, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you,’ she says.
‘Coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I have the money.’
‘So have I,’ she says, ‘but my bus will be here any minute.’
‘The cafeteria,’ I tell her, ‘is directly opposite the bus station entrance. We can, once we spot it, be back in no time at all.’
‘No, thank you,’ she says a third time at which a man standing in the queue beside her enquires, ‘Is this man bothering you in any way?’
‘He is,’ she says, ‘as a matter of fact,’ to which I reply, ‘She is like a very old friend of mine. Someone to whom I was devoted. A woman of infinite charm,’ to which the man – of no great height – responds by placing himself between the two of us. ‘I’d advise you to clear off before I have you taken off,’ he says.
‘She spoke to me on the bus,’ I tell him, ‘and smiled at me in a way which, if it hadn’t been broken already, would have seriously incommoded my heart. She doesn’t know what power she’s got. What wonder. What grace. Like Isabella. Like Bea. (Bea stands for Beatrice, by the way),’ I add. ‘If only you knew how hard it is, not only to focus my thoughts on what, specifically, is happening now, but, out of the memories and feelings associated with this place – the majority to do, if not with love, a state of mind conducive to it – to extract a phrase, an appropriate noun, an adjective which describes what it is I would wish to say, you wouldn’t feel obliged, as, evidently, f
rom the pressure of your hand against my chest, you are feeling now, to disengage me from this woman,’ peering round to find a woman, not unlike her, standing in her place. ‘All I wish to confess,’ I confirm to this second figure, ‘is that, while I may not be compos mentis, I am nevertheless mentis par dessous, which is another way of announcing that Maidstone and the present Raynor and, before that, the renowned Mackendrick, the transcendentalist Russo-Scottish psychoanalyst whose mother and father were born in the Ukraine, pronounced me “rational”, in the latter’s phrase, “this side of God”, the line a quotation from one of my plays, for want of a better appellation, A Better Man, which drew Mackendrick’s attention to me in the first place,’ concluding, ‘Could you direct me to the Onasett stop? I merely wished to ask.’
‘This, with one or two exceptions, is the most familiar place on earth,’ I tell the man who is waiting there. ‘I have endured more, waiting on this spot, than I have on any other. I know this place like the back of my hand. Or, better still, the palm.’
I hold it out.
‘A simian line, the heart and head line combined in a single furrow, not unlike an ape’s. A sign,’ I add, ‘of criminality – two out of three condemnees, in a famous survey, possessed this characteristic – or of high, exceptionally high artistic endeavour. Michelangelo, Leonardo, as well as Shakespeare, are often quoted as examples. Which latter case applies to me, the line between crime and art, as that between sadness and madness, not to mention badness, being very thin indeed.’
Bowed down by a bag of shopping, after glancing at my hand, the man announces, ‘Mad!’ to a figure standing on his other side (a woman) who, in turn, stands at the head of a very large queue.
‘It is the Onasett stop,’ the woman says, ‘but you have to join the other end.’
‘I shall,’ I tell her and peruse the faces as I move along the line: not once, in my youth, could I have walked along this queue and not seen a dozen, if not half a dozen, if not two or three familiar faces: here Bea would queue (to come and see me); here I would queue after seeing her off; here my mother waited with a weekend’s shopping; here my brothers and I on our way from school (the redoubtable King Edward’s); here our father on his trips from town; our neighbours, now deceased, from a multitude of errands.
‘It’s all too much,’ I tell a child, the last figure in the queue – and who, with a violent tug, is propelled towards its mother – as I, with similar alacrity (if by invisible strands), was propelled to mine. ‘Is this the Onasett stop?’ I ask her.
‘It is,’ she says, and turns aside.
‘I too stood here,’ I tell her, ‘as a child,’ and add, ‘Or, rather, in the Bull Ring. This place wasn’t built until after the Second World War, an area of derelict streets and houses which were bulldozed to the ground before the war began and remained like that until five years after when pre-stressed concrete came to the fore. It’s why,’ I add, ‘it’s dropping to pieces. How is Onasett?’ I enquire.
Her head turned from me, she remarks, ‘Not bad,’ as she might, I reflect, of a dog or a husband.
‘Not good,’ I might have said, but respond, ‘That place was paradise on earth. Bricks from Chalkley’s Quarry. I suppose that’s gone as well. A hole in the ground directly opposite the first road they cut across Onasett Common, a buttress of land, crossed and criss-crossed by dry stone walls, rising to the peak of Onasett Moor, in turn looking out to the Pennine uplands where we, the Onasettians, camped as boys, leaders of the tribe, despatched, in later years, to the four corners of the earth.’
The war went on for a very long time: in some instances, my dear, it never stopped; stepping, as I did, at the age of six, into the field at the back of the house to see reality re-valued: overhead the enemy lurked (about to descend at any moment): nothing after that could be the same, the brick no longer brick, the grass no longer grass, the sky no longer sky, embodiments, merely, of a soon-to-be-unleashed propensity for destruction.
And, secondly, of course, the films of Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen: figures that walked into and out of the mind, their ingress and egress continuing for ever.
‘That man,’ the child says, ‘is wearing his slippers.’
‘Don’t point.’ The mother draws the child’s arm in the opposite direction. ‘It’s crude.’
Conversely, would I recognise the youth who, thirty-five years ago, came to this stop: the dark-eyed look, the shadowed frown (two vertical creases incising his brow), the drawn-in cheeks – robosity itself, and yet constrained: braced like an animal before a jump which it, and it alone can see (the impediment of his years ahead, the liabilities of temperament)? I doubt, looking round, I would know him at all. Would he, for instance, be disguised as that long-haired, broad-shouldered figure over there who, while maintaining the appearance of having succumbed to the proprieties of everyday life (job, home, wife, car), has preserved a sense of indecorum: the wide-legged stance, the unshaven jaw, a wild-eyed look beneath a furrowed brow? Or – council house, unemployment cheque (disassociation) – is he a plumber on his way from one job to another, the bag at his feet containing, if not his tools, his week-long washing? Or the youth over there with a close-cropped head, jeaned and denim-jacketed (arms thrust to his elbows in his pouch-like pockets), he the embodiment of what I, dark-eyed and shadow-browed, embodied then: an indisposition to take yes or no for an answer, recalcitrant, obtuse, inapposite, grand?
‘I lived at Onasett for twenty years,’ I tell the mother. ‘The first twenty years, of course, are supposed to be the best, the first five being the most important. Quite a sentence when, at that age, there is no redress. Sentenced, I’d say, without a hearing. It was only when I published my own Theory of the Mind that this scheme of things had to be revised. You must have heard of New Mind Theory, or The Narrative or Pentadic Theory of the Mind (attributed exclusively,’ I tell her, ‘to myself).’
By ‘mind’, of course, I mean the psyche.
‘It may not be commonly known, for instance, that I made much of my recent reputation by re-writing a tripartite theory of the same, replacing it with a more clinically exact one of five recognisable selves.’
Viz:
the primal self,
common to us all, described as the reservoir of primal appetites;
the intrinsic self,
the unique conjunction of two equally unique parental systems;
the construct self,
the interaction of the primal and the intrinsic selves with everything around them;
and the preceptorial self,
which was the validating system that emerged from the conjunction of the previous three.
‘My extra-curricular discovery was of the fifth self, a super-authorial presence which, while independent of the previous four, was nevertheless integral to them. The impersonal element we become aware of when we sleep, the still, small voice of poetical inspiration –’
‘Are you all right?’
‘A totality I named “the composite self”.’
A policeman – I am aware, merely, of the darkness of his sleeve, and of a silver button which secures a flap (of his pocket) above his heart – and of his finger and his thumb as he takes (perhaps has taken now for quite some time) my elbow.
‘Perfectly,’ I tell him.
‘Where are you going?’ (he enquires).
‘Onasett,’ I tell him.
‘The bus,’ he says, ‘has left.’
He is – I glance up at his face – younger than his voice suggests: a moustache – a low, triangular shape, bifurcated, curiously, by a bare, scar-like patch – lies above a juvenile and singularly ill-formed mouth: sallow cheeks but not unfriendly eyes – immaturity bolstered by authority (constrained, temperamentally, by a lack of style).
He might, on the other hand – not unusual in his profession – have been in an accident.
‘I am,’ I tell him, ‘waiting for the next.’
‘You live at Onasett?’ (Definitely an impediment in s
peaking, brevity a tool).
‘I did. Presently,’ I add, ‘I live in London. Are you an inspector?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nor, I suspect, an Old Edwardian.’
‘No, sir.’
‘You have a ring of the comprehensive.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘All my children went to comprehensive. On principle. It did none of them more than adequate harm. “Education is a right, not a privilege,” I told them. “Not a commodity,” I expanded, “to be bought. Anyone who thinks it is confounds the first principle of a democracy. No democracy can exist that compounds within its system private education. Privilege abrogates demos.”’
‘Do you need any help?’ he enquires.
‘None,’ I tell him, ‘I can think of. Unless you have, secreted upon your person, a means of redressing pain.’
‘Pain, sir?’
‘Synonymous with “mind”, a physiological phenomenon not contingent upon environment. Indeed, not contingent on anything discernible at all. Were you aware, for instance, that the incidence of psychosis in the rural communities of East Africa – a region beset by natural disasters of every type – is precisely the same as it is in the English home counties? It makes a nonsense of the current superstition that form determines content, or, indeed, determines anything at all. Whereas odium theologicum characterised the previous century, odium psychologicum characterises the present. Odium politicum, I haven’t a doubt, will follow.’