Radcliffe Read online

  He recalled the moment of his life when, after four years in the war and the death of his three elder brothers, he had met his mother again for the first time. On a heavy, clouded morning he had hurried towards her familiar figure where it waited in the shadows of a station only to discover a face he scarcely recognised. It was as if the skin had been torn away to leave a bare and lifeless armature of bone; something to remind him derisively of what he had once known and loved. He had never forgiven her her suffering, that vulnerability which deprived him of consolation and of pride. He had wished then that he had died with his brothers. In a peculiar way, he had never forgiven himself for his survival.

  Yet, rather than the Place itself, it was the houses so closely surrounding it that sent a preliminary pulse through his body, like the confirmation of an indistinct yet grotesque premonition. As the taxi slowly climbed the crescents of the estate, passing over what he still vaguely recognised as undulating moorland, a remote sense of desolation stirred in him. At the summit of the first rise he had seen, stretching across what had once been the tree-strewn park, an endless vista of houses crushed so closely together in this steepening perspective that their walls appeared to merge into one another, overlapping, compressed so intensely that nowhere was the ground itself visible. Here and there above the matted roofs rose the broken heads of a few remnant trees. It had a bewildering and ominous familiarity.

  Only as the taxi moved over the last rise and the Place came into view did this sense of recognition merge into the transparent image of something he had witnessed before. It had been at the beginning of the war when, arriving at the Front, the truck he was travelling in had breasted a steep rise and for the first time he saw below him the trampled plain of a battlefield. It had been a bright morning after a night of heavy rain, there was no one else in sight. Numerous crescents of earth flowed into one another, interlocked; craters erupted within craters, the swollen volutes of clay frozen in restlessness. This turgid convolution of blackened earth was interspersed with the white fragments of trees, giant splinters that traced the percussive ghosts of innumerable explosions. A thin wreath of smoke rose in the centre, straight and unwavering in the still air. Beyond, on the opposite ridge, the rock had burst through this ruptured skin and lay like a dark bone glistening in the sun. Everything was moist and translucent. Now, as they approached the Place, he saw this bony structure protruding from the bricky confusion of the houses.

  Beaumont had been a large building. At one time three wings had extended from its rear, its northern side; but with the renovation of this section to suit first the functions of a farm then of a caretaker, they had been removed. The Place was now rather like a body deprived of its limbs, the scars of amputation still visible but shielded by thick and extensive vegetation. There was an air of concealment about its mutilated frame, a giant hiding in a forest with his head still projecting aggressively above the trees. It had long since lost any architectural significance it might have once possessed; it was a simple if enigmatic protrusion from the houses of the estate, an incongruous secretion of rock, forced up, the volcanic apex to the restless escarpment.

  It was the black cliff of the main, southern façade that first confronted them. Here the long rows of shuttered windows were relieved by a massive pediment set asymmetrically from the centre and running to the ground in four heavy pilasters. To the left of the pediment the flank was extended by an older building, the uniformity interrupted by a large oriel window which grew like a blister on the fabric of the house. It was surrounded at irregular intervals by several heavily eroded mullion windows. Here a balustrade replaced the cornice of the principal part of the house. The entire stonework was blackened, flaking yellow in parts, as if it had been subjected to long and immense heat. It seemed burned, like some strangely resistant ash.

  Afterwards John quickly forgot the nervous desolation of the first weeks. What remained fixedly within his memory was the remarkable way in which his wife had adapted herself to the bare rooms, to the cold, to the smell of damp and decay. The agent, spending the first day showing them over the building, scarcely concealed beneath his gloomy assessment of its condition his profounder distrust of their presence. Their rooms were at the rear where a wing of dilapidated farm buildings projected from the main body of the Place, enclosing a muddy, deeply-rutted yard flanked on its only exposed side by a row of trees. Several of the ground and first floor windows which overlooked this area had been painted, and a door of incongruously recent design stood at the kitchen entrance. It was through this that, as they arrived, their furniture was about to be carried. In the upper stories, and further along the façade, innumerable broken windows exaggerated the context of decay.

  Their rooms comprised a large kitchen on the ground floor, lit by three square windows and adjoined by a much smaller room which the previous occupant had used for storage. Miscellaneous tools and cleaning equipment and several large and irregular sections of panelling lay on the floor. From the kitchen, which had apparently served the full requirements of the Place during its occupation, rose a narrow winding staircase leading to the first floor. Here a tall sash window at the side of the building illuminated a broad landing from which opened out eight rooms, four overlooking the yard and four, securely fastened, overlooking the front. The landing terminated in a wooden partition that occupied the whole width from floor to ceiling. In the centre was a door secured by a multitude of locks and bolts. This led into the main body of the building beyond.

  Gradually John had set about the work of restoration, employing builders to repair the broken sections of the high wall surrounding the denuded grounds, and a watchman to discourage the intrusion of children. Eventually he secured all the possible entrances to the building itself, repairing the windows and protecting them with new, white-painted shutters. He threw himself into the work unthinkingly, thankful that the sense of desolation could be alleviated by physical activity. Then, when the last of the builders and the last joiners had gone, and when a kind of security had been achieved, he began to look inwards on his predicament.

  His sense of disenchantment, aroused initially by the question, ‘What am I working for: why isn’t there a unity between what I feel and what I do?’ tended to be stimulated by things which he didn’t really believe. His emotions were aroused very easily by generalities: by the Church, by newspapers, by politics and crowds, so that whenever he was confronted by any aspect of these he could never prevent an almost hysterical desire to escape from springing up inside him. He began to see himself as a synthesis of negative assertions, too fair-minded to be partisan, too sensitive to be political, too intelligent to subject the variety of life to a dogma. Yet from none of these sentiments could he extract any sense of reassurance. Newspapers were puerile, the Church was impotent, politics were corrupt, people were bestial: but how could any of these things matter? The greatest enemy was oneself.

  It was into this void that the Place had seemed to fit. It was as if the building itself represented a complete abdication; and to the extent that he struggled now to preserve and secure it from outside interference. During this period, now almost a year since his arrival, he had begun to see an increasing amount of his brother.

  Austen lived just across the valley in town. Unmarried, the manager of a furniture shop which divided its wares tactfully between antiquarian and contemporary extremes, he was a man of some fashion and taste, a virginal dandy with a parochial wit. From Austen he received a kind of help which, though nothing practical, consisted of something more than advice and criticism: an almost mordant, self-amused complicity.

  ‘Are you content with all this?’ Austen had asked him one day as he watched his brother working on the floor of one of the larger rooms.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you do justify it.’

  ‘I suppose so. But perhaps I won’t stay here long. In another year I might well go back to industry.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh?’ John stood
up, laying the hammer down and going to the window of the room. It overlooked the vast sweep of the estate. ‘And why not?’

  ‘Well, for one thing …’ Austen began to smile as though, in this instance, he were concerned more with his own feelings than those of John. ‘You’re such a Cromwell. Well, no. Perhaps that is ambitious. But do you know what I mean? Giants of self-restraint and melancholy strength.’

  ‘Is that how you see me? Some sort of majestic puritan.’

  ‘I think so.’ Austen looked round at the empty room with a vaguely arrogant expression, yet still furtively amused.

  ‘Perhaps it might mean something in one sense,’ John said after a while. ‘I mean, at the back of my mind there’s always lurking this ambition for some sort of complete action. One that exists simultaneously in both worlds. Someone who acts politically and religiously in the same event.’

  ‘And where does one collect such a convenient double harness?’

  ‘Nowhere. The world’s grown empty of such men. And such opportunities.’ He suddenly looked up at Austen in surprise. ‘Why! Are you looking for some such militancy in me?’

  ‘No. But there have been evangelists before, despairing of their vision. Singers without a song.’ And when John did not answer he added, ‘Cromwell, however, could act. He was the complete puritan. The one whose guilt matched his ambitions.’

  John suddenly returned to his work, retrieving his hammer and stooping down as though unsure now whether he was being provoked or merely ridiculed.

  At about this time Leonard was born.

  At first John had thought that he had married Stella to appease, if only in his own mind, that class by whom he felt opposed but for whom he had a strong and even passionate sympathy. As an officer, and later as a manager, he had looked upon the difference between himself and the men he controlled as a class difference. Yet he felt instinctively apart from them, isolated. Only gradually did it occur to him that this difference was more one of temperament than of social instinct.

  During the war he had been responsible for a grotesque accident. One night a large group of women and children and several old men had stumbled into an ambush he had carefully prepared, and they had immediately come under heavy and prolonged fire. The following morning, when the slaughter was revealed, he had been alarmed not so much by the spectacle itself as by the nature of his own feelings. There seemed to be no sense of shock at all, but rather a profound irritation at his men’s dejection and bitterness. That they could view such a terrible event as an accident enraged him. If in his own mind he discovered in it the dignity of a judgement, they themselves saw it simply as a confirmation of their own destitution, the meaninglessness not only of war but of life itself. He hated their despair; he loathed their suffering. They graced nothing with divine intention. He pitied them. In the end, from this pity grew his affection for them.

  At first, then, he thought that he had been drawn to Stella through a similar sympathy, as though to be reprieved from the loneliness of his own faith by one of ‘them’. But as they worked together in the Place he discovered that what he had first taken to be her ‘working-classness’ – her narrow-mindedness, even snobbishness, the way she saw people condemned by their behaviour – was in fact her religious judgement of people. She was as much at home in the austere atmosphere of this manor house as he was himself – even more so: her asceticism was expressed more directly in physical things, in work, in cleanliness, in the management of their day to day affairs. He found some peace in this revelation. Then, when Leonard was born, he was filled with dismay as though, through having a son, he realised that none of this could be true.

  He was thrown into confusion. Was all this, then, an elaborate charade? For a reason he couldn’t understand, he felt that Leonard was less the outcome than the purpose of his retreat.

  ‘What do you mean when you describe people … me, for example, as a puritan?’ he had asked Austen.

  ‘It’s really the description of a kind of temperament, a basic temperament,’ Austen stressed, watching his brother very carefully. ‘I mean that kind which is always concerned with a particular sort of guilt.’

  ‘Guilt? What guilt?’

  ‘To have to stoop to something so physical in order to propagate oneself in God’s likeness, or any likeness at all, is the one indignity a puritan can scarcely tolerate. That they are physically vulnerable – that’s what puritans hate. Their self-effacement, their stoicism come from that, a contempt of the physical. No!’ he insisted as John tried to interrupt. ‘They despise their bodies. Their temporality.’

  ‘Where then does your promiscuity come from?’ John said angrily since his brother, a confirmed bachelor, had a reputation as a seducer. ‘How can you cut yourself off so completely from me?’

  ‘The only difference between us is that you submit to it whereas I choose to deride it,’ Austen said slowly. ‘My promiscuity, as you call it, is still a pathetic thing. Its little nucleus, its energy still springs from the same guilt. To that extent I might just as well be celibate as deny it. Or like you. Coming here not because the world smells, but because your own flesh stinks. To propagate. To propagate yourself in private. Poor Leonard. He’s your confession.’

  Although John never believed this – there was after all, he thought, not only a mischievous superficiality in Austen’s dandyism but an unrecognised envy and resentment – it did affect his attitude towards his son. In fact, now having a child, he felt very much like returning to his old job and to a more normal way of life. But something held him back. It might have been Leonard himself. He was a tiny child and, despite his mother’s robust health, his birth had been a complicated and tedious affair. For a year his life was in doubt. It was like someone resenting an intrusion: there seemed to be a resistance to life in that slight, straggly and perpetually flushed body, a tenacity almost greater than the will to breathe. For days he would vomit his food, crying whenever he was touched as though refusing to accept any sustenance or reassurance.

  Yet, from within this prolonged and endless agitation, his eyes peered out with a curious, almost calm expression. In their large, withdrawn darknesses John often thought he had identified some incoherent and inexplicable reproach, and occasionally almost something that could be a sense of condolence. It was as though something separate, profounder and more intimidating was contained within that nervous and resentful body. Then, when Leonard was about a year old – as though it were the final exasperated residue of this struggle – he was afflicted by slight convulsions. Almost like fits of anger and frustration – a deep flushing of his face and trembling of his limbs – they gradually became more violent, making him gasp breathlessly and provoking swollen rashes on his skin. John and Stella became more desperate. It was at this point that the three of them underwent a disturbing experience.

  John had just become used to the enigmatic sounds of the building, the distant, anonymous movements in the empty rooms, the perpetual creaking of the woodwork, and often at night he lay awake listening to the throbbing of steam engines in the tunnel that ran beneath the escarpment. He had gone out one morning, soon after their arrival at Beaumont, and walked over the estate to where the escarpment terminated in a sudden cliff face. It dropped down from a row of back gardens in a series of huge orange and black wedges of rock. It was here that the stone for the Place had been quarried. At its foot a broad railway track curved into the cliff, the tunnel-mouth almost a natural feature of that stony face, the rails like slender strands of nerve. The soft pounding of the engines at night had a heart-like beat which, as he listened, united stone and rock within a single, recurring pulse.

  One night they were awakened by a huge and reverberating crash. It was as if a blow had been struck massively against the outside wall of the house, yet muffled, like a stone buried in cloth. It shook the entire structure. For a moment neither of them knew what to do. They listened to the sound of the flaked plaster falling around them. Then the building was struck again, a heavy, boom
ing vibration. It was as if a part of the house had collapsed. The baby cried out from its cot at the foot of the bed. As John sprang up a third and more violent crash shook the room and they heard somewhere the thud of falling masonry. Leaving Stella to soothe the child, John took a lamp, unlocked the partition and went into the Place. The air was cold from a heavy frost and there was a smell slightly more pungent and more stifling than that of dust. Yet apart from a broken frieze of plaster, there was no further sign of damage. He returned to their room to find Leonard in the throes of a violent fit. It was only several hours later, after John had hurried out to fetch a doctor, that his tiny body was finally calmed.

  The following morning the agent provided an explanation of the occurrence. A series of minor faults ran through the escarpment and had been disturbed by the construction of the railway tunnel and later by the mining in the area. They had a common focus in the strata immediately beneath the Place. Whenever a shift of rock occurred, the building absorbed the sound and gave it a peculiar resonance within its own eccentric structure. Although John was somewhat reassured by this explanation, he nevertheless soon found that he was relating the event portentously to Leonard’s birth. He despised such a mystical interpretation, yet knew that Stella also saw in it a superstitious significance which she would never admit to him. The need in him to interpret this as an omen, however, gradually disappeared, to be replaced by the recognition that he still retained a desire that Leonard should be portentous. He even began to look on his son with an almost evangelical zeal, as though in his tiny body and withdrawn eyes he might discover a significance and a meaning which had so far eluded him.