Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  But she’ll have something to keep her company while I’m away. “Shall we go along here?”—pointing to where the footpath forked, through a meadow and up a hill.

  “To the left,” he said, not knowing why. Walking before him, she hummed a tune. There was a low, grass-covered bank on one side and blackberry bushes on the other. The sound of birds and the combine-harvester working below was hardly noticed now, and the sun, soon to fall behind the hill, lay a pale yellow light over the fields. A breeze carried white fluff from seedpods of rose-bay, some settling on to his grey uniform.

  “You’ll be a snowman in a bit,” she said, finding it easy to laugh this evening.

  “You’ll be a snowmaiden as well,” he cried, her coat spotted white.

  “Tell me another. I’m a married woman now!” She stopped by a bush: “What are these blue flowers called?”

  “I don’t know,” he teased.

  “Yes, you do. You should, anyway. You’re the one who’s allus telling me about living all that time in the country at your grandma’s when you was a kid.”

  He knelt to look: “Harebells, I think.”

  “I thought they came in April?” she said.

  “Bluebells do, but these don’t. Where did you go to school?” Three blue heads hung half-concealed under the low leaves of a bush before some ferns. “Faith, Hope, and Charity’s what they look like,” she pronounced, brushing her fingers across them.

  “And Hope stays still,” he said, when one didn’t move.

  She touched it, made it sway with the others: “Easy, you see.” They sat on the bank and she emptied soil from her shoes. “I don’t want to go home tonight, do you?”

  “It’d be nippy,” he said, “kipping out in the fields. It’s nearly October. You’ll be better off in bed wi’ me, duck.”

  “You’re allus on about that,” she cried. “We shouldn’t do it so much now I’m pregnant.”

  “Hark at who’s talking!” He laughed, walked to a bush and picked a cluster of blackberries, then went to another until he had gathered a handful. “What are you doing?” she called out, unable to see. He came back: “Open your mouth.”

  “What for?” She picked the juiciest to eat, until a pang of conscience showed in her eyes, and made her feed him some. “I had a few already, when I was collecting ’em.” Hands empty, they looked at the vulnerable tenderness behind each other’s eyes: “Why have I got to go off tomorrow? It’s useless and crazy.” She couldn’t reply, but held him and took his kisses.

  They walked on, becoming more and more white from rose-bay. It even settled on the blackberries, had to blown off before they could eat them. They found raspberries also, and pink juice ran like blood to his hands: when they kissed he joked about tasting raspberry flavour: “I thought it was your lipstick,” he said, taking her arm so that she faced him. He saw the tremor of her mouth and they kissed passionately. “I love you,” she said. “Darling Brian, I I love you”—almost inaudibly. “I love you, sweetheart”—such committing words no longer unreal or out of place, not scoffed at as they might have been, had either used them a while back. He supposed such words were only embarrassing when the meaning of them had been forgotten or wasn’t known; when spoken with reason, their sounds were as intense and sexual as the kisses that flowered at the same time.

  Voices along the path made them stand apart. “Let’s walk on up the hill,” he said, nodding to show the direction. “There’s plenty of bushes where we wain’t be seen.” She hesitated. “It’ll be all right.”

  They threaded a way up through brambles, Brian in front when the path narrowed. Pauline seemed happier now, humming softly, dignified in her walk, as if heavier than she yet was. The fortnight since getting married had been spent at Pauline’s: he lived there as one of the family, and their room overlooked the back garden. Their names were down on the council housing list, but nothing would be ready, they realized, until years after he’d come out of the air force. So on his demob they planned to get rooms down town so as to be on their own.

  “We’ll sit here.” He spread his overcoat and took off his tunic.

  “Don’t get a cold, duck, will you?”

  “It ain’t winter yet,” he said, embarrassed that she should show concern that he would hardly have noticed before they were married.

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t want you to catch cold.”

  He put his hand on her stomach: “You want to worry about that little bogger in there, not me.”

  “He’s warm enough,” she said. They lay with arms around each other. He raised his head, saw a man walking along the footpath below, and wondered whether he could see them. “What’s up, duck?”

  “Nothing”—bending again to kiss her. I’ll be off tomorrow—a fact that kept hammering at him, wouldn’t let him live out the last few hours with her in peace. It had been in his mind all day, and now they lay silently together it became more painful. Back to prison. I’m free now: I should just piss off and desert. It’d be a few days before they missed me. I wain’t see her for another three months, studying my guts out at radio school to be jumped-up wireless operator. It’s a wonder I passed the aptitude tests for it. His hand touched her swollen breasts and he kissed each of her closed eyelids: the whole of her vision, all that she had seen and would ever see, was beating in the delicate hump under the thin white lids of flesh. And completely in her is a kid I can’t bear to leave as well. We ought to make the most of these few hours—but he couldn’t speak. There’s a time when you can’t do much but talk, and then there’s a time when you can’t do anything but kiss; and the trouble is that you’ve got no bleeding say as to when it will be.

  She clung to him: he’ll be off tomorrow, and the fact tormented her, keeping her close to tears the more she thought of it. I shan’t see him for a long while, and she felt afraid of being without him, even though both families looked up to her now and would keep her company. It’s getting dark already, and we’ll have to go soon. “Brian, when do you think your next leave’ll be?”

  “Near Christmas.” He raised his head and saw two men walking through the meadow, maybe poachers, though it was hardly dark enough for that, and he was uneasy at the thought that they might be seen. It’d be good to do it out here.

  She placed her fingers on his cheek and kissed him. Maybe he will, but I don’t know whether it’ll be all right, though in one way it would be nice, far from people and houses and on our own. He returned the kiss and suddenly there were tears in her throat and she tightened her arms around him. He won’t, she thought, so maybe he doesn’t love me any more.

  His arms were cold and he sat up to reach his jacket. A mist was creeping among the far fields, sun descending like a deserter, skulking behind the trees where grey clouds merged. She opened her hand and patted the ground: “It’s damp. You should be more careful.”

  He stood. We can’t do it here. “It’s autumn already,” he said. A tree branch swayed nearby and he looked hard but saw nothing, helped her up, thinking maybe it was the prospect of parting that made them such clumsy and hesitant lovers. He lifted his overcoat and put it on. “Look at that mist over there,” she pointed as they walked slowly down. Their attention was caught and suspended by a strange silence. Everything was still and quiet.

  “It’s funny,” he said, puzzled by it.

  “It’s the harvest machine that’s stopped,” she guessed.

  At the foot of the hill they turned for a moment to look into the sun. Why didn’t we? he wondered. It would have been good. The sun was blood-red and misshaped behind the thin trunks of a clump of trees some distance off, and it looked like a premature medal commemorating the winter that was on its way. A sombre crimson light flushed the meadows on either side of the copse.

  She wrote once a week, and he worked hard training for his sparks badge, an attainment which would mean more pay and the satisfaction of having a real trade for the first time in his life. Daytime went quickly at class: drawing and describing superhet
erodyne circuits and transmitter units, studying Ohm’s Law and WT procedure, stepping up week by week to higher speeds of morse practice and teleprinter-operating, to culminate later in out-station exercises. He enjoyed the drawing-in of knowledge and skill, which more than made up for what little parade-ground bullshit there was.

  But the long evenings were a yoke that crushed him into a broody silence, so physically strong as he sat by himself in the NAAFI that he grew to feel the resemblance they must have borne to those he had seen his father suffer during the long empty dole days before the war, steeped in vicious bouts of frustrations because he felt he could do nothing about the situation he had let himself fall into. It was a naked agony he couldn’t throw off for weeks after his return from Nottingham. He wrote two letters to Pauline’s one, and was so impatient and disappointed at the inadequacy of hers that he raged and often pulled himself back from screwing them up. But the occasional letter, which was written on impulse and not in answer to one of his, gave out the warm glow of her love in a quickening real sense that his long and thought-out ones rarely achieved. A few words juxtaposed in an unconscious and original way immediately flooded him with the totality of their so-far ecstatic love, drew him right back and painfully into it.

  He tried studying, dissected the symbols and diagrams in his notebooks, knowing that if he passed his exams at over sixty per cent he would qualify for more pay, but the pages were too complex to assimilate without further help from an instructor. As the dark frosts of winter came, the unheated billets at night meant sitting permanently in a sub-zero bath of stale air, because for some reason all deliveries of coal to airmen’s billets had ceased. So with a couple of ex-merchant navy roughnecks and an exborstal boy from Glasgow, Brian went on foraging expeditions. They crept silently around with high stockpiles of coal near the well-warmed officers’ quarters, loading sacks and returning black as bandits to set a red fire blazing—to the benefit also of the timid or lazy—in the potbellied stove.

  Now and again he went out alone into the white-covered frost fields of a Gloucestershire night and made his way overland to the village, where he threw down a few pints of rough cider and scorched himself by the lavish fire, despite resentful stares from the locals, who felt themselves deprived of its flames by his presence—a mere scab of an airman from the camp which they must have regarded as a blight on the surface of their fair county unless they were tradesmen or shopkeepers. Drank and impervious to the cold, he would weave back to camp, falling like a sack on his bed, to be pulled from sleep next morning by the thick imperative rope of reveille at half-past six.

  As Christmas and his next leave approached, he lived with the healthy sound of an express train passing through a station on one of whose platforms he would be waiting. The clean heavy rhythm of its wheels followed him into sleep at night during the last few days, its wheels regular and cleanly solid, evenly beating out a series of V’s, and in the middle of the series, one V coming too quickly on the tail of another and breaking the rhythm slightly—a thrilling and realistic dovetailing of sound. When the end of the train vanished, the noise dragged into a tunnel, and the wind played on the back of his head—because some thoughtless bastard had left the billet window open.

  There was a black fog all over the country and the train took five hours to reach Derby. It was crowded, and with a dozen others he found refuge in a luggage wagon, where they spread themselves over sacks, greatcoats tightened in the bitter cold. He reached Nottingham at midnight, a deserted woe-begone station slabbedout on either side of the tracks as he made his loaded way, ticket in teeth, towards the rising steps marked “Exit.”

  He took a taxi that purred its swift way through the dead roads of town to Canning Circus, a crest of the tarmac wave then sweeping gently beyond the valley of the Lean and along the wide well-lighted, familiar road to where the Mullinders lived.

  His mother-in-law let him in, stood by the stairfoot door saying she’d get straight back to bed because of the cold, and see him in the morning.

  “Is Pauline O.K.?” he wanted to know.

  “Yes,” she said, clicking the door to and on her way up.

  She must have been too fast asleep to hear him rattling at the door, and only woke up while he was undressing. It was a plain room, with yellow walls of orange stippling decorated last by Mullinder in a burst of energy on some long-lost creative weekend, whose memory he had taken to the grave with his bad foot. Apart from the bed, there was a wardrobe, dressing-table, and two chairs, with lino on the floor, and a cupboard in the corner holding Brian’s books. “I didn’t think you’d be in till tomorrow,” she said, when he laid his cold face by her, close in an embrace of kisses. “Get in quick, duck, or you’ll freeze.”

  “Why didn’t you have a fire?”

  “I didn’t need it,” she said. “It’s warm enough in bed. I filled a hot waterbottle.”

  “Well, you wain’t want one any more—not for the next fortnight anyway—because you’ve got me. So sling it out.”

  She looked well, an hour of sleep blurring her eyes. “How are you feeling, love?”

  “Fine,” she said. “I go to the clinic every week now. I’ve got varicose veins, and the doctor says I’ve got to have something done about them. I’m going to have the baby at home. It should be here in two or three weeks, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it came tomorrow, the way it feels at times.”

  “If anything happens while I’m here, I’ll get an extension.”

  “I’d like that. That’d be smashing.” He remembered the form that had been passed to all in his class at radio school only a week ago, giving a list of overseas postings and asking for preferences, though not guaranteeing that your choice would be met. The list had so dazzled him during the ten minutes the paper was in his hand (bringing back geography-book memories of fantastic tropical lands and a half-drunken childhood desire to go to them) that he had put an option down for a posting to Japan. He had not filled in the attached application which asked you to state any reason why you might not want to be sent overseas. I’m a nut case, he thought. Maybe I could stay in England, being married and Pauline about to have a kid. But for some unfathomable reason he had left it blank, never knowing what had induced him to do so, neither questioning nor regretting it, except to wonder why he had been sent to Malaya and not Japan.

  CHAPTER 27

  A couple of fifteen-hundredweight lorries stood by the camp gates, the bursting roar of their engines suggesting that when they finally debouched they would drag the rest of the camp with them. A drop in the noise, and the first one set off at a dangerous speed towards the village, ignored the policeman’s stop-signal at the crossroads, and made for the flat monotonous belt of the Patani swamps.

  Before the Dakota was pulled into a belly-dive by some concealed magnet of jungle-soil, its wireless operator had scraped out an SOS—ending his message by the continual buzz of a QTG so that its position was fixed with reasonable accuracy by the wide-awake operators in the DF huts at Kota Libis and Singapore. No message pip-squeaked out of the plane’s emergency set after the crash, so it was uncertain whether anyone had survived. The DF bearings, plotted on Mercator’s North Malaya, crossed on uninhabited terrain of dense forest, between Kedah and Perak.

  Brian sat in the first lorry—the wire grid of the earphones chafing his recent haircut—and listened wearily to the crackling of atmospherics, which seemed to be holding boxing-matches on the doorsteps of his eardrums. In some unexplainable way, such noise confined against his ears seemed to blur the distant detail of thin trees and kampong huts set beside the paddy fields on spindly legs. So he put the phones back a little to take in and enjoy the landscape flying by, the wide spaces of hot blue flatlands gently floating in the distance, a sight that made him dread entering the dark forests of the mountains where lurked the dead blood of injured men. The straight road in front, with a ditch and line of thin high trees on either side, looked like a tropically lit version of a Dutch picture he remembered from s
chool a long time ago.

  His call-sign crept over in slow morse, preambling a short message giving the position of the army screen moving north from Taiping. He tore off the paper and passed it to Odgeson—who pencilled an acknowledgement for sending back. It seemed like a game, an aptitude test of co-ordination in which groups one and two converge on number three, which has deliberately lost itself in the mountains. He pushed the bakelite from one ear and said: “I expect the bandits are picking up all my morse. It should be coded. Not that I mind: they’re welcome to it.”

  Baker lit two fags under cover of his shirt and passed him one: “Don’t worry, the aircrew’s already dead.”

  “Dead or not, we’ll have to stay in that jungle till we’ve found ’em. Maybe weeks.” The wind snatched smoke across his face, forced his eyes open. He looked through the cellophane window into the driver’s seat, above which the dashboard needle shivered around sixty. The paddy fields were green, shoots high, lush and cool-looking, unfilled parts reflecting white clouds that hid the blue and green ridges towards which they turned at the next crossroads. The second lorry was a hundred yards behind, and Knotman waved a greeting, clenched his fist in the Communist salute for a lark and a laugh.

  So much wind-stream came over the lorry that Brian’s cigarette soon warmed his skin, so he spat it on to the blurred tarmac river of the road. The lorry slowed down and sweat broke from his face, was rubbed dry into his hair. Beyond a village, the undulating and narrow road went through a rubber estate, where a solitary tapper passed, with yoked jerry-cans, from tree to tree like some sober advertisement in one of the trade magazines Brian had often flipped through in the camp library. The manager’s bungalow was fortified with sandbags and barbed wire, and from a rise in the lane a Malayan controlled the approaches with a machine-gun.