Room at the Top

19

"Aren't we baby-sitting?" Susan asked.

"No," I said. "They have company."

Susan's face puckered up as if she were going to cry, and she stamped her foot. "It's horrid of them, they practically promised ."

"We won't be going there again," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"The bus is coming," I said. "We'll have to run for it."

We jumped on it as it was going out of the station square and sat down breathing heavily.

"Where are we going, Joety?" Susan asked.

"The Folly."

"Oo, wicked . It's very lonely there."

"That's why we're going there." I squeezed her hand. "Unless you'd rather go to the flicks."

"No, truly," She looked at me with shining eyes.

"It's not cold now," I said. "But tell me if you do feel chilly and we'll go home straightaway."

"I won't be cold. Cross my heart." She leaned towards me and whispered: "If you love me up, I'll be as warm as toast." Her breath smelled of toothpaste and, better than that, of youth and health. She did not simply look clean; she looked as if she had never been dirty. And the night was clean, too, with a new moon silvering the trees along Eagle Road and an energetic breeze tidying away the clouds. With Susan beside me, the happenings of yesterday seemed absurdly unreal. Then my heart stopped a beat when a middle-aged man with spectacles boarded the bus. But it wasn't Hoylake.

A young man and a girl of about nineteen got in at the next stop. At least, I thought that she was about nineteen; her face, like the young man's, had a settled look, as if she'd decided what was the most respectable age to be, and wasn't going to change it in a hurry. She had a round flat face with lipstick the wrong shade and her silk stockings and high heels struck an incongruously voluptuous note; it was as if she were scrubbing floors in a transparent nylon nightie. The young man had a navy blue overcoat, gloves, and scarf, but no hat; he was following the odd working-class fashion which seemed to me now, after Alice's tuition, as queer as going out without trousers. I felt a mean complacency; with that solid mass of brilliantined hair and mass-produced face, bony, awkward, mousy, the face behind the requests on Forces Favourites, the face enjoying itself at Blackpool with an open-necked shirt spread out over its jacket, the face which Wilfred Pickles might love but which depressed me intensely - Len or Sid or Cliff or Ron - he'd never have the chance of enjoying a woman like Susan, he'd never explore in another person the passion and innocence which a hundred thousand in the bank could alone make possible.

"Why shan't we be going to Eva's again?" Susan asked.

"Don't you know?"

"Don't be so inscrutable, darling. If I knew, I wouldn't ask you."

"I don't think that your parents like me," I said. "Bob's obeying their orders."

She withdrew her hand from mine. "That's a beastly thing to say. As if they were all-powerful tyrants and Bob danced at their bidding."

"Part of it's true and you can't deny it. Your parents definitely don't approve of me."

She put her hand back. "I don't care. They can't stop us. We're not doing anything wrong."

We got off the bus at St. Clair Park and walked through the entrance where the great iron gates had been. They had been, Cedric once told me, the finest existing example of Georgian ironwork in England; the Council had taken them away during the war and sold them for scrap. One of the St. Clair falcons on the gateposts was wingless, the result of a drunken soldier doing a little professional practice with a Sten gun. At the top of the drive you could see the St. Clair mansion. It wasn't large as mansions go, absolutely severe with a flat parapet line and no projections. But I caught my breath as I looked at it, remembering suddenly the Dufton art master's favourite phrase: here was frozen music. Whoever designed the house would no more have dreamt of including the smallest false detail than I would have dreamt of presenting a balance sheet a penny in error. But it was dead. You didn't have to see the boarded-up windows, the choked-up fountains, the stagnant ornamental ponds east and west of it, to realise that. It smelled dead, it had wanted to die.

We climbed the winding path up the hillside behind the manor. It had as many turns as a maze, and there was about the turns a slightly sinister quality, as if it wouldn't mind, given the opportunity, leading one into an oubliette. In the moonlight the big trees around us looked as bare as gallows, and yet at some points the bushes grew so thickly as to make the path almost impassable. When we reached the little promontory where the Folly stood, I was sweating. I put my raincoat down, and we sat on the grass in silence for a moment. Below us we could see the whole of Warley as far as Snow Park. I noticed for the first time that it was shaped like a cross, with the market place in the centre and T'Top in the northern upright. And I saw roads and houses which I'd never seen before - big square houses, broad straight roads, not black and grey, but all white and clean. I realized afterwards that I'd been looking at the new Council estate above the eastern quarter; in the moonlight the concrete looked like marble and the unmade road like stone.

The Folly was an artificial ruin in the Gothic style. There were three turrets, sawn off, as it were, obliquely, and far too small ever to have been much use as turrets. The tallest even had two window slits. One side of the main building had a door and an aurora of stone round it, and the other had three windows ending a little too abruptly halfway up. It was very solidly built; Cedric said that if you compared it with contemporary prints, it was evident that it had survived over a hundred years on that exposed promontory absolutely unscathed.

"My great-great-great-grandpa built this," Susan said. "He was called Peregrine St. Clair and he was terribly dissipated and used to be a friend of Byron's. Mummy told me a bit about it; he had orgies here. All of Warley practically was St. Clair land and he could do just what he liked."

"What did he use to do at the orgies?"

"Wicked!" she said. "I don't really know, darling. Mummy would never be very explicit. Though actually she seems rather proud of him. He's been dead long enough to be romantic. He squandered most of the family fortune on these orgies and then my great-great-grandfather squandered the rest and was killed in the Crimea. She's rather proud of him too, he was very brave and dashing."

"Aren't there any St. Clairs in Warley?" I asked her.

"Only Mummy really. Death duties and drink finished off the St. Clairs, Mummy says. Her people used to live at Richmond - they're dead now. There was only one male St. Clair left and he was killed in the 1914 war. Most of them were killed in wars." She shivered. "I'm jolly glad I'm a girl."

"So am I," I said, and kissed her.

A cloud passed over the moon, darkening the Folly for a moment into a genuine ruin. The man who built it was dead, all the St. Clairs were dead; I was alive, and I felt that the mere fact of my survival was in itself a victory over them; and her parents, and Hoylake, and Bob, and Jack Wales; they were zombies, all of them, and only I was real.

"Would you like to come to the Civic Ball with me?" I asked.

"I'm awfully sorry," she said, "I can't."

"Why not?"

"I'm going with Jack."

"I thought you loved me. Do you prefer him? And his M.G.?"

"How can you say an awful thing like that to me?" She leapt to her feet in one movement; it was as if anger had plucked her upright. "I don't care about his silly old car. I don't care if you haven't got one, either. Mummy invited him to make up the party, she always does. We'll go in the Bentley, we won't even be alone together." She started to weep. "I don't believe that you love me at all."

She was hurt, she looked lonely and small. I felt as sorry for her at that moment as if she'd been an ordinary girl and not the daughter of Harry Brown with a hundred thousand pounds as a barrier between her and real sorrow.

"My darling," I said, "I'm sorry. I do love you, I'm just idiotically jealous." I took her hand and pulled her down beside me. "Don't cry, love, you'll make your eyes red. Cuddle up and stop crying, just to please Joe." I kissed her gently and felt her relax in my arms.

"It's horrid at home sometimes," she said between sobs. "They don't talk about you, but I know they don't think we should go about together. They say I'm too young to go about regularly with anyone, but I know that isn't the reason."

"Why don't you tell them?"

"Joe," she said, "I'm only nineteen. I'm not trained for anything. They always said there was no need."

"I can keep you."

"What if we can't get permission to marry?"

I thought of the blue budgerigar we once kept at home. I let it out of its cage and it flew into the grimy back yard; within five minutes the cat had got it. I suddenly realised that I couldn't ask her to leave home for some cheap lodgings and a soul-killing routine job in a shop or factory until she was twenty-one. Susan standing all day behind a shop counter, her face frozen into a selling smile and her feet aching, Susan in a factory taking orders from a forewoman who would hate her fiercely because of her youth, her beauty, her accent, her obvious superiority, and who would find a thousand petty ways to make her life miserable: it would make me experience again that moment twenty years ago when I'd seen the mangled body of the budgerigar and had known, without the shadow of a doubt, that the guilt was mine.

"Don't worry, sweetheart," I said. "We'll find a way to get married."

"They generally give me what I want," she said. "At least, Daddy does. "They're not unkind, Joe, truly they're not." Suddenly she threw herself on me, covering my face with kisses. "Oh God, I do love you so much, you've no idea - "

She made love strenuously; I was put in mind of a hard set of mixed tennis. When I put my hand under her blouse she moaned and shuddered convulsively. "Joe Joe Joe." She was somewhere away from me, I couldn't follow her but I knew that I should be with her. "I love you, Joe. I love you so much that I'd let you walk over me if you wanted, I'd let you tear me into bits and I wouldn't mind." She pressed my hand deep into her breast. "I want you to hurt me there. Oh God, you're so beautiful. You've lovely eyes, like Christ's - "

I felt the desire ebb out of me. The words were echoing in my ears, I wouldn't ever be able to rid myself of them. They were romantic, but what was behind them was a passion frightening in its intensity.

"I love you," I said. "I'd like to kiss you all over, every inch of you."

"You mightn't like every inch of me," she said.

"I would." I put my hand under her skirt.

"No. Please ~

"Don't you love me?"

"I'd do anything for you. But I'm scared."

I rolled away from her. This was how it always ended, and I didn't know whether to be sorry or glad. I lit a cigarette with trembling hands.

"Don't you love me any more?" she asked in a small voice.

"My God, Susan, don't you know the facts of life yet? I love you too much, that's the trouble. Can't you see?" I held out my hand. "What do you think I'm made of, darling?"

"Snips and snails and puppy-dogs' tails," she said. "So there!"

"And you're sugar and spice and all that's nice," I said. It was futile to explain to her that it plays hell with the nerves to stop at the crucial moment; besides, I wanted to keep her within the framework of the fairy story. "Perhaps it's best to wait," I said. "But I want you properly - you know what I mean?"

"Are you sure, Joe? Quite sure."

"I love you and I want to marry you and give you children," I said. The wind blew her hair across my face, soft and black and smelling of orange water; I wanted it to be longer, I wanted it to cover me and bury me, I wanted to sleep and not to argue, not to lie, not to promise, not to plot my future like a raid over the Ruhr.

"I want you to," she said. "I dreamt we had a baby last night. He was fair like you, and he was laughing all the time and we were very proud of him. But - oh, never mind." She stroked my hair gently.

"But what?"

"You'll think I'm silly."

"I promise I won't. Cross my heart."

"That's not a heart, Lampton," she said. "It's a swinging brick."

"It's the only one I've got." I tickled her in the ribs and she struggled squealing in my arms. "I'll tickle you until you do tell me."

"You're cruel," she said. "You're very cruel to poor Susan."

"Tell me."

"I was thinking," she said in a whisper, "that you wouldn't like me when I - when I was having the baby."

I rocked her in my arms gently. "Silly Susie. A pregnant woman is pleasing unto the Lord. I'd love you all the more, I'd be proud because it was my child."

"Oh, you are good to me," she said, half crying. "You're so kind, I love you so much."

That was what I wanted; I applauded my own skill impersonally. The strange thing was that I meant every word of what I said; and it was easy enough to speak them with her firm young body touching mine. But the words were meant for someone else, along with the night, and the new look of Warley under the moon, and the wind, faint again now, as if the grass and the trees and the river down in the valley were breathing in my face: Susan was welcome to all of it, but I had reserved it for someone else a long time ago.