David Storey - Saville

A bell rang at the end of an adjoining corridor.

‘I’ll get back to the class.’

‘That’s right.’ The headmaster returned to the papers on his desk and, as he read them, got out a pipe. ‘By the way.’ He raised his head. ‘Thy’ll leave thy coffee money before tha leaves. We’ve had one or two leave who’ve forgotten that: it comes out of petty-cash, and the divisional office, I can tell you, have me account for every penny. They shit hot bricks if I’m a halfpenny out.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to that.’

‘Right,’ the headmaster said and, flushing at Colin’s smile, he lit his pipe.

‘How was that?’ she said.

‘All right.’

‘You’re hard to please.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘ I think so. Perhaps others wouldn’t.’

It was a Saturday afternoon: they lay in the double-bed: her sister and brother-in-law were out.

‘In any case,’ she said, ‘they want me to leave.’

‘Why?’

‘They don’t like me bringing a man to the house.’

‘I’m not a man,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re more a boy.’

‘I mean’, he said, ‘not any man.’

‘If I want that freedom they think I should take a place of my own.’

‘Will you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose I shall.’

A few days previously a man had come up to him in the street.

He had asked him his name, standing directly before him on the pavement; finally, having confirmed who Colin was, he had handed him a letter.

Inside the envelope across which his name had been scrawled in capital letters was a note which said, again in capital letters, ‘WOULD YOU LEAVE MY WIFE ALONE?’

He’d shown it to her when he’d arrived that afternoon.

She’d gazed at it for quite some time.

‘I suppose it must be Derek,’ she said. ‘It looks like Derek.’ She’d set the paper down. ‘Did the man say anything at all?’ she added.

‘Just asked my name and gave me the letter.’

Now she said, as she got up from the bed, ‘I suppose I ought to, in any case. Derek’s not above coming here, if he thinks it suits him.’

‘Why don’t you go back to him?’ he said.

‘You don’t know the Waltons. You don’t know him . That family is all-consuming. If he couldn’t break free, how could I? There are so many of them and their interests are so closely related.’

He watched her dress; there was a certain neatness in her movements, self-enclosed, as if she were unaware of dressing in the presence of someone else: she made no attempt to conceal herself.

‘You ought to be getting up yourself. They’ll probably be back within an hour.’

‘Do they know you use the bed?’ he said.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Haven’t you any qualms?’

‘Not really.’

‘Has it some significance? It being your sister’s bed?’

‘Why?’

‘I wondered.’

She gazed up at him, surprised.

‘We get on very well.’

‘Is she younger or older?’

‘Older.’

They went through to her room: it looked out to the fields at the back of the house. As it was, there was a certain strangeness in being in a family house yet having no relationship to the family. When she heard her sister’s return, the drone of the car in the drive outside, she went down to meet her.

As she came back up he could hear her voice: ‘Oh, Colin’s here,’ and, slightly lower, ‘I thought I’d warn you.’

He couldn’t hear the sister’s response, only the duller tone of the husband.

She brought up some tea; they sat on the single bed.

‘Why don’t we go down and drink it?’ he said.

‘Oh, Maureen doesn’t approve of this at all,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in trying to force it.’

They went out a little later; they walked in the Park. A certain listlessness came over him now whenever he went out with her. Initially he had liked it: liked it, above all, that she was a married woman. His earlier hallucination had never returned and he’d never attempted to explain it; a fortnight had passed before he’d gone back to see her and it was as if that first abortive attempt to sleep in the sister’s bed had never occurred. Callow avoided him at school. Invariably, most evenings, he rode into town on the back of Stephens’s bike and either went directly to Elizabeth’s sister’s house or met her by arrangement at some place close to the city centre or her father’s shop.

Frequently they walked in the fields, and lay together beneath the hedges.

‘Is Derek looking for evidence, do you think?’ he said.

‘For what?’

They walked by the pond; they paused opposite the statue. She’d brought some bread: she threw it to the ducks.

‘A divorce.’

‘Don’t you want to be cited?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ve arrived on the scene too late.’

Yet there was a hardness in her voice: he didn’t know whether it was to do with him or her husband.

She had slender arms, her skin pale, glowing, almost luminescent. It was a quality he’d never seen in anyone before. Some days when he met her her cheeks would glow; other days there was a peculiar dullness, or the strange, almost languid luminescence of the skin.

‘Since you’re an anarchist, I didn’t think you’d mind. Flouting convention, I mean,’ she said.

‘Am I an anarchist?’ he said. He’d told her already, the day it had happened, that he’d been fired from the school. She’d seemed relieved: she was feeling guilty, he thought, about Callow.

‘Well, you’re not a communist,’ she said. ‘Whatever you told your Mr Corcoran.’ And a moment later, she added, ‘You’re more a Calvinist,’ and when he laughed she said, ‘Well, aren’t you? What allegiance have you got? I’d say you were a medievalist, a feudalist.’

She threw the last pieces of bread to the ducks.

‘You make it sound’, he said, ‘like a crime.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it probably is.’

‘I’d have thought attitudes like that came easily to hand. Aren’t you, after all,’ he added, ‘much the same?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I’ve had my way, you see, made for me. You’ve got to make yours.’ And a moment later, glancing up at him, she added, ‘In whatever way you can.’

A man walked behind them, his hands in his pockets: when they’d paused to feed the ducks he’d paused as well, gazing at the birds, smiling when Elizabeth looked, and nodding his head.

Now, as they continued along the path, he followed them once more.

The mocking, half-affected look came back to her eyes. She watched him closely; her arm in his.

‘In the end, what the individual achieves is for the benefit of everyone,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ Her smile continued. ‘That sounds like a credo made after the event.’

‘No,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘It’s how I would explain most, if not everything, that’s happened.’

‘To you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or anyone like me.’

They walked along for a while in silence: a narrow path led up to the central hill.

The man, walking behind, had taken a path divergent to their own.

‘You don’t really belong to anything,’ she said. ‘You’re not really a teacher. You’re not really anything. You don’t belong to any class, since you live with one class, respond like another, and feels attachments to none.’

‘Do you mind my being so much younger?’ he said, harshly, for he felt this lay at the root of her argument.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect it.’

‘Expect it of whom?’