Room at the Top

by John Braine

  "I always thought you liked older women," Anne said. "More mature and soignée."

  I looked at her too prominent nose and saw near the head of the table Johnny Rogers talking animatedly with Sally; suddenly I understood. "I didn't hear you, love," I said mildly. "Not one word did I hear."

  She looked at me angrily. "You've very good hearing."

  "Not for anything I don't want to listen to."

  Anne went off in the direction of Johnny without saying another word. She knows too much, I thought, feeling a premonition of danger.

  "You're scowling," Susan said. "Are you angry with me?"

  "Good God, no. I was just thinking."

  "What were you thinking about?"

  "You. I'm always thinking about you."

  "It doesn't seem to make you very happy. You had a horrid murderous scowl. You look awfully hard sometimes, Joe."

  "I'm very weak and sentimental where you're concerned."

  "What were you thinking about me?"

  "I'll tell you some other time."

  "Tell me now."

  "It's too private. I'll tell you when we're alone."

  "Oh," she said. " Wicked."

  After supper the floor was cleared for dancing. Susan was a good dancer, precise and light and free, always as it were poised above the ground, gay with weightlessness. In the intervals we sat on the sofa and held hands. Her hands were white and a little plump, and the nails were rosy and gleaming. (I thought of Alice's, already on the verge of boniness, the index finger yellow with tobacco and the nails flecked with white.) Whenever I looked at Susan she gave me a frank fullhearted smile: no reservations, no pretence: I could sense the joyfulness kicking inside her like a child.

  Halfway through the evening they put on a tango. "I can't do this one," I said to her;

  "Neither can I."

  "It's terribly warm in here."

  "I was thinking that too."

  It was cool outside and as we walked over to the summerhouse we both retained the lightness of dancing in our feet; it was as if the lawn were a sprung floor. There was a full moon, softening the inflamed harshness of the red brick front; from the lounge we could hear the genteel exoticism of "Two to Tango" -- like Earl Grey with gin in it -- washing against the iron silence of the moors. The night was like a scene from a musical comedy: one word, one change of lighting, and the trellises would bleed with roses and the flowerbeds draw themselves up into a pattern of tulips and pansies and aubrietia and lupins and the damp mustiness of the summerhouse be overlaid by the smell of night-scented stock and the air turn warm and lazy with birdsong and the buzzing of bees.

  When I took her in my arms she was trembling violently. I kissed her on the forehead. "That's a pure kiss for you," I said. I kissed her again on the lips. "Don't be frightened, dearest."

  "I'm never frightened of you."

  I wanted to give her something, as one would give a child a packet of sweets when it's pleased to see you. I wanted badly to give her something worth as much as what I knew she was at that moment giving me.

  "Tomorrow?" I asked. "I'll phone at ten."

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "You were very wicked to Susan before. You said you'd phone and you never did. Say when and where."

  "Six at the Leddersford Grand. Oh darling -- " I kissed her cheeks and her chin and her nose and the smooth nape of her neck. She was still trembling.

  "I wish we could stay here for always," she said.

  "So do I, dearest." And so I did; perhaps if time had released me then and there, I'd have been able to strangle the shabby little sense of triumph that was being born inside me, I'd have been able to accumulate enough emotional capital to match her gift. Two hours would have been enough in that summerhouse on that night when we were still caught up with the dance, when the moon and the feeling of winter being dead and the first-time delight of our bodies meeting had erased all complications and commitments; but two hours weren't available. Time, like a loan from the bank, is something you're only given when you possess so much that you don't need it.

  16

  Susan was already there when I reached the Grand. Against the black buildings of Leddersford, her face was fresh and glowing.

  "Hello darling." I took both her hands. "Sorry I'm late."

  "You're very naughty." She squeezed my hands. "I won't go out with you again." She held out her face for a kiss. "I've been longing for that. Aren't I wicked?"

  "You're the joy of my life," I said, feeling for a moment very old. I took the evening paper from my pocket. There's a good film at the Odeon. Or a mediocre play at the Grand. Or what do you fancy?"

  She looked at her feet. "Don't be angry with me. But I don't want to go to the pictures. Or the theatre."

  "Of course I'm not angry. But if we're going for a walk, you'll have to tell me where. I'm a stranger here."

  "Ooh," she said. "Wicked, wicked. I never said I wanted to go for a walk. There's Benton Woods though. I've a friend up there. But we needn't see her."

  She took my arm, holding it tightly as we walked over to the Benton bus stop. Passing the warehouses with their heavy, oily but curiously nonindustrial smell of raw wool and the cramped littered offices with their mahogany furniture and high stools and the Gothic Wool Exchange straight out of Doré, I felt as the owners of the big cars outside, the gaffers, masters, overlords, must feel: the city was mine, a loving mother, its darkness and dirtiness was the foundation of my big house in Ilkley or Harrogate or Burley, my holiday at Biarritz or Monte Carlo, my suit from my own personal roll of cloth: Susan took all the envy out of me at that very moment, she made me rich. We walked slowly, looking in all the shop windows; I bought a pair of made-to-measure aniline calf brogues, a made-to-measure shirt in real silk, a dozen wool ties, a fur felt trilby at five guineas, a beaver shaving brush, and a Triumph roadster. I bought Susan a big flask of Coty, a mink cape, a silver hairbrush, a nylon negligee, and a jar of crystallised ginger. Or I would have done so if the shops hadn't all for some unaccountable reason been closed.

  The bus had wooden seats; they reminded her of travelling third class on the Continent. She chattered in her high clear voice about Rouen and Paris and Versailles and Reims and St. Malon and Dinan and Montmartre and Montparnasse and the Louvre and the Comédie-française -- but I never had the feeling she was showing off, she hadn't a trace of self-consciousness; she'd been to all these places, they'd interested her very much, and she wanted to tell me all about them. Leddersford is a place where they don't like people who put on airs. To speak Standard English is in itself suspect; they call it talking well-off. And to talk about holidays abroad is one of the almost infallible marks of the stuck-up, the high-and-mighty, who are no better than they should be. All the people on the top deck had been listening to Susan; but there were no signs of resentment on their faces. Instead there was that pleased indulgent look, that wistful admiration (the princess has come among us, close enough for us to touch her if we dared) that I was to become accustomed to everywhere I took her. I've often thought that if I wanted to put paid to communism once and for all, I'd have a hundred girls like Susan ride on buses the length and breadth of Great Britain.

  "You're making me envious," I said. "I'd love to go to France before I get too old to enjoy it."

  "You're not old, silly."

  "I'm very old. I'm twenty-five. A genuine DOM."

  "What's a DOM?"

  "You're joking. Of course you know."

  "Truly I don't."

  "Dirty Old Man." I took out my pocket diary and scribbled for a moment.

  "What are you doing?" She looked over my shoulder. "Oh Joe, you are wicked. I'll tear it out."

  I put the diary away. "I'm going to make a collection of Susanisms," I said. "Last night you told me that I had a voice like treacle toffee, and my smile was awfully old and naughty. That'll do for a beginning."

  "It's true though," she said. "You have a voice like treacle toffee, it's dark and deep and ri
ch. It's lovely. I adore treacle toffee. I wish I had some now, but all my coupons are gone."

  "That's very sad," I said. "If you were to look in my right-hand pocket you might find something . . ."

  She leaned over me, her soft, orange-scented hair brushing my cheek. From the corner of my eye I caught sight of the road where Elspeth lived. That was a different body, I thought, a long time ago; the body with which, through several layers of clothing Susan was being permitted a minimal, facetious intimacy, was younger, stronger, cleaner than the instrument of pleasure which Alice had used in Elspeth's boudoir.

  Susan squealed with delight. "Darling Joekins, just what I wanted." She turned a glowing smile upon me. "Joe, will you always give me just what I want?"

  "Always, darling."

  She held my hand tightly the rest of the journey, only releasing it to put another toffee in her mouth.

  Benton used to be a pretty little village with a definite character of its own; there was even a local cheese, the Benton Blue. Now the original village with its grey stone houses clustered round the cobbled market square has been surrounded by a sort of dermoid cyst of pebbledash and brick and concrete. But the woods are still there, though the black tarmac road which has been plunged through them has almost entirely destroyed the pleasurably frightening quietness which all woods ought to possess. Susan took my arm as we walked along the road. On either side stood dank regiments of firs; there was no one about and it was very quiet, but not the sort of quiet I wanted. There was a stile past the plantation where the firs gave way to the real trees, the English trees with their green, locked away all winter, on the point of bursting out like birdsong. We went on into the woods until we came to a hollow in the hillside. As if in obedience to my desire for privacy, the sun began to set at the moment I put my raincoat on the ground and drew Susan down beside me.

  She held me tightly as we kissed, and I thought of the difference between her and Alice. Alice held me tightly too, but she was fully aware of my body against hers; Susan held me tightly out of a kind of childish abandon. Her embrace was clumsy like a bad dancer's.

  "I can't tell you," I said. I unbuttoned her coat and put my arms underneath it, stroking her warm back beneath the thin cashmere of her sweater. Her skirt had ridden above her knees; she pushed it down automatically. She was trembling as she'd done at the party; I laid my hand very lightly on her breast.

  "Your heart's very loud," I said. "You're not really frightened, are you, pet?"

  "A little now," she said in a low voice.

  I put my hand inside the wide sleeves of her coat and stroked her arms. Her skin was so cool and smooth that I felt grubby and sausage-fingered. Then I put my fingers round her wrist, spanning it easily with little finger and thumb. "What little wrists you have."

  "Now you're really frightening me," she said happily. "Just like Little Red Riding Hood and the great big 'normous wolf."

  "But I am a wolf," I said, deepening my voice, and bit her ear.

  "Oh," she said, "Susan tingle. Susan tingle up and down. Do it again."

  As I took her roughly into my arms I felt loneliness come over me, real as the damp churchyard smell of the grass, melancholy as the sound of the brook in the little glen below us. I felt heavy as Sunday, as if time might drag me into a world like a bad engraving, stiff and dark and dull and lost. I pulled myself out of the picture which the loneliness had suddenly outlined -- the woods at evening, the two figures for no good reason locked together, the shadows in the background that meant watchers -- and rummaged round in my mind for pretty words to give Susan. "My God," I said, "you're so beautiful and sweet that I can hardly believe it. You make me think of spring flowers . . ."

  "You make me think of the sea on a stormy day," she said, "I don't know why -- Oh Joe I do -- " She stopped suddenly. "Joe, tell me something."

  "Anything you like, honey."

  She stroked my hair. "It's lovely, so smooth and soft and fair." I remembered Alice advising me a long time ago to stop using hair oil ("Too too Palais de Danse, darling") and congratulated myself upon having taken her advice; for Susan's hand to have encountered scented grease at this moment would have destroyed the whole atmosphere. "Joe," she said, "you didn't think me wicked last night, did you? Awfully forward and shameless?"

  "You were lovely, darling," I said.

  "I thought you mightn't like me. You seemed so cold and scowly afterwards." She ran her finger along my forehead. "You're an awful old scowler." She kissed my forehead. "I'll kiss the scowl away. Don't you like me, old grumpy?"

  "You've come between me and my sleep from the very first moment I saw you," I said.

  "I thought you were horrid then," she said. "You stared at me so. And you scowled at Jack as if you wanted to kill him."

  "So I did. Pure jealousy."

  She put her hand on my wrist. "You've got 'normous bones. And a great big strong neck. Were you really jealous? I've never had anyone jealous of me before." She paused. "At least, I don't think so."

  "You've broken so many hearts that you don't know."

  "Oh what fun. Am I a femme fatale like Alice? In The Farm I mean. Very slinky and seductive?"

  "Definitely not."

  "You're horrid," she said, and rolled away from me. "I won't have anything more to do with you, Joe Lampton."

  "You're something much better than a femme jatale," I said. "You're an enchantress. Young and fresh and fair . . ." I remembered Eva's words. "Comme Ia rose au jour de bataille."

  "That's beautiful," she said. She repeated the words; her accent was much better than mine. She flung her arms around my neck and covered me with kisses. "Darling darling Joe." Then we lay silent for a while. "Joe," she said, "what were you thinking about at the party? You said you'd tell me when we were properly alone."

  What had I been thinking about? Then I remembered what I had to accomplish. I looked at the pale oval of her face with the large eyes, now dark and serious, and a scrap of poetry which Alice had been fond of came back to me.

  "Tulip figure, so appealing. Oval face, so serious-eyed . . ."

  "That's Betjeman," she said. "It's gorgeous. I'm not so nice as that, though."

  "It was written for you," I said. "I'll call you tulip, shall I?"

  She hit me on the arm. "You're maddening, Joe. Tell me now. What were you thinking about last night?"

  If I did tell you, I thought, what would happen? I've got her, I took my friend's advice, she's mine and I can do what I like with her. I've beaten that bastard Wales. I'll marry her if I have to put her in the family way to do it. I'll make her daddy give me a damned good job. I'll never count pennies again. And, every now and again, sharp as toothache, the loneliness, the torment of needing the one person I didn't want to need -- those were my thoughts, those and a gloating appraisement of young virginity and a maudlin pity like a paste jewel in a toad's head. I pushed my conscience away from the controls and let my intelligence take over.

  "You'll be angry with me if I tell you," I said.

  "I promise not to be. Cross my heart."

  "I couldn't."

  "You are mean," she said. I could see tears glittering in her eyes. "You promised. I wish you hadn't told me -- "

  I kissed her hard, putting my tongue between her lips. "I love you," I said. "I've always loved you. That's what I was thinking."

  "I love you too," she said.

  I inserted the correct amount of delighted incredulity into my voice. "Do you really, Susan? Honestly and truly? Oh darling, I can't believe it."

  "It's true. I think I did all the time -- because even when I thought you were awful I thought a lot about how awful you were. And I was going with Jack and it was most confusing."

  "Were you in love with Jack?"

  "Not really. I've known him a long time and Mummy likes him. He's very safe and solid."

  "Am I safe and solid?"

  She dropped her eyes. "You make me feel funny inside," she said. "I never felt like that before."

&
nbsp; "You make me feel all funny inside too. You know, there's hundreds of times I've cursed you -- all the time we were going out together you seemed so cold and withdrawn, so damned platonic. I just gave it up, it didn't seem any use."

  "Golly. Were you blazing with pent-up desire like people in books?"

  "Too true I was."

  "You never tried to kiss me."

  "It was futile. You always know when a woman wants to be kissed."

  "You don't like to be rebuffed, do you, Joe?"

  Her tone was disconcertingly shrewd.