The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “And it was all left to Pliny.”

  There was a general sigh.

  “And he doesn’t touch it. Rubbish he calls it. He turned his back on it. Only goes in for the best. Hepplewhite, marquetries, his consoles. Regency.”

  There was a pause.

  “And,” I said, “his Meissen.”

  They looked at me as if I were a criminal. They glanced at one another as if asking whether they should call the police. I was either a thief or I had publicly stripped them of all their clothes. I had publicly announced Pliny’s lust.

  Although Mrs Price had joined in the conversation, it was in the manner of someone talking in her sleep; for when this silence came, she woke up and said in a startled voice:

  “Lal Drake.”

  And screwing up her fists she got up and, pausing to get ready for a rush, she heaved herself fast to the door by which August had left for the Gents, down the alley a quarter of an hour before.

  “The other door, missis,” someone shouted. But she was through it.

  “Drink up,” we said and went out by the front door. I was the last and had a look down the side alley and there I saw a sight. August with one hand doing up his fly buttons and the other arm protecting his face. Mrs Price was hitting out at him and shouting. The language!

  “You dirty sod. I knew it. The girl told me.” She was shouting. She saw me, stopped hitting and rushed at me in tears and shouted back at him.

  “The filthy old man.”

  August saw his chance and got out of the alley and made for the cars in the square. She let me go and shouted after him. We were all there and in Woolworth’s doorway was Pliny. Rain was still falling and he looked wet and all the more alone for being wet. I walked off and, I suppose, seeing me go and herself alone and giddy in her rage she looked all round and turned her temper on me.

  “The girl has got to go,” she shouted.

  Then she came to her senses.

  “Where is August?”

  August had got to his car and was driving out of the square. She could do nothing. Then she saw Pliny. She ran from me to Pliny, from Pliny to me.

  “He’s going after the girl,” she screamed.

  We calmed her down and it was I who drove her home. (This was when she told me, as the wipers went up and down on the windscreen, that she and August were not married.) We splashed through hissing water that was like her tears on the road. “I’m worried for the child. I told her, ‘Keep your door locked.’ I see it’s locked every night. I’m afraid I’ll forget and I won’t hear him if I’ve had a couple. She’s a kid. She doesn’t know anything.” I understood that the face I had always thought was empty was really filled with the one person she loved: Isabel.

  August was not there when we got to their shop. Mrs Price went in and big as she was, she did not knock anything over.

  “Isabel?” she called.

  The girl was in the scullery and came with a wet plate that dripped on the carpet. In two years she had changed. She was wearing an old dress and an apron, but also a pair of high-heeled silver evening shoes. She had become the slut of the house and her pale skin looked dirty.

  “You’re dripping that thing everywhere. What have you got those shoes on for? Where did you get them?”

  “Uncle Harry, for Christmas,” she said. She called August Uncle Harry. She tried to look jaunty as if she had put all her hope in life into those silly evening shoes.

  “All right,” said Mrs Price weakly looking at me to keep quiet and say nothing.

  Isabel took off her apron when she saw me. I don’t know whether she remembered me. She was still pale, but had the shapeliness of a small young woman. Her eyes looked restlessly and uncertainly at both of us, her chin was firmer but it trembled. She was smiling too and, because I was there and the girl might see an ally in me, Mrs Price looked with half-kindness at Isabel; but when I got up to go the girl looked at me as if she would follow me out of the door. Mrs Price got up fast to bar the way. She stood on the doorstep of the shop watching me get into the car, swollen with the inability to say “Thank you” or “Goodbye.” If the girl was a child, Mrs Price was ten times a child and both of them standing on the doorstep were like children who don’t want anyone to go away.

  I drove off and for a few miles I thought about Mrs Price and the girl, but once settled into the long drive to London, the thought of Pliny supplanted them. I had been caught up by the fever of the trade. Pliny’s mother was dead. What was going to happen to Pliny and all that part of the business Pliny had inherited from his father, the stuff he despised and had not troubled himself with very much in his mother’s time. I ought to go “over the water”—as we say in London—to have a look at it some time. In a few days I went there; I found the idea had occurred to many others. The shop was on one of the main bus routes in South London, a speckled early Victorian place with an ugly red brick store behind it. Pliny’s father had had an eye for a cosy but useful bit of property. Its windows had square panes (1810) and to my surprise the place was open and I could see people inside. There was Pliny with his nose which looked servile rather than distinguished, wearing a long biscuit-coloured tweed jacket with leather pads at the elbows like a Cockney sportsman. There, too, was August with his wet eyes and drinker’s shame, Mrs Price swelling over him in her best clothes, and the girl. They had come up from the country and August had had his boots cleaned. The girl was in her best too and was standing apart touching things in the shop, on the point of merriment, looking with wonder at Pliny’s ears. He often seemed to be talking at her when he was talking to Mrs Price. I said:

  “Hullo! Up from the country? What are you doing here?” Mrs Price was so large that she had to turn her whole body and place her belly in front of everyone who spoke to her.

  “Seeing to his teeth,” she said nodding at August and, from years of habit, August turned too when his wife turned, in case it was just as well not to miss one of her pronouncements, whatever else he might dodge. One side of August’s jaw was swollen. Then Mrs Price slowly turned her whole body to face Pliny again. They were talking about his mother’s death. Mrs Price was greedy, as one stout woman thinking of another, for a melancholy tour of the late mother’s organs. The face of the girl looked prettily wise and holiday-fied because the heavy curls of her hair hung close to her face. She looked out of the window, restless and longing to get away while her elders went on talking, but she was too listless to do so. Then she would look again at Pliny’s large ears with a childish pleasure in anything strange; they gave him a dog-like appearance and if the Augusts had not been there, I think she would have jumped at him mischievously to touch them, but remembered in time that she had lately grown into a young lady. When she saw him looking at her she turned her back and began writing in the dust on a little table which was standing next to a cabinet; it had a small jug on it. She was writing her name in the dust I S A B … And then stopped. She turned round suddenly because she saw I had been watching.

  “Is that old Meissen?” she called out, pointing to the jug.

  They stopped talking. It was comic to see her pretending, for my benefit, that she knew all about porcelain.

  “Cor! Old Meissen!” said August pulling his racing newspaper out of his jacket pocket with excitement, and Mrs Price fondly swung her big handbag; all laughed loudly, a laugh of lust and knowledge. They knew, or thought they knew, that Pliny had a genuine Meissen piece somewhere, probably upstairs where he lived. The girl was pleased to have made them laugh at her; she had been noticed.

  Pliny said decently: “No, dear. That’s Caughley. Would you like to see it?”

  He walked to the cabinet and took the jug down and put it on a table.

  “Got the leopard?” said August, knowingly. Pliny showed the mark of the leopard on the base of the jug and put it down again. It was a pretty shapely jug with a spray of branches and in the branches a pair of pheasants were perching, done in transfer. The girl scared us all by picking it up in both hands, bu
t it was charming to see her holding it up and studying it.

  “Careful,” said Mrs Price.

  “She’s all right,” said Pliny.

  Then—it alarmed us—she wriggled with laughter.

  “What a funny face,” she said.

  Under the lip of the jug was the small face of an old man with a long nose looking sly and wicked.

  “They used to put a face under the lip,” Pliny said.

  “That’s right,” said August.

  The girl held it out at arm’s length and, looking from the jug to Pliny, she said: “It’s like you, Mr Pliny.”

  “Isabel!” said Mrs Price. “That’s rude.”

  “But it is,” said Isabel. “Isn’t it?” She was asking me. Pliny grinned. We were all relieved to see him take the jug from her and put it back in the cabinet.

  “It belonged to my mother,” he said. “I keep it there,” Pliny said to me, despising me because I had said nothing and because I was a stranger.

  “Go into the back and have a look round if you want to. The light’s on.”

  I left the shop and went down the steps into the long white store-room where the white-washed walls were grey with dust. There was an alligator hanging by a nail near the steps, a couple of cavalry helmets and a dirty drum that must have been there since the Crimean War. I went down into streets of stacked up furniture. I felt I was walking into an inhuman crypt or worse still one of those charnel houses or ossuaries I had seen pictures of in one of my father’s books when I was a boy. Large as the store was, it was lit by a single electric light bulb hanging from a girder in the roof and the yellow light was deathly. The notion of “picking up” anything at Pliny’s depressed me, so that I was left with a horror of the trade I had joined. Yet feelings of this kind are never simple. After half an hour I left the shop. I understood before that day was over and I was back in the room over my own place that what had made me more wretched was the wound of a sharp joy. First, the sight of the girl leaving her name unfinished in the dust had made my heart jump, then when she held the vase in her hands I had felt the thrill of a revelation; until then I had never settled what I should go in for but now I saw it. Why not collect Caughley? That was it. Caughley; it was one of those inspirations that excite one so that every sight in the world changes; even houses, buses and streets and people are transfigured and become unreal as desire carries one away—and then, cruelly, it passes and one is left exhausted. The total impossibility of an impatient young man like myself collecting Caughley which hadn’t been made since 1821 became brutally clear. Too late for Staffordshire, too late for Dresden, too late for Caughley and all the beautiful things. I was savage for lack of money. The following day I went to the Victoria and Albert and then I saw other far more beautiful things enshrined and inaccessible. I gazed with wonder. My longing for possession held me and then I was elevated to a state of worship as if they were idols, holy and never to be touched. Then I remembered the girl’s hands and a violent day dream passed through my head; it lasted only a second or two but in that time I smashed the glass case, grabbed the treasure and bolted with it. It frightened me that such an idea could have occurred to me. I left the museum and I turned sourly against my occupation, against Marbright, Alsop and above all Pliny and August, and it broke my heart to think of that pretty girl living among such people and drifting into the shabbiness of the trade. I S A B—half a name, written by a living finger in dust.

  One has these brief sensations when one is young. They pass and one does nothing about them. There is nothing remarkable about Caughley—except that you can’t get it. I did not collect Caughley for a simple reason; I had to collect my wits. The plain truth is that I was incompetent. I had only to look at my bank account. I had bought too much. At the end of the year I looked like getting into the bankruptcy court unless I had a stroke of luck. Talk of trouble making the trade move; I was Trouble myself, dealers could smell it coming and came sniffing into my shop and at the end of the year I sold up for what I could get. It would have been better if I could have waited for a year or two when the boom began. For some reason I kept the teapot I had bought in Salisbury to remind me of wasted time. In its humble way it was pretty.

  In the next six months I changed. I had to. I pocketed my pride and I got a dull job in an auctioneer’s; at least it took me out of the office when I got out keys and showed people round. The firm dealt in house property and developments. The word “develop” took hold of me. The firm was a large one and sometimes “developed” far outside London. I was told to go and inspect some of the least important bits of property that were coming into the market. One day a row of shops in Steepleton came up for sale. I said I knew them. They were on the London Road opposite the Lion Hotel at the end of the town. My boss was always impressed by topography and the names of hotels and sent me down there. The shops were in the row where August and one or two others had had their business, six of them.

  What a change! The Lion had been re-painted; the little shops seemed to have got smaller. In my time the countryside had begun at the end of the row. Now builders’ scaffolding was standing in the fields beyond. I looked for August’s. A cheap café had taken over his place. He had gone. The mirror man who lived next door was still there but had gone into beads and fancy art jewellery. His window was full of hanging knick-knacks and mobiles.

  “It’s the tourist trade now,” he said. He looked ill.

  “What happened to August?”

  He studied me for a moment and said, “Closed down,” and I could get no more out of him. I crossed the street to The Lion. Little by little, a sentence at a time in a long slow suspicious evening I got news of August from the barmaid as she went back and forth serving customers, speaking in a low voice, her eye on the new proprietor in case the next sentence that came out of her might be bad for custom. The sentences were spoken like sentences from a judge summing up, bit by bit. August had got two years for receiving stolen goods; the woman—“She wasn’t his wife”—had been knocked down by a car as she was coming out of the bar at night—“not that she drank, not really drank; her weight really”—and then came the final sentence that brought back to me the alerting heat and fever of its secrets: “There was always trouble over there. It started when the girl ran away.”

  “Isabel?” I said.

  “I dunno—the girl.”

  I stood outside the hotel and looked to the east and then to the west. It was one of those quarters of an hour on a main road when, for some reason, there is no traffic coming either way. I looked at the now far-off fields where the February wind was scything over the grass, turning it into waves of silver as it passed over them. I thought of Isab … running with a case in her hand, three years ago. Which way? Where do girls run to? Sad.

  I went back to London. There are girls in London too, you know. I grew a beard, reddish: it went with the red car which I had managed to keep. I could afford to take a girl down to the south coast now and then. Sometimes we came back by the Brixton road, sometimes through Camberwell and when we did this I often slowed down at Pliny’s and told the girls, “That man’s sitting on a gold mine.” They never believed it or, at least, only one did. She said: “Does he sell rings? Let us have a look.”

  “They’re closed,” I said. “They’re always closed.”

  “I want to look,” she said, so we stopped and got out.

  We looked into the dark window—it was Saturday night—and we could see nothing and as we stared we heard a loud noise coming, it seemed, from the place next door or from down the Drive-in at the side of Pliny’s shop, a sound like someone beating boxes or bath tubs at first until I got what it was: drums. Someone blew a bugle, a terrible squeaky sound. There was heavy traffic on the street, but the bugle seemed to split it in half.

  “Boys’ Brigade, practising for Sunday,” I said. We stood laughing with our hands to our ears as we stared into the dark. All I could make out was something white on a table at the back of the shop. Slowly I saw
it was a set of chessmen. Chess, ivories, August—perhaps Pliny had got August’s chessmen.

  “What a din!” said the girl. I said no more to her for in my mind there was the long forgotten picture of Isabel’s finger on the pieces, at Steepleton.

  When I’ve got time, I thought, I will run over to Pliny’s; perhaps he will know what happened to the girl.

  And I did go there again, one afternoon, on my own. Still closed. I rattled the door handle. There was no answer. I went to a baker’s next door, then to a butcher’s, then to a pub. The same story. “He only opens on Sundays,” or, “He’s at a sale.” Then to a tobacconist’s. I said it was funny to leave a shop empty like that, full of valuable stuff. The tobacconist became suspicious.

  “There’s someone there all right. His wife’s there.”

  “No she’s not,” his wife said. “They’ve gone off to a sale. I saw them.”

  She took the hint.

  “No one in charge to serve customers,” she said.

  I said I’d seen a chessboard that interested me and the tobacconist said: “It’s dying out. I used to play.”

  “I didn’t know he got married,” I said.

  “He’s got beautiful things,” said his wife. “Come on Sunday.”

  Pliny married! That made me grin. The only women in his life I had ever heard of were his mother and the gossip about Lal Drake. Perhaps he had made an honest woman of her. I went back for one last look at the chessmen and, sure enough, as the tobacconist’s wife had hinted someone had been left in charge, for I saw a figure pass through the inner door of the shop. The watcher was watched. Almost at once I heard the tap and roll of a kettle drum, I put my ear to the letter box and distinctly heard a boy’s voice shouting orders. Children! All the drumming I had heard on Saturday had come from Pliny’s—a whole family drumming. Think of Pliny married to a widow with kids; he had not had time to get his own. I took back what I had thought of him and Lal Drake. I went off for an hour to inspect a house that was being sold on Camberwell Green, and stopped once more at Pliny’s on the way back. On the chance of catching him. I went to the window: standing in the middle of the shop was Isabel.