The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I have one,’ Keith said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m living on my savings.’

  ‘Whose savings?’

  ‘Mine. Do you want to look at my hands?’

  ‘Not particularly. It wouldn’t prove anything.’

  ‘It would if you held yours up as well.’

  Keith put the paper away. ‘If this is the way you compete for your lady love it won’t get you far.’

  ‘It won’t get me as far as London, and that’s a fact. It ain’t necessary for me to compete, in any case.’

  ‘You think not?’ Keith retorted. ‘You’d be a lucky young man if it weren’t. And the woman would be unlucky, wouldn’t she, Pat?’

  ‘She wouldn’t think much about it,’ Frank said, ‘unless she lived in the Dark Ages.’

  ‘We’re in them now,’ Pat said, pouring the tea, ‘so perhaps she would.’ She put bread and butter out, and biscuits. Frank ate, but Keith couldn’t. Pat only wanted tea, feeling parched and feverish at the throat. A petrol stove burned in one corner, but Keith was chilled, unable to trace the moves that had landed him in this wintry unlucky cottage.

  ‘Do you mind if we talk alone?’ Keith asked.

  ‘I do,’ Frank said. ‘I’m staying. But say what you like. Don’t mind me. I live here.’ He waited, curious and interested in this new kind of situation that at the moment made him forget his natural disadvantage of worldliness.

  ‘After all,’ Pat said, ‘we did have a long time before he came.’ Keith did not like him. In the old days, if any man looked at Pat otherwise than by accident, he imagined that man in bed with her, and immediately loathed him. Now he was in the same room with a man who was not only her lover, but had flaunted the fact in his son’s eyes as well. He had no real claim on her, but saw Frank as an under-educated throw-out of a workman who had treacherously planted himself like a rank weed in the fair field of his hopes and affections. He and his type fell by the million under the sway of his sub-Freudian scythes, spent their sweaty wages before displays of deep and tricky symbols. No doubt Pat had told him of their past troubles, revealed secrets. There was an air as if they’d been living together for longer than they had. Present lack of speech didn’t faze them. They were undisturbed by each other’s weariness at the end of the day. Maybe she’d been truthful in saying she was in love. The idea appalled him. He knew they wanted him to go, be alone and console each other, but he would stay to the bitter end of what his own perversity had dragged him into. Yet at the same time he wanted so badly to leave, fly down those icebound lanes to Boston and the south, back to the warmth, light, and civilization of London. He could not get up and make an exit that would satisfy the pride that had suddenly become apparent in front of another man. ‘I came to ask Pat if she would live with me again.’

  ‘I don’t see what else you could have come for,’ Frank said.

  Keith remembered the advice of his analyst, that speech was always less harmful than silence, often a definite advantage. ‘I object to Kevin being up here when another man was in the house.’

  Frank laughed: ‘It’s better for him to see a man here than not. Gives him a sense of security. It’s even healthy for him. I’d like my wife to take up with another man, in case the kids grew up kinky. You never know.’

  ‘I have different views,’ Keith said. ‘I happen to be still in love with my wife. I object to my son witnessing the life she leads with someone who isn’t his father.’ Frank thought that was the way people only talked in books and on the BBC. He was amazed to confront it in real life.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with what he sees here,’ Pat said. ‘You’re just turning it into something unwholesome.’

  ‘I don’t see the point of this,’ Frank told him almost gently. ‘Pat stays with me. There’s no need to bring Kevin into it.’

  ‘You think not?’ Keith said. ‘You obviously haven’t the power even to begin to understand my point of view, though it’s simple enough.’

  ‘We’re different people, you and I,’ Frank smiled, ‘brought up in different ways. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘You’re saying it. I’m not.’

  ‘You bet I am, when you can’t come out with it straight. If I was in your shoes I’d pull out without any fuss.’

  The tone was falling below standards that Keith had been moulded to respect and live up to. This man knew no rules, had an undisciplined uneducated mind, and was actually trying to tell him what to do, to give advice, insults which he had no way of countering. ‘I’m sure Kevin would be better going to France or Austria for his holidays. If I were in his place I’d have had Lincolnshire by now. I’d want a change.’

  ‘You mean that if we were divorced,’ Pat said, a smile which made her lips seem thinner, ‘and I was married again – all respectably – there’d be no objection to Kevin coming up here?’

  Keith also smiled: ‘Don’t you know that we’re living in an age of conformity?’

  ‘Why try to soften it?’ she said. ‘Frank won’t mind.’ They all still sat, and she saw this as a help towards no real quarrel breaking out.

  ‘I’ll take anything from a cunning bastard,’ Frank said, ‘except action. Let’s make it plain: you want Pat to choose between me and Kevin; and you think that if you can blackmail her into choosing Kevin, then I’ll just quietly sling my hook and leave you on the field? How long does it take to put you off? Do we have to make a declaration of solidarity, or something?’ He understood Pat’s diffidence about provoking a row, but he saw there was nothing to be gained by listening. Keith might have the whip-hand but he couldn’t have it all in tea-party manners.

  ‘I don’t see why we can’t settle it in a civilized manner,’ Keith said.

  ‘I suppose by civilized you mean your way? There’s nothing to settle. It’s no use using your subtleties here. It won’t work. You’re not persuading anybody to buy Daz or vote Tory, so don’t come it.’

  Keith laughed. ‘It’s no use trying that line with me. I’m completely apolitical. I dropped all the political stuff years ago. I’m simply asking you to choose,’ he turned to Pat.

  ‘How can I?’

  Frank sensed her tears, as close as when, weeks ago, they had quarrelled and he had struck her. The recall of it doubled his rage and bitterness. He felt as if standing on a shellbacked insect getting bigger under his feet, felt himself blacking out towards another strange light dominated by the smooth face, fish-eyes and polished shoes of the person whose opposing spirit wanted to crush and strangle his own: ‘Listen, you bastard, you’ve got no right to come up here and spoil what doesn’t belong to you, to wreck and ruin to your own sweet tune. Your cock crow’s hoarse and false, mate, full of maggots, you miseducated boatfaced bastard eating food and wearing clothes you never earned or advertised on the telly. You speak calm but you boil like an empty kettle, the moon in your mouth and the sun up your arse. You’re starry-eyed and cloudy at the brain except when it comes to doing the sort of job that will keep you like it forever. The world’s top heavy with you and your sort who wank people’s brains off every night with telly advertisements that make them happy at carrying slugs like you on their backs, but I’d like to see you do a real day’s work, if you could, if anybody’d be crazy enough to set you on.’

  Keith pulled back his chair and stood up, a hand at his forehead as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer and was wondering where the blood poured from. ‘I had a commission in the army,’ he said, his voice dry and shocked, ‘and put people like you into detention.’

  An almost soundless blow sent him against the wall, bent double as if to look at some intricate design on the carpet that he remembered seeing years ago in Heal’s. Frank kicked him, a hand cracking on flesh, and the purple, spark-fanged floor on the sway and loose burst at Keith like a piece of ice over the eye-face, an engulfing polar cap. The chair cracked. Keith reacted, taller than Frank, heavily built, fist bursting, a whale-head driving across the light, packed with flintheads and darkness.


  Pat cried out at the black sky: feeling the rotten, festering sores of the everyday world a thousand times enlarged bursting over her again, the love and peace, isolation and work made into a disease that she only wanted to shun. In a few hours it had happened, the impossible, unexpected, unwanted, all out of nothing, for no reason, taking away two years of dignity and usefulness. ‘Frank,’ she cried, ‘don’t.’

  He was unconcerned whether it was the end or not, in some ways hoped it was, considered himself in the way of it since leaving home, wife, and factory, splitting his life’s tree with the axe of temperament and bloody-mindedness. The table roared, skidded before it could slice his spine, met the wall. He flung himself at the rushing figure, shoulder against chest and threw it stolidly back, drove his fist at an uprising forearm as if to break bone.

  A voice telling him that this was no way to argue, a surrender to barbarity, was stifled as a stab in the back from a world he had recently met. He hated this world because it let him down at such a time, didn’t tell him how to avoid a punch-up nor how to survive it. With flooding eyes and face awash, a waterfall came crashing from the roof. His fist swung into a blind, wet, unkillable face that slid away, then wielded its own granite response.

  There was no stopping or facing each other except by attack. Frank wasn’t conscious of thought, or even of seeing Keith’s upright body helpless against the wall before the violence of his opponent left him a shell unable to dwell on how he had come to begin this spiritual carnage. The room was a lighted cave, purple corners, greying walls, blue floor underfoot seen from scarlet eyes that alone had strength left to know what had been done.

  Keith fell, groped and spread. The house was silent but for a clock ticking from the kitchen. Frank felt isolated, pinned into the darkening hemisphere of his pain, used, shamed, unnoticed, an animal at large in the frightening wilderness of himself. No one else was conscious in the house – he was the shell who conquers, winner of desperate wars in which despair is the only winner because it takes everything and loses you to yourself.

  He sat on the floor, leaning at the wall in the smashed room, knees drawn up and smoking a cigarette, wondering why he hadn’t left when he saw the car and realized who was in the house. He had shunned the unwritten rules, the birthright, the tradition, and now the wage packet was proffered to be filled with his blood and life for repayment. Retreats are always wise, for if you retreat often and skilfully enough you may find that one of them has become an advance if you are quick to exploit it at the turning moment.

  He was conscious of the room’s true shape, geometry around chaos. How had it started? He didn’t know, except that it was stupid and unnecessary and that he alone had done it. A sickness of hunger swelled in his stomach, but he couldn’t break the barriers of misery to get up. Pat had gone, he knew, left some time during the fight. He didn’t even wonder where.

  Through the kitchen and out of the back door iced air gripped his throbbing head like a great hand, pressed more pain into it, a compress of cold sky. The big moon had been thrown up from the black net of bare tree-branches that stayed outspread waiting to catch it again should it fall back. Luminous, yellow and fire-bright, the blue-night sky held it, pale in the middle then darkening outwards. There were millions of stars. A car started at the front of the house, engine opening with a roar, charging down the lane, gear changes happening quicker than he could count. The garden was empty. Let her go. What else could she do? What else could he do, either, come to that?

  He held fainting onto the rim of the sink, the grey narrowing cylinder of unconsciousness passing over, slowly receding. The roads were iced and dangerous. Why had she done this when all he’d wanted was to protect her, keep her from the insults of that mad bastard in there? There was some reason in it, but the only thing she could do was take-off into the black night of narrow lanes, the steep sleeve-hills of this winter land that burned the heart out of you with its ice and frost.

  A cock crowed – shaking frost from its comb no doubt. He didn’t know what hour of the night it was. Shutters had fallen over the sun and moon, and he couldn’t break out of this timeless cottage. What had these last months been except a womb? Having taken off from trouble island he’d dived deep into what seemed like peace. Why did I do such a stupid thing? Not that I’ve been aware of it till now. Yet if it had been happiness, where was Pat? Gone, in spite of her so-called love, run away at the first sound of pain and responsibility, ultimately frightened at the back of her fine face and behind her strong front against life. He remembered her cry: ‘Frank, don’t!’ when the fight had started. Why hadn’t she shouted: ‘Keith, don’t!’?

  With a bowl of water he walked into the flaying light of the living-room. Keith slept on the floor, grey and cold, his face grazed, eyes blue, bunched mouth dark with blood. Yet his sleep was gentle, like a recuperation from some great struggle that had lasted all his life, and which would only land him back into it when he woke up. He seemed more of a man, lying in such a sleep, stronger, more in control of his ultimate safety. Frank had intended reviving him with the water, letting a chute of it fall over him, but thought he deserved better than that, ought to be left alone in his prostrate dignity.

  There was no point in staying. He was the bomb in the house with the slow-smoking fuse. Bill Posters was in paradise compared to this. To be prosecuted and persecuted, dogged and hunted is to be wanted at any rate. He hoped Pat would come back soon, but knew she wouldn’t. The fires were played out, purple ashes cold, black waves chopping at the mast. His packing-in from family and job now seemed light-headed, a lark, a jaunt, a cowardly truant meant to be skedaddled back from if the novelty grew stale. But now that a second break was on him, the first one seemed real enough, pushing the old life one stage further back into the past.

  He pulled the table to its usual position, set chairs in old places, closed doors, straightened pictures and mats. Order, order, order, there was no such thing as order in the land of the heart. The neat house and the bombed-out heart hid the truth from each other, a devastating fact. Restoration was quick and complete, the only incongruity being Keith. Why not leave it all as it was at the beginning? He set his mouth in a grin when all he wanted was to smash his head at the wall and finish off the live expanding stone in his chest.

  He worked his fists under Keith’s armpits, fastened his grip and dragged him towards the stairs. Every muscle in his body strained, as if, at each step, they would burst and leave him dead and helpless. He had never been more consciously afraid, for there seemed an element of death present in the effort to get him up towards the bedroom. In spite of Keith’s weight it was an effort he knew could be easily mastered at other times, for his strength had grown since leaving the factory.

  Time drew a circle round him, moved with him step by step but refused to be measured. The spending of his total strength couldn’t slacken for a counterfeit second. Unless he spent his agony in this way he wouldn’t be able to leave. Any strength remaining would weaken him, make him sit down and think things over until it was too late – until she came back, or Keith regained his consciousness of life. There must be nothing left. He would take nothing from that house. At the blackest and most desperate part of his midnight she had gone, seen him as light headed and fickle, fighting for no reason, reverting to the animal of what she thought was his past – in spite of the knowledge and intelligence she knew he firmly had. It showed how little she had ever understood and therefore loved him. It was impossible not to leave, even in the middle of the deepest love he’d known, for that’s how she wanted it, for her own good, for the good of Kevin, maybe most of all for the good of her husband – though she probably wasn’t to know it yet.

  The emptiness was breaking him. The dragging of this stone uphill was snapping the cord of his senses, tearing into his living strength like grapeshot. Maybe if she would come back. Maybe. Things didn’t happen that way. It was impossible. And if that door swung open now, the end would be the same. It had to be. He would
leave. He would save her for herself and the others. She had gone out for that, expected it of him, a test that she maybe hardly knew about, to see what sort of a man he finally was. The idea was awful but he knew it to be true, the one action that could atone for having started the fight, and the only one that could prove to her how much in love he was.

  No more steps behind his heels, he moved along flat boards, tapping them and searching, hardly able to believe it. Where should he take him? Onto Pat’s bed? He’d already given it up to that extent, to think of it only as hers. But that would be too final and complete. Kevin’s door was open, so he pulled him in, a painful and steely emptiness dragging a loaded man towards the camp bed under the uncurtained window. One war was over and he could afford to pause, match the utter silence outside against the new battleground of his breathing. He listened to the desolation of silence, deepening in himself. The stone exploded. He couldn’t remember this as a man before, ice breaking on midnight seas, the floes of dead passion crumbling inside him. He lay Keith, still senseless, on his son’s camp bed.

  Frank was breaking apart, a snap and creak of mooring-sinews, heart, stomach, brain, liver, body and mind separating, ripped out of him and filling the darkness. For a moment he felt battered, helpless, shorn of life; on the other hand he was like someone just born who needed the first and final knock to get him breathing. Answering this thought, he tapped himself on the head, and groaned at the bruise-fire that jumped around his temples.

  Keith moved, but didn’t open his eyes or wake up. Fetching a pile of blankets from the cupboard, Frank spread them over him. He’d made up his mind to go, and remembered it suddenly. The pain was greater than his bruises. It would be wrong to hope that further thought might alter his decision. He was bigger than that. He walked without thinking to the door, went downstairs for his things. In a few minutes he was out of the house.

  Part Two