It’s a Battlefield (4 page)

‘We are having trouble with the bathroom.'

‘Ah.'

‘How I envy you young unmarried men,' And it was true: Conder the married man with whooping cough in the new house and a defective bath and a wife who wanted him to be in bed at eleven envied the independence of the young compositor, envied it with such bitter knowledge of his own lot that in a few hours' time he would be himself young and independent, sowing his wild oats, twirling his umbrella down Piccadilly or across the Park, accosted by women, but they never got him beyond the doors of their flats, the entrances to their hotels, for on the threshold of enjoyment Conder, the revolutionary, whose vitality must not be weakened by enjoyment, or Conder, the married man, repelled him. Conder walked away along a passage which flashed with distorting mirrors.

*

The clock in the high tower struck six-thirty, and the siren cried through the dusk. No one responded; overtime was being worked in the match factory off Battersea Rise, but the siren, which was connected electrically with the clock, screamed on for a minute and a half while a hundred blue-and-white matchboxes jumped from the machines on to a great moving stair which drew them with slow solemnity, as if they were small coffins in a crematorium, to the blast of heat in the drying chamber. The hundred and fifty girls in the machine-room worked with the regularity of a blood beat; a hand to the left, a hand to the right, the pressure of a foot; a damp box flew out, turned in the air, and fell on the moving stair. It was impossible to hear the boxes falling, or a voice speaking, because of the noise of the machines, the machines in the hall, the machines in the cellar where tree trunks uncurled into thin strips of wood, the machines in the room above, where on a revolving band the pink-headed matches marched fifty deep up towards the ceiling, down towards the sulphur vats.

Kay Rimmer moved a hand to the left, a hand to the right, pressed down her foot, and winked her left eye. The girl opposite winked twice. Between the spitting of the machines, before the stair could move a foot away, the message passed. ‘Hunting tonight?' ‘No, the curse.'

Two men halted for a moment by the machines; a mouth opened in a shriek which could be heard as a faint whisper: ‘From here to the drying,' but the last word was buried by the crash of sound too deep for recognition. The manager and the visitor passed out of sight, and the eyebrows flashed messages up and down the machines. ‘Would you have him?' ‘Not if he paid me.'

A hand to the left, a hand to the right, the pressure of a foot.

In the courtyard the manager pointed. ‘That's Block A. The new employees go there for the simplest processes. Then if they work well they move to Block B, and so to Block C. Everyone in Block C is a skilled employee. Any serious mistake and they are moved back to Block B.'

‘I suppose they have more pay,' the visitor said.

‘And other privileges. A quarter of an hour longer at lunch time. The use of the concert-room.'

A hand to the left, a hand to the right, a pressure of the foot. All down the machine-room in Block C the eyelids flickered up and down; silent conversations passing with ease the barrier of noise. ‘Pictures?' ‘How's your boy?' ‘I'm going out tonight.' A hundred and fifty match-boxes were carried towards the drying chamber.

‘Beautiful food in the canteen. The same food is served to the management.'

‘Millions of match-boxes a month,' the visitor said. ‘It's wonderful when you think of it.'

‘We even have our own hospital. Of course, there are accidents occasionally. One can't avoid them. Carelessness or stupidity . . .'

A hand to the left, a hand to the right, the foot pressed down. A finger sliced off so cleanly at the knuckle that it might never have been, a foot crushed between opposed revolving wheels. ‘It never hurt her. She suffered nothing. Fainted at the sight of the blood.' ‘So brave. She chatted all the way, carried on the stretcher to the operating-room.' Sickness benefit; half wages; incapacity; the management regrets. Between the line of machines the girls stood with tinted lips and waved hair, fluttering an eyelid, unable to talk because of the noise, thinking of boys and pictures and film stars: Norma, Greta, Marlene, Kay. Between death and disfigurement, unemployment and the streets, between the cog-wheels and the shafting, the girls stood, as the hands of the clock moved round from eight in the morning until one (milk and biscuits at eleven) and then the long drag to six.

Two hundred match-boxes moved upwards to the drying-room; the hands of the clock pointed to five minutes to seven. Greta put a hand to the left, Norma a hand to the right, Marlene pressed down her foot, Kay Rimmer tried to draw her own image in the dusty stale air, head tilted with a lazy sensuous faint desire, orange lips a little parted. The clock struck and every machine was immediately stilled. The matches fifty deep stayed in mid circle, the electric lights flickered to half strength, and the girls ran to the entrance and the stairs. Each employee in Block C had earned ninepence overtime.

In the cloakroom Norma put on her hat, Greta brushed her hair, Marlene made up her face. Norma said: ‘Where are you going tonight, Kay?'

‘Party meeting,' Kay said.

‘How filthy,' Greta said. Kay Rimmer smiled. She could afford to smile; she was going where there would be fifty men to every woman; Greta would spend the evening with one boy at a cinema, Norma at a church meeting with a few pale men from a choir; art, politics, the church, Kay Rimmer had tried them all.

‘You'll never meet anyone at those meetings,' Norma said. Kay Rimmer tested the name ‘Jules' on her tongue. All down the long passage to the gate, with a confident unconscious smile, she let fall a succession of names, Terry, Herbert, Arthur, Joe; she welcomed the sound of any man's name with happiness, curiosity, and a profound ignorance. Peter, Bill, Ginger, Frank.

The name
DROVER
in great letters faced her from a poster at the gates and happiness, excitement and expectation left her; the name of the man she had seen for three years at every breakfast as he cut the loaf of bread or stirred his cup of tea, the man her sister had married, blew out at her from the crumpled paper. She read the poster twice: ‘Drover's Appeal Fails.' I ought to go back to Milly, she thought. I oughtn't to go to the meeting. Peter, Bill, Ginger, Frank. She stood on the pavement and rubbed the kerb with her foot. Terry, Herbert, Arthur, Joe. She had met them all with Drover. I must go home. Milly will be desperate. But another name fell into the balance, ‘Mr Surrogate'.

Milly never liked Jim taking me to the meetings. Milly loved him. Milly was jealous. A cold wind swept the pavement, bearing a scrap of silver paper from a chocolate box across the lamplight. Milly loved him. Kay Rimmer hugged herself for warmth and thought of love, her orange lips parted, her sister's misery fighting in her face with excitement, expectation, the touch of a man in darkness. Of course I must go home, but she dropped the last name, ‘Jules', softly and secretively.

In the shop windows where a light still burned, her face, as she quickly passed, was momentarily reflected across the bedroom slippers and the ready-cooked meats, fierce in the defence of happiness. There was ferocity even in her tread, light and quick, like an animal pacing the cave-mouth in protection of its young. Milly loves him. But she flashed to the help of her happiness breathing with weak trust in the darkness. The poster means nothing at all. They'll reprieve him. He isn't a murderer.

At the end of the street a man was waiting; she thought at first, because he was in shadow, that he was a stranger. Then she thought that he might be Jules. When she was twenty yards away she recognized Jim Drover's brother. She watched him with enmity as he stood in his dark clothes, one thin hand holding an attaché case; she knew that he was waiting for her.

‘You've seen it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘I've got a meeting, Conrad.' Hopelessly happiness cried to her, gaiety and amusement. She said weakly: ‘I suppose I ought to go home.'

‘Is Milly alone?'

‘Yes.'

He said: ‘I don't see why you need go home. I'll go. You don't know my brother as I did. Milly and I can talk.' He leant against a shop front and behind him she saw disappearing into a dim interior a long avenue of second-hand coats. ‘I was at the court all day.' She looked at him quickly, for the thought had come to her: he is going to cry. People will stop and stare at us. But his face was no whiter than it always was; the nerves had twitched in just that way as long as she had known him. Pale, shabby, tightly strung, he had advanced from post to post in his insurance office with the bearing of a man waiting to be discharged. While she watched him she lost the sense of his words and she had no idea of his meaning when he said: ‘A stupid joke.' He asked her: ‘Have you got people to sign the petition?'

She repeated ‘Petition' and he became nervously angry, clasping his attaché case. ‘Something's got to be done. There's to be a petition.'

She explained: ‘But I couldn't ask people at the works. I couldn't let them know it was Milly's husband.' With pale asperity he prepared a dagger thrust: ‘You won't do a little thing,' but her appearance daunted him. Behind her were all the machines of the factory. With orange lips and waved hair she fought their uniformity and grey steel, but she was as one with them as a frivolous dash of bright paint on a shafting. ‘The manager wouldn't like it. He'd sack me when he got a chance.'

It was not cowardice but realism that spoke. ‘What's the use of a dozen names? One must live. It's different with you.' She told him gently how different. He was a chief clerk, indispensable to the office; they couldn't just go out into the streets and get another chief clerk. ‘Anyone can do my job. But you,' she considered the dark coat, the stiff collar, the old-young face, with pride and contempt, as much as to say, it's not everyone who could be like you, and it's not everyone who'd want to be, ‘you've got brains.'

They flattened themselves against the shop to let the factory girls go by, and behind them the second-hand coats, the dingy blouses shook with the shopkeeper's approach. Conrad Drover said grudgingly. ‘It's lucky someone's got the brains.' She could not have told from his voice how he longed that it might be someone else. Brains had only meant that he must work harder in the elementary school and suffer more at the secondary school than those born free of them. At night he could still hear the malicious chorus telling him that he was a favourite of the masters, mocking him for the pretentious name that his parents had fastened on him, like a badge of brains since birth. Brains, like a fierce heat, had turned the world to a desert round him, and across the sands in the occasional mirage he saw the stupid crowds, playing, laughing, and without thought enjoying the tenderness, the compassion, the companionship of love.

‘Now tell me: do you want to buy a coat or a blouse or a pair of trousers? Fine plus-four suit for twenty-five shillings. You don't need to go to Savile Row to do your shopping.' The avenue of clothes still quivered behind him.

‘No, no,' Conrad Drover said. ‘I don't want anything.'

‘Well then, tell me: do you think it's fair blocking up my shop talking to your girl? I've got to make a living, haven't I? Well now, tell me . . .'

‘Come away,' Kay said, but he stood hesitating while he wondered whether the dealer was right, it wasn't fair; he ought to buy a tie or a pair of socks, something cheap which he could afford.

‘Oh, no. You wait a moment and tell me . . .'

‘Shut your mouth,' Kay Rimmer said, taking Conrad by the arm and drawing him a little way down the street.

*

Sacrifice, Mr Surrogate thought, as he stared from the window of his bare and tasteful room into the wide blue pool of the Bloomsbury square. The plane trees spread pale palms in the lamplight, and the postman went knocking from door to door. Sacrifice. Mr Surrogate strode to the door and back again to the window, pausing for a moment at the mirror over the Adam mantel to catch himself warily unaware, plump and fair, his hair grey over the ears, his mouth a little too resolute. But he corrected that, self-conscious for a moment when he caught the insolent Tartar eyes of Lenin in the plaster bust. Comrades, one man must die for the people. We accept Comrade Drover's sacrifice, knowing, knowing – back to the window, a turn on the heel, and again the bourgeois face with its insolent stare.

There was a knock on the door. It was cautiously opened and a hand slipped a letter through on to the sideboard. ‘Thank you, Davis, thank you.'

‘It's gone seven, sir.'

‘Thank you, Davis, I am quite aware of the time.' Comrades, Mr Surrogate began again. Comrades, we must not be daunted; no sacrifice is too great. . . . He stopped again and regarded nervously the involved beautiful unintelligible handwriting. He opened the envelope reluctantly and deciphered with difficulty the invitation to dinner which lay, like a bare white egg, in an intricate oriental nest of lettering. Caroline is curious about Drover, he thought. He never gave the surface value to an invitation. At the heart of his elaborate conceit lay an extravagant humility.

His inclination was to refuse, but he knew that he would accept, that he would suffer the hours of martyrdom, sitting in front of his dead wife's pictures which hung on every wall, the exquisite stylized landscapes, the green populous vistas which had emerged so simply and certainly from her malicious cantankerous brain. During a long, faithful and unhappy marriage they had exposed each other to Caroline Bury with a complete lack of reticence, and now to visit Caroline was to expose himself again. ‘Sacrifice.' There were occasions of brutal insight when she recognized the cause of his philosophy and his politics; his inability to conceal anything had humiliated him so often that he had needed to form a philosophy of humiliation, to found his career on self-exposure. ‘Be humble that you may be exalted,' and from the depth of humility he would spring refreshed to the height of pride.