“He’s a writer,” she said. “He’s going to write a book about me. He’s very interested in me …”
Mrs Johnson nodded.
“He’s coming to fetch us, Mum and me, and take us to France to write this book. He’s going to write my life.”
Her life! Here was a woman who had, on top of everything else, a life.
“Coming here?” said Mrs Fulmino with a grinding look at old Mrs Draper and then at Constance, trying to catch their eyes and failing; in despair she looked at the shabby room, to see what must be put straight, or needed cleaning or painting. Nothing had been done to it for years for Constance, teaching at her school all day, and very clean in her person, let things go in the house and young Mrs Draper said old Mrs Draper smelled. All the command in Mrs Fulmino’s face collapsed as rapidly, on her own, she looked at the carpets, the lino, the curtains.
“What’s he putting in this book?” said young Mrs Draper cannily.
“Yes,” said Jack Draper, backing up his wife.
“What I tell him,” Hilda said.
“What she tells him,” said old Mrs Johnson sparkling. Constance looked thoughtfully at Hilda.
“Is it a biography?” Constance asked coldly. There were times when we respected Constance and forgot to murmur “Go back to Russia” every time she spoke. I knew what a biography was and so did Mr Fulmino, but no one else did.
“It’s going to be made into a film,” Hilda replied.
“A film,” cried Iris.
Constance gleamed.
“You watch for American propaganda,” said Constance. There you are, you see: Constance was back on it!
“Oh, it’s about me,” said Hilda. “My experience.”
“Very interesting,” said Mr Fulmino, preparing to take over. “A Hollywood production, I expect. Publication first and then they go into production.”
He spread his legs.
None of us had believed, or even understood what we heard, but we looked with gratitude to Mr Fulmino for making the world steady again.
Jack Draper’s eyes filled with tears because a question was working in him but he could not get it out.
“Will you be in this film?” asked Iris.
“I’ll wait till he’s written it,” said Hilda with that lack of interest we had often noticed in her, after she had made some dramatic statement.
Mrs Fulmino breathed out heavily with relief and after that her body seemed to become larger. She touched her hair at the back and straightened her dress, as if preparing to offer herself for the part. She said indeed:
“I used to act at school.”
“She’s still good at it,” said Mr Fulmino with daring to Jack Draper who always appreciated Mr Fulmino, but seeing the danger of the moment hugged himself and scratched excitedly under both armpits, laughing.
“You shouldn’t have let this Mr Gloster go,” said Constance.
Hilda was startled by this remark and looked lost. Then she shrugged her shoulders and gave a low laugh, as if to herself.
Mr Fulmino’s joke had eased our bewilderment. Hilda had been our dream but now she was home she changed as fast as dreams change. She was now, as we looked at her, far more remote to us than she had been all the years when she was away. The idea was so far beyond us. It was like some story of a bomb explosion or an elopement or a picture of bathing girls one sees in the newspapers—unreal and, in a way, insulting to being alive in the ordinary daily sense of the word. Or, she was like a picture that one sees in an art gallery, that makes you feel sad because it is painted.
After tea when Hilda took her mother to the lavatory, Constance beckoned to Iris and let her peep into the room Hilda was sharing, and young Mrs Draper, not to be kept out of things, followed. They were back in half a minute:
“Six evening dresses,” Iris said to me.
“She said it was Mr Faulkner who gave her the luggage, not this one who was going to get her into pictures,” said Mrs Fulmino.
“Mr Gloster, you mean,” said Constance.
Young Mrs Draper was watching the door, listening for Hilda’s return.
“Ssh,” she said, at the sound of footsteps on the stairs and, to look at us, the men on one side of the room and the women on the other, silent, standing at attention, facing each other, we looked like soldiers.
“Oh,” said Constance. The steps we had heard were not Hilda’s. It was Bill Williams who came in.
“Good afternoon one and all,” he said. The words came from the corner of a mouth that had slipped down at one side. Constance drew herself up, her eyes softened. She had exact, small, round breasts. Looking around, he said to Constance: “Where is she?”
Constance lowered her head when she spoke to him, though she held it up shining, admiring him, when he spoke to us, as if she were displaying him to us.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” she said. “She’s going into films.”
“I’ll take a seat in the two and fourpennies,” said Bill Williams and he sat down at his ease and lit a cigarette.
Bill Williams was a very tall, sick-faced man who stooped his shoulders as if he were used to ducking under doors. His dry black hair, not oiled like Mr Fulmino’s, bushed over his forehead and he had the shoulders, arms and hands of a lorry driver. In fact, he drove a light van for a textile firm. His hazel eyes were always watching and wandering and we used to say he looked as though he was going to snaffle something but that may simply have been due to the restlessness of a man with a poor stomach. Laziness, cunning and aches and pains were suggested by him. He was a man taking his time. His eyebrows grew thick and the way one brow was raised, combined with the side-slip of his mouth, made him look like some shrewd man about to pick up a faulty rifle, hit the bull’s eye five times running at a fair and moan afterwards. He glanced a good deal at Constance. He was afraid of his manners before her, we thought, because he was a rough type.
“Put it here,” said Constance, bringing him an ashtray. That was what he was waiting for, for he did not look at her again.
Bill Williams brought discomfort with him whenever he came on Sundays and we were always happier when he failed to come. If there was anything private to say we tried to get it over before he came. How a woman like Constance, a true, clean, settled schoolteacher who even spoke in the clear, practical and superior manner of someone used to the voice of reason, who kept her nails so beautifully, could have taken up with him, baffled us. He was very often at Mrs Draper’s in the week, eating with them and Constance, who was thirty-five, quarrelled like a girl when she was getting things ready for him. Mrs Fulmino could not bear the way he ate, with his elbows out and his face close to the plate. The only good thing about the affair was that, for once, Constance was overruled.
“Listen to her,” Bill Williams would say with a nod of his head. “A rank red Communist. Tell us about Holy Russia, Connie.”
“Constance is my correct name, not Connie,” she said.
Their bickering made us die. But we respected Constance even when she was a trial. She had been twice to Russia before the war and though we argued violently with her, especially Mr Fulmino who tried to take over Russia, and populate it with explanations, we always boasted to other people that she’d been there.
“On delegations,” Mr Fulmino would say.
But we could not boast that she had taken up with Bill Williams. He had been a hero when he came back from Japan, but he had never kept a job since, he was rough and his lazy zigzagging habits in his work made even Constance impatient. He had for her the fascination a teacher feels for a bad pupil. Lately their love affair had been going better because he was working outside London and sometimes he worked at week-ends; this added to the sense of something vague and secretive in his life that had attracted Constance. For there was much that was secret in her or so she liked to hint—it was political. Again, it was the secretiveness of those who like power; she was the schoolmistress who has the threat of inside knowledge locked up in the cupboard. Once
Mrs Fulmino went purple and said to her husband—who told me, he always told me such things—that she believed Constance had lately started sleeping with Bill Williams. That was because Constance had once said to her:
“Bill and I are individuals.”
Mrs Fulmino had a row with Iris after this and stopped me seeing her for a month.
Hilda came back into the room alone. Bill Williams let his mouth slip sideways and spoke a strange word to her, saying jauntily to us: “That’s Japanese.”
Hilda wasn’t surprised. She replied with a whole sentence in Japanese.
“That means”—but Bill Williams was beaten, but he passed it off. “Well, I’d best not tell them what it means,” he said.
“East meets East,” Mr Fulmino said.
“It means,” said Hilda, “you were on the other side of the fence but now the gate is open.”
Bill Williams studied her inch by inch. He scratched his head.
“Straight?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Stone me, it was bloody closed when we were there,” said Bill Williams offensively, but then said: “They fed her well, didn’t they, Constance? Sit down.” Hilda sat down beside him.
“Connie!” he called. “Seen these? Just the job, eh?” He was nodding at Hilda’s stockings. Nylons. “Now,” he said to Hilda, looking closely at her. “Where were you? It got a bit rough at the finish, didn’t it?”
Jack Draper came close to them to hear, hoping that Hilda would say something about what moved him the most: the enemy. Bill Williams gave him a wink and Hilda saw it. She looked placidly at Bill Williams, considering his face, his neck, his shoulders and his hands that were resting on his knees.
“I was okey doke,” she said.
Bill Williams dropped his mouth open and waggled the top of his tongue in a back tooth in his knowing manner. To our astonishment Hilda opened her mouth and gave a neat twist to her tongue in her cheek in the same way.
Bill Williams slapped his knee and to cover his defeat in this little duel, said to all of us:
“This little girl’s got yellow eyes.”
All the colour had gone from Connie’s face as she watched the meeting.
“They say you’re going to be in pictures,” said Bill Williams.
And then we had Hilda’s story over again. Constance asked what papers Mr Gloster wrote for.
“I don’t know. A big paper,” said Hilda.
“You ought to find out,” Constance said. “I’ll find out.”
“Um,” said Hilda with a nod of not being interested.
“I could give him some of my experience,” said Bill Williams. “Couldn’t I, Connie? Things I’ve told you—you could write a ruddy book.”
He looked with challenge at Hilda. He was a rival.
“Gawd!” he exclaimed. “The things.”
We heard it again, how he was captured, where his battery was, the long march, Sergeant Harris who was hanged, Corporal Rowley bayoneted and left to die in the sun, the starvation, the work on the road that killed half of them. But there was one difference between this story and the ones he had told before. The sight of Hilda altered it.
“You had to get round the guards,” he said with a wink. “If you used your loaf a bit, eh? Scrounge around, do a bit of trade. One or two had Japanese girls. Corporal Jones went back afterwards trying to trace his, wanted to marry her.”
Hilda listened and talked about places she had lived in, how she had worked in a factory.
“That’s it,” said Bill Williams, “you had to know your way around and talk a bit of the lingo.”
Jack Draper looked with affection and wonder at the talk, lowering his eyes if her eyes caught his. Every word entered him. The heat! she said. The rain. The flowers. The telegraph poles! Jack nodded.
“They got telegraph poles,” he nodded to us.
You sleep on the floor. Shinji’s mother, she mentioned. She could have skinned her. Jack, brought up among so many women, lost interest, but it revived when she talked of Shinji. You could see him mouthing his early marvelling sentence: “She married a Nip,” but not saying it. She was confirming something he had often thought of in Normandy; the men on the other side were married too. A bloody marvel. Why hadn’t she brought him home? He would have had a friend.
“Who looked after the garden when Shinji was called up?” he asked. “Were they goldfish, ordinary goldfish, in the pond?”
Young Mrs Draper shook her head.
“Eh,” she said. “If he’d a known he’d have come over to change the water. Next time we have a war you just let him know.”
Mrs Fulmino who was throbbing like a volcano said:
“We better all go next time by the sound of it.”
At the end, Bill Williams said:
“I suppose you’re going to be staying here.”
“No,” said Constance quickly, “she isn’t. She’s going to France. When is it, Hilda? When is Mr Gloster coming?”
“Next week, I don’t know,” said Hilda.
“You shouldn’t have let him go!” laughed Bill Williams. “Those French girls will get him in Paree.”
“That is what I have been saying,” said Constance. “He gave her that brooch.”
“Oh ah! It’s the stockings I’m looking at,” said Bill Williams. “How did you get all that stuff through the customs? Twenty cases, Connie told me.”
“Twelve,” said Hilda.
Bill Williams did not move her at all. Presently she got up and started clearing away the tea things. I will say this for her, she didn’t let herself be waited on.
Iris, Mr and Mrs Fulmino and the young Drapers and their children and myself left Hincham Street together.
“You walk in front with the children, Iris,” said Mrs Fulmino. Then they turned on me. What was this letter, they wanted to know. Anyone would have thought by their questions that I ought to have opened it and read it.
“I just posted it at the corner.” I pointed to the pillar box. Mrs Fulmino stopped to look at the pillar box and I believe was turning over in her mind the possibility of getting inside it. Then she turned on her husband and said with contemptuous suspicion: “Monte Carlo!” As if he had worked the whole thing in order to go there himself.
“Two dead,” she added in her mother’s voice, the voice of one who would have been more than satisfied with the death of one.
“Not having a pension hasn’t hurt her,” said Mrs Draper.
“Not a tear,” said Mrs Fulmino.
Jack and Mr Fulmino glanced at each other. It was a glance of surreptitious gratitude: tears—they had escaped that.
Mr Fulmino said: “The Japanese don’t cry.”
Mrs Fulmino stepped out, a bad sign; her temper was rising.
“Who was the letter to?” she asked me. “Was the name Gloster?”
“I didn’t look,” I said.
Mrs Fulmino looked at her husband and me and rolled her eyes. Another of our blunders!
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
But Mrs Fulmino did believe it. We all believed and disbelieved everything at once.
I said I would come to the report in the News. It was in thick lettering like mourning, with Hilda’s picture: A Mother’s Faith. Four Years in Jap Torture Camp. London Girl’s Ordeal. And then an account of how Hilda had starved and suffered and been brain-washed by questioners. Even Hilda was awed when she read it, feeling herself drain away, perhaps, and being replaced by this fantasy; and for the rest of us, we had become used to living in a period when events reduced us to beings so trivial that we had no strong feeling of our own existence in relation to the world around us. We had been bashed first one way, then the other, by propaganda, until we were indifferent. At one time people like my parents or old Mrs Draper could at least trust the sky and feel that it was certain and before it they could have at least the importance of being something in the eye of heaven.
Constance read the newspaper report and it fulfilled
her.
“Propaganda,” she said. “Press lies.”
“All lies,” Mr Fulmino agreed with wonder. The notion that the untrue was as effective as the true opened to him vast areas to his powers. It was like a temptation.
It did not occur to us that we might be in a difficult situation in the neighbourhood when the truth came out, until we heard Constance and Bill Williams had gone over to the Lord Nelson with the paper and Constance had said, “You can’t believe a word you read in the capitalist press.”
Alfred Levy, the proprietor and a strong Tory, agreed with her. But was Hilda criticised for marrying an enemy? The hatred of the Japanese was strong at this time. She was not. Constance may not have had the best motives for spreading the news, we said, but it did no harm at all. That habit of double vision affected every one publicly. We lived in the true and the untrue, comfortably and without trouble. People picked up the paper, looked at her picture and said, “That’s a shocking thing. A British subject,” and even when they knew, even from Hilda’s own lips the true story, they said, congratulating themselves on their cunning, “The papers make it all up.”
Of course, we were all in that stage where the forces of life, the desire to live, were coming back, and although it was not yet openly expressed, we felt that curiosity about the enemy that ex-soldiers like Jack Draper felt when he wondered if some Japanese or some Germans were as fed up as he was on Saturdays by missing a day’s fishing. When people shook Hilda’s hand they felt they gave her life. I do not say there were not one or two mutterings afterwards, for people always went off from the Lord Nelson when it closed in a state of moralisation: beer must talk; the louts singing and the couples saying this or that “wasn’t right.” But this gossip came to nothing because, sooner or later, it came to a closed door in everybody’s conscience. There were the men who had shot off trigger fingers, who had got false medical certificates, deserters, ration frauds, black marketeers, the pilferers of army stores. And the women said a woman is right to stand by her husband and, looking at Hilda’s fine clothes, pointed out to their husbands that that kind of loyalty was sometimes rewarded; indeed, Mrs Fulmino asserted, by law.
The Pritchett Century Page 39
