David Storey - Saville

‘Won’t they want to come here, then?’ he said.

‘Only if I ask them.’

‘Won’t you ask them?’

‘Not for the present. No,’ she said.

On two occasions, when he knew she would be working in the shop, he’d gone to Bennett’s and surprised her behind the counter; she’d trained as a pharmacist as a girl and had frequently, during periods of her parents’ illness, or during holidays, taken over the shop completely. It stood, an old brick building, at the junction of a narrow sidestreet: the windows were tall, and bevelled outwards, and contained the old jars and coloured liquids and large, black ebony cabinets of a century before.

On the first occasion he thought she’d been embarrassed: she was standing in a white smock, immediately inside the counter, serving a customer. Her father, a small, delicately featured man, with white hair and a virulent red face, had been turned to one of the cabinets, removing packets. Evidently surprised by the change of tone in her voice as she greeted Colin, her father had gazed at him with some curiosity over the top of a pair of spectacles.

On that occasion she had made some apology and come out of the shop, walking down the street towards the city centre with her arm in his as if to reassure herself that nothing untoward had happened, that she hadn’t lost him or been diminished by this sudden revelation of her working life and to confirm to her father, who was undoubtedly watching from the window, that this was no ordinary encounter: in such a way she had drawn Colin closer to her.

On the second occasion she had refused to come out at all. It was an hour to closing-time: he came in after school, driven into town on the back of Stephens’s motorbike, and he had had to go away and wait in the bar of a pub until an hour later she came in and greeted him, as she did always, with a formal kiss on the cheek. It was as if, in a curious way, they’d been married several years: she had this peculiar intimacy and directness, a self-assurance which came from her curious bouts of introspection, a self-preoccupation which diminished her, in his eyes, in no way at all; out of them she invariably came to him more strongly.

‘What did your father say?’ he’d asked her after his first visit to the shop.

‘Nothing,’ she’d said, then had added, after some moments’ reflection, ‘He thinks you’re very young.’

Now he said, ‘Do they know you’ve taken a flat? I suppose they do.’

‘I told them I was looking for one,’ she said. ‘In any case, they’ll have heard from Maureen. That I’ve stopped living there, I mean.’

‘Do you ever go home?’

‘Occasionally,’ she said.

She watched him with a frown: he was trying to unknot a puzzle, one she herself couldn’t recognize, or – if she could recognize it – understand.

‘They’re very much preoccupied,’ she added, and when he said, ‘With what?’ she said, ‘With one another. They always have been. They married young: I don’t think, really, they wanted any children. Apart from the shop, I don’t think my father’s thought about anything except my mother. And she’s never thought about anything except him. They’re totally absorbed in one another. And that, mind you, after almost forty years.’

‘What were they like when you were young?’ he said.

‘They kept us very much in attendance. Maureen went off and got herself engaged when she was only nineteen. It didn’t work out. But she married, however, very soon after. My parents, finally, have never really been interested in either of us; they never neglected us; we went away to schools; they were pleased to see us whenever we came back, but it was always, I had the feeling, as an adjunct of their lives.’

In the shop he had sensed a peculiar amiability between the father and his daughter: they worked casually together, without any tenseness, with a great deal of fondness. They might have been friends, or brother and sister; there was nothing of the obsessiveness he experienced at home.

He had told her about his family: she was very much interested by his parents and at one point he had been tempted to take her to meet them, then, for some reason, he’d resisted and merely talked about them, and Richard and Steven.

‘Why are you so jealous of Steve?’ she’d said. ‘He sounds so fine and unprejudiced.’

‘But, then, what’s made him so fine and unprejudiced?’ he’d said. ‘He’s had chances of a freedom I’ve never had myself.’

‘Haven’t you?’ she said, smiling. ‘I’d have thought you had. Isn’t it his nature, not just his circumstances, you’re envious of?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s the circumstances, it’s been the circumstance, all along.’

‘It’s very odd.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It happens in most families, I imagine.’

‘Does it?’ She’d watched him with a smile. ‘I’ve never been jealous of Maureen, nor, as far as I’m aware, has she ever been jealous of me. We’ve quarrelled, but not as rivals, always more or less as equals.’

‘But then your parents threw you out,’ he said.

‘They didn’t throw us out.’

‘But you felt disengaged from them, disengaged by them, to a mutual degree. Whereas Steven always had more of my mother than I have.’

‘Yet you’re very involved with your mother,’ she said.

‘Am I?’

‘I think so.’

He’d been very surly: he hated to have elements of his behaviour pointed out, even if, absurdly, he’d pointed them out himself only a moment before. It was because he’d pointed them out that he hated her to refer to them: his having referred to them, he imagined, made them invalid.

‘I think you’re very naïve,’ she said. ‘It stands out a mile what you’re jealous of.’

Now, in the faded flat, he looked at her with a sense of defeat: both their pasts had caught up with them, she with her strange abstractness, her separateness not only from her parents but from her husband, he with his strange absorption in his family which, now that he needed it, refused to release him.

They sat in silence for a while. The room had a musty smell: he had brought some flowers; even they failed to dispel either by their brightness of their scent the drabness of the room; it was as if it were something she’d deliberately chosen.

‘You being so depressed about it, depresses me,’ she said.

‘Am I depressed?’ he said.

‘Not really by the room. I can have it decorated. I’ll get some different furniture. It’ll look like new in a week or two. The room itself is not important.’

‘Then what am I depressed by?’ he said, for his spirits, the longer he was in the room, with the bustle of the town outside, sank lower and lower.

‘It’s because it’s faced us’, she said, ‘with one another, and there’s no Phil, no Maureen or her husband, and no mother ’, she added, ‘to hide behind.’

‘I suppose that’s something you wanted,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s what you mean by commitment.’

She stroked her skirt around her knees: her figure, in the vastness of the chair, looked tiny and vulnerable once again. He’d begun to hate her, and to be frightened of her; she represented more than he could imagine, some sticking to the past, some conformation of his past which he didn’t like, some determination to secure him. He was wanting to hurt her all the time.

And as if she sensed his preoccupation she said, ‘What about you? Do your parents know about me?’

‘No,’ he said, then added, for no reason he could think of, ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘Do you want to tell them?’

‘I see no point.’ He added, ‘They know I see someone. I’m out every night.’