Life Goes On

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I crashed my first car when I was five,’ I said, which was true, ‘and now I’m thirty-five.’

  He took a box from under the desk that was big enough to put his feet on, and lifted out a cigar. To smoke it he needed one of those forked supports an arquebusier used to have. ‘So you see, Michael, I’ve got a decision to make. However, I’m a born judge of men. I always was. I’ve got to be. I wouldn’t last five minutes if I wasn’t. I know that you and me had a little trouble ten years ago.’

  I’d been waiting for that. ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘That’s for me to say,’ he snapped. ‘But I suppose it inclines me more towards you than otherwise. You might say it taught us a lot about each other. Almost makes you part of the family. I like to learn from the past, and don’t like starting with somebody from scratch unless I have to, or unless he’s an exceptional case, as you were in those days, and as Kenny Dukes’s brother isn’t. They’re ten a penny, that sort, in south and east London. They’re well built, cocksure and clever, but if you stop looking over their shoulder for a second they get too clever. And even the cleverest of them can’t think. Oh yes, they can move with cunning and alacrity in an emergency, but they can’t think.’

  ‘What do you expect?’

  ‘I know, but there comes a time when you hope that a subordinate might be able to think to the advantage of the man who’s paying him. I regard you as being in a different category. What’s more, you’re looking quite distinguished. Ten years in the wilderness seem to have made a man of you. In those days I didn’t so much mind a young roustabout for my wheel man. Now I like a steadier chap, but one who still knows the tricks. I’ll start you at five hundred a month, and you can have your old quarters back above the garage. You’ve got twenty-four hours to move in.’

  The answer to everything was yes. His handshake was the grip of an earth remover, and my hands were neither small nor weak. He called me back from the door. ‘How did you hear about this job?’

  ‘I bumped into Bill Straw at Liverpool Street this morning.’

  ‘Where was he going?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘What time was it?’

  ‘Just before half past nine.’

  He reached for the telephone. ‘I wish you’d come earlier.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was important.’

  ‘Piss off.’ He didn’t even look up. ‘I want a call to Holland,’ he was saying into the mouthpiece as I closed the door.

  If poor old Bill had got on that Harwich boat train, as Moggerhanger wrongly surmised due to my quick thinking, he would have been met at the Hook, made to tell where the money was and put to a particularly grisly death before being dumped into the ooze. Luckily, he was safe in Blaskin’s aerial foxhole, a fate which in no way would faze an old Sherwood Forester.

  Not wanting to get back to Upper Mayhem too early, where I would only brood myself to death over Bridgitte’s callous desertion, I decided to go into Town and get something to eat. A few hundred yards from the tube station a little dark girl who looked about ten but must have been thirty, judging from her big tits and almond eyes, was trying to carry a suitcase full of stones along the pavement. People passing were in too much of a hurry to help. Then she pulled the suitcase, till she had to stop. Then she pushed it. At that rate she’ll get to the underground in the morning, I thought. It’ll take another day to reach the platform, and she’ll tumble into some railway station – the wrong one – in about three weeks. Luckily, it wasn’t raining.

  I passed her, but a soft heart forced me to turn and pick up the case. She thought I was a footpad after her worldly belongings and looked at me, raising a little bun fist, though realising that she couldn’t win. I expected the weight to pull my arm off, but for my gold smuggling muscles it was no real burden, and I walked at a normal quick-march rate, with her half running by my side. ‘I’ll help you with it to the tube station. I’m not trying to steal it. It’s on my way.’

  She also had a satchel and a shoulder bag, so I slowed down. Her accent was foreign, and so was her lovely smile. ‘Thank you very much.’

  She was about four foot nothing, but full of promise. I asked her name, and she said it was Maria. ‘You going on holiday?’

  I thought she hadn’t understood. ‘Holiday?’ I said. We got to the ticket office. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Victoria.’

  I bought two fares, thinking to leave her after setting her luggage on the train. She’d clamped up since her first big smile and trotted by my side, while I was still wondering why Moggerhanger had given me the job so readily. It was as if he had been expecting me, though I couldn’t dredge up a reason to prove it. ‘Maria,’ I said when we were on the platform, ‘you going on holiday?’

  A bearded wino in his twenties knocked her so hard as he pushed by that she almost fell onto the rails. I pulled her back, which was as well for him that I was so occupied, but then I elbowed him onto the bench. ‘No holiday,’ she said. ‘I want to die.’

  I laughed. ‘You want to fly?’

  ‘No, die.’ She tried not to sob. Her accent was thick, but I could understand her. ‘No more job.’

  I was about to run away and leave her when the train came in. The last thing I wanted was a waif on my hands. I pushed her inside, and we faced each other over the luggage. The red woollen scarf that went round her neck and over her shoulder was only half as long as the braids of black hair that descended her back. She wore a white blouse under her coat, a black skirt, black ribbed stockings and black lace-up boots. Her face was oval and pale, a clean parting down the middle of her skull. Her brown eyes were almost liquid with tears, and the effort she made not to let them flow almost brought tears to my own – and stopped me getting out at Acton Town. I leaned forward: ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Portugal.’

  I held her warm hands, and tried to cheer her up. ‘Nice place, Portugal.’

  I wished I hadn’t said that, because she looked up full of hope. ‘You been there?’

  ‘Yes. Good country. Lisbon is a wonderful city. You go there now?’

  She didn’t answer so I looked away, wondering where I’d go to eat before getting my train to Upper Mayhem. Something wet fell on my middle finger left hand, and I turned back to her. It was a tear. I don’t know why I lifted my hand and licked it off. It was automatic, thoughtless, but with the hand that still held hers I felt a shiver go through her. I looked into her eyes, and thought I’d done the wrong thing in licking up that tear because as sure as hell – and the stare she gave hinted as much – such a gesture was, in the part of Portugal she came from, a kind of pre-nuptial ceremony that was binding forever.

  My next chance of escape was at Hammersmith. I had enough on my plate at the moment. When she spoke, the shiver went through me and not her. ‘I go nowhere. I lose my job working in English house. Missis Horlickstone throw me out. Mister Horlickstone hit me. Children hit me. Too much work. At six o’clock I get up, clean, do breakfast, serve tea, take children to school on bus, then go shopping, come back, clean, cook lunch, serve, clean up, make tea, get children from school on bus, feed children, bath children, cook dinner, serve, clean up. You know what money I get?’

  I thought the cheapskates would have paid her about thirty pounds a week.

  ‘Fifteen. I also babysit. No time off. For six months I work, live in box room, no air, no sky …’

  I couldn’t believe it. She was joking, but was breaking my heart. ‘And they sacked you?’ I said at South Kensington.

  ‘I ran away. They’re on holiday in Bermuda. They come back next week, so I leave.’

  I wondered whether she’d got the family silver in her suitcase, but knew she couldn’t be anything but honest. ‘And now you want a better job?’

  Another hot tear stung my wrist. I imagined a white acid spot when it dried. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I want to go home, but my family need money. They live on it. I have no money for train to …’ She named some place in Portuga
l I’d never heard of.

  So here was a lovely little down-trodden self-respecting intelligent thing like her with neither job, money nor place to sleep, in vast wicked London, sitting on the Underground facing a soft-hearted villain like me who also happened to be the son of Gilbert Blaskin. I supposed I could put her on the Circle Line and tell her to get off when it stopped. Where she would end up, I couldn’t imagine. She looked blank, and dumb with suffering. I wanted to go to the house she had come from and burn it down, which would be futile because the owner wasn’t in it, and would get the insurance anyway. ‘Where will you stay tonight?’

  She wiped her eyes with a white laundered handkerchief. ‘I have money for room. Tomorrow I don’t know.’

  ‘Haven’t you got any friends?’

  ‘Missis don’t let me out.’

  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘Don’t know. It takes time to get job.’

  I drew my hands away and sat up smartly, as befitted a man who was about to become an employer. ‘You’ve got one already, if you want it. Here’s Piccadilly. We’ll get out now, and go for something to eat. You hungry?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Good. While we’re eating I’ll tell you about your new job.’

  We found a place which served flock steak, chalk chips, ragdoll salad, whale fat gâteaux and acorn coffee. She loved it, so I made out that I did as well. ‘I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.’ I lit my cigar. ‘I have a country house in Cambridgeshire, as well as a wife and three children. Now, my wife and children are away at the moment, visiting our property in Holland, and won’t be back for a few days, but I’m supposed to find a woman to help with the housework. I was going to put an advertisement in the Evening Standard, but don’t need to now. What I suggest, Maria, is that you come with me to the house this evening and look the place over. I’ll pay your fare. If you don’t like it, you can stay the night, and a few more nights if you like, and then come back to London. My wife should be there, so you’ll be quite safe.’

  ‘You really got job?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ She tampered with my dessert, so I pushed it across. ‘Come and see the house. At least you won’t waste your money on a hotel.’

  She looked even paler under the artificial light. It was dusk outside, and people were hurrying along the street. ‘Why are you good to me, mister?’

  The question tormented me more than it did her. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get her into bed. Maybe I couldn’t stand living alone. She finished my dessert and I stood up. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  Out on the street it started to rain, and I had left my umbrella at Blaskin’s. I stopped, as if pricked with it, and snake venom was trickling down my leg. I saw the newsflash tickertaping across the Swiss Centre: NOVELIST ON MURDER CHARGE. Then I rubbed it away in the hope that it wouldn’t come true.

  ‘What’s a matter?’ she asked when I dropped the case. ‘No job for me now?’

  ‘No job for anybody,’ I told her, hurrying on, ‘if we don’t get to Liverpool Street and hop on that train.’

  Six

  ‘Never,’ I remember Blaskin saying, ‘bother with a novel that takes more than five pages to cover one day.’ Blaskin said many things. Blaskin is all wind and piss. Whatever he said, he meant the opposite. It was his silence you had to beware of. You were only safe when he had a pen in his hand. Even then, you had to be ready to duck in case, like James Cagney in G-Men, he mistook you for a fly on the door, and aimed it at you like a dart.

  The day I got the job with Moggerhanger was one of the longest in my life, or so it seemed at the time, proved by the fact that when I got back to Upper Mayhem with Maria, my troubles were just beginning. There were more lights shining in our comfy little railway station than had ever been set glowing when main line expresses rattled through. You could see the light for miles over the flat Fen country, a glow in the sky as if a new hydroelectric dam had been opened in the Yorkshire Dales.

  My first thought, walking with Maria and her suitcase from the bus stop, was that a band of squatters had occupied the place. I had often worked out what I would do if that happened. I’d phone Alfie Bottesford in Nottingham and tell him to get a posse of the lads together so that in one rough assault we’d have those squatters, including women, cats and kids, their pots and pans bundled into blankets, wending their lonely way in a refugee column across the Fens.

  But I could hear no triumphant wassailing as I opened the gate and stepped silently down the platform. The radio was on, and I signalled to Maria to slow down and say nothing, which gesture alone should have indicated that all was not right with her prospects for the promised job. My adrenalin was whirlpooling too much to worry about her. I looked into the booking-office-cum-parlour. Three half-packed suitcases were on the floor, and Bridgitte sat at the table trying to hypnotise a cup of tea. I felt like a marauder, dagger in teeth, about to fade back into the countryside, as if I had come to the wrong house. But it was as much mine as hers, just as were the years we’d been together, whose miserable intensity came back the longer I stared.

  She pushed the cup aside and reached for a sheet of paper and a pen, obviously intending to write the farewell letter she had been thinking about since the day we were married. Her expression of disgust caused a pain in my heart. I had never seen such a sad and saintly face. Though she may have been miserable for reasons known only unto God, both of us were locked in it together, and her despondency stirred up my muddy love for her, a love that was part of my marrow. Anything else might lack reality, but not what I felt for her. Whatever she said or did, wherever she went, whatever happened to me or to the kids, my association with her would never cease to have been the most vital of my life. I looked at her longingly and secretly.

  She wrote a few lines, stopped, and stared in my direction without seeing me. With mouth open and head drawn back, she laughed, her fair tresses hanging down, so loud that I heard her though I was outside. It was a laugh of blind malice. Perhaps she thought I was funny, pathetic and useless. Scorn brought out the happiness in her. I’d never seen her so happy. She looked like a young and carefree girl I had never known.

  I wondered what crime I had committed to have been lumbered with the catastrophe of meeting her. She had ruined my life with her humourless domesticity. I hated her. She was laughing now, but I’d never heard her laugh at anything funny while with me – if anything funny was ever worth laughing at. In our life together she had trudged unlovingly along, enduring rather than enjoying, and then, a couple of weeks ago, without warning, when Smog wasn’t too far from taking his A Levels, had lit off to Holland.

  As if picking up my thoughts, she saw the framed photograph on the sideboard. I’d never liked it. For reasons known only to herself, she had set it there, a blown-up snapshot taken at Cromer by Smog with his first camera eight years ago. Bridgitte had refused to be in the photo because she was pregnant. She reached for the frame and cracked it on the corner of the chair. Then she hit harder, till nothing was left. She bent down, broad and luscious hips beam on, picked the ragged photograph from the bits of glass and threw it on the fire.

  In a wild rage, ready to batter her to death, I kicked the door open. Striding through the hall I trampled over fifteen pairs of wellingtons, a corrugated footpath of walking sticks and umbrellas, a jungle of anoraks, and kneed so hard against the parlour door that the latch burst. I stood with fists raised, a pain in my feet because they weren’t yet kicking her.

  She faced me four-square, and shrieked, ‘Michael! You bastard!’

  ‘You bitch!’ I cried.

  ‘Oh, my love,’ she moaned, a glint in her eyes.

  I reached out for her. ‘Darling!’

  We practically ‘gonked on’ in the middle of the suitcases, ‘gonked on’ being a phrase Smog used as a youngster when he brought two trucks together on his model railway. He once stumbled into the bedroom when Bridgitte and I were ‘at it’, and ever after would refer to the time we had been ‘g
onked on’.

  We stood, embracing and kissing, mumbling dozens of tender words, apologies mostly, endearments among the tears, promises of undying loyalty and love. ‘I’m so glad you came back,’ she said. ‘Oh, Michael, Michael, Michael, I’ll never stop loving you.’

  ‘I never did stop loving you. You’re the one woman in my life.’ The sound of something scraping along the floor like the enormous bandaged left foot of a mummy coming out of a pyramid broke into my consciousness. ‘Rich, ripe, wonderful, beautiful! My only possible sweetheart.’

  I kept it up as long as I could without turning back into a baby in the playpen until Bridgitte, looking over my shoulder, stiffened at what she saw in the mirror. I felt a stinging blow from my ever loving wife who then, stepping back a few paces, stumbled over a suitcase. She righted herself. ‘Who’s that?’

  It had been obvious for some time who that was. First it was a suitcase, and then it was Maria, the waif I had rescued from a fate worse than death, pushing her luggage slowly across the threshold, panting as she did so.

  ‘It’s someone I hired in London to clean up the house and to look after you and the kids when you got back from Holland. Her name’s Maria. Maria,’ I called, ‘this is Bridgitte my wife who I told you about. She’ll show you what to do, though she may slap you around a bit in the process.’

  Bridgitte stiffened, as if about to show Maria how right I was. But she held herself back. ‘So that’s what you do? As soon as I go to see my parents for two weeks you run off and get another woman. I should have known.’

  It was no use trying to be angry. Yet if I wasn’t she would believe me even less. I gave her an equally stinging crack across the chops. ‘I was eating my heart out for you,’ I said, ‘and only went to London this morning. I met Maria tonight on the Underground. She’d just lost her skivvying job and had nowhere to go. So I thought we could use her here. I decided you worked too hard. You needed help.’