by David Storey
‘Where are the children?’ he said.
‘Marjorie’s taken them,’ Newsome said. ‘They’ll be all right.’
‘I love them,’ he said. ‘I never meant them any harm.’
‘Come on, old man,’ Newsome said. ‘Let me drive you back.’
He still held his face. ‘I didn’t want this to happen.’
He looked up at Kay, afraid of recognizing anything at all.
He was a kind of monster: some hunger that had driven them back. He couldn’t imagine how it had ever begun.
Yet Kay, all he saw, was something spun out from his own hysteria, intangible, far off.
‘Kay,’ he heard Newsome say: some invitation perhaps to intervene.
Yet he heard nothing.
He couldn’t make his feelings real.
‘I think I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I’d better go.’
‘I’ll drive you,’ Newsome said.
‘Yes, all right,’ he said.
He tried to find something that would hold these parts together, peering round.
‘It’s like being killed,’ he said to Newsome as they went to the door. ‘I don’t want to go. It’s such a shock. I really thought I was getting better.’
He tried not to think of Kay.
Yet, as the car was pulling away, he saw her standing at the door. ‘Take me back.’ And as the car accelerated he called out, ‘No. No. Take me back.’
They’d reached the corner of the square.
‘I can’t go,’ he said.
‘It’s all right, old man,’ Newsome told him and drove on.
The square disappeared.
They passed the end of Newsome’s street. A terrible coolness had come over him. It was like a sweat. He felt it springing out beneath his clothes.
At the flat he said, ‘It’s Fowler. In the end, that’s what I can’t stand.’ He waited for Newsome to condemn him, to extinguish that last and vital part.
‘Will you be all right, then?’ Newsome said. He added, ‘On your own. I’ll stay longer if you like.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right.’ He added, ‘In any case, I’ll be seeing her quite soon. Later in the week, I think she said.’
Yet a moment later, like a flame exploding, a fresh anguish broke out behind his eyes.
He held to a chair, saw Newsome speak, heard nothing, saw, dissolving, the walls, the windows, the figure of Newsome finally himself, and heard, too, a vast roaring in his head, a voice, calling, as if his own, ‘Kay, oh, Kay,’ and felt his head consumed, eaten, taken up, as if the bone, melting, had been lifted from his brain.
‘Kay, oh, Kay.’
‘I should forget him: Fowler. I should forget him,’ Newsome said.
And yet a moment later he heard the voice again, ‘I should forget him: Fowler,’ and, ‘I should forget him: Fowler,’ yet again, and then, ‘In any case, by the end of the week, you’ll be able to see her.’
‘I shall see her. I shall see her. I can always talk to her,’ he said, and then, ‘I shall see her, I suppose,’ and brought back, through a vague image of her, a faint coolness, a stillness, so that once more the walls, the windows, the curtains, the room, even Newsome, took on a recognizable shape. ‘I shall see her, I suppose,’ he said. ‘After all, I suppose too much has passed between us. If she decides against it, I shall go away.’
‘Fowler, in any case,’ Newsome said, ‘has left.’
‘Has he?’ he said.
‘I’m not sure whether Kay would have wanted me to tell you.’
‘Wouldn’t she?’ he said. ‘It’s not because he’s gone away that I’d go and see her.’ Yet he felt, as if across a chasm, the heat and the flames leap up again.
‘Will you be all right, then?’ Newsome said, and added, stooping down towards him, ‘Will you be all right, then? Or would you prefer it if I stayed?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right.’
He watched him drive off then down the street.
He lay down on the floor. He felt like a stone. He lay quite still.
He looked up, finally, towards the windows: the light, grey, ochrish, expanded slowly behind the panes.
He rang her again a few days later and asked her if she would see him.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘In the evening.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m certain.’
When he arrived she was sitting at the table. The curtains were still undrawn: the flowers were visible outside in the light that streamed from the window.
She sat facing the window. This had always amazed him, the lightness of the back and shoulders, the fragility beneath the dress: the thinness of her neck. It corresponded in some peculiar way to his own muscularity, that blank, uncalculating strength.
‘Marjorie let me in,’ he said.
‘Has she gone?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
He stood in the centre of the room, looking round. To one side, below Newsome’s picture, stood his flowers in a vase.
‘Are the children in bed?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He sat down. He didn’t take off his coat.
He could see her face reflected in the darkening window. It was small and still. The shadows hid its expression.
‘I’m glad I could come back,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
She’d got up. ‘Would you like something to drink?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some tea.’
She went to the stove across the room. He watched her. This, perhaps, was what he had always recognized in her: her compactness, the way she carried everything around with her, her vulnerability, her correctness, her incapacities; her general air of goodwill.
He wondered he hadn’t seen it before. The thing was held inside her.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said. ‘I didn’t imagine this happening.’ After a while he added, ‘I want to come home. That’s all I have to say.’
She was gazing at the floor. This she already knew, it seemed; or at least this was an event so far off as not to concern her.
But after a moment she looked up and said, ‘Yes, then. All right.’
He gazed at her quite blankly.
For a while they sat across the room.
One of the children got up: the youngest girl appeared in the door, her face white with sleep, her eyes half-closed, gazing round. She crossed to the tap, poured herself a drink, then returned to the door. ‘Goodnight,’ she said as she closed it.
Finally, when he judged it was time to leave, he said, ‘I’ll come and see you again in the evening. If that’s all right.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘At the end of the week.’
‘Yes.’
She came with him to the door.
‘Goodnight,’ she said.
‘Goodnight.’
When he reached the corner of the square he turned and waved and, after a moment, she waved herself and stepped inside.
PART III
Thirteen
In the summer he visited his parents.
Though he had warned them of his visit, his father was in bed when he arrived.
He sat in the living room with his mother, drinking tea, looking out through the back window at the overgrown garden and the field between the houses, its grass long now and almost hiding the fences.
He could hear his father turning on the bed, above their heads, the springs creaking, the floor groaning beneath the weight.
‘He’ll be down in a minute,’ his mother said intermittently, as if
this delay had been pre-arranged.
The whole house had a kind of weariness, like a battlefield, the windows open to the summer heat, the fire empty, the furniture pushed back to allow in the air.
His mother sat close to the table, during the long silences gazing at the floor, clearing her throat.
‘Well, I’d better go up and tell him you’re here,’ she said eventually.
‘He’ll come down,’ he said, ‘in his own time.’
He felt his mother’s presence acutely, a kind of animality, dull, uncomprehending, locked in its own kind of inconclusiveness: the slow alarm that had gradually overwhelmed her as she watched her family growing up, startled, seeing them slowly replace her in significance and purpose, and saying, ‘So this is how it happens.’
In a way, she seemed the least affected of them all, as if through all the misery and desolation she had clung to the one thing she knew: the flesh and blood, my son, my son. In a way, for her, nothing had happened to him since he had been born: marriage, love, work, children; things ended very much as they began. She sat unmoved, unmoving, at the table, gazing at the floor, embarrassed perhaps by the silence, yet content they had a focus above their heads.
When his father came down he saw easily enough the signs, almost the signature, of his father’s illness, a kind of self-immolation, as if he’d buried himself underground, bricked up the tunnel, refusing even now to acknowledge that he’d been released, let out.
His dark eyes looked round the room, to one side then another, and when his mother said, ‘Are you looking for something?’ he said, ‘No, no,’ and shook his head.
He’d dressed himself in a working shirt and trousers and put on a pair of socks.
‘I’ll make some fresh tea,’ his mother said.
His father sat down in a chair by the open window, looking out at the children playing in the field.
He was very thin. The skin was sucked in about his cheeks, his eyes black and lifeless.
For a while he wondered if they would speak at all.
‘How’s Kay?’ he said eventually, still looking towards the window.
‘She’s well.’
‘And the kiddies?’
‘They’re well, too.’
‘It’s a wonder,’ he said. Some slow shock crept into his voice.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve been lucky.’
‘Lucky?’ For the first time his father glanced at him. His illness flashed across his eyes, a kind of blankness.
‘Luck,’ he said. ‘You call that luck?’
He listened for a moment to his mother rooting in the kitchen, wondering if his father might spring across at him.
‘I didn’t come,’ he said, ‘to argue.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I know why you came.’ He looked back to the window.
‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘That makes it easier.’
‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘Easier. It does make things easier. Everything’s been made easier for you. Me flat on my belly half my life has been easier for you. Kay looking after your children while you park off with some woman. I see it all, don’t worry. Nothing, not even if you had begged for it, could have been easier for you. Your life’s been so easy I’m surprised you’re sitting there at all.’
He looked away. Then he looked at the surface of the table, polished obsessively to a glassy shine.
‘Don’t worry, I know why you came back here,’ his father said. ‘The same reason you went back to Kay. She’s a fool to have you. She’s sillier than I ever thought. If she only knew she’s making it easier for you to go the next time.’
‘Before, you wanted me to go back to Kay at any price.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I know.’
His mother came back in, bringing a fresh tray of cups and saucers and some pieces of cake.
‘You should let Colin have his say,’ she said.
‘You’re another one,’ he said. ‘I might have known.’ Yet he didn’t seem to attach much weight to this, for he got up and went to the fireplace and picked up his cigarettes. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘as far as I’m concerned, it’s finished. He runs his own life. If he wants to go chasing women, and she’s daft enough to let him, then that’s their look out.’
‘He hasn’t been chasing women,’ his mother said.
‘Do you think I was born yesterday?’ his father said. ‘For God’s sake. Don’t you think I don’t know what it’s all about?’
He went back to his chair but didn’t sit down.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s got nought to do with me. I’m too old for one thing. And for another,’ he flung out his arm, ‘I reckon nothing to somebody who smashes up other people’s lives and then comes back to say he’s sorry.’
‘Ah, well,’ he said.
‘Aye, and well it is,’ his father said and lit the cigarette with his home-made lighter. A moment later he stubbed out the cigarette and said to his wife, ‘Don’t you think I don’t know why he’s gone back home?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘His conscience. He can’t bear to live with it himself. He comes back here as happy as you please. “Sorry.” You’re as daft as he is if you believe that, for one second.’
He stood aimlessly by his chair, looking round.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to come back here to explain.’
Pasmore glanced up at his mother. She stood, her hands clenched together, by the table, the tea and the cakes untouched beside her.
‘You seem to think,’ his father said, ‘that you’re a race apart. You’re not. You’re the same as me. I don’t know what you’ve come here for.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to wonder.’
His sisters came a little later, arriving together in Wendy’s car. The argument was dropped.
Some more tea was made. His father sat silently across the room, refusing to leave, or to be involved, refusing to be disturbed at all, smoking again, his chair turned to the window where, with a kind of fury, he watched a group of children playing in the field.
‘Wendy’s election for the Council comes up in the autumn,’ his mother said, glancing at her youngest daughter who, in a white straw hat and a summer dress, sat across the room. His mother was invariably astonished by her daughters as if, unlike her son, she saw no connection between them, their flowering, independent selves, and her own stoical, domesticated body. Perhaps this was less true of Eileen whose life, in some respects, was very much a reflection of her own and who now sat in an upright chair by the door, her hands on her knees, not unlike a man.
‘Well, it comes up,’ Wendy said. ‘It doesn’t mean I’ll be elected.’
‘In a ward where they have a socialist majority,’ his mother said.
‘Socialist,’ his father said at last, to the window. ‘With all that money I’d call that a paradox.’
‘You’re not against that too?’ his mother said.
‘No, I’m not against it,’ he said. ‘I wish her well.’
Wendy looked across at her father. She had scarcely acknowledged him, or he her, since her arrival in the room. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s just the encouragement I want.’
He recognized her helplessness; in a way she’d fulfilled all his father’s dreams and yet, because she was a woman, had fulfilled none of them. She was an embarrassment, a liability: without children, wealthy, apparently enlightened. It was as if her sex disgusted him.
‘Oh, he’s proud of you enough,’ Eileen said from the door, ‘when you’re not here.’
‘Aye. That’s true,’ he said, anxious not to provoke her.
When Jack came there was a sudden, unmistakable relief in the room.
His father scarcely looked up when his son-in-la
w came in, his thin face nervously alight, anxious. ‘Well, this is a fair sight,’ he said from the door, looking round at the family.
He nodded at Pasmore and said, ‘Well, how are you, then? All right?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Much the same.’
‘And how’s the old man?’ he said.
‘Oh, all right,’ his father said, looking up as if he suspected the sentiment of this enquiry.
‘They haven’t told you, Colin?’ he said. ‘Dad had a fall.’
‘It wasn’t anything,’ his father said.
‘At work,’ Jack said as if, helplessly, once set on this course, he couldn’t stop.
‘Well,’ Eileen had said. ‘We’ll have to be going.’ To Pasmore she added, ‘I have to see to the lads. It’s not often I get a minute, you know, like this.’
He went out with them to the gate.
‘Don’t mind my father,’ his sister said, grasping his hand suddenly, then embracing him. Jack nodded, standing outside the gate, looking across at Wendy’s car. ‘He’s just trying to show you what he’s been through.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Ah, well,’ she said. ‘As for the rest, I can’t tell you how glad I am.’ A car passed them in the narrow road, slowing and easing its way past Wendy’s limousine. ‘You’ll not have time to pop up before you go back?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, look after yourself. And Kay. Give her our love. We’re always thinking of you.’
She walked off down the road with her arm in her husband’s. At the corner, as they turned up the estate, they waved.
When he went in, Wendy too was preparing to leave. She stood in front of the empty fire adjusting her hat in the mirror above the mantelpiece.
‘How’s Arnold?’ he said, watching her face in the mirror, the delicacy with which she arranged the hat.
‘Oh, he’s well,’ she said.