A Start in Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

they didn’t get married, so we got on well together as long as we didn’t say much about the way we wanted to live. As a child she’d been thin in the frame, but now she was nearing forty and had put on weight. Men were still like flies around her, though she rarely brought them to the house. When she did I kept out of the way, for I was embarrassed at her getting from them what I was now so assiduously giving to Claudine.
    I was absorbed in what I called the three -ings: reading, working, and fucking, and I did all three to the best of my time and ability. But now that I was beginning to feel too tightly held in my closeting with Claudine, I saw that after all one wasn’t made as wise by reading good books as I had thought. I could read, but not at the same time learn, which made it all seem a bit of a gyp, till I laughed it off on realizing that good books were only as much of an escape from the world as sex-and-gangster stories. The solution to this was not to give up reading, which had hit me early as a cure to some disease whose name I did not know, but to go on getting more out of life on the one hand, and learning more from it on the other. There’s no doubt I was mixed up in my feelings, but at least I wasn’t crazy in it as well. Believing this only proved how crazy I really was, though the assumption that I had cool sense stopped me going round in circles, and at least led me to feel I was the most important person in the world.
    In the factory, I was tolerated more than employed, though I must have been worth the eight pounds handed to me every Friday night. I carried bales of cloth from the stores to the cutting rooms, sometimes loading finished garments on lorries that drew up to the warehouse bay. The one advantage was getting suits of clothes at a discount, and occasionally for nothing when I worked up nerve enough to walk brazenly out with one wrapped in my overalls. In spite of my slackness, some intelligence had been noted when I suggested a way of speeding up the transport of cloth from one department to another, and the general manager asked one day if I wouldn’t like to work in the office. Wallace Pushpacker had been a major in the Army, had a blustery face and a thick ginger moustache, and I believe he expected me to jump at the chance as a kind of promotion, but he was taken by surprise when I said in a voice as quick and sharp as his that I’d like to think about it first.
    When I went off to load another trolley, having left Pushpacker baffled and irritable, I was trembling with the effort of putting the pros and cons of his offer through my machinating mind. It would be a clean job with more money and shorter hours, but on the other hand I dreaded the effect on Claudine. Such news would only confirm that I had it in me after all to GET ON , and was therefore the ONE FOR HER . An engagement would not be more than a few weeks off, and if I didn’t agree to it, it would mean the end of my delicious and fleshly privileges. So I told myself, and I may not have been far wrong, that having asked Pushpacker to let me think it over was considered so much of a cheek that even if I went back and said yes, he’d tell me the job was no longer available because I wasn’t the right material to accept the discipline of office life that his Army rule imposed. In the end I left the factory altogether, and decided to look for some other work.
    To Claudine this was as bad as if I’d turned down her suggestion of an engagement, because she looked upon me as a scatterbrained idler who couldn’t keep any job for long. ‘I only left to get a better place,’ I said, sitting in her parlour one night when her parents were out. ‘That was a dead-end joint, and I thought you didn’t like me being there. Now I’ll be able to get something better, maybe even in an office.’
    She came across to me on the settee: ‘Oh, Michael, that would be wonderful.