A Serious Man Page 3

  ‘You said that the last time,’ she replied, to which I instantly responded, ‘I’m surprised that you remember.’

  ‘I remember a lot of things,’ she said, and when I enquired, ‘Such as?’ replied, ‘About your reputation.’

  ‘For doing what?’ I asked.

  ‘Everything, as far as I can make out, that’s reprehensible.’

  I drew her closer: I felt the tautness of her back and the heat that surged between us, and recalled that this was the girl I was destined to marry. (‘Destined by whom?’ I mentally enquired, to which, then as now – and particularly on that lantern-lighted evening – came no reply).

  We sat the next dance out: prompted by the pastel-coloured lanterns that glowed from the darkening trees, I remarked, ‘I know that landscape well: every hill and dell, every beck and pond, every wood and hedge.’

  ‘I live beyond those hills,’ she said. She gestured to the south. ‘A place called Ardsley.’

  ‘What does your father do?’ I asked.

  ‘He owns,’ she said, ‘a lot of lorries.’

  ‘What do the lorries carry?’ I asked.

  After a while – not sure, I discovered later, how precisely to describe her father – she said, ‘Principally coal.’

  ‘A haulage contractor,’ I suggested.

  ‘I suppose he is,’ she said, disinclined to discuss it. ‘I hear,’ she went on, ‘from Harris,’ (our mutual friend who, I noticed, had not been invited to the party) ‘that you’re going to be an artist.’

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ Within the constriction of the garden bench, she glanced at me directly. ‘There isn’t much in it, if,’ she went on, ‘you wish to earn a living. Particularly,’ she paused, ‘if you haven’t any money.’

  ‘I intend to get a job,’ I said.

  ‘And give up,’ she said, ‘your education.’

  ‘What’s education,’ I enquired, ‘if it hasn’t already directed me to art?’ A moment later, eliciting no response, I added, ‘It’s a calling. Like Paul on the Road to Damascus. Three years ago,’ I went on, ‘I was sitting in the sixth-form classroom when, in the midst of reading Verlaine’s “Ode to Autumn”, it occurred to me that art is the highest form of human knowledge. I saw the whole of my life before me: a house, a wife, a job, a car: a set of rails that ran as far as I could see. At that instant I decided to dedicate my life to doing something that no one else could do.’

  ‘Weren’t you going to university?’ she asked.

  ‘I was,’ I said. ‘I’ve given it up.’ Gesturing at our peers, I added, ‘They’re going on to something they know and can already see.’

  ‘You’ll end up in the gutter,’ she suddenly declared. (‘Nothing,’ she might have said, ‘challenges me so much as someone who forsakes their friends, their family, common sense (the destiny chosen for him) in order to pursue what everyone recognises to be an impossible dream’; it was, in short, I suspected, that preliminary lack of faith that brought us both together).

  ‘Do you feel inspired?’ she added.

  ‘It’s hidden,’ I said, ‘by other things.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Practicalities.’ I paused. ‘Unlike science, industry, or any of the professions, art is useless. You can do it for three hundred and sixty-five days of the year and no one owes you a penny. It’s the next best thing,’ I was about to add, ‘to God,’ but, for reasons which only now I am beginning to understand, I substituted, ‘love.’

  ‘Are you coming down?’

  The sound of Lottie and Glenda came from the living-room below, (and of Mrs Otterman from the kitchen: the converging domestic interests of food and television).

  When I said, ‘Do you remember that party at Allgrave, the last Saturday of the last term of my last year at King Edward’s?’ I saw my own confusion mirrored in Etty’s face – in reality, Bea’s face, for, though she had my hair, dark and prematurely greying, she had her mother’s features – and added, ‘I visited it not long ago and the view was obscured, where not by trees, by speculative building. I used to camp out there. Not at Allgrave, which is on the edge of town, but across the valley at Broughton Wood.’

  I was about to continue, ‘Broughton Springs was the most magical camp-site in the world,’ but suddenly enquired, in order to distract her, ‘Don’t you use this room?’ for she had found me not in my bedroom but in the back upstairs room which Isabella, at one time, had used as a study.

  She looked at me, for a moment, as Bea had looked at me on the evening of the Allgrave party: like someone observing an accident which they were not altogether sure had taken place (‘Was that a leg? Was that an arm? Was that a body?’).

  ‘It used to be Gran’s. She came in here,’ I said, ‘to have her thoughts.’

  ‘I suppose, too,’ Etty said, ‘to write her diaries.’

  ‘Diaries?’

  ‘Mummy has them now, of course.’

  ‘I never knew,’ I said, ‘she kept a diary.’

  ‘In a lot of Grandpa’s ledgers. The ones he used for his trucks. She always had,’ she said, ‘such terrible writing,’ and added, ‘She only kept them at the time she married. And when you and Mum were growing up.’

  The floor was bare: other than a cupboard, there was no sign that anyone had occupied the room at all: it overlooked the stone-flagged yard at the back of the house – with Charlie’s shooting-brake standing by the garage – and, beyond the yard’s enclosing hedge, a lawn which, presently unmown, had been given over at one time to a tennis court: a thicker, darker growth of grass showed where the limed white lines had run. A sharply-ascending slope, engulfed by trees, obscured the view on either side, save where, at an angle, the tower of the church – sooty, square, a battlemented crest – and the stone-slabbed roof of the rectory were visible over an intervening wall: tall, buttressed, bowed, its brickwork marked by salt and long, horizontal fissures, it was here, in the time of the Wintertons, allegedly, peaches and apricots grew.

  Here, by the presently uncurtained window, Isabella had had her desk: there, by the soot-lined fireplace with its marble surround, she had had her couch and, facing the couch, her chintz-covered chair. On the walls she had had her books – mostly unread, and in glass-fronted cases – and the sketches (which she’d framed) of the house, done by myself.

  ‘She was immensely beautiful,’ I said, and added, ‘Your mother,’ under the absurd illusion I was talking to Bea.

  ‘She’ll be glad to hear it,’ Etty said. ‘Though a bit late in the day, I should think, to tell her,’ and, seeing no alternative, took my arm. ‘Come down and have some tea,’ she added.

  With no resemblance to Etty – round, moon-like faces with dark-irised, moon-like eyes (‘The epitome of Charlie,’ Etty remarked proudly after each of their births), the children were sitting on the couch on which, thirty-five years before, Isabella and I had sat watching the then black-and-white, now coloured television screen.

  Although the couch confronted the fireplace, with its marble pilasters and cornice and its iron grate, its black-leaded bars curled upwards like the ends of a moustache, the children were sitting sideways, the unshod feet of the one impressed against the stockinged legs of the other.

  ‘Here’s Grandpa,’ Etty said, and though the youngest one glanced up and the eldest frowned (and neither spoke) their gazes, dream-like at this intrusion, moved swiftly back to the screen.

  ‘Back to the table,’ Etty said, since both of them were chewing, the youngest, Glenda, with the fragments of a bun in her hand and on her knee.

  ‘I’ve finished, Mummy,’ Lottie said.

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ Etty said, in a manner indistinguishable from that of Isabella.

  ‘I have, Mummy.’ Swallowing first, Glenda opened her mouth.

  ‘I don’t want that chair made sticky,’ Etty said.

  ‘It is sticky,’ Lottie said. ‘It was sticky when I got here.’

  Both the children had thick, black hair, with only a hint of br
own, or red – the faintest legacy from Bea; they had, however, a pallid skin on which, in certain lights, could be glimpsed a scattering of freckles: in a similarly favourable light I have, from time to time, detected in their eyes a flickering of green amidst the brown – nothing, for instance, that was visible now – and not at all, of course, from a distance. They had, I had always been relieved to see (in light of the taciturnity of their father) something of a temper, an unmistakable Kellsian or Isabellian trait.

  With a cry, ‘Oh, Mum!’ they descended from the couch and scampered to the hall. From the kitchen came Mrs Otterman’s, ‘Something more to eat, then, loves?’ followed by a wail and, in unison, ‘We’ve got to wash our hands!’

  ‘The bathroom would be better,’ came the dutiful response, but already the feet were scampering back (followed by, from Mrs Otterman, ‘What about the tap!’) and, the door slammed back, breathless, red-faced, the two figures once more were sitting on the couch.

  ‘Are those hands dry?’

  ‘Yes, Mum!’ (Eyes on the screen.)

  ‘You’ve scarcely had time to wash them.’

  ‘We have!’ (Unison again.)

  Etty would sit there, in the old days, on Isabella’s knee: Corcoran, who, despite his lorries with their governors which, much to his satisfaction, restricted his otherwise reckless drivers’ speeds, had an aversion to ‘technological development’ (hence his retention of his shire horses and his four-wheeled carts long after everyone else had given them up): he similarly resisted ‘the television’: ‘Everyone has got one,’ Isabella said. ‘Then that’s all the damn more reason why we shouldn’t,’ he replied. As for colour, it wasn’t, he protested, ‘what you see’, and when Isabella pointed out – as she was inclined to when her wishes were frustrated – ‘everyone’s got one’ and that colours ‘could be seen outside,’ he responded, ‘Maybe colours can, but not the ones in theer (I prefer the black and white).’ Even in those days, the second generation of television watchers, the advisability of watching prompted the same exhortations to filial or domestic duty.

  ‘Did it do much harm?’ I asked.

  ‘Harm?’ Etty sat beside me on an adjoining couch. ‘I never watched like these two. If I let them,’ she went on, ‘they’d be in front of it all night.’

  ‘We rationed it, at their age, to an hour and a half each evening,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ she said. ‘Why,’ she went on, ‘they scarcely look at a book,’ and, indicating the younger of the two, continued, ‘I don’t even know if Glenda can read.’

  Short, white ankle socks on slippered feet, stocky calves and bulbous thighs, a tiny skirt, a jumpered chest, a pale, broad-featured, sensitive face: at the mention of her name she turned in my direction.

  ‘You used to equate it with eating plastic food,’ Etty added.

  ‘When you were older,’ I replied.

  ‘The arguments we had. Far longer than we used to watch.’ Her eyes, too, were fixed on the screen. ‘You and Mum.’

  ‘Look where she is now,’ I said.

  The curtains on the windows of the room had not been drawn: visible outside, a frieze of starkly-silhouetted branches were sheaved against a darkening sky: it was through the second of the two uncurtained windows, furthest from the door, that I’d first seen Isabella: sitting where Harriet, her grandchild, and I were sitting now – sewing, her head bowed, her face shadowed from the light of an overhead lamp, glancing up as she heard our step (Bea bringing me home, for the first time, to the house), and perceiving not so much my face, she told me later, as a mask, half-lighted, gazing from outside.

  ‘You could look at it,’ Etty said, ‘the other way around.’ Withdrawing her gaze from the screen, she added, ‘What good, for instance, does it do?’

  I was, however, recalling that journey back from the Allgrave party, stopping in Fernley (where, ironically, Harris lived), Otterton getting out to buy a drink and, finding the off-licence closed, coming back with fish and chips (having, with characteristic generosity, offered to drive both Bea and I home). He, with the toothsome Jenny, sat in front, Bea and I behind, each of us eating what – leaning in the car window to present each of us with a steaming packet – he had presciently described as ‘our final meal together’.

  I never saw Otterton again: over the years I heard (on the radio) and read (in a newspaper) accounts of him ‘on loan’ to one of the Arab states (a major in one, a lieutenant-colonel in another).

  ‘You in your attic,’ he had said on that final occasion, ‘painting pictures, me,’ he had added, ‘God knows where,’ gazing through the windscreen, his and Jenny’s heads silhouetted against the light of the village street.

  It was, or so it seemed, only moments later that I first saw Ardsley – or, more specifically, the door in the wall – and received, after a rebuke, my first, if peremptory goodnight kiss from Bea.

  ‘Off to your room,’ Etty said as the programme came to an end and, getting to her feet, turned off the television. ‘You can see a half hour later,’ she added, ‘when Lottie has done her homework and I’ve heard Glenda read her book.’

  ‘I haven’t any homework!’ Lottie cried.

  ‘I’ll set you some, in that case,’ Etty said.

  ‘Oh, Mummy!’ And, climbing on my knee, my daughter’s eldest child enquired, ‘Will you tell us a story, Grandpa?’

  ‘I want you both,’ Etty said, ‘to read to yourselves.’

  ‘Glenda can’t read, Mummy,’ Lottie said.

  ‘She can.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Glenda said (still ensconced on the couch).

  ‘I’ve heard her,’ Etty said.

  ‘You’ve just told Grandpa she can’t,’ Lottie said.

  ‘A lot,’ Etty said. ‘But she can read some.’

  ‘Oh, do tell us a story, Grandpa!’ Lottie placed her arm around my neck: in such a way her great-grandmother, in the most improbable places, would make her first approach.

  ‘Grandpa,’ Etty said, ‘can tell you one before you go to bed.’

  ‘Will you, Grandpa!’ Glenda, crossing the space between us, climbed on my knee as well.

  ‘Whenever your mother says you’re ready,’ I announced.

  ‘Goody, goody!’ Lottie said, removing her arm from around my neck (like Isabella, too, once she’d got what she’d wanted), adding, ‘It’s got to be one that frightens!’

  ‘It’ll be one that sends you to sleep. Up to your room,’ their mother said, yet it was Etty who was descending from my knee and it was Isabella who was being beseeched, ‘Will you tell us a story, Gran?’ and the smile of Bea’s mother was turning on me as she informed them, ‘If your father lets me.’

  ‘Oh, do, Daddy,’ Etty has said and, covertly, two hours later, as Etty and her sister go to bed, I am standing at the bedroom door watching Isabella stoop to kiss their cheeks – as, moments later, outside the door, her head is raised and I stoop to kiss her mouth.

  In the car, approaching Ardsley, I had said, ‘Do you think I can see you again?’ and Bea had replied – her skirt fortuitously drawn above her knee, the consequence of our movements as we cleared the interior of the papers from the fish and chips, ‘If you like,’ adding, as my hand enclosed the skin above her stockinged thigh, ‘I’m not that kind of girl,’ drawing down her skirt with – although sitting sideways I couldn’t be sure – a great deal of indignation.

  ‘Where shall we meet?’ I asked, while Otterton, restricted by his driving, murmured endearments to Jenny in the seat in front.

  ‘I’m going away,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’ I asked, in some surprise (could someone, I reflected, go away after receiving the sort of confidences I’d confided earlier that night?).

  ‘France,’ she said. ‘The Riviera. We go there every year.’

  An immeasurable gap – we weren’t, since her previous rebuke, even holding hands – opened up between us.

  ‘You ought to go,’ she added. ‘If you ever get the chance.’

  I be
gan to suspect she had listened to little if anything I had told her: how could an artist, about to take leave of his friends (his parents, his school, his past) contemplate the expense of going overseas? I hadn’t even had the money that evening to pay for the fish and chips. (‘On me,’ Otterton had announced, leaning in the car knowing I was broke. ‘It’s our final meal together.’)

  ‘How long are you going for?’ I asked.

  ‘Six weeks. Sometimes,’ she went on, ‘it’s nearer eight.’

  She might, in the light of our predicament, have said, ‘Six years’: there was little chance, after all that time, and the distractions of the Riviera, that she’d remember who I was.

  ‘I could write to you,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ she said and, with the interior light turned on above our heads, and with a pencil borrowed from Otterton, and a piece of paper from the fish and chips, she wrote down her address.

  ‘Will you write back?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I will,’ she said (she hadn’t asked for mine).

  ‘Who are you staying with?’ I asked.

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘Of Daddy’s. He has lots of friends down there. We sometimes go at Christmas.’

  My vision of a future with the daughter of a man who spent both the winter and the summer on the Riviera vanished with the sound of Otterton running the car across the kerb and Bea announcing, ‘That doorway over there,’ – a green-painted door, like the door to a house, let into a high stone wall.

  We kissed, perfunctorily, goodnight.

  ‘I’ll write to you,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll look forward to hearing from you,’ she said, and the door was opened and I was given my first glimpse of the path which led, beneath the shadowed mass of trees and through pools of light, to the hidden house above.

  4

  ‘Kids in?’

  Charlie had come in: an ebullient man, he rubbed his hands against the cold and went to the fire, acquainted himself with the fact that it wasn’t lit, and, turning, with the same cheeriness to me, went on, ‘Had time to find your way about?’