Читать книгу Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Alan Sillitoe - Страница 8

In the few minutes that passed between regaining consciousness and opening his eyes he knew that he was too ill to go to work. From time to time he intended getting out of bed to see how he really felt, but it was eleven o’clock before this was possible. Downstairs he found the filled teapot cold on the table where his mother had left it before going shopping. He did not know what was wrong as he walked bare-footed around the room. He picked up the Daily Mirror and, seeing no good-looking women on the front page, turned to the middle. A nice bathing-suit, anyway. Throwing the paper down, he went into the coal-place under the stairs to fill the bucket.

His mother came in, her arms weighed down with groceries.

‘I thought you was badly,’ she said, seeing him sitting with a pale face by the fire, ‘that’s why I let you stay in bed.’

‘My guts are rotten,’ he complained.

‘Bilious trouble,’ she said, a common label given to all such complaints. A common cure, when she had unloaded her baskets in the scullery, was to fetch sixpennyworth of Indian Brandy from the shop across the street.

She trudged hurriedly up the yard, her arms folded and drawn tightly together in the cold. In summer months they were held more loosely across her thin chest. This picture went through Arthur’s mind as he stayed by the fire, hearing to himself the click of her black, glossy, underslung shoes as she crossed the cobbled street. ‘Sixpennyworth of Indian Brandy, Mr Taylor,’ she would say, entering the shop. Old Tightfist, thought Arthur. ‘Nice thing to come for on a morning like this,’ the shopkeeper would say, measuring it out in drops. Arthur knew his mother would rather have risked short measure than be kept waiting, but a dee-dahed tune and blank look through his frosted window would speed Tightfist’s actions up for her. Unmade-up and thin, her face at fifty-odd had enough lines, not scored with age like an old woman’s, but crease-marked in the right places through too much laughing and crying. By God she had worked and hadn’t had a good life until the war, and Arthur knew it. When Seaton’s face grew black for lack of fags she had trotted around to the various shops asking for some on tick till Thursday dole-day. But just as Seaton nowadays had endless packets of Woodbines and a TV panel, so she had access to week after week of solid wages that stopped worry at the source and gave her a good enough life, and put real brightness into her bright blue-grey eyes as she asked, whenever she felt like it at the Co-op, for a pound of this and a pound of that. ‘Anybody badly, Mrs Seaton?’ Arthur could imagine Old Tightfist asking her. He had a blank face of forty, was dead-set in his ways, and nosy like a nark. She would unfold her arms and take the purse from her pina-pocket: ‘It’s Arthur’s stomach again. That factory’s not a bit o’ good to anybody on God’s earth.’ Young-looking and hair-creamed, Tightfist would hold up the sixpennorth of brandy and tell himself he must put more water in it when she’d gone. ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ he no doubt said, slipping the glass-stopper back. ‘I’ve never worked there myself. I was a traveller, you know. But grease is bad, I will say that.’ She was only half grey as yet. Halfway between fair and brown, Arthur said her hair was. His old man’s had been as black as the ace of spades. ‘Do you think this’ll do him much good?’ she would ask. ‘The poor bogger woks too ‘ard, if you ask me. He’s a good lad, though. Allus ‘as bin. Don’t know what I’d do wi’out ‘im.’ That’s what Arthur knew she would say. ‘Don’t know of owt better.’ Tightfist would think about the time Arthur came in his shop and played on the fruit machine. I stuffed penny after penny into the slot, Arthur at the fire thought, and when it stopped at three lemons at last, the kitty didn’t fall out. Not a farthing. So when Old Tightfist said he couldn’t do owt about it I thumped it in the side until it started coughing, and twelve-and-fourpence crashed into my lap.

He waited for her, saw her walk down the yard, heard the latch click as she came in with her small medicinal load.

‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘I’ll soon get yer well.’

He drank the brandy and felt doubly better by giving an imitation before the mirror of Bill Hickock knocking it back in a Wild West saloon, and the sickness brought on by too much breathing of suds and grease in the factory gradually left him. He called out urgently for a chaser of tea, and his mother made a hot strong cup with plenty of sugar and rich Co-op cream from the pint-bottle top that she took from the outside window-ledge, an efficient mash through two dozen years of practice. He stayed by the fire while she cooked the dinner, reading the Daily Mirror in a smell of cabbage, and looking occasionally out of the breath and frost-smeared window at the long ramshackle backyards, at women coming home with their shopping, and at his mother nipping out through the scullery door now and again to tip some rubbish into the dustbin, or to have a few-minute gossip at the yard-end with old Ma Bull.

It was a good, comfortable life if you didn’t weaken, safe from the freezing world in a warm snug kitchen, watching the pink and prominent houses of the opposite terrace. He could have laughed. From time to time it was fine to feel unwell and have a day off work, to sit by the fire reading and drinking tea, waiting for them to get cracking with something good on television. He did not know why he felt ill. Last night he was drinking with Brenda at the Athletic Club, though he hadn’t put back enough to cause an upset stomach. This made him ask: Did I really feel badly this morning? But his conscience was untroubled: his wages would not suffer, and he always kept his work at the factory at least one day’s supply ahead of those who waited for it. So there was nothing to worry about. His stomach was better now, and he drew his white bony foot back from the red heat of the blazing fire.

With a silk-scarf covering his Windsor-knotted tie he walked towards Wollaton hoping to meet Brenda on her way to the Athletic Club. He preferred to lean against a fence rather than trudge around dismal lanes, and from where he stood he saw that the surface of Martin’s Pond was frozen. Last night Brenda did not know whether she would come or not: only perhaps, and the wording sounded so uncertain in the soft tenderness of saying good-bye that he had forgotten all about her until tea-time.

Five struck by Wollaton clock, its sound chipping the cold air, nipping in strides over the pond where children, on their way home from school, shouted and slid and threw stones at astonished ducks that rose up from clumps of reed-grass and flew with flapping wings into trees and the hedges of allotment gardens. He stood by the fence looking along the side of the wood, one hand thrust deep into the pocket of his long draped overcoat. Nearly always, while waiting for a woman to turn up, he played a game, saying to himself: ‘Well, I don’t suppose she’ll come.’ Or: ‘Well, she won’t be on this bus’ — as it came around the bend and drew into the stop. Or: ‘She won’t come for another quarter of an hour yet’ — expecting a pleasant surprise as she walked suddenly towards him. Sometimes he won, and sometimes he didn’t.

Several people alighted from the bus, yet he could not see her. He tried to penetrate the windows, top deck and lower deck, but they were steamed over with breath and smoke. Perhaps Jack will get off: the possibility amused him, and he laughed outright at the thought of it. More than a month ago Brenda had said: ‘What shall I say to Jack if he asks me why I go to the club so often?’ And he answered jokingly: ‘Tell him you’re in the darts team.’ When next they met, she had said: ‘I told him I play darts at the club, and he seemed to think it was all right.’ ‘Anything satisfies them if they get jealous,’ he had replied. But some weeks later she had told him: ‘Jack said he would come up to the club one of these nights to see if I really played darts. He joked about wanting to see me win the championship cup.’ ‘Let him come, then,’ Arthur said.

And he thought the same now. She was not on it. The engine revved-up so loudly that the brittle twigs and tree branches seemed afraid of the silence that followed, making Arthur feel colder still and unable to hear the kids playing on the pond. Brenda came three times a week to the club when Jack was on nights, leaving Jacky and his sister with a neighbour’s girl who earned a shilling for her trouble and was given a wink that told her not to say anything to a living soul. Arthur hoped that the dart story would be good for another few weeks. Turning his back on the bus that drove towards Wollaton, he stared again at the kids hooting and ice-sliding in the dusk.

She stepped off the next bus, paused at the roadside for a car to pass, then made her way across to him. He knew she had seen him but he stayed in the shadow of the hedge. She walked in short quick steps, coat fastened tight, hands in pockets, a woollen scarf drawn incongruously around her neck. He didn’t go too far out of the hedge’s cover but called her name when she was a few yards off. He wanted to be careful. You never knew. Jack might be trailing her. Not that he was afraid for himself — if it came to a show he knew he could hold his own with anybody: over six feet tall, just turned twenty-two, and bags of strength always to be drawn from somewhere — but if they were caught Brenda would be the one to pay. Be careful, and you won’t go far wrong, he thought.

He went out to meet her, taking hold of her and drawing her into the shadows. ‘Hello, duck,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. ‘How are you?’

She came close and he put his arms around her. ‘I’m all right, Arthur,’ she said softly, as if she would have given the same answer had she not been all right. A white blouse showed below her scarf when he put his hand down near her warm breasts. She carried the easy and comfortable smell of a woman who had been in a hurry and was now relaxing from the worry of it, exuding warmth and a slight powdery perspiration that excited him. She must be thirty, he thought if she’s a day. ‘Did you get away from Jack all right?’ he asked, releasing her.

‘Of course. I told him I was going to the club to play darts again.’ She was ill at ease, so he pulled her to him and held her more gently than before. It did not seem right that a woman should worry overmuch. He wanted all her troubles for himself at that moment. It was easy. He had only to take them and, having no use for them, throw them away.

‘What did he say?’

‘That he might be down later.’ She spoke with her warm breath against his mouth.

‘He allus says that, but he never comes. Besides, he’s on nights, ain’t he?’

‘Yes.’ She would not have felt safe had he been ten thousand miles away. It’s only natural though, he thought, putting both arms around her and kissing her tenderly on the mouth.

‘Don’t worry, duck, he wain’t come. You’ll be all right wi’ me.’ He pulled up her coat collar and fastened the scarf properly around her neck, then lit two cigarettes, placing one between her lips. They walked up the dark quiet tree-lined lane on their way to the club building. He told her how long he stood there before she came, making a joke of it, saying it was like waiting for a football match to start on the wrong day, saying many wild things to make her laugh. There was a wood on one side of the lane, and after more jokes and kisses, they went into it through a gap in the hedge.

Arthur prided himself on knowing the wood like the back of his hand. There was a lake in the middle where he used to swim when young. A sawmill on the wood’s flank was set like the camp of an invader that ate slowly into it, though a jungle of trees still remained, that could be put to good use by Arthur on such nights as these.

He knew he was hurting her, squeezing her wrist as he led her deeper into the wood, but it did not occur to him to relax his hold. Trees and bushes crowding around in the darkness made him melancholy. One minute he thought he was holding her wrist so tightly because he was in a hurry to find a good dry place; then he felt it was because there was something about her and the whole situation that made him want to hurt her, something to do with the way she was deceiving Jack. Even though he, now leading her to a spot that suddenly came into his mind, would soon be enjoying it, he thought: ‘Women are all the same. If they do it to their husbands they would do it to you if you gave them half the chance.’ He trod on a twig that sent a cracking sound circling the osier-lined indistinct banks of dark water below. Brenda gasped as some bush-leaves swept by her face; he had not bothered to warn her.

The ground was hard and dry. They walked over a hump clear of bushes, the roof of a concealed tunnel burrowed into the earth and strengthened with pit-props, an air-raid shelter for the sawmill men during the war. He now held her hand lightly as she walked behind, considerate and tender again, telling her when to avoid a bush, or a tree-root sticking out of the ground.

There were no more paths in the wood than the clear and definite lines on Arthur’s palms, and he easily found the dry and enclosed place he had in mind. He took off his overcoat and laid it on the ground. ‘We’s’ll be comfortable ‘ere,’ he said softly.

Brenda spoke, the first time since entering the wood: ‘Won’t you be cold?’

Hearing her so solicitous, he could hardly wait for what was to come. He laughed out loud. ‘No fear. This is nothing to what we had to put up with in the army. And I hadn’t got you with me then to keep me warm, duck!’

She put her arms around him, and allowed him to unbutton her coat. He smelled again the smell of a woman whose excitement at doing something she considered not quite right was but one step from the hasty abandonment of making love. He felt the hardness of the imitation pearl brooch against her blouse, and then the buttons themselves, and they lay down on the spot where he had carefully placed his overcoat. They forgot the cold soil and towering trees, and lost themselves in a warm passion in the comfortable silence of a wood at night, that smelled of primeval vegetation, a wood wherein no one could discover your secrets, or kill the delight that a man and a woman generate between them on an overcoat in the darkness.

Back on the lane it needed a few hundred yards to reach the club-house, through a tunnel of bent-over trees with the lights of paradise at the other end. Brenda took his arm, and they joked, talked, smoked cigarettes, felt lovable and agreeable towards each other, as though a great deal of care had been lifted from them.

But Arthur’s gaiety lapsed by the tennis courts, and both became sad, as if they had taken on a happiness that could not be sustained. Brenda walked with head slightly bent, starting when she stepped on a patch of ice. Arthur thought again about Jack, this time with a feeling of irritation that he should be so weak as to allow his wife to go off with other men. It was funny how often you felt guilty at taking weak men’s wives: with the strong men’s you have too much to fear, he reasoned.

Did Jack know? he wondered. Of course he did. Of course he did not. Yet if he doesn’t know by now he will never know. He must know: no man is that batchy. He must have been told. Arthur had no positive reason for thinking that he knew, yet relied on the accuracy of his total ‘weighings-up’ from meetings with Jack and the reports of Brenda. But you could never be sure. Not that it would matter either way, as long as Jack didn’t object to it. There wasn’t much he could do about it: he would never make a divorce. It would cost too much, one way or another. And no woman is worth making a divorce over.

He felt that Jack might be trying to find out for sure what was going on, and that perhaps he might already be at the club waiting for Brenda to arrive. The idea grew stronger, surfaced like a definite warning to his lips. Near the last turn of the hedge he said: ‘Look, duck, I’m just going on in front to see if Jack’s at the club. He won’t be there, I suppose, but I’m going to make sure, so wait for me. I won’t be long.’

She did not argue, but stayed behind, smoking a cigarette he had lit for her. He walked along the gravel drive and in through the gates. He stood by the bottom step, tall enough to look in the windows, trying to see as far as the bar, glad at his good luck that he could see everybody inside, while they could not see him standing there in the darkness. Jack sat by the far window — looking straight at him, as a matter of fact — alone at a table, his hand resting by a half-finished pint. Arthur watched him, feeling a sudden deep interest that would not let him move. He saw a man walk up to Jack, pat him on the back, say something to him in true matey style, and walk away again. Jack shrugged his shoulders, and picked up the glass in a desultory fashion to finish his pint.

So the bastard had really come at last! Arthur was unable to move. Surprise and curiosity fastened him to the hard soil, his eyes a camera that slowly fitted the picture into his brain. Then he remembered Brenda waiting for him down the lane, and with a sudden movement turned and walked away, feeling sprightly and happy as his blood raced once more and his shoes crunched on the gravel, as if he were just coming away from a long and satisfying pint.

He found her where he had left her, standing like a shadow among the other shadows of the hedge. He would not have seen her in fact had she not moved slightly to indicate that she was there. He was so happy he would have walked right back to the main road without knowing what he was doing. He turned towards the hedge in a half-circle, as though he was a vehicle being steered by another person.

‘I was freezing,’ she said, half morosely, half regretfully, as though she had been blaming him for it and was now sorry. He told her to start walking with him along the lane, back towards the bus stop. ‘Why?’ she wanted to know.

‘Because Jack’s in the club.’

She didn’t seem surprised. ‘Did he see you?’

‘Not me,’ he said. She asked what they would do now. ‘You’re going home,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s the best thing to do. I’ll put you on the bus, then go back myself to the club for a drink or two, just to show my face.’

‘What if Jack asks where I went tonight?’

‘Say you went to your sister’s for an hour, that you had a headache and didn’t feel like going to the club.’

It was simple and explicit, because he had not thought about it. If he gave things too much thought they did not turn out so well. She understood, and they kissed good night near the end of the lane. She was warm again after the quick walk from the club. ‘I’m sorry it went wrong,’ he said at the bus stop, ‘but I’ll see you tomorrer night, duck.’

‘That’s all right. We had our bit of love, though, didn’t we?’

‘We did,’ he whispered. ‘I love you, Brenda.’

The bus came, stopped, sped away down the dark road, and he watched until its rearlight turned a corner.

He walked back up the lane, alone, with a tremendous feeling of elation and freedom, hardly able to believe it belonged to him, wanting to dance between the tree-shadows. Through gaps in over-arching branches he could see the stars. He sang and whistled and his happiness showed him the way like a lighted candle and protected him from the blackening frost of the night. He was feeling so good in fact that it took him a mere ten minutes to get back to the club. He walked up the wooden steps — that felt unsafe because he seemed giant-sized with optimism — and pushed open the door, seeing at once that Jack was still sitting in the same place, the only difference being that his pint jar was now empty and he had not yet bothered to have it refilled.

There weren’t more than a dozen men in the club, because it was a late week-day night, and wages had spilled out of the bottomless can of beer and cigarette prices. The barkeeper and caretaker, dressed sprucely in a white jacket provided by the firm, was playing darts, a popular man at the game not because he had a particularly good aim, but because he had a fine head for keeping scores, a gift that he had developed in his job. Arthur had once reckoned-up the darts scores, and the barkeeper at the end of the evening had detected several mistakes, all very much to Arthur’s advantage. ‘I don’t know,’ the barkeeper had cried, ‘you can’t reckon owt up for tuffey-apples. I thought you’d come down from three-o-one too quick.’ ‘That’s because I’m a numb-skull,’ Arthur winked. ‘I was never any good outside a bookie’s shop.’

He now unhesitatingly walked across the room and sat at Jack’s table, patting him warmly on the shoulder before taking off his overcoat and settling down for a drink. The good feeling from the lane had diminished in intensity, though the backwash of its elation lingered. ‘How are you, Jack? I haven’t seen you for two years: two weeks, at least.’

Jack greeted him coldly, looking up and giving a brief hello. If he one day thought to rip the mask of anxiety from his face he would be good-looking, for he had regular features and should have looked young for his age. Arthur noticed his bicycle clips, fastened in neatly to his overalls at the ankle. ‘I thought you were on nights?’ he demanded in gruff friendliness.

‘I am.’ Like all worried men Jack gave a forthright answer to questions, too busy worrying to equivocate. ‘Only I thought I’d come up here for a drink first. I can go in at ten o’clock. I’m not so busy as I was in the turnery.’

And also, for the same reason, it was hard to get him to talk much. ‘How’s Brenda these days?’ No use not asking about her, he thought. Otherwise he’d twig something.

Jack looked at him, then turned his eyes away to the bar when Arthur met his stare with ingenuous grey eyes and a half, know-nothing smile. ‘She’s all right.’

‘Is her cold better?’ Arthur wondered whether he should have said this, whether he had not overdone it.

‘She hasn’t got a cold,’ Jack said with a trace of resentment. He hardly ever looked at the person to whom he was talking, always at the bar, at other empty tables, at a row of machines, or a blank wall.

Arthur said: ‘I thought somebody said she had,’ and asked the barkeeper to bring two pints of beer, one for Jack, and one for himself.

‘Thanks,’ Jack said, not so cool now. ‘I mustn’t drink too much though, because I don’t want to fall asleep on the job.’

Arthur had so many different feelings at first, sitting with Jack after having been into the wood with his wife, that he did not know what feeling was the most definite. It was hard to know what to say next with such varied thoughts coming into your head. He asked how the kids were these days, and thought again that perhaps he was overdoing it.

‘They’re all right,’ Jack told him. ‘The eldest’ll be at school soon. Less for Brenda to do.’

That’s a good thing, Arthur thought, and couldn’t stop himself from saying it. He took a long drink of beer.

‘She’ll have more time to herself,’ Jack agreed.

‘This ale’s like piss,’ Arthur said loudly, hoping to draw the dart players into some diverting banter and force the conversation away from Brenda and Jack’s kids. It struck him as strange that when you were with a man whose wife you were doing you couldn’t stop talking about her, though it occurred to him that Jack was doing a good half of it too. They were both to blame. I suppose he knows something then, he thought sadly.

The dart players would not bite the bait he had thrown out, so he was left to cope with the compact mass of Jack’s mind himself, and it suddenly began to bother him, almost to the point of making him wish he had got on the same bus and gone home with Brenda. They talked about fishing, Arthur saying he hoped the thaw would come soon so that he could get on his bike of a Sunday morning and go out to Cotgrave, or beyond Trowel Bridge. ‘You can’t beat it up there,’ he said, ‘the fish bite like hungry niggers. They can’t wait to get their cops on the ‘ook. Queue for miles. I know a place with some owd limekilns where you can go if it rains.’

But Jack, unlike the fish, like the dart players, did not bite either. It was certainly taking something on to get him to talk. Arthur shouted out for two more pints, but the more Jack drank, he discovered, the less he opened his mouth to say things. ‘What’s up, Jack, my owd bird?’ he exclaimed loudly, leaning across and patting him again on the shoulder, as he often did at work when Jack was bent over his bench sharpening somebody’s drill. ‘Why don’t yer cheer up? You look as if you’ve got summat on yer mind.’

It was apparently the right thing to do and say, because Jack smiled, the first time that evening, and the tight expression of worry momentarily left his face. ‘I’m all right,’ he said in a friendly voice. Arthur wondered what would be said and done if he suddenly told Jack how the position really stood between himself and Brenda. Out of friendship, out of the feeling of being pals, he almost made up his mind to do it. It’s a rotten trick, he argued to himself, to play on your mate. Just for a bit of love.

The worried expression returned to Jack’s face, as if he was weighing the balance of some trouble — what trouble? wondered Arthur — one minute, and trying to guess whether or not anything were really happening the next.

Arthur wanted to shake his hand and tell him everything, tell him how good he thought he — Jack — was, that he had guts and that he was all right, that he didn’t like to see him suffer because of a looney thing like this, of a woman coming between them.

Instead, he drew him into a conversation about football, and over their third pint Jack was declaiming on how Notts would get into the second division next year. Everyone at the club put in their various pieces of knowledge, using imagination when knowledge failed. Arthur had little to say, and ordered more pints for himself, and Jack, feeling good and generous at buying beer for Brenda’s husband. All the same he kept on thinking, Jack’s a good bloke. It’s hard luck that things stand the way they do.

‘Bolton’s centre-forward’s got the best kick and aim o’ the lot on ‘em, I don’t care what you say,’ Jack cried, up to his neck in it now. Arthur had never seen him less worried.

The bartender cried back, shaking his thin face: ‘I don’t believe yer, Jack. It stands ter reason they can’t get it this year.’

‘No more do I,’ the other dart player put in. ‘They can play for another ten years and they wain’t get it, I can tell yer that, Jack.’

They were warmed-up to the argument, supping at pints and friendly in their speculations, each full of hope that he would be the man with the right prophecy.

‘But you’ve got to think of last week’s transfer from Hull,’ Jack said, arguing skilfully, taking the other pint that the barkeeper passed to his table. Arthur watched him, thankful that certain laws existed to prevent you from seeing into each other’s mind, that things were marvellous that way.