Saville (3 page)

‘I don’t know,’ she said and shook her head. She was pale, sick herself, moving round the house in a daze, unsure of what was happening.

‘I can’t miss another night,’ he said. ‘There’ll be all hell to pay, I can tell you.’

‘We’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘You go. I can always ask Mrs Shaw.’

‘Nay,’ he said, determined. ‘I’m damned if I can’t look after my own.’

He stayed at home. In the night the boy got worse. He started crying out and then, a little later, could scarcely catch his breath, his body arched, rising in its struggle.

Saville got out his bike and set off in the night to fetch the doctor.

The one he called at in the village was already out. He was given the address of a young doctor who was setting up in practice. The doctor was even younger than himself and had no car: he got out his bike and cycled back with him.

Ellen was sitting by the fire in the kitchen when they reached the house.

‘How is he? How’s he been?’ he said, surprised to find her out of bed.

‘He’s just the same,’ she said looking up, still dazed, her face paler than before.

He saw she was heating milk on the fire.

‘Which way up is it?’ the doctor asked.

They followed him up, putting on the light.

For a while he stooped over Andrew, half-crouched, running his hands across his chest.

‘How long is it since you looked at him?’ he said.

‘Ten minutes. Maybe less,’ his wife had said.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ the doctor said, and a moment later, still gazing at them, he added, ‘It seems I’ve come too late. I’m sorry.’

‘Why? What’s the matter with him?’ Saville said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’

Even then Saville doubted what the doctor said. He stepped past him, looking down, gazing at the boy. His night-shirt had been drawn up above his legs. His head had sunk back against the pillows, his eyes half-open.

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said again.

‘Nay, he’s never gone,’ he said.

‘I should come down,’ the doctor said.

‘Nay, he’s never gone,’ he said, his wife standing back, her eyes blank, vacant. ‘He’s never gone,’ he said, gazing at the shadow beneath the half-shut eyes.

‘I should come down,’ the doctor said again, turning to his wife and taking her arm.

At the door, downstairs, he said, ‘No fee. No charge,’ fastening his bag on to the rack behind the saddle.

A few days later, when the boy was buried, his wife went back to her parents. Saville fended for himself, cooking his own meals, cleaning up the house, cycling to work. When his wife came back a week later she was silent. He helped more in the house, leaving a little later for work and, by cycling harder, getting home a little sooner, cooking, cleaning, helping with the washing. His wife
was no longer sick each morning, yet it was as if the pregnancy had fatally weakened her. In the evenings when he left she would be lying prostrate by the fire, exhausted, pale, her dark eyes lifeless, dazed. He asked Shaw’s wife to keep an eye on her. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll sit by her.’ Sometimes too, on a morning, she cooked his breakfast. ‘She’ll soon be over the worst of it,’ she said.

His own life in some strange way was cancelled out. He got rid of Andrew’s toys, unable to bear the sight of anything that reminded him of the boy and of what they might have done together. Weeds grew in the garden and the holes that the boy had dug there he filled in. Occasionally he set off for walks but seldom got beyond the end of the street. Soon he was falling asleep at work, and was called up by the manager.

He almost gave up work. He felt ashamed, denying what he was, unable to break the hold, the feeling of contempt. He talked to his wife but saw there a distress he didn’t know how to approach, blank, blinded, uncomplaining. In the mornings when he went to bed he would find the pillow damp from her crying, and when he got up in the afternoon he would find her wandering, lifeless, round the house, a duster in her hand, a broom, unable to put it to any use.

‘Nay, we s’ll have to do summat,’ he said. ‘It can’t go on. It can’t. I s’ll kill myself. I shall. Nowt that happens could be worse than this.’

One morning he came home later than usual, unlocking the back door with his key to find the fire already lit, his wife kneeling in front of it, her head bowed, stiffened.

Only as he neared her did he see the knife, the blade gleaming in the light, and only as he caught her hand did he stop the movement. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Whatever,’ taking her against him, feeling the resignation. ‘Nay, for God’s sake,’ he said, his hand still on her. ‘What is it? Whatever are you doing, then?’

She cried against him and he felt his own grief breaking, pouring out, a sudden devastation, calling out, unable to see or hear. ‘Whatever shall we do?’ he asked her. ‘That’s no way out. We’ve got another one to think of now,’ he said.

‘Why did he go? Why did he go?’ she asked him.

‘Nay, let’s think of the other one,’ he said.

‘Why did he die?’

‘Nay, we mu’n never think of that,’ he said.

Some nights now, before he left for work, he prayed with her. The first time he’d seen her had been in a church, with a friend of hers, standing in the porch after an evening service. It had been raining and he’d had an umbrella, borrowed from his father, and he went up and offered it to her, taking her home that evening, and taking her out again a week later. To begin with all their meetings had started at the church. But for the wedding, and the funeral, they had never been again. Now, however, before he left for work he knelt with her by the fire, prayed ‘Our Father’, and then, on her behalf, prayed for the new baby. ‘May it be a good child, may it live and not die,’ he said, while at the back of his mind he prayed, unknown to her, ‘Give us something back. For Christ’s sake, give me something back,’ taking it with him as he cycled through the dark, looking back at the village, at the coke ovens glowing, wondering how she was, if she were sleeping, whether it might be a boy or, better still, a girl. And though all his new hope was on the baby, he felt the dead weight of the other pulling at his back.

Shortly before the child was born his wife went to a hospital in a near-by town. On two afternoons a week he caught a bus there, taking her fruit, or a change of clothing, sitting on the upper deck, smoking, anxious, yet somehow relieved she was away and he helpless now to intervene. It was two weeks before the child was born, a boy, and when she came back he’d been almost six weeks on his own, his meals occasionally cooked by Mrs Shaw.

The boy was dark-haired, with dark eyes, like his wife, but with something of his own features, the broad face and the wide mouth, a little larger at birth than Andrew.

It was a strange child. His wife gave it all her attention. It never cried. Its silence astonished him, its gravity, an almost melancholic thing. After the noise and spirit of the other child, its quietness frightened him.

‘Do you think it’ll be all right?’ he said.

‘Why not?’ she asked him. She’d seemed confident about it from the start, from the moment he first saw them both together. It was as if her grief had come out of her and was now lying
there, to hold. He would watch the baby with a smile, not sure what it represented, half-afraid, reluctant to hold it unless his wife were willing, she suddenly amused by his uncertainty, restored, almost contemptuous of the way he drew back, letting her the whole time go before him. ‘No, no, you see to it,’ he’d say whenever she suggested he should feed or change it, which he’d done often with the other boy.

They called it Colin. It was the name of her mother’s father, the only member of her family she’d ever admired, a sailor, who was seldom home and who, whenever he returned, was always giving her sweets. Her memories of him were very faint, but for his uniform, the sweets, and the beard which covered her face whenever he embraced her. She had a yellowed photograph of him which she kept with one of her parents and one of their marriage in a folder in the wardrobe by the bed.

He felt a little helpless with the boy, and only relieved when he could make him laugh, or turn and move at some distraction. In the summer he would sit over him in the garden and wave a leaf to and fro above the pram, the tiny hand reaching up and snatching, the face smiling, the look half-curious, aroused. It scarcely seemed a child. The only time it cried was when she lifted it from the bath, beside the fire, suckling it then, the sobs dying down, shuddering through its shoulders, its tiny hands clutching, reaching out.

‘That’ll be a strange ’un, then,’ he said. ‘That’s soon contented.’

‘Yes,’ she said, gazing down, stroking its head.

‘Can’t make head nor tail of it,’ he said.

It was like a part of her, never leaving, growing, so that he saw the quietness growing in her, a calmness, the other women in the street peering down, uncertain, as bemused by the child’s passivity as he was himself.

‘It’s as good as gold. A little angel,’ Mrs Shaw told him, flushing, smiling, whenever she was allowed to pick him up.

‘See, he’ll go to anybody, then,’ he told her.

‘If he’ll come to me, he’ll come to anybody, then,’ she said, and laughed.

When it was walking it seldom left the garden, and then only if he called it from the field, or from a neighbouring yard, shouting
across the backs as it forced its way between the fence, coming over, blindly, taking his hand while whoever it was he was talking to would gaze down at it, smiling, and shake their heads.

‘He’s going to be a boxer, then,’ they said, looking at his hands, his arms. He had the same muscular confidence as Saville himself, his limbs already thickening out. ‘Aye, he s’ll soon have you down, Harry,’ they told him and laughed whenever, for their amusement, he got the boy to skip about.

Usually he was shy and wouldn’t be moved, standing by the father’s side and gazing up at the other men with a slight frown, his brows knitted, his eyes dark and listening.

‘Here, do you want half-a-crown, then, Colin?’ they’d ask him and laugh when he refused to put his hand out. ‘He’ll not be bought off,’ they told Saville. ‘A dark horse. We’d better all watch out.’

He took the boy for walks like he’d taken Andrew, sometimes carrying him on his back, but more often walking. He sometimes took him out of the village, to the north and east, beyond the farm fields, to where the road led down towards the river. Its water was dark, its surface flecked by wads of foam and broken up here and there by clumps of timber. Barges passed bearing bales of wool, red and orange, blue and yellow, the bright colours glowing out against the darkness of the bank. There was a coal-slip farther up where the lorries from the colliery tipped their loads, the black dust sliding down the shute into the holds of the barges waiting in the stream below. A small tug with a red funnel pulled each of the barges off, a long slow train that swung from bank to bank, the men calling at the rudders, the bright funnel visible miles away, across the fields, unsupported, and belching out black clouds of smoke.

He bought another dog when the first dog died, and in the evenings, before he went to work, he would take it and the boy with him to the old colliery site at the farthest end of the village. He’d come here often before, on his own, and now he would lie in the grass and watch the boy digging with a stick, or following the dog about aimlessly, calling after it, ‘Billy! Billy!’ falling down, then coming back to tell him it had gone.

‘Nay, it’ll soon come back,’ he said. ‘It knows where its dinner comes from. Just you see,’ laughing when the dog reappeared,
its snout muddied from digging at the holes. ‘You’ll see, one of these days it’ll catch us both a rabbit.’

It was as if, looking back, Andrew’s death and the boy’s birth were part of the same event, the paying off of a debt, the receipt of a sudden, bewitching recompense. As time passed he never quite got used to it, sensing in his wife an almost mystical interpretation of what had happened, as if she saw the two boys as elements of the same being, Andrew the transgressed, the new boy a figure of atonement: the same element and spirit was in them both, like a rod put in the fire and brought out cleansed and glistening. Almost for these reasons he would attack the boy, half-joking, afraid of him being moulded, afraid of the way he cancelled the first child out. He would fight him on their walks, at the colliery site, rolling on his back while the boy grappled with his arms and legs, aroused, half-laughing, the dog barking at their heels. ‘Nay, you s’ll half-kill me,’ he said panting, the boy moving round, out of reach, his arms extended, before he made another attack. He would laugh at the boy’s strength and the strange ferocity that drove him. ‘Nay, half a chance,’ he’d tell him, rolling off, the dog barking, the boy jumping at his legs, bouncing on him, up and down, laughing. He came to a strange life the moment he was roused, so that at times it was as if Andrew were there again, calling out and shouting, the mood passing into that even stranger silence when, walking back, he’d glance down to see the face quite still and calm, the dark eyes abstracted, solemn, shadowed by a frown.

The summer after the boy had started school they went away on holiday.

Colin had never seen the sea before; Saville had told him, during the weeks before they left, about its blueness, its size; about the sand, the gulls, the boats; about light-houses, even about smugglers. He’d heard about a lodging from a man at work; his wife had written; they’d sent a deposit. The day they left he got up early to find the boy already in the kitchen, cleaning
his shoes, his clothes laid out on a chair by the empty grate, the two suitcases which they’d packed the night before already standing by the door.

‘You’re up early,’ he said. ‘Do you think they’ve got the train out yet? Yon engine, I think’ll be having its breakfast.’

The boy had scarcely smiled; already there was that dull, almost sombre earnestness about him, melancholic, contained, as if it were some battle they were about to fight.

‘Could you do mine up as well?’ the father asked him.

Saville got his own shoes out, then got the breakfast, his wife still making the beds upstairs.