Saville (20 page)

‘I’ve passed,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the grammar.’

‘Well,’ she said.

She started slowly down.

‘Is my dad in, then?’

‘He’s gone down to the shop. He won’t be a minute.’

‘Bletchley’s passed as well.’

‘Has he?’

‘He’s going to Melsham Manor.’

‘That’s a good school.’

‘Reagan hasn’t passed.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m not surprised.’

They waited for his father.

When she heard his step she stooped to the fireplace, setting on the kettle.

His father, his head bowed, rubbed his feet on the mat, looking up suddenly to see his mother.

‘What’s got into you?’ he said.

‘He’s heard the result,’ his mother said. ‘Of the examination.’

‘Nay, then.’ His father slowed. He gazed at him with a kind of anger, as if suddenly afraid he might be hurt.

‘I’ve passed,’ he said.

‘Have you? Have you?’

‘To the grammar.’

‘By God, then, lad.’

His face had flushed.

‘Sithee, are you sure?’ he said.

‘It was announced. Those who passed they’ve let out early.’

‘Sithee, I better sit down,’ his father said.

He rested in a chair, leaning to the table.

‘I knew you could do it. What did I tell you?’ he asked his mother.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We knew he could.’

‘It’ll mean a lot of expense,’ he said. ‘They wear a uniform,’ he added.

‘I suppose we’ll manage,’ she said, and laughed.

‘Aye. I suppose we will,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it’s happened.’

Steven came in from playing in the yard. His mother picked him up.

‘And what’s your brother gone and done?’ she said.

‘Nowt but show’, his father added, ‘that he’s just about the brightest on this road.’

‘Wait till Steven gets started, then.’

‘Aye, we’ll have two of ’em,’ his father said.

‘If not a third,’ his mother said.

‘Aye.’

His father laughed for a moment, then clapped his hands.

‘Wait till I tell them at work,’ he added.

Colin went with his mother to the town to buy the clothes. He’d only been to the town on one or two occasions, most memorable for him when the bombing started. There were still signs of damage. But no bombs had fallen for over a year. They crossed the river and started up the hill the other side. The shop where the clothes for the school were sold stood opposite the cathedral, in the city centre. They gazed in the window at the uniform before they entered: it hung on the bright pink dummy of a boy with blue eyes and red lips and cheeks, a dark-blue cloth with a gold-coloured ribbon. The badge of the school, a coat-of-arms, was almost as large as the breast pocket of the blazer.

‘There, then: what do you think of that?’

A boy came out of the shop: he had on the cap; beneath his raincoat Colin glimpsed the blazer.

‘I suppose we better go in,’ his mother said.

It took them an hour for his mother to choose the clothes. Everything she bought was too large for him; the blazer itself, and the trousers, were particularly large.

‘He’ll need room to grow into them,’ she told the assistant.

‘On the other hand,’ the man had said, ticking off their name in a list of pupils, ‘by the time he fits them they may have worn out.’

‘Aren’t they good quality, then?’ his mother had said.

‘Oh, they’re good quality,’ the assistant said. ‘But boys will be boys,’ he added with a smile.

‘If they’re good quality he’ll look after them,’ she said.

Colin stood in front of a mirror in the gold-ribboned blazer. The man, after trying several sizes, finally put a large peaked cap on his head. Gold ribbing ran down from the button at the top. ‘His head’s not likely to grow,’ he said when his mother inquired if he might have a larger one.

The raincoat he brought came to below his knees. It reached almost to his ankles.

‘There’s a good three of four years’ growth there,’ the assistant said. He fastened the belt. It was large enough to encompass a figure twice his size. The tongue of the belt was fastened round his back.

‘Well, I think that should do him,’ his mother said, yet gazing at the next size on the peg.

‘Oh, I think that’s large enough for all eventualities,’ the man had said.

He totted up the bill.

‘Will that be a cheque or cash?’ he said.

‘Oh, cash,’ his mother said, and flushed.

Each of the notes she had folded into four; she lay them down on the counter one by one, and added, ‘I’ve got the change,’ rooting in the narrow purse and taking out the coins. She’d worked out the sum exactly at home, allowing even for the larger sizes.

‘Would you like to wear them, or shall I make a parcel?’ the assistant said. He was an elderly man with greying hair; he wore the kind of suit Colin had only seen Mr Reagan wear before.

‘If you could make a parcel,’ his mother said.

Colin put his old clothes on. His mother, after watching him put on his coat, pulled out his collar. She straightened his tie as they waited by the counter.

The man came back with the clothes in a parcel.

‘If there’s anything we can do in the future, Mrs Saville,’ he said, ‘you only have to ask.’ He smiled across the counter as he handed Colin the parcel and added, ‘I suppose you’ll carry it, young man,’ and as he held the door of the shop he said, ‘And good luck at the grammar.’

Outside the shop his mother paused. She looked at the bill, checked the items, checked the money remaining in her purse, then looked round her in a blinded fashion.

‘The bus doesn’t go for an hour,’ she said. She looked over the roofs to the cathedral clock. ‘I suppose we could go on the train, only I’ve gone and got returns.’

They stood by the window; he could see their two figures reflected in the pane, his mother in her long brown coat, ending just above the ankles, he in his short raincoat which he’d had for several years. The town stretched back, immense, beyond them: the shop fronts, the crowds, the passing traffic.

‘We could go and look at the school,’ she said.

She’d made this suggestion before they left; his father, for this reason, had wanted to come with them. His mother, however, had put him off. ‘We’re only getting his clothes,’ she said. ‘We can see the school another time.’ And when his father had persisted, she had added, ‘When I’m buying clothes I’m
not
to be hurried.’

‘I suppose we ought to have the time,’ his mother said. She stopped a man in the street and asked the way.

An arched alleyway ran beneath an old timber-framed building opening off the city centre. It was broad enough to take a car, its surface roughly cobbled; on one side stood a baker’s shop, on the other a café with wooden beams and panelled walls. Beyond, the alleyway opened on to a narrow street; it was overlooked by shops on either side and farther on broadened into a main thoroughfare which ran back, diagonally, towards the city centre. Trees overhung the pavements, and the shops themselves gave way to houses, low, brick-built and black with soot. Tall brick chimneys projected from low, large-slabbed roofs.

‘Well, this is an interesting part. I don’t think I’ve been up here before,’ his mother said.

She gazed over at the houses on either side; some had shallow, tree-filled gardens; others opened directly on to the road – they could see into sitting-rooms, and here and there, through an open door, into a narrow hall.

‘I bet it costs a lot to live in those. See how old they are.’ She paused at a doorway and read the date inscribed on the stone above the porch. ‘Seventeen nineteen. And some are older if I’m not mistaken.’

The school itself stood back from the road. It was a long, low building with tall mullioned windows. It had two turrets at the centre, battlemented, and a wing, going back from the road, at either end. It was built of stone; a broad stretch of lawn led up to a pair of metal-studded doors.

Both the grass itself and the doors were evidently unused. A gravel drive ran up to either end of the building: twin metal gates, set between black gate-posts, were standing open; one or two figures in the now-familiar school uniform flitted between the main building and a taller, narrower building, also of stone, standing farther back from the road.

‘They even go on Saturdays,’ his mother said.

They stood at the gates looking up at the low, stone mass.

‘Saturdays as well?’

‘Saturday mornings, the letter says. Though they have Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for sport.’

A boy came down the drive. He put on his cap, pulled a satchel across his shoulder, and ran off behind them, across the road.

‘See how clean they are,’ his mother added.

They set off back towards the city centre. A bus swept past. It was the first time he’d been aware of how large the city was. In the past the place itself had been a name, a vague memory of towers and domes, the single steeple glimpsed from the bus across the valley: now it was narrow streets and looming buildings, and roads amongst which he felt already lost.

‘Oh, you’ll get used to it in a week,’ his mother said.

They waited at the bus-stop, below the cathedral.

‘We’ll get in touch with the Connors’ boy. He goes,’ she added. ‘He’ll know the way.’

He sat silent on the bus when it finally came. He watched the
outskirts of the city pass, the river, then the fields, the woods, a stretch of heath.

‘Shall I have to stay for dinner?’ he said.

‘Lunch,’ his mother said. She added. ‘You can’t really come back, then, all this way.’ She eased the parcel against her knee. ‘As it is, you’ll set off early. And you’ll not get back until quite late. Then there’s homework, of course. That takes an hour. An hour and a half, I think they said.’

When they got back home the clothes were unpacked. He went upstairs, at his father’s insistence, and put them on.

Colin came back down; he saw his father’s look – he gazed at the blazer, at the large badge, the coat-of-arms, worked in gold thread on the breast pocket, at the gold ribbon that followed the edge of the blazer as far as the collar, at the cap, with its gold ribbing running from the button, the badge set at the front, the broad, projecting peak; he looked at the stockings with their twin gold lines around the turned-down tops; his lips had parted; he began to smile.

‘Sithee. I wouldn’t have known him then.’

‘Now he looks something like,’ his mother said.

Steven sat across the room, not stirring.

‘Sithee, and what does that mean, then?’ his father said.

He ran his finger beneath the badge.

‘“Labor Ipse Voluptas”,’ he read aloud.

‘I don’t know,’ Colin said. He shook his head.

‘Didn’t you ask at the shop?’ his father said.

‘No.’ His mother touched the badge herself: she ran her finger around the yellow thread.

‘Labour something,’ his father said. ‘Dost think they’re all socialists, then?’ he added.

‘I don’t think it can be that,’ his mother said.

‘It’s one of the oldest schools in the country. I hope you realize that,’ his father added.

His smile had faded: he shook his head.

‘I never thought we’d do it. Come up from nowt, and now see where we are,’ he said.

He went over to the Connors’ house one evening. They lived across the village on a small estate of private bungalows. Connors
was a tall boy, solemn, fair-haired: he was half-way through the school. His father had offered him his rugby shirt, gold and blue striped and worn slightly at the collar, and a pair of worn-down rugby boots. Connors himself, too, had offered on the first day to take him to the school, and arranged to meet him at the bus-stop.

When Colin got to the door Connors had come out after him.

‘I better warn thee, I suppose,’ he said. ‘My faither says I should.’

‘What about?’ he said.

‘They collar new lads, first day theer, and duck ’em in the toilet.’

He gazed up at Connors’s face: it was dull and heavy, the cheeks flushed, as if he were talking to him from a long way away.

‘What do they do?’

‘They pull the chain.’

He pictured it for a moment, then shook his head.

‘Do they do anything else?’ he said.

‘Well, sometimes,’ he said, ‘they shove you in the basins. Full of water. And count ten slowly before they let you up.’

The vision haunted him throughout the summer, first the toilet, then the basin. He practised holding his head under water and counting up to ten, slowly. His mother came in one morning to find him with his head submerged, the sink spilling over on to the floor of the kitchen.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and added, ‘Washing.’ He practised holding his breath in bed at night. He thought, in the end, he would be able to manage, if not, he’d decided, he would have to drown.

Occasionally on week-days Bletchley wore the uniform of the new school he was going to. It was more austere and simpler than his own, the blazer decorated merely by a badge, his cap the same. He wore it to Sunday School, wore it to the shops, or whenever he went out walking with his mother. He’d bought a new satchel; he would sit on his step, taking out his ruler, his pen, his set of instruments for geometry and science, showing them to Reagan, who, not having passed the examination, regarded them with a dazed expression, gazing off, after having been shown them, across the yard. Bletchley had also been
bought a present for passing, a red-painted bicycle with white celluloid mudguards and swept-down handlebars which he rode up and down the street each evening.

‘We’d have bought you summat, don’t worry,’ his father said. ‘If it hadn’t have been the expense. What with that and a new brother or sister on the way, we’ve not much left.’

There was talk now of sending him to his uncle, his father’s younger brother, who lived in the town.

‘Nay, we mu’n keep you at home if we can. Both of you,’ his father said. ‘I hope to get on days when the baby’s due, then we can all of us sleep at home together.’

He played in the street, watched Bletchley on his bike, played cricket with Stringer and Batty, and several of Batty’s brothers. He watched the others go back to school. The grammar school didn’t start until two weeks later; he wandered through the village on his own. Occasionally he caught sight of Connors on a bike, and of one of the other boys who’d passed to the grammar school: apart from the long holiday they had nothing in common. He practised holding his head under water for longer spells.