The Broken Chariot

by Alan Sillitoe

  Jacob wondered what he would be able to make of all this. ‘I don’t understand how someone who left school at fourteen could write a book like Royal Ordnance. In a way I don’t quite see it.’

  Neither did Herbert, who hoped his test was close to the end, for he began to despise himself at such apparent success. ‘Well, I read a lot, didn’t I?’

  ‘But what about the scholarship, and going to a grammar school?’

  ‘A what ship?’

  ‘A scholarship.’

  ‘What sort o’ ship is that?’

  He told him, and after a few more fruitless skirmishes thought a touch of provocation would put him back on the ground. ‘Before you came in this evening,’ Jacob smiled, ‘I heard someone say he thought your book was good, but he did wonder how long you would be able to keep it up. Do you have anything to say about that?’

  Bert’s face twitched, and set hard. He looked towards the window, as if able to see outside and turn dark into daylight – and back again. ‘Is he still ’ere? I’ll knock him down the stairs’ – especially if Dominic had been the know-all loudmouth. ‘They can blab what they like,’ he said moodily.

  ‘I forget who it was.’ Jacob put book and pencil back into his pocket. ‘It’s been a pleasure talking to you,’ and took out a handkerchief to get the steam off his glasses. Herbert stretched himself, and cracked his knuckles, as he and Archie had often done in a duet to amuse the women at the end of the day, to indicate that the interview was over for him as well. Humphries had been listening by the door.

  ‘That was fine, Bert,’ he said when Jacob had left. ‘You’re ideal for interviews.’

  ‘I was only talking. Showin’ off, I suppose.’

  In the crush of the party, he excused himself between several backs, and lifted the last full glass from a tray before another hand could close on it. Deborah’s hugger-mugger with Dominic enraged both Bert and Herbert. ‘Fuck off, Jones,’ they said, ‘or I’ll bash yer pretty face in.’

  A ripple went up her body at the prospect of some mindless violence, ending in a giggle which spilled a few beads of wine. ‘Look here, Herbert,’ Dominic said. And then he grinned. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you Herbert?’

  Bert glared into his eyes. So the bastard had rumbled him. Or had he? If he was fishing he’d bury the hook in his finger. Dominic looked back impertinence passing for courage, as in the old days. It was one to one again, though pride and upbringing might well stop Dominic letting on if he did know, at least before so many people. Herbert, at the same time, no longer wanted to keep up the illusion of being someone he definitely was not. But he had to, and wondered what resources of his actor’s talent remained to help him if he started drowning in the morass of his lie – or if his so far solid chariot began breaking up.

  ‘It don’t bother me if you call me Herbert,’ Bert said, ‘as long as you don’t mind being dead. Nobody’s called me that since I went into hospital to have my heart out. I was about four at the time. Anyway, piss off, so’s I can have a conversation with this lovely, intelligent, and smashin’ bit o’ stuff called Debbie.’

  Dominic collected the blush of chagrin from one side of his smarmy clock with a cursory wipe and put it into his trouser pocket for a future emergency, but the other side of his face showed that he didn’t seem in any way concerned at leaving them together, giving one aspect to Bert and another to Herbert, so that each could make his choice. Even so, Herbert was glad to note how he shouldered himself along a disgruntled track towards a flat-chested woman who looked like his sister Rachel and blushed as he came close.

  Herbert’s words to Deborah had jerked out after soaking up too much inferior booze, but he decided to stay with her, and to rein in Bert for the rest of the evening, come what may, and put on whatever charm he could of a Thurgarton-Strang. She would only think he was learning fast. ‘I’m sorry about all that. It’s just that I get drunk on plain English now and again, which I think’s no bad thing in this place. Anyway, it ’elped to get rid o’ that lounge lizard.’

  ‘I’m glad you did.’ She looked at him with the sort of open full-toothed smile he could never have got from Cecilia. ‘If I’d tried it I’d have been given the push.’

  Herbert sensed that she and Dominic were closer than just acquaintances at the office, and if so he was glad to break up their affair, which would serve Dominic right.

  Twenty-One

  A light of inspiration in Herbert’s room shone from the picture by Briton Rivière. Phoebus Apollo drove his chariot of the sun over a flower-strewn plain, the sullen pack of lions in long shafts gnashing their teeth at the efforts of the lord and master to gibe them on. Powerless to strike back from the reins and drag him down, such rage could only be slaked by sensing a time when the inexperienced Phaeton would struggle to control them and become their victim.

  The reproduction, one of an album from a secondhand furniture shop, all houses cleared, provided another stitch in the tapestry of his progress, as well as a warning. He was half in the picture but too much in the bad dream of his room: a boil on the ceiling was about to burst, and drown him with pus while the walls closed in.

  The yen to work was dead, relief impossible, for the time unthinkable. He only felt secure when alone in his room, but even that no longer held back the sensation of being close to madness. The room had turned into a prison, in which his anchor found no rock to grip.

  He had money to spend, and London was all around, but being his own gaoler stopped him breaking out, unless to buy a cleaver at a bucket shop and disembowel a stranger in a dark alley. Without a motive he would never be caught. Would God or anyone look askance if he threw a child in the moiling water from Hungerford Bridge? It was the worst of dreams.

  There was no other self in the offing but the one that sought to overpower him, a stranger he would have to fight like Theseus and the Minotaur. The rite of passage, to he couldn’t tell what or where, gave a mixture of lassitude and voracious impatience, out of which not even Bert from way back could show him an escape route, except to say that he ensconce himself in the nearest pub and talk to people, something he was totally unable to do.

  To get on a train for the north and wallow in the life he had abandoned, or go to Norfolk and shoot a few rabbits, and falter under the questions of his ageing parents, would be annihilation. The bark of Simpson the games’ master might get him running, or the old army shout of rise and shine, but that was no more than a laugh. Or he could call Deborah from the box along the street and, babbling out his confusions, show himself as a worm not fit to live. They’d been close to getting into bed a few nights ago, but she said they hadn’t known each other long enough, and he steeled himself to be gallant and not push the opportunity into boorishness.

  He sliced brown bread and opened a tin of sardines into a saucer: the survival of the fittest had to begin with yourself. A barb on the ragged edge of the tin drew copious blood, an encouraging sign. Maybe his despair had been brought on because nothing had gone into his stomach since a meagre breakfast of distant coffee and a slice of buttered bread. He had been too intent on opening letters from the mat downstairs to eat much. Those with typed addresses were seen to first, in case there were cheques inside. The second half of his advance came for the novel, and a few hundred for a paperback, as well as cash for an American edition, an unnerving cocked hat for one post. He unfolded and flattened them with his buttery knife: let the teller at the bank wonder what the stains were.

  The top came easily off a bottle of White Horse and, filling a cup halfway, alcohol felt good at the lips, put pepper in his belly, to be mopped up by a sandwich. As if the blood was ink he pressed several folds of blotting paper over it till the skin was dry, and whisky could be rubbed into the cut.

  Behind the window of a showroom in South Kensington he saw an Austin Healey Four Cylinder One Hundred Sports Car, on sale for five hundred pounds, a heartening object to spring into your sight on a Monday morning. He sloped back and forth along the low
slung brutish panels, fingered the dark green wings as smooth as marble. ‘I’m serious. It’s a beauty.’

  ‘Then sit in it, pal.’ The salesman was a tall Germanic-looking man with rimless glasses and an amiable worldly squint. ‘The boss isn’t in yet. Cup of coffee while you wait?’

  ‘That’s very good of you. Yes, please.’

  ‘No trouble.’

  Herbert stroked the pristine wheel, and felt his prospects good enough to stick up two fingers at the notion of getting a job. Solvent for at least a year, it would seem like twenty at the rate time had gone in the last two decades. He called the man over. ‘Don’t care if I do go broke. I’ll have it.’

  The boss came in, overcoat, scarf and homburg, despite the warmish day, looking like a brother (or cousin) of Glenny the rackrent landlord, whose offer of a job Herbert had turned down. ‘I’ll have it, if I can drive it away.’

  ‘How would you like to pay, sir?’

  All problems solved, he drove on to the road. After the car had soaked its gallons out of a pump near Shepherds Bush, he took the paces slowly around quiet streets so that he could gauge the dimensions. Drops of rain splattered the windscreen, wipers leaving a clean Perspex after every heartfelt sweep. In the coffee bar his position by the window kept the car in view long enough for him to know it was his.

  He rocketed from the starter’s line at the Notting Hill Gate traffic lights, well in advance of any slow coach or happy saver, cruised along the Bayswater Road, and threaded a way through Mayfair and Soho, feeling like a kid who had been given a sparkling mechanical toy for his birthday.

  Pulling up at a phone box he called Deborah. Could they meet after work? ‘I’ll take you to dinner.’

  ‘Yes, please. Can’t wait. I know a terrific place in Hampstead.’ She wondered, putting the receiver down, if he hadn’t been a hoaxer, not Bert Gedling at all, unless he was trying to bring his accent into line, which would be no bad thing.

  At his solitary tea in the thirties splendour of the Hyde Park Hotel he imagined her thoughts, and smiled at their progress. She would analyse every nuance, and sooner or later get close to the right answer. Looking into the Bible he learned that Deborah was a prophetess, reason enough for falling in love.

  The waitress brought extra butter and filled his pot with hot water whenever he called. She had a stout figure and dark straight hair, and Herbert, because of her accent, wanted to know where she came from. She told him she’d been a teacher in Australia, and was working her way around Europe. Feeling quixotic, he left a pound note for a tip.

  Deborah, walking down the steps of the offices, heard him pip the horn from across the street, and paused at the kerb for traffic to pass. Herbert seemed to get his first real look at her face, her features usually too volatile to picture her properly when among other people.

  As for what she was like inside – inside? Where the fuck was that? – whoever you looked at, and thought you had weighed up, and knew from the spleen outwards, could remain a mystery, and the weighing up had to begin all over again. No one realized that better than he, and you could but speculate: often wide of the truth, yet sometimes close to reality. People, like quicksilver, needed a lifetime to properly pin down, the only thing being that you couldn’t afford to wait that long, and so used the imagination to fix them for better or worse at a particular moment and say that’s how they were.

  She was a little above middle height, and walked across the road in such a way as to show she had been carefully brought up but had enough independence to go her own way. Her nose pointed somewhat in the air, as if she considered everyone else as shit, which amused him, though he liked how her white and even teeth showed he deserved a smile. Either she was more beautiful than he had supposed, or it was marvellous what a sports car did for you.

  He looked in no way, she thought, like the proletarian novelist he was said to be, when leaning over the wheel to unlatch the door, though on opening his mouth he couldn’t help betraying himself. ‘Come on in, duck, and I’ll tek yer for a ride in this mechanical pram.’

  His accent was bound to mellow after a while, unless he’s playing it up because he hopes I find it sexy, which in a way I do. The interesting scar – a mark of Cain if ever there was one – hinted at a fair amount of trouble in his life, never mind how he said he’d come by it, though without it he might look a bit more ordinary.

  She thought him handsome, but unpredictable and hard to know, perhaps a man to beware of. Her father had warned her of people ‘from further down the ladder’, who tried to pass themselves off for what they hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming. Otherwise the kindest and gentlest person, he said he couldn’t bear social climbers. ‘They’re only out for themselves, so avoid them like the plague. You know what they say? “Put a beggar on horseback, and he’ll ride roughshod over you.”’

  He was only trying to protect her, bless him, but she was quite good at looking after herself, thank you very much. Bert Gedling wasn’t climbing anywhere, though he sometimes gave the impression of treading in hobnailed boots across the whole spectrum. Luckily he wasn’t fat, or coarse, or bumptious, or anything like such a person might be as shown on television. Nor was he paranoid or set on murder. His nails were scrubbed, and hair smartly cut, shoes polished and cravat arranged into the neck of his shirt. He used deodorant, so didn’t smell, and even if it was his only suit he knew how to use a clothes brush. Perhaps he came from a more respectable level of the working class than he let on or, going by his rough-beast streak, he was the black sheep who even so hadn’t been able to throw off the cleanly habits of his family.

  It didn’t much matter that she would never be able to introduce him to her father, as he wove with aggressive skill through traffic up Charing Cross Road. She caught looks of curiosity and admiration from other motorists, and glares of vile envy from one or two pedestrians. Her father would probably have been among the latter, but she didn’t care what he would think of Bert, and would do as she liked, which was what living in London was all about.

  My lovely popsy girl, he laughed, shooting the amber towards Camden Town, is enjoying her spin with Champagne Bertie, and I’m wallowing in being with her. Like an air stewardess in the telly ad she lit a pair of cigarettes and put one between his lips. Life was on the mend, though he supposed Archie in his place would have preferred her to be married, peril being pornography to him. Herbert took a hand away to up the gear. ‘You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met, seen, or even dreamed about, and I love you. I know you don’t believe me, but I can’t help that.’

  He was lying, of course. The first words of any man who wanted to be intimate with you was to say he loved you. And the first move of a woman who wanted the man to make love to her was to light a cigarette and put it between his lips. Her laugh at his declaration carried them much of the way up Haverstock Hill.

  She lived on the third floor of a large old house, which allowed him to park his precious motor off the road – and close the top to stop pigeons making a mess of the upholstery. There were trees along the drive, but the garden had degenerated into a jungle.

  ‘That’s my Mini over there,’ she nodded. ‘I don’t drive it to work, though it’s good to rattle around in at weekends, or go to see my parents in Woking now and again.’

  A curvaceous bottle of old Cliquot was lifted from behind the seat of his Healey. ‘Smart little buggy, the Mini. Do you have a room, or a flat?’ Meaning that if she’s sharing maybe I’ll have a go at the other girl as well.

  She drew him into the hall. ‘A flat, and I don’t have to share.’ Rising damp, woodworm and deathwatch beetle, with a dash of Colorado thrown in, it stank like his old school, tingled at the nostrils as they went up creaking stairs. She leaned on the banister. ‘Daddy bought me a ten-year lease.’

  He wondered if the building would last that long. ‘What does he do, your old man?’

  ‘He was a barrister, but retired early.’

  How a barrister’s daughter le
velled with the son of a brigadier general he neither knew nor cared, all such stuff left behind decades ago, at least on his part. Maybe everyone would start to think the same, though he doubted that anything could fundamentally change in such a country. Even if her father was a docker he wouldn’t have minded.

  He followed her into a large sitting room, with bedroom, kitchen-diner, and bathroom attached. ‘Quite a nice pied-à-terre, duck.’

  ‘It used to belong to Dominic, till he got a place in Chelsea.’

  ‘That fat worm.’

  ‘He’s a good editor. And it was kind of him to tell me the flat would be falling vacant. I’d always wanted to live in Hampstead, instead of the bedsit in Fulham. Oh, by the way’ – she took a letter from her handbag – ‘Dominic asked me to give you this. It came via the office.’

  Postmarked Nottingham, he was glad to note, for it might help to establish his authenticity in Dominic’s oyster eyes. He put it into his pocket, and looked around the room. She certainly did live here, everything neat and shipshape. ‘A very cushy billet.’ He took off his jacket only after she had shed her coat. ‘Where are the napkins?’

  ‘In the kitchen drawer. Glasses top left in the cupboard.’ Like all the men she had been used to he was curt, but basically courteous, so why should she think him any better or worse? He came in with two glasses: the cork hit the ceiling. ‘After we’ve polished this off we can go out to eat. I’m clambed to death.’

  She would have preferred dry sherry, but maybe he had seen an old Charles Boyer film. ‘I’m fairly hungry, as well.’

  He stood by the bay window looking into the half-leaved branches, mouth down and brown eyes sharp but, she thought, seeing only himself, different now to the mad but gallant boyo who had driven her from the office. His saturnine aspect showed character, too broody perhaps at times, as if he was having a struggle coming to terms with himself – with his so-called success, probably – since whether he admitted it or not, it must be something of a shock, though so far she had to admit he was carrying it off with panache, unless he was a consummate actor.