Saville (75 page)

‘We had a house. Near one of the shops. His family bought it. It stood in a little park, a stone affair, with an asphalt drive. It had eight bedrooms.’

‘Did you sleep in separate rooms?’ he said.

‘No.’ She laughed; the inquiry, suddenly, lightened her mood. ‘We had a nephew staying with us. He was going to one of the local schools.’

She was small and serious; some reflection on the past, or her home, brought back a darkening of her expression. She glanced away towards the window: perhaps the desolation of living in a flat, alone, with no connections, had suddenly occurred to her. He was surprised she’d chosen such a neglected place: the house, one of a row of old Victorian terraces, occupied a street opening off the city centre; many times he’d walked past it on his way to school.

‘What was your husband like?’ he said.

‘I believe I told you.’

She stood now with her back to him; it was as if he’d cast her off entirely.

‘I prefer a small place, actually,’ she said. ‘For one thing, I never liked the Snainton house. It was dark and huge and damp and cold and there never seemed to be anyone in it.’

‘Were you in it alone all day?’

‘I worked at the shop.’

‘What sort of work?’

‘I supervised the office. We manufactured carpets, and sold them retail, you see, as well.’

He grasped her arm, she was very light and slim: he could
almost have lifted her in one hand. Yet, in other moods, she seemed heavy and unwieldy, as if she wouldn’t be moved, physically, by anything at all. He had never known anyone whose physique, seemingly, changed with every feeling; even the texture of her skin varied from soft to hard – it appeared to be something over which she had no control herself.

She’d turned now and looked up at him directly.

‘Why won’t you commit yourself?’ she said.

‘To what?’

‘Anything.’

She released herself and moved away.

‘In any case, I shouldn’t ask. I’ve nothing to reproach you for.’

Once, when they were walking round the town, she had shown him her parents’ house. It stood in a tree-lined road beyond the grammar school, a large, detached, brick-built house in the garden of which a man not unlike his father was working, overailed, stooped with age, grey-haired.

He could never understand why she hadn’t gone back there to live.

‘What do your parents think?’ he said now, gesturing at the room.

‘About this?’ she said. ‘They haven’t seen it,’ and, a moment later, half-amused, she’d added, ‘Why do you relate everything to parents? Are you so inextricably bound up with yours?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s economics.’

‘Is it?’ she said, and added, still smiling, ‘I’m beginning to wonder.’ And a moment later, still watching him, she went on freshly, ‘In any case they haven’t seen it. Nor, I’m glad to say, are they likely to.’

‘Won’t they want to come here, then?’ he said.

‘Only if I ask them.’

‘Won’t you ask them?’

‘Not for the present. No,’ she said.

On two occasions, when he knew she would be working in the shop, he’d gone to Bennett’s and surprised her behind the counter; she’d trained as a pharmacist as a girl and had frequently, during periods of her parents’ illness, or during holidays, taken over the shop completely. It stood, an old brick building, at the
junction of a narrow sidestreet: the windows were tall, and bevelled outwards, and contained the old jars and coloured liquids and large, black ebony cabinets of a century before.

On the first occasion he thought she’d been embarrassed: she was standing in a white smock, immediately inside the counter, serving a customer. Her father, a small, delicately featured man, with white hair and a virulent red face, had been turned to one of the cabinets, removing packets. Evidently surprised by the change of tone in her voice as she greeted Colin, her father had gazed at him with some curiosity over the top of a pair of spectacles.

On that occasion she had made some apology and come out of the shop, walking down the street towards the city centre with her arm in his as if to reassure herself that nothing untoward had happened, that she hadn’t lost him or been diminished by this sudden revelation of her working life and to confirm to her father, who was undoubtedly watching from the window, that this was no ordinary encounter: in such a way she had drawn Colin closer to her.

On the second occasion she had refused to come out at all. It was an hour to closing-time: he came in after school, driven into town on the back of Stephens’s motorbike, and he had had to go away and wait in the bar of a pub until an hour later she came in and greeted him, as she did always, with a formal kiss on the cheek. It was as if, in a curious way, they’d been married several years: she had this peculiar intimacy and directness, a self-assurance which came from her curious bouts of introspection, a self-preoccupation which diminished her, in his eyes, in no way at all; out of them she invariably came to him more strongly.

‘What did your father say?’ he’d asked her after his first visit to the shop.

‘Nothing,’ she’d said, then had added, after some moments’ reflection, ‘He thinks you’re very young.’

Now he said, ‘Do they know you’ve taken a flat? I suppose they do.’

‘I told them I was looking for one,’ she said. ‘In any case, they’ll have heard from Maureen. That I’ve stopped living there, I mean.’

‘Do you ever go home?’

‘Occasionally,’ she said.

She watched him with a frown: he was trying to unknot a puzzle, one she herself couldn’t recognize, or – if she could recognize it – understand.

‘They’re very much preoccupied,’ she added, and when he said, ‘With what?’ she said, ‘With one another. They always have been. They married young: I don’t think, really, they wanted any children. Apart from the shop, I don’t think my father’s thought about anything except my mother. And she’s never thought about anything except him. They’re totally absorbed in one another. And that, mind you, after almost forty years.’

‘What were they like when you were young?’ he said.

‘They kept us very much in attendance. Maureen went off and got herself engaged when she was only nineteen. It didn’t work out. But she married, however, very soon after. My parents, finally, have never really been interested in either of us; they never neglected us; we went away to schools; they were pleased to see us whenever we came back, but it was always, I had the feeling, as an adjunct of their lives.’

In the shop he had sensed a peculiar amiability between the father and his daughter: they worked casually together, without any tenseness, with a great deal of fondness. They might have been friends, or brother and sister; there was nothing of the obsessiveness he experienced at home.

He had told her about his family: she was very much interested by his parents and at one point he had been tempted to take her to meet them, then, for some reason, he’d resisted and merely talked about them, and Richard and Steven.

‘Why are you so jealous of Steve?’ she’d said. ‘He sounds so fine and unprejudiced.’

‘But, then, what’s made him so fine and unprejudiced?’ he’d said. ‘He’s had chances of a freedom I’ve never had myself.’

‘Haven’t you?’ she said, smiling. ‘I’d have thought you had. Isn’t it his nature, not just his circumstances, you’re envious of?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s the circumstances, it’s
been
the circumstance, all along.’

‘It’s very odd.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It happens in most families, I imagine.’

‘Does it?’ She’d watched him with a smile. ‘I’ve never been jealous of Maureen, nor, as far as I’m aware, has she ever been jealous of me. We’ve quarrelled, but not as rivals, always more or less as equals.’

‘But then your parents threw you out,’ he said.

‘They didn’t throw us out.’

‘But you felt
disengaged
from them, disengaged
by
them, to a mutual degree. Whereas Steven always had more of my mother than I have.’

‘Yet you’re very involved with your mother,’ she said.

‘Am I?’

‘I think so.’

He’d been very surly: he hated to have elements of his behaviour pointed out, even if, absurdly, he’d pointed them out himself only a moment before. It was because he’d pointed them out that he hated her to refer to them: his having referred to them, he imagined, made them invalid.

‘I think you’re very naïve,’ she said. ‘It stands out a mile what you’re jealous of.’

Now, in the faded flat, he looked at her with a sense of defeat: both their pasts had caught up with them, she with her strange abstractness, her separateness not only from her parents but from her husband, he with his strange absorption in his family which, now that he needed it, refused to release him.

They sat in silence for a while. The room had a musty smell: he had brought some flowers; even they failed to dispel either by their brightness of their scent the drabness of the room; it was as if it were something she’d deliberately chosen.

‘You being so depressed about it, depresses me,’ she said.

‘Am I depressed?’ he said.

‘Not really by the room. I can have it decorated. I’ll get some different furniture. It’ll look like new in a week or two. The room itself is not important.’

‘Then what am I depressed by?’ he said, for his spirits, the longer he was in the room, with the bustle of the town outside, sank lower and lower.

‘It’s because it’s faced us’, she said, ‘with one another, and
there’s no Phil, no Maureen or her husband, and no
mother
’, she added, ‘to hide behind.’

‘I suppose that’s something you wanted,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s what you mean by commitment.’

She stroked her skirt around her knees: her figure, in the vastness of the chair, looked tiny and vulnerable once again. He’d begun to hate her, and to be frightened of her; she represented more than he could imagine, some sticking to the past, some conformation of his past which he didn’t like, some determination to secure him. He was wanting to hurt her all the time.

And as if she sensed his preoccupation she said, ‘What about you? Do your parents know about me?’

‘No,’ he said, then added, for no reason he could think of, ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘Do you want to tell them?’

‘I see no point.’ He added, ‘They know I see someone. I’m out every night.’

‘But not with me.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Do I complicate your life?’

‘No,’ he said again, stubbornly. He shook his head.

‘You complicate mine. But in a way I like,’ she said, anxious to appease him.

They went out a little later; they had a meal in a café: there was scarcely anywhere to eat in the town.

When they went back, later in the evening, to the flat, he felt his resistance, a slow, half-hesitant rancour, rising. He’d become peculiarly brutal: it was he who was frightened, and he was frightened more by himself, he thought, than by anything outside. He had left her after midnight, when the last bus had gone, and had hitched a lift part of the way to the village in a lorry. It was two o’clock in the morning by the time he got back home.

His mother was quiet the following morning.

‘Is anything the matter?’ he said, bitterly, constrained himself by her silence and the gravity of the house. Steven and Richard had already gone to school.

‘What time did you come in?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

His mother was completing dressing herself behind a chair. It was something that he hated: she would come down with her worn skirt and jumper, or her faded dress, and stand behind a chair to put on her stockings. It was some habit from her childhood, for she always took off her stockings in the evening, by the fire, and laid them on a chair; they were invariably in holes. It tormented him to watch her: it tormented him to ignore it. He never knew why she persisted, and she went on with it mechanically, finally flinging down the hem of her dress with an absurd gesture of propriety.

‘Your dad said it was two o’clock.’

‘So what?’ he said.

After he’d gone to bed, locking the back door to which he had a key, he’d heard his father rise and go downstairs, ostentatiously, to make some tea. Only three hours later he’d got up again to go to work.

Now his mother said, re-emerging from behind the chair, ‘It means none of us, particularly your father, gets any rest.’

‘I can’t see why.’

‘Because we lie awake wondering where you are. Then, if we do fall asleep, we’re woken up when you do come in. Then your dad has to get up at half-past five.’

‘He could get up later. It doesn’t take him half an hour to walk to the pit.’ He went on eating his breakfast.

‘He gets up earlier so he can light the fire. To help
me
, when I get up,’ she said.

‘I’ll get up and light it, then,’ he said. ‘Or Richard can. Or Steve.’

‘And who gets up to make sure they have?’

He didn’t answer.

‘If you’re so little in the house I don’t know why you go on living here,’ she said, turning away now to the sink and occupying herself with washing-up.

‘I come here because I can’t afford to live anywhere else. Not do that and go on paying something here,’ he added.

‘You should apply yourself more to teaching,’ she said. ‘No wonder you were asked to leave. If you’re out half the night how can you teach? You can’t’, she added, ‘have the concentration.’

‘It wasn’t lack of concentration I was fired for,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but it might just as well have been.’

He was caught in a dilemma which, a few years before, he could scarcely have imagined. He even began to look enviously at Reagan, and wondered, wildly, if he might not move in with him. Yet Michael’s house was increasingly deserted: it was rumoured, when he didn’t appear for a week, that he’d left the place for good, but late one night the light went on in the upstairs room and the next morning his figure could be seen across the backs.

New houses were being built across the village: his father had put down his name for one. People were moving in from neighbouring villages. A factory employing women sewing garments was set up in a prefabricated building in a yard adjacent to the pit. A new shop was opened; a corner of the village street was widened; a bus shelter had been built; the Miners’ Institute hired entertainers whose names were heard on the radio. The Shaws had a television; shortly after, the Bletchleys bought a set as well.