Free Key to the Door by Alan Sillitoe

would be struck down by a lorry and killed on his way to work, or mangled to death when he arrived there. If only he’d injured me, came another burst of reason, and I’d had to be taken to hospital, then he’d happen have been frightened to death by the police, and have been good to me for a bit. She was startled by the baby crying. But how can I stop its rotten father from being such a rotter to me? A positive thought told her to visit one of his brothers, tell Ernest, for instance, what had happened, and ask if he couldn’t talk to his batchy brother Harold and ask him to have more sense.
    She levered the table back on to its legs and fed the baby. A cup of tea, and a resolution to see Ernest Seaton, made her feel better. It wasn’t raining so heavily when she set out, pushing Brian in the pram.
    Turning through street after street, she wondered again why Harold was a numbskull, while his five brothers stood apparently on another level, in the firm grip of good jobs. One was a shoemaker, two were upholsterers, the fourth a lace-designer. Ernest managed a draper’s shop in town. Harold Seaton, a labouring numbskull, earned thirty-eight bob a week, when he was lucky, at a tannery and skinyard. The explanation had been pieced together that Harold, having had the bad luck to be the baby of the family, had been left behind by his up-growing brothers, and half-forgotten by his too-old parents. He had had rickets, from thoughtless neglect rather than lack of money, and the disease had prevented him from going to school, caused him lifelong to walk with the swinging gait that Vera, on first seeing him, had mistaken for the pull of the three whippets. She suspected that the bad end of a bargain had come to her, and from wondering whether Seaton was more to be pitied than blamed, gave in to another fit of weeping as she turned on to the street of semi-detached houses where Ernest lived.
    Ernest himself opened the door, and she was glad at finding him in. He’d got a good job right enough, able to go in when he liked: I wouldn’t be here now if Harold had such a job. He greeted her in a friendly way. “Hello, Vera. You are a stranger, aren’t you?” He was twelve years older than Harold, with the same dark eyes and complexion, similar stature going to roundness, afflicted with baldness blamed on his army days in Mesopotamia. They’ve all got strange eyes, though, Vera thought, leaving the pram by the window and following him into the living-room, where a huge fire burned in the grate. He offered her some tea, as if, she divined, being polite to one of his customers. The sound of herself saying no brought all the events of the black morning bursting into her. Ernest was thinking how pretty and lively she was, that Harold, though backward, had known how to go for the women, that in his opinion he’d done better than the rest of them in this respect. He hardly knew what to say to her, though: what could one ask one’s sister-in-law, except how one’s own brother was?
    â€œI don’t know”—her tone was bitter—“and I don’t care.”
    He’d thought something like this was in the offing. “What’s the matter then, Vera?” He was alarmed when she began to sob, yet also gratified because he had never known his own wife to shed a tear over anything. “Sit down,” he said; “that’s right.”
    She cried into her hands: “It’s your brother. He’s a swine to me.”
    Ernest sensed that some sort of blame was being thrown on to him. “Harold? How?” and didn’t like hearing his brother referred to in this way either.
    â€œHe hit me,” she accused, “for nothing. He’s a lunatic, that’s what he is.”
    Ernest stayed calm, reasoning: “He couldn’t have hit you without a reason.” Since he wouldn’t dare strike his own wife, he thought all that sort of thing had