Radcliffe Read online

  Tolson had remarkable strength and agility; an almost adult assurance, and a kind of cool ferocity which, in its degree of control and direction, was as intimidating as his violence itself. He seemed, through his strength, deliberately to prolong the fight. When Radcliffe had dazedly risen to his feet he stood watching with a frozen expression, a down-like impersonation of grief, which amused the boys not directly concerned with the conflict.

  When it was over and, bruised and crying, the boy had gone, Tolson stood some distance away and stared sulkily at Radcliffe. His fists hung down at his sides, the knuckles crested white in his hard, chapped skin, his look at first an uncertain one of contempt; then, almost imperceptibly, growing into that same expression of bitterness and reproach which he had levelled across the classroom. Then, quite suddenly and without any sign, he began to cry.

  Whether it was an accumulation of hurt and pain at the fight, or whether some inarticulate desolation implicit in Tolson, Radcliffe at that moment appeared unable to decide. He stood watching Tolson crying for some time; then, as he began to move towards him, Tolson turned abruptly away and disappeared in the crowded yard.

  The fight seemed to disturb Radcliffe far more than the persecution which had preceded it. He was absent from school for several days and when he returned it was with the remains of a slow, coughing illness. His unusual, ascetic face had a blue tinge around its temples. The bullying itself continued, but in less noticeable forms, and he managed to preserve his meagre existence by his own wiry resilience and strength.

  He began to pay Tolson a solemn yet distant attention which, through a kind of surly aloofness, was obscurely returned. Relaxed, Tolson was slow and methodical, with an almost premature muscularity: already he looked a little workman. There was something intensely likeable about him, a physical assurance that, when he worked, provoked people into smiling at his sturdy, self-absorbed independence. The leader of a large gang of boys, he monopolised a corner of the playground by an ominous, though sometimes amiable, use of his strength; and with a kind of lethargy, a slowness that exaggerated his physique into an almost parental indulgence, he would watch smilingly over the territory and the friendships that his remarkable strength had secured.

  It was only in the summer, when examinations were held to facilitate the division of the classes the following year, that Radcliffe made any direct approach.

  It was a hot afternoon, just after the school had been dismissed for the day. Tolson was playing with several boys in the deserted playground. He was always there. Although he had several brothers and sisters at the school, he never seemed to go home, just as his thin clothes never seemed to vary from winter to summer. And after watching for some time until he was sure he had been seen, Radcliffe approached him and asked him if he’d like to go home with him. Tolson at first didn’t answer. Suddenly arrested in his game, he frowned and looked away. Radcliffe was peculiarly confident, even adamant, and no longer shy. The demand was like the outcome of a long and familiar friendship.

  ‘Don’t you want to come?’ Radcliffe said. The building where he lived was a frequent subject of the children’s speculation.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tolson looked at him shrewdly, his first embarrassment giving way to curiosity, as if there were now some advantage to be gained. The boys were playing against the school wall, one line stooped down and the others running to leap on their backs. They were screaming and shouting. Tolson, red-faced and sweating, stood beside this undulating mass. He suddenly shouted at the boys, ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘Where to?’ One or two stopped playing but were quickly jolted back into the game.

  ‘They won’t come,’ Tolson said after a while.

  ‘You come, then.’

  ‘Nay, I don’t know.’

  Radcliffe looked at him darkly. It was like some loyalty he was being pressed into acknowledging; or a weakness.

  ‘Come on, Vic. Come on, stay here.’ The boys burst out laughing as the line of crouched figures began to break under the bucking weight of the jockeys. ‘Hi-jig-a-jig, who’s little pig? Hi-jig-a-jig, hi-cockalorum!’ The boys collapsed on their knees, laughing and fighting.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Radcliffe said. ‘We’ll go.’ He seemed afflicted by the noise.

  Tolson looked at his face as if recognising something that aroused his resentment as well as his curiosity. He suddenly punched Radcliffe violently on the shoulder, running past him as he cried, ‘All right, then … I’ll come for a bit.’

  Radcliffe turned and, suddenly anxious, hurried after him.

  The school stood at the foot of a vast escarpment crowded with the houses of a council estate. At the summit of its ridge, and raised over the symmetrical roofs like a huge and irregular extension of rock, was the black outline of the Place. One of a string of manor houses and halls which occurred every few miles in this northern part of the country, some still isolated amongst trees and pasture, others more frequently embedded in belts of factories and houses, it stood now like the detritus of a forgotten geological cycle. The estate, its twenty thousand inhabitants a small facet of forty unbroken miles of industry absorbing over three million people, had been built on the original park and farmland of the Place itself, and had in fact taken its name – Beaumont. Once the home of a prosperous family of cloth merchants and bankers whose business had gradually been displaced by the mammoth engineering and mining interests of the area, it had survived the first twenty years of the century as a farm, its main rooms and entrances shuttered, and a small section at the rear, along with its outbuildings, converted into living and working accommodation. The war confirmed the industrial domination of this landscape, and in 1921 the last of the farmland was sold.

  During the following decade the red houses of the estate crept slowly up the broad escarpment, absorbing first the stone cottages of a heathland village, then several towering oak trees and a wide avenue of elms, and finally surrounding the Place and its attendant church within a denuded perimeter of shrubbery and trees. The building had been retained by the original family under a trusteeship, and while the housing estate expanded and forced its way over the remaining green park and pasture, a caretaker was installed in the converted rooms at the rear to safeguard the structure from the curiosity of the growing army outside.

  Speculation about the building’s purchase, its imminent demolition, or its long-term conversion was dispelled when the old caretaker, under whose erratic supervision the Place had been gradually despoiled, was removed and a younger person introduced who began an immediate renovation and repair. All the more obvious signs of damage disappeared and no longer were the cavernous rooms and passages accessible to any casual intruder.

  It was in a solemn and speculative manner that Radcliffe now followed Tolson up the various crescents and avenues of the estate, the bigger boy rushing ahead as if it were his invitation that had inspired the visit. Then, as the chimneys of the Place came into view over the lower roofs of the houses, he began to lose his impetuosity and was soon walking quite slowly, glancing behind him occasionally with an almost disowning expression. As they passed a class-mate walking home on the opposite side of the road, Tolson suddenly called out to him and ran across. For a while they talked together confidingly, Tolson laying his arm on the boy’s shoulder and resting his weight against him.

  Radcliffe, walking parallel, watched them. Then seeing that the boy was to accompany them, he continued up the road alone. Tolson, his arm securely round his new companion, was content to walk some distance behind, deliberately slow. The two boys talked to one another quietly, then laughed. A moment later they began to kick stones, swinging from the single axis of their interlocked arms. Some distance down the road behind them an elderly bearded man was leading a large black dog.

  When they reached the twin black columns of the gateway they stopped indecisively and stood watching while Radcliffe pushed between the metal gates. Then Tolson followed. He pressed back the gates, stooping with his back to them. But they w
ere secured immovably, and only slightly apart, in the guttered debris from the drive, and after a moment’s frustrated activity he and his companion followed Radcliffe up the heavily shadowed track.

  In the treetops on either side rooks fluttered like rags, then sprang up, swaying, as the boys’ feet crunched on the firmer part of the drive. As the path suddenly turned to one side, Radcliffe glanced back and, apparently reassured by the look on Tolson’s face, hurried forward more expectantly. They came out into the sunshine on a gravel terrace at the front of the building.

  Tolson’s face turned upwards. He was sweating more heavily: perspiration streamed down his face, his eyes screwed against it and the strong light. His body had taken on a characteristically aggressive stance, his legs set firmly apart, his fists partly raised. Then his head sank back into his thick shoulders and turning slowly he gazed up at the full breadth of the crumbled façade.

  A familiar look of perplexity crossed his face, and suddenly flushing he glanced behind him reassuringly at the brick houses of the estate where he lived. Then he glanced at Radcliffe.

  Radcliffe was staring at him with an aloof, impassioned scrutiny, as if he’d simply brought him here to see his reaction. The other boy was forgotten. It was in that moment that Tolson’s look changed. It was immediately replaced by one of threat, an instant violence and force as if he’d been secretly abused. Radcliffe, with a sudden expression of alarm, glanced away.

  At the same moment the bolts shot back on the front entrance, a key turned, and the two heavy doors swung in slightly before one was pulled fully open. Radcliffe’s father came out, a tall, slender man who stood frowning, his hand to his forehead, staring out into the strong light.

  ‘Hello, Leonard. Have you brought your friends to look at the place?’ He came down the steps from the deep portico, his narrow, almost military face amusedly alight. He was in rolled shirt-sleeves as if he’d just interrupted some work.

  ‘Hello, Vic,’ he said as they were introduced. ‘Leonard’s told me a lot about you.’ He stooped slightly and held out his hand, which Tolson looked at confusedly and didn’t take. ‘Would you like to see around the inside of the monster?’

  ‘No. It’s all right,’ Tolson said with a thick accent. He backed stubbornly away, looking up at the bruised rock of the façade. Then, blushing deeply, he picked up a stone and threw it amongst the trees. Its crashes echoed against the branches.

  The other boy stood some distance away, watching. After a while Radcliffe’s father went in, vanishing like a magician into his cave, the bolts and locks slamming back into place. Radcliffe watched him go. Then he turned to the drive. Tolson and the other boy had disappeared.

  He hurried down the rutted track and soon saw Tolson plunging ahead, kicking at loose stones with short, powerful swings of either leg, tearing off twigs and flowers, and jumping over the low, stooped branches that encroached and almost blocked the drive. He was a small black animal leaping in the dark shadows, his arm intermittently flung up to send large stones crashing through the trees.

  The other boy waited in the road. He seemed in some way embarrassed. When Tolson reached the gate, he climbed onto it and dragged it to and fro within its brief arc of suspension; as Radcliffe came up he started swaying the gate on its rusted hinges, letting the weight of his body fall from it to be retrieved by his extended arms. Then he tugged at the eroded metal with a sudden burst of laughter. Radcliffe stood watching in silence, white and exhausted by Tolson’s energy.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then,’ he said.

  ‘Aye. When’ll it be?’

  Radcliffe stated a time, raising his hand as if precisely to indicate its significance. ‘At the end of the avenue.’

  Tolson dropped off the gate as though amused by the gesture itself, its minuteness. He squeezed through the narrow opening. ‘All right.’ He stood back a moment, watching Radcliffe through the lattice of the ironwork.

  Suddenly he laughed. ‘All right.’ He put his arm round the other boy’s shoulder, glanced at Radcliffe a moment longer then, pulling the boy slightly, ran off down the road. For a second Radcliffe could see through the bars their locked figures, running. Then they disappeared beyond the high wall.

  He turned back up the drive. The boys’ feet echoed under the heavy branches. ‘Radcliffe!… Radcliffe!… Radcliffe!’ His name was called several times. The rooks rose in the air, antagonised, cawing, and drifted restlessly over the heavy eaves of the house. The name crashed through the trees like a stone. When he went round the back of the Place and into the kitchen his father looked up expectantly. But Leonard had nothing to say.

  2

  At the age of thirty John Radcliffe had decided that his distaste for the society in which he lived was so complete that he could no longer reconcile himself to being a member of it. Since he observed himself to be in a minority in this respect and since he could not be sure that this was not merely a temperamental discontent, he saw that the most sensible thing to do, rather than to attempt to change such a society, was to withdraw from it altogether.

  Although unmarried he was by the standards of the world he despised a successful and resourceful man. After the severest hardship he had emerged from the First World War with a commissioned rank and, beginning a career in the lowliest clerical post of a firm of textile manufacturers, had attained after seven years a managerial position. He was fair-minded, scrupulously conscientious, extremely hard-working and in a situation at the age of thirty from which professionally he could expand in almost any direction he chose. He was also a religious man.

  This was something that had matured during the war when, in solitude, a superstitious fear of God had grown into a profound though naïve and strangely undemonstrative faith. He was not primarily a man who explored his own motives or who watched very closely what was going on in his own mind. Essentially a person who worked from an unquestioning faith in his instincts, he liked to deal with people and events rather than ideas; and his belief, though obscurely confessed, was laid out in simple Christian principles of charity, equality and good intentions. For a time he was a Socialist.

  The decision to give up his job came as a surprise, both to himself as well as to his few friends. He experienced a monstrous sense of helplessness that something inside him could have acted so conclusively. It was this helplessness that he had tried unsuccessfully to communicate to his puzzled associates. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he told his closest friend. ‘I feel I need an Absolute in life. And yet there’s nowhere I can find it. Except in the decision itself. That’s absolute.’

  For some reason, unlike his political acquaintances he tended to see society and the human condition as separate things.

  ‘But haven’t you heard of that equally quaint dialectic,’ his friend said, ‘that the desire for an Absolute is the symptom of someone who can’t tolerate relative, purely human values?’

  ‘Whatever society we create men will consistently abuse it. To struggle after such a transitory goal only makes me despair. And it is despair. I can do nothing about it.’ He watched his friend very carefully, not sure that he was not being ridiculed. ‘If nothing else, politics are no longer the way for intelligent men to govern their affairs.’

  Yet in the end he decided it was something deep in his nature which he could not explain. One thing was certain: the decision itself. It gave him hope.

  Two events coincided with this moment of his life: he suddenly married, and the trustees of the Beaumont estate circulated amongst the members of the family their concern at the rapid deterioration of the Place. To what extent these quite independent affairs influenced his decision he had no clear idea. By that instinctive process which seemed to have taken complete possession of his life, he married a woman slightly older than himself and whom he scarcely knew. She worked as a supervisor in one of the mills with which he had dealings, and ostensibly they had nothing in common except their single state and a practical experience of the manufacture of wool. Yet, almost com
placently, he felt the same reassurance about his marriage as he did about the decision to abandon his career.

  On a not dissimilar impulse he had written to the trustees of the estate offering his services as a resident caretaker, and after some further correspondence he had been granted the position. Beaumont had until then played no part in his life whatsoever. He had been there only once when, sometime after its conversion to a farm, his father had taken the entire family to see the place of his birth. John’s father had been one of three sons who had all spent their earliest years at the Place and who, long before its conversion, had left to live in considerably reduced circumstances and subsequently to enter the wool trade, with which the family had strong historical connections. The two brothers of John’s father had died childless but he himself had produced a family of ten children, one of whom had died very early of diphtheria and three of whom were killed almost within the same month in the First World War. He was, as John remembered him, a modest yet passionate man, reticent about his background of a decayed landed family, an amateur painter and antiquarian, and for a short period a J.P. Despite the number of his children, he had married late in life and had died at what appeared to be the height of his powers. Each one of his surviving children had gone quite separate ways, finding what livelihoods they could, and with only two had John maintained any sort of connection: with Austen, the next surviving eldest, and with the ‘baby’, Isabel.

  It was only on the morning that he and Stella travelled to Beaumont by train that the full strangeness of this venture occurred to him for the first time. He still retained his childhood memory of the Place seen through a long avenue of elms, a late autumn sunlight reflected in its numerous windows, something dark and even frightening against a pale and luminous sky. There had been a vast moorland crowded with sheep and, beyond, a park across which were scattered great trees. The Place had seemed like an animal crouched at the summit of the hill. Scarcely that: something he could not describe. There was the black stonework, the smell of damp stone, and the walls that had seemed so tall that they must fall down. And somewhere, whether a statue or a carved relief, a large and fragmentary stone figure. It was as if he had sensed his father’s own disappointment with such a deserted monument, as if there were something obscene in its desolation. As he sat in the train and tried to recollect this impression, he realised that in all his thinking about the Place the building itself had never developed for him beyond an abstraction: one which fitted exactly, however, into some central vortex of his mind.