by David Storey
‘Okay by me,’ he says, ‘if you come up with the goods.’
‘I’ll come up with something,’ I reassure him.
‘I wait to see it, Rick.’ He might have added more, but doesn’t. ‘Don’t take a leaf out of Jimmy’s book,’ is all he adds. ‘Like creativity being a part-time job. Nothing is a part-time job, least of all for anyone who does it. I’ve been offered a book,’ he goes on. ‘Not to film, to write. An autobiography,’ he explains.
He is sounding me out if I’m doing the same: an extended memo on the private life of Miss Geraldine O’Neill: what wouldn’t they pay for something like that?
‘Jesus,’ is all I tell him.
‘He’ll come into it, too.’ He laughs. ‘It’s far too soon, for instance, for anyone to write about that.’
‘That?’
‘Martha.’
The sum offered must have been considerable, I conclude, for him even to have to mention it.
‘I’m being offered projects I’d never have got near before. Everybody feels they owe me. What they want, of course, is access to her. She once wrote a lot about herself. I must have shown you.’
‘No,’ I tell him.
‘I thought I did.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I never heard.’
‘It must have been Gavin.’ He pauses. ‘It’s too early, Ricky. What d’you think?’
With my agreement, I can see, he’ll go ahead: how fast we’ve moved from my crumby education to his next project, casting, I guess, already underway.
‘You’re right,’ I tell him. ‘It’s far too soon. If ever,’ I add, to torment him.
‘You’re right.’ His voice drops an octave. ‘I hope,’ he says, ‘you’re not regressing.’
‘What’s regressing?’
‘Covering up.’
‘Repressing.’
‘Repressing. Suppressing. Whatever you do when you don’t come clean. James, by the way, is a great suppressor.’
‘Not any more.’
‘Does he say that?’
‘You’d better ask him.’
‘All he says is you get on well. Exceptionally. I suppose he’s suggesting I’m a lousy father and he a better one. I’ve fucked up with the two of you.’
‘Two?’
‘You and Ian.’
He adds nothing for a while, I not inclined to help him.
‘And Clare. I get the feeling that, too, was not a good idea.’
‘I don’t like being classified with Ian,’ I tell him. ‘I am not, as far as I know, scheduled to die.’
‘Another mistake. Forget about Clare. Forget the query about Martha.’
He is, I’m aware, moving swiftly on: the hissing of his blades, the ominous creaking on every side: glide! glide! I hear him say: glide! his instincts tell him.
‘I rely on you a great deal,’ he says.
‘You do?’
‘You have such a different view of things. Sometimes I feel buried. Then I see your face and realise why I do these things.’
‘Why?’
‘Fuck you,’ he says, and laughs – or weeps: for a moment I can’t tell, the other end. ‘Does Clare have this impression of you?’ he finally adds.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I tell him.
‘She must say something,’ he says.
‘We read a great deal.’
‘Read? Not Jimmy’s fucking novels? Don’t tell me they’re making you pay to stay up there? He sent me one, by the way. I suppose he told you.’
‘No.’
‘If it’s like the one he sent me years ago it must be delirious. I haven’t had time to look at it. Who’s ever heard of anyone but my brother writing for twenty fucking years without publishing a word?’
‘Perseverance.’
‘Is that what it is.’
He’s thinking.
He’s thinking like he always thinks, his eyes fixed on a distant and, to everyone else, invisible object.
‘Life up there is good?’ he asks.
‘Okay.’
‘You don’t want to see a psychiatrist?’
‘What about?’
‘The way, let’s face it, I fucked things up. There’s a lot gone on in your short little life. Most of it because of me.’
‘I’m off drugs. I don’t need to see anyone. I’m feeling fine,’ I tell him.
This, more than anything, unnerves him: his mind might be on last week’s rushes but his attention is dragged elsewhere.
‘I have all the advice I require,’ I add.
‘I get the message, Rick.’ He wheels away, speeding off beneath the stars (with the stars), the sky, reflected in the ice, fractured all around him …
2
The church sanctions our arrangement: ‘en plein jour’, she refers to the episode which invariably occurs on the journey home (a different field, or wood, every time) – a ritual (almost) with a sacramental edge, raising these occasions to what James, should he have been acquainted with them, would have described as a metaphysical level.
I love to lie beside her and anticipate what might happen next, in much the same way as I might anticipate her next move in the car when we’re driving back from a morning or an afternoon in town.
‘Even your clothes are blessed,’ I tell her, for not infrequently she takes me shopping, selecting garments which she believes will entice me to greater, or more imaginative ‘efforts’: ‘James was never interested. I’ve had such a lot of offers from other men. All of which, I needn’t tell you, I declined, you the sole exception.’
‘So,’ she concludes one Sunday, lying in the grass, ‘we are blessed?’ Summer is upon us: the sun is shining, clouds scudding, the car parked in the road below the tiny wood: we are in full view of everyone, should they pass, but no longer seem to care. ‘The danger of the occasion appears to elude you,’ she says (my eagerness precluding us finding a more hidden spot). ‘We have to show some discretion, if only for James’ sake,’ she tells me. ‘Otherwise,’ she goes on, ‘there is no problem. He, for his part, spends more time on that hill than he does in his study. He says it’s like a hill which overlooked the camp. He spent hours gazing at it, imagining his release. It represented freedom. Everything he’d lost, the sight of it, at that time, his only relief. When he was freed, however, he never had time to visit it. Which is why he goes to stand on this one now.’
I love her in these moods when she’s endeavouring to ‘place’ what we mean to one another: it’s why the visits to the church have such appeal, the ecstasy of sitting, kneeling, standing beside her, aware of what, a short while later, will undoubtedly occur.
‘You are exceptional,’ she says. ‘Even Gerry, who’s always been reluctant to praise you in case it goes to your head, describes you as “precocious”. You’re much the same with me. And James. You’ll walk the exams next summer.’
‘Unless I choose to fail.’
‘Will you fail?’
‘That’s up to you.’
‘Why me?’
‘I want this to go on for ever.’
‘It won’t. Even you must realise that,’ she says. ‘I do, and I am not afraid of it.’
I don’t believe her. I don’t need to. I make my own conditions. I am ungovernable. Martha, if no one else, has licensed it: why be a genius if it doesn’t show?
I play with her hair, her lips (her blouse), with her: how crude this is, yet, at the same time, how enthralling. I am, as she frequently tells me, ‘biologically’ at my peak: ‘A pity I can’t conceive,’ she says. ‘We could have had a miraculous baby. I must have absorbed enough for thousands by now.’
So we lie, examine the trees, the sky, the grass, reflecting on the sermon, and feel doubly blessed, the secular and the divine mellifluously blended – and hand in hand walk back to the road (unobserved by anyone).
‘I’ve never felt so happy,’ she says, as we reach the car. ‘Everything about us is both wrong and blessed,’ a religiosity, I’m aware, we carry with us into the house, blessing it, to
o, by our presence – James coming down, on this occasion, when we arrive, announcing, ‘Let’s celebrate. I’ve turned a corner. At least, with the present piece,’ opening a bottle of wine, we more than content to share his triumph with him.
After lunch, the day full of clouds and sunshine, a gentle breeze, he suggests we climb the hill at the back of the house, our agreement as spontaneously forthcoming. A hole he has widened in the hedge at the end of the garden through which he has evidently passed on numerous occasions, a track visible in the grass – strewn with flowers – forming a curiously winding route to the summit, the vegetation thinning where it has been browsed by the cattle. They, we can see, when we reach the trees, are penned in a field below the brow on the other side, a gentler incline giving a view of the route we follow – a hedge-escorted lane – to the church, itself invisible beyond a line of higher hills.
There is something stirring about the asymmetry of the crest: fields descend from it on every side, most steeply of all to where the house nestles in its hollow. Beyond, where the sun descends, the town is visible, stretched across the widening width of the valley where it disburses onto a plain: a festoon of towers and steeples and domes.
The breeze is fresh, Clare panting from the climb – our second (physical) excursion (and exertion) of the day: there’s a seductive odour of resin from the trees, mingling with that of her perfume: an intoxicating if not cleansing odour, the sun shifting between the clouds, covering us with shadow one moment, illuminating us brightly the next.
‘A glorious day,’ James tells us, breathing in the air.
He has brought a camera, an, until now, unremarked-upon endorsement of the significance of the occasion: it hangs around his neck, he moving ahead at one point to take a picture of Clare and I ascending. He now takes several more, of the two of us together, suggesting we stand with our arms around each other, we frowning, at first, then, at his insistence, smiling in the light. He further suggests he takes us singly, first Clare, then I, standing out from the crest of pines. Then I suggest I take one of him, and a second of he and Clare together, he showing me the mechanism with some reluctance before, smilingly, complying: an air of finality, of absolution, hangs about him: an odd, tolerant couple I view through the camera, and wonder how Clare and I, our positions reversed, must have looked to him.
The camera, our visit recorded, is replaced around his neck (another souvenir from Germany, he informs us): the pink bark of the trees luminous in the afternoon sun, he shows us the spot where he dug as a child, the irregular undulations of the ground, soft with needles. He appears transfixed, for that moment, as if removing the trees and imagining the configurations of something which eludes him. ‘It must have looked dramatic,’ Clare says, intrigued by the view of the house below, of the town beyond, the moors rising on the opposite side of the valley and crossed by the shadows of clouds passing overhead. ‘We ought to come up more often. Bring a picnic. I’ve only been up once before,’ she adds to me.
James, meanwhile, is gazing indecisively about him, something other than the view absorbing him, as if endeavouring to locate the source of his preoccupation inside his head.
Moments later, adjusting the camera, he says, ‘No need to stay up longer. I’ll hang around for a while. I’ll see you later. It’s often good to be here on my own,’ Clare and I setting off, the impress of our ascent still visible in the grass: walking separately, she in front, I admire for a second time her movements against a rural setting: her hips, her thighs, her waist, her legs, her hands, her head, her hair blown back and upwards by the summery breeze: she has changed, for the outing, into flat-heeled shoes, but is still wearing her skirt and blouse and jacket from church: I can see the creases from our earlier outing across her hips and once again preoccupy myself mentally with that region of her body.
Behind us James is visible beneath the trees: he is directing the camera once more towards us, its strap still secured around his neck: lowering it, he waves and, as I wave in return, Clare now descending more swiftly, he waves once more and disappears.
Moments later we hear a shot.
3
Having absorbed so much the mind is inclined to come to a halt: the war played a part (changed the public perception for ever), as it did in my father’s life and, by proxy, in my own. On one of his calls Gerry enquires if I’d like to see – or already have seen – a photographic ‘memoir’ of Martha’s life. I decline his offer (I haven’t seen it) but come across it, shortly after, in a bookshop in town – a place which, on my own, I wouldn’t have entered: we are looking for something for Clare to read and I see her across the shop pausing by the display which I’ve already spotted, a photograph of Martha in her prime prominently above it: stills, as I see, when I join her – of ‘Geraldine O’Neill’ – from most of her films: there are additional photographs of her as a child, as a youth, and of Gerry and several of their friends: none of me. The book, I’m aware, came out some time before and has been reissued since her death.
It is like looking at pictures of someone with whom I have no connection: a projection backwards to examine a past for which I can’t account: that wonderful face, that wonderful figure: that ironic, canvassing, comedic expression: someone who performs at the edge of reality, allowing you a glimpse of it and fiction at the same time: a revolutionary performer, the screen a foil – one she opposed with so much ease, a serf-denominated, serf-created ‘entertainer’.
It’s, curiously, this image of her that comes to mind as I climb back up the hill, wondering if I’ve imagined the sound – waiting, even, for it to be repeated to clarify my misgivings – glancing behind me to see that Clare has turned as well and is gazing past me, full of apprehension: she has, after all, more knowledge of James than I have.
Reaching the pines I see him some way in, sitting upright, his back to a tree, his head, the only sign of discomposure, slumped to one side: blood, from his temple, has reached his chest; as if alive, the figure moves, a delayed momentum, falling over, his forehead arrested by the ground. In the exposed hand, as if flung from the body, is the gun I refused to allow him to show me.
The scent of pine resin is strong: I am aware of it as a distraction moments before I’m aware of Clare breathless beside me. Maybe she has prepared herself for a scene like this – I involuntarily extending my arm to her shoulders. We stand there as spectators – then I’m stepping forward to see, inexpertly, if there are any signs of life: the angle of the head, the absence of any movement, the camera still about his neck – like the gun, a macabre souvenir, a functional disorder, the omnipotent recorder of contemporary life, its glossy excreta strewn around us.
Clare stands, swaying, as if pinned to the ground: James has moved himself to a distance from where she can no longer touch him, the pink columns of the pines an involuntary chapel, or so it seems – pillars reaching up to the inclines of the foliage, a secular enclosure dedicated to God knows what.
Turning away from the body I offer these phrases (I think) aloud – say something which, afterwards, I can’t recall – and see Clare gazing at me in consternation, less a shocked woman than a traumatised child – she surpised, not by the message, the flaccid allusions, but the fact that I’ve spoken. I am aware of my mother’s face again – see it, almost, imposed on the wholly dissimilar features of Clare – think, too, in that instant, of the other Martha, the same metamorphosis in her recalled face, appalled at the cessation of something known and peculiarly cherished – the man who lent me his wife, the wife who abrogated her husband: her first words, ‘I’ll stay,’ followed by, ‘I can’t leave him here alone,’ I taking off my jacket and laying it over his head, adding, ‘We’ll go down together,’ the camera, I notice, as I take her arm, ominously protruding from beneath the coat.
An ambulance arrives, police follow: a line of figures troops up the hill, a cortège, a considerable time later, winding down, a stretchered shape amongst them (the difficulty they have in getting through the hedge, James having widened t
he hole only to accommodate himself). For a moment, horrifically, I think they’re going to bring him through the house, Clare transfixed in the sitting room where, despite my encouragement, she refuses to sit down.
By the evening the summit of the hill is screened off and, after interviews are completed, a solitary policeman is visible, a second at the gate (the ‘integrity’ of the site preserved).
We don’t switch on the light but sit in the dark. At intervals, throughout the night, a police car appears at the end of the drive and the policeman at the gate and the one on the hill are relieved: I finally persuade her to go to bed, going up a short while later to find her, still dressed, lying in the dark. I lie with her for a while, try to contact Gerry (no answer at the flat) and ring Gavin whose home number I have ‘for emergencies’: Gerry and Gavin are night shooting and can’t be reached. I leave a message with a roused wife to ring me in the morning.
In the early hours I hear the phone ring and go downstairs, a police car, at that moment, retreating from the end of the drive: the crunch of the relieving and the relieved officers’ steps having preceded it.
‘What’s happened?’ Gerry says. ‘We’re in Shoreditch. What’s the problem?’ Patience and exasperation, exhaustion and apprehension: don’t inform me of anything I have to respond to, his tone suggests.
‘Is shooting finished?’ A desire to submerge him irrevocably, immovably, in the work he has on hand: nothing will stop him: he sweeps by me on the bank.
‘Has something happened to Clare?’
‘It’s James.’
‘Jimmy?’ The diminutive at all times.
‘There’s been an incident.’
Closest to ‘accident’ without – precisely – being one.
Our thin-ice skater speeds away: a metaphorical figure, a metaphorical distance: is this the ‘metaphysics’ which James went on about?