She was under the authority of her selfishness, that great motivator of the meek after they have gained their independence. In order not to be dead she had to become selfish, and stay that way for as long as it took her to hear what her voice sounded like. The argument went this way, and then that. If you aren’t selfish you’re dead, but if you’re dead you can’t be anything, not even selfish. To be too busy among the considerations of yourself taught nothing except that you were coming slowly back to a normal relationship with the world.
It was necessary to know that you were selfish in order not to let anyone steamroll over you with their petty desires and ignorant opinions, often only given so as to hear the sound of their own voice. The new bud on the tree selfishly gets sap and sustenance out of the twig-branch-trunk-and-soil, but later the tree selfishly discards all its leaves. The will to live and survive is paramount in everything. Unless you are selfish you do not survive, and by surviving you may at least one day get to know a little of what you are.
The only contact she had with the outside world was to walk its streets like a person just out of prison, or go shopping for her daily food as thriftily as someone loath to over-consume in case she was thought too greedy by those who might be her judges as to whether or not she deserved such freedom.
She also wondered whether a continual striving after freedom wasn’t a mere indulgence that could lead only to the greatest state of selfishness of all, which was self-destruction, and worse than the drudgery of non-freedom. Life – and she had never thought otherwise – was the discipline of having to abide by the choices you made, but if after years of trying to make a particular one work, both for yourself and whoever else it involved, you found that the decision you had made was no longer feasible, then you surely had the right to make another choice.
But having done so, and being where she was, she hated the uncertainty and isolation that often seemed more of a burden than the narrow life she had abandoned. There was no gainsaying that everything was hard to bear, no matter how many choices you made. She had settled for only two in her life, one being to get married, and the other to desert her son and husband, and both decisions had affected her so profoundly that all she had ever learned had come out of them.
She pulled the opener, beer squirted over hand, wrist and up the sleeve of her jumper. She wiped the mess with a cloth, and when she washed her hands at the sink the icy water made her veins ache. She pulled off her sweater, and blouse. It was not so easy to see her ribs any more, for she had put on a few pounds, and didn’t mind because she liked to see herself in the mirror, and would have stared longer at the shape of her covered breasts if it hadn’t been so chilly. She took clean things from her suitcase under the bed.
She would have felt a fool, and made some self-hurting comment to hide her embarrassment, if George had seen her spill the beer. He would have agreed, always keen to back her up at such times. Or he would have smiled and said: ‘Them tins are often faulty, you should know that. They seal ’em with air still inside just to make you believe the beer’s fresh. Happens to the lads at work. Goes all over the lathes, but they don’t care. The suds wash it off.’ And so on. Which made her feel even clumsier, and worse than if he had called her something he really felt like saying.
The poor bloke couldn’t win. But then, neither could she. Wasn’t his fault. Nor hers. Why did you have to be either selfish or not selfish when there was so much interesting space in between? You didn’t. By yourself you had the freedom to be neither one nor the other, which was the best of all reasons for liking it here.
She put tea in front of him. After he’d drunk it he pushed the cup to the middle of the table. He did the same with his dinner plate after eating. He always needed space before him, and she had often wondered whether he didn’t want to clear her out of the way as well, remove her to beyond arm’s length but only so that she could be called back whenever he wanted to make sure she wasn’t doing anything of which he disapproved, or when he needed her to supply him with another full plate or cup.
To be selfish was to be happy, but as soon as you knew it with any sort of conviction things were changing, or ought to be. George’s three brothers were selfish, a moderate word to label a condition so extreme. Yet who could blame them? They were generally happy. They survived because selfishness was their way of life. They were so absorbed by their business manipulations under the umbrella of selfishness that it would have been pure mischief on her part to try and disillusion them, an attempt which in any case would certainly have failed.
Bert’s close-handed resolution was backed by the assurance that if he didn’t get money from you at a particular time then he would find some other way of robbing you sooner or later, as had happened when he and his brothers had bullied George into letting them paint his workshop.
He had given a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds, but even a week later they hadn’t begun their work. George went to Bert’s house to find out why. Mavis said she didn’t know where Bert was, but thought he might be in a pub somewhere, ‘unless,’ she went on, ‘they’re out on a job, which I doubt, because as far as I know they ain’t had any orders for a week. I wonder how we’re going to live if things go on like this, although they have been drawing the dole, so at least we ain’t starving, yet. It’s a tussle to get money out of Bert for grub, because he prefers boozing to providing for the kids, who’ll be soon needing some new shoes. What with this wet weather, they’ll have to have them, though you wouldn’t think so to hear Bert talking about how he went barefoot when he was a kid, saying what’s been good enough for me’s good enough for them. So you see the way things are, George? We’re on our uppers, though it’s nice at times like these to know there’s somebody who’ll stand by us when things get so bad you think there’s nowt else to do but stick your ’ead in the gas oven. It makes us feel safer, George, to think you’re lucky enough to have your own factory. I know you would spare us a bit to tide us through hard times.’
Mavis didn’t ask him into the house, he told Pam, but kept him on the doorstep in the screeching wind, causing him to wonder if Bert and his brothers weren’t inside, frozen in their silence till he went, when they would resume their game of pontoon or brag. Mavis was capable of playing the part, though on the other hand maybe the brothers weren’t at home, because their van wasn’t parked along the council-house street. He’d even looked around the corners.
Mavis stopped her pleading, and George said: ‘Last week, I gave them a hundred and fifty quid to start painting my workshop, and they haven’t done anything yet. So I expect them to make a start tomorrow. As soon as they finish, they’ll have another hundred and fifty pounds, and that should buy the kids plenty of shoes.’
When Mavis’s mouth closed, her lips went back to their former position no matter what alteration had taken place in her state of mind. Even if George gave her a hundred pounds her expression would have stayed the same. She put on a grim face whenever she saw him, as a matter of policy, but he had heard her laughing loudly enough, from a distance, with a brassy kind of gaiety. There was nothing more intimidating than to be talked at by Mavis, and then to see the uncompromising hard-weather shape of her closed and colourless lips when she had finished.