David Storey - Saville

‘I don’t know what I believe in,’ Colin said.

‘Material progress, backed by a modicum of religious superstition. I can read it in your features,’ Stafford said. ‘You even play football as if you meant it. And if there’s anything more futile than playing sport I’ve yet to see it. Honestly, at times I just want to lie down and laugh.’

‘I suppose it’s more touching than anything else.’

‘Touching?’ Stafford glanced across at him and shook his head.

‘If everything is meaningless, that, nevertheless, we still ascribe some meaning to it.’

Stafford laughed. He flung back his head. His hair, caught by the moon, glistened suddenly in a halo of light. ‘Touching? I call it pathetic.’

He took out another cigarette, lit it, tossed the flaming match into the lake, glanced round him with a shiver and added, ‘We better get back. There’s nowhere to go. That’s symptomatic, in a curious way, of everything I’ve said.’ Yet later, lying in his bed, Hopkins snoring and Walker half-whining in sleep in their beds across the room, he had added, ‘Do you see some purpose in it at all, then, Colin?’

He could see Stafford lying on his back, his head couched in his hands. The moonlight penetrated in a faint, cold glow through the thin material of the curtains.

‘I’ve never really looked for one,’ he said.

‘You’re an unthinking animal are you?’ Stafford half-turned his head, yet more to hear the answer than to look across.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Are you frightened of admitting you believe in a Divine Presence?’ Stafford said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You do admit it, then?’

Colin paused. He gazed over at Stafford whose head, though not turned fully towards him, was still inclined in his direction.

‘It’s only when everything has lost its meaning that its meaning finally becomes clear,’ he said.

‘Does it?’ Stafford gazed across at him now quite fiercely.

‘For instance, I enjoy coming here,’ he said.

‘Oh, I enjoy coming here,’ Stafford said. ‘I suppose I enjoy coming here. I haven’t really thought about it. Not to the degree that you have.’ He waited. ‘If there isn’t a Divine Presence don’t you think it’s all a really terrible joke? I mean, if the world’s going to end as all worlds do, as an exploding mass of sunburnt dust, what’s the purpose in anything at all? It’s like a man taking infinite pains over his own funeral. I can’t see the point of it. I mean, if God’s going to allow the world to vanish, as all worlds do, what’s the point of putting us in it in the first place? To give him a clap, do you think? I mean do you think, really, He’s looking for applause? Or that He isn’t actually there at all; at least, not in any form that could be defined outside the realms of a chemical reaction?’

Hopkins groaned in his sleep; Walker whined freshly through his congested nose.

‘Just look at Hoppy. Just listen to him. Do you think there’s a divine purpose then in that?’

Yet, perhaps because of the freshness of the walk, of the air outside, or because of the vague, persuasive murmur of Stafford’s voice, he felt himself being drawn downwards into sleep: he opened his eyes briefly, saw Stafford, silent now, with his head couched once more in his hands, gazing with wide eyes towards the ceiling, then remembered nothing more until he heard the calls of Hopkins and Walker across the room, and the sound of a gong from the hall downstairs.

Below them, when they reached the snow-line, lay a vast area of undulating heath and coniferous woodland, interspersed with the cold, metallic sheen of several narrow lakes: a waterfall tumbled immediately below them to the village, and it was here, on the way up, that Stafford had paused and looking round at Colin, still casual, half-smiling, had said, ‘Do you ascribe to it a divine purpose, or are we ants, mechanistic functions, crawling on an arbitrarily eroded piece of rock?’ not waiting for an answer but glancing up, past the head of the corrie lake to where the flattened, cone-shaped peak of the mountain faded away into a mass of swiftly moving cloud. Gannen, booted, plus-foured, with a walking-stick and a small haversack on his back, had glanced behind him. ‘Do I hear a sceptic amongst the ranks?’

Several boys at the front had turned.

‘Was that your comment, Stafford,’ he added, ‘on the scene below?’

‘It was merely a speculation, prompted by the view, sir,’ Stafford said.

‘Far be it from me to ascribe a divine purpose to anything, particularly when I examine the sea of disingenuous faces I see below me at the present,’ Gannen said. ‘Nevertheless, examining the terrain beyond, even I, historian that I am, and acquainted with all the more perfidious traits of man, would confess to a feeling of uplift, of exhilaration, and might even ascribe to it an extra-terrestrial significance. After all, we are the end products, as Mr Macready, a biologist, will tell us, of several million years of evolution, and who is to say, standing at the threshold of human existence, what significance we might ascribe to it? In years to come humanity might stretch out its tentacles to the moon, or, conceivably, beyond the sun, to other galaxies perhaps. We stand today near the summit of a mountain: who can say where a man might stand in, for the sake of argument, another thousand years? God, as the philosopher might say, Stafford, is a state of becoming, and we, as the psychologists might say, are the elements of his consciousness.’

Stafford smiled; he looked past Gannen and the boys strung out below him on the path to where the small, grey-haired figure of Hepworth was climbing up the slope towards them with the slower group.

‘Stafford, of course, would have no time either for the philosopher or the psychologist,’ Gannen said. ‘He is one of the modern school, the sceptics, who see humanity as merely the fortuitous outcome of biological determinism. Like ants, I believe was the phrase, crawling on an arbitrarily eroded piece of rock. Hopkins, of course doesn’t care what we are, nor, no doubt, does Walker, as long as he can get his bottom at the earliest opportunity to the seat of a chair and hands and feet warmed up in front of a fire.’

Macready had taken a small bottle from his haversack and was tasting its contents. He tossed back his head, closed his eyes, then, replacing the bottle, glanced up with blank incomprehension at the peak before them.

It was late in the afternoon by the time they got back to the hotel. Rain was falling. Platt was standing in the doorway with the other boys who had stayed below, waving to Gannen as he appeared in the drive and calling, ‘We were just thinking of coming to look for you.’

‘Oh, just a routine climb, Platty,’ Gannen said, removing his haversack and looking round at the exhausted boys. ‘Apart from nearly going over the edge on one occasion, the afternoon you might say has passed without incident. Though’, he added, ‘we had to call on Stafford to invoke a divine blessing on our behalf. The fact of the matter was, for half an hour after we left the summit – from which, incidentally, we saw nothing at all – Mac and I were lost. If the sun hadn’t have come out, very briefly, in what Stafford might call a fit of arbitrary intervention, I don’t think we’d be back at all.’

And later, when the corridors of the hotel were full of steam from the baths, Stafford, flushed with the heat of the water, and with a towel around him, had come into the room and said, ‘I never thought Gannen was a sentimentalist until today. I don’t think I’ll get through history. It takes credibility from anything he says,’ lying on the bed, feeling in his jacket for his cigarettes, then adding, ‘Honestly, with a man like that, what chance have I got of an Exhibition?’