David Storey - Saville

‘But not with me.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Do I complicate your life?’

‘No,’ he said again, stubbornly. He shook his head.

‘You complicate mine. But in a way I like,’ she said, anxious to appease him.

They went out a little later; they had a meal in a café: there was scarcely anywhere to eat in the town.

When they went back, later in the evening, to the flat, he felt his resistance, a slow, half-hesitant rancour, rising. He’d become peculiarly brutal: it was he who was frightened, and he was frightened more by himself, he thought, than by anything outside. He had left her after midnight, when the last bus had gone, and had hitched a lift part of the way to the village in a lorry. It was two o’clock in the morning by the time he got back home.

His mother was quiet the following morning.

‘Is anything the matter?’ he said, bitterly, constrained himself by her silence and the gravity of the house. Steven and Richard had already gone to school.

‘What time did you come in?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

His mother was completing dressing herself behind a chair. It was something that he hated: she would come down with her worn skirt and jumper, or her faded dress, and stand behind a chair to put on her stockings. It was some habit from her childhood, for she always took off her stockings in the evening, by the fire, and laid them on a chair; they were invariably in holes. It tormented him to watch her: it tormented him to ignore it. He never knew why she persisted, and she went on with it mechanically, finally flinging down the hem of her dress with an absurd gesture of propriety.

‘Your dad said it was two o’clock.’

‘So what?’ he said.

After he’d gone to bed, locking the back door to which he had a key, he’d heard his father rise and go downstairs, ostentatiously, to make some tea. Only three hours later he’d got up again to go to work.

Now his mother said, re-emerging from behind the chair, ‘It means none of us, particularly your father, gets any rest.’

‘I can’t see why.’

‘Because we lie awake wondering where you are. Then, if we do fall asleep, we’re woken up when you do come in. Then your dad has to get up at half-past five.’

‘He could get up later. It doesn’t take him half an hour to walk to the pit.’ He went on eating his breakfast.

‘He gets up earlier so he can light the fire. To help me , when I get up,’ she said.

‘I’ll get up and light it, then,’ he said. ‘Or Richard can. Or Steve.’

‘And who gets up to make sure they have?’

He didn’t answer.

‘If you’re so little in the house I don’t know why you go on living here,’ she said, turning away now to the sink and occupying herself with washing-up.

‘I come here because I can’t afford to live anywhere else. Not do that and go on paying something here,’ he added.

‘You should apply yourself more to teaching,’ she said. ‘No wonder you were asked to leave. If you’re out half the night how can you teach? You can’t’, she added, ‘have the concentration.’

‘It wasn’t lack of concentration I was fired for,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but it might just as well have been.’

He was caught in a dilemma which, a few years before, he could scarcely have imagined. He even began to look enviously at Reagan, and wondered, wildly, if he might not move in with him. Yet Michael’s house was increasingly deserted: it was rumoured, when he didn’t appear for a week, that he’d left the place for good, but late one night the light went on in the upstairs room and the next morning his figure could be seen across the backs.

New houses were being built across the village: his father had put down his name for one. People were moving in from neighbouring villages. A factory employing women sewing garments was set up in a prefabricated building in a yard adjacent to the pit. A new shop was opened; a corner of the village street was widened; a bus shelter had been built; the Miners’ Institute hired entertainers whose names were heard on the radio. The Shaws had a television; shortly after, the Bletchleys bought a set as well.

Bletchley himself had been taken on, during his final term at university, by a large firm of cloth manufacturers in a neighbouring town: he worked in the laboratories. A few months later he was sent to America on a training course. He came back with a light-grey suit, a small, neat, metal-stemmed pipe and a slight American accent. A photograph of him appeared in the local paper. Mr Bletchley, who had been promoted from his local job on the railway to a divisional office, bought a second-hand car. It stood in the road outside, the first car to be owned by anyone in that part of the village.

His father would gaze out at it in fury; he would listen with the same dull rage to the sound of the television set through the wall. ‘Ian looks after his parents,’ he would say, although Ian himself was scarcely ever to be seen in the village and only came home occasionally at weekends, staying half a day and only rarely a night. His father would drive him back to the station.

The village had a worn-out look; from the centre it looked like the suburb of a town: new houses sprawled across the slope of the adjoining hill, and reached up to the overgrown grounds of the manor. Over half a century of soot appeared to draw the buildings, the people, the roads, the entire village into the ground, the worn patches of ashes between the terraces gashed by children digging and worn into deep troughs by the passage of lorries. Very little of the brightness that he remembered as a child remained: so much had been absorbed, dragged down, denuded. Occasionally, on an evening, when he walked out of the place he would gaze back at it from an adjoining hill and see, in the deepening haze, the faint configuration of the village as it might have been – the smooth sweep of the hill with the manor, the church, the cluster of houses at the base. The light would deepen: the simple, elemental lines of the place would be confirmed; then lights sprang up, and across the slopes and in the deep declivities would be outlined once more the amorphous shape of buildings and the careless assemblage of factory, pit and sheds and the image, almost in a breath, would be wiped away.

He taught for three years in a variety of schools; in none did he stay for very long: he was preoccupied by a peculiar restlessness. His relationship with Elizabeth fluctuated from one extreme to another. For a time he gave up seeing her altogether, long after the flat had been redecorated and looked, superficially at least, not unlike a room in her sister’s house. Then, of his own volition, he had gone back to her; they both struggled to escape, yet from what in their relationship he had no idea – his youth tormented her, her age preoccupied him; she tried to pretend at times she would soon re-marry.

Shortly after her decoration of the flat had been completed he was visited by her husband at home.

The man arrived one evening; his mother answered the door.

She showed him into the room at the front. She came in, flush-faced, her gaze hidden, however, behind the glare on her glasses.

‘There’s a Mr Walton to see you,’ she said and he recoiled instantly, knowing it was him.

The man was short and fair-haired: he might have been a school-teacher like himself, or a clerk in a local office.

His embarrassment was even greater than Colin’s. He refused a cup of tea and stood awkwardly before the empty fire; finally, at Colin’s insistence, he sat in a chair.

‘I came to see you about Elizabeth,’ he said, his hands clenched together. ‘I suppose she’s mentioned me,’ he added.

‘Yes,’ he said.