The Pritchett Century (62 page)

“I damn well will,” she said. And this became such a dogma that when, at last, he asked Rachel to come, he disliked her.

His house was not so sedate as hers which had been repainted that year—his not. His windows seemed to him—and to her—to sob. There was grit on the frames. When he opened the door to her she noted the brass knocker had not been polished and inside there was the immediate cold odour of old food. The hall and walls echoed their voices and the air was very still. In the sitting-room the seats of the chairs, one could see, had not been sat on for a long time, there was dust on the theatrical wallpaper. Hearing her, Sonia’s dog, Tom, came scrabbling the stair carpet and rushed into the room hysterically at both of them, skidding on rugs, snuffling, snorting, whimpering and made at once for her skirts, got under her legs and was driven off on to a sofa of green silk, rather like hers, but now frayed where the dog’s claws had caught.

“Off the sofa, Tom,” said Gilbert. The dog ignored this and snuffled from its squat nose and gazed from wet eyes that were like enormous marbles. Gilbert picked up a rubber bone and threw it to the dog. Down it came and the racing round the room began again. Rachel held her glass in the air for safety’s sake and the dog jumped at it and made her spill whisky on her dress. In this confusion they tried to talk.

“Sonia liked being photographed with Tom,” he said.

“I only saw her on the stage once. She was very beautiful,” she said. “It must have been twelve years ago. Gielgud and another actor called Slade were in it. Was it Slade? Oh dear! My memory!”

“Her second husband,” he said.

He picked up the dog’s rubber bone. The dog rushed to him and seized it. Man and dog pulled at the bone.

“You want it. You won’t get it,” said Gilbert while she seemed to hear her husband say: “Why can’t you keep your mouth shut if you can’t remember things?” And Gilbert, grinning in his struggle with the dog said:

“Sonia always had Tom to sleep on our bed. He still does. Won’t leave it. He’s on it even when I come back from the office.”

“He sleeps with you?” she said with a shudder.

“I come home. I want someone to talk to.”

“What d’you do with him when you go to your office?” The dog pulled and snorted. “The woman who comes in and cleans looks after the dog,” he said. And went on: “Your house has three storeys, mine has two, otherwise the same. I’ve got a basement full of rubbish. I was going to turn it into a flat but Sonia got worse. Futile. Yes, life is futile. Why not sell the damn place. No point. No point in anything. I go to the office, come back, feed the dog and get drunk. Why not? Why go on? Why do
you
go on? Just habit. No sense in it.”

“You
do
go on,” she said.

“The dog,” he said.

I must find some people for him to meet. He can’t live like this, she thought. It is ghastly.

When she left, he stood on the doorstep and said:

“My house. Your house. They’re worth four times what we gave for them. There it is.”

She decided to invite him to dinner to meet some people—but who could she ask? He was prickly. She knew dozens of people but, as she thought of them, there seemed, for the first time, to be something wrong with all of them. In the end she invited no one to meet him.

“On a diet, silly cow,” he thought when she came to the door but he fell back on his usual phrase as he looked about the empty room.

“Did you invite me? Or shall I go away? You
did
invite me. Thank you. Thank you.”

“I’ve been in Vienna with the Fladgates. She is a singer. Friends of David and Sarah.”

“Fladgates? Never heard of the people,” he said. “Sonia insulted
someone in Vienna. I was drunk. Sonia never drank anything—that made her insults worse. Did your husband drink?”

“Indeed not.”

He sat down on the sofa. The evening—Sonia’s time. He expected Sonia to fly in and sit there watching this woman with all her “problems” hidden chastely except for one foot which tipped up and down in her shoes under her long dress. But—to his surprise—Sonia did not come. The terrier sat at Rachel’s feet.

“How is your enemy?” she said as they drank. “The man in the office.”

“He and his wife asked me to dinner,” he said.

“That’s kind,” she said.

“People are kind,” he said. “I’ve remarked that.”

“Does he still watch you?”

“Yes. You know what it was? He thinks I drink too much. He thinks I’ve got a bottle in my desk. It wasn’t the job that was worrying him. We are wrong about people. I am. You are. Everyone is.”

When they went in dinner candles were on the table.

“Bloody silly having candles,” he said to himself. And when she came in with the soup, he said:

“We had candles. Poor Sonia threw them out of the window once. She had to do it in a play.”

The soup was iced and white and there was something in it that he could not make out. But no salt. That’s it, he thought, no salt in this woman. Writing about politics and things all day and forgets the salt. The next course was white too, something chopped or minced with something peculiar, goodness knew what. It got into his teeth. Minced newsprint, he thought.

“Poor Sonia couldn’t cook at all,” he said, pushing his food about, proud of Sonia. “She put dishes on the floor near the stove, terrible muddle and rushed back to hear what people were saying and then an awful bloody stink came from the kitchen. I used to go down and the potatoes had burned dry and Tom had cleared the plates. Bloody starvation. No dinner.”

“Oh no!” she said.

“I live on chops now. Yes,” he said. “One, sometimes two, every day, say ten a week. Am I being a bore? Shall I go?”

Rachel had a face that had been set for years in the same concerned expression. That expression now fell to pieces from her forehead to her throat. Against her will she laughed. The laugh shook her and was loud; she felt herself being whirled into a helpless state from the toes upwards. Her blood whirled too.

“You laughed!” he shouted. “You did not protest. You did not write an article. You laughed. I could see your teeth. Very good. I’ve never seen you laugh before.”

And the dog barked at them.

“She laughed,” he shouted at the dog.

She went out to make coffee, very annoyed at being trapped into laughing. While he waited, the dog sat undecided, ears pricked, listening for her and watching him like a sentry.

“Rats,” whispered Gilbert to the dog. It stood up sharply.

“Poor bastard. What a life,” he said.

The dog barked angrily at him and when she came in, he said: “I told your dog he ought to be on a farm.”

“You said that before,” she said. “Let us have coffee next door.” They moved into the next room and she sat on the sofa while she poured the coffee.

“Now
you
are sitting on the sofa. I’m in this armchair,” he said, thinking of life tactically. “Sonia moved about too. I used to watch her going into a room. Where will she sit next? Damned if I ever got it right. The same in restaurants. Let us sit here, she’d say, and then when the waiter came to her chair, she’d say, ‘No, not here. Over there.’ Never knew where she was going to settle. Like a fly. She wanted attention. Of course. That was it. Quite right.”

“Well,” she said coldly, “she was an actress.”

“Nothing to do with it,” he said. “Woman.”

“Nonsense,” she said, hating to be called a woman and thought, “It’s my turn now.”

“My husband,” she said, “travelled the whole time. Moscow, Germany, Copenhagen, South Africa, but when he got home he was never still, posing to the animals on the farm, showing off to barns, fences,
talking French and German to birds, pretending to be a country gentleman.”

“Let the poor man alone,” he said. “Is he still alive?”

“I told you,” she said. “I won’t bore you with it all.”

She was astonished to find herself using his word and that the full story of her husband and herself she had planned to tell and which she had told so many people, suddenly lost interest for her. And yet, anyway, she thought, why shouldn’t I tell this man about it? So she started, but she made a muddle of it. She got lost in the details. The evening, she saw, was a failure. He yawned.

If there was one thing Rachel could honestly say it was that she had not thought of her husband for years. She had not forgotten but he had become a generality in the busyness of her life. But now, after the evening when Gilbert came to dinner, her husband came to life and plagued her. If an aeroplane came down whistling across the wide London sky, she saw him sitting in it—back from Moscow, Capetown, Copenhagen, descending not upon her, but on another woman. If she took the dog for a run in the park, the cuddling couples on the grass became him and that young girl; if babies screamed in their prams they were his children; if a man threw a ball it was he; if men in white flannels were playing cricket, she wondered if he was among them. She imagined sudden, cold meetings and ran through tirades of hot dialogue. One day she saw a procession of dogs tails up and panting, following a bitch, with a foolish grin of wet teeth in their jaws and Sam rushed after them; she went red in the face shouting at him. And yet she had gone to the park in order to calm herself and to be alone. The worst thing that could happen would be to meet Gilbert, the cause of this, but, like all malevolent causes, he never showed his face. She had wished to do her duty and be sorry for him, but not for him to become a man. She feared she might be on the point of talking about this to a woman, not a woman she knew well—that would be disastrous—but, say, to some woman or girl sitting alone on a park seat or some woman in a shop; also a confidence she would regret all her life. She was touchy in these days and had a row with the doctor who threw flower pots at her dog. She petted the animal. “Your head is handsome,” she said, stroking its head, “but why did you go after that silly bitch?” The dog adored her when she said this. “You’re vain,” she said to it.

Gilbert
did
go to the park but only on Saturdays when the crowds came. He liked seeing the picnics, the litter on the grass; he stood still with pleasure when babies screamed or ice-cream dripped. He grinned at boys throwing water from drinking fountains and families trudging, drunks lying asleep, and fat girls lying half on top of their young men and tickling their faces with grass. “The place is a damn bedroom. Why not? Where else can they go? Lucky, boring people. I’ve got a bedroom and no one in it.”

One Saturday, after three days of rain, he took his dog there and—would you believe it?—there the whole crowd was again, still at it, on the wet grass. The trouble with Sonia was that she thought the park was vulgar and would never go there—went once and never again, hadn’t brought the right shoes.

He remarked this to his dog as he let it off its leash. The animal scampered round him in wide circles; came back to him and then raced off again in circles getting wider and wider, until it saw a man with string in his hand trying to fly a kite. The kite was flopping on the ground, rose twenty or thirty feet in the air and then dived again. The dog rushed at the kite, but the man got it up again, higher this time. Gilbert walked towards the man. “Poor devil, can’t get it up,” he said as he walked. He got near the man and watched his struggles.

Then the kite shot up high and Gilbert watched it raving there until suddenly it swept away higher still. Gilbert said: “Good for him.” The boredom of the grey afternoon was sweet. He lit a cigarette and threw the empty packet on the grass and then he found he had lost sight of the dog. When he saw it again it was racing in a straight line towards a group of trees by the lake. It was racing towards another dog. A few yards away from the dog it stopped and pranced. The dog was a terrier and stopped dead, then came forward. They stood sniffing at each other’s tails and then jumped round muzzle to muzzle. They were growling, the terrier barked and then the two dogs flew at each other’s necks. Their play had turned to a war, their jaws were at each other’s necks and ears. Gilbert saw at once it was Rachel’s dog, indeed Rachel was running up shouting, “Sam. Sam.” The fight was savage and Tom had his teeth in.

“Stop them,” Rachel was shouting. “Stop them. They’ll kill each other. He’s got him by the throat.”

And then she saw Gilbert: “You!”

Gilbert was enjoying the fight. He looked around and picked up a stick that had fallen from a tree.

“Stop them,” she shouted.

“Get yours by the collar, I’ll get mine,” he shouted to her.

“I can’t. Sam! Sam! They’re bleeding.”

She was dancing about in terror, trying to catch Sam by the legs.

“Not by the legs. By the collar, like this, woman,” he shouted. “Don’t put your arms round him, you idiot. Like this. Stop dancing about.”

He caught Tom by the collar and lifted him as both dogs hung on to each other.

“You’re strangling him. I can’t, I can’t,” she said. Gilbert brought his stick down hard on the muzzles of the dogs, just as she was trying to grasp Sam again.

“You’ll kill them.”

He brought the stick down hard again. The dogs yelped with pain and separated.

“Get the leash on,” he said, “you fool.”

Somehow she managed it and the two dogs now strained to get at each other. The terrier’s white neck and body were spotted with blood and smears of it were on her hands.

Gilbert wiped their spit off his sleeve.

They pulled their dogs yards apart and she stared at him. It infuriated her that he was laughing at her with pure pleasure. In their stares they saw each other clearly and as they had never seen each other before. To him, in her short skirt and her shoes muddied by the wet grass, her hair disordered and the blood risen to her pale face, she was a woman. The grass had changed her. To her he was not a pitiable arrangement of widower’s tricks, but a man on his own. And the park itself changed him in her eyes; in the park he, like everyone else there, seemed to be human. The dogs gave one more heave to get at each other.

“Lie down, Sam,” Gilbert shouted.

She lifted her chin and was free to hate him for shouting at her animal.