Room at the Top

10

I spent Christmas at my Aunt Emily's. It snowed in Warley the night I left, just a light powdering, a present from Raphael's and Tuck's and Sharpe's to make the girls' eyes sparkle and the waits sing in tune and to turn the houses taller and crookeder and all's-well-in-the-end adventurous; the town was crammed with people, all of them none the less absolute tenants of happiness because they'd been shepherded into it by the shopkeepers and the newspapers and the BBC: you could sense that happiness, innocent and formal as children's story, with each snowflake and each note of the Town Hall carillon.

It was hard to leave Warley then; I felt as if I were being sent home from a party before the presents had been taken off the tree. In fact, I'd felt out of things all December: I'd gone to the Thespians' Christmas party, and been the back end of a horse in the children's play, and kissed all the girls at the Town Hall after the traditional lunchtime booze-up, but I knew that I wasn't part of Warley's festival, because I was leaving before the preparations began to make sense, before that short turkey and spice cake and wine and whisky period when every door in the town would be wide open and the grades wouldn't matter. Not that I really believed such a thing could happen; but in Warley it at least was possible to dream about it.

No dreams were possible in Dufton, where the snow seemed to turn back almost before it hit the ground; Christmas there always seemed a bit ashamed of itself, as if it knew that it was a wicked waste of good money; Dufton and gaiety just weren't on speaking terms. And the house at Oak Cresent was small and dark and smelly and cluttered up; it wasn't that I didn't care for Aunt Emily and her family, but I was too much of T'Top now and, half hating myself for it, I found myself seeing them as foreigners. They were kind and good and generous; but they weren't my sort of person any longer.

I told Charles something of this on Boxing Day at the Siege Gun just outside the town. The Siege Gun was our local; it stood on the top of a little hill overlooking a wilderness of allotments and hen runs. It was about half an hour's walk from Oak Crescent; for some reason it was the only respectable pub in Dufton. The others weren't exactly low, but even in their Best Rooms you were likely to see the overalled and sweaty. The landlord at the Siege Gun, a sour old ex-Regular, discouraged anyone entering the Best Room without a collar and tie. Consequently his pub was the only place in Dufton where you'd find any of the town's upper crust, such as it was. I'd had some good nights at the Siege Gun but, looking around me that lunchtime, I knew that there wouldn't be any more. It was too small, too dingy, too working-class; four months in Warley had given me a fixed taste for either the roadhouse or the authentic country pub.

"I couldn't bear Dufton sober," I said to Charles.

"Too true," he said. "I'll be damned glad when I get to London.

I'd known for a month that he'd landed a job there, but when he spoke so lightly about going away I felt lonely and lost; I wanted him to stay permanently in Dufton, I suppose, so that I'd at least be able to depend upon my hometown providing me with company. Dufton's only virtue was that it never changed; Charles to me was part of Dufton. Now that he was leaving the town, the lever had been pulled that would complete its journey into death.

"You slant-eyed Mongolian pig," I said. "What do you want to go away for? Who'll I have to talk to now when I come home at weekends?"

Charles took out a grubby handkerchief and pretended to wipe his eyes. "Your beautifully phrased appeal to my friendship moves me inexpressibly. But I can't stay in Dufton even to please you. Do you know, when I come into this pub, I don't even have to order? They automatically issue a pint of wallop. And if I come in with someone else I point at them and nod twice if it's bitter. I'm growing too fond of the stuff anyway ... it's the only quick way out of this stinking town." He looked at his pint with an expression of comic gluttony on his plump, strangely cherubic face. "Lovely lovely ale," he said. "The mainstay of the industrial North, the bulwark of the British Constitution. If the Dufton pubs closed for just one day, there wouldn't be a virgin or an unbroken window left by ten o'clock."

"There's not many left of either as it is," I said.

"I do my best," he said. "How's your sex life, by the way?"

"Satisfactory. I see Alice every week."

"Weather's a bit cold for it," he said.

"She borrows a friend's flat in Leddersford."

"You be careful chum."

"She's not possessive. It's not that sort of affair - " What sort exactly was it, though? I remembered once, through half-closed eyes, watching her take up my shirt from beside the bed and kiss it. When she saw me looking at her she blushed and turned away. I felt myself blushing too.

"It's perfect," I said firmly. "She's wonderful in bed, and she wants nothing else from me."

"She will."

"Not Alice."

"Keep right on believing that, and it won't be long before I see your name in the Sunday papers."

"Phooey," I said. "It's a simple straightforward transaction. Just for the sake of our health, that's all. Besides, it helps me keep myself pure for Susan."

"You've not said much about her lately. The Lampton charm not working?"

"I've been out with her about half a dozen times now. The theatre and the cinema and a five-bob hop. All most genteel. Costs me the hell of a lot of money - flowers, chocolates, and all the rest of it - and I get nothing in return."

"You mean old swine."

"Mind you, she thinks I'm wonderful. Like an elder brother. I keep paying her compliments and I treat her with great respect et cetera et cetera. It's not entirely without effect - I suppose that Wales takes her for granted, the big slob."

"Their daddies will have arranged it all," Charles said. "I don't see why he should put himself out. Damned if I would. You haven't a cat in hell's chance, frankly. Unless you thoroughly misbehave, if you see what I mean."

"I see what you mean. But it's easier said than done. She doesn't want me to make love to her - I can always tell."

"Perhaps you're trying too hard. Why not leave her alone for two months or so? Don't quarrel with her, don't attempt to discover how you stand. Simply stop seeing her. If she's at all interested in you, she'll be a bit huffed. Or she'll wonder what's wrong with her. Remember, she's got into the habit of seeing you, poor bitch. But don't" - he wagged his finger at me - "say a word to anyone else. If you do run across her, behave as if nothing had happened." His face looked very red above his stiff white collar; there was a chess player's intentness in his pale blue eyes. "It should be very interesting. Report back with full details, Sergeant, if you survive."

"She mayn't give a curse whether I see her or not," I said. "She probably won't even notice that I've gone."

"In that case, you'll have lost nothing. And you'll have saved your pride."

"I'd be scared of losing her," I said. "I'm in love with her."

He snorted. "In love with her! Drivel! In lust with her. And Daddy's bank balance. I know you, you scoundrel. Do what Uncle Charles advises, and all will be gas and gaiters."

"I might try it," I said. "Another beer?"

"Wait," Charles whispered as a young man in a Crombie overcoat came through the door. "The Glittering Zombie's being democratic. After all, we went to school with him."

He waved at the newcomer. "Come over here, Cyril." He winked at me. "By Jove, old man, it's nice to see you. What are you having?" He was using his captain's accent, I observed with amusement. It was a wartime acquisition; he'd learned it in ten days flat after he'd seen a young Cockney sublieutenant driven to suicide by the jeers of the Standard English types. He did it rather well; the Glittering Zombie, a simple soul whose father had been a corporation dustman before the war, was, as always, impressed and flattered.

"Let me , Charlie," he said quickly. "Something short, eh?"

I returned to Aunt Emily slightly oiled.

"Hello, love," she said when I came in. "Been with Charles?"

"Talking over old times," I said. "We're going out tonight. I'll have supper at his place."

"Where are you going?"

"I don't really know yet."

"Not far from a bottle, if I know Charles."

She was sitting by the fire with her hands folded. It was quite dark in the Front Room; the fire burned with a kind of restrained brightness, reflecting itself gently from the unscratched furniture. A faint smell of cigars and wine and chocolate still hung over the room. Aunt Emily looked very much like my mother; her face had the same thin elegance and the same air of restrained energy. Aided by the beer and the whisky and the faint sadness of the Front Room, the tears came to my eyes.

"What's up, lad?"

"You made me think of Mother."

She sighed. "Ee, I remember her well as a young lass. She used to run the house after Father died. She wor proper determined, wor your mother. Your grandma had all t'heart knocked out of her when your grandpa wor killed at t'mill. During t'first war, that was, and them coining money then, but not a penny-piece of compensation did your grandma get. T'same people went bankrupt in 1930. T'owd meister shot himself."

"Good," I said.

"It wasn't good for those that wor thrown out of work." She looked at me sternly. "Think on how lucky you are, Joe. T'Town Hall can't go bankrupt. Tha'll never go hungry. Or have to scrat and scrape saving for thi old age."

"It's not so bad in the mills now," I said. "No one's out of work. Dammit, some of the millhands are better off than I."

"Aye," she said, "they can get ten and twelve pounds if they work fifty and sixty and seventy hours a week in t'heat and t'din and t'muck. But how long will it last?"

She rose. "Ah'll make some tea," she said. "Your uncle's having a lay-down and t'boys are out playing." She winked. "So there's only tee and me in t'house, and we'll have a right cup of tea. Ah've been putting a bit aside for you coming home."

Moved by an impulse of affection, I kissed her on the cheek. "Make it so t'spoon'll stand up in it, love," I said. "And I want a pint pot." I kissed her on the other cheek. "You're very good to me, Auntie," I said.

"It's t'beer that's making thee so sloppy," she said, but I could see that she was pleased by the springiness of her step as she went out.

When she came back with the tea I offered her a cigarette. To my surprise, she accepted it. "I am a devil, aren't I?" she said, puffing away inexpertly.

The tea was both astringent and sweet, and she'd put some rum in it. 'That's t'first right cup of tea Ah've had sin' Ah left home," I said.

"Time you had a home of your own."

"I'm too young yet," I said weakly.

"You're old enough. Old enough to be running after all t'lasses in sight, Mi do know."

"No one'll have me, Auntie. I'm not rich enough."

"Fiddlesticks. You're not bad-looking and you have a good steady job. And you're not shy, you're brass-faced, in fact. Don't try to tell me you can't get a lass, Joe Lampton, because Ah'll noan credit it. Haven't you met anyone at this theatre you keep writing about?"

It was no use; I never could withstand her questioning for very long. (I think that perhaps I was unconsciously making up to Mother through her for all the times I'd answered perfectly reasonable questions with boorish grunts or studied vagueness.)

"There's a girl named Susan Brown," I said. "I've taken her out a few times. She's rather attractive."

"Who is she?"

"Her father owns a factory near Leddersford. He's on the Warley Council."

She looked at me with a curious pity. "Money marries money, lad. Be careful she doesn't break your heart. Is she really a nice lass, though?"

"She's lovely," I said. "Not just lovely to look at - she's sweet and innocent and good."

"I bet she doesn't work for a living either, or else does a job for pin money. What good's a girl like that to you? Get one of your own class, lad, go to your own people."

I poured myself another cup of tea. I didn't like its taste any longer; it was too strong, stuffy and pungent like old sacking. "If I want her, I'll have her."

"I wonder how fond you really are of her," Aunt Emily said sadly.

"I love her. I'm going to marry her." But I felt shame-faced as I spoke the words.

On my way to the Siege Gun that evening I went past my old home. Christmas Eve's snow had already melted, and it was cold with a damp enclosing coldness; it was like being locked in a disused cellar. I paused by the gap where our house had stood; I had no desire to receive old memories but instantly, unbidden, the events of that morning in 1941 - the Bad Morning, the Death Morning - unreeled themselves like a film.

It was the smell which had upset me most. There was nothing there now but a faint mustiness; but on the Bad Morning it had been chokingly strong - the blitz smell, damp plaster and bonemeal. I'd accepted it as part of the atmosphere in London and the Home Counties, but here in Dufton it was as incongruous as a tiger.

There was no rubble now, no broken glass, no fluttering shreds of wallpaper. The pavement had been roped off that morning: among the debris was the bathroom mirror, which somehow had survived the explosion and seemed to wink derisively in the August sun, as if it had survived at my parents' expense. For a moment I'd pretended that the bomb had fallen on some other house, and that very soon I'd be talking the whole thing over with Mother. The houses were so much alike with their oak-grained doors, lace curtains, yellowstoned doorsteps, and fronts of stained Accrington brick (good for a thousand years) that it was easy to see how the Town Hall had made the mistake. Come to that, the front of the house had been so neatly sheared off that it was possible to imagine some macabre practical joke having been played - hadn't Charles and I often agreed that Zombies have a queer sense of humour?

There'd been the usual group of spectators with the usual expression of futile excitement, voyeurs of disaster; I didn't speak to any of them because I hated them so much that I couldn't speak. I shut them out of my mind because if I'd lost control of myself I should simply have been providing them with an extra pleasure, an unexpected titillation.

I'd ducked under the ropes and entered through the front porch, which was still standing, the door ajar. I could have entered with equal ease at any point where the wall had stood; but it would have been disrespectful, like dropping ash on a corpse.

"Clear out," the man in overalls had said. He was standing at the far corner of the living room with a small red notebook in his hand. His ARP helmet had been pushed back to show a mop of thick white hair; he was wearing heavy horn-rim spectacles and a bushy white moustache. He was small and square-shouldered and stood with his feet wide apart as if the floor were swaying. "Clear out," he repeated. "That wall's coming down soon. Christ, haven't you ever seen a blitzed house before?"

"I used to live here."

"I'm sorry." He'd taken off his spectacles and started to clean them with a little square of cloth, his face becoming weak and plump and civilian. "It was a terrible thing to happen. Terrible." He'd looked at the half-wing on my tunic. "You'll get your revenge," he said. He'd replaced his spectacles, his face regaining its purposefulness. "Yes," he said, "give the bastards hell."

Had he really said that, or had I imagined it? But he had used those exact words; I remembered how he'd stuck out his chin and frowned, trying to look like an MOI poster. The background was ideal - the wringing machine blown through the kitchen window, the stone sink cracked in two, a heavy grey sock, darned at the heel, lying half under a lump of plaster, and all of the crockery, except one thick half-pint mug, mixed up in fragments with butter and sugar and jam and bread and sausages and golden syrup.

Father and Mother had gone to bed when the bomb dropped. The siren had sounded but it was unlikely that they'd taken any notice. Dufton simply wasn't worth the trouble of raiding. They'd died instantly - at least, that was the phrase which Zombie Number One (looking uncommonly prosperous in a new suit and a Macclesfield silk tie) had used, standing with the Town Clerk and the Efficient Zombie in a group of official condolence. There'd even been whisky, offered with an air of ceremonial furtiveness. And I'd wanted to laugh when drinking the whisky because I was suddenly reminded of the picture Charles used to paint of the Council cache of liquor - a huge cellar crammed with rare liqueurs and vintage wines, guarded by huge eunuchs with drawn scimitars. I'd had an insane impulse to ask if they still stocked the Zombie specialties like blood-and-Benedictine.

I stepped forward into the bareness which had been the living room. Quite calmly now - more calmly than I had done that August morning - I reconstructed it in my memory. I was sure about the cream valance, the red velvet curtains, the big photograph of myself as a child which had hung over the mantelshelf; but I couldn't be quite certain about the location of the oak dining table. I closed my eyes for a moment and it came into focus by the far wall with three Windsor chairs round it. And there was the sofa with the blue cloth cover; it was most important to remember that. When its springs began to perish, my father brought a leather car seat from a junk-dealer's. The sofa cover was loose, and when my parents both went out I used sometimes to take it off and, sitting on the right-hand side, drive Birkin's Bentley or the Saint's Hirondel for hours at a stretch.

The walls had been decorated half in fawn and orange paper and half in imitation oak panelling. The paper was reduced to a few shreds now, the imitation oak panelling was pulped with dust and smoke and weather. There had been a pattern of raised beads; I struck a match and held it close to the wall and I could still see some of the little marks where as a child I'd picked the beads off with my fingernails. I felt a sharp guilt at the memory; the house should have been inviolate from minor indignities.

The fireplace had survived the bomb untouched; the two loose bricks on its left-hand side had still been projecting like buck teeth. For as long as I could remember, they'd annoyed me; but on the Death Morning they seemed unbearably pathetic. And the draught control handle over the fireplace - a chromium hand clutching a rod - which had frightened me in my dreams, seemed frightening no longer, but lost and in pain, a sick child's.

Everyone had been very kind and there'd been a constant stream of callers at Aunt Emily's. A shower of gifts had been pressed upon me by every organisation in the town and there was even talk of some kind of fund being opened for me. The truth was that the whole elaborate machinery for the relief of blitz victims had been unemployed until Father and Mother were killed, so it had set enthusiastically to work on me, like an elephant picking up a peanut. In a way, though, I'd rather enjoyed being the centre of attention, warm between the cosy breasts of sympathy.

A sluggish wind crept down from the Pennines, cold and damp and spiteful, trying to find a gap in my defences. It retired, defeated by alcohol and meat and the thick wool of my overcoat and the soft cashmere of my scarf; it had no power over me now, it was a killer only of the poor and the weak. I looked at the small space which had once been my home; I'd come a long way since 1941.

Too far perhaps; I thought of my father. He was a good workman; too good a workman to be sacked and too outspoken about his Labour convictions to be promoted. He told me this entirely without bitterness; in fact, I'd detected a note of pride in his deep, slow voice. "If Ah'd joned t'Con Club, lad, Ah'd be riding to work in mi own car ..."

I didn't, at the age of fifteen, share my father's pride, because the hypothetical car which he'd so high-mindedly rejected was all too real to me. So instead of the look of approval which he expected he received merely a sullen glare.

My mother knew what was in my mind. " You've never gone short, Joseph," she said. She always called me by my full name when she wanted to read the Riot Act. "Your father would starve before he'd sell himself for a handful of silver" - this was one of her favourite quotations and her use of it, I don't know why, always embarrassed me intensely - "but he'd never see his own in want. I knew that when I married him. I could have had a common, fat man with a motorcar, but I wanted something better than that."

She smiled at Father; intercepting that smile, I felt shut-out, bewildered, childish. My father was sitting in the armchair to the left of the fireplace, smoking his pipe and listening to, of all things, Noel Coward's "The Stately Homes of England." He was as completely relaxed as the grey tomcat asleep by the fire with its head on my feet. That, I might say, was as far as the image extended; there was nothing even remotely feline about my father. He had a face like the statue of some Victorian industrialist, heavy and firm and deeply lined, giving an impression of stern willingness. He was, in fact, a very handsome man; his features were regular, his hair thick and bright, and his teeth - this was rare in Dufton - were white and even. It was an obsolete handsomeness, a Charles Hawtrey, bay-rum, Sweet Adeline kind, solid and male and wholesome. Mother had a thin lively face which only just missed horsiness. She was never still and rarely silent. She had a fresh, rosy complexion and clear blue eyes; at thirty-eight, her hair was already greying but the effect, paradoxically, was to make her look younger, as if she were only pretending to be old.

Father rose. He rose very quickly and smoothly. He was a big man (six feet and over one hundred and ninety pounds) but he hadn't the ponderous clumsiness of most big men. He moved rather as a young bull moves, but without its blind menace.

"Ah'm bahn for a gill, lass," he said. He ruffled my hair as he passed. "Mind what Ah say, Joe. There's some things that can be bought too dear."

Then I remembered the bomb, and the whole scene dissolved. It was as if my mind were in watertight compartments. Behind the doors of this particular compartment, even six years after, were things I couldn't face. It was bad enough when these things happened to strangers; I remembered the WAAF messroom at my first station after a direct hit. I'd stood that better than I'd expected, thinking of it simply as a mess to be cleared up, even after I'd seen that fair-haired girl from Doncaster with both eyes running down her cheeks. But what made me really sick was treading on a piece of flesh which squirmed from under my foot like a mouse. The invasion of the abbatoir, the raw physical horror suddenly becoming undisputed master - I couldn't connect it with Father and Mother, I refused to accept it.

I turned away from the house and walked quickly away. It had been a mistake to go there. The watertight compartments were out of order; images of pain and distress, more memories of things I'd seen during the war and would rather have forgotten, rose to the surface of my mind. As long as I kept on walking they'd remain mixed and chaotic, like imperfectly recollected books and films; once I stopped they'd become unbearably organised; if I walked quickly I could cram my mind with the speed of my own movement, with the grocer's shop and its frosted window and the Christmas tree, with the men's outfitters and the awful American ties, with the Board School and its murderous asphalt playground - and then I stopped trying. It was futile; here on the left stood the huge bulk of Torver's Mills where Father had worked for twenty years; here was the Wellington, his local, and here was the greengrocer's where he bought muscatel raisins for our Sunday walks - wherever I looked there was a memory, an italicising of death.

Why hadn't I noticed it before? Because Warley had shown me a new way of living; for the first time I'd lived in a place without memories. And for the first time lived in a place; in the three months I'd been there I was already more a part of the town, more involved in its life, than ever I had been in my birthplace. And even for three days only, I couldn't endure the chilly bedroom with its hideous wallpaper and view of mill chimneys and middens, the bath with its peeling enamel, the scratchy blankets - my aunt and uncle were unselfish and generous and gentle, they spoke only the language of giving, but no virtue was substitute for the cool smoothness of linen, the glittering cleanliness of a real bathroom, the view of Warley Moor at dawn, and the saunter along St. Clair Road past the expensive houses.

"Dead Dufton," I muttered to myself. "Dirty Dufton, Dreary Dufton, Despicable Dufton - " then stopped. It was too quiet. There were lights in the windows but they seemed as if put there to deceive - follow them and you were over the precipice, crashing into the witch's cave to labour in the mills forever. There were cigarette ends and orange peel and sweet wrappers in the gutter but no one living had smoked those cigarettes or eaten those sweets; the town reminded me of those detective stories in dossier form which used to be sold complete with clues - cigarette ends, poisoned lozenges, hairpins ... I walked over the suspension bridge at the top of the town; the river was running faster than usual, swollen with melted snow and harried by the northeast wind; the bridge was swaying and creaking beneath my feet, and I suddenly was afraid that it might deliberately throw me into the water like a vicious horse; I forced myself to walk slowly, but the sweat was dripping off my brow.