The Pritchett Century (61 page)

He
was
ill. He staggered. I pushed my way through the fallen chairs and I picked up one and said: “Pliny, sit down on this.” Pliny with the bleeding face glared and she forced him to sit down. He was panting. And then a new voice joined us; the tobacconist came down the alley.

“I heard the bugle,” he said. “Anything wrong? Oh Gawd, look at his face. What happened, Pliny? Mrs Pliny, you all right?” And then he saw me. All the native shadiness of the London streets, all the gossip of the neighbourhood came into his face.

“I said to my wife,” he said, “something’s wrong at Pliny’s.”

“I came to offer Mr Pliny a piece of Dresden,” I said, “but he was
out at Brixton seeing his sister, his wife said. He came back and thought I’d broken in and hit himself on the wardrobe.”

“You oughtn’t to leave Mrs Pliny alone with all this valuable stock, Mr Pliny. Saturday night too,” the tobacconist said.

Tears had started rolling down Pliny’s cheeks very suddenly when I mentioned Brixton and he looked at me and the tobacconist in panic.

“I’m not interested in Dresden,” he managed to say.

Isabel dabbed his face and sent the tobacconist for a glass of water.

“No, dear, you’re not,” said Isabel.

And to me she said: “We’re not interested.”

That was the end. I found myself walking in the street. How unreal people looked in the sodium light.

(1974)

Rachel first met Gilbert at David and Sarah’s, or it may have been at Richard and Phoebe’s—she could not remember—but she did remember that he stood like a touchy exclamation mark and talked in a shot-gun manner about his dog. His talk jumped so that she got confused; the dog was his wife’s dog but was he talking about his dog or his wife? He blinked very fast when he talked of either. Then she remembered what David (or maybe Richard) had told her. His wife was dead. Rachel had a dog, too, but Gilbert was not interested.

The bond between all of them was that they owned small, white stuccoed houses, not quite alike—hers alone, for example, had Gothic churchy windows which, she felt, gave her point—on different sides of the park. Another bond was that they had reached middle life and said nothing about it, except that Gilbert sharply pretended to be younger than the rest of them in order to remind them they had arrived at that time when one year passes into the next unnoticed, leaving among the dregs an insinuation that they had not done what they intended. When this thought struck them they would all—if they had the time—look out of their sedate windows at the park, the tame and once princely oasis where the trees looked womanish on the island in the lake or marched in grave married processions along the avenues in the late
summer, or in the winter were starkly widowed. They could watch the weekend crowds or the solitary walkers on the public grass, see the duck flying over in the evenings, hear the keeper’s whistle and his shout, “All Out” when the gates of the park closed an hour after sunset; and at night, hearing the animals at the zoo, they could send out silent cries of their own upon the place and evoke their ghosts.

But not Gilbert. His cry would be a howl and audible, a joint howl of himself and this dog he talked about. Rachel had never seen a man so howling naked. “Something must be done about him,” she thought every time she met him. Two years ago, Sonia, his famous and chancy wife had died—“on the stage,” the headlines in the London newspapers said, which was nearly true—and his eyes were red-rimmed as if she had died yesterday, his angry face was raw with drink or the unjust marks of guilt and grief. He was a tall man, all bones, and even his wrists coming out of a jacket that was too short in the sleeve, seemed to be crying. He had also the look of a man who had decided not to buy another suit in his life, to let cloth go on gleaming with its private malice. It was well known—for he boasted of it himself—that his wife had been much older than he, that they quarrelled continually and that he still adored her.

Rachel had been naked too, in her time when, six or seven years before, she had divorced her husband. Gilbert is “in the middle of it,” she thought. She had been “through it” and had “come out of it,” and was not hurt or lonely any more and had crowded her life with public troubles. She was married to a newspaper column.

“Something really
must
be done about him,” she said at last out loud to David and Sarah, as she tried to follow Gilbert’s conversation that was full of traps and false exit lines. For his part, he sniffed when he spoke to them of Rachel.

“Very attractive woman. Very boring. All women are boring. Sonia was a terrible bore sometimes, carrying on, silly cow. What of it? You may have remarked it: I’m a bore. I must go. Thank you Sarah and David, for inviting me and offering me your friendship. You did invite me, didn’t you? You did? I’m glad. I have no friends. The friends Sonia and I invited to the house were hers not mine. Old codgers. I must go home and feed her dog.”

They watched him go off stiffly, a forty-year-old.

An outsider he was, of course, because of loss. One feels the east wind—she knew that. But it was clear—as she decided to add him to her worries—that he must always have been that. He behaved mechanically, click, click, click, like a puppet or an orphan, homelessness being his vanity. This came out when David had asked Gilbert about his father and mother in her presence. From David’s glances at his wife Rachel knew they had heard what he said many times before. Out came his shot, the long lashes of his childish eyes blinking fast.

“Never met the people.” He was showing contempt for a wound. He was born in Singapore, he said. One gathered the birth had no connection with either father or mother. She tried to be intelligent about the city.

“Never saw the place,” he said. The father became a prisoner of the Japanese; the mother took him to India. Rachel tried to be intelligent about India.

“Don’t remember it,” he said. “The old girl”—his mother sent him home to schools and holiday schools. He spent his boyhood in camps and dormitories, his army-life in Nissen huts. He was twenty when he really “met” his parents. At the sight of him they separated for good.

No further answers. Life had been doled out to him like spoonfuls of medicine, one at a time; he returned the compliment by doing the same and then erected silences like packs of cards, watching people wait for them to fall down.

How, Rachel asked, did the raw young man come to be married to Sonia, an actress at the top of the tree, fifteen years older than he? “The old girl knew her,” he said; she was his mother’s friend. Rachel worried away at it. She saw, correctly, a dramatic woman with a clever mouth, a surrogate mother—but a mother astute in acting the part among her scores of grand and famous friends. Rachel had one or two famous friends too, but he snubbed her with his automatic phrase:

“Never met him.”

Or

“Never met her.”

And then Rachel, again correctly, saw him standing in the doorway of Sonia’s drawing-room or bringing drinks perhaps to the crowd, like
an uncouth son; those wrists were the wrists of a growing boy who silently jeered at the guests. She heard Sonia dressing him down for his Nissen hut language and his bad manners—which, however, she encouraged. This was her third marriage and it had to be original. That was the heart of the Gilbert problem; Sonia had invented him; he had no innate right to be what he appeared to be.

So Rachel, who happened to be writing an article on broken homes, asked him to come round and have a drink. He walked across the park from his house to hers. At the door he spoke his usual phrase:

“Thank you for inviting me. You did invite me, didn’t you? Well, I thank you. We live on opposite sides of the park. Very convenient. Not too near.”

He came in.

“Your house is white and your dog is white,” he said.

Rachel owned a dog. A very white fox terrier came barking at him on a high, glassy note, showing a ratter’s teeth. Rachel was wearing a long pale blue dress from her throat to the tips of her shoes and led him into the sitting-room. He sank into a soft silky sofa with his knees together and politely inspected her as an interesting collection of bones.

“Shall I ever get up from this?” he said patting the sofa. “Silly question. Yes I shall, of course. I have come, shortly I shall go.” He was mocking someone’s manners. Perhaps hers. The fox terrier which had followed him into the small and sunny room sniffed long at Gilbert’s shoes and his trouser legs and stiffened when he stroked its head. The dog growled.

“Pretty head,” he said. “I like dogs’ heads.” He was staring at Rachel’s head. Her hair was smooth, neat and fair.

“I remarked his feet on the hall floor, tick, tick, tick. Your hall must be tiled. Mine is carpeted.”

“Don’t be so aggressive, Sam,” said Rachel gravely to the dog.

“Leave him alone,” said Gilbert. “He can smell Tom, Sonia’s bull terrier. That’s who you can smell isn’t it? He can smell an enemy.”

“Sam is a problem,” she said. “Everyone in the street hates you, Sam, don’t they? When you get out in the garden you bark and bark, people open their windows and shout at you. You chase cats, you killed
the Gregory boy’s rabbit and bit the Jackson child. You drive the doctor mad. He throws flower pots at you.”

“Stop nagging the poor animal,” said Gilbert. And to the dog he said: “Good for you. Be a nuisance. Be yourself. Everyone needs an enemy. Absolutely.”

And he said to himself: “She hasn’t forgiven her husband.” In her long dress she had the composure of the completely smoothed over person who might well have nothing on underneath. Gilbert appreciated this, but she became prudish and argumentative.

“Why do you say ‘absolutely,’ ” she said, seeing a distracting point for discussion here. “Isn’t that relative?”

“No,” said Gilbert with enjoyment. He loved a row. “I’ve got an enemy at my office. Nasty little creepy fellow. He wants my job. He watches me. There’s a new job going—promotion—and he thinks I want it. So he watches. He sits on the other side of the room and is peeing himself with anxiety every time I move. Peeing himself, yes. If I leave the room he goes to the door to see if I’m going to the director’s office. If I do he sweats. He makes an excuse to go to the director to see if he can find out what we’ve been talking about. When I am working on a scheme he comes over to look at it. If I’m working out costs he stares with agony at the lay-out and the figures. ‘Is that Jameson’s?’ He can’t contain himself. ‘No, I’m doing my income tax,’ I tell him. He’s very shocked at my doing that in office hours and goes away relieved. He’ll report that to the director. Then a suspicion strikes him when he is half-way back to his desk and he turns round and comes over again panting. He doesn’t believe me. ‘I’m turning inches into centimetres,’ I say. He still doesn’t believe me. Poor silly bugger.”

He laughed.

“Wasn’t that rather cruel?” she said. “Why centimetres?”

“Why not? He wants the French job. Boring little man. Boring office. Yes.”

Gilbert constructed one of his long silences. Rachel saw skyscrapers, pagodas, the Eiffel Tower and little men creeping up them like ants. After a while Gilbert went on and the vision collapsed:

“He was the only one who came from the office to Sonia’s funeral. He brought his wife—never met her before—and she cried. The only person who did. Yes. He’d never missed a show Sonia was in.”

“So he isn’t an enemy. Doesn’t that prove my point,” she said solemnly. Gilbert ignored this.

“They’d never met poor Sonia,” he said. And he blinked very fast.

“I never met your wife either, you know,” said Rachel earnestly. She hoped he would describe her; but he described her doctors, the lawyers that assemble after death.

“What a farce,” he said.

He said: “She had a stroke in the theatre. Her words came out backwards. I wrote to her two husbands. Only one replied. The theatre sent her to hospital in an ambulance—the damn fools. If you go to hospital you die of pneumonia, bloody hospital won’t give you enough pillows, you lie flat and you can’t get your breath. What a farce. Her brother came and talked, one of those fat men. Never liked the fellow.”

She said how terrible it must have been.

“Did she recover her speech? They sometimes do.”

“Asked,” he said, “for the dog. Called it god.”

He got up suddenly from the sofa.

“There! I have got up. I am standing on my feet. I am a bore,” he said. “I shall go.”

As he left the room the terrier came sniffing at his heels.

“Country dogs. Good ratters. Ought to be on a farm.”

She plunged into a confidence to make him stay longer.

“He used to be a country dog. My husband bought him for me when we lived in the country. I know” (she luxuriated in a worry) “how important environment is to animals and I was going to let him stay—but when you are living alone in a city like London—well there are a lot of burglaries here.”

“Why did you divorce your husband?” he asked as he opened the front door. “I shouldn’t have asked. Bad manners. I apologise. I was rude. Sonia was always on to me about that.”

“He went off with a girl at his office,” she said staunchly.

“Silly man,” said Gilbert looking at the dog. “Thank you. Goodbye. Do we shake hands? You invited me, now it is my turn to invite you. That is the right thing, of course it is. We must do the right thing. I shall.”

Weeks passed before Gilbert invited Rachel. There were difficulties. Whatever he decided by day was destroyed by night. At night
Sonia would seem to come flying out of the park saying the house had belonged to her. She had paid for it. She enumerated the furniture item by item. She had the slow, languid walk of her stage appearances as she went suspiciously from room to room, asking what he had done with her fur coats and where her shoes were. “You’ve given them to some woman.” She said he had a woman in the house. He said he asked only David and Sarah; she said she didn’t trust Sarah. He pleaded he had kept the dog. When he said that, her ghost vanished saying he starved the poor thing. One night he said to her, “I’m going to ask Rachel, but you’ll be there.”