John Braine - Room at the Top

What has happened to me is exactly what I willed to happen. I am my own draughtsman. Destiny, force of events, fate, good or bad fortune - all that battered repertory company can be thrown right out of my story, left to starve without a moment's recognition. But somewhere along the line - somewhere along the assembly line, which is what the phrase means - I could have been a different person. What has happened to my emotions is as fantastic as what happens to steel in an American car; steel should always be true to its own nature, always have a certain angularity and heaviness and not be plastic and lacquered; and the basic feelings should be angular and heavy too. I suppose that I had my chance to be a real person. "You're always in contact," Alice said to me once. "You're there as a person, you're warm and human. It's as though everyone else were wearing rubber gloves." She couldn't say that now.

I looked at the invitation as I drank my final cup of tea at breakfast. It was a fine morning; the sun had melted all but the last traces of snow in the valley, and one could almost smell the green things growing. For the first time in a week I didn't think of Alice.

"Sally Carstairs has asked me to her birthday party," I said to Mrs. Thompson.

"She's a thoroughly nice girl. Weren't you in The Farm with her?"

"She helped me with the props. Don't know her very well, though. What should I give her?" I tried to sound matter-of-fact but I was excited and delighted. The Carstairses had plenty of money - they ran a chain of cafés - and lived in a big house at Gilden, right on top of Warley Moors.

"You leave it to me. I know Sally's mother very well."

"How much should I spend?"

"Leave that to me too. I won't break you, I promise."

"It's in your hands," I said. I was leaving more and more in her hands, I thought, those thin long-fingered hands so much like Alice's - I shied away from the name like a horse from a corpse. I looked at my watch. "Time to get my nose to the grindstone." I said goodbye to Mrs. Thompson; when I passed her chair I wanted to kiss her. Not passionately, I may add, but as I would have kissed my mother on my way to work.

Walking down Eagle Road, I wondered dimly if I might achieve something with Sally. She was small and slim and bright as a budgerigar and was training at the Leddersford Art School; my mind shied away again, but this time it was more of an automatic sidestepping from what might disturb me than a violent and painful revulsion. As I walked down the hill I experienced the conqueror's sensation again. Warley was below in the valley waiting to be possessed, I'd just come from a beautiful room as near T'Top as made no difference, I was going to a rich house to meet rich people and who could say what would come of it? Perhaps Susan might be there; not that it mattered very much. It wasn't that I disbelieved Reggie; but at the moment I didn't feel prepared for that particular sector of the battlefield.

Gilden is a rather grim mill village northeast of Warley. It has the appearance of being ready for anything: the narrow windows of the millstone grit houses might suddenly sprout rifles; beyond the next corner of its twisting streets and alleys it's not fantastic to imagine the glint of bayonets, the two Crimean War guns in the Memorial Park are ready for action, the General Stores in the High Street has rations for a five years' siege. The village ends abruptly at the Ebenezer Methodist chapel with its crammed graveyard; beyond it is nothing but the moors and a few sheep and curlews and a solitary farmhouse a mile west. That too has a military air; the moors are Gilden's maquis and behind its walls are planned the sudden raid into the valley, the ambush in the village, the last desperate stand with the enemy corpses piling up behind the drystone walls.

The Carstairs home stood apart from the village, an opulent neutral. It wasn't merely its ten rooms, its raw newness, its glaring red brick of the type which is supposed to mellow with wind and weather, that made its Gilden address simply a geographical term; it was situated where it was not to be near the business or the estate or other houses or the road, not for any practical reason at all, but simply because Carstairs père had fancied a house on the moors. That was why I liked it: it hadn't the remotest connection with any sort of economic necessity, it was a rich man's vulgar solid self-indulgence.

Reggie and I shared a taxi from Warley; the bus ran only hourly. As we turned into the Carstairs drive, we passed the bus: I saw an old man, a gang of children, a young couple holding hands. I recognised the middle-aged woman in front, her frowning face looking like a dull pudding under her off-white headscarf; she never paid her taxes until the last moment, and the answer was, I fancied, in the village pub of which her husband was Gilden's most devoted mainstay. I felt a spasm of pity for her; as we passed, it seemed that two worlds were meeting. The world of worry about rent and taxes and groceries, of the smell of soda and blacklead and No Smoking and No Spitting and Please Have the Correct Change Ready and the world of the Rolls and the black-market clothes and the Coty perfume and the career ahead of one running on well-oiled grooves to a knighthood; and the party in the big house at the end of the pine-lined drive at which, I felt in a sudden accession of pessimism, I would very quickly be shown that my place was in the world of the poor with its narrow present like a stony hen-run.

A grey Jaguar coupé drove away as we reached the house. The woman driving it gave Reggie a circumscribed wave and sat bolt upright and disdainfully, as if giving the car its orders rather than driving it.

"Mama Brown," Reggie said. "That's her runabout. Hubby has a Bentley, and they keep a V-8 as a spare."

"She seems well aware of it," I said.

"Not half, old man. The last of the St. Clairs and stinking with money. She's an old tough too; a place for everyone and everyone in their place. She practically ran a young man out of town for making a pass at Susan."

I paid the taximan. "I didn't know Susan was coming."

"There's a lot you don't know," Reggie said as the maid opened the door for us.

The hall was as impersonal as a hotel lounge. The walls were hung with trophies - buffalo horns, lions' heads, a Fokker airscrew - but they gave the impression of having all been bought at the same time, they were too clean, too neatly arranged, too new. Everything from the silver cigarette boxes to the inlaid ash trays was new and heavy and expensive. When the maid took my coat I took a quick look at myself; I had an uneasy feeling that my fly was open or my shoelace broken or that I'd put on odd socks.

There were about twenty people at the party, most of whom I hadn't met before. The girls were dressed to kill; I remember that Sally was wearing a blue dress which exposed a great deal of a very pleasant bosom and even Anne Barlby looked bedworthy in white and rose chiffon. The room we stood in was the largest I'd ever seen in a private house, and it had the first parquet floor I'd seen outside a library or museum. The furniture was of the kind that was to become fashionable ten years later, and each wall was in a different shade of green.

But as soon as I saw Susan, I stopped noticing my surroundings. She was wearing a black taffeta skirt and a white broderie anglaise blouse; she made all the other girls look worn and shopsoiled. If anyone ever needed a justification of the capitalist system, I thought, here it was: a human being perfect of its kind, a phoenix amongst barnyard fowls.

"Hello," I said. "You look good enough to eat." My eyes were holding hers; mine were the first to drop. "I didn't know you were coming here."