David Storey - Saville

‘We’re not divorced yet.’

‘No,’ he had said. The man had stated it hopefully, as if suspecting Elizabeth might have told him something different.

He wondered what she’d seen in him, interpreting his extreme nervousness perhaps as sensitivity, and sensing in him someone she might mould: some image, hopefully, of her enterprising father.

‘I sent a message once,’ Walton said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He felt there was very little he could tell him.

‘And I had a man, I don’t know why, collecting evidence.’

‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘I thought you had.’

‘The fact is, I think it’s only a temporary break. I think she got very frustrated, being at home. I’m trying to make plans to leave,’ he added.

‘She said you already had. And that you’d decided, finally, not to.’

‘No, no,’ he said, suddenly. ‘She’s twisting it there.’ Yet he gazed at him hopefully, as if the solution of his problem might come from him.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

His mother had opened the door.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she said, looking in intently, flushing at her concern.

‘Mr Walton says he wouldn’t like one,’ he said.

‘Oh, in that case.’ She looked at the man for this to be confirmed, but he said nothing, sitting stiffly in the chair, anxious for her to leave. ‘In case you do just let me know,’ she added.

Her footsteps sounded remotely from the other room, then the sound of Richard’s voice inquiring.

‘I thought, if you didn’t see her, and recognized the reality of the situation, it might do some good,’ the man had said waiting a moment for the sound of the kitchen door to close. He added, ‘You see, from my point of view, you’re just exploiting it.’

It was as if someone else had persuaded him to come: that he were listening to some other voice, but faintly now, and which he could scarcely catch, struggling to decipher the message, the urgent things he’d been asked to say.

‘I can’t refuse to see her,’ Colin said. ‘I can’t agree to that,’ he added.

‘But to you’, the man said quickly, ‘this is nothing. It’s my life you’re playing with, my marriage.’

‘But surely Elizabeth has something to say in that.’

‘Liz?’ His voice thickened; the colour deepened in his face. His hands were vigorously entwined together: the pressure of some other place, and some other person, drove him on. ‘Elizabeth has a responsibility. It’s something she’s run away from. She has her problem, just like me, but you’re preventing us from working it out,’ he added.

‘She can see you if she wants to,’ he said. ‘You can see her. I’m not preventing that.’

‘You are preventing that. You’ve become a distraction.’ Yet the word wasn’t precisely what he wanted. ‘You’ve become an obstacle to us getting closer, or resolving what is, after all, the problem of our marriage and which has nothing to do with you.’

‘It has now,’ he said. ‘I’ve been included.’ It was as if he suspected that Elizabeth had sent him herself: this was her latest attempt to ‘commit’ him; yet the thought had no sooner arisen than he began to dismiss it.

‘I want you to leave my wife alone. I want you to leave her alone,’ the man had said, almost chanting, his small face flushing even deeper, the eyes starting, his lips drawn back. He thrust himself forward from the chair: he appeared no longer to be in control of himself, to care what he said. ‘I want you to leave my wife alone.’

He knew from the silence in the adjoining room that the man’s words had carried through to the kitchen.

‘I don’t want any promises. I don’t want any conditions. I’m telling you,’ he said, ‘to leave her alone. She is my wife. I married her. We have a right to decide this thing together.’

‘But she left you over a year ago,’ he said.

‘I don’t care when she left me. She’s coming back. She’ll see it’s the only way in the end. Meanwhile,’ he raised his fist: he pushed it wildly in front of his face. ‘I’ll kill you if you as much as see her again.’

‘But you can’t kill me ,’ he said, absurdly, wanting to laugh; to intimidate the man, he stood up himself.

‘I don’t mind what I do, or what punishment I get. She’ll see how much I love her. She’ll see how much I care,’ he said.

He turned to the door. Colin moved as if to open it for him, but the man flinched: he grasped the handle himself and stepped out quickly to the passage. For a moment he fumbled with the door to the street.

‘I’ve told you. I’ve warned you. I can’t do anything else.’

He opened the door. When Colin followed him he could see a car parked some distance down the street, opposite Reagan’s: its lights came on; its engine started. As it swept past a face peered out; its lights disappeared in the direction of the station.

‘Who was that?’ his mother said. Both she and Richard were standing in the kitchen, unable to sit down.

‘His name is Walton.’

‘Yes,’ his mother said. ‘I gathered that.’

‘It’s just something he wanted me to do,’ he said.

‘He mentioned his wife.’ His mother gazed at him in angry surprise.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Have you been seeing his wife?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and added, ‘They’re getting divorced.’

‘They’re getting divorced, or they are divorced?’

‘Getting. They’ve been separated’, he added, ‘for over a year.’

Nothing had ever alarmed his mother as much.

She gazed at him for several seconds: Richard sat down and looked at a book.

‘So this is your way’, she said, ‘of getting back.’

‘But there’s no getting back,’ he said. ‘It’s someone I met by accident.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and added, ‘That’s what you might well believe, my lad.’

She sat down at the table; she was worn and thin; so much of the life that might have been in her now had gone, torn out with each of the children, torn out by the struggle to make ends meet. He even saw the kitchen as might Walton himself, if he’d come inside, its worn patches, its bare floor: only its furniture was new, yet is design was poor. The place was like some cave they’d lived inside, worn, eroded, hollowed out by the vehemence of their use.

His brother’s slender face looked up at him, the eyes fresh, alert, still startled from Walton’s shouting, his cheeks flushed.

‘It’s bad,’ his mother said. ‘It’s something bad when you take a man’s wife.’

‘I haven’t taken her,’ he said. ‘She’s no intention of going back.’

‘Hasn’t she?’

Yet it was as if his mother had cut some final cord: the last attachment between them slipped away. She saw something bitter and remorseless in him, first with Steven, now with this, then with his job; the triumph they had looked for in his life had never occurred.

‘It’s bad,’ she said again, ‘it’s bad,’ almost in the same way the man himself had chanted ‘I want you to leave my wife alone’. She clung to the table as she might at one time, in some affliction or illness, or some quarrel with his father, have clung to him. ‘It’s bad,’ she said again, remorselessly now, unable to leave go of her rancour, or of herself.

‘There’s nothing bad in it. Why should someone be tied to what they’ve done in the past? Particularly if they’ve let go of it themselves.’

‘ He hasn’t let go of it,’ she said. ‘And he’s her husband.’

‘But what’s a marriage count if she’s dropped out of it?’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Colin, you don’t know what marriage is.’

‘Don’t I?’