John Braine - Room at the Top

"Why don't you tell them?"

"Joe," she said, "I'm only nineteen. I'm not trained for anything. They always said there was no need."

"I can keep you."

"What if we can't get permission to marry?"

I thought of the blue budgerigar we once kept at home. I let it out of its cage and it flew into the grimy back yard; within five minutes the cat had got it. I suddenly realised that I couldn't ask her to leave home for some cheap lodgings and a soul-killing routine job in a shop or factory until she was twenty-one. Susan standing all day behind a shop counter, her face frozen into a selling smile and her feet aching, Susan in a factory taking orders from a forewoman who would hate her fiercely because of her youth, her beauty, her accent, her obvious superiority, and who would find a thousand petty ways to make her life miserable: it would make me experience again that moment twenty years ago when I'd seen the mangled body of the budgerigar and had known, without the shadow of a doubt, that the guilt was mine.

"Don't worry, sweetheart," I said. "We'll find a way to get married."

"They generally give me what I want," she said. "At least, Daddy does. "They're not unkind, Joe, truly they're not." Suddenly she threw herself on me, covering my face with kisses. "Oh God, I do love you so much, you've no idea - "

She made love strenuously; I was put in mind of a hard set of mixed tennis. When I put my hand under her blouse she moaned and shuddered convulsively. "Joe Joe Joe." She was somewhere away from me, I couldn't follow her but I knew that I should be with her. "I love you, Joe. I love you so much that I'd let you walk over me if you wanted, I'd let you tear me into bits and I wouldn't mind." She pressed my hand deep into her breast. "I want you to hurt me there. Oh God, you're so beautiful. You've lovely eyes, like Christ's - "

I felt the desire ebb out of me. The words were echoing in my ears, I wouldn't ever be able to rid myself of them. They were romantic, but what was behind them was a passion frightening in its intensity.

"I love you," I said. "I'd like to kiss you all over, every inch of you."

"You mightn't like every inch of me," she said.

"I would." I put my hand under her skirt.

"No. Please ~

"Don't you love me?"

"I'd do anything for you. But I'm scared."

I rolled away from her. This was how it always ended, and I didn't know whether to be sorry or glad. I lit a cigarette with trembling hands.

"Don't you love me any more?" she asked in a small voice.

"My God, Susan, don't you know the facts of life yet? I love you too much, that's the trouble. Can't you see?" I held out my hand. "What do you think I'm made of, darling?"

"Snips and snails and puppy-dogs' tails," she said. "So there!"

"And you're sugar and spice and all that's nice," I said. It was futile to explain to her that it plays hell with the nerves to stop at the crucial moment; besides, I wanted to keep her within the framework of the fairy story. "Perhaps it's best to wait," I said. "But I want you properly - you know what I mean?"

"Are you sure, Joe? Quite sure."

"I love you and I want to marry you and give you children," I said. The wind blew her hair across my face, soft and black and smelling of orange water; I wanted it to be longer, I wanted it to cover me and bury me, I wanted to sleep and not to argue, not to lie, not to promise, not to plot my future like a raid over the Ruhr.

"I want you to," she said. "I dreamt we had a baby last night. He was fair like you, and he was laughing all the time and we were very proud of him. But - oh, never mind." She stroked my hair gently.

"But what?"

"You'll think I'm silly."

"I promise I won't. Cross my heart."

"That's not a heart, Lampton," she said. "It's a swinging brick."

"It's the only one I've got." I tickled her in the ribs and she struggled squealing in my arms. "I'll tickle you until you do tell me."

"You're cruel," she said. "You're very cruel to poor Susan."

"Tell me."

"I was thinking," she said in a whisper, "that you wouldn't like me when I - when I was having the baby."

I rocked her in my arms gently. "Silly Susie. A pregnant woman is pleasing unto the Lord. I'd love you all the more, I'd be proud because it was my child."

"Oh, you are good to me," she said, half crying. "You're so kind, I love you so much."

That was what I wanted; I applauded my own skill impersonally. The strange thing was that I meant every word of what I said; and it was easy enough to speak them with her firm young body touching mine. But the words were meant for someone else, along with the night, and the new look of Warley under the moon, and the wind, faint again now, as if the grass and the trees and the river down in the valley were breathing in my face: Susan was welcome to all of it, but I had reserved it for someone else a long time ago.

I hired an evening suit for the Civic Ball. It didn't fit very well, and neither did the shirt I bought to go with it. But as I stood at the open door of the Albert Institute, I couldn't help feeling happy. Light and music spilled out into the road, glistening on the dark leaves of the laurels in the drive; the tune was the tune which all dance bands seemed to play just before one enters the dancehall, a sad, refined, rather sexy little foxtrot of no particular period. The hall was hung with balloons and festooned with coloured paper and there were flowers and ferns everywhere: the Civic Ball was the event of the year at Warley, good for two full pages in the Courier . There was a blue haze of tobacco smoke and a smell of perfume and powder and clean linen and women's sweat; the voices of the guests seemed to rise and fall together as if everyone were one person who'd just been assured on good authority that life on this segment of the globe was going to make sense for the next few hours - there's no doubt about it, the voice was saying calmly and vigorously, I'm going to enjoy myself.

Most of the councillors were there, and practically all the Town Hall staff, unfamiliar in the black-and-white of evening suits and with bosoms and arms revealed which were in most instances, I thought, looking with fascination at the tremendous mottled shelf of flesh which the Clerk's secretary carried in front of her, better hidden.

I saw June at the edge of the dance floor, talking with Teddy Soames. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder green taffeta gown; Teddy, as might be expected, wasn't looking at her face. I went towards her, but just as I was going to speak, they moved off into a waltz. I tried my luck with some of the other girls but only succeeded in getting the promise of some dances later on; the Civic Ball was a program dance, the first of its kind I'd been to. The advice which Hoylake had given me wasn't very good; it was pre-eminently a function to which one had to take a partner. Otherwise, I reflected gloomily as I made a stiff-legged circuit of the floor with a mousy-haired and bespectacled girl from the Library, one was landed with the Grade Tens. I'd have done better to have gone to some dive in Leddersford and picked up a nice broadminded millgirl.

I went into the bar. That, I thought, as I tried to catch the waiter's eye, was another drawback to these evening-dress functions. You either paid the earth for shorts or you blew yourself up on bottled beer. As I gestured in the direction of the waiter, my shirt front bulged out; I felt a slow flush mottling my neck. It was at that moment that I saw Susan. Jack was with her in a tailored evening suit - white tie and tails, no less. His cuff links were of gold, naturally, and the white handkerchief in his breast pocket was of silk. He was laughing, showing his white teeth. I would have liked to smash them for him; except that he would have smashed mine first. Susan was wearing a silver dress which was a compromise between demureness and sophistication, showing just enough of her thin but rounded shoulders and the shape of those firm young breasts which, I remembered with rather a nasty gloating, I'd seen much more of than that rich oaf beside her.