Saville (59 page)

At the end of that year she applied for and was granted, conditionally on the results of her final examination, a place at a university in a town some forty miles away. He applied for an early medical for his National Service; they talked loosely now of what they would do in the future, of marriage before she went to university. One evening, when he arrived at her house, her father asked him if he’d like to talk about their plans. ‘Why don’t
we go over to the surgery?’ he said. ‘There’ll be no one there,’ opening the door for him which led through from the rear of the house into a passage which, when the light was turned on, he found led into the back of the doctor’s room. He sat in the patient’s chair, immediately in front of the desk, the doctor sitting behind it, smoking his pipe, tapping out the ash at one point, leaning forward, his conversation still about the weather, about certain activities in the sporting world. Glass cabinets flanked them on either side, and in one corner, on a white, metal-covered tray stood a row of empty medicine bottles. A weighing machine with a vertical ruler stood immediately beside the door.

‘Margaret tells me’, the doctor said, ‘that you’re thinking of getting married.’

‘We had talked about it, yes,’ he said.

‘I don’t want to impose a heavy hand.’ Dr Dorman smiled. ‘I’d just like to talk about it, loosely. As just a general principle in Margaret’s life.’ He took out his pipe again and re-filled it slowly with tobacco. ‘She’ll be nineteen, you see, when she goes up to the
varsity
,’ he added, stressing the word as if, for him, it were a place of some significance. ‘Your prospects, well, for two years, will be worth very little indeed. I’m looking, you see, on the practical side.’ He took out a box of matches, struck one boldly, and applied the flame vigorously to the pipe. A cloud of smoke was blown out steadily across the room. ‘If, for instance, Margaret gave up the
varsity
, which, if she had a baby, she would be obliged to, she’d have no qualifications of any note to fall back on later in life. As you get older your mind loses the resilience for learning, with the result that, if she did try to pick up where she’d left off, she’d find it very difficult, if not impossible. At the moment, there are no facilities for that sort of thing. And one child might easily lead to another. She’d find herself in middle life suited for what?’ He waited, watching him reflectively through the cloud of smoke. ‘Working in a shop.’

‘That hardly fits in’, Colin said, ‘with Margaret as she is. I think she’s determined, in any case, to qualify for what she wants. If we did get married,’ he added, more earnestly now and leaning forward in the chair, ‘we wouldn’t have a family for several years. Not, at least, until she’d settled, and I’d finished with the army.’

‘Of that you can’t be sure,’ the doctor said. ‘And I’m speaking as a professional man as well as a father,’ he added, smiling. ‘It would be absurd to put the whole question beyond the realms of human experience. After all, what’s the future for? To plan towards, to prepare oneself for. After she has her degree, and once you’ve got your job settled, as far as I can see there’s nothing to stop either you or she getting married. You may, even, by that time, have each found someone else. The human heart is very fickle, and at the age you’re both at, as well as over the next few years, you may find it coming up with a few surprises.’

Colin waited. Not only was he unprepared for the argument, but it had, he felt, committed him in ways which, if he considered them beforehand, he would have rejected. The whole idea now of working towards some given objective was not only obnoxious in the assumptions it made both about himself as well as Margaret, but, in his own bewildered state, virtually meaningless. He watched the doctor’s face for a while, as if he sensed that, given one or two more objections to their getting married, he would get up and go and do it the following day.

‘These are just one or two thoughts that came into my head,’ the doctor said. ‘Maybe you’d like to think about them. Talk them over with Margaret and we could, perhaps all three of us, have a talk again. Her mother and I, you see, are quite convinced that life at the varsity will be quite tough enough as it is. Without the demands and pressures of marriage. You see my point?’

Colin looked at the empty bottles. There was a chart on the wall beyond the doctor’s head, of the human body, a maze of coloured lines and muscles. In a large, thin-necked glass jar a moth or some other insect had begun to flutter.

‘After all, how long does a marriage last? Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years. What are three years waiting, and useful study, at the beginning? If you’ve both got something to work towards it’s an added incentive. You’re both sensible. It’s not as if I were talking to someone who could only see things, for instance, in terms of immediate gain.’

Colin got up. He felt stiff in the chair.

‘I’ll talk to Margaret about it,’ he said. ‘Though we hadn’t really thought it out in practice.’

‘No, I’m sure in practice people at your age seldom do. It’s the
job of old codgers like us’, the doctor added, ‘to do what we can in that direction.’

He got up himself and went over to the door, holding it open as he might for a patient, pausing only to glance round before he put out the light.

When they returned to the house Margaret was sitting in a chair by the fire, sewing, her mother beside her, preparing a sheet of paper, a placard or an announcement, for a meeting she was going to later that evening. ‘Tea?’ Mrs Dorman said, looking up at her husband’s face to see what the outcome of their conversation might have been.

‘Oh, tea for me. How about you, Colin?’ the doctor said, laughing, puffing out a final cloud of smoke before leaning down casually and knocking his pipe out against the square-shaped stove.

Margaret glanced across at Colin. He gave no sign. The feeling of domesticity in the room was heightened by the quietness of the two women, and the relaxed geniality of the man. As if nothing whatsoever had occurred the doctor picked up a newspaper and sank down in a chair. ‘Any chance of a biscuit with it?’ he called to his wife as she went over to the door. He looked over the top of the paper a moment later at Margaret and added, ‘You two off out this evening, or staying in?’

‘Oh, I suppose we’ll go for a walk,’ Margaret said. She glanced at Colin once again. ‘Is that all right?’

They went after her mother had brought in the tea.

They walked in the darkness of the golf-course. It was his habit now, whenever they walked, to hold her hand. After a while he took off his coat and they lay down on the grass. He’d told her already of what her father had said.

‘I don’t mind leaving school and getting married now,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel obliged to do what they want. Though naturally, of course,’ she added, ‘I’d listen.’

‘Even then, it’s better that you do qualify for something,’ he said. She had already, the previous year, decided against medicine, against following her father, and had allotted, largely because it was a shorter course, to go in for languages. Even over that there’d been some disagreement. Now she moved away from him, kneeling in the darkness. ‘Doesn’t it go against everything
you’ve always said? That you ought to be independent? That you should have a separate way of life? Why should you give that up now? What’s so different between now and a year ago?’ he added.

‘I can’t see why I can’t do both things. If we married in a year I could still take a degree. I can’t see marriage being a hindrance. If anything, it would be a settled background to work against.’

‘What if we did have a child?’ he said.

‘Couldn’t we plan a family?’ she said.

‘I suppose we could.’ He waited.

‘What’s to hold us back?’ she said.

‘It’s all so planned and deliberate,’ he said. ‘Like buying a suit, or a house. I’ve always looked for something spontaneous. It’s as if we’re laying down our lives, like rolling out a carpet. We know where we’ll go before it’s begun.’

He got up. They moved on after a moment. She took his hand.

‘You talk of all this independence,’ he said. ‘But you never live it through. You said your mother was like that, but you were different. I don’t want you married to me, as a matter of fact. Not on these terms. I’d rather get up and do it tomorrow. Or never do it at all. I’d rather we go on as we are, and let them speculate about the future.’

‘Then we’ll go on as we are,’ she said.

She came to the stop to see him off. After he’d mounted the bus and it drew away he turned and saw her figure beneath the lamp, poised at the edge of the road, and he almost leapt off the bus and hurried back, she seemed something so slender and vulnerable, scarcely there at all, with her impassioned desire to be something which, in the end, she would never become.

He felt her absence through the night, coiled in his bed. On the Monday morning, instead of returning to the college, he waited outside the school. He saw her figure some distance away, unfamiliar now in the uniform of the school. She looked up in surprise, with a kind of dread, when she saw him standing by the gate and despite the other girls’ curiosity came quickly across.

‘Is anything the matter?’ she said.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I just wanted to see you, that’s all,’ he said.

Yet even then she gazed at him with dread, her eyes dark, her hand grasped to the leather case which held her books.

‘I thought something must be wrong,’ she said, watching his face to see if, in the end, she might be right.

‘Not that I’m aware of. No,’ he said. He added, ‘And how are you? Are you all right?’

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said, vaguely, looking round then at the yard, at the other girls, and at a mistress who, with a querulous look, passed them in the gate. ‘They don’t like us talking in the vicinity of the school,’ she added.

‘We could move away,’ he said.

‘I haven’t time.’ A bell rang somewhere inside the building. The figures in the yard moved quickly towards the doors. There were screams and shouts. Someone called her name. ‘They asked me what we’d decided, of course,’ she said, and added, ‘I told them we’d go on as before. Unless something happened. I think they’re frightened more than anything else.’

‘Or concerned.’

‘You see, you vacillate’, she said, ‘as much as me. First on their side and then on ours.’

‘I’m glad I’ve seen you, at least,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have got through the week without.’

‘Me neither. I was going to ring you at college tonight.’

‘What about?’ he said, and smiled.

‘Oh, just to talk,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘I’ll have to go. I’ll call in any case,’ she added and, after glancing quickly to the yard, kissed him on the mouth.

The building was a large, square structure, like a mill or a warehouse built originally of brick, but covered now with a uniform yellowish plaster, darkening and stained with soot, its multitudinous rows of windows framed by peeling greenish paint: the whole edifice appeared to have been roasted inside an oven, seemingly lifeless until he entered the plain, green-painted door
at the top of a flight of concrete steps and a man in an Army uniform stepped forward.

He gave him his name, showed him the letter he’d been sent, and was directed to a room on the second floor. Here, at the end of a concrete corridor, thirty or forty youths were sitting on benches facing a wooden partition in the centre of which was a small glass panel. This was pulled aside the moment he entered and a man with close-cropped hair thrust his head towards the room and called, ‘Up to J26 on the third floor, and quick about it.’

The youths stood up; some were smoking, some remained standing by their benches, talking, glancing indifferently towards the open door.

A soldier with slightly longer hair and smoking a cigarette came from behind the wooden partition and read off names in a nasal voice.

Colin listened for his own. The last of the youths, with some prompting from the soldier, slowly drifted out. ‘J26, and quick about it,’ he called, echoing the words of the man behind the panel. He stood in the corridor outside, still calling, gesturing wildly and adding, ‘No, no, up the stairs, not down,’ coming finally into the room, allowing the door to crash to behind, and calling directly to the first of the soldiers who, Colin could now see, as he too came round the partition, was wearing sergeant’s stripes: ‘The bloody fools.’

He showed the sergeant the letter he’d been sent and was directed to one of the wooden benches. He waited for twenty minutes. Other youths drifted in, looking round, going to the glass panel, showing slips of paper, coming over to the benches, sitting down, yawning, one or two smoking. Two sooted windows looked out on an empty sky.

After a while, when the benches were full, the soldier with longer hair appeared once more from behind the partition. He read off a list of names and, but for Colin, the youths drifted out.

A third group came in, assembled on the benches, then, after a phone message received by the sergeant, were directed to the room upstairs.

The sergeant came out from the partition and, with the second
soldier, sat down on the benches. He took out a cigarette, offered one to the soldier, and for a while stretched there, his head in his hands. The phone rang after a while and he got up, slowly, and went to answer it. His square, bullet-shaped head was visible beyond the glass panel, reddening, nodding up and down. Eventually he came back to the benches, replaced his cigarette in his mouth, and once again lay down.

‘What’re you doing here?’ the soldier with longer hair said, seeing Colin still waiting in the room.

He showed him the letter. His name was checked on a list.

‘You should have gone up three batches ago,’ the soldier said. He showed the list to the sergeant.

‘I was told to wait in here,’ he said.

‘Who told you to wait in here?’ the sergeant said.

‘You did,’ he said.

‘You couldn’t have listened. Half the people that come in here are deaf,’ he added to the soldier. ‘Up to J26. That’s what I said. You better get up now.’

He went out to the corridor. A burst of laughter came from the room behind, cut short a moment later by the ringing of the phone.