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

  “What sort of a war?”

  “The Communists are at it, trying to throw us out of the country and take over. They’ve killed a lot of people already.”

  The lorry drove south along the main road, through villages and rubber plantations, the sea a perfect blue sheet to the right, sky equally blue and empty overhead. A breeze cooled them and took away the heavy smell of soil and sweat. No one spoke. Brian leaned back with eyes closed, wondering at the sergeant’s words about a war with the Communists in Malaya.

  CHAPTER 24

  Almost every day of his life Brian had heard his mother say she was going to pack up and leave Harold Seaton. But she never had, and on those days when there was no cause to say it, she dwelt on the still-hot embers from other quarrels. Before coming to work this morning Brian had a real set-to with his father. The house had been a boiling sea of sabre-toothed rows this last week because Seaton had been observed by a neighbour drinking in a Lenton pub with a woman he’d knocked-on with before he met Vera: black-haired, inscrutable Millie from Travers Row—now long since married herself. Not that such a brazen cheeky-daft outdacious baggage would let anything like that stop her, Vera raved when Seaton came home all fussy and pleased with himself, unsuspecting that a neighbour had got in with a colourful story half an hour ago. In times past, fed up to the teeth and eyeballs with him, the whole family had heard Vera say he could clear off and get another woman for all she cared, but now that there were reasonable grounds for thinking that he might, the house witnessed pitched battles that even made the money quarrels of the dole days look like the pleasant tit-for-tat of a lively courtship.

  It gave Brian something to think about during the long hours of watching the dead-slow traversing of his piece-work milling machine. He fixed an aluminium elbow into the jig, released the lever, and sent it towards the revolving cutters, making sure that the sudpipe was well aimed against it—otherwise it might seize-up and spray hot metal against his skin. His mother had kept up her tirade for days, even though Seaton had promised faithfully never to see Millie again. Brian asked his mother to pack it up now, saying it was no use going on and on and keeping the house in misery, but she replied: “Why should I? He’s allus bin a bogger to me, and this is the last thing I’m going to stand for from ’im, especially now yo’ lot’s growing up.” So Seaton went on being put through the mill, using a rare control and saying nothing because he knew himself to be in the wrong, until this morning when he was dragged into the blackest and most impressive rage Brian had ever seen and threatened to bash Vera’s head in. Brian stood between them intending to bash his in if he laid a finger on her. “He thinks you’re still a baby and can’t stick up for me,” Vera bellowed, halfway between rage and tears. She was triumphant: “I allus said he’d have to watch his step when you grew up. Now he knows what I mean.” Brian was baffled, caught in a fire of despair, knowing he wouldn’t be able to do much if the mad eyes and beefy fists of his father made a move. “Christ,” he shouted, his voice brittle, “can’t you both act better than this? It’s about time you learned more sense.” Maybe they caught the impending crack of his spirit; for the raw feelings of cold and early morning were drawn from all three gradually as tea was mashed and poured out. No one spoke, but twenty minutes later Seaton had been thawed by a fag, and his good morning to Vera was almost cheerful—though it stayed unanswered.

  Brian was glad to get away, pedalling his bike along Castle Boulevard, playing the fast and tricky daredevil between cars and buses to keep his mind blank. Speed brought drops of water to his eyes and cheeks; the spring air was fresh and cold, good because the world was waking up with the buds and blue sky. High above, on a wall of rearing sandstone rock, towered the Castle, an art museum and prison for deserters. It crouched like a spider with the beaten soul of the city in its mouth, a Union Jack fluttering on high. Brian cycled as part of the river of people flowing to work along the traffic artery far below, happier when once he’d passed it by and was already halfway through Canal Street. It seemed that the war was finishing, that soon the world would open for travel like a South Sea pearl. He could save money and go to France or Italy, free because call-up would stop with the battles. Yet perhaps it wouldn’t be as good as he imagined: Edgeworth’s would lose its War Office contracts and he’d be slung on the dole like his old man had been, unable to get a job anywhere, trapped for life in a queue every Tuesday and Thursday for a few measly bob to starve along on. Starve-along-Cassidy, that’s what I’ll be. “Don’t believe it, though”—an uncluttered stretch of cobbled short-cut allowed him to talk aloud as if before an audience—“the soldiers’ll be back and wain’t stand for dole queues any more, government contracts or no. They’ll get the Reds in and then we’ll have plenty of work. Yo’ see’f they don’t. And not all of Fatguts’s spouting about good old England and all that rammel will stop ’em either.”

  Cycling into the endless streets of Sneinton made him happy, a spirit retained even when he passed the house by which he’d fought with the husband of that bag Edna, picked up in the Langham last autumn. What a night! His black eye lasted a fortnight, and he only hoped the other bloke’s had taken as long to disappear. When Bert came home three months later his side of the story was spilled: Rachel had taken him to bed and he’d had the time of his life, including breakfast on a tray in the morning. Bert had all the luck, though he couldn’t but laugh as he skidded into the street on which was Edgeworth’s Engineering Ltd.

  It was a small firm, one long building of sixty workers, and two side offices at the street-end, where a typist drew up the Friday wages. The glass-pannelled door took him into a cul-de-sac of waist- and breast-high machines, lit by blue fluorescent gleams from overhead. Belts under the ceiling ran races with each other, pinjoints clicking against motor-driven wheels. Ted Edgeworth, the owner, worked like one of the men, tall and miserable with long grey hair, dressed in a boiler suit only different from the rest in that it was changed every day instead of once a week. His wife came in often to see him, drove down in a flash car from their bungalow by fresh-aired Thurgarton. Not to help, but to stand by his side while he fiddled with some blueprint or component on his bench at the end of the shop. Their backs were to the workers, but it was safely assumed that she nagged him black and blue over some long-corroding domestic detail because, though no words were heard above the drone and roar, the back of his beanpole neck stayed bright red whilever she was there. Maybe it’s because she caught him with some fancy woman or other a few years back and wain’t let him forget it, though that’s not likely because Ted is a bit pansyish if anything, the way he puts his hand on your shoulder when explaining a new job. Maybe it is something like that: you never know, what with having such a cat-faced scrag-end of mutton for a wife, and two sons in the army who didn’t want to take over the business.

  When Mrs. Edgeworth stayed away, there was Burton the government inspector from Birmingham to give him hell, as like as not. Poor old Ted. Burton was a real Hitler who played on the fact that Ted was a timid old bastard, even though he was a boss, one who couldn’t answer back too much because he was salting thousands away out of the fat government contract whose work Burton came every now and again to inspect. He was bigger than Ted, well-built and pan-mouthed, and let himself go into rages about inferior work that Ted was trying to palm off on a government that had had all the money in the world to spend since 1939. Two thousand nuts went one week to a Birmingham gun factory and all of them had been drilled and threaded so much off centre that the guns would have killed our own blokes instead of the Jerries. Burton made a special trip up in his car and saw boxes of them still being blithely turned off on a row of lathes. He pushed by poor flummoxed Ted, stood at the boxes with his battleship jaw fixed on his gauges, and then carried one back to Ted’s bench. Even over the noise of machinery you could hear him shouting, and he ended up by knocking—maybe an accident, but nobody ever knew—the whole box of them over the floor. After he’d stalked out and driven off, Ted started
screaming at his tool-setters and viewers, but not near enough to get his own back.

  Ructions, everywhere you went, though Brian hoped it would get quieter at home after this morning’s bust-up. The house was too small and so was the factory: often Brian would load his saddlebag with sandwiches, a bottle of milk, and a map and take off into the country, pedalling north through the open fields and scrub-lands of Sherwood Forest. The smell of tree bark in spring reminded him of his far-off days at the Nook, and of his not-so-distant ramblings over the Cherry Orchard with Pauline. Ructions with her it had been as well, though things had got better lately. Some months after their parting he’d been walking along the open pavement by the Council House lions one Sunday evening with Albert Lomax, and had spotted Pauline talking to a couple of other girls on the steps. Everyone was out in their Slab Square best, perambulating to either get or give the eye; perhaps in an odd moment stopping to hear a few words of admonition from Sally’s Army, or soak up a bit of sound advice from some Communist speaker, or argue with a Bible-backed old god in a trilby hat—who was so thin you’d think somebody had nicked his ration book.

  Pauline waved at Brian’s smile as if she were glad to see him. He’d never noticed before how pale she was. You’d think she’d got jaundice by the look of her. He went up the steps, followed by Albert. “Hey up, duck. How yer gooin’ on?”

  “All right.”

  “You want to come out of the wind or you’ll get a cold.” Though it was so long since their quarrel, he still felt affection for her. Her friends stood to one side, made sharp responses to the calls of passing youths. He also felt jealous at the world of time that had fallowed between them, some land of other-occurring days lost and never to be known. Why does it make so much difference? They should have been closer, and he considered it her fault they weren’t. “I feel marvellous,” she said. “I ain’t ’ad a cold for weeks. Where you off?”

  “A walk. Where yo’?”

  “A walk.” Picking up lads, he thought, like her pals now talking to some—feeling rotten against himself for these unspoken words, because Pauline seemed to have less ebullience and stature than when he had last been with her. “Do you still go to the Capitol on Sat’day nights?”

  “No.” She was absorbed by people moving around the square, as if wanting to be among them and away from this meeting that she had, by a characteristic lapse towards good nature, let herself in for. “I didn’t think you did,” he admitted, now hoping to get her going with him again, “because I often go there to see if I can spot you.” She didn’t, as he wished, take him up on this, and they stood awkwardly. It was a fact that he’d haunted the cinema the last few weekends to see if she would get off a 7 or 22 and walk slowly towards the queue he stood in—though knowing that such meetings never happened when expected or encouraged, came only when all thought of them was deep in hiding, like now. Her friends had dismissed the youths, and even Albert was impatient for a walk up Trent. “How’s your dad?” Brian asked, offering a cigarette, which was refused.

  “He’s dead.”

  The beginning of an ironic laugh came, a disbelieving start to a sentence that would have been catastrophic if he hadn’t pulled himself up in time: “You.…”

  “He died about six weeks ago,” she said, his doubt unnoticed. Disbelief withered, was overpowered at what he saw was the residue of grief in her pallid face and the damaged spirit of her slightly glowing eyes. He remembered the exact physical centre of the blow, as if someone had struck him by the left eye, dazed his senses, so that he took her arm—which seemed to her a gentle pressure of sorrow. But he shouted angrily: “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  She drew back. “I couldn’t very well telephone you, could I, loony?”

  “You knew where I lived, didn’t you?”

  “Well,” she shouted back—and Albert stood amazed at this unexpected blaze-up of a quarrel—“you knew where I lived as well, didn’t you?” Which floored him with its logic and quieted him down: “I’m sorry about your dad, duck. I liked him a lot, you know that.”

  “I know you did,” she said, half-jeering still, enraged at him for starting a row where so many people might hear and notice. “But don’t mek me cry, though, will yer?”

  “All right, then: I was just trying to say how sorry I am.” They stood in the path of a raking wind, and he wondered why she and her pals chose such a perch to flirt with lads. She turned from him, in some deep way insulted, though he couldn’t see how. “You could have called for me,” she said. “You didn’t think I was going to run after you, did you?” He’d never thought that at all, he argued, knowing that to knock at her house and ask if Pauline was in would have been too simple; he preferred to hang around the pictures in the hope of seeing her on the off-chance; and in any case, much of his time had been taken up boozing and gelling with Albert, just as it looked as though hers had been occupied ladding with her pals. There were ten sides to every story, when you came to think about it, but he didn’t want to tell her this—and perhaps upset her even further. The fact that Mullinder had died caused an emptiness even of air inside him, leaving nothing for his lungs to draw on. “Come up to the club next week,” he said, expecting her to swing round and tell him to clear off. “You’ll have a good time,” he added. “Albert brings his girl as well.”

  She turned and smiled: “If you like. As long as it i’n’t on a Wednesday, because I wash my hair that night.”

  “Thursday’s the night,” he told her, believing again in happiness. “You look perished, duck: let’s go off and get a cup o’ tea somewhere.” She ditched her pals and went with him, and had gone to the club every week since. The old times came back, though different. He thought about them as he set the miller spinning, invincible steel teeth biting soft as butter into aluminium castings, gouging out grooves with such exactitude that even Burton wouldn’t be able to complain. Sud-drenched splinters spat over the jigs and tray, cleared away every so often with a specially provided handbrush. Pauline had taken to the club like a duck to water, and though they still had violent rows, they usually made up before the good-night kiss. Nowadays there was less of the rough stuff, both of them not so eager to tread on the fine gauze of self-control and descend into thumped-up quarrels. Brian was gentler and more protective, learned to see that her previous tom-lad bouts were only indulged in so as to be like one of the rest. Even so, she sometimes became angry at his continual solicitude, but would have hated him to lose his temper over such resentment and go back to his old retaliatory ways. Their lovemaking was a natural prolongation of calm and seemingly endless walks together, showing that a new stage of tenderness had been reached.

  Grandfather Merton saw them arm-in-arm one evening, copped Brian at it, as he told Vera later, talking to his girl like any love-struck youth as they walked along in the spring dusk. Merton was over seventy, had a lean sardonic face that at one time had reminded Brian of a cross between a strengthened Dox Quixote and the head of George V on the back of coins; but Merton was cleanshaven, a blacksmith mixture of both, an upright man in the prime of his old age who still knocked back his seven or eight pints of Shippoe’s every day, much to the disgust of Lydia—who thought it time he packed it in a bit, though not daring, even now, to tell him so. Afraid once upon a time of the stick he beat his dogs with, she was, at forty-five, still wary of him lifting the stick he sometimes allowed to accompany him on his walks. Lydia was unmarried, lived at home, and, as she told Vera and Ada many a time: “The old man’s still a bogger, leads poor mother such a dance as well that I can’t help thinking it’ll be a good job when he’s out the road.” But Merton had always been gaffer, and would stay that way. “I’ll drink what I bloody-well like,” he said when Mary told him about it. “As long as you’ve got enough snap on the table, don’t try and tell me what I can and can’t do.” And knowing how much he liked his ale—and his own way—she didn’t mention it again. In any case he was never so drunk that he didn’t know what he was doing. During a period w
hen Harold Seaton was amiably disposed towards his in-laws, he called there at midday one Sunday and went out with Merton for a drink.

  They took a bus to the Admiral Rodney in Wollaton Village, walked back a mile to the Crown under blue sky and fresh-smelling wind, then to the Midland, the White Horse, the Jolly Hig’lers—the distance between each pub shrinking as they got into Radford—ending at the Gregory with Harold groggy on his feet, fuddled with beer fumes and fagsmoke, wrestling with the earth-pull at the calves of his legs, while Merton stood up tall, sliding a pint into himself now and again between casual called-out remarks to some pal or other. Considering, Seaton thought, what a hard old sod he’d been to his family, it was surprising he was so well liked by all and sundry. Still, Merton worn’t a bad owd stick at times, and you couldn’t deny as he’d wokked ’ard either. Seaton took him in small doses, enjoyed bumping into him but made sure it didn’t happen too often. Even now, over forty himself, he felt too much like a son when with him, and because his own father had been dead twenty years he resented Merton’s natural sense of domination.

  Seaton liked his beer as much as anybody, which gave him something in common with his father-in-law. A five-pound wage-packet made him well-off, and on weekend nights he would go out with Vera and let his voice rip on the old songs that he liked, his brown eyes, broad sallow face, and black receding hair set against his favourite corner in the Marquis of Lorne. For the first time since getting married he was able to buy a suit—utility and illfitting—but one in which he felt compact and proud, boss of himself when away from work. He had money to buy wood and paint and nails, spare parts for his bicycle and wireless set, but these materials for brightening home and life were hard to find because of the war. He made do and did what he could, though he considered he got little thanks for it from his wife and five kids. What was the use? A bloke couldn’t even have a row with his missis without his son getting up and threatening to bash him. Still, he’ll know different some day. He felt grieved that he seemed to get little love from anyone after all he’d done for them this last twenty years: serving two months in jail to pay for the grub he’d got on strap, which had been no picnic either; not to mention his odd-job versatility and force-put cunning in dodging the means-test man.