The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  We had been waiting for Hilda; now, by a strange turn, we were waiting for Hilda’s Mr Gloster. We waited for a fortnight and it ran on into three weeks. George Hartman Gloster. I looked up the name on our cards at the library, but we had no books of his. I looked up one or two catalogues. Still nothing. It was not surprising. He was an American who was not published in this country. Constance came in and looked too.

  “It is one of those names the Americans don’t list,” she said. Constance smiled with the cool air of keeping a world of meaningful secrets on ice.

  “They don’t list everything,” she said.

  She brought Bill Williams with her. I don’t think he had ever been in a public library before, because his knowing manner went and he was overawed. He said to me:

  “Have you read all these books? Do you buy them secondhand? What’s this lot worth?”

  He was a man always on the look-out for a deal; it was typical of him that he had come with Constance in his firm’s light-green van. It was not like Constance to travel in that way. “Come on,” he said roughly.

  The weather was hot; we had the sun blinds down in the Library. We were in the middle of one of those brassy fortnights of the London summer when English life, as we usually know it, is at a standstill, and everyone changes. A new grinning healthy race with long red necks sticking out of open shirts and blouses appears, and the sun brings out the variety of faces and bodies. Constance might have been some trim nurse marching at the head of an official procession. People looked calm, happy and open. There was hardly ever a cloud in the sky, the slate roofs looked like steel with the sun’s rays hitting them, and the side streets were cool in sharp shadow. It was a pleasant time for walking, especially when the sky went whitish in the distances of the city in the evening and when the streets had a dry pleasant smell and the glass of millions of windows had a motionless but not excluding stare. Even a tailor working late above a closed shop looked pleased to be going on working, while everyone else was out, wearing out their clothes.

  Iris and I used to go to the park on some evenings and there every blade of grass had been wire-brushed by sunlight; the trees were heavy with still leaves and when darkness came they gathered into soft black walls and their edges were cut out against the nail varnish of the city’s night. During the day the park was crowded. All over the long sweeps of grass the couples were lying, their legs at careless angles, their bottoms restless as they turned to the horseplay of love in the open. Girls were leaning over the men rumpling their hair, men were tickling the girls’ chins with stalks of grass. Occasionally they would knock the wind out of each other with plunging kisses; and every now and then a girl would sit up and straighten her skirt at the waist, narrowing her eyes in a pretence of looking at some refining sight in the distance, until she was pulled down again and, keeping her knees together, was caught again. Lying down you smelt the grass and listened to the pleasant rumble of the distant traffic going round like a wheel that never stopped.

  I was glad to know the Fulminos and to go out with Iris. We had both been gayer before we met each other, but seriousness, glumness, a sadness came over us when we became friends—that eager sadness that begins with thoughts of love. We encouraged and discouraged these thoughts in each other yet were always hinting and the sight of so much love around us turned us naturally away from it to think about it privately the more. She was a beautifully formed girl as her mother must have once been, but slender. She had a wide laugh that shook the curls of her thick black hair. She was being trained at a typing school.

  One day when I was sitting in the park and Iris was lying beside me, we had a quarrel. I asked her if there was any news of Mr Gloster—for she heard everything. She had said there was none and I said, sucking a piece of grass:

  “That’s what I would like to do. Go round the world. Anywhere. America, Africa, China.”

  “A chance is a fine thing,” said Iris, day dreaming.

  “I could get a job,” I said.

  Iris sat up.

  “Leave the Library?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “If I stay there I won’t see anything.” I saw Iris’s face change and become very like her mother’s. Mrs Fulmino could make her face go larger and her mouth go very small. Iris did not answer. I went on talking. I asked her what she thought. She still did not answer.

  “Anything the matter?” She was sulking. Then she said, flashing at me:

  “You’re potty on that woman too. You all are. Dad is, Jack is; and look at Bill Williams. Round at Hincham Street every day. He’ll be having his breakfast there soon. Fascinated.”

  “He goes to see Constance.”

  “Have you seen Constance’s face?” she jeered. “Constance could kill her.”

  “She came to the Library.”

  “Ah,” she turned to me. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “She came in for a book, I told you. For Mr Gloster’s books. Bill Williams came with her.”

  Iris’s sulk changed into satisfaction at this piece of news.

  “Mother says if Constance’s going to marry a man like Mr Williams,” she said, “she’ll be a fool to let him out of her sight.”

  “I’ll believe in Mr Gloster when I see him,” Iris said. It was, of course, what we were all thinking. We made up our quarrel and I took Iris home. Mrs Fulmino was dressed up, just putting the key in the door of her house. Iris was astonished to see her mother had been out and asked where she had been.

  “Out,” said Mrs Fulmino. “Have I got to stay in and cook and clean for you all day?”

  Mrs Fulmino was even wearing gloves, as if she had been to church. And she was wearing a new pair of shoes. Iris went pale at the sight of them. Mrs Fulmino put her gloves down on the sitting-room table and said:

  “I’ve got a right to live, I suppose?”

  We were silenced.

  One thing we all agreed on while we waited for Mr Gloster was that Hilda had the money and knew how to spend it. The first time she asked the Fulminos and young Drapers to the cinema, Mrs Fulmino said to her husband:

  “You go. I’ve got one of my heads.”

  “Take Jack,” young Mrs Draper said. “I’ve got the children.”

  They were daring their husbands to go with her. But the second time, there was a party. Hilda took some of them down to Kew. She took old Mrs Johnson down to Southend—and who should they meet there but Bill Williams who was delivering some goods there, spoiling their day because old Mrs Johnson did not like his ways. And Hilda had given them all presents. And two or three nights a week she was out at the Lord Nelson.

  It was a good time. If anyone asked, “Have you heard from Mr Gloster yet?” Hilda answered that it was not time yet and, as a dig at Constance that we all admired, she said once: “He has business at the American Embassy.” And old Mrs Johnson held her head high and nodded.

  At the end of three weeks we became restless. We noticed old Mrs Johnson looked poorly. She said she was tired. Old Mrs Draper became morose. She had been taught to call Mr Gloster by his correct name, but now she relapsed.

  “Where is this Indian?” she uttered.

  And another day, she said, without explanation:

  “Three.”

  “Three what, Gran?”

  “There’ve been two, that’s enough.”

  No one liked this, but Mrs Johnson understood.

  “Mr Gloster’s very well, isn’t he, Hil? You heard from him yesterday?” she said.

  “I wasn’t shown the letter,” said old Mrs Draper. “We don’t want a third.”

  “We don’t,” said Mrs Fulmino. With her joining in “on Gran’s side,” the situation changed. Mrs Fulmino had a low voice and the sound of it often sank to the floor of any room she was in, travelling under chairs and tables, curling round your feet and filling the place from the bottom as if it were a cistern. Even when the trolley bus went by Mrs Fulmino’s low voice prevailed. It was an undermining voice, breaking up one’s uppermost thoughts
and stirring up what was underneath them. It stirred us all now. Yes, we wanted to say, indeed, we wanted to shout, where is this Mr Gloster, why hasn’t he come, did you invent him? He’s alive, we hope? Or is he also—as Gran suggests—dead?

  Even Mr Fulmino was worried.

  “Have you got his address?” he asked.

  “Yes, Uncle dear,” said Hilda. “He’ll be staying at the Savoy. He always does.”

  Mr Fulmino had not taken out his notebook for a long time but he did so now. He wrote down the name.

  “Has he made a reservation?” said Mr Fulmino. “I’ll find out if he’s booked.”

  “He hasn’t,” said Bill Williams. “I had a job down there and I asked. Didn’t I, Connie?”

  Mrs Fulmino went a very dark colour. She wished she had thought of doing this. Hilda was not offended, but a small smile clipped her lips as she glanced at Connie:

  “I asked Bill to do it,” she said.

  And then Hilda in that harsh lazy voice which she had always used for announcements: “If he doesn’t come by Wednesday you’ll have to speak for me at your factory, Mr Williams. I don’t know why he hasn’t come, but I can’t wait any more.”

  “Bill can’t get you a job. You have to register,” said Constance.

  “Yes, she’ll have to do that,” said Mr Fulmino.

  “I’ll fix it. Leave it to me,” said Bill Williams.

  “I expect,” said young Mrs Draper, “his business has kept him.” She was sorry for Hilda.

  “Perhaps he’s gone fishing,” said Jack Draper, laughing loudly in a kind way. No one joined in.

  “Fishing for orders,” said Bill Williams.

  Hilda shrugged her shoulders and then she made one of those remarks that Grandma Draper usually made—I suppose the gift really ran through the family.

  “Perhaps it was a case,” she said, “of ships that pass in the night.”

  “Oh no, dear,” said Mrs Johnson trembling, “not ships.” We went to the bus stop afterwards with the Fulminos and the young Drapers. Mrs Fulmino’s calm had gone. She marched out first, her temper rising.

  “Ships!” she said. “When you think of what we went through during the war. Did you hear her? Straight out?”

  “My brother Herbert’s wife was like that. She’s a widow. Take away the pension and they’ll work like the rest of us. I had to.”

  “Job! Work! I know what sort of work she’s been doing. Frank, walk ahead with Iris.”

  “Well,” said young Mrs Draper, “she won’t be able to go to work in those clothes and that’s a fact.”

  “All show,” said Mrs Fulmino triumphantly. “And I’ll tell you something else—she hasn’t a penny. She’s run through her poor mother’s money.”

  “Ay, I don’t doubt,” said young Mrs Draper, who had often worked out how much the old lady had saved.

  Mr Gloster did not come on Wednesday or on any other day, but Hilda did not get a job either, not at once. And old Mrs Johnson did not go to Monte Carlo. She died. This was the third, we understood, that old Mrs Draper had foreseen.

  Mrs Johnson died at half past eight in the morning just after Constance had gone off to school, the last day of the term, and before old Mrs Draper had got up. Hilda was in the kitchen wearing her blue Japanese wrap when she heard her mother’s loud shout, like a man selling papers, she said, and when Hilda rushed in her mother was sitting up in bed. She gripped Hilda with the ferocity of the dying, as if all the strength of her whole life had come back and she was going to throw her daughter to the ground. Then she died. In an hour she looked like a white leaf that has been found after a lifetime pressed between the pages of a book and as delicate as a saint. The death was not only a shock: from the grief that spread from it staining all of us, I trace the ugly events that followed. Only the frail figure of old Mrs Johnson, with her faith and her sly smile, had protected us from them until then, and when she went, all defence went with her.

  I need not describe her funeral—it was done by Bickersons: Mr Fulmino arranged it. But one thing astonished us: not only our families but the whole neighbourhood was affected by the death of this woman who, in our carelessness, we thought could hardly be known to anyone. She had lived there all her life, of course, but people come and go in London, only a sluggish residue stay still; and I believe it was just because a large number of passing people knew just a little about her, because she was a fragment in their minds, that her death affected them. They recognised that they themselves were not people but fragments. People remembered her going into shops now and then, or going down to the bus stop, passing down a street. They remembered the bag of American cloth she used to carry containing her sewing—they spoke for a long time afterwards about this bag, more about it, indeed, than about herself.

  Bickersons is a few doors from the Lord Nelson, so that when the hearse stood there covered with flowers everyone noticed it, and although the old lady had not been in that public house for years since the death of her husband, all the customers came out to look. And they looked at Hilda sitting in her black in the car when the hearse moved slowly off and all who knew her story must have felt that the dream was burying the dreamer. Hilda’s face was dirty with grief and she did not turn her head to right or left as they drove off. I remember a small thing that happened when we were all together at old Mrs Draper’s, after we had got her back with difficulty up the stairs.

  “Bickersons did it very well,” said Mr Fulmino, seeking to distract the old lady who, swollen with sadness, was uncomfortable in her best clothes. “They organise everything so well. They gave me this.”

  He held up a small brass disc on a little chain. It was one of those identity discs people used to wear on their wrists in the war.

  “She had never taken it off,” he said. It swung feebly on its chain. Suddenly, with a sound like a shout Mr Fulmino broke into tears. His face caved in and he apologised: “It’s the feeling,” he said. “You have the feeling. You feel.” And he looked at us with panic, astonished by this discovery of an unknown self, spongy with tears, that had burst out and against whom he was helpless.

  Mrs Fulmino said gently:

  “I expect Hilda would like to have it.”

  “Yes, yes. It’s for her,” he said, drying his eyes and Hilda took it from him and carried it to her room. While she was there (and perhaps she was weeping too), Mr Fulmino looked out from his handkerchief and said, still sobbing:

  “I see that the luggage has gone.”

  None of us had noticed this and we looked at Constance who said in a whisper: “She is leaving us. She has found a room of her own.” That knocked us back. “Leaving!” we exclaimed. It told against Hilda for, although we talked of death being a release for the dead person we did not like to think of it as a release for the living; grief ought to hold people together and it seemed too brisk to have started a new life so soon. Constance alone looked pleased by this. We were whispering but stopped when we heard Hilda coming back.

  Black had changed her. It set off her figure and although crying had hardened her, the skin of her neck and her arms and the swell of her breasts seemed more living than they had before. She looked stronger in body perhaps because she was shaken in mind. She looked very real, very present, more alive than ourselves. She had not heard us whispering, but she said, to all of us, but particularly to Mr Fulmino:

  “I have found a room for myself. Constance spoke to Bill Williams for me, he’s good at getting things. He found me a place and he took the luggage round yesterday. I couldn’t sleep in that bed alone any more.”

  Her voice was shaky.

  “She didn’t take up much room. She was tiny and we managed. It was like sleeping with a little child.”

  Hilda smiled and laughed a little.

  “She even used to kick like a kid.”

  Ten minutes on the bus from Hincham Street and close to the centre of London is a dance hall called “The Temple Rooms.” It has two bands, a low gallery where you can sit and a soft
drink bar. Quite a few West Indians go there, mainly students. It is a respectable place; it closes at eleven and there is never any trouble. Iris and I went there once or twice. One evening we were surprised to see Constance and Bill Williams dancing there. Iris pointed to them. The rest of the people were jiving, but Bill Williams and Constance were dancing in the old-fashioned way.

  “Look at his feet!” Iris laughed.

  Bill Williams was paying no attention to Constance, but looking around the room over her head as he stumbled along. He was tall.

  “Fancy Auntie Constance!” said Iris. “She’s getting fed up because he won’t listen.”

  Constance Draper dancing! At her age! Thirty-eight!

  “It’s since the funeral,” said Mr Fulmino over our usual cup of tea. “She was fond of the old lady. It’s upset her.”

  Even I knew Mr Fulmino was wrong about this. The madness of Constance dated from the time Bill Williams had taken Hilda’s luggage round to her room and got her a job at the reception desk in the factory at Laxton. It dated from the time, a week later, when standing at old Mrs Draper’s early one evening, Constance had seen Hilda get out of Bill Williams’s van. He had given her a lift home. It dated from words that passed between Hilda and Constance soon afterwards. Hilda said Williams hung around for her at the factory and wanted her to go to a dance. She did not want to go, she said—and here came the fatal sentences—both of her husbands had been educated men. Constance kept her temper but said coldly:

  “Bill Williams is politically educated.”

  Hilda had her vacant look.

  “Not his hands aren’t,” she said.

  The next thing, Constance—who hardly went into a pub in her life—was in the Lord Nelson night after night, playing bar billiards with Bill Williams. She never let him out of her sight. She came out of school and instead of going home, marking papers and getting a meal for herself and old Mrs Draper, she took the bus out to the factory and waited for him to come out. Sometimes he had left on some job by the time she got there and she came home, beside herself, questioning everybody. It had been her habit to come twice a week to change her library books. Now she did not come. She stopped reading. At The Temple Rooms, when Iris and I saw her, she sat out holding hands with Bill Williams and rubbing her head into his shoulder, her eyes watching him the whole time. We went to speak to them and Constance asked: