Saville (53 page)

‘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?’

His father, finally, with Reagan’s help, had got a job at the local pit. The move, however, wasn’t a happy one. Now that he found himself working amongst the village men he began to feel uneasy, exposed. Promoted to a deputy, and responsible for an entire face during each of his shifts, he was earning less now than he had, with overtime, as a miner, less even than the men he superintended. He came home from each shift more exhausted than when he’d had a six-mile cycle ride at the end of his work. He would lie in the kitchen, his head sunk down in the corner of a chair, his arms splayed out, his mouth open, his eyes still dark with dust, groaning in his sleep, his mother afraid to disturb him, Steven and Richard creeping cautiously about the house, his mother calling, with a peculiar despair, whenever they made a sound.

The house, too, in some way suffered. It was as if the substance of the pit were brought home each day: some part of it was
emptied out, the dust, the darkness, a blackness descending on the house, his father’s exhausted figure slumped there as its pivot, his mother and his brothers and himself moving furtively around. There was little communication between them now, the silences broken by his mother’s calls, his father’s exhausted breathing, deepening finally to a snore, by the odd whisper of his brothers, as, solemnly, their eyes wide, they crept cautiously to the stairs or through the door, their voices, in sudden relief, calling in the yard outside.

‘Nay, what do I care what he does?’ his father said when, later that year, they discussed his prospects of taking a scholarship. ‘He’s to stay on another year if he wants to go to college.’

‘He can go to college next year,’ his mother said. ‘To train as a teacher. It’s for the university that he has to stay on another year,’ she added.

‘Whichever’s quickest road to get him working,’ his father said. ‘As long as he doesn’t go near that pit.’

Gannen came one evening to see his parents. He offered to go down to the bus stop to meet him, having worked out the probable time of the master’s arrival, but his father had added, ‘It’s not royalty we’re expecting. Just let him come like anybody else.’

‘Nobody ever
does
come,’ his mother had said. ‘If people did come more often perhaps it wouldn’t seem such a terrible mess.’

‘Mess? What mess?’ his father said, looking round at the bare floor, the chairs from which the springs protruded, the faded cloth on the table, the soot-stained walls. ‘He’s not coming to inspect us, you know. He’s coming to give advice.’

Yet, when Gannen came, it was his mother who had answered the door, his father standing in the kitchen, his head inclined to catch his introduction, going out finally to the front room where Gannen had been installed. The room, if anything, was barer than the kitchen. After sitting in its draughts and relative coldness for several minutes it was Gannen himself who had suggested they might move through to the kitchen. ‘Oh, let’s sit in the living-room,’ he said, bestowing on it a title which reassured his mother, for she quickly led the way, holding back the door. ‘Oh, you needn’t turf those out for me,’ Gannen said when she began to usher Steven and Richard into the room they’d just vacated.

Gannen sat down heavily, his large figure seemingly pinioned in the chair, his arms spread out over the protruding springs. ‘I didn’t know there were two other Savilles at home,’ he said. ‘More recruits for the First Team,’ he added, glancing at Colin.

‘Oh, they’ve plenty of muscle on, if nothing else,’ his father said, flushing now and sitting on an upright chair beside the table.

His mother made some tea. It was only as Gannen was leaving, however, an hour later, that his father had said, ‘Well, then, Mr Gannen. What do you really think?’

‘I think Colin should go to university,’ the master said. He stood in the doorway leading to the street, gazing back into the lighted passage.

‘Aye,’ his father said, his look abstracted, as if in fact the master himself weren’t there at all and he was listening to some voice in another room.

‘If there’s anything I can do’, Gannen said, ‘just let me know.’ He leant back in the passage to shake his mother’s then his father’s hand.

‘I’ll walk down to the stop with you, if you like. I’ll show him the way,’ Colin added to his father.

‘If it’s no trouble,’ Gannen said, pausing now on the step outside, and evidently pleased at the thought of having some company. ‘It took me quite a while to find, in any case,’ he added.

It was already dark. A yellow moon hung over the colliery, outlining the heap against a bank of cloud. They walked in silence for a while. The air was misty. Their feet echoed between the houses.

‘Do you think they’ll let you go, then?’ Gannen said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I realize the difficulties, of course,’ the master said as if, already, he sensed he’d failed. ‘They’ve done well getting you as far as they have,’ he added.

Other figures, shrouded against the sharpness of the air, passed by them beneath the lamps.

‘Ideally, what would you like to be?’ the master said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He added, ‘A poet.’

Gannen smiled. A moment later he looked across. ‘And have you written any poetry?’

‘Not much.’

‘But some.’

‘A little.’

‘You don’t look like a poet,’ he said, something of his classroom manner returning. ‘Poets I always thought were rather delicate chaps. At least, the poets I knew always were. I never had much time for them myself.’ Then, as if he suspected he might have been too hard, he added, ‘It seemed to me, and invariably proved to be the case, that it was a stage they went through. Most of them were decent chaps. They soon settled down to teaching, in one form or another, like everyone else.’ He laughed. His voice rang out clearly in the village street. ‘In any case, there’s not much money attached to that. It’s scarcely a profession. What would you do to earn an income?’

‘In the end I’d teach,’ he said.

‘Do you compose poetry in the rugger scrum?’ he said, pleased with this confession.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s not much time for that.’

‘I’ve noticed a certain dilatoriness at times, I must confess,’ the master said, looking up and adding, ‘Oh, this is the stop is it? I wouldn’t have known,’ pointing down the street the way they’d come. ‘I got off down there before, I think.’

When the bus finally came Gannen put out his hand. ‘I hope you’ll point out the advantages to your parents,’ he said, ‘
without
mentioning the poetry. I’d just stick to the professional aspects, if I were you,’ not looking back as he stepped aboard the bus, making his way to the front downstairs and sitting in his seat as if he had forgotten about his visit already.

He played regularly in the First Fifteen that year, represented the school at athletics, and forwent his Easter on the farm to study for the June examinations. It was one of the happiest periods of his life. Even the football he found absorbing, encouraged by the girls who came to watch, Audrey and Marion, and the quiet-faced Margaret, who invariably stood at the edge of their noisy crowd. Even the two afternoons of training he’d begun to enjoy, Gannen instructing the forwards, and Carter, the physical training master, the backs. The forwards played
amongst themselves, scrumming with the Second Fifteen, breaking, practising rushes, line-outs, pushing for what seemed hours against the metal scrum-machine, Gannen calling, ‘Lower, lower: back straight: thrusting upwards,’ pushing his muscular arm between the bodies, pressing heads, lifting kicking feet into correct positions, while, from across the field, would come Carter’s cries, Stafford distributing the ball or, later, with one other boy, practising place kicks against the distant posts.

In the end it had been decided he would try for college. Gannen had never referred to his visit or his talk with his parents again. When he told him his decision he’d nodded, standing on this occasion at his desk and said, ‘I’m glad you’re not giving it up altogether,’ collecting his books and adding, ‘If there’s anything I can do just let me know.’

He went for an interview. The college was located in a neighbouring town. He travelled there by bus. Miles of furnaces and factories, mills and warehouses, terrace streets and blank walls and advertising signs gave way eventually to a tiny park. At the end of an asphalt drive stood the college buildings, built of brick, a sportsfield stretching away on either side.

The man who gave the interview seemed surprised he was applying. Small, with black hair combed smoothly back, with dark eyebrows and dark eyes, he sat mask-like behind his desk and said, ‘Frankly, I think you’ll be doing yourself no service coming here. I should stay on another year. Take a degree. We’d welcome you here, but I think in all fairness the work is well below the standard you’re capable of.’ He added, ‘On top of which, of course, there’s National Service. In the end, you know, you’ll only save two years.’