Birthday: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I know,’ Arthur said. ‘I’d like to think otherwise, but I can’t. All of them Sherwood Foresters only had one life as well, and that’s a fact.’

  In the filling station forecourt Arthur said: ‘When did you last put oil in your car?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Get in and open the bonnet.’ He held the dipstick to the light. ‘It’s bone-dry. Something told me it was. I’ll go and get a couple of litres.’

  Arthur looked on him as a mechanical numbskull who didn’t realize that a car needed tending now and again, and it was true that he was often lazy, or unable to think of the engine as long as it kept running.

  ‘It wants feeding,’ Arthur said, with as contemptuous a look as could be given to a brother. He gurgled most of the oil in, and checked the dipstick again. ‘I’d better see to it whenever you come up, otherwise you’ll lose your engine, and that’ll be a thousand quid up your shirt. Now let’s look at the water.’ Not perilously low, he insisted in topping it up, and filling the windscreen reservoir. ‘We’ll check the tyres now.’ The pressure being down, he went from one to the other and squirted in the required amount of air. ‘Now you won’t break down on the motorway.’

  Avril brought tea into the sitting room. Brian had never seen her otherwise than smartly dressed. She wore a white blouse with a string of pearls over her bosom, a pale brown skirt and a cashmere cardigan. ‘And what have you two old devils been up to today?’

  ‘You won’t like it if I tell you.’ Arthur turned to Brian: ‘Shall I tell her?’

  ‘We had a pleasant day in Matlock.’

  ‘Happen so, but the truth never hurts.’ He looked at Avril. ‘I don’t know how to say this, but he got into a spot of bother.’

  ‘You’re lying again.’ She sat close to hear. ‘Or you’re going to. I can see by your face.’

  ‘No, I’m not. We went to a pub to have some dinner, and a young woman sat at the next table. Brian gave her the eye, and they got talking. He told her about all the pop stars he knows in London, and how he’s written speeches for famous people, and done films for television. He laid it on with a spatula.’

  ‘Now I know you’re lying,’ she said, ‘using a word like that.’

  ‘She gobbled his lies up, and half way through the meal they went out to the back. Ten minutes later I went to see what was happening, and caught them having a knee trembler by the dustbins. I was shocked, but what could I do? I ran back inside to finish my dinner, but no sooner was the fork in my mouth than I heard shouting and screaming. I ran out, and the girl was sobbing her socks off. Her beefy boyfriend was getting ready to thump Brian, but I told him to back away or he’d get one from me. He walked off with the girl, who was still crying. Our dinners were cold by now, but Brian didn’t care. I didn’t know where to put my face. Something like that happens every time we go out.’

  Avril laughed. ‘What a rigmarole!’

  ‘You can’t expect him to admit it. I’d have been ashamed for the rest of my life if it had been me.’

  ‘I don’t think I would have married you if you hadn’t been a liar.’ She turned to Brian. ‘He made me laugh so much the first time we met I knew I had to marry him. I just made sure we lived together for a few months to see if he could keep it up.’

  ‘Keep what up?’ Arthur laughed.

  ‘Then one morning he shook me awake and said: “I’ve got a surprise for you today.” I thought: “Oh, is he going to take me somewhere special?” He was, to the registry office. He’d made all the arrangements without telling me. He even bought a ring. You should have seen the grin all over his face. He only came out with it when we were halfway there.’

  ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t have much option, did I? I suppose it was the only way you could do it, though it was a good thing I wanted to as well. What would you have done if I hadn’t?’

  He looked forlorn. ‘I’d have cut my throat, darling!’

  They were well mated, however long their lifetime together would be. Kids from previous marriages had long since grown up, and they’d none from each other. She came in with more tea. ‘So you went to Matlock for the day?’

  ‘We did,’ Arthur said, ‘and had a marvellous time. I like it when me big bruvver teks me out! The best part was when he drove us up and down the Via Jelly-belly. I haven’t seen a prettier stretch of road in all my days.’

  FIVE

  Brian left the car on the street, and if it was nicked, or kicked in, or set on fire, or tipped upside down and danced on with bovver boots (or the latest trainers) then that would be the way things were, so don’t moan about it. After a chat with the police he’d go back by train, fill in insurance forms, and wait for the advent of a powder blue chocolate box courtesy car to run about in till his own was written off or fixed.

  Yet in his well worn vehicle there were only a few cardboard boxes of supplies for the day when he would set out on a freedom run through Europe to Asia, a stack of old newspapers on the back seat, and an empty plastic container of Evian water, so vandals would merely look in then scout on for better pickings.

  If you were too fearful of what nihilistic drug-raddled kids would do to your serviceable vehicle you were only conniving at their habits. He knew the rag-tag-and-bob-tailed bastards well, certainly more than they knew themselves, because as a kid he had done his stint of mischief and half-inching, though never to the extent of wrecking a poor man’s push-bike, the equivalent of today’s car and just as precious.

  He walked through newish houses built in the twenties, then to half a street of older redbricked and probably listed dwellings, whose front rooms opened onto the pavement, good enough to live in, façades neat and clean, but the doorsteps no longer scrubbed. A couple of pubs he and Jenny had sat in were also intact – a shandy for her and a pint of bitter for him, before the long walk back to the real pleasure of the evening.

  That she intruded was only to be expected during such perambulations. In those days he’d had an ineradicable itch in the heel, instep, ball and under the toes of both feet, an irritation of surplus blood prompting him to light off since first being conscious of where he was. Not that he had gone far, but twenty or a hundred miles in England was enough to deracinate you forever.

  Jenny had nothing to do with his departure. He would have abandoned whatever woman he had known. Unique idiosyncrasies stayed from cradle to coffin, and would have parted them even if he’d lived only a few streets away for the rest of his life. If he roamed Nottingham now and again it was because he had grown up there, and being in thrall to the past only meant that so little of the future was left.

  The area used to be a familiar maze of streets and dead-end terraces and double entries, at night a redbricked zone of gaslit cosiness miles in extent, an almost endless playground of freedom and safe adventure for the children who lived there. People long dead inhabited the warrens of memory, and he recalled suddenly and for some reason how sixty years ago everyone was singing ‘San Francisco’ because the film with Spencer Tracy was showing at the neighbourhood picture house. All knew the tune inside a week, and though his pal Bernard Griffin claimed he’d seen the film already, Brian didn’t believe him, knowing he’d heard his mother whistling it after either husband or fancyman had taken her to the pictures.

  Dorothy Griffin always had a fancyman because every few months she separated from her husband. Nobody could make up their minds whether Mrs Griffin left Mr Griffin because he could no longer put up with her carryings on, or whether Mr Griffin left Mrs Griffin because she couldn’t endure his carryings on at the way she carried on, and in any case he absolutely couldn’t stand the way she carried on. They had a hard time living together, but could never stand being apart for long.

  Soon enough after Herbert Griffin left, he would meet his wife Dorothy by accident, in the White Horse or the Dover Castle (or maybe even the Plough) and after some talk and a bit of shouting (the publican telling them to go outside and settle their d
ifferences on the pavement if they couldn’t behave and keep quiet) they came home hand in hand so that any fancyman who had been in the offing for her, or any fancywoman who had been on the cards for him, were one and both left out in the cold, or sent packing to their wife or husband, for all anybody knew.

  Dorothy Griffin never carried on with any man who lived in her own area, because as soon as Herbert Griffin went sneaking off to meet his fancywoman she would get on a bus to calm herself, sitting on the top deck with a fag on the go, and didn’t get off till the conductor told her they’d reached the terminus on the other side of the city a good five miles away. Her first call would be to the nearest pub for a few consoling drinks, because the air in the bus had made her thirsty, and after two or three gin-fizzes she would become amiable and talk to someone who might turn into another of her fancymen.

  Dorothy Griffin was pretty, always neatly and carefully dressed, even when going to work at the cigarette factory up the street; and Herbert Griffin, who was handsome and smart, was employed at the bike factory down the street. Both were small and slim, though sometimes not as well disposed towards each other as they should have been. Only when together after a suitable break would they be seen walking arm in arm to pub or pictures, or back to the house which, so Brian’s mother said, looked like a pigsty.

  Their son Bernard was privileged (all the other kids thought) in having both parents at work, and being so taken up with themselves, or with their fancymen or fancywomen, that he hardly ever saw them for more than an hour at a time, though they provided him with a back door key and money for food. He would never let Brian into the house when he called, while he was in the kitchen helping himself to a slice of bread and potted meat after school, so it was never possible to verify whether the place looked like a pigsty.

  He walked along the shop fronts of the main road, noting the cosmopolitan scene: The Golden Fish Bar, Sauna and Massage, Mahmood Brothers Halal Store, Nahal’s Off-licence, Twenty-Four Hour Taxi Service, Goodyear Chinese Restaurant, Honda Motorbike Franchise, Cellnet Communications, Car Sales Forecourt, and then the White Horse pub, which looked as if it would never change.

  His car hadn’t been scratched or dented, the windscreen not even a scattering of perspex cobbles across the bonnet, disappointing because the old place hadn’t lived up to its reputation, and provided him with a wreck that he could have turned in for something better.

  He drove by disused Radford Station towards the bungalow zone of Wollaton. Sitting at his desk in London, coaxing situations from his pen to amuse people, or at least the script editors, he often felt flu-bound or uninspired, but as soon as he got hold of a car wheel and heard the engine purring like a cat at feeding time – cruising up the Great North Road, or drifting around Nottingham – energy and clarity of mind would come back, the contaminations of a fluish cold forgotten.

  Window down, a shaft of clean air came in and, turning from the main road, he felt the customary excitement at seeing the towers and balustrades of Wollaton Hall, its three-tiered array of elongated windows, the chimneys and cupolas and stone terracing inspiring against any sort of sky, though when the sun fired its windows into molten copper, it seemed as if its precious insides would only cool when the entire pile was a heap of grey ash.

  On his first day at school a bag of variously shaped wooden bricks was emptied over the floor and, reaching what he could into his orbit, or prise from the hands of others, he structured a crude imitation of Wollaton Hall out of a prescient and waking dream long before seeing the place. So taken by the vision, he felt no grief at the sombre bell sounding for a change of classroom, the collapsing bricks scooped away by the teacher, as if knowing he would one day see the real version of his construction.

  Coming off the motorway in summer his first stop was always Wollaton Park. He glanced beyond the windscreen to make sure the Hall was still on its hill, as if it had not only been the centre of his world from an early age but had also pointed out the stepping stones of his life towards Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, a quest begun on first shaping that crude replica as an infant.

  Lord Willoughby employed Smithson to build the place in 1588, and the cost of eighty thousand pounds – almost incalculable in today’s money – was culled from the profits of nearby coal pits. Quarrelling with his family, Willoughby died a demented pauper in London, frying penny pork scraps over a wood fire in his attic room. Nottingham rioters in 1832, after gleefully torching the Castle (what a night that must have been!), were stopped by a troop of yeomanry and a few cannon from doing the same to Wollaton Hall.

  He enjoyed seeing the gentle and curious deer over the railings by the parking space, and cattle among pastures under the trees. On waking from an hour’s sleep he would broach the flask of tea and split open a packet of biscuits, before the first stage of his walk around the lake.

  He passed the conspicuous red telephone box on his walk up the sloping bank of grass to the wide steps before the main doors, as if going to wait for Jenny on the terrace. She wore a brown pleated skirt, white blouse, lisle stockings, laced-up shoes, but no headscarf, on the day he recalled. He had on his one alternative to overalls and boots, a navy-blue utility suit and white shirt, and tie with a pin half hidden by the waistcoat, jacket unbuttoned and shoes well shining.

  The Brylcreem quiff stood out as shapely as King George’s, and he smoked a Senior Service while leaning on the balustrade to watch Jenny coming up the steps. The green landscape was a balm of ointment after all week looking at mounting coils of brass and steel shavings around his capstan lathe. ‘Do you like the view?’

  The land undulated as far as Misk Hill seven miles away, a few houses here and there. ‘I do like it,’ she said, as if to pass the test.

  ‘So do I. I have done since I first saw it. Would you like to live somewhere out there?’

  ‘I already do. If you turn your head a bit to the right you can see Aspley. What you mean, though, is would I like to live somewhere out there with you, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I meant.’ The possibility was bedded in his soul but, for no reason he cared to explain, or even could, he was glad to see the back of such a thought.

  Her elbow jabbed playfully at what meat there was below his ribs. ‘You’re never sure of anything. But you must have meant something. I usually do when I open my mouth.’

  ‘I only asked if you liked the view.’

  ‘Of course I do. I’m not deaf, am I? Nor blind, either.’

  ‘That’s all right, then.’

  ‘I want to go in the museum,’ she said, ‘and look at the stuffed animals’ – intimating that she-might find them more alive than he seemed to be.

  ‘I want to stand here a bit. I can see a long way, and I like that.’

  ‘You can do it from a lot of other places.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘So why here, then?’

  ‘Because this is special. And here I am, aren’t I?’ Her question was a way of trying to find out what was in his mind, as if he knew, or wanted to know. It was a matter of pride not to know, which might be stupid but he didn’t care. ‘It’s got something to do with the scenery, and having the Hall behind me at the same time.’

  ‘I came to the museum the year before leaving school,’ she said. ‘The teacher brought us for the day. We all had jotters to write down what we saw, but my pencil wouldn’t move. All I could do was look at the birds and animals, and what clothes people used to wear in the olden days. I couldn’t take my eyes off so many lovely things. The next week at school we were told to write a composition about our time in the museum, using the notes we’d made, and I’d got nothing in my jotter. I didn’t know what to do. “Why aren’t you writing, Jenny?” the teacher asked me. “I can’t, Miss,” I told her. “Write;” she said, “and be quick about it.” So I did. I just wrote and wrote, and when the teacher read it she said it was the best composition in the class. She made me stand up in front and read it out to everybody else. I was trembling l
ike a leaf, but I did it.’

  She looked for some response, till he was glad the sun caught her eyes and she had to turn away. Life-changing moments, carelessly passed over, hid what the heart profoundly wanted. Whatever was yet to come which you couldn’t know about was more fundamentally what you wanted to happen. ‘We’ll go in, if you like, and you can tell me about it.’

  She turned to take his arm. ‘I love you. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I love you, as well. I always shall.’ What an outrageous liar. He always was, and always had been. He could love no one but himself, and knew the truth as he stood looking at how the old trees and fields had been painted by the rooftops of new houses, in one of which they would have been happy, though for how long? She had relinquished him but he had driven her to it. He hadn’t argued. Words of reconciliation would have been easy. She had wanted him to put a ring on her finger as proof that he loved her, even though marriage had to wait a few years. He had let go a kind of heaven in exchange for one disaster after another as if that was the only way someone like him could learn, though where such learning had got him he couldn’t say.

  In the days that mattered he had wanted no tie-ups, no domestic servitude, no obligations, no acquiescing to the call of the times, no giving in to the mindless drive of nature – shameful to fall into line like all his friends. Whatever was expected had to be against your deepest nature, until death did us kill being no state to live in, the black hole too close even then to tolerate, and so the irreversible step was taken, and he ran from the living death of marrying the girl he loved. He opted for liberty, of looking for a refuge from himself and never finding anything he could recognize as a final haven.

  The turmoil of fleeing was the only reality, self-defeating, but always exciting, but if you spoil a person’s life make sure you know what you do, otherwise your own soul could die. On the other hand he refused to believe he had ruined Jenny’s life, any more than he had wrecked his own. You could never be sure of what effect you had had as long as there was a future to look forward to. Jenny was alive and healthy, and since he had been asked to her seventieth birthday party all might yet be well.