Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Now and again,’ said Sam.

  ‘That’s because you pester her, you scroungers.’ Judy lifted a pair of trousers for patching. ‘She may hate you, but she’s a generous little Phyllida, all the same.’

  Pam walked up the stairs, glad now to get away from a series of well-worked-out relationships in which she had no part. Judy had her life finely organized, having the straitjacket of kids to look after. Maybe my mistake, she thought, was not to leave when Edward was three or four, and take him with me.

  17

  Though her watch said twelve-thirty she didn’t have to go to bed till she felt like it. Bone idle, they would have said. Spoiled rotten. Don’t know she’s born. When she’s got to go to work things’ll be different. She could sit still when her limbs had no wish to move, keep her legs stretched when she felt no desire to alter her position. She was being born again, without father or mother, blessed with a second life minus the aches and pains. She and the cane-bottomed chair had grown together, a weird animal never to be divided. There had been no such feelings when George was in the room, nor even when he had been out of the house, not in all the years of her marriage. She cringed before those simple wonders which were apparent for the first time.

  She didn’t want to go to bed, but no longer had to witness George’s crippled note of concern as if there were no words left that he could speak affectionately and direct from the heart. ‘I’m off upstairs, then,’ he’d say. ‘You can come when you like, love.’

  Every minute by herself carried its own stone-weight of guilt which would have to be paid for by his surly expression at breakfast. If she stayed half an hour she would know from his breathing and decisive tug at the clothes after she got into bed that he was still awake. Wanting to be alone when everybody else was in bed was nothing less than plain selfishness, he said. It wasn’t natural for him to go to bed while she stayed downstairs on her own. He liked to know that all doors were locked, that the lights were off, and that she was already by his side going to sleep. If he was already asleep, she was bound to wake him when she came up, and he had to get to work on time hadn’t he? It wasn’t fair. Separate rooms? He stamped on that one. What did we get married for?

  It was time for bed, but she wanted to eat, so stood up without even considering the act of separation from the cane-bottomed chair, and went to the cupboard for cheese, bread and a tin of beer. She spread them on the small round table. George had looked at her, his tone stiff. ‘Sickening for summat, love?’

  ‘Just hungry.’

  ‘Fry an egg, then.’

  ‘These biscuits are enough.’

  ‘An egg’ll do you more good. Two, in fact, with some bacon.’

  ‘I don’t like bacon.’

  ‘Shall I do it? Won’t tek a minute.’

  ‘I don’t want to get fat.’

  ‘Can’t see that happening.’

  She hated her apology. ‘I just want a biscuit.’

  ‘Wouldn’t do you any harm to put on a stone or two.’

  Her voice was at the edge of a precipice of sound, and he detected it sooner than even she did. ‘It would if I say it would.’

  ‘Don’t get like that,’ he retorted.

  She wondered why she couldn’t have a snack without any comment. ‘Like what?’ – hoping she didn’t resemble whatever he accused her of getting like, because it was bound to be unpleasant.

  ‘If you don’t know, I don’t.’

  She didn’t, and tried to be calm, but the attempt made her sound agitated, and she could do nothing because, behind his face of hurt concern, he was expecting her to be upset. ‘All I want is a biscuit and a cup of tea.’

  ‘Get it, then.’ He had tried to be helpful, and been rebuffed, as usual. He knew what she was thinking, so looked even more offended in order to confirm it for her. ‘I only made a suggestion.’

  ‘Does it need all this discussion?’

  ‘You mean we talk too much? Don’t make me bloody-well laugh.’ Now he was getting at her for having got at him in the past for not being able to express his feelings. As if this sort of sniping was a civilized conversation! He wanted to talk, having first made it impossible for her to open her mouth without a tone of defensive rancour, but would he talk so much, and what would his reply be, if I threw the kettle of boiling water at him? Instead she said, exhausted by the continual fight between them, and unable to do anything about it: ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Then what are you eating for? Why don’t you get to bed?’

  I’m not a rat, she thought, so stop cornering me. There were scores of accusations that she wanted to express, but searching for words that would hurt neither her nor George crushed them back. As people get older they get more selfish. It’s plain a mile off, isn’t it, George? No one can deny it, so how was it possible for increasingly selfish people such as you and me, George, to go on living together? It wasn’t, isn’t, can’t be, can it, George?

  ‘I’m dying,’ she said, ‘that’s why I’m eating.’

  He wondered why she tormented him so wilfully. ‘If you’re feeling that bad, why don’t you wait till morning and call on Dr Graham? He’ll give you some tranquillizers. They’ll make you feel better.’

  She laughed. ‘I’ve never had that sort of pill in my life, and never will. There’s nothing wrong with me that pills can cure.’

  ‘All I know,’ he said, ‘is that you’re always making arguments about nothing. Pills will keep you a bit steadier than you have been lately. Don’t you see that, duck?’

  ‘And what about some pills to help you, then?’

  ‘Don’t be so bleddy silly!’

  Tears were running down her face. She was bitter with herself at having no control. She envied how he went out in the morning, lucky as he was, and forgot about her till he walked in at night. She didn’t know whether she craved more to obliterate herself or him from her mind. When he was absent his voice remained with her. Marriage was a pitiless treaty.

  ‘I feel as if I’m dying in this place.’ For the sake of peace she was ready to add: ‘Though I think I’ll be all right in the morning’ – but she didn’t, and that sentence she was unable to speak was, in retrospect, the one that separated them.

  ‘Die, then,’ he threw at her, and his accusing tread up the stairs thickened the blood at her heart. She didn’t feel aggrieved at his response. She had deserved it. The food soddened in her mouth. She stood like a stone and recalled a radio talk in which some man suggested that those who came to life late at night were mentally unbalanced. The question was discussed, and she brooded in her stillness on how strange it was that after being exhausted all day, and wanting nothing but sleep, only the night promised liveliness.

  But George could not live in such a way. He had his work. Even if he hadn’t, he was a day man, a dawn-to-dusk man, a six-in-the-morning and a half-past-ten-at-night man, a person of habit and probity who had been unlucky enough to marry her.

  Yet neither was it her wish only to wake up when everyone was stamping off to bed. The pattern had been forced on her as a final refuge. She did not consider herself in any sense mentally disturbed, and to prove it she had left him next morning and come to London.

  18

  No more of that. She liked it here because she could stay up for as long as she liked and not think of herself as a mental case. She could eat what she fancied when she wanted to, and think whatever jumped into her mind without wondering what the person in the same room would say if she let him hear her thoughts. She did not have to take into account either her own ill-will, or his resentment if what she said perturbed him in any way. If she didn’t like what she thought then she, being the only person that mattered, could rid her mind of it whenever she wanted because there was nobody to keep pushing it back at her after altering it to suit their own image, as if what she had said was only so much spiteful and damaging rubbish. She could even talk aloud to herself, and if that wasn’t freedom she didn’t know what was.

  She was under the aut
hority of her selfishness, that great motivator of the meek after they have gained their independence. In order not to be dead she had to become selfish, and stay that way for as long as it took her to hear what her voice sounded like. The argument went this way, and then that. If you aren’t selfish you’re dead, but if you’re dead you can’t be anything, not even selfish. To be too busy among the considerations of yourself taught nothing except that you were coming slowly back to a normal relationship with the world.

  It was necessary to know that you were selfish in order not to let anyone steamroll over you with their petty desires and ignorant opinions, often only given so as to hear the sound of their own voice. The new bud on the tree selfishly gets sap and sustenance out of the twig-branch-trunk-and-soil, but later the tree selfishly discards all its leaves. The will to live and survive is paramount in everything. Unless you are selfish you do not survive, and by surviving you may at least one day get to know a little of what you are.

  The only contact she had with the outside world was to walk its streets like a person just out of prison, or go shopping for her daily food as thriftily as someone loath to over-consume in case she was thought too greedy by those who might be her judges as to whether or not she deserved such freedom.

  She also wondered whether a continual striving after freedom wasn’t a mere indulgence that could lead only to the greatest state of selfishness of all, which was self-destruction, and worse than the drudgery of non-freedom. Life – and she had never thought otherwise – was the discipline of having to abide by the choices you made, but if after years of trying to make a particular one work, both for yourself and whoever else it involved, you found that the decision you had made was no longer feasible, then you surely had the right to make another choice.

  But having done so, and being where she was, she hated the uncertainty and isolation that often seemed more of a burden than the narrow life she had abandoned. There was no gainsaying that everything was hard to bear, no matter how many choices you made. She had settled for only two in her life, one being to get married, and the other to desert her son and husband, and both decisions had affected her so profoundly that all she had ever learned had come out of them.

  She pulled the opener, beer squirted over hand, wrist and up the sleeve of her jumper. She wiped the mess with a cloth, and when she washed her hands at the sink the icy water made her veins ache. She pulled off her sweater, and blouse. It was not so easy to see her ribs any more, for she had put on a few pounds, and didn’t mind because she liked to see herself in the mirror, and would have stared longer at the shape of her covered breasts if it hadn’t been so chilly. She took clean things from her suitcase under the bed.

  She would have felt a fool, and made some self-hurting comment to hide her embarrassment, if George had seen her spill the beer. He would have agreed, always keen to back her up at such times. Or he would have smiled and said: ‘Them tins are often faulty, you should know that. They seal ’em with air still inside just to make you believe the beer’s fresh. Happens to the lads at work. Goes all over the lathes, but they don’t care. The suds wash it off.’ And so on. Which made her feel even clumsier, and worse than if he had called her something he really felt like saying.

  The poor bloke couldn’t win. But then, neither could she. Wasn’t his fault. Nor hers. Why did you have to be either selfish or not selfish when there was so much interesting space in between? You didn’t. By yourself you had the freedom to be neither one nor the other, which was the best of all reasons for liking it here.

  She put tea in front of him. After he’d drunk it he pushed the cup to the middle of the table. He did the same with his dinner plate after eating. He always needed space before him, and she had often wondered whether he didn’t want to clear her out of the way as well, remove her to beyond arm’s length but only so that she could be called back whenever he wanted to make sure she wasn’t doing anything of which he disapproved, or when he needed her to supply him with another full plate or cup.

  To be selfish was to be happy, but as soon as you knew it with any sort of conviction things were changing, or ought to be. George’s three brothers were selfish, a moderate word to label a condition so extreme. Yet who could blame them? They were generally happy. They survived because selfishness was their way of life. They were so absorbed by their business manipulations under the umbrella of selfishness that it would have been pure mischief on her part to try and disillusion them, an attempt which in any case would certainly have failed.

  Bert’s close-handed resolution was backed by the assurance that if he didn’t get money from you at a particular time then he would find some other way of robbing you sooner or later, as had happened when he and his brothers had bullied George into letting them paint his workshop.

  He had given a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds, but even a week later they hadn’t begun their work. George went to Bert’s house to find out why. Mavis said she didn’t know where Bert was, but thought he might be in a pub somewhere, ‘unless,’ she went on, ‘they’re out on a job, which I doubt, because as far as I know they ain’t had any orders for a week. I wonder how we’re going to live if things go on like this, although they have been drawing the dole, so at least we ain’t starving, yet. It’s a tussle to get money out of Bert for grub, because he prefers boozing to providing for the kids, who’ll be soon needing some new shoes. What with this wet weather, they’ll have to have them, though you wouldn’t think so to hear Bert talking about how he went barefoot when he was a kid, saying what’s been good enough for me’s good enough for them. So you see the way things are, George? We’re on our uppers, though it’s nice at times like these to know there’s somebody who’ll stand by us when things get so bad you think there’s nowt else to do but stick your ’ead in the gas oven. It makes us feel safer, George, to think you’re lucky enough to have your own factory. I know you would spare us a bit to tide us through hard times.’

  Mavis didn’t ask him into the house, he told Pam, but kept him on the doorstep in the screeching wind, causing him to wonder if Bert and his brothers weren’t inside, frozen in their silence till he went, when they would resume their game of pontoon or brag. Mavis was capable of playing the part, though on the other hand maybe the brothers weren’t at home, because their van wasn’t parked along the council-house street. He’d even looked around the corners.

  Mavis stopped her pleading, and George said: ‘Last week, I gave them a hundred and fifty quid to start painting my workshop, and they haven’t done anything yet. So I expect them to make a start tomorrow. As soon as they finish, they’ll have another hundred and fifty pounds, and that should buy the kids plenty of shoes.’

  When Mavis’s mouth closed, her lips went back to their former position no matter what alteration had taken place in her state of mind. Even if George gave her a hundred pounds her expression would have stayed the same. She put on a grim face whenever she saw him, as a matter of policy, but he had heard her laughing loudly enough, from a distance, with a brassy kind of gaiety. There was nothing more intimidating than to be talked at by Mavis, and then to see the uncompromising hard-weather shape of her closed and colourless lips when she had finished.

  ‘Tell ’em,’ he said, ‘will you?’

  He remembered before Bert married her, a highly made-up, round-faced nineteen-year-old wearing a tight skirt and high heels. She laughed loud at any dirty joke, and even in those days was never seen to smile. George was sorry for her. ‘She’s been with Bert long enough,’ he told Pam, ‘to have too much of him in her to be trusted, though I don’t suppose she would have been a very agreeable customer no matter who she married.’

  The men were more easygoing. Pam had seen them so full of fun that even she had to laugh. It was their women who bore the cost of their juvenile ways, no matter what George thought. She hated what they did to their wives and, though with lesser intensity, what the women allowed to be done to themselves.

  George stood on the doorstep. ‘Just t
ell ’em I called. I’d like to know when they can start the painting they promised.’

  Mavis glared. ‘I’ve got to go out shopping. I shall have to see what I can get on tick.’

  ‘Tell ’em what I said.’ He walked down the pot-holed garden path, back to his car by the kerb.

  19

  They came to the workshop a week later, at half-past three in the afternoon. George was walking across the yard towards the office with a blueprint under his arm, and saw Bert smiling from the gate, Alf and Harry trying to get in behind.

  George wanted to sound amiable. ‘You aren’t going to start today, are you? Be bloody dark soon.’

  ‘We had a few jobs to finish,’ Bert told him. ‘That’s why we had to put it off for a fortnight.’

  They unloaded ladders from the van and carried them into the yard. ‘We’ll get half a wall done before we knock off,’ Alf shouted, as if an audience was present to cheer this announcement.

  They reeked of ale. ‘You know your business.’ George continued his way to the office. They did: he had passed a newly painted house which they told him was their work, and though it wasn’t top class it proved that they could do a job well enough when they tried.

  He was pleasantly surprised when they arrived at eight next morning. Even a grey sky and drizzle didn’t discourage them. On the other hand he disliked the fact that whenever he walked outside to the toilet one of them would call, urged by guffaws from the others: ‘What’s this, then? Got the shits?’ Or, if he were going across the yard to the cubby-hole of an office: ‘Hey up, George! Going to cook the books?’

  It was as if three malevolently mouthed parrots were half-concealed at different points of his premises to taunt him for his two basic weaknesses. He didn’t even look up. They had always needed their bit of fun, though he didn’t like them using his first name so blatantly. The dozen workmen addressed him as Mister Hargreaves, but if he asked his brothers to do so, the ensuing ructions would diminish his status even further in the esteem of his employees. It was plain that his brothers knew it, and he should have realized the folly of allowing them to carry out any part of their trade on his property. They were well aware that he regretted his mistake in this respect, and so were determined to make him pay in case he had entertained any hope of them not taking advantage of it.