by David Storey
‘Other than by numbers, which always count,’ (chuckles at the joke himself), ‘who is to judge whether a popular entertainment is inferior or superior to the interests of an esoteric cult?’
His teeth are brown (if artificial) and his jacket, which he always wears, stained by the food he, at each meal, invariably drops down it: from the third button of his waistcoat to its top left-hand pocket (the folds of the garment, when he sits, enclosing his shrivelled chest) stretch the thin gold links of a watch chain, the watch itself rarely, if ever, lifted out – and wound, curiously, while still inside his pocket, his forefinger and thumb disappearing for minutes at a time.
‘Otherwise,’ he goes on, ‘we are merely left with contempt for the popular judgement. The mass, despite what Shakespeare says, is never, and never has been wrong, particularly,’ he concludes, ‘when its deepest feelings are aroused.’
‘Is this senility,’ I ask Isabella, ‘or mischief?’ when, moments later, disengaging myself from the old man – his long, thin thigh flung, with a booted foot, across the other as he studies the list of football teams again – I cross the lawn, and she – who, her back to us, has listened, I discover, with a smile – smiles again and says, ‘The product of experience, Richard. He has lived, after all, a very long time.’
Does he, I reflect, know more about us than, say, Isabella’s husband or her daughter: does he suspect, with a father’s lifetime’s perception of his daughter, that the relationship between us is more than appears at first sight; or, is what appears at first sight?
‘More means better.’
‘Better means most.’
‘Where does that leave us?’ while she, glancing at her father – a pair of glasses, wire-framed, suspended halfway down his nose – declares, ‘I found roses, would you believe it, in the wood?’ adding, ‘I’m showing Richard the roses, Father,’ taking my hand, about the wrist – as she might, in school, encourage a pupil.
‘I’m afraid I’ve told him,’ she says, ‘about us,’ and adds, ‘He’s quite indifferent,’ and when, amongst the trees, I ask her, ‘Why?’ she laughs and, having released my hand, declares, ‘Haven’t you been in love and wanted to tell someone all about it?’
‘I have,’ I say, ‘but not him.’
‘It’s quite all right,’ she says (the heavy laugh – guttural – like, or so I’m told, her mother’s: the high colour of the cheeks, the incandescence of her eye). ‘He was quite pleased,’ she goes on, ‘to hear it. He was always unprincipled,’ she adds, ‘with my mother. Or, at least, communality was his principle and my mother, with her background, half-believed it. His interest in people, in any case,’ she continues, ‘transcends any he has in individuals. He sees life, after all, as a generic whole. Hence the pools: it’s the figures, Richard, not the money. The greatest mystery of all,’ and, with something of Kells’ own expression – but more greatly, I suspect, that of her mother’s, whispers, half-smiling, ‘chance!’
Later, returning to the lawn, Kells studies me above his glasses. ‘Art,’ he says, ‘in the way you practise it, is a philosophy of despair, the legacy of an already, in most respects, discarded past. If, in your judgement, you are against the people, you can’t be for them. If you can’t be for them, you are condemned to a life of isolation. Man is a social animal and if, in society, you are alone, you can’t and never will be happy. And,’ he laughs, ‘are we here to be miserable, do you think?’
‘Who is this homo serioso?’ he would enquire when, appearing on the lawn, ostensibly to call on Bea, I would cross to where he and, not infrequently, his daughter were sitting. ‘Your homo serioso, Bella, is here again! Are you to take him for a walk in the wood?’ adding, on one occasion – for when, so prompted, we seldom followed his suggestion, ‘Two innocents at large.’
‘Wouldn’t you say,’ he asked me on another occasion, ‘that my daughter, your would-be-mother-in-law, is very naive?’ adding, ‘So was her mother. She gets it from her. So was I, in an underhand way: danced rings round by the anglo-saxonic scientific élite – until, that is, I set my marxian cat amongst the pigeons. A good cat is that, related to the Manx but far more clever – and not only for its transformation, at a stroke, by a single letter.’
‘A marxian,’ I told him, ‘without a cause.’
‘Not at all. I did it to confound the English, and much more effectively than those apeists from the public schools who were always confounded by their education.’
‘Do you,’ he said on a further occasion, leaning forward from his chair (as if to examine something close to his feet) ‘make love to both mother and daughter?’ waiting, head stooped (inspecting the grass) until, assured I would not, perhaps could not offer a reply, he raised his lean-jawed head and laughed – his brown teeth loosened from his gums – gazing at the sky.
Rooks, I recall, rose slowly from the trees: they had – disturbing as it was – heard, I assumed, the sound before.
‘He wouldn’t tell Freddie, or, indeed, anyone,’ Isabella said when, on going into the house, I told her of this conversation. When I enquired, ‘Why not?’ she said, ‘It’s not important, though, as a scientist, he sees its relevance to other people. He was always discreet with his indiscretions. This, at least, he feels he owes me.’
‘For what?’ I asked.
‘For all he did to my mother and which she, through her good-nature, forgave. “I made your mother unhappy,” he said just after she died. “I shall never – I feel it a bounden duty – do the same to you.” Why,’ she suddenly went on, ‘I can tell my father everything. Everything!’ adding, with something of his slyness – the sideways look of the long-lashed eyes, ‘But, of course, my dear, I don’t have the obligation to tell him anything.’
He feared the old man: he feared what he knew: he feared his life of principle (communality, detachment: amoral): ‘You do right,’ he told him, ‘to fear the Irish,’ – the long-angled jaw, the far-from-supplicating eye turned, over the top of the wire-framed glasses (‘the glasses that have-seen everything!’ Bea) in his direction, ‘the apostate Irish,’ he added as homo serioso approached.
Ah, serious man!
‘I wish,’ Isabella said, ‘you had met my mother,’ (one autumn day in the kitchen, waiting for Bea, swotting, in her bedroom overhead). From the mantelshelf above the kitchen range she took down a sepia photograph: a woman sitting sideways, on a bench, her dress short-sleeved, her long, bare arms extended to her knee (her fingers clasped together), a compassionate, warm-hearted, broad-featured face, dark-eyed, broad-lipped. ‘Father always called her “Gypsy”’: slim calves, feet, delicately poised in high-heeled shoes, demurely held together. ‘“Gave nothing away but love,” he said.’
In my head, the Sardinian wife: ‘Isabella’s mother’s background was the bordello,’ Kells once said – leaning back, head raised, to laugh (scattering the rooks again in the trees). You know what a bordello is, I take it?’
He went into hospital, after I and Bea had moved to London, with a broken hip, caught pneumonia and, with ‘Cleo’ (a more intimate name for ‘Gypsy’) on his lips, he died: ‘Love personalised, after all,’ I said, fearing, for the first time, no rejoinder.
‘I never missed anyone,’ Isabella said, ‘as much as I miss him. Not even you.’
He was tired: he couldn’t sleep (the noises of the house, once familiar: no longer so): he had come across the subject in a book of Bea’s, propping up the missing castor of their double bed (looking out to their Belsize Park garden) shortly after she had left, with Beckie, and taken the flat in Barnet: Harrison’s and Schaadt’s experiments, at Berkeley, with pregnant mice, twelve of which had been kept, on fertilisation, in a cage in which the conditions were arranged to cause them maximum discomfort: tilting floors, electric bells, flashing lights, irregular food and – cumulatively – electric shocks: in no time at all, Harrison and Schaadt observed, the mice were subject to ‘involuntary trembling’, subsequently ‘fits and spasms’ and, finally, ‘catatonic withdrawal’ – sy
mptoms which, they further observed, ‘disapeared without trace’ when, at the birth of their offspring, they were removed to ‘a normal environment’.
Except (Fenchurch noted) in their offspring: though only foetal witnesses to the events in the previous cage, they, from birth, exhibited those symptoms which had characterised their mothers’ earlier behaviour – involuntary trembling, fits and spasms, catatonic withdrawal – and continued to do so until they died.
‘You’re not,’ Maidstone said, ‘making a connection between yourself and a traumatised mouse?’ to which, at the time, he replied, ‘If smoking can affect a pregnant woman, how about the death of a previous child – precisely at the moment when the central nervous system of the unborn foetus comes on tap, namely, the twelfth or thirteenth week of gestation?’
O homo serioso.
‘The more you go into it,’ Mackendrick says, ‘the crankier it becomes. The prognosis, for instance, in its stress on material functions, is not merely derivative but self-protective: someone whose background impels him to disregard the complexities of any situation other than those he can relate to external events. Idealism extends itself first to define and then to embrace the whole.’
‘Hole?’
‘The Hegelian whole.’ He leans back in his chair: the leather creaks: the patter of his son’s feet above our heads and the demented cry of, ‘Selda!’ – the put-upon East German nanny who came through the Berlin Wall in a van driven by a young admirer: Schnabel, subsequently a journalist on Die Welt. ‘“If the material causes of greed are removed cupidity will disappear.” None of this, of course, is true.’
True.
Like Marx, Mackendrick: a pharisaical tradition (‘my father did not forsake his religion and turn it into a secular joke’): bohemian (despite his pin-stripe suit: a joke on the world he will never join), theoretical, zealous (a charming plagiarist, to boot): firm, Ukrainian peasant legs inside his trousers: dark-eyed, flat-browed – overtopped, his cunning face, by a frieze of curls – tight-sprung, wiry, greying from each core to an outer fringe of black: an attractive, Panic personality merely bereft of the cloven hoof, the five-barred flute: short, square hands – more used to spade or shovel: ‘Who, in a “fulfilled” society would work in the kitchen – wash the floors, superintend the laundry, dig the coal – while we, my friend, are hunting and riding (shooting and fishing), walking in the country, painting and writing, communing, if not with nature, with our fellow men? What, for instance, is the individual going to think who has the floor to wash, the fields to till, the street to sweep, the train to drive, the recalcitrant children to teach when there are others who do not have to do these things because of “different gifts”? Who, in short, Herr Fenchurch, is going to shovel shit?’
Charlie says, ‘Why did you run away, then, Father?’ sitting on the bed: enquiry rather than reproof, perplexity rather than castigation.
The bed creaks, in the semi-darkness, beneath his weight: the children, I conclude, are both in bed (where I have been since my return), Etty, hopefully, writing up her diary: “This morning/afternoon my father ran away. He had gone back to his childhood home in order, so he said, ‘to meet his Maker’.”
‘The tribulations of the creative life are not to be dealt with lightly,’ I tell him, ‘nor explained, or dismissed in a conventional way. I am not, after all, a clerk in an office.’
‘I never said you were,’ his face shadowed by the bedside lamp which, casually, he has turned on while I am speaking. ‘It’s because you aren’t that we’re so concerned,’ (an unlikely snobbery in Charlie). ‘We want, above all, to see you better,’ his ample hands spread out across his knees, ‘and, if possible, living in London.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Work.’
‘What work?’
‘Writing.’
He makes the suggestion with a shake of his head.
‘My writing days,’ I say, ‘are over. Such as they were.’
‘Painting.’
‘What?’
‘The drawings,’ he says, ‘you did today.’
‘Negligible. Bea,’ I tell him, ‘saw to that.’
The arguments we had, first to persuade her to go back to science then, once she was back, not to overlook almost everything else.
‘Careers, I’m afraid, are toys to women. Freedom,’ I tell him, ‘went to her head. One look down her microscope and she had no time for anything else. The bric-à-brac she left, assembled by her friend Constanza, the absolutely frightful South American (Columbian) interior decorator she got in to desecrate our house.’
‘Otherwise,’ not listening to this, ‘it’s back,’ he says, ‘to the North London Royal.’
‘Maidstone has retired. Something to do with his pension. They have a new man in now,’ I tell him. ‘Waddle. Or Coddle. Or Straddle. In my view, it was exhaustion: Maidstone. That and wanting to write a book about Rossini, Rimbaud, and Piero della Francesca. He had a theory they all suffered from unipolar depression. Unmistakable signs he was cracking up. As for my theory about pregnant mice, not to mention New Mind Theory, further and further evidence he was falling behind the times.’
‘Harriet cannot devote the whole of her time to looking after you,’ he says.
‘I’ve no wish that she should,’ I tell him. Far rather, I am about to add, I’d prefer the reverse, only he swiftly looks up at a sound from outside and, reassured we are not to be disturbed, declares, ‘So long as you persist in neglecting yourself,’ and is about to continue, ‘you leave us no choice,’ but, to get the gentle giant off the hook, I announce, ‘I might as well specialise in something. Neglect is something I ought to be good at. I’ve had unlimited training. Indeed, if there is one subject I am familiar with it’s the very one, Charlie, you’ve chosen. I ought to be grateful – indeed, I am – at your offering me not only a lifeline but the prospect of a promising way ahead. Certainly,’ I thank him, ‘something to rely on.’
‘Wouldn’t you say,’ Maidstone says, ‘that your preoccupation with your brother is a sign that that preoccupation is doing you no good at all?’
‘No,’ I tell him.
‘He died six months before you were born.’
‘My mother’s grief is endemic to my nature. There is no morning when I wake that I am not aware of his dying. (Despite every effort to beat it down.) I (even) dream of demands I become more cheerful – demands which, when I turn round to see who has made them, I find coming from myself.’
‘What Harrison and Schaadt have achieved with mice is not necessarily applicable,’ he says, ‘to human beings.’
‘Why not?’ I ask.
‘Why,’ he says, and laughs, ‘they’re mice!’
‘We shall have to have a rule. If and when you go out one of us will have to go with you. Or, at least,’ Charlie says, ‘be told precisely where you are.’
How long I’ve been prattling on I’ve no idea – evidently some time, I conclude, for he now announces – i.e., threatens – more sternly than I have previously heard him, ‘It’s not, at least, like Boady Hall, nor the closed ward at the North London Royal. Other than accounting for where you are going, you have all the freedom you want.’
‘People used to defer to me,’ I tell him. ‘I had great actors at my beck and call. I talked, occasionally, to princes. Statesmen called me on the phone. I could, had I wished, have travelled round the world simply in answer to invitations, and still have had enough left over to start again. I was,’ I tell him, ‘in demand. Not a night went by but that somewhere in the world a play of mine was being performed: for every hour of every day, for every hour of every night, people were watching a play by Richard Fenchurch, a colliery worker’s son brought up on Onasett estate, near Linfield. Now look where I am,’ I conclude.
‘Those days are over, Father,’ he says, easing his frame against the bed, his figure more sombre for being beyond the pool of yellowish light. ‘I always liked,’ I say, ‘a greenish shade, yet here I am with a yellow one. (Over,’ I t
ell him, ‘and long since gone’).
‘Will you agree,’ he says, ‘to what we ask? It’ll make Etty’s job much easier.’
‘When the miners come up the path to the door you have a similar manner,’ I tell him. ‘Those stalwarts of the Ardsley Constituency Labour Party. Why they agree to being patronised I have no idea. I’m sure they talk behind your back. The good-natured Charlie. We are still a class apart,’ I add. ‘You and your father, me with mine. Despite the absurdity of what, in a life of absurdity, I’ve tried to do, the absurdity of what, for a time, I almost achieved – the sums of money, the distinguished friends, the awards, distinctions, honours and prizes, I’m still at heart, unchanged from what I was forty years ago on Onasett estate: gauche, inept, untried, lacking in grace, in faith, in love – bereft, by temperament as well as background, of all that might enhance – all that might, you could say, make life worth while.’
I am even, Charlie, going to fat: when I glimpsed, in a window, a reflection of myself today (in a pane of glass when I descended from the Ardsley bus at Linfield) I didn’t recognise – in fact, on first sight, ignored – the figure standing there: grey-haired, obesity at that stage where, on a stocky figure, it might easily be confused with muscle.
Etty – at first I thought Bea, then her mother – has, I’ve noticed, for several seconds, been standing in the door (the sound which, earlier, had caused Charlie to raise his head): the sleeves of her dress are rolled from having bathed the children or, conceivably, from clearing up her room further along the landing – about to get down (at last) to The Private Papers of Richard Fenchurch – or, perhaps, more simply: A Life. Charlie, unaware of her, goes on, ‘It makes Etty’s task more difficult if we can’t come to an agreement, Father. All you have to say is, “I’ll be in the garden,” or, “I’m going out to paint.”’
‘I haven’t the energy,’ I tell him, and when he asks, ‘To paint? Or tell us where you’re going?’ I add, ‘I took up art as a means of killing fear. I thought, “When I become an artist it will go away”: a sense of loss, a sense of isolation, a sense of being alone so fearful at times I couldn’t move. Yet the irony is, of course, it goes the other way.’