David Storey - Saville

‘I never thought you were,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’ She appeared quite confident of his assessment of her. ‘You’re an opportunist, Colin. You’ll move on from one advantage to another.’

‘It sounds awful,’ he said.

‘You don’t know what power is,’ she said. ‘Nor’, she added, ‘what power you’ve got. I don’t think anything will arrest you. The fact of the matter is you’ve been cut loose. Much to your chagrin, and perhaps to your loss. But from what I can see, you’ve no alternative. Once you are free, well,’ she paused, ‘I hope to hear of it but I don’t hope I’ll be around to see it.’

Yet her view of him was never clear. It was one of her ways of fencing him off, threatening him with a future he couldn’t see himself; his instinct was to cling to her more closely.

‘Oh, you’ll go, my boy,’ she said on another occasion when, provoked by her certainty, he’d attacked her. ‘You’ll go, my boy. But I ’ll not do it for you.’

They were constantly battling with one another; chiefly him with her. There was a calmness in her: she had a strength, a humourless and unperceiving certainty which he felt he had to thrust against; he tested himself continuously against her.

‘Oh, leave me, my boy,’ she would cry at times when his anger became too much, and the thrill of her challenge, the way she condescended to him, knowingly, in that phrase, ‘my boy’, only drove him on.

‘I want you to know you can rely on me,’ he said. ‘I want you to trust me. I love you. I’ll do anything you want.’ Finally, in order to make himself feel real, he had said, ‘I’ll marry you, if you want.’

‘Is this a proposal, or a threat?’ she said.

‘It’s a proposal.’

‘It sounds like a challenge. I refuse to take it up. I refuse for your sake to take it up. You’re not in love.’

‘But I am,’ he told her. ‘Tell me something I haven’t done.’

‘You haven’t loved me,’ she said. ‘ You can’t see it, but I know.’

He tormented himself with this accusation.

‘Show me,’ he would say. ‘ How haven’t I loved you?’

He proposed to her that they go away.

‘Where?’ she said.

‘On holiday.’

‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly mocking. ‘But not for good?’

He hadn’t answered: she was marking out areas in him he didn’t like. His cantankerousness spread back towards his brother.

‘Why won’t you live, Steve?’ he would say when he saw his brother, dumbly, getting on with his work. ‘Why won’t you live ?’

‘I am living,’ his brother said, unruffled by these charges.

‘You’re going to end up down the pit, like my father. Something they threatened they’d never let me do.’

‘Nay, he’ll end up as a manager,’ his father had said. He was wearied now almost to extinction by the pit himself. Each time he came home he seemed physically smaller: he shrank before them, lying prostrated by the fire, too tired to go to bed, too sick from exhaustion even to eat; his presence was a constant reproach, one he deliberately cultivated, flaunting himself before them, his tiredness, his diminution. ‘He’ll not be like I am,’ he had added, indicating Steven’s robust figure and the set good nature of his looks. As it was his brother was popular: he had left school and was apprenticed as a mining mechanic, attending, for part of his time, a local college. Yet he never thrust himself forward in anything; he had an incalculable strength which Colin envied.

‘I can’t understand why you let him give in to it,’ he would tell his father, indicating his father’s own exhausted condition. ‘You were convinced at one time he would never go down.’

‘He’s gone down’, his father said, ‘because he wants to. He’s gone down with a skill. I started with nothing. I was fresh from the land when I first went in. He’s been educated, he’s been trained for it,’ he added.

The familiar arguments began again: but only Steven himself antagonized him, his docility. He could see so much more in his brother than Steven could see himself.

‘Nay, I’m not complaining,’ Steven would say, shaking his massive head; muscles were hunched now around his shoulders. He had started playing football; he was in much demand: youths his own age as well as girls were constantly coming to the house. Steven would keep them at the door in deference to his mother, or only show them into the kitchen if he knew she was out. ‘I can’t see what you’re getting at,’ he added on another occasion when he and Colin were alone in the house.

‘But what are you going to get out of all this?’ he asked him.

‘Nay, I’ll get a living. Like thy gets a living out of teaching,’ his brother said.

‘But it’s slavery,’ he said. ‘My dad’s a slave. You’re a slave. They pay people enough to work down a mine, but never enough for them not to. It’s like a carrot: put it up a bit each year. Like good-natured donkeys they go on turning it out.’

His brother shook his head; he ran his hand through his tousled hair.

‘You develop a slave mentality to live with these slaves. In acquiescing to it you’re reinforcing it.’

‘But the mines have been nationalized,’ his brother said.

‘So what difference does that make?’ Colin said. He waited.

His brother rubbed his head again.

‘Nay, I’m content with what I’m doing.’ He glanced up at him and smiled, but shyly, as if he were embarrassed by his concern. ‘If I’m content, I can’t see why thy can’t be content as well.’

‘Well, I’m not content,’ he said, bitterly.

‘If tha’s not content,’ his brother said, broadening his accent, ‘tha mu’n start to change it.’

‘I am starting,’ he said. ‘I’m starting with you.’

‘Nay, tha’s starting with the wrong end. It’s the head tha hast to get hold on.’

‘You’re closest; I love you; you’re the nearest. You’re young, you’re flexible, you’re amenable to new ideas. You haven’t been conditioned like my father has.’

‘Somebody’s got to work down,’ he said. ‘I reckon I can do it better than most. I can improve conditions. I can do a better job. We’re making changes all the time. What dost tha want me to do? Become a communist?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to get out.’

‘Nay, I’m in,’ his brother said simply. ‘I can’t get out. I like what I’m doing.’

‘It’ll not bring you anything at all,’ he said, ‘except a dumb acceptance.’

‘And supposing I did get out: what’ll happen to all the other slaves?’

‘You’ll leave them.’

‘And my dad?’

‘My dad as well. He’s accepted. Look where he is. Look where all of them are,’ he added, indicating with a sweep of his arm the whole of the village.

‘My dad’s too old to be down, that’s why.’

‘You’re too old to be down. You can set an example by getting out.’

‘Nay, I’m damned if I know what you’re after,’ Steven said, sitting so sturdily there and looking so confused that Colin smiled, dazed by the strength and the obtuseness of his brother. ‘I think thy’s got thyself into a muddle. You lie and cheat; you lied about Claire: you say no one should accept responsibility for ought.’

‘Except themselves.’

‘Accepting responsibility for yourself is accepting it on behalf of other people,’ his brother said with difficulty, thinking it out.

‘It is,’ he said, ‘precisely. And not the other way about.’

He laughed, looking at Steven now in triumph.

‘You should experience everything about you, Steve. You should go out and live.’

‘Nay, thy’s a hypocrite. Thy’s a treacherous hypocrite,’ Steven said; he flushed deeply, looking away.