Room at the Top

by John Braine

  S1569

  Signet

  35¢

  John

  Braine

  ROOM

  AT THE TOP

  This is a daringly honest portrait of an angry

  young man on the make. His morals may shock you

  but you will not be able to deny or dismiss him.

  Now a great movie starring Lawrence Harvey, Simone Signoret

  and Heather Sears. Produced by Romulus Films

  and released through Continental Distributing Inc.

  A Signet Book Complete and Unabridged

  LOVE or MONEY?

  In one of the most remarkable novels to be

  published in years, John Braine bares the

  emotions, thoughts and strategy of a schem-

  ing yet vulnerable go-getter.

  Joe Lampton is a penniless young man who

  is out to conquer the world, no holds

  barred. He wants the things that only

  money can buy -- position, power, and a so-

  cially prominent wife -- but to get them he

  must give up the only woman he will ever

  love . . .

  Compelling, passionate, honest, Room at

  the Top has been hailed by critics as the

  literary sensation of the year.

  "Mr. Braine has gifts which could carry

  him far -- humor and vitality . . . and

  a capacity to project with passionate

  sharpness the hungers of youth."

  -- Atlantic

  "Mr. Braine definitely has it; his creative

  equipment is impressive."

  -- Commonweal

  ________________________________________________

  THIS IS A REPRINT OF THE ORIGINAL HARDCOVER EDI-

  TION PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

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  room at the top

  by JOHN BRAINE

  A SIGNET BOOK

  Published by THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  To Pat

  COPYRIGHT © 1957 BY JOHN BRAINE

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or parts thereof in any form. No part of this

  book may be reproduced without permission. For

  information address Houghton Mifflin Company,

  2 Park St., Boston 7, Mass.

  Published as a SiGNET BOOK

  by Arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company

  FIRST PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1958

  SECOND PRINTING, MAY, 1959

  THIRD PRINTING, AUGUST, 1959

  FOURTH PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1959

  FIFTH PRINTING, MARCH, 1960

  SIXTH PRINTING, APRIL, 1960

  All characters in this novel are entirely

  fictitious and bear no relation to

  any living person.

  SIGNET BOOKS are published by

  The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.

  501 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  1

  I came to Warley on a wet September morning with the sky the grey of Guiseley sandstone. I was alone in the compartment. I remember saying to myself: No more zombies, Joe, no more zombies.

  My stomach was rumbling with hunger and the drinks of the night before had left a buzzing in my head and a carbonated-water sensation in my nostrils. On that particular morning even these discomforts added to my pleasure. I was a dissipated traveller -- dissipated in a gentlemanly sort of way, looking forward to the hot bath, the hair-of-the-dog, the black coffee and the snooze in the silk dressing gown.

  My clothes were my Sunday best: a light grey suit that had cost fourteen guineas, a plain grey tie, plain grey socks, and brown shoes. The shoes were the most expensive I'd ever possessed, with a deep, rich, nearly black lustre. My trench coat and my hat, though, weren't up to the same standard; the coat, after only three months, was badly wrinkled and smelled of rubber, and the hat was faintly discoloured with hair oil and pinched to a sharp point in front.

  Later I learned, among other things, never to buy cheap raincoats, to punch the dents out of my hat before I put it away, and not to have my clothes match too exactly in shade and colour. But I looked well enough that morning ten years ago; I hadn't then begun to acquire a middle-aged spread and -- whether it sounds sentimental or not -- I had a sort of eagerness and lack of disillusion which more than made up for the coat and hat and the ensemble like a uniform. The other evening I found a photo of myself taken shortly after I came to live at Warley. My hair is plastered into a skullcap, my collar doesn't fit, and the knot of my tie, held in place by a hideous pin shaped like a dagger, is far too small. That doesn't matter. For my face is not innocent exactly, but unused. I mean unused by sex, by money, by making friends and influencing people, hardly touched by any of the muck one's forced to wade through to get what one wants.

  This was the face that Mrs. Thompson saw. I'd arranged my lodgings through an advertisement in the Warley Courier and hadn't actually seen her yet. But even without the maroon coat and copy of the Queen she'd said I'd recognise her by, I knew immediately who she was; she was exactly what I'd imagined from her thick white handmade writing paper and her near-copper-plate with its Greek e's.

  She was waiting by the ticket barrier. I gave up my ticket and turned to her. "Mrs. Thompson?"

  She smiled. She had a pale, composed face and dark hair turning grey. The smile was perhaps the result of long practice; she hardly moved her mouth. It came from her eyes, an expression of personal friendliness, not the usual social grimace. "You're Joe Lampton," she said. "I hope you had a pleasant journey." She stood looking at me with a disconcerting steadiness. I suddenly remembered that I should offer my hand.

  "I'm glad to meet you," I said, meaning the words. She had cool dry hands and returned my clasp firmly. We went out over a covered footbridge which vibrated as a train went underneath, and then through a long echoing subway. I always feel hemmed in and lost in railway stations and for a moment I was overcome by depression and the buzzing in my head became an ache.

  When we were outside I felt better; the rain had diminished to a drizzle and the air tasted fresh and clean with that special smell, like good bread-and-butter, which means that open country is near at hand. The station was at the centre of the eastern quarter of Warley. The effect was as if all the industries of the town had been crammed into one spot. Later I discovered that this segregation was Council policy; if anyone wanted to set up a mill or factory in Warley, it was the east or nowhere.

  "This isn't the prettiest part of Warley," Mrs. Thompson said, waving her hand in a gesture which included a big mill, a fish-and-chip shop, and a seedy-looking Commercial Hotel. "It's always like this around stations, I don't know why. Cedric has some theory about it. But, you know, it's rather fascinating. There's a positive maze of streets behind the hotel . .
."

  "Is it far to Eagle Road?" I asked. "We could get a taxi." There were half a dozen of them in the station yard, their drivers all apparently frozen at their steering wheels.

  "That's a good idea," she said. "I feel quite sorry for those poor men. She laughed. "I've never seen any of those taxis in use; they just wait here, day by day and year by year, for fares who never come. I sometimes wonder how they live."

  When we were in the taxi she gave me another long look. It was searching but not embarrassing, as cool and dry but as friendly and firm as her handshake; I had the impression of having passed some test. "I'll call you Mr. Lampton if you like," she said, "but I'd rather call you Joe." She spoke without a trace of awkwardness or flirtatiousness; she had now, her attitude implied, settled the whole matter. "And my name is Joan," she added.

  "That'll be fine, Joan," I said. And from then on I always used her Christian name; though, oddly enough, I never thought of her as anything else but Mrs. Thompson.

  "This is St. Clair Road," she said as the taxi turned up a long steep hill. "We live at the top. It's always T'Top in Warley, though, with a capital T. My husband has some theory about that, too . . ."

  She spoke very well, I noticed; she had a low but clear voice, with no hint either of the overbuxom vowels of Yorkshire or the plum-in-the-mouth of the Home Counties. I congratulated myself on my good fortune; all too easily she might have been the usual sort of landlady, smelling of washing soda and baking powder, my lodgings might easily have been one of those scruffy little houses by the station -- from one Dufton to another. Instead I was going to the Top, into a world that even from my first brief glimpses filled me with excitement: big houses with drives and orchards and manicured hedges, a preparatory school to which the boys would soon return from adventures in Brittany and Brazil and India or at the very least an old castle in Cornwall, expensive cars -- Bentleys, Lagondas, Daimlers, Jaguars -- parked everywhere in a kind of ostentatious litter as if the district had dropped them at random as evidences of its wealth; and, above all, the wind coming from the moors and the woods on the far horizon.

  What impressed me most was Cyprus Avenue. It was broad and straight, and lined with cypresses. The street where I lived in Dufton was called Oak Crescent; it didn't curve one inch and there wasn't even a bush along it. Cyprus Avenue became at that instant a symbol of Warley -- it was as if all my life I'd been eating sawdust and thinking it was bread.

  Mrs. Thompson put her hand on my knee. I caught a whiff of eau de cologne, the best kind, discreet and aseptic. "We're home, Joe," she said. The house was semi-detached; I'd hoped it wouldn't be. But it was a decent size and built of an expensive-looking biscuit limestone and there was a garage. The paintwork gleamed with newness, the lawn had the texture of moleskin; it was a house that had always had the best of care. Except, strangely enough, for the garage, with its peeling, blistered paint and cracked window.

  "Cedric uses it for his oddments," Mrs. Thompson said. She had an uncanny way of answering questions one hadn't asked. "It needs attention but we never seem to get round to it. We disposed of the car when Maurice died. It was his, really; we hadn't the heart to use it somehow.

  She opened the door. "He was in the Forces?" I asked.

  "A pilot in the RAF. Killed in a silly accident in Canada. He was just twenty-one."

  The hall smelled of beeswax and fruit and there was a large copper vase of mimosa on a small oak table. Against the cream-painted walls I could see the faint reflection of the mimosa and the vase, chrome yellow and near-gold; it looked almost too good to be true, like an illustration from Homes and Gardens .

  I helped Mrs. Thompson take off her coat. For a woman of, I estimated, at least forty-five, she possessed a good figure, with a small waist and no tendency either to bulges or to stringiness. It was easy to imagine her as a young woman, though she made no attempt to disguise her age. I looked at her, however, without the least flicker of desire; I never wished at any time to make love to Mrs. Thompson, though I certainly wouldn't, to be perfectly frank, have thrown her out of my bed.

  She looked at me again with that peculiarly steady gaze. "You're very like him," she murmured. Then she straightened her back, as if recalling herself. "I'm sorry, Joe. I'm forgetting my duties. I'll show you your room."

  My room at Eagle Road was the first room of my own in the real sense of the word. I don't count my cubicle in the N.C.O.'s quarters at Compton Bassett because I hardly ever used it except for sleeping; and I always had the feeling that it had been made impersonal by the very number of others there before me, living on the verge of departure to another station or death. Nor do I count my room at my Aunt Emily's; it was strictly a bedroom. I suppose that I might have bought some furniture and had an electric fire installed, but neither my uncle nor my aunt would have understood the desire for privacy. To them a bedroom was a room with a bed -- a brass-railed one with a flock mattress in my case -- and a wardrobe and a hard-backed chair, and its one purpose was sleep. You read and wrote and talked and listened to the wireless in the living room. It was as if the names of rooms were taken quite literally.

  Now, following Mrs. Thompson into my room, I was moving into a different world. "It's marvellous," I said, feeling the inadequacy of the words and yet not wanting to appear too impressed; after all, I hadn't been living in the slums. I looked at it with incredulous delight: wallpaper vertically striped in beige and silver, a bay window extending for almost the whole length of the room with fitted cushions along it, a divan bed that looked like a divan and not like a bed with its depressing daylight intimations of sleep and sickness, two armchairs, and a dressing table, wardrobe, and writing table all in the same pale satiny wood. On the cream-painted bookcase was a bowl of anemones and there was a fire burning in the grate, leaving an aromatic smell, faintly acid and faintly flowerlike, which I knew but couldn't quite place.

  "Applewood," Mrs. Thompson said. "Thanks to the coal shortage we're becoming connoisseurs. There's an electric fire but I thought a real one would be more cheerful on a miserable day like this."

  There were three small pictures hanging on the far wall: "The Harbour at Arles," a Breughel skating scene, and Manet's "Olympe."

  "Especially chosen in your honour," Mrs. Thompson said. "Medici reproductions. We have quite a picture library -- you just slip in new ones when you become tired of them."

  "I like the skaters," I said, meaning I liked it best. It wasn't true; even as I said it I was looking at Olympe, white, plump, and coldly self-possessed. But my upbringing held me back; I couldn't bring myself to admit to a woman that I liked a nude.

  Until that day I'd never really looked at a picture. I knew, for instance, that there were three water colours in Aunt Emily's living room, but outside the house I couldn't even remember their subjects. I'm normally observant and I'd used the living room daily for over two years; it was simply that in Dufton pictures were pieces of furniture, they weren't meant to be looked at. The Medicis quite definitely were. They belonged to a pattern of gracious living; to my surprise the worn phrase straight from the women's magazines accurately conveyed the atmosphere of the room -- it was as if a ready-made suit fitted perfectly.

  "I expect you'd like a wash," Mrs. Thompson said. "The bathroom's to the right and the usual offices next to it." She took a bunch of keys from the dressing table. "Your keys, Joe, before I forget. Front door, this room, wardrobe, bureau, and heaven knows what these two are for but I'll remember presently. There'll be some coffee in half an hour, by the way. Or would you prefer tea?"

  I said that coffee would suit me splendidly (I would much rather have had tea but I had an instinctive feeling that it wasn't quite correct at that hour). When she'd left the room I opened my suitcase and unfolded my dressing gown. I'd never had one before; Aunt Emily thought not only that they were an extravagance (an overcoat would serve their purpose) but that they were the livery of idleness and decadence. As I looked at it I seemed to hear her voice. "I'd sooner see someone naked,"
she'd say. "Working people look daft in dressing gowns, like street women lounging about the house too idle to wash their faces . . . Spend your money on something sensible, lad." I smiled; there was certainly nothing sensible about the garment. Its material was, I remember, a very thin rayon and the shop assistant had used the term shot silk, which meant that, according to the light, it looked either garish or drab. The stitching was poor and after one washing it became a shapeless rag. It was a typical example of the stuff turned out for a buyer's market in the early postwar period and I rather think that I was drunk when I bought it.

  For all that, it gave me far more pleasure than the dressing gown I have now, which was bought from Sulka's in Bond Street. Not that I don't like the Sulka; it's the best, and I always wear the best. But sometimes I feel uncomfortably aware that I'm forced to be a living proof of the firm's prosperity, a sort of sandwich-board man. I've no desire to be ill dressed; but I hate the knowledge that I daren't be ill dressed if I want to. I bought the cheap rayon garment to please myself; I bought the expensive silk garment because always to wear clothes of that quality is an unwritten term of my contract. And I shall never be able to recapture that sensation of leisure and opulence and sophistication which came over me that first afternoon in Warley when I took off my jacket and collar and went into the bathroom wearing a real dressing gown.