Thin-Ice Skater

by David Storey

  ‘The war,’ he says, ‘I try and forget. Has Gerry spoken much about it?’

  ‘His war?’ I say, and shake my head. ‘Yours, neither,’ I tell him.

  ‘He had a better one than me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘His charm. Expansiveness. He had something of his mother. Our real mother,’ he adds, nodding at me. ‘I was very enclosed. Always have been.’ He might have continued, but merely shrugs. ‘It’s like some things, too, must be for you. We share something, in that respect, together.’ He looks across the desk between us: the desk on which a typewriter stands with a half-typed sheet of paper protruding, a handwritten text beside it: an eighth ‘mystery’, or his revamping of an old one.

  ‘There’s your schoolwork, too, we have to keep up with.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Gerry’s arranged all that.’

  ‘By correspondence,’ I tell him.

  ‘You can read any of these, by the way,’ he says, indicating the manuscripts he’s shown me. ‘Choose any one.’

  The conclusion is I’m obliged to read – at least, to take away – a dog-eared tome which, I assume, has seen many rejections but which he aimlessly recommends with, ‘the best of the bunch, in my view, though not in the opinion of others’. A conscientious plod (I discover) through a labyrinth of double-dealing, false accounts, inaccurate statements, duplicitous claims, secret handouts, a body, or a corpse, on almost every page. At the end, if schematically read, I’m unsure who’s done what to whom: a tangle of unsubstantiated motives and (invariably) unsurprising explanations.

  ‘I’d recommend the war,’ I tell him when I hand it back.

  We are sitting in his study before Sunday lunch (the sound of Clare singing in the kitchen below, I having helped her to prepare it earlier).

  In front of us is the hill, on this occasion seen through a filter of falling rain: the glistening grass, the absent cattle, the darkened crest of the trees themselves: sombre, strangely menacing: still.

  ‘I don’t mind you and Clare,’ he says, suddenly, inconsequentially. ‘She and I have an understanding. Though we live together, we live apart. I do feel I am apart. I see you, in short, as a welcome addition. Far more painful it would be if, for instance, it were someone else. We live very much as brother and sister. At the very least as very good friends.’

  ‘I’d still recommend the war,’ I add, hoping to distract him.

  ‘You would?’

  ‘What, after all, have you got to lose?’

  His look returns to the hill: he peers at it intensely.

  ‘There was one particular incident I’ve always felt inclined to write about, but have never known how. We were retreating – though we never made it – towards Dunkirk and came across a group of people pushing a coffin on a cart. An elderly man, two women, and a boy. And a youth who appeared to be partially demented. He ran around the whole time and was never still. They were trying to find a priest. Their own had been killed. They’d been travelling for over a week looking for one to bury the body. The coffin stank. So did they, the body evidently the women’s father and the old man’s brother. They hadn’t eaten for days. We gave them food. Shortly after that we were captured. No ammunition, two wounded. The lowest point of my life. Yet all I could think of were the women, the man, the boy and the youth. Some time later we passed them on the road. The coffin had fallen from the cart. The top of the box was lying open, their bodies strewn around in the road. I began to cry. Shock at everything, I imagine. The hopelessness which came with it. It seemed to me that, even in peacetime, everything is a sham. Species destroying species in an aimless appetite to exist.’

  We’re silent, Clare passing on the landing, calling, ‘Are you boys still talking? Come down for a drink,’ the sound of her feet thudding, briskly, from the stairs.

  ‘It haunted me throughout the camp. Nothing that happened there did anything other than confirm it, the terms on which the universe is convened a ghastly error. The arrogance of any religious message, everything there merely to be destroyed, even the supercilious efforts made in attempting to deny it. A malign conception.’

  Clare is whistling – an engaging sound – passing to and fro in the hall: we have, as it is, a rota of household chores, over and above those done by Mrs Jenkins: we are, as she and James often say, ‘in this together’.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’

  ‘A precursor to something you ought to write.’

  ‘Let’s go down to lunch,’ he says.

  The following Sunday morning he knocks on my room door (essays to be posted to my crammer, I writing at my desk).

  ‘I’m not disturbing you?’ he says, coming in at my invitation.

  Clare is out – strangely, at a church she attends in an outlying village, a social rather than a spiritual occasion, but of that, as of so much in the house, I can’t be sure.

  ‘You have a contrary view of life to mine,’ he says, picking up on our week-old conversation. ‘You believe in life in a way I admire. And envy. You’ve something of your father in you and, through him, my mother, who despite everything was a lively woman. Not unlike Clare in many respects, I not unlike my father whom I always despised.’

  He hands me another manuscript with, ‘I wondered if you could see any way I might improve it.’

  This confederacy draws us closer: in the evenings we sit, the three of us, reading (‘mysteries’, Clare and James; something other – text-books – me: this the closest to ‘home’ I’ve ever had). When they go out to their various societies I read (and study) alone (occasional calls to and from Gerry: guilt, on his part, reassurance on mine: he never asks me the nature of my relationship with Clare). The longer we are together the closer the three of us become – to the point where, one Sunday morning, Clare invites me to accompany her to church.

  We drive there: a route beyond the hill at the back of the house, one of lanes and woods and streams and valleys: a Saxon structure, the building, set at the edge of a wood, with zigzag-patterned arches, tiny windows and a narrow, high-roofed nave: a domestic air: scarcely more than a dozen people, all of whom know her and are uninhibitedly curious about me. I am introduced: much interest and avidity to please: invitations to lunch (supper, tea), all of which, ‘for the moment’, Clare graciously declines.

  Everything signals we are a couple, a natural intimacy between us which to the others must be reassuring, not least to the minister who turns to Clare with great – and equally reassuring – animation: he talks of my ‘recent bereavement’ with compassion, mentioning it in his sermon. I am sitting beside her conscious of experiencing her in a ritualised setting: the austerity and gravity of the place (there are only the simplest decorations, one crucifix and two candle-holders alone on the altar) – allied to this the intimacy evoked by her perfume, the sheen of her stocking, the rising and falling of the hem of her skirt as we kneel and sit and stand.

  And her hands – clasped in her lap or held devotedly together: occasionally she reaches for mine, squeezing my fingers before releasing them, a gesture of complicity which intoxicates me to such a degree that, once we have said farewell to the other worshippers and the minister and are in the car, she is obliged to draw up in a secluded lane and announce, ‘A walk would do us both some good. It would be so uncomfortable returning home feeling as we do at present,’ a discomfort which can only finally be appeased in a field beyond the hedge which so conveniently skirts one side of the lane.

  Martha rings, inviting the three of us to supper with ‘mother and father’, an unusually elderly couple for such a young daughter: an evening which goes remarkably well but perhaps not quite fulfilling the hopes of our hostess: ‘I so like living in the provinces,’ she announces, on our leaving, ‘away from all the rivalries of London, don’t you think?’

  However, returning home, James expresses himself ‘delighted’ with the way things have gone – recognising a more suitable partner, for one thing, for his errant nephew: ‘I can see
Martha has an eye for you. She’s a very serious girl, I understand, with pronounced views of her own. And their house, too, is lovely,’ another out-of-town ‘detached dwelling’ which, in the darkness, I assume is surrounded by fields. ‘Oh, no!’ Clare laughs. ‘Whetton is the suburb to live in, the houses so far apart they’re scarcely visible to one another. We’d have gone there, too, only James wished to pioneer. He had a fixation on that hill, and also wanted “virgin territory. Starting from scratch”.’

  ‘More than we can say of you, dear,’ James says, glancing at me to share his laughter.

  On the way to the Armitages Clare insists on sitting in the back, our positions reversed, on my insistence, on the way home – largely in order to see my (newfound) aunt and uncle, if in silhouette, as a couple before me, something, I realise, I rarely do: more often, in the car, she and I are alone, not least because of James’s recent habit of walking to work on a morning, rising early (‘It does me good, and gives me room to think. New mysteries, new adventures’). Invariably he takes a taxi home, or Clare drives in to pick him up. Rarely, too, are he and I together, except in the privacy of his study where, increasingly, we have our ‘talks’ (‘I’m sure,’ Clare says, ‘they do him good’). Occasionally, in the evenings, he taps on my door, enquiring, ‘Have you a moment? I don’t wish to intrude,’ I disinclined to refuse, his excuse, not infrequently, that his writing ‘has got into a muddle. I wonder if you’d cast your eye over this?’

  ‘I do these things like crosswords,’ he explains on one of these occasions. ‘They keep me occupied. In contrast to the work I normally do, which can be extremely tedious at the best of times, I find them entertaining. Like going to the cinema, or the theatre. I don’t ultimately care if they fail to see the light of day. At least I’ve done them. They’ve kept me amused. I’ve come up with a solution. Solved a mystery. Isn’t that what metaphysics is, or are, about? How are you getting on at church, by the way?’

  The excursions, particularly the episode which occurs afterwards – eroticism enhanced by the piety and austerity of the place, the endorsement by so many friendly hands and faces – has become an indispensable part of our ‘week’, it itself characterised not only by the time I spend in James’ study but by the amount Clare and I spend in our respective rooms: prior to my arrival she and James have moved to separate bedrooms at the front of the house, on either side of the bifurcated landing, James retaining their original room: one further room, apart from his study, answers as a ‘guest’ room.

  ‘Maybe I should come with you,’ he goes on. ‘Though I’m sure Clare wouldn’t like it. Church is her provenance, after all, not mine. I can see well enough the pleasure she gets out of going with you. It has for her, I know, an educative function. We are both educators, in our differing ways. You coming here has done so much for both of us. I can’t tell you how much nicer she is to me, and how much more amiable she is to everyone else. Before your arrival we were both very rocky, this house our belated attempt to keep things together. We very much care for one another, and respect each other’s varying needs, but with the limitations placed on our relationship, principally by my limitations, it has, at least, until your arrival, been very much touch and go. Social life becomes a hollow alternative when the heart is not attended to. With you here the place is full of life. Continuity has been re-established. The Audlin name is carried on. You’ve so much of Martha in you.’

  ‘Martha?’

  ‘Your mother. Not Armitage.’ He laughs. ‘Though that’s a remarkable coincidence, don’t you think? Your future may lie there. I don’t need to tell you, coincidence is what mystery is about. If only to discover it’s not coincidence after all!’

  The introduction to these ‘dialogues’, as he’s inclined to call them, occasionally takes the form of an invitation to listen to something he’s written: considerately, he keeps the readings short. ‘Does this make sense?’ he’ll ask, or, ‘How about this at the beginning of a chapter?’, one such subsequent ‘dialogue’ drifting off to reflections on the shape of the hill at the back of the house: ‘An obvious likeness to a source of nourishment. Something elemental, do you think, in that, but also, don’t you think, to a place of ritual? I used to come here as a boy, haunted by its shape, and once dug a hole at the top and came across pieces of brick, eighteenth century, or before, and realised there must have been a structure of some sort before the trees. A gazebo. A folly. An observatory, perhaps. The land belonged originally to the local manor. Occasionally I go up there. Often when you and Clare are asleep. I find it a place of solace. Unique, in that respect, less self-conscious, for instance, than a church. Who knows, over the centuries, who may have stood there, gazing out?’

  On a subsequent occasion his talk drifts on to the war: ‘You’re my therapist, Richard,’ he announces, laughing, the account inducing a mood of reflectiveness, the intensity of which I haven’t previously seen. ‘Perhaps I’m regressing,’ he concludes.

  ‘Progressing,’ I suggest.

  ‘What’s the difference, genius?’ he says, his mood light-hearted. ‘In any case, what’s the point? It all happened twenty-odd years ago. Much, as we know, has happened since. Everything’s moved on.’

  ‘Worth talking about,’ I tell him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ He pauses, avoiding my expression. ‘I couldn’t stand the buggery,’ he suddenly adds.

  The confession is climactic, bleak: and, to him at least, alarming.

  ‘I couldn’t fail to notice it going on. A biological perversion which, therefore, you could only assume is a moral one.’

  He gazes at me like someone coming in from the dark to a lighted room, his eyelids lowered, his mouth braced: a tortured, vanquished, riven expression.

  ‘It doesn’t seem much to me,’ I tell him.

  ‘It doesn’t?’

  ‘Inevitable,’ I add.

  ‘I simply can’t get rid of it,’ he says. ‘If I met any of the men now my immediate reaction would be to assume I didn’t know them. I’d cross the street. Alternatively, if I had to face it I’d shoot myself.’

  ‘What with?’ I maintain the lightness of my response.

  ‘A pistol. I still have it. A Mauser. I got it, oddly, over here. When we were repatriated at the end of the war. Soldiers waiting to be demobbed. One of them had collected quite an arsenal. In a rucksack. He was selling them off as souvenirs. “I might as well have something to show for all these bloody years,” I said, and bought it. I actually borrowed the money from Gerry. Visiting me, the first time we’d seen one another since the beginning of the war, he on his way to Hollywood. And Martha. I occasionally go up the hill and shoot it.’ He gestures to the window. ‘I got fifty rounds of ammunition. Quite a few soldiers were flogging stuff. I tried to get more. Without the slightest notion of what I intended to do with it. I’ve only a dozen rounds left. Do you want to see it?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘It’s why the crimes in my mysteries are often shootings. Invariably with Mausers. Apart from my regulation service revolver it’s the only pistol I know. Not sinister. Quite practical. Mechanical.’ He laughs. ‘Know who I shoot?’

  Again I shake my head.

  ‘My fellow officers. How’s that for a returning hero? A man who sacrificed himself for “future generations”. You see at what a price.’

  His look turns from me to the hill and back again.

  ‘It affected my relationship with Clare, of course. When she finally did conceive she lost the child. Sex was replaced by social life, for which she has a gift. And, for me, by mysteries in which people I know in real life, though fictionalised, are murdered.’

  He’s silent for a while, studying my reaction.

  ‘So here we are,’ he continues, satisfied with what he’s confided. ‘The history of our times writ large. I’m sorry to burden you with it. You’ve had so much to take on. And at such an early age. I always thought Gerry was bringing you u
p too fast. That attempt to “localise” you, as he put it, in London, almost drove him mad. He’s never been one for domesticity and used to talk to you as if you were the same age as himself. At six, at seven, at eight, he was addressing you as an adult. I used to say, “Talk to Richard as if he were a child.” He could never get the hang of it. Perhaps, that, too, was a result of the war. Years in the company of men. I suspect, too, the death of Ian. He never intended to be that vulnerable again.’

  ‘Vulnerable?’

  ‘He loved Martha, it’s true, more than I thought he was capable of loving anyone. When she went into decline, so soon after their marriage – almost as if it had precipitated the event – his only recourse was to work. He never changed. Clare used to say I was workaholic, and I suppose, after the war, I was. But writing books, thank God, stopped that. Whatever their outcome, they gave me a sense of perspective. My fantasy, when I was working and building up my reputation, was that I’d be moved to the head office in London. Our child dying put a stop to that. Which is when, as I say, the books took over. It’s the theme of several of the mysteries, not the camp, but someone taking revenge for what happened in the past. The one element in my fiction, as everyone observes, which invariably weakens the plot. I never make it clear what the past was precisely. It’s always a euphemism for something I can’t admit. Except, of course,’ he pauses, ‘to you. Apart from Clare, the only one to know.’ He pauses again to observe my reaction. ‘Your coming has certainly freed us up! I hope we’re not imposing on you. You must tell us if we are. We take so much of what has happened for granted. If we can do anything to help we are, as you know, only too anxious to play our part.’

  There is an element of mockery in this – self-mockery as well as mockery of Clare and myself, a playfulness he otherwise rarely shows. He doesn’t pursue the subject on this occasion, and I refrain from encouraging him.

  Gerry, when he rings, keeps his distance: shooting is almost at an end. He is aware I’m being ‘intoxicated by those crazy people there’. (‘Don’t take that as criticism,’ he says, ‘I’m sure it’ll do you good.’) He is worried, more, by my lack of schooling, about which Clare – and James – and myself reassure him: he checks up himself on my correspondence with the crammer. ‘My chance,’ I tell him to be different. Every kid at my age is at school. Let’s try an experiment with one who isn’t.’