Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  Invariably my sister-in-law shows neither surprise nor pleasure at my appearance, a consistency of non-receptivity she sustains with Gerry, too. I sometimes wonder if she knows me – or him – at all. No doubt she is unaware of the mental gymnastics I am obliged to go through in order to confront her in a place like this, not she, however, but the other patients the disconcerting factor: I can’t help feeling – the thought can’t help expressing itself – that, taking into account the vagaries of human nature (a whole twentieth-century compendium to go through) it’s not at all unlikely (the potential is there already) that I will end up in a place like this myself (Gerry more than halfway there already).

  She is, in her fifties, beautiful to look at: more than beautiful, ethereal (not of this world): calm, composed – so self-contained – so, ideally what an autonomous, self-regulated human being should be. Even glancing at her, I am, frequently, reduced to tears. She sits in a cushioned, wickerwork chair, on a terrace, at the rear of the house, if it’s sunny, placed there by an attendant – who, allegedly, ‘adores’ her – so serene, so abstracted, that often I’m reluctant to approach her. In the distance, a lake – a bank of sheep-mown grass sloping down towards it, a frieze of trees silhouetted, in a variegated pattern against the sky the other side: a place of serenity, of abstraction, as far from the world of Leighcroft Gardens as anything I can imagine.

  My invariable response, once I have made my presence known (‘It’s Richard!’ the blank, unvarying stare) is silently (vehemently) to enquire, ‘Why don’t we pack this in? Why don’t you come back with me? Why not make a film? Why not be famous (once again)? Why not be my sister? Why not be my brother’s wife?’

  Her cheeks are plumper than in the past, her figure, if anything, stouter (enough, at least for me, to notice: so memorable her image on the screen): her mouth – her beautiful lips fuller (coarser, less refined: evidence of biting them – a pain I can’t describe): the delicacy of her hands remains – reminding me, curiously, of the anachronistically delicate hands of Mrs Dover. Blue eyes, blonde hair (carefully tinted: Gerry hires a hairdresser to check her out each week). She pouts: her lips – her attendant, too, attends to these – are tinted red. Similarly, above her pale blue eyes with their thick blonde lashes, is a streak of eye shadow, spreading sideways and upwards in a quaintly quizzical, oriental fashion – an affectation of hers, or Gerry’s, or the in-house attendant, I’m not sure which. She didn’t look like this in the past: then an open, guileless, ingenuous expression – even, on occasion, faintly mocking (the eyebrows raised): generous, spontaneous: glad!

  Her forehead retains its shape, even if the cheekbones are masked somewhat by the fullness of her cheeks: the fringes of her mouth are lined and, unmistakably, beneath her chin, a layer of fat – scarcely noticeable, but significant to me. Her skin is bronzed (so many hours has she sat in the sun): a light blue suit – silk, richly lustred – jacket, skirt, offsets the colour: her legs, like her figure, have retained their underlying shape. From a distance she presents an image of someone little more than half her age. ‘What woman at her age – at our age – wouldn’t want to look like that?’ Gerry has often said. ‘The outside’s as good as it ever was. In many respects, a good deal better. Maturer. Firmer. She looks composed. She looks enriched. And yet,’ he frowns, ‘the inside, Rick, is seriously fucked up.’

  We have an agreement, her husband and I, that Martha will be an ‘open’ subject. ‘No hiding her in a cupboard,’ he often says. ‘Martha’s as present in our lives as she ever was. No setting her aside. She’s with us. One of the family. Don’t either of us, Richard, ever forget it.’

  We talk about her, as a consequence, scarcely at all: the declaration that she’s ‘one of us’ is – and always has been – enough: our ‘open’ agreement is now a closed book. A ghost, her absence dominates the house, a given (if unmentioned) element of it. ‘She’s in our thoughts,’ he says if – whenever – I bring the subject up: invariably when he fails to enquire how she is after one of my visits. A ghost, in effect, which resembles so little the figure that sits beside me on the terrace, staring at the lake, the distant trees (more potentially undiscovered bodies, ‘culprits’ passing invisibly to and fro). ‘Suspects’ have, recently, grown more elusive, and the ‘corpses’ she allegedly comes across more difficult to find: she will, on occasion, permission being given, take me across the grounds, indicating the places where we might, by constant searching, constant vigilance, come upon a ‘clue’: a broken twig, a trampled plant, a piece of paper beneath a tree, a footprint by a wall. ‘They’re cleverer, Ronald, than they ever were,’ she often tells me, though even this mystery is beginning to elude her. ‘Ronald’ is one of her misnomers – one of many: I have long given up prompting her to my given name. ‘Richard?’ she will say, repeating it with a querulous look, adding, ‘I knew it had an “r” in it. Not Ralph, then, Roland, after all?’

  ‘Roderick, Robert, Rupert, Raymond’ (odd she rarely hits on ‘Richard’) – even, occasionally, ‘Ian’ – no ‘r’ at all, the name of my (dead) nephew.

  Poor Martha.

  Poor Gerry.

  Poor Ian.

  Poor fucked-up Richard.

  A star, its zenith: too close to the sun, the female Icarene, if she but knew it (the celluloid melting), not even aware she’s taken off.

  While we, her admirers, stand rooted to the spot.

  Dear God, who has never answered my requests, this suffering in the name of ‘free will’ is beyond my ken. Does the fly sucked dry by the spider suffer from the same, the gazelle brought down by the tiger – its eyes alert, its body ripped apart – the fish crunched up by the shark – the cyclical horror of species devouring species upon which the whole of nature apparently subsists – benefit, like we do, from the graciousness, the generosity, the ‘gift’ of free will: or are we the ‘material’ of a self-devouring monster …? queries Audlin, aka Richard, Ronald, Roderick, etc., whenever he visits his alienated ‘sister’.

  She never will get well. Gerry’s prognosis (‘new drugs in the pipeline’), frequently – invariably absent-mindedly – repeated that she will, is intended to keep us ‘going’. To keep me going, his own visits to Market Whelling growing – recently – increasingly infrequent. She will never know me as I am, nor will I ever know her as she was – other than the persona transposed from her movies (copies stored ‘out of the way’ in cardboard boxes in the attic: occasionally I climb up the ladder with a torch and lift a reel out, look at it, lifeless, wonder if it’s deteriorating, and put it back. Gerry has plans to transfer all of them to new reels that we can store ‘for the next generation: the generation,’ he tells me, ‘after you’).

  Will they want to know? Not as much as I do – and I’m an adjunct, scarcely functioning, if alive at all: a potential corpse, if not a murderer (lining up behind the trees, a ‘nomen’ with an ‘r’ in it, along with Ronald, Robert, Roderick, all the rest).

  When I first used to visit her I had the impression (I had the belief) that, of all the people she had known, she knew me best: in her decline, I was, for a considerable period, her principal companion, not least when we came to England: the walks we shared searching for ‘clues’ – closer to her, at that time, than Gerry (his time taken up with ‘work’). Closer, also, than her sister (who visited her only once, took one look and declared herself to be feeling ‘that way, too’. ‘Perhaps it’s genetic!’ she exclaimed. ‘Our mother, after all, was very odd.’

  ‘How odd?’ I enquired.

  ‘Odd,’ she declared. ‘She stayed married to our father all those years.’).

  I thought, furthermore, by being close, I might remind her – not only of who I was, but who she’d been: why she had come here; what, as an alternative, she had to live for (the resumption, for one thing, of her remarkable career). I would mention the titles of her movies, the stars she had appeared with (been fucked by, too, I assumed); spoke, too, of my own ambitions – or, rather, Gerry’s ambitions for me – called her n
ot only ‘Martha’ but ‘Geraldine’, even ‘Matty’, hoping to distract her from moving through the plots of half-forgotten movies, the titles of which, like my name – like, presumably, her own – meant little if anything to her. I had a camera (another prompt from Gerry) and took pictures of her sitting on the terrace, or in her room, walking down the staircase into the communal hall. ‘I am,’ I told her, ‘your brother-in-law, who loves you very much,’ to which invariably she responded, ‘What law? Who says it?’ (Even, on one occasion, ‘Who passed it?’) Little I say fails to disturb her. At times I wonder if my visiting her does any good, concluding, on several visits, I won’t come again – to be mystified, days later, by an increasing desire to be with her, to see her (convinced, if I could find the right phrase, I could prompt her back to the person she’s been).

  Poor Geraldine.

  Poor Martha.

  Poor Matty.

  Poor us.

  (This when poverty isn’t a problem.)

  The fact of the matter was – the fact of the matter is – I scarcely know anyone else, she, other than Gerry, the person I’m closest to: a rake, a vocational voyeur, on one side, a nutter on the other.

  MEMO TWENTY-TWO (22)

  GREENLINE.

  1.My brother never talks about his activities in the war.

  2.I know he must have done something, having been mentioned in despatches – presumably having killed or crippled or disfigured someone on the way.

  3.What he is clear about is that I should be grateful for what he and his generation have done on my behalf.

  4.About the rest of his life he is loquacious.

  5.Almost.

  6.Or have I misjudged him?

  7.I have seen Martha today, having only seen her a week ago. Gerry hasn’t seen her for a month. We were going to Biarritz only this has been cancelled. Not only the film he’s working on the cause, but he’s quarrelled with the agent whose house we were going to borrow.

  8.We live, always, in other people’s pockets.

  9.I have decided to make a virtue of being fucked up. It’s done my sister-in-law a power of good: people on hand, no requirement to earn a living: no requirement to do anything but solve mysteries for which no one gives a fuck.

  10.When I tell Gerry I don’t believe in ‘politics’ he hits the roof (‘the bullshit panacea of the twentieth century like religion was to the nineteenth’). Everyone, I tell him, is active. I’d like to make a virtue of being pissed off.

  11.A part of him is thinking, ‘Is there something to be made from that? This is the first affirmative statement to have come from the creep, even if it’s a negative one.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ he says.

  12.My brother rarely uses colloquialisms, except when he’s worried about money (most of the time). Then he refers to stars as ‘cunts’, agents as ‘toss-offs’, and virtually everyone else as ‘items I wouldn’t piss on’.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ I tell him, ‘is maybe there’s a virtue in what I am.’

  ‘Sure there’s a virtue,’ he says. ‘There’s strength and principle, too. On the other hand, nothing comes to he – or she – who sits and waits. And although that goes against contemporary mythology – vis-à-vis meditation, for instance – I can say it’s true of my experience as well as of that of everyone who I happen to have observed. Activity generates comment and comment, in turn, generates thought. Thought, inevitably, generates action. This is the circle, Richard, we move in. This is the conclusion I have come to, after, I might tell you, a great deal of thought.’

  This is an observation, variations of which I have heard before and, although I can’t identify its source, I doubt if it is one he has conjured up himself.

  13.Or has he?

  14.I have never seen my brother thinking.

  15.In justifying myself am I inadvertently doing my brother down?

  I glance at his dark eyes for a glimmer of awareness but all I see is apprehension which, over recent years, has come to characterise him more and more – not least, I’m convinced, when he’s dealing with me. We’ve both, after all, got the abyss of Martha to fall into: a pit of incomprehension which awaits us both. If she’s gone down, why not one or both of us as well?

  ‘It’s only by opposing yourself to your equals, and particularly to those who are ostensibly more than your equals, that your own qualities are ever realised,’ he says. ‘You’re shaped by what goes on around you, and if everything around you is defined by inactivity you end up …’

  He intends to say ‘like Martha’, only Martha is more than even he would care to acknowledge (why she is like she is is ‘inexplicable’: a ‘genetic aberration’ the latest diagnosis – as revelatory as saying Hitler is the evidence of free will).

  ‘As a bum,’ he concludes.

  16.The circles we are driven in.

  17.(The continuum in which we live.)

  18.‘Maybe I’m an observer,’ I tell him.

  19.To get him off the hook.

  20.To help us retreat from familiar ground.

  21.‘Observe from behind a camera,’ he says. ‘Make something from your observation. Artists are observers. The camera, which you object to, is as much a tool to a director as a brush is to a painter or a chisel to a sculptor. It doesn’t invalidate what they do. I don’t go in for your “anti-kinema” crap. It’s your way,’ he goes on, ‘of getting back at me. I understand. But it’s no way, Rick, of going about it.’

  Maybe he concludes he’s getting through.

  He draws up a chair beside the bed.

  ‘How’s anyone to know what you’re observing if you don’t demonstrate your observations?’

  ‘Maybe my observations are equated with inactivity,’ I tell him.

  ‘Sure.’

  He waits, a demonstration by yours truly evidently underway.

  ‘Inactivity,’ he adds, ‘is a lack of faith.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Anything.’ He pulls his chair in closer: he’s coming to the point: how many times have we sat like this, me sprawled on the bed, the putative invalid, he the exhorting visitor?

  ‘Maybe there’s nothing to have faith in,’ I tell him.

  Not a suggestion my brother likes: the evidence – the material – of faith is all around: take the house, take Mr & Mrs Hodges – take the camera he’s bought me (and which I’ve used only once): take the paintings he’s bought from penurious bums (and later sold at an inordinate profit).

  Take the care he is exercising over me.

  " " " " " " " Martha

  (the astronomical cost of the Home he’s found).

  """" everything.

  """" his job.

  ‘There’s everything to have faith in,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t see it, Gerry,’ I tell him.

  ‘Take regard of your perceptions. Take regard,’ he says, ‘of the regard you hold them in.’

  ‘Nothing adds up to anything,’ I tell him.

  ‘Am I nothing, Richard?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is Martha?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you?’

  I wait.

  ‘How come we add up to nothing?’

  He is showing a streak of commonsense (?).

  ‘I hate to mention relevance,’ he adds. ‘Like,’ he goes on, ‘what we’re doing here. The significance, for instance, of my talking to you.’

  ‘What’s relevance?’ I ask him. ‘What will Martha’s madness add up to in a thousand years? What value the shit we live through now? I don’t go in,’ I conclude, ‘for your thin-ice skaters.’

  ‘What thin ice?’

  He raises his head, gazing at me for several seconds, the caesarian fringe, greying at the edges, arrested on his brow.

  ‘I’d like you to explain,’ he says, ‘the state of mind which, when surrounded by all this affluence, declares that there is no purpose in life that you care to respond to. Maybe you’ve been too much provided for. Maybe circumstances, der
ived from others, have allowed you the luxury to indulge yourself in negative thoughts and encouraged you, having nothing else to do, to feel sorry for yourself. Maybe affluence, Richard, is your problem.’

  ‘I don’t make a virtue of how I feel, even if you’re inclined to,’ I tell him. ‘You ask me a question, I give you an answer. The next thing I know it’s morality you’re on about. What’s so moral about making all this dough?’

  ‘Maybe I should give it away,’ he says.

  He’s suggested – indeed, offered (threatened) – this several times (a) as an indication that making money means nothing to him (‘a means to an end’), (b) because it means nothing to him, giving it away would be a pointless exercise.

  ‘I’m not an artist,’ I tell him. ‘If I were I’d be painting a picture.’

  ‘Or making a film. The opportunities today for an apprentice film-maker were unheard of when I was young. Why,’ he waves his arm, encompassing the room, the house, the heath, the whole of London, the entirety of the known and the unknowable universe, ‘you had to kiss someone’s ass for fifteen fucking years before you were allowed behind a camera, let alone a view through the eyepiece. They’re making films in schools. I’ve been in schools where the kids are making films themselves.’

  ‘Not Dover’s.’

  ‘Fuck Dover’s.’

  You see how early the process starts, the age’s preoccupation with sentiment and action.

  My brother applauds from the wings.

  ‘Or write a book,’ I tell him.

  ‘Okay. Write a book.’

  My brother is suspicious of – more than suspicious, positively detests – authors. For one thing, they’re always after your money. For another, they’re always preoccupied with something he has no time for. Themselves.

  Which is why he hates to see me preoccupied in this way too.

  Like the alcoholic genius two years back who burned him for twenty thousand dollars for writing a treatment of his early masterpiece in which he scarcely changed a single word – simply copied out the crap he’d written before, for which he’d only made fifty-four pounds, ten shillings and seven pence when the masterpiece was first published. ‘I’ll never employ an author again. Give me a hack, goddamit, every time.’