4

After almost three years at the council school, when their friendship had reached its most intriguing stage, Leonard gained a scholarship to the grammar school. It happened almost without his knowing it so that he felt in some way that he’d been deceived. When his name was read out in the short list of successful candidates and he suddenly realised that he was to be uprooted again, he felt himself the victim of a conspiracy. Partly out of anger and partly out of his own sense of deception he avoided Tolson throughout the morning of the announcement, and at dinner-time he stayed in the lavatories until the playground was deserted. Only then did he venture out to take the news home. He was half way across the asphalt arena when he heard someone running quickly and lightly behind him and, before he could turn, he was knocked to the ground by an indescribable strength. The next thing he knew he was lying on his back looking up at his class-teacher’s face. She was the only person in sight. He was taken home in her car and he never discovered whether she had seen what had happened or not.

Afterwards it seemed strange to him that he had never objected; that he never in fact refused to accept the scholarship. It was as if he acceded to events in this way because they came from some vague source of authority he knew had to be obeyed. It was this, rather than the assault itself, which finally determined him that he would never see Tolson again. And as if to test out the strength of his determination, once he had recovered from the attack he went to Tolson’s house for the last time. Getting no answer to his knocking he realised that the entire family were somehow involved in his betrayal. Several weeks later, when he arrived at the grammar school, he felt a great sense of relief, as if in some way he’d been released.

Yet, strangely, the grammar school broke him in two. Without the compensation and protection of Tolson he found himself even more isolated than in his first year at the elementary school. The physical health and assurance which he’d acquired were rapidly displaced by that white-faced recluseness which he had considered to be a forgotten part of his life. Now he became the victim of a persecution more subtle and intense than that of mere physical assault, and since he never tried to appease his new tormentors it seemed to them that he secretly invited it. It was as if he recognised within himself the working of a virtually implacable pessimism, for he neither opposed these assaults nor felt the least inclination to deplore his situation. His despair, however acute, never drove him to action, and he began to suspect – and with the slowest yet profoundest shock of his life – that what in fact so hugely dominated his existence, to the extent that he could scarcely recognise it, was an inscrutable sense of guilt.

This suspicion, prompted quite suddenly by a conversation with Austen, came at the moment when he realised he had survived the more vigorous attacks on his nature. During the six years he spent at the grammar school he re-discovered the anomaly of his intelligence and his continued facility for drawing. There was an abnormality about his gifts. That this wretched figure should possess an intelligence and a talent which people of a healthier and more sociable disposition had to do without, bred a sort of incoherent resentment which even the masters themselves did not trouble to hide. The opposition to Leonard was complete, and varied only in subtlety and direction according to his detractor’s age. It was as if, both by his indifference to his gifts and to the animosity they aroused, he were commenting not so much on his own deficiencies as on those of the people around him. The instinct to disown everything within him which he felt to be unusual made him an ideal target for persecution.

It was because of this that he turned to drawing, as if to detach himself from something he could not understand. All he was aware of was a morbid self-preoccupation, something to which he was helplessly bound, and yet which he despised. Closeting himself in some distant room of the Place, he would spend hours gazing at fragments of paper, the minute size of which seemed an indication of his resentment. At times he found his pencil moving ferociously over a fragment no larger than a stamp: yet it seemed in this way that the absurdity of his situation was expressed to his own satisfaction. The tiny rectangles answered a solemn and anonymous reproach, and the minute figures and landscapes tempered his unease. He derived an obscure satisfaction from the drawings; he threw none of them away, but pinned them to the wall of his room much as a grocer might affix bills due to him at some indeterminate time in the future. Austen vociferously approved of them; his father was sceptical. His mother hated them.

Certain childhood illnesses began to re-occur. These were brief fits, similar to fits of anger in naturally volatile people: a sudden flushing of his face, a slight protrusion of his eyes and a trembling of his limbs. But the emotion which normally might have accompanied such symptoms was completely absent in him.

None of these disturbances ever amounted to the full, rampaging disorder of a fit; there was even a certain calmness and restraint about them which, as they recurred, persuaded his father that they might be wilfully induced. It was his father who, strangely, was the more disturbed by them. These moments of rageless anger, however, distracted his mother from her absorbed attention in her daughter, and she turned now to Leonard with anxious, maternal indulgence, stroking his arms and legs and his face with a kind of solemn tenderness which soon allayed the more distressing symptoms.

If these illnesses never seriously alarmed his parents – they seemed, after all, almost natural expressions of his sensitive nature – what did disturb them was his growing self-absorption. Although his mother hated his drawings, as though they were almost evidence of demonic possession, his father never displayed anything more than an irritable suspicion; what antagonised him so fiercely was Leonard’s self-preoccupation and the recluseness that produced them. Whenever he was on one of his constant journeys of repair around the Place and found Leonard drawing in some distant room, his anger would break out violently. As at school, Leonard’s reaction to these outbursts was only a slight tensing of his figure and a sudden flushing of his cheeks. No one could tolerate such abject humility.

Gradually he took to being absent from school. After a while it seemed he had never been there. All the evidence of his six years’ attendance was contained in several drawings and paintings hoarded amongst numerous others by a sympathetic though incredulous art master. The intermittent absences occasioned by his slight fits developed into more prolonged periods when he began to suffer from mild yet lingering asthmatic attacks. It seemed as though he were physically disintegrating and that his sporadic attendances were belated and futile attempts to satisfy some vague, lost ambition. For a while he was too ill to do anything. Until he was twenty he was virtually confined to the Place by alternate bouts of depression and nervous, convulsive elation, venturing out only occasionally to visit Austen’s shop, where he would sit moodily watching the customers coming and going and discussing their purchases; or to Isabel’s house where, in the same attitude of dejected aloofness, he would listen to the earnest debates of her numerous visitors and to his aunt’s highly emotional charges. As if his detachment were contagious, his father succumbed to a similar aloofness, becoming increasingly absorbed in the maintenance of the Place to the exclusion of everything else.

In his early twenties Leonard began to get jobs. Physically if not temperamentally unsuited to the kind of work he found for himself, his absences were as frequent as they had been from school, and he seldom retained his employment long. There was now an undeniable wilfulness in his behaviour, as if he sought some way of evading his difference from other people and taking upon himself the conventional identity of a workman. If he was trying sincerely to touch on those ordinary experiences of life from which he felt excluded, it seemed to those people who superficially observed him that he was assuming the guise of an idiot. For several years he drifted aimlessly from job to job and brought upon himself an increasing reputation for idiocy. By children, who continued to exert their unique and primitive instincts, he was openly abused; he was often followed or pursued down the roads and crescents of the estate by a chanting host who had no cause for fear, since he still preserved a remarkable opacity, and reluctance for action.

Austen occasionally reproved John now for his lack of interest and indifference towards his son. But never with any great force: more, he seemed curious about his own loss of conviction in Leonard, though he still encouraged him in his drawing.

‘But what can I do?’ John said on what proved to be the last occasion that Austen so reproached him. ‘He’s a man now. I give him all the affection he appears to need. There’s no real necessity for him to work. I’d even be some sort of friend to him if he ever showed any inclination for friendship.’

‘Do you think he needs treatment? I mean, attention of a different sort.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you feel anything real for him?’

‘Not what I imagine one should for a son. He seems to be beyond help.’

‘Or even sympathy?’

‘Or sympathy. He carries his disillusionment around with him, it seems to me. It’s as if all the time he’s reproving you for showing any interest. Worse. It’s as if he reproves himself for arousing people’s interest. He seems determined not to exist. He’s like a person of no importance, interest or significance whatsoever. He’s nothing at all like Elizabeth. I used to think it was something in me. But she – she’s got such a happy temperament.’ He looked at Austen sharply. ‘Well, and where does guilt enter into all this?’

Austen shrugged and didn’t answer.

‘I thought Leonard was your hero. Your guilty man of action. Your Cromwell.’ John laughed ferociously at the allusion.

‘This is the chrysalis,’ Austen said eventually. ‘We’ve yet to see whether it’s to be an ugly or a beautiful moth that emerges.’

‘At times you appal me – more than any other person I know. You, with your talk of repressions and guilt. It’s terrifying.’

‘Why, don’t you believe in psychoanalysis?’

‘This fashionable and frivolous self-exposure. What is there beneath that elegant suit, Austen? Just an equally elegant and fashionable soul? A psychological soul?’ John turned abruptly away from Austen: ‘You patronise other people’s experience as well as your own. It’s obscene!’

John had, in fact, reached a stage which, at some earlier point in his life, might have made him more adaptable. He was now able to externalise the disabilities of his own temperament and to attach them securely to the society around him. He brooded much more on his situation as if, still walking determinedly in a circle, he were deliberating in which direction he would finally decide to move.

If Leonard noticed the disruption he had created between his father and his uncle he showed no awareness of it. As if to break the aloofness that existed between the three of them, Austen now began to encourage Leonard’s other uncles to visit the Place; one of them, Thomas, more than the other two.

Thomas was a small man, unusually small for a Radcliffe, with a gaunt face and large, staring eyes, like two brutally exposed nerves; in his youth he had suffered from a tubercular complaint. Quiet, and with a kind of modest intensity, he seemed after his first visit to be as much a part of the Place as either Leonard or his father. He was a clerk in a local government department, yet never mentioned his work other than to point out how ill-health had continually jeopardized his chances of promotion and how he was continually under the supervision of inferior men. His wife, a large, cheerful woman, seemed always apprehensively on the verge of some delightful experience.

They had two children who had died early in life, and in face of this tragedy Thomas himself had quietly withdrawn from events and now pursued, not so much his own existence as that of his fellows with a relentless and unabating sympathy. It had a frightening tenacity. For a while he and John discovered some sort of mutual attraction in one another; and although they had scarcely known each other since they were boys, when Thomas was a mischievous younger brother, they now walked about the Place and the grounds wrapped in conversation as though since their youth no moment of privacy had gone unrevealed.

Yet simply because he provided such a patient and sympathetic audience John soon began to tire of and then, even, to avoid him. Nodding his head slowly and continuously as each fact or opinion was revealed, his hands held appreciatively together in slow gestures of condolence, Thomas suggested a kind of faceless commiseration behind which John began to suspect a parasitic attitude that fed on adversity as instinctively as a leech on blood. After a while, no longer provided with sustenance from John, and discovering no such source in Leonard, Thomas’s visits to the Place became less frequent and subsequently stopped altogether. His wife continued to come, and with an increasing frequency. As if encouraged by the dissolution of their husbands’ relationship, she and Stella formed a securer and more intimate one of their own.

Matthew, the next to the youngest of Leonard’s uncles, made regular, well-spaced visits to the Place, usually with his wife, a blonde, smartly-dressed woman who was a celebrated hostess in the rural region to the east. By profession an accountant, and therefore morbidly addicted, Thomas had earnestly stated, to the assessing of other people’s incomes, Matthew had recently been appointed to a directorship in an important firm of mining engineers. Usually his visits occurred while he was on his way to or from some more important business, and invariably ended with a heated discussion with John over his ideas of leasing, converting or of selling the Place altogether. Tall, elegantly dressed, with a bony face and rather large, importuning eyes, he presented the kind of functional exterior which, John discovered, had earned him the title of ‘The Fridge’ amongst his colleagues. His visits left John with a feeling of total helplessness, a satellite ineffectually circling its parent body.

If Austen had any particular motive in introducing Leonard’s uncles to the Place, it was most clearly realised in the infrequent though boisterous visits of the youngest, Alex. The Radcliffes varied curiously in height. John, Austen and Matthew were all tall; Thomas, Isabel and Alex were small. Alex lived some distance away to the south and his visits usually lasted two or more days. Crew-cut, dogmatic, extremely energetic, so that his body was continually occupied in unnecessary action, he always seemed like some critical though well-intentioned intruder in the passive household. He was in charge of industrial relations in a giant corporation of motor manufacturers, and appeared to be a man who in the service of some higher ideal rode over his own feelings as much as those of others with a nerveless energy which caused Leonard, whenever he came into contact with him, to shy away as though he had been confronted with a wild beast.

For a while Austen appeared to satisfy himself by arranging these visits of his brothers to the Place; they were like carefully planned assaults which he directed on some stubbornly resisting citadel. Then, as a kind of mutual incomprehension settled on both sides, blunting even Alex’s insistent demands that Leonard should get a job, that they should move out of the Place, that even John himself should look for some more worthwhile employment, he began to grow increasingly frustrated, so that occasionally he would flare up in strident and uncharacteristic arguments, railing against John, and against Leonard. His behaviour was as incomprehensible to himself as it was to John; and for a while he stayed away from the Place altogether and the only news they ever had of him was through Isabel.

For a time he formed a friendship with a man whom he had first seen singing in a club in town. He was a coal-miner who now made his living exclusively from performing in various halls and institutions and it was as if in the man’s oddly ravaged features Austen recognised something of his own unspoken distress. What oblique need for companionship drove him into this relationship he had no idea.

‘Men undergo a change of life in the same way as women,’ he had told Isabel, who in turn had told John – ‘except in men it’s less physical and therefore perhaps more subtle and devastating in its effects.’

‘But what can you have in common with a miner?’ Isabel had said, antagonised by what she interpreted as a reference to her own increasing years.

‘I’ve no idea. Though he’s not a miner. He sees himself as some sort of artist. Perhaps it’s because I see him as a man trying to escape his predicament. You see, he’s completely self-educated.’

Yet in Austen himself, although this relationship was confined to endless arguments, not dissimilar to those he held with John, but conducted, strangely, with the energy of a much younger man, he felt that beneath the surface there was a desire to know this tortured man so completely that in the end it would have to include some sort of physical embrace. It was this that apparently led him on. There was in this new acquaintance a gauche and passionate sense of enquiry and speculation, a wilfulness and abandonment, that attracted him considerably. They were both quite elderly men.

One day when his friend failed to turn up at an appointed time Austen went in search of him with a recklessness that not only surprised but profoundly excited him, visiting pubs and institutions where in the previous few weeks he had watched him singing, enquiring for his address. When, some time later, he heard that the man had been arrested and subsequently imprisoned for a kind of behaviour which, tormentedly, had been at the back of his own mind, he felt that a part of his body had been torn away.

His immediate reaction had been drastic: he decided to sell his business and to leave the district. At first, undecided where to go, he had visited his brothers, finally arriving at Alex’s. He was more than ordinarily frustrated. If at first Austen had found Alex’s energy and nervelessness exciting, he was now completely intimidated by it. If this was at last his ‘guilty man of action’ then it was one whose purpose and intentions he could neither condone nor appreciate. After a while, growing more and more restless, he went abroad.

For two years he travelled aimlessly across Europe, visiting the northern fringes of Africa and the Middle East, but always returning to some centre close to the main capitals. Invariably alone, the solitary occupant of rooms and restaurant tables, there were in all this time scarcely a dozen people whom he could later with any clarity recollect having met. His mind was in an extraordinary state. It was as if it were a vessel gradually being emptied. Slowly it poured itself away in these unknown, unfelt places until, when it seemed that the last drop had gone, he rose early one morning and took the most direct passage home. He had only one thought, a quiet determination and sense of purpose regarding his nephew, Leonard.

Almost at the same time as Austen’s departure Isabel had begun to interest herself in religious activities. Belief had always been latent in her energetic character, and for a while she had attended a spiritualist church before embracing the more orthodox Anglican faith. At first Leonard had played something of the role of catalyst in the initial alarming process of her conversion, but as she subsided into a less fervent and more practical acceptance of her new faith, Leonard found himself discarded, first as an encumbrance, then as an embarrassment in the company which now frequented his aunt’s drawing-room. ‘The Prince’ had now become a silent Jester, and eventually he was discouraged from attending court altogether.

He continued to produce his strange miniatures, some so small that they were indecipherable to his father who occasionally brought himself to examine them. Afterwards, looking back on these years of isolation, Leonard himself was surprised by their purposelessness. He had no recollection of them other than of vague, ominous dreams induced largely by his aunt’s religious fanaticism. They seemed an increasingly misty void marked only by a bewildering debris of drawings. He was now the most familiar person on the estate. Whether followed by a jeering band of school-children or walking alone in some stooped attitude of self-absorption, his slim, raincoated figure attracted the immediate attention of every passer-by.

Whether despite Austen’s absence or because of it, he began to discover certain things about himself. His mind, for example, worked in a rather extraordinary way. He was strangely pleased by the discovery: it seemed that he tended to see things in separate camera-like impressions. He had never appreciated this before. The difference was, however, that whereas a film ran at a predetermined speed, animating each individual picture by its sustained momentum, in him the feelings that normally might have provided this motor-force, uniting several separate sensations in a single image, were frequently absent or functioned only intermittently. If he saw himself as such a projector and the life he absorbed as a film, then the screen of his consciousness was interspersed with long periods of flickering, incoherent light, alternating with sudden, extremely vivid impressions. It was the disconnectedness that made these intermittent pictures so alarming and gave him a feverish anxiety to know exactly what had occurred in between to cause them. It was this, he decided, which gave rise to his alternate bouts of elation and depression.

He was very absent-minded. He had a memory which his parents found both bewildering and irritating. Many apparently obvious events he would completely forget or, it seemed, show no awareness of their having occurred. Others, which to his parents might have appeared more obscure or elusive, he could recall with a remarkable clarity and precision. If this were some form of unconscious censorship, it had a persistence which not only bewildered his parents but appeared also to distress Leonard himself. The excisions were prompted so obscurely that his state of mind began to assume the dignity of a mystical condition.

Frequently he discovered a discrepancy between the images and the sensations that accompanied them, as if the soundtrack and the film were running at different speeds. Yet, because he could recognise this inconsistency so clearly, he assumed it was not so much a disorder as a heightening of his perceptiveness which, until he should grow more familiar with it, would remain unintelligible. He began to look upon this strange phenomenon with the interest of a spectator. His life was a series of enigmatic fragments, a roomful of discarded and arbitrary drawings. Soon they would be arranged to some purpose.

When Austen suddenly returned Leonard wondered for the first time about his absence, yet his curiosity was never sufficiently aroused either by this or by other slightly unusual circumstances to question it. There was some change in Austen which he couldn’t explain: a purposefulness and energy, a certain intensity which he could not be sure had existed before. The immediate effect of his arrival was a renewal of affability in his father, and a slight sharpening of animosity in Isabel. It was as if she were resisting something.

For a while Austen lived at the Place, and during this time Leonard became aware of the hardening in his uncle’s temperament, an urgent sort of militancy and anxiety. Then Austen found a flat in town and a job similar, though inferior, to his previous occupation; the original shop had quietly closed shortly after his disappearance. For several weeks, in fact, Leonard worked as his uncle’s assistant in the shop – the branch of a large national retailer of furniture – and appeared to be very much at the centre of Austen’s concern until, at the end of this period, Austen declared that he would have to find him a more suitable occupation. His enquiries amongst his numerous acquaintances in the town absorbed him completely. Then, after three weeks of exploration, Austen suddenly announced that he had found Leonard a job.