David Storey - Saville

The woman stood alone for a while. With the door closed, the fire still glowing, she gazed round her at the room: there was nothing there to reassure her, simply the table, the four chairs, a cupboard and the pots they’d mounded in the sink for washing. She sank down finally by the hearth and cried.

The Savilles had been married eighteen months when they came to Saxton. Before that they had shared a room in a flat with another couple. Then, finally, had come the chance of a farm-labourer’s cottage in a neighbouring village: an old man had lived there, a widower, and it was the smell of his dog and his cat they were most aware of in the days following their arrival, and the odour of the food he’d pushed down beneath the floor.

Not having had time to prepare the house they spent the first few days scrubbing the floors, washing down the walls and woodwork, and filling in the holes which the dog, with its scratching, had dug in the various doors and the plaster. They repaired the ceilings, and replaced the crumbled boards in the floor; finally they distempered the walls, painted the outside woodwork and, in the evenings, when Saville had slept from his morning shift, at a colliery some six miles distance, he dug the garden, turning over the thickly matted weeds between the narrow barrier of fences.

Later, in the evenings, he would take the child out and sit in the yard: he had built a wooden bench from disproportionate bits of timber, and here, the child on his knee, he would smoke his pipe, the baby snatching at the clouds of smoke, Saville wafting them away and laughing.

Soon there was a routine in the mother’s care of the house: on Mondays she did the washing, on Tuesdays completed the drying and started the ironing. On Wednesdays she did her midweek shopping, finished the ironing and, if she had time baked bread – large, tea-cake-shaped loaves which fitted one to each shelf in the tiny oven, and smaller, oblong-shaped loaves, the dough of which she raised in a large porcelain bowl in front of the fire. The boy, sitting in his chair or on the floor, would watch her, eager at times to use the dough himself, watching her drawing it out and shaping it in the tins or on the black, greased oven-plates, occasionally, if a fragment were over, rolling a piece himself and laying it on grease-proof paper, first in the hearth, where the flames shone and flickered on its surface, then sliding it beside the tins inside the oven and waiting impatiently, while his mother adjusted the tiny, chromium ventilator and stoked the fire; then, finally looking at the clock on the tall mantelshelf, she’d stoop to the door, a piece of hessian in her hand and, if the bread were ready, lift his out first. ‘There, what do you think of that?’ she’d ask him absent-mindedly, her attention solely on the loaves and the tea-cakes she’d baked herself. Yet there was an alertness in her son which belied his age, even a dexterity with his tiny hands so that at times, although she helped him, she would be astonished at the way he took the bread and was able to connect the various stages – the mixing, the leavening, the shaping out, the final raising and then the sliding of the plates and tins inside the oven. ‘He mu’n be a baker,’ Saville would say, coming home to see the tiny, irregular-shaped loaf the boy had baked himself, breaking a piece off, at Andrew’s insistence, putting on jam and then, watched raptly by his son, chewing it carefully and with evident pleasure: ‘Nay, I mu’n come to this house again. They know how to treat a hungry man.’

On Thursdays she cleaned the house upstairs, first the front bedroom, the only room apart from the kitchen to have linoleum on the floor, which she washed and polished, then the two rear rooms and finally the stairs. On Fridays she swept and cleaned the kitchen, washing the floor, and swept out and scrubbed the tiny room at the front: here the two easy chairs stood before an empty, black-enamelled fireplace. This she polished as she did the black enamel on the stove in the kitchen: on Friday evening the house smelted of polish and the gas light glowed, flaring, against all the shiny surfaces. Saville, taking the baby, would bath him in front of the fire, laying out sheets of paper and standing the metal tub in front of the hearth. Andrew would flap his arms and shout, the water would hiss against the coal, the mother would call at the damage done to her recently polished floor. Saville himself would laugh, sometimes singing, leaning back on his heels as he knelt to the tub, the child finally gazing up at him with a look of wonder, his pale eyes bright, transfixed, as his father, his face flushed, his teeth gleaming in the light from the fire, sang long and lustily for his amusement.

‘By go, just see his little legs, Ellen,’ he’d say as he stood the child in the bowl, feeling the mound of muscle and fat, his own hand, gnarled and knotted and stained beneath the skin with tiny filaments of coal, incongruous against the smoothness and pinkness of Andrew’s flesh. He’d lift him, still wet, above him in the air, the child’s arms and legs flung out, dangling below him, calling, shrieking as he shook him by the fire, the flames sizzling once again, and the mother shouting, ‘Wash him, for goodness’ sake, without all that mess.’

Ellen frequently went back to visit her parents. They lived in a village four miles away, their house one of a pair, backing on to a paddock in which they kept geese and hens and, in sheds, at the farthest end, a number of pigs. She would take the boy with her, preparing him thoroughly for the journey, in his best clothes, his face bright and gleaming, his hair brushed neatly and parted at the side. He would sit beside her in the bus, gazing out at the fields with the same look of perplexity which characterized his features whenever his mother chastised his father, his expression vaguely disconcerted, yet as if in a curious way their quarrel had scarcely anything to do with him at all.

Mrs Saville’s mother was a small woman; she had had seven children in all, two of whom had died, and had long since relinquished her domestic responsibilities to these surviving offspring, one of whom visited her almost every day. So it was, whenever Ellen brought Andrew, she was obliged at some point of her visit to pull on an apron, roll up her sleeves and wash a floor, or clean the windows, wash the clothes, or prepare a meal. Her father, a tall, silent man who had been out of work for much of his later life, and who scratched a living from the weed-strewn acres at the back of the house, would leave the women of the house to their own devices, for, despite her good intentions, quarrels were frequently the outcome of Ellen’s visits home. The keynote of her mother’s resentment was her marriage to Saville – Ellen herself being the youngest of her mother’s children and destined traditionally for several years at least to combine the services of a daughter and a domestic servant; an expectation which had been terminated by her marriage and further compounded by the birth of Andrew.

The boy would sit between the warring women, immaculate in his child’s suit, with his gleaming hair and bright, robust face, open, frank and blue-eyed, vaguely aware of the animosity that passed between the adult figures and relating it conceivably to the animosity of a not dissimilar nature, a rancour and a bitterness, that passed between his mother and father at home, and which, usually, had preceded if not occasioned this visit to his round-faced, red-cheeked, dark-eyed grandmother. His playing in the dust of the yard at the back of the house was rigidly supervised by his mother. Occasionally, if he were allowed into the paddock at the back of the house, it was with instructions never to let go of his grandfather’s hand – an injunction which the tall, elderly man with large, soft brown eyes and an almost inaudible voice, so self-effacing was his manner, adhered to as conscientiously and as unremittingly as Andrew did himself. ‘Sithee, then, what dost think to Jackie?’ he would say, holding him to the pigs’ pen and, if he couldn’t see through the wooden lathes, lifting him to the top of the wall to peer over: the mud and the mess there would fascinate them both, and they would still be gazing at the pink and whitish bodies splashing through it when Ellen’s voice would call from the house, ‘Dad, bring him away from there.’