David Storey - Saville

Steven had failed his exam the previous year. It had been his last chance to go to the grammar school. He was now attending the secondary-modern school in the village. All through the previous year, whenever he had been home from college, Colin had coached him for the exam, like his father had coached him, years before. Now his father had been too tired to take any interest, his energy going into persuading Colin to coach his brother, to teach him spelling, maths, the use of words, standing over him whenever he faltered, showed lack of interest or hadn’t the time. ‘He’s to have the same chances as you’ve had,’ his father said. ‘You know it better than me, so he’s an even better chance than you had. Don’t let’s miss out on it, not now we’ve worked so hard for it,’ he added.

Yet his brother, as he’d known, as they’d all known all along, had failed. He had no aptitude for work; he was not unlike the children Colin taught now: in two years’ time it would be Richard’s turn. There was a curious disparity between the younger brothers. Steven was large and steady, with heavy shoulders, straight-backed, not unlike Colin in appearance, but with a more open, outward-going, frank-faced nature. He showed no awareness of having failed anything, and went to school with the same imperturbable good grace that he’d always shown; it was Richard who showed a resistance, almost a slowness, half-casual, as if he resented being imposed upon at all. He was more delicately featured than either of his older brothers, with his father’s light-blue eyes and something, half-hidden, of his father’s nature.

Colin would read with Richard in the evening, the boy crouched against his arm, following the words with his finger, irritated whenever he was corrected; or Richard would write at the table, looking up with a dulled resentment, the end of his pencil slipped between his teeth, protesting, gazing to the window where his friends played in the field.

‘You do what Colin tells you,’ his father would say, yet distantly, remote now from the activities of his children, more clearly exhausted day by day, by the responsibility he had for working an entire face, by his closeness to the men he worked with, some from the houses across the street, maintaining something of his supervisory role even when away from the pit: Shaw was one of the men he worked with, and because he was responsible for measuring off his work each week, the amount he might be paid, they scarcely spoke at all. ‘You see where Steven’s got to,’ his father would add. ‘With not paying attention much at school and not doing much work when he got back home either. He’s going to be stuck down the pit with me.’

‘Oh, don’t go on with those old arguments,’ his mother would say, as wearied by this battle now as his father was. ‘If they want to do it, then it’s up to them. If they don’t then it’s no good forcing them.’

Yet Richard, from time to time, would react to his father’s demands; though scarcely eight he would sit solidly at the table sometimes for an hour, writing, working out sums, waiting patiently for the work to be corrected, copying out the corrections underneath then looking up at Colin, waiting to be dismissed. ‘Can I go now? Is that enough, our kid?’

Occasionally too Colin worked with Steven; his father had some vague notion in a year’s time of getting him a county transfer to the grammar school; yet Steven would look at the work with a good-natured incomprehension, puzzle over it a while then push it away, shaking his head, glancing at Colin with a smile, and say, ‘Nay, it beats me. I’ll never mek it out.’ In the end, occasionally, they read together, Steven following the words intently, going over and over each word until he got the pronunciation right, only to stumble over it again when he came across it in the following line. He’d absolved himself, without rancour, from learning anything at all.

Michael Reagan had been attacked one week-end in town and had spent two weeks in hospital. He’d been robbed of over forty pounds, had had his jaw broken and now spoke with a stutter. His father, by a curious coincidence, had been taken to hospital the following week after being found in the road in a collapsed condition. He was in for a slightly longer period than Reagan, having suffered a stroke, and when he was finally released and came home it was rumoured that he would have to finish his job in the colliery office, which he had had for over thirty years, and take on something less arduous which would occupy him for shorter hours.

Reagan, on his mother’s insistence, gave up his dance band and returned to full-time work as a clerk in an accountant’s office. Occasionally, when Colin passed the house, he could both hear and see Michael giving lessons in the violin to small boys in the front room, but, a few months later, after complaints about his conduct with one of the boys, the lessons stopped altogether. He would be seen, a thin, ghostly figure, walking the streets of the village in a long black coat, a cap pulled down above his eyes, exaggerating if anything the familiar bulbous shape of his head. Occasionally boys followed him, calling names, but on the whole he appeared oblivious of everything around him, scarcely pausing whenever Colin spoke to him, glancing up with haunted eyes, shaking his head or nodding, slowly, to some inquiry, unwilling or unable to speak, his long thin legs carrying him off quickly as if he hadn’t recognized anyone he knew at all. His father too, on occasion, would appear at the door, a gaunt, wasted figure, moving with a slow shuffle, his body partially paralysed along one side.

‘Oh, they’ve had it,’ his father would say. ‘That family’s had a visitation, and no mistake. If trouble doesn’t come in bucket-loads it doesn’t come at all. It’ll be the turn of the missis next. There’ll be something calamitous happen to her.’

Yet Mrs Reagan, in adversity, appeared to blossom. A thin, shadowy figure herself, invariably dressed in pale clothes, with a ghostly pallor to her skin, she could now be seen talking at her door, or on Mrs Shaw’s step, occasionally even on Mrs Bletchley’s, roaming across the yards to disseminate news of her husband’s progress, scarcely mentioning her son at all. It was as if Michael, in a curious way, had never existed: the sound of his violin no longer came from the house, and none of the clothes which, in the past, she had proudly made for him, were ever hung out on the line to dry.

One evening Colin met Michael on the bridge above the station. He was leaning against the parapet, gazing at the line.

‘Are you coming up home?’ he said.

Reagan didn’t answer. His figure, draped in the black coat, the flat cap pulled well down on top of his head, was thrust forward against the stone, almost like a log, thin and angular, propped up against the wall itself.

‘Are you coming up home?’ he asked again.

Reagan’s features were half hidden beneath the shadow of the cap. His hands were clenched together.

‘Are you coming up home?’ he said again. ‘If you like,’ he added, ‘we could go for a drink.’

‘I don’t drink,’ Reagan said, so quietly that, for a moment, he doubted what he’d heard. ‘I don’t drink, you know,’ he added more clearly.

‘I’m just walking up home,’ Colin said.

‘I’ll walk up with you,’ Reagan said, looking off to where the road ran past the station, disappearing, beyond a row of houses, amongst the fields.

Colin turned towards the village. Reagan, still leaning against the wall, continued to gaze off in the opposite direction.

‘I saw you getting off the train,’ he said again so quietly that he scarcely heard. The train’s faint pounding could still be heard at the far end of the cutting. ‘Have you been into town?’ he added, turning his head to glance at him directly.