by David Storey
‘He has,’ I reassure him.
‘In that case,’ Mackendrick observes, ‘he’s scarcely likely to marry again.’
‘Why?’ I instantly reply.
‘He has two women already (what man,’ he is about to add, ‘could ask for anything more?’ but says), ‘The enfranchised proletariat, after all, are the bourgeoisie, and where society isn’t bourgeois,’ he concludes, ‘it struggles to become so.’
I am sitting on a slope: a hen has captured my attention: it runs round the back of my mother and, as my father reaches out, the hen runs off. For the first time in my life I stand.
I press my feet against the grass.
I hear my mother’s voice call out.
Yet all I am aware of is the thought, ‘If I had wished, I could have walked like this before,’ and, ‘I have walked like this on many previous occasions,’ and, like reflections reflected endlessly in opposing mirrors, am conscious of my previous existences stretching out before me.
As, seated in a pew to the rear of the nave, the interior of St Michael’s stretches out to the clear-glass, five-lancet window above the altar.
‘Surely,’ I tell Mackendrick, ‘you have removed that from my book,’ (The Logic of Grief: in reality, a pamphlet – of lectures given at the ICA at the height of my notoriety: “the working classes are the bourgeoisie bereft of their possessions”).
It was this pamphlet that brought us together, Mackendrick alluding to it in his introduction to The Phenomenology of Experience as well as – and more generously – if equally plagiaristically (Mackendrick is a great synthesiser or, what is referred to benignly as a ‘great anthologiser’ of other people’s work, invariably – after token acknowledgement – subsumed under his own name) – to A New Theory of the Mind. In LOG, as it became known, I divide experience into actuality – our awareness of what is happening now – and reality, which includes actuality, but also everything beyond it: actuality is Mackendrick seeing me and me seeing him in his subterranean study in Belsize Park (with intermittent incursions from Cardo and Griselda overhead), and reality, including that, is what is happening in the rest of the house, in all the houses, in all the streets, in the universe as a whole, to the outermost reaches of time, not excluding its potential to go on for ever. Mackendrick’s book, not unindebted to my contributions, has become a cult (hence the house) and has been followed by a sequel, Six Studies in Dementia which, in the words of one notable reviewer, ‘has given psychiatry not so much a new as a novel life’, its colloquial style and subsequent accessibility, offensive only to clinicians, contributing in no small degree to the impression created in the mind of the reader that he or she is irretrievably insane.
I dream; I dream quite often in Mackendrick’s chair, never sure whether, as was the original case, he was consulting me or I am consulting him: ‘Come along and listen to my tapes,’ he suggested after the second of our meetings (sure of me at last). ‘They’re so much like the plays you’ve written,’ tapes which turned out to be of his patients talking of their wives, their husbands, their children, their friends (their mothers, their fathers, themselves). ‘What strikes you most?’ he genially enquired. And when I said, ‘Their exclusivity,’ he said, ‘Precisely. No one, they are convinced, has suffered like themselves. The subject of comedy, don’t you think, as in so much of what you’ve written.’
“I am lost: I dream of people I have not seen for thirty years: a teacher at school who taught us tables; a boy I feared; another I admired; a neighbour who died and who had only lived for a year in the house next door. I live,” I go on, “in a delirium of terror. I wake: I perspire: my eyes frighten me with what they throw back each day in the mirror. I pray, ‘Our Father,’ followed by the one injunction, ‘Help!’”
Fenchurch, prefixed Richard, regarding, in church, the back of the knees of the boy in front, the profile of his head silhouetted against the southerly-orientated clear-glass (five-lancet) window above the altar: the Crusaders’ banners, each with its emblem, at the end of the pews (boys on one side, girls on the other): the Marys and Matthews, the Hildas and Johns: the peculiar scales on St Peter’s fish, painted in a luminous silver: ‘Give us this day our daily …’
“Classes in society are only superficially identified by wealth and possessions: what identifies them more profoundly is expectancy: what each class holds itself in anticipation of – a mental or even spiritual condition which identifies different cadres in society in relationship to what each cadre anticipates drawing to itself. A ‘classless’ society segregates itself into layers of expectancy each of which, in turn, becomes identified as a class itself.” (LOG).
Between my praying hands, Allcock, the vicar, his cassock corded like a monk’s, tassels hanging from his waist. Our Father: (the yorkstone paving of the aisle, the columns of sandstone: octagonal shape) walnut pews: hassocks, green on one side, blue on the other: church of St Michael (angel of light).
On the way home (my parents in bed) the buttered-once-a-week-only bread.
‘Why Maidstone said he’d found a therapist,’ I tell the boy in front, ‘who might unearth a hitherto unknown source of anxiety, I’ve no idea. “I sent a poet to him some years ago,” he said, “and though he committed suicide two years later I thought Mackendrick’s insights at the time remarkable. He’s somewhat softened that existentialist-phenomenologist approach and, in my view, is very much open to new ideas. I’ve written him a letter. Not mentioning you by name, of course, but enquiring if he’d take on a case not dissimilar to that of the poet. His suicide, by the way, as Mackendrick pointed out, was due to him not keeping to the treatment. He was found hanging from a beam in a lodging house in Kilburn. At the age, I might add, of twenty-one. His poetry had a Dantesque intensity. A remarkable fellow. Mackendrick, I mean. The poet, I guess you could say, was promising.”’
‘I thought I’d find you here.’
Etty is sitting across the aisle: cheeks glowing, eyes bright, wrapped against the weather (a headscarf disarranged, or perhaps hastily put on): she has taken a look at my sodden clothes, at my sockless feet (my mud-stained slippers) and, with a gesture of indifference, sinks further back in the walnut pew.
‘I’ve been all over,’ she adds.
‘I don’t see why.’
She is gazing at the altar, her profile alone sufficient to convey the gravity (depth, range, complexity) of her feelings.
‘When you disappeared from the garden I searched the grounds. I searched the village. Your shoes,’ she goes on, ‘were in the hall. I didn’t think you could have gone far. Then I met someone in one of the shops who recalled seeing you waiting at the Linfield stop. I got in the car and searched the town. Then I thought of Onasett. I called at the house where I thought you’d lived. The woman there must have thought I was mad. Nevertheless, I gave her my number and asked her to call me should you turn up.’ Tears glisten in her eye. ‘You’re worse,’ she concludes, ‘than one of the children.’
‘It wasn’t a good idea,’ I tell her, ‘bringing me up. I’ll only be the burden to you that I was to your mother. She, if you recall, absented herself. Her instinct, Etty, is one you ought to follow. Just look at it,’ I add, and gesture at the pillars: to each is attached a placard: ‘Love,’ reads one, ‘is what unites.’ ‘They’ve even taken down the donated copy of Rubens’ “Descent from the Cross” and put it against a window, blocking the light and, because it’s silhouetted, obscuring the picture. Can any goodness be left when art is in decline? In the old days, shields, symbolising the saints, of either sex, were hung in profusion at the end of the pews. I was in St Matthew’s which had, appropriately, a picture of a book …’
She has blown her nose: she wipes her eyes: the coldness of the interior – conceivably, the intensity of her feelings – causes her to tremble.
‘Considering my career, something portentous in that, don’t you think,’ and when she doesn’t answer, I add, ‘Although, at times, I’m not altogether certain where I am, or what I’m doing
– or what, for instance, I set out to do – or whether I’m talking or thinking aloud – I am quite capable, Etty, of looking after myself. At least …’
She isn’t listening: footsteps echo inside the door from which, in earlier days, the choir and the clergy would emerge: a man in shirt sleeves appears, carrying a bucket.
He turns, aware of our presence and, having lowered the bucket, retrieves it and returns inside the door.
‘I came here,’ I tell her, ‘to confess,’ and add, ‘I don’t suppose it’ll do much good.’
‘I’ve got the car outside,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to wait, or are you coming out? I have to get back as soon as I can.’
‘I rather wanted,’ I tell her, ‘a moment to myself,’ at which, blowing her nose again, she rises. ‘There’s no need,’ I go on, ‘to take me back. If you give me the bus fare I’ll be all right. I gave what I had to that woman at the house. The place, though it’s where I used to live, is little more than a rabbit hutch.’
‘Perhaps,’ she says, ‘it was before,’ startled by my reaction.
‘It saddened me,’ I say, ‘no end. Or would have done. I’ve got past being saddened by anything,’ and add, ‘I gave her the money because I don’t believe her husband, once he’s paid for the car – he rents it from a man in town – makes enough to live on.’
‘I’ll wait outside,’ she says, and adds, ‘I’d like to leave as soon as we can.’
‘I wanted to look in the classroom windows. Miss Arnold’s and Miss Batty’s,’ I tell her. ‘The one considerate, the other alarming. One three is three. One four is four. Evil is the seat of goodness.’
‘Will you be long?’
‘Not at all.’
She is, moments later, I am aware, watching me through the glass panes of the door which opens to the porch. She is afraid I might get up and leave by the vestry.
The (blue underpainted) body of Christ, strung, pale, a long, descending diagonal from the arms of the man who has drawn out the nails (standing on a ladder) to those of the women who, weeping, kneel by his feet: I saw such looks in Boady Hall and in my outpatient days at the North London Royal: ‘I am sorry and ashamed of my love for Isabella. And yet, dear Lord, I love her now. I disavow …’ the blue underpainting of the flesh, the rattle of the bucket (the greenness of the paint where the flesh has putrefied): the fleck of red around each hole, ravaged at the edges: the pair of pincers in the workman’s hand, the upraised fingers of the praying mother, the half-closed eyes shadowed from a light which, glowing on the face, inspires the question, ‘Is he still alive?’ ‘… nothing!’
‘Your stratagem,’ I tell her, when I get outside, ‘was to leave me in there, knowing I had nowhere else to go and would therefore be all the more obliged to come out and join you,’ while, inside, before I’d left, I’d perused, from a distance, the T-shaped cross, the centre piece of a triptych, on the wings of which, fore and aft, were depicted four scenes from the lives of the saints (Mark, Luke, Matthew, John) which might well have been appended to those witnessed, daily, in Boady Hall, where ‘The Prince of Peace’ and ‘The King of Love’ mingled in the dining-hall, the art therapy room, the corridors, offices and wards (though not the padded cells: much reported on but non-existent) with Napoleon, the Primal Visitor from Space, the Martian Dayman and the Man Who Came From Nowhere.
She is sitting on the wall across the stone-flagged terrace, drawing my attention to the view (south, across the valley, to Ardsley: hedged fields and copses, the silver-lit surface of the winding river: the pitless village of Harlstone, a serrated ridge of silhouetted houses), I gesturing, however, to the low, one-storeyed school visible, across a lane, in the opposite direction (to the north).
‘I need to take you back,’ she says (‘Where are your socks? Look at your slippers!’) yet takes my arm (her thoughts, I reflect, on something else) allowing me to escort her up the ramp to the narrow lane which divides the school playground from the church itself.
‘That’s the first classroom I was in.’ I indicate the square-paned window yet, having arrived there, don’t glance in. She, for her part, releases my arm, cups her hands and gazes inside.
‘I suppose it’s not much changed,’ she says, and when I reply, ‘I can’t remember,’ adds, ‘One classroom, I imagine, is much like another,’ a score of tiny heads and one adult one turned in our direction. ‘In any case,’ she concludes, ‘they’re coming out.’
‘We should have a look at the crypt,’ I tell her. ‘It’s where I attended scouts, Sunday school and the youth club and, in my sixteenth year, painted my “Crucifixion”, one which, when exhibited, was described in the Linfield Express as “a modernist view of Christ”. I painted him surrounded, not by people, but robots,’ directing her, her hand, this time, on mine, the way we have come, voices already behind our back.
Something not so much about my voice, nor my manner, but my appearance has alarmed her: ‘We’ll have to be going. Glenda and Lottie will be home from school. You’ve led us,’ she tells me, ‘far enough.’
‘The crypt,’ I tell her. ‘The parquet floor, the row of windows looking out to the valley (the Pennine hills, the sweep of the river, the marching column of smoke that indicates a train hauling its way to or from the Pennine gorge).’
‘I shall be quite glad to get home,’ Vivienne said, pale-faced (stuffed with drugs from a recent stay at a clinic in Blackheath), slouched, her head thrust back, in front of the imitation coal-fire (gas flames flickering around synthetic – unburnable – fuel) in our Taravara Road back kitchen. ‘I’ve been feeling, at last, there’s a place to go back to,’ her bare feet protruding beneath her winceyette nightie, her hands, short-fingered, clasped around a pot of undrunk tea. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t even know where I am. It can’t be in a back street in London. Isn’t it true’ (a glance to me for the first time since she’d got up that morning) ‘I’m dragging you down? Isn’t it true we’re no good for one another? Your preoccupation is with your dreadful wife and her dreadful mother and all your children who hate the sight of me, and mine,’ she concluded, ‘is still with Mel, a bigger shit than all of them.’
Her bloodless lips, her acned skin (‘never cleared up from childhood, dear: one reason, of course, I’m not a star’), her bitten-down nails, her vacuous look, her tousled hair – thick-textured, curled (‘my hair and my legs – though not above the knee – were considered my best features, pal!’).
‘She is, to my mind, the greatest actress of her generation,’ Maidstone said after I had brought her to see him (the window-less room at the North London Royal). What a tragedy, he might have said, to see her in the state she’s in at present. ‘I’m sure we might do something for her,’ he declared but, although he tried, no improvement was discernible to anyone. ‘Her problems are intractable,’ he announced after – at the end of six months (without any warning) – she took herself off on holiday. ‘Has she,’ he asked me, ‘gone for good?’
‘Those awful diets,’ I told her (those awful drives she took alone): ‘Nowhere is everywhere,’ she said, ‘when you’re looking for somewhere,’ and when I told her she had read that in my pamphlet (LOG), she said, ‘I knew that a long time, Richard, before you wrote it. Anywhere is better than nowhere. That’s why I drive the freeways. Going from nowhere to nowhere has anywhere between.’
‘What?’ Etty enquires for, assured we are not to be pursued, I have turned once more in the direction of the school, walking parallel to it, along the lane – marking off, as I do so, the classrooms: ‘Miss Schofield’s, Miss Setchell’s – a teacher in that one whose name I don’t recall. I learnt my first poem, by Wordsworth, in that room: such simplicity and directness evoking such complexity of feeling. There never was a writer who came so nakedly to the point. And all before his thirtieth year. After his marriage it turned to dross,’ recalling how – was it earlier that day? – I had watched my pen making marks on a sheet of paper – scrawls of ink comprised of lines and whirls – an
intermittent dash or dot – as might a machine perform a task – the dark excrescence, a residue of vegetable matter, a coagulation – and wonder: where am I – not Fenchurch, prefixed Richard – but the nameless part of me that searches the San Bernardino and/or the Hollywood Freeway (at the same time as it does so calling out a name, ‘Vi!’): what is the ‘one’ that the ‘self’ is true to? (what is the ‘one’ that is lost at birth?).
“Dear Mackendrick, the notion that all experience has a particular locale (and its own dynamic) – ‘intrinsic referral’, you describe it (another lift from me) – begs the question when you go on to assert that, vis à vis the world in general – ‘society’, loyalties, and the like – ‘intolerable consequences’ occur if such experience is ignored, a ‘malfeasance’, you describe it, of the spirit (yet another lift from me: have you ever had such an uncomplaining plagiaree?): the ‘degenerative imperative’ (ibid) which envelops – in my view (if unacknowledged by you) – the whole of our life and finally destroys it. My immediate wish to go along with this is dissipated by my inevitable enquiry: what about Ricardo? Shouldn’t his mother be looking after her son?”
‘Over here, where the playing-field forms a small enclosure, surrounded by hawthorn hedge, and the ground, here and there, has uneven swellings, stood a searchlight and anti-aircraft gun emplacement during the war: here, adjoining the school gate, stood a guard-house where the soldiers, at playtime, would pass sweets across the fence: there was one called Lofty who was the butt of the other men: they would get him to dance, drill him with his rifle, get him, even though unloaded, to fire it. Once they lit a newspaper he was reading while sitting at the guard-house door and, using the occasion as a pretext, tipped a bucket of water over his head. It gave to the war a feeling of lightness, the guns, when they fired at night, like giant dustbin lids clanging at the top of the estate, and then, the next day, all clean and shiny, the barrels gleaming, the searchlights like dwarfs hunched up on the ground, and we over here, reciting our poems, endeavouring, in my last year, to link, with a horizontal line, the individual letters in each word (the excrescence of ink – a watery blue mixed from a dark blue powder – which years later I came to recognise as less a vegetable or mineral dye than the matter of the mind itself).’