David Storey - Saville

‘Aye. But with the chances of an education there’s no telling where I might have gone,’ his father said. ‘That’s where people like you and Colin are very lucky.’

His father now was almost fifty; his hair was greying. He’d long since removed his moustache. His skin was heavily lined, his figure small, almost shrivelled, his look gaunt; even now, with the liveliness induced in him by the presence of the girl, there was a heaviness in his movements, a slowness in his voice, as if at the back of his mind were some dark dream or vision he couldn’t displace.

‘Aye, we’ve all done very well,’ he added as if, finally, to dispel this mood.

They went out walking a little later while his mother prepared the tea. Margaret had offered to help with this as well, but his mother had insisted they should go. ‘Now, I don’t want you prying into all my secrets, do I?’ she said primly, feeling threatened by the girl.

They walked in silence for a while. Colin turned up the hill towards the Park. There was an air of desolation about the village, the pit silent but for the faint hum of the dynamo. It was autumn and most of the greenery about the place had gone.

‘We could look at the church,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing of any interest.’

He turned up the lane leading to the dark, stone building. Mounds of dead leaves had drifted up against the hedge. The door to the building, however, was locked.

‘Do you still go to church?’ she said.

‘Occasionally.’ He shrugged.

They went up the overgrown track to the manor. The caretaker, since the end of the war, had left. The place more than ever now was falling into ruin. Great blocks of stone had fallen into the drive itself. They looked in through the empty windows.

‘It’s strange: but I can’t imagine you living here,’ she said. She gestured to the village below. A faint trail of yellowish fumes drifted off from the colliery heap. The houses, but for odd strands of smoke, were lifeless. The air was still.

‘Why not?’ He’d climbed up the steps at the front of the manor, suggesting she might look in the now unshuttered windows.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and shook her head. She’d gone on walking around the side of the building; he followed her after a moment. She was standing in the overgrown yard at the back. Vague areas of cobbles and flagstones showed beneath the weeds and grass.

‘My father used to drill in the Home Guard here,’ he said, indicating the now roofless outbuilding where the desk and the chairs and the various pieces of equipment had been stored. A strand of the rope which had fastened the bayoneting targets to the trees was still dangling from a branch. The stairs, however, which had led up to the centre of the main building, from the back, had now collapsed. ‘I used to come here with Steven in a pram. I’d set him under the trees, then climb up through the building.’

‘Haven’t you ever thought of moving from that house?’ she said.

‘Often,’ he said. ‘We’re on the list. They’re going to build a new estate, outside the village. They haven’t started yet,’ he added. ‘In any case, compared to some people, we’ve more than enough.’

They set off back towards the road. He described to her some of the games they’d played, pointing out the Dell across the village. They came out finally opposite the Park. The bare trees stood out starkly across the slope, the apparatus in the playground at the bottom now eroded and, in one or two instances, collapsed entirely.

‘Don’t you mind it being so poor?’ she said.

‘I’ve always minded it,’ he said. ‘But living in it, for most of the time you never notice.’ He added, ‘We’ve been better off than most. It’s that I’ve been aware of more than anything else.’

They sat on a bench for a while at the top of the slope, disinclined to go any farther. The bare fields stretched away below the Park, in one of which a tractor, ploughing, chugged slowly up and down. A railway engine came coasting along the straight length of track and disappeared into the cutting before the junction.

‘I suppose you were lucky even to get out of it,’ she said. ‘I mean, into town and to school, and away from this.’

‘I think I’ll get away for good, in any case,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to hold me here, you see. Well, not really.’

She glanced across.

‘I ought really to help out at home, when I start working, you see,’ he said. ‘While Steven and Richard get through. There’s still quite a bit to go,’ he added, helplessly now, and looked away.

‘One tyranny’, she said, ‘is replaced by another.’

‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Is it as easy as that?’

‘Like teaching a bird to fly, then insisting that it shouldn’t.’ After a moment she added, ‘Don’t you ever want to change it?’

‘How?’ he said.

‘So people like you don’t have to live like this.’

‘I won’t have to live like this.’

‘Won’t you?’ she said and added, ‘Somebody will.’

‘Yes,’ he said, looking to the trees below. ‘But things improve.’

‘Do they?’ The irony of their previous conversation had suddenly returned.

‘Why do you always lecture me?’ he said.

‘Because you’re so complacent,’ she said. ‘So still .’

‘I wouldn’t have thought complacent,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. She laughed. ‘It’s complacency, I suppose, that makes you think so.’ And after a moment she added, ‘Don’t you feel any responsibility towards your class?’

‘What class?’ he said.

‘This.’ She gestured round.

‘None.’

She was silent for a while.

‘Should I?’ he said.

‘There’s no should,’ she said. ‘Or ought.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But you hoped there might be.’ After a moment he said, ‘The responsibility I feel I couldn’t describe,’ and a little later, having added nothing further, they got up from the bench and moved away.

As they came down through the village Bletchley, dressed in a pair of shorts and a blazer, cycled slowly past them in the road. He was waiting at the front of the house when they arrived, adjusting something on the bike itself. They still, on Sunday evenings, occasionally went to church together, more out of habit than anything else.

Bletchley’s red knees gleamed as he stooped to the bike, his face flushed, bright-eyed, as he looked across. ‘I thought it was you,’ he said, glancing at Margaret, sternly, as if her entry to the house would somehow be denied unless it had been sanctioned by an introduction.

‘This is Margaret Dorman,’ Colin said.

Bletchley nodded, saying nothing.

‘And this is Ian Bletchley,’ he added. ‘He lives next door.’

Bletchley nodded again, his flush deepening as if he suspected it were really him she had come to see.

‘We’re just going in for tea,’ Colin said and Bletchley had finally said, ‘I hope you enjoy it,’ as if his long-held view regarding the Saville household would be vindicated by what they found inside. He rammed his bike against the wall and, his vast figure glowing from his recent exertions, his legs almost luminous beneath the bottom of his shorts, he banged open his own front door and went inside.

His mother had changed her dress. Perhaps this was what had discomposed her from the beginning, that she hadn’t had time to prepare herself. She had only two dresses in any case, a brown, faintly speckled one which she wore now, and a dark-grey one which, alternating with a skirt and jumper, she wore about the house.

The jug of flowers had been set in the centre of the table. Around it were arranged the various plates, with one large plate containing meat paste sandwiches immediately beside it. A tin of fruit had been opened by the sink.