Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Alan Sillitoe

he whispered. ‘I love you, Brenda.’

      The bus came, stopped, sped away down the dark road, and he watched until its rearlight turned a corner.

      He walked back up the lane, alone, with a tremendous feeling of elation and freedom, hardly able to believe it belonged to him, wanting to dance between the tree-shadows. Through gaps in over-arching branches he could see the stars. He sang and whistled and his happiness showed him the way like a lighted candle and protected him from the blackening frost of the night. He was feeling so good in fact that it took him a mere ten minutes to get back to the club. He walked up the wooden steps — that felt unsafe because he seemed giant-sized with optimism — and pushed open the door, seeing at once that Jack was still sitting in the same place, the only difference being that his pint jar was now empty and he had not yet bothered to have it refilled.

      There weren’t more than a dozen men in the club, because it was a late week-day night, and wages had spilled out of the bottomless can of beer and cigarette prices. The barkeeper and caretaker, dressed sprucely in a white jacket provided by the firm, was playing darts, a popular man at the game not because he had a particularly good aim, but because he had a fine head for keeping scores, a gift that he had developed in his job. Arthur had once reckoned-up the darts scores, and the barkeeper at the end of the evening had detected several mistakes, all very much to Arthur’s advantage. ‘I don’t know,’ the barkeeper had cried, ‘you can’t reckon owt up for tuffey-apples. I thought you’d come down from three-o-one too quick.’ ‘That’s because I’m a numb-skull,’ Arthur winked. ‘I was never any good outside a bookie’s shop.’

      He now unhesitatingly walked across the room and sat at Jack’s table, patting him warmly on the shoulder before taking off his overcoat and settling down for a drink. The good feeling from the lane had diminished in intensity, though the backwash of its elation lingered. ‘How are you, Jack? I haven’t seen you for two years: two weeks, at least.’

      Jack greeted him coldly, looking up and giving a brief hello. If he one day thought to rip the mask of anxiety from his face he would be good-looking, for he had regular features and should have looked young for his age. Arthur noticed his bicycle clips, fastened in neatly to his overalls at the ankle. ‘I thought you were on nights?’ he demanded in gruff friendliness.

      ‘I am.’ Like all worried men Jack gave a forthright answer to questions, too busy worrying to equivocate. ‘Only I thought I’d come up here for a drink first. I can go in at ten o’clock. I’m not so busy as I was in the turnery.’

      And also, for the same reason, it was hard to get him to talk much. ‘How’s Brenda these days?’ No use not asking about her, he thought. Otherwise he’d twig something.

      Jack looked at him, then turned his eyes away to the bar when Arthur met his stare with ingenuous grey eyes and a half, know-nothing smile. ‘She’s all right.’

      ‘Is her cold better?’ Arthur wondered whether he should have said this, whether he had not overdone it.

      ‘She hasn’t got a cold,’ Jack said with a trace of resentment. He hardly ever looked at the person to whom he was talking, always at the bar, at other empty tables, at a row of machines, or a blank wall.

      Arthur said: ‘I thought somebody said she had,’ and asked the barkeeper to bring two pints of beer, one for Jack, and one for himself.

      ‘Thanks,’ Jack said, not so cool now. ‘I mustn’t drink too much though, because I don’t want to fall asleep on the job.’

      Arthur had so many different feelings at first, sitting with Jack after having been into the wood with his wife, that he did not know what feeling was the most definite. It was hard to know what to say next with such varied thoughts coming into your head. He asked how the kids were these days, and thought again that perhaps he was overdoing it.

      ‘They’re all right,’ Jack told him. ‘The eldest’ll be at school soon. Less for Brenda to do.’

      That’s a good thing, Arthur thought, and couldn’t stop himself from saying it. He took a long drink of beer.

      ‘She’ll have more time to herself,’ Jack agreed.

      ‘This ale’s like piss,’ Arthur said loudly, hoping to draw the dart players into some diverting banter and force the conversation away from Brenda and Jack’s kids. It struck him as strange that when you were with a man whose wife you were doing you couldn’t stop talking about her, though it occurred to him that Jack was doing a good half of it too. They were both to blame. I suppose he knows something then, he thought sadly.

      The dart players would not bite the bait he had thrown out, so he was left to cope with the compact mass of Jack’s mind himself, and it suddenly began to bother him, almost to the point of making him wish he had got on the same bus and gone home with Brenda. They talked about fishing, Arthur saying he hoped the thaw would come soon so that he could get on his bike of a Sunday morning and go out to Cotgrave, or beyond Trowel Bridge. ‘You can’t beat it up there,’ he said, ‘the fish bite like hungry niggers. They can’t wait to get their cops on the ‘ook. Queue for miles. I know a place with some owd limekilns where you can go if it rains.’

      But Jack, unlike the fish, like the dart players, did not bite either. It was certainly taking something on to get him to talk. Arthur shouted out for two more pints, but the more Jack drank, he discovered, the less he opened his mouth to say things. ‘What’s up, Jack, my owd bird?’ he exclaimed loudly, leaning across and patting him again on the shoulder, as he often did at work when Jack was bent over his bench sharpening somebody’s drill. ‘Why don’t yer cheer up? You look as if you’ve got summat on yer mind.’

      It was apparently the right thing to do and say, because Jack smiled, the first time that evening, and the tight expression of worry momentarily left his face. ‘I’m all right,’ he said in a friendly voice. Arthur wondered what would be said and done if he suddenly told Jack how the position really stood between himself and Brenda. Out of friendship, out of the feeling of being pals, he almost made up his mind to do it. It’s a rotten trick, he argued to himself, to play on your mate. Just for a bit of love.

      The worried expression returned to Jack’s face, as if he was weighing the balance of some trouble — what trouble? wondered Arthur — one minute, and trying to guess whether or not anything were really happening the next.

      Arthur wanted to shake his hand and tell him everything, tell him how good he thought he — Jack — was, that he had guts and that he was all right, that he didn’t like to see him suffer because of a looney thing like this, of a woman coming between them.

      Instead, he drew him into a conversation about football, and over their third pint Jack was declaiming on how Notts would get into the second division next year. Everyone at the club put in their various pieces of knowledge, using imagination when knowledge failed. Arthur had little to say, and ordered more pints for himself, and Jack, feeling good and generous at buying beer for Brenda’s husband. All the same he kept on thinking, Jack’s a good bloke. It’s hard luck that things stand the way they do.

      ‘Bolton’s centre-forward’s got the best kick and aim o’ the lot on ‘em, I don’t care what you say,’ Jack cried, up to his neck in it now. Arthur had never seen him less worried.

      The bartender cried back, shaking his thin face: ‘I don’t believe yer, Jack. It stands ter reason they can’t get it this year.’

      ‘No more do I,’ the other dart player put in. ‘They can play for another ten years and they wain’t get it, I can tell yer that, Jack.’

      They were warmed-up to the argument, supping at pints and friendly in their speculations, each full of hope that he would be the man with the right prophecy.

      ‘But you’ve got to think of last week’s transfer from Hull,’ Jack said, arguing skilfully, taking the other pint that the barkeeper passed to his table. Arthur watched him, thankful that certain laws existed to prevent you from seeing into each other’s mind, that things were marvellous that way.