by David Storey
Etty, stepping into the room, creaking a floorboard, momentarily distracts Charlie’s attention: after all, as a socialist, a humanist, he wants to understand.
‘Fear is, in reality, a symptom – of an isolation which was generated before I was born. The use to which I put it, or it put me, exacerbated it in a peculiar way. For nothing quite motivates the artist as the desire for recognition, and yet, the moment that recognition is achieved, his isolation is complete. The longing, would you believe it, Charlie? – the most absurd of all our appetites – a longing to be saved! Vivienne, at the height of her fame, when she discovered that – not unlike many in her predicament – despite struggling for years against the inclination – found the realisation too much to bear and, after taking a bottle of sleeping pills, swallowed, for good measure, a bottle of bleach. I will never forgive myself for not going in the yard. I, who suffered in that way, too. Nothing can beat that kind of pain: a sense that all you have struggled for has not only failed, but disappeared. Gone: all your efforts inappropriate.’
I pause, Charlie and Etty now standing together. ‘When I came in from the yard I sat on a chair and thought, what effect will this have on Bea, then, more pertinently, on Mathilda, Harriet – on Kenneth, Benjamin, Rebecca? What effect does it have on me? An attempt to obviate the shock – of a sight which, even now, I resist describing: the figure reclining on a pile of compost, the snarl which, with rigor mortis, had stiffened into a ravaged grin: teeth flecked with blood, a fly alighting between her lips, her tongue: the smell. A peculiar codicil, Charlie, to what I’ve done. A peculiar way to end existence.’
‘Let’s look to the future,’ Charlie says. Subsiding on the bed again, he adds, ‘That, and the present, is all we’ve got. The best thing you can do for Vivienne is to draw and paint, to write.’
‘Yet the past,’ I tell him, ‘is where I am,’ (the shadow of Etty, who has come closer, now upon me). ‘The past, after all,’ I add, ‘is here. Bea and her mother sat there, too.’ I indicate the bed. ‘They, too,’ I continue, ‘sketched out a future. Into the distance (the long flight I followed, the journey I took). Yet here I am, where I started.’
‘You appreciate,’ Charlie stands, the bed springing up at the removal of his weight, ‘we can’t proceed from this point unless we have a plan.’ (How the constituency devotees – more the men than the women – admire him.)
‘What sort of plan?’
‘Of action.’
‘I shan’t come,’ I tell him, ‘to any harm. Nor do I intend to harm man, woman, child or animal.’
‘It’s the damage, Father,’ he says, his figure looming above me, ‘to yourself. Etty, for instance, has other things to do. She can’t confine her life exclusively to looking after you.’
‘Nor should I wish her to,’ I tell him. ‘I have already confided to her a course of action. She could, for instance, write a book. The material, I’ve pointed out, is close at hand.’
His thick, broad-featured face drives outwards in a smile.
‘It might, despite Etty’s reservations, solve both our problems,’ I go on. ‘It would, in a constructive way, employ her skills and gifts – which I, incidentally, hold in very high esteem – and I would be obliged to be here with her, if not in close attendance, while the book is finished. An incidental benefit,’ I continue, ‘would be, not further notoriety for her, but approbation and the possibility, girded by such praise, that I might return to the work which, as you have pointed out, I have, in middle age, despairingly abandoned.’
‘I’ve asked Bryan to look in,’ Etty says, taking, as far as I am aware, not the slightest notice of what I have said. ‘He says he’ll come tomorrow. You’ll stay in, I take it, until he comes?’
‘Indubitably,’ I tell her. ‘No doubt,’ I go on, ‘there’ll be a subsequent consultation behind my back.’
‘He’ll have his own views on the subject, Father,’ Charlie says. ‘After all, it’s for your good,’ he adds, ‘that he’s coming.’
I’m not sure whether this final remark is directed at me or Etty, or both: he looms for a moment at the foot of the bed, then – a flash of his shirtsleeves – he’s gone.
‘His torso was dark,’ I tell Etty, ‘with his wearing a waistcoat, but, for several moments, he reminded me of Corcoran. He, too, would come in here – particularly in the mornings, when I was painting, or writing, there, on a chair, by the window – and make a remark about, for instance, the dignity of manual labour – remarks which, I hadn’t a doubt, were intended to point out the strenuous nature of his own employment, and the dependency of so many others on it as well as the irrelevance, if not indulgence of mine.
So that’s today, so desperately begun:
so much endeavoured, so little done,
I’d quote him – but one of the many poems I wrote at the time,
so much attempted, so little done:
so much abandoned, so little won,
another version, he striding off to his yard and his lorries – his men, his coal, his steel, his oil – and I would re-immerse myself in my self-appointed task to show up humanity for what it was.’
As Etty sighs, I add, ‘I apologise to Charlie but, most of all, to you, for all the trouble I’ve caused you. In earlier times, someone like myself would simply walk off, at night, into the trees, or the river. Perhaps, in my own way, that’s what I intended to do. Different times, different places. I shall not leave the grounds, or the house, without informing you, or Mrs Otterman, or Charlie, or all three. As for Raynor, he can tell you as much about me as he likes. I doubt, after all this time, there’ll be much that is new. Having fouled up my life the last thing I want is to foul up someone else’s. After all, if I can do anything at all I can at least set a bad example.’
‘After all,’ I tell Maidstone, ‘the strong may cherish their vulnerability: all those elements which in their lives have previously distracted them, are, by their susceptibilities, brought into focus – and swept aside. Their perceptions are extended: they are obliged to move beyond themselves (they are obliged to move they know not where). In reaching the end of things they arrive at their beginnings.’
Hell has no optimum condition.
The unimaginable is realised and precedes the unimaginable again.
While all Harriet says is, ‘We don’t want you to feel imprisoned.’
‘I don’t feel that at all,’ I tell her. ‘This house is how it was four decades ago, at least. I was just turned eighteen when I first saw it and, while I was a student, I stayed here several times a year – on holidays, at weekends. This room,’ I go on, ‘is haunted, not least,’ I continue, ‘by the women that I loved. Principally by two of them, and now, of course, by you. It’s no wonder I confuse Corcoran with Charlie: large men, both avuncular, both, in their differing ways, good sports. Your grandfather, of course, was a rabid Tory – the only one in the district at the time – and Charlie is one of your middle-class dreamers, promoting a world which, should it ever come about, would do away with people like himself.’
She has gone.
Fenchurch, I reflect – sketching her introduction – is a complex man: too sensitive to be political, too fair-minded to be partisan, too intelligent to submit the variety of life to a dogma: an amazing conjunction of hypocrisy and ambition, of irresolution and certitude, of absurdity and good sense (of baseness and magnanimity): morbidly introspective, revolutionarily inclined, indisposed to expressions of affection.
Momentously, at the height of his success, he arrived at the conclusion that his life – as he had envisaged it from his youth, if not his childhood – pursuing his goals with an energy bordering on venom – had been based on a misconception. His sense of humiliation in his childhood but, more specifically, in his youth, had indisposed him to society in general, and to certain all-too-clearly identifiable aspects of it in particular: his pessimism – deriving from a source beyond his control – inclined him to an anarchic view of his own existence (one which only belatedly h
e had come to realise teetered on the threshold of despair). His only antidote, a vitalist belief in self, inclined him to use circumstances and people to increase his power (the product of his insecurity) and to dominate his environment: ‘isn’t domination,’ he conjectured, ‘in reality, what life is all about? Didn’t Christ dominate the Devil (the priests, the pharisees, his parents, the Romans)? didn’t he seek, as a child, to over-rule his mother? (What did his father make of that? What, come to that, did his father make of his Father?)’
Night: his daughter and her husband sleeping: their daughters – with odd cries and shouts which characterise their dreams – asleep as well. ‘I might, quite easily,’ he reflected, ‘be in our home in Belsize Park, the night, for instance, Bea tells me – not the confirmation merely the beginning of his crack-up. And Constanza, the South American brood-mare, as Bea described her, with that psychopathic father who had killed – how many people was it? – three hundred in a day (‘almost as many as days in the year’), the Minister of Justice. What about Bea: her drawings, her photographs, the stone (breeding) trough in the boiler-room beneath the front door steps? What about – tears flooding his eyes – the years they’d spent inside that building, in partnership, in comradeship, bringing up their children? ‘Our children!’ (the only revolution they had witnessed in their lives).
The owls, the mice, the rumble of the trains – the sudden rush, as opposed to the vibration, as they passed a vent, brick-lined and grated, between his and his neighbour’s house.
The beginning of what he called his ‘grand dispersal’.
He gave away his money: first to charities (who wrote grateful, personalised, incredulous replies), then to organisations whose activities he wasn’t sure about, then to a variety of individuals, from artists whose work he disapproved of (‘I might be wrong’) to people whose faces or appearances he didn’t like (‘they might be beautiful to their husbands/wives’ – or, conversely, getting his own back: indebtedness, materialism – all the things he sensed had brought him down). Much, of course, he gave to Bea and, a larger sum, shared amongst the children. It was in response to a letter to Bea from his bank that his affairs, finally, were transferred to her control: he was – in proceedings which he didn’t attend – judged to be no longer responsible for his actions. ‘I have never been more responsible,’ he complained – without acrimony or resentment – the first time she visited him, coming to the end of his first month at the North London Royal. ‘I have never, as far as I am aware, been so clear-headed. I have done away with everything,’ he told her, gazing from the cupboard – empty, but for his night-clothes and wash things – by his bed to the disillusioned faces which filled the rows of chairs in the television and recreation lounge immediately outside his door. ‘People queue up to come in here. My bed is very popular.’
He watched her – as he watched her on most occasions – cry; or, if not cry, endeavour not to. ‘I used to know you,’ she told him, ‘as a child,’ and when he answered, ‘Surely, Bea, it was after that,’ she said, ‘I was taken in: all that childishness to do with art.’
(‘This place,’ he told her at the time, ‘is a paradox: you can say but not do anything you like.’).
He introduced her to Walter: ‘Walter,’ he first warned her, ‘is known as the King of Peace,’ his head enclosed in a turban (knotted handkerchiefs) and held permanently to one side. ‘It keeps it,’ he told Bea with a beatific smile, ‘from falling off my shoulders.’ Then to Oskar, an Austro-Hungarian avionics, electrical and civil engineer: ‘I am civil,’ he told her with a bow, ‘I have electricity within my system and I have, at night, the capacity to fly,’ a sturdy, square-shouldered (bald-headed) man who, Bea declared, looked a smaller version of me. ‘Was he bald-headed?’ she said when I pointed this out (‘They all look alike to me’). ‘This is paradise on earth,’ I told her. ‘Only a genius could live here, and only a genius, Bea, describe it.’
Then to Daphne (ancient at the age of thirty-five, wizened) who, terrified, dug her nails, behind her, in the wall.
Fenchurch, in his letters – why did he write them? – described what he called ‘the improvidence of God’: the abandonment with which a caring deity dispenses wretchedness, senility, lunacy, disease and pain – even children, even animals – nothing, not even the smallest microbe, is exempt: ‘even babies, minutes old’. In the face of the profligacy of God’s disasters, he enquired, why, if he cares so little for us, should we, his creations, care for him: did he, frankly, think twenty-four hours on a cross would be enough? If he, for instance, were subject to the laws of man, he would be in prison – for eternity – for child-neglect: an artist takes more care of his creations, a father of his offspring, than God, in his profligacy, takes care of us.
She listened – Albert waiting in his car outside – with patience to her (then still) husband: ‘the ravings of a lunatic,’ I heard her once describe them to a colleague when, as a surprise, without warning – my first day ‘off – I visited her in her lab.
“How I love to see you,” I wrote to her at this time, “with your lovely hair – as deep and as thick as your mother’s – piled on top of your head, stooped, and yet erect, sitting on your stool – square-shouldered – peering (with the intensity, I might tell you, of a child) into the binocular lenses of your microscope, your right hand drawing with a pencil, your left adjusting the focus. How proud your mother would have been! How prouder still your dad! The grandchild, would you believe it, of H.J. Kells!”
‘It’s not the romance of lunacy,’ I told her, ‘that makes me warm to a place like this, but a cinquetential structure of the mind I’m sure I have discovered. It will revolutionise psychiatry,’ and then, ‘There’s one thing you can say about madness, it gets you out and about!’
17
‘I don’t think I told you,’ I said to Etty the following morning, ‘the first occasion I saw your mother not as I’d always seen her but as she is, sitting on a stool in her lab at the MRC, her hair piled high on the top of her head. She wore a jacket cut square at the shoulders, with epaulettes and pleated pockets. Her colour was high: she was on the threshold, if I’d known it, of making a discovery she sensed was there but hadn’t realised. Her head was bowed, her right hand drawing. Her left hand held the focus. A beam of light lit up her brow. At first – I’d been directed to the room by a colleague – I failed to recognise her. Her eyes, when she looked up, were out of focus.
“Bea?” I enquired.
Perhaps, at that moment, too, she failed to recognise her husband.
“Yes?” She waited.
“It’s your husband,” I announced.
The fact of the matter was (I didn’t know it) she was waiting for Albert and the sight of me, I discovered later, filled her with alarm.’
She wore, in addition to her jacket, a long, blue denim skirt: not denim. Wool. Beneath its generous folds a pair of boots. Soft leather. Wrinkled horizontally across her instep. Sitting on a stool. Flushed. Loved. On the threshold. In reality, expecting Albert. Good old Al!
‘I rang her up the following day and said, “I have never seen you so absorbed.” “Like you,” she said, “when you started writing. Or when I came into the studio in the middle of a picture, for all practicalities your attention on the moon.”’
It’s dark. The curtains closed, Etty – so clear in the dream – not there at all. ‘The fact of the matter is, independence, self-reliance, to the point of self-contentment (the one man pitted against the rest) was the one quality I prized above all others. Without it,’ I informed Isabella, for want of anyone else to talk to, ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today,’ – here in the bedroom where, for the remainder of his teenage years, she had, on all his visits, brought him a cup of tea each morning – her figure arced, diagonally, as she drew the curtain, the sunlight flooding from the south: the warmth, the glow, the preparations she had made (invariably wearing lipstick), the removal, if the moment were propitious, of all her clothes.
O my dear,
my love.
Prized, that is, above all others, a singular, he thought at that time, human virtue: in reality a symptom – his independence – of an illness which, perceivable with hindsight, had, from the beginning, engulfed his life.
Hand in hand, as symptom, went reliance – on one other person who, because of his dependency, he despised.
“Nothing,” he wrote to Vivienne in her absence (she lying in the shed outside), “will ever be the same again. All the old virtues – independence, single-mindedness, self-reliance – those, that is, I saw as virtues, are, it turns out in middle age, not virtues after all: self-reliance (self-containment); single-mindedness (isolation); courage (an inability to relate warmly, movingly, entrancingly, effectively to others).”
“It was all,” he wrote to all of them, “coming to an end.”
All the old virtues, Bella, tested, strong and true!
‘What happens after that,’ he said to Maidstone, ‘I’ve no idea.’
For the first, and the last time, at the edge of existence.
“When we met in the producer’s office at the top of the Beaumont theatre the first thing I noticed were your glasses and, the second thing, your legs. ‘She is famous for her legs,’ the casting director remarked at the time (something of a feminist: in her office a poster of a men’s urinal, men back to camera, the centre of the five figures, urinating, a woman). And, ‘I would have more pride,’ the moment you departed. ‘No man,’ she announced (or woman), ‘would reduce me to the state she’s in.’”
Gibbering Vi: no man would reduce you to the state you’re in: no man would know that much of love. Paul’s Second Letter to the Philippians recommends not a closer walk with God but the acquisition of neurotic symptoms: fear and trembling of an involitional nature: ‘Go mad,’ he might have said, ‘with Jesus (see if he comes if you don’t come back).’