Room at the Top

by John Braine

  I realised all this but I went on running past her, not looking back. Before Christmas it would have been possible for me to look back; before Christmas I could have courted June. Nothing else would have done, and I'm always glad that I realised this. She's been married happily now this past four years -- or at least she's not unhappy that I know of. But I somehow feel that I hurt her. It must have seemed that she was offering me a good home-cooked dinner and that I was rejecting it in favour of a slice of chalky shop bread with factory-made meat paste -- I feel a sense of waste whenever I think of June. I'm sure that we choose our own destinies; but I can't help feeling that once one's chosen a certain track there's remarkably little opportunity of changing it.

  But there was no room in my head for such thoughts that morning; all that mattered was that soon I'd be with Alice and the celibacy of two months would be broken. My desire to be with her again was mostly on this account; after all, one can't be expected to lead a normal sex life for a long period and then suddenly be deprived of it and not suffer. I don't mean that I wanted her only as a body; the main reason for my celibacy was that she had spoiled me for the dance-hall pick-up and the pub flopsie, for the bit of fun, the quick nibble; there are a thousand synonyms for the sort of thing I mean, and their flat nastiness reflects the disgust which any man one stage above the apes is bound to feel when he unites with a woman whom he despises. But all the humiliation I'd suffered since we'd quarrelled -- from Hoylake, from the Storrs, from Jack Wales, from the Browns -- dissolved in my memory beside the image of Alice in my arms again, of grown-up love instead of the frustrating teen-age games I'd been playing with Susan.

  I went up to Gilden in the afternoon and took in money for rent and taxes and paid out money for wages for about three hours; it was fortunate that this job -- which was being palmed off on me more and more often -- was the sort which could be performed in his sleep by an idiot child. Even then, I generally enjoyed it; Gilden was, as I've said before, a typical moorland village, its inhabitants incredibly inbred, and it was always interesting to see the twelve basic faces -- there had only really been twelve families there since the Conquest -- popping up with slight variations due to sex and age.

  That afternoon each of the faces before me was a blank. There was only one face that I wanted to see, only one voice that I wanted to bear, only one body that I wanted to touch. I was once extravagant with my cigarette ration at Stalag 1000 and spent three days without tobacco; it was like that but worse, a brackish wanting, a roughness inside, a black uneasiness; the blank faces before me were prisoners' faces, the long oak table and the heavy ledgers and the official notices and the official buff and olive walls of the front room of the village Institute were the barbed wire and the machine-gun towers and the Alsatians which everyone said were trained to go for your genitals first.

  When we met at the St. Clair it wasn't at all as I imagined it would be. We were alone in the Snug; I kissed her briefly on the cheek. She put her hand out to my face and gulped back a tear: it was a noisy snuffle, without grace or artifice and I found my guts dissolving with pity.

  "I'm so sorry, darling. I didn't mean it, I never meant to hurt you."

  "I'm making a show of myself. I was going to be very sensible!"

  "For Christ's sake no. Let's get out of here and then we can talk."

  Once she was in the car she let herself go; the tears poured down her cheeks unceasingly, leaving two parallel streaks in her make-up. I drove as fast as I dared to Sparrow Hill, nearly knocking down a cyclist at the top of St. Clair Road; I saw his white face as he wobbled into the gutter, shaking his fist at us.

  Lying under the beeches in the gentle darkness I didn't speak. She kept on crying, burying her face in my chest; there was a dark patch of moisture on my shirt.

  "It doesn't matter now," I said, when at last she'd dried her eyes. "There's no need to cry. You know why I made such a fuss, don't you?"

  "I'm glad you did," she said. "It was horrible when you looked at me as if I were dirt, but I'm glad you cared."

  "I love you."

  "I'm old and I look terrible. You can't possibly."

  She did look terrible, every year of her age even in the darkness; but the words were out now, our journey had begun. It wasn't a romantic feeling: I had no illusions about her or myself. When we were together I wasn't lonely, when we were apart I was lonely. It was as simple as that.

  "Don't you love me?" I asked her.

  "Of course I do, you fool. What do you think I was crying for?"

  She took my hand and put it inside her blouse. "There, honey," she whispered. "Like some animal returning home."

  There was a smell of summer around us, of new green and moist earth; the air up there on the moors was good and clean and sharp, there was no smoke and dirt to make your lungs feel as if they were stuffed with cotton wool -- we were part of that, but not violently, we were one happy person, one reality. I wanted to take her then, not because the act itself mattered, but because I wanted to be close to her, to give her something of myself. I put my hand upon her knee. She pushed it away.

  "Not now."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Me too. I wasn't going to come tonight, I always look awful and feel worse -- you know how it is."

  "Fortunately no." We began to laugh.

  "I needed to see you so badly but I hate inflicting myself on you when . . ."

  "You couldn't ever inflict yourself upon me. I love you just as much now as when you're well."

  "Would you sleep with me, though? Would you share a bed with me?"

  "Why not? You need company when you're feeling ill and miserable."

  She started to cry again. "Oh God, you're so normal . I do love you for that, I do love you, I do love you -- " She spoke the next words in a whisper. "I'm so happy with you that I wish I could die now. I wish that I could die now. "

  22

  The next two months were -- at least, when I was with Alice -- entirely happy. We stopped being lovers; we became husband and wife. Of course I always gave her what in our private language we described as a fine piece of china; but that was almost incidental now. The security, the calm, the matter-of-fact tenderness which came from her -- that is what was important; that, and talking to each other and having no dangerous corners or forbidden subjects. We never hid anything from one another, we really talked; our words were something more than animal noises or counters in a social or financial or sexual game.

  I continued to take Susan out after the Civic Ball. I had no hope now of marrying her; but I saw no point in letting her go. She was my weekly shilling on the pools, my selection at random with no hope of winning. And I suppose that to run two women at once rather tickled my vanity; and to take her out at all was still a satisfactory way of spitting in the eye of Jack Wales and the rest of them.

  I didn't really enjoy making love to Susan now. Once she was wound up, so to speak, she never stopped. Even when we were on a bus or in the street she wanted to hold hands or for me to put my arm around her waist. And when she thought no one was looking she'd take my hand and press it against her breast. Once the novelty had worn off, it was wearisome. It hadn't the proper end; no matter how deep our intimacies -- and in some ways I knew her body better than Alice's -- she still stopped short at the crucial moment. If Alice hadn't been my mistress, I'm certain that I would have forced her to give me what I wanted. As it was, she was the sweetmeat I toyed with after the main course -- delicious, pure, light with youth's spun sugar, but unimportant, neither real nor nourishing.

  There was a compensation: with Susan I recaptured my youth. I joined the RAF when I was nineteen and grew up far too quickly. At an age when a kiss should have been Technicolored excitement, not seriously in one's inmost thoughts to be connected with the acrid physical tumults of adolescence, I was in a field near Cardington with the WAAF's red cookhouse hands expertly unbuttoning me: "Ee, Ah doan't think tha's done this often afore, luv." I recaptured my youth, that is, as far as it cou
ld be recaptured. The sky didn't seem on the point of exploding, I didn't have that feeling of nearly dying with joy at discovering how wonderful female bodies are -- the children's games we played were full of magic only if one believed in magic.

  It seems surprising now that I should have got away with it for so long. Alice knew that I was going about with Susan; but she didn't to outward appearances let it bother her.

  "She's a baby," she said to me once. "You'll soon tire of her. Try not to hurt her, that's all, darling."

  At the time her attitude puzzled me. It doesn't now. She was sure that Susan wouldn't marry me, and she was sure that she could hold me. She wasn't going to waste her strength in fits of jealousy; she would simply wait for the inevitable break-up. It happened rather differently than she had anticipated, however.

  The last evening under the old dispensation I remember as one remembers the party on the eve of the mutiny, the play seen a couple of hours before the earthquake. It was a warm evening and I was lying in the bed too lazy to put my clothes on; Alice came into the room wearing a black taffeta dress. She rustled down beside me.

  "Do my buttons up at the back, honey."

  I did as she asked, my eyes half closed, feeling with every tiny gold button snapped into place that I too was being fastened closer and closer to her.

  "You'd better dress," she said. "Elspeth'll be here before we know where we are."

  "Alice, dress me."

  "You sensual old ram, you," she said happily. "Would you really let me?"

  "Why do you think I asked you?" I put my arm around her; the smooth roughness of the taffeta against my bare skin made me shiver with pleasure. "Come on. I want to be cherished and made much of."

  She dressed me with a nurse's efficiency. I closed my eyes, smelling the goodness of her sweat and the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-room smell of her lavender water.

  "I like being looked after," I said.

  She looked pale and her mouth was set tightly. "I can't find your socks."

  "I feel as if you'd left your hands all over me. It's wonderful -- "

  Her face wrinkled up and she slumped across the bed, weeping noisily.

  "I want to look after you all the time, Joe. I want to do everything for you and cook for you and mend your socks and clean your shoes and dress you if you want dressing and have your children -- "

  "I want it too."

  Her face was across my feet. The words were muffled; I couldn't be sure what she said. "I'm too old for you. It's too late." I felt the warm moisture of her tears on my feet.

  "Let's go away together," I said. "I'm sick of meeting you like this. I want to sleep with you -- remember?"

  "This is tearing me up inside." Moving up beside me, she pressed my hand fiercely into her belly. "I'm empty. I lie awake at nights aching with emptiness. I wake up and I'm alone and I walk round Warley and I'm alone and I talk with people and I'm alone and I look at his face when I'm home and it's dead -- when he smiles or laughs or looks thoughtful, it's as if different strings were being pulled or different lights had been ordered -- " She giggled, clasping my hand and driving her nails deep into it. She drew blood, then released her hold, looking at me wildly. "I'm hysterical, aren't I?"

  I shook her gently. "You find my socks and make me some tea. I love you."

  "Yes. Yes I will." She retrieved the socks from under the dressing table and brought them over to me. "I've washed your feet with my tears," she said. She brushed them lightly with her hair. "Washed your feet with my tears and dried them with my hair."

  She put on my socks for me and laced my shoes. Then she went out of the room. She stopped at the door as if she'd been hit or as if a hundred-mile-an-hour gale had sprung up and she were bracing herself against it. Then she put her hand to her belly very slowly. "Give me my bag, Joe."

  I ran across to her. "What is it, dearest?"

  "Nothing at all." Her face was tense with fear as if the gale, inch by inch, were driving her over the edge of the cliff. She swallowed two tablets from the bag and I felt her body relax. "Don't look so worried, Joe. It's only an illness peculiar to women. I won't die."

  "But you only -- "

  "There's more than one kind, precious. Just you sit down and wait for the tea." She kissed me on the forehead. "I do love you, Joe."

  I sat on the pink-and-flame chintz bedspread, surrounded by the photographs and the glass menagerie and the scent sprays and the potpourri vases and the flowers and the copies of The Stage and Theatre Arts , feeling empty myself, knowing in a flash what it was to be Alice; it was as if I myself had that pain in my belly, as if, by an effort of will, we'd changed bodies.

  After supper I left the flat before her, as usual. Striding along in the dim corridor with its silence as different from real silence as a barbitone trance from natural sleep I thought suddenly: There's no need for me to leave her. Going down the spiral staircase I kept hearing her words: I want to do everything for you, I want to have your children. It was possible, it was real; I could be with her all the time, we could become as firmly rooted and as good as my father and my mother. We could enter into marriage, not just acquire a license for sexual intercourse -- I was old enough to cease chasing phantoms, to enjoy Now in its true colours, not spoiled by the silly iridescence of dreams.

  As I came out into the street I felt a tap on my shoulder. I wheeled round. It was Eva Storr.

  "You look guilty," she said. "What are you doing so far from home?"

  "What are you doing, my sweet?"

  Standing there with her plump little body brushing mine and her round black eyes staring at me, she reminded me of a bird. But birds not only sing and dance across the sky, they swoop down to their victim from a thousand feet, and they peck dead men's eyes out -- or living men's if they dare.

  "I've been seeing an old friend," she said. "All aboveboard."

  "Female of course?"

  "I went to school with her."

  "All right. I believe you." I took her arm. "Going on the bus?" I wanted to get her away quickly; the Fiat was parked nearby.

  "I've no option. Bob couldn't fiddle any extra petrol this month."

  "Do you good to be among the common people."

  She pushed away my arm. "Wrong way round." She put her arm in mine. "There, I'm not so affectionate as Susan, but I'll do for tonight, won't I? God help us if anyone's watching. You'd be surprised if you knew how many Warley people come to Leddersford."

  I was armoured against her now. As we walked down the drive I said, in what can only be described as a bitchy snarl: "Your chastity's too well known, darling."

  She didn't take away her arm. "You're being sarcastic."

  "Oh no. I respect you, Mrs. Storr."

  She appeared to disregard this. "You haven't told me whom you've been visiting."

  "An old friend."

  "Man or woman?"

  "That's telling." There wasn't anything else I could say; I contemplated the invention of an old RAF friend, but lies are always dangerous. And I didn't dare mention Elspeth's name.

  "Look," I said, pointing to the west. The sun was setting, going down like a battleship, its flaring red extinguishing itself in the black sea of Leddersford. The great bulk of the mansion began to erupt little yellow lights and I could hear the soft clicks of drawing curtains. "A good sunset always gives me the hell of a kick," I said.

  "Does it?" Eva put her head on my shoulder for a second. "If your friend's male you should tell him not to use lavender water," she said.

  23

  And that was why, only three days later, I found myself staring at a letter from Susan.

  I don't want to see you ever again. I didn't listen when people told me about you and her but now I know that all the time we've been going together you've been making love to her. I'll be going abroad soon so it's no use your writing or telephoning. You've been very bad to me and what hurts most is that you were telling lies all the time. I expect you thought that I was too young and silly to make you happ
y. Perhaps I was; but now I feel grown up. I hope you will be happy and get all the things you want so much. I don't feel angry with you, only sad and hurt, as if someone I loved had died.