by David Storey
‘He still does admire her, I know,’ she says.
She gazes at the surface of the lake, I wondering, at this point, if I might contradict her: her hand, releasing the wheel, encloses mine.
‘Poor Richard,’ she says.
It’s a moment, had I chosen it to be so, when I might have leaned across – and who knows what next might have happened? Maybe she has brought us here with this in mind – at least, to test out (and reject) its probability.
‘I don’t feel bad about it at all,’ I tell her.
‘That’s good.’
‘I feel more concerned for her than Gerry does.’
‘I’m sure that isn’t true.’
‘He’s exhausted by it. Not that he doesn’t care.’
‘He cares a lot. As you say,’ her gaze reverts to the lake, ‘he’s had a long time to endure it. Plus all the intrusion he’s had to deal with. That, at least, to a large extent, is behind you. There’s the occasional journalist, he tells me. Parasites,’ she concludes, ‘of course.’
‘Most,’ I tell her.
‘How awful.’
We sit in silence, her hand on mine: the lake, the trees, the hedge enclosing the lane itself.
‘Not much more,’ I tell her, ‘to be done. The doctors’ diagnosis is she’ll never change. Dementia, at her age, invariably gets worse.’
Her grip tightens, involuntarily, as if she’s afflicted by another thought: it’s almost, for an instant, as if Martha is beside me.
‘We have to bear up under these tragedies,’ she says. Glancing across, her expression full of affection, she adds, ‘We have to count ourselves fortunate in other ways.’
‘I’m not complaining,’ I tell her. ‘Where Martha’s concerned, all I want is the best.’
This isn’t precisely what I’d meant to say, nor, I suspect, is it precisely what she’d inferred: in a sense, it would have been better to have been brought up by her and James (I’m reflecting), their relationship with my father and his second wife no doubt prohibiting it.
‘Let’s go home,’ she says. ‘We’ve had a full day.’
Mrs Jenkins has gone by the time we return. The house is silent.
‘What would you like to do now?’ she says. ‘I usually have a rest in the afternoon.’
‘I’ll have a rest, too,’ I tell her, a strange formality in place now we’re in the house alone.
‘If there’s anything you want in the kitchen, use it,’ she says, ‘as you would your own. Or anything else, for that matter,’ she adds.
I go up to my room, stare out at the hill at the back, observe the herd of cows, and lie down on the bed. Not much comes to me by way of reflection: the girl on the train the previous day has been subsumed by everything that’s followed: even enquiring about her has slipped from my mind. Mentally I prepare a memo, uncertain what I’ll inscribe.
What was my (our) father like, the one person we have in common? Only the conflicting and possibly perjured views of my half-brothers to guide me. His ghost – a metaphysical as well as metaphorical presence – hovers, in a mutiliated fashion, above the house: somewhere out there, in the town, is the site of his mill – one of his mills – located, evidently, in a tributary valley.
Within moments, however, I’m thinking of her: lying on another bed, only a few feet – a few yards – away.
The telephone rings: I hear her voice coming from what I presume must be her bedroom.
Moments later she is standing in the door.
She is wearing a housecoat: flowered, reaching below her knees.
Her feet are bare.
‘I wondered,’ she says, ‘if you were all right?’
I raise myself on one elbow.
She stands with one hand on the handle of the door.
‘I really appreciate the time you’ve given me,’ I tell her.
‘It’s been a great pleasure, Richard,’ she says. ‘Is there anything more I can get you?’
Perfume drifts in: it envelops the room.
‘You’ve done everything,’ I tell her.
‘I’ll leave you to rest,’ she says. ‘I, too, enjoyed today so much,’ and is gone, closing the door behind her.
I assume, for a while, she has returned to her room.
Resolution, of a peculiar nature, takes place in the form of another memo.
Equally resolutely, I set it aside.
The tension between our two rooms feels like a third, connecting, compulsive, dynamic presence.
I get off the bed and open the door.
I walk along the landing to the front of the house. There are, I’ve discovered, five bedrooms, a storeroom, and a second bathroom. All the doors, but one, are closed: inside I glimpse what must be the corner of her bed.
She is, when I look in further, sitting on the bed, her back to the door: two windows look out to the front of the house.
She has removed her housecoat and is wearing a slip. Her head is bowed, examining the telephone receiver in her hand.
She slowly replaces it, I remaining in the door.
Seconds extend themselves, it feels, to minutes.
Only then, finally, does she raise her head: she examines the view at the front of the house.
I have gone too far to go back, I decide.
The telephone rings.
She starts, but doesn’t answer it, the sound also coming from the hall.
‘Come in,’ she says, suddenly, ‘if you like.’
Reality and prospect uneasily combine.
‘Perhaps,’ she adds, ‘you should get undressed. Do you know much about all this? It’s mechanical,’ she continues. ‘At least, to begin with. I’ll show you the procedures, and you can take it from there.’
She has thought about this, I assume, for some time, confirming a decision taken, probably, as we were walking round the town, or while sitting by the lake.
The ‘mechanics’ she applies in a practical (and, I now realise, a characteristic) fashion, first in explaining her ‘function’ and then extemporising mine.
‘It may end, on your part, prematurely,’ she goes on, applying first her hand and finally her mouth.
Her prognosis is correct.
‘Which doesn’t prevent you, Richard, from doing the same for me.’
The afternoon, what remains of it, passes swiftly. By the time James returns supper – or dinner – is being prepared. He is in an avuncular mood, listening to our activities of the day, excluding the final significant one, with a smile. ‘Do you think,’ he enquires, ‘you’ll like it here?’
‘I will,’ I tell him.
‘If there’s anything we haven’t thought of, you only have to tell us.’
‘I will,’ I confirm.
‘I can’t tell you,’ he says, ‘what it means to have you with us.’
‘I appreciate it, too,’ I tell him.
‘Anything,’ he concludes, ‘on the telly? I usually flake out this time of the day.’
Indeed, a little later, after supper, we are sitting, the three of us, watching the screen, Clare beside him on the settee, he finally, head dropping, falling asleep.
We exchange glances across his body.
‘You go up,’ she says, ‘if you like. This is what usually happens. If,’ she goes on, ‘we don’t have people in. At some point,’ she lowers her voice, ‘I wake him.’
And later when, evidently having roused him – several telephone calls taken in the hall below – I hear them come up to their room, the sobriety of his voice, her lighter, effervescent, almost frivolous one.
Moments later, knocking, she puts her head around the door.
‘Goodnight, dear,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much for the day.’
‘Thank you,’ I tell her.
‘Oh, we mustn’t set too much by it. There’s still some time ahead.’
‘Thank you, all the same,’ I say.
‘I think,’ she says, leaning further in and lowering her voice, ‘there may have been much which you knew already.�
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And is gone.
Perhaps I have – not unsurprisingly – misjudged her: not only mercurial but deceptive: even the sobriety might be applied – beneath all I’ve seen, a different woman entirely: someone methodical, composed – even (the thought occurs to me for the first time) vengeful.
With this confusion I go to sleep.
4
Two weeks pass: so much occurs yet little is retained (memos and/or number obsession abandoned), events succeeding, and precipitating, one another with a speed I rarely appreciate and can scarcely comprehend. Not least of my observations is that my half-brother knows, if not is in collusion with, what goes on – daily and vicariously – in the countryside as well as in various rooms of the house.
James’ lack of curiosity dominates (for me) the mood prevailing in the place – a mood with so many subtleties and changes (receiving the sanitised version of our activities each evening with a credulity which beggars belief).
‘Does he know?’ I ask her (my efforts to satisfy her efforts to delay my equivalent satisfaction improving by the hour).
She draws back from where we are lying: our engagements invariably take place in the afternoon when Mrs Jenkins isn’t around, our impatience for her to complete her domestic chores and depart often obliging us to occupy ourselves with visits to the town (one evening, not memorable, with James to the theatre, Clare’s enthusiasm for the occasion genuine enough).
‘Why should he know?’ she asks.
‘Surely he’s aware?’
‘He would have mentioned it if he was.’
‘Maybe not,’ I tell her. ‘It might be too difficult. He may be hurt. How, for instance, might he bring it up?’
‘Does he look hurt?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I tell her. I shake my head.
There’s a formality about our relationship, in the presence of others, which I can only assume – I’m convinced – is an unmistakable signal of what we are up to: the sort of formality which engages couples in the company of other couples doing precisely the same thing: visitors to the house, in the evening, or friends or acquaintances we encounter in the street (at the theatre: more than a dozen there), look from me to her and back again, the blankness of expression sufficient an indication that ‘relative’, in my case, doesn’t fit the bill. Only occasionally does she, not James, give an account of the curious gap in ages between my half-brother and myself.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ she says, after a significant silence from both of us, ‘it wouldn’t matter a great deal if he did.’
‘Why not?’
‘The war immobilised him,’ she says, and adds, ‘in that way.’
‘To what extent?’ I ask.
‘To the extent of those activities that absorb both of us at present.’
I’m about to enquire, if that’s the case, how come they conceived a child?
‘When I did conceive,’ she adds, ‘it was by another man.’
‘What other man?’
For a while she doesn’t respond.
‘The child I did conceive,’ she finally (almost formally) declares, ‘was by Gerry.’
We’re lying on the bed and this brings me, after several seconds, to a sitting position.
‘Does he know?’
‘Who?’
‘James,’ I add. ‘Or Gerry.’
‘Of course.’
‘It was acknowledged?’
‘Naturally.’
Sitting there, gazing out at the half-completed garden: no significant steps have been taken to complete it since my arrival.
‘Why “naturally”?’
‘At the time we thought it was the only way I might conceive,’ she says.
‘Is that why James and Gerry quarrelled?’
‘Partly.’
‘Our father’s objectionable nature an excuse?’ I ask.
‘After the event,’ she says. ‘We were, for a time, quite friendly. Gerry, James and I. As you might imagine, for such an arrangement to take place.’
‘Did Martha know?’
‘It was before Martha’s time.’
‘Did Gerry’s first wife know?’
‘Their relationship was over at the time. What with the death of Ian …’
‘Now me,’ I say after a considerable silence, a hardness – indeed, a harshness – in her I’ve only briefly glimpsed before.
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you telling me?’
Another casualty of war, I am beginning to reflect.
‘I thought you’d asked.’
‘If James knows about us.’
‘Probably.’ She adds, ‘We’ve never been involved, in that way, since the first years of our marriage.’
‘Why have you never left?’
‘I love him.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’ She pauses, lying there, her head against the pillow: her body, exposed, takes on a different texture: something coarser, cruder, even brutal: her arms are raised behind her head.
She examines me with a smile.
‘Keep it in the family?’ I enquire.
‘That was the idea,’ she says.
A measure, too, I reflect, of how much James loves her.
‘And this?’
‘The same idea,’ she says, ‘as well.’
‘Does Gerry assume we’ll get involved?’
‘You’ll have to ask him. All he mentioned was your reserve. Your aloofness. His perplexity about what he should do for the best. He cares. I think, at times, he gives you the impression he doesn’t. As it is,’ she lowers her arms, taking my hand between both of hers – a by now familiar, if not habitual gesture, ‘he’s aware of his inadequacies as a parent.’
‘A parent?’
‘A surrogate. So are we all,’ she says, and adds, ‘You’re our mutual responsibility.’
‘This your way of expressing it.’
I withdraw my hand.
‘This,’ she says, ‘was not expected. The first time at the station I realised I had a problem.’
‘Really?’
‘For most years of my marriage I haven’t functioned as a woman. As, no doubt, you’re finding out.’
‘I’d have thought, if anything, the reverse,’ I tell her.
‘Frustration builds up. More, in your case, than I was aware. I simply feel James, if he does know, would not resent it. He’s even, in the past, after Gerry, acknowledged the likelihood of my going off with someone else. I’ve always reassured him otherwise. He’s responded by giving me all the freedom I want.’
We are silent once again.
I lie back on the bed: my immediate reaction is to go to sleep, to blot it out. Instead, I enquire, ‘We’ve all three fucked you over the years?’
‘Male potency, at your age, biologically, is at its peak,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t have believed so much was possible, I’m post-menopausal. A peculiar freedom. Not that I wouldn’t have welcomed it, before, even though, after the miscarriage, I couldn’t conceive.’
I am reassessing what I imagine Gerry – and James, and she – might have planned. Was much of this foreseen? Is this part of a broader agenda? Is this what Gerry means by an ‘expansive education’ (a phrase used after our interview at Dover’s)? Is he diverting responsibility for my well-being – my upbringing – away from himself (a justifiable desire, even in my eyes: he has, after all, done his whack) to other, equally well – if not better-placed members of the family? Is this our father’s legacy (i.e., liability) being more equitably shared out – handed on from one half-brother to another (neither’s exclusive responsibility) – handed on, in a curiously similar way, from one sister-in-law to another, with Martha lunacy, with Clare, presumably, lasciviousness the problem?
‘James must know,’ I tell her.
I get up from the bed: she likes to watch me, I’ve discovered, getting dressed (I, similarly, her undressing).
‘Why?’
‘Simply what we don’t say to one another.
So much of what we might have said has been conveyed in other ways.’
She spreads out her hands: I haven’t troubled to retrieve my clothes and take a peculiar delight in allowing her to examine me: a nakedness which knows no bounds (free – in a curious way – as she has suggested).
In much the same fashion she has, almost instructionally, allowed me, perversely, to examine her, for she is more conscious of the signs of ageing – insisting on a realism, in this respect, I shy away from: her thighs, her waist, her breasts, her neck: all these, at different times, she has disavowed with ‘don’t look at me so intensely,’ and, ‘you mustn’t see precisely what is going on.’
Yet there is only one place I have minutely (to her consternation and yet subsequent delight: her strangely, consistent, ambivalent response) explored – with the intensity, for instance, she is examining me now.
She is drawing up a bottom line: she is seeing how the debit and the credit balance: she is, prompted by my misgivings and her revelations, assessing the account.
‘You could divorce James and marry me. That way we’d both be satisfied,’ I tell her.
‘You’re far too young.’
‘Not for long.’
She smiles. ‘James and I are far too old to change. We’ve been through this, after all, with Gerry.’
‘The circumstances,’ I tell her, ‘are different. Flexibility as opposed to rigidity is now the rule. Modern times!’ I finally exclaim.
I am pleased, smiling – but, unaccountably, not knowing why.
Moments later I reflect that my pleasure is the result of perceiving that this latest news can bring this relationship to a close.
‘I seem to have been manoeuvred into a situation in which I am the innocent party.’
‘Not so innocent, Rick,’ she says.
The first time the abbreviation (she must have heard it from Gerry) has been used.
‘Innocent,’ I insist.
‘Nothing is that clear,’ she says. ‘Nevertheless, I may have handled this quite badly. Each of us has injuries of which we rarely speak, or, perhaps, are unable to. In our case, none of this was expected. Gerry’s intention was to give you a break. Provide you with a root you didn’t know you had. However imperfect. It’s only right he should hand you on to us. Shortly,’ she goes on, ‘you’ll leave. All this,’ she gestures round, ‘will vanish. Whether your self-enclosure will have ended I can’t be sure. Undoubtedly, you’ll be different. As for James, his injuries go deeper than you imagine. He was brutalised by the war, and was in a way lucky to survive it. Luck equates with brutalisation. What should he, what should we make of that?’