The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  Maybe if he hadn’t been persecuted, Frank thought, he’d have turned out a different man, been a bloke like me who’d got a job at a factory and worked every week for fifteen quid or so. He might have been a good worker for the union and, who knows, in time become a big official – Sir William Posters ‘today went to confer with Beeching, Ford, Robens and Nuffield with regard to the General Strike called for tomorrow by his caucus of unions. According to the D. Worker Sir William maintained that he wanted a minimum wage of twenty pounds a week for all workers, as well as a communist government of six hundred and forty deputies to be chosen by him and sent to the House of Commons. Great cheers from all the workers’.

  ‘Don’t call me Sir William, lads. I shit on the Sir. Call me Bill – Bill Posters as I was born and bred.’ Comrade Posters, party boss, in his cloth cap and big topcoat as he inspects blast furnaces and power stations. ‘Good old Bill. We’ve got what we want now.’ Until an aeroplane flying over one day, sky-writes high up in the blue: ‘No you haven’t. BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.’

  Mostly the people who gave Frank lifts were happy to do so. One man was not, and said, when they were well into the wolds beyond Louth: ‘Don’t you sometimes feel ashamed, to be begging lifts like this?’

  There’d been no smile when the man stopped to pick him up, nothing but a slit-mouth asking where he wanted to go. He wore a belted mac, and cap, was pale at the face and kept his steel-blue eyes angled towards the road. ‘To get where I’m going,’ Frank replied, ‘it would be cheaper by bus. I only hitchhike to give miserable bastards like you a break from yourself. Stop this car and put me down.’

  The man smiled. ‘Well, now look here, I didn’t mean to be offensive, you know. I asked a question because I don’t see much point in sitting quiet for the next ten miles.’

  ‘If you don’t pull up I’ll grab that wheel and swing you into the ditch as well.’

  The car stopped quickly. He reached for his pack and got out, not a word said, happy to have weight again on his moving legs. He gave lifts to hundreds of people, even those who didn’t look as if they wanted one. On the last day before leaving, anything to get out of town, warm sunshine dazzling through the spotless windscreen, he sped along a straight, narrow lane that ran two flat miles across open wasteground, had a yen to take his car off and crash the fence, subside into the ditch and grind up onto wider spaces. But what was beyond them except what he could see now? – the Trent, the power-station and, over the river, hills forming a hazy blackening cloudbank?

  Driving towards a rooftop sea of newly built houses increased his worm-eaten discontent. Fields and woods bordered the sluggish river, a live, cloud-reflecting limb held under by a smart new bridge. Beyond the estate he turned to the main road, and, seeing a soldier and kitbag planted hopefully for a lift, drew up to find out where to. ‘Loughborough, sir,’ came the obliging answer.

  ‘Sling your sack in,’ Frank said, opening a packet of twenty, fresh and newly shining like Alfonso’s teeth: ‘Fag?’ He was about twenty – short haircut and come-to-bed eyes for a female ape – sallow-faced and ill at ease as he drew the door to. ‘Slam it, mate, or you’ll roll out, then you won’t be worth much as a soldier.’

  ‘I’m in a good regiment,’ the soldier said, stammering slightly. Frank lit up before driving off. ‘On leave?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Don’t call me sir. It makes my ulcers jump. Call me Frank. I might have a car, but I’m still one of the mob.’ Deep angry creases formed on the soldier’s forehead, as if he wondered: ‘Who does he think he is, telling me not to call him sir?’

  ‘How long you got?’ – a few bob a day, and kept on call with nothing to do but read Flash Gordon comics.

  ‘Seven days, sir. I’m a bit fed up. I’m married, and don’t see much of my wife. This is the first bit of leave I’ve had in months.’ Frank pitied him, stepped on the accelerator to get him back sooner to his hearthrug pie. ‘You know what you ought to do?’

  ‘What, mate – Frank?’

  ‘Pack it in. I’ll drive you down to London if you like. Fix you up at my house with a suit of civvies, and you’d never get caught. I’ll take your wife down at the same time. It’s no good being in khaki and having to jump out of your dreams every time some bloke with two pips on his bony shoulders opens his plumby mouth. I know. Was in myself once.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’ The soldier hesitated, still with a slight stammer, as if obliged to consider it seriously for the privilege of his lift. ‘I’m due out soon. There’s no point. Anyway, did you desert, then?’

  ‘No,’ he answered, unperturbed, ‘there was no one to help me. I was too stupid in those days’ – and went on talking as they sped along, making a short journey of it, plying the soldier and himself with cigarettes and hoping to brainwash him into saying: ‘All right, mate, stop the car, I’ll desert now’ – though it’s hard to brainwash someone with no brains. Not that Frank was serious; he was playing a game, knew it when a startling question was etched on the emptiness of his own mind, saying that since he was telling this young man to run away from his khaki troubles, why didn’t he pluck up guts enough to light off himself, sell his car, buy a rucksack and bike, and just fade out into the blue-and-green? He smiled: it was impossible to do anything while thinking about it.

  The built-up area fell like red flakes around them. The youth seemed happier. ‘Where’s your camp?’ Frank asked. ‘Is it easy to get into the armoury from outside?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he stammered. ‘It’s right near a wood on the edge of Harby camp. The doors are locked in case anybody tries to get in without a pass.’

  Frank laughed. ‘Wirecutters and a hairgrip. When you’re on guard next send me a telegram and we’ll clean it out together. Draw me a map of the camp, will you?’ – passed him pencil and paper.

  The youth’s face became rounded, his eyes and mouth open. ‘Do you mean it?’ He was glum, set in a grim mould of discontent and fear, which made two of them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Frank said, ‘I’m not serious.’ Passing a disused railway station, he climbed the smooth tarmac up a hump bridge, and the speed of his fast-cruising car dropped them into an airpocket on the other side.

  Ashamed to be begging lifts! I’m learning more in two weeks than twelve years in factories and living with Nancy. I couldn’t get this from a paperback. The blue wolds drew him in, treeless heights rolling and dominant. He struck off the main road after making his exit from the car, cut along a minor route marked red and thinly on his map as the veins in somebody’s bloodshot eye. No woods or villages, just onward rolling fields, the smell of dead rose bay and the lonely farm every mile or two. At the moment he felt more at home on this paved lane where no traffic passed than he had on the A road further back. Black and white cattle, huge and sleek, were dedicated to a slow contemplative chewing of grass, contrasted to his own troubled mind as he spared a glance for them and walked on.

  Sunday and distant bells muffled the cold air. A mile ahead and dropping two hundred feet was a village still locked in afternoon sleep and stillness. Peace was rampant out of town and factory, obtruding, obvious and disturbing, and it wouldn’t let you be. The other day he was at Wainfleet – about five in the afternoon – and thought he’d nip along a lane and get to the sea, have a paddle before dark. He reached the sand but water was nowhere to be seen, then walked miles, it seemed, out over the hard sand, jumping ruts and channels in places. It was flat, dead flat, and no matter how far he walked and how much he looked across this sand he couldn’t see a ripple of the sea. It began to darken so that he couldn’t see the land either – and it was so flat – and somehow in the distance he could hear water shuffling around like an old man in carpet slippers, looking for the light switch in a dark room. But he couldn’t see anything so came back to the proper coast. Near it was an old pillbox, a machine-gun post he supposed from the war, so he went inside and slept the night. Waking up next morning the sea was almost lapping at the door. He s
tripped off and swam for half an hour, then got dressed and went back to the main road, where he ate some breakfast at a pub, food well-needed because he hadn’t slept well in that pillbox. It was cold, and he had rough dreams.

  The first house set by itself on the far outskirts belonged to the district nurse, so the plaque said. A red Mini was posted outside, and the sight of it made him wonder for a moment, in his biased state against all four-wheeled friends, whether he should call there at all, or whether it wouldn’t be better to walk on to the next house. But he knocked at the door.

  ‘Yes?’

  He felt he should say: ‘My wife’s labour’s started. Can you come and see her through? I’ve been expecting it for a week – she’s that much overdue’; but he said:

  ‘Would you give me a drink of water, please?’

  2

  There was nothing she liked better than, on a long, free, wild winter’s evening, to shut all doors and curtains in the living-room, heap up the fire with coal, and sit down with a book. It was the best distraction from her nurse’s life, a deep and final escape for a few hours from the insistent and necessary calling of the outside world. She was old enough to appreciate this solitude, after a child and twelve years of married life, yet young enough to let her book fall and reflect on what had brought her to it, and to realize faintly that this work and solitude was not to be the end of her life.

  Vile weather was held at bay, its thumping sea-like roar muffled by walls and comfort. Outside it was wet and violent, the world a boxing-ring for ebony shapeless cloud. Inside there was warmth and clarity, light, good furniture and food. As a woman she respected it, knew its rarity and value. The hours had no end. The end of them was out of sight. They had no frontiers – until the phone pulled her back into the world again, sent her out to birth, death or pain, which was easy to handle since it was no longer her own. So there was always this possible disturbance to cut into thoughts or reading, and the elements growling beyond the walls were always audible enough to eat at the basis of her reasons for being there.

  On this Sunday even fine weather, open curtains and in-streaming light from the blue sky didn’t save her from the encroaching habit of reflection. Since she had left her husband and gone back to nursing he had made good progress in the advertising firm he worked for. She still received an occasional letter from him, saying he wanted her back – an unfortunate phrase which implied that she had once belonged to him. When she left him he hadn’t run off to the woman he was having an affair with – which might have embellished their break-up with some slight yet elevating aura of tragedy; he had gone to his psychoanalyst and spent another year pouring out the soul he had never been able to pour out to her. He imagined, in his suffering, that she must be suffering too, but her pain had died before leaving him, so that when she went away there was never any possibility of her ‘going back’. It wasn’t possible to go back in life; it might often appear nice and cosy and comfortable, but it would mean a perilous defeat, an annihilation of her true growth, a rejection of the world that she had, after immense expenditure of spirit, come face to face with at last. Even in her lonely Lincolnshire cottage, with the spite-wind of the wolds sealing her in with apprehension and self-questioning, she knew this – that she was out on her own, independent, useful, set at last in the vanguard of her life.

  Keith, now in middle age, had told how his mother gave him three choices for a career: either the Church, the army, or advertising – and he chose the latter because it was considered something new. Pat thought him dead, hollow, and self-centred, but couldn’t deny that he was good at his job. In that, he was forthright and decisive – so she gathered from parties given and gone to – but with her he was never able to make up his mind about anything, threw all decisions onto her. He wouldn’t say: ‘I’m taking you to the Mozart concert tonight,’ but: ‘Would you like to go to the concert?’ so that she had to wonder whether or not he’d like to go before answering (and deciding) whether or not she’d like to. It was the same in all things, even to the buying of cuff-links or a new tie. The only thing he could decide on without her was a new car. She put it down to a terror of life, and a form of togetherness that she was glad to be away from.

  Keith had said in his last letter that he would come up to visit her one day, talk to her (plead, she noted), but she knew he would never have the courage to do so unless she sent a definite word of goodwill. This she could never do, because one’s life grew hard and settled after decisions had been acted on at a certain age. The anguished turbulent twenties had played themselves out to the bitter end, though she had at one time seen herself putting up with it for good, queening it forever over their small house near Notting Hill Gate that grew tinier with her discontent.

  In her early twenties love had been the most important factor, and no good had come of it because it hadn’t been the most important thing to her husband. It was only now that she realized how little love he had been able to give her, both physically and from his spirit. He had wanted to give her all the love in the world (much as if it were a collection of Boy Scout honours and Sunday school prizes), great amounts of it (to recall one of his phrases), to smother her with far more love than she really needed. This was all very fine and well, she recalled, except that he hadn’t as much to give as he thought he had. The power of his emotions was so great that it held back the considerate speeches that should have been made; and whereas he saw it as a sign of the overpowering love within him – which it may have been – it only served to prevent him transferring this love to someone else. It was a deadlock that nothing could cure. The only chance was if she called off the fight and left him. Hadn’t he indicated once in a quarrel that he had so much love to give, and that it was her fault that he couldn’t give it to her, that maybe one day he would find someone with whom a sharing of his great and beneficial love would be perfectly natural and easy? Her unwillingness or inability to accept his love was killing him. After leaving, she suspected that this great untransferable passion he had raved about was really no more than self-love. Perhaps she was unjust in thinking this and, being able to use more intelligent and realistic terms nowadays, knew that maybe her side of it also needed explaining.

  The end had been a nightmare, a violent festering wound finally causing death to the body politic of their married life. In the final weeks he had threatened to kill her, then to kill himself – in that order. The house had been a battlefield. He went off to Manchester for a three-day conference, and she knew that he wanted her to take this as an opportunity for going away, of leaving him in peace and sanity. She could, of course, have been mistaken, but she also had wanted to use these seventy-two hours to arrange her retreat from that bleak Labradorian coast of a wrecked and rotten marriage.

  Now, in her isolation, she couldn’t understand how it had taken twelve years to find out that it wasn’t going to work. But the twenties of one’s life were like that: painful and slow, to which one tried continually to adjust against the most impossible odds. It was no use brooding on it, for that would merely show that they still had power over you, and such a thing was humiliating to a woman like Pat in her early thirties.

  She hadn’t thought about it much before. What was the point? It was no use easing the plaster off a sore place until the wound had healed, and she admitted that hers hadn’t yet, though it was well on the way since she could reflect on it without getting back to the pain and dread. But to expose it to the fresh air of anybody else’s gaze would be both useless and uninteresting. She was very conscious of being now in her thirties, of having crossed certain chaotic miserable territories and landed on a sounder shore. It was no less hard and perilous, but things were seen more clearly than before. She felt more confident now, saw that some mishaps could even be avoided, armed as she was with this new foresight and intelligence. As the twenties had been ruined by love – or her preconceptions about it – so her thirties would be made by work. She grew to believe that work was the most important thing in one’s li
fe. It was the rails, the mainstay, the only valid reason for being alive. Without embarrassment she remembered her parents stating exactly this, and she had scornfully denied it, calling them cynical, materialistic, Victorian, but now she knew they were in some way right. The difference was that her idea of work was not theirs. After twelve years of marriage to an advertising copywriter, she saw it clearly. His work to her parents was honest because it was greatly rewarding. Her work – to her – was better because it was rewarding in another way. She didn’t want to explain it further than that; but even that was far enough for her to accept the maxim that work was the only thing worth living for. As for love, well, that would either come or it would not.

  There was no doubt though that lately she had been getting into a solitary state from which she could only emerge as an old maid with a cat on her shoulder. She couldn’t have set herself up in a more remote place. There wasn’t much friendship for her in this village. People were cheerful when their noses weren’t pressed to the soil by hard seasons, and talked to you often enough, but you were expected to do all the listening. The ordinary people respected her as the nurse, told of their simple and significant troubles, but from a distance that she could never cross. The so-called ‘gentry’ didn’t consider her worth knowing beyond the ‘Good morning, how are you?’ stage. As a nurse they all imagined she was someone who didn’t need ordinary human contact, and thought that her job gave her more than she could want. All she had to look forward to were the holiday visits of her eleven-year-old son, but even these were shared with her husband, and didn’t exactly fill her with the intimate and interesting conversation she had gone without all the rest of the year. Still, it was true that she did not rationalize this as solitude, and she did not complain about it now, either. She could not dislike the two years she had so far spent alone, partly because she might have to do so for a very long time, and also from a real and gentle feeling for solitude remembered from the time when she was without it. Since leaving her husband she had a way of liking whatever state her new life led her into. This was an advantage for her wellbeing, but she also saw that it was not so good to glory in such a state of mind, since certain deadnesses of perception and a limitation of experience also went with it. Such a thing was to be expected, but that too would change. After all, not only could you not have everything, but as far as she was concerned it was often true that the less you had the more might be in store for you later. This was a parsimonious, puritanical, yet unpredictable state of mind, at the mercy of any strong outlandish circumstance that came unexpectedly from beyond the outer limits of such prickly defences.