Saville (2 page)

Not having had time to prepare the house they spent the first few days scrubbing the floors, washing down the walls and woodwork,
and filling in the holes which the dog, with its scratching, had dug in the various doors and the plaster. They repaired the ceilings, and replaced the crumbled boards in the floor; finally they distempered the walls, painted the outside woodwork and, in the evenings, when Saville had slept from his morning shift, at a colliery some six miles distance, he dug the garden, turning over the thickly matted weeds between the narrow barrier of fences.

Later, in the evenings, he would take the child out and sit in the yard: he had built a wooden bench from disproportionate bits of timber, and here, the child on his knee, he would smoke his pipe, the baby snatching at the clouds of smoke, Saville wafting them away and laughing.

Soon there was a routine in the mother’s care of the house: on Mondays she did the washing, on Tuesdays completed the drying and started the ironing. On Wednesdays she did her midweek shopping, finished the ironing and, if she had time baked bread – large, tea-cake-shaped loaves which fitted one to each shelf in the tiny oven, and smaller, oblong-shaped loaves, the dough of which she raised in a large porcelain bowl in front of the fire. The boy, sitting in his chair or on the floor, would watch her, eager at times to use the dough himself, watching her drawing it out and shaping it in the tins or on the black, greased oven-plates, occasionally, if a fragment were over, rolling a piece himself and laying it on grease-proof paper, first in the hearth, where the flames shone and flickered on its surface, then sliding it beside the tins inside the oven and waiting impatiently, while his mother adjusted the tiny, chromium ventilator and stoked the fire; then, finally looking at the clock on the tall mantelshelf, she’d stoop to the door, a piece of hessian in her hand and, if the bread were ready, lift his out first. ‘There, what do you think of that?’ she’d ask him absent-mindedly, her attention solely on the loaves and the tea-cakes she’d baked herself. Yet there was an alertness in her son which belied his age, even a dexterity with his tiny hands so that at times, although she helped him, she would be astonished at the way he took the bread and was able to connect the various stages – the mixing, the leavening, the shaping out, the final raising and then the sliding of the plates and tins inside the
oven. ‘He mu’n be a baker,’ Saville would say, coming home to see the tiny, irregular-shaped loaf the boy had baked himself, breaking a piece off, at Andrew’s insistence, putting on jam and then, watched raptly by his son, chewing it carefully and with evident pleasure: ‘Nay, I mu’n come to this house again. They know how to treat a hungry man.’

On Thursdays she cleaned the house upstairs, first the front bedroom, the only room apart from the kitchen to have linoleum on the floor, which she washed and polished, then the two rear rooms and finally the stairs. On Fridays she swept and cleaned the kitchen, washing the floor, and swept out and scrubbed the tiny room at the front: here the two easy chairs stood before an empty, black-enamelled fireplace. This she polished as she did the black enamel on the stove in the kitchen: on Friday evening the house smelted of polish and the gas light glowed, flaring, against all the shiny surfaces. Saville, taking the baby, would bath him in front of the fire, laying out sheets of paper and standing the metal tub in front of the hearth. Andrew would flap his arms and shout, the water would hiss against the coal, the mother would call at the damage done to her recently polished floor. Saville himself would laugh, sometimes singing, leaning back on his heels as he knelt to the tub, the child finally gazing up at him with a look of wonder, his pale eyes bright, transfixed, as his father, his face flushed, his teeth gleaming in the light from the fire, sang long and lustily for his amusement.

‘By go, just see his little legs, Ellen,’ he’d say as he stood the child in the bowl, feeling the mound of muscle and fat, his own hand, gnarled and knotted and stained beneath the skin with tiny filaments of coal, incongruous against the smoothness and pinkness of Andrew’s flesh. He’d lift him, still wet, above him in the air, the child’s arms and legs flung out, dangling below him, calling, shrieking as he shook him by the fire, the flames sizzling once again, and the mother shouting, ‘Wash him, for goodness’ sake, without all that mess.’

Ellen frequently went back to visit her parents. They lived in a village four miles away, their house one of a pair, backing on to a paddock in which they kept geese and hens and, in sheds, at the farthest end, a number of pigs. She would take the boy with her,
preparing him thoroughly for the journey, in his best clothes, his face bright and gleaming, his hair brushed neatly and parted at the side. He would sit beside her in the bus, gazing out at the fields with the same look of perplexity which characterized his features whenever his mother chastised his father, his expression vaguely disconcerted, yet as if in a curious way their quarrel had scarcely anything to do with him at all.

Mrs Saville’s mother was a small woman; she had had seven children in all, two of whom had died, and had long since relinquished her domestic responsibilities to these surviving offspring, one of whom visited her almost every day. So it was, whenever Ellen brought Andrew, she was obliged at some point of her visit to pull on an apron, roll up her sleeves and wash a floor, or clean the windows, wash the clothes, or prepare a meal. Her father, a tall, silent man who had been out of work for much of his later life, and who scratched a living from the weed-strewn acres at the back of the house, would leave the women of the house to their own devices, for, despite her good intentions, quarrels were frequently the outcome of Ellen’s visits home. The keynote of her mother’s resentment was her marriage to Saville – Ellen herself being the youngest of her mother’s children and destined traditionally for several years at least to combine the services of a daughter and a domestic servant; an expectation which had been terminated by her marriage and further compounded by the birth of Andrew.

The boy would sit between the warring women, immaculate in his child’s suit, with his gleaming hair and bright, robust face, open, frank and blue-eyed, vaguely aware of the animosity that passed between the adult figures and relating it conceivably to the animosity of a not dissimilar nature, a rancour and a bitterness, that passed between his mother and father at home, and which, usually, had preceded if not occasioned this visit to his round-faced, red-cheeked, dark-eyed grandmother. His playing in the dust of the yard at the back of the house was rigidly supervised by his mother. Occasionally, if he were allowed into the paddock at the back of the house, it was with instructions never to let go of his grandfather’s hand – an injunction which the tall, elderly man with large, soft brown eyes and an almost inaudible voice, so self-effacing was his manner, adhered to as
conscientiously and as unremittingly as Andrew did himself. ‘Sithee, then, what dost think to Jackie?’ he would say, holding him to the pigs’ pen and, if he couldn’t see through the wooden lathes, lifting him to the top of the wall to peer over: the mud and the mess there would fascinate them both, and they would still be gazing at the pink and whitish bodies splashing through it when Ellen’s voice would call from the house, ‘Dad, bring him away from there.’

‘Nay, muck never did no man any harm,’ the old man would say when they got back to the house.

‘No,’ Ellen would say with the same vehemence as she did at home. ‘You don’t have to wash and clean him.’

‘Nay, I’ve washed and cleaned seven of them. And thy’s been one of them.’

‘
Who
have you washed and cleaned?’ the little old grandmother would say and the father would turn away, silent, leaving these squabbles as he always did to the peculiar moralizing passion of the women.

Yet Andrew enjoyed these visits to his grandparents’ house. For one thing, he enjoyed being out of his home: even going into the village with his mother he appreciated, as well as those longer journeys with his father that took him to the Park, on the slope that overlooked the village, or even farther afield than that where, some two miles away, the river came round in a vast dark curve from the distant towns.

On the journey back from his grandparents’ house his mother would frequently set him on her knee, so that his head was raised to the bus window and he gazed out at the fields from between her arms – a gesture she seldom made on their journey to the house when her thoughts, seemingly, were on the chastisement that lay ahead. ‘Well, then, there’s a horse,’ she would say to him on the journey back, pointing out objects that caught her attention as if the relief of going home, and the peculiar victory she had won – for survival in her family atmosphere was sufficient of a victory to satisfy Ellen – were scarcely more than she could bear. These moments of companionability were the deepest that Andrew and his mother shared, as if he himself were both a trophy and a burden, she the successful recipient and the suffering host.

When Andrew was three the Savilles moved house. They moved up the street to one of the miners’ houses which had a lower rent. As it was, their first cottage was old, and despite their renovations water came in through the roof in winter and soaked in in huge patches through the walls. Shortly after they left the four other tenants of the block moved out and the terrace was demolished, the stone taken away in carts and the timber burnt. A little later the miners’ row was extended to take in the newer ground.

Shortly after they moved Andrew ran away from home. Saville, coming in from work, was met by his wife at the door. Pale, almost speechless, she came out with him to search the streets, he wheeling his bike beside her. At odd corners she would wait and Saville would pedal off, looking in yards, in odd fields and alleys; finally, as they were returning to the house, the boy appeared, escorted by a neighbour. He had been found several miles away, walking steadily along the road to a neighbouring village: he was quiet and composed: Ellen sat with him by the fire; he scarcely seemed conscious of having gone away.

Perhaps the warmth that greeted his return persuaded him to leave again: he was brought back a second time from the pit by Mr Shaw, a miner who lived in the house next door. Saville saw him carrying Andrew along the street, the boy’s face pale, earnest, gazing steadily before him, uncertain of the other man’s grasp.

‘Why, where’s he been?’ Saville asked him.

‘We found him in the engine-house, curled up by the boiler,’ Shaw had said. ‘How he got in we’ll never know. The engine-man found him, tha knows, by chance.’

Finally on a third occasion, he was spotted by a tradesman on the same road leading out of the village.

‘But where were you going?’ Saville asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ the boy had said.

‘Aren’t you happy here?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Andrew nodded.

‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’

He shook his head.

‘I shall have to smack you. You’ll have to know it’s wrong,’ he said.

Andrew stayed home. It was almost a year before he began to wander off again, his eyes wide, startled, whenever he was brought back, the blueness burning so that, having beaten him, Saville would go to the lavatory outside and sit on the scat, smoking, his hands shaking, like on those first occasions in his marriage when he had quarrelled with his wife.

She too seemed numbed. There was almost a ritual now; the boy’s wildness a quiet, almost a systematic thing, so that the father no longer felt alarmed or frightened by his going, as if he sensed the boy’s immunity to danger in much the same way that he sensed his own down the pit, a carelessness, almost an indifference. He spent longer hours in bed; he bought a dog. He would take the dog up to a deserted colliery to the south of the village where the small black and white animal ran to and fro amongst the overgrown pit-heaps chasing rabbits or digging at their burrows.

Andrew started school. He was as much trouble there as he was at home. One day, coming home from one of his walks, Saville saw his son in the road ahead. He was, perhaps because of his mother’s close attention, curiously well-mannered; the trouble came from these almost inadvertent gestures, the same absent-minded movement which, at school, might result in the knocking over of a desk, or the breaking of a window, and which at home led to his constant wanderings off.

He was kicking a stone in the middle of the road, and as Saville began to catch him up the stone flew up, glancing off another boy’s head, the boy himself stooping down and crying. Saville saw the look of consternation on Andrew’s face, the rigidity which gripped his body, a helplessness which overcame him whenever he discovered he’d done something wrong. A moment later he’d crossed the road but the boy, his hands clutched against his face, ran off, crying. For a while Andrew watched him, disconsolate, standing in the road; then, with strange, stiff gestures, his face flushed, he stepped back on the pavement and with the same strange, stiff strides, set off towards the house.

He wondered even then why he hadn’t intervened, and wondered
what it was that held him back, as appalled by this as he was by Andrew’s grief, that strange remorse which gripped them both, the son walking on ahead, unknowing, the father walking on behind, half-raging. When he finally reached the house he saw Andrew playing in the yard, on his own, digging at the soil between his feet, his face red, glistening, as if recently he’d been crying.

One morning he came home from work to find the boy was ill.

His wife was three months’ pregnant. Saville stayed home that night to nurse them both. In the morning his wife was feeling better. Andrew, however, had a hacking cough, slow, half-delirious, fevered.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll soon pass,’ he told his wife, and gave the boy a powder, going to bed himself in the afternoon, ready to go to work that evening.

When he got up the boy was worse.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If he doesn’t get better I s’ll fetch the doctor.’ He gave Andrew another powder now to sweat it out: he put another blanket on the bed. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’ he asked his wife.