A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  The meal ended amicably because we all got drunk. On the way back to the compartments Gilbert fell down, and I trampled on his hat. This made him truculent, but I told him to pack it in and not get so ratty over an accident. ‘I’ll scratch your eyes out,’ June said to me, ‘if you try anything.’ She picked up the hat and put it on Gilbert’s cock-head. ‘Come on, love.’

  In spite of our differences we sat in the same compartment, much to the disgust of an elderly parson, who told Gilbert to stop using such foul un-Christian talk in front of a lady. ‘Don’t worry, your reverence,’ June said with a downbeat leer, ‘I’m not a lady, and he’s not a Christian. If he is I’m going to stop living with him,’ at which he got up and walked out.

  ‘I’ll have to take you everywhere,’ Gilbert said to her. ‘I like space, and you’ll clear every place I go into. We’re made for each other.’

  I asked him if he was writing another book.

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ June said. ‘We’re too busy living, aren’t we, Gilbert my sweet?’

  ‘Almost,’ he said, standing up to do physical jerks on the luggage rack. ‘I’m doing a monumental non-fiction work at the moment called The History of Carnage. My publisher thinks there’s a market for it in these years of peace.’ He was out of breath, so sat down between us. ‘I should get good material living with dear June. The reason I’ve been so unsuccessful and unhappy with women so far in my life is because I’ve never found one that will stand up and fight with me. June is a real match. In a restaurant last night she threw an avocado pear, and it splattered beautifully, oil and all.’

  ‘He kicked me under the table.’

  ‘I wanted to see what you’d do.’ Gilbert smiled: ‘Whenever I did it in the past I just got a look of regret from the injured party.’

  ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘I’ll throw the table as well.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ he said, ‘and I’ll break your bloody neck.’ I marvelled at the way he seemed to have altered. I could only assume that Pearl had been driven into the looney-bin. I got off at Nottingham Midland and left the happy couple to their love and kisses.

  I’d sent a telegram to my mother the day before and, as I hoped, she had got the afternoon off work so as to be in when I arrived. I took a taxi from the station, craning my neck to get a view of Castle Rock as I went by, caught in the swamp of memory, and loving every minute of it, so that I could get out of it blithely any second. Nobody can feed me the crap that you can’t go back, that you can’t go home again, because I never believed I was going anywhere, anyway. You do what the hell you like, and don’t need to believe in any such thing that ties you down and stops you moving. To go back or to go forward is better than standing still, that’s all I know, though the only final moving you do is in the skinbag of yourself.

  She was cleaning out my room. ‘I’ll only stay tonight,’ I said, ‘because I’ve got to be back at work tomorrow.’

  I stood in the scullery as she lit the gas.

  ‘What work?’

  ‘Travelling’ – adding the usual explanations.

  She had her curlers in and wore a turban to cover them up: ‘You’ve landed a good job.’

  ‘It pays well.’

  ‘Do you like it, though?’

  ‘It’s easy.’

  She laughed, and we plonked in the armchairs opposite each other: ‘You always were on the lookout for a cushy billet.’

  I offered her a cigarette: ‘How’s your work then?’

  ‘The same old drag. But it keeps me alive and kicking. Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’ She made the tea, poured it, put in sugar and milk, stirred it up, and pushed it towards me. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be at Grandma’s funeral,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t know about it.’

  ‘We tried to find you. I even went to the police, but there was nothing they could do.’

  This made my stomach jump: ‘I’ll keep in touch from now on.’

  ‘It’s best if you do, in case something happens to me. Not that I’m likely to be a drain on you, because I’m getting married soon. Albert and I have fixed it for about three months from now.’

  ‘Albert?’

  ‘You’ll meet him tonight, if you come out down town.’

  My grandmother’s box was upstairs, and I was given an envelope with the key in it. It wasn’t full. There were the rent books she’d kept right through her life, all the lapsed insurance policies, birth certificates, a family Bible which, when I opened it, had the births and deaths of several generations of the family written in the fly-leaves, not only by her but by others before her. There were character references from people she had worked for from the age of twelve – packs of that useless detritus that old-fashioned half-literate people liked to hoard. I tore up a few of the rent books and stacked them in the fireplace, piled them on and got a good blaze going with my lighter, for the room was damp and cold. Some fifty-year-old newspapers came out, and these I put to one side to read later, curious as to why she had saved them. Then a pack of ancient photos, a few of them daguerrotypes, members of the family who had steamed over from Ireland.

  I compared the dates on the back with the notes in the Bible, and one photo was particularly interesting because it was of the first Cullen to come from County Mayo at the time of the Famine. He’d brought six sons and a wife with him, and the photo showed a man who looked very much like photos I’d seen of myself. It gave me a shock. Polly Moggerhanger had taken one of me in Geneva, and the same stiff self-conscious pose was there. The man of eighteen-forty wore a fine suit, with a waistcoat that had a watch-chain looping across it. He was just above middle height, about thirty years old, and wore a derby hat (or was it a billy-cock?). But he had my thin lips and straight nose, the same arching of the back as the head looked superciliously into the air as if expecting trouble from that quarter. It gave me a pang to realize he’d been dead eighty years, and that maybe in another hundred years someone like me would be looking at a photo of me and saying the same thing to himself. Time has no meaning, I thought, when it comes to photos hoarded by an old woman. I tried to picture his life in the England of those days, but I couldn’t. He’d worked with his sons on the railways in Cambridgeshire, and I supposed they’d earned good money with it. He certainly looked well dressed in this photo.

  I put it in my wallet, continued digging in the trunk. There was a bonnet, a few embroidered handkerchiefs, a hymn and prayer book, a man’s yellow necktie or cravat, and a gold watch that didn’t go when I wound it up. Lower down and beneath everything was a small leather bag with something inside that weighed heavily. I opened the string, and gold coins fell out. There were fifty altogether, and I’d never seen golden sovereigns before, that must be worth four or five quid each. The sight and weight of so much gold made my mouth water, and for several minutes I ran them through my fingers like a miser. I was so long up there my mother must have thought I’d laid down and died, so I put all the things back except the gold and humped my way to the living-room.

  She looked up from her novel. ‘Get anything?’

  I clinked the bag down: ‘Photos, rent books, and this.’

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Fifty gold sovereigns.’

  She stood up: ‘Do you want any more tea?’

  ‘If it’s fresh. There’s half for you, and half for me. It’s over a hundred pounds each.’

  ‘It was left to you,’ she called from the scullery.

  ‘I insist on going halves.’

  This obviously pleased her: ‘All right. Albert and me might go to Paris for a few days with it. I’ve always wanted to go there.’

  ‘That’s a good way of spending it,’ I said, pleased that she hadn’t wanted to fritter it away on sensible things like clothes or the house.

  I met Albert that night, and we hit it off together, which was just as well because my mother wanted me to ‘give her away’ when the time came, and we both knew I wouldn’t give her away to just
anybody. She looked so young dressed up that if I’d met her in London and she’d not been my mother I could imagine wanting to get off with her. As for Albert, he was about fifty, and had been a factory worker most of his life. But from being a boy he’d been in the Communist Party and had educated himself, so we had a lot to talk about. Before the war he’d actually been sent to Russia by his trade union, and in those days, being so young, he’d thought it was great. Even now, he wasn’t one of those who’d opted out. He knew all about what had been going on, but still kept his faith in a better world and all that. I didn’t see eye to eye with him on some of this, but there’d always been a tradition of religious tolerance in our family, so there was no reason why I shouldn’t respect him for it. We drank steadily, as if we’d never stop talking, and I could see how pleased my mother was that we took to each other. I certainly wouldn’t mind him going to Paris on part of the Cullen gold. My grandmother must have got her hands on so much during the Great War when she was working at the gun factory. I’m glad to know that somebody made something out of it apart from the millionaires. She must have gone out of her way to get gold so that it wouldn’t lose its value, and I was glad that at least one member of the Cullen family had shown a bit of wisdom for once.

  I left my twenty-five sovereigns locked in the box, and went back to London, an ideal journey in that I neither met nor spoke to anyone. Sunshine came warmly into the musty compartment as I left Nottingham, but two hours later the train passed St Albans and entered the drizzle. My mother had packed sandwiches so I didn’t need to go to the restaurant coach. As for drink, I never got thirsty. I don’t know why but I could go a whole day without liquid of any kind, not even feeling uncomfortable for lack of it.

  On St Pancras Station I bought a newspaper to pass my time on the Underground, and when I unfolded it I saw a headline which made me feel uneasy, not to say queasy. HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN RIVER. POLICE LAUNCH SEARCH ON PUTNEY REACH. HUSBAND GASSED. I read it several times. Her head had been discovered in the mud, and my friend on the plane from sunny Portugal had done it after all, in spite of that loving reunion I’d witnessed at London airport. The gory gossip was given, and all the office girls were reading it up. I chopped my vomit back and saw his face before me, mad and vivid in its details, when even on the plane during his spiel I hadn’t got a good look at it, and so could never have known what was really behind those amiable, intelligent, grotesque eyes.

  His story had fixed me, there’s no doubt of that, because who isn’t still gripped by tales of medieval jealousy, mother-love, and spite, even though it can be seen as rockingly funny? But I couldn’t see that far behind his eyes and believe he’d really meant what he said. I decided that from now on I’d accept what people said as being part of their true interiors. They are incapable of lying when they are desperate, and in any case your intuition has to tell you when they were in this state. If I had taken the pains to see, which wouldn’t have been that far beyond me, to the deepest recesses behind his eyes in which that picture lurked in black and grey and red, of his wife’s head tilted in the mud and staring at some innocent barge going by in the moonlight, I might have saved her, and him. But I didn’t, because somehow my feet were no longer plugged into the earth, and my aerial was withered in its contact with heaven. It seemed I had been living underwater not to have known the truth of what was so obvious, and been able to do something about it. I saw everything sharp and clear with the bare eye, but a lazy idleness inside kept a permanent cloth-bound foot on the deeper perceptions that blinded me from action. Some explosion was necessary in my consciousness and I didn’t know how to bring it about before something happened due to this inadequacy that would be fatal to me.

  The train rumbled under the earth of London. I was packed in with office workers, my eyes uncontrollably reading all the inane advertisements that even such thoughts as I was having could not blot out. I took my eyes away and set them on someone’s blank back.

  I was relieved on reaching the flat to find a letter from the estate agents saying that my offer of eleven hundred for Upper Mayhem station and house had been accepted. I was asked to instruct my solicitors to proceed as quickly as possible with a view to exchanging contracts. I didn’t want telling twice, so in the morning called up Smut and Bunt asking them to get a move on in case someone should now come and pip me by a bigger offer. The man from Putney was out of the running, but as far as I knew there might be others, and in view of my precarious situation I was now more set in my heart than ever at, getting that bit of property.

  I dialled headquarters to see if a trip was lined up for me. Stanley was in an expansive mood. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not for a couple of days, Michael. We’ve got Arthur Ramage going to Zurich in the morning and he’s so good he can do two men’s share. So stand by the day after tomorrow.’ Before I could say Arthur Ramage ought not to be such a graballing bastard, he hung up. Ramage was a legend in the smuggling trade, king of the job. William had called him champion, held him in awe because he’d been on it for years without getting caught and had exported more gold than Cunard – making himself so rich by his earnings that he owned a prosperous farm in Norfolk. He got good prices for all his jobs because they were the trickiest, and William said that if he wrote a book about it it would be a bestseller except that he’d get three hundred years in jail for endangering Britain’s economy. Every time the Prime Minister got up in Parliament to try and talk his way out of a financial crisis you could bet Arthur Ramage had been in action. Whenever Britain got its neck saved by a massive loan from overseas to reinforce its gold stocks, Arthur Ramage set to work again (with the connivance of the Jack Leningrad Organization) to wittle them away. In fact if you took all such talk seriously you might honestly begin to believe that those who made the massive loan were the ones who got the gold back again via Jack Leningrad in order to keep the pot boiling and their commission and profits piling up. It was all so dirty I could only laugh at it, because if I took it seriously and wept I might not have earned the money to buy my station.

  I went out to have a meal in Soho. Before going in I phoned Polly, and by the breath of luck she picked it up herself. There was a tone of gladness in her voice at hearing from me. ‘Are you working tomorrow? If not, why don’t you come and see me?’

  A bloke outside hugged a girl to him and waited to come in. ‘I was on in the morning,’ I said, ‘but somebody else is going to Lisbon for a change.’

  ‘As long as it’s not you, love,’ she said softly. ‘I have missed you. What unlucky man is taking your place?’

  ‘Oh, a bloke called Ramage will be doing it for the next two weeks, on the same day. You don’t know him, though. I’ve only seen him once myself. A champion.’

  She broke in, as if I might go on boring her for half an hour over it. ‘The house should be clear by ten. Phone me, and then come over. You can help me pick roses.’

  ‘As long as I don’t get pricked.’ She laughed, and hung up. I did likewise, pushed my way roughly by the bloke and girl struggling to get in.

  The head waiter bowed as he’d previously done to William, and I didn’t like the omen of it, though just the same I was pleased because when I couldn’t think of what to order he’d pamper me with the dish of the day, or suggest something special that might tempt me in my jaded mood. So in order to bring my fragmented mind to heel I treated myself to a good feed and washed it down with half a bottle of champagne. My dreamprint for the future, in so far as I hoped it would work, was to leave my gold-smuggling profession, put a certain proposition to Polly Moggerhanger, and retire with her to a life of bliss at my railway station. Yet none of this seemed real or possible, because I knew that no matter how fondly I mused on the future, it was all worked out for me, in spite of my wants and hopes. Still, this part of reality didn’t suggest itself strongly enough to douse my appetite. I looked around the room for a girl who might interest me, but it was an off-night, for not many people were there.

  I walked in the rain down Cha
ring Cross Road, on my way towards Hungerford footbridge, meaning to wend home along the south bank. Near midnight I met Almanack Jack, with a sheet of plastic over himself, holding two carrier bags. ‘What’s in there, Jack?’ I asked. ‘You’ve done another job?’

  He told me to eff-off, and shambled on.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s me?’ he growled.

  ‘Michael, of bacon-sandwich fame. Remember?’

  A breeze sent drops of rain from him, and his breath was tainted with decay, and pure steam-alcohol he’d been floating down himself. ‘I’m grovelling,’ he said, coming close. People passing thought he was tapping me for a bob or two, so hurried on in case he should turn to them, though they made it seem as if they were merely trying to get on out of the rain. ‘Grovelling,’ he said, ‘can’t you tell?’

  ‘Is it like that, Jack? I can’t see it though. You’ve never done that.’ A vivid picture came to me of my grandmother dying and I didn’t know where to turn my head, wanting to get away from him like those people and buses going down Whitehall. ‘I can’t escape it,’ he said, ‘and that’s the truth. A hundred million people are standing on the moon holding up the Earth, and they’re going to throw it on my belly. They want me to burst. It’s the world’s end, the only way it can end.’

  I lit a fag but didn’t offer one, wanting him to ask so that I could see he was coming back to his right mind. Maybe he’s in it already, I thought, and has spent most of his life trying to get there. ‘They won’t be able to lift it,’ I said, ‘so you’ll be safe enough.’

  He laughed: ‘They will, don’t you worry. I sleep under a bridge. Even then, I try to keep awake. But I sleep. Can’t help it. When they throw it the bridge will break. Bound to if you think of the weight of the world. Straight through and on to me.’

  ‘You can’t live without hope,’ I said, as much for myself as him, wishing I hadn’t bumped into him, because I didn’t feel as safe and callous as I’d always thought I was.