Room at the Top

by John Braine

  "She sounds nice. I'd like to meet her."

  "She's dead."

  "I'm sorry. Poor Joe -- " She put her hand on mine very quickly, then withdrew it.

  "Don't be sorry. I like talking about her. I don't mean that I don't miss her -- and my father -- but I don't live in the graveyard." I was, I realised, quoting Mrs. Thompson. That was all right; I meant what I said. Why should I feel guilty about it?

  "How did it happen?"

  "A bomb. Dufton's one and only bomb. I don't even think it was meant to hit anything."

  "It must have been awful for you."

  "It's a long time ago."

  The waiter set down the coffee and cakes and left us as silently as he came. He smiled at Susan; it was his real smile too, a warm flicker, constrained a little, not a waiter's grin. The coffee was very strong and the cakes were fresh and of the kind which young girls like -- meringues, éclairs, chocolate cup-cakes, marzipan rolls.

  "He really does like you," I said. "Everyone else has been given Madeira cakes and rock buns."

  "You're horrid. He's a delectable little man and I like him very much." She bit into an éclair. "We didn't see much of the war in Warley. Daddy used to work awfully hard at the factory, though. Sometimes he used to stay up all night."

  What fun he would have had too, I thought. The rich always had the most fun during the war. They had the double pleasure of influencing the course of events and making themselves still richer. I elaborated the thought with no real satisfaction. Suddenly I felt sad and lonely.

  "Don't you miss your father and mother terribly sometimes?" she asked.

  "Often. But generally when I think of them it makes me happy in a queer sort of way. Not happy because they're dead, but because they were good people."

  It was perfectly true. But, as I looked at Susan's rosy young face -- so young that the full neck and firm little breasts seemed at moments not to belong to her but to have been borrowed for the occasion like an older sister's stockings and lipstick -- I felt guilty. I was manoeuvring for position all the time, noting the effect of each word; and it seemed to devalue everything I said.

  9

  I was depressed for some time afterwards. It wasn't a tangible sort of depression: it was rather like that washing-day sadness which came to one on waking to the realisation that the Ł75,000 cheque, so convincing even to the twopenny stamp, was, after all, only a dream.

  I began to shake it off a little when I went to the Thespians the following Monday. There's an atmosphere about a theatre at rehearsals that's as comforting as cloves for toothache. It's dusty, it's dry, it's chilly, and at times it seems to be a huge reservoir of silence into which all one's words take belly-flops. But at the same time it's as warm and cosy and private as a nursery and every activity, even just waiting for one's cue, is important and exciting, every moment is handed to one like a hot buttered muffin.

  When Alice came to sit beside me, the sense of pleasure increased. I felt reassured, too, protected, like a child. I could tell her everything and be sure that she'd understand. It was like the way I'd feel when, the Efficient Zombie having been even more bloody-minded than usual, I'd see Charles and know that I'd be able to talk away all my accumulated anger and humiliation. Except that I'd never had the least desire to undress Charles and, I realised with a shock, I wanted to undress Alice. I was angry with myself for the thought; I felt as guilty as if it had been Mrs. Thompson I was lusting after. I honestly didn't want to spoil the relationship that was building up between us; I could get sex at any pub or dance hall, but not the friendship which Alice had given me from that first evening at the St. Clair. It had come to us quickly and smoothly but without hurry; we could not only talk about every subject under the sun but we could sit together in silence and be happy and contented.

  "It's good to see you," I said. This was the standard Thespian greeting, but I meant it.

  "It's good to see you too, Joe." When she smiled I could see that there was a speck of decay on one of her upper incisors and another seemed to be more filling than tooth. They weren't bad; but they were no better than mine and this fact gave me a kind of shabby kinship, as if we'd both had the same illness. It was a kinship which I could never share with Susan: I loved looking at her teeth, white and small and regular, but they always induced an uncomfortable inferiority.

  "I know my lines now," I said. "And I can say the Song of Solomon bit backwards. It's lush ."

  "Don't let Ronnie see that you're enjoying yourself or he'll cut it."

  "We'll knock 'em in the aisles," I said.

  When my cue came a moment later I didn't walk onto the stage, I made an entrance. I was supposed to stand glancing at Herbert and Eva for a moment before I spoke; until that evening I'd always made a mess of it, holding the silence either too long or not long enough. That evening I timed it perfectly: I knew instinctively that a fraction of a second less would have seemed pointless and a fraction more would have seemed as if I needed a prompt. And I knew that the reason for my glowering was that I wanted my mistress badly and was as frustrated as a tethered bull in spring. Everything clicked into place, I found it impossible to go wrong; and when Alice entered, something happened which is rare with amateurs; we achieved exactly the right tempo. I found myself thinking, or rather sensing, that at some places I must go slowly and at others more quickly and that the slowness and the quickness hadn't, as it were, to be dumped in heaps but to be spread smoothly. And for the first time in my life I became aware of my own body and voice without conceit, as instruments. Alice and I were a team; she was no more to me and no less, than the Theatre Sister to the surgeon; she wasn't Alice Aisgill whom I'd just wanted to undress, she was Sybil whom I'd already undressed in the other world bounded now by stacked-up flats, tangles of wires and ropes, and the smell of new paint.

  "You were pretty good tonight," Alice said in the Fiat afterwards.

  "Not so good as you," I said. I turned the ignition key, her praise brandy to my self-esteem. The engine started immediately, thought I always had trouble with it normally. I wish often that I could have fixed my life at that moment -- the car rolling smoothly down the narrow street with the gas lamps washing the cobbles with orange light, the smells of East Warley tugging at me for attention as children on their father's birthday -- malt, burning millband, frying fish, that wonderful bread-and-butter smell coming from the open spaces nearby -- and inside the car, the masculinity of steel and oil and warm leather and, best of all, Alice, her smell of lavender and her own personal smell as musky as furs and as fresh as apples.

  We left the quarter all too quickly. It was the part of Warley I came to like best; that evening it was as if there was an invisible street party: each house was my home and the blackened millstone grit looked soft as kindness. I remember that the curtains of one house weren't fully drawn and I caught a glimpse of a young man in overalls tickling the waist of a red-haired girl. I knew somehow that they weren't long married and I watched them with tenderness, in a queer bless-you-my-children way without the least trace of, as Charles used to put it, the bog-eyed hogger.

  Even the long drabness of Sebastopol Street, with no building along it but Tebbut's Mills, seemed part of my happiness. The sound of the looms filled the air, a loud clicking that didn't seem like a naturally loud noise but a small one deliberately amplified to annoy the passer-by; and the fluorescent lighting inside, the daylight, if it is daylight, of hangovers and executions, made the workers at their looms look like the inhabitants of a vast aquarium; but I could translate them both, the noise and the light, into prosperity, into marriage and meat and dancing.

  And when we came to Poplar Avenue I was able to laugh at Susan's house without anger or frustration. I imagined her sitting at a dressing table of polished walnut with a litter of silver brushes and bottles of expensive scent in front of her. The white carpet would be ankle-deep and the sheets of her bed would be silk. There would be a lot of photographs; but they wouldn't be the cheap kind that seemed d
eliberately to have caught their subjects in positions so unnatural that to hold them for one moment longer would cause actual physical pain: They would be the very best, not one under a guinea, the work of professionals who could make the pretty beautiful, the passable pretty, and the ugly interesting. Surrounded by these glossy pieces of well-being, Susan would be brushing her hair, that was as smooth and shining as a blackbird's wing, not thinking, not wanting, not making plans, but quite simply being .

  Again I felt that I was a part of a fairy story. There was a melancholy pleasure in the thought of her inaccessibility. I could hardly believe that I myself had thought of marrying her: it seemed like the crazy prophecy of some old witch. I was grateful that she should exist, just as I was grateful that Warley should exist. The road was rustling with dead leaves, the air was smoky and mellow as if the whole earth were being burned for its fragrance like a cigar; I felt suddenly that something wonderful was going to happen. The feeling was sufficient in itself; I didn't expect anything material to result from it. I was honoured by the gesture; life doesn't often bother to be charming once childhood has passed.

  "You're smiling," Alice said.

  "I'm happy."

  "My God, I wish I were."

  "What's the matter, love?"

  "Never mind," she said. "It's too damned sordid and boring to explain."

  "You need a drink."

  "Do you mind if we don't?" She laughed. "Don't look so woebegone, honey."

  "You want to go home?"

  "Not particularly." She switched on the car radio. A brass band was playing "The Entry of the Gladiators"; the huge bombast of the piece seemed to blow the little car along.

  "I'd like to go to Sparrow Hill," she said.

  "It's cold up there."

  "That's what I want," she said violently. "Somewhere cold and clean. No people, no dirty people . . ."

  I turned the Fiat into Sparrow Hill Road, narrow, twisting, steep, with the fields and weeds on either side stretching out into the black and endless distance. Alice switched off the radio as abruptly as she'd switched it on and there was no sound but the Fiat's self-satisfied little hum and the moan of the wind in the telephone wires.

  "Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve . . ."

  Her voice was dreamy and there was something about its tone which for a second made the hairs on the nap of my neck bristle. In the half-light I could see her profile with the straight nose and the chin a shade too heavy and beginning to sag underneath; I could smell her again, too, but this time the smell wasn't part of the evening but the whole evening.

  The fields and woods clinging to the hillside gave way to the plateau of Warley Moors; a little ahead I saw the old brickworks and hard by them Sparrow Hill rising abruptly from the surrounding flatness.

  There was a dirt road by the brickworks; I stopped the car by the little corrugated-iron office which stood at the top. The door was boarded up and the windows broken; as I looked at it and the big mouldering kiln towering above it like a red igloo, I felt a not unpleasant melancholy, though I generally dislike dead places and would rather look at a prosperous mill than the most beautiful ruin. Here on the moors it was different: it was as if someone had been playing a game with those bricks and corrugated iron, leaving them there in that lonely spot to assert the fact of human existence.

  "We're too visible here," said Alice. "Turn to the left behind the hill." Sparrow Hill is set back some two hundred yards from the road; the side facing the road is bare except for short, sheep-nibbled grass but the far side is covered with bushes and bracken and there's a big grove of beeches at the foot of the hill.

  "Follow the road," she said. "You can see the concrete edges -- it ends just beyond that farmhouse on the right. They were going to have all sorts of things at Sparrow Hill once, but it all came to nothing."

  I stopped in the shelter of the trees. My heart was beating hard and when I gave Alice a cigarette my hand was trembling. We're too visible here. I knew exactly what the words implied. And somehow I didn't want them to imply anything. I wanted to postpone what was going to happen within the next few minutes: I was on the verge of a new territory and it frightened me. Alice was much more than a pair of willing thighs and she would ask for much more than quick comfort. I didn't at the time put it to myself as clearly as this; but I definitely remember thinking that I felt exactly as I did when I had my first woman -- a plump WAAF whose name I've forgotten -- at the age of eighteen.

  So I talked to her. I talked without stopping, and I don't remember what I talked about. It was as if I were putting on a filibuster: a kind of bill was to be passed which would alter my whole life and I wasn't sure that I wanted my whole life to be altered. Then I stopped talking; or, rather, my voice trailed off into silence independently of me. I looked at her. She was was smiling with that tight, almost painful expression which I'd noticed when we'd had supper at her house. Her hands were clasped over her knees, her skirt drawn back above them.

  I leaned over towards her. "I've been thinking about you all week. I've been dreaming about you, do you know that?"

  She put out her hand and touched the nape of my neck. I kissed her. Her lips tasted of tobacco and toothpaste; they were held moistly and laxly against mine in a way that was entirely new to me, utterly different from her dry and light stage kisses. Her breasts felt astoundingly heavy and full against me; she seemed to be much younger, much more feminine and soft than ever I'd imagined her to be.

  "I'm all twisted," she said. "This is a terribly moral kind of car."

  "We'll go outside," I said hoarsely. She kissed my hands. "They're beautiful," she said. "Big and red and brutal . . . Will you keep me warm?"

  I remember those words especially. They were empty and tawdry, they didn't match what took place in the beech grove soon afterwards; but they were Alice's own words and I preserve them like saints' relics. And yet there was no great physical pleasure for either of us that night: it was too cold, I was too nervous, there was too much messing about with buttons and zips and straps. It was best when we'd finished; it was like having a cup of really good coffee and a Havana after an indifferently cooked but urgently needed meal. It was a clear starlit night: through a gap in the tree I could see the distant hills. I kissed Alice on the little wing of hair just above the temple. The hair at that point always seems to me to smell differently from the hair on the rest of the head; it's vulnerable and soft and somehow babyish. She pressed herself more closely against me.

  "You're all warm," she said. "My dear overcoat. I'd like to sleep with you, Joe. Truly sleep, I mean, in a big bed with a feather mattress and brass rails and a china chamberpot underneath it."

  "I wouldn't let you sleep," I said, not then understanding.

  She laughed. "We will sleep together, pet, I promise you."

  "It's never been like this before," I said.

  "Nor me."

  "Did you know this was going to happen?"

  She didn't answer. After a moment she said: "Please don't fall in love with me, Joe. We will be friends, won't we? Loving friends?"

  "Loving friends," I said.

  When I was starting the car going back she didn't speak at all. But she was smiling to herself all the way; perhaps it was only a trick of the light but her hair seemed as if it were glowing from within. I drove fast along the narrow switchback of Sparrow Hill Road, taking the corners as if on rails. I couldn't go wrong; the car felt as if it had two litres under its hood instead of just over a half. I was the devil of a fellow, I was the lover of a married woman, I was taking out the daughter of one of the richest men in Warley, there wasn't a damn thing I couldn't do. Say what you like of me when I was younger; but I certainly wasn't blasé.

  10

  I spent Christmas at my Aunt Emily's. It snowed in Warley the night I left, just a light powdering, a present from Raphael's and Tuck's and Sharpe's to make the girls' eyes s
parkle and the waits sing in tune and to turn the houses taller and crookeder and all's-well-in-the-end adventurous; the town was crammed with people, all of them none the less absolute tenants of happiness because they'd been shepherded into it by the shopkeepers and the newspapers and the BBC: you could sense that happiness, innocent and formal as children's story, with each snowflake and each note of the Town Hall carillon.

  It was hard to leave Warley then; I felt as if I were being sent home from a party before the presents had been taken off the tree. In fact, I'd felt out of things all December: I'd gone to the Thespians' Christmas party, and been the back end of a horse in the children's play, and kissed all the girls at the Town Hall after the traditional lunchtime booze-up, but I knew that I wasn't part of Warley's festival, because I was leaving before the preparations began to make sense, before that short turkey and spice cake and wine and whisky period when every door in the town would be wide open and the grades wouldn't matter. Not that I really believed such a thing could happen; but in Warley it at least was possible to dream about it.