by David Storey
Burnt, the grass, in one or two places: missing, the fences, behind my back: the desultory windows no longer recall the personalities inside: the Davidsons, the Clarkes, the Petersons, the Smiths.
Dereliction.
Almost idly, Fenchurch takes out a pencil (in his pocket all the while) and, the grass too wet to sit, begins to draw: the line of the field, the inappropriately adapted houses – the battlemented crest formed by the silhouetted roofs – identifying, as he does so, the pattern of the windows – alternating double and single – the alcoves of the porches, the scattered trails of smoke – and decides he is too tired, fatigued (worn-out, defeated): how on earth did Etty know? the woman, he observes, still watching, the child, half-naked, in her arms.
Other figures, too, are watching (other windows, other doors).
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she calls, and disappears inside her porch.
Glancing round, once more, at the familiar façades, I complete the sketch – the lowering excrescences of greyish vapour beyond which, at one fame, lurked German bombers (the remainder of my life a remoter threat) – and return, with difficulty – negotiating the rusting metal obstacles – down the remnants of the garden path to the oil-stained entrance to the at-one-time Fenchurch porch.
I tap on the grease-marked door (‘Come in,’ says a voice immediately inside) and step into a scullery smaller in size than the one retained in memory, the cracked concrete floor covered in linoleum, across which has been laid a tattered mat: a motor-cycle, its engine disassembled, leans against the wall against which, in inclement weather, we propped our bikes. A cooker replaces the gas-fired, green-painted copper, the sink in the corner much the same: beneath the window, looking out to the road, a washing-machine is piled high with washing.
‘Come in,’ she says again (a kettle plugged to the wall). ‘Go through to the living-room, I’ll bring the tea through,’ she adds, ‘in a minute,’ the child still in her arms.
Crossing the hall, scarcely broad enough to take two figures standing together, I enter the living-room the other side – a vast interior, in memory, of familial warmth – reduced, in reality, to something not much larger than my Taravara Road kitchen: the closeness of the walls, the lowness of the ceiling, the confinement of the view to the field and road outside – the dereliction of the disassembled cars at the back, the asphalt verge, the overgrown and trampled remnants of the lawn at the front: a decaying, grease-stained settee and two similarly disfigured easy chairs, together with a crockery-encumbered wooden table, take up much of the available space; a television set, turned on, stands adjacent to a fireplace which, tiled, unlike the black-leaded stove of previous years, is occupied by cans of beer, which, on closer inspection, prove to have been opened.
Laying down my sketchbook and pencil I hear a voice behind me call, ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Tea.’
The chairs are small.
‘Make yourself at home, I shan’t be a minute.’
Springs protrude beneath the much-stained fabric. My feet are wet: I clench my toes inside my socks, feel the dampness against the slippers and, having sat, remove them.
Taking off my socks, I put them in my pocket.
Here, on many a solitary evening, I have read Lord Jim, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Dostoyevsky: ‘procrastination common to Lord Jim and Hamlet: discuss.’
The paper on the wall, distempered, is marked at a uniform height by children’s hands: dark patches enclose the light-switch: a smell of beer is obfuscated, to some degree, by that of rotting meat, the air not only chill but damp: so many evenings have I sat behind a barricade of drying clothes, the dampness permeating the furniture and curtains: the glow of the fire through the different thicknesses of cloth, the chink of flame between adjacent garments, the creak of the leather thongs on the supporting wooden frame echoing that of the table where, on a sheet laid on newspaper, my mother irons.
‘Sugar and milk?’
‘Milk,’ I tell her and, a moment later, the child still in her arms, she brings in a steaming pot.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’
‘No, thanks,’ I tell her.
‘A piece of cake?’
I shake my head (uncertain where she keeps it). ‘Excuse my feet,’ I tell her. ‘I wet them in the grass,’ and add, ‘I came out in my slippers.’
‘That’s all right,’ she says, ‘by me.’
She sits, the child, its head averted, twisting in her arms.
‘You notice any changes?’ she enquires.
A feeling of dispiritation, bordering on despair, and not unmixed with apprehension, absorbs me for a while. ‘It seems much smaller,’ I finally reply. ‘I can’t imagine how we all got in.’
‘How many were there of you?’ she enquires.
‘Five. Two parents and three brothers.’
‘Where are your brothers now?’ she asks.
‘Abroad.’ I add, ‘Since our parents’ deaths I rarely see them.’ (Nor, I reflect, would they want to see me: disparity of purpose, for one thing; disparity of content, for another).
‘I suppose, if you lived here before, you could say,’ she says, ‘we have something in common,’ the child wriggling in her lap. ‘Mam! Can I have summat t’eat?’ it says (surprisingly: I’d assumed it to be dumb). ‘I’d better be getting her clothes on,’ she adds. ‘She’s alus wetting herself at present,’ (the vestiges, I assess, of an education – brought to a premature end by marriage: fewer colloquialisms in her speech, for instance, than might reasonably have been expected). ‘How many children do you have?’ turning to a cupboard by her chair.
‘Five,’ I tell her, noticing, for the first time, a telephone on a stand behind the door. ‘Three grandchildren,’ I go on, ‘at present.’
A mist comes in, within which the house itself has vanished.
‘It’s not at all like it was,’ I add, enquiring, ‘How many other children do you have?’
‘Two more at school,’ she says, ‘though this ’un’s nearly ready,’ the child’s eyes unblinking as, turned in its mother’s hands, its final garment is removed and dry ones pulled on.
‘It looks much younger,’ I suggest, and am about to describe the antics of Lottie and Glenda (of Mathilda, Harriet, Kenneth, Benjamin and Rebecca) but, having got to my feet, intemperately announce, ‘I ought to be going. There’s so much still I have to do. Your husband’ll be at work, I haven’t a doubt, and you’ll have a great deal to do yourself,’ adding, ‘I have a house of my own in London. An area to the north of the Euston Road, much frequented by the uprooted and the lost,’ making for the door only, with a cry, to return for my slippers.
‘Mrs Stott said she’d be here,’ she says, ‘in a very short while.’
‘When did she say that?’ I ask.
‘When you were in the field I phoned her,’ she says. ‘She gave me her number and told me to call. She said she’d be here in no time at all.’
‘She’s a very slow driver, and the road from Ardsley to Lin-field,’ I tell her, ‘is full of bends. She’s enough on her hands, as it is, at present, not least of which should have been a definitive study of her father, a singularly neglected figure at the best of times but, in my not unprejudiced view, unlikely to be so in the future. Give her a ring. Tell her,’ I pause, a car passing in the road, ‘I’ll come back on the bus.’
‘She says you shouldn’t be out,’ she says, following me to the door.
‘I’ve been on my own,’ I tell her, ‘for a very long time. Far longer,’ I go on, ‘than I recall,’ returning to the room to pick up my sketchbook and pencil. ‘I have,’ I continue, ‘never felt better. No day passes,’ I tap my head, ‘but I wake to a feeling commensurate with being hanged. Hanged, I might add, within the hour. An inordinate sense of guilt masks an indescribable sense of dread. Somewhere along the road, assuming I ever had it, I appear to have lost myself. And yet …’
I am looking up the stairs: those tiny stairs, scarcely wider than a ladder.
‘I hope you won’t mind if I leave behind some money,’ emptying my pockets of all the coins I have, laying them on the stairs before me, re-entering the scullery while, behind my back, ‘I feel very worried at letting you go,’ and, ‘Is that man going, Mam?’
‘Tell her,’ I tell her, ‘I went into town. I shall be back home,’ I add, ‘in no time at all. As quick as a flick,’ I call to the child, the walls, I notice, of the scullery, as in my time, damp with condensation. ‘I suppose your husband,’ I continue, ‘is unemployed.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘he drives a taxi.’
‘In that case,’ I tell her, ‘he’ll not disapprove of me leaving a tip. I could, if I’d had one on me, have written a cheque. I still can, of course, the moment I get back. I know the address,’ I add, ‘by heart. The old, old home.’ I tap the walls (even damper than I’d thought). ‘Things being equal,’ I go on, ‘I’d have looked upstairs, seen the old bedroom,’ turning in the door: in another place, in another time – not bowed down by domesticity, debt and propaganda – she might have been another Vi. But then – this, I reflect, or a garden shed? ‘I escaped from this place with an alacrity even now I can’t recall. I hated its squalor, its aridity, its lack of scale, its denigration of everything I considered fine.’ I shake my head. ‘Yet here I am. Looking, would you believe it, for what I lost, hoping for a fire amongst the ashes,’ yet all I get, I might have told her, is the smell of beer, the scent of oil, the sight of rusting metal.
‘Wouldn’t you say,’ says Maidstone at one of our meetings in his tiny office (the walnut-fascia desk, the plastic chairs, the postcards from abroad and English sea-side places, pinned to the wall above his head: ‘Thank you, Professor Maidstone, for all your help’), ‘that life is a deeply depressing experience?’ adding, ‘Mishima, the Japanese writer, described it as the only definitive view of reality we ever have, and although I have never suffered in the way the majority of my patients have I’m not disinclined to agree with him. As you yourself have remarked, we have been given the means to resolve a mystery which, of its nature, eludes definition. Our tragedy is not only that our minds have outgrown our bodies but that our bodies have outgrown their reason to exist.’
Will this unfortunate woman, I mentally enquire, repeat to Etty what I have told her: tell her, in short, I have returned to town (am returning home: shall be back in Ardsley in no time)? ‘His taxi isn’t here, by any chance?’ I ask, at which, standing in the porch, she shakes her head.
‘That’s not one of his cars,’ I ask her, ‘in the back?’ and indicate the metal wreckage, at least three models evident amongst the rubbish.
‘He hires his car,’ she says, ‘from a man in town and once he’s covered that,’ she shifts the child to her other arm, ‘everything is profit.’
‘Not a great deal of trade, I imagine, with so many out of work, and those in work not earning all they might: industry run down and not,’ I tell her, ‘being replaced.’
‘There’s quite a bit,’ she says, ‘at the station,’ and, to clarify this, adds, ‘The railway station. There are quite a lot of people go up and down from London.’
Already I am walking down the path, between the houses – the path – obstructed by the dilapidated parked vehicle, and all but obliterated by tyre tracks – down which I have walked too many times to count, the wedged-apart hurdles standing in for gates before me – and fail to recognise the figure getting out of Etty’s car drawn up in the road outside.
A man in a corduroy zip-jacket and jeans – an open-necked shirt, the collar of which could do with washing – enquires, ‘You’re leaving, are you?’ and (not unpleasant features: fresh-faced, blue-eyed), glancing to the woman and the child who have now appeared at the top of the path behind me, he adds, ‘I can give you a lift, if you like.’ (Not Etty’s car after all.)
‘I haven’t any money,’ I tell him.
The car, though large – its front wheel drawn up on the tarmacked verge – is old.
‘It must cost,’ I tell him, ‘a lot to run,’ and add, ‘Did your wife call you, by the way, as well as my daughter?’ continuing, as he steps aside to let me pass (determination written in my features, I haven’t a doubt, as well as implicit in my figure) ‘I have an important appointment. One I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time,’ uncertain still he might not delay me, he clearly in two minds. ‘The principal characteristics of someone like myself,’ I hastily continue, ‘are slyness, self-containment, selfishness, aggression – directed against others as well as oneself: manipulative behaviour, an aversion, overtly as well as covertly expressed, to being influenced by others, an unwillingness, if not an incapacity to give gratification, a basic sense of hostility, the whole suffused by an ineradicable and unappeasable feeling of anxiety, manifesting itself, in my case, throughout my life, in unsolicited and unmotivated attacks of terror. These symptoms are caused, exclusively, by a malfunction of the brain – or by what might even be described as a “colouration” of the brain – like I was born with dark hair, you with light – and can’t be altered, except by “dyeing”. That is, by chemical infusion, of a kind which, on principle, I eschew. Psychotherapy, I’m afraid, of which I am a connoisseur, is out and, except for the psychotherapist, a waste of money, the only exception to this rule being that to have someone listen to one’s tribulations is not an altogether disagreeable way of spending the time when time, with this particular syndrome, lies heavy on one’s hands. Taking all in all,’ having proceeded through the gate, ‘it may be just as well to let me pass. I take it you haven’t read A New Theory of the Mind which, in the last two years, has become a best seller, having sold a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone, that land of the ill- or the half-digested, the proceeds of which have been frozen by the bank in lieu of the many creditors who quite outpace my capacity to give it to more worthy causes.’
I am halfway down the road, the taxi-driver and his wife (with child) standing at the gate, the former uncertain – on foot or in his vehicle – whether (promises from Etty) he ought not to follow.
I turn up Hasledean Road.
Hasledean: a former benefactor of the town – one of the four co-founders of the Free Grammar School of Edward VI, a man who, in his time, poked fun at Rayburn, the Free Church preacher who, on a single day, converted five hundred people by offering to walk across the River Lin (above the site of the present weir) and who, being assured by them that he could, desisted on the principle (cf. Christ’s mountain-top encounter with the Devil) that a gratuitous indulgence in divine providence was not to their credit. ‘Credulity and the English lower orders’ Hasledean was alleged to have said, ‘are synonymous.’ A mill-owner, pre-dating Owens, yet virtually unheard of in his time, he was also alleged to have said, ‘If you look after the workers, they’ll look after you,’ a system he described as ‘the reciprocating system of social welfare: what goes up won’t go up again unless it first comes down.’
Hasledean: up which I walked each schoolday between the ages of five and ten, occasionally three times, invariably twice on Sundays (morning service, Sunday school, evensong) talking, most of the time, of war: the numbers of Germans and Italians killed, the number taken prisoner, the number of miles advanced (tanks destroyed, planes shot down): the paraphernalia of killing: life extrapolated – (as it turned out) for ever – by what could be done away with (fear, in the form of anxiety, exonerated as social duty: memory, imagination, perception formulated by terror.)
From Hasledean Road into Horsfall Crescent: another co-founder of the Grammar School – plus the Horsfall Hospital (founded 1553 on the road between Linfield and Ardsley – and two fellowships at St Edmund’s, still competed for by the pupils of King Edward’s, and ‘twenty-four quarters of corn yearly for ever to the great town of Linfield’ – the houses here, like all those on Onasett, semi-detached, one or two – where the land rises and the air sweeps in unhindered from the Pennine hills – up for sale: if Etty or Matt would release my money,
or Bea give me some of hers, I could buy an Onasett home myself, the one, perhaps, in Manor Road. I could even, with hindsight, have brought Vivienne here.
Yet what would a woman who was used to living in Cannes, with an apartment in Manhattan overlooking Central Park, with a home in Beverly Hills (for most of her married lives) have made of living on an industrial housing estate in the industrial north, a place in which she had no roots, neither religious nor artistic nor familial, a sojourner on the jetstreams of this world, from the age of nineteen (her first appearance on the London stage) to her death in a garden shed at the age of fifty-seven? Oh, Vi!
And would Hasledean and Horsfall have recognised their legacy in or on the road and crescent respectively bearing their names: those educators, philanthropists, benefactors whose enterprise saved the sixteenth-century equivalent of the derelict inner cities, those parochial connoisseurs of ignorance, poverty: fear – endowers of Bone (the ecclesiastical scholar), Taplow, the nineteenth-century divine, Foster, the inventor of the ‘mechanical jenny’ (which revolutionised the manufacture of worsted wool), Freestone and Morton, designers of the ‘Freestone Car’, the first ‘people’s car’ in Europe, Simpson, the lexicographer, who institutionalised the teaching of Latin in schools, Stansfield, the scholar, who re-interpreted the Greek Bible, Simmons, ‘the poet of the Somme’ whose Letters to Linfield is still in print, Garside, the cricketer, Monkton, the footballer, Weston, the politician (a pre-war Minister of State), Henderson, the D’Oyly Carte singer, Featherstone, the actor, Hawks, Wentworth and Ripley (producers and directors) and lastly, if not least, Fenchurch, writer, painter, madman (lunatic at large): anxious, humorous, selfish – duplicitous: strong?