The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  ‘But I don’t know you,’ she said.

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ I said, feeling smaller and more foolish with every second she went on gazing up at me.

  ‘But how else can we get to know each other?’

  ‘No,’ she said, freeing me from her direct gaze at last. ‘I see your point. But I’m afraid I couldn’t. My boy friend wouldn’t like it, you see.’

  ‘Oh! Your boy friend.’ What a fool I was! Seeing her always alone, I’d never considered the most obvious point – that someone else might have a prior claim on her.

  She went on, blasting all my hopes and driving me deeper into confusion. ‘He doesn’t live round here and we only see each other at weekends; but he wouldn’t like me to go out with anybody else during the week.’

  ‘No,’ I babbled. ‘No, of course not.’ All I could think of now was what a fool I must look to her. I gave her back her shopping bag. ‘I’m sorry I said anything.’

  Going home, I thought that these things worked only in books or on the films; in real life you were just made to look silly. And it was pride that was really uppermost in my mind now. So long as she didn’t turn the incident into a joke to tell to her friends, it mightn’t be too bad. I’d told nobody about her; not even Larry and Peter; and I was even less inclined to take them into my confidence now.

  But when that confusion had left me I realised that the setback had not changed my feelings about her. I abandoned my evening walks but still watched for her on Friday afternoons. And now the ice was broken; we could greet each other as acquaintances, and she did at least acknowledge my existence by letting me ride with her into town and talking with me while we waited for our connections. Sometimes Peter, who lived out in my direction, would be with us, but more often we were alone. All the rest of the winter my mind was full of her, and the idea that, if only I were patient, she might one day turn to me. This became the great impossible dream of my life. My feeling for her deepened steadily, strengthened by the very absence of encouragement, until it seemed to me that all the wonder and delight of Woman was contained in her sweet and gentle self. And, sustained by my dream, I went on wooing her passively by my presence on those short homeward journeys on the one afternoon in the week.

  On an afternoon in March, with the days lengthening into spring, we stood together chatting idly in the bus station. I was talking about a film I’d seen at the weekend. She mentioned then that she’d spent the weekend indoors and, wondering at this, I mentioned my unknown rival for the first time.

  ‘He’s neglected you for once, then?’ I said, trying to keep my voice light.

  ‘For always,’ she said. ‘It’s over. It has been for weeks.’

  My heart gave a tremendous leap of joy. Over! Then there was nothing to stop her going out with me.

  ‘Are you still thinking about that?’

  ‘Of course.’ Oh, God, wasn’t it all I’d been able to think about since I first saw her!

  ‘But why?’ she said, and it seemed to me that there was a great weariness in her voice. ‘We’re friends, aren’t we? Isn’t that enough for you?’

  ‘It can never be enough.’

  ‘But why?’ she said again.

  ‘Because... because I like you too much.’ No, it wasn’t good enough. I had to say it, even here in broad daylight, among streams of people. I must say it. ‘Because I love you.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s no use. I’m sorry, Clive, but it could only lead to disappointment. People never live up to expectation, you know.’

  It needed only one word from her to make my world a place of life and joy and laughter; and I was shocked by the disillusionment in her voice. ‘Why… that’s defeatism! Look, maybe you are a bit cut up just now, but you can’t look at life in general like that.’

  ‘It’s the way things are,’ she said with quiet finality. ‘It’s the way it goes.’

  I could only think she had loved him very much, and envy him for that. Whatever had happened between them had hurt her badly. Frantically, I searched for something else to say, then gave it up as I realised that it was no good. I knew with miserable certainty that it never had been.

  I saw her several times more before summer came, bringing with it the end of my deferment and a summons to serve a postponed period of National Service.

  I took a job in Wales when I came out of the army and it was only on infrequent weekends that I went home to see my family. As time went by I lost touch with Larry and Peter and I saw neither of them for several years until I ran into Larry quite accidentally while on a visit home. It was lunchtime and we went into a pub to talk over a glass of beer. Larry had been working away too – in London – but he’d married now and returned to settle in his home town.

  ‘And Peter,’ I said when we’d gossiped for a while. ‘What’s he doing nowadays?’

  ‘He’s in the Merchant Navy. Third Engineer. Or is it Fourth? I forget now.’

  ‘I seem to remember hearing he’d got married too.’

  ‘Lord, yes!’ Larry’s ugly mobile face screwed itself into a grimace of disgust. ‘Bought himself a real packet there. He signed on to get away from it all.’

  ‘As bad as that, eh? Who did he marry? A local girl?’

  ‘Called Joyce Henryson. Used to work up the road from us. That’s how he met her. On the bus.’

  ‘Joyce Henryson?’ Could it be? I tried to analyse the feeling the name evoked in me. How long since she’d been in my thoughts? I could almost feel myself blushing now at my past folly. But trouble?

  ‘That’s right,’ Larry said. ‘You knew her. You used to ride down into town with her, didn’t you? I remember thinking at one time that you’d a fancy for her yourself.’

  ‘And you say old Peter went to sea to get away from her?’

  ‘He certainly did, mate. What a so-and-so she turned out to be! He always knew she liked a good time, mind. He was mad about her, but after they were married he just couldn’t keep up with her. He wrote to me and I got him a job with my firm in London. The money was better but she wouldn’t move and he was no better off, trying to keep both ends going and seeing her only once every few weeks.’

  I drank from my glass, listening to him.

  ‘A sorry tale, Clive. Then... well, he eventually found out that she was carrying on with a bloke she’d known years back. A married man. Seemed she’d had an unhappy affair with him then, and now he’d left his wife and there was nothing standing between them but poor old Peter. She seemed to blame him for that. I tell you, she got him so he didn’t know what he was doing. And you know what a steady lad he always was.’

  I nodded. ‘It’ll be divorce, then?’

  ‘The sooner he gets rid, the better.’

  We drank in silence for some minutes.

  ‘No signs of you getting hitched, then, Clive?’

  ‘No... I haven’t found the right one, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, it’s fine if you get the right one; and hell if you pick a wrong ’un.’

  ‘You know,’ I said in a moment, ‘she never struck me as being that sort.’

  ‘Nor Peter, evidently. Still, you never did know her well, did you?’

  I looked at the amber dregs of my beer. Of course I was thinking – would it have been different with me? Could I have held her or would I have got the same rotten deal as Peter? And how rotten did the deal seem to her? They were things I’d never know.

  ‘No,’ I said at length. ‘No, she was just a casual acquaintance.’

  Waiting

  Old Thompson was seventy-four the winter his wife died. She was sixty-nine. They would have celebrated their golden wedding the following summer and they were a quiet and devoted couple. It was bronchitis that finished her, helped along by a week of November fog poisoned by Cressley’s industrial soot and smoke. In ten days she was
gone.

  His wife’s death nearly finished Thompson too. He was a changed man. Always active and vigorous, carrying his years lightly, and with a flush of ruddy good health in his face, he now seemed to age overnight. He seemed to shrivel and bend like a tree from whose roots all nutrition had been drained. His hands were all at once uncertain and fumbling, where they had grasped surely. The world about him seemed to lose interest for him. He became silent and withdrawn. He would sit for long hours in his tall wooden-backed armchair by the fire, and what he thought about in his silence no-one knew.

  Bob, the Thompsons’ younger son, and his wife Annie were living in the house in Dover Street when Mrs Thompson died. The Thompsons had had four children. The elder son was lost at sea during the war; a daughter married and emigrated to Australia, and a second daughter, Maud, fifteen years older than Bob, lived with her family in another part of the town.

  Bob and Annie had not known each other long before they became eager to get married: Bob because he wanted Annie and she (though she was fond of Bob in her own way) because she could at last visualise a life away from her roughneck family. When Mrs Thompson suggested that they marry and live with them in Dover Street until they could get a house of their own, Annie hesitated. Her ideal of marriage had been a process whereby she acquired a husband and an orderly, well-furnished home in one fell swoop. But she soon saw the advantages in this arrangement. She would, first of all, escape from her present life into a house which was quiet and efficiently run, if not her own; and she would be able to go on working so that she and Bob could save up all the more quickly for their own house. She would also get Bob, a good enough husband for any working-class girl: good-natured and pliable, ready to be bent her way whenever it was necessary for her ends.

  In time Bob became used to the silent figure in the house: but Annie, who since her mother-in-law’s death had given up her job and was at home all day, began to find the old man’s constant presence a source of growing irritation.

  ‘He gets on me nerves, Bob,’ she said one night when they were alone. ‘Just sitting there all day and me having to clean up round him. And he hardly says a word from getting up in a morning to going to bed.’

  ‘Well, I reckon he’s a right to do as he likes,’ Bob said mildly. ‘It’s his house, not ours. We’re the lodgers, if anybody.’

  But to Annie, now looking after the house as if it were her own, it was beginning to seem the other way about.

  On Wednesday afternoons Annie took the bus into Cressley to shop in the market. For an hour or so she would traverse the cobbled alleyways between the stalls, looking at everything, buying here and there, and keeping a sharp lookout for the bargains that were sometimes to be had. And then, with all her purchases made, she would leave the market for the streets of the town to spend another hour in her favourite pastime: looking in furniture-shop windows. There were furniture shops of all kinds in Cressley, from those where you had to strain your neck to see the prices on the tickets to others where you could hardly see the furniture itself for the clutter of placards and notices offering goods at prices almost too tempting to be true.

  One Wednesday she found a new shop full of the most delightful things, with a notice inviting anyone to walk in and look round without obligation. Annie hesitated for a moment before stepping through the doorway where, almost at once, she stopped entranced before a three-piece suite in green uncut moquette. There was a card on the sofa which said: ‘This fine 3-piece suite is yours for only ten shillings a week’, and very small at the bottom, ‘Cash price eighty-nine guineas’. Ten shillings a week… Why, she could almost pay that out of her housekeeping and never miss it!

  A voice at her shoulder startled her. ‘Can I help you, Madam?’ She looked round at the assistant who had come softly to her side.

  ‘Oh, well, no,’ she said, flustered. ‘I was just looking.’

  ‘Was it lounge furniture you were particularly interested in?’ asked the young man.

  ‘Well, no... All of it, really.’

  ‘I see. You’re thinking of setting up house?’

  ‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I am. I’m just looking round, y’know, seeing what there–’

  ‘We can supply everything you need.’ The assistant took her by the elbow. ‘If you’ll just come up to the showroom you’ll see what I mean…’

  ‘Well, I…’ Annie began, panicking a little at the thought of getting involved; but she was already being led to the rear of the shop and up a few wide steps.

  In the entrance to the showroom she stopped and gaped. There before her, filling every corner of the vast room, was furniture of all shapes, sizes and uses; lounge furniture, dining-room furniture, furniture for bedroom and kitchen, and even television and wireless sets.

  ‘You know we can furnish a complete home for only a few pounds a week…’

  Half an hour later Annie was on the bus, going home, with pictures of beautiful rooms floating through her intoxicated mind. All that, and for just a few pounds a week. Why, there was no reason why they couldn’t have their home tomorrow. No reason except they hadn’t got a house.

  ‘Bob, when are we going to have a house of our own? We’ve been hanging about for three years now and we’re no nearer than when we got married.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Bob said easily. ‘There’s not a lot o’ point in trying to get another place with things as they are. Besides, who’d look after me dad?’

  ‘Your Maud might think about doing her share.’

  ‘Aye, aye, I know,’ Bob mumbled. ‘Happen she’d buckle to if it came to it. She’s not a bad sort at bottom, our Maud. But anyway, it hasn’t come to that. Where would we go if we did move? You can’t get a house to rent any more than you could three year ago.’

  ‘What about buying one, then?’ Annie said.

  ‘We’d better wait till we’ve enough brass for a good deposit.’

  ‘We’ve over three hundred pounds in the bank,’ Annie said. ‘What did we save it for?’

  ‘You could spend all that on furniture. That wouldn’t go far.’

  They were walking home from the cinema after seeing a film set partly in an American house with an open split-level living-room where there was lots of space and all the furnishings looked smart and well made. Annie knew the limitations of her life and did not yearn for the impossible; but she was becoming avid now to reach out and take what was there awaiting her grasp.

  ‘There’s always hire purchase. I was talking to a feller in a shop today and he told me you could furnish a house for just a few pounds a week.’

  Bob laughed. ‘Had one o’ them chaps on to you, have you? They’ll tell you owt. No, we can do wi’ out debts like that. Someday you’ll have all you want.’

  ‘Someday...’ Annie muttered. ‘Stopping at home after working all that time has got me wanting a place of me own.’

  ‘Well, I mean this place is as good as yours, isn’t it? You do pretty well as you like in it, don’t you? And it’ll really be yours one o’ these days. After all, me dad can’t last–’ He stopped.

  Annie glanced quickly at him. ‘You mean he can’t last for ever.’

  ‘Shurrup,’ Bob muttered. ‘We shouldn’t be talking like that.’

  There was a light on in the house and they found Bob’s father sitting in his chair by the fire.

  ‘Still up?’ Annie said. ‘I thought you’d have been in bed long since.’

  The old man lifted his face to them, though his eyes seemed hardly to take them in. ‘I wa’ just going.’

  He pulled himself up and went out without another word.

  They went on as they were for some time. And then summer came and with the warmer days old Thompson stirred from his chair and began in the afternoons to stroll down the hill to the park where he could sit on a bench in the sun.

 
It was a great relief for Annie to be without him for a while each day, and she found new zest for her life as a housewife, the life she had always craved for from being a girl in a rough, overcrowded home. She tackled the work with great spirit, scrubbing and polishing until the house was always faultlessly clean.

  But still there was something lacking. It wasn’t like caring for her own possessions, for she was surrounded by furniture that was heavy and dark and old-fashioned and which never gave her a true reward for all the effort she applied to its care.

  ‘This old furniture gives me the willies,’ she complained to Bob. ‘It’s like living in a museum. All them chinks and crannies just harbour dust. I don’t know how your mother put up with it all them years.’

  ‘She was used to it. It’s the furniture they got when they were married. It was all the fashion at one time.’

  ‘It’s out o’ fashion now, all right,’ Annie said.

  ‘Aye, well, we’ll have some good stuff when we get a place of our own.’

  ‘Look, Bob,’ she said, ‘why don’t we get some new furniture now? Think how nice this place could look with a new carpet and a three-piece suite, and–’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Bob said. ‘What about me dad? This is his house, y’know, and he might like it as it is.’

  ‘You can ask him. I don’t think he’d mind. You know how he is these days.’

  ‘But what could we do with his stuff?’

  ‘Oh, we could sell it. Somebody on the market ’ud take it off our hands.’

  ‘We can’t just sell the old feller’s home up round him,’ Bob said. He sounded shocked at the thought. ‘Dammit, what would he do when we left?’

  ‘I don’t know as there’d be any need for us to leave if we had some decent furniture,’ Annie said.

  Bob saw her smooth round face set stubbornly in the expression which always frightened him a little. He was still surprised she had ever married him and anxious to please her in any way he could.