David Storey - Saville

‘They’re sleeping now,’ his mother said, standing at the foot of the bed, as if some long-drawn-out battle had been fought before his arrival. He’d come down directly to the place from school, travelling on unfamiliar buses, in response to some wish of his mother’s that he should see his grandparents before they died. He hardly connected them with anything living; there was something vague, inanimate, past recognition in their faces now: almost ghostly, the colour of their skin glowed eerily, like paper, from the shadows of the room. He saw the strange stoop of his mother’s shoulders, a weariness verging on regret, nearer bewilderment he would have guessed; she gazed at the two heads as she might have examined some mysterious object inside a box, puzzling, uncertain, prompting her to some memory she couldn’t recall. ‘At least it’s something’, she added, ‘that they’ll go together. My sister’s coming in an hour, then we can both go home.’

A bucket of water stood by the hearth; in the top of it floated a wooden scrubbing-brush. The carpet had been rolled up in front of the fire and the stone floor between there and the door opening to the yard scrubbed clean. There was a smell of soap in the room, overlain by the musty, almost stifling odour which came from the bed. One of the curtains had been drawn across leaving a faint strip of light to fall through the remaining single pane on to the chair where his grandmother in the past had usually sat and on to the sofa with its leaking horsehair at the back of the room where silently, smoking his pipe, his grandfather normally reclined.

‘They haven’t eaten anything all day,’ his mother said, still gazing at the figures as if some huge puzzle in her life were suddenly complete, all the pieces drawn together, yet leaving her more confused than ever. Her hands were red from scrubbing, her arms bare, the sleeves of her dress, which came down to just above her elbow, damp. She wore an apron which she’d brought, strangely unfamiliar in these surroundings. There was a certain helplessness about her which he’d never seen before: even as he watched she began to weep, drawing a handkerchief from the pocket of her apron. She wiped her eyes, lifting her glasses. ‘They’ve had a terrible life, they have. They’ve never had anything,’ she added. ‘And I’ve brought them nothing else but worry.’

She waited for some comment of his own; he gazed back to the bed. Nothing but horror filled him now, the strange, seemingly identical heads, like the two heads of a single body, united by the bolster, by the strange, waving symmetry of the patchwork quilt.

‘They’d have liked to have seen so much more of you, Colin,’ she said, speaking now on their behalf; while all he remembered were the strange, half-querulous looks. ‘They were so proud of the scholarship,’ she added, gazing at the heads as though at any moment one of them might rise, confirm it, peeling back those bulbous lids, peer at him a moment and then, with a cry of approval or acclamation, sink back down to that slow, irregular, stentorian breathing. It was as if there were some blockage in their throats; as if, beneath the patchwork cover, some hand invisibly had gripped their bodies and were pressing out their life.

‘Poor mother,’ his mother said, and he, thinking it so strange to hear his mother refer to some mother of her own, had glanced at her again.

A red flush, slowly, had spread across her face; her eyes, distended, glistened with tears, glancing down in turn at him almost as if, now, she were expecting him to protect her from the figures on the bed.

‘Well, then, we can’t go on like this,’ she said. She wiped her eyes on her handkerchief again. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ she added, almost casually, as if he’d just come into the room at home. She turned to the gas ring beside the fire.

‘No,’ he said. He shook his head.

‘Have you had something to eat?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said again.

It was some aspect of his mother’s life he no longer wished to see. He watched her then as she finished the scrubbing, the torn stockings, the torn dress, and the inflamed, seemingly blistered arms, the hands covered in soap, the slow, angular motion of the brush across the floor.

‘Shall I finish it, Mother?’ he said.

‘Nay,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your school-clothes on.’

He sat on an upright chair beside the door. His mother drew the curtain in the corner: only a faint, muffled panting now was audible behind it. The ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece began once again to dominate the room.

For a while his mother forgot him; he watched her back, its round, amorphous shape, her stooped head, and saw, as she knelt across the room, that the soles of her shoes were worn through to the welts beneath. In the middle of each hole he could see the darkness where the hole went through to the foot.

A fresh weariness, then, had flooded through the room; his one thought now was to get up and leave, to take his mother with him, and never come back. Beyond the curtain, that breathing would go on for ever, an element of the room as integral as the ticking of the clock, the crackle of the fire, the slow swirling of the brush as it spread the white suds across the floor.

‘Shall I go for a walk?’ he said.

‘What, love?’ His mother glanced back, startled, as if surprised to find him there.

‘I thought I’d go for a walk,’ he said.

‘Nay, love, you’ve only just come.’ He could see the appeal in her face, whether he’d only just come or not, not to leave her in the room alone.

‘I just wondered if you wanted me out. I mean, while you were washing the floor,’ he added.

‘Nay, love, I’ve washed that part of it,’ she said. She turned back to the scrubbing, then, a moment later, glanced back at him again. It was like someone gazing down a road; there was even the look of a girl about her, reluctant, half-ashamed. ‘They’ve had a hard life,’ she added, her eyes flooding once again with tears. ‘You can’t imagine how hard life could be in those days.’

He glanced down from the tear-streaked face to his mother’s worn-out shoes, her torn stockings, the frayed edges of her dress. It was like some child now, a sister, making some last appeal, some desperate demand before it disappeared.

‘He was out of work for nearly three years. We had hardly anything to live on. He could have done so much if he’d had a chance. As it was, it never came. It’s not like nowadays, love,’ she added. ‘If you have anything about you now there’ll always be someone who’ll be glad to take you. In those days nobody wanted you, no matter how hard you were prepared to work.’

She turned away; he could hear her sobbing: her grief echoed the dull breathing from the alcove, and the sharp ticking of the clock.

He gazed beyond her head to the tall rectangular pictures on the wall above the horsehair sofa: cows standing knee-deep at the edge of a river with purplish mountains, topped with snow; a cottage with a thatched roof standing amidst a sea of flowers, the branches of an oak flung out in a bulbous angularity above.

She went back to the scrubbing; it was like some childhood task, the slow drawing of the brush across the floor, the dull moaning, half-resentful, sobbing, a grief he’d never heard before, melancholic, resigned, prompted by some discontent that could never be appeased. It was a strange, unknown figure now that knelt before him, someone in a passage, anonymous, caught up in a task he couldn’t understand.

His aunt came later. He scarcely knew her; he’d visited her home on one occasion, years before, a tiny terrace house in some back street of a town, and had met her with his mother in this same room when his grandparents were, seemingly, both well. She was built more stoutly than his mother, her hair already grey, her face chubbier, the features more pronounced: unaffected by the two figures lying on the bed, she pulled back the curtain, gazing in like someone who had been called in to clean the house; she set a shopping-bag down on the narrow table, put a kettle on the fire and began generally to tidy up the room, straightening the furniture and the carpet which his mother had disturbed.