Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  The only advantage to her was that she became more acute at divining when George was about to embark on the same course. He was always more successful because, being able to act in a bluff and easy manner, he caused Edward throughout most of his childhood to feel far more his father’s son than his mother’s.

  Realizing how he was placed between them, Edward soon learned that they were dependent on him for getting at each other. He might indeed have been two people, each one living up to his separate name, one of them open and the other shut, one happy and the other sly, one vicious and the other loving, sometimes mixed up together, which made it impossible for either of them to talk to him, in which case George said he was her son absolutely, while she averred he was his son completely.

  The difference of names only established the fact that, she and George being so unlike, it stood to reason their child would reflect for each of them the unfavourable view of the other when he was intractable, and the flattering version of themselves when he was everything a contented child should be.

  By the time he was seventeen Edward didn’t care about either of them, and only wanted to leave home and be where they wouldn’t bother him. Pam sensed this desire in him long before George, who was too busy to be aware of much, though even he realized the state of the family when, on telling Edward to turn the volume of his hi-fi down, he came in from the living-room and said: ‘I’ve had enough of this place. I’m fed up with both of you.’

  He was taller than either. Physically he had the best of them both, but he trembled at what he had said. He was pale. ‘I want to leave home.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ George said, who was even more afraid of what he now knew was in the offing. ‘Just because I asked you to turn that record player down.’

  George would have liked him to be wearing overalls, and manipulating the knobs and levers of a lathe in his workshop. He wanted to be showing him, teaching him, watching him respond with utter fascination to his dexterity and knowledge. George would then have seen his own earlier self, and pictured exactly how he had been at that age, which he could not otherwise recall, in such detail as would have been possible by putting his son through a first-class apprenticeship devised by himself. It would be sensible, he said, when they talked about it, though Pam did not want Edward to go into a factory.

  Edward refused the possibility of such training because he knew it would have to be done in his father’s workshop. George’s vision of the ideal father for the perfect son was scorned by Ted, as Pam had known it would be. George reproached her for not agreeing to his plans for Edward: ‘He’s got to make a living for himself, just like we had to when we was fifteen.’

  She wanted him to go to university, though George said that, judging by the way he was struggling for his ‘O’ Levels, there wasn’t much chance of that. He was probably right, but she disliked his pessimism. He gets his cleverness from you, he said, mildly ironic, but it might not be worth all that much when it comes to finding a job. She argued that it was still too early to tell.

  When George said they should put him into a technical college to do engineering she backed him up, and George was grateful for that at least, and consoled her for any disappointment by saying that ‘you can’t have everything’ – which was a typical response from, someone who expected everything to happen in the way he wanted. She had given him a little consideration, but in return he sought to rob her blind. At such times she caught herself using these apt expressions of her in-laws, phrases she loathed while acknowledging the thrill that ran through her when she spoke them thoughtlessly in occasional talks with George.

  She had done her best to save Edward the noise of their arguments, and the density of their matrimonial silences, and right from the time when he had been put into her arms at the hospital, the day when he wouldn’t be under her direct protection regarding all other perils was unimaginable. But at sixteen he saved enough of his pocket money to buy hobnailed boots, and clattered in wearing them one Saturday afternoon. He let his hair grow long, joined a gang, and looked like Alf. While making his bed one day she found an ear-ring under his pillow.

  At seventeen he said he’d had enough and wanted to leave, and though she had been expecting it, she was too alarmed to reply. After a shouting match in which Pam thought he and his father would end by knocking each other down, they decided that after getting sufficient ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels he would go to a college in Manchester, and be given enough of an allowance for lodgings and spending money.

  From imagining she wouldn’t be able to breathe if he were out of her sight for more than a few hours, she found the separation easy to accept, reflecting that it hadn’t seemed so long a time from the patter of little feet to the clatter of hobnailed boots. Now that she had left, she might never see him again. He was in Manchester. She had departed without thought, and still couldn’t fully know what she had done. She was more incomplete than before having Edward – for who had children over forty? – though by the time he became adolescent the golden age of mother and son had finished. He had stopped relying on her, or confiding in her. As long as there was food, money and clothes she hardly mattered, and even George’s influence was at an end.

  Edward and his father had demanded total devotion so that they could pursue the perfect relationship that George at least must have thought possible. It had certainly looked like that for a while. Now she was out of it, and glad, yet felt an ache and an undeniable panic at having parted from Edward for ever. But losing Edward made it easier to leave George. Sending him to college prised loose the vital brick of a wall that hemmed her in.

  It would be possible to see him again. She went by circuitous reasoning to decide that she was not an outlaw or murderess. She could write and tell him where she was. He’d be sure to understand. He would come to London. They’d find a nice place to eat, and laugh at their past life that would never return, and talk about the state of the world like old friends more than mother and son.

  They wouldn’t. The picture wasn’t real. She hadn’t left George in order to indulge in dreams. She would stay on her own. She was settled into her proper sphere at last. Yet it was easy to think that her vision wasn’t fatally distorted, because Edward was also away from home, an amiable young man now managing in his Manchester digs with a couple of friends. He was a person with firm views, and rules for living his own life. Away from her and George he was doing well in his course. At the end of the first year he had got top marks in technical drawing, proving that it had been the best thing for him to leave home.

  The lock that held all three together had burst. Edward had known exactly what to do. His spirit had been fought over till he could stand the strain no longer, and his decisive departure proved that he was neither like her nor George – much better for him in the long run if this were true. She was therefore not unhappy at having fragmented the base which Edward had always looked on as home.

  The three-way split had completed itself. She had gone into marriage without thought, and had not been a success. The different places where they now lived marked the triangle in which all such threesomes sooner or later found themselves, and to try and get back to the false life of the past would be like attempting to repair the dam while drowning in the floodwater.

  21

  Such well-being was too good to waste in sleep, but if she savoured her enjoyment overlong sleep wouldn’t come at all when she got into bed. She would stay vividly alert until feverish dreams at dawn eliminated her memory of the calm evening.

  Her hope during the day was to end the evening in peace, for if by dawn she could no longer endure the nightmare responsibility of having left George and Edward she would get her clothes on and run to the nearest telephone box in Ladbroke Grove, and while wind beat icily through glassless frames dial the home digits and wait for the bleeps before pressing down on what coins she had. George would ask who is it, and she would say it’s me, and feel her spirit die in a silence too long to bear. George was a real man who would
make her wait a second for every day she had been away, refusing to say hello how are you? because he wanted her to break and say I’m sorry, and sob and say I’ve had enough, and can I come back and I haven’t slept properly for a week because you and Edward are haunting my life.

  Before going downstairs she would take every coin from the shelf above the gas fire. He would be home from work. The coins grew big, and fell on her like circular tokens of hot steel.

  ‘What do you want?’ he’d ask.

  ‘Send the rest of my clothes.’

  ‘I don’t need those rags around here any more,’ he’d say. ‘Teddy and me was going to burn ’em tomorrow in the garden, soak ’em in paraffin and have a sing-song around the blaze. They only clutter the wardrobe. Where shall I send ’em?’ She would put the phone on top of the box, or let it swing by the cable before walking down the road towards home.

  The long evening was to be enjoyed. After closing the door at dusk there were hours to go before the desire for sleep became so strong that she was snared into making the attempt. The fact that she would be punished by insomniac half-dreams after hours free of all problems did not spoil the ease she felt, and she wouldn’t give up her enjoyment in the hope that sleep would come as a reward. That would be as craven as packing up and going back to George. Perhaps there was no such connection between the two states, but it was a risk she would have to take. Life was full of such risks. Every choice made created another, more so when you lived alone than when you were cooped up in a family that demanded to be looked after.

  Guarding a husband and son had its rules. Cosset them, and they assumed you were spoiling yourself due to the pleasure you ought to be getting. Sometimes they were right, but mostly not, for you drudged along and took no chances, because nothing must jar or be out of place either for them or yourself. You were afraid to miss putting sugar in your husband’s tea in case he had a nervous breakdown at the thought that your next move might be a knife in his back. If you forgot to put your son’s school bus fare in his pocket, and he found no money when the conductor asked, he’d think you had deliberately committed treachery against him, and would probably hate you as well as all women for the rest of his life. Every act was a form of premeditated lunacy, because you were never allowed to take risks even with yourself as long as you were glued like a cut-out on to the cardboard scenery of a family.

  Now it was different. Her eyes in the mirror were not flat and vacuous in their expression any more. They were coming back to life. She had changed continents, and was more at risk because she had thrown in her lot with the rest of the world. She was waking out of a long sleep, which explained why proper sleep was impossible. The excitement of getting to know herself drove away sleep, and she had long been used to the idea that she could not have everything, or even much of anything, and certainly not two states of blessedness at the same time – wherein all choices were impossible to make.

  On such evenings that seemed endless she sat by the fire. No one would knock at the door. Those who had known her would never find her. If George were to shuffle on the landing she wouldn’t let him in. If he paced obstinately day after day, she had enough tinned food not to go out and be talked into following him home. Should he get angry and smash the door, and knock her about in order to drag her away, she had a carving knife on the table.

  Impossible to go to bed. All important moves were made, and her desires could make no impression on the course of action. She felt in the grip of some force too strong to resist, but she would fight it because she didn’t like being led into situations where she was not under her own control.

  She wondered what had brought her to this room, for she wasn’t clear in her own mind as to how she came to be there – or here, she thought. She was living on the outside of herself, and trying to discover what was happening within. The person she saw in the mirror knew far more about her and how she had come to be here than she knew herself. She hoped that, no matter how great the effort, she might soon acquire the knowledge possessed by that sardonic reflection in the mirror. She also hoped that when the two of them were united they would be able to learn about others, not wanting to end the rest of her life with the revelation that she had not actually lived.

  She listened to noises that came either from water pipes close by, or from the street. Wind rattled a door. The only way to learn as well as survive was to let things happen as if nothing could affect her. To endure meant walking the streets without flinching at every passer-by. Her life had been lived in a hundred pieces, but at any one moment she had been only a single fragment giving an intense light which she alone could sense.

  She had been born inside a fragment of bottle-green glass, and couldn’t remember how it had happened. Didn’t much matter, as long as she one day got all her senses back. However far she was inside, she both liked it here and liked it there as well. Existence had become too good to wonder whether she liked it or not. Yet to speculate was a condition of not going back into the dark; and being here wasn’t painful because, however she had gone into this room, and no matter what her reflection in the mirror said, her own will always told her to stay where she was, especially when she felt urged to go back to the bitter warmth of normality.

  Sitting at the fire she was alone yet not lonely, wary but unafraid, hunted though not threatened, and willing to dwell for as long as the mood lasted on why she had been born as a small piece of bottle-green glass over which people could walk barefoot without cutting themselves. Such humiliating pressure had driven her to a place where neither George nor anyone she had known would be able to set the mark of judgement on her more convincingly than she could put it on herself.

  Now that she was free it was easier to forgive George, and at the same time admit that she too needed forgiveness. Being the one who had left the happy home she was guilty in the eyes of the condemning world; but knowing that somehow or other she would have to pay made her wonder whether the whole cakewalk was worth the bare reward of being able to go on breathing.

  The face in the mirror looked wryly into her sparsely furnished room. She was free. She had left everything behind. Even a few bits of furniture would have made some difference to the desolation. Her father had been apprenticed as a cabinet maker, but left the trade at twenty-five to become a shop assistant. No one knew why. He made things out of wood in his spare time, saying it was a consolation for not being able to do much else. He put together an ornamental mantelshelf for her wedding, with borders of elaborate beading, and six diamond-shaped mirrors along the front, a well-varnished box-like structure to fit over the plain shelf in the living-room. It was out of place among the furniture George and she had chosen, but would stay with him for ever.

  She sat through the long evening, the mirror-image telling her that idleness was a sin unless you took advantage of it by wasting time, as her father used to say with a seriousness that deceived her for years. There’s nothing wrong with idleness, as long as you don’t get into mischief, he would say. Idleness is its own reward, and the greatest pleasure in life, because you can do so much with it.

  His only idleness was in those few minutes during which he came out with such homilies, usually between ending one job and starting another. She had never seen him idle. With his peculiar humour he taught by first saying the opposite of what ought to be done, and then setting such an example at doing the right thing that the emphasis was even more sure than if he had plainly told her what to do in the first place.

  The occasional idleness did not make her feel guilty, yet she was aware of being so. When idleness turned into freedom she contemplated the wallpaper in order not to feel imprisoned. Each wall was a different colour, its pattern a scruffy map she had damp-ragged to get clean. At first she couldn’t tell one direction from another when glancing out of the window at so many buildings. Their bedroom in George’s house looked west, the builder told them when they first went to see it, from which she gathered that the front door pointed east, and that the other sides o
f the box faced north and south, confirmed when winter came on the estate of private houses where crescents curved in all directions.

  In London, figuring it by the A to Z, her window appeared to face south-east.

  Perhaps four young men had once shared this room, each choosing the paper for his wall. Women would have used pleasanter designs – though the room was certainly too small for four to live in. But suppose she herself had four different people careering around inside her? She would settle a wall on each, and to do so would start on the one with the door.

  The rectangle of entrance and exit made the least interesting wall of her abode, since she hadn’t come in by it for hours and had no intention of going out till morning, if then. The dullest and the least conspicuous. She turned her back because the brown shade was tonally dead. It had been a plush russet judging by the section curling down under the top of the skirting board, that she had picked out with her longest fingernail when sitting on the floor one afternoon while entranced with a shabby old copy of Wuthering Heights got from a stall at the market. The embossed pattern of Grecian urns would have been almost funereal but for the fern and sprig of alfalfa springing from each as if they had just been born and were full of life.

  The door was a paler brown, and may have been more recently dabbed on, though this seemed unlikely because down the inner edges of each panel the paint had bubbled and cracked. When she pressed with her fingertips, bits flaked off and darkish green showed underneath. Out of curiosity, she forced the blade of her carving knife against it, and, like going through the archaeological layers of an ancient city, found three more levels of colour before reaching wood.