Saville (47 page)

Finally the doctor came out, briskly, screwing back the top of a fountain-pen and clipping it inside his pocket. He went through to the front door, his father following.

The sound of his car, a moment later, came echoing from the street outside.

‘You can fetch that from the chemist,’ his father said, coming in then with a slip of paper.

His mother was in bed when he got back in.

‘I’ve told her she shouldn’t do any work,’ his father said. ‘She’s to do no lifting, and she’s not to come downstairs again, except for the toilet until the doctor’s seen her. You see what happens when you don’t follow instructions.’

Her illness frightened his father: it gave him strength; he buckled to the housework now himself, and came home from work with an eye anxious for any job that hadn’t been done, ironing his own clothes, washing, scrubbing the floor and washing the windows, but with none of his earlier resentment. Now she was fastened upstairs, with the doctor coming every day, and with the threat of the hospital hanging over them once again, an older, more familiar momentum returned to the place: his father knew what he ought to do, and did it, cooking his mother’s meals and carrying them upstairs, sleeping on the sofa now, whistling to himself as he worked in the kitchen, going upstairs to kiss his mother goodbye each evening before he set off for work.

‘You take good care of her,’ he’d tell Colin, coming down, before he left. ‘Ought she wants you get it. And keep Richard quiet when he goes to bed.’

Colin would go in to see her himself before he went to bed; she would be lying back against the pillow, sometimes reading a paper, other times dozing, glancing up, casually, saying, ‘Have you washed, then, love?’ or, ‘Have you locked the doors? Your father’s got his key, then, hasn’t he?’ half-dazed, almost as if he were some other person, leaning forward suddenly to touch his hair, to push back his fringe, inquiringly, as if unsure for a moment who he was.

In the mornings, if his father wasn’t back, he’d take her in a cup of tea, quietly setting it on the chair beside her bed, listening to her breathing, not wakening her or touching the curtains. Then, having got Steven up and Richard, he would tiptoe down
the stairs. Sometimes, waking drowsily, she would call to the stairs, ‘Is that you, Colin? What time is it?’ waiting then for him to come back in and adding, ‘Can you draw the curtains, love?’ or, ‘If you’ll hand me the coat I’ll have to go downstairs.’ She crossed the yard on her own to the toilet, white, thin-faced, not glancing up when anyone called so that often Mrs Shaw or Mrs Bletchley watched her from their doors, not speaking, their arms folded. ‘How’s your mother, Colin?’ Mrs Shaw would say and shake her head before he answered. ‘She’s not looking well. She ought to be in hospital,’ she’d tell him.

One Sunday evening, when his father changed shifts, he borrowed his bike and cycled out to St Olaf’s. The service was still on; the soldiers in the old mansion were sitting on the steps below the porch: one or two were playing with a ball between the trees. From several of the ancient, mullioned windows soldiers’ heads were hanging out, their voices calling, echoing in the yard beyond the church.

He rode up and down the road opposite the church until he saw a verger hook back the doors. He waited then beneath a tree; several girls and youths came out, the older people standing in groups around the gate. He saw Audrey and Marion with several other girls he recognized; they stood by the stone wall for a while, in a circle, laughing, glancing over at the groups of boys. Finally one or two boys moved off, slowly; some of the girls began to follow.

Colin waited for a while beneath the tree; then, as the group of youths rounded the corner towards the village he started after them, cycling slowly. Audrey glanced across, then Marion; perhaps they’d expected Stafford as well for they glanced behind him, but seeing the road empty but for the following line of boys, they continued talking to the girls on either side. Colin paused, not knowing any one of them to speak to, then cycled slowly on until the first of the houses came into sight. He got off the bike, took off his cycle clips, and waited for the youths to pass.

Neither Audrey nor Marion paid him any attention; there was a brief glance across from the dark-haired girl, but it was more a gesture directed at the world in general, half-smirking, the eyes narrowed, the eyebrows raised, the mouth pulled wide in the beginning of a smile.

He got on the bike again after the line of pursuing boys had passed, and cycled slowly in their wake. Finally, when they reached a bus stop in the centre of the village they stood in a large group around a wooden seat, still talking and laughing. Occasionally one figure would chase another, a pursuit egged on by the others and ending in screams – a girl pushed back against a hedge, a boy hanging over her, pinning her arms, helpless suddenly, and grinning.

At one point a boy and girl moved off, along a hedged lane adjoining the stop: two or three of the boys called out and, between the slowly shifting figures, he caught a glimpse of Audrey, sitting on the bench, smiling suddenly and shaking her head.

Some time later the group parted and Marion appeared: she was wearing a reddish hat. She wore high heels. She came over to the hedge where he was leaning on the bike and, glancing back at the boys, who, in turn, were gazing across in her direction, said, ‘Audrey’s given me a message. She doesn’t want to see you again. I didn’t want to tell you, but there it is.’ Some comment was made amongst the boys around the stop and a moment later the girls as well as the boys had laughed. Marion, aware of the audience at her back, had shaken her shoulders and tossed her head. ‘Is there anything you want to tell her, then?’

‘I’d like to talk to her,’ he said. ‘If she can drag herself away from those grinning idiots.’

‘Those grinning idiots, as you put it,’ Marion said, ‘are some of my friends.’

‘If she can drag herself away from some of your friends,’ he said, suddenly gratified by the eloquence his feelings had given him.

‘I’m sure she doesn’t want to. But I’ll ask her all the same,’ she said.

She walked back to the watching group. His message was passed loudly through the wall of figures to Audrey sitting on the bench.

Audrey, in a slightly subdued voice, had given an answer back.

Marion, her face pale beneath her bell-shaped hat, called over, ‘She doesn’t want to speak to you, my dear. I said she wouldn’t.’

He picked up a blade of grass from the verge and set it slowly
in the corner of his mouth. His hand, he saw, had begun to tremble. His whole body began to shake.

A moment later some of the boys and two of the girls moved off; they disappeared up a road between the houses. A bus appeared at a bend in the road. It rattled down towards the stop.

A man got off; Marion and Audrey, followed by the boys, got on.

He could see them at the rear windows as the bus went past, a hand waving, and behind, a brief glimpse of Audrey’s face, half-smiling. The bus disappeared in a cloud of dust.

He mounted the bike and cycled after it for a while, re-passing the church where soldiers now were sitting along the wall, and turning down the road which, from the amount of dust in the air, he assumed the bus had taken.

After half an hour’s cycling, and passing several stops, he turned in the road, idly, and, freewheeling, started back, re-passing the church once more, the wall outside deserted, and continuing on towards the village; it was almost dark by the time he got back home.

‘And what did Stafford have to say?’ his father said when he went in the kitchen. ‘Not borrowed another book again?’

‘I didn’t go,’ he said, and shook his head. It was the notion of cycling to Stafford’s that he had used to borrow his father’s bike.

‘So where have you been till this time? It’s long past the time tha mu’n be in bed.’

‘I just cycled around,’ he said. ‘I thought I might go to church.’

‘Church?’ his father said.

‘I got there too late,’ he said, and shook his head.

‘And what’s thy doing at church?’ his father said, as if he connected it in some way with his mother.

‘I thought I might go. On Sunday evenings. Instead of the afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a bit old for Sunday School,’ he added.

‘Nay, tha mu’n do what thy want about church,’ his father said. ‘Tha’s not punctured the bike or ought?’ he added.

‘No,’ he said, and added, ‘I’ll get up and get you some breakfast if you like.’

‘Nay, I don’t eat ought, when I get up,’ his father said. He looked at him uneasily as he crossed over to the stairs. ‘Think on about coming in late,’ he added.

Later, from his room, he heard his father say, ‘I think our Colin’s been courting. He’s come in with as daft a look as I’ve seen on his face,’ the door closing then, his mother’s voice murmuring from the other side.

He heard a faint laugh from his parents’ room, the creaking of their bed; he slowly succumbed to his tiredness, worn out more by cycling than anything else.

He started going to church on Sunday evenings with Bletchley and Reagan. Mrs Bletchley and Mrs Reagan, with their respective sons, but without their respective husbands, attended church also on Sunday mornings. In the evenings, however, he and Bletchley and Reagan sat at the back of the north aisle, on the opposite side to the pulpit, and behind a row of girls from Bletchley’s school. They passed messages to and fro, fastened in the pages of a prayer-book, and Bletchley, during the prayers, when the girls knelt forward from the wooden chairs, would frequently take a glove, passing it to Reagan, who, with his eyes closed, red-faced, would put it in his pocket.

Reagan had grown into a pale-cheeked, narrow-faced youth; he had a prominent brow, a long nose, slightly upturned, which dominated his face. His attempt to conceal the extraordinary rearward bulge of his head by allowing his hair to hang down to the nape of his neck was a source of constant irritation to his father. Frequently on an evening, above the strains of the now somewhat larger violin on which Reagan practised, could be heard the shouts echoing across the yards: ‘
You
think it’s beautiful:
I
think it makes him look like a cissy.
You
think he can play a violin:
I
think it’s like a cat on hot bricks.
You
think he looks distinguished:
I
think he looks like a bloody woman,’ or, later, as he came out to the yard, ‘Don’t leave him alone in that house or I’ll have it off him,’ stalking then across the backs to sit with his
father in the porch, or moving with an abstracted air towards the foot of his garden where, standing at the fence, he would call to the miners playing cricket in the field, ‘Hit it! Hit it harder,’ his face reddening, his neck on the point of bursting from his collar. ‘Harder, for God’s sake. You’ll never get anywhere with that.’

With Bletchley, Reagan preserved a respectful silence; it was one of Bletchley’s mannerisms, when walking, to pause at some relevant point of his conversation waiting for Reagan to turn his head, to pause and, finally, however much in a hurry he was, to incline his body in his direction, even stepping back a pace or two; Reagan’s face would be set with a wearied look, contemplating not Bletchley but the space above his head. If, as not infrequently happened, Reagan went on walking, unaware of Bletchley’s pause, Bletchley would stand waiting with a patronizing sneer set on his lips until, suddenly aware that he was no longer walking in the company of his friend, Reagan with the same wearied air would walk back down the road to where, with raised eyebrows now, and anxious to continue his narrative, his friend was standing. No word of any sort, during these encounters, passed Reagan’s lips; merely his presence and the expression of studied expectancy were sufficient to fire Bletchley into prolonged descriptions of his life at school, of his father’s exploits in the war, of the achievements of distant relatives, or into an analysis of recent political events.

The war had ended earlier that year. A party had been held in the field at the back of the house; tables of every description had been lifted over the fences and set with variously coloured cloths and miscellaneous plates of food. A gramophone, wound by hand, had been placed on a wooden chair and after the meal was over couples danced in the grass, stumbling over mounds of bricks and bottles, the sounds of their voices echoing between the houses with the dull, almost mournful rhythm of the tune. Children ran wildly between the tables, snatching at the food, gathering in groups to watch the couples, occasionally imitating the dancers’ movements, the miners clearing a space finally beyond the tables where they organized races, wives wheeling husbands in garden barrows, or running three-legged, stumbling, to screams and shouts, hopping, husbands carrying wives and
wives, later in the day, attempting to carry husbands. Walking slowly amongst all these rushing bodies, his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat pockets, a fresh white handkerchief projecting from the breast-pocket of his suit, his bowler hat on this occasion missing, was Mr Reagan. Occasionally he would step out from the crowd and producing a second white handkerchief from his trouser pocket insist on starting one of the races, examining each of the contestants first as to their positions on the starting line, the legality of their posture, drawing one back, or thrusting another forward, giving a noticeable advantage to those he judged less likely to show up well, and starting them off, to screams and shouts, with something of a gesture. ‘When I drop the handkerchief so – before which I shall say, “Are you ready? Get to your marks,”’ waving the handkerchief with a slow, almost derisory gesture above his head, and withholding the signal until that moment when the cries of complaint had risen to a crescendo. Finally, when he had made sure there was nothing left to eat and that the small supply of liquid refreshment had been consumed, he took over this task completely, even following the competitors across the field, calling advice, or running, if the race were one which allowed only intermittent progress, to the finishing-line and indicating to those he favoured most how they might gain advantage over their nearest rivals, getting in the way, if only accidentally, of those whom he judged to have taken an unfair advantage or those whom he thought were too well endowed in any case.