Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  She knew that one day, when Edward was fourteen and old enough not to need her any more, she would leave.

  With this in mind she became more confident, able to argue, and sometimes keep him away at night when he came at her with his battering love-making. She saw how he had used her as ruthlessly as he used everyone who came his way, employing the half-conscious tactics of the self-made man. He was unaware of his methods, and laughed with disbelief when they were pointed out. He was one of those mainstays of society whose activities were interesting to watch, as long as you kept to one side. At the same time, she believed there was nothing malicious about him, otherwise the temptation to live with him again might become too great to resist.

  Through knowing him, she had grown to see something of what she was like herself, and apart from not altogether liking what she discovered, she did not relish the idea of getting through to herself in such a way. While accepting that it was impossible to know what you were like except through contact with someone else, she would have preferred self-enlightenment to have come from others rather than only from him.

  7

  Workmen were throwing furniture from a house about to be demolished. Two mildewed armchairs thudded down. A fire shot flames into the raw drizzle. Pam paused on her morning walk. A bus at full speed sent icy air against her, and a current on the rebound brought smoke from the fire that made her eyes run. Furniture coming from the house was too old and gimcrack for anybody to want, but an elderly woman wearing an army greatcoat and a piece of coloured blanket for a headscarf watched each piece as it fell.

  The sharp-eyed face of a man showed at the first floor, and he threw a chamber pot, which the totter shook her head at in disgust when it bounced from the padded back of a chair and rolled on to the wood-rubble. A second workman at the window lifted his right thumb: ‘Wait for the next lot!’

  He took a cigarette from his overalls and scraped a match down the window frame. He smoked, gazed at the fire, then tugged something across the floor.

  Changing her mind as to the value of the chamber pot, the totter asked Pam to guard her barrow and, looking at the ground so as not to trip on a brick or spar, zigzagged to avoid holes and ruts. A man warmed himself at the fire: ‘You’d think she was going to a wedding.’

  She wore boots. Rolls of socks and stockings padded her lower legs. Pam wondered whether she herself would soon be like those men and women huddled under the motorway bridge at night. Perhaps the totter once had family and friends, and maybe a house her husband was buying on a mortgage when, after twenty years, she turned wild for no reason, put on several dresses and suits of clothes, and got to the nearest railway station. Who was she to think it would be any different for her?

  A crane worked noisily. Pam called, but the woman couldn’t hear. Having thought all was clear, the two men at the window got themselves behind the wardrobe and pushed it out.

  The woman must have sensed it coming, for she looked, and took a few steps back, and smiled as if thinking she couldn’t be close enough. The wardrobe turned on its side and hit a chair, and sprang at her with both mirrored doors flying open. Through the world’s noise Pam heard the blow that knocked her down. A bus conductor and the man at the fire scrambled forward, while she ran to a telephone box.

  A man inside saw her scared rawboned face when she pulled the door open. ‘Can’t you see I haven’t finished?’

  ‘But it’s urgent.’

  ‘Shan’t be long.’ He pulled the door shut: ‘Well, as I was saying.’ He wore a smart homburg hat, and leather gloves, and an overcoat that must certainly have kept him warm. His speech was loud, though not clear enough to make sense. A whiff of cigars and aftershave lingered, and Pam assumed the smart Volvo by the kerb to be his. She had seen him before, had probably passed him on her walks by Queensway or Notting Hill Gate, but remembered the stricken woman, and pulled the door again: ‘Someone’s been injured, and I want to get an ambulance.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ He pressed the button, dialled three nines, handed her the receiver, and stepped outside. He looked as if wondering where else he had seen her. When she put the receiver back and came on to the pavement he was driving up the road like the busy man he was, no doubt used to running his own life and maybe those of sufficient others to give him whatever confidence he needed.

  When the ambulance and police car arrived she didn’t want to go back to the building site and get involved as a witness. They would need her name and address, and if she went to court the case might be reported. She wasn’t ready to have George find her and say why the hell don’t you come back home?

  The woman was carried over the rubble on a stretcher, shouting at the two men through her pain and telling them not to drop her. Smoke and flame against the half demolished house made the scene like that of the blitz she had seen on old news films. The woman’s hand gripped the chamber pot. ‘Let’s hope the poor old biddy gets compensation,’ a man by the fire said.

  ‘If she don’t, she’ll get three months in hospital. Just right for the winter. Shouldn’t like to be in the next bed, though.’

  ‘They don’t have mixed wards, so you needn’t worry about that, Fred.’

  She was alarmed that they could laugh at such a tragic event, and decided that, having once done jury duty, she would be a witness if necessary.

  8

  George got used to running his own life. He no longer needed the confidence she had given him during their early struggles. She wasn’t necessary to him anymore, and he released her, but when he realized that her unexpected freedom increased her self-assurance he did all he could to undermine her, where he had never felt the need to before. Arguments became bitter. She resented his new independence, and it seemed that nothing could end their quarrels. He accused her of making him incapable of any sort of work. She wanted to ruin him. Life together had become impossible. All he needed was peace, and she was sorry because she didn’t know how to give it to him and herself at the same time. And in any case, why shouldn’t he give it to her?

  She went down town two evenings a week to a literature course at the Workers’ Educational Association. George stayed late at the office so as to meet her and take her home in the car. He didn’t like her going anywhere without him. He made it plain that he didn’t understand how she could enjoy herself on her own. There are other people there, she told him. What sort? he wanted to know.

  She had seen a poster in the library advertising the course, and thought that the ‘workers’ of the title had something to do with Trades Unions. George despised and feared the unions, and laughed at her when she said the classes were run by the Workers’ Educational Association. He sat back in the armchair, letting his coffee get cold while he told her how on walking into the factory at the age of fifteen he was told that he had to join a union. ‘I don’t join anything,’ he said, ‘especially when you tell me I’ve got to.’

  He hadn’t gone to work to be ordered about by his workmates. If the gaffers issued an instruction, that was different. He argued by the door, until the manager said that if he didn’t enrol he would have no job. ‘It isn’t my decision. That’s the way things are.’ The sight of so many machines pulled at his new boots and caused his hands to twitch as if he were trying to struggle out of a dream. He told it in so many words, as he often had and was able to do with something which affected him so profoundly. He certainly hadn’t brought half as much discussion to bear where his relationship with her was concerned.

  Because he had never forgotten his defeat he made certain that no union members got a look in when he came to setting on men at his firm. If he had been left to choose whether or not to join a union at fifteen he might have thought it a more beneficial institution, but he wasn’t that sort. He despised organizations, except the one he had created. The only passionate language she heard was when some stoppage, strike, walk-out or go-slow in another firm prevented vital supplies reaching his own. Components gone astray on the roads or in the post, or delaye
d at the mill where they were produced, turned him into a promenading wagon of invective that kept her speechless and laughing in turn. His reputation for prompt delivery was threatened, not to mention his living and that of his men, as well as his pride which she suspected mattered most.

  As was to be expected, he voted Conservative. It was impossible to live long with a person and not fall in with their habits, and have the same opinions regarding the way the world was organized. But such views had been hers for years before meeting him. If she began to question them now, it was simply because he held them, and because they were the linchpins of so much of his character that she disliked. His taunts about the Workers’ Educational Association made her uneasy concerning the sort of people she would find there, though because of his attitude she was unable to change her mind about going even if she had wanted to.

  At the first session she didn’t see anyone resembling a workman. They were the same kind as herself, except for one or two she thought might look down upon her as she had thought to look down on others who in fact were not there at all. During the discussion on E. M. Forster one of the women was staring at her, and under the thin face and grey hair she recognized Eunice Dobson who had once worked at the corporation ticket office.

  Pam sat at the large table, conspicuous by her inability to say anything. She had read the books, and shaped whole sentences from her ideas, but couldn’t speak. She did not feel stupid, having something to say if only she could get it out. George would have laughed if he had known that she couldn’t talk.

  She was content to listen to the lecturer, and those who, during the round-table talk, which he cleverly encouraged, were not afraid to state their views, even though they might be shown as mistaken or irrelevant in the summing up. But the discussion was easy and even humorous, and though unable to add anything, she felt happy to be in a different world to the one at home.

  When D. H. Lawrence’s attitudes to the working class were under discussion, after a reading of Sons and Lovers, a young ginger-bearded man commented that in his opinion Lawrence was an Edwardian snob who in fact hated the workers, was a writer whose views were not to be trusted because he made the working people out to be far worse than they were, and totally ignored their proletarian virtues, not to mention their revolutionary potential.

  She was compelled to speak at last, her face red from embarrassment, her eyes staring with such conviction that she did not see anyone. Her words were distorted by unnecessary hurry, but the class gave absolute attention to what she was saying: ‘You can’t talk like that about “the workers”. They all behave differently. Some are good and work hard, others are skivers and don’t. Lawrence’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s. So is mine, I suppose, and yours as well. I only know my own family, and my husband’s, and I never saw any revolutionary potential in them.’

  She sat down. It was politically criminal to look on the workers in the way she did, the man retorted. But she had broken her quietude and didn’t care what he said, even if she had sounded a fool. Even if, she thought, I am a fool. Her heart banged against her blouse. She seemed bloodless, and wished the words unsaid. Yet she had done it, and would speak again whenever she felt like it.

  As soon as she found something to do which excluded him, George realized that she had done so because there was no part of his life he would let her share. As a way of getting back at her he decided there would be even less in the future.

  9

  The two workmen from the first floor were talking to the police. She expected argument, vociferation, perhaps pushing around, but they only mentioned what had happened. The younger man tapped at a brick with his foot. The other laughed because one of the policemen made a joke. It hadn’t been their fault. The old woman had run across the house-wreckage after her bit of treasure and been struck down. Another onlooker told them how. There were neither shouts nor moans of sorrow, and no one was taken struggling away. The demolishers had not thrown the wardrobe on her, but neither had they looked properly beforehand. It was an accident, like all unstoppable occurrences. But some were lawful and others were not. The men in the house had their bit of fun by chucking objects out of the window and laughing at the smash, but this time they had broken the ribs of a person who, a few seconds before, had thought nothing of grabbing at every little thing to earn a shilling or two.

  She felt close to her whom the ambulance had taken. The woman would be looked after. For a few seconds Pam didn’t know where she was, and envied the injured woman’s fate because day and night had been separated from her senses. Icy rain chilled, and she turned, intending to go to her proper home, as if she had been lost for an hour while walking the streets, and had daydreamed of a woman being struck down. She would make coffee and wait for George to come from work and tell what she had seen. She went as close as possible to the fire, pressing fingers against her eyelids till they hurt, then looked to see in what part of the world she now belonged.

  George soon thought better of her evening classes, because they made her less liable to snap and grumble when, about once a week, he wanted to make love. His ramming habit, as she thought of it, maligned her body and left her in despair. Her mind veered off it like a finger from an open wound. The emptiness of space was paradise compared to such memories. In her rented room she could moan like a mutilated animal which had nevertheless got out of the trap. Solitude was preferable to a feeling of annihilation with George, when her spirit had been a particle of light getting further and further away, bruised and disregarded because no other human being thought it of any value.

  The hold he kept on her was harder to break the tighter it became. The more he oppressed, the more she was his prisoner, till she felt that even to raise a finger would be as impossible as getting under the world and attempting to walk with it on her back.

  Sufficient anger came to indicate what she wanted, but finally it wasn’t what she wanted that mattered. Desires and necessities, once she knew what they were, were seen to be of no importance, except that they too helped to keep her a prisoner which, reducing her to impotence, thereby made her feel like a victim. But life went on as if nothing were the matter. Action was denied to someone who could endure for so long. The force that eventually moved her to act existed far below the level of intention. Everything she did was under her control. The insupportable life she led seemed as if it would go on forever, but it felt like something had fallen from the sky and crushed her.

  She was finally taken by the scruff of the neck, and what she had wanted to do for so long was accomplished by a part of her that she didn’t know existed. Whatever it was had more strength – though still part of her – than she had ever been aware of before. She had sensed it, yet for a long time held back in case it betrayed her by not being strong enough when the time came, but its power at last erupted so positively that she had been taken by sufficient force to get to the railway station. From the beginning she had wanted to be dominated by this act, since it was, after all, her own well-concealed self emerging from its hiding place to prove that it was her victory and nobody else’s.

  Smoke from the fire turned in her direction, so she stepped aside. The wardrobe lay across splintered laths and a mouldy chair, one of its doors detached. Her reflection was distorted by rain spots hitting the full-length mirror, and she knelt to slide a finger from right to left over the glass. Lakes and rivers formed. She rubbed a place dry with her handkerchief, and saw her face in the few seconds before colourless globs of water disguised it again.

  The mirror was heavy in its wooden framework, and she was several streets from home. The fire was a hump of smouldering rubbish, and no one else was on the site. She had never taken something from a wasteground before, but felt no sense of stealing when she lifted the mirror-door to the pavement.

  The back was covered with black dust, and dirtied her coat. Hinges torn from the main supports had left splinters, but she gripped above and below, and hoped people would move as she walked down the road, for it
was impossible to see unless she swung the mirror aside like a windmill sail.

  The man in the telephone box seemed to be looking over her shoulder, his face almost as clear as her own. She had seen him in the corridor of the train that was leaving Nottingham when he spat out of the window to say goodbye. There was no doubt. She hoped he was more satisfied with London which, being a bigger place to spit on, might feel the sting less.

  She leaned the mirror against a wall, but disliked stopping, even though it was vital, because of picking it up again. The intervals were made fewer by counting an extra dozen steps when at the end of her endurance. She had never carried such weight for any distance. It was painful against her breasts, and pulled her arms till the muscles deadened. At a corner the wind pressed hard as if to prevent her getting the plunder home.

  Wall and pavement-edge were visible, and anything in front seemed unimportant. The mirror faced outwards, and people coming towards her, seeing their reflection, stepped aside to let her by. The screen baffled their remarks. The mirror was a memento, and set against a wall of her room would hide a blemish, and fill emptiness. When polished it would reflect both herself and the room within, and create space to look into when the illusion of being a prisoner wore her down. It would reflect light for someone who had come out of the dark. Should it crack, seven years’ bad luck would be in store, so she would have to be careful.

  Crossing Ladbroke Grove, she stepped up the opposite pavement. Acquiring the burden might make a different person out of her, for she felt wedded to the weight, an experienced carrier not to be waylaid by the last obstacle of the kerb on the final few hundred yards.

  Her toast-and-tea breakfast of four hours ago left her famished. In her exertions she was all awkwardness, and rested before reaching the gate. The rain drove, but the mirror protected her. Water streamed off her knuckles. She spun when a corner of her load struck a lamp post. She scraped a low wall, and the mirror fell.