by David Storey
‘Why not call me Fenny?’ I ask.
‘Fenny?’
‘The name I had at school.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ he says (his own, too, I presume, forgotten).
‘I don’t see why my wife should interfere,’ I tell him. ‘It’s only guilt. She came, I might add, without any warning. Two days, as it happened, after she’d got back – though I wasn’t to know it at the time – from an overseas trip with Albert. Tanned. I hadn’t, she discovered, read about her in the paper – the sensational run-away bride and groom, and the difficulties both the Ministry of Health and the Medical Research Council might be in having the soliciting of funds, by the latter of the former, compromised by what was described as “practically an interdepartmental marriage”. Politics,’ I add in parenthesis, ‘is a tricky business. As it is,’ I continue, ‘she caught me by surprise, opening the door, as I did so, to find her on the step, no food in the kitchen, a pile of unwashed pots, unshaven – “unapproachable,” she announced, “merely the shadow of my former self, the man she had married some thirty-odd years before.” Albert, I scarcely need to add, I never brought up. Sexual jealousy is the most painful of all the emotions, outside of anxiety and terror, and their cohort, despair, I being a specialist in all three. Nevertheless, if I had had the opportunity, I wouldn’t have had the slightest compunction – would, indeed, have derived a great deal of pleasure from it – in killing Albert, and a great deal more, not from killing – I wouldn’t like to do her down (after all, I love her) – but from conveying to my former wife the scale and intensity of what I felt at being abandoned in favour of a one-armed mandarin whose own species of suffering is infinitesimal beside my own.’
‘I believe you were deeply affected,’ Robeson says, ‘by the death of Vivienne Wylder.’
‘I was,’ I say, ‘and am,’ and then enquire, ‘Who is Vivienne Wylder?’
‘Vivienne,’ Etty says.
‘I know no one of that name,’ I tell her.
‘You lived with her,’ Etty says, ‘for over five years.’
‘It couldn’t have been over,’ I tell her, ‘I would have noticed.’
‘Under five years,’ she says. ‘The dates aren’t that important.’
‘She had a great deal of money of her own,’ I tell her, ‘but never any cash. The greatest disturbances to our relationship were less to do with drink and drugs and professional failure – the latter, otherwise, apart from Melvyn, her constant preoccupation, but money. I’d given all I had to Bea who, unlike Etty, took it without the slightest hesitation. I’ve earned – or, perhaps, I deserve, she might have said, every single penny. For putting up with me,’ I add to Robeson.
‘She enjoyed being a mother,’ Etty says.
‘She enjoyed,’ I tell her, ‘being my wife, until she was persuaded not to.’
‘Who by?’ Etty asks.
‘I never found out,’ I tell her. ‘The place, the times. All the women at that time were giving up on marriage, only – within days, in some instances – weeks, months – taking up with someone else, invariably,’ I go on, ‘a facsimile of the one they’d left behind.’
‘Like you, in Mum’s case,’ Etty says.
‘I doubt it,’ I tell her, and add, ‘I wonder.’
‘It had, nevertheless,’ Robeson says, ‘a profound effect.’
‘My assets,’ I enquire, ‘or my wife’s re-marriage?’
‘The death of Vivienne Wylder.’
‘That was several years ago,’ I tell him, and add, ‘Two and a half, to be precise,’ or was it eighteen months (two weeks, three days, and thirty-seven minutes? according to the coroner’s report). ‘She’d been lying there for nearly two days, or was it four, her suitcases packed and hidden in the garden shed, I assuming she was visiting friends, the few she had left, in L.A., one in particular, a diabolic presence, addicted to a diet which when she was over there, reduced Vi to little more than a match-stick, something she redressed with booze the moment she got back. Initially,’ I go on, ‘she came whenever she’d started drinking, having been turned out or down by most if not all of her other friends. In her final years she’d turn up directly from the airport, having flown in from L.A. or New York, or even Chicago where she used to go and dry out. A taxi-load of cases, like moving half a house, none of which she opened. Sometimes she’d stay a month, sometimes a day, sometimes – on two or three occasions – for only three or four hours. Sometimes six months. Sometimes a year. “Partners in distress,” she’d say, and bed down, or otherwise, without another word. She’d been threatening to kill herself for seventeen years, and had even tried it two or three times, on one occasion driving a car into a motorway bridge, having previously, however, fastened her seat-belt. She came out with a dislocated shoulder and a broken wrist which, for two or three days, sobered her up. As for psychoanalysts: she joined me at the North London Royal. Maidstone, the Sub-Dean of the Medical School and the Longcroft Professor of Psychiatry, fell on his knees before her. “The most remarkable woman,” he told me, “I have ever met,” taken in by her assertions she intended to reclaim herself. “My Academy performance,” she described it. He let her out after seven weeks on that occasion and two weeks later she was dead.’
I weep. ‘In,’ I tell Robeson, ‘a disenchanted way (no notice to be taken of it: in another man such an affectation might just as casually be conveyed by the scratching of his head: an itch occurs which induces tears, a melancholia so profound it can neither be described nor analysed).’
The writer takes a rest, absorbing himself in thoughts of the countryside, or the wife of his next-door neighbour, the impracticalities of a relationship with whom must be as clear to her as they are to him: thoughts of immortality cross his mind, together with intimations of senility (currently undiagnosed).
‘My principal concern,’ I add, ‘is to find a companion of the opposite sex with whom I can have a relationship at least as rewarding as that which, for the better part of thirty-odd years, I had with my wife. A woman, in short, who is companionable and strong, intellectually assertive, physically engaging, and who has lived a life, ideally, as unpredictable and as charged with adversity as my own.’
Robeson is writing once more on his pad.
‘Do you require,’ he suddenly enquires, ‘a sedative?’
‘I’ve dispensed with drugs,’ I tell him, ‘some time ago.’
‘I’d recommend you re-start your course,’ he says, ‘of anti-depressants. We might,’ he goes on, ‘try a different kind. Once this phase is over I’d recommend a return to lithium. It doesn’t necessarily require,’ he adds, ‘a lifetime commitment.’
‘I’m afraid,’ I tell him, ‘I’ve been this way before,’ glancing at Etty and adding, ‘Have you brought me here to be sectioned? Is that what Raynor’s up to?’
‘No,’ she says, and shakes her head.
‘As a child,’ I tell Robeson, ‘she loved me very much. So did all the children. When I was a husband and a father, for days, quite often, at a time, I felt, in light of my temperament, unreasonably happy.’
‘It’s your welfare,’ Robeson says, ‘we’re concerned about But that doesn’t preclude,’ he goes on, ‘the effect that that welfare, and the provisions we may make for it, may have on others.’
Maidstone said, ‘I have never been depressed myself, as opposed to being dispirited, nor have I ever been anxious to a degree which makes it impossible to function, as a consequence of which I can only imagine what it’s like, in your analogy the equivalent of endeavouring to imagine a new colour or the limits of a limitless universe. I have only your symptoms to go on, indications which, as you can see, distress me as much as anyone. If I respect your suffering there is an obligation on you, not to defer to, but to recognise mine. The treatment I am recommending I am obliged, in all cases but your own, to prescribe with the knowledge that if I failed to do so I would be open to accusations of professional neglect. I have no alternative therefore but to insist you take the medicatio
n and, failing that, to make it mandatory that it is administered to you, if not by me, then someone else.’
Robeson says, ‘If you don’t take the prescription, in the doses I recommend, to the satisfaction of your daughter and/or Doctor Raynor, I shall have no alternative but to have you brought inside.’
I weep.
‘The dispensary,’ he adds to Etty, ‘you’ll find downstairs. If any further difficulties arise you will, of course, let me or Doctor Raynor know.’
On a separate sheet of paper he writes a number.
‘Telephone that number at any time and bring your father in directly if you’re in any doubt at all.’
To me, he continues, ‘I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Freedom outside as opposed to confinement here.’ He raises his arm, as he might on winning the mile that he says he never ran. ‘The choice,’ he concludes, ‘is yours.’
‘Not that it’s any concern of mine,’ I tell him, ‘but at the time of the events I have previously described I was plagued by reporters, as indeed were my neighbours, who wished to take photographs of the shed in question. Though failure is a cloak that few people can afford and none, as far as I am aware, wholeheartedly welcome, despite its being so freely dispensed, it is not one which even now obscures me entirely. I am still susceptible to being recognised and responded to in a wholly unacceptable way.’
‘I am sure your name,’ Robeson says (his smile returning), ‘will be of no interest, if it’s known at all outside the pages of The Edwardian, to anyone at Eastley Hall.’
Eastley was a man of action and lived in a house the foundations of which are still, allegedly, in place beneath the present building: he built a five-arched bridge across the River Lin (‘one for each of the senses’), hunted in South America, was famous for riding a crocodile with a bridle and bit, and built the first hospital in the district, in the grounds of his house, for the treatment of the mentally ill: a taxidermist, naturalist, water-colourist, philanthropist, engineer (his son assisted George Stephenson in the construction of the station in Linfield) he bequeathed his house and grounds to the hospital which bears his name.
‘I gave,’ I tell Robeson (Eastley, too, of course, was considered mad), ‘all my money away, although a sum has been retained by my former wife, and is administrated by her and my children in conjunction with the bank and the Board of Inland Revenue. I have a residual income which would inconvenience the proverbial mouse, though not at all one of Harrison’s and Schaadt’s notorious menagerie who subsequently lived, despite their hereditary problems, in, I understand, luxurious retirement, in the form of royalties on plays and novels and from the sale of occasional paintings and drawings, most, too, of which, I gave away. I don’t belong to the government scheme for paying authors on the basis of copies borrowed from public libraries, on account of the principle, adhered to, as much as possible, throughout my life, that an artist should be independent of statutory procedures, such independence being the only valuable thing he or she may have. I’d rather starve to death, and, on occasion, have almost done so, rather than accede to state support, not least – the most invidious of all motives – because it’s well intentioned.’
I am about to continue but observe that Robeson has already risen (the slurring of his chair). ‘The pills are to be taken initially,’ he says, ‘in very small doses. There’ll be no effect for five or six weeks, during which time,’ he confides to Etty, ‘I want you to call me should you ever feel the need. I’ll see your father this time next week. Will you be free,’ he enquires, ‘to bring him?’
‘I,’ she says, ‘or someone else.’
‘The other point I wish to make,’ I tell him, unable to recall precisely what it is, ‘is that there are certain qualities common to us all, the “all” I refer to,’ I continue, remaining in my chair, ‘being those afflicted by an unreasonable dependency on others.’
‘I’ll see you and your father out,’ Robeson says (after all, at one point, he was courting Etty’s mother and, should Albert fall at the final jump – a one-handed leap at the prime-minister-ship – might still see himself in there with a chance: from provincial anonymity to metropolitan (Kellsian) notoriety: fame, for fuck’s sake! I can see it in his glance).
‘This, in turn, is occasioned by what I would describe as an absence of self, a phenomenon I can only describe as being akin to a fall from grace, an absence of, or a removal from God. No language adequately describes it, and though it may have prompted Major Eastley to donate his home, in the late eighteenth century in an unprecedented fit of generosity, to the community in which he lived, for the healing, by seclusion, of those who were mentally ill, the only comment it would draw from me is that it is indistinguishable from a feeling of perdition, the absence of something within one’s body without which communication with anything outside, temporal or divine, is not only indescribably painful but impossible. In short, I am not the person you thought I thought you thought I thought you thought I was.’
We are sitting in the dispensary amidst a multitude of over-coated figures who are waiting, via an illuminated sign, for their number to come up: Etty has gone off to get a coffee, returning with a plastic cup which, despite being encased in another, is still too hot to hold.
‘Am I to be like this for ever?’ I ask her. ‘For ever like this to the end of my life?’
‘You’re lucky he didn’t take you in,’ she says.
‘It’s at moments such as this that reality becomes a mockery of my strongest feelings,’ I tell her. ‘A further reality takes over, comprised of violence, malevolence and destruction, the whole of it suffused by a feeling that life is comprised of nothing else – love, friendship, goodwill – not to mention hope – species of appearance, until appearance becomes our springboard for living and, the ultimate deception – the final irony, Etty – the core of life itself.’
She isn’t listening (sipping her coffee) crossing her legs within the confines of the chair and glancing up at the illuminated sign above the dispensary porthole. We have, evidently (glancing at the ticket in her hand) several numbers to go.
‘All this,’ I tell her, ‘is a waste of time. When you were young and happy, and we were living in Belsize Park, one big, happy family, or, if not happy, boisterous, things like this would have seemed unreal. Untenable. Inconceivable. Out of this world. As if I have been cast into inner darkness. Where,’ I enquire again, ‘did it go wrong?’
‘I shall arrange for Charlie to come with you when you next see Robeson,’ she says. ‘He may be more constructive than I appear to have been.’
‘You’ve been,’ I tell her, ‘constructive enough. What more could anyone want? My principal impulse,’ I go on, ‘is to protect you. You have done more than enough,’ I add, ‘already. No man, considering his history, could have been more sympathetically looked after than I have been. Manipulative, self-centred, cantankerous, uncaring – cowardly, to boot – what more could I have asked for?’
We are being observed by several attentive faces. (‘Take no notice of these,’ I tell her. ‘Most of them are mad.’)
‘This is a general dispensary. Eastley Hall is part of a general complex,’ she says.
‘As for being sectioned, I don’t believe my behaviour warrants it,’ I tell her. ‘As for these pills. I wondered if Bea and Albert wouldn’t have me. Being a junior minister in the Ministry of Health, having a madman in his home might do him, professionally, a great deal of good. While life might seem to be vicious and bad he would have the invaluable satisfaction of proving it is not so.’
‘I don’t think, Father,’ she says, formally and calmly, ‘you have anywhere left to run.’
This phrase I not infrequently used with Bea: having written myself, as it were, to notoriety, and complemented this achievement by painting pictures – several of which, though rarely hung, were purchased by the Tate – and discovering that my propensity to subside at intervals into the profoundest gloom was, despite all my efforts to resist it, unassuaged, I f
requently remarked, ‘I have nowhere left to run,’ to which Bea would respond, with her unfathomable stare, ‘Except here.’
‘The other thing I wanted to tell him,’ I tell her, ‘was that long into my adult life I was firmly convinced that everyone endured the things that I did. Everyone, I foolishly assumed, woke each morning to a feeling of terror and, throughout the day, their principal energies were engaged in attempting to overcome not only that but its indefatigable ally, dispiritation. Fear, combined with despair, produced an awesome dread, the most fearful of all the human emotions. Everyone, I was convinced, experienced the same. I took it for granted – in the same way I could assume that, despite wearing shoes, everyone had five toes on each foot. I even assumed Bea, even you, suffered in a not dissimilar way, that all the principal questions of human existence came terrifyingly to the surface at the moment of waking, but that she, and you, and everyone else, had not only a greater degree of resourcefulness in combating the condition but, the most debilitating emotion of all, infinitely more courage in covering it up. Only in the last few years have I come to recognise that the degree of fear and dispiritation that has greeted me each morning on waking, and which, in struggling not to show, I merely showed to everyone, is the prerogative, if not of me alone, of a small percentage of the human race who suffer in a not dissimilar fashion. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that what came to my mind as effortlessly as the joy of living was confined, in my personal experience, to me alone. Surprise, that is, and dispiritation, a fear and a despair at my isolation greater, terrifyingly, than the original symptoms. I was, as the saying goes, engulfed.’
‘That’s our number.’
My daughter stands: I repair to the porthole and, through the sliding panel, take the pills myself. When the pharmacist – a girl, in appearance at least, of seven – enquires, ‘Mr Fenchurch?’ I am more than convinced that in her unseemly made-up face there is a flicker of recognition.
‘It was merely,’ Etty says, when I point this out, ‘the loudness of your voice. In respect of remaining anonymous, you having only yourself to blame.’