John Braine - Room at the Top

"I used to work stripped to the waist in Germany," I said. "I nearly went mad with sunburn and I caught cold every time the wind changed."

"Clever Dick," she said. "Think yer knows everythink, doncha?"

"I don't even know where I am. No mountains, no mill chimneys, no black buildings - it's positively decadent."

"You wouldn't exactly call Warley heavily industrialised."

"Yes, but industry's there in the background. This is different." I looked at the cottages nearby, dazzling white or fresh biscuit, with their low thatched roofs and air of conscious charm, and then across at the church in weathered grey stone. The whole place seemed to smell of milk and hay and clean summer dust; and it had about it a drowsy tolerant sensuousness. A Dales village on an evening like this would have taken the sun like a palatable medicine, a necessity which happened to be enjoyable: Cumley relaxed into a shameless abandonment.

"It is different," she said. "It's an older world. It's so different that it's foreign. It belongs to the farmers and the gentry. I suppose they're mostly stinkers, but at least a manure heap smells more wholesome than a woolcombing shed. It's more English than the North - my God, listen to me talking!"

"You needn't stop." I always liked to hear her; she could talk about impersonal things without turning the conversation into a lecture.

We'd been there about an hour when two girls passed us, followed by two youths. One of the girls caught my eye. She looked about fifteen, with a flat impassive face and black hair. She was wearing a skimpy print dress and I could see the shape of her legs through it.

"Good evening," she said. "Have you the time, please?"

Before I could look at my watch Alice gave her the necessary information quickly and curtly. The girl continued to look at me, her eyes running up and down my body as mine had hers.

"Thank you, sir," she said. "Proper warm weather, isn't it?" Then she turned and went off down the lane, swaying her hips slightly. I heard them giggling as they disappeared from view in the direction of the woods which stood west of the village.

"I need a drink," Alice said. She glanced towards the woods. " She doesn't."

"I love you," I said. "I'm not interested in little girls. Particularly not in jail-bait like that one."

"You'll be here after I'm gone," she said. "Will you promise me something - now, stone-cold sober in broad daylight? Don't sleep with her. Anyone else, darling, but not her."

"Of course not. I'll be in no condition to."

She giggled, and the strain passed from her face. We walked on to the pub with our arms round each others' waists; never before had I felt so free, so free of tension and worry and shame. The pub, an old building with low ceilings and oak beams and thick walls and mullioned windows, was an agreeable place to sit in, listening to the warm burr of Dorset and drinking a brown ale which, unlike most Southern beers had a good malty taste. When we reached the third round, I offered Alice a cigarette.

"No, darling."

"I have plenty."

"I don't want one. I don't believe I'll ever want one again. I have you and tonight and another three days and we have a house and plenty to eat and drink and my nerves aren't on edge. It's not important enough for me to think about and yet it is, because it's a symbol. You have one if you want, dearest. But if my nerves need soothing I'll - " She whispered in my ear.

I felt as if I'd been taken by the scruff of the neck and dropped through a sky of hands and each hand Alice's, slowing me down gradually until I was down in the pub again, dizzy with exhilaration, looking into Alice's dark blue eyes. I couldn't say anything; the moment was too enormous. I had discovered what love was like, I had discovered not, as before, its likeness to other people's but what made it different from other people's. When I looked at her I knew that here was all the love I'd ever get; I'd drawn my ration. It would have been better if she'd been ten years younger and had money of her own, just as life would be more agreeable if the rivers ran beer and the trees grew ham sandwiches. I was past being sensible.

The notion that there is only one woman to suit a man may appear foolishly romantic. All I know is this: there wasn't any other woman with whom I could be happy. There wasn't any obsessive compulsion towards each other, nor was our love efficient, an exact matching of virtues and defects. When I say that she suited me I use the word in the Yorkshire sense too, meaning pleased with, delighted about: Ah'm right suited wi' thee, lass was a statement I made entirely without facetiousness, it expressed something I couldn't say in any other language.

That night, and the nights that followed, I learned all about a woman's body and my own - all that I'll ever know, for now, as far as I'm concerned, there are no more women, only friendly strangers with the appearance and functions of women. Whenever I make love now, I feel as if I were one of the characters in a magazine advertisement. You know the kind - a big room and everything in it brand new and lithographer's sunbeams pouring through the window. The girl in the bed is, as they put it in the song, as pink and as soft as a nursery. She looks scarcely old enough to be married, but she has a wedding ring to prove it. The husband generally has a smooth monkeyish face with round eyes and a long upper lip and a few wrinkles on his forehead. The last items are, together with his crew cut, simple ways of indicating sex. They both look very clean - but too clean, as if they were made of something hard and shiny that could be washed down like bathroom tiles. They need more sleep in their eyes, they need at least a little rumpling and staleness, just as the room needs at least a small crack in the plaster and a set of false teeth in a glass, and the sunbeams a suggestion of that dust which, whether we come from it or not, we all eat a peck of before we die. My wife and I aren't exactly facsimiles of that couple, of course, but we belong to the same world; and what happens two or three times a week between the fine linen sheets in the front bedroom of our cosy little cottage on Linnet Road is, I feel sure, exactly what has just happened to the couple in the advertisement. Not that I don't enjoy it; it's decent and wholesome and satisfying. But what Alice and I enjoyed together was something no one else could enjoy. There was no restraint, no shame, no normal or abnormal in that cramped double bed in the room with the dormer window or lying naked in the little cove nearby or running through the honeysuckle-heavy woods and the sunken lanes overgrown with trees and bushes into dark hot tunnels. We stopped smoking: it was part of the heightened perception we shared those four days. Anything that would have dulled that perception or have smothered even the smallest fragment of time was unthinkable. For, although we planned a lifetime together, we instinctively behaved as if we were meeting for the last time.

She cried all the way in to Dorchester. I held her tightly, her face against mine; I remember the smell of her hair, brine and olives and sweat. We hardly spoke; I kept staring outside at the rolling downs, at the wheat that seemed to have the dark glitter of pyrites, at the stretches of heath as theatrically bleak as the farmland was theatrically opulent, taking in great gulps of scenery like brandy against my mounting guilt and emptiness.

As we walked into the station she said suddenly: "I wish you'd kill me." The words were made shocking by her matter-of-fact tone.

" Kill you?"

"If you wanted to now, I'd let you." Her colour was patchy under the tan. "You've made me so happy that I can't imagine living for one second without you. I can't really imagine the moment when I'll be alone in the compartment ... I suppose people who are going to be hanged don't really believe it until they're standing on the trap - "