John Braine: Room at the Top

I came to Warley on a wet September morning with the sky the grey of Guiseley sandstone. I was alone in the compartment. I remember saying to myself: No more zombies, Joe, no more zombies.

My stomach was rumbling with hunger and the drinks of the night before had left a buzzing in my head and a carbonated-water sensation in my nostrils. On that particular morning even these discomforts added to my pleasure. I was a dissipated traveller - dissipated in a gentlemanly sort of way, looking forward to the hot bath, the hair-of-the-dog, the black coffee and the snooze in the silk dressing gown.

My clothes were my Sunday best: a light grey suit that had cost fourteen guineas, a plain grey tie, plain grey socks, and brown shoes. The shoes were the most expensive I'd ever possessed, with a deep, rich, nearly black lustre. My trench coat and my hat, though, weren't up to the same standard; the coat, after only three months, was badly wrinkled and smelled of rubber, and the hat was faintly discoloured with hair oil and pinched to a sharp point in front.

Later I learned, among other things, never to buy cheap raincoats, to punch the dents out of my hat before I put it away, and not to have my clothes match too exactly in shade and colour. But I looked well enough that morning ten years ago; I hadn't then begun to acquire a middle-aged spread and - whether it sounds sentimental or not - I had a sort of eagerness and lack of disillusion which more than made up for the coat and hat and the ensemble like a uniform. The other evening I found a photo of myself taken shortly after I came to live at Warley. My hair is plastered into a skullcap, my collar doesn't fit, and the knot of my tie, held in place by a hideous pin shaped like a dagger, is far too small. That doesn't matter. For my face is not innocent exactly, but unused. I mean unused by sex, by money, by making friends and influencing people, hardly touched by any of the muck one's forced to wade through to get what one wants.

This was the face that Mrs. Thompson saw. I'd arranged my lodgings through an advertisement in the Warley Courier and hadn't actually seen her yet. But even without the maroon coat and copy of the Queen she'd said I'd recognise her by, I knew immediately who she was; she was exactly what I'd imagined from her thick white handmade writing paper and her near-copper-plate with its Greek e's.

She was waiting by the ticket barrier. I gave up my ticket and turned to her. "Mrs. Thompson?"

She smiled. She had a pale, composed face and dark hair turning grey. The smile was perhaps the result of long practice; she hardly moved her mouth. It came from her eyes, an expression of personal friendliness, not the usual social grimace. "You're Joe Lampton," she said. "I hope you had a pleasant journey." She stood looking at me with a disconcerting steadiness. I suddenly remembered that I should offer my hand.

"I'm glad to meet you," I said, meaning the words. She had cool dry hands and returned my clasp firmly. We went out over a covered footbridge which vibrated as a train went underneath, and then through a long echoing subway. I always feel hemmed in and lost in railway stations and for a moment I was overcome by depression and the buzzing in my head became an ache.

When we were outside I felt better; the rain had diminished to a drizzle and the air tasted fresh and clean with that special smell, like good bread-and-butter, which means that open country is near at hand. The station was at the centre of the eastern quarter of Warley. The effect was as if all the industries of the town had been crammed into one spot. Later I discovered that this segregation was Council policy; if anyone wanted to set up a mill or factory in Warley, it was the east or nowhere.

"This isn't the prettiest part of Warley," Mrs. Thompson said, waving her hand in a gesture which included a big mill, a fish-and-chip shop, and a seedy-looking Commercial Hotel. "It's always like this around stations, I don't know why. Cedric has some theory about it. But, you know, it's rather fascinating. There's a positive maze of streets behind the hotel ..."

"Is it far to Eagle Road?" I asked. "We could get a taxi." There were half a dozen of them in the station yard, their drivers all apparently frozen at their steering wheels.

"That's a good idea," she said. "I feel quite sorry for those poor men. She laughed. "I've never seen any of those taxis in use; they just wait here, day by day and year by year, for fares who never come. I sometimes wonder how they live."

When we were in the taxi she gave me another long look. It was searching but not embarrassing, as cool and dry but as friendly and firm as her handshake; I had the impression of having passed some test. "I'll call you Mr. Lampton if you like," she said, "but I'd rather call you Joe." She spoke without a trace of awkwardness or flirtatiousness; she had now, her attitude implied, settled the whole matter. "And my name is Joan," she added.

"That'll be fine, Joan," I said. And from then on I always used her Christian name; though, oddly enough, I never thought of her as anything else but Mrs. Thompson.

"This is St. Clair Road," she said as the taxi turned up a long steep hill. "We live at the top. It's always T'Top in Warley, though, with a capital T. My husband has some theory about that, too ..."

She spoke very well, I noticed; she had a low but clear voice, with no hint either of the overbuxom vowels of Yorkshire or the plum-in-the-mouth of the Home Counties. I congratulated myself on my good fortune; all too easily she might have been the usual sort of landlady, smelling of washing soda and baking powder, my lodgings might easily have been one of those scruffy little houses by the station - from one Dufton to another. Instead I was going to the Top, into a world that even from my first brief glimpses filled me with excitement: big houses with drives and orchards and manicured hedges, a preparatory school to which the boys would soon return from adventures in Brittany and Brazil and India or at the very least an old castle in Cornwall, expensive cars - Bentleys, Lagondas, Daimlers, Jaguars - parked everywhere in a kind of ostentatious litter as if the district had dropped them at random as evidences of its wealth; and, above all, the wind coming from the moors and the woods on the far horizon.

What impressed me most was Cyprus Avenue. It was broad and straight, and lined with cypresses. The street where I lived in Dufton was called Oak Crescent; it didn't curve one inch and there wasn't even a bush along it. Cyprus Avenue became at that instant a symbol of Warley - it was as if all my life I'd been eating sawdust and thinking it was bread.

Mrs. Thompson put her hand on my knee. I caught a whiff of eau de cologne, the best kind, discreet and aseptic. "We're home, Joe," she said. The house was semi-detached; I'd hoped it wouldn't be. But it was a decent size and built of an expensive-looking biscuit limestone and there was a garage. The paintwork gleamed with newness, the lawn had the texture of moleskin; it was a house that had always had the best of care. Except, strangely enough, for the garage, with its peeling, blistered paint and cracked window.

"Cedric uses it for his oddments," Mrs. Thompson said. She had an uncanny way of answering questions one hadn't asked. "It needs attention but we never seem to get round to it. We disposed of the car when Maurice died. It was his, really; we hadn't the heart to use it somehow.

She opened the door. "He was in the Forces?" I asked.

"A pilot in the RAF. Killed in a silly accident in Canada. He was just twenty-one."

The hall smelled of beeswax and fruit and there was a large copper vase of mimosa on a small oak table. Against the cream-painted walls I could see the faint reflection of the mimosa and the vase, chrome yellow and near-gold; it looked almost too good to be true, like an illustration from Homes and Gardens .