A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  He sent Pearl into the kitchen to make coffee: ‘That’s what women and disciples are for,’ he said, sprawling back in a wide armchair, ‘to clean your glasses, fill your pipe, and tuck you up at night when you go to bed slightly drunk.’

  ‘I believe in treating them better than that,’ I said, deliberately sanctimonious so as to draw him out.

  ‘That’s because you’re young,’ he laughed. ‘You’ll learn.’

  I was always being told that, and it riled me. They said it in order to bring me round to their opinions. As far as I was concerned I’d learned already, but I had yet to find out how wrong I was. ‘They stay longer if you treat ’em better,’ I said.

  ‘Who wants them to stay? There are plenty more where they come from. They never get wise, either, so don’t tell me that.’

  Pearl came in with a tray. ‘Do you take it black or white, Mr Blaskin?’

  ‘Better give it to me black, Pearly dear. That’s the way I’m feeling tonight, so watch your bum when we get to bed. I’m the sex maniac incorporated tonight.’

  Her face went vermilion at this, so she turned to pour coffee for me. ‘Do you want me to leave?’ I asked Gilbert. There was a row of small pictures along the deep-blue wall behind his chair, of horses floundering to death, and jolly huntsmen in their bloody jackets lying on top of them with gritty smiles.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘unless you can’t stand my personal remarks to Pearl. You don’t mind, do you, lovely?’

  She didn’t speak, tried to smile, but the coffee went down her wrong throat and she coughed to clear it out. I offered to start typing his novel right now.

  ‘The morning’s better,’ he said. ‘I can’t be bothered to find it. I think I put it in the bread bin. Or maybe it’s under my pillow. Or in the airing cupboard. Anyway, don’t bother me with such supremely unimportant questions. I think I’m going to have a thought.’ He lifted himself a little, and one of his profundities splintered the room.

  ‘It’s all very well,’ I said, ‘but how much are you going to pay me while I work for you? I was getting twenty a week at my last job.’

  He threw his cigarette towards the electric fireplace but it landed on the carpet. ‘What’s all the hurry?’

  ‘I’ve got to go out and find a room for the night.’

  He glared at Pearl, who still had her nose in the coffee: ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘There’s the spare room if you want it. We can talk terms in the morning.’

  It didn’t seem a bad place to hole up in if Moggerhanger should think to hunt me out for the theft of his cigarette lighter. ‘Darling,’ Gilbert said to Pearl, singing like a canary, ‘are you going to sit there watching a hole burn itself in my best carpet? One of my great great-uncles looted it from India, and that would be a sad end for it.’

  I found the spare room, and on my way called at the kitchen, taking half a cold chicken from the fridge, as well as a few slices of Miracle Bread from the bin, and a tin of orange juice and two bananas. So I lay in bed and puffed myself on Blaskin’s goodies, while he was in the main room doing his best to stuff Pearl Harby.

  I woke in the morning to the noise of Handel’s Messiah, which seemed a mockery to the confusion I felt inside me, because for a while I didn’t know where I was. Then the music made me want to laugh, because it was so great to hear first thing up from the dreams of oblivion that no matter where I was I felt glad to be alive and wanted to go on living for ever. Looking out I saw a great façade of drainpipes and back windows, lit up by the sun. By my pocket watch it was almost ten o’clock, and the smell of breakfast filtered under the door, together with the music singing ‘O my people’ which, the longer it went on, made me want to cry with joy, booming as if the world was full of drums and voices, so that when I lay down again, with my eyes closed, it began to pull me backwards by the feet, back towards some great river I’d never get out of.

  I dressed to my shirt and trousers, then hungrily followed my nose. Blaskin was sitting in a grandad-armchair at the end of the kitchen table, a wine-dark dressing-gown looped around him, frowning over the various plates of breakfast that Pearl had laid out. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is serious in the morning. In the morning you realize with deadly dread that the past is the present, because whatever has happened in the past is part of now. To know this gives you an angel’s grip on life, but it’s a bitter pill, just the same.’

  He began eating, and Pearl, whiter than the night before and far more haggard, wrote quickly in a pad by the side of her cornflakes, maybe what he was saying, though I couldn’t be sure, because at the same time she breathed heavily as if she were making up a shopping list. ‘My next novel is to be called Motto by Gilbert Blaskin. People may think I’ve gone crackers, using a title like that, but it’s the thought that counts.’

  I launched a thousand cornflakes into a dish of milk. ‘I’ll give you two pounds a week with your room and food,’ he offered.

  ‘Two pounds fifteen,’ I haggled.

  He glared at me. ‘Two pounds ten.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, thinking to take it for as long as it suited me.

  ‘My novel is about a man who came out of a Christmas cracker, and lived by the same motto, through thick and thin, until he gets run over by a bus while being chased by the police for firing an air-gun at a horse-guard’s horse. Pearl, the bacon’s cold.’ I couldn’t see myself lasting very long in this place, though I thought that if I was here for the next half-hour I’d be all set to hang on as long as I liked.

  She stopped writing: ‘What was the motto, Mr Blaskin?’

  ‘You’ll have to search the novel for that. It’s a quarter of a million words long and based on the Oedipus legend told backwards. It consists of four fateful words, but it does for our hero. Two will be hammered into his feet to lame him, and the other two will put out his eyes. That’s how he gets run over. He can’t see. Also he can’t run, but he hobbles very well. They find a copy of the Factories Act in his pocket, which is the only pornography he ever allowed himself. Also, of course, the pertinent question may be brought up as to how a blind man can aim an air-gun at a horse. The fact was, he didn’t need to run at all, would merely have been bound over, or patted on the head and given a safe seat by the Conservative Party. Such is life, he said, as they lifted the bus off him a few seconds before he expired!’

  I got up and put the coffee back on the stove, while he chewed the fat of his insane liver that lived off the fat of the land. I wished I’d been working in a factory so that I could have told him to belt up and get some real work done.

  His novel, a pile of paper tied up in purple cloth, was taken from a locked safe in his study and carried to my room as if it were the royal baby, and set on a table where I was to copy it on to a typewriter. I did ten pages the first day, but after that I speeded up to thirty or forty. It was better than I thought it would be, after all the gobbledegook he spouted when he wasn’t actually writing, and at the end of each day I quickly read what I’d done to make sure I’d missed no part of the story. Pearl sat in the living-room copying his notes, and writing her own book on what the great man said, and what his ideas were. She must have been more of a genius than he was to fathom that lot out. And while we were busy Gilbert himself was in his study, writing to the record of Handel’s Messiah, which he played over and over again. He said that with such music he fancied himself in the wilderness, with no other soul nearby for a hundred miles, and that’s what he liked because it kept his thoughts on an inspired and elevated level. Sometimes when he was in the kitchen or living-room eating in silence he would get a glazed look over his eyes and cry out: ‘Pass my pen. And some paper. I can feel it. Something’s coming!’ Pearl would usually hustle to do his bidding, so that he was able to scribble a few lines of whatever it was, then get back to the serious business of eating or throwing back brandy.

  There were times when Gilbert Blaskin went into what I came to recognize later in life as a mood of cosmic despair. It seemed to me, neverth
eless, only right that an author should subside into this misery, even though it might be self-induced for the benefit of his work – as I sometimes suspected it to be. In order to work himself into it he had first to have an audience which, because they were black days for him, consisted only of me and Pearl. He also needed to say something funny, not necessarily so to him, but he had to see us laugh before he could get really depressed. I told myself I was only staying there to escape the wrath of Moggerhanger when he discovered I’d filched his heirloom, but partly, and maybe even mostly, it was because I couldn’t contain my curiosity regarding the inner life of this weird person. I didn’t like myself for it, either, and said ten times a day that I’d slide out as soon as I’d had my fill.

  One night Gilbert Blaskin (who hasn’t heard of him?) was booked for the Royal Court Theatre nearby. He dressed in his best suit and bow-tie because it was a first-night performance, and before leaving he went – all spruced-up as he was – into the kitchen, looking for his lighter, which he found, and put into his pocket. His eyes then caught sight of a full cool bottle of milk, so without thinking he pushed in the top, upended it at his mouth, and began to gurgle it down. I was on the other side of the table cutting into a steak that Pearl had just grilled for me, and saw that half the milk was spilling down Gilbert’s immaculate togs. I was too fascinated by this spoliation to say anything, though I know I should not have been, but ought to have opened my mouth about it at the beginning. By the end he didn’t need to be told, though I did tell him, for he felt his saturated front with horror. Then he shrugged, wiped it with a tea towel, and went out cursing his luck. This depressed him for a start.

  I couldn’t stand the flat, so went for a walk towards Victoria, drinking in the drizzle as if it were the best and freshest moisture in the world when it fell against my face. The station held me in its movement, and I drifted along one platform after another, till I wandered on to one from where trains left for Paris and Italy. People were kissing and saying goodbye before setting off towards the coast. It made London seem smaller and less important, and myself less rooted in it, thrilled me to realize that I had enough money in the bank to get on one of those trains whenever I liked, and go a long way, not only there, but even back if I wanted to, or had to. It calmed me, and I walked home through Eaton Square.

  It was still early, so I went into the kitchen to make coffee. Pearl hadn’t heard me come in, because she was standing at the stove with only a thin pair of pants on and nothing else, not even carpet slippers. ‘You look marvellous from behind,’ I said, ‘but turn round, love, and let me see the front.’

  For the first time her face had an expression on it, of dis-content that was near to tears, so I went over and tried to comfort her, though my eyes weren’t too long on her face. There were scars on her back and sides, as if she’d been stitched up for some good reason or other. When my fingers touched one she shrugged them away pettishly. Then she nestled close and said: ‘Why didn’t he take me with him? I’ve known him for a month but the only time we went anywhere together was to that poetry reading where we met you.’

  ‘Maybe he’s meeting somebody else,’ I said, kissing her forehead. ‘But don’t let it worry you if he is. He can’t help it. He’s just rotten. He has to be, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to write his books.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘that’s what I keep telling myself. I didn’t expect anything when I first met him, and then when I didn’t get anything I began to expect something. It’s so stupid of me.’

  ‘It is,’ I had to admit. ‘I don’t really know why people expect things of each other in any case.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, trying to smile, ‘it’s not as bad as you make it, because I don’t expect anything from you, but you’re being kind and trying to comfort me.’

  ‘Don’t let that worry you,’ I said. ‘I can’t help it. It’s my nature to be kind to people.’ She was right though. I had no thought of getting her into bed just because she was Blaskin’s mistress. For that’s what she was no matter how he snubbed her. However, she stood a bit too long leaning her naked top into me, and soon I began to kiss her lips, and out of her tears she began to respond.

  ‘I’ll put you to bed,’ I said, and when she nodded, I walked her into the main bedroom. In case she was feeling cold because of her tears, I filled a hot-water bottle, but she said she didn’t need that sort of heater, so I let it drop and took off my clothes to lie by her side. In fact I found her to be burning like a big hot coal, and of its own accord my piece found its way there, and of its own accord her birdcage welcomed it till my vulture sank its head for joy and flooded her to the brim so that I was also scorching. I was flushed with love, but she wouldn’t let me kiss her lips or touch her on the tenderest spot with my fingers, so after a while I got out of bed and dressed, left her content as far as I could tell, and went into the kitchen to look for something to eat.

  While I was chopping off slices of salami she came in wearing a thick sunflower dressing-gown: ‘I’m hungry, too, now that I’ve got over my fit of melancholic jealousy.’ I made her a sandwich, thick with German mustard, and she ate greedily, which put me off her a bit because though I like to see a woman eat (it gives me more of a kick than if she had loosened her own blouse) I don’t like to see one as voracious as Pearl Harby now was. So I turned my back on her and got the coffee. In any case, she was eating so quickly that she reached out for the salami before I could offer her some more, and soon there was none left for me. Never mind, I thought, she’s been disappointed in love, and that explains everything, or is supposed to.

  ‘My father worked in the railway yards at Swindon,’ she said, sitting herself comfortably on my knee, ‘and one night he was killed by a German landmine that lit up his life beautifully before it blacked him into a thousand pieces. I was six at the time and there was no funeral because he didn’t exist. It must have landed right on the parting of his hair. A year later my mother died of bronchitis, and I was taken to live with an aunt and uncle, who already had a little girl of their own, called Catherine. The man, unlike my father, had got on in the world, as they say, and he was a solicitor in Cowminster, a small Wiltshire market town. He was very respected, but apart from having done what he regarded as his duty by adopting me, he really had no love for me. He was cold towards me, as if he thought I was going to jump into his bed and force him into an unnatural crime, or as if I was going to alienate him from his own daughter. In my bewilderment I was a bit afraid of him, and it took me a good two years not to be, and to adjust to the new situation. He could tell I was afraid of him, and resented it because he thought it meant I didn’t love him as I should for having had the kindness to take me in.

  ‘Well, he didn’t realize that I was a child, and had no consciousness. I only loved him, for a few minutes, when he was giving me something, and so he resented it too, that I didn’t love him all the time, even though he didn’t really love me. But neither of them knew that for several years I was still grieving for my real parents, and I wasn’t able to tell them this. They spoke about them now and again, but in a very matter-of-fact way, almost as if they were still alive, and as if I were on holiday with them. Of course, they loved Catherine as their true daughter, and nobody could blame them for that or expect it to be any different, but I felt it sharply. To make up in some way for my desolation I fell in love with Catherine, because much of what she got from her parents she gave to me, because she was very kind and sweet. She was two years older, a girl with blonde hair and grey eyes, slightly fat from overfeeding and too much indulgence, but we were good friends, and my life after a year or so became much more settled, and I eventually did get to think more tenderly of my new parents.

  ‘The mother was kind to me, and tried to love me, and helped me a great deal. Most of all, I grew up in a mildly intellectual atmosphere, which could never have been the case with my real parents, and this certainly did a lot to make my life richer. The house was full of books, books read, books talked abou
t. I found out later that most of them were no good, all second-rate except for writers like Dickens and Thackeray, Jane Austen and Shakespeare. So I read those avidly, because I was soon able to tell what books were good and what were trash. Catherine went to a grammar school, and I followed her there as soon as I was old enough. If only she had been my real sister, then I wouldn’t have gone through so much suffering because of her. All the love I had in me I put on to her, and when I saw her getting a crush on somebody else, whether boy or girl, I got so jealous and tormented that I thought I’d have to kill myself to get over it! It was crazy, and bad for both of us. Not that she didn’t love me as well, in her way, as a friend, though at times this was almost enough to make me happy and satisfy me, but mostly she was interested in everything and just wanted to get on with her self-absorbed life.

  ‘Our parents noticed how I mooned after her, but they thought I had only the same worshipful regard for her as they had, because after all she was their only child. I always felt that I was nowhere near as good-looking and well favoured as she was, which wasn’t all that true, but that’s what I felt at the time. It’s terrible being a child, when you don’t know what’s happening to you. You’re just at the mercy of these supercharged underground emotions that gnaw you away like black midnight wolves, and you suffer because you can’t tell what’s happening to you. You’re able to see it more clearly when you get older, but by then it’s too late to do any good, and in any case underground emotions are still taking you to pieces and not putting you back together again, just as they were then, and you still don’t have the detachment to know what’s happening. In fact I suppose it’s even more dangerous because you think that you do, and actually get the illusion that you are in control of yourself. I have the horrible feeling this goes on all your life, and that at death the final question whose answer can solve everything and tell you everything can only be answered after death itself, which really is too late. It gives me the horrors, throws me into despair if I go on thinking about it for too long. But as there’s no answer, I try to block it out, though I’m not always capable of it.