A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘It doesn’t sound like love to me.’

  ‘It’s the only one I know, and I’m chained to it. Every day at the forge I want to walk out and never go back. But I know I shan’t because there’s something stronger than chains to hold me there. You have to go on working, and never complain. You might think I’m complaining now, but I’m not. I’m telling you how it is. You’ll have a lot better life with the sort of man you can get than running off with me.’

  Yards from the weir again, drawn to its line of toppling water, she thought the best thing would be if they went over together and drowned. Or, most of all, if she did, though her heart throbbed so fiercely she knew the body wouldn’t allow such a convenient fate.

  A few more pulls at the oars got them to safety, and her tone was regretful. ‘How strong you are!’

  He knew what she had been thinking. ‘It’s a good job I am. You don’t die until you have to.’

  She laughed. ‘Can’t you swim?’

  ‘No more than Saint Clement. They tied an anchor to his leg and threw him in, or so I heard.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘That I don’t know. I heard he was a blacksmith, but he still drowned.’

  ‘I can’t swim, either, but I shall learn one day.’

  ‘We’d better go back. The hour’s about finished. And I’m hungry for my dinner, so you must be.’

  The stale cheese smell of fish bait came from a tackle shop, postcards dazzling in the sun by the door of a gift emporium, placards blazoned outside a stationer’s front. A boy laden with newspapers shouted his way along the promenade: ‘Special! Special! Telegram to Berlin!’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘There’ll be a war with Germany,’ she said.

  People stopped to buy papers. ‘As if there isn’t enough trouble in the world. Anybody must be daft in the head to want war.’ They came to a restaurant. ‘Let’s go in and fill our bellies. We’ve earned it, one way or another.’

  A clerkly man on his way to take the only vacant table was frustrated by Burton’s long strides, who put his hat on one chair, and pulled the other out for Alma. Exhausted and hungry, she loved him for getting a place so soon.

  ‘You can read that for me, as well.’ He gave her the menu as she sat down. ‘I worked almost as soon as I could stand, and had no time for schooling.’ Smithing’s my trade, he added to himself, and you don’t need letters for that.

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Two hot dinners should settle us.’

  ‘There’s beef, and there’s lamb.’

  The waitress was a gawky tom-laddish woman whose apron looked none too clean. ‘Bring me beef,’ he told her, ‘with plenty of fat on it.’

  ‘I’ll have the lamb,’ Alma said.

  Burton pointed to food left on plates at the next table. ‘What do you do with all that?’

  The waitress wrote their orders. ‘Throw it away.’

  He grunted at such waste. ‘If you kept a couple of pigs on it they’d think it was Christmas every day.’

  Her eyebrows lifted, as if he wasn’t in his right mind. ‘Tell it to the manageress.’ She looked at Alma, wondering how she could put up with a man like that, and Alma was half-inclined to tell her, as if quite taken with her, while Burton speculated on what might be done in bed with such a woman. ‘She’s a bit of a rum ‘un,’ he said, on her zig-zagging away.

  Alma smiled. ‘She didn’t know what you were talking about.’

  ‘She might one day. People waste too much.’ Her plainly troubled eyes could not meet his, her thoughts whirling in all directions, but he had no intention of guessing why. A woman’s eyes always showed when her mind was on the boil, and he knew he was right on her saying: ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re waiting to eat.’

  She turned her knife in a circle. ‘I love you. You’re my whole life now.’ Passion joined them, but he lived in too wilful a world to want the cargo of her troubles. She needed kind words, promises, even lies, but he couldn’t help because he saw no future, only the present. ‘We’re enjoying outselves,’ he told her. ‘It’s a holiday. What more do you want?’

  She held his wrist. ‘There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?’

  Disliking to be touched in public, he drew his hand away. ‘If there is, I don’t know what it can be.’

  The waitress set Alma’s soup on the table. ‘Enjoy it, duck!’

  He reached a piece of bread. ‘Get that down you,’ and touched her hand, adding gently: ‘It’ll make you fit for when we’re in bed tonight.’ The big-eared waitress, who made an enquiring face at his words, could think what she liked. Alma smiled, as if for the moment his advice was what she wanted to hear.

  Plates of meat and Yorkshire pudding, potatoes roast and boiled, peas and cabbage were set on the cloth, the waitress glaring at Burton as if to say he could lump it if he didn’t like it. He looked at Alma over his uplifted fork, before bringing it to his mouth. ‘You’re famished, aren’t you? You should be. I know I am.’

  She leaned forward and said that she was. ‘The sight of you makes me hungry, but the trouble is I can’t come down from the stars so soon.’

  Oliver, usually finding distraction in a book, couldn’t now. Shirtsleeves rolled, he wore neither coat nor waistcoat. Burton would have been shocked, since he was always fully dressed when beyond the bounds of the house and garden, even in the hottest weather.

  Emily moved loving fingers among flowers by the brook. She counted the daisies but, though knowing her numbers, got them in the wrong order. From his seat on a fallen tree he held back a laugh for fear of hurting her raw pride. Out of love the others often made her cry so that they could take her in their arms and cradle her back to happiness, always easy to do. Mary Ann, making sure she lacked for nothing to appear normal, had tied a ribbon in her hair, and put on a clean pinafore. She never let Burton bully her, and was glad the others looked after her, even though they often treated her as a pet.

  Burton regarded her as dense enough to be quite a long way on the wrong side of normal, therefore so little receptive to his discipline that he hardly cared to look at her. She had neither the fair features nor the liveliness of the others, and could be left alone.

  ‘What are you sitting there for, our Oliver? You’re ever so quiet. Why don’t you say something?’

  ‘I’m trying to read.’

  ‘Reading’s daft.’

  ‘You won’t say that when you can do it’ – though she never would.

  ‘What’s the book saying?’

  ‘It’s about famous engineers.’ He flipped the pages to their frontispiece. ‘Men who built trains and ships and bridges.’

  ‘You won’t do anything, if you only read.’

  ‘Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘I heard Dad say it.’

  ‘He would. But I’m also waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To die.’

  Her features were wrenched into distress, so he pulled her close and stroked her face. ‘I’m not really. Look, your ribbon’s got tangled. Let me see to it.’

  Her smile came back. ‘Shall you go to heaven when you die?’

  ‘Nobody knows till they get there.’

  ‘I shall. They said so at Sunday School. But when I laughed and couldn’t stop they made me stand in the street.’ Every indignity was stored in her heart, never to be forgotten. ‘Can you pick daisies in heaven?’

  ‘I expect they’ll find some for you.’ He offered his hand. ‘Let’s go home, and get our tea.’

  She was eight, and would never make her way in the world. He feared for her future, but vowed to see she never came to harm. His tears almost broke as she hugged him. ‘We’ll have sliced cucumber and salmon, pineapple chunks and jam pasties,’ she cried. ‘I love Sunday tea.’

  ‘Come on, then, you greedy little devil.’ Burton would not be in the house to spoil her teatime. He had gone to Sheffield, or so he said, though not all of Aha
b’s horses would get the truth out of him.

  Her merriment covered any anxiety about Alma, though when he looked across the blank stretch of the field his misery came swamping back. Emily lingered at the edge of the wood, loving greenery and flowers. ‘Run!’ he called. ‘There’ll be buttercups in heaven as well when you get there in a hundred years.’

  The broad and shaded track went steeply through the woods, Alma breathless by the summit. Burton walked beyond the lookout tower to the shelter of a tree where they could be more alone. The neighing of a horse from a trippers’ wagonette came on a warm breeze from the valley. He kissed her, and she sat on the dry bracken. ‘I went on a motorbus to Skegness last year, with some girls from work.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I couldn’t stop looking at the waves coming up the sand. I was going to walk into them but the girls pulled me back.’

  He enjoyed the taste of a cigarette. ‘I’ve heard they’re dangerous.’

  ‘Because I can’t swim, the waves looked so strong and beautiful, like a wall I wanted to walk through. I was sure if I went into them they’d be warm and soft.’

  She was beginning to sound like daft Emily, not knowing there were things you could think but not say, though he smiled. ‘I’m strong, and you’re lovely, so we get all we want between us.’

  ‘I still think there’s something missing.’

  He caught her regret. ‘It was all right in bed.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  ‘You’re a funny thing. You know I love you. You’re a miracle to me.’

  ‘You’re a lot more than that to me.’

  She wanted to stay but, hearing laughter on the path below he held out a hand for her to get up. ‘You’re as light as a feather. We’ll go down now.’ On the descent she kept a hand in his, praying he wouldn’t take it away, as was his habit. He didn’t, more aware now as to how she felt about him, though at people coming towards them he put the hand by his side. She kept up with his strides: ‘I’ve never had a weekend like this.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not the last.’

  He was remote and unfeeling, except when storms within showed by a sign at his cheeks, which he couldn’t always control. He was the opposite to all that her father was, but she hoped that wasn’t the reason she loved him. They paused by a small stone shelter under the trees, built into a sort of grotto. ‘I like being with you. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live in that little place?’

  Anguish unsettled his features, though only for a moment. ‘That’s a rare notion.’

  She would never break through. Even make-believe wasn’t part of his nature. ‘Oh, why is it? I could live anywhere with you.’

  ‘And me with you, but not in this world. And there isn’t any other. We might want to do all sorts of things, but we can’t.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. Imagine how happy we would be. I could teach you to read and write,’ thinking he would prize the capability.

  ‘There are plenty of others to do that.’ He put a comforting hand on her shoulder, feeling warm flesh under the blouse. ‘There’s no hope for us staying here, but don’t you think I wish there was?’

  She began to weep. A man and his girl stared on their way by. Burton steeled himself. ‘Let’s get down. There’s a train to catch.’ He’d had enough, wanted to be a thousand miles away. Yet she was right. The picture of a new life dazzled, perhaps brighter for him than for her, but nothing could be done about it.

  Crossing the bridge, a train whistle warned everyone to get a move on, a melancholy signal for Alma, who knew they would never be here again. She wanted to tell him, but said: ‘We shall miss it, unless we run.’

  ‘I never run. There’ll be another in an hour. And if we miss that, we can walk.’

  ‘But it’s twenty-five miles.’

  ‘I know. I did it once.’ He had been young, and ale inside helped on the way. He was pulled from mulling on that dull incessant walk by seeing Florence come out of the station. She gazed ahead, a stately vision in a high hat, carrying a folded parasol. She looked older, as if tragedy had struck, though he knew it hadn’t. The man must have been her husband, middle-aged and neatly dressed, a bowler hat on and carrying an ivory-handled stick, so cock of the walk he could never have known about the behaviour of his wife. Burton ensured mutual recognition before she turned her head and walked on, her husband hurrying to catch up.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Somebody I was acquainted with, once upon a time.’

  It was obvious she believed something else, though he was glad no more was said. ‘We can still catch the train if we hurry.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to stay?’ He shouldn’t have said so, but on such a weekend how could you listen to every word in your mind before letting it from your lips? She wanted to get the day over, and so did he now that all enjoyment had gone, but it would end soon enough.

  Torment burned her insides: ‘We can’t stay forever, I know, so what’s the point in another hour? If we could stay forever I would.’ She turned on him. ‘You’re not alive. You’re not even awake. You don’t know how to live.’

  ‘I don’t know anybody who does, but I didn’t come here to do your bidding.’ He pulled her along. ‘The train’s still in. We’ll catch it.’

  People got out of the way like minnows before a bigger fish as he walked through the crowd, saw above everyone’s head, thrust her into a carriage, and found seats.

  The train threaded the wooded vale towards Derby. Neither spoke, in the withdrawal from a pleasure they felt would have to be paid for. His features were set, when all she wanted to hear was how he expected her to pass the rest of her life, which could only be unreal compared to the one already lived. Two days in Matlock had set her years apart from her previous existence, and she would never understand what madness had driven her into going away with him.

  Whatever he could say – if he wanted to open his mouth, which he didn’t – would help neither. They would be better hardened for whatever might happen if they didn’t indulge in entangling speech.

  The train slowed through flat land close to Nottingham, and he ignored her as if they weren’t together, when the thought of what had been done to Oliver was so overwhelming that she cried as quietly as could be done in the crowded carriage. People looked as if wanting to speak words of comfort, till Burton said: ‘Didn’t you enjoy yourself? I know I did.’

  ‘You don’t realize what’s hurting me. I want to die.’

  Allow me to open the door so that you can jump out and have your will against me, he said to himself, though the train’s going too slow at the moment to do much damage, which you must know, or you wouldn’t have said it. Despair or disappointment was no excuse for weakness.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he had to say, ‘more than you think in that young head of yours, but we had a good time, so stop blawting about it. You ought to be happy, that’s all I can say.’ But he didn’t know what had been done, nor wanted to know, nor could in any way know, in his assumption that all things would take care of themselves.

  He’d had a good weekend, and spent something like two pounds, so she ought to be glad. But she wasn’t, and he couldn’t think why she expected a good time to go on forever, because they never could nor had, and though she was inexperienced enough to hope they would, it was unreasonable of her to think so. He liked her young body but not her immature thoughts, which served him right for taking up with such a woman, though he couldn’t blame himself because who wouldn’t have done his best to get her into bed, and miss Sunday School for him into the bargain?

  The train shunted into Radford station. ‘I don’t want to see you again,’ which he thought a bit soon to hear.

  Usually, by the time such words were said, he was more than halfway wanting to tell the woman himself, since everybody got fed up with each other sooner or later. ‘That’s a fine thing to say.’

  She dried her cheeks. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘That’s that, then.’ H
e drew her upright as the door opened, and helped her to the platform, hoping she would want to see him again, however she felt. ‘Go out of the station first.’

  She walked quickly up the steps to join the tread of men’s boots across the wooden floor of the booking hall. The lamps were lit, though it was still daylight outside, a subtle odour of gas, their mantles glowing with fairy incandescence. Burton lit a cigarette, and let her get well in front, not wanting them to be seen so close to home.

  Oliver, opposite the station entrance, was hoping to see someone he knew, for company on the way to Woodhouse, though doubting anyone would be able to keep up with him in his present mood. He had been in and out of town at such a rate as to erase all thoughts of Alma, and the sight of her turned him pale, an unbelievable apparition he hadn’t hoped to see.

  He recalled her kisses among the pungent sheds of the sawmill, their dalliance on Misk Hill, her homely entertainment of children at the Mission Hall, but since that short time ago her face had changed. As if not sure she was the same person he let her go a few yards, before running across the road and taking her arm. ‘Where have you been? I couldn’t find you anywhere.’

  ‘I went to Matlock.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘On my own.’

  He wanted to believe, but her features had no fear, and settled into a hardness he found strange. ‘You must have been with someone. I’m not daft. I can tell.’ He couldn’t, particularly, but it was a way of attacking her as he knew she deserved. ‘Nobody goes to Matlock on their own.’

  ‘I did. And it’s got nothing to do with you.’

  Distress in her eyes told him that guilt was responsible for the unfamiliar tone, which she had no way of hiding. ‘By heck, it’s got a lot to do with me.’ He calmed himself. ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘I was by myself.’ The words were forced out. A fortnight ago her dull life had been so marvellously peaceful, but she had been drawn to Burton on seeing him at the sawmill, and had met him on the lane when her only thought had been to call on Oliver. If only he hadn’t been still at work, though she despised herself for thinking that everything was his fault.