The Pritchett Century (54 page)

“Bill Williams came for her luggage.”

We marched on. Or rather we went stealthily along like two men walking a steel wire of suspicion. We almost lost our balance when two cats ran across the street and set up howls in a garden, as if they were howling us down. Mr Fulmino stopped.

“Harry!” he said. “She’s playing us up. She’s going off with Bill Williams.”

“But she’s frightened of him. She said he was going to kill her.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Mr Fulmino. “She’s been playing him up. Who was she with at the dance hall? She’s played everyone up. Of course she’s frightened of him. You bet. I’m sorry for anyone getting mixed up with Bill Williams—he’ll knock some sense into her. He’s rough. So was her father.”

“Bill Williams might have just dropped by to have a word,” I said.

“Funny word at half past eleven at night,” said Mr Fulmino. “When I think of all that correspondence, all those forms—War Office, State Department, United Nations—we did, it’s been a poor turn-out. You might say,” he paused for an image sufficiently devastating, “a waste of paper, a ruddy wanton waste of precious paper.”

We got back to his house. I have never mentioned, I believe, that it
had an iron gate that howled, a noise that always brought Mrs Fulmino to her curtains, and a clipped privet hedge, like a moustache, to the tiny garden.

We opened the gate, the gate howled, Mrs Fulmino’s nose appeared at the curtains.

“Don’t say a word,” said Mr Fulmino.

Tea—the room smelled of that, of course. Mrs Fulmino had made some while we were out. She looked as though she had eaten something too. A titbit. They all looked sorry for Mr Fulmino and me. And Mrs Fulmino
had
had a titbit! In fact I know from Iris that the only thing Mrs Fulmino had got out of Hilda was the news that she had had a postcard from Mr Faulkner from Chicago. He was on the move.

“Well?” said Mrs Fulmino.

“It’s all right, Hilda,” said Mr Fulmino coldly. “They’ve gone.”

“There,” said Mrs Fulmino, patting Hilda’s hand.

“Hilda,” said Mr Fulmino, “I’ve been straight with you. I want you to be straight with me. What’s going on between you and Bill Williams …?”

“Hilda’s told me …” Mrs Fulmino said.

“I asked Hilda, not you,” said Mr Fulmino to his wife, who was so surprised that she went very white instead of her usual purple.

“Hilda, come on. You come round here saying he’s going to kill you. Then they tell me you’ve given your notice up there.”

“She told me that. I think she’s done the right thing.”

“And did you tell her why you gave your notice?” asked Mr Fulmino.

“She’s given her notice at the factory too,” said Mrs Fulmino.

“Why?” said Mr Fulmino.

Hilda did not answer.

“You are going off with Bill Williams, aren’t you?”

“Ted!” Hilda gave one of her rare laughs.

“What’s this?” cried Mrs Fulmino. “Have you been deceiving me? Deceit I can’t stand, Hilda.”

“Of course she is,” said Mr Fulmino. “She’s paid her rent. He’s collected her luggage this evening—where is it to be? Monte Carlo? Oh, it’s all right, sit down,” Mr Fulmino waved Mrs Fulmino back. “They had a row at the dance this evening.”

But Hilda was on her feet.

“My luggage,” she cried, holding her bag with both hands to her bosom as we had seen her do once before when she was cornered. “Who has touched my luggage?”

I thought she was going to strike Mr Fulmino.

“The dirty thief. Who let him in? Who let him take it? Where’s he gone?”

She was moving to the door. We were stupefied.

“Bill Williams!” she shouted. Her rage made those artificial eyebrows look comical and I expected her to pick them off and throw them at us. “Bill Williams I’m talking about. Who let that bloody war hero in? That bitch up there …”

“Hilda,” said Mr Fulmino. “We don’t want language.”

“You fool,” said Mrs Fulmino in her lowest, most floor-pervading voice to her husband. “What have you been and done? You’ve let Bill Williams get away with all those cases, all her clothes, everything. You let that spiv strip her.”

“Go off with Bill Williams!” Hilda laughed. “My husband was an officer.

“I knew he was after something. I thought it was dollars,” she said suddenly.

She came back from the door and sat down at the table and sobbed.

“Two hundred and fifty pounds, he’s got,” she sobbed. It was a sight to see Hilda weeping. We could not speak.

“It’s all I had,” she said.

We watched Hilda. The painted eyebrows made the grimace of her weeping horrible. There was not one of us who was not shocked. There was in all of us a sympathy we knew how to express but which was halted—as by a fascination—with the sight of her ruin. We could not help contrasting her triumphant arrival with her state at this moment. It was as if we had at last got her with us as we had, months before, expected her to be. Perhaps she read our thoughts. She looked up at us and she had the expression of a person seeing us for the first time. It was like an inspection.

“You’re a mean lot, a mean respectable lot,” she said. “I remember you. I remember when I was a girl. What was it Mr Singh said, I can’t remember—he was clever—oh well, leave it, leave it. When I saw that
little room they put my poor mother in, I could have cried. No sun. No warmth in it. You just wanted someone to pity. I remember it. And your faces. The only thing that was nice was,” she sobbed and laughed for a moment, “was bump, bump, bump, the trolley.” She said loudly: “There’s only one human being in the whole crew—Jack Draper. I don’t wonder he sees more in fish.”

She looked at me scornfully. “Your brother—he was nice,” she said. “Round the park at night! That was love.”

“Hilda,” said Mrs Fulmino without anger. “We’ve done our best for you. If we’ve made mistakes I hope you haven’t. We haven’t had your life. You talk about ships that pass in the night, I don’t know what you mean, but I can tell you there are no ships in this house. Only Ted.”

“That’s right,” said Mr Fulmino quietly too. “You’re overwrought.”

“Father,” said Mrs Fulmino, “hadn’t you better tell the police?”

“Yes, yes, dear,” agreed Mr Fulmino. “We’d better get in touch with the authorities.”

“Police,” said Hilda, laughing in their faces. “Oh God! Don’t worry about that. You’ve got one in every house in this country.” She picked up her bag, still laughing, and went to the door.

“Police,” she was saying, “that’s ripe.”

“Hilda, you’re not to go out in the street looking like that,” said Mrs Fulmino.

“I’d better go with her,” said Mr Fulmino.

“I’ll go,” I said. They were glad to let me.

It is ten years since I walked with Hilda to her lodgings. I shall not forget it, and the warm, dead, rubbery city night. It is frightening to walk with a woman who has been robbed and wronged. Her eyes were half-closed as though she was reckoning as she walked. I had to pull her back on to the pavement or she would have gone flat into a passing car. The only thing she said to me was:

“They took Shinji’s rings as well.”

Her room was on the ground floor. It had a divan and a not very clean dark green cover on it. A pair of shoes were sticking out from under it. There was a plain deal cupboard and she went straight to it.

Two dresses were left. The rest had gone. She went to a table and opened the drawer. It was empty except for some letters.

I stood not knowing what to say. She seemed surprised to see me there still.

“He’s cleared the lot,” she said vacantly. Then she seemed to realise that she was staring at me without seeing me for she lowered her angry shoulders.

“We’ll get them back,” I said.

“How?” she said, mocking me, but not unkindly.

“I will,” I said. “Don’t be upset.”

“You!” she said.

“Yes, I will,” I said.

I wanted to say more. I wanted to touch her. But I couldn’t. The ruin had made her untouchable.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m okey doke. You’re different from your brother. You don’t remember those days. I told Mr Gloster about him. Come to that, Mr Faulkner too. They took it naturally. That was a fault of Mr Singh”—she never called him by his Christian name—“jealousy.”

She kicked off her shoes and sat down on the cheap divan and frowned at the noise it made and she laughed.

“One day in Bombay I got homesick and he asked me what I was thinking about and I was green, I just said ‘Sid Fraser’s neck. It had a mole on it’—you should have seen his face. He wouldn’t talk to me for a week. It’s a funny thing about those countries. Some people might rave about them, I didn’t see anything to them.”

She got up.

“You go now,” she said laughing. “I must have been in love.”

I dreamed about Hilda’s face all night and in the morning I wouldn’t have been surprised to see London had been burned out to a cinder. But the next night her face did not come and I had to think about it. Further and further it went, a little less every day and night and I did not seem to notice when someone said Bill Williams had been picked up by the police, or when Constance had been found half dead with aspirins, and when, in both cases, Mr Fulmino told me he
had to “give assistance in the identification,” for Hilda had gone. She left the day after I took her to her room. Where she went no one knew. We guessed. We imagined. Across water, I thought, getting further and further away, in very fine clothes and very beautiful. France, Mr Fulmino thought, or possibly Italy. Africa, even. New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Bombay, Singapore. Where? Even one day six months after she had left when he came to the library and showed me a postcard he had had from her, the first message, it did not say where she was and someone in the post office had pulled off the stamp. It was a picture of Hilda herself on a seat in a park, sitting with Mr Faulkner and Mr Gloster. You wouldn’t recognise her.

But Mr Gloster’s book came out. Oh yes. It wasn’t about Japan or India or anything like that. It was about us.

(1961)

“We’re all dressed up today,” said the landlady, going downstairs to her husband in the kitchen, from the old lady’s room. “Diamond rings, emerald necklace—she’s put the lot on. I said to her: ‘You’re all dressed up for company, I see.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Harry’s coming.’ I mean, it’s childish. I don’t trust that man. He’d stop at nothing and he tells lies. And do you know what she said?”

“What did she say?” said the landlady’s husband.

“It’s Thursday, Mrs Lax, she says. It’s my day for telling lies.”

It was a February afternoon. Under her black wig, the old lady upstairs was sitting up in bed reading her father’s
Baudelaire
. She read greedily; her eyes enlarged by her glasses, were rampaging over the lines; with her long nose and her long lips sliding back into her cheeks, she looked like a wolf grinning at the smell of the first snow and was on the hunt restlessly among the words.

She was murmuring avidly as she read. All over the bed were books, French and English, papers, detective novels that she had picked up
and pushed away. On and off, in the long day, she had looked to see what was going on in the street; sleet had emptied it. The only thing that still caught her eye was an old blackbird gripping the branch of the plane tree outside her window; its wings hanging down, alone.

“You’re late,” said the old lady, pulling her shawl violently round her arms, taking off her glasses and showing her strong, expectant teeth, when Harry came up to her room at four o’clock. The bold nose was naked and accusing.

Harry put the library books he had brought for her on the table under the window by her bedside. He was a tall, red-faced man with the fixed look of moist astonishment at having somehow got a heavy body into his navy-blue suit and of continually hearing news.

“I had my hair cut,” he said, moving a small cane-seated chair out of the muddle of furniture into the middle of the room. The old lady waited impatiently for him to sit down.

“No,” he said. The old lady took a deep breath and gave a small hungry smile.

“No,” he said. “A terrible thing happened when I came out of the barber’s.” The old lady let out her breath peacefully and let her head slip aside on her pillow in admiration.

“I saw my double,” Harry said.

Two years ago she had been in hospital, but before that Harry had the job of pushing her along the sea front in a bath chair on fine mornings. When she had been taken ill, he had started working in the bar and dining-room of the Queens Hotel. Now that she was bedridden he brought her books. First of all, in the days when he used to wheel her out, it was “Yes, Miss Randall” or “Is that a fact, Miss Randall?” while she chattered about the town as it was when she was a child there, about her family—all dead now—and about her father, the famous journalist and what he had done at Versailles after the 1914 war and his time in the Irish troubles, and her London life with him. And Harry told her about himself. “I was born in Enniskillen, ma’am.” “Now that’s a border town, isn’t it Harry?” “It’s like living on a tightrope ma’am. My father fought against the British.” “Very foolish of him,” said the old lady. “Oh, it was,” said Harry. “He had us blown up.” “The British
bombed
you, Harry?” “Not at all, it was one of father’s bombs, homemade
thing, it went off in the house.” “Were you hurt, Harry?” “I was at my Auntie’s. So I went to sea.” “So you did, you told me, and the ship blew up too.” “No ma’am it was the boiler. It was a Liverpool ship, the
Grantham.
” “Two explosions, I don’t believe you, Harry.” “It’s God’s truth ma’am. It was in New York harbour. But I’d left her in Buenos Aires—there was always trouble on her.” “And then you went to that hacienda—no, you got a job in an hotel first of all—isn’t that it?” “Yes, in two or three hotels, ma’am until this American lady took me up to her hacienda.” “To look after the horses?” “That is correct.” “This was the lady who rode her horse up the steps into the dining-room?” “No ma’am,” said Harry, “she rode it right inside and up the marble staircase into her bedroom.” “She couldn’t Harry. A mule yes, but not a horse.” “That part was easy for her, ma’am, it was getting the horse down that was the trouble. She called us, the Indian boy and myself, and we had to do that. Down twenty-five marble steps. She stood at the top shouting at us ‘Mind the pictures.’ ” “I suppose there was an explosion there, too, Harry?” “No ma’am, but there were butterflies as large as plates flying through the air, enough to knock you down …” “Harry,” said the old lady one day, “You’re as big a liar as my sister’s husband used to be.”