Key to the Door (46 page)

CHAPTER 22

He remembered how on the long straight street of the housing estate Pauline ditched him one night: “I don't want to go out with you any more. I've got a date with somebody else tomorrow.” Just like that; and even though they'd been getting on each other's nerves, it was still as abrupt as if she'd prodded him with a hatpin or knitting needle.

“Go and get dive-bombed then,” he raged, and walked at a quick pace down the street to catch up Albert Lomax, who had just bid good night to his girl, Dorothy.

“That was quick,” Albert said. “Has she chucked you?”

“Don't be bleddy funny,” Brian retorted. Then: “She has, if you want to know. Not that I'm bothered. We've been getting fed up with each other the last week or two.”

“You've been having too much of it, that's what's wrong,” Albert said soberly. “You've got to lay off now and again, not see owt of each other for a few weeks, then you wain't get so bored.” Exactly what had been in Brian's mind, but neither he nor Pauline were made for the mechanics of sensible separation. Too much passion was involved, and any letting-go would have to come out of hatred, not understanding.

Weekdays had been given to kissing by the back door, or sitting in with old Jack Mullinder over a lugubrious game of darts. Jack was off work now—for good, it looked like—because his foot had broken out again, was giving him jippo, he admitted whenever an evening passed with not much more than a snappy word from him now and again. To Brian it was a house of silence compared to what it had been, no fun with poor old Mullinder trying to nurse his pain without going off his head. He felt sorry for him, as if he were his second father dropped into a cleft of hell, and was moved to weeping one night on his long wind home through the black-out. Nothing could be done except take the foot off, the doctors thought, and that's what it seemed like coming to. It was a miserable lookout when you dwelt on it, what with the war and everything.

On dry days of mid-week he walked with Pauline past the Broad Oak to Strelley fields and they lay on his topcoat behind isolated hedges, making love again and again into an intimate and speechless lassitude. They were blind in such darkness, unable to see except by the touch of hands against each other, which suited Brian down to the ground, though Pauline was sometimes irritated when his solicitude went on too long afterwards. “I can't help it,” he laughed, “if my old man was a rabbit. John I was christened, not Brian—Jack Rabbit to my pals.”

“I don't know about a rabbit,” she said, wiping herself, “but you must a bin born in a boat, if you ask me.”

“It's so bleeding dark,” he said, “I can't see a thing.”

“Stop swearing: wash your mouth out with soap, foulmouth.” The tone and volume of her voice were calmer than the content of her retort, the main fire staying in her eyes, which he could not see. Shocked nevertheless at her reaction to a plain truth, he stood up and took a few paces away as if to make the darkness thicker by being on his own. It certainly was more comfortable, and his rage at her temper went like the matter from a pimple back into his bloodstream and left him calm. But she hadn't finished: “You're allus swearing, and you never stop doing it for my sake. I suppose you think it meks you look big.”

The darkness was lit up, as if he had been smacked in the mouth—like his fight the time they first met. He wanted to walk off without turning towards her to do so—impossible because it was a lunar and dangerous landscape they were in, full of lime-kilns and abandoned pit shafts, wells and outcrop workings where one false step might cripple you for life. So it was better to stay and try argument: ‘“There's nowt wrong wi' swearing. It's just words like any others.”

“It's what they mean, though. You know it is”—not so brittle now she had forced him to argue rather than quarrel. Of course they're different: all words are different. “They're adjectives, I suppose,” he said. “It's all right if you don't mean 'em to be bad.” His back was to her, determined to avoid a row because she was plainly trying to head him into one. “Shall we go? I'd like a pint.”

“Yes,” she answered, “clever dick”—the word “adjective” still ringing in her ear. He shook his mac, as if hoping the damp would drop from it. “We don't want to stay out too long drinking or we wain't see dad before he goes to bed.”

Thank God I'm too young to get married, he told himself, helping her through the hedge. “Well, I'd better make the best of it as well because I'll be in the army in a year—unless I can dodge out of it.” The sky had cleared: “A marvellous night,” he said. “It's a wonder the bombers ain't up, smashing the Jerries.” A year! What a nut to mention it. I'll be eighteen, which is too far off to bother with. It was a mile to the pub and they walked arm-in-arm with only the crunch of their leisurely feet sounding along the lane. When my time comes I'll desert, he thought, rather than leave all this. I'll go on the run in every town round about so's the redcaps wain't know where to find me. There's plenty o' people who'll see me right. Dad, for one. Aunt Ada, for another. Even old Mullinder'll fill my gob with a meal if ever I need it. I don't expect for a minute it's principle as keeps Colin and Dave out of the army either, so much as not wanting to be bossed about and shouted at like dogs. As it is, they keep themselves by night work and spend their nicked dough on women in pubs, having the time of their lives, only dodging back into the black-out shadows when they hear police whistles. They've heard a lot of them in their time, though they never got used to the jitters of them any more than I got used to bombs and the rattle of anti-aircraft guns. It was so bad once when I went to Aunt Ada's to have tea (they lived off the fat of the land, for there was a ham on the table as fat as our Sammy) that when a whistle sounded from the next backyard they couldn't scatter fast enough. No bump came at the door but the whistling went on, low and frightening as if a thousand coppers had surrounded the Meadows and was closing in, but it turned out that the man next door had joined the air-raid wardens and his snotty-nosed kid had got hold of his whistle while he was upstairs having a Sunday afternoon kip with his missis. Everybody laughed when they knew: Colin and Dave bolting out of the house for fear of the coppers when all it was was a kid blowing on his dad's tin whistle.

“Why don't you talk? You don't say a deal these days.”

“I was thinking.” She offered a penny for them, but he wouldn't mention his deserting cousins to her. Not that he thought she'd give them away, but you never knew whether or not she might as a sort of joke mention them to somebody who would: there was a war on and you couldn't be too careful because walls have ears and all that pack of lies. “I was just wondering where the planes were off to, that's all.”

“That ain't much: I'd want ha'penny change.” There was disappointment in her voice: “You never tell me anything”—as if after two years' courting I've got much to keep from her. There was certainly more to his thoughts than he could make into living words, and he often fought battles to try and unroll the pictures and monologues that seemed for ever playing within himself on to his tongue so that she could share them. This happened during the first year they knew each other, when, as if inspired, his mind and tongue would now and again unite and he would make jokes or assume the life of some other person to make her laugh—Churchill, Lord Haw-Haw, or the Xmas Day Speech. But to try at a time when he didn't feel like it was impossible. “I suppose you'd like me to tell you a fairy story,” he responded. “As if you was a school kid.”

“I don't want you to tell me owt,” she said. “I just want you to talk.” They were level with the Broad Oak, but he was too full of rage to turn in, unwilling to enter such packs of noise and faces while their quarrel was on. And Pauline no longer wanted a drink. “If I don't feel like talking, I can't talk,” he replied. “Anyway, we're talking now, aren't we?”

A few feet grew between them, a space of live invisible wires that fused now and again like the flashpan of Dick Turpin's pistol: “No, we aren't talking: we're rowing. We're allus rowing lately, and I tell you I'm fed up on it.”

“It's a lie,” he said, tongue-tied at her list of truths, “you know it is.” He was depressed, bitten by an indefinable blind misery. Maybe she's got the rags on, he thought, and his mood lightened for a moment—until it struck him that she couldn't have. The strong presence of a thousand blacked-out houses of the estate proved itself further by vague noises and smells—petrol, coal-smoke, and the vanishing odour of the fish-and-chip van. A gang on a privet corner kicked a tin-can into the road: it ended near Brian and he took great pleasure in booting it back at full speed, for which thanks were shouted. With a laugh he put his arm tight around Pauline and pulled her close. But her mood had deepened and she shoved him off.

“Come on,” he said happily. “Don't get like that, duck,” and took hold of her again. Had anyone been listening from the shadow of some doorway, he would have heard the perfectly aimed smack of an open hand against an unguarded relaxed face, followed by a gasp of shock and pain: “You sod!” He would then have heard a second smack—as hard and resounding as the first—as Brian slammed her back. “No woman's going to hit me and get away with it,” he called out, for she was already ten yards down and crossing the street to where the Mullinders lived.

At the gate she turned: “You can clear off, bully.”

“Don't worry: I shall”—and heard the back door slam as he went towards a 16 bus stop.

Christ, what a thing to do. But the weekends were wonderful because on a Sunday afternoon they made love in comfort. The Mullinders would be out, visiting mothers or aunts at Cinderhill, Mullinder pushed there on a wheelchair (wife and daughters taking turns at the handle) and making the best of a bad life when meeting any of his pit-mates along the road, braving it with gruff gratitude when one dropped a packet of twenty into his lap. Pauline and Brian were left in the house, it being taken for granted that they would stay together now and maybe even get married when the time came. Brian sensed this but lived so completely in the enjoyable present that it meant little to him. He certainly never thought about getting married—not at seventeen, on the four or five quid knocked up on piece-work. So he was careful not to get her pregnant, put wise on how to avoid it by a pal at work who said: “They're only half a dollar a packet, so you want to use 'em. Cost you a lot more than that if you don't.”

“There's nowt like a bit of hearthrug pie,” he said to Albert, walking along in the darkness. “I'll get none o' that now we've packed each other in. I don't know.” The regret in his voice was plain a mile off: “It was smashing on Sunday afternoon in her house when there was nobody in. Went at it three or four times. Thanks,” he said, to the offer of a cigarette.

“You'll have to get somebody else then,” Albert said. “It's easy done. You ought to come to our club sometime. Lots o' tarts there. It's a Co-op place on Garfield Road. We play darts and draughts and argue politics.”

“Maybe I will,” Brian said, such a club not appearing too silly a place if you could pick up bits o' skirt there. Like a book was all the more interesting if there was a bit of hot love-stuff now and again. “Come up next Wednesday,” Albert said. “Call for me about seven.” To pass the next mile off they asked each other questions on geography. “Can you tell me the names of the States of America?”

Brian could, or most of them, and those he couldn't think of were supplied by Albert. When at school, he'd been surprised to see in a world gazetteer a reference to the nearby village of Wollaton, and from then on he hunted up maps of Nottingham, eager for larger and larger scales, hungry to find clearer marks of his geographical existence. Later he looked at maps in the headmaster's office, pleased at seeing for the first time in his life that the streets he ran about in were important enough to be marked on maps that someone as far away as London could easily be gazing at. Then in a down-town bookshop he saw manuals of street-fighting for sale to such as Home Guards—meaning that every street was also marked and no doubt studied because of its military importance now. One such manual was mouldering away in the bookcase at home—forgotten after his first intense study of it.

The geography game didn't quite last the mile, so Albert broke out into his undulating wail of “The Song of the Steppes,” and when Brian joined in—nothing else to do with such a noise so close—it sounded as if the Red Army was swooping from Matlock Bath and making for Nottingham's centre, where the rich spoils lay. Brian wondered how it seemed to those already in bed. The song was long and continuous, coming from nowhere and going into an even darker nowhere, strong only because it was never-ending—like the Red Army columns that had paralyzed the Germans at Stalingrad. Brian was out of breath, but barrel-chested Albert went on and on, enjoying the power of his worldless song, staring dead-ahead as he walked and wailed as if the sounds automatically hypnotized his brain to make him continue. Brian had known Albert a few months, met him at Edgeworth's Engineering Ltd. in Sneinton, which was his next job after the cardboard factory. Albert there had shown him how to work a capstan lathe, simple when you knew how; later taught him to set one up, which was more difficult; then to sharpen tools, an art Brian hadn't mastered yet. Albert went to night school to learn engineering and math, wasn't exactly an apprentice but had been promised a good and permanent job by Mr. Edgeworth if he showed himself as willing a scholar as a machine-operator. Albert had a flair for setting up a miller, lathe, or drill; could shape metal to any blueprint design, and his skill was always to be relied on; unlike Brian's, which occasionally let him down by a sudden flooding-in of carelessness.