Thin-Ice Skater
Page 26
I am writing this while you are away at church. One look at my beloved’s face, on your arrival, will tell me all that has happened. And then I will invite you up the hill. With what consequences you will now know. My big decision, as you must have realised, is whether to take you with me: whether shooting with the camera – something, I know, you dislike (and for good reason) – will devolve naturally into shooting you both with a gun.
Your loving uncle,
James.
Rising, I stand back from the desk as, earlier, I had stood back from his body – and find my gaze returning to the window. It’s as if he’s still up there – that we’re still up there – and the event, described in the letter, having been rehearsed, is about to happen.
Gerry’s voice murmurs to Clare below: the ringing of the telephone, his louder voice, ‘Don’t ring again. I’m taking the phone off the hook. I’ll ring you.’
I am gliding, wheeling, the ice creaking on every side, ‘life’ that otherwise burdensome property comprised of ‘awareness’, nothing else …
4
For reasons for which I can’t account I don’t show James’s ‘confession’ to anyone. The inquest is held, the body released, the ashes scattered, at my suggestion, on the hill. The commentators and photographers who have surrounded the end of the drive (and who have visited the hill, trespassing on an infuriated farmer’s land) have disappeared. The house (and the phone calls) return to normal. We go away: to the Lake District, the scene of a childhood holiday for Clare, then to London, meeting Martha (yet again) returning on the train: the group of us, she with her ubiquitous companion, sit at a table in the restaurant car – something like a wake immediately after a funeral: a celebration of what I’m not entirely sure. Clare has aged; at least, sobered – a sobriety she says she acquires from me (‘except when you’re in the company of Martha Armitage: she brings something other out in you’).
We are into new country, hissing along, the ice growing thinner all the while. My ‘wealth’ is being assessed by lawyers. James has left everything to Clare. We are ‘autonomous’, as she describes it – Gerry skating effortlessly before us (two other ‘projects’ underway, one a life of Miss Geraldine O’Neill). The past, whatever its horrors, has been eclipsed: we travel faster than the shadows – or the cracks lengthening on either side.
The photographs, of course, arrive. The police enclose the negatives: a casual, if bureaucratic thought, accompanied not by a letter but a printed slip attributable to the city constabulary and date-stamped by, I presume, a mechanical device.
She and I, arms round one another; she and James, arms linked (the unnoticed bulge visible – for the first time – beneath his jacket); he and I together – the portentous, ‘defining’ picture; she alone; I alone; she and I walking up the hill, smiling, waving (I’d forgotten our spontaneity) and, curiously, the last one he took of the two of us descending, our backs to the camera, my attention, despite the rear perspective, plainly focused on her.
What held him back? Perhaps her insistence I take a photograph of him, of him being the recipient in or of the picture – something he hadn’t anticipated (similarly the two of us together) – or even a remoter aspiration he should, in some form, if only in others’ memories, go on living, in her, in me. If not in Gerry.
Or a final gesture of ‘insurance’, self-enclosure – ‘authenticity’ adhered to as he watched us walk away, turning from us, sitting down, taking out the gun, placing the muzzle to his head, not others the target but himself.
MEMO
5.9.01, 5:15 a.m.
Thirty (30) years to write this down (31, to be precise: I got up in the early hours to complete it). I’ve been up most of the night ‘improving’ the script (crumby writers: I do a better job myself). The studio car is due at six (6). Martha’ll get up to see me off, and no doubt Gerry (staying with us, with Clare – though she’ll sleep on: the kids, thank God, are all at college). Peculiar household (Leighcroft Gardens), peculiar past. Yesterday Dad doddered in, almost precisely at this hour: he’d set his alarm clock to make sure he caught me before I left (old habit), looking over my shoulder: ‘Treat the camera as a friend,’ he says. ‘If you don’t like it, it won’t like you’. His staying here, even for a fortnight, while I’m shooting, not a good idea: eighty-two (82) and thinking he’ll make another picture. ‘Not your fucking masterpiece, I know, but good in its way: I the precedent, you the fruition’: he gets that from the equally doddery Gavin, a youthful seventy-nine (79), who’s also convinced he’ll produce another movie: thin-ice skaters never die. They only disappear.
‘Memorandum!’ He comes in in his dressing-gown, picking up the sheet, unable to read it without his glasses. ‘Photographs. Of what?’ He drops it. ‘Another denigration of the greatest art of the past and present century, or, after all this time, has the penny dropped? You fucking crook. Have they rumbled you at Pinewood? What goes through your head I can’t imagine. After all these fucking years: Genius!’
‘You or me?’ I ask.
I wave to him – and Martha – from the window of the car, apprehensive of leaving him with her. But then, there’s Clare … she, too, appearing as the car drives off.
My father has learnt nothing. He doesn’t realise what a world we live in, in which dissemblance governs all. He cannot see what is to come – forces which will despatch us as effortlessly, as naturally, as keenly – as guilelessly – as a bird sings in a tree. I, who admire his grace and love his skill: his gyrations, his leaps and whirls, his dancing and his speed are everything …
Amen.
About the Author
David Storey was born in 1933 in Yorkshire, England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. His novels have won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of fifteen plays and is a fellow of University College London. Storey lives in London with his wife and four children.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by David Storey
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1514-1
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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