David Storey - Saville

He went out to the stone-flagged corridor, then past several barred windows to the concrete stairs. He waited in the hall for a while, the bag of food his father had brought still on the receptionist’s desk. Finally he went out to the street and walked up and down, glancing at the windows at the top of the building, trying to work out behind which one his grandfather was lying.

After something like twenty minutes his father appeared.

He had evidently been weeping and appeared, for a moment, as he came down the steps to the street, like some quaint facsimile of the figure lying on the bed, nodding his head briefly, absently, in his direction, then turning towards the stop.

‘He doesn’t want to come out,’ his father said when he caught him up. ‘And they seem to think he’ll be better in there than living at home.’

They walked through the intervening streets in silence. The place had a closed-in atmosphere: in the distance they could hear the hooting of ships and, somewhere close at hand, the dull, drumming rhythm of a band.

His father wiped his nose. He wiped his eyes. By the time they’d reached the stop he was more composed.

‘Well, it’s sad.’ He looked about him. ‘To think of the life he’s had. I can’t stop thinking of him when he was younger. We worked on the same farm, you know. I got him a job when he was out of work, and we used to go in together. I can remember him now. As clear as a bell.’

These thoughts, when the bus came, silenced him again. Even later, on the train, he scarcely spoke, and when, some two hours later, they reached the house he sat at the kitchen table shaking his head and saying to his mother’s inquiries, ‘I can’t get over it,’ his eyes reddened, his cheeks and his forehead still inflamed.

A telegram arrived two weeks later. His father came home late from the afternoon shift and stood in the kitchen, dark-eyed, when his mother said, ‘There’s a telegram come for you,’ his father perhaps unprepared for what it might reveal, or perhaps too tired from his work to think, opening it carelessly, reading it slowly, then, with a child-like cry, turning, as if he would fall, leaning up against the kitchen wall, opposite the door, shielding his face beneath his hand.

‘Oh, Harry,’ his mother said, taking the telegram and reading it herself, his father turning casually aside, going to a chair, taking off his boots, then going to the sink to wash his face. Then, as his mother set out his meal, his father had gone to the door and with the same casualness had gone to the stairs. They heard the boards creak in the room at the front. His mother began to busy herself about the kitchen as if nothing had occurred, saying, ‘Come on, then, Colin, haven’t you something you should do? Haven’t you finished your homework? There’s time, if you look sharp about it, to clean a few shoes,’ scarcely pausing when a moment later they heard, with a slow chilling, the sound of his father’s grief above their heads.

The winter passed. At Easter a party from the school went away on holiday. They stayed in a guest-house at the foot of a mountain. One evening he and Stafford went out to a near-by village. A hump-backed bridge looked out over a lake. From a row of small houses behind them came the sound of singing.

Stafford paused.

Three or four men and women were singing what sounded, from this distance, like a wordless song. No other sound came from the village; columns of smoke drifted up against the lightness of the sky, the dark shapes of the houses strewn out like boulders at the foot of the mountain. At the peak of the mountain, overlooking the village and the bright expanse of lake beyond, snow glistened in the moonlight.

Stafford leant against the parapet of the bridge. He’d lit a cigarette on the way down from the hotel and now, his head back, his arms crooked on the stone parapet behind, he blew out a stream of smoke, half-smiling.

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘They’ve put me down for Oxford.’

‘Who?’ he said.

‘Gannen. I’m going to have special coaching in Latin. They’ve put me down for an Exhibition.’

‘Don’t you think it’s worth it?’ he said.

Stafford shook his head. ‘What do you do with life, do you think?’

Perhaps he hadn’t heard the singing, for he stubbed out the cigarette, leaning over the parapet and dropping it into the darkness of the stream below: odd, almost luminescent crests of foam shone up, here and there, from the deepest shadows. Stafford kicked the toe of his shoe against the stone.

‘It seems worth going for, I suppose,’ he said.

Stafford shrugged. He looked up at the cold, cloudless depth of sky, glanced, almost with a look of irritation, towards the moon, and added, ‘I don’t think, really, it’s worth all that effort. What really is? Have you any idea?’

‘No.’

‘If you did, in any case, you’d never tell me. You’re such an eager beaver. I suppose, with you, getting a job, a house, a car, a wife, and all that sort of stuff, is all that matters.’

‘No,’ he said and turned away.

Perhaps Stafford, aware of the singing, had assumed it to come from a wireless. With the same look of irritation he’d given the moon, he glanced up now towards the houses. A door had opened somewhere followed immediately by the barking of a dog.

‘What a dead and alive hole this really is. I don’t suppose there’s a pub or anything,’ he said, moving slowly from the wall, still kicking his toe and, his hands in his pockets, setting off towards the village. ‘I mean, what are we when it comes down to it?’ he added. ‘A piece of something whirling through nothing and getting,’ he went on, ‘as far as I can see, nowhere at all.’ He waited for Colin to catch him up. ‘In a thousand million years the sun’ll burn up the earth, and all that everybody’s ever done or thought or felt’ll go up in a cloud of smoke.’ He laughed. ‘Not that we’ll be here to see it. Yet metaphorically one sees it. I feel it all the time as a matter of fact.’ He walked on in the darkness of the road, still kicking his toe, the sound echoing from the walls of the houses on either side. ‘Everything’s so easy for you,’ he added. ‘You’ve come from nowhere: they’ve put the carrot of education in front of you and you go at it like a maddened bull. I couldn’t do half the work you put into it, you know. I can see’, he went on more slowly, ‘what lies the other side.’

‘What does lie the other side?’ Colin said, walking beside him now, his hands in his pockets.

‘Nothing, old boy,’ Stafford said, and laughed. ‘Take away the carrot, and there really isn’t anything at all. It’s only someone like you, crawling out of the mud, that really believes in it. Once you’ve got it, you’ll see. You’ll sit down and begin to wonder: “Is that really all it is?”’ He laughed again, glancing across at him from the darkness.

They’d come out from between the houses and emerged on a stone embankment which, for a few yards, ran along the edge of the lake.

‘I mean, what does Hepworth tell us about these mountains? This lake, you know, and this U-shaped valley. They were formed by ice ten thousand years ago. Here’s a few houses put down at the side: a few people live in them, go through God knows what privations, misery, exaltations, and in another ten thousand years another sheet of ice comes down and wipes it all away. That, or an atom bomb. So what’s the point of suffering or enduring anything at all?’

Colin waited. Beneath them, with a dull, almost leaden sound, the lake lapped against the stone. It washed up in little waves over a bed of pebbles, the white foam glistening in the light.

‘I suppose you believe in a Divine Presence and all the rest of the propaganda,’ Stafford said. He stooped to gaze down at the water as if, for a moment, he’d suddenly forgotten anyone else was there.