David Storey - Saville

‘I don’t feel manly at all,’ he said. ‘In most ways I feel set against what I’ve been told to become, or felt I ought to become.’

‘Well, that’s the end of one picnic at least,’ she said, suddenly frightened herself of what she had revealed. She handed him the bag, a small haversack which he took on his shoulder. His own food he’d brought in a paper carrier; she folded it up now and slid it beneath the flap. ‘Do you want to go on?’ she added. ‘Or shall we go back?’

‘I suppose we better go back,’ he said. The sun was moving down towards the plain. It threw heavy shadows across the slope behind.

They set off slowly around the foot of the ridge. Where the path became clearer and they could walk abreast, he took her hand.

‘It’s strange. I feel in a way it’s come between us.’

‘What has? ‘She swung his hand slowly, to and fro.

‘All this.’ He gestured round. ‘Even the wood at some time belonged to a man’s estate.’

‘It needn’t cloud the future, though,’ she said. ‘Things could be clearer between men and women. They could be equals, couldn’t they, and still be together.’

‘Equal in all things?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem real. Even when women have got freedom they don’t do much with it.’

‘Why go on with it?’ she said, as if perniciously she’d pushed some thorn against his flesh, regretting it now, almost wishing to draw it out.

‘It doesn’t seem real, that’s all,’ he said.

‘What’s real?’ she suddenly said, and laughed. ‘Real’s only what you’re used to. Would what you feel, for instance,’ she added, ‘be real to your father? Would what he feels be real to you? Are you denying that change mightn’t come with children? If they were brought up to accept nothing else but equality they’d look back on your attitudes as we look back, say, on Viking customs, or some other social paraphernalia that’s never stood the test of time.’

The path had broadened; it ran through the centre of the wood. A rider on horseback appeared beneath the trees, a figure with a dark bowler hat and jodhpurs who, as the horse galloped past, nodded down in their direction.

‘Man or woman?’ he said.

‘A woman.’ She laughed. They turned to watch the dark clods of earth flung up by the horse’s hoofs.

‘There are other inequalities,’ he said.

‘You can draw a line through all of them. They’re like a common point on a graph,’ she said. ‘All lines of inequality intersect.’

The path came out at the side of the lake. A man with a fishing-rod sat beneath the trees. He glanced up as they passed, opened a basket beside him and took out a sandwich. The float rested motionless on the surface of the lake.

‘Stafford is a fatalist,’ he said. ‘He believes, in the end, it comes to nothing. I feel tempted at times into sharing his view. I sometimes wonder, really, what’s the use? You put up a struggle, but what do you struggle for? It’s arrogance to assume that things can change, or that you personally can or should be instrumental in effecting them. At times, even to see a wood like this I find exhausting. Any kind of life in a way makes death all the more appalling.’

‘Or more exhilarating,’she said. ‘It’s an invariable sign of an egotism that’s been deflated for it to lapse into self-pity. What’s Stafford got to be fatalistic about? I’ve never seen him fatalistic when any of his interests are threatened. It’s just that he’s had some things too easy. And other things, I suppose,’ she added, ‘he’s never had at all.’

‘I sometimes think he’s had it harder. Not that it matters, in any case,’ he said, watching her smile then releasing her hand.

They walked on past the end of the lake and came out finally on a narrow road. Some distance farther down they came to a bus stop, and sat down on a wall to wait.

A boy on a bike cycled slowly past.

‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ she said.

‘Two brothers. Younger than me. One’s eight,’ he added. ‘The other’s five.’ He paused. ‘I had an older brother though who died.’

‘What of?’

He shrugged.

‘Pneumonia.’

‘When was that?’

‘Before I was born.’

‘How long before you were born?’

‘Six months.’ He waited.

‘Is that what makes you so conservative and gloomy?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Its effect’, he added uneasily, ‘is quite the reverse.’

When the bus came they sat at the front upstairs, with the window wound down. The wind rushed through their hair. The rest of the bus was empty. It rattled into town. Small buildings in the farthest distance were outlined clearly by the now almost horizontal rays of the sun.

He sat with his arm around her. With the wind in their faces they scarcely spoke, calling out as the bus descended a hill, rushing at the slope, laughing finally when the conductor came upstairs to take their fares. ‘Where do you think you’re at? A fair?’ He stood in the gangway a moment, stooping to the air himself, laughing at its force, bracing himself against the swaying of the bus, then, still laughing, going back to the stairs, holding to the seats on either side. ‘Any more for any more?’ he called to them as they got off in the town.

He waited at her stop. ‘I won’t see you for a couple of weeks,’ she said.

‘Why’s that?’ he asked her.

‘My parents think I ought to give school a couple of weeks’ attention, without any distractions.’

‘I suppose, really, it’s only sensible,’ he said.

‘Do you think so?’ she said.

‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘Still, today’s been worth it. Despite the argument,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

The bus drew up.

‘Will you give me a ring?’ she said. ‘We could go out a fortnight today, if you like.’

‘It hardly fits in, this sudden compliance, with all your arguments,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I’m really looking to my own interests,’ she said. ‘After all, education, or certain aspects of it, are a way out of the trap. If you can see the trap waiting, of course,’ she added.

He watched her mount the bus. Only after it began to move did he remember her bag and, running along the pavement, handed it to her as she leaned from the door. She called and waved. He stood at the corner, by the cathedral, and watched the bus and her silhouetted figure disappear.

They met once, sometimes twice a week if he came over specially from the college to see her. After the first interval of a fortnight something of a regular pattern was set in their meetings. Perhaps her parents resisted it; he was scarcely aware of it. Most weekends he would go up to her house on the outskirts of the town, talk with her mother as he waited for Margaret to get ready, seldom with her father, who, if he wasn’t engaged with a patient, was out on the golf-course at the back of the house where, occasionally, on some of their walks they would see him, in plus-fours, sweeping at the ball or standing, smoking a pipe, talking to other men beneath the trees. He would look up casually and wave, his concentration on the game or the conversation scarcely interrupted.

‘And isn’t your mother emancipated?’ he would ask her. She’d been one of the first women to go up to Oxford after the First World War. On some occasions, in order to inveigle herself into a meeting or some club activity, she’d dressed as a man. Margaret would listen with a spellbound look when her mother described these incidents, not looking at Mrs Dorman directly, merely adding once she’d left the room, ‘And what did she do with it all, I wonder?’

‘Oh, she’s emancipated,’ she said. ‘Like all women of her generation. And gave it up at the first opportunity to get married and have children. It’s all part of her romantic past. That’s why she goes on about it. It’s all like puberty: growing up. A pang you go through at a certain age. Now she puts it all into women’s meetings: the Women’s Guild, the Voluntary Service, like trying to doctor a sick patient when what’s needed is radical surgery.’