David Storey: Saville

‘That’ll be a strange ’un, then,’ he said. ‘That’s soon contented.’

‘Yes,’ she said, gazing down, stroking its head.

‘Can’t make head nor tail of it,’ he said.

It was like a part of her, never leaving, growing, so that he saw the quietness growing in her, a calmness, the other women in the street peering down, uncertain, as bemused by the child’s passivity as he was himself.

‘It’s as good as gold. A little angel,’ Mrs Shaw told him, flushing, smiling, whenever she was allowed to pick him up.

‘See, he’ll go to anybody, then,’ he told her.

‘If he’ll come to me, he’ll come to anybody, then,’ she said, and laughed.

When it was walking it seldom left the garden, and then only if he called it from the field, or from a neighbouring yard, shouting across the backs as it forced its way between the fence, coming over, blindly, taking his hand while whoever it was he was talking to would gaze down at it, smiling, and shake their heads.

‘He’s going to be a boxer, then,’ they said, looking at his hands, his arms. He had the same muscular confidence as Saville himself, his limbs already thickening out. ‘Aye, he s’ll soon have you down, Harry,’ they told him and laughed whenever, for their amusement, he got the boy to skip about.

Usually he was shy and wouldn’t be moved, standing by the father’s side and gazing up at the other men with a slight frown, his brows knitted, his eyes dark and listening.

‘Here, do you want half-a-crown, then, Colin?’ they’d ask him and laugh when he refused to put his hand out. ‘He’ll not be bought off,’ they told Saville. ‘A dark horse. We’d better all watch out.’

He took the boy for walks like he’d taken Andrew, sometimes carrying him on his back, but more often walking. He sometimes took him out of the village, to the north and east, beyond the farm fields, to where the road led down towards the river. Its water was dark, its surface flecked by wads of foam and broken up here and there by clumps of timber. Barges passed bearing bales of wool, red and orange, blue and yellow, the bright colours glowing out against the darkness of the bank. There was a coal-slip farther up where the lorries from the colliery tipped their loads, the black dust sliding down the shute into the holds of the barges waiting in the stream below. A small tug with a red funnel pulled each of the barges off, a long slow train that swung from bank to bank, the men calling at the rudders, the bright funnel visible miles away, across the fields, unsupported, and belching out black clouds of smoke.

He bought another dog when the first dog died, and in the evenings, before he went to work, he would take it and the boy with him to the old colliery site at the farthest end of the village. He’d come here often before, on his own, and now he would lie in the grass and watch the boy digging with a stick, or following the dog about aimlessly, calling after it, ‘Billy! Billy!’ falling down, then coming back to tell him it had gone.

‘Nay, it’ll soon come back,’ he said. ‘It knows where its dinner comes from. Just you see,’ laughing when the dog reappeared, its snout muddied from digging at the holes. ‘You’ll see, one of these days it’ll catch us both a rabbit.’

It was as if, looking back, Andrew’s death and the boy’s birth were part of the same event, the paying off of a debt, the receipt of a sudden, bewitching recompense. As time passed he never quite got used to it, sensing in his wife an almost mystical interpretation of what had happened, as if she saw the two boys as elements of the same being, Andrew the transgressed, the new boy a figure of atonement: the same element and spirit was in them both, like a rod put in the fire and brought out cleansed and glistening. Almost for these reasons he would attack the boy, half-joking, afraid of him being moulded, afraid of the way he cancelled the first child out. He would fight him on their walks, at the colliery site, rolling on his back while the boy grappled with his arms and legs, aroused, half-laughing, the dog barking at their heels. ‘Nay, you s’ll half-kill me,’ he said panting, the boy moving round, out of reach, his arms extended, before he made another attack. He would laugh at the boy’s strength and the strange ferocity that drove him. ‘Nay, half a chance,’ he’d tell him, rolling off, the dog barking, the boy jumping at his legs, bouncing on him, up and down, laughing. He came to a strange life the moment he was roused, so that at times it was as if Andrew were there again, calling out and shouting, the mood passing into that even stranger silence when, walking back, he’d glance down to see the face quite still and calm, the dark eyes abstracted, solemn, shadowed by a frown.

The summer after the boy had started school they went away on holiday.

Colin had never seen the sea before; Saville had told him, during the weeks before they left, about its blueness, its size; about the sand, the gulls, the boats; about light-houses, even about smugglers. He’d heard about a lodging from a man at work; his wife had written; they’d sent a deposit. The day they left he got up early to find the boy already in the kitchen, cleaning his shoes, his clothes laid out on a chair by the empty grate, the two suitcases which they’d packed the night before already standing by the door.

‘You’re up early,’ he said. ‘Do you think they’ve got the train out yet? Yon engine, I think’ll be having its breakfast.’

The boy had scarcely smiled; already there was that dull, almost sombre earnestness about him, melancholic, contained, as if it were some battle they were about to fight.

‘Could you do mine up as well?’ the father asked him.

Saville got his own shoes out, then got the breakfast, his wife still making the beds upstairs.

Later, when they set off, the boy had tried to lift the cases.

‘Nay, you’ll not shift those,’ the father said. From the moment the boy had finished the shoes he’d been finding jobs, clearing the grate, emptying the ashes, helping to finish the washing-up, following his mother round as she inspected all the rooms, turning off the gas, checking the taps, making sure the window catches had been fastened tightly. They bolted and locked the back door then carried the cases to the front. Saville had set them in the garden, the patch of ground between the front door and the gate, and as he locked the door and tested it, and looked up at the windows, the boy had lifted first one case then the other then, finally, gasping, had put them down.

‘Better let me carry those,’ Saville said. He’d laughed. He gave his wife the key. ‘Though I don’t know why we’re locking up. There’s nought in there to pinch.’

Even then, with nothing to do but follow them, the boy’s mood had scarcely changed; he held his mother’s hand, looking over at his father, waiting impatiently, half-turned, while Saville rested, or switched the cases, trying one in one hand then the other.

‘We’ve enough in here for a couple of months,’ he told her. ‘I mu’n have got a handcart if I’d known they were as heavy as this.’

It was still early. The streets were empty; the sky overhead was dark and grey. Earlier, looking out of the window, he’d said, ‘Sithee, when it sees we’re off on holiday, it’ll start to brighten.’ Yet, though they were now in the street and moving down, slowly, towards the station, it showed no sign of changing: if anything, the clouds had thickened.

‘I should say no more about the weather,’ his wife had said. ‘The more you talk about the sun the less we’ll see.’

‘Don’t worry. When it sees us on our way it’ll start to brighten.’ He glanced over at the boy. ‘It likes to see people enjoying themselves,’ he added.