John Braine - Room at the Top

"Every little helps," Teddy said. "You know I'm going steady with June?"

"You couldn't do better." I had a sudden sense of loss, and then a feeling of barriers being raised between me and the rest of the world. "I wish you luck, Teddy. With both her and the job."

"You're sure that you don't mind about me applying?"

"Why the hell should I?"

"I'd be your senior."

"Tom never bothered me much."

"I had the buzz that Hoylake's reorganising."

"I knew that a long time ago," I said. I looked at the rows of files, the red and black inkwells that the office boy should have cleaned out yesterday, the tin lid used as an ash tray in which my cigarette was smouldering, the calculating machine and the typewriter, the calendar with the picture of the girl like Susan, the basket full of accounts at my desk, and each became part of a dreadfully cosy desert - though at least, I thought as I turned away from the calendar, I was no longer deceived by the mirage.

"I knew a long time ago," I repeated. I dropped my hand heavily on Teddy's shoulder and squeezed it in mock friendliness until he winced with pain. "You go right ahead, Teddy."

When we reached Wool, Alice was asleep on my shoulder. It was almost too hot; we'd had the window open all the way but it only had the effect of stirring the air like porridge without bringing any fresh oxygen in. I shook Alice gently and she came to wakefulness slowly, smiling happily at me as her eyes opened. She was wearing a blue dirndl skirt and a white blouse; I helped her to her feet, my hand touching with gratitude the good heaviness of her breast.

"Four days," she said, when we were at last in the taxi. "Four whole days. I don't know how I managed to wait for so long - " She kissed me, regardless of the crowd of holiday-makers around the station. "Look," she said as the car snaked through the lushly green lanes, "there's Tess of the D'Urbervilles's mansion. I once was cast as Tess in an awful rep production and I swotted up everything about her. This is the country for passion, darling."

I bit her ear gently. "Is that a promise?"

"Anything you want," she said in a whisper. "You can beat me if you like."

"That depends upon your cooking."

"There's a caseful of food. Our larder's bare now."

I whispered something mildly improper into her ear and to my surprise she blushed, then giggled like a schoolgirl.

"Oh, you are a one, Mr. L, reely there's no 'olding you once your passions are aflame. Don't never leave a gal alone for one minute, you don't."

"Aye, lass," I said. "T'truth is, Ah'm insattible . Tha's let thisen in for a rough time, Ah'm telling tha straight."

She put her finger on her lips, looking in the direction of the driver. "Hasn't it been hellish waiting, though?"

"God, yes. Until I saw you at Waterloo I didn't believe we'd ever manage it. It doesn't seem quite real even now."

"We'll make it real." We sat in silence then, holding hands until the taxi pulled up at the cottage.

It was limewashed and thatch-roofed, with two front doors next to each other; it had originally been two cottages and its owners had converted it. Standing at the bottom of a steep lane off the main road among a wilderness of elders and blackberry bushes it had a strange atmosphere of self-willed solation. From beyond the little rise in front I could hear the faint muttering of the sea.

When I'd paid the taxi driver, he drove up the lane at breakneck pace; the taxi was an old high-built Minerva and lurched all over the place, its springs squealing. "You'd think the place was haunted," I said.

"It probably is. We'll haunt it after we're gone, shall we?"

"We're not going to die yet," I said, scooping her off her feet and carrying her over the threshold. I dropped her on the sofa in the living room and stood over her, feeling a little dizzy.

"You've done it now," she said. "You're compromised."

"I don't care," I said. "Have you realised, darling, we're alone? We needn't worry about Elspeth coming in unexpectedly, or Eva spying on us. I don't have to leave you at ten o'clock, and I can give you some fine china anytime I like."

"What's wrong with right now?" She pulled me down beside her. I accompanied her almost immediately into an agony of pleasure; we sank into a different dimension from which we emerged shaking and frightened - it was as if we'd been fused together, melting into each other like amoebae but violently, like cars crashing head on.

"Christ," she said. "that was almost too wonderful." The word didn't sound like a blasphemy, any more than it had done when we were making love. She had said it again and again then, in a breathless amazement: it was the first time I'd heard her use the word.

Before tea, we washed in the kitchen. It was small and stone-flagged and cool; the sink was shallow and the water splashed up from the stone. The water was icy cold; Alice, stripped to the waist, shivered as drops ran down her back. The window was small and covered with dust; in the half-light her skin seemed almost luminous. Free, at that moment, from the desire to enter her body, I saw its beauty impersonally, as an arrangement of colour and light, a satisfying theorem of lines which curved generously, which gave, gave, gave to the air, to the cold stinging water, to me: a woman's body always wants to live, all of it, and a man's is always deathward inclined - as long as Alice was there I wouldn't die, it was like having my father and mother alive again, it was the end of being afraid and alone.

She turned to me and put her arms around my neck. "I've never let any man see me washing before," she said. "I've always been fussy about it - they only were allowed to see me at my best, made-up, bathed, my hair just so. But you - if it gave you pleasure you could watch me doing anything. I don't care how you see me, as long as you do see me. I love you, Joe, I love you properly, like a wife. I'd like us to love each other so much that there'd be no need for us to say it. But I want to say it all the time."

"I love you, I love you like a husband. I'd die for you."

"Don't talk about death."

"I'll live for you, then. I'll make you the most-loved woman in the whole world."

"No. Just the woman you love most." She sighed. "I could stay here forever."

My eyes prickled with tears. We're all imprisoned within that selfish dwarf I - we love someone and we grow so quickly into human beings that it hurts.

"It's real now," I said. "The whole earth's solid."

She pressed herself harder against me. "Do you like the way I feel? Do you like these? Or are they too old?"

"They're perfect. The only ones my head's happy in between." But as I said it I found myself wishing for a second that they were younger.

We had a big tea of American canned sausage and dried eggs and tinned fruit and then went down to Cumley. Or, rather up; the village was about a mile from the sea and the cottage was at the head of Cumley Cove. It was six o'clock when we reached the village, and a little cooler; after we'd ordered bread and milk at the village stores, we sat on the village green under the shade of a big oak, letting the quietness come to us and stay with us, nuzzling our hands gentle as a spaniel.

She'd changed into a low-cut silk dress with a pattern of turquoise and flame and gold, each colour running softly into the other; it had a dark plum-cake richness and against her pale honey hair and skin, already beginning to tan, looked smoothly exotic. A farm labourer going home, well wrapped up against a temperature of seventy in the shade, bade us good evening, his pale eyes wandering ruminatively over her body.

"Pullover, waistcoat, flannel shirt, corduroys, and probably ankle-length woolen underwear," she said. "It makes me sweat just to look at him."