New and Collected Stories by Alan; Sillitoe Page A

big head with,’ she said, slowly to make sure I knew she meant every word. The print wouldn’t stick any more; the storm was too close.
    â€˜Look, why don’t you get a book, duck?’ But she never would, hated them like poison.
    She sneered: ‘I’ve got more sense; and too much to do.’
    Then I blew up, in a mild way because I still hoped she wouldn’t take on, that I’d be able to finish my chapter. ‘Well let me read, anyway, won’t you? It’s an interesting book and I’m tired.’
    But such a plea only gave her another opening. ‘Tired? You’re allus tired.’ She laughed out loud: ‘Tired Tim! You ought to do some real work for a change instead of walking the streets with that daft post bag.’
    I won’t go on, spinning it out word for word. In any case not many more passed before she snatched the book out of my hands. ‘You booky bastard,’ she screamed, ‘nowt but books, books, books, you bleddy dead-’ead’ – and threw the book on the heaped-up coals, working it further and further into their blazing middle with the poker.
    This annoyed me, so I clocked her one, not very hard, but I did. It was a good reading book, and what’s more it belonged to the library. I’d have to pay for a new one. She slammed out of the house, and I didn’t see her until the next day.
    I didn’t think to break my heart very much when she skipped off. I’d had enough. All I can say is that it was a stroke of God’s luck we never had any kids. She was confined once or twice, but it never came to anything; each time it dragged more bitterness out of her than we could absorb in the few peaceful months that came between. It might have been better if she’d had kids though; you never know.
    A month after burning the book she ran off with a housepainter. It was all done very nicely. There was no shouting or knocking each other about or breaking up the happy home. I just came back from work one day and found a note waiting for me. ‘I am going away and not coming back’ – propped on the mantelpiece in front of the clock. No tear stains on the paper, just eight words in pencil on a page of the insurance book – I’ve still got it in the back of my wallet, though God knows why.
    The housepainter she went with had lived in a house on his own, across the terrace. He’d been on the dole for a few months and suddenly got a job at a place twenty miles away I was later told. The neighbours seemed almost eager to let me know – after they’d gone, naturally – that they’d been knocking-on together for about a year. No one knew where they’d skipped off to exactly, probably imagining that I wanted to chase after them. But the idea never occurred to me. In any case what was I to do? Knock him flat and drag Kathy back by the hair? Not likely.
    Even now it’s no use trying to tell myself that I wasn’t disturbed by this change in my life. You miss a woman when she’s been living with you in the same house for six years, no matter what sort of cat-and-dog life you led together – though we had our moments, that I will say. After her sudden departure there was something different about the house, about the walls, ceiling and every object in it. And something altered inside me as well – though I tried to tell myself that all was just the same and that Kathy’s leaving me wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. Nevertheless time crawled at first, and I felt like a man just learning to pull himself along with a club-foot; but then the endless evenings of summer came and I was happy almost against my will, too happy anyway to hang on to such torments as sadness and loneliness. The world was moving and, I felt, so was I.
    In other words I succeeded in making the best of things, which as much as anything else meant eating a good meal at the canteen every midday. I