Saville (48 page)

Flags had been draped from several of the houses, and strings of small, triangular flags had been hung across the streets. On some of the houses placards had been mounted, welcoming home a member of the family from service in the forces, and several figures in uniform, khaki, blue and navy-blue, wandered in a desultory fashion about the field, one soldier, his sleeves rolled, tunic-less, competing in several of the races but finally lying in the grass by one of the fences, his mouth open, apparently asleep.

In the evening small groups of miners sat about the field, chewing grass, or collected in dark knots about the doorways, one or two lifting back the tables across the fences, the women standing in the yards, arms folded, or sorting plates and cups and saucers. An air of lethargy had settled on the place, Mrs Shaw
alone, after spending most of her time serving at the tables, stalking from door to door, offering her services for washing-up. Batty and his brothers, who had lingered on the fringe of the activities during the afternoon, now occupied the centre of the field, where, with Stringer’s father and two other men, they tossed coins in a half-hearted fashion, their occasional cries echoing back to the open doors. ‘Nay, Geoff,’ and, ‘Toss again,’ and, ‘I’ve won, I’ve won,’ while several of the smaller children gathered round.

‘They won’t have that again for a long time,’ his father said when he’d finally returned the kitchen table and with Colin’s help lifted it inside the room. ‘That’s exhausted neighbourly hospitality for a year or two, you can be sure of that. Did you see Mrs McCormack complaining that her plates were smashed? And that woman who ate that fruit cake doesn’t even live in the street, you know.’

‘I think they should have it more often,’ his mother said. ‘Not wait for a war to end before people get together. It just shows what you can do when you set your mind to it.’

‘Aye,’ his father said, sinking down beside the table. ‘Why, there’s half of yon colliers too drunk to go to work.’

‘Oh, he’s exaggerating as usual,’ his mother said, turning to Colin. ‘He’s enjoyed himself for once, so he’s anxious not to show it.’

His father, in fact, had taken as prominent a part in the afternoon’s activities as Mr Reagan, only he had done it as a competitor, racing down the field at one point with Mrs Bletchley, their legs strapped together, on another with Mrs Shaw, who, screaming, had bundled his father along as a wheelbarrow, while clutching at his legs. It was perhaps his pleasure at these achievements that he was anxious to disown, for his mother had spent most of the afternoon standing at the tables, serving food, or going to and fro between the kitchens collecting sandwiches and attempting to supervise the children who removed the cakes from the plates as fast as they were laid. Now she stood at the sink, flushed, stacking the wet plates beside her and adding, ‘If you’ve nothing else to do but grumble you could easily dry these up.’

His father took the cloth; he gazed out of the window, wiped a plate, saw someone he recognized in the yard outside and saying,
‘Hold on, I won’t be a minute,’ dropped the cloth and disappeared through the open door.

Some time later they could hear his laughter across the backs, his voice calling out in protest, followed by Mrs McCormack’s, then Mrs Bletchley’s, then by a screech which they finally identified as Mrs Shaw’s.

‘
He
hasn’t enjoyed himself, it’s easy to see that,’ his mother said. She handed Colin the cloth. ‘One war over and another begun as far as he’s concerned, and someone else to clear the mess.’

His mother had a faded air; ever since he’d known her there’d been some steady diminution of her spirit, first with Steven’s birth, then with Richard’s, now with this, a slow extraction, leaving her, after each interval of illness, weaker, more disenchanted, half-bemused. It was as if her life had flooded out, secretly, without their knowledge, and she some helpless agent, watching this dissolution with a hidden rage, half-apologetic, half-disowning. ‘You didn’t celebrate much, in any case,’ she said. ‘I saw Batty’s lad and that Stringer tucking in. They didn’t lose much opportunity in taking out more than any of them put in.’

‘Oh,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I mainly stayed in here.’

‘You and Ian and Michael Reagan, I expect, are above it all,’ she said.

Yet Bletchley and Reagan had, though taking no part in the activities in the field, played a conspicuous part in the disposal of the food, bringing whole plates back to Bletchley’s kitchen, where, since Mrs Bletchley was busy in the field, they had consumed it unmolested.

‘Do you feel above it all?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I suppose I feel apart.’

‘Is that the grammar school’, she said, ‘we shall have to thank for that?’

‘You wanted me to go,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, love. I’m not complaining.’

‘I don’t feel I’m part of anything there, either,’ he said, ‘if it comes to that.’

He took another plate and dried it. His mother, still bowed to the sink, took the kettle from beside her and warmed the water.
She ran her hand round the pile of plates still there. Then, raising her head, she washed each one and lifted them out.

‘I suppose that’s a phase you go through.’ She glanced across at him and smiled. ‘Aren’t there other boys like you?’

‘I suppose there are.’

‘Don’t they feel out of it?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’ll find you’ll get no more out of life than what you put into it,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s true.’

‘Couldn’t you have joined in today?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘I suppose I could. As it was’, he gestured round, ‘I stayed in here.’

His father came back a little later, flushed, bright-eyed, rubbing his hands. ‘Well, that was a day to remember,’ he said as if, by the buoyancy of his spirit, he could make some secret of his activities outside. ‘When you’ve been through something together it makes a party like that seem well worth while,’ gazing in surprise then at the pots piled on the table and adding, ‘What’s this, then, love? Have you gone and dried?’

His life had been fragmented into a third and final part. First there’d been his life in the village, then his life at the school; now there was a more formidable portion of his existence which he’d never, consciously, been aware of before, a self-absorption which took him away from the other two. At school he had begun to sense what it might be like to be in the upper forms, the privileges, the association with that part of the hierarchy which enjoyed all the benefits and suffered few of the abuses. His progress through the school had been echoed by his progress through the age-group football teams. He would be taking his first external examinations the following summer, and after that came, if he survived, the Sixth Form. He saw little of Stafford; absorbed into the Classics stream and protected now on sports occasions by a covey of admirers, their brief exchanges were marked more by hostility than any awareness of the companionship they had shared before. Colin spent much of his time at the school on his own, working during the summer on a number of farms, though never as far afield as the first. He saw
Audrey on several occasions in the town, and Marion, talking to groups of boys in the city centre; apart from a distant acknowledgment, more evident in Marion than Audrey, they too, like Stafford, gave no sign of their past acquaintanceship at all. For a while he went about with the red-nosed Walker, who seemed good at nothing but avoiding work, then with a boy called Berresford who introduced him to his sister, slightly older than himself, with whom occasionally Colin walked down to the bus stop, a little distance from his own, discussing books he had never read and various aspects of the world situation. She was a dark-haired girl with a large Roman nose, and it was, if anything, her lack of any pretensions as to her appearance which drew him to her. One week-end they had arranged to meet in the town and, after going to the pictures, walked for some time in the local Park. For some reason this encounter brought an end to their acquaintance, as if by mutual agreement, and he even found himself drifting away from Berresford, and once again, but for odd encounters with boys like Connors, whom he saw on the bus as well as in school, he found himself left very much to his own devices.

One evening he had been coming home from the local picture-house with Bletchley when they had seen a girl walking ahead of them, dressed in a dark coat and wearing a dark beret who, as they approached, turned and, seeing Bletchley, said, ‘Hello, Ian. What’re you doing around these parts?’

‘I live here, Sheila,’ Bletchley said, apparently disconcerted by this inquiry, for he added in a belligerent, almost leering tone, ‘What’re you doing round here in any case yourself?’

‘Oh, I live round here as well,’ the girl said simply, removing her beret and suddenly shaking out her hair. On the front of the beret was the single stork motif of Bletchley’s school.

Bletchley was smoking; his father had returned home earlier that year from the army, and, as if as a result of his re-appearance, Bletchley had suddenly acquired a number of adult mannerisms. As well as smoking he’d begun, tentatively, since he scarcely shaved, to grow a moustache. The effect, when viewed from the house next door, was that of two men vying for the attention of one woman, and Mrs Bletchley, far from wilting beneath the
weight of these unprecedented demands, had taken on a new life and vigour. She had, as if in acknowledgment, begun to smoke herself. Bletchley, on this occasion, produced the cigarette from the palm of his hand, setting it conspicuously between his lips. He blew out a cloud of smoke and examined her with greater circumspection through it.

‘I thought you lived in Shafton,’ he said.

‘We did,’ she said. ‘We moved here about a week ago. I’m just coming home from Geraldine Parker’s. That’s why I’m late.’ She tossed back her hair. ‘Where have you been to in any case?’ she added.

‘We’ve been to the flicks,’ Bletchley said, allowing another cloud of smoke to escape, the cigarette propped loosely in the corner of his mouth. He gestured back the way they’d come. The picture-house, built only a few months before the war, stood at the edge of a piece of waste ground opposite the Miners’ Institute. It was from that direction that the girl herself was coming.

She had dark eyes; her hair, to which she wished to draw their attention, was dark too, her face pale, almost startlingly white, emphasizing the redness of her lips and a certain gravity, almost gauntness of expression. She had the staidness of an older woman, walking along at Bletchley’s side as if they had been together throughout the evening.

‘This is Colin,’ Bletchley said when she finally glanced across and the girl had added, ‘Not from King Edward’s?’

‘Why, do you know him?’ Bletchley said, removing the cigarette and glancing at Colin himself as if he suspected the casualness of this encounter wasn’t all it seemed.

‘I’ve heard about him,’ the girl had said.

‘Sheila’s in our form at school,’ Bletchley said, his tone suggesting that, as a consequence of this, anything she might say could, on his authority, be discounted. ‘She got a transfer from a county school.’

‘Oh, we’ve lived all over,’ the girl said, nodding her head and indicating a near-by street. ‘We live down there as a matter of fact. I’ll be seeing you around, I suppose. What night do you normally go to the pictures?’

‘You never can tell,’ Bletchley said, the pictures being but one
of a host of activities occupying his attention throughout the week.

‘Well, I suppose I’ll be seeing you on the bus,’ the girl had said and nodding to Colin called good night, turning as she reached the corner, and waving, Bletchley raising his cigarette and moving it, airily, in the region of his ear.

‘What’s her second name?’ he said.

‘Richmond,’ Bletchley said. ‘She came last year and she and this Geraldine Parker spend most of their time together.’

He added little else until they reached their respective doors, then said, pausing on the step to light another cigarette, ‘I think she took a fancy to you. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice.’

‘I ought to warn you, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Her mother’s divorced. Some of the boys she goes out with have had her once or twice. Though I suppose it gets exaggerated,’ he added, ‘things like that.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I suppose I better get inside.’

He kicked the door open with the toe of his shoe, pushed it with his shoulder and, his hands in his pockets, stepped inside.

A few moments later through the kitchen wall came the sound of Mr Bletchley’s voice, renewed, if not renovated entirely by his absence during the war. ‘Will you remove that cigarette or do you want me to remove it for you?’

‘You’ll remove nothing of mine,’ came Bletchley’s shout, if anything one or two decibels lower.

‘I’ll remove anything I like. I’ll remove one or two other things besides.’ The words were followed a moment later by something of a cry. ‘How many more have you got inside that pocket?’

‘Mind your own business.’

There was the sound of shuffling feet followed, a moment later, by another cry.

‘Stop it. Stop it, Arthur,’ came Mrs Bletchley’s voice.

‘I’ll stop it. I’ll stop him one in the mouth if he answers me back again,’ came Mr Bletchley’s shout.

‘At least, the war’s done him some good,’ his father said, looking up from where he was reading by the fire. ‘If it hasn’t done much for Ian or his mother.’

‘Live and let live,’ his mother said, standing at the sink.

‘Don’t worry: I’ve waited long enough to see it as I’m not likely to want to stop it now,’ his father added, folding up his paper and going to the wall himself. ‘Go on, go on. Give him another, Arthur,’ he called in a voice reminiscent of Mr Reagan’s, his shout however, after a brief moment, followed by total silence on the other side.

He saw her stepping off the bus and, by jumping the wall of the pub yard, he came out a few paces ahead of her as she turned down the street towards the village.

‘Are you going far?’ he said.