Saville

by David Storey

  ‘Whose are they?’ he said, gazing in particular at a drawing of three apples, their redness veering into greenness, lying in a bowl.

  ‘They’re by your brother.’ His father laughed. ‘Andrew.’ He turned to the front. The name of the village school and his brother’s unfamiliar name, ‘Andrew Saville’, were written on the cover. ‘He was only seven.’

  ‘How did he die?’ he said, suddenly reminded.

  ‘He died within a few hours. Of pneumonia,’ his father said. ‘He was here one minute, and gone the next. I’d give ought to have that lad alive.’

  ‘How give ought?’ he said.

  ‘Well.’ His father hesitated then turned aside.

  On one occasion, some years previously, he’d gone with his father to put some flowers on his brother’s grave: it lay in a small plot of ground at the side of the road leading to the colliery, the whole area invisible, behind high hedges, from the road itself. The grave was marked by a small round-headed stone on which were painted his father’s initials, H.R.S., and a number. They cleared brambles from the spot, weeded the oblong bed, set a jam-jar in the ground and in the jam-jar set the flowers. ‘We ought to come each week and keep it tidy,’ his father had said, yet as far as Colin was aware neither he nor his mother had been again. Now, looking at the coloured drawings in the book, his father said, ‘We ought to go and have a look. See how that grave is. We haven’t been for some time, you know.’

  ‘How did it affect my mother?’ he said.

  ‘Well.’ His father, uncertain, gazed at the book steadily now, his eyes intense. ‘I think that’s been half the trouble.’

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘Nay, Andrew dying,’ his father said.

  The house was silent. His mother had gone off that afternoon to visit her sister, taking, after much complaining from his brothers, Steven and Richard with her.

  ‘Why thy’s so silent and morose at times?’

  ‘Am I silent and morose?’

  ‘Nay, thy should know,’ his father said.

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  ‘Nay, I can’t be the first to mention it.’ His father flushed.

  ‘I didn’t think I was morose,’ he said.

  ‘Nay, not all the time,’ he added. ‘It’s just been lately, I suppose.’ He gazed at the drawings.

  A cup stood on a saucer: looking at the picture Colin, with a peculiar sensation, as if someone had touched him, saw how clear and confident the ellipses were, perfectly drawn by his seven-year-old brother, with scarcely an inflection that broke the line, or a faltering in the shading of their blue-painted pattern.

  ‘Your mother was three months gone, tha knows. It must have had an effect, I reckon. She was very down.’ His father, almost idly, closed the book. ‘She was very down, I can tell you that.’ He added nothing further for a while. ‘It all seemed very strange at the time.’

  ‘Strange in what way?’

  ‘It was as if he wa’ gone.’ His father looked up. ‘And then, you see, came back again.’

  There was a freshness in his father’s face, as if, briefly, he’d gone back to that moment when he was young himself. He gazed up at Colin directly.

  ‘I’m not Andrew, though,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  His gaze drifted back towards the book: only in the writing of the name was there any uncertainty, he thought; as if his brother weren’t quite sure, despite the confidence of the drawings, of who he was.

  His father too glanced down at the book: it lay between them like a testament, or a tribulation, a strange denial, he couldn’t be sure.

  *

  His brother’s presence, so casually aroused, preoccupied him for several days. He was sleeping now in the tiny room, his two brothers occupying the larger room, and realized in fact he was probably sleeping in Andrew’s bed. It was also, he recalled, the bed the soldier had slept in during the war. Certain scenes of his early life came back: he recalled, faintly, the holiday with his mother and father, the journey on the back of the milkman’s cart. It had a peculiar familiarity, like the pictures in the book itself.

  One evening, when his father was at work, he had asked his mother about his brother, listened to her distant answers, then had asked her specifically about the death itself. ‘Oh,’ his mother said, ‘aren’t we getting morbid? What does it matter after all these years?’ and had added, ‘It’s the good things, after all, that count.’

  ‘Wasn’t Andrew good?’ he said.

  ‘He was good,’ his mother said. She told him then of the doctor’s visit, of the sudden illness, and of the doctor’s apologetic statement when he examined his brother on the double bed. ‘And what brought all this up suddenly?’ she added.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and mentioned the book.

  ‘And where did your father find it?’ she said.

  ‘He must have discovered it,’ he said.

  ‘He must have been amongst my papers.’

  ‘What papers?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I keep things,’ his mother said, mysteriously, as if this, finally, were something she wouldn’t confide. ‘At any rate, you could say he was going to be an artist. He had the nature as well as the gift’.

  ‘What nature?’ Colin said.

  ‘Oh, the nature.’ His mother traced her finger along a chair. ‘He was very unruly.’

  ‘In what way?’ he said.

  ‘Questions. Questions!’ His mother turned away. Then, as if drawn by the silence, she added, ‘He was always wandering off.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. He seemed to have nowhere in mind he was going to.’

  A blankness in his brother’s intentions suddenly faced him, just as presumably it had faced his mother; she gazed steadily before her.

  ‘Away from here, at least,’ she said.

  ‘Why away?’

  ‘Why all these questions? Honestly, if I could answer any of them don’t you think I would?’

  She took off her glasses; the light, as it was, had hidden her expression. She dried her eyes on the edge of her apron: it was a contained, almost self-denying gesture.

  ‘I loved him, Colin.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

  He visited his brother’s grave a few days later and found to his surprise it had recently been weeded; fresh flowers had been set in a glass jar which had in turn been buried in the earth. Some image of his brother came to mind, of a wild, anarchic boy, fair-haired, blue-eyed, stocky, square-shouldered, walking along the road from the village. For a moment standing by the grave, hidden by the surrounding shrubs, with the colliery pumping out its smoke and steam, the mountain of the heap above his head, he felt an invisible bond with that figure in the ground, as if they suffered in that moment a peculiar conjunction.

  He looked up towards the road: it was past this place that his father walked each day; it was in that school building, adjacent to the colliery, that Andrew, conceivably, had done his drawings. He recalled something then that had been nagging at the back of his mind for several days: it was his recollection of the time when he had first walked. He had been sitting with his parents at the side of a dam – the dam he had visited years before with Reagan on their country walk – and had got to his feet to follow a hen, the bird hurrying before him towards the water’s edge, and even as he heard his parents’ cries, he recalled vividly the thought that had struck him then, ‘But I have walked many times like this before: why should they be surprised I am walking now?’ And beyond their surprise was this greater conviction that not merely had he walked but lived his life before. It was like glimpsing a headland out of a mist.

  He felt a peculiar detachment: some part of his mind had been displaced, fragmented, cast away. He walked out of the cemetery towards the village. The cloud from the pit, with the colliery’s clankings and groanings, its peculiar gaspings, followed him: it was as if he were being ejected from the earth himself, disgorged. He
glanced back to the cemetery where, unknown, his brother was buried and felt, prompted by that child, a sense of mission, a new containment, a vulnerability which numbed him to the bone.

  It affected his relationship with Steven first. There was a peculiar assurance in his younger brother; he questioned nothing: the quietness of his childhood had given way to a robust, undemanding confidence. He played football, but without any intentness; he worked with little concentration. His voice, in the field at the back, would dominate the houses, refusing to be commanded or advised by anyone. ‘What’s up, our kid?’ he would say, slumping down in the settee beside him. ‘Ar’t feeling bad?’ his shoulder crushing against Colin’s almost like an older brother’s would. ‘Has’t flighted any sense out of ought, then?’ he would add whenever he saw him writing, or marking school books at the table. ‘Wheer’st the genius in that?’ peering mysteriously over his shoulder as if to find in the work some key to Colin’s nature which otherwise eluded him. He had grown in build, proportionately, even larger than Colin; his muscles were prematurely developed. There were very few boys in the village who threatened him; and yet, when they did, Steven never fought; rather, he would take their arm and turn them with him. ‘Nay, wheer’st that gonna’ get you?’ he would say amicably as if, in fighting, they had more to lose than they could imagine. It was as if his nature had been absolved, cleansed, washed through.

  ‘Why don’t you do more with your work?’ Colin would ask him.

  ‘Why should I?’ Steven would say.

  ‘Well, I’ve had to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To help you,’ Colin would tell him.

  ‘Why help me?’

  ‘To give you a chance.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To get through.’

  ‘Nay, I’ve got through.’ He would laugh. ‘What is there to get through, Colin?’

  ‘Don’t you feel you ought to get on?’ he said.

  ‘Get on wheer?’

  ‘Out of this.’

  His brother would look round him at the kitchen, he would look at the window and then outside.

  ‘Well, it’s not much to look at,’ he would add. ‘But we don’t have to stay here for good, though, do we?’

  ‘Don’t we? The way you’re going I think we shall.’

  ‘Nay, tha mu’n leave whenever tha wants.’

  ‘And leave you and Richard? You should have a chance.’

  ‘Nay, I’ve got a chance. All t’chance I’ll need.’

  His brother’s imperturbability disturbed him; it disturbed him as much as his mother’s acquiescence to it.

  ‘Don’t you want our Steven to get on?’ he’d ask her.

  ‘But he’s not as bright as you. At least, not as bright in that way.’

  ‘But he shows no aptitude, no determination, no need to do anything. He’ll just go on like he’s always done.’

  ‘But he’s got an equable nature,’ his mother said.

  ‘Has he?’ The word alone suggested that his mother had thought about this herself. ‘Acquiescent I should think’s more like it.’

  ‘Acquiescent to what?’

  ‘To this.’

  He would gesture hopelessly around him: the pit, the darkness, the perpetual smell of sulphur, the dankness, the soot; it flattened his spirits more than anything; there was no escape.

  ‘Doesn’t he want to change it? Is he going to live here all his life?’

  ‘Well, we’ve lived here,’ his mother said.

  ‘But then we’ve got a chance to change it. We’ve got a chance of getting out.’

  ‘Of leaving.’

  ‘Not physically. Spiritually. It does Steven no good to be buried here.’

  ‘But why are you so concerned?’ she said. ‘If he’s content why should you insist on him being different?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’d just want something better for him.’

  ‘But why change his nature when he’s always so happy.’

  ‘Is he happy?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Like a dog is happy. It’s bovine. He has no will.’

  His mother, at these attacks, would draw away: there was a peculiar ambivalence in them. His brother antagonized him; yet there was no enmity, no animosity or resentment in his brother at all. If anything, Steven admired him: when he was younger he would listen to Colin’s accounts of school and later of college with fascination. On one occasion, while still at college, Steven had visited him: he had shown him round the buildings, introduced him to the staff and to the students and his brother had admired it all, entranced, without any equivocation. He accepted everything that came before him.

  ‘Why do you get on at Steven?’ his father would ask.

  ‘He doesn’t do anything,’ he would tell him.

  ‘He’s being himself.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’ He would watch Steven playing in the field with the same irritation: his good nature was apparent from a distance, the lack of guile, of anything considered; his goodness was dishonest.

  ‘He doesn’t do anything,’ he would add.

  ‘Does he have to do something?’ his father would ask.

  ‘But you insisted that I do something,’ he said.

  ‘How did I insist?’

  ‘Everything. There’s always an insistence. I suppose you’ll be content for him to go in the pit.’

  ‘I suppose I shall. If he’s happy doing it,’ he added.

  ‘But why should I have had to do things I wasn’t happy doing?’ he said.

  ‘What weren’t you happy doing?’ his father said.

  ‘All this.’ He would gesture at the backs.

  ‘I thought it was something you wanted. It was something you were good at,’ his father said.

  ‘Was it something I wanted? Or something you wanted for me? Like you wanted something for Andrew, too.’

  ‘What did we want for Andrew?’

  ‘To make him good. To make him like me.’

  ‘Nay,’ his father said, and looked away. It was as if he’d wounded him too deeply. ‘Nay,’ he said again. He shook his head.

  ‘Isn’t it true?’

  ‘No. It’s not true. And if you said that to your mother I think it would kill her.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s better that she should know, then.’

  ‘You’ll say nothing to her,’ his father said, strangely, turning to him then and standing there as if physically he stood before his mother.

  ‘And what am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t I have the freedom that Steven has? Not selfishly, but for your good as well?’

  ‘What good? What good? Is there any good in saying this?’ his father said. Despite his tiredness he would have beaten him then.

  ‘But why should I have to take the blame?’

  ‘What blame?’

  ‘Why should I be moulded? Why weren’t you content with me?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t I have been allowed to grow like Steve?’ It was as if some evil in him had been held in abeyance, while in Steven it had been allowed to flow out, appeased.

  ‘Didn’t you want to go that school?’ his father said, yet lightly, anxious to distract him. ‘When you came home to tell us you’d passed I’d never seen you look so glad.’

  ‘It’s what I thought you wanted,’ he said.

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Yet why do you want nothing for Steve?’

  ‘I do want something for Steve. But I wouldn’t force him to it, not against his nature.’

  ‘But why force me?’

  ‘I haven’t forced you.’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘I haven’t forced you to anything.’

  ‘Not through force,’ he said. ‘Through love.’

  ‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘I think it’s far too deep for me.’

  And later, as if he had nursed his wound, and wondered why Colin should have inflicted it, his father added, ‘We’ve given you a key. We’ve given you a key to get o
ut of this.’

  ‘I can’t get out,’ he said. ‘You need the money. And in any case, with what I earn, I couldn’t afford to live by myself.’

  ‘It’s only for two or three years.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘While Richard and Steven are still at school. It bled us, you know, educating you.’

  ‘Why do it, then?’

  ‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘I’m beginning to wonder.’

  And a few weeks later, coming home from school, exhausted, to find his brother playing in the backs, Colin had picked another argument. His brother, listening to his rage, stood smiling, distantly, across the room.

  ‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘If you go on like that he’ll clobber you.’

  ‘Will he?’ he said.

  His mother, too, had been in the room.

  ‘Steven isn’t as docile’, she said, ‘as you sometimes think.’

  ‘Isn’t he?’ he said. ‘I’ve never noticed anything different.’

  ‘He’s got a mind and values of his own.’ His mother gazed angrily at him through her glasses as if, in his argument, he were attacking her.

  ‘I’ve never noticed a mind,’ he said. ‘As for values, I don’t think he even knows the word.’

  ‘Oh, I think he knows a lot of things,’ she said.

  ‘Where from? I’ve never seen him learning anything.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to learn,’ she said, deeply. ‘He already knows.’ She glanced at Steven as if she were confessing to something she scarcely knew how to express herself.

  ‘All he knows’, Colin said, ‘is how to eat and drink and take up space, and use the freedom that others have bought him.’

  ‘You’ve bought him nothing,’ his mother said.

  ‘Haven’t I? I’d have thought I’d done quite a lot for him. And Richard.’

  ‘Nay, he’s done something, Ellen,’ his father said. ‘He’s looked after those two like a father would.’

  ‘Has he?’ she said, bitterly, strangely. ‘He’s done what he’s wanted. We haven’t forced him’, she added, ‘to anything.’

  ‘Nay, you mu’n let him get it off his chest,’ his brother said, confidentially, as if the fault lay entirely now with Colin and their patience alone would have to deal with it.