Saville (51 page)

He closed the door behind him and went over to the house.

‘I don’t know what you do in there,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve been waiting to go for half an hour. Didn’t you hear me come to the door?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Are you constipated, then?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Well, I don’t know what he does,’ she said to his father, stepping out then to the yard, her feet sounding briskly across the ashes.

‘Are you reading books in there?’ his father said. ‘If you’re reading books you can read them just as well in here.’

‘I didn’t know she wanted to go,’ he said.

‘You must have done. Do you think she tries the door for fun?’

‘I just forgot she’d been,’ he said.

‘Forgot?’ he said. ‘Do you think it’s a palace, or summat, in theer? It’s t’on’y lavatory, tha knows, we’ve got.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He went to the stairs.

‘And where are you going now?’ his father said.

‘It’s some homework I have to finish,’ he said.

‘Well, finish it and be quick,’ his father said. ‘It’s getting to be
like a monastery this house. You can’t go to the lavatory without finding someone theer who has to study.’

He closed the door to his room, eased his way between his and Steven’s bed, and sank down on the single wooden chair, which, a year previously, his father had made from the dug-out bits of timber from the air-raid shelter. He took out the pad and examined the writing. He read it through again, then, in capital letters, printed
‘AUTUMN’
at the top. Hearing Steven’s voice in the kitchen below he stooped beneath the bed, pulled out a wooden box and slid the pad beneath a pile of books and was apparently glancing through these when, a few minutes later, Steven, fair-haired, blue-eyed, opened the door and said, ‘What’re you doing, our Colin? Have you finished? I’ve got to go to bed.’

The road bent away to his left. Some distance ahead he could see two cyclists, but by the time he reached the curve of the bend himself they’d disappeared. Reagan was out of sight now, some way behind. He suspected, even, that he might have turned back but, after sinking down on the verge and waiting, leaning on his arm, chewing grass, the tall, awkwardly proportioned figure finally came into view, walking slowly in the centre of the road, his hands in his pockets, looking up when he saw him waiting, evidently with little interest, and saying nothing when eventually he caught him up, merely sinking down on the verge and sighing.

Reagan flung out his legs across the grass, his large head thrust back, his long dark hair lying in loose strands across his face.

‘We can wait for a bus at the next stop if you want to,’ Colin said.

‘No. I’m all right.’ Reagan closed his eyes. He blew upwards, across his face, disturbing the strands of hair. His thin features glowed with a reddish hue, his nostrils distended, a faint bluish patch throbbing at his temple.

For a while, lulled by the quietness, the heat, and the singing
of the birds, neither of them spoke. From across the fields came the rattle of a tractor, and Reagan raised himself slightly, thinking he’d heard a vehicle on the road.

Nothing, however, disturbed the vista of fields and woodland.

‘I think we ought to be going,’ Colin said. ‘It’ll be dark in a couple of hours, and to be frank’, he added, ‘I’m not sure where we are.’

‘Oh, what does it matter?’ Reagan said, sinking back again. ‘If we get back late we get back late.’ He closed his eyes, projecting his lower lip and blowing up once more across his face. ‘What’re you going to do when you leave school?’ he said a moment later.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I might go to college.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to do National Service,’ Reagan said.

‘Won’t you go to college or university?’ Colin said.

‘How?’ He opened his eyes, gazing at the leaves above his head. ‘I’ll not even get School Certificate,’ he said. ‘In any case, I don’t really mind. I might not even get in the army. I’m supposed to be anaemic.’

‘What sort of school is St Dominic’s?’ he said. Occasionally he’d seen Reagan in town, wearing the dark cap with the red insignia of his private school, and the red-rimmed blazer, but, away from the village, Reagan had always shown a reluctance to be acknowledged.

‘Oh, they work you, if you want to work,’ he said. ‘If you don’t, they never even bother. In any case,’ he slowly straightened, ‘I might join a dance band. Or even form one of my own. I’d rather do that than go to college.’

‘Where would you have it?’ he said.

‘In the village. Or at Brierley, or Shafton. Anywhere.’ He waved his hand, his long, thin-boned fingers thrust stiffly out. ‘I haven’t mentioned it at home. My mother wants me to go to a music college. But I don’t think I’d get far there. My Dad thinks I ought to go into the County Hall, or work in accountancy, or something.’

Colin stood up.

‘I suppose we ought to be going,’ he said.

‘You’ll be going into the army, in any case,’ Reagan said. ‘So will Bletchley. Though I reckon you’ll get deferment first. That’s one reason, really, why my mother wants me to go on with
music. If I’m a student long enough she thinks in a year or two I might miss conscription.’

‘Will it be over by then?’ he said.

‘Oh, it’s bound to be,’ Reagan said.

They’d been walking all morning; during the afternoon they’d sat by a lake in which one or two boats were being rowed, then, searching for a quicker route home, they’d set off in a fresh direction They’d been walking now for over two hours and nothing familiar had appeared to guide them, Reagan himself curiously indifferent as to whether they found their way or not.

‘There aren’t many dance-halls, you see. And you could give lessons. Or start a club.’ His long hair thrust back, his feet, which were small and dainty, tapping lightly at the road beneath him, he indicated something of a step. ‘I’ve picked it up, you see, from a book. It’s pretty easy once you get the rhythm. It’s just a question really of one foot following the other.’ Refreshed by these speculations about his future, if not by the rest at the side of the road, Reagan now walked slightly ahead, his arms held out before him, his eyes half-closed, and, in a fit of unprecedented boldness, danced lightly to and fro, murmuring a rhythm, glancing finally at Colin and adding, ‘
One
, two, three.
One
, two, three,’ inviting him to join in.

Colin laughed; he had seldom seen Reagan carried away by anything at all, and a moment later, his arms held out in an identical fashion, he danced beside him, his head stooped as he followed Reagan’s steps until, with a blaring of a horn, a car disturbed them and they stepped aside to see a pair of curious faces flying past.

‘You see, everyone’s interested when it comes down to it,’ Reagan said, waving through the cloud of dust at the departing vehicle and taking up his stance once more in the centre of the road. ‘What say thou Lothario? Shall we dance?’ laughing then as Colin followed, repeating the steps to Reagan’s instructions, Reagan leaning up finally against a post and adding, ‘Nay, lad, tha s’ll be some folk as’ll never learn, you can be sure of that,’ his skeletal figure with its massive, rearward-bulging head stooped over, his long arms flung down, his face flushing, as he tried with much groaning and coughing to restrain his pleasure. ‘You’ll be my first customer, I’m hoping. If there are many more like you
I’ll make a fortune,’ his habitual shyness returning as he smoothed back his hair and they set off once more along the road.

The idea of spending the day with Reagan had come from his father. Perhaps, in this way, he had been hoping to ingratiate himself with Mr Reagan, who reputedly now carried, since the nationalization of the coal-mines, greater weight than ever in the local colliery office. His father, since the ending of the war, had grown increasingly restless. Bread had been rationed for a period. Clothes and food were short. He had tried once again, as he had three years earlier, to get a job in the local pit, applying on this occasion for a job as a deputy, but having, so far as Colin knew, not had an answer. It was on this basis – at least, as a result of his father’s prompting – that he’d invited Reagan out for the day. They had wandered initially in the direction of the lake, drawn there by Reagan’s information that there was a café on the way whose owner was known to his father and who, on being acquainted with Reagan’s identity, would let them have a meal for nothing: information which, in the event, had proved to be if not untrue at least misleading. A café they had come across, set in a green-painted wooden hut at the side of the road: its proprietor, however, on inquiry had turned out to be a swarthy, frizzy-haired woman who, on Reagan’s name being mentioned, had looked at Reagan himself over the bridge of her nose and pointed venomously at the blackboard beside her on which were clearly chalked the prices of the food she had to offer. They had come away in the end without purchasing anything at all.

The same aimlessness with which they’d started re-asserted itself as the day wore on: a minimum of food they had purchased at a hut by the lake and the notion of finding a shorter way back to the village had been one of expediency more than anything else – to bring the day to an end as quickly as possible, Colin forging ahead as Reagan tired, hoping to identify some familiar landmark before sinking back, disappointed, to wait for him at the side of the road.

Now they walked along quite freshly, Reagan whistling a dance tune, murmuring to himself at odd moments as if anxious to communicate something of which, as yet, he was still uncertain, glancing finally at Colin and saying, ‘What’re your parents hoping you’ll turn into, then?’

‘They’ve mentioned teaching. I don’t suppose there’s anything else.’

‘They wouldn’t want you to go into an office?’ Reagan said.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’ He shook his head.

‘What would you teach, do you think?’ he said.

‘English. Perhaps geography. They’re the best two subjects on the whole,’ he said.

‘I’ve no best subject, really,’ Reagan said. ‘They’re all about as bad as one another.’

They breasted a rise.

Below them stretched an area of plain and woodland, scattered here and there with colliery heaps. To their right, in the farthest distance, appeared the familiar profile of the village pit.

‘I think I know where we are,’ he said.

‘And I do,’ Reagan said, his eyes narrowing as he gazed off in the same direction. ‘We’re miles out of the way. It’ll be hours before we get back now.’

Yet, a few minutes later, a lorry came down the road behind them and, stopping, the driver offered them a lift. ‘Oh, Reagan. Bryan Reagan. I know Bryan,’ he said when, after asking them where they were going, he’d demanded their names. ‘I know one or two things about your father,’ he added to Reagan, ‘which it’d be wise of me not to mention. Just say Jack Hopcroft gave you a lift and watch his expression.’ He dropped them half an hour later in a lane leading to the village, sounding his horn as he drove away.

‘Well, it’s been a good day,’ Reagan said as they walked into the village, his awkwardness returning with almost every stride. ‘I hope you won’t mention what I told you: about the dancing and the band, and that.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘It was just a thought,’ he said. ‘If my dad got to hear that’d be the end of it.’

The lights had come on: faint yellowish pools of gaslight illuminated the pavement and the walls of the houses. A mist had risen in the hollows round the colliery, and had drifted out now across the nearest streets. Their feet echoed in the gathering darkness. At Reagan’s door a stream of light illuminated the figure of his mother, as angular though not as tall as Reagan himself.
Michael almost stopped altogether the moment he saw her, and might even, if she hadn’t called, have crossed over the street.

‘Is that you?’

‘We got lost, Mother,’ he said, stepping into the light, his manner, the whole droop of his figure, reminding Colin of the night during the war when they had come home from sitting the exam.

‘That’s all right,’ his mother said, adding, ‘Is that you Colin, love?’ stepping down from the door itself and feeling Reagan’s clothes. ‘You haven’t got damp, then, have you?’

‘No,’ Reagan said. ‘We’ve been walking nearly all the time.’

‘Would you like to come in, Colin?’ Mrs Reagan said. ‘I’ve something in the oven ready for Michael, but we could easily split it up. I don’t like him eating too much late at night.’

‘Is that that cat-gut scraper?’ a voice roared suddenly from inside the house, a vast shadow for a moment darkening the doorway before the figure of Mr Reagan himself appeared. Recognizing Colin, however, his tone and manner changed abruptly. ‘You two lads got back from your adventures, have you? His mother’s been wondering where he’s got to, cooking and uncooking, trying to keep his supper hot. We haven’t been able to eat till he got back. We never knew he’d be this long.’

‘Oh, we’ve had a good day,’ Reagan said allowing a certain sense of relief to show. ‘We got lost coming back. That’s why we took so long. We got a lift, you know, in a lorry.’

‘A lorry?’ his mother said, clutching his sleeve again.

‘A man called Jack Hopcroft asked us to remember him to you,’ Reagan said.

‘Hopcroft? Hopcroft?’ Mr Reagan said, stroking his chin and glancing at his wife then Reagan as if to see how relevant this might be. ‘Hopcroft.’ Evidently no sign of recognition was visible in son or mother and Mr Reagan added, ‘Well, we can get in now and have our supper,’ Colin moving on towards his door.

‘And how did it go?’ his father said, looking up as he entered as if he had only gone out a moment before.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We came back in the end in the cab of a lorry.’

‘Oh, Bryan’ll appreciate it,’ his father said, as if he hadn’t heard this piece of news at all.

*

The results of the examination came in the post. He’d done neither worse nor better than had been expected; though his relatively low mark for English surprised his mother. ‘I thought that was your best subject, love.’

‘Easiest, I suppose,’ he said.

‘That’s all the grounding I gave him,’ his father said. ‘Though why he can’t come out with it in an examination I’ve no idea.’