Room at the Top

1

I came to Warley on a wet September morning with the sky the grey of Guiseley sandstone. I was alone in the compartment. I remember saying to myself: No more zombies, Joe, no more zombies.

My stomach was rumbling with hunger and the drinks of the night before had left a buzzing in my head and a carbonated-water sensation in my nostrils. On that particular morning even these discomforts added to my pleasure. I was a dissipated traveller - dissipated in a gentlemanly sort of way, looking forward to the hot bath, the hair-of-the-dog, the black coffee and the snooze in the silk dressing gown.

My clothes were my Sunday best: a light grey suit that had cost fourteen guineas, a plain grey tie, plain grey socks, and brown shoes. The shoes were the most expensive I'd ever possessed, with a deep, rich, nearly black lustre. My trench coat and my hat, though, weren't up to the same standard; the coat, after only three months, was badly wrinkled and smelled of rubber, and the hat was faintly discoloured with hair oil and pinched to a sharp point in front.

Later I learned, among other things, never to buy cheap raincoats, to punch the dents out of my hat before I put it away, and not to have my clothes match too exactly in shade and colour. But I looked well enough that morning ten years ago; I hadn't then begun to acquire a middle-aged spread and - whether it sounds sentimental or not - I had a sort of eagerness and lack of disillusion which more than made up for the coat and hat and the ensemble like a uniform. The other evening I found a photo of myself taken shortly after I came to live at Warley. My hair is plastered into a skullcap, my collar doesn't fit, and the knot of my tie, held in place by a hideous pin shaped like a dagger, is far too small. That doesn't matter. For my face is not innocent exactly, but unused. I mean unused by sex, by money, by making friends and influencing people, hardly touched by any of the muck one's forced to wade through to get what one wants.

This was the face that Mrs. Thompson saw. I'd arranged my lodgings through an advertisement in the Warley Courier and hadn't actually seen her yet. But even without the maroon coat and copy of the Queen she'd said I'd recognise her by, I knew immediately who she was; she was exactly what I'd imagined from her thick white handmade writing paper and her near-copper-plate with its Greek e's.

She was waiting by the ticket barrier. I gave up my ticket and turned to her. "Mrs. Thompson?"

She smiled. She had a pale, composed face and dark hair turning grey. The smile was perhaps the result of long practice; she hardly moved her mouth. It came from her eyes, an expression of personal friendliness, not the usual social grimace. "You're Joe Lampton," she said. "I hope you had a pleasant journey." She stood looking at me with a disconcerting steadiness. I suddenly remembered that I should offer my hand.

"I'm glad to meet you," I said, meaning the words. She had cool dry hands and returned my clasp firmly. We went out over a covered footbridge which vibrated as a train went underneath, and then through a long echoing subway. I always feel hemmed in and lost in railway stations and for a moment I was overcome by depression and the buzzing in my head became an ache.

When we were outside I felt better; the rain had diminished to a drizzle and the air tasted fresh and clean with that special smell, like good bread-and-butter, which means that open country is near at hand. The station was at the centre of the eastern quarter of Warley. The effect was as if all the industries of the town had been crammed into one spot. Later I discovered that this segregation was Council policy; if anyone wanted to set up a mill or factory in Warley, it was the east or nowhere.

"This isn't the prettiest part of Warley," Mrs. Thompson said, waving her hand in a gesture which included a big mill, a fish-and-chip shop, and a seedy-looking Commercial Hotel. "It's always like this around stations, I don't know why. Cedric has some theory about it. But, you know, it's rather fascinating. There's a positive maze of streets behind the hotel ..."

"Is it far to Eagle Road?" I asked. "We could get a taxi." There were half a dozen of them in the station yard, their drivers all apparently frozen at their steering wheels.

"That's a good idea," she said. "I feel quite sorry for those poor men. She laughed. "I've never seen any of those taxis in use; they just wait here, day by day and year by year, for fares who never come. I sometimes wonder how they live."

When we were in the taxi she gave me another long look. It was searching but not embarrassing, as cool and dry but as friendly and firm as her handshake; I had the impression of having passed some test. "I'll call you Mr. Lampton if you like," she said, "but I'd rather call you Joe." She spoke without a trace of awkwardness or flirtatiousness; she had now, her attitude implied, settled the whole matter. "And my name is Joan," she added.

"That'll be fine, Joan," I said. And from then on I always used her Christian name; though, oddly enough, I never thought of her as anything else but Mrs. Thompson.

"This is St. Clair Road," she said as the taxi turned up a long steep hill. "We live at the top. It's always T'Top in Warley, though, with a capital T. My husband has some theory about that, too ..."

She spoke very well, I noticed; she had a low but clear voice, with no hint either of the overbuxom vowels of Yorkshire or the plum-in-the-mouth of the Home Counties. I congratulated myself on my good fortune; all too easily she might have been the usual sort of landlady, smelling of washing soda and baking powder, my lodgings might easily have been one of those scruffy little houses by the station - from one Dufton to another. Instead I was going to the Top, into a world that even from my first brief glimpses filled me with excitement: big houses with drives and orchards and manicured hedges, a preparatory school to which the boys would soon return from adventures in Brittany and Brazil and India or at the very least an old castle in Cornwall, expensive cars - Bentleys, Lagondas, Daimlers, Jaguars - parked everywhere in a kind of ostentatious litter as if the district had dropped them at random as evidences of its wealth; and, above all, the wind coming from the moors and the woods on the far horizon.

What impressed me most was Cyprus Avenue. It was broad and straight, and lined with cypresses. The street where I lived in Dufton was called Oak Crescent; it didn't curve one inch and there wasn't even a bush along it. Cyprus Avenue became at that instant a symbol of Warley - it was as if all my life I'd been eating sawdust and thinking it was bread.

Mrs. Thompson put her hand on my knee. I caught a whiff of eau de cologne, the best kind, discreet and aseptic. "We're home, Joe," she said. The house was semi-detached; I'd hoped it wouldn't be. But it was a decent size and built of an expensive-looking biscuit limestone and there was a garage. The paintwork gleamed with newness, the lawn had the texture of moleskin; it was a house that had always had the best of care. Except, strangely enough, for the garage, with its peeling, blistered paint and cracked window.

"Cedric uses it for his oddments," Mrs. Thompson said. She had an uncanny way of answering questions one hadn't asked. "It needs attention but we never seem to get round to it. We disposed of the car when Maurice died. It was his, really; we hadn't the heart to use it somehow.

She opened the door. "He was in the Forces?" I asked.

"A pilot in the RAF. Killed in a silly accident in Canada. He was just twenty-one."

The hall smelled of beeswax and fruit and there was a large copper vase of mimosa on a small oak table. Against the cream-painted walls I could see the faint reflection of the mimosa and the vase, chrome yellow and near-gold; it looked almost too good to be true, like an illustration from Homes and Gardens.

I helped Mrs. Thompson take off her coat. For a woman of, I estimated, at least forty-five, she possessed a good figure, with a small waist and no tendency either to bulges or to stringiness. It was easy to imagine her as a young woman, though she made no attempt to disguise her age. I looked at her, however, without the least flicker of desire; I never wished at any time to make love to Mrs. Thompson, though I certainly wouldn't, to be perfectly frank, have thrown her out of my bed.

She looked at me again with that peculiarly steady gaze. "You're very like him," she murmured. Then she straightened her back, as if recalling herself. "I'm sorry, Joe. I'm forgetting my duties. I'll show you your room."

My room at Eagle Road was the first room of my own in the real sense of the word. I don't count my cubicle in the N.C.O.'s quarters at Compton Bassett because I hardly ever used it except for sleeping; and I always had the feeling that it had been made impersonal by the very number of others there before me, living on the verge of departure to another station or death. Nor do I count my room at my Aunt Emily's; it was strictly a bedroom. I suppose that I might have bought some furniture and had an electric fire installed, but neither my uncle nor my aunt would have understood the desire for privacy. To them a bedroom was a room with a bed - a brass-railed one with a flock mattress in my case - and a wardrobe and a hard-backed chair, and its one purpose was sleep. You read and wrote and talked and listened to the wireless in the living room. It was as if the names of rooms were taken quite literally.

Now, following Mrs. Thompson into my room, I was moving into a different world. "It's marvellous," I said, feeling the inadequacy of the words and yet not wanting to appear too impressed; after all, I hadn't been living in the slums. I looked at it with incredulous delight: wallpaper vertically striped in beige and silver, a bay window extending for almost the whole length of the room with fitted cushions along it, a divan bed that looked like a divan and not like a bed with its depressing daylight intimations of sleep and sickness, two armchairs, and a dressing table, wardrobe, and writing table all in the same pale satiny wood. On the cream-painted bookcase was a bowl of anemones and there was a fire burning in the grate, leaving an aromatic smell, faintly acid and faintly flowerlike, which I knew but couldn't quite place.

"Applewood," Mrs. Thompson said. "Thanks to the coal shortage we're becoming connoisseurs. There's an electric fire but I thought a real one would be more cheerful on a miserable day like this."

There were three small pictures hanging on the far wall: "The Harbour at Arles," a Breughel skating scene, and Manet's "Olympe."

"Especially chosen in your honour," Mrs. Thompson said. "Medici reproductions. We have quite a picture library - you just slip in new ones when you become tired of them."

"I like the skaters," I said, meaning I liked it best. It wasn't true; even as I said it I was looking at Olympe, white, plump, and coldly self-possessed. But my upbringing held me back; I couldn't bring myself to admit to a woman that I liked a nude.

Until that day I'd never really looked at a picture. I knew, for instance, that there were three water colours in Aunt Emily's living room, but outside the house I couldn't even remember their subjects. I'm normally observant and I'd used the living room daily for over two years; it was simply that in Dufton pictures were pieces of furniture, they weren't meant to be looked at. The Medicis quite definitely were. They belonged to a pattern of gracious living; to my surprise the worn phrase straight from the women's magazines accurately conveyed the atmosphere of the room - it was as if a ready-made suit fitted perfectly.

"I expect you'd like a wash," Mrs. Thompson said. "The bathroom's to the right and the usual offices next to it." She took a bunch of keys from the dressing table. "Your keys, Joe, before I forget. Front door, this room, wardrobe, bureau, and heaven knows what these two are for but I'll remember presently. There'll be some coffee in half an hour, by the way. Or would you prefer tea?"

I said that coffee would suit me splendidly (I would much rather have had tea but I had an instinctive feeling that it wasn't quite correct at that hour). When she'd left the room I opened my suitcase and unfolded my dressing gown. I'd never had one before; Aunt Emily thought not only that they were an extravagance (an overcoat would serve their purpose) but that they were the livery of idleness and decadence. As I looked at it I seemed to hear her voice. "I'd sooner see someone naked," she'd say. "Working people look daft in dressing gowns, like street women lounging about the house too idle to wash their faces ... Spend your money on something sensible, lad." I smiled; there was certainly nothing sensible about the garment. Its material was, I remember, a very thin rayon and the shop assistant had used the term shot silk, which meant that, according to the light, it looked either garish or drab. The stitching was poor and after one washing it became a shapeless rag. It was a typical example of the stuff turned out for a buyer's market in the early postwar period and I rather think that I was drunk when I bought it.

For all that, it gave me far more pleasure than the dressing gown I have now, which was bought from Sulka's in Bond Street. Not that I don't like the Sulka; it's the best, and I always wear the best. But sometimes I feel uncomfortably aware that I'm forced to be a living proof of the firm's prosperity, a sort of sandwich-board man. I've no desire to be ill dressed; but I hate the knowledge that I daren't be ill dressed if I want to. I bought the cheap rayon garment to please myself; I bought the expensive silk garment because always to wear clothes of that quality is an unwritten term of my contract. And I shall never be able to recapture that sensation of leisure and opulence and sophistication which came over me that first afternoon in Warley when I took off my jacket and collar and went into the bathroom wearing a real dressing gown.

The bathroom was the sort you'd expect to find in any middle-class home - green tiles, green enamel, chromium towel rails, a big mirror with toothmug and toothbrush holders, a steel cabinet, a flush-sided bath with a shower attachment, a steel cabinet, and a light operated by a cord instead of a switch. It was immaculately clean, smelling faintly of scented soap and freshly laundered towels: it was nothing except a bathroom, it had been designed as a bathroom.

The bathroom I'd used the night before I came to Warley had been adapted from a bedroom. At the time the houses in Oak Crescent were built it wasn't considered that the working classes needed baths. It was a small room with pitch-pine flooring (if you weren't careful you could pick up a nasty splinter) and brown wallpaper blotchy with splashes. Towels were kept in the cistern cupboard, which was generally full of drying undergarments. On the window sill were a razor, a stick of shaving soap, a tube of toothpaste, and a dingy mess of toothbrushes, used razor blades, face cloths, and no less than three cups with broken handles which were supposed to be used as shaving mugs but, obviously, from their encrusting of dust, never had been.

I'm not going to pretend that I spent all my time at Aunt Emily's in a state of outraged sensibility. Charles and I used to make it a point of honour not to be squeamish about anything; we didn't want to be like the grocery manager at the top of Oak Crescent who was perpetually professing his great regard for cleanliness and his disgust at other people's lack of it, Charles often used to mimic him - "Soap and water's cheap enough, goodness knows. A person doesn't have to be rich to be clean. I wouldn't be without my bath for anything ..." He talked of baths as if there was something commendable about the mere fact of immersing one's body in water. As Charles said, he made you want to yell at the top of your voice that you kept coal in your bath and only washed when you began to itch.

For all that, I was beginning to find certain details of living in Dufton a bit too sordid to be funny. I was very fond of Aunt Emily and Uncle Dick and even their two sons, Tom and Sydney, thirteen and fourteen respectively, noisy and clumsy and clueless, heading straight for the mills and apparently perfectly happy about it. I even had a slight feeling of guilt about leaving Dufton, because I knew that the monthly eight pounds which I gave her had been a great help to her. But I couldn't stay in her world any longer. Already, drying my face and hands on a large soft towel, looking out of the corner of my eye at the dressing gown hanging behind the door (I used to watch that garment as if I were frightened it would run away) and breathing the room's odour of perfume and cleanliness, I had a footing in a very different world.

I went back to my room and changed my collar and brushed my hair. Looking at myself in the minor, I suddenly felt entirely alone. I had a childish longing for the ugly rooms and streets where to be hungry or lost wasn't possible; for the familiar faces which might bore or irritate but never hurt or betray. I don't suppose that homesickness can entirely be avoided; but I had all mine in one concentrated dose of a few seconds that first day, and I never suffered from it again.

I looked out of the window. The back garden was surprisingly large. It was bordered by a privet hedge and there was a big apple tree at the far end. There were two cherry trees next to it; I remembered my father telling me once that cherry trees can't flourish by themselves. "They have to be wed afore they're fruitful," he'd added, innocently pleased at the image. Father had never possessed a garden of his own, only a plot at the municipal allotments. No apple trees, no cherry trees, no lawn, no privet hedge ...

I straightened my tie and went downstairs to the drawing room. I'd hardly been there five minutes when Mrs. Thompson came in with the coffee. She brought it on a silver tray; I wondered how much money was coming into the house. She'd told me in her letter that her husband taught English at the Grammar School; but that didn't seem sufficient to explain their standard of living. It wasn't only the tray and coffeepot which impressed me - they might, after all, have been wedding presents - but the cups and milk jug and sugar bowl. They were thin and translucent and enamelled in clear primary colours - red, blue, yellow, orange - and I knew that they were expensive because of their lack of ornament and the deep glow of the enamel. I've an instinct like a water diviner's where money's concerned; I was certain that I was in the presence of at least a thousand a year. When I noticed the matter-of-fact way in which Mrs. Thompson handled the coffee set, without a trace of that expression of mingled pride and anxiety which most women assume on bringing out good china, I increased the amount by five hundred.

"We've never had a lodger before," she said as she handed me my coffee. Her voice paused perceptibly at the word lodger as if considering and rejecting all the euphemisms - paying guest, young gentleman to stay with us, and so on. "But I've suffered from landladies myself in my younger days. I do want you to understand, Joe, that your room's entirely your own. And you must bring your friends any time you like." She hesitated. "If ever you feel lonely - it's always a little strange at first, living in a new place - you'll be very welcome down here. Is this the first time you've been away from home? Apart from the Forces, I mean?"

"It is and it isn't. My father and mother were killed during the war and I've been living at my Aunt Emily's." I was going to pronounce Aunt with a broad a but decided not to attempt it yet.

"What sort of place is Dufton exactly?"

"A lot of mills. And a chemical factory. And a grammar school and a war memorial and a river that runs different colours each day. And a cinema and fourteen pubs. That's really all one can say about it."

"You haven't a theatre then?"

"The Nonconformists work their way through Abe Heywood's catalogue each winter. I used to go into Manchester if I wanted to see a show. There isn't anything in Dufton."

To Charles and me it was always Dead Dufton and the councillors and chief officials and anyone we didn't approve of were called zombies. At first we used to number them: "Zombie Number Three," Charles would say, referring to his boss, the Librarian, "made a joke today. It's pathetic when they pretend to be alive, n'est-ce pas?" When Number Ten was reached, it became difficult to remember whom we meant, so we adopted another system. "The Fat Zombie's been watering the beer again," I'd remark as the landlord of the Dufton Horseman waddled by in a new worsted suit. "He didn't come by that new shroud honestly." And there was the Washable Zombie, the grocery manager who was always talking about baths, and the Smiling Zombie, who ran a clothing club and a moneylender's. There were many others; we knew a great deal about the people of Dufton. Much more, for instance, than the Adulterous Zombie and the Childloving Zombie, two of the town's most prominent citizens, realised; if they had, we shouldn't have kept our jobs very long.

"We have a very good Little Theatre in Warley," Mrs. Thompson said. "The Warley Thespians - silly name really. You must come to our next social evening, Joe. They'll snap you up - men are scarce."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Male actors, I should have said." She smiled. "Though handsome young bachelors are greatly in demand too. Have you done any acting?"

"A little at camp concerts, But I didn't have much spare time at Dufton. And to tell you the truth, I didn't much fancy Careless Cyril Comes a Cropper and Peggy's Prize Packet ."

"You've made those up," she said, appearing rather pleased with me on that account. "Though I admit they've got the Heywood flavour."

"It was Charles actually," I said. "My friend Charles Lufford. We've known each other since we were children."

"You're very fond of him, aren't you?"

"We're as close as brothers. A great deal closer than most brothers." I remembered Charles's plump face with its absurdly large horn-rimmed spectacles and its mixed expressions of innocence and bawdy cheerfulness; I used to say that he looked like a parson on the razzle. "There's nothing in Dufton, Joe. Leave it before you become a zombie too ..." I could hear his deep, rather beery voice so distinctly that he might have been in the same room. "When you go to Warley, Joe, there'll be no more zombies. Remember that. No more zombies."

"You'll miss him," Mrs. Thompson said.

"Yes. I'll get over it, though - " I paused, not quite knowing how to express myself.

"I think men's friendships are much deeper than women's," Mrs. Thompson said. "But not so possessive, they never stand in each other's way." She didn't say that she knew what I meant; but the effect was as if she had; with her usual efficiency she saved me the embarrassment of explaining that I wasn't heartbroken about leaving Charles but that I wasn't totally unaffected by it either.

The clock struck the half hour and Mrs. Thompson said that she'd better attend to the chicken. When she'd left the room I lit a cigarette and walked over to the mantelpiece. Hanging over it was a large framed photograph of a young man in RAF uniform with the white air-crew slip in his cap. He had dark thick hair, a full mouth held very firmly, and heavy eyebrows. He was smiling with his eyes - Mrs. Thompson's trick. He was good-looking; he was also charming, a quality which doesn't often come through in photographs.

Charm was a favourite object of discussion between Charles and myself; we had the notion that if only we could learn how to use it our careers would be much benefited. The possession of charm wasn't in itself a guarantee of success, but it seemed to follow ambition like a pilot fish. It wasn't a highly esteemed quality in Dufton, though. Bluntness was the fashion; as Charles said, everyone behaved as if they were under contract to live up to the tradition of the outspoken Yorkshireman with a heart of gold underneath a rough exterior. The worst of it was, he'd add, that underneath the rough exterior their hearts were as base and vicious as anyone's from the Suave and Treacherous South. Not, I think, that they were entirely to be blamed; there wasn't much room for gracious living in Dufton. The young man in the photograph (obviously Mrs. Thompson's son who'd been killed during the war) had been given from birth the necessary background for charm. It's astounding how often golden hearts and silver spoons in the mouth go together.

I was a little surprised that Mrs. Thompson should so prominently display the picture of her dead son; I wouldn't have thought that she could have borne to be reminded of him. Then I remembered something that Charles had said: "Zombies always pass away or cross the Great Divide or go into the sunset. And they lose people like a parcel or a glove. And they can't bear to talk of It or to be reminded of It. They're dead already, that's why."

Mrs. Thompson wasn't a zombie; she'd be able to look at her dead son without hysteria. The room hadn't the necessary atmosphere for hysteria anyway. It was a drawing room furnished in what seemed to me to be very good taste with Sheraton-type furniture, thin-legged and graceful but not spindly or fragile, and pale yellow and cream wallpaper in an arrangement of colour rather than a pattern. There was a radio-gramophone and a big open bookcase and a grand piano; the piano top was bare, a sure sign that it was used as a musical instrument and not an auxiliary mantelpiece. The white bearskin rug on the parquet floor was, I suppose, strictly Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but it fitted in, added a necessary touch of frivolity, even a faint sexiness like scented cachous.

I looked at Maurice's photograph again. It reminded me of someone I knew. I was irritated with myself for not remembering; it was as if a catalogue card had been misplaced of a book which I knew was in stock. It seemed very important that I should recall the likeness; but the harder I tried, the more neutral and anonymous his face became. I gave up the attempt and went upstairs to unpack.