John Braine - Room at the Top

After two rums I moved into the Lounge next door. There were no vacant seats in the Bar and my legs were aching, but that wasn't the reason for my going there. The true reason was sitting alone near the entrance; as soon as I saw her I discovered that she was the one thing necessary to round the evening off, the one drug that I hadn't tried.

She was about twenty, with frizzy blonde hair and small bones; she wasn't bad-looking, but her face had a quality of inadequacy, as if there hadn't been enough flesh available to make a good job of her femininity. When she saw me looking at her, she smiled. I didn't like it very much when she smiled; the pale flesh seemed as though it were going to split. But one hasn't to be too choosy about pick-ups; they're not so easy to come by in peacetime as the respectable would suppose. And there was something about her that suddenly prodded to life a side of me that I thought had been dead for years, a lust that was more than half curiosity, a sly, sniggering desire to see what she was like under her clothes.

I sat down beside her. "I'm not squeezing you, am I?"

She giggled. "There's plenty of room."

I offered her a cigarette.

"Thank you very much," she said. "Oh, what a lovely case." She stroked the silver, her long thin fingers with their too curved red nails brushing mine. "You don't come from round here, do you?"

"Dufton. I'm a traveller."

"What in?"

"Ladies' underwear," I said. When she laughed I noticed that her upper teeth were scored horizontally with a brown line of decay.

"You're a devil," she said. "Will you give me a free sample?"

"If you're a good girl," I said. "Will you have a drink with me?"

"IPA, please."

"You don't want beer," I said. "How about something short? I've sold thousands of pairs of knickers this week."

"You're cheeky," she said; but she had a gin-and-it and another and another and then a brandy, and soon we were touching each other lightly all the time, coming closer and closer together and yet farther and farther apart; we were, I saw in a moment of clarity before brandy and lust closed over my head, only touching ourselves. But at least I wasn't thinking of Alice. She wasn't crawling round Corby Lane now with her scalp in tatters over her face. She hadn't been born, there had never been any such person; and there was no Joe Lampton, only a commercial traveller from Dufton having a jolly evening with a hot piece of stuff.

I think that it was about half past eight when I was aware of a nasty silence over the room. I looked up; a young man was standing scowling over us. He had the sort of face that one's always seeing in the yellow press - staring-eyed, mousy, the features cramped and shapeless and the mouth loose. He was wearing a light blue double-breasted suit that was so dashingly draped as to look décolleté and he had a blue rayon tie of an oddly slimy-looking texture. At that moment he was enjoying what a thousand films and magazines had assured him to be righteous anger: His Girl had been Untrue.

"Come along," he said to her. "Come along, Mavis."

"Oh go away," she said. "We were all right until you came."

She took out her compact and began to powder her nose. He grabbed her hands. "Bloody well stop that," he said. "I couldn't help being late, see? I was working over."

I'd been measuring him up, wondering whether or not to leave her to him. I wasn't so drunk that I wanted to be beaten up in a Birmingham Road pub. But he was no Garth: he was as tall as me, but his shoulders were all padding and he had a look of softness about him; he was the type whose bones never seem to harden.

"Leave her alone," I said.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Jack Wales."

"Never heard of you."

"I don't expect that you have." I stood up. "You heard what I said." My hand groped about on the table independently of me until it found an empty beer glass. There wasn't a sound in the room. There was a decently dowdy-looking middle-aged couple at the next table who looked frightened. The man was small and skinny and the woman had pale horn-rimmed spectacles and a little button of a mouth. I remember feeling rather sorry for them, and an anger as smooth and cold and potentially as jagged and murderous as the beer glass started to grow inside me.

"Take your hands off her." I lifted the beer glass as if to strike it against the table. His hand loosened and she pulled her wrist away. The compact dropped, and a little cloud of powder floated up from it. He turned and went out without a word. The ordinary noises of the pub began again, the incident obliterated as quickly as it had begun.

"He's not my boy friend really, Jack," she said. "I'm sick of him. Thinks he owns me just because I've been out with him a time or two."

"He's introduced us, anyway," I said. "Mavis. It suits you, darling."

She stroked my hand. "You say that nicely," she said.

"It's easy to say things nicely to you."

"You're the best-looking boy I've ever met. And you have lovely clothes." She felt the texture of my suit. It was new, a mid-grey hopsack made from a roll of cloth that Alice had given me five months ago. "I work in a mill, I know good cloth."

"If you like it, Mavis, I'll never wear anything else," I said. My words were beginning to slur. "I feel so happy with you, you're so gentle and bright and beautiful - " I went into the old routine, mixing scraps of poetry, names of songs, bits of autobiography, binding it all with the golden syrup of flattery. It wasn't necessary. I well knew; a skinful of shorts, a thousand lungfuls of nicotine, and ordinary good manners, were enough to get me what I wanted; but I had to have my sex dressed up now, I was forced to tone down the raw rhythms of copulation, to make the inevitable five or ten minutes of shuddering lunacy a little more civilised, to give sex a nodding acquaintance with kindness and tenderness.

"Let me buy the drinks," she said after we'd had two more.

"That's all right," I said.

"You've spent pounds, I know you have. I'm not one of those girls who's just out for what she can get, Jack. If I like a boy, I don't care if he can only afford tea. I earn good money. I took home six pounds last week."

I felt the tears coming to my eyes. "Six pounds," I said. "That's very good money, Mavis. You'll be able to save for your bottom drawer."

"You've got to find the chap first," she said. She fumbled in her handbag. It was a large one of black patent leather, with diamanté initials. There was the usual litter of powder and lipstick and cotton and handkerchiefs and cigarettes and matches and photos inside it. She slid a ten-shilling note into my hand. "This is on me, love," she said. The warm Northern voice and the sight of the open handbag gave me an intolerable feeling of loneliness. I wanted to put my head between the sharp little breasts and shut out the cruel world in which every action had consequences.

I ordered a bottle of IPA and a gin-and-it. Time was beginning to move too quickly, to slither helplessly away; each minute I looked at my watch it was ten minutes later; I knew that I'd only that minute met Mavis, but that minute was anything up to a year ago; as I drank the sharp summer-smelling beer the floor started to move again. Then every impression possible for one man to undergo all gathered together from nowhere like a crowd at the scene of an accident and yelled to be let in: time dancing, time with clay on its hobnailed boots, the new taste of the beer and the old taste of brandy and rum and fish and cornflour and tobacco and soot and wool scourings and Mavis's sweat that had something not quite healthy about it and her powder and lipstick - chalk, orris root, pear drops - and the hot hand of brandy steadying me again, and just as it seemed that there wasn't to be any other place in the world but the long room with the green art moderne chairs and glass-topped tables, we were out in the street with our arms around each other's waists and turning in and out of narrow streets and alleys and courts and patches of waste ground and over a footbridge with engines clanging together aimlessly in the cold below as if slapping themselves to keep warm, and then were in a corner of a woodyard in a little cave of piled timber; I took myself away from my body, which performed all the actions she expected from it. She clung to it after the scalding trembling moment of fusion as if it were human, kissing its drunken face and putting its hands against her breasts.