by David Storey
‘I can’t believe that,’ I told him, ignoring his feelings, not wanting to be lost with him.
‘Perhaps if you saw Sheila and Brian you’d understand. It wouldn’t do them much good to be without a father, but in my case it’ll do them less harm. You’ve got to believe that that’s true, if nothing else.’
‘But I can’t believe it. How can I just take your word for it, as easily as that?’
‘No,’ he said.
He went to the door and pulled it open. The dry shadow of the platform still bore the trail of our wet feet. Howarth dropped on the seat outside the door, resting his hands on his knees. I followed him out slowly and sat on the seat, away from him.
‘I can’t go on seeing you,’ I told him.
‘Why did you come with me this afternoon?’
‘I never realized how much you were meaning to destroy. I didn’t want to give myself like that.’
‘You wanted us holding hands and talking about art?’
‘You forced that sort of thing on me. I wanted a decent friendship … not anything like this, like you’ve made it.’
‘All right. All right. You don’t have to cry.’ He looked away.
‘All the same,’ he warned. ‘You mustn’t give me that sort of stuff. It makes it sound worse than ever. I’m not a “friendly” character.’
‘The way you talked about your children – the way you said their names – it didn’t sound as though you hated them.’
‘I don’t understand you at all. What do you want me to say? Don’t you see – I’m giving things up now. I’m not building them up. I’m not going to make do with things as they are any longer. Whatever you might believe in that happy-home mind of yours, I’m leaving my home as soon as I can. I’ve decided that already.’
‘You make it all so terrible. You make me the sole cause of it all. Even if it isn’t true, it’ll look like that to other people.’
‘No one’s going to blame you,’ he said patiently. ‘I haven’t made much concealment of going out with you, but I’ve made even less about my married life. The students at college know more about it than you do. And they don’t even know of your existence.’ He shook his head scornfully at me. ‘It’s the first time I’ve thought realistically of leaving her. It’s the decision that shocks. And I’ve made that now. For some reason I made it when I was hooking that trailer on to the tractor. There it is … you can sacrifice the wrong things for people.’
‘If you do this … you’ve got to see I can’t go on seeing you.’
‘Are you sorry you ever met me?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Why did you come with me this afternoon?’
‘I don’t know.… Because I wanted a friendship.’ He looked at me contemptuously. ‘I don’t know why,’ I repeated.
He tried to deny his feelings and look at me with some tenderness. For a moment I watched his conflict, then turned away.
‘You don’t love me?’ he said.
‘You don’t believe in love. Any longer, you can’t. How can you go from one parasitic thing to another?’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that.’
‘No?’
‘Do you have that sort of thing in you?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never wanted to.’
We sat in silence. At the other end of the platform the stationmaster was piling some crates on to a trolley. A bell rang in his office, and a few minutes later the sound of a train came down the track.
‘I seem to have gone on aimlessly and not cared,’ he said.
The train was already slowing when it came into sight. The stationmaster waved as the engine blasted down the platform. The carriages were virtually empty. As I climbed in Howarth said, ‘If you like I’ll wait for the next train.’
‘It’s a bit late for that sort of thing now. You’d better come with me, I feel too awful to be alone.’ He got in and banged the door. He sat opposite, looking first at me and then abstractedly out of the window. The stationmaster walked past carrying a green flag, glancing at Howarth, who was close to the window. He must have been watching our quiet quarrel.
A moment later we could hear his brief conversation with the driver; then the engine’s whistle screamed and the train lurched into a smooth glide.
‘What time is it?’ I asked him, resenting his silence.
‘It was due to leave at a quarter to five. We should get into City station before half past.’
‘Then it’ll seem I’ve come straight home from the office.’
‘It will, won’t it?’ he said emptily.
The landscape on either side of the track was dampened down, hanging low and murky as an evening heat spread out from the city. The greyness had lightened and was almost transparent, with the hidden sun. The wet trees and foliage collected shadows, holding together in simple, stark clumps, which slowly converged on the track, then disappeared to be replaced by isolated trees, and finally the gradually ascending walls of the city. We were like rabbits hurtling back into the warren.
Howarth sat crouched close to the window, his arms folded determinedly, deep in thought. He wanted to be alone. He himself would have preferred to have travelled on a later train. His brooding gave him a clownish air of independence. It emphasized the strangeness of his physique; the odd way he held his hands. His eyes were an abstracted blueness, and the fairness of his hair was no longer exaggerated by his flushed skin – his face was white, with small patches of colour on the cheekbones. He was older and more sullen, intently self-possessed.
The city was limitless in the rain. It was raining more heavily as the train rumbled over the arches, and the hard, angled shapes appeared and disappeared with an unending sameness. It was infinite: there was no fringe to each bricky vista, but line after line of successively fainter summits, disappearing uncertainly into the low greyness of cloud. The buildings were a part of the rain; and, as if such an identity had to be confirmed, the sky opened as we left the train and a sudden torrential spasm filled the yard. We sheltered under the archway by a row of taxis. I was shivering. The warmth of the carriage had brought out the dampness in my clothes. Howarth had his hands deep in his raincoat pockets, his elbows clutching his sides.
‘This is really something.’ he said bitterly, as if it were both unexpected and yet indicative of the whole mood of the day.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked tonelessly.
‘It’s all over and decided, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘And I’m going now.’
Like a boy longing to escape from some persecution, he darted out from the archway and ran quickly across the yard. I shouted after him, but he didn’t pause in the rain. The taxi-drivers watched. His feet splashed and exploded through the rivulets: then all I could see was his head over the wall, as he ran out to the street. In a moment he’d gone, and I hired a taxi to take me home.
Michael announced his engagement out of the blue. He came especially on a Tuesday to tell us, then brought Gwen home the following evening. He was shy yet dogmatic about it, almost impersonal, and secretly pleased. His sudden politeness was all part of his satisfied reserve. My mother was shocked, alarmed, then nervously elated; serious with herself all day, she set about preparing the home for Gwen’s visit with her usual slow thoroughness. Between the Tuesday and the Wednesday evenings she’d scrubbed and polished the living-room, scrubbed the stone floor of the scullery, vacuumed and polished the three upstairs bedrooms, and carefully washed out the bathroom. She was desperate to wash the living-room curtains, but daren’t in case they wouldn’t be dry and ironed in time. My father became extraordinarily amusing, with his swift intuitive humour that had scarcely shown itself since we were children. He joked all the time about Gwen’s coming, and was very serious when she entered house, extending his hand like a Victorian father and the introducing my mother and me without waiting for Michael. He took the initiative deliberately, showing Gwen where to sit. Michael was pleased to let his father succeed in these formalities.
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She was a surprise to all of us: seven or eight years younger than Michael, Welsh, and a teacher in an infants school. She seemed completely at home the moment she came in the door. She had the confidence of someone who is prepared to trust at first sight: a compassionate, unthinking girl, who made me feel harsh and resentful. Her already plumpish but not fat, body seemed ready to accommodate any number of emotional responsibilities. Michael had picked himself a little mother. It wasn’t what anyone had imagined, ever; but now that it had happened it seemed to have been inevitable. My mother was tremendously taken with her, more than she had been with Alec’s wife, Nora. Gwen looked much more assured, and full of common sense.
‘And what’s a Welsh lass doing up in these parts?’ my father said, laughing, and chewing his false teeth. ‘I never thought we were a tourist attraction or ought.’
‘I was at the training college here, and I thought I’d stop,’ Gwen said. Her accent amused my father. He grinned shyly at its novelty, and looked at her wonderingly.
‘She means she was taken up with a teacher she met here,’ Michael said with his heavy humour. Gwen laughed and poked her hand at him.
‘Go on,’ she said, shyly provocative. She evidently took Michael’s instinct for destroying illusions as a sign of honesty.
‘Well, don’t tell me I’m wrong,’ he said. ‘It was only last week that he threatened to flatten my face if I even spoke to you again.’
‘He’s very bad-tempered, you know,’ Gwen entrusted this schoolteacher to us. ‘You know how girls are at college. They go out on school practice and meet some mature teacher … well, he wasn’t really mature,’ she naïvely anticipated Michael’s criticism.
‘Oh, aye,’ my father agreed.
‘Anyway,’ Michael said, ‘I’ve to look out whenever I’m in town with Gwen. This chap’s warned me I mustn’t speak to her again.’
‘Oh, he’s not like that,’ she told him seriously, and Michael laughed, with my father.
‘Ah well, you’re engaged,’ my mother said, sighing with satisfaction that something at last was resolved for her eldest son. Gwen glanced at her ring with nervous pleasure. We’d all been pretending to ignore it, but now my mother felt assured and stared at it invitingly.
‘Would you like to have a look?’ Gwen said, and went across to show my mother. ‘It’s three diamonds in a gold setting.’ My mother examined it with great interest and delight.
‘Oh, it’s very nice, love,’ she said, and added with great emotion and deliberateness, ‘Can I give you a kiss?’
She strained up to Gwen and the two of them embraced. My father smiled awkwardly. And Michael didn’t look.
Then Gwen came to show it to me. She was consoling.
‘It’s very nice,’ I said, and deliberately held her wrist. There was a sudden hardness between us, as if we’d physically collided.
‘I never knew you’d afford such a thing,’ my mother said to Michael in triumph.
‘Nay, when we’re married,’ he said, assuming an accent, ‘it’ll be pawned. It’s only the bait on the hook is that, you know.’
He and Gwen laughed. They already had a deep confidence between them, and an unspoken pride.
‘Yes, there comes a time when you have to face up to things,’ my father said seriously. He moved his false teeth around inside his mouth, unaware of Gwen’s sympathetic scrutiny.
‘We’re getting married in a month,’ Michael suddenly stated, and gave the date. He laughed at my father’s surprise. ‘You’ve got to face up to things some time, Dad,’ he said.
Gwen’s eyes darkened at my parents’ change in concern.
‘It’s a bit soon,’ my mother said, her doubts and elation swiftly concealed. My father stared at Michael inquiringly.
‘I think it’s all right,’ Michael said. ‘We want to get married. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t.’
‘It’s a serious business is marriage,’ my father said. ‘You don’t want to go rushing into it without thinking, you know. And I’m talking from Gwen’s point of view as well as yours. She doesn’t want to take up with a man straight off when she hardly knows him.’
Gwen didn’t say anything. She glanced consolingly at Michael, and he said, ‘Oh, we’ve settled it all. We’re sure about it. And literally, there’s nothing to stop us. So why should we wait?’
‘But you want to be sure,’ my mother pleaded. ‘As your dad says, it’s not a thing you can go charging into.’
‘We’re old enough to see that, Mother, I’d ‘a thought,’ Michael reassured her colloquially. ‘It’s not a thing I want to rush into, any road. I’ve waited long enough to mek sure.’
He looked at us all confidently, smiling at our concern. We avoided him.
‘Well, you want to wary on him, lass,’ my father said. ‘Don’t go letting him rush you into things you haven’t first thought about yourself. He’s like that is our Michael. Just you be careful on him.’
‘Oh, I’m able to watch him, Mr Thorpe,’ she said. ‘I’ve got forty worse than him at school to watch all day.’
My father liked her humour. His eyes shone, and he laughed. ‘Ah well, you might know about it then, after all,’ he said.
‘I’m not so slow, Mr Thorpe,’ she said directly. The family laughed at her matronly assurance.
‘I’ll go and put on a cup of tea,’ my mother said, and when Gwen stood up to go and help her in the scullery, she said, ‘No, you sit down, love. I’ve got it all laid out ready. It only needs me to carry it through.’
But Michael went through with her. She was glad, and pleased that he did.
‘Michael’s told me you work for the Coal Board,’ Gwen said to me. ‘What’s it like there?’
‘Oh, it’s straightforward. There’s not much hard work attached to it. It’s just routine.’
‘I’ve often thought of going into an office myself,’ she said. ‘It’s so exhausting teaching nippers, and you never seem to get anywhere even when you make a special effort.’
‘I don’t think you’d like the routine of an office, not after the liveliness of a school. But if you’re getting married, will you carry on with teaching?’
‘Michael wants me to. Then we could save all I earn towards a house, and that sort of thing. It’s a nuisance being tied down like that, to saving, and so on. But …’ She patted her thighs and looked down at her blouse, then smiled at me. Her confidence hardened me. She was aware of my uneasiness with her: her benevolent nature gave her a patronizing attitude. But she was not hard. She was frightened of Michael, and she instinctively leant towards us for protection. She had already sensed my parents’ uncertainty with him, and allied it to her own.
‘By the way,’ she said. ‘We met a man who Michael says you know – at a social at the university last week. I can’t remember his name, but Michael said that he’d left his wife. Or there was a rumour going around about it.’
We could hear Michael talking to my mother in the scullery, an assured monotone, explanatory, and perhaps tendentious. ‘There’s a lot of that going on today,’ my father said, indifferent, absorbed in his thoughts and gazing at the fire. ‘People don’t seem to have any backbone these days. There ne’er used to be all this divorcing when me and your mother was young. You’d to get stuck into marriage if you wanted to make a go on it. But now, it doesn’t seem to count,’ he said mildly, afraid of being fierce with a stranger in the house.
‘I think you’ve got to leave people to themselves,’ Gwen said uneasily.
I resented her, wondering how much Michael had told her about me, and if she was only being polite about Howarth. I hated her idea of a well-brought-up marriage. But I struggled to create a fondness for her. I was fond of her, already. And she was trying to encourage it.
When Michael came back carrying the tea tray, she said to him, ‘Who was that man you showed me at the university, the one you said Margaret knew?’
‘Oh yes.’ He looked at me with sudden interest. He held a cup of te
a in either hand, and gave one to Gwen and the other to me. ‘It was that Howarth character. He seems to have had a wife after all, our Margaret. There’s a rumour that he’s left her, and applied for a job, down south probably.’
‘He’s left town, then?’ I said.
‘No. He’ll have a couple of months notice to work off. He mayn’t leave the college until Christmas. How long is it since you’ve seen him?’ he added deliberately.
‘Two or three weeks.’
My mother looked at me uneasily. She was still flushed from her joyful talk with Michael, like a young girl.
‘The common room will be a different place without him,’ Michael said. ‘No dark brooding, or lurking suspicion that we should all be artists.’ He laughed pleasantly, and handed my father his pot of tea. ‘What do you think of these artists, then, Dad? I bet they’d be less sickening after a couple of shifts down the pit.’
‘Nay, everybody’s got their place,’ my father said defensively, but with no conviction.
‘You see that I’ve got you your pot,’ Michael told him, overlooking his father’s feelings. ‘Your wife wanted you to have a cup like the rest on us. But I stuck out for you. Gwen ain’t impressed with formalities.’
‘Oh, Michael,’ my mother said. ‘At least Gwen likes to see a decent cup, not a great thing like that, I’m sure.’
‘We ought to have something in, you know,’ my father said. ‘To toast the happy pair, and that. It’s nowt exciting supping it i’ tea.’
‘I thought of bringing something with us,’ Michael said. ‘But then I thought you might be offended, presenting you with all the plans and the stuff to celebrate them with.…’
‘Where are you getting married?’ my mother said acceptingly. She had obviously heard about it from Michael. She looked at Gwen.
‘I’d like it to be in church,’ Gwen said. ‘And my mother wants me to wait until Christmas, at least, and to go home for it to Cardiff. But Michael say’s he’ll only get married in a Registry Office.’
‘Yes, he’s been telling me,’ my mother said. ‘And I’ve told him he ought to go along with you, Gwen, in a thing like this. It’s the biggest thing in a woman’s life. I think you’d be wrong to be married in a Registry Office if Gwen’s set on church.’