“She was very kind. She took my suits to the cleaners.”
He ignored this. We walked together across the Nursery and he waved his hand to the flower beds. Did I say that his daughter was with him? She was then a fat girl of thirteen or fourteen with fair hair like her mother’s.
“Fetched them,” said the pedantic child, and from that time her gaze was like a judgement. I picked a flower for her as they followed me to the door of my office.
“By the way,” he said, “what did you do about that fellow who gets over the wall? Sally told me. Which wall was it?”
Sally seemed to tell him everything.
“He’s stopped. That one over there.”
He stood still and considered it. “What you need is a wire fence, with a three-inch mesh to it; if it was wider, the fellow could get his toe in. It would be worth the outlay—no need to go in for one of those spiked steel fences we put up round our refineries.” He went on to the general question of fences: he had always been against people who put broken glass on walls. “Unfair,” he said. He looked lofty—“Cruel, too. Chap who did that ought to be sent off the field.
“Come and have a drink with us this evening,” Duggie said.
I could think of no excuse; in fact I felt confident and bold now, but the first person I saw at the house was Duggie wearing a jacket far too small for him. It was my jacket. She had left his suits at my office and taken mine to her own house.
Duggie laughed loudly. “Very fishy, I thought, when I saw this on my bed. Ha-ha! What’s going on? It would be funnier still if you’d worn mine.”
Sally said demurely she saw nothing funny in that. She had only been trying to help.
“Be careful when Sally tries to help.” He was still laughing. The comedy was a bond. And we kept going back to it. Judy, her daughter, enjoyed this so much that she called out, “Why doesn’t Mr Ormerod take our flat?”
Our laughter stopped. Children recklessly bring up past incidents in their parents’ lives. Duggie was about to pour wine into Sally’s glass and he stopped, holding the bottle in the air. Sally gave that passing grimace of hers and Duggie shrank into instant protective concern and to me he seemed to beg us all for silence. But he recovered quickly and laughed again, noisily—too noisily, I thought.
“He has to live near the Nursery, don’t you, Teddy? Colonel Thompson and all that.”
“Of course,” said Sally easily. “Duggie, don’t pour the wine on the carpet, please.”
It was a pleasant evening. We moved to the sitting-room and Sally sat on the sofa with the child, who gazed and gazed at me. Sally put her arm round her.
Three years have passed since that evening when Judy spoke out. When I look back, those years seem to be veiled or to sparkle with the mists of an October day. How can one describe happiness? In due time Duggie would leave and once more for months on end Sally and I would be free, and despite our bickerings and jealousies, our arguments about whether Duggie knew or did not know, we fell into a routine and made our rules. The stamp of passion was on us, yet there was always in my mind the picture of her sitting on the sofa with her daughter. I came to swear I would do nothing that would trouble her. And she and I seemed able to forget our bodies when we were all together. Perhaps that first comedy had saved us. My notion was that Duggie invented me, as he had invented her. I spend my time, she says, inventing Duggie. She invented neither of us.
Now I have changed my mind. After that evening when the child Judy said, “Why doesn’t Mr Ormerod take our flat?” I am convinced that Duggie knew—because of his care for Sally, even because he knew more than either of us about Sally and that tenant of theirs who was so horribly killed on his motorbike. When he turned us into fictions he perhaps thought the fiction would soon end. It did not. He became like a weary, indulgent, and distant emperor when he was home.
But those words of Judy’s were another matter. For Duggie, Judy was not a fiction. She was his daughter, absolutely his, he made her. She was the contradiction of his failure. About her he would not pretend or compromise. I am now sure of this after one or two trivial events that occurred that year. One afternoon the day before he was due home—one of those enamelled misleading October days, indeed—Sally was tidying the bedroom at my flat. I was in the sitting-room putting the drinks away and I happened to glance down at the Nursery. I saw a young woman there, with fair hair, just like Sally’s, shading her eyes from the sun, and waving. For a moment I thought it was Sally who had secretly slipped away to avoid the sad awkwardness of those business-like partings of ours. Then I saw the woman was a young girl—Judy. I stepped back out of sight. I called Sally and she came with a broom in her hand.
“Don’t go near the window like that”—she was not even wearing a bra—“look!”
“It’s Judy! What is she up to? How long has she been there?” she said.
“She’s watching us,” I said. “She knows!”
Sally made that old grimace I now so rarely see.
“The little bitch,” she said. “I left her at home with two of her school friends. She can’t know I’m here.”
“She must do,” I said. “She’s spying.”
Sally said crisply, “Your paranoia is a rotten cover. Do you think I didn’t know that girl’s got a crush on you, my sweetheart? Try not to be such a cute old man.”
“Me? Try?” I said jauntily.
And then, in the practical manner of one secure in the higher air of unruffled love, she said, “Anyway, she can’t see my car from there. She can’t see through walls. Don’t stand there looking at her.”
She went back to tidying the flat and my mind drifted into remembering a time when I was a boy throwing pebbles at the window of the girl next door. What a row there was with her mother!
I forgot Judy’s waving arm. Duggie came home and I was not surprised to see him wandering about the Nursery two days later like a dog on one of his favourite rounds, circling round me from a distance, for I was busy with a customer, waiting for his chance. He had brought Judy with him. She was solemnly studying the girls, who with their order books and pencils were following undecided customers or directing the lost to our self-service counter inside the building. Judy was murmuring to herself as if imagining the words they said. She was admiring the way one of the girls ordered a youth to wheel a trolley-load of chrysanthemums to the main gate.
When I was free Duggie came quickly to me. “That counter works well,” he said. He was congratulating himself, for the counter had been his idea, one item in his dreamy possession of the place. “It has cut down the labour costs. I’ve been counting. You’ve got rid of three girls, haven’t you?”
“Four,” I said. “My secretary left last week to get married.”
Judy had stopped watching and came up with him. Yes, she had grown. The child whose face had looked as lumpish as a coffee mug, colourless too, had suddenly got a figure, and her face was rounded. Her eyes were moist with the new light of youth, mingling charmingly with an attempt at the look of important experience. She gazed at me until Duggie stopped talking, and then she said, “I saw you the day before yesterday”—to show she had started to become an old hand—“at your window. I waved to you.”
“Did you?” I said.
“You weren’t in your office,” she said.
Cautiously I said, “I didn’t see you.”
“You were ironing your shirts.”
A relief.
“Not me. I never iron my shirts,” I said. “You must have seen the man who lives in the flat below. He’s always ironing his shirts, poor fellow. He usually does it at night.”
“On the third floor,” the girl said.
“I live on the fourth, dear,” I said.
“How awful of me,” the girl said.
To save her face Duggie said, “I like to see women scrubbing clothes on stone—on a riverbank.”
“That’s not ironing, Daddy,” she said.
There was the usual invitation to come to
his house for a drink now that he was back. I did my cough and said I might drop in, though as he could see, we were in a rush. When I got to his house I found a chance to tell Sally. “Clever of her,” I said. “It was a scheme to find out which floor I live on.”
“It was not what you think,” Sally said.
The evening was dull and Sally looked unwell and went to bed early. Duggie and I were left to ourselves and he listened to me in an absent-minded way when I told him again about my secretary leaving. He said grumpily, “You ought to leave the girls alone and go in for older women,” and went on to say that his sister-in-law was coming to stay, suggesting that married life also had its troubles. Suddenly he woke up, and as if opportunity had been revealed to him in a massive way he said, “Come and have dinner with me at my club tomorrow.”
The invitation was half plea, half threat. He was being punished. Why not myself also?
Duggie’s club! Was this to be a showdown? The club was not a bolt-hole for Duggie. It was an imperial institution in his life and almost sacred. One had to understand that, although rarely mentioned, it was headquarters, the only place in England where he was irrefutably himself and at home with his mysteries. He did not despise me for not having a club myself, but it did explain why I had something of the homeless dog about me. That clubs bored me suggested a moral weakness. I rose slightly in his esteem once when I told him that years ago my uncle used to take me to his club. (He used to give me a lot to drink and lecture me on my feckless habits and even introduced me to one or two members—I suppose to put stamina in me.) These invitations came after my wife’s death, so that clubs came to seem to me places where marriages were casketed and hidden by the heavy curtains on the high windows.
There was something formidable in Duggie’s invitation, and when I got to his club my impression was that he had put on weight or had received a quiet authority from being only among men, among husbands, in mufti. It was a place where the shabby armchairs seemed made of assumptions in leather and questions long ago disposed of. In this natural home Duggie was no longer inventive or garrulous. Nods and grunts to the members showed that he was on his true ground.
We dined at a private table. Duggie sat with his back to an old brocade curtain in which I saw some vegetable design that perhaps had allayed or taken over the fantasies of the members.
A couple of drinks in the bar downstairs and a decanter of wine on the table eased Duggie, who said the old chef had had a stroke and that he thought the new chef had not got his hand in yet. The sweetbreads had been runny the last time; maybe it would be better to risk the beef.
Then he became confessional to put me at my ease: he always came here when his sister-in-law came to stay. A difficult woman—he always said to Sally, “Can’t you put her off? You’ll only get one of your migraines after she has been.”
“I thought Sally didn’t look too well,” I said.
“She’s having a worrying time with Judy,” he said. “Young girls grow up. She’s going through a phase.”
“She is very lovely.”
He ignored this. “Freedom, you know! Wants to leave school. Doesn’t work. Messed up her exams.”
“Sex, I suppose,” I said.
“Why does everyone talk about sex?” said Duggie, looking stormy. “She wants to get away, get a flat of her own, get a job, earn her living, sick of the old folks. But a flat of her own—at sixteen! I ask you.”
“Girls have changed.”
Duggie studied me and made a decision. I now understood why I had been asked.
“I wondered,” said Duggie, “has she ever said anything to you—parents are the last to hear anything.”
“To me?”
“Friend of the family—I just wondered.”
“I hardly ever see her. Only when Sally or you bring her to the Nursery. I can’t see the young confiding in me. Not a word.”
Duggie was disappointed. He found it hard to lose one of his favourite fancies: that among all those girls at the Nursery I had sublimated the spent desires of my youth. He said, taking an injured pride in a fate, “That’s it. I married into a family of gardeners.”
And then he came out with it—the purpose of this dinner: “The girl’s mad to get a job in your nursery. I thought she might have been sounding you out—I mean, waving to that fellow ironing his shirt.”
“No. Nothing,” I said.
“Mad idea. You’re turning people away! I told her. By the way, I don’t want to embarrass you. I’m not suggesting you should take her on. Girls get these ideas. Actually, we’re going to take her away from that school and send her to school in Switzerland. Alps, skiing. Her French and German are a mess. Abroad! That is what she needs.”
Abroad! The most responsive string in Duggie’s nature had been struck. He meant what he said.
“That will be hard on Sally,” I said. “She’d miss her terribly.”
“We’ve got to do the best for the girl. She knows that,” said Duggie.
And without warning the old stare, but now it was the stare of the interrogator’s lamp, turned on my face, and his manner changed from the brisk and business-like to the commandingly off-hand.
“Ironical,” he said. “Now, if Sally had wanted a job at your nursery, that would be understandable. After all, you deal with all those Dutch and French, and so on. Her German’s perfect. But poor Judy, she can’t utter.”
“Sally!” I laughed. “She’d hate it.”
Duggie filled my glass and then his own very slowly, but as he raised the decanter he kept his eye on me: quite a small feat, indeed like a minor conjuring trick, for a man who more than once had knocked a glass over at home and made Sally rush to the kitchen for a cloth.
“You’re quite wrong,” he said. “I happen to know.”
Know what? “You mean she’s mentioned it,” I said.
“No, no, of course not,” he said. “But if you said the word, I’m certain of it. Not last year, perhaps. But if Judy goes to Switzerland, she’ll be alone. She’d jump at it.”
Now the wine began to work on him—and on me, too—and Duggie’s conversation lost its crisp manner. He moved on to one of his trailing geographical trances; we moved through time and space. The club became subtropical, giant ferns burst out of the club curtains, liana hung from the white pillars of the dining-room, the other members seemed to be in native dress, and threading through it all was the figure of Sally, notebook in hand. She followed us downstairs to the bar, which became a greenhouse, as we drank our port. No longer wretched because her daughter had gone, no longer fretting about the disastrous mess she had made of her life when she was young, without a mother’s experience to guide her. I heard Duggie say, “I know they’re moving me to Brussels in a few months and of course I’ll be over every weekend—but a woman wants her own life. Frankly,” he said with awe in his voice, “we bore them.”
The club resumed its usual appearance, though with an air of exhaustion. The leather chairs yawned. The carpets died. A lost member rose from the grave and stopped by Duggie and said, “We need a fourth at bridge.”
“Sorry, old boy,” said Duggie.
The man went off to die elsewhere.
“And no danger,” said Duggie, “of her leaving to get married.”
And now, drunkish as we were, we brought our momentous peace conference to an end. The interrogator’s lamp was switched on again just before we got to our feet and he seemed to be boring his way into my head and to say, “You’ve taken my wife, but you’re bloody well not going to get my daughter into your pokey little fourth-floor flat ironing your shirts.”
I saw the passion in his mottled face and the powerful gleam of his honourable head.
After Sally had put up a fight and I had said that sending Judy away was his revenge, Sally came to work for me. Duggie had married us and I became as nervous and obsequious as a groom. There was the awkwardness of a honeymoon. She dressed differently. She became sedate—no strokings and squeezes of love were
allowed: she frowned and twisted away like a woman who had been a secretary all her life. She looked as young and cross as a virgin. She went back to her straight-back hair style; I was back in the period when I was disturbed by the soft hair of her eyebrows. Her voice was all telephone calls, invoices, orders, and snapping at things I had forgotten to do. She walked in a stately way to the filing cabinet. Only to that object did she bend: she said what a mess her predecessor or I had left it in. If she went downstairs to the yard when the lorries arrived, she had papers in her hand. The drivers were cocky at first and then were scared of her. And in time she destroyed our legend—the only unpopular thing she did—the legend of Colonel Thompson. Dog or no dog, he had never come over the wall. The thief, she discovered, had been one of our gardeners. So Colonel Thompson retired to our private life.
Before this, our life had been one of beginnings, sudden partings, unexpected renewals. Now it hummed plainly along from day to day. The roles of Duggie and myself were reversed: when Duggie came home once a week now from Brussels, it was he who seemed to be the lover and I the husband. Sally grew very sharp with both of us and Duggie and I stood apart, on our dignity.
I have done one thing for him. I took my mother to dine with him, as I have said.
“What a saintly man,” she said as we drove away. “Just like your father. He’s coming to see me next time they’re at their cottage.”
(1980)
COCKY OLLY
At the end of term I often give a lift to two or three of my students who are going back to London. They talk; I listen. Halfway, about forty miles from the city, where the motorway rises and slices through the Downs, cutting one off from the towns that are merely names on the road signs, I interrupt their chatter to point out one or two prehistoric barrows. The youngsters listen politely. When we pass the sign, “NEXT EXIT FORDHAMPTON,” where a winding side road drops itself into the wooded country, I have the impulse to say that down there is a turning to Clapton St Luke, Fogham, and the Marshes—one of the paradises of my childhood—but I check it. And farther on we pass Newford, where I was at school when I was a girl, forty years ago. One of these days, when there is no one with me, I plan to go and look at these places, but I never do. The main road whips it all away.
The Pritchett Century Page 54
