David Storey - Saville

Marion, her face pale beneath her bell-shaped hat, called over, ‘She doesn’t want to speak to you, my dear. I said she wouldn’t.’

He picked up a blade of grass from the verge and set it slowly in the corner of his mouth. His hand, he saw, had begun to tremble. His whole body began to shake.

A moment later some of the boys and two of the girls moved off; they disappeared up a road between the houses. A bus appeared at a bend in the road. It rattled down towards the stop.

A man got off; Marion and Audrey, followed by the boys, got on.

He could see them at the rear windows as the bus went past, a hand waving, and behind, a brief glimpse of Audrey’s face, half-smiling. The bus disappeared in a cloud of dust.

He mounted the bike and cycled after it for a while, re-passing the church where soldiers now were sitting along the wall, and turning down the road which, from the amount of dust in the air, he assumed the bus had taken.

After half an hour’s cycling, and passing several stops, he turned in the road, idly, and, freewheeling, started back, re-passing the church once more, the wall outside deserted, and continuing on towards the village; it was almost dark by the time he got back home.

‘And what did Stafford have to say?’ his father said when he went in the kitchen. ‘Not borrowed another book again?’

‘I didn’t go,’ he said, and shook his head. It was the notion of cycling to Stafford’s that he had used to borrow his father’s bike.

‘So where have you been till this time? It’s long past the time tha mu’n be in bed.’

‘I just cycled around,’ he said. ‘I thought I might go to church.’

‘Church?’ his father said.

‘I got there too late,’ he said, and shook his head.

‘And what’s thy doing at church?’ his father said, as if he connected it in some way with his mother.

‘I thought I might go. On Sunday evenings. Instead of the afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a bit old for Sunday School,’ he added.

‘Nay, tha mu’n do what thy want about church,’ his father said. ‘Tha’s not punctured the bike or ought?’ he added.

‘No,’ he said, and added, ‘I’ll get up and get you some breakfast if you like.’

‘Nay, I don’t eat ought, when I get up,’ his father said. He looked at him uneasily as he crossed over to the stairs. ‘Think on about coming in late,’ he added.

Later, from his room, he heard his father say, ‘I think our Colin’s been courting. He’s come in with as daft a look as I’ve seen on his face,’ the door closing then, his mother’s voice murmuring from the other side.

He heard a faint laugh from his parents’ room, the creaking of their bed; he slowly succumbed to his tiredness, worn out more by cycling than anything else.

He started going to church on Sunday evenings with Bletchley and Reagan. Mrs Bletchley and Mrs Reagan, with their respective sons, but without their respective husbands, attended church also on Sunday mornings. In the evenings, however, he and Bletchley and Reagan sat at the back of the north aisle, on the opposite side to the pulpit, and behind a row of girls from Bletchley’s school. They passed messages to and fro, fastened in the pages of a prayer-book, and Bletchley, during the prayers, when the girls knelt forward from the wooden chairs, would frequently take a glove, passing it to Reagan, who, with his eyes closed, red-faced, would put it in his pocket.

Reagan had grown into a pale-cheeked, narrow-faced youth; he had a prominent brow, a long nose, slightly upturned, which dominated his face. His attempt to conceal the extraordinary rearward bulge of his head by allowing his hair to hang down to the nape of his neck was a source of constant irritation to his father. Frequently on an evening, above the strains of the now somewhat larger violin on which Reagan practised, could be heard the shouts echoing across the yards: ‘ You think it’s beautiful: I think it makes him look like a cissy. You think he can play a violin: I think it’s like a cat on hot bricks. You think he looks distinguished: I think he looks like a bloody woman,’ or, later, as he came out to the yard, ‘Don’t leave him alone in that house or I’ll have it off him,’ stalking then across the backs to sit with his father in the porch, or moving with an abstracted air towards the foot of his garden where, standing at the fence, he would call to the miners playing cricket in the field, ‘Hit it! Hit it harder,’ his face reddening, his neck on the point of bursting from his collar. ‘Harder, for God’s sake. You’ll never get anywhere with that.’

With Bletchley, Reagan preserved a respectful silence; it was one of Bletchley’s mannerisms, when walking, to pause at some relevant point of his conversation waiting for Reagan to turn his head, to pause and, finally, however much in a hurry he was, to incline his body in his direction, even stepping back a pace or two; Reagan’s face would be set with a wearied look, contemplating not Bletchley but the space above his head. If, as not infrequently happened, Reagan went on walking, unaware of Bletchley’s pause, Bletchley would stand waiting with a patronizing sneer set on his lips until, suddenly aware that he was no longer walking in the company of his friend, Reagan with the same wearied air would walk back down the road to where, with raised eyebrows now, and anxious to continue his narrative, his friend was standing. No word of any sort, during these encounters, passed Reagan’s lips; merely his presence and the expression of studied expectancy were sufficient to fire Bletchley into prolonged descriptions of his life at school, of his father’s exploits in the war, of the achievements of distant relatives, or into an analysis of recent political events.

The war had ended earlier that year. A party had been held in the field at the back of the house; tables of every description had been lifted over the fences and set with variously coloured cloths and miscellaneous plates of food. A gramophone, wound by hand, had been placed on a wooden chair and after the meal was over couples danced in the grass, stumbling over mounds of bricks and bottles, the sounds of their voices echoing between the houses with the dull, almost mournful rhythm of the tune. Children ran wildly between the tables, snatching at the food, gathering in groups to watch the couples, occasionally imitating the dancers’ movements, the miners clearing a space finally beyond the tables where they organized races, wives wheeling husbands in garden barrows, or running three-legged, stumbling, to screams and shouts, hopping, husbands carrying wives and wives, later in the day, attempting to carry husbands. Walking slowly amongst all these rushing bodies, his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat pockets, a fresh white handkerchief projecting from the breast-pocket of his suit, his bowler hat on this occasion missing, was Mr Reagan. Occasionally he would step out from the crowd and producing a second white handkerchief from his trouser pocket insist on starting one of the races, examining each of the contestants first as to their positions on the starting line, the legality of their posture, drawing one back, or thrusting another forward, giving a noticeable advantage to those he judged less likely to show up well, and starting them off, to screams and shouts, with something of a gesture. ‘When I drop the handkerchief so – before which I shall say, “Are you ready? Get to your marks,”’ waving the handkerchief with a slow, almost derisory gesture above his head, and withholding the signal until that moment when the cries of complaint had risen to a crescendo. Finally, when he had made sure there was nothing left to eat and that the small supply of liquid refreshment had been consumed, he took over this task completely, even following the competitors across the field, calling advice, or running, if the race were one which allowed only intermittent progress, to the finishing-line and indicating to those he favoured most how they might gain advantage over their nearest rivals, getting in the way, if only accidentally, of those whom he judged to have taken an unfair advantage or those whom he thought were too well endowed in any case.