A Serious Man

by David Storey

  He has left the room – yet only to fetch his briefcase, for, returning to the door, he stands there, at my declaration, ‘come up trumps’, fastening the catch (the old-fashioned type, characterised by a flap, and not the miniature suitcase variety popular today), and adds, as if a postcript to his final remark, ‘The choice is yours.’

  ‘The choice was mine,’ I tell him, ‘a long time ago (and see where I am now,’ I add).

  ‘You can button up,’ he says, fastening, head stooped, the middle button on his pin-striped jacket – a rotundity below the waist the only blemish on a not unyouthful figure, ‘or,’ raising his head, ‘be buttoned down. The choice is yours,’ he says again.

  ‘You are kicking,’ I tell him, ‘against the pricks, a euphemism, in biblical times, for a genetic disability manifesting itself in the form of a disingenuous indisposition to fulfil the expectations of others,’ he already turning from the door, something in his pocket absorbing his attention, his briefcase now beneath his arm. ‘This came, by the way,’ he says, handing me an envelope. ‘The writing looks familiar,’ he continues as he lays it on the bed.

  ‘In that case,’ I tell him, ‘it must be from Bea. Bea,’ I continue, ‘and the private parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Health, the ubiquitous one-armed bandit who is never off the news-screens at present, much, I might add, to Etty’s pleasure. All our children appear to delight in their mother’s choice of husband – her first not being a choice, she says, and therefore doesn’t count,’ and when, picking up the envelope (without a second glance), I conclude, ‘Their father, I’m afraid, they’ve no time for at all,’ he declares, ‘At least he makes a go of things,’ turning once more so that his final phrase he gives to the stairs – and Mrs Otterman, not oblivious, despite her vacuum, on the landing, ‘from a background, I might add, as unpromising as yours.’

  ‘One arm versus half a mind,’ I tell him, at which he is about to add, ‘She must have a penchant for cripples,’ at least, I do my best to imagine so, only, glancing at his watch, I hear a strangulated, ‘I’m late, Mrs Otterman. Mrs Stott isn’t back yet. Could you keep an eye on Father?’ – the sixty-nine-year-old proletarian fake with his faded if once-pristine reputation for being the only outstanding depicter of working-class life since that androgynous aesthete Lawrence, the one compounded of the elements of earth and water (phlegm), the other of air and fire (bathos).

  I hear his car a moment later and the (pregnant) silence from the landing as Mrs Otterman, switching off her vacuum, contemplates, in the absence of her mistress (let alone her master), the possibility of being – it must have crossed her mind – assaulted by the mindless mogul in the bedroom who was once described in a national journal as ‘the only writer who, in his depiction of the material of English working-class life, illuminates ideas.’

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Fenchurch?’ comes from the heart of Yorkshire: guttural in its strength: no thoughts of anything other than combativeness promised there.

  ‘I’m well,’ I tell her, and when she calls, ‘Anything I can get you?’ immediately respond, ‘No, thank you, Mrs Otterman. I shall, in a moment, be getting dressed,’ (an invitation to the picnic, the dissolute old devil whom even a potential Nobel-Prize-winning wife could not constrain) at which, after a pause, the vacuuming begins again.

  How much I should have liked the previous mistress of the house, as she did on so many occasions, to have come in the door and enquire, ‘Where are you going to draw today? If you’ll tell me where you’ll be (when I’ve done the shopping, chores, housework, lunch) I’ll come out and join you. I fancy a walk in Ardsley Wood,’ I choosing a suitable rendezvous in which to sketch, and pleasurably anticipate her arrival: the reeded stream, the leaf-strewn grass, her summer dress, the sheen of her stockings.

  There were times, on these occasions, when I suspected that Corcoran might be, contrary to appearances, a patron of the arts; that, having come to a judgement about my potential, he had decided to contribute his wife, a testimony to and an encouragement of my talent. ‘You walk in the woods, if you like!’ I heard him – in moments of reverie – exclaim. ‘Never mind the neighbours. For the sake of his art, which I know is buried in him somewhere, allow him to take with you, as well as your reputation (for housewifeliness, domesticity, fidelity, etc.) whatever liberties he likes. Go with him! Give the genius what he wants!’ I endeavouring, on our next encounter to identify in his smiles and frowns, his gestures and appearance, if not an endorsement a hint of a contributory fervour which might, in the name of inspiration, betray a complicity in his handing over his wife.

  How I loved her! When, on one occasion, lying beside me in Ardsley Wood, the sunlight in the ferns above her head, she enquired, tracing my lips beneath her finger, ‘Would you give up writing and painting if it threatened to come between us?’ I responded, without a second’s thought, ‘Of course!’ at which she laughed and, not for the first or last time, exclaimed, ‘You’re such a rotten liar! Let’s hope you never have to make the choice,’ nestling her deliciously smelling hair against my cheek as, side by side, we gazed up at the ferns together.

  Sometimes in the wood we lit a fire, a bundle of twigs, a rotted log, and, with a pleasure derived from domesticity as much as anything else, watched the flames flicker beneath the trees, the smoke drifting up against the darkness. ‘How nice it would be,’ I’d say, ‘if we could be married. I’d never have to paint, or write again: just to wake to you each morning,’ to which, invariably, she’d reply, ‘When I am eighty, my dear, you will be forty-five.’ (‘Forty-six,’ I would correct her.) ‘Beauty of your sort,’ I’d tell her, ‘doesn’t fade. (It deepens and increases.)’ ‘So speaks,’ she’d say, ‘a young and, if I may say so, not only inexperienced but dishonest man.’

  The writing is my own: “Dear Richard Fenchurch, this is written in case (when your daughter arrives to take you ‘home’ – to that damned house which (nowadays) brings you no pleasure – because in the past it brought you so much) you find, once there you are out of your mind. Recall how much peace, despite loathing it, your Taravara home brought Vi: ‘I want to be a star!’ and, ‘I am the legend that dreams are made of: when I am dead there will be films about my life played by actresses who couldn’t hold a candle to me. I call that irony: you, I believe, a suitable reward.’

  No doubt this finds you as it’s leaving me: confused (terrified), waiting for relief from the tribulations that have plagued my life in general but specifically the last five years when not one morning has there been when I have not woken to a degree of fear and dispiritation that would drive any normal person mad (and this abnormal one also).

  “No other writer in his time” is crossed out and replaced by, “No other woman (I am speaking of Bella) ever did me so much good. ‘Isn’t it strange,’ she told me one day in the wood, ‘you’re the only man I know on whom to gaze has been enough.’ What Christ was to the author of the Philippian letters she has been to me: an illumination that transfigures (the radiance of her looks – and, let’s face it, the dexterity of her touch).

  Now you’re in that room you’ve thought so much about; now you’re in that bed; now you’re gazing, each morning, at the village – bereft of its pit, headgears and slag heap, now the whole place has returned to something not indistinguishable from its medieval past – its one or two burghers, the ‘big man’ in the manor, endowed with the debilitating accoutrements of a post-socialist existence – you’ll know what it’s like to be out of touch – in a way you never were, and never will be, in Taravara Road with its brutalised and brutalising neighbours, its graffiti, its dereliction, its public squalor and its private – how would you describe it? – indolence.”

  ‘All right?’ A pink-cheeked face around the door: breathlessness within the aproned bosom (head of vacuum in her hand). ‘Had a letter?’

  Speaking to an idiot: but then, of course, I reflect, I am.

  ‘From myself.’

  ‘Yourself?’

  ‘Addresse
d to me at this address. Written before I came here.’

  More redolent of masculine assertiveness than receptivity, her bosom.

  ‘Keep you up to date?’

  ‘It does. If not,’ I tell her, ‘a little in advance.’

  ‘On your way to the bathroom?’ Indicates the towel. ‘Why don’t you get dressed?’

  ‘I thought,’ I tell her, ‘I’d have a rest,’ and then, ‘I’m about to do some writing.’

  ‘In the buff?’

  ‘I often write like this.’ I let the towel drop, and recall that she has seen more naked men in the bath-tub by the fire than I have had hot dinners, as companionable, and as discounted, Mrs Otterman, as any domestic pet.

  ‘Best not let Mrs Stott know about it!’ with something of a laugh.

  ‘Or,’ I tell her, ‘Doctor Raynor.’

  ‘Nor Doctor Raynor!’ Another laugh. ‘He’ll have you locked up in no time,’ a threat which, casually delivered, has an immediate effect.

  ‘Think I’ll get dressed,’ I tell her, at which she leaves the room.

  “This is from a chum of yours whom you may have forgotten, the one who lived, disguised as you, in Taravara Road the week before Etty was due to arrive: the one who butters your bread and toasts your toast and goes to bed as you at night in that Vi-less room at the back of the house where the sounds from the neighbours are least intrusive – and the sounds of Vivienne, when she lived there, less extreme: ‘I’ll never be a star!’”

  ‘No point,’ she tells me, ‘reading that letter if you’ve written it yourself,’ leaning in the door.

  I woke this morning to the rhyme in my head, ‘Reason and its guide: reason and its pride,’ and thought, ‘That presages a return to painting,’ and later came the thought which never troubled me years ago but which now troubles me almost daily: ‘How could a woman fall in love with her daughter’s lover without the slightest guilt, remorse or, as far as I could discern it, (not simply unease but) anguish? At the time I took her to be naive, then I took her to be cunning, then, after talking to her father, that it was due to ‘genes’ – the sea, the sand, the sub-tropical beaches, the whore-house ridden coast of that almost-inland sea: yet all these, I considered later, were excuses to pacify a sense of fear which, on all those occasions I waited at a bus-stop, approached the house, sauntered up and down a road, sat on a log, preceded our encounters – until I saw the turn of her head, the swing of her skirt: her high-heeled shoes, her low-heeled sandals, her blouse (her jumper, her scarf, her coat).

  ‘Naivety,’ I thought, ‘must be the answer,’ as if, in reality, Bea were not her daughter (‘Don’t you need a coat? Have you put away your books/clothes/things upstairs?’ as she might enquire, not of her own but anyone’s child). ‘She is of a race with which the Anglo-Saxons have never come to terms,’ I thought – the one from the shores of a turquoise sea, the other from pitch blackness: the mine, the cauldron, the pit.

  ‘Naivety,’ I said, ‘of course,’ and add, ‘Of which I took advantage. Bea idolised her mother,’ and when Mrs Otterman says, ‘Who?’ the vacuum cleaner in her hand, its orifice directed at me, I continue, ‘My wife. She thought her mother a remarkable woman. “A child of nature,” she being a scientist and not a poet. “It’s why my father married her. Her mother, too, was much the same, with the reputation, rumoured in the family, of being a Turkish prostitute.”’

  In Taravara Road, from my workroom window, I see, each morning in an adjoining garden, the wife of a neighbour: in a benign and wholly passive way, even when Vivienne was alive, I fell in love with her stocky figure, stooping to the plants (another horticulturist), only to discover that she is Greek by birth – and then, not even Greek, but Turkish (a cross-border liaison in a war-torn land) and, God help me, the same age as Isabella when we first met – that fateful glance, open and accepting, through the living-room window to the evening-lit figure in the garden outside. ‘How I loved her,’ I announce, but the termagant Yorkshire miner’s wife, the vacuum turned on behind her, is already thrusting at the floor and, above the wailing, calls, ‘I want to do in here.’

  ‘Alki’, I discover, is her name, the neighbour’s wife, and though her beauty is of the sort that can, with discretion, only be admired from a distance, her smile and her composure (a garden-to-window wave) are enough to reassure me.

  Etty is back: ‘Sorry I’m late, Mrs Otterman,’ the lowered tone, ‘Is he all right?’ and the breathless, flushed-cheeked face, ‘Mrs Otterman says you’re dressing.’

  ‘So I am,’ I tell her.

  ‘Magnificent,’ I announce and when she asks, ‘What is?’ reply, ‘All that life entails.’

  She is sitting at her desk, the window of her study looking out to the trees at the back of the house – a room which, in my youth, was Bea’s bedroom and from the window of which she waved on the memorable day Bella and I climbed Sugden’s Bank, lying immediately before us, to look at the Swansons’ house.

  ‘What,’ I ask her, ‘are you writing?’

  ‘I am tinkering,’ she says, ‘with a life of Cotman. It comes,’ she goes on, ‘as some relief.’

  ‘A self-effacing fellow, whose personality,’ I tell her, ‘had little appeal but whose work can only be matched with that of Girtin and, with reservations, Peter de Wint. A genius,’ I continue, ‘before his time, the progenitor of much in twentieth-century art, not excluding Cézanne and Picasso, and prone to depression at the end of his life, caused, to some degree, I haven’t a doubt, by neglect and the consequent cultural isolation,’ adding, ‘Why don’t you choose a living model? No one else will have the chance. If it turns out you’ve picked a dud – another Haydon, say, rather than a Christopher Wood – you can, when I’m gone, turn back, if not to Cotman – a worthy subject – someone else. Constable, of course, I’ve never liked. I can’t stand the coarseness of his textures, the paint put on as if with a trowel, and Turner is far too literary for my taste. Except, of course, for the first decade of his century, when he painted like a dream. But whores: his life has whores, and misogyny,’ I go on, ‘in plenty. If you follow my advice on this occasion you’d make a killing. As for myself, I’m astonished that someone hasn’t tried already. A film,’ I conclude, ‘would be the least of your worries.’

  Removing her glasses she massages the bridge of her nose.

  She frowns.

  ‘Cotman wasn’t prone,’ she says, with surprising intensity, ‘he was ill.’

  ‘He suffered,’ I tell her, ‘from timidity and a lack of resolution. Timidity of execution and irresolute ambition. A parochial English figure. Or do you, unlike with Caravaggio, see much of him in me?’

  The frown intensifies between her puckered eyes: the spontaneity – the turning over of a new leaf – of earlier that day has gone.

  ‘I can’t stand these English mediocrities,’ I add. ‘They dominate the scene but when I’m gone we’ll see who’s been the master.’

  Her gaze, like mine, is on the trees: the bare oak and beech and poplar: I am, rather than defining a position, digging my own grave.

  ‘What’s so wrong,’ I ask, ‘in writing not about something you’ve studied but something you’ve observed? You can incorporate that part of my life before you even knew me. You have, before you,’ I conclude, ‘a seminal source.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says, ‘his reticence is inseparable from the quality of his work.’

  (‘A quality,’ she might have concluded, ‘I very much admire.’)

  ‘When he should have ventured all he plumped for patronage,’ I tell her, ‘of a particularly unenlightened sort. What originality he did possess, to, as I’ve said, no small degree, he meticulously squandered. If only Girtin had had his life span. Dead at twenty-seven.’

  It rains: or is the wind flailing dust, from the gutter and the roofs, against the panes?

  In the rain, one evening, Isabella and I lay beneath the ferns in Ardsley Wood: ‘Pretend this is a house,’ she said, while the drops – she laughing – fell across he
r face.

  ‘I am,’ she says, ‘too close to the subject,’ and returns her gaze to the paper strewn across her desk. ‘If,’ she adds, her head still bowed, her glasses replaced, ‘you’re such an interesting subject, why not try yourself?’

  I am in this house with Isabella: we embrace: the windows are blacked out with tar – sprayed on by a figure in overalls outside. I crawl out from a crashed and burning car and find my glasses frosted: ‘I shall never,’ I tell Bella, ‘see you again. (I shall never write and paint)’: a dream the night before I heard she’d died (Bea, but not Corcoran, with her).

  ‘If you’re going out let’s keep to the arrangement we’ve worked out already,’ she says, ‘and let me or Mrs Otterman know.’

  Meanwhile, at the back of Fenchurch’s mind, spring, like feathers, wings.

  “The writer, painter, raconteur, plagiarist, poseur and charlatan (he raised charlatanism to the heights of a respectable profession) was born in the city of Linfield in 1934 (or was it five – or ’33?), date, as yet, to be decided: he had no education other than the one normally available to the majority of children at that time: drilled in spelling, writing and arithmetic (a spouter of mathematical tables backward by the time he was seven), he advanced from one educational peak to another with a dexterity which was the envy of his peers and aroused much pride in his family (if enmity amongst his brothers).”

  ‘I thought I might go to Cawthorne Castle.’

  ‘Isn’t it far?’ without looking up.

  ‘No further than yesterday,’ I tell her. (And yesterday no further than the day before). ‘I would like,’ I go on, ‘to sum up my life (draw a line beneath the account; find out, for instance, how much I owe, how much I am in debt, how much, if anything, is left over.’)

  ‘What has that to do with Cawthorne Castle?’