David Storey - Saville

‘But I’m other things’, he said, ‘as well. Good things. I can help you. I’m not only bad. There are things about me you might accept. There are things about me you should accept. I know them.’

‘What things?’ Steven said.

‘Things you’d never experience yourself: things you’d never experience by accepting.’

‘It’s like Jesus in the wilderness,’ his brother said.

‘Is it?’

‘When he was offered all the kingdoms of the world. I believe in what I’m doing. It does some good.’

‘Good. What good is that? That’s Jesus’s good. It’s not the good of understanding; it’s not the good of embracing evil – it’s only the goodness, the primness, of cutting evil off.’

‘Nay,’ his brother said, gazing at him slowly. ‘I believe you are evil, Colin.’

‘So are you,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get you to admit it.’

Yet his brother continued to look at him in his heavy way, his brows furrowed, his gaze confused, his eyes troubled. He shook his head.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You’re a mystery to me.’

‘But do you feel, Steven,’ he said, ‘that I want your good? Not your “Jesus” good, but your fundamental good: the good that makes you real.’

‘Well,’ his brother said.

‘You’re after the “good” that my parents want for you, out of fear. You’ve to disabuse them of that fear. You’ve got to break out.’

‘Aye.’ Yet he’d stopped listening to him. Richard came in from playing outside. He was at the grammar school now himself: he was at the top of his year. ‘You’d better ask Dick. He’s the one with ideas.’

‘Oh, Richard’s got brains, but he hasn’t any ideas. Brains beget slavery as much as anything else. He’ll go to university and be lost for good. He’ll be cleaned out: “brains” will become his panacea.’

‘Will they?’ Richard said, his thin face pale, yet as if, almost perkily, he accepted his challenge.

‘It takes all sorts,’ Steven said. ‘We don’t all want to end up, tha knows, like you.’

‘Not like me, but for me,’ Colin said.

‘Nor for you, for I think all thy’s after is grabbing for thysen.’

‘Oh, Steve,’ he said, morosely, looking at his two younger brothers as if he would never really talk to them again.

It was but one of many quarrels that he had with his brother; they upset Steve: his lethargy drove Colin on. He watched him playing football: he had the same robustness, the same stubbornness, the same now almost conscious amiability as he was pushed up against the first deep waves of life. He hoped he would rise above them, not insist on breaking through, but on floating, on rising, not standing immobile, like a rock, moving nowhere, accepting his imperturbability as a gift rather than a handicap.

Coming away from one such match he had said, ‘I hear they’ve asked you to sign professional. There was a man there from the City.’

‘Yes,’ Steven said, his face reddened from the game, his nose, which had been damaged, fastened with plaster.

‘Will you go?’ he said.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s quite a bit of brass.’

‘Won’t they turn you into a sausage?’

‘What sort of sausage?’ he said, beginning to laugh.

‘Doing it for money.’

‘And what’s wrong with money, all of a sudden? Dost mean tha doesn’t want it when tha does a job of work?’

‘But not for doing that,’ he said. ‘Doing it for the money becomes the end.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Steven said.

A few days later two men came to the house: a chauffeur-driven car was parked at the door.

The two men went with his father into the front room: Steven was called in a little later.

‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ Colin said.

‘Nay, I’m bigger than all three on ’em,’ his brother said. ‘I mu’n think I can look after it mesen.’

A few days later the car came again; his father and Steven were taken off to town. Steven had put on his suit; his father, too, had put on a suit, but taken it off again and said, ‘I’m not kow-towing to them lot,’ and had gone finally in a sports coat of Richard’s.

They came back almost four hours later.

His father’s face was flushed. He clapped his hands as he came into the house.

‘It’s done,’ he said.

Steven followed him in more slowly, smiling, looking round. His head, strangely, was stooped as if in fear of the ceiling: it was as if he suspected he was much bigger than he was.

His father, feeling in the inner pocket of the sports coat, produced a cheque.

He unfolded it on the table.

‘Two hundred pounds,’ he said slowly, following the writing with his finger then stabbing at the figures. ‘And all due’, he added, ‘to my powers of persuasion.’

‘Well,’ his mother said. She looked at Steve – it was as if all she’d suspected of him had now come true. There was some gift, some peculiar power, unspoken, in her son: he’d brought it in at the door, casually, neither dazzled nor even surprised by it himself.

‘Nay, but it fastens him up more firmly,’ Colin said. ‘Why did you sell him for as much as that?’

‘Oh, take no notice,’ his mother said. ‘You can have no doubt he would have a comment.’

Half of it was put in the bank for his parents; half of it was put in the bank for Steve. His parents bought a television set; a carpet was bought for the stairs; an electric fire was fitted into the fireplace in the other room.

The following spring the Shaws left the house next door and went to live in one across the village. A family with two young children moved into the empty house. At first the strangeness was acute: the sound of crying came through the walls each morning, and of the man shouting impatiently at night.

Beyond, too, in the Reagan house, Michael finally had disappeared: he was reported being seen in a seaside town, serving as a waiter, then as a doorman at a cinema. Workmen came and carried out refuse from the front room of the house. An elderly couple moved in, a miner who was still working at the pit, his wife and, a few weeks later, an older parent, a woman with white hair and a reddened face who, strangely, would come and stand in the garden as, years before, Mr Reagan himself had done. She would gaze over at the children playing in the field and occasionally, calling to them, pass them sweets across the wooden fence.

‘When you think of the war, and all we’ve lived through here together,’ his father said. ‘There’s only us and the Bletchleys left.’ The Battys, too, a year previously, had left the village, the father with a chest complaint which had made him leave the pit; the various brothers and sisters had moved to the town. ‘How long are we going to be here?’ he added. ‘No inside lavatory, no bath: there’s people who came here long after us have been re-housed.’

Once the impetus of Steven’s football had faded, his father went back into his previous decline. From going to watch every match he now, on occasion, made excuses, and though he would wait eagerly for Steven to come home each Saturday evening, the significance of Steven playing slowly died. He would sit with a fixed smile on his face as he listened to details of the game which, genially, Steven was always pleased to describe. When he did go to the match he came back invariably disgruntled, complaining bitterly about the cold, or the way Steven himself had been cheated or let down by the other players. The impetus of his children’s lives had passed him by, leaving him stranded. He would examine Richard’s books and question the marks, look at the remarkable results and favourable comments Richard brought home in his school reports, and gave some acknowledgment which both disappointed Richard and yet drove him on to greater efforts. A master came from the school to talk of Richard’s university chances.