Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  Clara put the letter down.

  ‘Is that all?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Isn’t it enough?’

  ‘It’s what I expected,’ Emma sighed, ‘and half hoped for. I like his style, but not his awful cheek.’

  ‘Are you going to answer?’

  ‘Burn it – to ashes.’

  ‘I’d like to keep it.’

  ‘Do what the hell you like. As long as I never see it again, and you never mention it. Come on, let’s get this bloody sugar-bag cut out. I might as well look the part of the fallen woman. There’s really not much left to do but enjoy it.’

  She had fallen, Clara realized, from such a height that she wasn’t yet aware of having landed. She hadn’t, and would she ever? Try as she might to get through to her, Emma stayed obstinately and resolutely alone. And the more Clara tried the more distance she felt between them. It was best to stay calm, not make the attempt, and help when the time came. Emma had to be guarded, rather than looked after. The thought haunted Clara that, coming back from shopping one day, she would find her gone. She would go into the living-room and not see her sitting at the table sewing or reading or staring at the wall. Only an echo would answer when she called her name. But Emma was always in some part of the house.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Clara asked after breakfast.

  ‘I don’t think any more. Nothing so crude as that. Nothing so grand, either. I just sit and feel this tadpole kick and grow inside me. We’re like husband and wife, contemplating the absolutely empty future together. I’m filled, among other things, with dread for this poor thing coming into the world. I keep seeing those thousands of graves we passed on our little trip of homage to visit dear John, and I think: “Will this bloke inside me, if it is a bloke, end up known only unto God?” Oh, I’ve got a lot to think about, if you can call it thinking. I think of mother’s romantic beginning with father, and of how they must now see my escapade. It would have been bad enough if I’d done the same, but I’ve actually gone one better, so I can see how they must hate me. I really have spoiled their lives. But I don’t think, exactly. Things only go through my mind in such a way as to reassure me that I still have one.’

  Clara tried to be jovial. ‘He’ll be all right. There’ll be two of us to look after him. It’ll be great fun.’

  ‘I hope so. But I wish I could get it over with.’

  Clara heard a noise at the front door and went into the hall. After their father’s letter she hadn’t expected to see her mother again. Rachel shook her head at their surprise, and sat down with them at the table. ‘He has his opinions, and I have mine. Whenever I feel like coming to visit you, I’ll catch the train. That’s what they were invented for.’

  ‘We were just off to the picture palace,’ Clara said. ‘Emma gets so bored.’

  ‘Don’t let me prevent you. I’ll be happy to sit on my own. I can read or sew. You should buy a gramophone and listen to music. The mood was so sudden to come and see you both that I didn’t have time to send a telegram.’

  They took off their coats.

  ‘I left two trunks at the station,’ Rachel said, ‘not knowing whether you would be in. They’re full of things which will be needed for the baby, if it’s to be dressed in anything good.’ She stood up to take off her hat by the mirror. ‘It’s a pity you can’t find a nice young man for a husband.’

  ‘I don’t think there are many, even in Cambridge,’ Emma said, ‘who would want to marry a woman in this all too obvious state, though I suppose I could go out on the street and try. “Excuse me, kind sir” – and I’d do a very nice curtsy – “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but if you aren’t poxed-up from the war, or have a false leg, or an eye missing, or a toe gone, I wonder if by any chance you can see your way to marrying me some time in the next few days? I have a thousand pounds a year at my disposal, so you shouldn’t have too many regrets.”’

  When they stopped laughing Rachel said: ‘You’ll take life seriously one day, I promise. I don’t know what we did to make you so foul-mouthed and wicked.’

  ‘You’re not responsible,’ Emma told her, ‘nor is father. I suppose I got into this mess because I didn’t know anything about myself. At the moment I’m nothing. When I go for a walk I feel I’m like everybody I pass on the street, and can’t wait to get back here so that I can be on my own, and feel like nothing and nobody, and then again like myself, whatever that is. Maybe I’ll know a bit more when this thing comes out. Did you know yourself any better, mother, after you’d had three children?’

  Clara was disturbed, and only doubted that Emma spoke such rigmarole when her mother replied: ‘It was after you were grown-up that I began to know who I was.’

  ‘The last few months must have taught you something,’ Emma said. ‘It has me.’

  ‘I know,’ Rachel retorted. ‘It’s taught you how to quarrel. And how to insult your parents.’

  By her silence Emma knew that she was pressing against all their wounds. ‘I’m sorry, mother.’

  ‘I think you should be.’

  Clara felt pain for them both, and stood up, saying brightly to Emma: ‘Why don’t you start keeping your journal again? It might help you to sort things out in your mind. I write mine, as and when I can. It keeps me in touch with myself – or what’s left of me these days.’

  ‘I prefer to be on my own,’ Emma said. ‘When people are with me, I’m even more alone, so I don’t mind either of you being here. If I kept a journal I might get to think I was somebody else, and I should hate that, even though I don’t know who I am most of the time. Only this in here knows who I am, but by the time he’s old enough to tell me I won’t be anywhere where I can hear what he’s got to say. And he wouldn’t know by then, in any case. One minute I feel I’m going to live a hundred years, and the next it seems I’ll be lucky to get beyond this one. I don’t care, really. During the war the world was crowded with happy people who only wanted a good time. Now, it’s full of ghosts. Something happened, and I don’t suppose any of us knows what it was. Perhaps even having a baby won’t make much difference to me. If so I don’t know what will happen.’

  Rachel went home after three days because, she said, she needed a rest. Clara, left behind, was swept with anguish as she looked at her sister, and heard her, in an ordinary enough voice, say things which filled her with either sorrow or horror. Emma’s lips were set firm when she stopped talking. The glow in her eyes, suggesting a far-seeing vision, was due only to short-sightedness.

  9

  Clara came back from the post office, took off her raincoat and galoshes in the hall, and coo-eed to let Emma know she had returned. With a fire burning, the parlour could not be cosier, but Emma was neither there nor in the kitchen. Clara shouted upstairs, and the maid told her she hadn’t seen Emma for an hour.

  She put her galoshes back on, and took a dry coat from the hall stand, but did not know which way to go. Sleet blew into her face, so she walked with its main force behind, to open ground beyond Park Side. Someone was cycling, but there were no pedestrians. Protected by houses from the worst of the weather, she made her way to Christ’s Piece. They had often gone over Butts Green and Midsummer Common to the river, a pleasant stroll with the minimum of buildings hemming them in. But she kept as much towards houses as possible, and peered across spaces in case Emma was there.

  It was muddy by the river and the boathouses. Her nose ran water and her neck was cold. Every step made her doubt that she was going in the right direction, but not to make for somewhere seemed too painful to be borne.

  Her instinct was to get back into the warm house, but the knowledge that she must fight against it drove her on. You did what you had absolutely no wish to do far more easily than what you would quite enjoy doing – a reflection which made her momentarily stalwart against the elements, and would comfort her as long as the thought of Emma and her general predicament didn’t force itself too close to her powers of strength and decision – thought the dreadful situation could only
be absent for a few precious seconds at a time during her surge through the rain.

  The green river lapped at its banks. An old man on the other side pottered at some job on a boathouse roof, but then came down his ladder to take shelter, squeezing his hands together as if to get the wet out of them. She called, and asked if he had seen a woman walking alone.

  He laughed. ‘No, I ain’t. Not even a dog, come to that.’

  She felt an ache in her chest as if someone had punched her. Chimney smoke and mist hung over the houses. The wind had dropped and rain came directly down. Crossing Sun Street, she was nearly struck by a horse-and-cart, the driver too surprised to shout back when she called him a fool for not looking where he was going.

  She went up and down every street, then crossed each at right angles, imagining Emma as quite close in front, but always turning a corner before she could be seen. She considered walking across Parkers Piece to the railway station, then stood by the kerb wondering whether she shouldn’t get into the comfort of the house and stop allowing Emma to make both their lives miserable. It was impossible to be still. From the edge of the space she saw someone a few hundred yards away, where the walks intersected at the middle.

  The never-ending distance passed by putting one foot in front of the other, and keeping on with head down and eyes fixed at the soaking turf, as if afraid that should she look up the figure would vanish. The rain made no difference. If she had to live the rest of her life under water, so be it. To exist in such a way attached her to the earth and could only be good for her. Every step forward put on another year of life, but Emma had to be reached and taken home because each minute out there might take a year off her life.

  She looked up every dozen paces to make sure there was still some object to aim for. She laughed at herself. There was no one to hear. Raindrops distorted what she saw. The figure was probably a poor old tramp with nowhere to go. She wanted to turn back, for fear he should jump on her. Girls had been raped on Parkers Piece at night. But it was Emma. There was no mistaking the way she hunched her shoulders. Clara called, and hurried breathlessly on. Emma stood with head bowed, unable to hear.

  Clara held her arm. ‘Whatever are you doing? You’ll get pneumonia – at least!’

  She looked. Her skin was like clay, glazed so that the rain poured off. ‘I’m trying to find out what it’s like to be alone.’

  Clara drew her close. She smelled of rain and sweat. ‘I’ve been looking all over. You might at least have told me where you were going, then you could have been alone for as long as you liked. But just to go off like this for your own crackbrained reason is too much. You’ve no consideration for anybody except yourself. Don’t you think it’s time you pulled yourself together and behaved a bit more reasonably? Perhaps it doesn’t matter what happens to you, but you ought at least to think about the baby you’re going to have.’ She gripped her arm. ‘So let’s go back to the house before you really get ill. You’re going to need a hot bath and something to drink if you aren’t to get a bad cold. Now come on, and stop all this bloody stupid nonsense.’

  She was putting it on, but the severe tone was right, under the circumstances, she thought. We are all Death’s prisoners, she had heard a preacher say from his pulpit on the edge of the market one morning. Life was a battlefield from which there could be no survivors. Once the fight begins, losses continually occur, even in the most favoured conditions, till you become one of them. She made her observations and, with so many dreadful events all of a sudden to endure, thought it her duty to record the fact that no family was free of tragic times.

  Emma allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led back to the midday autumnal gloom of the buildings.

  10

  Her bedroom looked over the squalid backyards. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t have got a better place,’ she said, but Emma reminded her that the inside of the house was clean and comfortable, and they were lucky not to be in China or Russia or Germany, for they had coal, food and clothes, and didn’t have to live in the rain with no shelter. They had each other. Life was good when you weren’t standing alone in the rain. If she could go on living, she would be happy and have no complaints. She wanted her baby to have a long life, without war, want or inner misery. Her life had been fortunate, she said when Clara sat on the bed and held her hand, and yet on the eve of the greatest acquisition she had a fear of losing everything. A senseless anxiety troubled her day and night. There was no sleep, and no peace. Did Clara think that only a woman could have such feelings?

  Clara didn’t know. If a question was asked with too much intensity she was always lost for an answer, and Emma never wanted to know anything that would be satisfied by a casual response. Emma didn’t wait for answers she knew would never come, or for answers that would never convince her if they did. She then asked if she weren’t trying to live out all possible anxiety and hopelessness so that there would be so much less for her child to inherit. Heaven only knows, Clara said, hardly able to endure the torment settling on to her from Emma’s disturbed state. She suffered with her, and did not know whether or not Emma noticed. But Emma was aware of everything, and what diference could it make that Clara was equally tormented? The suffering was doubled, but not thereby diminished. Clara had no say in the matter, and went through equal anguish with her sister, a process over which she did not wish to have any control in the hope that by taking some of the burden, Emma would sooner or later feel its intolerable weight shifting away from herself.

  Clara thought that if she spent another moment with her she would descend into a madness from which recovery would be impossible. She felt herself saturated with resentment at having to bear so much, but her objections were not directed at Emma, who in her misery seemed either unaware or unconcerned that it was passing with ever-increasing intensity to her sister. The mechanism had been there since childhood, for Clara recollected that Emma’s infantile despair had in its own way been equally desolate for her. She, on the other hand, had never in either adult or childish misery witnessed any similar effect on Emma when she – Clara – was depressed, for Emma at such times kept her temperament intact against all influences, not out of callousness but because she was set too firmly into her own sphere to know what was happening. Any sympathy Emma might express was mere casual condolence. She certainly wouldn’t waste time on sharing half-imagined woes.

  When Emma’s mood lifted for no apparent reason Clara, with pain still searing her heart, went to the barometer in the hall to see if the pressure had altered, to find out whether the needle was now set fair when it had previously indicated stormy. She was disappointed to see that it denied her idea, having hoped to find some system to Emma’s moods that would help her to counter them. She stayed baffled, because while Emma’s upsets undoubtedly served to get her through another few days of reasonable life, they left Clara mentally crippled, and even more so when she tried to hide her anguish from Emma in case it caused another of her fits. She contained herself in the hope that the residue of her own misery would go away and leave them both in peace at last.

  This volume of Clara’s journal ended with: ‘Not beyond here. No point going on.’ But a pocket diary contained occasional remarks and pencilled comments on occurrences she later thought worth noting, and entries in a jotting pad dealt with the coming and going of their mother, the doctor’s visits, days when the weather was fine and sunny, and walks into town to go shopping or to the pictures. In an unposted letter she described how Rachel came one day and, finding Emma in one of her ‘moods’, dismissed it with such astonishing ease and panache that the raucous half-hour quarrel which ensued stung Emma finally to speechlessness and weeping. After a while she became girlish, laughed and behaved normally till Rachel left for the railway station. Clara felt gratitude at her mother’s courage and ability. Rachel wasn’t afraid to shout, and was in no sense willing to stifle helplessly under Emma’s injurious silence or frivolous accusations. She marvelled at her mother, but did not regret that she herself was u
nable to use the same methods.

  11

  The night was created from a snowstorm of the previous day, making it easy to imagine wolves howling in the spacious Fens and searching for the blood of infants and the warmth of mothers in the city. No one could avoid meeting them in their dreams, or cease to imagine them in the snowy daylight of dark outside their tight-shut windows. The wolf in Emma was trying to get out by gnawing at her backbone, and her screams kept the street awake. Eventually the wolf would streak away, having drunk all her blood, join its lupine brothers still howling to enter whatever house they could find unguarded. Time had reached a stop, while Clara, Rachel and the midwife kept watch, and waited for either the night or the world to end. Each sound was muffled by snow and bleached by pale gas light as the agony that none of them could reach came and went and came again with an intensity towards dawn that they thought could not possibly increase.

  Rachel and the midwife made a show of giving practical advice, but nothing mattered to Emma except that she must reach the end of the tunnel or be torn to fragments by the wolf that had her in its teeth. ‘What do you say?’ Rachel asked when she tried to speak.

  Out of the sweat, and the state for which she knew no word, came: ‘Get it away from me.’

  Clara waited in the parlour, hoping to die if her sister’s ordeal did not stop, wondering why they didn’t help her, or put her out of her misery like a dog or a horse – for if I were in the same state, she thought, vowing that she never would be, I’d surely ask them to do a kindness and end it by a single shot, as I would if I’d been left to die on a battlefield. Had John gone through similar agony? she wondered, torn half to pieces, yet not dead, and pleading with one of his men to kill him?