As it happened, p.46
As It Happened,
p.46
When Simone reappeared, bringing with her, in one hand, a cup of tea for him, in the other a cup of coffee for herself, he was under the impression she had left him only a moment before, looking up, startled, the cat jumping down. ‘Been here all the while?’ she said, sitting in the chair on the opposite side of the table. ‘Did you ring Mrs Viklund?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘But I will again soon,’ wondering why he had postponed it. ‘Already she’s talking of a memorial service. Or others are. I’ll probably have to arrange it.’
‘The newspaper, meanwhile,’ she said, ‘has rung. You I couldn’t deny. The rest I dismissed. Symonds says I should have said nothing. There we are. I don’t seem to mind. I feel peculiarly free of everything,’ taking the cat as it leapt on her lap, looking over at Maddox with a smile, almost a radiance, the warmth of which, he was aware, enveloped him entirely.
‘Is there anything more I can do to help?’ he said. ‘Other than the damage I’ve done already?’
‘Of course!’ She laughed, her exclamation disturbing the cat: it dropped from her lap and, after some hesitation, made for the roof door and disappeared inside. ‘Without you, well,’ she waved her hand. ‘The whole thing would be impossible!’
‘It’s as if,’ he said, ‘we’re thin-ice skaters, the cracks catching up with us all the while, the whole thing about to break up around us,’ he surprised by the conclusion he had come to, looking across at her to deny it.
‘Of course!’ she said again. ‘Don’t you think that’s fine? Don’t you think,’ she added, ‘that’s precisely what we should be doing? Don’t we want to be exceptional? Daring! Innovative! Not knowing, for an instant, what might come next? What’s your life been about, for God’s sake? What’s all this, Matt, been for?’ laughing, gazing across at him, a part of her, he could see, on her own as well as his behalf, triumphant.
‘I wouldn’t nail us out,’ he said, ‘as nakedly as that.’ ‘What do I do now?’ had been a question that had tormented him since his father died: now, for the first time, he felt it answered, asked and answered, she in her life, he in his, the force that had gripped him on the tube station platform, Peter’s denial.
He was gazing at the sky, aware of the relevance of its bird and insect and aircraft activity: nothing changed, yet everything had: the paradox they would live with, separately and together, ‘What do I do now? no longer a question,’ surprised to discover he had spoken aloud, she, on this occasion, not answering.
19
They were drawing the Albanian refugee, the Kosovan mother: she had put on weight, the rotundity of her body more pronounced, a feeling of fecundity, of richness, he wondering what the women in the room made of it, how much they identified with her sensuality, the unconscious movement of her hips, her thighs as, abstractedly, she eased her position, he watching her as intently as he watched the other mysteries in the room – Rachel, Mary, Hannah, Ruth – speculating on their origins, then his own, speculating on the model’s origin and his own, disavowing its relevance.
Here they were, in this room, intent on delineation; that, he concluded, as far as it went, no further recognition required: Masaccio’s tormented Edenic figures, joined in rejection, joined in awareness, joined in departure, joined in love.
He had been engaged – still was – in giving an account of himself (as graphic as the figure before him now): at the present, in this location, partially there (much yet to be discovered, recovered, examined, laid bare), Simone engaged on an identical venture, stripped of illusion: the peculiar markers they had each laid down, the possibility of professional disgrace in her case, of something as specific, the result of a blood test, in his, the image of Isaacson coming to him: Taylor’s pronouncement, murder the signature at the foot of every page – his pencil returning to the sheet of paper, his gaze moving on from its engagement with the model to Rachel … And Viklund, whose coffin he had seen glide behind the curtain at the crematorium the previous day, he taking Ilse’s arm as they left, the child they’d never had, but now the one appointed.
She hadn’t been to St Albans before: they drove there one afternoon in her car, parking by the Cathedral, going in (alcoholics assembled around the gate): the impression of an ark inverted (two of everything notably not inside: two of them, instead, alone): the colour of the fabric, the height of the windows, the sepulchral light: outside, the greenery of the Abbey’s former site, the place of Alban’s execution – the echo of a belief which, for his part, he assumed he had outlived. Sainthood, for instance, he had taken for granted (as, at one time, he had done the prophets): something separate from existence, not to be absorbed or even followed: suffering where the mind departed from the body, took its leave, going where and for what he had no idea … taking her to the place he had once considered home, nothing of the house or the showroom remaining, the latter, fronting the London Road, a parade of shops, the site of the house behind occupied by several others. ‘Might just as well never have been there,’ he said. ‘Except we were. The same sort of visit we can make to your place. And find out,’ he added, ‘who you really are.’
About the Author
David Storey was born in 1933 in Yorkshire, England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. His novels have won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of fifteen plays and is a fellow of University College London. Storey lives in London with his wife and four children.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by David Storey
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1517-2
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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David Storey, As It Happened
