John Braine - Room at the Top

She looked at her feet. "Don't be angry with me. But I don't want to go to the pictures. Or the theatre."

"Of course I'm not angry. But if we're going for a walk, you'll have to tell me where. I'm a stranger here."

"Ooh," she said. "Wicked, wicked. I never said I wanted to go for a walk. There's Benton Woods though. I've a friend up there. But we needn't see her."

She took my arm, holding it tightly as we walked over to the Benton bus stop. Passing the warehouses with their heavy, oily but curiously nonindustrial smell of raw wool and the cramped littered offices with their mahogany furniture and high stools and the Gothic Wool Exchange straight out of Doré, I felt as the owners of the big cars outside, the gaffers, masters, overlords, must feel: the city was mine, a loving mother, its darkness and dirtiness was the foundation of my big house in Ilkley or Harrogate or Burley, my holiday at Biarritz or Monte Carlo, my suit from my own personal roll of cloth: Susan took all the envy out of me at that very moment, she made me rich. We walked slowly, looking in all the shop windows; I bought a pair of made-to-measure aniline calf brogues, a made-to-measure shirt in real silk, a dozen wool ties, a fur felt trilby at five guineas, a beaver shaving brush, and a Triumph roadster. I bought Susan a big flask of Coty, a mink cape, a silver hairbrush, a nylon negligee, and a jar of crystallised ginger. Or I would have done so if the shops hadn't all for some unaccountable reason been closed.

The bus had wooden seats; they reminded her of travelling third class on the Continent. She chattered in her high clear voice about Rouen and Paris and Versailles and Reims and St. Malon and Dinan and Montmartre and Montparnasse and the Louvre and the Comédie-française - but I never had the feeling she was showing off, she hadn't a trace of self-consciousness; she'd been to all these places, they'd interested her very much, and she wanted to tell me all about them. Leddersford is a place where they don't like people who put on airs. To speak Standard English is in itself suspect; they call it talking well-off. And to talk about holidays abroad is one of the almost infallible marks of the stuck-up, the high-and-mighty, who are no better than they should be. All the people on the top deck had been listening to Susan; but there were no signs of resentment on their faces. Instead there was that pleased indulgent look, that wistful admiration (the princess has come among us, close enough for us to touch her if we dared) that I was to become accustomed to everywhere I took her. I've often thought that if I wanted to put paid to communism once and for all, I'd have a hundred girls like Susan ride on buses the length and breadth of Great Britain.

"You're making me envious," I said. "I'd love to go to France before I get too old to enjoy it."

"You're not old, silly."

"I'm very old. I'm twenty-five. A genuine DOM."

"What's a DOM?"

"You're joking. Of course you know."

"Truly I don't."

"Dirty Old Man." I took out my pocket diary and scribbled for a moment.

"What are you doing?" She looked over my shoulder. "Oh Joe, you are wicked. I'll tear it out."

I put the diary away. "I'm going to make a collection of Susanisms," I said. "Last night you told me that I had a voice like treacle toffee, and my smile was awfully old and naughty. That'll do for a beginning."

"It's true though," she said. "You have a voice like treacle toffee, it's dark and deep and rich. It's lovely. I adore treacle toffee. I wish I had some now, but all my coupons are gone."

"That's very sad," I said. "If you were to look in my right-hand pocket you might find something ..."

She leaned over me, her soft, orange-scented hair brushing my cheek. From the corner of my eye I caught sight of the road where Elspeth lived. That was a different body, I thought, a long time ago; the body with which, through several layers of clothing Susan was being permitted a minimal, facetious intimacy, was younger, stronger, cleaner than the instrument of pleasure which Alice had used in Elspeth's boudoir.

Susan squealed with delight. "Darling Joekins, just what I wanted." She turned a glowing smile upon me. "Joe, will you always give me just what I want?"

"Always, darling."

She held my hand tightly the rest of the journey, only releasing it to put another toffee in her mouth.

Benton used to be a pretty little village with a definite character of its own; there was even a local cheese, the Benton Blue. Now the original village with its grey stone houses clustered round the cobbled market square has been surrounded by a sort of dermoid cyst of pebbledash and brick and concrete. But the woods are still there, though the black tarmac road which has been plunged through them has almost entirely destroyed the pleasurably frightening quietness which all woods ought to possess. Susan took my arm as we walked along the road. On either side stood dank regiments of firs; there was no one about and it was very quiet, but not the sort of quiet I wanted. There was a stile past the plantation where the firs gave way to the real trees, the English trees with their green, locked away all winter, on the point of bursting out like birdsong. We went on into the woods until we came to a hollow in the hillside. As if in obedience to my desire for privacy, the sun began to set at the moment I put my raincoat on the ground and drew Susan down beside me.

She held me tightly as we kissed, and I thought of the difference between her and Alice. Alice held me tightly too, but she was fully aware of my body against hers; Susan held me tightly out of a kind of childish abandon. Her embrace was clumsy like a bad dancer's.

"I can't tell you," I said. I unbuttoned her coat and put my arms underneath it, stroking her warm back beneath the thin cashmere of her sweater. Her skirt had ridden above her knees; she pushed it down automatically. She was trembling as she'd done at the party; I laid my hand very lightly on her breast.

"Your heart's very loud," I said. "You're not really frightened, are you, pet?"

"A little now," she said in a low voice.

I put my hand inside the wide sleeves of her coat and stroked her arms. Her skin was so cool and smooth that I felt grubby and sausage-fingered. Then I put my fingers round her wrist, spanning it easily with little finger and thumb. "What little wrists you have."

"Now you're really frightening me," she said happily. "Just like Little Red Riding Hood and the great big 'normous wolf."

"But I am a wolf," I said, deepening my voice, and bit her ear.

"Oh," she said, "Susan tingle. Susan tingle up and down. Do it again."

As I took her roughly into my arms I felt loneliness come over me, real as the damp churchyard smell of the grass, melancholy as the sound of the brook in the little glen below us. I felt heavy as Sunday, as if time might drag me into a world like a bad engraving, stiff and dark and dull and lost. I pulled myself out of the picture which the loneliness had suddenly outlined - the woods at evening, the two figures for no good reason locked together, the shadows in the background that meant watchers - and rummaged round in my mind for pretty words to give Susan. "My God," I said, "you're so beautiful and sweet that I can hardly believe it. You make me think of spring flowers ..."

"You make me think of the sea on a stormy day," she said, "I don't know why - Oh Joe I do - " She stopped suddenly. "Joe, tell me something."

"Anything you like, honey."

She stroked my hair. "It's lovely, so smooth and soft and fair." I remembered Alice advising me a long time ago to stop using hair oil ("Too too Palais de Danse, darling") and congratulated myself upon having taken her advice; for Susan's hand to have encountered scented grease at this moment would have destroyed the whole atmosphere. "Joe," she said, "you didn't think me wicked last night, did you? Awfully forward and shameless?"