A Start in Life by Alan Sillitoe
The stewardess poured our coffee. ‘I thought you were a writer,’ he sneered softly. ‘If you are, you ought to understand that there’s nothing else I can do.’
‘What about afterwards?’ I asked.
‘Time has stopped. There’s no more peace, not for one minute, any time, anywhere. That’s all gone and finished. No more peace, and no more love.’
‘You’re a saint,’ I said, ‘to try for those two things, the first saint I’ve met, on an aeroplane at thirty thousand feet as well!’
‘I suppose you think I’m old-fashioned?’ he said guardedly.
I thought he was drunk, but didn’t say so. ‘There’s no such thing as old-fashioned. I have enough understanding to know that much.’
With a sudden flush of good-will he reached over and shook my hand: ‘I’m glad you said that. You’ll go a long way as a writer.’ I held out my cup for more coffee, and got a hot spot on my trousers as the plane lurched. If it crashed, his wife would be quids in. ‘I feel better now,’ he said, ‘after that meal, and so much champagne. Perhaps I really have got a soul. I was beginning to doubt it after my ups and downs of the last week.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Maybe you won’t feel so bad when you get home.’
‘Oh, no. When I feel in this mood I loathe her more than ever. I can only murder when I feel in this mood. The bottom of the ocean is in my stomach. The top of the sky is in my lungs. My spirit’s flying between the two.’
He wasn’t crying, but tears were coming out. I lifted my glass: ‘Let’s drink to happy landings, anyway.’
He smiled, showing a very good-natured face, as if all his troubles had gone.
‘What I want,’ I said, confiding in him, ‘is to find a hideaway in the country where I can write in peace. The town is like a nutcracker crunching me. I feel I’ve got to get out and work.’
‘That shouldn’t be difficult,’ he said. ‘While all this has been going on with my wife, we’ve occasionally talked about finding a place in the country where we can go now and again, and try to get back to our old basis of love. Of course, she never meant this to be possible, but it was a good reason for her to send me out of town to look at places as they came up for sale so that she could be free to go to her lover. Well, she won’t be free to go anywhere much longer. I shall be back in an hour, and then I’ll do it. I know exactly what I’ll do. But let me tell you what I found, an old disused railway station for sale in the Fen country. It’s been empty for some time, and nobody seems to want it, so I think you can get it for about twelve hundred. I’ll give you all the information on it.’ He reached for his briefcase, and handed me a few sheets of paper: ‘I’ve seen it, and you’ll want nothing more remote or quiet than that. I was going to take it before I came on this trip, but you might as well have it now. There’s a surveyor’s report in those papers. The place is in good condition, though it needs a few gallons of paint.’
I put them in my pocket: ‘Are you sure you won’t be needing them?’
‘Absolutely certain. I won’t need peace, or any place to hide from now on.’
‘Thanks, then,’ I said. ‘If you loathe your wife, don’t you think that’s a sort of love?’
‘In paradise maybe, but not here on Earth. I’ll never love her again. I can only love someone if I can finally trust them. Love is an extension of trust, and if you’re too young yet even as a writer to finally know what that means, Mr Blaskin, then you are lucky. But trust has nothing to do with whether a person can be trusted or not, if love is involved. The normal sort of trust is only an unspoken treaty of self-preservation between two or a group of people. When this has gone, and I am forty years old, there’s nothing left. The earth has slid from under me, and I am falling. There’s just one more thing to do on my way down.’
‘You know best,’ I said. ‘It’s your life. But thanks for telling me about that railway station.’
I followed him down the steps when we landed, stood far enough away in the bus to the customs hall to get a further look at him in his neat shirt and tie, well-trimmed beard, stylish hat, all of it impeccable enough to warn any woman off him. He stared out of the window and saw nothing, the corners of his mouth drooping so that nobody could say he wasn’t unhappy. I thought I ought to warn his wife about his intending homicidal crackdown, tell her to watch that split-level look to his eyes – that she had maybe spent all her life putting there. Still wondering whether I should do it I followed him from the bus and into the customs. By chance we went through at the same moment. I saw his head jerk, and he began to run, as if told to stop and surrender by someone only he could hear, but deciding to make a break for it against all chances.
Halfway across the hall was a woman, fair and slight in the quick view I got of her, wearing a discreet hat and a light grey suit, a faint smile of welcome on her face, as if not wanting to invest too much of a smile in case the bottom fell out of the market, and in case he shouldn’t see her smile but walk right through her like his taxi had driven through the dying mare. But I was wrong again, which is what comes of being a bastard, who is too often wrong. He ran towards her, and she saw him. I watched. They latched together like lovers who had not seen each other for weeks, a murmuring groan from each that I’d swear I heard if I claimed to have invented it. They kissed openly a couple of times, his grin fixed, hers still a modest smile with half-closed eyes as if she was taken up by a great force and couldn’t stop herself, but at the same time didn’t want to see anyone who might be noticing them, or indeed even acknowledge the strokes of lust that taunted her for coming straight to the airport from the Christian Woman’s Club. It was touching, and made me hungry for the same thing, a living advertisement for the love-shop. They walked towards the escalator, arms around each other as if they were both sixteen.
Because I’d expected him to go straight home after what he’d told me, and cleave her down the middle, I thought I didn’t know I was living now that the exact opposite seemed to be on the cards. My mistake showed me what a baby I was and how little I knew of the world. All I’d got out of meeting him were the details of a remote railway station I could retire to when I decided to sever connexion with Jack Leningrad Incorporated. I supposed that the Lovers of Putney would be immersed in each other for the next twenty-four hours, so decided to steal a march on him and get to the Fens first thing in the morning to view the place, assuming that since things seemed to be patched up with his wife he would still entertain notions of getting it for himself.
I was looking forward to seeing Smog and Bridgitte, but the flat was empty. A letter on the table said she had taken Smog and gone back to her husband. He had found out where they were and had phoned them, sobbing and weeping and imploring them to come back so that they could live once more as a happy and loving family. Smog didn’t want to go, so Bridgitte had to get him kicking and screaming out of the flat. What he hated most, she wrote, was having to go back to school, and no longer playing this thrilling game of being on the run from his father.
I took a shower so as to have moving water for company, and to swill off the grind of travel. Every journey pulled flesh from me and I didn’t know why, though the physical cost, the fear of getting caught, and the guilt perhaps of doing this work at all, might have added up to an amount I could only just pay, and I was kicking at the limit of my capabilities. I felt as if my blood had been sucked out, but then cheered up, as I lay back and lit a cigar, at the idea of seeing the railway station. I read the timetables, then phoned the agents, Smut and Bunt of Huntingborough.
‘It’s cheap,’ he said, ‘because it’s beyond the commuter belt, but it’s the most beautiful little station you ever saw. Just the place, I would say, for a writer like you.’ The land was flat and waterlogged, grey and green under a vast and heavy sky, metalled by the sun just breaking through. Beautiful. I felt a free man, for the first time since I’d set out from Nottingham on my old jalopy two years ago. I didn’t feel like going back to London, but the trouble was that I?
‘I pay cash.’
He took a humpbacked bridge over a dyke and nearly shot my throat into my brain. ‘That’s all right then,’ he said, envious rather than impressed.
The nearest village was Upper Mayhem, and half a mile on the other side of it we turned into a cul-de-sac, at the end of which was the station, well away from the nearest houses. ‘Any offers yet?’
‘There’ve been one or two, but they’ve fallen through. A chap in London, from Putney, was quite firm on it, but we haven’t heard from him lately. It’s first come, first served. I’ve only got the keys to the back door.’ He opened a wooden gate to get there, and it fell forward off its hinges. He picked it up and set it against the wall. ‘You might find it a bit damp, but you have to expect that in the Fens. Nothing that a few good fires won’t cure.’
It reeked with must as he opened the back door. There were three simple rooms downstairs, with a scullery. ‘Toilet in the garden,’ he said. Upstairs were four more rooms, and half a ton of soot in one of the fireplaces. I didn’t tell him I used to be an estate agent. The plumbing wasn’t up to much, but the ceilings looked all right. I stood at the end of the garden and trained my binoculars on the roof to make sure the slates were in place, and the chimney-stack firm. According to the survey it would need a bit of work done in a few years, but sufficient to the day is the ruination thereof.
‘We’ll go to the actual station,’ he said, which lay across a hundred yards of asphalt, badly holed in places.
‘How much does the land come to?’
‘Two acres. Room to swing a cat, certainly.’
‘Any rabbits around here?’
‘Quite a few.’
I noticed a huge potato field beyond the track, and fruit orchards on the other side of the station. ‘Not an architectural gem,’ I said, ‘though I expect I could make it cosy.’ To the left was the booking office, and all the shelves and ticket compartments were still there, as well as a few cupboards. Across the hall was the waiting-room, with plain seats going around the walls. We strode up and down the platform, passed the ladies and gents lavatories.
‘You say they want twelve hundred for it,’ I said. ‘Is it open to offer, or not?’
‘It’s a firm price. They wouldn’t take less.’
I offered him a cigar. ‘What about a thousand?’ We lit up, and walked back towards the house. ‘You can try,’ he said. ‘Maybe eleven hundred would get it.’
‘I’ll offer eleven then. I’ll need the other hundred to stop it falling down.’
‘It’s pretty firm, the main structure. Are you married?’
‘Divorced,’ I told him. ‘I gave my London house to my wife.’
Back in his office I wrote a cheque for the ten per cent deposit, and gave the name of William’s solicitors as stake holders.
I had a meal at the hotel in Huntingborough, then got the train back to town. When I reached the flat nothing had happened in my absence. I felt let down when I saw no letters or telegrams of alarm waiting for me, so after some beans on toast I phoned Polly, and Moggerhanger himself answered: ‘What do you want?’
‘Can I speak to Polly?’
‘She’s out. Who’s that?’
‘Kenny Dukes,’ I answered, and put the phone down. Then I phoned Bridgitte’s number, and Anderson said: ‘Who’s that?’
‘Mind your own business,’ I said. ‘I’m not one of your weak-headed patients who answers all your questions. Let me speak to Bridgitte.’
‘So it’s you?’ he said, frothing.
‘Yes, it’s me. And if you don’t mind I’d like to talk to Bridgitte.’
‘You mean my wife,’ he said.
‘Bridgitte Appledore,’ I told him, ‘Mrs Anderson if you like.’
‘You damn-well bet I do. You can’t talk to her. And if you see her any more I’ll bloody-well divorce her, and you’ll be paying off court costs for the rest of your life. I’ll spin you around my little finger.’
‘Listen,’ I said, holding the phone a few feet away and shouting into it to trample over his gallop. ‘I’ll see who I like when I like, so get that into your headshrinking head. And if you hit Bridgitte again, or if you kick Smog again, I’ll use your head for a football all over Hampstead Heath.’
I put the phone down, and didn’t feel like using it again any more, having drawn two dud numbers, but thinking I might be third time lucky I contacted Jack Leningrad to say I was back in town, at which they didn’t show much interest, as if they might be glad to see the back of me now that I’d made my expected quota of successful trips. It was my honourable intention to relieve them of all responsibility for my welfare, in any case, but only in my own good time. I was looking to my retreat, not wanting to end up in the next-door cell to William, which wouldn’t be difficult for them to arrange, if they supposed I knew a bit too much. I suspected it was no accident that William had been caught in the Lebanon rather than in England where he would have been brought to court and may have talked too freely.
A few days later, when they loaded me up with gold for Turkey, I looked at each piece in case it was hollow and filled with poppy seed, for if I were searched at that place with such stuff on me it would mean twenty years’ darkness. They noted my suspicions, and didn’t like it, but when I saw them weighing me up I liked it even less. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to fight a war on ten fronts. I was as helpless before the Leningrad outfit as I had been with Moggerhanger’s, and if I lost my nerve it would be through this feeling, not at the brief and occasional ordeal of dodging the customs. Back from Istanbul, I spoke to Stanley, who said there’d be nothing doing for the next three days, after which there could be a bit of a rush.
Brooding on the misery of William’s mother, I’d become tender enough to write to my own and let her know where I was and that I was well. A letter was pushed through the door with a Nottingham postmark and she said, to my surprise, how much she’d worried about me, and how much she missed me, and how much she loved me – love being a word I don’t think I’d heard her mention before. She told me the news of my grandmother’s death a month ago, which may have upset her because now, apart from me, she was alone in the world, though I thought she must be far from lonely if I knew my mother, who’d never been the person to let boyfriends grow under her feet, and I supposed she was still the same, not being too much above forty. My grandmother, she said, had left me a locked box, and nobody knew what was in it, but she thought it might contain family photos that hadn’t been seen for years. So I ought to go up and collect them some time, though if I was busy they’d be kept safe for me until I wasn’t, whenever that might be.
I wandered around town all day, reading the letter every time I stopped for a coffee or snack. I was touched by the fact that my mother missed me, and intrigued at the thought of what was in my grandmother’s box, so the next day I got on a train at St Pancras and steamed north for Nottingham.
Part Six
I lounged among a heap of newspapers and magazines in a first-class compartment, but soon got bored with them and went to the dining-car for lunch. I’d left it late, and the only remaining place was opposite two other people. I’d felt like being alone with my thoughts, didn’t even want to be asked to pass the salt or ashtray. The man’s hand was on the table, and the girl by his side touched it, then rested hers on it. I was looking at the window, fascinated by beads of rain breaking and multiplying on their way down the glass as the train rushed along. Then I heard my name spoken, and, being forced to look, I saw that the loving and handsome couple in front of me were none other than Gilbert Blaskin, and my old friend June. I couldn’t speak, and a wide smile came on to Gilbert’s already wide mouth: ‘Having a rest from the big city?’
I smiled back, but it nearly broke my face: ‘Where are you two going?’ I hadn’t seen June since our encounter in the taxi, for which I wasn’t exactl
‘It’s a small world,’ said Gilbert. ‘We all know that. But she’s going back north with me now, aren’t you, darling?’
‘I gave up my job at the club,’ she told me. ‘Gilbert and I have known each other for months, and we’ve decided to stay together. You know, the old “man-and-wife” kick.’ They’d already had brandy, and we were served with scalding soup.
He toasted her: ‘Maybe we’ll even get married. We don’t talk about it, though it’s in the air we breathe. I’m divorced now, thank God.’
I couldn’t stand their brimming happiness. ‘What happened to Pearl Harby?’
He winced, but I waited for an answer. ‘She left me.’
‘You mean you threw her out.’
‘She left me, old son.’
When the next course came I asked June how Moggerhanger was these days, and she didn’t take it so well: ‘You’re as rotten as your car. Why don’t you drop to bits?’
‘I’d like to, but I can’t.’
‘Not yet, you mean.’ Then she smiled, too happy for many hard feelings: ‘He came to the club and asked for Kenny Dukes. Moggerhanger said something about Kenny trying to get off with his daughter Polly, who’s a lecherous little bitch, I might say. But he told him not to phone her again. Kenny went all flustered and tried to deny it, and when a few more words flew Claud punched him, and had him thrown out of the club.’ I laughed, because that must have been the result of my casual phone call, but I didn’t tell her, merely tut-tutted at Moggerhanger’s vile temper and irrational suspicions. Her opinion of Polly seemed no more than a bit of feminine pique. And one good turn deserves another, I thought, remembering how Kenny Dukes had done me down in a similar way when I lost my chauffeuring job.