Saville

by David Storey

  When they went back, later in the evening, to the flat, he felt his resistance, a slow, half-hesitant rancour, rising. He’d become peculiarly brutal: it was he who was frightened, and he was frightened more by himself, he thought, than by anything outside. He had left her after midnight, when the last bus had gone, and had hitched a lift part of the way to the village in a lorry. It was two o’clock in the morning by the time he got back home.

  His mother was quiet the following morning.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ he said, bitterly, constrained himself by her silence and the gravity of the house. Steven and Richard had already gone to school.

  ‘What time did you come in?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  His mother was completing dressing herself behind a chair. It was something that he hated: she would come down with her worn skirt and jumper, or her faded dress, and stand behind a chair to put on her stockings. It was some habit from her childhood, for she always took off her stockings in the evening, by the fire, and laid them on a chair; they were invariably in holes. It tormented him to watch her: it tormented him to ignore it. He never knew why she persisted, and she went on with it mechanically, finally flinging down the hem of her dress with an absurd gesture of propriety.

  ‘Your dad said it was two o’clock.’

  ‘So what?’ he said.

  After he’d gone to bed, locking the back door to which he had a key, he’d heard his father rise and go downstairs, ostentatiously, to make some tea. Only three hours later he’d got up again to go to work.

  Now his mother said, re-emerging from behind the chair, ‘It means none of us, particularly your father, gets any rest.’

  ‘I can’t see why.’

  ‘Because we lie awake wondering where you are. Then, if we do fall asleep, we’re woken up when you do come in. Then your dad has to get up at half-past five.’

  ‘He could get up later. It doesn’t take him half an hour to walk to the pit.’ He went on eating his breakfast.

  ‘He gets up earlier so he can light the fire. To help me, when I get up,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get up and light it, then,’ he said. ‘Or Richard can. Or Steve.’

  ‘And who gets up to make sure they have?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘If you’re so little in the house I don’t know why you go on living here,’ she said, turning away now to the sink and occupying herself with washing-up.

  ‘I come here because I can’t afford to live anywhere else. Not do that and go on paying something here,’ he added.

  ‘You should apply yourself more to teaching,’ she said. ‘No wonder you were asked to leave. If you’re out half the night how can you teach? You can’t’, she added, ‘have the concentration.’

  ‘It wasn’t lack of concentration I was fired for,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but it might just as well have been.’

  He was caught in a dilemma which, a few years before, he could scarcely have imagined. He even began to look enviously at Reagan, and wondered, wildly, if he might not move in with him. Yet Michael’s house was increasingly deserted: it was rumoured, when he didn’t appear for a week, that he’d left the place for good, but late one night the light went on in the upstairs room and the next morning his figure could be seen across the backs.

  New houses were being built across the village: his father had put down his name for one. People were moving in from neighbouring villages. A factory employing women sewing garments was set up in a prefabricated building in a yard adjacent to the pit. A new shop was opened; a corner of the village street was widened; a bus shelter had been built; the Miners’ Institute hired entertainers whose names were heard on the radio. The Shaws had a television; shortly after, the Bletchleys bought a set as well.

  Bletchley himself had been taken on, during his final term at university, by a large firm of cloth manufacturers in a neighbouring town: he worked in the laboratories. A few months later he was sent to America on a training course. He came back with a light-grey suit, a small, neat, metal-stemmed pipe and a slight American accent. A photograph of him appeared in the local paper. Mr Bletchley, who had been promoted from his local job on the railway to a divisional office, bought a second-hand car. It stood in the road outside, the first car to be owned by anyone in that part of the village.

  His father would gaze out at it in fury; he would listen with the same dull rage to the sound of the television set through the wall. ‘Ian looks after his parents,’ he would say, although Ian himself was scarcely ever to be seen in the village and only came home occasionally at weekends, staying half a day and only rarely a night. His father would drive him back to the station.

  The village had a worn-out look; from the centre it looked like the suburb of a town: new houses sprawled across the slope of the adjoining hill, and reached up to the overgrown grounds of the manor. Over half a century of soot appeared to draw the buildings, the people, the roads, the entire village into the ground, the worn patches of ashes between the terraces gashed by children digging and worn into deep troughs by the passage of lorries. Very little of the brightness that he remembered as a child remained: so much had been absorbed, dragged down, denuded. Occasionally, on an evening, when he walked out of the place he would gaze back at it from an adjoining hill and see, in the deepening haze, the faint configuration of the village as it might have been – the smooth sweep of the hill with the manor, the church, the cluster of houses at the base. The light would deepen: the simple, elemental lines of the place would be confirmed; then lights sprang up, and across the slopes and in the deep declivities would be outlined once more the amorphous shape of buildings and the careless assemblage of factory, pit and sheds and the image, almost in a breath, would be wiped away.

  He taught for three years in a variety of schools; in none did he stay for very long: he was preoccupied by a peculiar restlessness. His relationship with Elizabeth fluctuated from one extreme to another. For a time he gave up seeing her altogether, long after the flat had been redecorated and looked, superficially at least, not unlike a room in her sister’s house. Then, of his own volition, he had gone back to her; they both struggled to escape, yet from what in their relationship he had no idea – his youth tormented her, her age preoccupied him; she tried to pretend at times she would soon re-marry.

  Shortly after her decoration of the flat had been completed he was visited by her husband at home.

  The man arrived one evening; his mother answered the door.

  She showed him into the room at the front. She came in, flush-faced, her gaze hidden, however, behind the glare on her glasses.

  ‘There’s a Mr Walton to see you,’ she said and he recoiled instantly, knowing it was him.

  The man was short and fair-haired: he might have been a school-teacher like himself, or a clerk in a local office.

  His embarrassment was even greater than Colin’s. He refused a cup of tea and stood awkwardly before the empty fire; finally, at Colin’s insistence, he sat in a chair.

  ‘I came to see you about Elizabeth,’ he said, his hands clenched together. ‘I suppose she’s mentioned me,’ he added.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘We’re not divorced yet.’

  ‘No,’ he had said. The man had stated it hopefully, as if suspecting Elizabeth might have told him something different.

  He wondered what she’d seen in him, interpreting his extreme nervousness perhaps as sensitivity, and sensing in him someone she might mould: some image, hopefully, of her enterprising father.

  ‘I sent a message once,’ Walton said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He felt there was very little he could tell him.

  ‘And I had a man, I don’t know why, collecting evidence.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘I thought you had.’

  ‘The fact is, I think it’s only a temporary break. I think she got very frustrated, being at home. I’m trying to make plans to leave,’ he adde
d.

  ‘She said you already had. And that you’d decided, finally, not to.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, suddenly. ‘She’s twisting it there.’ Yet he gazed at him hopefully, as if the solution of his problem might come from him.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

  His mother had opened the door.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she said, looking in intently, flushing at her concern.

  ‘Mr Walton says he wouldn’t like one,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, in that case.’ She looked at the man for this to be confirmed, but he said nothing, sitting stiffly in the chair, anxious for her to leave. ‘In case you do just let me know,’ she added.

  Her footsteps sounded remotely from the other room, then the sound of Richard’s voice inquiring.

  ‘I thought, if you didn’t see her, and recognized the reality of the situation, it might do some good,’ the man had said waiting a moment for the sound of the kitchen door to close. He added, ‘You see, from my point of view, you’re just exploiting it.’

  It was as if someone else had persuaded him to come: that he were listening to some other voice, but faintly now, and which he could scarcely catch, struggling to decipher the message, the urgent things he’d been asked to say.

  ‘I can’t refuse to see her,’ Colin said. ‘I can’t agree to that,’ he added.

  ‘But to you’, the man said quickly, ‘this is nothing. It’s my life you’re playing with, my marriage.’

  ‘But surely Elizabeth has something to say in that.’

  ‘Liz?’ His voice thickened; the colour deepened in his face. His hands were vigorously entwined together: the pressure of some other place, and some other person, drove him on. ‘Elizabeth has a responsibility. It’s something she’s run away from. She has her problem, just like me, but you’re preventing us from working it out,’ he added.

  ‘She can see you if she wants to,’ he said. ‘You can see her. I’m not preventing that.’

  ‘You are preventing that. You’ve become a distraction.’ Yet the word wasn’t precisely what he wanted. ‘You’ve become an obstacle to us getting closer, or resolving what is, after all, the problem of our marriage and which has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It has now,’ he said. ‘I’ve been included.’ It was as if he suspected that Elizabeth had sent him herself: this was her latest attempt to ‘commit’ him; yet the thought had no sooner arisen than he began to dismiss it.

  ‘I want you to leave my wife alone. I want you to leave her alone,’ the man had said, almost chanting, his small face flushing even deeper, the eyes starting, his lips drawn back. He thrust himself forward from the chair: he appeared no longer to be in control of himself, to care what he said. ‘I want you to leave my wife alone.’

  He knew from the silence in the adjoining room that the man’s words had carried through to the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t want any promises. I don’t want any conditions. I’m telling you,’ he said, ‘to leave her alone. She is my wife. I married her. We have a right to decide this thing together.’

  ‘But she left you over a year ago,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care when she left me. She’s coming back. She’ll see it’s the only way in the end. Meanwhile,’ he raised his fist: he pushed it wildly in front of his face. ‘I’ll kill you if you as much as see her again.’

  ‘But you can’t kill me,’ he said, absurdly, wanting to laugh; to intimidate the man, he stood up himself.

  ‘I don’t mind what I do, or what punishment I get. She’ll see how much I love her. She’ll see how much I care,’ he said.

  He turned to the door. Colin moved as if to open it for him, but the man flinched: he grasped the handle himself and stepped out quickly to the passage. For a moment he fumbled with the door to the street.

  ‘I’ve told you. I’ve warned you. I can’t do anything else.’

  He opened the door. When Colin followed him he could see a car parked some distance down the street, opposite Reagan’s: its lights came on; its engine started. As it swept past a face peered out; its lights disappeared in the direction of the station.

  ‘Who was that?’ his mother said. Both she and Richard were standing in the kitchen, unable to sit down.

  ‘His name is Walton.’

  ‘Yes,’ his mother said. ‘I gathered that.’

  ‘It’s just something he wanted me to do,’ he said.

  ‘He mentioned his wife.’ His mother gazed at him in angry surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Have you been seeing his wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and added, ‘They’re getting divorced.’

  ‘They’re getting divorced, or they are divorced?’

  ‘Getting. They’ve been separated’, he added, ‘for over a year.’

  Nothing had ever alarmed his mother as much.

  She gazed at him for several seconds: Richard sat down and looked at a book.

  ‘So this is your way’, she said, ‘of getting back.’

  ‘But there’s no getting back,’ he said. ‘It’s someone I met by accident.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and added, ‘That’s what you might well believe, my lad.’

  She sat down at the table; she was worn and thin; so much of the life that might have been in her now had gone, torn out with each of the children, torn out by the struggle to make ends meet. He even saw the kitchen as might Walton himself, if he’d come inside, its worn patches, its bare floor: only its furniture was new, yet is design was poor. The place was like some cave they’d lived inside, worn, eroded, hollowed out by the vehemence of their use.

  His brother’s slender face looked up at him, the eyes fresh, alert, still startled from Walton’s shouting, his cheeks flushed.

  ‘It’s bad,’ his mother said. ‘It’s something bad when you take a man’s wife.’

  ‘I haven’t taken her,’ he said. ‘She’s no intention of going back.’

  ‘Hasn’t she?’

  Yet it was as if his mother had cut some final cord: the last attachment between them slipped away. She saw something bitter and remorseless in him, first with Steven, now with this, then with his job; the triumph they had looked for in his life had never occurred.

  ‘It’s bad,’ she said again, ‘it’s bad,’ almost in the same way the man himself had chanted ‘I want you to leave my wife alone’. She clung to the table as she might at one time, in some affliction or illness, or some quarrel with his father, have clung to him. ‘It’s bad,’ she said again, remorselessly now, unable to leave go of her rancour, or of herself.

  ‘There’s nothing bad in it. Why should someone be tied to what they’ve done in the past? Particularly if they’ve let go of it themselves.’

  ‘He hasn’t let go of it,’ she said. ‘And he’s her husband.’

  ‘But what’s a marriage count if she’s dropped out of it?’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Colin, you don’t know what marriage is.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘You’ve no idea.’ Some part of her own life had been disrupted: the man had left a conflagration in the house that neither of them could put out. ‘You’ve no idea what a marriage entails, and if one partner falters it’s no man, no decent man, who comes along and takes advantage.’

  ‘I’ll bring her,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see where the advantage lies.’

  ‘I don’t want her here,’ she said, so violently, so immediately, it was as if Elizabeth had come in the room with him. She got up quickly and turned to the fire: she poked it vigorously, her figure, its shoulders rounded, stooped to the flames. She put on more coal and dampened the blaze.

  Smoke rose in thick clouds across the chimney.

  And it was as if he had fought his last fight in the house: he could feel it slip away from him, his younger brother sitting there, his mother standing, turned away, then carrying the bucket out to the yard.

  ‘I’ll get it, Mother,’ Richard said.

 
He thought he might have left it then, gone for good: yet he stood gazing down at the smoke-filled hearth.

  Outside his brother rooted at the coal. His mother came inside.

  ‘I hope you’re going to break with her,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I shall.’

  She said nothing for a while.

  ‘And what shall you do’, she said finally, ‘when he comes again? Half the street must have heard his shouts. What will Richard think? What effect will it have on him?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think it’ll have any effect at all,’ he said.

  ‘He looks up to you,’ she said. ‘So does Steven.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘I think he still does, despite how badly you’ve treated him.’ And strangely, as if to prove her point, they could hear Steven whistling cheerily across the backs, then his voice, ‘How are you, Dick?’ as he called to his brother bringing in the coal.

  Then, standing in the door, looking in at the lighted room, he gazed brightly from one to the other of them, and added, still cheerily, ‘Well, Mother, then. What’s up?’

  30

  When he told Elizabeth about her husband’s visit she’d been alarmed – as much by his own reaction, he thought, as anything else. ‘But aren’t you worried?’ she said, and added after a moment, ‘And what your mother must have thought.’

  He burst out laughing at this speculation.

  ‘Why this sudden concern about my mother?’ he said. ‘That’s the last thing, I’d have thought, you’d have worried about.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She seems a remarkable woman. I can’t imagine what her life has been like. It’s a pity now I’ll never know her.’

  ‘You can still come and see her. I won’t take her injunction at its face value,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to push it down her throat.’

  Yet what the ‘it’ was to push down his mother’s throat she didn’t mention.

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried about him coming,’ he said. He felt in fact, on reflection, more relieved. He liked to see strong feeling in others, it reassured him: it was the lack of feeling, in himself and others, that disconcerted him. He would even, as with Corcoran on his dismissal from the school, provoke someone deliberately in order to find out where he was; he could no longer accept the sobriety of life, he wanted to be an exception. The thought of Walton feeling anything violently was a consolation in the weeks that followed; he even hoped be might come again, even angrier, more violent.