Birthday by Alan Sillitoe Read Free Book Online

make arrangements and clear things up.
    She’d been thinking about it, and that was a fact, while his fantasies at the machine hadn’t included this one. Maybe she had a boyfriend, a bit of you know what going on with a neighbour or the window-cleaner, but if so he had no interest in finding out. He wasn’t one for trying to save a marriage, deciding to get shut of her and the house as soon as possible in case she changed her mind. ‘You can have all the time you like to pack up,’ he said, unwilling to put up with three days of hatred, ‘because I’ll be going instead. Keep everything. I don’t want any of it.’
    At the beginning of their marriage they had shared a house with her deaf mother, and her boyfriend from India whom they always called Chumley, a middle-aged man who spoke so little it was impossible to tell what was in his mind, which was all right as far as Arthur was concerned because Mrs Greatton loved him, and had no time to interfere with him and Doreen.
    â€˜You don’t say a word to Chumley,’ Doreen said to him more than once. ‘He’s only human, you know. He wouldn’t mind if you said hello now and again.’
    â€˜When did you notice the last time he opened his mouth and said hello to me?’
    â€˜It’s the way you look at him. I can tell you don’t like him.’
    â€˜It ain’t true. We don’t have anything in common to talk about. I offered him a fag the other day but he refused it because he didn’t smoke my sort. He didn’t even want to try it. And when I asked him out to the pub he said he didn’t drink alcohol. What can you do with a bloke like that?’
    â€˜You’re only making excuses,’ she said. ‘You’re lying like you’ve always done.’
    Then one day Chumley packed his bags (one of which, Arthur joked, must be full of hard earned money) and told them with a smile that put life into his face for the first time, that he was going to Wolverhampton. Tears and ructions from Doreen’s mother, but he went on smiling and backed out of the door, a taxi waiting on the crescent.
    Arthur and Doreen got a council house not long afterwards, and when they called on Mrs Greatton one day found her dead at the kitchen table, a cup of cold Ovaltine by her hand. From then on Doreen said that her mother had died of a broken heart because of Chumley having gone due to Arthur being so rotten. ‘He couldn’t stand it any more.’
    Well, he didn’t know about that. He had respected Chumley for never missing a day in the factory, and assumed he had only slung his hook to get married to one of his own people. Mrs Greatton knew it, and if she had died of a broken heart that was her lookout. Nobody could have done anything about it, though he was sorry, all the same.
    And now the split had come for them as well, though maybe she was getting rid of him before he could do the same to her. He slept on the couch, and in the morning collected money due to him from the factory, then walked out of the house with two suitcases and a kitbag, and the clothes on his back. After a few days at his mother’s he rented a room in a house owned by a Polish man, as far from Doreen as he could get yet still in the same city.
    He hadn’t seen her since, nor wanted to, and if he refused to blame her for the break-up it was only because he had no intention of blaming himself. But whenever he thought of her, which was more often than he cared to, he saw that she hadn’t been happy, and that neither had he much of the time, but it was no crime to be unhappy, in fact lucky that both had been because when the break came there was a better chance of improvement for both. His only pain was that letters to Melanie and Harold went unanswered, and his feelings were not friendly on knowing Doreen had poisoned his children against him. Life was long, and there was nothing to do but endure, though the