David Storey - Saville

‘You’ve no idea.’ Some part of her own life had been disrupted: the man had left a conflagration in the house that neither of them could put out. ‘You’ve no idea what a marriage entails, and if one partner falters it’s no man, no decent man, who comes along and takes advantage.’

‘I’ll bring her,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see where the advantage lies.’

‘I don’t want her here,’ she said, so violently, so immediately, it was as if Elizabeth had come in the room with him. She got up quickly and turned to the fire: she poked it vigorously, her figure, its shoulders rounded, stooped to the flames. She put on more coal and dampened the blaze.

Smoke rose in thick clouds across the chimney.

And it was as if he had fought his last fight in the house: he could feel it slip away from him, his younger brother sitting there, his mother standing, turned away, then carrying the bucket out to the yard.

‘I’ll get it, Mother,’ Richard said.

He thought he might have left it then, gone for good: yet he stood gazing down at the smoke-filled hearth.

Outside his brother rooted at the coal. His mother came inside.

‘I hope you’re going to break with her,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I shall.’

She said nothing for a while.

‘And what shall you do’, she said finally, ‘when he comes again? Half the street must have heard his shouts. What will Richard think? What effect will it have on him?’

‘I shouldn’t think it’ll have any effect at all,’ he said.

‘He looks up to you,’ she said. ‘So does Steven.’

‘Does he?’

‘I think he still does, despite how badly you’ve treated him.’ And strangely, as if to prove her point, they could hear Steven whistling cheerily across the backs, then his voice, ‘How are you, Dick?’ as he called to his brother bringing in the coal.

Then, standing in the door, looking in at the lighted room, he gazed brightly from one to the other of them, and added, still cheerily, ‘Well, Mother, then. What’s up?’

When he told Elizabeth about her husband’s visit she’d been alarmed – as much by his own reaction, he thought, as anything else. ‘But aren’t you worried ?’ she said, and added after a moment, ‘And what your mother must have thought.’

He burst out laughing at this speculation.

‘Why this sudden concern about my mother?’ he said. ‘That’s the last thing, I’d have thought, you’d have worried about.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She seems a remarkable woman. I can’t imagine what her life has been like. It’s a pity now I’ll never know her.’

‘You can still come and see her. I won’t take her injunction at its face value,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to push it down her throat.’

Yet what the ‘it’ was to push down his mother’s throat she didn’t mention.

‘Oh, I’m not worried about him coming,’ he said. He felt in fact, on reflection, more relieved. He liked to see strong feeling in others, it reassured him: it was the lack of feeling, in himself and others, that disconcerted him. He would even, as with Corcoran on his dismissal from the school, provoke someone deliberately in order to find out where he was; he could no longer accept the sobriety of life, he wanted to be an exception. The thought of Walton feeling anything violently was a consolation in the weeks that followed; he even hoped be might come again, even angrier, more violent.

Yet her husband didn’t come back. Each evening when he arrived home he looked for the car or for a figure waiting: neither was ever there. Several weeks had passed before he discovered the reason – Elizabeth had gone herself to see him.

‘What did he say?’ he asked her later.

‘I think it was what he was really wanting all along,’ she said. ‘For me to see how much I’d hurt him. He was very cold. But then’, she added, ‘you don’t really know him, do you?’

He wondered if he did. The man was insignificant: she diminished herself in seeing him; he was beginning to see how ordinary she really was, despite her independence, her determination, if only for a while, to live alone. Perhaps, he speculated, it was some fault in her: her incapacities made her humourless. Perhaps there would never be anyone she trusted, or whom she allowed to live up to her expectations: she was always looking for a reason in everything.

‘We’re two such egotists,’ she said on one occasion. ‘I don’t think anything will ever come of it.’

Now she said, ‘He’d been instructed by his father to offer me a stake. In the firm, I mean. He thought I might be tempted.’

‘He must be really desperate,’ he said.

‘I don’t think he is. Not with me. I think it’s his family that put him up to it: I think he’s desperate because of them. It wasn’t really at you he was shouting: I think he’d be relieved not to be married at all. I offered to divorce him, by putting the onus on to me. They wanted him to get me back or, if not, to get a divorce and cite you as co-respondent.’

She’d had difficulty in telling him this: it was the thing she was most afraid of. All along she had told him, ‘It’s quite safe, you know,’ and when he had asked, ‘Safe for what?’ she said, ‘Safe with me. You’re not likely to be exploited.’ Now she said, ‘It’s the one threat they’ve always held over me: that anyone I went with would be involved. I think, in the end, it’s what kept Phil away. But even Derek drew back at that: it’s done some good, I imagine. He’s insisted that you shouldn’t be used.’

‘Nevertheless, it won’t stop them if they wanted to.’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps their solicitor might prefer it.’

‘Yes.’

She watched him gravely.

‘It’s like being engaged. I’ll have to marry you after all.’

‘But it’s absurd,’ she said. ‘You occurred much later.’

‘Not that much later.’

‘Oh, far too late’, she said, ‘for them.’

Yet perhaps it was what the husband, and the family, had been attempting all along – to cool his ardour, to inhibit his relationship, her freedom, in this particular way. There was a sudden halt to their openness: he became evasive. He started seeing other women, particularly a teacher at one of the schools. She was younger, closer to his own age, yet empty, he found, and finally silly. Beside the gravity of Elizabeth she had no presence. The relationship ended as suddenly as it began: he found himself back in the flat at Catherine Street.

‘Well, my boy,’ she had said, when he’d told her about the woman, ‘I feel more sorry for them than I do for you.’

‘Why?’

‘You go from strength to strength. You suck the meat out. You drain these women. Like you drain your mother with your abuse.’

‘I don’t drain her,’ he said.

‘Don’t you?’ she said as if she knew his mother intimately, better than he knew her himself.

Yet there was a shallowness in her, a desperation: she was afraid he might leave her now for good.

For he did feel a strength. As the world faded all about him, as the people faded, as the bonds faded with his family he felt a new vigour growing inside.

‘You’ll leave me soon,’ she said one evening as they lay in bed. Yet she stated it not sadly, but as if relieved she too might be moving on.

They were like prisoners; he wondered where their new assertiveness had come from; he could see, secretly, no hope for her at all. She still worked at her father’s shop, though she had mentioned, since she had trained as a pharmacist, she might move to a larger firm and take charge of a department. ‘I’ve had experience of administration: I’m not as stupid as I look.’