A Serious Man
Page 39
Vaughan, he suspected, was relieved that he should leave (perhaps had been, in any case, expecting someone else). ‘All is not lost,’ was his immediate response (walking back through the streets). ‘Going to Ardsley and coming away from it,’ he further reflected, ‘was the best thing I ever did. And although this feeling won’t be with me all the time, on those occasions that it is I can recoup sufficient of its strength to carry me through the intervals between. I shall outlive the pain that engulfed me, outlive my art, outlive the means by which I put it into practice. Reality, after all, goes on for ever and, to the degree that I am part of it, so will I.’ In the decadence of Vaughan’s existence he had found a source of strength: in the arbitrary way she supervised – or refused to supervise – her life (disinclined to arbitrate in the existences of others) he had found an antidote to the way he had lived himself (the prescription he had written from an early age and which – in fulfilment through women, an unrepayable obligation – had driven him mad). He had – he had not been aware of the process, merely of the pain – been re-united, in a tangible way, with that source of reality which was within him, not outside. ‘Such a casual visit,’ he thought, ‘and yet, as if, in a curious way, I’ve been planning it all my life: right up to that moment when (her bell not working) I knocked on her door, found her doodling on the newsprint in the kitchen, made the tea, went up to her room, looked at her pictures then, with a peculiar contentment, came away,’ (she undismayed at his leaving): all those forces that had, waveringly, characterised his existence in the past had been brought into focus. ‘Of course, at the instant she showed me the painting – the woman rising, as if from a bed – I took it as an invocation, the one thought came to me, through the mists and clouds, of Isabella,’ as if, with dread as well as understanding, with a sense of enchantment as well as fear, in fear and trembling, he were moving closer to the one he loved.
About the Author
David Storey was born in 1933 in Yorkshire, England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. His novels have won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of fifteen plays and is a fellow of University College London. Storey lives in London with his wife and four children.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by David Storey
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1516-5
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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