Key to the Door (52 page)

Pauline waved at Brian's smile as if she were glad to see him. He'd never noticed before how pale she was. You'd think she'd got jaundice by the look of her. He went up the steps, followed by Albert. “Hey up, duck. How yer gooin' on?”

“All right.”

“You want to come out of the wind or you'll get a cold.” Though it was so long since their quarrel, he still felt affection for her. Her friends stood to one side, made sharp responses to the calls of passing youths. He also felt jealous at the world of time that had fallowed between them, some land of other-occurring days lost and never to be known. Why does it make so much difference? They should have been closer, and he considered it her fault they weren't. “I feel marvellous,” she said. “I ain't 'ad a cold for weeks. Where you off?”

“A walk. Where yo'?”

“A walk.” Picking up lads, he thought, like her pals now talking to some—feeling rotten against himself for these unspoken words, because Pauline seemed to have less ebullience and stature than when he had last been with her. “Do you still go to the Capitol on Sat'day nights?”

“No.” She was absorbed by people moving around the square, as if wanting to be among them and away from this meeting that she had, by a characteristic lapse towards good nature, let herself in for. “I didn't think you did,” he admitted, now hoping to get her going with him again, “because I often go there to see if I can spot you.” She didn't, as he wished, take him up on this, and they stood awkwardly. It was a fact that he'd haunted the cinema the last few weekends to see if she would get off a 7 or 22 and walk slowly towards the queue he stood in—though knowing that such meetings never happened when expected or encouraged, came only when all thought of them was deep in hiding, like now. Her friends had dismissed the youths, and even Albert was impatient for a walk up Trent. “How's your dad?” Brian asked, offering a cigarette, which was refused.

“He's dead.”

The beginning of an ironic laugh came, a disbelieving start to a sentence that would have been catastrophic if he hadn't pulled himself up in time: “You.…”

“He died about six weeks ago,” she said, his doubt unnoticed. Disbelief withered, was overpowered at what he saw was the residue of grief in her pallid face and the damaged spirit of her slightly glowing eyes. He remembered the exact physical centre of the blow, as if someone had struck him by the left eye, dazed his senses, so that he took her arm—which seemed to her a gentle pressure of sorrow. But he shouted angrily: “Why didn't you let me know?”

She drew back. “I couldn't very well telephone you, could I, loony?”

“You knew where I lived, didn't you?”

“Well,” she shouted back—and Albert stood amazed at this unexpected blaze-up of a quarrel—“you knew where
I
lived as well, didn't you?” Which floored him with its logic and quieted him down: “I'm sorry about your dad, duck. I liked him a lot, you know that.”

“I know you did,” she said, half-jeering still, enraged at him for starting a row where so many people might hear and notice. “But don't mek me cry, though, will yer?”

“All right, then: I was just trying to say how sorry I am.” They stood in the path of a raking wind, and he wondered why she and her pals chose such a perch to flirt with lads. She turned from him, in some deep way insulted, though he couldn't see how. “You could have called for me,” she said. “You didn't think I was going to run after you, did you?” He'd never thought that at all, he argued, knowing that to knock at her house and ask if Pauline was in would have been too simple; he preferred to hang around the pictures in the hope of seeing her on the off-chance; and in any case, much of his time had been taken up boozing and gelling with Albert, just as it looked as though hers had been occupied ladding with her pals. There were ten sides to every story, when you came to think about it, but he didn't want to tell her this—and perhaps upset her even further. The fact that Mullinder had died caused an emptiness even of air inside him, leaving nothing for his lungs to draw on. “Come up to the club next week,” he said, expecting her to swing round and tell him to clear off. “You'll have a good time,” he added. “Albert brings his girl as well.”

She turned and smiled: “If you like. As long as it i'n't on a Wednesday, because I wash my hair that night.”

“Thursday's the night,” he told her, believing again in happiness. “You look perished, duck: let's go off and get a cup o' tea somewhere.” She ditched her pals and went with him, and had gone to the club every week since. The old times came back, though different. He thought about them as he set the miller spinning, invincible steel teeth biting soft as butter into aluminium castings, gouging out grooves with such exactitude that even Burton wouldn't be able to complain. Sud-drenched splinters spat over the jigs and tray, cleared away every so often with a specially provided handbrush. Pauline had taken to the club like a duck to water, and though they still had violent rows, they usually made up before the good-night kiss. Nowadays there was less of the rough stuff, both of them not so eager to tread on the fine gauze of self-control and descend into thumped-up quarrels. Brian was gentler and more protective, learned to see that her previous tom-lad bouts were only indulged in so as to be like one of the rest. Even so, she sometimes became angry at his continual solicitude, but would have hated him to lose his temper over such resentment and go back to his old retaliatory ways. Their lovemaking was a natural prolongation of calm and seemingly endless walks together, showing that a new stage of tenderness had been reached.

Grandfather Merton saw them arm-in-arm one evening, copped Brian at it, as he told Vera later, talking to his girl like any love-struck youth as they walked along in the spring dusk. Merton was over seventy, had a lean sardonic face that at one time had reminded Brian of a cross between a strengthened Dox Quixote and the head of George V on the back of coins; but Merton was cleanshaven, a blacksmith mixture of both, an upright man in the prime of his old age who still knocked back his seven or eight pints of Shippoe's every day, much to the disgust of Lydia—who thought it time he packed it in a bit, though not daring, even now, to tell him so. Afraid once upon a time of the stick he beat his dogs with, she was, at forty-five, still wary of him lifting the stick he sometimes allowed to accompany him on his walks. Lydia was unmarried, lived at home, and, as she told Vera and Ada many a time: “The old man's still a bogger, leads poor mother such a dance as well that I can't help thinking it'll be a good job when he's out the road.” But Merton had always been gaffer, and would stay that way. “I'll drink what I bloody-well like,” he said when Mary told him about it. “As long as you've got enough snap on the table, don't try and tell me what I can and can't do.” And knowing how much he liked his ale—and his own way—she didn't mention it again. In any case he was never so drunk that he didn't know what he was doing. During a period when Harold Seaton was amiably disposed towards his in-laws, he called there at midday one Sunday and went out with Merton for a drink.

They took a bus to the Admiral Rodney in Wollaton Village, walked back a mile to the Crown under blue sky and fresh-smelling wind, then to the Midland, the White Horse, the Jolly Hig'lers—the distance between each pub shrinking as they got into Radford—ending at the Gregory with Harold groggy on his feet, fuddled with beer fumes and fagsmoke, wrestling with the earth-pull at the calves of his legs, while Merton stood up tall, sliding a pint into himself now and again between casual called-out remarks to some pal or other. Considering, Seaton thought, what a hard old sod he'd been to his family, it was surprising he was so well liked by all and sundry. Still, Merton worn't a bad owd stick at times, and you couldn't deny as he'd wokked 'ard either. Seaton took him in small doses, enjoyed bumping into him but made sure it didn't happen too often. Even now, over forty himself, he felt too much like a son when with him, and because his own father had been dead twenty years he resented Merton's natural sense of domination.

Seaton liked his beer as much as anybody, which gave him something in common with his father-in-law. A five-pound wage-packet made him well-off, and on weekend nights he would go out with Vera and let his voice rip on the old songs that he liked, his brown eyes, broad sallow face, and black receding hair set against his favourite corner in the Marquis of Lorne. For the first time since getting married he was able to buy a suit—utility and illfitting—but one in which he felt compact and proud, boss of himself when away from work. He had money to buy wood and paint and nails, spare parts for his bicycle and wireless set, but these materials for brightening home and life were hard to find because of the war. He made do and did what he could, though he considered he got little thanks for it from his wife and five kids. What was the use? A bloke couldn't even have a row with his missis without his son getting up and threatening to bash him. Still, he'll know different some day. He felt grieved that he seemed to get little love from anyone after all he'd done for them this last twenty years: serving two months in jail to pay for the grub he'd got on strap, which had been no picnic either; not to mention his odd-job versatility and force-put cunning in dodging the means-test man.

I reckon Brian thinks a lot o' me, though, even after our bit of an argument the other day, because last year he bought me a new set of teeth for nine quid when I'd lost my others being sick down the lavatory after a booze-up. It must a took him a long time to save all that out of his wages, so I don't think we hate each other even if we do have our ups and downs. By God, you can't have everything, you can't. We're lucky to have some work and grub and not get blown to bits, I do know that much. With his labouring spade he spent all day at the bicycle factory loading mountains of brass dust and splinters from the auto shop on to lorries for the scrap trucks over the road. Just turned forty, he was stocky and of iron strength and knew he would have flattened Brian in ten seconds if it had come to a smash that morning, though, unlike Merton, he found it easier to knock his wife about than his children: the idea of fighting with solid hard-working Brian seemed an impossible disaster; while Merton on the other hand had knocked his lads about, but never Mary.

Brian didn't mind meeting his grandfather when walking along Wollaton Road with Pauline, and noted the mischievous wink in his eye: “Hey up, Nimrod, where are you off to, then?”

“A walk.”

Merton looked at Pauline: “A bit o' courting, eh? I suppose you're off up Cherry Orchard?”

Christ, Brian said to himself, he wain't say the right thing now. “Maybe,” he grinned.

“What's your name, me duck?” Pauline told him. He'll run me off if I'm not sharp, Brian thought. I'll let me gra'ma know if he does, though. “I wondered if you might be going to Abyssinia,” Merton laughed, turning to Pauline: “The young bogger used to say that, when he was a kid. If I got on to him and made him wok too 'ard, he'd get up and shout: ‘Bogger you all, I'm off.' ‘Where yer off to?' his auntie Lydia would say. ‘Abyssinia,' he'd tell us, and run back to Radford. He was a bogger when he was a lad.” Brian wondered how Merton could have invented such a tale on the spur of the moment—then realized it was true, and that while it had been buried deep in him and may have seemed a century ago if he'd remembered it at all, it appeared only a year or two back and as plain as a door to Merton. What else will he come out with? he wondered.

Pauline laughed: “Well, he's still a bogger, if you ask me.”

“I allus knew he would be,” Merton said, ready to be on his way. “So long, then, Brian. Look after yourselves, both o' yer.”

“He's nice, your grandad,” was Pauline's verdict, as they turned towards the Cherry Orchard to make love in some hump-lipped hollow of the dusk, and be there an hour in silence before piped notes of cuckoos nipped out on the echo from Snakey Wood.

The club was noisy and popular, absorbed those youths and girls from streets roundabout who snubbed any suggestion of joining a cadet force, yet wanted a place to meet friends once a week. Two middle-aged women of the Co-op and Labour Party ran it, organized talks (mostly political) and saw that the evening ended with hot tea and sandwiches. After being at hard work all day, a lightness or lack of weight crept into Brian's bones on getting the body back into motion after a twenty-minute sit-down slump at the tea table, energy recalled by a second wind of fatigue and fought by a cold breeze footballing it down from the Pennines when, having thrown off his heavily greased overalls and had a good swill at the sink, he walked the odd mile to the club.

Frank Varley met him at the school gate, a crafty smile on his lean handsome face. “Hey, Bri”—he waved a wad of paper from the step-tops—“have yer seen this one?” He was the pen-pusher of the gang, worked in an insurance office down town, and somehow got hold of dirty stories that were given to him, he swore blind, by his brother when home on leave from a signals battalion at Catterick. Brian inwardly disputed the truth of this, wondered whether or not Horace Varley sat at his typewriter all day making them up, though if he did they were bleddy good and he was on his way to earning big money as a journalist. Somebody started 'em off, and that was a fact. Usually they were a dozen typed sheets of single-spaced narrative, the first one Frank handed around being about a special sort of club in India formed by officers' wives to keep themselves happy while their husbands were away for months at a time. The goings-on described in Frank's black-market tale made everybody's hair curl—the girls' included, for they wouldn't be left out of such exotic readership. Another story described a week's leave spent by a soldier in Rome, and the wad now handed to Brian as he entered the playground concerned, he discovered on stopping in the middle of the yard and not caring that those sitting on the far side knew what froze him, the adventures of a nubile young woman who kept a St. Bernard dog. Wind bent the pages back and he made this an excuse to turn round so that no one would witness the slow growth at his groin. The story ended when some man shot the dog because it attacked his little girl, and its mistress died of a broken heart. Brian read it again so that by the time he walked across to the others he need no longer feel ashamed.