Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  “I mean about the house.” He wrapped two pictures in brown paper, a wedding present from one of Vera’s brothers. “I told you before: everything’s ready. The house is clean from top to bottom and I’ve got the rent book and keys. All we’ve got to do is get the stuff there.”

  A common peril—having other things to fight beside themselves—made them amiable. They were too busy to quarrel, warmed by the risk of a secret move. Yet Vera tormented herself by wondering how long this happiness would last. “I hope we do better in the new place than we’ve done here.”

  “We haven’t done too bad, you know,” Seaton said, making a packet of knives and forks with tea-towel and white tape. He worked with a single-minded intensity, an undeflectable purpose in which action became an emotion and therefore was contentment for him. “Think of it, duck, a house to oursens!”

  “It’ll be a lot better,” she admitted. “There’s too much noise here. And besides, the house is cheaper.”

  Blankets and sheets were drawn into brown paper, became a parcel bulging between a squeezing network of thin string. “Put your finger on here,” he said, twisting the first loop of the final knot and pulling it tight. She did so, exerting a gentle pressure where the string crossed. He looped the cord again in the half-dark room. “Take it off now,” he said, and snapped the fixity tight as soon as she did so. “There!” he exclaimed. “That’s done.” He sat on one of the chairs to rest. “We can get going in a bit”—and lit a cigarette to wait.

  Vera opened the window and rested her elbows on the cool ledge. It was autumn and the red-bricked factory wall glowed with light, turning a salmon-pink from the dying sun that could no longer be seen, making her think of the sun as she remembered it going down behind Wollaton Church, whose spire split the glowing clouds suspended above Baloon House hill. And she thought of suppers at the Nook and the small bedroom shared with Ada and Lyddy, and being half-asleep in the half-light in spite of stories being told in the same or in the next bed and the grunt of ever restless pigs in the sty outside. Now the factory bricks were dull and a few dead-eyed stars came out above the roof. She heard the oven-door clang at the Nook and smelled new-baked bread.

  A voice was talking and she turned back to the dark room, in time to remember that she had somehow been landed in the middle of a moonlight flit.

  Back from work, he glanced at her distrustfully, saying with unlimited concern: “You ain’t bin working too hard, have yer?”

  Steak-potatoes-cabbage came from oven to table. “I’ve got to work, you know.”

  He patted her on the stomach: “I don’t want owt to ’appen to my little gel.”

  “How do you know it’ll be a gel?” she joked, sitting by the fire.

  “It’s sure to be,” he said, eating. “If I want it to be a gel, it will be.”

  “I want a boy. He can look after me then when he grows up.” Against you, she added under her breath.

  “Whatever it is,” he grinned, “it’s bound to be a baby.”

  He made her sit down while he mashed the tea. She couldn’t help saying: “I wonder how long this will last?”

  “What?”—boiling water went into the pot.

  “You being so nice.”

  “Forever, my sweetheart. You know I’m a good lad to you,” he claimed, pressing the cosy down.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, almost as uneasy as if he were in one of his rages. But it was impossible to provoke him. He laughed off her taunts, fussed over her and squeezed her hand, got her to tell him what was in the newspaper while he cleared the table and washed the pots. Coming back from the scullery, he seated himself opposite, took out a pair of old trousers to mend. “You’re a real jack-of-all-trades,” she said.

  “Aye,” he answered, looking for the thimble, “and master of none. I should a bin a good ’polsterer, but my feyther thought too much of his booze to bother learnin’ me.”

  “You’re a sight cleverer than me, I will say.” It was one of two old cottages they lived in—living-room, scullery, and a pair of small bedrooms—set on a lane. Vera missed the sound of factory engines and traffic, found herself immersed again in silent afternoons as she waited for a reasonable time at which the kettle could be set on the fire, or sat with folded hands waiting for the tread of Seaton’s shoes on the ash-laid path.

  She liked to see him busy, for then he was less irritable. He turned his hand to make tasks, employing such slow-moving methods that she thought he would never be done, when suddenly there was a neat patch, a pair of refurbished shoes, a new latch on the gate. When a brother lent him tools, he made cabinets, and ornamental shelves into which he fixed diamond-shaped mirrors, sold for five shillings to people met in Radford or at work. But his suit still went to the pawnshop on Monday morning, a hand-to-mouth loaning system on which they lived until Friday night.

  Winter snowed its snow, created a masterpiece of arctic mist and rain until a vanguard convoy of warm days turned into Easter, with supplies of sun run surreptitiously through from warmer lands. Normally slim Vera felt her body growing to what seemed enormous size, which often made her half-ashamed in spite of Seaton’s saying with a laugh that she looked no different from other women, and that was the truth. “In fact, you wouldn’t know there was owt inside you at all unless you thought to tek a closer goz,” he argued. Well, she felt too sluggish to worry much.

  She walked up the lane one afternoon, passing the sandtip where lorries sometimes came to empty their humped backs. Over the low sandstoned wall lay a stagnant stream, a green and still surface whose tadpoled water beneath seemed to have come from nowhere, a lost tributary of the Lean displaced by the machinations of the pit. She passed primroses and ripening elderberry bushes, and from the railway bridge looked down at the colliery working full tilt. Trucks jangled in the sidings, hooters sounded, and coal rushed into railway trucks from glistening steel chutemouths on the underside of enormous reservoirs that matched the free-wheeling pit shaft in height. Smells of dust and train smoke were in the air, but she enjoyed the sun, and the sight of buttercups growing out of the parapet wall. She told herself that, though Christmas had carried off her twenty-fourth birthday, she was still a girl, felt a girl at any rate, and was somehow distantly frightened that everyone should consider her a woman. And Harold isn’t much more than a lad either, she thought.

  It was hot and still, a world without wind. Looking in the direction of the Nook, she wanted to leap down the bridge steps and go there, crossing the far ridge to where safety lay. Her mind slipped into the momentary refuge of this idea, saying to run back would mean no more worry about the baby on its way. Once she had slammed the door (hearing the dogs chase off the few pursuing devils), her pregnancy would disappear and she would be a girl again. She stood a long time by the wall, various scenes arising from a well of forgotten relics. It must have been twenty years ago, on a Saturday night when she had been hours asleep with her sisters, that an arm lifted her up, out of bed and room. She huddled to what carried her, still trying to sleep in spite of movement and the sound of creaking stairs. “Now then, Vera, wake up,” Merton said when the kitchen lamp blazed white upon them. He set her on the table and took a screwed-up fist from her eyes to show her a circle of collier pals, with grinning faces, done up in their weekend best, breathing beer and pip-smoke when they laughed at what Merton had done. “She’s going to dance,” he said, drumming a rhythm on the table. “I towd yer she was pretty, did’t I? Now you’ll see her dance as well. Come on, Vera, my duck, cock yer legs up and do us a dance. Come on, and I’ll gi’ yer a penny.” A man’s voice sang and she stepped around the table edge, feet lifting and falling to the tune, smiling at the long moustaches and laughing voices saying what a pretty little dancer she was.

  Seaton entered the house whistling a song, cap in hand and coat half off; a minute later he left the house, his face a yellow white, and hurried in the direction of the nearest houses to get a midwife.

  While waiting, he set himself to clean the k
itchen and scullery, but because of his nervousness this task lasted half an hour instead of a possible two or three. He sat by the fire smoking, his mind clouded by a numb unhappiness, a helplessness at what was going on upstairs. The groans and cries suggested only disaster, an unspectacular black ending of the world that kept him pinned like a moth to the fireside. His enforced quiescence released only a paltry feeling of rage, not strong enough to dispel the hypnotic grip in which each fresh cry caught him. A flame suddenly burned his fingers, its pain reminding him to strike another match and light up in earnest. He thrust a heavy brass-handled poker between the firebars, and glowing coal fell wastefully through into the tin beneath. “How long will it be,” he wondered aloud, “before it’s all over?”

  Eleven struck from some church. “The first one’s worse than waiting to go over the top at Gallipoli,” a workmate had assured him. For the woman it might be, Seaton thought, throwing more coal on, because sometimes they never got over it. No amount of thinking could take him further than that, and his face was ashen with the burden of pity. He wished some pub or picture-house was open, or that some pal would be glad to see him at such an hour, but it was black outside with only the odd bird trying to whistle and maybe a few rats scuttling through long grass in the field.

  The coalscuttle was empty: his searching hand rubbed among cobbles and dust on the bottom, so he went outside to the garden shed. He dislodged a ledge of coal in the light of an uprisen half moon, then set to breaking pieces off without spilling too much slack or making much noise. He used both the blunt and blade of the axe, spinning the smooth haft in his palm without once letting it fall, chipping a wedge into the coal grain with the blade, and knocking it apart with the back, until a pan of even lumps had been gathered. A handbrush hung on the wall and he swept the slack up to a corner, then stacked the coal into a more even arrangement as far from the door as possible, happy and content now that his mind was empty, whistling a tune from nowhere that no one had ever written as his stocky waistcoated figure stooped to his made-up work.

  By the kitchen door he heard Vera cry. He had forgotten her, and the blinding cry of pain startled him so that he almost dropped the coal. He went in and loaded the fire, but couldn’t stay by it. The clock hands had moved on ten minutes, and that was the only difference in his mood between now and before he had broken the coal. Another cry of pain brought a response of hatred and anger, and he leaned on the gate outside hearing the distant beat of colliery engines and seeing occasional courting couples sauntering along the lane to vanish in darkness by hedges further up, until he felt deathly cold and returned to the fire. He swore in a low voice, cursing no one in particular and nothing he could give words to, unless it was whatever made his lips whistle the unwritten tune in the coal-house, that he didn’t even know he’d been whistling.

  The midwife said it was a boy, and he went quickly up the stairs. “Are you all right, duck?”

  “Yes,” she told him, her face bleached with exhaustion. He stood a few moments not knowing what to say. She held something in her arms. “Can I see him?” The baby was shown. “It’s small, i’n’t it?” was his opinion. “Though I expect it’ll get bigger. They all do.”

  She looked at him looking at the baby. “It will.”

  “What shall we call it?”

  “I ain’t bothered about that yet,” she said, thinking: I don’t want to go through that lot again.

  “Call it Brian,” he ventured.

  She closed her eyes. “All right.”

  “I’m going to work in the morning,” he told her. “But I’ll go to your mother’s first and tell her to call and see you.” She was asleep; my young gel, he thought, walking down the stairs to make a bed on the sofa, my young gel’s got over it at last and it’s about time.

  Rain beat in gusts against the bedroom window, an uneven rhythm singing with the wind, and Vera realized from her blissful half-sleep that Seaton was still in bed, that he had to be at work by half-past seven, that it must be late because the room was light already. Six-month bottle-fed Brian should cry his guts out from the crib for milk any minute, so she sat bolt upright, while Seaton grunted and turned over in his sleep at the disturbance. She glanced at the clock on the dressing-table, nudged him in fear and apprehension.

  “What’s a matter?” he yawned.

  “Come on, ’Arold. It’s gone eight-thirty.” Dressing quickly, she knew there’d be trouble, always the case when he overlaid like this. He acted as if it were the end of the world because he’d be an hour late at his job. She could never understand it; he seemed not to have much fear of losing it, or to be afraid of his foreman; but he became a maddened bull when jerked straight from sleep into something to worry about, a rush that wouldn’t let him dawdle by the fire over a cup of tea and some bread-and-jam, then wander off briskly yet with a settled mind along the morning lane. With a glance at Brian she went downstairs, leaving Seaton looking sullenly for his trousers.

  She poked ashes through the grate and screwed up a newspaper, shivering in the damp cold. Seaton came down: “Get out of my bastard way”—pushing by and sitting in an armchair to pull on his boots. She spread sticks over the paper. “Why don’t you wash your foul mouth out?” she cried, knowing how true it was that their quarrels never began by a stray word and went by slow stages to a climax, but started immediately at the height of a wild destructive battle, persisting with violent intensity to blows, or degenerating to a morose energy-less condition often lasting for days. There seemed no halfway stage between a taunting jungle fray, and a loving happiness. Vera could not switch her moods with Seaton’s speed, and so detested his fussiness between quarrels, treating him at the best with brittle gaiety and reserve. She had tried controlling her retorts in the hope of finding some other man in Seaton who never quarrelled, who was kind all the time, who would love her in spite of them both, only to discover that no such breadth existed in him. For six months after Brian was born he had been near to this, but the novelty of a baby soon wore off.

  A bootlace snapped and he snorted with rage, muttering inaudibly. Her heart beat wildly: “Why didn’t you wake up?” she implored.

  “Because the bastard alarm clock didn’t go off,” he shouted. “Or you forgot to set the bleeding thing, one of the two.”

  Sticks and paper flared in the grate, cracking and sparking. His continual swearing was the carrier of terrible hatred seen in his face; thus she attacked his swearing, as if his hatred—and therefore their troubles—would go could she cure him of that: “For God’s sake, use less filthy talk.”

  “You what?” he bellowed. “You what?” She wanted to say something else, but no words were good enough. If only the minute-hand would race around the clock (that he had set on the shelf as an accusation against her) so that he would clear off to work; or if, better still, it would run back to seven o’clock and they were happily drinking tea. She was crying now. “You can get into the factory at half-past nine, can’t you?”

  “Shut yer cryin’, yer mardy bleeder.”

  “I’m not cryin’ for you.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to cry for me,” he shouted, dragging cups and saucers from the cupboard. “I wouldn’t want any bastard to cry for me.” She sat by the window, which was the farthest point she could get from him in the house without actually running away—which she felt powerless to do. “I wish I’d never married you. And I wouldn’t a done if Ada and my mother hadn’t made me come downstairs on the day we got married.”

  The kettle boiled and he was not deterred from making the tea. “It’s the worse turn they ever did me then.”

  “I wish I’d never married you,” she wept.

  “Well, you know what to do,” he roared. “Go back to that dirty mother o’ yourn, and that drunken old man, and that pack of poxetten brothers and sisters.”

  She picked up a cup. “Don’t you call them, or you’ll get this at your face. They’re worth fifty of yo’.”

  Seaton stood, head and shoulders be
nt towards her, eyes pierced with madness. “You throw that bastard cup, that’s all. Just you throw that cup.”

  No thought, no caution. “I will,” she cried. “I will”—words of affirmation echoing through her memory back to the day she was married.

  “Go on,” he hissed, “go on, throw it. Just you throw it, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” He stood by the wall, a loaf in one hand and a knife in the other.

  The table was between. “You think I daren’t, don’t you?”—her heart breaking in agony.

  It flew for his eyes, all her might and aim behind it, smashing to pieces on the wall. He had not leaned out of its track; and then she felt his hand hitting at her face. Reeling back to the sofa, covering her head, she remembered the breadknife gripped in his fist before she let fly with the cup. The stinging blows somehow hurt through to her cheeks despite the protection of her hands, until she felt no more stings because he must have stopped.

  “You’ll have your day to come,” she sobbed, shaking with misery, hands still over her eyes, “when he grows up upstairs.”

  His answer was a barrage of curses: no reasonable reply to her long-term threat, but simply a spring reaction to what could be countered in no other way.

  “God will pay you out,” was all she could say to it.

  “What bastard God?” he shouted with a sneer. “There ain’t no bastard God.” His sacrilege overwhelmed her and she looked blankly out of the window, at tree trunks showing dimly through sheets of rain. You’d think God would strike him dead, saying a thing like that; but happen he was right: there was no God. He was cutting bread and wrapping it in paper for his lunch, then drinking a cup of tea, and all the time she hoped he would put on his coat and leave her in peace.

  “’Ave some snap and fags ready for when I get back tonight.”

  “You’ll get nowt else from me,” she cried. “I’m going home this morning, and I’m taking Brian with me. You wain’t see me again, so don’t try and come for me.”