Room at the Top

by John Braine

  It was a nicely expressed letter, all things considered; the first I'd had from her or any other woman. In a way, it was a relief; I wasn't obliged any more to spend even that figurative shilling; all my physical and emotional capital could go to Alice. The affair was neatly rounded off -- it was rather flattering, too, that I should be the reason of her sadness. As if someone I loved had died -- I made a mental note of the phrase. It conveyed the fact that she had loved me, that everything was over, and that she was most distressed about it, without descending to abuse or threats of suicide. It was a Grade Two letter; a woman of my own grade could never -- even if she'd got round to writing a letter -- have achieved that innocent, dignified, elegiac note.

  Smiling, I opened Charles's letter.

  I'm settling down happily in London, though so far I've been unable to find one of the rich old sugar- mammies with whom, I'd been given to understand, the place abounded. However, I'm now entangled with the Children's Librarian, a delicious little Grade 5 -- if not 4 (intelligent at least she agrees with everything I say), untampered-with I'll take my oath, and, to my great surprise and joy, with a daddy who is a MANAGING DIRECTOR. Mind you, it's a small firm, and daddy has three sons -- big boozy clots who are all continually wasting the Old Man's substance: one's at Oxford, another's a writer and gets far too generous an allowance, and the eldest is in the business and draws far too big a salary. No one gives a thought to poor little Julia -- but she has in me a devoted defender, you may be sure.

  But that isn't what I wanted to ask you about. Before the dark night of matrimony descends upon us -- or at any rate, upon me -- how about this holiday in Dorset? I've got the offer of a cottage at Cumley, which is at the head of a little cove near Lulworth. Roy Maidstone will share expenses with us and we can have a fortnight's fishing, swimming, drinking, and, I hope, sinful goings-on with the local wenches who, everyone says, are stupid, loving, and passionate, and smell of hay and honeysuckle.

  The only snag is that the place is only available from the 20th of June to the 11th July, and Roy and I can't get down until the 24th. It's only four days we shan't be getting our money's worth for but it niggles me rather. You said you could get away on the 20th -- so if you'd like to go on ahead of us and draw up a list of likely virgins and places of historical interest and so on, the picturesque little residence is all yours. Or you can stay at my digs -- it's up to you . . .

  I smiled again. Alice and I had been making vague plans to go away together even if only for one night. She was going to visit an old friend in London in July. George was going to the Continent on business --

  "You've let your tea go cold, Joe," Mrs. Thompson said.

  "I'm thinking about my holidays."

  She gave me a fresh cup of tea. "Everything fixed?"

  "Yes," I said. "It's odd, but whenever you want something you get it."

  A change came over the happy composure of her face. I'd seen something like it before: Aunt Emily had looked like that at my parents' inquest. It was an old face looking at me, knowing too much about love, proper human love as prosaic as wet Mondays and as necessary as wages, knowing too much about the pain which announces itself in accents as matter-of-fact as the policeman giving evidence; Mrs. Thompson at that moment knew all about me, saw through the flesh of my words and into the skull beneath.

  "You always get what you want when you're young," she said. "The whole world's in a conspiracy to give you things . . ."

  Then she was herself again, and I was out of that courtroom in 1943 with its smell of damp wool and dried ink, and stone floors and the coroner, listening to Aunt Emily with a bored look on his fat face, and back in the front room with the sun sparkling on the polished oak table and Eagle Road outside as bright and bouncing as a newly bathed baby.

  When I reached the office, it was full of people shaking Tom Harrod's hand. Tom was the Chief Audit Clerk, spectacled and bald and in his early thirties, with the typical sedentary worker's stoop and pasty face; I suppose that he had all the normal human attributes, but to me it always seemed that he'd been included with a new consignment of office equipment or given at Christmas instead of a desk diary or inkstand.

  I joined the crowd. "Congratulations. You'll make a good Deputy Treasurer. When are you leaving for the South?"

  "Steady on," he said. "I haven't resigned yet." He put his hand on Teddy's shoulder. "I expect you'll be able to carry on without me."

  Teddy looked smug. It didn't suit him. When Tom had gone and we were left alone together, he said: "Are you applying, Joe?"

  "You don't get Grade Four until you're too old to enjoy it," I said. "Besides, it's not worth the extra responsibility."

  "I think I'll have a bash just the same," he said.

  "You stand a better chance than I anyway. You've been here longer." He had been there longer than I; but he wasn't as good as I and he knew it. "They'll put you on Grade Three at first," I said. "There's something about Four which terrifies them."

  "Every little helps," Teddy said. "You know I'm going steady with June?"

  "You couldn't do better." I had a sudden sense of loss, and then a feeling of barriers being raised between me and the rest of the world. "I wish you luck, Teddy. With both her and the job."

  "You're sure that you don't mind about me applying?"

  "Why the hell should I?"

  "I'd be your senior."

  "Tom never bothered me much."

  "I had the buzz that Hoylake's reorganising."

  "I knew that a long time ago," I said. I looked at the rows of files, the red and black inkwells that the office boy should have cleaned out yesterday, the tin lid used as an ash tray in which my cigarette was smouldering, the calculating machine and the typewriter, the calendar with the picture of the girl like Susan, the basket full of accounts at my desk, and each became part of a dreadfully cosy desert -- though at least, I thought as I turned away from the calendar, I was no longer deceived by the mirage.

  "I knew a long time ago," I repeated. I dropped my hand heavily on Teddy's shoulder and squeezed it in mock friendliness until he winced with pain. "You go right ahead, Teddy."

  24

  When we reached Wool, Alice was asleep on my shoulder. It was almost too hot; we'd had the window open all the way but it only had the effect of stirring the air like porridge without bringing any fresh oxygen in. I shook Alice gently and she came to wakefulness slowly, smiling happily at me as her eyes opened. She was wearing a blue dirndl skirt and a white blouse; I helped her to her feet, my hand touching with gratitude the good heaviness of her breast.

  "Four days," she said, when we were at last in the taxi. "Four whole days. I don't know how I managed to wait for so long -- " She kissed me, regardless of the crowd of holiday-makers around the station. "Look," she said as the car snaked through the lushly green lanes, "there's Tess of the D'Urbervilles's mansion. I once was cast as Tess in an awful rep production and I swotted up everything about her. This is the country for passion, darling."

  I bit her ear gently. "Is that a promise?"

  "Anything you want," she said in a whisper. "You can beat me if you like."

  "That depends upon your cooking."

  "There's a caseful of food. Our larder's bare now."

  I whispered something mildly improper into her ear and to my surprise she blushed, then giggled like a schoolgirl.

  "Oh, you are a one, Mr. L, reely there's no 'olding you once your passions are aflame. Don't never leave a gal alone for one minute, you don't."

  "Aye, lass," I said. "T'truth is, Ah'm insattible . Tha's let thisen in for a rough time, Ah'm telling tha straight."

  She put her finger on her lips, looking in the direction of the driver. "Hasn't it been hellish waiting, though?"

  "God, yes. Until I saw you at Waterloo I didn't believe we'd ever manage it. It doesn't seem quite real even now."

  "We'll make it real." We sat in silence then, holding hands until the taxi pulled up at the cottage.

  It was limew
ashed and thatch-roofed, with two front doors next to each other; it had originally been two cottages and its owners had converted it. Standing at the bottom of a steep lane off the main road among a wilderness of elders and blackberry bushes it had a strange atmosphere of self-willed solation. From beyond the little rise in front I could hear the faint muttering of the sea.

  When I'd paid the taxi driver, he drove up the lane at breakneck pace; the taxi was an old high-built Minerva and lurched all over the place, its springs squealing. "You'd think the place was haunted," I said.

  "It probably is. We'll haunt it after we're gone, shall we?"

  "We're not going to die yet," I said, scooping her off her feet and carrying her over the threshold. I dropped her on the sofa in the living room and stood over her, feeling a little dizzy.

  "You've done it now," she said. "You're compromised."

  "I don't care," I said. "Have you realised, darling, we're alone? We needn't worry about Elspeth coming in unexpectedly, or Eva spying on us. I don't have to leave you at ten o'clock, and I can give you some fine china anytime I like."

  "What's wrong with right now?" She pulled me down beside her. I accompanied her almost immediately into an agony of pleasure; we sank into a different dimension from which we emerged shaking and frightened -- it was as if we'd been fused together, melting into each other like amoebae but violently, like cars crashing head on.

  "Christ," she said. "that was almost too wonderful." The word didn't sound like a blasphemy, any more than it had done when we were making love. She had said it again and again then, in a breathless amazement: it was the first time I'd heard her use the word.

  Before tea, we washed in the kitchen. It was small and stone-flagged and cool; the sink was shallow and the water splashed up from the stone. The water was icy cold; Alice, stripped to the waist, shivered as drops ran down her back. The window was small and covered with dust; in the half-light her skin seemed almost luminous. Free, at that moment, from the desire to enter her body, I saw its beauty impersonally, as an arrangement of colour and light, a satisfying theorem of lines which curved generously, which gave, gave, gave to the air, to the cold stinging water, to me: a woman's body always wants to live, all of it, and a man's is always deathward inclined -- as long as Alice was there I wouldn't die, it was like having my father and mother alive again, it was the end of being afraid and alone.

  She turned to me and put her arms around my neck. "I've never let any man see me washing before," she said. "I've always been fussy about it -- they only were allowed to see me at my best, made-up, bathed, my hair just so. But you -- if it gave you pleasure you could watch me doing anything. I don't care how you see me, as long as you do see me. I love you, Joe, I love you properly, like a wife. I'd like us to love each other so much that there'd be no need for us to say it. But I want to say it all the time."

  "I love you, I love you like a husband. I'd die for you."

  "Don't talk about death."

  "I'll live for you, then. I'll make you the most-loved woman in the whole world."

  "No. Just the woman you love most." She sighed. "I could stay here forever."

  My eyes prickled with tears. We're all imprisoned within that selfish dwarf I -- we love someone and we grow so quickly into human beings that it hurts.

  "It's real now," I said. "The whole earth's solid."

  She pressed herself harder against me. "Do you like the way I feel? Do you like these? Or are they too old?"

  "They're perfect. The only ones my head's happy in between." But as I said it I found myself wishing for a second that they were younger.

  We had a big tea of American canned sausage and dried eggs and tinned fruit and then went down to Cumley. Or, rather up; the village was about a mile from the sea and the cottage was at the head of Cumley Cove. It was six o'clock when we reached the village, and a little cooler; after we'd ordered bread and milk at the village stores, we sat on the village green under the shade of a big oak, letting the quietness come to us and stay with us, nuzzling our hands gentle as a spaniel.

  She'd changed into a low-cut silk dress with a pattern of turquoise and flame and gold, each colour running softly into the other; it had a dark plum-cake richness and against her pale honey hair and skin, already beginning to tan, looked smoothly exotic. A farm labourer going home, well wrapped up against a temperature of seventy in the shade, bade us good evening, his pale eyes wandering ruminatively over her body.

  "Pullover, waistcoat, flannel shirt, corduroys, and probably ankle-length woolen underwear," she said. "It makes me sweat just to look at him."

  "I used to work stripped to the waist in Germany," I said. "I nearly went mad with sunburn and I caught cold every time the wind changed."

  "Clever Dick," she said. "Think yer knows everythink, doncha?"

  "I don't even know where I am. No mountains, no mill chimneys, no black buildings -- it's positively decadent."

  "You wouldn't exactly call Warley heavily industrialised."

  "Yes, but industry's there in the background. This is different." I looked at the cottages nearby, dazzling white or fresh biscuit, with their low thatched roofs and air of conscious charm, and then across at the church in weathered grey stone. The whole place seemed to smell of milk and hay and clean summer dust; and it had about it a drowsy tolerant sensuousness. A Dales village on an evening like this would have taken the sun like a palatable medicine, a necessity which happened to be enjoyable: Cumley relaxed into a shameless abandonment.

  "It is different," she said. "It's an older world. It's so different that it's foreign. It belongs to the farmers and the gentry. I suppose they're mostly stinkers, but at least a manure heap smells more wholesome than a woolcombing shed. It's more English than the North -- my God, listen to me talking!"

  "You needn't stop." I always liked to hear her; she could talk about impersonal things without turning the conversation into a lecture.

  We'd been there about an hour when two girls passed us, followed by two youths. One of the girls caught my eye. She looked about fifteen, with a flat impassive face and black hair. She was wearing a skimpy print dress and I could see the shape of her legs through it.

  "Good evening," she said. "Have you the time, please?"

  Before I could look at my watch Alice gave her the necessary information quickly and curtly. The girl continued to look at me, her eyes running up and down my body as mine had hers.

  "Thank you, sir," she said. "Proper warm weather, isn't it?" Then she turned and went off down the lane, swaying her hips slightly. I heard them giggling as they disappeared from view in the direction of the woods which stood west of the village.

  "I need a drink," Alice said. She glanced towards the woods. " She doesn't."

  "I love you," I said. "I'm not interested in little girls. Particularly not in jail-bait like that one."

  "You'll be here after I'm gone," she said. "Will you promise me something -- now, stone-cold sober in broad daylight? Don't sleep with her. Anyone else, darling, but not her."

  "Of course not. I'll be in no condition to."

  She giggled, and the strain passed from her face. We walked on to the pub with our arms round each others' waists; never before had I felt so free, so free of tension and worry and shame. The pub, an old building with low ceilings and oak beams and thick walls and mullioned windows, was an agreeable place to sit in, listening to the warm burr of Dorset and drinking a brown ale which, unlike most Southern beers had a good malty taste. When we reached the third round, I offered Alice a cigarette.

  "No, darling."

  "I have plenty."

  "I don't want one. I don't believe I'll ever want one again. I have you and tonight and another three days and we have a house and plenty to eat and drink and my nerves aren't on edge. It's not important enough for me to think about and yet it is, because it's a symbol. You have one if you want, dearest. But if my nerves need soothing I'll -- " She whispered in my ear.

  I felt as if I'd been taken
by the scruff of the neck and dropped through a sky of hands and each hand Alice's, slowing me down gradually until I was down in the pub again, dizzy with exhilaration, looking into Alice's dark blue eyes. I couldn't say anything; the moment was too enormous. I had discovered what love was like, I had discovered not, as before, its likeness to other people's but what made it different from other people's. When I looked at her I knew that here was all the love I'd ever get; I'd drawn my ration. It would have been better if she'd been ten years younger and had money of her own, just as life would be more agreeable if the rivers ran beer and the trees grew ham sandwiches. I was past being sensible.

  The notion that there is only one woman to suit a man may appear foolishly romantic. All I know is this: there wasn't any other woman with whom I could be happy. There wasn't any obsessive compulsion towards each other, nor was our love efficient, an exact matching of virtues and defects. When I say that she suited me I use the word in the Yorkshire sense too, meaning pleased with, delighted about: Ah'm right suited wi' thee, lass was a statement I made entirely without facetiousness, it expressed something I couldn't say in any other language.