The bartender placed a pint before him. He paid one-and-eightpence and drank it almost in a single gulp. His strength magically returned, and he shouted out for another, thinking: the thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but halfway through it, the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought if off and struggled to light a cigarette.
Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push his way back through the crush — nudging his elbow into standing people who unknowingly blocked his way, half choked by smoke now issuing from mouth and nostrils, feeling strangely taken up by a fierce power that he could not control — before he gave way to the temptation that had stood by him since falling down the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man sitting with a woman on one of the green leather seats.
‘My God!’ the man cried. ‘Look at this. Look at what the young bogger’s gone and done. Would you believe it? My best suit. Only pressed and cleaned today. Who would credit such a thing? Oh dear. It cost me fifteen bob. As if money grows on trees. And suits as well. I wonder how I’ll ever get the stains out? Oh dear.’
His whining voice went on for several minutes, and those who turned to look expected him with every word to break down into piteous sobs.
Arthur was stupefied, unable to believe that the tragedy before him could by any means be connected with himself and the temptation to which he had just given way. Yet through the haze and smoke and shrill reproaches coming from the man’s lady-friend, he gathered that he was to blame and that he should be feeling sorry for what had happened.
He stood up straight, rigid, swaying slightly, his eyes gleaming, his overcoat open. Automatically he felt for another cigarette, but remembering in time what his attempt to smoke the last one had caused, gave up the search and dropped his hands by his side.
‘Look what yer’ve done, yer young bleeder,’ the woman was shouting at him. ‘Spewed all over Alf’s bes’ suit. And all you do is jus’ stand there. Why don’t yer do something? Eh? Why don’t yer’t least apologize for what yer’ve done?’
‘Say summat, mate,’ an onlooker called, and by the tone of his voice Arthur sensed that the crowd was not on his side, though he was unable to speak and defend himself. He looked at the woman, who continued shouting directly at him, while the victim fumbled ineffectually with a handkerchief trying to clean his suit.
The woman stood a foot away from Arthur. ‘Look at him,’ she jeered into his face. ‘He’s senseless. He can’t say a word. He can’t even apologize. Why don’t yer apologize, eh? Can’t yer apologize? Dragged-up, I should think, getting drunk like this. Looks like one of them Teddy boys, allus making trouble. Go on, apologize.’
From her constant use of the word apologize it seemed as if she had either just learned its meaning — perhaps after a transmission breakdown on television — or as if she had first learned to say it by spelling it out with coloured bricks at school forty years ago.
‘Apologize,’ she cried, her maniacal face right against him. ‘Go on, apologize.’
The beast inside Arthur’s stomach gripped him again, and suddenly, mercilessly, before he could stop it or move out of the way, or warn anybody that it was coming, it leapt out of his mouth with an appalling growl.
She was astonished. Through the haze her face clarified. Arthur saw teeth between open lips, narrowed eyes, claws raised. She was a tigress.
He saw nothing else. Before she could spring he gathered all his strength and pushed through the crowd, impelled by a strong sense of survival towards the street-door, to take himself away from a scene of ridicule, disaster, and certain retribution.
He knocked softly on the front door of Brenda’s house. No answer. He had expected that. The kids were asleep, her husband Jack was at Long Eaton for the races — dog, horse, motor-bike — and not due back until Sunday midday, and Brenda had stayed at the pub. Now sitting on her front doorstep he remembered his journey to the house: a vague memory of battles with lampposts and walls and kerb stones, of knocking into people who told him to watch his step and threatened to drop him one, voices of anger and the hard unsympathetic stones of houses and pavements.
It was a mild autumn night, a wind playing the occasional sharp sound of someone slamming a door or closing a window. He lay across the doorstep, trying to avoid the pavement. A man passed, singing a happy song to himself, noticing nothing. Arthur was half asleep, but opened his eyes now and again to make sure that the street was still there, to convince himself that he was not in bed, because the hard stone step was as round and as soft as a pillow. He was blissfully happy, for he did not have the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to be sick any more, though at the same time he had retained enough alcohol to stay both high-spirited and sleepy. He made the curious experiment of speaking out loud to see whether or not he could hear his own voice. ‘Couldn’t care less, couldn’t care less, couldn’t care less’ — in answer to questions that came into his mind regarding sleeping with a woman who had a husband and two kids, getting blind drunk on seven gins and umpteen pints, falling down a flight of stairs, and being sick over a man and a woman. Bliss and guilt joined forces in such a way that they caused no trouble but merely sunk his mind into a welcome nonchalance. The next thing he knew was Brenda bending over him and digging her fingers sharply in his ribs.
‘Ugh!’ he grunted, noting the yeast and hop-like smell of her breath. ‘Yer’ve bin boozin’!’
‘’Ark at who’s talkin’,’ she said, gesticulating as if she had brought an audience with her. ‘I had two pints and three orange-squashes, and he talks about boozing. I heard all about what happened to you though at the pub, falling downstairs and being sick over people.’
He stood up, clear-headed and steady. ‘I’m all right now, duck. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back upstairs to you in the pub, but I don’t know what went on.’
‘I’ll tell you some day,’ she laughed. ‘But let’s be quiet as we go in, or we’ll wake the kids.’
Got to be careful, he said to himself. Nosy neighbours’ll tell Jack. He lifted the band of hair from her coat collar and kissed her neck. She turned on him petulantly: ‘Can’t you wait tell we get upstairs?’
‘No,’ he admitted, with a mock-gloating laugh.
‘Well, you’ve got to wait,’ she said, pushing the door open for him to go in.
He stood in the parlour while she fastened the locks and bolts, smelling faint odours of rubber and oil coming from Jack’s bicycle leaning against a big dresser that took up nearly one whole side of the room. It was a small dark area of isolation, long familiar with another man’s collection of worldly goods: old-fashioned chairs and a settee, fireplace, clock ticking on the mantelpiece, a smell of brown paper, soil from a plant-pot, ordinary aged dust, soot in the chimney left over from last winter’s fires, and mustiness of rugs laid down under the table and by the fireplace. Brenda had known this room for seven married years, yet could not have become more intimate with it than did Arthur in the ten seconds while she fumbled with the key.
He knocked his leg on the bicycle pedal, swearing at the pain, complaining at Jack’s barminess for leaving it in such an exposed position. ‘How does he think I’m going to get in with that thing stuck there?’ he joked. ‘Tell him I said to leave it in the backyard next week, out of ‘arm’s way.’
Brenda hissed and told him to be quiet, and they crept like two thieves into the living-room, where the electric light showed the supper things — teacups, plates, jam-pot, bread — still on the table. A howl of cats came from a nearby yard, and a dustbin lid clattered on to cobblestones.