Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Alan Sillitoe

walked off.

      Arthur and Robboe tolerated and trusted each other. The enemy in them stayed dormant, a black animal stifling the noise of its growls as if commanded by a greater master to lie low, an animal that had perhaps been passed on for some generations from father to son on either side. They respected this lineage in each other, recognized it when they asked or answered tersely the few brusque questions that passed between them speaking with loud mouths and passionless eyes.

      Robboe had a car — admitted, an ancient Morris — and a semidetached in a posh district, and Arthur held these pretensions against him because basically they were of equal stock, and he would therefore have felt friendlier had Robboe lived in the same kind of four-roomed house as himself. For Robboe was in no way better than him, he ruminated, spinning the turret and lightly applying its chamfer-tool to one of the last dozen cylinders of the day, and no better than anybody else if it came to that. Arthur did not assess men on their knowledge or achievement, but by a blind and passionate method that weighed their more basic worth. It was an emotional gauge, always accurate when set by him, and those to whom it was applied either passed or did not pass the test. Within the limits of its narrow definitions he used it as a reliable guide as to who was and who was not his friend, and up to what point he could trust a person who might become his friend.

      So when Arthur looked at a man, or heard the inflexion in his voice, or saw him walk, he made a snap judgment that turned out to be as accurate as one made after weeks of acquaintance. His first assessment of Robboe had never altered. In fact it had gained ground. His half-conscious conclusions proved to him that no one man was better than the other in this particular case, that they shared with plain openness a world of enmity that demanded a certain amount of trust. And Arthur did not doubt that Robboe had applied a similar test to him, with the same conclusions. So the respect they had for each other was based on a form of judgment that neither could give words to.

      Whenever Arthur looked into somebody’s face and screwed up his brows to look black and cunning, and shouted: ‘I’ve got yo’ weighed-up’ — the chances were that he really did have their main characteristics balanced nicely on the scales in his mind, though he could explain neither the mechanism of the scales nor the nature of the goods that kept each pan level.

      Reactions varied to his remark. When he said it to one of his mates, perhaps in a quarrel over a box of work rejected at the viewers’ table, they would reply in an equally knowing and stentorian voice: ‘That’s what yo’ think.’ When someone said to Arthur: ‘I’ve got yo’ weighed-up,’ his stock reply was: ‘Oh, ‘ev yer? Then ye’r bloody clever, mate, because I ain’t got meself weighed-up, I can tell yer’ — which was equally effective in shutting them up, and perhaps equally truthful in that though everybody might have the ability to weigh-up others, it never occurred to them to attempt a weighing-up of themselves. Arthur had stumbled on this lack from which all seemed to suffer, though as yet he had not thought of applying it with any great force to himself.

      But despite his aptitude for weighing people up, Arthur had never quite weighed-up Jack the tool-setter. Perhaps the fact that he was Brenda’s husband made him appear more complicated than other men. Certainly he was of the same sort as Arthur, never pretended otherwise, and he might normally have weighed him up like a shot, but somehow the essential ramifications of Jack’s character evaded him. Jack was timid in many ways, a self-contained man who did not give much of himself away. He chipped-in with his share of the talking, yet never shouted or swore or boozed like a fish, or even got mad no matter how much the gaffers got on his nerves; he never opened his mind so that you could take a squint inside and see what he was made of. Arthur did not even know whether or not Jack had any idea he was carrying-on with his wife. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he hadn’t, but if he had, then he was a sly bastard for not speaking out. He was the sort that might suspect or even have definite proof that you were knocking-on with his wife for months and not take you up on it until he was good and ready. In fact he might never take you up on it, a mistake on his part, for if ever he did Arthur would give Brenda back, which was one of the rules of his game.

      But, all said and done, if he was carrying-on with Jack’s wife then it served Jack right. Arthur classified husbands into two main categories: those that looked after their wives, and those that were slow. Jack fell into the latter class, one that Arthur, from experience, knew to be more extensive than the first. Having realized this quickly he had been lucky in love, and had his fun accordingly, making hay while the sun shone, growing-up from the age of seventeen with the idea that married women were certainly the best women to know. He had no pity for a ‘slow’ husband. There was something lacking in them, not like a man with one leg that could in no way be put right, but something that they, the slow husbands, could easily rectify if they became less selfish, brightened up their ideas, and looked after their wives a bit better. For Arthur, in his more tolerant moments, said that women were more than ornaments and skivvies: they were warm wonderful creatures that needed and deserved to be looked after, requiring all the attention a man could give, certainly more than the man’s work and a man’s own pleasure. A man gets a lot of pleasure anyway from being nice to a woman. Then on the other hand there were women who wouldn’t let you be nice to them, women with battleship faces and hearts as tough as nails who rattle a big fist at you and roar: ‘Do this, do that, do the other, or else’ — and you could try all you liked to be kind to them, but they wouldn’t have any of it. It’d been better if they’d have been born men, then they’d do less damage and cause less misery: they’d be called-up in a war and get killed, or get slung in clink for saying: ‘Down with this, and down with that,’ from soap-boxes. They were the sort of women who thought you were barmy if you tried to love ‘em, and they just didn’t understand what love was, and all you could do was end up by giving them a smack in the chops. Hopeless and barmy. But I reckon that mostly women want you to love ‘em and be nice to ‘em, and that even if they didn’t they’d start to love you back after a bit. Make a woman enjoy being in bed with you — that’s a big part of the battle — then you were well on the way to keeping her with you for good. Christ, that’s the best thing I’ve ever done, to make sure a woman got her fun as well as me getting mine. God knows how it dawned on me. I don’t. Then again though, a man likes a drink, and if a woman didn’t like a man who drank, then it was going to be touch-and-go, whichever way you looked at it. Which is my big trouble, and why I’m not so cocksure about everything, in the end, and why I have to be careful and find the most loving women of all — nearly always married women who don’t get much love, who have slow husbands.

      And so it was possible to forget the factory, whether inside it sweating and straining your muscles by a machine, or whether swilling ale in a pub or loving Brenda in her big soft bed at the weekend. The factory did not matter. The factory could go on working until it blew itself up from too much speed, but I, he thought, already a couple of dozen above his daily stint, will be here after the factory’s gone, and so will Brenda and all women like her still be here, the sort of women that are worth their weight in gold.

       3

      In the few minutes that passed between regaining consciousness and opening his eyes he knew that he was too ill to go to work. From time to time he intended getting out of bed to see how he really felt, but it was eleven o’clock before this was possible. Downstairs he found the filled teapot cold on the table where his mother had left it before going shopping. He did not know what was wrong as he walked bare-footed around the room. He picked up the Daily Mirror and, seeing no good-looking women on the front page, turned to the middle. A nice bathing-suit, anyway. Throwing the paper down, he went into the coal-place under the stairs to fill the bucket.

      His mother came in, her arms weighed down with groceries.

      ‘I thought you was badly,’ she said, seeing him sitting with a pale face by the fire, ‘that’s why I let you stay in bed.’

      ‘My guts are rotten,’ he complained.

      ‘Bilious trouble,’ she said, a common label given to all such complaints. A common cure, when she had unloaded her baskets in the scullery, was to fetch sixpennyworth of Indian