The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  Mrs Forster let her expensive fur slip back from her fine shoulders and looked at the rings on her small hands.

  “I loved him, Margaret,” she said. “I really did love him.”

  “We know you loved him. I mean, it was love,” said Margaret. “It’s nothing to do with the age you are. Life’s never over. It was love. You’re a terrible woman, Jill.”

  “Oh, Margaret,” said Mrs Forster with a discreet glee, “I know I am.”

  “He was your fourth,” said Margaret.

  “Don’t, Margaret,” giggled Mrs Forster.

  “No, no, I’m not criticising. I never criticise. Live and let live. It wasn’t a fancy, Jill, you loved him with all your heart.”

  Jill raised her chin in a lady-like way.

  “But I won’t be hit,” she whispered. “At my age I allow no one to strike me. I am fifty-seven, Margaret, I’m not a girl.”

  “That’s what we all said,” said Margaret. “You were headstrong.”

  “Oh, Margaret!” said Mrs Forster, delighted.

  “Oh, yes, yes, you wouldn’t listen, not you. You wouldn’t listen to me. I brought him up to the Chequers, or was it the Westmoreland?—no, it was the George—and I thought to myself, I know your type, young man—you see, Jill, I’ve had experience—out for what he could get—well, honest, didn’t I tell you?”

  “His face was very brown.”

  “Brown! Would you believe me? No, you wouldn’t. I can see him. He came up here the night of the dance. He took his coat off. Well, we all sweat.”

  “But,” sighed Mrs Forster, “he had white arms.”

  “Couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Put it away, pack it up, I said. He didn’t care. He was after Mrs Klebs and she went potty on him till Mrs Sinclair came and then that Mr Baum interfered. That sort lives for trouble. All of them mad on him—I bet Frederick could tell a tale, but he won’t. Trust Frederick,” she said with a look of hate at the barman, “upstairs in the billiard room, I shan’t forget it. Torpedoed twice, he said. I mean Ted said: he torpedoed one or two. What happened to him that night?”

  “Someone made him comfortable, I am sure,” said Mrs Forster, always anxious about lonely strangers.

  “And you were quite rude with me, Jill, I don’t mean rude, you couldn’t be rude, it isn’t in you, but we almost came to words …”

  “What did you say, Margaret?” said Mrs Forster from a dream.

  “I said at your age, fifty-seven, I said you can’t marry a boy of twenty-six.”

  Mrs Forster sighed.

  “Frederick. Freddy, dear. Two more,” said Mrs Forster.

  Margaret took her glass, and while she was finishing it Frederick held his hand out for it, insultingly rubbing his fingers.

  “Hah!” said Margaret, blowing out her breath as the gin burned her. “You bowled over him, I mean you bowled him over, a boy of twenty-six. Sailors are scamps.”

  “Not,” said Mrs Forster, reaching to trim the back of her hair again and tipping her flowered hat forward on her forehead and austerely letting it remain like that. “Not,” she said, getting stuck at the word.

  “Not what?” said Margaret. “Not a scamp? I say he was. I said at the time, I still say it, a rotten little scamp.”

  “Not,” said Mrs Forster.

  “A scamp,” said Margaret.

  “Not. Not with a belt,” said Mrs Forster. “I will not be hit with a belt.”

  “My husband,” began Margaret.

  “I will not, Margaret,” said Mrs Forster. “Never. Never. Never with a belt.

  “Not hit, struck,” Mrs Forster said, defying Margaret.

  “It was a plot, you could see it a mile off, it would make you laugh, a lousy, rotten plot,” Margaret let fly, swallowing her drink. “He was after your house and your money. If he wasn’t, what did he want to get his mother in for, a big three-storey house like yours, in a fine residential position? Just what he’d like, a little rat like that …”

  Mrs Forster began a long laugh to herself.

  “My grandfather,” she giggled.

  “What?” said Margaret.

  “Owns the house. Not owns. Owned, I say, the house,” said Mrs Forster, tapping the bar.

  “Frederick,” said Mrs Forster. “Did my grandfather own the house?”

  “Uh?” said Frederick, giving his cuff links a shake. “Which house?”

  “My house over there,” said Mrs Forster, pointing to the door.

  “I know he owned the house, dear,” Margaret said. “Frederick knows.”

  “Let me ask Frederick,” said Mrs Forster. “Frederick, you knew my grandfather.”

  “Uh?” said Frederick, leaning to listen.

  “He’s as deaf as a wall,” Margaret said.

  Frederick walked away to the curtain at the back of the bar and peeped through it. Nervously he came back, glancing at his handsome face in the mirror; he chose an expression of stupidity and disdain, but he spoke with a quiet rage.

  “I remember this street,” he raged, “when you could hardly get across it for the carriages and the footmen and the maids in their lace caps and aprons. You never saw a lady in a place like this.”

  He turned his back on them and walked again secretively to the curtain, peeped again, and came back stiffly on feet skewed sideways by the gravity of the gout and put the tips of his old, well-manicured fingers on the bar for them to admire.

  “Now,” he said, giving a socially shocked glance over the windows that were still half boarded after the bombing, “all tenements, flats, rooms, walls falling down, balconies dropping off, bombed out, and rotting,” he said. He sneered at Margaret. “Not the same people. Slums. Riff-raff now. Mrs Forster’s father was the last of the old school.”

  “My grandfather,” said Mrs Forster.

  “He was a gentleman,” said Frederick.

  Frederick walked to the curtains.

  “Horrible,” he muttered loudly, timing his exit.

  There was a silence until he came back. The two women looked at the enormous empty public house, with its high cracked and dirty ceilings, its dusty walls unpainted for twenty years. Its top floor had been on fire. Its windows had gone, three or four times.

  Frederick mopped up scornfully between the glasses of gin on the counter.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Margaret, her tongue swelling up, her mouth side-slipping. “If you’d given the key to his mother, where would you have been? They’d have shut you out of your own house and what’s the good of the police? All the scum have come to the top since the war. You were too innocent and we saved you. Jill, well, I mean if we hadn’t all got together, the whole crowd, where were you? He was going to get into the house and then one night when you’d been over at the George or the Chequers or over here and you’d had one or two …”

  Jill looked proudly and fondly at her glass, crinkled her childish eyes.

  “Oh,” said Jill in a little naughty-faced protest.

  “I mean, I don’t mean plastered,” said Margaret, bewildered by the sound of her own voice and moving out her hand to bring it back.

  “Not stinking, Jill, excuse me. I mean we sometimes have two or three. Don’t we?” Margaret appealed to the barman.

  “Uh?” said Frederick coldly. “Where was this?”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” said Margaret, turning round suddenly and knocking her glass over, which Frederick picked up and took away. “What was I saying, Jill?”

  A beautiful still smile, like a butterfly opening on an old flower, came onto Mrs Forster’s face.

  “Margaret,” she confided, “I don’t know.”

  “I know,” said Margaret, waving her heavy bare arm. “You’d have been signing papers. He’d have stripped you. He might have murdered you like that case last Sunday in the papers. A well-to-do woman like you. The common little rat. Bringing his fleas.”

  “He—was—not—common,” said Mrs Forster, sitting upright suddenly, and her hat fell over her nose, giving her
an appearance of dashing distinction.

  “He was off a ship,” said Margaret.

  “He was an officer.”

  “He said he was an officer,” said Margaret, struggling with her corsets.

  Mrs Forster got down from her stool and held with one hand to the bar. She laughed quietly.

  “He—” she began.

  “What?” said Margaret.

  “I shan’t tell you,” said Mrs Forster. “Come here.”

  Margaret leaned towards her.

  “No, come here, stand here,” said Mrs Forster.

  Margaret stood up, also holding to the bar, and Mrs Forster put her hands to Margaret’s neck and pulled her head down and began to laugh in Margaret’s ear. She was whispering.

  “What?” shouted Margaret. “I can’t hear. What is it?”

  Mrs Forster laughed with a roar in Margaret’s ear.

  “He—he—was a man, Margaret,” she whispered. She pushed her away.

  “You know what I mean, Margaret,” she said in a stern clear voice. “You do, don’t you? Come here again, I’ll tell you.”

  “I heard you.”

  “No, come here again, closer. I’ll tell you. Where are you?”

  Mrs Forster whispered again and then drew back.

  “A man,” she said boldly.

  “And you’re a woman, Jill.”

  “A man!” said Mrs Forster. “Everything, Margaret. You know—everything. But not with a belt. I won’t be struck.” Mrs Forster reached for her glass.

  “Vive la France!” she said, holding up her glass, drank, and banged it down. “Well, I threw him out.”

  A lament broke from Margaret. She had suddenly remembered one of her husbands. She had had two.

  “He went off to his work and I was waiting for him at six. He didn’t come back. I’d no money in the house, that was seventeen years ago, and Joyce was two, and he never even wrote. I went through his pockets and gave his coats a shake, wedding rings poured out of them. What do you get for it? Your own daughter won’t speak to you, ashamed to bring her friends to the house. ‘You’re always drunk,’ she says. To her own mother. Drunk!” said Margaret. “I might have one or perhaps two. What does a girl like that know?”

  With a soft, quick crumpling, a soft thump and a long sigh, Mrs Forster went to the floor and full-length lay there with a beautiful smile on her face, and a fierce noise of pleasure came from her white face. Her hat rolled off, her bag fell down, open, and spilling with a loud noise.

  “Eh,” said Frederick, coming round from behind the counter.

  “Passed out again. Get her up, get her up quick,” said Margaret. “Her bag, her money.

  “Lift her on the side,” she said. “I will take her legs.”

  They carried Mrs Forster to the broken leather settee and laid her down there. “Here’s her bag,” Margaret wrangled. “It’s all there.”

  “And the one in your hand,” said Frederick, looking at the pound note in Margaret’s hand.

  And then the crowd came in: Mrs Klebs, Mrs Sinclair, Mr Baum, the one they called Pudding, who had fallen down the area at Christmas, and a lot more.

  “What’s this?” they said. “Not again? Frederick, what’s this?”

  “They came in here,” Frederick said in a temper. “Ladies, talking about love.”

  (1982)

  WHEN MY GIRL COMES HOME

  She was kissing them all, hugging them, her arms bare in her summer dress, laughing and taking in a big draught of breath after every kiss, nearly knocking old Mrs Draper off her feet, almost wrestling with Mrs Fulmino, who was large and tall. Then Hilda broke off to give another foreign-sounding laugh and plunged at Jack Draper (“the baby”) and his wife, at Mr Fulmino, who cried out “What again?” and at Constance who did not like emotion; and after every kiss, Hilda drew back, getting her breath and making this sound like “Hah!”

  “Who is this?” she said, looking at me.

  “Harry Fraser,” Mr Fulmino said. “You remember Harry?”

  “You worked at the grocer’s,” she said. “I remember you.”

  “No,” I said, “that was my brother.”

  “This is the little one,” said Mrs Fulmino.

  “Who won the scholarship,” said Constance.

  “We couldn’t have done anything without him,” said Mr Fulmino, expanding with extravagance as he always did about everything. “He wrote to the War Office, the Red Cross, the Prisoners of War, the American Government, all the letters. He’s going to be our Head Librarian.”

  Mr Fulmino loved whatever had not happened yet. His forecasts were always wrong. I left the library years ago and never fulfilled the future he had planned for me. Obviously Hilda did not remember me. Thirteen years before, when she married Mr Singh and left home, I was no more than a boy.

  “Well, I’ll kiss him too,” she said. “And another for your brother.”

  That was the first thing to happen, the first of many signs of how her life had had no contact with ourselves.

  “He was killed in the war, dear,” said Mrs Fulmino.

  “She couldn’t know,” said Constance.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hilda.

  We all stood silent, and Hilda turned to hold on to her mother, little Mrs Johnson, whose face was coquettish with tears and who came only up to Hilda’s shoulder. The old lady was bewildered. She was trembling as though she were going to shake to pieces like a tree in the autumn. Hilda stood still, touching her tinted brown hair which was done in a tight high style and still unloosened, despite all the hugs and kissings. Her arms looked as dry as sand, her breasts were full in her green, flowered dress and she was gazing over our heads now from large yellow eyes which had almost closed into two blind, blissful curving lines. Her eyebrows seemed to be lacquered. How Oriental she looked on that first day! She was looking above our heads at old Mrs Draper’s shabby room and going over the odd things she remembered, and while she stood like that, the women were studying her clothes. A boy’s memory is all wrong. Naturally, when I was a boy I had thought of her as tall. She was really short. But I did remember her bold nose—it was like her mother’s and old Mrs Draper’s; those two were sisters. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known her. And that is what Mr Fulmino said when we were all silent and incredulous again. We had Hilda back. Not just “back” either, but “back from the dead,” reborn.

  “She was in the last coach of the train, wasn’t she, Mother?” Mr Fulmino said to Mrs Johnson. He called her “mother” for the occasion, celebrating her joy.

  “Yes,” said Mrs Johnson. “Yes.” Her voice scraped and trembled.

  “In the last coach, next the van. We went right up the platform, we thought we’d missed her, didn’t we? She was,” he exclaimed with acquisitive pride, “in the First Class.”

  “Like you missed me coming from Penzance,” said Mrs Fulmino swelling powerfully and going that thundery violet colour which old wrongs gave her.

  “Posh!” said Hilda. And we all smiled in a sickly way.

  “Don’t you ever do it again, my girl! Don’t you ever do it again,” said her mother, old Mrs Johnson, clinging to her daughter’s arm and shaking it as if it were a bellrope.

  “I was keeping an eye on my luggage,” Hilda laughed.

  Ah! That was a point! There was not only Hilda, there was her luggage. Some of it was in the room, but the bigger things were outside on the landing, piled up, looking very new, with the fantastic labels of hotels in Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York on it, and a beautiful jewel box in white leather on top like a crown. Old Mrs Draper did not like the luggage being outside the room in case it was in the way of the people upstairs. Constance went out and fetched the jewel box in. We had all seen it. We were as astonished by all these cases as we were by Hilda herself. After thirteen years, six of them war, we recognised that the poor ruined woman we had prepared for had not arrived. She shone with money. Later on, one after the other of us, except old Mrs Draper who could not walk far, went out a
nd looked at the luggage and came back to study Hilda in a new way.

  We had all had a shock. She had been nearly two years coming home from Tokyo. Before that there was the occupation, before that the war itself. Before that there were the years in Bombay and Singapore, when she was married to an Indian they always called Mr Singh. All those years were lost to us. None of us had been to India. What happened there to Mr Singh? We knew he had died—but how? Even if we had known, we couldn’t have imagined it. None of us had been to Singapore, none of us to Japan. People from streets like Hincham Street do go to such places—it is not past belief. Knock on the doors of half the houses in London and you will find people with relations all over the world—but none of us had. Mention these places to us, we look at our grey skies and see boiling sun. Our one certainty about Hilda was what, in fact, the newspaper said the next day, with her photograph and the headline: A Mother’s Faith. Four Years in Japanese Torture Camp. London Girl’s Ordeal. Hilda was a terrible item of news, a gash in our lives, and we looked for the signs of it on her body, in the way she stood, in the lines on her face, as if we were expecting a scream from her mouth like the screams we were told Bill Williams gave out at night in his sleep, after he had been flown back home when the war ended. We had had to wait and wait for Hilda. At one time—there was a postcard from Hawaii—she was pinned like a butterfly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; soon after there was a letter from Tokyo saying she couldn’t get a passage. Confusing. She was travelling backwards. Letters from Tokyo were still coming after her letters from San Francisco.

  We were still standing, waiting for Constance to bring in the teapot for the tea was already laid. The trolley buses go down Hincham Street. It is a mere one hundred and fifty yards of a few little houses and a few little shops, which has a sudden charmed importance because the main road has petered out at our end by the Lord Nelson and an enormous public lavatory, and the trolley buses have to run down Hincham Street before picking up the main road again, after a sharp turn at the convent. Hincham Street is less a street than an interval, a disheartened connection. While we stood in one of those silences that follow excitement, a trolley bus came by and Hilda exclaimed: