Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  CHAPTER 26

  On his first leave from square-bashing, Brian had got into Nottingham at eight of an evening, having taken most of the day to travel from the back-end of Gloucestershire. Reaching the wide green flatlands of the Trent beyond Brum, he felt so much excitement that he couldn’t eat the sandwiches and cake dashed out for at the last stop. Cows were dotted by peaceful and diminished streams and sunlight still burned into the packed corridor, and he felt himself being channelled nearer to Nottingham with every circling clatter of the wheels. The excitement in him was not so much at seeing Pauline as at the sensation in his stomach of being lost once more in the vast familiar spider’s web of Nottingham and all the comfortable meaning of it.

  After a hello cup of tea with mam and dad in Radford, he hopped a couple of buses to see Pauline on the estate out at Aspley. Perhaps by some fluke the house would be empty and they’d be able to love each other on the settee or roll about in one of the made beds upstairs; or if not that, then happen they could go for a walk beyond the Broad Oak and snug down in some dry field of sweet summer grasses.

  Everybody was in, at supper, as if they’d been waiting especially to greet him after his first ten weeks drilling like a brainless ragbag for his king and country. You never got what you hoped for, so he might have known it would be like this. Mrs. Mullinder poured him tea in the pint-sized mug that used to be old Mullinder’s favourite—a gesture indicating that Brian was already part of the tribal loot. Fourteen-year-old Maureen sat reading Oracle by the fire, all self-conscious with her small high bosom and trace of lipstick, her face the spit-image of Pauline’s when he’d started courting her at fifteen. They’re a good-looking family, he thought, though feeling uneasy at the mother’s gaze and the comparative silence in spite of the fact that there were five people in the room. “You look a bit as if you’ve had a hard time in the air force,” Betty said with a sly grin. “Do you get good grub?”

  “Not bad. Sometimes it’s pigswill, though.” Pauline didn’t say much either, face half-hidden by the hair as she opened a tin of fruit on the other side of the table. However, he was too involved eating his way through the still-lavish supper to let the atmosphere disturb him. Not that he expected them to put the flags out.

  Afterwards he suggested a walk. “You’d better tell him while you’ve got the chance,” he remembered Mrs. Mullinder saying. “And come to some arrangement.”

  She broke it on Coventry Lane: “I’m having a baby.”

  They stopped by a gate, leaned on it so that he could take the shock. Even going into the air force hadn’t wrenched the nuts-and-bolts of his world as loose as this piece of information. The picture of his life was shaken, sent spinning like an iron Catherine-wheel in front of his eyes. He closed them tight, knew that this wasn’t the way to take such news, so opened them on green fields rolling up to the tree-trunked bastion of Catstone Wood, a mist-green spear-blade of sky above, which, he realized through his shock, was coloured by the sun going down. “Roll on,” he muttered with a long-drawn-out whistle of breath. “This is a stunner.”

  “That’s nowt to what I said when I found out, I can tell you,” she retorted, pale and firm-lipped. She was half a stranger after ten weeks’ absence, and he felt this wasn’t a good way to get to know her again. He remembered how Joan and Jim had got married: it began a mere three months ago by Joan telling Jim that she was pregnant, and by the time she was able to say it was a false alarm, they were engaged and didn’t think it worth the fuss and bother to put off the tentative wedding-date already fixed. Jim told Brian at the time that being engaged made people look up to you, treat you with more respect, like an adult at last. But Brian didn’t feel he needed that sort of respect, though he wondered whether Pauline had taken a tip from Joan and was only saying she was pregnant to get him on the tramline to matrimony.

  “Mam caught me being sick one morning and I said I had a bilious bout, but when it went on for a week she made me go to the doctor’s with her. I already knew, though, in a way, because I’d missed a period. I kept hoping it wasn’t true, that’s all.” She smiled, and he saw she wasn’t concerned—like Joan had plainly been—to trick him into an engagement.

  “It’s a sod, i’n’t it?” he said, half-smiling back. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, was gripped by a hot-aches of the heart and brain.

  “It is, if you look at it in that way,” she answered. They walked arm-in-arm along the blue-blackness of the lane, a cold wind blowing into their faces. His next statement came almost without thought—at least, he had wondered whether or not to say it, and decided he would before too much consideration stopped him: “We’ll think about getting married.”

  “Do you want to?” she asked, in a dead-level inconsequential voice. He squeezed her arm: “I do, if you want to know. If you’ll ’ave me, that is.”

  She laughed: “Maybe it’s a case of having to!”

  “We’ve been going out with each other long enough.”

  “In a way, though, I’m sorry it had to be a bit of a force-put. I don’t like having to, if you see what I mean.”

  He was offended. “Why not then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It would have been better the other way.”

  “I suppose it would.”

  “Not that I want to get married in church or anything like that,” she said. “It’s old-fashioned now. As long as you’re married, what does it matter?”

  “That’s a good job,” he agreed, “though I don’t expect it’ll make your mam and Betty very happy.”

  “Well, it’s us that matter, duck, i’n’t it? Not many people bother wi’ church nowadays.”

  “They don’t,” he said. “We should be in the Broad Oak knocking it back now, celebrating. It’s supposed to be good when two people get engaged.” He was fighting away from the part of himself that felt bear-trapped, leg-caught, and pulled into the earth-pits of responsibility.

  “I’d love to have a drink, but I can’t face it just now.”

  “Neither can I, in a way”—glad that she also felt the same mixed sensation of it all.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “Though I don’t see the need for much hurry.”

  “Well, we can’t dawdle either, can we?”

  “I’ll see to everything, don’t worry. Get special leave and all that.”

  “As long as you aren’t backing out,” she said, a half-serious caution to see how he’d take it.

  “I would if I wanted to,” he said firmly. “But I won’t want to. I love you too much, you know that.”

  “As long as I know,” she taunted.

  “Well, I’ve told you,” he cried. “I’ve been telling you for a long time.”

  “I know you have, duck.”

  “You never look as though you believe me, though.”

  “What do you expect? We both go as far as we can”—this reference to the just-revealed fact that she was having a baby quieted his shock, and he held her close: “Don’t let’s get mad, love.”

  “I’ve been worrying myself blind these last three weeks. Mam’s been on to me as well.”

  “Why didn’t you write and tell me?” he shouted in the darkness. “I’d a been out o’ that camp like a shot. Nobody could have stopped me.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I thought it wouldn’t be the best thing, to write and tell you it in a letter. Mam said so as well when I told her.”

  “You thought I’d run away and never show my face?” he laughed.

  Her hard knuckles thumped into his ribs: “No, you leary swine. But you can clear off now if you want to, because I can soon have the baby and keep it myself without your ’elp. In fact, that’s what mam said. ‘Don’t get married if you don’t like him. But if you can, it’d be better.’ So I don’t care how much trouble it is, it ain’t that much of a force-put. I didn’t want to get married as early as this, no more than yo’ did. So I’m not going to marry you just because I’m having a baby. I can allus live at home and stay at work.” />
  He rubbed the pain out of his bones: her outbursts were the more abrupt and fiery in proportion to her at-times angelic calmness. “You want to keep your temper. I was only having a joke.”

  “All right,” she said, “but you ought to be nice to me sometimes.”

  “I often am”—he tried to hit off the correct ratio of his good nature—“but I come home on leave, rush straight to see you all the way from Gloucestershire, and this is what you meet me with. You think it i’n’t a shock for me as well?”

  “I know it is, but I couldn’t break it any other way, could I? I’m glad you’ve come, though. It feels better for me now.”

  They drew into a long kiss by the hedge, stopped only when a car drove by and fixed them in its headlights before turning off at the Balloon Houses. “I don’t feel bad about having a baby,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll like it, and that it’ll be all right.”

  “It sounds O.K. to me. I suppose we let ourselves in for it.” He was filled with joy and dread. The first shock had shown the future as a confused black ocean, which had lost much of its alarm, however, in the last half hour because a feeling of having gained some enormous happiness had gradually come into him. They crossed the main road, arms locked around each other, and walked into a wood on the far side.

  The day before Brian was due back in Gloucestershire Bert swung up in the yard, resplendent in beret and battle-dress and a couple of campaign ribbons won from the last push over the Rhine. He was quartered in Trieste and had travelled across Europe on a forty-hour journey of wooden seats to get himself—so he joked to Harold Seaton—an earful of Radford, a gutful of Shippoe’s, and an armful of fat tart.

  They went out to walk part of the way together: Brian to see Pauline at Aspley, Bert to call on his brother at nearby Cinderhill. It was a dry, baking summer, seemingly endless because it had been on almost a week, and they swapped opinions on life in uniform, Brian disliking his incarceration mainly for a reason as yet unspoken to Bert, and Bert enjoying his experience because he had a marvellous time not having to worry where the next meal or shilling came from. “I might even sign on an extra three years,” he said, “instead of coming out at Christmas. In fact, I’m sure I shall.”

  “What do you want to do that for?” Brian asked. “There’s plenty o’ wok.”

  “I like it better than wok,” Bert told him.

  Over a sandstone wall lay a cemetery, cool grass waving and flowers spread on many graves, colours of snow and blood and mustard against marble. It was Sunday morning, and some people tended stones and urns, busying themselves with hedge-clippers and watering-cans. Brian said to his cousin: “I’m signing on as well in a way, only for life. I’m getting married.”

  Both stopped walking. Bert took his arm and stared: “You’re not.”

  “I am. To Pauline. Don’t you think we’ve been courting long enough?”

  “Come off it.”

  “What do you mean, come off it?” He wanted more reaction than this, so little not indicating whether Bert thought him a fool or a grown-up, a madcap or a restless layabout who was getting spliced for want of anything new to do, or a shade of every reason. But he underestimated Bert, who looked at him slyly, shut one eye, and demanded: “She’s having a kid?”—at the same time offering a fag from a ten-pack to mollify such outrightness in case he was wide of the mark.

  Brian’s first thought was to say no, she bloody-well wasn’t, but who knew how much it would show by the time they were able to get married? And in any case, when she had the kid it would be calculated in simple-finger arithmetic (digit by digit backdated), so that it was better to be thought trapped now than be seen to have been a frightened liar then.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said, “and we’re getting married.”

  They walked on, out of step now and Bert looking in at him as if to find a trace of lying on his face. “But you’ll be done for,” he raved suddenly. “You’ll be hooked, finished, skewered and knackered. Why don’t you do a bunk?”

  “Because I don’t want to. I’d never be able to see her again.”

  “Come off it. Sign on, get sent overseas, cut your throat, hang yourself. For Christ’s sake, you’re only eighteen.”

  “I’ll be nineteen next year,” he grinned. Bert was grieved: “I know, sure, Brian. You’ll be twenty-one soon as well, and we’ll give you the key to the bleeding door: can’t you wait even that long? It’s batchy to get married at eighteen. Think of all the fun you can still have. Running after all the women your eyes hook on to. I know it wain’t suit yo’ to get married, I do an’ all. You ain’t that sort. You’re too much of a sod, like I am.”

  “I know,” Brian said, “but I love her, you see. You think I’m trapped just because she’s having a kid? Well, what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. If I didn’t love her, I might think twice about it.”

  “You’ve got to think twenty times about whether you love a tart or not.” Brian had thought a hundred times, and knew his mind by now on that subject anyway. Pauline was having a baby, and because he loved her they were going to get married. There was no need to ask himself what he would have done if he hadn’t loved her, if she’d been little more than a casual acquaintance. “What’s made you get sloppy all of a sudden?” Bert demanded.

  He turned on him, fists clenched and ready to be raised: “I’m not bloody-well sloppy, so don’t come it. I’m just doing what I want to do and what I think is right, and I’m not asking yo’ whether it’s good for me or not, because I know it is because I want it.”

  “Well,” Bert said, “if that’s the way you feel. All right, all right. Let me be best man, then.” They shook on it and Bert seemed to think it a good idea Brian was getting married by the time they got around to changing the subject.

  The cornfield was being subtly reduced in size. A combine-harvester came towards them, went on by, and passed before they were halfway across on their slow walk. The area of high corn seemed no smaller than before, and already the machine was a red beetle turning again towards the far side of the sloping field, its engine noise filling the autumn evening like the leisured omnipresent growling of an invisible mastodon. A few bristles of withered corn lay over the path, like heads at which the big chop of the machine had suffered disappointment.

  He reached for her hand as they ambled towards the shrub-covered hillside, a rising gradient of amber and bracken. He frowned with concern at her slight limp: “Does your foot still hurt, love?”

  “It aches across the top.”

  “We wain’t walk far, then,” he promised, squeezing her hand tighter, hoping her foot would stop hurting if they ceased to think about it. He fastened the polished buttons of his overcoat, smiled at her long brown hair tied by a piece of ribbon, and noticed the strength in her calm smooth face, her pouting lips, shining forehead—a face resting for the moment from make-up because she had said: “You don’t mind me letting my hair down now and again, do you?” Not that she had ever been much addicted to the alchemy of powders and lipsticks. The fresh smell of mown corn sharpened his regret that this would be their last night together for a few months, and he smiled to hide his anguish: “I suppose we should make the best of this evening.”

  She pressed his hand: “It worn’t a very long leave, wor it?”

  “Long enough to get married in.”

  It was an’ all.

  “You don’t regret it, do you?” A tractor passed slowly, pulling a dray loaded with the systematic droppings of the combine-harvester. The young driver had a sleeve of his shirt torn, and a farmhand on top of the sacks smiled as they passed.

  “We’re young, so everybody told me at work. But I think it best to get married young.”

  “So do I,” he laughed. “More time for being in bed together.” They’d been married two weeks ago, both families (and the friends of both) crowding the vestibule of the down-town registrar, and packing into the Trafalgar later for a noisy reception.

  “Have you enjoyed t
his fortnight?”

  She detected in his voice a sickness at heart simply because he was trying to hide it, at a time when they could hide nothing from each other. “It’s been marvellous,” she answered. Her stomach was beginning to show, a slight pushing from under her voluminous coat.

  “I’ll be in Birmingham this time tomorrow, on my way back.”

  “I wish I was going with you. It’s not very nice being left behind.”

  “I know. I shan’t enjoy it either.” She asked why not, knowing the answer, yet still wanting to hear it. “Because you won’t be with me,” he told her. “I often think of packing the air force in. Walking out. They’d never find me. We could live in another town.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “You’ve only got two years to do. It’ll be all over then.”

  “I might have to go abroad.”

  “But you’ll soon be back.” He wondered how she could say these things with such an expression of surety, see two years as being but a feminine small wisdom-tooth of time, a nothing that to him looked like a vast ocean with no opposite shore visible. Her love must be deeper than mine, calm and everlasting, if this seems such a normal hurdle to get over before our proper lives start.