After Julius (5 page)

‘Whatever are you doing?’ She stood with the tray hitched against her stomach trying to glare at him. She had eyes as violently blue as cornflowers, but there was nothing dreamy
about them, he thought: either they were fairly snapping with merriment, or stormy with unshed tears of rage. The love-light in
her
eyes would be something, but trying to make the adjustment
was too much for him. One’s sister was known: whenever one could see that she was attractive, one wasn’t feeling that way. ‘I wouldn’t catch me breath with a hand on
her
breast – tickled her too often when she was a kid.’ Aloud, he said:

‘Dot, you’re a lovely girl. They don’t breed ’em like you in these concrete boxes. They need room for that sort of thing. Some air, and reality, and none of this sex tied
up with where’s-my-next-meal-coming-from and everything in cans and twin beds. There’s more of
you
than meets the eye – you’re not the least anybody can do
–’

‘The last thing that will go with you will be your talk. Jaw, jaw, jaw – your teeth will fall out, and your hair fall off and you won’t have a bladder you can call your own,
but will you talk!’

The twin beds had made her angry: Alfred didn’t like the idea of sharing a bed. She had poured his tea and now she banged it down so that it slopped. He seized her tied-back hair, which
was rich and dark-brown and hung well below her ample waist. ‘Dottie, listen to me. Drink a cup of tea and let me explain.’

‘Wait then, while I get me a cup.’ Pride had forbidden her to bring two in the first place. While she was gone, he drank half his scalding cup and pulled on his trousers – he
had slept in his shirt. I must be tactful, he thought: I must exercise great tact. It had a shady, foreign sound: plain speaking was his forte, but you couldn’t go around knocking women about
– even your own sister.

He waited while she poured him another cup and one for herself; he could hear three separate radios. When she had sat down on a hard chair at the table – this was the living-room –
rested her rosy face on one hand which was wrinkled and white from washing, and was looking elaborately unconcerned and in a different direction, he knew she was listening and ready.

‘About last night, Dot – I’m sorry, and that’s all I can say.’ He knew that she would disbelieve a graceful apology; it had to be wrenched from him for her to
accept it. So he added grudgingly: ‘I mean it.’

She said stiffly: ‘You’d no call to go losing your temper.’

‘I know it, Dottie.’

‘Making a beast of yourself, and using brute force.’ She was gaining spirit now: if he could appear unpardonable, she could forgive him. To aid this he said:

‘I didn’t drink such a lot, but I didn’t have my dinner or my tea. It was just meant to be a kindly argument.’

‘There’s no such thing in your language, Daniel Brick. If people don’t agree with you, you always knock them up, and what’s kindly about that? And if they do agree with
you, where’s the argument?’

‘That’s my girl! What a mind for a woman!’

‘I’m the only one who can stand up to you and keep you in your place, and you know it.’ She finished severely, but he knew she was pleased.

Simple, dear girl, he thought. All the complications of women were on top – a kind of patina; underneath they’re as simple as can be. The trick is never to let them know it. And if
it’s a choice between my skill and their simplicity, I know what suits us both every time: even with my sister. I may not be tactful, he thought, but by God, I’m cunning. He held out
his cup to her. ‘Well – Dot?’

‘Well – once more then.’ She was deliberately ambiguous about whether it was forgiveness or another cup of tea. Watching her drain the ugly trashy little square pot with sunken
lid and stunted spout, he suddenly remembered the last real celebration at home – in the butty boat, with Dot flushed and lovely, wielding the great brown Measham pot with its decorated glaze
of posies, pink and blue flowers and
LOVE AT HOME
on a white swag around it. When that pot was full, you had to have arms like Dot to lift it. Their mother only used it for
occasions . . .

‘Will I fetch some hot water, Dan?’ She was smiling at him, and for the first time he noticed smoky smudges under her eyes, and wondered if that little bastard had taken it out on
her afterwards.

‘No. Listen – Dot. I said things all the wrong way last night, but that doesn’t mean what I said was wrong. This
is
an awful life, and if Alfred calls this progress and
civilization, he must have had a right time of it before. No –
listen.
He’s living as though the point about it all is that some day he’ll be weak and old and maybe dead
– he wants to feather his nest long after he won’t be laying in it. He can’t
enjoy
that job! He
can’t.
! So why does he do it? So you can live here in this
awful labour-saving little concrete box with hundreds of others above and below and around you like a flock of battery fowls. You don’t want half the things you’ve got, and you
certainly can’t buy what you need in a place like this. And meantime, while you’re waiting for you and Alfred to wither into a bag of bones with a stomach attached, you don’t have
any fun, any adventure; there’s no beauty or entertainment in a dump like this. And, Dot, you’re only twenty-five! Think of it! You’ve got forty years before you’ll be
sitting in the sun – before you need be thankful for small, hygienic mercies. Your mind will go to seed. You’ll get potty with all the days the same and nothing in them.’

She was staring at her cup, but he knew she was shaken, because her eyes were closed and choppy, like a lake with a storm coming. Then she said:

‘My days
aren’t
all the same.’

He said nothing, knowing that she would flounder in his silence.

‘We’re saving
up
,’ she said; ‘we aren’t going to stay here all our lives. Alfred wants a house with a garden. He’s very fond of roses, and we
can’t keep a dog here. That’s why we’re so quiet now.

‘We’re saving for a car as well. Then Alfred can take me to the country, Sundays.

‘We may even travel abroad for a holiday! It isn’t just our old age!’

‘You didn’t used to need a car to get to the country, Dot.’

‘I know what you’re thinking of! It’s time you got those fancy dreams of life on the cut out of your head. We were on a coal run – remember? Dad wasn’t a Number One
– he wasn’t in a position to choose what we carry. It was coal or nothing, right through the war, and after it. All right – a proper man’s job, you’ll say. But do you
know what that was like for our mother? It was every single thing black, with soot and that grease that’s always at the back of coal, into everything – over us children, all our
clothes, the cabins, you even had a job to keep it off the marge. Every single drop of water to be carried in the cans, all the water to be heated for washing, and however much she washed us or our
clothes or the boats, it was never clean for five minutes because the coal dust was always there, over everything. And it wasn’t just the coal. Don’t you remember the winters? I
remember when the lines were frozen stiff in the morning – take the skin off my hand – and standing at the tiller in the butty with a head-wind hours on end; cups of tea and bits of
bread at odd times, and nowhere for the young kids, and down in the cabin it hurt getting warm. That’s what I remember, and when I think of our mother’s life, struggling to feed us on
the rotten rations – kippers and cut water – not even what they gave to the rivermen, and working on boats with Dad as well, and she wasn’t brought up to it, she wasn’t born
on the cut, she wanted us all to go to school – she was just so tired out with it all, she didn’t have the energy to
think
about anything, just bringing the lot of us up was all
she could think to do. When I think of all she went through, I
hate
the boats – I said ‘I’d get out of them if it killed me. If ‘I’d married Sam Brownie
I’d be like our mother by now with my life one long battle against time, and money, and dirt. That’s the country for you, in the boats. Do you remember when that inspector came down,
Dan? To find out which of us could read and write? And Mam said about me, “She can write lovely, but she can’t read what she writes.” I was twelve then and I hated that man for
trying to get at her, and that’s the only reason I wanted to learn to read, so if he came again he couldn’t say anything.
I
had no other fancy to read.’

‘You learned all right when I taught you – sharp as a needle you were.’

‘I notice
you
didn’t stay with the boats, Dan, for all your talk about what a wonderful life it was, and the fuss you made when I came ashore to work in the caff. I sent Mam
money each week you know – ten bob every week.’

‘I know Dot – she told me.’ It was just in his throat to tell her about his books then, but he’d planned the surprise for so long that he wouldn’t spoil it now.
Somehow, her long outburst about their life when she had been his young sister – all true, but only the half of it – had taken away his energy for making the proposition to her that he
had been milling about in his mind since the previous night. But his head ached, and he had also gone to sleep with the feeling that this Friday held something fateful in store for him: feelings of
this kind were rare, and he never questioned them. So, in the end, he asked her. She
was
his favourite sister, and he couldn’t bear to see her being wasted on that little, mincing
bureaucrat.

Still heaving from effort, she watched him with open, anxious eyes, until he reached the end, when they darkened; she made the deliberately angry gesture of folding her arms and cried:

‘You’ve no
call
to say such things of Alfred! Where’s the harm
he’s
ever done to you?’

‘It’s you I’m thinking of, Dot.’

‘I can see you’re not thinking of him!’

‘It’s just that there’s so much more to life than you imagine – than you’ll ever get in this –’

But she leaned towards him with a smile which suddenly showed the true colour of her gaiety and said: ‘I don’t imagine it, Dan – it’s here! Imagination’s what you
fall back on – like a piece of cold bacon.’

This time, he could not admire her – he was too genuinely astonished. Her lovely, capable arms were still folded across her body, and looking down at it she said in tones of practical
comfort: ‘Anyways, I’ve no longer just myself to please – I’ve a baby on the way, to be born the first week of May.’

An old, natural, innocent triumph – he could only retreat from it. ‘Looking at her with mixed feelings,’ he thought, as he recognized another printed label remark attaching
itself to his life. The idea was an outrage to him. She ought to be the Virgin Mary –
how
he would have cared for her then! She had no idea how kind he could be with a good reason for
it.

‘Alfred makes me think of baked beans,’ he said aloud and absently.

She eyed him warily, not knowing how to take this: she liked baked beans.

But Dot made him feel about lovely, rolling women in pictures he had seen at the Tate Gallery by the river: firm, candid, festive girls; hot-summer, Sunday women – out to enjoy themselves,
in to be enjoyed: creatures about whom one felt a kind of sporting sentiment. He would rather Dot had married anyone than that little runt; if he hadn’t been in hospital at the time, you
wouldn’t have seen Alfred for dust. Poor Dot – perhaps women just couldn’t tell the difference between one man and another.

‘Well – all I can say is I wish it was mine.’

‘Don’t let me ever hear you say such a thing. The idea!’ But he could see that secretly she was not altogether displeased.

‘Will you name him after me, Dot?’

‘Alfred wants to call him Clarence, after his Dad.’

‘
Clarence!
’ He was almost too shocked to jeer.

‘And Mabel if it’s a girl.’

‘I’ll have a word with him about that!’

‘No you won’t, Dan. He wants you to go.’

‘He . . .
wants
? . . .’

‘He doesn’t want you here any more. He wants you gone when he gets back to his tea. He says he and you don’t see eye to eye about anything. He says you ought to have a proper
job and writing’s no good if nothing happens to it when you’ve written it. ’Tisn’t any good arguing when he gets upset, it goes to his stomach. He says he won’t have
you eating his food and insulting him. He says poetry was for olden times and people don’t want it any more. He says you got gypsy blood . . .’

‘Shut
up
!’ he yelled. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of Alfred’s second-hand opinions third-hand from you. You must be mad to live with anyone so awful!
He’s like some silly little bit of machinery, ticking away, turning out hundreds of the same trashy little objects nobody knows what to do with. He hasn’t got any blood at all! Squeeze
him and all you’d get’d be a few drops of Wincarnis which wouldn’t stop a postmistress from getting ’flu. Give me Romany blood any day. Alfred’s got no more tradition
than a paper clip – he’s not worth an inch of your hair on a Friday night. If you come with me,
I’ll
look after the child – the both of you – I can do it easy.
It’s your whole life, Dottie – you’d see something of me you don’t know about –’ but he saw from her kinder face that she was stubborn, and felt tears like pain
in his eyes.

‘You got no job, no money, Dan.’

‘About six miles from here, I have only to walk in to a building and ask, and they would give me fifty pounds.’ That impressed her, and to rub it in, he added: ‘I could ask for
more – another fifty – but I wouldn’t – they’d have to pay what I asked, and that’s what I’d ask in one go.’

She seemed to believe in him then, but it made no difference, so he had to leave. She cried when he went, and begged him to write to her: this emphasized their separation as though one of them
was going on some journey – which was funny, because she was stuck in that awful flat for life as far as he could see, and he didn’t know
where
he was going, because he
hadn’t anywhere to go. And so, as he hadn’t anywhere – he’d had to give up the room when he got sick of the job – and as it was one of those mornings when the air,
like mildewed chain-mail, was gripping his chest so that he moved slowly and swallowed a good deal in order not to start coughing – and by God, the taste was like sour bacon rinds – and
as he seemed mysteriously to have only three and tenpence and the beginnings of a forged season ticket which he’d got tired of making because he couldn’t make up his mind what would be
the most useful journey, he got rid of his suitcase and went, meekly paying his fares, to Holborn, to Great Queen Street, to his Publishers (they always had a capital letter in his mind), they
being the only people left in London after Dottie who knew who he was.