Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  ‘Doesn’t this,’ I ask her, ‘make it worse?’

  ‘He hasn’t told you, I know, but it was he who introduced Martha to detective stories.’

  She waits for my surprise to express itself.

  ‘We met her and Gerry shortly after they married. Over here. James bought Martha several books to read on the plane going back. She became addicted. Not a cause, of course, but a symptom. She rang several times asking him to send her more. We didn’t realise, neither did Gerry, that deterioration was already taking place. He thought her turning down offers she would normally have agreed to was a newfound heightening of her ambition, an integrity he connected with their marriage.’

  Still I am standing there, her eyes following my body up and down.

  ‘It was part of the blame James took on himself. Part of the blame Gerry thought he should bear. If it hadn’t been that obsession, however, it would undoubtedly have been another. Ironically, it brought her to England. And you came with her. That, too, James feels responsible for. It helps to countenance what’s happened here. Apart from this,’ she gestures to me, ‘we’re happy. He leaves me to my friends, I leave him to his work. And his detective stories. As you might guess, they have an additional significance to, and justification for, him now. Not something he’d be inclined to mention. I hope you’ll treat this with discretion.’

  ‘Would Gerry mind me knowing?’

  ‘I suppose, in sending you here, he’s opening his book.’

  ‘Book?’

  ‘His past. Something only partly opened till now. His wartime marriage, his first wife pregnant at the time. He was far too young. She was much older. And the war. The war did for them both, in a peculiar way. He and James,’ she concludes.

  This aspect of Gerry I’m not familiar with – the tennis-playing tyro, of his own description, the liaison affair with the American Fleet: for a while both of us are silent.

  ‘What will you do,’ I finally enquire, ‘when I’m gone?’

  ‘Bit by bit,’ she says, ‘I shall get back to normal. This has never happened to me before. What will you do?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  She watches me in silence once again.

  ‘Normality, I imagine,’ she suddenly announces, ‘is why we’re living here and not in London. James, much earlier, had the chance, with his insurance work, but decided to stay where he was. This place, after the war, was the only one he had any contact with. Gerry went off to America, where he’d been, in any case, several times before. That’s partly, of course, what broke up his marriage. America. It went to his head. Ian dying shortly after. Maybe James, for his part, wanted to come to terms with his past.’ Again she gestures round: the new house, the town: the countryside: the hill. ‘It all, in some way, added up. Or seemed to, at the time. No wonder he took on insurance.’

  She laughs: lightly, her habitual, trilling, affectionate sound (the other deep, antagonistic, challenging).

  ‘Has he come to terms with it?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know him well enough.’

  ‘I’m not sure anyone does. Not even me. It may be what keeps us going.’

  We are sitting downstairs, still talking, when James returns, an unexpected conviviality persisting throughout the evening: several friends drop by. I go up early to my room.

  I feel a new warmth for James: the temporary nature of our arrangement: the strange detachment I associate with both he and Clare: our mutual involvement at the same time as our partial disregard: the deployment of sexuality to convivial ends in a situation – and an environment – which would normally preclude it: the insurance manager in his office overlooking the river (once an industrial scene) preoccupied with ‘mysteries’ – murders, unreasonable deaths: his teenage ‘brother’ in consort with his wife (his unspoken acquiescence): the inclusivity of ‘family’ life.

  Much of the time we spend in the car, travelling into and out of town or around the countryside, a companionship characterised by silence, on my part, and something singularly the reverse on hers: she ‘chatters’ ceaselessly, irrespective of whether I’m listening or not. These ‘outside’ activities – cafés, restaurants, shops (even, once more, the two of us – a matinée – the theatre) – occupy, invariably, the first half of the day. The second half – Mrs Jenkins having completed her chores and gone – in bed, or in an alternative location. We often simply lie and talk, on our backs, holding hands, a Hansel and Gretel in an altogether original setting, certainly an unexpected, not to say unlikely one. Her voice, irrespective of what she’s saying, calms me, disposing me to untroubled reflection. I am – the phrase occurs – moving into myself, ingesting, so it feels, an element of her, something which occupies, then fills up a void which I knew to be there but could never locate. It’s as if, I tell her, she is fucking me, a less than mutual yet nevertheless desirable avocation: I feel, I tell her, she is instilling herself, transposing herself as an otherwise insatiable spirit: love flows in as I flow out, onto her hand, into her mouth, into her: fulfilment of an obscure and, because of that, of a resonant nature.

  ‘I can’t help wondering what I’ll do when I’ve gone,’ I tell her (thinking exclusively of me, not of her).

  ‘Carry on as you were,’ she says. ‘But more, as you would put it, fulfilled. In any case,’ we are lying once more on the bed, ‘you can, and must, come up again. I may even come down and visit you. It would be nice to be shown round London by someone as sympathetic as yourself. This,’ she gestures to both of us, ‘needn’t come to an end. It will,’ she concludes, ‘be more intermittent.’

  We go to the cinema occasionally, in the evenings, with James, Clare driving ‘his’ (bigger) car – the one we use during the day – I sitting, at his insistence, in front, he in the back where, I assume, he watches both of us, conjugating his wife and his half-brother, no doubt, in novel ways.

  In the cinema we sit with Clare between us, her hand occasionally drifting to mine, our arms compressed against each other’s, my fingers, intermittently, touching her thigh. She has, over the weeks, taken to experimenting with her underwear, disappearing into the bathroom with her latest purchases, to re-emerge, shorn of her outer clothing, dressed in something approaching a convivial style. She lives, she tells me, an ‘appropriate’ life: a philosophical, if not a religious affirmation, irrespective of the mores by which ‘appropriateness’ is measured. I, too, am seduced by an ‘appropriate’ regime, in the belief that (so this is what Gerry has been getting up to all these years) it begs the principal questions at the same time as it assumes it’s answering them. We ‘collude’ in her choice of underwear – and her engaging way of displaying it – in the same way as we ‘collude’ in everything else: collusion, after all, is what binds us together (all four of us, if we include Gerry; all five, if we include Martha – oblivious or not): less a family than a household, a ménage, the common element – to which I mentally return all the time – a father I didn’t know and who, about his fatherliness, my two half-brothers are divided. ‘He was,’ James announces one evening, from the back of the car (returning from a film whose explicitness, unanticipated when we went in, has dismayed us), ‘a great womaniser. It’s one of the things I had against him. He wronged our mother. Gerry’s and mine. In that respect Gerry derives much of his nature from him, whereas I was so much – perhaps too much, in this respect only – like her. I acquiesced.’

  It’s a word that prompts Clare into ceaseless chatter (referring to the film), the word, however – a relevant confession as well as a critique, I can’t help thinking – hanging in the air like a physical presence: accompanying us, even, from the darkness outside into the lighted porch, the hall, the sitting room, where the suggestion is made that we have a drink.

  ‘Why don’t you stay with Richard tonight, Clare?’ James suddenly, amazingly suggests, handing out the drinks as casually as he might a round of cards. ‘I don’t want to handicap you in any way.’ Clare avoiding my expression �
� avoiding looking at me at all. ‘Good God,’ he goes on, ‘this is nothing to what went on in the camps. This, whatever Gerry might think, is a liberal house, not least in the freedom we bestow on one another. Surely you’ve told Richard I’m impotent? I genuinely and sincerely do not mind. Marriage – our marriage – is built on firmer ground than exclusivity, or anything like. We are, after all, realists, if nothing else. And Richard is a far more rewarding and appropriate partner than anyone we know. Anyone other than in the family.’

  It’s an invitation we don’t accede to (conceivably James’ intention): it introduces an element of circumspection to our encounters: as the prospective close of the visit approaches I suggest we work towards a conclusion which, I tell her, ‘decides itself’ (phone calls every three or four days from Gerry, reassurances, heartfelt, at either end). ‘One morning I’ll get up and know it’s time to leave,’ I add. ‘I should, after all this time, see Martha.’ Phone calls there, too, she listening silently the other end, prompted by her attendant, I hearing only her heavy, suspenseful breathing. ‘I have to see her. I feel guilty if I don’t. Guilty, too, about leaving here. Guilty, too, about staying. Guilty about everything!’

  Yet neither Clare nor James appear to mind my indecision; it’s as if my involvement with his wife fortifies James in ways that, like everything else, are unexpected: he exudes charm as well as complicity, encouragement as well as – a curious phenomenon – an increased confidence in himself: ‘I think I’ll send out all seven books again, possibly to an agent, something I haven’t tried before. They’ll know more about these things than I do. No more insisting I’m a one-man band. Or you,’ he adds, jocularly, to Clare, ‘a one-man woman. What a delight,’ he concludes to me, ‘to have you with us.’

  Reluctance becomes associated with my inability to leave – until, without warning (consistent with everything else in this venture), Gerry arrives.

  He appears one evening, no warning given, tanned, to a degree (more time in LA than New York), bearing presents, curiosity as well as unease evident in his manner, apprehension as well as the expectancy of, by his arrival, promoting pleasure.

  God’s gift to whom, for what, and why?

  ‘Good God!’

  James’ voice comes from the hall after he’s gone out to answer the ringing of the bell, the lights of a vehicle arriving and departing preceding the sound.

  ‘Gerry!’

  It’s an announcement – we are watching television – which brings Clare to her feet: moments later she, too, is in the hall, I following, catching sight of Gerry embracing (reunited with) his brother, then transferring the same gesture to his sister-in-law.

  He looks across her shoulder; or, more nearly, above her head: the warmth of her response – and James’s – I see less as a challenge to than an endorsement of myself.

  ‘I got back this morning and thought I’d come straight on up. Didn’t wish to prepare you in case I didn’t make it. In addition, I wanted to see precisely,’ he glances at James, ‘how everything is.’

  ‘Dandy,’ James replies.

  ‘Fine,’ Clare joins in – with an exuberance novel even for her. ‘Richard,’ she goes on, ‘has been so good to us.’

  The preposition I’m not sure I have heard: ‘to’ or ‘for’?

  ‘For us,’ James concurs.

  Gerry looks well (he says the same about me: ‘Mature, by God! He’s grown two years!’ embracing me as he enters the room). ‘He’s grown a couple of feet, as well. Is this the youth I left behind? How long have I been away?’ Holding me, finally, at arm’s length. ‘An unmistakable improvement, James!’ he calls over his shoulder, his brother, as if the sole beneficiary of this encounter, standing in the door, Clare with her arm – amazingly – around her husband’s waist (already beginning our delayed departure). ‘Wonders, Clare, will never cease. Rick’s positively pleased to see me!’

  ‘Surprised,’ I tell him. ‘No warning.’

  ‘None needed, Richard,’ James says from the door: the room – the house – has been abandoned, his manner suggests, to the two of us, he and Clare, their work done, retiring.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ Clare, releasing James, is entering the room.

  ‘Overnight. If that’s convenient. I have to be in London tomorrow. I had to make a diversion to Market Whelling.’

  Of course: Eric: the Rolls: maybe, even, he’s driven him up and gone into town to find a hotel, Gerry unsure of his reception.

  ‘How is Martha?’ James enquires.

  ‘She wasn’t aware I’d gone. Or even I was there. No different from before. You’ve spoken to her several times,’ he adds to me.

  ‘Spoken,’ I tell him. ‘Not received.’

  ‘I’m sure she takes it in. Takes you in, if she doesn’t me.’

  He is looking to James, oddly, for confirmation.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Clare enquires.

  ‘On the train.’

  ‘Drink?’ James says.

  ‘Now you’re talking, Jimmy!’

  A strange, synthesised, mid-Atlantic accent: he is still somewhere out there, above the waves.

  ‘It’s so good to see you all together!’ The unspoken question: will I be going back with him?

  I’ve already decided not – concluding I could scarcely leave without a moment (at least) with her – even, stay with her and James for ever.

  Gerry, however, is impatient to go (on the phone several times before we retire to bed: ‘I’ll pay for the calls!’ dismissed by his brother).

  They are disappointed he is determined to leave (so early) and finally he postpones his departure until the afternoon (further calls until, James having delayed his own departure: ‘No more calls, Jimmy! Let’s sit and talk!’).

  A résumé of his time in the States. ‘It’d be so much easier if we lived over there. But,’ spreading out his arms, ‘not possible. Apart from Martha, I want Rick to grow up in a non-violent place,’ followed by a résumé, by Clare, of our time together. As she accounts for one visit to town, then another, one trip round the countryside, then a second, a visit to the theatre, the prospect of another, a unique, mid-morning visit (‘to take him by surprise’) to James’s office (he delighted to receive us: enthusiastic, engagingly shy introductions to his staff), Gerry’s eyes flick from her to me and back again, his lecher’s animus ignited, he finally reaching the point where he interrupts, ‘I hope he wasn’t a bore, Clare. He scarcely says two words to me, and neither are repeatable. I thought much of the time he’d either be studying or go off on his own.’

  ‘He’s been nothing but involved,’ Clare says.

  ‘Involved?’ He looks at me less with surprise than consternation.

  ‘We’ll be sorry to see him go.’

  ‘Let him stay.’ He spreads out his hands: nothing, his gesture suggests, could be so simple.

  ‘For good?’ She smiles.

  ‘As long as he wants. As long,’ he says, ‘as he studies. Dover’s have given him work to do while he is here. I suppose he hasn’t looked at it.’

  ‘All of it,’ she says, glancing at me (half of it is true). ‘He’s so often writing in his room.’

  ‘Not his fucking memos?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She looks at me again.

  ‘Our house is full of memos. He has, what I call, memomania. That and fucking numbers. Everything has to be written down, particularly if it didn’t happen. And if it didn’t happen, dated.’

  He is looking at me for confirmation.

  ‘No memos here, Gerry,’ James confirms.

  Gerry flicks out his arm. ‘He’s free to choose. He won’t wish me to stay. There’s Martha, of course. He’s the only one she responds to.’

  ‘Hardly at all,’ I tell him.

  ‘Hardly at all,’ he says, ‘is more than she does with me. I can never raise a flicker. I think she thinks I’m another goon. Or one of the fucking doctors.’

  ‘That’s not a good way, surely, to talk about her?’

&n
bsp; Clare, I can see, is shaken: Gerry is here for sympathy – see how badly he has been badly done to – and inadvertently discloses the obscene environment I’ve been brought up in.

  ‘After all these years?’ He shrugs, glances at me, and adds, ‘What would you prefer?’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ I say, ‘in one or two days.’

  ‘Make it a week. I’ve so much to do I’ll hardly be there. Though sooner, of course, if you like.’

  ‘A week,’ I tell him.

  ‘Fine by me.’ And looking up at James he adds, ‘Not fucked up your schedule, I take it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ James says. ‘If anything enhanced.’

  ‘Let’s have a talk, James.’ Gerry suddenly rises. ‘How about your garden?’

  ‘Are you interested in gardens?’ James enquires.

  ‘Not at all,’ he tells him. ‘Yours looks like a battlefield. On the way in or on the way out?’

  ‘In,’ James says. ‘We’re looking for a designer. The previous one died.’

  ‘Fortunate for him, I’d say,’ Gerry says as he follows his brother out.

  Some time later we observe them walking along the half-completed footpaths, Gerry’s arm companionably in James’s, Clare relieved to see the warmth between them, which, knowing Gerry – and James – I believe is real enough.

  ‘Poor James,’ she says, as she watches them from the window. ‘He so wants to be at one with Gerry. Despite all he says, he so admires him, yet hasn’t found a way to tell him. Gerry’s so abrasive, and, as you can see, obscene. I’d practically forgotten. Life appears to have coarsened him. I’m sorry to see how much.’