A Serious Man Read online

  ‘Didn’t you love Bea?’ Etty enquired when I went down to the kitchen (no sign of Mrs Otterman at all).

  ‘Ours,’ I said, ‘was a mystical conjunction.’

  ‘All those women that you had,’ she said.

  ‘Where are they now?’ I might have asked, but merely responded, ‘There were scarcely any.’

  ‘They were even in the papers, Dad.’

  Her back to me at the sink, she glanced across her shoulder. Outside, in the yard, surrounded by a hedge, her car stood by the garage, a side-window lowered, a child’s seat clipped in the back for Glenda.

  She was – Mrs Otterman clearly not here – preparing food.

  ‘There were other things,’ I said, ‘as well.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Why,’ I said, ‘her own ambition.’

  Instead of Etty, however, it was Isabella who was standing there and, in my imagination, I heard her say, ‘It’s my daughter, my dear, you’re supposed to love.’

  ‘I do love her,’ I said aloud and, as Etty turned, half-startled, from the sink, I swiftly added, ‘She is, they tell me, very good. The Medical Research Council are very pleased. You may have seen it announced. She’s on the threshold of discovering, in the anti-coagulant properties of the moorland leech, a possible cure for cancer.’

  ‘Scarcely,’ she said, and added, ‘Couldn’t she have combined research and marriage? After all,’ she frowned, ‘you say it’s what I ought to do.’

  ‘But then,’ I said, ‘she fell in love.’

  ‘That,’ she said, and added, ‘Albert.’

  ‘You’re talking like the kind of man you say I should despise,’ I told her.

  ‘After this wonderful relationship you say you had, it surprises me,’ she said, ‘she should feel, at the age of fifty-two, the need to go off with another man.’

  ‘Marriage is a morbidity,’ I said, and added, ‘You sympathised with her at the time. “I hope,” you said, “I have the guts to do the same at fifty.”’

  ‘I thought she didn’t mean it,’ Etty said.

  ‘When you discovered that she did,’ I said, ‘I suppose you changed your mind.’

  She smiled (I could see her reflection in the kitchen window): the absurdity of what we were up to struck us both afresh.

  ‘Before I came down,’ I gestured overhead, ‘I was thinking of a project. I thought it might amuse you. Much of the research you could do from here. I could even,’ I went on, ‘suggest a title.’

  ‘The Fenchurch Papers.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The idea,’ she said, ‘is quite absurd.’

  ‘If, as you say, I am about to die, you haven’t much time. Less,’ I added, ‘the more you leave it.’ When, however, she didn’t reply, I hastily continued, ‘Science acknowledges that subjectivity is the most valuable tool it has. Who, for instance, would describe Vasari or Lockhart or Boswell as objective? It’s not the inscrutability of the observer that qualifies his or her judgements but the warmth, the dedication, the love they bring to their subject.’

  At home together, in our early days, Etty both liked and resented me theorising in this manner, fascinated by the conclusions that I drew at the same time as feeling chastened by them. Afterwards I would hear her presenting similar if not identical views (when, for instance, she was at the Courtauld) to her fellow students, Viklund, the accredited authority in her field, describing her as ‘the most forward pupil I have’, and since he taught me for several terms (evening lectures at the Drayburgh: ‘Landscape and the European Mind’ – describing me as ‘too clever by half’) I have been inclined to accept his judgement.

  ‘You don’t have to go on. I’m perfectly capable,’ she said ‘of making up my mind.’

  I heard her go out later in the morning, once in the car and once on foot. We ate our lunch in silence at the kitchen table, listening to the news. Afterwards I went upstairs to sleep. When I woke she had gone to fetch the children and Mrs Otterman, to my surprise, was busy in the kitchen.

  A tall, dark-haired woman, with cadaverous features, she was, like Etty before her, busy at the sink.

  ‘How are you, Mr Fenchurch?’ she said.

  ‘I’m well,’ I said, in no mood to be patronised.

  ‘Mrs Stott came and fetched me,’ she said.

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘In her car.’

  ‘Why should she do that?’ I asked.

  ‘She didn’t wish,’ she turned from the sink, having previously watched me in the reflection in the kitchen window, ‘to leave you on your own.’

  She was performing, I could see, a needless task – washing-up from lunch – a task, at the time, I’d offered to do myself.

  ‘You can wash those in the machine,’ I said, indicating the device adjacent to the sink.

  ‘It’s hardly worth the trouble,’ she said, her hands, inflamed, plying in the water.

  When she withdrew them completely, however, I observed she was wearing rubber gloves.

  Whereas Mrs Otterman regarded Charlie as a cut or two above herself – with all the obsequiousness of the northern working class that that implied – she looked on me as something of a rival, she the daughter of a miner, the wife of another, the mother of a third (the last two out of work), I merely the offspring of another: despite differences in sensibility, intelligence, taste and wealth – or almost any other human attribute I might dare to mention – it put us on an equal footing – if not, in my case, having, if not sold out, absented myself, on something less. On the morning after I arrived I heard her talking on the telephone in Charlie’s study (assuming I and Etty, no doubt, were out), referring to me as ‘Mrs Stott’s poor dotty Dad – just like that man in Clatherton Street they took away last night.’

  On one occasion, in an attempt to explain the acquiescence of so many of the miners in the village to being out of work, I remarked to Etty, ‘So many people in the south, particularly intellectuals, talk of victimisation without realising that true conservatism – the imperviousness to change – lies at the heart of a place like this. What was Ardsley,’ I went on, ‘before the Wintertons discovered coal, but a dozen farms, as many rows of cottages, a church, a rectory, and Ardsley Hall?’

  ‘It’s a commuter village, for that involves work, too,’ she said, angered, as the grand-daughter of a miner, by a designation she secretly despised.

  ‘For some,’ I said. ‘But not for most,’ for around the nucleus of the village have been constructed several estates of yellow-brick houses (described on a billboard, at the outskirts of the village, as ‘executive-dwellings’): boxes, but for a garage, not much larger than the original miners’ cottages themselves. ‘Why the theorists go on,’ I added, ‘looking for change in a place like this, beats me.’

  At which, for the first time, she exclaimed, ‘It’s why those theorists – and not theorists only – despise your work!’

  ‘Why my work?’ I enquired.

  ‘Where they might have been looking for an appetite for change – even for revolution – they never find it.’

  ‘In me?’ (much feigned surprise).

  ‘If anyone’s work has been produced by a place like this – and by these conditions – and from amongst these people,’ she further exclaimed, ‘it’s yours!’

  ‘I think you’re a couple of vowels out,’ I said. ‘Revolution returns any point on a circumference to where it was before. You don’t think I’d waste my time on that? It’s not revolution,’ I went on, ‘but revelation you’re on about. Unless hypocrisy can be described as a phenomenon with a dynamic all its own, neither religious nor political sentiment affects or has affected anything at all. Both are based on appetites which are undeclared, and not merely undeclared but dishonestly perceived. I, for one, have always believed in a true revolution – of the individual spirit which prefers not to put its faith in authority, but to disseminate the authority of faith.’

  ‘Feathering your own nest is a better description. Faith,’ she went on, ‘
like love, is only achieved through others.’

  ‘Not through destroying them by political and religious bigotry,’ I said.

  Taking up a tea-towel, Mrs Otterman, having previously removed her gloves, began to dry the pots.

  ‘Would you like me to dry?’ I said.

  ‘No, thank you, Mr Fenchurch.’

  ‘I’m quite capable,’ I said (while you could get on with something else).

  There was nothing else, however, to get on with: the tea for the children was already prepared (and standing on the table), and the food to be cooked for the evening meal arranged in a variety of bowls and dishes.

  ‘It’s quite all right, Mr Fenchurch,’ she said.

  What she couldn’t be sure of, in Etty’s absence, was what ‘Mrs Stott’s poor dotty Dad’ might next get up to: not a few of her neighbours, I had heard her explaining one morning to Etty, had in recent years been ‘taken off’ – to be returned a few weeks later looking, if not changed, markedly subdued: other than that, and the eccentricities, observed or reported, which had preceded their departure (the broken windows, the shattered doors, the peculiar incidents to do with a length of rope or a bottle of pills) she had had, as she had told Etty, ‘not a lot to go on’.

  It was not, however, Mrs Otterman I was seeing there but Isabella’s Mrs Hopkins: the ebullient, broad-bosomed, insolent (high-heeled, broad-hipped – invariably with laddered stockings) ‘Rose’ – the woman, also a collier’s wife, who came and ‘did’ (stealing a great deal in the process: ‘One thing she can’t take away: the cheerfulness she leaves behind’ – Isabella), and who more than suggested, in her occasional glances, she knew what Isabella and I were up to.

  Or did she? And, if so, in the face of so much passion, what could she have done?

  ‘And what are you doing, young Richard?’ when she found me in the kitchen, creeping down in the hope the sounds I’d heard were those of Isabella – and not disinclined herself to be hugged, her more than ample figure ill-concealed in a home-made sweater – one of a variety she knitted in a range, as I endeavoured to explain to her on more than one occasion, of uniquely ill-matched colours. ‘I suppose you’re looking for Bea?’ (‘The mother and the daughter!’ she announced coming, one Christmas, upon Isabella and myself kissing under the mistletoe.) ‘I wonder what Mrs C is like in bed?’ she had whispered to me once having caught me gazing after Bella as she walked off, one evening, down the drive on the way to her weekly meeting of the W.I.

  ‘Why Etty should ask you to come,’ I told Mrs Otterman, ‘I’ve no idea. Or did she arrange it earlier? It’s a terrible nuisance, I’m sure,’ I added.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, putting the pots in the cupboard.

  ‘It’s extra income, of course,’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s part of it,’ she said. ‘But I’d do it for nothing for Mrs Stott.’

  ‘How are things in the village?’ I asked.

  ‘Three-quarters of them,’ she said, ‘are out of work.’

  ‘I thought the official figure,’ I said, ‘was a third.’

  ‘If you add to it those who’ve decided to retire, those who don’t bother to sign on, those who are on training schemes, it soon comes up to three-quarters. Seventy per cent, the unions make out.’

  ‘There must be a lot of ill-feeling,’ I said.

  ‘And drugs.’

  ‘And drugs.’

  ‘Drugs are the main industry round here,’ she added.

  ‘So where does that put us?’ I said.

  ‘Some of you can get out,’ she said. ‘As opposed to them that are carried.’

  ‘It must seem odd,’ I said, about to take a dish to put away but foiled by her quicker movement; ‘seeing someone like me coming to a place like this when everybody else is desperate to leave.’

  ‘In work, or out,’ she said, ‘it’s home.’ With a sideways look, she added, ‘And where is your home, Mr Fenchurch?’

  ‘I’m not sure where it is,’ I told her. ‘Another drug-infested street.’

  ‘At least,’ she said, ‘you have the choice,’ and, closing the cupboard door with a bang, added, ‘Which is more than most of us can say at present.’

  3

  Much of the village is visible from my room, the trees, their branches bare, coiled in a familiar frieze against a bifurcated backdrop of land and sky: a characterless scene without the pit. On the lower slopes are the screes of sooty houses, overlooked by the more recently-constructed ‘executive-dwellings’, each house with its view of Ardsley Dam, a stretch of water divided by a hump-backed bridge (built by the proprietors of Ardsley Hall, the Wintertons, long before coal was discovered on their land), and brought near to collapse in the recent past by the weight of (mainly) Corcoran lorries. On a quiet day, I’m told by Mrs Otterman, the hum of machinery comes over the hill at the back of the house from the outcrop mine at Fernley – another pit which, having been closed, has been replaced by opencast workings.

  I’ve drawn most of the fields and woods, the hedgerows and houses (and, once in London, painted them from memory and sketches). Along most of those lanes I have walked with Bea – and along not many fewer with her mother. I can see the outcrop of rock at Ardsley Edge, an extrusion of fissured sandstone – and recall that amongst its grasses and ferns, and beneath the silver birch (couched by buttercups, anenomes and daisies) that grow in profusion amongst the rock-falls at its base, I have lain for hours, as a youth, with the mother of the girl I was about to marry.

  Red hair which, as with Bea, had darkened in later life to magenta: a pallid, lightly-freckled skin, green-irised eyes, an incisive mouth – a robust, slim-waisted, high-breasted figure, the slightest contact with which, whether excised by clothes or not, went through me like a knife.

  I met Bea at a Christmas Dance (the boys from King Edward’s, the girls from Linfield High: two single-sex schools confronting each other across a city street). Several weeks previously, Harris, an anonymous fellow whose parents owned a shop in town and who lived at Fernley, remarked that he was bringing a girl from a nearby village whom he met from time to time on the train: she would, on the night, be staying in town: ‘Ought that might have gone on,’ he said, ‘on the train back home has gone clean out of the window.’ A few days later he pointed her out in the street: amongst the groups of uniformed figures drifting along the pavement hers was indistinguishable. ‘She’s gone,’ he said and, pointing down a sidestreet, departed in the opposite direction towards his parents’ shop.

  Wandering to the end of the street I glanced along it: a tall coppery-haired figure of slender build, with the mandatory dark blue High School coat stretching to her ankles, was walking away from me. Instantly (inexplicably) the thought came to me, ‘This is the girl I shall marry,’ and, without glancing back, let alone going after her, I slowly walked away.

  On the evening of the party I invited her to dance: even as I held her I was aware of things I would never like: the way, for instance, she did her hair (less to attract than distract, I thought, swept from her brow in the manner of a child), the freckles on her brow, the green-irised eyes, flecked minutely, I observed, with strands of brown: nor did I like – nor could I separate these features from – the sharpness of her glance. Later in the evening, when I invited her again to dance, without any interest, she turned me down.

  Six months elapsed before we met again: a party was being held to which several of the boys and an equivalent number of girls who were leaving their respective schools that year had been invited, their numbers supplemented by girls from a lower year: amongst the latter was Bea. As at the dance, she wore a light green dress which complimented the colour of her hair and emphasised, if that’s the word, the colour of her eyes and her complexion; gauche, she had little of the assurance of the girls from the year who were leaving, and had come – as, indeed, had I – without a partner.

  I had, in fact, come with Otterton, a thin-featured, lugubriously-humoured youth, and his girlfriend, Jenny, the buck-toothed daug
hter of a dentist whose mother, with some misgivings, had lent Otterton her car.

  It was the last Saturday of the last term of our final year at Edward’s. Otterton, whose ineptitude at sport had endeared him to me throughout that year, was destined for the army (the Officer Training School at Sandhurst).

  I, I had announced, intended to become an artist (more dramatic still, already was one).

  The party was held in a garden which stretched along one side and round the back of a (to me) very large house. The sun, as I arrived, was on the point of setting: its light illuminated a greenhouse (incandescent) and an orchard (ethereal), as well as a series of trellised terraces upon which figures were already dancing. Beyond an area of hedged fields and woodland, comprising the lower slopes and the bed of a shallow valley, hills were mistily enclosed in the mellow light. It was an area I’d roamed through as a child: the distant hills, with the bleaker slopes of the moors above, I’d camped in as a youth: the Pennine foothills with their dammed-up streams and rushing falls, their silent ponds and crumbling abbeys.

  Chinese lanterns had been strung above a lawn: a gramophone, manipulated by the hostess’s sister, in the Fifth Form, played a melancholy tune. It was the one I’d danced to with Bea at the Christmas Party and, looking up, I experienced a secondary shock of recognition, not unmixed with pleasure, to see her chatting with a group of friends.

  I invited her to dance.

  ‘Are you cold?’ I asked.

  ‘I am, as a matter of fact,’ she said. Her hand, as I took it, had trembled.

  I drew her closer to me.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ I enquired.