Flight into Camden Read online

  Although I was only ten yards away, he was so intent on searching the pavements that he didn’t catch sight of me. He seemed to look through me. He stepped one way, then another, as the circulating traffic interrupted his view. I was frightened he would not see me.

  When he eventually recognized me I walked stiffly towards him, aware of some sort of deceit.

  ‘You got my letter, then. I hope you didn’t mind too much.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I couldn’t think of any other way, not knowing your address. I tried to catch your brother but he wasn’t in the building.’ He was looking at me with the same offended stare as when he’d left me at the Miners’ Gala.

  ‘I’ve come, haven’t I?’

  ‘That’s the main thing,’ he said.

  We walked across the square – the main square of the city. He held his hand against my back as we crossed the roads.

  Prince Regent Road was empty. ‘This is where I used to make some friends,’ he said as though he wanted to provoke me. He pointed to the Victorian mansion of Youth House up the road, opposite the Education Offices. ‘I haven’t been here for some time, as I told you in the letter. So it all might be a bit rusty.’ The road was off the bus route, and in the evening it was very quiet and empty, the wooden blocks of its surface streaked with oil and grease from the daytime parking.

  The rivet-studded door was open and Howarth led the way up a short flight of stone steps to the small assembly hall.

  Seven or eight people stood about. A slim man with a crew cut and a clerical collar was pushing tubular steel chairs into a rough circle below the stage at the far end of the room. They all looked up as we entered, and nodded briefly. But apart from the clergyman they carried on talking.

  The young parson stared at Howarth and myself with a curious open frankness, not in the least ashamed. Then suddenly aware of his own interest he broke into a pleasant smile and said, ‘Hello, Howarth. You’re a stranger these days. We’re just waiting for Ben.’

  Howarth nodded. He didn’t reply. It was as if he wanted me to notice the distance he kept between himself and these people. Aware of this as an intrusion, the group of talkers glanced up occasionally to the corner of the room where Howarth had taken me to sit. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, looking up to smile at me. He made them uneasy.

  They each had at least one book. The young clergyman went round the circle of chairs, straightening them unnecessarily, examining one or two as if they were in doubtful repair, standing up to push his hand through his short wiry hair as if the sensation both delighted and bewildered him. When he glanced at me it was with the same unaffected curiosity, as if he felt a sincere right to know why I was there. Howarth was relaxed by it.

  ‘Did you used to come here often?’ I said.

  ‘Fairly often. There used to be more people here then …’ He almost stood up, but instead leaned back in his chair as a tall, heavily-built man with a bright pink face and thick blond hair strode into the room. A large off-white macintosh flapped about his muscular body.

  His arrival caused the group to split up. He shook someone’s hand: several people took their places in the neat circle of chairs.

  As if the arrival of the leader were enough to dispel his own shyness, the young clergyman came across to us. ‘Aren’t you coming to sit over here with us?’ he asked. ‘My name’s Johnnie Fawcett.’ He held out his hand to me. Howarth introduced me as Margaret as we shook hands.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Fawcett said, as though it were something he’d expected.

  We followed him across the room and Howarth whispered clumsily in my ear, ‘He takes all this seriously, so don’t offend him.…’

  Fawcett had reddened. He sat stiffly in his chair on the other side of Howarth.

  It was the meeting of a literary group that I remembered having seen advertised just outside the bus station. I already sensed Howarth’s motive in bringing me here, and Ben, as if sensing the same, was staring at Howarth with a look of resentment. His macintosh, thrown over a chair, spoke of a rural leisure, a military tradition, a squirearchy in fact, rather than the council house, his mother’s stall on the market, and his father’s shunting engine, which were, Howarth afterwards insisted, the actual background from which he’d come. I, too, resented Howarth for bringing me here. It was as if he wanted to ridicule me as one of them.

  Howarth’s loneliness had this degree of destructiveness in it. I felt anxious about how deep it went. He had turned it on this group of conscience-stricken artisans unnecessarily, wanting me to applaud. He was careless with it, and small.

  I ignored him. I listened intently to the poems that were being read and discussed, the work of a famous writer of the Midlands. I shared a copy with a small, large-eyed woman, whose nicotined forefinger traced the lines as they were being read. She grunted agreements. Her eyes were strained and bulbous with effort.

  Yet Howarth was not prepared to allow me to escape.

  He shared Fawcett’s book. He listened patiently as Fawcett himself read out one of the poems with a moving intonation and intensity. It was like a prayer. His voice was full of redness and flowering, the subject of the poem. Then a middle-aged man was reading a poem about a woman’s breasts and the pleasure of sleeping between them, when Howarth, as if to deride the earnestness with which they accepted this as a type of repose befitting the intelligent, laughed.

  The reader looked up. He was hesitant: he’d been reading in a dull monotonous voice. They all looked at Howarth. There was some sort of snobbery involved. He told them briefly of a reference that this poet had made to sleeping with his mother. I watched the page. The woman’s finger had slurred the lines. One or two people laughed.

  Then a young black-haired man, thick-set like Ben himself, read several of his own poems. They discussed them. They were about factory chimneys and slag heaps and collieries.

  When we came out it was into one of the nights that had been described in the last poems: the darkening buildings, the bulging shape of the city and its bastion housing estates, outlining every hill and curve for miles around with a battlemented crescent.

  Ben and John Fawcett came together in the street and joined Howarth. They apologized for the brevity of the meeting and wondered why he’d come. Ben had his macintosh over his arm, and looked at me brazenly.

  ‘In the summer we tend to keep it short,’ Fawcett said. We walked down to the end of the street and Ben invited us into the snack bar at the corner. He held the door very wide as I walked in.

  We sat at a table away from four other members of the group, but one of them came over, the dark, thick-set man, and he grinned at Howarth. He nodded at Ben’s face and said to Howarth, ‘How can I criticize a world that doesn’t put in an appearance? Isn’t that just it?’

  ‘Get lost,’ Ben said. They laughed together.

  Over the street the sky still held a haze of colour, the sun faintly illuminating the topmost clouds, and giving the street lamps an emptier, vaguer look. The atmosphere was filled with a damp luminosity.

  The clergyman, Fawcett, was smiling consolingly at me, drawing himself apart from the others to catch my attention. He had ordered the coffee, and was holding out a cup to me, sweating slightly, and looking cruelly incongruous beneath the half-nude women painted on the walls.

  I stared round at the water dripping from the windows, at the people eating and drinking, the gritty coffee, the thin soup, fascinated and consoled by the peculiar destitution that Howarth had crudely brought to my notice. The Miners’ Gala had saddened him. But this he hated. In the middle of the clergyman saying something I stood up and said I must go.

  Howarth followed me willingly. He felt now that he’d betrayed my confidence and interest.

  But he was still displeased that Ben hadn’t put on some characteristic show. The first thing he said when I joined the bus queue to go home was, ‘Ben – he’s a sort of industrial Don Quixote, don’t you think? It took me some time to realize – seven whole weeks
in fact. I used to go there regularly. Physically he’s the Sancho Panza of his intentions. Perhaps that disguised it.’

  ‘I only wish you hadn’t taken me there.’

  He didn’t answer for a while. He waited patiently beside me in the queue, then lit me a cigarette.

  ‘I wanted to correct any impression your brother might have given you,’ he said eventually.

  ‘I don’t see.’

  ‘All that stuff tonight – it blows back on me. It’s exactly the sort of bathetic farcing – and the same at the Art School – that makes my position look small.’

  ‘I don’t see how it does at all.’

  ‘No. But your brother and people like him think so.’

  ‘It only makes you look small when you go there and when you laughed like you did. You don’t have to do that.’

  We stood in silence until the bus came, and when the queue started to move up he said, ‘Ah well, I don’t suppose it’ll stop me seeing you again.’ He watched me while I took my seat. We gazed bitterly at one another through the glass.

  ‘You don’t really mean that,’ Michael said. He looked at Alec intently, accusingly. My mother and father were silent at his sudden outburst. Alec’s wife, Nora, glanced up from feeding their youngest child, who was strapped with a scarf on to a chair. Alec stopped eating.

  His small, stocky body, not unlike my father’s, was set stiffly in his seat. He leaned on the table. ‘’Course I do,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t,’ Michael said. ‘It’ll be the end of everything for you.’

  Alec’s eldest son, Norman, stared up at his father with alert, adult eyes. He was four.

  ‘A father who sacrifices everything for his children does them a disservice: that’s even a proverb, Alec. I’m not just making this up.’

  But Alec was unimpressed by Michael. ‘When you get some kids of your own you’ll see different,’ he said. He smiled and didn’t care. He knew his thoughtless, instinctive view of life crazed Michael.

  My mother stood up. She went to help Nora feed the baby. For a moment the two women’s voices chatted amiably, condemning any interference in their essential task. Alec’s broad, easy back hid them.

  ‘When you’ve endured your own domesticity a bit longer,’ Michael said, ‘you might begin to think you have lost something.’

  ‘I wasn’t making it that personal,’ Alec said. ‘But I don’t mind. Look at my dad. He seems to have managed all right. Where would you be, or me, if he hadn’t put us first?’

  Michael was pained. He looked at me.

  ‘Nay, don’t bring me into it,’ my father said, content until now since he was no longer drawn by family abuse. ‘I’ve done what I thought right, and I don’t want ought mentioned on it.’ He made to stand up, but sat down again at the tea table, and drained his pot. His foot tapped under the table.

  Alec was quiet. His eyes were fixed on Michael. ‘What do you think, Margaret?’ he said. ‘What’s he driving at?’

  My mother, bending over the baby, Leslie, was looking up at me. She said, ‘Aren’t you off out this evening, Margaret?’

  ‘No. I haven’t planned anything.’

  ‘Well don’t you be drawn into arguing with them.’ She was afraid. She hated seeing me like this, with Nora and her children and her deadening motherly concern.

  Nora hadn’t noticed the threat of my brothers. She went on feeding the baby from a little saucer, blind to us. It had roused Michael. And Alec enjoyed antagonizing Michael.

  ‘We mu’nt get personal,’ my father said, preparing to sacrifice himself to Michael’s agitation yet wanting a peaceful Sunday tea and family formalities.

  ‘No, no,’ Michael said. ‘But our Alec ought to see what he’s letting himself in for. A man should be a man not a father. “Working for your children”,’ he quoted Alec. ‘You want to give that idea up right away.’

  ‘But listen at him,’ Alec said. ‘You’ll be saying next my dad’s been wasting his time educating us, giving us a start. He could have shoved us down the pit at sixteen.’

  ‘He nearly did.’

  ‘Well you’ve a lot to thank God for that he didn’t.’

  ‘That’s what he wants you to think, anyway,’ Michael said. ‘But I can still be as miserable and as unhappy now as I could have been if I’d left school at fourteen.’

  ‘Like I did,’ Alec said. He hated Michael now.

  ‘You’re like my dad,’ Michael said. ‘You think education’s a substitute for people, that it makes them different and better.’

  ‘And doesn’t it?’ Alec threatened him.

  ‘No. It’s the big fallacy of our time.’

  ‘It’s not nice hearing you speak like that, Michael,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not right after all that your dad’s done.’

  ‘Let them get on with it,’ my father said, standing up and going to sit in an easy chair, away from the table. ‘Let ’em carry on, Mother. It’s nothing to do with us. Our Michael only says these things to be different.’ His right foot tapped soundlessly on the hearth-rug.

  ‘So my dad could have been living it up all these years,’ Alec said. ‘You must think him a bit of a flop or something.’

  ‘No …’ Michael said in a hollow, nearly frightened voice.

  ‘You shouldn’t be speaking about your dad like this,’ my mother pleaded. She stood by the table, watching us.

  ‘It’s our Michael,’ Alec said. ‘He talks about my dad as if he didn’t owe him a thing.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ Michael said. ‘I feel I do owe him something. He’s made us feel that. He needn’t have given us an education … and you don’t want to laugh, Alec. Because you’re going to do exactly the same thing with your family. It’s because, fundamentally, my dad felt it was a guilty thing to have children. And you do as well.’

  ‘Oh, now.’ Alec was laughing. He’d no doubt that Michael was jealous of his family. ‘You’re forgetting,’ he said to Michael, ‘you’re forgetting the most important thing. A father feels he owes something to his children. He breeds them. They’re his.’

  ‘So you feel guilty about having children,’ Michael said.

  ‘I didn’t say that …’ Alec turned to me, but Michael insisted quietly:

  ‘You’ve got to see, Alec. My dad didn’t educate us for our sakes. It was very largely to relieve his own anxiety. He’s made us feel all along that we owe him something, that it’s our obligation to accept his so-called sacrifice.’

  ‘What’s up with him, our Margaret?’ Alec said, as I began collecting the plates to clear away. ‘All this family stuff – he’s not thinking of getting wed or something, is he?’

  Michael was satisfied. His intentness vanished. ‘You mustn’t bring her into it,’ he said. ‘She’s enough on her plate as it is.’

  Alec looked at the plates in my hand. He laughed at the allusion. ‘Why, Mag, you’re not after a chap?’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think you were like our Michael here – a frustrated bachelor through and through.’

  ‘You should ask our Michael. He seems to know it all,’ I said, and suddenly felt too weak to take the tea things into the scullery.

  ‘You all ought to be helping with the table instead of this silly talk,’ my mother said. She came to pick up the cake dishes and carry them through.

  ‘Nay, come on, Mag. Tell us about him,’ Alec said, relieved at the shift in conversation, and benevolent.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting so fetched up about,’ I told him.

  ‘Me fetched up?’ He pointed dismally at his chest. ‘But I’m only asking. Why, if you’d rather not say …’

  ‘She’s got tangled up with a right load of trouble,’ Michael said in a broad accent. ‘Only she won’t take my word for it.’

  ‘Who bloody would?’ Alec said. ‘What sort of chap is he, Margaret? Has he got dark hair like me?’

  ‘He doesn’t exist,’ I said.

  Alec sensed the family’s coldness. ‘What’s it all about?’ he asked. He pu
t his arm casually round his small son’s shoulders.

  My mother came back into the room and started piling the cups and saucers. ‘We want to get this cleared,’ she said. ‘Then we can sit round the fire.’ When she saw me hesitating, she said, ‘Come on! I don’t want to do it all on my own.’ Her anger started the baby crying. I got my pile of plates and carried them into the scullery.

  ‘Take no notice of our Michael,’ my mother said firmly, once we were behind the door. ‘D’you hear, love? Take no notice at all. He’s just like that at times.’ She reluctantly allowed me back into the room.

  ‘She’s got caught up with an artist of all people,’ Michael was saying.

  I piled the remaining dishes, and folded the cloth up. ‘You want to leave well alone what you don’t know about,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, then he does exist, this fatal charmer,’ Alec said.

  ‘That’s what he reckons to be himself,’ Michael said, still looking at me. ‘But then that’s only half the problem.’

  Alec looked at me demandingly. My mother came back in. ‘I’ve told you, Margaret,’ she said.

  Michael watched her. ‘What’s that? What have you been telling her?’

  ‘I’ve told her not to listen to any of your nonsense.’

  ‘You shouldn’t try and protect her like that,’ he told her. ‘It’s not fair to her.’

  ‘Not fair! And I suppose your sly digs at her are. You can just shut up about it. Both of you.’ Worn out, she glared at them, despairing of her sons.

  I took the crockery and the cloth into the scullery. I went into the back yard to shake the cloth. It was sunny. Starlings flew up off the lawn in a cloud. The garden was covered in weeds; though at one time it had been well-kept. But my father had got tired, and the garden itself seemed to have sunk with him.

  When I went in I heard Michael still talking in the living-room. ‘You’ve done that all along,’ he said. ‘She’s not sensitive or anything.’

  ‘I don’t mind you talking or arguing about anything, but that.’

  ‘What’s that?’