Room at the Top

by John Braine

  "Don't look at it too closely, Joe," she said, coming up behind me. "I was ten years younger then."

  "I wish I were ten years older," I said.

  "Why, Joe, that's very sweet of you." She squeezed my hand but didn't release it straightaway. "You like the room?"

  "Very much," I said. But I wasn't quite sure that I did. It was a strange room, very clean, very bright, in good taste, but somehow without comfort. The low white-painted shelves across the wall opposite the fireplace were full of books, mostly brand new, with the jackets still on; they should have humanised the room but they didn't; it seemed impossible that they should be read; they were so much a part of the room's decorative scheme that you wouldn't have dared to have taken one.

  "Drink?" George asked, going to the cocktail cabinet. "Gin, whisky, brandy, rum, sherry, and various loathsome liqueurs which I can't really recommend."

  "Whisky, please."

  He gave me a malicious look. "It's not Scotch, alas. An American customer gave me a crate. Tastes like hair oil. I warn you."

  "I drank a lot of it in Berlin," I said. "No soda, thanks."

  It left a warm glow inside my stomach after it had for a split second dried my mouth and sent a little rush of air up my throat.

  "Alice says you're from Dufton." He filled up his glass with soda-water and sipped it like a medicine.

  "I was born there."

  "Been there on business once or twice. My God, it's depressing!"

  "You get used to it."

  "You'll know the Torvers, I suppose."

  I did know them in the same way that I knew the Lord Lieutenant of the county. They were Dufton's oldest mill-owning family; in fact, the only mill-owning family left after the Depression, the other mills having gone either into the hands of the Receiver or London syndicates.

  "My father worked at their mill," I said. "He was an overlooker. So we never met socially, as you might say."

  George laughed. "My dear Joe, no one ever meets the Torvers socially. No one would want to. The Old Man hasn't had one decent emotion since he was weaned, and Dicky Torver spends what little time he has left over from the mill-girls in drinking himself to death."

  "We used to call Dicky the Sexy Zombie," I said.

  "Damned good. I say, damned good!" He refilled my glass as if he were giving me a little reward for amusing him. "That's just how he is with that awful pasty face and that slouch and that fishy gleam that comes into his eyes whenever he sees a bedworthy woman. Mind you, he's a good businessman. You'd have to get up very early to catch Dicky Torver."

  "He's a horror," said Alice, entering with a tray of sandwiches. She poured herself a whisky. "I met him at the Con ball at Leddersford. He made a pass within the first five minutes and invited me to a dirty weekend within another five. Why doesn't someone beat him up?"

  "Some women might find him attractive," George said. He nibbled a cheese biscuit.

  "You mean that their husbands might want to do business with him?" I said.

  He laughed again. It was a low, pleasant laugh; he could evidently call it up at will. "Not that way, Joe. It's like bribing an executioner; if you're reprieved, he says it's due to his efforts and if you're hanged you can't talk. If someone's wife is -- well, kind to Dicky, and the husband lands the contract or whatever it is, then Dicky's kept his side of the bargain. If the husband doesn't land the contract he can hardly make a public complaint. No, business isn't as simple as all that."

  "It happens," said Alice.

  "Occasionally." His manner indicated the subject was closed and I'd been put in my place.

  "Joe," Alice said, "do have a sandwich. They're there to be eaten."

  The sandwiches were the thinnest possible slices of bread over thick slices of cold roast beef. The plate was piled high with them. "You've cut up all your ration," I said.

  "Oh no," she said. "Don't worry about that. We've lots more. Truly."

  "The farmers have meat," George said, "I have cloth. See?"

  It was perfectly clear; and I enjoyed the meat all the more. It was like driving Alice's car; for a moment I was living on the level I wanted to occupy permanently. I was the hero of one of those comedies with a title like King for a Day . Except that I couldn't have deceived myself as long as a day, and I could, in that room, tasting the undeniable reality of home-killed beef and feeling the whisky warm in my belly, put myself into George's shoes.

  Alice was sitting a little away from the table, facing me. She was wearing a black pleated skirt and a bright red blouse of very fine poplin. She had very elegant legs, only an ounce away from scragginess; her likeness to a Vogue drawing struck me again. I looked at her steadily. We were the same sort of person, I thought fuzzily, fair and Nordic.

  George poured me another bourbon. I swallowed it and bit into a second sandwich. Alice gave me a light little smile. It was no more than a quick grimace, but I found my cheeks burning as I realised that I'd like to be in George's shoes in more ways than one.

  8

  Waiting for Susan on Saturday evening, I was as excited as if it had been the first time I'd taken a girl out. I standing in the foyer of the Leddersford Grand; it was the usual sort of theatre foyer with red carpets, white pillars, photos of stars with white teeth and glossy hair and sparkling eyes, and over it all a faint smell of cigars and perfumed disinfectant, but at that moment it seemed to possess a sort of innocent splendour. I experienced so many different emotions that I was like a child with one of those selection boxes the chocolate manufacturers used to bring out before the war. I was undecided as to which to taste first; the plain dark chocolate of going out with a pretty girl, the Turkish Delight of vanity, the sweet smooth milk of love, the flavour of power, of being one up on Jack Wales, perhaps the most attractive of all, strong as rum.

  If she'd come then I would, so as to speak, have eaten the whole selection box. But at three minutes to seven there was no sign of her, and the whole evening began to turn sour on me. I heard again the panic in her voice. 'Golly, here's Mummy.' Why should she be so frightened of her mother knowing about me? Why shouldn't I call at the house? And why should I? I saw myself as Mummy would see me, ununcouth and vulgar and working-class -- with all the faults of the nouveau riche, in fact, but none of those solid merits, such as a hundred thousand in gilt-edged securities, for the sake of which so much can be forgiven. "That awful Lampton boy with the funny teeth," I heard Susan say. "He's pursuing me. Yes, really! I don't know why, but I said I'd go to the ballet with him. Yes, I know, it was silly of me, but I wasn't thinking . . . Well, my dear, I forgot! It went right out of my head ! For all I know, he's still waiting. Aren't I awful ?"

  I was elaborating this dialogue with a drearily masochistic relish when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  "I've been watching you," she said. "You look awfully bad-tempered. Are you very angry with me?"

  "Not now you've come."

  "I'm very sorry for being late. Herbert gave me a lift and something went wrong with the magglet."

  I laughed. "That's very serious. Are you sure it was the magglet?"

  "I don't know about cars," she said. "Should I?"

  "There's no law that enforces you to. Magglet's very good anyway. All cars should have a magglet." I took her arm. "We'll have to hurry. Two minutes to zero."

  She was wearing a fur-topped Cassock cap and big fur gloves and a full-skirted cashmere topcoat. Her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks flushed a little and there was about her that clean smell -- like baby powder mixed with new-mown hay -- which I had noticed the first time I'd met her.

  When I handed the tickets to the usher she caught sight of their price. "Four and six," she said. "Golly. Isn't that frightfully expensive?"

  I looked at her sharply; did she expect a box? But I saw that she was quite serious and I was astounded and delighted at her naïveté; the clothes she was wearing must have cost a good fifty pounds.

  We settled down to watch The Haunted Ballroom . I passed her a block of milk
chocolate; my hand brushed hers and hovered over it for a second but it had no responsiveness; if a girl wants her hand to be held, it tightens over yours the moment it's touched.

  Somehow it seemed tremendously important that I should hold her hand. Contact with her, I felt, would be as different from contact with ordinary women as singing is to speaking. It seemed tremendously important; and yet I didn't want to touch her at all. Brought out, perhaps, by the music and the dancers blown across the stage by it like pieces of coloured paper, a deeply buried instinct asserted itself: I wanted simply to admire what is, after all, a rare human type: a beautiful and unspoiled virgin. Even when I let my eyes rest on the outline of her firm small breasts beneath her sweater, it was without a trace of lasciviousness; I was visited, in fact, by the emotion of our first meeting. This time it was more real, there wasn't the annoyance of other people's presence, and Susan was herself, speaking her own words, not a fictitious character seeable for half a crown.

  I took her to the bar at the interval.

  "Mummy would be awfully cross if she knew I was here," she said, looking doubtfully round her at the rows of coloured bottles and the gilt mirrors and the framed playbills and cartoons and the usual beefy men and plump women smelling of bay-rum and violets, whom one never sees in any number except in theatre bars and who always seem to be comfortably installed before one's arrived.

  "Is she teetotal?" I asked.

  "She thinks pubs are low. But this isn't a pub really, is it?"

  "Not really," I said. "What would you like to drink?"

  "You won't laugh if I have a grapefruit, will you?"

  "There's no law against it." I smiled at her. "Have whatever you like, honey."

  When I got the drinks I offered her a cigarette.

  "No, thank you," she said. "I don't smoke."

  "You're the sort of girl I like to take out."

  She gave me a look which was coquettish in a naive sort of way. "Why am I the sort of girl you like to take out?"

  "You've no expensive vices."

  "Are your usual girls very expensive?"

  "I haven't any girls," I said. "There's never been any. Only you."

  "Now you're telling fibs. Wicked! "

  She had an intonation for the word which was altogether charming and innocent but at the same time faintly provocative.

  I put my hand on my heart. "There's no one but you."

  "You haven't known me very long. How can you tell?" She looked a little frightened; I'm going too fast I thought.

  "You're not a dear kipper," I said, as if I hadn't heard her question.

  The phrase instantly distracted her, as I'd calculated it would. "A dear kipper?"

  "My mother used to call me that when I wanted something that cost more than she could afford."

  She clapped her hands. It was a gesture which I'd read about but never seen, so childish and outmoded that only Susan, I think, could have got away with it. "A dear kipper. A dear kipper. Oh, how lovely . You know, I'd rather like to be a dear kipper."

  I sipped my gin-and-lime. I'd chosen it because it wouldn't make my breath smell, but quite apart from the fact that the price is sheer robbery, I don't care for the stuff. For a moment I had a fierce longing to be drinking Old at the St. Clair with Alice.

  "Are you enjoying the show?" I asked Susan.

  "It's gorgeous . I adore ballet. And the music -- it makes me feel all squashy inside -- I feel, oh, ever so excited and squiffy." She put her elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand. "It's ever so difficult to explain . . . it's like being inside a house all painted with beautiful colours and when you listen it's like touching the paint, the colours all run over your mind -- does that sound silly?"

  "No. Not one little bit. I've always felt like that myself, only I can't put it as well as you." I was lying, of course; as far as I'm concerned ballet is something with which to occupy the eyes whilst listening to music. But I wouldn't having dreamed of saying so; it was essential that I should appear to share Susan's interests -- or rather, that they should appear to coincide. I'd discover something unimportant to disagree with her about so that she'd think me an intelligent type with a mind of my own.

  "I'd like to take you to Sadler's Wells," I said.

  "Have you seen Fonteyn?"

  "All of them." I talked about ballet till the bell rang, managing -- rather skilfully, I thought -- to conceal the fact that I'd only been to Sadler's Wells once and that Fonteyn was the only prima ballerina I'd ever seen.

  After the show had ended to the usual tumultuous and idiotic applause, I asked her if she'd like some coffee. I was helping her on with her coat; I remember noticing with approval that she took the courtesy for granted.

  "Coffee? Oh, that's sweet of you. I'd love some."

  "You can have some cakes too," I said, "I know a café where they're eatable."

  "I'm awfully hungry. I didn't have any dinner, I was in such a rush."

  "You should have told me. It's silly to miss meals in winter."

  "I'll be all right. I eat a terrific lot, really I do. But I'm starving. I could eat lots and lots -- oh dear!" She put her hand to her mouth. "You'll think I'm a dear kipper," she said dolefully.

  I laughed. "Don't worry about that." It was charming when she put her hand to her mouth; entirely natural, but stylised and graceful. She made all the other girls I'd been out with seem dingy and clumsy and old before their time: the thought came to me tinged with apprehension -- I wasn't playing for matches any more.

  The café was just outside the theatre. It was the sort of place I didn't normally go to then -- oak panelling, deep carpets, a four-piece band, and an atmosphere of exclusiveness. I don't mean that I personally was overawed by all the splendid people there -- they were mostly fat old women anyway. But I always had the fear of doing the wrong thing, of making a fool of myself in front of the higher grades. Saying the wrong thing to the waiter or picking up the wrong fork or not being able to find the cloakroom immediately wouldn't have mattered in an ordinary café. In fact, there wouldn't have been any possibility of me making any faux pas. In front of those with no more money than me there would be no necessity to be careful, people in one's own income group can't be enemies. The rich were my enemies, I felt: they were watching me for the first false move.

  It's queer when I remember it -- I have even bought meals at cafeterias when for a couple of shillings extra I could have had an eatable meal at a good restaurant. That evening with Susan, though, I walked into the café quite happily: she was my passport, it was her sort of place.

  "Isn't it nice here?" she said. "All Dickensy. And look at that little waiter there with the funny quiff. He's utterly squoo . Don't you think so, Joe?"

  The waiter came over to us with the flat-footed glide of the professional servant. We'd hardly taken our seats before he came over; I wondered for a moment if he'd have come so quickly if I'd not been with Susan. When he'd gone off with the order, Susan looked at me and giggled. "Do you think he heard me? I don't care, he was squoo. Awfully sad and yet perky like a little monkey. I wonder if he likes his job? I wonder what he thinks of his customers?"

  "He'll think you're the most beautiful girl he's ever seen," I said, "and he'll think me extremely fortunate to be in your company. He's sad because he's married and has twenty children and you're forever unattainable, and he's perky because no man could help being happy when you're around. See?"

  "You're making me blush." She kept on looking round the place with a frank and lively interest. There was a middle-aged woman at the far side of the room with black dyed hair and a sort of deliquescent distinction; she was talking in a hoarse but still attractive voice to her companion, a mousy little woman with a pink openwork jumper revealing at my estimate eight shoulder straps. The middle-aged woman's face was set in an attitude of ashamed disillusion as if she'd lost her vitality as suddenly and ludicrously as underwear when the elastic snaps in the street. When she saw Susan looking at her she smiled. For a mo
ment she looked her real age and her real age didn't matter. I don't know why I should remember this, nor why it should hurt me when I remember. Susan returned the old woman's smile and continued to look round the place, examining every person there with the frank and lively interest of a child.

  I laughed. "You're as bad as my mother." I kept my tone light and bantering because, though a dead mother is useful in boosting the emotional atmosphere, to have used a sepulchral tone would have spoiled the particular line I was trying to use. "She used to know everything that went on in Dufton. She was interested in people, like you. She said that there was something wrong with you if you didn't take any notice of what your fellow humans did."