Essential Stories

by V. S. Pritchett

  Evans took up the wheelbarrow and swaggered back with it across the lawn towards the house, sometimes tipping it a little to one side to see how the rubber-tyred wheel was running and to admire it. Miss Freshwater’s niece smiled. With his curly black hair, his sun-reddened face and his vacant blue eyes, and the faint white scar or chip on the side of his nose, he looked like some hard-living, hard-bitten doll. “Burn this? This lot to go?” was his cry. He was an impassioned and natural destroyer. She could not have found a better man. “Without you, Robert,” she said on the first day and with real feeling, “I could never have faced it.”

  It was pure luck getting him but, lazy, smiling and drifting, she always fell on her feet. She had stepped off the morning train from London at the beginning of the week and had stood on the kerb in the station yard, waiting for one of the two or three taxi drivers who were talking there to take notice of her. Suddenly, Evans drove in fast from the street outside, pulled up beside her, pushed her in and drove off. It was like an abduction. The other taxi drivers shouted at him in the bad language of law-abiding men, but Evans slowly moved his hand up and down, palm downwards, silently and insultingly telling them to shut up and keep their hair on. He looked very pious as he did this. It made her laugh out loud.

  “They are manner-less,” he said in a slow, rebuking voice, giving each syllable its clear value as if he were speaking the phrase of a poem. “I am sorry I did not ask you where you want me to take you.”

  They were going in the wrong direction and he had to swing round the street. She now saw him glance at her in the mirror and his doll’s eyes quickly changed from shrewd pleasure to vacancy: she was a capture.

  “This is not the first time you are here, I suppose?” he said.

  “I was born here,” she said. “I haven’t been here for twenty-five years, well perhaps just for a day a few years ago. It has changed. All this building!”

  She liked friendly conversations.

  They were driving up the long hill out of the town towards her aunt’s house. Once there had been woodland here but now, like a red hard sea flowing in to obliterate her memory, thousands of sharp villas replaced the trees in angular waves.

  “Yes,” he said simply. “There is money everywhere.”

  The car hummed up the long, concrete hill. The villas gave way to ribbons of shacks and bungalows. The gardens were buzzing with June flowers. He pointed out a bungalow which had a small grocery shop in the lean-to at the side, a yard where a couple of old cars stood, and a petrol pump. That was his place, he said. And then, beyond that, were the latest municipal housing estates built close to the Green which was only half a mile from her aunt’s house. As they passed, she saw a white marquee on the Green and a big, sagging white banner with the words Gospel Mission daubed on it.

  “I see the Gospellers still keep it up,” she said. For it was all bad land outside the town, a place for squatters, poor craftsmen, smallholders, little men with little sheds, who in their flinty way had had for generations the habit of breaking out into little religious sects.

  “Oh, yes,” said Evans in a soft voice, shocked that she could doubt it. “There are great openings. There is a mighty coming to the Lord. I toil in the vineyard myself. You are Miss Freshwater’s niece?” he said. “She was a toiler too. She was a giantess for the Lord.”

  She saw she had been reckless in laughing. She saw she was known. It was as if he had knowingly captured her.

  “You don’t come from these parts, do you?” she said.

  “I am from Wales,” he said. “I came here from the mines. I ob-ject-ed to the starvation.”

  They arrived at the ugly yellow house. It could hardly be seen through the overgrown laurels and fir trees which in some places fingered the dirty windows. He steadied her as she got out for she had put on weight in the last year or so and while she opened her bag to find some money, he walked to the gate and looked in.

  “It was left to you in the will, I suppose?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. She was a woman always glad to confide. “I’ve come down to clear up the rubbish before the sale. Do you know anyone here who would give me a hand?”

  “There are many,” he pronounced. “They are too handy.” It was like a line from an anthem. He went ahead, opened the gate and led the way in and when she opened the front door, splitting it away from the cobwebs, he went in with her, walking into the stale, sun-yellowed rooms. He looked up the worn carpet of the stairs. He looked at the ceilings, measuring the size of everything.

  “It will fetch a high price,” he said in a sorrowful voice and then, looking over her figure like a farmer at the market, in case she might go with the property, he added enthusiasm to his sorrow.

  “The highest!” he said. “Does this door go to the back?” She lost him for a while. When she found him he was outside, at the back of the house, looking into sheds. He had opened the door of one that contained gardening tools and there he was, gazing. He was looking at a new green metal wheelbarrow with a red wheel and a rubber tyre and he had even pulled it out. He pushed it back, and when he saw her he said accusingly:

  “This door has no lock. I do not like to see a door without a lock. I will bring one this afternoon.”

  It was how she knew he had appointed himself.

  “But who will do your taxi work?”

  “My son will do that,” he said.

  From that moment he owned her and the house.

  “There will be a lot of toil in this vineyard,” she said to him maliciously and wished she had not said it; but Evans’s eyes lost their vacancy again and quickened and sparkled. He gave a shout of laughter.

  “Oh boy, there will!” he said admiring her. And he went off. She walked from room to room, opening windows, and from an upper one she saw distantly the white sheet of the Gospel tent through the fir trees. She could settle to nothing.

  It was an ugly house of large mean rooms, the landings dark, the stairs steep. The furniture might have come out of old-fashioned hotels and had the helpless look of objects too large, ill-met commercially and too gregarious. After her mother’s death, her father had moved his things into his sister’s house. Taste had not been a strong point in the family. The books, mainly sermons, were her grandfather’s; his son had lived on a hoard of engineering textbooks and magazines. His sister read chiefly the Bible and the rest of her time changed her clothes, having the notion that she might be going out.

  What paralysed Miss Freshwater’s niece was the emptiness of the place. She had expected to disturb ghosts if she opened a drawer. She had expected to remember herself. Instead, as she waited for Evans to come on the first day she had the sensation of being ignored. Nothing watched in the shadows, nothing blinked in the beams of sunlight slanting across the room. The room she had slept in meant nothing. To fit memories into it was a task so awkward and artificial that she gave up trying. Several times she went to the window, waiting for Evans to walk in at the gate and for the destruction to begin.

  When he did come he seized the idea at once. All files marked A.H.F.—that was her father—were “rubbish.”

  “Thorpe?” he said. “A.H.F. more A.H.F.! Burn it?” He was off with his first load to lay the foundation to the fire.

  “And get this carpet up. We shall trip on it, it is torn,” she said. He ripped the carpet off the stairs. He tossed the door mats, which were worn into holes, outside. By the barrow load out went the magazines. Every now and then some object took his eye—a leather strap, a bowl, a pipe rack, which he put into a little heap of other perquisites at the back door.

  But to burn was his passion, to push the wheelbarrow his joy. He swaggered with it. He unloaded it carefully at the fire, not putting it down too near or roughly tipping it. He often tried one or two different grips on the handles before he started off. Once, she saw him stop in the middle of the lawn and turn it upside down and look it over carefully and make the wheel spin. Something wrong? No, he lovingly wiped the wheel with a handf
ul of grass, got an oilcan from his pocket, and gave the wheel a squirt. Then he righted the wheelbarrow and came on with it round the house, singing in a low and satisfied voice. A hymn, it sounded like. And at the end of the day, when she took him a cup of tea and they stood chatting, his passion satisfied for the time being, he had a good look at her. His eye was on the brooch she was carelessly wearing to fasten her green overall. He came closer and put his hand to the brooch and lifted it.

  “Those are pearls, I shouldn’t wonder?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. He stepped nimbly away, for he was as quick as a flea.

  “It is beautiful,” he said, considering the brooch and herself together. “You would not buy it for fifty pounds, nor even a hundred, I suppose. A present, I expect?” And before she could answer, he said gravely: “Half past five! I will lock the sheds. Are you sleeping here? My wife would go off her head, alone in the house. When I’m at the Mission, she’s insane!”

  Evans stared at Miss Freshwater’s niece, waiting for a response to his drama. She did not know what to do, so she laughed. Evans gave a shout of laughter too. It shook the close black curls of his hair and the scar on the side of his nose went white.

  “I have the key,” he said seriously and went off.

  “Robert,” Miss Freshwater’s niece opened the window and called again. “Can you come now? I can’t get on.”

  Evans was on his way back to the house. He stamped quickly up the bare stairs.

  “I’m in here,” she called. “If you can get in!”

  There was a heap of old brown paper knee high at the door. Some of the drawers of a chest had been taken out, others were half open; a wardrobe’s doors were open wide. There were shoes, boxes and clothes piled on the bed which was stripped. She had a green scarf in a turban round her head, and none of her fair hair could be seen. Her face, with its strong bones and pale skin marked by dirty fingers, looked hard, humorous and naked. Her strong lips were dry and pale with dust.

  They understood each other. At first he had bossed her but she had fought back on the second day and they were equals now. She spoke to him as if they were in a conspiracy together, deciding what should be “saved” and what should be “cast into the flames.” She used those words purposely, as a dig of malice at him. She was taller than he. She couldn’t get over the fact that he preached every night at the Mission and she had fallen into the habit of tempting him by some movement of arm or body, when she caught him looking at her. Her aunt had used the word “inconvenient,” when her niece was young, to describe the girl’s weakness for dawdling about with gardeners, chauffeurs, errand boys. Miss Freshwater’s niece had lost the sense of the “convenient” very early in life.

  “I’ve started upstairs now,” she said to Evans. “It’s worse than downstairs. Look at it.”

  Evans came a step further into the room and slowly looked round, nodding his head.

  She leaned a little forward, her hands together, eagerly awaiting for him to laugh so that they could laugh together.

  “She never threw away a scrap of paper. Not even paper bags. Look at this,” she said.

  He waded into the heap and peeped into a brown paper bag. It contained a bun, as hard as stone.

  “Biscuits too,” she said. “Wrapped up! Like a larder. They must have been here for years. In the top drawer.”

  Evans did not laugh.

  “She feared starvation,” he said, “old people are hungry. They are greedy. My grandmother nibbled like a little rat, all day. And in the night too. They wake up in the night and they are afraid. They eat for comfort. The mice did not get in, I hope,” he said, going to look in the drawer.

  “She was eighty-four,” she said.

  “My grandmother was ninety,” he said. “My father’s mother. She liked to hear a mouse. It was company, she said.”

  “I think my aunt must have been fond of moths,” she said. “They came out in clouds from that wardrobe. Look at all those dresses. I can hardly bear to touch them.”

  She shook a couple of dresses in the wardrobe and then took them out. “There you are, did you see it? There goes one.”

  She held up an old-fashioned silk dress.

  “Not worn for twenty years, you can see by the fashion. There!” She gave the dress a pull. “Did you hear? Perished. Rotten. They are all like that. You can’t give them away. They’d fall off you.”

  She threw the dresses on the floor and he picked up one and he saw where moths had eaten it.

  “It is wicked,” he said. “All that money has gone to waste.”

  “Where moth and dust doth corrupt,” she mocked him, and took an armful of the clothes and threw them on the floor. “Why did she buy them if she did not want them? And all those hats we had to burn? You haven’t seen anything yet. Look at this.”

  On the bed was lying a pile of enormous lace-up corsets. Evans considered them.

  “The men had patience,” he said.

  “Oh, she was not married,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “That is how all the property comes to you, I suppose,” he said. There was a shrewd flash in his blue eyes and she knew he had been gazing at her all this time and not at the clothes; but even as she caught his look the dissembling, still, vacant light slid back into it.

  “Shoes!” she said, with excitement. “Do you want any shoes?” A large number of shoes of all kinds, little worn or not worn at all, were rowed in pairs on the bed and some had been thrown into a box as well.

  “Fifty-one pairs I counted,” she said. “She never went out but she went on ordering them. There’s a piece of paper in each pair. Have a look. Read it. What does it say?”

  He took a piece of paper out of a shoe.

  “ ‘Comfortable for the evening,’ ” he read out. He took another. “ ‘For wet weather.’ Did it rain indoors?”

  She took one and read out:

  “ ‘With my blue dress!’ Can you imagine? ‘Sound walking pair,’ ” she laughed but he interrupted her.

  “In Wales they lacked them,” he said. “In the bad times they were going barefoot. My sisters shared a pair for dances.”

  “What shall I do with them?” she asked. “Someone could wear them.”

  “There are good times now. They have the money,” he said, snubbing her. “They buy new.”

  “I mean—anyone,” she said. “They are too big for me. I’ll show you.”

  She sat down on a packing case and slipped her foot into a silver evening shoe.

  “You can see, my feet are lost in them,” she said.

  “You have small feet,” he said. “In Wales the men would be chasing you.”

  “After chapel, I’ve no doubt,” she said. “Up the mountain—what was the name of it? You told me.”

  “It has the best view in Wales. But those who go up it never see it,” he laughed. “Try this pair,” he said, kneeling down and lifting her foot. “Ah no, I see. But look at those legs, boy!”

  Miss Freshwater’s niece got up.

  “What size does your wife take?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, very pleased with himself. “Where is this trunk you said we had to move?”

  “Out in the landing cupboard. I’ll show you. I can’t move it.”

  She led the way to the landing and bent down to tug at it.

  “You must not do that,” he said, putting his hands on her waist and moving her out of the way. He heaved at the trunk and tipped it on end. She wanted it, she said, in the light, where she could see.

  “Here on the chest,” she said.

  He lifted it up and planked it down on the chest.

  “Phew!” he said. “You have a small waist for a married woman. Soft. My wife is a giantess, she weighs thirteen stone. And yet, you’re big, too, oh yes, you are. But you have light bones. With her, now, it is the bones that weigh. Shall we open it?”

  She sat down on a chair and felt in her pocket for a mirror.

  “Why didn’t
you tell me I looked such a sight?” she said, wiping her face. “Yes, open it.”

  The trunk was made of black leather: it was cracked, peeling, stained and squashed by use. Dimly printed on it was her father’s fading name in white large letters. The trunk had been pitched and bumped and slithered out of ships’ holds and trains, all over the world. Its lid, now out of the true, no longer met the lock and it was closed by a strap. It had lain ripening and decaying in attics and lofts for half a lifetime.

  “What is in it?” she called, without looking from her mirror.

  “Clothes,” he said. “Books. A pair of skates. Did the old lady go skating?”

  He pulled out a Chinese hat. There was a pigtail attached to it and he held it up.

  “Ah,” he called. “This is the job.” He put the hat on his head and pulled out a mandarin coat.

  Miss Freshwater’s niece stared and then she flushed.

  “Where did you get that?” she cried jumping up, taking the hat from his head and snatching the coat. “They’re mine! Where were they?”

  She pushed him aside and pulled one or two things from the trunk.

  “They’re mine!” she accused him. “All mine.”

  She aged as she looked at him. A photograph fell to the floor as she lifted up a book. “To darling Laura,” she read out. “Tennyson.”

  “Who is this?” he said, picking up the photograph.

  She did not hear. She was pulling out a cold, sequined evening dress that shrank almost to nothing as she picked it up.

  “Good God,” she said and dropped it with horror. For under the dress was an album. “Where,” she said, sharply possessive, “did you put the skates?” She opened the album. She looked at a road deep in snow leading to an hotel with eaves a yard wide. She had spent her honeymoon there.

  “Kitzbühel,” she said. “Oh, no!”

  She looked fiercely at him to drive him away. The house, so anonymous, so absurd, so meaningless and ghostless, had suddenly got her. There was a choke of cold wonder in her throat.

  She turned on him: “Can’t you clear up all that paper in the room?” She did not want to be seen by him.