The Pritchett Century (43 page)

That was the Police. On to it at once. That fellow Colin had followed us down by road.

Cry, I never heard a girl cry, as Muriel cried, when we came back from the hospital. He had died in the ambulance. Cutting in, the old game he used to play on me. Clean off the saddle and under the Birmingham bus. The blood was everywhere, they said. People were still looking at it when we went by. Head on. What a mess! Don’t let’s talk about it.

She wanted to see him but they said “No.” There wasn’t anything recognisable to see. She put her arms round my neck and cried, “Colin. Colin,” as if I were Colin and clung to me. I was feeling sick myself. I held her tight and I kissed her and I thought “Holiday ruined.”

“Damn fool man,” I thought. “Poor devil,” I thought.

“I knew he’d do something like this.”

“There, there,” I said to her. “Don’t think about Colin.”

Didn’t she love me, I said, and not Colin. Hadn’t she got me? She said, yes, she had. And she loved me. But, “Oh Colin! Oh Colin!” she cried. “And Colin’s mother,” she cried. “Oh it’s terrible.” She cried and cried.

We put her to bed and I sat with her and my mother kept coming in.

“Leave her to me,” I said. “I understand her.” Before they went to bed they both came in and looked at her. She lay sobbing with her head in the pillow.

I could quite understand her being upset. Colin was a decent fellow. He was always doing things for her. He mended her electric lamp and he riveted the stem of a wine glass so that you couldn’t see the break. He used to make things for her. He was very good with his hands.

She lay on her side with her face burning and feverish with misery
and crying, scalded by the salt, and her lips shrivelled up. I put my arm under her neck and I stroked her forehead. She groaned. Sometimes she shivered and sometimes she clung to me, crying, “Oh Colin! Colin!”

My arm ached with the cramp and I had a crick in my back, sitting in the awkward way I was on the bed. It was late. There was nothing to do but to ache and sit watching her and thinking. It is funny the way your mind drifts. When I was kissing her and watching her I was thinking out who I’d show our new Autumn range to first. Her hand held my wrist tight and when I kissed her I got her tears on my lips. They burned and stung. Her neck and shoulders were soft and I could feel her breath hot out of her nostrils on the back of my hand. Ever noticed how hot a woman’s breath gets when she’s crying? I drew out my hand and lay down beside her and “Oh, Colin, Colin,” she sobbed, turning over and clinging to me. And so I lay there, listening to the traffic, staring at the ceiling and shivering whenever the picture of Colin shooting right off that damned red thing into the bus came into my mind—until I did not hear the traffic any more, or see the ceiling any more, or think any more, but a change happened—I don’t know when. This Colin thing seemed to have knocked the bottom out of everything and I had a funny feeling we were going down and down and down in a lift. And the further we went the hotter and softer she got. Perhaps it was when I found with my hands that she had very big breasts. But it was like being on the mail steamer and feeling engines start under your feet, thumping louder and louder. You can feel it in every vein of your body. Her mouth opened and her tears dried. Her breath came through her open mouth and her voice was blind and husky. Colin, Colin, Colin, she said, and her fingers were hooked into me. I got out and turned the key in the door.

In the morning I left her sleeping. It did not matter to me what my father might have heard in the night, but still I wondered. She would hardly let me touch her before that. I told her I was sorry but she shut me up. I was afraid of her. I was afraid of mentioning Colin. I wanted to go out of the house there and then and tell someone everything. Did she love Colin all the time? Did she think I was Colin? And every time
I thought of that poor devil covered over with a white sheet in the hospital mortuary, a kind of picture of her and me under the sheets with love came into my mind. I couldn’t separate the two things. Just as though it had all come from Colin.

I’d rather not talk any more about that. I never talked to Muriel about it. I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. She didn’t say a word.

The next day was a bad day. It was grey and hot and the air smelled of oil fumes from the road. There’s always a mess to clear up when things like this happen. I had to see to it. I had the job of ringing up the boy’s mother. But I got round that, thank God, by ringing up the garage and getting them to go round and see the old lady. My father is useless when things are like this. I was the whole morning on the phone: to the hospital, the police, the coroner—and he stood fussing beside me, jerking up and down like a fat india-rubber ball. I found my mother washing up at the sink and she said:

“That poor boy’s mother! I can’t stop thinking of her.” Then my father comes in and says,—just as though I was a customer—

“Of course if Mrs Mitchell desires it we can have the remains of the deceased conveyed to his house by one of our new specially sprung motor hearses and can, if necessary, make all the funeral arrangements.”

I could have hit him because Muriel came into the room when he was saying this. But she stood there as if nothing had happened.

“It’s the least we can do for poor Mrs Mitchell,” she said. There were small creases of shadow under her eyes which shone with a soft strong light I had never seen before. She walked as if she were really still in that room with me, asleep. God, I loved that girl! God, I wanted to get all this over, this damned Colin business that had come right into the middle of everything like this, and I wanted to get married right away. I wanted to be alone with her. That’s what Colin did for me.

“Yes,” I said. “We must do the right thing by Colin.”

“We are sometimes asked for long-distance estimates,” my father said.

“It will be a little something,” my mother said.

“Dad and I will talk it over,” I said.

“Come into the office,” my father said. “It occurred to me that it would be nice to do the right thing by this friend of yours.”

We talked it over. We went into the cost of it. There was the return journey to reckon. We worked it out that it would come no dearer to old Mrs Mitchell than if she took the train and buried the boy here. That is to say, my father said, if I drove it.

“It would look nice,” my father said.

“Saves money and it would look a bit friendly,” my father said. “You’ve done it before.”

“Well,” I said. “I suppose I can get a refund on my return ticket from the railway.”

But it was not as simple as it looked, because Muriel wanted to come. She wanted to drive back with me and the hearse. My mother was very worried about this. It might upset Muriel, she thought. Father thought it might not look nice to see a young girl sitting by the coffin of a grown man.

“It must be dignified,” my father said. “You see if she was there it might look as though she were just doing it for the ride—like these young women on bakers’ vans.”

My father took me out into the hall to tell me this because he did not want her to hear. But she would not have it. She wanted to come back with Colin.

“Colin loved me. It is my duty to him,” she said. “Besides,” she said, suddenly, in her full open voice—it had seemed to be closed and carved and broken and small—“I’ve never been in a hearse before.”

“And it will save her fare too,” I said to my father.

That night I went again to her room. She was awake. I said I was sorry to disturb her but I would go at once only I wanted to see if she was all right. She said, in the closed voice again, that she was all right.

“Are you sure?” I said.

She did not answer. I was worried. I went over to the bed.

“What is the matter? Tell me what is the matter,” I said.

For a long time she was silent. I held her hand, I stroked her head. She was lying stiff in the bed. She would not answer. I dropped my hand to her small white shoulder. She stirred and drew up her legs and half turned and said, “I was thinking of Colin.”

“Where is he?” she asked.

“They’ve brought him round. He’s lying downstairs.”

“In the front room?”

“Yes, ready for the morning. Now be a sensible girl and go back by train.”

“No, no,” she said. “I want to go with Colin. Poor Colin. He loved me and I didn’t love him.” And she drew my hands down to her breasts.

“Colin loved me,” she whispered.

“Not like this,” I whispered.

It was a warm grey morning like all the others when we took Colin back. They had fixed the coffin in before Muriel came out. She came down wearing the bright blue hat she had got off Dormer’s millinery man and she kissed my mother and father good-bye. They were very sorry for her. “Look after her, Arthur,” my mother said. Muriel got in beside me without a glance behind her at the coffin. I started the engine. They smiled at us. My father raised his hat, but whether it was to Muriel and me or to Colin, or to the three of us, I do not know. He was not, you see, wearing his top hat. I’ll say this for the old boy, thirty years in the trade have taught him tact.

After leaving my father’s house you have to go down to the tram terminus before you get on to the by-pass. There was always one or two drivers, conductors or inspectors there, doing up their tickets, or changing over the trolley arms. When we passed I saw two of them drop their jaws, stick their pencils in their ears and raise their hats. I was so surprised by this that I nearly raised mine in acknowledgment, forgetting that we had the coffin behind. I had not driven one of my father’s hearses for years.

Hearses are funny things to drive. They are well-sprung, smooth-running cars, with quiet engines and, if you are used to driving a smaller car, before you know where you are, you are speeding. You know you ought to go slow, say 25 to 30 maximum and it’s hard to keep it down. You can return empty at 70 if you like. It’s like driving a fire engine. Go fast out and come back slow—only the other way round. Open out in the country but slow down past houses. That’s what it means. My father was very particular about this.

Muriel and I didn’t speak very much at first. We sat listening to the engine and the occasional jerk of the coffin behind when we went over
a pot hole. We passed the place where poor Colin—but I didn’t say anything to Muriel, and she, if she noticed—which I doubt—did not say anything to me. We went through Cox Hill, Wammering and Yodley Mount, flat country, don’t care for it myself. “There’s a wonderful lot of building going on,” Muriel said at last.

“You won’t know these places in five years,” I said.

But my mind kept drifting away from the road and the green fields and the dullness, and back to Colin,—five days before he had come down this way. I expected to see that Indian coming flying straight out of every corner. But it was all bent and bust up properly now. I saw the damned thing.

He had been up to his old game, following us and that had put the end to following. But not quite; he was following us now, behind us in the coffin. Then my mind drifted off that and I thought of those nights at my parents’ house, and Muriel. You never know what a woman is going to be like. I thought, too, that it had put my calculations out. I mean, supposing she had a baby. You see I had reckoned on waiting eighteen months or so. I would have eight hundred then. But if we had to get married at once, we should have to cut right down. Then I kept thinking it was funny her saying “Colin!” like that in the night; it was funny it made her feel that way with me, and how it made me feel when she called me Colin. I’d never thought of her in that way, in what you might call the “Colin” way.

I looked at her and she looked at me and she smiled but still we did not say very much, but the smiles kept coming to both of us. The light-railway bridge at Dootheby took me by surprise and I thought the coffin gave a jump as we took it.

“Colin’s still watching us,” I nearly said.

There were tears in her eyes.

“What was the matter with Colin?” I said. “Nice chap, I thought. Why didn’t you marry him?”

“Yes,” she said. “He was a nice boy. But he’d no sense of humour.”

“And I wanted to get out of that town,” she said.

“I’m not going to stay there, at that hotel,” she said.

“I want to get away,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

She had a way of getting angry with the air, like that. “You’ve got to
take me away,” she said. We were passing slowly into Muster, there was a tram ahead and people thick on the narrow pavements, dodging out into the road. But when we got into the Market Square where they were standing around, they saw the coffin. They began to raise their hats. Suddenly she laughed. “It’s like being the King and Queen,” she said.

“They’re raising their hats,” she said.

“Not all of them,” I said.

She squeezed my hand and I had to keep her from jumping about like a child on the seat as we went through.

“There they go.”

“Boys always do,” I said.

“And another.”

“Let’s see what the policeman does.”

She started to laugh but I shut her up. “Keep your sense of humour to yourself,” I said.

Through all those towns that run into one another as you might say, we caught it. We went through, as she said, like royalty. So many years since I drove a hearse, I’d forgotten what it was like.

I was proud of her, I was proud of Colin and I was proud of myself. And, after what had happened, I mean on the last two nights, it was like a wedding. And although we knew it was for Colin, it was for us too, because Colin was with both of us. It was like this all the way.

“Look at that man there. Why doesn’t he raise his hat? People ought to show respect for the dead,” she said.

(1938)

We took our seats at the table. There were seven of us.

It was at one of those taverns in Madrid. The moment we sat down Juliano, the little, hen-headed, red-lipped consumptive who was paying for the dinner and who laughed not with his mouth but by crinkling the skin round his eyes into scores of scratchy lines and showing his bony teeth—Juliano got up and said, “We are all badly placed.” Fernando and Felix said, “No, we are not badly placed.” And this started another argument shouting between the lot of us. We had been arguing all the way to the restaurant. The proprietor then offered a new table in a different way. Unanimously we said, “No,” to settle the row; and when he brought the table and put it into place and laid a red and white check tablecloth on it, we sat down, stretched our legs and said, “Yes. This table is much better.”