by David Storey
He is, in this context, a pitiable figure, his energy expended: at some point he will have to turn and start again: life, with his force removed, would scarcely, if ever, be life at all.
He is looking at me with an air of resignation, as if, in reality, I am a thing: transposed, displaced, possibly abandoned (a liability to be disposed of).
His intention in coming has been to unload me – conceivably – onto her: recognition of her name, then of me: failing that, recognition of me, then of her name (jolted back to something): she is, I am, we are (exclusive to ourselves).
He persuades her, finally, off the bed, finds her attendant, and has her accompany us to the hall, she walking between us, oblivious of who we are, and presumably of where we are going. This might be the last we see of her – her dress, summery, fluttering in the breeze, she waving (persuaded by her attendant), Gerry wondering if he could still be right, she aware of everything, having decided to withdraw – fleeing to a hilltop, a refuge – at least, a retreat in the English countryside.
The familiar features disappear.
He is silent as he drives – driving, in effect, as he might skate, a ‘received’ reaction, invoking processes too deep (intrinsic, organic) to fathom – no signal given other than their effect, this metaphorical sweep, sweep, sweep of the arms and legs, the horizon itself constantly reforming: something he knows he will never reach.
‘Seems much the same,’ I suggest as the first suburbs appear: semi-detached houses interspersed with trees (how often, on the Greenline bus, I have speculated on inhabiting one, lulled to sleep by the monotony of their passing).
‘This place?’
He is scarcely aware of where we are, glancing sideways to get his bearings, startled to be brought back from his thoughts.
‘Martha.’
‘Her?’ He isn’t, for a moment – amazingly (so far away has he been) – sure who she is, recalling with a backward jolt of the head. ‘Maybe I should have seen her on my own. The two of us must have been confusing.’
‘Do you still think she’s faking?’
‘Do you?’
‘No,’ I tell him, collateral, either way, to the ‘world’ he represents.
After a while he responds, ‘On the other hand …’ leaving the speculation for me to take up.
I don’t.
He concentrates on the thickening traffic.
‘She was an actress,’ he finally says. ‘Actors,’ he stresses, ‘are a species to themselves. I say that advisedly. I’ve known one or two. They’re only real when they’re not what they are. She was – the speculation is, still is – no exception. I dream of her, particularly when I’m stressed, like now, and in the dreams she’s always as she was, a comedic edge – the quality which, in the first and last analysis, gave her class, as if she were scrutinising her performance the same time as she gave it, offering it to the audience as if to say, “This is playing, baby. How about playing with me?” More or less, you could say – though you’d disagree – what she’s doing with us.’ He glances across. ‘She invites you in, or, in this instance, invites you out. The secret of her success.’
‘Is that why she cracked?’
‘Discounting my own view you’d have to say it’s hormonal, chemical, genetic. No two doctors say the same. With one she’s schizophrenic, another delusional, with someone else a manic-depressive. One said she suffered from a cellular anomaly, and drew a sketch to take away. Another told me there were missing letters in her DNA. None say it’s irreversible, but infer it all the same.’
‘What did the sketch look like?’
‘A road map with no warning signs, names, or indications of compass bearings.’
He laughs, indicating the congestion ahead.
I am mentally inscribing everything that happens, setting down words like bricks: building structures the design of which I have no idea: edifices, cities: no remedy other than to accede to their erection (the shapes that formulate themselves).
Around the focus – it always feels – of Martha: the linchpin, the core, the heart …
‘The fact of the matter is …’
He doesn’t continue, distracted by his driving.
‘The fact of the matter is …’ he says, and, once again, does not continue.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ I tell him.
‘I don’t know if there is an answer. After all these years, that’s still the bottom line.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t look for one,’ I tell him.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’
‘Maybe it’s beyond us.’
‘So why the endless grossing?’ he says. ‘It must add up to something. If only I could see it. If she’s nuts for ever, what’s the point in her being alive? What’s the point in going to see her?’
The summation of his thoughts: the questions crowd in behind a long-locked door.
‘All this dough that’s going down the drain to keep her in a state of not knowing who or what or where she is, or who anyone else might be, either.’
Maybe he had gone with a notion of lifting some of it off her: changing the terms of the trust that paid for this waste.
‘But then you think it’s faked.’
He reflects a little longer. ‘It’s the only alternative to thinking she’s doing nothing. Assuming she’s faking gives me relief. If not, her illness takes over everything.’
‘Me included?’
‘You as well.’ He pauses again. ‘How do you like what she is?’ and when I don’t answer, he looks across and adds, ‘Not you as well. You, as I’ve always said, have the whole of your life before you. Isn’t that what I’ve been telling you all these years? That’s why I had to get you out of Leighcroft. I had to take action.’
He needed the dough, I assume, as well.
‘Precipitate,’ I tell him.
‘Somebody had to do something, Rick,’ desperation of a new sort creeping in.
‘Where do we go from here?’ I ask.
‘Home,’ he says, ‘at least, for the moment. There are Homes, of course, in the States, that she could go to.’
A fresh alarm in me.
‘She seems happy here,’ I tell him.
‘Happy?’
‘Calm.’
‘Sure.’
‘I prefer to stay. Your work is here. We are here.’
‘Right.’
‘Our past is here.’
‘Some of it,’ he says. He looks across: a piercing, inquisitive stare.
‘Most of it, surely,’ I tell him.
‘Most of it. That’s right,’ he says.
The victims and culprits: the suspects and clues: there never will be a bottom line: the criminal (no more red herrings) will never be found.
All this, had I known it, the preliminary stage to cracking up: alone in the flat with Mrs Shapiro, or occasionally the cleaner, Mrs Marshall, an amiable Caribbean woman, or simply alone, journeying to and from the crammer – the hyper-active (foreign) fellow students, the functional interior of the adapted rooms (formerly a house) – add to a record, or so it feels, of displacement: of life going on over there when it should be going on over here.
And Gerry: his preoccupation with his film: the convergence of first shooting with the prospect, if not the certainty, of leaving where we are (occasional letters from Clare: postscripts from James: memoranda, in return, from me), and the fateful waking to a mist, a feeling that the observable world is closing in.
Entombed! a voice like Martha’s, in her heyday, informs me.
Enclosure by a sensation that has its source in the walls, the doors, the singular plate glass window overlooking the eastern skyline: incorporated, the whole, as a feature of my mind.
I am taken off by Gerry to see his ‘pal’: a doctor in Devonshire Street he first visited with Martha (who recommended Market Whelling as a ‘refuge’ and who, occasionally, at Gerry’s prompting, visits her there).
He talks to me (Gerry in the waiting-room) about my feelings of s
elf-enclosure, words refusing to coalesce with feelings, ‘appropriate’ language no longer the norm, he diagnosing a condition acronymically referred to as GAD: a generalised anxiety disorder – recommending, in the process, a course of pills, calling Gerry in to discuss it: an avuncular, friendly, broad-shouldered figure, with rounded back and a bowed and balding head (white hair receding decorously at the rear).
‘Maybe a home environment would be better for him,’ he suggests to Gerry when he calls him in, Gerry responding, ‘Home or home?’ I, for a moment, confused, his ‘pal’ (‘Ronnie’) replying, ‘Domestic, not institutional,’ with a laugh. ‘The itinerant life, as Richard describes it, is not, at the present, at least, for him.’
‘But, then,’ Gerry says, ‘that’s how we live. How we’ve always lived. Inertia in Hampstead was doing him no good. He – even he – would agree with that.’
‘Would you agree?’ Ronnie enquires.
‘R du Pleiss’ is inscribed outside his door.
I shake my head.
‘There’s Martha, too,’ he adds.
He has, perfunctorily, enquired how much, if at all, I like her (‘I love her’), how often I see her (‘more frequently than Gerry, who hasn’t the time’).
‘The two of them,’ Gerry says, ‘are very close. He’s very attached to her,’ identification, his tone suggests, conceivably a problem. ‘What’s the treatment?’ he finally enquires.
‘I think it would do him some good to talk.’
‘He does talk,’ Gerry says.
‘To someone,’ Ronnie says, ‘I can recommend.’
‘Sure.’ Gerry looks at me. ‘Is that okay?’
Implicit in the question is a reckoning of the cost.
‘That, together with medication,’ Ronnie says (a confidant of stars as well as people behind the scenes, like Gerry).
‘Maybe,’ I tell him, ‘I should give it a try. Nothing lost,’ they looking at me as if something in this response is far too prompt.
So I end up at a clinic not a few hundred yards from Dover’s and maybe a few hundred of the same from Leighcroft which – three days a week in this impersonal room, in a ‘purpose-built’ structure not unlike an office block – I walk past occasionally for old time’s sake (someone else is living there already).
My interlocutor is someone I have, initially, to resist disliking, a censoriously-featured middle-aged woman with long grey hair which would benefit, in my view, from being cut and which she has trouble controlling: large, heavily-veined hands and slight, flat-heeled shoes like dancing-pumps or slippers: thick-limbed, long-skirted, jerseyed: around her neck hangs, on most days, a string of beads – uniformly-sized, red some days, green or blue on others.
I endeavour to read signals in these changes of colour, but none occurs.
Her eyes are dark, underlined by shadows, her nose pronounced, her mouth thick-lipped (inappropriately coloured), her cheeks jowled: altogether, a sense of unnecessary weight.
Gerry makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he is suspicious of me talking to her (Martha has talked to lots not dissimilar in her time), he having seen her on our first visit. Ronnie he ‘respects’, but, as he often confesses, ‘respect’ invariably – and not just with Ronnie – leaves him ‘blind’. As much as the woman talks me ‘in’ he endeavours to talk me ‘out’ – not, at least, to suspend my judgement.
But then, it’s my judgement, I tell him, that is allegedly impaired.
Not that I see him often: the one positive element in this latest arrangement is that it keeps me busy: rushing to and from where we are (a comfortable place to go nuts in, which is probably why I’ve gone) and Notting Hill, and Notting Hill and north London, he’s scarcely present at all (my exams postponed until the following year).
We are, too, in no time, on the move: Grosvenor Street, practically next door to the office: ‘Not permanent,’ he tells me, ‘for the duration’ (of this film). ‘We’ll move back to Hampstead, maybe, when I have the dough.’
Disturbance is matched with irregularity, the one a reflection of the other, an air of anxiety (not as acute as mine) characterising Gerry’s features (the shooting at Pinewood underway – the money, allegedly, having come via the Seagroves: all the time we are buying time) to a degree I’ve seldom seen: a haggard, no longer youthful – no longer caesarian (no longer anything you’d care to mention) – look: an aged man staggers out of the top-floor flat at an unearthly hour each morning and an even more aged one crawls back in at night. He has a fathomed look, as if his brain has left his body, behind his eyes a cavern from inside of which nothing shows.
‘How are you making out with that woman?’
Her name is Pelling: he never uses it (Marjorie, I learn).
‘Okay.’
‘What’s the score?’ sprawled in a chair: the hotel-suite crap which has been flung around the place by an ‘interior’ designer: a sparseness which suggests it could be removed any time.
‘Evens,’ I tell him.
It’s Sunday: a brief respite from telephone calls: i.e., only twenty throughout the day.
‘What does she ask?’
‘What I’m doing at present.’
‘Not about the past?’
‘Not yet.’
‘If you’re feeling you’re making no progress, let me know. You don’t have to go on seeing her.’
‘I don’t?’
‘Not at all.’
‘What about Ronnie?’
‘He’ll understand.’
‘Maybe that’s why she calls me Ronald.’
‘Who?’
‘Martha. She’s seen him, too.’
‘She also calls you Roland, Robert, all the rest. As it is,’ he waves his hand, his normally manicured hand, neglected like, I can’t help observing, the rest of him, ‘it’s up to you.’
‘Imagine with a surname like du Pleiss being given a personal name like Ronald.’
‘We’re talking about you.’
‘What about the pills?’
‘They take time to have effect.’
‘I still wake up feeling frightened. Terrified,’ I tell him.
He doesn’t wish to hear: I am taking the pills, I am seeing Mrs Pelling: ‘Doctor M. Pelling’ is inscribed on the outside of her door, not, I’ve been told, a medical appellation.
‘Sure.’
‘It rarely goes away throughout the day.’
‘I feel the same.’
‘You’re fifty-two. I shouldn’t be taking this fucking crap. You’re doing something. I’m sitting on my butt.’
‘You’re working. You’re studying. You’ll have a career.’
‘I’m going mad. I’m going to end up,’ I tell him, ‘like your wife. Won’t that be sufficient?’
That brings him to my side: he sits on the arm of the chair, his arm around my shoulder.
‘You’re not going the way of Martha.’
‘I feel it.’
‘She was as bright as a penny at seventeen. Eighteen. So was I.’
I’m not entirely sure what this means: reassurance, or confirmation. ‘I’m talking,’ I tell him, ‘about me. I’m full of fear. I’m fucking desperate. I don’t belong to anything.’
‘You belong to me.’ His cheek beside my own: he hasn’t shaved all day.
Where all this comes from I’ve no idea: out of a mist, a forgotten time: places, events, people: Beverly Hills, Beaconsfield, the West End: Hampstead: a passage across a landscape that has no significance other than its passing: everything has ‘gone’, what’s present soon to be gone as well.
I am, I tell Marjorie, not ‘founded’: I wake up each morning not knowing if I’m there.
‘Who experiences the terror?’ she asks me.
‘No one I know,’ I reply.
The pills, meanwhile, are still to take effect.
‘There are side-effects, too,’ I tell him.
Ronnie made no mention of those.
‘Such as?’
‘Nausea. Dizziness. Fat
igue. You name it. My mouth, most of the time, feels like rubber. I don’t know where it is when I speak.’
His cheek compressed against mine: moments later, I realise he is weeping.
‘You realise how much I care about you, Rick?’ he says.
‘We’ve been through all that,’ I tell him, ‘before.’
‘I’d do anything to keep the two of us – the three of us,’ he amends, ‘together.’
‘I know that.’
‘You know what a fucking film is like. Unless I’m on the spot the whole thing goes down the shute.’
A disconsolate figure, bereft to a degree I’ve seldom seen: I’m not sure whether I’m looking at him or me: everything, his manner suggests, is lost. He is lost. I am lost – except, his manner further suggests, he is thrusting me out – the intended sole survivor: two derelicts, cast up on the shore of Martha’s dementia: whether to survive, whether to disappear.
Maybe he’s not convinced (of what I’m feeling, my capacity to describe it), too much bound up in his own distress: a bum-deal arrangement with someone who’s making no ‘moves’: observant, immobilised. Still.
Bewilderment bordering on contempt: his half-brother Richard must get it from his mother.
The unknown mother.
‘The whole strategy, at the moment, is to hang in,’ he says. ‘Once this picture’s finished I’ll take a break. We’ll go away. We might take-Martha. Somewhere where she, and I, and you, have never been. We’ll reassess,’ his arm relaxing around my shoulder.
He turns, rises, goes to the window.
He – we – might be gazing out of any window onto any street in any city: a representational interlude between something purporting to be one thing while, in reality, it masquerades as another: no local animation, no local name, no variety of custom – the constancy, only, of human nature – such equated with mundanity, relieved by distraction (something conjured up by him).
He wipes his eyes, what he is thinking interpreted by the movement of his hand, the sideways inclination of his head: he runs his knuckles across each cheek: the impropriety of not moving (the precocious arsehole behind his back – suffering while he, Gerry, does for him (by him) all he can).