Room at the Top

by John Braine

  "I've not qualified as a cost accountant yet, you know. I've only got the C.S. -- "

  He silenced me with a wave of his hand. "I judge people by what they do, not by little bits of paper. I've no time to go into much detail now, but what I need, and need damned quick, is someone to reorganise the office. There's the hell of a lot too much paper; it started during the war, when we took everyone we could get hold of, thinking we could always find use for them. I'm an engineer, I'm not interested in the administrative side. But I know what we can and what we can't afford."

  "So I'm to be an efficiency expert?"

  "Not quite. Don't like those chaps anyway; there's bad blood wherever they are. Alterations have to be made which are best made by a new man. That's all."

  "I've a wife and family to support," I said. "How much salary?"

  "Thousand to begin with. Nowt at all if you don't make a success of it. You can have one of the firm's cars; there's depots at Leeds and Wakefield you'll be visiting a good deal."

  "It's too good to be true," I said, trying to look keen and modest and boyish. "I can't thank you enough."

  "There's just one matter to be cleared up," he said. "And if you don't, then it's all off. You've been too bloody long about it already." He scowled. "God, you have a nerve. Whenever I think about it, I could break your neck."

  He fell silent again; after a minute I couldn't take it any longer. "If you tell me what's wrong, I can do something about it," I said. "I can't read your mind."

  "Leave off Alice Aisgill. Now. I'm not having my daughter hurt any more. And I'm not having my son-in-law in the divorce courts either. Not on account of an old whore like her."

  "I've finished with her. There's no need for you to use that word."

  He watched me through narrowed eyes. "I use words that fit, Joe. You weren't the first young man she's slept with. She's notorious for it -- " I suddenly remembered, down to the last intonation, Eva's crack about Young Woodley -- "there's not many likely lads haven't had a bit there. She has a pal, some old tottie that lends her a flat . . . Jack Wales . . ."

  On a trip over Cologne the bomb aimer got a faceful of flak. I say a faceful because that takes the curse off it somehow; it was actually a bit of metal about two inches square that scooped out his eyes and most of his nose. He grunted when it happened, then he said: "Oh no. Oh no."

  That is what I said when Brown spoke Jack Wales's name and, pressing his advantage home, went on to give chapter and verse.

  There was a handshake, there was talk of a contract, there was tolerance -- I've been young and daft myself -- there was praise -- You're the sort of young man we want. There's always room at the top -- there was sternness -- See her tomorrow and get it done with, I'll not have it put off any more -- there was brandy and a cigar, there was a lift back to Warley in the Bentley; and I said yes to everything quite convincingly, to judge from Brown's satisfied expression; but inside, like that sergeant until the morphine silenced him, all that I could say, again and again and again, was the equivalent of those two syllables of shocked incredulity.

  29

  The month was September, the time was eight o'clock, the weather was unsettled, with a sky mottled with indigo, copper, and tinges of oxblood red. The place was Elspeth's flat, the exact point of space from where I told her it was all over was the brown stain on the carpet in the lounge, just by the door into the corridor. I knew that stain well; I'd spilled some cherry brandy there one night before Christmas. By the time I'd finished telling Alice that I didn't love her, I could have drawn a coloured map of it and its surroundings, correct down to the last scroll of the silly little gilt chair next it.

  I couldn't bring myself to look at her and I didn't want to come close to her. I did look at her, of course; she was wearing a black silk dress and a pearl necklace and a sapphire on her right hand which I'd not seen before. Her hands were clenched by her side, and the rouge which she had so carefully applied stood out in two patches on her cheeks. She wasn't wearing her usual lavender but something strong and musky with an animal smell in the background like a newly bathed tiger, if anyone were ever to bathe a tiger.

  "So you've finished with me, Joe?" Her lips scarcely moved and she was breathing very quickly.

  "I love Susan."

  "That's very sensible of you."

  "There's no need to be bitter."

  "I'm not bitter. Only surprised. How quickly you've changed. How long is it since you -- ?"

  She described everything we'd done together in Dorset, using the simplest Anglo-Saxon words and talking with a cool, dry detachment.

  "It hasn't left any mark on you, has it? It was only our bodies that did these things -- your young one and my -- my old one that's well past its best. Why don't you say it, Joe? I'm thirty-four and she's nineteen -- you want someone young and strong and healthy. I don't mind, I should have expected it anyway, but why in God's name can't you be honest?"

  "It isn't like that," I said wearily. "I did love you, but I can't now. Let's leave it at that."

  I couldn't tell her about Jack Wales; it didn't seem important any longer. The knowledge that once she'd made love with him, him of all the people in the world, here on the very bed where I'd lain with her, had come between me and sleep all night; but now that I was with her it didn't matter, it was as dead as yesterday's newspaper. That she had let him make love to her had proved only her contempt for him; she'd used him in an idle hour -- as a man might take a quick whisky when tired and depressed -- and forgotten him. He was a trivial detail of a past era, dead millions of seconds Before Joe, just as my own dreary copulations in Dufton and Lincolnshire and Germany had been Before Alice.

  "It wasn't wise for us to go on," I said. "It would have blown up in our faces anyway. Eva's found out about us, and it's only a matter of time before George does. He's too crafty to be found out himself -- I'm going in no mucky divorce courts, and that's flat. And I'm not going to be thrown out of Warley either. What would we live on?"

  Her mouth twisted. "You're a timid soul, aren't you?"

  "I know which side my bread is buttered on," I said.

  She slumped ungracefully into the nearest chair, shading her eyes as if against some arc lamp of interrogation.

  "There's something else," she said. "Why are you holding it back? Scared of hurting me?"

  "I hate hurting you." My head began to throb; it wasn't aching but it felt as if a big hammer inside it were stopping just short of the threshold of pain. I wanted to escape from the stuffy little room with its smell of scent and ill-health, I wanted to be in Warley. Alice didn't belong to Warley. I couldn't have both her and Warley: that was what it all boiled down to. I knew that I couldn't explain this to her, but I was forced to try.

  "I'm engaged to Susan," I said. "I'm going to work for her father. But that isn't the reason that we've got to call it a day. It's impossible for us to love each other in Warley, and I can't love anyone anywhere else -- can't you see?"

  "No," she said. "I wish you wouldn't lie to me. It's perfectly simple and understandable and I wish you luck. You needn't dress it up with all this nonsense. Places don't matter." She rose and came over to me. I put my arms around her waist automatically. The hammer inside my head broke into the threshold of pain; it was a crackling neuralgic ache but it had no effect upon the tenderness and happiness that visited me when I touched her.

  "There is something else," she said. "Please tell me, Joe. That's all I ask." She looked at me as pleadingly as a German child. Belsen or no Belsen, you gave those skinny little brats your chocolate ration; truth or no truth, I had to give Alice her self-respect. Susan wasn't the real reason for me ending our affair; but to have made it clear to her that I was leaving her for Warley would have damaged her pride past endurance. So I told her what was, with her body touching mine, a lie; though it wouldn't have been a lie the day before.

  "I heard that Jack Wales was your lover once," I said. She stiffened in my arms. "I couldn't bear that. Not him. Anyone else
, but not him. Is it true?"

  If she'd denied it, I think that I would have taken her back. It was like the pound note I'd dropped on the floor after our quarrel in the winter; honour, like freedom, is a luxury for those with independent incomes, but there is a limit to dishonour, a sort of soft-shoe line of decency which marks the difference between manhood and swinishness.

  "You hate Jack," she said. "I'm sorry about that. You needn't, because he doesn't hate you."

  "He doesn't know I'm alive."

  "He didn't when we first met. You hadn't come to Warley then. But he likes you."

  "You've been with him -- lately?"

  She unloosened herself from me and went over to the sideboard. "I think we both need a gin." Her voice was calm. "I went with him twice. Once in his car, if you really want to torture yourself, and once here. He took me home from the Thespian Ball the first time." She handed me a drink. "There's only lime juice."

  "What about the second time?"

  "That was after we quarrelled. The night after. I ran across him in a hotel bar."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "It didn't seem important. I never asked you about your past -- or your present, for that matter. We had an agreement about it, in case you've forgotten."

  There was a heavy silence in the room, as if some had seeped in from the long grey corridors outside. There suddenly was nothing left to say. She was standing with her back to me at the sideboard; the sun had gone down and I couldn't see her very well, but I think that she had begun to cry.

  "Goodbye, Alice," I said. "Thank you for everything."

  She didn't answer, and I went out very quietly, as from a sickroom.

  30

  Drinking my morning tea at the Town Hall the next day I felt very pleased with myself. In the first place, the tea was fresh and strong, with three lumps of sugar and just the amount of milk that I like; I suppose that Ray, who was looking at me with an expression of rapt devotion, had seen to that. My inkwells were clean, and there was a new box of paper clips and a snowy-white sheet of blotting paper. He'd even torn off the old pages from the calendar. All accountants, even toughs like me, have a bit of the old maid in them; a neat and tidy desk gives me the same satisfaction as a clean shirt and underwear.

  The Town Hall atmosphere seemed all the more pleasant to me because I was going to leave it. I could see the machinery of local government as it really is, appreciate its blend of efficiency and cosiness; I hear a lot of nasty things said about municipal bureaucrats nowadays, but if every business were run as smoothly as even the most slatternly little urban district, then Americans would come over here to learn the technique of greater productivity instead of it being the other way about. I reflected on this, making a neat little speech for the NALGO conference, and when the delegates had finished applauding me -- only through sheer exhaustion did they stop -- I took out my good news of yesterday, adding to it the fact that I'd parted from Alice with at least a sufficiency of dignity and a minimum of pain, and unfolded it slowly, admiring its glittering colour and intricate pattern an item at a time.

  I'd just finished furnishing a house in St. Clair Road, and was driving to the Civic Ball in a new Riley, Susan by my side in a scarlet dress that would make all the other men sick with lust for her and murderous with envy of me, when Teddy Soames entered.

  "Heard that you had lunch with Brown on Wednesday," he said. "Leaving us for the lush pastures of private enterprise?"

  "Eventually."

  "Mention me, will you? I can fiddle an expense account as well as the next man."

  "All that I know about fiddling I learned from Mr. Edward Soames, Chief Audit Clerk, Warley UDC -- will that do?"

  "Just the job. Well, Lampton, we'll get our money's worth out of you before you go -- glance through these accounts, will you?"

  The tone was supposed to be one of mock severity, but it came out vicious. I grinned and tugged my forelock.

  "Yes, Master. Right away."

  He gave me the folder of accounts and a cigarette. "I'll expect a box of Havanas in return." He frowned at me. "You don't seem bothered about Alice Aisgill," he said. "Or hadn't you heard?"

  "What about her?"

  "She's dead."

  Oh merciful God, I thought, she's committed suicide and left a note blaming me. That's finished it. That's finished me in every possible way. Teddy's eyes were a pale blue, as if all the colour had been drained from them; they were probing my face now.

  "She was a friend of yours, wasn't she?"

  "A very good friend," I said. "How did she die?"

  "Ran her car into a wall on Warley Moor. She'd been drinking all night at the Clarendon and the St. Clair. They wouldn't serve her any more at the St. Clair."

  "He let her drive home, though," I said. "And he took her money for booze so that she could kill herself." It was hardly fair to blame poor old Bert; but I had to say something.

  "She must have been going at the hell of a pace," Teddy said. "They say that the car's bent like that" -- he cupped his hand -- "and there's blood all over the road. It wasn't till this morning that they found her."

  "Where exactly was it?"

  "Corby Lane. You know, right up in the north, above Sparrow Hill. It's the last place that God made. What she was doing there at that time I can't imagine."

  "Me neither," I said; but I could. I could imagine everything that had happened to Alice after I'd left her. She'd stayed in the flat the duration of two more double gins. Then everything in the room -- the little gilt clock, the Dresden shepherdesses and Italian goat boys, the photos of dead names of yesterday, the flounces and the gilt, the bright chintz curtains, the glass I'd drunk from -- had gathered together and attacked her, trivial individually but as deadly collectively as those little South American fish which gnaw swimmers to the bone in five minutes. So she'd run out of the flat and into the Fiat; but once in Warley (she didn't know she reached there, there was a blank until she found herself waiting at the lights in Market Street repeating my name under her breath) she didn't know what to do with herself. She turned up St. Clair Road with the idea of going home. Home would be an abstract notion -- Father, Mother, safety, hugs, and hot milk and a roaring fire and all the trouble and grief forgotten in the morning. But as she'd gone past Eagle Road (Joe lives there) she'd recovered her bearings. Home was the house where she lived with a husband she didn't love; she was fleeing towards an electric radiator and George's cold tolerance, she was too old for hot milk, there were no hugs going, even if she wanted any from him, and it would all be even more unbearable tomorrow. She'd reversed at Calder Crescent or Wyndham Terrace and gone to the Clarendon. Probably she'd used the Snug, where she was less likely to see anyone she knew -- the Thespians always used the Lounge. If she needed company, if she were able to persuade herself that she didn't care about me ditching her, she could move out of the Snug and return to the main stream, return to, perhaps not happiness, but to a sort of emotional limbo. When she heard their voices from the Lounge at about nine-fifteen, she discovered that she didn't want to see anyone whom she knew or who knew me. She slipped out of the back door. To the double gins which she'd had at the flat would have been added three or four more. She still wouldn't want to go home. There was only the St. Clair. The gins rolled their sleeves up and got to work on her: you must eliminate him from your system, they said. Eliminate, obliterate, expunge. You've been to the St. Clair often with him? Very well, then, walk straight in and sit where you used to sit with him. Spit in his eye --

  Or had she gone there in an attempt to recapture the decent and wholesome happiness we shared once when I was nearly a year younger and fully ten years more innocent? More gins had been called upon to assist her nearer towards whichever stage of illusion she wished for, and then she'd started to sing or to swear or to fall flat upon her face or all three, and Bert, who kept a respectable house, had persuaded her to leave. She drove up St. Clair Road again, then along the narrow switchback of Sparrow Hill Road; but she
couldn't exorcise my presence by stopping at the old brick works. And she still couldn't go home. If she pressed the accelerator down still harder, she could travel out of herself -- I was beside her in the car now, she was approaching that double bend which only a racing car could take at over twenty --

  "What a damned awful way to die," Teddy said.

  "I expected it," Joe Lampton said soberly. "She drove like a maniac. It doesn't make it any the less tragic, though." I didn't like Joe Lampton. He was a sensible young accountant with a neatly pressed blue suit and a stiff white collar. He always said and did the correct thing and never embarrassed anyone with an unseemly display of emotion. Why, he even made a roll in the hay with a pretty little teen-ager pay dividends. I hated Joe Lampton, but he looked and sounded very sure of himself sitting at my desk in my skin; he'd come to stay, this was no flying visit.