Flight into Camden

by David Storey

  ‘Are you still looking for some outside reassurance?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s been simpler for me to find it.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said mockingly, yet curious and perhaps surprised. ‘Could you say that and at the same time imagine yourself living back up north? It’s easy living like this down here. But would you still feel certain about it up there?’

  ‘If you want to go back and live there, both of us, I wouldn’t be depressed. It’d be more difficult, but it wouldn’t change me.’

  ‘Ah, I don’t know.… I was beginning to feel some sort of security, that I’d got somewhere at last.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s Ben who’s upset you so much as Fawcett. What he said about feelings not lasting.’

  ‘He’s being superficial, isn’t he?’ Howarth said. ‘Of course feelings don’t last. They develop. He doesn’t like the idea of feelings breeding, no doubt. He obviously thinks I came with you for that.’ He pointed at the bed.

  ‘No.… He doesn’t think that. You torture yourself with what you’ve done. It’s as if you’ve been looking round all your life for something like this.…’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you talk about when I was out of the room?’

  ‘He asked me if you’d done any painting since you’d come down here.’

  Howarth looked at me doubtfully. He had been standing in the middle of the room, but now he went to sit on the bed.

  ‘He seemed to think you were a painter.’

  ‘He would. He’s an optimist, and religious.’

  ‘Why should he be wrong?’

  ‘Because he is. He knows nothing. There is nothing to paint now. Except paint itself.’

  ‘But what do you want, Howarth?’

  He looked at me soberly, as if he were no longer mystified. ‘You,’ he said. ‘That’s all there is.… and all there ever was. You know, I always used to think I was a “real” person. But recently, now … I’m beginning to feel I’m only a figment of my own imagination. Isn’t that odd? I’ve always charged myself with being down-to-earth, with being one of the unfeeling poor. But now, though … it’s as if I’m floating in the air, that I’ve never once had my feet on the ground.’

  ‘I think Fawcett has made you feel too lonely.’

  He quietened. ‘I don’t know about lonely.… But I do feel really alone, now. Maybe it’s better that way. It makes it all simpler at any rate. I was a joke, I know, in the university common room because I took some things seriously. Anyone who does that nowadays is suspect straight away. And it was in the common room there that I looked for the company I thought I needed.’

  ‘To hunt with the hounds and run with the fox.’

  ‘I am the fox,’ he said, quietly amused. ‘Didn’t you know? And this is my hole.’ He was full of his ironical amusement.

  I thought a great deal about home. Having left it, I began to think of it with some nostalgia: I could only enjoy it in its absence. I was glad of its reassurance: in a way it measured the depth of things as they then were. Its severity became less imminent and destructive: a plant that had been pruned and now flourished more wisely. My mother wrote two letters to the accommodation address I gave her. But all along I had been expecting something from Michael, vehement, full of resentment and hurt. But nothing came. My mother described Michael’s flat, describing it in the detached way in which she now seemed to accept me, as if the whole of her interest had been depressed. There was no reproach in her letter, no meaning in it at all: she told me how Michael and Gwen saved nearly the whole of Michael’s salary, of their plans for an architect-designed house outside town, and the choice they intended of cars. It was factual and dead. She said nothing of herself, nor of my father. Neither did she mention Howarth. She had no curiosity; her letters were habits, but ones I would have suffered without.

  I showed the letters to Howarth. He was extremely interested in them, reading them more thoroughly than I did, but saying little of how they affected him. Apparently trivial things of this nature interested him profoundly; almost as if he expected to discover the thing he wanted in them.

  He received no letters of his own apart from the one from his wife. His isolation haunted him, more real than it had ever been before: he shrugged it off and tried to forget it in me. One evening when I came into the room unexpectantly he was looking at a photograph, his head bent towards the reading lamp, fair and reddened by the glow. He was so intent that his head came up involuntarily, in surprise as well as dismay, and he impulsively held the photograph out rather than show any sign of concealing it. ‘Have a look at this,’ he said.

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is.’

  ‘They’re your children.’

  He nodded. ‘Well …’ And still offered them.

  ‘I don’t want to see them.’

  ‘I’d like you to. They’re to do with me. They’re part of me.’

  ‘Do you try and forget them that much?’ I said hopelessly.

  ‘I’d like you to look at them.’

  I took the photograph, gazing at it blindly. But the two faces broke through. It was an early photograph: they stared up with simple, untouchable faith, as they might have stared at Howarth as he suddenly came in the room. ‘It’s not recent,’ I said, relieved.

  ‘No. You don’t have to feel responsible. They’re not as innocent as that now.’

  ‘You’re being sentimental,’ I warned him, and handed it back.

  ‘About these?’ He was surprised.

  ‘About their innocence.’

  ‘But what do you know about it?’ he said half in anger and in amazement. ‘You’ve never had a child!’

  He wanted to apologize. He held out his hand towards me, shaking his head.

  ‘I want you to be strong without that,’ I said quietly.

  ‘I thought I had been.’ He was conciliatory, and watched me carefully, his body tensed towards me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But with a thing like that – I’d rather you had it on the wall than catch you looking at it furtively.’

  ‘I wasn’t being furtive, you know.’

  ‘You were afraid of them, though. You showed it. They make you afraid. It’s better to have them on the wall.’

  ‘If you don’t mind then, I will,’ he said, and the next day he bought a frame and put up the photograph as the only picture in the room.

  The emptiness of London slowly shaped itself: we had an affection for certain places, for Regent’s Park, the Embankment, Piccadilly. It was a conventional choice, pleasurable with its masses of unknown faces and the places we couldn’t afford to visit. Our main pleasure was the walk we often took in the evening: down Camden High Street and Hampstead Road to Tottenham Court Road, round the West End, coming out by the Victoria Embankment, crossing Hungerford Bridge to the Festival Hall, and catching a bus back to Camden from Waterloo Bridge. We listened a great deal to the wireless, and went once a week to one or other of the two cinemas opposite the tube station. They were habits that Howarth at the most didn’t resent. He needed the refuge, and he was too exhausted by teaching to attend to much else.

  Even though we were so close he kept a great deal of his life to himself, partly at my insistence, as with the prospects of his divorce, but often because he guarded himself with an exile’s jealousy. He told me little that wasn’t anecdotal about school: I knew the whole of it numbed him, the dirtiness, the indifference, the compulsion to educate people who didn’t want it, the obsessiveness of the staff. But he was determined not to give in to it. He didn’t want me to help him. At school he could only succeed alone: his isolation there was as complete as it was at home.

  But I could only look uneasily at the closing-in of life around him, the slow and meaningful intrusion of things he would have wanted to ignore, and I tried not to think of how he would act when he again felt that he must break out. I wanted to keep him: but it wa
s an end in itself. He needed a vista to his life. At the moment he couldn’t see it, and was too busy and too numbed to search.

  He was usually happy in the evenings, seeking his relief from within himself against the heaviness of the day. He lived for the evenings, delaying our going to sleep in order to make them as long as possible. He was always exhausted with his tenseness in the mornings, unable to eat, deliberately numbing himself, almost afraid to move, it seemed, in case his fear would break out. When I asked him to apply to a decent school to teach in he refused. Strangely, he was suspicious of good schools: suspecting the same perverseness and uniformity that he thought he had found at the University and the Art College. He hated education, believing that its success was contained in its mundanity. He insisted on teaching in a bad school, believing that there his individuality glowed within him, lit up by the startling contrast.

  The more he taught the more convinced he became in his hatred of education, tormented by his inability to accept such a simple thing or to see any alternative. It was the mediocrity and the depersonalization that wearied him: he seemed to use this restlessness to conceal that caused by the thought of his divorce.

  All the time I was aware of this waiting: with Fawcett’s visit and with his argument with Ben, I felt his reluctant admission that he needed to antagonize, to feel opposed. He forced his life apart with this restlessness. At times he seemed to me to be something that would inevitably be destroyed by its own personal civilization.

  He was fully aware now of having carried me, of my prospering by the energy of his isolation. He made our domestic life as close to a married one as he could, treating me at times as the conventional wife, and acting with the imagined sobriety of a husband. He wanted an equality between us, thinking that he carried, by virtue of his sombre nature, the heavier load. It made me feel that there were things he hadn’t told me about his wife, facts about their life together that would dissuade a divorce court. He spoke about it obliquely: reading aloud the divorce hearings in The Times mentioning certain divorces who lived in the street or whom he came across in the poor backgrounds of the children he taught. It was no good resisting him.

  On those days when my tea was not ready when I arrived home from work I was to know that something was wrong. Usually it was some defeat he had suffered at school, and it took his pride several hours of the evening to rid itself of its rancour. When he was content, or only mildly disturbed, he would have the tea waiting and sit down to eat it with me. One evening, half-way to Easter, I came home to find him with the tea not made but he himself in a state of suppressed elation.

  ‘Read this,’ he said, flinging down his cigarette the moment I came in the door, and thrusting a letter at me. I could tell by the first sentence that it was from his wife, but when I made to put it down he insisted that I should read it.

  I followed the large sprawled handwriting with a disembodied sensation, my chest burning at the surprise that my first glimpse of a person I had tried so hard to ignore and deny should be in the shape of a letter and the muddled hysteria of her thoughts. I had wanted something cold and thoughtful. But she was writing out of instinct: the words were confused remnants of her emotions. She wanted him to come back on any condition and without any rebuke.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ he said, calm now that it was shared.

  ‘Is it what you’ve been waiting for all along?’

  ‘I never expected it,’ he said unwisely.

  I sat down, handing the letter back to him, too shocked to take my coat off or even to bother wondering about him. His wife terrified me. My picture of her as a dislikeable woman had dissolved with the pitiable immediacy of her letter. She needed him back, not as a father or husband, but as a person, as someone she’d known.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ll have to tell her what I said before, if I do write.’ He was suddenly irritable.

  ‘But you’re not sure about it. Yet I can’t blame her writing in that way. It’s bound to affect you. It’d all have been easier if she’d have given some grounds for divorce.’

  ‘That’s a right nice thing to say,’ he said, flushing and full of resentment.

  ‘I meant some recognizable grounds, that everybody could have understood.’

  ‘They can understand this plain enough. And so can she.’

  ‘So you’re going to tell her the same thing. Can’t you see she’ll only write back if you do? She’ll go on pestering us like this perhaps for ever.’

  ‘You’ve taken it a bit too seriously,’ he decided. ‘It’s only to be expected this sort of thing.’

  ‘So you did expect it, after all,’ I said wearily.

  He sat down, sullen and resentful of my interference. ‘You made me feel she wouldn’t do things like this,’ I said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Your attitude: you seemed so confident that she wouldn’t interfere, that this was what she wanted as well. That day at Lindley Ponds …’

  ‘That day at Lindley Ponds … you’re going to make it hang over the rest of my life.’

  ‘It’ll always hang over mine.… You made it all sound so final then, as if you’d already agreed about it between you.’

  He stared moodily at me, full of accusation. ‘You sound as if I might even consider what she says. Don’t you see – this helps to clear the thing up. It gives it all a bit of meaning, and sense … to me at least. And I’m the one who’s been demanding these things.’

  ‘She’s admitting that you’ve beaten her. Didn’t you know that already? This is only the start of her intrigue. You’re flattered by it already: that she should ask you back in language like that.’

  ‘It’s not flattery, and I haven’t beaten her. It wasn’t a contest between us. That’s your idea of sex. To me, it was a mutual thing, failing each other like this. At least this shows that there was some reason in what I did. I’ve been needing to feel that badly.’

  ‘And yet, until now, you were content to rest on your own feelings.’

  ‘Yes. But I feel safer now that I’ve got this. Don’t worry. She won’t write again. I’ll make sure I tell her everything.’

  ‘But if she does, it makes your divorce sound almost impossible. She can’t write like that and give you a divorce at the same time. And she sounds a woman who doesn’t like to let go.’

  He laughed, and came across to kiss me.

  10

  He was cheerful throughout the next week, suddenly friendly: it was a sexless friendship in which he was affectionately careful about the distance between us.

  For a whole week he didn’t write to her; he wrote to his solicitor and received a letter which he didn’t show me. I didn’t even know of its existence for several days, during which time his friendliness had changed into absent-minded humour. He was quietly amusing the whole time I was with him, teasing: it overlay the truculence and the moodiness of his nature. He was disturbed by the way things were going but did everything to conceal it. ‘Why haven’t you written to her?’ I asked him then.

  He looked up doubtfully from an evening paper. The main electric light was on, but he was frowning just as he did when reading by the light from the small red lamp. But his eyes were so alive. ‘I got in touch with my solicitor first,’ he said, uninterested. ‘I don’t want to spoil anything inadvertently by writing to her.’

  ‘Is the divorce going to be difficult, like Fawcett said?’

  He put the paper down, and crossed his legs: he frequently crossed his legs as a habit now. I thought it had something to do with his schoolteaching and his need for authority. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said with a sudden frankness, ‘her letter can change things. The solicitor’s advised me not to acknowledge it. That’s why I haven’t written. I’m waiting for him to find out what the situation is.’ He watched me unsympathetically.

  ‘I’ve wondered all along,’ I said tonelessly, ‘whether we could ever carry off a thing like this. It’s been so unreal to me. I wake u
p in a morning and I can’t believe it … at times it seems so artificial living like this. Like being on a tightrope in a nightmare all the time. I’ve dreaded something happening every minute …’

  ‘What’s artificial about it?’ He was cautious, looking at me only half-determinedly.

  ‘Me. Trying to ignore that you have a wife and children, and that they still have a right to make demands on you.’

  ‘It’s immaterial. I thought you’d got just the right attitude to all this. I’d come to think you were right to ignore it.’

  ‘Yes, and then this happens.… And what do you mean by the letter changing things?’

  ‘The solicitor thinks she might be considering withdrawing the petition.’

  ‘Out of spite?’

  ‘She might even do that. But it’d be unlike her. No … he thinks she’s going to try and seek a reconciliation, and that she’ll withdraw the petition as a first step.’

  ‘But once she knows you won’t go back, do you think she’ll still refuse to give you a divorce?’

  ‘I don’t know … that letter from her is quite a shock really: it makes her seem a stranger. Like a letter from an unknown woman. I just can’t see her writing it.’

  ‘Maybe it was the woman she used to be, the one you married. Did she love you then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘… I could bring myself to believe that I did, or that I didn’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t say much for me,’ I said, trying to be amused. ‘Don’t you know whether you love me?’

  ‘You’re not asking me seriously,’ he reproved me. ‘I don’t think I could answer you in a mood like that.’

  ‘But I am serious. Do you feel for me now what you felt for her when you married her?’

  ‘I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable,’ he said heavily, almost with sarcasm. ‘But I married her fourteen years ago, when the war was still on. How can it be the same?’

  ‘You must have loved her to marry her.’

  ‘I did.’ He was about to leave it, but he added slowly, ‘If anything it was that ambitious sort of love, of a young man – half attraction, half fulfilment.’