When I went off to load another trolley, having left Pushpacker baffled and irritable, I was trembling with the effort of putting the pros and cons of his offer through my machinating mind. It would be a clean job with more money and shorter hours, but on the other hand I dreaded the effect on Claudine. Such news would only confirm that I had it in me after all to GET ON, and was therefore the ONE FOR HER. An engagement would not be more than a few weeks off, and if I didn’t agree to it, it would mean the end of my delicious and fleshly privileges. So I told myself, and I may not have been far wrong, that having asked Pushpacker to let me think it over was considered so much of a cheek that even if I went back and said yes, he’d tell me the job was no longer available because I wasn’t the right material to accept the discipline of office life that his Army rule imposed. In the end I left the factory altogether, and decided to look for some other work.
To Claudine this was as bad as if I’d turned down her suggestion of an engagement, because she looked upon me as a scatterbrained idler who couldn’t keep any job for long. ‘I only left to get a better place,’ I said, sitting in her parlour one night when her parents were out. ‘That was a dead-end joint, and I thought you didn’t like me being there. Now I’ll be able to get something better, maybe even in an office.’
She came across to me on the settee: ‘Oh, Michael, that would be wonderful. I’d really know then that you were serious. You ought to look in the Evening Post and see what you can find. I’ll help you.’ She went into the kitchen and came back with the newspaper, holding it like a great white sheet, as if to smother me.
There was a homely passion between us that night, and we sat close and petted each other, though afraid to lay down to it in case somebody should suddenly come back to the house. Such clandestine satisfaction made the air deeper between us than if we had been in the freedom of the wood. I went home with six addresses of various city firms in my wallet, and promised faithfully to go bright and early to each one next morning.
I avoided decisions by thinking too far ahead, by wanting Fate to act for me. When it did I complained and cursed, but that was all right because by then it was too late. I didn’t mind what happened to me, as long as there was no possibility that I could have made things any better. Because of that I learned early to have no vain regrets, and never to recall the lost chances that, had I taken them, might have made life easier for me.
True to my promise, I put on the best suit I had ever stolen, which would have cost twenty guineas if I’d bought it in a shop, and called at the first office by half past nine. I was fairly all right in my appearance, being five feet ten in height and, in spite of the lackadaisical style of work since leaving school, far from beefy about it. In fact what with steaming off so often with Claudine and walking umpteen miles a week with her, I could almost be described as slim, and perhaps this as much as anything else made me look as if I had some wits about me. There was also something in my manner that made me seem a year or two older than I was, possibly connected as well to my manly practices with Claudine, and augmented by that worry of getting in so deep with her that I wouldn’t be able to shuffle out. Concern with worldly preoccupations was stamped quite clearly on my face, for I’d noticed it one morning gazing in the mirror before shaving, and since it suited me I decided to cultivate the picture it gave to my features, no matter how false it might be. This is only to explain that I got the second job I applied for, which was that of general run-about at Pitch and Blender’s, the estate agents in town.
It seemed as if a river, five hundred yards wide, separated me from the last work I was at. At this new place I was never told what to do. I was always asked — though if I refused I’d have been thrown out on my neck just like in any other dead-end job. But I was puffed up with snakey pride, and on meeting Claudine after my first day, she had tears of dewy joy in her eyes. She talked to me, when she’d cleared her throat, about how I must be ‘obliging’ and ‘show willing’ in my new ‘situation’, said I must never be late, and always wear a clean suit. This was all very well, I informed her, but when I was told to run out now and again for tea or coffee from the nearby bar, I didn’t much fancy the slops and stains that made my suit look like a map of the moon.
Yet it was so easy that I stuck it, and in a few weeks I was no longer sent to get tea because a new youth was taken on. I cyclostyled details of houses for sale in Nottingham and the country, as well as taking over Miss Bolsover’s desk while she went to lunch (it was lunch now, not dinner) and answering the telephone. The blunt edges of my accent went in record time. I got through my first months by playing the silent man, as far as I could, listening to other people’s speech, and copying the mannerisms of Mr Weekley, the boss.
I suppose I’m obliged to show how much I suffered at changing from one ‘class’ of job to another, how impressed I was at handling a typewriter and duplicating machine instead of a capstan-lathe or Jacquard-cutter. Maybe I ought to say what clothes people wore and tell of the witty things they said, how they talked about house deals and money, and making good marriages, and spending a pound on a haircut and five bob for a cup of coffee. But all this meant nothing — and in any case I’ve forgotten what effect it had on me. Swimming in the sea, all you want to do is keep the salt out of your mouth. You fix your gaze on the horizon, even if it’s only a few feet away at the top of the next wave.
Yet when I met any of my friends who still slogged in factories I used my homeliest Radford accent, just to show that I wasn’t being influenced by the toffee-nosed set I was how forced by my peculiar and unavoidable streak of perversity to associate with. This patronizing bonhomie, this twisted attempt to put things back as they were, when in a way it had always been too late, didn’t usually go down very well, for I’d be met by a combination of cynical smile and blank stare, or a simple request to bogger off out of the way.
I often put on this broad accent in front of Claudine when I sensed she was thinking that, since I had been caught in the treadmill of getting on at work, she might now begin to draw me close into another sort of trap. At such times I could Sound so low and ignorant that, judging by her look of unconcealed dislike, it seemed as if her heart had become a plastic bag full of ice cubes. At times it was the only defence I had, a thin red line of real blood holding me back from the land of milk and water beyond. Still, by all the rules of the heart (whatever they are: I still don’t think I know) I ought to admit that I was in love with Claudine.
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.