Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

by Alan Sillitoe

  The wind came against them like an outside kiss from the distant curve of the woods (the last leapfrogged obstacle down from the bleak Pennines), and as the pushing within grew at the deep prolonged valley of the kiss, the air and grass and darkness outside pulled away and left them in the grip of an insoluble torment of love. Pauline’s hands were at his neck, around under the hair at the back of his head, and she hoped that he would see through her equal torment and relax his wild unfeeling pressure by allowing her to breathe and win because she loved him more. His inner world grew to a blind illuminated space, the inside of a sphere that marked the limit of all pictures in his mind and turned his kiss-breaking into a vision. This was marvellous. He wanted to breathe, but held himself, even though the artistry of his kisses suffered, went on through brief seconds of control with each one the reason for further prolongation. His hands roamed up and down her back, from neck to shoulders, to take away the drumbeats of his lungs protesting against such obstinacy. I love you, Pauline, I love you. Give in. Start breathing and let me prove it. She pulled him tighter, as if to say that the kiss could go on for another five minutes for all she cared. His knees shook. He moved his head from side to side to keep a further second of breath in him: like swimming under water and hoping to reach a better part of the shore before surfacing. Though her lips were fast closed, she swayed also, moaned and tried shaking his head away. He knew that a few more seconds would kill him, for his lungs were barrels of gunpowder and the only vision left in his lighted sphere was that of a curving fuse going into them, with smoke that had travelled along it now close. If he kept on, he would die like a man does when he drowns.

  She drew her hands away and he wondered what was happening—until her fists came down, and in the crash they made against his spine he heard her taking enormous drinks of breath out of the air. Tears were on her cheeks and he went in this time to a kiss of love in which both could breathe, so that he felt tears springing to his own eyes, but tears of laughter and happiness. They leaned against each other, hands free. “I love you, Brian,” she said.

  They went into a wide hollow and lay down by a bush, dark banks bringing the night closer. The earth felt damp under his hand, and she drew him down to it, spreading kisses like salt on his face as if to recompense them both for his victory of kisses up in the field and bring them back to loving. He tasted the sweetness of her lipstick and opened each button of her coat as he fought back his own kisses into her loving mouth.

  They afterwards lay in the dip of the Cherry Orchard with no watch between them to tell what time it was, each smoking a cigarette to give taste and body to the fragrance of their exhaustion and an illusion of comforting warmth to the humid freshness of the night. “You ought to get yoursen a topcoat,” she said. “You’ll get pneumonia like that, duck.”

  He laughed: “Not me. I’ve got blood like boiling water. A walking stove.”

  “Still,” she said. They walked out of the hollow. “It must be after nine. I wonder what happened to the others?”

  “Gone, I expect. Joan lives at Lenton, don’t she?” He felt loosened from the fever, vibrant and sharp against the night air, as much in love with the rustle of bushes and odours of soil and grass as with Pauline. He stopped and drew another kiss from her, gentle and indrawn. “Well,” she said with a laugh, “you can never have enough, can you?”

  “I can’t”—taking her naked hand by the dark shadows of Colliers’ Pad. They came to the lights of the main road: “Mam and dad’ll be at the pictures, being it’s Friday,” she said. “I don’t expect they’ll be back yet.”

  “If your dad’s in, p’raps we’ll ’ave a game o’ darts. I’m hoping to beat ’im one of these days.”

  “You’ll never do that: he had too much practice when he was in ’ospital.” He agreed: Ted Mullinder had been bed-bound through an accident at the pit. A truck underground had run into his foot and all but crushed it when he was coming back from the face one day. He’d got off too soon at the skip, thinking the truck had stopped when it hadn’t. It was as if a shark had got him, pain leapfrogged to his brain and exploded there, blowing him into a mixed land of black-out and dreams in which he had mistaken his own pain and suffering for somebody else’s, then woken up to find with horror that it had been his own. Operation after operation, and now he was a sad asthmatic cripple with a job on top, the only compensation being that he had become the unbeatable champion of the local darts team. On most nights he made his way on two sticks to the John Barleycorn, slung down three pints of mild, and got his hand in before a game by going round the clock. Though able to stand, he played from a chair set at the regulation paint mark, preferring to sling his arrows this way because his hospital marksmanship had been built up from a wheelchair. He was broad-shouldered and dark, kept in life and friendship by sufficient bouts of ironical cheerfulness, buttressed against despair by his wife and four daughters.

  Mullinder now sat at the table with his bad leg spread towards the fire while his wife, a tall nut-brown gypsy-like woman, followed Brian and Pauline in with a loaded enamel teapot and set it before him. What a life, Brian observed: waited on like a king. Not that I wish it was me, with that bad foot. Eleven-year-old Maureen took up the other side of the hearth to read a comic. “Hey up, Brian,” she called out, no sooner was he in.

  “Did you pass your scholarship?” he asked. You could tell she was one of the family all right, her face oval and alive, and even more mischievous because of her age.

  “I don’t know yet. But I don’t care if I pass or not. I’ll feel daft in a uniform and all that. I want to go to work when I’m fourteen, not stay till I’m sixteen.”

  “Don’t be barmy,” Mullinder said. “You’re a lot better off at school. You don’t know you’re born until you start wok, Maureen Madcap!”

  “I’ll get mad all right in a bit, our dad. I’ve told you before not to call me Maureen Madcap.” But from almost crying with shame and shyness, she called to Brian: “Hey, Brian, you know what heppens when you wash too much?”

  “What?”

  “You get soap rash! Don’t you, our dad?”

  “Go on,” he called. “I reckon Maureen Madcap’s the name for yo’, right enough.”

  Mrs. Mullinder set Pauline to wash more cups, and put Brian at the supper table facing her husband. “Tek a couple o’ them cheese sandwiches,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind sacs in your tea, but I don’t get the sugar ration till tomorrow.”

  “That’s all right. We’ve got nowt else but them.” He felt it strange that an issue should be made of it, as if he’d strayed into a higher degree of civilization than he was used to. Tea was tea, whether it was dosed with saccharine or sugar. In fact, the ration at home was always three weeks in advance because his mother had wheedled it out of the grocer. “She’s clever,” Mr. Mullinder laughed when he mentioned it. “When the war ends she’ll have had three weeks for nowt.”

  “What’s the score on the Russian front these days?” Mullinder asked, teasing Brian’s obsession, who took him seriously: “They’ll be in Germany soon. I’m sure they’ll get to Berlin before anybody else.”

  “Let’s hope they stay there,” Mullinder said. “They want to finish off that lot once and for all, this time.”

  Brian ripped into a sandwich: “I’ll say.”

  “Get my fags out o’ my mac pocket, Pauline,” her old man said. Brian liked to see her doing such things, washing-up, slicing bread, paring cheese, and spreading butter. He observed the mature sixteen-year-old shape of her body as best he could with so many in the house, saw how attractive it showed when prized out of the voluminous thick coat and clothed only in the blouse and skirt she had worked in by her machine all day. The raw animal sweetness lingering from their lovemaking in the Cherry Orchard still beat in his loins, and now and again as she passed him at the table he caught a faint odour of her face and skin, of powder and lipstick she lightly used—though her father had told her time and time again not to wear it. He was s
urprised that no one could twig they had spent the last hour loving each other, felt it should be showing in their eyes and the way they moved.

  He ate his food slowly, drank tea, only half-aware of the squabble going on between Maureen and Doris, the eldest daughter, who was to be married in a month and seemed to be getting her bellyful of family fights before leaving them off for good. Mullinder switched the news on hopefully, but it didn’t get a look in, so with a pit curse—also drowned—he flicked it off again. I don’t know how he puts up with this racket, though maybe he likes it—you never know. It’s certainly a living family. If there was an argument like this in our house, fists and pots would be flying already. Pauline sat opposite, eating her supper. She caught his look and picked up her cup of tea to dispel it. He was overwhelmed by an impossible thought, an outlandish idea that would drag him from all settled notions of work and courting (and freedom that nevertheless existed between the two states) and set him on a course so new and head-racking, yet in a way perhaps wonderful and good, that he wished the vision of it had never fixed itself like a hot picture-transfer against his skin. Maybe she already is pregnant, he thought, we’ve done it often enough.

  CHAPTER 21

  Seven hours gone, and seven to go: it was a long watch, two workdays wrapped up in the parcel of one black night. The air in the hut had left off being air and turned to sweat. Talk about dead-beat! This is what trade unions is good for, but they’re all verboten in this Belsen. He screwed up his eyes so that they opened wide when the pressure of his knuckles lifted, adjusted a few of the dozen dials to get spot-on frequency, and tapped out a legible two-letter call-sign KB KB KB—more to fill his own earphones with a companionable noise than drag other and distant operators from their stolen half-burnt slumber. The morse lacked energy, like his eyes and mind. Singapore was silent down the steps of latitude: Saigon, Karachi, Negombo—meaningless ghosts beyond the periphery of consciousness. He wrote his call in the log: half-past three, wanting five hours still to be back in camp and under the sluicing cold bite of a shower. Most of all, he wanted the bullock cart of the year to take off its brakes and roll quickly into next week, for he and Knotman had formed a jungle-rescue team and arranged that its initial exercise be an attempt to climb Gunong Barat from the south. He’d done weeks of work, had drafted charts to show how the grub-tins and biscuits would be divided between the six donkey-backs of the team, and had already plotted each night’s camping position on a three-inch map he’d spent a week drawing in the camp library. “Planning the trip’ll be the easiest part of it,” Knotman said. “Don’t bank on three miles a day. Make it two.” I suppose he should know, Brian thought. Even so, we’ll do more than two: I could go that far on my head. At Transmitters the wireless mechanic was breathing life into a walkie-talkie, and Brian had more overlapping maps to sketch and trace, and would have to queue in a day or two for injections against typhus and typhoid. Camp monotony was broken, a thing of the past—and as a team ever after they could be called on to trek and search for the survivors of any kite that belly-dived in the north Malayan jungle.

  A month ago he had gone by air-sea-rescue pinnace as relief sparks to a buoy-laying scheme off the Barat coast. The pinnace made tracks like a well-polished beetle around tiny jungle islands, while Brian’s morse kept a couple of rusty and worn-out naval tugs in touch with Kota Libis. There were few messages to send, and he spent most of the day on deck, reading by the donkey engine. At night the pinnace was moored a few yards out from an island, a half-sphere of grapefruit jungle with no more than six feet of sand for a beach. He did anchor-watch, and looking down in the darkness, there was nothing in the sea but grey humps of giant jellyfish, stationary and sinister below the surface as if waiting for a sleep-laden inhabitant of the boat to lose his footing and provide a meal for them. Now and again he swung the leadweight, sounding fathoms to make sure the boat didn’t drag its anchor. At seven he watched the sun feeling its way up the jungle of Gunong Barat, showing him at this close range secret valleys and subsidiary hilltops invisible from the camp, and coastal knolls coming almost down to the still night-laden sea. The sun poured yellow fire on to each pinnacle and dyed the greyish villages red as if they were in some nightmare waterless land of iron ore, then hardened to a purple and crimson. Yellow grew out it, came towards green, until the sun broke through its barrier and slowly turned the water around the pinnace into a sea of blood.

  He slung down his pencil, restless from the memory of that fabulous dawn, felt feverish in the dank tobacco-soaked air on which insects seemed content to draw their calories of existence. Kicking open the door, he smelled the warm stillness of the tiger-night, took up the rifle and walked outside, feeling the tall brittle blades of elephant grass chafing his knees as he made his way slowly towards the far wall of trees. I hope I don’t put my foot on a snake, he thought, going slower so as to give any comfortably curled-up krait or cobra time to make its getaway. Half a mile off was an open shed in which an airman armed with a wooden club was set to guard petrol and tools. A few nights ago, Brian reminded himself, the poor sod had seen the face of a full-grown tomcat tiger gimletting from tall grass outside. With no doors to hold it back should the tiger roam around, he nearly curled up and died at the shock, but was able to use the field telephone and explain with garbled obscenity to some officer at the mess that they’d better come and get him before he was chewed to bone and gristle. Half an hour later a jeep of drunken officers roared up the runway firing Stens—by which time the tiger was safe in its hide-out jungle.

  Maybe I’ll meet that tiger: he slid a bullet up the spout. My claws are as sharp as his while I’ve got this .303 in my fist. The fear livened him and he walked on, though slowly, as if a cord were tied to his feet. The grass moved, bent into a hollow. He peered and saw nothing, a shadow of wind perhaps, though his .303 burst against it, sending a hemisphere of deafening noise shaking towards the hills.

  Back in the hut, he switched the tuning dial from its allotted wave-length to find some music, hoping no plane would choose to send an SOS while he wasn’t listening. The needle flickered across graduated readings behind the glass, settled on a station whose music he eventually recognized (able to follow the tune, though static made mincemeat of crotchets and semi-quavers) as Bizet’s “L’Arlésienne Suite.” He remembered hearing it first when he was fourteen, alone in the house as it played in the interval of Daudet’s play, the same music now wavily crossing the Pacific. The sad melody had haunted him ever since, bringing sharply before his eyes the vision of a sun going down over the flat grey land of the Camargue, where the air is cool and still to the insane cry of someone dying of love.

  When the first hearing of the music finished, he was in tears, a shameless unfair desecration of his working manhood. It was an evening in summer before the advent of darkness, when children had stopped screaming along the asphalt path by the lavatories, and the group of women who normally gossiped at the yard-end had gone in to give them their teas. No anti-aircraft guns belted away at illusive aeroplanes and no sirens wailed their warning song. It was the dead hour between tea and supper, light and dark, between the end of barking dogs and the start of lad-gangs calling at passing girls from unlit lamp-posts. The feeling of poetry and death was broken as his mother said, having suddenly walked in: “What’s up, Brian? You’re never crying, are you?”

  “No,” he answered. “The sun hurt my eyes today when I was out up Trent.”

  The same music came to him now, in places distorted or impossible to hear, so that he tried to tune it clearer, using all his skill to bring it free from the murderous inundations of atmospherics. He allied himself to the music, related it to the workings of his own brain. In the enervating damp heat of Malaya, both thought and action took place in a kind of haze, and he sensed strongly that his mind could be far deeper and sharper than it was. The only practical way, it seemed, of reaching this occasionally perceived and ideal state in the near future was to get back to England, for he imagined tha
t in a colder and clearer temperature his thoughts and perceptions would deepen and increase.

  He glimpsed it now, but vaguely, because the music confused him with self-pity, reminding him that no letter from Pauline had come for a fortnight, and no news from Mimi either; and he couldn’t envisage a future beyond the dark escarpments of Gunong Barat.

  He hadn’t seen Mimi for several weeks, in fact, and through the hard and alternating watches (increased day-work because bombers patrolled the jungle on square-searches, termed exercise) he pondered on specific reasons for it. The widow, she said, had been told of his visits and threatened to throw her out if he came there again because she didn’t like English airmen invading the sacred territory of her house. Or is Mimi making this up to put me off? There was no way of knowing, and brooding gets you nowhere. Sooner or later the good things end, your troubles start. Only for so long can you think the world is a lovely place to be in, until with a couple of mild hits between the eyes it reminds you that you don’t count as to whether it’s good or not. Some invisible thug takes you by the shoulders and shakes you this way and that, roaring all the time: “You’re alive, you stiff-necked jumped-up bastard. You’re alive, I’m telling you. And here’s summat to let you know it.” You’re left tottering, trying to see what’s wrong and put things right, when underneath all you want to do is crawl away and sleep while the trouble and bother works itself out—die, in other words. I should have known things would go this way with us, but that’s the trouble about being slow on the uptake, because I didn’t do anything to stop the rot setting in.