Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  I reckon Brian thinks a lot o’ me, though, even after our bit of an argument the other day, because last year he bought me a new set of teeth for nine quid when I’d lost my others being sick down the lavatory after a booze-up. It must a took him a long time to save all that out of his wages, so I don’t think we hate each other even if we do have our ups and downs. By God, you can’t have everything, you can’t. We’re lucky to have some work and grub and not get blown to bits, I do know that much. With his labouring spade he spent all day at the bicycle factory loading mountains of brass dust and splinters from the auto shop on to lorries for the scrap trucks over the road. Just turned forty, he was stocky and of iron strength and knew he would have flattened Brian in ten seconds if it had come to a smash that morning, though, unlike Merton, he found it easier to knock his wife about than his children: the idea of fighting with solid hard-working Brian seemed an impossible disaster; while Merton on the other hand had knocked his lads about, but never Mary.

  Brian didn’t mind meeting his grandfather when walking along Wollaton Road with Pauline, and noted the mischievous wink in his eye: “Hey up, Nimrod, where are you off to, then?”

  “A walk.”

  Merton looked at Pauline: “A bit o’ courting, eh? I suppose you’re off up Cherry Orchard?”

  Christ, Brian said to himself, he wain’t say the right thing now. “Maybe,” he grinned.

  “What’s your name, me duck?” Pauline told him. He’ll run me off if I’m not sharp, Brian thought. I’ll let me gra’ma know if he does, though. “I wondered if you might be going to Abyssinia,” Merton laughed, turning to Pauline: “The young bogger used to say that, when he was a kid. If I got on to him and made him wok too ’ard, he’d get up and shout: ‘Bogger you all, I’m off.’ ‘Where yer off to?’ his auntie Lydia would say. ‘Abyssinia,’ he’d tell us, and run back to Radford. He was a bogger when he was a lad.” Brian wondered how Merton could have invented such a tale on the spur of the moment—then realized it was true, and that while it had been buried deep in him and may have seemed a century ago if he’d remembered it at all, it appeared only a year or two back and as plain as a door to Merton. What else will he come out with? he wondered.

  Pauline laughed: “Well, he’s still a bogger, if you ask me.”

  “I allus knew he would be,” Merton said, ready to be on his way. “So long, then, Brian. Look after yourselves, both o’ yer.”

  “He’s nice, your grandad,” was Pauline’s verdict, as they turned towards the Cherry Orchard to make love in some hump-lipped hollow of the dusk, and be there an hour in silence before piped notes of cuckoos nipped out on the echo from Snakey Wood.

  The club was noisy and popular, absorbed those youths and girls from streets roundabout who snubbed any suggestion of joining a cadet force, yet wanted a place to meet friends once a week. Two middle-aged women of the Co-op and Labour Party ran it, organized talks (mostly political) and saw that the evening ended with hot tea and sandwiches. After being at hard work all day, a lightness or lack of weight crept into Brian’s bones on getting the body back into motion after a twenty-minute sit-down slump at the tea table, energy recalled by a second wind of fatigue and fought by a cold breeze footballing it down from the Pennines when, having thrown off his heavily greased overalls and had a good swill at the sink, he walked the odd mile to the club.

  Frank Varley met him at the school gate, a crafty smile on his lean handsome face. “Hey, Bri”—he waved a wad of paper from the step-tops—“have yer seen this one?” He was the pen-pusher of the gang, worked in an insurance office down town, and somehow got hold of dirty stories that were given to him, he swore blind, by his brother when home on leave from a signals battalion at Catterick. Brian inwardly disputed the truth of this, wondered whether or not Horace Varley sat at his typewriter all day making them up, though if he did they were bleddy good and he was on his way to earning big money as a journalist. Somebody started ’em off, and that was a fact. Usually they were a dozen typed sheets of single-spaced narrative, the first one Frank handed around being about a special sort of club in India formed by officers’ wives to keep themselves happy while their husbands were away for months at a time. The goings-on described in Frank’s black-market tale made everybody’s hair curl—the girls’ included, for they wouldn’t be left out of such exotic readership. Another story described a week’s leave spent by a soldier in Rome, and the wad now handed to Brian as he entered the playground concerned, he discovered on stopping in the middle of the yard and not caring that those sitting on the far side knew what froze him, the adventures of a nubile young woman who kept a St. Bernard dog. Wind bent the pages back and he made this an excuse to turn round so that no one would witness the slow growth at his groin. The story ended when some man shot the dog because it attacked his little girl, and its mistress died of a broken heart. Brian read it again so that by the time he walked across to the others he need no longer feel ashamed.

  He held it up: “Who’s next?”

  “Nobody,” Frank said, a grin of triumph. “They’ve all read it”—indicating Pauline and Dorothy. Albert was immersed in his Soviet Weekly, bringing his squat head up now and again to spout out some marvellous fact about Russia: “It says here that ten years after the war nobody’s going to work more’n forty hours a week.”

  “I don’t see how that can happen,” Frank said, folding up his sexual proclamation. And the cranky bleeder let the girls see it, Brian cursed. Think o’ that. He ought to have more sense.

  “It’s easy,” Albert argued. “All you do is round up them bastards as never do a stroke o’ work: get ’em in the factories and on the railways.”

  “Round up a few pen-pushers as well,” Brian put in, a punch at Frank. “All they do day in and day out is copy dirty stories, then come here at night and get a cheap thrill passing ’em round to girls.”

  “He might,” Pauline said, “but I don’t get a thrill, I can tell you that. It just makes me laugh.”

  “I think it’s disgusting,” Dorothy said, her round swarthy face flat and angry.

  Frank laughed out loud: “Owd Dolly! You know you liked it.”

  Albert set himself square like a boxer: “Lay off Doll. Nobody likes that sort o’ stuff, you pen-pusher.”

  “We can’t all work a machine, you know,” Frank recoiled.

  “Somebody’s got to reckon our wages up,” Pauline said, coming to his defence. “Not that it would take long to reckon up mine.”

  “Don’t worry,” Brian said. “We’ll be better off as soon as we’ve beat the Jerries. We’ll get rid of Old Fatguts and vote a socialist government in.”

  “You’ll still have to work, though, won’t you?” Dorothy called out sarcastically.

  “Shurrup, sharp-shit,” Albert said, as if forgetting she was his sweetheart. “I don’t mind wokkin’.”

  “You should wash your mouth out with soap,” she called.

  “It don’t bother me either,” Brian argued. “As long as I get paid.”

  “I don’t see why you’ve got to ’ave money,” Albert said. “I reckon you should be able to get all you wanted for nowt. As long as everybody worked, what difference would it make? I read in the Worker that it’d be possible for bread to be free in Russia one o’ these days. That’d be all right, wouldn’t it?”

  Everybody thought so. “It’d tek a long time to come true, though,” Pauline added. Shadows lay heavily in the playground, from air-raid shelters to lavatories, gate to cycle-shed. The sky was blue, and starless unless you looked hard for a few seconds. A cold night was driven into the city like a lost traveller wanting warmth, harried on by an officious wind that scaled the wall and played around them. Coats were unobtrusively pulled together and buttoned.

  “Suppose it took fifty years?” Brian said. “That’s nowt: the flick of a gnat’s left eyelid. As long as we start now. There’s enough snap and clo’es and houses for everybody.”

  Frank was dubious: “It’d tek a lot o’ doin�
�.”

  “I ain’t found anybody at wok as don’t want another government,” Brian put in. “’Ave yo’, Albert?” No one had. The end of the war was coming, and so were the days of change, a definite thing that everyone felt.

  “Our old man wants a new ’un,” Dorothy said. “There was ructions at our house the other night when Fatguts was bellyaching on the wireless.” Albert spun round with a broad overpowering laugh: “O Christ, yes. Go on, tell ’em, love.”

  “Well,” she gave him a mischievous look, “Owd Fatguts was going on and on, and dad ups and brings his grett fist down on the wireless. I thought he was going to bost all the valves. ‘Tek that,’ he says. And there was a big crack right across the top: ‘You old bogger,’ he says. Mam towd ’im not to be so daft, but when she said that, he hit it again, as if he was going off his loaf, and he kept on hitting it—ever so hard—until Owd Fatguts made as if he was coughing hissen to death and the wireless stopped. ‘I don’t ’ave to listen to that bleedin’ liar,’ dad says, and mam gets on to him then because he’s broke the wireless. But he just tells her to shurrup and says he’ll get a new one next week. He towd me later, when mam was upstairs, that he felt an electric shock when he gave it the last big crack.” Laughter engulfed them, like ice breaking.

  “He saved England, though, didn’t ’e?” Frank Varley called from a few feet away.

  “You reckon so?” Brian answered. “It was him and his gang as turned hosepipes on the hunger marchers before the war.”

  “Old Fatguts was saving his own neck,” Albert said, “not ourn. He didn’t give a bogger about us. It was all his bleeding factory-owners he saved, the jumped-up bags like owd Edgeworth who’s making a fortune. You can’t tell me owt. I’ve got eyes and I use ’em to read wi’.”

  “I can read as well, you know,” Varley retorted. “I get the Express on my way to work every day and I read all of it.”

  Albert wasn’t in a quarrelling mood, laughed: “I read three papers every day, Frank, not one, because it’s best to get more than one opinion so’s nobody can say you’re biased. I get the Worker, the Herald, and the Mirror. And my old woman gets Reynolds on Sunday, so I have a goz at that as well.”

  “We’ll make you Prime Minister in the next government,” Varley said. “Then you can boss it over vacant bleeders like us.”

  “If I was Prime Minister,” Brian said, “I’d get rid o’ blokes who sit at wok all day typing dirty stories.”

  Mrs. Dukes walked slowly over from the Infants’ door while Albert was reading aloud from his worn-out Soviet Weekly. She listened a minute before breaking in, regarding him as one of the most intelligent members of the club: “I’ll get Jack Taylor to come and talk to you in a week or two,” she said at last. “He’s a socialist and you’d like hearing him.”

  “He’d have a job to convert us, Mrs. Dukes,” Brian laughed, “because we all are as well.”

  “Still,” she said, “you’ve got to know more than you know.” And they went in to get their share of tea and sandwiches before splitting up for home.

  He stood with Pauline by the back door of the Mullinders, and the end of their quiet evening blazed between them in a battlefire of kisses, bodies pressed close, and arms inside each other’s open coats. Neither wanted to leave, and time ran by. Pauline’s mother was in bed, had left her to a good-night kiss at her own risk. A cat scuffled before the lightless windows, a dog dragged its chain over the stone-cold monotonous paths of the estate gardens, and they were snug in the porch, out of the wind and half asleep against each other, warm and inexhaustible in a bout of long slow kisses. This is love, he said to himself. “I’ve never been in love like this, Brian,” she said into his ear.

  “What?”

  “I must go, and I don’t want to. I’ve got to go in now, duck.”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “I don’t want to either.”

  “Don’t yet then: I can’t let you go.”

  “It’s comfortable,” she said. “I like being here, so close. I hope it’s allus marvellous like this.”

  “It will be,” he told her. “I know what you mean. I mean I love you.”

  “I shan’t go yet,” she answered. Work tomorrow, but so what? Work was the one definite landmark always visible at any moment from the delectable night before, so it didn’t matter whether you felt good or bad about it. He’d be able to get up no matter what time he went to bed.

  The moon saw him home, following him on a long walk through the utter silence of allotment gardens, a cigarette to keep him warm, the smell and presence of it an added comfort along the same lonely footpath as when he had fled from the Nag’s Head clutching a couple of beer-mug handles five hundred years ago, Bert running after him to say it was all right. It is all right an’ all, he laughed, blowing out smoke against the damp air. In a few days the war would be over, and there was nothing on God’s earth to stop it ending. Then the world would change, at any rate be new to him, because he hadn’t been alive long enough to know what the ending of a war was like.

  It finished well: wooden forms and bunks were dragged from airraid shelters and heaped on to bonfires. In the White Horse, a buxom loud-mouthed ear-ringed woman of fifty did a can-can on one of the tables, clattering her shoes among a ring of pint jars to the bashing of the rhythmical piano, cocking her legs up high to show—apart from her fat knees—that her baggy drawers had been made from the gaudy colours of a Union Jack.

  Brian, sitting in the pub with Pauline and his parents, drained his pint and joined in the wild release of singing with the rest of the packed room, enjoying the empty thoughtlessness that went like flashpowder among the moving throng and only allowed the arms of the clock to move by the half-hour. Yet at certain moments he stopped singing to take in the dozens of faces, saw them as mere life-shapes with such sad clarity that even the sound they were making left his ears and drew back until he couldn’t listen any more. They were wild with excitement because the war had ended, yet the truth of it didn’t seem real to him. This was just a booze-up night, more joyous and violent than usual, but what difference would it make to everybody? They would wake up tomorrow with sore heads and see out of their windows the same backyards and line of lavatories, hear the same drone of factory engines. He remembered opening the Daily Mirror when just home from work a few days ago, coming to the double pages of the middle and seeing spread out before him something he would never forget: the death pits of Belsen, a scene of horror making a pincer movement through each eye to the middle of his brain. He closed the paper, every other word irrelevant, and the images stamped forever. But the end of the war meant something, he thought, lifting another pint his father put before him, a lot in fact: backyards and Belsen—and it meant getting rid of both.

  But the beer stunned that part of him and, victory or no victory, he was kay-lied. Pauline, his mam and dad, all of them sat at a table roaring their guts out, arms around each other and happy, done for at last by the six-year desert of call-up and rationing, air-raids and martial law. All this was finished and victory had come, victory over that, even more than over the Germans, and what else could he want but to sing out his happiness in the biggest booze-up anybody could remember?

  Vera and Seaton had been drinking all day, and Brian helped his father along Eddison Road at firelit midnight, Pauline behind with his mother and the children. Seaton leaned heavily, slurred his words, tried to apologize but clapped hand to mouth to stop his false teeth falling. Brian was flexible on his feet, sober enough to hold himself up as well as his father. “Come on, dad. Stop draggin’ or you’ll ’ave me down as well.” He turned: “Y’all right, mam?”

  “I’ve got her,” Pauline said.

  “I am, my owd duck,” his mother shouted, riotously plastered. “I’ll mek yer some supper when I get ’ome, my love.”

  “Yer’ll ’ave a job.” Brian laughed at the earnest tone in her barely controlled voice. He felt love for them both: heavy Seaton, who pressed a firm hand on his sho
ulder to help himself along; his mother, happy and light-headed behind; above all for Pauline, who, by witnessing how totally they took to a good time, was in a way being as intimate with him as when they were in Strelley Woods together.

  The last high flames were belting up from a bonfire at the end of the terrace. Gertie Rowe leapt through them, and her four sisters led all the lads of the street in a fire-dance—a rapid roaring circle around.

  Pauline packed the kids off to bed, while Brian saw his father and mother safely snoring between the sheets. He came downstairs, back to Pauline, who sat on the rug by the built-up fire in the hearth. “Feel all right, duck?” she asked.

  “Solid,” he said. “I must have had eight pints.”

  She took off her cardigan and threw it over the chair. “Do you good. Our dad used to like his beer, I do know that. I’d hate to go out with a lad who didn’t drink.”

  “Well, you’ll never be able to grumble at me,” he laughed. “Not that I’m a big boozer, but I like a sup now and again.” Poor old Mullinder—it was too happy a time not to think of him. Into the world and out of it; out of nothing and into nothing, and that was all there was to it, the beginning and the end of it. He stood by the shelf, looking down at her: long unpermed brown hair falling to her shoulders, breasts low and pointing outwards, full and mature, legs turned back under her. She smoked a Park Drive—as though it didn’t belong to her, he thought, or as though she didn’t know it was lit—in short inexperienced draws without bothering to take down, a long pause between each as she stared into the fire. He reached back to switch off the light.

  In the yard outside footsteps and calls of good night were loud between the street and back doors. Children’s voices diminished, and because they were put to bed, dogs rested free from torment by fireworks. Someone clattered his way into a lavatory, and after a few minutes dragged the chain down and slouched his boots out again, rattling his gate and calling good night to a neighbour on the way in. Mister Summers, Brian thought, able to recognize every voice no matter how much drink had gone into it. The yard quieted, and the festival of sound left the flickering fire to itself. “Are you all right, duck?” he said tenderly.