by David Storey
‘Nay, I’ll leave it all to you,’ he said, and laughed, moving back towards the cloisters.
‘Any time you want ought special, just let me know, then,’ Stephens said. ‘But don’t let on to any of the others. I’m only doing it as a favour.’
He crossed the yard, re-entered the cloisters, walked down their ill-lit interior and entered the classroom. The fire which heated the room was going out; he put on more coke and sat at his desk, took his paper out again and began to read it. ‘And in the summer, when bees haunt flowers, and birds the hedges; when scents and blossoms have been distilled into one heady draught for the reeling senses; then doth my heart shake off the winter’s tale of woe and drudgery, and broken pledges, and take on the summer’s glow of health and smiles.’
He crossed out ‘doth’ and wrote in ‘does’, and began to read it through again more slowly.
Stafford swung his bag beneath his arm, leaning up against the window in which his figure and those of the two girls he was talking to were clearly reflected. Traffic passed slowly across the city centre, building up towards the evening rush. Other groups stood around outside the shops and across the front of the large hotel: boys in blazers and the familiar caps, girls with the dark-blue coats, ending just above their ankles, and the small, dark-blue berets.
‘You know Audrey, don’t you?’ Stafford said. ‘She saw you at the farm where you worked last summer.’ He indicated the taller of the two girls, slim, fair-haired, her red-cheeked face familiar now that Stafford had pointed her out. ‘It’s her old man’s farm,’ he added, and began to laugh, turning to the other girl, who, dark haired, with dark eyes and a high-bridged nose, had, after glancing at Colin, begun to laugh as well. ‘This is Marion,’ Stafford added, leaning up more securely now against the window, and burying both hands inside his pockets.
‘He said he worked well,’ the tall girl said, easing the strap of her satchel across her shoulder. ‘He worked as hard as a man,’ she added, at which, his head bowed, Stafford laughed again.
‘He is a man,’ he said to the other girl and all three of them began to laugh, more quickly, half-nervous, glancing at Colin to laugh as well.
‘Is Jack still there?’ he said. ‘And the man with the bow-legs?’
‘Oh, Gordon’s still there,’ she said. ‘He’s been there for years. And Tom’s still there. But the other one’s gone. He went down the pit, I think,’ she added.
‘Oh, Colin knows something about that, too,’ Stafford said. ‘He’s a great one for work, and knowing all about it.’
‘Has the football season finished, then?’ the dark-haired girl said, swinging away reflectively, to glance at the other groups along the pavement.
‘Over and done with,’ Stafford said, kicking against the stone covering beneath the window. ‘We’d been expecting you up to watch, but we never had any fair admirers. If we’d had there’s no knowing what we might have done,’ he added.
‘We only watch the First Team,’ the dark-haired girl said, beginning to giggle and glancing once again, speculatively, towards the other groups. ‘I think Swallow’s got terrific hair,’ she added. ‘And Audrey’s really keen on Smith.’
‘Major or Minor?’ Stafford said.
‘Major, of course.’ The dark-haired girl laughed, nudging Audrey, who, flushing deeper, began to laugh as well.
‘I’ll have to be going,’ Colin said. ‘The bus goes in a few minutes and there isn’t another for nearly an hour.’
‘Do you go home on the bus?’ the dark-haired girl said. ‘It’s so much quicker by train. You don’t have to wait in all those queues.’
‘And we have good fun in the carriages. There aren’t any corridors,’ Stafford said. ‘Once in, you see, they can’t get out.’
The dark-haired girl laughed again.
‘They’ll be reporting Stafford, one day. Just you mark my words,’ she said, swinging back her satchel.
‘There’re any amount of tunnels, and you can take out all the light-bulbs,’ Stafford said.
The light-haired girl had flushed. She glanced at Colin then, vacantly, gazed off across the road.
‘Brenda was going to report you, in any case,’ the dark-haired girl said. ‘Her skirt was torn when she got to school, and Miss Wilkinson sent her from the room to sew it up.’ She pushed back her hair, taking her beret off and flicking her head, the dark hair swaying out behind. ‘I wish Swallow travelled on our train. We’d have a super time,’ she added.
‘You’re too young for Swallow,’ Stafford said.
‘I’m not too young for anybody, darling,’ the girl said and glanced back up the road with another smile.
‘Why don’t you come through on Saturday, Colin?’ Stafford said. ‘There’s a train through your place at one o’clock. Ask for Swinnerton Junction: I can meet you there.’
‘All right,’ he said. He bowed his head, hitched up his satchel, and started off across the road.
‘Goodbye, handsome,’ the dark-haired girl said and, as he reached the other side, he saw that all three of them were laughing, the fair-haired girl still gazing across, the shorter, dark-haired girl reaching up to grasp Stafford’s shoulder and talking earnestly, half-smiling, into his seemingly indifferent face.
Hedged fields gave way to woodland, then a cutting, with large, orange-coloured rocks jutting down towards the carriage.
A moment later the train drew into a station, a single wooden hut with seats, standing in the centre of a wooden platform.
Colin got down; a woman with a baby, who’d been sitting in the wooden hut, got into the carriage and closed the door. A man with a barrow, weeding a garden at the side of the station, took his ticket.
He set off up a track leading to a fenced-off road that skirted the top of a hill. An old cart stood propped up on wooden boxes in the station yard; a dismembered lorry, wheelless, its engine removed as well as its bonnet, stood mouldering amidst a bed of weeds. From somewhere along the line came the sound of a whistle and immediately ahead, at the top of the track, a man on horseback appeared, riding along the edge of the road. A wooden gate, leaning from its hinges, its bars intertwined with grass and weeds, divided the track from the road itself.
A figure on a bike was pedalling slowly up the hill, its head bowed, its shoulders stooped. Only as it reached the crest of the hill did it begin to straighten, and seeing him standing there beside the gate, it raised its hand and waved. ‘Hi,’ Stafford said and pedalled up towards him. ‘How long have you been waiting, then?’
He pointed to the train: having left the station it was now visible across the fields. A plume of dark smoke drifted back towards the cutting.
‘We go this way,’ Stafford said. He pointed back the way he’d come. The roofs of several houses were visible. ‘Jump on.’
Colin climbed on. Stafford turned the bike.
He pushed off with his foot.
The bike lurched; then, as it gathered speed, it straightened. They careered down the hill towards the houses. ‘Hold on,’ Stafford said. As the speed increased he started shrieking; he dragged his feet against the road. ‘There’s a turning at the bottom. Hold on. The brakes aren’t working.’ The bike swung aside; it ran off the road, across a pavement and on to an ashy track the other side. The brakes jarred; they shuddered, locked against the wheels, and, before the bike itself had stopped, Stafford fell. He put out his foot, the bike sliding round, and Colin clung to his arms, to the handlebars, then found himself finally pinned with Stafford against a wall.
‘I say, that was pretty good. We’ve come the wrong way, though,’ Stafford said. He began to pull Colin upright, laughing. The track led off between tall, clipped hedges: gates opened out on either side. ‘Do you want to ride it?’ Stafford said. ‘Though if you sit on the cross-bar we’ll get there much quicker.’ He wheeled the bike back towards the road.
Finally, having sat on the cross-bar and finding Stafford couldn’t pedal, Colin sat on the seat, holding to Stafford’s shoulders while Staf
ford half-crouched on the pedals in front.
They passed the arched entrance to a church; a large stone house stood back beneath a cliff of overhanging trees: small terraces of stone-built houses appeared on either side of the narrow road.
Stafford pedalled slowly; his head moved up and down stiffly, his back straightening as he kept his balance: when they came to a rise in the road he stopped.
‘It’s not much farther.’ He pointed up the road.
Colin dropped off.
To one side, as the road levelled out, appeared a large brick house: it was set well back from the road at the end of a narrow, unkempt garden. A pond, surrounded by bare, muddy earth was visible immediately behind the house and, beyond that, a roofless brick-built structure from inside the door of which, as they approached the house, appeared a pig and a flock of geese.
A driveway, rutted and submerged here and there in pools of water, ran off from the road towards the house; alternative tracks wound through the overgrown vegetation on either side, coming together abruptly in front of the pillared door.
Stafford had got off his bike; he led the way along one of the more circuitous tracks, skirting the pools of water and following a narrow, stone-flagged path which led to a door at the side. He leant the bike against the wall, removing his clips, then, without wiping his feet or attempting to get rid of the mud that clogged his shoes he stepped through the already open door and called, ‘Mother? Are you back?’ beckoning to Colin to follow without waiting for an answer.
A kitchen looked out to the back of the house. The floor was bare. A table, laden with plates containing sandwiches and cakes, stood against the wall. A sink with a single tap and a hot-water geyser was fastened beneath the window. Two doors led off, presumably, to the rest of the house.
‘Grab one of these,’ Stafford said, standing by the table and lifting the tops of the sandwiches, choosing two finally and handing one of them to Colin. ‘We might as well take one of these as well,’ he added, picking up a tart from one of the plates and a piece of cake from another. ‘We’ll go out to the back. Or do you want to have a look in here?’ He ate the sandwich quickly then picked up another. ‘We better go out to the back,’ he said. ‘There’ll be somebody here if we wait too long.’
Stone flags led down to an overgrown lawn. Beyond it, where the grass petered out and was replaced by a flattened stretch of mud, stood the pond; the flock of geese were wandering along one side and, by the roofless, brick-built structure, the pig was rooting at the turned-up ground.
The geese honked as Stafford approached; he appeared, to Colin, neither to hear them nor see them, walking round the pond, still eating, glancing uncertainly towards the house, beckoning him to follow to where a fence divided the end of the garden from a clump of trees.
The fence had been broken down at several points, tentatively repaired, and broken down again. Amongst the closely spaced trees, some distance beyond the fence, stood a wooden hut; it was little more than shoulder height and made up from disproportionate bits of timber across the top of which had been thrown a strip of corrugated metal.
Stafford, having climbed the fence, made his way towards it, stooping beneath the branches, hurrying, half-bowed, scarcely glancing back before ducking down inside.
The entrance was shielded by a piece of sacking; a piece of damp carpet covered the floor.
‘This is where I come at night,’ Stafford said. ‘I get stuff to eat and come out here.’ Yet he lay back as if disowning it, his head propped on one hand. ‘It’s not much good. I built it about a year ago,’ he added. ‘My brother came in once and broke it down.’
The dampness, increasing, seeped slowly through Colin’s clothes; he could, crouching in the narrow space, see only the vague outline of Stafford’s face, the lightness of his hair, and the slow motion of his hand as he ate the cake. Then, when the cake had gone, he lay quite still, the face expressionless, the eyes concealed, a vague darkness around his nose and lips.
‘It’s not as good as yours,’ he said, and added, ‘Lolly’s.’
‘No,’ he said and shook his head.
‘’Course,’ Stafford said, ‘I built it by myself. There’s no one round here, you know, to help me much.’
He spoke in a whisper now as if, unseen, there were others lurking in the trees outside.
‘I get one or two to come up. But we don’t have much to do’, he added, ‘with people in the village.’
Renewed honking from the geese came waveringly from beyond the fence. A dog had barked.
Stafford pulled back the sacking and looked outside.
Beyond the barrier of the trees the house was visible, the lawn rising up towards it from the muddied pond; a woman’s figure had emerged from the door at the side, glancing down towards the pond, then towards the shed, then, shielding its eyes, towards the trees. After a moment’s hesitation it went inside.
‘I sometimes come here at night. When the others are asleep. And bring grub in, you know. I have a candle.’
A match flared up in Colin’s face, but the candle, standing on a punctured tin, was too wet for the match to light: the flame spluttered out and once again they were plunged in darkness. Stafford had let the sacking fall back down.
‘That cake was good. What was that tart like?’ Stafford said.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘What was in your sandwich?’
‘Meat paste.’
‘She makes crab-paste ones, but they’re not much good.’
The faint murmur of a car engine came from the direction of the drive; Stafford lifted the sack again. A car was approaching the front of the house, bouncing in the ruts and sending up at each bounce a shower of water. It disappeared towards the door.
Stafford let the sacking fall.
‘We could go up to my room, if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ve one or two things.’
He made no move for a moment, kicking his feet against the wooden wall, the corrugated metal roof rattling ominously above their heads.
‘Or there’s the farm we could go to. At the back of these trees. Or we could cycle over, if you like, to Audrey Smith’s. Marion Rayner lives only a mile beyond. There’s a path that takes you there across the fields. They’ve got some horses. We could have a ride.’
Yet he continued to lie back with his head propped on his hand, only reaching forward finally when he heard the sound of a second car. He lifted the sacking again, his head stooping, gazing out. Rain had begun to fall: the surface of the pond had been broken up; there was a splatter of drops across the roof.
‘I suppose we had better go in,’ he said. ‘I thought it might rain but I hoped it wouldn’t.’ He got up slowly, easing himself feet first through the narrow entrance; Colin followed. Rain spattered through the branches overhead, and drummed on the corrugated iron roof. The surface of the pond was ruffled; the geese, however, were swimming up and down.
‘We can make a dash for it. We’ll go in by the kitchen,’ Stafford said. He ran ahead, along the edge of the pond, up the paving stones, hesitating slightly as he reached the door, glancing in before he stepped inside. A third car was coming up the drive; pale faces gazed out from behind the windows. A door had opened at the front of the house: a voice called out.
The sandwiches and cakes had gone from the kitchen; Stafford, after glancing at the empty table, had opened a cupboard door; he opened a second door: inside was a narrow pantry, lit by a single window.
‘Nothing doing,’ he said. ‘We’d better go up.’
He smoothed down his hair, straightened his jacket, then opened one of the doors leading from the room. The sound of several voices came from the other side.
‘If anybody sees you, just nod your head.’
They entered a broad hallway. Bare walls led up to a banistered landing. The front door of the house was standing open: a woman in a blue dress was standing on the steps outside, shielded by the porch, calling to the people who were descending from the car. Through a door le
ading off the hall came a murmur of voices followed, suddenly, by a burst of laughter. ‘Irene, for God’s sake,’ someone called.
‘That’s mother. She’s having one or two of her women in.’ Stafford mounted the stairs in urgent strides, pausing only as he reached the landing and leaning over the banister, gazing down as the woman in the blue dress came back inside the hall, her voice deep, almost like a man’s, directing the women who’d just arrived. ‘We go along here,’ he added. ‘My bedroom’s at the back.’
They passed an open door through which Colin glimpsed two single beds set side by side. At the end of a narrow passage stood a red-painted door to which a notice had been fastened. Stafford, as he reached the door, had felt inside his pocket and a moment later took out a key. ‘Private. Keep Out’, the notice read, with the initials N. K. S. printed underneath.
Having unlocked the door Stafford stepped inside. The room was narrow and lit by two windows on adjoining walls. The floor, like the floor of the hall below, was bare, the walls unpapered. A single bed stood behind the door; adjacent to it stood a chest of drawers, a cupboard and a desk. The floor in the centre of the room was occupied by several cardboard boxes which, the moment they were inside the room and the door closed and locked again, Stafford began to clear away. ‘Just one or two things,’ he said, pushing some of the boxes beneath the bed and balancing others on top of the drawers, on the cupboard and the desk. A single dark-blue curtain covered each of the windows, one window looking out to the pond and the roofless shelter, the other to the fields adjoining the side of the house.
‘Sit on the bed if you like. Though usually’, Stafford said, ‘I sit on the floor.’
The light pattering of the rain came from the guttering overhead. The sound of voices in the hall had faded. From the driveway, faintly, came the sound of another car.
‘What sort of meetings does your mother have?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ Stafford said. ‘They’re always women. They sometimes go on for hours.’ He lay on the floor, reaching out beneath the bed. He stood up a moment later, red-faced from his exertions, an airgun in his hand. ‘We can have pot-shots, with that, if you like. We’ll try the geese. They’re just the distance.’