John Braine - Room at the Top

"She sounds nice. I'd like to meet her."

"She's dead."

"I'm sorry. Poor Joe - " She put her hand on mine very quickly, then withdrew it.

"Don't be sorry. I like talking about her. I don't mean that I don't miss her - and my father - but I don't live in the graveyard." I was, I realised, quoting Mrs. Thompson. That was all right; I meant what I said. Why should I feel guilty about it?

"How did it happen?"

"A bomb. Dufton's one and only bomb. I don't even think it was meant to hit anything."

"It must have been awful for you."

"It's a long time ago."

The waiter set down the coffee and cakes and left us as silently as he came. He smiled at Susan; it was his real smile too, a warm flicker, constrained a little, not a waiter's grin. The coffee was very strong and the cakes were fresh and of the kind which young girls like - meringues, éclairs, chocolate cup-cakes, marzipan rolls.

"He really does like you," I said. "Everyone else has been given Madeira cakes and rock buns."

"You're horrid. He's a delectable little man and I like him very much." She bit into an éclair. "We didn't see much of the war in Warley. Daddy used to work awfully hard at the factory, though. Sometimes he used to stay up all night."

What fun he would have had too, I thought. The rich always had the most fun during the war. They had the double pleasure of influencing the course of events and making themselves still richer. I elaborated the thought with no real satisfaction. Suddenly I felt sad and lonely.

"Don't you miss your father and mother terribly sometimes?" she asked.

"Often. But generally when I think of them it makes me happy in a queer sort of way. Not happy because they're dead, but because they were good people."

It was perfectly true. But, as I looked at Susan's rosy young face - so young that the full neck and firm little breasts seemed at moments not to belong to her but to have been borrowed for the occasion like an older sister's stockings and lipstick - I felt guilty. I was manoeuvring for position all the time, noting the effect of each word; and it seemed to devalue everything I said.

I was depressed for some time afterwards. It wasn't a tangible sort of depression: it was rather like that washing-day sadness which came to one on waking to the realisation that the Ł75,000 cheque, so convincing even to the twopenny stamp, was, after all, only a dream.

I began to shake it off a little when I went to the Thespians the following Monday. There's an atmosphere about a theatre at rehearsals that's as comforting as cloves for toothache. It's dusty, it's dry, it's chilly, and at times it seems to be a huge reservoir of silence into which all one's words take belly-flops. But at the same time it's as warm and cosy and private as a nursery and every activity, even just waiting for one's cue, is important and exciting, every moment is handed to one like a hot buttered muffin.

When Alice came to sit beside me, the sense of pleasure increased. I felt reassured, too, protected, like a child. I could tell her everything and be sure that she'd understand. It was like the way I'd feel when, the Efficient Zombie having been even more bloody-minded than usual, I'd see Charles and know that I'd be able to talk away all my accumulated anger and humiliation. Except that I'd never had the least desire to undress Charles and, I realised with a shock, I wanted to undress Alice. I was angry with myself for the thought; I felt as guilty as if it had been Mrs. Thompson I was lusting after. I honestly didn't want to spoil the relationship that was building up between us; I could get sex at any pub or dance hall, but not the friendship which Alice had given me from that first evening at the St. Clair. It had come to us quickly and smoothly but without hurry; we could not only talk about every subject under the sun but we could sit together in silence and be happy and contented.

"It's good to see you," I said. This was the standard Thespian greeting, but I meant it.

"It's good to see you too, Joe." When she smiled I could see that there was a speck of decay on one of her upper incisors and another seemed to be more filling than tooth. They weren't bad; but they were no better than mine and this fact gave me a kind of shabby kinship, as if we'd both had the same illness. It was a kinship which I could never share with Susan: I loved looking at her teeth, white and small and regular, but they always induced an uncomfortable inferiority.

"I know my lines now," I said. "And I can say the Song of Solomon bit backwards. It's lush ."

"Don't let Ronnie see that you're enjoying yourself or he'll cut it."

"We'll knock 'em in the aisles," I said.

When my cue came a moment later I didn't walk onto the stage, I made an entrance. I was supposed to stand glancing at Herbert and Eva for a moment before I spoke; until that evening I'd always made a mess of it, holding the silence either too long or not long enough. That evening I timed it perfectly: I knew instinctively that a fraction of a second less would have seemed pointless and a fraction more would have seemed as if I needed a prompt. And I knew that the reason for my glowering was that I wanted my mistress badly and was as frustrated as a tethered bull in spring. Everything clicked into place, I found it impossible to go wrong; and when Alice entered, something happened which is rare with amateurs; we achieved exactly the right tempo. I found myself thinking, or rather sensing, that at some places I must go slowly and at others more quickly and that the slowness and the quickness hadn't, as it were, to be dumped in heaps but to be spread smoothly. And for the first time in my life I became aware of my own body and voice without conceit, as instruments. Alice and I were a team; she was no more to me and no less, than the Theatre Sister to the surgeon; she wasn't Alice Aisgill whom I'd just wanted to undress, she was Sybil whom I'd already undressed in the other world bounded now by stacked-up flats, tangles of wires and ropes, and the smell of new paint.

"You were pretty good tonight," Alice said in the Fiat afterwards.

"Not so good as you," I said. I turned the ignition key, her praise brandy to my self-esteem. The engine started immediately, thought I always had trouble with it normally. I wish often that I could have fixed my life at that moment - the car rolling smoothly down the narrow street with the gas lamps washing the cobbles with orange light, the smells of East Warley tugging at me for attention as children on their father's birthday - malt, burning millband, frying fish, that wonderful bread-and-butter smell coming from the open spaces nearby - and inside the car, the masculinity of steel and oil and warm leather and, best of all, Alice, her smell of lavender and her own personal smell as musky as furs and as fresh as apples.

We left the quarter all too quickly. It was the part of Warley I came to like best; that evening it was as if there was an invisible street party: each house was my home and the blackened millstone grit looked soft as kindness. I remember that the curtains of one house weren't fully drawn and I caught a glimpse of a young man in overalls tickling the waist of a red-haired girl. I knew somehow that they weren't long married and I watched them with tenderness, in a queer bless-you-my-children way without the least trace of, as Charles used to put it, the bog-eyed hogger.

Even the long drabness of Sebastopol Street, with no building along it but Tebbut's Mills, seemed part of my happiness. The sound of the looms filled the air, a loud clicking that didn't seem like a naturally loud noise but a small one deliberately amplified to annoy the passer-by; and the fluorescent lighting inside, the daylight, if it is daylight, of hangovers and executions, made the workers at their looms look like the inhabitants of a vast aquarium; but I could translate them both, the noise and the light, into prosperity, into marriage and meat and dancing.