Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  Maybe a way, too, of getting me to go: curiosity, for one thing, about another brother: his relationship to his sister-in-law.

  Have I agreed to go, or not? I can’t remember.

  ‘How do I tell him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jimmy. Tell him,’ I add, ‘I’m coming up.’

  ‘I’ll give you his work number, his home number. Ring him. He’ll be delighted. He’s always wanted a reconciliation.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘I’ll call him, after you’ve talked to him. He’ll like it coming from you. You don’t remember him?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘The last time he saw you you must have been nine. Seven. How many years ago? He was passing through London. He’s passed through lots since, but never called.’

  ‘Because of you.’

  ‘I never had the time. I regret that now.’

  ‘He screwed up with the Germans?’

  ‘I had it easy. The Second Fleet. Like living in a city. He was on the front line. The Germans had the advantage. A prisoner of war. Not pleasant. It turned him in on himself. Incredibly aggressive. Faded now. It must have been what got at me. No way in. Hardly spoke. His wife had a hell of a time. What with that and my first marriage. And Ian …’

  His thoughts float on: he hasn’t thought this much about anything recently. Maybe I’m the answer. Much of his life – and Martha’s, and Jimmy’s – is behind him now: incredibly – exhilaratingly – most of mine is ahead. Okay? The right move? Who says? Putting his brother in the hands of an ex-POW who works in a provincial insurance office: exchange high society, he’s thinking, for what? Am I putting my kid brother – our kid brother – out to dry? Am I putting our kid brother on the line?

  He looks across.

  Maybe not such a good move! Only, Richard, the asshole, has taken the bait: what the bait is, why he’s taken it, for what purpose, only Richard can decide. A brother – unlike the current one: extension of flesh, antecedents – extension of the knowledge of where he’s come from – with a view, perhaps, of where he might go.

  Martha, when I tell her, says nothing: sitting in her room, looking out, from the ground floor, onto the terrace that runs across the back of the house, the windows to which are permanently locked: a privileged room (one of the best in the place: larger than most, its own bathroom as well as dressing room attached: my brother – or Martha – has spared nothing). She has a pencil in her hand – in both hands, for she holds it like a baseball bat, not so much to write with as to fend off (whatever she might be tempted, presumably, to write – too frightening the revelations she has to divulge). Her knuckles crested white – her delicate, sensitive, endearing hands. I love her so much I want, as always, to embrace her, tell her – reassure her – no crime has been committed (no one is involved: no victim, no culprit: none) – submitting to this temptation from time to time in the hope that love is what she’s after: unconditional, unparalleled, unrestrained, otherwise undefined. Even my brother’s suggestion this is faked makes sense – endearing her to me more: all this to conceal an inexpressible … what? Pain? Sure. True. Fact. I love my brother’s second wife: lasciviousness, if it has been there (which I’d vigorously deny) has been transferred to the corpulent Mrs Dover, a travesty of the figure before me now …

  Is that it?

  When I try to take the pencil from her in order to hold her hand – unconditional attachment on her part, too – she resists by grasping hold of it more firmly.

  ‘I’m going to Jimmy’s,’ I announce, then, ‘James’s. Gerry’s brother,’ and unable to think of any other description that might arouse her (will he, too, become another ‘cause’, another ‘suspect’?) I add, ‘I’ll be away for several weeks. So will Gerry. He’s coming down before he leaves. Both of us will keep in touch, on top of which I’ll come back down – I’m going north – should you need me. Or ring each evening, if you like.’

  She has a notepad by her feet; her dainty feet, the feet that were sung to in Bachelor Folly; the feet that danced in Love Alive; the feet around which the towel sensationally descended, after a bath, in Happiness to Follow (complaints from the Catholic Guild, amongst a lot of others, which were – equally sensationally – finally ignored).

  On the pad are inscribed a number of circles, of varying diameter, none complete, like the striations cut by blades on ice.

  There is no purpose in concealing it: I have often been tempted, in the presence of my sister-in-law, to carry on as if she isn’t there: laugh, move around, read, listen to her radio, turn on her television at which she is inclined to gaze for hours, irrespective of what’s on the screen. Is all this a stratagem? I’d say – on reflection – definitely not. Yet … battier things have happened: would she keep up something so mundane if she wasn’t genuinely out of her mind? But where? I’d say, far more, she was in it, lost, irretrievably, to those of us out here. Once the two of us sat watching Finder’s Keepers in which she had a not inconsiderable part – the last film she made – with not a flicker of an eyelid on her part, abstraction – a vacuous detachment – sustained to the end (and, the screen blank, a long time beyond).

  I stand at the permanently secured French windows and gaze out at the terrace, at the lawn, at the descending slope to the lake, at the silhouetted trees beyond (Collin’s Wood: the hours we’ve hunted there for clues, suspects, reported bodies) and find my eyes are full of tears.

  Why I cry I’ve no idea: I could have cried on numerous occasions, not least each time I leave her – she oblivious of my presence – looking back, expecting a wave, a glance, a last, remembered gesture. Her figure never stirs.

  Nor does it now, with news of Gerry and my departures. Only when I conclude, ‘For God’s sake, they’ll lock you up with her,’ do the sobs subside and, turning back to the room, I see a look of consternation – as she might have examined an inanimate object sprung up in her path: the pencil in her left hand, the pad now on her knee, she has started to add to the circles on the sheet before her.

  At some point, my back to her, she has stooped to the pad and picked it up.

  I travel up the afternoon my brother leaves: I go with him and Eric to the airport. I’ve never seen my brother off anywhere before (he having offered to see me off at the station, I declining): a premonition of disaster – unexpected, alarming – disposes both of us to assume we’ll never see each other again. Maybe it’s caused by our unprecedented mutual departures, he going one way, I another – and for a significant length of time – but, equally unexpectedly, we embrace before he turns towards the reception lounge. We’ve embraced before – invariably on his departures and returns – but never as warmly, or as portentously as this: absurdly – what makes me do it? – I kiss his cheek.

  More surprised (shaken) by this than by anything else, he glances back, once, before he disappears, gazing at me in the same curious fashion that has characterised Martha’s reaction to seeing me cry. So absorbed by this response, in fact, that it’s several seconds before he collects himself and raises his hand to wave.

  It’s as if he’s suddenly remembered something – something pushed back, until now, to the rear of his mind. Then, with that skater’s grace – that inimitable swiftness – he’s gone (never, I morbidly reproach myself, to be seen again).

  We return to the house to pick up Mr Hodges: my brother’s idea. ‘If I’m not to see you off, somebody has to. I’ll ask Jack. I don’t like the idea,’ he insists, ‘you going off on your own.’

  ‘I’m often on my own.’

  ‘Jack will come with you.’

  ‘To Jimmy’s?’

  ‘The fucking station.’

  ‘As an ex-employee of the old LMS,’ Hodges says, after he’s climbed into the car (Mrs Hodges at the house door as well), ‘I can’t let you leave without a proper send off. Mr Audlin wouldn’t like it. He gave me my instructions. It’s more than my reputation would allow,’ the NCO to the officer cadet.

  He sits in front with Eri
c, I, an even bigger prick, behind.

  ‘This was the terminus of the old LNER, the London and North Eastern Railway,’ he says, as, despite my resistance, carrying my case, he leads the way to the platform (Eric, thank God, remaining with the car: what a fucking field day they’ll have in the house with both of us away). ‘It brings back memories, does this,’ he finding me a first-class compartment. ‘You’ll go off as a gentleman, or I’ll know the reason why.’

  Asshole.

  He’s acquired the veneer of domestic subservience from films: not only an edge of self-consciousness but decrepitude. Was this the man commended for something in the desert? stout, square-shouldered, trim: a parody of what he’s supposed to be.

  The first-class compartment, thank God, is empty. ‘It’ll soon fill up,’ he says, reluctant to see me sitting there alone, he anchored to the platform despite my suggestion he leave – remaining there, stoney-faced, looking for companions to board as well, almost soliciting a passing figure (‘This carriage is empty, sir’). I bummed to the seat, the one compensation for this farcical departure the relief I feel when the train finally pulls out.

  Hodges waves (he almost salutes), a robust stanchion to a domestic world I care little – so it feels – about: waves in an almost melancholic fashion, his hand hovering by his head, as if saying farewell to everything.

  I wonder, as the train rumbles into a tunnel and I contemplate the brickwork passing outside – its crumbling texture a portent, I suspect, of the place that lies ahead – wonder what Hodges and Mrs Hodges make of Gerry and myself: ‘respect’, ‘servitude’, ‘obedience’ – qualities associated with military life: the axioms of the slave identifying with the interests of its master – the unspoken insolence of people who otherwise ‘know their position’: one of those ‘traits’, as Mrs Dover might call it, bringing up her school of gentlemen – and of which Martha, amongst her other ‘absences’, is blithely unaware: one of those mysteries which, so far, appear to have eluded her. Looking for ‘traits’ as opposed to ‘clues’ might task her more than her constant searches do already: not one of those mysteries she is here to solve, that being left to her disinterested half-brother-in-law.

  Looking back on my home as I might, metaphorically, gaze back at it from the window of the train – currently concealed by tunnels and cuttings, and glimpses, as we trundle north, of stretches of London suburb – I have to conclude it resembles nothing more clearly than the stage-set of a film: an anachronistic one at that (still waiting to be ‘shot’), the two stage managers busy in the basement, the two ‘principals’ active overhead (a minimal cast, a threadbare plot), a third, unresolved character, in the early stages of disintegration, hard to tell, reported in the wings (the Hodges, unlike Eric, who has driven out frequently to Market Whelling, scarcely familiar on her occasional ‘home’ trips, with Martha, at all). Why, I wonder, has Gerry gone to all this trouble, not least this fiction of creating a ‘home’? (Home, the Home, is where Martha is – a not inconsiderable one, at that.) The furniture, for instance, you could find in LA, New York or Houston, or in those expensive service flats in South Kensington and Knightsbridge, scarcely distinguishable from that of a suite in an Intercontinental hotel. He may, for all I know, have hired it, like the Rolls – even though occasionally he asks me if there’s anything I want ‘by the way of decoration’, casting his hand aimlessly at what he’s put together as if his art director has somehow missed the plot: the house represents nothing more than a waiting room.

  For whom? For what? Maybe for Martha to come back and tell us she wants to return to LA, Philadelphia – even Beaconsfield, for Christ’s sake: anywhere, in any case, other than ‘here’.

  No doubt the writer who owned it before us had the best idea: everything in the house in his time, he told Gerry, was secondhand: ‘Why pay bullshit prices for something that’s going to be used in any case? I could furnish this twice over for what we’d pay out if all this was new,’ my brother enquiring of me, after we’ve left the house on that first inspection, if we shouldn’t buy the furniture as well.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘It looks so lived in.’ He looks at me apprehensively. ‘It’s so much like a home.’

  ‘It looks pissed on and shat on by that fucking cat,’ I tell him, having stood on the animal as we came in the door (unconvinced, at that stage, my brother would buy it, his theory about ‘community’ announced only after we’ve moved in).

  He may – more likely – have rented it, and not bought it at all: he may even, I often suspect, have rented his clothes: even the fucking pictures he alleges he sells: everything. Gerry is the sort of person over whom the average rentier hangs out his tongue.

  The fact of the matter is – the truth of the matter is (any way you care to put it) – we are living on a film set, designed for a script which has yet to be written – a speculative venture on my brother’s part uncharacteristic of his normal behaviour: ventures nothing without a scenario, at least a treatment, however schematic. ‘This is for real,’ he says, by way of explanation, on confirming we’ve ‘taken’ the house.

  Its atmosphere, as a consequence of the motivation by which it came to be in our possession, is surreal: an atmosphere not unlike those constructs on the back lots of studios, or on the studio floor itself (half a sitting room; half a house; a façade without an interior, an interior without a façade: no wonder Martha went nuts): at any moment I expect a wall to be removed, a ceiling, or the floor: a camera to enter at the end of a crane: the feeling the whole time, even in my bedroom (which I have made, for this reason, as anonymous as I can: of no interest to anyone), is of being ‘shot’, what we’ve said, done, not said, not done – perhaps in some other location – being repeated.

  Yet, as in Mount Street, Curzon Street, Berkeley Square, Putney or Beaconsfield, not to mention the Scottish Castle, occasional (borrowed) apartments in New York, Tangier and Paris, it is nothing new: all that is unexpected is the inappropriateness (the provenance) of the setting. My brother does not operate naturally in a house like this (a curious element of our ‘scenario’, for instance, is that he looks more at home in the institutional atmosphere of Whelling Hall: a place, revealingly, designed – certainly equipped – for lunatics: he operates there as if he were at home, relaxed, convivial, laid back – as if, at long last, he knows precisely not only where but who he is). Maybe it’s not unlike the shore establishments he visited or lived in in the navy; or maybe it’s its implicit air of ‘class’ – however parodied, trivialised, adapted – something recognised from an earlier life. Certainly Hampstead is foreign to him – as it is, indeed, to me. Certainly, too, I can’t imagine Martha living there. If Gerry’s intention is – or was – to show me how hopelessly equipped we are to live in a house and look after a problem as intractable as his second wife he couldn’t have picked a better setting than Leighcroft Gardens NW3. Our ‘home’ wouldn’t be ‘complete’ with Martha (the hopeless project he’s working on) so much as torn apart.

  The train slips over a river: distracted by the change of scenery – urban displaced by rural (a herd of cows) – I go along to the dining car. Maybe everyone is travelling into London this time of the day (not inappropriate I should be moving in the opposite direction), for the interior is deserted: a girl sits at a table diagonally opposite, her male companion with his back to me. I catch her eye in a manner Gerry, in his less brotherly, more avuncular, companionable mood, would undoubtedly have recommended. She reminds me, strangely, of Martha.

  England is dead: is that why Martha came here, to match her condition to a place as un-American, in this respect, as any? As it goes, I go – scratching, in her case, amongst the ruins, oblivious of what, in reality, she’s scratching for: death itself, presumably, in one form or another. The place – like Whelling Hall – has the air of a haunted palace: which is probably why Gerry sets up his camera with an air not only of fatigue but frustration – certainly disappointment. He’d prefer – much prefer – to be back in the S
tates where you can set up a camera at ease. ‘Only the sane go nuts, so watch them,’ Martha might have said, warranting her decision not only to go but to arrive, not only to arrive but to stay. But for her I wouldn’t be heading north – gazing at a girl’s remarkable – sensuous, sensitive – face (pale skin, pale eyes, dark hair) over a man’s anonymous right shoulder: she is facing backwards, I forwards: symbolism of a sort suggested there.

  ‘Nothing matters’ a positive statement (at that moment): a nihilist’s affirmative creed (something counts, if it doesn’t add up): there is, otherwise (I morbidly reflect) no will to survive, merely an anxiety to preserve form (Hodges, Eric – the latter’s peaked cap which even my brother draws a line at, insisting he doesn’t wear it – just the pleated-pocket uniform – when he’s around – and Mrs Dover and her privately funded pupils): the scruples and the certainty of class, the knowledge that nothing, least of all death, gets out of hand: no blood, no wound, no pain – merely the fictional enterprise on which, for instance, my sister-in-law is engaged.

  I eat the toast, I drink the tea, I bite the piece of cake I’ve ordered. Looking out of the window I consider how many miles away, across the fields, is Market Whelling: she, too, presumably, will be having tea, dreaming of (embalmed in) vicarage lawns, village greens, suspects, corpses, ‘solutions’ which fail to emerge anywhere but there.

  None of the clues, however, ‘add up’: killings go on unabated: circles beget circles: nothing breaks out. Lines curve and return to their source – the source, I’m convinced, of my own misanthropy. Nothing, however much I might have wished it, is ascertainable, meaningful (correct), complete.

  The girl, smiling in consideration of what her partner has or has not said, looks over again: her lips move: her eyes return to him. A curl dances by her cheek: she raises her hand, signalling chastisement, she curious to see, however, its effect on me.

  I’ve seen my brother do it two hundred thousand times and know how well I do it now: with a tutor like Gerry, where women are involved, it would need a genius to fail.