Flight into Camden Read online

  ‘I can’t blame you not liking Howarth, Mother. But you’ve got to allow me my own discretion.’

  ‘I’ve a mind that Mrs Tunnicliffe was reckoning to suggest he stayed here all Saturday night. I’m almost sure that’s what she was trying to say. I could have cracked her face for her.’

  ‘What’s the use? If you go on like this I shall have to leave home.’

  ‘Are you going on seeing this man, then?’ she said aimlessly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what do you see in him, pray? A married man, living away from his wife and family. Just to think of it, Margaret. And if he’s an artist – well, he doesn’t care. He can’t care, letting you bring him here like that. It’s a terrible thing.’

  ‘He’s not an artist. And you’re making it sound so crude that I won’t talk about it any more.’

  ‘Our Michael says he’s an artist, an art teacher or something, it makes no difference. And he knows him. He doesn’t like him either, and you can’t say our Michael’s an unfair judge of character.’

  ‘I don’t care what Michael says … I don’t know why either you or him should push yourselves in.’

  ‘We’re not pushing in,’ she said hopelessly, dismayed by my lack of feeling. ‘I don’t want to interfere like that. But I can’t go clapping my hands when I see you with a chap like that. There’s nothing right with it, and it’s not decent.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue. It’s one of those things you can’t do anything about.’

  ‘I suppose I could go and see his wife and see what she thinks of it all. She must be able to do something.’

  ‘I don’t think you’d do that.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she said, standing up, small and fierce with her emotion. ‘I didn’t mean to get het up about it like this, either. But that Mrs Tunnicliffe fair enraged me, she was so sly … I feel like going now and having it out with her.’

  ‘You’d only degrade everything. And I’m not going to be dragged about amongst the neighbours like this. I’d rather leave home than see that happen.’

  ‘I don’t want you to do that,’ she said slowly, suddenly afraid now that it seemed possible.

  When my father came down he was quiet. He was going to the pit in two hours, but he must have been listening for me to come in from work, and to my mother’s arguing. He was tired, his eyes were red and inflamed, and his cheeks sunken and dark with fatigue. His whole appearance was one unspoken reproach. I would have bled rather than hurt him, rather than have him condemn me. It wearied both of us, this worn appearance of his. He sat by the fire without speaking. I sat at the table too numb and sick to eat. When I stood up he said, almost indifferent to me, ‘You know you’ve hurt your mother a lot doing this.’ His head turned and his eyes flared at me with hate and disgust. I felt myself colouring and burning. His punishment was no longer physical, but when it appeared it was more implacable than his occasional blows. I was terrified with fear and love of him; of when he had hit my brothers and I had screamed at their helplessness, at the break in their dignity, tearing at my chair while he beat them. I hated his physicality, and the way it could destroy that dignity. He had a miner’s uncouthness about him, and a miner’s silence in pain, retributive, embracing all those who watched it. He had a miner’s indifference to the physical, a savage complacency, that turned his silent reproach on me with a long association of childhood meanings.

  He had nothing to say or advise; his helplessness sustained his desire to hurt me. Yet if I didn’t respond to him he would think I despised him, that not only had I betrayed him by bringing someone to the house in his absence, but was unrepentant about it.

  He watched me pile my few tea things, but as I moved to the door he couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He staggered in his chair, as if attacked, then jumped to his feet and in spite of his tiredness rushed across the room and threw the tea things out of my hands with his fist.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say anything to me, you sly bitch!’

  The crash and my cry brought my mother into the room. We stared unbelievingly at one another, my father’s mouth wide and vacant, trembling with rage and frustration. I burst into tears and ran upstairs.

  I beat the bed with my fists. But I didn’t know whom I loved. Howarth or my father. I wanted to love one of them above everything. To love one of them with everything. I lay sobbing on the bed terrified of my father’s helplessness and his rage.

  The door opened, and I could hear his breathing. He watched me, his breath roaring through his nose. ‘I’m sorry, lass. I’d give ought not to have done that.’

  He waited dumbly. I stopped crying, and lay with my face hidden in the blankets. They still smelt of Howarth, almost of his warmth. I waited for my father to go, but I sensed him standing helpless in the door. ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It’s all right. Let me be.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said, with an unnatural, masculine tenderness. His pain weakened me. I didn’t look up.

  ‘Yes.

  I heard the door shut, and his slow steps downstairs. I couldn’t restrain my pity for him, and I fell asleep sobbing, yearning to give him peace and some sort of absolution.

  The process of tearing myself away had already begun, at Manchester and now back at home, and my father’s remorse grew during the next few days. He lived in a silence which nothing would disturb: a miner’s silence of emotional entombment, of justified fears and helplessness. Nothing I could do or say relieved him. He came back from work lifeless, staggering with exhaustion and with hate of the pit, but he couldn’t sleep. I began to doubt that I was responsible at all; that I had merely brought to a climax a long and terrible despair. It seemed that it was something that moved in him, independent of all of us. Whenever he ate he brought his food up, in great, agonized retchings that filled the house until the building itself seemed convulsed. When Michael and Gwen came he made a token response, pulling out a tired humour, with none of his amiable invective and disinterest. He had the curious, inquiring humour of a miner; but now it staggered out half-torn by its own amusement. Michael, stared at him sullenly, unaware of the cause. In a way, neither did my mother understand. My father sensed something, and failed to recognize it or sympathize. He was aware only of himself.

  But whenever we were alone, and I sat sewing by the fire or reading, I would catch his eyes on me with their terrifying look.

  I couldn’t understand. I longed for him. I wanted him. I wanted him to talk to me, and to laugh and to show his rough affection. He turned his look away quickly and I was sure I was responsible for his unhappiness. Whatever he sensed, it exhausted him completely, and drove away any instinct to combat it. I wanted to touch him. But I was afraid of feeling him. It was the lack of touch that was implicit in both of us: he was careless of it, yet conscious of my fear of it. His bewilderment grew inwardly, destroying and wrapping itself round everything until all his recognizable traits were hidden. There was still his need to protect me, but that too was helpless in the flame that tormented his mind.

  I couldn’t help feeling angry, even enraged, with Michael, and resentful of Gwen. It was a bad thing. But in a way I couldn’t forgive him for marrying Gwen. Everything that he had reproached and derided in me was embodied in her. My femininity, my original wish for education, my domesticity, my concern with my clothes and appearance: he had ridiculed these in his youth, then more subtly and implicitly in his maturity; only to resurrect them in Gwen. In his way he had embittered me and encouraged me to destroy much that was wholesome and necessary in a woman for the sake of some unintelligible and sexless rivalry. My distrust of domesticity and the fatefulness of motherhood were largely his doing. He had insisted on the subservience of women, and as a youth had bullied me into the weaker role. He had painted a picture of woman for me that was denuded and full of his natural destructiveness. He had been contemptuous of motherhood and the breeding animality of women, yet in Gwen i
t abounded luxuriously. She was fully a woman, companionable, sexed, motherful. He seemed to have produced her at my expense, as if her appearance were a direct result of my defeat.

  I frightened her. She was puzzled by me. Whenever our eyes met we looked nervously at each other and smiled, a world of misunderstanding revolving between us. She wanted to be kind, but felt that I would rebuff her, perhaps humiliate her, at the first opportunity. I wasn’t to be trusted. She only approached me through Michael.

  Neither my mother nor my father mentioned to Michael Howarth’s visit to the house. Having found out, I would have thought that their first reaction would have been to tell him, to secure him on their side. But they said nothing, not even to me. It was as if Howarth’s coming to the house had suddenly separated the family into its components, isolating each one, and fragmenting the domesticity into its final pattern of disruption and decay. At times it still seemed to me that Howarth was in the house: I seemed to smell him and feel his warmth in the bed.

  Michael was easily aware of the disruption, but couldn’t identify the cause. He even suspected his marriage was to blame, that there was some bitterness amongst us all directed at Gwen. But there was no evidence: my parents had got on well at Cardiff and everyone was pleased with the marriage. He must have mentioned his concern to Gwen: she changed visibly, too, after her first visits, becoming quiet and uncertain in the family atmosphere, and relieved whenever Michael said it was time for them to go.

  One evening, when Michael was explaining their plans to take their honeymoon in London at the end of term, and regretting that they’d miss Christmas at home, my father suddenly said, out of his deep inattention, ‘I wish I’d never educated our Michael, nor our Margaret.’ He spoke loudly, irrelevantly to what Michael had been saying.

  At first Michael thought there must be some connection, then he said, half amused, ‘Why not, Dad?’

  ‘If I’d known then what I know now I’d never have let you go to that grammar school, nor you to university. I’d rather have had you working with your bare hands at twelve years old than you stay a day longer at school. I regret nothing more in my life than having educated you.’

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ my mother said, distressed at his seriousness and simplicity.

  ‘What are you getting at?’ Michael said, impressed, yet not far from being amused.

  ‘I was a fool to have educated you. I should have known. I should have known.’ His quiet, determined remorse numbed us. He beat his fist against the arm of the chair, slowly, almost with the frustration of a young man. He was far from us, deliberately withdrawn and disowning. I felt I would never come near him again. My mother stared at his loss with empty, in-turned eyes. She looked blinded.

  ‘It’s no use regretting a thing like that now,’ Michael said, as if he understood what my father meant. ‘You can’t stop something of that sort.’

  ‘But I could have. I could have,’ he said. ‘I should have put you to work when you were young.’

  ‘What is it that makes you say things like that?’ Michael asked. He was hurt, and wretched at my father’s wilfulness.

  ‘What is it?’ my father said. ‘Why, it’s your emptiness. Your great and everlasting emptiness.’ He looked at Michael narrowly, his eyes blazing and wet. ‘It’s your great educated emptiness. And I never saw it. Me, a bloody man.’

  Yet Michael was not as hurt as I was. He seemed to absorb my father’s words as if, deeply, he’d been expecting them all his life. He was just beyond the reach of my father now, but not so far that he wasn’t wounded. He looked at my mother with open pain and humiliation. ‘What’s made him like this?’ he asked her bitterly.

  She shook her head, clasping her hands together, unable to speak.

  ‘It’s because you are empty, Michael,’ I said, unable to control my anger.

  He stared at me without offence, then said to me, ‘Yes. But I feel that he really means you, not me.’

  8

  Howarth accepted my silence. I boarded the train with him and waited while he found two seats and lifted the suitcases, pushing them on to the racks and pressing my bag in on top. He’d deliberately chosen an empty slow train in the middle of the afternoon. Sitting opposite me in the tabled carriage, he watched me carefully as we pulled out of the station. The city was bright in winter sunlight, a light blue sky flooded with small ochre clouds. I sat still as the familiar buildings slipped below and disappeared. The train passed over the town on a series of arches; then a broad metal span took us over the river, and the track buried itself in a thick forest of chimneys and tall banks of crusted brickwork. The walls ran by in yellow and red streams, streaked with blackness.

  We turned south in a long shallow sweep, away from the peninsula of arches, mounting slowly towards the low ridges and the black brickwork of the Shawcliffe tunnel. The train was very long. As the track curved I could see the inside length of the brown carriages, heavily splayed out before and behind us, the engine toiling away, soundlessly at this distance, and the purple ridge seemingly impenetrable a mile away. It was cold, the heating had only just been turned on. The faint hissing of the steam in the pipes muffled the conversation from the other end of the carriage.

  ‘You look the epitome of a Happy Christmas,’ Howarth said. He looked determined and calm. ‘I had a job stopping Ben coming to see me off,’ he added. ‘I gave him the wrong time of the train. It’s not the sort of thing you like to do.’

  I shook my head. He stared inquisitively at me, then, finding it painful, turned his gaze to the slow disappearance of the fields and grey stone farms. Out of the opposite window I had a distant view of my father’s pit, with its stubborn white smoke and the long, broken-backed slag heap. It looked senselessly powerful and remote on its ridge top.

  ‘There’s been an awful coincidence,’ I told him. ‘Michael and Gwen are taking their honeymoon in London this next fortnight.’

  He looked at me blankly. ‘A postponed one, you mean.’

  ‘They couldn’t get away until now.’

  It was irrelevant.

  ‘They’re not on the train,’ he said.

  ‘No. I’m not sure when they’re going down. The end of next week sometime, when Gwen finishes at school. My parents will be alone at Christmas for the first time. Unless Alec comes over.’

  ‘Did you tell them everything about this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The train rose into the tunnel. We stared at one another across the table, then Howarth leaned over and took my hand. He gripped it tightly. His eyes were wet. The train burst out amongst the dark, open fields. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all been settled now,’ I said. ‘And I’m glad of that.’

  I pulled my hand away and lay back in the seat. He looked at me with a new affection, disbelieving, and full of doubt.

  ‘Have you always chosen the most difficult way of doing things?’ I asked.

  He smiled earnestly. ‘It used to be characteristic of me. I was always awkward, according to my mother. What did your parents say when you left?’

  ‘We had a bad scene.’

  ‘I can imagine it.’ He shook his head, wonderingly. ‘I shouldn’t have let you do it on your own. I should have been with you.’

  ‘I didn’t want it like that, did I?’

  ‘You’re making it very hard for yourself. In the future …’ He stared at me reproachfully.

  ‘I don’t think my mother’s sure you are with me. In a way, I didn’t handle it properly. I made it seem I was leaving in a temper.’ I half-laughed and half-cried.

  Howarth leaned heavily on the table towards me, frowning, his hands clasped together tightly. ‘What makes us do things like this?’ he said. ‘All this – and I still don’t know. It all seems to have gone on outside us.’

  ‘We’re not really going away at all, are we?’ I said. ‘We’re carrying it all with us.’

  He gazed at the window. In a moment I realized he was looking at his own reflection; then furtively at
mine. The unfamiliarity of the landscape and the increasing speed of the train relieved me.

  I’d never experienced the long approach to London. Howarth had relaxed, and sat back smoking after four hours in the train. But the continual surging through tunnels, the brief glimpses of worn brick embankments and the dirty rear windows of houses, the stopping and starting, wearied me more and more. It was a deliberate lingering. The jarring and battering of passing trains entombed us further in the dark brickiness. But Howarth knew the line well. At a certain point he gave a start, smiled at the familiarity of some gasometers, and began to pull the cases from the rack. ‘Well, this is it,’ he said. I was sick and retching with the fumes and the continual delay in tunnels. It was too noisy and foreign. We seemed to have been chased the whole of the journey.

  Howarth went and called a porter. The four cases were wheeled down the platform; we followed them through the barrier and joined the taxi queue. Howarth had told me the arrangements already: but Camden Town, where he had found us a flat with a landlord he had had as a student, was only a name to me. I resented submitting to him as early as this. He was pleased to be back in London. He hardly sensed my strangeness, and for his own peace of mind ignored my feeling of loss. His sudden indulgence repelled me. I could only feel reassured by going to the time-table board and examining with great care the times of the trains back north. Then Howarth called me to the taxi.

  ‘It’s great to be back,’ he said, his enthusiasm lost amongst the crowded streets. I tried to ignore the scene, just as he ignored me: I had a vague impression of streets narrower and buildings dirtier than I had ever expected; of row after row of sordid houses, filthier than anything I had seen at home. The area we went through was one of disintegration and decay, infected with a parasitic disease that fed on the buildings, the brick and the stone. It was its desolation and the persistence of its life that wearied me: the streets were full of eager, rushing people.