The Pritchett Century (48 page)

“The young one was a nice-looking boy, wasn’t he, Mum?” and Mr Fulmino, who almost never voiced the common opinion about anything but who had perhaps noticed how the eyes of all the women went larger at this remark, laughed loudly and said:

“We’ve got the old Hilda back!”

I mention this because of the item in the papers next day: A Mother’s Faith. Four Years in a Japanese Torture Camp. London Girl’s Ordeal.

Wonderful, as Mr Fulmino said. To be truthful, I felt uncomfortable at old Mrs Draper’s. They were not my family. I had been dragged there by Mr Fulmino, and by a look now and then from young Mrs Draper and from Constance I had the feeling that they thought it was indecent for me to be there when I had only been going with Iris, Mr Fulmino’s daughter, for two or three months. I had to be tolerated as one more example of Mr Fulmino’s uncontrollable gifts—the gift for colonising.

Mr Fulmino had shot up from nothing during the war. It had given him personality. He was a short, talkative, heavy man of forty-five with a wet gold tooth and glossy black hair that streamlined back across his head from an arrow point, getting thin in front. His eyes were anxious, overworked and puddled, indeed if you had not known him you would have thought he had had a couple of black eyes that had never got right. He bowled along as he walked like someone absorbed by fondness for his own body. He had been in many things before he got to work for the Council—the Army (but not a fighting soldier) in the war, in auctions and the bar of a club. He was very active, confiding and enquiring.

When I first met him I was working at the counter of the Public Library,
during the war, and one day he came over from the Council Offices and said, importantly:

“Friend, we’ve got a bit of a headache. We’ve got an enquiry from the War Office. Have you got anything about Malaya—with maps?”

In the next breath he was deflating himself:

“It’s a personal thing. They never tell you anything. I’ve got a niece out there.”

Honesty made him sound underhand. His manner suggested that his niece was a secret fortification somewhere east of Suez. Soon he was showing me the questionnaire from the Red Cross. Then he was telling me that his wife, like the rest of the Drapers, was very handsome—“a lovely woman” in more ways, his manner suggested, than one—but that since Hilda had gone, she had become a different woman. The transition from handsome to different was, he suggested, a catastrophe which he was obliged to share with the public. He would come in from fire-watching, he said, and find her demented. In bed, he would add. He and I found ourselves fire-watching together, and from that time he started facetiously calling me “my secretary.”

“I asked my secretary to get the sand and shovel out,” he would say about our correspondence. “And he wrote the letter.”

So I was half a stranger at Hilda’s homecoming. I looked round the room or out at the shops opposite and, when I looked back at the family several times, I caught Hilda’s eyes wandering too. She also was out of it. I studied her. I hadn’t expected her to come back in rags, as old Mrs Draper had, but it was a surprise to see she was the best-dressed woman in the room and the only one who looked as if she had ever been to a hairdresser. And there was another way in which I could not match her with the person Mr Fulmino and I had conjured. When we thought of everything that must have happened to her it was strange to see that her strong face was smooth and blank. Except for the few minutes of arrival and the time the reporters came, her face was vacant and plain. It was as vacant as a stone that has been smoothed for centuries in the sand of some hot country. It was the face of someone to whom nothing had happened; or, perhaps, so much had happened to her that each event wiped out what had happened before. I was disturbed by something in her—the lack of history, I think. We were
worm-eaten by it. And that suddenly brought her back to me as she had been when she was a schoolgirl and when my older brother got into trouble for chasing after her. She was now sharper in the shoulders and elbows, no longer the swollen schoolgirl but, even as a girl, her face had the same quality of having been fixed and unchangeable between its high cheek bones. It was disturbing, in a face so anonymous, to see the eyes move, especially since she blinked very little; and if she smiled it was less a smile than an alteration of the two lines at the corners of her lips.

The party did not settle down quite in the same way after the reporters had been and there was talk of not tiring Hilda after her long journey. The family would all be meeting tomorrow, the Sunday, as they always did, when young Mrs Jack Draper brought her children. Jack Draper was thinking of the pub which was open now and asking if anyone was going over. And then, something happened. Hilda walked over to the window to Mr Fulmino and said, just as if she had not been there at the time:

“Ted—what did that man from the
News
ask you—about the food?”

“No,” said Mr Fulmino widening to a splendid chance of not giving the facts. “No—he said something about starving the prisoners. I was telling him that in my opinion the deterioration in conditions was inevitable after the disorganisation in the camps resulting from air operations …”

“Oh, I thought you said we starved. We had enough.”

“What?” said Mr Fulmino.

“Bill Williams was a skeleton when he came back. Nothing but a bowl of rice a day. Rice!” said Mrs Fulmino. “And torture.”

“Bill Williams must have been in one of those labour camps,” said Hilda. “Being Japanese I was all right.”

“Japanese!” said Mr Fulmino. “You?”

“Shinji was a Japanese,” said Hilda. “He was in the army.”

“You married a Japanese!” said Mrs Fulmino, marching forward.

“That’s why I was put in the American camp, when they came. They questioned every one, not only me. That’s what I said to the reporter. It wasn’t the food, it was the questions. What was his regiment? When did you hear from him? What was his number? They kept on. Didn’t they, Mum?”

She turned to her mother who had taken the chance to cut herself another piece of cake and was about to slip it into her handkerchief, I think, to carry to her own room. We were all flabbergasted. A trolley bus went by and took a swipe at the wall. Young Mrs Draper murmured something and her young husband Jack said loudly, hearing his wife:

“Hilda married a Nip!”

And he looked at Hilda with astonishment. He had very blue eyes.

“You weren’t a prisoner!” said Mrs Fulmino.

“Not of the Japanese,” said Hilda. “They couldn’t touch me. My husband was Japanese.”

“I’m not stupid. I can hear,” said young Mrs Draper to her husband. She was a plain-spoken woman from the Yorkshire coalfields, one of a family of twelve.

“I’ve nowt to say about who you married, but where is he? Haven’t you brought him?” she said.

“You were married to Mr Singh,” said Mrs Fulmino.

“They’re both dead,” said Hilda, her vacant yellow eyes becoming suddenly brilliant like a cat’s at night. An animal sound, like the noise of an old dog at a bone, came out of old Mrs Draper by the fire.

“Two,” she moaned.

No more than that. Simply, again: “Two.”

Hilda was holding her handbag and she lifted it in both hands and covered her bosom with it. Perhaps she thought we were going to hit her. Perhaps she was going to open the bag and get out something extraordinary—documents, letters, or a handkerchief to weep into. But no—she held it there very tight. It was an American handbag—we hadn’t seen one like that before, cream-coloured, like the luggage. Old Mrs Johnson hesitated at the table, tipped the piece of cake back out of her handkerchief on to a plate, and stepped to Hilda’s side and stood, very straight for once, beside her, the old blue lips very still.

“Ted,” accused Hilda. “Didn’t you get my letters? Mother,” she stepped away from her mother, “didn’t you tell them?”

“What, dear?” said old Mrs Johnson.

“About Shinji. I wrote you. Did Mum tell you?” Hilda appealed to us and now looked fiercely at her mother.

Mrs Johnson smiled and retired into her look of faith and modesty. She feigned deafness.

“I put it all in the post office,” she said. “Every week,” she said. “Until my girl comes home, I said. She’ll need it.”

“Mother!” said Hilda, giving the old lady a small shake. “I wrote to you. I told you. Didn’t you tell them?”

“What did Hilda say?” said Mr Fulmino gently, bending down to the old lady.

“Sh! Don’t worry her. She’s had enough for today. What did you tell the papers, Ted?” said Mrs Fulmino, turning on her husband. “You can’t ever keep your big mouth shut, can you? You never let me see the correspondence.”

“I married Shinji when the war came up,” Hilda said.

And then old Mrs Draper spoke from her armchair by the fire. She had her bad leg propped up on a hassock.

“Two,” said Mrs Draper savagely again.

Mr Fulmino, in his defeat, lost his nerve and let slip a remark quite casually, as he thought, under his voice, but everyone heard it—a remark that Mrs Fulmino was to remind him of in months to come.

“She strikes like a clock,” he said.

We were stupefied by Mr Fulmino’s remark. Perhaps it was a relief.

“Mr Fraser!” Hilda said to me. And now her vacant face had become dramatic and she stepped towards me, appealing outside the family. “You knew, you and Ted knew. You’ve got all the letters …”

If ever a man looked like the Captain going down with his ship and suddenly conscious, at the last heroic moment, that he is not on a ship at all, but standing on nothing and had hopelessly blundered, it was Mr Fulmino. But we didn’t go down, either of us. For suddenly old Mrs Johnson couldn’t stand straight any longer, her head wagged and drooped forward and, but for a chair, she would have fallen to the ground.

“Quick! Constance! Open the window,” Mrs Fulmino said. Hilda was on her knees by her mother.

“Are you there, Hilly?” said her mother.

“Yes, I’m here, Mum,” said Hilda. “Get some water—some brandy.” They took the old lady next door to the little room Hilda was sharing with her that night.

“What I can’t fathom is your aunt not telling me, keeping it to herself,” said Mr Fulmino to his wife as we walked home that evening from Mrs Draper’s, and we had said “Good-bye” to Jack Draper and his wife.

He was not hurt by Mrs Johnson’s secretiveness but by an extraordinary failure of co-operation.

It was unwise of him to criticise Mrs Fulmino’s family.

“Don’t be so smug,” said Mrs Fulmino. “What’s it got to do with you? She was keeping it from Gran, you know Gran’s tongue. She’s her sister.” They called old Mrs Draper Gran or Grandma sometimes.

But when Mr Fulmino got home he asked me in so that we could search the correspondence together. Almost at once we discovered his blunder. There it was in the letter saying a Mrs Singh or Shinji Kobayashi had been identified.

“Shinji!” exclaimed Mrs Fulmino, putting her big index finger on the page. “There you are, plain as dirt.”

“Singh,” said Mr Fulmino. “Singh, Shinji, the same name. Some Indians write Singh, some Shinji.”

“And what is Kobayashi? Indian too? Don’t be a fool.”

“It’s the family name or Christian name of Singh,” said Mr Fulmino, doing the best he could.

Singh, Shinji, Shinji, Singh, he murmured to himself and he walked about trying to convince himself by incantation and hypnosis. He lashed himself with Kobayashi. He remembered the names of other Indians, Indian cities, mentioned the Ganges and the Himalayas; had a brief, brilliant couple of minutes when he argued that Shinji was Hindu for Singh. Mrs Fulmino watched him with the detachment of one waiting for a bluebottle to settle so that she could swat it.

“
You
thought Kobayashi was Indian, didn’t you, Harry?” he appealed to me. I did my best.

“I thought,” I said weakly, “it was the address.”

“Ah, the address!” Mr Fulmino clutched at this, but he knew he was done for. Mrs Fulmino struck.

“And what about the Sunday papers, the man from the
News
?” she said. “You open your big mouth too soon.”

“Christ!” said Mr Fulmino. It was the sound of a man who has gone to the floor.

I will come to that matter of the papers later on. It is not very important.

When we went to bed that night we must all have known in our different ways that we had been disturbed in a very long dream. We had been living on inner visions for years. It was an effect of the long war. England had been a prison. Even the sky was closed and, like convicts, we had been driven to dwelling on fancies in our dreary minds. In the cinema the camera sucks some person forward into an enormous close-up and holds a face there yards wide, filling the whole screen, all holes and pores, like some sucking octopus that might eat up an audience many rows at a time. I don’t say these pictures aren’t beautiful sometimes, but afterwards I get the horrors. Hilda had been a close-up like this for us when she was lost and far away. For myself, I could hardly remember Hilda. She was a collection of fragments of my childhood and I suppose I had expected a girl to return.

My father and mother looked down on the Drapers and the Johnsons. Hincham Street was “dirty” and my mother once whispered that Mr Johnson had worked “on the line,” as if that were a smell. I remember the old man’s huge crinkled white beard when I was a child. It was horribly soft and like pubic hair. So I had always thought of Hilda as a railway girl, in and out of tunnels, signal boxes and main line stations, and when my older brother was “chasing” her as they said, I admired him. I listened to the quarrels that went on in our family—how she had gone to the convent school and the nuns had complained about her; and was it she or some other girl who went for car rides with a married man who waited round the corner of Hincham Street for her? The sinister phrase “The nuns have been to see her mother” stuck in my memory. It astonished me to see Hilda alive, calm, fat and walking after that, as composed as a railway engine. When I grew up and Mr Fulmino came to the library, I was drawn into his search because she brought back those days with my brother, those clouts on the head from some friend of his, saying, “Buzz off. Little pigs have big ears,” when my brother and he were whispering about her.