Room at the Top

by John Braine

  I waited, my heart beating fast with anger; I knew what was coming.

  "I'm awfully sorry, old man," he said, "but Eva invited some friends up. Between you and me, for business reasons. She's been reading those articles on how to help your hubby to success. Personally I'd rather go out, they're crashing bores, but there it is. Some other time, eh? The weather's getting warmer now anyway." He laughed; I seemed to detect a gloating note. "Give my love to Sue," he said. "And Eva sends hers. Sorry if this has messed up your plans, Joe."

  "That's all right," I said. "I hadn't really any plans."

  "When I was younger, I used to go to the Folly. No one else ever visits the spot. Or if they do, they won't bother you." He laughed again. "It's hell to be young and passionate in a cold climate."

  "How true," I said, "how true. I'll return to the delights of economics now, Bob. Goodbye."

  I replaced the phone and went to the window. The ground was shiny with rain. The room was quiet. The Thompsons had gone to the theatre and wouldn't return till late. The fire was burning brightly and smelled faintly aromatic, as it had done the first time I'd been in the room. The quietness bit my sense of time like a Commando ear-box; I had to pick up the paper to reassure myself of the date. It was as if somehow I would find myself in yesterday with the knowledge that I would have to endure the interview with Hoylake and the phone call to Bob again.

  I lit a cigarette and turned to Benham's Economics . Halfway through a chapter I stopped. I wasn't taking in a single word; the truth was that I'd already had a very stiff lesson in economics. We shall begin by examining Joseph Lampton. Born January 1921 at Dufton. Father John Lampton, occupation overseer. Educated Dufton Grammar School. Junior Clerk, Treasurer's Department, Dufton UDC, 1937. Sergeant-Observer, 1940. 1943-1945, Stalag 1000, Bavaria. Present post, Senior Audit Clerk, Warley UDC. Salary, APT Two. Resources, Ł800, from accumulated RAF pay, gratuity, and insurance on parents. Prospects: he might be the Treasurer of Warley one day. Shall we say a thousand a year at the age of forty if he's very fortunate? Lampton has risen remarkably high, considering his humble beginnings; but, in our considered opinion, he has not the capacity to succeed in our sense of the word. He lacks the necessary background, the poise, the breeding: in short, he is essentially vulgar, and possesses no talents which might compensate for this drawback.

  We learn to our astonishment and horror that Lampton has entered upon a clandestine relationship with a young Grade Two woman. The young woman in question is of an ardent and impetuous nature and lacks the worldly experience which would enable her to deal firmly with a man of Lampton's type; it is, therefore, imperative that we intervene.

  The impassable gulf between Grade Eight (at the highest) and Grade Two (at the lowest) is sufficient reason in itself for the immediate termination of the relationship. But there is yet a stronger reason: the existence of John Alexander Wales. Born at about the same time as Lampton, he has all the qualities which his rival so conspicuously lacks. He is at present studying for a science degree at Cambridge, acquiring not only the knowledge of technics which will qualify him ultimately for the position of Managing Director of Wales Enterprises Incorporated, but also the polish of manner, the habit of command, the calm superiority of bearing which are the attributes of -- let us not be afraid to use the word -- a gentleman .

  An illuminating insight into the characters of the two men may be obtained by examining the parts which they played in the Second European War. Mr. Wales had a distinguished RAF career, which was doubly distinguished by his escape from Camp 2001 in 1942. Mr. Wales is too modest to wish his exploit to be discussed, but it is sufficient to say that it reflects the greatest credit on his ingenuity, courage, and resourcefulness. It will be noted that Lampton, in the same position, made no attempt to escape, but devoted his attention to his studies, passing his main accountancy examination while actually a prisoner. This proves -- we are anxious to be fair -- that he possesses an admirable pertinacity of purpose, since it must have been extremely difficult to study under prison camp conditions. It does not, however, say much for his manhood or patriotism.

  Mr. Wales was a squadron-leader at the end of hostilities, and wore a DSO and bar, and also a DFC. Lampton has no decorations apart from those which all servicemen who served his length of time are given, as they say, with the rations. And Lampton was, of course, merely a sergeant-observer from start to finish. He is not, it may be seen, officer material. We might feel differently about him if he were.

  The friendship between Mr. Wales and Miss Brown (the young woman who is entangled with Lampton) is one of long standing. Mr. Alexander Wales, the head of Wales Enterprises Incorporated, has long had a close friendship with Miss Brown's father. They have felt of late that a closer business association -- possibly to the extent of a merger -- might be to their mutual benefit. If Mr. Wales's son and Mr. Brown's daughter should also decide to effect what we may term a permanent merger, this would, as it were, underline their parents' business relationship. Such happy coincidences are the foundation of British business, which is not, as certain people appear to believe, a jungle in which the weakest go to the wall, but simply a civilised and harmonious way of earning one's daily bread.

  There is no wish to coerce the young people into marriage against their will, but it is most strongly felt by those who have their best interests at heart that they are perfectly suited to each other, and that Miss Brown's love (or what she imagines to be love) for Lampton will be of short duration. Lampton is not of her class, and the disparity is far too great to be bridged. Should he object to this, one might point out that there are many young women, perfectly respectable and of reasonable intelligence and attractiveness, whom Lampton himself would not dream of marrying -- purely on social grounds. He would not demean himself by marrying a millhand or shop girl; why should Miss Brown demean herself by marrying a minor municipal official?

  It has come to our attention that Lampton has spent several evenings alone with Miss Brown in the house of a local businessman. It is not suggested that anything beyond a few embraces has transpired; we do not believe that either of them is totally lacking in restraint or discretion. But as her grandfather used to remark: "Where a man and a woman are alone together, the Devil makes a third." Mr. Brown's business interests extend to the wool trade, and he has a great deal of influence both in Warley and Leddersford; it must be pointed out tactfully to this businessman that it would be unwise to antagonise a man who can help him substantially both in business and in his ambition to occupy a place on the Warley Council.

  We are not living in the Middle Ages; it would be unwise to forbide Miss Brown to see Lampton and, strictly speaking, impossible to forbid Lampton to see Miss Brown. In any case, Miss Brown is a girl of spirit nearly twenty years old; it is not inconceivable that tactless handling of the situation might result in an elopement. It would be as well, though, if Miss Brown were gently discouraged from seeing Lampton; it would be wise for her to abandon her connection with the Warley Thespians, for instance. She has been seeing Lampton on the pretext of attending meetings of the Thespians and of going out with friends of her own sex; it would be as well to reproach her gently on this score. A holiday abroad and a visit to Bond Street and the Ivy and the Savoy Grill and Goodwood would also be helpful. However, countermeasures against Lampton may safely be left in the hands of Fred Hoylake, the Warley Treasurer, a man of sterling worth, whose cousin, Mr. Squire Oldroyd, is, incidentally, a valued member of Mr. Brown's sales staff . . .

  "You fool," I said aloud to myself, "you bloody fool. Why didn't you see it before? The whole of Warley's ganged up against you." I looked at myself in the mirror above the mantelshelf. Good-looking enough, but the suit was my de-mob Utility. And I was wearing my shirt for the second day. I had the working-class mentality; anything was good enough for work. I might as well face facts: goodbye Susan, goodbye a big car, goodbye a big house, goodbye power, goodbye the silly handsome dreams. I looked around the room; it had never seemed so a
ttractive. It might even be goodbye to Warley, the spindle-legged furniture, the gold-and-white paper, the hot bath at evening, the trees and the river and the moors, the winding cobbled streets of the eastern quarter with their elegiac cosiness. And goodbye to Alice. But we had already said goodbye; why did I still think of her in the present tense, why had I, in the morning, instinctively thought that Hoylake had found out about Alice, why had I felt that the dead relationship with a woman almost ten years older than myself was the most important? I could see her now, screaming at me like a fishwife, naked, with her figure beginning to submit to middle age, I could remember her tobacco-stained fingers, the upper left grinder which needed filling. And none of it made any difference.

  I swore aloud to myself, using the old RAF obscenities that I'd almost forgotten the sound of. Then I went over to the telephone. I stopped with my hand on it, and returned to the armchair and Benham. At first I kept thinking of Alice with every page; I would master a concept, then it would end with her name. I didn't dare think of what she had done in London -- but that was there too, like a toothache masked with aspirin. And then I stopped the attempt to suppress it and set myself the task of doing twice as much as I did normally. After a while her name came up neutral as a page number or chapter heading as I got into the rhythm of concentration.

  19

  "Aren't we baby-sitting?" Susan asked.

  "No," I said. "They have company."

  Susan's face puckered up as if she were going to cry, and she stamped her foot. "It's horrid of them, they practically promised ."

  "We won't be going there again," I said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "The bus is coming," I said. "We'll have to run for it."

  We jumped on it as it was going out of the station square and sat down breathing heavily.

  "Where are we going, Joety?" Susan asked.

  "The Folly."

  "Oo, wicked . It's very lonely there."

  "That's why we're going there." I squeezed her hand. "Unless you'd rather go to the flicks."

  "No, truly," She looked at me with shining eyes.

  "It's not cold now," I said. "But tell me if you do feel chilly and we'll go home straightaway."

  "I won't be cold. Cross my heart." She leaned towards me and whispered: "If you love me up, I'll be as warm as toast." Her breath smelled of toothpaste and, better than that, of youth and health. She did not simply look clean; she looked as if she had never been dirty. And the night was clean, too, with a new moon silvering the trees along Eagle Road and an energetic breeze tidying away the clouds. With Susan beside me, the happenings of yesterday seemed absurdly unreal. Then my heart stopped a beat when a middle-aged man with spectacles boarded the bus. But it wasn't Hoylake.

  A young man and a girl of about nineteen got in at the next stop. At least, I thought that she was about nineteen; her face, like the young man's, had a settled look, as if she'd decided what was the most respectable age to be, and wasn't going to change it in a hurry. She had a round flat face with lipstick the wrong shade and her silk stockings and high heels struck an incongruously voluptuous note; it was as if she were scrubbing floors in a transparent nylon nightie. The young man had a navy blue overcoat, gloves, and scarf, but no hat; he was following the odd working-class fashion which seemed to me now, after Alice's tuition, as queer as going out without trousers. I felt a mean complacency; with that solid mass of brilliantined hair and mass-produced face, bony, awkward, mousy, the face behind the requests on Forces Favourites, the face enjoying itself at Blackpool with an open-necked shirt spread out over its jacket, the face which Wilfred Pickles might love but which depressed me intensely -- Len or Sid or Cliff or Ron -- he'd never have the chance of enjoying a woman like Susan, he'd never explore in another person the passion and innocence which a hundred thousand in the bank could alone make possible.

  "Why shan't we be going to Eva's again?" Susan asked.

  "Don't you know?"

  "Don't be so inscrutable, darling. If I knew, I wouldn't ask you."

  "I don't think that your parents like me," I said. "Bob's obeying their orders."

  She withdrew her hand from mine. "That's a beastly thing to say. As if they were all-powerful tyrants and Bob danced at their bidding."

  "Part of it's true and you can't deny it. Your parents definitely don't approve of me."

  She put her hand back. "I don't care. They can't stop us. We're not doing anything wrong."

  We got off the bus at St. Clair Park and walked through the entrance where the great iron gates had been. They had been, Cedric once told me, the finest existing example of Georgian ironwork in England; the Council had taken them away during the war and sold them for scrap. One of the St. Clair falcons on the gateposts was wingless, the result of a drunken soldier doing a little professional practice with a Sten gun. At the top of the drive you could see the St. Clair mansion. It wasn't large as mansions go, absolutely severe with a flat parapet line and no projections. But I caught my breath as I looked at it, remembering suddenly the Dufton art master's favourite phrase: here was frozen music. Whoever designed the house would no more have dreamt of including the smallest false detail than I would have dreamt of presenting a balance sheet a penny in error. But it was dead. You didn't have to see the boarded-up windows, the choked-up fountains, the stagnant ornamental ponds east and west of it, to realise that. It smelled dead, it had wanted to die.

  We climbed the winding path up the hillside behind the manor. It had as many turns as a maze, and there was about the turns a slightly sinister quality, as if it wouldn't mind, given the opportunity, leading one into an oubliette. In the moonlight the big trees around us looked as bare as gallows, and yet at some points the bushes grew so thickly as to make the path almost impassable. When we reached the little promontory where the Folly stood, I was sweating. I put my raincoat down, and we sat on the grass in silence for a moment. Below us we could see the whole of Warley as far as Snow Park. I noticed for the first time that it was shaped like a cross, with the market place in the centre and T'Top in the northern upright. And I saw roads and houses which I'd never seen before -- big square houses, broad straight roads, not black and grey, but all white and clean. I realized afterwards that I'd been looking at the new Council estate above the eastern quarter; in the moonlight the concrete looked like marble and the unmade road like stone.

  The Folly was an artificial ruin in the Gothic style. There were three turrets, sawn off, as it were, obliquely, and far too small ever to have been much use as turrets. The tallest even had two window slits. One side of the main building had a door and an aurora of stone round it, and the other had three windows ending a little too abruptly halfway up. It was very solidly built; Cedric said that if you compared it with contemporary prints, it was evident that it had survived over a hundred years on that exposed promontory absolutely unscathed.

  "My great-great-great-grandpa built this," Susan said. "He was called Peregrine St. Clair and he was terribly dissipated and used to be a friend of Byron's. Mummy told me a bit about it; he had orgies here. All of Warley practically was St. Clair land and he could do just what he liked."

  "What did he use to do at the orgies?"

  "Wicked!" she said. "I don't really know, darling. Mummy would never be very explicit. Though actually she seems rather proud of him. He's been dead long enough to be romantic. He squandered most of the family fortune on these orgies and then my great-great-grandfather squandered the rest and was killed in the Crimea. She's rather proud of him too, he was very brave and dashing."

  "Aren't there any St. Clairs in Warley?" I asked her.

  "Only Mummy really. Death duties and drink finished off the St. Clairs, Mummy says. Her people used to live at Richmond -- they're dead now. There was only one male St. Clair left and he was killed in the 1914 war. Most of them were killed in wars." She shivered. "I'm jolly glad I'm a girl."

  "So am I," I said, and kissed her.

  A cloud passed over the moon, dark
ening the Folly for a moment into a genuine ruin. The man who built it was dead, all the St. Clairs were dead; I was alive, and I felt that the mere fact of my survival was in itself a victory over them; and her parents, and Hoylake, and Bob, and Jack Wales; they were zombies, all of them, and only I was real.

  "Would you like to come to the Civic Ball with me?" I asked.

  "I'm awfully sorry," she said, "I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "I'm going with Jack."

  "I thought you loved me. Do you prefer him? And his M.G.?"

  "How can you say an awful thing like that to me?" She leapt to her feet in one movement; it was as if anger had plucked her upright. "I don't care about his silly old car. I don't care if you haven't got one, either. Mummy invited him to make up the party, she always does. We'll go in the Bentley, we won't even be alone together." She started to weep. "I don't believe that you love me at all."

  She was hurt, she looked lonely and small. I felt as sorry for her at that moment as if she'd been an ordinary girl and not the daughter of Harry Brown with a hundred thousand pounds as a barrier between her and real sorrow.