The Pritchett Century (12 page)

One summer morning when I was on the heavy leather floor of our building, I heard the impudent whistle of Atterbury, the foreman of the floor. He was a cross-eyed, jeering little fly, known to everyone as Ankleberg.

“I got a nice birthday present this morning,” he shouted. “My old woman give it me. Somethink I coulda done without. Same as last time, same as time afore that—nine bleeding times! Another bleeding kid. And no lie either.”

He had an accusing manner.

“Know what the woman next to her in hospital said to the doctor? ‘E’s never off me.’ ”

Ankleberg stared and, then, he shouted with laughter and went off looking like the devil. He was the man who let me have a go at cutting maggots out of some cow-hides in return for loading a van with them.

“Here Ankle,” said his mate but coming over to me and opening a wallet. “This is what you want.” And showed him a packet of French letters.

“Dirty bastard,” said Ankleberg. “You’ll get some poor girl into trouble.”

Our talk was stopped by a curious sound of pumping and hammering
going on in the sky and we went over to the gap. The sound was gunfire.

“Stone me, it’s bleeding Fritz,” said Ankleberg.

Up we went in the warehouse lift.

“Nine little hungry mouths,” said Ankleberg on the way up. “What d’you make of that, son?”

We got on to the roof. Not far off, high in the sky over the Tower of London and coming westward were a dozen German aircraft. They looked like summer gnats in the clear sky and around them hundreds of little cherub-like bursts of anti-aircraft fire were pocking the blue. Sudden bursts of bomb smoke came stepping along the Thames towards St Paul’s, where black and green clouds went up from the roofs: and then, down our way the aircraft came. In the street people were watching the planes, most of our staff were there and they ran indoors when a bomb fell; some said on a printing works in Newcomen Street near by, or in the Boro.’

In a minute or two the raid was over. I was looking at the fires near St Paul’s. I tried to ring my father. There was no answer. I got permission to go and see if he was all right; but in fact I was longing to see the damage. It was, for those days, startling. A flight of aircraft had bombed London for the first time by day. Over London Bridge I went down the steps by St Magnus the Martyr into Billingsgate and saw the street walls of several houses and wharves had been stripped off, carts were overturned and horses lay dead among the crowds. The pubs in Bermondsey had filled with women pouring drink into themselves and their babies as I left; it was the same in Billingsgate. Outside a pub at the Monument, on the very spot where the old fire of London had started, one of those ragged and wild-looking women street singers with enormous plumes in her coster hat was skirling out a song, luscious with Cockney sentiment and melodrama: “Cit-ee of larfter, Cit-ee of tears.” I kicked my way through little streets of broken glass in Little Britain and, passing the stink of burning chemical works, reached my father’s office. The flames of the fire were so hot that he and I could not stay on his roof.

(1968)

I started work on a misty morning. The shop was in an arcade and was the Paris branch of an English manufacturer of photographic plates and papers. At first I had thought the boss was French, for he had the black long curly moustache and frisked-up hair of a French barber of the period and wore a tight little jacket and boots with high heels. In fact, he was a London sparrow brought up in Marseilles. His sallow skin looked as though it had been painted with walnut stain and he spoke French fast but with an entirely English pronunciation. His “combiangs” and “ker voolay voos” raced through the tongue of Molière like a rusty lawn mower. He pointed out that on the small salary he was paying me I should have to leave my hotel and find a cheaper room.

That morning, I saw that my job was a come-down after the leather trade. First of all, the situation of the shop was wrong. Du Maurier, Murger and W.J. Locke and Anatole France would have dropped me if they had known I was earning my living on the Right Bank within five minutes of Thomas Cook and the American Express: that I was in Paree and not Paris. My mind split: here I was copying, in pencil, lists
of stock on half sheets of flimsy paper, hour after hour, in the dark back office of the shop, but my other self was across the river among the artists. The other people working in the shop were, first, the salesman: he was a heavy, black-haired, scowling young Highland Scot, a handsome man with grey threatening eyes and a very soft voice. He had run away from home at fifteen and, disguising his age, he had fought in the artillery in the 1914 war. He was a broken-nosed Army boxer, too. Towards the end of the war he had been blown off his horse and received a chunk of high explosive in his bottom and spoke of this with gravity. He had married a French woman and I imagined a pert little midinette: but one day she stood in the arcade outside making signs to him and I saw she was a plain, short woman, middle-aged and enormously fat. They lived in Montmartre and he spoke of her cooking reverently. He was a magnet to all the women who came to the shop. They became helpless or frantic at the sight of him; he would stand close to them and look down into their eyes, unsmiling, and speak in a low voice, with slow, pedantic deliberation.

The rest of the staff were a nimble little guttersnipe from Montmartre called Pierre, and a gangling, hot-faced Breton. I was the clerk: they were messengers and packers. I checked the stock in a store-room opposite the shop and packed as well. After a month, when suddenly my awkward French became fluent, I had to serve the customers and deal with the dozens of Cash on Delivery forms at the Post Office. By this time, if the boss had left, I had to type out short letters to the customers, on an old English typewriter. I bought a book on French commercial correspondence. I was the hero of Pierre, the Montmartre boy, who jumped about as he watched me type with three fingers and helped me salt and pepper the letters with the proper French accents.

The customers were mainly from firms of photographers in Paris, but many came up from the provinces bringing with them—to my mind—all that one thought of as the provincial bourgeois. Madame Bovarys came in to see the Scot. Their voices—and his—would drop to murmurs. Sometimes the two would disappear into the street together and the Scot would be away for half an hour; the office boys, particularly the Breton, danced about him when he came back trying to get details out of him. What was she like in bed? The male photographers
had an artistic appearance which I admired. They wore hard-crowned black hats with wide brims and a loose black bow dangling from the collar. I longed to dress as they did, but the artistic dress was beyond my income.

For some time I was the office joke. The French boys could not pronounce my name. I became Monsieur Shwep or Machin-Shwep, occasionally M. Victor and their clown. We all got on well. There is that picture of me standing by the counter of the shop, wearing the tweed jacket and flannel trousers—a uniform unknown to the French in the twenties for most Frenchmen wore black then—and my juvenile grin. I grinned most of the time for I was careless of the future, living from day to day, free to do as I pleased. I became finally acceptable to the French boys when in the evenings we left the shop and all walked arm in arm along the Boulevard practising the girl auction invented by the Breton.

“How much to sleep with this one? A thousand, five hundred, a hundred, twenty, ten?” they shouted as the girls came towards us.

One day I had a triumph.

“M. Shwep—how much?”

“Twenty-two francs fifty,” I said.

They were ravished by this superb office joke. Twenty-two francs fifty was the well-known price of one of the photographic papers we sold. How easily the office humorist is born.

But the Scot was the hero of the shop. It was he who was worshipped as we trailed after him to the bistro round the corner. His unsmiling face imposed. His drinking amazed. His betting at Auteuil and Longchamps was famous. We marched back to the shop after lunch, the Montmartre boy singing:

The boss was frightened of the Scot, who towered over him. Mac’s gestures were as slow as his speech. His arm came up as if judging for an uppercut when he talked to the boss, whose eyes began to flutter and his feet to edge back. Sometimes, when one of the Madame Bovarys
came in to the shop and the magnetizing stares and monosyllabic invitations began, the boss would come out to stop them, but his courage always failed; and with ceremonious impudence Mac would say that in view of the importance of the lady as their best customer from Lille or Dijon, he thought he would go out for half an hour with her for a drink. One lunch time when we were at the bistro and he was talking to the barman about some horse-race or other, one of his women (who could not get a word in), became annoyed. She made a dart at his flies and pulled his cock out. The Scot turned slowly to her with admiration. He buttoned up and our procession marched back to the shop; Mac went straight to the boss and in the sad manner of some old Scots preacher he told the boss what had happened.

“I thought it might be advisable to warn you about the bistro,” he said, “in case you should find yourself in a similar situation.”

I left my room on the
cinquième
at the hotel. I now lived in a cheap room at Auteuil, a fashionable quarter, but my room was in the poorer part of it, where servants, shop assistants and small employees lived. I had given up trying the Latin Quarter, for thousands of Americans had swarmed in and put up the prices. I had been forced to reject a tiny room in the Mont St Geneviève because the place stank. In Auteuil I found a good cheap room on the ground floor in the flat of a war widow who went out to work every day as a charwoman. She was a sad women in her thirties who came from Tours, and she was very religious, a strong Catholic, and very proud of the pâtés of her region. A priest used to bring her little boy back from school at the weekends: nuns visited her. The flat had two rooms. Mine was nearly filled by a large bed and a washstand and looked out on a yard and dirty wall.

When she was at home Mme Chapin wore a black overall from chin to feet and felt slippers. She had a lamenting voice and sounded like one of the Fates. On Sunday mornings, usually when I was naked and washing in cold water, for there was no bathroom, she would come in with my laundry and stand there telling me bits of her life.

“Oh, that filthy war,” she would say again and again. “My husband would have been the chief mechanic at the garage if he had not been killed.”

Paris was a wicked city of heartless people, she would groan, as I tried to cover myself with the little wet towel. And there was a good deal of “Such is life,” in my mother’s fashion. Madame Chapin worked for a rich cocotte up the street.

“A life of luxury—but with women like that, a false step, a suspicion, and the man who keeps them throws them into the gutter.”

On Sundays she dressed in her best black and now her face would seem rounder and her yellowish eyes would become warm and seductive. Her pale, dressed-up little boy would stare at me.

“Ah, my son,” she often said to him. “Look at the gentleman. He works. Work—follow his example, my son.”

And they would go off to Mass. I got to know Madame Chapin very well.

“I feel safe with you,” she said after a month. “It was not the same with my Polish lodger. I never felt any confidence with him, but with you it is different.”

I was hurt. One Sunday, when Christmas came, she came in dressed up in her black as usual with her boy. She was going on her annual visit to her sister who had come to stay at the Ritz. This sister was a kept woman and lived with a motor car manufacturer. The rich sister gave her discarded dresses to sell and the boy was given a book or a toy. When Madame Chapin came back she fell back on her stock epitaph, standing still as stone in the doorway, in her mournful voice:

“With those women, one false step …” She seemed more like a man than a woman to me.

It did not occur to me until forty years later that this annual visit would make a good story. I moved the two sisters to London and, in the manner of writers, changed or added to what I could guess of their characters. I gave Madame Chapin a husband. I think that what prevented me from writing the story before was my knowledge of her real life. It was not until I had given her an imaginary husband and transferred her to another place that she took on the reality of a fiction that I think dignified her. It is part of the function of the novelist to speak for people, to make them say or reveal what they are unable to say, to give them a dignity, even the distinction of being comical though she was not comical in my story. But in those Paris days I could not easily
think of what to write about, and I did not know that the creative impulse is often ignited when scenes and people from the almost forgotten past are struck like a flint against something from the present. Her one happiness was knowing the “saintly Brothers” who took charge of her son.