Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

  “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 geogr
aphical 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.

  Albert, almost from birth, had been the handyman in his mother’s house, had learned how to mend lamps and fuses after only one shock, how to fix supports into the garden fence to stop it falling, put in a pane of glass or whitewash the attic—because his father had died when he was three. Albert told Brian the same night his mother divulged the secret to him, couldn’t wait to get it out, he was so excited. They went into the Wheatsheaf at Bobbers Mill and ordered two pints of mild. “Sit down, Brian. Mam’s just towd me summat I’d never known before. I allus thought dad had died of a bad heart when I was three, but you see, by Christ, you know what did happen?” The previous story had been of Albert’s poor dad digging away at his prize allotment garden for all he was worth, shifting heavy clods of spud-soil near beds of multicoloured chrysanths that stood high in the sun like white and yellow pom-pom hats. The picture was that Mr. Lomax, having foolishly overdone it when he should have known better, had folded up from a stab in the heart and died on the spot; but it was now revealed to Albert that his dad had really got fed up with life and cut his throat, altering the picture to one of a tormented corpse twisted among the support sticks of his collapsing chrysanthemums. Albert got more pints and drank to it again: “Just think, the old man committed suicide! I don’t know anybody else whose old man committed suicide! I don’t know anybody else whose old man killed himself, do you? I wish mam ’ud told me sooner. Fancy leaving it till now.” Brian was glad to see him so happy, and went to get the next round. It explained a lot about Albert’s cleverness, and the vivid light in his brown eyes, as if the life that had been forced out of his father had joined with his and made him so much stronger.

  Albert sang himself up the slope and over the railway bridge—out of nothing, into nothing—the noise of his primeval voice drowned for a while by the hoot of a pit whistle, but emerging strongly (as if he hadn’t heard it) when the hooting stopped as cleanly as if an invisible knife had slewed down it through the black air. He turned off for Radford. “See yer’t wok tomorrer then,” he called to Albert.

  No wonder Pauline packed me up, Brian thought, after I cracked her one like that—and me thinking I’d never hit a woman in my life after seeing the way dad knocked mam about when I was a kid and remembering how I hated to see it. I don’t know. It’s rotten to do owt like that. But if you come to think on it, though, dad hit mam for nothing at all, just because she cursed him or said he was a numbskull for not being able to read and write, but Pauline gave me a big whack first, before I hit her, and that’s a fact. Maybe I shouldn’t have hit her anyway, but I’m still not as bad as dad used to be. Anyway, maybe it’s a lot worse to call someone a numbskull who can’t read and write than it is to give a bloke a crack across the gob for nothing. It’s anybody’s toss-up which comes keener; but I still wish I hadn’t bumped her.

  Bert came home on weekend pass and Brian went out with him Saturday night to see what they could pick up. Tracks led by nine o’clock to the Langham, Bert lacquered up in khaki battle-dress and Shippoe’s ale, small for his seventeen years but also drunk by the success of his lies that had joined him up a long while before his time. “I can’t be bothered to desert like Dave and Colin,” he confessed to Brian, a chip on his shoulder at having to justify such action to his disapproving family. Bert had a mind of his own, had the same surviving face as when he was a kid, and Brian didn’t think for a second that any Jerry bomb or bullet could put Bert’s light out. He was a good shot and adept with foxhole and slit trench, wouldn’t starve because he knew how to live off the land, could sleep standing up, march forty miles a day, make a fire in three feet of snow, leap off a lorry with full kit and rifle at thirty miles an hour. “That’s how they train the infantry,” he said. “You’ve got to be tough to beat the Jerries, and if you can’t beat the Jerries you can’t help the Reds, can you? Can you, though, eh? We was doing street fighting in Newcastle, and you know how you get from house to house? You don’t go out of one door and into another—like a rent man—you use grenades and blow out the fireplace, then creep through the hole. I enjoyed that. We might be doing it in Berlin soon; you never know, though, do you, eh? I hate the cold, though, I do. I can stand it, but I hate it. We was on a scheme last January in Yorkshire and had to sleep out, dig holes in the snow to sleep in. Christ, I’m not kidding when I tell you, our Brian, I was so cold I was pissing mysen all night. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t hold it. I hate the cold.”

  The Langham was crowded but they pushed a way through to the bar: Brian was good at that. “I can’t see her,” Bert said. “But she swore blind she’d be here at nine. I asked her to bring a pal as well, for yo’. I hope she does.” Brian was jammed front and back, kept his pint at face level above other shoulders, and was able gradually to tilt the jar up so that a wall of ale slid into his mouth. “How’s that tart o’ yourn?” Bert asked when Brian shunted a second pint across. “See much on her lately?” Brian admitted he’d chucked her. “Looking for somebody else then?” The pub was packed, generating a noise even louder than the machine shop he worked in. It was impossible to hear: “What?” he bawled, seeing but not hearing the second question. The loudest voice was that of the piano, beating its pathways above smoke and din, where nothing could reach to compete with it. A jaggle of colliers in the corner crashed out into laughter over the antics of their dominoes, a sound like the sudden splintering downfall of a wooden fence.

  Bert nudged him, held up the other hand to wave. “Here they are,” he said, nodding at two young women pushing in from the doorway. Brian got more drinks, two pints and a couple of gin-and-its, while Bert latched on to the stoutest of the two women, as if, being smaller than Brian, he needed to ally himself to someone hefty in order to strike the right average should everyone be weighed out by pairs as they went into heaven. She must have been well over twenty, married as like as not, a round face and well-permed hair, not much given to powder and rouge but making up for it by the amount of laughter that rolled out of her at everything Bert said—which must have pleased him because it kept a permanent g
rin on his face, a low-burning light which seemed to say: Look what I’ve landed myself with. She’s a rare piece, ain’t she? Brian cursed to himself. Her eyes shone, showed by their life that she was having the good time she’d got used to since her husband, you could bet, was going off his head in some snuffed-out hole of Burma or Italy. “What’s your name, duck?” Brian asked.

  “Rachel.”

  “Down the hatch,” he said. “That’s a Bible name, Rachel, ain’t it?” which got him a louder laugh than Bert. He called for two more gins and slid them over before the first ones were finished.

  “Steady,” Bert said, thinking Brian might get on all right with gels his own age but that he didn’t much know how to treat grown women. If you bought them drinks the second they’d slung one lot down, they’d swill ’em off quicker than ever: you had to wait for the hint first, to keep things as slow as you could.

  “He’s trying to get us drunk,” the other woman said, unable to laugh as heartily as Rachel. “It’d tek some doing,” Brian retorted. “What’s your name, love?”

  A straight answer, as if she didn’t mind telling him: “Edna.”

  Bert already had his arm round Rachel’s fine middle, like a kid embracing a jar of sweet biscuits. Edna was small and thin, well made up with rouge and lipstick and looked a year or two older than her pal if the truth were known. She had long curly hair and a well-padded coat—was so thin that Brian thought she might be heading for consumption, though the way she chain-smoked may have helped to keep her that way. Her small features seemed distrustful of the world and of Brian in particular, so that in odd troughs of soberness he wished for the knowledge and familiarity of Pauline. Nevertheless it was good to be in a pub, half-pissed with a grown woman who at last was beginning to smile and give him the glad-eye now and again. He held the bridgehead at the bar, passing over gin and beer and cigarettes: soldier Bert was moneyless, and women didn’t pay, so money-man lashed out, one half of him not thinking about it and the other half glad to be the fountainhead of so much benevolence. Bert was telling both women that Brian his cousin had a cupboardful of books at home as well as a stack of maps for following up the war, and Brian turned to deny this and make out that Bert was spinning a tale just for the fun of it. “He says owt to keep the party going,” he told Edna, squeezing her thin waist, but then relaxing his grip for fear he should snap her in two and get hung for murder. Booze was clouding his eyes, and he was glad when “Time” was bawled because he didn’t want to be dead-helpless by the time he got Edna in bed or against a wall, and in any case by ten he’d only that many shillings left, half of which slid away on the last order allowed after towels had been put on.