Her Victory (6 page)

She leaned the bicycle against a wall in the middle of the village, but did not have the knack or strength to lift the machine and press the pedal with one foot so as to snap the chain back into place. Hands black with grease, she already felt the effort of pushing the whole way home. Trying again, the bike capsized.

His face was almost touching. ‘You'll never do it like that, duck.'

‘Thanks for telling me.'

‘I'll show you.' Leaning his own slim racer by the wall, he pressed the chain on in a few seconds. ‘It's the
knack
as yer want!'

‘I suppose it is.' She didn't care to encourage his vulgarity, though he seemed nice enough. ‘Thanks, anyway.'

‘Trust a proper cyclist to rescue a lady in distress! I've been to Heanor already this morning.' He stood upright by his bicycle, head bent back as he tapped a map poking from his pocket. ‘To see a pal at work. He broke his arm. Where did you get that old dragon-bike?'

‘Oh, it belonged to my mother before she died.'

‘I'm sorry to hear about that.'

She was amused at his sympathy. ‘That was years ago.'

His foot was on the pedal, as if ready for a race. ‘I'll ride back to Nottingham with you in case the chain comes off again. It is a bit loose.'

She would leave the office and get a bus for Old Lenton to meet him walking out of the factory at five. He had only to look at a broken contraption to know what to do. He tinkered with his fingers, prodded a screwdriver here and there, and applied a spanner till whatever it was slotted back into place and shifted in tune when the motor was switched on and electricity flowed through. The women pampered him, and he took their praise as gospel truth, whereas they were on piece rates and only wanted him to mend their machines straightaway.

At the office she was considered barmy going out with someone who worked in a factory. Her best friend asked if he smelt of grease, then said it was only a joke when she saw Pam's anger. But Pam knew she was incensed only because she herself had wondered whether she ought to pack him in, though she liked him enough to see how daft and snobbish it would be to do so.

He had loved machinery, even before leaving school. His claims of proficiency were true, though he wasn't backwards at boasting where his skills were concerned. He saw the thought in her eyes. ‘You can't blame me, can you? It's all I've got.'

He was more right than he knew, for he treated anyone close to him like a machine, and only those people he had to deal with in business like human beings. When a factory woman told her how smart he was at tackling machines Pam thought it fortunate both for him and the world that he was. She could feel the woman trying to decide what a young man, the spark of everyone's life, saw in her. She wondered herself, and later thought that maybe the girls in the ticket office had been right when they looked amazed at her marrying someone who worked in a factory no matter how good he was at his job.

Behind his sway walk and wide smile, and his opinions which were more overbearing the less he knew about something, he was as insecure as a rat between three traps, and his loud views grew harder to bear the more she realized how disturbed he was at seeing that she believed less and less in his abilities regarding the human side of life. A livelier wife might have made him feel even more uncertain in his ways, but with Pam he was able to further his precarious self-esteem by appearing happier than he really was, in the hope that he would get more out of life, which stance enabled him to abandon the commonplace and devote himself entirely to his ambition.

He gave up his job, rented a workshop, borrowed from the bank and installed machinery. He called it doing his bit for the export trade, saying in one of their arguments that work was his only happiness because he didn't have to think about anything else while doing it. And Pam was content because the more he had to do the less he bothered her.

She kept his accounts, filed insurance cards, typed letters and bills. His trade prospered, and he allowed her to help as if doing her a favour, so that she would have something to pass her otherwise empty time. They discussed all the administration of his business that seemed too tedious for him to manage. Then he hired a secretary, without mentioning it to her, because he thought the work took too much of her time, and that she would feel better without having the job around her neck.

‘That might be true,' she answered, ‘but you ought to have told me you were going to get somebody else.'

He hardly gave her time to finish. ‘I wanted it to be a surprise.'

‘We needn't have got married.'

He looked into her eyes, pilloried by her bitterness, and she was sorry that both were in a situation which could not be remedied without vast damage. His fists curled, as if he would strike, but he went back to the mood of his early days, saying jovially: ‘Don't get like
that
, duck!'

She knew that one day, when Edward was fourteen and old enough not to need her any more, she would leave.

With this in mind she became more confident, able to argue, and sometimes keep him away at night when he came at her with his battering love-making. She saw how he had used her as ruthlessly as he used everyone who came his way, employing the half-conscious tactics of the self-made man. He was unaware of his methods, and laughed with disbelief when they were pointed out. He was one of those mainstays of society whose activities were interesting to watch, as long as you kept to one side. At the same time, she believed there was nothing malicious about him, otherwise the temptation to live with him again might become too great to resist.

Through knowing him, she had grown to see something of what she was like herself, and apart from not altogether liking what she discovered, she did not relish the idea of getting through to herself in such a way. While accepting that it was impossible to know what you were like except through contact with someone else, she would have preferred self-enlightenment to have come from others rather than only from him.

7

Workmen were throwing furniture from a house about to be demolished. Two mildewed armchairs thudded down. A fire shot flames into the raw drizzle. Pam paused on her morning walk. A bus at full speed sent icy air against her, and a current on the rebound brought smoke from the fire that made her eyes run. Furniture coming from the house was too old and gimcrack for anybody to want, but an elderly woman wearing an army greatcoat and a piece of coloured blanket for a headscarf watched each piece as it fell.

The sharp-eyed face of a man showed at the first floor, and he threw a chamber pot, which the totter shook her head at in disgust when it bounced from the padded back of a chair and rolled on to the wood-rubble. A second workman at the window lifted his right thumb: ‘Wait for the next lot!'

He took a cigarette from his overalls and scraped a match down the window frame. He smoked, gazed at the fire, then tugged something across the floor.

Changing her mind as to the value of the chamber pot, the totter asked Pam to guard her barrow and, looking at the ground so as not to trip on a brick or spar, zigzagged to avoid holes and ruts. A man warmed himself at the fire: ‘You'd think she was going to a wedding.'

She wore boots. Rolls of socks and stockings padded her lower legs. Pam wondered whether she herself would soon be like those men and women huddled under the motorway bridge at night. Perhaps the totter once had family and friends, and maybe a house her husband was buying on a mortgage when, after twenty years, she turned wild for no reason, put on several dresses and suits of clothes, and got to the nearest railway station. Who was she to think it would be any different for her?

A crane worked noisily. Pam called, but the woman couldn't hear. Having thought all was clear, the two men at the window got themselves behind the wardrobe and pushed it out.

The woman must have sensed it coming, for she looked, and took a few steps back, and smiled as if thinking she couldn't be close enough. The wardrobe turned on its side and hit a chair, and sprang at her with both mirrored doors flying open. Through the world's noise Pam heard the blow that knocked her down. A bus conductor and the man at the fire scrambled forward, while she ran to a telephone box.

A man inside saw her scared rawboned face when she pulled the door open. ‘Can't you see I haven't finished?'

‘But it's urgent.'

‘Shan't be long.' He pulled the door shut: ‘Well, as I was saying.' He wore a smart homburg hat, and leather gloves, and an overcoat that must certainly have kept him warm. His speech was loud, though not clear enough to make sense. A whiff of cigars and aftershave lingered, and Pam assumed the smart Volvo by the kerb to be his. She had seen him before, had probably passed him on her walks by Queensway or Notting Hill Gate, but remembered the stricken woman, and pulled the door again: ‘Someone's been injured, and I want to get an ambulance.'

‘Why didn't you say so?' He pressed the button, dialled three nines, handed her the receiver, and stepped outside. He looked as if wondering where else he had seen her. When she put the receiver back and came on to the pavement he was driving up the road like the busy man he was, no doubt used to running his own life and maybe those of sufficient others to give him whatever confidence he needed.

When the ambulance and police car arrived she didn't want to go back to the building site and get involved as a witness. They would need her name and address, and if she went to court the case might be reported. She wasn't ready to have George find her and say why the hell don't you come back home?

The woman was carried over the rubble on a stretcher, shouting at the two men through her pain and telling them not to drop her. Smoke and flame against the half demolished house made the scene like that of the blitz she had seen on old news films. The woman's hand gripped the chamber pot. ‘Let's hope the poor old biddy gets compensation,' a man by the fire said.

‘If she don't, she'll get three months in hospital. Just right for the winter. Shouldn't like to be in the next bed, though.'

‘They don't have mixed wards, so you needn't worry about that, Fred.'

She was alarmed that they could laugh at such a tragic event, and decided that, having once done jury duty, she would be a witness if necessary.

8

George got used to running his own life. He no longer needed the confidence she had given him during their early struggles. She wasn't necessary to him anymore, and he released her, but when he realized that her unexpected freedom increased her self-assurance he did all he could to undermine her, where he had never felt the need to before. Arguments became bitter. She resented his new independence, and it seemed that nothing could end their quarrels. He accused her of making him incapable of any sort of work. She wanted to ruin him. Life together had become impossible. All he needed was peace, and she was sorry because she didn't know how to give it to him and herself at the same time. And in any case, why shouldn't
he
give it to
her
?

She went down town two evenings a week to a literature course at the Workers' Educational Association. George stayed late at the office so as to meet her and take her home in the car. He didn't like her going anywhere without him. He made it plain that he didn't understand how she could enjoy herself on her own. There are other people there, she told him. What sort? he wanted to know.

She had seen a poster in the library advertising the course, and thought that the ‘workers' of the title had something to do with Trades Unions. George despised and feared the unions, and laughed at her when she said the classes were run by the
Workers'
Educational Association. He sat back in the armchair, letting his coffee get cold while he told her how on walking into the factory at the age of fifteen he was told that he had to join a union. ‘I don't join anything,' he said, ‘especially when you tell me I've got to.'

He hadn't gone to work to be ordered about by his workmates. If the gaffers issued an instruction, that was different. He argued by the door, until the manager said that if he didn't enrol he would have no job. ‘It isn't my decision. That's the way things are.' The sight of so many machines pulled at his new boots and caused his hands to twitch as if he were trying to struggle out of a dream. He told it in so many words, as he often had and was able to do with something which affected him so profoundly. He certainly hadn't brought half as much discussion to bear where his relationship with her was concerned.

Because he had never forgotten his defeat he made certain that no union members got a look in when he came to setting on men at his firm. If he had been left to choose whether or not to join a union at fifteen he might have thought it a more beneficial institution, but he wasn't that sort. He despised organizations, except the one he had created. The only passionate language she heard was when some stoppage, strike, walk-out or go-slow in another firm prevented vital supplies reaching his own. Components gone astray on the roads or in the post, or delayed at the mill where they were produced, turned him into a promenading wagon of invective that kept her speechless and laughing in turn. His reputation for prompt delivery was threatened, not to mention his living and that of his men, as well as his pride which she suspected mattered most.

As was to be expected, he voted Conservative. It was impossible to live long with a person and not fall in with their habits, and have the same opinions regarding the way the world was organized. But such views had been hers for years before meeting him. If she began to question them now, it was simply because he held them, and because they were the linchpins of so much of his character that she disliked. His taunts about the
Workers
' Educational Association made her uneasy concerning the sort of people she would find there, though because of his attitude she was unable to change her mind about going even if she had wanted to.