ALAN SILLITOE

Saturday Night and

Sunday Morning

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction to 1979 edition of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Part One - Saturday Night

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Part Two - Sunday Morning

13

14

15

16

Keep Reading

P.S.

About the author

A Biographical Sketch

Everyone Getting Blindo

Top Ten Favourite Books

About the book

What the Papers Said

Read on

Must Reads

Find Out More

If You Loved This, You Might Like …

On the Man, His Life and Art

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction to 1979 edition of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was first published nearly twenty years ago, in the autumn of 1958.

No one was more surprised by its success than I was, not even the reviewers and critics. I wrote the final version in Majorca, in 1956-7, but many of the chapters and various parts of it had been composed from 1950 onwards, so that it was in progress for seven years before the final typed version was sent to London.

Some of the chapters were originally written as short stories, a few of which were sent to magazines, but not accepted. One or two items in the novel (including the reflections while fishing by the canal bank on Sunday morning) were written as poems. They were merely incidents, yet fitted well into the novel because they either concerned one character — Arthur Seaton — or centred around one city and one family.

These sketches and stories have been lost, because in moving from one pan of Spain to another during those indigent years of apprenticeship I could not take into my suitcases the monstrous amount of paper that was constantly accumulating.

The novel was turned down by four publishers. I thought I would make £200 from it at most, with which sum I intended to return to Majorca, and live for a year until I had another novel ready for publication — which I also hoped would earn me the same amount. And so I would go on living and writing.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that the novel is autobiographical, as they did when it first appeared. It is not, at least not in the strictest sense of the word. When I was writing it I had not been in a factory for ten years. But the novel, while mirroring the sort of atmosphere I grew up in, is a work of the imagination in that all the actors in it are put together from jigsaw pieces assembled so that no identifiable characters came out at the end. I imagine novelists of the middle-class condition also perform in this way.

I had no theme in my head except the joy of writing, the sweat of writing clearly and truthfully, the work of trying to portray ordinary people as I knew them, and in such a way that they would recognize themselves. This took me a long time to achieve, and was more difficult than one might imagine.

It is not up to me to say whether I succeeded or not. I am a writer still, not a critic or reviewer. I am too engrossed in the construction of my own novels, as I was with this one, even to be a reader of them in the final sense. After all, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was and remains a first novel, with all its liberties and limitations. Yet it was in this piece of work that I think I found my true voice, and if I still like it at all, it is for that reason. Beyond that point, it is in the reader’s hands.

ALAN SILLITOE

1979

PART ONE

1

The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must all have known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.

It was Benefit Night for the White Horse Club, and the pub had burst its contribution box and spread a riot through its rooms and between its four walls. Floors shook and windows rattled, and leaves of aspidistras wilted in the fumes of beer and smoke. Notts County had beaten the visiting team, and the members of the White Horse supporters club were quartered upstairs to receive a flow of victory. Arthur was not a member of the club, but Brenda was, and so he was drinking the share of her absent husband — as far as it would go — and when the club went bust and the shrewd publican put on the towels for those that couldn’t pay, he laid eight half-crowns on the table, intending to fork out for his own.

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of ‘be drunk and be happy’, kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.

Brenda and two other women sitting at Arthur’s table saw him push back his chair and stand up with a clatter, his grey eyes filmed over so that he looked like a tall, thin Druid about to begin a maniacal dance. Instead, he muttered something that they were too tight or far away to understand, and walked unsteadily to the top stair. Many people looked at him as he held on to the rail. He turned his head in a slow stare around the packed room, as if he did not know which foot to move first in order to start his body on the descent, or even know why he wanted to go down the stairs at that particular moment.

He felt electric light bulbs shining and burning into the back of his head, and sensed in the opening and closing flash of a second that his mind and body were entirely separate entities inconsiderately intent on going their different ways. For some reason, the loud, cracked voice singing in the room behind seemed like a signal that he should begin descending at once, so he put one foot forward, watched it turn towards the next step in a hazy fashion, and felt the weight of his body bending towards it until pressure from above became so great that he started rolling down the stairs.

A high-octane fuel of seven gins and eleven pints had set him into motion like a machine, and had found its way into him because of a man’s boast. A big, loud-mouthed bastard who said he had been a sailor — so Arthur later summed him up — was throwing his weight about and holding dominion over several tables, telling his listeners of all the places he had been to in the world, each anecdote pointing to the fact that he was a champion boozer and the palliest bloke in the pub. He was forty and in his prime, with a gut not too much gone to fat, wearing a brown waist-coated suit and a shirt with matching stripes whose cuffs came down to the hairs of self-assurance on the back of his beefy hand.

‘Drink?’ Brenda’s friend exclaimed. ‘I’ll bet you can’t drink like young Arthur Seaton there’ — nodding to Arthur’s end of the table. ‘He’s on’y twenty-one and ’e can tek it in like a fish. I don’t know where ’e puts it all. It just goes in and in and you wonder when ‘is guts are goin’ ter go oust all over the room, but ‘e duzn’t even get fatter!’

Loudmouth grunted and tried to ignore her eulogy, but at the end of a fiery and vivid description of a brothel in Alexandria he called over to Arthur: ‘I hear you drink a lot, matey?’

Arthur didn’t like being called ‘matey’. It put his back up straight away. ‘Middlin’,’ he answered modestly. ‘Why?’

‘What’s the most you’ve ever drunk, then?’ Loudmouth wanted to know. ‘We used to have boozing matches on shore-leave,’ he added with a wide, knowing smile to the aroused group of spectators. He reminded Arthur of a sergeant-major who once put him on a charge.

‘I don’t know,’ Arthur told him. ‘I can’t count, you see.’

‘Well,’ Loudmouth rejoined, ‘let’s see how much you can drink now. Loser pays the bill.’

Arthur did not hesitate. Free booze was free booze. Anyway, he begrudged big talkers their unearned glory, and hoped to show him up and take him down to his right size.

Loudmouth’s tactics were skilful and sound, he had to admit that. Having won the toss-up for choice, he led off on gins, and after the seventh gin he switched to beer, pints. Arthur enjoyed the gins, and relished the beer. It seemed an even contest for a long time, as if they would sit there swilling it back for ever, until Loudmouth suddenly went green halfway through the tenth pint and had to rush outside. He must have paid the bill downstairs, because he didn’t come back. Arthur, as if nothing had happened, went back to his beer.

He was laughing to himself as he rolled down the stairs, at the dull bumping going on behind his head and along his spine, as if it were happening miles away, like a vibration on another part of the earth’s surface, and he an earthquake-machine on which it was faintly recorded. This rolling motion was so restful and soporific, in fact, that when he stopped travelling, having arrived at the bottom of the stairs — he kept his eyes closed and went to sleep. It was a pleasant and far-away feeling, and he wanted to stay in exactly the same position for the rest of his life.

Someone was poking him in the ribs: he recognized it not as the vicious poke of someone who had beaten him in a fight, or the gentle and playful poke of a woman whom he had taken to bed, but the tentative poke of a man who did not know whether he was poking the ribs of someone who might suddenly spring up and give him a bigger poke back. It seemed to Arthur that the man was endeavouring to tell him something as well, so he tried very hard, but unsuccessfully, to make an answer, though he did not yet know what the man was saying. Even had he been able to make his lips move, the man would not have understood him, because Arthur’s face was pulled down into his stomach, so that for all the world he looked like a fully-dressed and giant foetus curled up at the bottom of the stairs on a plush-red carpet, hiding in the shadow of two aspidistras that curved out over him like arms of jungle foliage.

The man’s pokes became more persistent, and Arthur dimly realized that the fingers must belong either to one of the waiters or to the publican himself. It was a waiter, towel in one hand and tray in the other, white jacket open from overwork, a face normally blank but now expressing some character because he had begun to worry about this tall, iron-faced, crop-haired youth lying senseless at his feet.

‘He’s had a drop too much, poor bloke,’ said an elderly man, stepping over Arthur’s body and humming a hymn tune as he went up the stairs, thinking how jolly yet sinful it would be if he possessed the weakness yet strength of character to get so drunk and roll down the stairs in such a knocked-out state.

‘Come on, Jack,’ the waiter pleaded with Arthur. ‘We don’t want the pleece to come in and find you like that or we shall get summonsed. We had trubble wi’ a man last week who had a fit and had to be taken to ’t General Hospital in an amb’lance. We don’t want any more trubble, or the pub’ll get a bad name.’

As Arthur rolled over to consolidate and deepen his sleep a glaring overhead light caught his eyes and he opened them, to see the waiter’s white coat and pink face.

‘Christ!’ he mumbled.

‘He won’t help you,’ the waiter said dispassionately. ‘Come on, get up and go out for some fresh air, then you’ll feel better.’

Arthur felt happy yet uncooperative when the waiter tried to get him to his feet: like being in hospital and having a nurse do everything for you with great exertion, and all the time warning that you mustn’t try to help yourself in any way or else it would result in you being kept in bed for another week. Like after he had been knocked down by a lorry riding to Derby two years ago. But the waiter had a different point of view, and after pulling him into a sitting position cried, his heavy breath whistling against the aspidistra leaves:

‘All right. That’s enough. You aren’t lifeless. Come on, get up yoursen now.’

When another man’s legs opened and closed over Arthur — the retreating shoe knocked his shoulder — he shouted in a belligerent and fully-awake voice: ‘Hey, mate, watch what yer doin’, can’t yer? Yo’ an’ yer bloody grett clod-‘oppers.’ He turned to the waiter: ‘Some people love comin’ out on a Saturday night in their pit-boots.’

The man turned from halfway up the stairs: ‘You shouldn’t go to sleep in everybody’s way. Can’t tek the drink, that’s what’s the matter wi’ yo’ young ‘uns.’

‘That’s what yo’ think,’ Arthur retaliated, pulling himself up by the stair-rail and holding firmly on to it.

‘You’ll have to go out, you know,’ the waiter said sadly, as if he had donned a black cap to pronounce sentence. ‘We can’t serve you any more ale in that condition.’

‘There’s nowt wrong wi’ me,’ Arthur exclaimed, recognizing a situation of extreme peril.

‘No,’ the waiter retorted, coolly sarcastic, ‘I know there ain’t, but it’s a bit thick, you know, getting drunk like this.’

Arthur denied that he was drunk, speaking so clearly that the waiter was inclined to believe him.

‘Have a fag, mate,’ he said, and lit both cigarettes with a perfectly calm hand. ‘You must be busy tonight,’ he suggested, so sanely that he might just have walked in off the street and not yet sipped a shandy.

His remark touched the waiter’s grievance. ‘Not much we aren’t. I’m so tired I can’t feel my feet. These Saturday nights’ll be the death o’ me.’

‘It ain’t what yer might call a good job,’ Arthur said with sympathy.

‘Well, it’s not that exactly,’ the waiter began to complain, friendly and confiding all of a sudden. ‘It’s because we’re short of staff. Nobody’ll take on a job like this, you know, and …’

The publican came out of the saloon door, a small wiry man in a pin-striped suit whom no one would know as a publican unless they recognized the slight cast of authority and teetotalness in his right eye. ‘Come on, Jim,’ he said sharply. ‘I don’t pay my waiters to talk to their pals. You know it’s a busy night. Get back upstairs and keep ‘em happy.’

Jim nodded towards Arthur: ‘This bloke here’ — but the publican was already carrying his fanatic stare to another department, and so the waiter saw no point in going on. He shrugged his shoulders and obeyed the order, leaving Arthur free to walk into the saloon bar.

Fixing an iron-grip on the brass rail, he shouted for a pint, the only sufficient liquid measure that could begin to swill away the tasteless ash-like thirst at the back of his mouth. After the rapid disposal of the pint, so long in coming, he would bluff his way back upstairs, dodge the waiter, and rejoin Brenda, the woman he had been sitting with before his fall. He could not believe that the descending frolic of the stairs had happened to him. His memory acted at first like a beneficial propaganda machine, a retainer and builder of morale, saying that he could not have been so drunk and rolled down the stairs in that way, and that what had really happened, yes, this was it for sure, was that he must have walked down and fallen asleep on the bottom step. It could happen to anybody, especially if they had been at work all day, standing near a capstan lathe in the dull roar of the turnery department. Yet this explanation was too tame. Perhaps he really had tripped down a few of the stairs; yes, he distinctly remembered bumping a few steps.

For the third time he demanded a pint. His eyes were glazed with fatigue, and he would have let go of the bar-rail had not an ever-ready instinct of self-preservation leapt into his fist at the weakest moment and forced him to tighten his grip. He was beginning to feel sick, and in fighting this temptation his tiredness increased. He did not know whether he would go back upstairs to Brenda afterwards, or have his pint and get home to bed, the best place when you feel done-in, he muttered to himself.

The bartender placed a pint before him. He paid one-and-eightpence and drank it almost in a single gulp. His strength magically returned, and he shouted out for another, thinking: the thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but halfway through it, the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought if off and struggled to light a cigarette.

Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push his way back through the crush — nudging his elbow into standing people who unknowingly blocked his way, half choked by smoke now issuing from mouth and nostrils, feeling strangely taken up by a fierce power that he could not control — before he gave way to the temptation that had stood by him since falling down the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man sitting with a woman on one of the green leather seats.

‘My God!’ the man cried. ‘Look at this. Look at what the young bogger’s gone and done. Would you believe it? My best suit. Only pressed and cleaned today. Who would credit such a thing? Oh dear. It cost me fifteen bob. As if money grows on trees. And suits as well. I wonder how I’ll ever get the stains out? Oh dear.’

His whining voice went on for several minutes, and those who turned to look expected him with every word to break down into piteous sobs.

Arthur was stupefied, unable to believe that the tragedy before him could by any means be connected with himself and the temptation to which he had just given way. Yet through the haze and smoke and shrill reproaches coming from the man’s lady-friend, he gathered that he was to blame and that he should be feeling sorry for what had happened.

He stood up straight, rigid, swaying slightly, his eyes gleaming, his overcoat open. Automatically he felt for another cigarette, but remembering in time what his attempt to smoke the last one had caused, gave up the search and dropped his hands by his side.

‘Look what yer’ve done, yer young bleeder,’ the woman was shouting at him. ‘Spewed all over Alf’s bes’ suit. And all you do is jus’ stand there. Why don’t yer do something? Eh? Why don’t yer’t least apologize for what yer’ve done?’

‘Say summat, mate,’ an onlooker called, and by the tone of his voice Arthur sensed that the crowd was not on his side, though he was unable to speak and defend himself. He looked at the woman, who continued shouting directly at him, while the victim fumbled ineffectually with a handkerchief trying to clean his suit.

The woman stood a foot away from Arthur. ‘Look at him,’ she jeered into his face. ‘He’s senseless. He can’t say a word. He can’t even apologize. Why don’t yer apologize, eh? Can’t yer apologize? Dragged-up, I should think, getting drunk like this. Looks like one of them Teddy boys, allus making trouble. Go on, apologize.’

From her constant use of the word apologize it seemed as if she had either just learned its meaning — perhaps after a transmission breakdown on television — or as if she had first learned to say it by spelling it out with coloured bricks at school forty years ago.

‘Apologize,’ she cried, her maniacal face right against him. ‘Go on, apologize.’

The beast inside Arthur’s stomach gripped him again, and suddenly, mercilessly, before he could stop it or move out of the way, or warn anybody that it was coming, it leapt out of his mouth with an appalling growl.

She was astonished. Through the haze her face clarified. Arthur saw teeth between open lips, narrowed eyes, claws raised. She was a tigress.

He saw nothing else. Before she could spring he gathered all his strength and pushed through the crowd, impelled by a strong sense of survival towards the street-door, to take himself away from a scene of ridicule, disaster, and certain retribution.

He knocked softly on the front door of Brenda’s house. No answer. He had expected that. The kids were asleep, her husband Jack was at Long Eaton for the races — dog, horse, motor-bike — and not due back until Sunday midday, and Brenda had stayed at the pub. Now sitting on her front doorstep he remembered his journey to the house: a vague memory of battles with lampposts and walls and kerb stones, of knocking into people who told him to watch his step and threatened to drop him one, voices of anger and the hard unsympathetic stones of houses and pavements.

It was a mild autumn night, a wind playing the occasional sharp sound of someone slamming a door or closing a window. He lay across the doorstep, trying to avoid the pavement. A man passed, singing a happy song to himself, noticing nothing. Arthur was half asleep, but opened his eyes now and again to make sure that the street was still there, to convince himself that he was not in bed, because the hard stone step was as round and as soft as a pillow. He was blissfully happy, for he did not have the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to be sick any more, though at the same time he had retained enough alcohol to stay both high-spirited and sleepy. He made the curious experiment of speaking out loud to see whether or not he could hear his own voice. ‘Couldn’t care less, couldn’t care less, couldn’t care less’ — in answer to questions that came into his mind regarding sleeping with a woman who had a husband and two kids, getting blind drunk on seven gins and umpteen pints, falling down a flight of stairs, and being sick over a man and a woman. Bliss and guilt joined forces in such a way that they caused no trouble but merely sunk his mind into a welcome nonchalance. The next thing he knew was Brenda bending over him and digging her fingers sharply in his ribs.

‘Ugh!’ he grunted, noting the yeast and hop-like smell of her breath. ‘Yer’ve bin boozin’!’

‘’Ark at who’s talkin’,’ she said, gesticulating as if she had brought an audience with her. ‘I had two pints and three orange-squashes, and he talks about boozing. I heard all about what happened to you though at the pub, falling downstairs and being sick over people.’

He stood up, clear-headed and steady. ‘I’m all right now, duck. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back upstairs to you in the pub, but I don’t know what went on.’

‘I’ll tell you some day,’ she laughed. ‘But let’s be quiet as we go in, or we’ll wake the kids.’

Got to be careful, he said to himself. Nosy neighbours’ll tell Jack. He lifted the band of hair from her coat collar and kissed her neck. She turned on him petulantly: ‘Can’t you wait tell we get upstairs?’

‘No,’ he admitted, with a mock-gloating laugh.

‘Well, you’ve got to wait,’ she said, pushing the door open for him to go in.

He stood in the parlour while she fastened the locks and bolts, smelling faint odours of rubber and oil coming from Jack’s bicycle leaning against a big dresser that took up nearly one whole side of the room. It was a small dark area of isolation, long familiar with another man’s collection of worldly goods: old-fashioned chairs and a settee, fireplace, clock ticking on the mantelpiece, a smell of brown paper, soil from a plant-pot, ordinary aged dust, soot in the chimney left over from last winter’s fires, and mustiness of rugs laid down under the table and by the fireplace. Brenda had known this room for seven married years, yet could not have become more intimate with it than did Arthur in the ten seconds while she fumbled with the key.

He knocked his leg on the bicycle pedal, swearing at the pain, complaining at Jack’s barminess for leaving it in such an exposed position. ‘How does he think I’m going to get in with that thing stuck there?’ he joked. ‘Tell him I said to leave it in the backyard next week, out of ‘arm’s way.’

Brenda hissed and told him to be quiet, and they crept like two thieves into the living-room, where the electric light showed the supper things — teacups, plates, jam-pot, bread — still on the table. A howl of cats came from a nearby yard, and a dustbin lid clattered on to cobblestones.

‘Oh well,’ he said in a normal voice, standing up tall and straight, ‘it’s no use whisperin’ when all that racket’s going on.’

They stood between the table and firegrate, and Brenda put her arms around him. While kissing her he turned his head so that his own face stared back at him from an oval mirror above the shelf. His eyes grew large in looking at himself from such an angle, noticing his short disordered hair sticking out like the bristles of a blond porcupine, and the mark of an old pimple healing on his cheek.

‘Don’t let’s stay down here long, Arthur,’ she said softly.

He released her and, knowing every corner of the house and acting as if it belonged to him, stripped off his coat and shirt and went into the scullery to wash the tiredness from his eyes. Once in bed, they would not go to sleep at once: he wanted to be fresh for an hour before floating endlessly down into the warm bed beside Brenda’s soft body.

It was ten o’clock, and she was still asleep. The sun came through the window, carrying street-noises on its beams, a Sunday morning clash of bottles from milkmen on their rounds, newspaper boys shouting to each other as they clattered along the pavement and pushed folded newspapers into letter-boxes, each bearing crossword puzzles, sports news and forecasts, and interesting scandal that would be struggled through with a curious and salacious indolence over plates of bacon and tomatoes and mugs of strong sweet tea.

He turned to Brenda heaped beside him, sitting up to look at her. She was breathing gently; her hair straggled untidily over the pillow, her breasts bulged out over her slip, a thick smooth arm over them as if she were trying to protect herself from something that had frightened her in a dream. He heard the two children playing in their bedroom across the landing. One was saying: ‘It’s my Teddy-bear, our Jacky. Gi’ it me or else Is’ll tell our mam.’ Then a low threat from the boy who would not hand back his plunder.

He sank down contentedly into bed. ‘Brenda,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come on, duck, waken up.’

She turned and pressed her face into his groin.

‘Nice,’ he muttered.

‘What’s time?’ she mumbled, her breath hot against his skin.

‘Half-past eleven,’ he lied.

She sprang up, showing the crease-marks of crumpled sheets down one side of her face, her brown eyes wide open. ‘You’re having me on again,’ she cried. ‘Of all the liars, you’re the biggest I’ve ever known.’

‘I allus was a liar,’ he said, laughing at his joke. ‘A good ‘un an’ all.’

‘Liars don’t prosper,’ she retorted.

‘It’s on’y ten o’clock,’ he admitted, lifting her hair and rolling it into a ball on top of her head.

‘What a time we had last night,’ she grinned, suddenly remembering.

It came back to him now. He had put away more swill than Loudmouth, had fallen down some stairs, had been sick over a man and a woman. He laughed. ‘It seems years.’ He took her by the shoulders and kissed her lips, then her neck and breasts, pressing his leg against her. ‘You’re lovely, Brenda. Let’s get down in bed.’

‘Mam,’ a small plaintive voice cried.

She pushed Arthur away. ‘Go back to bed, Jacky.’

‘It’s late,’ he crooned tearfully through the door. ‘I want some tea, our mam.’

‘Go back.’

They heard the shuffling of a small foot behind the door. ‘I want to see Uncle Arthur,’ Jacky pleaded.

‘Little bogger,’ Arthur muttered, resigning himself to the disturbance. ‘I can’t have a bit o’ peace on a Sunday morning.’

Brenda sat higher in the bed and straightened her slip. ‘Leave him alone,’ she said.

Jacky was insistent. He kicked the bottom of the door.

‘Can I come in, Uncle Arthur?’

‘You little bogger.’

He laughed, knowing now that it was all right.

‘Go down to the parlour,’ Arthur said, ‘and get the News of the World that’s just bin pushed in the letter-box. Then I’ll let yer come.’

His bare feet went thudding softly on the wooden stairs. They heard him hurrying through the parlour below, then running back and climbing the stairs with breathless haste. They drew apart as he burst in and threw the paper on the bed, jumping up and crushing it between his stomach and Arthur’s legs. Arthur pulled it free and held him high in the air with one hand, until he began to gag and choke with laughter and Brenda said he was to be put down or else he would go into a fit.

‘Young Jacky,’ Arthur said, looking up at his animated face, five years old, with pink skin and fair hair, fresh in his shirt and clean from bath-night. ‘You little bogger, young Jacky, you young jockey.’ He let him down, and the child burrowed up against him like a passionate rabbit.

‘Listen,’ Arthur said to him, blowing in his ear between each word, ‘go and get my trousers from that chair and I’ll gi’ yer a bob.’

‘You’ll spoil him,’ Brenda said, touching him under the blankets. ‘He gets enough money as it is.’ She lifted herself out of bed and picked up a skirt draped over the bottom rail. Both Arthur and Jacky watched her intently as she dressed, deeply interested by the various secrets of her that became hidden with the donning of each item of clothing.

‘What does it matter?’ Arthur demanded at being forced to justify his generosity. ‘I give ‘im money because I was lucky to get a ha’penny when I was a nipper.’

She was slovenly and easily dressed for Sunday morning: a white blouse open at the throat, a wide grey skirt, a slip-on pair of shoes, and hair pushed in strands to the back of her neck. ‘Come on, get up, Arthur. It’s nearly eleven o’clock. You’ve got to be out of the house before twelve. It wouldn’t do for Jack to see you here.’

‘That bastard,’ he said, holding Jacky at arms’ length and pulling a face at him. ‘Who do you love?’ he shouted with a laugh. ‘Who do you love, young Jack Blud-Tub?’

‘Yo’, yo’,’ he screamed. ‘Yo’, Uncle Arthur’ — and Arthur released him so that he fell with a thud on to the rumpled bed.

‘Come on, then,’ Brenda said impatiently, tired of watching, ‘let’s go downstairs.’

‘Yo’ goo down, duck,’ he grinned, ‘and cook me some breakfast. I’ll come when I can smell the bacon and egg.’

Jack’s head was turned and she bent over to kiss Arthur. He held her firmly by the neck, and was still kissing her when Jacky lifted his head and looked wonderingly at them.

At half-past eleven Arthur sat at the table with a plate of bacon-and-egg before him. He tore a piece of bread in half and dipped it in the fat around his plate, then took a long drink of tea. Jacky, already fed, stood on a nearby chair and followed every move with his blue eyes.

‘It’s thirsty work, fallin’ downstairs,’ Arthur said. ‘Pour me some more tea, duck.’

She held the newspaper against her midriff with one hand. ‘Plenty of sugar?’

He nodded and went on eating. ‘You’re good to me,’ he said after a while, ‘and don’t think I don’t appreciate it.’

‘Yes, but it’ll be your last breakfast in this house if you don’t hurry. Jack’ll be home soon.’

Tomorrow is work, and I’ll be hard at it, sweating my guts out until next weekend. It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken. He told her what was on his mind.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ she laughed.

He passed a choice piece of bacon to Jacky. ‘A present from Uncle Arthur.’

‘Ta!’ he said, relishing the honour before his mouth closed over the fork.

Brenda suddenly stiffened in her chair and half turned her ear to the window, silent like an animal waiting to spring, an alertness that transformed her face to temporary ugliness. Arthur noticed it, and swilled down the last of his tea. ‘He’s coming,’ she said. ‘I heard the gate open.’

He picked Jacky up and kissed him on the lips, feeling his arms curl tight around his face and ears. He then stood him on a chair while he kissed Brenda.

‘So long,’ he said. ‘See you next week’ — and walked towards the parlour. He stood by the bicycle for a moment to light a cigarette.

‘Get going,’ Brenda hissed softly, seeing her husband open the gate and walk down the yard.

Arthur unlocked the front door and pulled it towards him, sniffing the fresh air of a bright Sunday morning as if to decide whether the day was fine enough to venture out in. It was. He clicked the door to and stepped into the street, as Brenda’s husband Jack opened the back door and came in through the scullery.

2

He lifted a pair of clean overalls from the bed-rail and pulled them over his big white feet, taking care not to disturb his brother Sam who, while still in the depths of sleep, rolled himself more advantageously into the large mound of blankets now that Arthur had left the bed. He had often heard Friday described as Black Friday — remembering a Boris Karloff film of years ago — and wondered why this should be. For Friday, being pay-day, was a good day, and ‘black’ would be more fitting if applied to Monday. Black Monday. Then there would be some sense in it, when you felt your head big from boozing, throat sore from singing, eyes fogged-up from seeing too many films or sitting in front of the television, and feeling black and wicked because the big grind was starting all over again.

The stairfoot door clicked open.

‘Arthur,’ his father called, in a deadly menacing Monday-morning voice that made your guts rattle, sounding as if it came from the grave, ‘when are yer goin’ ter get up? Yer’ll be late fer wok.’ He closed the stairfoot door quietly so as not to waken the mother and two other sons still at home.

Arthur took a half-empty fag-packet from the mantelpiece, his comb, a ten-shilling note and heap of coins that had survived the pubs, bookies’ counters, and cadgers, and stuffed them into his pockets.

The bottom door opened again.

‘Eh?’

‘I’eard yer the first time,’ Arthur said in a whisper.

The door slammed, by way of a reply.

A mug of tea was needed, then back to the treadmill. Monday was always the worst; by Wednesday he was broken-in, like a greyhound. Well, anyroad, he thought, there was always Brenda, lovely Brenda who was all right and looked after you well once she’d made up her mind to it. As long as Jack didn’t find out and try to get his hands around my throat. That’d be the day. By Christ it would. Though my hands would be round his throat first, the nit-witted, dilat’ry, unlucky bastard.

He glanced once more around the small bedroom, seeing the wooden double-bed pushed under the window, the glint of a white pot, dilapidated shelves holding Sam’s books — rulers, pencils, and rubbers — and a home-made table on which stood his portable wireless set. He lifted the latch as the stairfoot door opened again, and his father poked his head up, ready to tell him in his whispering, menacing Monday-morning gut-rattle that it was time to come down.

Despite the previous tone of his father’s voice, Arthur found him sitting at the table happily supping tea. A bright fire burned in the modernized grate — the family had clubbed-up thirty quid to have it done — and the room was warm and cheerful, the table set, and tea mashed.

Seaton looked up from his cup. ‘Come on, Arthur. You ain’t got much time. It’s ten past seven, and we’ve both got to be on by half-past. Sup a cup o’tea an‘ get crackin‘.’

Arthur sat down and stretched his legs towards the fire. After a cup and a Woodbine his head was clearer. He didn’t feel so bad. ‘You’ll go blind one day, dad,’ he said, for nothing, taking words out of the air for sport, ready to play with the consequences of whatever he might cause.

Seaton turned to him uncomprehendingly, his older head still fuddled. It took ten cups of tea and as many Woodbines to set his temper right after the weekend. ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded, intractable at any time before ten in the morning.

‘Sittin’ in front of the TV. You stick to it like glue from six to eleven every night. It can’t be good for yer. You’ll go blind one day. You’re bound to. I read it in the Post last week that a lad from the Medders went blind. They might be able to save ‘im though, because ‘e goes to the Eye Infirmary every Monday, Wednesday, an’ Friday. But it’s a risk.’

His father poured another cup of tea, his black brows taut with anger. Short, stocky Seaton was incapable of irritation or mild annoyance. He was either happy and fussy with everybody, or black-browed with a deep melancholy rage that chose its victims at random. In the last few years his choice of victims had grown less, for Arthur, with his brother Fred, had been through the mill of factory and army and now stood up to him, creating a balance of power that kept the house more or less peaceful.

‘I’m sure it never did anybody any harm,’ Seaton said. ‘Anyway, yer never believe what the papers tell yer, do yer? If yer do then yer want yer brains testin’. They never tell owt but lies. That’s one thing I do know.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ Arthur said, flipping a dead Woodbine into the fire. ‘Anyway, I know somebody who knows this kid as went blind, so the papers was right for a change. They said they saw this kid bein’ led to the Eye Infirmary by ’is mam. It was a rotten shame, they said. A kid of seven. She led ‘im along wi’ a lead, and the kid had a stick specially made for him, painted white. I heard they was getting him a dog as well to help him along, a wire-haired terrier. There was talk o’ standin’ him outside the Council House for the rest of his life wi’ a tin mug if he don’t get better. His dad’s got cancer, an’ ‘is mam can’t afford ter keep him in white sticks an’ dogs.’

‘Ye’re barmy,’ Seaton said. ‘Go an’ tell yer stories somewhere else. Not that I’m bothered wi’ my eyes anyway. My eyes ‘ave allus bin good, and allus will be. When I went for my medical in the war they were A1, but I swung the lead and got off 3C,’ he added proudly.

The subject was dropped. His father cut several slices of bread and made sandwiches with cold meat left from Sunday dinner. Arthur teased him a lot, but in a way he was glad to see the TV standing in a corner of the living-room, a glossy panelled box looking, he thought, like something plundered from a spaceship. The old man was happy at last, anyway, and he deserved to be happy, after all the years before the war on the dole, five kids and the big miserying that went with no money and no way of getting any. And now he had a sit-down job at the factory, all the Woodbines he could smoke, money for a pint if he wanted one, though he didn’t as a rule drink, a holiday somewhere, a jaunt on the firm’s trip to Blackpool, and a television-set to look into at home. The difference between before the war and after the war didn’t bear thinking about. War was a marvellous thing in many ways, when you thought about how happy it had made so many people in England. There are no flies on me, Arthur thought.

He stuffed a packet of sandwiches and a flask of tea into his pocket, and waited while his father struggled into a jacket. Once out of doors they were more aware of the factory rumbling a hundred yards away over the high wall. Generators whined all night, and during the day giant milling-machines working away on cranks and pedals in the turnery gave to the terrace a sensation of living within breathing distance of some monstrous being that suffered from a disease of the stomach. Disinfectant-suds, grease, and newly-cut steel permeated the air over the suburb of four-roomed houses built around the factory, streets and terraces hanging on to its belly and flanks like calves sucking the udders of some great mother. The factory sent crated bicycles each year from the Despatch Department to waiting railway trucks over Eddison Road, boosting post-war (or perhaps pre-war, Arthur thought, because these days a war could start tomorrow) export trade and trying to sling pontoons over a turbulent unbridgeable river called the Sterling Balance. The thousands that worked there took home good wages. No more short-time like before the war, or getting the sack if you stood ten minutes in the lavatory reading your Football Post — if the gaffer got on to you now you could always tell him where to put the job and go somewhere else. And no more running out at dinnertime for a penny bag of chips to eat with your bread. Now, and about time too, you got fair wages if you worked your backbone to a string of conkers on piece-work, and there was a big canteen where you could get a hot dinner for two-bob. With the wages you got you could save up for a motorbike or even an old car, or you could go on a ten-day binge and get rid of all you’d saved. Because it was no use saving your money year after year. A mug’s game, since the value of it got less and less and in any case you never knew when the Yanks were going to do something daft like dropping the H-bomb on Moscow. And if they did then you could say ta-ta to everybody, burn your football coupons and betting-slips, and ring-up Billy Graham. If you believe in God, which I don’t, he said to himself.

‘It’s a bit nippy,’ his father remarked, buttoning his coat as they turned into the street.

‘What do you expect for November?’ Arthur said. Not that he didn’t have an overcoat, but you never went to work in one, not even when snow was on the ground and it was freezing. An overcoat was for going out in at night when you had your Teddy-suit on. Living only five minutes from the factory, walking kept you warm on your way there, and once inside at your machine the working of it kept your blood running. Only those that came from Mansfield and Kirkby wore overcoats, because it was cold in the buses.

Fat Mrs Bull the gossiper stood with her fat arms folded over her apron at the yard-end, watching people pass by on their way to work. With pink face and beady eyes, she was a tight-fisted defender of her tribe, queen of the yard because she had lived there for twenty-two years, earning names like ‘The News of the World’ and the ‘Loudspeaker’ because she watched the factory go in every morning and afternoon to glean choice gossip for retail later on. Neither Arthur nor his father greeted her as they passed, and neither did they speak to each other until they were halfway down the street.

It was long, straight, and cobble-stoned, with lamp-posts and intersections at regular intervals, terraces branching off here and there. You stepped out of the front door and found yourself on the pavement. Red-ochre had been blackened by soot, paint was faded and cracked, everything was a hundred years old except the furniture inside.

‘What will they think on next!’ Seaton said, after glancing upwards and seeing a television aerial hooked on to almost every chimney, like a string of radar stations, each installed on the never-never.

They turned on to Eddison Road by the big red-bricked canteen. The November sky was clear and dark-blue, with some stars still showing whitely. ‘Everybody’ll ‘ave little baby ‘elicopters,’ Arthur answered readily. ‘You’ll see. Five-bob-a-week-and-misses for ten years and you can go and see your mate at Derby in lunch-hour.’

‘Some ‘opes,’ the old man scoffed.

‘I read it in the paper,’ Arthur said. ‘It was the one last Thursday, I think, because my snap was wrapped-up in it, that they’ll get to the moon in five years. In ten they’ll be having cheap-day returns. It’s true right enough.’

Seaton laughed. ‘You’re crackers, Arthur. You’ll grow-up one day and stop telling these tales. You’re nearly twenty-two. You should know better. I thought they’d a cured you on it in the army, but I can see they didn’t.’

‘The on’y thing the army cures you on,’ Arthur retorted, ‘is never to join the army again. They’re dead good at that.’

‘When I was a lad they din’t even have wireless sets,’ Seaton ruminated. ‘And now look at what they’ve got: television. Pictures in your own ‘ouse.’

They were caught by the main ingoing stream: bicycles, buses, motor-bikes, and pedestrians on a last-minute rush to breach one of the seven gates before half-past. Arthur and his father walked in by the hexagonal commissionaires’ office, a building in the centre of a wide roadway dividing the factory into two unequal parts. Seaton was on viewing in the three-speed shop, so turned off after a hundred yards.

‘See yer’t dinnertime, Arthur.’

‘Tarr-ar, Dad.’

Arthur walked into a huge corridor, searching an inside pocket for his clocking-in card and noticing, as on every morning since he was fifteen — except for a two-year break in the army — the factory smell of oil-suds, machinery, and shaved steel that surrounded you with an air in which pimples grew and prospered on your face and shoulders, that would have turned you into one big pimple if you did not spend half an hour over the scullery sink every night getting rid of the biggest bastards. What a life, he thought. Hard work and good wages, and a smell all day that turns your guts.

The bright Monday-morning ring of the clocking-in machine made a jarring note, different from the tune that played inside Arthur. It was dead on half-past seven. Once in the shop he allowed himself to be swallowed by its diverse noises, walked along lanes of capstan lathes and millers, drills and polishers and hand-presses, worked by a multiplicity of belts and pulleys turning and twisting and slapping on heavy well-oiled wheels overhead, dependent for power on a motor stooping at the far end of the hall like the black shining bulk of a stranded whale. Machines with their own small motors started with a jerk and a whine under the shadows of their operators, increasing a noise that made the brain reel and ache because the weekend had been too tranquil by contrast, a weekend that had terminated for Arthur in fishing for trout in the cool shade of a willow-sleeved canal near the Balloon Houses, miles away from the city. Motor-trolleys moved up and down the main gangways carrying boxes of work — pedals, hubs, nuts, and bolts — from one part of the shop to another. Robboe the foreman bent over a stack of new timesheets behind his glass partition; women and girls wearing turbans and hair-nets and men and boys in clean blue overalls, settled down to their work, eager to get a good start on their day’s stint; while sweepers and cleaners at everybody’s beck and call already patrolled the gangways and looked busy.

Arthur reached his capstan lathe and took off his jacket, hanging it on a nearby nail so that he could keep an eye on his belongings. He pressed the starter button, and his motor came to life with a gentle thump. Looking around, it did not seem, despite the infernal noise of hurrying machinery, that anyone was working with particular speed. He smiled to himself and picked up a glittering steel cylinder from the top box of a pile beside him, and fixed it into the spindle. He jettisoned his cigarette into the sud-pan, drew back the capstan, and swung the turret on to its broadest drill. Two minutes passed while he contemplated the precise position of tools and cylinder; finally he spat on to both hands and rubbed them together, then switched on the sud-tap from the movable brass pipe, pressed a button that set the spindle running, and ran in the drill to a neat chamfer. Monday morning had lost its terror.

At a piecework rate of four-and-six a hundred you could make your money if you knocked-up fourteen hundred a day — possible without grabbing too much — and if you went all out for a thousand in the morning you could dawdle through the afternoon and lark about with the women and talk to your mates now and again. Such leisure often brought him near to trouble, for some weeks ago he stunned a mouse — that the overfed factory cats had missed — and laid it beneath a woman’s drill, and Robboe the gaffer ran out of his office when he heard her screaming blue-murder, thinking that some bloody silly woman had gone and got her hair caught in a belt (big notices said that women must wear hair-nets, but who could tell with women?) and Robboe was glad that it was nothing more than a dead mouse she was kicking up such a fuss about. But he paced up and down the gangways asking who was responsible for the stunned mouse, and when he came to Arthur, who denied having anything to do with it, he said: ‘I’ll bet you did it, you young bogger.’ ‘Me, Mr Robboe?’ Arthur said, the picture of innocence, standing up tall with offended pride. ‘I’ve got so much work to do I can’t move from my lathe. Anyway, I don’t believe in tormenting women, you know that. It’s against my principles.’ Robboe glared at him: ‘Well, I don’t know. Somebody did it, and I reckon it’s you. You’re a bit of a Red if you ask me, that’s what you are.’ ‘Now then, that’s slander,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ll see my lawyers about you. There’s tons of witnesses.’ Robboe went back to his office, bearing a black look for the girl inside, and for any tool-setter that might require his advice in the next half-hour; and Arthur worked on his lathe like a model of industry.

Though you couldn’t grumble at four-and-six a hundred the rate-checker sometimes came and watched you work, so that if he saw you knock up a hundred in less than an hour Robboe would come and tell you one fine morning that your rate had been dropped by sixpence or a bob. So when you felt the shadow of the rate-checker breathing down your neck you knew what to do if you had any brains at all: make every move more complicated, though not slow because that was cutting your own throat, and do everything deliberately yet with a crafty show of speed. Though cursed as public enemy number one the rate-checker was an innocuous-looking man who carried a slight stoop everywhere he went and wore spectacles, smoking the same fags as you were smoking, and protecting his blue pinstriped suit with a brown staff-overall, bald as a mushroom and as sly as a fox. They said he got commission on what reductions he recommended, but that was only a rumour, Arthur decided, something said out of rancour if you had just been done down for a bob. If you saw the rate-checker on your way home from work he might say good evening to you, and you responded to this according to whether or not your rate had been tampered with lately. Arthur always returned such signs with affability, for whenever the rate-checker stood behind him he switched his speed down to a normal hundred, though once he had averaged four hundred when late on his daily stint. He worked out for fun how high his wages would be if, like a madman, he pursued this cramp-inducing, back-breaking, knuckle-knocking undiplomatic speed of four hundred for a week, and his calculations on the Daily Mirror margins gave an answer of thirty-six pounds. Which would never do, he swore to himself, because they’d be down on me like a ton of bricks, and the next week I’d be grabbing at the same flat-out lick for next to nowt. So he settled for a comfortable wage of fourteen pounds. Anything bigger than that would be like shovelling hard-earned money into the big windows of the income-tax office — feeding pigs on cherries, as mam used to say — which is something else against my principles.

So you earned your living in spite of the firm, the rate-checker, the foreman, and the tool-setters, who always seemed to be at each other’s throats except when they ganged-up to get at yours, though most of the time you didn’t give a sod about them but worked quite happily for a cool fourteen nicker, spinning the turret to chamfer in a smell of suds and steel, actions without thought so that all through the day you filled your mind with vivid and more agreeable pictures than those round about. It was an easier job than driving a lorry for instance where you had to have your wits about you — spin the turret and ease in the blade-chamfer with your right hand — and you remembered the corporal in the army who said what a marvel it was the things you thought of when you were on the lavatory, which was the only time you ever had to think. But now whole days could be given up to wool-gathering. Hour after hour quickly disappeared when once you started thinking, and before you knew where you were a flashing light from the foreman’s office signalled ten o’clock, time for white-overalled women to wheel in tea-urns and pour out their wicked mash as fast as they could from a row of shining taps.

Arthur refused the firm’s tea because it was strong, not from best Ceylon tips but from sweepings-up in the tea warehouse and the soda they doused it with in the canteen. One day he spilled some of their orange brew on a bench — thus went his story — and tried for three hours to rub out the stain, and even the ingenuity of the mechanics could make no inroads against the faint testament of unswallowable tea that stayed there as a warning to all who saw it, telling them to bring their own drink to work, though few bothered to take the hint. ‘If it makes that stain on an old wooden bench covered with oil, what do you think it does to your guts?’ Arthur asked his mates. ‘It don’t bear thinking about.’ He complained at the head office about it and they listened to him. A director examined the canteen tea urns and found the insides coated with an even depth of tea and soda sediment. Because Arthur stood up for his rights a big noise was made, and thereafter the quality improved, though not enough to induce Arthur to drink it. He still came to the factory with a flask sticking out of his pocket, and took it out now after switching off his machine, because the light began flashing from Robboe’s office, and men were unwrapping packets of sandwiches.

He walked over to Brenda’s husband, Jack, who sat on his tool-setter’s bench between a clamped-on vice and a carborundum wheel, a mug of the firm’s tea in one hand and a cheese sandwich in the other; half the cheese sandwich was already in his mouth, and the other half was on its way there.

‘Udge-up,’ Arthur said, sitting beside him on the bench. ‘Mek room for a rabbit-arse!’

‘Don’t knock my tea over,’ Jack said.

Arthur unscrewed the cap from his flask and poured out a cup of scalding tea. ‘Try a drop,’ he offered. ‘That stuff you’ve got’ll give yer a bilious-bout.’

Jack unwrapped another sandwich. Arthur had a big enough pack himself, but he wished Jack would offer him one, cut and spread by Brenda’s own hands. Even if he did, I wouldn’t take it, he cursed to himself. Christ, I’ll give myself away one of these days.

‘This tea’s good enough for the others,’ Jack said, ‘so it’s good enough for me. I’m not fussy.’ His Monday-morning overalls were stiff and clean, with as yet only a few file-stains near the breast pocket, and his collarless plain blue shirt was fastened loosely by a stud at the neck. He had a young fresh-looking face of twenty-nine or thirty, but marred by a continual frown that subjected him to pitiless teasing by the men whose machines he looked after.

‘Then you should be fussy,’ Arthur said with deep conviction. ‘Everybody should be fussy. Some blokes ‘ud drink piss if it was handed to ‘em in China cups.’

Jack’s face relaxed. Not swearing himself, it didn’t put him out to hear it from other people. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they wouldn’t go that far. I suppose I could get Brenda to make me a flask up in the mornings, but I don’t want to put her to the trouble.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ Arthur said, snapping a piece out of his sandwich.

‘It might be, with two kids to look after. Young Jacky’s a bogger. He fell down the stairs yesterday afternoon.’

More quickly than was necessary, Arthur asked: ‘Did he do hisself any damage?’

‘A few bruises and screaming for two hours. But he’s all right. He’s like iron, if you ask me.’

Time to change the subject. Like treading on a haystack, he told himself, you dirty sinner. Will this be a quick enough change?

‘How did you go on at the races?’

‘All right. I won five quid.’

It was. ‘Lucky bastard,’ he swore. ‘I put ten bob each way on the three-thirty at Redcar on Sat’day and I didn’t get a penny back. I’ll smash that bookie one of these days.’

‘Why smash the bookie?’ reasonable Jack asked. ‘You’re too superstitious. You either win or you don’t. I don’t believe in luck.’

Arthur screwed his sandwich paper into a ball and threw it across the gangway into somebody’s work-box. ‘Spot-on,’ he cried. ‘See that, Jack? Couldn’t a done better if I’d ‘ave aimed.’

‘I don’t think luck ever did anybody any good, in the end,’ Jack went on.

‘I do,’ Arthur affirmed. ‘Mostly I’m lucky and all. But sometimes I get a smack between the eyes. Not often though. So I’m superstitious and I believe in luck.’

‘You was only telling me you believed in communism the other week,’ Jack said reproachfully, ‘and now you talk about luck and superstition. The comrades wouldn’t like that,’ he ended with a dry laugh.

‘Well,’ Arthur said, his mouth full of second sandwich and tea, ‘if they don’t like it, they can lump it.’

‘That’s because you’ve got nowt to do wi’ ‘em.’

‘I said I was as good as anybody else in the world, din’t I.’ Arthur demanded. ‘And I mean it. Do you think if I won the football pools I’d gi’ yo’ a penny on it? Or gi’ anybody else owt? Not likely. I’d keep it all mysen, except for seeing my family right. I’d buy ‘em a house and set ‘em up for life, but anybody else could whistle for it. I’ve ‘eard that blokes as win football pools get thousands o’ beggin’ letters, but yer know what I’d do if I got ‘em? I’ll tell yer what I’d do: I’d mek a bonfire of ‘em. Because I don’t believe in share and share alike, Jack. Tek them blokes as spout on boxes outside the factory sometimes. I like to hear ‘em talk about Russia, about farms and power-stations they’ve got, because it’s interestin’, but when they say that when they get in government everybody’s got to share and share alike, then that’s another thing. I ain’t a communist, I tell you. I like ‘em though, because they’re different from these big fat Tory bastards in parliament. And them Labour bleeders too. They rob our wage packets every week with insurance and income tax and try to tell us it’s all for our own good. I know what I’d like to do with the government. I’d like ter go round every factory in England with books and books of little numbers and raffle off the ‘Ouses o’ Parliament. “Sixpence a time, lads,” I’d say. “A nice big ‘ouse for the winner” — and then when I’d made a big packet I’d settle down somewhere with fifteen women and fifteen cars, that I would.

‘But did I tell yer, Jack, I voted communist at the last election? I did it because I thought the poor bloke wouldn’t get any votes. I allus like to ‘elp the losin’ side. You see, I shouldn’t have voted either, because I was under twenty-one, but I used Dad’s vote because he was in bed wi’ a bad back. I took ‘is votin’ card out of ‘is coat pocket wi’out ‘im knowin’, and at the booth I towd the copper outside and the bloke at the desk inside that I was ‘Arold Seaton and they didn’t even bother to look at the card, and I went in and voted. Just like that. I didn’t believe it mysen till I was outside again. I’d do owt like that though, I would.’

‘You’d have got ten years in clink if they’d caught you,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a serious thing. You were lucky.’

Arthur was triumphant. ‘I told yer I was. But that’s what all these looney laws are for, yer know: to be broken by blokes like me.’

‘Don’t be too cocky though,’ Jack rebuked him. ‘You might cop it, one day.’

‘’What for? Like gettin’ married, you mean? I’m not that daft.’

Jack defended where Arthur had made him feel vulnerable: ‘I’m not saying you are. Neither was I daft when I got married. I wanted to do it, that’s all. I went into it wi’ my eyes open. I like it, and all. I like Brenda, and Brenda likes me, and we get on well together. If you’re good to each other, married life is all right.’

‘I’ll believe you then. Thousands wouldn’t, though.’

Who would believe anyway that I was carrying on with his missis? One day he’ll know, I suppose, but don’t be too cocky, you cocky bastard. If you’re too cocky your luck changes, so be careful. The worst of it is that I like Jack. Jack is a good bloke, one of the best. It’s a pity it’s such a cruel world. But he’s one up on me because he sleeps with Brenda every night. I suppose I should keep on hoping he gets knocked down by a double-decker bus so that I can marry Brenda and sleep with her every night, but somehow I don’t want him to get knocked down by a bus.

‘I haven’t told you this, have I?’ Jack said gravely after a long pause of munching, as though something big and heavy had suddenly climbed up to his conscience.

Arthur wondered. Has he? Was it possible? His face looked thoughtful. What was it? No one could have told Jack about his carrying-ons. Or could they, the nosy gossiping spies? Not much they couldn’t. He does seem a bit funny this morning.

‘What about, Jack?’ he asked, screwing the top back on his flask.

‘Nothing much. Only Robboe came up to me the other day and told me that I was to start on nights next week in the Press Shop. They’re short-handed there and want another tool-setter. A week on nights and a week on days.’

‘That’s a bastard,’ Arthur commiserated, thinking he was saying the right thing under the circumstances. ‘I’m sorry, Jack.’

Then he saw his mistake. Jack was really happy at his transfer. ‘I don’t know about that. It’ll mean a bit more money. Brenda’s been on about a television set lately, and I might be able to get her one like that.’

He accepted a cigarette from Arthur, who said: ‘All the same, who am I going to talk to in tea-break?’

Jack laughed, a curious laugh, since the frown managed somehow to stay on his face. ‘You’ll be all right,’ and slapped him — not very hard — on the shoulder, saying:

‘I’ll see you again.’

The light flashed: tea-break over.

I’m just too lucky for this world, Arthur told himself as he set his lathe going, too lucky by half, so I’d better enjoy it while I can. I don’t suppose Jack’s told Brenda yet about going on nights, but I’ll bet she’ll die laughing at the good news when he does. I might not see her at weekends, but I’ll get there every night, which is even better. Turn to chamfer, then to drill, then blade-chamfer. Done. Take out and fix in a new piece, checking now and again for size because I’d hate to do a thousand and get them slung back at me by the viewers. Forty-five bob don’t grow on trees. Turn to chamfer and drill, then blade-chamfer, swing the turret until my arms are heavy and dead. Quick as lightning. Take out and fix in, shout for the trolley to take it away and bring more on, jotting down another hundred, not noticing the sud smells any more or belts over my head that gave me the screaming abdabs when I first came in the factory at fifteen, slapping and twisting and thumping and changing direction like Robboe the foreman’s mind. It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, so you grab like owt to earn a few quid, to take Brenda boozing and back to bed, or to the footpaths and woods up Strelley, passing the big council estate where Margaret my sister has a house and three kids from her useless husband, taking Brenda by all that to a broken-down shepherd’s cottage that I’ve known since I was a kid and laying her on the straw and both of us so loving to each other that we can hardly wait. Only less of this or there’ll be another handle on the lathe that I won’t know what to do with and another gallon of suds that will jam the works. Time flies and no mistake, and it’s about time it did because I’ve done another two hundred and I’m ready to go home and get some snap and read the Daily Mirror or look at what’s left of the bathing tarts in the Weekend Mail. But Brenda, I can’t wait to get at her. It serves you right, ducks, for being so lush and loving. And now this chamfer-blade wants sharpening, so I’ll give it to Jack this afternoon. And it’s too bad about him, but he’ll be going on nights soon which is too bad as well, for him, because Brenda and me’ll play merry hell in all the beds and nooks we can find. Bloomers flying, and legs waving in Strelley Woods, no matter how cold it gets.

The minute you stepped out of the factory gates you thought no more about your work. But the funniest thing was that neither did you think about work when you were standing at your machine. You began the day by cutting and drilling steel cylinders with care, but gradually your actions became automatic and you forgot all about the machine and the quick working of your arms and hands and the fact that you were cutting and boring and rough-threading to within limits of only five-thousandths of an inch. The noise of motor-trolleys passing up and down the gangway and the excruciating din of flying and flapping belts slipping out of your consciousness after perhaps half an hour, without affecting the quality of the work you were turning out, and you forgot your past conflicts with the gaffer and turned to thinking of pleasant events that had at some time happened to you, or things that you hoped would happen to you in the future. If your machine was working well — the motor smooth, stops tight, jigs good — and you spring your actions into a favourable rhythm you became happy. You went off into pipe-dreams for the rest of the day. And in the evening, when admittedly you would be feeling as though your arms and legs had been stretched to breaking point on a torture-rack, you stepped out into a cosy world of pubs and noisy tarts that would one day provide you with the raw material for more pipe-dreams as you stood at your lathe.

It was marvellous the things you remembered while you worked on the lathe, things that you thought were forgotten and would never come back into your mind, often things that you hoped would stay forgotten. Time flew while you wore out the oil-soaked floor and worked furiously without knowing it: you lived in a compatible world of pictures that passed through your mind like a magic-lantern, often in vivid and glorious loonycolour, a world where memory and imagination ran free and did acrobatic tricks with your past and with what might be your future, an amok that produced all sorts of agreeable visions. Like the corporal said about sitting on the lavatory: it was the only time you have to think, and to quote him further, you thought of some lovely and marvellous things.

When Arthur went back to work in the afternoon he needed only four hundred cylinders to complete his daily stint. If he cared he could slow down, but he was unable to take it easy until every cylinder lay clean and finished in the box at his lathe, unwilling to drop off speed while work was yet to be done. He turned out the four hundred in three hours, in order to pass a pleasant time doing a well-disguised nothing, looking as though he were busy, perhaps cleaning his machine or talking to Jack during the ostensible business of getting his tools sharpened. Cunning, he told himself gleefully, as he began the first hundred, dropping them off one by one at a respectable speed. Don’t let the bastards grind you down, as Fred used to say when he was in the navy. Something about a carborundum wheel when he spouted it in Latin, but good advice just the same, though he didn’t need to tell me. I’ll never let anybody grind me down because I’m worth as much as any other man in the world, though when it comes to the lousy vote they give me I often feel like telling ‘em where to shove it, for all the good using it’ll do me. But if they said: ‘Look, Arthur, here’s a hundredweight of dynamite and a brand-new plunger, now blow up the factory,’ then I’d do it, because that’d be something worth doing. Action. I’d bale-out for Russia or the North Pole where I’d sit and laugh like a horse over what I’d done, at the wonderful sight of gaffers and machines and shining bikes going sky-high one wonderful moonlit night. Not that I’ve got owt against ‘em, but that’s just how I feel now and again. Me, I couldn’t care less if the world did blow up tomorrow, as long as I’m blown up with it. Not that I wouldn’t like to win ninety-thousand quid beforehand. But I’m having a good life and don’t care about anything, and it’d be a pity to leave Brenda, all said and done, especially now Jack’s been put on nights. Not that he minds, which is the funny part about it, because he’s happy about a bigger pay-packet and a change, and I’m happy, and I know Brenda’s happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a fine world sometimes, if you don’t weaken, or if you don’t give the bastards a chance to get cracking with that carborundum.

Robboe the Gaffer passed along the gangway talking to a tool-setter. Robboe was a bloke of about forty who had been with the firm since he was fourteen, having signed on as an apprentice and put in a lot of time at night-school, a man who had not suffered the rigours of short-time before the war — as my old man had, thought Arthur — and who had been in a ‘reserved occupation’ during the war so that he had kept out of the army. He now drew about twenty a week plus a good production bonus, a quiet man with a square face, tortured-looking eyes and brow, thin rubbery lips, and one hand always in his pocket twiddling on a micrometer. Robboe kept his job because he was clever at giving you the right answers, and took back-chat with a wry smile and a good face as long as you did it with a brutal couldn’t-care-less attitude and didn’t seem frightened of him. A terror to men like Jack, to Arthur he was a human being afflicted with the heavy lead-weight of authority when a rebellion always seemed on the point of breaking out.

Arthur started with the firm as a messenger boy, carrying samples of bicycle parts from one branch of the factory to another, or doing errands around the city on a carrier-bike. He was fifteen at the time and every Thursday morning Robboe sent him on a mysterious errand to a chemist’s shop downtown, giving him a sealed envelope with a note and some money inside. Arthur reached the shop after an interesting and idling ride along canal banks and through narrow streets, and the chemist handed him a stronger brown envelope containing something flat and sponge-like, and the change from the money in the first envelope. After three months of such journeys Arthur discovered what Robboe sent him to buy, because one morning the chemist was in too much of a hurry to see that the envelope was firmly sealed. So Arthur was able to open it while waiting for the traffic-lights to change, to see what was inside, and seal it again, this time securely. He found what he had expected to find, and rode his bike back along Castle Boulevard laughing like a maniac, overtaking buses, milkcarts, even cars in his furious speed. Everyone stared at him, as if he had gone mad. ‘Three packets!’ he shouted out. ‘The dirty bogger! He’s got a fancy-woman! Nine times a week!’ So the news broke in the shop, and long afterwards, when Arthur had been taken off the messenger job and put on a drill, if he left his machine to walk out to the lavatory, someone would shout: ‘Where are you going, Arthur?’ And if Robboe was not in the shop he would yell back at the top of his voice: ‘I’m going downtown to get Robboe’s rubbers!’ — in his broad, deliberately brutalized Robin Hood accent that brought screams of laughter from the women, and guffaws from the men.

Robboe stopped at his machine, picked up a piece of finished work, and checked its size carefully with a micrometer.

Arthur paused while turning the capstan. ‘All right?’ he asked belligerently.

Robboe, always with a cigarette in his mouth, blew smoke away from his eyes, and ash fell on to his brown overall-coat. He made the last measurement with a depth-gauge. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nothing wrong’ — and walked off.

Arthur and Robboe tolerated and trusted each other. The enemy in them stayed dormant, a black animal stifling the noise of its growls as if commanded by a greater master to lie low, an animal that had perhaps been passed on for some generations from father to son on either side. They respected this lineage in each other, recognized it when they asked or answered tersely the few brusque questions that passed between them speaking with loud mouths and passionless eyes.

Robboe had a car — admitted, an ancient Morris — and a semidetached in a posh district, and Arthur held these pretensions against him because basically they were of equal stock, and he would therefore have felt friendlier had Robboe lived in the same kind of four-roomed house as himself. For Robboe was in no way better than him, he ruminated, spinning the turret and lightly applying its chamfer-tool to one of the last dozen cylinders of the day, and no better than anybody else if it came to that. Arthur did not assess men on their knowledge or achievement, but by a blind and passionate method that weighed their more basic worth. It was an emotional gauge, always accurate when set by him, and those to whom it was applied either passed or did not pass the test. Within the limits of its narrow definitions he used it as a reliable guide as to who was and who was not his friend, and up to what point he could trust a person who might become his friend.

So when Arthur looked at a man, or heard the inflexion in his voice, or saw him walk, he made a snap judgment that turned out to be as accurate as one made after weeks of acquaintance. His first assessment of Robboe had never altered. In fact it had gained ground. His half-conscious conclusions proved to him that no one man was better than the other in this particular case, that they shared with plain openness a world of enmity that demanded a certain amount of trust. And Arthur did not doubt that Robboe had applied a similar test to him, with the same conclusions. So the respect they had for each other was based on a form of judgment that neither could give words to.

Whenever Arthur looked into somebody’s face and screwed up his brows to look black and cunning, and shouted: ‘I’ve got yo’ weighed-up’ — the chances were that he really did have their main characteristics balanced nicely on the scales in his mind, though he could explain neither the mechanism of the scales nor the nature of the goods that kept each pan level.

Reactions varied to his remark. When he said it to one of his mates, perhaps in a quarrel over a box of work rejected at the viewers’ table, they would reply in an equally knowing and stentorian voice: ‘That’s what yo’ think.’ When someone said to Arthur: ‘I’ve got yo’ weighed-up,’ his stock reply was: ‘Oh, ‘ev yer? Then ye’r bloody clever, mate, because I ain’t got meself weighed-up, I can tell yer’ — which was equally effective in shutting them up, and perhaps equally truthful in that though everybody might have the ability to weigh-up others, it never occurred to them to attempt a weighing-up of themselves. Arthur had stumbled on this lack from which all seemed to suffer, though as yet he had not thought of applying it with any great force to himself.

But despite his aptitude for weighing people up, Arthur had never quite weighed-up Jack the tool-setter. Perhaps the fact that he was Brenda’s husband made him appear more complicated than other men. Certainly he was of the same sort as Arthur, never pretended otherwise, and he might normally have weighed him up like a shot, but somehow the essential ramifications of Jack’s character evaded him. Jack was timid in many ways, a self-contained man who did not give much of himself away. He chipped-in with his share of the talking, yet never shouted or swore or boozed like a fish, or even got mad no matter how much the gaffers got on his nerves; he never opened his mind so that you could take a squint inside and see what he was made of. Arthur did not even know whether or not Jack had any idea he was carrying-on with his wife. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he hadn’t, but if he had, then he was a sly bastard for not speaking out. He was the sort that might suspect or even have definite proof that you were knocking-on with his wife for months and not take you up on it until he was good and ready. In fact he might never take you up on it, a mistake on his part, for if ever he did Arthur would give Brenda back, which was one of the rules of his game.

But, all said and done, if he was carrying-on with Jack’s wife then it served Jack right. Arthur classified husbands into two main categories: those that looked after their wives, and those that were slow. Jack fell into the latter class, one that Arthur, from experience, knew to be more extensive than the first. Having realized this quickly he had been lucky in love, and had his fun accordingly, making hay while the sun shone, growing-up from the age of seventeen with the idea that married women were certainly the best women to know. He had no pity for a ‘slow’ husband. There was something lacking in them, not like a man with one leg that could in no way be put right, but something that they, the slow husbands, could easily rectify if they became less selfish, brightened up their ideas, and looked after their wives a bit better. For Arthur, in his more tolerant moments, said that women were more than ornaments and skivvies: they were warm wonderful creatures that needed and deserved to be looked after, requiring all the attention a man could give, certainly more than the man’s work and a man’s own pleasure. A man gets a lot of pleasure anyway from being nice to a woman. Then on the other hand there were women who wouldn’t let you be nice to them, women with battleship faces and hearts as tough as nails who rattle a big fist at you and roar: ‘Do this, do that, do the other, or else’ — and you could try all you liked to be kind to them, but they wouldn’t have any of it. It’d been better if they’d have been born men, then they’d do less damage and cause less misery: they’d be called-up in a war and get killed, or get slung in clink for saying: ‘Down with this, and down with that,’ from soap-boxes. They were the sort of women who thought you were barmy if you tried to love ‘em, and they just didn’t understand what love was, and all you could do was end up by giving them a smack in the chops. Hopeless and barmy. But I reckon that mostly women want you to love ‘em and be nice to ‘em, and that even if they didn’t they’d start to love you back after a bit. Make a woman enjoy being in bed with you — that’s a big part of the battle — then you were well on the way to keeping her with you for good. Christ, that’s the best thing I’ve ever done, to make sure a woman got her fun as well as me getting mine. God knows how it dawned on me. I don’t. Then again though, a man likes a drink, and if a woman didn’t like a man who drank, then it was going to be touch-and-go, whichever way you looked at it. Which is my big trouble, and why I’m not so cocksure about everything, in the end, and why I have to be careful and find the most loving women of all — nearly always married women who don’t get much love, who have slow husbands.

And so it was possible to forget the factory, whether inside it sweating and straining your muscles by a machine, or whether swilling ale in a pub or loving Brenda in her big soft bed at the weekend. The factory did not matter. The factory could go on working until it blew itself up from too much speed, but I, he thought, already a couple of dozen above his daily stint, will be here after the factory’s gone, and so will Brenda and all women like her still be here, the sort of women that are worth their weight in gold.

3

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.

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