New and Collected Stories by Alan; Sillitoe

and light wind we walked over the Cherry Orchard, happy and arm-in-arm. Suddenly she stopped and turned to me, a big-boned girl yet with a good figure and nice enough face: ‘Do you want to go into the wood?’
    What a thing to ask! I laughed: ‘You know I do. Don’t you?’
    We walked on, and a minute later she said: ‘Yes, I do; but you know what we’re to do now you’ve got a steady job, don’t you?’
    I wondered what it was all about. Yet I knew right enough. ‘Get married,’ I admitted, adding on second thoughts: ‘I don’t have much of a wage to be wed on, you know.’
    â€˜It’s enough, as far as I’m concerned,’ she answered.
    And that was that. She gave me the best kiss I’d ever had, and then we went into the wood.
    She was never happy about our life together, right from the start. And neither was I, because it didn’t take her long to begin telling me that all her friends – her family most of all – said time and time again that our marriage wouldn’t last five minutes. I could never say much back to this, knowing after the first few months how right everybody would be. Not that it bothered me though, because I was always the sort of bloke that doesn’t get ruffled at anything. If you want to know the truth – the sort of thing I don’t suppose many blokes would be ready to admit – the bare fact of my getting married meant only that I changed one house and one mother for another house and a different mother. It was as simple as that. Even my wage-packet didn’t alter its course: I handed it over every Friday night and got five shillings back for tobacco and a visit to the pictures. It was the sort of wedding where the cost of the ceremony and reception go as a down payment, and you then continue dishing-out your wages every week for life. Which is where I suppose they got this hire purchase idea from.
    But our marriage lasted for more than the five minutes everybody prophesied: it went on for six years; she left me when I was thirty, and when she was thirty-four. The trouble was when we had a row – and they were rows, swearing, hurling pots: the lot – it was too much like suffering, and in the middle of them it seemed to me as if we’d done nothing but row and suffer like this from the moment we set eyes on each other, with not a moment’s break, and that it would go on like this for as long as we stayed together. The truth was, as I see it now – and even saw it sometimes then – that a lot of our time was bloody enjoyable.
    I’d had an idea before she went that our time as man and wife was about up, because one day we had the worst fight of them all. We were sitting at home one evening after tea, one at each end of the table, plates empty and bellies full so that there was no excuse for what followed. My head was in a book, and Kathy just sat there.
    Suddenly she said: ‘I do love you, Harry.’ I didn’t hear the words for some time, as is often the case when you’re reading a book. Then: ‘Harry, look at me.’
    My face came up, smiled, and went down again to my reading. Maybe I was in the wrong, and should have said something, but the book was too good.
    â€˜I’m sure all that reading’s bad for your eyes,’ she commented, prising me again from the hot possessive world of India.
    â€˜It ain’t,’ I denied, not looking up. She was young and still fair-faced, a passionate loose-limbed thirty-odd that wouldn’t let me sidestep either her obstinacy or anger. ‘My dad used to say that on’y fools read books, because they’d such a lot to learn.’
    The words hit me and sank in, so that I couldn’t resist coming back with, still not looking up: ‘He on’y said that because he didn’t know how to read. He was jealous, if you ask me.’
    â€˜No need to be jealous of the rammel you stuff your