John Braine: Room at the Top

They both talked as if they were in constant contact with the professional theatre. In actuality they knew only a handful of professionals, mostly young people like Roger not long out of the theatre school. And the Thespians occasionally had actors and playwrights visit them as lecturers, mostly down-at-heel nonentities but each with his or her stock of scandal in return for free drinks and, with luck, a substantial supper and bed for the night.

I wasn't aware of these facts till much later, of course; I thought Bob and Eva immensely sophisticated. They gave me the sensation of being in the know, of being close to a wicked, exciting, above all, wealthy world. Beside Cedric and Mrs. Thompson, they seemed very young, not much older than myself, though he was thirty-seven and she was thirty-three and they had two sons.

Bob, it transpired, was in textiles but precisely what he did in textiles I couldn't discover. He'd lived in London and hadn't enjoyed it. "Got damned tired of it," he said. "Don't like being a little fish in a big pond. Glad to come home again, weren't we, Evie?"

I noticed that, when he remembered to, he clipped his words; he's learned that from Ronald Colman, I thought, and felt a little less impressed - it put him on the same level as the millhand with the Alan Ladd deadpan and the millgirl with the Veronica Lake hair style.

"Do you act?" he asked me.

"I have," I said. "There's never been much time for it, though."

"You've a nice profile," Eva said, "and a deep brown voice. It's time we had a new man. This diminutive wreck plays practically all the juvenile leads. I joined the Thespians with the vision of being constantly embraced by handsome young men. And the only man who ever makes love to me is my own husband. I could do that at home."

"That's right," said Bob and gave her a facetious leer. Suddenly I had a mental picture of them in bed together. Eva gave me a cool, appraising look; I wondered if she knew what I was thinking.

"We'll introduce him to Ronnie, and arrange an audition," Mrs. Thompson said briskly.

"Don't introduce him to Alice," Eva said. "She's hunting for fresh meat. She's never really recovered from Young Woodley ."

"Shush," said Mrs. Thompson, "you're giving Joe the wrong impression."

"Are you spoken for, Joe?" Eva asked.

"No one will have me," I said.

"I'll see that you meet some real nice girls."

"Darling," Bob said, "what an awful combination of debauchery and respectability in that phrase. It always strikes me - "

Mrs. Thompson cut in. "No more of that Design for Living humour, Bob Storr." The smile which accompanied it took the sting from the reproof; but I was aware that she was in control of the conversation, that Bob had been steered away from some dangerous corner.

"They'd no business to do that play," Cedric said. "It should be banned to amateurs. Yes, banned . They only put it on to show off their evening dresses, anyway."

"I had a most glamorous evening dress," Eva said.

"Yes," said Bob, "and God only knows how it kept up."

Eva stuck her tongue out at him. Then she stretched her arms above her head and yawned, her eyes on me again.

I hadn't fallen in love with her. And I wasn't sex-obsessed - though there are worse things to be obsessed by. it was simply that I was an unmarried man of twenty-five with normal appetites. If you're hungry and someone's preparing a good meal, you'll naturally angle for an invitation.

The meal was on the table, so to speak, and it was a long time since I'd eaten. After a dance at the Dufton Locarno, to be exact; I couldn't even remember her name. It had been quick and sordid and I hadn't enjoyed it very much. I was beginning to dislike that sort of thing: it was typically Dufton, something I had to outgrow.

Suddenly I had an intuition that I could sleep with Eva. It was a genuine intuition, not simply a rationalisation of my desires. I've always found that intuitions are rarely wrong. Mine work very well because I'm not very fond of abstract thinking and I never expect anyone to be morally superior to myself.

After tea we went to the Thespians in Bob's car. It was a new Austin Eight; it was very difficult to get new cars - particularly small ones - at that time, and it occurred to me that whatever he did in textiles must be outstandingly profitable.

"You go in front with Bob," Eva said to Cedric. "Then you can stretch your legs. And you go in the back, Joan. And you too, Joe darling. Then I can sit on your knee."

"You'd better ask Bob's permission," I said, feeling foolishly pleased.

"Bobby dear, you don't mind if I sit on Joe's knee, do you? You're not going to be jealous and possessive and Victorian, are you?"

"I don't mind if he doesn't. He'll be sorry before the journey's over, I may add. She only appears light and fragile, Joe. I never let her sit on my knee."

"Pay no attention," Eva said. "Joe's strong enough to bear my weight. You like it, don't you, Joe darling?"

I tightened my hands round her waist. "Drive as far as you like, Bob," I said. I could feel the warmth and softness of her distinctly.

The quarter of Warley where the theatre was situated, was, as Mrs. Thompson had said, a positive maze of little streets. They reminded me of Dufton for a moment; but they had a warmth and cheerfulness which Dufton never had.

Perhaps the presence of the theatre helped. Even the tattiest theatre radiates a certain gaiety, it's always as it were announcing the existence of a wider world, of things outside the drabness of washing day and taxes. And of course Warley had never suffered very deeply from the Slump; its eggs were in too many baskets. Three quarters of the working population of Dufton was unemployed in 1930; I remember the streets full of men with faces pasty from bread and margarine and sleeping till noon and their children who wore sneakers in the depth of winter. And that river thick and yellow as pus - the final insult, worse even than Stag Woods, the last bit of unspoiled countryside in Dufton, which the Council cut down and surrounded with barbed wire fences, putting the dank orderliness of a pine plantation in its place. The Slump didn't only make Dufton miserable and broken-spirited while it lasted, though; even when full employment came there was still an atmosphere of poverty and insecurity, a horde of nasty snivelling fears left in the town like bastards in the wake of an invading army.

I wasn't, I may add, bothered about all this from a political point of view. Though if I'd been in a job where I was allowed to take part in politics I might have tried to clear up the mess - eventually, I suppose, from a place like Hampstead, which, believe it or not, is where Dufton's Labour M.P. lives. (I voted for him in 1945, incidentally, partly because Mother and Father would have liked me to, and partly because the Tory candidate was a relative of the Torvers, who owned the biggest firm in Dufton, and I wasn't going to help them in any way - it would have amounted to licking their already well-licked boots.)

Mrs. Thompson's voice broke in upon my thoughts. "When I was a little girl, I always used to imagine the Sire de Maletroit's door was somewhere around here. I loved to wander around, looking for adventures."

The little car smelled of leather and tobacco and scent; my thighs began to register Eva's body again. I was in Warley riding in a car to the theatre; Dufton was far away, Dufton was dead, dead, dead.

"Did you find any adventures?" I asked Mrs. Thompson. My face was against Eva's hair.

"Once a little boy kissed me," she said. "An awful little tough with red hair. He just grabbed me and kissed me. Then he hit me and ran away. I've been attached to the neighbourhood ever since.

"That man," said Bob gravely, "is today the richest in Warley. He has never looked at another woman since that fateful encounter. Everyone thinks him hard and unapproachable, caring only for money and power. But sometimes, sitting alone in his Georgian mansion right at T'Top, he remembers that winsome little girl, half angel and half bird, and tears soften his flinty eyes ... It's rather touching, really, like Dante and Beatrice."