John Braine - Room at the Top

"No, truly," She looked at me with shining eyes.

"It's not cold now," I said. "But tell me if you do feel chilly and we'll go home straightaway."

"I won't be cold. Cross my heart." She leaned towards me and whispered: "If you love me up, I'll be as warm as toast." Her breath smelled of toothpaste and, better than that, of youth and health. She did not simply look clean; she looked as if she had never been dirty. And the night was clean, too, with a new moon silvering the trees along Eagle Road and an energetic breeze tidying away the clouds. With Susan beside me, the happenings of yesterday seemed absurdly unreal. Then my heart stopped a beat when a middle-aged man with spectacles boarded the bus. But it wasn't Hoylake.

A young man and a girl of about nineteen got in at the next stop. At least, I thought that she was about nineteen; her face, like the young man's, had a settled look, as if she'd decided what was the most respectable age to be, and wasn't going to change it in a hurry. She had a round flat face with lipstick the wrong shade and her silk stockings and high heels struck an incongruously voluptuous note; it was as if she were scrubbing floors in a transparent nylon nightie. The young man had a navy blue overcoat, gloves, and scarf, but no hat; he was following the odd working-class fashion which seemed to me now, after Alice's tuition, as queer as going out without trousers. I felt a mean complacency; with that solid mass of brilliantined hair and mass-produced face, bony, awkward, mousy, the face behind the requests on Forces Favourites, the face enjoying itself at Blackpool with an open-necked shirt spread out over its jacket, the face which Wilfred Pickles might love but which depressed me intensely - Len or Sid or Cliff or Ron - he'd never have the chance of enjoying a woman like Susan, he'd never explore in another person the passion and innocence which a hundred thousand in the bank could alone make possible.

"Why shan't we be going to Eva's again?" Susan asked.

"Don't you know?"

"Don't be so inscrutable, darling. If I knew, I wouldn't ask you."

"I don't think that your parents like me," I said. "Bob's obeying their orders."

She withdrew her hand from mine. "That's a beastly thing to say. As if they were all-powerful tyrants and Bob danced at their bidding."

"Part of it's true and you can't deny it. Your parents definitely don't approve of me."

She put her hand back. "I don't care. They can't stop us. We're not doing anything wrong."

We got off the bus at St. Clair Park and walked through the entrance where the great iron gates had been. They had been, Cedric once told me, the finest existing example of Georgian ironwork in England; the Council had taken them away during the war and sold them for scrap. One of the St. Clair falcons on the gateposts was wingless, the result of a drunken soldier doing a little professional practice with a Sten gun. At the top of the drive you could see the St. Clair mansion. It wasn't large as mansions go, absolutely severe with a flat parapet line and no projections. But I caught my breath as I looked at it, remembering suddenly the Dufton art master's favourite phrase: here was frozen music. Whoever designed the house would no more have dreamt of including the smallest false detail than I would have dreamt of presenting a balance sheet a penny in error. But it was dead. You didn't have to see the boarded-up windows, the choked-up fountains, the stagnant ornamental ponds east and west of it, to realise that. It smelled dead, it had wanted to die.

We climbed the winding path up the hillside behind the manor. It had as many turns as a maze, and there was about the turns a slightly sinister quality, as if it wouldn't mind, given the opportunity, leading one into an oubliette. In the moonlight the big trees around us looked as bare as gallows, and yet at some points the bushes grew so thickly as to make the path almost impassable. When we reached the little promontory where the Folly stood, I was sweating. I put my raincoat down, and we sat on the grass in silence for a moment. Below us we could see the whole of Warley as far as Snow Park. I noticed for the first time that it was shaped like a cross, with the market place in the centre and T'Top in the northern upright. And I saw roads and houses which I'd never seen before - big square houses, broad straight roads, not black and grey, but all white and clean. I realized afterwards that I'd been looking at the new Council estate above the eastern quarter; in the moonlight the concrete looked like marble and the unmade road like stone.

The Folly was an artificial ruin in the Gothic style. There were three turrets, sawn off, as it were, obliquely, and far too small ever to have been much use as turrets. The tallest even had two window slits. One side of the main building had a door and an aurora of stone round it, and the other had three windows ending a little too abruptly halfway up. It was very solidly built; Cedric said that if you compared it with contemporary prints, it was evident that it had survived over a hundred years on that exposed promontory absolutely unscathed.

"My great-great-great-grandpa built this," Susan said. "He was called Peregrine St. Clair and he was terribly dissipated and used to be a friend of Byron's. Mummy told me a bit about it; he had orgies here. All of Warley practically was St. Clair land and he could do just what he liked."

"What did he use to do at the orgies?"

"Wicked!" she said. "I don't really know, darling. Mummy would never be very explicit. Though actually she seems rather proud of him. He's been dead long enough to be romantic. He squandered most of the family fortune on these orgies and then my great-great-grandfather squandered the rest and was killed in the Crimea. She's rather proud of him too, he was very brave and dashing."

"Aren't there any St. Clairs in Warley?" I asked her.

"Only Mummy really. Death duties and drink finished off the St. Clairs, Mummy says. Her people used to live at Richmond - they're dead now. There was only one male St. Clair left and he was killed in the 1914 war. Most of them were killed in wars." She shivered. "I'm jolly glad I'm a girl."

"So am I," I said, and kissed her.

A cloud passed over the moon, darkening the Folly for a moment into a genuine ruin. The man who built it was dead, all the St. Clairs were dead; I was alive, and I felt that the mere fact of my survival was in itself a victory over them; and her parents, and Hoylake, and Bob, and Jack Wales; they were zombies, all of them, and only I was real.

"Would you like to come to the Civic Ball with me?" I asked.

"I'm awfully sorry," she said, "I can't."

"Why not?"

"I'm going with Jack."

"I thought you loved me. Do you prefer him? And his M.G.?"

"How can you say an awful thing like that to me?" She leapt to her feet in one movement; it was as if anger had plucked her upright. "I don't care about his silly old car. I don't care if you haven't got one, either. Mummy invited him to make up the party, she always does. We'll go in the Bentley, we won't even be alone together." She started to weep. "I don't believe that you love me at all."

She was hurt, she looked lonely and small. I felt as sorry for her at that moment as if she'd been an ordinary girl and not the daughter of Harry Brown with a hundred thousand pounds as a barrier between her and real sorrow.

"My darling," I said, "I'm sorry. I do love you, I'm just idiotically jealous." I took her hand and pulled her down beside me. "Don't cry, love, you'll make your eyes red. Cuddle up and stop crying, just to please Joe." I kissed her gently and felt her relax in my arms.

"It's horrid at home sometimes," she said between sobs. "They don't talk about you, but I know they don't think we should go about together. They say I'm too young to go about regularly with anyone, but I know that isn't the reason."