Free A Start in Life by Alan Sillitoe

see at that moment, and it was still early enough in the day to go out and find him. In fact a few hours in the country would do me good after the mental strain of getting the sack. I’d wheedled from Miss Bolsover the information that the bright young man had sent in his deposit cheque on Clegg’s house for four hundred and sixty pounds, so I’d be due for at least a hundred pounds when the contract was signed, though I wondered now whether Clegg the egg would keep to it.
    The fields and woods weren’t half so pleasant, for a sharp wind was shaking itself out from Lincolnshire, and even a thick tweed overcoat didn’t stop it finding my ribs. Walking through it from the bus stop, the full shock of getting my cards hit me, and I wondered whether in this life I was only destined to work in a factory where I could get into nothing more troublesome than walking out now and again with whatever was produced there bulging from my pockets. My natural move should have been to retreat, to get back and let my heart curl up in safety where no blow-through mistakes could get at it. But natural moves were already alien to me, and I was set on some course even more natural than my natural desires because I didn’t think one bit about what I was going to do.
    Clegg asked me into a room just inside the door, where he had a sort of office or study. He hadn’t shaved for a few days and the stubble, like his hair, was grey. I sat down, when he asked me to, in an armchair. On the wall behind was a framed railway map of England. I was left alone while Arthur Clegg went hospitably into the kitchen to make some tea. I don’t know what he thought I’d come for, because he asked nothing and said nothing, imagining perhaps in the quirky darkness of his mind that I just happened to be passing and had called in. But his grey shallow eyes showed him to be far more alive to the world than I was, and while he was busy with his teapot and old cups he’d left a record on his pick-up, playing part of what I knew to be Handel’s Messiah . I supposed he spun this sort of music all day to stop himself going sideways up the wall till he got the hell out of his gloomy house. I wondered why I had come, now that I was here, and the voice was telling me that the trumpet shall sound, while I didn’t know how to get to the point because I knew he knew he didn’t have to give me a blue penny for the favour I’d done him.
    He asked how I was getting on, and I saw that the only thing I could do was be dead honest and tell him I’d just been booted out of my job on his behalf. He smiled at this: ‘That’s the way of the world. What did you expect?’
    I wasn’t ready to let things go as easily, and said I was glad to hear he’d got four thousand six hundred for his house: ‘That was due only to me, and you shouldn’t forget it.’
    â€˜Oh, I won’t, my lad,’ he said, putting half a biscuit between his false teeth. ‘Not in a hurry, anyway.’
    â€˜It’ll take me a good while to get another job,’ I said, ‘and I’ll need a bit to tide me over. A hundred and fifty would see me right.’
    â€˜You’ve upped your price?’ he grinned.
    I was beginning to dislike the way he too obviously played with me, and wished I’d brought a blunt instrument to threaten him with – though I knew that as a wicked thought, because it went out of my mind very quickly, especially when he said: ‘There’s many a slip between the first offer being made and the final payment falling into my bank. He can still back out, as you know. He’s sending a surveyor over tomorrow, and if his report’s no good, I expect the deal will be off, or he’ll want a lower price. But if it all goes through as planned, I’ll give you a hundred. That’s what you said, wasn’t it?’
    â€˜It’s not much of a share.’
    He poured more