by David Storey
Suck his thumb: admit nothing but content.
Gerry’s back (to me) is his most expressive posture, more vulnerable than when his features might be seen, the face that shows the concentration of the skater, gaze fixed on an objective no one else can see: chasms, voids (going down for ever): velocity, the ice itself: strength, lightness: speed.
‘All this is to the good,’ equilibrium restored. ‘Wouldn’t you agree we’re getting closer?’
‘By me,’ I tell him, ‘going nuts.’
‘You’re not.’
‘Why won’t you believe me?’ I ask him.
He can’t afford to: and hasn’t time: already the look in his attractive, revivified eye: ‘Look at me! I’m flying!’
‘Haven’t you heard,’ he says, ‘of adolescence?’
‘I’m still going mad.’
‘This is backwash,’ he says, ‘from fucking Clare. Maybe you should go back and finish off. Grow up,’ he adds, ‘and finish off. Finish what you started.’
‘All she did,’ I tell him, ‘was to bring it to the surface. Now that it’s happened I don’t know what to do.’
‘Everyone’s taking pills,’ he says. He names his star. ‘Without pills she’d never get out of bed on a morning. I’d never get out of bed. Come down and see what happens. It would interest you, even if you did nothing but fucking watch.’
‘The cinema is bullshit. The worst distraction yet,’ definitive statements, too familiar to be listened to (extracted under pressure): it’s disengagement we’re involved with, a commonality of experience, purpose – even possessions – moving, however, in opposite directions.
Yet, for an instant, he has wept: something, finally, has reached the eye – emerging from those depths where memories of Ian and Martha in her prime must still exist, I amongst them.
‘Get this picture out of the way and we can both,’ he tells me, ‘reassess.’
‘You’re not listening to me,’ I tell him.
‘I’m listening,’ everything in motion: his metaphorical arms embrace me – hold me: we will power through this together.
‘I don’t know how to explain it further.’
‘I know precisely how you’re feeling. It comes to me when I wake each morning, knowing I’ve got to go down and face it. A hundred, maybe more, waiting for direction. When I open that door and go out on the floor every fucking face is turned towards me. Clare,’ he raises his hand, ‘thought, no doubt, she was doing you a favour. No need to make an illness out of it. Christ, I didn’t fuck until I was nineteen.’
The dishevelment of his clothes, his hair, together with his unshaven chin, give him an unexpectedly youthful look: back to his favourite subject: so many women must have seen him like this: glimpsed him like this: a boy pleading – if not for acceptance – for entertainment.
‘If it wasn’t her it would have had to be someone else. Someone has to get in first. She had a first time. I had a first time. You’ve been lucky. Someone who cares. Someone who knows. No incest. – No blood link.’
He is talking (with relief) off the top of his head: everything happens in the end: we’re all in this together: don’t think I’m in there on my own.
I am, on the other hand, feeling worse.
‘You’re bright.’ He comes to sit on the arm of a chair (the phone rings in the room he uses as his study: he ignores it). ‘The way we’ve moved around has given you no time with kids. On top of that there’s Martha …’
He watches me intensely: something, perhaps, he isn’t ready to confide (a crack: look out!).
He swerves.
Veers off.
Another tack. ‘Those fucking memoranda might have been written by a fucking adult …’
Has he gone too far? He is moving fast (something healthy in my distress: anybody (normal) would feel the same: no need to resort to exclusivity: every genius feels like this: look at him (maybe I should see another ‘pal’). Did I hear that properly? He has these ‘pals’ all over the place. I wonder how they refer to him? ‘Maybe you should talk to someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Phil.’
‘Phil?’
‘O’Connor.’
‘He’s nuts.’
‘Some say. Others not. If he is, you’d have something in common, according to you.’
I’ve come across O’Connor on several occasions at Gerry’s ‘cultural’ suppers at Leighcroft Gardens: poets, musicians, artists, composers, journalists, hacks, restaurateurs, admirers, politicians, hangers-on (stars): a macabre, limelight-hogging figure: dark (black-pupilled) eyes, pale face, drawn cheeks, a frontally balding head (shrivelled features, like those native shrunken ‘souvenirs’), black clothes (suit, sweater, socks, shirt): a sinister presence I’ve never taken to and of whom, if anything, I’m morbidly afraid (a half-hour grilling once, in a corner, on ‘how I was’). Notorious as a psychiatrist with authorial leanings, he is frequently to be encountered not only in the broadsheet but the tabloid press – not least for running a ‘centre’ in the far north-east of London where he treats lunatics without the aid of medication – apart, allegedly, from aspro: often to be seen in his inimitable dress on late-night television advocating the closing of mental institutions and prisons (‘much the same thing’). Even occasionally appearing on early evening television news, his Irish accent with its lilting cadence at the end of every word offering comment which, delivered in any other accent, would have the speaker accredited as criminally insane. Gerry is beguiled by him (has put him into one of his films as a disputatious psychiatrist), O’Connor’s freakishly bestselling book, The Nature of Reality: the Reality of Nature: a Phenomenological Error, lying on his desk (unread) at Leighcroft for the better part of a year.
‘I don’t understand a word, but,’ Gerry has said, ‘I respect the authority with which he says it. I’ve never met a more authoritative man.’
‘Or woman.’
‘That I’m not so sure of. Martha is very authoritative. In her way.’
‘Perhaps it’s his accent,’ I now suggest.
‘Maybe it is,’ he says, ‘but also the thought.’
‘What thought?’
‘Whenever he speaks I always hear something I never heard before.’
‘And wouldn’t want to again.’
‘Always a fucking answer. That’s why you ought to see him. If he deals with people who are nuts he definitely is not nuts himself.’
‘You want me to go and see him.’
‘He is the only person I know, the only doctor I know, who has a belief informing his judgements.’
‘What belief?’
‘Read his book. You think you’re so fucking clever. An existential belief. A definitive, non-doctrinal judgement.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
He doesn’t know himself (maybe Gavin filled him in): he looks to me to explain it, motoring me along, inertia the scourge of the age, the disease films are uniquely opposed to: turpe nescire: the Socratic rule, disgrace the corollary of ignorance founded in staticity (I’m catching his disease).
‘Hasn’t he had more suicides amongst his patients than any other shrink on the circuit?’
‘Because he sees those who others shy away from.’
‘You still want me to see him.’
‘I trust him.’
‘You trust him?’
‘Would I ask you to see him if I didn’t?’
Showing me the medicine: instantly I’m better.
‘These quips you come up with. No thought behind them. Always negative. Always dismissive.’
He is regaining his confidence as well as his temper.
‘What about Doctor Pelling?’
‘She isn’t a doctor.’
‘A PhD doctor.’
‘She’s buttering you along.’
‘She could have fooled me.’
‘She’s coaxing you along,’ he says.
‘She’s trying to open me out. I’m beginning to see her method.’
/>
‘Clare opened you out. How much opening do you want?’
‘It’s your pal who recommended her.’
‘Maybe he was wrong.’
‘Maybe he was right.’
Neither of us able, or willing, to concede.
Night is closing in: the moment – the only moment – when I begin to feel relief.
‘I don’t understand,’ he says, ‘what goes on inside your fucking head. With most people I wouldn’t care. But not with you and Martha.’
He regrets this final observation: he raises his hand to withdraw it.
‘I’m relieved about you and Clare. Maybe it would have been better to have been someone different. But she we can trust. Which isn’t to diminish the responsibility which, considering her age and position, is hers. And mine.’
A tortuous confession: I wonder how much more he wishes to say, and how, if necessary, I might prompt him.
‘I don’t regret it,’ I tell him.
‘You probably miss her.’
‘Yes.’
‘It couldn’t go on.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll give O’Connor a ring.’
‘Okay.’
‘You’ll see him?’
‘If you say so.’
‘I’m very proud of you,’ he says. ‘The way we talk. I don’t talk to anyone the way I talk to you. It’s a measure of the bond between us. Despite all the things you say, that counts,’ leaving us looking apprehensively at one another across the almost empty room: two individuals separated by thirty-odd years and something even more in thought and feeling: a father in common, on whom there are strictly divergent views.
‘What was my mother like?’ I ask.
‘I scarcely knew her. Father and I didn’t see much of each other at the time of his second marriage.’
He waits: he doesn’t like this line of questioning, and never has. At times he even forgets her name: ‘Lorna, was it?’ he said, the last time I asked him.
‘Did you go to the wedding?’
He shakes his head.
‘Father cabled me afterwards,’ he says.
This, too, he’s said before.
‘I suppose James didn’t go to it, either.’
‘As far as I know.’ Again he shakes his head. ‘I was out of the country. Did James talk about it?’ He looks away.
‘His attitude,’ I tell him, ‘was much the same.’
‘He didn’t like Father, that’s for sure.’
‘Clare knew nothing of her, either.’
‘Father was retired and living on the south coast by the time he re-married.’
‘I was born at sea?’
This has been told me several times.
‘They were cruising.’
‘Wonder you didn’t join them.’
‘Why?’
‘The navy.’
‘Behind me, of course, by then.’
‘Premature,’ I remind him. ‘The birth.’
‘It’s what caused her early death. That and the fucking boat.’
‘What fucking boat?’
‘It wasn’t equipped for childbirth. Not for someone of that age.’
‘How old was she?’
‘I forget. Certainly in her forties.’
He likes this less and less. ‘It’s the sort of thing you can talk about with O’Connor.’
‘Does he know about these things?’
‘The relevance of the past,’ he says. ‘If we count those sort of things.’
‘Has O’Connor ever seen Martha?’ I ask.
It’s the question he’s been dreading: at least, I assume so: I watch him stand.
He goes to the window once again: the Sunday evening Grosvenor Street outside, devoid of traffic, devoid of people: an unnatural quiet descends around the place.
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I didn’t ask him.’
‘Why not?’
He shrugs, his back to me, his shoulders, oddly, remaining raised: a question to which there’s no answer, even now.
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t want to know.’
‘Didn’t he want to tell you?’
‘I suppose he did.’
‘He must have thought it odd.’
‘No odder than a lot of other things.’
‘What things?’
‘Things he must have come across.’
He turns, dismissing it, his hands in his pockets.
‘All I said was would it help or hinder the way I saw her. All he said was, “Neither.” “In which case,” I said, “don’t tell me.”’
‘Did Martha ever say anything?’
‘Apart from saying she thought him strange.’
‘Not far from the mark.’
‘No.’
‘So neither James nor Clare nor you ever liked her?’
‘Who?’
‘My mother.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ He’s not sure what he would say: the O’Connor decision, with him, is all that counts. ‘None of us really knew her,’ he adds.
‘A hell of a father, too,’ I tell him. ‘How come they went cruising when he was broke?’
‘I sent them money,’ he says. ‘He’d always wanted a cruise. I was in the States. We intended to meet. Then she fell ill.’
‘With me.’
‘With you. I paid for the flight back as well, as a matter of fact.’ A moment later, avoiding my look, he adds, ‘I wouldn’t say I knew him too well, either. Particularly as he grew older.’
‘Yet an element common to all of us,’ I tell him.
There are photographs of James and Gerry, their mother and father: only one of their step-mother and their father: a not unpromising-looking woman gazing flirtatiously into his elderly face some time, evidently, before their marriage (her ideal). I stare at these blurred features as into a mist, recognising nothing: a three-quarters profiled face representing, allegedly, opportunism – calculation, probity: reserve. Somewhere, presumably, I’m buried in all that, the photograph something Gerry, I suspect, regrets preserving (I coming upon it by chance, he unaware he still had it): all other photographs of that period he reportedly ‘lost’ (perhaps destroyed).
So there I have it: Mum!
Life is first awful, then it’s worse: the melancholy commentary passes through my head: born to renegades their family have disowned – if latterly with regret.
‘Did Martha ever meet her?’
‘Who?’
‘My mother.’
He shakes his head, the doorbell ringing from the street below. He doesn’t respond: bewilderment or denial in his gesture, I can’t decide.
The telephone also rings: he doesn’t answer that, either.
‘I’m never quite sure,’ he says, carefully, ‘how much you’re putting me on.’
Bewilderment, on my part: confusion.
‘How much you do know,’ he adds, oddly, ‘and say you have forgotten.’
‘I don’t forget anything,’ I tell him.
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
He smiles, oddly reassured.
‘What prompted you to take me to du Pleiss?’ I ask.
‘I thought it might be something physical.’
‘Physical?’
‘Mental.’
‘Mental?’
‘In the fucking head!’
Impatience back again.
‘A physiological reason,’ he adds.
Losing not only patience but his nerve.
‘I thought he was a psychiatrist.’
‘A neurologist.’
‘He didn’t take very long. He recommended Doctor Pelling in no time.’
‘That I wasn’t expecting.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Not a shrink.’
‘She isn’t a shrink. She’s a psychotherapist.’
‘I wouldn’t know the fucking difference.’
Or doesn’t want to.
/> ‘With O’Connor, at least, we know where we are,’ he says.
‘A philosopher, just what I’ve been missing,’ I tell him.
‘He’ll see you as a friend, not a patient.’
‘You’ve spoken to him?’ I ask.
‘Sure.’
‘And didn’t tell me.’
‘I wanted to know if he’d see you before we went through all this,’ he says. ‘He’ll see you as a friend.’
‘I hardly know him.’
‘As my friend, for fuck’s sake.’
The doorbell rings again: Gavin (perhaps) who’s phoned and got no answer: who said Sunday wasn’t a working day?
Or even one of his women, pissed off waiting.
‘I’ll call him now,’ he says. ‘I’ll call him now and get it fixed.’
(Why didn’t he say ‘moving’?)
2
So I end up at Jubilee Hall, a converted community centre built by a local philanthropist (‘for the community’: good old Gerry has registered that: he’s written the address on a piece of paper) before the Second World War – bombed, apparently, and subsequently rebuilt: a pair of battered metal doors leads to a urine-stained, concrete-floored hallway, a telephone hanging from its wire against one wall, a noticeboard pinned with leaflets and handwritten messages facing it. A metal table, with a plastic chair behind, stands adjacent to double wooden doors leading into a hall in which several figures are variously located: some look up but the majority persevere with their principal occupation, which involves observing and commenting on the activities of a woman drawing, or painting, on a large sheet of paper on the floor.
Two other figures are playing table tennis at the far end of the room, one elderly – that’s to say, middle-aged – short and stocky, with a balding head, cropped hair, reddened features and protruding eyes, the other a lean, physically uncoordinated youth, possibly younger than myself – who appears not to be focused – is perhaps unfocusable – on what he’s attempting to do.
‘Nineteen, two!’ the older figure calls, serving. ‘You’re fucking hopeless, Patrick!’ adding to me, as the youth misses the ball and trots off to collect it, ‘What can we do for you, my friend?’
The surface of the table is decorated with a female face: a series of interlocking circles, with coagulated paint standing up in ridges, I identify a pair of female breasts and a baby’s suckling head.