The Pritchett Century (46 page)

Mrs Forster straightened herself with dignity and stopped crying.

“He broke my heart,” said Mrs Forster, panting. “I always found one in the bed after his leave was over.”

“He couldn’t help it,” said Margaret.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs Forster.

“It’s the life sailors live,” said Margaret. “And don’t you forget, are you listening, Jill? Listen to me. Look at me and listen. You’re among friends, Jill. He’s gone, Jill, like you might say, out of your life.”

“Yes,” said Mrs Forster, nodding again, repeating a lesson. “Out of my life.”

“And good riddance, too, Jill.”

“Riddance,” murmured Mrs Forster.

“Jill,” shouted Margaret. “You’ve got a warm heart, that’s what it is, as warm as Venus. I could never marry again after what I’ve been through, not whatever you paid me, not however much money it was you gave me, but you’re not like me, your heart is too warm. You’re too trusting.”

“Trusting,” Mrs Forster repeated softly, squeezing her eyelids.

“I tell you what it was,” Margaret said. “You were in love, Jill,” said Margaret, greedy in the mouth. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, dear.”

“That’s what I said. It was love. You loved him and you married him.”

Margaret pulled herself up the bar and sat upright, looking with surprise at the breast that had rested there. She looked at her glass, she looked at Mrs Forster’s; she picked up the glass and put it down. “It was a beautiful dream, Jill, you had your beautiful dream and I say this from the bottom of my heart, I hope you will have a beautiful memory.”

“Two months,” sighed Mrs Forster, and her eyes opened amorously in a grey glister and then sleepily half closed.

“But now, Jill, it’s over. You’ve woke up, woken up. I mean, you’re seeing things as they are.”

The silence seemed to the two ladies to stand in a lump between them. Margaret looked into her empty glass again. Frederick lit a cigarette he had made, and his powdered face split up into twitches as he took the first draw and then put the cigarette economically on the counter. He went through his repertory of small coughs and then, raising his statesman-like head, he listened to the traffic passing and hummed.

Mrs Forster let her expensive fur slip back from her fine shoulders and looked at the rings on her small hands.

“I loved him, Margaret,” she said. “I really did love him.”

“We know you loved him. I mean, it was love,” said Margaret. “It’s nothing to do with the age you are. Life’s never over. It was love. You’re a terrible woman, Jill.”

“Oh, Margaret,” said Mrs Forster with a discreet glee, “I know I am.”

“He was your fourth,” said Margaret.

“Don’t, Margaret,” giggled Mrs Forster.

“No, no, I’m not criticising. I never criticise. Live and let live. It wasn’t a fancy, Jill, you loved him with all your heart.”

Jill raised her chin in a lady-like way.

“But I won’t be hit,” she whispered. “At my age I allow no one to strike me. I am fifty-seven, Margaret, I’m not a girl.”

“That’s what we all said,” said Margaret. “You were headstrong.”

“Oh, Margaret!” said Mrs Forster, delighted.

“Oh, yes, yes, you wouldn’t listen, not you. You wouldn’t listen to me. I brought him up to the Chequers, or was it the Westmoreland?—no, it was the George—and I thought to myself, I know your type, young man—you see, Jill, I’ve had experience—out for what he could get—well, honest, didn’t I tell you?”

“His face was very brown.”

“Brown! Would you believe me? No, you wouldn’t. I can see him. He came up here the night of the dance. He took his coat off. Well, we all sweat.”

“But,” sighed Mrs Forster, “he had white arms.”

“Couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Put it away, pack it up, I said. He didn’t care. He was after Mrs Klebs and she went potty on him till Mrs Sinclair came and then that Mr Baum interfered. That sort lives for trouble. All of them mad on him—I bet Frederick could tell a tale, but he won’t. Trust Frederick,” she said with a look of hate at the barman, “upstairs in the billiard room, I shan’t forget it. Torpedoed twice, he said. I mean Ted said: he torpedoed one or two. What happened to him that night?”

“Someone made him comfortable, I am sure,” said Mrs Forster, always anxious about lonely strangers.

“And you were quite rude with me, Jill, I don’t mean rude, you couldn’t be rude, it isn’t in you, but we almost came to words …”

“What did you say, Margaret?” said Mrs Forster from a dream.

“I said at your age, fifty-seven, I said you can’t marry a boy of twenty-six.”

Mrs Forster sighed.

“Frederick. Freddy, dear. Two more,” said Mrs Forster.

Margaret took her glass, and while she was finishing it Frederick held his hand out for it, insultingly rubbing his fingers.

“Hah!” said Margaret, blowing out her breath as the gin burned her. “You bowled over him, I mean you bowled him over, a boy of twenty-six. Sailors are scamps.”

“Not,” said Mrs Forster, reaching to trim the back of her hair again and tipping her flowered hat forward on her forehead and austerely
letting it remain like that. “Not,” she said, getting stuck at the word.

“Not what?” said Margaret. “Not a scamp? I say he was. I said at the time, I still say it, a rotten little scamp.”

“Not,” said Mrs Forster.

“A scamp,” said Margaret.

“Not. Not with a belt,” said Mrs Forster. “I will not be hit with a belt.”

“My husband,” began Margaret.

“I will not, Margaret,” said Mrs Forster. “Never. Never. Never with a belt.

“Not hit, struck,” Mrs Forster said, defying Margaret.

“It was a plot, you could see it a mile off, it would make you laugh, a lousy, rotten plot,” Margaret let fly, swallowing her drink. “He was after your house and your money. If he wasn’t, what did he want to get his mother in for, a big three-storey house like yours, in a fine residential position? Just what he’d like, a little rat like that …”

Mrs Forster began a long laugh to herself.

“My grandfather,” she giggled.

“What?” said Margaret.

“Owns the house. Not owns. Owned, I say, the house,” said Mrs Forster, tapping the bar.

“Frederick,” said Mrs Forster. “Did my grandfather own the house?”

“Uh?” said Frederick, giving his cuff links a shake. “Which house?”

“My house over there,” said Mrs Forster, pointing to the door.

“I know he owned the house, dear,” Margaret said. “Frederick knows.”

“Let me ask Frederick,” said Mrs Forster. “Frederick, you knew my grandfather.”

“Uh?” said Frederick, leaning to listen.

“He’s as deaf as a wall,” Margaret said.

Frederick walked away to the curtain at the back of the bar and peeped through it. Nervously he came back, glancing at his handsome face in the mirror; he chose an expression of stupidity and disdain, but he spoke with a quiet rage.

“I remember this street,” he raged, “when you could hardly get
across it for the carriages and the footmen and the maids in their lace caps and aprons. You never saw a lady in a place like this.”

He turned his back on them and walked again secretively to the curtain, peeped again, and came back stiffly on feet skewed sideways by the gravity of the gout and put the tips of his old, well-manicured fingers on the bar for them to admire.

“Now,” he said, giving a socially shocked glance over the windows that were still half boarded after the bombing, “all tenements, flats, rooms, walls falling down, balconies dropping off, bombed out, and rotting,” he said. He sneered at Margaret. “Not the same people. Slums. Riff-raff now. Mrs Forster’s father was the last of the old school.”

“My grandfather,” said Mrs Forster.

“He was a gentleman,” said Frederick.

Frederick walked to the curtains.

“Horrible,” he muttered loudly, timing his exit.

There was a silence until he came back. The two women looked at the enormous empty public house, with its high cracked and dirty ceilings, its dusty walls unpainted for twenty years. Its top floor had been on fire. Its windows had gone, three or four times.

Frederick mopped up scornfully between the glasses of gin on the counter.

“That’s what I mean,” said Margaret, her tongue swelling up, her mouth side-slipping. “If you’d given the key to his mother, where would you have been? They’d have shut you out of your own house and what’s the good of the police? All the scum have come to the top since the war. You were too innocent and we saved you. Jill, well, I mean if we hadn’t all got together, the whole crowd, where were you? He was going to get into the house and then one night when you’d been over at the George or the Chequers or over here and you’d had one or two …”

Jill looked proudly and fondly at her glass, crinkled her childish eyes.

“Oh,” said Jill in a little naughty-faced protest.

“I mean, I don’t mean plastered,” said Margaret, bewildered by
the sound of her own voice and moving out her hand to bring it back.

“Not stinking, Jill, excuse me. I mean we sometimes have two or three. Don’t we?” Margaret appealed to the barman.

“Uh?” said Frederick coldly. “Where was this?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” said Margaret, turning round suddenly and knocking her glass over, which Frederick picked up and took away. “What was I saying, Jill?”

A beautiful still smile, like a butterfly opening on an old flower, came onto Mrs Forster’s face.

“Margaret,” she confided, “I don’t know.”

“I know,” said Margaret, waving her heavy bare arm. “You’d have been signing papers. He’d have stripped you. He might have murdered you like that case last Sunday in the papers. A well-to-do woman like you. The common little rat. Bringing his fleas.”

“He—was—not—common,” said Mrs Forster, sitting upright suddenly, and her hat fell over her nose, giving her an appearance of dashing distinction.

“He was off a ship,” said Margaret.

“He was an officer.”

“He said he was an officer,” said Margaret, struggling with her corsets.

Mrs Forster got down from her stool and held with one hand to the bar. She laughed quietly.

“He—” she began.

“What?” said Margaret.

“I shan’t tell you,” said Mrs Forster. “Come here.”

Margaret leaned towards her.

“No, come here, stand here,” said Mrs Forster.

Margaret stood up, also holding to the bar, and Mrs Forster put her hands to Margaret’s neck and pulled her head down and began to laugh in Margaret’s ear. She was whispering.

“What?” shouted Margaret. “I can’t hear. What is it?”

Mrs Forster laughed with a roar in Margaret’s ear.

“He—he—was a man, Margaret,” she whispered. She pushed her away.

“You know what I mean, Margaret,” she said in a stern clear voice. “You do, don’t you? Come here again, I’ll tell you.”

“I heard you.”

“No, come here again, closer. I’ll tell you. Where are you?”

Mrs Forster whispered again and then drew back.

“A man,” she said boldly.

“And you’re a woman, Jill.”

“A man!” said Mrs Forster. “Everything, Margaret. You know—everything. But not with a belt. I won’t be struck.” Mrs Forster reached for her glass.

“Vive la France!”
she said, holding up her glass, drank, and banged it down. “Well, I threw him out.”

A lament broke from Margaret. She had suddenly remembered one of
her
husbands. She had had two.

“He went off to his work and I was waiting for him at six. He didn’t come back. I’d no money in the house, that was seventeen years ago, and Joyce was two, and he never even wrote. I went through his pockets and gave his coats a shake, wedding rings poured out of them. What do you get for it? Your own daughter won’t speak to you, ashamed to bring her friends to the house. ‘You’re always drunk,’ she says. To her own mother. Drunk!” said Margaret. “I might have one or perhaps two. What does a girl like that know?”

With a soft, quick crumpling, a soft thump and a long sigh, Mrs Forster went to the floor and full-length lay there with a beautiful smile on her face, and a fierce noise of pleasure came from her white face. Her hat rolled off, her bag fell down, open, and spilling with a loud noise.

“Eh,” said Frederick, coming round from behind the counter.

“Passed out again. Get her up, get her up quick,” said Margaret. “Her bag, her money.

“Lift her on the side,” she said. “I will take her legs.”

They carried Mrs Forster to the broken leather settee and laid her down there. “Here’s her bag,” Margaret wrangled. “It’s all there.”

“And the one in your hand,” said Frederick, looking at the pound note in Margaret’s hand.

And then the crowd came in: Mrs Klebs, Mrs Sinclair, Mr Baum,
the one they called Pudding, who had fallen down the area at Christmas, and a lot more.

“What’s this?” they said. “Not again? Frederick, what’s this?”

“They came in here,” Frederick said in a temper. “Ladies, talking about love.”

(1982)

She was kissing them all, hugging them, her arms bare in her summer dress, laughing and taking in a big draught of breath after every kiss, nearly knocking old Mrs Draper off her feet, almost wrestling with Mrs Fulmino, who was large and tall. Then Hilda broke off to give another foreign-sounding laugh and plunged at Jack Draper (“the baby”) and his wife, at Mr Fulmino, who cried out “What again?” and at Constance who did not like emotion; and after every kiss, Hilda drew back, getting her breath and making this sound like “Hah!”

“Who is this?” she said, looking at me.

“Harry Fraser,” Mr Fulmino said. “You remember Harry?”

“You worked at the grocer’s,” she said. “I remember you.”

“No,” I said, “that was my brother.”

“This is the little one,” said Mrs Fulmino.

“Who won the scholarship,” said Constance.

“We couldn’t have done anything without him,” said Mr Fulmino, expanding with extravagance as he always did about everything. “He wrote to the War Office, the Red Cross, the Prisoners of War, the American Government, all the letters. He’s going to be our Head Librarian.”