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

  He reached for his coat and cap. “We’ll bleeding well see about that.”

  “You can’t stop me from leaving,” she called out.

  He spun round: “Can’t I?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll see then,” he bellowed, and with one rush caught hold of the table rim, tipped it, and sent it spinning across the room. Dishes and cups flew towards the fireplace, and a pot of steaming tea sprayed over the rug. He was no one she knew, had never known anyone so wild as this, a stranger here with her, gone mad in a way she hadn’t seen before. Her father had ruled the roost right enough, had wielded big stick and bony fist, but had never havocked and scattered his own goods in so blind a way. There was no man left in his unseeing eyes, and she waited, waited.

  “It’s no good, she said when he’d gone out into the rain, it’s no good not knowing what to do, not even crying any more, though the pain was sharper than knives. Can I really go back to my mother’s? She decided she could not. It was as bad there as it is here, so either way it’s a rotten look-out. What reasoning she did sprang from hatred, the hope that Seaton would be struck down by a lorry and killed on his way to work, or mangled to death when he arrived there. If only he’d injured me, came another burst of reason, and I’d had to be taken to hospital, then he’d happen have been frightened to death by the police, and have been good to me for a bit. She was startled by the baby crying. But how can I stop its rotten father from being such a rotter to me? A positive thought told her to visit one of his brothers, tell Ernest, for instance, what had happened, and ask if he couldn’t talk to his batchy brother Harold and ask him to have more sense.

  She levered the table back on to its legs and fed the baby. A cup of tea, and a resolution to see Ernest Seaton, made her feel better. It wasn’t raining so heavily when she set out, pushing Brian in the pram.

  Turning through street after street, she wondered again why Harold was a numbskull, while his five brothers stood apparently on another level, in the firm grip of good jobs. One was a shoemaker, two were upholsterers, the fourth a lace-designer. Ernest managed a draper’s shop in town. Harold Seaton, a labouring numbskull, earned thirty-eight bob a week, when he was lucky, at a tannery and skinyard. The explanation had been pieced together that Harold, having had the bad luck to be the baby of the family, had been left behind by his up-growing brothers, and half-forgotten by his too-old parents. He had had rickets, from thoughtless neglect rather than lack of money, and the disease had prevented him from going to school, caused him lifelong to walk with the swinging gait that Vera, on first seeing him, had mistaken for the pull of the three whippets. She suspected that the bad end of a bargain had come to her, and from wondering whether Seaton was more to be pitied than blamed, gave in to another fit of weeping as she turned on to the street of semi-detached houses where Ernest lived.

  Ernest himself opened the door, and she was glad at finding him in. He’d got a good job right enough, able to go in when he liked: I wouldn’t be here now if Harold had such a job. He greeted her in a friendly way. “Hello, Vera. You are a stranger, aren’t you?” He was twelve years older than Harold, with the same dark eyes and complexion, similar stature going to roundness, afflicted with baldness blamed on his army days in Mesopotamia. They’ve all got strange eyes, though, Vera thought, leaving the pram by the window and following him into the living-room, where a huge fire burned in the grate. He offered her some tea, as if, she divined, being polite to one of his customers. The sound of herself saying no brought all the events of the black morning bursting into her. Ernest was thinking how pretty and lively she was, that Harold, though backward, had known how to go for the women, that in his opinion he’d done better than the rest of them in this respect. He hardly knew what to say to her, though: what could one ask one’s sister-in-law, except how one’s own brother was?

  “I don’t know”—her tone was bitter—“and I don’t care.”

  He’d thought something like this was in the offing. “What’s the matter then, Vera?” He was alarmed when she began to sob, yet also gratified because he had never known his own wife to shed a tear over anything. “Sit down,” he said; “that’s right.”

  She cried into her hands: “It’s your brother. He’s a swine to me.”

  Ernest sensed that some sort of blame was being thrown on to him. “Harold? How?” and didn’t like hearing his brother referred to in this way either.

  “He hit me,” she accused, “for nothing. He’s a lunatic, that’s what he is.”

  Ernest stayed calm, reasoning: “He couldn’t have hit you without a reason.” Since he wouldn’t dare strike his own wife, he thought all that sort of thing had been stopped years ago, had gone out of fashion.

  “He tipped the table up as well,” she told him, “and smashed all the pots.”

  “Whatever for?”—still unbelieving.

  “I don’t know. Because we overlaid. He’s always using filthy talk. They’ll cart him off to Mapperley one day, the hateful way he looks at you. I couldn’t stand his dirty talk, and he hit me because I told him about it. I’m going back to my mother’s. I daren’t stay with him.”

  Ernest caressed the top of his bald pate, looked at her sardonically, stood before the fire with his legs apart. He patted her on the shoulder. “Calm down, Vera,” he said kindly. “Beryl will be back soon with the shopping, and we’ll have something to eat.”

  But she couldn’t calm down, felt Seaton’s blows once more and saw the table flying across the room, and she felt them again for tomorrow and the next day. “Can’t you talk to him?” she asked, a last desperate remedy that she didn’t think would help.

  He was cautious. “I suppose I could, but I don’t know anything about it.”

  “I’ve told you already,” she protested.

  “I haven’t heard Harold’s side yet, have I? I must be fair.”

  “And you won’t hear it,” she cried. “He daren’t tell you, don’t worry.”

  “I think he will. There’s two sides to every story. People don’t do things like that for nothing.” He hadn’t meant her to take this in the way she did, but blood was thicker than quicksilver in the Seaton family.

  “But he did,” she roared, “because he’s looney like the rest of the family.”

  Well, this was the bloody limit. Now he could see how Harold had been provoked. They’re all alike, these women. And on she went: “He’s a numbskull who can’t even read and write, so it’s no wonder he does such rotten things. If he’d been to school he might a been a bit more civilized.”

  The two things don’t figure, he told himself. “You must have asked for it,” he said sharply, “that’s all I can say.”

  Yes, they’re all alike, she thought. “You’re all the same,” she threw at him.

  They must fight like demons, and I’ll bet she does a good half of it. If me and Beryl did a bit as well, our lives would be a bloody sight livelier, but one word back from me and we’d be finished. And this no-good bloody girl complains of Harold, and then comes here to cheek me off as well. “You should go back and look after him,” he exclaimed.

  As thick as thieves, that’s what they are. “But won’t you help me? Won’t you talk to him for me?” she pleaded.

  “No, I bleddy-well won’t; not until I’ve heard the full story.”

  She turned from him: “I’m going. But he isn’t going to swear at me and hit me any more. I’m going to do myself in,” she sobbed. “I can’t stand it, I tell you. I’ll chuck myself under a bus.”

  The door slammed, every window in the house tingling against its frame. She pushed the pram down the path and into the empty street, walking quickly along the semi-detached rent-collecting shop-managing pavement. Everybody hates me, and he’s only the other side of the bad penny. I can’t understand why I ever got married. Now, why did I? And I didn’t want to, no, never wanted to do any such thing, though if I’d stayed at home the old man would have gone on pasting me, because they’re all rotters and if it
ain’t Harold it’s the old man. Everybody hits me, and why? That’s what I’d like to know, because it’s no use living like this. I can’t keep on with it. I’d be a sight better off dead, I’m sure. I wish I was dead, and I will be soon, quicker than anybody thinks, under a tram at where it’ll be going fast, and then to have no more rowing and misery like I’ve allus had. The boulevard isn’t far off and there’ll be lots of traffic. Around two corners and up a bit of hill. Ernest is rotten like the rest. They hate everybody: and it’s no good going back so’s it’ll happen again in a few more mornings. Why am I still crying? Because they made me? I wouldn’t cry for them, the rotten lot. Thank God it’ll soon be over, because never again. I’m out of breath, but here’s the corner. They are all rotten. I’ll wait here as if I’m going to cross the road. Nobody’ll think to stop me.

  As a tram came one way, footsteps ran up the street behind her and stopped when they came close. A hand touched her shoulder.

  “Come on, Vera,” Ernest said gently. “I’m sorry about all this. I’ll see Harold and make things right.”

  She shook him off. “I’m not frightened, so leave me alone. I’m fed up with everything.”

  “Don’t be daft,” he said. “Come on, duck. Harold won’t hit you again.”

  A suggestion of Harold’s kindness after a quarrel lurked in the tone of his voice. “No,” she said, watching a tram gather speed at the crossroads.

  “Come on back to the house and we’ll have something to eat.” He took her arm firmly. “You’ll be all right. Things are never as bad as they seem.” His considerate inflexion so closely resembled Seaton’s that for a moment she thought he was behind her, too, as if by magic he had come out of the factory to find her and make up for the quarrel.

  She turned. He pushed the pram. Brian woke up and she thought he was going to cry. Bending over, she pulled the coverlet up to his neck. He did not cry. She let herself be led by Ernest, feeling bitterly cold, though the air was warm and Seaton had dashed out without a coat. She shivered on her way back to the house, and a drowsiness replaced or accompanied the cold, as if she had been a week without sleep.

  When she left Ernest’s, a huge basket of groceries was at the foot of the pram, and the small fortune of a pound note lay in her coat pocket. But she was indifferent to these gifts and all that Ernest had meant they should mean. Yes, he would meet Harold coming out of work. Yes, he would say he should control his temper and not lead her such a dance; yes, he would say this and he would wag his head and nod his chin and tell Harold he should behave himself. Fine, fine, fine. But in the end it wouldn’t mean a bleddy thing. You can say things to a reasonable man that he’d take notice of, but you can’t tell a madman not to be mad any more. And so it would go on, though one day, she said, Brian would grow up, the proof of it being that he was beginning to cry.

  PART TWO

  Nimrod

  CHAPTER 4

  Brian had just height and strength to wrench himself on to the parapet of New Bridge and see the free-wheeling bare spokes of the headstocks riding the empty air like upside-down bicycle wheels. Leaning on his elbows and booting a rhythm on the wall, he saw the semaphore arm of a signal rise upwards, and settled himself in the hot sun to wait for a train.

  When he was on an errand to his grandma Merton’s, the couple of grandiose miles out from the last houses of Nottingham became an expedition. Across his route lay streams and lanes and stiles, and to the left stretched a green-banked railway line, rightwards an acre of allotment gardens whose shabby huts and stunted trees were often raided by roving kids from Radford—among them, he knew for a fact, Bert Doddoe and his elder brothers. Brian remembered, in the awesome silence before the advent of a train, how the whole family had descended on his house during the bitter blue snow of last winter. Ada, Doddoe her husband, and their four kids had done a bunk from Chesterfield with their bits of furniture because Doddoe had lost his job for cursing at the overseer down pit; and had spent his wages on booze before going home. Being two months behind in rent, they’d come back to Nottingham without a penny in any pocket, had been given a lift all the way by a lorry driver who had lived next door—otherwise they’d have walked. The lorry drew up outside the house one morning, and there was Ada calling to her sister Vera—crying at the same time she was—asking if they could come in for a warm because they were freezing to death. The look on her face forbade any questioning; to do so would mean going into the animal glare of uncivilized territories, as even Harold Seaton realized when the anger felt at their disturbing arrival had worn off. Ada tried to climb from the lorry-back, but her chapped fingers went aside—like cotton thread that misses the needle-hole when it doesn’t seem possible it can—and she fell towards the pavement while Vera screamed a warning. The rest of the kids watched, except Bert, who ran from under the lorry into his father’s stinging fist, a quick hand that opened in time to catch his wife and stop her fall.

  That afternoon Bert and Brian played on the recreation-ground roundabouts while their mothers walked to the convent at Lenton to ask the nuns for bread. They slid face downwards from the high apex of the slide, hoping to work up speed for a dive into soil at the bottom—impossible because the surface wasn’t smooth enough. “You want a candle to rub on it and mek it proper slippy,” Bert had said, and Brian was impressed with the useful know-how of his much-travelled cousin. Their mothers came back with two carrier bags of bread and a tin of cornbeef, making a supper for the ten people who that night slept in three rooms. Next day Ada’s half-dozen moved into a house up Sodom. Lucky Doddoe bluffed a quid out of his old man and got a six-week navvying job from the labour exchange—at which the unwieldy barge of the Doddoe family was once more afloat in its native Nottingham.

  A signal passed from the wall to his fingers: train coming. The thunder of its warning grew louder behind, until a black engine burst into the open and shot a choking cloud up from its funnel. He had intended counting the carriages as they clicked one by one into sight, but heavy smoke threw him from the wall.

  The fields were divided by a narrow sandy-bottomed brook, and he descended the steps towards it. White clouds climbed shoulder upon shoulder over the houses of Radford, while in front two horses tethered to a tree-stump meditated the clover like statues. He forced a branch back from an elderberry bush until it cracked, stripped it with a quiet, preoccupied ruthlessness, each leaf dropping to the path and taken into an unwilling dance by the wind. His stick was a sword, and he fenced with the shadow of a bush. Thistles were sabred, stinging-nettles laid low, flowers massacred, and he turned up a lonely lane where bordering thorn hedges were tall enough to hide everything from view but the blackening clouds.

  A thunder-noise quickened his walk, a distant drumroll that seemed to single him out from everyone else in the world as its first victim. With thunder, fear had come before the word. At its first sound in a darkening house his mother had looked at the window and said: “Thunder,” and between both pronouncements he had run to hide himself. I’m frightened because it makes a noise like guns and bombs, and guns and bombs can kill you, he thought.

  He stood in the silent field halfway between home and the Nook, and without thinking he walked on, knowing he would rather go to his grandma’s than run back home, even though the storm might come smashing down any minute, chase him along the lane with each growl louder than the last, blue lightning like cats’ tongues licking the hedgetops. His stick was brandished, as if it could be used as a weapon to wheel and fight the storm should it catch him up.

  He leapt a stream with bursting heart, seeing reedgrass between scissor-legs as he went across. Green and blue thunder-clouds rose like jungles over the uncannily lighted red of city buildings behind, and with the next burst of noise flat, heavy drops of rain fell against knees and forehead.

  Still clutching his stick, he stood on tiptoe to reach the gate latch, heard the ceaseless grunting of the pigs as he rushed up the yard. A blue sausage-like globule of lightning bounced from a too-clos
e hedgetop and he was impelled by a last effort towards the kitchen door, a box of red geraniums on the window-sill passing him by like a splash of blood. One push, and he was standing inside, breathless, wiping his feet, claimed by the interior warmth. Grandma Merton looked up from her sock-darning. “Hello, Brian, what brings you here?”

  Sheets of newspaper protecting the recently scrubbed tiles were used as stepping-stones to the fire: “Mam says she can’t come to see you this weekend because Margaret’s badly again.”

  “Don’t stand with your back to the fire, Brian, or you’ll be sick, there’s a good lad.” He moved, waiting for a proper response to his delivered message, hands in pockets and looking out at the last triangle of blue sky. “I don’t know,” she tut-tutted. “What’s up wi’ ’er this time?”

  “I think she’s got measles, because she had spots on her face this mornin’.” She took knives and forks from the table drawer and laid them on the cloth for tea. “You must be hungry after coming all that way”—looking out of the window as if to see in one glance the total distance of his journey. She went down the pantry steps and the rattle of the panchion lid filled his mouth with instant desire for the pasty she would bring. Will it be jam or mincemeat? he wondered.

  It was mincemeat, and he sat on grandad’s chair to eat it. A steel-blue flash across the window robbed one bite of its sweetness. “It started thunderin’ when I was comin’ over the fields.” He noticed the tremor in her hands, filled with knives and forks. She’s frightened as well, a fact that reduced his own fear.

  Heavy boots sounded on gravel and cinders outside, and a tall man in a raincoat passed the rain-spitted window. The door burst open and Merton pushed his bike into the parlour.

  “You’re back early, aren’t you?” his wife said. He took off his coat. “There’s a storm comin’ up, Mary”—dividing the embers and placing a log on the low fire. “There’s nowt to do at pit so they sent us ’ome.”