John Braine - Room at the Top

Or had she gone there in an attempt to recapture the decent and wholesome happiness we shared once when I was nearly a year younger and fully ten years more innocent? More gins had been called upon to assist her nearer towards whichever stage of illusion she wished for, and then she'd started to sing or to swear or to fall flat upon her face or all three, and Bert, who kept a respectable house, had persuaded her to leave. She drove up St. Clair Road again, then along the narrow switchback of Sparrow Hill Road; but she couldn't exorcise my presence by stopping at the old brick works. And she still couldn't go home. If she pressed the accelerator down still harder, she could travel out of herself - I was beside her in the car now, she was approaching that double bend which only a racing car could take at over twenty -

"What a damned awful way to die," Teddy said.

"I expected it," Joe Lampton said soberly. "She drove like a maniac. It doesn't make it any the less tragic, though." I didn't like Joe Lampton. He was a sensible young accountant with a neatly pressed blue suit and a stiff white collar. He always said and did the correct thing and never embarrassed anyone with an unseemly display of emotion. Why, he even made a roll in the hay with a pretty little teen-ager pay dividends. I hated Joe Lampton, but he looked and sounded very sure of himself sitting at my desk in my skin; he'd come to stay, this was no flying visit.

"Alice wasn't perfect," Joe Lampton said. "But who is? She was a jolly good sort, and I'm going to miss her very much." He shook his handsome dignified head slowly. That meant that a moral exordium was on the way. "I enjoy a drink myself, but no one in charge of a car should be allowed into a pub. It's lucky she killed only herself. My God, only yesterday she was alive and cheerful, and then, all in a second - "

"A second?" Teddy said. "She was still alive when the ambulance came. She didn't die until eight o'clock."

"Jesus Christ," I said. "Jesus Christ." I turned on Teddy fiercely. "Who told you? Who told you?"

"My cousin works at Warley Hospital," he said. "Turned me up a bit when I heard about it. She was crawling round the road when a farm labourer found her. She was scalped and the steering-column - "

I half ran out of the office and went into the lavatory. But the w.c. door was locked, and it was nearly ten minutes before it opened and one of the Health Department juniors came out looking sheepish and leaving the compartment full of tobacco smoke. I locked the door and sat on the w.c. seat with my head between my hands, those gentle loving hands that had so often caressed what was, because of the treachery in the brain in the head between the hands, a lump of raw meat with the bones sticking through.

At twelve o'clock I told Teddy that I was sick. I don't know what I did till then; I hope that I had at least the decency to make a lot of mistakes checking the accounts. I stood about at the station end of Market Street for about ten minutes, then caught a bus to Leddersford. I couldn't eat any lunch, and I couldn't stay in Warley, and I couldn't face the Thompsons. They were sure to talk about her, and then Joe Lampton would take possession of me again. Joe Lampton Export Model Mark IA warranted free of rust, flaws, cracks, dust or pity; as long as I was in the bus I was safe. I tried to make my mind a blank as it speeded up on the main road; a stationer's, a draper's, a tobacconist's, a cricket field, a little girl pulled along by an Alsatian, an old woman wincing away from the Alsatian, who only wanted to lick her face anyway. Then there were fields and cows and narrow roads wriggling like tapeworms into the new Council estate. But Alice had been killed, and what I saw was the components of a huge machine that now only functioned out of bravado: it had been designed and manufactured for one purpose, to kill Alice. That purpose was accomplished; it should have been allowed to run down and then stop, the driver asleep at the wheel, the passengers sitting docilely with their mouths wide open, waiting for the bus to fly away, the estate left unfinished, the shops shuttered and overrun with rats, the unmilked cows lowing in agony with swollen udders, the dogs and cats running wild and bloody-mouthed, and then a great storm to scour the whole dirty earth down to clean rock and flame. I licked my dry lips, looking round the bus at the other passengers, sleek, rosy, whole, stinking of food and tobacco and sleep; I closed my eyes as a big sickness came over me. I was cold and trembling and on the point of vomiting, but it was more than that. It was an attack of the truth: I saw quite clearly that there were no dreams and no mercy left in the world, nothing but a storm of violence.

I sat with my hands clasped tightly, waiting for the next blow. It didn't come; so when the bus reached Leddersford I went into the first pub that I saw.

It was an old building with an atmosphere of damp plaster and dusty plush; the front door opened directly into the saloon bar. As I opened it, the noise and light from the street outside was cut off. There were a lot of people at the bar, talking in subdued voices. I ordered a rum and a half of bitter, and stood at the bar staring at the pictures which were hung round the walls and on the staircase leading to the Ladies'; they were all battle scenes, rather pleasant coloured prints with energetic marionettes waving swords with red paint on the tips, firing muskets which each discharged one round puff of white smoke, planting their standards on little cone-shaped hills above the perfectly flat battlefield, advancing relentlessly in perfect parade-ground formation and, occasionally, dying very stiffly with their left hand clutching their bosoms and their right hand beckoning their comrades on to victory. The beer tasted like water after the rum, and for a moment I was nauseated, and couldn't face the idea of having another drink. Then I felt the first tiny glow of warmth in my belly and ordered another; the glow increased until, at the fourth or the fifth, a slatternly happiness sidled up to me: I had eight hundred in the bank, I was going to be an executive with an expense account, I was going to marry the boss's daughter, I was clever and virile and handsome, a Prince Charming from Dufton, every obstacle had been magically cleared from my path -

Every obstacle? That meant Alice. That wasn't magic. How long must she have crawled round in her own blood in the dark? Where was I now? There was Dufton, there was Cardington, there was Compton Bassett, there was Cologne and Hamburg and Essen from the air, there was the wine-growing country of Bavaria, there was Berlin and the pale schoolgirls and their mothers. Five Woodbines for the mother, ten for the daughter. And Dufton again, then Warley, only a year ago. I should have stayed in the place where I was born, and then Alice would be walking round Warley now with her hair shining in the sun or lying on the divan at home reading a play for the Selection Committee or eating chicken and salad if it were the season for salad. I put my hand to my head.

"You ill?" the landlord asked. He had a doughy, expressionless face and a gratingly heavy voice. Up to that moment he'd been talking about football to a knot of his cronies. Now, the wheels of whatever passed for his intelligence creaking, he turned his attention to me. I took my hand away from my head and ordered a brandy. He didn't move to serve me.

"I said, Are - you - ill?"

"Uh?"

"Are you ill?"

"Of course not. I asked for a brandy."

Everybody had stopped talking and were devouring me with glittering eyes, hoping that there'd be a fight and that I'd get my face bashed in; there was nothing personal about it, it's simply that, at any given moment, the majority of people are bored stiff. I glanced round the room and saw that it wasn't a pub for casuals; it was a betting-slip and pansy pub (there were three of them next to me now, standing out like sore teeth among the surrounding roughs).