Saville (68 page)

‘Well, it’s not much to look at,’ he would add. ‘But we don’t have to stay here for good, though, do we?’

‘Don’t we? The way you’re going I think we shall.’

‘Nay, tha mu’n leave whenever tha wants.’

‘And leave you and Richard? You should have a chance.’

‘Nay, I’ve got a chance. All t’chance I’ll need.’

His brother’s imperturbability disturbed him; it disturbed him as much as his mother’s acquiescence to it.

‘Don’t you want our Steven to get on?’ he’d ask her.

‘But he’s not as bright as you. At least, not as bright in that way.’

‘But he shows no aptitude, no determination, no need to do anything. He’ll just go on like he’s always done.’

‘But he’s got an equable nature,’ his mother said.

‘Has he?’ The word alone suggested that his mother had thought about this herself. ‘Acquiescent I should think’s more like it.’

‘Acquiescent to what?’

‘To this.’

He would gesture hopelessly around him: the pit, the darkness, the perpetual smell of sulphur, the dankness, the soot; it flattened his spirits more than anything; there was no escape.

‘Doesn’t he want to change it? Is he going to live here all his life?’

‘Well,
we
’ve lived here,’ his mother said.

‘But then we’ve got a chance to change it. We’ve got a chance of getting out.’

‘Of leaving.’

‘Not physically. Spiritually. It does Steven no good to be buried here.’

‘But why are you so concerned?’ she said. ‘If he’s content why should you insist on him being different?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’d just want something better for him.’

‘But why change his nature when he’s always so happy.’

‘Is he happy?’

‘I think so.’

‘Like a dog is happy. It’s bovine. He has no will.’

His mother, at these attacks, would draw away: there was a peculiar ambivalence in them. His brother antagonized him; yet there was no enmity, no animosity or resentment in his brother at all. If anything, Steven admired him: when he was younger he would listen to Colin’s accounts of school and later of college with fascination. On one occasion, while still at college, Steven had visited him: he had shown him round the buildings, introduced him to the staff and to the students and his brother had admired it all, entranced, without any equivocation. He accepted everything that came before him.

‘Why do you get on at Steven?’ his father would ask.

‘He doesn’t do anything,’ he would tell him.

‘He’s being himself.’

‘I can’t believe it.’ He would watch Steven playing in the field with the same irritation: his good nature was apparent from a distance, the lack of guile, of anything considered; his goodness was dishonest.

‘He doesn’t do anything,’ he would add.

‘Does he have to
do
something?’ his father would ask.

‘But you insisted that
I
do something,’ he said.

‘How did I insist?’

‘Everything. There’s always an insistence. I suppose you’ll be content for him to go in the pit.’

‘I suppose I shall. If he’s happy doing it,’ he added.

‘But why should I have had to do things I wasn’t happy doing?’ he said.

‘What weren’t you happy doing?’ his father said.

‘All this.’ He would gesture at the backs.

‘I thought it was something you wanted. It was something you were good at,’ his father said.

‘Was it something I wanted? Or something you wanted for me? Like you wanted something for Andrew, too.’

‘What did we want for Andrew?’

‘To make him good. To make him like me.’

‘Nay,’ his father said, and looked away. It was as if he’d wounded him too deeply. ‘Nay,’ he said again. He shook his head.

‘Isn’t it true?’

‘No. It’s not true. And if you said that to your mother I think it would kill her.’

‘Perhaps it’s better that she should know, then.’

‘You’ll say nothing to her,’ his father said, strangely, turning to him then and standing there as if physically he stood before his mother.

‘And what am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t I have the freedom that Steven has? Not selfishly, but for
your
good as well?’

‘What good? What good? Is there any good in saying this?’ his father said. Despite his tiredness he would have beaten him then.

‘But why should I have to take the blame?’

‘What blame?’

‘Why should I be moulded? Why weren’t you content with me?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t I have been allowed to grow like Steve?’ It was as if some evil in him had been held in abeyance, while in Steven it had been allowed to flow out, appeased.

‘Didn’t you want to go that school?’ his father said, yet lightly, anxious to distract him. ‘When you came home to tell us you’d passed I’d never seen you look so glad.’

‘It’s what I thought you wanted,’ he said.

‘It was.’

‘Yet why do you want nothing for Steve?’

‘I do want something for Steve. But I wouldn’t force him to it, not against his nature.’

‘But why force
me
?’

‘I haven’t forced you.’

‘You have.’

‘I haven’t forced you to anything.’

‘Not through force,’ he said. ‘Through love.’

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘I think it’s far too deep for me.’

And later, as if he had nursed his wound, and wondered why
Colin should have inflicted it, his father added, ‘We’ve given you a key. We’ve given you a key to get out of this.’

‘I can’t get out,’ he said. ‘You need the money. And in any case, with what I earn, I couldn’t afford to live by myself.’

‘It’s only for two or three years.’

‘Is it?’

‘While Richard and Steven are still at school. It bled us, you know, educating you.’

‘Why do it, then?’

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘I’m beginning to wonder.’

And a few weeks later, coming home from school, exhausted, to find his brother playing in the backs, Colin had picked another argument. His brother, listening to his rage, stood smiling, distantly, across the room.

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘If you go on like that he’ll clobber you.’

‘Will he?’ he said.

His mother, too, had been in the room.

‘Steven isn’t as docile’, she said, ‘as you sometimes think.’

‘Isn’t he?’ he said. ‘I’ve never noticed anything different.’

‘He’s got a mind and values of his own.’ His mother gazed angrily at him through her glasses as if, in his argument, he were attacking her.

‘I’ve never noticed a mind,’ he said. ‘As for values, I don’t think he even knows the word.’

‘Oh, I think he knows a lot of things,’ she said.

‘Where from? I’ve never seen him learning anything.’

‘He doesn’t have to learn,’ she said, deeply. ‘He already knows.’ She glanced at Steven as if she were confessing to something she scarcely knew how to express herself.

‘All he knows’, Colin said, ‘is how to eat and drink and take up space, and use the freedom that others have bought him.’

‘You’ve bought him nothing,’ his mother said.

‘Haven’t I? I’d have thought I’d done quite a lot for him. And Richard.’

‘Nay, he’s done something, Ellen,’ his father said. ‘He’s looked after those two like a father would.’

‘Has he?’ she said, bitterly, strangely. ‘He’s done what he’s wanted. We haven’t forced him’, she added, ‘to anything.’

‘Nay, you mu’n let him get it off his chest,’ his brother said,
confidentially, as if the fault lay entirely now with Colin and their patience alone would have to deal with it.

He turned away.

‘And if you have something to say to me, it’s better you say it to me. Not to my mother and dad,’ his brother added.

‘All I can say,’ Colin said, ‘I can say with this.’ He held up his fist.

‘Nay, I don’t mind fighting,’ his brother said as if, by his amiability, he could win him out of this.

‘Don’t you?’

‘I don’t at all.’

‘Nay, Steve,’ his father said.

‘Oh, let them,’ his mother said. ‘If Colin thinks he can perhaps he might find Steven more than he bargained for.’

And, locked into the logic of a fight, they went out in the backs. Perhaps even then Steven thought he might win him out of his mood, show by his conciliatoriness that he meant no harm. He stood smiling before him, strangely calm, almost acquiescent, putting up his fists as if he suspected the gesture alone would be sufficient to warn him off. Yet there was never any doubt in Colin’s mind; with some peculiar rage, drawn from the very depths of his nature, he drove his fist into Steven’s face: he saw his brother’s look of helplessness, the same guilelessness and acquiescence, as he felt the blow, as if his passivity had at last been shattered. Blood sprang out across Steven’s face; a look of anguish came into his eyes; his strength, physically sapped, came out of his body. Almost callously, and with no diminution of his anger, Colin threw him to the ground.

His brother lay still; he appeared quite dazed: when he attempted to rise he fell on his side. Colin had never hated anyone as he hated Steven: he hated his helplessness and he hated his pain. As his father came across the yard to help his brother he turned away. His mother, standing in the door, gazed past him. Her expression was hidden behind the light of her glasses; it was as if, in that moment, she’d been cut in two, unexpectedly, without reason. She attempted to speak, then said, ‘You bully,’ yet quietly, unable to express the depth of her rage. ‘You bully,’ she said again. ‘He never hit you.’

‘You asked him to.’

‘I didn’t ask him.’ She turned away. ‘What harm has he ever done to you?’

‘More’, he said, ‘than you imagine.’

He went out of the house; as he was coming away Steven was being helped into the kitchen.

‘No,’ he was saying. ‘I’m not really hurt,’ yet his voice sounded dazed and his movements heavy, uncertain now of what had happened.

Colin walked into the village; he caught a bus. Three-quarters of an hour later he was in the town. He sat in a pub. The blood roared through his head.

It was after midnight when he got back home; he’d taken the last bus in that direction and had had to walk the last four miles.

No lights were showing in the house; the front door was locked. He went round the back.

The back door, too, was locked.

A drainpipe led up to his bedroom window.

After several attempts, hoisting his foot on the kitchen sill, he clambered up: he pulled open the window and climbed inside.

No sound came from the house at all: a movement came finally from the adjoining room, Steven or Richard turning in bed.

He lay down: his clothes were stained from the soot of the pipe, his hands smelled of stagnant water.

A coughing, and then a dog barking came from across the backs.

He lay quite still; he closed his eyes.

The fumes of the beer and the cigarette smoke from the pub obscured the more prevalent odour of the pit.

‘This is Elizabeth,’ Callow said, and after a moment’s hesitation – stepping away slightly as if being recognized with her were something he disliked – he added, ‘We were going for a drink.’

The woman was somewhat smaller than Callow, with thick dark hair, half-concealed by a flowered scarf, and a broad, thickly featured face.

‘Come for a drink as well,’ she said. She indicated a pub across the city centre. It was early evening: lights flared out across the pavement.

The woman’s eyes were dark: they possessed a melancholic light, like those of a doctor examining a patient. She waited for Colin’s response with something of a smile. ‘I hear you teach at the same school,’ she said when they’d entered the pub and were seated at a table.

‘Endeavouring to,’ he said, bemused by the woman’s expression.

‘Well that’s all Phil does,’ she said, her attitude to Callow more that of a sister, or a neighbour, than that of a friend. ‘He daydreams most of the time, so you never really know whether he’s there or not.’

‘I don’t daydream. The school we teach in allows no daydreaming at all,’ Callow said. ‘Quite the reverse: it drives any poetic inclination clean out of you.’

‘Nevertheless, you do philosophize occasionally,’ the woman said. ‘You do put down your thoughts in the evening and allow your imagination a little licence.’ There were the seeds here of some old and familiar argument, half-mocking: she glanced across at Colin and smiled.

‘Colin writes: he’ll tell you how remorseless it is.’ Callow glanced at him for this to be confirmed.

‘Not two in the one building?’ the woman said. She was, if anything, older than Callow. There were thin lines at the corners of her eyes: she wore little if any make-up. ‘That place, despite your protestations, and its prosaic if not depressing appearance, is an incubus of poetic talent.’

‘I have no pretensions. It’s merely therapy for me,’ Callow said wearily, yet glancing too at Colin as he reached for his drink.

‘Do you teach, too?’ Colin asked the woman.

‘Never.’ She shook her head. Inside the pub she’d removed the scarf; her head was swept back from a prominent brow: there was something composed, assured and imperturbable about her expression. ‘I’m an independent lady,’ she said with an affected accent and looked at him directly as if to challenge him to make of this whatever he could.

Callow, moodily withdrawn now from the woman’s banter, had added nothing further, drinking lengthily from his glass, then, at the woman’s suggestion, getting up to order another.

He met the woman again a few days later. It was a Saturday morning: crowds of shoppers flooded the town. Seeing her outside a shop he had, familiarly, caught her arm: he felt her flinch at the touch.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said and he had the distinct impression that she’d already recognized him: that she’d seen him from a distance and had stopped, as if unconsciously, to wait.

‘Are you doing anything special?’ he said.

‘Nothing’, she said, ‘that couldn’t be delayed.’

They went into a restaurant in an adjoining alley; it was the same alleyway, he reflected, as they waited at a table, that he had gone up with his mother years before on his first visit to the school.