by David Storey
I smile.
A faint discoloration rises to her cheek and – God help me – she is looking at my hands.
Her companion, aware of this intrusion, glances across his shoulder.
He is much older than she is: I allow my gaze to encounter his – blank, uncomprehending – then, unblinking, return it to the girl’s.
A moment later, placing money on the table, rising, he takes her arm and departs along the carriage.
Her figure – legs, waist, hips, thighs, shoulders, head – I follow to the door.
Moments later – I can scarcely believe it – she reappears: returning down the carriage to her table, she retrieves a handkerchief from the seat (I am working wonders), glances across and, as she straightens, I rise and, indicating my table, enquire, ‘Fancy some tea?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘You’ve had some.’
Observation, not enquiry.
My brother’s tactic: face adversity, with women, with a broadening smile.
‘I have.’
‘It’s more refreshing this side.’
I indicate my table.
Wit is man’s first defensive gesture: an observation borrowed from my brother, it, in turn, borrowed no doubt from someone else: probably the author who screwed him for twenty thousand for a treatment as unusable as one he might have written himself.
‘Really?’
‘Also,’ I suggest, ‘a different view.’
‘Yes.’
I don’t know whether she’s agreeing the tea is more refreshing and the view superior to the one on the other side of the carriage, or that she will sit down: anonymous fields fly past on either side.
Until I step round the table and draw out the chair she is unsure herself.
She sits, lifting back her hair with either hand.
This, for me, is an indescribable success: flicking swiftly through the shoals of women I have encountered, I reflect that not one have I ever approached, or been approached by, who hasn’t known precisely who I am (that one identity static: a brother). For an instant, my confidence deserts me: returning to my chair I catch a glimpse of myself in the carriage window (darkened by, first, a cutting, then trees outside) and am jolted into smiling once again by the discovery that it is Gerry who is standing there: if not him exactly, a more engaging, younger self. I smile the Audlin smile, preface to many self-exculpating explanations: tall, lean, dark-haired, caesarian-fringed, caesarian-featured. Grandeur, ascendancy: style: what more could a woman want – dressed in a suit purchased for me and insisted upon on the re-introduction of me to the family (the northern branch): dark, sober (a vertical, faint-red striation), which, by its anonymity, draws attention to my shirt – blue – and my diagonally-striped pink and grey tie – as well as, of course, to my, once again, smiling features? Charm, as any thin-ice skater knows, is more than two-thirds of any battle: speed, lightness: grace.
I place my hands before me as I sit at the table and casually rearrange the cup and saucer and plates – the milk jug, the cutlery, the sugar-bowl: these, my hands suggest, will not intrude upon or invalidate any subsequent refreshment. Handing her a napkin (from several on the table) which – her gaze still on my hands – she takes, I keeping my movements to a minimum as a hypnotist might before his subject, until, clenching them beneath my chin, I make an observation about the weather, summoning (as I do so) the waiter with a glance.
He, approaching the table, gazes at the girl with a not dissimilar fascination, which obliges me to repeat the order twice.
Her hair, dark, but with a reddish tinge, hangs to her shoulders; her eyes are hazel (on closer observation) – a hybrid colour, somewhat like her hair, her mouth broad, thin-lipped: she is, if not of my age, a little older, mature, like me, before her time.
I order two more teas and confirm, ‘We don’t have to eat them,’ adding, ‘either,’ and watch her smile, ‘but it gives us an excuse for sitting here. It’s far less cramped than the compartments and we have a wider view,’ indicating the length of the carriage which gives us a broader perspective of where we’re going, where we’ve been, as well as of where we are.
Before she has sat at the table she has glanced along the carriage, reassuring herself, I assume, she hasn’t been followed. ‘I’m going to visit a relative,’ I tell her, and begin to unfold my story, surprised at the alacrity with which I do so, and the pleasure – the extraordinary relief – I experience in recounting it. ‘Someone I don’t recall. A half-brother,’ the whole – or nearly the whole – of my history, as an aside, laconically slipping out. ‘And you?’ I conclude, anxious not to bore her.
At this final enquiry she glances once again behind her and announces she is returning from a trip to London. ‘We go every two or three months. To the theatre, to visit friends. To see exhibitions.’
I have refrained from identifying my brother’s job; nor have I mentioned the situation of his wife – casualness the keynote of my account. It’s as if my gifts – my precocity, as Gerry would be inclined to call it – have, for the first time, been brought into focus: I feel exhilarated and, at the same time, wholly in control, no longer an apologist for, or a victim of, events.
Even when her companion returns – someone she has described as a ‘cousin’ – a few seconds after our second tea has been served, and approaches the table, asking, since evidently he can think of nothing else to say, ‘Are you all right?’ her look is scarcely turned aside, she responding (every confidence in her manner), ‘I came across a friend.’
Our names, amusingly, have not been exchanged.
‘Will you be long?’ he enquires.
‘Not very.’ Her gaze returns to the table: not someone to get on the wrong side of.
Having watched his approach down the length of the carriage – the darkening of his look as he reaches the table – I watch his long departure: tall, darker than myself, elegantly suited, these trips to London, I assume, are, or have been, his idea.
‘My name, by the way,’ she says, ‘is Martha.’
The coincidence – stated so abruptly, and, because of the previous incident, conspiratorially – unnerves me (is this another of Gerry’s ‘plots’?). Or – more weirdly – one of Martha’s?
‘You look surprised.’
‘It’s the same name,’ I tell her, ‘as a relative. In fact, my brother’s wife.’
‘I see.’
She waits.
No further explanation forthcoming, she adds, ‘I always think it odd.’
‘Odd?’
‘Old-fashioned.’
‘I like it.’
‘You do?’
‘I like it very much. My name,’ I go on, ‘is Richard.’
‘I like that, too.’
‘You do?’
She nods. ‘Dick has a reassuring sound.’ She smiles. ‘Do you abbreviate it?’ Still smiling.
‘Sometimes Rick. Or Rickie.’
‘Rick. It rhymes. Relevant in your case, too, I take it?’
Laughter, for a while, absorbs us both.
‘My second name is Armitage.’
‘Scottish?’
‘Is it?’
‘I’ve no idea. Mine,’ I tell her, ‘is Audlin.’
‘I know someone called Audlin.’
‘Could be a relative.’
She doesn’t reply.
‘Are you at college?’
‘Will be soon.’
Dismissing it, she waves her hand. ‘And you?’
‘Sure.’
‘What do you study?’
‘Sanskrit.’
‘Sanskrit.’
‘I might switch,’ I tell her, ‘to something else.’
‘Such as?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
Why I pick Sanskrit I have no idea. Lying, in the Audlin household, comes easily to hand: there it’s anodyned as ‘imagination’.
‘Grand.’
The word comes out with a flattened vowel: the suggestion of something solid,
reliable.
Gazing across the table I isolate her face: why, with its pale skin and dark hair, hazel eyes, I identify it with my Martha I’ve no idea; something of the same aura, the same glow: something of the same unwitting confidence: an emissary, or so it feels, from another world. And the inflection of the voice: the interrogative stress on the final word.
‘Film-making, for instance,’ I suggest.
‘Are you interested in films?’ Her eyes refocus with this fresh enquiry.
‘My family are.’
‘How?’
Trump card: play it now or later?
‘My brother is a producer.’
‘Really?’
Not much excitement there: someone picking up a book and, having opened it, closing it with a snap.
‘I find films boring,’ she adds.
‘You do?’
‘I find them shallow.’
‘Shallow.’
‘Superficial.’
Why hadn’t I told her that?
‘Slight.’
Maybe I should have said ‘psychology’. Advisory work with the CIA. From Martha’s preoccupation with murder I might have chosen anything: precocity, I could have told her (not far from the mark) sets me apart.
‘I’m at that stage,’ I tell her, ‘I could move in almost any direction.’
‘Life’s pretty useless, don’t you think?’ she says.
‘Sure.’
‘Yet you intend to do something with it.’
‘I could, on the other hand, just bum around.’
No wonder Gerry’s favourite epithet: arsehole, asshole: having pre-empted my occupation, I find it impossible to retreat.
‘Everything,’ she says, ‘is so arranged.’
‘Prescribed.’
‘I’m very much drawn,’ she says, ‘to the philosophy of despair.’
Even that’s been canonized.
‘It seems closest to reality,’ she adds.
That stress, again, on the final word, its truculent, trailing, interrogative flavour.
‘Me, too. I think,’ I tell her, ‘of little else.’
‘How can you think of nothing?’ she says. ‘Nothing, by definition, is not thinking at all.’
‘Sure.’
‘I do not think, therefore I am not.’
‘That’s a thought,’ I tell her.
‘So it is.’
‘All you do,’ I suggest, ‘is sensate.’
‘Precisely.’
Her eyes, more evenly, examine mine. The tea, I’m aware, has been left untouched. I am conscious of her hand upon the table: it toys with a napkin, then sets it down.
‘Which is why I agreed to sit at this table.’
‘Consciousness, your consciousness,’ I tell her, ‘informs me now.’
‘It’s sensation alone,’ she says, ‘that is speaking, no objectivity of any sort involved.’
Her look, throughout this exchange, has scarcely faltered: mine, I assume, is flickering up and down: her hand, her mouth, her eyes: the untouched tea. Even, occasionally, the view outside. A town has passed. A second.
We are moving through a landscape in which factories have appeared. We have been talking, it feels, for hours: the strangeness of the encounter is paralleled by an even greater strangeness visible outside: yet all this is, I conclude, leading to familiarity.
‘You realise,’ she says, ‘I’m pissing you about?’
Her smile – radiant: more than radiant: ethereal – has reappeared.
‘Probably,’ she tells me, ‘you’re still at school.’
‘Right.’
‘Sanskrit bullshit.’
‘Correct.’
‘I’m pissed off, too.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re the expert.’
Trembling in my legs beneath the table.
‘Are you,’ she goes on, ‘as feckless as you seem?’
‘I am.’
She extends her hand. ‘My cousin does not like me talking to strangers. My one inclination is to talk to no one else. I shall have to leave.’
‘Maybe,’ I tell her,’ we’ll meet again.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘You can’t be sure.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘You can’t be sure. But then, in that case, we shan’t be strangers.’
Extending her hand further for me to shake, she rises.
‘You American?’ she asks.
‘I’ve lived there for a while,’ I tell her.
‘Quite a while,’ she says, ‘I think.’
My hand, after a further, firmer clasp, is suddenly released: tossed back, it feels, in my direction.
‘It must be pretty boring living here.’
‘It is.’
‘Boredom is something of a way of life with me. I like,’ she tells me, ‘pissing you about. Doesn’t seem much else to do, otherwise, don’t you think?’
‘Sure.’
‘Everything, wouldn’t you say, is posthumous?’ she says.
‘Right.’
‘So where is the life we had before? You realise,’ she adds, ‘we’ve ceased to fake?’
‘Have we?’
‘I think so.’
‘Strange pickup,’ I tell her, ‘on a train.’
‘Won’t lead anywhere,’ she says.
‘It might.’
‘No chance.’
‘We might get off at the same station,’ I tell her.
‘Like the Audlin I know might be your brother,’ she says.
And she’s gone, the waiter approaching, we the last two in the carriage.
‘Finished, sir?’ he says.
‘We have,’ I tell him.
‘You can stay, if you like,’ he says, as he begins to clear, I having watched her down the length of the carriage: slim, composed, a mirror image, her persona, to my personum: the door slides to behind her back.
I sit at the cleared table in the deserted carriage and watch the landscape change: a river: collieries: headgears, slagheaps: strands of stagnant water: a feeling of being enclosed by – let’s face it – something of an artefact: manmade, unyielding: dour. Bleak.
The waiter, passing through, confirms my destination.
I return to the compartment to retrieve my case: an impression, as I pass along the corridor, of disparate elements outside: brick, stone, metal: people.
Yellow fumes, at one point, rise in the air – then darkness as the train runs beneath the canopy of a station.
2
A woman recognises me as I emerge at the end of the platform: I have an impression of her waving, I glancing round to confirm it’s to me – catching sight of my recent companion passing with her partner, she looking in the direction of the woman before disappearing beyond the barrier.
The woman is wearing a green coat with a dark fur collar: the colour of her stockings is light, her shoes conspicuously high-heeled (doesn’t want to be found too short), her hair cut in a cowl-like fashion around a tautly-featured face: sharp, inquisitive, birdlike (censorious, opinionated, engagingly engaged).
My other sister!
‘Richard!’ An exclamation which suggests involuntary involvement, raising her cheek to be laid against mine, a squealing sound – appropriate to her person – accompanying the gesture. ‘I’m Clare!’ with which, I can see, she’s more than delighted. Placing her arm in mine, and adding, ‘I have the car outside. James is at work but over the moon at your coming.’
I am looking for my fellow passenger and her companion but they have not reappeared – aware, at the same time, of the pressure of my half-sister-in-law’s arm (exuding a sense of confederacy, warmth), the daintiness of her grip, her gloved hand resting in the region of my wrist – and of a feeling I associate unmistakably with rapacity – voraciousness: strength (stoicism): with curiosity, solidity: frustration.
We cross the station forecourt, my attention still on the crowd ahead: no sign of that by now familiar figure. We approach a car of conventional appearance, s
he having signalled she might take my suitcase (Gerry has suggested two: I have insisted one: ‘Only five weeks,’ I had told him. ‘Five weeks,’ he has said, ‘can be a long time.’), I resisting her offer (such dainty hands, such – despite the volume and the cut of her coat – a delicate figure), she raising the car boot to announce, ‘You have so little luggage! Travelling light is a thing with you as well. Does Gerry?’
‘Not at all,’ I tell her, wondering how close they’ve been.
Opening the passenger door she adds, ‘You can drive if you like.’
‘I don’t have a licence,’ I tell her, passing before her, getting inside, examining the crowd through the windscreen.
‘Of course!’ she slipping in behind the wheel, revealing, as she does so – I am speedily distracted – first one knee, then the other below the fur trim of her coat.
With extraordinary alacrity she starts the vehicle and steers it down a cobbled ramp into what looks like a city square.
‘You’re so much older than I’d imagined,’ I wearing an overcoat, one of Gerry’s, too large for me (and long ago discarded), which, to a degree, bulks out my figure. ‘Though I recognised you, Richard, well enough. That Audlin look is not easily mistaken.’
The carefully made-up face, the mouth: a sense of self-possession: the thin lines bracketing the lips suggesting, above all, a disposition to humour: the delicacy of the ears, visible beneath the cowl of tinted, auburn hair: the profile as she gazes forward full of animation: the sudden, if almost absent-minded gesture with which, after negotiating a set of traffic lights, her hand releases the wheel and tugs down her skirt, the stockinged sheen conspicuous in the shadow: I am forgetting the girl on the train.
The fact of the matter is my sister-in-law is something of a flirt: her instinctive regard for her body in relationship to the one she is with.
In, I estimate, her late forties (in reality, her middle fifties), sensually preserved – self-acclamation, self-appreciation written, I suspect, all over her: I admire her gloves – leather, the seams raised, dyed a diaphanous green – anticipating the receptivity of the hand inside, the way – the provocative way – she grips the wheel: as potent a foil to Mrs Dover as any I might have imagined: I shall, I decide, stay here for ever.
We drive through slow-moving traffic, stopping, starting: the movements of her hands on the wheel (the car is automatic): the movements of her high-heeled shoe on and off the pedal (the other immobile at its side): the raising and lowering of her knee alternately exposed and concealed beneath the fur of her coat: how wonderful! (how wonderful. Do I have the same effect on her?).