Flight into Camden

by David Storey

  ‘Not the sort of teaching I have in mind. I wouldn’t teach art. I’ll teach in a secondary modern school where a specialist’s not needed.’

  ‘You’re going back on yourself,’ I warned him. ‘I think you should keep to what you decided at first.’

  ‘But I must find something to do, Margaret. Something that’s not ruinous. I don’t know.…’ He rubbed his head wildly.

  ‘I want you to be happy …’

  He stared at me, uncertain of my change in meaning. He suspected I pitied him, now, and it made him nervous, and unwillingly dogmatic.

  ‘You do what you think is right,’ I said.

  ‘Now you’re talking like a woman,’ he said, smiling. ‘Uncommitted to work.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m getting a job myself. There’s always a shortage of typists.’

  ‘Ah, now that’s what I need. A mechanical nature.’

  ‘You make me sick,’ I said, depressed by him.

  He laughed cheerfully, and patted my shoulder. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve given you all my conviction. Every little drop of it.’

  In the afternoon he said he had some sort of surprise for me. He took me out of the house, and instead of walking down Inverness Street he took me in the opposite direction, walking between two rows of not unpleasant, heavily-painted houses. Within a few minutes a frieze of branches showed beyond the houses, then a broad stretch of grass and bare trees. He laughed at my surprise.

  ‘But I’d never have thought,’ I said, looking back at the roofs and chimneys, ‘I’d never have guessed that this was here. It’s like the sea … in the middle of all these buildings.’

  ‘It’s only Regent’s Park. Don’t look too enthusiastic or they’ll charge us to go in. There’s still one more thing.…’ He put his arm in mine and kissed me and led the way up through the trees.

  Down the side of the park stretched a row of beautiful terraces, white and glistening against the cold blue sky. Howarth explained their architectural uniqueness as we walked. But I didn’t believe in the Nash terraces. They seemed again only a façade to the seething ugliness behind.

  ‘There,’ he said, and pointed at two strange birds.

  Behind a fence two ostrich-like birds, dark brown, were pacing up and down; and then other features of a zoo came into sight: the low buildings topped by wire cages, and the noise of strange animals and birds. He was excited and loving at my surprise, pushing his face against mine, suddenly, and whispering, and kissing my ear. ‘Do you want to go in?’ he said. ‘Or would you like just to walk round the side?’

  ‘We’ll go round the side,’ I told him. I didn’t want to look too closely at anything.

  The zoo was in a low hollow, and as we walked down towards the lake in the distance we could see a few of the animals – llamas, deer, brown and white and black bears on their yellow, concrete hills. The menagerie was like an arena to the surrounding façade of glistening plaster and columns, as if everything had been flung out centrifugally. Or as if it were one large room, with its decorated walls. And the park – the park was strangely reassuring; worn and anxious like a mother: the place had a heavy maternity.

  The lake had the same shallow artificiality as the zoo, stretching itself in its low hollow between the trees. Like the rest of the park it was deserted. The emptiness was a meagre, polite desolation, anxious not to be distressing. It seemed merely an absence of buildings, bare and thin with conceding too much. It was a big, empty park, sighing with the wind, its polite hand over its aching heart.

  We came out on to Baker Street, and walked slowly towards the Oxford Street shops. ‘I want you to buy some new clothes,’ Howarth said. ‘Make a complete change of yourself. It’s very important.’

  ‘What sort of change have we in mind?’

  ‘Something sexy. Sex with restraint: that should be your new motif.’

  ‘Something for you to play with,’ I said.

  ‘All right, then,’ he said, angered. ‘Just get some new clothes. I’ll pay for them.’

  ‘Do you know how much money I’ve got?’

  He shook his head indifferently.

  ‘I’ve enough to look after myself absolutely. And that’s what I want to do.’

  ‘What about food?’

  ‘We’ll halve it. If you haven’t enough yourself I’ll pay for everything.’

  He grunted to himself as if he’d been amused. We went round the shops making plans for what I would buy. He had a passionate taste for clothes, strangely full of reason, and completely dominating me; then suddenly becoming bored with the whole thing.

  We did nothing the next few days but walk around London, visiting places, eating out, like anyone on holiday. I never relaxed. I was afraid any moment of meeting Michael. I wrote a letter home, not giving my address, to try and reassure my parents, and for the first time told them fully about Howarth and his divorce plans. I didn’t mention whether we intended getting married or not. I wanted to send them small presents, but it would have upset them, and been too ironical. I told them I would send an accommodation address for them to write to in the next letter.

  I was worried by Howarth’s sudden inability to settle on a job. He talked a great deal about doing manual labour, but it depressed him profoundly. His pride confused him. He was tremendously realistic about money and could measure its effect with great accuracy. When both of us had got used to mutual spending we pooled our accounts.

  During the day he spent a great deal of his time on his own, often in the National Gallery, where he seemed to have sat for hours in front of only one or two of the paintings. Whenever he took me there he walked through rapidly, commenting on many of the pictures, but becoming impatient if I wanted to stop and look. It was as if we were trespassing on private ground. He came with me to buy my clothes, taking infinite pains to see that I found his taste acceptable. The two winter suits and the coat I bought pleased him. I was more feminine and stronger, much more a woman, and full of his male attention and flattery. I began to enjoy sharing my body with him, wanting to lead him and antagonize him. He was frightened: he was frightened of giving me a child. ‘Why won’t you let me use a contraceptive if you won’t,’ he complained.

  ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘But it’s only sense.… We can’t have a child.’

  ‘It’s the thought of it,’ I told him. ‘Just the idea. It makes me feel sick.’

  And it frightened and exhausted him. ‘How can I make love to you?’ he pleaded.

  ‘With one of those – it makes it all artificial. As if we didn’t believe in it for our sakes, but just for the sake of doing it. It’s so premeditated. And crude.’

  ‘Crude, crude!…’

  But I was ashamed for him. I refused, repelled and degraded the only time he tried it. Nothing had ever revolted me more. He tried interrupting his loving, and was dissatisfied and slowly ashamed of himself. I was much more aggressive towards him.

  I was the first to get a job. Howarth was noticeably relieved. He relaxed, lazily, and took longer in choosing what he would do. I found the work easy, and more congenial: it was in the B.B.C.’s Overseas Department. I simply caught a bus from Camden Town to Kingsway and back each day.

  I was astonished by my new confidence. It cowed Howarth. He knew I was immediately successful at work, and almost popular. The people in the office had a cautious respect for me; it had none of the familiarity and irony of my work up north. I liked working in London, and travelling through it in the early mornings and the winter evenings. When I wrote to my parents and sent them two presents for Christmas they must have sensed my relief: their return letter contained no reproach, and no warmth. I was extremely happy. Only Howarth wearied me. It became apparent how we were feeding off one another, and only I seemed to be thriving. He was cold at the ease with which I took to London. He had expected me to be difficult. But I thrived on the anonymity. I took my confidence from him, and was agressive.

  In return he had a bated satisfa
ction; then a slow frustration that grew with the distance that suddenly sprang us apart. I struggled to keep with him. I relied on his sexuality wilfully; I loved his body and its fairness. It was so vulnerable, and bare to everything.

  I gave myself to him like a child, thinking that it soothed him: the baby-talk and the baby-gestures. He accepted it, and gave all he could in return. He was in despair. I took his conviction away; and London took it away. He collapsed into his bitter, empty shell; that protective cynicism and disillusion which underlay his earnest nature. And he wouldn’t let me help him. He made finding a job an act of pilgrimage, an atonement, a confession of his solitariness. He wrote twice to his wife, once at Christmas with a parcel of presents he bought for his children, and two weeks later, discussing the divorce arrangements. He didn’t seem to care. We celebrated Christmas lavishly, reducing our small capital to a minimum. It passed him by unseen.

  Yet, although he was despairing it didn’t drain my enthusiasm: it drove me on. I was like a girl again, and full of a quiet sensuality. I had never been so alive. The moment he came into the room I was wanting to touch him, to watch his hands, and his mouth; to feel him touch me, casually, as he passed; to feel the heat of his body as he did something intently, reading or listening; the way his body curled in the chair. For a while the presence of Michael in London lingered over me, even after I knew he and Gwen must be back north. It faded slowly, and it vanished just at that moment when the novelty of London wore off.

  After a month Howarth swallowed his pride and went back into teaching. I tried to discourage him at first, but he was peculiarly adamant, and resigned. He’d expected it all along. He went on Divisional Staff, and was sent to a secondary modern school in north London.

  His unhappiness, the emptiness, began to depress me: he seemed to have no way to turn, no purpose in life that he could yield to, struggling with himself when I would have least expected it to provide a way out.

  ‘I don’t like doing this,’ he said, the day before he was due to go. He spoke to himself, reprovingly. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this, I know. I’m throwing too much away.’

  ‘You’re not throwing anything away,’ I reassured him. ‘You’re only tormenting yourself with it.’

  ‘Why should I, though?’

  ‘I don’t know.… Some part of you – it must feel you’ve done wrong.’

  ‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘But it can’t be true.’ He hung his head in his bewilderment. ‘I’d never punish myself for leaving her and all that she meant.’

  ‘What did she mean?’

  He didn’t stop to think. ‘The uselessness … the inevitability of everything,’ he replied quickly.

  ‘But you can’t escape that.’

  He flushed, his fairness discoloured by his quick rage and regret. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve done it all for nothing.… No!’ He condemned me with his fixed stare, urging me to judge him, to enrage him and free him from his fear.

  ‘You tire me out when you torment yourself like this,’ I said. ‘I can’t see why you must torment yourself all the time. You confuse everything with it.’

  ‘But it’s so simple,’ he said. ‘I didn’t come here to feel like this. I came here for something fresh, a new start of some kind.’

  ‘Didn’t you come for me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at me soberly.

  ‘Because there’s no new start to anything, is there? You’re only making everything impossible for us.’

  ‘But it should mean more than this. I should have something to show for it, besides you. You’ve gained a lot by coming here …’ He looked at me, full of jealousy. ‘The truth is,’ he went on, ‘there’s still this coldness between us. Of you having one thing in our relationship and me having another.’

  ‘Then it’s your coldness.’

  ‘I can’t believe that. There’s something separating us. I can never feel with you.’

  ‘You’re being jealous and bitter,’ I said. ‘I’ve given you everything I have. There isn’t any more. What else can there be? You have everything.’

  ‘It’s your pride. Yourself. You haven’t given me yourself at all, you’ve only given from it. You haven’t given me the thing itself, like I’ve given you.’

  I shook my head. I couldn’t understand. I thought he was merely urging his dejection on to me.

  ‘Do you despise me,’ he asked, ‘because I’ve given you all my pride? I’ve given everything.… You’ve only given me bits in return.’

  There was an air of nausea about him: it frightened me that I hadn’t noticed it before, this plunging sickness. ‘Then you shouldn’t,’ I said. ‘You can’t give all that to a person and then ask for it back.… And I don’t think you have.’

  ‘I’ve sunk it all in you. I don’t mind that, though.… Yet I feel that you could leave me, Margaret, and I’d be the only one to suffer.’

  ‘You don’t believe I can love you, do you? I don’t think you can believe anybody can love you.’

  ‘I don’t feel the love. It reaches me as different things – but never, it seems, as love.’

  ‘Has your marriage destroyed so much?’

  ‘I’m afraid of loving you, of finding that you love me. I’ve always been afraid of you because of that – because I feel you have so much love to give. But I can’t feel your love. It all goes on outside me, on the surface. I watch myself loving you. It’s miles away. I can never get hold of it, and feel: “now, that’s it”. There are just moments when I really know I’m loving and in love with you. I feel it in every part of me … everything seems to feel it. I can’t describe it. Then it goes. And I’m struggling all over again for it. It never stays. And I’ve been blaming you for that.’

  ‘Do you want to go back to your wife? Is that what you’re really trying to say?’ I asked almost incoherently.

  ‘No. This is something that I have with you. With her I I never had it. At least there’s hope … some hope with you. I can feel alive.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I told him, tearful, weakened by him.

  We lay down together, and curiously he didn’t want my loving. I felt his relief. It burned in him that something had at last been resolved.

  9

  I wasn’t sure why Howarth went back to teaching: it may even have been a longing for his own children. He was strong with himself in quite small ways. I knew he had a photograph of Sheila and Brian, torn from a family group, but I only saw it by accident when he pulled his wallet out. He never mentioned them. He gave me no direct cause for jealousy about the past. He urged himself on into the present all the time. It was a reluctant, staggered race.

  He was already back from school the first day when I got home from work. He hadn’t made my tea, which had been his usual habit. He was sunk with a deep muted depression in a chair, his figure illuminated by the glow from the gas fire. It was already dark and cold outside: the kerbs of the pavements were beginning to frost in Inverness Street. He’d still got his top coat on, but I could tell he’d been sitting there for some time. His smile turned his face into that clown-like remoteness, rejecting any direct sympathy.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked, taking off my coat concernedly. I’d thought about him all day long, trying to imagine him in a classroom with his inevitable clumsiness and preoccupation. He stared up at my hair, almost as if he hadn’t heard. He used to tease me about the pains I took with it.

  ‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’ I said.

  ‘It went all right. I haven’t got the hang of it yet. I treat them like people.’

  ‘Are they little horrors?’ I laughed with relief.

  ‘They’re vile,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ I ignored his mood.

  He stood up and took his coat off, and followed me into the kitchen. He helped me slowly with the tea, liking the way I did things, practical, smiling to himself, wanting to watch and to conceal his true feelings.

  ‘We’ll go out and celebrate tonight,’ I told him.

>   He shook his head. ‘I’ve some marking to do. I shan’t have time,’ he said.

  ‘You are taking it seriously.’

  ‘You want me to.’

  ‘Yes … But don’t forget me.’

  ‘That’s more how I like to see you,’ he decided. ‘Possessive.’

  ‘I’m not immune to you, then?’

  ‘You’re not.’ He laughed simply, revived and suddenly pleased with himself. He’d bought himself a light blue pullover since coming to London and he wore it all the time: it lit up his fairness and his pleasure. He looked very dear in it.

  I read the whole evening, and watched him marking the ragged books. He surprised me with his conscientiousness, his head bowed stiffly over the table, working by the light from a red reading lamp. He was shut inside himself. All his force was turned inwards. It tormented me to resist him. When he was nearly finished I picked up one of the books.

  ‘Are you teaching English?’ I asked him, going near him. My hip touched his shoulder. He looked up, absorbed, afraid of intrusion. It burned me to touch him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in an inquiring voice. ‘English and History.’

  ‘Have you ever taught them before?’

  He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he dismissed it. ‘I can’t think of any other subject to teach but English. It’s useful and I don’t have to distort it.’

  ‘What about History?’

  ‘That might be different. I’ve only had one lesson so far. I think in the end I’ll make it a vehicle of my own moral judgements. That’s the most I can do, isn’t it? The history books I have to teach from are full of the Nation and the Empire.’

  ‘Yes. I think you’ve been wise,’ I appeased him.

  He listened to my voice carefully, as if it echoed inside him. Then he said, ‘The French teacher’s a German. The Geography teacher’s a Frenchman. A little Belgian agnostic takes Scripture. I don’t suppose they can mind me teaching English.’

  He laughed to himself, resigned to his humour. I was glad that he was working. I stood close to him and felt him working. When I went to prepare supper in the kitchen I could feel his presence through the wall. It seemed to warm the air.