Saville (67 page)

‘Do you feel reconciled?’ Callow said.

‘No.’

‘I mean,’ Callow said, returning briefly to his earlier, darker look, ‘do you envisage staying here for good?’

He shook his head; something of the bleakness of the place, something of the bleakness of Callow, gripped him: he sensed a disillusionment in Callow which hid some profounder discontent. He couldn’t be sure in that instant what it was.

‘You’re young, you’re hopeful, you’ve got it all before you,’ the older teacher said. He appeared, visibly, to shrink before him: the corduroy coat, even the square-shaped cut of his hair, suggested a hardness, a firmness, even a physical robustness and mental pugnacity which the manner of the man himself denied.

A bus came down towards the stop. Callow flinched as its shadow fell across him.

‘Are you getting on?’ Colin said as he moved up in the queue.

‘No. I walk.’

‘Do you live close by?’

‘I have relations who do. I visit them occasionally.’

It sounded like some excuse he’d made up on the spot; as it was, on an evening, Colin had seldom seen him in the queue.

‘See you tomorrow,’ Callow said and, without any further acknowledgment, moved quickly off.

He saw the corduroy-coated teacher frequently over the next few weeks. Though they never caught the same bus – and he never discovered where he lived, or even if he were married – they often walked down the hill together. The evening after their first encounter, when he was waiting for Stephens by the gate, his friend had cruised up on the motor-bike and, his scarf already lowered, said, ‘I won’t, in future, give you a lift, if you don’t mind.’

‘I was wrong to refuse, I know,’ he said.

‘If there are people who interest you more, and you see me merely as a convenience, clearly there’s no point in my putting myself out,’ he added.

‘It’s entirely up to you,’ he said.

‘I suppose Thornton was talking about Stafford.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘He told me he was. I mean, I asked him,’ Stephens said. ‘Apparently he’s marrying your former girl.’

‘He didn’t tell me that,’ he said.

‘I made inquiries.’ He revved the engine; a cloud of blue smoke rose steadily between them. ‘I’d have nothing to do with those bastards if I were you.’

‘What bastards?’

‘King Edward bastards. They screwed me up and they’ve screwed up you.’

He said nothing for a moment

‘You can have a lift if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a bad day.’ He leaned down and lowered the foot-rests for him.

Colin got on: they cruised down the hill. When Colin got off Stephens added, ‘I’d give it up, only I’ve nothing else to do.’

‘Why don’t you go abroad?’ he said.

‘Abroad?’ He revved the engine once again, almost as if willing the bike at that moment to take him. ‘Why don’t you?’

‘I’m helping out the family,’ he said.

‘I’m helping out the family,’ Stephens said. ‘But should families pin you down for ever?’

‘I owe them something,’ he said.

‘Oh, debts are never meant to be paid. I owe debts to everybody,’ Stephens said. ‘I’d be a damn fool, and
they’d
think I’m a damn fool, if I ever attempted to pay them.’

‘Isn’t there such a thing as loyalty?’ he said.

‘To what?’

Stephens waited for an answer.

‘The only loyalty is to oneself,’ he added.

Colin looked away. Farther up the hill he could see Callow and Thornton descending: the taller man had waved.

‘Oh, well, I’ll leave you to your friends,’ Stephens said and without adding anything further drove away.

‘Was he cheesed?’ Thornton said. ‘About last night.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Apparently Neville’s fiancée was once your friend.’

‘Apparently,’ he said.

‘I suppose I’ll be seeing him soon. The fact is, when I go in, he’s suggested I should join his regiment. I don’t know how easily these things are arranged.
If
they can be arranged, I’m sure he’ll manage it.’ He waved his hand without adding anything further and ran across the road as his bus appeared.

‘Have you ever seen this?’ his father said. He held out a square-shaped book of greyish, tinted paper. Inside were a number of chalk drawings, some of fruit, some of flowers, their bright colours imprinted on the sheets of protective tissue. The drawings themselves were done with an adult assurance, seemingly effortless and uncorrected.

‘Whose are they?’ he said, gazing in particular at a drawing of three apples, their redness veering into greenness, lying in a bowl.

‘They’re by your brother.’ His father laughed. ‘Andrew.’ He turned to the front. The name of the village school and his brother’s unfamiliar name, ‘Andrew Saville’, were written on the cover. ‘He was only seven.’

‘How did he die?’ he said, suddenly reminded.

‘He died within a few hours. Of pneumonia,’ his father said. ‘He was here one minute, and gone the next. I’d give ought to have that lad alive.’

‘How give ought?’ he said.

‘Well.’ His father hesitated then turned aside.

On one occasion, some years previously, he’d gone with his father to put some flowers on his brother’s grave: it lay in a small plot of ground at the side of the road leading to the colliery, the whole area invisible, behind high hedges, from the road itself. The grave was marked by a small round-headed stone on which were painted his father’s initials, H.R.S., and a number. They cleared brambles from the spot, weeded the oblong bed, set a jam-jar in the ground and in the jam-jar set the flowers. ‘We ought to come each week and keep it tidy,’ his father had said, yet as far as Colin was aware neither he nor his mother had been again. Now, looking at the coloured drawings in the book, his father said, ‘We ought to go and have a look. See how that grave is. We haven’t been for some time, you know.’

‘How did it affect my mother?’ he said.

‘Well.’ His father, uncertain, gazed at the book steadily now, his eyes intense. ‘I think that’s been half the trouble.’

‘What trouble?’

‘Nay, Andrew dying,’ his father said.

The house was silent. His mother had gone off that afternoon to visit her sister, taking, after much complaining from his brothers, Steven and Richard with her.

‘Why thy’s so silent and morose at times?’

‘Am I silent and morose?’

‘Nay, thy should know,’ his father said.

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘Nay, I can’t be the first to mention it.’ His father flushed.

‘I didn’t think I was morose,’ he said.

‘Nay, not all the time,’ he added. ‘It’s just been lately, I suppose.’ He gazed at the drawings.

A cup stood on a saucer: looking at the picture Colin, with a peculiar sensation, as if someone had touched him, saw how clear and confident the ellipses were, perfectly drawn by his seven-year-old brother, with scarcely an inflection that broke the line, or a faltering in the shading of their blue-painted pattern.

‘Your mother was three months gone, tha knows. It must have had an effect, I reckon. She was very down.’ His father, almost idly, closed the book. ‘She was very down, I can tell you that.’ He added nothing further for a while. ‘It all seemed very strange at the time.’

‘Strange in what way?’

‘It was as if he wa’ gone.’ His father looked up. ‘And then, you see, came back again.’

There was a freshness in his father’s face, as if, briefly, he’d gone back to that moment when he was young himself. He gazed up at Colin directly.

‘I’m not Andrew, though,’ he said.

‘No.’

His gaze drifted back towards the book: only in the writing of the name was there any uncertainty, he thought; as if his brother weren’t quite sure, despite the confidence of the drawings, of who he was.

His father too glanced down at the book: it lay between them like a testament, or a tribulation, a strange denial, he couldn’t be sure.

*

His brother’s presence, so casually aroused, preoccupied him for several days. He was sleeping now in the tiny room, his two brothers occupying the larger room, and realized in fact he was probably sleeping in Andrew’s bed. It was also, he recalled, the bed the soldier had slept in during the war. Certain scenes of his early life came back: he recalled, faintly, the holiday with his mother and father, the journey on the back of the milkman’s cart. It had a peculiar familiarity, like the pictures in the book itself.

One evening, when his father was at work, he had asked his mother about his brother, listened to her distant answers, then had asked her specifically about the death itself. ‘Oh,’ his mother said, ‘aren’t we getting morbid? What does it matter after all these years?’ and had added, ‘It’s the good things, after all, that count.’

‘Wasn’t Andrew good?’ he said.

‘He
was
good,’ his mother said. She told him then of the doctor’s visit, of the sudden illness, and of the doctor’s apologetic statement when he examined his brother on the double bed. ‘And what brought all this up suddenly?’ she added.

‘Oh,’ he said, and mentioned the book.

‘And where did your father find it?’ she said.

‘He must have discovered it,’ he said.

‘He must have been amongst my papers.’

‘What papers?’ he said.

‘Oh, I keep things,’ his mother said, mysteriously, as if this, finally, were something she wouldn’t confide. ‘At any rate, you could say he was going to be an artist. He had the nature as well as the gift’.

‘What nature?’ Colin said.

‘Oh, the nature.’ His mother traced her finger along a chair. ‘He was very unruly.’

‘In what way?’ he said.

‘Questions. Questions!’ His mother turned away. Then, as if drawn by the silence, she added, ‘He was always wandering off.’

‘Where to?’

‘I’ve no idea. He seemed to have nowhere in mind he was going to.’

A blankness in his brother’s intentions suddenly faced him, just as presumably it had faced his mother; she gazed steadily before her.

‘Away from here, at least,’ she said.

‘Why away?’

‘Why all these questions? Honestly, if I could answer any of them don’t you think I would?’

She took off her glasses; the light, as it was, had hidden her expression. She dried her eyes on the edge of her apron: it was a contained, almost self-denying gesture.

‘I loved him, Colin.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

He visited his brother’s grave a few days later and found to his surprise it had recently been weeded; fresh flowers had been set in a glass jar which had in turn been buried in the earth. Some image of his brother came to mind, of a wild, anarchic boy, fair-haired, blue-eyed, stocky, square-shouldered, walking along the road from the village. For a moment standing by the grave, hidden by the surrounding shrubs, with the colliery pumping out its smoke and steam, the mountain of the heap above his head, he felt an invisible bond with that figure in the ground, as if they suffered in that moment a peculiar conjunction.

He looked up towards the road: it was past this place that his father walked each day; it was in that school building, adjacent to the colliery, that Andrew, conceivably, had done his drawings. He recalled something then that had been nagging at the back of his mind for several days: it was his recollection of the time when he had first walked. He had been sitting with his parents at the side of a dam – the dam he had visited years before with Reagan on their country walk – and had got to his feet to follow a hen, the bird hurrying before him towards the water’s edge, and even as he heard his parents’ cries, he recalled vividly the thought that had struck him then, ‘But I have walked many times like this before: why should they be surprised I am walking now?’ And beyond their surprise was this greater conviction that not merely had he walked but lived his life before. It was like glimpsing a headland out of a mist.

He felt a peculiar detachment: some part of his mind had been displaced, fragmented, cast away. He walked out of the cemetery towards the village. The cloud from the pit, with the colliery’s clankings and groanings, its peculiar gaspings, followed him: it was as if he were being ejected from the earth himself, disgorged. He glanced back to the cemetery where, unknown, his brother was buried and felt, prompted by that child, a sense of mission, a new containment, a vulnerability which numbed him to the bone.

It affected his relationship with Steven first. There was a peculiar assurance in his younger brother; he questioned nothing: the quietness of his childhood had given way to a robust, undemanding confidence. He played football, but without any intentness; he worked with little concentration. His voice, in the field at the back, would dominate the houses, refusing to be commanded or advised by anyone. ‘What’s up, our kid?’ he would say, slumping down in the settee beside him. ‘Ar’t feeling bad?’ his shoulder crushing against Colin’s almost like an older brother’s would. ‘Has’t flighted any sense out of ought, then?’ he would add whenever he saw him writing, or marking school books at the table. ‘Wheer’st the genius in that?’ peering mysteriously over his shoulder as if to find in the work some key to Colin’s nature which otherwise eluded him. He had grown in build, proportionately, even larger than Colin; his muscles were prematurely developed. There were very few boys in the village who threatened him; and yet, when they did, Steven never fought; rather, he would take their arm and turn them with him. ‘Nay, wheer’st that gonna’ get you?’ he would say amicably as if, in fighting, they had more to lose than they could imagine. It was as if his nature had been absolved, cleansed, washed through.

‘Why don’t you do more with your work?’ Colin would ask him.

‘Why should I?’ Steven would say.

‘Well, I’ve had to.’

‘Why?’

‘To help you,’ Colin would tell him.

‘Why help me?’

‘To give you a chance.’

‘To do what?’

‘To get through.’

‘Nay, I’ve got through.’ He would laugh. ‘What is there to get through, Colin?’

‘Don’t you feel you ought to get on?’ he said.

‘Get on wheer?’

‘Out of this.’

His brother would look round him at the kitchen, he would look at the window and then outside.