The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

With so much house he was surprised they sat in the kitchen, big as it was. Two small children played at a box of toys, a boy and girl who seemed rather subdued. He winked and tried to catch their eyes, but it was some time before they smiled.

  ‘Are you going to see mother?’ Pam asked. Myra said she wouldn’t have time today, but might well call on them next time. ‘They won’t like it,’ Pam told her, ‘when they know you haven’t been to see them.’

  ‘I have a show to see at the Arlington,’ Myra said, ‘a new painter from Lincolnshire.’

  ‘I read about him,’ Pam said, filling the kettle to make them some tea. ‘His work sounds marvellous, and I’d love to see it too, but I always have too much on with the sprogs’ – meaning the children, Frank gathered. She must have been cleaning up when they came, because a heap of Observers and Woman’s Owns still lay by the draining board. Or maybe she’d been reading, because he noticed some sort of manual called: How to Deal with the Outstanding Child lying near the sugar dish.

  They drank tea, and talked, and he was happy to see Myra so animated over news of family and old friends, and the chitchat of what was on in town. He put in his comments now and again, but couldn’t feel himself part of the main thread because he was so much a stranger. He couldn’t tell whether Pam looked at him so openly out of curiosity, or whether she was giving him the eye. He smiled, to find out, and got a smile back, none the wiser. When Myra went to the bathroom she asked if he’d known her long.

  ‘A couple of years,’ he lied, and when she asked him what he did for a living he said he was a writer, though it didn’t pay enough to keep an illiterate in postage stamps.

  ‘Oh, and what do you write?’

  ‘Stories,’ he said. ‘No luck yet though. I’m off to France in a couple of weeks. Bum around a bit. I can’t stand England.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to leave it,’ she said, ‘teach in some exotic place like Persia or India. But there’s no hope of that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You could teach in England,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps I will when the sprogs are older.’

  He felt sorry for her. ‘Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the sort of world we live in?’

  ‘I’d never thought of it,’ she answered. ‘It is difficult, that’s true. But I suppose it’s up to us as individuals, really.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really. It’s about time we got past all that, grew up, you might say.’ Myra came back, only catching the last sentence. It was a rich house, as far as Frank could see, must be run on about forty pounds a week from Pam’s photographer husband. Yet there was a squalor about it that he had always imagined such money could eliminate, an educated squalor, admitted, a stench of untidy intellect that didn’t appeal to him. Myra had told him that Pam had a degree from Cambridge, in English, and he had been naïve enough to expect an impeccable house. Even the tea was weak.

  By the time he left he had both children on his knees asking him to come again, and he saw how blind and irrevocable had been his own action in leaving his children.

  Pam also asked him to call again, though gave a firm pressurized sort of handshake that could have meant good-bye for good.

  They walked to a bus stop in Highgate. ‘I can’t go back on the underground,’ he said. ‘Let’s go overland to my place for a drink. The house looks squalid, but the room’s clean. Do you know Camden Town?’

  ‘I wandered around it in my student days.’

  ‘What were you studying?’

  ‘I read economics, and got a first.’

  ‘What are you doing then, being a wife? Maybe you get a kick out of wasting yourself.’

  ‘I’m not wasting anything. I’m living.’

  ‘It’s not enough. You’ve got to do something with it.’ His words disturbed her after the visit to Pam’s. He knew it, and she wondered why he kept on when a more sensitive and considerate person would have let her fall back into pleasant sloth.

  They sat on the top deck, descending into the smoke and view, and she told him about her work in the village so that it sounded worthwhile and even important, until she caught a note of justification in her voice, and stopped. ‘I suppose London is full of women like Pam,’ he said. ‘Places like Hampstead and Highgate. I’ve seen ’em around, dragged down by snotty and petulant kids, and wasting their educated lives out of inertia. I guess it’s the fault of the country though, as much as them. They could do useful work, but there’s just no need of it. It’s a rare world.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked, and he had no answer. She took his arm when they left the bus. ‘If I hadn’t met Albert in Lincolnshire I wouldn’t have met you in London,’ he said.

  ‘Does it seem so important, to trace it back like that?’

  ‘It’s fate,’ he said. ‘By politics I’m a socialist, but I believe in fate.’

  She laughed: ‘You want it both ways.’

  ‘At the moment it’s got me both ways. I was wondering what moves I went through to meet you.’ They came to a road of dilapidated early Victorian houses. One or two had been fixed up, cleaned and painted, adorned with shiny brass knockers and fancy numbers, cars outside like metal watchdogs. They walked to the far end, through a gang of playing children.

  Stepping out of the sun Frank went up the stairs first, refusing to comment on how much of a dump it was because maybe she was thinking the same. Which was true. He certainly had no right to rail against Pam’s house. She wondered whether it would be possible to sit down when she reached his room – until the door opened. ‘I painted it out,’ he explained. ‘It was so bad even I couldn’t stand it. Take this chair. The others are clean, but only this one’s safe. I’ll sit on the bed.’ The walls were bare, like a top-floor cell, oblong and simple, a few books on a table, a suit behind the door, two pair of shoes showing under the made bed. How lucky he was to be so free, she thought, no more belongings – material or spiritual – than could fit in a suitcase. He looked at her: ‘If ever you want to make a decision, just say yes, whatever it is.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of anything.’

  ‘That’s impossible. You’ve always got something on your mind. I’m good at thinking on nothing, though it’s getting less easy. I’m thinking plenty at the moment.’

  ‘Such as what?’ It was a dangerous question, as if she had said yes to something by making it.

  ‘The same as before. I think we ought to go away.’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’

  He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. ‘Do you think I’m blind and stupid? It’s got to be talked about. I’ve never seen a woman so much at the end of her tether. You’re like a sea being drained. The first time you meet somebody you get to know as much as you’re ever likely to, even if all the pennies don’t drop for a while. Something’s been eating you alive for a long time.’

  ‘Going away with you won’t stop it.’

  ‘If that won’t, nothing will.’

  ‘It sounds like boasting. You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’d be doing.’

  ‘All you need do is say yes.’ She wanted to say it, to overwhelm him with it, but it just couldn’t be so easy for him, or her. The house and room and the street outside were silent except for their own voices. No traffic sounded and the children had run off to fresh pastures of brick and pavement. The afternoon had reached its deep middle, a silent and stale sheet on the bed of the day, a blue sky at the square window, an emptiness all around them and through it in which no feelings could be hidden. ‘Where do you think you’d go?’

  ‘Off this island, then I’d tell you where.’

  ‘I’m using the singular, not the plural. What would you do?’

  ‘Why do you make a question out of everything?’

  ‘Because I want to know.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘call it a holiday; call it the end of the world. What more do you want? I don’t care
whether the sun’s shining or not. I don’t expect to sprout wings and be a bloody angel. I just want us to crash this rotten barrier. I want to look at my life from the outside. My life and this big island are meshed up and I’ve got to separate them. I’m caught in a press, and I want to struggle out of it. Maybe then I’ll fight my way back in, but then it’ll be different.’

  She listened in amazement: ‘What does all this have to do with me?’

  He sat, hands pressing against his head. ‘Nothing, if you feel nothing when I say it. I thought you might.’

  ‘Why did you choose me?’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘Who can say who chose who? I want you to come.’ She trembled, drawn easily to her feet.

  ‘No,’ she cried, pushing him away. ‘I want to come. I want to come more than you want me to, but the answer’s no. It’s got to be. I can’t do it.’

  She was weeping with a bitterness he’d never heard before, but he held her loosely, though knowing that she needed no support with such salt tears. ‘Myra, don’t cry. We’re all right.’

  ‘I’m a happy woman,’ she wept. ‘Leave me alone.’ It would end well, he felt, so it would, but he could only hold her, his arms around and face close, eyes open blankly at the vacant window beyond her shoulders.

  They stood, and he smiled at the window, the blank space. A pressure from her arms forced him away so that she could kiss him. Then she softened against him, limp and exhausted, her body shaking.

  Her eyes were closed, and he lay by her side. The kisses she gave froze him. They felt so remote, so far away and detached that they came out of a dream he had nothing to do with, a form of revenge against what he hoped would not turn out to be himself. He stroked her hair and kissed her closed eyes. He wondered if she were asleep, as a lethargy matched to the blue window seemed to creep over her, attuned to the soft folds of her body, under the coat that she hadn’t thought to take off. A train rumbled, and behind the silence there was traffic along the main road.

  19

  He brought in food from a Greek shop down the road – fruit, olives, bread, sausage, wine and halva. They were like people mildly drunk, never mentioning plans or hopes, who understood each other perfectly. ‘Will it matter, me staying here?’ she asked the first night. They talked with the light off, but the curtains open, a faint moaning noise entering on sodium reflections and the softened beams of passing cars.

  ‘Nobody asks questions in this place.’

  ‘I didn’t come out with luggage,’ she laughed, ‘but I came out with money. We could have gone to a hotel.’ She had only a handbag and an empty basket – nothing to spend any sort of night with, except a night like this. ‘To me,’ she said, ‘the only sort of love I feel is when it seems as if I know nothing, when I’m so inflamed and infatuated that I think I’m a teenager and have never met a man before, as if there’s no past behind me except the non-sexual golden age of childhood that can’t be divided into years. Everything to do with the world draws away from me, except the man I’m with. I forget everything else.’

  He turned from the wall, wondering how many lovers she’d had, to talk like that. Several columns of shillings were stacked on the table, waiting to feed the gas fire whose bars glowed under the opposite shelf. ‘The only sort of love for me is when it feels as if I know a lot – and when it doesn’t matter whether I know anything at all. Love’s not much more than a holiday in life. I think everything should be put in its place. The most important thing is work – to do something that means something. When two people meet who want to live together they should spend a fortnight in bed. There should be special hotels where you hand in your clothes, and then they lock you in, and slide your meals under the door every so often, so that when you come out you’ll know all about each other and won’t let it obsess you – for a while anyway. In my ideal society all advertisements would be ripped off the streets, and instead there’d be well-placed neon signs in red saying: “Work! Work! Work!” Maybe now and again there’d be a little one going on and off saying: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” – which I don’t suppose would be necessary, though it’d get people on the hop a bit more.’

  She laughed: ‘What would they have to believe in?’

  ‘Aren’t work and fucking enough? Both of them excite me equally – though maybe that’s because I haven’t done any work for a few weeks, and have only just made love.’ He stood up and poured wine, his broad-shouldered nakedness looming in the half light. She lay on her side, the room even dimmer as she was not wearing her glasses. Speech and darkness were healing. In spite of the black passion of his desires, her body seemed to belong to her again, was beginning to reinstate itself as part of her mind and thought.

  She slept with an arm over his body, accustomed now to the Lysol smell of the room, the faint reek from the blankets, odours of tobacco-smoke and food, sour wine on their lips, the taste of their bodies. They didn’t sleep well, and Frank was up by the first chorus of traffic. She hadn’t opened her eyes, but he held a cup of tea near her face: ‘Myra, get this. You’ll sleep after it.’ On seeing her awake, George’s first act had been to kiss her, a formal passionless greeting that meant nothing after the first year.

  Frank was crouching over the gas ring to boil more water, as if she weren’t there. They slept till midday, a cold wind banging at the window to get them up.

  She didn’t leave the house for four days, fastened into the sensual timelessness of its warm room. She said: ‘I suppose this idyll must be brought to a close some time. I want to see daylight again. I think I can take it now.’ He had already been out, stood by the table unloading provisions. Blue sky and daylight filled the room, an open window letting in the chill air. ‘You don’t seem interested.’

  ‘The only way I can be,’ he said, ‘is if you go back to your house, and finish with everything there. I’ll go with you. Then we can take off somewhere.’

  ‘Are you sure you want that?’

  He held her: ‘Myra, if this is the end, let’s begin something. I know it’s time we did.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘But come with me then.’

  They ate at a good restaurant in Soho. ‘It’s so perfect,’ she said, ‘I hope it isn’t a last supper.’

  ‘It won’t be. Everything’s settled, except for the details. Where do you want to go first?’

  ‘I’d like to see my friend in Majorca. She’s always inviting me down.’

  ‘That’s in Spain, isn’t it? We can call on Franco as well, with a bomb. It’s about time somebody got him.’

  ‘I’d like to see my friend first,’ she smiled.

  ‘We could take in some propaganda, anyway. Teddy Greensleaves was telling me about somebody he knew who took a great trunk of it in his Jaguar. He didn’t get searched, and handed it over in Barcelona, where his contacts had been fixed up.’

  ‘It must be strange,’ she said to him, ‘how much your life’s changed in this last year. I wish mine had.’

  It will, he thought. It will. ‘I’ve swum out of something but I’ve not swum into anything else. It’s impossible to in England, if you’re true to yourself, unless the whole way of life changes through some political switch. I’m nowhere yet. Albert thought his life had changed, but he’ll be sound enough to see that it hasn’t once he hits Lincolnshire again.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to leave England?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said coolly. ‘I’m finished with it. That fat staggering pigeon safe on a lion’s head, and the lion is made of stone: that’s how I see it. One blow from a catapult and its fat corn spills out. It’s not what people are that matters; it’s what they want to become.’

  ‘Perhaps you only want to go for a while,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t know till I get there.’

  ‘Get where?’

  He still did not know, and felt foolish at having to admit he didn’t by an empty sounding ‘Ah’ – which he had heard snap from so many fatuous mouths in restaurants and bars he’d gone into with Albert. It
’s catching; he thought, so that’s one good reason I’ve got to scat.

  It took George little time to realize that, after six years of comfortable marriage, Myra wasn’t coming back, unless to collect her belongings. He knew he was in for one of those fatal hammerblows that he had comfortably chuckled over when dealt out to one of his friends. She hadn’t been run over, obviously, or met with any accident: such a sound reason would at least make her absence less humiliating. His waking moments showed him another glimpse of the newspaper photo which undoubtedly held some clue as to what was in store for him. That night was ominous in that she had told so little about it, whereas before that she’d described her runs to Town in such detail that he’d found it impossible not to show boredom – almost irritation if he had papers to go over.

  His mood swung between indifference, and a resentful bitterness. At times of indifference he nevertheless told Mrs Harrod that Myra had gone to her sister’s in Somerset. In moments of despair he told himself that they had needed a rest from each other for a long time, and that Myra had merely gone to stay in some coastal place until her peace of mind came back. Then she would return – by which time he would be accustomed to living on his own.

  In the long hours of evening he put the final touches to his book, working in the deep unscarred silence of the house. The same quiet had existed when Myra was there, but then he believed she had purposely created it so that he could work in peace. He now realized it was a part of the house and of himself, a silence which battened onto his spirit and robbed him of the will to work. He preferred the silence of two people to that of himself alone.

  It was unjust and thoughtless of her not to let him know. It was downright bloody cruel, in fact. A letter saying she had gone off for good would have been better than this uncertainty. The saying that no news was good news didn’t work between man and wife. No news could only mean indifference, and there was nothing good about that. The world hadn’t shattered in colourful explosion, but it was breaking under his feet, even in this silence, ice in a slow thaw. Without Myra his occupation of the house seemed temporary by the third day, a place he’d moved into for a few weeks while somewhere else was got ready. He worked at the kitchen table, instead of in his commodious study, and if the kitchen had been big enough he would have slept there as well, concentrated himself into a single room as in the days before he met Myra.