A Serious Man

by David Storey

  ‘Pour ne désespérer Billancourt,’ wrote Sartre for and to the working class (lying to himself).

  Collect his thoughts (like kittens placed in a bag by a neighbour and dropped into a river: ‘Is this,’ they must have thought, in those dying seconds, ‘what life is all about?’).

  No fire to light in Taravara Road (gas: together with the central heating).

  In his youth were many mansions (principally the Corcorans’).

  He wasn’t a poet for nothing.

  Domestic bleach is indispensable in every kitchen, said an advertisement at the time. ‘Am I a housewife?’ Vivienne said.

  His father lying on the bed where, hours before, he had almost died, saying, ‘Would you do something for me?’ in a whisper, Fenchurch stooping closer (to hear his father’s dying words): ‘Would you cut my toe nails. They’ve been bothering me for hours.’

  Going mad: ‘not as easy,’ he told Maidstone (in the land of the blind there’s no premium on light bulbs): ‘a bicycle for two,’ he complained, ‘with only one set of pedals.’

  A tautologous effect: I love you.

  Naked ways.

  I mean more to me than life itself.

  “I no longer have an appetite for writing – of the sort that Etty – and Charlie, would you believe it – recommend.”

  Plays.

  Novels.

  Are you there?

  Bea?

  Bella?

  Vi.

  Treasures.

  “Not treasures, dear, but footprints.”

  She would sit each morning on or by the bed, hair tied with a ribbon, and say, ‘What shall we do today?’ he, wondering what Corcoran would think should he come in, replying, ‘I hope to go out drawing,’ resentful of being asked (‘Don’t ask an artist what he’s doing’).

  Flogging a dead horse.

  Dreamed (borrowing, as it happened, Bea’s scissors: would she mind, his father’s nails? she insisting, ‘for old time’s sake’ in coming with him).

  Linfield Municipal Hospital standing halfway between the King Edward VI Grammar School and the High School, his father’s room (provided by Bea, who supervised his money) overlooking an expanse of depleted lawn on which, years before, entranced, he’d first seen a reclining figure: a neo-Aztec configuration set, incongruously, in the heart of a coalfield: Moore.

  “Things have not turned out exactly as we planned. It is time,” he wrote, “we wrote our memoirs. Etty says I’m going to die. She had, she told me, lost her temper. Who wouldn’t with a man of fifty-five? (How about sixty?)”

  How about – God help me – sixty-five?

  St Paul.

  An acute, or sub-acute anxiety neurosis.

  “The resemblance,” he wrote, “of things to come.”

  Jupiter.

  ‘The lineaments,’ on a phone call to Bea at her Brighton hotel (her weekend away while he looked after Beckie), ‘of gratuitous desire.’ (‘Will you not ring me here,’ she said, ‘unless it’s something important.’)

  What kind of shit is it who cares if his wife is fucked by someone else?

  ‘The bare-headed Fenchurch,’ he read in a review, writing, perplexed to the reviewer who swiftly responded: ‘A misprint: for “ar” read “on”.’

  “O, my dear,” he wrote, “two things make a right.”

  This night: strikes each hour, as then: awake in the old days (imagining Isabella with Corcoran in the other room) to realise two hours had passed without hearing a chime and conclude he had, after all, been sleeping.

  The classification of visitors (written at the time): those who were interested in seeing what he looked like; those who came because they thought they had to; those who thought they’d better stay clear and this was the necessary inducement to do so; those who felt flattered they had been and survived; those who were curious about what a lunatic asylum looked like; those who thought they might write about him in their diaries (memoirs, columns in the press); those – the one person – who thought they loved him; and his wife and children whose motives came under the generic heading which, after a great deal of reflection, and much rubbing-out, he identified as ‘love’. All of them, he concluded, acquired a relish for their own existence together with a disinclination to endorse the one they were leaving behind.

  “My mind,” he wrote at this time, “is in the region of – by my calculation (rough at the best of times) – two hundred and fifty thousand years old: more images flow through it in one night’s sleep (and one day’s reflections) than pass through a normal brain in three or four years. Since my discovery that the mind, in sleep, disintegrates into a psychotic state – the five cellular structures which comprise the composite self distinguishable, uniquely, one from the other – the significance of my dreaming has vividly increased. I can elucidate dreams like no one’s business: indeed, no one’s business is what dreaming is all about.”

  He understood it clearly: in sleep, as in breakdown, the psyche devolved into its constituent parts. Dreams were the dramatisation of the process.

  “Dear Maidstone, odd how we never got to first names – despite the informalities, despite the intimacy, the delicacy – indeed, the outrageousness of much of what was revealed. There we are: doctor and patient; emeritus professor and psychotic – acute or sub-acute anxiety neurosee. Maybe, in retirement, you have discovered that what goes on in the psyche goes on in the universe as a whole (we are plugged in to eternity): systems are elaborated, patterns evolve, processes reveal themselves – everything is in motion. If the black holes of astronomical speculation are one of the wonders of the universe, entities a billion times more powerful than the sun, switching themselves on and off in a time interval equivalent to two earthly days, then so, in my view, is the black hole of depression into which all matter seemingly descends and where the organism ceaselessly absorbs itself.”

  The waste, he was about to write, that characterises space – all those galaxies going on for ever, matter evolving and dissolving without purpose – was echoed by the wastefulness of the human brain (see Fenchurch: its unused resources, its neural profligacy unmatched by a proportionate function).

  “Dear Mackendrick, I wasn’t at all convinced by your performance on television the other night: ‘Politics and Madness: are the two irretrievably combined?’ No one, for instance, attending courses for training in the practice of counselling or psychotherapy can have failed to have noticed, let alone to have been affected by, the party games or group disciplines involved, where insights are encouraged to appear and manifest themselves, and are accredited, by the deployment of mechanistic verbal and/or non-verbal techniques: neutralised personalities are both attracted by and vulnerable to these neural engagements, and non-neutralised personalities to controlling them.

  Yet the rationalisations engendered in and by this form of play, harmful or harmless as it may seem, can just as efficaciously be assigned to the same category of empirical observation as the Virgin Birth, the bodily ascension of Christ, or the service of ritualised cannibalism which lies at the heart of Christian worship. Or – and I come to the point I am making (and you undoubtedly will steal) – the tracts of any political theory.”

  No light shows beneath the curtains.

  Four must have passed without his hearing.

  Conversely, regarding his temperature, he might have been asleep.

  There is hope for everything, he concluded.

  There were those who came to clarify what they thought about themselves; there were those who thought they felt the same and wondered if it mattered: there were those, of course, who didn’t come at all.

  Those, the latter, he saw little of.

  In my mind, I reflect, I see them all the time.

  She sat on a log, her legs astride: ‘When I am eighty, you, my dear, will be forty-five.’ (‘Forty-six,’ he told her).

  Coming to the point when, once again, he would take up drawing.

  I have lost, in order of importance: Bella, Bea, our children, Vi,
recognition, my vocation: an avalanche before that: Liam, Mackendrick …

  Here, in the room, I recall, where the mischief started.

  The equilibrium he found in dementia towards the end of a faithful life.

  “Fenchurch’s discovery of the process of dreaming is the logical result of his discovery of the structure of the mind, essentially an n-dimensional concept allied to his observations on the radial nature of perception and its lateral suffusion, or association, throughout the system: the mind perceives radially (he asserts), translating its perceptions through lateral connections which have acquired as well as intrinsic characteristics transfigurations which determine not only what is perceived but how it will be perceived in the future.”

  Consider the nasturtiums in the garden, they strangulate the lesser plants, yet they weep not, neither do they labour.

  ‘What, in my youth,’ he told Mackendrick, ‘was of interest no longer is: personality, idiosyncracies, character. Do you occupy the same hinterland of terror?’

  The tertiary way of doing things (testing, he thought, the lateral extensions).

  ‘What is mind?’ Mackendrick said: ‘the dirty sheet on which society writes its incorrigible message.’

  ‘What is my mind the window on if not its own reflection?’ Fenchurch said.

  Vivienne said, ‘You have given me such a happy time. Do you remember the day we spent by the river – was it Maidenhead or Marlow? – even if you can’t otherwise bear the sight of me.’

  ‘I never said,’ he said, ‘I would.’

  The physiognomy of love: ‘Just look at my nose!’ (as she examined it in the mirror).

  The night: how long the night is when you’re on your own: how swiftly it goes in the company of another.

  Who was the one that the other lay close to?

  He heard the children scamper down the stairs: scrape chairs and clatter cups and open doors: ‘I am closer to Isabella’s great-grandchildren than I am to my own: there I can see the separation, whereas the my that the self is close to is invisible to me.’

  Homo serioso.

  ‘I engineer,’ he told Maidstone, ‘the engine of the mind,’ (selling off the spare components).

  ‘I can’t cope with children,’ the child psychotherapist said as the secretary led in the next child patient (unaware that the therapist’s sole aim is to subsume his or her irrationalities in those of other people), her husband, a celebrated paediatrician – ‘killing two birds with one stone’, he described it – explaining how the extraordinary size of his fees facilitated his purchasing of our house in Belsize Park, intended to be turned by the pair of them into ‘a mecca for child care: cure the parents with very large bills: it is, after all, an open market.’

  Rising from the floor, he saw – in the morning light – the ghost of Isabella.

  Kells and Corcoran: Irish priests (two men to be relied on).

  ‘Nothing,’ Kells says, ‘is what it seems,’ following, in the sunny garden, the movements of his daughter (stooping, in her middle years, to the flowered beds).

  Then Etty got up.

  Two selves: what price, he thought, in staying one?

  What a lot to be taken for granted, not least the room provided by his daughter, the company that she provided.

  ‘My daughter,’ Kells said, ‘is a happy woman. She would be happy if she wasn’t married. She would be happy if she didn’t know you. She is, by nature, a happy woman, in the same way as, by nature, her mother was: a child of God,’ a daughter, Fenchurch took it to be, of H. J. Kells.

  ‘My close relatives,’ he told Mackendrick, ‘are powerful people (how powerful, he went on, you’d be surprised).’

  In the night: ‘instead of writing a radial novel (which all novels, until now, have been) I shall write a diametric one, which traverses rather than travels in and out.’

  (‘That,’ Bea said, ‘is good enough for me.’).

  He dreamed.

  Overhead, scratching on the tiles, a rook, he conjectured, or a pigeon.

  He no longer cared whether he wrote at all: what came to hand was dispirited, de-energised – unrepresentative of what he was himself.

  ‘Between Linfield and Ardsley: somewhere on that road,’ he said, measuring the distance, ‘is a quotient of myself.’

  He would rise, go down to the shop, owned and staffed by Pakistanis, in Sebastopol Street – hardly more than a converted front room in one of those narrow, one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old houses – and buy a paper and two cartons of milk. Vivienne, meanwhile, would be in bed: the endless charade with her glasses, her compulsive buying of several more, together with a variety of clip-on lenses – until he persuaded her to give them up (‘they will not change the nature of what you see,’ he said): ‘our naked selves,’ as she described it – regarding herself, eyes almost closed, as she did each morning in the mirror.

  It’s cold: despite the introduction of central heating since the days, in Isabella’s time, when the inside of the panes, in winter, invariably were frozen up, the room does not retain its heat for long: at night, when the boiler switches off, the warmth disappears in seconds. Charlie is always threatening to improve it: ‘These old houses,’ he complains, as if his being here is Etty’s fault entirely, ‘are not designed for easy living: their level of comfort, at the time of their construction, was determined by that prevailing in a cave.’ Yet, despite his threats, the windows, for instance, have not been double-glazed: there is no insulation in the roof and draughts whistle in not only from beneath the doors (and from around the windows) but from underneath the floor itself – one vacated knot-hole being a favourite where a stream of air, as if from a bellows, is, on windy days, as undiminished in its velocity as it was when Isabella used to stand there, dressed in a housecoat, and complain, as I do now, about the fact that, despite her protestations, Corcoran, in those days, Charlie now, did, or has done, nothing about it. ‘I am,’ she would tell Corcoran, ‘a Mediterranean woman with a passion for the sun.’

  I would see her, on occasion, walking amongst the stalls in Linfield market – held beneath the northern walls of the, at that time, coal-black cathedral – her unmistakable head of hair (around which a green silk scarf would occasionally – strikingly – be fastened) conspicuous amongst the drab-coloured awnings and the colourless figures of the colliers’ wives. I would delay, for instance, going up to her, merely for the pleasure of observing her from a distance – as might a devotee of wildlife observe a creature he had long admired but, in its native habitat, never glimpsed. I would follow her amongst the stalls, deriving pleasure of an ecstatic nature from contemplating the inclination, at one stall, of her head, from the extension of her arm at another, from the sway of her body at a third. All the while I would be aware of the glances of the other shoppers, not least the fixated gaze of the men – contrasting sharply with the sideways but nevertheless all-consuming gazes of the women – and the often bizarre effect her face and figure and her manner (her clothes, that is, and her manner of address) had on the stall-holders themselves – invariably resulting in her being offered a bargain rather than, as might have been expected, her being exploited because of the exoticism of her dress). ‘Look at this,’ she would say, like a child, smiling, when I finally came up – and, with the greatest propriety, she had offered her cheek. ‘Half the price I would have to pay in Ardsley, and for something twice as fresh,’ showing me a savoy (a savoy: her ‘favourite’ vegetable, she more than once announced), a piece of fruit, or – one of Corcoran’s favourites – a veal and ham meat pie.

  Laden with her shopping we would make our way to the semi-derelict room I occupied over the barber’s shop in South-gate, on the opposite side of the cathedral’s coal-black hulk, and there, having made a cup of tea, we would, as she, on occasion, described it, ‘endeavour to amuse ourselves’. ‘Isn’t this innocent?’ she asked, with surprise, when I remarked, if we were conscious of (the implication of) what we were about, it couldn’t be innocent any longer, adding, �
�After all, my dear, I see you as a child.’

  She was more duplicitous than I imagined, or, rather, wished to acknowledge: was she as unaware, for instance, of being observed as I, in my innocence, or seeming innocence, imagined? Was she oblivious of the effect our relationship would have on Bea had she, either before our marriage or after, been aware of what was going on? Was she as unaware of her attractiveness to me – the, at times, mesmeric effect she had – as she, from time to time, bemusedly made out? ‘I don’t see what you see in me,’ she would protest. ‘I am a woman, as far as I can see, without an attraction in the world,’ affecting reluctance, when she posed, not only to remove her clothes (which she did willingly enough on other occasions) but to pose at all. ‘You’ll see how much is wrong,’ she’d happily complain, coaxed into submission with gestures which, with hindsight, I see she was soliciting all the time.

  Perhaps she was mad. Perhaps she didn’t believe in Bea. Perhaps she didn’t believe in anything: unquestioning, unasking, untormented – except on those occasions when she identified – or thought she did – something morosely none of these things in me. Perhaps she was an exotic, brought back, unwittingly, by Kells from the Middle East (caught up in his baggage) – something founded in thousands of years of desert life, as unreal, as unlived, as inauthentic in this northern clime as the exotic plants she cherished.

  ‘Not one of Kells’ locusts?’ Maidstone wryly enquired, while I protested, ‘I re-live my life at that time over and over again, as if, after all this time, it will never come into focus. I not only seem to see but need to see something in it which eludes me all the while. An embodiment of a faith in something which I know to be there but which, other than in her, I shall never recognise,’ he crossing his legs, inscribing his notes, propped on his knee, murmuring through pursed lips, ‘I wonder what that is?’

  ‘Eyes that can see that,’ I tell him, ‘have not yet been invented.’