It May Never Happen

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Buy and repent you mean,” said Aunt Gertrude, whose face used to puff into small lumps when she was contradicting. If Uncle Smith was the sun of the house, Aunt Gertrude was the critical and watery moon, ringed with omens of bad weather.

  There was a canal at the end of Dorinda Gardens, the road went over it by a bridge and from the bridge one saw the slow worm of water pass under the girders of the railway. The days were warming and summer was blistering the new paint of the doors. One Sunday Aunt Gertrude said to Harold, her eldest son:

  “Where’s your dad? What’s he doing?”

  “S’upstairs, mum.”

  “He’s a long time,” said Aunt Gertrude.

  She was tied to her husband by fear. He was out all day and sometimes he would be away for two or three nights, and in these absences she sank back into an undercurrent of uneasiness. His absences, even in another room, had the same effect on her as the silences of a child. What calamity had occurred? She was far from being one of those women who have the pose of treating their husbands as children. She was afraid of him and she knew it.

  “Pop up and see,” said Aunt to Harold, but he did not want to go.

  A time passed and then Uncle came downstairs. He was a quiet and secretive walker. He opened the kitchen door.

  “Gert,” he said.

  We gaped at him. He had dressed himself in a dark blue blazer with the initials H.B.S. worked on the pocket, white flannel trousers, white boots and on his head was a yachting cap. He kept his right hand in his blazer pocket.

  He smiled shyly and modestly.

  “I thought I’d take you for a row on the canal.”

  We all laughed until he blushed like a boy. He had to laugh too.

  “What’s the joke? I see no joke,” he said grinning.

  “Where did you get that hat?” called Harold.

  “No need to be vulgar,” Uncle said, with a smirk. “We may not have a yacht, but we’re close to the water.”

  Aunt stopped laughing and into her face came a glint of fear such as she always had whenever he did a new thing.

  “Look at your mother,” said Uncle to Leslie. “Pretending she’s never been in a boat. We used to go out every Sunday when we were courting.”

  “I was a young limb,” said Aunt Gertrude tenderly and dreamily; but while there was a glow in Uncle’s dreams, Aunt Gertrude’s had an edge to them and suggested that if anyone went back with her into her memories, they would get their hands scratched or their clothes torn.

  We did not go rowing on the canal. There were no boats. But we walked down to the bridge, Uncle still in his regalia. We saw men fishing in the oil-green water and the thundery marble of summer clouds crested as white as cherry blossom and very still over our heads, as if the London sky were in a glass case. The men sat in the stillness smoking their pipes and watching their floats. Or leaving their rods, they went for short circular walks and grunted to one another. While we watched from the bridge one of the men whipped up his line. There was the squeal of rapid winding and at the end of the line was a fish like a slip of dancing tin. Uncle took us down to the towpath and the man showed us the fish.

  “That’s what we ought to do,” said Uncle. “We’re on the water. We ought to catch our own fish. Imagine herrings straight out of the river.”

  He said this to Aunt Gertrude when we got back. “You don’t get herrings in rivers,” she said tartly.

  This genuinely astonished Uncle, but he recovered.

  “Imagine it!” he cried, giving her a smack on the bottom.

  “Ah, come on, old girl,” he bullied. “Cheer up. Imagine it!”

  Our only visitor at Dorinda Gardens was my Grandma Carter. She came in her black bead bonnet, her red nose and the red-rimmed eyes showing like knife-cuts through her black veil, and wearing a black cape of some shiny material, the death-watch beetle of grief. She carried a string bag with her, for wherever she went she seemed always to travel with a few groceries, some sewing and a bottle of stout. There was the smell of the sharp grocer’s about her, something compounded of tea, biscuits, bacon and pickles, and her tongue was the vinegar. Grief, one thinks, should purge and exalt the soul, but it had made her ugly, bad-tempered and given her also a morbid shuffling humility, a look of guilt and shame. She came every Wednesday to see us and she would suddenly appear, letting herself in by the back door and saying every time apologetically:

  “I came round the back, Gert dear, because I see you done your front.” Then she pushed back her veil to the bridge of her nose, and turning slowly in a circle as a dog does before it lies down to sleep, she would give a sniff and put her string bag down on a chair. Her loneliness, her unhappiness and her snuffling made us afraid.

  Aunt Gertrude was very guarded with her mother, for Gran had a tongue.

  “Where d’you get that from?” Grandma Carter would exclaim at once, pointing perhaps at the coat and umbrella stand in the hall. She was very jealous of her daughter’s new furniture.

  “Horace bought it at Freebody’s.”

  “What’s wrong with a hook and two nails?” Gran sniffed. “Now I’ve come round to see what’s happening to my boy’s money.” I, of course, was her boy; but so many she had loved had repaid her treacherously by dying that she was distant and suspicious and erratic in the show of affection to me. She had had a scare when she thought she might be landed with me when my mother died. Gran gave me a whiskered kiss which smelled of sugar-bags, and tears came off her face on to mine. She was small but there was something muscular in her grip when she hugged me and she would tell Aunt of the dozens of times when “the poor lamb” (myself) had shown that I regarded her as a second mother—a delusion, for Gran terrified me. Gran’s life was filled with guilt towards the living, whom she looked at slyly, and her tears were not tears of sorrow, but issued to conceal this guilt. She was guilty because she forgot the living and neglected them in her absorption with the dead.

  When they had settled down and Grandma Carter had asked perfunctorily after her son-in-law with a “How’s Smith?” Aunt Gertrude asked after Gran’s lodgers. They were never called lodgers.

  “How is … er …” Aunt said, not finishing the sentence and looking up at the silk shade over the gas-bracket in the middle of the room.

  “Studying for his …” Gran replied, nodding with a genteel expression. The word “examination” suggested a rare, upper atmosphere which it did not become her to investigate or even mention.

  After this Aunt and Gran got down to the dead. The two women raised them and wept. Poor Flo, how she had suffered; my father’s cough, that horse which had kicked my grandfather—the horse had died too, for they had had it shot—then Harry being taken and the brightness of my mother, her last words—some dispute about them—and then poor Great Aunt Emily, her last years darkened, and her brother Wilf, the deaf fishmonger. Having exhausted the human dead, unwrapping the cerements of memory and gazing at the closed faces, Aunt and Gran would feel hungry, as if death had been their appetizer, and would get out the beetroot, the vinegar and the mutton bone. Aunt called from the kitchen in a high giggling voice.

  “Gran! Gran!”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I was thinking of Aunt Emily’s dog Rover.” And Aunt went off into a shriek of laughter. “How it went away that night, do you remember? And they found it two days later drowned in the canal!”

  Aunt came in holding the mutton bone in her hand, waving it as she laughed, and they both laughed and laughed till they had to sit down.

  “Don’t be so reel, Ma,” said Aunt Gertrude. “It’s wicked to laugh. She loved that dog. Oh, don’t, I’ll die …”

  “Emily was a fool about that dog,” said Gran Carter to steady their laughter.

  But Aunt was “off” now, “off” being Gran’s word for it. She remembered other dogs, then Wilf’s jackdaw, Flo’s goldfish, my mother’s canary, which Aunt Gertrude’s cat had got when they were young—for there was a jealousy between the sisters and Aunt was
always guilty about having left the cage door open—human beings had given place to the animals and birds. And then Aunt’s face and Gran’s straightened and the two women ended with the horse which had given Gran’s husband the fatal kick.

  “I’ll never forget the day poor Jessie was shot.” The purgation was complete, Gran started to admire all the new furniture now and said, “Smith’s paid for it, I hope,” and a defiance came into Aunt Gertrude’s salty green eyes and she said, “Yes, he has.” And then Gran went. She took a roll of wallpaper that day to paper her closet. She was an active woman and a natural picker up of trifles by the way.

  Women are the terrors, the sergeant majors of childhood. Their hard quick fingers pull at the neck, get at your ears, strain at buttons, one moment they are cuffing, the next they are hugging. Their moods last about a quarter of an hour. It’s easy to scare them, simple to delude them…. Not all women. My mother was not like this. Our shop must have put some order into her feminity. But Aunt Gertrude had the disorder of a story. When she wasn’t weeping, she was laughing, swaying up and down and covering her face with her hands, or she was in a temper, or she was sulking. She sulked when she was tired of us, especially when Uncle was away for a day or two, waiting for him to come home. She was not a beautiful woman, but the nearer the time of his return came, her restless face calmed in a sulk which was a kind of beauty. She set her yellow hair under a net until it was as firm as a scone, her underlip drooped and the pupils of her grey eyes turned darker, almost blue. She put on her best dress and watered a small fern in the middle of the table and sat in the front room without moving. It made her rather impressive that in the middle of the afternoon she had had a bath and we had to keep away from her so as not to spoil her clothes. She was one of those fair, freckled women who sweat easily and after a bath the smell, half of soap, and half hay-like, of her skin, put an excitement into the air, as if we were walking in a summer field. Harold, her son, was in love with her at these times, and spoke very piously and devotedly and kept us away from her. He wanted her to stay like this and did not want his father to return. But she was not in love with her son.

  “Why don’t you behave yourself like this all the time?” she said sarcastically to him. Harold had the sanctimoniousness of a once-spoiled and now easily envious eldest child. She preferred Leslie, the younger boy, at this moment because he too was longing for Uncle to come back and stood for hours at the window. The time when she was in love with Harold was just after Uncle had gone away; but Harold was excited by freedom then and did not want her.

  Aunt Gertrude was like a book of stories to me. When there were holidays I would leave the boys who were playing in the garden or the kitchen, pretending to them I was going to the lavatory. I would go upstairs and try to get into Aunt Gertrude’s bedroom where she used to lie down in the afternoon.

  “Who’s that? Stop fiddling at the door. What do you want?”

  I got into the habit of going there and standing at the window, watching the road and telling her what was happening. A wide road, sandy; the hoarding opposite; a dog in the paddock; a pile of new bricks in the lot which had been sold.

  “There goes the lady with the dog.”

  Once or twice Aunt got off the bed when I said this. She lay on the bed in a pair of grey bloomers and a loose vest with her thick hair down over her shoulders so that her face seemed to be looking out of the flap of a hairy tent, like a savage’s. She got off the bed and kicked the chamber pot and peeped through the curtains. The tall grey-haired woman with the dog fascinated my aunt.

  “There she goes,” she repeated to herself. “Look at her. And the dog.” It was a fox terrier.

  “She’s a lady,” Aunt Gertrude said in a dreamy voice, coming away and pushing the chamber pot under the bed in a refined way. “She spoke to me in the grocer’s. Her little dog got its lead all twisted up round me and she said,“—here Aunt imitated the woman’s accent—” ‘Ooh, Ai’m soo sorr’eh.’ Oh noo reely, its quite all right,’ I said. I could see she was a lady. ‘Ooh, but mai leetle dawg is being ai nuis-ance. Come heah, Tiny.’ And she smiled. ‘Ooh, don’t mention it,’ I said.”

  Now she was out of bed, Aunt sat at her dressing table. Like all the other furniture it was new; the price of the dressing table was marked in blue chalk on the back of the mirror. I looked at her. She had slim arms and small shoulders and the skin, except at the armpits where it was the colour of dry yellow grass, was very white. She told me to have another look at the window, and, when I obeyed, with a furtive blush, she took her clothes off and put on the new ones in a hurry in case I should see. I turned to watch her brush her straight thick hair.

  One afternoon she was doing her hair like this when an accident happened, something which dominated her thoughts for months afterwards. She was holding her hand-mirror in one hand and talking to herself in it while she did her hair at the back.

  “Is it right at the back? There’s another bit. Let’s put a pin in it. Here,” she said, handing me a hairpin over her shoulder, “put it in, do you see? No, not there. That bit. Oh come on, give it to me.”

  She had quick nervy hands, and she put out her hand for the pin and placed the mirror on the table.

  “Here it is,” I said. She was trying to get the pin from me without looking round and then she turned round with one of her sudden movements. Her elbow caught the mirror and it fell to the floor.

  Aunt Gertrude’s face changed.

  “Don’t touch it,” she said.

  I stood back, startled by the crash. She stared down at the mirror which was lying on its face. Her manner frightened me.

  “It’s gone,” she exclaimed. “I heard it go.” Her face went very red and her cheeks became lumpy as she bent down and picked up the mirror. The glass had cracked across the face.

  “Oh I wish I hadn’t done that,” she said, gazing at the crack.

  It was nothing for Aunt to smash things, tear things, drop things. She was a careless woman. And she did not mind except to say to the boys: “Don’t tell your father.” But as she held the mirror, she looked with helpless appeal at it, blown out with unbelief.

  “That’s seven years’ bad luck to me,” she said.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said.

  “You see. I know it,” she said. “I broke one before my wedding-day. And for seven years your uncle had nothing but trouble.”

  Then she stood up and got in a temper with me and everything, telling me to pick up her clothes and fold them straight and muttering such things as: “Where’s your Uncle? Brush your hair before he comes. Three late nights this week! Look at my hair—it’s coming down again.”

  And suddenly she pulled half her hair down, picked up the cracked mirror and started again angrily. Half her face was swollen and the other half looked fierce, distraught and mad, as she picked up lengths of hair and pulled them into place on top.

  “Trouble the whole time. Never in the same job five minutes,” she spat at the mirror. “That’s your uncle. What’s he doing now?”

  She had hairpins in her teeth and pulled one out after every sentence.

  “Pay as you go,” she said. And out came a hairpin.

  “That’s how us girls were brought up. If you haven’t got it, don’t spend it.” Another pin.

  “It’s robbery. They say I don’t understand these things, but right’s right.” Another pin.

  Aunt began to talk to invisible presences in the room.

  “If your precious son’s so perfect why did I have to come up here with a babe in arms begging for bread and say ‘Thank you’ for every mouthful? ‘Eh,’ she says. ‘There’s some have no business to get married and may be some has to get married.’ Vernon,” she swung round to me, taking out the remaining pins and holding them wildly. “T could have skinned the old bitch. ‘You mind what you’re saying,” I said. ‘A better-living lot of girls you won’t find. Gran had her troubles as we all know, but us girls were straight.’”

  The temper went and s
he sulked dreamily into the mirror.

  “It’s a good thing he met a straight girl like me,” she said quietly. “A young country boy like that, he might have had someone who would have got hold of him. There was one or two in the shop. But I could stick up for myself. It was my hair,” she said, lifting up the final strand and curling it round her finger, “he fell in love with, your poor mother could sit on hers.

  “Vernon,” she said, turning round again. “He had the cleanest hands I’ve ever seen on a man. I’ll never forget in all my natural how clean his hands were. That was the first thing I noticed. Your dead dad used to say Horace Smith’s the only man in this shop that washes.

  “He got that from old Mrs. Smith, of course. She scrubbed Horace and Mildred when they were kids till they were as clean as her kitchen. Too clean, if you ask me. But, of course, I didn’t go out with him for the asking. I led him on. I didn’t half make him jealous. There he was in his spats—a regular k-nut, shop-walker, see—of course, he would have everything just so, your uncle!—and he says, ‘Buttons forward, Miss Carter,’ I can see him now. ‘Gloves here, not buttons, caught you bending,’ I said. The cheek of me when you come to think of it. I was terrible.” Aunt’s eyes flashed green as the sea.

  “Girl-like,” she said dreamily. And then she saw the crack in the mirror and tears came into her eyes, large tears like the pearl buttons in her blouse. To me they were not like the tears I had seen before, for her common tears were hardly personal, but a general oblation to the unexplainable coming and going of woe in the world.

  MANY ARE DISAPPOINTED

  Heads down to the wind from the hidden sea, the four men were cycling up a deserted road in the country. Bert, who was the youngest, dreamed:

  “You get to the pub, and there’s a girl at the pub, a dark girl with bare arms and bare legs in a white frock, the daughter of the house, or an orphan—may be it’s better she should be an orphan—and you say something to her, or better still, you don’t say anything to her—she just comes and puts her arms round you, and you can feel her skin through her frock and she brings you some beer and the other chaps aren’t there and the people don’t say anything except laugh and go away, because its all natural and she doesn’t have a baby. Same at the next place, same anywhere, different place, different girl, or same girl—same girl always turning up, always waiting. Dunno how she got there. Just slips along without you knowing it and waiting like all those songs …”