by David Storey
‘I don’t think you appreciate how much help you’ve been given, Arthur,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the crux of the matter.’
‘I felt I deserved it, and you don’t think I do. I reckon that’s the crux of the matter if anything is. Am I a good footballer or not?’
‘I’m not saying any more,’ he told me like a big girl. ‘Just don’t try to push yourself too far—that’s all I’ve got to say.’
He went away before I could think of anything else. He’d got a short mincing stride. A small backside.
I stayed and talked to the stockyard clerk about his pigeons until the buzzer went.
The change wasn’t only in Weaver. Mrs Hammond suddenly heeled over. We were out driving one Sunday afternoon when suddenly she came out with, ‘Had you thought of buying a TV?’
When I looked surprised she said, ‘You’ve nothing against them, have you?’
‘I was shaken at you asking,’ I told her.
‘I thought you’d say that.’ She smiled to herself. ‘But if we can afford it, why shouldn’t we?’
‘You seem to forget—you’re sitting in ten TV sets and dressed in another two.’
‘You’re getting rough. I suppose you mean the car and my fur coat. But I didn’t want it to sound I was greedy or something.’
The fur coat I’d bought her at Christmas, cost price from a dealer who was a fan of mine, though he wasn’t that close. It’d taken me some time and effort to convince him that knowing me was more important than his profit from one coat. Mrs Hammond’s reaction to it on Christmas morning was first surprise and natural greed, then a strict, martyred refusal, and a final reluctant acceptance. There was no doubt she was proud of it, and treated it like a living thing.
Now she suddenly said, ‘I’m a kept woman, Arthur. You can’t expect me to act otherwise.’
‘Oh Christ,’ I told her. ‘But I know what you mean.’
‘Well, then, you shouldn’t be surprised at me being straight about it.’
‘I reckon not. … But I can’t see how it helps.’
‘You mean how it can help you. What you don’t see is that if you deal with dirt you mu’n expect to look dirty. People have got eyes, you know.’
I couldn’t think why she should say all this, and the shortest way of stopping it I found was to hit her. I cracked her hard across the face, and I wanted to apologize when I saw the mark.
We drove along in the kind of silence that comes after an event like that. The kids were stiff, erect, then Ian began to cry, then Lynda.
‘Do you feel like dirt?’ I asked.
‘What do you think?’
We reached the summit of a hill and coasted down through a leafless wood. I noticed how there’d been a light fall of snow during the night, and how the frost had kept it in place till now. A faint sun was breaking it up into patches: the brown earth and dark grass showed through.
‘I don’t feel dirty,’ I told her. ‘I wonder what the difference is.’
‘The difference is,’ she said after a while, ‘I’m still used to being honest. It’s one thing somehow I haven’t been able to throw off.’
‘I said I didn’t feel dirty. You’re talking about seeing—about what other people think from what they see.’
‘I’d like to feel clean, that’s all,’ she said, and added with a queer reluctance, ‘I don’t want to get at you, Arthur. You’ve got your own feelings. But I’d just like to be decent.’
‘You think I should feel like you? Is that what you mean?’
‘You don’t need me to tell you how it looks. A car … me in a fur coat. Living in the same house as you. You see what I mean now? It’s only natural I should feel about it like this.’
‘I don’t bother about what people feel,’ I told her. ‘You don’t have to take any notice at all, so why bother?’
‘You don’t mean that. You bother about what your fans feel, about what people tell you, when they tell you how good you are. Look what you’re like when you’ve had a bad match. You break things. You tear about the house like a madman. And just because you dropped a ball or something at the wrong moment. You’re always looking at your body in the mirror. Look how you shadow-box in front of that mirror—watching yourself. Don’t tell me …’ She was breathless, hurt; the red mark on her temple and cheek had flushed a deeper, vicious colour that made her face look pale. ‘You’re not fair to me, Arthur. You just say whatever comes into your head—to make me feel I should be grateful. …’ Tears hung in her eyes, but she held them back. Her eyes glistened.
‘These people who watch—I don’t care about them. I don’t, honestly. So you’re wrong. They’re pigs and I don’t reckon with them at all. They can go stuff themselves. …’
‘That’s you all over. You just bluster about. Anybody who gets in your way—you just knock them down. Anybody who’s stopped being useful—you just throw over on one side. You just use people. You use me. You don’t treat me like … I should be. You don’t know what you’re like with people. Look how you treat that Johnson now. At one time you couldn’t leave him alone.’
‘That’s good of you to say that. It was you who spoilt anything Johnson and me had between us.’
‘Spoilt it! I didn’t spoil it. You can’t put the blame of things like that on to me. I’d nothing to do with it. I only said I didn’t like you bringing him home. I didn’t like the man. It was nothing to do with me how you and him found each other.’
‘Well, whatever you say now, you set him against me.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said quietly, letting the water at last run from her eyes. She pulled Ian over on to her knee. ‘You’ll be blaming me next because you’re not playing football well.’
We ran out of the wood and accelerated alongside a reservoir. The water had a thin coating of ice, and on a hill the other side a swarm of kids were trying to sledge in the melting snow.
‘Why do you carry on like this?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve tried to treat you all along as if I cared. You don’t seem to appreciate a bloody thing of what I’ve done.’
‘I don’t have to tell you why. I’m a mother.’
‘If you’re going to think this way how can you expect Lyn and Ian to think any different when they’re older? Don’t you mind what they think about us?’
‘Of course I mind,’ she said tonelessly. ‘But I reckon you’ll leave me soon.’
I felt that, in spite of herself, she was always trying to hurt me. Her face seemed to tell me she didn’t want to do it, but something prompted her inside, and out these jibes came, almost every day, almost every time we spoke to each other. And here was I, showing all the time how I was growing to rely on her, and she went on doing it. It was as if one side of her wanted me to rely on her, and the other was terrified of the responsibility. She was frightened of committing herself, and so she just went on pushing me off, hurting herself as much as me, and building up a fire and pain between us that neither of us knew how to handle.
The car shook, and something rattled and dropped off as we shot over a hump-backed bridge at the head of the reservoir. The car went on running so I didn’t stop. We slowed down to cruise through the village. As we rose up the opposite flank of the valley the kids came into sight again with their sledges. Lynda and Ian stopped crying to watch them. We skirted the foot of their hill. It was an old slag heap; behind it stood the crumbled structure of a disused colliery.
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ I said. ‘Me leaving.’
‘There’s always a first time.’
I remember what Weaver had said the night he drove me home after signing on. ‘It’s amazing how these dead people keep popping up.’ Eric, whoever he was, whoever he had been, stood not between us, but behind her. ‘Don’t you see what you’re saying?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re making everything betwee
n us cheap—no value. When it could be just the opposite if you’d only let it.’
‘I’m not saying it hasn’t a value,’ she said, thinking clumsily, with difficulty. ‘Everything’s got a value. But you can always tell a cheap thing. You can always tell when a thing’s got cheap value.’
‘I never thought any of it was like that.’
We didn’t say anything for a while.
Then I told her, ‘You sound as if you want to shove me on to some other woman.’
She laughed.’ I don’t have to do that, do I? From what I hear you’re never short of girls—you and your Maurice.’
‘You think I go bedding other women?’
‘Think. I don’t think … You don’t believe I’m that simple?’
‘If you think you know that why do you stick with me still?’
‘You’ve never heard me complain.’
‘You don’t mind me knocking off other women?’
‘I might mind.’ Her eyes had dried. The mark of my hand still flushed her cheek, and had been joined by two dribbles from her eyes. ‘I’m not one to complain.’
‘Because you’ve got nothing to complain about. I’ve kept clean of other women.’
She gave her funny sort of laugh. Short, and breathless.
‘Your Maurice: he wouldn’t have the same view, I bet.’
‘“Your Maurice”—why is it always “your Maurice”, “your Johnson”, with you? My mother’s the same: “your Mrs Hammond. …”’
‘I can just hear her saying that. I can just imagine it. I bet your mother was like me when she was younger.’
‘I’m not arguing over that. You’re so blind wrong about everything that there’s not much point me saying anything.’
‘Well don’t—I don’t want to argue about it. Don’t say anything else.’
I lowered the window and let cold air stream into the car.
‘If I stopped the car,’ I asked her, ‘you took your fur coat off, and we all got out and walked back, would you feel any cleaner?’
‘No. I’d only feel stupid. How could that alter anything? It’s just like you: big, swash actions. I’ve told you, Arthur. In spite of what you say, it’s impressions that count more with you than anything else. Make a big impression, and you think everybody will swallow it.’
‘But you don’t like the idea. You don’t like the idea of walking back all those miles.’
‘’Course I don’t. The kids’d freeze to death, even if we didn’t.’
‘I could wrap them in a blanket. It’s getting warmer.’
‘And carry them? Being a martyr doesn’t alter anything. I’ve told you. That’s what I mean when I say you’ll go soon and leave me. You’ll find it’s the only way you can feel clean.’
‘I don’t feel dirty!’
‘You’re all right for another week, then. I don’t want to argue about it. The time’ll come soon enough for me.’
She calmed down a bit because she started pointing out things we passed to the kids, and we didn’t talk till we came over the ridge at Caulsby Castle and in sight of town.
‘You don’t seem to understand the reason I’ve done all these things for you,’ I told her, and suddenly felt like Weaver making a big-girl complaint.
‘’Course I do. You do it because it makes you feel good, it makes you feel big—you know how you like to feel big.’
‘And that’s the reason?’
‘I don’t know. … But you must think: look at me, keeping a widow and two brats thrown in. Aren’t I a hero? I must be good if I do that. They depend on me. And I don’t have to do it.’
‘That’s how I feel about you?’
‘I know how you feel. I’ve lived with a man before.’
‘You’ll be glad then when I buy you a TV.’
‘I won’t grumble. People expect us to live big.’ She saw my look and said, ‘I’ve got past being very glad about anything—and more than that—I’m past pitying myself because of it. But I will say this—you’ve helped me. You’ve probably helped me as much as the kids. If you hadn’t come along I reckon I’d have gone around in a shroud for more than a long time.’
‘ I thought you were beginning to feel happy.’
‘Happy! I could say something there, but I won’t.’
‘Go ahead. I don’t mind. I’d like to hear all of it.’
‘You’ll hear it soon enough. It’s like a disease you can’t do anything about. As it is, this’s brought it all closer.’
‘I’ll get the TV then … You’ll be able to sell it when I go.’
‘Yes,’ she said, seriously, as if there was a lot I didn’t know, and even more she couldn’t tell me.
Around March all this coincided with a slight change in her habits. She let herself go a bit. I came home one night from work and found her sitting at the tea table smoking. She laughed at my surprise, and held the cig out for me to have a drag. ‘That’s one thing I don’t like,’ I said, ‘women smoking.’
‘What’s the matter with women smoking?’ she said, puffing inexpertly and laughing as the smoke drained from her mouth.
‘It looks obscene.’
‘Oh, obscene. I see. We’re getting very classy … and you’re a right one to talk about that.’
‘Maybe I am.’
‘Anyway, big boy, I’m only smoking in private. I need the relaxation.’
A week later she was in the backs smoking, and I could see one or two people had noticed. The next day, a Saturday morning, I met her up town when I was with Maurice. She was pulling Lynda and Ian along, and was laden down with a basket and a canvas bag, a cigarette cocked in the corner of her mouth. ‘You look bloody awful,’ I told her. ‘If you feel a slut you shouldn’t show it.’
She stared a minute, and didn’t look at Maurice. Her look, deep under her eyebrows, seemed to say I’d betrayed her. She bent down and collected the brats, and shuffled off down the street.
‘So that’s your Mrs Hammond,’ Maurice said.
‘Is it the first time you’ve seen her?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nearly sighing, and nodding his head at me. ‘What d’you say that to her for, Art?’
‘I don’t like seeing her smoke.’
‘What’s the matter with you, kid? You’ve never been like that before. I can’t think of a bag you know who doesn’t.’
‘That’s what I mean. She’s the only one who doesn’t. I want her to keep that way.’
‘She’s not a dog you’ve trained or bought,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t say things like that to her. You talk as if you owned the woman.’
‘For the moment I do. And she doesn’t like it.’
His small, cheeky teeth came out in a smile. He thought I was being funny. We went into the Booth.
Beyond the confectionery counters the British Legion doorman saw us coming and got ready to hold open the smoke-room door. ‘Mr Middleton said he wanted to see you, Mr Braithewaite, Mr Machin,’ he said.
‘What’s up?’ Maurice said. ‘Does he want a new car?’
The doorman half smiled, and looked at me apologetically over Maurice’s head.
There were the usual celebrities inside—the Area Manager and the Area Accountant of the Coal Board, the pre- and post-war Conservative nominated candidates, the woodwork master from the grammar school, the Town Clerk. Each had his bunch of confederates and informers. Down the far end of the room were a few old forgotten football heroes, big and fat, a suspect amateur boxer, a selective bunch of fans, all would-be advisers. And the Mayor: Ralph Middleton.
Weaver’s group had taken over the tables near the huge coal fire, and he beckoned to Maurice as soon as we came in. Maurice went over; then I saw the Mayor moving to the only empty table and waving me to join him. He must have reserved it. ‘Did the doorman tell you?’ he said.
&nbs
p; ‘About you wanting to see Maurice and me?’
‘I see he did.’
A waiter came up and Middleton ordered a coffee. ‘Is he going to be long?’ he asked me.
‘I couldn’t say. He knows you want to see him.’
‘Well, I hope he weren’t keep us waiting. What I’ve got to say is of some importance. Even to somebody as important as Maurice Braithewaite.’ He was cold and angry, and he kept his eyes on me as if either he didn’t want to look across at Maurice or I had something that belonged to him.
I looked round at the oak-panelled walls and timbered ceiling and tried to avoid Middleton’s peculiar expression. The fire glowed, through the smoke-stained air, on the coats-of-arms and the pieces of armour decorating the room. The low tone of the conversation, the selectiveness of the people allowed in, the absence of women, made this my favourite meeting place of the week. Only this week it’d been spoilt by Mrs Hammond and now by Middleton, who suddenly changed his look to show he thought I was responsible for Maurice not coming.
‘Go an’ tell him I want him, Machin,’ he said eventually. ‘Tell him it’s now, not tomorrer.’
I went across and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Weaver, but Middleton’s bursting his britches over Maurice not being there to talk to him. He wants us for something important. Right now, he says.’
‘Oh?’ Weaver looked round the room, ducking and bobbing his head, till he saw the Mayor, who at that moment was signing for his coffee on expenses. ‘What’s the trouble, Morry?’
‘I don’t know,’ Maurice said, and I immediately knew he did. ‘How long do you think I ought to keep him waiting?’
Before Weaver could tell him anything, I said, ‘It’s up to you, Maurice. I’m going to sit with him. I can’t get a seat anywhere else,’ and I went back.
‘Is he coming?’ Middleton said over the steam from his coffee.
‘He’ll be over in a minute. What’s it you want to see us about?’