A Serious Man

by David Storey

  ‘The station hasn’t been here for years,’ he says – a youngish fellow, a woman still in the car, its engine running.

  ‘I spent hours,’ I tell him, ‘by the siding. It was my principal occupation when I’d nothing to do. I drew the buildings, and an ancient metalwork bridge that crossed the lines and through the planks of which you could see directly down the engines’ funnels (the demise of the steam engine the end of the world of course, for me).’

  ‘The nearest station,’ he says, ‘is Linfield.’

  ‘Isn’t there one,’ I enquire, ‘much further away?’

  ‘Further?’ He glances towards the car. ‘There’s Darton,’ he says, mentioning a village in the opposite direction.

  ‘I might try that,’ I tell him, looking along the road (any moment Etty and Charlie setting out to search).

  ‘I can drop you there, if you like,’ he says.

  A sporty model, the car, like the man himself. ‘I’d be much obliged,’ I tell him.

  The boot is opened, my suitcase placed in.

  ‘We’re giving this gentleman a lift,’ the man remarks to the figure inside and, with signs of displeasure, the woman gets out: sliding the front seat forward, she indicates I get in behind.

  ‘You get in, Shirl,’ the man suggests, but churlish Shirl remains by the door and, hearing a car engine approaching from the village, I swiftly squeeze in.

  A car – neither Etty’s nor Charlie’s – passes, throwing up a cloud of spray.

  ‘We’re going to Darton,’ the man informs the woman and she – no comment – gets in in front. ‘We almost knocked you down,’ he adds to me, over his shoulder, as he closes his door.

  The car moves off: the road, unfamiliar in its straightness, is neatly attenuated between their heads. They are young: a disembodied gesture of goodwill. ‘It must be some time,’ he goes on, ‘since you came down here,’ the last houses of the village, set amongst fields and against the profile – still there, thank God – of Ardsley Wood, passing by on either side.

  ‘I was only,’ I tell him, ‘passing through,’ noticing, for instance, the neatness of his hair (how ill-judged, I reflect, of Etty to suggest my interest in people has been impaired), the neatness, too, of hers, and the fragrance that comes through to the back of the car. ‘Though I knew it well when I was younger. So much of my life,’ I go on, ‘was spent amongst these fields and woods, by Ardsley Dam, in Ardsley Wood,’ gesturing as the trees of that – I now observe denuded – plantation disappear: a large, prefabricated structure – not unlike an aircraft hangar, and presumably a warehouse – has been set incongruously in the long-loved fields the other side.

  Beginning his last adventure at the age of sixty-five.

  ‘I’ll be forty-six next birthday.’ An incongruous message which has little effect on the heads in front.

  I resist observing the landscape on either side or directly ahead and merely concentrate on the surface of the road itself: the alternate flicking of a broken line and the variegated texture of the tarmac.

  ‘Nothing is what it seems,’ I am about to add, but say instead, ‘I hope it doesn’t take you out of your way.’

  ‘Hardly,’ the youthful, clean-shaven, fair-hair-styled man declares. ‘A couple of miles at most.’

  He has, possibly speeding, almost knocked me down and is anxious, I reflect, to make amends.

  ‘I thought I might make for Glasgow,’ I tell him, reflecting (‘Lunatic Picked Up by Disingenuous Couple’), should he be questioned, this should be enough to put pursuers off. Such a primitive device, however, depresses my spirits and, recalling there is no chemical agent in my digestive system that can arrest or subdue my current excesses, I add, ‘Or Sheffield. Being,’ I go on, ‘of independent means, the world, as, indeed, it always was, is still my oyster,’ on the absurdity of this confession wondering if I haven’t gone too far. ‘Or Blackpool,’ I suggest.

  All is not well in the Land of Ur.

  ‘The advantages of the independent life – the independent mind apart – is that freedom and liberty are often confused, the one not being a concomitant of the other, defined, as they are, by separate rules which, on the surface, appear to confound the element they’re defining. The man, for instance, in the middle of the desert might assume he is free, but, on further reflection, conclude he is not. At liberty would be a better description, for he is not free from hunger or thirst, or, let’s face it, the longing for someone to love. Freedom, in short, has to be defined, and mine is defined by its limitations. I am free, for instance, from the burden of earning a living, for it’s difficult to starve in a country with such a profusion of goods and so richly endowed with charities. Is one’s freedom defined solely by the limitations one places on oneself, inculcated, the majority at least, in childhood, which in turn is the period when the adult mind brings to bear upon it the discipline required of the adult mind in order to function in an environment governed exclusively by technological prescription which is itself the product of an adult mind? Indeed,’ I add as a car sweeps past to the young man’s consternation, ‘a vicious circle.’

  Two vehicles are overtaken by the young man in turn: the car ahead – unfamiliar, not one I recognise – disappears over the brow of a wooded hill: we are moving through a landscape I recognise with a pang of pain: here I walked with Isabella, here I strolled, on summer afternoons, with Bea: here, on one occasion, I wheeled Etty in her pram, sitting down on a fallen tree and, admiring her sleeping head against the pillow, reflected, ‘What on earth will become of her?’

  ‘It’s odd, Ardsley station being removed. It had such character,’ I tell them. ‘On the one hand, the expresses thundering through, approaching ninety miles an hour, on the other, the stopping trains, together with the long coal trains from Ardsley pit, and the long, returning trains of empty wagons,’ while, further afield, at Onasett, as a child, I and my companions would follow a path across the fields, beside the golf-course, to the parapet of a bridge which allowed us access to a similar, cross-Pennine line where we laid coins on the rail to be flattened by engines.

  ‘So you come from here?’ the man enquires.

  ‘A child of Ardsley, an old son of the village,’ I tell him, ‘who has seen,’ I continue, ‘better days. I came in by bus and couldn’t believe my eyes, my favourite station, the one from which I left on many adventures, to school, to college, on holidays, on travel to foreign lands, had disappeared.’

  ‘We haven’t lived long in the village ourselves,’ he says. ‘Since the pit went we thought it looked quite pretty. We’re in one of those new estates at the top of Ardsley hill, next to the old house and Rectory, close to the church.’

  ‘A sort of mews,’ the woman declares.

  ‘The Hall,’ I tell her.

  ‘That’s the one. Lived in by a solicitor,’ she adds.

  ‘A barrister,’ the young man says.

  ‘A lively place in the old days,’ I tell her.

  ‘You knew it, then?’ She turns her head.

  ‘I knew the family living there,’ I suddenly explain.

  ‘The ones there at present are relatives,’ she says. ‘A grandchild, or, at least, that’s what they say.’

  ‘You go to work in Darton?’ I enquire.

  ‘Near there,’ the young man says, naming a town some miles away. ‘We have a shop. We set up in business this time last year and so far,’ he glances at the woman, ‘so good.’

  ‘Fashion and sportswear,’ the woman says.

  ‘It’ll be quite late before you get back home,’ I tell them. ‘And hear the news in the village.’

  ‘We don’t hear much,’ the woman says. ‘Unlike the old days, I imagine.’

  ‘The only village activity nowadays,’ the young man says, ‘is to do with the consumption and sale of drugs.’

  ‘By which time I’ll be in Glasgow,’ I tell him.

  ‘Or Blackpool,’ the woman says.

  ‘I think I’ll press north,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve a particu
lar reason for doing so,’ I add.

  ‘Relatives?’ comes the man’s enquiry.

  ‘Someone, at one time,’ I tell him, ‘I thought I might marry.’

  ‘Where do you live yourself?’ the woman enquires.

  ‘I’m on the move, at present,’ I tell her and, the conversation having achieved a degree of tedium I can, in the comfort of the car, no longer sustain, the old rail junction of Dalton (lines from the east and west meeting those from the north and the south) comes into sight, its colliery, I notice, too, having disappeared.

  Rows of terraced houses enclose the road: shops (the majority of them, eerily, boarded up) and, some distance through the village, beyond where the colliery at one time stood, the station is visible above an embankment of slag.

  ‘It was very kind of you,’ I tell the couple as I disembark and my suitcase is set down in the station yard.

  ‘Any time,’ the man says as he gets back in, waving, moments later, as the car drives off.

  ‘They nearly knocked me down,’ I inform the man I assume to be the station official but he merely remarks, ‘Cold day for sandals. Off oh your holidays?’ indicating the overcast sky – resonant, still, of course, with winter, even though the flowers of spring, in one or two places (plastic tubs, for instance, on either side of the tarmacked entrance) are pushing through.

  I plan a route that will take me not to King’s Cross but Euston and, using the money I have taken from Etty’s purse, a little more from a drawer in her desk, the children’s piggy-bank and the pockets of Charlie’s overcoat (and Mrs Otterman’s in the kitchen), I purchase the relevant ticket.

  Trains of a local nature pass in and out, none, however, on the route I want: a phalanx of passengers finally alights. The name of my first destination is called.

  My suitcase, I observe as the train pulls out, I leave behind, glimpsing it as I might a child deserted on a railway platform. It is midday by the time I arrive at Euston.

  I catch a bus in Drummond Street: familiar shops and offices pass: the dull façades of Victorian houses, the Georgian lineaments of Mornington Crescent obscured beyond adjoining roofs, the detritus of Camden High Street and, after a change of bus, the oppressive, winding route, along a narrowing road, between decaying offices, shops, yards and blocks of flats: the darkening, suddenly, beneath a bridge, the emergence into the fracas of traffic and people the other side: within minutes of getting off the bus I am in Taravara Road, an interstice between the diminutive, butterfly-roofed houses with their ochre brick façades and white and cream-painted fascias.

  I unlock the front door: an aroma of cold air, a hint of gas, perhaps of vegetation (the drains nothing to write home about), stale food: the welcoming hall (illuminated from the fanlight above the door): the room, to the left, knocked through from back to front and cluttered with canvases and sheets of paper – hardboard, easel, paints – the light suffused through dusty glass. Immediately ahead, beside the stairs, the passage leading, down two steps, to the room at the back: I open a door and reveal an interior divided between a sitting-room and kitchen: a gas-mantled fire (the cooking range the opposite end), a door and two windows looking out to the yard (a vista of encroaching houses).

  I sit in a chair and allow the house to re-absorb me.

  The telephone rings. Not many hours after that there’s a knock at the door. ‘What is madness?’ Maidstone enquired. ‘I’m not even here,’ he went on, ‘to discuss it.’

  Food. Am I capable of living on my own? The cuckolded husband, the writer and artist (incompetent father, improvident son). Where do I go, I reflected, from here?

  I went out shopping; returning, I sat for hours: noises from the house next door: the clatter of pots in the adjoining kitchen. Voices.

  All is not well in the Land of Ur.

  From a curtained window I glimpse my eldest daughter Matt first getting out of then into her car parked down the street: the intervening ringing of the bell, the rush of blood to the heart: paroxysmal tachycardia (that rushes round the head): a tall, lean girl with her mother’s freckled skin: long-skirted, booted, with a tight-waisted, round-cut jacket (secured by a single button): visible, behind the windscreen, Dan, her Scandinavian husband, taller, slimmer: blond: they gaze up at the house for several seconds: they must be discussing the possibility of summoning the police.

  Christ crucified (‘I know what I am doing’): he had it all worked out.

  Looking for a cottage – vandalised, of course, while he was out: out-of-work miners trample on his goods, write ‘Here we go’ across his pictures: “the miracles of art outweigh,” he wrote to Bea, “the miracles of science”. “How are you?” she enquires in a letter I pick up, amongst circulars and bills behind the front door (recognise the writing). “I’ve suggested to Etty she takes you north,” (“home” crossed out: ‘at least,’ he thought, ‘we have that in common, our children and our past’), “there’s plenty of room at Ardsley,” enough, I reflect, to do her research, me in one wing, she in another, divorced from Albert, staining cells: all my pictures, from now on, will be in yellow.

  The bell rings at the door: it’s followed by a knock (‘I know you’re in there, Father!’).

  ‘Perhaps the door is jammed,’ (Dan’s voice the other side: the Scandinavian reporter).

  ‘It’s bolted,’ (as the door is tried again).

  Rain fell, the day we married, but the sun came out in the afternoon: Isabella’s friend (from the WI) had a cinematic camera and took pictures of us walking, through the grounds and past the Rectory, to Church and – a single cut (no cameras allowed in the church itself) – walking back again.

  Bea’s daughter beats on the door the other side and, after a pause, calls, ‘Dad?’ and then, more formally, ‘Father!’

  Etty must have called her.

  And pictures, too, of the reception on the lawn, the looming presence of the Hall, Fenchurch in his morning-suit (despite it being the afternoon), with his grey top hat, Bea in her tight-waisted, flare-skirted wedding dress (which lay like a lost cause for years in a cupboard above the sweet-shop in Camden Town), the relatives and friends – and Isabella, radiant, incandescent, like a bride herself – all fifty-seven years of her, Fenchurch subdued (fired from the Drayburgh the previous summer, his art in tatters, Bea still one year to do at college) the final shot on the station platform, the train to London drawing in: Bea, Isabella, Corcoran …

  ‘Dad?’

  Tenacity a Kellsian trait.

  ‘I’ve gone to Scotland,’ I tell her through the door.

  ‘Open up,’ she says. ‘We want to come in.’

  ‘Don’t ring me,’ I tell her, ‘I’ll call you:’ cheeks suffused by the exertion of pushing, knocking, stooping, pressing – calling out to a recalcitrant father as I open up the door.

  Who breathes, perspires, creates, aspires: ‘You’ve got here, then,’ she says.

  ‘I’m just about to leave,’ I tell her while Dan, smiling, brushes back his fringe of hair. ‘Where are you going, Richard?’ he says, as if other plans in mind.

  ‘I thought I’d try the north,’ I tell him. ‘Or, then again, the south.’

  ‘You’re in the south,’ he says, ‘already.’

  ‘Further south,’ I tell him. ‘Where the bluebird flies and the sea is green and people can lie all day in the sun,’ only Mathilda says, ‘You’ve done enough lying already. How much money did you pinch?’ as if this invoking of the preceptorial self will bring the composite back in line.

  ‘The awful irrelevance,’ I tell her, ‘of all we do – in art, that is, as well as silence,’ and when she says, ‘Do you mean “science”?’ her pale green eyes – almost grey in colour – looking into my darker ones, I add, ‘Names of painters, poets and whores – dramatists, Mattie, and musicians – people whose work is of no consequence at all, while mine goes unattended. There was not one letter here when I arrived that has anything to do with me, Bea writing to a man at this address whom she assumes to be her former husband,’
turning down the passage while the tall, slim figure of Bea’s child casts a tall, slim shadow before me.

  ‘My mind is in pieces,’ I remind her. ‘I have no intention it should be other than it is,’ drugs which I took under Bea’s influence, ‘which wasn’t true,’ I add, ‘at all,’ uncertain which words of these I’ve spoken. ‘Only the other day, for instance, I stood on the hill at Onasett golf-course and did a drawing of Onasett against its headland, Harlstone pit no longer there. It has a pre-industrial freshness, like an athlete in peak condition arriving at a race already run.’

  Leather boots, creased horizontally around her instep: a full-length, full-skirted dress, the upper half of which, with its high-necked collar (secured by a glittering brooch), is concealed beneath her round-cut jacket (no corner on it anywhere): ‘the turbulence of genius,’ I might have said (the buzzing of a fly in a long-still room where, once, Vivienne, with the incongruity of the Hollywood whore she was, stretched out on a couch – where Danny sits, his wife still standing by the door).

  Contemplates her father: all my previous triumphs – posters, of his plays – stored with the miscellaneous bric-à-brac of Vivienne’s upstairs.

  ‘I had her for weeks,’ I tell her, ‘on the mantelpiece in a plastic jar provided by the Golders Green crematorium, several of her drinking pals imbibing from the bottle while the priest intoned the non-sectarian rites and we chanted, absurdly, in the local church (no organist provided) the fifteenth psalm which identifies those who, in the last analysis, will not be allowed into the kingdom of heaven – excluding not only Vivienne herself, and all her pals, but yours truly, Richard Fenchurch,’ my long-loved daughter at the peak of her career, her bronze hair, plaited, coiled in a crown at the top of her head, her pale, hollow-cheeked face turned not in my but her husband’s direction (‘Say something, Dan,’ her look suggests).

  ‘We’ve come,’ Dan says, ‘to take you back.’

  ‘How can you spare,’ I enquire, ‘the time from work?’

  ‘This doctor, Robeson, Etty has found, is prepared,’ Matt says, ‘to sign you into Eastley Hall.’