David Storey - Saville

‘What you been doing with yourself?’ Batty said as if he had misjudged the success of Colin’s life entirely.

‘I’m teaching.’

‘Mug’s game.’

‘Like being in prison.’

‘I was in the nick because I was framed. I’ll never be framed again.’ He looked at his glass, which he’d emptied a second time at a single swallow.

‘Fancy another?’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

‘Have you been back home?’ he asked him when he brought the drink across.

‘What for?’

‘Where are you going to sleep tonight?’

‘I’ll find somewhere,’ Batty said. ‘They live in town. My dad. I called today. They wouldn’t see me. Go with open arms: what do you get?’

‘What about your brothers?’

‘Two of ’em are inside already: their wives don’t reckon much to having me around.’

He gave him a pound when they went outside. He waited at the bus stop with him for a bus to take him back to town.

‘Do you remember that hut we had?’ Batty said. He looked about him at the deserted, lamp-lit street. ‘What a dump,’ he added. When the bus came he got on without adding anything further, climbed the stairs and disappeared.

One evening, visiting the town, he came out of a pub in something of a daze and gazed around. It was early evening: the sky was clear; sunlight lit up the roofs above his head; an evening bustle came from the city centre; farther along the road was the dark, pillared building of the Assembly Rooms; a faint sound of music drifted down the street.

He walked back slowly to the bus.

When, a little later, the bus crossed the river, the sun was setting beyond the mills.

‘It could be Italy,’ a voice said behind him and when he turned a man gestured off towards the river. ‘Italy,’ he said again, indicating the yellow light.

She had known the break was coming and said nothing when he told her.

He had told her he was leaving on two occasions before: both times, however, he’d finally come back.

Now, he could see, she knew it was different.

‘I’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘I have no choice.’

Still she didn’t answer.

He’d been sitting across the room; he got up and went to her chair. There was a peculiar immunity about her. Beyond her he could see directly into the street, the parked cars, the bustle of the town from the opposite end.

‘Will you stay here yourself?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

She sat with her back straight; she was wearing a light-blue dress; her hands were clenched in her lap, her head erect. Her gaze was abstracted: it was as if she’d removed herself from the room entirely.

‘Well,’ she said, putting up her hand. ‘We’d better say goodbye.’

He drew her up: almost formally, as whenever they met, they kissed each other on the cheek.

‘It’s very strange,’ she said. ‘This town. I wonder if I’ll ever leave it. In the old days children stayed in the same community. When we discover everywhere is very much the same, when we find that everyone is very much like us, when we realize the world is smaller than we thought, do you think we’ll all drift back? I used to despise Maureen for staying here; it is sterile in one sense, but does it have to be? Doesn’t the chance of renewal come wherever you live?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You make it sound so clear. But all you do is take the destitution with you: of belonging nowhere; of belonging to no one; of knowing that nowhere you stay is very real.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be real?’ he said.

‘Don’t the dead, doesn’t the past only make it real?’

‘No,’ he said again. ‘The dead just hold it back.’

‘But what is there?’ she asked him. ‘Doesn’t everything finish the way it began? Won’t I end up working with my father? Despite all I might do in order to avoid it. I might even’, she added, ‘take over the shop.’

‘And marry a pharmacist’, he added, ‘to go with it?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Although it would be terrible if it turned out you were right.’

‘Shakespeare never travelled farther than London; Michelangelo never went farther from Florence than Rome; Rembrandt stayed virtually where he was. It’s an illusion to think you’ve to break the mould. The mould may be the most precious thing you have.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t believe it. Travelling is only one way of breaking it.’

‘Why not stay?’

‘Would you want us to get married, then?’ he said.

She laughed: she was driving him in circles, yet it was an argument she couldn’t conclude.

‘My chances of victory are so much less than yours,’ she said.

‘In being older?’ he said.

‘In being a woman.’

‘But then, that should be more of a challenge.’

‘Yet I’m a woman formed’, she said, ‘by old conceptions. I believe, at the end of it, there is only one man. Just as for a man there is only one woman. Not any man, or any woman, but one man. And one woman. Despite the circumstance.’

‘In any case,’ he said, freshly, ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Perhaps you’ll learn that later,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I refuse to believe it.’

‘You may refuse, my boy,’ she said. ‘But you’ll come to it in the end. One man: one woman. The unity of that is irrefutable; growth is impossible without it.’

It sounded so much like her older self that he laughed. He took her hand.

‘It’s been a friendship of a kind,’ he said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t wish to make it sound decent,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of bitterness here you’ll never see. I’m the senior partner. I’ve had my chance: I feel it’s my duty not to show it.’

‘But you try to diminish yourself so much,’ he said. ‘You make the mould yourself instead of allowing life to do it for you. I believe that life is limitless, that experience is limitless: yet it can’t be conceived by standing still.’

‘Go out and experience it, in that case, then,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when you come back, if you come back, you’ll see you may have been mistaken. What, after all, is a community if it isn’t formed by people who are committed, who commit their lives, and have their lives committed for them?’

‘But a community isn’t anything,’ he said. ‘It exists’, he went on, ‘of its own volition. When the volition goes, the community goes with it. It’s no good hanging on.’

‘Oh,’ she said bleakly, gazing at him as if there were a great deal she might have told him. It was like a child crying to be let outside a door.

‘I can see now’, he said, ‘the difference between us. You have no faith. Whereas everything that happens to me, even the worst things, merely strengthens mine. Because things are bad, because they only get worse, faith is all the stronger.’

‘Faith in what?’

‘Impossibility. Everything is allowable; everything is permissible; anything can happen. It’s arrogance’, he added, ‘to assume it can’t. Not an arrogance to assume it should.’

‘Well,’ she said quietly, sitting once more, gazing at her hands, the fingers intertwined, lying in her lap. ‘Well,’ she said, tired, as if he were a force that couldn’t be countered.

‘But I can do so much,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what makes me feel it: but I know it must be true.’ And when she looked up he said, ‘I was a pessimist like you. Now I’m different. I wish you’d take this assurance from me. For I haven’t just taken: I’ve given something back.’

‘Yes,’ she said, then added, ‘It’s only youth. You can’t give that back, however much you wanted.’