by David Storey
‘Are you a school teacher?’ An impulse to take out a notebook is replaced by a gesture which involves the unhitching of a two-way radio from the region of his waist.
‘I was. In some of the worst schools in the United Kingdom. Whitechapel, Dalston, Islington, Hackney. Seventeen, three of them described at the time, in a report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, as amongst the four worst schools in Great Britain. You name it: I’ve seen it. Latterly, I have decided art and didacticism do not mix, unlike sentiment and religion, lunacy and charm, except, of course, in the subtlest sense, that the former may serve a moral purpose. For instance –’
‘Are you staying in town?’
‘With my daughter. Her husband, Charles, is the principal partner in Stott, Stevens and Hopcroft, barristers at large. The final epithet, of course, applying to their fees. Though Charlie, to be fair, is the chairman of the local constituency Labour Party which returns a member to parliament at each election with the second largest majority in the United Kingdom. Or did until the pit was closed.’
‘Ardsley?’ he enquires.
‘Fenchurch is her maiden name, which happens to be mine. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’
He shakes his head.
‘What sort of education did you have? Apart from one who died a hundred years ago, I’m the only author – not to mention artist – this town has ever had.’
‘My father was a policeman and couldn’t afford to keep me in school,’ he says.
‘Mine was a miner and thought he could. First at Callwood Pit and then at Onasett. Both gone. I passed the former, coming into town. Not a sign it ever existed. Ground smooth as silk stretching to the summit of a slope which, in the old days, was decorated solely by a gantry from which the waste-trucks used to tip their load, leaving a plume, on windy days, blowing across the fields, invariably in the direction of Ardsley. I suppose he’s still alive.’
‘Alive?’ He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
‘Your father.’
‘Retired.’
‘Not much older than I am.’
‘No, sir,’ he says, and adds, ‘younger, I should think.’
At which a shadow falls upon us. ‘Onasett,’ I tell him, as a bus pulls up by the kerb. ‘I might see you,’ I go on, ‘when I return,’ clambering inside – at the head of a queue, formed behind my back, unnoticed.
He watches me take my seat inside (to one side of the driver, anxious, in this instance, to see ahead). I nod my head, point at the sky, mouth, ‘Fair,’ and nod again. The vehicle sways: people clamber overhead: with one or two groans the vehicle subsides. ‘No standing,’ I announce, ‘on the upper deck. No smoking on the lower. No spitting, of course, on upper or lower!’
The policeman’s head appears at the door.
‘All right, conductor?’ addressing the man who, with something of a smile, has listened to my comments.
‘It’s all right by me, officer,’ the man declares.
‘Something of a comic,’ the policeman says.
‘So I see,’ the conductor replies.
Soon to be made redundant (I have heard from Etty): driver-only buses, abandoned because of vandalism, about to be reprieved.
The bus drives out: I see a perspective of the cathedral above the roofs of the nearby shops, the pilastered, tall-windowed façade of the old Mechanics’ Institute, subsequently the Music Saloon and now the City Museum, the Town Hall tower – the municipal proponents of a bygone age, the bus passing the end of North Parade so quickly that this vista is curtailed, allowing a glimpse only of the placarded site of the ancient Butter Cross in Cross Square before, with an accelerating roar, we reach the broader expanse of once tree-lined Westgate.
Directly ahead, beyond the driver’s bulky figure, across, at the foot of our descending slope, a shallow valley, lies the more precipitous hill at Onasett – framed, in this instance, by the distant, smooth-featured profile of the misted Pennine hills.
‘I used to be a Peewit, a jolly Peewit, too, but now I’ve given up Pee-witting I don’t know what to do, I’m growing old and weary and I can Peewit no more, so I’m going to work my passage if I can. Back to Ona-sett, happy land! I’m going to work my passage if I can!’
Within himself the putative Richard Fenchurch feels diminished (indisposed, withdrawn) out of his depth, bewildered by his situation – the circumstances which enclose him on every side (and the feelings they evoke). He considers the part of him he and his parents haven’t spent, writes (somewhere in his diary – ‘Any more fares?’ the conductor enquires), “What I am attempting to do appears impossible, reconciling a reflective life with one which is active. There is something in the atmosphere which inhibits me from making contact – unless the willingness to listen is all the contact I require. My invalidity is as absurd as it is oppressive. (‘Who wants to be an artist? Our budding Fenchurch here!’)”
Fenchurch, the indomitable Fenchurch, his feet, divested of his slippers, shuffling in the debris on the floor of the bus, consults his parents: ‘Which stop do you want?’ the conductor enquires.
‘Is Spinney Moor still there?’
‘It is.’
‘Spinney Moor,’ I tell him, across a gap of forty years. He slides the ticket out, hands me the change.
‘Soon to be dispensed with, conductors and the like.’
‘They are.’
‘Me, too,’ I am about to tell him.
‘Any more?’ without listening: sets off to the stairs.
Onasett, a phalanx of red-tiled houses, rises up ahead.
‘On the other hand,’ I tell the woman beside me, ‘I have, subsequent to the experiences of the past few months, if not the past five years, acquired a tendency to fall in love with every woman I meet.’
She smiles, loaded down with shopping (no view of the way ahead).
‘Her physical appearance, for instance, is infused with what I can only describe as the elemental, something little short, I would say, of the irresistibly divine, a quality unimpeded by what, normally, where female beauty is concerned, might be considered a liability, age. Or even insanity, in one or two instances, hence my preoccupation, verging on obsession, with Vi.’
Such a woman is seated by me now: middle-aged, wearied (by circumstance – class, temperament, geographical location – as well as shopping): dark eyes, with folded skin beneath each one, the cheeks drawn in, the mouth crudely fashioned by the indelicate use of make-up: yet, despite the corrugation of skin beneath her chin, despite the amplitude of her waist and bosom – exceeding the demands, the latter, of any reasonable requirement – despite her smile (as much an expression of pain as pleasure) she is everything I love: ‘I am,’ I tell her, ‘from Onasett myself, eulogised by the Reverend Swanson in his memorable creation, “Happy Land!”, the first vicar of St Michael’s, a song we sang, invariably, on the backs of lorries when returning home from camp. O happy land!’
Teeth regular and artificial: she smiles again – I recalling, in that instant, Bella’s habit, while talking by the fire, seated across the hearth from Corcoran, of tracing then arranging then rearranging, the folds of her skirt across her lap – revealing, inadvertently, her stockinged thighs – and further recall the way she lowers her voice – then lightens it – recounting, first with censure, then with humour, an incident witnessed in the village.
She laughed, with me, like a woman who had been restrained from laughing all her life – revealing, in the process, something of the girl she might have been (she was, years later showing me – our children, her grandchildren (Etty on her knee) – photographs taken by Kells shortly after the First World War, she in a long skirt and (for those days, I suspected) provocative blouse standing amidst a group of chums: the lean-back of her body – her hands on her hips, her fingers spread-eagled across her stomach – laughing at the father who was taking the picture, her sisters, Venny and Clare, beside her).
I hear a piece of music (played, in reality, at the back of the bus), and am stan
ding at the window of our house in Belsize Park – the fourteen-roomed mansion bought at the height of my career – our youngest daughter, Rebecca, in my arms: I have been living alone in the house for the previous year: Bea, on this particular occasion – a weekend – is in a hotel, in Brighton, with her lover, Albert. Normally, she and Rebecca live in their flat, close to the Medical Research Centre at Barnet. An airship is passing overhead – an aluminium-coloured capsule with the name of a beverage inscribed along one side: a tiny sliver of rope dangles from its prow (a low murmur, its engines, like a vacuum cleaner being pushed across the sky).
A constant occupation of mine over the previous year, I am standing at the window, looking out: a tiny cabin is slung beneath the vehicle overhead (swaying and rearing, ducking and bowing) and behind its square-shaped windows we imagine we can see pale faces gazing down. Five hundred feet, perhaps, above our heads, the airship gives the impression (Beckie flinching unconsciously, as she glances up) of being close enough to step inside (an involuntary lurch, we might find it dangling in the garden). Below us, in the street a cyclist slows and raises his head: arrested, one foot on the ground, he shields his eyes. Clouds unsheathe the sun.
‘I’d like to be up there,’ Rebecca says.
She grasps my arm more tightly (forty feet above the ground ourselves: the upstairs front bedroom that, years ago, was occupied by Etty).
Meanwhile, to the south, in a hotel bedroom, at Brighton, her mother: the airship is proceeding in that direction.
‘Will it crash?’
I shake my head.
‘I think it will.’
‘I doubt it.’ (She flinches once again.)
‘Is Benjie coming?’ (our youngest son).
‘I shouldn’t think so, Beckie.’ (Arm aching at her weight.)
‘Kenneth?’ (our other son).
‘Kenneth is abroad,’ I tell her.
‘Where is that?’ (head ducked again).
‘The United States. Studying,’ I tell her, ‘the philosophy of science.’ (‘Has science a philosophy?’ his mother ingenuously enquired when, bright-eyed, dark-haired – her colouring, my features – our eldest son declared his intention of studying at Berkeley. ‘Hasn’t it, Mum?’ he asked, wise, at this stage of her life, to, if not her malignancy, her mischief).
Beckie, as it is, more nearly sees her brothers as uncles, her sisters more nearly as aunts: ‘What is a sister?’ she enquired, examining Matt dressed for a visit to 10 Downing Street (a species of businesswoman approved of at the time: her own management consultancy at twenty-seven).
‘Just the two of us?’ she enquires (this last child of our marriage, aged nine).
‘What shall we do?’
‘Dance?’
I put on a record: we dance to a tune much loved by Benjie (before he left for college) – a whining lyric, drowned by its accompaniment: “Would you leave me? Would you love me? Would you leave me here alone?” an incredulity echoed in my mind as I recall this record being played when – like a storm erupting from a cloudless sky – Bea announced, at breakfast, over a cup of tea, ‘A most extraordinary thing has happened. I’ve fallen in love!’
‘Love?’ (“Would you leave me? Would you love me? Would you leave me here alone?” whined from Benjie’s (then occupied) bedroom – the one in which we are now dancing, at the top of the house).
‘Isn’t it odd?’ (The coincidence, I reflect, of the music, or the state of mind itself?). And then, a second cup of tea to follow the first (‘Would you like one, darling?’), ‘It’s never happened before.’
‘Never?’
‘No.’
‘What about us?’
‘Never in love.’
‘I thought it was.’ (I thought I was. I thought we were.)
She shakes her head.
‘I was intrigued.’
‘Intrigued?’
‘By your attempt to reconcile God and Mammon.’
‘God?’
‘Art.’ (The working class and everything else.) ‘How old was I?’ she went on. ‘Sixteen? Now, of course, I’m …’ (she’s about to tell me ‘fifty-two’).
‘The same age as your mother when you and I first met.’
‘There you are!’ She gestures. ‘The prime,’ she goes on, ‘of life.’
Had she, I reflected, ever suspected? She had come across Bella, on one occasion, sneaking a kiss and, unable to explain what was clearly a sensual embrace, I had said, ‘Your mother was about to scold me. I was thinking too much of you.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ she had said, ‘can keep you in line,’ adding, ‘He’s like that with all the women, Mum, just as all the men are like that with you.’
‘Do you fancy her, sometimes?’ she had later enquired.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, but added nothing further for, a moment later, she went on, ‘The two of you are often spikey.’
‘Spikey?’
‘Both Dad and I have noticed. He, after all,’ she had gone on, ‘was very lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘To have attracted Mum. She could have married any number of men. She still could,’ she went on, ‘as a matter of fact. She married, as it was, the most handsome one of her time.’
It was in Kells, however – ‘Grandpa Kells’ – that Bea recognised a challenge (as potent as the challenge – of an altogether different nature – I recognised in her mother). ‘To continue,’ as she expressed it, ‘where Grandpa Kells left off. The war, and the awful Kell Cakes – the uniting of science to a social good – appealed to him in a furtive way as much as it appalled him. I, on the other hand, can see it more clearly: science and the social good. The two are indivisible. He, for instance, once the war was over, drifted into supervising the research of others: one of the walking wounded, the ones who were killed but never found out.’
It explained – I always felt – once our children were off our hands, the nights as well as the days spent, in a pool of light, stooped over her microscope – staining her slides, those slivers of cells which came up, under magnification, in a range of colours – lemon, yellow, orange, red – like the pitted surface of a hitherto undiscovered planet. ‘I always liked,’ she said on one occasion, ‘to see you and Mum together. That photograph at the wedding, “like the bride and groom”, someone said. Her eyes! I’ve never seen anything like it! You know her ancestors were pirates and most of the women whores!’
‘Supernumerary wives,’ I said.
‘In a harem.’
‘It was described as a private house.’
‘In Istanbul?’
‘Constantinople.’
‘Whores.’
‘Concubines.’
‘Whores!’
On one occasion, lying in bed, shortly after our honeymoon (spent in a room above a sweet-shop in Camden Town), Bea had said, ‘There’s something about you which isn’t right.’
‘What?’ I’d asked.
‘Something twisted. Even indecent.’
‘I wonder what it is,’ I said.
‘I always felt it,’ she said. ‘All that innocence,’ she went on.
‘The first time on the soap-works?’ I said.
‘The first time you kissed me,’ she suddenly confided, ‘and, to my surprise, you missed my mouth.’
When I asked her to be more specific, she said, ‘Father sensed it. So did mother. They couldn’t, at an intuitive level, make you out.’
‘Have you never loved me?’ I asked her when, in the kitchen, over breakfast (drinking tea), she announced, with characteristic candour, she had ‘fallen in love’.
With her mother’s gentle smile – that amoral, unassuming smile, the legatee of whores and pirates – she responded, ‘I’ve always loved you, as, indeed,’ she’d smilingly continued, ‘I love you now, but never,’ she had gone on, ‘have I been in love. Slightly, perhaps, with that youth from Reading. But not like this. Not really,’ she’d concluded, ‘like a flame in the bowel.’
‘Isn’t that uncomfortabl
e?’ I’d said, but she’d merely responded, ‘Like staining a cell and catching, for the first time, not only the pattern but the purpose of its development.’
‘Love and work,’ I said, ‘in that case, are curiously combined.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose they are,’ adding, after pouring another cup, ‘It’s different for a girl to be in love as opposed to a woman of fifty.’
‘Two,’ I said, ‘to be exact.’
‘Over fifty,’ she replied.
(‘Would you leave me? Would you love me? Would you leave me here alone?’ whined from the bedroom overhead.)
A tortuous year, that first year of our involvement, her mother and I, one evening, ‘caught’ by a neighbour in the grounds of the house – a trespasser taking a short-cut from the Ardsley Arms, perhaps, to one of the outlying farms (quicker over the fields) and who, coming across us, late at night, lying on the ground (our ‘position’ unmistakable) had, Bella suspected, refused to believe his senses: (‘I saw his face: I can only conclude he must have seen mine’). A few days later, however, she saw him in the village and he had merely raised his hat in, she confessed, a non-committal manner.
She was seldom, if ever, out of my thoughts: I saw her, or thought I saw her in, if not almost, every middle-aged woman I caught sight of walking in the street, or gazing from a window, or seated in a bus. The risks we took only drove us on (managing, on one occasion, to perform the impossible on the back seat of a bus (how easily one unconsidered act leads to another), she sitting astride my lap, the novelty of the situation – there was one man sitting on his own at the front, the conductor chatting to a chum downstairs, the bus rattling along through the countryside with no one waiting to be picked up – heightened my performance). I had nothing to gauge my actions by: everything was possible (therefore anything was allowed).
‘Would you leave me here for ever? Would you leave me here alone?’
I danced with Bella’s grandchild. Albert’s lover’s daughter (the parliamentary private secretary to the Minister of Health: why should he get the benefits of thirty years of marriage?), with H J. Kells’ great-grandchild, the seed of Bea’s womb, her magenta hair shining in a swathe the length of her slender back (‘I didn’t want to come, but Mummy made me!’ within minutes of her arrival, jumping on the bed: how like a Kells or a Corcoran to know abandonment when she saw it). ‘Is Harriet not coming?’ (preferring her brothers to her sisters).