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

by Alan Sillitoe

  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.

  “Yes, are you?”

  “Yes.” He pushed the chairs back, took cushions from the sofa, and placed them on the rug. “Did you have a good time?”

  “I liked it in the pub,” she said. “A bit o’ singing like that does you good, I reckon.”

  He sat by her: “It does, an’ all.”

  “I ain’t ’ad a night out like that since our Betty got married.” She threw her cigarette into the fire, watched it strip off its paper like a coat as if to dive deeper in. They kissed, and lay down on the rug, and knowing that no one would disturb them that night, he drew skirt and blouse and underwear from her white and passionately waiting body. Her face glowed from the nearness of the blazing fire, and from the unfamiliarity of allowing her nakedness to be seen by him. She drew towards his caresses, a thoughtless process of kissing that, as he undressed, passed into an act of love-making that was slow and marvellous, submerging their closed eyes into a will over which neither thought of having any control. They lay together with no precaution between the final pleasure, into a smooth rhythm of love and a grip of arms to stop them crying out at the climax of it.

  They dressed in silence. He went to the back door and stood looking up the yards, suffocating from a deep still-burning fever. He felt a laugh of oversatisfied joy begin in his heart, then caught a full cold draught of the night air, which made him think it was about time he took Pauline home. The smell of ash and burnt paper from dead bonfires drifted in from the street, pointing out how silent were the thousands of houses spreading around. It was a good smell, and he savoured all it would ever mean: spring flames of victory and love. The factory dynamos still filled the air with their omnipresent low drone, so all-pervading that unless they were brought to mind by an act of imagination, the noise would go unnoticed. The factory hadn’t shut down its row! Not for a minute. On it went, through booze-ups and victory fires, never stopping. Work, more than anything, was something good, hitched on to the slow grinding chariot wheels of life that never ceased.

  Pauline came to his side, coat on and ready to be walked home. She hadn’t once mentioned that her mother would be mad at her having stopped out half the night. Not that either of them thought it mattered any more. They walked up the street arm-in-arm, through many streets, passing deflated bonfires, from some of which a red eye still glowed, potent and hiding its colours. A few months later, victory fires would burn again, red posters in every window, red streamers waving from every child’s hand, red in the real victory for which the people had waited like the glowing eyes of the bonfires.

  CHAPTER 25

  He closed the doors early, shutting out the unquestionable superiority of insect life, and the red-soaked sky at dusk that filtered away to blue scrub and forest and a runaway flattened to cold sleep. He spun the goniometer like a roulette wheel and it stopped at east, the opposite direction he wanted to take. No aircraft fenced the atomospherics with its morse, and he slouched in the basket-chair, bored and tired, tense at the thought of a dozen empty hours before daylight and relief. It wasn’t possible any more to take an occasional potshot at shadows with the rifle, for together with fifty pounds of ammo it had been recalled to the armoury so that if bandits attacked the hut (still the farthest outpost of camp and airstrip) they couldn’t capture the wherewithal to knock off a few planters or swaddies. They’ll kill me, but as long as they don’t get the rifle, that’s all that matters. The old man would laugh if he knew I was in such a fix: What did I tell you then, eh? Don’t join up, I said, didn’t I? And what do you do? You join up, don’t yer? If you get shot it’ll serve you right. Don’t come crying to me with your head in your hands, you bleddy numbskull. That’s how he’d carry on, and he’d be dead-right as well. Still, there are fifty-odd rounds the amoury’ll never get back, which I’m holding for when the Communists come up and say: “Stand and deliver: your bullets or your life.” And if they mow me down first, they’ll be plain enough to find by anyone good at looting. I suppose the old man would say I was daft for climbing Gunong Barat, but there I’d argue, because even though we didn’t get to the top I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I weighed a solid hundred and fifty when I went up but only a hundred and thirty now, and no matter how much I scoff (and I feel clambed all the time), I can’t put it back on. So it cost twenty pounds of flesh to find out that Gunong Barat wasn’t worth a light.

  He saw Mimi the same evening he got back, not having thought of her once during the trip. Both spoke little, moved quickly and blindly into love on her narrow bed. Shuddering at the orgasm, he roared like an animal, the jungle bursting out of his soul. It was as though, in this first night asleep, shrubbery entangled itself in his brain, branches and leaves worked their way to the back of his eyes. He burned in a fever, as if next to a fire, plunged like burning iron into a bath of warm water. After the hard earth of the forest, it was difficult to sleep. She woke him at midnight: they talked and made love, and he finally slept as if he had no life left.

  He walked a few yards out for a piss, into a night still and warm, as if the sky had stopped breathing, it had so many stars around. Anybody hiding in the grass could shoot me while I shake the drops off: the thought turned sweat-cold on his back, though he didn’t hurry to get inside. And just imagine, he don’t know I’m really a friend who’d go into the jungle and help him if he came up and asked me to. All I’d feel is a hot thump at the back of my neck and the next second I’d be dead, listening to the old man say: I told you so.

  I could be back in Nottingham earning ten quid a week at the Raleigh instead of wasting time in this hot district, fighting my pals. He fastened the door and listened-out at the set: nothing doing. But on day watches a dozen four-engined bombers were up patrolling the mountain jungle, wanting DF bearings as fast as they could be sent. It got so hot at times that the relieving operator had to jump into the chair and take over sending without a hello or goodbye.

  Rifle or not, the first burst of bullets would rip through the hut and write LONG LIVE STALIN on my bony chest. I wouldn’t even have time to rush outside with my hands up and shout: “Don’t fire, comrades. It’s me—Brian. I used to listen to your pals spouting outside the Raleigh only a couple of years back, and I used to buy all their pamphlets and ruin my eyes reading ’em.” His hollow laugh ran round the hut and came chewed up back to him. Why did I let myself get into this? I could have deserted or gone to clink like Colin and Dave. I told Knotman: “I don’t want to do anything against the Communists.”

  “You won’t have much choice,” he told me back.

  “Maybe I will have. Something might turn up that I can help them with.”

  “Don’t be crazy and rush into anything you might regret,” Knotman said, taking another pull at his pint of Tiger. “This whole system will go rotten of its own accord without you risking your neck. It doesn’t matter whether the Communists win or lose in Malaya: they’ll get the whole world sooner or later, peacefully as well. It might not happen in your lifetime, but as Bill Shakespeare said, it’s bound to some day. Too bloody right it will. Let’s drink to it.”

  He set a fire going outside, long wood-smelling flames jumping into the darkness like assegais, swallowing the black kettle resting on a crude arrangement of stones. The fire made a circle of light, the darkness a prison into which he couldn’t walk. He realized how illuminated he was against the lit-up backdrop of the hut should some Communist happen to be reconn
oitring. A stream of bullets aimed at his silhouetted stick-like figure would finish him off, and bang would be gone the rest of his sweet life with Pauline and the kid: all memories destroyed and expectations nullified; present tiredness, boredom, boots warmed by the flames, his sleepless rimless eyes, obliterated.

  Long-range annihilation, a decoy to sponge up bullets. Around the hut was a tin-henge circle, a radius of petrol cans threaded by a piece of invisible string, so that anyone creeping in the darkness would send a resonant warning clatter against stony ground. Should this happen, Brian saw himself switching off lights and dashing into the elephant grass, gripping a rusty bayonet, where he’d stick it out while the hut was ransacked for ammunition or maybe spare wireless parts—though he found it hard to imagine himself not being shot at and killed before witnessing this dramatic scene of plunder.

  Mechanics at the transmitter compound had electrified the wire fence and rigged the fire extinguishers with sulphuric acid. Perhaps they’ll get the orderly officer and a couple of sergeants by mistake, because, as Knotman says: “It’s them who shout ‘Charge’ and ‘Up and at ’em, lads’ who are your biggest enemies.”

  Guards at the camp had been doubled and armed with rifles—instead of a pencil and book to note anyone coming back late from a good time. Several companies of Malayan Police patrolled the area. A few nights ago two of them ventured as far as the hut and knocked at the door, so he mashed some tea and set them a couple of mattresses on the floor for an hour’s kip, feeling sorry at their boring walkabout in the jungle darkness. Brian stayed awake at the set, to rouse them at dawn and send them back to camp. He remembered also how the same pair had been drummed out of the Malayan Police a week later for being found asleep near the transmitter compound: they walked from the camp after the court martial, dressed again in saris and trilby hats, laughing gaily while lugging cheap suitcases towards the station. If only it could happen to me.

  Barbed-wire fences were repaired and patrolled, and road-blocks between ferry and airstrip manned by Malayan and planter volunteers toting clubs and shotguns. The Communists issued an ultimatum that all Europeans in Malaya were to scat within a month, and most of the signals billet wished it could be accepted. Brian was all for it, but Baker replied, calm and studious in such circumstances, that Chinese communists were causing all the trouble, and that if anyone should rule Malaya it should be the Malays. They were already a long way to getting self-government anyway, though of course the Chinese would have to have a hand in it because they outnumbered other races in the peninsula and were the brains of the country. The Chinese Communists, Baker went on, reacting as expected to the emergency, were a small minority who wanted to get rid of the British and set up their own dictatorship. If you believe in democracy you’ve got to do what you can to put down these terrorists.

  “You’ve been reading the wrong newspapers,” Brian told him.

  “You haven’t been reading any at all,” Baker said.

  The kettle boiled, and the ritual mashing and drinking of tea passed a bemused hour. He ate bread and sardines, flipped through a Saturday Evening Post, unable to read any of the stories. Dry-mouthed atmospherics crashed so loud out of the earphones that he wouldn’t have heard a tank roaring by, never mind the feeble warning of a tin falling on stone. “I can’t wait to get back to you,” he wrote to Pauline. “I’ve finished with this joint, even though I did like it at first. I know when I’ve had enough. In a way, I volunteered to come out here, because I’m sure I could have stayed all my time out in England if I’d put in for it. But even though it’s been murder being away from you all this time, I’m still glad I came.” He was going to scrap that paragraph, but left it and went on: “I feel good at the moment. I wish you was here with me now, though. I don’t need to tell you what I’d do to you, and I bet you can guess anyway. It’s stark wicked not being able to be near you.” He paused to chase a spider that winged across the table—red diamond among hairy legs—which he cornered and flattened with a one-pound hammer after it tipped itself in a suicide dive to the floor. It could have bitten me to death: I won’t get back to England if I’m not careful. “Still, it’s only six weeks now, sweetheart, and I’ll be on the boat coming home to you. So keep well for me, and look after the young ’un with a few kisses from me. We’ll have a smashing time.” The envelope was marked with reciprocating cyphers: BURMA; ITALY; SWALK: Be Undressed and Ready, My Angel; I Trust And Love You; Sealed With A Loving Kiss.

  By one, he felt his bones melting, senses falling to death. Sending his call-sign to all stations brought no answer, so he spread a mattress over the table and heaved himself on to it, cradled away in seconds to a disintegration of sleep. A metallic hand drew his consciousness together, turned it into a punchbag, and was battering at the fibres of his exhaustion. It began softly and was tolerated, then became like the banging of a drum that he was locked in, increased till it woke him, startled and enraged. He mustered a big voice: “Who’s that?”

  His heart bumped and trembled. My number’s up, though they didn’t shoot first, so maybe I can argue, give a few air-force secrets away. He looked for something he might use as a weapon. “Who’s that?” he called again.

  He picked up the hammer and swung open the door. Light blinded him and he saw nothing. Then he made out an officer and a sergeant, and slid his hammer back to the table. “I didn’t hear you come up,” he said, observing the dark shadow of a jeep by the aerials. “I was working on the set.”

  They looked around. The NCO, a sawn-off little bastard with a mug like Al Capone, carried a Sten: “Orderly officer,” he barked, as if expecting him to jump to attention and throw a well-ironed ceremonial uniform over his bare chest, oil-stained shorts, and unlaced slippers.

  “Are you the only one here?” the orderly officer said. He was a flying-control officer, an enormous red-haired Jew of thirty-odd, more like Goliath than David, with the stature of the proverbial village blacksmith. Brian nodded. “What are all them tins doing around the hut?” the sergeant demanded. “I nearly broke my shins on ’em.”

  “What tins?” Brian asked, reverting from an intelligent wireless operator to a Radford lout. The orderly officer glanced at his wireless set: “Any kites around?”

  “Not tonight,” Brian said, adding “sir” when Al Capone gave him a dirty look. “Where’s your rifle?”

  “I haven’t got one, sir. They called ’em in from out-stations in case the bandits should get in and take ’em.”

  “I don’t suppose you feel very good about that,” the orderly officer said sympathetically.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Why do you keep the doors closed and locked?” Al Capone said.

  “To keep insects out.”

  “Gets a bit stuffy, don’t it?” Brian kept quiet, while Capone looked the place over as if it were a pigsty he’d stumbled into instead of a brothel. “Are you all right out here then?” the orderly officer asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Telephone in order?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Rations sufficient from the cookhouse?”

  “Yes, sir. Fine.”

  “What did they give you?” He told him: half a tin of milk, some sugar, tea, a loaf, and a tin of sardines.

  “Enough?”

  “Plenty, sir.”

  He turned to go: “If you want anything, phone me at the control tower. I’ll be there for the night.”

  Brian watched them drive off. It was the first time an orderly officer had thought to call that far from the bar at the officers’ mess. Maybe they are bothered whether I get shot after all. Tiredness rushed back, ached into his eyes like creosote. I don’t care if all the Communists of the world are creeping up on my hut to burn it to the ground, or if all the kites above Malaya are getting sore throats sending SOS’s: I’m dead-beat. He lowered the volume of the receiver, stretched out on the bed, and fell into a deep sleep till daylight.

  He read every newspaper from front page to last, ho
ping to discover how the “war” was progressing. A so-called “state of emergency” brought in martial law, and he noted with some confusion the fact that he was part of it. Because others in the camp were also mixed up, a civilian education officer came from Singapore to give a lecture on the political situation. He was a thin, dried-out man of middle-age wearing an immaculate flower-blue shirt and beige trousers, a deliberate touch of informality that would endear him more to his khaki-drilled audience. The same talk, called “British Achievements in Malaya,” had been given at every camp along the line, so by the time he reached Kota Libis he was practised and adept in his delivery, the marked set of his jaw and his steel-blue eyes somehow dividing his personality between severity on the one hand, and final disbelief in his own words on the other. Even if what he said didn’t seem convincing to himself, he was a gifted enough speaker to make it appear so to the more simple of his listeners. The NAAFI canteen was filled with those who had come to hear him spout on the official view of the Malayan rebellion, and after the station adjutant had spoken a few words by way of introduction, the first twenty minutes of his address were an account of how the British had acquired Malaya, how they had rid it of disease and laid a superlative system of communication, pushed back the ravaging waves of the jungle and brought rubber into the country. He then came to the present day:

  “War was declared, in a manner of speaking,” he said, “on June 15th. An emergency meeting of a hundred Perak rubber-estate managers took place at Ipoh, and it was decided then and there to ask Sir Edward Ghent (the High Commissioner, as you all know) to declare a state of emergency because of widespread outbreaks of lawlessness. For this lawlessness the planters blamed the weakness of civil government, as well as Communist political agitators, who were also behind the murders that were beginning to sweep the rest of the peninsula.

  “It was about this time that the Cornish manager of a tin mine near Ipoh was shot dead while paying his employees, and robbed of two thousand four hundred dollars.” [“And ten thousand people starved that month,” someone near Brian said.] “The Straits Times also reported that three British rubber planters were murdered near Ipoh. They were captured by Chinese Communists armed with Sten guns, tied to chairs, and riddled with bullets. All European families were ordered to evacuate the area at once, though only a few would do so. A law was passed securing capital punishment for illegal possession of firearms” [It’s like a law being passed in 1939 making it criminal for the Jerries to have guns, Brian thought] “a law which, while necessary from a legal point of view, made little if any difference to the gathering wave of war coming out of the jungle. In such a country as this a few thousand men, resourceful and determined, can hold out for a long time, inflicting far more damage and casualties than they would sustain themselves, at first. Reinforcements come in constantly from South China, moving by secret jungle routes through Indo-China and Siam. British subjects in Malaya are now living under hard and dangerous conditions. Their bungalows—as most of you may well know—are turned into miniature fortresses, outposts on the edge of the jungle, guarded day and night, surrounded with barbed wire and sandbags. The planters carry on their work armed with rifles and sub-machine-guns, and these men and their families are showing the usual British obduracy under such difficult circumstances, an obduracy always unexpected by their enemies. The Communists had hoped for a concerted rush for the boats at Penang and Singapore, but they were disappointed.