Room at the Top

by John Braine

  That night, and the nights that followed, I learned all about a woman's body and my own -- all that I'll ever know, for now, as far as I'm concerned, there are no more women, only friendly strangers with the appearance and functions of women. Whenever I make love now, I feel as if I were one of the characters in a magazine advertisement. You know the kind -- a big room and everything in it brand new and lithographer's sunbeams pouring through the window. The girl in the bed is, as they put it in the song, as pink and as soft as a nursery. She looks scarcely old enough to be married, but she has a wedding ring to prove it. The husband generally has a smooth monkeyish face with round eyes and a long upper lip and a few wrinkles on his forehead. The last items are, together with his crew cut, simple ways of indicating sex. They both look very clean -- but too clean, as if they were made of something hard and shiny that could be washed down like bathroom tiles. They need more sleep in their eyes, they need at least a little rumpling and staleness, just as the room needs at least a small crack in the plaster and a set of false teeth in a glass, and the sunbeams a suggestion of that dust which, whether we come from it or not, we all eat a peck of before we die. My wife and I aren't exactly facsimiles of that couple, of course, but we belong to the same world; and what happens two or three times a week between the fine linen sheets in the front bedroom of our cosy little cottage on Linnet Road is, I feel sure, exactly what has just happened to the couple in the advertisement. Not that I don't enjoy it; it's decent and wholesome and satisfying. But what Alice and I enjoyed together was something no one else could enjoy. There was no restraint, no shame, no normal or abnormal in that cramped double bed in the room with the dormer window or lying naked in the little cove nearby or running through the honeysuckle-heavy woods and the sunken lanes overgrown with trees and bushes into dark hot tunnels. We stopped smoking: it was part of the heightened perception we shared those four days. Anything that would have dulled that perception or have smothered even the smallest fragment of time was unthinkable. For, although we planned a lifetime together, we instinctively behaved as if we were meeting for the last time.

  25

  She cried all the way in to Dorchester. I held her tightly, her face against mine; I remember the smell of her hair, brine and olives and sweat. We hardly spoke; I kept staring outside at the rolling downs, at the wheat that seemed to have the dark glitter of pyrites, at the stretches of heath as theatrically bleak as the farmland was theatrically opulent, taking in great gulps of scenery like brandy against my mounting guilt and emptiness.

  As we walked into the station she said suddenly: "I wish you'd kill me." The words were made shocking by her matter-of-fact tone.

  " Kill you?"

  "If you wanted to now, I'd let you." Her colour was patchy under the tan. "You've made me so happy that I can't imagine living for one second without you. I can't really imagine the moment when I'll be alone in the compartment . . . I suppose people who are going to be hanged don't really believe it until they're standing on the trap -- "

  "Hush now, silly. You'll see me again. You'll see me again often. For the rest of our lives, remember?"

  "Do you love me? Even now, you don't have to lie about it. Do you really want me to divorce him?" Her eyes were ugly with weeping, her clothes had lost their bandbox appearance; I suddenly remembered the cool well-dressed Alice I'd met that first evening at the Thespians, and felt like a murderer.

  "I swear it." I looked straight into her eyes. "I do love you, Alice. I'll love you till the day I die. You're my wife now. There'll never be anyone else. I'll be with you every inch of the journey."

  "There's nothing more I can say to you, Joe." She started to make up her face briskly and expertly. "Do something for me before the train comes, will you, darling? Get me some cigarettes and some matches. And walk away when I board the train. Walk away and don't look back. And think of me all the time. Keep on thinking of me."

  After I'd seen her off on the London platform of the odd little station -- far too clean and green and white, not like a real railway station at all -- I went into a hotel for a drink, having an hour to kill before Charles and Roy came. Under the blazing sun the whole town seemed dedicated to pleasure. It wasn't the pleasure of Blackpool or Margate or Scarborough, a happiness set apart from the workaday. It was a highlighting of a pattern of living that was already crackling with comfort like a five-pound note: the people round me in the thickly carpeted hotel bar were enjoying themselves because for a while they hadn't to worry about briefs and contracts and reports, not because they were drinking shorts before a slap-up lunch. The de luxe bar and the iced Pimm's and the light worsted suit and the silk tie and Panama hat were part of my holiday, just as the taxi to and from Cumley had been; but such things were no treat -- only necessities -- to the higher grades. I finished the Pimm's and beckoned to the white-jacketed waiter; he came over immediately, so I knew that he'd accepted me as being the kind of customer the management liked. If you want to discover which grade people think you belong to, go to any cocktail bar when it's crowded and make a note of how quickly you're served.

  I met Charles and Roy after lunch. Charles was wearing biscuit-coloured linen slacks, white and brown shoes, a bright red shirt, and a white cap with a green visor. Beneath the cap his face was brick-red. Roy, a tall and stooping young man who worked at the library in the borough adjacent to Charles, was wearing blue suede shoes, blue linen slacks, an orange T-shirt, and white sunglasses. Both were smoking cigars.

  "My God," I said, "you look like mad film directors."

  "That's the idea," Charles said. "A dozen former virgins are now awaiting contracts."

  "It's easy," Roy said. "You just say, Now be nice to me and I'll be nice to you, little girl." He scrutinised me slowly and shook his head. He had a Lancashire comedian's face, long and immobile, with deep furrows that gave the impression of a sardonic amiability. "You look tired, Joseph. No doubt you have been working your fingers to the bone preparing our little home for us."

  "It's not his fingers he's been working to the bone," Charles said. "Examine that natty suit, the dazzling white shirt and, by God, the Panama. Observe the bags under his eyes, the look of lascivious satisfaction -- he hasn't been thinking of us at all these last four days, Roy. Do you know why he's got those knife-edge creases in his pants? Because today's the first time he's worn any since he came to Dorset."

  "You've not even admired our passion wagon yet," Roy said.

  It was a prewar Hudson Terraplane with a gangsterish raffishness about it. "We hired it from Roy's uncle at cut rates," Charles said. "You know, the jovial type you met in the Smoke at Christmas."

  "Not so bloody jovial," Roy said. "She's killed three men. Nunky thought he was very clever when he bought her cheap and patched her up, but he can't sell her. Mean old blighter, the bloodstains are still on the front seat."

  Charles clapped me on the back and thrust a cigar in my mouth.

  "There now, picture of the perfect English gent. Well fed, slightly drunk, and in the last stage of sexual exhaustion." He looked at his watch. "Quick one before they close, or a slow wallow at the cottage?"

  "The cottage," I said. I sat beside him in front, and Roy stretched himself out across the back seat.

  "I'm engaged, did you know?" Charles scratched the side of his nose, a trick of his when he was embarrassed.

  "It wouldn't be Julia?"

  "That's right. She's a good girl. You really must meet her."

  "It'll make her discontented. Mind you, I'm glad you've decided to settle down. You're too old for sleeping around. You've not kept your looks as well as I have. She's Grade One now?"

  "All the grades are rolling into one. Never a dull moment."

  I had a feeling of change, a change as inevitable and natural as the seasons, a tide that I should be moving with but wasn't.

  "I've been earmarked for matrimony too." Roy said.

  "Congratulations." A thought struck me. "You're not inviting them to the cottage, are you?" />
  "Calm yourself, boy. Mine is in Ireland and Roy's in Scotland."

  "Our mothers-in-law don't trust us," Roy said.

  "No wonder," Charles said, taking the gap between a farm wagon and an approaching motorbike at fifty. "Lucy was one of Roy's juniors. A sweet little girl of sixteen when she first came down -- "

  "Slow down," I said, "or I'll ruin the upholstery too. My God, what must you have been like on a jeep?"

  "I was there with Errol Flynn on the day of victory. Driving over a causeway of Jap corpses. Mountbatten and Slim and the rest followed at a respectful distance. Beautiful Burmese girls smothered us with kisses and flowers and the Warner Brothers hovered overhead singing Te Deums . . ."

  The motorbike cut in on us, scraping the front wing with a fraction of an inch to spare. Charles shook his fist at him.

  "You stupid bastard!" be yelled.

  "I'll take over," I said. "Whenever you're at the wheel you forget that you're no longer in the glamorous East where you can mow 'em down in their hundreds and be let off with a caution."

  "Caution be damned," Charles said. He stopped the car and moved over to make way for me. "A coolie cost me a hundred chips once."

  "Imperialist brute," Roy said. "Men like you lost us the Empire." I started the car with a jerk, but I soon got the hang of it. The steering was low-geared and more than a trifle soggy but the engine had plenty of power and I found that I was enjoying myself. Charles and Roy started to sing "In Mobile," and I took my cigar out of my mouth and joined in the chorus.

  In Mobile, in Mobile Here's a health to the drinking classes in Mobile When they've finished with their glasses --

  I looked at the cigar and remembered that I'd given up smoking. The guilt began to work inside me again; but when we'd finished the song, I put the cigar back in my mouth. It was too good to waste.

  Charles slapped me on the back. "Those sensitive features are set in a mask of pain. A tear quivers in those bloodshot blue eyes. Does our little ditty arouse memories of the time when you were an inordinate user of Brylcreem and never wore an overcoat even on the coldest days?"

  "He's been like this all the way from London," Roy said. "He's grooming himself for Chief; he'll make some poor little squirt writhe under a flow of sarcasm one of these days."

  "It might be you," Charles said. "After the usual remarks about the necessity for senior members of my staff setting an example etcetera, I shall get down to cases. Maidstone , I shall say, belching slightly after my lunch at the Savoy Grill, Maidstone, I can hardly believe it possible that a man occupying so high a position is unaware of the existence of the age of consent. It is of no avail to asseverate that the juvenile issues have considerably increased . . ."

  I slowed down going past the village green. "There's a toothsome juvenile for you," I said. It was the black-haired girl who'd asked me the time on my first day in Cumley.

  "Oh my," Roy said, " 'strap me to the mast,' said Ulysses. Almost worth ten years hard, isn't she?"

  The girl was sitting on the grass at the roadside reading a magazine. She was wearing slacks and a tight red jersey. She looked up as we passed.

  "She's smiling at you, Roy said. "Charles and I will testify on your behalf. Say that everything went black."

  "They're like little apples," Charles said wistfully. "It's bloody unfair; the precise age at which that type is worth having is the age when an asinine law says they're inviolate. That girl has now reached her peak. From now on she'll decline rapidly."

  I thought of Alice's face raddled by tears and the tired droop of her shoulders as she turned away from me at the station; I felt angry with the girl for being young and unbroken and angry with myself for looking at her.

  "You're growing old," I said. "Little girls in cinemas are the next stage."

  "Doubtless, doubtless," Charles said. "When I was her age, I wouldn't look at a woman under thirty. Now I won't look at any woman over" -- he looked at me sharply -- "twenty. Twenty-one at the outside."

  "You're a couple of worn-out old lechers," Roy said. "Let's have a bathe before tea and wash away these unclean thoughts. Which is the best place, Joe?"

  We were passing the lane which led to the cove where Alice and I had been that morning. It was the best place to swim from; all the other stretches of beach nearby were shingly and exposed. But I couldn't, just then, tolerate the thought of anyone else disturbing my memories of what had taken place there less than four hours since. The cove was our own in a way that, I don't know why the cottage wasn't.

  "It's half a mile farther," I said as I drove past the lane.

  "Hurry up," said Charles impatiently. "The road's clear."

  I put my foot down and drew up a moment later in a flurry of dust on the narrow road by the headland north of Cumley. There was a path leading down to the beach and Charles and Roy snatched up their bathing trunks and started running down it.

  "Aren't you coming, Joe?" Roy asked. "There's a spare costume somewhere."

  "No, thanks," I said. "I've already bathed."

  They went whooping down the path like schoolboys and in scarcely ten minutes I heard them swearing as their bare feet hit the shingles and then there was a sound of splashing. I took another cigar from the box in the back seat, pierced it, lit it carefully, and tried to think about nothing at all, stroking the worn bakelite of the steering wheel for comfort.

  26

  It was a good holiday that we had, though. We started each day with strong tea and rum, bathed before breakfast -- they discovered our cove for themselves the second day -- and ate huge meals. We saw all the sights -- the Cerne Giant, Corfe Castle, Cloudshill, and the rest. We also drank a lot of beer; but I suppose that the food and sunshine and fresh air kept us sober. At any rate, the one day that it rained was the day that we got really stinkingly sozzled, starting at the village pub at lunchtime, carrying on in the cottage with bottled beer in the afternoon, and driving out to a roadhouse near Bournemouth in the evening. I don't believe that I've ever drunk so much before: one always tends to exaggerate the amount, but totting it up afterwards we all agreed that it couldn't have been less than twenty pints and half a bottle of gin apiece.

  I don't quite know how I drove the car back. Normally we'd have left it and taken a taxi, but Roy hit a Territorial officer in the Gents' and it seemed best to remove ourselves quickly. Roy, a quiet type normally, seemed to become, as Charles said, all Id when he'd had one over the eight. Charles had a rough time with him in the back seat; he was trying for some reason to take off his clothes and he only stopped the attempt when Charles hit him on the jaw. Then he became normal, if you can call alternate fits of weeping and blasphemy normal. I was in that final stage where the mind grasps fully the fact of being drunk, orders the limbs and senses to behave themselves, and finds them obeying seconds too late. The night was steaming with heat like a great animal; you could see it rising from the ground. And the roads were slippery; twice the car shimmied into a long skid, the worst part of which was that though I knew I ought to care whether or not I came out of it alive, I didn't give a damn. I was, in a crazy way, enjoying it.

  When we came into Cumley the rain had stopped. There was a smell of wet grass and night-scented stock, and the moon was out, cold and faraway as an owl's hoot.

  "God is dead!" Roy suddenly yelled. Then he started blubbering again. "There were two officers. I've just remembered. I hit the wrong one. God forgive me."

  "The final stage," Charles said. "Maudlin remorse."

  "I wouldn't want to appear inquisitive," I said, "but why did you sock him?"

  "He had the M.C.," Roy said.

  "You've got the D.T's," I said. "That's no reason to bash the poor devil. They won't give you a medal just because you bust his nose."

  "Isn't he a card?" Charles said. "A genuine schizo once he's tiddly. He's brooding because he thinks he deserved a medal and they passed him over. Why, damn it all, I'm the one who ought to have done the bashing. I've killed forty Japs at least, not to
mention that Wog I ran over in Calcutta. What thanks have I received for it, what recognition of my devotion to duty and disregard for danger? None at all. Am I bitter? No. Only glad that forty Japs are dead instead of me."

  "You don't understand," Roy said. "I was a sergeant. If I'd done whatever it was that that captain had done, they wouldn't have given me an M.C. It would have been an M.M."

  "Different brands of courage," Charles said. "Serge and barathea. Don't let it bother you, Sergeant."

  "He worries too much," I said.