The Death of William Posters: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 1)

by Alan Sillitoe

  3

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘come in a moment.’

  It was a plainbricked four-roomed cottage and, when he entered, a steep flight of stairs faced him. One door to the right led into a parlour, that to the left, a dining-room. ‘Leave your pack by the stairs.’ He dropped it and followed her into the dining-room. On the table was a tea tray, and she took another blue-ringed beaker from the shelf: ‘Sit down and have some tea. That is, unless you’re determined on water.’ She was tall, had ginger hair and flowerblue eyes, thin lips that smiled back at him. Her frock had a cardigan over it, and she wore stockings and houseshoes. He put her at over thirty, but then, he thought, I’ve never seen a young midwife. ‘You look as if you’ve walked a long way,’ she said.

  He faced her across the table, slid down the sweet scald of the big cup. ‘From Spilsby.’ It had been the longest footslog so far, his eyes fried and feet sore, his body feeling dustcaked and sweatbound. He offered her a cigarette.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. The silence won over the birds, backed up by heavy cloud shadows approaching road and hedgerows, and the humping softloamed fields beyond the window. A car went by, leaving a heavier silence. ‘It’s rare for someone to stop at my door and ask for a drink of water – unless it’s children in the summer.’

  ‘It’s rare for me to get tea when I ask for it. I’m on my way to Lincoln.’

  ‘Why Lincoln?’ She spoke well, smoked as if she smoked a lot, and seemed always about to laugh at him, which he sensed and was amused at.

  ‘To get to Sheffield. I’m just tramping around the country.’

  ‘You don’t look like a tramp. When I opened the door just now I thought you were an ordinary young man from the village to see about some carpenter’s work I want doing.’ He had that sort of build – yet now he didn’t seem like that to her at all. Maybe that’s what put that bastard’s back up who thought I was begging his lift, he thought. He didn’t know what I looked like, out on the road with rucksack, but dressed in smart enough jacket and trousers, travelling in heavy and well-polished shoes, a short haircut, and a tie on. If I’d snivelled and was clobbered up like a tramp, that would have been O.K., but it worried him that he couldn’t place me – private, corporal, sergeant. He thought back again to giving the soldier a lift. After dropping him at a house in Loughborough he had headed north again, the day opening wider as his car drove into it, black trees and green hills of the Trent hemming around the curving road. Summer was poleaxed: the sapjuice smell of wild flowers and dead wheat soaked in sun was giving place to spent grass and barren trees. September was playing it cool, and the first subtle change of season rolled a desperate message up from the turning tyres, whispering it was time to light out to the unlit far-and-wides felt to exist with such potency only by a man more than fed-up to the teeth.

  A policeman was flagging him to a halt by a barrier of black cars and cycle-cops, plainclothes men and brasshats talking together as if the word had gone out to get Bertrand Russell. He slowed down and a black cyclop swung towards him: jackboots crunching, helmet unstrung above a red, vacant face, in truth the timid Midlands visage of a man who should have been serving behind the Co-op counter, joshing with the women in some collier’s town. He stood by the car window and Frank twisted the ignition off, tempted to let the wheel roll over his boot and end his days in prison. ‘A man’s got out of Upton Asylum, and he’s dangerous. You haven’t given anybody a lift today, have you? He’s a young feller of nineteen. Got out early this morning. Wearing a soldier’s uniform, and stutters a bit.’

  Frank lifted his face, hand on chin as if truly thinking, yet instinctively answering: ‘I didn’t see anybody.’

  He was waved on. It must have been that soldier I picked up. Maybe tonight he’ll be raping little girls or coshing an old couple for their pension books. Perhaps I said I hadn’t seen him because it would have kept me back from a drink for an hour while they checked my answers. I suppose it’s no good, though, not to be bothered, but in most things that’s how they like you to be, to watch the telly or have a few drinks and not be bothered, because if I was bothered I wouldn’t put up with the death camp I’m living in. So they’ve got to be satisfied when I can’t be bothered to help them to capture some poor soldier who has jumped the looneybin. I couldn’t be bothered to tell the police where that soldier was because I couldn’t be bothered to be bothered. But they’ll get him because thousands of others can be bothered to be bothered, but maybe this dangerous soldier will get his hands on the throat of some fleshhead who can be bothered to be bothered and drop him dead in some dark corner, because those who can be bothered to be bothered are bothered about the wrong things and never bother to get bothered about things that really matter.

  Still, it worried him that he hadn’t told them where he’d driven that soldier to in Loughborough, and now so long afterwards it seemed much more a crime that, in his lunacy of the last day, he had committed without thought, worrying him more and deeper even than his departure from wife and kids.

  He looked around the room, at the writing desk, bookcase loaded, mirror above the fireplace. ‘It’s good furniture you’ve got.’

  ‘It belonged to my mother. I brought it up from Surrey, and some of it came from auction rooms around here. What else do you want to know?’

  He played along with her light-hearted mockery, unused to the idea of eating in such silence. ‘I didn’t think you came from the norm. How did you end up in Lincolnshire?’

  ‘I hope I don’t end up anywhere. By marriage I lived in London, and by appointment I got this job here. It’s a hard one, but I like it. Have another cup?’

  ‘I will. You’ve set me off, with such good tea’ – and again she gave a smile as if to say: ‘I might have taken you in out of the goodness of my heart, but you don’t have to say anything nice for it. I’m in charge here.’ She laughed at these thoughts: wrinkles beginning around the eyes, but her skin was white and smooth. The dress was buttoned to her neck, and the cardigan didn’t hide completely the small swell of her breasts. ‘I’d better be on my way,’ he said. ‘Knock a few more miles back.’

  ‘I don’t imagine you’ll get to Lincoln tonight.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll sleep somewhere snug. I’m glad of the healthy life for a while. It’s not too cold yet, and a barn will do me.’

  ‘Why are you on the run?’ she asked. ‘I’m curious.’

  That makes two of us, he thought. ‘I’d had enough of married life. It was getting to be like that play on in London, “The Rat Trap” – now in its fifth year. It kept going along, dead as a doornail, and then, all in the space of a day I’d decided everything, packed in and left, as if those five years were only a sizzling fuse leading to a load of dynamite that suddenly exploded.’ All in a day, and the shell-shock was rippling. Out in his fast car he’d had nowhere to go, except home to say it was all finished. He was on the main road after the soldier’s lift, doing ninety and dashing around like a tomcat after its own bollocks, tart wild and pub crazy after a stretch of high-fidelity that he’d stood so long because he was temporarily dead, thinking: ‘I go round in circles, as if in some past time I’ve had a terrible crash, and the more I drive in circles the more I’m bleeding to death. I don’t feel this bleeding to death because it’s slow and painless (almost as if it’s happening to another man and I’m not even looking on, but am reading about it in a letter from a friend hundreds of miles away) but I know it’s happening because my eyes get tired and I’m fed up to my spinal marrow, while the old rich marrow I remember is withering and turning black inside me. But perhaps it isn’t completely bad, because if I thought it was I’d flick this steering wheel enough to hit that fence or pillar box and flake myself to a scrap of cold meat under the soil and greenwood tree. Maybe you can get better from it, because I can’t have lost enough blood if I could get in with that woman last night and hump into bed with her. And perhaps I’ve still got blood in me if I feel it running out of me.’

>   A paraffin upright stood in the corner, warming the room, perpetuating the smell of tea just made and drunk. Someone walked along the road, whistling. A van drummed by. ‘It’s quiet here,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t notice it usually, but when I do, I like it.’

  ‘I’ve never been in a house so quiet. I worked in a factory where you can’t even hear yourself shout. I had a wife and two kids, and a house where you couldn’t even hear yourself think above the news being read, or someone yapping about Homo or Wazz.’

  ‘That’s modern life,’ she said. ‘Would you rather work in a field?’

  ‘That ain’t why I’m on the run. I don’t mind noise at work – though I notice you haven’t got a television set.’ Out of the factory his face had changed, away from Nottingham and the pubs. It wasn’t that his expression had lost self-assurance or his body its confident walk, but his actions were slower, his smile more uncertain. It made him look older, as if thought preceded even the movement of his hands bringing the cigarette up to his mouth, as if his smile or frown was backed by an unfathomable depth of reasoning. ‘Maybe I’m on the run to find out why I’m on the run,’ he grinned, feeling foolish at making such a twisted statement.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why everybody goes on the run,’ she said. ‘I think you’re probably right.’ He was surprised and flattered that she took it seriously. She was fascinated at flashes of complexity in a mind she had imagined as too simple to take seriously. So far, he could only see the mechanics of how he’d gone on the run, rather than the cause. She had used the phrase, and he wondered if the time would come when it no longer applied, when he would be going to, and not away from, something. He’d got back to Nottingham, after so much driving around, and felt like using his feet. He parked his car up a side street off Alfreton Road, and the sky was less blue, white clouds hanging around the chimney stacks of Radford Baths. He yearned to let his legs walk, maybe carry him where a car could never go.

  Narrow, winding and mildewed, he’d lived in these streets once upon a long time ago, and hovering odours made different air to that in the windswept well-spread estates. He’d hardly noticed such change in the oblivious one-track of getting married. It was amazing how quickly he’d fallen in, but years had gone by before clarifying his vision of it.

  After the landmarks of birth, school, work you get more handy with the girls. Then at eighteen you’re called up, and so look forward to getting out. While you had something ahead of you it was fine. When you got out you Went after the women, earned your money and drank your fill. This went on for a couple of years, then there was nothing left, just a fifty mile wall dead in front, starting from your shining shoes and going, as far as you could see, right up to the sky. At the feel of it you stepped up the wild life, went mad for a month or two, spinning around like a bluebottle with a dose of Flit, and people thought you weren’t half a hell of a lad. Then you stopped, because even though the thick grey wall had gone and the sky was spring-blue again, you felt that the wall was still there, but inside you, which was worse because it really did mean that life was finished. You brooded for a month, and people thought you’d turned thoughtful and worried because you’d got some young woman into trouble, but you hadn’t. It was only your black ever-surviving heart getting you used to seeing a way out that you’d have whistled at in scorn only a few months before. Then your eyes opened, or you thought they did, and in this wall you saw a hole at the bottom, surrounded by rubble and dust as if you’d used the handgrenade of your life so far to blast that hole just big enough to crawl through. So you got married, and it all looked rosy on the other side. The fact that a penny bun didn’t cost tuppence any more, but four-and-eleven with threepence off was almost a pleasure to put up with. You loved in bed and comfort night after night and thought what have I been missing all these years?

  The marriage was a light-hearted get-together at the Registry Office, standing to repeat after that sanctimonious corpse-head in glasses to honour and obey until the atom bomb parts us. And there was I larking around and pretending I had to be dragged in screaming by my mates because one of the other blokes had got her up the spout and not me, whereas nobody had at all and she was as pure as virgin snow I don’t think. Nancy smiled as if nothing was happening. Her mother tut-tutted and didn’t know where to put her face because she thought I meant it – and maybe half of me did, but things quietened down and ten minutes later I was under a snowstorm of paper wanting to get my hands on a St Bernard mongrel with a keg of well-bred brandy around its neck. To everybody’s disappointment I was icicle-sober that night.

  Nancy must have come from a long line of bad cooks, because after a week at Cleethorpes she put a plate of tinned steak, tinned celery and baked beans before him, fortified by several slices of Miracle Bread, so named, he supposed, because it was a miracle it didn’t kill you. Ever the gentleman, he tackled it as best he could, able to joke about living off love until the month was out.

  They lived with Nancy’s mother, and her cooking was worse. Even the meat tasted like cabbage, and there was nothing he could do but push it aside like a spoiled kid. Mrs Stathern thought her cooking the best for miles around and this made him hate her as well, because he couldn’t stand up and say he was going down the road for an egg and chips. If she’d known it wasn’t so good he might even have eaten some of it – in a joking light-hearted way while waiting for the stomach cramps. All he could do was thank God for a canteen dinner and get Nancy to fry some beans and bacon in the evening, a concoction that got monotonous day after day, but at least it was difficult to spoil, and such repetition eventually turned her into the best cowboy breakfast cooker in the whole of Aspley.

  Those early months dreamed themselves by. Food wasn’t as important as his thoughts for some reason now made it, for there was house and home to buy and pay for week by week, and the first kid to wait for month by month and his machine to work at day by day. He couldn’t understand why it had gone on so long. Was it because of the violent blindoe times he’d made for himself before feeling that wall in front of him? In effect, he’d never left the wall, after having crawled through the shell hole with such relief. Instead of in front, the sheer face had stayed a few feet at his back, and now, lately, it had drawn a circle around him, stifling his life, so that he had to get out or choke to death.

  ‘The thing about this country,’ he said to her, ‘is that there’s nowhere to go. You just keep going round in circles. Have you read Dr Zhivago? No? It gives you a marvellous idea of what it’s like living in a big country. Spaces thousands of miles wide and long. I’d like to be in a big country. He goes from Moscow to Siberia. When the train is held up by snow everybody gets out and digs. And when he wants to go back to Moscow, he walks. I don’t know how many thousand miles it was, but he didn’t say: “Oh, I can’t go because the trains aren’t running.” He just walks! He found out why he went on the run after he’d been on the run long enough. You know why it was? I’m just finding out myself as I talk about it: he went on the run because life was too much for him.’

  ‘Do you know then why you’re on the run?’ she smiled.

  He thought, his face hard. ‘Ah! I do though, if you want to know. It’s because life’s too little for me.’

  ‘It’s the same thing. He couldn’t face life because it was too much. You can’t face it because it’s too little. Neither of you can face life.’

  ‘You put it neat,’ he said, rueful over his shattered epigram.

  ‘I’m not a nurse for nothing. I’ve been in nursing for fifteen years, on and off. It makes you hard and wise, if you know how to take it.’

  ‘It’ll be dark soon, so I must be on my way.’

  ‘I have some sherry, nothing harder, would you like a drop for the road?’

  ‘Yes. Are all those books yours?’

  ‘Mostly novels. Some I’ve never even glanced at. They’re part of the furniture.’ The cardigan sleeve was drawn up almost to the elbow, showing freckles on her fair skin. He looked
directly at her eyes, and she smiled before turning. ‘What I’ve always wanted to do,’ he said, ‘is do nothing for a year except read books, and learn something.’

  ‘I don’t think you’d learn much, necessarily, but you might enjoy it.’

  ‘You’re bound to learn something if you don’t know anything.’ He finished the sherry, sweet water, cold and griping after the tea. ‘There’s a drop left,’ she said, ‘so you might as well finish it. I can’t see you getting drunk on it.’ It was darkening outside, and she stood to switch on the light. ‘If you’re not in a desperate hurry to get where you’re going I have a spare room upstairs. It’s only a camp bed, but you’ll find it comfortable. Better than a hedgebottom, though it’s up to you.’

  He hesitated, as if unable to believe the offer. She laughed, open and frank about it. ‘I’m not trying to pick you up. You look as if I might be.’