Birthday. Alan Sillitoe

pity for somebody he much preferred dealing with the emotional turmoil that came from himself, always useful for channelling into his work.

      She stroked her husband’s pale hand. ‘Maybe one day we’ll win a lottery, then we’ll hire a private plane and go to Tobruk.’

      ‘Don’t be daft.’ He pushed the hand away, smiling at Brian as if to apologize, though not to Jenny, for his abruptness.

      She didn’t have much of a life, shackled to his side and waiting for any little request that might pop into his circumscribed brain, but she was glad at hearing Brian tell of his drive through the Balkans, the description of a squalid night-stop in Macedonia exaggerated into as much of a narrative as would interest George and amuse Jenny. Set apart from the world, no such talk could lift them out of their imprisonment. By now he had taken in all he could, and had to leave, Jenny offering to show him out because she wanted to see what sort of a car someone drove who wrote scripts for television.

      He had never been a flash lad for posh motors, he told them, not caring to impress anybody when he was on the road. A dependable estate served for whatever he wanted in the way of transport, no need of a blood-red underslung tin lizzie with the power of a Spitfire flashing up and down the motorway at a hundred and twenty till he was nicked for the third time and lost his ticket.

      They smiled at his admission that the car wasn’t changed every three years, though his accountant said it should be for self-employed income tax. Maybe she was disappointed that he didn’t live up to his image, though why should she care? ‘It’s nothing to show off about, but come and look. Nice meeting you,’ he said to George, once being enough. ‘I’ll call again sometime, if that’s all right.’

      ‘You’re always welcome.’ He told Jenny to put on her mac, the first to notice a drop at the window.

      She stood outside with Brian. ‘I didn’t really want to look at your car.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘Sometimes he dozes off in the afternoon and wakes up with tears on his cheeks, but what can I do? He used to scream because the iron was falling on him in his dreams, but he doesn’t do that anymore, which is a blessing.’

      He took her in his arms and kissed her. Because he wanted to? Because she expected it? To give her a treat in her miserable life? Whatever, he pressed her to him, his and her tears meeting after so much time. ‘I’m sorry, love.’

      ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s my bed, and I’ve got used to lying on it.’

      He let her go, whether or not she hoped he might hold on to her forever and release her from the life she had been pitched into. He saw the light glow again in those melting brown eyes that he recalled after making love so many times in the old days, knew her as she was then, the momentary resurrection of the past suddenly blown away like so much smoke, the poignancy that you couldn’t go back setting him as close to a broken heart as he would ever get.

      Pain pulled them away, a fire that burned all memories. ‘Call again,’ she breathed into his ear. ‘Anytime you like. I’ll always be here.’

      George’s room faced onto the garden, but he would wonder, all the same, why his departure was taking so long. The neighbours would also be looking through their curtains, but he couldn’t care less about that, and neither could Jenny. ‘I will.’

      If you could dispute the number of angels able to dance on the tip of a pin he wondered how much emotion could be packed into a split second as he drove back through Basford Crossing. A message from a new chapel not noticed before said: ‘Turn your cares into prayers.’ Only a quick reader wouldn’t smash into the crossing gates, cursing a prayer that had done no good at all. The exhortation couldn’t concern him, though did suggest that there might be life in the old district yet.

      The new estate on which his mother lived was such a tangle of ways and drives and crescents and closes and cul-de-sacs and gardens and walks and rises that all but a madman would get lost, no distinguishing features to indicate one turning from another. Only a pull-in and unremitting attention to the town plan ever got him to her ground-floor flat. Ask someone who lived there how to find a certain address and nine times out of ten you’d get a blank stare and the statement that they didn’t know, though the regret was plain at not being able to tell you. The planners had created a nightmarish labyrinth rather than a civilized layout of houses; the street plan of Radford in his younger days had been simple by comparison.

      ‘I’m glad you went to see her.’ A Senior Service smouldered in one hand, and a mug of strong tea steamed in the other. ‘She told me she’d love to see you, and it makes a change for the poor woman, with that bleddy miserable husband she’s got to look after. A right bleddy burden he is. If I was her I’d pack him off into a home. He can be a nasty bogger, as well. She came here once with a black eye, and I said: “You want to bogger off, duck. Don’t put up with it. He don’t appreciate anything you’ve done for him.” But she said: “I just couldn’t do a thing like that. I daren’t even let myself think about it.”’

      ‘It would be hard to leave a bloke in that condition,’ he said.

      ‘Yes, I suppose it would. I don’t expect I’d do it, either. When I think of what I had to put up with from Harold all those years, it makes me marvel. Every morning I used to think of packing him in. It’s twenty-five years since he died, and I haven’t been unhappy a single day since. Before that I was never in peace for a minute.’

      The old man had led her such a dance that she let no tears fall at his funeral, though put a hand to her face as if some were there while going through a group of neighbours to the hearse. She cut bread and laid out smoked ham and fresh tomatoes for his tea, fuel for his drive to London. He recalled sitting on her knees and reading when he was six, the air warm at the end of a summer’sevening, and she still a young woman (he realized now) resting on the doorstep before going inside to make Harold’s supper. He put together one sentence after another, a miracle to them both, from a book about people going fancy free over the countryside in a gypsy caravan – and how she must have wished she was with them!

      Doing an effortless ninety after the Leicester turn-off, a car ahead had for some reason stopped on the inside lane, no hazards flashing, or brake lights redly blazoning. There was barely time to notice in the dusk, and who but a murderer or a mindless suicide would stall at such a place and give no warning? By the splittest of seconds he swung the wheel and missed the car’s bumper by inches, realizing that in all his years of driving he had never been so close to annihilation. Instinct had saved him, no other way to explain it.

      He pushed in a tape of the Messiah. If he had survived as a basket case there would have been no one like Jenny to look after him, because what generous actions had he performed to be paid back for? Scorning to admit that the nearest of misses had scared him, he slowed to seventy and thought of Jenny getting the shit out of George twice a day and emptying it, the eighth baby she was never to get off her hands. His pitiful existence was her dead-end from which there was neither escape nor relief, no matter how often he was shunted off to Ingoldmells. Her placid and uncomplaining aspect didn’t mean she wasn’t suffering. He knew she was. She had to be, and giving no sign made him as angry as if she was betraying their former love.

      The music wiped out her face, kept the mind blank to stay fixed on the road and not get killed. The turmoil of his two marriages and the bother of three children as recalcitrant as himself had taught him at least to be calm. They were grown up, and no longer needed his money (they’d had plenty, willingly given) and rarely telephoned because they didn’t approve of his feckless ways. He only knew that no longer being married stopped him inflicting misery on those who had the misfortune to get too close.

      To complain about his own life would be self-indulgence compared to Jenny’s fate, but she at least had a solid reason for existence, and in any case all lives were at some time pitiable, otherwise there would be nothing for scriptwriters to do except a day’s real work.

      He hated the dazzle of driving at night, the lack of horizon and uncertain borders, so with half the run gone he forked into a service station. The coffee was like whitewash