David Storey - Saville

‘Nay, muck never did no man any harm,’ the old man would say when they got back to the house.

‘No,’ Ellen would say with the same vehemence as she did at home. ‘You don’t have to wash and clean him.’

‘Nay, I’ve washed and cleaned seven of them. And thy’s been one of them.’

‘ Who have you washed and cleaned?’ the little old grandmother would say and the father would turn away, silent, leaving these squabbles as he always did to the peculiar moralizing passion of the women.

Yet Andrew enjoyed these visits to his grandparents’ house. For one thing, he enjoyed being out of his home: even going into the village with his mother he appreciated, as well as those longer journeys with his father that took him to the Park, on the slope that overlooked the village, or even farther afield than that where, some two miles away, the river came round in a vast dark curve from the distant towns.

On the journey back from his grandparents’ house his mother would frequently set him on her knee, so that his head was raised to the bus window and he gazed out at the fields from between her arms – a gesture she seldom made on their journey to the house when her thoughts, seemingly, were on the chastisement that lay ahead. ‘Well, then, there’s a horse,’ she would say to him on the journey back, pointing out objects that caught her attention as if the relief of going home, and the peculiar victory she had won – for survival in her family atmosphere was sufficient of a victory to satisfy Ellen – were scarcely more than she could bear. These moments of companionability were the deepest that Andrew and his mother shared, as if he himself were both a trophy and a burden, she the successful recipient and the suffering host.

When Andrew was three the Savilles moved house. They moved up the street to one of the miners’ houses which had a lower rent. As it was, their first cottage was old, and despite their renovations water came in through the roof in winter and soaked in in huge patches through the walls. Shortly after they left the four other tenants of the block moved out and the terrace was demolished, the stone taken away in carts and the timber burnt. A little later the miners’ row was extended to take in the newer ground.

Shortly after they moved Andrew ran away from home. Saville, coming in from work, was met by his wife at the door. Pale, almost speechless, she came out with him to search the streets, he wheeling his bike beside her. At odd corners she would wait and Saville would pedal off, looking in yards, in odd fields and alleys; finally, as they were returning to the house, the boy appeared, escorted by a neighbour. He had been found several miles away, walking steadily along the road to a neighbouring village: he was quiet and composed: Ellen sat with him by the fire; he scarcely seemed conscious of having gone away.

Perhaps the warmth that greeted his return persuaded him to leave again: he was brought back a second time from the pit by Mr Shaw, a miner who lived in the house next door. Saville saw him carrying Andrew along the street, the boy’s face pale, earnest, gazing steadily before him, uncertain of the other man’s grasp.

‘Why, where’s he been?’ Saville asked him.

‘We found him in the engine-house, curled up by the boiler,’ Shaw had said. ‘How he got in we’ll never know. The engine-man found him, tha knows, by chance.’

Finally on a third occasion, he was spotted by a tradesman on the same road leading out of the village.

‘But where were you going?’ Saville asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ the boy had said.

‘Aren’t you happy here?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Andrew nodded.

‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’

He shook his head.

‘I shall have to smack you. You’ll have to know it’s wrong,’ he said.

Andrew stayed home. It was almost a year before he began to wander off again, his eyes wide, startled, whenever he was brought back, the blueness burning so that, having beaten him, Saville would go to the lavatory outside and sit on the scat, smoking, his hands shaking, like on those first occasions in his marriage when he had quarrelled with his wife.

She too seemed numbed. There was almost a ritual now; the boy’s wildness a quiet, almost a systematic thing, so that the father no longer felt alarmed or frightened by his going, as if he sensed the boy’s immunity to danger in much the same way that he sensed his own down the pit, a carelessness, almost an indifference. He spent longer hours in bed; he bought a dog. He would take the dog up to a deserted colliery to the south of the village where the small black and white animal ran to and fro amongst the overgrown pit-heaps chasing rabbits or digging at their burrows.

Andrew started school. He was as much trouble there as he was at home. One day, coming home from one of his walks, Saville saw his son in the road ahead. He was, perhaps because of his mother’s close attention, curiously well-mannered; the trouble came from these almost inadvertent gestures, the same absent-minded movement which, at school, might result in the knocking over of a desk, or the breaking of a window, and which at home led to his constant wanderings off.

He was kicking a stone in the middle of the road, and as Saville began to catch him up the stone flew up, glancing off another boy’s head, the boy himself stooping down and crying. Saville saw the look of consternation on Andrew’s face, the rigidity which gripped his body, a helplessness which overcame him whenever he discovered he’d done something wrong. A moment later he’d crossed the road but the boy, his hands clutched against his face, ran off, crying. For a while Andrew watched him, disconsolate, standing in the road; then, with strange, stiff gestures, his face flushed, he stepped back on the pavement and with the same strange, stiff strides, set off towards the house.

He wondered even then why he hadn’t intervened, and wondered what it was that held him back, as appalled by this as he was by Andrew’s grief, that strange remorse which gripped them both, the son walking on ahead, unknowing, the father walking on behind, half-raging. When he finally reached the house he saw Andrew playing in the yard, on his own, digging at the soil between his feet, his face red, glistening, as if recently he’d been crying.

One morning he came home from work to find the boy was ill.

His wife was three months’ pregnant. Saville stayed home that night to nurse them both. In the morning his wife was feeling better. Andrew, however, had a hacking cough, slow, half-delirious, fevered.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll soon pass,’ he told his wife, and gave the boy a powder, going to bed himself in the afternoon, ready to go to work that evening.

When he got up the boy was worse.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If he doesn’t get better I s’ll fetch the doctor.’ He gave Andrew another powder now to sweat it out: he put another blanket on the bed. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’ he asked his wife.

‘I don’t know,’ she said and shook her head. She was pale, sick herself, moving round the house in a daze, unsure of what was happening.

‘I can’t miss another night,’ he said. ‘There’ll be all hell to pay, I can tell you.’

‘We’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘You go. I can always ask Mrs Shaw.’

‘Nay,’ he said, determined. ‘I’m damned if I can’t look after my own.’

He stayed at home. In the night the boy got worse. He started crying out and then, a little later, could scarcely catch his breath, his body arched, rising in its struggle.

Saville got out his bike and set off in the night to fetch the doctor.

The one he called at in the village was already out. He was given the address of a young doctor who was setting up in practice. The doctor was even younger than himself and had no car: he got out his bike and cycled back with him.