John Braine - Room at the Top

I slowed down going past the village green. "There's a toothsome juvenile for you," I said. It was the black-haired girl who'd asked me the time on my first day in Cumley.

"Oh my," Roy said, " 'strap me to the mast,' said Ulysses. Almost worth ten years hard, isn't she?"

The girl was sitting on the grass at the roadside reading a magazine. She was wearing slacks and a tight red jersey. She looked up as we passed.

"She's smiling at you, Roy said. "Charles and I will testify on your behalf. Say that everything went black."

"They're like little apples," Charles said wistfully. "It's bloody unfair; the precise age at which that type is worth having is the age when an asinine law says they're inviolate. That girl has now reached her peak. From now on she'll decline rapidly."

I thought of Alice's face raddled by tears and the tired droop of her shoulders as she turned away from me at the station; I felt angry with the girl for being young and unbroken and angry with myself for looking at her.

"You're growing old," I said. "Little girls in cinemas are the next stage."

"Doubtless, doubtless," Charles said. "When I was her age, I wouldn't look at a woman under thirty. Now I won't look at any woman over" - he looked at me sharply - "twenty. Twenty-one at the outside."

"You're a couple of worn-out old lechers," Roy said. "Let's have a bathe before tea and wash away these unclean thoughts. Which is the best place, Joe?"

We were passing the lane which led to the cove where Alice and I had been that morning. It was the best place to swim from; all the other stretches of beach nearby were shingly and exposed. But I couldn't, just then, tolerate the thought of anyone else disturbing my memories of what had taken place there less than four hours since. The cove was our own in a way that, I don't know why the cottage wasn't.

"It's half a mile farther," I said as I drove past the lane.

"Hurry up," said Charles impatiently. "The road's clear."

I put my foot down and drew up a moment later in a flurry of dust on the narrow road by the headland north of Cumley. There was a path leading down to the beach and Charles and Roy snatched up their bathing trunks and started running down it.

"Aren't you coming, Joe?" Roy asked. "There's a spare costume somewhere."

"No, thanks," I said. "I've already bathed."

They went whooping down the path like schoolboys and in scarcely ten minutes I heard them swearing as their bare feet hit the shingles and then there was a sound of splashing. I took another cigar from the box in the back seat, pierced it, lit it carefully, and tried to think about nothing at all, stroking the worn bakelite of the steering wheel for comfort.

It was a good holiday that we had, though. We started each day with strong tea and rum, bathed before breakfast - they discovered our cove for themselves the second day - and ate huge meals. We saw all the sights - the Cerne Giant, Corfe Castle, Cloudshill, and the rest. We also drank a lot of beer; but I suppose that the food and sunshine and fresh air kept us sober. At any rate, the one day that it rained was the day that we got really stinkingly sozzled, starting at the village pub at lunchtime, carrying on in the cottage with bottled beer in the afternoon, and driving out to a roadhouse near Bournemouth in the evening. I don't believe that I've ever drunk so much before: one always tends to exaggerate the amount, but totting it up afterwards we all agreed that it couldn't have been less than twenty pints and half a bottle of gin apiece.

I don't quite know how I drove the car back. Normally we'd have left it and taken a taxi, but Roy hit a Territorial officer in the Gents' and it seemed best to remove ourselves quickly. Roy, a quiet type normally, seemed to become, as Charles said, all Id when he'd had one over the eight. Charles had a rough time with him in the back seat; he was trying for some reason to take off his clothes and he only stopped the attempt when Charles hit him on the jaw. Then he became normal, if you can call alternate fits of weeping and blasphemy normal. I was in that final stage where the mind grasps fully the fact of being drunk, orders the limbs and senses to behave themselves, and finds them obeying seconds too late. The night was steaming with heat like a great animal; you could see it rising from the ground. And the roads were slippery; twice the car shimmied into a long skid, the worst part of which was that though I knew I ought to care whether or not I came out of it alive, I didn't give a damn. I was, in a crazy way, enjoying it.

When we came into Cumley the rain had stopped. There was a smell of wet grass and night-scented stock, and the moon was out, cold and faraway as an owl's hoot.

"God is dead!" Roy suddenly yelled. Then he started blubbering again. "There were two officers. I've just remembered. I hit the wrong one. God forgive me."

"The final stage," Charles said. "Maudlin remorse."

"I wouldn't want to appear inquisitive," I said, "but why did you sock him?"

"He had the M.C.," Roy said.

"You've got the D.T's," I said. "That's no reason to bash the poor devil. They won't give you a medal just because you bust his nose."

"Isn't he a card?" Charles said. "A genuine schizo once he's tiddly. He's brooding because he thinks he deserved a medal and they passed him over. Why, damn it all, I'm the one who ought to have done the bashing. I've killed forty Japs at least, not to mention that Wog I ran over in Calcutta. What thanks have I received for it, what recognition of my devotion to duty and disregard for danger? None at all. Am I bitter? No. Only glad that forty Japs are dead instead of me."

"You don't understand," Roy said. "I was a sergeant. If I'd done whatever it was that that captain had done, they wouldn't have given me an M.C. It would have been an M.M."

"Different brands of courage," Charles said. "Serge and barathea. Don't let it bother you, Sergeant."

"He worries too much," I said.

"That's better than not worrying at all," Charles said, and hiccuped. "What is worrying our friend is unimportant, and his action was childish and futile, even if he'd hit the right person. What matters is that he felt something was wrong and he did something about it."

The car skidded again turning into the lane to the cottage and I was too busy wrenching it into control to answer him. Roy had passed out cold by the time we reached the cottage; when we'd unloosened his collar and put him to bed on the sofa downstairs, Charles returned to the attack.

"You want some supper?" he asked.

"I'm going to bed. The floor won't keep still."

"You'd better eat something, then you won't get alcoholic poisoning."

He went into the kitchen, tripping up twice over his own feet, and came back in a surprisingly short time with a pot of tea and a plate of corned beef sandwiches.

He pulled up a chair opposite me, sitting astride it. "You're not going to marry Alice," he said. He took a huge bite from his sandwich. "Though I'm grateful to her for leaving all this lovely grub behind."

"Who says I'm not going to marry her?"

"I do." He took off his spectacles. Deprived of them, his eyes seemed paler and larger and colder; his round red face wasn't jolly any longer.

"Get this straight," I said. "I love Alice. She loves me. I'm happy with her. Not just in bed either."

"Love? That's a funny word to use. What would your Aunt Emily say if you went to her and said that you loved a married woman ten years older than yourself?" He took a gulp of tea. "She'd vomit, she really would."

"You can't possibly understand. Her husband doesn't come into it. He doesn't love her and she doesn't love him."

"No," Charles said. "Of course not. But he keeps her. You said that she had no money of her own. All that tinned stuff in the larder, that bottle of whisky, that silver cigarette case she gave you - it all came from him."