Room at the Top

30

Drinking my morning tea at the Town Hall the next day I felt very pleased with myself. In the first place, the tea was fresh and strong, with three lumps of sugar and just the amount of milk that I like; I suppose that Ray, who was looking at me with an expression of rapt devotion, had seen to that. My inkwells were clean, and there was a new box of paper clips and a snowy-white sheet of blotting paper. He'd even torn off the old pages from the calendar. All accountants, even toughs like me, have a bit of the old maid in them; a neat and tidy desk gives me the same satisfaction as a clean shirt and underwear.

The Town Hall atmosphere seemed all the more pleasant to me because I was going to leave it. I could see the machinery of local government as it really is, appreciate its blend of efficiency and cosiness; I hear a lot of nasty things said about municipal bureaucrats nowadays, but if every business were run as smoothly as even the most slatternly little urban district, then Americans would come over here to learn the technique of greater productivity instead of it being the other way about. I reflected on this, making a neat little speech for the NALGO conference, and when the delegates had finished applauding me - only through sheer exhaustion did they stop - I took out my good news of yesterday, adding to it the fact that I'd parted from Alice with at least a sufficiency of dignity and a minimum of pain, and unfolded it slowly, admiring its glittering colour and intricate pattern an item at a time.

I'd just finished furnishing a house in St. Clair Road, and was driving to the Civic Ball in a new Riley, Susan by my side in a scarlet dress that would make all the other men sick with lust for her and murderous with envy of me, when Teddy Soames entered.

"Heard that you had lunch with Brown on Wednesday," he said. "Leaving us for the lush pastures of private enterprise?"

"Eventually."

"Mention me, will you? I can fiddle an expense account as well as the next man."

"All that I know about fiddling I learned from Mr. Edward Soames, Chief Audit Clerk, Warley UDC - will that do?"

"Just the job. Well, Lampton, we'll get our money's worth out of you before you go - glance through these accounts, will you?"

The tone was supposed to be one of mock severity, but it came out vicious. I grinned and tugged my forelock.

"Yes, Master. Right away."

He gave me the folder of accounts and a cigarette. "I'll expect a box of Havanas in return." He frowned at me. "You don't seem bothered about Alice Aisgill," he said. "Or hadn't you heard?"

"What about her?"

"She's dead."

Oh merciful God, I thought, she's committed suicide and left a note blaming me. That's finished it. That's finished me in every possible way. Teddy's eyes were a pale blue, as if all the colour had been drained from them; they were probing my face now.

"She was a friend of yours, wasn't she?"

"A very good friend," I said. "How did she die?"

"Ran her car into a wall on Warley Moor. She'd been drinking all night at the Clarendon and the St. Clair. They wouldn't serve her any more at the St. Clair."

"He let her drive home, though," I said. "And he took her money for booze so that she could kill herself." It was hardly fair to blame poor old Bert; but I had to say something.

"She must have been going at the hell of a pace," Teddy said. "They say that the car's bent like that" - he cupped his hand - "and there's blood all over the road. It wasn't till this morning that they found her."

"Where exactly was it?"

"Corby Lane. You know, right up in the north, above Sparrow Hill. It's the last place that God made. What she was doing there at that time I can't imagine."

"Me neither," I said; but I could. I could imagine everything that had happened to Alice after I'd left her. She'd stayed in the flat the duration of two more double gins. Then everything in the room - the little gilt clock, the Dresden shepherdesses and Italian goat boys, the photos of dead names of yesterday, the flounces and the gilt, the bright chintz curtains, the glass I'd drunk from - had gathered together and attacked her, trivial individually but as deadly collectively as those little South American fish which gnaw swimmers to the bone in five minutes. So she'd run out of the flat and into the Fiat; but once in Warley (she didn't know she reached there, there was a blank until she found herself waiting at the lights in Market Street repeating my name under her breath) she didn't know what to do with herself. She turned up St. Clair Road with the idea of going home. Home would be an abstract notion - Father, Mother, safety, hugs, and hot milk and a roaring fire and all the trouble and grief forgotten in the morning. But as she'd gone past Eagle Road (Joe lives there) she'd recovered her bearings. Home was the house where she lived with a husband she didn't love; she was fleeing towards an electric radiator and George's cold tolerance, she was too old for hot milk, there were no hugs going, even if she wanted any from him, and it would all be even more unbearable tomorrow. She'd reversed at Calder Crescent or Wyndham Terrace and gone to the Clarendon. Probably she'd used the Snug, where she was less likely to see anyone she knew - the Thespians always used the Lounge. If she needed company, if she were able to persuade herself that she didn't care about me ditching her, she could move out of the Snug and return to the main stream, return to, perhaps not happiness, but to a sort of emotional limbo. When she heard their voices from the Lounge at about nine-fifteen, she discovered that she didn't want to see anyone whom she knew or who knew me. She slipped out of the back door. To the double gins which she'd had at the flat would have been added three or four more. She still wouldn't want to go home. There was only the St. Clair. The gins rolled their sleeves up and got to work on her: you must eliminate him from your system, they said. Eliminate, obliterate, expunge. You've been to the St. Clair often with him? Very well, then, walk straight in and sit where you used to sit with him. Spit in his eye -

Or had she gone there in an attempt to recapture the decent and wholesome happiness we shared once when I was nearly a year younger and fully ten years more innocent? More gins had been called upon to assist her nearer towards whichever stage of illusion she wished for, and then she'd started to sing or to swear or to fall flat upon her face or all three, and Bert, who kept a respectable house, had persuaded her to leave. She drove up St. Clair Road again, then along the narrow switchback of Sparrow Hill Road; but she couldn't exorcise my presence by stopping at the old brick works. And she still couldn't go home. If she pressed the accelerator down still harder, she could travel out of herself - I was beside her in the car now, she was approaching that double bend which only a racing car could take at over twenty -

"What a damned awful way to die," Teddy said.

"I expected it," Joe Lampton said soberly. "She drove like a maniac. It doesn't make it any the less tragic, though." I didn't like Joe Lampton. He was a sensible young accountant with a neatly pressed blue suit and a stiff white collar. He always said and did the correct thing and never embarrassed anyone with an unseemly display of emotion. Why, he even made a roll in the hay with a pretty little teen-ager pay dividends. I hated Joe Lampton, but he looked and sounded very sure of himself sitting at my desk in my skin; he'd come to stay, this was no flying visit.

"Alice wasn't perfect," Joe Lampton said. "But who is? She was a jolly good sort, and I'm going to miss her very much." He shook his handsome dignified head slowly. That meant that a moral exordium was on the way. "I enjoy a drink myself, but no one in charge of a car should be allowed into a pub. It's lucky she killed only herself. My God, only yesterday she was alive and cheerful, and then, all in a second - "

"A second?" Teddy said. "She was still alive when the ambulance came. She didn't die until eight o'clock."

"Jesus Christ," I said. "Jesus Christ." I turned on Teddy fiercely. "Who told you? Who told you?"

"My cousin works at Warley Hospital," he said. "Turned me up a bit when I heard about it. She was crawling round the road when a farm labourer found her. She was scalped and the steering-column - "

I half ran out of the office and went into the lavatory. But the w.c. door was locked, and it was nearly ten minutes before it opened and one of the Health Department juniors came out looking sheepish and leaving the compartment full of tobacco smoke. I locked the door and sat on the w.c. seat with my head between my hands, those gentle loving hands that had so often caressed what was, because of the treachery in the brain in the head between the hands, a lump of raw meat with the bones sticking through.

At twelve o'clock I told Teddy that I was sick. I don't know what I did till then; I hope that I had at least the decency to make a lot of mistakes checking the accounts. I stood about at the station end of Market Street for about ten minutes, then caught a bus to Leddersford. I couldn't eat any lunch, and I couldn't stay in Warley, and I couldn't face the Thompsons. They were sure to talk about her, and then Joe Lampton would take possession of me again. Joe Lampton Export Model Mark IA warranted free of rust, flaws, cracks, dust or pity; as long as I was in the bus I was safe. I tried to make my mind a blank as it speeded up on the main road; a stationer's, a draper's, a tobacconist's, a cricket field, a little girl pulled along by an Alsatian, an old woman wincing away from the Alsatian, who only wanted to lick her face anyway. Then there were fields and cows and narrow roads wriggling like tapeworms into the new Council estate. But Alice had been killed, and what I saw was the components of a huge machine that now only functioned out of bravado: it had been designed and manufactured for one purpose, to kill Alice. That purpose was accomplished; it should have been allowed to run down and then stop, the driver asleep at the wheel, the passengers sitting docilely with their mouths wide open, waiting for the bus to fly away, the estate left unfinished, the shops shuttered and overrun with rats, the unmilked cows lowing in agony with swollen udders, the dogs and cats running wild and bloody-mouthed, and then a great storm to scour the whole dirty earth down to clean rock and flame. I licked my dry lips, looking round the bus at the other passengers, sleek, rosy, whole, stinking of food and tobacco and sleep; I closed my eyes as a big sickness came over me. I was cold and trembling and on the point of vomiting, but it was more than that. It was an attack of the truth: I saw quite clearly that there were no dreams and no mercy left in the world, nothing but a storm of violence.

I sat with my hands clasped tightly, waiting for the next blow. It didn't come; so when the bus reached Leddersford I went into the first pub that I saw.

It was an old building with an atmosphere of damp plaster and dusty plush; the front door opened directly into the saloon bar. As I opened it, the noise and light from the street outside was cut off. There were a lot of people at the bar, talking in subdued voices. I ordered a rum and a half of bitter, and stood at the bar staring at the pictures which were hung round the walls and on the staircase leading to the Ladies'; they were all battle scenes, rather pleasant coloured prints with energetic marionettes waving swords with red paint on the tips, firing muskets which each discharged one round puff of white smoke, planting their standards on little cone-shaped hills above the perfectly flat battlefield, advancing relentlessly in perfect parade-ground formation and, occasionally, dying very stiffly with their left hand clutching their bosoms and their right hand beckoning their comrades on to victory. The beer tasted like water after the rum, and for a moment I was nauseated, and couldn't face the idea of having another drink. Then I felt the first tiny glow of warmth in my belly and ordered another; the glow increased until, at the fourth or the fifth, a slatternly happiness sidled up to me: I had eight hundred in the bank, I was going to be an executive with an expense account, I was going to marry the boss's daughter, I was clever and virile and handsome, a Prince Charming from Dufton, every obstacle had been magically cleared from my path -

Every obstacle? That meant Alice. That wasn't magic. How long must she have crawled round in her own blood in the dark? Where was I now? There was Dufton, there was Cardington, there was Compton Bassett, there was Cologne and Hamburg and Essen from the air, there was the wine-growing country of Bavaria, there was Berlin and the pale schoolgirls and their mothers. Five Woodbines for the mother, ten for the daughter. And Dufton again, then Warley, only a year ago. I should have stayed in the place where I was born, and then Alice would be walking round Warley now with her hair shining in the sun or lying on the divan at home reading a play for the Selection Committee or eating chicken and salad if it were the season for salad. I put my hand to my head.

"You ill?" the landlord asked. He had a doughy, expressionless face and a gratingly heavy voice. Up to that moment he'd been talking about football to a knot of his cronies. Now, the wheels of whatever passed for his intelligence creaking, he turned his attention to me. I took my hand away from my head and ordered a brandy. He didn't move to serve me.

"I said, Are - you - ill?"

"Uh?"

"Are you ill?"

"Of course not. I asked for a brandy."

Everybody had stopped talking and were devouring me with glittering eyes, hoping that there'd be a fight and that I'd get my face bashed in; there was nothing personal about it, it's simply that, at any given moment, the majority of people are bored stiff. I glanced round the room and saw that it wasn't a pub for casuals; it was a betting-slip and pansy pub (there were three of them next to me now, standing out like sore teeth among the surrounding roughs).

"You've had enough," the landlord repeated. I scowled at him. There was no reason why I shouldn't have walked out; but my feet seemed bolted to the floor.

"I'll buy you one, dear," one of the pansies said. He had dyed hair of a metallic yellow and smelled of geraniums. "I think you're awfully mean, Ronnie." He smiled at me, showing a mouthful of blindingly white false teeth. "You're not doing anything wrong, are you, dear?"

"You'll get yourself into trouble," the landlord said.

"Yes, please ," the pansy said, and they all giggled in unison. I let him buy me a double brandy, and then asked him what he'd have. It was tonic-and-lemon; pansies only use pubs for picking up boy friends. They don't booze themselves, any more than you or I would if surrounded by bed-worthy women who might be had for the price of a few drinks.

"My name's George," he said. "What's yours, handsome?"

I gave him the name of the Superintendent Methodist Minister of Warley, who'd Struck Out Fearlessly Against Immorality (meaning sex) in last week's Clarion .

"Lancelot," he said. "I shall call you Lance. It suits you. Isn't it a funny thing, how you can tell just what a boy's like from his first name? Will you have another brandy, Lance?"

I went on drinking at his expense until five minutes to three, then slipped out on the pretence of a visit to the Gents'. Then I bought some peppermints at a chemist's and sat in a news theatre until half past five. Joseph Lampton was doing the sensible thing, keeping out of harm's way until the rum and the beer and the brandy settled down; and Joseph Lampton was keeping a barrier of warmth and darkness and coloured shadows between himself and pain. I came out into the acid daylight with that headachy feeling that matinees always induce; but I'd stopped thinking about Alice and I was walking steadily.

I went into a café and ate a plateful of fish-and-chips, bread and butter, two queer-tasting cream cakes (that was the time that confectioners were using blood plasma and liquid paraffin), and a strawberry ice. Then I drank a pot of mahogany-coloured Indian tea. When I'd finished my third cigarette and there wasn't a drop of tea left in the pot I looked at my watch and saw that it was half past six. So I paid the bill and strolled out into the street; I was pretty well in control of myself by then, and it occurred to me that my becoming hopelessly drunk wasn't going to help anyone, least of all Alice. I'd go home - for Warley, after all, was my home, I'd chosen it myself - and go to bed with a hot-water bottle and a couple of aspirins. I wasn't Alice's keeper; let George take over whatever guilt there was to bear. Then I saw Elspeth.

She stood in my path, a henna-haired, tightly corseted old woman swaying slightly on her three-inch heels. I had never seen her look such a wreck; her face was so bedizened with powder, rouge, and lipstick, all in shades meant for the stage, that only her red-rimmed eyes were human.

"You pig," she said. "You low rotten pimp. You murdering little - " she glared up at me - "ponce. Are you happy now, you bastard? Got rid of her nicely, didn't you?"

"Let me go," I said. "I didn't want her to die."

She spat in my face.

"You can't punish me anymore," I said. "I'll punish myself. Now for Christ's sake leave me alone. Leave us both alone."

Her face changed; tears began to furrow the make-up. She put her skinny hand on mine; it was dry and hot. "I phoned this morning and they told me," she said. "I knew what had happened. Oh Joe, how could you do it? She loved you so much, Joe, how could you do it?"

I shook off her hand and walked off quickly. She made no attempt to follow me, but stood looking sadly at me, like a young wife watching a troopship leave harbour. I half ran through the maze of side streets off the city centre, making my way to the working-class quarter round Birmingham Road. Birmingham Road, if you keep on for about a hundred and fifty miles, does eventually take you to Birmingham; that was another reason for my wanting to become really drunk. All the voyages of the heart ended in a strange city with all the pubs and the shops shut and not a penny in your pocket and the train home cancelled without notice, cancelled for a million years - Leave us alone , I'd said to Elspeth; but who was us ? Myself and a corpse, a corpse that would soon be in the hands of the undertaker - a little rouge, a little wax, careful needlework, white silk bandages over the places past repair, and we wouldn't be ashamed to face anyone. I was the better-looking corpse; they wouldn't need to bury me for a long time yet.

It was the trains and the warehouses which forced the drill against the decay inside me. Each time a tram ground and swayed past me, missing unconcerned pedestrians by inches, I saw Alice under the wheels, bloody and screaming; and I wanted to be there with her, to have the guilt slashed away, to stop the traffic, to make all the bovine pay-night faces sick with horror. I didn't mind the other traffic, I don't know why; and I don't know why I thought of such an irrelevant kind of death. Nor why I didn't dare look at the warehouses. There was one with a new sign - Umpelby and Dickinson, Tops and Noils, Est. 1855 - that still gives me bad dreams. It had sixty-three dirty windows and four of the raised letters on those adjacent the main office were missing. Umpelb and D kinso are the three most terrible words that I have ever seen. I think now that I was frightened because the warehouses didn't care about what had happened to Alice; but why did I hate the innocent friendly trains?

I went on for about a mile, going farther and farther from the main road, but still with the sound of the trains grinding in my ears. It was a fine evening for the time of the year, with an unseasonably soapy warmth trickling along the mean little streets; most of the house doors were open and the people were standing inside them, just standing, saying nothing, looking at the black millstone grit and the chimneys and the dejected little shops. It was Friday and soon they'd go out and get drunk. At this moment they were pretending that it was Monday or even Thursday and they hadn't any money and they'd be forced to sit in the living room among the drying nappies looking at their wife's pasty face and varicose legs and hating the guts of the bastard in the next street who'd won a cool hundred on a five-shilling accumulator; then they'd stop pretending and gloat over their spending-money, at least three quid -

I stopped and leaned against a lamppost because I couldn't go on any longer. I should have gone into the country. You can walk in the country without wanting to vomit, and you're not hurt because the trees and the grass and the water don't care because you can't expect them to, they were never concerned with love; but the city should be full of love, and never is.

A policeman walked past, and gave me a hard inquiring look. Five minutes later he walked past again; so there was nothing else to do but go into the nearest pub. I went into the Bar first, where the customers mostly seemed to be Irish navvies; even when they weren't talking, they gave an impression of animated violence. I was out of place there, as they would have been out of place at the Clarendon, and they knew it. I sensed their resentment with a deep enjoyment. It was what I needed, as satisfyingly acrid as cheap shag; I took half my pint of bitter at one gulp, looking with a derisive pity at the stupid faces around me - the faces of, if they were lucky, my future lorry drivers and labourers and warehousemen.

I drank another pint. It changed taste several times: bitter, scented, sour, watery, sweet, brackish. My head was full of an oily fog that forced its way up through my throat, the pressure increasing until it seeped into my eyes, and the chairs and the mirrors and the faces and the rows of bottles behind the bar blurred together into a kind of pavane on the slowly heaving floor. The bar had a brass rail, and I clung to it tightly, taking deep breath after deep breath until the floor, under protest like a whipped animal, stayed quiet.

After two rums I moved into the Lounge next door. There were no vacant seats in the Bar and my legs were aching, but that wasn't the reason for my going there. The true reason was sitting alone near the entrance; as soon as I saw her I discovered that she was the one thing necessary to round the evening off, the one drug that I hadn't tried.

She was about twenty, with frizzy blonde hair and small bones; she wasn't bad-looking, but her face had a quality of inadequacy, as if there hadn't been enough flesh available to make a good job of her femininity. When she saw me looking at her, she smiled. I didn't like it very much when she smiled; the pale flesh seemed as though it were going to split. But one hasn't to be too choosy about pick-ups; they're not so easy to come by in peacetime as the respectable would suppose. And there was something about her that suddenly prodded to life a side of me that I thought had been dead for years, a lust that was more than half curiosity, a sly, sniggering desire to see what she was like under her clothes.

I sat down beside her. "I'm not squeezing you, am I?"

She giggled. "There's plenty of room."

I offered her a cigarette.

"Thank you very much," she said. "Oh, what a lovely case." She stroked the silver, her long thin fingers with their too curved red nails brushing mine. "You don't come from round here, do you?"

"Dufton. I'm a traveller."

"What in?"

"Ladies' underwear," I said. When she laughed I noticed that her upper teeth were scored horizontally with a brown line of decay.

"You're a devil," she said. "Will you give me a free sample?"

"If you're a good girl," I said. "Will you have a drink with me?"

"IPA, please."

"You don't want beer," I said. "How about something short? I've sold thousands of pairs of knickers this week."

"You're cheeky," she said; but she had a gin-and-it and another and another and then a brandy, and soon we were touching each other lightly all the time, coming closer and closer together and yet farther and farther apart; we were, I saw in a moment of clarity before brandy and lust closed over my head, only touching ourselves. But at least I wasn't thinking of Alice. She wasn't crawling round Corby Lane now with her scalp in tatters over her face. She hadn't been born, there had never been any such person; and there was no Joe Lampton, only a commercial traveller from Dufton having a jolly evening with a hot piece of stuff.

I think that it was about half past eight when I was aware of a nasty silence over the room. I looked up; a young man was standing scowling over us. He had the sort of face that one's always seeing in the yellow press - staring-eyed, mousy, the features cramped and shapeless and the mouth loose. He was wearing a light blue double-breasted suit that was so dashingly draped as to look décolleté and he had a blue rayon tie of an oddly slimy-looking texture. At that moment he was enjoying what a thousand films and magazines had assured him to be righteous anger: His Girl had been Untrue.

"Come along," he said to her. "Come along, Mavis."

"Oh go away," she said. "We were all right until you came."

She took out her compact and began to powder her nose. He grabbed her hands. "Bloody well stop that," he said. "I couldn't help being late, see? I was working over."

I'd been measuring him up, wondering whether or not to leave her to him. I wasn't so drunk that I wanted to be beaten up in a Birmingham Road pub. But he was no Garth: he was as tall as me, but his shoulders were all padding and he had a look of softness about him; he was the type whose bones never seem to harden.

"Leave her alone," I said.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Jack Wales."

"Never heard of you."

"I don't expect that you have." I stood up. "You heard what I said." My hand groped about on the table independently of me until it found an empty beer glass. There wasn't a sound in the room. There was a decently dowdy-looking middle-aged couple at the next table who looked frightened. The man was small and skinny and the woman had pale horn-rimmed spectacles and a little button of a mouth. I remember feeling rather sorry for them, and an anger as smooth and cold and potentially as jagged and murderous as the beer glass started to grow inside me.

"Take your hands off her." I lifted the beer glass as if to strike it against the table. His hand loosened and she pulled her wrist away. The compact dropped, and a little cloud of powder floated up from it. He turned and went out without a word. The ordinary noises of the pub began again, the incident obliterated as quickly as it had begun.

"He's not my boy friend really, Jack," she said. "I'm sick of him. Thinks he owns me just because I've been out with him a time or two."

"He's introduced us, anyway," I said. "Mavis. It suits you, darling."

She stroked my hand. "You say that nicely," she said.

"It's easy to say things nicely to you."

"You're the best-looking boy I've ever met. And you have lovely clothes." She felt the texture of my suit. It was new, a mid-grey hopsack made from a roll of cloth that Alice had given me five months ago. "I work in a mill, I know good cloth."

"If you like it, Mavis, I'll never wear anything else," I said. My words were beginning to slur. "I feel so happy with you, you're so gentle and bright and beautiful - " I went into the old routine, mixing scraps of poetry, names of songs, bits of autobiography, binding it all with the golden syrup of flattery. It wasn't necessary. I well knew; a skinful of shorts, a thousand lungfuls of nicotine, and ordinary good manners, were enough to get me what I wanted; but I had to have my sex dressed up now, I was forced to tone down the raw rhythms of copulation, to make the inevitable five or ten minutes of shuddering lunacy a little more civilised, to give sex a nodding acquaintance with kindness and tenderness.

"Let me buy the drinks," she said after we'd had two more.

"That's all right," I said.

"You've spent pounds, I know you have. I'm not one of those girls who's just out for what she can get, Jack. If I like a boy, I don't care if he can only afford tea. I earn good money. I took home six pounds last week."

I felt the tears coming to my eyes. "Six pounds," I said. "That's very good money, Mavis. You'll be able to save for your bottom drawer."

"You've got to find the chap first," she said. She fumbled in her handbag. It was a large one of black patent leather, with diamanté initials. There was the usual litter of powder and lipstick and cotton and handkerchiefs and cigarettes and matches and photos inside it. She slid a ten-shilling note into my hand. "This is on me, love," she said. The warm Northern voice and the sight of the open handbag gave me an intolerable feeling of loneliness. I wanted to put my head between the sharp little breasts and shut out the cruel world in which every action had consequences.

I ordered a bottle of IPA and a gin-and-it. Time was beginning to move too quickly, to slither helplessly away; each minute I looked at my watch it was ten minutes later; I knew that I'd only that minute met Mavis, but that minute was anything up to a year ago; as I drank the sharp summer-smelling beer the floor started to move again. Then every impression possible for one man to undergo all gathered together from nowhere like a crowd at the scene of an accident and yelled to be let in: time dancing, time with clay on its hobnailed boots, the new taste of the beer and the old taste of brandy and rum and fish and cornflour and tobacco and soot and wool scourings and Mavis's sweat that had something not quite healthy about it and her powder and lipstick - chalk, orris root, pear drops - and the hot hand of brandy steadying me again, and just as it seemed that there wasn't to be any other place in the world but the long room with the green art moderne chairs and glass-topped tables, we were out in the street with our arms around each other's waists and turning in and out of narrow streets and alleys and courts and patches of waste ground and over a footbridge with engines clanging together aimlessly in the cold below as if slapping themselves to keep warm, and then were in a corner of a woodyard in a little cave of piled timber; I took myself away from my body, which performed all the actions she expected from it. She clung to it after the scalding trembling moment of fusion as if it were human, kissing its drunken face and putting its hands against her breasts.

There were houses very near on the dirt road at the top of the woodyard; I could hear voices and music and smell cooking. All around were the lights of the city; Birmingham Road rises from the centre of Leddersford and we were on a little plateau about halfway up; there was no open country to be seen, not one acre where there wasn't a human being, two hundred thousand separate lonelinesses, two hundred thousand different deaths. And all the darkness the lights had done away with, all the emptiness of fields and woods long since built over, suddenly swept over me, leaving no pain, no happiness, no despair, no hope, but simply nothingness, the ghost in the peepshow vanishing into the blank wall and no pennies left to bring him out again.

"You've lovely soft hands," Mavis said. "Like a woman's."

"They're not - not lovely," I said with difficulty. "Cruel. Cruel hands."

"You're drunk, love."

"Never feltfeltbetter." I'd returned to my body, I realised with horror, and didn't know what to do with it.

"You're a funny boy," she said.

I fumbled for my cigarette case. It was empty. She brought out a packet of Players and lit two. "Keep these," she said. We smoked in silence for awhile. I was trying to will myself into sobriety, but it was useless. I honestly couldn't even remember where I lived, and I literally truly Fowler's English Usage didn't know whether I was awake or dreaming.

"Jack, do you like me?"

"From the veryfirstmomentthat - that I saw you." I made another effort. "You'reverysweet. Like you verymuchveryverymuch."

The lights started to wheel around and there was a clanging sound in my ears. "Those bloody engines," I said. "Those bloody engines. Why can't they stop?"

She must have half carried me away; I don't know how she managed it. We stopped outside a terrace house eventually; I was trying to keep myself upright, and not succeeding very well. Finally I propped myself against the garden railings.

"Are you all right now, Jack?"

"Fine," I said. "Fine."

"You turn left and keep straight on - have you enough for a taxi?"

I pulled out a fistful of notes.

"You be careful," she said. A light came on above us, and I heard a man's voice growling her name. "Oh God," she said, "they've woken up." She kissed me. "Goodbye, Jack. It's been lovely, really it has." She ran into the house.

I walked away, weaving my body from side to side in a pattern of movement which I felt to be not only graceful and harmonious but so exquisitely funny that I had to laugh.

A hand on my shoulder broke the laugh in half and started the Unarmed Combat reflexes working. The gears were stiff, but any second now, I thought with joy, pain and humiliation would move forward to crush the stupid bodies of the two men who faced me.

One of them was Mavis's ex-lover. I didn't know the other, but he was the one who had me worried the most. He seemed quite sober and his shoulders were broader than mine.

"This is the - " Mavis's ex-lover said. "Full of brandy and conceit, the bloody bastard - " He swore at me monotonously; the words depressed me more than they annoyed me. "She's my woman, see? We don't like strangers muscling in, see?" His hand tightened on my shoulder. "You're going to be bloody sorry you came round these parts, chum."

"Shove off," I said.

" You're shoving off. But not before - " He struck out with his fist; I sidestepped, but not quickly enough, and he hit my cheekbone, cutting it with something (a ring, I realised afterwards). But I thought it was a razor, so I hit him in the Adam's apple. He gave a sound halfway between a baby's gurgle and a death rattle and staggered away from me, his hands to his throat.

"You dirty bastard," his friend said, and tried to kick me in the groin. More by good luck than good management I turned sideways; but not properly as the PT Sergeant had taught me; his foot landed home on my thigh and I lost my balance and went down with him on top of me. We rolled about on the pavement like quarrelling children; I was trying to keep him off and he, I think, had no idea in his head that wasn't based upon making me suffer as much as his friend (whom I could still hear choking with agony) had been made to suffer by me. He got both hands around my throat and began to squeeze; a black and red stream of pain spread like lava behind my eyes. My hands had lost their strength and I couldn't move my legs and I could taste blood from my cut cheek and smell his hair oil and the laundered stiffness of his shirt and orange and fish and dog from the gutter; the lampposts shot up suddenly to a hundred times their height like bean flowers in educational films, taking the buildings with them in elongated smudges of yellow light; and then I remembered another of the PT Sergeant's maxims, and I spat in his face. He recoiled instinctively, his hold relaxing for a second; then I remembered a lot more things and within thirty seconds he was in an untidy heap on the pavement and I was running as fast as I could down the street.

My luck was in that night; I didn't see one policeman, and I heard no pursuing footsteps. After I'd been running for about ten minutes I came to the main road and caught a tram to the city centre. My hands and face were bleeding when I mounted it, and I saw from my reflection in the lighted window that my suit had big splotches of dirt and blood on the jacket, and that not one button on my fly was fastened. Fortunately there were a lot of other drunks on board, so I was not as conspicuous as I might have been. I was squeezed up against a woman who seemed the only sober person on the tram, white-haired, with an old-fashioned thick wedding ring, who kept looking at me with a disgusted expression. The words of a Salvation Army hymn erupted to the surface of my mind and, without knowing it, I started to sing under my breath - The old rugged cross the old rugged cross I will CLING to the old rugged cross - The disgust on her face deepened to contempt. She looked so clean and motherly, her blue boxcloth coat showing a vee of crisply starched white blouse, that I found tears coming to my eyes. I was grateful to her for noticing me, for caring enough to be disgusted.

The lights and the noise and the cars and the buses and the trains and the people in the centre of the city were too much for me. I was nearly run over twice, and I was just as frightened of the people as I was of the traffic. It seemed to me as if they too were made of metal and rubber, as if they too were capable of mangling me in a second and speeding away, not knowing and not caring that they'd killed me.

The Warley bus station was away from the city centre. I couldn't remember the way, and I couldn't remember the time of the last bus. I lit a cigarette which tasted of Mavis's powder and stood, or rather swayed, outside a milk bar near the railway station. I wondered if the police had picked up the two yobs; I'd probably hurt them badly. I thought of the first one's hands, red and scarred, with black ridged nails, clutching his throat, and the limp body of the other with his nice clean collar and new rayon tie spoiled, and I felt a deep shame, as if I'd hit a child.

I walked around until I found a taxi rank. It took a great deal of finding; having visited Leddersford a few times, I kept a mental street map of the place, which normally I could unfold in a second. That night it had been turned upside down and all the streets had changed their names; I went up one street and found myself in Birmingham Road again, and twice I repassed the milk bar from where I'd set off. When I saw the row of taxis at the other side of the road, I paused for a second to see if it was safe to cross.

Then I found myself falling. There was a kind of exhilaration about it; I imagined a mattress below me to break my fall, to bounce away from, higher and higher into the sky.... There was only the pavement, the cold stone that I wanted to lie upon, to kiss, to sleep with my face against. I struggled up to my feet when I heard a car stop beside me, holding on to a lamp standard. If it was the police, there was nothing left but to face them; I was too tired and confused to run away, and I knew that if I tried to cross the road by myself I should be killed. I braced myself for the official questions, staring at the dark green standard.

"Time for you to come home, Joe." I turned. It was Bob Storr.

"I have no home."

"Yes, you have. We've all been worrying about you." He took my arm. Eva came out of the car and took my other arm; as soon as she came, I let myself be taken quietly, but I still insisted that I had no home. I sat in the back with her; I was trembling with cold, and she put a rug over my knees.

"My God," she said, "what have you been up to? There've been search parties out all over Yorkshire for you. The Thompsons are nearly off their heads with worry .

"Susan," I said. "What about Susan?"

"You are pie-eyed, aren't you?" Eva said. "She went to London for a wedding dress this morning. Had you forgotten?"

"Leave him alone," Bob said. "He's had enough for one day."

"I murdered Alice," I said, and began to cry.

"Don't talk rubbish," Bob said.

"Everyone knows that I killed her. The Thompsons too."

"The Thompsons knew that she was your mistress," Bob said. "They had a son themselves and they know what young men are like. They don't blame you. Nobody does."

The car was climbing the eastern heights of the city now, away from the smoke and the dirt and the black fingernails scrabbling the pavement and the sad, lost faces that had tried to keep up with me; the engine purred smoothly, as it would have done if Alice had been beside me instead of Eva, as it would have done if Bob had suddenly grown talons and horns, as it would have done if the world were due to end in five minutes.

I went on crying, as if the tears would blur the image of Alice crawling round Corby Road on her hands and knees, as if they would drown her first shrill screams and her last delirious moans. "Oh God," I said, "I did kill her. I wasn't there, but I killed her."

Eva drew my head on to her breast. "Poor darling, you mustn't take on so. You don't see it now, but it was all for the best. She'd have ruined your whole life. Nobody blames you, love. Nobody blames you."

I pulled myself away from her abruptly. "Oh my God," I said, "that's the trouble."