by David Storey
‘Aren’t you a student here?’ she says.
‘The Drayburgh,’ I tell her, ‘is affiliated to the university.’
‘Oh,’ she says, and little else, except, as we spin and whirl – she spiralling politely beneath my hand (has she heard, I reflect, about her mother?) she adds, ‘The Drayburgh, by the way, is known as “The Drain”, on account of the people, of course, who go there.’
‘Haven’t we met before?’ I ask.
‘Isn’t it reprehensible,’ she says, ‘the way a reputation like that can get around?’
‘Take me,’ I say. ‘I’m known as licentious,’ she waiting – our acquaintance once renewed – in her college room dressed in suspenders, stockings, little else (a dressing-gown half-belted), saying, ‘Aren’t you early? I thought we said half-seven,’ the spry, ‘My dear!’ as I come inside, a Christmas dance, thrown at the Student Union in Malet Street where I’d hoped (intended) to meet her again – and not a week later, of course, her mother (‘I thought you and Bea had drifted apart’), she waiting in my room in much the same fashion as Bea in hers, the spry, ‘Oh, Richard!’ and then, ‘My dear!’
‘I was studying painting at the time and a student at the Drayburgh was quite a catch. As for her mother: “I really came down, of course to see Bea.”’
‘Are you a member?’ the man enquires.
Unlike the majority of the men who occupy the room he wears a collar and tie: a square moustache, a pale blue eye buttoned either side of a fleshy, mottled nose.
‘I’m looking,’ I tell him, ‘for Mr O’Donnell.’
‘O’Donnell?’
‘A member here in nineteen forty-five. He lived two doors away in Manor Road, spent more of his time on the tees than he did with his wife.’
‘I don’t know Mr O’Donnell,’ the man replies.
‘This would be where Wordsworth, Turner, Castlereagh, on two occasions, Gladstone and Disraeli, at varying times,’ I tell him, ‘were entertained. You must know Turner’s sketch of Onasett Hall, set against the slope, poetically exaggerated, of Onasett itself, the setting sun, the pink eminence of the house in the middle distance.’
‘If you’re not a member, or invited by a member, you’re not allowed in the bar,’ he says.
‘Any time, he told me, I happened to be around. “You’ll be assured,” he said, “of a welcome.”’
‘If you’re not a member, nor an invited guest, I have a statutory obligation,’ he says, ‘to ask you to leave.’
‘My father came down here during the Second World War. The Onasett Home Guard occupied premises in what was the gardeners’ hut at the back. A unique structure, circular, brick-built, and probably still there, comprised of two rooms, one on top of the other.’
‘Nostalgia,’ Maidstone says, ‘classified as a medical condition, was first noted amongst mercenaries in the European armies in the eighteenth-century wars: stout-hearted men who suddenly acquired the symptoms of depression, not merely a disinclination but an inability to eat, sitting for hours in a stooped or crouched position: men who, when they first left home, had been, where not relieved, jubilant to do so – escaping from marital or parental discord, lack of food or unemployment – only, once away, to curl up and die. Though discarded nowadays as a clinical diagnosis, nosomania is, in my view, under-rated. A longing for one’s home is, in many respects, inseparable from a longing for the past: not merely a sentimental aspiration to return to a familiar place and time, but a passionate regard for experiences which may, in reality, never have occurred, a diffusing of experience to which the victim helplessly clings, like a martyr to a cross or a drowning man to a plank of wood, the recollection, in short, of a place or places without which a person, mistakenly, believes he can’t exist.’
‘As for Maidstone’s reference,’ I tell the man, ‘to my clinging to the past, I only have to refer him to what actually took place, the material set down in black and white.’
‘I’ll be obliged, if you won’t leave, sir, to call on someone to take you out. We have two policemen here as members,’ calling, ‘Bryan!’ to a figure whom, with several others, reflected in a mirror, I see standing at the bar.
‘O’Donnell died,’ I tell him, ‘in 1955, scarcely ten days short of his sixty-fifth birthday. A rent and rates clerk at the County Hall, I saw him, believe it or not, the day preceding the event, walking past our house swaying, as he did so, not merely from side to side but forwards and backwards.’
‘He’s come here looking for a man who died in 1955.’
‘O’Donnell was his name,’ I tell the policeman: in civvies, fair-haired, not disinclined, I suspect, to be moved. ‘His namesake, not dissimilar in several respects, directed one of my films and a not inconsiderable number of my plays,’ I add.
‘I’m afraid,’ Bryan says, ‘this is not a public bar. I shall have to ask you, if you aren’t a member, or haven’t been invited as a guest, to leave.’
‘Jack the Democrat,’ I tell him, ‘would not be pleased. A populist when populism had more than a pejorative meaning. As for O’Donnell …’
The off-duty constable – perhaps sergeant (or, considering the youth of today, conceivably inspector) – takes my arm. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, on the other hand, invite me as a friend. I am, after all,’ I tell him, ‘native bred, a son of the Devonian sandstone, the millstone grit – along with the glacial marls and shales, the sands and gravels, the deltaic deposits. Between you and I,’ I go on, ‘there is no between. That which comprises the between between me and other people has, in the past few years, been set aside. Certainly by me, if no one else. I am almost too free,’ I conclude, ‘to be alive. Which is why, if the truth were known, I was sectioned by my wife, working in conjunction with a live wire at the North London Royal. Maidstone by name, if rarely by practice …’
We are at the door: it looks directly to a smoothly-cut lawn (‘Like a bowling-green,’ I tell him. ‘It is a bowling-green,’ he says) bordered in turn by a balustraded wall through a gap in which (decorated on either side by urns in which spring flowers are already blooming: daffodil, crocus, and the like) the first tee of the golf-course can be seen and, in the furthest distance, across a diagonal view of the valley, the pudding-like profile of Cawthorne Castle, the river – hidden by its low embankments and the parallel canal and railway embankments – somewhere in between.
‘Which is not unlike being sent outside with the integument of one’s skull removed, the abrasiveness of the air so intense a pain as to be,’ I tell him, ‘impossible to describe.’
‘I advise you to leave by the drive,’ he says.
The first of my interlocutors – he of the square moustache and collar and tie – points the opposite way to the one I’m going. ‘There is no public access across the course,’ he adds.
Vivienne, poor Vi, was ensconced at the N.L.R. herself (a different time to me: ‘Would you say,’ she enquired, ‘we’re taking it in turns?’), but, unlike me, was never sectioned (no family nor lover to do it for her): subsequently, she joined her chums in L.A.: “mystical analysis”, “rational diets”, endless hours of driving the freeways, going nowhere, coming back: between her and I there is no between – I bringing her here on one occasion (her incapacity to disengage the seat-belt alone preventing her from falling out).
‘I want you,’ I tell her, ‘to find a root. This is where I started. This,’ I tell her, ‘is where I belong.’
‘Another fucking place to me. Never a one,’ she cries, ‘to call my own!’
‘You left this behind,’ the policeman says, handing me the sketchbook.
‘That’s kind of you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m on my way home,’ the driveway, however, already empty, no one but myself, he a disappearing figure: no curiosity about the present. None, presumably, about the past.
‘When you get into these states,’ Maidstone says, ‘select an image. Preserve it. Concentrate on one thing and nothing else.’
‘What I always choose,’ I say, ‘is Be
lla.’
‘Vi is Isabella,’ he says, ‘bereft of prohibition.’
“Thanks for everything,” Vivienne wrote in her last letter – leaving it, curiously, with her wedding-ring on the draining-board (where the bleach had stood) beside the sink, I waiting for a call to say she had arrived (conceivably, she’d missed me) – three days, God help me, before I found her (her finger nails filled with garden soil – perhaps, not inconceivably, evidence she’d changed her mind, intending to crawl to the kitchen door, calling me or, God help her, Melvyn.)
A bus goes past: I am once more on the curving, roller-coaster strip of tarmac, rising and falling over ancient, overgrown moraines, which circuits the foot of the estate: an aperture in the façade of red brick and pebble-dash indicates the opening to Manor Road: the familiar verges have been replaced by tarmac, the trees little more than hacked-at stumps: cars, the majority in a dilapidated if not irretrievable condition, are parked amidst pools of coagulating oil: hedges as well as gardens are overgrown and, where the soil has been tarmacked too, vehicles are parked between the houses. The doors and windows have been replaced with inappropriate frames and mountings: out of scale, out of sympathy (out of everything): plebeian exigencies: what was graceful (small and neat) a distortion of the planners’ earliest intention: the burgeoning trees, the fresh-cut verges (the smell of grass), the flowered gardens …
“Thanks for everything. Love. V.”
An overcast sky, the tarmac flanked by the intermittently-tarmacked-over verges (of the trees, where not missing, only one or two are fully grown), the mutilated (or absent) hedges – gaps hacked in to allow access to cars – the decimated gardens, the air of adventitious debilitation: a drive carved out of the soil by tyres; windows punched in inappropriate walls ‘Nosomania,’ Maidstone says, ‘is cured by a return to the place – or the past – imagined.’
‘Only,’ I tell him, ‘nothing, from being observed, is what it was before.’
Some distance ahead, where the road rises up a gentler slope (never steep enough to sledge down), the front of the house appears: the green paint, inset with yellow, of its window frames and doors is now a uniform brown: the roof is disfigured with wedge-shaped tiles. The front door has changed (a uniform, unmoulded expanse of wood: no relief to its tedious surface), the hedge at the front hacked to waist-height: the gate has gone, replaced by a pair of wooden hurdles which, wedged apart, are already broken. A dilapidated car stands in the gap between the houses (scarcely space to open the door), a makeshift garage blocking the view to the field and – from the enclosing weeds – the overgrown garden behind. The windows are uncurtained, strips of cloth attached on either side.
“Here,” Vi had written obscurely in her last letter, “you will find me. We had, did we not, a hell of a time, you fucked up from the inside, I from the outside. ‘A woman’s work is never done,’ ran an advert in my childhood – beside, as it happened, a bottle of bleach. How true! ‘Take this cup from me,’ Christ prayed in the garden. How, since he prayed alone, did anyone know? When, as a child, I asked my father, all he said was, ‘Inspiration!’ All I can say to him now, as I say to you. Thanks for everything. Love. V.”
In her diary, its writing so small I had to use a magnifying glass to decipher the scrawl: “A sense of obsolescence has preoccupied me all my life: the laughing child, the beautiful daughter, the blushing bride (the fucked-up wife), on each occasion the still, small voice, ‘This isn’t meant to last.’ Nailed to his cross he must have felt the same: ‘Don’t take it at anything other than face value,’ the nails, the hammer, the spear, the sponge – the lament of every woman on earth – and Him: why hast thou deserted me!”
My father, pushing his upright-handled bicycle, comes up the path: dark (imprinted, his face, with coal-dust round his eyes and mouth, the cracked lines that retain it beside his lids, the crevices beneath his chin), a short, broad-shouldered, smouldering figure, still at the coal-face at sixty-one – the handlebars grasped in either hand, the querulous, ‘It’s you?’
‘How are you?’ I enquire – to which he doesn’t reply, laying the bike against the hedge (no longer there) which hides the back garden from the road, stamps his feet on the mat in the porch, ducks his head as he pulls off his cap, stoops, removes his clips, before he thrusts his way inside.
‘What did Grandpa do?’ the children enquire, years later, as they watch his stumpy, white-haired figure recline in a deck-chair on the lawn of our Belsize Park house – solemn, silent, gazing at the air (rasping in the London pollution), their incredulous looks as they listen to his tales of tunnels, pitprops and collapsing roofs (runaway trucks and crashing engines, floods and falls and fire and dying men).
Taking off his jacket, he washes at the sink, turning, hands wet, to the frayed-edge towel: his boots, coal-dusted, are thrust beneath the mangle: lifting the lid on the plate laid across the top of a pan of simmering water, his head is immersed in a cloud of steam: too tired to eat, he allows my mother, who has come through from the living-room, to take the plate from him. He sits, answering briefly my mother’s questions, at the living-room table, the food carried to his mouth unseen: ‘The roof half-buried the machine this morning,’ eating, two-fisted, like a boxer, the gravy streaked across his lips, eyes like a dog’s, hungered from exhaustion, submitting to an appetite his body cannot feel.
‘Would you mind telling me what you are doing here?’ the woman asks.
‘I live here,’ I say, and add, ‘or used to,’ aware I have wandered between our old house and our neighbour’s and am standing at the side of a makeshift garage: where once stood a lawn, a rockery and, between the rockery and the field, a vegetable patch, are the accumulated remains of several motor cars: clothes, hung for drying, are suspended above them, while the porch, its coal-house door broken, has its brickwork smeared with the imprint of what appear to be innumerable oil-stained hands.
‘You’re not, by any chance, called Fenchurch?’ she says.
‘I am,’ I say, ‘as it happens,’ (a commemorative plaque, it’s been suggested, should be attached to the front of the house?).
‘Someone was looking for you.’
She gestures to the road.
‘Who?’ I immediately respond.
‘A woman.’
Small and stout – a stoutness which, to some degree, belies her age, for she can’t, I imagine, be more than in her middle twenties (servile to a savage husband, the mother of more children than she can count: the sound of squawking comes from inside the scullery door: the door through which, for forty-five years, my father daily entered).
‘What did she look like?’
‘She came in a car. Said, “Has a gentleman been here?” Said you walked with a shuffle, and may even be in your slippers.’
She gazes at my feet.
‘Where is she now?’
Gesturing to the road again, she says, ‘She drove off when I told her I hadn’t.’
‘A fan of mine,’ I tell her.
‘She said she was your daughter.’
‘They all say that,’ I tell her. I shift my sketchbook to my other hand, recall I may have lost my pencil, and add, ‘You have a beautiful dress.’
She looks down at her skirt – stained, ill-fitting, torn at the seam.
‘On the line,’ I tell her.
‘That’s a nightdress,’ she declares.
‘I would love,’ I say, ‘to see you in it.’
‘So would I,’ she says. ‘I put the wrong heat on and it’s gone and shrunk.’
‘You’re a rough and ready woman, I can see,’ I tell her. ‘Quite used to your environment, I imagine, and to the rough treatment that you get, no doubt, from your husband.’
‘It’s a good job he isn’t here,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to ring the police?’
‘I merely came,’ I tell her, ‘to look at the house. I painted my first picture behind that door, composed my first poem, wrote my first novel. For the first twenty years of my life I slept here almost
every night, sometimes in the bedroom at the back, more often in the second bedroom at the front. You will hardly credit it,’ I go on, ‘but I was once put up for the New Year’s Honours, until my private life came under closer scrutiny, by which time my reputation, unfortunately, had declined, if not disappeared entirely. Previous to that, several plays of mine had been seen by President Johnson, at the instigation of his wife, Lady Bird – who became, I could almost say, an intimate acquaintance – she arriving at the theatre with her usual guards who not only occupied the best seats in the stalls, the Royal and Dress Circles, but the gallery, each of them armed with an automatic weapon which, on one memorable evening, misinterpreting a line of the play as an attack on her, they drew, pointing them in a variety of directions but principally at the seat in which was sitting the director of the play. I was, for several years, the toast of Broadway and won, for several years running, its principal awards.’
She has turned her attention to a child behind her back, her broad figure stooping to its bare-legged frame which, with a sigh, she hauls to her shoulder.
‘Do you mind,’ I enquire, ‘if I step in the field?’ and clambering between the miscellaneous piles of rusted metal, reach the area where normally there might have been a fence and, an instant later, am standing in wasteland (where previously, I remind myself, there had been only grass): here neighbours danced and ate and drank to the music of a wind-up gramophone to celebrate the end of the Second World War and, years later, the coronation of the Queen; here the subsidence that marks the hole where we built our final den, marked itself, like a grave, by weeds; there the cricket-pitch, more pitted than ever; there the slope behind the goal down which the ball invariably rolled after scoring; here – last of all – the level stretch of ground – adjacent to the cricket-pitch – where the tables were set in a single line for the parties to celebrate peace and the coronation – where the women, in their Sunday dresses (overhung with aprons) danced with their waist-coated, shirt-sleeved men, the latter shy to be seen embracing their wives in public, the bolder dancing with their more adventurous neighbours: Mr Clinton (of the large moustache) with Mrs Russell (of the prominent bosom); Mr Walton (with the protuberant waist) with the much animated Mrs Swanson; Mr Wade (bow-legged) with Mrs Braine (from Ireland); my father with my mother, before finding an excuse – the children’s demands at the table – to disengage; the golfing Mr O’Donnell with the tennising Mrs Crawshaw, the religious Mr Walls with the irreligious Mrs Shay, the unmarried Peter Waterton (about to be demobbed) with the widowed Mrs Preston, myself an idle youth, leaning on the fence, grimacing at this display of communality …