Saville (74 page)

‘Are you working at present?’ he said.

‘Oh, I have one or two things,’ he said. ‘I’ve joined a band, on a wholly voluntary basis. I don’t do much.’

‘How do you make a living?’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Michael said airily, ‘there are ways and means,’ and, as he moved off towards his darkened house, he added, ‘Remember now: I’ll hold you to that drink.’

It was in fact several evenings later that he met him again; they were both converging on the city centre. Michael had evidently been upstairs on the bus, and must have been already there when he’d got on himself in the village.

‘I say,’ Reagan said, ‘are you up here for the night?’

‘I’m meeting a friend,’ he said, and indicated the hunched shape of Stephens waiting by a shop.

Michael took one look at Stephens and glanced away. ‘Well, see you,’ he said casually and raised his hand. He carried no cane; he was dressed in a raincoat with a turned-up collar, his head looking even larger than usual beneath his trilby hat. ‘Do you see Belcher these days?’ he added.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Maybe one day we should get together.’ Yet he was already moving across the road and some other remark he made was lost.

‘Who was that remarkable-looking object?’ Stephens said.

‘A friend.’

‘He looks like an attenuated version of Humphrey Bogart,’ Stephens added from his own diminutive height and still gazing with amazement at the disappearing figure which, even from a distance, was conspicuous amongst the evening crowds. ‘What does he do?’

‘Nothing at present.’

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Another like you.’

‘Oh, I’ve still got one or two weeks,’ he said.

‘Freewheeling, though. Freewheeling,’ Stephens said.

And later, as he walked home with Stephens, down the hill towards the river, his friend, who had been in a convivial mood all evening, had added, ‘I’ll be leaving soon, of course, myself. Casting myself off from this rotten town: embarking from these shores of oblivion. I’ve given my notice in from the end of next
term. I’ll be leaving for London in a couple of months. Why not come with me?’

‘We’ve been through all that’, he said, ‘before.’

‘You’ve other tricks up your sleeve, young Saville?’

‘None that I’m aware of, no,’ he said.

‘Still bound by convention, piety and a grotesque compliance to the family that hast engendered thou.’

‘I don’t think I’m bound to anyone,’ he said.

Stephens hummed to himself for several seconds: hunched up, with his head thrust back, he represented, in the darkness of the street, a figure not altogether unlike a tortoise, scenting the air, inquisitive for food.

‘You don’t deceive me,’ he said, finally, and adding, ‘I saw through you from the very start. You’re Pilgrim bogged down at the gates of the city. Look southward, Colin: the land is bright.’

In fact a moon shone in a clear sky before them. It was early summer.

Numerous other figures drifted through the streets in the fading light: the town looked bright and clean.

‘And what are you going to do?’ Colin said.

‘I shall look around. I shall make inquiries. I have an introduction to a man in television.’

Colin laughed.

‘Scorn not the medium of the prophets,’ Stephens said. ‘Television is the medium of the future.’

‘Whose future?’

‘My future,’ Stephens said. ‘I intend to contribute to a programme on which, in visual as well as verbal form, I shall give my views on the topics of the day. The re-emergence, for instance, of Germany as a major power, the confluence of its aims with those of America; the resurgence of Japan; the new Philistinism of the post-war intelligentsia; the seduction of the proletariat by a materialism even more hideous than the one that initially engulfed it; the gradual and unconscious debilitation of the west and the coming, inevitable war with Russia.’

‘It all sounds highly improbable,’ he said.

‘These are the themes of the present,’ Stephens said. ‘These are the issues that crowd in upon us every day: the disintegration
of the psyche; the communalization of sensibility; the trivialization of human intercourse and reason; the birth, in Russia and elsewhere, of a re-incarnated bourgeoisie; the plethora of ignorance which, in our generation, after the age of elitism, will rule the world. Where do you place yourself’, he added, ‘in regard to that?’

Colin walked along with his hands in his pockets; Stephens, his face streaming with sweat from the night’s drinking, regarded him with a smile.

They came out on the bridge; Stephens’s house stood up a narrow street of newly built semi-detached houses almost opposite.

The moon was reflected in the river.

‘Well? What
do
you believe in?’ Stephens added. He leaned up on the parapet and gazed at the water: the river coiled like a broad, quaintly luminous thoroughfare between the fabric of the mills on either bank.

‘I believe in doing good,’ he said.

‘Then you
are
a sentimentalist,’ Stephens said.

‘Not your kind of good. Not at all,’ he said.

‘You’re not a religious maniac
as well
as being an idealist?’ he said.

‘I don’t believe I’m an idealist at all,’ he said.

They parted finally at the end of Stephens’s road: he could see his friend’s motorbike parked under a tarpaulin cover in one of the gardens.

‘I shall look you up when I leave for London,’ Stephens said. ‘I shall drench you with letters. “I come to turn children against their parents”, says Christ in one of the less sensational gospels and I, I can assure you, will do the same.’

Colin crossed the road below the bridge and waited for his bus: sitting on the upper deck when it arrived was Michael.

‘Well,’ Reagan said, nodding his head. ‘I thought it was you. I saw you in the road ahead.’

They sat side by side on a long, bench-like seat at the front of the bus.

‘Was that your friend you were talking to?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What does he do?’

‘He teaches at present,’ he said. ‘Though shortly, I believe, he’s going to London.’

‘I thought I might go there as well, in the not too distant future,’ Reagan said. ‘There are one or two openings for musicians,’ he added. His collar was undone; because of the low ceiling of the bus he’d removed his hat. ‘In addition to which I’ve one or two connections.’

‘Perhaps the two of you will meet,’ he said.

‘Oh, not in the circles I move in,’ Michael said. His hands, which were tiny and long-fingered, were clenched and unclenched in his raincoated lap.

The sky had darkened: the lights of the bus lay out in a broad swathe in the moonlit road ahead.

‘If I knew I could get some accommodation I’d move out of the village,’ he added. ‘I can’t tell you how sick I am of living there. You have no privacy with the neighbours. You excepted, of course. Though you, I suppose, have always been different.’

Colin waited; Reagan fingered his hat, poised on his rain-coated knees before him.

‘The fact is the house is a colliery house, and because my father worked at the pit they can’t throw me out. I thought at one time of offering to buy it. Then I thought if I did I could never sell it. All these years we’ve been paying rent: we’ve paid for that house ten times over. Well, so have you, I suppose,’ he added.

The bus rattled on. At the summit of a hill they could see, faintly, the glow of the village lights in the sky: it outlined the profile of a wooded ridge between them.

‘I can’t tell you how sickened I get coming back like this,’ he said again. He gazed down forlornly, dark-eyed, at the road ahead.

‘How is your mother?’ Colin said.

‘She’s mad. She’ll never get out.’ His gaze didn’t shift from the road itself. ‘She never recognizes me when I visit her. Perhaps it’s just as well. She blamed me, you know, for my father’s death. Not openly, that is.’

They sat in silence for a while; at each of the stops more people got off.

Soon they were sitting alone on the upper deck.

A peculiar desolation gripped Colin. It was as if all his past had come together, that some final account had been submitted: his future suddenly seemed as desolate and as empty as the road ahead.

‘Well, here it comes, then,’ Michael said and squeezing past him made quickly for the stairs.

They walked through the darkened streets together.

A man was waiting at the end of the road; he moved away from beneath a lighted lamp as they passed.

‘Do you want to come in for a drink, Colin?’ Michael said.

‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

‘Don’t if you don’t want to.’

‘I’d like to, if you didn’t mind,’ he said.

‘Oh, company’s company,’ he said and glanced up, as if unconsciously, towards Bletchley’s house.

It was the first time he’d been inside Reagan’s home.

There was a pungent odour of stale food.

As his father had described, the rooms were bare: in the kitchen a mat stood before an empty fire; a wooden chair, with its back broken, stood directly opposite. On the floor, in the corner, was propped a violin case.

The wallpaper, meticulously shaped and patterned, and which Mrs Reagan had kept scrupulously clean, was now stained and greased. The unblemished lino had vanished from the floor.

‘Sit down,’ Michael said, indicating the chair. ‘I’ll get you a glass.’

He opened a cupboard and lifted out a bottle.

He set two cups on the floor and proceeded to fill them.

‘You’ve never been in here before?’ he said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Your father came one night. It was kind of him to bother. Mrs Bletchley came as well. She’s been two or three times. She was fond of my mother. She’s even been to see her, though my mother didn’t recognize her. She’s got something matter with her leg as well.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It might be cancer. None of them give her much chance.’ He added, after drinking from the cup, ‘I’ve never heard of cancer in the leg before.’

From outside came the quiet panting of the pit. The light was dim, there was no shade around the bulb.

‘Do you want to sit on the chair?’ Colin said.

‘No, no,’ Michael said, and sat on the floor. ‘I don’t light a fire,’ he added. ‘I’m not often in.’

‘When do you propose to go to London?’ he said.

‘Oh, I’ve one or two opportunities I want to look at first,’ he said. ‘The whole style of music, you see, has changed. The one I was brought up in has gone for ever. The story of my life.’ He finished the cup and half-filled it once again.

Colin, less quickly, drank from his.

‘Have you noticed how there are no young people living here,’ he added. ‘There are hardly any young ones at the pit. They don’t even play cricket in the field any more: Batty, Stringer, your father, Shaw – they’re all too old. And there’s no one, as far as I can see, has taken their place. They’re even talking of shutting up the pit.’

‘Yes,’ he said, for his father had mentioned this some time before.

‘It’s too old-fashioned, and its resources are too limited,’ Michael said. ‘Just think: my father worked there all his life. And Shaw. And your father’s worked there a year or two himself.’ He raised his head. ‘Do you remember that time we walked to Brierley, and a man gave us a lift in the cab of a lorry? Oh, how I’d like to go back to then. Everything seemed certain and safe, though I don’t suppose it was, or didn’t seem so at the time. I never did know what relevance that name was supposed to have: the one the man told me to mention to my father. I suppose now we’ll never know,’ he added.

He began to moan to himself a little later: his head dropped. He hadn’t taken off his coat; his hat, which he’d hung on a hook, had dropped to the floor.

Finally, when Colin called to him, he shook his head: he’d been drinking heavily, he’d assumed, throughout the evening. As Colin stood up, Michael slumped to the floor.

He lifted him, astonished at his lightness; with considerable difficulty because of the length of his body he carried him upstairs.

The main bedroom at the front was empty; so was the second bedroom at the back.

In the tiny remaining bedroom was a single bed.

Colin laid Michael down and took off his coat.

‘Is that you, Maurice?’ he said and put up his arms, speculatively, reaching out.

‘It’s Colin,’ he said. ‘I’ll cover you up.’

‘Oh, Colin,’ Michael said, as if he had trouble remembering who he was.

He took off the raincoat, removed Reagan’s shoes and drew the blanket over him. His socks were in holes; his feet stuck out at the end of the bed; the shirt, too, he noticed, was black at the collar.

He turned off the light.

Michael made no sound.

Colin took out the key from the lock downstairs, let himself out of the front door, then posted the key back through the letter-box.

Then, his hands in his pockets, he went up the street towards his home.

‘What do you think to it?’ she said. The room looked down into a tiny yard. From the open window at the opposite end came the bustle of traffic in the street outside.

‘Do you mind living here?’ he asked.

‘Mind?’ She watched him with a smile. She seemed content.

‘You’ve always had a house before. Even your sister’s house,’ he said.

‘Haven’t you ever lived on your own?’ she said.

‘No,’ he told her.

‘You ought to try.’

She moved across the room; there was a faded carpet on the floor; the furniture was old. The wallpaper was faintly marked: it sprawled in a dull pattern of sepia flowers across the walls.

‘I’ve never been able to afford it,’ he said.

‘Oh, you always go on about money.’

‘It’s all there is to go on about,’ he said, ‘or very nearly.’

‘Where
you
come from,’ she said. ‘But not where I come from.’

Yet she was disconcerted by his dislike of the room; it might have been the first time she’d lived on her own herself. The flat was in no way like the stolid elegance of her sister’s house, with its polished floors, thick rugs, and heavy, chintz-covered chairs and mahogany furniture.

‘Where did you live with your husband?’ he said.