A Start in Life Page 5

  ‘Brandy,’ I said, lighting a Whiff.

  ‘Please don’t do it again,’ she said. ‘I love you, and I wouldn’t want to marry anybody who drank like that.’

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ I said, ‘honest, duck. Not on three doubles. I can tek a lot more than that.’

  ‘You seem drunk to me.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not me.’

  ‘I’m glad I’m not, then. It’s terrible, getting drunk like that.’ She didn’t look as nice as she had the night before, but I felt my love and sympathy too deeply for that to worry me. ‘I’ve passed my driving test. I promise not to get drunk again.’

  She said all right at this, and actually smiled. ‘It’ll be for your good, as well as mine, for our good,’ was her conjugal way of putting it – ‘if you really stop drinking.’

  I said that in any case I didn’t like the stuff, that it meant nothing to me, that the taste was rotten and burned my throat. All the same, she took my victorious driving test to be a great move in the war of ‘getting on’, saying I’d be so much more useful to the firm that I’d no doubt be given a responsible post in it soon.

  Latching quickly on to her enthusiasm I went into a fantasy at how I might one day be able to save up for my own car, gloating to myself not only over the secret hoard of my savings but also about the money I was going to land from the sale of Cleggy’s house.

  We sat on the settee and kissed, but after a few minutes her parents came in and the television began shattering the room while supper was being put on the table. The old man thought I was even more of a lad when I told him about the driving test and the brandies, and yet, in spite of their friendly umbrella, I had a feeling of not belonging in this happy family that seemed all ready, out of the goodness of their souls, to treat me so well – even as a son. I was not really uneasy, because at the same time I felt a fundamental need to be with them and, while eating and talking, to remember the previous night when I had all but stripped Claudine and made love to her on their rich and wonderful bed. I was dead set to wallow in mother, father and wife, which was good for every string-end of me. Even though I felt an impostor who might be shown up at any moment for what I was and slung into the blustery autumn rain, I drank the unsuspecting familiarity they gave out. The thought that the real me had got at last what I actually wanted made me smile rather than become fearful as the evening wore on. I could bear this, and much more, and I felt so shifty and happy that I never stopped asking myself how much they could take, a vague sensation that drifted over from time to time. After several such evenings Claudine and I decided that we’d tell of our engagement on her twentieth birthday, which was to come on the following week. Everything seemed made to hold us together, even such a flimsy and insignificant secret as this.

  A client came into the office and wanted to see a house that we had on our books at Mapperley, whose rough details had been advertised in the previous day’s Post. Only Mr Weekley and I were in the office, and he had an appointment in half an hour, so when he tutted from his thin lips I offered to drive the parson-looking client to Mapperley. It appealed to Weekley: ‘Think you can drive my car?’

  ‘I passed my test, sir.’

  ‘True. You’ll never be as careful a driver as you are now, so close to your test.’ He gave me the keys: ‘Be doubly careful, then. It’s my car.’

  The fact that I had a passenger in the back gave me confidence for threading a way through the town traffic. While still obeying the rules I branched off from Mansfield Road and went on with the uphill climb, to a district of villas and large houses I hadn’t much explored as a kid. Percy Parson asked: ‘Have you seen the house?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But it’s supposed to be in good order.’ It wasn’t, though neither was it in an advanced stage of senile decay like some of the places we handled. The owners had left, and I took him from room to room, making doors shut behind me as best I could, because Weekley had always advised: ‘When you’re in an empty house, shut the doors of the rooms you stand in, because the client has a better feeling and can imagine how he’d live in it with his furniture. But if the house is still furnished, and the rooms cluttered with somebody else’s rammel, leave the doors open, so that the client inspecting the house can see how big it would be when empty. Psychological tricks, Michael. Experience. Intuition. There’s more to this business than technical qualifications!’ I don’t know whether or not he was right, but I always took his advice, though whether this particular bit was ever crucial in making a person buy anything I shall never know.

  I felt in such a good state of mind that I showed the man over the house as if I’d spent my childhood there, and even as if my parents had grown up in it, but that now I wanted to sell it, though only with the most piercing regret, because my sweetheart lived in the delectable countryside, and I was gallant and loving enough to go and live there when we married each other. The story would have been as full of holes as the spout end of a watering-can, so I let it die a silent, undignified death.

  On the way back I didn’t speak, so that the client could make up his mind whether or not he wanted the house, my rhapsodies either to sink in or push him away from it for good. The fact was I had thoughts of my own, wondering when Wainfleet was going to come into the office and make his offer for Clegg’s house at Farnsfield. It should already have been done, and I rehearsed an appreciative smile for when I came face to face with that hundred pounds Clegg had promised. A momentary uncertainty flitted into me now and again, and I cursed as I nearly had my lamp taken off by a delivery van moving too quickly out from the kerb.

  It was expected of me that as soon as I left work I should make my way up by the post office and meet Claudine outside the Elite cinema, the point she would reach after leaving her place at the same time. It was an easy and pleasant rendezvous to keep, for a while. We would kiss and, if the sky was dry, walk up Talbot Street, leaving the city centre behind and below. Sometimes we would go by the Ropewalk, stopping to look over the houses of the park and, on a clear day, gaze at the smoky valley of the Trent.

  On one such evening, when the nights of autumn were drawing in, I felt the urge to get away from Claudine and go back home. This sensation of wanting to make a sudden escape confused me, because it was only part of my real desire at that moment, the other half of which was to go with Claudine and make love in her house. Our arms were fast and affectionately locked as we walked, and she was telling me some woe-tale of how the tyrant of a manageress at her office was threatening to make them work late as from next week if they didn’t get through their day’s quota by knocking-off time – or some such thing I was meant to drink in as if I were her twin sister. But I felt a definite twinge of panic drawing me towards my home, and when we reached Canning Circus I said: ‘Look, sweetheart, I’ll put you on a bus here. I’ve got to go.’

  It was the simplest wish in the world, but she suspected a trick: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve got to go home,’ I told her.

  Something was frightening me, but it only seemed to her as if I was up to no good: ‘Why, what’s the matter, then?’

  I was foolish enough to be honest: ‘I don’t know, duck. I’ve just got to get home’ – mad at myself for not knowing what was ratting at me.

  ‘You’re going to see somebody else, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’

  I should have admitted that I was, in order to get away quickly, but I couldn’t lie at that moment, because I was too disturbed, and I hated being like that, as if I were letting myself down at not being able to lie. ‘Come home with me,’ I said, ‘then you’ll see. We’ll go on to your house after.’

  But she wouldn’t do this. I’d asked her before to come to where I lived, but she always made up some excuse not to, the truth being that having spent most of her life on an open-housing estate she was afraid of the dark cobbled streets of Old Radford. I might just as well not have spoken.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go on to your place. I won’
t go home.’ In any case, the fear had left me, and I no longer felt the great alarm of a few minutes before. But every tack and move was the wrong one, because she now thought I’d really tried some deception on her, and that I’d only backed down when she had opposed it so firmly. All the way to Aspley she worried at me and wouldn’t let go, trying to find out why I’d wanted to go off without her all of a sudden. The walk worked it out of her, yet it poisoned the whole evening so that neither of us enjoyed it. Even the kisses were tasteless, though at the last one outside her back door we both said how much we loved each other. She insisted on walking me to the bus stop, as proof of her love, but I knew it was because she wanted to make sure that I got on the right one, and didn’t go off to see some other girl, even at that late hour.

  When I arrived home my mother was at the table, still wearing her coat. There was a look of desolation on her face I’d never seen before.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, sitting opposite without even bothering to take my mac off. She didn’t answer, so I just looked, and tried to guess. The anguished premonition of my stroll through the Ropewalk with Claudine came back to me, and I held her hand.

  She drew it away: ‘My father’s dead.’

  As soon as I knew what it was my heart and stomach became normal again. My sense of wanting to die on the spot vanished absolutely and did not come back. ‘Grandad?’ She said nothing. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Had a heart attack at half past five. The police came and told me when I got home from work.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Grandma’s. At Beeston. She’s breaking her heart. I nearly fainted when I saw him.’ She didn’t say anything for a few minutes. ‘They’ll be taking him to Callender’s funeral parlour tomorrow.’

  I got up and put the kettle on: ‘If you’re going there in the morning I’ll go with you,’ I said, slashing three big spoons of tea into the pot.

  ‘All right. You might be a help to us.’

  ‘When are they burying him?’

  ‘On Thursday.’

  I felt fine, wonderful, and saw Grandad stretched out in the parlour next morning before they carted him away. He was sixty-five (or had been) and I considered he’d had a good life to reach such an age. From being a big man he now seemed like a doll, as if I could lift him up and sit him on my knee, speak for him like a ventriloquist. But his sternness was having none of it. He lay like an age-old soldier in a horizontal tailor-made sentrybox, but ready to get up at the split-fart of an Army bugle, or the smell of the rag they used to wipe up spilt beer on the bar with. His eyes were closed, so that he couldn’t see where he was going, and though it looked as if some dreams might still be tail-ending behind his life, I knew he was surely as dead as I would ever see anyone and that God’s heaven was not for the likes of him or me. We were both of us cut out for finer stuff than God’s own heaven. I held his cold hand, hoping that I too would get the royal privilege of stepping into the be-all and end-all as soon as my heart stopped and the lights went out. I tweaked his ice-cold nose, kissed him on the stone forehead, and went out, to have Grandma throw her soft arms around me and wet my silk shirt through to the skin. She sobbed that I was just like him, and that no doubt I’d be as good as he ever was when I grew up. My mother was also weeping, but I thought: what the hell he lived to be old, and that should be enough for any man unless eaten up with the greatest greed of the world. They thought I had no heart and almost drove me away, till Grandma in all her soft wisdom said I was too young to let it tear me up, and that taking it like I did was the only way to show my grief.

  And who knew that she wasn’t right? Because in this frame of mind I did various useful errands connected with Grandad’s sudden drop-out. There were payments to make and collect, various people to tell, as well as odd messages to carry to those who might come to the funeral, food to order for the party afterwards.

  I went to the office with a black band around my arm to make me feel important, and Mr Weekley was sorry at my loss, impressed by such looks of grief that I could use when necessary, and told me I could stay off for a day after the funeral. I also got immediate sympathy from Claudine on telling her by phone at midday, and it blossomed to a full-blown envelopment of her body when I went to her house in the evening and found that her parents were out. It was marvellous, the grief people thought you felt, and how they were ready to shed your own tears for you, and the soft oily gratitude they gave you for giving them the opportunity of it.

  Grandma wanted her dead husband to have a fair funeral, and Mother and I did our best to see that her wish was satisfied. There were three car-loads of friends and family, and I sat among them with my black suit on, seeing the occasional person by the roadside take off his hat as we went by. Standing in the rain by the open grave, and staring the box into the bottom of it, I had the mad desire, which I was hardly able to resist, to jump down and drag my mother and grandmother with me so that all three of us got buried at the same time.

  I walked back to the gate and the waiting cars, and didn’t care whether the world ended or not. This had nothing to do with my grandfather having died. It was almost as if I’d started something by suddenly beginning to live, but wasn’t interested any more in going on to finish it.

  I’d asked Claudine to come to the funeral, but she said she ‘didn’t like to’ because she wasn’t yet ready to meet my mother. The truth was that she didn’t want to be connected to someone who had died, and nobody could blame her for this, because there had been moments when I hadn’t been too easy about it either. Yet I wanted her to come, because it was the first opportunity in our courting that I’d been able to offer on my side something to balance the weight of her family that she had given to me from hers. It would in some way have equalized the intimacy of life between us, but she was too embarrassed to come, and I thought: so what? Why should she? Maybe she won’t even go to her own grandparents’ funeral, when the time comes. If I had a father of my own, I thought, instead of being the undoubted bastard that I am, I wouldn’t have bothered to take so much part in it as I had.

  I got really drunk that night, so that I didn’t even have the stiffening left to get myself to Claudine’s place as I’d promised. When I saw her the next day I said I’d been too blacked out with fond memories of my dear grandad to leave the house. I’d hugged my bed, I told her ‘in a paroxysm of grief’. She really understood that, and forgave me, giving me such comfort on the settee that I said I hoped I’d be able to do the same for her some day, if ever she needed it, though I hoped she wouldn’t.

  It took a long time to push house deals through, and I assumed that Wainfleet was having a surveyor go over the Clegg mansion before he made his offer. Nevertheless, I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t heard from either of them, and I knew that no news had come in at the office. Nothing would go wrong as far as I could see, and I stayed optimistic because before going out to work that morning (I hadn’t yet steeled myself to calling it ‘business’ as they did in West Bridgford) I read my horoscope in Mam’s paper which said: ‘A day to remember. Financially good. Romantically sound. Don’t rush it. Promotion in the air. Heady progress. Good for you.’

  I went blithely to work and, as was only to be expected when I got there bright and punctual, Mr Weekley called out for me: ‘Shut the door,’ he said.

  He didn’t look good, and I wondered whether it wasn’t his turn now to go down with some half-imaginary flu. He opened a folder in front of him: ‘Cullen, you’ve been up to some monkey business, and it’s the most clumsy piece of work I’ve ever come across in this line. If it had been a bit more subtle and underhand I might have been tempted to keep you on. As it is, you disgrace me. A bloody baby could have done better. Let me put you in the picture. Your Mr Wainfleet did offer Clegg a higher price for his house – four thousand three hundred instead of four thousand that Clegg originally wanted. I’m putting you wise so that you’ll never make the same mistake again, behind the back of the person you might work for at y
our next job. Well, so far so good, but in comes the first chap who set out the asking price, and offers four thousand four hundred. Then Clegg plays him off in a dutch auction, and Wainfleet, red in the face, ups it to four thousand five hundred. Do you see what you started? You bloody jackanapes!’

  I was boiling too: ‘That’s all right by you,’ I cried, ‘as far as commission’s concerned, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But let me tell you the last of it. Then comes the bright young chap again, and jacks it up to four thousand six hundred. There it stops, and yesterday while you were away getting those ordnance-survey plans, enter Wainfleet absolutely frothing at the mouth, and accusing me of using innocent young you as a pawn to start a dutch auction, and positively screaming that he was going to make a complaint to the Society. Well, of course, I can take care of that. In any case that vile vendor Clegg wasn’t entirely innocent when he saw which way the wind was blowing. But you’ve got to go, young Cullen. You can take your briefcase and umbrella, and remember next time to think before trying to push something so intricate. Oh, yes, I know, you nearly brought it off, but don’t forget: there’s always some swine a bit greedier than you are.’

  ‘I didn’t expect anything from Clegg,’ I said. ‘I was only trying to do the firm a favour so that you’d think highly of me and I could get on a bit. Anyway, they were both bidding for the house on the open market. What’s wrong with that? It was nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Don’t lie, Michael. You make it hard for me, mate. I’ve got the particulars of the house here that you typed for Wainfleet, with your fancy price on it. Oh, all right, there’s more to you than the others working here, but I can’t keep you on. However, I’ll give you a fair reference so that you might get a job somewhere else. But wherever it is, try not to pull such monkey business again. It’ll get you a bad name.’