A Start in Life

  I couldn’t be sure of a wink under his glasses, but wanted to thump his putty cheeks and grey moustache so as to stop the trembling in both my legs – except that I didn’t want to end up in a cell at the Guildhall at that particular moment.

  I took my fortnight’s pay and insurance money, and said goodbye with regret to Miss Bolsover. ‘It’s a shame you got into trouble,’ she said, ‘but don’t worry.’

  I smiled. ‘Glad to get away, really. I’ve been thinking of moving on to London’ – another useless lie, for she was bound to see me around town sooner or later and wonder why I hadn’t had the guts to go. She was a proud, grey-haired woman, well into her thirties, who I often fancied knuckling into because there seemed no hope of it.

  There was only one person I wanted to see at that moment, and it was still early enough in the day to go out and find him. In fact a few hours in the country would do me good after the mental strain of getting the sack. I’d wheedled from Miss Bolsover the information that the bright young man had sent in his deposit cheque on Clegg’s house for four hundred and sixty pounds, so I’d be due for at least a hundred pounds when the contract was signed, though I wondered now whether Clegg the egg would keep to it.

  The fields and woods weren’t half so pleasant, for a sharp wind was shaking itself out from Lincolnshire, and even a thick tweed overcoat didn’t stop it finding my ribs. Walking through it from the bus stop, the full shock of getting my cards hit me, and I wondered whether in this life I was only destined to work in a factory where I could get into nothing more troublesome than walking out now and again with whatever was produced there bulging from my pockets. My natural move should have been to retreat, to get back and let my heart curl up in safety where no blow-through mistakes could get at it. But natural moves were already alien to me, and I was set on some course even more natural than my natural desires because I didn’t think one bit about what I was going to do.

  Clegg asked me into a room just inside the door, where he had a sort of office or study. He hadn’t shaved for a few days and the stubble, like his hair, was grey. I sat down, when he asked me to, in an armchair. On the wall behind was a framed railway map of England. I was left alone while Arthur Clegg went hospitably into the kitchen to make some tea. I don’t know what he thought I’d come for, because he asked nothing and said nothing, imagining perhaps in the quirky darkness of his mind that I just happened to be passing and had called in. But his grey shallow eyes showed him to be far more alive to the world than I was, and while he was busy with his teapot and old cups he’d left a record on his pick-up, playing part of what I knew to be Handel’s Messiah. I supposed he spun this sort of music all day to stop himself going sideways up the wall till he got the hell out of his gloomy house. I wondered why I had come, now that I was here, and the voice was telling me that the trumpet shall sound, while I didn’t know how to get to the point because I knew he knew he didn’t have to give me a blue penny for the favour I’d done him.

  He asked how I was getting on, and I saw that the only thing I could do was be dead honest and tell him I’d just been booted out of my job on his behalf. He smiled at this: ‘That’s the way of the world. What did you expect?’

  I wasn’t ready to let things go as easily, and said I was glad to hear he’d got four thousand six hundred for his house: ‘That was due only to me, and you shouldn’t forget it.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t, my lad,’ he said, putting half a biscuit between his false teeth. ‘Not in a hurry, anyway.’

  ‘It’ll take me a good while to get another job,’ I said, ‘and I’ll need a bit to tide me over. A hundred and fifty would see me right.’

  ‘You’ve upped your price?’ he grinned.

  I was beginning to dislike the way he too obviously played with me, and wished I’d brought a blunt instrument to threaten him with – though I knew that as a wicked thought, because it went out of my mind very quickly, especially when he said: ‘There’s many a slip between the first offer being made and the final payment falling into my bank. He can still back out, as you know. He’s sending a surveyor over tomorrow, and if his report’s no good, I expect the deal will be off, or he’ll want a lower price. But if it all goes through as planned, I’ll give you a hundred. That’s what you said, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not much of a share.’

  He poured more tea, looked me straight in the eye: ‘It’s all you’re going to get. It’s more than you deserve, twenty per cent, in any case, but I’ll stick to our agreement. A pity you lost your job over it, though. What’s a bright young lad like you going to do now?’

  ‘I’m going to London.’

  ‘That’s even brighter of you. This town would soon be too hot to hold you, I suppose.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘Nobody said you had. But you’ll like London, if I know you. You have the face to like it – though God knows, you must be careful.’ He waffled on like this for another half-hour, while I sat at my ease and listened to him tell about museums and famous places he thought I should see down there.

  When I left he shook my hand, held it and squeezed it, and his fingers were ice-cold so that I felt sorry for him, though I didn’t know why. After all, he had no troubles any more, having got rid of his wife and kids, and being about to sell his house for a good fat price. He’d have nothing then, and he’d be free. Maybe this was why I had that faint shred of sorrow for him.

  I got back in time to meet Claudine by the cinema. She was glad to see me, smiled as I took her hand and kissed it like an Italian count. ‘You’re in a good mood,’ she said, ‘have you got a raise, or been promoted?’

  ‘Better than that. I’ve got the sack. I feel wonderful.’

  She stopped so suddenly in the middle of the pavement that a couple of postmen going at a good pace behind bumped into us and almost knocked me flying. It was as if I’d buried the blunt end of a claw-hammer in her back: ‘What for?’

  ‘A good reason. A bloody good reason.’

  Her stony anger flashed itself full into me. ‘But why?’

  I had to tell her something, or just walk away, and I couldn’t do that. The real reason I’d got the push now seemed petty and stupid, and my pride buckled under it: ‘I was in the office this morning’ – persuading her to walk along so that it would be easier to talk – ‘when Weekley asked me to type a sheet of information about a house. Then I had to cyclostyle it, but the machine was no good and it left off the bottom part. When he saw it he called me an idle bastard, and I said that if there was an idle bastard in this office then he was that idle bastard, the idle bastard. At which he calls me a thieving bastard, an illiterate no-good bastard from Radford, so I punch him one, and knock his glasses flying. Everybody in the office had to hold me down, otherwise I’d have pummelled him into putty. He sent somebody for a copper, but they couldn’t find one near, so Weekley then said I wasn’t worth taking to court because I’d go there soon enough on my own, being already a criminal who could only go from bad to worse. All he wanted was to see the back of me, which he did, because I got out as fast as I could. I’ll never go near the place again. I hate it.’

  I piled it on so high it nearly toppled over. ‘Oh,’ she cried. ‘Oh, how awful.’ We walked in silence while the full blood of it sank into her, and me, getting more horrible all the time. ‘What have you been doing all day?’ she asked.

  ‘Sitting in coffee bars,’ I said gruffly. ‘What else could I do after that little set-to?’

  ‘You ought to have been looking for another job. You might have had one by now.’

  ‘I hadn’t got the heart to.’

  ‘Why do you do it? Oh, Michael, why did you do it?’ she cried with such anguish that a man passing by laughed at the thought of what I’d done to her, the dirty bastard. It sounded as if I’d just killed her mother, or something. ‘Well,’ she said, when I didn’t answer, ‘we can’t announce our engagement till you get another good job, and even then, I don’t know.’
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  ‘Do you love me?’ I asked, ‘or don’t you? Just tell me, for God’s sake, so that I’ll know where I stand.’

  My sarcasm was mixed with a dash of bile, but she took me dead seriously: ‘I don’t know. I’m all mixed up. Oh, why did you do it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said, ‘and I mean it: I couldn’t stand working in that office with such a gang of four-eyed ponces for the next four hundred years, getting deader and deader and deader and deader, selling rotten houses to poor drudges who are even worse than dead but who just wanted a rose-painted kennel to die in, or a converted matchbox rabbit-hutch to bring their snotty-nosed kids up in. I’ve had my short sharp dose and that’s enough to last me all my life. In fact I might die next year and I’d weep scalding tears if I’d wasted so much time saying yes-sir and no-sir to that lot of bleeders. I’d rather work in the blackest factory on earth than go through that again. I might be a fool and a thief but I’ve not yet been brainwashed enough to crawl into that sort of death with a lettuce up my arse.’

  ‘Stop it!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t swear. Go away. I don’t want to see you. Don’t follow me.’ I stood, watching her get on to a bus that, conveniently for both of us, drew into its stop at that moment. It trundled towards Canning Circus, and for ten minutes I didn’t move but leaned against the wall of the cathedral wondering what I’d done, why I had made Claudine so desperate and unhappy that she had to walk out on me. It was the finish, I knew, because knowing her heart so well, I could see that I’d split the ground under her feet, and that the absolutely unforgivable had been done and said.

  I didn’t think the oak and the ash and the bonny rowan tree was the best that the earth had to offer. A man of all colours is a man of the night as well as of the day, and because I acted merely, and hardly thought at all, I eventually began to see that the best the earth could give me was the wherewithal to support myself in bread and books without actually earning it. The nearer I got to my twenty-first birthday the firmer this belief took hold. Fortunately I had no moral teachers except myself. My mother didn’t care, as long as I was clothed and fed. By this I don’t mean to imply that we didn’t love each other and wouldn’t have died for each other. We certainly wouldn’t. The fact was, I suppose, that I could never have found a moral teacher with whom to agree, certainly not in any of the people I knew both inside and outside the family. In this sense, a lot was put on to my shoulders, namely the task of finding my own moral way in a world where no adults were available to guide me. Of course, there must have been many who would have taken me on, but I’m sure that their qualifications for doing so would have been down below zero. Being young, I was left alone by moral hypocrites and bullies who’d only want to deprave or colonize me. A man of many colours can go a long way, as long as he keeps out of their way.

  I walked home after leaving Claudine, feeling as if I’d been cursed, holding a weight of tons on my back. Mother was smoking a fag and reading the evening paper: ‘You look as if you’ve lost your wages. What’s up?’

  ‘I got the sack.’

  ‘That’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘My girlfriend packed me in.’

  ‘Because you got the sack? She’s not much of a friend. You’re well rid of her. There’s some ham in the larder. Get a bit of it into your belly.’

  I slumped down: ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Come on, you bleddy fool. Get that light back in your eyes. It’s down to twenty-five watts and it was a hundred yesterday.’ She poured my tea, put out the bread and ham, with some pickles. ‘Good God!’ she said, ‘you’re crying! I never thought I’d live to see it. Come on, love. Don’t bother about her.’

  I was only nearly crying, if such a thing can be said. Tears were about to break through, and this was what she saw. After eating I went to bed, and cried there alone, and when I went to sleep I felt much better.

  Claudine lost no time in getting back into the affections of Alfie Bottesford, if ever she had been out of them during the time we had courted together. I actually saw them a week later, walking through town and hanging on each other as if they were frightened of some black angel ripping them apart. Claudine turned her eyes at the offending sight of me, but Alfie gave a wink as I went by, amused at me not being able to stop and talk to them because they were determined that I shouldn’t be able to. But I was glad nevertheless of this chance glimpse, because up to then I’d been thinking that perhaps I’d call on Claudine to see if I couldn’t get us going again. Now I realized that, though seeing her with Alfie might give me more chance of success than if she’d stayed at home brooding alone and lonely over me, I was not prepared to risk it, because I didn’t really want to become part of her cakewalk again – which might this time settle in for life. I began to recover from her, and enjoy my new phase of leisure.

  I didn’t try for a new job. Cutting myself to half-pay, I could last in idleness for a month. I bought a newspaper every morning, walked up and over the hill into the bowl of town. I found it impossible to lie long in bed. Idleness did not extend as far as to rot my spine. When Mother went out at half past seven I felt the emptiness of the house getting louder and louder in my blood, so in ten minutes I was dressed and down before the pot of tea had got cold. In scarf and overcoat I called at coffee bars and bookshops, looking at passing faces or in windows. A city is fascinating if you don’t have to work in it, not the same place any more, but richer, and full of things you’d never noticed.

  I went into the record shop on Clumber Street as if to buy discs, but played classical pops for an hour, then said I wasn’t satisfied with the reproduction and went to spread out the next couple of hours in the reference library, before a cheese-cob and cup-of-tea lunch in Lyons. In the reading-room I went through the papers, but the news never really interested me, though I read it for a laugh and to while away time on such stuff as held everybody in thrall while on the bus to work or during a ruminative five-minute crap after breakfast. I rejected news, and even rejected the interest of it. I stopped buying magazines or newspapers, thinking the only news to be what was happening in myself, and this only came out in headlines flashing now and again across my brain, such as:

  MICHAEL CULLEN GETS THE SACK. CULLEN THROWN OVER BY GIRLFRIEND. BASTARD’S GRANDAD KICKS THE BUCKET.

  I usually went up and down the columns wanting men for work. Indisputable proof that I was needed stared me in the face till I went nearly blind. Before he lost his sight, I said to myself, he remembered that, now and again, for a few seconds, he would see a large patch of grey when he looked into the light. The Situations Vacant showed me the way people still lived, and the monkey’s claw shot out at me to join them, but I held back the belly-laughs as I skimmed my eyeballs from one dead job to another, from van driver’s mate to builders’ labourer, loader, packer, welder, dishwasher, boilermaker, shop helper, bartender, and factory hand, a long sad hymn to real life spinning into me till I stopped laughing for fear I’d get the jaundice, and so switched to the crossword.

  After three weeks I went to see how Clegg had got on with selling his house. Hedges were heavy and ugly with frost, and under a clear sky the fields rolled away white and sparkling like a sheet thrown off by a dead man on his way up to heaven. It looked grim and I wanted none of it, the countryside seeming alien to me in winter. I needed summer lushness with hot days and flowers, and I was reminded of how warm factories could be at such a time.

  No one answered the bell so I walked to the back and saw Clegg taking wood logs from the shed and stacking them by the kitchen door. ‘I was expecting you,’ he said, straightening himself and coming towards me. I asked if he wanted any help, feeling suddenly bored with inactivity at the sight of him having a useful job.

  He laughed: ‘I can manage. I spin this work out, because what can I do when it’s finished? I’ve still got plenty of packing to do, though. The sale’s over. The survey was good, and the searches were made by the other man’s solicitor. It was more of a rush than I expected. The whole
price is paid already. Bit of a shock now I’ve actually got to clear out.’

  ‘Better than standing still.’

  ‘Aye,’ he answered. ‘I suppose it is.’

  Remembering my first idyllic sight of his picture-box house, a great pang came back for Claudine, of the stupid daydream I’d had of us both living in this place. Close after it was the thought that thank God it was going to be sold, and that after this visit I need never see it again. I was frightened and put off by the surrounding frost.

  Clegg asked me inside. He seemed older than when I’d first seen him, as if selling his house had been a big mistake that was too late to back out of now. His skin was lank and sallow, his eyes empty of all but an impression of water as if he were about to be ill, or as if the winter was threatening to do for him. A limb of the house had propped up his backbone, but still he smiled on telling me he’d be glad to get out of it. Perhaps he’d worked too hard at filling cases and stacking books in boxes when he should have left it all to the removal men. I offered to help him shift any heavy stuff, saying it not as if he weren’t strong enough to do it on his own, but in a matey way so that he could get it done sooner. ‘Perhaps you could,’ he said, ‘if you’ve no other work.’

  So I stayed until after dark, clearing huge basket-cases from the attic. Because I was working so effectively he realized there was more to do than he had thought, so asked me to stay the night and get an early start next day. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said, ready for any work as long as I got something to eat. Food wasn’t important to me if I ate regularly. It needn’t be a lot, but if it didn’t come on time it put me into a very bad mood indeed.

  Old Clegg took my hand and held it: ‘Listen, Michael, whenever somebody asks you whether you want to do something, never answer by saying that you don’t mind, because it’s no answer at all. If you want to do something in the, world, always come out with a straight yes or no, and then you’ll be of great value to your fellow men, but also of even greater value to yourself.’