by David Storey
Not that there’s much castle, to speak of, there at all.
‘I drew up sums in the past while standing there.’ Many a sunset watched with Bea: many a sunset watched on my own: the path across the fields, for instance, which led, via a footbridge across the Lin, across the golf-course to a back-garden ginnel leading, through someone’s garden (a fretted look from the scullery window), to Manor Road itself. ‘It is time,’ I say, ‘to make amends, to come to a judgement, to recognise all I’ve been through in the hope I shall not have to go through it all again.’
He heard Alki, from time to time, busy with her pots (preparing her husband’s lunch) in Taravara Road, welcoming the sound (all domestic sounds audible in that tiny London back-street house) as evidence of a life other than his own.
‘I sacrificed everything,’ I tell her, ‘for art,’ while she, above Cotman’s ‘Greta Bridge’, adjusts her glasses on her nose.
If I released the nude I painted of her, in the room above the barber’s, in Southgate, all those years ago, no one would recognise, I’m sure, anything other than another female.
‘Many people make the mistake of equating madness with irresponsibility. It’s nothing of the kind,’ I tell her. Bea, for instance, and that woman in the neighbour’s garden who came out each day to tend her plants, and whose appearance, from a distance of twenty-five feet, I mistook for that of Isabella, she and Isabella two figures in one, a definitive form of femininity, the possibilities of which I saw no end. ‘The first thing a madman discovers is his obligation to duties which he not only had never responded to before but had never even recognised. First and foremost,’ I add, ‘his duty to God. Not to his wife, not to his children, not to his vocation, but, above all else (“above all else” a phrase not chosen lightly) to …’
She has, that morning, plaited her hair (it must have taken quite a while: up early after a night spent talking to Charlie) and has coiled a plait above each ear – in a manner that reminds me, with a shock – a sensational spasm of recognition – of her grandmother sitting in the same room on her daughter’s bed, where I have found her as if by chance – allowing me to stroke her neck, which led moments later to her lying back, the vibrations of the floor beneath us echoed on the kitchen ceiling, Mrs Hopkins (Rose) enquiring, ‘What on earth was going on up there?’ when we went down, Bella, calm as a dove on a summer evening, responding, ‘Richard was helping me to move Bea’s bed: there’s so much dust collects beneath.
‘… higher things. Madness, after all, devolves from grief, and grief, in turn, devolves from loss,’ and when she says, ‘There’s so much, this morning, I’d like to do,’ stooping closer to her desk, ‘A View of Richmond, Yorkshire’ absorbing her attention, I respond, ‘If you don’t take note of what I tell you there’s no way for either of us to look ahead. Charlie’s aspirations to a general good are no more realisable than they were two thousand years ago when the first theologian of the Christian religion enjoined us to seek our salvation in fear and trembling, that is, within the parameters, clinically defined, of a sub-acute anxiety neurosis.’
‘If you’re going to Cawthorne Castle,’ raising her head, ‘put on your shoes and winter coat. We bought them, if you recall, expressly for this weather. And take enough money to get you there and back and, if you are going to be late, have the courtesy to ring us. I’ll give you the number.’
‘I know this number,’ I tell her, ‘by heart.’
‘It’s changed.’
‘Changed?’ I am, without intending to, pausing in the door.
She is writing – has been writing on a piece of paper which, getting up, she places in my trouser pocket.
‘Remember where I’ve put it.’
‘You look so much like,’ I tell her, ‘Isabella. Is it one of her photographs you’ve been looking at?’ to which, ignoring the enquiry, she adds, ‘Bryan Raynor will be here in half an hour. Don’t even go into the grounds until then.’
‘This higher responsibility,’ I tell her, ‘is all that it’s cracked up to be. The physiological implications of which I don’t even have to go on about.’
So that one morning, in the garden, looking down – the heat of the summer (a July afternoon) – the humid heat that strikes these airless back-street yards – I see her in a low-cut blouse, stooping to her roses (in no way as effulgent as those of Bella) and, from this angle, glimpse her breasts, shadowed, within the collar of her blouse, and recall a not dissimilar occasion when, stooping, Bella too, inadvertently, had disclosed her breasts, stooping to me in her evening gown (twin fruits of femininity transcending transcendentity itself).
‘In half an hour?’
‘I’ll come down,’ she says, ‘and see him with you.’
‘No doubt he will see you without me as well.’
When, after returning to her desk, she doesn’t look up, I announce, ‘If you look like that in seven years’ time, when Lottie brings her first boyfriend home – conceivably from King Edward’s – you will find yourself in an impossible situation. You will fall in love with an eighteen-year-old youth and neither the grounds nor Ardsley Wood, nor the entire fields and surrounding copses will be sufficient to contain what it is you are endeavouring to hide, not even the railway line, or the motorway from here to London. Wherefore, I ask you, where will you hide that which years later, you will find, there is no confessing?’
For the first time since I have come into the room she glances up directly: she examines my gaze for several seconds – and I see that Etty is, by no stretch of the imagination – despite the plaits – an Isabella: she is not her grandmother’s grandchild so much as the daughter of the opportunist, subvertionist, duplicitous Richard Fenchurch – as inclined to betray his class as he is his family: ‘all for art!’ he might have said as vehemently as now he cries, ‘all that I can gather unto myself!’
Raynor is a small man: at our previous meeting – a week, ten days, a month before? – he has told me in his youth he wished to be a jockey: ‘Until I saw the horses: I’ve never looked at another since.’ Slight, with sharply fashioned features: ‘Like a bird of prey,’ I told Etty on that occasion the moment he had left, with no interest in the past (The past, Mr Fenchurch, is only a fiction’), he comes into the sitting-room, distinct from the living-room (the children largely excluded) and says, ‘So you’ve been running off again. We’ll have a rope around your ankles, like Corcoran’s horses had, they tell me, when he hobbled them in the yard.’
‘I take it I’m to be seen as something other than a dumb animal?’ I enquire.
‘Far from it!’ cheerily, as he looks round for a chair, selecting a straight-backed one as if to signal he has more important things to see to (and far more important on his mind).
‘I have dispensed with pills,’ I tell him. ‘And I have not caught a fever. No chills or sneezes or pains in the chest. I am, in short, in tip-top condition.’
His pale blue eyes, veiled by light, thin lashes even lighter than his thin, fine hair: auburn (‘He is,’ Etty explains, previous to our first encounter, ‘a shy and self-effacing man.’
‘We have, in that case,’ I rejoined, ‘much in common.’).
Bares my arm, takes my blood pressure: makes no comment. ‘The worst moment of all,’ I tell him, ‘in the maze is to discover that the minotaur is preferable to any other choice. That one is the minotaur and there is no better offer.’
‘Mrs Stott has asked me to recommend a doctor,’ he says.
‘I thought you were a doctor,’ I tell him.
A window looks out to the front of the house: the descending slope, the remnants of the beech hedge, the crescent beds of roses (pruned) inset at each corner of the lawn – and a window at the side of the room, framed, to its right, by the massive fireplace, looks out to the iron-gated arch which, in the old days, led to Corcoran’s yard: nothing but neatly-tiled roofs is visible above the old stone wall.
‘A psychiatrist,’ he says.
He sits, as might a petitioner, on his ha
rd-backed chair, I, for my part, reclining on a couch (as close to the confessional as, I imagine, will set him at his ease).
‘I’ve seen all the psychiatrists I intend to,’ I tell him. ‘Many, in fact, have followed my example, having moved on to, or homed in on my discovery of the super-authorial self, a multidimensional phenomenon and the closest thing we know to God. Indeed, it’s more than my contention that it is the God in all of us, unique, articulate, all-comprehending, our miraculous window on paradise.’
‘Doctor Robeson is an admirer of your work,’ he says.
‘If we know enough,’ I say, ‘already, why on earth should we need to know more?’
‘Another view,’ he says, ‘is helpful,’ in no way swayed, I observe, by my beneficent smile.
‘Are you a native of these parts?’ I ask.
‘As a matter of fact,’ easing his trousers around his knees, ‘my father was a local doctor.’
‘In Ardsley?’
He shakes his head. ‘Several miles away’ He adds, ‘I was always interested in the mines.’
‘After horses.’
‘Oh, horses came much earlier,’ he says. ‘I had ambitions, at one time, to be a vet, but the examination requirements were more demanding than those for medical school, so I followed the family practice. My uncles and brother are doctors, too.’
‘In these parts?’
‘In London. One of them,’ he adds, ‘was a former colleague of Professor Maidstone.’
‘Oh, Maidstone,’ I reflect, inwardly comparing his avuncular frame with the ascetic one before me.
‘He, too, has a high opinion of your work.’
‘But, then,’ I tell him, ‘he’s retired. The fate, I’m afraid, of all those who have had a high opinion of me. Or my work. It appears to be a pre-condition, a high opinion of Richard Fenchurch and retirement going,’ I continue, ‘hand in hand.’
‘He refers, in his notes, to your habit of giving subjective reactions an air of objectivity,’ he says, adding, ‘Maidstone,’ as I frown.
‘He never mentioned that,’ I tell him.
‘I’m sure he did.’ He bows his head (leaning forward, his hands clasped loosely between his thighs).
‘I’d have remembered if he had.’
‘You may, on the other hand,’ he says, ‘have chosen to forget.’
‘And forgotten,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I’m far too clever,’ I tell him, ‘for that.’
‘None of us are, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘Which brings me back to why I would like you to see my colleague.’
‘Not Donny Robeson?’ I ask.
‘His name is Donald Robeson,’ he says.
‘I knew him at school, if it’s the same Donald Robeson,’ I tell him.
‘He never mentioned that,’ he says.
‘I’ll run rings round him,’ I tell him. ‘What new observations will he have to make that I and others haven’t made already?’
‘It’s not so much a question of something new as merely to have an outside view. And one up to date, of course,’ he adds.
‘To date?’
‘Something,’ he says, ‘to bounce things off.’
‘I’ve bounced a few things off Robeson in the past, a few more,’ I tell him, ‘shouldn’t do him any harm.’
‘Having known you in the past might,’ he tells me, ‘be of assistance now. Particularly,’ he goes on, ‘at a time of your life when none of your other advisers knew you.’
‘Is he tall and thin?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘Red hair?’
‘Balding.’
‘Oxford.’
‘He was.’
‘One of the school’s great scholars,’ I tell him.
‘Was he?’ Getting up he re-opens his bag. ‘I thought,’ he says, ‘I might look at your chest.’
‘Heart?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ he says.
When, a little later, he re-packs his bag, he says, ‘I’d like to prescribe some pills. See what effect they have over the next few months.’
‘You might prescribe,’ I tell him, ‘but I’m afraid, even with Donny on your back, I shall not be inclined to take them.’
‘They’re a precaution, rather than a cure,’ he says. ‘Rather like lithium in the past, they’ll help you to live a fuller life.’
‘I live a full enough life,’ I tell him, ‘already. When the time comes to go you’ll find me,’ I add, ‘at the head of the queue.’
‘What if you only half go?’ he says. ‘The life of an invalid, after a cardiac attack, isn’t something, I’m sure, that you’d welcome.’
‘I’ve had these pills,’ I tell him, ‘before. They didn’t do me any good then. They won’t do me any good now,’ and, at a knock on the door, Etty pausing on the threshold a moment before entering, I add, ‘See what your chum is up to. Prescribing pills he knows I won’t take. From now on, Etty, it’s mind over matter.’
‘Mind devolves from matter,’ Raynor says (portentously, in my view: not the sort of statement either welcome or expected from a village doctor), ‘not the other way around.’
‘I shall get well,’ I tell him, ‘in my own good time, and by good,’ I go on, ‘I mean good of my own prescription.’
“Nothing,” Fenchurch wrote, “was resolved by this meeting with the doctor, in his liveried pin-stripe suit (light grey in (vivid) contrast to Maidstone’s charcoal), but,” he paused, “the prospect of running rings round Donny Robeson after all these years (he beat me in the mile and got a scholarship – after special coaching – to St Edmund’s College) brings me – more than the threat of partial paralysis – back to life.”
‘He says your pulse is high (“fevered”, he describes it), your blood pressure is no better, if not slightly worse, than it was before, and he says your mood is too volatile to be allowed to go out on your own. He’s concerned,’ she adds, ‘you’re taking no medication.’
‘I am not,’ I tell her, ‘a chemical bin,’ (though I have been, even more than Vivienne, in the past), she having spoken to Raynor in the hall for several minutes – then several minutes (considerably) longer in the yard outside – even stooping to his car door after he’s got inside: ‘He’s doing us a favour coming to the house: most patients, other than the terminally ill, have to go to him.’
‘He doesn’t consider that a favour, he feels flattered,’ I tell her. ‘Called out, in this provincial backwater, Etty, to see the scribe, plagiarist, grovelist and playwrong, friend of the grate and the gourd, novelless, playless, plagueless, friendless: good God, he’ll make a fortune with his memoirs.’
‘Will you see Robeson?’ she says.
‘Once I’ve run Donny,’ I tell her, ‘round this provincial patch I shall be fit and ready, my dear, for anything!’
19
Cawthorne Castle overlooks the upper reaches of the Lin: a bend of the river skirts it to the north, flowing along a broad, alluvial bed, while to the south, the east and the west, lies the wooded hill-land of the lower Pennine slopes. On an opposing hill, beyond the river, stands the Onasett headland.
I am too tired, I am tempted to tell Etty, to go out, having discovered, after sixty years (doesn’t do to be precise), that my body isn’t my own, merely the property of an artificer who has little, if anything, to do with what’s inside (the facility, Etty, of everything I’ve done), leaving the house, however, in Charlie’s boots (stronger than my own) and my winter coat, with (as if I needed them) precise instructions (‘they have moved the stop’) where to catch the bus, for, if I go the ‘back’ way to Linfield, through the lesser mining villages to the west (a favourite route in the past, but now awash with drugs), instead of the more familiar route to the north-north-west, I can get off close to the castle where, at the zenith of my powers, I wrote, ‘Meditations Standing on a Hilltop at Cawthorne’ – yet minutes later see Raynor leave his car, parked at the kerb, and enter a shop and come out ca
rrying a bag (the shop’s a chemist’s). Having glanced in my direction he shakes his head (face flushed above his light grey suit no overcoat for him), gets in his car, adjusts his mirror (a reflection of myself) and, re-adjusting it, drives off.
A stiff breeze is blowing on Cawthorne hill: the town lies in a haze across the valley: to the west, obscured by cloud, is the fissure in the Pennine wall through which the upper river flows (cascading through a limestone gorge: sandstone at a lower level, its ochre boulders strewn in its bed).
I enjoy the bus ride more than (an unfinished sentence is, if frequently repeated, an invariable sign, Maidstone says, of a schizoid condition).
The disassociated frame of mind.
The disassembly of his head.
I am still at the stop (the other side of the road to the direct-to-Linfield stop) waiting for the ‘back way’ bus.
After a moment of reflection, Fenchurch bows his head, contemplates the footpath by his feet (the eroded flags) and returns, past the church and the rectory, to the door in the old stone wall and makes his way, up the steepening slope, beneath the trees, to a recently-installed wicket-gate in the beech hedge (Charlie’s idea, matching the one that leads to the orchard), entering the front garden of his daughter’s house, his wife’s childhood home and, glancing in the window of the living-room with the hope of glimpsing the love and longing of his life, the woman without whom his existence has no meaning, re-enters the front door which, by his estimation, he has left only moments before.
‘The inclination never to complete a sentence is invariably a sign of,’ Maidstone pauses to illustrate, unwittingly, the state of mind in question.
‘Back?’ the vacuuming, at least in the hallway, finished, Mrs Otterman popping out from the kitchen.
‘Back?’ Etty coming out, spectacles raised above her head, from her study (once Bea’s bedroom).
‘I have,’ I tell her, ‘changed my mind. My mind,’ and such a mind, tuned, I reflect, to molecular phases, ‘is susceptible to change,’ I add.
I mount the stairs, still in Charlie’s boots and my winter coat. ‘I had envisaged taking the back way bus, through those villages which, now the pits have gone, are seldom seen – domestic scree, the grey and crumbled houses amidst the fields and copses, the little streams and dells, the unexpected ponds and lakes, the whole awash, I am told, with drugs, theft, burglary, violence to obtain the same – a sea which will finally engulf this village, this house – everything we have known and loved – you see them now, waiting at the stop, behind the houses, in windows and doors, unemployed miners, their wives, their children, waiting, watching every move – “What,” they are asking, “did we dig all that fucking coal for, to be cast on the waste-tip with everything else?” but found that a discontinued course of action is as relevant, in this instance, as a discontinued sentence. Stop.’