by David Storey
Yet O’Donnell, whose mother’s maiden name is Cary, is one of those Anglo-Irish ‘presbyterian pederasts who have crawled out of the mother church and fornicated across the border’: a religious man whose religiosity is sophomorically expressed by telling God to fuck Himself.
We meet in a pub at the back of the Cambridge Theatre – in a bar which, at that early hour of the evening (half-past six), is full of actors from the play Liam is rehearsing – myself an unknown, post-pubescent author, Warren, red-haired, pale, sharp-nosed, broad-mouthed, his brow and cheekbones lightly freckled (‘Liam and I have more than presbyterianism in common, more, even, than the catholic church’), Liam with a leather jacket that, in its tightness, exaggerates the rotundity of his figure, his open-necked shirt with its broad-winged collar framing his head – disproportionately large – as a dish might frame a piece of fruit, a stand a piece of sculpture, a frame envelop a picture (‘a highbrow, by any definition,’ Warren says): broad-browed, a narrow chin, a thin-lipped and slightly upward-curving mouth – creased by dimples the moment (not often) he smiles (‘like,’ Warren later says, ‘a man might bite on a nerve’). Engaging, cantankerous: ‘She has no glamour.’
‘Anima,’ Warren says.
‘Anima.’
‘Unlike Miles.’
‘Miles.’
‘Macauley.’
‘Surely,’ Liam says, ‘that’s animus.’
Solace (lead on paper): the interminability of the roofs rising to the scarcely tarnished stone of the church, to the red brick of the school, to the high-walled grounds of the isolation hospital (built on the site of a Roman villa, its fractured mosaic pavement destroyed in the building): the shout of ‘Fore!’ from the slope, the crinkling of last year’s leaves against the rhododendron.
Liam’s flaw (his fatal error): ‘Wouldn’t you like to play the part yourself? No experience as an actor? I think you’d do it well,’ his predilection to doomed careers: ‘I suppose Viv Wylder was another,’ (see his own decline: booze – followed by depression: ‘She’s good,’ he said. ‘She’s fine: ignore Warren,’ on the occasion that we watched her test).
I didn’t see Vi again until the novel-as-a-film had started shooting and I heard her say. ‘He never thought I loved him, but, Jesus, how I tried,’ her back to the camera, while I thought, ‘Princess of Lost Causes.’
‘Meet Richard,’ Liam says, ‘who wrote it,’ bringing her across the floor, and Vivienne says, ‘I was so nervous, hearing you were coming,’ her face unreal, or so I thought, with make-up, an apologist for Stratford East, the Royal Court: ‘I was a star! In L.A.’ (in Capri, Hollywood, New York) ‘and now I’m in a house in the back streets of a town I never want to hear about,’ saying, years earlier, on the studio floor, ‘Don’t tell me what you think.’
‘Which means she’s waiting,’ Liam says. ‘Which means,’ his arm around her waist, ‘you’ll have to. Say: “Even better than your test”,’ and laughs.
‘There’s so much more I can do with it,’ she says.
Her eyes expand behind her lashes.
‘So much. I’ve scarcely come to grips with it,’ I thinking, ‘So we’re doomed (such spaces we must plunge to).’
Thirty years elapse before I see poor Vi again (but for one or two meetings when the film comes out: the start of my career), she coming in, not drunk (‘intoxicated, merely’) to enquire about a part in Cage at the Beaumont Theatre (my last West End production), she the six-years-dispensed-with wife of Zygorski (currently on film posters throughout the town): dark glasses beneath which, absurdly, are a second pair (attached to the upper frame of which are a pair of swivel lenses): honed, her figure, like a fighter’s, stripped to a minimum weight, from hours of solitude, booze and weeping.
Her features ‘travel’ (Liam says – there for this audition), handsome, curiously attractive – full of grace (‘no doubt, from all she’s been through’ (Liam): two publicised abortions, three interim marriages between the two to Zygorski). Her fingers, as she takes the playscript, tremble: ‘I don’t read well, I’m afraid,’ and then, having cleared her throat – returning the playscript to the desk behind and alongside which, respectively, Liam and I are sitting – she declares, ‘On principle I never do. My agent, for one thing, doesn’t allow it.’
‘Too proud,’ Liam says, ‘to read for friends.’
Turning to me, she says, ‘It’s no reflection on your play, which, incidentally, I admire immensely. I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t.’
‘How are you, Vivienne?’ Liam says.
‘I believe,’ she says, ‘I’m very well. I merely came,’ she crosses her legs, ‘because I’d been invited.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Vivienne,’ Liam says, ‘you can read as well as anyone.’
‘As long as I can keep in a vertical position, and, when necessary, sustain a horizontal one, I don’t see why I should,’ she says.
‘Why didn’t I get the part?’ she asked (years later). ‘Because you thought I’d never learn the lines? I’d learnt half of them, I might tell you, the night before. Until five a.m., when I snatched an hour of sleep, then had a shower, then walked the streets waiting to come up to that crummy office and be offered the part. Not asked, God damn it, to audition. I made that man’s career. And yours. And Miracle Miles Macauley.’
‘We made yours, too,’ I told her.
‘With Hero? Before that, all Liam was known for was making documentaries. You thought,’ she went on, ‘I was on the bottle.’
‘More than thought,’ I said.
‘I hadn’t touched a drop for hours. Hours!’
‘How many pairs of glasses did she have?’ the casting director asks after Vivienne has gone (she herself a former actress).
‘Two pairs,’ Liam says, ‘three lenses.’
‘She had a glass-case in her hand, with another pair inside,’ the woman says.
‘Three pairs, four lenses, which shows,’ Liam says, ‘she came to read.’
‘I would never,’ the woman says, ‘as a woman, get into a state like that.’
‘Like what?’ Liam says.
‘I’d have,’ she says, ‘more pride.’
‘Pride, I’m afraid,’ Liam says (he to go down that road himself), ‘is all that Viv has left.’
‘That’s not pride,’ the woman declares. ‘That, I’m afraid, is subjugation.’
‘I was never too humble to be proud,’ Vivienne said later. ‘The last time was in that office at the top of that crummy theatre. The lift didn’t work. I walked the stairs, and didn’t even get the crummy part. Which is just as well. I’d never have kept it. How long was the run? Two months? Two weeks would have been my limit.’
‘Three pairs of glasses, four lenses!’ Liam says, laughing (foreshadowing his own disasters: all of my friends and most of my contemporaries dead).
‘I fell down the stairs when I left that office and – what you didn’t know – I had to be taken home in a cab,’ she ringing me a few days later: ‘I liked your face. You looked as though you’ve been through much the same as I have, booze apart, of course, and three or four husbands.’
‘Two moths,’ Liam said, ‘and a single flame: no wonder you both got burned.’
I brought Bea to this hilltop – twice: once to see the view, the other to make love – and Bella once (the motive much the same). ‘It’s a sacred place,’ I said to Bella when, winded from the climb, she stood panting in the darkness of the trees: the absurdity of requesting her to climb, her vulnerability (humility) in accepting. ‘It must have been an island in the neolithic lake. The signs of a settlement have been found at the southern end. Perhaps you’d like to see it?’ the lights strewn out beyond the links (the pressure of her hand in mine: ‘How much I love you,’ I declared. ‘I wish that we were married’).
‘Hence the difference between us,’ Vivienne – who was my age – said when I told her about my earlier life. ‘You really need a mother. Was she as lovely as you describe? We must have a lot in common.’
When I asked her, ‘What?’ she laughed. ‘Women,’ she said, ‘who were never loved.’
‘I loved her more than any other woman I know,’ I said.
‘Until she grew too old.’
‘Not once,’ I told her, ‘was she ever too old.’
To see her sitting there, or working in the garden, or merely standing at the door when we departed was more than I could bear: I longed to take her in my arms. I would, when we moved to London, lie awake for hours, aching for her touch. She totally possessed me. ‘After I was married, after I had children, after I had been with other women, one encounter merely the presage to another. More to me,’ I tell Vivienne, ‘than life itself,’ recalling the occasion when, in the darkness, she had stood here with me, her hand in mine, gazing at the scree of lights before us (Onasett and, behind us, those of Harlstone, across the valley), the swaying presence of the trees (the softness of her touch). ‘Making love was a disappointment. It always led to something else. Disquiet. The fact that she was married. The disparity between our ages. The frustration of never knowing in what circumstances we might meet. The longing to be with her was more than I could bear. I would creep into the grounds at Ardsley and wait amongst the trees, hoping I might glimpse her passing by a window. One evening, when I did, she at an upstairs window, gazing out, speculating, I imagined, what she would do, or merely feel like if, glancing out, she saw me, it was more than I could bear. I stepped out from the shadows. She never saw me. All she could see, she said, was the dark. It was to appease this indiscretion of mine that she took to walking in the grounds in the evening. “To take the air,” as she described it, prompting her husband jocularly to remark she must be meeting a lover.’
‘I don’t know what it was,’ I said to Vi. ‘The sight of her alone was enough to set me off. I’d be engulfed by feelings which convinced me I was mad. I’d tremble. Her sounds of gratification, the removal of her clothes, the elevation of her hips, the paleness of the garment which, despite my efforts, still concealed her breast, drove me to distraction. “Don’t be so wild,” she’d tell me (after all, her tone implied, you’re getting what you want), and, “Don’t be so clumsy,” would be her other plea, the final consummation, even now, after all these years, impossible to describe.’
‘It’s not me you love,’ Vivienne, on one sultry evening, casually announced (‘I should never have come here to live or had anything to do with you at all,’ she added), ‘but that woman you see in me. I’m about the age that she was. It’s me you’re launching into when you come on top. It’s her you’re making love to,’ requesting (something she’d resisted until that moment) I find a photograph amongst the papers I’d brought from Belsize Park to Taravara Road (no search required at all), showing her the most precious – taken in a woodland clearing (with a camera – at my insistence – she’d brought herself), she sitting on the ground, the hem of a summer frock demurely above her knee, her eyes half-closed, her lips parted, the dimples evident in her unlined cheeks. My coat and her own are on the ground, revealing clearly the impress of our bodies (her hair in disarray): sunlight – we are on our memorable visit to Broughton Woods, close to my boyhood camp-site – sprinkles a patina of shadow across her frock, the outline of her thigh, one leg curled beneath her. She smiles as, years later, Bea would smile at the first of our children – bewildered, perplexed (subliminally entranced).
‘She’s very beautiful,’ Vi said, searching, indubitably, for a vestige of herself. ‘She must have loved you very much. Incontinently,’ she added, stammering (a full glass in her hand). ‘To have risked not only her husband’s but her daughter’s love. You said he idolised her, didn’t you?’ raising her head to examine the kitchen-cum-living-room of that tiny dwelling (no vestige in the photograph, after all, only the residue of where we are now). ‘To have risked all that for a boy of – how old were you at the time? Nineteen? It doesn’t make sense, and yet, to me, all the sense,’ she belched, ‘in the world. I idolised my father in a similar way and have been looking for a surrogate ever since. An awful cheat. Zygorski. An awful fucking creep. Twenty-five years younger and the mind of a child of seven.’
She kept the photograph by our bed: ‘How beautiful she looks and – worst of all – how innocent Isn’t the key, my darling, she was really much younger than you? What, I wonder, does her daughter think? That inimitable genius who, sooner or later, will come up for the Nobel Prize.’
‘She never knew,’ I told her.
‘Never?’
I shook my head.
‘I thought that’s why you split.’
I shook my head again.
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
In two minds, I could see (a handy weapon), to tell her now herself.
‘The only person who knows, apart from yourself, is Maidstone,’ I said. ‘He thought it was something Bea could sense but not define.’
‘Which, in any case, came between you,’ she said.
‘It might.’
She sat in silence for a while: what, she must have reflected, could I do with that? Damage, she must have concluded, commensurate with her own.
Isabella’s collar: her arm, her sleeve, the abrasiveness of the material of the coat itself: the extraordinary effect of her perfume in the dark: her smile: ‘Is this what you do with Bea?’
‘No,’ I tell her, and add, ‘You’d decided you’d never ask.’
‘Nevertheless,’ her hair flung back against the grass. ‘It must be desperation that makes me.’ (‘It’s more,’ she has said on one occasion, ‘than flesh and blood can stand.’) And adds – or I think she adds – recollection inhibited by aversion, ‘This instrument that goes in and out of me, goes in and out of my daughter. Does she, I wonder, feel the same? If she found out, is there only disillusionment for both of us?’ (Isn’t her gratification, she might have gone on, identical to mine – achieved after all, in an identical way?). ‘What, I wonder,’ she concluded, ‘is so different?’
While on the South Coast, in a sunlit room, an airship passing overhead, her daughter is experiencing what she, her mother, experienced then – on the banks of streams, in sunlit woods, on the back seat of a bus (in moonlit copses): ‘I seldom feel afterwards I haven’t been raped. Odd, when I invite it.’
My dear. My dear! My love!
Or on the bed, when Corcoran is out: in the guest-room where I am staying at present (the view to the trees and the pit-less village); in my lodgings at the Drayburgh when she came to London – which, only moments before, her daughter had left …
15
‘Are you all right?’ the jerseyed (a roll-top collar) zip-jacketed figure enquires: panting from his climb, a golf-club in his hand, a companion – female, skirted – some distance down the slope behind: ‘My wife,’ he gestures with his club, ‘saw you lying down. She thought,’ glancing down the slope, ‘you’d fallen.’ He calls, ‘I think he looks all right,’ vigorous – thick-calved, broad-chested, face flushed from his exertions: a native, undoubtedly, of Onasett itself.
‘Are you a native of these parts?’ I enquiring, aware of sitting on the ground, my back against a tree, leaning, my elbow supporting me, over to one side (a dizzy attack or a reflexive action).
‘Linfield.’ He names a distant suburb. ‘The Cawthorne Club is difficult to get into. Onasett isn’t so choosey.’
‘Onasett,’ I tell him, ‘never was,’ conscious of the damp beneath my thigh: though covered with decaying leaves, the ground is wet. I can feel further evidence through my jacket sleeve. ‘It took all the people living by the river, in those streets around the Linfield dock, my parents, as it happened, amongst them,’ half a century or more ago, I might have added but he is gazing at my sketchbook which, together with my pencil, is lying on the ground.
‘You’ve got the appearance of it well,’ he says.
‘I have,’ I say, ‘and more.’
‘Is he all right?’ calls a voice from down the slope and, ‘He is an artist,’ is offered in reply
. ‘Would you like me,’ turning back, ‘to help you from the ground?’
I take his hand; for the first time – as he takes mine in return – he is aware of my carpet slippers.
‘I came out,’ I tell him, ‘in a hurry.’
‘From Onasett?’ he enquires.
‘Home,’ I say, ‘is where the heart is.’
‘Dougie?’ from the slope below: two trolleys parked along the fairway.
‘Coming,’ he calls, adding, ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’
‘Perfectly,’ I tell him, he setting off, soliciting a signal, with his golf-club, to which, however, I don’t reply.
The etymology of grief is the epistemology of madness, viz:
Grief (pace grievance) = injury.
Injury = not right (wrong).
Wrong = unjust (related to wring, awry).
Wring = squeeze, twist (distress, torture).
Awry = crooked (related to wry).
Wry = distort, turned to one side (contort).
(Contort = twist).
Distort (similarly).
Twist = double (twin, twine).
(Double = two).
Two = division:
injury, injustice, torture, distortion: duality – madness, it is conjectured, the logic of grief, its antecedents to be found in injury, injustice, torture, distortion – duality – and self-division.
‘Bea,’ Maidstone says, ‘is no longer a woman,’ she is, he is about to tell me, a state of mind, but adds, misjudging my look, ‘well known at the Ministry.’
‘Ministry?’
‘Of Health. Where do you think she gets her money?’
I was about to say, ‘Myself,’ but go on, ‘We separated, would you believe it, after coming to London, and met up again at a college dance: a room full of streamers, played to by a jazz band led by a man with a stammer, his announcements, over a faulty mike, variations on an extemporary theme, she a radiant figure – “Beattie” to her pals, principal amongst them her college tutor who, a molecular physicist, was subsequently fired for screwing a student: magenta hair, green-irised eyes, green-coloured dress.’