Flight into Camden

by David Storey

  I was relieved at the sight of the room. From the outside it seemed that the building might have been falling down. But inside all this decay was concealed behind neat wallpaper and good second-hand furniture. It had neither the cosiness nor the cleanliness of home: it was crying out for some female hand. On the mantelpiece was a letter addressed to me.

  Howarth was smiling. He put the suitcases down and watched me open the envelope. There was a simple message inside, in his large mechanical handwriting. Thank you, Margaret, for coming. You’ve made it all worth while. ‘Howarth’. We smiled at one another. It was clumsy.

  ‘I came down a week ago to tidy the place and see the landlord. We’re lucky to get a place like this.’ He was like a boy offering a present and wondering whether it would be genuinely pleasing or only tokenly accepted. I went and put my arms round him, needing him. ‘It’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘And it’s not going to be half as bad as you think.’

  There was a newness about him, and a freshness: he seemed younger and more certain. ‘I’m not really frightened. It’s the strangeness,’ I told him.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I want to tell you about the divorce arrangements. You’ll have to hear them.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear anything yet. Please, I’d just like some quiet and some peace.’

  ‘Just as you like,’ he said, and went into the kitchen of the little flat. There was just the one room and the kitchen.

  I sat on the divan in the corner of the room and looked at the four suitcases and my bag in the middle of the floor, and at the old furniture. It was a shock, its coldness and the absence of any familiarity. Howarth was now as strange as the flat. The stains on the wallpaper round the gas fire, the marks of former pictures, seemed to represent the blankness of the journey itself. Yet I had longed for it, to be alone. But it was too sudden and shattering, and uncertain.

  When he came back in, quietly, he expected me to be asleep. He had a cup of tea in either hand, in little yellow cups, and he lifted his head in surprise. ‘I thought you’d be resting,’ he said, and put the tea on the small cupboard beside the bed. He sat on a chair, facing me. ‘You want to drink it,’ he said.

  We were looking at one another, waiting for our first impression of the place to reveal itself. ‘What do you think? Rather neat,’ he added quickly, in case I should show any disappointment. ‘I used to have a room at the top of the house when I was a student here.’

  ‘It looks better than the outside,’ I told him.

  ‘London’s not so bad once you get into it. I’ll take you round and you’ll see how different it is … how different each street is, really …’ When I didn’t answer, he said tonelessly, ‘There’s only one thing to talk about immediately, Margaret. And that’s money. Do you mind?’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’ I lay back, finishing the tea, and listened to him insist on the arrangements he had already made – leaving everything to his wife except the fifty pounds he had brought with him. He’d already paid a month in advance on this place. His wife was preparing to sell the house and move into a flat.

  ‘There’s so much disturbance about it,’ I said hopelessly. ‘Don’t go on.’

  He didn’t say anything for a while. People chatted in the street below, with foreign voices: the city throbbed beyond. ‘I can guess why you don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. ‘Are you afraid that all this is only temporary, or something? That I’ll go back to her in the end?’

  ‘I haven’t thought about it,’ I told him, exhausted and numb. ‘But it all seems so unnecessary – all this change. All the argument. Selling your house.… It’s so simple to me. It doesn’t have to have all this restlessness.…’

  ‘It’s not as neat and tidy as you think,’ he said. ‘It’s no good carrying on with your face turned away from what your hands are doing. I’ve ended my marriage, I’ve given up my job … You can’t expect all the people we’ve involved to go on as if nothing had happened. You can’t enter into other people’s lives like that and hope to come away unnoticed.’

  ‘But I don’t want to know your wife. Nor your children. I just want our life here, and nothing else. That’s what I came for. That’s why I came away. I want nothing more than that. Nothing whatsoever.’

  ‘This is a fine start,’ he said dismally. ‘You can’t cut things off like that, Margaret. If we’ve to have any chance at all we’ve got to look at what’s there.’

  ‘This is how I want my chance: no different from this. That’s the reason I came away. The only reason I came away was so that I could be alone with you.’

  ‘It’s made you hard,’ he suggested softly, thinly. I despised him for his consideration.

  ‘I hope it has.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like that.’

  ‘It won’t be hard for you. You’re a man. But it’s going to be hard for me. You don’t understand my position at all.’

  ‘You’re wrong to treat it as a battle even before we’ve begun.’

  He let me sleep it off. I dreamed of the distant shattering of trains.

  It was dark when I woke. He was stretched out in an armchair. The gas fire gave a low, intense light round him, but its heat scarcely reached the bed. He’d been dozing. He started, and looked round when I moved.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, as if I’d been a long way away.

  He came over and sat on the bed, peering intently at me to see if, in the darkness, he could detect any change. ‘Do you feel any better, now?’ he asked. He ran his hand cautiously through my hair.

  ‘I’d like to take you out,’ he added, and quickly went over to fetch my coat as though he’d been waiting a long time.

  The street down to the tube station was piled high with mounds of rubbish from a market. It smelt strongly of fruit and vegetables. Howarth liked the sight and the smell. The stalls were being dismantled, but were still alight with glaring yellow gas lamps. He wanted to take me on the tube to show it to me, but I refused. Instead we caught a bus down to Tottenham Court Road. He wanted to show me everything at once, wanting to soothe me. I insisted on a meal, and he took me into Soho.

  At once there was a difference, a lively, superficial, rotting difference, a surface thing that didn’t reflect but hid the emptiness around. I enjoyed the oily difference of the food, the warmth of the wine, the faked atmosphere. The whole city seemed an embellishment with no inside, and in Soho was this last finial at the very top. Howarth was pleased that I was thrilled. He was almost uncouth, touching me provocatively, bubbling over with himself. I wanted to shelter him from his disappointment. He was coming back to himself, but doubtfully and frightened.

  The evening and the morning were hardly connected. There was a dragged-out peacefulness about the evening, an ease of anticipation. He showed me round the West End with the suspicion that I would inevitably dislike it, that my provincial insecurity would after all identify the place with Sheffield or Manchester. But we’d brought the difference with us. In a way I wanted it the same, yet I clung to the strangeness and the emptiness. They hid us.

  We crossed the river over Hungerford Bridge. The lights trailed in the water; they were dragged and dribbled away. The Festival Hall’s molten image in the Thames was like a luminous rock, submerged and glowing. We climbed up from the gardens and caught a bus back to Camden.

  It was late. The bus moved slowly over the bridge. The road was deserted. Below, the river glistened like black metal, the boats moulded on its surface like deceptive toys and growths. The buildings slowly narrowed and drew close to the road. As the bus moved northwards the decay moved closer, until once more we seemed to be tucked under that rotting façade, creeping under, walking up the street in the still darkness and climbing wearily up the narrow stone steps to the door.

  There was the frozen strangeness as we undressed, suddenly ashamed of our nakedness, as if it mustn’t be confused with our reasons for coming here. When I went down to
the bathroom and found it locked and the noise of someone busy inside, I rushed back up the stairs as if I’d been molested. Howarth went down himself and tried the door noisily, exchanging a few words with the person inside. When he came up he said it was empty. I was afraid of using the lavatory. It had a communal dirt.

  Howarth was already in bed. He’d pulled the divan slightly away from the wall, making it look bigger. He kept to the side nearest the wall, and encouraged me to get in by appearing to be drowsy. He didn’t touch me, and kept to his side of the bed. It was strange lying with him and knowing that now there was no real alternative. It made everything less immediate and sharp. Then he said my name and came to hold me tightly, feeling me through my clothes.

  ‘I want to bury myself in you,’ he said later. We lay side by side watching the reflected light on the ceiling. ‘And forget all this.’

  ‘Yet you complained when I said the same, this afternoon.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said slowly, as if nothing had really changed. ‘It’s what I want.’

  ‘Aren’t you satisfied with me?’ I asked, complacent.

  ‘Yes. If this is what you mean.’ He felt my breasts, almost derisively arousing me. ‘Yet you and your body … they’re miles apart.’

  ‘I’m not aware of it.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ He kissed me, and kissed my breasts, frustrated with himself. I pushed his head away, shy of his boyishness. His head sank down again with a sigh. ‘There’s always this barrier between you and me. I wonder if you’ll ever let it down? It’s almost a physical thing. I can feel it when we’re loving. It comes into your movements as if somehow you begrudge giving all this. I can almost beat my fists against it.’

  ‘I might want something more than your love of my body, of what I can give you.’

  ‘A love of you, yourself? But you never let me see you. You’re suddenly prim … with barricades up all round as if you couldn’t even bear the thought of being hurt. You hold back something – and it’s that which really makes me despair.’

  ‘You’re not sure what you do want from me. That’s the cause of it.’

  ‘I know what I want. I still don’t know what I can get.’

  He laughed and kissed me, but failed to arouse me, and laughed again at his helplessness. ‘Don’t you despise your “coolness” at times?’ he asked.

  ‘Is it very important, what we’ve got?’

  His head turned towards me and I felt his long look. ‘I’ve no values of that sort left,’ he said. ‘Have you?’

  When I didn’t answer he rolled on his side, away from me. I was imprisoned by him when he felt weakened and disappointed, as though we’d never be released.

  I kissed him behind his ear, where his blond hair curled on his pyjama collar. He laughed at it, relieved. ‘Go on,’ he said, when I stopped.

  ‘No, you’re too erotic, Howarth.’

  He laughed again, so stubbornly.

  He had already made certain plans. Before he came to London he had paid a brief visit to secure the flat, made arrangements with a bank, and looked around for a job. He had arranged an interview with an advertising agency for the morning after our arrival. He got up while I was still asleep; I was vaguely aware of his movements about the room, and when I woke up he had gone. He’d left me a cup of tea with a morning paper on the cupboard beside the bed. The tea was cold. He’d left no message, and it wasn’t until he came back, two hours later, that I knew where he had been. I was dressed and unpacking my cases. He came in disconsolately, carrying a large clean portfolio which he dropped on the bed.

  ‘They have a job for me,’ he said, after explaining where he’d been. ‘It’s not much, but I could build it up quickly.’

  ‘What’s in the portfolio?’ I asked.

  ‘The work I sent up a few weeks ago. I’ve brought it back … it’s all old stuff.’

  I opened the folder and looked at the mounted sheets inside. The work was highly professional as far as I could judge, neat and very impressive. It was mainly designs for posters and book jackets and record sleeves, with drawings of machinery and several examples of typographic design.

  ‘Are you going to take it?’ I said. He watched me look at his work reluctantly: he was suddenly restless, regretting that I’d seen it.

  ‘I worked in this agency before. When I came out of art school. But I left fairly quickly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I disliked the work. It wasn’t very well paid in those days. But now … it’s at least four times the size as I knew it. If I’d have stopped there I’d be a rich man now. They weren’t slow to point that out.’

  ‘Don’t you think the job’s good enough for you? This work, it looks tremendous.’

  ‘It’s very clever, isn’t it? But it’s quite a different thing doing that in an art school than in an agency.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like the hardness?’

  ‘I don’t mind that. Once I got used to working again …’ He looked at me indifferently.

  ‘The ethics of it, then?’

  ‘I don’t want to be pretentious about it at this stage, do I? Nay … but it has worried me. What the hell am I going to do for a job? I’ve to pay maintenance to the family. Do you want me to talk about it?’

  ‘Are you afraid to face that side of it on your own?’

  ‘No … But you’re involved. My wife’s filing the divorce and it’s undefended. She’s citing my desertion and misconduct with you.’

  He watched my reaction without surprise. He’d been waiting too long to tell me, and he was resigned to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, almost ignoring my distress. ‘It’s the quickest and the cleanest way. I wanted it over with, quick.’

  ‘But you never mentioned it. That I’d be involved.’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ he pleaded, standing up and wanting to touch me. ‘To get the thing over with as quick as we can. I can’t bear the thought of it hanging over me indefinitely.’

  ‘But you’ve pulled me in … you’ve dragged me in without a word. You never asked me. I should have been given some choice. I never wanted it like this.…’

  ‘It can’t be helped, believe me. She knew something about it and … I told her everything. I wanted it all clean and open.’

  ‘But you never asked me!’

  ‘You wouldn’t let me talk about it,’ he almost shouted. ‘I asked you to.…’ He gazed hopelessly at me, banging his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘I’d have done anything to avoid something like this. It’s been burning in my mind all the time.’

  ‘Oh, Howarth. How could you? You knew I’d never want it like this. You knew. You’ve just used me, whatever else you meant to do.’

  ‘I promise you I haven’t done that.’

  ‘But you have!’

  We stared helplessly at one another, waiting for one of us to find something which would deny it.

  Howarth picked up his raincoat and walked out of the room. I let him go. It seemed suddenly characteristic of him to walk out on a situation that had become unbearable. I was afraid that he had walked out on his marriage in the same way.

  He hated to argue something out, to make something sound reasonable. He walked away from things. I began to dread that his weakness was in relying on others and on his technique of escape to solve anything that grew unbearable. But he had nothing else to turn to. If he had been an artist as Michael insisted he was, he would have had something. But his portfolio of work had nothing to do with him: it was some mechanical process; nothing of Howarth himself showed in it. He had only a vast emptiness to turn to.

  The difference between Michael and Howarth was now vivid and real. I kept remembering seeing them both together for the first time, at Christmas: Howarth standing aloof in the Professor’s room, almost contemptuous and above it; and Michael, pouring himself passionately into his group, working within it.

  Michael would go on, I knew, to a happy home life with Gwen and their children. His fatalism would be redeemed by his children in a way th
at Howarth had failed to find. Michael had waited for his children and not had them young like Howarth; he had given himself no time to overcome the force of their consolation. Michael would always be able to be consoled now. He was out of reach of my father’s primitive conscience. It wounded him that he was, but he was safe. He was safe even in his work, protected on all sides by it, an instrument of his science, no longer a person. We’d lost him. My father had lost him as he had just lost me, and had cried out when it was all too late.

  Howarth was an outcast from all this, I was sure. He’d been left behind; he’d been chased out. Coming to London was his acceptance of his situation. He’d declared his absence completely by withdrawing. He’d accepted it at last, declaring himself out of favour. Yet where had he withdrawn to?

  It was no place at all. Around us settled the emptiness of London, the abyss. He couldn’t retreat, like my father, to a hard, unquestioning conscience: the conscience that was his work, a miner’s dolorous habit of thought and affection. He and my father had so much in common. But Howarth had stepped back into space, he had run back, and I had shared his lust for this freedom.

  Only, it was a falling. A fall that neither of us knew how to end. The very area we’d moved to seemed steeped in our dilemma: the rot and the decay. It was a refuse area, full of detritus and rotting space. We’d come to it like so many others, with a bird’s instinct, purposeless, drawn to it unthinkingly, like a natural migration. And what was to be its effect?

  But he was surprised and secretly pleased to find me not angry when he came back. He may even have prepared himself to find me gone. I didn’t ask him. My blood surged to him when he came in the room, his raincoat carried on his arm, his eyes questioning me. I held his hands to my face, warming him.

  ‘Will you come shopping?’ I said. He smiled in relief. We went down into Inverness Street market, and whatever he had hopelessly planned on his walk round he quickly forgot.

  ‘I think I’ll go down to the County Hall tomorrow,’ he decided, ‘and see what teaching jobs there are.’

  ‘But you’ve just left teaching. Why do you want to go back? You said it was degrading.’