Flight into Camden

by David Storey

  ‘It only wears me out when you talk like this.’

  ‘Like what?… It’s all the truth, you can’t get rid on it,’ he said contemptuously.

  ‘No. It’s not!’

  I watched his familiar anger rising as he suspected that I derided his emotions and his life. He had this secret fear. But he could see no scorn in my face, and he reluctantly gazed at his hands, feeling his ignorance of me, finally pained by it. He was so easily forgetful of his feelings.

  ‘What can you hope to gain by carrying on like this?’ he said, his fierceness controlled and more menacing. ‘If you get shut on all of us what will you have got?’

  ‘You’re exaggerating it hopelessly. It’s just hopeless talking about it like this.’

  ‘If you’d only come and see your mother,’ he said, staring at me in tears of frustration.

  ‘You mustn’t, Dad.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll change your mind when he hears …’ He turned his head to a sound on the stairs.

  But it wasn’t Howarth. The Italian father tramped upstairs, and his arrival caused the usual crying out and shouting. ‘Howarth’s given up more than any of us. We could never go back now.’

  ‘If he hasn’t heard about the divorce you don’t know. He’ll have been relying on that all along. When he finds out … What’s he going to say?’ His voice sounded empty and lost now, and he was coughing into his hand, from his lungs.

  ‘It can’t make any difference.’

  He rubbed his face wearily. ‘What’s made you like this, Margaret? I’d never have thought it’d have turned out like this. Your mother feels it even more than me. We just don’t know which way to turn.’

  ‘You were only just saying that there were bigger things than this to suffer in life,’ I told him bitterly. ‘What things are they, pray? One minute it hardly counts, then the next you’re making it like this.… Don’t you see it’s all to no good? I can’t go back on what I’ve done, ever.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, then? Get down on my knees and beg you? I’d do that if I knew it’d change anything.’

  I stood up and hurried through into the next room.

  He followed after a few minutes. He came in quickly and sat on the edge of the couch. His defeat hardly seemed to matter to him. It was his miner’s resignation that gripped him; coughing, then gazing stonily at the floor, beyond hope, possessed only by his sense of endurance.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ I screamed. ‘Don’t be so helpless!’

  He heard Howarth’s footsteps and stood up. He looked round for his jacket, ignoring me, and hurriedly pulled it on, breathing heavily through his nose. He didn’t care that I watched his preparation to appear respectable: it was too familiar and I knew its purpose.

  When Howarth came in, his face set for opposition, he found my father polite almost to the point of warmness. It dazed me to see him performing like this, sticking to his pride whatever happened, to show no pain whatever he felt. I burned for him.

  ‘Are you ready for something to eat?’ Howarth asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ my father said. ‘I’ve been thinking of catching a train back tonight. There’s one just after ten … I think I’d better be getting down to the station.’

  Howarth looked up at me casually. But there was an intense relief in his face. His eyes stared with it, almost haunted. ‘But you’ll have to have something to eat,’ he said forcefully, and helped me on with my coat. His hands touched me for a second. ‘We’ll go out and get a bite, then come down and see you off.’

  My father said nothing. His silence hurt him. Howarth led the way downstairs. Between Howarth and me there seemed to be no friction, no sign of what had happened. His politeness concealed everything, even his curiosity about my father. They scarcely realized they were merely being polite and proud with one another, each fearing the other’s significance as if I weren’t there.

  As we walked down to the bus I again found my mind talking with itself, holding the remnant of some intense conversation of which only snatches came to me, irrelevant phrases like scraps overheard, made meaningless. It was the disturbance beneath the conversation that impressed me, like in a dream, beyond my control. ‘I couldn’t eat anything,’ I told them, as we came to the High Street.

  ‘Ah, but your father could,’ Howarth said.

  ‘I want nothing.’ My father was small beside Howarth: he looked at me earnestly, and was angry. ‘I don’t want ought. I’ll catch the next train.’

  ‘We might as well take a trolley down,’ Howarth said quietly.

  We crossed the road. Howarth held my arm, possessively. ‘What did you want to see Margaret about, Mr Thorpe?’ he said, while we waited on the other side. ‘I can imagine most of it, that you’d like her to go back. But why did you leave it until now?’

  ‘Your wife came to see us,’ my father said. ‘She was desperate, I can tell you.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have done that.… But we knew as much. We had a letter from her.’

  ‘Did you know she’s stayed your divorce?’

  ‘I heard yesterday from my solicitor.’

  ‘Margaret didn’t know that until I told her.’ He waited for Howarth to show himself.

  ‘I’ve purposely kept it from her, Mr Thorpe.’

  ‘Aye, you have,’ my father said, as if exposing a great deceit. He looked at me pointedly, his eyes tired but full of justification. ‘How does it affect you, then?’ he asked Howarth.

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference at all. She’ll have to give me a divorce eventually. Sooner or later: it won’t make much difference.’

  ‘And you think all this is fair on our Margaret?’

  He upset Howarth by the simplicity of his concern.

  ‘Margaret makes her own decisions, Mr Thorpe. She doesn’t have to rely on me in making up her own mind. I’ve seen to that all along. That’s one reason why we’ve been apart like this.’

  ‘Like what?’ my father said, confused but indifferent.

  Howarth looked at me. ‘Haven’t you told your father?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t see that it’s got anything to do with it.’

  My father watched us suspiciously, like someone standing on the threshold of a private room.

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have told him,’ Howarth said.

  ‘What’s this?’ my father asked. ‘What’s this all about?’ He stood at the side of the road stiffly, his hands clenched at his sides.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I told him. ‘It doesn’t concern you at all.’

  He suddenly stated: ‘I don’t know what to do. I can’t go home to your mother like this.’

  ‘Like what?’ I said, wretched for him.

  ‘I can’t go like this … I can’t explain anything to her …’ The trolley pulled up beside him silently, and startled him: he winced as its shadow fell across him, jerking back his head. He climbed on mechanically and sat down beside someone. We sat across the gangway from him, Howarth on the outside.

  ‘Is this to the station?’ my father asked the conductor.

  ‘What station d’yew want, mate?’

  He looked at me to explain, avoiding Howarth.

  ‘Three to Kings Cross,’ Howarth said patiently, and handed the money.

  ‘Are we right for the station?’ my father said determinedly to me. I reassured him and he stared fixedly out of the window.

  As we neared the station all the pretence disappeared. I yearned for him. I forgot Howarth, and wanted to comfort my father, to touch him. As I stood back to let him get out I said, ‘We’re all right, Dad. You’ll see it was right in the end.’

  ‘Right!’ he whispered in the bus. ‘You’re dirt! Both on you. You’re just bloody dirt.’

  We got off and stood outside the station. The street glowed with the mellow orange of the lamps.

  ‘Tell my mother that I love her,’ I told him fiercely. ‘And that I’m happy.’ I was terrified of his suddenly turning on Howarth with his fists as
I knew he might easily do. Howarth sensed it and said nothing, standing back.

  ‘I wish to God I’d never come down,’ he said, so coldly and full of hate that he seemed physically to drain away from me. He started walking into the station, and I hurried to keep up with him.

  ‘You won’t kill my love for you like this,’ I said incoherently.

  He stared gauntly at me. ‘Love? What love have you? It’s nothing but a selfish bitch’s lust. You rotten slut.’

  Howarth could bear it no longer. He stayed behind, and we left him.

  ‘You’ve no right to say that to me,’ I said weakly, panting to keep up with him.

  ‘Go away, lass,’ he called.

  I walked dumbly behind him. There was a train already in, with twenty-five minutes to wait. He strode through the barrier without looking back. I bought a platform ticket and ran after him. There was nothing to say. He climbed into a carriage and walked down the corridor of the train.

  I followed him from window to window. There’d been a time on holiday as a child when I’d hunted for him like this, burning and despairing at his loss. I stood patiently outside the carriage he chose. It had one other occupant. He sat the other side. I waited blindly, standing on the deserted platform afraid to stare in at him.

  I stood close to the window hoping he would come out again, or make some sign. Other people drifted down the platform, hesitating by the open doors. One or two looked with interest at me waiting alone. When I glanced back at my father I found him staring at me through the two layers of glass. He looked away. I could scarcely see him for the reflection. At the front of the train there was some activity as the engine came down out of the tunnel and slowly backed on to the carriages. They jarred with a heavy crunching. Steam drifted from beneath them. A man wheeled a stall towards me, and parked it a few feet away, full of refreshments and snacks. My father suddenly got up.

  He walked quickly down the corridor until he found an empty compartment. He’d found it unbearable to sit with a stranger. I followed him, and waited. At the next carriage door a couple were saying good-bye. My father could just see them. But he stared only across the compartment, containing himself. His eyes were red, as if he’d just come from work, and he was leaning forward, his arms on his knees. He was crying. It looked as though he was being sick. I looked away and waited for him. The station was unusually quiet and empty.

  Suddenly he stood up and came to the next door down the carriage. He lowered the window and when I came close he said, ‘Nay, but come back with me, Margaret.’

  I shook my head slowly. He stared at me with his old tiredness and defeat. He drew the window up slowly in front of his face as he might have done a mask, and looked out at me a moment longer through the glass. Then he went back to his seat. The station was full of the long emptiness of his journey north, the hours he would sit alone. The train was almost empty, and dark. We seemed to listen to each other’s silence. He had withdrawn completely into himself now, no longer aware of his surroundings, enclosed in his underground cell. The train lurched heavily, but he didn’t move. He looked up for a fraction, not at me but at the startled face of the man at the next door. A porter came down the train testing the doors. He met a second man coming from the opposite direction. An inspector waved his arm towards the rear of the train, then turned and lighted his green filter towards the engine. It whistled briefly, and moved smoothly, the thunder of the steam now echoing within the vault of the station. I watched my father intensely.

  He passed by unseeing, the train carrying him along the platform without a sign towards the tunnel and out of sight. The desolation of the station was complete without him: the long emptiness of the track, the useless brightness of its steel, the disappearance of the last carriage into the tunnel; the whole useless efficiency of the train. I followed him in my senses, noticing each detail of the brickwork as the lights illuminated the wall.

  Howarth was waiting at the barrier. He might even have watched me. He took my arm in his, holding my hand tightly. He was white with anger, his eyes staring and motionless.

  I guided him off Euston Road into Cartwright Gardens. I collected my things from the hotel and paid my bill while he waited outside. He insisted that we walk back to Camden, he carrying the case, so that he could walk off some of his despair.

  Soon I was clutching his arm ready to fall at any moment. He hailed a taxi, and we drove home.

  I lay on the bed oppressed by my loneliness as by a physical thing: it was a suffocating weight on my lungs and stomach, stifling my life. Howarth covered me with a travelling rug and sat across the room by the gas fire. It hissed quietly. The chatter of the people in the house was tossed about restlessly beyond the door. The room seemed smaller, tiny. Things murmured in the street. I heard Howarth emptying my case, opening cupboards, and sliding drawers. A smell of cooking drifted up from the rooms below. Laughter rose from outside, climbing the walls of the house. They seemed to creak. It surged for a moment in the street. If only I could have touched him.

  11

  I had a habit, when I was lying on the bed and Howarth was across the room, of twisting my head into the sheets so that I could see him upside down. His face then appeared like a piece of apparatus, mechanical and amusingly inhuman. His big toyishness was emphasized by the silent shutting of his eyes and the clamp-like openings of his mouth. It pleased me to be able to turn him at times into a machine, the strange perspective reducing all his humanity to the automatic movements of a puppet or a doll.

  Eventually this machine amused me less. For one thing, when he was inverted in this way, and unaware of what I was doing, the real sense of scale would be replaced by an almost infinite one, where his head was nothing less than a mountain, and the great apertures in its side were the features of an indescribable life. They continued to function unknown to him, their mechanism so crude and prodigious that they were unrecognizable: it was an unchallenged, unknown monster in the room with a bloodless, engineering appetite.

  I began to be unnerved by this transformation that the mere twisting of a head could produce. Once, when he caught me looking at him in this way, he laughed: the horrible mechanics of it, the great split of his mouth and the huge cogs that were his teeth, the shutter of his eye, convulsed me. The nostrils opened and quivered, the cheeks creased back in thick folds, flushing with the effort of his laughter. The sound itself was transformed into a vibrant mechanical sobbing; the flanges of a great machine rasping together under a heavy load.

  I was tormented by my association of Howarth with this infinite mechanism: what was Howarth? When I righted my head and looked at his familiarity, his identity was more elusive than ever. In what way did Howarth occupy this peculiar machine? Where did he end and the impersonal features of his mechanism begin? His physicality depressed me. There was no indication of the margin of his huge male physique, none that I knew I could cross to feel myself in the real Howarth, to be in his individuality, where it lay like a single, hidden egg in the nest of his body. Where was Howarth in all this? And why could he never indicate this division between himself and the mechanism that contained him?

  After my father’s visit it was as if he took advantage of this obscurity to protect himself. There was a new warmth and intensity between us. Yet there were moments now of deep withdrawal, when I couldn’t feel at all that he was with me, as if he wished desperately not to burden me with the thing that he was. My father had exaggerated the wall of confusion and antagonism surrounding Howarth: but at school and now at home he had experienced this open resentment and abuse. One day, when we were out walking in the park, he pointed out a group of children coming towards us, and laughing slightly said they were ones that he taught. They smiled at him as they passed and he called out cheerfully to them. When they were behind us I heard their abuse called after him, full of obscenity and filth, bringing my heart into my mouth. I looked at him. His face had stiffened, and paled. I could have fallen on the ground and wept for him. But he showed no sign
except that weariness round his eyes. And we never went in the park again.

  Perhaps he wanted to assume all the responsibility for defending me as well as himself. The collapse of the divorce suit, the visit of my father, even Fawcett’s coming, had all reduced the sanctuary wall. His need for a vista, for a view in his life, only increased at this sudden widening of his horizon. As I watched his moodiness increase, and that hunted look come into his eyes, I felt that he was concealing himself more and more behind that mechanistic barrier, as if he wished it to be absorbed indistinguishably into the vast mechanics of the city around.

  When I asked him about this, telling him that I was beginning to feel like some object discarded in his wake, he was immediately warm and disbelieving, coming to hold me tightly, and assuring me physically that there could never be such a thing. ‘How could I ever leave you?’ he said, laughing at the impossibility.

  ‘Because I was the means of you doing this, of being alone. And now you’ve achieved it you want to get rid of the means.’

  ‘But that’s utter nonsense,’ he said with his schoolteacher vehemence. ‘Have I ever shown one sign of going back on you? I just couldn’t do it. And remember it was you who left me a few days ago. You drove yourself to that.’ He was so confident and hurt that I had to be dissuaded from my feelings.

  Later I asked him, ‘Are you sure she will re-petition … can she petition for divorce again?’

  But his confidence had already subsided.

  ‘How long will she make you wait?’ I insisted.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He moodily showed he was no longer indifferent to her hold over him.

  And within a few days he was saying, ‘I never thought I’d be waiting on her beck and call like this … I’ve been thinking – I ought to go and see her and make her realize she must change her mind. I’m certain I could by talking to her.…’

  ‘How long would it take? How long would you be away?’

  ‘I might do it in a day, in two days,’ he encouraged himself, seeing that I wasn’t offended. ‘Would you want me to do that? To go and have it out … Would you like to come with me?’