Key to the Door (42 page)

It was getting dark as they passed Radford Station. “Good,” Brian thought, “I don't want to see anybody I know”—though no sooner had this crossed his mind than Uncle George came biking over the hill, from Woodhouse, calling as he went by: “Now then, Brian, you're a bit young to be courting, aren't you?” He put a good face on it, bawling back: “Ar, I'm doing all right an' all.” Fancy shouting out like that, though he laughed at remembering back to when George had persuaded Vera to introduce him to a young unmarried woman in the yard, and she had sent Brian to tell Alice Dexter she wanted to see her a minute—all to help her stingy brother, blacksmith George. When Alice Dexter came into the house George picked up a newspaper to make her think he'd been reading like a sober educated man, but he'd been unable to read from birth and the paper was upside down. Which caused periodic laughs in the family, especially from Seaton, because he couldn't read either and would never try to impress anybody that way by pretending he could.

Wind blew across the bare dark stretch of the Cherry Orchard. “Are you all right, duck?” he said to Pauline. “Keep well wrapped up.”

“It ain't cold,” she whispered. The others were a merging shadow far to the left, intent on finding their own private hollow in which to snug down. He held her tightly around the waist. “We'll find a good place.” Stars were pale and liquid-eyed, each as if nervous at not knowing whether it was next to be hidden away. “It's marvellous out here. It's warm and lonely.”

“It is an' all,” he responded. “My grandma used to live over there”—pointed far off into the darkness. “And my grandad. He was a blacksmith.” An inexplicable pride came at the thought of his grandfather having been a blacksmith. Blacksmith was a word of skill and hardiness: a smith makes things, and black means the toughest sort of work—like when I did that bout of flue-cleaning—the shaping of iron and steel between hammer and anvil, moved by muscle in a subtle mixture of controlled strength.

“Ooooooh!” she drawled out. “Mek a wish, Brian.”

“What for? Mind that bush.”

“I saw a shooting star.”

“I didn't, though”—pulled out of his blacksmith world.

“There's another one, look”—still pointing.

“Yes, I saw that one,” he was glad to own. “I've made a wish.”

“So've I.”

“What did yo' wish?” he wanted to know.

“I'm not telling you. It don't cum true if you tell anybody.”

“Well,” he teased, “I shan't tell you what I wished then.”

“I'm not asking you to,” she said, offended. “Don't if you don't want to.”

“What do you think I am?” he cried, indignant. “If you wain't tell me, I'm not going to tell yo'.”

“Well,” she said, “if you tell me what yo' wished, mine'll still come true.”

“Mine wain't, though,” he reasoned, no thought of self-sacrifice.

“P'raps our wishes was the same,” she ventured. This put him on his guard: “I bet they worn't.” I didn't wish we could get married, he told himself. It's enough if she did, though I'll bet she'll be wrong. “You know what mine was, though, don't you?” she said, pressing his hand. He did. It leapt across with no words, a shaft of love unseen in the darkness, meeting the wish he had made because no other was possible for him, being with his girl in the middle of the Cherry Orchard in the first darkness of a spring evening. Her words came sweet, into an isolation of something better than he'd ever known, even though it wasn't the first time they'd worked out this desire between them.

“Mine was the same,” he said, seeing the two lines written on the picture in the Nook parlour: “If you love me as I love you, nothing will ever part us two.” The sentiment quickly vanished because he thought that if he told it to Pauline she might laugh and see him as too sloppy to go out with. Not that he was unhappy at this.

A moon was up, had severed all connection with the chimneypots of distant houses, was responsible for the faint luminous gleam that held the humps and hollows and solitary bushes back from the hand of complete darkness. A gentle warm infiltration of visibility overspread from hedge and houses to a vale of Serpent Wood, a vague light giving the impression that the dwindling countryside of the half-mile Cherry Orchard was a vast and untouchable heath-land through which no arteries of life ran. He pulled up a handful of fresh grass to smell. “I can't see Jim and Joan any more,” she said.

“They're just over there,” he told her. “They'd hear us if we shouted.” To stop any idea of it he drew her to him, arms fastened around the waist and shoulders of her coat. He caught her mouth, half-open to start some reply to his remark, and felt the moist warm surprise of her lips that closed and hardened to a passionate response, her arms also reinforcing the kisses that she seemed to try and repulse only by increasing the forward pressing of her own. The uneven ground caused him to lurch, and though he kept balance without thinking where to place his feet, he succeeded in breaking the force of her kisses, holding her to him and placing his lips on her at such an angle that it was impossible for them to breathe. Both knew the meaning of this manoeuvre; it gave each a chance of proving that the power of greatest love was on his side; for the one who craved breath first bore the lesser love. The closeness of her body and the pressure of her face and lips hardened and sweetened the urgent rod of his loins. He moved his lips over hers, neither taking nor giving breath, prolonging the fleshy meeting with her mouth, which was one second dormant and then moving to prove that she loved him with all her strength and was nowhere near losing the contest. He went harder into her face, wanting to lift his head away from her, though, and laugh and pull in gusts and lettershapes of pure air, but the sweetness of Pauline, the well and slight shifting of her lips drew him in so that his kisses, like tears, grew in strength at the feel of her love.

The wind came against them like an outside kiss from the distant curve of the woods (the last leapfrogged obstacle down from the bleak Pennines), and as the pushing within grew at the deep prolonged valley of the kiss, the air and grass and darkness outside pulled away and left them in the grip of an insoluble torment of love. Pauline's hands were at his neck, around under the hair at the back of his head, and she hoped that he would see through her equal torment and relax his wild unfeeling pressure by allowing her to breathe and win because she loved him more. His inner world grew to a blind illuminated space, the inside of a sphere that marked the limit of all pictures in his mind and turned his kiss-breaking into a vision. This was marvellous. He wanted to breathe, but held himself, even though the artistry of his kisses suffered, went on through brief seconds of control with each one the reason for further prolongation. His hands roamed up and down her back, from neck to shoulders, to take away the drumbeats of his lungs protesting against such obstinacy. I love you, Pauline, I love you. Give in. Start breathing and let me prove it. She pulled him tighter, as if to say that the kiss could go on for another five minutes for all she cared. His knees shook. He moved his head from side to side to keep a further second of breath in him: like swimming under water and hoping to reach a better part of the shore before surfacing. Though her lips were fast closed, she swayed also, moaned and tried shaking his head away. He knew that a few more seconds would kill him, for his lungs were barrels of gunpowder and the only vision left in his lighted sphere was that of a curving fuse going into them, with smoke that had travelled along it now close. If he kept on, he would die like a man does when he drowns.

She drew her hands away and he wondered what was happening—until her fists came down, and in the crash they made against his spine he heard her taking enormous drinks of breath out of the air. Tears were on her cheeks and he went in this time to a kiss of love in which both could breathe, so that he felt tears springing to his own eyes, but tears of laughter and happiness. They leaned against each other, hands free. “I love you, Brian,” she said.

They went into a wide hollow and lay down by a bush, dark banks bringing the night closer. The earth felt damp under his hand, and she drew him down to it, spreading kisses like salt on his face as if to recompense them both for his victory of kisses up in the field and bring them back to loving. He tasted the sweetness of her lipstick and opened each button of her coat as he fought back his own kisses into her loving mouth.

They afterwards lay in the dip of the Cherry Orchard with no watch between them to tell what time it was, each smoking a cigarette to give taste and body to the fragrance of their exhaustion and an illusion of comforting warmth to the humid freshness of the night. “You ought to get yoursen a topcoat,” she said. “You'll get pneumonia like that, duck.”

He laughed: “Not me. I've got blood like boiling water. A walking stove.”

“Still,” she said. They walked out of the hollow. “It must be after nine. I wonder what happened to the others?”

“Gone, I expect. Joan lives at Lenton, don't she?” He felt loosened from the fever, vibrant and sharp against the night air, as much in love with the rustle of bushes and odours of soil and grass as with Pauline. He stopped and drew another kiss from her, gentle and indrawn. “Well,” she said with a laugh, “you can never have enough, can you?”

“I can't”—taking her naked hand by the dark shadows of Colliers' Pad. They came to the lights of the main road: “Mam and dad'll be at the pictures, being it's Friday,” she said. “I don't expect they'll be back yet.”

“If your dad's in, p'raps we'll 'ave a game o' darts. I'm hoping to beat 'im one of these days.”

“You'll never do that: he had too much practice when he was in 'ospital.” He agreed: Ted Mullinder had been bed-bound through an accident at the pit. A truck underground had run into his foot and all but crushed it when he was coming back from the face one day. He'd got off too soon at the skip, thinking the truck had stopped when it hadn't. It was as if a shark had got him, pain leapfrogged to his brain and exploded there, blowing him into a mixed land of black-out and dreams in which he had mistaken his own pain and suffering for somebody else's, then woken up to find with horror that it had been his own. Operation after operation, and now he was a sad asthmatic cripple with a job on top, the only compensation being that he had become the unbeatable champion of the local darts team. On most nights he made his way on two sticks to the John Barleycorn, slung down three pints of mild, and got his hand in before a game by going round the clock. Though able to stand, he played from a chair set at the regulation paint mark, preferring to sling his arrows this way because his hospital marksmanship had been built up from a wheelchair. He was broad-shouldered and dark, kept in life and friendship by sufficient bouts of ironical cheerfulness, buttressed against despair by his wife and four daughters.

Mullinder now sat at the table with his bad leg spread towards the fire while his wife, a tall nut-brown gypsy-like woman, followed Brian and Pauline in with a loaded enamel teapot and set it before him. What a life, Brian observed: waited on like a king. Not that I wish it was me, with that bad foot. Eleven-year-old Maureen took up the other side of the hearth to read a comic. “Hey up, Brian,” she called out, no sooner was he in.

“Did you pass your scholarship?” he asked. You could tell she was one of the family all right, her face oval and alive, and even more mischievous because of her age.

“I don't know yet. But I don't care if I pass or not. I'll feel daft in a uniform and all that. I want to go to work when I'm fourteen, not stay till I'm sixteen.”

“Don't be barmy,” Mullinder said. “You're a lot better off at school. You don't know you're born until you start wok, Maureen Madcap!”

“I'll get mad all right in a bit, our dad. I've told you before not to call me Maureen Madcap.” But from almost crying with shame and shyness, she called to Brian: “Hey, Brian, you know what heppens when you wash too much?”

“What?”

“You get soap rash! Don't you, our dad?”

“Go on,” he called. “I reckon Maureen Madcap's the name for yo', right enough.”

Mrs. Mullinder set Pauline to wash more cups, and put Brian at the supper table facing her husband. “Tek a couple o' them cheese sandwiches,” she said. “I hope you don't mind sacs in your tea, but I don't get the sugar ration till tomorrow.”

“That's all right. We've got nowt else but them.” He felt it strange that an issue should be made of it, as if he'd strayed into a higher degree of civilization than he was used to. Tea was tea, whether it was dosed with saccharine or sugar. In fact, the ration at home was always three weeks in advance because his mother had wheedled it out of the grocer. “She's clever,” Mr. Mullinder laughed when he mentioned it. “When the war ends she'll have had three weeks for nowt.”

“What's the score on the Russian front these days?” Mullinder asked, teasing Brian's obsession, who took him seriously: “They'll be in Germany soon. I'm sure they'll get to Berlin before anybody else.”

“Let's hope they stay there,” Mullinder said. “They want to finish off that lot once and for all, this time.”

Brian ripped into a sandwich: “I'll say.”

“Get my fags out o' my mac pocket, Pauline,” her old man said. Brian liked to see her doing such things, washing-up, slicing bread, paring cheese, and spreading butter. He observed the mature sixteen-year-old shape of her body as best he could with so many in the house, saw how attractive it showed when prized out of the voluminous thick coat and clothed only in the blouse and skirt she had worked in by her machine all day. The raw animal sweetness lingering from their lovemaking in the Cherry Orchard still beat in his loins, and now and again as she passed him at the table he caught a faint odour of her face and skin, of powder and lipstick she lightly used—though her father had told her time and time again not to wear it. He was surprised that no one could twig they had spent the last hour loving each other, felt it should be showing in their eyes and the way they moved.