by David Storey
‘I suppose I do,’ she said. ‘But the same is true for you.’
‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m changing that. At least, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll tell her. That there is someone else. And I think I’ll come and live here the whole time.’
‘And leave her?’
‘I’ve no choice,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand this deception.’
‘As long as you understand it puts me under no similar obligation,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told her.
It was the closest they had come to quarrelling.
He wanted to say a great deal more – she lying on the bed, smoking, uncovered, her legs turned on one side.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘The whole thing,’ he said. ‘You’ve given me nothing.’
She didn’t answer.
‘Don’t you think so? I know nothing about you.’
After a moment she said, ‘Do you want to go on with it?’
‘Is that the solution? You don’t want me to feel a thing about you.’
She didn’t answer.
‘You disown everything about me that I think is worthwhile.’
He stared brokenly at her. Then, finally, he averted his gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to take me as I am.’
He decided to tell Kay.
He had imagined in any case that a time would come when he would announce boldly what had happened; the weight and reality of his feelings would push everything else aside: an authority which Kay, however she reacted, would have to respect.
Yet, having arrived at this point, he still hesitated. The thought of her distress, the terror and confusion, held him back. He felt too ashamed to approach her directly.
Instead, he sank – so quickly he was astounded – into that mood of despondency which for some time they had both thought to be a part of their buried past, re-opening those wounds so recently healed, querying his life, the complacency and confinement of his existence, the irony of its securities, its inertia.
Kay was broken in two.
It came so swiftly and so perversely, from underneath, that she had no time to prepare herself. She had no defence.
The blacker his moods grew the higher his hopes soared that she would be driven to telling him what he was afraid to confess to her himself: not so much that he was in love as that their lives had reached such an impasse, had become so irrational, that to separate was their only solution. If she could only recognize this he might never have to tell her about this other woman; her life need not be crushed at all.
Yet she seemed as incapable of coming to such a decision, despite his blackness, as he was of revealing it himself. By refusing to offer an explanation he had hoped to make the inevitability of their situation clearer still and had even, being the cautious man he was, begun to map out a system of disintegration so that, if he had to go into decline, he could do so with the sensation that he was, in some sense at least, its master.
As it was, they were running round in circles. The faster he ran, the closer Kay pursued him. So innocent, so gullible: she seemed unable to realize one word would break the spell.
Eventually he told her that he had actually found a room.
‘And what’s it for?’ she said.
‘To sort out our differences.’
‘What differences?’ she said. ‘And do you mean literally live there?’
‘What else can we do?’ he said. ‘The longer I stay here the more it drives me into the ground.’
‘One of us must be going mad,’ she said. ‘Only a few weeks ago you said your life had never had so much meaning.’
‘I know.’
She gazed hopelessly at him.
‘What is it?’ she said.
For a moment he was tempted to tell her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If I did we wouldn’t be like this.’
‘You mean to go through with it?’
He thought, then, she must know. He gazed at her quite hopefully.
‘It’ll give us both a rest,’ he said. ‘And time to sort things out.’
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Though all I feel is that if you leave you won’t come back.’
‘You haven’t much confidence.’
‘No,’ she said.
He was sickened by the whole thing.
A week later he told her he was leaving. He packed a suitcase and went and didn’t give her an address.
He was broken-hearted. He didn’t know what he was doing. The more he tried to sort things out the more complicated they became. All that he was really aware of in leaving home was the children’s faces: not knowing where he was going, nor for how long, they waved cheerfully at him from the front-room window.
What had happened? Everything he had spent his life preparing had crashed to the ground. Nothing had been solved; nothing cleared up or decided.
And having moved into the flat Helen’s attitude to him changed too. Or, rather, it became more plainly what it had been – though he had never cared to acknowledge it – before. Dependent on her for some sort of reassurance he realized how meagre her support really was. They met once, at the most twice a week; he sensed in her a fresh resistance. Her need now was to disassociate herself from any responsibility for what he had done: the rupture of his home, the break-up of his life. If anything her silences, those appalling absences from the room, he recognized as her reproach. He grew increasingly frightened.
‘You’re not responsible for what I’ve done,’ he told her. ‘As long as you keep coming here, like you do, that’s all I want.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
She didn’t come for a week.
She made excuses when she rang. At the same time she tried to reassure him. Finally, on the evening they had agreed to meet, she rang at the last minute and said she couldn’t make it.
‘Why ever not?’ he said.
‘I think my husband’s begun to suspect,’ she said.
‘So what?’ he said. ‘Does that make a difference?’
‘For this evening, I’m afraid it does.’
‘When shall I see you?’
He felt, perhaps, she’d been frightened too.
‘I’ll try and get,’ she said, ‘tomorrow morning.’
He put the ’phone down.
He returned to the bed where he had been lying; where in fact he spent most of his time alone.
A single reading-lamp illuminated the empty room.
He hated to see the place fully lit.
He’d got nowhere.
Through the window he could see the clouds illuminated by the red glare from the city. Somewhere, beneath them, not far away, were his wife and children, his home: everything which, only a few months ago, had been his world; the last things he would ever have wanted to injure, the last things he could have ever done without.
Five
She came the next morning as she had promised. He scarcely noticed. He began to resent her. She was colder than he had ever known her.
‘Would you ever leave your children?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The problem doesn’t arise.’
‘It’s a fine indulgence,’ he said, ‘to think that one can suffer for it alone.’
She had glanced at him then as she might at a man who talked aloud in the street.
‘It must trouble you,’ he said. ‘It might be my decision but you’re benefiting from the situation. From the suffering I’ve caused.’
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Are you trying to drive me away?’
He watched her for a moment; then, alarmed, he shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. �
��I’m bound to have moods like this.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and nodded, ‘I understand.’
Yet a gap had opened between them. He felt it as soon as she came in the door, the way in which she allowed him to embrace her. He grew, in response, more threatening as if to outrage her not by his but her own desires. He felt her reaction acutely: the casualness which was as much a part of her as anything he knew; a determination, in effect, not to deny herself the pleasure as well as the security which came from holding herself apart.
At times she took a delight in arousing him from a distance, glancing up as if surprised to find him contemplating her, revealing herself with an awareness that humiliated him as if implying that her knowledge, even of his deepest instincts, was greater than his own. Underneath it all, however, lay his complicity, a kind of treachery. It seemed that gradually, with his approval, she was deriding the things on which he most relied.
Perhaps he misjudged her. He scarcely spoke to her. She was like some presence he conjured up. He could no longer distinguish between what were her feelings, her motives, and his own. It was like a dream.
Every few days he went home. The length of his visits was dictated very largely by Kay’s mood. There was a kind of ruthlessness in her now which he welcomed, at least to the extent that it kept them apart. On her side was this formality, on his a certain amiability which this kind of self-protection allowed. With it he shut himself off from the children’s bewilderment, the unmistakable confusion which enveloped everything they did, creating, on the occasion of each visit, an air of normality amounting almost to indifference, as if this arrangement, his sudden removal, the disruption of their lives, were something inevitable if not natural, something for which they should even feel obliged.
Yet his distress never left him, an extension of those feelings when, much earlier, as babies, he had been overwhelmed by their vulnerability, the precarious tenure they held over their own lives.
He delayed telling Kay about Helen.
For one thing, he felt convinced she already knew. To bring it into the open after all his previous postponements seemed an unnecessary infliction. He even believed he recognized in her some appreciation of his concern.
Only her silences, the stony resistance with which she greeted his visits, disturbed him. Occasionally he would glance up from playing with the children to find her gaze fixed appealingly on him, the same look which, unawares, came over her the moment he began to leave, starting for the door. It dragged at him; he resented her. It was her vulnerability he despised, her lack of pride. Some visits, despite the children, he postponed merely at the thought of that ineffectual look. He wondered that he hadn’t seen it before, the incapacity to stand alone.
The problem of telling or not telling her, based as it was on the assumption that she already knew, became an increasing distraction. There was this obvious desire not to hurt her more than he could help; and there was the feeling too that, while the thing was as yet unacknowledged, he still had a foot in either camp. When he was at the flat he was determined to tell Kay everything, and when he was at the house he realized the wisdom of saying nothing at all.
He was stifled. Whatever qualification he placed upon it, his life was full of richness; yet there was no one to appreciate it but himself.
One day he rang Coles and met him in a pub.
There, too, he detected the same aloofness. They talked for a while about his work, and about life at the college now he was no longer there.
‘I went to see Kay,’ Coles said eventually. ‘Last weekend.’
‘Kay?’
Coles examined him through his thick lenses. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘No.’
‘She seems very upset.’
‘I suppose she is.’
‘There was the friend there I met before. Marjorie.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘And her husband.’
‘Newsome.’
‘Isn’t he an artist of some sort?’
‘I believe he is.’
‘He seemed a very nice chap.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
He couldn’t conceal his disappointment.
‘How are you making out, then?’ Coles said at length.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You’re not looking so bad,’ he said. ‘You’re putting on weight.’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘I suggested that Kay should come over for the weekend to our place,’ he said. ‘It would give her and the children a bit of a break.’
‘That’s probably a good idea,’ he said.
They talked only a little longer. He left without mentioning any of the things he’d intended. At the last moment, however, he gave Coles the telephone number of his room.
It took him several days to recover from their meeting. It was this rather than anything else which made him tell Kay about the other woman.
He was astonished, then bewildered by her reaction.
It was as if he’d pushed her off a cliff: the spurt of alarm in her eyes, then the cry echoing through his head.
‘But you must have known,’ he said.
‘How could I?’ She sounded as embittered by its effect as he was himself.
‘You must have known,’ he said. ‘What do you think it’s all been about?’
‘I never thought it was another woman,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t at first.’ He hung out his arms at the task of explaining. ‘She grew out of the circumstances,’ he said. ‘She didn’t create them.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is she married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to marry her?’
‘It’s hardly a question of that.’
‘Has she any children?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does her husband know?’
‘I don’t think so.’
She turned away. Really she had known, he supposed, yet had never admitted it to herself. He couldn’t see why she refused to face it.
‘I don’t think it’s such a good idea to keep coming here,’ she said.
‘I think I should. If I vanish completely what will the children think?’
‘I don’t think I could bear it.’
She had started to cry.
He felt embarrassed.
‘I’ll come on Sundays,’ he said. ‘If you like, you could be out.’
He hung around for a while, his irritation increasing.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
Finally, still crying, she had nodded her head.
As he was leaving he said, ‘It’s perhaps not a good idea, telling everything to Coles.’
‘Why?’ She glanced up at him.
‘It’ll get around at college, for one thing. For another, I don’t want him intruding.’
She didn’t answer.
‘Have you told your parents about my leaving?’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘Nor mine, I suppose?’
‘No.’
After a moment he added, ‘What will you do if they ring up?’
‘I don’t know.’ She waited, then said, ‘I’ll have to face that, won’t I, when it comes?’
He stood in the doorway, regarding her for a little while. ‘You know, it’s no good making it worse than it really is,’ he said.
At first he thought she hadn’t heard.
Then she said, ‘How could I make it worse, Colin?’
It seemed like some hideous indulgence, her tears, her fatalistic manner, the odd use she made of his name.
‘It’s not easy for any of us, that’s all,�
�� he said.
He watched her shut the door, uncertain of her expression, and came away from the house feeling not merely irritated but betrayed.
The outside vanished. Only the flat itself had any kind of meaning. Within it he was aware, not of himself, but of a robust, plundering animal, heavy and dispassionate, a composite, bits and pieces of them both. Alone in the room, once Helen had gone, he felt disabled. He welcomed her back each time as if waking from a dream.
Some evenings he sat across the room admiring her imperfections, the slight thickening of her waist, the faint mosaic of bruises which, from child-bearing, flawed her stomach; the slight patina of veins. Then, in the shadows, he saw an older, more familiar figure appear, ageing before him.
She never tried to hide. From the beginning she had taken this pleasure in letting him see her. The more frequently she came the more his confidence grew. It was as if he were celebrating a victory, one perversely allowed him by herself. The whole time he reminded himself of his good fortune.
She was a lady.
He had come to recognize this like a man suddenly confronted, after years of confinement, with the world outside, recognizing there something so immeasurably superior to his recent lot that he immediately endowed it with an immutability, a sense of transcendence, all its own: whatever he had thought of it in the past, that first glance established it for ever as something good and meaningful and never-to-be-lost.
So in her he recognized, beyond his own dilemma, beyond those conflicts that engaged him inside and out, beyond his confusion, an imperturbability and intransigence that both distinguished her from and yet united her with the life around. At first he related it to a common feminine property; to that instinct which had told him from the very beginning that women were superior to men: a superiority which lay in this very intransigence, a permanence of spirit, a kind of contentment, as deep and as imperturbable as their capacity to create life. Theirs was an instinct for what was ‘for life’, fed from their own flesh and blood, from their own outpouring: with it they loved, with it they bore children, with it they died, locked in a communion of spirit. What came out of their wholeness, this sense of life, was something which men could only compose for themselves by edict, that moral order which they fitted onto life like a suit of armour, hoping to contain from the outside what could only be directed from within. So it seemed to him that women were little less than gods, drawn here to love and be loved, to praise and be praised, the sole illumination of men’s struggle to exist.