by David Storey
After something like twenty minutes his father appeared.
He had evidently been weeping and appeared, for a moment, as he came down the steps to the street, like some quaint facsimile of the figure lying on the bed, nodding his head briefly, absently, in his direction, then turning towards the stop.
‘He doesn’t want to come out,’ his father said when he caught him up. ‘And they seem to think he’ll be better in there than living at home.’
They walked through the intervening streets in silence. The place had a closed-in atmosphere: in the distance they could hear the hooting of ships and, somewhere close at hand, the dull, drumming rhythm of a band.
His father wiped his nose. He wiped his eyes. By the time they’d reached the stop he was more composed.
‘Well, it’s sad.’ He looked about him. ‘To think of the life he’s had. I can’t stop thinking of him when he was younger. We worked on the same farm, you know. I got him a job when he was out of work, and we used to go in together. I can remember him now. As clear as a bell.’
These thoughts, when the bus came, silenced him again. Even later, on the train, he scarcely spoke, and when, some two hours later, they reached the house he sat at the kitchen table shaking his head and saying to his mother’s inquiries, ‘I can’t get over it,’ his eyes reddened, his cheeks and his forehead still inflamed.
A telegram arrived two weeks later. His father came home late from the afternoon shift and stood in the kitchen, dark-eyed, when his mother said, ‘There’s a telegram come for you,’ his father perhaps unprepared for what it might reveal, or perhaps too tired from his work to think, opening it carelessly, reading it slowly, then, with a child-like cry, turning, as if he would fall, leaning up against the kitchen wall, opposite the door, shielding his face beneath his hand.
‘Oh, Harry,’ his mother said, taking the telegram and reading it herself, his father turning casually aside, going to a chair, taking off his boots, then going to the sink to wash his face. Then, as his mother set out his meal, his father had gone to the door and with the same casualness had gone to the stairs. They heard the boards creak in the room at the front. His mother began to busy herself about the kitchen as if nothing had occurred, saying, ‘Come on, then, Colin, haven’t you something you should do? Haven’t you finished your homework? There’s time, if you look sharp about it, to clean a few shoes,’ scarcely pausing when a moment later they heard, with a slow chilling, the sound of his father’s grief above their heads.
The winter passed. At Easter a party from the school went away on holiday. They stayed in a guest-house at the foot of a mountain. One evening he and Stafford went out to a near-by village. A hump-backed bridge looked out over a lake. From a row of small houses behind them came the sound of singing.
Stafford paused.
Three or four men and women were singing what sounded, from this distance, like a wordless song. No other sound came from the village; columns of smoke drifted up against the lightness of the sky, the dark shapes of the houses strewn out like boulders at the foot of the mountain. At the peak of the mountain, overlooking the village and the bright expanse of lake beyond, snow glistened in the moonlight.
Stafford leant against the parapet of the bridge. He’d lit a cigarette on the way down from the hotel and now, his head back, his arms crooked on the stone parapet behind, he blew out a stream of smoke, half-smiling.
‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘They’ve put me down for Oxford.’
‘Who?’ he said.
‘Gannen. I’m going to have special coaching in Latin. They’ve put me down for an Exhibition.’
‘Don’t you think it’s worth it?’ he said.
Stafford shook his head. ‘What do you do with life, do you think?’
Perhaps he hadn’t heard the singing, for he stubbed out the cigarette, leaning over the parapet and dropping it into the darkness of the stream below: odd, almost luminescent crests of foam shone up, here and there, from the deepest shadows. Stafford kicked the toe of his shoe against the stone.
‘It seems worth going for, I suppose,’ he said.
Stafford shrugged. He looked up at the cold, cloudless depth of sky, glanced, almost with a look of irritation, towards the moon, and added, ‘I don’t think, really, it’s worth all that effort. What really is? Have you any idea?’
‘No.’
‘If you did, in any case, you’d never tell me. You’re such an eager beaver. I suppose, with you, getting a job, a house, a car, a wife, and all that sort of stuff, is all that matters.’
‘No,’ he said and turned away.
Perhaps Stafford, aware of the singing, had assumed it to come from a wireless. With the same look of irritation he’d given the moon, he glanced up now towards the houses. A door had opened somewhere followed immediately by the barking of a dog.
‘What a dead and alive hole this really is. I don’t suppose there’s a pub or anything,’ he said, moving slowly from the wall, still kicking his toe and, his hands in his pockets, setting off towards the village. ‘I mean, what are we when it comes down to it?’ he added. ‘A piece of something whirling through nothing and getting,’ he went on, ‘as far as I can see, nowhere at all.’ He waited for Colin to catch him up. ‘In a thousand million years the sun’ll burn up the earth, and all that everybody’s ever done or thought or felt’ll go up in a cloud of smoke.’ He laughed. ‘Not that we’ll be here to see it. Yet metaphorically one sees it. I feel it all the time as a matter of fact.’ He walked on in the darkness of the road, still kicking his toe, the sound echoing from the walls of the houses on either side. ‘Everything’s so easy for you,’ he added. ‘You’ve come from nowhere: they’ve put the carrot of education in front of you and you go at it like a maddened bull. I couldn’t do half the work you put into it, you know. I can see’, he went on more slowly, ‘what lies the other side.’
‘What does lie the other side?’ Colin said, walking beside him now, his hands in his pockets.
‘Nothing, old boy,’ Stafford said, and laughed. ‘Take away the carrot, and there really isn’t anything at all. It’s only someone like you, crawling out of the mud, that really believes in it. Once you’ve got it, you’ll see. You’ll sit down and begin to wonder: “Is that really all it is?”’ He laughed again, glancing across at him from the darkness.
They’d come out from between the houses and emerged on a stone embankment which, for a few yards, ran along the edge of the lake.
‘I mean, what does Hepworth tell us about these mountains? This lake, you know, and this U-shaped valley. They were formed by ice ten thousand years ago. Here’s a few houses put down at the side: a few people live in them, go through God knows what privations, misery, exaltations, and in another ten thousand years another sheet of ice comes down and wipes it all away. That, or an atom bomb. So what’s the point of suffering or enduring anything at all?’
Colin waited. Beneath them, with a dull, almost leaden sound, the lake lapped against the stone. It washed up in little waves over a bed of pebbles, the white foam glistening in the light.
‘I suppose you believe in a Divine Presence and all the rest of the propaganda,’ Stafford said. He stooped to gaze down at the water as if, for a moment, he’d suddenly forgotten anyone else was there.
‘I don’t know what I believe in,’ Colin said.
‘Material progress, backed by a modicum of religious superstition. I can read it in your features,’ Stafford said. ‘You even play football as if you meant it. And if there’s anything more futile than playing sport I’ve yet to see it. Honestly, at times I just want to lie down and laugh.’
‘I suppose it’s more touching than anything else.’
‘Touching?’ Stafford glanced across at him and shook his head.
‘If everything is meaningless, that, nevertheless, we still ascribe some meaning to it.’
Stafford laughed. He flung back his head. His hair, caught by the moon, glistened suddenly in a halo of light. ‘Touching? I cal
l it pathetic.’
He took out another cigarette, lit it, tossed the flaming match into the lake, glanced round him with a shiver and added, ‘We better get back. There’s nowhere to go. That’s symptomatic, in a curious way, of everything I’ve said.’ Yet later, lying in his bed, Hopkins snoring and Walker half-whining in sleep in their beds across the room, he had added, ‘Do you see some purpose in it at all, then, Colin?’
He could see Stafford lying on his back, his head couched in his hands. The moonlight penetrated in a faint, cold glow through the thin material of the curtains.
‘I’ve never really looked for one,’ he said.
‘You’re an unthinking animal are you?’ Stafford half-turned his head, yet more to hear the answer than to look across.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Are you frightened of admitting you believe in a Divine Presence?’ Stafford said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘You do admit it, then?’
Colin paused. He gazed over at Stafford whose head, though not turned fully towards him, was still inclined in his direction.
‘It’s only when everything has lost its meaning that its meaning finally becomes clear,’ he said.
‘Does it?’ Stafford gazed across at him now quite fiercely.
‘For instance, I enjoy coming here,’ he said.
‘Oh, I enjoy coming here,’ Stafford said. ‘I suppose I enjoy coming here. I haven’t really thought about it. Not to the degree that you have.’ He waited. ‘If there isn’t a Divine Presence don’t you think it’s all a really terrible joke? I mean, if the world’s going to end as all worlds do, as an exploding mass of sunburnt dust, what’s the purpose in anything at all? It’s like a man taking infinite pains over his own funeral. I can’t see the point of it. I mean, if God’s going to allow the world to vanish, as all worlds do, what’s the point of putting us in it in the first place? To give him a clap, do you think? I mean do you think, really, He’s looking for applause? Or that He isn’t actually there at all; at least, not in any form that could be defined outside the realms of a chemical reaction?’
Hopkins groaned in his sleep; Walker whined freshly through his congested nose.
‘Just look at Hoppy. Just listen to him. Do you think there’s a divine purpose then in that?’
Yet, perhaps because of the freshness of the walk, of the air outside, or because of the vague, persuasive murmur of Stafford’s voice, he felt himself being drawn downwards into sleep: he opened his eyes briefly, saw Stafford, silent now, with his head couched once more in his hands, gazing with wide eyes towards the ceiling, then remembered nothing more until he heard the calls of Hopkins and Walker across the room, and the sound of a gong from the hall downstairs.
Below them, when they reached the snow-line, lay a vast area of undulating heath and coniferous woodland, interspersed with the cold, metallic sheen of several narrow lakes: a waterfall tumbled immediately below them to the village, and it was here, on the way up, that Stafford had paused and looking round at Colin, still casual, half-smiling, had said, ‘Do you ascribe to it a divine purpose, or are we ants, mechanistic functions, crawling on an arbitrarily eroded piece of rock?’ not waiting for an answer but glancing up, past the head of the corrie lake to where the flattened, cone-shaped peak of the mountain faded away into a mass of swiftly moving cloud. Gannen, booted, plus-foured, with a walking-stick and a small haversack on his back, had glanced behind him. ‘Do I hear a sceptic amongst the ranks?’
Several boys at the front had turned.
‘Was that your comment, Stafford,’ he added, ‘on the scene below?’
‘It was merely a speculation, prompted by the view, sir,’ Stafford said.
‘Far be it from me to ascribe a divine purpose to anything, particularly when I examine the sea of disingenuous faces I see below me at the present,’ Gannen said. ‘Nevertheless, examining the terrain beyond, even I, historian that I am, and acquainted with all the more perfidious traits of man, would confess to a feeling of uplift, of exhilaration, and might even ascribe to it an extra-terrestrial significance. After all, we are the end products, as Mr Macready, a biologist, will tell us, of several million years of evolution, and who is to say, standing at the threshold of human existence, what significance we might ascribe to it? In years to come humanity might stretch out its tentacles to the moon, or, conceivably, beyond the sun, to other galaxies perhaps. We stand today near the summit of a mountain: who can say where a man might stand in, for the sake of argument, another thousand years? God, as the philosopher might say, Stafford, is a state of becoming, and we, as the psychologists might say, are the elements of his consciousness.’
Stafford smiled; he looked past Gannen and the boys strung out below him on the path to where the small, grey-haired figure of Hepworth was climbing up the slope towards them with the slower group.
‘Stafford, of course, would have no time either for the philosopher or the psychologist,’ Gannen said. ‘He is one of the modern school, the sceptics, who see humanity as merely the fortuitous outcome of biological determinism. Like ants, I believe was the phrase, crawling on an arbitrarily eroded piece of rock. Hopkins, of course doesn’t care what we are, nor, no doubt, does Walker, as long as he can get his bottom at the earliest opportunity to the seat of a chair and hands and feet warmed up in front of a fire.’
Macready had taken a small bottle from his haversack and was tasting its contents. He tossed back his head, closed his eyes, then, replacing the bottle, glanced up with blank incomprehension at the peak before them.
It was late in the afternoon by the time they got back to the hotel. Rain was falling. Platt was standing in the doorway with the other boys who had stayed below, waving to Gannen as he appeared in the drive and calling, ‘We were just thinking of coming to look for you.’
‘Oh, just a routine climb, Platty,’ Gannen said, removing his haversack and looking round at the exhausted boys. ‘Apart from nearly going over the edge on one occasion, the afternoon you might say has passed without incident. Though’, he added, ‘we had to call on Stafford to invoke a divine blessing on our behalf. The fact of the matter was, for half an hour after we left the summit – from which, incidentally, we saw nothing at all – Mac and I were lost. If the sun hadn’t have come out, very briefly, in what Stafford might call a fit of arbitrary intervention, I don’t think we’d be back at all.’
And later, when the corridors of the hotel were full of steam from the baths, Stafford, flushed with the heat of the water, and with a towel around him, had come into the room and said, ‘I never thought Gannen was a sentimentalist until today. I don’t think I’ll get through history. It takes credibility from anything he says,’ lying on the bed, feeling in his jacket for his cigarettes, then adding, ‘Honestly, with a man like that, what chance have I got of an Exhibition?’
21
His father, finally, with Reagan’s help, had got a job at the local pit. The move, however, wasn’t a happy one. Now that he found himself working amongst the village men he began to feel uneasy, exposed. Promoted to a deputy, and responsible for an entire face during each of his shifts, he was earning less now than he had, with overtime, as a miner, less even than the men he superintended. He came home from each shift more exhausted than when he’d had a six-mile cycle ride at the end of his work. He would lie in the kitchen, his head sunk down in the corner of a chair, his arms splayed out, his mouth open, his eyes still dark with dust, groaning in his sleep, his mother afraid to disturb him, Steven and Richard creeping cautiously about the house, his mother calling, with a peculiar despair, whenever they made a sound.
The house, too, in some way suffered. It was as if the substance of the pit were brought home each day: some part of it was emptied out, the dust, the darkness, a blackness descending on the house, his father’s exhausted figure slumped there as its pivot, his mother and his brothers and himself moving furtively around. There was little communication between them now, the silences broken by his mother�
�s calls, his father’s exhausted breathing, deepening finally to a snore, by the odd whisper of his brothers, as, solemnly, their eyes wide, they crept cautiously to the stairs or through the door, their voices, in sudden relief, calling in the yard outside.
‘Nay, what do I care what he does?’ his father said when, later that year, they discussed his prospects of taking a scholarship. ‘He’s to stay on another year if he wants to go to college.’
‘He can go to college next year,’ his mother said. ‘To train as a teacher. It’s for the university that he has to stay on another year,’ she added.
‘Whichever’s quickest road to get him working,’ his father said. ‘As long as he doesn’t go near that pit.’
Gannen came one evening to see his parents. He offered to go down to the bus stop to meet him, having worked out the probable time of the master’s arrival, but his father had added, ‘It’s not royalty we’re expecting. Just let him come like anybody else.’
‘Nobody ever does come,’ his mother had said. ‘If people did come more often perhaps it wouldn’t seem such a terrible mess.’
‘Mess? What mess?’ his father said, looking round at the bare floor, the chairs from which the springs protruded, the faded cloth on the table, the soot-stained walls. ‘He’s not coming to inspect us, you know. He’s coming to give advice.’
Yet, when Gannen came, it was his mother who had answered the door, his father standing in the kitchen, his head inclined to catch his introduction, going out finally to the front room where Gannen had been installed. The room, if anything, was barer than the kitchen. After sitting in its draughts and relative coldness for several minutes it was Gannen himself who had suggested they might move through to the kitchen. ‘Oh, let’s sit in the living-room,’ he said, bestowing on it a title which reassured his mother, for she quickly led the way, holding back the door. ‘Oh, you needn’t turf those out for me,’ Gannen said when she began to usher Steven and Richard into the room they’d just vacated.