Free Birthday by Alan Sillitoe Page A

to the rails as he deserved, if an express had been speeding out of the tunnel. On the other hand she might have laughed, in spite of her tragic errand, as when he used to amuse her with impossible propositions in bygone days. It could have been just what she needed, to judge by her anguished face. And what if she had said yes, take me, let’s go, it’s the only thing left for me to do, would he have ditched her in London? The question nagged him for years, though he knew she would have got on to the train for Sheffield thinking that at least once in her life she’d shown good judgement in not tying herself to someone like him.
    The Georgian façade of the hotel he’d taken his girlfriend to overlooked the main road, and he recognized the window of their room. Her name was Penelope, neither the first nor the last of that name, amazing how many had been christened it, as if scores of those coming back from distant battlefronts at the end of the war had picked up a copy of The Odyssey at Victoria Station, and hoped their wives had been unknitting the khaki jersey they had been making for them for the last five years, so that the lodgers wouldn’t get at her bloomers.
    At the Heights of Abraham station they stayed in the little bug-like cabin and waited for the ride back. ‘I suppose every bloke of our age remembers the days when he biked to Matlock with his sweetheart,’ Arthur said. ‘I did it first with Helen Dukes, who lived a few doors down from us. She was as hot as a cat, and pretty. It was sunny and warm, and we finished our bottles of Tizer at Eastwood, and couldn’t find a place to sell us a drop of anything till we got to Matlock and had a drink of tea. We scrambled up that hill over there and bedded down in some bushes. I didn’t think I’d get it off her, but I did. It was my first time, and I was fifteen. It was marvellous. She was dying for it, and so was I. I don’t know why, but she called fucking “nursing”. “Will you nurse me?” she asked, when I’d got her knickers off. “I fucking well will,” I said. She was dark and lovely, but I never knew why she called it nursing, unless it was a secret code word between her mam and dad, and she’d heard ’em at it one day.’
    The incline was steeper going back, Arthur gripping the railbar as if the little truck might race for the ground, but it levelled out and floated gently over the valley of their dreams, grey clouds bleeding a steady drizzle which obscured the houses like curtains at a theatre. Meteorological phenomena of the valley turned the day magical: to get out of traffic needed only a short climb into the well moistened air of nostalgia.
    The ruins of Riber Castle on its hill were still in sunlight, cloud moving across gaps in the masonry: ‘Like Frankenstein’s residence,’ Arthur said. ‘After being burned down in the Carpathians.’
    â€˜There’s a café in Matlock Town where we can have some coffee.’
    Showing Arthur so many different places reminded him of the Penelope he should have married but couldn’t because, knowing what was good for her, she refused the jump. ‘Have you seen anything of cousin Dave lately?’
    Arthur had a slab of chocolate cake with his coffee. ‘Didn’t I tell you? He snuffed it, from cancer of the throat. He was seventy-three, but the same old Dave to the end. I phoned him a week before he died. He couldn’t say much, and it was painful to laugh, but he liked hearing me talk about the thieving him and Donnie did when they deserted from the army in the war. He was always as hard as nails, Dave was, and I didn’t much like him, but because he was dying I asked whether it had been him who gave our Margaret’s husband that big pasting all those years ago. Do you remember? Albert could hardly crawl back in the house because somebody had punched the crap out of him. I was in the