Birthday. Alan Sillitoe

his fate, and the nightmare was that he would live as a cripple for the rest of his life.

      Jenny’s skin blistered with tears as she sat by him. She loved him. Everything would be all right. At least he was still alive. But so deep was her misery that she sometimes thought how good it would be if they could be struck dead together.

      Walking through a bookshop to get a present of coloured pencils for Eunice’s birthday she saw something on the table with Tobruk in the title. During the week it occupied George he wasn’t in such despair, so from then on she took everything from the library connected with that place during the war, so that he could relive his days and stop regretting he hadn’t died in the foundry.

      His experience of artillery and machine guns helped his expertise with a wheelchair and orthopaedic bed. When a telephone was installed he smiled that it was like having his own headquarters in a dugout, able to call up friends and family whenever he liked. She suspected that he never left off secretly wanting to die, but knew it was a comfort for him to go even further back in time before he met her, and live again in the world of Tobruk. Dangerous though it had been, he’d at least had the use of his limbs.

      Brian first saw George when he’d been twenty-five years in a wheelchair. His mother persuaded him to call: ‘Sometimes Jenny comes and sits with me. If I’d been in her place I’d have gone mad now, but she always asks after you, so it would be nice if you’d pop in and say hello.’

      Sunlight through the gaps of a high-clouded day gave amplitude to the spirit. He slowed along the tree-lined dual carriageway, reading each street sign so as not to overshoot the drive on which Jenny’s house stood. He found a dwelling anyone should be happy to live in, the roof as if someone got up to scrub it every morning, windows as clean as if without glass, nothing too old to be unpointed or shabby, immaculate paintwork on doors and window frames, the house behind an area of sloping well cut lawn.

      When setting out on his travels he hadn’t wanted to live in either the cosy but decrepit houses of Basford Crossing nor a place like this, but he was happy for Jenny that she had such a pristine house. He had thought only of getting away, even if to be a homeless figure stricken by rain and bitten into by the cold, for whom any house would be paradise.

      To be well fed and shod, to be out of the rain and have clothes on his back, was all he needed. A one-roomed dwelling in the middle of a wood had figured in his childhood dreams, but by craving the romantic he had achieved far more. A house like Jenny’s had seemed an unattainable luxury, but as soon as he had money enough to get one he despised it. The fee for a single script could buy a dozen huts in a wood, as well as the wood and surrounding fields.

      Believing that this life was the only one, that there was no God to help you (and he was intellectually incapable of believing He was other than dead and buried) meant that safety and contentment didn’t exist, an ever-likely and interesting state in which there was no class, nation, or religion to capture his allegiance or give comfort. If you allowed yourself to conceive of immortality you were no longer free.

      An inane Strauss jingle brought her to the door. ‘Brian Seaton!’

      The emphasis on his surname hid her pleasure. Well, he couldn’t be sure about that, but he enjoyed hearing she would know him anywhere, though it didn’t bring back the old shine in her eyes. He should have telephoned first, but wanted to surprise her. In London you never called on anyone without warning, but he had acted as if Jenny was inferior, or out of familiarity, in his usual off-hand way, an attitude which over the years had become a habit. I suppose that’s how they live in London, she might tell herself, just dropping in without any notice at all. Even in the old days she often hadn’t known he’d be where he said he would be.

      ‘Your mam phoned, to tell me you were on your way.’

      ‘And here I am. It’s good to see you again.’ He made up a script about a man knocking at the wrong door, then starting a conversation with the woman who answered. She asked him in for a cup of tea, which led to a new life for them that neither had thought possible when they had got out of bed that morning, but which made sense when it happened. The change in their existences was so passionate that when they went away together the relationship turned into a disaster.

      He had made no such mistake with Jenny, for she had known all about him, gave him that special weighing up which now showed much of the old self in her features. Her shorter hair was a mix of grey and dark, curling around the head instead of a long and vigorous band of black, making the face seem smaller, fragile and more vulnerable. She was pale, almost sallow, lines scored for a woman in her fifties, perhaps more so than on women of similar age he met in London who hadn’t been through half as much. She was slim and middling in height from what he used to think of as tallish and more robust, though she could hardly be shapely after having had seven kids. ‘I was passing, and thought I’d call.’

      ‘I’m glad you have. Come on in.’

      Everything you did was wrong, even more so when you thought well and long before doing it, but she seemed happy at him standing before her, the only sign a tremble of hands as he followed her in. ‘An old friend’s come to see us.’

      George had been forewarned perhaps, so as to hide the importance of what they had been to each other, though he didn’t see why she should be diffident about it. George must have known of her life before they met, since she’d had a kid already, but the hint that they had been more than acquaintances made Brian smile. Maybe she thought that the old adolescent intensity might even now flame up between them. At least the lifetime of suffering under George’s misfortune hadn’t broken her.

      They entered the brightly lit living room. ‘Brian’s an old friend. He used to know mam and dad.’

      Large windows showed a well trimmed garden, an umbrageous laurel tree in the far corner beyond a newly creosoted tool shed. In the room blue and white plaster birds were fixed in attitudes of purposeful flight along the wall opposite the fireplace, on the wing to a place George might well mull on in his despairing hours, glazed eyes following the direction of their long necks. With such wings, and being heavier than air, they would fly neither far nor easily, kept from a real sky by the ceiling.

      He looked away as they came into the room,the open book face down, on knees kept together by his all-tech wheelchair. A palish glow on his face suggested that movement was hard labour, as if eternally sitting with the useless lower part of himself sapped his energy, took far more of his attention than in the days when he had walked with his shovel from mould to mould around the foundry thinking of the ale he would put down in the pub after knocking-off time.

      The shine of his intensely blue eyes, out of a broad face in which the bones were nevertheless visible, hinted that the accident happened last month instead of twenty-five years ago. His expression was of living by the minute, as if things hadn’t changed nor time moved from the moment he had come out of the hospital. Nothing to look forward to, and little enough to think back on the longer his incapacity lasted, kept him separate and aloof, king of each moment on his wheelchair throne, only able to reign since he could no longer hope.

      The furnishings of a three-piece suite on the thick piled carpets gave a temporary aspect to the room, as if George hoped to be moving out in the next week or two. Maybe Jenny had created it that way out of a restless nature now that she too was imprisoned.

      The floral pattern of wallpaper was broken by pictures and framed photographs of children on a climbing frame, a youth straddling a motorbike, two young wide-smiling girls in Goose Fair hats. He was never alone with so many children and grandchildren, a living theatre to vicariously take part in. He sometimes stared at the photographs as if he hardly knew the people in them, though he did right enough, because who else was there for such as him to acknowledge?

      His blue shirt was open at the neck, grey hairs below the throat, pudgy white veined hands resting on a tartan blanket covering his withered knees. Order had been arranged around him by Jenny, as much for her benefit as his, because without the routine of a twenty-four hour job such a life would have been insupportable. She had to make sure he was fed, get him into and out of bed, wash him and dress him and see to his toilet requirements, knowing it would go on into old age, never