Room at the Top

15

I looked at the invitation as I drank my final cup of tea at breakfast. It was a fine morning; the sun had melted all but the last traces of snow in the valley, and one could almost smell the green things growing. For the first time in a week I didn't think of Alice.

"Sally Carstairs has asked me to her birthday party," I said to Mrs. Thompson.

"She's a thoroughly nice girl. Weren't you in The Farm with her?"

"She helped me with the props. Don't know her very well, though. What should I give her?" I tried to sound matter-of-fact but I was excited and delighted. The Carstairses had plenty of money - they ran a chain of cafés - and lived in a big house at Gilden, right on top of Warley Moors.

"You leave it to me. I know Sally's mother very well."

"How much should I spend?"

"Leave that to me too. I won't break you, I promise."

"It's in your hands," I said. I was leaving more and more in her hands, I thought, those thin long-fingered hands so much like Alice's - I shied away from the name like a horse from a corpse. I looked at my watch. "Time to get my nose to the grindstone." I said goodbye to Mrs. Thompson; when I passed her chair I wanted to kiss her. Not passionately, I may add, but as I would have kissed my mother on my way to work.

Walking down Eagle Road, I wondered dimly if I might achieve something with Sally. She was small and slim and bright as a budgerigar and was training at the Leddersford Art School; my mind shied away again, but this time it was more of an automatic sidestepping from what might disturb me than a violent and painful revulsion. As I walked down the hill I experienced the conqueror's sensation again. Warley was below in the valley waiting to be possessed, I'd just come from a beautiful room as near T'Top as made no difference, I was going to a rich house to meet rich people and who could say what would come of it? Perhaps Susan might be there; not that it mattered very much. It wasn't that I disbelieved Reggie; but at the moment I didn't feel prepared for that particular sector of the battlefield.

Gilden is a rather grim mill village northeast of Warley. It has the appearance of being ready for anything: the narrow windows of the millstone grit houses might suddenly sprout rifles; beyond the next corner of its twisting streets and alleys it's not fantastic to imagine the glint of bayonets, the two Crimean War guns in the Memorial Park are ready for action, the General Stores in the High Street has rations for a five years' siege. The village ends abruptly at the Ebenezer Methodist chapel with its crammed graveyard; beyond it is nothing but the moors and a few sheep and curlews and a solitary farmhouse a mile west. That too has a military air; the moors are Gilden's maquis and behind its walls are planned the sudden raid into the valley, the ambush in the village, the last desperate stand with the enemy corpses piling up behind the drystone walls.

The Carstairs home stood apart from the village, an opulent neutral. It wasn't merely its ten rooms, its raw newness, its glaring red brick of the type which is supposed to mellow with wind and weather, that made its Gilden address simply a geographical term; it was situated where it was not to be near the business or the estate or other houses or the road, not for any practical reason at all, but simply because Carstairs père had fancied a house on the moors. That was why I liked it: it hadn't the remotest connection with any sort of economic necessity, it was a rich man's vulgar solid self-indulgence.

Reggie and I shared a taxi from Warley; the bus ran only hourly. As we turned into the Carstairs drive, we passed the bus: I saw an old man, a gang of children, a young couple holding hands. I recognised the middle-aged woman in front, her frowning face looking like a dull pudding under her off-white headscarf; she never paid her taxes until the last moment, and the answer was, I fancied, in the village pub of which her husband was Gilden's most devoted mainstay. I felt a spasm of pity for her; as we passed, it seemed that two worlds were meeting. The world of worry about rent and taxes and groceries, of the smell of soda and blacklead and No Smoking and No Spitting and Please Have the Correct Change Ready and the world of the Rolls and the black-market clothes and the Coty perfume and the career ahead of one running on well-oiled grooves to a knighthood; and the party in the big house at the end of the pine-lined drive at which, I felt in a sudden accession of pessimism, I would very quickly be shown that my place was in the world of the poor with its narrow present like a stony hen-run.

A grey Jaguar coupé drove away as we reached the house. The woman driving it gave Reggie a circumscribed wave and sat bolt upright and disdainfully, as if giving the car its orders rather than driving it.

"Mama Brown," Reggie said. "That's her runabout. Hubby has a Bentley, and they keep a V-8 as a spare."

"She seems well aware of it," I said.

"Not half, old man. The last of the St. Clairs and stinking with money. She's an old tough too; a place for everyone and everyone in their place. She practically ran a young man out of town for making a pass at Susan."

I paid the taximan. "I didn't know Susan was coming."

"There's a lot you don't know," Reggie said as the maid opened the door for us.

The hall was as impersonal as a hotel lounge. The walls were hung with trophies - buffalo horns, lions' heads, a Fokker airscrew - but they gave the impression of having all been bought at the same time, they were too clean, too neatly arranged, too new. Everything from the silver cigarette boxes to the inlaid ash trays was new and heavy and expensive. When the maid took my coat I took a quick look at myself; I had an uneasy feeling that my fly was open or my shoelace broken or that I'd put on odd socks.

There were about twenty people at the party, most of whom I hadn't met before. The girls were dressed to kill; I remember that Sally was wearing a blue dress which exposed a great deal of a very pleasant bosom and even Anne Barlby looked bedworthy in white and rose chiffon. The room we stood in was the largest I'd ever seen in a private house, and it had the first parquet floor I'd seen outside a library or museum. The furniture was of the kind that was to become fashionable ten years later, and each wall was in a different shade of green.

But as soon as I saw Susan, I stopped noticing my surroundings. She was wearing a black taffeta skirt and a white broderie anglaise blouse; she made all the other girls look worn and shopsoiled. If anyone ever needed a justification of the capitalist system, I thought, here it was: a human being perfect of its kind, a phoenix amongst barnyard fowls.

"Hello," I said. "You look good enough to eat." My eyes were holding hers; mine were the first to drop. "I didn't know you were coming here."

She pouted. "Do you mean you wouldn't have come if you'd known I'd come?"

"On the contrary. I couldn't hope to enjoy myself without you. You're a festivity in yourself."

"You're making fun of me," she said in a low voice.

"I'm quite serious. Not that I've any right to be."

She didn't speak for a moment, but stood looking at me intently. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were flecked with gold, bright and alive and dancing. Looking into them and smelling her scent I felt my head swimming.

"I don't see why you haven't any right to be serious," she said. "It's not - not fair if you're joking."

I've never loved her more than I did then. I forgot the Jaguar and the Bentley and the Ford V-8. She loved and she wanted to be loved, she was transparent with affection; I could no more deny that correct response in my heart than refuse a child a piece of bread. In the back of my mind a calculating machine rang up success and began to compose a triumphant letter to Charles; but the part of me that mattered, the instinctive, honest part of me, went out to meet her with open hands.

At that moment Sally's mother came up to me, gushing and bejewelled. "My naughty daughter's failing in her duties," she said. "I must make you known to everyone, Joe." Out of the corner of my eye I saw Reggie take Susan away, and the next ten minutes were a blur of new faces and half-hearted names. There was a young man with a broken nose who was training to be a doctor, a sprinkling of young officers, some young-old men who were, I think, executives of Carstairs and Co., and what seemed to be a hundred girls in party dresses.

It's already difficult to remember the days of rationing, but I am sure of one thing: one was always hungry. Not hungry in the way I'd been at Stalag 1000, but hungry for profusion, hungry for more than enough, hungry for cream and pineapples and roast pork and chocolate. The Carstairses were in the business, of course; but the meal laid out in the dining room would have been considered sumptuous even today. There was lobster, mushroom patties, anchovy rolls, chicken sandwiches, ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, smoked roe on rye bread, a real fruit salad flavoured with sherry, meringues, apple pie, Danish Blue and Chesire and Gorgonzola and a dozen different kinds of cake loaded with cream and chocolate and fruit and marzipan. Susan watched me eat with a pleased maternal expression. "Where does it all go?"

"No difficulty," I said with my mouth full. "A sound stomach and a pure heart."

"Our Joe has a huge appetite for everything," Anne Barlby said. "If only he were a little fatter he'd be just like Henry the Eighth."

"You're horrid," Susan said. "I like to see a man eat."

"Henry wasn't famous only for eating," Anne said.

I laughed in her face. "I haven't chopped off anyone's head yet. Or been divorced, for that matter." I smiled at Susan. "I'm singlehearted. There's only one girl for me."

"Which one?" asked Anne. "It becomes confusing."

Susan was going pink. She made me think of a kitten whom someone had kicked instead of stroking. Without having any very clear idea of what was going on, she knew I was being got at.

"I always thought you liked older women," Anne said. "More mature and soignée."

I looked at her too prominent nose and saw near the head of the table Johnny Rogers talking animatedly with Sally; suddenly I understood. "I didn't hear you, love," I said mildly. "Not one word did I hear."

She looked at me angrily. "You've very good hearing."

"Not for anything I don't want to listen to."

Anne went off in the direction of Johnny without saying another word. She knows too much, I thought, feeling a premonition of danger.

"You're scowling," Susan said. "Are you angry with me?"

"Good God, no. I was just thinking."

"What were you thinking about?"

"You. I'm always thinking about you."

"It doesn't seem to make you very happy. You had a horrid murderous scowl. You look awfully hard sometimes, Joe."

"I'm very weak and sentimental where you're concerned."

"What were you thinking about me?"

"I'll tell you some other time."

"Tell me now."

"It's too private. I'll tell you when we're alone."

"Oh," she said. " Wicked."

After supper the floor was cleared for dancing. Susan was a good dancer, precise and light and free, always as it were poised above the ground, gay with weightlessness. In the intervals we sat on the sofa and held hands. Her hands were white and a little plump, and the nails were rosy and gleaming. (I thought of Alice's, already on the verge of boniness, the index finger yellow with tobacco and the nails flecked with white.) Whenever I looked at Susan she gave me a frank fullhearted smile: no reservations, no pretence: I could sense the joyfulness kicking inside her like a child.

Halfway through the evening they put on a tango. "I can't do this one," I said to her;

"Neither can I."

"It's terribly warm in here."

"I was thinking that too."

It was cool outside and as we walked over to the summerhouse we both retained the lightness of dancing in our feet; it was as if the lawn were a sprung floor. There was a full moon, softening the inflamed harshness of the red brick front; from the lounge we could hear the genteel exoticism of "Two to Tango" - like Earl Grey with gin in it - washing against the iron silence of the moors. The night was like a scene from a musical comedy: one word, one change of lighting, and the trellises would bleed with roses and the flowerbeds draw themselves up into a pattern of tulips and pansies and aubrietia and lupins and the damp mustiness of the summerhouse be overlaid by the smell of night-scented stock and the air turn warm and lazy with birdsong and the buzzing of bees.

When I took her in my arms she was trembling violently. I kissed her on the forehead. "That's a pure kiss for you," I said. I kissed her again on the lips. "Don't be frightened, dearest."

"I'm never frightened of you."

I wanted to give her something, as one would give a child a packet of sweets when it's pleased to see you. I wanted badly to give her something worth as much as what I knew she was at that moment giving me.

"Tomorrow?" I asked. "I'll phone at ten."

"No."

"Why?"

"You were very wicked to Susan before. You said you'd phone and you never did. Say when and where."

"Six at the Leddersford Grand. Oh darling - " I kissed her cheeks and her chin and her nose and the smooth nape of her neck. She was still trembling.

"I wish we could stay here for always," she said.

"So do I, dearest." And so I did; perhaps if time had released me then and there, I'd have been able to strangle the shabby little sense of triumph that was being born inside me, I'd have been able to accumulate enough emotional capital to match her gift. Two hours would have been enough in that summerhouse on that night when we were still caught up with the dance, when the moon and the feeling of winter being dead and the first-time delight of our bodies meeting had erased all complications and commitments; but two hours weren't available. Time, like a loan from the bank, is something you're only given when you possess so much that you don't need it.