Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘This may be what is called bracing,’ she shouted, ‘but I’m frozen!’

  He gripped her arm. ‘Let’s go this way. We’ll soon be out of it.’ The wind blew strong from the sea, and she tasted salt. They went back to the comfort of shops and people. ‘It’s better to see such water from the inside of my aunt’s flat.’

  8

  He held open the door, and she went in, to a smell of musty cushions. The clock striking twelve seemed that it would never stop. He pulled the curtains open on their rails, then took off his hat and overcoat. ‘Make yourself comfortable. There are about fifty bottles of sherry knocking around, if you want a glass. She liked her tipple of sack from sunny Spain.’

  ‘Nothing at the moment.’

  They were silent. When she was with another person she felt even more like herself – vulnerable and defensive, isolated and unable to feel she belonged anywhere. She walked around the room. ‘What’s that picture?’

  ‘An uncle, killed in the Great War.’

  She had not seen such a flat before. ‘It’s a nice place – grand.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it.’

  She didn’t, particularly, but he followed her as if it was something special. She had meant that it was nice for him, though wasn’t sure he liked it either. The atmosphere weighed too much. When in a strange place her first impulse was to leave, but such hasty feelings were a screen behind which true impressions could form, if she had any, or if she gave them time. She opened one of the side windows, and fresh air pushed at the curtains. ‘Is it your home now?’

  He nodded, and sat down. ‘Good job I kept the central heating on. Everything’s as my aunt left it. I’m torn between keeping it exactly like this, and altering it so that I can really call the place mine.’

  ‘I suppose you would enjoy that.’

  He walked impatiently up and down the room, as if he were embarrassed, she thought, or felt trapped. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘I could sell it, and buy a house in the country.’

  ‘That sounds a nice idea.’

  He stopped under the portrait of his dead uncle. ‘I like being close to the sea, on the other hand.’

  ‘There must be a cottage,’ she said, ‘near the coast.’

  She followed him into the kitchen. ‘Was your aunt married?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘Did she have any men?’

  It was a stark, almost unthinkable question. He had never even wondered. Clara had seemed old and staid when they first met. Yet she had been younger then than he was now. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Funny if she didn’t.’

  He poured sherry for himself. ‘I suppose so, but it needn’t be.’

  ‘I’ll have one, then.’ She wondered whether she felt easier only because she was in the kitchen. ‘I like her furniture.’ She sat at the large table, remembering her own plastic, formica-topped or stainless-steel equipment, all sparkling and clinical, wipeable, washable, dustable and swillable. In this place you had to scrub properly to get things clean. There were rows of wooden-topped spice jars, huge spoons, old-fashioned saucepans and colanders, zinc buckets, beautiful cups and saucers – all solid and homely. The place was tidy, yet hadn’t been done thoroughly for months.

  He laughed. ‘It’s antiquated, and needs replacing. Rip it out, put new stuff in.’

  She had opinions, backed by a stare from her grey eyes. ‘Don’t do that. It must be comforting to live with.’

  ‘If I don’t make up my mind quickly I’m inclined to do nothing. Let’s take our sherry back to the living-room.’

  There was something tentative, almost stricken about him. She had never been in the flat before, but was sure she felt less of a stranger than he did. When he stood in the large bay window and looked at the sea there was no unit of distance by which she could measure his separation not only from her but from every person in the world, and especially from himself.

  He gazed as if he had never been close to anyone in his life, never wanted to and never would be, whereas George had always been impersonal and distant when talking to her, though much closer in his silences. She was angry at comparing every man to George, and wished she had known more men in her life. She went close, and said quietly: ‘You’re here, you know. You’re not out there any more.’

  He turned. ‘No doubt about that. I’m where you are. Otherwise I couldn’t be so certain about my geographical position.’

  ‘It’s good to be useful.’ She was flippant. ‘Can I see the rest of the flat?’

  She followed along the corridor, which needed a light even during the day.

  ‘This is where my aunt slept.’

  The room was gloomy, but impressive in its bigness, combining the safety and isolation that she would feel if it were hers. She stopped by the door. The wide bed had a bolster across the top of its deep yellow counterpane. Drawers from a chest had been taken out, and stacked at all angles. ‘I’ve had neither the time,’ he said, ‘nor the inclination to go through her things, except to get at the necessary legal papers.’

  There was a dressing-table by one wall, and a bureau against another. ‘It needs time.’

  He was close, but did not touch, afraid to narrow the gap, or perhaps wise in knowing that the time had not yet come. ‘There’s so much stuff, but this is nothing: there’s also a boxroom full from floor to ceiling.’

  ‘You don’t sleep in here?’

  ‘I have the room she always kept for me. No matter how much shore leave I had she never let me stay more than two or three days. Thought it would spoil me to rely on a ready-made bolt-hole. I understood. She didn’t like men in the place. Not even me. Or maybe especially not me. That’s why I don’t think she ever had a boy-friend – as the awful phrase goes.’

  ‘What did she have?’

  His smile was almost sour. ‘If there’s someone you respect you simply block off enquiries about particular areas. She never asked questions beyond a certain limit about me, so I couldn’t put any to her. It was easy for me. On a ship you listen to stories, and maybe tell one or two, but you don’t ask questions.’

  ‘Women would,’ she said. ‘Why don’t men? I can’t understand it. Maybe men aren’t so friendly with each other – unless, I suppose, they’re as thick as thieves – though even then they probably don’t get personal.’

  ‘Well,’ he said firmly, ‘it wasn’t done with Clara, that’s all. In some situations people satisfy your curiosity if you have patience and know them long enough. But with my aunt, it was sufficient that she existed, and that she condescended to know me. Hard to put it more accurately than that, but it’s true enough that without her I would have been nothing.’

  Pam sat on a stool which he must have brought in from the kitchen to reach some high built-in cupboards. ‘She liked the fact that you were an officer in the Merchant Navy, though, didn’t she?’

  He thought about it. ‘She would have preferred the Royal Navy.’

  All the same, she couldn’t understand his lack of curiosity, and considered that he and his aunt must have looked a weird pair when they were together. ‘Don’t you want to know what she really thought?’

  He sat on the bed. ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘I’d go through everything with a fine-tooth comb,’ she said, ‘and find out what I could.’

  ‘You sound more interested than I am.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because I’ve had a more sheltered life.’

  ‘Not more than mine, I’m sure.’

  ‘And you make her sound so mysterious.’

  Her curiosity was flattering, and an improvement on her apathy of a few days ago. ‘I didn’t intend to.’

  ‘I mean to yourself.’ His own room was half the size of Clara’s, with truckle bed and plain chest of drawers, wash-hand stand and flowered bowl-and-jug set, though there was a small sink in the corner. There was also a table with books, an armchair, a framed map of the world on one wall and an oil painting of a sailing ship in full blo
om on the other. ‘You were probably the only person she loved,’ Pam said, ‘though I don’t suppose you needed to bring me here to hear that.’

  He leaned against the wall as if he had drunk too much the night before, and was only now feeling the alcoholic distortion break into his system. ‘Perhaps I did.’

  He had meant to reveal something more, but held himself back. There was always the danger of falling and, once started, the death of never stopping. He shook himself. What was there to tell, in any case, except that there was chaos in his mind? All he ever said was superficial, while anything vital was too insubstantial to be put into words. There was no certainty as to final truth, nothing on which to fasten emotions which racked him, because whatever wires there had been were rusted, and would snap at the least touch.

  She thought he was going to faint. ‘Are you all right?’

  Common talk over the years, had he lived in a normal family, would have put all praise and scandal in its place. He had missed the benefit of such revelations which, he thought, was just as well. ‘Seems I drank too much last night. There are certain things one ought not to tell oneself, though I suppose there shouldn’t be. Clara once said: “Whatever you do, don’t have any regrets. Regret nothing – but at the same time never do harm to anyone, and always try to behave yourself, so that at least you don’t have regrets of that sort.” She was strong, plain, generous and, I sometimes think, sentimental to the core.’

  He had to get away from a place which was only tolerable because he was here with a person of whom his Aunt Clara would have disapproved. Or would she? He had known better than to bring anyone in those days, and Clara had appreciated his tact. She’d had enough to do in putting up with him.

  Pam hoped he was right in the summing-up of his aunt, while wondering whether she was as all-powerful as he made out. ‘It doesn’t really sound as if she was sentimental.’

  Clara had probably deprecated his lack of courage in never bringing anyone to see her. So did he, now that it was too late. ‘Let’s say she was wise, then.’

  Shelves in the spare room held cartons tied with string gone brown with age, and cardboard boxes were piled on the floor. ‘It’s no use staring,’ she said, after they had laid them along the corridor, ‘and not doing anything to sort every one.’

  He could think of better ways to spend the rest of his life, wanting to throw the lot out for the dustbin men, with a suitable tip for their trouble. He didn’t care to know what might be gleaned from so many dusty boxes, each with the year clearly pencilled, and splitting under the weight of albums, diaries, bundles of letters, journals, theatre programmes, receipts, bank statements, tourist brochures, railway timetables, Harrods’ catalogues, menus, scrapbooks, newspapers and magazines, drawings and photographs. An investigation of such material would spoil the purity of what Clara had ordained for him. He preferred the rosy miasma of endless speculation to information that would fill the gaps in Clara’s life and his own, and even that of his mother’s.

  ‘You’ve lived out of a suitcase all your life,’ Pam said, ‘or even a kit bag for some of it, so I expect you’re a bit scared. Maybe I would be.’

  He had never been afraid of anything. If she thought that, he told himself, she didn’t understand him. But why should she, when they had known each other such a short time? To inspect Clara’s boxes, and relate whatever he found to himself, would be a surrender to the forces of continuity and order, the taking of which path he could hardly be expected to find attractive after a life at sea.

  Whoever you were, you sooner or later became part of deaths and departures over which you had no control. It was not fear, he said, but inconvenience, and the distaste at being controlled by the uncontrollable which he had formerly been in a position to put up some fight against. Facing the unpredictable sea, you had training, experience, luck, intuition and native-born sense to match its antics, and so rarely felt total helplessness.

  ‘I once knew a man,’ he said, ‘who at sixty years of age went to Australia for a two-month holiday. At the end of his stay, while he was still there, he wrote to an estate agent in England, and signed the necessary papers for them to sell the house he owned and auction all the furniture and inherited possessions. Anything not saleable was for the junk man. He never saw the house again, and was not unhappy, with his two-roomed shack near Sydney. He got work, though he wasn’t short of money. It would be sensible for me as well, to go somewhere pleasant to live, and forget all this.’

  The idea chilled her. He had made the story up, she decided. ‘It’s none of my business what you do.’

  He was startled by her brusqueness. They sat in the living-room. ‘I’ve never known anyone who had much more than what they stood in.’

  ‘You’d better grow up, then,’ she said. ‘You always had this flat to come to, didn’t you?’

  ‘I know, but it’s hardly the billet for a seafaring man!’

  She was irritated. His argument seemed silly. ‘What is?’

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.’ He was aware of what he wanted, but couldn’t say it. There was nothing to do except continue talking, until she divined what he needed her to say, said plainly to him what he could not say to her, and mean what she said, till all certainty was gone and he was then able to say it for both of them. It was a perilous course, for though she might know what he wanted, she would strongly resent the onus of choice he put on her. In the meantime she might get bored or annoyed, and walk out, never to bother with him again.

  She said ironically: ‘And where would you be, then?’

  ‘I’m a realist. I suppose I would be where I am at this moment.’

  If he doesn’t search through the stuff now, she thought, he’ll never do it. Without knowing why, she felt it imperative that he look at the papers, because something important must be among them. He was aware of it also, which was why he felt an almost irresistible urge to discard the boxes. So much clutter was intimidating. They reproached him for a wasted life, or so he might have thought.

  Whatever the risk, she must persuade him to get on with the process which could only eradicate the icy emptiness that took him over when he forgot for a few minutes that she was in the room. She didn’t like such a mood in him. It was threatening, almost frightening. She sensed it as much for him as for herself. She was aware of the risk if he opened them, however, and swung to thinking that whether he looked at his papers or not was none of her business. Why was she getting into a thing like this? Was she treading carelessly into a continent of misery? But she had learned something in the last few months, summed up by the fact that it was better to say yes than no.

  His hands were cold when she turned and held them. ‘You won’t have much peace of mind till you get going on that so-called rubbish. I’m sure I shan’t.’

  Her palms and fingers folded over the top of his fists. He may not have wanted such friendliness, but as far as she was concerned there was no substitute. Little as the gesture might mean, she had no control over making it, and if her motion could be described as letting herself go, she had the strength of mind not to be ashamed or draw back, but held on in all innocence for both of them because there was something he had to do, and she was determined that he do it.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to be tackled’ – knowing that if he hadn’t brought her to the flat he would have slung the lot out with no thought of what was in them.

  PART FOUR

  The Women

  1

  Clara began with her mother, whose maiden name was Moss, and first name Rachel. She was born in 1860, and her father was a tea merchant who had settled in London from Hamburg thirty years before. By intelligence and toil he became well-to-do. A birth certificate in the first box was leaved between yellowing paper headed by a stark engraving of warehouse and offices. The engraving for the export house was of a clipper in full sail and, small as the letter-head was, a child had put tiny men on the mast tops with coloured pencils.

  Rachel
was the middle daughter of three, and the mother had died after the birth of the third child. ‘I am big, gawky, with scarlet flamy hair and with freckles like sparks, and I do not like myself,’ she had written in a school exercise book. There was a small painting taken at some time from its frame which, though as unclear as if seen through a window beaded with moisture, showed her hair to be plentiful and auburn, as firmly tied by a band as her spirit seemed to be held behind her unhappy eyes and shapely sensitive mouth. She had a high clear forehead, and the only freckles visible on the cracked portrait appeared to be on the wrist which rested on her knees.

  A clutch of pages had been torn from her leather-bound diary. The spine was worn away, and the ink brown where it had been black: ‘The one I am to marry is an honourable man. He is good and pleasant, but I don’t love him. The rabbi who spoke to me about it is an honourable man. My father, whom I love, is an honourable man. They are all honourable. But they are all men. What can I do, being alone as I am? I shall ask questions at Passover, but they won’t hear what is in my voice. Miss Silver, who talked to me for so long about free will, denies now that she did, and says I ought to marry whomsoever my father wishes, and that I am lucky a husband has been found for me, and that I am to be taken care of, and that she wished she had a husband and children instead of having to teach for her miserable living etc. But I will not marry Benjamin Green, whether or not he is the rabbi’s nephew, because I saw him while walking from Schule with Miss Silver last Sabbath, and he saw me, and I know that he followed us down Edgware Road as far as the Park, as he knew I wished him to do. I hoped he would follow me forever, and that I would walk until Miss Silver could keep her pace no longer, when I was on my own and still walking, and then I would turn and he would be there, and with no one else but the two of us we could meet and talk, just as one day we shall be together always.’