So I talked to her. I talked without stopping, and I don't remember what I talked about. It was as if I were putting on a filibuster: a kind of bill was to be passed which would alter my whole life and I wasn't sure that I wanted my whole life to be altered. Then I stopped talking; or, rather, my voice trailed off into silence independently of me. I looked at her. She was was smiling with that tight, almost painful expression which I'd noticed when we'd had supper at her house. Her hands were clasped over her knees, her skirt drawn back above them.
I leaned over towards her. "I've been thinking about you all week. I've been dreaming about you, do you know that?"
She put out her hand and touched the nape of my neck. I kissed her. Her lips tasted of tobacco and toothpaste; they were held moistly and laxly against mine in a way that was entirely new to me, utterly different from her dry and light stage kisses. Her breasts felt astoundingly heavy and full against me; she seemed to be much younger, much more feminine and soft than ever I'd imagined her to be.
"I'm all twisted," she said. "This is a terribly moral kind of car."
"We'll go outside," I said hoarsely. She kissed my hands. "They're beautiful," she said. "Big and red and brutal ... Will you keep me warm?"
I remember those words especially. They were empty and tawdry, they didn't match what took place in the beech grove soon afterwards; but they were Alice's own words and I preserve them like saints' relics. And yet there was no great physical pleasure for either of us that night: it was too cold, I was too nervous, there was too much messing about with buttons and zips and straps. It was best when we'd finished; it was like having a cup of really good coffee and a Havana after an indifferently cooked but urgently needed meal. It was a clear starlit night: through a gap in the tree I could see the distant hills. I kissed Alice on the little wing of hair just above the temple. The hair at that point always seems to me to smell differently from the hair on the rest of the head; it's vulnerable and soft and somehow babyish. She pressed herself more closely against me.
"You're all warm," she said. "My dear overcoat. I'd like to sleep with you, Joe. Truly sleep, I mean, in a big bed with a feather mattress and brass rails and a china chamberpot underneath it."
"I wouldn't let you sleep," I said, not then understanding.
She laughed. "We will sleep together, pet, I promise you."
"It's never been like this before," I said.
"Nor me."
"Did you know this was going to happen?"
She didn't answer. After a moment she said: "Please don't fall in love with me, Joe. We will be friends, won't we? Loving friends?"
"Loving friends," I said.
When I was starting the car going back she didn't speak at all. But she was smiling to herself all the way; perhaps it was only a trick of the light but her hair seemed as if it were glowing from within. I drove fast along the narrow switchback of Sparrow Hill Road, taking the corners as if on rails. I couldn't go wrong; the car felt as if it had two litres under its hood instead of just over a half. I was the devil of a fellow, I was the lover of a married woman, I was taking out the daughter of one of the richest men in Warley, there wasn't a damn thing I couldn't do. Say what you like of me when I was younger; but I certainly wasn't blasé.
10
I spent Christmas at my Aunt Emily's. It snowed in Warley the night I left, just a light powdering, a present from Raphael's and Tuck's and Sharpe's to make the girls' eyes sparkle and the waits sing in tune and to turn the houses taller and crookeder and all's-well-in-the-end adventurous; the town was crammed with people, all of them none the less absolute tenants of happiness because they'd been shepherded into it by the shopkeepers and the newspapers and the BBC: you could sense that happiness, innocent and formal as children's story, with each snowflake and each note of the Town Hall carillon.
It was hard to leave Warley then; I felt as if I were being sent home from a party before the presents had been taken off the tree. In fact, I'd felt out of things all December: I'd gone to the Thespians' Christmas party, and been the back end of a horse in the children's play, and kissed all the girls at the Town Hall after the traditional lunchtime booze-up, but I knew that I wasn't part of Warley's festival, because I was leaving before the preparations began to make sense, before that short turkey and spice cake and wine and whisky period when every door in the town would be wide open and the grades wouldn't matter. Not that I really believed such a thing could happen; but in Warley it at least was possible to dream about it.
No dreams were possible in Dufton, where the snow seemed to turn back almost before it hit the ground; Christmas there always seemed a bit ashamed of itself, as if it knew that it was a wicked waste of good money; Dufton and gaiety just weren't on speaking terms. And the house at Oak Cresent was small and dark and smelly and cluttered up; it wasn't that I didn't care for Aunt Emily and her family, but I was too much of T'Top now and, half hating myself for it, I found myself seeing them as foreigners. They were kind and good and generous; but they weren't my sort of person any longer.
I told Charles something of this on Boxing Day at the Siege Gun just outside the town. The Siege Gun was our local; it stood on the top of a little hill overlooking a wilderness of allotments and hen runs. It was about half an hour's walk from Oak Crescent; for some reason it was the only respectable pub in Dufton. The others weren't exactly low, but even in their Best Rooms you were likely to see the overalled and sweaty. The landlord at the Siege Gun, a sour old ex-Regular, discouraged anyone entering the Best Room without a collar and tie. Consequently his pub was the only place in Dufton where you'd find any of the town's upper crust, such as it was. I'd had some good nights at the Siege Gun but, looking around me that lunchtime, I knew that there wouldn't be any more. It was too small, too dingy, too working-class; four months in Warley had given me a fixed taste for either the roadhouse or the authentic country pub.
"I couldn't bear Dufton sober," I said to Charles.
"Too true," he said. "I'll be damned glad when I get to London.
I'd known for a month that he'd landed a job there, but when he spoke so lightly about going away I felt lonely and lost; I wanted him to stay permanently in Dufton, I suppose, so that I'd at least be able to depend upon my hometown providing me with company. Dufton's only virtue was that it never changed; Charles to me was part of Dufton. Now that he was leaving the town, the lever had been pulled that would complete its journey into death.
"You slant-eyed Mongolian pig," I said. "What do you want to go away for? Who'll I have to talk to now when I come home at weekends?"
Charles took out a grubby handkerchief and pretended to wipe his eyes. "Your beautifully phrased appeal to my friendship moves me inexpressibly. But I can't stay in Dufton even to please you. Do you know, when I come into this pub, I don't even have to order? They automatically issue a pint of wallop. And if I come in with someone else I point at them and nod twice if it's bitter. I'm growing too fond of the stuff anyway ... it's the only quick way out of this stinking town." He looked at his pint with an expression of comic gluttony on his plump, strangely cherubic face. "Lovely lovely ale," he said. "The mainstay of the industrial North, the bulwark of the British Constitution. If the Dufton pubs closed for just one day, there wouldn't be a virgin or an unbroken window left by ten o'clock."
"There's not many left of either as it is," I said.
"I do my best," he said. "How's your sex life, by the way?"
"Satisfactory. I see Alice every week."
"Weather's a bit cold for it," he said.