A Start in Life (5 page)

Because of something now and again in her appearance, and of the way that her intentions always turned out to be realized, and her low-grade homilies being invariably right, I got the feeling that she was a lot older than me, and than she said she was, so that now and again I went to sleep in a sweat of panic. This was only my imagination, though the thought was so potent that I often felt people looking at us and wondering why I was going out with an older girl. Yet it was so marvellous making love to her, and I hoped she thought so too, that we soon felt we actually owned the woods and fields that had become so familiar to us. I was only put off this state of paradise by her nagging at me to get on. I didn't know where she'd got it from, certainly not her parents, because I found out that her mother was a member of the Communist Party and that her father drove a lorry and couldn't care less about anything except his twenty quid a week. Yet it only came to her in fits and starts, and as long as I stayed on the alert I felt I could handle it.

But it stuck in my craw, really, when she got on to me about saving money. This actually frightened me, not because I was incapable of it, but because I knew what she wanted me to use it for. The fact was, and she didn't know it because it was more than my neck was worth to tell her, that I'd been saving money ever since starting work four years ago. It was part of my nature to do so. I did it very carefully and secretly because if I let on about it to Mam she'd ask me now and again to lend her some. And how can you ask your mother to pay it back, or even accept it if she should offer to? So I'd had practice at keeping the fact to myself. Not that it amounted to much: just over a hundred pounds, but I guarded it like a miser without knowing what I would ever use it for. So when Claudine asked me to start saving money I was afraid that out of pride and to please her, I might in a weak moment let on that I'd already been doing so for a long time.

The one occasion I broke into my savings was to buy a superfine, capacious, pigskin lock-up briefcase that I took to work every morning and that cost twelve pounds. I made sure there was always a good book inside, provided free by the library, as well as my morning copy of
The Times
discreetly hidden. I also read books on architecture and surveying, not that I was hoping to learn anything and take exams, but merely to be able to follow conversations which took place around me. At first it had seemed as if I were living in the dark, because practically everything said was incomprehensible to me. I'd always had a horror of the dark, but in this instance I knew I'd be able to remedy it. I began to use my knowledge in conversation, and then the light really did shine on me, so much so that Mr Weekley suggested I might be far more useful to the firm than I was at present if I had driving lessons and got a licence. So for a while I took one every morning, at the firm's time and expense. When the instructor asked if I'd had any previous experience I didn't mention the time when, at the age of six, I'd let off the brakes of a man's van and got it trundling down the street into a privet hedge.

I may have been in the dark for a while, but never so much as the man called Wainfleet who turned up at our office every day looking for a house to buy. He was probably known at every estate agent's in the city, and had been coming to Pitch and Blender's for at least six months, so the others told me, calling several times a week and always at exactly eleven in the morning. An offer was made to put him on our mailing list, but he preferred the human contact of visiting us, in case anything good turned up, so that he could then get straight out and see it. A twenty-four-hour delay till the notification reached him might cause somebody else to get there first, and make a deposit while he was still reading the particulars over breakfast – which seemed to be the only nightmare he ever had.

He was more than forty years old, always wearing the same suit of salt-and-pepper drag, and a mackintosh of military cut, as well as a dark green hat with the faintest of feathers in it. His clean-shaven face was slightly flushed, with ordnance-survey veins on the cheeks, and his brown eyes turned anxious on coming in, as if he thought somebody might have been just before him and hared off to see the house that he himself had been dreaming about all his life. ‘Good morning,' he'd say, putting a good face on it. ‘I've called to see whether you might know of a country place for sale in the vicinity – eight rooms, up to four thousand pounds. Could go a chip higher for something special.'

He played it as if he were seeing us for the first time, and while I went through the books with him he chatted affably about how factory strikes should be illegal, and how bad the weather was. Now and again, he'd ask one of us to show him a house that sounded interesting, but he'd invariably come back dejected because he said he saw signs of wet rot, dry rot, rising damp, or death-watch beetle – sometimes all of them together. Or he found it too noisy, not sufficiently isolated, not enough garden, too close to a farmyard; or the ground was low-lying and might be subjected to river floods in spring. Sometimes it was too near an aerodrome, or he'd mention train whistles in the distance that nobody else could hear, or he thought that the presence of a colliery eight miles away might bring a risk of subsidence, so that one morning his bed would slide so far into the earth that a group of colliers with their picks and lamps would suddenly open their broad grins into his waking up. If all these conditions didn't exist he'd say it was a pity the house hadn't got central heating, or that he thought, on reflection, that he might after all need an extra room, or that on thinking it over the price seemed a bit too high.

For all these vacillations, he appeared to be, when coming briskly through the door, a man who'd been used to making quick and firm decisions all his life, and who perhaps still did in whatever Ms work was. Nobody had ever lost patience with him. Mr Weekley had once taken him over personally, and after showing him one very suitable property that no one else had yet seen, actually brought him to the point of getting him to make an offer for it, which was accepted. Wainfleet then had the house surveyed, and all seemed to be going through to the expected conclusion, but then he lost his nerve and pulled out, with the tale that his surveyor had told him the place would fall down if he slammed the door too hard.

‘So we don't pay much attention to him,' Weekley told me. ‘You'll get used to such people. They're serious, but can't make up their minds. They don't even want you to make up their minds for them. Years ago I saw one man taken from this office straight to the lunatic asylum. He'd screwed himself up so tight over the months he'd been looking at houses that he just exploded one day, challenged us all to fisticuffs, and then wrecked the office before he was taken off. There aren't many like that, mind you, but you get them now and again, and they plague the life out of us. Some of the worst are married couples who come around saying they are wanting a house, not the ones who were married last week, but those who've been married six or seven years and are looking for a place to stop the marriage breaking up. Estate agents run quite a service! Thank the Lord most people are able to make decisions, even though they are the wrong ones. But I expect we shall get rid of Wainfleet sooner or later, one way or the other.'

He came back after a fortnight, during which Mr Weekley lost his irritation, and began his search all over again. One morning another and younger client was going out, holding a foolscap sheet with the details of a property on it, and called to us: ‘All right. I'll drive out and have a look at it right away. Sounds just the thing.'

Wainfleet stopped halfway to the counter, his face white, as if he had lost the only chance in his life by just five minutes. ‘What was it?' he stammered. ‘Is it something new?'

I laughed: ‘It's only a bungalow near Farnsfield. Wouldn't suit you, Mr Wainfleet.'

It was, in fact, exactly what he was looking for.

‘You're lying,' he cried.

I thought he was going to punch me, so, jumped back a bit. ‘Tek another step forward, and I'll brain yer.'

He went down at this: ‘Sorry. Shouldn't have said that.'

There was nobody else in the outer office, and an idea came to me, vague and newborn as it was: ‘Listen,' I said in a low voice, leaning over to him, ‘I'll get you that house, if you want it. But it costs four thousand three hundred, and no offers.' I thought that in his quest for hearth and home he needed an extra bit of personal service to make him think that, not only was the house unique, but that the rest of the world was all right as well, since he who was doing him the favour (meaning me) knew his place in it.

My hands shook in case somebody came from the inner office: ‘The bloke who went to look at it in his sports car is bound to pay a deposit as soon as he sees it. He's been coming at twelve o'clock every day for the last three years. I don't know why, but he came at half past ten today. Still, don't worry, sir. If you really want it I should be able to pull it off for a good client like yourself. I'll meet you in the Eight Bells tomorrow at one o'clock. Keep the afternoon free to look at it. Got that?'

When he went I typed a sheet giving full particulars of the house, but putting the price at three hundred pounds more than the four thousand asked for, so that I could show it to Wainfleet next day.

Mr Weekley came in and saw I was trembling and as white as clay. ‘My God, Cullen, what's the matter with you?'

‘I don't know, sir. Seem to have the flu.'

‘It's a bit slack, so you'd better go home.'

‘I'll be all right after lunch, Mr Weekley.'

‘Do as I tell you,' he snapped. ‘Sleep it off.'

I sniffed: ‘Perhaps you're right, sir.'

‘Of course I bloody-well am.'

They thought a lot of me at that firm, but I was crazy enough to imagine they'd go on doing so for ever. Not that I had any intention of being there all that long, but at least I expected to leave only when I was ready, under my own good steam. Instead of going home I took a bus to Farnsfield to see Mr Clegg, who owned the house that was for sale.

It was a long job getting round to my real business, because first of all Clegg showed me over the house because I said I was interested in it, thinking that I wanted to buy it. If I'd had the money I would have, since it had good flower and vegetable gardens at the back and a landing-ground lawn at the front, as well as an orchard and paddock. There was no better spot for Claudine and myself to sport in as man and wife, without troubles and for ever and ever, not even an amen necessary to see us into heaven. Maybe it was the accidental sight of this Georgian fairy-box house that set my thoughts bending at last towards hers.

After lots of argy-bargy it appeared that the man in the sports car had offered the full asking price, and Clegg had accepted it. He told me that the house was too big for him, since his wife and kids had left. All he wanted was a small flat in Leicester, where he had relations, not to mention a few friends.

‘You see, I'd been married twenty-eight years, and then my wife goes off with a man twenty years younger than she is, and I'm left high and dry with this house on my hands. I hate it so much I can't wait to get out of it. I don't suppose you'd understand, being so young, but after twenty-eight years it's as if the world's been pulled from under your feet. Too many memories. They're like poisonous snakes. Every one kills me. We were so happy, you've no idea. Happiness unlimited. I was an engineer at the pit, and retired last month. A lifetime of hard work and married bliss. Do you think a man can ask for more than that? He can't. You're too young to understand. It must be wonderful, being too young to understand. If only we could stay that way! I suppose I did stay that way, because when she said she was leaving a year ago I was so shocked I knew she couldn't be joking. At least she waited till my son and daughter were grown up and out of the happy home. I'll say that for her. Funnily enough, no sooner had she gone than I saw how right she'd been to go. The next thing was, I wondered why she'd waited so long. Number three thought came when I got angry at not having gone myself, before she did. Then during the long nights number four came when I cursed at the fact that we'd ever got married at all. Number five was when I wished I'd never met her. Last of all, number six, was when I sat here and wished I'd never been born. But I'm over that now, and just want to get out of this bloody house – and get the best possible price for it.'

I heard his life story while he made us a cup of tea, then put my question to him: ‘How would you like to get three hundred more for your house? I have a buyer who'll pay that, if it takes his fancy. There'll have to be a little consideration in it for me, though.'

He didn't like this, threatened to go back to Pitch and Blender's and tell them, but I told him I didn't care if he got me the sack or not because I was all set to work elsewhere. I was just putting another two hundred in his pocket.

‘Three hundred, you said,' he said.

‘I did, but a hundred of it will be mine.'

After a bit more arguing he agreed, and I went away after saying that a Mr Wainfleet would come to view the place tomorrow afternoon.

I was so pleased that I walked half the road back to Nottingham. Next day I met Wainfleet in the pub, and over a glass of Youngers and a cheese cob, which he paid for, I told him to go and see the house. If he liked it he could get it for four thousand three hundred.

‘And it's worth every penny of it,' I said. He was so excited he ordered a double brandy, and went on to tell me how he'd spent twenty years in the Army, and that he'd lived the last five years at Wollaton with his elder sister, whom he couldn't stand. I sympathized with him, and hoped he'd be able to straighten out his life soon, by finding the place that his heart was set on wanting. He said he wouldn't forget the favour I was doing, and that if he liked the house and got it, he'd be certain to remember my help. I told him I was only doing it out of friendship, and that he wasn't to mention my part in it to anyone at the estate agent's, because they didn't like me doing personal services such as this one, and this in his gratitude he agreed to. ‘After all,' I said, ‘they'll make fun of me if they know I'm soft-hearted.'