A Serious Man

by David Storey

  ‘Nothing,’ I told her at this time, ‘is clear. (Everything, of its nature, is bound to be confused.)’ Except, of course, his pictures – and his drawings (principally of her): sitting, for instance, in the third-class compartment in Linfield Station the day he left for the Drayburgh – Bea, whose term started later, coming on behind (with, he understood, a new friend: a pupil from King Edward’s who, the same subject, had enrolled at the same college) – his paints, in a tin, above his head, on the rack, buried inside a suitcase: ‘My passport,’ he’d told his parents – and there, framed in the window, suddenly, her face which, after this date – despite their holiday with Clare and ‘Venny’ – and Bea (perhaps because of it) – he’d assumed he’d rarely if ever see again.

  ‘How are you?’ she enquired, and when he asked, startled, ‘But Bella, my love, are you coming to London?’ (abandon everything: come with me), she had merely responded, ‘I am seeing you off.’

  ‘I live, and let live,’ he told Maidstone, ‘and fail to come alive,’ and he, fatigued (having, that day, announced his coming retirement), had responded, ‘You don’t let live long enough. You don’t, when it comes down to it, give anyone a chance.’

  When he replied, ‘But I give everyone a chance,’ Maidstone wearily rejoined, ‘Only a chance with chance. Not, I’m afraid, a chance with you.’

  It was the turning-point, he’d thought, in his recovery. ‘He thinks,’ he’d reflected, ‘I’m holding something back. After all this time. I wonder what it is? Something solid, something elusive: something, in the light of his condemnation, I can grasp at last.’

  ‘We have the chance, now that Bea may well be embarked,’ I tell her, ‘with someone else. Come with me.’

  ‘Permanently?’ she says, half-smiling. ‘Or for a while?’

  ‘Forever,’ I tell her. ‘I would like to have you with me.’

  ‘This argument,’ she says, ‘goes on for ever,’ (I have, by this time, stepped out from the train).

  ‘Why not run away for good?’ (my arm around her waist).

  ‘I only came,’ she says, ‘to see you off. This,’ she goes on, ‘is as good a time as any,’ and when, my lips against her cheek, she adds, ‘to break away for good,’ I whisper in her ear, ‘My love! My love! Just step into the train. We’ll send a letter. I’ll telephone. Your father, I know, will understand. Corcoran, too, no doubt, in time. I can’t exist,’ I go on, ‘without you!’

  ‘This break,’ she says, ‘will do you good. You,’ she continues, ‘must go ahead, and I,’ she concludes, ‘must stay behind.’

  She allows me for a while to kiss her lips (months before I had the chance to kiss her again – at King’s Cross Station, meeting her with Bea after she and I are re-united: ‘on a maturer basis, after each of us has had a “fling”,’ as Bea described it, Isabella there to visit her daughter). “In her lips,” I wrote that night in my room in a hotel in Cartwright Gardens, “I felt the distance that has come between us: the force – for the first time – of those thirty-two years: ‘half a lifetime’, she described it. Goodbye, my dear, my dear, my love,” without, to my surprise, the slightest regret.

  That night, sitting in a window of a café in the Euston Road, a stone’s throw from my lodgings, I watched the crowds flood by and realised that, for the first time since we had met, my thoughts had moved on to something else: the noise, the surge, the grip of something which, I knew, could only be ambition. ‘It is,’ I concluded, ‘to justify her (all my achievements to justify Bella).’

  I watched the dull red glow of the lamps which, spread at intervals along the street, slowly increased in incandescence, changing imperceptibly to a transfiguring orange then finally to a translucent gold. “I wouldn’t change my being here for anything,” I further wrote that evening.

  “Dear God, tolerate my worst excesses for my best are meant for you alone,” I might have written at the time, for my decline began the moment that my fortunes rose, the path downwards never, from that instant, more clearly defined.

  All I recall is the steam of the engine, the metalwork structure above the platform, the look of relief as we said goodbye.

  I hadn’t left, after all, but arrived.

  18

  First, there is the room, twenty feet in height, glazed panels on the upper walls, supplemented, in darker weather, by neon lights. A model, reclining on a cushion, is positioned on a platform: around her, sitting on donkeys, or standing at easels, are a variety of students, tall, short, fat, thin, old, young: male – the women’s life-room occupies a similar interior on the opposite side of this ancient, neo-classical, Greek portico-fronted building. The light, on an early winter’s afternoon, is fading: the neon strips, an hour earlier, have been switched on: the clock on the wall is approaching five. The model, who has been posing, with rests and an interval for lunch, for the previous eight hours, eases her weight against her arm: her shoulder stirs; a hand is raised, the fingers shaken. Someone, at one of the easels, and two others, seated on donkeys, begin, after glancing, head-sideways, at their drawings or paintings, to pack their things.

  Feet stir: there’s a distant hum of traffic: the college, its main entrance off, nevertheless backs onto the Euston Road, its presence obscured by a façade of shops, a restaurant, and an amusement parlour.

  Someone looks up: the minute hand on a clock set high on the wall approaches twelve, quivers, reaches its zenith and, after coming to a halt, quivers once again.

  ‘Rest.’

  ‘Thanks,’ come up on every side.

  Groaning, despite her recumbent posture, the model stretches.

  One of the students – a stocky, well-built figure (dark-haired and of a saturnine expression) – cleans his brushes and packs his equipment and, taking down his painting from an easel, leaves the room with a briskness which marks him out from the others. Depositing his work in a rack outside, he passes along a corridor which runs underneath the centre of the building (with its antique-room and studios overhead), past the student common-room where a sideways look of regret animates his features as he glances at the students congregating in groups and making plans for excursions to the West End that evening, and reaches a back door of the building from where, down a narrow alley, he emerges into the lamp-lit glow of the Euston Road. He walks, increasing his pace, eastwards until, opposite St Pancras Station, he enters a narrow street and, from there, the door of a terraced building, set at the corner of a crescent and, in several rapid bounds, climbs a winding flight of stairs.

  He enters an attic room: the walls are lined with pictures (others, of varying sizes, propped against the walls themselves) and on the floor of which are stacked piles of (mostly) secondhand books. An easel, holding a painting, stands beside the window, the uncurtained panes of which look down to a tennis court set in the centre of the crescent’s gardens.

  Drawing to him a sheaf of papers, he takes out a pen and, sitting at a table immediately beneath the window, a light beside him, begins to write.

  A political view of his life was coming to the surface: ‘It isn’t me,’ he reflected, ‘but the life I lead which creates the impression of a divided world, dissonance and vulgarity on one side, refinement and perspicuity on the other,’ his life, indeed, fragmented, at that time, in more ways than he imagined, Bea (and her mother) on the one hand, the girls he was attracted to, on the other: the working and the (largely) middle classes which, separately, absorbed his artistic and his social lives, providing, the one, the dynamic which, he suspected, energised his work, the other the impetus necessary to his ambition. Each morning he got up, wrote, walked briskly to the college, entered his name in the Drayburgh register (lying on a shelf of one of the rotunda windows which illuminated the spiral-staircased entrance), descended to the locker-room to retrieve his materials, then made his way to the life-room to which he had been assigned or, if he were working on a composition, to the antique-room where, amidst the casts, the plants and the multitude of easels, he set up his hardboard (cheaper than
canvas) and, for the remainder of the day worked as steadily as distractions (too numerous to mention) in such a large interior might allow – not excluding an occasional break for coffee and one for lunch and for earnest chats about ‘art’ with the men and about ‘life and love’ with the women.

  At some point he went home and wrote, steadily, for several hours: in the evenings, if he didn’t draw (or write) or paint, he visited Bea in her room or she came to visit him, or, if he were deceiving her, he visited or entertained someone else.

  He was a ‘card’; on the other hand, a bundle of conflicting yet nevertheless dogmatic views (he had opinions about everything, a compendium of the most divergent and contentious elements in the world he lived in, a synthesis – and the principal protagonist of – the same within himself: ‘A liver and lover,’ he said to Bea, ‘if only because the extremes I live at are common to no one else.’)

  Even after the pipes start ticking beneath the floor – the expansion from the heat as, at intervals, audibly, in the basement of the house, the boiler fires – it is cold: ‘These old houses,’ I reflect, ‘and this one in particular, the one in which I have loved and which has brought me to this pass (unloved by anyone at present), are not for me.’

  The girls are romping in their room, sent up, I assume, after breakfast, to prepare themselves for school: Charlie, having come out from the bathroom into his bedroom, is whistling (as, no doubt, he fastens on his tie beneath his triplicated chin), examining, with equanimity, warmth and candour those eyes which, reflected in the mirror, convey nothing but the same in return).

  ‘Breakfast, Charlie!’ (from Etty, below).

  I’ve been awake for hours, absorbed in the persona of a twenty-year-old youth (a child, his body and his mind divided, his heart, like his soul, in two).

  I used to wake like this at camp: the other sleeping figures, the muggy air, the pigeons in the wood and, at Broughton Springs, the distant sound of the sawmill: the dew, as I crawled out beneath the brailing, first on hands and then on feet (the cool, sharp shock abrasive), the clarity of the air, the shadowed humps across the valley of the medieval mine works, the cows standing in or browsing by the stream, or drifting in a line to or from the dairy on the opposite valley slope: the visit to the toilet, already thick with flies, the smell of the damp, the dust and stone in the decaying game keeper’s cottage: the stillness of the wood which, hours before, in the darkness, lit by the flickering camp-fire flames, had sent me to bed with a pang of fear – to be infinitely extended in future years – a deeper darkness, untouched by the flames, lying dauntingly beyond them.

  ‘I thought, this morning, I might go to Broughton Springs,’ I say to Etty as she comes in carrying not, as I’d thought, a pot of tea (or my breakfast) but several buff-coloured letters. ‘What are those?’ I ask to which, seeing me awake, she says, ‘Charlie’s,’ drawing back the curtains.

  ‘Does it require you,’ I ask, ‘to bring him up his letters? Won’t he get them the moment he goes down to the hall (to find,’ I am about to add, ‘unlike myself, his breakfast waiting)?’

  ‘I thought you’d be asleep,’ she says, turning with a smile, and adds, ‘If I don’t put them in his hand he forgets them. I’ve brought them to put in his briefcase,’

  ‘Nothing, I suppose for me?’ I enquire.

  ‘No one knows,’ she says, ‘you’re here. As for Taravara Road, Matt has said she’ll keep an eye on things and post anything that comes.’

  ‘I used to get ten, sometimes twenty, occasionally thirty or forty letters a day,’ I tell her, ‘at the height of my notoriety,’ and add, ‘I’ve been lucky, in the recent past, to get as many as that in a year. Sometimes, in Taravara Road, nothing comes for over a month. That,’ I go on, ‘despite forty-five years as a writer. And a few other activities as well.’

  ‘They must think you dead.’ She smiles.

  ‘Irrelevant,’ I tell her.

  ‘Are you getting up, or shall I bring you something?’ still smiling in the door.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ I ask her.

  ‘I have decided,’ she declares, ‘to make a fresh start.’

  ‘Does that include the first draft of The Private Papers of Richard Fenchurch?’ I enquire.

  ‘It doesn’t.’ She smiles again.

  ‘I hesitate to call it a revolution, but what,’ I enquire, ‘has caused this change?’

  ‘Nothing I can think of,’ she says, ‘except when I was driving you home, after picking you up at the church, I realised there was nothing more I could do. It took a great weight,’ she adds, ‘off my mind. No longer do I need to care, slippers or no slippers, sketching or not. You are not my responsibility any longer.’

  ‘I never said I was,’ I tell her.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘but the whole of yesterday, after you’d disappeared, I’d begun to think you were.’

  ‘You sound,’ I tell her, ‘like your mother.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Having closed the door behind her, she opens it again.

  ‘As for Broughton Springs, that’s up to you,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. And I shan’t,’ she adds, ‘if you fail to come back here, come all that way to fetch you.’

  ‘Then, again, there’s Ardsley Edge.’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘And Cawthorne Castle.’

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘Places which, in the past, have inspired, some would say, my better work.’

  ‘You are as free,’ she tells me, ‘as a bird.’

  But I can see, apart from discussing me with Charlie – during the dark hours of the night, or perhaps the previous evening – she is saying this not merely to keep her spirits up but to put me on my guard – not against her, but against my own misgivings. She is doing it to alarm me: I have no one, she is saying, but Charlie and herself: biology alone, she might have said (taking a leaf from my book) is the cause of your distress, and not the conditions you were born in.

  The embolismic structure of – let us choose a mind at random – that of a once well-known author, playwright, painter and draughtsman, is exacerbated by circumstance, or what the theorists describe as nature, and that, too – though discounted by his second daughter – may be taken into account when assessing how responsible or otherwise he or other people are for his unprecedented actions.

  Verbosity was his greatest sin, she might have said, not least at the moment that he suspected that, against the odds (and the prognosis of his doctors) he might recover his peace of mind (never there to be recovered, he’d omitted to tell them, in the first place).

  ‘I’ve been tormented,’ I tell her, ‘the whole night long by the thought of mediocrity: all those practitioners of the same who comprise virtually the whole of those engaged on those activities I have been so busily engaged upon myself and who, by self-definition, come under the sobriquet of “failure”.’

  Her feet come from the stairs: ‘I’ve got your correspondence, dear. I’ve put it in your briefcase,’ and, ‘Glenda! Lottie! Time for school! We’re leaving in a minute!’

  Charlie, I assume, is late, or is delaying his departure in order, as is his not unusual custom, to give me the benefit of his advice sans wife and children in the background: ‘You are an old phoney,’ he told me, on one occasion, in Taravara Road, on a London visit, before he realised – or had it from Maidstone – I was already mad.

  ‘What is madness,’ I can see his much-chinned face enquire, ‘if not a cop-out we could all subscribe to?’ revising his view, alarmingly (and, incidentally, to my disappointment), on his first visit to Boady Hall: I’d been counting on cop-out, at the time, myself: that innocent, socialist vision that included all things but the view that life intrinsically is bad.

  ‘The final page,’ I tell Etty when I go down, ‘should have a single drawing – of the one woman who – I might as well admit it – dominated and still dominates my life, namely,’ I am about to tell her, ‘Isabella,’ only, with a suffusion of alarm (a shock of
recognition) she declares, ‘You’ve come down without your clothes,’ for, in the mirror of the kitchen I can see, my upper (and I presume my lower) body is as naked as the day when, traumatised by an earlier death, it came soundlessly from between my mother’s thighs.

  “This is the man I gave birth to: heredity in action, a close-up of death, a foetal spasm at the graveside of his eldest brother:” there, with the grace of God, go I.

  As the children arrive she offers me a towel and I say, ‘I’m on the way to the bathroom,’ with something of a laugh, at which, the moment I have gone, they begin to giggle.

  ‘Has Grandpa come down,’ I hear them say, ‘like that?’ and later, to Charlie, before she takes them off to school, Etty says, ‘He came down like that to shock us.’

  ‘We shall have to send you back,’ says Charlie when he comes up to my room (Mrs Otterman already flushing a vacuum outside the door) and when I say, ‘To where?’ he says, ‘To a place that Raynor recommends.’

  ‘Private,’ I ask him, ‘or National Health?’

  ‘The latter,’ he says, and adds, ‘knowing your appetite for social justice.’

  ‘I never sent my children to a private doctor – except, of course, in emergency (which happened twice) – nor to a private school,’ I tell him (as, no doubt I have, many times before), and when he replies, ‘Hypocrisy was always a dominant feature of your life,’ (does he talk like that to the local constituency Labour Party?), I respond, ‘Even when my wealth was sufficient to buy up a private school (one such became available, while we were living there, at the back of our home in Belsize Park – an area given over, almost exclusively, to private and therefore privileged education) I never had a second thought about sending any of our children to a state school, all of which, with one exception, gave them an education which you would have to travel for ever to find an equivalent in paucity of imagination, enterprise, credibility, professionalism and moral strength. I fought for years to raise their standards, entirely on my own, and for most of that time without success, only in the final years, having taken several years off my own life in the process, and when most other middle-class parents had removed their children to the private sector, did I finally come up trumps.’