The Pritchett Century (49 page)

To Mrs Fulmino, a woman whose feelings were in her rolling arms, flying out from one extreme to another as she talked, as if she were doing exercises, Hilda appeared in her wedding clothes and all the
sexuality of an open flower, standing beside her young Indian husband who was about to become a doctor. There was trouble about the wedding, for Mr Singh spoke a glittering and palatial English—the beautiful English a snake might speak, it seemed to the family—that made a few pock marks on his face somehow more noticeable. Old Mrs Draper alone, against all evidence—Mr Singh had had a red racing car—stuck to it that he was “a common lascar off a ship.” Mrs Fulmino had been terrified of Mr Singh—she often conveyed—and had “refused to be in a room alone with him.” Or “How can she let him touch her?” she would murmur, thinking about that, above all. Then whatever vision was in her mind would jump forward to Hilda, captured, raped, tortured, murdered in front of her eyes. Mrs Fulmino’s mind was voluptuous. When I first went to Mr Fulmino’s house and met Iris and we talked about Hilda, Mrs Fulmino once or twice left the room and he lowered his voice. “The wife’s upset,” he said. “She’s easily upset.”

We had not all been under a spell. Not young Jack Draper nor his wife, for example. Jack Draper had fought in the war and where we thought of the war as something done to us and our side, Jack thought of it as something done to everybody. I remember what he said to his wife before the Fulminos and I said “Good night” to them on the Saturday Hilda came home.

“It’s a shame,” said Jack, “she couldn’t bring the Nip with her.”

“He was killed,” said his wife.

“That’s what I mean,” said Jack. “It’s a bleeding shame she couldn’t.”

We walked on and then young Mrs Draper said, in her flat, northern laconic voice:

“Well, Jack, for all the to-do, you might just as well have gone to your fishing.”

For Jack had made a sacrifice in coming to welcome Hilda. He went fishing up the Thames on Saturdays. The war for him was something that spoiled fishing. In the Normandy landing he had thought mostly of that. He dreamed of the time when his two boys would be old enough to fish. It was what he had had children for.

“There’s always Sunday,” said his wife, tempting him. Jack nodded.
She knew he would not fall. He was the youngest of old Mrs Draper’s family, the baby, as they said. He never missed old Mrs Draper’s Sundays.

It was a good thing he did not, a good thing for all of us that we didn’t miss, for we would have missed Hilda’s second announcement.

Young Mrs Draper provoked it. These Sunday visits to Hincham Street were a ritual in the family. It was a duty to old Mrs Draper. We went there for our tea. She provided, though Constance prepared for it as if we were a school, for she kept house there. We recognised our obligation by paying sixpence into the green pot on the chiffonier when we left. The custom had started in the bad times when money was short; but now the money was regarded as capital and Jack Draper used to joke and say, “Who are you going to leave the green pot to, Mum?” Some of Hilda’s luggage had been moved by the afternoon into her mother’s little room at the back and how those two could sleep in a bed so small was a question raised by Mrs Fulmino whose night with Mr Fulmino required room for struggle, as I know, for this colonising man often dropped hints about how she swung her legs over in the night.

“Have you unpacked yet, Hilda?” Mrs Fulmino was asking.

“Unpacked!” said Constance. “Where would she put all that?”

“I’ve been lazy,” said Hilda. “I’ve just hung up a few things because of the creases.”

“Things do crease,” said Mrs Fulmino.

“Bill Williams said he would drop in later,” said Constance.

“That man suffered,” said Mrs Fulmino, with meaning.

“He heard you were back,” said Constance.

Hilda had told us about Shinji. Jack Draper listened with wonder. Shinji had been in the jute business and when the war came he was called up to the army. He was in “Stores.” Jack scratched with delight when he heard this. “Same as I tried to work it,” Jack said. Shinji had been killed in an air raid. Jack’s wife said, to change the subject, she liked that idea, the idea of Jack “working” anything, he always let everyone climb up on his shoulders. “First man to get wounded. I knew he would be,” she said. “He never looks where he’s going.”

“Is that the Bill Williams who worked for Ryan, the builder?” said Hilda.

“He lives in the Culverwell Road,” young Mrs Draper said.

Old Mrs Draper speaking from the bowels of history, said:

“He got that Sellers girl into trouble.”

“Yes,” exclaimed Hilda, “I remember.”

“It was proved in court that he didn’t,” said Constance briskly to Hilda. “You weren’t here.”

We were all silent. One could hear only the sounds of our cups on the saucers and Mrs Fulmino’s murmur, “More bread and butter?” Constance’s face had its neat, pink, enamelled smile and one saw the truthful blue of her small eyes become purer in colour. Iris was next to me and she said afterwards something I hadn’t noticed, that Constance hated Hilda. It is one of the difficulties I have in writing, that, all along, I was slow to see what was really happening, not having a woman’s eye or ear. And being young. Old Mrs Draper spoke again, her mind moving from the past to the present with that suddenness old people have.

“If Bill Williams is coming, he knows the way,” she said.

Hilda understood that remark for she smiled and Constance flushed. (Of course, I see it now: two women in a house! Constance had ruled old Mrs Draper and Mrs Johnson for years and her money had made a big difference.) They knew that one could, as the saying is, “trust Gran to put her oar in.”

Again young Mrs Draper changed the subject. She was a nimble, tarry-haired woman, impatient of fancies, excitements and disasters. She liked things flat and factual. While the family gaped at Hilda’s clothes and luggage, young Mrs Draper had reckoned up the cost of them. She was not avaricious or mean, but she knew that money is money. You know that if you have done without. So she went straight into the important question being (as she would say), not like people in the South, double-faced Wesleyans, but honest, plain and straight out with it, what are they ashamed of? Jack, her husband, was frightened by her bluntness, and had the nervous habit of folding his arms across his chest and scratching fast under his armpits when his wife spoke out about money; some view of the river, with his bait and line and the evening flies came into his panicking mind. Mr Fulmino once
said that Jack scratched because the happiest moments of his life, the moments of escape, had been passed in clouds of gnats.

“I suppose, Hilda, you’ll be thinking of what you’re going to do?” young Mrs Draper said. “Did they give you a pension?”

I was stroking Iris’s knee but she stopped me, alerted like the rest of them. The word “pension” is a very powerful word. In this neighbourhood one could divide the world into those who had pensions and those who hadn’t. The phrase “the old pensioner” was one of envy, abuse and admiration. My father, for example, spoke contemptuously of pensioners. Old Mrs Draper’s husband had had a pension, but my father would never have one. As a librarian (Mr Fulmino pointed out), I would have a pension and thereby I had overcome the first obstacle in being allowed to go out with his daughter.

“No,” said Hilda. “Nothing.”

“But he was your husband, you said,” said Constance.

“He was in the army, you say,” said young Mrs Draper.

“Inflation,” said Mr Fulmino grandly. “The financial situation.”

He was stopped.

“Then,” said young Mrs Draper, “you’ll have to go to work.”

“My girl won’t want for money,” said old Mrs Johnson, sitting beside her daughter as she had done the day before.

“No,” said young Mrs Draper. “That she won’t while you’re alive, Mrs Johnson. We all know that, and the way you slaved for her. But Hilda wants to look after you, I’m sure.”

It was, of course, the question in everyone’s mind. Did all those clothes and cases mean money or was it all show? That is what we all wanted to know. We would not have raised it at that time and in that way. It wasn’t our way—we would have drifted into finding out—Hilda was scarcely home. But young Mrs Draper had been brought up hard, as she said, twelve mouths to feed.

“
I’m
looking after
you
, Mum,” said Hilda, smiling at her mother.

Mrs Johnson was like a wizened little girl gazing up at a taller sister.

“I’ll take you to Monte Carlo, Mum,” Hilda said.

The old lady tittered. We all laughed loudly. Hilda laughed with us.

“That gambling place!” the old lady giggled.

“That’s it,” laughed Hilda. “Break the bank.”

“Is it across water?” said the old lady, playing up. “I couldn’t go on a boat. I was so sick at Southend when I was a girl.”

“Then we’ll fly.”

“Oh!” the old lady cried. “Don’t, Hil—I’ll have a fit.”

“ ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,’ ” Mr Fulmino sang. “You might find a boy friend, Mrs Johnson.”

Young Mrs Draper did not laugh at this game; she still wanted to know; but she did smile. She was worried by laughter. Constance did not laugh but she showed her pretty white teeth.

“Oh, she’s got one for me,” said Mrs Johnson. “So she says.”

“Of course I have. Haven’t I, Harry?” said Hilda, talking across the table to me.

“Me? What?” I said completely startled.

“You can’t take Harry,” said Iris, half frightened.

“Did you post the letter?” said Hilda to me.

“What letter?” said Iris to me. “Did she give you a letter?”

Now there is a thing I ought to have mentioned! I had forgotten all about the letter. When we were leaving the evening before, Hilda had called me quietly to the door and said:

“Please post this for me. Tonight.”

“Hilda gave me a letter to post,” I said.

“You did post it?” Hilda said.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked contentedly round at everyone.

“I wrote to Mr Gloster, the gentleman I told you about, on the boat. He’s in Paris. He’s coming over at the end of the week to get a car. He’s taking mother and me to France. Mr Gloster, Mum, I told you. No, not Mr Faulkner. That was the other boat. He was in San Francisco.”

“Oh,” said Mrs Johnson, a very long “oh” and wriggling like a child listening to a story. She was beginning to look pale, as she had the evening before when she had the turn.

“France!” said Constance in a peremptory voice.

“Who is Mr Gloster—you never said anything,” said Mrs Fulmino.

“What about the currency regulations?” said Mr Fulmino.

Young Mrs Draper said, “France! He must have money.”

“Dollars,” said Hilda to Mr Fulmino.

Dollars! There was a word!

“The almighty dollar,” said Constance, in the cleansed and uncorrupted voice of one who has mentioned one of the commandments. Constance had principles; we had the confusion of our passions.

And from sixteen years or more back in time or perhaps it was from some point in history hundreds of years back and forgotten, old Mrs Draper said: “And is this Indian married?”

Hilda—to whom no events, I believe, had ever happened—replied: “Mr Gloster’s an American, Gran.”

“He wants to marry her,” said old Mrs Johnson proudly.

“If I’ll have him!” said Hilda.

“Well, he can’t if you won’t have him, can he, Hilda?” said Mrs Fulmino.

“Gloster. G-L-O-S-T-E-R?” asked Mr Fulmino.

“Is he in a good job?” asked young Mrs Draper.

Hilda pointed to a brooch on her blouse.

“He gave me this,” she said.

She spoke in her harsh voice and with a movement of her face that in anyone else one would have called excited, but in her it had a disturbing lack of meaning. It was as if Hilda had been hooked into the air by invisible wires and was then swept out into the air and back to Japan, thousands of miles away again, and while she was on her way, she turned and knocked us flat with the next item.

“He’s a writer,” she said. “He’s going to write a book about me. He’s very interested in me …”

Mrs Johnson nodded.

“He’s coming to fetch us, Mum and me, and take us to France to write this book. He’s going to write my life.”

Her life! Here was a woman who had, on top of everything else, a life.

“Coming
here
?” said Mrs Fulmino with a grinding look at old Mrs Draper and then at Constance, trying to catch their eyes and failing; in despair she looked at the shabby room, to see what must be put straight, or needed cleaning or painting. Nothing had been done to it for years for Constance, teaching at her school all day, and very clean in her person, let things go in the house and young Mrs Draper said
old Mrs Draper smelled. All the command in Mrs Fulmino’s face collapsed as rapidly, on her own, she looked at the carpets, the lino, the curtains.

“What’s he putting in this book?” said young Mrs Draper cannily.

“Yes,” said Jack Draper, backing up his wife.

“What I tell him,” Hilda said.

“What she tells him,” said old Mrs Johnson sparkling. Constance looked thoughtfully at Hilda.