Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  On the other hand I might ring Martha (unable to witness her expression, however, when finally addressed as ‘Mother!’): listen to her breathing (revived, restored, forgiven).

  I have, for the first time, come alive.

  I am not responsible for what has happened.

  Jubilation appropriate to Jubilee Hall (Gerry right to send me).

  I hunt round the flat for money, searching his bedroom, going through his clothes: come across several dollars in a wallet and, making my way to the bank in Berkeley Square, change them into pounds, take a bus to Victoria and pick up a Greenline.

  I sit at the front (I should have left a note for Dad: ‘All is well. Gone to Mother,’ but focus on the road ahead).

  Martha (Mother), one and a half hours later, is walking on the lawn at the rear of the house, her arm threaded in that of a middle-aged, stout, white-overalled woman who is talking to her (it seems) in a whisper: a conspiratorial exercise: her eyes – my mother’s – meet mine: she watches me without slowing.

  I’m conscious of how beautiful she looks (radiant) seen through an offspring’s eyes – and wonder if my visit has been preceded by a telephone call, if not from O’Connor, Gerry. ‘Here’s your brother-in-law,’ her attendant says. ‘Would you like to walk with him?’

  I take her arm, the attendant adding, ‘Don’t walk Mrs Audlin far. She’s due indoors to see the doctor. I’ll give a call, if you remain in view,’ and she’s gone, having handed the disengaged arm to me.

  I’ve reflected on the bus how I might introduce the suggestion I am her son (should have checked it out with Gerry: she is, after all, his wife). Walking for a while in silence I wonder if telepathy will do the trick (love, association, empathy): the natural (even, in the circumstance, unnatural) bond between a mother and her child, unique in our particular situation.

  I enquire, ‘Have you had any children?’ expecting no response.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, surprising me with the certainty of her answer.

  It draws me to a halt.

  Her face is fastidiously made up, the blue eyes shaped by liner and mascara: the sensitive presence of her nose: the clarity of her cheek and brow – her hand, delicate, lightly-veined: the perfume reminds me of Clare. Probably the same (the one Gerry gives to all his women: the trail of his progress I’d never otherwise detect – looking for clues, in my fashion).

  ‘How many?’ I ask.

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘Boys or girls?’

  She has rarely been so communicative.

  ‘Both.’

  ‘In your films, or in life?’

  A risky interjection, warned off by Gerry, and doctors, in the past.

  ‘Films.’ (I can’t tell whether enquiry or statement.) She appears relieved, waving her hand, dismissing the speculation.

  ‘In real life you had one.’

  ‘Did I?’

  Unusual, too, to speak so promptly, and at such length.

  ‘Do you remember who that was?’

  ‘I don’t think I do.’ The subject evidently bores her: nothing unusual, however, in that.

  ‘A boy, do you think, or a girl?’

  ‘A boy.’

  Illumination of some sort apparent.

  ‘Where is he?’ I ask.

  ‘He died.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Some time ago.’

  She glances away: other clues present themselves, somewhere in the distance.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Long ago.’

  We have recommenced our walking.

  ‘What if he didn’t die?’ I ask.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I killed him.’

  She turns, her eyes, despite their blueness, darkening.

  ‘It’s why they keep me here.’ It’s the first direct look she’s given me for as long as I recall.

  ‘I’ve been coming to see you all these years. My name is Richard,’ I tell her.

  ‘Richard.’ Her look turns away.

  ‘There’s no reason to pretend that I’m dead. Philip O’Connor has only just told me.’

  First I’m an embarrassment, to be denied, secondly the cause of something that has driven her mad – obtusely, obscurely, perversely mad: another performance she’s been required to make: I am looking, however, at a stranger, the more intimate, dynamic relationship denied.

  ‘I’m not pretending anything,’ she says, the directness and simplicity of her conduct amazing: it’s the way she might have spoken to a director (or to Gerry), defending her interpretation of a part, aware of what she is doing, why she’s doing it – defending her craft, her skill, her ‘art’.

  ‘There’s no need to pretend with me,’ I tell her again.

  She turns towards me, gazing not so much at as into my eyes.

  ‘Do you remember how we used to hunt for clues at Beaconsfield?’ I add.

  I intend to startle her: one of her ‘clues’ she might recall. Is this film? no doubt she is thinking. Or has it been introduced (without warning) by someone not involved?

  Or is it that ubiquitous thing called ‘life’?

  For a long time I accept her gaze: what’s going on behind it I’ve no idea: for the first time I wonder if I’ve done the right thing. Will she disappear entirely?

  Someone is waving from the terrace: the attendant: a white-clad arm, and her name, or mine, is called.

  ‘Time,’ I tell her, ‘to see the doctor. I didn’t ring up before I came. I’ll wait until you’ve seen him.’

  ‘Her,’ she says.

  We are walking up the slope to the terrace: once there, we follow the attendant to the hall: I wait outside a door while Martha, my mother, is taken inside. She is there, alarmingly, a considerable time: not a woman’s voice, however, but a man’s comes from beyond the door. The attendant, who merely closed the door before retiring, reappears and enquires of my seated figure, ‘Still there?’

  ‘She is.’

  Disbelief gives way, in her, to apprehension.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ she enquires.

  ‘As long as it takes,’ I tell her.

  This, too, she finds disturbing.

  ‘I’m down the corridor,’ she says, ‘if you need me. It may be I see you before you leave,’ and she’s gone.

  The male voice murmurs on, the sounds interspersed with a female tone which I don’t recognise as my mother’s. Nor Martha’s.

  Perhaps O’Connor’s got it wrong: another ‘plot’ intended to mislead: another false trail, another red herring.

  The door re-opens, I, by this time, pacing up and down, Martha reappearing, followed by a figure I’ve never previously seen: stout, wearing glasses, his hair coiled, spring-like, around his head: a benign, if not benevolent expression: dark eyes, a generous mouth, an air, less of disenchantment (a prevailing medical expression) than bemusement, verging on pleasure.

  Seeing me, he nods. ‘You Richard?’

  I indicate I am, standing perplexed before them: Martha – my mother – examines me with a smile: a parent visiting a child at school, full of the reports of his scholarly behaviour.

  ‘Mrs Audlin’s well today. Why don’t you come in?’ he says.

  The room is spacious: books line a wall: windows look onto the lawn and the driveway at the front of the house: a desk, laden with telephones and files, suggests an other-than-recreational function. Several upholstered chairs occupy the floor. Indicating one of them he invites me to sit, my mother taking her place in the one, presumably, she’s sat in before. The doctor, if it is he, occupies another.

  ‘Martha’s feeling well today,’ he says again. ‘You’ve spoken to her, I take it?’

  I nod.

  His benignity remains.

  ‘About anything in particular?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Martha has a clear recollection of what it was.’

  He glances at her for confirmation.

  She is regarding me with the sa
me unfathomable expression – not unlike that of someone entering a lighted room, accustomed to the dark outside: as if dazzled, assured of her reception.

  ‘I’m Doctor Ryman, by the way.’ He reaches across, rising as I shake his hand: something tenuous, almost abandoned, in his hold. ‘Martha has been in the care of a colleague who is away today. I have her notes.’ He indicates the desk to one side. ‘I’d say something unusual has occurred, wouldn’t you?’

  I nod again, glancing at Martha for confirmation.

  Even now, I might have gone too far, O’Connor’s revelation suddenly unreal: is this what Gerry has really planned (given his name to, intended)?

  I realise how remarkable my mother looks: the slimness of her figure when (pace Mrs Dover) it might so easily have gone to fat: her extraordinary composure (no longer pathological): the way, for instance, she has crossed her legs, her hands clasped, casually, in her lap (the only sign of apprehension the way, after a moment, she bites her lower lip, at one time the prelude to her making an effort to respond to something she suspects is beyond her comprehension).

  Her head is in profile against the light from the window: sharp, authoritative, dynamic: a woman in charge of herself.

  ‘She refers to you as her son.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve only just been told myself.’

  ‘I’ve rung her husband. He’s rung me back. A difficult man to get hold of.’

  I wait: admonition or approval associated with Doctor Ryman’s silence, hard to tell.

  ‘Martha has been able to recall something of your past.’

  She, for her part, examines the doctor’s face intently: this might be the part she intends (she has been cast) to play – her interpretation of it: a climactic demonstration of her art, summoning up lives – a life – she assumed was past, at the worst had been forgotten.

  ‘That’s of interest, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’m not inclined to disagree.

  ‘You, for instance, as a child.’

  A heated charge around my chest: a sudden burning behind my ears: a constraint, so it feels, on breathing at all.

  ‘In America.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘A shock.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To you both.’

  He looks to her for confirmation: she, more than anyone, looks composed: a body accustomed to playing a role, an intrusion which galvanises others into action.

  My love for her, I am aware, has been there all the time, a formality, almost, instinctively presented – requiring no response, no recognition: where she is is where I am: what she is is what I am (all those journeys on Greenline buses).

  And maybe, throughout this time, an equally subliminal recognition in her, too: her transposition of the same to an obscure displacement of a clinical need.

  ‘I remember,’ she says, gazing vacantly before her, ‘a swimming pool. Not long after his mother dies. That was how it all began.’

  Tears, a distillation of light, appear around her eyes – moving down her cheek, she raising her hand to arrest them.

  I offer her my handkerchief, rising from my chair: she takes it with no sign of recognition, then hands it back. ‘Thank you,’ she says, but doesn’t move her head, her gaze fixed on the doctor as if he is the source of her recollection.

  ‘Swimming with his father,’ she adds. ‘Confusing, to begin with, not knowing he wasn’t to be mine. His mother …’ she continues, glancing across at me. ‘It did him, I believe, a very bad turn. The studio insisted. Gerry said … Now I’m here I feel quite well,’ this the longest speech I recall her making: mechanically, she extends her hand for me to take: a formal gesture, her fingers warm and hearteningly firm, as if my hand were enclosed by those of a child. ‘Like swimming under water for a very long time and coming up in a place where everything has changed,’ a radiant, still composed expression.

  ‘Your husband’s coming to see you,’ the doctor says.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Here.’

  She glances at me.

  ‘Gerry is coming to see you,’ she says.

  The room takes on an identity other than its own.

  ‘Us,’ she amends.

  Some while later, holding my hand, we go out to the tea room: a place of tables and basketwork chairs where patients and visitors are seated. Tea is brought on trays from a distant counter, and Ryman, who has suggested this ‘break’ (‘I’ll talk to your husband, Mrs Audlin, when he arrives’), having accompanied us to the room, disappears.

  ‘How much did you know?’ I ask her.

  The question eludes her: she shakes her head.

  ‘My mind is full of drugs,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure who I am. The same,’ she adds, ‘must go for you,’ a formality still between us (this, too, a part she assumes she must play).

  We watch, in silence, the others in the room: it might be a tea room in a tourist hotel.

  My identity recedes, in unison with her own: in its place, a space in which nothing of significance occurs, the present too obscure, too tenuous, too fragile to rely on.

  Finally, we walk: the corridors, the terrace, the lawn. Gerry arrives as dusk is falling – a studio car, with a chauffeur who, dismissed, goes off in search of a cup of tea – Gerry walking up the steps of the terrace towards us, looking from one face to another, recognising us with something of a startled expression. He embraces us both, she unsure who he is: his arm around each of us, we turn along the terrace.

  He doesn’t say anything, others observing us from the windows of the house: she is, after all, the ‘star’ of the place, sheltered, secreted, hidden, in her decline.

  A family reunited, a long time, it feels, apart.

  ‘Quite a day,’ his voice murmurs above my head: murmurs, too, beside my ear: murmurs, obscurely, something else. The word ‘precocious’ comes to mind, an allusion to something he fails to understand.

  This (evidently) in the midst of filming: ‘the greatest crisis of his life’.

  ‘This beats everything I’ve ever felt,’ characteristically looking for superlatives. ‘There isn’t anything,’ evidently, ‘to describe it,’ drawing back to observe the effect of his announcement, Martha, despite her confusion (it’s been a long day), drawing back as if to place herself precisely: is this further role consistent with her previous interpretation?

  The doctor summons us from a window, stepping onto the terrace to make the gesture clear. We return to the room where we were before, Gerry retaining my arm as well as Martha’s, his look drawn queryingly from face to face. ‘You all right?’ he asks me as we enter.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Was Phil okay?’

  ‘He was.’

  A light illuminates the doctor’s desk, I realising, suddenly, why there are so many chairs in the room: more than one person, more than two persons, are often involved: two separate pools of light are reflected in the darkening windows: figures still drift along the terrace.

  ‘I’ve left you – I will leave you – to talk between yourselves,’ the doctor says: his wirely-sprung hair glistens in the shaded light – incandescent as he moves his head, his eyes speculative, enquiring.

  Gerry looks not merely strained (a day’s shooting, then a drive across country, the following week’s schedule already on his mind) but vanquished: the thin-ice skater pauses – rocks back on his heels (the cracks catching up on either side – catching up and ever-widening): he has, by some stratagem, to take us with him – or leave us, stranded, on the bank.

  ‘It requires you to readjust yourselves,’ the doctor adds, I no longer listening, merely watching: a fractured expression, an assemblage of disparate parts, illuminated eerily by the nearest lamp: he might be all three of us, drawn together.

  Gerry, despite his exhaustion, listens intently: he sits, childlike, holding Martha’s hand, he the supplicant, she the provider: occasionally he glances across at me, wishing we were closer, I anxious to allow him to witnes
s the miraculous change in her himself. There is much, for instance, he would like to ask: ‘Is she cured?’ dreading anything other than an affirmative answer.

  Yet the doctor is saying she will have to stay. ‘Stay on,’ he says. ‘Though I hope you’ll be free to see her,’ Gerry’s equivocal response to this ‘greatest moment in our lives’ superseded by another, if of his own invention. ‘Until Martha is sure. I’m confident, from what I’ve seen today, we’ll soon be able to tell,’ I thinking of the lousy apartment she’ll come home to. Events, as usual, have forced themselves upon us. This, I am concluding, is more than we can stand (a suite at the Ritz, or Brown’s, in lieu of what she/we pay out here).

  I am looking at my parents in situ, for the first time seeing them as such together, I suddenly, unmistakably, a son.

  I travel back with Gerry in the car, an earlier suggestion I stay overnight abandoned when it becomes apparent that the day, for Martha, has been too long: she wilts as we see her to her room, I withdrawing for Gerry to call me in before we leave. Martha sitting there, wearing a nightgown, her tiredness – her absence, even – showing in the light from the bedside lamp: a filmic image (purposely created: ‘see us together,’ Gerry might have said), he sitting on the bed beside her.

  So much for love.

  He says little in the car, the driver someone I’ve only glimpsed before though he drives Gerry to the studio each day (and drives him, occasionally with Gavin, back). He talks, principally, about the day’s shooting, implying it’s best not to talk about anything else, the conversation upbeat, jolly: a characteristic piece of skating for a spectator he doesn’t wish to be well-informed.

  Secondly, he talks about Jubilee Hall, though markedly not about my visit. He’s been there once to give a talk, and has a standing invitation to give another (lectures something O’Connor is noted for giving, celebrities of every description flooding in to hear him. Several of his performances have, through Gerry’s offices, been recorded on film). ‘Phil’s a celebrity. He has, fortunately, unlike some, a sense of humour,’ not caring to expand on this. ‘Madness as a social event. How, despite the best intentions, we drive one another crazy.’

  The back of the driver’s head: the headlights tunnelling in the darkness: we’re taking an unfamiliar route.