Whenever Arthur looked into somebody’s face and screwed up his brows to look black and cunning, and shouted: ‘I’ve got yo’ weighed-up’ — the chances were that he really did have their main characteristics balanced nicely on the scales in his mind, though he could explain neither the mechanism of the scales nor the nature of the goods that kept each pan level.
Reactions varied to his remark. When he said it to one of his mates, perhaps in a quarrel over a box of work rejected at the viewers’ table, they would reply in an equally knowing and stentorian voice: ‘That’s what yo’ think.’ When someone said to Arthur: ‘I’ve got yo’ weighed-up,’ his stock reply was: ‘Oh, ‘ev yer? Then ye’r bloody clever, mate, because I ain’t got meself weighed-up, I can tell yer’ — which was equally effective in shutting them up, and perhaps equally truthful in that though everybody might have the ability to weigh-up others, it never occurred to them to attempt a weighing-up of themselves. Arthur had stumbled on this lack from which all seemed to suffer, though as yet he had not thought of applying it with any great force to himself.
But despite his aptitude for weighing people up, Arthur had never quite weighed-up Jack the tool-setter. Perhaps the fact that he was Brenda’s husband made him appear more complicated than other men. Certainly he was of the same sort as Arthur, never pretended otherwise, and he might normally have weighed him up like a shot, but somehow the essential ramifications of Jack’s character evaded him. Jack was timid in many ways, a self-contained man who did not give much of himself away. He chipped-in with his share of the talking, yet never shouted or swore or boozed like a fish, or even got mad no matter how much the gaffers got on his nerves; he never opened his mind so that you could take a squint inside and see what he was made of. Arthur did not even know whether or not Jack had any idea he was carrying-on with his wife. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he hadn’t, but if he had, then he was a sly bastard for not speaking out. He was the sort that might suspect or even have definite proof that you were knocking-on with his wife for months and not take you up on it until he was good and ready. In fact he might never take you up on it, a mistake on his part, for if ever he did Arthur would give Brenda back, which was one of the rules of his game.
But, all said and done, if he was carrying-on with Jack’s wife then it served Jack right. Arthur classified husbands into two main categories: those that looked after their wives, and those that were slow. Jack fell into the latter class, one that Arthur, from experience, knew to be more extensive than the first. Having realized this quickly he had been lucky in love, and had his fun accordingly, making hay while the sun shone, growing-up from the age of seventeen with the idea that married women were certainly the best women to know. He had no pity for a ‘slow’ husband. There was something lacking in them, not like a man with one leg that could in no way be put right, but something that they, the slow husbands, could easily rectify if they became less selfish, brightened up their ideas, and looked after their wives a bit better. For Arthur, in his more tolerant moments, said that women were more than ornaments and skivvies: they were warm wonderful creatures that needed and deserved to be looked after, requiring all the attention a man could give, certainly more than the man’s work and a man’s own pleasure. A man gets a lot of pleasure anyway from being nice to a woman. Then on the other hand there were women who wouldn’t let you be nice to them, women with battleship faces and hearts as tough as nails who rattle a big fist at you and roar: ‘Do this, do that, do the other, or else’ — and you could try all you liked to be kind to them, but they wouldn’t have any of it. It’d been better if they’d have been born men, then they’d do less damage and cause less misery: they’d be called-up in a war and get killed, or get slung in clink for saying: ‘Down with this, and down with that,’ from soap-boxes. They were the sort of women who thought you were barmy if you tried to love ‘em, and they just didn’t understand what love was, and all you could do was end up by giving them a smack in the chops. Hopeless and barmy. But I reckon that mostly women want you to love ‘em and be nice to ‘em, and that even if they didn’t they’d start to love you back after a bit. Make a woman enjoy being in bed with you — that’s a big part of the battle — then you were well on the way to keeping her with you for good. Christ, that’s the best thing I’ve ever done, to make sure a woman got her fun as well as me getting mine. God knows how it dawned on me. I don’t. Then again though, a man likes a drink, and if a woman didn’t like a man who drank, then it was going to be touch-and-go, whichever way you looked at it. Which is my big trouble, and why I’m not so cocksure about everything, in the end, and why I have to be careful and find the most loving women of all — nearly always married women who don’t get much love, who have slow husbands.
And so it was possible to forget the factory, whether inside it sweating and straining your muscles by a machine, or whether swilling ale in a pub or loving Brenda in her big soft bed at the weekend. The factory did not matter. The factory could go on working until it blew itself up from too much speed, but I, he thought, already a couple of dozen above his daily stint, will be here after the factory’s gone, and so will Brenda and all women like her still be here, the sort of women that are worth their weight in gold.
3
In the few minutes that passed between regaining consciousness and opening his eyes he knew that he was too ill to go to work. From time to time he intended getting out of bed to see how he really felt, but it was eleven o’clock before this was possible. Downstairs he found the filled teapot cold on the table where his mother had left it before going shopping. He did not know what was wrong as he walked bare-footed around the room. He picked up the Daily Mirror and, seeing no good-looking women on the front page, turned to the middle. A nice bathing-suit, anyway. Throwing the paper down, he went into the coal-place under the stairs to fill the bucket.
His mother came in, her arms weighed down with groceries.
‘I thought you was badly,’ she said, seeing him sitting with a pale face by the fire, ‘that’s why I let you stay in bed.’
‘My guts are rotten,’ he complained.
‘Bilious trouble,’ she said, a common label given to all such complaints. A common cure, when she had unloaded her baskets in the scullery, was to fetch sixpennyworth of Indian Brandy from the shop across the street.
She trudged hurriedly up the yard, her arms folded and drawn tightly together in the cold. In summer months they were held more loosely across her thin chest. This picture went through Arthur’s mind as he stayed by the fire, hearing to himself the click of her black, glossy, underslung shoes as she crossed the cobbled street. ‘Sixpennyworth of Indian Brandy, Mr Taylor,’ she would say, entering the shop. Old Tightfist, thought Arthur. ‘Nice thing to come for on a morning like this,’ the shopkeeper would say, measuring it out in drops. Arthur knew his mother would rather have risked short measure than be kept waiting, but a dee-dahed tune and blank look through his frosted window would speed Tightfist’s actions up for her. Unmade-up and thin, her face at fifty-odd had enough lines, not scored with age like an old woman’s, but crease-marked in the right places through too much laughing and crying. By God she had worked and hadn’t had a good life until the war, and Arthur knew it. When Seaton’s face grew black for lack of fags she had trotted around to the various shops asking for some on tick till Thursday dole-day. But just as Seaton nowadays had endless packets of Woodbines and a TV panel, so she had access to week after week of solid wages that stopped worry at the source and gave her a good enough life, and put real brightness into her bright blue-grey eyes as she asked, whenever she felt like it at the Co-op, for a pound of this and a pound of that. ‘Anybody badly, Mrs Seaton?’ Arthur could imagine Old Tightfist asking her. He had a blank face of forty, was dead-set in his ways, and nosy like a nark. She would unfold her arms and take the purse from her pina-pocket: ‘It’s Arthur’s stomach again. That factory’s not a bit o’ good to anybody on God’s earth.’ Young-looking and hair-creamed, Tightfist would h
old up the sixpennorth of brandy and tell himself he must put more water in it when she’d gone. ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ he no doubt said, slipping the glass-stopper back. ‘I’ve never worked there myself. I was a traveller, you know. But grease is bad, I will say that.’ She was only half grey as yet. Halfway between fair and brown, Arthur said her hair was. His old man’s had been as black as the ace of spades. ‘Do you think this’ll do him much good?’ she would ask. ‘The poor bogger woks too ‘ard, if you ask me. He’s a good lad, though. Allus ‘as bin. Don’t know what I’d do wi’out ‘im.’ That’s what Arthur knew she would say. ‘Don’t know of owt better.’ Tightfist would think about the time Arthur came in his shop and played on the fruit machine. I stuffed penny after penny into the slot, Arthur at the fire thought, and when it stopped at three lemons at last, the kitty didn’t fall out. Not a farthing. So when Old Tightfist said he couldn’t do owt about it I thumped it in the side until it started coughing, and twelve-and-fourpence crashed into my lap.
He waited for her, saw her walk down the yard, heard the latch click as she came in with her small medicinal load.
‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘I’ll soon get yer well.’
He drank the brandy and felt doubly better by giving an imitation before the mirror of Bill Hickock knocking it back in a Wild West saloon, and the sickness brought on by too much breathing of suds and grease in the factory gradually left him. He called out urgently for a chaser of tea, and his mother made a hot strong cup with plenty of sugar and rich Co-op cream from the pint-bottle top that she took from the outside window-ledge, an efficient mash through two dozen years of practice. He stayed by the fire while she cooked the dinner, reading the Daily Mirror in a smell of cabbage, and looking occasionally out of the breath and frost-smeared window at the long ramshackle backyards, at women coming home with their shopping, and at his mother nipping out through the scullery door now and again to tip some rubbish into the dustbin, or to have a few-minute gossip at the yard-end with old Ma Bull.
It was a good, comfortable life if you didn’t weaken, safe from the freezing world in a warm snug kitchen, watching the pink and prominent houses of the opposite terrace. He could have laughed. From time to time it was fine to feel unwell and have a day off work, to sit by the fire reading and drinking tea, waiting for them to get cracking with something good on television. He did not know why he felt ill. Last night he was drinking with Brenda at the Athletic Club, though he hadn’t put back enough to cause an upset stomach. This made him ask: Did I really feel badly this morning? But his conscience was untroubled: his wages would not suffer, and he always kept his work at the factory at least one day’s supply ahead of those who waited for it. So there was nothing to worry about. His stomach was better now, and he drew his white bony foot back from the red heat of the blazing fire.
With a silk-scarf covering his Windsor-knotted tie he walked towards Wollaton hoping to meet Brenda on her way to the Athletic Club. He preferred to lean against a fence rather than trudge around dismal lanes, and from where he stood he saw that the surface of Martin’s Pond was frozen. Last night Brenda did not know whether she would come or not: only perhaps, and the wording sounded so uncertain in the soft tenderness of saying good-bye that he had forgotten all about her until tea-time.
Five struck by Wollaton clock, its sound chipping the cold air, nipping in strides over the pond where children, on their way home from school, shouted and slid and threw stones at astonished ducks that rose up from clumps of reed-grass and flew with flapping wings into trees and the hedges of allotment gardens. He stood by the fence looking along the side of the wood, one hand thrust deep into the pocket of his long draped overcoat. Nearly always, while waiting for a woman to turn up, he played a game, saying to himself: ‘Well, I don’t suppose she’ll come.’ Or: ‘Well, she won’t be on this bus’ — as it came around the bend and drew into the stop. Or: ‘She won’t come for another quarter of an hour yet’ — expecting a pleasant surprise as she walked suddenly towards him. Sometimes he won, and sometimes he didn’t.
Several people alighted from the bus, yet he could not see her. He tried to penetrate the windows, top deck and lower deck, but they were steamed over with breath and smoke. Perhaps Jack will get off: the possibility amused him, and he laughed outright at the thought of it. More than a month ago Brenda had said: ‘What shall I say to Jack if he asks me why I go to the club so often?’ And he answered jokingly: ‘Tell him you’re in the darts team.’ When next they met, she had said: ‘I told him I play darts at the club, and he seemed to think it was all right.’ ‘Anything satisfies them if they get jealous,’ he had replied. But some weeks later she had told him: ‘Jack said he would come up to the club one of these nights to see if I really played darts. He joked about wanting to see me win the championship cup.’ ‘Let him come, then,’ Arthur said.
And he thought the same now. She was not on it. The engine revved-up so loudly that the brittle twigs and tree branches seemed afraid of the silence that followed, making Arthur feel colder still and unable to hear the kids playing on the pond. Brenda came three times a week to the club when Jack was on nights, leaving Jacky and his sister with a neighbour’s girl who earned a shilling for her trouble and was given a wink that told her not to say anything to a living soul. Arthur hoped that the dart story would be good for another few weeks. Turning his back on the bus that drove towards Wollaton, he stared again at the kids hooting and ice-sliding in the dusk.
She stepped off the next bus, paused at the roadside for a car to pass, then made her way across to him. He knew she had seen him but he stayed in the shadow of the hedge. She walked in short quick steps, coat fastened tight, hands in pockets, a woollen scarf drawn incongruously around her neck. He didn’t go too far out of the hedge’s cover but called her name when she was a few yards off. He wanted to be careful. You never knew. Jack might be trailing her. Not that he was afraid for himself — if it came to a show he knew he could hold his own with anybody: over six feet tall, just turned twenty-two, and bags of strength always to be drawn from somewhere — but if they were caught Brenda would be the one to pay. Be careful, and you won’t go far wrong, he thought.
He went out to meet her, taking hold of her and drawing her into the shadows. ‘Hello, duck,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. ‘How are you?’
She came close and he put his arms around her. ‘I’m all right, Arthur,’ she said softly, as if she would have given the same answer had she not been all right. A white blouse showed below her scarf when he put his hand down near her warm breasts. She carried the easy and comfortable smell of a woman who had been in a hurry and was now relaxing from the worry of it, exuding warmth and a slight powdery perspiration that excited him. She must be thirty, he thought if she’s a day. ‘Did you get away from Jack all right?’ he asked, releasing her.
‘Of course. I told him I was going to the club to play darts again.’ She was ill at ease, so he pulled her to him and held her more gently than before. It did not seem right that a woman should worry overmuch. He wanted all her troubles for himself at that moment. It was easy. He had only to take them and, having no use for them, throw them away.
‘What did he say?’
‘That he might be down later.’ She spoke with her warm breath against his mouth.
‘He allus says that, but he never comes. Besides, he’s on nights, ain’t he?’
‘Yes.’ She would not have felt safe had he been ten thousand miles away. It’s only natural though, he thought, putting both arms around her and kissing her tenderly on the mouth.
‘Don’t worry, duck, he wain’t come. You’ll be all right wi’ me.’ He pulled up her coat collar and fastened the scarf properly around her neck, then lit two cigarettes, placing one between her lips. They walked up the dark quiet tree-lined lane on their way to the club building. He told her how long he stood there before she came, making a joke of it, saying it was like waiting for a football match to start on the wrong day, saying many wild
things to make her laugh. There was a wood on one side of the lane, and after more jokes and kisses, they went into it through a gap in the hedge.
Arthur prided himself on knowing the wood like the back of his hand. There was a lake in the middle where he used to swim when young. A sawmill on the wood’s flank was set like the camp of an invader that ate slowly into it, though a jungle of trees still remained, that could be put to good use by Arthur on such nights as these.
He knew he was hurting her, squeezing her wrist as he led her deeper into the wood, but it did not occur to him to relax his hold. Trees and bushes crowding around in the darkness made him melancholy. One minute he thought he was holding her wrist so tightly because he was in a hurry to find a good dry place; then he felt it was because there was something about her and the whole situation that made him want to hurt her, something to do with the way she was deceiving Jack. Even though he, now leading her to a spot that suddenly came into his mind, would soon be enjoying it, he thought: ‘Women are all the same. If they do it to their husbands they would do it to you if you gave them half the chance.’ He trod on a twig that sent a cracking sound circling the osier-lined indistinct banks of dark water below. Brenda gasped as some bush-leaves swept by her face; he had not bothered to warn her.
The ground was hard and dry. They walked over a hump clear of bushes, the roof of a concealed tunnel burrowed into the earth and strengthened with pit-props, an air-raid shelter for the sawmill men during the war. He now held her hand lightly as she walked behind, considerate and tender again, telling her when to avoid a bush, or a tree-root sticking out of the ground.
There were no more paths in the wood than the clear and definite lines on Arthur’s palms, and he easily found the dry and enclosed place he had in mind. He took off his overcoat and laid it on the ground. ‘We’s’ll be comfortable ‘ere,’ he said softly.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Page 5
