by David Storey
‘Maidstone said,’ however, I go on, ‘that a cyclonic depression of the sort I’ve got is invariably the preamble to something worse. I had such visions, Etty, of the castle, the town spread out below, Onasett across the valley, its ridge poking up beyond the trees.’
He couldn’t write,
nor could he right
the wrong
that writing of his wrongs
had done.
The thought occurred, ‘I don’t feel well,’ (decide to tell her), lying there, moments later, boots still on, ‘I’ll go to bed.’
‘Are you all right?’
She coming in.
‘That doctor.’ Said, ‘I think I’ll rest. (Think I’ll go to sleep). Even though I’ve just got up.’ Shouldn’t have dressed. Threats from Charlie. Best behaviour. Found a place not far from here. ‘Greater responsibility to greater things unseen when not insane,’ et cetera. One thought is always back of brain. Has no one found a master?
Two:
‘Caught a chill,’ flu (from walking in his slippers).
All day he lay there.
Bells.
Church.
Midday: rhetoric was his strongest suit.
If writing didn’t work he could always paint; if painting didn’t work – he didn’t recall the score exactly: hydrochloric acid mixed with amphetamines.
Well, then, Fenchurch, what sort of person am I? Strong, as a youth; stronger as a man: dependent, despite that, on women as vulnerable as himself: picture entitled by others, not himself – Maidstone, Mackendrick, Raynor, et al, always looking for the bottom line: inverted paranoia.
Last night he had had a peculiar dream: he had brought an old steam engine up from London and parked it – to people’s amusement – in the field at the back of the house at Manor Road: crowds had collected – figures from his past, contemporaries who, as the saying goes, he had left behind: doltards, thickheads, provincial oafs. He joined in, along with his engine, a ‘festival of art’: films and pictures (poems and books: songs and dancing) ending, anachronistically, in a football match of the kind he had played at school but involving, rather than a team, these figures (and many more) from his past. At the end of the dream the field, flattened by the festivity, was deserted: the engine stood alone, gigantic and absurd in its garish colours, with its giant metal wheels and its smoking funnel. He set off, directing it from behind, on the long road back to London: no one, other than a policeman, came to shake his hand: no one, he observed, was there to see him off. He had one last ambition – to park the engine in front of his house and allow his parents to see it: that ambition, too, he set aside – for he was, he reminded himself, already on the road and, once started, he knew from experience there was no turning back.
He woke with a clear view of his past: he woke, he recalled later, not to a familiar sense of terror – fearfulness, apprehension – but to a peculiar sense of calm: he and Bea, he reflected, had never lived: they had been joined, throughout their adult lives, in a common venture: the steam engine, with its gargantuan wheels, its hissing valves, its gigantic funnel, its superfluous power, was a symbol of his writing and painting: he had worked to achieve, not so much fame as recognition and she to raise a family of – as it turned out – five vividly contrasted children. He had failed, she succeeded: ‘Bea,’ he said, on waking, aloud, and then, curiously, in the same loud voice, he had added, without the thought having, until that moment, been in his head, ‘That’s why she took everything I had: the house, my writing, my money – even our children: she knew about her mother, and this, she felt, is what she deserved – what she was owed by the man who had betrayed her in a way that could, even if explained, or understood, never be forgiven.’
She has come to success by climbing on my back, the Nobel Prize acquired, he reflected, at my expense. And I thought last night I had never slept!
I am ill, unwell, as a consequence of Raynor’s visit, that putative jockey (doctorial vet: diminutive build and threat of confinement) and the most absurd suggestion of all I should see a contemporary of mine with whom I was in competition throughout my school career.
And then, she knows: ‘Are you going mad?’ she would, ingenuously, at the time, enquire as she might, ‘Is this the right way to stain a cell?’ This – he clutched his heart – is a consequence of that. ‘That’s why, of course, she instantly agreed,’ aloud, ‘to my coming here: “You go there”: to rub it in (“Meet my Nemesis” the title of the picture).’
Bereft of wife (possessions) God: she wishes me to be confronted by what I am (defined by my omissions). ‘If this is her way of telling me she knows then I have nothing left to fear,’ he told her: he was, he reflected – with a peculiar calmness, considering his position – about to fall.
She knows.
I know she knows.
I know she knows I know she knows.
“Dear Bea, not only have I discovered that your theory that the stream that runs (a polluted beck) through the middle of Ardsley, and which, you suspected, was flanked by reeds in medieval times, and thereby gave its name to the house built on this site previous to The People’s Palace, is wrong, but that this original house derived its name from the colour of the sandstone of which it was built: red (hence, Rede House). Which brings me to a lesser point, namely,” I made a pact with fate (read ‘fete’, the subject of my dream last night), the lore of self-expression. I lost my art to Beatrice Kells (her professional name) but really to her mother, “the doctor came today and wants to place me in the hands of a quack – a putative quack when I knew him at school. Didn’t you go out with Robeson (D.), he wanting to put one over on me, you wanting to get back at me also? Tall, thin, sporty, but not as good as he thought, and with parents who had a chauffeured limousine?
Etty is convinced I’m out of remission.
P.S. Mrs Otterman says the principal industry in the village is the procurement and the sale of drugs which makes it surprising that the Hall, unlike most houses in the village, hasn’t been broken into more often (twice: nothing of interest taken), but it does suggest – despite Charlie’s New Labour Line – conceivably because of it – they won’t (we won’t) be here for long: a more modest dwelling closer to Linfield – or even in London (though never mentioned) – is on the cards, Charlie champing to get his hands on global abuses of humanity again, the local ones too horrible to mention: debilitation of a class, almost of a race, certainly a species, that proud, autocratic (conservative), humanist fervour associated with what, at one time, was a necessary profession (‘a rat in a hole,’ my father described it).
P.P.S. I am better than I’ve ever been.”
‘Do you want,’ she says, ‘to take your pills?’ (She has been to the chemist to get them: holds them out).
‘I caught a chill,’ I tell her. ‘I shall stay in bed. Nothing to write home about – apart,’ I go on, ‘from a note to your mother.’
‘Are you taking to heart what Raynor said?’ glasses pushed to the top of her head – a mannerism I never liked (two supernumerary eyes, etc.).
‘I’ve decided,’ I tell her, ‘to stay in bed.’
‘I ought to call Raynor back,’ she says.
‘Carry on with Cotman,’ I tell her. ‘I,’ I assure her, ‘will be all right.’
The etymology of grief, the epistemology of madness.
The plight of the middling asses.
‘I shall,’ I further reassure her, ‘draw the line (beneath all these armless jesters). Is your father farther from the truth than your father’s father ever was? What’s it like,’ I further enquire, ‘to be embraced by a single arm? Does he use it to support himself or embrace where others have embraced before?’ adding, ‘I saw Raynor shopping in the village and felt so ill I came back home to bed. All those hours of introspection on which,’ I conclude, ‘there’s been no return,’ (a terror of being re-interned).
Neurones and syntases.
‘One other thing,’ I interrupt, ‘I weigh too much. I shall have to sl
im.’
He went, in the end, in Charlie’s car, though it was Etty who came with him. ‘Charlie, I suppose, has gone to work?’ I enquire as we drive into the grounds of the North London Royal and when I observe we are parking in the forecourt of Eastley Hall, the former Linfield Municipal Lunatic Asylum – passed by, on numerous occasions, on the way to school (its grey brick, mullion-windowed, gothic façade) – having driven all the way in silence – she says, ‘He has,’ manoeuvring the car into a vacant parking bay.
‘It’s not,’ I tell her, ‘so different from Boady Hall.’
‘Pleasanter,’ she says.
‘Worse.’
‘Some things get better, Father,’ she says, and might have added, ‘and some get worse,’ but continues, ‘It has greatly improved in recent years.’
‘Little that I can see,’ I tell her.
‘But then, you’ve seen it so little,’ she says. ‘At least coming out has done some good. I hope you’re not going to show Robeson how well and how frequently we quarrel.’
‘I didn’t ask you to bring me here,’ I tell her, stiffly climbing out.
Rain flecks the windscreen of the car: it falls on my grey and grizzled head: my arm in hers, the car door locked, we proceed up a flight of worn stone steps to a glass-panelled porch.
Lunatics are visible inside: a mosaic floor inset with a design which appears to incorporate, to my discerning eye, a flower. ‘Didn’t Van Gogh shoot his brains out,’ I ask her, ‘after visiting a place like this?’
She appears to know her way, gripping my arm beneath hers then, having negotiated a flight of stairs, we turn along a corridor which echoes (more mosaics) to a woman’s high-pitched voice calling, ‘I shan’t! I shan’t!’ and then, as if re-programmed by someone as positive in their thinking as Etty, ‘I shall!’
We enter a room: we have, a nurse informs us, been expected. We sit, with several others, on wooden benches: figures pass to and fro obfuscated by a layer of liquid which hangs, in permanent suspension, in front of my eyes.
I see a facsimile of a figure I knew before, erect, slim, balding: the epitome, I reflect, of a self-made man, except, I recall, so much more has gone into his creation: a suit as dark and as elegantly striped as Maidstone’s, and singularly less creased.
‘Forty-three years,’ I tell him, ‘is a very long time,’ to which, unsmiling, he remarks, ‘I make it nearer forty-five,’ grasping, however, my outstretched hand – smiling at Etty (shaking hers), I convinced he has met her already.
‘So much,’ I tell him, ‘is still the same. As if,’ I add, ‘we were back at King Edward’s,’ the smoothness of his chin (so many lunatics have passed his way before), the coolness of expression (eyes, light blue, cast, distractedly, to a far horizon). ‘You announcing your intention of thrashing me in the mile.’
‘I don’t think I ran the mile,’ he says. ‘Cross-country,’ he adds, ‘I did for a while,’ continuing, ‘I’ve had a long talk with Doctor Raynor, and a longer one still with your daughter,’ smiling at Etty again, and when I enquire, ‘Did you come to any conclusions?’ he replies, ‘We’re not here to come to conclusions. We’re only here to help.’
Put him in perspective.
‘On the other hand …’
He indicates the way to a door marked ‘Annexe’: we pass along a corridor with a wooden floor: a line of elderly figures, holding hands backwards and forwards, approaches us from a lighted space: a key is taken from Robeson’s pocket and a door inscribed with his name is opened.
He indicates, with an outstretched hand, a chair that Etty might sit in, directly to one side of a wooden desk – indicating a second as Etty signals I sit in the first. He takes his place not behind but, not unlike Maidstone, beside the desk so that, confronting Etty, he is diagonally across the desk from me.
‘How are you?’ he enquires, glancing from me to Etty, and when she replies, ‘Not well,’ he adds, ‘Doctor Raynor, in his letter, sounded intimidated by your father.’
‘He’s more at home,’ I say, ‘with miners, at least, with those that used to be miners. Particularly,’ I go on, ‘their wives and children.’
Robeson’s legs are crossed: long and lean, with prominent, sharply-pointed knees and one bared ankle above a sock which reminds me of the short-trousered, red-haired, lanky youth squeezing spots in a glass-fronted cupboard. Now consultant at Eastley Hall, re-named, he must, on not a few occasions, encounter not a few of his former chums (rivals, fellow entrants for the Horsfall fellowship to St Edmund’s).
‘Good old Edward’s!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘One Old Edwardian to another,’ (creatures from a bygone age). ‘The parameters are perimeters only,’ I tell him. ‘Beyond them,’ I continue, ‘everything is allowed.’
‘Let me,’ he tells me, ‘make a note.’
A pad, taken from the desk, replaces the file on his knee. A pen, taken from an inside pocket, is – Old Robeson! – carefully unscrewed: nothing changed in three thousand years. ‘Perhaps you remember Beatrice?’ I enquire. ‘A putative beauty with magenta hair likened by some to a ptolemaic cat. A leading light,’ I go on, ‘at the High School.’
Previous medical history, he enquires, glancing at Etty, to which I reply, ‘I was consulted by the infamous existentialist Robert (known as “Bobby”) Mackendrick whose father was a Ukrainian cobbler who plied his trade in places as far apart as East Ham and Clapham, in years as divergent as 1906 and 1937, he killed by a bomb at the grand old age of seventy-two in an air-raid shelter with a suspect roof which received a direct hit in 1941. “Bobby” asked me if I would listen to his tapes, a preamble to his writing his celebrated The Phenomenology of Experience, an amalgam, not entirely inaccurate; of much of what I told him. It is, in short, a study of me, unannounced and something of a parotly of my less successful but more influential A New Theory of the Mind and my equally influential The Logic of Grief, without a doubt,’ I wait for acknowledgement, ‘you must have read them all.’
‘We read nothing, I’m afraid,’ he says, ‘up here.’ He glances not at me, but Etty.
‘In which case,’ I tell him, ‘let’s stick to the facts,’ giving him my date of birth and marital status, number of children and financial position. ‘The future has been mortgaged to the past by mortgagees who made commitments which had nothing to do with me,’ I tell him. ‘Insanity is a motor impairment which, like everything else, has a spiritual dimension, one, however, which conditions, rather than is conditioned by.’
‘What feelings, for instance,’ he asks me, ‘are you having now?’
‘I might as well confess it, dissimulation is my ruling passion. I am that not uncommon phenomenon, a vocational liar. All my life,’ I add, ‘is a fiction. Not a day has gone by in which I have not added another word, another deed, another event, another action.’
‘Is he,’ he enquires of Etty, ‘as defensive with you?’ and when she answers in the affirmative, I add, ‘Opposition, in the past, has been all I’ve had. (Me against the school, remember?) Not invited back in my final year at the Drayburgh, for – I was told, by Sir Felix Pemberton, the Principal at the time – you’ve seen, I take it, his pictures at the Tate? – failing to attend statutory classes in Perspective, Anatomy and the History of Art and, a peculiarly venturesome subject for that time, the Moral, or was it the Immoral Principles of Design. I was, in reality, writing novels, not painting the pictures and drawing the drawings I should have done. Furthermore, for the next few years, I taught in schools in the East End of London which were – at least three of them – counted amongst the worst in Great Britain, the venomous Tudor Street School between the Whitechapel Road and Cable Street in Stepney, and the odious Windsor School in Hackney, to name but two, after which I applied for jobs as diverse as a refuse superintendent (the only white man in the queue of West Indians and Asians, losing out to one of the latter) at a departmental store in Oxford Street, as a stock-clerk in a steam-casings manufacturer’s office in Clerkenwell,
an exhibition-stand erector for a firm in Southwark, at the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge, as a copy-writer at the corner of Wardour Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, as a journalist on the in-house magazine of a well-known manufacturer of household soap: a cleaner, a bouncer, a washer-up. I ended up starving in a room above a sweet-shop in a street not far from where I am living at present, collecting discarded vegetables and half-rotten fruit from the gutters as the daylong street markets closed. Meanwhile of course,’ I glance at Etty, ‘our first two children were born and I was writing and painting every minute of every hour when exhaustion didn’t engulf me.’
I laid it on the line:
I gave it to him proper:
no good not lying when you’re down:
o give the sod a copper.
‘And all the while,’ I add, ‘you were studying at the Radcliffe.’
He is writing with a thick-nibbed pen – a present from Mrs, or perhaps Ms Robeson at Christmas, or bought at the Swan Press, the only bookshop in Linfield: no books by the author whose tortured revelations are a postscript to his life in Linfield.
‘Then, of course, with A Hero of Our Time, I became,’ I add, ‘a household word.’
And so forth, as Isabella, in her retirement at Torquay would say (‘nothing like the Riviera’) when the delirium of recollection got beyond her: ‘Those picnics that we had (when Bea was a child) in Ardsley Woods, and so forth,’ waving her delicately wrinkled hand.