Key to the Door (53 page)

He held it up: “Who's next?”

“Nobody,” Frank said, a grin of triumph. “They've all read it”—indicating Pauline and Dorothy. Albert was immersed in his
Soviet Weekly
, bringing his squat head up now and again to spout out some marvellous fact about Russia: “It says here that ten years after the war nobody's going to work more'n forty hours a week.”

“I don't see how that can happen,” Frank said, folding up his sexual proclamation. And the cranky bleeder let the girls see it, Brian cursed. Think o' that. He ought to have more sense.

“It's easy,” Albert argued. “All you do is round up them bastards as never do a stroke o' work: get 'em in the factories and on the railways.”

“Round up a few pen-pushers as well,” Brian put in, a punch at Frank. “All they do day in and day out is copy dirty stories, then come here at night and get a cheap thrill passing 'em round to girls.”

“He
might,” Pauline said, “but I don't get a thrill, I can tell you that. It just makes me laugh.”

“I think it's disgusting,” Dorothy said, her round swarthy face flat and angry.

Frank laughed out loud: “Owd Dolly! You know you liked it.”

Albert set himself square like a boxer: “Lay off Doll. Nobody likes that sort o' stuff, you pen-pusher.”

“We can't all work a machine, you know,” Frank recoiled.

“Somebody's got to reckon our wages up,” Pauline said, coming to his defence. “Not that it would take long to reckon up mine.”

“Don't worry,” Brian said. “We'll be better off as soon as we've beat the Jerries. We'll get rid of Old Fatguts and vote a socialist government in.”

“You'll still have to work, though, won't you?” Dorothy called out sarcastically.

“Shurrup, sharp-shit,” Albert said, as if forgetting she was his sweetheart. “I don't mind wokkin'.”

“You should wash your mouth out with soap,” she called.

“It don't bother me either,” Brian argued. “As long as I get paid.”

“I don't see why you've got to 'ave money,” Albert said. “I reckon you should be able to get all you wanted for nowt. As long as everybody worked, what difference would it make? I read in the
Worker
that it'd be possible for bread to be free in Russia one o' these days. That'd be all right, wouldn't it?”

Everybody thought so. “It'd tek a long time to come true, though,” Pauline added. Shadows lay heavily in the playground, from air-raid shelters to lavatories, gate to cycle-shed. The sky was blue, and starless unless you looked hard for a few seconds. A cold night was driven into the city like a lost traveller wanting warmth, harried on by an officious wind that scaled the wall and played around them. Coats were unobtrusively pulled together and buttoned.

“Suppose it took fifty years?” Brian said. “That's nowt: the flick of a gnat's left eyelid. As long as we start now. There's enough snap and clo'es and houses for everybody.”

Frank was dubious: “It'd tek a lot o' doin'.”

“I ain't found anybody at wok as don't want another government,” Brian put in. “'Ave yo', Albert?” No one had. The end of the war was coming, and so were the days of change, a definite thing that everyone felt.

“Our old man wants a new 'un,” Dorothy said. “There was ructions at our house the other night when Fatguts was bellyaching on the wireless.” Albert spun round with a broad overpowering laugh: “O Christ, yes. Go on, tell 'em, love.”

“Well,” she gave him a mischievous look, “Owd Fatguts was going on and on, and dad ups and brings his grett fist down on the wireless. I thought he was going to bost all the valves. ‘Tek that,' he says. And there was a big crack right across the top: ‘You old bogger,' he says. Mam towd 'im not to be so daft, but when she said that, he hit it again, as if he was going off his loaf, and he kept on hitting it—ever so hard—until Owd Fatguts made as if he was coughing hissen to death and the wireless stopped. ‘I don't 'ave to listen to that bleedin' liar,' dad says, and mam gets on to him then because he's broke the wireless. But he just tells her to shurrup and says he'll get a new one next week. He towd me later, when mam was upstairs, that he felt an electric shock when he gave it the last big crack.” Laughter engulfed them, like ice breaking.

“He saved England, though, didn't 'e?” Frank Varley called from a few feet away.

“You reckon so?” Brian answered. “It was him and his gang as turned hosepipes on the hunger marchers before the war.”

“Old Fatguts was saving his own neck,” Albert said, “not ourn. He didn't give a bogger about us. It was all his bleeding factory-owners he saved, the jumped-up bags like owd Edgeworth who's making a fortune. You can't tell me owt. I've got eyes and I use 'em to read wi'.”

“I can read as well, you know,” Varley retorted. “I get the
Express
on my way to work every day and I read all of it.”

Albert wasn't in a quarrelling mood, laughed: “I read three papers every day, Frank, not one, because it's best to get more than one opinion so's nobody can say you're biased. I get the
Worker
, the
Herald
, and the
Mirror
. And my old woman gets
Reynolds
on Sunday, so I have a goz at that as well.”

“We'll make you Prime Minister in the next government,” Varley said. “Then you can boss it over vacant bleeders like us.”

“If I was Prime Minister,” Brian said, “I'd get rid o' blokes who sit at wok all day typing dirty stories.”

Mrs. Dukes walked slowly over from the Infants' door while Albert was reading aloud from his worn-out
Soviet Weekly
. She listened a minute before breaking in, regarding him as one of the most intelligent members of the club: “I'll get Jack Taylor to come and talk to you in a week or two,” she said at last. “He's a socialist and you'd like hearing him.”

“He'd have a job to convert us, Mrs. Dukes,” Brian laughed, “because we all are as well.”

“Still,” she said, “you've got to know more than you know.” And they went in to get their share of tea and sandwiches before splitting up for home.

He stood with Pauline by the back door of the Mullinders, and the end of their quiet evening blazed between them in a battlefire of kisses, bodies pressed close, and arms inside each other's open coats. Neither wanted to leave, and time ran by. Pauline's mother was in bed, had left her to a good-night kiss at her own risk. A cat scuffled before the lightless windows, a dog dragged its chain over the stone-cold monotonous paths of the estate gardens, and they were snug in the porch, out of the wind and half asleep against each other, warm and inexhaustible in a bout of long slow kisses. This is love, he said to himself. “I've never been in love like this, Brian,” she said into his ear.

“What?”

“I must go, and I don't want to. I've got to go in now, duck.”

“Not yet,” he said.

“I don't want to either.”

“Don't yet then: I can't let you go.”

“It's comfortable,” she said. “I like being here, so close. I hope it's allus marvellous like this.”

“It will be,” he told her. “I know what you mean. I mean I love you.”

“I shan't go yet,” she answered. Work tomorrow, but so what? Work was the one definite landmark always visible at any moment from the delectable night before, so it didn't matter whether you felt good or bad about it. He'd be able to get up no matter what time he went to bed.

The moon saw him home, following him on a long walk through the utter silence of allotment gardens, a cigarette to keep him warm, the smell and presence of it an added comfort along the same lonely footpath as when he had fled from the Nag's Head clutching a couple of beer-mug handles five hundred years ago, Bert running after him to say it was all right. It is all right an' all, he laughed, blowing out smoke against the damp air. In a few days the war would be over, and there was nothing on God's earth to stop it ending. Then the world would change, at any rate be new to him, because he hadn't been alive long enough to know what the ending of a war was like.

It finished well: wooden forms and bunks were dragged from airraid shelters and heaped on to bonfires. In the White Horse, a buxom loud-mouthed ear-ringed woman of fifty did a can-can on one of the tables, clattering her shoes among a ring of pint jars to the bashing of the rhythmical piano, cocking her legs up high to show—apart from her fat knees—that her baggy drawers had been made from the gaudy colours of a Union Jack.

Brian, sitting in the pub with Pauline and his parents, drained his pint and joined in the wild release of singing with the rest of the packed room, enjoying the empty thoughtlessness that went like flashpowder among the moving throng and only allowed the arms of the clock to move by the half-hour. Yet at certain moments he stopped singing to take in the dozens of faces, saw them as mere life-shapes with such sad clarity that even the sound they were making left his ears and drew back until he couldn't listen any more. They were wild with excitement because the war had ended, yet the truth of it didn't seem real to him. This was just a booze-up night, more joyous and violent than usual, but what difference would it make to everybody? They would wake up tomorrow with sore heads and see out of their windows the same backyards and line of lavatories, hear the same drone of factory engines. He remembered opening the
Daily Mirror
when just home from work a few days ago, coming to the double pages of the middle and seeing spread out before him something he would never forget: the death pits of Belsen, a scene of horror making a pincer movement through each eye to the middle of his brain. He closed the paper, every other word irrelevant, and the images stamped forever. But the end of the war meant something, he thought, lifting another pint his father put before him, a lot in fact: backyards and Belsen—and it meant getting rid of both.

But the beer stunned that part of him and, victory or no victory, he was kay-lied. Pauline, his mam and dad, all of them sat at a table roaring their guts out, arms around each other and happy, done for at last by the six-year desert of call-up and rationing, air-raids and martial law. All this was finished and victory had come, victory over that, even more than over the Germans, and what else could he want but to sing out his happiness in the biggest booze-up anybody could remember?

Vera and Seaton had been drinking all day, and Brian helped his father along Eddison Road at firelit midnight, Pauline behind with his mother and the children. Seaton leaned heavily, slurred his words, tried to apologize but clapped hand to mouth to stop his false teeth falling. Brian was flexible on his feet, sober enough to hold himself up as well as his father. “Come on, dad. Stop draggin' or you'll 'ave
me
down as well.” He turned: “Y'all right, mam?”

“I've got her,” Pauline said.

“I am, my owd duck,” his mother shouted, riotously plastered. “I'll mek yer some supper when I get 'ome, my love.”

“Yer'll 'ave a job.” Brian laughed at the earnest tone in her barely controlled voice. He felt love for them both: heavy Seaton, who pressed a firm hand on his shoulder to help himself along; his mother, happy and light-headed behind; above all for Pauline, who, by witnessing how totally they took to a good time, was in a way being as intimate with him as when they were in Strelley Woods together.

The last high flames were belting up from a bonfire at the end of the terrace. Gertie Rowe leapt through them, and her four sisters led all the lads of the street in a fire-dance—a rapid roaring circle around.

Pauline packed the kids off to bed, while Brian saw his father and mother safely snoring between the sheets. He came downstairs, back to Pauline, who sat on the rug by the built-up fire in the hearth. “Feel all right, duck?” she asked.

“Solid,” he said. “I must have had eight pints.”

She took off her cardigan and threw it over the chair. “Do you good. Our dad used to like his beer, I do know that. I'd hate to go out with a lad who didn't drink.”

“Well, you'll never be able to grumble at me,” he laughed. “Not that I'm a big boozer, but I like a sup now and again.” Poor old Mullinder—it was too happy a time not to think of him. Into the world and out of it; out of nothing and into nothing, and that was all there was to it, the beginning and the end of it. He stood by the shelf, looking down at her: long unpermed brown hair falling to her shoulders, breasts low and pointing outwards, full and mature, legs turned back under her. She smoked a Park Drive—as though it didn't belong to her, he thought, or as though she didn't know it was lit—in short inexperienced draws without bothering to take down, a long pause between each as she stared into the fire. He reached back to switch off the light.

In the yard outside footsteps and calls of good night were loud between the street and back doors. Children's voices diminished, and because they were put to bed, dogs rested free from torment by fireworks. Someone clattered his way into a lavatory, and after a few minutes dragged the chain down and slouched his boots out again, rattling his gate and calling good night to a neighbour on the way in. Mister Summers, Brian thought, able to recognize every voice no matter how much drink had gone into it. The yard quieted, and the festival of sound left the flickering fire to itself. “Are you all right, duck?” he said tenderly.

“Yes, are you?”

“Yes.” He pushed the chairs back, took cushions from the sofa, and placed them on the rug. “Did you have a good time?”

“I liked it in the pub,” she said. “A bit o' singing like that does you good, I reckon.”

He sat by her: “It does, an' all.”

“I ain't 'ad a night out like that since our Betty got married.” She threw her cigarette into the fire, watched it strip off its paper like a coat as if to dive deeper in. They kissed, and lay down on the rug, and knowing that no one would disturb them that night, he drew skirt and blouse and underwear from her white and passionately waiting body. Her face glowed from the nearness of the blazing fire, and from the unfamiliarity of allowing her nakedness to be seen by him. She drew towards his caresses, a thoughtless process of kissing that, as he undressed, passed into an act of love-making that was slow and marvellous, submerging their closed eyes into a will over which neither thought of having any control. They lay together with no precaution between the final pleasure, into a smooth rhythm of love and a grip of arms to stop them crying out at the climax of it.