Saville Read Online Free Page A

when he could make him laugh, or turn and move at some distraction. In the summer he would sit over him in the garden and wave a leaf to and fro above the pram, the tiny hand reaching up and snatching, the face smiling, the look half-curious, aroused. It scarcely seemed a child. The only time it cried was when she lifted it from the bath, beside the fire, suckling it then, the sobs dying down, shuddering through its shoulders, its tiny hands clutching, reaching out.
    ‘That’ll be a strange ’un, then,’ he said. ‘That’s soon contented.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, gazing down, stroking its head.
    ‘Can’t make head nor tail of it,’ he said.
    It was like a part of her, never leaving, growing, so that he saw the quietness growing in her, a calmness, the other women in the street peering down, uncertain, as bemused by the child’s passivity as he was himself.
    ‘It’s as good as gold. A little angel,’ Mrs Shaw told him, flushing, smiling, whenever she was allowed to pick him up.
    ‘See, he’ll go to anybody, then,’ he told her.
    ‘If he’ll come to me, he’ll come to anybody, then,’ she said, and laughed.
    When it was walking it seldom left the garden, and then only if he called it from the field, or from a neighbouring yard, shoutingacross the backs as it forced its way between the fence, coming over, blindly, taking his hand while whoever it was he was talking to would gaze down at it, smiling, and shake their heads.
    ‘He’s going to be a boxer, then,’ they said, looking at his hands, his arms. He had the same muscular confidence as Saville himself, his limbs already thickening out. ‘Aye, he s’ll soon have you down, Harry,’ they told him and laughed whenever, for their amusement, he got the boy to skip about.
    Usually he was shy and wouldn’t be moved, standing by the father’s side and gazing up at the other men with a slight frown, his brows knitted, his eyes dark and listening.
    ‘Here, do you want half-a-crown, then, Colin?’ they’d ask him and laugh when he refused to put his hand out. ‘He’ll not be bought off,’ they told Saville. ‘A dark horse. We’d better all watch out.’
    He took the boy for walks like he’d taken Andrew, sometimes carrying him on his back, but more often walking. He sometimes took him out of the village, to the north and east, beyond the farm fields, to where the road led down towards the river. Its water was dark, its surface flecked by wads of foam and broken up here and there by clumps of timber. Barges passed bearing bales of wool, red and orange, blue and yellow, the bright colours glowing out against the darkness of the bank. There was a coal-slip farther up where the lorries from the colliery tipped their loads, the black dust sliding down the shute into the holds of the barges waiting in the stream below. A small tug with a red funnel pulled each of the barges off, a long slow train that swung from bank to bank, the men calling at the rudders, the bright funnel visible miles away, across the fields, unsupported, and belching out black clouds of smoke.
    He bought another dog when the first dog died, and in the evenings, before he went to work, he would take it and the boy with him to the old colliery site at the farthest end of the village. He’d come here often before, on his own, and now he would lie in the grass and watch the boy digging with a stick, or following the dog about aimlessly, calling after it, ‘Billy! Billy!’ falling down, then coming back to tell him it had gone.
    ‘Nay, it’ll soon come back,’ he said. ‘It knows where its dinner comes from. Just you see,’ laughing when the dog reappeared,its snout muddied from digging at the holes. ‘You’ll see, one of these days it’ll catch us both a rabbit.’
    It was as if, looking back, Andrew’s death and the boy’s birth were part of the same event, the paying off of a debt, the receipt of a sudden, bewitching recompense. As time passed he never quite got used to it,