Key to the Door

  There was no fight when he brought the book into the house: “Why,” Seaton said with a laugh, “the little bogger’s gone and bought another book. I don’t know. I wish I was as clever as he is. He beats me at being a scholar.” He gave him fourpence to see the film of the book, and made him tell all about it when he came home. The last creditor of the weekend had been fobbed off with a shilling, and Seaton sat by the fire with a basin of warm tea beside him on the hob. Vera switched off the noisy row of a football match and went back to darning a pair of socks. The light was on, and Arthur could be heard up in the garret-bedroom playing with a hammer.

  “And when Jean Valjean came back to the bridge to keep his promise,” Brian was saying to his father, “Javert worn’t there any longer. And when he looked over the bridge into the water he saw that Javert (Charles Laughton played ’im) had chucked hissen in and was drowned. That’s where the picture ended, but the book goes on for a long time after that. Shall I tell you ’ow the book ends?”

  “’E don’t want to ’ear it,” Vera said, a tone that made Brian uneasy because he couldn’t see whether or not it was meant as a joke: “Do you, dad?”

  “Course I do, my lad.” He finished his story, pronouncing the French names in the imitated accents of the radio serial. Margaret stood before him, her long straight hair framing a mischievous laugh. It wasn’t long before her gaze penetrated: “I could die at our Brian saying them funny words.”

  “If yer do,” Brian said, “I’ll bash yer.”

  “I’ll bash yer back as well, wi’ our dad’s bike pump.” She edged towards the window, to observe in safety his increase of rage. “He thinks ’e can talk French; I can talk it better than ’im.” She gabbled quickly, imitating a foreign language.

  “I’m tellin’ yer,” Brian threatened.

  “Pack it up,” the old man said.

  Margaret stopped a moment, but the more afraid she grew, the more something inside her said he knew she was becoming afraid and that she should continue taunting to prove him wrong. “Booky!” she cried. “Allus reading books.”

  “Leave ’im be,” Vera said to her, “or I’ll start.” Brian felt the flesh at his mouth jumping, such a high twitch he imagined all could see it. Maybe there was something shameful in reading books, in imitating French, in writing, in drawing maps, that he was putting himself beyond their reach. He couldn’t quite grasp or understand the sense of betrayal, though its connection with books had been clearly seen and picked out by the others as his most exposed nerve. He knew he should show indifference to their taunts, but they touched something too deep for that. He stood by the table, a few feet from his tormentor. “Look,” Margaret sang out, “’e’s goin’ ter cry!”

  “I’ll mek yo’ cry if yer don’t shurrup,” he exclaimed. Seaton came out of his huddle by the fire: “Now stop arguin’ or you’ll get sent ter bed out o’ the way. You’re allus on, the pair o’ yer.”

  “She started it,” Brian said bitterly. “She’s allus causin’ trubble.”

  “No, I didn’t, our dad,” Margaret threw back. “It’s ’im: ’e reads all them books till ’e’s daft.” She had heard her parents say this, and it cut into him like a knife.

  Brian ran, sent a couple of quick thumps to her shoulder, and made for the door before his father could get at him. He was in the street, and heard Margaret crying as he went by the window, and his father saying: “Wait till the little sod comes back, then ’e’ll get it.”

  But he didn’t return for two hours, by which time everybody had forgotten his attack, except Margaret herself. The parents were out, and she clenched her fist on the other side of the table, showing it to him menacingly while he cut himself some bread. Soon they were playing Ludo.

  Some mornings Seaton turned a deaf ear to the knocking-up man, and even to Vera when she railed by his side: “Come on, Harold, if you don’t get up you’ll be late. The knocking-up man’s bin a long time ago.”

  At the third nudge he mumbled from the sheets that he wasn’t going. “Don’t be idle,” she said. He went back to sleep with: “I’m not effing-well going in”—meaning that if he was to lose a day’s pay he was certainly intending to get the bliss of a lie-in. Later, downstairs and eating, he would say: “They did without me for six years, they can do without me today. I’m at no effer’s beck and call.”

  “You’ll get the sack,” she said, taking the pots away.

  “Not any more. There’s a war coming. And bring that cup back: I want some more tea.” These days and mornings off weren’t so frequent as to cause alarm. Vera knew he wasn’t idle, and Seaton knew it, too. Work had always been blood in his veins, but since his life-sentence to dole and means-test he didn’t find it so easy to climb down from the scrap-heap. On those days when he hadn’t been to work Brian would come home from school and find him in a blacker, fouler, and more vicious mood than he’d ever got into even on the most desperate of penniless dole days.

  One Monday morning Mr. Jones didn’t turn up at school and word was tom-tommed around that he was ill, had caught a cold going home in the rain on Friday. The lessons went on as before, only more relaxed. Why can’t ’e allus stay away? Brian wondered. There don’t need to be a head teacher. He liked learning, but now and again during the free week he somehow expected Mr. Jones, by a supreme effort of spite, to come, still sick like a phantom from his bed, and scare the happy class merely by showing his gargoyle face above the partition. In any case, after a weekend gang fight Brian was apprehensive lest some parent whose boy had been cut above the eye by a flying stone should have reported the skirmish, and that Mr. Jones would break in during the scripture lesson and read out names from a list he waved in his hand—Brian Seaton being at the head of it.

  He didn’t return the following week either. There was a lack of desperate noisiness in the yard at playtime, which meant more laughter and less nose-bleeders. Brian went early to school one day because it was his turn to enter the temperature and barometric readings on the wall-graph. Several boys were already in the classroom talking softly, and something was obviously up, for two looked as if about to weep, and one actually was making silent and helpless tears as if somebody had blown cigarette smoke into his eyes. This was the prefect, and the others were favourites of Mr. Jones who had never been under his wrath. They tolerated Brian’s company, however, because his examination results were often as high as theirs.

  “What’s up, Johnnoe?” he asked, entering the readings.

  “Mr. Jones’s dead,” Johnson told him.

  The thought gave him pleasure, extended the vista of easy lessons. “Don’t kid me.”

  “He’s dead. I’m not fibbin’.”

  “It’s true,” somebody else said. “It was last night: from pneumonia.” The graph finished, Brian dashed from the room and met Jim Skelton coming into the playground. He hugged him, pulled him into an embrace, and tried to dance.

  “What’s up?” Jim asked. “What’s up, Brian?”

  “Jones ’as snuffed it,” he said. “He’s stone dead and kicked the bucket. Honest-to-God and cut my throat if I tell a lie.”

  Jim’s ginger hair blew in the wind: “You bleeding liar. Stop ’aving me on.”

  Brian laughed: “That’s what I said to ’em, but it’s true. He got pneumonia and kicked it. Johnson just towd me. If yer don’t believe it, go into the classroom and see ’im and ’is pals blubbering.”

  It sank in; they seemed ready to cry at the good news, just as the others were crying at the bad. “Well, owd Brian, it’s about time, ain’t it?” He brought out a packet of marbles. “I’ll share ’em wi’ yer, then we can play.”

  Prayers were said, and collections made for a fitting wreath: Brian dropped a ha’penny into the box. Any boy wishing to attend Mr. Jones’s funeral, it was said, would be given half a day off. Brian measured the pleasure of a break from lessons, and decided it wasn’t worth it. Three teachers went to the funeral, and under the lax discipline there was a subdued air of rejoicing.
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  CHAPTER 15

  Water, gravel, cement, and sand were shovelled and poured into the circling cannonlike mouth of the concrete mixer. With these ingredients well shaken to a grey pulp, the mouth lifted upwards, still turning, stayed there for a time as if wondering whether to let itself go and spit its cement up at the cloudless sky. Then, as if remembering its humble fixed purpose in life, it gave a shudder of regret, and turned its mouth over to the side opposite Brian to pour its cement-guts dutifully into a huge vat.

  He walked on, weighed down by four blue mash-cans of scorching tea. Fresh-planed wood planks slanted from doorways and windows, clean-smelling of resin and tar, giving off newness even more acceptable to the blood that buds in spring. A man, hosing down a stack of bricks, called: “Yo’ got my tea, young ’un?”

  Brian stopped: “What’s yer name then, mate?”

  “Mathews. That’s it, that one there.” Brian had found it hard at first to remember who owned what mash-can. Four or five faces were fixed in his mind when he collected them, but when he got back he stood desperately trying to distinguish between them while at the same time looking as if he’d merely stopped for a moment to watch the progress of work—until a man would call out for his can. Brian would give it to him, and no mistakes were made, though by the time he caught on to the ease of this system he knew most of the faces anyway. Mathews slid the can from his wrist: “I’ll pay yer grandma Friday, tell ’er.”

  “All right, but if she says no, I’ll cum back an’ c’lect it.”

  He looked around. “Will yer now? You’re a bleddy sharp ’un, an’ no mistake.”

  “I’ve got to be, ain’t I?”

  “Wi’ some, I dare say you ’ave. ’Ow much do yo’ get for this, anyway?”

  “Grandma gi’s me a bob on Sat’day.”

  “Not bad for a young ’un.” Brian’s summer holidays passed in fetching and taking their cans, running to Woodhouse for more tea and sugar, and gathering the money on Friday. The boundaries of fields had been trodden in by lorry ruts and brick stacks, and houses had made a rush forward during the spring as if they’d grown with the leaves. Some by the boulevard were almost finished, their tops still grinning like the pink tents of an army or circus—urged on, it seemed, by the totem-poles of factory chimneys in the smoking city behind. The sputtering sound of concrete mixers blended in the hot summer air with the klaxon-throated cockerels from the Nook, and privet hedges by the gate were dusty from powdered concrete.

  The Nook was lighted by electricity, was magically blessed with water-taps so that the bucket-yoke hung as useless as a souvenir on the wash-house wall. The surface of the land was changing, becoming covered like memory, though Brian realized as he walked for the first time along new-laid pavements that the familiar soil underneath would never be difficult to reach. There was even soil under Slab Square in the middle of Nottingham, he realized, but that was harder to believe in.

  With the money he earned he bought novels, dictionaries, and maps, browsed through the threepenny boxes in the basement of a second-hand bookshop downtown. His father hammered a shelf together in the bedroom so that they wouldn’t litter the kitchen. Books fitted into a separate part of his life, divided from reality by the narrow pen-knife cut of a canyon that he could cross and recross with ease. The book world was easily defendable because he was alone in it and without competitors—though it was occasionally threatened by his father’s resentful glare if he had them strewn over the table when supper-time was near and tea called for.

  From where they were working on the foundations, past the singing of trowels as bricks were tapped into position by plumb-line and spirit-level, to where whole walls were complete and surrounded by scaffolding, Brian walked with his final can of tea. He watched a man ascend a swaying ladder with a hod of bricks: he was tall, thin, and agile, blessed with a good sense of balance and seemingly without fear. Someone from the top platform shouted out that he be careful, but he responded by a wave of the arm and by tackling the next few steps without holding on, ending his antic by sending a few swear-words like handclaps into the air. Brian wondered where he’d heard the voice, seen the lanky figure before: stood watching him unload his bricks and talk—friendly despite his swearing—with the bricklayers up top. He took off his cap to scratch his head, then came down the ladder swinging the emptied hod round and round like a mace. One man called to another: “Owd Agger’s a real glutton for wok. I ain’t seen nobody as can goo up ladders like he can, ev yo’?”

  “He wants to be careful, though. I ’eard as a bloke on them new houses near Bilborough broke both his legs last week. He’ll get a lot o’ compo, though.”

  Agger went to a stack of steaming bricks, and Brian decided to go close and greet him: “Ey up, Agger.”

  “Hey up, kid”—only a glance. He was the same, a combination of the words “jaunty” and “gaunt,” and his lined face had the regular features of a hard exterior life without realizing it too much within. He seemed easier, though, relaxed compared to a year ago on the harder, more uncertain battlefield of the Sann-eye tips. His eyes had lost some of their haunted ironic glare, were as agile and good-humoured in fact as his limbs at the climbing of ladders.

  “Don’t yer goo on tips any more?” Brian hoped he wouldn’t crack him one at thinking he and not Bert had stolen his prize rake on that far-off day.

  “Not since I got a job. I di’n’t want to stop all my life on t’ tips, kid. Anyway, my missis passed on.” He spoke as if to an adult, and Brian wondered what his wife’s dying had to do with getting work. He counted twelve bricks being placed on the hod. “So I couldn’t mess about much longer. I knock up above fifty bob a week now, you know.” He felt Agger’s pride: his father was in work, hadn’t been able to get it up to then simply because it wasn’t on the market. Why didn’t Agger say this? “It’s an ’ard life on the tips, kid. This is better graft for us”—was as far as he would go.

  “You said it,” Brian agreed, realizing that he had been taken as a full-time worker and feeling pleased about it. Agger smiled: “They’ve set you on as a mash-lad, ’ave they?” Brian told him the tariff drawn up by his grandmother, and Agger said he’d like a can as well, every morning at ten if he could manage it. “I’ll gi’ yer a tanner on Friday.” He hoisted the bricks on his shoulder, and was halfway up the ladder before Brian turned to deliver his last can of tea.

  Merton didn’t like the idea of leaving the Nook, and said as much to Tom, who came for his fortnight’s rent. Mary laid the open book on the table, four half-crowns and sixpence down the dividing line of the middle. “I thought they were going to leave it a year or two,” he said, “what wi’ tekin’ so much trouble putting in water and electricity.”

  Tom scooped up the money and wrote it in: “It’s the land they want, you see. As far as the railway and over to the woods.”

  “Aye,” Merton grunted, “they’re bleddy gluttons for it.” He stood near the window, a tall thin figure wearing black trousers from an old suit, a brown cardigan, and well-polished laced-up boots. He’d finished his momentous fifty-odd years of work as a blacksmith, and now gave his strength to the garden, to chopping wood and seeing to his pigs and poultry—taking it soft, as he termed it. There was no work for Brian to do; Merton shouldered it himself as if, despite his fifty years’ hard labour, he hadn’t yet worked the violence out of himself, as if he had been put on the earth to attack life rather than live it, to subdue it with hammer and pickaxe, tunnelling his way through until he dropped within sight of the ligher daylight of death. He had a long way to go yet: stood erect, white hair cropped short, his blue eyes steadily taking in the view, an ironic fierce gaze set upon the tatterdemalion camp of wood and bricks and cement bags nearby. He turned back to the cups of tea Mary had poured: “Not that I ’adn’t bin expectin’ it.”

  “It ain’t that black,” Tom said, not sitting down to drink. “They’ve got another house for yer: in the Woodhouse, on Vane Street.”

  “That’s su
mmat to be thankful for,” Mary said.

  “Besides, it’s only two doors up from the beer-off.” Tom had a gnome face topped by a nicky hat, the sort of face that seemed to have dried-up river beds running down it to meet at his pointed chin, a worried expression that tried to do nothing but please because the vanity behind it wanted everyone to think him a good bloke and not insult him. He buttoned his mac. “Thanks for the tea, Mrs. Merton. You’ve got a month or two to think about moving.”

  Merton thought about it: and since he had been expecting the upheaval, he wasn’t so disturbed as he led everyone to believe. It would be a change to live among shops and pubs and be nearer to bus stops for the city. Lydia thought so as well: that there’d be no walking down the muddy lane and under the lonely bridge on dark nights. Mary said the house was like being in the middle of a graveyard all through winter, and now they’d have neighbours and company for a change. Merton was galled most of all at the smaller garden. “I’ve seen ’em down there,” he said, “and they aren’t big enough to tek a piss in.”

  The new house was in the middle of a long row inhabited mainly by miners working at Wollaton Pit. Merton sold up and moved in, George and Lydia glad because, apart from being comfortingly nearer the town, there was less work for him to set them to. Brian walked there along the main road and down by the canal side, went for the first time one afternoon and found no one in but his grandmother, who dozed by the fire. He sat on the sofa waiting for her to wake up. The kitchen was arranged exactly as at the Nook, with the same mixed pervading aroma of tea and spices, kindling wood and tobacco, baked bread and stew. Brass candlesticks towered on the shelf, with two black and white statue dogs that reminded him of Gyp about to leap for birds before Merton had killed him, and white pot ornaments were placed between seaside souvenirs of Cromer and Skegness, Cleethorpes and Lowestoft. A magnifying glass hung from a nail, waiting for Merton to come back from his walk and look closely at the photographs in tonight’s Evening Post: Brian always hoped to borrow it, to set fire to a piece of paper in the garden by holding it under the sun. On the other side of the room was a glass-faced cupboard of tea-services, and rows of Merton’s prize horseshoes. His grandmother sneezed and woke up. “Hello, Brian, I di’n’t ’ear you come in.”