Saville (77 page)

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.