David Storey - Saville

He pointed to the train: having left the station it was now visible across the fields. A plume of dark smoke drifted back towards the cutting.

‘We go this way,’ Stafford said. He pointed back the way he’d come. The roofs of several houses were visible. ‘Jump on.’

Colin climbed on. Stafford turned the bike.

He pushed off with his foot.

The bike lurched; then, as it gathered speed, it straightened. They careered down the hill towards the houses. ‘Hold on,’ Stafford said. As the speed increased he started shrieking; he dragged his feet against the road. ‘There’s a turning at the bottom. Hold on. The brakes aren’t working.’ The bike swung aside; it ran off the road, across a pavement and on to an ashy track the other side. The brakes jarred; they shuddered, locked against the wheels, and, before the bike itself had stopped, Stafford fell. He put out his foot, the bike sliding round, and Colin clung to his arms, to the handlebars, then found himself finally pinned with Stafford against a wall.

‘I say, that was pretty good. We’ve come the wrong way, though,’ Stafford said. He began to pull Colin upright, laughing. The track led off between tall, clipped hedges: gates opened out on either side. ‘Do you want to ride it?’ Stafford said. ‘Though if you sit on the cross-bar we’ll get there much quicker.’ He wheeled the bike back towards the road.

Finally, having sat on the cross-bar and finding Stafford couldn’t pedal, Colin sat on the seat, holding to Stafford’s shoulders while Stafford half-crouched on the pedals in front.

They passed the arched entrance to a church; a large stone house stood back beneath a cliff of overhanging trees: small terraces of stone-built houses appeared on either side of the narrow road.

Stafford pedalled slowly; his head moved up and down stiffly, his back straightening as he kept his balance: when they came to a rise in the road he stopped.

‘It’s not much farther.’ He pointed up the road.

Colin dropped off.

To one side, as the road levelled out, appeared a large brick house: it was set well back from the road at the end of a narrow, unkempt garden. A pond, surrounded by bare, muddy earth was visible immediately behind the house and, beyond that, a roofless brick-built structure from inside the door of which, as they approached the house, appeared a pig and a flock of geese.

A driveway, rutted and submerged here and there in pools of water, ran off from the road towards the house; alternative tracks wound through the overgrown vegetation on either side, coming together abruptly in front of the pillared door.

Stafford had got off his bike; he led the way along one of the more circuitous tracks, skirting the pools of water and following a narrow, stone-flagged path which led to a door at the side. He leant the bike against the wall, removing his clips, then, without wiping his feet or attempting to get rid of the mud that clogged his shoes he stepped through the already open door and called, ‘Mother? Are you back?’ beckoning to Colin to follow without waiting for an answer.

A kitchen looked out to the back of the house. The floor was bare. A table, laden with plates containing sandwiches and cakes, stood against the wall. A sink with a single tap and a hot-water geyser was fastened beneath the window. Two doors led off, presumably, to the rest of the house.

‘Grab one of these,’ Stafford said, standing by the table and lifting the tops of the sandwiches, choosing two finally and handing one of them to Colin. ‘We might as well take one of these as well,’ he added, picking up a tart from one of the plates and a piece of cake from another. ‘We’ll go out to the back. Or do you want to have a look in here?’ He ate the sandwich quickly then picked up another. ‘We better go out to the back,’ he said. ‘There’ll be somebody here if we wait too long.’

Stone flags led down to an overgrown lawn. Beyond it, where the grass petered out and was replaced by a flattened stretch of mud, stood the pond; the flock of geese were wandering along one side and, by the roofless, brick-built structure, the pig was rooting at the turned-up ground.

The geese honked as Stafford approached; he appeared, to Colin, neither to hear them nor see them, walking round the pond, still eating, glancing uncertainly towards the house, beckoning him to follow to where a fence divided the end of the garden from a clump of trees.

The fence had been broken down at several points, tentatively repaired, and broken down again. Amongst the closely spaced trees, some distance beyond the fence, stood a wooden hut; it was little more than shoulder height and made up from disproportionate bits of timber across the top of which had been thrown a strip of corrugated metal.

Stafford, having climbed the fence, made his way towards it, stooping beneath the branches, hurrying, half-bowed, scarcely glancing back before ducking down inside.

The entrance was shielded by a piece of sacking; a piece of damp carpet covered the floor.

‘This is where I come at night,’ Stafford said. ‘I get stuff to eat and come out here.’ Yet he lay back as if disowning it, his head propped on one hand. ‘It’s not much good. I built it about a year ago,’ he added. ‘My brother came in once and broke it down.’

The dampness, increasing, seeped slowly through Colin’s clothes; he could, crouching in the narrow space, see only the vague outline of Stafford’s face, the lightness of his hair, and the slow motion of his hand as he ate the cake. Then, when the cake had gone, he lay quite still, the face expressionless, the eyes concealed, a vague darkness around his nose and lips.

‘It’s not as good as yours,’ he said, and added, ‘Lolly’s.’

‘No,’ he said and shook his head.

‘’Course,’ Stafford said, ‘I built it by myself. There’s no one round here, you know, to help me much.’

He spoke in a whisper now as if, unseen, there were others lurking in the trees outside.

‘I get one or two to come up. But we don’t have much to do’, he added, ‘with people in the village.’

Renewed honking from the geese came waveringly from beyond the fence. A dog had barked.

Stafford pulled back the sacking and looked outside.

Beyond the barrier of the trees the house was visible, the lawn rising up towards it from the muddied pond; a woman’s figure had emerged from the door at the side, glancing down towards the pond, then towards the shed, then, shielding its eyes, towards the trees. After a moment’s hesitation it went inside.

‘I sometimes come here at night. When the others are asleep. And bring grub in, you know. I have a candle.’

A match flared up in Colin’s face, but the candle, standing on a punctured tin, was too wet for the match to light: the flame spluttered out and once again they were plunged in darkness. Stafford had let the sacking fall back down.

‘That cake was good. What was that tart like?’ Stafford said.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘What was in your sandwich?’

‘Meat paste.’

‘She makes crab-paste ones, but they’re not much good.’

The faint murmur of a car engine came from the direction of the drive; Stafford lifted the sack again. A car was approaching the front of the house, bouncing in the ruts and sending up at each bounce a shower of water. It disappeared towards the door.

Stafford let the sacking fall.

‘We could go up to my room, if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ve one or two things.’

He made no move for a moment, kicking his feet against the wooden wall, the corrugated metal roof rattling ominously above their heads.

‘Or there’s the farm we could go to. At the back of these trees. Or we could cycle over, if you like, to Audrey Smith’s. Marion Rayner lives only a mile beyond. There’s a path that takes you there across the fields. They’ve got some horses. We could have a ride.’