Birthday

by Alan Sillitoe

  Derek was taller than his father had been, a sober pipe-smoking man Brian sometimes envied for going through every crisis with a show of optimism, though he didn’t cop out of violence if he or anyone in the family was threatened. Brian was once alarmed to hear his invective against other drivers as he launched his BMW beyond the lights, a dangerous temper under his uncle-like exterior that needed much control to keep in check. ‘I suppose we can go in now. She’ll be due in ten minutes.’

  ‘He can’t wait to see his old flame,’ Avril smiled. ‘She won’t run away, so don’t get impatient.’

  Derek, halfway up the steps, knocked his briar out on the rail, sparks flying by his shoes, Brian and Arthur a rearguard behind Avril and Eileen, the five advancing into a spacious curving saloon parted by a wide stairway. A notice between the banisters saying PRIVATE meant that the upper floor was for family and friends only, and that interlopers, or those who couldn’t read, would be seen off by Jenny’s sons and daughters.

  They were welcomed by a round-faced fifty-ish woman whom Brian surmised hadn’t had a happy life – though with no hopes for pumping he would have to imagine why, and hope to get it right. ‘I’d know you anywhere,’ she said to Arthur. ‘And these are your brothers and their wives?’

  He did the introductions.

  ‘I’m glad you could all come,’ she said. ‘I’m Jenny’s daughter, Eunice. She’ll be here soon, and won’t she get the surprise of her life!’ She smiled at Brian. ‘We’ve heard all about you, though.’

  A score or so were already in the room, talking in groups or standing at the bar. ‘I hope not too much.’

  ‘She always said you were her first love. But I’ll see you later. I’ve got to go now, and talk to my brothers, to make sure everything’s all right for when she comes.’

  He went to the bar, a rum and coke for Avril, and a shandy for Eileen who would be driving Derek home, then three pints. Old people far outnumbered the young, and they talked mostly to each other, so that if he pushed a way in they would only wonder what this funny old bogger wanted.

  ‘We’ll sit at that table near the window,’ Arthur said, knowing Avril couldn’t stand for too long. He called the barman to clear the vandalized graveyard of empties.

  Curtains were ruched aside, the landscape more impressive from higher up, though Brian sat with his back to the window, looking at people rather than the same old view. A slim fortyish man with fair wavy hair and wearing a cardigan was laying out a speaker system.

  ‘Are you Brian Seaton?’

  He noted the woman’s plain grey dress buttoned up the front, and one leg thicker than the other from a reinforcing bandage. About sixty, she must have been handsome when young, her wreck of a face still suggesting mischief. ‘How’s your sister, Jane? We used to go out together, and I haven’t seen her for years.’

  ‘She died about eight years ago.’ He had forgotten the exact date, and didn’t want to mention cancer, with Avril so close, but he had to, and did, Avril knowing well enough what had killed Jane. The woman’s face went small with pain. He was sorry to spoil her evening. ‘I didn’t like to tell you.’

  ‘She was such a happy person. We used to dress up to the nines and go out to Yates’s on Saturday night. I haven’t seen her since she got married, but we did have some good times together.’

  He smiled at her memories. Nor were his own dead for him, though he rarely thought of Jane. Like their elder sister Margaret she was out of his mind for months at a time, till a remark brought her so clearly back she might still have been alive. Realizing she was not, he felt like weeping, while surmising that all families had casualties in equal proportion.

  ‘We went to the same school,’ she said. ‘But after she got married we lost touch. Then I got married as well, and had to bring up five kids. How many did Jane have?’

  ‘Two.’ Arthur was listening. ‘One with each husband.’ He wanted to get rid of her: ‘Would you like to sit down and have a drink?’

  ‘There isn’t a seat.’

  ‘You can sit on Brian’s knee. His wife won’t mind. She’s in London.’

  ‘What a bleddy cheek!’

  ‘You’re blushing,’ he said, ‘and none of us are.’

  ‘You mean I can still blush?’ She laughed. ‘I thought them days was over. But my husband’s over there, so I must be getting back.’

  ‘Which one’s that?’ Arthur wanted to know.

  ‘Him against the bar looking as if he’s lost something.’ A tall elderly man in a grey suit, black sleeked hair, and a thin sour face, turned with a glare in their direction. The white head of a chrysanthemum glistened in his buttonhole like a miniaturized deathray.

  ‘You’d better go back, by the look of him,’ Arthur said, ‘or he’ll come over and give you a pasting for talking to strange men. I shan’t tell him you can still blush.’

  ‘I’d scratch his bleddy eyes out if he even thought of laying a hand on me. I can tell you’re Jane’s brother, though. Now I can see why we used to have so much fun. If I told you one half of the things we used to get up to you wouldn’t believe me.’

  Arthur put the remains of a pint into his throat. ‘I thought she’d never go. I don’t think she knew our Jane at all. Somebody mentioned we had a sister of that name and she came over to get off with you,’ he said to Brian. ‘Jane wouldn’t have been seen dead with a person like that.’

  ‘Jane used to go out with Betty Smith,’ Derek said. ‘They worked at a little factory in the next street, where they made pot dogs. They sat at a bench painting them after they came out of the kiln. I walked in when I was a kid, and saw them doing it.’

  ‘I remember them pot dogs.’ Arthur flexed himself for a laugh. ‘When she brought her rejects home I’d set ’em up on the shelf in our bedroom, and shoot ’em to bits with my air rifle.’

  ‘You once used old Ma Bull for target practice as well,’ Derek said.

  Arthur reached for the empty glasses and took out a tenner. ‘John Smith’s bitter, in’t it?’

  ‘I can just imagine you lot when you were young.’ Avril’s smile came easily, though she was fragile, Brian saw, and vulnerable, pain somewhere in her body, only sipping at her drink.

  ‘Arthur’s told me a few things, but I’m sure he left a lot out.’

  ‘We were as good as gold,’ Brian said. ‘We always got top marks at Sunday School. You couldn’t get in our parlour for Bibles.’

  ‘When they were knocking those old houses down in Radford,’ Eileen held Avril’s hand, ‘Derek and Arthur took a bag of tools like thieves in the night. Arthur steadied the ladder while Derek shinned up and unscrewed the street signs. How they got them down I’ll never know. They were real iron, and weighed a ton, but they’d only have been smashed into rubble. Now they’re fixed on a wall in our back garden, and look as good as new. When Brian stays with us and uses the outside toilet he says: “Shan’t be a minute. Just going down Salisbury Street.”’

  ‘That’s right.’ Whenever he looked at it he saw the houses still attached, short terraces angling off to stop at the Berlin wall of the bike factory, the district alive with the smell of machinery, petrol, horse shit, and a whiff of fag smoke and stale beer when a pub door opened and slammed to.

  ‘Sup this.’ Arthur set their pints on the little square mats. ‘Nottingham ale would be on the National Health, if I had my say. “Not feeling on top form, lad? Wait while I write a prescription. It’s four pints a day before your tea, and four pints after. A month ought to see you right, but if you still feel peaky, come and see me again. Oh, and just a minute. They won’t run out of ale. You look a bit off colour. I want you to swallow a handful of Viagra pills with your beer, before going to bed with your wife.”’

  ‘Brian can get Viagras on private medicine,’ Derek said.

  ‘I know. He was popping ’em all the way here, in case Jenny pulls him on for old time’s sake.’

  Brian slewed much of his pint, to keep up with his brothers. He wiped his mouth, then sp
eculated on whether the amount of spunk he had shot in his life would have been enough to drown in.

  ‘It would have poisoned you first,’ Arthur said.

  Maybe the ink he had used was a safer bet for suicide. Gallons of both, but neither death was tempting. The collective bulk of matches struck for fires and cigars could have made a tree from which to hang himself, though he’d only ever thought of such an end to scorn himself out of doing it. Every morning he mainlined ink from a fat Mont Blanc into his upper arm, one side one day and the other the next, at which notion they laughed, as did he.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a shot in the arse from that magic pen if I could live the way you do,’ Arthur said. ‘But I don’t think what I wrote would get put on’ – though his letters, Brian recalled, had never been dull, and during the days of his being poor in London, there’d often be a pound note attached for him to buy food. ‘This fat pen cost a couple of hundred quid or so.’

  ‘It’d buy a lot of beer.’ Arthur handed it back. ‘A workman’s got to have good tools, so’s he can’t blame ’em if anything goes wrong.’

  Those near the bar were facing the entrance, as if a pigeon had flown in, no noise but the rattle of jars. ‘I think she’s on her way up,’ a man said, but as if not wanting to be heard.

  Brian’s blood pressure had always been of the lowest, but wouldn’t it be perfect, he thought, if a massive heart attack sent me into oblivion (I should be so lucky), clogs popped at the sight of her? He found a good position for the view, and the excitement of being among people with whom he felt little connection made him wonder whether his sundering from Jenny (and perhaps others like her) was yet final.

  She came up the stairs between two of her daughters, though free of their arms, an erect figure taking one step at a time, not like the Queen of Sheba to music by Handel, or Good Queen Bess to the strains of Tallis, but a bemused and ordinary woman surprised by a gathering she hadn’t expected.

  The neat dark curls around her pale forehead were dyed, because formerly they had been turning white. An open grey cardigan showed a white blouse buttoned to the neck with a purple brooch, a grey skirt below. He focussed on her face, uncertain why such coercion was necessary, noting the serene aspect of someone who had come through the test of a lifetime, a glow of innocence yet authority from a person few in the room could finally know.

  After the first surprise she liked what she saw, as if part of getting back into a world which little resembled what she had known before, which she had inhabited for as long as many people in the room had lived, to go by the stones near George’s grave, of those who had been born and had died in the time spent caring for him. George had clawed at her skirt near the end, asking for poison. When she sat by him in the hospital the nurse told her that he had used a knife from the breakfast tray to jag at his sticklike wrists.

  Jenny would have given him all she had, but life was precious, and death a cliff with a long drop, to be gone over only when the time came, so he had to be tended as long as a crumb of life remained. After such years knowing that she had little to give, her spirit broke over and over again, as if she too might be nearing the end, weariness forcing her to sit down, almost as helpless as he, until the dying voice called that he wanted this or that, or just to say he was alive and needed to know that she was also. Sometimes too weak to lift him, she’d get one of her sons to help, wondering how far off the day was when she could do no more.

  In the hospital she heard sounds telling her he wanted to die, and she stroked the white brow, his almost weightless body hidden by the sheet. ‘I can’t help you to do a thing like that. I just can’t. What shall I do if you pass away?’ Guilt at thinking it was best for him to die kept them closer. ‘What will I have to live for after you’ve gone?’

  ‘I shall have to live for myself,’ was in her mind as she took the final step into the large room crowded with people to celebrate her birthday.

  Her head turned left and right. She took her time assessing those she knew, or hadn’t seen for a while, or those of her own family, an expression altering from shock to suspicious delight while letting out a little cry.

  The small teeth, as she smiled, were too even not to be false, the subtly fluctuating features showing not so much astonishment as that a trick had been played (which it had) whose purpose she needed time to think about. Such solicitousness for her well being seemed less deserved because so unexpected. Drawn into a trap, she didn’t know what to say. Those in the room wanted to hear words that she couldn’t yet get from her lips, like what a wonderful family they were to have set up such fairy-tale splendour, arranged to celebrate the end of her ordeal.

  Age had drawn lines on her forehead which he remembered emphasized as well on the young girl, after his telling an obvious lie, or weaving a clumsy fantasy to divert her from going somewhere he did not want to follow, or even only to astound her out of silence. A smile transformed the skin on her sometimes melancholy face, the same now as she looked over the culinary abundance brought by the women and spread over the table: sausages, slices of ham, sandwiches, various salads, and a large iced cake with a single candle in the middle as if to make it easy for her when so much had formerly been hard, or as if all the years looking after George were to be extinguished in a single breath. Or maybe it was to mark Year One of her new life.

  She took in what had been done, lips half opened as if to speak, but once more changing her mind, not wanting them to think she was too astounded by their secret efforts. The scene would make a precious memory, and he thought that whoever awarded campaign medals for the Battle of Life weren’t knowing or willing enough to give one to such as her. Maybe those calling happy birthday thought the same, taking her hand before letting others have their turn. She had registered him in that long preliminary gaze.

  ‘You’d better go and claim your kiss,’ Arthur said.

  The small box in his pocket, with its silver Celtic cross in a bed of cotton wool, had seemed the right present. Anything more elaborate would be showy, or facetious, or lack significance – not be worthy of her. No way of telling, it would have to do, too late to drive back and get something else. He had traipsed around Covent Garden, browsing at every stall till the glittering merchandise half blinded him. After a cup of watery coffee between forays he thought he might not go to the party, feeling so little enthusiasm in searching assiduously for token or trinket. Now, he was in the same room with her, and knew they had to talk.

  ‘Let the mob go first,’ he said to Arthur. He foresaw a sad smile at the memory of their early days when he gave her the present: a press of the hand, even a quick kiss, though he had no right to one, nor even much desire. After saying hello he was only here to watch, an outsider if ever there was one, foolishly conspicuous, yet as welcome as anybody else. At the same time he felt as shy as a youth, and she the first girl he must try to get off with.

  Jenny left whoever she was talking to, and stood before him. ‘I’m ever so glad you’re here. You’re the biggest surprise of all.’

  ‘I jumped at the opportunity to see you.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you tonight, but I was hoping to meet you again some time.’

  They’d played a game in her parlour after making love, or when sitting a few feet apart on a fallen tree at the edge of a field smelling of cornstalks at the end of summer, of looking deep and long into each other’s eyes, and whoever blinked first didn’t love the other. He looked away, wondering how it was that lost loves endured the longest.

  ‘And you drove all the way up from London especially?’

  ‘I couldn’t not. As soon as I heard about the party.’ He smiled, for it was true enough, but how genuine did it sound to her? She must know he’d come to see his family at the same time. ‘I got a letter from your daughter, and put the date in my diary, in big red letters.’

  She held one of his hands in hers. ‘I’m glad you did. I can’t tell you how much.’

  If he gave her the small container in his pocket sh
e would need to take her hands from his to see what it was. Yet he had to. ‘I brought you this. Happy birthday!’

  She held the box, as if to make sure it was hers and would not be taken back, but didn’t open it to see what was inside, which disappointed him, as if she thought it too insignificant. Or maybe she wanted to make the most of their meeting, and didn’t want to lose the warmth of his hands either. ‘I’m still dazed about what I’ve found here tonight – and not only this’ – she waved towards the tables. ‘I feel like a young girl again. But if only we could look as young as we feel! I’m seventy, I know, but I don’t feel it at the moment.’

  ‘I suppose if anybody does feel their age they’re dead from the neck up. But I thought you must be about forty when you came up the stairs. You were a real picture. I’ll never forget it. Forty’s all you looked.’

  Such teasing could do no harm, since she knew the score, though her smile showed a multitude of emotions. ‘Ah, well, there are times when I feel a hundred.’

  ‘The same for all of us. But I’ve heard about your life. I can imagine what it was like.’

  ‘Can you?’

  Well, he’d asked for that. Of course he couldn’t. Idle talk was out of place. Her tone said that he didn’t and never could, and he knew she was on the point of saying he didn’t know one half, when she said it. Nothing more, either, that he could respond with, too great a gap, always had been, so much water under the bridge, such cruel differences separating them. It needed all the time of the years not spent together for them to say any more.

  She put the present into her black handbag. ‘My eldest son’s over there. Come with me and meet him.’ Her warm hand drew him between two women, who smiled as if wondering whether the birthday would turn into a wedding.

  ‘Ronald,’ Jenny said, ‘I want you to meet Brian. He’s a very old friend of mine.’

  Tall and tending to corpulence, he wore a navy-blue waistcoated suit, white shirt and a colourful reddish tie, stood with amiable dignity, his back to the bar, an aspect of being pleased with life, as if he scorned to question that there could be anything more to know about himself than had been obvious from birth, confident that such an attitude had done nothing but good – a prosperous hardworking man who took no nonsense from anybody but could be kindly as well.