Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  PART THREE

  Meeting

  1

  The system of forethought by which he lived made sure that on the next watch, or by the morning after, he would find all necessary items for life and duty laid out in perfect navy order. Such drill, when working with a thoroughness too ordinary for him to admire, made existence easy, for sufficient preparation meant less to think about when the moment of necessity came, though he didn’t doubt that if assailed by an unexpected happening his training and intuition would channel him into the right actions. There was no other way of doing things.

  Yet despite this eternal striving for perfection there were times when the mind had so much to think about that one essential item was missed in the too rapid litany of the restocking procedure. When he got out of bed and looked in the provision box he didn’t even curb the foul old clichés of the sailor’s trade used whenever something went wrong, that acted like a pinch of snuff to clear the head before remedial thoughts came in.

  There was everything necessary in the box except sugar. The blue tin with the fancy lid was empty but for enough discoloured grains stuck to the side to show what the tin was for, but not sufficient to sweeten the coffee that he craved.

  He switched off the moaning radio, and scratched his head at this contemptible proof of what ought to be feared as no less than an attack of premature senility. The habit of being prepared had come from a time when every happening could signify the difference between life and death. Such thoroughness didn’t matter any more, so perhaps he would stand easy and leave things in future to chance. All he had to do was walk to the nearest shop and buy sugar to put in his coffee, or go next door and ask whoever lived there to let him have a few spoons of the stuff till he replenished his larder.

  He had done that sort of thing on a ship only occasionally, careful to indulge as little as possible, but on shore there seemed something lacking in a person who knocked on a stranger’s door to borrow sugar when he could easily go out and buy a pack from a shop, the inconvenience a way of paying for a trivial mistake.

  In rectifying errors you created others, and therein lay the peril that could arise from insufficient attention to detail. On the other hand a number of errors might more or less cancel each other out, though accuracy was sacrificed if too much reliance was placed on such a system. But he wasn’t navigating through half-charted waters any more. His latitude was benign, his longitude comfortable, and he was in a country where quakes were unknown, tremors infrequent, fires rare, and floods didn’t reach this far from the river.

  What would Aunt Clara have done in the present fix? He had never asked such questions, though thought of a few cases when it might have been wise to do so. He had stubbornly relied on training, tradition, his orphanage upbringing, and fragments of congenital sense coexisting so well with that triple grafting on to himself – which by now could not be spliced into distinctions.

  To ask Clara, while she was alive, what he should do in such a situation would have opened him to an influence too powerful to be good. She might have told him to do the wrong thing as punishment for having had the weakness to need advice. He only knew that you managed better on your own, and therefore were never likely to be embarrassed by sharing mistakes with anyone else.

  Clara considered that, no matter what purpose other people served, they were there to help her, and if she was in need she would respect their existence by giving them the privilege of doing so. Lacking even so lowly an item as sugar for her tea, she would ask for it with that presence which only those could object to who did not possess what she wanted. The notion that not to ask was mean-spirited would hardly occur to her, for she would do so without the thought going through her mind.

  He ran the electric shaver over his chin, washed his face, and reached for a tie. To act as Clara would have done was a form of homage – for which she would no doubt call him a bigger fool than he had ever thought himself.

  He unscrewed the fuel tap so that he could light the stove when he came back, then took up his sugar-tin and went out. He’d often wondered whether Clara’s gruffness hadn’t hidden a subtlety too deep for him to fathom, until he came to feel that much of the deviousness lay in himself. Acquaintances over the years had hinted at such qualities on seeing his obtuse and effective methods in dealing with difficulties among the men, but he had felt straightforward in what he was doing, and thought they were exaggerating his skill out of a wish to become friendly – a gesture which he hardly ever returned, on the assumption that people should mind their own business.

  Finally, he decided, as he knocked on the door, you do as you damn-well like. Smells of breakfast came up the stairs. A crying child seemed unwilling to go to school. The place was a bit of a slum, and now that he had money he would get somewhere better. A smell of gas overpowered all others. Must have gone to work and left it on. He leaned close to make sure. People were careless, and he thought so would I be if I lit a cigarette while standing here.

  There had been movement earlier, but if someone went out the slamming of the door was followed by a thunderous hoofing down the stairs. So much for his scruples about borrowing sugar. He would light the stove, and fetch his own, and might even get fresh bread instead of chewing damp biscuits.

  A sensation of horror and alarm, against which he swore obscenely, caused him to propel himself from the wall in a heavyweight rush at the door, and he had knocked over a table and all that was on it in the darkened room before he stopped.

  He ripped at the curtains. Strips of tape snapped at his wrists as he slammed the window up, the cut of icy air as welcome as a dash of cold water in the Red Sea.

  She lay by the fire, like someone pulled out of a lifeboat after a shipwreck and left to take a chance on recovery while less serious cases that might survive were seen to first. He turned off the tap, but thought she was dead, and that if she wasn’t she ought to be, should be thrown out of the window, and then see what troubles she’d have – provided she landed in one piece.

  She weighed enough to be in the next world already. Such a signing-off and homecoming was more than he could be bothered with. Leave her. Seal up the window. Turn the gas back on. Go out and lock the door. She’ll never forgive you if you don’t.

  She was damp under the armpits. He hauled her along the floor. A shoe came off, and he stopped to put it back on. Her foot was warm. The fumes and effort gave him a headache. Your trouble wasn’t bad enough, or you wouldn’t have tried such a stunt. He worked ill before breakfast and, still holding her, rested to get breath, not wanting to fail with a heart attack and have two suicides found instead of one which, in view of the apparent methods of having brought it about, might at least get them a posthumous commendation for ingenuity.

  Laughing at the notion, he closed the door and pulled her to his own room. Too cold to open the window, but she needed oxygen – if she was sufficiently in the world to profit from anything. He took off his jacket and put it on a hangar behind the door. Her face continually changed expression, as if she were having painful and vital conversations with herself.

  She lay on the floor. He undid the top buttons of her shirt, then stretched her arms up and began to man the pumps, his head and face sweating after the first half dozen of north-south, north-south and north-south. She’s dead, but keep on, he said, keep on, and felt light in the head at having to work again, though it was such hard galley-slavery that if it took five more minutes he would stop whether she came to life or didn’t. If breath had been available he might have sung a ditty. The impulse to guffaw was hard to fight, as if it had been laughing gas instead of plain old coal. Pity the new North Sea stuff isn’t in yet. Must have known it was coming soon, so couldn’t wait.

  She’ll need a bath after this. For a change we’ll have east-west, east-west and east-west, but if anybody asks what I’m up to I’ll say I might be performing an act of mercy or doing physical jerks as I do every morning like this on whoever’s willing, but thank God you’ve come to take over
the pumps because I’m flagging at north-by-east, north-by-east and north-by-east.

  He prayed, and bullied, and laughed at her, and swore at himself, and cursed his bad luck, berating his lack of endurance when the pump wouldn’t draw, and rocks were about to rip away the bottom of the ship on which she lay. He had made the effort with men about to peg out from drowning, and to the absolutely drowned – with undisciplined hope but diminishing strength.

  In freezing air he steamed from the effort and called on God, and Clara, his father and mother, and anyone else who might listen, but most of all himself and the gassed woman under him till he heard her choke and gag and fart and bite more of the bitter cold welling in through the window. Disinclined to gentleness, he spun her halfway round the compass and hauled her with his last strength to the sill, pushing her over as if he’d had enough and would send her three decks below like a bag of dirty linen at the end of a voyage.

  ‘Breathe!’ he shouted.

  Shirt sleeves flying, he took in air for himself and held her at the window, looked out from the dead centre on a hundred and fourteen degrees of great circle bearing pointing somewhere or other but right now too much was happening to bother where such a beam might go. A man got out of a car across the street and looked up at their lovers’ tiff, then shook his head and walked down the nearest basement steps as if on his way to collect a poor soul’s rent.

  She gasped, and retched when he forced her to the sink. ‘Fetch it up!’ Only rough stuff could help in a matter of such life and death. ‘Or I’ll put my hand down your throat and pull it out myself.’

  ‘Leave me be!’ she screamed at the purple world that was killing her.

  ‘Ha! You’ve found your voice? No more blockages?’ He tugged her round as if to aim a deliberate blow at a baby to get it breathing – and sent her spinning into the room. ‘Don’t try and put one over on me, or I’ll hand you over to the plumbers!’

  He was so much the old sort that he hardly knew himself. He hadn’t left it behind, after all. Should have known better than to think so. Wouldn’t it come whenever needed? You couldn’t save a life and follow the niceties of polite behaviour.

  The whizz-bang circled her head, and the carpet she tasted was not her own. She was in London. A madman had broken into her room. She’d had a nightmare but couldn’t remember lock, latch or hinges bursting. Yet the door had come open. He tried to throw her out of the window. Water was pounding into a sink, laughter above everything. He’d made her sick. A pillar of bile had rammed to her stomach and she retched it out, sent it flying. Arms, legs and teeth shook from cold. A star ate into her forehead, while a hammer beat at the bones behind. The star burned. She choked. She had eaten pepper, chewed salt. She looked at grey rods and silver wires. I wanted to sleep. She tried to close her eyes but the burning rods forced them open. Knees came to her chin. What happened? You may bloody well ask, she heard.

  He cleaned the sink and filled it. ‘Get up.’

  ‘Who are you?’ She couldn’t see him.

  ‘You’ll know, soon enough.’

  She smelled sweat when he came close. ‘Don’t kill me, George.’

  His laugh wasn’t George’s. Never could be, a sound from somebody caught in a trap she’d had nothing to do with. He exulted in his separation from civilized entanglements. The metal grip shook from her eyes.

  ‘Stand up,’ he barked, ‘or I’ll half-kill you.’

  She tried. He saw that she couldn’t. She was lifted, and supported in a walk across the room, her head pushed into a block of ice. She screamed from shock. That’s better. Bubbles burst, then floated. He was torturing her, holding her head under water. She kicked him, arms pounding at cloth and bone. She was pulled by the hair.

  ‘No brain damage.’ He sounded gleeful, had saved more than he’d hoped for. Her feet kicked against ankle. A hand swung at her wet cheek and pushed her once more into the freezing mist. She might have known that George would catch her. Wrong again. He had paid his brothers’ friends to kill her. Never took on his own dirty work. The water leaped at her face till she felt him get tired.

  ‘Thank God.’ He sat her in an armchair, and took a clean towel from the cupboard. ‘Dry yourself. You might be all right. But no funny business.’

  Vision was scarlet, changing to a steel grid, shaking into interchange. The pink face was surrounded by red. He lived in blood. Hands and legs would not stop rattling. Pieces of wood clattered, and a gong was calling the world to dinner, sonorously behind both eyes. She talked, but heard him say:

  ‘Can’t make out a word.’

  ‘I want to sleep,’ she roared.

  His ear was against her lips, and he heard faintly.

  ‘I’ll tell you when you can go to sleep.’

  He pulled her upright, too exhausted to be gentle. ‘Walk. First this foot. And now the other. Left-right, left-right, left-right. Come on!’

  ‘Don’t shout.’

  He didn’t hear.

  She stepped obediently, pushing against a cliff of indifference. She dropped.

  ‘I can’t go on.’

  He caught her. She walked the room and back, then fell off the wall. He sat her down. No use. They spoke together, but neither heard. He put a kettle of water on the stove, not knowing what else to do. Then he walked her again. Shouting and cajoling, he was remorseless. He moved her at the waist, pushed her, walked her again until she clutched at the ceiling and heard a whistle that became a scream of pain. She sat while he turned the gas off and put six tablespoons of coffee into the pot. After water, the lid went on, and he walked her again.

  The treadmill was unendurable. ‘I hate you.’

  ‘Walk,’ he said, ‘or you really will go out of the window – without a bloody parachute.’

  She walked, though. ‘I tried to …’

  She was inching back to life. He felt wasted to nothing, yet hadn’t known such elation since the war, when perils came fast enough to stop youth dead in its tracks – when youth was the ideal state to be in. Brought a whiff of it back, cordite and salt water. ‘Yes, I know. I know all about it.’

  ‘Free country,’ she said.

  Bald, ugly, freckled, she saw him laugh. No devil without cruelty. ‘Tell me some more,’ he said, ‘it’s good for you.’

  ‘It’s a free country.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Stop laughing.’

  ‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Free as air. You do what you like, and I do what I like. God works in many ways his wonders to perform, even in a free country.’

  ‘I don’t like it here. And I don’t like you.’

  He held her, wouldn’t let go. ‘Talk, then you’ll have to walk less.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’ Stone on a piece of rope kept banging the back of her head. She asked him to cut it loose. She’d ask anyone if they were here. She told him. He didn’t care.

  ‘Maybe you’re going to live, after all.’

  ‘I shan’t do it.’

  At the stove he poured hot stuff into mugs. He put spoons of white powder in. He was going to poison her. She ran at him but didn’t move. She told him not to kill her, but instead of her lips moving she felt more tears wetting her cheeks. He put white powder into his own mug as well, but it wouldn’t kill him, she was certain.

  ‘I want to go back,’ she heard herself saying.

  He turned. ‘You tried to kill yourself, and that’s your business. It’s my business to bring you out of it. You’re staying here till you’re all right, and afterwards, if you still want to chuck yourself off the world, it’s up to you.’

  He hoped she wouldn’t. But she was over twenty-one, and that was a fact. He snapped at the plug chain, and water ran out of the sink. She nodded. He was asking something. He couldn’t stand up, and shouted. He was insane. He was in a fit when he said: ‘I wonder if you could lend …’

  She was alarmed. His head swayed left and right. Some new horror was about to be manufactured by his mad but versatile mind.

  His la
ughter subsided, but silence gave him a dignity that didn’t fit. ‘I was going to ask if by any chance … you haven’t some sugar in your room?’

  It was impossible to know what he meant or would do. She nodded. He was concerned about a matter which frightened her. He would murder her if she didn’t escape. The light pushed like a flame against her eyes.

  ‘Where is it?’

  She tried to explain, but couldn’t tell what he wanted. He seemed to understand. She saw him as dead – and deaf as well as ugly. She wouldn’t return to George no matter how much he tormented her.

  ‘Don’t fall while I’m away.’

  He returned with half a loaf of bread, some butter and cheese, and a packet of sugar, reasoning that with such a full cupboard she couldn’t have considered knocking herself out for ever – unless she had been too dead-set on it to care.

  She was asleep, and he asked himself, putting spoons of sugar into each mug, and whisky into hers, whether he should call a doctor. He helped her to her feet. ‘Come on, more walking along the deck. You’re all right’ – wishing to God she was – ‘so twice to the window for a ten-fathom breather, then back to the coffee pot for a sniff at the bean.’

  ‘Don’t like it here.’

  ‘Oh yes, you will, or I’ll knock you for six.’

  He held her waist, fearful that she might fall, that she’d faint and never recover.

  She hated him.

  ‘Why?’

  And she hated him even more when he laughed, and said: ‘I owe you some sugar. I’ll repay every grain.’

  Impossible to comprehend. He led her to the seat. She clutched the mug for warmth, and drank blackjack coffee, watching him. At the mirror he fastened cufflinks, adjusted his tie, and put on a jacket. A comb from his wallet went through hair around his head, though she didn’t see any.

  ‘A sailor likes to look spick and span.’

  ‘Sailor?’

  ‘First officer – but harmless. I only came on earth to stop you doing yourself a fatal injury. Thank God for what’s left of my sweet tooth.’ He spread a cloth, and opened sardines over the sink. Knives and forks were in order. Two plates of different shapes and colours drifted from a shelf. He cut bread, split cellophane from biscuits, and set the kettle wailing again. She forgot where she was, and what she’d done or had done to her. Why was she here, in another room? A man was putting a meal on the table in as quick and neat a way as she had ever been able to manage.