by David Storey
I come out of Horsfall Crescent on to Alceston Road (no associations other than a village of that name further up the valley) which, like a backbone, runs along the crest of Ona’s headland: geodynamic definition displaces the philanthropic: sandstone, limestone and millstone grit, scoured by river, ice and weather, ameliorated by river, pond and stream (by apathy and despoliation) dissolve into a mist of hill and valley: directly opposite me, behind a six-foot privet hedge (the shrubbery beyond it overgrown) is the brick-built hall of St Michael’s church: humouresque in style – lancet (leaded) windows, nail-studded doors, dormer intrusions into its tall, steep-sloping, low-eaved roof – a place of intimacy combined with informal exaltation: scouts, crusaders, Sunday school, youth club: dances, discussions, concerts, shows – its polished parquet floor and blue-curtained stage, its dark-varnished chairs, its domestically-smelling kitchen, its loft where we stored our camp equipment, its posters depicting disabled soldiers, people suffering from loneliness, disease (leprosy and blindness), children, black or yellow, in a variety of clothes. The shrubbery, which shelters the mellow-bricked edifice from the road, is strewn with refuse: paper, plastic cups, cans – a piece of cloth, a tattered shirt: miscellaneous bricks and pieces of stone: the front forks of a bicycle – an itinerary like the contents of a pocket, forgotten, unemptied, ingenuously added to each day. ‘Here I have come,’ I reflect, ‘to do what?’ and walk round the hall on a loosely-stoned path to the church.
St Michael’s was constructed from a mill: stone by stone and beam by beam, the industrial structure transposed to a terrace dug out of the southern slope of the Onasett headland: a clay-lined, clay-backed, hacked-out trench into which the church was inserted like a ship into a dock: low-roofed, square-structured: its plain glass windows let in an undiluted light.
“His life had been destroyed by a principle (he wrote), though what that principle was he had no idea: from the very beginning to now, as he rounded the corner of the brick-built hall and contemplated the sandstone structure of the church (its mullioned, horizontally-leaded windows more familiar to him than those of any other building on earth) he had been guided by a voice which said, ‘For reasons peculiar to your birth you have ascribed to art a significance which is not that which normally exists between an artefact and its creator’ (you have taken to yourself, he might have said, a graven image): he had, as the psychologists would now term it, objectified a process, reified his life.”
‘What’s the first thing?’ Mackendrick said, ‘that you remember?’
I sitting in the celebrated psychologist’s consulting room in Belsize Square (the whole house recently purchased from the sales of The Phenomenology of Experience (POE, for short), and transformed from separate flats, apartments and bed-sits into a single unit, with Mackendrick’s consulting-room and study in the former basement): a view through the recently-installed french windows onto the recently-planted lawn (enclosed on three sides by plants purchased on the final public-viewing day of the previous year’s Chelsea Flower Show), overhead the stamping feet of Mackendrick’s son (aged three) and his intermittent calls (amounting to screams), of ‘Selda! Selda!’ to the Mackendricks’ former East German nanny, the rosy-cheeked, blonde-haired, ample-bottomed Griselda (Mackendrick’s wife was also a psychiatrist, but worked away from home).
‘My first memory,’ Fenchurch said, ‘is of being pushed in a pram beneath a bridge.’
My first memory, dear B, is of being pushed in a pram beneath the railway bridge that runs directly out – across Westgate – from Linfield Station:
directly above me are the rusted, corrugated metal sheets which underlie the bridge and across which, at the time, a train is rumbling; water drips from between the metal sheets and falls on the black, gaberdine cover of the pram – one drop, at its source, high overhead, glistening in the light and descending onto the shoulder of my mother’s coat.
A second figure walks beside the pram: I merely have the impression of his darkness, of the sobriety of his dress, and of the movement of his arm as he walks adjacent to the handle.
The stain on my mother’s coat expands, darkening the reddish fabric as we pass into the light beyond the bridge.
I am bored; I have outgrown the distractions of the field at the back of the house: the world is circumscribed by the garden, the gardens on either side, by the field, by the houses that enclose it. Other roads lead off from our own: they branch out in every direction – to the town, to the park, to the fields (to the golf-course), but, most directly, to the school which, together with a stone-built church and a brick-built hospital, stands at the summit of a hill.
I bore my mother with my summer complaints: ‘Go out and play. When you get to school you’ll find you haven’t the time,’ until, when the day arrives, afflicted by apprehension, the portent, merely, of things to come, I become concerned about my bladder. ‘Go before you go in. Go,’ she says, ‘as soon as you come out.’
The torment of not being able to contain himself dominates his other feelings (‘You’ve been asking to go to school for months’), the vacancy of the previous weeks infinitely preferable to the terror which afflicts him now: on the morning that he leaves – clean socks, clean shirt, clean trousers, shoes (clean handkerchief inside his pocket) – five years old and two months exactly – he sets out from the scullery door. At the corner of the road he turns: from the top of the slope he can hear the raucous sound of children’s voices.
He goes back to the house, raises the back door sneck and goes inside: his uncle, his father’s younger brother, who lives across the field, has come in through the garden. ‘Home already?’ he says, and laughs.
They have seen him from the scullery window.
‘Anything the matter?’ his mother enquires.
‘Is my cap on straight?’ he asks.
‘Of course it is,’ she says.
She sets it on his head more firmly.
He turns to the door: ‘Laugh and be happy!’ his uncle says, years later, giving him lifts in his post office van: Bea on his knee in the tiny cab: down to the station or the Ardsley stop.
Re-setting his cap, he sets off once again.
At some point in the day he cries: a Miss Arnold calls him to her desk (his gaze through the window to the stone of the church: its clear-glass windows, its horizontally-leaded lights, its short, square bell-tower like a chimney, the bell visible inside): the confusion of teacherly commands: don’t talk, don’t stand, don’t turn (sit, listen, learn: fold arms). She presses Fenchurch’s head against her breast (his first embrace by a woman): there’s the smell of chalk-dust and, before he leans against it – before his head is drawn against it – the softness of her breast. ‘Against that softness,’ he reflects, ‘I have been pressing all my life.’
His crying stops and, as far as he recalls, he never cries again.
“The difference between writing a diary,” Fenchurch writes in his as he recalls the incidents of his first morning at school, he sitting at his desk in his back-room study in his gigantic house in Belsize Park, “and writing fiction, is that, with the latter (his diary is full of “latters” and “formers”, “comparisons between” and “on the other hands”) the context within which it exists has to be set down, whereas with the former that element is given (full, too, of incidents witnessed in the street, out-mayhewing Mayhew). The blank page upon which a created world has to be set down is not the blank page upon which the events and the reflections of everyday life can be recorded: the energy as well as the intensity are different; the evocation of a created character within a created context dissipates casualness and even (in me, at least) reflectiveness. I wish it were different (he underlined the last phrase in his mind), that the effortlessness of setting down a thought or feeling, invariably uncorrected, on a page like this could be transposed directly to a novel. It doesn’t work (he underlined that, too). It never has, and no amount of effort is going to make it.”
“Bea: beatitude,” he doodled: “beatific. Beat. B
eattie. Beatrice (Beatrix – ‘Tricks’ – to our children who adopted first the suffix then the nickname at an early age). Mackendrick suggesting today that instead of visiting him in the afternoons at four, when I’m feeling sleepy, I ought to come in at six a.m. When I expressed surprise he informed me it was not unusual for him to see patients at five a.m.”
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘A doctor,’ he said. ‘A civil-servant. A poet who sleeps all day and writes at night. A solicitor. A therapist’ (to my surprise).
A portly, genial, black-haired man, dressed in a pin-stripe suit (which I, for one, appreciate immensely), he leans back in his chair (the feet of his demented son across the bare-wood floor overhead: ‘Selda! Selda!’ the put-upon fascist nanny).
‘I thought,’ I said, ‘you weren’t allowed to talk about your clients.’
‘What clients?’ his hands behind his head: he feels sleepy this time, too, himself.
‘Your other clients.’
‘I can,’ he declares, ‘do anything I like.’
“Dear Mrs Fenchurch,” I read in a letter Bea received (though no longer living with me at the time), “your husband is seeing another woman. Her name is O’Farrell, though she often goes under her maiden name of O’Connor. Ask him where he was last Wednesday evening. She has been married twice and has four children by three different men.”
‘Do you think I’m out of my mind?’ I ask Maidstone, who has recommended Mackendrick ‘as a friend’. ‘I often think I’m in it whereas,’ I go on, ‘to be out of it would be a blessing.’
“Dear Bea, the paint is peeling in the kitchen; mouse-droppings, overnight, appear around the sink. At night there is an owl. I walk in the garden excited by your letter: ‘Dear Mrs Fenchurch (you won’t know me but I know you).’ Enclosed: someone, it appears, still thinks we’re married. (I believe she’s referring to Vaughan).”
Bea, Beatrice: Beattie Kells (uses Bella’s maiden name in her research).
Must relate to something: Kells, her mother? She is not a PhD for nothing (she is searching at the moment for ‘the secret of life’). Her lover, too, is a brilliant man, the parliamentary private secretary to the Minister of Health – divorced and living with a lover who is the picture editor of an international magazine (“such complexity,” I wrote, “such singleness of purpose”). Adrian Morley (she calls him by his second name, Albert) is, by any call, a fastidious seducer – in addition to which he has only one arm (a handicap which professionally – certainly politically – has done him a deal of good: he can only write with one hand). His picture-editing lover, too, is something of a charmer: coppery hair, green eyes, a pendulous chin which, not undisagreeably, evokes – misleadingly, I’m told – an air of lasciviousness and languor. B: hair of a lustrous, dark magenta, her colour rich
rich
a northern childhood
her maternal grandfather the one-time syndicalist and latter-day ‘democratic communist’ H. J. Kells, his The Locust and the Meaning of Life being instrumental in the founding not only of his and Bea’s careers but of six university embryology departments (three in America, three over here)
overhung, her brows, by that lustrous hair (from beneath which her dark, green-irised eyes gaze out: flecked with brown), the colour, the bloody suffusion of her cheeks
blooming
like the fruit in her father’s Ardsley garden (the trees that encroach it on every side).
Her nose is arched: her mother’s mother’s Sardinian parent, ‘the sea,’ so she told me, ‘in her blood’ – evident only, in later years, in the wave-like fervour with which she overlooks her husband’s life, smiling
smiling
‘no bolts or catches, for instance,’ Corcoran tells me, ‘on their lavatory door so that, on the occasion of my first visit – when I was courting Bea’s mother – her mother steps in to clean her teeth, turns on the tap, chatting between scrubs to her daughter’s suitor sitting, flushed, on the lavatory seat, caught in the midst of what my mother – who was not a primitive woman – was not disinclined to call “my morning ablutions”. It’s why she and Kells have never got on.’
Mediterranean whore (Bea’s mother) mixed with nutty celt (Kells meets Mile Rievers in Ajaccio, on holiday, in 1912): oriental mixed with occidental: live, dishonest: strong.
“Bea,” he wrote about this time, “who has beaten me so badly;
whose pride, after having had five children, has taken a fall;
whose intelligence has been honed by having children;
whose strength has been added to by each mucused streak of bone and gristle deposited on the midwife’s table:
Bea: B!”
‘Apropos our previous conversation,’ Mackendrick says, ‘what is revealed in the ideology of confrontation is a shift in the instrumentation of power: behind the nineteenth-century pragmatic idealism is a movement to wrest power from money and invest it in a more expendable commodity: people.’
‘People,’ I rejoin.
‘Note their preoccupation,’ he goes on, ‘with the “proletariat”, a body to be “led”, a body “external to the ideology itself” – just as capital is external to the proletariat which, allegedly, it endeavours to exploit.’
‘My family name,’ he said this morning (not, I might say, at 6 a.m.), his suit uncreased as he lay back in his leather-upholstered chair (how I admire his neatness, a source, to me, of reassurance, providing, as it does, a contrast to my own dishevelment: all the contortions, distortions, dissemblement of the human psyche contained in a pin-striped suit) ‘is not Mackendrick.’
‘What is it?’ (I enquired).
‘Butalowski,’ (I think he said).
‘Butalowski,’ (he didn’t correct the pronunciation).
‘My father came from Russia.’
‘When?’
‘In 1905.’
‘And changed his name.’
‘He changed his name,’ he confirmed.
‘Why did he choose Mackendrick?’ I asked.
‘He always admired the Scots.’
‘In Russia?’
‘He was a great admirer of Sir Walter Scott.’
‘I thought, in Russia, it was Robbie Burns.’
‘This,’ he smiled, ‘is before the Revolution. He spent his first few years in England in SE 29. After he married he moved to Clapham.’
‘What was his christian name?’ I enquired.
He smiles again. ‘His given name was Yuval.’
‘Yuval Mackendrick.’
‘He changed that, too, of course to Walter.’
‘Apropos Marx,’ I said, ‘that sounds like the reaction of someone whose family were driven out of their native land and whose father arrived at the London Docks in 1905 and who lived – would it be in West Ham? – before he married.’
‘The defensive note in Marx,’ he said, ‘isn’t that of someone defending an ideology against an opponent but that of someone defending a faith against themselves.’
‘I, too, have read Postscript to a Revolution,’ I said.
‘In Russian?’
‘Paperback.’
Yesterday afternoon he told me that the roots of fascism are to be found in Hegel: the secularisation of the Divine Will: ‘It’s no coincidence that Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact in 1939, and the Russians another with the Japanese only a year or two before that.’
Now I ask him, ‘What about my wife?’
He is – I am convinced – in love with her himself: after all, we are almost neighbours.
‘Bea is making plans to marry Albert if he can get rid of the picture-editing Rose.’
‘I thought you weren’t divorced,’ he says.
‘A technicality, in her view, despite our having five children.’
‘Your children are all grown up,’ he says.
‘The youngest,’ I tell him, ‘is nine.’
‘Nine?’
He is about to say, ‘Are you sure?’ but adds, ‘Apart from lovely Rebecca.’
‘There is also lovely Benjamin, who is twenty-one, lovely Kenneth, who is twenty-three, lovely Harriet, who is twenty-six, and lovely Mathilda, who is twenty-seven.’
‘You can’t hang on for ever!’ About to laugh, he adds, ‘And who is Rose?’
‘Rose is Albert’s girl-friend, who is six years younger than Albert, and considerably younger than Bea.’
‘Rose.’ An unself-conscious habit, swivelling in his chair, he slowly picks his teeth: Russian teeth but Clapham-bred.
‘Horowitz, neé Schlegel.’
‘I don’t know the name.’ (Cardo, Mackendrick’s son, stabs, with his foot, the ceiling overhead).
‘Her former husband – Horowitz – is an interior designer.’
‘Horowitz.’ Listening to Ricardo’s voice, he adds,
‘“The law protects the ideology of those who have it against the attacks of those who don’t and who, possessing no ideology, grow steadily submissive, until, having nothing to define them except their submissiveness, they become,”’ his chair comes to a halt, ‘“the revolutionary mass themselves.” Romanticism, would you say, or faithlessness, or,’ avoiding eye contact altogether, ‘both?’
The class divides: a few of my (brighter) contemporaries and I, in my second year at Onasett Primary, are joined by others: we enter a room dominated by the tiny Miss Batty: dark hair, dark-eyed, protuberantly featured: on her blackboard are intimidating signs and figures, identified, by her – after a perusal round the class – as mathematical tables: on the top right-hand corner of the blackboard is written the date: a figure in this is changed each morning.
Each morning we inscribe this in our diaries.
Today the sun is out. I ate my dinner,
maturing, years later, into,
‘Is Albert very attached?’
‘I scarcely know him,’ I reply.
‘He has been married,’ Mackendrick remarks, ‘unless I am mistaken, once before.’