"Take your hands off her." I lifted the beer glass as if to strike it against the table. His hand loosened and she pulled her wrist away. The compact dropped, and a little cloud of powder floated up from it. He turned and went out without a word. The ordinary noises of the pub began again, the incident obliterated as quickly as it had begun.
"He's not my boy friend really, Jack," she said. "I'm sick of him. Thinks he owns me just because I've been out with him a time or two."
"He's introduced us, anyway," I said. "Mavis. It suits you, darling."
She stroked my hand. "You say that nicely," she said.
"It's easy to say things nicely to you."
"You're the best-looking boy I've ever met. And you have lovely clothes." She felt the texture of my suit. It was new, a mid-grey hopsack made from a roll of cloth that Alice had given me five months ago. "I work in a mill, I know good cloth."
"If you like it, Mavis, I'll never wear anything else," I said. My words were beginning to slur. "I feel so happy with you, you're so gentle and bright and beautiful - " I went into the old routine, mixing scraps of poetry, names of songs, bits of autobiography, binding it all with the golden syrup of flattery. It wasn't necessary. I well knew; a skinful of shorts, a thousand lungfuls of nicotine, and ordinary good manners, were enough to get me what I wanted; but I had to have my sex dressed up now, I was forced to tone down the raw rhythms of copulation, to make the inevitable five or ten minutes of shuddering lunacy a little more civilised, to give sex a nodding acquaintance with kindness and tenderness.
"Let me buy the drinks," she said after we'd had two more.
"That's all right," I said.
"You've spent pounds, I know you have. I'm not one of those girls who's just out for what she can get, Jack. If I like a boy, I don't care if he can only afford tea. I earn good money. I took home six pounds last week."
I felt the tears coming to my eyes. "Six pounds," I said. "That's very good money, Mavis. You'll be able to save for your bottom drawer."
"You've got to find the chap first," she said. She fumbled in her handbag. It was a large one of black patent leather, with diamanté initials. There was the usual litter of powder and lipstick and cotton and handkerchiefs and cigarettes and matches and photos inside it. She slid a ten-shilling note into my hand. "This is on me, love," she said. The warm Northern voice and the sight of the open handbag gave me an intolerable feeling of loneliness. I wanted to put my head between the sharp little breasts and shut out the cruel world in which every action had consequences.
I ordered a bottle of IPA and a gin-and-it. Time was beginning to move too quickly, to slither helplessly away; each minute I looked at my watch it was ten minutes later; I knew that I'd only that minute met Mavis, but that minute was anything up to a year ago; as I drank the sharp summer-smelling beer the floor started to move again. Then every impression possible for one man to undergo all gathered together from nowhere like a crowd at the scene of an accident and yelled to be let in: time dancing, time with clay on its hobnailed boots, the new taste of the beer and the old taste of brandy and rum and fish and cornflour and tobacco and soot and wool scourings and Mavis's sweat that had something not quite healthy about it and her powder and lipstick - chalk, orris root, pear drops - and the hot hand of brandy steadying me again, and just as it seemed that there wasn't to be any other place in the world but the long room with the green art moderne chairs and glass-topped tables, we were out in the street with our arms around each other's waists and turning in and out of narrow streets and alleys and courts and patches of waste ground and over a footbridge with engines clanging together aimlessly in the cold below as if slapping themselves to keep warm, and then were in a corner of a woodyard in a little cave of piled timber; I took myself away from my body, which performed all the actions she expected from it. She clung to it after the scalding trembling moment of fusion as if it were human, kissing its drunken face and putting its hands against her breasts.
There were houses very near on the dirt road at the top of the woodyard; I could hear voices and music and smell cooking. All around were the lights of the city; Birmingham Road rises from the centre of Leddersford and we were on a little plateau about halfway up; there was no open country to be seen, not one acre where there wasn't a human being, two hundred thousand separate lonelinesses, two hundred thousand different deaths. And all the darkness the lights had done away with, all the emptiness of fields and woods long since built over, suddenly swept over me, leaving no pain, no happiness, no despair, no hope, but simply nothingness, the ghost in the peepshow vanishing into the blank wall and no pennies left to bring him out again.
"You've lovely soft hands," Mavis said. "Like a woman's."
"They're not - not lovely," I said with difficulty. "Cruel. Cruel hands."
"You're drunk, love."
"Never feltfeltbetter." I'd returned to my body, I realised with horror, and didn't know what to do with it.
"You're a funny boy," she said.
I fumbled for my cigarette case. It was empty. She brought out a packet of Players and lit two. "Keep these," she said. We smoked in silence for awhile. I was trying to will myself into sobriety, but it was useless. I honestly couldn't even remember where I lived, and I literally truly Fowler's English Usage didn't know whether I was awake or dreaming.
"Jack, do you like me?"
"From the veryfirstmomentthat - that I saw you." I made another effort. "You'reverysweet. Like you verymuchveryverymuch."
The lights started to wheel around and there was a clanging sound in my ears. "Those bloody engines," I said. "Those bloody engines. Why can't they stop?"
She must have half carried me away; I don't know how she managed it. We stopped outside a terrace house eventually; I was trying to keep myself upright, and not succeeding very well. Finally I propped myself against the garden railings.
"Are you all right now, Jack?"
"Fine," I said. "Fine."
"You turn left and keep straight on - have you enough for a taxi?"
I pulled out a fistful of notes.
"You be careful," she said. A light came on above us, and I heard a man's voice growling her name. "Oh God," she said, "they've woken up." She kissed me. "Goodbye, Jack. It's been lovely, really it has." She ran into the house.
I walked away, weaving my body from side to side in a pattern of movement which I felt to be not only graceful and harmonious but so exquisitely funny that I had to laugh.
A hand on my shoulder broke the laugh in half and started the Unarmed Combat reflexes working. The gears were stiff, but any second now, I thought with joy, pain and humiliation would move forward to crush the stupid bodies of the two men who faced me.
One of them was Mavis's ex-lover. I didn't know the other, but he was the one who had me worried the most. He seemed quite sober and his shoulders were broader than mine.
"This is the - " Mavis's ex-lover said. "Full of brandy and conceit, the bloody bastard - " He swore at me monotonously; the words depressed me more than they annoyed me. "She's my woman, see? We don't like strangers muscling in, see?" His hand tightened on my shoulder. "You're going to be bloody sorry you came round these parts, chum."
"Shove off," I said.
" You're shoving off. But not before - " He struck out with his fist; I sidestepped, but not quickly enough, and he hit my cheekbone, cutting it with something (a ring, I realised afterwards). But I thought it was a razor, so I hit him in the Adam's apple. He gave a sound halfway between a baby's gurgle and a death rattle and staggered away from me, his hands to his throat.