I didn’t think the oak and the ash and the bonny rowan tree was the best that the earth had to offer. A man of all colours is a man of the night as well as of the day, and because I acted merely, and hardly thought at all, I eventually began to see that the best the earth could give me was the wherewithal to support myself in bread and books without actually earning it. The nearer I got to my twenty-first birthday the firmer this belief took hold. Fortunately I had no moral teachers except myself. My mother didn’t care, as long as I was clothed and fed. By this I don’t mean to imply that we didn’t love each other and wouldn’t have died for each other. We certainly wouldn’t. The fact was, I suppose, that I could never have found a moral teacher with whom to agree, certainly not in any of the people I knew both inside and outside the family. In this sense, a lot was put on to my shoulders, namely the task of finding my own moral way in a world where no adults were available to guide me. Of course, there must have been many who would have taken me on, but I’m sure that their qualifications for doing so would have been down below zero. Being young, I was left alone by moral hypocrites and bullies who’d only want to deprave or colonize me. A man of many colours can go a long way, as long as he keeps out of their way.
I walked home after leaving Claudine, feeling as if I’d been cursed, holding a weight of tons on my back. Mother was smoking a fag and reading the evening paper: ‘You look as if you’ve lost your wages. What’s up?’
‘I got the sack.’
‘That’s not the end of the world.’
‘My girlfriend packed me in.’
‘Because you got the sack? She’s not much of a friend. You’re well rid of her. There’s some ham in the larder. Get a bit of it into your belly.’
I slumped down: ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Come on, you bleddy fool. Get that light back in your eyes. It’s down to twenty-five watts and it was a hundred yesterday.’ She poured my tea, put out the bread and ham, with some pickles. ‘Good God!’ she said, ‘you’re crying! I never thought I’d live to see it. Come on, love. Don’t bother about her.’
I was only nearly crying, if such a thing can be said. Tears were about to break through, and this was what she saw. After eating I went to bed, and cried there alone, and when I went to sleep I felt much better.
Claudine lost no time in getting back into the affections of Alfie Bottesford, if ever she had been out of them during the time we had courted together. I actually saw them a week later, walking through town and hanging on each other as if they were frightened of some black angel ripping them apart. Claudine turned her eyes at the offending sight of me, but Alfie gave a wink as I went by, amused at me not being able to stop and talk to them because they were determined that I shouldn’t be able to. But I was glad nevertheless of this chance glimpse, because up to then I’d been thinking that perhaps I’d call on Claudine to see if I couldn’t get us going again. Now I realized that, though seeing her with Alfie might give me more chance of success than if she’d stayed at home brooding alone and lonely over me, I was not prepared to risk it, because I didn’t really want to become part of her cakewalk again — which might this time settle in for life. I began to recover from her, and enjoy my new phase of leisure.
I didn’t try for a new job. Cutting myself to half-pay, I could last in idleness for a month. I bought a newspaper every morning, walked up and over the hill into the bowl of town. I found it impossible to lie long in bed. Idleness did not extend as far as to rot my spine. When Mother went out at half past seven I felt the emptiness of the house getting louder and louder in my blood, so in ten minutes I was dressed and down before the pot of tea had got cold. In scarf and overcoat I called at coffee bars and bookshops, looking at passing faces or in windows. A city is fascinating if you don’t have to work in it, not the same place any more, but richer, and full of things you’d never noticed.
I went into the record shop on Clumber Street as if to buy discs, but played classical pops for an hour, then said I wasn’t satisfied with the reproduction and went to spread out the next couple of hours in the reference library, before a cheese-cob and cup-of-tea lunch in Lyons. In the reading-room I went through the papers, but the news never really interested me, though I read it for a laugh and to while away time on such stuff as held everybody in thrall while on the bus to work or during a ruminative five-minute crap after breakfast. I rejected news, and even rejected the interest of it. I stopped buying magazines or newspapers, thinking the only news to be what was happening in myself, and this only came out in headlines flashing now and again across my brain, such as:
MICHAEL CULLEN GETS THE SACK. CULLEN THROWN OVER BY GIRLFRIEND. BASTARD’S GRANDAD KICKS THE BUCKET.
I usually went up and down the columns wanting men for work. Indisputable proof that I was needed stared me in the face till I went nearly blind. Before he lost his sight, I said to myself, he remembered that, now and again, for a few seconds, he would see a large patch of grey when he looked into the light. The Situations Vacant showed me the way people still lived, and the monkey’s claw shot out at me to join them, but I held back the belly-laughs as I skimmed my eyeballs from one dead job to another, from van driver’s mate to builders’ labourer, loader, packer, welder, dishwasher, boilermaker, shop helper, bartender, and factory hand, a long sad hymn to real life spinning into me till I stopped laughing for fear I’d get the jaundice, and so switched to the crossword.
After three weeks I went to see how Clegg had got on with selling his house. Hedges were heavy and ugly with frost, and under a clear sky the fields rolled away white and sparkling like a sheet thrown off by a dead man on his way up to heaven. It looked grim and I wanted none of it, the countryside seeming alien to me in winter. I needed summer lushness with hot days and flowers, and I was reminded of how warm factories could be at such a time.
No one answered the bell so I walked to the back and saw Clegg taking wood logs from the shed and stacking them by the kitchen door. ‘I was expecting you,’ he said, straightening himself and coming towards me. I asked if he wanted any help, feeling suddenly bored with inactivity at the sight of him having a useful job.
He laughed: ‘I can manage. I spin this work out, because what can I do when it’s finished? I’ve still got plenty of packing to do, though. The sale’s over. The survey was good, and the searches were made by the other man’s solicitor. It was more of a rush than I expected. The whole price is paid already. Bit of a shock now I’ve actually got to clear out.’
‘Better than standing still.’
‘Aye,’ he answered. ‘I suppose it is.’
Remembering my first idyllic sight of his picture-box house, a great pang came back for Claudine, of the stupid daydream I’d had of us both living in this place. Close after it was the thought that thank God it was going to be sold, and that after this visit I need never see it again. I was frightened and put off by the surrounding frost.
Clegg asked me inside. He seemed older than when I’d first seen him, as if selling his house had been a big mistake that was too late to back out of now. His skin was lank and sallow, his eyes empty of all but an impression of water as if he were about to be ill, or as if the winter was threatening to do for him. A limb of the house had propped up his backbone, but still he smiled on telling me he’d be glad to get out of it. Perhaps he’d worked too hard at filling cases and stacking books in boxes when he should have left it all to the removal men. I offered to help him shift any heavy stuff, saying it not as if he weren’t strong enough to do it on his own, but in a matey way so that he could get it done sooner. ‘Perhaps you could,’ he said, ‘if you’ve no other work.’