Saville

by David Storey

  ‘Fuss? What fuss?’ his father said, glancing at Margaret. ‘We’re not going to sit over them mucky pots, now, are we? We’ll have us a clean room to sit in.’

  ‘Nay, you take Margaret through to the front room,’ his mother said to Colin. ‘Your father and I will do the pots.’

  In the end they went through, sitting in silence in the tiny interior, gazing out to the street, the sounds of his parents’ voices coming through the wall, followed a little later by a wail from Steven.

  Colin went through to the door.

  ‘You can let him go out and play: he doesn’t have to stay in for Margaret,’ he said.

  ‘Nay, love: they’re not going out when we have a guest,’ his mother said, his brother sitting sulkily by the door, Richard already back on the floor, playing beneath the table.

  ‘Oh, what a commotion. Why does she have to be a martyr to it all?’ Margaret said when he went back in the room. She stood by the window, her arms folded, gazing out. Bletchley, as if aware of the commotion, perhaps having even listened to the flood of voices through the wall, was cycling slowly up and down, in loose circles, in front of the house, his large red face intermittently turned towards the door, no doubt aware of Margaret behind the curtains and offering, so his expression and attitude seemed to say, his own presence and personality as a suitable alternative.

  ‘It’s just nerves,’ he said. ‘She wanted to make a good impression. You’re the first girl I’ve brought back to the house,’ he added. He waited. She didn’t turn from the window. ‘Her ambitions for the house are so much greater than the things she’s got to work with. She really sees this as a sitting-room.’ He gestured round at the dilapidated furniture and the piece of ill-fitting linoleum on the floor.

  ‘It’s so awful. It’s so sickening. It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for her,’ she said. ‘I do. But to be driven to live like this.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll begin to relax,’ he said, ‘when you’ve been here one or two times. She might even be glad for you to do the washing-up,’ he added.

  ‘And do you think that would be an improvement, a step in the right direction?’ she said, turning finally from the window.

  ‘It depends what you want to make of it,’ he said.

  He was silent for a while. She returned her gaze to the street outside. Almost like a metronome, Bletchley appeared and disappeared, first in one direction then the other, beyond the window.

  ‘What’s his name again?’ she said.

  ‘Ian.’

  ‘Have you known him long?’

  ‘Almost all my life. Well, certainly all my life,’ he said. ‘Though I didn’t get to know him really until I went to school.’

  ‘Is he still at school?’ she said.

  ‘He’s another year. Then he goes on to university,’ he said.

  ‘Well, at least one more will have escaped,’ she said. ‘Are there any more like you in the village?’

  ‘One or two,’ he said. ‘Though in the end they seem to come back to it. Not the village so much as the industry,’ he added, indicating now a cloud of smoke that was drifting over the street from the direction of the pit.

  When the washing-up had been resolved, and his parents had come into the room to sit for a while, they all finally went back to the kitchen to play cards. Richard, at an early hour, was put to bed, and Steven allowed to go out, after a further argument. His voice finally came to them from the field at the back. A further cup of tea was made, the game of cards was played a little longer, his father shuffling and calling out his bid in a loud, raucous voice, his fits of laughter ending in coughing, playing so carelessly that Margaret invariably won her hand. ‘Oh, she’s dazzling me. Intelligence: you can see it at a glance.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re really trying, Mr Saville,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Trying? I’m trying. But what chance have I got against an intelligence like that?’

  Colin, later, in the darkness, walked her to the bus. She took his hand as they neared the stop.

  ‘Are you glad you came?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’m glad. It’s you I’m interested in, not your mother and father.’

  ‘They’re part of it,’ he said.

  ‘Not the whole of it,’ she said. ‘Now the week after next I shall come again. We’ll see if there’s some improvement.’

  In the end, she fitted into the house more easily than he’d expected. His mother, even, began to expect certain things from her; not only the regular bunch of flowers and the washing-up, but small services like shopping, ironing, even cleaning-out the kitchen one Saturday afternoon. Colin, arriving home from college, found her there, working alone, a scarf for a dust-cap on her head, sweeping the floor. Steven and Richard were playing down the backs: there was no one, as far as he was aware, in the house at all.

  ‘Your mother’s shopping, and your father’s in bed,’ she said. ‘And Richard and Steven are out somewhere. I haven’t seen them for an hour.’

  He helped her to finish the room and put the furniture back in place.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ he said.

  ‘Since this morning,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d come over, you see, for lunch. We had some meat at home that no one could eat.’

  ‘We’re not that poor here,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I thought it might help. You don’t begrudge it, after all?’ she added.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I hope you’re not letting yourself be used.’

  ‘And if I am being used, what does it matter? I wouldn’t come unless I wanted.’

  ‘But I thought you were against all this,’ he said.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t substitute one tyranny for another: the tyranny of not doing it’, she added, ‘for the obligation that I should.’

  They were out walking when his mother came back. It was part of the pattern now of their encounters: long, hauling walks, alternating with visits to the pictures, either to the small cinema in the village, or to one of the three in town. They seldom saw anyone at all. He introduced her to Reagan when they met in the street, to Mrs Shaw when she came in the kitchen one afternoon, to Mrs Bletchley in the yard outside. Apart from that their walks were conducted in silence, a strange, almost solemn companionship which he looked forward to all week in college, their arguments, whenever they occurred, ending in some embrace beneath a tree or in the depths of some unfrequented wood, their conversations, usually as they waited at stops for buses, or as they rested on some tedious stretch of road, about their respective activities at school and college. Little intruded on them at all.

  At the end of that year she applied for and was granted, conditionally on the results of her final examination, a place at a university in a town some forty miles away. He applied for an early medical for his National Service; they talked loosely now of what they would do in the future, of marriage before she went to university. One evening, when he arrived at her house, her father asked him if he’d like to talk about their plans. ‘Why don’t we go over to the surgery?’ he said. ‘There’ll be no one there,’ opening the door for him which led through from the rear of the house into a passage which, when the light was turned on, he found led into the back of the doctor’s room. He sat in the patient’s chair, immediately in front of the desk, the doctor sitting behind it, smoking his pipe, tapping out the ash at one point, leaning forward, his conversation still about the weather, about certain activities in the sporting world. Glass cabinets flanked them on either side, and in one corner, on a white, metal-covered tray stood a row of empty medicine bottles. A weighing machine with a vertical ruler stood immediately beside the door.

  ‘Margaret tells me’, the doctor said, ‘that you’re thinking of getting married.’

  ‘We had talked about it, yes,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to impose a heavy hand.’ Dr Dorman smiled. ‘I’d just like to talk about it, loosely. As just a general principle in Margaret’s life.’ He took ou
t his pipe again and re-filled it slowly with tobacco. ‘She’ll be nineteen, you see, when she goes up to the varsity,’ he added, stressing the word as if, for him, it were a place of some significance. ‘Your prospects, well, for two years, will be worth very little indeed. I’m looking, you see, on the practical side.’ He took out a box of matches, struck one boldly, and applied the flame vigorously to the pipe. A cloud of smoke was blown out steadily across the room. ‘If, for instance, Margaret gave up the varsity, which, if she had a baby, she would be obliged to, she’d have no qualifications of any note to fall back on later in life. As you get older your mind loses the resilience for learning, with the result that, if she did try to pick up where she’d left off, she’d find it very difficult, if not impossible. At the moment, there are no facilities for that sort of thing. And one child might easily lead to another. She’d find herself in middle life suited for what?’ He waited, watching him reflectively through the cloud of smoke. ‘Working in a shop.’

  ‘That hardly fits in’, Colin said, ‘with Margaret as she is. I think she’s determined, in any case, to qualify for what she wants. If we did get married,’ he added, more earnestly now and leaning forward in the chair, ‘we wouldn’t have a family for several years. Not, at least, until she’d settled, and I’d finished with the army.’

  ‘Of that you can’t be sure,’ the doctor said. ‘And I’m speaking as a professional man as well as a father,’ he added, smiling. ‘It would be absurd to put the whole question beyond the realms of human experience. After all, what’s the future for? To plan towards, to prepare oneself for. After she has her degree, and once you’ve got your job settled, as far as I can see there’s nothing to stop either you or she getting married. You may, even, by that time, have each found someone else. The human heart is very fickle, and at the age you’re both at, as well as over the next few years, you may find it coming up with a few surprises.’

  Colin waited. Not only was he unprepared for the argument, but it had, he felt, committed him in ways which, if he considered them beforehand, he would have rejected. The whole idea now of working towards some given objective was not only obnoxious in the assumptions it made both about himself as well as Margaret, but, in his own bewildered state, virtually meaningless. He watched the doctor’s face for a while, as if he sensed that, given one or two more objections to their getting married, he would get up and go and do it the following day.

  ‘These are just one or two thoughts that came into my head,’ the doctor said. ‘Maybe you’d like to think about them. Talk them over with Margaret and we could, perhaps all three of us, have a talk again. Her mother and I, you see, are quite convinced that life at the varsity will be quite tough enough as it is. Without the demands and pressures of marriage. You see my point?’

  Colin looked at the empty bottles. There was a chart on the wall beyond the doctor’s head, of the human body, a maze of coloured lines and muscles. In a large, thin-necked glass jar a moth or some other insect had begun to flutter.

  ‘After all, how long does a marriage last? Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years. What are three years waiting, and useful study, at the beginning? If you’ve both got something to work towards it’s an added incentive. You’re both sensible. It’s not as if I were talking to someone who could only see things, for instance, in terms of immediate gain.’

  Colin got up. He felt stiff in the chair.

  ‘I’ll talk to Margaret about it,’ he said. ‘Though we hadn’t really thought it out in practice.’

  ‘No, I’m sure in practice people at your age seldom do. It’s the job of old codgers like us’, the doctor added, ‘to do what we can in that direction.’

  He got up himself and went over to the door, holding it open as he might for a patient, pausing only to glance round before he put out the light.

  When they returned to the house Margaret was sitting in a chair by the fire, sewing, her mother beside her, preparing a sheet of paper, a placard or an announcement, for a meeting she was going to later that evening. ‘Tea?’ Mrs Dorman said, looking up at her husband’s face to see what the outcome of their conversation might have been.

  ‘Oh, tea for me. How about you, Colin?’ the doctor said, laughing, puffing out a final cloud of smoke before leaning down casually and knocking his pipe out against the square-shaped stove.

  Margaret glanced across at Colin. He gave no sign. The feeling of domesticity in the room was heightened by the quietness of the two women, and the relaxed geniality of the man. As if nothing whatsoever had occurred the doctor picked up a newspaper and sank down in a chair. ‘Any chance of a biscuit with it?’ he called to his wife as she went over to the door. He looked over the top of the paper a moment later at Margaret and added, ‘You two off out this evening, or staying in?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose we’ll go for a walk,’ Margaret said. She glanced at Colin once again. ‘Is that all right?’

  They went after her mother had brought in the tea.

  They walked in the darkness of the golf-course. It was his habit now, whenever they walked, to hold her hand. After a while he took off his coat and they lay down on the grass. He’d told her already of what her father had said.

  ‘I don’t mind leaving school and getting married now,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel obliged to do what they want. Though naturally, of course,’ she added, ‘I’d listen.’

  ‘Even then, it’s better that you do qualify for something,’ he said. She had already, the previous year, decided against medicine, against following her father, and had allotted, largely because it was a shorter course, to go in for languages. Even over that there’d been some disagreement. Now she moved away from him, kneeling in the darkness. ‘Doesn’t it go against everything you’ve always said? That you ought to be independent? That you should have a separate way of life? Why should you give that up now? What’s so different between now and a year ago?’ he added.

  ‘I can’t see why I can’t do both things. If we married in a year I could still take a degree. I can’t see marriage being a hindrance. If anything, it would be a settled background to work against.’

  ‘What if we did have a child?’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t we plan a family?’ she said.

  ‘I suppose we could.’ He waited.

  ‘What’s to hold us back?’ she said.

  ‘It’s all so planned and deliberate,’ he said. ‘Like buying a suit, or a house. I’ve always looked for something spontaneous. It’s as if we’re laying down our lives, like rolling out a carpet. We know where we’ll go before it’s begun.’

  He got up. They moved on after a moment. She took his hand.

  ‘You talk of all this independence,’ he said. ‘But you never live it through. You said your mother was like that, but you were different. I don’t want you married to me, as a matter of fact. Not on these terms. I’d rather get up and do it tomorrow. Or never do it at all. I’d rather we go on as we are, and let them speculate about the future.’

  ‘Then we’ll go on as we are,’ she said.

  She came to the stop to see him off. After he’d mounted the bus and it drew away he turned and saw her figure beneath the lamp, poised at the edge of the road, and he almost leapt off the bus and hurried back, she seemed something so slender and vulnerable, scarcely there at all, with her impassioned desire to be something which, in the end, she would never become.

  He felt her absence through the night, coiled in his bed. On the Monday morning, instead of returning to the college, he waited outside the school. He saw her figure some distance away, unfamiliar now in the uniform of the school. She looked up in surprise, with a kind of dread, when she saw him standing by the gate and despite the other girls’ curiosity came quickly across.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ she said.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I just wanted to see you, that’s all,’ he said.

  Yet even then she gazed at him with dread, her eyes dark, her hand grasped to the leather case which held her books.
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  ‘I thought something must be wrong,’ she said, watching his face to see if, in the end, she might be right.

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. No,’ he said. He added, ‘And how are you? Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said, vaguely, looking round then at the yard, at the other girls, and at a mistress who, with a querulous look, passed them in the gate. ‘They don’t like us talking in the vicinity of the school,’ she added.

  ‘We could move away,’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t time.’ A bell rang somewhere inside the building. The figures in the yard moved quickly towards the doors. There were screams and shouts. Someone called her name. ‘They asked me what we’d decided, of course,’ she said, and added, ‘I told them we’d go on as before. Unless something happened. I think they’re frightened more than anything else.’

  ‘Or concerned.’

  ‘You see, you vacillate’, she said, ‘as much as me. First on their side and then on ours.’

  ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you, at least,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have got through the week without.’

  ‘Me neither. I was going to ring you at college tonight.’

  ‘What about?’ he said, and smiled.

  ‘Oh, just to talk,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘I’ll have to go. I’ll call in any case,’ she added and, after glancing quickly to the yard, kissed him on the mouth.

  23

  The building was a large, square structure, like a mill or a warehouse built originally of brick, but covered now with a uniform yellowish plaster, darkening and stained with soot, its multitudinous rows of windows framed by peeling greenish paint: the whole edifice appeared to have been roasted inside an oven, seemingly lifeless until he entered the plain, green-painted door at the top of a flight of concrete steps and a man in an Army uniform stepped forward.

  He gave him his name, showed him the letter he’d been sent, and was directed to a room on the second floor. Here, at the end of a concrete corridor, thirty or forty youths were sitting on benches facing a wooden partition in the centre of which was a small glass panel. This was pulled aside the moment he entered and a man with close-cropped hair thrust his head towards the room and called, ‘Up to J26 on the third floor, and quick about it.’