Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  ‘A thin-ice skater,’ I tell her.

  ‘What is one of those?’

  ‘Just as you sum up Gerry.’

  The younger of the two brothers is preoccupied: despite his exuberance, his mind is on other things: serious other things. I’ve rarely seen him both so present and so distant.

  ‘Jet lag,’ Clare suggests when I point it out.

  ‘That, too,’ I tell her.

  ‘A thirteen-hour fright from LA, then Market Whelling. The train up here. He mustn’t have stopped for twenty-four hours.’

  ‘He’s used to moving,’ I tell her. ‘It’s when he’s standing still you have to worry. Surely you must have noticed.’

  ‘No,’ she says. She shakes her head.

  ‘Earlier,’ I tell her. ‘When you first knew him.’

  ‘No,’ she says again and I see she, too, must love him. ‘So what are they talking about?’ she adds.

  ‘Us,’ I suggest.

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Me. You. How we are together. He’s bound to enquire.’

  ‘I hardly think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Their looks.’ She adds, ‘They would have looked quite different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Different. After all, I know them both.’

  I am conscious, in that instant, of someone I scarcely know: an awareness that has come and gone over the previous weeks: one moment she is the woman with whom I have struck an immediate accord, the next someone eerily overseeing not only her life but mine.

  ‘In that case, they are re-acquainting themselves,’ I tell her, ‘with one another.’

  ‘That’s far more likely,’ she says. ‘On the other hand, I’m not sure what we ought to do. Carry on without them, or wait for them to finish. Mrs Jenkins I’ve given the day off.’

  In the end she busies herself in the kitchen, I propped up against the wall, disinclined to sit (arms folded, feet crossed), gazing out at the garden at the back – that area least traversed by my two half-brothers.

  ‘We’re strangers, aren’t we?’ she says, reading my thoughts. ‘Half a relationship with James, and no connection with me, other than through marriage.’

  ‘Isn’t that just as well?’ I ask.

  ‘Fortuitous,’ she says. ‘I might easily have married someone else. In which case we wouldn’t have met.’

  ‘Chance.’

  ‘Chance,’ she says, and adds, ‘Does everything hang on that? It trivialises all of it,’ she concludes.

  We chatter on, dispossessed, waiting for the conversation in the garden to end.

  At one point we hear the two brothers come in the front door and go upstairs, returning a little later and entering the sitting room, James, surprised not to find us there, calling, ‘Clare?’ with an alertness I’ve never heard before, the two of us returning to the hall. ‘There you are,’ he says. ‘We were talking! The past! A hell of a lot to get through, neither of us inclined to stop.’

  Gerry is sitting with a drink, glancing up as we come in: his interest is focused on Clare, examining her with, I reflect, something little short of admiration.

  ‘We could do with a week, just to cover part of it,’ James adds. ‘And well worth the trouble.’

  ‘Maybe we should take a week. Go away together. The four of us,’ Gerry says. ‘Clare, I haven’t a doubt, would have a lot to contribute. And Rick could write us up in his memos.’

  ‘Why do you go on about it?’ Clare says. ‘There’ve been no memos here.’

  ‘Just as well. I’m glad to hear it,’ Gerry says.

  ‘He’s sent off his work to Dover’s each week and they’ve returned it, marked, the next. Otherwise,’ she adds, ‘he’s kept quite busy.’

  ‘I’m sure he has,’ Gerry says, gratified – intrigued – to have aroused her. ‘Have a drink.’

  We go out to lunch, taking Gerry’s luggage – a holdall and a briefcase – with us. In a restaurant overlooking the river – where Clare appears to know everyone at the other tables, and where James, not she, we discover, occasionally has lunch – Gerry says, ‘We must do this more often. I can’t tell you how fulfilled I feel, after all these years, to have the four of us together. Martha would have made it perfect. Even then …’ The thought trails off, he waiting for one of us to complete it.

  No one does.

  ‘It’s a privilege having you come at all,’ James says. ‘When was the last time?’ he adds to Clare. ‘We were trying to work it out.’

  Dates are suggested, my mood abstracted: three adults, one juvenile, not, for the juvenile, a positive mix.

  ‘Things must change,’ Gerry is saying. ‘I must change. Less work, more people. Less people than more family. The problem, otherwise, is the more you do the more you are obliged to. I delegate as much as I can but unless you’re looking down their throats nothing,’ he concludes, ‘gets done.’

  We drive to the station to see him off: a delegation of three figures standing by the carriage door in which he’s framed, his earlier anxiety, it seems to me, returning, glancing at me swiftly, then away: how much – and what – has passed between him and his brother I’ve no idea.

  Then he’s gone, the train gliding out, a glimpse of his figure as he moves to his seat (a pang within me that I’m not going with him), his final call, ‘See you in a week’s time, Rick’ – and James is saying, ‘I’ll walk to the office from here. See what they’re up to without me,’ and he, too, is gone, disappearing through the crowd outside the station.

  We return to the house.

  James, when he comes in that evening, glances enquiringly from one to the other of us, then looks away, evidently satisfied, no postmortem required: whatever has passed between him and Gerry appears to have done no harm.

  ‘I should think the reverse,’ Clare tells me, later, looking in my room. ‘I’ve never seen him so enlivened.’

  The week passes – work sent off, at a brisker rate, to Dover’s: a protracted, almost elegiac farewell, my half-brother, on two evenings, leaving us to ourselves, only insisting the three of us should remain together on the one before I leave. We have a meal at home which concludes with his declaration, ‘If you only have one more night …’ Clare declining the suggestion she should spend it with me. ‘We have,’ she says, ‘spent so much time together.’ This her way of preparing for our separation. I, for that night, spending much of it awake, she coming into the room at an early hour and announcing, ‘I couldn’t sleep, either,’ a Hansel and Gretel still, if of an indeterminable age.

  At the station, showing the same discretion, James says his farewell at the barrier, declaring, ‘You go ahead,’ the two of us embracing by the carriage door. ‘You’ll write, I assume,’ she says. ‘If only a memo.’

  ‘Sure,’ I tell her.

  ‘It’ll seem an empty place without you.’ She gestures round. ‘The town. The house. Your room. I don’t think I could bear to go in knowing you won’t be there.’

  ‘That’s bound to pass,’ I tell her.

  ‘You’ll know it’s always there.’ She backs off across the platform. Perhaps James is watching, hard to tell.

  ‘I can always ring,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’d love to hear your voice.’

  ‘Yours, too. You,’ I tell her, ‘ring me. We can, if you like, ring each day.’

  A whistle blows.

  I step inside the door.

  ‘Goodbye, my dear,’ she says, eyes glistening now with tears.

  5

  It’s been arranged that Eric meets me at the station – only, I manage to avoid him: not easy, with one exit from the platform. I see him waiting at the opposite end, in uniform (cap as well), and when all the passengers have drifted off I wait for him to inspect the carriages, ducking his head as he passes each one, finally enquiring of an attendant, I, ducking, too, exiting the train at the barrier end and disappearing in the crowd outside.

  One sanitised situation exchanged for another: the first-class carriage, the back seat o
f the Rolls. I walk until my arm aches with the weight of my case (I’ve come away with more things – Clare’s wilful presents (invariably clothes) – than those with which I started), then catch a bus, getting off in Camden Town, prospecting whether to tube or taxi the remainder of the way to Hampstead, savouring, as I do, the sense of freedom – of no one knowing who or where I am. Eric, meanwhile, on the phone, enquiring if he’s been given the wrong train time, even the wrong station.

  Free!

  Gerry’s fault: only Martha accepts me as I am: that quizzical smile which animates her features when she listens to me speak, I gazing at her, full of expectation, convinced, at any moment, she will come alive.

  Over all these years, I have, I conclude, learned nothing.

  Indolence intruding, I catch a taxi to Leighcroft Gardens: where else can I go with my residual allowance (thrust in my hand by Gerry before departing, a similar, if significantly larger, disbursement to James and Clare, I assume)?

  The house, when I arrive, appears not only empty but deserted.

  The curtains have gone and, as I confirm from the front steps, the furniture too.

  Confused, the taxi having departed, I wonder if I’ve come to the wrong address (the lock’s been changed: my key doesn’t fit).

  I step back to the street, look at the façade, at those on either side, and confirm (a) this is it, and (b) the place is empty: even the curtains from my room have gone, as well as – I go round to the side door – Mr and Mrs Hodges from the basement.

  A feeling of exhilaration gives way to alarm: free! liberated! Where, however, do I go?

  Back to Clare and James; on the other hand, I have no money.

  The day is drawing to a close: a notion of catching a cab to Gerry’s West End office (the grinning Gavin in charge, who pays the fare) I reject on the realisation, by the time I arrive, there’ll be no one there.

  I could, alternatively, call one of my (few) friends (juveniles, without exception); that, too, feels undesirable: if I am alone why not remain alone? Returning to the front door to check again that my key won’t fit the lock, glancing in obliquely at the window (how bereft the place looks: suddenly retrospectively, it has possessed a great deal of charm – even if most of the furniture was rented: Gerry, like Clare, galvanises everything around him) re-descending to the pavement where my suitcase stands like a discarded adjunct of the house itself.

  A part of me, I conclude, has been removed: whether a good or a relevant part, or a redundant one, I can’t, for that moment, decide. I wander down the Gardens in the direction of the Heath, remember a favoured spot in the nearby Gainsborough Gardens – a treed and shrubbed enclosure within a circle of Edwardian mansions – and, finding a bench facing, through the trees and beyond the houses, the setting sun, sit there to reflect on my situation.

  Not only has the familiar gone but an element I relied on: Gerry, like so much else, I have taken for granted: whatever his shortcomings, he has always – if, at times, from a considerable distance – been a constant provider.

  The enclosure of trees and shrubs – around a lawn: a one-time tennis court visible against its otherwise sloping contours – darkens: the sky reddens, then fades beyond the turret-like extrusions of the houses: the grandiose (irregular) façades, the sombre brickwork and glowing paintwork and plaster surrounds (what care people take in providing themselves with a home: what consideration). The air is still, the sky clear: a not inappropriate night to spend in the open.

  Slotting the suitcase beneath the bench I lie along the bench itself, Gerry’s overcoat beneath my head, my arms folded. After a while, as lights go on in the houses, and the air grows chill, I remove several bulkier items from the suitcase, my Clare-purchased dressing gown amongst them, and arrange these beneath my head, drawing the overcoat on and, grateful for its more than ample size, sink my face inside its collar.

  Surprisingly, I fall asleep, waking to note I have been asleep, sinking into oblivion once again before, at some early hour of the morning, waking to the hardness of the bench and wondering if it wouldn’t be more comfortable on the grass.

  Sounds in the surrounding shrubs have woken me: at first I assume a bird, then a rat, then a cat – a dog: an animal walking out from the densest shadow and, after pausing to glance in my direction, moving across the grass, something hanging from its mouth: a loping animal – bowed head and strangulated tail – which, as I focus on its shape, I recognise as a fox.

  High up, a solitary light is burning in one of the houses and I imagine a similar light burning, high up, in ours: my room. Isolation feels, suddenly, less like freedom than rejection. I recall the warmth of Clare’s body, its texture, its smoothness, its embracing, intoxicating charm.

  What, I wonder, would she think of this?

  I turn on my back, contemplate the stars (visible through a thickening haze): the darkness, the hardness of the bench: what would it be like knowing, out there, there wasn’t an anchor – like the several I am blessed with: even Martha, even her – my thoughts caravaning northwards: what would it be like to be like this for ever: what would it be like if no one gave a fuck?

  This is me, legs curled within the constraints of the bench, shrouded in an overcoat of Gerry’s, one which, at some time, has enclosed him too, my seigneurial half-brother – my other half-brother, their respective spouses – and my own, cataclysmic, generational gap.

  Light comes up amongst the bushes, descends over the houses. Aircraft, at intervals, lumber overhead. The need to urinate (defecate): hunger. I realise how little I appreciated having a home: somewhere to eat, something to be known in – gazing at the houses opposite, envious of their location: a part as well as apart: unity, composure.

  Birds sing; a vehicle passes on a nearby road, the Gardens otherwise silent. Lights flicker from the aircraft overhead. A feeling of desolation envelops me: what has Gerry organised on my (on our) behalf? Where was Eric instructed to take me? Where, have they concluded, might I be now?

  Shuffled (like this) between locations: one fortuitous exercise followed by another. What have they intended? What new locale has Gerry found? Why, so swiftly, without warning, has he abandoned not only ‘home’ but ‘community’? Where do James (and Clare) feature in the plan? Why have none of them told me? What, if anything, am I supposed to have done?

  Abandonment, on my part, can be brought to an end in a moment: a phone call, a walk, a ride – a ring on someone’s door – and this hiatus will be over. Love knows no bounds, but then neither does hate – or vacuity – and that greater emptiness above my head: despite my reflections I am still lying down.

  A milk float circles the Gardens, invisible beyond the shrubs: a blackbird darts off with its startled chatter: someone else’s life begins: expectancy, on the one hand; containment, on the other: lost or found, I am still in Gerry’s pocket (or James’s, or Clare’s): as for Martha, she might as well be sitting by me (a constant preoccupation, a constant companion), presence or absence, to me, the same.

  In limbo: suspended: time out: have I told Gerry, has he assumed, the memoranda are for her, copies left on each of my visits, a résumé of life-without-her, she and I united by a reality described exclusively by me: the mystery we live by, the as-yet-to-be-recognised corpses, suspects, culprits, the account that she and I must live by, both of us assembled, cast as an amalgam – a residue of someone else’s life?

  I relieve myself amongst the bushes: when the milk float has gone I collect a bottle and a loaf of bread in waxed paper left on a doorstep and move off through a gate in the direction of the Heath.

  I haven’t been up this early for a long time (a lot to be said for it), things moving without me, I a piece of refuse delayed, in the stream, by an overhanging branch a moment before, being dragged on – finding another bench at the summit of a knoll, a pine tree overhead and a view – a low perspective – of the City, the light flooding from my left where it throws into shadow several ponds fringed, on their opposite banks, by houses, trees, la
wns …

  I drink the milk, eat a slice of bread, possess an inordinate desire to abandon the suitcase which, so far, I’ve carried with me: a documented life to be documented yet – a rabid, faithless, faded account: a protean journey in search of a life other than that prescribed by circumstance (or nature) – the grass descending the slope below me, the reflection of trees in the bird-strewn surface of the ponds – and me – eating bread (white, sliced), drinking milk, aware of traffic descending the road I’ve crossed to my right: everything – Gerry included – going on without me: something in which I play a minimal, if not a non-existent part.

  An omission in the midst of an otherwise featureless story, an embryo grown up in the company of halves: nothing to claim me, measure me (retain me: retrieve me, restore me).

  The amount of money I have will get me, by taxi, to Gerry’s West End office: I’ve been there once or twice before: if he’s not there, Gavin will be. If not him, someone who can book me into a room, re-introduce me to a life which I have, temporarily, at least, abandoned. Beneath those roofs, those chimneys, behind those windows, in those vehicles, in those gardens: beneath those trees, conceivably on this bench, the containment of an apprehension greater than even I can imagine: like a wall, holding back a sea, an ocean. A maelstrom.

  I decide to walk, discarding the half-empty bottle, the opened loaf of bread, ruminating on what I envisage as a return to fiction, the scenario Gerry has put about as my (and Martha’s, peripherally his own) existence: a scenario still waiting to be completed, set in motion: transferred to film … catching a bus at South End Green, which takes me to the West End: a second bus to the end of Oxford Street from where I make my way through Grosvenor Square to Grosvenor Street and Gerry’s office.

  Closed.

  I sit in the square and contemplate the pigeons (the winged eagle suspended over what at one time might have been my embassy). I am free, eclipsed, on the loose, secured – the remnant of a story put about by someone else (a mystery and, as yet, something little short of murder), something other than my own creation, something more than I would have wished. At liberty. Not free.