Saville

25

The school stood on the outskirts of a village, a large, sprawling, one-storeyed building, red-brick, with tall, metal-framed windows and green-painted doors. A playground surrounded it on three sides, the fourth separated from the main road, which led from the village, by a strip of lawn. Flowers grew in a diamond-shaped bed immediately below the headmaster’s window.

Behind the school an expanse of heathland led away to rows of small terrace houses set at the crest of a hill. A colliery with three massive headgears occupied a deep hollow, also lined with terrace houses, immediately below the school.

Mr Corcoran, the headmaster, was a short, squat figure with close-cropped hair and a heavy, bulbous brow, who, on Colin’s first morning, had called him to his study and said, ‘We don’t teach poetry here. Just matter-of-fact English. They can pick up poetry on their own. We provide them with the tools: their own inclinations provide the rest. We’re like the smithy, if you like, to the pit down there. We provide the means: they’ve got to dig the coal themselves.’

He had no class of his own. On the teachers’ rota he was listed as a ‘supernumerary’, and went from class to class as required. The children he taught the most were in the lower end of the school; it was as unlike King Edward’s as any school he could imagine.

The boys reminded him of Batty and Stringer; the girls were more docile, cantankerous occasionally, like those he had followed round the Park years before with Bletchley. They had no interest, either boys or girls, in anything he had to tell them, accepting a certain amount of work with an air of resignation, leaning on their desks, writing words they could neither understand nor spell.

He was surprised to find Stephens also teaching at the school, the boy with the misshapen back whom he had invariably sat behind at school, and who had once, perhaps out of sympathy, offered to sell him one of any number of stolen pens. He came to the school each day on a motor-bike with a sidecar, his hunched figure clad in leathers, brown and creased, and cracked in huge weals across his back, his head protected by a leather helmet and his face covered with a scarf and goggles. Occasionally he gave Colin lifts to the bus stop in the village.

‘You’ve got to realize these are the working class,’ Stephens said as he went with him one evening to the motor-bike parked at the back of the school. ‘Anything we may have learnt at King Edward’s is of no relevance whatsoever here.’ He waved a leather-clad arm at the sooted windows. One or two boys who had stayed behind were playing football in the yard. Piles of coke were stacked up against the walls. Stephens removed loose pieces from around the wheels of the bike. ‘What might engage them’, he added, ‘is beyond my comprehension. Nothing we’ve learnt, however, either at school or college can be related to anything we encounter here.’

He checked various parts of the bike itself, stepping vigorously on the starter, then swung his small body across the seat. He clipped the strap of his helmet beneath his chin and waited for Colin to climb on behind. His voice droned on through the roar of the engine. Colin couldn’t hear. He held to Stephens’s waist as the bike turned across the yard, narrowly avoiding the boys playing there, and into the road outside.

Occasionally Stephens turned his head: he was still talking, his scarf, which normally covered his face, lowered round his neck. No word came to Colin at all above the rattle of the engine.

They descended quickly towards the pit, and the bus stops which stood, beside concrete barriers, at the colliery entrance. It was here that his father had worked some four years previously.

He got off the bike and put up the foot-rests. Stephens, his head bowed, examined them a moment before setting off.

‘You have to realize’, he added, throttling back the engine and evidently continuing the conversation he’d been engaged with during the descent from the school, ‘that the working class is a relatively recent phenomenon. Two centuries ago, or even less, the thought of large numbers of men gathered together in towns, or in villages, like this, and vast working places, for instance, like this pit, would have been unthinkable. In my view, the working class, as distinct from the peasant class, will soon disappear, replaced by technicians of one sort or another. And all the revolutionary fervour we at one time associated with the class will have disappeared for good. That’s my estimation of the situation.’ He glanced over to the rows of miners waiting at the stops. ‘The working class, I’m afraid, is a temporary phenomenon; and our job, unfortunately, is to distract and, if possible, entertain that temporary phenomenon until it, of its own volition, disappears.’

He revved the engine. The miners looked across at the strange figure, diminutive and misshapen, sprawled on top of the bike.

‘It’s what we’ve been trained to do. And what we’re paid to do. But one can’t help thinking at the same time that it’s a bit of a dead loss. What’s it all add up to? A few more colliers down the pit, a few more split skulls, a few more broken arms, a few more bodies carried out.’

He nodded his head, anxious now for some reply.

‘I don’t see them all like that, I suppose,’ Colin said. ‘As members of a class.’

‘But they’re members of a class before they’re anything,’ Stephens said. ‘They think, they feel, they diminish, they destroy, they prevaricate, they breed, they interject, they do and are everything first and foremost as members of a class. They are the working class. I mean,’ he added, glancing at Colin slyly from beneath the leather helmet, ‘don’t tell me you see them as human beings!’ He laughed, revving the engine. ‘Good God, they’re as devoid of sensibility as the coal they’ll hew in a few years’ time, as thick as the pit-props in that colliery yonder.’ He laughed again, his teeth showing freshly above the scarf. Then, with a nod, he pulled the scarf up. ‘See you,’ he said through the material and, glancing behind him, turned the bike in the road and set off in the opposite direction.

Colin crossed to the queue of miners and stood there, the only one in clean clothes, waiting for the bus to arrive.

Somebody spat in the road. A man at the front of the queue had laughed. A cloud of cigarette smoke drifted above the heads.

He kept his hands in his pockets and tapped with the toe of his shoe against the piles of dust.

Steven had failed his exam the previous year. It had been his last chance to go to the grammar school. He was now attending the secondary-modern school in the village. All through the previous year, whenever he had been home from college, Colin had coached him for the exam, like his father had coached him, years before. Now his father had been too tired to take any interest, his energy going into persuading Colin to coach his brother, to teach him spelling, maths, the use of words, standing over him whenever he faltered, showed lack of interest or hadn’t the time. ‘He’s to have the same chances as you’ve had,’ his father said. ‘You know it better than me, so he’s an even better chance than you had. Don’t let’s miss out on it, not now we’ve worked so hard for it,’ he added.

Yet his brother, as he’d known, as they’d all known all along, had failed. He had no aptitude for work; he was not unlike the children Colin taught now: in two years’ time it would be Richard’s turn. There was a curious disparity between the younger brothers. Steven was large and steady, with heavy shoulders, straight-backed, not unlike Colin in appearance, but with a more open, outward-going, frank-faced nature. He showed no awareness of having failed anything, and went to school with the same imperturbable good grace that he’d always shown; it was Richard who showed a resistance, almost a slowness, half-casual, as if he resented being imposed upon at all. He was more delicately featured than either of his older brothers, with his father’s light-blue eyes and something, half-hidden, of his father’s nature.

Colin would read with Richard in the evening, the boy crouched against his arm, following the words with his finger, irritated whenever he was corrected; or Richard would write at the table, looking up with a dulled resentment, the end of his pencil slipped between his teeth, protesting, gazing to the window where his friends played in the field.

‘You do what Colin tells you,’ his father would say, yet distantly, remote now from the activities of his children, more clearly exhausted day by day, by the responsibility he had for working an entire face, by his closeness to the men he worked with, some from the houses across the street, maintaining something of his supervisory role even when away from the pit: Shaw was one of the men he worked with, and because he was responsible for measuring off his work each week, the amount he might be paid, they scarcely spoke at all. ‘You see where Steven’s got to,’ his father would add. ‘With not paying attention much at school and not doing much work when he got back home either. He’s going to be stuck down the pit with me.’

‘Oh, don’t go on with those old arguments,’ his mother would say, as wearied by this battle now as his father was. ‘If they want to do it, then it’s up to them. If they don’t then it’s no good forcing them.’

Yet Richard, from time to time, would react to his father’s demands; though scarcely eight he would sit solidly at the table sometimes for an hour, writing, working out sums, waiting patiently for the work to be corrected, copying out the corrections underneath then looking up at Colin, waiting to be dismissed. ‘Can I go now? Is that enough, our kid?’

Occasionally too Colin worked with Steven; his father had some vague notion in a year’s time of getting him a county transfer to the grammar school; yet Steven would look at the work with a good-natured incomprehension, puzzle over it a while then push it away, shaking his head, glancing at Colin with a smile, and say, ‘Nay, it beats me. I’ll never mek it out.’ In the end, occasionally, they read together, Steven following the words intently, going over and over each word until he got the pronunciation right, only to stumble over it again when he came across it in the following line. He’d absolved himself, without rancour, from learning anything at all.

Michael Reagan had been attacked one week-end in town and had spent two weeks in hospital. He’d been robbed of over forty pounds, had had his jaw broken and now spoke with a stutter. His father, by a curious coincidence, had been taken to hospital the following week after being found in the road in a collapsed condition. He was in for a slightly longer period than Reagan, having suffered a stroke, and when he was finally released and came home it was rumoured that he would have to finish his job in the colliery office, which he had had for over thirty years, and take on something less arduous which would occupy him for shorter hours.

Reagan, on his mother’s insistence, gave up his dance band and returned to full-time work as a clerk in an accountant’s office. Occasionally, when Colin passed the house, he could both hear and see Michael giving lessons in the violin to small boys in the front room, but, a few months later, after complaints about his conduct with one of the boys, the lessons stopped altogether. He would be seen, a thin, ghostly figure, walking the streets of the village in a long black coat, a cap pulled down above his eyes, exaggerating if anything the familiar bulbous shape of his head. Occasionally boys followed him, calling names, but on the whole he appeared oblivious of everything around him, scarcely pausing whenever Colin spoke to him, glancing up with haunted eyes, shaking his head or nodding, slowly, to some inquiry, unwilling or unable to speak, his long thin legs carrying him off quickly as if he hadn’t recognized anyone he knew at all. His father too, on occasion, would appear at the door, a gaunt, wasted figure, moving with a slow shuffle, his body partially paralysed along one side.

‘Oh, they’ve had it,’ his father would say. ‘That family’s had a visitation, and no mistake. If trouble doesn’t come in bucket-loads it doesn’t come at all. It’ll be the turn of the missis next. There’ll be something calamitous happen to her.’

Yet Mrs Reagan, in adversity, appeared to blossom. A thin, shadowy figure herself, invariably dressed in pale clothes, with a ghostly pallor to her skin, she could now be seen talking at her door, or on Mrs Shaw’s step, occasionally even on Mrs Bletchley’s, roaming across the yards to disseminate news of her husband’s progress, scarcely mentioning her son at all. It was as if Michael, in a curious way, had never existed: the sound of his violin no longer came from the house, and none of the clothes which, in the past, she had proudly made for him, were ever hung out on the line to dry.

One evening Colin met Michael on the bridge above the station. He was leaning against the parapet, gazing at the line.

‘Are you coming up home?’ he said.

Reagan didn’t answer. His figure, draped in the black coat, the flat cap pulled well down on top of his head, was thrust forward against the stone, almost like a log, thin and angular, propped up against the wall itself.

‘Are you coming up home?’ he asked again.

Reagan’s features were half hidden beneath the shadow of the cap. His hands were clenched together.

‘Are you coming up home?’ he said again. ‘If you like,’ he added, ‘we could go for a drink.’

‘I don’t drink,’ Reagan said, so quietly that, for a moment, he doubted what he’d heard. ‘I don’t drink, you know,’ he added more clearly.

‘I’m just walking up home,’ Colin said.

‘I’ll walk up with you,’ Reagan said, looking off to where the road ran past the station, disappearing, beyond a row of houses, amongst the fields.

Colin turned towards the village. Reagan, still leaning against the wall, continued to gaze off in the opposite direction.

‘I saw you getting off the train,’ he said again so quietly that he scarcely heard. The train’s faint pounding could still be heard at the far end of the cutting. ‘Have you been into town?’ he added, turning his head to glance at him directly.

His face was lined by tears. He blinked them back, waiting now for Colin to answer.

‘I went to the pictures.’

‘Do you go by yourself?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What happened to your girl-friend?’

‘She’s gone away.’ He waited.

‘Ian said she’d gone off with Stafford.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Did you mind her going?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Reagan regarded him with increasing interest. He pulled down quickly at the peak of the cap and for the first time stepped away from the wall.

‘Where are you teaching?’ he said.

‘Rawcliffe,’ he said. ‘I believe I mentioned it before.’

‘Wasn’t that where your father used to work?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

More than anything now Michael reminded Colin of Mrs Reagan, the gaunt figure that he’d known before; there was the same almost mechanical earnestness he’d associated with her in the past.

‘Had you thought of moving from the village? Into town, or to some other village perhaps?’

‘I had thought of it,’ he said.

‘I’ve thought of moving,’ Reagan said. ‘I’ve never been happy here, you know.’

He stepped into the road, paused a moment, as if even now he were tempted to walk off in the opposite direction, then turned slowly towards the village.

‘You’ve heard that my father’s been ill?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I don’t think he’ll ever get out again. Not like he used to in the past.’

‘I see him sometimes,’ Colin said.

‘He tries to get out. His mind wanders. He keeps asking for his hat and gloves.’ He measured his strides slowly, as if, the closer they got to the village, the more determined he was to turn back. ‘He sometimes thinks he’s in the office and keeps on about the wages. He was always arguing about money with the men. He even argues with my mother sometimes. He thinks she’s one of the men, and starts on about the deputies, how they’ve measured off the coal, and that.’

‘I haven’t heard you playing the violin,’ Colin said. ‘Not for some time,’ he added, ‘at least.’

‘No.’ Reagan shook his head. There was a calculated air of absurdity about him now, as if his coat and the cap were some disguise he’d deliberately adopted. He glanced over at Colin and shook his head again. ‘I’ve given it away, you know.’

‘Who to?’ he said.

‘Oh.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. My mother gave it away, as a matter of fact. I’ve given up going to the office, as well. They gave me two weeks’ notice. I should have had a month. The doctor said I needed a rest, so I suppose it’s worked out all right in the end.’

‘Did they ever find out’, he said, ‘who stole the money?’

‘Oh, it was Batty,’ he said. ‘Though naturally I couldn’t tell. Batty and Stringer, and two other men. They’d been at the club, you see, that night. I always had the takings with me on the Saturday to put in the bank on Monday morning, then I paid out the staff the following week. They’ve closed it down, as a matter of fact. I thought of taking it for classes, you know. In the afternoons, for old-tyme and modern dancing, for children, you know. But the fees I don’t think would have covered the cost. I might start the Saturdays up again when I feel a bit better.’

He’d begun to talk more quickly now, as if Colin wasn’t there, his stride lengthening, his gaze, beneath the peak of his cap, more abstracted. The tears had dried on his face, leaving dark smears on either cheek.

‘Or again, I could always go in for orchestral work. There’s a great demand, at the moment, for orchestral players. So few were trained, you know, during the war. There’s a whole area I could turn to there. It wouldn’t need much adaptation. Even Prendergast recommended that, you know, some years ago. He was quite disappointed in his way that I went in for band work. There seemed more opportunity in that field, of course.’ He paused, stopping in the road. The first houses of the village had appeared; lights glowed from the windows, beyond them the vast, dull glow of the pit itself. ‘The pendulum seems to have swung the other way.’

Colin had paused.

Reagan was undecided which way to turn, his gaze transfixed, abstracted, his hands clenched loosely together. Tears appeared once more on either cheek, his eyes half-hidden beneath the shadow of the cap.

‘I think I might go back to the bridge. I was thinking of something there. I’ve forgotten what it was.’

Yet he remained, as if suspended, in the middle of the road.

‘I’ll go back with you,’ Colin said.

‘There’s no need to,’ Reagan said, speaking so quietly again that he scarcely heard.

‘I don’t mind going back,’ he said.

‘I’d prefer to go on my own,’ he said, his voice acquiring some of the correctness which characterized his conversations at the ballroom.

‘Why not come back home?’ Colin said. ‘You could come in, if you like, and have some tea.’

‘Oh, I never go in people’s houses,’ Reagan said.

‘Why not come up to the house, in any case?’ he said, yet already Reagan had turned and set off back along the road, walking with lengthening strides, quickly, as if he had some appointment to keep which he’d suddenly remembered.

Colin watched him go down the hill; he reached a bend in the road and disappeared, in the gathering gloom, towards the station.

For a moment he thought of following him; then, having set off, turned and went on towards the village.

‘Isn’t your name Saville?’ the taller of the two teachers said. He was a well-built, fair-haired man, scarcely older than Colin himself; he had large, bony features, the cheeks red and bronzed slightly by the sun. The other teacher, an older man by the name of Callow, he’d met when he first arrived: he wore a corduroy coat and flannels and a check shirt, his face pallid and square-featured, his mouth broad and thin – he came forward now and said directly to the taller man, ‘Of course this is Saville. I told you when he came. I’ve never discovered his first name, though.’

‘Colin,’ he said.

They were standing just outside the school where, normally, he waited for Stephens for a lift into the village. Callow also taught English in the school, and though he’d occasionally seen the other, taller man, he’d never discovered his name. Children flooded by on the pavement on either side.

‘This is Gerry Thornton,’ Callow said. ‘He was telling me he knew you the other day, though in what circumstances he never did explain.’

‘Aren’t you a friend of Neville Stafford?’ Thornton said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Do you ever remember working on Smith’s farm? Oh, years ago now,’ he added. ‘I remember seeing you one morning cutting thistles in one of the fields. Then after that, do you remember three boys with one of those collapsible dinghies playing in that pond when you were stooking?’ He waited, smiling, for Colin to reply. ‘There was Neville, my brother, and myself.’ He laughed simply, watching Colin’s expression. ‘I’m going in the forces in two or three weeks,’ he added. ‘I got deferment and seem to have been left on the shelf. I thought I’d put in one or two weeks here.’ He gestured round, vaguely, at the school. ‘Not much, but enough to be going on with, I suppose.’

He saw Stephens in the distance, emerging from the school. Colin waved him on, and as Stephens pulled up, the scarf wrapped firmly round his face, he said, ‘I’ll walk down today.’

Stephens shrugged: he glanced at the other two. ‘Do you want a lift?’ he said to Callow, lowering the scarf.

‘Oh, I’ll walk down as well,’ the teacher said, glancing at the pillion seat and adding, ‘Is it safe?’

‘As safe as houses,’ Stephens said. He rode away, quaint and strangely child-like on the large machine.

‘I suppose I should have gone with him,’ he said, watching the abrupt way Stephens drove off.

‘Weren’t you both at school together?’ Callow said.

‘Yes,’ he said. The bike, seemingly riderless from a distance, disappeared beyond the pit.

The three of them walked on down the hill in silence.

‘I suppose you’ve heard about Neville,’ Thornton said as they reached the stop at the bottom; he was taking a bus in the opposite direction and had paused at the side of the road before crossing.

‘No.’ Colin looked across at the fair-haired man: he had the same carelessness, almost the same ‘glamour’, as Stafford himself.

‘He’s got engaged. His mother and father, I believe, are in a hell of a can. He goes up to Oxford, you see, quite shortly. They believe he’s chucking everything away.’

‘But then, that’s just like Stafford,’ Colin said.

‘Is it?’ Thornton looked at him again, freshly, then shook his head. ‘I’ve never known Neville to be careless,’ he said. ‘He’s always seemed a schemer to me,’ and as if this might have sounded too hard, he added, ‘Not a schemer, but doing things by calculation.’

‘Who is this Neville?’ Callow said. He watched the groups of children who passed them in the road: away from the school there was a strange sense of disowning those to whom, in the school, they might have been close. Only one or two children signalled any acknowledgment.

‘Oh, he’s quite a card, really,’ Thornton said, yet casually, as if he knew of no way of communicating his impression of Stafford to the other man. ‘Excels at everything he does.’

‘That doesn’t sound so cardish,’ Callow said. He grimaced at the passing children and looked away.

‘Well, he has excelled, I suppose, at most things,’ Thornton said. ‘I don’t know who the girl is. Not someone whom his parents are particularly fond of.’

‘Yes,’ Callow said and might have added something else only he grimaced once more at the passing children and with much the same expression glanced away.

‘Will he give up Oxford?’ Colin said.

‘Oh, I don’t suppose so. Neville gives up most things, but only as a prelude, usually, to his taking them on. He was saying at one time he might stay on in the forces. Had himself marked out as a major by the time he’d finished. I suppose’, Thornton added, reflectively, ‘he’d make a success of it. The thing about Neville, if he puts his mind to it, he can do anything, I reckon.’ He glanced down the road. ‘Well, here’s my bus.’ He waved, ran over and joined the queue of children.

‘I hear you do writing,’ Callow said. His pale face had darkened slightly, as if he’d mentioned something which concerned, or hurt him, very much.

‘Not really. No.’

‘Oh, I heard it,’ he said, casually, yet relieved. ‘Thornton mentioned it.’ He looked round him at the village, the rows of terraces running up the hill, at the dull declivity beneath them, shadowed by the pit. ‘Relieves the gloom.’

‘Do you find it gloomy?’ Colin said.

‘Not really. But then I’m not as hopeful as you.’

‘Hopeful?’ Colin glanced at the other man and laughed.

‘Oh, I’ve had quite a few years. Not just of this,’ He gestured off up the slope to the low, silhouetted profile of the school. ‘One or two others. If you didn’t have something else I think you’d go quite mad.’

‘But then, I thought you were reconciled,’ Colin said. ‘I mean, to teaching here, or to places like it.’

‘Do you feel reconciled?’ Callow said.

‘No.’

‘I mean,’ Callow said, returning briefly to his earlier, darker look, ‘do you envisage staying here for good?’

He shook his head; something of the bleakness of the place, something of the bleakness of Callow, gripped him: he sensed a disillusionment in Callow which hid some profounder discontent. He couldn’t be sure in that instant what it was.

‘You’re young, you’re hopeful, you’ve got it all before you,’ the older teacher said. He appeared, visibly, to shrink before him: the corduroy coat, even the square-shaped cut of his hair, suggested a hardness, a firmness, even a physical robustness and mental pugnacity which the manner of the man himself denied.

A bus came down towards the stop. Callow flinched as its shadow fell across him.

‘Are you getting on?’ Colin said as he moved up in the queue.

‘No. I walk.’

‘Do you live close by?’

‘I have relations who do. I visit them occasionally.’

It sounded like some excuse he’d made up on the spot; as it was, on an evening, Colin had seldom seen him in the queue.

‘See you tomorrow,’ Callow said and, without any further acknowledgment, moved quickly off.

He saw the corduroy-coated teacher frequently over the next few weeks. Though they never caught the same bus – and he never discovered where he lived, or even if he were married – they often walked down the hill together. The evening after their first encounter, when he was waiting for Stephens by the gate, his friend had cruised up on the motor-bike and, his scarf already lowered, said, ‘I won’t, in future, give you a lift, if you don’t mind.’

‘I was wrong to refuse, I know,’ he said.

‘If there are people who interest you more, and you see me merely as a convenience, clearly there’s no point in my putting myself out,’ he added.

‘It’s entirely up to you,’ he said.

‘I suppose Thornton was talking about Stafford.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘He told me he was. I mean, I asked him,’ Stephens said. ‘Apparently he’s marrying your former girl.’

‘He didn’t tell me that,’ he said.

‘I made inquiries.’ He revved the engine; a cloud of blue smoke rose steadily between them. ‘I’d have nothing to do with those bastards if I were you.’

‘What bastards?’

‘King Edward bastards. They screwed me up and they’ve screwed up you.’

He said nothing for a moment

‘You can have a lift if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a bad day.’ He leaned down and lowered the foot-rests for him.

Colin got on: they cruised down the hill. When Colin got off Stephens added, ‘I’d give it up, only I’ve nothing else to do.’

‘Why don’t you go abroad?’ he said.

‘Abroad?’ He revved the engine once again, almost as if willing the bike at that moment to take him. ‘Why don’t you?’

‘I’m helping out the family,’ he said.

‘I’m helping out the family,’ Stephens said. ‘But should families pin you down for ever?’

‘I owe them something,’ he said.

‘Oh, debts are never meant to be paid. I owe debts to everybody,’ Stephens said. ‘I’d be a damn fool, and they’d think I’m a damn fool, if I ever attempted to pay them.’

‘Isn’t there such a thing as loyalty?’ he said.

‘To what?’

Stephens waited for an answer.

‘The only loyalty is to oneself,’ he added.

Colin looked away. Farther up the hill he could see Callow and Thornton descending: the taller man had waved.

‘Oh, well, I’ll leave you to your friends,’ Stephens said and without adding anything further drove away.

‘Was he cheesed?’ Thornton said. ‘About last night.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Apparently Neville’s fiancée was once your friend.’

‘Apparently,’ he said.

‘I suppose I’ll be seeing him soon. The fact is, when I go in, he’s suggested I should join his regiment. I don’t know how easily these things are arranged. If they can be arranged, I’m sure he’ll manage it.’ He waved his hand without adding anything further and ran across the road as his bus appeared.

26

‘Have you ever seen this?’ his father said. He held out a square-shaped book of greyish, tinted paper. Inside were a number of chalk drawings, some of fruit, some of flowers, their bright colours imprinted on the sheets of protective tissue. The drawings themselves were done with an adult assurance, seemingly effortless and uncorrected.

‘Whose are they?’ he said, gazing in particular at a drawing of three apples, their redness veering into greenness, lying in a bowl.

‘They’re by your brother.’ His father laughed. ‘Andrew.’ He turned to the front. The name of the village school and his brother’s unfamiliar name, ‘Andrew Saville’, were written on the cover. ‘He was only seven.’

‘How did he die?’ he said, suddenly reminded.

‘He died within a few hours. Of pneumonia,’ his father said. ‘He was here one minute, and gone the next. I’d give ought to have that lad alive.’

‘How give ought?’ he said.

‘Well.’ His father hesitated then turned aside.

On one occasion, some years previously, he’d gone with his father to put some flowers on his brother’s grave: it lay in a small plot of ground at the side of the road leading to the colliery, the whole area invisible, behind high hedges, from the road itself. The grave was marked by a small round-headed stone on which were painted his father’s initials, H.R.S., and a number. They cleared brambles from the spot, weeded the oblong bed, set a jam-jar in the ground and in the jam-jar set the flowers. ‘We ought to come each week and keep it tidy,’ his father had said, yet as far as Colin was aware neither he nor his mother had been again. Now, looking at the coloured drawings in the book, his father said, ‘We ought to go and have a look. See how that grave is. We haven’t been for some time, you know.’

‘How did it affect my mother?’ he said.

‘Well.’ His father, uncertain, gazed at the book steadily now, his eyes intense. ‘I think that’s been half the trouble.’

‘What trouble?’

‘Nay, Andrew dying,’ his father said.

The house was silent. His mother had gone off that afternoon to visit her sister, taking, after much complaining from his brothers, Steven and Richard with her.

‘Why thy’s so silent and morose at times?’

‘Am I silent and morose?’

‘Nay, thy should know,’ his father said.

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘Nay, I can’t be the first to mention it.’ His father flushed.

‘I didn’t think I was morose,’ he said.

‘Nay, not all the time,’ he added. ‘It’s just been lately, I suppose.’ He gazed at the drawings.

A cup stood on a saucer: looking at the picture Colin, with a peculiar sensation, as if someone had touched him, saw how clear and confident the ellipses were, perfectly drawn by his seven-year-old brother, with scarcely an inflection that broke the line, or a faltering in the shading of their blue-painted pattern.

‘Your mother was three months gone, tha knows. It must have had an effect, I reckon. She was very down.’ His father, almost idly, closed the book. ‘She was very down, I can tell you that.’ He added nothing further for a while. ‘It all seemed very strange at the time.’

‘Strange in what way?’

‘It was as if he wa’ gone.’ His father looked up. ‘And then, you see, came back again.’

There was a freshness in his father’s face, as if, briefly, he’d gone back to that moment when he was young himself. He gazed up at Colin directly.

‘I’m not Andrew, though,’ he said.

‘No.’

His gaze drifted back towards the book: only in the writing of the name was there any uncertainty, he thought; as if his brother weren’t quite sure, despite the confidence of the drawings, of who he was.

His father too glanced down at the book: it lay between them like a testament, or a tribulation, a strange denial, he couldn’t be sure.

His brother’s presence, so casually aroused, preoccupied him for several days. He was sleeping now in the tiny room, his two brothers occupying the larger room, and realized in fact he was probably sleeping in Andrew’s bed. It was also, he recalled, the bed the soldier had slept in during the war. Certain scenes of his early life came back: he recalled, faintly, the holiday with his mother and father, the journey on the back of the milkman’s cart. It had a peculiar familiarity, like the pictures in the book itself.

One evening, when his father was at work, he had asked his mother about his brother, listened to her distant answers, then had asked her specifically about the death itself. ‘Oh,’ his mother said, ‘aren’t we getting morbid? What does it matter after all these years?’ and had added, ‘It’s the good things, after all, that count.’

‘Wasn’t Andrew good?’ he said.

‘He was good,’ his mother said. She told him then of the doctor’s visit, of the sudden illness, and of the doctor’s apologetic statement when he examined his brother on the double bed. ‘And what brought all this up suddenly?’ she added.

‘Oh,’ he said, and mentioned the book.

‘And where did your father find it?’ she said.

‘He must have discovered it,’ he said.

‘He must have been amongst my papers.’

‘What papers?’ he said.

‘Oh, I keep things,’ his mother said, mysteriously, as if this, finally, were something she wouldn’t confide. ‘At any rate, you could say he was going to be an artist. He had the nature as well as the gift’.

‘What nature?’ Colin said.

‘Oh, the nature.’ His mother traced her finger along a chair. ‘He was very unruly.’

‘In what way?’ he said.

‘Questions. Questions!’ His mother turned away. Then, as if drawn by the silence, she added, ‘He was always wandering off.’

‘Where to?’

‘I’ve no idea. He seemed to have nowhere in mind he was going to.’

A blankness in his brother’s intentions suddenly faced him, just as presumably it had faced his mother; she gazed steadily before her.

‘Away from here, at least,’ she said.

‘Why away?’

‘Why all these questions? Honestly, if I could answer any of them don’t you think I would?’

She took off her glasses; the light, as it was, had hidden her expression. She dried her eyes on the edge of her apron: it was a contained, almost self-denying gesture.

‘I loved him, Colin.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

He visited his brother’s grave a few days later and found to his surprise it had recently been weeded; fresh flowers had been set in a glass jar which had in turn been buried in the earth. Some image of his brother came to mind, of a wild, anarchic boy, fair-haired, blue-eyed, stocky, square-shouldered, walking along the road from the village. For a moment standing by the grave, hidden by the surrounding shrubs, with the colliery pumping out its smoke and steam, the mountain of the heap above his head, he felt an invisible bond with that figure in the ground, as if they suffered in that moment a peculiar conjunction.

He looked up towards the road: it was past this place that his father walked each day; it was in that school building, adjacent to the colliery, that Andrew, conceivably, had done his drawings. He recalled something then that had been nagging at the back of his mind for several days: it was his recollection of the time when he had first walked. He had been sitting with his parents at the side of a dam – the dam he had visited years before with Reagan on their country walk – and had got to his feet to follow a hen, the bird hurrying before him towards the water’s edge, and even as he heard his parents’ cries, he recalled vividly the thought that had struck him then, ‘But I have walked many times like this before: why should they be surprised I am walking now?’ And beyond their surprise was this greater conviction that not merely had he walked but lived his life before. It was like glimpsing a headland out of a mist.

He felt a peculiar detachment: some part of his mind had been displaced, fragmented, cast away. He walked out of the cemetery towards the village. The cloud from the pit, with the colliery’s clankings and groanings, its peculiar gaspings, followed him: it was as if he were being ejected from the earth himself, disgorged. He glanced back to the cemetery where, unknown, his brother was buried and felt, prompted by that child, a sense of mission, a new containment, a vulnerability which numbed him to the bone.

It affected his relationship with Steven first. There was a peculiar assurance in his younger brother; he questioned nothing: the quietness of his childhood had given way to a robust, undemanding confidence. He played football, but without any intentness; he worked with little concentration. His voice, in the field at the back, would dominate the houses, refusing to be commanded or advised by anyone. ‘What’s up, our kid?’ he would say, slumping down in the settee beside him. ‘Ar’t feeling bad?’ his shoulder crushing against Colin’s almost like an older brother’s would. ‘Has’t flighted any sense out of ought, then?’ he would add whenever he saw him writing, or marking school books at the table. ‘Wheer’st the genius in that?’ peering mysteriously over his shoulder as if to find in the work some key to Colin’s nature which otherwise eluded him. He had grown in build, proportionately, even larger than Colin; his muscles were prematurely developed. There were very few boys in the village who threatened him; and yet, when they did, Steven never fought; rather, he would take their arm and turn them with him. ‘Nay, wheer’st that gonna’ get you?’ he would say amicably as if, in fighting, they had more to lose than they could imagine. It was as if his nature had been absolved, cleansed, washed through.

‘Why don’t you do more with your work?’ Colin would ask him.

‘Why should I?’ Steven would say.

‘Well, I’ve had to.’

‘Why?’

‘To help you,’ Colin would tell him.

‘Why help me?’

‘To give you a chance.’

‘To do what?’

‘To get through.’

‘Nay, I’ve got through.’ He would laugh. ‘What is there to get through, Colin?’

‘Don’t you feel you ought to get on?’ he said.

‘Get on wheer?’

‘Out of this.’

His brother would look round him at the kitchen, he would look at the window and then outside.

‘Well, it’s not much to look at,’ he would add. ‘But we don’t have to stay here for good, though, do we?’

‘Don’t we? The way you’re going I think we shall.’

‘Nay, tha mu’n leave whenever tha wants.’

‘And leave you and Richard? You should have a chance.’

‘Nay, I’ve got a chance. All t’chance I’ll need.’

His brother’s imperturbability disturbed him; it disturbed him as much as his mother’s acquiescence to it.

‘Don’t you want our Steven to get on?’ he’d ask her.

‘But he’s not as bright as you. At least, not as bright in that way.’

‘But he shows no aptitude, no determination, no need to do anything. He’ll just go on like he’s always done.’

‘But he’s got an equable nature,’ his mother said.

‘Has he?’ The word alone suggested that his mother had thought about this herself. ‘Acquiescent I should think’s more like it.’

‘Acquiescent to what?’

‘To this.’

He would gesture hopelessly around him: the pit, the darkness, the perpetual smell of sulphur, the dankness, the soot; it flattened his spirits more than anything; there was no escape.

‘Doesn’t he want to change it? Is he going to live here all his life?’

‘Well, we’ve lived here,’ his mother said.

‘But then we’ve got a chance to change it. We’ve got a chance of getting out.’

‘Of leaving.’

‘Not physically. Spiritually. It does Steven no good to be buried here.’

‘But why are you so concerned?’ she said. ‘If he’s content why should you insist on him being different?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’d just want something better for him.’

‘But why change his nature when he’s always so happy.’

‘Is he happy?’

‘I think so.’

‘Like a dog is happy. It’s bovine. He has no will.’

His mother, at these attacks, would draw away: there was a peculiar ambivalence in them. His brother antagonized him; yet there was no enmity, no animosity or resentment in his brother at all. If anything, Steven admired him: when he was younger he would listen to Colin’s accounts of school and later of college with fascination. On one occasion, while still at college, Steven had visited him: he had shown him round the buildings, introduced him to the staff and to the students and his brother had admired it all, entranced, without any equivocation. He accepted everything that came before him.

‘Why do you get on at Steven?’ his father would ask.

‘He doesn’t do anything,’ he would tell him.

‘He’s being himself.’

‘I can’t believe it.’ He would watch Steven playing in the field with the same irritation: his good nature was apparent from a distance, the lack of guile, of anything considered; his goodness was dishonest.

‘He doesn’t do anything,’ he would add.

‘Does he have to do something?’ his father would ask.

‘But you insisted that I do something,’ he said.

‘How did I insist?’

‘Everything. There’s always an insistence. I suppose you’ll be content for him to go in the pit.’

‘I suppose I shall. If he’s happy doing it,’ he added.

‘But why should I have had to do things I wasn’t happy doing?’ he said.

‘What weren’t you happy doing?’ his father said.

‘All this.’ He would gesture at the backs.

‘I thought it was something you wanted. It was something you were good at,’ his father said.

‘Was it something I wanted? Or something you wanted for me? Like you wanted something for Andrew, too.’

‘What did we want for Andrew?’

‘To make him good. To make him like me.’

‘Nay,’ his father said, and looked away. It was as if he’d wounded him too deeply. ‘Nay,’ he said again. He shook his head.

‘Isn’t it true?’

‘No. It’s not true. And if you said that to your mother I think it would kill her.’

‘Perhaps it’s better that she should know, then.’

‘You’ll say nothing to her,’ his father said, strangely, turning to him then and standing there as if physically he stood before his mother.

‘And what am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t I have the freedom that Steven has? Not selfishly, but for your good as well?’

‘What good? What good? Is there any good in saying this?’ his father said. Despite his tiredness he would have beaten him then.

‘But why should I have to take the blame?’

‘What blame?’

‘Why should I be moulded? Why weren’t you content with me?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t I have been allowed to grow like Steve?’ It was as if some evil in him had been held in abeyance, while in Steven it had been allowed to flow out, appeased.

‘Didn’t you want to go that school?’ his father said, yet lightly, anxious to distract him. ‘When you came home to tell us you’d passed I’d never seen you look so glad.’

‘It’s what I thought you wanted,’ he said.

‘It was.’

‘Yet why do you want nothing for Steve?’

‘I do want something for Steve. But I wouldn’t force him to it, not against his nature.’

‘But why force me?’

‘I haven’t forced you.’

‘You have.’

‘I haven’t forced you to anything.’

‘Not through force,’ he said. ‘Through love.’

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘I think it’s far too deep for me.’

And later, as if he had nursed his wound, and wondered why Colin should have inflicted it, his father added, ‘We’ve given you a key. We’ve given you a key to get out of this.’

‘I can’t get out,’ he said. ‘You need the money. And in any case, with what I earn, I couldn’t afford to live by myself.’

‘It’s only for two or three years.’

‘Is it?’

‘While Richard and Steven are still at school. It bled us, you know, educating you.’

‘Why do it, then?’

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘I’m beginning to wonder.’

And a few weeks later, coming home from school, exhausted, to find his brother playing in the backs, Colin had picked another argument. His brother, listening to his rage, stood smiling, distantly, across the room.

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘If you go on like that he’ll clobber you.’

‘Will he?’ he said.

His mother, too, had been in the room.

‘Steven isn’t as docile’, she said, ‘as you sometimes think.’

‘Isn’t he?’ he said. ‘I’ve never noticed anything different.’

‘He’s got a mind and values of his own.’ His mother gazed angrily at him through her glasses as if, in his argument, he were attacking her.

‘I’ve never noticed a mind,’ he said. ‘As for values, I don’t think he even knows the word.’

‘Oh, I think he knows a lot of things,’ she said.

‘Where from? I’ve never seen him learning anything.’

‘He doesn’t have to learn,’ she said, deeply. ‘He already knows.’ She glanced at Steven as if she were confessing to something she scarcely knew how to express herself.

‘All he knows’, Colin said, ‘is how to eat and drink and take up space, and use the freedom that others have bought him.’

‘You’ve bought him nothing,’ his mother said.

‘Haven’t I? I’d have thought I’d done quite a lot for him. And Richard.’

‘Nay, he’s done something, Ellen,’ his father said. ‘He’s looked after those two like a father would.’

‘Has he?’ she said, bitterly, strangely. ‘He’s done what he’s wanted. We haven’t forced him’, she added, ‘to anything.’

‘Nay, you mu’n let him get it off his chest,’ his brother said, confidentially, as if the fault lay entirely now with Colin and their patience alone would have to deal with it.

He turned away.

‘And if you have something to say to me, it’s better you say it to me. Not to my mother and dad,’ his brother added.

‘All I can say,’ Colin said, ‘I can say with this.’ He held up his fist.

‘Nay, I don’t mind fighting,’ his brother said as if, by his amiability, he could win him out of this.

‘Don’t you?’

‘I don’t at all.’

‘Nay, Steve,’ his father said.

‘Oh, let them,’ his mother said. ‘If Colin thinks he can perhaps he might find Steven more than he bargained for.’

And, locked into the logic of a fight, they went out in the backs. Perhaps even then Steven thought he might win him out of his mood, show by his conciliatoriness that he meant no harm. He stood smiling before him, strangely calm, almost acquiescent, putting up his fists as if he suspected the gesture alone would be sufficient to warn him off. Yet there was never any doubt in Colin’s mind; with some peculiar rage, drawn from the very depths of his nature, he drove his fist into Steven’s face: he saw his brother’s look of helplessness, the same guilelessness and acquiescence, as he felt the blow, as if his passivity had at last been shattered. Blood sprang out across Steven’s face; a look of anguish came into his eyes; his strength, physically sapped, came out of his body. Almost callously, and with no diminution of his anger, Colin threw him to the ground.

His brother lay still; he appeared quite dazed: when he attempted to rise he fell on his side. Colin had never hated anyone as he hated Steven: he hated his helplessness and he hated his pain. As his father came across the yard to help his brother he turned away. His mother, standing in the door, gazed past him. Her expression was hidden behind the light of her glasses; it was as if, in that moment, she’d been cut in two, unexpectedly, without reason. She attempted to speak, then said, ‘You bully,’ yet quietly, unable to express the depth of her rage. ‘You bully,’ she said again. ‘He never hit you.’

‘You asked him to.’

‘I didn’t ask him.’ She turned away. ‘What harm has he ever done to you?’

‘More’, he said, ‘than you imagine.’

He went out of the house; as he was coming away Steven was being helped into the kitchen.

‘No,’ he was saying. ‘I’m not really hurt,’ yet his voice sounded dazed and his movements heavy, uncertain now of what had happened.

Colin walked into the village; he caught a bus. Three-quarters of an hour later he was in the town. He sat in a pub. The blood roared through his head.

It was after midnight when he got back home; he’d taken the last bus in that direction and had had to walk the last four miles.

No lights were showing in the house; the front door was locked. He went round the back.

The back door, too, was locked.

A drainpipe led up to his bedroom window.

After several attempts, hoisting his foot on the kitchen sill, he clambered up: he pulled open the window and climbed inside.

No sound came from the house at all: a movement came finally from the adjoining room, Steven or Richard turning in bed.

He lay down: his clothes were stained from the soot of the pipe, his hands smelled of stagnant water.

A coughing, and then a dog barking came from across the backs.

He lay quite still; he closed his eyes.

The fumes of the beer and the cigarette smoke from the pub obscured the more prevalent odour of the pit.

27

‘This is Elizabeth,’ Callow said, and after a moment’s hesitation – stepping away slightly as if being recognized with her were something he disliked – he added, ‘We were going for a drink.’

The woman was somewhat smaller than Callow, with thick dark hair, half-concealed by a flowered scarf, and a broad, thickly featured face.

‘Come for a drink as well,’ she said. She indicated a pub across the city centre. It was early evening: lights flared out across the pavement.

The woman’s eyes were dark: they possessed a melancholic light, like those of a doctor examining a patient. She waited for Colin’s response with something of a smile. ‘I hear you teach at the same school,’ she said when they’d entered the pub and were seated at a table.

‘Endeavouring to,’ he said, bemused by the woman’s expression.

‘Well that’s all Phil does,’ she said, her attitude to Callow more that of a sister, or a neighbour, than that of a friend. ‘He daydreams most of the time, so you never really know whether he’s there or not.’

‘I don’t daydream. The school we teach in allows no daydreaming at all,’ Callow said. ‘Quite the reverse: it drives any poetic inclination clean out of you.’

‘Nevertheless, you do philosophize occasionally,’ the woman said. ‘You do put down your thoughts in the evening and allow your imagination a little licence.’ There were the seeds here of some old and familiar argument, half-mocking: she glanced across at Colin and smiled.

‘Colin writes: he’ll tell you how remorseless it is.’ Callow glanced at him for this to be confirmed.

‘Not two in the one building?’ the woman said. She was, if anything, older than Callow. There were thin lines at the corners of her eyes: she wore little if any make-up. ‘That place, despite your protestations, and its prosaic if not depressing appearance, is an incubus of poetic talent.’

‘I have no pretensions. It’s merely therapy for me,’ Callow said wearily, yet glancing too at Colin as he reached for his drink.

‘Do you teach, too?’ Colin asked the woman.

‘Never.’ She shook her head. Inside the pub she’d removed the scarf; her head was swept back from a prominent brow: there was something composed, assured and imperturbable about her expression. ‘I’m an independent lady,’ she said with an affected accent and looked at him directly as if to challenge him to make of this whatever he could.

Callow, moodily withdrawn now from the woman’s banter, had added nothing further, drinking lengthily from his glass, then, at the woman’s suggestion, getting up to order another.

He met the woman again a few days later. It was a Saturday morning: crowds of shoppers flooded the town. Seeing her outside a shop he had, familiarly, caught her arm: he felt her flinch at the touch.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said and he had the distinct impression that she’d already recognized him: that she’d seen him from a distance and had stopped, as if unconsciously, to wait.

‘Are you doing anything special?’ he said.

‘Nothing’, she said, ‘that couldn’t be delayed.’

They went into a restaurant in an adjoining alley; it was the same alleyway, he reflected, as they waited at a table, that he had gone up with his mother years before on his first visit to the school.

‘So you’re familiar with the place as well?’ she said when he made some remark describing this.

‘I was educated here,’ he said.

‘Educated,’ she said, looking at him slyly.

Her hair was greying at the temples; she watched him with the same companionable expression which characterized her relationship with Callow.

‘Don’t you lay much store by it?’ he said.

‘More than most,’ she said, ‘and less than some.’

‘Why do you always make fun of Callow?’

‘Do I?’ Neither his tone nor accusation had surprised her at all. ‘He’s such a stuffy old bird,’ she added, and leant across the table to touch his arm. ‘So are you, but a little bit younger.’

She smiled; her eyes were shielded by dark lashes, her eyelids, narrow, almost invisible beneath her brow.

‘Are you married?’ he asked directly.

‘I am,’ she said. She wore no ring.

‘Is your husband here?’ He gestured behind him, towards the town.

‘I hardly think so. Yet nevertheless’, she added, smiling at him still, ‘you could never be sure.’

She wore a dark-green coat; it had a fur collar. The brownness of the collar gave her face, with its broad cheek-bones and narrow jaw, a peculiar intensity.

‘What does your husband do?’

‘He doesn’t do anything at present.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Is it important?’ she said. ‘I’d have thought, on the whole, it was impertinent to ask.’

There was a certain daintiness about her; her hands were small, her fingers delicate and thin. He watched her pick up her cup: her knuckles were crested white; the veins stood out on the back of her wrist.

‘He worked in a company run by his father,’ she added. ‘Then he broke away, intending to stand on his own two feet. Unfortunately, he didn’t succeed. He’ll go back to the firm, I imagine, and take it over when his father dies. We’re not living together, you see, at present.’

‘Are you divorced?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, casually. ‘He wants me back.’

She watched him for a moment over her cup.

‘You’re very greedy,’ she added.

‘Am I?’

‘Very.’

She glanced away: her daintiness, her sudden bouts of petulance, simulated it seemed and in response to some imagined pattern of behaviour, had made him smile. He was smiling still when she glanced towards him.

‘Is anything the matter?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Philip’, she said, ‘is quite impressed,’ and after a moment added, ‘Callow.’

‘What by?’

‘Your rapport with the students.’

‘I’d hardly call them students,’ he said.

‘He does.’

‘They’re really children.’

‘Isn’t that patronizing?’ she said watching him once more through hooded eyes.

‘I suppose it is.’ He smiled again. ‘I’m not much more than a child myself.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I believe you’re not.’

‘Does your husband live locally?’ he said.

‘Fairly locally.’ She paused. ‘I use my maiden name.’ She flushed, then added, ‘Elizabeth Bennett.’

It was as if the name should have had some significance for him. She watched him for a moment then said, ‘Is anything wrong?’

‘Who were you waiting for?’ he said.

‘No one. I saw you coming. I thought I’d wait for you,’ she said. There was some declaration of feeling here he thought he couldn’t avoid: a moment later when she added, ‘Do you want another coffee?’ he got up from the table and held her chair.

As she proceeded him out of the café he took her arm: outside in the street he didn’t release it.

‘Where are you going now?’ he said.

‘I’ll be going home,’ she said.

‘Is it far?’

‘Just out of town. I have a room at my sister’s. I usually walk back for the exercise.’

‘Do you have a job?’ he said.

‘I work at a chemist’s.’

‘At a shop?’

‘Is anything wrong?’

‘Why aren’t you working today?’ he said.

‘It’s run by my father. I go in’, she said, ‘whenever I please.’

Bennett’s, a chemist’s, stood conspicuously at a corner of the road leading up to the school.

‘I’ll walk back with you if you like,’ he said.

‘I usually walk through the Park,’ she said. ‘It’s longer, but it brings me out by my sister’s house.’

‘What does your sister do?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ she said as he led her across the road. ‘She’s married. She and her husband have no children. They frequently travel.’ After a moment she added, ‘They’re away at present.’

‘You haven’t any children?’

‘No,’ she said.

The road led down towards the river; on the flat land immediately at the foot of the city’s central hill a smaller hill stood up from a surrounding mass of trees: the roof of a large old house was visible beyond.

Paths led off through the grounds; a lake glistened amongst the trees. Birds flew up; the day was windy. As if in fear of the wind she held her coat to her, clasped across her chest.

‘And you? What do you intend to do?’ she said.

‘Oh.’ He gestured round. The trees obscured the view of the town. ‘I’ll teach.’

‘Forever?’

‘For a while.’ Then, bitterly, he added, ‘What alternative is there? It’s all ordained.’

‘Is it? You don’t strike me as a fatalist.’

Other figures moved off beneath the trees. To their right, as they proceeded in the direction of the river, the ruins of the old house were finally enveloped by the profile of the hill.

‘Philip said he’d seen some of your poems.’

‘Yes.’

‘In a magazine.’

‘I don’t think anyone reads it,’ he said.

‘Apparently they were reviewed in the national press.’

‘Three lines at the end of a paragraph,’ he said.

‘Were your family pleased?’

‘Yes,’ he said, though in fact his father’s response had been non-committal. Only his mother had read them with any interest, raising her glasses to gaze at the page. The print was small. She had studied them for quite some time and finally had looked up, flush-faced, as if, in her pleasure, suddenly embarrassed, and said, ‘Yes,’ quaintly, strangely, in half a whisper.

‘Are you and Callow close friends?’ he said.

‘Oh, very,’ she said, and laughed.

On reaching the Park he’d released her arm: they walked along a little distance apart.

‘I knew him before he was a teacher,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘He was a student. We both grew up in the town together. We perform for one another what I believe you would call a supernumerary role: namely we invariably stand in for someone else.’

She didn’t explain it further.

They walked along for a while in silence. The path led by a lake; a statue stood in a pillared alcove on a tiny island.

He had walked here quite frequently with Margaret; often they had sat on a seat gazing across at the island and the female statue, draped to its ankles, its breasts clearly outlined beneath its robe, its gaze inclined towards the water: it had seemed, in its calmness, so much a reflection of their own relationship. Now he walked by with another woman and scarcely glanced at it; it was as if a rupture with his past had taken place, tiny, and scarcely to be considered, but perceptible and, to the extent that he discarded so much of what he felt before, disheartening and repulsive.

He added nothing further until they’d reached the gates.

A road led off to a distant housing estate; close by, opposite the Park walls, stood several large houses: their backs looked on to fields running down to the river.

‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘We’re almost there. Do you fancy’, she added, ‘another coffee? Or do you intend on walking farther?’

‘I’ll come in,’ he said.

They walked along the road by the bevelled brick wall. Originally the retaining wall to the grounds of the ruined house, which now comprised the grounds of the Park, it had fallen down in one or two places, and they could see the gardens and several covered walks inside.

‘It’s a pleasant part to live,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ She looked back now at the Park herself. ‘I suppose so. I hadn’t noticed.’

The house stood away from the road at the end of a drive: bay-windows looked out on to a lawned garden.

Unlocking the front door she revealed a polished hall: a banistered staircase rose immediately ahead; large rooms with carpeted floors opened up on either side.

‘Go straight ahead,’ she said, indicating a door at the rear of the hall. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’

He heard her feet stamping overhead.

A window looked out to the garden at the back: flower-beds, bare with winter, ran down to a distant hedge; wooden frames provided a covered walk. In the farthest distance were the hills across the valley; immediately beyond the hedge figures ran to and fro in a game of hockey.

She came in wearing a dark-brown dress. Her face, as a result of the walk, had regained some colour. She went directly to the fire, which was blazing behind a wire guard, and warmed her hands.

‘It won’t be a minute. It’s warmer at the back. We’re facing south.’ She indicated the window and the view beyond.

Later, when she brought in the coffee, she said, ‘I could get you something to eat if you like.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

‘What do you normally do at week-ends, in any case?’ she said.

‘I walk quite a bit.’

‘Don’t you have any friends?’

‘Most of them’, he said, ‘have left.’

‘The ugly duckling.’

‘Do you think that’s right?’

‘I don’t think that’s right. I thought you did.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘It’s odd,’ she said, gazing at him once more across a cup, as she had in the café, ‘but your mood has changed again. It seems to fluctuate like anything.’

He laughed. He looked round him at the house: the furniture was large and set down like boulders around the fire. From outside, faintly, came shouts and the occasional click of sticks against a ball.

‘Do you play sport?’

‘I did.’

‘Not any longer?’

‘No.’

‘A native of the city. Though, of course, not quite.’

‘Saxton isn’t really anywhere, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Alienated from his class, and with nowhere yet to go.’

‘Do I seem alienated?’ he said.

‘I believe that was Philip’s word. He’s always looking for a champion, you know.’

‘A champion in what way?’ he said.

‘Why, someone who’s come to the top from the bottom. He, you see, has gone from middle to middle. His father worked in an office in the county hall.’

‘I don’t think’, he said after a moment’s reflection, ‘I’d measure progress in terms of class.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘I mean’, she added, ‘not even as an intellectual?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said and added after a while, ‘Wonders of one sort will never cease.’

‘Why are you always laughing?’ he said.

‘Laughing?’ She smiled.

‘Isn’t that patronizing in its way as well?’

She didn’t answer.

‘I didn’t think you’d go much by it,’ he said.

‘My boy,’ she said. ‘You’ve a lot to learn.’

He left a little later; she came with him to the door.

‘You can get a bus back, if you like,’ she said. She pointed out the stop across the road. It was as if, with his leaving, she’d lost interest in his visit.

‘I’ll probably walk back, though,’ he said.

‘It was good of you to accompany me,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I can see you next Saturday.’

‘All right.’ She shrugged.

‘The same place if you like.’

‘All right.’ She shrugged again.

He turned at the gate to wave, but found she’d already gone inside the house and closed the door.

‘See here,’ his father said, ‘it’s no good going on at him.’

He had been teaching Richard, at the table: a mass of figures on torn pieces of paper lay before them.

His brother’s face had wrinkled: it reddened; a moment later, prompted by his father’s tone of sympathy, he began to cry.

‘See here,’ his father said again. ‘It’s gone too far.’ He thumped his hand against the table: pieces of paper drifted to the floor.

His mother, who had been busy in the room upstairs, came down.

‘He can’t go on at him like that,’ his father said. ‘You can hear his voice at the end of the backs. How can he learn anything if he shouts at him?’

‘It’s better he leaves it,’ his mother said, looking in despairingly at the crowded table. ‘I’d rather he worked in the streets than we have all this.’

‘Nay, he s’ll never do that,’ his father said, indicating Richard. ‘He’s got more brains than all of them despite his shouting and his saying he’ll never do it.’

‘I haven’t said he’ll never do it,’ Colin said.

Richard had covered his face in his hands: his head was shaken from side to side; his shoulders shook, some fresh anguish broke from him as his father touched his back.

‘Nay, love,’ his father said. ‘It’s not important.’

‘It is,’ his brother said, his voice buried by his moans.

‘Nay, just look at it,’ his father said, stepping back to reveal the situation freshly to his mother. ‘He’s trained as a teacher, he’s trained as a teacher, but the first thing he does is lose his patience.’

‘It isn’t important,’ Colin said. ‘Why should he have to do it?’

‘Nay he’ll do it because he can do it,’ his father said. ‘It’s on’y thy shouting now that stops him.’

‘Do you shout at them at school?’ his mother said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Why do you shout at Richard? He’s your brother. I would have thought you’d have cared, far more than you do for the others. Why can’t you show the same patience with him? We showed the same patience with you.’

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘I s’ll teach him myself.’

‘With a trained teacher in the house?’

‘Is he in the house? And is he trained? He’s never here on an evening, and if he’s trained for ought I’d say it wa’ shouting.’

Yet the argument on this occasion petered out. It was one of many similar arguments that broke out now almost every night, but particularly at week-ends: there was a delicacy about Richard which inspired his mother’s protectiveness and brought out a concern in his father which he had seldom shown before. Colin came home each evening from school as he might to a prison: he dreaded the street, he dreaded the houses, he dreaded the pit; the village was like a hole in the ground. In the winter all he was aware of was its greyness, the soot, the perpetual cloud of smoke, the smell of sulphur, the stench which penetrated to every corner of every room, which infected clothes and, seemingly, the brick and stone: no one could escape it. The village was derelict; it was like a wreck, cast up in the wilderness of the fields and on the shores of that ever-growing heap.

Most evenings, if he could, he delayed coming home at all; he would walk with Callow to his relative’s house, leaving him at the door, at the end of a tiny terrace street, or ride into town on the back of Stephens’s bike. He would walk in the streets, more lost now, amongst such familiar places, than he’d ever been before. There was a wilfulness in his isolation; all the time, despite his longing, he was anchored to the village. On several occasions he walked the twelve miles home, arriving late in the evening or the early hours of the morning, his steps as he approached the village growing increasingly slower, coming over the final rise and gazing down, past the church, at the glow of the pit and the rising eddies of steam and smoke, the bleakness of the lamp-lit streets, and wondering even then, despite the three-hour walk, whether he might not turn round and walk back again. There was nothing to come back to.

‘If you feel so fond of the place why go on living here?’ his father said. ‘Tha mu’n find a room. There must be summat, the money thy earns.’

‘I don’t earn all that much,’ he said.

‘Nay, I don’t know how much you do earn,’ his father would say. ‘But it’s more than I do for doing half as much.’

‘It’s less than you earn.’

‘Not if you reckon it by the hour.’

‘In any case,’ he said, ‘I’ve looked.’

‘Aye,’ his father said, ‘and where would we be? It’s the first chance we’ve had to buy summat good.’

A new three-piece suite, the deposit paid down as a result of his first month’s salary, now occupied the room; a new dining-table had recently followed it; there were plans to put linoleum on the floor. His father was thinking of buying a better wireless. ‘These are things that we deserve,’ he said. ‘We need these things. It’s what we’ve struggled for together.’

‘It’s prostitution,’ Colin said.

His father balked; he gazed at him with a sudden fury.

‘What’s prostitution?’ His two brothers who’d been listening raised their heads; his mother, too, had turned from the fire.

‘Hiring me out.’

‘Hiring who out?’

‘Me out.’

‘You’re not hired out to ought.’

‘It’s supposed to be enlightenment I’ve acquired, not learning how to make a better living.’

‘It’s both. I thought it would have been both,’ his mother said.

‘But how can it be? The one is in conflict with the other. The one’s opposed to the other,’ Colin said.

‘Nay,’ his father said disowningly. ‘This man is a mystery to me.’

And later, when his father had gone to work and his two brothers were in bed, his mother had said, ‘How can it be hiring out? Don’t you want us to have any of these things?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Don’t you want your brothers to take advantage of the progress you’ve been able to make?’

The light, glistening on her spectacles, concealed her expression.

‘But it’s all shaping us towards an end, it’s propaganda,’ he said. ‘I don’t fancy seeing Richard going through all I’ve gone through. Not to come out of it like this.’

‘Like what? Like what?’ she said desperately. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘To conditioning more people like himself into doing what he’s had to do,’ he said.

‘But what he’s doing, what you’ve done, is a privilege,’ she said.

‘To who?’

‘To you.’

‘Nay, it takes our best qualities and turns them into something else.’

‘You’ve changed,’ she said, bitterly, ‘and I suppose I know why.’

‘I don’t see it as a change, I see it more as a realization,’ he said.

‘Nay, you’ve changed. I hate to see it,’ and a moment later she added, ‘I hate to see you taking it out on us.’

‘I’m taking it out on no one,’ he said.

‘What about Steve? What about Richard? What about your father?’

‘I’m doing all I can for you,’ he said.

‘Doing all you can to disillusion us.’

‘Not to disillusion. To make you see.’

‘See? See what?’ She gazed at him bleakly.

That Easter he had given them money to go away on a holiday, his mother and father together; they’d gone for a week. It was the first time they’d been alone together for over twenty years. He stayed at home to look after Steven and Richard.

‘No arguing, and no fighting,’ his father had said. Colin had seen them off at the station, carrying down their case. There’d been a sudden reconciliation between them: he kissed his mother goodbye and shook his father’s hand; it was as if his parents were going off for good.

A few days later he had come home from school to find Steven in the house: he was sitting with a girl in front of the fire; some tea had been made; the pots were on the table; the fire itself was almost out.

‘Well, then, our Colin,’ his brother had said. ‘This is Claire.’

‘What’s she doing here?’ he said.

‘Nay, she’s visiting,’ his brother said. His mood was amiable, unconstrained: he’d been sitting in his shirt-sleeves with his arm laid casually around the girl’s shoulder.

The girl was small and dark: she stood up quickly when he came in the room.

‘Does she realize your mother and father aren’t here?’

‘Nay, I suppose she does,’ his brother said. There was no rancour in his voice: he gazed at the girl with a smile. She had flushed and gone to the table as if to clear it.

‘And does she reckon it’s all right,’ he added, ‘coming here alone?’

‘Nay, she’s not alone,’ his brother said. ‘She’s here with me. I’m here,’ he added, ‘if you hadn’t noticed.’

The girl had laughed; she glanced away.

‘Do her parents know she’s here alone?’

‘Nay, are you going to dot me one, Colin?’ his brother said: he took up a casual pose, as if for a fight.

As it was, since their previous fight, scarcely any mention subsequently had been made of it; to some extent it was as if it had never taken place. Fights in any case frequently occurred in the field or the yards, sometimes between neighbours, sometimes between sons, or sons and fathers; in that sense, he supposed, theirs hadn’t been any different.

‘I just wondered what her parents would think. Her coming here alone.’

‘Nay, they’d suppose she was a bit of a flirt. Which you are, then, aren’t you, Claire?’ his brother said; he ran his hand casually against her cheek.

‘Oh, well, I’d better go,’ the girl had said. She looked round for her coat.

‘Nay, I’m damned if thy’ll leave,’ his brother said. ‘Tha’s only just come. We’ve just had tea.’

‘Oh, but I’d better go,’ she said. She had a refined voice: she came from a better home.

‘I suppose you realize what you’re doing,’ Colin said.

‘Doing?’ His brother watched him with a smile.

Yet it was to the girl directly that Colin spoke.

‘I suppose you realize this would kill my mother.’

‘Kill her?’ Steven said.

‘I suppose’, he said, ‘you’ve put her up to it.’

‘You’re mad. Whatever’s got into you,’ his brother said.

Colin stood over the girl; he saw her now through a haze of blood.

‘Do you know what his mother would think if she came in now?’

‘What would she think?’ The girl trembled; her face, plaintive, wide-eyed, looked up at his.

‘She’d think you were trying to destroy her,’ he said.

‘Destroy her?’ His brother’s voice came from behind his back; then, urgently, he heard his brother say, ‘Take no notice of him, love,’ and thought then for a moment his brother’s shadow fell upon him.

‘It’d destroy her to see Steven here like this.’

‘But whatever’s the matter?’ the girl had said, gazing past him, appealing to Steven behind his back.

‘You’d better go. You’re trying to kill her. I know you’re killing her,’ he said.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ the girl had said again, appealing once more to his brother.

‘Nay, we’re going,’ Steven said. He’d already pulled on a coat; his face was flushed. ‘Nay, we’re going,’ he said again, taking the girl’s arm. ‘And I s’ll not come back.’

‘You will come back,’ he said.

‘I shall not,’ Steven said and, drawing the girl out with him, closed the door.

He could hear their steps across the yard.

He stood for a moment inside the door; finally he opened it.

The air was fresh: it was as if he’d come out from inside a furnace; even the smell of the pit revived him; he stood there for a while, his legs trembling, gazing at the field.

It was only when Richard came in from playing that he felt any different: he stood at the table and got his tea.

‘What is it?’ she said.

He’d recoiled, broken, rising from the bed.

‘Why, what is it?’ she said again.

Her breasts were thrust up above the sheet.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I should be going.’

Yet the thing that had driven him back had been her face; as he stooped towards her he saw lying there not the face of another woman but that of his mother, so clear and unmistakable, her features so deeply set, lit then by her smile, that he drew away, pushed back. Only slowly did the broadness of Elizabeth’s features re-appear.

‘Why? What is it?’ She drew herself up. ‘You needn’t go for hours.’

‘I ought to go,’ he said.

‘But the bus doesn’t go for ages yet.’

He stood by the bed, gazing to the curtained window. A bus went by in the road outside.

‘Is it the bed?’

He shook his head.

‘We can go to mine, if you like,’ she added.

‘No,’ he said.

‘They won’t be coming in for hours.’

‘Won’t they know you’ve slept in it?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, yet as if she were familiar with using her sister’s bed and had done it frequently before. ‘Let’s go to my room, then,’ she added. ‘It’s bound to be different.’

He began to get dressed; she watched him now without speaking at all.

Finally, she said, ‘Has anything happened?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘I feel something has happened Colin,’ she said. ‘I wish you’d tell me.’ After a moment, she added, ‘Is it Phil?’

‘Why Phil?’

‘That you feel you’ve compromised yourself with him.’

‘Perhaps you feel that,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, and added, ‘You’re the first person I’ve slept with since my husband.’

She began to cry. She turned her face against the pillow.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I think it’s, me.’ He sat on the bed. He might then at that moment have lain beside her.

‘You shouldn’t have come to me in this way,’ she said.

Her voice was buried against the pillow.

‘It’s too much,’ she added. ‘I want you to go.’

Yet he stood by her, helplessly, gazing down.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said.

‘I want you go to.’ Her voice moaned up at him; he was afraid to touch her. ‘What is it? Why have I done this?’ he thought.

‘Please go.’ She lay quite still, her head turned from him. There was nothing he could do at all.

He closed the door; as he went down the stairs he anticipated her calling him back; yet he knew he had inflicted a defeat, so carelessly, that the thought of what had occurred bemused him entirely.

Outside, in the drive, he looked up at the bedroom window: the curtains were still, there was no sign of life at all.

He walked through the Park; when he reached the town he rang her number. There was no reply.

He got on the bus and went back home.

‘I never accused her of anything,’ he said.

His brother gazed at him astounded.

The previous night he had brought Steven back. Having heard he was staying at a friend’s house across the village, he had waited in the road and had seen Steven in the distance talking to the girl then, later, as he approached his friend’s door had caught his arm.

‘You’re coming back home,’ he told him. ‘My mother’s come back and she’s out of her mind that you’re not at home.’

Yet, strangely, his mother had been careless of the fact that Steven was staying at a friend’s. Now she stood gazing at Steven in the door: he had come in suddenly and said, as his father got ready for work, ‘I left home, Mother, because of Colin.’

‘Why because of Colin?’ His mother had gazed at him half-smiling, unconcerned.

‘He threatened the girl I brought.’

‘What girl?’

‘Claire,’he said.

‘How did he threaten her?’

‘He accused her of wanting to kill you, Mother.’

His mother glanced at him in some surprise: her face had flushed. His father looked up, intensely, from fastening his boots.

‘I don’t understand,’ his mother said.

‘It’s a lie,’ Colin said. ‘I never accused her of anything.’

Steven gazed at him in disbelief; his sturdy, open face had darkened.

‘Why, he did,’ he said. ‘You can ask her mother. I had to take her home, she was so upset.’

‘But why on earth should he say she wanted to kill me?’ his mother said.

‘I never said such a thing at all,’ he said.

‘But this is wrong, Mother,’ Steven said. ‘He said it here. I heard him. It’s why I haven’t been home these last two nights.’

‘I thought you’d been staying with Jimmy,’ his mother said.

‘I have,’he said.

‘Well.’ His mother gazed at Colin in disbelief; her face was reddened from the sun: it had an openness, a sudden candour. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s going on. It can’t be true. He’d never say that.’

There were tears now in Steven’s eyes.

‘But it is true, Mother,’ he said. ‘Ask him. Ask him to be honest.’

‘I am being honest. I never said such a thing,’ he said.

‘But he’s lying, Mother,’ Steven said. ‘He’s lying now as he lied to the girl.’

His mother looked at him in terror; there was some conflict between them she couldn’t recognize.

His father had risen.

‘Why did you bring her here?’ his father said to Steven.

‘Why shouldn’t I bring her here?’ he said.

‘You’re too young to bring girls into the house,’ he said. ‘Particularly on your own.’

‘Were you on your own?’ his mother said.

‘Colin came in. We were sitting here. You can ask her parents. She’s on the phone. I have her number.’

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘I mu’n not drag other people in. Particularly if you’ve been as daft as that. What should I say if he rang her up?’

‘Just ask her what Colin said.’ He gazed now at Colin directly.

‘She must have misheard him,’ his father said. ‘And I don’t agree with you bringing her here, in any case. No matter what you think.’

‘But he’s lied about it,’ Steven said.

‘Nay, you mustn’t have heard properly,’ his father said, stubbornly, and wheeling out his bike.

‘Well, I s’ll never stay here again, in that case,’ Steven said.

‘You will stay,’ his father said. ‘You’ll stay right now.’

‘Nay, I shall never,’ Steven said: he stood over his father, his face flushed. They had never seen him in this mood before.

‘Tha should have clattered his lug for him,’ his father said, suddenly, viciously, and gestured at Colin.

‘I don’t want to fight him,’ Steven said.

‘Nay, but tha mu’n not come complaining to us, then,’ his father said. He pulled on his coat; he shouldered his bag. Having wheeled the bike out to the yard he set his lamps.

‘I s’ll not forgive you,’ Steven said, turning to Colin. ‘Having lied about it, you see, as well.’

‘Tha’ll stay, in any road,’ his father said. ‘I’ll not have you sleeping out at somebody’s house.’

‘I don’t want to stay here any longer,’ Steven said.

‘Nay, tha s’ll have to,’ his father said.

He gazed in at them a moment longer; he was darkened from the holiday; his expression was hidden beneath the neb of his cap: it was, with his smallness, like a child gazing in at the door of the house.

‘Think on,’ he said, gazing in a moment longer, staring at his mother, then, mounting his bike, he rode away.

‘I don’t want to come back to sleep here,’ Steven said. ‘I don’t want to live here with him in the house.’

‘Nay, don’t go on with it,’ his mother said. ‘You’ll have forgotten all about it in the morning.’

‘No, I s’ll never forget it,’ Steven said, quietly, taking off his coat. ‘I s’ll never forget it, Mother. And I s’ll never forget’, he added, ‘you giving in to it.’

‘I haven’t given in to it,’ his mother said.

‘Then ring up the Blakeleys and ask them. They live in the village,’ Steven said.

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

‘No,’ he said. ‘And I know why.’

‘Oh, and why should that be?’ his mother said.

‘You know it’s true. He’s poisoned all of us.’

‘How can you say such a thing?’ his mother said.

‘How can you let him get away with it, Mother?’ Steven said. ‘He’s lied about it and I s’ll never forgive him.’

He went up to his room where Richard was sleeping.

‘Did you say something to him?’ his mother said as they listened to Steven’s movements above their heads.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You must have said something.’

‘I said he shouldn’t have been in the house,’ he said. ‘Not with a girl alone; not if he respected her.’

‘And that’s all you said to him?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

His mother turned away; there was a strange silence in the house: she stooped to the fire.

‘Perhaps you should have left it to him to decide. If that’s what in fact you said to him,’ she said.

‘Why? What else could I have said to him?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and added, ‘But Steven never lies.’

‘Doesn’t he?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He never needs to.’

‘That’s all you know about it, then.’

‘Why are you so bitter, Colin?’ she said. ‘You were never bitter before. But I suppose I know the reason,’ she added.

‘There is no reason; and it’s not bitterness,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it?’ she said.

She turned to the door.

‘I’m going up,’ she added. ‘If you’re staying down put out the light.’

‘Mother,’ he said, but when she turned to him he added, ‘Shall I kiss you good night?’

‘Good night,’ she said.

He kissed her cheek.

‘Why are things as they are?’ he said.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to turn everything into,’ she said.

‘I’m trying to be good,’ he said.

‘Are you?’

‘But not goodness as you would know it. Not goodness in inverted commas.’

‘What goodness is in inverted commas?’ she said.

‘Steven’s goodness.’

‘I should leave Steven alone,’ she said. ‘He’s never meant you any harm.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s what I mean. It can’t do him any good at all.’

His mother closed her eyes.

‘I don’t know where I am any more,’ he said. ‘I feel that it’s something new that I’m living, but I don’t understand it any more,’ he added.

‘Oh, I should leave things for a while,’ she said. ‘And leave Steven. I can’t stand these arguments,’ she added. ‘I thought, with a holiday, we’d all have been better.’

He heard her going to bed; he sat by the fire.

A few moments later there was a sound by the stairs.

Steven came in: he was in his pyjamas. He picked up his jacket which was lying on a chair, folded it over his arm and went back to the door.

‘Why did you lie about it, Colin?’ he said.

‘I haven’t lied,’ he said.

Steven gazed in at him a moment longer; it was as if some terrible truth had dawned in him. His eyes widened: they took in the reflected glare of the fire.

‘Why did you come whining, in any case?’ he added.

‘No. I can see. I shouldn’t have come back at all,’ he said.

‘Why, what are you frightened of?’ Colin said.

He gazed directly at his brother who, in his pyjamas, caught in the doorway, appeared now like a little boy.

‘I s’ll leave as soon as I’ve got a job,’ he said. ‘I’ll see about getting one tomorrow.’ He closed the door.

The sound of his feet came slowly from the stairs, then his mother’s voice calling, then the creaking of the bed.

He dreamt of Andrew; he was first older than him, then suddenly younger; he was standing at a window, gazing in; then he was walking away along a road and he ran calling, ‘Andrew, Andrew,’ and when he didn’t turn he called, ‘Steve! Steve!’ and saw the figure’s face: it was, dreamily, abstracted, that of his younger brother.

28

‘Oh, I have come from a promised land

Which young men love and women can’t stand:

There’s whiskey and money both growing on trees,

And the only policemen come up to your knees.’

The children laughed.

‘Any more, sir?’ a boy had said.

‘Oh, when I am old

And my feet turn cold,

And my thoughts have turned to jelly,

I’ll sit by the fire

And smoke my briar

And tickle my fat old…’

‘Belly!’ the class had said in a single voice.

‘There’s a man in the moon

With a chocolate spoon

And eyeballs made of custard,

When he eats his tea

He sits like me

And peppers his rhubarb with mustard.’

They laughed again, freshly, gazing at him in admiration.

‘Simon Brown was a man with a frown

And eyes as black as charcoal:

He wouldn’t have looked bad

If he hadn’t have had

A mouth in the shape of his… elbow.’

‘Sir!’ the children said. A fresh peal of laughter broke out across the room.

‘Though what I have in mind’, he said, ‘is something far different. I thought if we listened to the music you could write down whatever you felt.’

He turned on the gramophone.

The class was silent: a faint murmur of voices came from adjoining rooms.

The children gazed, abstracted, towards the front of the room as the music began.

A few moments later the door opened and Corcoran came in.

‘What’s this?’ he said.

‘English,’ he said.

‘It sounds more like music to me.’ The headmaster indicated the gramophone placed on the desk. ‘And what sort of music is it?’ he added.

‘Jazz.’

‘Jazz? What’s jazz? What’s jazz’, he said, ‘got to do with music?’

‘They’re writing down’, he said, ‘their various feelings appertaining to the music.’

‘What feelings?’ the headmaster said. His stocky figure swelled with indignation; his eyes protruded; a redness crept up from his neck across his cheeks; as Colin watched the colour deepened: veins stood out on the top of his head.

‘I don’t know what feelings they are until they express them,’ he said. ‘Neither do they, I assume,’ he added.

The headmaster turned his head to the blackboard so that his voice couldn’t be heard by the children, who were gazing at him now in fascination. ‘I’m not having this in my school: this is a place of education, of enlightenment, not an institution dedicated to the propagation of half-baked drivel.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to see their essays,’ he said.

‘I’d like to see nothing from this room until that noise has stopped,’ the headmaster said.

‘I’m not turning it off,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘If you want it off you’ll have to turn it off yourself. I want the children to see you do it.’

The headmaster’s eyes were dark; the pupils were entirely surrounded by white; light patches showed on either cheek: it was as if the blood had abandoned his face. He gazed at Colin with a sudden, malevolent fascination.

‘I’d like to see you in my room at the end of the lesson.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘if I can fit it in.’

‘You’ll fit it in, all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll send Mr Dewsbury to take your lesson.’

‘I believe he’s otherwise occupied.’

‘Is he? Then I’ll send a prefect.’

‘They can’t keep control of a class, I’m afraid,’ he added.

‘Come to my room at break,’ the headmaster said.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘And I want that music off.’

‘You’ll have to turn it off.’

‘I want it off.’ The headmaster went directly to the door and closed it behind him.

Some time later the squat, broad-shouldered, bald-headed figure returned along the corridor; Colin turned the music a little louder.

He glimpsed the reddening of the already empurpled headmaster’s face, saw the brief falter outside the classroom door then the sudden upsurge of energy as, with a stumble, he hurried on.

When he went into Corcoran’s study later in the day the headmaster was seated behind his desk, intent seemingly on a pile of papers.

Colin sat down in a chair and waited.

‘Did I ask you to sit down?’ the headmaster said without raising his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But since you’re rude enough not to acknowledge me I’ll be rude enough to go on sitting.’

‘See here,’ the headmaster said, rising to his feet and coming round the desk. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Saville, but this sort of behaviour won’t do you or your future any good.’

‘You’ll have to leave me to be the judge of that,’ he said.

‘I’ll do no such bloody thing,’ the headmaster said. ‘I’ll be the judge of that. It’s me who runs this school, not you.’

‘And it’s me who teaches in it, unfortunately,’ he added. ‘I object to you or anyone else coming into my lesson, without permission, and attempting to disrupt it.’

‘I can come and go when and wherever I please,’ the headmaster said.

‘Not in my lesson, you can’t,’ he said. ‘Nor in anyone else’s, if you had any respect for the staff.’

‘What staff?’

‘Your staff.’

‘You call this a staff? Half of them couldn’t teach a bag of toffee. Half of them’, he added, ‘couldn’t cobble my shoes.’

‘With you standing over them I’m surprised they would even try,’ he said.

‘See here,’ the headmaster said again but stood gazing down at him in some perplexity. ‘I’m in charge round here,’ he added after several seconds.

‘If you’ve any comments to make on how I teach you’ve plenty of opportunity to make them away from the lesson. What authority do I have with the children if you come waltzing in whenever you please?’

‘I didn’t waltz in. I walked.’

‘I thought, on the whole,’ he said, ‘you came in more or less in time to the music.’

‘See here,’ the headmaster said again, and stood gazing at him once more in consternation.

‘There’s nothing wrong in playing music. I prefer to approach them from all directions.’

‘There’s only one direction to approach them from. I know: I’ve taught here for over thirty years.’ He swung out the toe of his laced-up boot. ‘On the end of that: that’s the direction I approach these rough-necks from.’

‘I disagree.’

‘Nay, tha’s not above giving them a wallop: I’ve seen you do it myself,’ he added.

Colin waited.

‘What would the Inspector say if he came in a classroom and found you playing that?’

‘I’m not particularly interested in what he would say.’

‘I can tell you what he would say,’ he said. ‘And what he would say to me,’ he added.

‘Are you frightened of him?’ he said.

‘I’m frightened of nobody,’ the headmaster said and returned swiftly to his desk. ‘N-o-b-o-d-y: nobody.’ He picked up a pen and gazed down, disconcerted, at the pile of papers.

‘I intend to go on using music,’ he said. ‘Of any kind. If you don’t wish to support me you’ll have to fire me.’

‘See here, Saville.’ He gazed at him once more across the desk. Then he added, ‘Have you had your coffee?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Even that’s not very good round here. I’ve been in schools where the girls brewed a coffee which made a playtime well worth having. Our girls, I don’t think, could cook an egg.’

‘Maybe you should leave and I should take over here,’ he said. ‘I’m not that concerned about the coffee.’

‘And neither am I,’ the headmaster said. ‘What I’m concerned with is running a practical and efficient educational institution, and all this airy-fairy nonsense, all this dissolute and promiscuous-making music, has got no part in it at all, either for me, or anyone else,’ he added.

He waited once again; he crossed his legs.

‘See here, it’s my opinion you’re a very good teacher,’ the headmaster said. ‘You’re arrogant and rude, but that’s your youth: a few years of what I’ve been through and you’ll have those edges knocked off. I can tell you that for nothing. A few more years, like some of us have been through, you’ll toe the line and allow experience to speak instead of ignorance and good intentions. We all had good intentions: I had good intentions; Mr Dewsbury and Mrs Wallsake had good intentions; unfortunately good intentions don’t butter parsnips, they don’t redden beetroots and they don’t sweeten swedes; the only things that do are practical measures to ensure that they know what four and four add up to and what happens to the water when they boil a kettle. After all,’ he added, ‘where are most of these children off to? When they leave here the majority’ll go into factories that don’t go down the pit: they’ll work on the roads, they’ll dig holes and clear out ditches; the girls’ll do nought but work in a mill, get married and have children: children we’ll be expected to do summat with. So where’s the music come into that? They can listen to music when they get home at night: that’s about all they do do, some of them. All thy wants to teach them is how to read a rent book, add up the week’s wages, and write a letter of application if they want a job. Apart from that, they’ll not thank you, neither will their parents, for teaching them something that doesn’t come through on the bread-and-butter line. The bread-and-butter line is the only line of advancement these people understand.’

‘In that case, you’re just confirming them in their roles,’ he said.

‘What rolls? Bread rolls?’

‘Encouraging them to submit to a situation which you, if you were in their place, wouldn’t tolerate at all.’

‘Nay, I wasn’t a duffer,’ the headmaster said. ‘Not that I’ve ought against duffers, but it’s no good teaching them the significance of higher mathematics or the beauties of Shakespeare if they can’t even spell margarine,’ he added.

‘What are the beauties of Shakespeare?’ he said.

‘Nay,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had the time. Unlike you, I’ve been concerned with practicalities.’ He paused. ‘You’ll be saying next I’ve done no good.’

‘I’d like to think you’d done some good,’ he said.

‘Half the children I have here are the children of parents I’ve taught myself. More than half, three-quarters,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t mean you’ve done them any good,’ he said.

‘Ask them. You ask them. Would they send their children here if it wasn’t any good?’

‘But they’ve nowhere else to send them,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t say their incomes quite rose to the level of a private education.’

‘Tha’s too clever for your britches,’ the headmaster said. He got up from his desk once more: he went to the window and gazed out at the flowerless flower-beds. ‘You’ll give me no choice if tha goes on playing the music,’ he added.

‘I think I’ll get a longer wire and play it in the corridor,’ he said.

‘What are you, Saville? A communist?’ He turned from the window and advanced quickly across the room. He stood directly over him so that Colin, as if threatened, slowly got up.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Corcoran gazed at him in disbelief: the redness of his face had faded to a deathly pallor. ‘Communists don’t play music. They’re utilitarians like me,’ he said. ‘Only, with renegades like you, they put you up against a wall. If you were a communist,’ he added, ‘you wouldn’t be teaching here.’

‘Where would I be teaching?’ he said.

‘Nay, thy’d be in some crack-pot school. Not stuck in a mining village, not stuck in a place where, if they knew you were a communist, they’d kick you up the arse to the village limits.’

‘There’s a communist on the local miners’ union,’ he said.

‘Miners’ union? Nobody belongs to a union here. There’s not one miner you could tell me who’s been to a union meeting in twenty-five years. They leave it to all these maniacs like you, communists who think they’ve got a bit of power without realizing that that conservative, apathetic body of supporters are using them: they use people like you, the working classes, to do their canvassing and haranguing for them. Colliery-workers are the most conservative body of people thy can possibly imagine. I ought to know, I’ve lived here fifty year: my father was a pit-man, and my brother is one, too. I’d have been down there meself, if I hadn’t have had the brains, and so would you. I’ll tell you: all they’re interested in isn’t changing society, but getting more money, and they’ll use a communist trade-union official, or King Kong if they want to, if they think he’ll do it for them.’

Colin stood back across the room: the headmaster, thumping one fist against his hand, paced up and down: it was as if, for a moment, he’d been forgotten.

‘Tha’s idealistic, like all of us were. Thy wants to change the world when the world itself doesn’t want a change: all it wants is bread and butter, preferably before anybody else, but with anybody else so long as it gets it. Lower the wages round here and you’d see a difference: put them up a bit each year and you’ll keep everything as it is. It’s why these communists never cotton on; if they kept the miners’ claims lower they’d have a chance: you’d see a revolution tomorrow morning. As it is, the silly buggers are sentimentalists like you, think because they’re working-men they live in the same conditions as they do in Russia. Why, a tramp is better off here than he is in any other country you mu’n care to mention. We’ve freedom here, tha knows. Freedom to do nought about ought if nobody wants to, and, if you want to know the truth, thank God that most of them don’t.’

‘You’re one of them,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You’re above it, then?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But I know it could be different.’

‘Different to what?’

‘That people could be different. That the children could be different.’

‘Nay, they’ll still have to work down a pit,’ he said. ‘They’ll still have to work in a mill: they’ll still have to get married because they can’t control theirse’ns. They’ll still have to make do with nearly nought: what difference will music make, or poetry, or these books you’re alus on about? Tha’ll have ’em so refined they won’t want to work in a pit at all.’

‘Maybe that’s all to the good,’ he said.

‘Aye. Thy’d say that stuck in front of an empty fire, or teaching in a frozen school. I’ve seen all thy idealists, you know, before: put a bit of hardship in the way and they’re up top screaming before anybody else.’

‘I think things can be changed,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should all take it in turn to work down a pit.’

‘In turn?’

‘Three months down a year wouldn’t do you any harm. It wouldn’t do anybody any harm, if it comes to that. It’d probably do us all a lot of good.’

‘I can see thy daftness growing every minute: you’ll have us out theer sweeping the bloody street up next.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? Because I’m trained and qualified to do something better. These skills don’t come out of the air, tha knows.’

‘It’s not difficult, teaching,’ he said. ‘You’d probably even do it better after three months sweeping the street.’ He looked out of the window now himself. ‘It could do with sweeping, in any case,’ he added.

‘I haven’t got the time, even if you have, to hold a philosophical discussion,’ the headmaster said returning briskly to his desk.

‘If you can’t hold it in a school where can you hold it?’ he said. ‘And if you can’t hold it with the head of a pedagogical institution, whom can you hold it with?’ he added.

‘Does that music go, or you?’

‘That’s for you to decide,’ he said.

‘Then you go, I’m afraid,’ he added. ‘Not that I’m not sorry. The football team’s improved by leaps and bounds since you came to the school. Unfortunately, life isn’t made up of bloody football. You’ll have two months’ notice from today and leave at the end of the term. I’ll notify the divisional office.’

‘What about a testimonial?’ he said.

‘For what?’

‘For another job.’

‘Art thy intending on remaining in teaching, then?’ He gazed up at him directly.

‘That’s all I’ve been trained to do,’ he said.

‘Nay, thy’ll not get a job with thy ideas,’ he said. ‘I’m a liberal headmaster. Wait till thy comes across one with a few ideas of his own. Thy gramophone and record’ll be out of the window.’ He tapped his teeth with the end of a pen. ‘I’ll write you a testimonial,’ he added. ‘I’ll put “independence of ideas not normally encountered in our profession” and they can make on that whatever they want.’

‘I’ll be sorry to leave on the whole,’ he said.

‘I’ll put it around and they can buy you a present.’

‘Oh, I don’t really want a present,’ he said.

‘Nay, I don’t hold any enmity,’ the headmaster said. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a job to do. I’ve done it, one road or another, for forty years. Nobody’s complained, as far as I reckon. Based on that experience, I’d say you were wrong.’

A bell rang at the end of an adjoining corridor.

‘I’ll get back to the class.’

‘That’s right.’ The headmaster returned to the papers on his desk and, as he read them, got out a pipe. ‘By the way.’ He raised his head. ‘Thy’ll leave thy coffee money before tha leaves. We’ve had one or two leave who’ve forgotten that: it comes out of petty-cash, and the divisional office, I can tell you, have me account for every penny. They shit hot bricks if I’m a halfpenny out.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to that.’

‘Right,’ the headmaster said and, flushing at Colin’s smile, he lit his pipe.

‘How was that?’ she said.

‘All right.’

‘You’re hard to please.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I think so. Perhaps others wouldn’t.’

It was a Saturday afternoon: they lay in the double-bed: her sister and brother-in-law were out.

‘In any case,’ she said, ‘they want me to leave.’

‘Why?’

‘They don’t like me bringing a man to the house.’

‘I’m not a man,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re more a boy.’

‘I mean’, he said, ‘not any man.’

‘If I want that freedom they think I should take a place of my own.’

‘Will you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose I shall.’

A few days previously a man had come up to him in the street.

He had asked him his name, standing directly before him on the pavement; finally, having confirmed who Colin was, he had handed him a letter.

Inside the envelope across which his name had been scrawled in capital letters was a note which said, again in capital letters, ‘WOULD YOU LEAVE MY WIFE ALONE?’

He’d shown it to her when he’d arrived that afternoon.

She’d gazed at it for quite some time.

‘I suppose it must be Derek,’ she said. ‘It looks like Derek.’ She’d set the paper down. ‘Did the man say anything at all?’ she added.

‘Just asked my name and gave me the letter.’

Now she said, as she got up from the bed, ‘I suppose I ought to, in any case. Derek’s not above coming here, if he thinks it suits him.’

‘Why don’t you go back to him?’ he said.

‘You don’t know the Waltons. You don’t know him. That family is all-consuming. If he couldn’t break free, how could I? There are so many of them and their interests are so closely related.’

He watched her dress; there was a certain neatness in her movements, self-enclosed, as if she were unaware of dressing in the presence of someone else: she made no attempt to conceal herself.

‘You ought to be getting up yourself. They’ll probably be back within an hour.’

‘Do they know you use the bed?’ he said.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Haven’t you any qualms?’

‘Not really.’

‘Has it some significance? It being your sister’s bed?’

‘Why?’

‘I wondered.’

She gazed up at him, surprised.

‘We get on very well.’

‘Is she younger or older?’

‘Older.’

They went through to her room: it looked out to the fields at the back of the house. As it was, there was a certain strangeness in being in a family house yet having no relationship to the family. When she heard her sister’s return, the drone of the car in the drive outside, she went down to meet her.

As she came back up he could hear her voice: ‘Oh, Colin’s here,’ and, slightly lower, ‘I thought I’d warn you.’

He couldn’t hear the sister’s response, only the duller tone of the husband.

She brought up some tea; they sat on the single bed.

‘Why don’t we go down and drink it?’ he said.

‘Oh, Maureen doesn’t approve of this at all,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in trying to force it.’

They went out a little later; they walked in the Park. A certain listlessness came over him now whenever he went out with her. Initially he had liked it: liked it, above all, that she was a married woman. His earlier hallucination had never returned and he’d never attempted to explain it; a fortnight had passed before he’d gone back to see her and it was as if that first abortive attempt to sleep in the sister’s bed had never occurred. Callow avoided him at school. Invariably, most evenings, he rode into town on the back of Stephens’s bike and either went directly to Elizabeth’s sister’s house or met her by arrangement at some place close to the city centre or her father’s shop.

Frequently they walked in the fields, and lay together beneath the hedges.

‘Is Derek looking for evidence, do you think?’ he said.

‘For what?’

They walked by the pond; they paused opposite the statue. She’d brought some bread: she threw it to the ducks.

‘A divorce.’

‘Don’t you want to be cited?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ve arrived on the scene too late.’

Yet there was a hardness in her voice: he didn’t know whether it was to do with him or her husband.

She had slender arms, her skin pale, glowing, almost luminescent. It was a quality he’d never seen in anyone before. Some days when he met her her cheeks would glow; other days there was a peculiar dullness, or the strange, almost languid luminescence of the skin.

‘Since you’re an anarchist, I didn’t think you’d mind. Flouting convention, I mean,’ she said.

‘Am I an anarchist?’ he said. He’d told her already, the day it had happened, that he’d been fired from the school. She’d seemed relieved: she was feeling guilty, he thought, about Callow.

‘Well, you’re not a communist,’ she said. ‘Whatever you told your Mr Corcoran.’ And a moment later, she added, ‘You’re more a Calvinist,’ and when he laughed she said, ‘Well, aren’t you? What allegiance have you got? I’d say you were a medievalist, a feudalist.’

She threw the last pieces of bread to the ducks.

‘You make it sound’, he said, ‘like a crime.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it probably is.’

‘I’d have thought attitudes like that came easily to hand. Aren’t you, after all,’ he added, ‘much the same?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I’ve had my way, you see, made for me. You’ve got to make yours.’ And a moment later, glancing up at him, she added, ‘In whatever way you can.’

A man walked behind them, his hands in his pockets: when they’d paused to feed the ducks he’d paused as well, gazing at the birds, smiling when Elizabeth looked, and nodding his head.

Now, as they continued along the path, he followed them once more.

The mocking, half-affected look came back to her eyes. She watched him closely; her arm in his.

‘In the end, what the individual achieves is for the benefit of everyone,’ he said.

‘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.

‘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.

29

‘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.

‘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.

Bletchley himself had been taken on, during his final term at university, by a large firm of cloth manufacturers in a neighbouring town: he worked in the laboratories. A few months later he was sent to America on a training course. He came back with a light-grey suit, a small, neat, metal-stemmed pipe and a slight American accent. A photograph of him appeared in the local paper. Mr Bletchley, who had been promoted from his local job on the railway to a divisional office, bought a second-hand car. It stood in the road outside, the first car to be owned by anyone in that part of the village.

His father would gaze out at it in fury; he would listen with the same dull rage to the sound of the television set through the wall. ‘Ian looks after his parents,’ he would say, although Ian himself was scarcely ever to be seen in the village and only came home occasionally at weekends, staying half a day and only rarely a night. His father would drive him back to the station.

The village had a worn-out look; from the centre it looked like the suburb of a town: new houses sprawled across the slope of the adjoining hill, and reached up to the overgrown grounds of the manor. Over half a century of soot appeared to draw the buildings, the people, the roads, the entire village into the ground, the worn patches of ashes between the terraces gashed by children digging and worn into deep troughs by the passage of lorries. Very little of the brightness that he remembered as a child remained: so much had been absorbed, dragged down, denuded. Occasionally, on an evening, when he walked out of the place he would gaze back at it from an adjoining hill and see, in the deepening haze, the faint configuration of the village as it might have been – the smooth sweep of the hill with the manor, the church, the cluster of houses at the base. The light would deepen: the simple, elemental lines of the place would be confirmed; then lights sprang up, and across the slopes and in the deep declivities would be outlined once more the amorphous shape of buildings and the careless assemblage of factory, pit and sheds and the image, almost in a breath, would be wiped away.

He taught for three years in a variety of schools; in none did he stay for very long: he was preoccupied by a peculiar restlessness. His relationship with Elizabeth fluctuated from one extreme to another. For a time he gave up seeing her altogether, long after the flat had been redecorated and looked, superficially at least, not unlike a room in her sister’s house. Then, of his own volition, he had gone back to her; they both struggled to escape, yet from what in their relationship he had no idea – his youth tormented her, her age preoccupied him; she tried to pretend at times she would soon re-marry.

Shortly after her decoration of the flat had been completed he was visited by her husband at home.

The man arrived one evening; his mother answered the door.

She showed him into the room at the front. She came in, flush-faced, her gaze hidden, however, behind the glare on her glasses.

‘There’s a Mr Walton to see you,’ she said and he recoiled instantly, knowing it was him.

The man was short and fair-haired: he might have been a school-teacher like himself, or a clerk in a local office.

His embarrassment was even greater than Colin’s. He refused a cup of tea and stood awkwardly before the empty fire; finally, at Colin’s insistence, he sat in a chair.

‘I came to see you about Elizabeth,’ he said, his hands clenched together. ‘I suppose she’s mentioned me,’ he added.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘We’re not divorced yet.’

‘No,’ he had said. The man had stated it hopefully, as if suspecting Elizabeth might have told him something different.

He wondered what she’d seen in him, interpreting his extreme nervousness perhaps as sensitivity, and sensing in him someone she might mould: some image, hopefully, of her enterprising father.

‘I sent a message once,’ Walton said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He felt there was very little he could tell him.

‘And I had a man, I don’t know why, collecting evidence.’

‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘I thought you had.’

‘The fact is, I think it’s only a temporary break. I think she got very frustrated, being at home. I’m trying to make plans to leave,’ he added.

‘She said you already had. And that you’d decided, finally, not to.’

‘No, no,’ he said, suddenly. ‘She’s twisting it there.’ Yet he gazed at him hopefully, as if the solution of his problem might come from him.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

His mother had opened the door.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she said, looking in intently, flushing at her concern.

‘Mr Walton says he wouldn’t like one,’ he said.

‘Oh, in that case.’ She looked at the man for this to be confirmed, but he said nothing, sitting stiffly in the chair, anxious for her to leave. ‘In case you do just let me know,’ she added.

Her footsteps sounded remotely from the other room, then the sound of Richard’s voice inquiring.

‘I thought, if you didn’t see her, and recognized the reality of the situation, it might do some good,’ the man had said waiting a moment for the sound of the kitchen door to close. He added, ‘You see, from my point of view, you’re just exploiting it.’

It was as if someone else had persuaded him to come: that he were listening to some other voice, but faintly now, and which he could scarcely catch, struggling to decipher the message, the urgent things he’d been asked to say.

‘I can’t refuse to see her,’ Colin said. ‘I can’t agree to that,’ he added.

‘But to you’, the man said quickly, ‘this is nothing. It’s my life you’re playing with, my marriage.’

‘But surely Elizabeth has something to say in that.’

‘Liz?’ His voice thickened; the colour deepened in his face. His hands were vigorously entwined together: the pressure of some other place, and some other person, drove him on. ‘Elizabeth has a responsibility. It’s something she’s run away from. She has her problem, just like me, but you’re preventing us from working it out,’ he added.

‘She can see you if she wants to,’ he said. ‘You can see her. I’m not preventing that.’

‘You are preventing that. You’ve become a distraction.’ Yet the word wasn’t precisely what he wanted. ‘You’ve become an obstacle to us getting closer, or resolving what is, after all, the problem of our marriage and which has nothing to do with you.’

‘It has now,’ he said. ‘I’ve been included.’ It was as if he suspected that Elizabeth had sent him herself: this was her latest attempt to ‘commit’ him; yet the thought had no sooner arisen than he began to dismiss it.

‘I want you to leave my wife alone. I want you to leave her alone,’ the man had said, almost chanting, his small face flushing even deeper, the eyes starting, his lips drawn back. He thrust himself forward from the chair: he appeared no longer to be in control of himself, to care what he said. ‘I want you to leave my wife alone.’

He knew from the silence in the adjoining room that the man’s words had carried through to the kitchen.

‘I don’t want any promises. I don’t want any conditions. I’m telling you,’ he said, ‘to leave her alone. She is my wife. I married her. We have a right to decide this thing together.’

‘But she left you over a year ago,’ he said.

‘I don’t care when she left me. She’s coming back. She’ll see it’s the only way in the end. Meanwhile,’ he raised his fist: he pushed it wildly in front of his face. ‘I’ll kill you if you as much as see her again.’

‘But you can’t kill me,’ he said, absurdly, wanting to laugh; to intimidate the man, he stood up himself.

‘I don’t mind what I do, or what punishment I get. She’ll see how much I love her. She’ll see how much I care,’ he said.

He turned to the door. Colin moved as if to open it for him, but the man flinched: he grasped the handle himself and stepped out quickly to the passage. For a moment he fumbled with the door to the street.

‘I’ve told you. I’ve warned you. I can’t do anything else.’

He opened the door. When Colin followed him he could see a car parked some distance down the street, opposite Reagan’s: its lights came on; its engine started. As it swept past a face peered out; its lights disappeared in the direction of the station.

‘Who was that?’ his mother said. Both she and Richard were standing in the kitchen, unable to sit down.

‘His name is Walton.’

‘Yes,’ his mother said. ‘I gathered that.’

‘It’s just something he wanted me to do,’ he said.

‘He mentioned his wife.’ His mother gazed at him in angry surprise.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Have you been seeing his wife?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and added, ‘They’re getting divorced.’

‘They’re getting divorced, or they are divorced?’

‘Getting. They’ve been separated’, he added, ‘for over a year.’

Nothing had ever alarmed his mother as much.

She gazed at him for several seconds: Richard sat down and looked at a book.

‘So this is your way’, she said, ‘of getting back.’

‘But there’s no getting back,’ he said. ‘It’s someone I met by accident.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and added, ‘That’s what you might well believe, my lad.’

She sat down at the table; she was worn and thin; so much of the life that might have been in her now had gone, torn out with each of the children, torn out by the struggle to make ends meet. He even saw the kitchen as might Walton himself, if he’d come inside, its worn patches, its bare floor: only its furniture was new, yet is design was poor. The place was like some cave they’d lived inside, worn, eroded, hollowed out by the vehemence of their use.

His brother’s slender face looked up at him, the eyes fresh, alert, still startled from Walton’s shouting, his cheeks flushed.

‘It’s bad,’ his mother said. ‘It’s something bad when you take a man’s wife.’

‘I haven’t taken her,’ he said. ‘She’s no intention of going back.’

‘Hasn’t she?’

Yet it was as if his mother had cut some final cord: the last attachment between them slipped away. She saw something bitter and remorseless in him, first with Steven, now with this, then with his job; the triumph they had looked for in his life had never occurred.

‘It’s bad,’ she said again, ‘it’s bad,’ almost in the same way the man himself had chanted ‘I want you to leave my wife alone’. She clung to the table as she might at one time, in some affliction or illness, or some quarrel with his father, have clung to him. ‘It’s bad,’ she said again, remorselessly now, unable to leave go of her rancour, or of herself.

‘There’s nothing bad in it. Why should someone be tied to what they’ve done in the past? Particularly if they’ve let go of it themselves.’

‘He hasn’t let go of it,’ she said. ‘And he’s her husband.’

‘But what’s a marriage count if she’s dropped out of it?’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Colin, you don’t know what marriage is.’

‘Don’t I?’

‘You’ve no idea.’ Some part of her own life had been disrupted: the man had left a conflagration in the house that neither of them could put out. ‘You’ve no idea what a marriage entails, and if one partner falters it’s no man, no decent man, who comes along and takes advantage.’

‘I’ll bring her,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see where the advantage lies.’

‘I don’t want her here,’ she said, so violently, so immediately, it was as if Elizabeth had come in the room with him. She got up quickly and turned to the fire: she poked it vigorously, her figure, its shoulders rounded, stooped to the flames. She put on more coal and dampened the blaze.

Smoke rose in thick clouds across the chimney.

And it was as if he had fought his last fight in the house: he could feel it slip away from him, his younger brother sitting there, his mother standing, turned away, then carrying the bucket out to the yard.

‘I’ll get it, Mother,’ Richard said.

He thought he might have left it then, gone for good: yet he stood gazing down at the smoke-filled hearth.

Outside his brother rooted at the coal. His mother came inside.

‘I hope you’re going to break with her,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I shall.’

She said nothing for a while.

‘And what shall you do’, she said finally, ‘when he comes again? Half the street must have heard his shouts. What will Richard think? What effect will it have on him?’

‘I shouldn’t think it’ll have any effect at all,’ he said.

‘He looks up to you,’ she said. ‘So does Steven.’

‘Does he?’

‘I think he still does, despite how badly you’ve treated him.’ And strangely, as if to prove her point, they could hear Steven whistling cheerily across the backs, then his voice, ‘How are you, Dick?’ as he called to his brother bringing in the coal.

Then, standing in the door, looking in at the lighted room, he gazed brightly from one to the other of them, and added, still cheerily, ‘Well, Mother, then. What’s up?’

30

When he told Elizabeth about her husband’s visit she’d been alarmed – as much by his own reaction, he thought, as anything else. ‘But aren’t you worried?’ she said, and added after a moment, ‘And what your mother must have thought.’

He burst out laughing at this speculation.

‘Why this sudden concern about my mother?’ he said. ‘That’s the last thing, I’d have thought, you’d have worried about.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She seems a remarkable woman. I can’t imagine what her life has been like. It’s a pity now I’ll never know her.’

‘You can still come and see her. I won’t take her injunction at its face value,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to push it down her throat.’

Yet what the ‘it’ was to push down his mother’s throat she didn’t mention.

‘Oh, I’m not worried about him coming,’ he said. He felt in fact, on reflection, more relieved. He liked to see strong feeling in others, it reassured him: it was the lack of feeling, in himself and others, that disconcerted him. He would even, as with Corcoran on his dismissal from the school, provoke someone deliberately in order to find out where he was; he could no longer accept the sobriety of life, he wanted to be an exception. The thought of Walton feeling anything violently was a consolation in the weeks that followed; he even hoped be might come again, even angrier, more violent.

Yet her husband didn’t come back. Each evening when he arrived home he looked for the car or for a figure waiting: neither was ever there. Several weeks had passed before he discovered the reason – Elizabeth had gone herself to see him.

‘What did he say?’ he asked her later.

‘I think it was what he was really wanting all along,’ she said. ‘For me to see how much I’d hurt him. He was very cold. But then’, she added, ‘you don’t really know him, do you?’

He wondered if he did. The man was insignificant: she diminished herself in seeing him; he was beginning to see how ordinary she really was, despite her independence, her determination, if only for a while, to live alone. Perhaps, he speculated, it was some fault in her: her incapacities made her humourless. Perhaps there would never be anyone she trusted, or whom she allowed to live up to her expectations: she was always looking for a reason in everything.

‘We’re two such egotists,’ she said on one occasion. ‘I don’t think anything will ever come of it.’

Now she said, ‘He’d been instructed by his father to offer me a stake. In the firm, I mean. He thought I might be tempted.’

‘He must be really desperate,’ he said.

‘I don’t think he is. Not with me. I think it’s his family that put him up to it: I think he’s desperate because of them. It wasn’t really at you he was shouting: I think he’d be relieved not to be married at all. I offered to divorce him, by putting the onus on to me. They wanted him to get me back or, if not, to get a divorce and cite you as co-respondent.’

She’d had difficulty in telling him this: it was the thing she was most afraid of. All along she had told him, ‘It’s quite safe, you know,’ and when he had asked, ‘Safe for what?’ she said, ‘Safe with me. You’re not likely to be exploited.’ Now she said, ‘It’s the one threat they’ve always held over me: that anyone I went with would be involved. I think, in the end, it’s what kept Phil away. But even Derek drew back at that: it’s done some good, I imagine. He’s insisted that you shouldn’t be used.’

‘Nevertheless, it won’t stop them if they wanted to.’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps their solicitor might prefer it.’

‘Yes.’

She watched him gravely.

‘It’s like being engaged. I’ll have to marry you after all.’

‘But it’s absurd,’ she said. ‘You occurred much later.’

‘Not that much later.’

‘Oh, far too late’, she said, ‘for them.’

Yet perhaps it was what the husband, and the family, had been attempting all along – to cool his ardour, to inhibit his relationship, her freedom, in this particular way. There was a sudden halt to their openness: he became evasive. He started seeing other women, particularly a teacher at one of the schools. She was younger, closer to his own age, yet empty, he found, and finally silly. Beside the gravity of Elizabeth she had no presence. The relationship ended as suddenly as it began: he found himself back in the flat at Catherine Street.

‘Well, my boy,’ she had said, when he’d told her about the woman, ‘I feel more sorry for them than I do for you.’

‘Why?’

‘You go from strength to strength. You suck the meat out. You drain these women. Like you drain your mother with your abuse.’

‘I don’t drain her,’ he said.

‘Don’t you?’ she said as if she knew his mother intimately, better than he knew her himself.

Yet there was a shallowness in her, a desperation: she was afraid he might leave her now for good.

For he did feel a strength. As the world faded all about him, as the people faded, as the bonds faded with his family he felt a new vigour growing inside.

‘You’ll leave me soon,’ she said one evening as they lay in bed. Yet she stated it not sadly, but as if relieved she too might be moving on.

They were like prisoners; he wondered where their new assertiveness had come from; he could see, secretly, no hope for her at all. She still worked at her father’s shop, though she had mentioned, since she had trained as a pharmacist, she might move to a larger firm and take charge of a department. ‘I’ve had experience of administration: I’m not as stupid as I look.’

‘I never thought you were,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’ She appeared quite confident of his assessment of her. ‘You’re an opportunist, Colin. You’ll move on from one advantage to another.’

‘It sounds awful,’ he said.

‘You don’t know what power is,’ she said. ‘Nor’, she added, ‘what power you’ve got. I don’t think anything will arrest you. The fact of the matter is you’ve been cut loose. Much to your chagrin, and perhaps to your loss. But from what I can see, you’ve no alternative. Once you are free, well,’ she paused, ‘I hope to hear of it but I don’t hope I’ll be around to see it.’

Yet her view of him was never clear. It was one of her ways of fencing him off, threatening him with a future he couldn’t see himself; his instinct was to cling to her more closely.

‘Oh, you’ll go, my boy,’ she said on another occasion when, provoked by her certainty, he’d attacked her. ‘You’ll go, my boy. But I’ll not do it for you.’

They were constantly battling with one another; chiefly him with her. There was a calmness in her: she had a strength, a humourless and unperceiving certainty which he felt he had to thrust against; he tested himself continuously against her.

‘Oh, leave me, my boy,’ she would cry at times when his anger became too much, and the thrill of her challenge, the way she condescended to him, knowingly, in that phrase, ‘my boy’, only drove him on.

‘I want you to know you can rely on me,’ he said. ‘I want you to trust me. I love you. I’ll do anything you want.’ Finally, in order to make himself feel real, he had said, ‘I’ll marry you, if you want.’

‘Is this a proposal, or a threat?’ she said.

‘It’s a proposal.’

‘It sounds like a challenge. I refuse to take it up. I refuse for your sake to take it up. You’re not in love.’

‘But I am,’ he told her. ‘Tell me something I haven’t done.’

‘You haven’t loved me,’ she said. ‘You can’t see it, but I know.’

He tormented himself with this accusation.

‘Show me,’ he would say. ‘How haven’t I loved you?’

He proposed to her that they go away.

‘Where?’ she said.

‘On holiday.’

‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly mocking. ‘But not for good?’

He hadn’t answered: she was marking out areas in him he didn’t like. His cantankerousness spread back towards his brother.

‘Why won’t you live, Steve?’ he would say when he saw his brother, dumbly, getting on with his work. ‘Why won’t you live?’

‘I am living,’ his brother said, unruffled by these charges.

‘You’re going to end up down the pit, like my father. Something they threatened they’d never let me do.’

‘Nay, he’ll end up as a manager,’ his father had said. He was wearied now almost to extinction by the pit himself. Each time he came home he seemed physically smaller: he shrank before them, lying prostrated by the fire, too tired to go to bed, too sick from exhaustion even to eat; his presence was a constant reproach, one he deliberately cultivated, flaunting himself before them, his tiredness, his diminution. ‘He’ll not be like I am,’ he had added, indicating Steven’s robust figure and the set good nature of his looks. As it was his brother was popular: he had left school and was apprenticed as a mining mechanic, attending, for part of his time, a local college. Yet he never thrust himself forward in anything; he had an incalculable strength which Colin envied.

‘I can’t understand why you let him give in to it,’ he would tell his father, indicating his father’s own exhausted condition. ‘You were convinced at one time he would never go down.’

‘He’s gone down’, his father said, ‘because he wants to. He’s gone down with a skill. I started with nothing. I was fresh from the land when I first went in. He’s been educated, he’s been trained for it,’ he added.

The familiar arguments began again: but only Steven himself antagonized him, his docility. He could see so much more in his brother than Steven could see himself.

‘Nay, I’m not complaining,’ Steven would say, shaking his massive head; muscles were hunched now around his shoulders. He had started playing football; he was in much demand: youths his own age as well as girls were constantly coming to the house. Steven would keep them at the door in deference to his mother, or only show them into the kitchen if he knew she was out. ‘I can’t see what you’re getting at,’ he added on another occasion when he and Colin were alone in the house.

‘But what are you going to get out of all this?’ he asked him.

‘Nay, I’ll get a living. Like thy gets a living out of teaching,’ his brother said.

‘But it’s slavery,’ he said. ‘My dad’s a slave. You’re a slave. They pay people enough to work down a mine, but never enough for them not to. It’s like a carrot: put it up a bit each year. Like good-natured donkeys they go on turning it out.’

His brother shook his head; he ran his hand through his tousled hair.

‘You develop a slave mentality to live with these slaves. In acquiescing to it you’re reinforcing it.’

‘But the mines have been nationalized,’ his brother said.

‘So what difference does that make?’ Colin said. He waited.

His brother rubbed his head again.

‘Nay, I’m content with what I’m doing.’ He glanced up at him and smiled, but shyly, as if he were embarrassed by his concern. ‘If I’m content, I can’t see why thy can’t be content as well.’

‘Well, I’m not content,’ he said, bitterly.

‘If tha’s not content,’ his brother said, broadening his accent, ‘tha mu’n start to change it.’

‘I am starting,’ he said. ‘I’m starting with you.’

‘Nay, tha’s starting with the wrong end. It’s the head tha hast to get hold on.’

‘You’re closest; I love you; you’re the nearest. You’re young, you’re flexible, you’re amenable to new ideas. You haven’t been conditioned like my father has.’

‘Somebody’s got to work down,’ he said. ‘I reckon I can do it better than most. I can improve conditions. I can do a better job. We’re making changes all the time. What dost tha want me to do? Become a communist?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to get out.’

‘Nay, I’m in,’ his brother said simply. ‘I can’t get out. I like what I’m doing.’

‘It’ll not bring you anything at all,’ he said, ‘except a dumb acceptance.’

‘And supposing I did get out: what’ll happen to all the other slaves?’

‘You’ll leave them.’

‘And my dad?’

‘My dad as well. He’s accepted. Look where he is. Look where all of them are,’ he added, indicating with a sweep of his arm the whole of the village.

‘My dad’s too old to be down, that’s why.’

‘You’re too old to be down. You can set an example by getting out.’

‘Nay, I’m damned if I know what you’re after,’ Steven said, sitting so sturdily there and looking so confused that Colin smiled, dazed by the strength and the obtuseness of his brother. ‘I think thy’s got thyself into a muddle. You lie and cheat; you lied about Claire: you say no one should accept responsibility for ought.’

‘Except themselves.’

‘Accepting responsibility for yourself is accepting it on behalf of other people,’ his brother said with difficulty, thinking it out.

‘It is,’ he said, ‘precisely. And not the other way about.’

He laughed, looking at Steven now in triumph.

‘You should experience everything about you, Steve. You should go out and live.’

‘Nay, thy’s a hypocrite. Thy’s a treacherous hypocrite,’ Steven said; he flushed deeply, looking away.

‘But I’m other things’, he said, ‘as well. Good things. I can help you. I’m not only bad. There are things about me you might accept. There are things about me you should accept. I know them.’

‘What things?’ Steven said.

‘Things you’d never experience yourself: things you’d never experience by accepting.’

‘It’s like Jesus in the wilderness,’ his brother said.

‘Is it?’

‘When he was offered all the kingdoms of the world. I believe in what I’m doing. It does some good.’

‘Good. What good is that? That’s Jesus’s good. It’s not the good of understanding; it’s not the good of embracing evil – it’s only the goodness, the primness, of cutting evil off.’

‘Nay,’ his brother said, gazing at him slowly. ‘I believe you are evil, Colin.’

‘So are you,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get you to admit it.’

Yet his brother continued to look at him in his heavy way, his brows furrowed, his gaze confused, his eyes troubled. He shook his head.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You’re a mystery to me.’

‘But do you feel, Steven,’ he said, ‘that I want your good? Not your “Jesus” good, but your fundamental good: the good that makes you real.’

‘Well,’ his brother said.

‘You’re after the “good” that my parents want for you, out of fear. You’ve to disabuse them of that fear. You’ve got to break out.’

‘Aye.’ Yet he’d stopped listening to him. Richard came in from playing outside. He was at the grammar school now himself: he was at the top of his year. ‘You’d better ask Dick. He’s the one with ideas.’

‘Oh, Richard’s got brains, but he hasn’t any ideas. Brains beget slavery as much as anything else. He’ll go to university and be lost for good. He’ll be cleaned out: “brains” will become his panacea.’

‘Will they?’ Richard said, his thin face pale, yet as if, almost perkily, he accepted his challenge.

‘It takes all sorts,’ Steven said. ‘We don’t all want to end up, tha knows, like you.’

‘Not like me, but for me,’ Colin said.

‘Nor for you, for I think all thy’s after is grabbing for thysen.’

‘Oh, Steve,’ he said, morosely, looking at his two younger brothers as if he would never really talk to them again.

It was but one of many quarrels that he had with his brother; they upset Steve: his lethargy drove Colin on. He watched him playing football: he had the same robustness, the same stubbornness, the same now almost conscious amiability as he was pushed up against the first deep waves of life. He hoped he would rise above them, not insist on breaking through, but on floating, on rising, not standing immobile, like a rock, moving nowhere, accepting his imperturbability as a gift rather than a handicap.

Coming away from one such match he had said, ‘I hear they’ve asked you to sign professional. There was a man there from the City.’

‘Yes,’ Steven said, his face reddened from the game, his nose, which had been damaged, fastened with plaster.

‘Will you go?’ he said.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s quite a bit of brass.’

‘Won’t they turn you into a sausage?’

‘What sort of sausage?’ he said, beginning to laugh.

‘Doing it for money.’

‘And what’s wrong with money, all of a sudden? Dost mean tha doesn’t want it when tha does a job of work?’

‘But not for doing that,’ he said. ‘Doing it for the money becomes the end.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Steven said.

A few days later two men came to the house: a chauffeur-driven car was parked at the door.

The two men went with his father into the front room: Steven was called in a little later.

‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ Colin said.

‘Nay, I’m bigger than all three on ’em,’ his brother said. ‘I mu’n think I can look after it mesen.’

A few days later the car came again; his father and Steven were taken off to town. Steven had put on his suit; his father, too, had put on a suit, but taken it off again and said, ‘I’m not kow-towing to them lot,’ and had gone finally in a sports coat of Richard’s.

They came back almost four hours later.

His father’s face was flushed. He clapped his hands as he came into the house.

‘It’s done,’ he said.

Steven followed him in more slowly, smiling, looking round. His head, strangely, was stooped as if in fear of the ceiling: it was as if he suspected he was much bigger than he was.

His father, feeling in the inner pocket of the sports coat, produced a cheque.

He unfolded it on the table.

‘Two hundred pounds,’ he said slowly, following the writing with his finger then stabbing at the figures. ‘And all due’, he added, ‘to my powers of persuasion.’

‘Well,’ his mother said. She looked at Steve – it was as if all she’d suspected of him had now come true. There was some gift, some peculiar power, unspoken, in her son: he’d brought it in at the door, casually, neither dazzled nor even surprised by it himself.

‘Nay, but it fastens him up more firmly,’ Colin said. ‘Why did you sell him for as much as that?’

‘Oh, take no notice,’ his mother said. ‘You can have no doubt he would have a comment.’

Half of it was put in the bank for his parents; half of it was put in the bank for Steve. His parents bought a television set; a carpet was bought for the stairs; an electric fire was fitted into the fireplace in the other room.

The following spring the Shaws left the house next door and went to live in one across the village. A family with two young children moved into the empty house. At first the strangeness was acute: the sound of crying came through the walls each morning, and of the man shouting impatiently at night.

Beyond, too, in the Reagan house, Michael finally had disappeared: he was reported being seen in a seaside town, serving as a waiter, then as a doorman at a cinema. Workmen came and carried out refuse from the front room of the house. An elderly couple moved in, a miner who was still working at the pit, his wife and, a few weeks later, an older parent, a woman with white hair and a reddened face who, strangely, would come and stand in the garden as, years before, Mr Reagan himself had done. She would gaze over at the children playing in the field and occasionally, calling to them, pass them sweets across the wooden fence.

‘When you think of the war, and all we’ve lived through here together,’ his father said. ‘There’s only us and the Bletchleys left.’ The Battys, too, a year previously, had left the village, the father with a chest complaint which had made him leave the pit; the various brothers and sisters had moved to the town. ‘How long are we going to be here?’ he added. ‘No inside lavatory, no bath: there’s people who came here long after us have been re-housed.’

Once the impetus of Steven’s football had faded, his father went back into his previous decline. From going to watch every match he now, on occasion, made excuses, and though he would wait eagerly for Steven to come home each Saturday evening, the significance of Steven playing slowly died. He would sit with a fixed smile on his face as he listened to details of the game which, genially, Steven was always pleased to describe. When he did go to the match he came back invariably disgruntled, complaining bitterly about the cold, or the way Steven himself had been cheated or let down by the other players. The impetus of his children’s lives had passed him by, leaving him stranded. He would examine Richard’s books and question the marks, look at the remarkable results and favourable comments Richard brought home in his school reports, and gave some acknowledgment which both disappointed Richard and yet drove him on to greater efforts. A master came from the school to talk of Richard’s university chances.

‘Fancy,’ his father said when the man had gone, ‘who’d have thought it: to come so far from where we began.’

One week-end Bletchley came home. Colin called at his house. ‘Oh, come in,’ his mother said brightly when she opened the door. ‘He’s in the front room.’

Ian was now huge: his neck had thickened; a heavy jowl concealed his chin; his waist was scarcely concealed by a reddish waistcoat. He was sitting in his shirt-sleeves when Colin came in but quickly stood up and pulled on a jacket. He’d been watching television and didn’t turn it off. He appeared to be in no good humour, as if he resented being home.

‘I’ll leave you two together,’ Mrs Bletchley said, closing the door with a smile at Colin.

Bletchley almost filled the room; he indicated the only other chair to Colin and they sat down together, Bletchley’s gaze turned resentfully to the television screen. ‘How have you been?’ he said, watching the picture. ‘I hear your brother’s signed up for the City.’

He described his present teaching; he was, as a supernumerary, being moved on from school to school.

‘Don’t you fancy getting anything steady?’ Bletchley said. ‘Not that there’s much scope in any case in teaching.’ He took out a pipe and quickly lit it. ‘I’m on a management course at present. That’s why I’m home. No work but lectures for the next three weeks. After that I start in the office. I’ll have a department of my own inside three years: after that, the sky’s the limit.’

‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ he said.

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll go abroad.’

‘Teaching?’

‘Whatever comes to hand.’

Bletchley said nothing for a while: clearly, he’d cast him off in his mind. As if prompted by this thought, he said finally, ‘What happened to Reagan?’

‘He was working in a cinema, the last I heard.’

‘His mother died. Did he tell you that?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘My mother got a message from the hospital.’

‘Poor old Michael,’ he said.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I reckon he’ll be better off without. Do you remember that violin? And going to Sunday School? It seems funny to think of it.’ Bletchley gazed out at the street as he might at an unknown town. There was nothing to connect him with the place at all.

Mrs Bletchley brought in some tea.

‘Are you two going out?’ she said.

‘Where to?’ Bletchley said.

‘Oh, anywhere. Anywhere young men are likely to go,’ she said.

She set down the tea on a tiny table; the room was even cleaner than Mrs Shaw’s had been.

‘There’s nowhere to go to,’ Ian said. ‘Not round here.’ He turned, with renewed discontent, towards the television.

‘Well,’ Mrs Bletchley said, handing Colin the tea, ‘I’ll leave the two of you to it, then.’

‘It’s a terrible place. I don’t know why they go on living here,’ Bletchley said. Through the wall Colin could hear Richard’s voice calling to his mother: he wondered how much of their life had been heard through the wall, and what impression it had made on Bletchley. ‘I tell them to move, but they never do. Do you remember that Sheila you used to go with? She has seven children. Seven.’ He picked up his cup blindly, still gazing at the screen.

He was still gazing at it an hour later when Colin got up to leave. ‘Oh, are you going?’ Bletchley said, standing up himself and thrusting out his hand. ‘Where did you say you were going?’

‘Abroad,’ he said, grasping the podgy hand.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Bletchley gazed at him blindly, nodding his head.

‘It doesn’t sound very promising.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘What happened to that Stafford?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never heard.’

‘Give my regards to your mother, in case I don’t see her before I leave,’ he said.

He’d already turned back to the screen before he’d reached the door.

‘How is your mother?’ Mrs Bletchley said and as he reached the door she added, ‘I’m sorry you’re not going out. I get so worried about Ian at times.’

‘Why?’ he said.

‘He’s progressing so well, but he ought to be married.’

‘Oh, he’s bound to be married soon,’ he said.

‘Do you think so? He never goes out with girls.’

‘Who does he go out with?’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he drinks quite a lot, on top of which he studies. His work, too,’ she added, ‘is very demanding. His boss thinks he’ll be in charge of the works when he retires. And that, Ian’s told us, is in less than ten years!’ She gestured back to the kitchen where Mr Bletchley sat reading a paper. ‘We sit here at times and think of when you and Ian were boys and wonder how all these incredible things have happened. You’ll be leaving soon yourself.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said, gazing at him. ‘Give my love to your mother.’

One evening he was coming down the street and a figure came out of a ginnel at the end of the terrace and called his name, speculatively, as if unsure he’d identified him correctly.

At first he thought it was Reagan; then, in the light, he recognized the red hair.

‘Hi, Tongey,’ Batty said. ‘How ya’ keeping?’

‘All right,’ he said, and added, ‘What’re you doing down here?’

‘I came to see Stringer. I’ve just discovered he’s left.’ He gazed about him aimlessly, almost like Bletchley might have done, at the empty street.

‘They left two or three years ago,’ he said, and added, ‘Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been in the nick.’

‘What for?’

‘For nicking.’ Batty looked at him with a great deal of irritation; his tall figure was stooped, his head turned from the light.

‘Come and have a drink,’ Colin said.

‘Where?’ Batty said.

‘Wherever you like.’

They walked back together towards the centre of the village.

‘You can’t lend us any money?’ Batty said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How much do you want?’

‘How much have you got?’

‘Two or three pounds.’

‘Do you have a cheque book?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Batty said nothing for a while. When they reached the public house at the centre of the village he went quickly ahead as if anxious to get inside: once in he went directly to a table.

Colin went to the bar and ordered the drinks, calling back to Batty to find out what he wanted.

‘Whisky,’ Batty said, and added, ‘A double,’ looking round slowly at the bar then shielding his face.

When he carried the drinks over he said, ‘How much would you like?’

‘As much as you want.’

‘How much have you got already?’

‘To tell you the truth,’ Batty said, avoiding looking at him directly, ‘I’m skint. I came out today. I’ve got the clothes on my back and nothing else.’

‘What were you had up for stealing?’ he said.

‘You name it,’ Batty said, emptying the glass at a single swallow.

Colin bought him another: the extraordinary pallor of Batty’s face was relieved by bright red patches on either cheek.

‘Stringer was my last bet.’

‘I can let you have ten pounds,’ he said.

Batty glanced away. ‘Well, it’s better than nothing, I reckon,’ he said.

When he’d written the cheque Batty examined it before putting it away.

‘I could change this, you know, and make it a hundred.’

‘Why don’t you?’ he said.

‘Are you tempting me?’ he said.

‘It’s up to you. If you can get away with it I reckon it’s worth it. There’s not that in the account,’ he added.

‘What you been doing with yourself?’ Batty said as if he had misjudged the success of Colin’s life entirely.

‘I’m teaching.’

‘Mug’s game.’

‘Like being in prison.’

‘I was in the nick because I was framed. I’ll never be framed again.’ He looked at his glass, which he’d emptied a second time at a single swallow.

‘Fancy another?’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

‘Have you been back home?’ he asked him when he brought the drink across.

‘What for?’

‘Where are you going to sleep tonight?’

‘I’ll find somewhere,’ Batty said. ‘They live in town. My dad. I called today. They wouldn’t see me. Go with open arms: what do you get?’

‘What about your brothers?’

‘Two of ’em are inside already: their wives don’t reckon much to having me around.’

He gave him a pound when they went outside. He waited at the bus stop with him for a bus to take him back to town.

‘Do you remember that hut we had?’ Batty said. He looked about him at the deserted, lamp-lit street. ‘What a dump,’ he added. When the bus came he got on without adding anything further, climbed the stairs and disappeared.

One evening, visiting the town, he came out of a pub in something of a daze and gazed around. It was early evening: the sky was clear; sunlight lit up the roofs above his head; an evening bustle came from the city centre; farther along the road was the dark, pillared building of the Assembly Rooms; a faint sound of music drifted down the street.

He walked back slowly to the bus.

When, a little later, the bus crossed the river, the sun was setting beyond the mills.

‘It could be Italy,’ a voice said behind him and when he turned a man gestured off towards the river. ‘Italy,’ he said again, indicating the yellow light.

31

She had known the break was coming and said nothing when he told her.

He had told her he was leaving on two occasions before: both times, however, he’d finally come back.

Now, he could see, she knew it was different.

‘I’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘I have no choice.’

Still she didn’t answer.

He’d been sitting across the room; he got up and went to her chair. There was a peculiar immunity about her. Beyond her he could see directly into the street, the parked cars, the bustle of the town from the opposite end.

‘Will you stay here yourself?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

She sat with her back straight; she was wearing a light-blue dress; her hands were clenched in her lap, her head erect. Her gaze was abstracted: it was as if she’d removed herself from the room entirely.

‘Well,’ she said, putting up her hand. ‘We’d better say goodbye.’

He drew her up: almost formally, as whenever they met, they kissed each other on the cheek.

‘It’s very strange,’ she said. ‘This town. I wonder if I’ll ever leave it. In the old days children stayed in the same community. When we discover everywhere is very much the same, when we find that everyone is very much like us, when we realize the world is smaller than we thought, do you think we’ll all drift back? I used to despise Maureen for staying here; it is sterile in one sense, but does it have to be? Doesn’t the chance of renewal come wherever you live?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You make it sound so clear. But all you do is take the destitution with you: of belonging nowhere; of belonging to no one; of knowing that nowhere you stay is very real.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be real?’ he said.

‘Don’t the dead, doesn’t the past only make it real?’

‘No,’ he said again. ‘The dead just hold it back.’

‘But what is there?’ she asked him. ‘Doesn’t everything finish the way it began? Won’t I end up working with my father? Despite all I might do in order to avoid it. I might even’, she added, ‘take over the shop.’

‘And marry a pharmacist’, he added, ‘to go with it?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Although it would be terrible if it turned out you were right.’

‘Shakespeare never travelled farther than London; Michelangelo never went farther from Florence than Rome; Rembrandt stayed virtually where he was. It’s an illusion to think you’ve to break the mould. The mould may be the most precious thing you have.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t believe it. Travelling is only one way of breaking it.’

‘Why not stay?’

‘Would you want us to get married, then?’ he said.

She laughed: she was driving him in circles, yet it was an argument she couldn’t conclude.

‘My chances of victory are so much less than yours,’ she said.

‘In being older?’ he said.

‘In being a woman.’

‘But then, that should be more of a challenge.’

‘Yet I’m a woman formed’, she said, ‘by old conceptions. I believe, at the end of it, there is only one man. Just as for a man there is only one woman. Not any man, or any woman, but one man. And one woman. Despite the circumstance.’

‘In any case,’ he said, freshly, ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Perhaps you’ll learn that later,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I refuse to believe it.’

‘You may refuse, my boy,’ she said. ‘But you’ll come to it in the end. One man: one woman. The unity of that is irrefutable; growth is impossible without it.’

It sounded so much like her older self that he laughed. He took her hand.

‘It’s been a friendship of a kind,’ he said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t wish to make it sound decent,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of bitterness here you’ll never see. I’m the senior partner. I’ve had my chance: I feel it’s my duty not to show it.’

‘But you try to diminish yourself so much,’ he said. ‘You make the mould yourself instead of allowing life to do it for you. I believe that life is limitless, that experience is limitless: yet it can’t be conceived by standing still.’

‘Go out and experience it, in that case, then,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when you come back, if you come back, you’ll see you may have been mistaken. What, after all, is a community if it isn’t formed by people who are committed, who commit their lives, and have their lives committed for them?’

‘But a community isn’t anything,’ he said. ‘It exists’, he went on, ‘of its own volition. When the volition goes, the community goes with it. It’s no good hanging on.’

‘Oh,’ she said bleakly, gazing at him as if there were a great deal she might have told him. It was like a child crying to be let outside a door.

‘I can see now’, he said, ‘the difference between us. You have no faith. Whereas everything that happens to me, even the worst things, merely strengthens mine. Because things are bad, because they only get worse, faith is all the stronger.’

‘Faith in what?’

‘Impossibility. Everything is allowable; everything is permissible; anything can happen. It’s arrogance’, he added, ‘to assume it can’t. Not an arrogance to assume it should.’

‘Well,’ she said quietly, sitting once more, gazing at her hands, the fingers intertwined, lying in her lap. ‘Well,’ she said, tired, as if he were a force that couldn’t be countered.

‘But I can do so much,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what makes me feel it: but I know it must be true.’ And when she looked up he said, ‘I was a pessimist like you. Now I’m different. I wish you’d take this assurance from me. For I haven’t just taken: I’ve given something back.’

‘Yes,’ she said, then added, ‘It’s only youth. You can’t give that back, however much you wanted.’

So they parted with a certain bitterness, she couldn’t help it. Perhaps even she thought, or hoped, one part of her, at this last moment too he would finally come back: that there was something intangible between them that only temporarily he resisted. Yet he never went again: his last glimpse of her was of her standing in the room, for she left him to close the door. He glanced back, frowning, as he might at a shadow he couldn’t make out, and feeling guilty, as he did now about almost everything.

Once in the street, however, he felt the certainty return; a cloud had lifted: the town, even the village when he finally arrived there, no longer held him. There was nothing to detain him. The shell had cracked.

His mother came to the station: it was a Sunday afternoon. The place was quiet; there was the one train that stopped on its way to London.

‘We shall miss you,’ his mother said. Yet it was as if he had left her a long time ago. They stood in silence waiting for the train.

The air was still: from farther up the line came the haze of the other villages, with just the blankness of the cutting in the other direction.

He had saved, over the previous four years, nearly fifty pounds. He had little luggage: a bag he carried easily in one hand.

‘Well,’ his mother said with relief when the train came into sight.

The large engine thundered by the platform.

He found a seat near the front.

His mother came to the door: he stooped and kissed her.

There was a dull pallor in her skin.

‘And you haven’t any lodgings’, she said, ‘or anything.’

‘I don’t need lodgings,’ he said. ‘I can always sleep on the street.’

‘No. Not in the street,’ she told him, and added, almost aimlessly, ‘Think of the people who love you, Colin.’

She had begun to cry.

She got out a handkerchief and glanced away.

He waited impatiently then for the engine to start. Everything was quiet in the station; only two other people had got on the train.

‘Nay, I shall come back,’ he said. ‘I’m not going off for ever.’

‘No,’ she said. Yet it was as if she sensed she would never see him again, or he the village, or the family: the ugliness of the engine would take him away.

The whistle sounded.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait,’ and raised her hand, vaguely, as the engine started.

The carriage jolted: a moment later it was gliding away beneath the bridge. He leaned out and glimpsed her figure; then, in a cloud of steam, she disappeared.

The cutting obscured the village. Finally, as the embankment sank he saw the church, the ruin of the manor on the distant hill, the idling of the smoke above the pit.

The side of the cutting rose again and when, a little later, the train ran out across the fields all signs of the village had disappeared. Above a distant line of trees a smear of blackish smoke appeared.