The Pritchett Century (52 page)

Mrs Johnson died at half past eight in the morning just after Constance had gone off to school, the last day of the term, and before old Mrs Draper had got up. Hilda was in the kitchen wearing her blue Japanese wrap when she heard her mother’s loud shout, like a man selling papers, she said, and when Hilda rushed in her mother was sitting
up in bed. She gripped Hilda with the ferocity of the dying, as if all the strength of her whole life had come back and she was going to throw her daughter to the ground. Then she died. In an hour she looked like a white leaf that has been found after a lifetime pressed between the pages of a book and as delicate as a saint. The death was not only a shock: from the grief that spread from it staining all of us, I trace the ugly events that followed. Only the frail figure of old Mrs Johnson, with her faith and her sly smile, had protected us from them until then, and when she went, all defence went with her.

I need not describe her funeral—it was done by Bickersons: Mr Fulmino arranged it. But one thing astonished us: not only our families but the whole neighbourhood was affected by the death of this woman who, in our carelessness, we thought could hardly be known to anyone. She had lived there all her life, of course, but people come and go in London, only a sluggish residue stay still; and I believe it was just because a large number of passing people knew just a little about her, because she was a fragment in their minds, that her death affected them. They recognised that they themselves were not people but fragments. People remembered her going into shops now and then, or going down to the bus stop, passing down a street. They remembered the bag of American cloth she used to carry containing her sewing—they spoke for a long time afterwards about this bag, more about it, indeed, than about herself.

Bickersons is a few doors from the Lord Nelson, so that when the hearse stood there covered with flowers everyone noticed it, and although the old lady had not been in that public house for years since the death of her husband, all the customers came out to look. And they looked at Hilda sitting in her black in the car when the hearse moved slowly off and all who knew her story must have felt that the dream was burying the dreamer. Hilda’s face was dirty with grief and she did not turn her head to right or left as they drove off. I remember a small thing that happened when we were all together at old Mrs Draper’s, after we had got her back with difficulty up the stairs.

“Bickersons did it very well,” said Mr Fulmino, seeking to distract the old lady who, swollen with sadness, was uncomfortable in her best clothes. “They organise everything so well. They gave me this.”

He held up a small brass disc on a little chain. It was one of those identity discs people used to wear on their wrists in the war.

“She had never taken it off,” he said. It swung feebly on its chain. Suddenly, with a sound like a shout Mr Fulmino broke into tears. His face caved in and he apologised: “It’s the feeling,” he said. “You have the feeling. You feel.” And he looked at us with panic, astonished by this discovery of an unknown self, spongy with tears, that had burst out and against whom he was helpless.

Mrs Fulmino said gently:

“I expect Hilda would like to have it.”

“Yes, yes. It’s for her,” he said, drying his eyes and Hilda took it from him and carried it to her room. While she was there (and perhaps she was weeping too), Mr Fulmino looked out from his handkerchief and said, still sobbing:

“I see that the luggage has gone.”

None of us had noticed this and we looked at Constance who said in a whisper: “She is leaving us. She has found a room of her own.” That knocked us back. “Leaving!” we exclaimed. It told against Hilda for, although we talked of death being a release for the dead person we did not like to think of it as a release for the living; grief ought to hold people together and it seemed too brisk to have started a new life so soon. Constance alone looked pleased by this. We were whispering but stopped when we heard Hilda coming back.

Black had changed her. It set off her figure and although crying had hardened her, the skin of her neck and her arms and the swell of her breasts seemed more living than they had before. She looked stronger in body perhaps because she was shaken in mind. She looked very real, very present, more alive than ourselves. She had not heard us whispering, but she said, to all of us, but particularly to Mr Fulmino:

“I have found a room for myself. Constance spoke to Bill Williams for me, he’s good at getting things. He found me a place and he took the luggage round yesterday. I couldn’t sleep in that bed alone any more.”

Her voice was shaky.

“She didn’t take up much room. She was tiny and we managed. It was like sleeping with a little child.”

Hilda smiled and laughed a little.

“She even used to kick like a kid.”

Ten minutes on the bus from Hincham Street and close to the centre of London is a dance hall called “The Temple Rooms.” It has two bands, a low gallery where you can sit and a soft drink bar. Quite a few West Indians go there, mainly students. It is a respectable place; it closes at eleven and there is never any trouble. Iris and I went there once or twice. One evening we were surprised to see Constance and Bill Williams dancing there. Iris pointed to them. The rest of the people were jiving, but Bill Williams and Constance were dancing in the old-fashioned way.

“Look at his feet!” Iris laughed.

Bill Williams was paying no attention to Constance, but looking around the room over her head as he stumbled along. He was tall.

“Fancy Auntie Constance!” said Iris. “She’s getting fed up because he won’t listen.”

Constance Draper dancing! At her age! Thirty-eight!

“It’s since the funeral,” said Mr Fulmino over our usual cup of tea. “She was fond of the old lady. It’s upset her.”

Even I knew Mr Fulmino was wrong about this. The madness of Constance dated from the time Bill Williams had taken Hilda’s luggage round to her room and got her a job at the reception desk in the factory at Laxton. It dated from the time, a week later, when standing at old Mrs Draper’s early one evening, Constance had seen Hilda get out of Bill Williams’s van. He had given her a lift home. It dated from words that passed between Hilda and Constance soon afterwards. Hilda said Williams hung around for her at the factory and wanted her to go to a dance. She did not want to go, she said—and here came the fatal sentences—both of her husbands had been educated men. Constance kept her temper but said coldly:

“Bill Williams is politically educated.”

Hilda had her vacant look.

“Not his hands aren’t,” she said.

The next thing, Constance—who hardly went into a pub in her life—was in the Lord Nelson night after night, playing bar billiards
with Bill Williams. She never let him out of her sight. She came out of school and instead of going home, marking papers and getting a meal for herself and old Mrs Draper, she took the bus out to the factory and waited for him to come out. Sometimes he had left on some job by the time she got there and she came home, beside herself, questioning everybody. It had been her habit to come twice a week to change her library books. Now she did not come. She stopped reading. At The Temple Rooms, when Iris and I saw her, she sat out holding hands with Bill Williams and rubbing her head into his shoulder, her eyes watching him the whole time. We went to speak to them and Constance asked:

“Is Hilda here tonight?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“She’s a whore,” said Constance in a loud voice. We thought she was drunk.

It was a funny thing, Mr Fulmino said to me, to call a woman a whore. He spoke as one opposed to funny things.

“If they’d listened to me,” he said, “I could have stopped all this trouble. I offered to get her a job in the council office but,” he rolled his eyes, “Mrs F. wouldn’t have it and while we were arguing about it, Bill Williams acts double quick. It’s all because this Mr Gloster didn’t turn up.”

Mr Fulmino spoke wistfully. He was, he conveyed, in the middle of a family battle; indeed, he had a genuine black eye the day we talked about this. Mrs Fulmino’s emotions were in her arms.

This was a bad period for Mr Fulmino because he had committed a folly. He had chosen this moment to make a personal triumph. He had got himself promoted to a much better job at the Council Offices and one entitling him to a pension. He had become a genuine official. To have promoted a man who had the folly to bring home a rich whore with two names, so causing the robbery and death of her mother, and to have let her break Constance’s heart, was, in Mrs Fulmino’s words, a crime. Naturally, Mr Fulmino regarded his mistakes as mere errors of routine and even part of his training for his new position.

“Oh well,” he said when we finished our tea and got up to pay the bill, “it’s the British taxpayer that pays.” He was heading for politics. I
have heard it said, years later, that if he had had a better start in life he would have gone to the top of the administration. It is a tragic calling.

If Hilda was sinister to Constance and Mrs Fulmino, she made a different impression on young Mrs Draper. To call a woman a whore was neither here nor there to her. Up north where she came from people were saying that sort of thing all day long as they scrubbed floors or cleaned windows or did the washing. The word gave them energy and made things come up cleaner and whiter. Good money was earned hard; easy money went easy. To young Mrs Draper Hilda seemed “a bit simple,” but she had gone to work, she earned her living. Cut off from the rest of the Draper family, Hilda made friends with this couple. Hilda went with them on Saturday to the Zoo with the children. They were looking at a pair of monkeys. One of them was dozing and its companion was awake, pestering and annoying it. The children laughed. But when they moved on to another cage, Hilda said, sulkily:

“That’s one thing. Bill Williams won’t be here. He pesters me all the time.”

“He won’t if you don’t let him,” said young Mrs Draper.

“I’m going to give my notice if he doesn’t stop,” said Hilda. She hunched a shoulder and looked around at the animals.

“I can’t understand a girl like Constance taking up with him. He’s not on her level. And he’s mean. He doesn’t give her anything. I asked if he gave her that clip, but she said it was Gran’s. Well, if a man doesn’t give you anything he doesn’t value you. I mean she’s a well-read girl.”

“There’s more ways than one of being stupid,” said young Mrs Draper.

“I wonder she doesn’t see,” said Hilda. “He’s not delivering for the firm. When he’s got the van out, he’s doing something on the side. When I came home with him there was stuff at the back. And he keeps on asking how much things cost. He offered to sell my bracelet.”

“You’d get a better price in a shop if you’re in need,” said young Mrs Draper.

“She’d better not be with him if he gets stopped on the road,” said Jack, joining in. “You wouldn’t sell that. Your husband gave it you.”

“No. Mr Faulkner,” said Hilda, pulling out her arm and admiring it.

Jack was silent and disappointed; then he cheered up.

“You ought to have married that earl you were always talking about when you were a girl. Do you remember?” he said.

“Earls—they’re a lazy lot,” said young Mrs Draper.

“I did, Jack,” said Hilda. “They were as good as earls, both of them.”

And to young Mrs Draper she said: “They wouldn’t let another man look at me. I felt like a woman with both of them.”

“I’ve nowt against that if you’ve got the time,” said young Mrs Draper. She saw that Hilda was glum.

“Let’s go back and look at the giraffes. Perhaps Mr Faulkner will come for you now Mr Gloster hasn’t,” young Mrs Draper said.

“They were friends,” said Hilda.

“Oh, they knew each other!” said young Mrs Draper. “I thought you just … met them …”

“No, I didn’t meet them together, but they were friends.”

“Yes. Jack had a friend, didn’t you?” said Mrs Draper, remembering.

“That’s right,” said Jack. He winked at Hilda. “Neck and neck, it was.” And then he laughed outright.

“I remember something about Bill Williams. He came out with us one Saturday and you should have seen his face when we threw the fish back in the water.”

“We always throw them back,” said young Mrs Draper taking her husband’s arm, proudly.

“Wanted to sell them or something. Black market perch!”

“He thinks I’ve got dollars,” said Hilda.

“No, fancy that, Jack—Mr Gloster and Mr Faulkner being friends. Well, that’s nice.” And she looked sentimentally at Hilda.

“She’s brooding,” young Mrs Draper said to Mrs Fulmino after this visit to the Zoo. “She won’t say anything.” Mrs Fulmino said she had better not or
she
might say something. “She knows what I think. I never thought much of Bill Williams, but he served his country. She didn’t.”

“She earns her living,” said Mrs Draper.

“Like we all do,” said Mrs Fulmino. “And it’s not men, men, men all day long with you and me.”

“One’s enough,” said young Mrs Draper, “with two children round your feet.”

“She doesn’t come near me,” said Mrs Fulmino.