Free Key to the Door by Alan Sillitoe Page B

a tram at where it’ll be going fast, and then to have no more rowing and misery like I’ve allus had. The boulevard isn’t far off and there’ll be lots of traffic. Around two corners and up a bit of hill. Ernest is rotten like the rest. They hate everybody: and it’s no good going back so’s it’ll happen again in a few more mornings. Why am I still crying? Because they made me? I wouldn’t cry for them, the rotten lot. Thank God it’ll soon be over, because never again. I’m out of breath, but here’s the corner. They are all rotten. I’ll wait here as if I’m going to cross the road. Nobody’ll think to stop me.
    As a tram came one way, footsteps ran up the street behind her and stopped when they came close. A hand touched her shoulder.
    â€œCome on, Vera,” Ernest said gently. “I’m sorry about all this. I’ll see Harold and make things right.”
    She shook him off. “I’m not frightened, so leave me alone. I’m fed up with everything.”
    â€œDon’t be daft,” he said. “Come on, duck. Harold won’t hit you again.”
    A suggestion of Harold’s kindness after a quarrel lurked in the tone of his voice. “No,” she said, watching a tram gather speed at the crossroads.
    â€œCome on back to the house and we’ll have something to eat.” He took her arm firmly. “You’ll be all right. Things are never as bad as they seem.” His considerate inflexion so closely resembled Seaton’s that for a moment she thought he was behind her, too, as if by magic he had come out of the factory to find her and make up for the quarrel.
    She turned. He pushed the pram. Brian woke up and she thought he was going to cry. Bending over, she pulled the coverlet up to his neck. He did not cry. She let herself be led by Ernest, feeling bitterly cold, though the air was warm and Seaton had dashed out without a coat. She shivered on her way back to the house, and a drowsiness replaced or accompanied the cold, as if she had been a week without sleep.
    When she left Ernest’s, a huge basket of groceries was at the foot of the pram, and the small fortune of a pound note lay in her coat pocket. But she was indifferent to these gifts and all that Ernest had meant they should mean. Yes, he would meet Harold coming out of work. Yes, he would say he should control his temper and not lead her such a dance; yes, he would say this and he would wag his head and nod his chin and tell Harold he should behave himself. Fine, fine, fine. But in the end it wouldn’t mean a bleddy thing. You can say things to a reasonable man that he’d take notice of, but you can’t tell a madman not to be mad any more. And so it would go on, though one day, she said, Brian would grow up, the proof of it being that he was beginning to cry.

PART TWO
    Nimrod

CHAPTER 4
    Brian had just height and strength to wrench himself on to the parapet of New Bridge and see the free-wheeling bare spokes of the headstocks riding the empty air like upside-down bicycle wheels. Leaning on his elbows and booting a rhythm on the wall, he saw the semaphore arm of a signal rise upwards, and settled himself in the hot sun to wait for a train.
    When he was on an errand to his grandma Merton’s, the couple of grandiose miles out from the last houses of Nottingham became an expedition. Across his route lay streams and lanes and stiles, and to the left stretched a green-banked railway line, rightwards an acre of allotment gardens whose shabby huts and stunted trees were often raided by roving kids from Radford—among them, he knew for a fact, Bert Doddoe and his elder brothers. Brian remembered, in the awesome silence before the advent of a train, how the whole family had descended on his house during the bitter blue snow of last winter. Ada, Doddoe her husband, and their four kids had done a bunk from Chesterfield with their bits of furniture