by David Storey
Once in the street, however, he felt the certainty return; a cloud had lifted: the town, even the village when he finally arrived there, no longer held him. There was nothing to detain him. The shell had cracked.
His mother came to the station: it was a Sunday afternoon. The place was quiet; there was the one train that stopped on its way to London.
‘We shall miss you,’ his mother said. Yet it was as if he had left her a long time ago. They stood in silence waiting for the train.
The air was still: from farther up the line came the haze of the other villages, with just the blankness of the cutting in the other direction.
He had saved, over the previous four years, nearly fifty pounds. He had little luggage: a bag he carried easily in one hand.
‘Well,’ his mother said with relief when the train came into sight.
The large engine thundered by the platform.
He found a seat near the front.
His mother came to the door: he stooped and kissed her.
There was a dull pallor in her skin.
‘And you haven’t any lodgings’, she said, ‘or anything.’
‘I don’t need lodgings,’ he said. ‘I can always sleep on the street.’
‘No. Not in the street,’ she told him, and added, almost aimlessly, ‘Think of the people who love you, Colin.’
She had begun to cry.
She got out a handkerchief and glanced away.
He waited impatiently then for the engine to start. Everything was quiet in the station; only two other people had got on the train.
‘Nay, I shall come back,’ he said. ‘I’m not going off for ever.’
‘No,’ she said. Yet it was as if she sensed she would never see him again, or he the village, or the family: the ugliness of the engine would take him away.
The whistle sounded.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait,’ and raised her hand, vaguely, as the engine started.
The carriage jolted: a moment later it was gliding away beneath the bridge. He leaned out and glimpsed her figure; then, in a cloud of steam, she disappeared.
The cutting obscured the village. Finally, as the embankment sank he saw the church, the ruin of the manor on the distant hill, the idling of the smoke above the pit.
The side of the cutting rose again and when, a little later, the train ran out across the fields all signs of the village had disappeared. Above a distant line of trees a smear of blackish smoke appeared.