Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  ‘I like him,’ is Gerry’s (confident) summing-up: concordance with the way the day has gone: things are looking up (if the ice is getting thinner, he is still outpacing the cracks). He has taken something out of his pocket: having looked at it, he returns it, inside his jacket. A moment later he switches on a light above his head, extracts what is evidently a sheet of paper – a memo! – unfolds it, gets out a pair of glasses I’ve never seen before, and reads it. Confirming something (he seems unfazed), he puts it back again, together with the glasses (his effortless gait, one ice-skimming blade alternating with the other) and switches off the light. It’s like watching a sprinter’s head which, despite the momentum of his body, scarcely appears to move at all.

  He looks across, his face illuminated by the reflected glow inside: he touches my arm, the first physical contact since leaving Market Whelling when he’d indicated I get in the car before him. ‘We have to make up for a lot of lost time,’ his coded message. ‘Ever since you went up to Jimmy’s things have changed so quickly. Now this.’ He nods, indicating, in the presence of the driver, I needn’t respond: he is referring to what no doubt he is going to conclude is ‘a successful day’, the outcome of which, however, he can’t be sure. ‘Things can never be the same,’ signalling with another nod.

  ‘Right,’ I tell him.

  ‘We can talk about that later.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The driver, unnerved, finally, by the silence behind him (uncharacteristic where transporting Gerry is concerned), remarks about the traffic: ‘Easier going in than coming out, Mr Audlin.’

  ‘We had a hell of a job coming out,’ Gerry says. ‘But for Charlie knowing a back route we’d have been another couple of hours. Normally, going to and from Pinewood, we’re against the rush. Coming out to Market Whelling we were caught in the middle.’

  The rest of the journey we complete with observations about the route, not Gerry sitting beside me but my father, a father I know as intimately, as confederately, as I would a brother: something we shared has been broken apart, replaced by something the nature of which I will, perhaps, never be able to recognise.

  Once in the apartment Gerry makes for the phone, pausing after dialling to pour a drink, the instrument tucked between his chin and shoulder.

  Finally, after speaking swiftly, receiving a reply, he speaks once more and replaces the receiver. Turning to me he says, ‘Do you want one?’ I shaking my head, waiting, as he is, for me to respond. His face is grave: he is sitting across the characterless room: a piece of free-wheeling he can so easily slip into, his figure stretched out along the couch: ‘Tell me something!’ his eyes voraciously invite.

  Maybe we’re past the point of saying anything: I am transferring ‘authenticity’ from one thing to another – in transition, going where, from where, I’ve no idea. ‘Why did you do it?’ I (inevitably) ask.

  Uncertain how direct an enquiry this is – uncertain, perhaps, what specifically it alludes to, he gets up and crosses to the window (uncurtained: looking out to the vandalised – as offices – houses across the street). Gazing out, he drinks from the glass still in his hand, then crosses to the door and closes it (although there’s no one in the place but us).

  ‘To protect you.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Do you know what a star’s life was like in those days? Martha was run by the studios. They didn’t approve of her getting married. Let alone to me. The fact that you were on the way made it an unimaginable situation. She refused to abort you. We refused to abort you. This was the best way we could think of at the time.’

  He has rehearsed this maybe a thousand times: it doesn’t come out as he’d intended: bleak, intractable, unforgiving – as if, even, I’m the one to blame.

  Having raised his glass to drink, he lowers it: the glass is empty, yet still he holds it.

  ‘I don’t know what my father would have thought. Had he been alive. Probably approved, if not applauded. As it was, his widow screwed him for every cent he had. Which wasn’t much. She did the best thing by us and died. At the opportune time. We were always worried you’d look up the dates. That’s why we said they were both cremated. Father’s grave is still up there. Large as life. Jimmy was on tenterhooks you’d ask to see it.’

  ‘I was born at sea,’ I remind him.

  ‘Something vague about the sea, don’t you think?’ (It hasn’t ice, for one thing, covering the whole of it.) ‘We took off a month before you were due. Before that we bummed around in Mexico, avoiding the press. Puerto Bueno a dump we ended up at. There we borrowed a good friend’s yacht. Sailed to the Virgin Islands, hoping you’d pop out on the way. Didn’t. Turned round when the press got wind. Sailed in the opposite direction. The midwife we called on board didn’t recognise Martha because she lived in a settlement off the St Lawrence Seaway. Gave her a week’s cruise during which you belatedly appeared. After that, trusting to luck, we put out the story. I don’t think we really cared any more. Not about you. The circumstances. As luck would have it, we didn’t have to. Unfortunately, shortly after that, Martha’s symptoms first appeared. Post-natal blues evolved into something we could scarcely recognise. It seemed the wisest thing, to stick to what we’d arranged. Luck ran out in an unexpected fashion. Maybe all that time on the boat was not a good idea. It all seemed fun to us at the time. Beating the system. As for the studios, they were always good at that sort of thing. Give them a fuck-up and, if it was in their interest, it never occurred.’

  He watches me for several seconds, remaining standing.

  He is, I can see, in a pre-skating pose: any moment now he will whisk away: perhaps there is someone else in the apartment, waiting in his bedroom.

  ‘We were very much in love.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘The blame for the whole of it lies with me. The fabrication. The story. Martha, for her part, loved you very much. She wanted you more than anything. Then grew too ill to do anything about it. It all seemed easier, as time went on, to keep to the arrangement we’d set in place.’

  ‘You didn’t want me to think I had a crazy mother.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But I have.’

  ‘You can see my concern, what it’s been, all this time.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now we have to sort it out as it is. You’re okay. I know it in my gut.’

  ‘You’ve known a lot of things in your gut,’ I tell him.

  ‘Not all of them,’ he says, ‘have turned out badly.’ Not waiting for me to respond, he adds, ‘Martha could command any picture she wished to make when you were conceived. Acting was her life. She loved it. She couldn’t be married to a limey liaison officer with the American Second Fleet. As for you, the birth wasn’t difficult, just delayed. The hormonal effect must have changed her. There were times when it seemed she wasn’t there. Odd when she’d been able to focus on nothing but you the previous hour. It was as if she took off, inside, and left us. Went.’

  He pauses, not waiting long for my reaction: none forthcoming, he says, ‘Jimmy had given her several books. “Murder at the Vicarage” sort of thing. She became preoccupied, first with England, then with rural life. Her ancestors, she told me, had come from Devon. She had someone look it up. Beaconsfield, too. We went there. It was near the studios. By the time we got there, however, I was convinced she was nuts. But because she wanted it so much I agreed to it, thinking it might save her. It did for a while. Or seemed to. She made one film over here. Then I discovered she was taking you round the houses, looking in windows, hiding in bushes, looking for clues. Some of the locals reported her. If she hadn’t have been Geraldine O’Neill she’d have been arrested.’

  He is sitting, perched on the edge of the couch, his legs at an angle, I sunk in its depths (receiving this as I might a blow to the head: whether an over-indulgent mark of affection or the prelude to an assault, impossible to tell).

  ‘Maybe what we did was wrong. Hide the fact she’d had a child by a guy who regis
tered less than zero in the picture-making racket. The fact that we pulled it off seemed, at the time, a remarkable feat. As I say, we beat the system.’

  He decides to get another drink and, rising, crosses to the cabinet where it’s stored.

  ‘Want anything to eat?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’ll get something. I’m starving. Maybe Mrs Summers,’ he says, referring to the woman he’s hired to look after the place, ‘has put something out. I said we’d be late.’

  I’m left reflecting on what he’s told me: a blind man groping in a room he’s never been in before.

  For some reason I’m thinking of the girl on the train: I had thought of her rarely while staying with James and Clare (what new identity will I acquire with them?). Why I am thinking of her I have no idea: a peer, a companion, the only one at present ‘on a par’, and yet unknown and, at this stage, at least, unknowable. A fellow nihilist: a cynic.

  Our times have made us both.

  No sooner has this thought occurred than Gerry reappears, a sandwich in his hand: he is chewing, intending, perhaps, to invite me to the kitchen – something familiar in the impulse yet, in the current context, dispiriting. He suspects he’s ‘got away with it’, his first triumph capped (compounded) by another. It’s no big deal, his manner suggests: he’s been doing something not dissimilar all his life: it doesn’t change us. It binds us, if anything, closer. And Martha: look at the improvement. Ryman has seen nothing like it (even though she isn’t his patient). Wait until he tells O’Connor. It’s worked out in the end.

  Maybe I’m reading too much into it; maybe he’s not feeling this at all: he’s coasting, allowing his momentum to propel us along – off-hand, exhausted. ‘What do you think?’

  He doesn’t want a direct answer: a euphemism will do: he is looking for a response which will move him, glidingly, away from the bank.

  ‘What about Martha?’

  I almost say, ‘My mother.’

  ‘Martha?’ Concern back in his voice.

  ‘The changes are more than she can cope with. She looked ill, I thought, before we left.’

  ‘You told her about us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘You being her son.’

  ‘I tried to.’

  ‘How did she respond?’

  ‘Mixed.’

  ‘Mixed?’

  He doesn’t like it.

  ‘She thought I’d died.’

  ‘A metaphor,’ he says. ‘A symbol.’ Not sure what he might mean by this, he adds, ‘She’s had a lot to take in. Or rather,’ he goes on, ‘to take off. She’s removed herself from a husk. She’s an actress. A brilliant one. She’s like she would be after a wonderful day’s shooting. The following morning – it’s all like new.’

  The past, until I pronounce it – until she pronounces it – has not been appeased: on none of our parts will it go away. Too much is involved.

  ‘Today,’ he says, ‘has been astonishing. O’Connor’s right. It was the appropriate thing to do.’ He is standing in the door, the sandwich, half-eaten, in his hand. ‘There’s no longer a need to dissemble. As you say’ (have I said it?), ‘she plays the leading part. We are, and always were, in the hands of her performance. How did you get on with Phil?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He moves from one to the other with familiar speed.

  ‘Like him?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Genius is like that.’

  ‘Is he a genius?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you say so?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘He’s seen so many people go nuts. His insights, however, are unimpeachable. He sees Martha, of course, as a relavent case.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘The system.’

  ‘I thought you were the system,’ I tell him.

  Has always seemed so.

  ‘I was an independent before the word ever got around.’

  He is thinking, no doubt, of ‘The Studios’, a mythology difficult to overrate: nevertheless, I’m sure he does. Overrate. Them and her.

  I overrate her, too, if on entirely different grounds.

  ‘You seem to have misgivings,’ he says.

  ‘What you did – disguise my birth, ascribe it to another (as it turns out, inappropriate) couple – may have turned her mind. Condemned to live out her life with a surrogate child knowing he wasn’t surrogate but her own, turns her existence into a surrogate existence – tragic and alarming. A diabolical waste, turning both her public and her private life into a performance. No wonder she became a detective. Convinced there’d been a crime. Someone was responsible. If she looked long enough she might even find a clue. Done, the whole of it, through love. Did you ask O’Connor about that?’

  He is thinking – a phrase I have overheard him using in reference to his ‘brother’ – ‘he can’t get it all from me’. Presumably, some, if not a lot of it, comes from her: an innate intelligence, implicit in her, explicit in me.

  ‘O’Connor would probably agree that was the inadvertent effect,’ he says.

  ‘If not the intended one. The subliminally intended one,’ I tell him.

  The Audlin provenance, going by what he has said about his father (what about his mother?), is not a likeable one.

  Father and son, again, in this scenario, in conflict with one another: having consumed the last of the sandwich, another drink in his hand, he sinks on the couch beside me.

  ‘So that’s why you think the cinema’s crap,’ he tells me, summing up.

  Side by side, I alert, he similarly so, the glass between his hands.

  ‘Not only that,’ I tell him.

  ‘I see what you mean about O’Connor.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘The war has a lot to answer for. I see you as a casualty as well.’

  ‘How?’

  His remark surprises me: not something he’s in the habit of doing.

  ‘The studio system, for instance. The breakup of that a direct result. The system that had made both Martha and me,’ a novel experience to be skating, not with Gavin, or his brother, but his son. ‘My mind goes haywire when I’m tired. Maybe we’ve taken it as far as we can tonight. As you say, it was done in the name of love.’

  He is about to add, ‘Not in the name but the reality of love.’ All he does, however, is place his arm around my shoulder and say, ‘I love you, kid.’

  The poor, suffering, incompetent sonofabitch.

  2

  I fall asleep on the couch, waking several hours later to find a travelling rug thrown over me and a note laid on the floor between me and the door. ‘Go to school. Not to Market Whelling. When we next go we’ll go together. Possibly this evening.’ And then, incredibly, ‘Love. Dad.’ Ironically appended, in brackets, ‘Your Father’.

  We don’t go that evening, but in the afternoon: he drops in at the crammer and hauls me out of a class. He has the car with Charlie the chauffeur who drives us to Market Whelling at, in my view, excessive speed (Gerry keen to get back to the set before evening?): a police car, at one point, draws abreast and signals us to ease down.

  He hates to be away from the film, yet is keen to press home his advantage: no doubt he’s already consulted O’Connor on the best way to proceed (his guru on the psychic front as Gavin, if less so, is on the business).

  It’s a sunny day, the countryside welcoming, Gerry gesturing at the fields, the hedgerows, the distant hills: ‘Fresh. Enlivened. What d’you think?’ his confidence increasing. Skating each day on thinning ice, he recognises a safe stretch when he sees one – my credentials as a son finally accepted: at one point he begins to sing, the sound scarcely louder than a murmur, the words indecipherable.

  A lightening of the heart (even mine) as we enter the drive, a feeling of expectancy (in him), if not of triumph: he lowers the window, breathing deeply, his eyes half-closed: a breeze blows through the car prompting (again, no doubt, in him) a feeling of renewal.

  ‘Take it
easy,’ he says, as we get out by the pillared porch, ‘with our mother,’ the lightness in his manner persisting – unlike the intensity of his look (one of anticipation): something like this must have characterised him as a youth, or in his first day in the navy, the future an excitingly open book.

  She is not in the hall, nor on the terrace, nor visible across the lawns. He has already spoken to her on the phone, though nothing of relevance, he implies, has passed between them.

  Most patients, I assume, must be asleep (a post-lunch practice much encouraged): few are evident in the corridors or on the stairs. An unusual air of relaxation characterises the place, associated, presumably, with this time of the day: lassitude, inertia. An odour of food drifts down from the restaurant: a figure passes – young, male: he signals with one finger raised to his brow, a self-mocking salute responded to by Gerry.

  Her room door is open, her clothes on the bed. ‘Not here,’ Gerry says as he approaches her bathroom door.

  He remains inside for several minutes: inappropriate, I sense, to follow.

  When he comes out his manner has changed. Identifying the phone by the bed, he raises it and, getting no response, replaces it and says, ‘We’ll find a doctor.’

  His face has undergone a remarkable transformation.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s not here.’ He speaks in a daze – unusual in someone normally relaxed, the prodigal, prodigious, inveterate ‘mover’.

  ‘Did she say anything when you spoke to her this morning?’ I ask.

  He has turned me to the door, not bothering, oddly, to look in her dressing room, the door of which is also open.

  ‘She sounded okay. Not sure of who I was. To be expected. After all this time.’

  He stops a figure in the corridor outside, asking for directions, glancing back for me to follow.

  We skate – gracefully, swiftly: the way he holds his head, his neck, his shoulders, particularly, as now, when we move at speed. He knocks on a door, enters, disappears – reappearing to announce, ‘Not there.’

  ‘Who are we looking for?’ I ask.