Saville Page 4

  His wife had bought a hat; it had a broad brim, bevelled, sweeping down across her eyes. It was made of straw; a broad pink ribbon was fastened round the crown, its ends fluttering out across the brim. She would walk in the sea with the wind tugging at the ribbon, holding one end of her light-coloured dress, her other hand holding the boy’s, walking to and fro in front of the spot where they had their deckchairs. She was like a girl, or a woman just grown, light, uncaring; he scarcely recognized her from a distance. The other men, he noticed, watched her too; it was as if she were taller, slimmer, unconscious now of the things that lay behind them, careless, untouched. He couldn’t relate her in any way to the woman that he knew.

  A war was imminent. There were men in uniform lying on the beach, or walking on the promenade above. One of them he recognized one morning, a man from the village. He had a sergeant’s stripes and had called out to them as they went to the beach, coming over, nodding, leaning on the rail, the boy and his wife going on down to the beach below.

  ‘Why don’t you join up?’ the man had said. He had a broad figure, and since he’d last seen him as a miner in the village, he’d grown a short moustache. ‘If you join now you’ll get preferment. I could get you your stripes within a month.’

  ‘Will we join in the war do you think?’ he said. Until then, glimpsed vaguely in the papers, he’d scarcely any notion of what the war might mean.

  ‘We’ll be in it, in the thick of it in no time,’ the miner said. ‘If you join up now you’ll have a choice, of what you do and where you’re sent. If you wait till you’re called up they’ll send you wherever they want to. Join up now and the world’s your ticket.’ He slapped his back.

  Saville gazed down at the figure of his wife; she was stooping to a chair, unfolding its legs, propping it against the sand. The boy was helping her with another; they seemed contained, one unit, bound up in themselves, with no need of anyone else. The soldier’s offer sent a dull surge along his arms and legs; he felt a slow heat inside his chest: it was a glimpse of a horizon like the one before him, open, fathomless, full of light.

  He saw his wife look up; uncertain for a moment where he was, she scanned the row of figures leaning on the rail, her gaze finally pausing as she came to his. He saw her wave, the face lit-up, smiling.

  ‘Nay, I mu’n stay where I am,’ he said. He looked at the soldier. ‘They’ll be needing miners. To dig coal. They can’t fight wars without,’ he added.

  ‘Take it or leave it,’ the soldier said. ‘But if you decided now I could fix it up.’

  Saville glanced back towards his wife; she was sitting in the chair, opening a paper. He could see the word ‘War’ emblazoned in the headline; she turned it over and read inside.

  ‘Nay, I better stay.’ He gestured to the sands. ‘I’ve got a lad.’

  ‘So have I. They’ll be all right at home,’ the soldier said.

  ‘Nay, I mu’n stay with them, I suppose,’ he said.

  He saw the glow in the soldier’s eyes; there was a boldness there that frightened him, a certainty of where he was going and who he was. It filled him with dismay. He felt it was cowardice that held him back.

  He gazed over at his wife.

  ‘Think it over,’ the soldier said. ‘I’ll be down again tomorrow.’

  When he went back to the chairs he felt the warmth of the holiday drain away, the coldness and the dampness of the colliery coming back.

  ‘What did he want?’ his wife had said.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ he said. He shook his head.

  ‘He seemed improved a lot’, she said, ‘since we last knew him. Do you remember that slouch he had? And the way he never washed.’

  ‘It’s done a lot for him, I suppose,’ he said.

  He gazed over at the sea; he felt cut off. The boy dug at his hole; his wife, reading the paper, sat beside him.

  They didn’t go down to the same beach again: each morning they took a bus round the promontory of the castle and found a spot in the bay to the north; the wind was slightly fresher here, the sand less crowded. There were still the donkeys, and the Punch and Judy, and the roundabout, and they could still see the boats sailing from the harbour. Above them, more sternly, loomed the castle; it was all a good preparation, he felt, for going back.

  4

  Shortly after returning from the holiday, Colin came home from school one afternoon and found his father digging at the end of the garden. Saville had cut off the grass into neat sods which he had rolled up and stacked to one side. Underneath, in the grey soil, he had begun to dig a hole.

  It was quite large, the sides measured out with pieces of string fastened to pegs in the ground. The soil he threw carefully away from the sides of the hole, mounding it up in smooth piles, occasionally climbing out of the hole to shovel back the edge.

  A little lower down the soil had turned to clay. It was pale yellow and came out in great clods which Saville slapped down on the pile with a great deal of groaning, shaking the spade from side to side to loosen its hold. Sometimes, his face red and streaming, he climbed out to slide the clay off with his foot. As the hole grew deeper the clay darkened. It was occasionally flecked with orange and stuck to the father’s boots and his clothes. Now when he came home from school in the afternoon all he would see were his father’s head and shoulders, occasionally stooping and disappearing, the spade flying up behind him in the air.

  Later there would be nothing there at all. He only knew if his father were in the hole when a piece of clay came flying out, landing sometimes on the pile, sometimes on the beds of cabbages and peas the other side. When he stood at the edge and looked down his father would be an almost diminutive figure stooping to the spade, pushing it in with his foot, forcing down the handle, tugging it free then flinging up the clay above his head. His face would be crimson, his eyes shrunken, and every few minutes he would wipe the sleeve of his shirt against his forehead. A little ladder had been propped up against the side to enable him to climb in and out.

  Sometimes when he looked in he would find his father resting on the spade, leaning back against the side of the hole, smoking, his eyes fixed on the bottom or the opposite side as if, despite its depth and width, he were planning some further extension. ‘When it comes it’ll come,’ he would say whenever a neighbour leaned over the fence or came, smiling, to examine the hole, peering down on to the top of his head.

  The neighbour would look up then, at his own garden, at his house, and nod, frowning.

  The sides of the hole were very clean and neat, the separate blows of the spade clearly imprinted. At the bottom pools of water had formed and the clay itself had turned to a dull crimson.

  In the end, the hole itself had got too deep: he had to shout for someone to come and help him over the edge from the top of the ladder.

  The next morning he brought home several pieces of wood from work. They were long and flat. He wheeled them home roped to his bike. With them, too, he brought strips of conveyor belt, pieces of webbing and piles of nails which, the moment he came in, he unloaded from his pockets on to the table. They lay there amongst the cups and plates, glistening, the fresh smell of wood and rubber mingling with the more familiar smell of coal from his clothes and the even more familiar smell of cooking.

  ‘You’ve never walked all that way?’ the mother said.

  ‘I have,’ Saville said, sitting down at the table, his eyes reddened and still black with dust. ‘It’s surprising what you see when you’re not riding. I must have pushed that lot up every hill in sight.’ He indicated the pile of wood which he’d stacked up in the yard outside. ‘I go like the wind down the other side.’

  An image of his father came to Colin’s mind, of him pushing the bike up the winding lanes that lay between the village and the colliery, and of him sitting astride the wood strapped to the cross-bar and riding down the other side, his flat cap pulled over his eyes, his short legs dangling above the roadway, his coat tails flapping out behind. He could even imagine the sound of
the wind in his father’s ears, and the soft hissing of the tyres under their heavy load.

  ‘I’ll break my neck one morning,’ Saville said, laughing, his mouth red and glistening as he lay back. ‘I s’ll. Don’t any of you be surprised.’

  He brought the wood home each morning, staining it with creosote then nailing it together.

  He built four walls, kneeling on the timber as he hammered the pieces together, the sole of his boots turned up, the studs shining, the nails hanging from his mouth like teeth.

  Sometimes he hit his thumb, which was thick and curled, and for a while he would lean on his heels, his head turned up, his eyes closed, his mouth full of nails, grimacing.

  When he had built the walls he lowered them into the hole, the two long walls held in by the shorter ends. Then he nailed several beams across the top to fasten them together.

  In the mornings now he brought back other shapes roped to his bike. There were pieces of tarpaulin, black and smelling of tar, and bricks.

  He brought the bricks in a pannier fastened to the back of his saddle, in his knapsack and, once or twice, in his overcoat pockets until they tore at the weight. In the evenings, when he set off for his night shift, he would string his knapsack with his tin of food and his bottle of tea over one shoulder and an empty knapsack for the bricks over the other, setting off with a wave, his red light visible to Colin and his mother long after he himself had disappeared.

  He built a roof over the hole, wedging the wooden beams into the earth on either side, and across them nailing planks of wood.

  Over the planks he laid the tarpaulin, tacking it down and covering it with blocks of clay. Over the clay he threw the grey soil and on top the grass sods, yellowing now, which had originally covered the spot. ‘It’ll be invisible from the air,’ he said, ‘don’t worry,’ as if, when the bombing started, this was the one place where the enemy would come and look.

  He built a flight of steps down one side of the hole, each step supported by a wedge of timber and neatly paved with bricks. Inside the hole itself he laid a floor of bricks, mixing the cement and the mortar in the street outside and carrying it in buckets through the house along a line of newspapers laid down from the front door to the back, disappearing down the steps into the hole from where, reddened and sweating, he would emerge a little later, hurrying back.

  He worked with the aid of a miner’s lamp which, like everything else, he had brought with him from the pit. A small, shelllike case, it hung with its pool of yellow light from one of the beams in the ceiling.

  With the remaining timber he built four bunks. He built them in pairs, one on top of the other, nailing them together. Across the bed of each bunk he wove the strips of webbing and the bits of conveyor belt, which he cut into strands like thick bandages, nailing them down, so that each bunk looked like a huge, ill-fashioned net.

  The last thing he brought home was a tin of grey paint. He painted the bunks with it and the wooden door, which was the last thing he made. It had two bolts on the inside and a lock on the outside. When he had painted it he hung a sign over it which said, ‘Wet Paint. No Entry.’ A week later he took it down and let them look inside.

  They went down one afternoon, just after Colin had come home from school and his father had woken from his day-long sleep. The lock too he had brought with him from the colliery and the strange, square, stubby key. ‘Mind the steps,’ he said as they climbed down and he unlocked the door. ‘I’ll just light the lamp.’

  Saville stepped into the darkness beyond, feeling with his foot, then went down the steps inside which led into the well of the shelter. For a moment there came the sound of his heavy breathing, then a match was struck. There was a brief glimmer of light, then it went out. ‘God damn and blast,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, now,’ the mother said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  There was a second flare of light which faded then, after a moment, expanded.

  A dull yellow glow lit up the interior of the shelter and Saville said, ‘Watch the steps, then. You can come inside.’

  The hole smelled of tar from the wood, of oil, and of the clay. Saville stood in the middle of the pool of light, his head stooped slightly from fear of the ceiling.

  Ellen stood with her arms clenched to her, her eyes shining in the light, gazing round.

  ‘It should be safe,’ she said.

  ‘As safe as houses,’ Saville said.

  ‘Yes.’ She gazed up at the bunks.

  ‘And water-tight,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ She nodded her head.

  The lamp swung slowly on the nail which held it to the beam. To Colin his mother and father appeared to be moving, the shadows on their faces swaying in time to the larger shadows which swung behind them on the walls. Their faces dissolved then re-appeared, their eyes glinting with the light one moment then buried in shadow the next.

  ‘We’ll have the bottom bunks,’ his father said. ‘The lad can have the one up yonder.’

  The whole interior rocked to and fro, like a ship, as if they were floating.

  ‘Let’s hope we won’t have to use it,’ his mother said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Saville said. ‘Well, I suppose we s’ll have to, but let’s hope we don’t.’

  As they climbed out he added, ‘I’ll look round for a little stove. We might have to live for days down there, you know.’

  ‘Mrs Shaw’, his mother said, referring to their neighbour, ‘says they’ll go down the pit if there’s any bombing.’

  ‘Oh, will they?’ Saville said. ‘And how many can they get down there, and how fast, once it starts?’ And as they came out of the hole and waited for him to extinguish the lamp, he called up, ‘And what if they bomb the shaft, then? How will they get out?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ the mother said.

  ‘No,’ Saville said. ‘I’m the only one round here who has.’

  The day the war started Colin had gone out into the garden in the evening and looked up at the sky. It was grey and cloudy, the sun visible only to the west, above the colliery, through narrow gaps. Behind the clouds, he imagined, aircraft were already waiting. Yet they gave no sign. It was as if the houses, the clouds, the pit, the village had been changed now, re-fashioned, the brick no longer brick, the cloud no longer cloud, merely elements of some new and incomprehensible presence stretching all around.

  He watched the sky the next day and the next and yet, despite these changes, nothing happened. It wasn’t until the following spring that anything occurred. Then, at the station less than a mile away, soldiers disembarked from long, blacked-out trains and marched up in small groups to the village. They were tired, some were only half-dressed with overcoats thrown over their vests and shirts. Some had no rifles, others carried packs. When they reached the village they sat down on the pavements, smoking, sitting in the coal-dust, scarcely troubling to look around.

  One of them came to stay in the house. He had the only other room, next to the boy’s – a small, cupboard-like space that looked out on to the backs. He was a tall, well-built man like Colin had always imagined soldiers were, towering over his father, standing in front of the fire in his khaki shirt and his rough khaki trousers or, more usually, lying on the bed in his room, staring at the ceiling, smoking, and sometimes singing songs in a light tenor voice.

  He brought his rifle with him. It stood leaning by his room door. In the narrow space between the single bed and the wall he laid out his equipment. All of it was tarnished with salt and all the clothes in his pack were damp when he unrolled it.

  Most of the space in his pack was taken up by three large tins. Two were full of sugar which he gave to his mother, who put them in the cupboard by the fire to dry. The third was full of medals, metal buttons, and money.

  In the evening when the soldier came back from the pub he would sit at the kitchen table and count the money out, arranging it in neat piles, silver and copper-coloured, then laughing, and leaning back and saying, ‘If I was a Jerry I’d be a r
ich man now.’

  He often sat by the fire, gazing at the blaze, and sometimes he would take the boy on his knee and from his breast pocket, where he kept a wallet, take out a photograph of a woman and three children, pointing at each one with his finger, which was thick and nicotine-stained, and tell him their names and what they were doing when he last saw them. He came from some other part of the country and had an accent which at times Colin found hard to understand. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the way I talk, boy,’ the soldier would say, laughing, looking up at Saville. ‘I come from a place where they go about with nothing on.’

  He would often go for walks with his father and sometimes his father would take him to look at the shelter, unlocking the door and letting him go inside, lighting the lamp, the soldier gazing round, trying the bunks at his father’s insistence, lying sprawled out, his head cradled in his hands.

  ‘It’s as safe as houses,’ his father said.

  ‘More,’ the soldier would say, laughing, ‘if I had a guess.’

  When they went for walks the two men would go off down the street with their hands in their pockets, coming back hours later with a bunch of flowers or chewing a piece of grass. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ the soldier would say if they were late and the meal spoilt. ‘By all rights I should be dead, so anything’ll do for me. Just cough it up.’