Flight into Camden Read online

  ‘Anyway,’ Michael said. ‘She’s chapel, not church.’

  ‘Even if you don’t believe in God, getting married in a church makes it a different thing again,’ my mother said. ‘It makes it lasting and more important. You can ask your dad. He wasn’t going to get married in a church, but he’s glad now that he did.’

  ‘You mean he tells you he’s glad,’ Michael said. He sat on the arm of the chair beside Gwen; he enjoyed his novel situation more than anything else.

  ‘It’s nowt to joke about,’ my father said. ‘Getting wed in a church does mek a big difference.’

  ‘If you’ve that sort of mind,’ Michael said. ‘But don’t let’s spend the night arguing about getting married. Let’s talk about something pleasant.’ He and Gwen laughed. They imprisoned us.

  ‘I know what that means,’ my mother said. ‘Michael’ll have his own way in the end.’

  When they’d gone the house was quiet, as if a great deal of life had suddenly been taken out. My mother cleared up the cups and saucers, and my father went upstairs to bed. He’d been pleased and tired by the visit and, as if yet another responsibility had been taken from his shoulders, he went to rest.

  ‘Do you want another cup of tea before I finish?’ my mother asked.

  I went into the scullery and made it while we washed up. We worked mechanically, separated from one another, without speaking. When the tea was mashed we put the pots away and took our cups into the living-room.

  ‘What do you think of her, then?’ my mother said, finding it intolerable that I should say nothing about Gwen.

  ‘She’s just the woman Michael needs,’ I told her. ‘But I’d always imagined he’d picked somebody different.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, relieved. ‘I never thought I’d see our Michael walk in the door with a girl like that. But I’m right glad that he has. She’ll do wonders for him, I’m sure.’

  ‘What sort of wonders do you want seen done to our Michael?’ I asked, laughing at her.

  ‘Nay, but she’ll take the hard corners off,’ she said deeply. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that he hasn’t picked on some … you know, high-up young woman. It’s a right nice ring he’s picked, don’t you think?’ She was happy to talk of Michael: she’d been longing intensely for a Gwen to come into his life and bring him, through such a warm personality, back to her own maternal feelings. Even back to her class. Gwen was one of us. ‘I do hope he makes a proper go of it,’ she went on passionately. ‘I couldn’t bear him to play up with a girl like that. Not now. You can tell she relies on him.’

  ‘You seem to have sized it all up, Mum. She was only here an hour or so and you’ve got it all neatly tied up.’

  ‘But a mother sees these things, Margaret,’ she said indulgently. ‘I haven’t watched my own son for thirty years without realizing what he needs and what he doesn’t. The only difficulty I can see is the wedding. If she was my daughter I’d want her married at home, and at church, whoever the chap was. But our Michael – he’s so headstrong. I can quite see him getting his own way.’

  ‘Yet you wouldn’t be so bothered if they did get married up here, and not in Wales.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say anything about that … I might prefer it, for myself.’ She stroked the arm of her chair, trying not to smile possessively. ‘But it’d be wrong for me to say anything about that. Yet our Michael always was one for getting his own way. Even as a baby. His mouth was everlastingly open. He bawled and bawled until he got exactly what he wanted. Even as a baby. It was strange that – knowing just what he did want all the time. I can’t see it stopping now.’ She drank her tea quickly, excitedly. Michael’s independence and power often stimulated her when it was directed away from her and the family. ‘It’s a great load off my mind,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I’m glad it’s worked out like this. It’s the best in every way,’ I said.

  ‘We might even get a bit of peace at home, Margaret,’ she went on, laughing; and pulling out a handkerchief from her skirt she began to dry her tears of relief.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad about it,’ she said, and hurried out to cry quietly in the hall.

  5

  I went up to the pit on the Friday. During the week I’d been ill, and this was the first time I’d been allowed out. Michael had been engaged two weeks, and seemed to have been in and out of the house all the time. Gwen liked to see my father and mother. They’d formed a sudden and profound attachment. I was glad to get out.

  My father was on the afternoon shift and I offered to go up to the pit and collect his wage from him before he went down. I walked up through the estate, along the winding roads bounded by privet hedges and heavily-pruned sycamores. The houses, usually so dead in the sameness, were fresh. Each house had its own identity for me, particularly if I knew the occupants by sight. The fronts of the houses, in spite of their regularity, bore the expressions of frowning walls or smiling windows that were outward signs of the family inside. The houses of my childhood friends still possessed the heavy expressiveness of their remembered faces; the houses used to look at me, their fronts the familiar masks of friends or dislikeable neighbours.

  Soon I was away from the boundary of my childhood games, the estate rising over former moorland to Moorfield Road. I came out by the newly-built private houses. The road was broader, and the hedges and trees were more varied in the larger gardens, with thick banks of rhododendrons blazing from the dull green. On the road itself the colliery traffic was relieved only occasionally by a bus or a car. Between the houses, with their cosy, sometimes leaded windows, I could see across the broad dip to the other side of the city; the university tower stood up clear.

  I soon lost interest: the heavy moan of the colliery and the sulphurous smell began to dominate the road, and the new headgear came into sight over the lowered slag heap of the older, renovated pit.

  My father was not to be seen on the road outside. I stood at the yard gate and waited. The lorries came in at regular intervals, bouncing and crashing over the deep ruts and pools, and parking at the side of the coal shutes. As each full lorry drew out, coal spilling over, its tail boards, it ran up to where I was standing, and parked on the steel platform of the weighing office. A moment later it drew away. Its place under the shute was taken by another lorry, the driver clambering up into the darkness of the loader to hurry the coal down with his shovel. The yard was filled with dust, rising in tight, blinding eddies in the wind. Through the blackness gleamed the red lip of the dynamo fan, revolving invisibly at speed, like a tight red mouth grimacing.

  The men worked near it, absorbed, occasionally shouting to one another, or staring and pointing at me. Across the far side of the yard the rails curved into the pit, two rows of trucks standing under the new shutes of the renovated section. A small colliery engine, black and red, stood fussing steam, waiting for the lane the other side of the pit yard to be cleared of traffic before it could cross.

  I didn’t recognize my father at first. He came across the harsh, dirty yard of men, a tiny figure against the inanimate scale of the workings. He’d just changed into his pit clothes. I was nervous at his strangeness. He was shy and cold. His knees were padded, and his trousers tucked into bright football stockings. His too-large boots gave him a heavier, staggered walk. He looked cold. He was already holding out the wage packet before he reached me, wishing that I should be gone immediately. His face was straight, and serious, squashed up, without its teeth, below the beetle hardness of his black helmet. His coat was the only thing I recognized about him: he’d brought it home once for my mother to sew on doubly large pockets. They hung on him like a clown’s heavy pouches.

  ‘I thought your mother said she’d be coming up,’ he told me.

  We were both shocked.

  ‘I thought I’d come up for a breath of air and a walk,’ I said.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said uneasily, hurt. ‘You shouldn’t come up here. It’s not a place for you.’ His unhappiness was a hard, protective one. ‘Go on
, then,’ he said. ‘You get off. Tell her I’ll be home as usual.’ His hard-worked, nugget-like shape made me helpless and monstrous. He’d been hiding this from me all my life: his work and his fear of it. I said good-bye, and walked away. I turned round to watch him cross the yard to the pit-head. He joined the disordered queue of miners standing silently under the corrugated iron roof. Two or three of the men were talking; the rest waited dumbly and still.

  The pit was hostile to my back. There was the whine of the dynamos and the fan, then the sudden gasping of the winding engine as the men were lowered. I imagined my father moving through the earth below me.

  I walked quickly. There was a tremendous urgency. I no longer felt protected. I’d never considered the pit, nor my father in it. I’d forgotten it. I’d given him to the pit, and taken everything that was left over. It was only a small part of him. Behind him was a great deadness, as if I’d only been grasping his shadow.

  The familiarity of the estate was transparent as I wound into it. A council housing estate with its one bombed house still a vacant site, and its endless interlocking rows of houses bound up in one tormented shape of winding roads and twisting crescents, its one long avenue pushed through the middle like a spear. The huge knot of houses was bolted to the city by this single straight avenue. The traffic fled through it into town.

  When I got in the house was empty. I sat in front of the fire, staring at it, my hands pushed to my mouth, as if I’d never see my father again.

  Michael and Gwen visited the house frequently. They were patronizing. I hated to see the ring on Gwen’s finger, as if she insisted on displaying their feelings, and they couldn’t exist without this blatant memento. I found it unbearable to be in the house with them. I wanted to deride my mother’s concern, but chose only to ignore it, assuring her that I wasn’t miserable and that I hadn’t a mood. ‘What is it, love?… I don’t know, there’s something wrong, and you just won’t say.’ Time seemed endless. I had never been so alone before. I clung round my mother helplessly, silent and resenting, holding to her.

  Then Howarth came to the house. I could hardly contain myself. He was stiff and formal. He knew I’d been waiting for him. He looked as if he’d been chased to the door, as if he’d come to the house for protection. My mother went into the scullery and shut the door after she had been introduced.

  ‘Is she offended?’ Howarth said.

  ‘No. She thinks we want to talk on our own.’

  ‘Does she know about me?’

  ‘A little. What I’ve told her, and what Michael’s said … that you’d left your wife.’

  ‘Did you expect me to come?’ He was strange and oddly threatening in the living-room. The juxtaposition of Howarth and the familiar was always threatening.

  ‘I thought you might come,’ I told him.

  ‘I was hoping I might have seen you in town somewhere.’

  ‘I preferred you to come.’

  He looked at me uncertainly, not sure what I meant. ‘Michael said you’d taken a job elsewhere, and that you’d be leaving by Christmas.’

  ‘I’ve given in my notice. Nothing more than that … I haven’t taken on another job, or anything.’

  ‘Are you going away?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He stared round at the room, noting its details carefully as if they oppressed him. ‘I’ve seen quite a bit of Ben these last few days,’ he said. ‘He wants me to take a job with him. As a scaffolder! He works for his uncle somewhere in town.’

  ‘Do you want to do that?’

  ‘I thought I’d feel free after leaving her,’ he said inconsequentially. He moved restlessly about the room.

  ‘How are you feeling about it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He rubbed his face as he looked at me. ‘Destroyed more than anything else. I feel let down, for some reason.’

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘Well, I’m staying at the Studio – it’s a room some painting students have over a plumber’s in town. They use it for their little bohemian excesses. They were very sympathetic at first – as though leaving your wife condoned their sort of licentiousness. Instead – my staying there seems to have stopped it. I think they’re just beginning to resent my being there now. I’ve been trying to get a room of my own.’

  ‘You seem to have gone back on your tracks – the last time you mentioned Ben, or students, you sounded as though they were God’s last creatures.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to divorce your wife?’

  ‘We’ve talked it over.’ He stared dumbly at me, then went across to the window and peered into the bareness of the road. ‘We’ve talked it over. But she’s not sure about it. She thinks there’s another woman at the root of it all. I suppose that’s her pride.’

  ‘Is she altogether wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ He lifted the curtain, for no reason, and looked up and down the length of the road. He turned round biting his lips, yet trying to appear indifferent. ‘I can’t untangle all the threads yet.’

  ‘Why did you come here, today?’

  He gazed round the room at its cosy furniture. He made it seem small and too precious. ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘You sound as if you’re more definite about things.’

  ‘That’s what you’d like me to be, isn’t it? But I’m still the discriminating spinster you first thought I was.’

  ‘Yes. You must be right discriminating to have tangled with me.’

  ‘You’re going to take me out,’ I told him. ‘Just wait there until I get my coat.’

  He sat on the arm of a chair, smiling. ‘All right,’ he said.

  I went into the hall. ‘We’re going out, Mother,’ I called to her.

  She didn’t answer for a while. Then she said distantly, ‘Oh, all right.’

  I opened the scullery door. She was busying herself in the sink and didn’t look up. ‘Is that all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she insisted.

  Howarth was pained by her coldness. He came into the hall while I pulled on my coat. He wanted to explain to my mother, but I touched his arm and shook my head.

  ‘I won’t be late, Mum.’

  ‘Good night, Mrs Thorpe,’ Howarth said.

  ‘Good night, Mr …’ she answered emptily, forgetful.

  I knew she wouldn’t watch us from the window. She didn’t want Howarth to exist.

  ‘I don’t think she did like me coming,’ Howarth said, smiling, as we waited in the avenue for a bus.

  ‘She’s always peculiar with strangers. Don’t mind her.’ He knew I was happy with him.

  He stared around him knowingly. It was dusk and the evening was settling, with red strips across the clouds, glowing through them, and not moving. The road was emptying of traffic.

  ‘The vicar, from home, came to the college to see me this week,’ he said. ‘Asked me if I realized what I was doing.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him some rubbish … I don’t know. I tried to point out to him the difference between someone who made a profession of their convictions, like him, and those who merely lived them. He didn’t believe that I’d tried to reconcile myself to the situation – as he saw it. Even that parson pal of Ben’s came to see me. Fawcett. Told me to give it another try. You see how they’re ganging up. So your mother’s not the only one.’

  The bus came and we sat at the front downstairs. I was relieved to be on it, away from home.

  ‘Ben’s got the notion that this is the great turning point in my life. I ought to renounce everything now and devote the rest of my life to painting pictures in an attic he knows about … collieries, factories, and working people. He’s lent me a book on Gauguin.’

  ‘So you were bored and came to see me.’

  ‘No,’ he said seriously. ‘I’ve done what I said I’d do, and now I feel free to see you.… But then, I am a bit stuffed with Ben.’ He laughed, looking into my eyes, and wanting me to forget his tone.
‘I can’t say I wasn’t glad for some chronic distraction, Ben or otherwise. He just gravitated towards me: the cultural philanthropist. He’s even offered to buy me brushes and paints and a few canvases. It’d have been heavy going without somebody like him.’

  ‘You really would have liked to have been able to paint, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No.’ He stood up and we got off the bus.

  We turned up a street at the side of the Education Offices: the buildings were a mixture of Victorian terraces and shops, the brickwork purpled with soot and caked yellow with old posters. He unlocked the rickety door at the side of a shop and I followed him up a narrow flight of steep wooden stairs on to a small landing. It was stacked with hardboard and paintings and an old black oil stove. The place smelt impregnated with paint and turps.

  A student was reading inside the small white room. He offered to go when he saw me, and Howarth said it would be good of him. He clambered down the stairs like a disturbed animal. Howarth had this strange power of disturbing small things, and causing their flight. He seemed to be ignorant of it.

  He switched on a cream portable wireless without thinking. I sat down carefully on a chair that pulled out as a short bed, and he lowered himself into a bucket seat of red canvas. The walls were plain and white, creaming with dirt, and several dark paintings hung on them, all in monochrome and of fruit and jars, and of empty roads and large empty fields. The place was moderately clean, as if it were being subjected to only a cautious and not a wholesale dissolution. A series of sports results were being given on the wireless. Howarth listened to them while he gazed at me. The announcer gave the winners of several athletic events, and the times of the runners. Howarth was laughing to himself, as if this record of useless effort bitterly amused him.

  ‘Don’t you know of a better room than this?’ I said.

  ‘It’s indescribable, I know. But even then it’s better than any of the places I’ve been to see so far.’