by David Storey
‘He’s shot himself.’
I wonder at the appropriateness of the tense, the improbability and unexpectedness of the announcement sufficient for him to place the telephone – or so it seems – some distance from him: I have a vision of him closing his eyes: he’s in a street: there’s a murmur of voices and the chugging of a generator engine. The door of a phone booth is suddenly closed.
‘Say again.’
‘Are you listening?’
‘What the fuck do you think I’m doing? Do you mean there’s been an accident?’
‘I’m sure it was intended.’
‘You’re not making sense. Where’s he got it from? A gun.’
He is about to revoke the whole affair: have it rewritten: he peels away, diverting to another course.
A previously brotherly relationship (fake) is alarmingly in place.
‘He had a Mauser. From the war.’
‘He never told me.’
‘He used to fire it on the hill. The one he was always preoccupied by.’
‘What hill?’
Everything I tell him confirms his view that what I’m telling him can’t be true: this – a fictionalist himself – is being made up.
‘Overlooking the house. It’s why he built it here.’
‘He never told me.’ The affirmation – the condemnation. ‘Say again.’
‘I thought I’d better tell you before you heard it in some other form.’
‘I was talking to him this morning. Yesterday morning. Everything, he said, was going well. You were at church. Church, for God’s sake. He rang me. Everything was fine. Are you okay? I’ve never heard of a fucking hill. I don’t remember.’
‘There is one.’
So move it: we’ll shoot it somewhere else.
‘With trees on top?’
A visual memory – ironically, not his strongest suit.
‘We climbed up there this afternoon. He brought his camera. We took pictures of one another. Then he said he wanted to be alone and Clare and I set off back. Halfway down we heard a shot. When I reached him he was sitting down. Against a tree. The gun in his hand. A hole in his head.’
Speaking to a cineaste, I make it exact.
Silence, however, the other end – so prolonged I enquire, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Of course I’m fucking here.’
Death follows me around (I can hear him thinking). ‘The police, I assume, have been involved?’
‘They have.’
‘It’ll be in tomorrow’s – this morning’s – papers.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Why not?’
‘They won’t have made the connection.’
‘Don’t you doubt it,’ he says, in another voice entirely: if the scene can’t be re-shot it will have to be re-managed. ‘What did they say?’
‘They asked questions. Clare’s in no state. I gave the answers.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Lying down.’
‘Is she awake?’
‘Probably.’
‘I’ll speak to her.’
‘She’s not even speaking to me.’
Everything we touch, he is thinking: everywhere we go.
‘I’ll come up.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll drive.’
Another silence.
‘Are you okay?’ he adds.
‘Sure.’
Am I okay? he’s further asking.
‘I’m not sure what I feel,’ I tell him.
‘Better not to think.’
A further pause.
His own philosophy exactly.
‘I don’t like leaving you on your own,’ he says. ‘Is there a policeman in the house?’
‘At the gate. Another on the hill. The site’s screened off.’
‘Can you phone someone else in town?’
‘The Armitages.’
‘Who are they?’
‘People I’ve met up here.’
‘Will they come?’
‘We’ll be all right on our own.’
‘I don’t like you being on your own. Ask Clare if she’ll speak to me.’
‘I doubt if she will.’
‘Tell her I’m coming.’
The disowning of support he doesn’t like.
‘I’ll be there in three or four hours. The roads are clear this time of night. I’m coming.’
‘What about the film?’
‘Remember I love you. Don’t let Clare be alone. Don’t forget to tell her I’m coming.’
I put the phone down and return to Clare’s room. I sit in the chair – a comfortable chair – and realise it’s covered in her clothes. She’s lying under the cover. Her eyes are closed. I’m convinced she’s not asleep.
I go back to the chair, fold the clothes and lay them on a chest of drawers. I turn the chair in her direction and remain there, I calculate, for an hour. Another car comes to the end of the drive: there’s the crunch of feet followed, after an interval, by the crunch of feet returning: lights from the car sweep across the window: the sound of its engine fades.
I cross to the window and draw the curtains.
‘Could you open them?’ I hear her say.
‘You awake?’ I ask.
‘Not really.’ The voice is confidential. ‘I don’t know whether I’m asleep or awake. Would you lie here with me?’
Her teeth are chattering, her body trembling. I remove my clothes, pull back the covers, and get in beside her.
Locked together we fall asleep: when a car comes up the drive and I hear Gerry’s voice, talking to the driver or to a policeman, or both, I feel I haven’t slept at all.
‘Gerry’s here,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll see him,’ the doorbell ringing before I reach the hall.
She, I and Gerry walk – in the countryside beyond the town, she between us, our arms linked, he much on the phone before we leave: a track leads through woods and fields, somewhere I haven’t been with her before, I wondering why (until she informs us she and James walked here in their early life), she wishing, I suspect, to place him even further back in time, at least that part of him she wishes to remember.
All the while, meantime, frissons of fear – me, and Gerry too, no doubt – as if we are dragging James with us, hauling him along, for Gerry remembers this part of their life as children: we come to a lake behind a low stone wall, enveloped by a wood on one side, a pasture on the other: cattle browse at the edge: here he and James played as boys and, for someone who rejects his past – skates beyond it as quickly as he can – it’s not a site to which he wishes to return, pointing out the changes (‘It wasn’t so polluted. We used to swim’), as if to place it not merely in another time but elsewhere.
It’s decided he’ll go back the following morning (having prospected leaving that evening: ‘I have to get back. The whole thing’s almost there’), witnessing the persistence of the police questioning, however, and the calls at the house (a thorough search of James’ study and his bedroom); reluctant to ‘abandon’ me (and Clare) to ‘this fucking situation’ (blaming ‘Jimmy’ now ‘for so much’), he defers his departure from hour to hour (an hour-long tirade to Gavin on the phone).
Clare is anxious for him to be gone: to be swept away, as if a reminder of where, persistently, she is not.
‘It’s so good no one’s stood back,’ he says. ‘The same with Martha. Everyone called in. It’s moments like this,’ he adds, ‘when you realise how good people are,’ taking me aside to announce, Clare on the phone in the hall, we in the kitchen, ‘I’m not at all easy leaving you together. Clare’s a resourceful woman, and Jimmy, I guess, has been a burden, but she has her limits. Maybe he’s threatened her with this before. We all had a war to get rid of. He’s behaved like a shit. Taking you there to witness it. What sort of a creep is that? After all the effort I’ve made to get back with him. That you’ve made, too,’ he adds. ‘But there it is. We’re not nor
mal. And have never pretended to be.’
Clare’s voice comes calmly from the hall: she is, I overhear, talking to the Armitages.
‘Let’s go to your room,’ he says, ‘and talk.’
‘She’ll think we’re closing down on her,’ I tell him.
So he is looking out at the garden at the back: the terraces and flowerbeds James has had laid out. And the hill.
‘That fucking hill.’ I’m surprised he hasn’t asked to go up it himself, to get a feel of what has happened: no inclination to do so has been expressed at all. In any case, presumably, we wouldn’t be allowed beyond the screens.
‘Don’t you think it odd he should invite you up?’ he asks.
He is a ‘mystery’ man himself and yet not given to enquiry. ‘I demonstrate,’ he has often said. ‘Not analyse.’
‘He wanted to celebrate,’ I tell him.
‘What?’
‘His writing, he said, had turned a corner.’
‘No sign of it on his fucking desk.’
The police have taken away, with Clare’s agreement, many of his papers.
‘And he took photographs?’ he adds.
‘We both did.’
‘What of?’
‘Each other.’
‘You hate a fucking camera. Look at the one I bought you. Unused.’
‘I took them to humour him,’ I tell him.
‘Why?’
I shake my head. ‘I didn’t like being taken, at all. I wanted to even it out,’ I tell him, not at all sure what I mean.
‘He invites you up there. Takes his camera. And a gun. Takes shots of you, then you of him. Asks you to leave. Then shoots himself. What the fuck is he trying to say? What the fuck was he trying to do?’
‘You tell me.’
He shakes his head.
‘The complexity of people knows no bounds.’
‘Is that from O’Connor?’
‘No, arsehole, that’s from you. Something you said at Leighcroft. Remember?’
‘I said a lot of things at Leighcroft.’
‘Too fucking right.’ He is looking at me intensely. ‘Know what I think? You’re too precocious for your own fucking good. You’d do everyone a very big favour to think before you fucking speak.’
He is thinking of Martha, and my abortive trip to announce the arrival of her son.
There is silence from the hall: Clare has finished her call. The phone begins to ring again.
She doesn’t answer.
Moments later, however, we hear her voice.
‘See,’ he says, ‘how quickly she recovers.’
‘She is distracting herself,’ I tell him. ‘Maybe she, too, is good on ice. She’s skating along with the rest of us.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Forget it.’
Disguises fall away on every side: film scenarios – I see the signs – pass through Gerry’s head: Martha, him, me, Clare, Jimmy. Who else? The cast increases every second.
‘I’ll come back up as soon as I can,’ he says. ‘Definitely for the funeral’ (another night’s shooting he’s about to miss: the conviction the whole thing will fall apart if he isn’t there). ‘Perhaps you and Clare will change your minds. About coming down. In any case …’ The scenario drifts on: fiction more real than reality, etc. Nothing beats this for being real. ‘Maybe she’s talking too much,’ he says, her voice chattering on outside. ‘Very little gets her down. Not even losing a kid, in the end. She was the first to ring up and talk of Martha when she first cracked up. Not only that, but she talks good sense. Jimmy blamed himself for that, you know. Giving her those fucking murder stories. That’s maybe why he went on writing them.’
‘Why?’
‘To vindicate himself, for fuck’s sake.’
He is inviting me to reassure him: that leaving tomorrow will be okay, fleeing the scene of something for which he feels responsible (unloading it where he can on me, and ‘Jimmy’) – the scenes of his childhood revisited in ways he would have least expected (if anyone should have cracked it should have been me, his hitherto unexpressed prognosis).
Richard, however, is still intact (for all he knows, still writing): on his way into and out of my toilet he must have flicked through the sheets on my table: memoranda – unnumbered. Where, in any case, will he sleep tonight? In the ‘guest’ room, hitherto unused (not in James’s): he’s restless, not so much to get Clare off the phone (talking herself into hysteria) but to get on it himself: he has already spoken to Gavin twice, I overhearing the second: ‘Not that line. The other. Ask him to come up with something better. What’s the prickhead paid for?… Ask Richard? Are you crazy? He hates fucking films. He thinks they’re fucking up the universe,’ catching sight of me passing in the hall and adding, ‘Now is not a good time to make arsehole suggestions.’
I leave him to it: go up to my room: not long after I hear his voice, talking to Clare: ‘How is Richard? That kid has seen too much. He’s smarter than the rest of us combined and, worst of all, he knows it.’
Closing my door, disinclined to hear any more, I sit at my desk and stare not at the hill but into the garden: the hill is going from my thoughts. I pick up my pen and write on the sheet before me – aware of a darker scrawl visible below its surface, clearly something Gerry, if he has examined my desk, has missed.
I am confronted, lifting the sheet, by a page of James’s familiar scrawl (several of his manuscripts are in ink): a curvilinear, almost lyric line, varying in width and pressure: something inscribed, evidently, with emotion.
If you read this you will know the end of the ‘mystery’. Not good to be informed after it has happened, construction – plotting – never my strongest suit – always wanting to get to the denouement before the exposition: motives were always frustratingly obscure. The device for assuming you won’t come across this document immediately (probably not until you sit down to write) is intended to afford me the opportunity to change my mind and retrieve it – if what I intend should happen doesn’t. I’m unsure, as always, of my courage. As I am of my determination. However, I’ve always been a tenacious character, not least when I’m doing an inappropriate thing. As true of my job as of everything else. Something to do with my upbringing, I’m sure. The decision in question I shan’t make until I view you through the camera. You will, if you do read this, recognise the irony of the ‘shooting’ involved.
What comes to mind, at this point, is the suggestion made by Clare that she ‘shoot’ James and I together: a photograph, I realise, I have, until now, forgotten – recalling James’s initial reluctance, then his peculiarly tortured acquiescence, standing by me, I placing my arm, at Clare’s further suggestion, around his shoulder: perhaps it was this contact, brief though it was, that, literally and metaphorically, disarmed him: his insistence on taking Clare and I together had led to a protracted effort to ‘frame’ us to his satisfaction: perhaps, in reality, he was struggling with thoughts which in his confession he was endeavouring to express: the gun, in the meanwhile, was hidden in an inside pocket – a jacket he had insisted on wearing (‘a nice breeze, Clare, but chill’) before we went up.
This is my last ‘mystery’. I’m convinced I shall not ‘commission’ another. Perhaps this is what they were all about: my participating in events which, until now, I have only imagined. This one is about failure. As a survivor you’ll have the privilege of reading it knowing you are safe. I have not the gift of words that you have. Nor have I the gift of Clare to the same degree. Each day I witness how much you bring her. I have never seen her so fulfilled, not even in our youth. Everything about her conveys the fact that she is loved and, in turn, is full of loving, and, to this extent, I see that as my final, perhaps my only genuine achievement: I have brought my beloved back to life – a life, some twenty-odd years ago, I was, inadvertently, almost responsible for destroying. I wasn’t made for freedom (look at my brother to see the profligate father we sprang from): freedom for me was first confined, then killed. I
n the camp I realised I’d been a prisoner all my life, condemned to justify myself to a father I despised. What a trap! One out of which Gerry sprang – our mother’s spirit – with no trouble! I’ve spoken to you of imprisonment but that scarcely conveyed the horror I felt, let alone the terror: the feeling that I was imprisoned for ever.
I am writing to you in a way I have never written before. Writing which, knowing the outcome, I’ve always resisted. I hated our collusion in Gerry’s ‘plot’ to make you a ‘brother’ – if only a half one, at that – allegedly to ‘save’ Martha, on the one hand, and you, on the other. You were bound to find out in the end – by which time, Gerry judged, you’d be ‘safe’. Once commissioned, however, he didn’t know how to unravel it, ‘commissioning’ O’Connor to do it for him. With what results! Bowing to the Studios’ authority has done for us all. Did he really care, as he appears to now? I can only say I took his word for it that it was ‘for the best’ only to see ‘the best’ run out of control when he realised he couldn’t tell you the truth for fear of condemning you to the stigma of someone who subsequently emerged as a lunatic mother. Clare, in her own way, perhaps is making up for that.
A separate sheet: this is taking longer than I imagined. I’ve had to refill my pen (not full when I started). These thoughts fly faster than I can write them down. Once released, I find I have too many. Not only that, but I’m beginning to realise the circumstances which must exist if you are to read this. We have talked in the recent past of humanity’s aspirations for itself. Maybe that’s what took me into insurance: expect the worst and you can’t go wrong. After the war I could only recognise humanity in terms of failure, its ‘achievements’ underlain by a train of horror which even now, after its most potent demonstrations, we are unable to acknowledge: at least, if acknowledge, do little if anything constructive about. We are, in my view, implacably intent on our own destruction, not hubris but hedonism our principal drive, a generic imperative which nothing can overcome: we are condemned, as a species, to invent the means of our own destruction: what sort of saviour do we need for that?
All I should say is measure your life by what I gave, by way of licence, by deferment, standing back: if I can’t live with her, I can live for her. She is, to me, my entire world. I envy you, as I envied Gerry: my brother inherited the family grace, the endowment of my cherished mother, who looked to him, I’m afraid, as a reflection of herself. I inherited our father, a man, as I’ve said, I despised. A mercurial whim of nature. If we’d had a third brother no doubt he would have inherited an equable element of both. Perhaps you are he: a posthumous but equally arbitrary creation.