The Pritchett Century (55 page)

Harry looked at her warily, then around him to see if there was anyone he could call to for help if there was trouble.

“It’s God’s truth,” said Harry rapidly and anxiously.

“There’s truth and there’s God’s truth,” said the old lady. It was after this that she had to be taken off to hospital.

“So you saw your double, Harry,” the old lady said. “Stand up and let me look at you.”

Harry stood up.

“They’ve cropped you at the back, you’re nearly blue. I’ll tell you whose double you are, Harry. My sister’s husband. He was in the hotel business like you.”

“Is that a fact?” said Harry. “Did your sister marry?”

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since you went to work at the Queens,” said the old lady. “He was taller and broader than you and he had fair hair, not black like yours and a very white face, a London night
face—but the feet were the same, like yours, sticking out sideways. Sit down, Harry.”

“I suppose,” said Harry, who had heard versions of this story before. “I suppose he’d be the manager?”

“Manager!” shouted the old lady. “He wouldn’t have considered it! Ambassador, Archbishop, Prime Minister, more like it. That is what he sounded like and what he looked like—anyway what we
thought
he was. He was the head waiter at a night-club.”

She stared herself into silence.

“No, it’s God’s truth,” said Harry, taking his chance. “I was coming out of the barber’s and I forgot your books and went back for them and when I came to cross the street, the lights changed. There was a crowd of us there on the kerb and that was when I saw this fellow. He was standing on the other side of the street waiting to cross. I stared at him. He stared at me. We were the double of each other. I thought I was looking in a mirror.”

The old lady let her head slip back peacefully on the pillow, a happy smile came on her face and she took a biscuit from the tin.

“Same clothes?” said the old lady slyly.

“Except for the hat,” said Harry. “Same height. He was staring at me. Same nose, eyes, everything. And then the lights changed and he stepped off the kerb and I stepped off and we were still staring at each other. But when we got to the middle I couldn’t look at him any longer and I looked away. We passed each other and I felt cold as ice down one side of my body.”

“Did he turn round? Did
he
recognise you?”

“He did not. But after we passed I looked back and he wasn’t there. No sign of him at all. I got to the kerb and I had a second look. He’d gone.”

“He was lost in the crowd.”

“He was not. There wasn’t a crowd. He was the only one crossing from that side of the street. Except for the hat, it was me.”

The pupils of Harry’s eyes were upright, brown ovals. He had been wronged, so wronged that he looked puffed out, full of wind.

“It was like passing an iceberg in the Atlantic. Or a ghost,” Harry said.

“You could say Deb’s husband was a ghost,” said the old lady. “He was living upstairs in the flat above us for three years before we met him. We used to hear his taxi at four in the morning. He was out all night and we were out all day. Deb at her art school and I worked on the paper my father used to work on.”

“You mightn’t have met at all,” Harry said. “I never saw the night porter at the Queens for a year.”

“I wish we hadn’t,” said the old lady.

“It would be accidental if you did. Would there have been an accident?” Harry said, putting on an innocent look. “When I was working on that hacienda with the American lady, the one with the horse in her bedroom …”

“There was an accident!” said the old lady. “You know there was. I told you, Harry.”

“He left the stopper in his basin,” Harry said.

“With the tap dripping,” the old lady said. “Deb got home one evening and heard the water dripping through the ceiling on to father’s desk. She put a bowl underneath it and it splashed all over father’s books—we had a very pleasant flat, not like this. Father left us some very beautiful things. When I got home I was angry with Deb. She was a very dreamy girl. ‘Why didn’t you get the housekeeper up instead of letting it ruin everything?’ I said.
I
had to ring for him—stone deaf, like your cook. Didn’t you say the explosion on that ship, the
Cairngorm
, made your cook stone deaf?”

“On the
Grantham,
” Harry said.

“You told me the
Cairngorm
before,” said the old lady. “But never mind. He got his keys and went upstairs to see what was going on. That flat, Harry. It was empty. When I say empty, just the lino on the floor …”

“I’ve got lino at the Queens,” said Harry. “Brown with white flowers.”

“Nothing—nothing but a table and a bed and a couple of chairs. It was like a cell. It was like a punishment hanging over us. Not a book. There was a parcel of shirts from the laundry on the bed—that would have told us something if we’d looked.”

“It would,” said Harry.

“Four o’clock in the morning,” said the old lady, “he came home. The taxi ticking down below in the street! Like a ghost in the night. Of course he came next day to apologise about the water. Harry, the moment he stood in the room, I knew I’d seen him before! I said to my sister ‘I’ve seen that man somewhere.’ The way he stopped in the doorway, looking across the room at Deb and me and the chairs, nodding at them as if he were telling us where to sit, the way he held his hands together as he spoke with his head bent. He had one of those kissing mouths—like a German. He looked at the books that had been splashed and said, ‘Balzac and Baudelaire, very great men,’ and looked fatter in the face after he said it. More important. We said they were father’s books and my sister said ‘Father was a special correspondent. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.’ He said he’d heard people mention him at his club and it sounded as if he’d eaten father.” The old lady laughed out loud at this idea of hers and left her mouth open for a while after she had laughed. “I’ll tell you who he was like,” she said excitedly, “that statue of George II. Or do I mean the Duke of Bedford?

“I wanted to get rid of him: he was so large and serious and he sounded as if he was making a speech to Parliament about what some painter he knew had said about art and the public. He knew a lot of people—cabinet ministers, actors, judges. Well, I said, when he’d gone, I don’t know who he is but he’s a man ‘in the know!’ Deb did not like my saying this. ‘He’s a journalist, I expect.’ Before he went Deb asked him to have a drink with us one day. ‘Let me look at my diary. Thursday I’m free and Sundays, unless I go away to stay,’ he said. ‘Come on Sunday,’ Deb said. He came. We had people there. The first thing he did was to start handing round the drinks. It was
his
party. He owned us. He’d eaten us too. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. One or two people were as curious as I was. ‘Who is he? The editor of
The Times
? What does he do?’ He wasn’t like any of our friends, we were all younger. You know what I think drew us to him—girls are such fools—his conceit! He was as conceited as a gravestone. I watched him moving about. There was his round white face, rather puffy, and his head bowing like the whole of the House of Hanover—the House of Hanover were very stiff, I know, Harry, but you know what I mean—and talking
about the Prime Minister and politics in a pooh-poohing way; but down below were his feet sticking out sideways and scampering about beneath him—like messenger boys. ‘Which paper do you work for?’ I asked him. ‘I’m not a journalist,’ he said. ‘Oh’, I said, ’the housekeeper said you were a journalist on night work. We hear your taxi every night. And do you know what he said? ‘I asked the housekeeper about
you
when I took my flat here. I wanted to be sure it was a quiet house. He said you were two ladies out all day.’ Snubs to us, I said to my sister after he had gone, but she said ‘Fancy him asking about us!’ and she danced round the room singing up at the ceiling ‘I’m a lady out all day.’ We could hear him upstairs walking about.”

“Yes, but that’s what I can’t make out about this man,” said Harry. “I was thinking about it yesterday. Why wouldn’t he tell you what his job was?”

“He thought we were a pair of snobs,” said the old lady. “I expect we were.”

“Out all night, he could have been a printer,” said Harry.

“Or the post office! Or the police! Nightwatchman. Actor. We thought of that,” the old lady raced along. “It was clever of him: you see what he did. He didn’t tell a single lie but he started us imagining things and telling lies to ourselves. Deb couldn’t leave it alone. Every time he dodged our questions, she made something up.”

The old lady pulled her arms out of the shawl and spread her arms wide.

“Burglar came into
my
head,” she shouted. “I came home from the office one evening and there they were, both of them, sitting on the sofa and he was saying he had heard on the ‘highest authority’—the highest authority, he actually used those words, I always called him the highest authority after that to annoy Deb—that the Cabinet had decided to legalise street betting. When he left I said to Deb ‘Deb, that man is not in politics: he is in crime.’ ‘I can tell you he is
not
in crime,’ Deb said, ‘I asked him straight out.’ ”

Harry leaned forward and began to rub his hands up and down his sleeves making a sound like breath.

“ ‘I asked him straight out what he did,’ Deb said, and he said he was very sorry but it was secret work, something he couldn’t talk about, but
not crime. He made her promise not to ask or try to find out, but he said he would tell her when he was free to say.”

“If you’d looked at those shirts on his bed you’d have known the answer,” Harry said. “Dress shirts.”

“The head waiter at a smart night-club,” the old lady said.

“And earning good money, I suppose,” said Harry. “That is where he picked up his talk.”

“I’ve told you all this before, Harry,” said the old lady.

“Things come back,” said Harry.

“The chief steward on the
Grantham,
” said Harry, “used to pass himself off as the Captain when he went ashore. That was to girls too.”

“Oh he talked very well and took us in. You can call him a waiter if you like but you know what I call him? Bluebeard.”

“Bluebeard?” said Harry, very startled. “Was he married?”

“No, but he had Bluebeard in him,” said the old lady. “A girl will do anything to find out a secret.”

“That’s true,” said Harry.

The old lady stared at Harry, weighing him up. Then she said, in a lower voice: “I can talk to you, Harry. You’re a married man. I mean you’ve been a married man. Show me your wife’s picture again.”

Harry opened his wallet and took out an old snapshot of a young girl with smooth dark hair drawn in an old-fashioned style round an oval face.

“She was pretty, Harry. Deb was fair and a bit plump.” She looked at the photograph a long time and then gave it back to Harry who put it in his wallet again.

“You miss her, Harry.”

“I do that.”

“You would have had a home,” said the old lady. “I haven’t got a home. You haven’t got a home—and yet, years ago, before we moved to London, my family had a large house in this town.”

The old lady suddenly changed her mood and her voice became sarcastically merry.

“Bluebeard! Oh, we were all mystery! Secret service, Russian spies. When Deb went to bed at night, she started drawing back the curtains, turning out the lights and undressing by the light of the street lamp
down below. And she would open the window wide—in the winter! The fog blowing in! She would stand in her nightdress and say ‘Can’t you feel the mystery of London? I want to feel I am everywhere in London seeing what everyone is doing this minute. Listen to it.’ ‘You’ll get pneumonia,’ I said. But it was love. He came down to see us very often now. One day he was saying something about the French Ambassador and French foreign policy, it sounded boastful and I said (I remember this) ‘Father was one of Clemenceau’s very few English friends’—which wasn’t true. I told you he made us tell lies. That impressed him because before he went he asked us both out to dinner—at the Ritz! The Ritz! And that was where something funny happened—only a small thing. A party at another table started staring at him and I was sure I heard someone mentioned his name. I’m sure I heard one of the men say ‘There’s Charles,’ and I said to him: ‘Someone knows you over there.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘They were talking about you. They were saying it was unfair a man taking out two pretty sisters.’ Deb was very pleased. ‘He’s very well known,’ she said. ‘In that case, he can’t be secret, can he?’ I said.

“He never took us out again.”

The old lady scowled.

“After that it was champagne, caviar, lobster. Up in his flat and Deb took her gramophone—I never went. ‘He must be a cook,’ I said and she said ‘No, he sends out for it’ and wouldn’t speak to me for a week afterwards. She was clean gone. She gave up her classes because she couldn’t see him during the day except on Thursdays and Sundays. She was mad about him. And she got very secretive, hiding things, not like her at all. I told her she’d have a bigger secret than she bargained for.”