Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  ‘Have you written a book?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you intend to?’

  ‘I haven’t thought of it.’

  ‘Why mention it?’

  He is about to add, ‘All these fucking memos around the fucking house,’ for I can see the prospect of my writing a book so close to home disturbs him more than ever. For instance, he is currently in litigation with several characters in the US who are writing the life of his second wife. My brother wants Miss Geraldine O’Neill, at this stage of the proceedings, to be forgotten. He wants her to be forgotten while she’s still alive – at the very least while she’s off her head. The moment she is dead he has, I’m convinced, worked out the scenario for a first-class movie, in which case, if there are any books around, he will have to buy the rights: ‘Let’s burn the bastards now,’ he says. ‘In the long run, that way, we can save a lot of dough.’

  ‘I could have said, “Or write a symphony”.’

  ‘You have to train to write a symphony. You have, for one thing, to learn the fucking piano. You have to have no training to write a book. Any asshole – and I’ve known some – can write a fucking book. The costs, for one thing,’ he concludes, ‘are nothing.’

  He is thinking, no doubt, of my memo pads: he is thinking, ‘This sonofabitch is going to write a book about Miss Geraldine O’Neill and how she was fucked up by her (present) husband and how all the blame can be laid at his door, the poor suffering bastard who’s done everything to help her – and him: he’ll create the shit-all scandal of all time for I’ll hardly be able to sue my brother and, worst of all, say anything in public by way of litigation while my second wife is still alive.’

  He is also (a secondary, though no less important function of his brain) reflecting, ‘I can always buy the movie rights at cost, make him feel he’s accomplished something independent of his brother, and show him I’m above all petty sentiment, even the inconvenience of being libelled.’

  ‘I have a meeting.’ He looks at his watch, a chronometer costing several thousand pounds – an early present, in their courtship, from Martha.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ll talk about this later.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I mean that, Rick.’

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  ‘I don’t want you here. See a girlfriend. Get one to stay over one or two nights. I don’t want you wanking here all evening.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘How about the fair-haired one who called last week?’

  I can see he has a view to the fair-haired one himself: just as the fair-haired one had a view to him. ‘Is that your brother?’ she enquires, her pale blue eyes following Gerry out.

  ‘I’ll look forward to seeing her,’ he tells me.

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Right.’

  My brother skates off to his next assignment. Having paused by the bank, he swirls away. Faithless and unjustified as I am, I have to admire his grace. I have to admire his skill: his gyrations, his leaps and whirls – his dancing and his speed are everything.

  BOOK ONE

  1

  ‘I’m going, Martha,’ I tell her.

  She doesn’t stir.

  Neither does she move her hand, her habitual gesture – a casual, upward flick – enquiring and dismissive – when registering something of what is going on around her: a demonstration of ‘as you were’ or, even, conjecturely, ‘understood’.

  She sits in her room as if she’s waited here for hours, expectant (news of a fresh catastrophe outside: a ‘crime’ demanding her immediate detectorial presence). I’ve been told already she isn’t well, Gerry instructing me on this visit, however, to tell her he’ll be away ‘for a month’.

  In effect, five weeks (when he gives me the dates), coming into my room to inform me, the decision a torment to him (the ice getting thinner all the while, the speed required to keep ahead: one day, I know, the ice will crack: the strangulated cry, the outreaching hand, the desperate face as, caught irrevocably in his own momentum, he disappears – that grace, that dexterity: the ‘perfect line’ – for good).

  An antidote to his anxiety (perplexity: letting go of those he loves), he suggests – surprisingly (the first time he has done so) – I travel with him (to New York, Los Angeles, back to New York). ‘Maybe I should involve you in this production. Give you a break from Dover’s, this house, a life which – my guess – isn’t doing you an awful lot of good. I shan’t, for instance, be taking Gavin. He’s enough on his hands over here. You could do some useful work.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Discuss the things I come up with.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Money. Since you have no regard for it, detachment – yours – might be a help.’

  ‘Waiting in hotels,’ I tell him.

  ‘Hell, no. There’ll be a suite. I’d like you with me. All the time.’

  A fresh – a novel – unexpected anxiety: an extension, no doubt, of the one he’s shown before (via vexatiousness, exasperation, contempt) but this with a new intensity. What, for Christ’s sake, is his brother up to?

  ‘I’d hate to leave you on your own, even with Mr and Mrs Hodges. These trips to see Martha appear to be your only consistent social contact. Does she insist you see her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does she tell you things I ought to know?’

  ‘No different to the things she’s said before.’

  ‘Does she talk about us?’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t think she knows who I am. You,’ I tell him, ‘never come up. I wouldn’t, either, if I wasn’t there. She often calls me Ronald.’

  ‘Ronald.’ He stares at me for several seconds. ‘As I say,’ he says, ‘I’d hate to leave you with Mr and Mrs Hodges.’

  ‘And Martha.’

  ‘And Martha.’

  Mrs Hodges is, inimitably, the wife of Mr Hodges, who began his employment as a waiter on the old London, Midland and Scottish Railway: a dining car attendant, acquiring his NCO status during the Second World War in the Western Desert: incidental, this information, I have to confess, but, both by manner and appearance (stocky, barrel-chested, winged moustache), he lends formidable support to Mrs Hodges who is significantly bigger than himself: a Mrs Dover of the Domestic Front, with her own, authoritarian, dismissive flavour. My brother, in my view, was a sucker to hire them (accommodation provided – the basement – a salary to match): at the time he was determined (more than determined – vocationally inclined) to provide a home, a place fit to bring me up in after the life of itineracy which – an exact reflection of Martha’s disturbance – he (we) had lived until then. In a sense, I suspect, my brother has never recovered from the war: seconded to the US Navy, he encountered a force of nature (the sea) and a societal enterprise (America) which have absorbed if not overwhelmed him ever since: subsequently, nothing has matched that expansiveness (I guess), not even Martha (though with her he had a try: films – or, rather, filmmaking – having little, if any interest, curiously, in the finished product, nor in the texts from which the films invariably derived: the process is the purpose).

  As I say, a digression – but the thought of being the sole focus of Mr and Mrs Hodges’ attention is more than my famous lack of resilience (resourcefulness, enterprise) will allow. Sufficient to say, however, that my disinclination to travel with and be in my brother’s company all the while is matched by my disinclination to be in the diurnal presence of the domestic duo below: the formalised behaviour of the husband (mentally at attention all the while) and the ritualised dominion of the wife (everything in place, at the proper time – memos excluded, she not sure what to make of them: have they been written, for instance, by Gerry himself? Our writing is indistinguishable at times).

  Having made my feelings clear – waiting in hotels, whether a suite or not – Gerry is (surprisingly) disinclined to press his point (what girls I’d have to witness passing through the bedroom, Gerry unable to endure t
wenty-four hours without a fuck). Five weeks! And me, seven and a half thousand miles, most of the time, from Mrs Dover, orgasmic interludes exclusively by hand. ‘What’s so different from home?’ I might have asked, only, at Dover’s, in Hampstead, at home, I catch sight of her every day (Saturdays and Sundays alone excluded).

  Thereupon Gerry suggests I stay with one, or a succession, of my friends, or, conversely, one or other of my friends can stay with me.

  ‘What friends?’

  ‘Don’t you have any friends?’ (Enough bums pass through the house – none, he may have noticed, staying long.)

  ‘None I’d spend five weeks with.’

  ‘One week with each.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘I hate the thought,’ he says, ‘of you being on your own.’

  ‘With the Hodges.’

  ‘Fuck the Hodges. The Hodges are all right. When,’ he says, ‘we’re here together.’

  ‘Why not on my own?’

  ‘You need …’ he can’t think of the word, ‘a different class of person,’ amending this, when he sees my look, ‘a different type. A peer.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t go in for titles.’

  ‘A generational peer.’

  His patience, I can see, is running out.

  Twenty-four hours later he comes back to the problem.

  ‘Maybe you should go to Jimmy’s.’

  ‘Who’s Jimmy?’

  I’m lying – as usual on these occasions – in bed.

  ‘Our brother.’

  Patience still a premium.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like him.’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I said we never got on.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Chemical. Who knows? He pissed all over our father.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He had no sympathy with his views. When he went bust he offered him no help. Not that I offered him much. At least,’ he goes on, ‘I listened.’

  ‘What to?’

  ‘Him, for fuck’s sake.’

  Not sure how obtuse I am.

  ‘Jimmy, on the other hand,’ he adds, ‘thought he was a cunt.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How do I know? He thought he favoured me. As it was, unlike me, Jimmy had a very bad war.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘He fucked up early.’

  ‘Early?’

  ‘In France. Surrendered his men to, as it turned out, a smaller German force. Been kicking himself ever since. More than kicking …’

  He waits: how much of this is Richard taking in?

  ‘Did he know Hodges?’

  ‘Why?’

  Instantly suspicious.

  ‘In the forces.’

  ‘Hodges was in the desert. It was why I took him on. He hadn’t fucked up. Fought at El Alamein and never looked back. Was personally recommended by Montgomery. As for Jimmy. He went off on his own. Up there he lives a very different life to the one we have down here. Nevertheless, he is your brother. Since there are only the three of us, and Martha, I’d say relatives, in our case, are thin on the ground. A pity to have discarded one.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘Every reason why you should. A wonderful opportunity to make a start. Don’t let sentiments stand in the way.’ He spreads out his hands. ‘He’d be very pleased to have you.’

  ‘You’ve asked him?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘An hour ago.’ He looks at his £10,000 (ten thousand) watch and adds, ‘Two hours ago. The car can take you up.’

  ‘I hate the fucking car. I feel an asshole sitting in the back.’

  ‘Sit in the front.’

  ‘Or the fucking boot. I hate the fucking thing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s not even earned. It’s fucking rented. Apart from that, it looks pretentious.’

  ‘It’s the most beautiful machine in the world. A masterpiece of engineering. Eric will get you there in less than four hours.’

  Eric is the chauffeur: a slim, obnoxious creep, who’s fought in no wars, reveres my brother, thinks Martha has let him down, and despises me likewise. Gerry, where Eric is concerned, is life’s generic force: no doubt he sees most of the women Gerry screws – on top of which ‘Good old G’, as he offensively calls him, gets him autographs from the stars, prefaced by the odious, ‘To Eric’.

  The cunt.

  ‘I can ask Jimmy to come and fetch you. He probably drives a Morris Ten. Or even rides a bike.’

  ‘I don’t know where he lives.’

  ‘Up north.’

  ‘Where up north?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know? Some fucking place. I’ve never been.’

  ‘But want me to go.’

  ‘You,’ he says, ‘are a different proposition. On top of which, as I say, you’re flesh and blood.’

  More is conveyed than I ought to know: he stares at me intensely.

  ‘He could arrange a school up there.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You don’t want to piss around for five weeks. You need some sort of focus.’

  ‘I can write a book.’

  ‘Schooling, at this stage, is all that counts.’

  ‘Maybe I’m a genius and five weeks with someone you can’t stand will turn me on. Make me appreciate what we have down here. What I have, for instance, with you.’

  He’s not over-fond of derision, either. ‘Jimmy, despite his difficulties,’ he says, ‘maybe because of them, may very well give you a different perspective.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Anything you care to mention.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Like me. Or you. All we have down here, as you suggest. I don’t say – I’ve never said – this is the optimum way to live. It happens to be the way I’ve chosen. I never set out to be a producer.’

  ‘What did you set out to be?’

  He thinks back through the Navy and, after that, his career as an actor, and, before all that, to the prospects, which failed to materialise, of working with his father: taking over a textile firm of which, even before the war, Jimmy had washed his hands. ‘Basically, all I wanted,’ he says, ‘was to have a good time. I played a lot of tennis.’

  ‘Tennis?’

  ‘I might have been a pro. Or the equivalent in those days. Tennis was a way – the way, at that time – to fuck a lot of girls. Short skirts, blouses. Sun …’

  ‘Fucking, would you say, was your principal occupation?’

  ‘Fucking, in those days, was barely understood. It was tied in with marriage, church, propriety. Nowadays it’s an industry. Then, at that time – I’m talking of the thirties – to get your hand in a woman’s pants required the skill of an engineer allied to that of a union convenor. It became, because it had to be, a way of life. Nowadays fucks hang out on trees. You can pull them down whenever you like.’

  He may have gone too far: he looks at me (again) intensely.

  ‘I am speaking as a brother.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s not the sort of talk I’d recommend. You need a more civil parent than the sort that I provide. To be talking to a schoolboy as if he were a man may not do either of us a lot of good. Jimmy is civil. Apart from our misunderstandings – more my fault than his. He has written to me over the years, twice, maybe three times, with suggestions we might meet. I’ve always brushed him off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I associate him with the past. Parochialism. Small-mindedness. On the other hand, would a small-minded man ask for a reconciliation? I’d say I’ve’ been stuck up. But, then, I never had the time. He’s gone his way. I’ve gone mine.’

  ‘What’s his way?’

  ‘He’s the manager of an insurance office.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘A change from here.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘He never had a child. His wife miscarried. Apart from that …’ He shrugs.

  �
��A pretty fuckless life.’

  He doesn’t like this, and says, ‘Who are we to judge? Look at Martha. At least Jimmy’s wife is still around. And, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t fuck around like me.’

  ‘I ought to go?’

  ‘For what it’s worth.’

  The intensity continues.

  ‘If I go,’ I tell him, ‘I’ll make my own way. I don’t like being carried by someone else.’

  ‘Is that why you prefer Greenline to see Martha rather than going with Eric and me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You ought to tell her, incidentally, even if she fails to understand,’ he says. ‘Maybe somewhere she’s aware of all that’s going on.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I feel so. Sometimes, out of nowhere, comes that funny fucking look. I’ve never mentioned it before. Maybe you’ve seen it, or she only does it with me. But suddenly, when I look away and then look back, I find her looking at me with this funny fucking expression.’

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘As she looked before. Comprehending. As if all this … lunacy is a fucking act. A piece of dramaturgical skill. A way to escape from something which, as far as she’s concerned, became too much.’

  ‘All these years?’

  Incredulous.

  ‘I may be wrong.’

  She’s rumbled it.

  Or not.

  ‘Setting her hair on fire was an act? Coming down to dinner with people we didn’t know with nothing on?’

  I have to prove him wrong.

  Mentally, I begin to count the occasions when she’s threatened him with a knife.

  ‘She’s an actress. Maybe this is her way – her definitive way – as an actress, she chooses to express herself. I stress definitive. This is all-inclusive. An act to end all acts. Even the attempts at suicide.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  I have an ally in her, at last.

  Or not.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘It may be me.’