David Storey - Saville

‘Have you ever seen this?’ his father said. He held out a square-shaped book of greyish, tinted paper. Inside were a number of chalk drawings, some of fruit, some of flowers, their bright colours imprinted on the sheets of protective tissue. The drawings themselves were done with an adult assurance, seemingly effortless and uncorrected.

‘Whose are they?’ he said, gazing in particular at a drawing of three apples, their redness veering into greenness, lying in a bowl.

‘They’re by your brother.’ His father laughed. ‘Andrew.’ He turned to the front. The name of the village school and his brother’s unfamiliar name, ‘Andrew Saville’, were written on the cover. ‘He was only seven.’

‘How did he die?’ he said, suddenly reminded.

‘He died within a few hours. Of pneumonia,’ his father said. ‘He was here one minute, and gone the next. I’d give ought to have that lad alive.’

‘How give ought?’ he said.

‘Well.’ His father hesitated then turned aside.

On one occasion, some years previously, he’d gone with his father to put some flowers on his brother’s grave: it lay in a small plot of ground at the side of the road leading to the colliery, the whole area invisible, behind high hedges, from the road itself. The grave was marked by a small round-headed stone on which were painted his father’s initials, H.R.S., and a number. They cleared brambles from the spot, weeded the oblong bed, set a jam-jar in the ground and in the jam-jar set the flowers. ‘We ought to come each week and keep it tidy,’ his father had said, yet as far as Colin was aware neither he nor his mother had been again. Now, looking at the coloured drawings in the book, his father said, ‘We ought to go and have a look. See how that grave is. We haven’t been for some time, you know.’

‘How did it affect my mother?’ he said.

‘Well.’ His father, uncertain, gazed at the book steadily now, his eyes intense. ‘I think that’s been half the trouble.’

‘What trouble?’

‘Nay, Andrew dying,’ his father said.

The house was silent. His mother had gone off that afternoon to visit her sister, taking, after much complaining from his brothers, Steven and Richard with her.

‘Why thy’s so silent and morose at times?’

‘Am I silent and morose?’

‘Nay, thy should know,’ his father said.

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘Nay, I can’t be the first to mention it.’ His father flushed.

‘I didn’t think I was morose,’ he said.

‘Nay, not all the time,’ he added. ‘It’s just been lately, I suppose.’ He gazed at the drawings.

A cup stood on a saucer: looking at the picture Colin, with a peculiar sensation, as if someone had touched him, saw how clear and confident the ellipses were, perfectly drawn by his seven-year-old brother, with scarcely an inflection that broke the line, or a faltering in the shading of their blue-painted pattern.

‘Your mother was three months gone, tha knows. It must have had an effect, I reckon. She was very down.’ His father, almost idly, closed the book. ‘She was very down, I can tell you that.’ He added nothing further for a while. ‘It all seemed very strange at the time.’

‘Strange in what way?’

‘It was as if he wa’ gone.’ His father looked up. ‘And then, you see, came back again.’

There was a freshness in his father’s face, as if, briefly, he’d gone back to that moment when he was young himself. He gazed up at Colin directly.

‘I’m not Andrew, though,’ he said.

‘No.’

His gaze drifted back towards the book: only in the writing of the name was there any uncertainty, he thought; as if his brother weren’t quite sure, despite the confidence of the drawings, of who he was.

His father too glanced down at the book: it lay between them like a testament, or a tribulation, a strange denial, he couldn’t be sure.

His brother’s presence, so casually aroused, preoccupied him for several days. He was sleeping now in the tiny room, his two brothers occupying the larger room, and realized in fact he was probably sleeping in Andrew’s bed. It was also, he recalled, the bed the soldier had slept in during the war. Certain scenes of his early life came back: he recalled, faintly, the holiday with his mother and father, the journey on the back of the milkman’s cart. It had a peculiar familiarity, like the pictures in the book itself.

One evening, when his father was at work, he had asked his mother about his brother, listened to her distant answers, then had asked her specifically about the death itself. ‘Oh,’ his mother said, ‘aren’t we getting morbid? What does it matter after all these years?’ and had added, ‘It’s the good things, after all, that count.’

‘Wasn’t Andrew good?’ he said.

‘He was good,’ his mother said. She told him then of the doctor’s visit, of the sudden illness, and of the doctor’s apologetic statement when he examined his brother on the double bed. ‘And what brought all this up suddenly?’ she added.

‘Oh,’ he said, and mentioned the book.

‘And where did your father find it?’ she said.

‘He must have discovered it,’ he said.

‘He must have been amongst my papers.’

‘What papers?’ he said.

‘Oh, I keep things,’ his mother said, mysteriously, as if this, finally, were something she wouldn’t confide. ‘At any rate, you could say he was going to be an artist. He had the nature as well as the gift’.

‘What nature?’ Colin said.

‘Oh, the nature.’ His mother traced her finger along a chair. ‘He was very unruly.’

‘In what way?’ he said.

‘Questions. Questions!’ His mother turned away. Then, as if drawn by the silence, she added, ‘He was always wandering off.’

‘Where to?’

‘I’ve no idea. He seemed to have nowhere in mind he was going to.’

A blankness in his brother’s intentions suddenly faced him, just as presumably it had faced his mother; she gazed steadily before her.

‘Away from here, at least,’ she said.

‘Why away?’

‘Why all these questions? Honestly, if I could answer any of them don’t you think I would?’

She took off her glasses; the light, as it was, had hidden her expression. She dried her eyes on the edge of her apron: it was a contained, almost self-denying gesture.

‘I loved him, Colin.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

He visited his brother’s grave a few days later and found to his surprise it had recently been weeded; fresh flowers had been set in a glass jar which had in turn been buried in the earth. Some image of his brother came to mind, of a wild, anarchic boy, fair-haired, blue-eyed, stocky, square-shouldered, walking along the road from the village. For a moment standing by the grave, hidden by the surrounding shrubs, with the colliery pumping out its smoke and steam, the mountain of the heap above his head, he felt an invisible bond with that figure in the ground, as if they suffered in that moment a peculiar conjunction.

He looked up towards the road: it was past this place that his father walked each day; it was in that school building, adjacent to the colliery, that Andrew, conceivably, had done his drawings. He recalled something then that had been nagging at the back of his mind for several days: it was his recollection of the time when he had first walked. He had been sitting with his parents at the side of a dam – the dam he had visited years before with Reagan on their country walk – and had got to his feet to follow a hen, the bird hurrying before him towards the water’s edge, and even as he heard his parents’ cries, he recalled vividly the thought that had struck him then, ‘But I have walked many times like this before: why should they be surprised I am walking now?’ And beyond their surprise was this greater conviction that not merely had he walked but lived his life before. It was like glimpsing a headland out of a mist.