Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Alan Sillitoe
they were held more loosely across her thin chest. This picture went through Arthur’s mind as he stayed by the fire, hearing to himself the click of her black, glossy, underslung shoes as she crossed the cobbled street. ‘Sixpennyworth of Indian Brandy, Mr Taylor,’ she would say, entering the shop. Old Tightfist, thought Arthur. ‘Nice thing to come for on a morning like this,’ the shopkeeper would say, measuring it out in drops. Arthur knew his mother would rather have risked short measure than be kept waiting, but a dee-dahed tune and blank look through his frosted window would speed Tightfist’s actions up for her. Unmade-up and thin, her face at fifty-odd had enough lines, not scored with age like an old woman’s, but crease-marked in the right places through too much laughing and crying. By God she had worked and hadn’t had a good life until the war, and Arthur knew it. When Seaton’s face grew black for lack of fags she had trotted around to the various shops asking for some on tick till Thursday dole-day. But just as Seaton nowadays had endless packets of Woodbines and a TV panel, so she had access to week after week of solid wages that stopped worry at the source and gave her a good enough life, and put real brightness into her bright blue-grey eyes as she asked, whenever she felt like it at the Co-op, for a pound of this and a pound of that. ‘Anybody badly, Mrs Seaton?’ Arthur could imagine Old Tightfist asking her. He had a blank face of forty, was dead-set in his ways, and nosy like a nark. She would unfold her arms and take the purse from her pina-pocket: ‘It’s Arthur’s stomach again. That factory’s not a bit o’ good to anybody on God’s earth.’ Young-looking and hair-creamed, Tightfist would hold up the sixpennorth of brandy and tell himself he must put more water in it when she’d gone. ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ he no doubt said, slipping the glass-stopper back. ‘I’ve never worked there myself. I was a traveller, you know. But grease is bad, I will say that.’ She was only half grey as yet. Halfway between fair and brown, Arthur said her hair was. His old man’s had been as black as the ace of spades. ‘Do you think this’ll do him much good?’ she would ask. ‘The poor bogger woks too ‘ard, if you ask me. He’s a good lad, though. Allus ‘as bin. Don’t know what I’d do wi’out ‘im.’ That’s what Arthur knew she would say. ‘Don’t know of owt better.’ Tightfist would think about the time Arthur came in his shop and played on the fruit machine. I stuffed penny after penny into the slot, Arthur at the fire thought, and when it stopped at three lemons at last, the kitty didn’t fall out. Not a farthing. So when Old Tightfist said he couldn’t do owt about it I thumped it in the side until it started coughing, and twelve-and-fourpence crashed into my lap.
He waited for her, saw her walk down the yard, heard the latch click as she came in with her small medicinal load.
‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘I’ll soon get yer well.’
He drank the brandy and felt doubly better by giving an imitation before the mirror of Bill Hickock knocking it back in a Wild West saloon, and the sickness brought on by too much breathing of suds and grease in the factory gradually left him. He called out urgently for a chaser of tea, and his mother made a hot strong cup with plenty of sugar and rich Co-op cream from the pint-bottle top that she took from the outside window-ledge, an efficient mash through two dozen years of practice. He stayed by the fire while she cooked the dinner, reading the Daily Mirror in a smell of cabbage, and looking occasionally out of the breath and frost-smeared window at the long ramshackle backyards, at women coming home with their shopping, and at his mother nipping out through the scullery door now and again to tip some rubbish into the dustbin, or to have a few-minute gossip at the yard-end with old Ma Bull.
It was a good, comfortable life if you didn’t weaken, safe from the freezing world in a warm snug kitchen, watching the pink and prominent houses of the opposite terrace. He could have laughed. From time to time it was fine to feel unwell and have a day off work, to sit by the fire reading and drinking tea, waiting for them to get cracking with something good on television. He did not know why he felt ill. Last night he was drinking with Brenda at the Athletic Club, though he hadn’t put back enough to cause an upset stomach. This made him ask: Did I really feel badly this morning? But his conscience was untroubled: his wages would not suffer, and he always kept his work at the factory at least one day’s supply ahead of those who waited for it. So there was nothing to worry about. His stomach was better now, and he drew his white bony foot back from the red heat of the blazing fire.
With a silk-scarf covering his Windsor-knotted tie he walked towards Wollaton hoping to meet Brenda on her way to the Athletic Club. He preferred to lean against a fence rather than trudge around dismal lanes, and from where he stood he saw that the surface of Martin’s Pond was frozen. Last night Brenda did not know whether she would come or not: only perhaps, and the wording sounded so uncertain in the soft tenderness of saying good-bye that he had forgotten all about her until tea-time.
Five struck by Wollaton clock, its sound chipping the cold air, nipping in strides over the pond where children, on their way home from school, shouted and slid and threw stones at astonished ducks that rose up from clumps of reed-grass and flew with flapping wings into trees and the hedges of allotment gardens. He stood by the fence looking along the side of the wood, one hand thrust deep into the pocket of his long draped overcoat. Nearly always, while waiting for a woman to turn up, he played a game, saying to himself: ‘Well, I don’t suppose she’ll come.’ Or: ‘Well, she won’t be on this bus’ — as it came around the bend and drew into the stop. Or: ‘She won’t come for another quarter of an hour yet’ — expecting a pleasant surprise as she walked suddenly towards him. Sometimes he won, and sometimes he didn’t.
Several people alighted from the bus, yet he could not see her. He tried to penetrate the windows, top deck and lower deck, but they were steamed over with breath and smoke. Perhaps Jack will get off: the possibility amused him, and he laughed outright at the thought of it. More than a month ago Brenda had said: ‘What shall I say to Jack if he asks me why I go to the club so often?’ And he answered jokingly: ‘Tell him you’re in the darts team.’ When next they met, she had said: ‘I told him I play darts at the club, and he seemed to think it was all right.’ ‘Anything satisfies them if they get jealous,’ he had replied. But some weeks later she had told him: ‘Jack said he would come up to the club one of these nights to see if I really played darts. He joked about wanting to see me win the championship cup.’ ‘Let him come, then,’ Arthur said.
And he thought the same now. She was not on it. The engine revved-up so loudly that the brittle twigs and tree branches seemed afraid of the silence that followed, making Arthur feel colder still and unable to hear the kids playing on the pond. Brenda came three times a week to the club when Jack was on nights, leaving Jacky and his sister with a neighbour’s girl who earned a shilling for her trouble and was given a wink that told her not to say anything to a living soul. Arthur hoped that the dart story would be good for another few weeks. Turning his back on the bus that drove towards Wollaton, he stared again at the kids hooting and ice-sliding in the dusk.
She stepped off the next bus, paused at the roadside for a car to pass, then made her way across to him. He knew she had seen him but he stayed in the shadow of the hedge. She walked in short quick steps, coat fastened tight, hands in pockets, a woollen scarf drawn incongruously around her neck. He didn’t go too far out of the hedge’s cover but called her name when she was a few yards off. He wanted to be careful. You never knew. Jack might be trailing her. Not that he was afraid for himself — if it came to a show he knew he could hold his own with anybody: over six feet tall, just turned twenty-two, and bags of strength always to be drawn from somewhere — but if they were caught Brenda would be the one to pay. Be careful, and you won’t go far wrong, he thought.
He went out to meet her, taking hold of her and drawing her into the shadows. ‘Hello, duck,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. ‘How are you?’
She came close and he put his arms around her. ‘I’m all right, Arthur,’ she said softly, as if she would have given the same answer had she not been all right. A white blouse showed below her scarf when he put his hand down near her warm breasts. She carried the easy and comfortable smell of a woman who had been in a hurry and was now relaxing from the worry of it, exuding warmth and a slight powdery perspiration that excited him. She must be thirty, he thought if she’s a day. ‘Did you get away from Jack all right?’ he asked, releasing her.
‘Of