“I’ve got her,” Pauline said.
“I am, my owd duck,” his mother shouted, riotously plastered. “I’ll mek yer some supper when I get ’ome, my love.”
“Yer’ll ’ave a job.” Brian laughed at the earnest tone in her barely controlled voice. He felt love for them both: heavy Seaton, who pressed a firm hand on his shoulder to help himself along; his mother, happy and light-headed behind; above all for Pauline, who, by witnessing how totally they took to a good time, was in a way being as intimate with him as when they were in Strelley Woods together.
The last high flames were belting up from a bonfire at the end of the terrace. Gertie Rowe leapt through them, and her four sisters led all the lads of the street in a fire-dance — a rapid roaring circle around.
Pauline packed the kids off to bed, while Brian saw his father and mother safely snoring between the sheets. He came downstairs, back to Pauline, who sat on the rug by the built-up fire in the hearth. “Feel all right, duck?” she asked.
“Solid,” he said. “I must have had eight pints.”
She took off her cardigan and threw it over the chair. “Do you good. Our dad used to like his beer, I do know that. I’d hate to go out with a lad who didn’t drink.”
“Well, you’ll never be able to grumble at me,” he laughed. “Not that I’m a big boozer, but I like a sup now and again.” Poor old Mullinder — it was too happy a time not to think of him. Into the world and out of it; out of nothing and into nothing, and that was all there was to it, the beginning and the end of it. He stood by the shelf, looking down at her: long unpermed brown hair falling to her shoulders, breasts low and pointing outwards, full and mature, legs turned back under her. She smoked a Park Drive — as though it didn’t belong to her, he thought, or as though she didn’t know it was lit — in short inexperienced draws without bothering to take down, a long pause between each as she stared into the fire. He reached back to switch off the light.
In the yard outside footsteps and calls of good night were loud between the street and back doors. Children’s voices diminished, and because they were put to bed, dogs rested free from torment by fireworks. Someone clattered his way into a lavatory, and after a few minutes dragged the chain down and slouched his boots out again, rattling his gate and calling good night to a neighbour on the way in. Mister Summers, Brian thought, able to recognize every voice no matter how much drink had gone into it. The yard quieted, and the festival of sound left the flickering fire to itself. “Are you all right, duck?” he said tenderly.
“Yes, are you?”
“Yes.” He pushed the chairs back, took cushions from the sofa, and placed them on the rug. “Did you have a good time?”
“I liked it in the pub,” she said. “A bit o’ singing like that does you good, I reckon.”
He sat by her: “It does, an’ all.”
“I ain’t ’ad a night out like that since our Betty got married.” She threw her cigarette into the fire, watched it strip off its paper like a coat as if to dive deeper in. They kissed, and lay down on the rug, and knowing that no one would disturb them that night, he drew skirt and blouse and underwear from her white and passionately waiting body. Her face glowed from the nearness of the blazing fire, and from the unfamiliarity of allowing her nakedness to be seen by him. She drew towards his caresses, a thoughtless process of kissing that, as he undressed, passed into an act of love-making that was slow and marvellous, submerging their closed eyes into a will over which neither thought of having any control. They lay together with no precaution between the final pleasure, into a smooth rhythm of love and a grip of arms to stop them crying out at the climax of it.
They dressed in silence. He went to the back door and stood looking up the yards, suffocating from a deep still-burning fever. He felt a laugh of oversatisfied joy begin in his heart, then caught a full cold draught of the night air, which made him think it was about time he took Pauline home. The smell of ash and burnt paper from dead bonfires drifted in from the street, pointing out how silent were the thousands of houses spreading around. It was a good smell, and he savoured all it would ever mean: spring flames of victory and love. The factory dynamos still filled the air with their omnipresent low drone, so all-pervading that unless they were brought to mind by an act of imagination, the noise would go unnoticed. The factory hadn’t shut down its row! Not for a minute. On it went, through booze-ups and victory fires, never stopping. Work, more than anything, was something good, hitched on to the slow grinding chariot wheels of life that never ceased.
Pauline came to his side, coat on and ready to be walked home. She hadn’t once mentioned that her mother would be mad at her having stopped out half the night. Not that either of them thought it mattered any more. They walked up the street arm-in-arm, through many streets, passing deflated bonfires, from some of which a red eye still glowed, potent and hiding its colours. A few months later, victory fires would burn again, red posters in every window, red streamers waving from every child’s hand, red in the real victory for which the people had waited like the glowing eyes of the bonfires.
CHAPTER 25
He closed the doors early, shutting out the unquestionable superiority of insect life, and the red-soaked sky at dusk that filtered away to blue scrub and forest and a runaway flattened to cold sleep. He spun the goniometer like a roulette wheel and it stopped at east, the opposite direction he wanted to take. No aircraft fenced the atomospherics with its morse, and he slouched in the basket-chair, bored and tired, tense at the thought of a dozen empty hours before daylight and relief. It wasn’t possible any more to take an occasional potshot at shadows with the rifle, for together with fifty pounds of ammo it had been recalled to the armoury so that if bandits attacked the hut (still the farthest outpost of camp and airstrip) they couldn’t capture the wherewithal to knock off a few planters or swaddies. They’ll kill me, but as long as they don’t get the rifle, that’s all that matters. The old man would laugh if he knew I was in such a fix: What did I tell you then, eh? Don’t join up, I said, didn’t I? And what do you do? You join up, don’t yer? If you get shot it’ll serve you right. Don’t come crying to me with your head in your hands, you bleddy numbskull. That’s how he’d carry on, and he’d be dead-right as well. Still, there are fifty-odd rounds the amoury’ll never get back, which I’m holding for when the Communists come up and say: “Stand and deliver: your bullets or your life.” And if they mow me down first, they’ll be plain enough to find by anyone good at looting. I suppose the old man would say I was daft for climbing Gunong Barat, but there I’d argue, because even though we didn’t get to the top I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I weighed a solid hundred and fifty when I went up but only a hundred and thirty now, and no matter how much I scoff (and I feel clambed all the time), I can’t put it back on. So it cost twenty pounds of flesh to find out that Gunong Barat wasn’t worth a light.
He saw Mimi the same evening he got back, not having thought of her once during the trip. Both spoke little, moved quickly and blindly into love on her narrow bed. Shuddering at the orgasm, he roared like an animal, the jungle bursting out of his soul. It was as though, in this first night asleep, shrubbery entangled itself in his brain, branches and leaves worked their way to the back of his eyes. He burned in a fever, as if next to a fire, plunged like burning iron into a bath of warm water. After the hard earth of the forest, it was difficult to sleep. She woke him at midnight: they talked and made love, and he finally slept as if he had no life left.