by David Storey
‘Aye, I suppose we’ll see one or two improvements,’ his father said, sighing, and with no conviction in his voice at all.
There were steps across the yard.
Mrs Shaw came into view.
‘And what problems of the world have you been straightening out?’ she said. ‘What shape is it in now, after your cogitations?’
‘Oh, we’ve rounded it up, Mrs Shaw,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘Taken off the edges.’
‘Nay, well, I didn’t know we had any,’ Mrs Shaw said.
‘You can be sure it’s in better shape, any road,’ his father said. ‘Two words from Reagan over any problem and you mu’n wonder where it wa’ afore he came.’
‘Oh, now, I don’t claim any great philosophical virtues, Harry,’ Mr Reagan said, standing to Mrs Shaw at first with something of a bow. The ends of his braces with their little white tapes had re-appeared. ‘I have but the general view of things, namely that things themselves are getting better.’
‘Well, they couldn’t get worse,’ Mrs Shaw had said.
‘Oh, now, what a doleful yard we have this evening,’ Mr Reagan said. Having offered his seat in the porch to Mrs Shaw, and having seen it gracefully refused, he sat down again, hitching up the knees of his pin-stripe trousers. ‘Spring on its way, if I’m not mistaken, when a young man’s fancy turns to love. And a young woman’s, too, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘I don’t notice any young men round here. Nor young women come to that,’ Mrs Shaw had said. She gave a scream which broke into a laugh. ‘And what do you think, Mrs Bletchley?’ she’d called across.
Mrs Bletchley’s voice came floating back.
‘Oh, I’d keep my distance from those two romancers, Mrs Shaw. Especially when they gang together.’
‘Now, would we gang together, ladies?’ Mr Reagan said. He’d risen from the step again, this time presumably to bow to Mrs Bletchley, who remained hidden beyond the angle of the door. ‘In the presence of two such charming members of the opposite sex would a man like myself, or a man like Mr Saville, think, even if we were overwhelmed entirely, of ganging up? Each man for himself in this world, Mrs Bletchley.’
‘Oh, now, just listen to him,’ Mrs Bletchley said, her voice, like Mrs Shaw’s, breaking into a scream and then, less violently, a laugh. ‘He’s got a tongue like a spoon of sugar. All sorts of things go past before you’ve even noticed. It’s a good job he lives two doors away, and not next door,’ she added, ‘or I think we’d have some trouble.’
‘Would I let a brick wall, let alone a window or a door, come between me and the ones that I admire, Mrs Bletchley?’ Mr Reagan said.
Both women had laughed again; a high-pitched wail came beseechingly from either side of the open door.
‘Just listen to the man,’ Mrs Shaw had said.
‘Oh, beauty can be admired from a distance, over any number of years, Mrs Bletchley,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘The most carefree of us have passions that it might astonish the closest of our friends to hear. Isn’t that so, Harry?’ Reagan added.
‘Nay, he mu’n have summat he never confesses to,’ his father said, glancing uneasily behind, as if this aspect of Mr Reagan’s neighbourly existence wasn’t one he was particularly anxious for Colin to hear.
‘Ah, what secrets the most inconspicuous of us harbour in our bosoms, Mrs Bletchley,’ Mr Reagan added, his large head turning casually from one side to the other, his thin neck reddening as if in measure of the feelings that the sight of these two women had suddenly inspired. ‘Might each one go about his labour, but he doesn’t at some point lift his head and glimpse in some distant door or window a head, a face, a pretty hand or ear, that catches a secret fancy, Mrs Bletchley. Who’s to say, now, whose pretty hand or whose pretty ear, whose face or figure, etcetera, is not the one to inspire him; and who’s to say who the person is who keeps such longings wrapped secretly up inside his bosom?’
‘More sugar, more sugar,’ Mrs Bletchley said, breaking into a laugh, if anything, even wilder.
‘If I were a few years younger I might very well be leaping yon wooden fence and giving your heart a little flutter,’ Mr Reagan said, half-rising from the steps.
‘Mr Reagan,’ Mrs Bletchley said, ‘it’s a good job Mr Shaw isn’t here or Mr Bletchley, now,’ she added.
‘Who’s to say what he might get up to if there wasn’t someone to keep an eye on him,’ Mrs Shaw had said.
The two women’s laughter came once more, alternately screeching, from either side of the open door.
‘If Mr Bletchley were here,’ Mr Reagan said, ‘wouldn’t I be the one to remind him of what a treasure he’s left behind. While he fights for King and Country, would I, now, be the one to make demands upon his wife.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you might do, if I gave you even half a chance,’ Mrs Bletchley said, her voice raised higher now beyond the door and fading off into another laugh.
‘Is that an invitation or merely a speculation, Mrs Bletchley?’ Mr Reagan asked. He stood up on the step, his arms poised as if he’d leap the fence from where he was standing.
‘Oh,’ Mrs Bletchley said and gave a screech, which was immediately echoed from the other side.
‘Restrain me, Harry. Restrain me,’ Mr Reagan said, putting his hand down now to his father’s shoulder. ‘But the woman’s a provocation, I haven’t a doubt.’
‘Oh,’ Mrs Bletchley said again, her voice sounding farther from the door.
‘And would you barricade your door, now, Mrs Bletchley, with a handsome feller like meself without?’ Mr Reagan said, raising one leg in addition to one arm as if he were flying across the fence already.
Another screech of laughter came from the adjoining door, then the sound of Mrs McCormack’s voice calling from the other side.
‘It’s Mr Reagan up to his tricks, Mrs McCormack,’ Mrs Bletchley said. ‘Saying I won’t be safe,’ she added, ‘not even inside the house.’
Several words of advice were called from the other side and Mr Reagan, as if pacified, lowered his leg, lowered his arm and, though still leaning on his father, sat slowly down.
‘Outnumbered, three to one. Who am I to deny that women have the best of everything?’ he said.
A communal screech came up from across the yard.
‘And since when has a woman had the best of anything, Mr Reagan?’ Mrs Shaw had said.
‘The best of anything?’ Mr Reagan said. ‘Why, there’s not one thing she doesn’t have the best of, Mrs Shaw,’ he added. ‘The best of us’, he tapped his chest, ‘in the prime of life. The best of our wages on a Friday night. The best part of the day entirely to themselves, feet up on a cushion, a box of chocolates by their side. What woman would you find, now, down a mine? And what woman would you find up at the front line, defending her country?’
‘You’re a one to talk,’ Mrs Bletchley said. ‘A fine office to go to every morning, with a coal fire burning in the hearth, and the nearest line you’ve ever been near is the one where Mrs Reagan hangs her washing.’
‘To God, but did a man ever get the better of a woman?’ Mr Reagan said. His hand still clutched to his father’s shoulder he glanced into the kitchen behind. ‘Take notice of these Valkyries, boy,’ he added. ‘Witches. Every one.’
‘Oh, we’ll witch you all right, don’t worry,’ Mrs Bletchley said. ‘With his airs and graces, and his carnation buttonhole.’
‘To God, but they’re at me every side,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘We better retire to the kitchen,’ he added. ‘But a man can’t find a drop of peace once he steps outside his house.’
‘Nor a lady, either, once she finds you and that other gigolo around,’ Mrs Bletchley said, screeching with laughter.
‘To God, Harry, but they’re after you too,’ Mr Reagan said, getting up quickly as if, suddenly, it had begun to rain. He rarely, if ever, came inside the house, and now, instead of stepping into the door, he pulled down his waistcoat and woollen cardigan more securely and, with a discreet bow, first in the dire
ction of Mrs Bletchley, then Mrs Shaw, retreated, still bowing, across the yard.
‘He’s a great gabbler, is Reagan,’ his father said, getting up slowly and coming inside the door. ‘If he could work half as hard as he talked he’d be a rich man now, not sitting on a doorstep and filling in his time.’
He went to the fire and put on the kettle. His face was still flushed, however, from the conversation on the step outside. He folded a piece of paper and reached into the fire, drawing his head away quickly then lighting a cigarette.
‘Though Mrs Bletchley when she has a mind can match him. It’s best not to listen to half the things they say,’ he added.
It was as if in some way he’d been put out by the flow of Mr Reagan’s conversation, secretly elated yet anxious not to show it.
‘Your mother hasn’t much time for it,’ he added. ‘I can tell you that,’ as if the conversation might, if he wasn’t careful, be reported back. ‘They’ve a tongue at times where their brain belongs.’
He stood aimlessly for a moment beside the table, gazing at the books. He turned to the fire.
‘Dost set much store by living here?’ he said. He stood with one hand raised to the mantelpiece, glancing round when he didn’t answer. The kettle, set against the flames, had begun to simmer.
‘Living in this house?’ he said.
‘This house. This village. I thought we might move out,’ he said.
‘Where would we move to?’ he said.
‘Nay, I’ve no idea.’ He shook his head. It was as if the conversation at the door had roused him to the thought. ‘Away from here, at any road,’ he said.
‘We couldn’t move far, in any case,’ he said. ‘You’d have your work to go to still.’
‘Nay, I mu’n give that up, an’ all.’
‘What sort of job could you get?’ he said.
‘Nay, not much, I suppose.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m only good for shovelling. That’s the sum total of my life,’ he added.
He went to the sink, emptied the tea-pot, rinsed it beneath the tap, then took it to the kettle.
‘We mu’n move into town, or summat like that. You’d be nearer school, for a start.’ He crouched by the fire, poured water from the kettle into the pot, took it to the sink and rinsed it out.
He put in the tea. He waited then for the kettle to boil.
‘Just think on it, any road,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do ought if you mu’n think it wrong. I’ve mentioned it to your mother, but she’s no idea. She’s one for sticking in a place,’ and a few moments later, as if summoned to the room by his father’s thought, his mother’s step came from the yard outside.
‘Well,’ she said, looking in, pale-faced, the baby in her arms, Steven dragging at her coat, ‘what have you two been up to, then?’
They lay, like two stone effigies, on either side of the double bed. The bed itself, with its metal bars at either end and its large brass-coloured balls on each of the bedposts, stood in the curtained-off alcove in the corner of the room. The curtain itself, on its wooden rail, had been drawn aside; a slow, stentorian breathing, like the gasping of an engine, filled the room.
Their heads were small, shrunken against the bulk of the single pillow; he remembered seeing them before, his grandmother’s red, cherubic face, her small, short-fingered hands and stubby nails, and his grandfather’s long, angular frame, with its dark, melancholic eyes and seemingly disjointed limbs. Nothing joined them now but the single bolster beneath their heads, and the patchwork cover which gave scarcely any indication of their figures underneath; their skin was yellow their mouths open, their eyelids bulbous, their cheeks drawn in.
‘They’re sleeping now,’ his mother said, standing at the foot of the bed, as if some long-drawn-out battle had been fought before his arrival. He’d come down directly to the place from school, travelling on unfamiliar buses, in response to some wish of his mother’s that he should see his grandparents before they died. He hardly connected them with anything living; there was something vague, inanimate, past recognition in their faces now: almost ghostly, the colour of their skin glowed eerily, like paper, from the shadows of the room. He saw the strange stoop of his mother’s shoulders, a weariness verging on regret, nearer bewilderment he would have guessed; she gazed at the two heads as she might have examined some mysterious object inside a box, puzzling, uncertain, prompting her to some memory she couldn’t recall. ‘At least it’s something’, she added, ‘that they’ll go together. My sister’s coming in an hour, then we can both go home.’
A bucket of water stood by the hearth; in the top of it floated a wooden scrubbing-brush. The carpet had been rolled up in front of the fire and the stone floor between there and the door opening to the yard scrubbed clean. There was a smell of soap in the room, overlain by the musty, almost stifling odour which came from the bed. One of the curtains had been drawn across leaving a faint strip of light to fall through the remaining single pane on to the chair where his grandmother in the past had usually sat and on to the sofa with its leaking horsehair at the back of the room where silently, smoking his pipe, his grandfather normally reclined.
‘They haven’t eaten anything all day,’ his mother said, still gazing at the figures as if some huge puzzle in her life were suddenly complete, all the pieces drawn together, yet leaving her more confused than ever. Her hands were red from scrubbing, her arms bare, the sleeves of her dress, which came down to just above her elbow, damp. She wore an apron which she’d brought, strangely unfamiliar in these surroundings. There was a certain helplessness about her which he’d never seen before: even as he watched she began to weep, drawing a handkerchief from the pocket of her apron. She wiped her eyes, lifting her glasses. ‘They’ve had a terrible life, they have. They’ve never had anything,’ she added. ‘And I’ve brought them nothing else but worry.’
She waited for some comment of his own; he gazed back to the bed. Nothing but horror filled him now, the strange, seemingly identical heads, like the two heads of a single body, united by the bolster, by the strange, waving symmetry of the patchwork quilt.
‘They’d have liked to have seen so much more of you, Colin,’ she said, speaking now on their behalf; while all he remembered were the strange, half-querulous looks. ‘They were so proud of the scholarship,’ she added, gazing at the heads as though at any moment one of them might rise, confirm it, peeling back those bulbous lids, peer at him a moment and then, with a cry of approval or acclamation, sink back down to that slow, irregular, stentorian breathing. It was as if there were some blockage in their throats; as if, beneath the patchwork cover, some hand invisibly had gripped their bodies and were pressing out their life.
‘Poor mother,’ his mother said, and he, thinking it so strange to hear his mother refer to some mother of her own, had glanced at her again.
A red flush, slowly, had spread across her face; her eyes, distended, glistened with tears, glancing down in turn at him almost as if, now, she were expecting him to protect her from the figures on the bed.
‘Well, then, we can’t go on like this,’ she said. She wiped her eyes on her handkerchief again. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ she added, almost casually, as if he’d just come into the room at home. She turned to the gas ring beside the fire.
‘No,’ he said. He shook his head.
‘Have you had something to eat?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said again.
It was some aspect of his mother’s life he no longer wished to see. He watched her then as she finished the scrubbing, the torn stockings, the torn dress, and the inflamed, seemingly blistered arms, the hands covered in soap, the slow, angular motion of the brush across the floor.
‘Shall I finish it, Mother?’ he said.
‘Nay,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your school-clothes on.’
He sat on an upright chair beside the door. His mother drew the curtain in the corner: only a faint, muffled panting now was audible behind it. The ticking of a clock on the mantelpiec
e began once again to dominate the room.
For a while his mother forgot him; he watched her back, its round, amorphous shape, her stooped head, and saw, as she knelt across the room, that the soles of her shoes were worn through to the welts beneath. In the middle of each hole he could see the darkness where the hole went through to the foot.
A fresh weariness, then, had flooded through the room; his one thought now was to get up and leave, to take his mother with him, and never come back. Beyond the curtain, that breathing would go on for ever, an element of the room as integral as the ticking of the clock, the crackle of the fire, the slow swirling of the brush as it spread the white suds across the floor.
‘Shall I go for a walk?’ he said.
‘What, love?’ His mother glanced back, startled, as if surprised to find him there.
‘I thought I’d go for a walk,’ he said.
‘Nay, love, you’ve only just come.’ He could see the appeal in her face, whether he’d only just come or not, not to leave her in the room alone.
‘I just wondered if you wanted me out. I mean, while you were washing the floor,’ he added.
‘Nay, love, I’ve washed that part of it,’ she said. She turned back to the scrubbing, then, a moment later, glanced back at him again. It was like someone gazing down a road; there was even the look of a girl about her, reluctant, half-ashamed. ‘They’ve had a hard life,’ she added, her eyes flooding once again with tears. ‘You can’t imagine how hard life could be in those days.’
He glanced down from the tear-streaked face to his mother’s worn-out shoes, her torn stockings, the frayed edges of her dress. It was like some child now, a sister, making some last appeal, some desperate demand before it disappeared.
‘He was out of work for nearly three years. We had hardly anything to live on. He could have done so much if he’d had a chance. As it was, it never came. It’s not like nowadays, love,’ she added. ‘If you have anything about you now there’ll always be someone who’ll be glad to take you. In those days nobody wanted you, no matter how hard you were prepared to work.’