by David Storey
I didn’t seem to get what she meant. She took another sip and put her glass down.
I moved round to the french windows and glanced out as I passed. There was no one in sight. I was half hoping Johnson might have been there, and have solved the problem.
‘I don’t know whether I should be here,’ I said.
‘Oh Arthur. … Don’t take that silly attitude.’ Her voice sounded really kind, sympathetic. She might be talking to a kid.
She came up and just stood in front of me, holding her breath, her mouth slightly open. ‘You haven’t been upset by anything, have you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
She put her hand near the top of my arm. ‘There’s no need to feel so awkward,’ she said with the same sympathy.
She could see me shaking slightly, so she came up so close I had to put an arm round her. She slotted her mouth over mine and slipped her tongue inside.
I made a big effort to pull away, and said, ‘I don’t know why I came.’
‘Don’t talk,’ she insisted, and put pressure on my arm to turn me towards the doorway. Standing in it I expected to see Weaver.
No one there. I found I didn’t mind who came in now. ‘I think I ought to go,’ I told her.
She cooled down and we let go of each other. ‘Why? I thought you were behaving so nicely.’
‘I don’t think it’s fair.’
‘Oh, Arthur—fair.’ She turned sideways to look at me.
The more I moved the cooler I felt. And I started to walk a few steps across, then round, the room.
‘You’re not feeling … you know—out of your depth, or anything like that?’ she asked.
‘I probably am.’ I stared at the bonnet of the car, and felt safe at the sight of it.
Then she suddenly said, ‘It’s not Mrs Hammond you’re thinking about, is it?’
She was waiting for me to look up quickly. She seemed vaguely concerned.
‘Mrs Hammond?’
‘The woman you live with. … You do live with her, don’t you?’
‘I lodge there.’
‘Well, whatever way you want to put it. I’m not trying to frighten you, Arthur. But is it her?
‘No … I was thinking about Mr Weaver.’
‘Oh—I see.’ She wasn’t sure whether she should explain why we needn’t worry over him. She came up close again indecisively.
‘I think I’ll go,’ I told her.
It was the wrong thing to say. I had the wrong idea about her, about what she wanted, and I could still change my mind, she seemed to say, but be quick about it, my patience has almost run out. I made a move for the french windows. I hadn’t been subtle.
She wasn’t sure, now, how angry she should be—or how violent. The way she looked at me I could imagine her picking up the half-ton mahogany table and lugging it after me. ‘You’re going?’
I’d made it more sordid than it ever could have been. I’d been too clumsy. I was turning down a free sample, and she gave all the appropriate grimaces of the disappointed salesman. She didn’t see how disappointed I was myself. She just hadn’t a notion of how I felt about jeopardizing my chances with Weaver himself. She just looked on me as the mean frog I felt.
‘You are going,’ she said again.
I tried to start explaining, telling her what I wanted in life, and how I wanted it. ‘But how can I?’ I asked her. ‘I just can’t stand that pace of living.’
‘You needn’t explain, Arthur. If you feel you must go, you go.’
‘You see what I mean? Don’t you?’
‘Either come in or go, Arthur.’
We both thought for a minute I was coming in.
Then I nipped into the drive, scrambled into the car, and shot off down to the white gate. I left a wide skid mark through the carefully raked gravel. I was sweating freely now, trembling, and blinding everything I could think of. Why hadn’t I jumped in with her? She’d be the best sample I ever tasted. She is something to sample. And I go and turn it down.
Why? That’s too easy … I ought to see it all as a joke. It’s just not an economic proposition. It’s so uneconomical that I’ve to turn down the best thing that ever happened to me. She may have had a hundred other candidates lined up—I didn’t care. She’d asked me. A scrubbing nobody. And I’d gone and turned it down. It was so uneconomical that I’d acted like a decent human being. There was only one thing. If ever Weaver showed signs of dropping me. …
The season started with a bang. We didn’t know it then but some had been threatened with dismissal unless a big improvement was made in our League position. George Wade and Dai Williams, the first team trainer, were at us every minute. Pre-season training was hard and continuous, sweating through the late summer evenings, boxing, sprinting, exercises, seven-a-side, touch-and-pass, and we started the first game with Leeds in high spirits. It came at the right moment for me, a big relief from the growing restlessness. My play was all the better for this; it seemed to have matured over the summer. I was surprised when I found all this coincided with a falling off in Weaver’s enthusiasm. It was nothing very noticeable, except I was very noticing on things like that: Maurice seemed to share more of his time. It was also at this time I got my first look at Slomer: a boyish crippled figure shrouded in a rug, sitting in the committee box.
One Sunday morning I made the mistake of driving round to my parent’s place. My father was in bed—he was working nights on the railway—but the car woke him and he came down in his underpants and stood in front of the fire.
‘I hear you’re getting a good start to the season,’ he said. His eyes were tired, blurred. He wasn’t quite awake.
‘Why don’t you come and watch a match?’ I asked him.
‘He does,’ my mother said. She was baking, kneeling down in front of the coal fire and kneading the dough. Her face and hands were red with the heat and effort, and her round, aproned figure wheezed and panted in the light from the near flames. ‘He goes when he’s not on days, don’t you love?’
‘If you’d have let me know,’ I told him, ‘I could’ve got you a season ticket for the stand … I still can, I think.’
‘Oh,’ he said quickly, ‘I can pay my own way, can’t I, Mother?’
‘If Arthur can get you a ticket’, she told him, ‘you might let him. After all …’ She saw his warning look, a tight, proud face. ‘You wouldn’t have to stand so much in the rain.’
‘I saw your first match, three weeks ago, is it?’ he said, drawing his small, stocky figure up, and turning his back to the fire. ‘Seemed to me you were the best player on the field.’
‘That’s what he always says,’ my mother said, and leaned back on her heels to look up at us both.
‘It’s funny you never played before—when you were younger. I don’t remember you as a lad being over keen about rugby.’
‘You’ve to be in touch with people, Dad, for one thing.’
‘Aye. …’ He glanced at my mother. ‘We’ve heard plenty on that.’ His voice was tired.
‘Don’t start off on that on Sunday,’ she reminded him, and added to me, ‘we don’t see you often these days, Arthur. Are you kept very busy?’
She got off her knees and lifted the large bowl of dough on to the table. The smell of it leavening filled the room. She dusted the baking-board with flour and pulled the dough out of the earthenware bowl and began to cut it.
‘I’ve been doing a lot of training after work,’ I told her.
‘There’s a man at work’, my father said, ‘tells me he sees you often at Stokeley dogs.’
‘He could do.’
My mother seemed to wait for an explanation, her back to us. Then she picked up a brown baking tin and began to grease its inside with old margarine paper. ‘Where’s that?’ she said eventually, putting each tin on to a black oven plate beside the baking-
board.
‘Down the valley,’ I told her lamely, and my dad and I watched as she picked up the lumps of dough, shaped them between the flushed cups of her hands, and dropped them into the tins.
‘It’s got one of the worst reputations,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine any decent person going anywhere near the place. It’s not even affiliated. They dope the wretched animals.’
She carried the black oven plate with the four tins of dough to the hearth. She tilted it on the fender so the tops of the loaves were exposed to the flames, and pricked each lump four times with a fork. The prongs sank in and were pulled out without resistance. ‘Do they dope them, Arthur?’ she said.
‘Sometimes.’
‘You don’t have anything to do with it, do you?’
‘No.’
She bent down and pushed hot cinders under the oven with a long polished poker. She rested a couple more lumps of railway coal on the fire.
‘That’s all right, then,’ she said, ‘if you don’t have anything to do with it.’
‘But why do you go there?’ my father said. ‘You know they dope them.’
‘If they do, it doesn’t do the dogs any harm—no more than it does me if I lake football without having had a steak for dinner. The only harm it does is to those folk who back doped dogs. Those are the ones it harms.’
‘It’s not nice to hear you talk like that …’ my mother began.
‘Nobody ever came to any good on a dog track,’ my father broke in. ‘Nobody. I’m telling you, Arthur.’
‘Are you staying to dinner?’ my mother asked. ‘If you are I’ll start on it now. I can get the meat in straight after the bread while the oven’s hot.’
‘I told Mrs Hammond I’d be back for dinner. She’ll have it ready.’
My father sat down near the fire, his short, muscular legs turned towards it. The skin was pale and knotted with veins. ‘You ought to get your trousers on, Dad,’ she told him, to distract his growing feeling. ‘And how is your Mrs Hammond? I was only thinking yesterday, how many years is it since … and it’s not a nice district or anything.’
She looked how she felt, flushed and hurt. She moved about a lot, as if all her activity could evaporate anything she or my dad might say in anger about Mrs Hammond.
‘It’s a cheap place,’ I told her, ‘and it’s near work.’
‘But now you’ve got your motor-car, and you’re playing football, can’t you get some other place, in the fresh air—up at Primstone, or Sandwood maybe?’
‘I don’t want to use the car for travelling to work. I doubt if I could afford it every day. And in any case, it causes bad feeling with my mates.’
‘You could still use the bus—and live somewhere further out.’ Screwing up her eyes to the heat she opened the oven door; then she picked up the oven plate and slid it inside. The dough hadn’t risen properly. Some water dropped on the bread. It might have been sweat from her face.
‘I’ve got used to living there now,’ I told them.
She straightened up and busied herself with the small chrome ventilator on the oven door.
‘I don’t know what you’re coming to, Arthur,’ my dad summed it up, staring into the fire and shaking his head slowly, provocatively. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘But look at the car,’ I told him. ‘Look at my suit. You don’t get things like that working five and a half days a week on a third-rate lathe. … And not only that, people know me. You must realize that. Machin’s a name that means something in town. It’s not just one of the hundred thousand others. I bet people at work talk about me to you. Don’t you find that pleasing? That everybody knows about your son?’
‘You don’t know what they’re talking about, though, Arthur. That man, all he said about you was he saw you every week at Stokeley dogs. That’s all he told me.’
‘You’ll find them like that—the people who don’t like to see you successful. They want you to be in the same miserable mess as themselves. Now admit it. You must have heard quite a few pleasing things. Hasn’t somebody you never even spoke to before come up to you on Monday morning and said, “Your Arthur played a great game on Saturday. …”’
‘And that Weaver you seem to mix with,’ he went on. ‘That crowd were never your sort, Arthur. They’re not your kind.’
‘I wish you’d be fair about it,’ I complained. ‘Where there’s money there’s bound to be dirt. It’s up to me to step over the puddles. I want to make some money. I am making some money. You don’t want me to stop doing that, do you? Look what you’ve always said about money yourself. Everybody needs some to enjoy any happiness at all. You’ve told me that since I was little. And now that I’ve gone out and done exactly what you said … you throw it right back in my face.’
‘Ah, but there’s money and money, Arthur,’ he said, quietened at seeing me angry.
‘Money’s money to me. Nobody can cut it up into good money and bad money. Nobody. Look at the Catholics, look at Slomer—they’re backing and running lotteries all day long. Ideals don’t count where money’s concerned. It hasn’t got any right and wrong. Ideals! Where do ideals get you? Where have your ideals got you?’
‘Where?’ He stared round him as if it was only too obvious where his ideals had got him, where Mrs Shaw’s ideals next door had got her, and Mr Chadwick’s beyond her had got him. It was only too obvious.
Then, just for a moment, he saw that through my eyes there was nothing there at all. He saw the neighbourhood without its affections and feelings, but just as a field of broken down ambition. He might have wanted to be a footballer in his youth. My mother looked at him as if she’d been turned to stone. He just sat there, the little man with no trousers, his head shaking from side to side in bewilderment, his face screwed up with inadequacy and self-reproach, half-blinded with tiredness and with life-fatigue.
5
I can see his face, creased in the darkness, racked with a pain that seems to grow steadily. Between us is a wall of pain that grows and thickens until it absorbs us both. It runs across my face in dull spasms. It wakes me.
My tongue is resting on those empty front sockets, and sending sharp flickers up behind my nose. I feel depressed. Then I think I hear some giggling outside the door.
I get off the bed, shove my feet in my shoes, and shuffle over to the door. I pull the bolt back but the door won’t budge. It’s locked.
I hear the giggle again outside and I bang on the door. When I stop there isn’t a sound from the landing, though the din downstairs has increased. I put my eye to the keyhole. It could be Tommy Clinton in a funny mood. Or Maurice. I go over to the window but there’s no drainpipe in sight. I sit down on the bed and light a cig. Somebody is singing carols downstairs.
A van comes up the drive and stops a few minutes while a lot of bottles clink. Drinks are being replenished, and it must still be early. Maybe ten. The party proper will be just about starting. The van drives off. There are two choirs in the drive singing carols.
I think about Mrs Weaver. With nothing else to do I think about Mr Weaver too. One I don’t know any more, the other suddenly doesn’t like me. Towards the end of November I had the idea he tried to have me dropped. It was the time things were difficult both on and off the field. And now my front teeth are broken. And by Mellor—though he couldn’t have known it was going to be my teeth. Maybe I’m blaming Weaver for too much—what with Mellor being one of his quieter pals. At any rate, I think the only reason I wanted to come tonight was a vague notion I ought to settle up with Mrs Weaver. If I’m going to be had at all I might as well be had properly. Though—at the back of my mind is that other reason. Slomer’s due tonight.
A car comes up the drive. I press my face to the window, and find there’s a light frost on the glass. The car stops at the porch and into the stream of light steps Ed Philips. He’s come in a taxi—lashing out. I shout down at him. He
glances in at the front door, waves to somebody, pays the driver, and goes inside.
I feel the need to get out of the room. I have another try at the door, squint through the keyhole, bang and shout, then go back to the window. I open it to realize how cold it is outside. A frost sparkles on the sloping lawn. The sky is clear and full of pale moonlight. Twenty feet or more below is Johnson’s scruffy rockery.
I switch off the light and ease myself out on to the sill. I cling there a while like a reluctant window-cleaner. Below I can see the glare from the windows, and those garden rocks. I tug hard and the gutter holds.
Using my feet to climb the window, I pull myself up. A pane breaks and falls quietly into the room. I get my elbows into the gutter and tuck my feet in the open top of the window, and worry about whether I should go on. There’s ice and water under my arms; the metal creaks and groans under my weight. The roof is too steep to climb on to, a regular pyramid. Right in front of me a chimney streams out smoke against the pale sky.
To the right is the corner of the house. Round it should be the drainpipe I need. I lower myself until I’m again at full stretch, and push off from the sill. I swing along, grabbing at the gutter. Somewhere the other side of the window, behind me, it cracks, breaks, and suddenly drops a foot. I give a shout and rush hand over hand for the corner.
I reach round but can only feel a bracket where the gutter should be. I test it, and it snaps off.
It’s just like Weaver to keep his house in such a rotten state of repair. My shoulders are dropping off and I can’t move either way. I haul myself up and slot my elbows back in the gutter. Putting my weight over my left side I free my right arm and start tugging at the tiles on the corner. The first is a bit difficult. It cracks off and I fling it down on to the lawn. The next few prise up more easily, and slowly I’m able to take the corner off Weaver’s rotten roof.
Two wooden beams show up, and soon the hole is big enough to pull myself into. I slot my feet between the beams, lie back on the tiles, and light a fag.
Individual voices come up clearly. I listen to the things people are saying, and wonder if I sound as bad as that. There’s quite a view over the city. The two big mills, Yarrow’s and Sudgeon’s, are sailing down the valley like big ships, their windows all alight, moving right into the path of those two power station funnels. Lights flash in the low atmosphere, and glow from thousands of Christmas Eves. It’s a party night. I feel cold after my sweat, and start clearing a path through the tiles down the side of the roof. I shove my fingers under the edges and pull up. The tiles snap or come off clean, and I fling them down into the shadows below. Eventually I’m within reach of the only drainpipe I’ve seen that night, and I slide down.