Saville Read online

  David Storey

  SAVILLE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  About the Author

  By David Storey

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Four

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Five

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446419342

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 1999

  8 10 9 7

  Copyright © David Storey. 1976

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, 1976

  Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

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  Random House New Zealand Limited

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  Random House (Pty) Limited

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  Houghton 2198, South Africa

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099274087

  SAVILLE

  David Storey was born in 1933 in Wakefield, and studied at the Slade School of Art. His eight previous novels have won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Faber Memorial Prize and, in 1976, the Booker prize for Saville. He is also the author of fifteen plays. He now lives in London.

  BY DAVID STOREY

  Novels

  This Sporting Life

  Flight into Camden

  Radcliffe

  Pasmore

  A Temporary Life

  Saville

  A Prodigal Child

  Present Times

  A Serious Man

  Plays

  The Restoration of Arnold Middleton

  In Celebration

  The Contractor

  Home

  The Changing Room

  The Farm

  Cromwell

  Life Class

  Mother’s Day

  Sisters

  Phoenix

  Early Days

  The March on Russia

  Stages

  Caring

  Poetry

  Storey’s Lives

  General

  Edward

  (with drawings by Donald Parker)

  Part One

  1

  Towards the end of the third decade of the present century a coal haulier’s cart, pulled by a large, dirt-grey horse, came into the narrow streets of the village of Saxton, a small mining community in the low hill-land of south Yorkshire. By the side of the haulier sat a dark-haired woman with phlegmatic features and dark-brown eyes. She wore a long reddish coat which covered the whole of her, except for her ankles, and a small, smooth-crowned hat which fitted her head rather like a shell and beneath which her hair showed in a single, upturned curl. In her arms, wrapped in a grey blanket, sat a child, scarcely more than a year old, with fair hair and light-blue eyes, who, as the cart pulled into a street several hundred yards from the village centre, where the houses gave way to farm fields, gazed about it in a blinded fashion, its attention suddenly distracted from the swaying of the horse in front.

  On the back of the cart were piled numerous items of household furniture; numerous that is in the context of the cart, for it was plainly not designed to carry such a multifarious cargo. There were a square wooden table with four wooden chairs, two upholstered chairs in a dilapidated condition, a double bed with wooden headboards and a metal-sprung base, various pots and pans and boxes, a cupboard, a chest of drawers and a tall, brown-painted wardrobe, the door of which was lined with a narrow mirror.

  Riding uncomfortably on top of this load was a small, fair-haired man with light-blue eyes. He wore a loose, unbuttoned jacket, a collarless shirt and, unlike the woman, was gazing around him with evident pleasure. As the cart came to a turning of small terrace houses leading directly towards the fields he called out to the driver, who, clicking his tongue, turned the horse and, to the fair-haired man’s instructions, pulled up finally outside a small, stone-built house, the centre one of a terrace of five. A door and a window occupied the ground-floor of the building, and two single windows the first-floor, the roof itself topped by large, uneven stone-slab slates.

  The fair-haired man sprang down; he opened the tiny gate that led across a garden scarcely six feet broad and, taking a key from his jacket pocket, unlocked the dull brown door and disappeared inside. A few moments later he came out again; he signalled to the cart and after a moment’s hesitation the child was lifted down. No sooner was it on its feet, however, than it set off with unsteady steps, not towards the open gate, but away from it, back along the street the way they’d come.

  ‘Nay, Andrew,’ the man called and, after helping down the woman, he turned and went after the baby, finally catching him up in his hands and laughing. ‘And where’s thy off to, then?’ he said, delighted with the child’s robustness. ‘Off back home, then, are you?’ turning the baby’s head towards the house. ‘This is thy home from now on,’ he added. ‘This is where thy’s barn to live,’ and called to the woman who stood apprehensively now at the open gate, ‘Here, then, Ellen, you can take him in.’

  The furniture was lifted down, and the haulier and the fair-haired man carried it inside: the bed, in pieces, was set down in the tiny room at the front upstairs; a cot, little more than a mattress in a wooden box, was set beside it – with that and the wardrobe there was scarcely any space to move at all. The chest of drawers was squeezed into one of the two rooms overlooking the rear of the house: one room was scarcely the width of a cupboard, the other was square-shaped, its narrow window looking down on to the communal backs and, beyond those, the strips of garden exclusive to each house, which ran down to the fenced field and were enclosed by the houses the other side.

  The rem
ainder of the furniture was set in the kitchen and the front room downstairs.

  ‘Well, fancy we mu’n celebrate,’ the fair-haired man said when the job was done. He hunted through the various boxes and produced finally three cups; from a shopping bag he took out a bottle. He looked round for somewhere to remove the top and finally edged it off against the square-shaped sink which stood beneath a single tap in the corner of the kitchen. A high, mantelshelfed cooking range and a pair of inset cupboards occupied the remainder of the wall.

  ‘None for me,’ the mother said, still holding the baby to her and looking round at the room. ‘I can’t stomach beer.’

  ‘Just what you want after a job like this.’ The fair-haired man drank his undismayed.

  ‘Well, here’s to it, Mr Saville,’ the haulier said. ‘Good luck and happiness in your new home.’ He raised his cup to the dark-haired woman, who, until now, had removed neither her coat nor her hat, and added, ‘May all your troubles be little ones.’

  The woman glanced away; the fair-haired man had laughed. ‘Aye, here’s to it,’ he said, quickly filling his cup again and offering the remainder to the driver.

  Finally, when the cart had gone, the front door was closed and Saville and his wife began to arrange the furniture in the tiny room. A fire was lit, they made some tea and sat looking at the bare interior of the kitchen; the stains and the smells of the previous tenant were evident all around. The woodwork of the back door, which opened directly to the yard, was scratched through to the other side. There were cavities in the floorboards beneath which were visible odd pieces of paper and items of refuse which finally, disbelieving, Saville got down on his knees to examine.

  ‘Would you believe it? They’ve shoved their tea-leaves down here, tha knows.’

  The baby had wandered off upstairs, they heard its steps on the floor above.

  ‘You’ll have to watch it,’ the mother said. ‘It’s not used to stairs.’ Previously they’d lived in a room in a flat: it was the first home they had had entirely to themselves.

  ‘I s’ll have to make a gate,’ the father said, yet going to the stairs and looking up them proudly. ‘Well, this is a grand place. We’ll soon have it in shape,’ he added, seeing through the kitchen door his wife’s despairing glance and, with something of a laugh, going quickly to her and endeavouring to hold her.

  ‘No,’ she said, holding to the chair in which she was sitting, her gaze turned disconsolately towards the fire. ‘No hot water but what we heat, and the lavatory across the yard.’

  ‘It could have been worse. We could have been sharing it,’ the father said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with no belief. ‘I suppose so,’ and adding, rising to her feet, ‘We’d better start.’

  ‘Nay, we can leave it for one day at least,’ her husband said.

  ‘I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t bear to sleep here, let alone cook and eat, with all this dirt around.’

  So, on that first day, the Savilles cleaned the house: they worked into the night; the gas flare from their lamps spread out into the yard long after the houses on either side were dark. The baby slept in its cot upstairs, undisturbed by the scrubbing and brushing. Towards dawn the man slept for two hours then, finally, as the light broke, he got up for work.

  ‘I shall see you this afternoon,’ he said, standing at the door. ‘I’ll come back on the bike: I’ll bring the last things over.’ He gazed in a moment at the room in which the fire still burned, then, turning, set off across the yard. His wife watched him: on parting at the door she’d kissed his cheek and now, in the faint light spreading directly over the field before them, and over the houses opposite, the isolation of her new home was suddenly apparent. She called after the man and he, turning finally at the end of the deserted yard to glance back, waved cheerily as if this were for him the beginning of but one of many similar departures and disappeared, still waving, towards the road outside.

  The woman stood alone for a while. With the door closed, the fire still glowing, she gazed round her at the room: there was nothing there to reassure her, simply the table, the four chairs, a cupboard and the pots they’d mounded in the sink for washing. She sank down finally by the hearth and cried.

  The Savilles had been married eighteen months when they came to Saxton. Before that they had shared a room in a flat with another couple. Then, finally, had come the chance of a farm-labourer’s cottage in a neighbouring village: an old man had lived there, a widower, and it was the smell of his dog and his cat they were most aware of in the days following their arrival, and the odour of the food he’d pushed down beneath the floor.

  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 re
cently 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.