Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  ‘Idyllic’

  ‘Idyllic?’

  ‘Life.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Enviable.’

  Surprised. ‘You’d like to live like this?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The past takes care of the past. Forget it.’

  Not sure what he means by this, I don’t respond.

  ‘A great admirer of Martha,’ he adds.

  ‘He is?’

  ‘Elise particularly. Knows all her movies.’

  Presumably, at some point, Jack and Elise have been to the house (I wonder if they met Jack and Edith?): amongst the many admirers of Martha (and Gerry) I don’t recall their names.

  ‘Why are we staying here?’ I finally ask.

  ‘Until we decide about Grosvenor Street.’

  ‘I thought we had.’

  ‘I had. You hadn’t.’

  ‘I thought the other way around.’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind?’

  I shake my head. ‘Are we short of dough?’ I ask.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘What about Martha?’

  ‘Hers we don’t touch.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I ask, ‘or can’t?’

  ‘It’s tied up. I’m a trustee. It all goes to Market Whelling. That takes almost the whole of the interest. She made her dough before the big dough really started. It’s partly that which affected her. We make ends meet, but only just.’

  He is sitting down, watching me, wondering, no doubt, what he might do: a liability of a brother he can’t disown: should he, he must be thinking, shove me back with James and Clare?

  ‘Once this picture’s made we’ll be afloat.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You name it.’ He smiles. ‘The work I’ve done on this movie. More than on all the others combined.’

  ‘Will you keep the office?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘It must cost a lot.’

  ‘Essential.’ The drink has softened his mood: it always does: our thin-ice skater speeds away: gracefully, calmly …

  ‘You don’t have to worry,’ he says.

  ‘I like it here,’ I tell him.

  ‘You should. On the other hand it’s not practical.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The phone, for one thing. The other, it’s some way from the office.’

  ‘Not far.’

  ‘Not as near as the place next door.’

  ‘I hoped you might drop it,’ I tell him.

  ‘No chance.’ He holds his glass in both hands, leaning forward. ‘What do you think,’ he adds, ‘of going back to Jimmy’s?’

  ‘Does he want me?’

  ‘I haven’t asked.’

  ‘I prefer it down here.’

  He regards me for a while in silence: so absorbed is he by his thoughts that he shudders when I cough.

  ‘You slept on a bench last night?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘How did you get on with Jimmy?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘And Clare.’

  ‘I like her.’

  ‘I thought,’ he pauses, ‘when I was up, you had a thing going for one another.’

  ‘We had.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘What you had.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He is silent once again, this dismaying him more, conceivably, than the previous hours of waiting. ‘Does Jimmy know?’

  ‘He invited me,’ I tell him, ‘in the end.’

  No sound, merely the stare: something profound: what – apart from consternation, horror, or disbelief – estrangement, even – I can’t decide.

  ‘You fucked her because he asked you?’

  ‘He gave it afterwards,’ I tell him, ‘his seal of approval. Though not, of course, as simple as that.’

  A second profanation. After a moment, he says, ‘What about her? Was she willing?’

  ‘From the start.’

  He can’t take his eyes away, re-visioning everything.

  ‘Was she with you?’ I ask.

  ‘The circumstances were different.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Probably was.’

  ‘Probably.’ Still his gaze fixed on mine. ‘What have I let this kid in for?’ he must have been asking; as near to telling him he’d have to shoot the picture all over again (no film in the camera. The labs blew up. The star’s developed meningitis).

  ‘It must have been the same with you,’ I suggest. ‘To that extent.’

  ‘Different.’

  ‘How different?’

  ‘They wanted a kid. Jimmy couldn’t have one. Traumatised by the war. What went on in the camp. We had a thing about keeping it in the family. When Clare miscarried it came to an end. A boy. Another boy.’ He is thinking again of Ian. ‘Somehow, when Martha went down, it all seemed fated. Maybe that’s why she made for you. Clare. In which case, you can’t go back.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Would you want to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It would be a fuck-up if you did.’ After a moment, he adds, ‘It’s a fuck-up if you don’t.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘I can’t get onto your wavelength, Rick. I thought Leighcroft Gardens a disaster. It turned you into a recluse. Aged you, I thought, before your time.’

  ‘I don’t see that.’

  ‘Too comfortable, for fuck’s sake. Too easy. You hadn’t to do a thing. That’s why you came on with all those fucking numbers. Superstition. Boredom. Checking everything. Marking it. In Grosvenor Street, and a crammer – there’s one I’ve dug out in Notting Hill – a bus-ride away, or even a walk across Hyde Park – it’s a job. Practical. I made a mistake about community. Community, I’ve realised, is not for us. We’re different. Itinerants. Putting down roots delays us.’ (Diminishes. Reduces.)

  It’s a speech, I assume, he’s prepared (on the hoof), none the less heartfelt, despite all that. The news about Clare, however, leaves him (leaves us) with a dilemma – determined to persuade me to go up there, even now, should objections to Grosvenor Street persist.

  ‘We’ll be here,’ he says, ‘for five or six weeks. Maybe less if I get things moving. If not,’ he waves his hand: about to get up and replenish his drink, he changes his mind. ‘How was lunch?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘A good cook.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Unlike Mrs Hodges.’

  ‘She wasn’t bad.’

  ‘She wasn’t good. Kept you in line too much, I thought.’

  Leighcroft Gardens, whatever I might think, is enclosed in revisionist feeling – communal, historical, domestic …

  Meanwhile there is the apartment (flat) where he fucks his women: for a moment I’d assumed Grosvenor Street must have been it, until I saw the absence of furniture, its barren spaces.

  ‘What do you feel about Clare?’ he asks (curious, mild, full of affection).

  ‘I like her. I miss her.’

  ‘I can’t, for your own sake, send you back. Not even for a visit.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s hardly a situation in which you can flourish.’ Having set down his empty glass he waves his hand. ‘Any sense of responsibility I might have had has gone clean out of the window.’

  ‘It might be usual but not unprecedented,’ I suggest.

  Silence, once again.

  ‘Did you like it?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was, when I knew her, one hell of a fuck.’

  He is about to add something more to this but, still gazing at me, desists.

  ‘And now she’s fucked you.’

  ‘Or the other way around.’

  Once more he is about to speak, but doesn’t. He even picks up the empty glass.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ I tell him.

  ‘I suppose I don’t,’ he says, and then, putting down the glass again, adds, aimlessly, ‘What would Martha think
?’

  ‘Why Martha?’

  He looks up, startled, suddenly grave. ‘No need at all,’ he says.

  ‘She wouldn’t know what we were talking about.’

  ‘She wouldn’t.’

  His concurrence is swift: coloured – flushed – he looks away.

  The telephone ringing causes him to stand: he appears to be on the point of leaving the room.

  ‘I’d better make one or two calls,’ he says. ‘It’s a piss-hot week chasing dough. I’m too old for this racket.’

  He’s gone.

  I hear his voice from the study.

  When he comes back he has made up his mind.

  ‘The alternative is a service flat,’ he says, ‘in Curzon Street.’

  ‘Back to that.’

  ‘While,’ he tells me, ‘you make up your mind.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Decide where to live. When we leave here, Curzon Street for a month. Maybe three. At the end of which I’ll need to get a mortgage. We can’t presume on Jack and Elise for longer than a month. They have kids, too, who might want to come.’

  A disconsolate figure, my brother rises and stands beside the massive studio window: he views the scene to the east.

  ‘At least,’ he adds, ‘you like it here.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We could, with a pinch, move in with Gavin. His kids are never there for longer than a day at a time.’

  He must have put this to Gavin already.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘He likes you.’

  ‘He hardly knows me.’

  ‘He’s known you almost as long as I have.’

  A curious remark: I don’t pick it up. ‘In any case,’ I tell him, ‘I’m still disturbed.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘Being nowhere.’

  ‘Nowhere has nowhere been set down as comfortably,’ he tells me, ‘as here.’

  ‘It helps,’ I tell him. ‘But also reminds.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t belong.’

  ‘Nobody belongs, for fuck’s sake,’ he says. ‘You belong as much as anyone.’ Something of his previous concern returns. ‘I can always live out of a suitcase.’

  ‘So I’ve noticed.’

  ‘In the navy,’ he says, ‘you had to.’

  ‘I’m not in the navy,’ I tell him.

  Another thought occurs: ‘How about the crammer?’ he says.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘We’ll go together. Work out a schedule.’ He waits. ‘If not Oxford, Harvard. How about Berkeley? You’re bound to know someone there.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Or London. We’d be available to see one another.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll have to go somewhere.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’ll have to do something.’

  Back to that.

  ‘I’ll get the qualifications first, and then decide.’

  ‘Get you into a film crew and start from scratch!’

  Confirmation as well as suggestion.

  ‘Fuck the cinema.’

  Changing his mind about the drink, he gets another: turning to the room, he smiles, salutes with his glass, drinks, and salutes again.

  What has the fucker thought of now?

  ‘When you’ve thought about Grosvenor Street,’ he says, ‘you’ll let me know.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘As quick as that?’

  ‘That’s how fast we’re moving, Rick.’

  To me, on one occasion, he announced, ‘No one but a fool would live on anything other than credit.’

  On another, ‘Who’d borrow dough with interest if they didn’t have to?’

  Inordinate sums, I know, over the years, have moved through his accounts: some I’ve glimpsed from examining the contents of his desk: for several years he employed a secretary in the house: her filing of his correspondence gave easy access.

  Life is in abeyance once again.

  BOOK TWO

  1

  I wake to a sense of apprehension, increasing, once awake, to one of terror: something abstract which appears to originate in the senses, themselves oppressed by the appearance of the wall, the paintwork, the moulding round the ceiling (the lampshade, the light itself): by the sounds, too, however distant, of aircraft, traffic, birds: a vessel’s siren on the river – the whole coalescing into a single pang which finally contorts my body: another thing – a seizure which, however much I struggle, refuses to let me go.

  Two weeks, by this time, at the crammer: anonymous rooms in Notting Hill, twenty-six desks in one, of which twenty-five are occupied most days, the recalcitrant pupil no one but myself. English. History. Geography. Waking shortly after dawn: an other-than-worldly aberration which, instinct tells me, comes from an imbalance in the brain.

  Fiercer than anything previously imagined (something formulates, death or something: the fall to the yard, to the footpath below). I get out of bed to a generalised terror …

  All perceived through a veil of tears: the inconsiderable advantage of not being sane (composed, affected). ‘Some place to live, not someone else’s,’ I tell Gerry, he distracted by other things, incessantly on the phone, even here, the few hours he spends away from the office (he spells the sums out loud: ‘Five hundred grand is pissing in the pot. I’m short of fifteen point five million’). Has he been stretched like this before, or are these mountains he’s never climbed? Goes off twice to see Martha, despite the pressure (is he prizing something out of her?) – hiring a car on each occasion (an unusual occurrence) and driving himself.

  On a third of these trips I insist he takes me with him, he curiously at ease driving north and east, getting lost, consulting a map, the turreted, battlemented outline of Whelling Hall finally showing (with a cry of triumph) above the trees: the long run up the drive, Martha walking with an attendant on the lawn, having been forewarned of our arrival – showing no sign, however, of recognition.

  ‘This,’ Gerry says, ‘is something,’ kissing her cheek, stooping – tenderly – to his crazy wife, holding her against him.

  She shows no response other than she’s tired (brought out, I assume, against her will).

  We go indoors, first to a lounge, where we sit, she something of a wraith: a recent loss of weight (‘Her appetite hasn’t been all it should be,’ her attendant has explained. ‘If you coax something down her, all to the good’). Then to her room where we sit adjacent to her bed, Gerry on one side, I on the other, she reclining on the covers, supported by pillows, uncertain who we are: two of us together: her beatific smile and saintly, sweet-natured incomprehension: the drawn-in cheeks outlining the delicacy of her features: the startled nose, the winsome mouth, the inquisitive brow: the bewilderment, I assume, she is passing on to me.

  It is this visit which turns me into something I no longer recognise, Gerry describing, in anodyne terms, his latest project, omitting his principal concern, the money: the director, the writer, the stars: a roller-coaster of a ride, I following his tracks, attached to his tail, inept, graceless …

  No point issuing further statement.

  One of the names she might respond to.

  ‘Martha?’ He watches her expression (guilelessness writ large): the vacuous eyes turned in his direction. ‘This is Richard. Richard? I’m Gerry. Remember Las Vegas? The boat we sailed at El Guardero? Remember your sister Alice? The snow above Phoenix?’ The eyes examining him from a distance. ‘How about Richard?’ He stresses the name, almost, absurdly, as if I’m not there. ‘Rick?’

  The corners of her mouth stir: creased, tightly compressed: a sound, whether of acknowledgement or indigestion, hard to tell.

  ‘Not often, Martha, the three of us together.’ He is urging something on, leaning from his chair: her hand, for some time, has been retained in his: in both of them – a tenderness I have rarely seen before.

  I re-examine his features: his brow,
the broken nose, the caesarian fringe, the line of the jaw, the contour, turned upwards, of his mouth: he looks more youthful than I’ve ever seen him – searching for a sign of recognition with a concentration which causes him to frown, calling her to him, ‘Martha!,’ then, strangely, ‘Gerry,’ then, ‘Geraldine,’ then, the ultimate injunction, ‘Matty,’ pressing her hand.

  Prompted less by his voice than the pressure on her arm, she gazes at him directly.

  ‘I don’t like being called Geraldine.’ A voice of old, imperious, self-mocking.

  ‘What shall I call you?’ he says. He has drawn her hand towards him.

  ‘I don’t like being called Geraldine,’ she says again.

  ‘Miss O’Neill?’ he says, startling her into recognition.

  ‘I don’t like being called …’ the division of identity too much: her eyes flicker, close, widen: we are retracing a familiar path. ‘Someone I was telling.’ She can’t recall. ‘My friend.’

  ‘Who?’ Gerry enquires.

  ‘I was almost sure.’

  Her eyes move to the window.

  ‘Somewhere,’ she adds, quite bleakly, ‘John.’

  The name of her first husband: I see the recognition of failure in Gerry’s face.

  I am looking at her mouth, the lines like brackets, at each corner – endeavouring to recall an image projected on a screen: something impersonal yet also ‘mine’, something intrinsic yet everything but; something in conflict with everything I feel – more relevant, however, than anything I know. I am the abyss into which her memory descends.

  ‘This isn’t John,’ Gerry says, glancing at me: not so much a brother, or half-brother, as a stranger, looking up to encounter another unknown figure – like he might, I reflect, from a café table – perfunctory, unseeing, weariness, to this degree, virtually unknown: our skater falters and, maybe for the first time, glances back: his skill – his grace, his speed: the fissures, the cracks, are still advancing.

  I absorb each detail of the room, determined to recall it yet not knowing why: the pattern of the curtains which, half drawn, let in a filtered light: the lacquer on her fingernails, painted by another hand: the delicacy of her fingers – the enlargement which, mythic, I have witnessed on a screen: the books and magazines beside her bed – untouched, I imagine, since my last visit: the way her legs have retained their shape and lie, discarded, on the bed: similarly, her arms, the hand held by Gerry now released.