John Braine - Room at the Top

And when we came to Poplar Avenue I was able to laugh at Susan's house without anger or frustration. I imagined her sitting at a dressing table of polished walnut with a litter of silver brushes and bottles of expensive scent in front of her. The white carpet would be ankle-deep and the sheets of her bed would be silk. There would be a lot of photographs; but they wouldn't be the cheap kind that seemed deliberately to have caught their subjects in positions so unnatural that to hold them for one moment longer would cause actual physical pain: They would be the very best, not one under a guinea, the work of professionals who could make the pretty beautiful, the passable pretty, and the ugly interesting. Surrounded by these glossy pieces of well-being, Susan would be brushing her hair, that was as smooth and shining as a blackbird's wing, not thinking, not wanting, not making plans, but quite simply being .

Again I felt that I was a part of a fairy story. There was a melancholy pleasure in the thought of her inaccessibility. I could hardly believe that I myself had thought of marrying her: it seemed like the crazy prophecy of some old witch. I was grateful that she should exist, just as I was grateful that Warley should exist. The road was rustling with dead leaves, the air was smoky and mellow as if the whole earth were being burned for its fragrance like a cigar; I felt suddenly that something wonderful was going to happen. The feeling was sufficient in itself; I didn't expect anything material to result from it. I was honoured by the gesture; life doesn't often bother to be charming once childhood has passed.

"You're smiling," Alice said.

"I'm happy."

"My God, I wish I were."

"What's the matter, love?"

"Never mind," she said. "It's too damned sordid and boring to explain."

"You need a drink."

"Do you mind if we don't?" She laughed. "Don't look so woebegone, honey."

"You want to go home?"

"Not particularly." She switched on the car radio. A brass band was playing "The Entry of the Gladiators"; the huge bombast of the piece seemed to blow the little car along.

"I'd like to go to Sparrow Hill," she said.

"It's cold up there."

"That's what I want," she said violently. "Somewhere cold and clean. No people, no dirty people ..."

I turned the Fiat into Sparrow Hill Road, narrow, twisting, steep, with the fields and weeds on either side stretching out into the black and endless distance. Alice switched off the radio as abruptly as she'd switched it on and there was no sound but the Fiat's self-satisfied little hum and the moan of the wind in the telephone wires.

"Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve ..."

Her voice was dreamy and there was something about its tone which for a second made the hairs on the nap of my neck bristle. In the half-light I could see her profile with the straight nose and the chin a shade too heavy and beginning to sag underneath; I could smell her again, too, but this time the smell wasn't part of the evening but the whole evening.

The fields and woods clinging to the hillside gave way to the plateau of Warley Moors; a little ahead I saw the old brickworks and hard by them Sparrow Hill rising abruptly from the surrounding flatness.

There was a dirt road by the brickworks; I stopped the car by the little corrugated-iron office which stood at the top. The door was boarded up and the windows broken; as I looked at it and the big mouldering kiln towering above it like a red igloo, I felt a not unpleasant melancholy, though I generally dislike dead places and would rather look at a prosperous mill than the most beautiful ruin. Here on the moors it was different: it was as if someone had been playing a game with those bricks and corrugated iron, leaving them there in that lonely spot to assert the fact of human existence.

"We're too visible here," said Alice. "Turn to the left behind the hill." Sparrow Hill is set back some two hundred yards from the road; the side facing the road is bare except for short, sheep-nibbled grass but the far side is covered with bushes and bracken and there's a big grove of beeches at the foot of the hill.

"Follow the road," she said. "You can see the concrete edges - it ends just beyond that farmhouse on the right. They were going to have all sorts of things at Sparrow Hill once, but it all came to nothing."

I stopped in the shelter of the trees. My heart was beating hard and when I gave Alice a cigarette my hand was trembling. We're too visible here. I knew exactly what the words implied. And somehow I didn't want them to imply anything. I wanted to postpone what was going to happen within the next few minutes: I was on the verge of a new territory and it frightened me. Alice was much more than a pair of willing thighs and she would ask for much more than quick comfort. I didn't at the time put it to myself as clearly as this; but I definitely remember thinking that I felt exactly as I did when I had my first woman - a plump WAAF whose name I've forgotten - at the age of eighteen.

So I talked to her. I talked without stopping, and I don't remember what I talked about. It was as if I were putting on a filibuster: a kind of bill was to be passed which would alter my whole life and I wasn't sure that I wanted my whole life to be altered. Then I stopped talking; or, rather, my voice trailed off into silence independently of me. I looked at her. She was was smiling with that tight, almost painful expression which I'd noticed when we'd had supper at her house. Her hands were clasped over her knees, her skirt drawn back above them.

I leaned over towards her. "I've been thinking about you all week. I've been dreaming about you, do you know that?"

She put out her hand and touched the nape of my neck. I kissed her. Her lips tasted of tobacco and toothpaste; they were held moistly and laxly against mine in a way that was entirely new to me, utterly different from her dry and light stage kisses. Her breasts felt astoundingly heavy and full against me; she seemed to be much younger, much more feminine and soft than ever I'd imagined her to be.

"I'm all twisted," she said. "This is a terribly moral kind of car."

"We'll go outside," I said hoarsely. She kissed my hands. "They're beautiful," she said. "Big and red and brutal ... Will you keep me warm?"

I remember those words especially. They were empty and tawdry, they didn't match what took place in the beech grove soon afterwards; but they were Alice's own words and I preserve them like saints' relics. And yet there was no great physical pleasure for either of us that night: it was too cold, I was too nervous, there was too much messing about with buttons and zips and straps. It was best when we'd finished; it was like having a cup of really good coffee and a Havana after an indifferently cooked but urgently needed meal. It was a clear starlit night: through a gap in the tree I could see the distant hills. I kissed Alice on the little wing of hair just above the temple. The hair at that point always seems to me to smell differently from the hair on the rest of the head; it's vulnerable and soft and somehow babyish. She pressed herself more closely against me.

"You're all warm," she said. "My dear overcoat. I'd like to sleep with you, Joe. Truly sleep, I mean, in a big bed with a feather mattress and brass rails and a china chamberpot underneath it."

"I wouldn't let you sleep," I said, not then understanding.

She laughed. "We will sleep together, pet, I promise you."

"It's never been like this before," I said.

"Nor me."

"Did you know this was going to happen?"

She didn't answer. After a moment she said: "Please don't fall in love with me, Joe. We will be friends, won't we? Loving friends?"