John Braine - Room at the Top

"Whisky, please."

He gave me a malicious look. "It's not Scotch, alas. An American customer gave me a crate. Tastes like hair oil. I warn you."

"I drank a lot of it in Berlin," I said. "No soda, thanks."

It left a warm glow inside my stomach after it had for a split second dried my mouth and sent a little rush of air up my throat.

"Alice says you're from Dufton." He filled up his glass with soda-water and sipped it like a medicine.

"I was born there."

"Been there on business once or twice. My God, it's depressing!"

"You get used to it."

"You'll know the Torvers, I suppose."

I did know them in the same way that I knew the Lord Lieutenant of the county. They were Dufton's oldest mill-owning family; in fact, the only mill-owning family left after the Depression, the other mills having gone either into the hands of the Receiver or London syndicates.

"My father worked at their mill," I said. "He was an overlooker. So we never met socially, as you might say."

George laughed. "My dear Joe, no one ever meets the Torvers socially. No one would want to. The Old Man hasn't had one decent emotion since he was weaned, and Dicky Torver spends what little time he has left over from the mill-girls in drinking himself to death."

"We used to call Dicky the Sexy Zombie," I said.

"Damned good. I say, damned good!" He refilled my glass as if he were giving me a little reward for amusing him. "That's just how he is with that awful pasty face and that slouch and that fishy gleam that comes into his eyes whenever he sees a bedworthy woman. Mind you, he's a good businessman. You'd have to get up very early to catch Dicky Torver."

"He's a horror," said Alice, entering with a tray of sandwiches. She poured herself a whisky. "I met him at the Con ball at Leddersford. He made a pass within the first five minutes and invited me to a dirty weekend within another five. Why doesn't someone beat him up?"

"Some women might find him attractive," George said. He nibbled a cheese biscuit.

"You mean that their husbands might want to do business with him?" I said.

He laughed again. It was a low, pleasant laugh; he could evidently call it up at will. "Not that way, Joe. It's like bribing an executioner; if you're reprieved, he says it's due to his efforts and if you're hanged you can't talk. If someone's wife is - well, kind to Dicky, and the husband lands the contract or whatever it is, then Dicky's kept his side of the bargain. If the husband doesn't land the contract he can hardly make a public complaint. No, business isn't as simple as all that."

"It happens," said Alice.

"Occasionally." His manner indicated the subject was closed and I'd been put in my place.

"Joe," Alice said, "do have a sandwich. They're there to be eaten."

The sandwiches were the thinnest possible slices of bread over thick slices of cold roast beef. The plate was piled high with them. "You've cut up all your ration," I said.

"Oh no," she said. "Don't worry about that. We've lots more. Truly."

"The farmers have meat," George said, "I have cloth. See?"

It was perfectly clear; and I enjoyed the meat all the more. It was like driving Alice's car; for a moment I was living on the level I wanted to occupy permanently. I was the hero of one of those comedies with a title like King for a Day . Except that I couldn't have deceived myself as long as a day, and I could, in that room, tasting the undeniable reality of home-killed beef and feeling the whisky warm in my belly, put myself into George's shoes.

Alice was sitting a little away from the table, facing me. She was wearing a black pleated skirt and a bright red blouse of very fine poplin. She had very elegant legs, only an ounce away from scragginess; her likeness to a Vogue drawing struck me again. I looked at her steadily. We were the same sort of person, I thought fuzzily, fair and Nordic.

George poured me another bourbon. I swallowed it and bit into a second sandwich. Alice gave me a light little smile. It was no more than a quick grimace, but I found my cheeks burning as I realised that I'd like to be in George's shoes in more ways than one.

Waiting for Susan on Saturday evening, I was as excited as if it had been the first time I'd taken a girl out. I standing in the foyer of the Leddersford Grand; it was the usual sort of theatre foyer with red carpets, white pillars, photos of stars with white teeth and glossy hair and sparkling eyes, and over it all a faint smell of cigars and perfumed disinfectant, but at that moment it seemed to possess a sort of innocent splendour. I experienced so many different emotions that I was like a child with one of those selection boxes the chocolate manufacturers used to bring out before the war. I was undecided as to which to taste first; the plain dark chocolate of going out with a pretty girl, the Turkish Delight of vanity, the sweet smooth milk of love, the flavour of power, of being one up on Jack Wales, perhaps the most attractive of all, strong as rum.

If she'd come then I would, so as to speak, have eaten the whole selection box. But at three minutes to seven there was no sign of her, and the whole evening began to turn sour on me. I heard again the panic in her voice. 'Golly, here's Mummy.' Why should she be so frightened of her mother knowing about me? Why shouldn't I call at the house? And why should I? I saw myself as Mummy would see me, ununcouth and vulgar and working-class - with all the faults of the nouveau riche, in fact, but none of those solid merits, such as a hundred thousand in gilt-edged securities, for the sake of which so much can be forgiven. "That awful Lampton boy with the funny teeth," I heard Susan say. "He's pursuing me. Yes, really! I don't know why, but I said I'd go to the ballet with him. Yes, I know, it was silly of me, but I wasn't thinking ... Well, my dear, I forgot ! It went right out of my head ! For all I know, he's still waiting. Aren't I awful ?"

I was elaborating this dialogue with a drearily masochistic relish when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

"I've been watching you," she said. "You look awfully bad-tempered. Are you very angry with me?"

"Not now you've come."

"I'm very sorry for being late. Herbert gave me a lift and something went wrong with the magglet."

I laughed. "That's very serious. Are you sure it was the magglet?"

"I don't know about cars," she said. "Should I?"

"There's no law that enforces you to. Magglet's very good anyway. All cars should have a magglet." I took her arm. "We'll have to hurry. Two minutes to zero."

She was wearing a fur-topped Cassock cap and big fur gloves and a full-skirted cashmere topcoat. Her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks flushed a little and there was about her that clean smell - like baby powder mixed with new-mown hay - which I had noticed the first time I'd met her.

When I handed the tickets to the usher she caught sight of their price. "Four and six," she said. "Golly. Isn't that frightfully expensive?"

I looked at her sharply; did she expect a box? But I saw that she was quite serious and I was astounded and delighted at her naïveté; the clothes she was wearing must have cost a good fifty pounds.

We settled down to watch The Haunted Ballroom . I passed her a block of milk chocolate; my hand brushed hers and hovered over it for a second but it had no responsiveness; if a girl wants her hand to be held, it tightens over yours the moment it's touched.

Somehow it seemed tremendously important that I should hold her hand. Contact with her, I felt, would be as different from contact with ordinary women as singing is to speaking. It seemed tremendously important; and yet I didn't want to touch her at all. Brought out, perhaps, by the music and the dancers blown across the stage by it like pieces of coloured paper, a deeply buried instinct asserted itself: I wanted simply to admire what is, after all, a rare human type: a beautiful and unspoiled virgin. Even when I let my eyes rest on the outline of her firm small breasts beneath her sweater, it was without a trace of lasciviousness; I was visited, in fact, by the emotion of our first meeting. This time it was more real, there wasn't the annoyance of other people's presence, and Susan was herself, speaking her own words, not a fictitious character seeable for half a crown.