Room at the Top

by John Braine

  Once all the rich people in Leddersford had lived in the district round the flats. As cars had become more dependable and the city had become more dirty, the rich people had moved out to towns like Warley. The houses which hadn't been converted into flats and private hotels now belonged to doctors and dentists and photographers. There were a lot of trees and the roads were broad; in a way it reminded me of Warley. But it had ceased to be a place a long time ago.

  It was clear evening with a warm wind. Spring was on the way; not that it made much difference there. The laurels and pines and firs would look exactly the same all the year round, dark and melancholy and alien. I wasn't due home until ten; it was only half-past eight. There was a vast useless stretch of time to fill; I occupied my mind with dreariness like a starving man eating earth. It's all over now, the sensible part of me said, you're well rid of the neurotic bitch. You're out of the danger of scandal, you're out of the danger of being possessed. But another side of me kept remembering the big tears rolling down her cheeks, remembered, with shocked tenderness, how they had washed away her attractiveness.

  Then I thought of her lying naked beside me, and the pain returned, as real as toothache. The strange thing was that I hoped she had lied to me, that she had slept with the artist. That would have made it bearable. What hurt me was the fact of her exposing herself unemotionally, as if her body were of no importance. An arrangement of colour and light -- as if an arrangement of colour and light could cut its finger with the breadknife, get married, make love, receive my most secret confidences -- it was the excuse, the palliative for my jealousy, that hurt me most. I called her the worst names I could think of, repeating them again and again under my breath, but it didn't relieve my feelings very much. (There are, after all, only about a dozen foul words in the English language and nine of them aren't, properly speaking, foul, but merely physiologically descriptive.)

  I thought with bitter regret of the time when she had been a stranger to me and I wouldn't have cared if she'd walked the streets naked in broad daylight. She'd done that as if I hadn't existed -- I bit my lip sharply, drawing blood. My head was throbbing and my mouth tasted of vomit and my throat was dry. I put my hand against the wall. It was as if I were being attacked by an invisible enemy. I crossed the road and kept on walking. It was a street of large terrace houses; I remember that one had its curtains drawn back and that inside there was a crowd of young people and a sound of music. As I passed, they drew the blinds. I walked on; the houses became smaller and there were no more trees and the mills loomed up at me from the gathering darkness. I didn't want to think of what Alice had done and yet my imagination persisted in returning to London ten years ago: I saw her, innocent, firm, smelling of youth, going into the studio, undressing behind a screen then, quite naked, a little abashed perhaps, being reassured by the artist. He looked rather like Jack Wales, but he had a beard. I saw her sitting on the model's throne, her legs parted a little . . . That was as far as I got; savage, useless, sick anger took over again. I thought of Charles and me looking at the nudes in Leeds Art Gallery, and of the time we'd been to a London revue. "Of course," Charles had said, "they're no better than prostitutes. Wouldn't care to marry a woman who'd show all she'd got to dirty young men like thee and me."

  I wondered if George knew. If he did, would he care? I frowned with concentration. If it would hurt him, then he was my kind of person, and some of the pain was, as it were, shared. But I knew very well that it wouldn't matter to him; if he thought of it at all, it would be with amusement. So that was an extra torment -- magical, but there, indisputably, the fact was.

  I saw a large pub standing a little off the road. I went in; it being Thursday, it was nearly empty. Drinking my pint, I began to go over my last lesson in economics. The theory of surplus value states . . . I have normally a memory like a sponge; I used often to fill in spare moments by presenting pages of print before my mind's eye. But now I saw the lesson torn into scraps of paper, the facts were totally unrelated. On the page I was looking at I could only see Nude; I closed my eyes for a second and saw a red blur and then opened them to see the word again. I looked at the far corner of the room and saw the poster. THE NEATEST NAUGHTIEST NUDES IN SHOW BUSINESS -- SANDRA CAROLE ELISE LIZBETH . . . And Alice, I wondered if she'd done that too, if that was another thing she hadn't bothered to tell me about, if she had stood in the pink spotlight in a spangled headdress and a gold fig leaf with a thousand eyes settling on her naked flesh like leeches. I couldn't be sure that it hadn't happened, that she, with her bright, quick mind and sharp tenderness, hadn't descended to this last tatty extreme; it was as if I'd seen her given over to torture in some shabby cellar. That was what hurt me. It wasn't the fact of modelling, but of Alice modelling. Some of my standards were still Dufton standards, and in Dufton artists' models were thought of as tarts, not quite professionals, but simply the kind who couldn't be bothered to say no. It was unbearable to think of Alice in that way; and I didn't know, or didn't want to know, why it should affect me at all. And I was jealous retrospectively -- it was almost as if I were standing frustrated outside the studio, a pimply sixteen.

  Looking back, I see myself as being near the verge of insanity. I couldn't feel like that now; there is, as it were, a transparent barrier between myself and strong emotion. I feel what is correct for me to feel; I go through the necessary motions. But I cannot delude myself that I care. I wouldn't say that I was dead; simply that I have begun to die. I have realised, you might say, that I have, at the most, only another sixty years to live. I'm not actively unhappy and I'm not afraid of death, but I'm not alive in the way that I was that evening I quarrelled with Alice. I look back at that raw young man sitting miserable in the pub with a feeling of genuine regret; I wouldn't, even if I could, change places with him, but he was indisputably a better person than the smooth character I am now, after ten years of getting almost everything that I ever wanted. I know the name he'd give me; the Successful Zombie.

  I don't of course care whether that young man looking at the theatre bill was wiser or kinder or more innocent than the Successful Zombie. But he was of a higher quality; he could feel more, he could take more strain. Of a higher quality, that is, if one accepts that a human being is meant to have certain emotions, to be affected strongly by all that happens to him, to live among the people around him. I don't mean that one has to love people, but simply that one ought to care. I'm like a brand-new Cadillac in a poor industrial area, insulated by steel and glass and air-conditioning from the people outside, from the rain and the cold and the shivering ailing bodies. I don't wish to be like the people outside, I don't even wish that I had some weakness, some foolishness to immobilise me among the envious coolie faces, to let in the rain and the smell of defeat. But I sometimes wish that I wished it.

  What has happened to me is exactly what I willed to happen. I am my own draughtsman. Destiny, force of events, fate, good or bad fortune -- all that battered repertory company can be thrown right out of my story, left to starve without a moment's recognition. But somewhere along the line -- somewhere along the assembly line, which is what the phrase means -- I could have been a different person. What has happened to my emotions is as fantastic as what happens to steel in an American car; steel should always be true to its own nature, always have a certain angularity and heaviness and not be plastic and lacquered; and the basic feelings should be angular and heavy too. I suppose that I had my chance to be a real person. "You're always in contact," Alice said to me once. "You're there as a person, you're warm and human. It's as though everyone else were wearing rubber gloves." She couldn't say that now.

  15

  I looked at the invitation as I drank my final cup of tea at breakfast. It was a fine morning; the sun had melted all but the last traces of snow in the valley, and one could almost smell the green things growing. For the first time in a week I didn't think of Alice.

  "Sally Carstairs has asked me to her birthday party," I said to Mrs. Thompson.


  "She's a thoroughly nice girl. Weren't you in The Farm with her?"

  "She helped me with the props. Don't know her very well, though. What should I give her?" I tried to sound matter-of-fact but I was excited and delighted. The Carstairses had plenty of money -- they ran a chain of cafés -- and lived in a big house at Gilden, right on top of Warley Moors.

  "You leave it to me. I know Sally's mother very well."

  "How much should I spend?"

  "Leave that to me too. I won't break you, I promise."

  "It's in your hands," I said. I was leaving more and more in her hands, I thought, those thin long-fingered hands so much like Alice's -- I shied away from the name like a horse from a corpse. I looked at my watch. "Time to get my nose to the grindstone." I said goodbye to Mrs. Thompson; when I passed her chair I wanted to kiss her. Not passionately, I may add, but as I would have kissed my mother on my way to work.

  Walking down Eagle Road, I wondered dimly if I might achieve something with Sally. She was small and slim and bright as a budgerigar and was training at the Leddersford Art School; my mind shied away again, but this time it was more of an automatic sidestepping from what might disturb me than a violent and painful revulsion. As I walked down the hill I experienced the conqueror's sensation again. Warley was below in the valley waiting to be possessed, I'd just come from a beautiful room as near T'Top as made no difference, I was going to a rich house to meet rich people and who could say what would come of it? Perhaps Susan might be there; not that it mattered very much. It wasn't that I disbelieved Reggie; but at the moment I didn't feel prepared for that particular sector of the battlefield.

  Gilden is a rather grim mill village northeast of Warley. It has the appearance of being ready for anything: the narrow windows of the millstone grit houses might suddenly sprout rifles; beyond the next corner of its twisting streets and alleys it's not fantastic to imagine the glint of bayonets, the two Crimean War guns in the Memorial Park are ready for action, the General Stores in the High Street has rations for a five years' siege. The village ends abruptly at the Ebenezer Methodist chapel with its crammed graveyard; beyond it is nothing but the moors and a few sheep and curlews and a solitary farmhouse a mile west. That too has a military air; the moors are Gilden's maquis and behind its walls are planned the sudden raid into the valley, the ambush in the village, the last desperate stand with the enemy corpses piling up behind the drystone walls.

  The Carstairs home stood apart from the village, an opulent neutral. It wasn't merely its ten rooms, its raw newness, its glaring red brick of the type which is supposed to mellow with wind and weather, that made its Gilden address simply a geographical term; it was situated where it was not to be near the business or the estate or other houses or the road, not for any practical reason at all, but simply because Carstairs père had fancied a house on the moors. That was why I liked it: it hadn't the remotest connection with any sort of economic necessity, it was a rich man's vulgar solid self-indulgence.

  Reggie and I shared a taxi from Warley; the bus ran only hourly. As we turned into the Carstairs drive, we passed the bus: I saw an old man, a gang of children, a young couple holding hands. I recognised the middle-aged woman in front, her frowning face looking like a dull pudding under her off-white headscarf; she never paid her taxes until the last moment, and the answer was, I fancied, in the village pub of which her husband was Gilden's most devoted mainstay. I felt a spasm of pity for her; as we passed, it seemed that two worlds were meeting. The world of worry about rent and taxes and groceries, of the smell of soda and blacklead and No Smoking and No Spitting and Please Have the Correct Change Ready and the world of the Rolls and the black-market clothes and the Coty perfume and the career ahead of one running on well-oiled grooves to a knighthood; and the party in the big house at the end of the pine-lined drive at which, I felt in a sudden accession of pessimism, I would very quickly be shown that my place was in the world of the poor with its narrow present like a stony hen-run.

  A grey Jaguar coupé drove away as we reached the house. The woman driving it gave Reggie a circumscribed wave and sat bolt upright and disdainfully, as if giving the car its orders rather than driving it.

  "Mama Brown," Reggie said. "That's her runabout. Hubby has a Bentley, and they keep a V-8 as a spare."

  "She seems well aware of it," I said.

  "Not half, old man. The last of the St. Clairs and stinking with money. She's an old tough too; a place for everyone and everyone in their place. She practically ran a young man out of town for making a pass at Susan."

  I paid the taximan. "I didn't know Susan was coming."

  "There's a lot you don't know," Reggie said as the maid opened the door for us.

  The hall was as impersonal as a hotel lounge. The walls were hung with trophies -- buffalo horns, lions' heads, a Fokker airscrew -- but they gave the impression of having all been bought at the same time, they were too clean, too neatly arranged, too new. Everything from the silver cigarette boxes to the inlaid ash trays was new and heavy and expensive. When the maid took my coat I took a quick look at myself; I had an uneasy feeling that my fly was open or my shoelace broken or that I'd put on odd socks.

  There were about twenty people at the party, most of whom I hadn't met before. The girls were dressed to kill; I remember that Sally was wearing a blue dress which exposed a great deal of a very pleasant bosom and even Anne Barlby looked bedworthy in white and rose chiffon. The room we stood in was the largest I'd ever seen in a private house, and it had the first parquet floor I'd seen outside a library or museum. The furniture was of the kind that was to become fashionable ten years later, and each wall was in a different shade of green.

  But as soon as I saw Susan, I stopped noticing my surroundings. She was wearing a black taffeta skirt and a white broderie anglaise blouse; she made all the other girls look worn and shopsoiled. If anyone ever needed a justification of the capitalist system, I thought, here it was: a human being perfect of its kind, a phoenix amongst barnyard fowls.

  "Hello," I said. "You look good enough to eat." My eyes were holding hers; mine were the first to drop. "I didn't know you were coming here."

  She pouted. "Do you mean you wouldn't have come if you'd known I'd come?"

  "On the contrary. I couldn't hope to enjoy myself without you. You're a festivity in yourself."

  "You're making fun of me," she said in a low voice.

  "I'm quite serious. Not that I've any right to be."

  She didn't speak for a moment, but stood looking at me intently. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were flecked with gold, bright and alive and dancing. Looking into them and smelling her scent I felt my head swimming.

  "I don't see why you haven't any right to be serious," she said. "It's not -- not fair if you're joking."

  I've never loved her more than I did then. I forgot the Jaguar and the Bentley and the Ford V-8. She loved and she wanted to be loved, she was transparent with affection; I could no more deny that correct response in my heart than refuse a child a piece of bread. In the back of my mind a calculating machine rang up success and began to compose a triumphant letter to Charles; but the part of me that mattered, the instinctive, honest part of me, went out to meet her with open hands.

  At that moment Sally's mother came up to me, gushing and bejewelled. "My naughty daughter's failing in her duties," she said. "I must make you known to everyone, Joe." Out of the corner of my eye I saw Reggie take Susan away, and the next ten minutes were a blur of new faces and half-hearted names. There was a young man with a broken nose who was training to be a doctor, a sprinkling of young officers, some young-old men who were, I think, executives of Carstairs and Co., and what seemed to be a hundred girls in party dresses.

  It's already difficult to remember the days of rationing, but I am sure of one thing: one was always hungry. Not hungry in the way I'd been at Stalag 1000, but hungry for profusion, hungry for more than enough, hungry for cream and pineapples and roast pork and chocolate. The Car
stairses were in the business, of course; but the meal laid out in the dining room would have been considered sumptuous even today. There was lobster, mushroom patties, anchovy rolls, chicken sandwiches, ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, smoked roe on rye bread, a real fruit salad flavoured with sherry, meringues, apple pie, Danish Blue and Chesire and Gorgonzola and a dozen different kinds of cake loaded with cream and chocolate and fruit and marzipan. Susan watched me eat with a pleased maternal expression. "Where does it all go?"

  "No difficulty," I said with my mouth full. "A sound stomach and a pure heart."

  "Our Joe has a huge appetite for everything," Anne Barlby said. "If only he were a little fatter he'd be just like Henry the Eighth."

  "You're horrid," Susan said. "I like to see a man eat."

  "Henry wasn't famous only for eating," Anne said.

  I laughed in her face. "I haven't chopped off anyone's head yet. Or been divorced, for that matter." I smiled at Susan. "I'm singlehearted. There's only one girl for me."

  "Which one?" asked Anne. "It becomes confusing."

  Susan was going pink. She made me think of a kitten whom someone had kicked instead of stroking. Without having any very clear idea of what was going on, she knew I was being got at.