Saville (79 page)

She had known the break was coming and said nothing when he told her.

He had told her he was leaving on two occasions before: both times, however, he’d finally come back.

Now, he could see, she knew it was different.

‘I’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘I have no choice.’

Still she didn’t answer.

He’d been sitting across the room; he got up and went to her chair. There was a peculiar immunity about her. Beyond her he could see directly into the street, the parked cars, the bustle of the town from the opposite end.

‘Will you stay here yourself?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

She sat with her back straight; she was wearing a light-blue dress; her hands were clenched in her lap, her head erect. Her gaze was abstracted: it was as if she’d removed herself from the room entirely.

‘Well,’ she said, putting up her hand. ‘We’d better say goodbye.’

He drew her up: almost formally, as whenever they met, they kissed each other on the cheek.

‘It’s very strange,’ she said. ‘This town. I wonder if I’ll ever leave it. In the old days children stayed in the same community. When we discover everywhere is very much the same, when we find that everyone is very much like us, when we realize the world is smaller than we thought, do you think we’ll all drift back? I used to despise Maureen for staying here; it is sterile in one sense, but does it have to be? Doesn’t the chance of renewal come wherever you live?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You make it sound so clear. But all you do is take the destitution with you: of belonging nowhere; of belonging to no one; of knowing that nowhere you stay is very real.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be real?’ he said.

‘Don’t the dead, doesn’t the past only make it real?’

‘No,’ he said again. ‘The dead just hold it back.’

‘But what is there?’ she asked him. ‘Doesn’t everything finish the way it began? Won’t I end up working with my father? Despite all I might do in order to avoid it. I might even’, she added, ‘take over the shop.’

‘And marry a pharmacist’, he added, ‘to go with it?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Although it would be terrible if it turned out you were right.’

‘Shakespeare never travelled farther than London; Michelangelo never went farther from Florence than Rome; Rembrandt stayed virtually where he was. It’s an illusion to think you’ve to break the mould. The mould may be the most precious thing you have.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t believe it. Travelling is only one way of breaking it.’

‘Why not stay?’

‘Would you want us to get married, then?’ he said.

She laughed: she was driving him in circles, yet it was an argument she couldn’t conclude.

‘My chances of victory are so much less than yours,’ she said.

‘In being older?’ he said.

‘In being a woman.’

‘But then, that should be more of a challenge.’

‘Yet I’m a woman formed’, she said, ‘by old conceptions. I believe, at the end of it, there is only one man. Just as for a man there is only one woman. Not any man, or any woman, but one man. And one woman. Despite the circumstance.’

‘In any case,’ he said, freshly, ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Perhaps you’ll learn that later,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I refuse to believe it.’

‘You may refuse, my boy,’ she said. ‘But you’ll come to it in the end. One man: one woman. The unity of that is irrefutable; growth is impossible without it.’

It sounded so much like her older self that he laughed. He took her hand.

‘It’s been a friendship of a kind,’ he said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t wish to make it sound decent,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of bitterness here you’ll never see. I’m the senior partner. I’ve had my chance: I feel it’s my duty not to show it.’

‘But you try to diminish yourself so much,’ he said. ‘You make the mould yourself instead of allowing life to do it for you. I believe that life is limitless, that experience is limitless: yet it can’t be conceived by standing still.’

‘Go out and experience it, in that case, then,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when you come back,
if
you come back, you’ll see you may have been mistaken. What, after all, is a community if it isn’t formed by people who are committed, who commit their lives, and have their lives committed for them?’

‘But a community isn’t anything,’ he said. ‘It exists’, he went on, ‘of its own volition. When the volition goes, the community goes with it. It’s no good hanging on.’

‘Oh,’ she said bleakly, gazing at him as if there were a great deal she might have told him. It was like a child crying to be let outside a door.

‘I can see now’, he said, ‘the difference between us. You have no faith. Whereas everything that happens to me, even the worst things, merely strengthens mine. Because things are bad, because they only get worse, faith is all the stronger.’

‘Faith in what?’

‘Impossibility. Everything is allowable; everything is permissible; anything can happen. It’s arrogance’, he added, ‘to assume it can’t. Not an arrogance to assume it should.’

‘Well,’ she said quietly, sitting once more, gazing at her hands, the fingers intertwined, lying in her lap. ‘Well,’ she said, tired, as if he were a force that couldn’t be countered.

‘But I can do so much,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what makes me feel it: but I know it must be true.’ And when she looked up he said, ‘I was a pessimist like you. Now I’m different. I wish you’d take this assurance from me. For I haven’t just taken: I’ve given something back.’

‘Yes,’ she said, then added, ‘It’s only youth. You can’t give that back, however much you wanted.’

So they parted with a certain bitterness, she couldn’t help it. Perhaps even she thought, or hoped, one part of her, at this last moment too he would finally come back: that there was something
intangible between them that only temporarily he resisted. Yet he never went again: his last glimpse of her was of her standing in the room, for she left him to close the door. He glanced back, frowning, as he might at a shadow he couldn’t make out, and feeling guilty, as he did now about almost everything.

Once in the street, however, he felt the certainty return; a cloud had lifted: the town, even the village when he finally arrived there, no longer held him. There was nothing to detain him. The shell had cracked.

His mother came to the station: it was a Sunday afternoon. The place was quiet; there was the one train that stopped on its way to London.

‘We shall miss you,’ his mother said. Yet it was as if he had left her a long time ago. They stood in silence waiting for the train.

The air was still: from farther up the line came the haze of the other villages, with just the blankness of the cutting in the other direction.

He had saved, over the previous four years, nearly fifty pounds. He had little luggage: a bag he carried easily in one hand.

‘Well,’ his mother said with relief when the train came into sight.

The large engine thundered by the platform.

He found a seat near the front.

His mother came to the door: he stooped and kissed her.

There was a dull pallor in her skin.

‘And you haven’t any lodgings’, she said, ‘or anything.’

‘I don’t need lodgings,’ he said. ‘I can always sleep on the street.’

‘No. Not in the street,’ she told him, and added, almost aimlessly, ‘Think of the people who love you, Colin.’

She had begun to cry.

She got out a handkerchief and glanced away.

He waited impatiently then for the engine to start. Everything was quiet in the station; only two other people had got on the train.

‘Nay, I shall come back,’ he said. ‘I’m not going off for ever.’

‘No,’ she said. Yet it was as if she sensed she would never see him again, or he the village, or the family: the ugliness of the engine would take him away.

The whistle sounded.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait,’ and raised her hand, vaguely, as the engine started.

The carriage jolted: a moment later it was gliding away beneath the bridge. He leaned out and glimpsed her figure; then, in a cloud of steam, she disappeared.

The cutting obscured the village. Finally, as the embankment sank he saw the church, the ruin of the manor on the distant hill, the idling of the smoke above the pit.

The side of the cutting rose again and when, a little later, the train ran out across the fields all signs of the village had disappeared. Above a distant line of trees a smear of blackish smoke appeared.