Saville (73 page)

‘Is it?’ Her smile continued. ‘That sounds like a credo made
after
the event.’

‘No,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘It’s how I would explain most, if not everything, that’s happened.’

‘To you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or anyone like me.’

They walked along for a while in silence: a narrow path led up to the central hill.

The man, walking behind, had taken a path divergent to their own.

‘You don’t really belong to anything,’ she said. ‘You’re not really a teacher. You’re not really anything. You don’t belong to any class, since you live with one class, respond like another, and feels attachments to none.’

‘Do you mind my being so much younger?’ he said, harshly, for he felt this lay at the root of her argument.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect it.’

‘Expect it of whom?’

‘Of me. I’m old enough, or almost old enough’, she added, ‘to be your mother.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you are.’

They continued their walk. The river, shining in the afternoon light, came into view, curving across the valley floor.

‘I’m glad you’re leaving the school,’ she said finally, as they reached the summit of the Park.

‘Why?’

‘I think you should.’

And a little later, she had added, ‘Has Philip ever spoken to you? Recently, I mean.’

‘Once,’ he said.

Callow in fact had come up to him one evening, after school, almost in the same manner as, on the one occasion, Stephens had, and had said, with a forced geniality, ‘You don’t have to leave for my sake, chum.’

‘I’m not,’ he’d said. ‘I’m fired.’

‘By whom?’ Callow said. He didn’t believe it.

‘Corcoran.’

‘
Has
he fired you?’ he said, searching if anything for qualities of discernment in Corcoran which hitherto he might have overlooked: it was the first direct evidence he had given of his displeasure at Colin’s relationship with Elizabeth.

‘You could always ask him,’ Colin said.

‘What’s it got to do with?’ Callow said.

‘Playing music.’

‘Music.’

‘Poetry. He considers it all a lot of waffle.’

‘Well, I know his views, but they’re scarcely enough to fire you,’ Callow said.

‘Mine are,’ he said.

‘You’re not’, Callow said, ‘turning into a Bolshie?’ His plight, seen now as retribution, had reassured the older man.

Elizabeth had laughed. The daintiness that was always evident in her was never more apparent than when they walked: there was a certain primness in her; anyone glimpsing them from a distance, and seeing their companionability, might have thought they were married. Once, shopping, he’d been taken for her son: ‘What does your son think?’ the shop assistant had said when she was showing her a dress and Elizabeth had laughed, glancing at him however in some alarm. Though she had never told him her age, despite his asking, he’d guessed she was in her middle thirties.

‘I still see Phil occasionally,’ she said.

‘How occasionally?’ he said.

‘Whenever he rings me.’ She glanced across.

‘How often is that?’

‘Whenever he feels inclined to.’ She added, ‘He has the same attitude to you as he has to my husband.’

She was silent for a while: the pressure of her arm had slackened. The path wound in amongst some trees: the view below them was suddenly obscured.

‘Are you annoyed?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘It’s just that at times I feel frightened,’ she said.

‘What of?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. She shook her head.

The man who had been walking in the path below appeared now on the path ahead: the curving track emerged from the trees on to an open area of grass. Below them stretched a view of the valley; the river, sweeping directly away from the Park, appeared now very much as it must have done from the windows of the ruined house behind.

‘What you describe as medievalism you described initially as alienation,’ he said.

‘Philip did.’

‘It amounts to much the same thing,’ he said.

‘How would he describe this?’ she said. ‘Making love to a married woman.’

‘I’d imagine he’d describe it as symptomatic.’

The man too had paused to gaze out across the valley.

‘As opposed to forming a relationship, that is, with someone of a proper age.’

‘What’s a proper age?’ he said.

‘A more compatible age,’ she said.

‘You’re not that old, are you, Liz?’ he said.

‘No, not really, I suppose,’ she said, yet slowly, as if he’d frightened her.

They descended the hill in the direction of the town; it rose up on its ridge before them.

‘Have you anywhere in particular you’d like to go?’ he asked.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to the pictures.’

Later that night she saw him on to the bus.

Since the war a bus station had been built on derelict ground adjacent to the city centre: they stood waiting in a draughty concrete shelter; her own bus left from an adjoining stop.

‘I’ll start looking for a flat,’ she said. ‘Do you think you’d like to help?’

‘In what way?’

‘To help to choose it.’

‘I don’t think I would.’ The bus station, late at night, was relatively deserted; occasionally an empty bus lumbered in or out; two or three tiny queues were scattered across the concrete spaces.

‘I don’t think you should rely on me at all,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. And as the bus came into the station and its arriving passengers descended she added, ‘I’ll speak to Derek. He’s no right in getting in touch with you at all.’

‘What will you tell him?’

‘To mind his own affairs,’ she said.

‘Well, I don’t really mind so much about that,’ he said and, as the empty bus drew up, he stooped down to where her head nestled against his arm and kissed her.

Mr Reagan had died: he collapsed one afternoon in the garden.
His walks had been confined for some time to the yard at the back of the house, and the stretch of narrow garden that ran down to the field. Each day, when the weather was fine, he could be seen shuffling along the overgrown path to the fence where he could gaze over at the children playing in the field, and one tea-time his father, who had been watching him from the kitchen door, had called out, ‘Bryan’s fallen,’ and had hurried out across the yard.

He and Mr Shaw had carried him inside.

Two days later, without leaving his house again, he’d died.

‘Oh, he was a fine man,’ his father said. ‘He was fine in a way that men round here aren’t often fine,’ he added. ‘It’s a tragedy about his son.’

Michael now had become a recluse; occasionally he could be seen about the village, invariably in the evenings: he went to the picture house alone, or would walk the road between the village and the station, as if setting out on a journey or coming back.

‘He wanted Michael to be a fighter. To take the world by the scruff of the neck.’

‘You can’t force people into what they’re not meant to be,’ his mother said.

‘Don’t I know that? Aren’t I the one
exactly
to know a thing like that?’ his father said. On the day of the funeral he had walked with Mrs Reagan behind the coffin; she had no relative. When he came back, flush-faced from drinking, he said, ‘Nay, he’s got some spirit in him. Did you know what he did at the Rose and Crown? Got up on a table and played his fiddle.’

‘Who did?’ his mother said.

‘Michael.’

And a few days later Mrs Reagan came over to the yard and knocked on the door and when Colin answered it had handed him a parcel. It was bound up thickly with string.

‘Mr Reagan wanted you to have this, Colin,’ she said.

‘That was very kind of him,’ he said.

‘He looked on you with special favour,’ she said, almost formally, her narrow features flushing, her eyes, dark and set closely together, gazing at him over the bridge of her nose. ‘“The one nugget out of all this dross,”’ she added, imitating vaguely Mr Reagan’s accent.

He watched her go back, round-shouldered, passing with strangely delicate steps across the backs.

‘Nay, look at this,’ his father said, standing at the table as he unwrapped the parcel. He found him the scissors to cut the string.

Inside was the gold chain Mr Reagan invariably wore from his waistcoat pocket.

‘Well, it wasn’t a pebble after all,’ his father added, looking at the gold disc attached to the end.

It was designed in the shape of a gold star and bore a Latin inscription.

‘“Aut vincere aut mori”,’ he read.

‘Sithee, he must have thought a lot to give you that,’ his father said, gazing at the chain. ‘He was a fine sport, was Bryan. In a better world than this he’d have had a grander life.’

‘So would we all,’ his mother said.

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘But him especially. He could spot a poet. He had an eye. And he always stood up for his opinions.’

‘Yes, he was a grand neighbour, I suppose,’ his mother said, getting out her handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

Two weeks later Mrs Reagan was taken ill herself. She went away to hospital; his mother went to visit her. Mrs Reagan however had already left the hospital and had been taken into a mental institution.

‘I can’t understand it, she was standing in that door a few days ago,’ his father said, more shocked by this than he had been by Reagan’s death. ‘I talked to her in the street a day or two after. Why, I even went to the funeral with her. She was as right as rain I thought after that.’

‘Nay, but she idolized him,’ his mother said. ‘She put him on a pedestal and thought he could do no wrong.’

‘Well, there’s no danger of that happening in this house,’ his father said. ‘No danger of that, I should say, at all.’

For a few days Michael wasn’t seen by anyone; then, one evening, the lights were on in all the rooms: a car stood at the door. The sound of music and laughter came from the house.

The following afternoon, with the curtains still drawn, three men emerged; they stood in the tiny garden, blinking in the sun, then finally climbed over the fence and sat in the field. A little
later, white-faced, as if he’d just wakened, Michael joined them; he climbed over the fence with some difficulty and, to the three men’s laughter, stumbled in the grass the other side.

‘Nay, they look a dissolute lot,’ his mother said. ‘Poor Michael. His mother would go mad if she was here to see it.’

‘She has gone mad,’ his father said, standing at the door and gazing out with interest at the noisy group: they were wrestling with one another and Michael, his white arms visible, was endeavouring to join in.

The men came again the following week-end; occasionally, too, they came odd weekdays. Sometimes a fourth figure, a woman, joined them. The Shaws complained about the noise: Michael, in his shirt-sleeves, holding a bottle, the laughing group behind him, stood in the yard struggling to apologize.

On odd evenings other groups of two or three men, and occasionally the woman, re-appeared: Michael went away for over a fortnight. Stories came back of him being glimpsed in neighbouring towns, once of being arrested.

Nevertheless, when he finally re-appeared, he was dressed in a suit; he wore a trilby hat; a scarf was knotted loosely round his neck.

‘I think his mother must have left him summat,’ his father said. ‘Some sort of inheritance she’s scraped together. He’s got his hands on it, I think, a bit too soon. Do you think I ought to go and talk to him?’

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ his mother said.

‘Nay, I owe it to Bryan. He was a good friend to me,’ his father said. And one evening, when he knew Michael was in, he went across.

He came back an hour later.

‘Dost know, I don’t think I’ve ever been in their house,’ he said. ‘And now I have been I wish I hadn’t.’

He sat pale-faced, half-trembling, beside the fire.

‘He’s sold every stick of furniture,’ his father added. ‘There’s nothing in that house but a chair and a bed. He must have taken it out at night. “Nay, Michael,” I said, “dost think your mother’s going to like all this?” Do you know what he said? “My mother’ll never see it again.” I said, “Even if she isn’t, and I hope she is, she’d scarce like to think of you living here like this.” “I like
living here like this,” he said. “You don’t have to worry.” Don’t have to worry!’ His father shook his head. ‘“Nay, Michael,” I told him, “we worry about you because we knew your father, and we’ve known you”, I told him, “nearly all your life.” “Oh, I can take care of myself, Mr Saville,” he said. “It’s the first time, after all, I’ve had the chance.”’ His father wiped his eyes. ‘You know how his mother kept that house: cleaner even than Mrs Bletchley’s. Cleaner even than Mrs Shaw’s.’

‘Well,
this
house has never been dirty,’ his mother said.

‘Not dirty, but it’s always been lived in,’ his father said.

‘Well this house is as clean as
anyone
’s,’ his mother said.

‘But not
morbidly
clean, now is it?’ his father said, distressed to have to argue with his mother like this.

‘Well, I’m sorry to hear he’s made such a mess of it,’ his mother said, yet grieved that her own efforts in this direction had gone uncohsidered.

‘Nay, I damn well wish I’d never gone,’ his father said. ‘I should have kept my nose clean out of it.’

Colin met Reagan one evening in the street; he was wearing not only a suit, but a spotted bow-tie, and he carried a cane: his trilby hat was missing. His hair, which was longer now than it had ever been, fell down in a single greased swathe at the back of his neck.

‘Hi, Colin,’ he said, waving the cane casually and having crossed the street to greet him. A smell of scent came from his figure. His eyes were dark; they glared at him with a peculiar intensity; his forehead shone, his cheeks were sallow; a tooth was missing from the front of his mouth. ‘How have you been?’ he added. ‘I hear you’ve finished teaching.’

‘Not quite,’ he said.

‘Come into town one night and have a drink.’

‘Where do you usually go?’ he said.

‘Oh, any amount of spots.
Not
the Assembly Rooms, I can tell you that.’ He tapped the cane casually against his foot: there was some absurd parody evident in his dress, some grotesque misappliance of his father’s fastidiousness and style.