Saville

by David Storey

  The bus rattled on. At the summit of a hill they could see, faintly, the glow of the village lights in the sky: it outlined the profile of a wooded ridge between them.

  ‘I can’t tell you how sickened I get coming back like this,’ he said again. He gazed down forlornly, dark-eyed, at the road ahead.

  ‘How is your mother?’ Colin said.

  ‘She’s mad. She’ll never get out.’ His gaze didn’t shift from the road itself. ‘She never recognizes me when I visit her. Perhaps it’s just as well. She blamed me, you know, for my father’s death. Not openly, that is.’

  They sat in silence for a while; at each of the stops more people got off.

  Soon they were sitting alone on the upper deck.

  A peculiar desolation gripped Colin. It was as if all his past had come together, that some final account had been submitted: his future suddenly seemed as desolate and as empty as the road ahead.

  ‘Well, here it comes, then,’ Michael said and squeezing past him made quickly for the stairs.

  They walked through the darkened streets together.

  A man was waiting at the end of the road; he moved away from beneath a lighted lamp as they passed.

  ‘Do you want to come in for a drink, Colin?’ Michael said.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I’d like to, if you didn’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, company’s company,’ he said and glanced up, as if unconsciously, towards Bletchley’s house.

  It was the first time he’d been inside Reagan’s home.

  There was a pungent odour of stale food.

  As his father had described, the rooms were bare: in the kitchen a mat stood before an empty fire; a wooden chair, with its back broken, stood directly opposite. On the floor, in the corner, was propped a violin case.

  The wallpaper, meticulously shaped and patterned, and which Mrs Reagan had kept scrupulously clean, was now stained and greased. The unblemished lino had vanished from the floor.

  ‘Sit down,’ Michael said, indicating the chair. ‘I’ll get you a glass.’

  He opened a cupboard and lifted out a bottle.

  He set two cups on the floor and proceeded to fill them.

  ‘You’ve never been in here before?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Your father came one night. It was kind of him to bother. Mrs Bletchley came as well. She’s been two or three times. She was fond of my mother. She’s even been to see her, though my mother didn’t recognize her. She’s got something matter with her leg as well.’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It might be cancer. None of them give her much chance.’ He added, after drinking from the cup, ‘I’ve never heard of cancer in the leg before.’

  From outside came the quiet panting of the pit. The light was dim, there was no shade around the bulb.

  ‘Do you want to sit on the chair?’ Colin said.

  ‘No, no,’ Michael said, and sat on the floor. ‘I don’t light a fire,’ he added. ‘I’m not often in.’

  ‘When do you propose to go to London?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I’ve one or two opportunities I want to look at first,’ he said. ‘The whole style of music, you see, has changed. The one I was brought up in has gone for ever. The story of my life.’ He finished the cup and half-filled it once again.

  Colin, less quickly, drank from his.

  ‘Have you noticed how there are no young people living here,’ he added. ‘There are hardly any young ones at the pit. They don’t even play cricket in the field any more: Batty, Stringer, your father, Shaw – they’re all too old. And there’s no one, as far as I can see, has taken their place. They’re even talking of shutting up the pit.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, for his father had mentioned this some time before.

  ‘It’s too old-fashioned, and its resources are too limited,’ Michael said. ‘Just think: my father worked there all his life. And Shaw. And your father’s worked there a year or two himself.’ He raised his head. ‘Do you remember that time we walked to Brierley, and a man gave us a lift in the cab of a lorry? Oh, how I’d like to go back to then. Everything seemed certain and safe, though I don’t suppose it was, or didn’t seem so at the time. I never did know what relevance that name was supposed to have: the one the man told me to mention to my father. I suppose now we’ll never know,’ he added.

  He began to moan to himself a little later: his head dropped. He hadn’t taken off his coat; his hat, which he’d hung on a hook, had dropped to the floor.

  Finally, when Colin called to him, he shook his head: he’d been drinking heavily, he’d assumed, throughout the evening. As Colin stood up, Michael slumped to the floor.

  He lifted him, astonished at his lightness; with considerable difficulty because of the length of his body he carried him upstairs.

  The main bedroom at the front was empty; so was the second bedroom at the back.

  In the tiny remaining bedroom was a single bed.

  Colin laid Michael down and took off his coat.

  ‘Is that you, Maurice?’ he said and put up his arms, speculatively, reaching out.

  ‘It’s Colin,’ he said. ‘I’ll cover you up.’

  ‘Oh, Colin,’ Michael said, as if he had trouble remembering who he was.

  He took off the raincoat, removed Reagan’s shoes and drew the blanket over him. His socks were in holes; his feet stuck out at the end of the bed; the shirt, too, he noticed, was black at the collar.

  He turned off the light.

  Michael made no sound.

  Colin took out the key from the lock downstairs, let himself out of the front door, then posted the key back through the letter-box.

  Then, his hands in his pockets, he went up the street towards his home.

  29

  ‘What do you think to it?’ she said. The room looked down into a tiny yard. From the open window at the opposite end came the bustle of traffic in the street outside.

  ‘Do you mind living here?’ he asked.

  ‘Mind?’ She watched him with a smile. She seemed content.

  ‘You’ve always had a house before. Even your sister’s house,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t you ever lived on your own?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he told her.

  ‘You ought to try.’

  She moved across the room; there was a faded carpet on the floor; the furniture was old. The wallpaper was faintly marked: it sprawled in a dull pattern of sepia flowers across the walls.

  ‘I’ve never been able to afford it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you always go on about money.’

  ‘It’s all there is to go on about,’ he said, ‘or very nearly.’

  ‘Where you come from,’ she said. ‘But not where I come from.’

  Yet she was disconcerted by his dislike of the room; it might have been the first time she’d lived on her own herself. The flat was in no way like the stolid elegance of her sister’s house, with its polished floors, thick rugs, and heavy, chintz-covered chairs and mahogany furniture.

  ‘Where did you live with your husband?’ he said.

  ‘We had a house. Near one of the shops. His family bought it. It stood in a little park, a stone affair, with an asphalt drive. It had eight bedrooms.’

  ‘Did you sleep in separate rooms?’ he said.

  ‘No.’ She laughed; the inquiry, suddenly, lightened her mood. ‘We had a nephew staying with us. He was going to one of the local schools.’

  She was small and serious; some reflection on the past, or her home, brought back a darkening of her expression. She glanced away towards the window: perhaps the desolation of living in a flat, alone, with no connections, had suddenly occurred to her. He was surprised she’d chosen such a neglected place: the house, one of a row of old Victorian terraces, occupied a street opening off the city centre; many times he’d walked past it on his way to school.

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sp; ‘What was your husband like?’ he said.

  ‘I believe I told you.’

  She stood now with her back to him; it was as if he’d cast her off entirely.

  ‘I prefer a small place, actually,’ she said. ‘For one thing, I never liked the Snainton house. It was dark and huge and damp and cold and there never seemed to be anyone in it.’

  ‘Were you in it alone all day?’

  ‘I worked at the shop.’

  ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘I supervised the office. We manufactured carpets, and sold them retail, you see, as well.’

  He grasped her arm, she was very light and slim: he could almost have lifted her in one hand. Yet, in other moods, she seemed heavy and unwieldy, as if she wouldn’t be moved, physically, by anything at all. He had never known anyone whose physique, seemingly, changed with every feeling; even the texture of her skin varied from soft to hard – it appeared to be something over which she had no control herself.

  She’d turned now and looked up at him directly.

  ‘Why won’t you commit yourself?’ she said.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Anything.’

  She released herself and moved away.

  ‘In any case, I shouldn’t ask. I’ve nothing to reproach you for.’

  Once, when they were walking round the town, she had shown him her parents’ house. It stood in a tree-lined road beyond the grammar school, a large, detached, brick-built house in the garden of which a man not unlike his father was working, overailed, stooped with age, grey-haired.

  He could never understand why she hadn’t gone back there to live.

  ‘What do your parents think?’ he said now, gesturing at the room.

  ‘About this?’ she said. ‘They haven’t seen it,’ and, a moment later, half-amused, she’d added, ‘Why do you relate everything to parents? Are you so inextricably bound up with yours?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s economics.’

  ‘Is it?’ she said, and added, still smiling, ‘I’m beginning to wonder.’ And a moment later, still watching him, she went on freshly, ‘In any case they haven’t seen it. Nor, I’m glad to say, are they likely to.’

  ‘Won’t they want to come here, then?’ he said.

  ‘Only if I ask them.’

  ‘Won’t you ask them?’

  ‘Not for the present. No,’ she said.

  On two occasions, when he knew she would be working in the shop, he’d gone to Bennett’s and surprised her behind the counter; she’d trained as a pharmacist as a girl and had frequently, during periods of her parents’ illness, or during holidays, taken over the shop completely. It stood, an old brick building, at the junction of a narrow sidestreet: the windows were tall, and bevelled outwards, and contained the old jars and coloured liquids and large, black ebony cabinets of a century before.

  On the first occasion he thought she’d been embarrassed: she was standing in a white smock, immediately inside the counter, serving a customer. Her father, a small, delicately featured man, with white hair and a virulent red face, had been turned to one of the cabinets, removing packets. Evidently surprised by the change of tone in her voice as she greeted Colin, her father had gazed at him with some curiosity over the top of a pair of spectacles.

  On that occasion she had made some apology and come out of the shop, walking down the street towards the city centre with her arm in his as if to reassure herself that nothing untoward had happened, that she hadn’t lost him or been diminished by this sudden revelation of her working life and to confirm to her father, who was undoubtedly watching from the window, that this was no ordinary encounter: in such a way she had drawn Colin closer to her.

  On the second occasion she had refused to come out at all. It was an hour to closing-time: he came in after school, driven into town on the back of Stephens’s motorbike, and he had had to go away and wait in the bar of a pub until an hour later she came in and greeted him, as she did always, with a formal kiss on the cheek. It was as if, in a curious way, they’d been married several years: she had this peculiar intimacy and directness, a self-assurance which came from her curious bouts of introspection, a self-preoccupation which diminished her, in his eyes, in no way at all; out of them she invariably came to him more strongly.

  ‘What did your father say?’ he’d asked her after his first visit to the shop.

  ‘Nothing,’ she’d said, then had added, after some moments’ reflection, ‘He thinks you’re very young.’

  Now he said, ‘Do they know you’ve taken a flat? I suppose they do.’

  ‘I told them I was looking for one,’ she said. ‘In any case, they’ll have heard from Maureen. That I’ve stopped living there, I mean.’

  ‘Do you ever go home?’

  ‘Occasionally,’ she said.

  She watched him with a frown: he was trying to unknot a puzzle, one she herself couldn’t recognize, or – if she could recognize it – understand.

  ‘They’re very much preoccupied,’ she added, and when he said, ‘With what?’ she said, ‘With one another. They always have been. They married young: I don’t think, really, they wanted any children. Apart from the shop, I don’t think my father’s thought about anything except my mother. And she’s never thought about anything except him. They’re totally absorbed in one another. And that, mind you, after almost forty years.’

  ‘What were they like when you were young?’ he said.

  ‘They kept us very much in attendance. Maureen went off and got herself engaged when she was only nineteen. It didn’t work out. But she married, however, very soon after. My parents, finally, have never really been interested in either of us; they never neglected us; we went away to schools; they were pleased to see us whenever we came back, but it was always, I had the feeling, as an adjunct of their lives.’

  In the shop he had sensed a peculiar amiability between the father and his daughter: they worked casually together, without any tenseness, with a great deal of fondness. They might have been friends, or brother and sister; there was nothing of the obsessiveness he experienced at home.

  He had told her about his family: she was very much interested by his parents and at one point he had been tempted to take her to meet them, then, for some reason, he’d resisted and merely talked about them, and Richard and Steven.

  ‘Why are you so jealous of Steve?’ she’d said. ‘He sounds so fine and unprejudiced.’

  ‘But, then, what’s made him so fine and unprejudiced?’ he’d said. ‘He’s had chances of a freedom I’ve never had myself.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ she said, smiling. ‘I’d have thought you had. Isn’t it his nature, not just his circumstances, you’re envious of?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s the circumstances, it’s been the circumstance, all along.’

  ‘It’s very odd.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It happens in most families, I imagine.’

  ‘Does it?’ She’d watched him with a smile. ‘I’ve never been jealous of Maureen, nor, as far as I’m aware, has she ever been jealous of me. We’ve quarrelled, but not as rivals, always more or less as equals.’

  ‘But then your parents threw you out,’ he said.

  ‘They didn’t throw us out.’

  ‘But you felt disengaged from them, disengaged by them, to a mutual degree. Whereas Steven always had more of my mother than I have.’

  ‘Yet you’re very involved with your mother,’ she said.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He’d been very surly: he hated to have elements of his behaviour pointed out, even if, absurdly, he’d pointed them out himself only a moment before. It was because he’d pointed them out that he hated her to refer to them: his having referred to them, he imagined, made them invalid.

  ‘I think you’re very naïve,’ she said. ‘It stands out a mile what you’re jealous of.’

  Now, in the faded flat, he looked at her with a sense of defeat: both their pasts had caug
ht up with them, she with her strange abstractness, her separateness not only from her parents but from her husband, he with his strange absorption in his family which, now that he needed it, refused to release him.

  They sat in silence for a while. The room had a musty smell: he had brought some flowers; even they failed to dispel either by their brightness of their scent the drabness of the room; it was as if it were something she’d deliberately chosen.

  ‘You being so depressed about it, depresses me,’ she said.

  ‘Am I depressed?’ he said.

  ‘Not really by the room. I can have it decorated. I’ll get some different furniture. It’ll look like new in a week or two. The room itself is not important.’

  ‘Then what am I depressed by?’ he said, for his spirits, the longer he was in the room, with the bustle of the town outside, sank lower and lower.

  ‘It’s because it’s faced us’, she said, ‘with one another, and there’s no Phil, no Maureen or her husband, and no mother’, she added, ‘to hide behind.’

  ‘I suppose that’s something you wanted,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s what you mean by commitment.’

  She stroked her skirt around her knees: her figure, in the vastness of the chair, looked tiny and vulnerable once again. He’d begun to hate her, and to be frightened of her; she represented more than he could imagine, some sticking to the past, some conformation of his past which he didn’t like, some determination to secure him. He was wanting to hurt her all the time.

  And as if she sensed his preoccupation she said, ‘What about you? Do your parents know about me?’

  ‘No,’ he said, then added, for no reason he could think of, ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Do you want to tell them?’

  ‘I see no point.’ He added, ‘They know I see someone. I’m out every night.’

  ‘But not with me.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Do I complicate your life?’

  ‘No,’ he said again, stubbornly. He shook his head.

  ‘You complicate mine. But in a way I like,’ she said, anxious to appease him.

  They went out a little later; they had a meal in a café: there was scarcely anywhere to eat in the town.