by David Storey
‘As always,’ I rejoin as we descend the steps to the car. ‘Guilt at feeling guilt,’ I add, ‘and so on.’
Peas, broccoli, baked potato and ham are, peculiarly, all we have that day for lunch.
We eat in silence (a brief call from Etty to Charlie to tell him the outcome).
‘I don’t think,’ I tell her when she returns from the phone, ‘I’m ill. Some experts call it “a problem with living”, varying degrees of experience of which are common to most if not all people’s lives.’
To which, with typical Kellsian asperity, she replies, ‘If you’re not ill then I am.’
‘Perhaps you are,’ I tell her, to which, with not unKellsian vigour, she responds, ‘That’s how you used to undermine Mother. You won’t do the same with me.’
‘I was most gentle with your mother,’ I tell her. (‘There was no one I loved more,’ etc. ‘She couldn’t have had a finer husband.’) ‘She was much envied by the women in the street (whichever street that was). There was no woman in the neighbourhood more idolised by her husband.’
‘Why not make it London?’ she says.
‘Why aren’t the children home to lunch?’ I ask.
‘I made arrangements,’ she says, ‘for them to have their lunch elsewhere. I didn’t know,’ she adds, ‘how long we’d be.’
‘Good job you did,’ I tell her, yet wonder at the emptiness of the house. It was never, I reflect, as empty as this: there was always someone or something in it.
‘We’ll be leaving, in any case,’ she says. ‘There’s a partner of Charlie’s who’s willing to buy it.’
‘I never knew that,’ I tell her, looking out, for the first time, at the garden and trying to imagine, after all these years, those flowerbeds – and those trees, the beech hedge – in the hands of someone else. The last vestige of Isabella, with that garden, I reflect, will be gone, but say aloud, ‘It sounds to me a good idea.’
‘We’ve found a pleasanter house,’ she says, ‘closer to Linfield.’
‘Not London?’ I enquire.
‘I’ve had enough of London,’ she says. ‘It’s paradise on earth up here,’ (a recent, and derisory conclusion, I reflect).
‘You’re beginning to talk like me,’ I tell her, to which, without interest, she replies, ‘I am.’
Nevertheless, consulting Robeson (not least, a figure of authority) has given her some relief: I hear her singing in the kitchen, later in the day, and moments later, humming on the stairs: shortly after that comes the sound of recorded music from her room (as she works, no doubt, on ‘Greta Bridge’ – all those tones and planes and textures, the miraculous abstraction and miracle invention). Mrs Otterman, who normally leaves each day after preparing lunch, returning later, if requested, to prepare dinner or supervise the children, comes in, around tea-time, and calls – from the back door of the house, ‘I’ve brought you up some flowers, Mrs Stott,’ naming the gardener as her source and, in response to a call from Etty, adding, ‘I thought the house needed cheering up.’
‘Oh, we’re cheerful enough already,’ Etty calls – on with ‘Ships off Gravesend’ now, no doubt. ‘Which isn’t to say they won’t be welcome.’
I have, at her suggestion, remained throughout the afternoon in bed and when I go down to the kitchen, Mrs Otterman, who has evidently come in to prepare the dinner (several guests are due at seven), the miner’s wife, daughter, grand-daughter and great-grandchild remarks, ‘You’re looking well. How did the hospital go this morning?’
‘You’d better ask Mrs Stott,’. I tell her. ‘She did all the talking.’
‘That’s unlike Mrs Stott,’ she says, and adds, ‘Nevertheless, I can see it’s done some good. You’re far less dark beneath the eyes.’
‘That,’ I say, ‘is because I’ve washed. You should know, being the daughter of a miner.’
Her sharp-featured, dark-eyed face lightens with a smile.
‘You’re pulling my leg, Mr Fenchurch!’ turning to the sink.
‘I’m too old to pull anybody’s leg,’ I tell her, at which, turning once more, she cries, ‘I’m, sure you’re much younger than I am!’
‘I’m sixty-five,’ I tell her, ‘or nearly, and look half as much again.’
‘I’m not quite as o’d as that,’ she says. ‘But feel it, at times, I can tell you.’
‘I hope this house,’ I tell her, ‘will never change. That you, or I, or someone known to me, will forever be at work in the kitchen, in one or other of the rooms upstairs, in the garden or the yard outside. That the trees will bud, the flowers bloom, the fruit ripen, with a Kells or a Corcoran or a Fenchurch somewhere about, painting or writing or hammering or drawing, the window open, on a sunny day, to the sound of Celtic or Saxon voices. Too much has happened here, too much has been felt, endured, survived. Our blood is in these stones.’
‘I thought you were from Onasett,’ she says.
‘What have you been saying to Mrs Otterman?’ Etty says when, later, she comes up to my room. ‘She was ever so bright when she first came in.’
‘I won’t, if you don’t mind, come down to dinner,’ I tell her, for the children, already, are playing in their room (the sound of Mrs Otterman’s voice as, earlier, she bathed them) and Charlie has returned and is already dressed, his voice coming from the hall and then the sitting-room as he first greets then solicits with drink the first of his evening’s guests.
‘Everyone will expect you,’ she says, (the occasion, she is about to tell me, will do me good).
‘Tell them,’ I tell her, ‘I’m unwell. It’s happened often before,’ and when she says, ‘They won’t believe it. You’re supposed to be up here and getting better,’ I respond, ‘I am much better,’ (in my shirt-sleeves, she in a gown that scarcely covers her shoulders). ‘I intend in the morning,’ I continue, ‘to go back to London. There’s nothing left for me up here.’
A look of extraordinary gravity lightens the skin around her eyes.
‘When did you decide that?’ coming one step further into the room.
I am sitting at the table, beside the window, where, from my youth onwards, I have sat many times before.
‘I am writing up,’ I tell her, ‘my memoirs. The embryo, as it were, of The Private Papers of Richard Fenchurch, revealed to the world by his second eldest daughter or, failing that, the author himself, the ultimate, if unreliable, authority on the subject. Previous studies have merely moved my work on the one step from penultimate neglect to conclusive obscurity.’
‘It’s not a good time to discuss it,’ she says, a flush rising from her throat, more nakedly exposed than ever. ‘Which,’ she adds, ‘is probably why you chose it.’
‘It’s too late to ring up Robeson. He’ll be out at dinner, or, if I’m any judge of character, in front of the television,’ and when she turns to the door, I add, ‘I welcomed seeing him this morning. I welcomed you taking me as, well. Don’t you see I’ve come full circle? Robeson and Linfield is where it began: the old school tie, the élitist education, that ardour that goes with the provincial grammar-school boy: that plum-cheeked look, like the crest of the school, which accompanies him throughout the rest of his life. There’s one such youth, with that same parochial, charming, bright-eyed look, who presents a television programme on the arts in an identical manner, adenoidal, sincere, that earnest, community-serving expression (the persona of the actor not far behind). It’s a world I eschew. I loathed it then. I loathe it now, buried, as it was, in the London mists, the London fog, the effete artistic drizzle that, throughout these years, has numbed me to the bone. I’ve buried my pills, by the way, in the garden, a foot apart. The worms, I can assure you, over the next few years, will turn into happy toads.’
And when, moments later, Charlie comes up, dressed for the evening, after Etty’s gone down, I say something of the same again: ‘Robeson has done me the world of good!’
‘I hear,’ he says, ‘you’re leaving, Father.’
‘I feel much better,’ I tell him, ‘for
seeing Robeson. It’s brought my old motivation back, contempt for parochialism and an avid desire – which has nothing to do with you – to escape.’
‘Where would you escape to, supposing we were inclined to let you?’ Charlie says, sitting on the bed (very much, I reflect, in a pre-match fashion: elbows on thighs, a thick-necked stoop, leaning forward as he gathers his strength: an Old Edwardian, of course, himself, as was his distinguished father).
‘Taravara Road,’ I tell him. ‘Apart from one or two tourists, curious to see where Vivienne swallowed her bleach, I should settle in quite quickly. I even thought,’ I go on, ‘I could rent or buy a miner’s cottage – there are a lot standing empty in the back-way villages where the pits have gone – and paint and write to my heart’s content. I’ve been admiring the sunsets since I came up here, specifically the one,’ I continue, ‘we had last night, with a lurid band of green above a screen of red, a crimson orifice darkening to blue, an orange sheen around the sun, a turquoise and magenta cloud one side, and fangs of vapour, like wings, gold and silver along each edge.’
He fists one hand in the palm of the other.
‘The fields and hedgerows,’ I conclude, ‘where my youth and dreams began.’
He fists his hand once more (before he runs out with the First XV: ‘Play up, KEGS! Play up, play up, for fuck’s sake, play the game!’).
‘And you’ve buried all your pills.’
‘I’m grateful to Raynor,’ I tell him. ‘And more grateful still to Robeson. And most grateful of all to you and Etty. Without the former, of course, and the latter, the second wouldn’t be there. I’ve come full circle. I feel a new man. I can’t tell you, Charlie, how glad I am that you and Etty had the idea of bringing me here. It’s done me, I assure you, the world of good. On top of which, the news of you selling up the house – too big, too impractical, too vulnerable – it scarcely needs explaining – has clearly done the trick. I gave away, over the past fifteen years, something in excess of half a million pounds, none of it recoverable. I have a house, of modest proportions, and a residual income which will enable me not to have to scour the gutters after the local street market has been cleared up. As I say, when I’ve settled in, with a little subsidy, perhaps, from you, or Bea, or both – or, even, the sale of a picture, an unexpected run on a book, a revival of a play – I can come up here, rent or purchase a cottage – one up, one down – and paint and write, and think. Respice finem, Charlie.’
‘Are you coming down?’ he says.
‘I’m staying up here,’ I tell him, ‘to write.’
‘We’ll discuss it in the morning,’ he says. ‘I’ll delay going in to Linfield. These phases,’ he goes on, ‘require that someone should be with you all the time.’
All is not well in the Land of Uz, said Hiro of the Chaldeans.
Cannibalism in Ardsley as the miners eat their wives.
‘You can’t be left alone,’ says Charlie.
(I’ve been there all my life).
I remember very well how, in her last days, Vivienne was convinced she was being followed in the street – ‘by an actress’ who, ‘portraying’ Vi, was being filmed in a film commissioned by her former husband, ‘in order,’ she complained, ‘to justify his life.’ On occasion, out together, we would come across this woman disguised, variously, as a bus conductress, a police officer, and an usherette in a cinema – and once as a stranger who approached us in the foyer of a theatre and asked Vivienne the way to the ladies’ toilet. ‘That’s her! she said as the woman walked away. Much subsequent fleeing from scenes (she said were) being filmed while all I saw was a passing car, a woman glancing in her handbag, a tourist with a camera. ‘They’re everywhere,’ she said, running videos of her films twice hourly through the night, ‘looking,’ as she said, ‘for clues. I’m convinced they hired her to watch me as I failed.’
Poor Vi.
Poor Hiro.
Poor wives.
Our telephone was tapped: a ‘detective’ followed her from bar to bar (from car to car, shop to shop): everywhere was somewhere.
‘Why should they make a film?’ I asked. ‘They haven’t got the rights.’
‘Rights?’
‘The rights,’ I tell her, ‘to your life.’ (The rights to the story which, she says, time alone can tell.)
Her midnight calls to Hollywood: to a director she had worked with, to a dietician, to a Scotsman she had met on a studio lot who professed to have known her father: ‘A saint! A saint!’ The writing on large (discarded) sheets of paper, in coloured crayon, ‘the story of how,’ she’d cry, ‘I was crucified by men!’ (‘That’s why,’ she’d say, ‘I live with you: look at the way you treated your wife.’).
‘Look at the way,’ I’d tell her, ‘she’s treated me.’
‘With contempt! (Don’t you think you didn’t deserve it!),’ lying on the couch in the tiny Taravara Road back kitchen. ‘My admiration for your wife goes up in leaps and bounds. It wasn’t large-heartedness that prompted you to give away your money.’
‘I haven’t gone back on anything,’ I tell Etty when, her guests departed, she knocks on the door, seeing the light beneath. ‘I promised nothing at Eastley Hall, nothing to Raynor, nothing to Robeson, nothing to you and Charlie, nothing even to Maidstone, who was far more pressing than all of you. I intend,’ I go on, ‘to make a new start.’
‘I’m not sure Robeson, or Raynor, would agree to your going, nor your doctor in London,’ she says, implying it only takes two of them to put me away for good.
‘I’m so much better,’ I tell her. ‘I was telling Charlie, that meeting with Robeson has done the trick. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you and Raynor. Without you bringing me up here nothing like this would ever have worked out.’
‘It’s too late to discuss it,’ she says, and when I enquire, ‘Too late in the day, or too late in the cycle of events?’ she merely shakes her head. ‘We’ll discuss it in the morning.’
‘In the morning,’ I tell her, ‘I’ll be gone. My whole life has been based on spontaneous reaction. In such a way I got all my jobs, got to the Drayburgh, wrote my books, painted my pictures, became, in short, what I am today,’ and when she replies, ‘A fool,’ I laugh. ‘To be insane, with me, is to be dead with any other person.’
‘That’s not much of an endorsement of Charlie,’ she says. ‘And even less of me,’ to which I respond, ‘Charlie is as mad as I am. At least I represent a range of disaffection which would put me on a level with those iconoclastic heroes he and his chums affect to admire. How, for instance, would you have spoken to Van Gogh? Aren’t I a Gogh of the northern counties, a parochial buccaneer?’ she waiting in the door, arm raised towards the lintel (a childhood gesture) as if searching for support. ‘I’ll pack my bags,’ I add, ‘tonight. Without your help, as I told Charlie, I couldn’t have achieved this peace of mind.’
‘Is it peace of mind?’ she says.
‘I feel a new man,’ I tell her, ‘already.’
‘This morning,’ she says, ‘you didn’t feel well.’ (‘Creased over in that chair when I came in,’ she adds, indicating the one in which I’m sitting – terrified (let’s face it) of what might happen at Eastley Hall.)
‘I shall miss this place,’ I tell her, ‘and yet it’s necessary,’ I add, ‘to let it go,’ while, from behind her back, across the landing, Charlie enquires, ‘Why don’t you leave it, Etty, tonight? There’ll be plenty of time in the morning,’ his voice no different from when, earlier, I had heard him calling, in the yard behind the house, ‘Goodnight! Goodnight!’ to his cheerily departing guests. (‘He’ll not do a midnight scarper.’)
20
In the morning I am ill: ‘A rheumatoid condition,’ Raynor says when, alarmed, Etty calls him in. ‘His blood-pressure,’ he tells her, ‘is far too high and there’s congestion in his lungs. His glands, too,’ he adds, ‘are up. In other circumstances,’ he addresses me directly, ‘I’d have you taken in.’
I dream: there is an argument (in
an ancient building, not unlike a temple, across a landing) about the medication I might be given. ‘He planted the pills,’ I hear, ‘in the garden, and all sorts of peculiar things came up,’ (flowers bloomed, plants burgeoned, the house, after a while, began to fall down).
‘It’s been coming on,’ she says, ‘for days. (Ever since I brought him up.) His feet were steaming in the car.’
‘It’s a wonder,’ I tell her, ‘I didn’t the (He takes no regard of other people.) In sleep, the mind is disassembled, like petals close at sun-set, opening (I go on) at sun-rise. Figments,’ I add, ‘are the fruit of the tree that you have at the back of the house, adjacent to the Dell, into whose pool it drops its leaves (in autumn when they die).’
When she says, ‘You needn’t act, you are delirious,’ I reply, ‘Put me on the train to Taravara Road (or the bus to Camden Town),’ the place, had I known it, I set out for sixty-five years ago (pushed beneath the bridge of Linfield Station while overhead a single drop of water falls, darkening the fabric of my mother’s coat).
‘I dreamt last night,’ I tell Etty when she next comes in, ‘that I fell ill,’ and when she says, ‘Like the time I called on you in London and found Vivienne, drunk, beneath the sink,’ I respond, ‘She was. She was mending the plumbing,’ recalling the incident far too well. ‘She hit her head on a pipe.’
‘What was all the vomit?’ she says.
‘Vomit?’
‘She was,’ she tells me, ‘very sick.’
‘Dizziness from the blow,’ I tell her, perceiving the room through a veil of tears.
I make my way up the slope then across the fields and down the, at one time, winding lane (that led, by a circuitous route, to Ardsley Wood) – now a broadened, straightened highway – to the station.
‘Where’s the station?’ I enquire of a man in a passing car and when the car has stopped and the man got out, enquiring, ‘Are you all right?’ I remark, ‘It used to be here, by this bridge,’ lines running off in both directions.