The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Ronny found his father’s way of speaking and his look at the girl intolerable.

  Marian had been waiting for someone to make the suggestion. “Well …” She hesitated. “No sense, I suppose …”

  “That’s right,” said the older man.

  She went out to the sink in the scullery and slipped her shoulders out of her blouse. She soaped a flannel under the icy water and passed it quickly over her throat, gathering up her hair at the back to wash her neck, curving one arm, then the other, over her head as she soaped her armpits.

  Ronny and his father sat beside the fire, listening to the water splashing into the bowl. When they heard the wooden sound as Marian pulled at the roller towel, the older man glanced at the door and moved, stirred by the thought of the young girl.

  It was one of the moments of hatred that the son often felt for him, but it seemed to make no impression on his father.

  Marian came in, fresh, her face shiny, her blouse carelessly buttoned. “Well, good night,” she said, and opened the door behind which stairs led up to the little bedrooms. “If you want me, you know where I am.”

  There was no sophistication in either man to see the ambiguity of her words; they simply took them to mean what she intended.

  The door closed, and they heard her creak upstairs and overhead. They went on sitting by the fire and neither spoke. Occasional faint beer smells came from the father. It did not occur to him to go into the other room to his wife. Ronny took the tea things into the scullery and washed up. It was dark out there and lit by a very small oil lamp. He remained there for as long as he thought he could without being questioned. The tap dripped into the sink. He smelled the soap she had used. He could no longer hear the breathing.

  Marian lay between the rough twill sheets, shivering. Her feet were like ice, although she had rolled them in her cardigan. The only hot-water bottle was in the bed downstairs. She hated this house but had no energy to move from it. Or had she stayed because of that sickened curiosity that always forced her to linger by hearses while coffins were carried out? Ron, too, she thought—it isn’t right for us. We’re young. In the mornings, I’m not fit for work. If only Enid knew how the girls at the factory went on: “What’s happening now?” “The blinds down yet?” “How awful for you!” She drew up her knees, yawned, and crossed her arms on her breast. The young slip into the first attitude with beautiful ease and relaxation.

  · · ·

  Because the house had been so quiet for days, the sound of a door bursting open, a chair scraped hurriedly back, shocked Marian out of sleep, and she lay trembling, her feet still entangled in the cardigan. She felt that it was about halfway through the night, but could not be sure. She heard Ron stumbling upstairs, tapping on her door. She put on her raincoat over her nightgown and went out to him.

  “It’s Gran,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  “What had I better do?” she asked in panic, with no example before her of how she should behave. He had wakened her but did not know why.

  “Ron!” Enid came to the bottom of the stairs and called up. The light from the room behind her threw a faint nimbus around her head.

  “Yes, Mother,” he said, looking down at her.

  “Did you wake Marian?”

  “Yes.” He answered guiltily, but evidently she thought his action right and proper.

  “You will have to go for Mrs. Turner,” his mother said.

  “Why?”

  “She—she’s expecting you.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “Yes. Right away—now.” She turned away from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Who is Mrs. Turner?” Marian whispered.

  “I think— She lays people out.” Ronny felt shame and uneasiness at his words, which seemed to him crude, obscene.

  The girl covered her face with her hands. “Oh, life’s horrible.”

  “No, it’s death, not life.”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “Come with me, then.”

  “Is it far?”

  “No, not far. Hurry.”

  “Stand there by the door while I get ready.”

  Marian moved into the dark bedroom, and he stood leaning against the doorframe, waiting, with his arms folded across his chest. She came back quickly, wearing the raincoat, a scarf tied over her head.

  They went downstairs into the bright kitchen, where Enid stood fixing candles into brass holders while her husband poured some brandy from an almost empty bottle into a glass. Enid drowned the brandy with warm water from the kettle and drank it off swiftly, her dark eyes expressionless.

  “Give some to the children,” she said, without thinking. They stiffened at the word “children” but took their brandy-and-water and sipped it.

  “It’s a cold night,” said Enid. “Now, go quickly.”

  “Marian’s coming with me.”

  “So I see,” said Enid. Her husband drank the last spoonful from the bottle, neat. “The end house, Lorne Street, right-hand side, by the Rose and Crown,” she said, turning back to the other room.

  The fumes of the brandy kindled in Ron’s and Marian’s breasts. “Remember that,” he said. “The end house.” He unlatched the back door.

  “Next the Rose and Crown,” she added. They slipped out into the beautiful, shocking air of the night.

  · · ·

  When Ronny shone his torch down, they could see the yellow hands of the leaves lying on the dark, wet pavements. Now there was only a flick of moisture in the air. He had taken her arm, and they walked alone in the streets, which flowed like black rivers. She wished that they might go on forever and never turn back toward that house. Or she would like it to be broad daylight, so that she could be at work, giggling about it all with the girls. (“Go on, Marian!” “How awful for you!”)

  His arm was pressed against her ribs. Sometimes she shivered from the cold and squeezed him to her. Down streets and around corners they went. Not far away, goods trains shunted up and down. Once, she stumbled over a curb, and in saving her he felt the sweet curve of her breast against his arm and walked gaily and with elation, filled with excitement and delight, swinging the beam of the torch from side to side, thinking it was the happiest evening of his life, seeing the future opening out suddenly, like a fan, revealing all at once the wonder of human relationships.

  “The Rose and Crown,” she whispered. The building was shuttered for the night, the beer smells all washed away by the rain, the signboard creaking in the wind.

  “The next house then.” She felt tensed up, but he was relaxed and confident.

  “I’ve forgotten the name,” she said.

  “Turner.”

  They went up a short path onto a dark porch and knocked at the door. After a moment, a window at the front of the house was thrown up and a woman’s voice called out. They stepped back into the garden and looked up.

  “Who is it?” the voice asked.

  “We’re from Mrs. Baker’s,” Ron said.

  “Poor soul! She’s gone, then, at last. How’s your mother?”

  Ronny considered this and then said, “She’s tired.”

  “She will be. Wait there, and I’ll come along with you.” She disappeared and the window was slammed down.

  “She seemed an ordinary sort of woman,” whispered Marian.

  They drew back into the shelter of the porch and waited. No sounds came from the house, but a smell of stuffiness seemed to drift out through the letter slot in the door.

  “Suppose she goes back to bed and leaves us here?” Marian asked, and began to giggle. She put her mouth against his shoulder to stifle the little giggles, and he put his arm around her. She lifted her papery-white face in the darkness and they kissed. The word “bliss” came into his mind, and he tasted it slowly on his tongue, as if it were a sweet food. Platitudes began to come true for them, but they could not consider them as such.

  Suddenly, a step sounded on the other side of the door, bolts were slid back with
difficulty, a chain rattled.

  “Here we are!” said the brisk voice. The woman stepped out onto the porch, putting on a pair of fur gloves and looking up at the night sky and the flocks of curdy, scudding clouds. “It’s a sad time,” she said. “A very sad time for your poor mum and dad. Come on, then, lad, you lead the way. Quick, sharp!”

  And now the footsteps of the three of them rang out metallically upon the paving stones as they walked between the dark and eyeless cliffs of the houses.

  October 29, 1949

  V. S. Pritchett

  “We had the builders in at the time,” my father says in his accurate way, if he ever mentions his second marriage, the one that so quickly went wrong. “And,” he says, clearing a small apology from his throat, as though preparing to say something immodest, “we happened to be without stairs.”

  It is true. I remember that summer. I was fifteen years old. I came home from Miss Compton’s School at the end of the term, and when I got to our place in Devonshire not only had my mother gone but the stairs had gone, too. There was no staircase in the house.

  We lived in an old crab-colored cottage, with long windows under the eaves that looked like eyes half closed against the sun. Now, when I got out of the car, I saw scaffolding over the front door and two heaps of sand and mortar on the crazy paving, which my father asked me not to tread in, because it would “make work for Janey.” (This was the name he called his second wife.) I went inside. Imagine my astonishment. The little hall had vanished, the ceiling had gone; you could see up to the roof; the wall on one side had been stripped to the brick, and on the other hung a long curtain of builder’s sheets. “Where are the stairs?” I said. “What have you done with the stairs?” I was at the laughing age.

  A mild, trim voice spoke above our heads. “Ah, I know that laugh,” the voice said sweetly and archly. There was Miss Richards, or, I should say, my father’s second wife, standing behind a builder’s rope on what used to be the landing, which now stuck out precariously without banisters, like the portion of a ship’s deck. The floor appeared to have been sawed off. She used to be my father’s secretary before the divorce, and I had often seen her in my father’s office, but now she had changed. Her fair hair was now fluffed out, and she wore a fussed and shiny brown dress that was quite unsuitable for the country. The only definite idea of what marriage would be like must have come to her from magazines; my father was a successful man, and she supposed she would always be going to cocktail parties, and at twelve in the morning on went the dress.

  I remember how odd they both looked, she up above and my father down below, and both apologizing to me. The builders had taken the old staircase out two days before, they said, and had promised to put the new one in against the far wall of the room, behind the dust sheets, before I got back from school. But they had not kept their promise.

  “We go up by the ladder,” said my father, cutting his wife short, for she was apologizing too much, as if she were speaking to one of his customers.

  He pointed. At that moment, his wife was stepping to the end of the landing, where a short ladder, with a post to hold on to at the top as one stepped on the first rung, sloped to the ground.

  “It’s horrible!” called my stepmother.

  My father and I watched her come down. She came to the post and turned round, not sure whether she ought to come down the ladder frontward or backward.

  “Backward!” called my father…“No, the other hand on the post!” My stepmother blushed fondly and gave him a look of fear. She put one foot on the top rung and then took her foot back and put the other one there, and then pouted. It was only eight feet from the ground; at school, we climbed halfway up the gym walls on the bars. I remembered her as a quick and practical woman at the office; she was now, I was sure, playing at being weak and dependent.

  “My hands,” she said a moment later, looking at the dust on her hands as she grasped the top rung.

  My father and I stopped where we were and watched her. She put one leg out too high, as if, artlessly, she were showing us the leg first. And she was; she was a plain woman, and her legs (she used to say) were her “nicest thing.” This was the only coquetry she had. She looked like one of those insects that try the air around them with their feelers before they move. I was surprised that my father (who had always been formally attentive to my mother, especially when he was angry, and had almost bowed to me when he met me at the station and helped me in and out of the car) did not go to help her. I saw an expression of obstinacy on his face.

  “You’re at the bottom,” he said at last. “Only two more steps.”

  “Oh dear,” said my stepmother, getting off the last rung onto the floor, and she turned with her small chin raised, offering us her helplessness for admiration. She came to me and kissed me and said, “Doesn’t she look lovely? You are growing into a woman.”

  “Nonsense,” said my father.

  And, in fear of being a woman and yet pleased by what she said, I took my father’s arm. “Is that what we have to do? Is that how we get to bed?” I said.

  “It’s only until Monday,” my father said.

  They both of them looked ashamed, as though by having the stairs removed they had done something foolish. My father tried to conceal this by an air of modest importance. They seemed a very modest couple. Both of them looked shorter to me since their marriage; I was rather shocked by this. She seemed to have made him shorter. I had always thought of my father as a dark, vain, terse man, very logical and never giving in to anyone. He seemed much less important now his secretary was in the house.

  “It is easy,” I said, and I went to the ladder and was up it in a moment.

  “Mind!” called my stepmother.

  But in a moment I was down again, laughing. While I was coming down, I heard my stepmother say quietly to my father, “What legs. She is growing.”

  My legs and my laugh! I did not think that my father’s secretary had the right to say anything about me. She was not my mother.

  · · ·

  After this, my father took me around the house. I looked behind me once or twice as I walked. On one of my shoes was some of the sand he had warned me about. I don’t know how it got on my shoe. It was rather funny seeing this one sandy footmark making work for Janey wherever I went.

  My father took me through the dust curtains into the dining room and then to the far wall, where the staircase was going to be.

  “Why have you done it?” I asked. He and I were alone.

  “The house has wanted it for years,” he said. “It ought to have been done years ago.”

  I did not say anything. When my mother was there, she was always complaining about the house, saying it was poky, barbarous—I can hear her voice now saying “Barbarous,” as if it were the name of some terrifying and savage queen—and my father had always refused to alter anything. Barbarous—I used to think of that word as my mother’s name.

  “Does Janey like it?” I asked.

  My father hardened at this question. He seemed to be saying, “What has it got to do with Janey?” But what he said was—and he spoke with amusement, with a look of quiet scorn—“She liked it as it was.”

  “I did, too,” I said.

  I then saw—but, no, I did not really understand this at the time; it is something I understand now I am older—that my father was not altering the house for Janey’s sake. She hated the whole place, because my mother had been there, but was too tired by her earlier life in his office, fifteen years of it, too unsure of herself, to say anything. It was an act of amends to my mother. He was punishing Janey by getting in builders and making everyone uncomfortable and miserable; he was creating an emotional scene with himself. He was annoying Janey with what my mother had so maddeningly wanted and he would not give her.

  · · ·

  After my father had shown me the house, I said I would go and see Janey getting lunch ready.

  “I shouldn’t do that,” he said. “It will delay her. L
unch is just ready. Or should be.” He looked at his watch.

  We went to the sitting room, and while we waited, I sat in the green chair and he asked me questions about school and we went on to talk about the holidays. But when I answered, I could see he was not listening to me but trying to catch sounds of Janey moving in the kitchen. Occasionally there were sounds; something gave an explosive fizz in a hot pan, and a saucepan lid fell. This made a loud noise and the lid spun a long time on the stone floor. The sound stopped our talk.

  “Janey is not used to the kitchen,” said my father. I smiled very close to my lips. I did not want my father to see it, but he looked at me and he smiled by accident, too. There was a sudden understanding between us.

  “I will go and see,” I said.

  He raised his hand to stop me, but I went.

  It was natural. For fifteen years, Janey had been my father’s secretary. She had worked in an office. I remember when I went there when I was young she used to come into the room with an earnest and hushed air, leaning her head a little sidewise and turning three-quarter face toward my father, at his desk, leaning forward to guess at what he wanted. I admired the great knowledge she had of his affairs, the way she carried letters, how quickly she picked up the telephone when it rang, the authority of her voice. Her strength had been that she was impersonal. She had lost that in her marriage. As his wife, she had no behavior. When we were talking, she raised her low bosom, which had become round and ducklike, with a sigh and smiled at my father with a tentative, expectant fondness. After fifteen years, a life had ended; she was resting.

  But Janey had not lost her office behavior; that she now kept for the kitchen. The moment I went to the kitchen, I saw her walking to the stove, where the saucepans were throbbing too hard. She was walking exactly as she had walked toward my father at his desk. The stove had taken my father’s place. She went up to it with impersonal inquiry, as if to anticipate what it wanted; she appeared to be offering a pile of plates to be warmed as if they were a pile of letters. She seemed baffled because it could not speak. When one of the saucepans boiled over, she ran to it and lifted it off, suddenly and too high, in her telephone movement; the water spilled at once. On the table beside the stove were basins and pans she was using, and she had them all spread out in an orderly way, like typing; she went from one to the other with the careful look of inquiry she used to give to the things she was filing. It was not a method suitable to a kitchen.