Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  18

  She recorded the fact that in the midst of death she was in desolation, but rejoiced at the inquest’s conclusion that her sister’s demise was accidental. Emma seemed to have turned on the gas heater and absent-mindedly forgotten to apply a light. There was a willingness to believe such an assumption after the family general practitioner said that, having known her for twenty years, he considered her a normal outgoing person, of whom it was inconceivable to think that the misfortune could have been anything other than an accident. The exoneration helped them to feel that Emma’s carelessness was only another manifestation of her feckless nature. If she had died at home, however much more upsetting it would have been, they might not have been tormented by the suggestion that she had betrayed them after cutting herself off so entirely from help. She did not want to be part of them any more, a feeling that, after the first paralysing weeks, diminished Clara’s gnawing pain.

  From one stance she changed to another, would sit hours by the fire – even in the summer it was cold that year – while her mind went through endless conversations with Emma as to what had gone wrong. Talking aloud, she would walk between the door and the window:

  ‘But she committed suicide, you fool, whatever the coroner decided. Her man friend went back to the Sudan and she couldn’t stand the thought of being alone. Perhaps she was pregnant, and this time didn’t want to be. She was alone because we didn’t mean enough to her. She cared nothing for my support, nor father’s, in the final mood she got into. She’d been in that state ever since I can remember, till her condition became so bad she could do little except find a way out, which must have come easily, whether or not it was an accident. Thank God she didn’t do it at home and take Thomas with her, though it might have been a blessing in disguise if she had.’

  But she wept at the thought of all that had not been done to stop Emma dying, though when she wondered what she might have done it was apparent that nothing would have been possible, because the time and place of a person’s death was decided the moment they were born – and with such words she cleared her mind of futile speculation.

  Clutching the door handle in order to go out, she could not turn it, and had only the strength to get back to a chair. It was impossible to know whether she stayed a minute or an hour. The days were long, and darkness came late. Then she sprang from her inanition and went out of the room, believing that if she had stayed a moment longer she would have been paralysed for life.

  She walked along the hall, and entered her father’s study without knocking. He sat in an armchair, and put the newspaper to his knees on hearing the door knob rattle. She sat on a stool at his feet. ‘I’ve come to talk to you.’

  ‘I used to read quickly,’ he complained, ‘but I have difficulty fixing my eyes nowadays.’ He took off his wire spectacles and rubbed his forehead. ‘I can’t sleep, either.’ His skin was lined and deadly white, nose thin and bones prominent. Nor did he eat much except porridge, orange juice, or mashed potatoes. Nothing but nursery food. ‘What do you need to talk about?’

  She had forgotten, but wanted to be near him because there was no one else. Since Emma’s death she felt a need to be with him, but was afraid of seeming a nuisance. ‘It’ll soon be time for dinner. I thought you might like to come down with me.’

  ‘I’ll eat in my room,’ he said sharply.

  ‘I got some Dover sole from the fishmonger this morning, and cook has made one of her marvellous soups.’ She wanted to talk, if only to get a response from a voice not her own. She missed Emma’s. There was no speech, nothing but vague noises of Audrey and cook laughing together, or of the baby that never seemed to stop grizzling.

  ‘I won’t come down.’

  ‘I’m not going to eat alone any more in this house,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, aren’t you?’ He stood up, and took off his dressing-gown. ‘Where’s my collar and tie?’

  They were hanging on a chairback. She gave them to him. ‘Shall I help you?’

  His hands trembled. He snatched the tie. ‘Get my jacket.’

  She found it in his bedroom, and when she came back he had already fastened on his collar and tie.

  ‘We still have a lot to talk about,’ she said.

  ‘Have we?’

  ‘I can’t make every decision myself.’

  His small blue eyes, from seeing nothing, glittered acutely. ‘You don’t have to. I make them, in this house. Where’s my tie? I’ve been looking all over, and can’t find it.’

  It was not the time to play jokes. ‘You’ve put it on already.’

  He sat down, and placed a hand to his throat to make sure she was telling the truth. ‘Did you say there was Dover sole?’

  ‘And soup. And batter pudding.’ She held out her hand. ‘Come on, father, it’s nearly time.’

  ‘You go,’ he said. ‘I can manage.’

  She walked downstairs to the dining-room, thinking that even if she heard him fall she would not help. He wasn’t even fond of her. He liked no one. All he had was the power of the man in the house, and he enjoyed that, though she was determined he wouldn’t have it much longer. But she was afraid to turn and deride the way he had snubbed her. Her fear of him was as intense as her pride that would not allow her to make one more attempt to become friendly. He blocked himself in, and she locked herself out, but she knew that without being able to speak his thoughts his eyes pleaded for her to come close to him. He was too afraid to ask, and his pride would stop him even if he weren’t. Emma once told her that pride was a sophisticated form of fear. The family was rotten with it, but because it was Clara’s only means of self-respect, and therefore defence, she would guard it jealously. Emma had thrown hers overboard, and look what had happened.

  Percy held the spoon high against his chest as if about to beat a tattoo on a drum. The soup steamed. He looked ahead, unable or not willing to move.

  ‘We mustn’t let our soup get cold.’ It wasn’t possible to begin before he did, though she supposed he might not notice it in his abstracted condition.

  He broke his bread and started to eat. The cook had decanted a bottle of burgundy, and Clara filled two glasses.

  ‘I pour the wine,’ he said. ‘I always do.’

  She smiled at his petulance, her mouth wired to stop a cry breaking out. ‘I’ve already done so.’

  He hung the napkin from his waistcoat. She reminded him again to begin. When cook took the plates she heard the far-off wail of Thomas from upstairs. Thank goodness for Audrey, who had replaced his mother, but how long could it last? ‘What are we going to do with the baby?’

  He spoke, the unexpected precision startling her. ‘He must go to an orphanage. That’s the only place, when there are no proper parents.’

  She flushed warmly at such a drastic and outrageous solution, with which she felt in immediate agreement. She couldn’t bring up a child, and Audrey’s plebeian ministrations were only a stopgap. ‘He’s a bit young, isn’t he?’

  ‘They’ll take him. I know a place. I’ll write to the director and make special arrangements. We’ll pay the bills by the year.’

  She had seen him wearing his napkin in such a fashion after coming out of convalescent homes, and then only until Rachel told him to place it on his knees. Let him use it that way. She didn’t mind, except that it gave his aspect an air of childish authority that must have been exercised over him while he was under care. In the present situation he knew exactly what to do, though she was surprised that he would make her share the expense. ‘But is it the right thing to do?’

  ‘Somebody has to look after him,’ he retorted. ‘Will you bring him up? No. You couldn’t bring up a flower in May. Can I do it?’ He laughed dryly. ‘Soon be dead. So the place where he’ll be cared for, and get a good Christian education, is the Boxwell Orphanage. Never thought I’d need it for this little matter, but they’ll be glad to take him till he’s fifteen, after all I’ve done for them. Then you can find a way for him to earn a living.’

  H
is scornful laugh made her doubt even more that it was right to put Emma’s child into such a place. ‘Isn’t there any other way?’

  He was unhealthily excited. ‘Certainly. A very good one. Get a husband, and you can both adopt him.’ He drank half his wine. ‘If your husband’s a good man, he’ll be agreeable.’

  Would he have done it? Not damned likely, she told herself. But such problems cleared his brain. Even at his most absentminded he could muster a man’s decisiveness. When they were children he would come back from visiting the orphanage he patronized (she only now heard its name) and say how lucky the inmates were in having found a refuge which did not require them to suffer for the sins of their parents. But Emma, Clara and John felt how awful it must be for such children, and their nanny of the time said that that was where all bad creatures went, and quite right too, because where would the world be if there weren’t such places for them to be hidden away in?

  Children knew nothing, made up their own harrowing fears, and trembled at the wicked world of which they had no experience. Thomas would be provided for. Her father reassured her that it was the right thing to do. It was an orphanage, of course, but it was more like a home, certainly a great improvement on the one that he would have if it were possible for him to stay where he was – which it wasn’t. It would be like a boarding school, but starting younger. He would enquire about him now and again, and when the time came she would have to make sure that he was not entirely forgotten. Some time in the future he would be found, no doubt, tractable and presentable, and might spend the occasional weekend with her. She would talk to him, or take him out. She supposed he would be polite, and have lots to say. He would be glad of the change, and grateful to her for giving him some relief to life in an institution. In that sense she would do what she could. When he grew up she would see about a career for him. Her father said that from such places boys went into the army or the navy, or had their passage paid to one of the colonies or dominions. It seemed very suitable. There were no problems because they were trained to expect such arrangements. And what boy in his right mind, however he had been brought up, would want to stay in this country, considering the state things were? He didn’t know how lucky he was going to be.

  ‘I must get him put in,’ Percy said, ‘before it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘While I’m able to do it. I shan’t live for ever.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ To contemplate life alone, and all the shifts of place and spirit that it must entail, was as yet impossible, like looking over a cliff with nothing in the distance, and no sight of the bottom. In spite of his unpleasantness he was all she had, the last tree of familiar safety, and she knew by now that you loved people as much because of their faults as in spite of them.

  ‘You’re a big silly fool,’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you know that if you talk of one thing, you must think of another? I’ve left some of my money to a few charities, but most will go to you. I only hope you’ll take good care of it.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to.’ In a final gesture she touched his hand affectionately, but he pulled it away. If any contact was needed, he would be the one to make it. She felt revulsion now at his instinctive drawing back, shivered as if a cold wind had blown across her. How had her mother put up with this? She hadn’t, really, because she was not the person to do so. But Emma at least said that to offer affection only made him more cruel. You have to bully him and baby him, though to show that you really care, she said, don’t show him that you care in the least.

  Perhaps he read her thoughts, for he seemed unable to look at her for a few moments. They were silent while the pudding was served. He tapped the dish with his spoon, each stroke getting louder. She didn’t wait for him to begin, but when he saw she had done so he stopped his maniacal banging and ate rapidly.

  His absent-mindedness, and fits of childishness, became more frequent. She couldn’t bear to think of her father existing in a state where she would have to take over her mother’s role and bully him as if he were the child. She had read that old people who turned senile lived longer than those who did not.

  He strayed too far on his daily walk, and was found in the street staring at the gutter. He picked up a cigarette packet, took out the picture card, and put it in his pocket. She discovered others in his desk. People round about were familiar with the foibles of this smartly dressed old man who walked along the street looking only in the gutter.

  On her way to bed she went into the nursery, where a night-light was left burning. To disturb Thomas would be a blessing, because if he cried Audrey would come from the adjoining room and put him to sleep again. He would like such attention. There would be little enough from now on. Four neatly folded fingers went to his eyes. He turned, and the clean fresh smell of a new world came from his cot. The cot would afterwards go to the attic, though God knew what for. She wouldn’t stay long in that house. The sooner she was out the better. Too much had happened. She would find a flat at some place on the south coast.

  His lips curled, and he tried to turn over. Discovering that he couldn’t, he was about to cry. Her large hand held his side, enabling him to complete the manoeuvre. Then he yawned, and seemed to sleep. She was alarmed at how he already looked like Emma. Why had she done all the things she had done? The question was foolish, as questions invariably were that came too late to get an answer. She put out the light and closed the door, feeling better when she had done so, as if her troubles had gone, and left her empty.

  19

  ‘A woman came from the orphanage to collect him,’ Clara wrote on an undated sheet of paper which was folded into the book, ‘and though he didn’t cry – in fact he was quite happy, because he obviously didn’t know what was happening – Audrey did when she had to give him up. If I was sorry to see him go it was only because he was the last of Emma.’

  At the bottom of the box was a pack of carefully written receipts for money sent by his grandfather to the orphanage. Tom perceived that at two hundred pounds a year the contributions had been generous, when in those days it must have cost little more than fifty to provide for an inmate at such a place.

  The family had kept their obligations, so he could not complain. His career as a seaman hardly allowed him to grumble about any conditions of existence. Nor was he made that way. The fact of being alive, in work, and comfortable enough as an officer at sea was more than sufficient to be grateful for.

  It was difficult to claim much connection with this family whose lives had been revealed. Neither, at the moment, did he feel any attachment to his mother. And the younger Clara seemed to have little in common with the formidable and elderly aunt he had seen perhaps two dozen times in his life. But then, he wondered, how much connection do any of us have at fifty with what we were at twenty-five?

  In the last box he found a cigarette-card album, with pictures of different series stuck at all angles inside. Flowers, kings, film stars, birds, ships, cricketers and butterflies had been fixed unevenly. He assumed they were cards his grandfather had collected from the streets, and that they had been put there haphazardly by the old man’s hands. But the more he stared the more he knew that he himself had collected them, or begged them, or had been given them at the orphanage. Or he had traded them, because some had worn edges and turned-over corners.

  There was a piercing familiarity about the arrangement as he lifted the album from the floor to the table and sat on a chair to look more closely at these colourful and prize possessions of a cloistered infant, a four-year-old’s view on to the outside world. He remembered putting them in one by one as he acquired them, tensing the muscles of hands and fingers to get them straight, with the feeling each time that he had succeeded triumphantly in creating another world whose colours he could walk among.

  One day the album vanished, and his days of hope were over. Childhood was knocked down by a hammer-blow, and replaced by the plodding dullness of common survival till the time when he saw ships on the sea from the haven of
Clara’s front window, a vision distant and unreal enough for him to believe once more that there might yet be a way to give meaning to his life.

  The cigarette-card album must have been taken away and sent to his grandfather, or to Clara, perhaps as proof that he liked being at the orphanage, that he was at home there and making progress in his separate existence. He is happy, they said. Look how he spends his time. Maybe his senile grandfather had visited the place before he died and, watching from a distance, saw the album and coveted it for reasons best not gone into. The director had removed the tattered object from his bedside one night, and posted it to his grandfather next morning. Why else would they have robbed him of the only thing that made life possible?

  In the garden of the orphanage was a wooden one-floored building called the Recreation Room, set among trees and apart from the main house, and on wet weekend afternoons they were sent there to be out of the way. The hours between lunch and tea lasted for ever. He had learned early what eternity meant, so that no long watch kept at sea was ever in the least monotonous.

  Inside the room was a large table, and an old upright piano with no lid that one of the boys knew how to play, and a few shelves of mildewed penny-dreadful magazines, and adventure novels by Ballantyne, Conan Doyle, Haggard, Henty and Jules Verne. He had stuck his treasured cigarette cards into the album to the sound of rain dripping on to the roof from trees outside, as they sat the afternoon hours away in an intense smell of pungent soot from a chimney place that had once been lit but now never was, and of damp books and half rotting timber that took a decade of sea-life to get out of his spirit.