Saville (60 page)

He climbed up the steps to the third floor, and walked slowly along the concrete corridor looking at the numerous identically painted doors. Finally he came to a room lettered J29, the six apparently having spun upside down. He knocked on the door loudly, heard no answer from the other side, and pushed it open.

Rows of small wooden desks and chairs were set out inside. At a larger desk, facing the rows, sat a soldier with two stripes on his arm. He was unwrapping a packet of sandwiches, which were held together by a rubber band. As Colin entered he looked up in surprise.

‘What is it?’ he said. A large thermos flask stood on the desk beside him.

‘I’ve been sent up’, he said, ‘from the room below.’

‘There must be some mistake. I’ve just had the last batch through,’ he said.

He showed him the letter with his name and number and the time of his appointment.

‘I was just going to have my lunch,’ the soldier said. He began to replace the rubber band around his sandwiches. ‘How many more are there?’ he added.

‘Just me,’ he said.

‘Just one, is it?’ He leant down by the desk, picked up a briefcase and put the sandwiches then the thermos inside and fastened the top. He replaced the case beside the desk. ‘I can’t see why you couldn’t have waited. I was just going to have my lunch,’ he said again.

He handed Colin a printed card.

‘Don’t look at it’, he said, ‘until I tell you,’ pointing at the desks and adding, ‘I should just sit farther back. Not near the front. Have you got a pencil? You’ll find one on the desk.’

He chose one of the desks, finally, in the centre of the room, looking up to see if the soldier had any objection, saw that he’d returned once more to his brief-case, stooping down, and sitting at the desk set the card down on the top before him.

‘Are you ready?’ the soldier said. He’d produced a watch from his brief-case and gazed across at him with it held significantly in his hand. ‘When I tell you to go you’ve got ten minutes to answer the questions on the card before you. I can’t answer any inquiries: if you can’t understand them just leave a blank.’

He pressed the watch down with a significant gesture and nodded his head.

‘That means’, he added, calling across in irritation, ‘you may begin.’

Colin picked up the pencil on the desk before him, saw that the first question involved a juxtaposition of figures and numbers in sequence, not unlike those he had answered years before in his grammar-school examination, and, deciding it would take a little thought to work it out, moved on to the second. He answered the second question, then the third, writing the brief answers down in a box at the side. When he’d reached the final question at the foot of the card he found that he had still one box empty.

Looking back up the column of answers he saw, as he reached the top, that inadvertently he’d placed the answer to the second question in the box provided for the answer to the first. Similarly the answer to the third question was in the box provided for the answer to the second, the answers, in effect, to all the thirty-two
questions, with the sole exception of the first, which had no answer at all, being in boxes once removed from their proper place.

He had just begun, laboriously, to draw an arrow in the margin to indicate the error, when the corporal at the desk called out, ‘Pencils down. No looking at the card or reading it from now on.’

‘I was putting in a correction to the placing of the answers,’ he began to say when the corporal called, ‘No comments, please. If you wish to make inquiries you may raise your hand.’

He lifted his hand. The corporal appeared to take no notice of it for several seconds, his attention on a red pencil which he was sharpening with a knife.

‘Yes, what is it?’ he said, finally looking up.

‘I was about to point out an error I’ve made in the positioning of the answers,’ he said.

‘No comment may be made upon the examination. Please bring it out.’

He got up from the desk and took the card down to the soldier.

‘You’ve left the pencil behind, I take it?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘If you don’t watch them the whole roomful can go inside a morning. Please go up to room S27 on the floor above.’

‘I thought I’d just like to point out’, he said, indicating the card over which the red pencil was now sharply poised, ‘that the positioning of the answers isn’t correct. That the answer in effect to number one …’

The soldier turned slowly to look at his face.

‘Why don’t you piss off?’ he said.

When he glanced back from the door he could see the soldier placing a neat column of red crosses down the side of the card, checking the answers automatically with a sheet before him, marking a further cross and looking up at him in some surprise before he finally stepped out into the corridor beyond.

S27 was a large room, somewhere near the top of the building. In the centre of it were two or three elderly men in white coats standing by a metal stove. Its metal chimney went up through a large, ill-fashioned hole in the ceiling.

Around three walls of the room were arranged curtained
cubicles, large enough to take a table or a bed. Several of the youths from the last group were standing around the entrance to one of the cubicles, most of them undressed, two draped with towels. They went in one by one and as each came out they went on to the adjoining cubicle. In the centre of the fourth wall stood a wooden desk, behind it a uniformed officer and two soldiers.

A third soldier showed him into the first of the cubicles. He was instructed to strip off. Then, naked, he was taken into the second cubicle, was given a glass jar and told to urinate into that and a metal bucket, already full to overflowing. He handed the jar to the soldier when he finally emerged and it was taken off smartly across the room where it was given a label and lined up on a wooden table with several others.

In the third cubicle a white-gowned figure with grey hair and spectacles was reading a book. He looked up in surprise when he came round the curtain.

‘I thought they’d all gone through,’ he said.

‘I think I’m the last,’ he said.

‘Sit in the chair and let’s have a look in your ears,’ the man had said.

The canvas on the chair was cold. The man looked in one ear and then the other, shining in a tiny light. Finally he tilted his head to one side, ran liquid inside his ears and plugged them up with cotton wool.

‘Come back here when you’ve finished your eye-sight test,’ he said, calling now, his mouth close to his head.

His throat and teeth were examined in the adjoining booth. Beyond that his body and legs were examined, finally his chest, the elderly doctor stooping over with a stethoscope. In the booth beyond that he sat in a chair opposite a wall of coloured charts. He read off numbers and figures, had the cotton wool removed from one ear while the doctor, partially deaf himself, called instructions, then returned to the first booth to have his ears re-examined.

‘Is anything the matter?’ he said.

‘It’s just dirt, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said.

‘Dirt?’

‘You bohemians are all the same,’ the doctor said, indicating Colin’s longish hair.

When he was dressed there was no one left in the room but the group of white-gowned figures, grown larger now, around the stove, and the officer with the two soldiers sitting at the desk.

‘Could you tell me my grading?’ he asked the officer as he reached the door.

‘You’ll be informed in due course,’ the officer said.

‘There’s no chance of finding out now?’ he said. ‘I asked for an early medical, you see.’

‘Why did you ask for an early medical?’ the officer said.

‘So I could go straight in when I leave college at the end of the term,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’ll be hanging around for months.’

‘I’m afraid there’s no way I can tell you,’ the officer said. ‘You’ll have to wait like the rest, and you’ll be informed’, he added again, ‘in due course.’

As he came down the corridor, several youths, some still dressing in coats and shirts, others pulling on shoes, were gathered round a desk on the landing. Behind the desk sat a soldier with his hat threaded through the lapel on his jacket, calling out names and numbers, and giving out cards.

Colin waited. After several minutes his name was called.

‘Grade three,’ the soldier said, waving the card above his head. He took it from the soldier without the soldier looking up. The knot of youths had almost dispersed. The last cards were given out and he stepped up to the desk.

‘I think there’s been a mistake,’ he said.

‘What’s your name?’ the soldier said.

He showed him the card. ‘The name’s correct, and the number, but I think the grade must be wrong.’

‘Grade three,’ the soldier said, checking against a sheet before him. ‘Flat feet. Have you got flat feet?’ he said.

‘I hadn’t noticed them,’ he said.

‘A lot have things they haven’t noticed until they come here,’ the soldier said.

‘Does that mean I won’t be taken?’ he said.

‘That’s quite correct.’ The soldier snapped to a file before him. ‘You’ve a blighty ticket. No grade threes are taken at present.’

Outside he caught a tram which took him to the college. He sat on a wooden bench at the front. He examined the card, his name
written out in full and the grade given beside it in roman numerals. The tram rattled on; it screeched at the bends, the wheels grinding at the track, the glass vibrating in the wooden frames, the reversible wooden benches clattering against the metal brackets. He stared down at the street, at the smooth bands of tarmac inset with the shiny rails, the terraces and concertinaed roofs, the vast furnaces set far beyond in metal coffers, the overhanging pall of smoke, lit by flame, and saw, finally, beyond the farthest roofs, the outlines of the hills to the south beyond which lay the town where he’d gone to school and beyond which, in turn, some twelve miles farther on, lay the village. The tram dipped down; the road ran between high walls and narrow buildings: he glanced at the card and then to the ribbed, ticket-strewn floor between his feet.

‘I’ll be going in October, I suppose,’ she said.

She gazed out at him from beneath the brim of the hat, a large, sweeping, straw-coloured shape, fastened round with a pinkish ribbon.

Beyond her, down the track, was visible the crescent of smoke which heralded the train beyond the cutting. Since leaving school that summer she’d taken to travelling on the train, rather than the bus. It had been another cause of tension between them: the cost of things on which they might have saved.

It was Sunday evening. Other groups that had been in the church were now wandering through the fields below the village, the sun’s magnified shape, a bulbous, burning red, sinking down in a mist above the pit.

‘I suppose I’ll see less of you’, he said, ‘if I take this job at Rawcliffe. I can only get away at weekends.’

‘You could, if you wanted, get a job near the university,’ she said.

‘But then I couldn’t help out at home.’

‘I can’t see why not.’

‘There wouldn’t be much left after paying rent. Whereas if I pay rent at home my mother gets it.’

‘Yes,’ she said, turning to watch the train herself. Only its sound, however, penetrated to the station. The wedge-shaped mound of smoke slowly grew above the cutting.

‘In any case, I don’t think much to hanging around: that’s what it would amount to,’ he said. ‘You’ll have your own life to lead.’

Already, largely because of this, he’d decided against their getting married.

‘Are you going to live for the next three years at home?’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Anything might happen.’

‘Not if you stay there,’ she said.

The train came into sight, a black, cylindrical shape moving through the shadow of the cutting. Its smoke and a white cloud of steam welled up between the grass slopes on either side. A whistle blew as it came beneath the bridge, the smoke ballooning beneath the arch.

The platform shuddered as the engine passed.

‘We might find after a year we’ve no alternative: but to get married, I mean,’ he said. ‘We may find, in the end, it’s the best solution.’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes followed the engine as it coasted along the track, the carriages jolting as it came to a halt.

A door opened at the opposite end and Reagan got out. He was carrying his violin case and was dressed in a dark suit, a white handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket. He ducked his head but didn’t speak as he hurried past, flushing slightly as he glanced at Margaret, then hurrying to the flight of steps. His tall, angular figure was visible a moment later as he crossed the bridge to the station yard.

Margaret got into an empty carriage. She lowered the window, carefully removed her hat, laid it on the seat, then leant out, gazing along the platform.

‘That’s all we can do, then,’ she said. ‘See how it goes.’ She glanced at him, briefly, then looked down the platform the other way. Her thin, high-boned cheeks had flushed. A white patch showed at either temple.

Other doors were slammed; a porter came along, testing the handles.

‘I’ll see you next week-end, then,’ he said.

She leant to him quickly.

He kissed her mouth.

‘Take care,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a ring.’

A whistle had blown. The train lurched, shuddering; a harsh panting came from the front as the engine moved to the track.

The carriages glided out of the station. Margaret’s hand waved, and continued waving until the end of the platform and the signal box had passed.

Reagan was waiting by the bridge when he came out of the station; the smoke and the steam from the train was still visible down the track.

‘I thought I’d wait and walk up with you,’ he said, running his hand slowly across his hair then stooping to pick up the violin case between his feet.

They set off up the slope towards the village. The sun had sunk down behind the shoulder of the hill. Reagan walked with a long, loping stride, his head thrust back as if in some way, unconsciously, he were trying to restrain his body.