Flight into Camden

by David Storey

  Soon my father came down, in his bare feet, his pyjamas too large for his small muscular body. I poured him his pot of tea, and he sat stiffly on a wooden chair, staring at the coarse matting on the floor, and coughing at the dust in his throat. ‘Shall I take my mother a cup of tea?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘She’s only just got off. I’ve made her take three of them pills. She’s just beginning to get her eyes shut.’

  We sat in silence, unsure of one another. The light deadened everything, cheapening all the colour, reducing all the pans and crockery to shadows. The scullery was emptied by the light and by the thing between us: we were two shadows, with acres of sleeping bodies around us. The place had a dead harvest, the stillness. And in the middle of it was this aching, a solemn convulsion of my inside, as if Howarth had been ripped away from within me.

  ‘Won’t you come away, Margaret?’ he said, as if the silence had been a long conversation which he was now ending. ‘You could go away for a holiday. We’d manage it somehow. We’ve always stuck together before.’

  ‘No. It’s no good, Dad.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you do it even for me?’ he asked quietly. But he was so full of distaste at this that his face twisted wretchedly. We watched ourselves retreat from one another. ‘Can’t you see what it does to all of us?’ he said. ‘It knocks out everything we’ve done for you.… And I’d do ought to get your mother and things right again.’

  ‘I can’t argue about it,’ I said miserably, and suddenly too tired by it. ‘To me it only makes everything you have done for me seem worth while.’

  He continued to drink his tea out of habit: to slake his throat. Everything was an obligation to him now. His eyes drooped and were familiarly reddened by fatigue. ‘Your mother wants you to leave him. More than anything in the world. You know that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then … Don’t leave it too late. That’s what I’m asking you.’

  ‘You mustn’t blame me like this!’

  ‘No. All right. We’ll blame nobody. We’re all to blame. But only you can do ought about it.’

  ‘My mother won’t die,’ I told him.

  ‘You don’t know what your mother might do … I’m asking you, Margaret.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t!’

  ‘Nay … Margaret.’ He shuddered at me.

  I was too tired. The night was a weight on me, its silence. I went into the hall and for a moment stood there to look at the living-room. It was dark, but the ashes still glowed, faintly illuminating the room, casting those great russet shadows on the ceiling. The room was lived in. It was warm and cosy, and its familiarity was something that couldn’t be spoiled. It was unearthly, its glow coming from within itself, concealing and revealing things indiscriminately. I went upstairs. As I lay in bed I listened to my father moving about downstairs, restlessly from the room to the scullery and back. All around the house was still. The estate. I ached for Howarth, longing for him to take me away from this thing for ever.

  It was my father who wakened me.

  He had a letter, and as if he sensed its significance, he brought it into the bedroom, woke me, and stood by the bed a moment while I tore open the envelope.

  I had already recognized Howarth’s neat handwriting. The letter was long. I stared at it blindly, suddenly hot and stifled, disbelieving as my eyes tried to plunge amongst the first few words. ‘I’ve called an end to it and I’m going away.…

  ‘I only hope this reaches you before you catch your train to London. But your brother understood.…

  ‘Although what I’ve done has always to me been the hardest way, it has still been weak. Even when I’ve been strongest with myself.

  ‘I just haven’t been strong enough. That must be it. I haven’t a chance of achieving any of those things I set my heart on. I don’t know whether your brother came at the right or the wrong moment – but it must have come in the end. We’d have been hunted out.

  ‘This is the cruellest thing of all. Writing to you like this. But I could never push you away even for your own safety while you were near me, and I could touch you. Even when your finger touches me I’m in flames. I could never turn away when you were there.

  ‘If our love has counted then it’s as a purgative, for me. I’ll always have it here. It’s helped me to reconcile myself finally. You might say the hounds have got me at last. I wish at times I was a hound like you. Doing things together, in groups, never useful if he’s alone. That’s what your brother means. But – it was wrong of me to share my uselessness with you. Your brother must be right after all. When he hears of this I imagine he’ll pat himself on the back. It can’t be helped. People have spent their lives patting themselves on the back at my expense. I still need you, Margaret. You’re life to me. But I can’t destroy everything merely because I want to live.…

  ‘In a way it solves everything, doesn’t it? Things still go on. I can’t believe that the clock is still ticking as I write this, when everything else has stopped. It’s still ticking. I’ve tried to stop too many things, to call a halt too noisily. And look what’s happened. I couldn’t go on teaching in that school. I can’t throw myself overboard and end it all. But another twenty years – It doesn’t seem much, in a strange way. I still love you, Margaret, with everything I’ve got. You’re still with me in the room, where we’ve been together so much and I’m crying that I can’t just see you and touch you. Those evenings when I came home from school feeling the bottom had dropped out. And then you! So optimistic. All the time.

  ‘You’re everything that was worth while. I’ll just go on and on repeating it. The freedom and the peace I found through you. But I see I’m not the person to demand those things outright. I’ve either to steal them or do without. I can’t steal any longer. I’m the worst thief there ever was. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t steal. I suppose I’ll end up in a cage now as an oddity. “Look what happened to old Howarth”, will be the caption, and people will look at me with that funny smile. What makes a man like me? It’s a useless question, isn’t it? I’m just there, without use or purpose. So I end up as a decoration. The only way I can be accepted on my own terms is by being inconspicuous.…

  ‘I can’t stop you coming back to London. But I won’t be here. I’ve already let the flat go, and arranged for your luggage to go north. I couldn’t bear to think of you alone in this flat. That would be too much. I’m leaving London. I’ll be gone by the time you get this. I’ve no idea where I’m going. I’m just going – perhaps one more run before the hounds really get me. You never know. I’m glad you’ve got a brother like yours. He’ll know just how to help you now. But please don’t let him crow. My death was only pointed out, not accomplished by him. He might even understand what it’s all been about.…

  ‘I’d made my mind up when we said good-bye yesterday. I knew as I watched you go down the stairs that this was the last time. I know you’ll never forgive me that deception. I can’t describe my feeling as I watched. I’ll never want to remember it – the loss of everything. If you can ever bring yourself to forgive me I shall know that I wasn’t completely a failure to myself, that there was a little bit of dignity in it somewhere. Without that I suppose everything will have been useless.

  ‘If I’d been an artist as I wanted to be when I was young, my work might have taken the place of you. But I’m not creative in that way. That part of me was deadened. You’ve been my art. I’ve punished and loved and struggled with you. I can never reject you now. And only you can show what I’ve really been. You’re the test of my deepest character. I’ve never shown myself to anyone as I’ve shown myself to you. I seem to have put all my faith and ambition into you. And if there’s any failing then it’s not your fault. You must go on.… At least I’ve shown you that if nothing else. You must go on and on. There’s nothing more important than that: it’s magnificent.…’

  My eyes strayed over the remaining words: it was a steadily rising crescendo, of waves, of water, of a d
epth that finally reached my throat, my mouth, and I gave out a drowning cry, collapsing into that endlessness of space, that suffocation that blinded and choked and ruined everything.

  Michael stretched himself out in his deck chair in the middle of the lawn. Gwen, gently rounded with her first pregnancy, sat closer to the back door of the house, in the shade. Both of them were pleased and really taken with John Fawcett. His unspoken curiosity roused Michael, almost distressing him one moment with his urge to blunt it, then amusing him the next with its seeming invulnerability. It was the first person I’d seen him overtly respect.

  Both the men screwed up their eyes slightly in the heat of the afternoon sun, but Fawcett’s short-clipped hair gave him a sharp, forceful appearance, swamping the more hesitant and perhaps heavier power of Michael. I liked seeing them together – they were so oddly contrasted. Their liking for one another may have sprung from that. They went on talking in the slow, easeful sun, while I drowsed on a blanket, close to the flowers.

  Voices came from nearby houses, and overhead an aircraft lumbered through the tiny, fractured clouds. The hill and the low wood beyond the garden hid the first approaches to town. ‘We’d planned on an architect-designed house,’ Michael was saying. ‘But Gwen soon put a stop to that. She was pregnant within three months of us getting married, so we had to rush into this place.’

  ‘This place isn’t so bad,’ Fawcett said, amused by Michael’s impetuosity.

  ‘It’s very fine,’ Gwen called from the doorway, quickly chastising Michael whenever he showed his peculiar blindness to things.

  ‘Yes,’ Fawcett said, ‘I’d count myself a very lucky man if I ended up in a house and garden like this.’

  ‘It does. It does. It’s a bit like a vicarage in any case,’ Michael said mockingly, glancing at Gwen and shaking his head. ‘Why she had to get into that condition so early beats me.’

  Fawcett laughed to himself, and softly glanced at me. ‘Are you comfortable stretched out there?’ he asked.

  I nodded, staring across at the two men as a mutual silence overcame them. Fawcett was openly anxious, but Michael had a certain furtiveness about him. ‘I’m very comfortable,’ I said, and closed my eyes.

  A moment later I was only drowsily aware of their murmured voices. I was overwhelmed by the scent of the flowers, the heavy scent of the newly mown grass.

  I wakened to the sound of tea things. Four chairs had been brought out and a tea table. Gwen was laying the tea things. The two men watched her careful handling of the crockery.

  ‘… He was a conscience was that man,’ Michael said wearily.

  ‘Did you know that he’s gone back to his wife?’ Fawcett’s voice was very distant, and unfamiliar.

  ‘Has he?’ Gwen leaned over him and put the sandwiches down.

  ‘But poor chap. He must have been human after all,’ Michael said.

  He laughed carefully, but without derision. ‘Still. That’s enough of that.…’ He must have glanced at me, but by now I had re-closed my eyes. Even Gwen’s rattling stopped a moment. ‘You must tell me exactly what your Belief is, Fawcett.… And let’s see if I can break it down.’ He laughed challengingly.

  When I opened my eyes Gwen was staring slowly at me. ‘Margaret?… Won’t you come and have some tea? We’ve been waiting for you, love.’

  About the Author

  David Storey was born in 1933 in Yorkshire, England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. His novels have won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of fifteen plays and is a fellow of University College London. Storey lives in London with his wife and four children.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1960 by David Storey

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1510-3

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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