The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Is Hilda here tonight?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “She’s a whore,” said Constance in a loud voice. We thought she was drunk.

  It was a funny thing, Mr Fulmino said to me, to call a woman a whore. He spoke as one opposed to funny things.

  “If they’d listened to me,” he said, “I could have stopped all this trouble. I offered to get her a job in the council office but,” he rolled his eyes, “Mrs F. wouldn’t have it and while we were arguing about it, Bill Williams acts double quick. It’s all because this Mr Gloster didn’t turn up.”

  Mr Fulmino spoke wistfully. He was, he conveyed, in the middle of a family battle; indeed, he had a genuine black eye the day we talked about this. Mrs Fulmino’s emotions were in her arms.

  This was a bad period for Mr Fulmino because he had committed a folly. He had chosen this moment to make a personal triumph. He had got himself promoted to a much better job at the Council Offices and one entitling him to a pension. He had become a genuine official. To have promoted a man who had the folly to bring home a rich whore with two names, so causing the robbery and death of her mother, and to have let her break Constance’s heart, was, in Mrs Fulmino’s words, a crime. Naturally, Mr Fulmino regarded his mistakes as mere errors of routine and even part of his training for his new position.

  “Oh well,” he said when we finished our tea and got up to pay the bill, “it’s the British taxpayer that pays.” He was heading for politics. I have heard it said, years later, that if he had had a better start in life he would have gone to the top of the administration. It is a tragic calling.

  If Hilda was sinister to Constance and Mrs Fulmino, she made a different impression on young Mrs Draper. To call a woman a whore was neither here nor there to her. Up north where she came from people were saying that sort of thing all day long as they scrubbed floors or cleaned windows or did the washing. The word gave them energy and made things come up cleaner and whiter. Good money was earned hard; easy money went easy. To young Mrs Draper Hilda seemed “a bit simple,” but she had gone to work, she earned her living. Cut off from the rest of the Draper family, Hilda made friends with this couple. Hilda went with them on Saturday to the Zoo with the children. They were looking at a pair of monkeys. One of them was dozing and its companion was awake, pestering and annoying it. The children laughed. But when they moved on to another cage, Hilda said, sulkily:

  “That’s one thing. Bill Williams won’t be here. He pesters me all the time.”

  “He won’t if you don’t let him,” said young Mrs Draper.

  “I’m going to give my notice if he doesn’t stop,” said Hilda. She hunched a shoulder and looked around at the animals.

  “I can’t understand a girl like Constance taking up with him. He’s not on her level. And he’s mean. He doesn’t give her anything. I asked if he gave her that clip, but she said it was Gran’s. Well, if a man doesn’t give you anything he doesn’t value you. I mean she’s a well-read girl.”

  “There’s more ways than one of being stupid,” said young Mrs Draper.

  “I wonder she doesn’t see,” said Hilda. “He’s not delivering for the firm. When he’s got the van out, he’s doing something on the side. When I came home with him there was stuff at the back. And he keeps on asking how much things cost. He offered to sell my bracelet.”

  “You’d get a better price in a shop if you’re in need,” said young Mrs Draper.

  “She’d better not be with him if he gets stopped on the road,” said Jack, joining in. “You wouldn’t sell that. Your husband gave it you.”

  “No. Mr Faulkner,” said Hilda, pulling out her arm and admiring it.

  Jack was silent and disappointed; then he cheered up.

  “You ought to have married that earl you were always talking about when you were a girl. Do you remember?” he said.

  “Earls—they’re a lazy lot,” said young Mrs Draper.

  “I did, Jack,” said Hilda. “They were as good as earls, both of them.”

  And to young Mrs Draper she said: “They wouldn’t let another man look at me. I felt like a woman with both of them.”

  “I’ve nowt against that if you’ve got the time,” said young Mrs Draper. She saw that Hilda was glum.

  “Let’s go back and look at the giraffes. Perhaps Mr Faulkner will come for you now Mr Gloster hasn’t,” young Mrs Draper said.

  “They were friends,” said Hilda.

  “Oh, they knew each other!” said young Mrs Draper. “I thought you just … met them …”

  “No, I didn’t meet them together, but they were friends.”

  “Yes. Jack had a friend, didn’t you?” said Mrs Draper, remembering.

  “That’s right,” said Jack. He winked at Hilda. “Neck and neck, it was.” And then he laughed outright.

  “I remember something about Bill Williams. He came out with us one Saturday and you should have seen his face when we threw the fish back in the water.”

  “We always throw them back,” said young Mrs Draper taking her husband’s arm, proudly.

  “Wanted to sell them or something. Black market perch!”

  “He thinks I’ve got dollars,” said Hilda.

  “No, fancy that, Jack—Mr Gloster and Mr Faulkner being friends. Well, that’s nice.” And she looked sentimentally at Hilda.

  “She’s brooding,” young Mrs Draper said to Mrs Fulmino after this visit to the Zoo. “She won’t say anything.” Mrs Fulmino said she had better not or she might say something. “She knows what I think. I never thought much of Bill Williams, but he served his country. She didn’t.”

  “She earns her living,” said Mrs Draper.

  “Like we all do,” said Mrs Fulmino. “And it’s not men, men, men all day long with you and me.”

  “One’s enough,” said young Mrs Draper, “with two children round your feet.”

  “She doesn’t come near me,” said Mrs Fulmino.

  “No,” Mr Fulmino said sadly, “after all we’ve done.”

  They used to laugh at me when I went dancing with Iris at The Temple Rooms. We had not been there for more than a month and Iris said: “He can’t stop staring at the band.”

  She was right. The beams of the spotlights put red, green, violet and orange tents on the hundreds of dancers. It was like the Arabian Nights. When we got there, Ted Coster’s band was already at it like cats on dustbins and tearing their guts out. The pianist had a very thin neck and kept wagging his head as if he were ga-ga; if his head had fallen off he would have caught it in one of his crazy hands and popped it on again without losing a note; the trumpet player had thick eyebrows that went higher and higher as he tried and failed to burst; the drummers looked doped; the saxophone went at it like a man in bed with a girl who had purposely left the door open. I remember them all, especially the thin-lipped man, very white-faced with the double bass drawing his bow at knee level, to and fro, slowly, sinful. They all whispered, nodded and rocked together, telling dirty stories until bang, bang, bang, the dancers went faster and faster, the row hit the ceiling or died out with the wheeze of a balloon. I was entranced.

  “Don’t look as though you’re going to kill someone,” Iris said.

  That shows how wrong people are. I was full of love and wanted to cry.

  After four dances I went off to the soft drink bar and there the first person I saw was Bill Williams. He was wearing a plum-coloured suit and a red and silver tie and he stood, with his dark hair dusty-looking and sprouting forward as if he had just got out of bed and was ducking his head on the way to the bathroom.

  “All the family here?” he asked, looking all round.

  “No,” I said. “Just Iris and me.”

  He went on looking around him.

  “I thought you only came Saturdays,” he said suspiciously. He had a couple of friends with him, two men who became restless on their feet, as if they were dancing, when I came up.

  “Oh,” said Bill Williams. Then he said, “Nic
ky pokey doda—that’s Japanese, pal, for keep your mouth shut. Anyone say anything, you never see me. I’m at Laxton, get me? Bill Williams? He’s on night shift. You must be barmy. OK? Seeing you,” he said. “No sign of Constance.”

  And he walked off. His new friends went a step or two after him, dancing on their pointed shoes and then stopped. They twizzled round, tapping their feet, looking all round the room until he had got to the carpeted stairs at the end of the hall. I got my squash and when I turned round, the two men had gone too.

  But before Bill Williams had got to the top of the stairs he turned round to look at the dancers in one corner. There was Hilda. She was dancing with a young West Indian. When I got back to our table she was very near.

  I have said that Hilda’s face was eventless. It was now in a tranced state, looking from side to side, to the floor, in the quick turns of the dance, swinging round, stepping back, stepping forward. The West Indian had a long jacket on. His knees were often nearly bent double as though he were going to do some trick of crawling towards her, then he recovered himself and turned his back as if he had never met her and was dancing with someone else. If Hilda’s face was eventless, it was the event itself, it was the dance.

  She saw us when the dance was over and came to our table breathlessly. She was astonished to see us. To me she said, “And fancy you!” She did not laugh or even smile when she looked at me. I don’t know how to describe her look. It was dead. It had no expression. It had nothing. Or rather, by the smallest twitch of a muscle, it became nothing. Her face had the nakedness of a body. She saw that I was deaf to what Iris was saying. Then she smiled and in doing that, she covered herself.

  “I am with friends over there”—we could not tell who the friends were—then she leaned to us and whispered:

  “Bill Williams is here too.”

  Iris exclaimed.

  “He’s watching me,” Hilda said.

  “I saw him,” I said. “He’s gone.”

  Hilda stood up frowning.

  “Are you sure? Did you see him? How long ago?”

  I said it was about five minutes before.

  She stood as I remember her standing in Mrs Draper’s room on the first day when she arrived and was kissing everyone. It was a peculiar stance because she usually stood so passively; a stance of action and, I now saw, a stance of plain fright. One leg was planted forward and bent at the knee like a runner at the start and one arm was raised and bent at the elbow, the elbow pushed out beyond her body. Her mouth was open and her deep-set yellow eyes seemed to darken and look tired.

  “He was with some friends,” I said and, looking back at the bar. “They’ve gone now.”

  “Hah!” It was the sound of a gasp of breath. Then suddenly the fright went and she shrugged her shoulders and talked and laughed to all of us. Soon she went over to her friends, the coloured man and a white couple; she must have got some money or the ticket for her handbag from one of them, for presently we saw her walking quickly to the cloakroom.

  Iris went on dancing. We must have stayed another half an hour and when we were leaving we were surprised to see Hilda waiting in the foyer. She said to me:

  “His car has gone.”

  “Whose?”

  “Bill Williams’s car.”

  “Has he got a car?” Iris said.

  “Oh, it’s not his,” said Hilda. “It’s gone. That’s something. Will you take me home? I don’t want to go alone. They followed me here.”

  She looked at all of us. She was frightened.

  I said, “Iris and I will take you on our way.”

  “Don’t make me late,” said Iris crossly. “You know what Mum is.” I promised. “Did you come with him?”

  “No, with someone else,” Hilda said, looking nervously at the glass swing door. “Are you sure his friends went too? What did they look like?”

  I tried to describe them.

  “I’ve seen the short one,” she said, frowning, “somewhere.”

  It was only a quarter of an hour’s ride at that hour of the night. We walked out of The Temple Rooms and across the main road to the bus stop and waited under the lights that made our faces corpse-like. I have always liked the hard and sequinned sheen of London streets at night, their empty dockyard look. The cars come down them like rats. The red trolley bus came up at last and when we got in Hilda sat between us. The bus-load of people stared at her and I am not surprised. I have said what she looked like—the hair built up high, her bright green wrap and red dress. I don’t know how you would describe such clothes. But the people were not staring at her clothes. They were staring at her eyebrows. I said before that her face was an extension of her nudity and I say it again. Those eyebrows of hers were painted and looked like the only things she had on—they were like a pair of beetles with turned up tails that had settled on her forehead. People laughed under their hands and two or three youths at the front of the bus turned round and guffawed and jostled and whistled; but Hilda, remember, was not a girl of sixteen gone silly, but a woman, hard rather than soft in the face, and the effect was one of exposure, just as a mask has the effect of exposing.

  We did not talk but when the trolley arm thumped two or three times at a street junction, Hilda said with a sigh, “Bump! Bump! Bump!” She was thinking of her childhood in old Mrs Draper’s room at Hincham Street. We got off the bus a quarter of a mile further on and, as she was stepping off, Hilda said, speaking of what was in her mind, I suppose, during the ride:

  “Shinji had a gold wrist-watch with a gold strap and a golden pen. They had gone when he was killed. They must have cost him a hundred pounds. Someone must have stolen them and sold them.

  “I reported it,” Hilda said. “I needed the money. That is what you had to do—sell something. I had to eat.”

  And the stare from her mask of a face stated something of her life that her strangeness had concealed from us. We walked up the street.

  She went on talking about that watch and how particular Shinji was about his clothes, especially his shirts. All his collars had to be starched, she said. Those had gone too, she said. And his glasses. And his two gold rings. She walked very quickly between us. We got to the corner of her street. She stopped and looked down it.

  “Bill Williams’s van!” she said.

  About thirty houses down the street we could indeed see a small van standing.

  “He’s waiting for me,” she said.

  It was hard to know whether she was frightened or whether she was reckoning, but my heart jumped. She made us stand still and watch. “My room’s in the front,” she said. I crossed over to the other side of the street and then came back.

  “The light is on,” I said.

  “He’s inside,” she said.

  “Shall I go and see?” I said.

  “Go,” said Iris to me.

  Hilda held my wrist.

  “No,” she said.

  “There are two people, I think, in the front garden,” I said.

  “I’m going home with you,” Hilda said to Iris decisively. She rushed off and we had to race after her. We crossed two or three streets to the Fulminos’ house. Mrs Fulmino let us in.

  “Now, now, Hilda, keep your hair on. Kill you? Why should he? This is England, this isn’t China …”

  Mr Fulmino’s face showed his agony. His mouth collapsed, his eyes went hard. He looked frantic with appeal. Then he turned his back on us, marched into the parlour and shouted as if he were calling across four lines of traffic:

  “Turn the wireless off.”

  We followed him into the room. Mrs Fulmino, in the suddenly silent room, looked like a fortress waiting for a flag to fall.

  We all started talking at once.

  “Can I stay with you tonight?” she said. “Bill Williams has broken into my house. I can’t go there. He’ll kill me.” The flag fell.

  “Japan,” said Mrs Fulmino disposing of her husband with her first shot. Then she turned to Hilda; her voice was coldly rich and rumbli
ng. “You’ve always a home here, as you well know, Hilda,” she went on, giving a very unhomely sound to the word. “And,” she said, glancing at her neat curtains to anyone who might be in ambush outside the window, “if anyone tries to kill you, they will have to kill,” she nodded to her husband, “Ted and me first. What have you been doing?”

  “I was down at The Temple. Not with Bill Williams,” said Hilda. “He was watching me. He’s always watching me.”

  “Now look here, Hilda, why should Bill Williams want to kill you? Have you encouraged him?”

  “Don’t be a fool!” shouted Mrs Fulmino.

  “She knows what I mean. Listen to me, Hilda. What’s going on between you and Bill Williams? Constance is upset, we all know.”

  “Oh keep your big mouth shut,” said Mrs Fulmino. “Of course she’s encouraged him. Hilda’s a woman, isn’t she? I encouraged you, didn’t I?”

  “I know how to look after myself,” said Hilda, “but I don’t like that van outside the house at this hour of night, I didn’t speak to him at the dance.”

  “Hilda’s thinking of the police,” ventured Mr Fulmino.

  “Police!” said Mrs Fulmino. “Do you know what’s in the van?”

  “No,” said Hilda. “And that’s what I don’t want to know. I don’t want him on my doorstep. Or his friends. He had two with him. Harry saw them.”

  Mrs Fulmino considered.

  “I’m glad you’ve come to us. I wish you’d come to us in the first place,” she said. Then she commanded Mr Fulmino: “You go up there at once with Harry,” she said to him, “and tell that man to leave Hilda alone. Go on, now. I can’t understand you”—she indicated me—“running off like that, leaving a van there. If you don’t go I’ll go myself. I’m not afraid of a paltry … a paltry … what does he call himself? You go up.”