A Start in Life Read online

  ‘I want to watch television. Mam had one come yesterday. Bought it out of her savings. Dad would never buy anything because he don’t earn that much.’

  She wanted me to go home and watch television with her, seated between her struggling happy-saver parents, but I had another idea. ‘I saw Alfie last night,’ I said, in all innocence. At this, she had a very uneasy glint in her eyes. ‘We just talked about this and that,’ I added. ‘Nowt unusual.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘He did seem a bit worried. Have another cake? Go on. I’ll treat you to it.’

  She was too interested to eat. ‘What was up with him? Did he say?’

  ‘He did, but it was between mates.’

  ‘Did he make you promise not to tell anybody?’

  I smiled: ‘He didn’t need to.’

  The cake had smeared her lipstick, and she took a mirror from her handbag to smooth it right. ‘Was it about me?’

  ‘He’s got his eyes on another girl and he’s wondering whether to chuck you up.’

  Her lip trembled: ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘I told him he’d be a fool to pack you in. I talked and talked to him, so I don’t think he will now.’

  She looked around the coffee bar, as if to make sure no one might recognize us and clatfart the news to Alfie. If that happened, he really would pack her in. She stood up. ‘I’m going now. On my own. Don’t follow me.’

  ‘You’re going to see Alfie?’

  She wasn’t a very good liar, so didn’t try: ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time. He isn’t in tonight. He told me he was going up Carlton to see his grandma.’ She looked done for at this news, believing me all along the line, though I don’t know how she could have been so stupid. I held her hand and pressed it so that she could feel my love. ‘You might as well come up Strelley with me. It’s fine out, and you’ll enjoy a bit of country air.’

  She sat down again, and I got her another cup of tea. ‘I’m going home,’ she said, ‘that’s the best thing.’

  Now it was my turn to stand up: ‘If that’s how you feel. I’m fed up with this. I’ve got a date at half past six with a girl from our place, who comes in from Tibshelf every day. She’s a smasher.’

  ‘Don’t you like me any more then?’ Claudine said.

  ‘Course I do. But I just want to get out of this dump and go for a walk.’

  Half an hour later we were passing the Broad Oak pub on the lane towards Strelley, arm in arm. There were some two hours of daylight left, and a warm breeze blew in from the fields. ‘Feeling better?’ – and she answered glumly that she was all right. We turned left after the church and made our way into Spring Wood. A courting couple were snogging on the path in front, so I said: ‘Let’s get farther in off the path.’ She didn’t want to, so I thought it was time to say: ‘Let’s go and have it together. I’m dying for you, Claudine. You’re the first girl I’ve been in love with, and we’ve known each other for months. It’s all right now.’ I pulled her to me, and we met in a wonderful kiss under the heavy rustling leaves.

  ‘No,’ she said, when I put my hand on her leg. I pushed them apart, and she wondered what was coming.

  ‘I’m going to see Alfie in my dinner hour tomorrow, and I’ll tell him what’s been going on between us all this time.’

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘How could you be so rotten?’

  ‘Because I want you. You drive me crazy. But I’ll tell him, and then he’ll go to this new girl he’s got his eyes on. I’ll pack you in as well.’

  She laughed it off: ‘There’s plenty of other pebbles on the beach.’

  I laughed as well. ‘The sea’s a long way away, and at Skegness it’s all sand.’

  She stood silent for a while, then said solemnly: ‘Do you mean it?’

  I swore that I did, so she took my hand and said: ‘All right, then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ – I wanted it straight and from her own lips.

  ‘You can do it to me.’

  We found a place, and after passionate kisses she lay down, head back on the grass and her legs open. She was warm and somehow her lips were peppery, mixed with the sweetness of her lipstick that seemed to be sliding all over me. I pushed up and took down everything, and after fingering her for some minutes my flesh-rod went sliding chock-a-block into her, and before I began going up and down I made her large breasts spread loose. Then after only a few goes I had the top of my head blown off with sweetness, and just after this she started to shift and bite, before I shrank out of her.

  I felt sorry she’d only done this with me on condition I wouldn’t spoil things between her and Alfie, and arm in arm on the way back I was jealous of him for the first time. But I needn’t have been, for though I’d used false words to get her into that wood, the more I saw her after that the less she met Alfie, until we were going steady together, and having it marvellously several times a week in various fields and parks. When our hands clasped on meeting out of work we couldn’t breathe till that smell of grass and full-grown leaves got into our noses. We’d thread our way through hidden paths, branching off from them and hiding absolutely from the world, living in our own house where we could all but strip naked under the trees, and I could bury myself deep into the first love of my life. Both of us wanted it, but she sometimes made it hard for me, so that I had to cajole and struggle, though this was doubly sweet because the end was certain.

  After a few weeks of this man-and-wife play I got familiar and facetious, and on our way back from the woods one night I asked if she used to have it so good with my old pal Alfie.

  She stopped under a lamp-post and looked at me very seriously: ‘Shall I tell you something? Shall I, Michael?’ Not waiting for me to say yes or no: ‘I will tell you, though. I never had it with Alfie Bottesford. Never. I don’t care whether you believe me or not, but I’m telling the truth. He’d never dare, because when he tried and I put him off (as Mam always said I had to do) he never came back for me but got downhearted and sulked. So in all the time we went together it never came to it.’

  We walked on and I was all of a sweat. We were ‘going steady’ and the full force of these soul-treading words came to me now, because if she hadn’t been having it with Alfie, then my little plan to ensnare her into having it with me had done nothing more than ease me into getting ensnared by her. It was hard to say who had set out to get who, but we had certainly got each other now, and that was a fact. She took my arm and leaned on my shoulder as if heaven were about to open and belt down the chimes of multiple church bells on to us. Passing a bus-stop queue I felt as if people were weighing us up in their different ways, thinking that there went another nice young couple to the altar in a few more months. An old man seemed to smile and smirk in the twilight and I felt like thumbing my snout and saying: ‘That’s what you bloody-well think, mate.’ But I squeezed my sweetheart’s hand, and kissed her when we reached the shadow of a hedge.

  ‘I thought you was a bit quiet,’ she said. ‘I hope that made you feel better.’

  ‘It did, duck.’

  ‘Are you coming home with me tonight, Michael?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ll miss the last bus.’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘Not me.’ But I wouldn’t go to her house because that would put the seal on it, for if her parents liked us, we were as good as engaged, and this I couldn’t stomach. There’d been a terrible rash of early marriages at work among the nineteen-year-olds, and I sometimes got the liver-jitters at Claudine’s seriousness. It seemed as if I was being dragged towards a chute not too far in front, and that once on the brink I’d fall into a canning machine and come out at the other end with Claudine in the same tin marked IDEAL MARRIAGE. Where I got this terror from I don’t know, though I suppose it was natural at such an age. Perhaps I didn’t feel like getting tangled in something my mother had never entered into. She was one of those free and independent women who believed they were the equal of any man providing they didn’
t get married, so we got on well together as long as we didn’t say much about the way we wanted to live. As a child she’d been thin in the frame, but now she was nearing forty and had put on weight. Men were still like flies around her, though she rarely brought them to the house. When she did I kept out of the way, for I was embarrassed at her getting from them what I was now so assiduously giving to Claudine.

  I was absorbed in what I called the three -ings: reading, working, and fucking, and I did all three to the best of my time and ability. But now that I was beginning to feel too tightly held in my closeting with Claudine, I saw that after all one wasn’t made as wise by reading good books as I had thought. I could read, but not at the same time learn, which made it all seem a bit of a gyp, till I laughed it off on realizing that good books were only as much of an escape from the world as sex-and-gangster stories. The solution to this was not to give up reading, which had hit me early as a cure to some disease whose name I did not know, but to go on getting more out of life on the one hand, and learning more from it on the other. There’s no doubt I was mixed up in my feelings, but at least I wasn’t crazy in it as well. Believing this only proved how crazy I really was, though the assumption that I had cool sense stopped me going round in circles, and at least led me to feel I was the most important person in the world.

  In the factory, I was tolerated more than employed, though I must have been worth the eight pounds handed to me every Friday night. I carried bales of cloth from the stores to the cutting rooms, sometimes loading finished garments on lorries that drew up to the warehouse bay. The one advantage was getting suits of clothes at a discount, and occasionally for nothing when I worked up nerve enough to walk brazenly out with one wrapped in my overalls. In spite of my slackness, some intelligence had been noted when I suggested a way of speeding up the transport of cloth from one department to another, and the general manager asked one day if I wouldn’t like to work in the office. Wallace Pushpacker had been a major in the Army, had a blustery face and a thick ginger moustache, and I believe he expected me to jump at the chance as a kind of promotion, but he was taken by surprise when I said in a voice as quick and sharp as his that I’d like to think about it first.

  When I went off to load another trolley, having left Pushpacker baffled and irritable, I was trembling with the effort of putting the pros and cons of his offer through my machinating mind. It would be a clean job with more money and shorter hours, but on the other hand I dreaded the effect on Claudine. Such news would only confirm that I had it in me after all to GET ON, and was therefore the ONE FOR HER. An engagement would not be more than a few weeks off, and if I didn’t agree to it, it would mean the end of my delicious and fleshly privileges. So I told myself, and I may not have been far wrong, that having asked Pushpacker to let me think it over was considered so much of a cheek that even if I went back and said yes, he’d tell me the job was no longer available because I wasn’t the right material to accept the discipline of office life that his Army rule imposed. In the end I left the factory altogether, and decided to look for some other work.

  To Claudine this was as bad as if I’d turned down her suggestion of an engagement, because she looked upon me as a scatterbrained idler who couldn’t keep any job for long. ‘I only left to get a better place,’ I said, sitting in her parlour one night when her parents were out. ‘That was a dead-end joint, and I thought you didn’t like me being there. Now I’ll be able to get something better, maybe even in an office.’

  She came across to me on the settee: ‘Oh, Michael, that would be wonderful. I’d really know then that you were serious. You ought to look in the Evening Post and see what you can find. I’ll help you.’ She went into the kitchen and came back with the newspaper, holding it like a great white sheet, as if to smother me.

  There was a homely passion between us that night, and we sat close and petted each other, though afraid to lay down to it in case somebody should suddenly come back to the house. Such clandestine satisfaction made the air deeper between us than if we had been in the freedom of the wood. I went home with six addresses of various city firms in my wallet, and promised faithfully to go bright and early to each one next morning.

  I avoided decisions by thinking too far ahead, by wanting Fate to act for me. When it did I complained and cursed, but that was all right because by then it was too late. I didn’t mind what happened to me, as long as there was no possibility that I could have made things any better. Because of that I learned early to have no vain regrets, and never to recall the lost chances that, had I taken them, might have made life easier for me.

  True to my promise, I put on the best suit I had ever stolen, which would have cost twenty guineas if I’d bought it in a shop, and called at the first office by half past nine. I was fairly all right in my appearance, being five feet ten in height and, in spite of the lackadaisical style of work since leaving school, far from beefy about it. In fact what with steaming off so often with Claudine and walking umpteen miles a week with her, I could almost be described as slim, and perhaps this as much as anything else made me look as if I had some wits about me. There was also something in my manner that made me seem a year or two older than I was, possibly connected as well to my manly practices with Claudine, and augmented by that worry of getting in so deep with her that I wouldn’t be able to shuffle out. Concern with worldly preoccupations was stamped quite clearly on my face, for I’d noticed it one morning gazing in the mirror before shaving, and since it suited me I decided to cultivate the picture it gave to my features, no matter how false it might be. This is only to explain that I got the second job I applied for, which was that of general run-about at Pitch and Blender’s, the estate agents in town.

  It seemed as if a river, five hundred yards wide, separated me from the last work I was at. At this new place I was never told what to do. I was always asked – though if I refused I’d have been thrown out on my neck just like in any other dead-end job. But I was puffed up with snakey pride, and on meeting Claudine after my first day, she had tears of dewy joy in her eyes. She talked to me, when she’d cleared her throat, about how I must be ‘obliging’ and ‘show willing’ in my new ‘situation’, said I must never be late, and always wear a clean suit. This was all very well, I informed her, but when I was told to run out now and again for tea or coffee from the nearby bar, I didn’t much fancy the slops and stains that made my suit look like a map of the moon.

  Yet it was so easy that I stuck it, and in a few weeks I was no longer sent to get tea because a new youth was taken on. I cyclostyled details of houses for sale in Nottingham and the country, as well as taking over Miss Bolsover’s desk while she went to lunch (it was lunch now, not dinner) and answering the telephone. The blunt edges of my accent went in record time. I got through my first months by playing the silent man, as far as I could, listening to other people’s speech, and copying the mannerisms of Mr Weekley, the boss.

  I suppose I’m obliged to show how much I suffered at changing from one ‘class’ of job to another, how impressed I was at handling a typewriter and duplicating machine instead of a capstan-lathe or Jacquard-cutter. Maybe I ought to say what clothes people wore and tell of the witty things they said, how they talked about house deals and money, and making good marriages, and spending a pound on a haircut and five bob for a cup of coffee. But all this meant nothing – and in any case I’ve forgotten what effect it had on me. Swimming in the sea, all you want to do is keep the salt out of your mouth. You fix your gaze on the horizon, even if it’s only a few feet away at the top of the next wave.

  Yet when I met any of my friends who still slogged in factories I used my homeliest Radford accent, just to show that I wasn’t being influenced by the toffee-nosed set I was how forced by my peculiar and unavoidable streak of perversity to associate with. This patronizing bonhomie, this twisted attempt to put things back as they were, when in a way it had always been too late, didn’t usually go down very well, for I’d be met by a combination of cynical sm
ile and blank stare, or a simple request to bogger off out of the way.

  I often put on this broad accent in front of Claudine when I sensed she was thinking that, since I had been caught in the treadmill of getting on at work, she might now begin to draw me close into another sort of trap. At such times I could Sound so low and ignorant that, judging by her look of unconcealed dislike, it seemed as if her heart had become a plastic bag full of ice cubes. At times it was the only defence I had, a thin red line of real blood holding me back from the land of milk and water beyond. Still, by all the rules of the heart (whatever they are: I still don’t think I know) I ought to admit that I was in love with Claudine.

  Because of something now and again in her appearance, and of the way that her intentions always turned out to be realized, and her low-grade homilies being invariably right, I got the feeling that she was a lot older than me, and than she said she was, so that now and again I went to sleep in a sweat of panic. This was only my imagination, though the thought was so potent that I often felt people looking at us and wondering why I was going out with an older girl. Yet it was so marvellous making love to her, and I hoped she thought so too, that we soon felt we actually owned the woods and fields that had become so familiar to us. I was only put off this state of paradise by her nagging at me to get on. I didn’t know where she’d got it from, certainly not her parents, because I found out that her mother was a member of the Communist Party and that her father drove a lorry and couldn’t care less about anything except his twenty quid a week. Yet it only came to her in fits and starts, and as long as I stayed on the alert I felt I could handle it.

  But it stuck in my craw, really, when she got on to me about saving money. This actually frightened me, not because I was incapable of it, but because I knew what she wanted me to use it for. The fact was, and she didn’t know it because it was more than my neck was worth to tell her, that I’d been saving money ever since starting work four years ago. It was part of my nature to do so. I did it very carefully and secretly because if I let on about it to Mam she’d ask me now and again to lend her some. And how can you ask your mother to pay it back, or even accept it if she should offer to? So I’d had practice at keeping the fact to myself. Not that it amounted to much: just over a hundred pounds, but I guarded it like a miser without knowing what I would ever use it for. So when Claudine asked me to start saving money I was afraid that out of pride and to please her, I might in a weak moment let on that I’d already been doing so for a long time.