by David Storey
‘Your attention,’ Etty would say, ‘moves from one thing to another, seemingly without purpose. I suppose you’d say,’ she’d go on, ‘you are the purpose,’ and if, in this instance, a description of the district I live in – when, in her own phrase she comes ‘to rescue me’ – appears to have little connection with the purpose of human existence, it has in my mind, if only in the sudden and vivid evocation of that moment when, packing the case in the bedroom which Vivienne and I had occupied, on and off, for the better part of five years – and in which, unknown to me, she had finally packed her cases before taking them down to the yard below (visible through the uncleaned window) – I recall not only Etty’s dismissal of my five years’ spiritual progress but the moment when, drawing open the garden shed door – curiously ajar when, unused, it was always shut – I had caught the first glimpse of the cases themselves then, grotesquely, of her cruelly distorted body (the blood and bleached tissue around her mouth).
‘You must have misunderstood what I meant by “biological”,’ I tell her. ‘Isn’t the physical an embodiment of what I, in my illness, no doubt, would call the divine? Aren’t the bricks and mortar of this house, not to mention the cracking plaster, the crumbling ceilings, the tiles and stucco, the splintered front door, as much an expression of the divine as anything more portentous you may care to mention? His church, His people, His ministers, His priests, the infrastructure of religion which is as much to do with belief as your scepticism of my motives is to do with me?’
I follow her down the stairs (the case on the bed) into the tiny hall that runs the length of the house: her own suitcase, packed from her overnight stay, is waiting behind the front door. I follow her into the kitchen which runs out as an annexe at the back – facilitating, through a side window, a view of our neighbour’s yard. The female of the couple who live on the ground floor (the house divided into two flats) is hanging out her washing: an elderly woman, of a nervous disposition – a legacy of war-time bombing when a section of the street was reduced to rubble (a council tenement occupies the site) – she glances over the low partition wall aware, if not welcoming, my scrutiny from the other side (‘I’m glad you’re keeping an eye on us, Mr Fenchurch,’ she has said on a previous occasion. ‘Our kiddies, now we’re getting on, never come and see us.’). She nods: behind my back (washing up tea-cups at the sink) Etty says, ‘Let’s keep it at a practical level. Everyone, including Maidstone, says you can’t or shouldn’t live alone,’ adding (no ceremony intended), ‘No one else will have you. You have to come to Ardsley. You know it. You’ve lived there. God, and metaphysics, have no part in it at all.’
When, turning from the window, I interrupt, she swiftly continues, ‘Your incapacity to relate to anything around you in a way meaningful to anyone else is the only relevant factor. If Matt can’t have you – which she clearly can’t – and the boys aren’t in a position to – then it’s up to Charlie and me. The only alternative,’ she concludes, ‘is Boady Hall.’
‘Provided by the estate of F. K. Boady who went mad on these premises,’ someone had written on the wall while I was there, to which a subsequent hand had appended, in a larger – and significantly neater script, ‘Who wouldn’t?’ Similarly, a poster starkly declaring, ‘Apathy is the greatest sin’ across which someone had scrawled, ‘Who cares?’ Boady, in reality, a clothing manufacturer whose wife had benefited, in his view, if dying, from the medical treatment she had received at the North London Royal of which this was the residential psychiatric wing – and where, a significant number of years later, I had taken up residence myself (on and off, for the better part of five years), an indirect consequence, it could have been said, of Boady over-charging for clothes (sold to people like Mrs Laski next door whose husband, injured in an industrial accident – insufficient provision made for safety – is confined, in his premature retirement, to a wheelchair – the ineffable consequence of the means by which Sir Frederick Boady produced the wealth which in turn takes care of the people driven mad producing it). ‘Don’t you see the connection which, other than by my asserting there is one, you tell me isn’t there?’
‘Sentimentality,’ she responds, drying the pots and – the last of our washing-up – placing them in the cupboard beside the (still) victorian (black-leaded) cooking range. (‘How quaint,’ poor Vi had said, ‘my parents had one in Scotland’: it was in the oven – I discovered too late – she hid not only her drugs but her booze.)
‘I live,’ I tell her, ‘in another world, which is just as real as this one.’
‘Which one?’ she enquires.
‘This!’ I tell her. ‘This!’
14
I have reached the top of the hill: the fringe of trees is interspersed with several rhododendron shrubs, beyond – a vista of the valley: the parkland of the old estate running down towards the river (invisible from this distance other than in the form of the raised, dyked bank of its parallel canal and the embankment of the railway). Only in the upper reaches does a silver-like expanse, shadowed by enclosing trees and buildings, and the shoulder of the valley, indicate where the Lin winds out in a broadening, placid curve from its turbulent course through the Pennine hills – a bulwark of darkness against the lightening clouds.
Directly across the valley is Harlstone, its colliery, too, with its familiar elongated waste-heap, gone, the village no more than a crescent of houses scattered across the brow of a hill: above, looms the shoulder of Walton Top, the soot-blackened outcrop of yellow sandstone, its rain-eroded scars visible at this distance, marked at its base by the sombre fringe of Cornthorpe Wood – a place, in the past, where I have courted Bea and – on one sensational occasion – her mother.
The breeze behind me is brisk and sharp: turning to confront it I am met by a view I have drawn and painted innumerable times: Onasett, a scree of red-tiled roofs rising in a series of interlocking planes like the ill-arranged stones on the wall of a castle, its parapet surmounted by the mill-like church of St Michael’s, a pale, low, rectangular structure with a stub of a tower, scarcely more than a chimney, and surmounted, in its turn, by the red brick structure of Onasett School – a onestoreyed building which lies along the crest of what, from this perspective, can be seen to be a protuberant headland, projecting like a cliff from the northern flank of the valley: Ona’s Headland; His Place; Ona’s Sett (Fenchurch’s Folly).
Fenchurch examined the scene before him as he might, on this headland, the embers of a fire, or a scene in a forest: was it here he intended to rest; was it here he had rested before; was it here he had hoped to meet a friend (a companion, a guide) or, as in his youth, had he come to this hilltop to view his home, his native heath, with an impervious if not a Godlike eye (his God, his Saviour – the spirit of the place, that numinous presence of which, from his earliest years, he had been aware – essence not only of the place itself but of all who lived and had lived there – the neolithic hunters who had crouched at the foot of the Onasett hill and fished in the waters of the lake left by the retreating ice cap; the Celts, the Britons – the Roman centurion who, two millennia ago, had built his villa and farmed his fields, clearing the woodland long before Ona himself had appeared; the invading armies, the marauding hordes, the civilising Normans (killing everyone north of the river, the land desolate for years – other than for Cawthorne Castle, a visible stump on the southern horizon); himself; his father (first tenant of that house whose roof was indistinguishable amongst so many others) who had tunnelled beneath the hill itself)? The spirit of the place was what? Within himself: God, if he only knew it.
‘It’s immaterial to me,’ he had said to Etty as she placed the last of the pots inside the cupboard. ‘“Acknowledge” is an indefinite word, perceivable to some and not to others.’
‘I am a humanist,’ she had, early on in her college life, declared, and he had said, with something of a laugh, ‘someone who sees God within him or herself and, pride inverted, then denies it.’
Now I tell her, ‘I see the prese
nce in your hand, the way, for instance, it holds that pot A pot which, in its turn, has been held by me, was held by Vi – and has been, on occasion, by your mother on her infrequent and invariably recriminating visits. It becomes,’ I tell her, ‘axiomatic and, to the degree of having to point it out, of no interest to me any longer.’
‘In that case,’ closing the cupboard door, ‘why bother?’
‘I am,’ I tell her, ‘sowing seeds and, at this point of my life, interested only in doing that. Through my work I go on living. Through my work, of course, and you. Not the “I” with which I came into this world and which, within myself, will go out of it, but the “I”,’ I hastily conclude, ‘beyond it.’
‘What about the child-molester?’ she suddenly exclaimed (I could see her protest coming, she much exercised at this time by an incident with Lottie when a man in the village had not only exposed himself but endeavoured to entice her into his car: ‘What if she had gone?’ she had said, her face buried in her hands).
‘This isn’t,’ I tell her, ‘the God of Good. This is the God of Nagasaki, of Buchenwald, of Dachau. This,’ I tell her, ‘is the God of War. We are no more innocent than He is.’
For over an hour.
‘Like God to his daughter,’ she finally declared. ‘Don’t look for your salvation, Father, in me.’
A residue of ashes, I reflect, examining the flame-red roofs before me: evidence of what was there before but which can never be re-ignited.
The breeze blows freshly in my face: with it comes the smell of smoke: Onasett coal, from the Onasett seam, a shaky, friable substance that leaves an orange ash – less ‘heat co-efficient’ than the denser coals from the deeper seams where time and weight have hardened their texture (burning with a whitish flame).
I begin to draw: two golfers cross the slope: a club is swung: invisible at first, a ball – white, in this instance – bounds across the furrowed grass; I am, as I told myself on those occasions I came here as a youth, in tune with tunefulness itself: praise Him Whose praise we sing below: the graphite smears and smudges.
‘Don’t tell me,’ Etty says, ‘you want to drive,’ getting in, nevertheless, behind the wheel, while all I can enquire (and complain) about as we drive through the maze of littered streets is, ‘Are you sure you locked the door? There are so many papers I’ve left behind. (So many pictures, too.) I’d hate to find it looted.’
‘Matt has said she’ll look in. And Mum,’ she reminds me, ‘has said so, too. They can easily collect anything you want and send it on. Though what you have brought,’ signalling behind (a cardboard carton tied with string), ‘looks quite enough. After all,’ she continues, ‘you’ve written nothing for the past five years. What makes you think you’ll be starting now? You’re getting away,’ she concludes, ‘to rest.’
‘From what?’ I ask.
‘From resting,’ she says, ‘that did you no good.’
‘I told Maidstone I wanted to discover how real I am, without the aid,’ I go on, ‘of medication. “Lithium up your arse,” I said, “no-longer, love, up mine.” I wanted, I told him, to get close to God.’
‘Mania,’ she told me, in a motorway cafeteria, halfway through our drive to Ardsley, ‘strikes you, Father, when I least expect it.’ (‘Father’ denotes irony, ‘Dad’ affection, silence intimacy – or so I reflect). You don’t mind me speaking frankly,’ she adds (more injunction than enquiry). ‘Otherwise,’ she goes on, ‘with the kids and Charlie, the future will be impossible. I’m taking a risk,’ she concludes, ‘after all.’ One hundred and seventy miles from London, the familiar hills and woodland, the valleys and the rivers coming into view, she suddenly enquires, ‘You do love Glenda and Lottie?’
‘More,’ I tell her, ‘than life itself,’ and add, ‘You don’t set a very high premium on it, I know, at present, but, for as much as it’s worth, or you’re able to judge, as much as I loved yourself.’
‘I have never doubted you loved me,’ she says, stooping to the wheel, gazing with a peculiar intensity (not far short of serenity) at the road ahead.
‘Which isn’t quite as strong as saying you were always aware that I did,’ I tell her.
‘No,’ she says, ‘but then, I was,’ adding, ‘Do many people travel along this road, I wonder, discussing the nature of God?’
‘I don’t think,’ I tell her, gazing at the vacuous faces in both the oncoming and the overtaking traffic, ‘they think of anything I’d care to mention.’
My hand, I notice, has begun to tremble: I have come all this way, I reflect, searching for someone, or something, that doesn’t exist: I am, as I told Maidstone, finished.
‘You’re not much older than I am,’ he said. (He was, he’d already told me, fifty-five). ‘I expect, when I’m your age, to be in my prime. As you are,’ he hastened to add, ‘at present. This is merely a reversal before the next prodigal leap.’
‘I’ve made all the leaps I’m going to,’ I told him. ‘If what I have done is not sufficient I have nothing further to add.’
A pensive man (with a heavy face: a pendulous jaw and soulful eyes) who has said in the past, ‘I have no personal experience of what you are going through but, not least from a lifetime’s knowledge, I can imagine what it’s like,’ reflecting, ‘There, but for the grace of God,’ as he watches each departing lunatic figure (which doesn’t obviate his alarm as he watches each subsequent one approach).
The graphite directs my mind to the horizontal line which crosses the paper and which is crossed, in turn, by several shaded patches: I perceive a landscape which, rather than generating awe, precipitates fear – of a magnitude and intensity I can’t describe. I shiver: prayers, comprised of the one injunction, ‘Help!’ alternate with images of Bella – even, absurdly, of Vi: seated at a table in her test for Hero of Our Time (‘Hoot,’ as she described it): the protopsic condition of her eye (swelling at the height of any emotion) for which she saw a specialist in Devonshire Street (‘Nothing we can do, I’m afraid,’ charging her two hundred guineas).
Figures cross the scene below (I am glancing back towards the river): in pairs, in groups of four: how, I reflect, do they find the time: growers of wheat, hewers of wood, tillers of soil (diggers of coal), builders of houses – those newer structures, I can see now, impinging upon the golf-course, at the furthest end of the slope? ‘A collusion of disasters,’ as Bea described it, I first seeing Vivienne, on a screen, in a viewing theatre at Boreham Wood, an intensity, not only about her face but, elusively, her figure (the sharpness of her voice – even her smiles: something forbidding and yet, despite the rapacity, forbearing).
‘What do you think?’ Liam says as, in the darkness, he leans across (her protagonist in the scene Macauley – a fair-haired Scot who became, via the subsequent film, an even bigger star than Vi).
‘How I imagined her,’ I tell him, adding, ‘The character when I wrote it.’
Liam is short and stocky: Irish – O’Donnell: one of the postwar generation of film (and theatre) directors who have had an education: Caius, via Dublin (‘Which has done me, I’m afraid, no good at all, merely inbred, in my case, the vice of patience’). He still preserves a light, inconsequential, hopelessly deceptive, native accent: blue-eyed, broad-browed – white skin, wide-boned – round-shouldered, gutted already with too much drink (which, rather than lightening his nature, leaves him curiously phlegmatic): his hands are short-fingered – clumsy (round and smooth) – pale, like fish, his fingers as they dangle, subtended at the end of a dimpled arm, round the back of the seat beside me – he sitting one seat away (much shading in as the clouds descend and, returning to the Onasett side, I fashion in the road).
‘Intense,’ Warren, our producer, says in the seat behind. ‘And possibly short on glamour.’
‘Glamour?’ The word, in Liam’s throat, is swallowed like a pebble.
‘Sexuality she has in abundance,’ Warren goes on: dour (Scot), red-haired, verging to ginger (pallid face – like Liam), sharp-featured, eyes, pale-blue,
like those of someone under water: tall, when he stands, and thin: gawkiness not so much a trait as a weapon.
‘She is,’ Macauley says, ‘like a boxer. Never lets you off the hook, and is light on her fucking toes.’
Warren is young: five years older than myself just as Liam is five years older than Warren: twenty-seven years old, myself, on the occasion Warren rings up and says, ‘My name is Warren De’ath (‘Day-ath’). I’ve just been reading your Hero of Our Time. I’d like you to meet a man called Liam O’Donnell,’ the call not unexpected for De’ath has directed a film himself (from which he has made a fortune, its actors, author and himself in and out of the papers), while, ‘Liam is directing a play and could meet us after rehearsals.’
‘A catholic, a presbyterian and an anglican,’ he once described us: ‘a Mick, a Jock and – how would you describe yourself?’