A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Thank you,’ she smiled, and I felt how pleasant travelling was. It took the weight off me, back and front. I had seen her before, but only from a distance, and I doubt that she had seen me, and if she had it hadn’t been long enough for future recognition. ‘I was your father’s chauffeur,’ I said, ‘until I got a better job.’

  ‘I hate to be recognized,’ she said stonily. ‘It embarrasses me.’

  ‘Sorry. I only told you I knew you in case you might recognize me first. Then you might be annoyed. Cheers I’

  She drank the whole glass: ‘This was a good idea, anyway.’

  ‘Here’s to you, Miss Moggerhanger.’ I said Polly under my breath, for I’d seen her black smouldering hair wrinkling from always too far away, as she rode a horse to the stable when she was back from riding, her plum-coloured shirt or jumper jumping nicely as she jogged along. Or she’d be dressed in a smart suit as she got demurely into somebody’s E-type for a fashionable night in town. I felt very good, as if my head had no top to it, but couldn’t have said whether meeting Polly Moggerhanger was a lucky day in my life or not. Since I’d had nothing to do with it, it wasn’t for me to say.

  ‘I thought I could get into a plane at least and not be recognized,’ she pouted, ‘but there’s no damned hope even of that.’

  ‘It’s no use worrying,’ I said, watching the colour get to her cheeks as she gobbled back the rest of the drink. The stewardess was coming with trays of lunch, but I ordered more champagne. ‘Helps the food to float down,’ I said. I was beginning to feel better from it myself, but only now remembered William’s sternest warning: ‘Don’t drink, not alcohol. Not a drop. It’s fatal. Don’t bloody-well countenance such a thing going between your lips, Michael.’ He’d repeated it over the weeks of preparation, and I’d agreed to never, never, never touch it, because I didn’t need it and didn’t like it. One, I suppose, would have been all right, especially since there was a meal to go with it, but two of those little champagne landmines at thirty thousand feet and eleven in the morning put the cobwebs back in front of my eyes, notwithstanding the fact that the ice had been broken with a pretty young woman talking easily by my side. There’s no doubt that the Moët Chandon helped her, for while we were smoking our cigarettes I held her hand, and she made no brisk move to get it away.

  ‘My father brought me to the airport,’ she said. ‘There are times when he doesn’t even want to let me out of his sight. It gets very bloody tiresome. He thinks I’m going to Geneva to see a girlfriend of mine from finishing school, and I am, but only for an hour if I can help it. After that I’ll have three delicious days on my own, rent a car, drive along the lake, see who I can get to know, and have a ball.’

  She asked what my work was, and I said I was travelling for a business firm. ‘Ah’ – her smile alarmed me because it was almost a sneer – ‘it’s smuggling, I suppose. How much does that coat weigh that you can’t take off?’

  ‘It’s chilly at this time of the year,’ I said, sweating blood.

  ‘That coat would keep you warm at the North Pole. I’ve seen ’em before.’

  ‘I had a chill all last week,’ I said, ‘and I’m still recovering, so I keep well wrapped up. I fell in the river. For a dare, really. My girlfriend dared me to do it, and I did, just dropped in like a stone. It’s a wonder I didn’t get anything worse, it was so filthy.’

  ‘Why did she want you to do that?’ Polly asked, bending her head with interest, so that some of those black curls fell on to the white skin of her neck. I wanted to touch it, but held back, though I set myself to do it some time or other.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been at sixes and sevens these last weeks. We don’t really get on. It’s impossible, and I’m thinking I might not see her again. I knew, when she dared me to jump into the river, that she’d be horrified if I did. So I did it, thinking we couldn’t hate each other any more than we did already. But I was wrong. We did. Yet we’re still together. Anyway, I’ve been uneasy about it ever since we’ve met. She’s from a rich family, you see, and I don’t hold that against her, but she doesn’t really know how to live. It’s ruined her, somehow, spoiled her. I’ve known a few girls who came from rich families, and they’ve all been the same: very difficult, and also not very good in bed. I always prefer a more ordinary girl for that sort of thing. It somehow works better. They’ve got less on their backs. Not that it matters to me any more. I’ve really decided not to see Joan again, even though I know I won’t be able to make it with any girl for another few months, not till I get over it. It always takes me a while to recover from something like this. It devastates me. I’m too sensitive about it. I just can’t run over to another girl and start from scratch again. I have to hide away somewhere, or busy myself in work. I’m not the flippant type, though I certainly wish I was. Not that I get too serious when I meet a girl, but if I really do know her for a long time it often takes just as many weeks or months to forget her after we’ve parted. You see what I mean?’

  She nodded, and the curl shook on her neck, a sight that set me talking onwards so that I wouldn’t pick it up to kiss it. ‘I think at the bottom I don’t like life, but when I’m with a person whom I consider sympathetic and intelligent, somebody I can talk to with more than polite phrases that last only a minute and a half, then I soon get on top form. I’m not talking about love, mind you. I don’t think that comes into it with a person like me. I’ve never told anyone I love them, but I let the attachment speak for itself. As soon as love is mentioned it flies out of the window. I can just become very very intimate with a girl, so that a real bond exists when we are together, and we have wonderful tender times in bed. But love as a question or, worse, as a statement, never comes up between us, at least not from me. If a girl mentions it I feel that the end is near, and even if I still keep up exactly the same intensity of the bond, she on her part begins to grow cooler. I’ve seen it more than once. But if neither of us says it, the association goes on, and only ends when it is absolutely time for it to end, no sooner and no later. And it’s also a strange thing, that when the girl first mentions the word love in any way, and the association ends, then whenever we meet casually afterwards neither of us feels any friendship, but when love has never been mentioned during an association and it finishes on its natural rhythm, and when the girl and I bump into each other later, we meet as the best of friends, and might even spend that night in bed together and have an absolutely marvellous time.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘very true.’ And though I chatted away like this I knew it was only the bubble-vat of champagne inside my gut that was doing the thinking. I had one idea at that moment, which was to get into bed with Polly Moggerhanger. It was as if my life depended on it, I didn’t know why, because in spite of all my talk, or maybe even because of it, I didn’t think at all about the situation I might be slipping into. If William Hay’s number-one caution had been that I mustn’t drink, his second had been that I should not talk, not to anyone while I was on such a journey. But since I had started to talk, so that I was even fascinated by it myself, I went on to more dangerous ground when I casually told her the name of the hotel I would be staying at in Geneva in case she felt like phoning me up. Before I could stop her, or tell her it wouldn’t be necessary, she was writing it down in a little beige address book with a diamond at the head of the pencil – a present from Daddy, no doubt. I was both thrilled and horrified, but both feelings were dulled by the after-effects of the champagne, and I was almost asleep by the time the plane settled itself on the final skid-bumps for landing, though I went on talking, nevertheless, to pretty Polly, who gripped my hand.

  I fastened my coat, and gripped the rail firmly so as not to slide head first on to the tarmac. I felt the need for glasses, seeing everything with less clarity than usual, so swore to have my eyes tested as soon as I got back. Something genuinely had snapped in them, not from the champagne which, after all, had been a very small amount, but due to the fact that I had never been so exha
usted in my life, so racked out, as it were, and again I swore that this would be my first and last trip on such kind of work.

  No one bothered me at the passport window, and soon I was lifting my arm for a taxi to take me to a prearranged office address in the suburb of Eaux-Vives. Polly, who’d gone out in front of me, was met by her girlfriend’s family, and driven in a very large car to some villa along the lake.

  The lift at my rendezvous didn’t work, which meant an act of self-escalation foot by foot up three flights of stairs. I cursed them blind at the dead weight, step by step, sweating upwards, standing often to grunt my breath, so that a kind and elderly gentleman on his way down looked at me in alarm as if I were in the throes of a heart attack. I smiled to say I was all right, but he stood looking at me as I continued up, as if he didn’t believe me, and was about to shuffle off and get one of those famous Swiss doctors to run off with my corpse. I was at my lowest gasp up the final flight, and I felt worse than I’d done since leaving William’s flat, so that it was only now that I fully realized I was in a foreign country for the first time in my life. Why it only came at this point, I’ll never know, but it did, and there was no great thrill about it either. I forgot all about it as soon as I pressed my sweating fingertips on the bell.

  An office boy who looked thirty-eight under his rimless glasses and scrubbing-brush hair asked me what I wanted, and after I said Mr Punk he changed colour and beckoned me into a sort of waiting-room corridor. I pulled him back when he was about to disappear and told him in sign language to get me a drink of water – though he understood English as well as I did. He gave me ice-cold water in a paper cup, then went to report my arrival. There were chairs all round the room but I stood up and leaned against the wall, too weary and frightened of death to sit down. I began to have delusions that I’d landed in the wrong place, and that if I weren’t careful I’d get rolled of my gold and thrown plumb-line into the gutter. I thought it best to stay on my feet so that I could run if anything threatening threatened to happen, but before I could start my looney-bin screaming from under a chair, Mr Punk himself came in, with a wide even-toothed smile on his face, which seemed merely a bigger and more genial version of the office boy’s. He held out his hand for a brief shake, and said in perfect English: ‘I’m pleased to see that you have arrived safely. Everything all right?’

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘except that through some strange fluke I’m dying of thirst.’

  He laughed, heartily, and slapped me on the back: ‘They all say that. Come into my office and get out of that coat. It’s warm for the time of the year. How do you like Switzerland?’

  I went before him, ignoring his inane question, and he shut the door, when it suddenly occurred to me that he was waiting for the magic-password phrase which would absolutely establish my credentials. ‘I’ve got some good news about Sir Jack Leningrad. He’s much better. And he sends his fondest wishes.’

  ‘Ah,’ he replied, with a deadpan businesslike face. ‘I last met Mr Leningrad in Canterbury.’

  ‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake help me off with this coat.’

  Underneath, I was as wet as if I’d been dipped into a vat of warm water, soaked from my suit down to underwear and skin. He opened a cupboard and took out an identical mackintosh coat to the one I’d been wearing except that it had no inside pockets. ‘Put this on, you’ll catch cold. We lost one traveller like that a few years ago – he died of pneumonia. We don’t want to lose you, because according to Mr Leningrad they have high hopes of you. You’re one of their promising young gentlemen.’ I wrapped myself up and drank another paper cup of water. ‘What I suggest now,’ he said, ‘is that you go by taxi to your hotel and take a hot bath. It usually makes quite a difference.’

  It was a small room, looking out on rooftops and pigeons. I hung up my suit to dry, then got into the bed and didn’t wake up for four hours, by which time it was dark, and I was hungry. The fact that I’d just earned three hundred pounds cheered me up no end, and I went downstairs to the dining-room to celebrate with an elaborate dinner and a bottle of rosy wine. Sitting alone, feeling relaxed and haggard, I hoped I looked interesting to the other people in the room. I hung on in the pleasant atmosphere after the meal and chewed through a few long cigars. I went to sleep that night musing on how pleasant life could be if only one had money. Nothing else seemed to matter except money, and though this came as a slow and pleasant revelation, I knew, at the same time, that I’d always known it, right from birth. I wondered if any bastard had ever wanted anything more than that. I wasn’t completely rotten (not by any means) in that I wanted power as well as money. Nothing like that. I only wanted money, a desire that could do no harm to anyone, and I’d do anything and go to great lengths to get it. To want power seemed to me vile, but to want money was noble.

  The desire – not that I’d needed to make it plain by thinking about it – lit a new light inside me, and, in my mind’s eye, a halo around my head. I had the idea that if I kept this picture of myself clean and uncompromised, I’d never have any trouble carrying my little bits of gold through the customs. The pure of heart shall inherit the earth, and what could be more pure of heart than a simple good-natured desire for money and an easy life that would harm none of my fellow men? The wish to acquire money without working for it was a virtue that few people shared with me. They worked for it, and by this got power over others. If they didn’t get power over others, then at least they got power over themselves, and I didn’t want even this. For if I got power over myself it might break my innocence, put a look back in my face that would be spotted a mile off by any customs man – something which clicks within them because they can’t help having it themselves.

  After breakfast in my room, the telephone rang, and a girl asked to speak to me. It took a few moments to realize it was Polly Moggerhanger. Either there was something wrong with my memory or I wasn’t the sort of person I thought I was. Since leaving her at the airport she had not come once into my mind, and now that she was speaking brightly into my ear I was so shocked and surprised to hear her that I didn’t know whether or not I was pleased about it. She told me she’d had the most boring time yesterday with her friend and her family, and that if she didn’t get out of it she’d go crazy and scream. It was a nice picture, but I couldn’t let her do it, so I invited her to lunch.

  I didn’t know of any good restaurants in Geneva, so eating on the hotel premises might give her the idea that I did, but that I was merely being idle or pressed for time. I could hardly remember her from the desperate haze of yesterday, and thought that when I saw her maybe I wouldn’t want to spend more time with her than lunch. There was a strong feeling in me to be on my own for a while in these strange surroundings – which seemed stranger the longer I was in them. It was as if yesterday’s trip had taken me across an important borderline, and as usual, though I felt this strongly, I didn’t quite know what the consequences would be. In fact I didn’t know, in any way, at all, but when I saw Polly walking into the hotel lounge I realized that I no longer wanted to be alone for the next couple of days.

  It came out over lunch that she was very unhappy, and didn’t know what to do with her life – which seemed to prove that her despair wasn’t monumentally serious. But when I said that unhappiness was the spice of life, and that if you weren’t unhappy you were dead, she became a lot more cheerful. ‘I’ve had an ideal life,’ she told me, ‘being the daughter of someone like my father, as you can imagine. He doted on me, and gave me everything I wanted, which suited me fine. It certainly kept me very content for a long time. But when I first started having men friends, he got meaner, though he didn’t make too open a row about it. It got so I thought I was doing something wrong when I had it in somebody’s flat or on the back seat of a car, and it stopped me getting all my thrills out of it for a year or two. Parents think they own you, just because they brought you up.’

  ‘I hope it’s different now,’ I said, dipping into my water ice. ‘Not
for my sake, but for yours.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t,’ I answered. ‘It’s not my problem, is it? But where shall we go this afternoon?’ When she had no idea I said we ought to bus along the lake to the castle of Chillon, and when I went on about Bonivard and Byron’s poem, she thought it an exciting plan, because though she’d heard of it herself, she was more than pleasantly surprised to find that I was no stranger to it, imagining perhaps that a born smuggler like me could never know of things like that. I didn’t really, but had read of it in a tourist hand-out from the hotel only that morning. Yet I was able to tell her, truthfully and with an offhand candour, about Byron’s pad at Newstead where I’d been a time or two on a bus in my childhood and youth – on one occasion with my mother who was visiting a tubercular friend in the nearby sanatorium. It gave us something to talk about, with which to break through to the comfort of more private things, whispering sugar-nothings into a sweet ear of corn as we sat on the bus, the lake glinting in our eyes at every new bend. When I ran out of topics I asked her what she wanted from life, and she said that she didn’t know. ‘I haven’t been brought up to want anything, because I had everything I wanted.’

  ‘There must be something you want, though, that your old man can’t provide.’

  ‘Tell me what you want,’ she said, ‘and then perhaps it will remind me of what I could want. Maybe I’ve been too happy to want much.’

  ‘Or too unhappy,’ I said, mixing her up, often the best way of getting the truth out of people. Since I wasn’t in love with her, or even falling for her, I could try this kind of trick.

  ‘I’m not neurotic,’ she said defiantly, ‘if that’s what you mean. My father’s started going to a psychiatrist, but I never will.’