Essential Stories

by V. S. Pritchett

  The son interrupted, picking up the story. “And a bus driver leaned out of his cab and said, ‘Watch out, lady. Babies are scarce this year.’ Mother told me.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t,” said the old gentleman, blushing a little. “Your father’s imagination, Richard!”

  “Yes, but what happened?” asked his daughter-in-law.

  “And there was a little place, a real old London fish place—sawdust on the floor, I suppose they had in those days. Crossfield . . . Cross . . . Crofty—I forget the name—and we had a dozen oysters each, maybe I had a couple of dozen; I don’t remember now, I couldn’t say. Frederick’s—that was the name of the place. Frederick’s. And I suppose we must have followed it with Dover sole. They used to do a wonderful Welsh rabbit.”

  “And that is how I was born,” said the son. “Let me give you some more beef, Father.”

  “Me? Oh, no. I don’t eat what I used to. It’s living alone, and these new teeth of mine—I’ve had a lot of trouble with them. Don’t give me any more. I don’t mind a couple of slices—well, just another. And some fat. I like a piece of fat. That’s what I feel. You go home and you get to the house, and it’s dark. And it’s empty. You go in and the boiler’s low—I don’t seem to get the right coke. Do you get good coke here? You look at it all and you look in the larder and you can’t be bothered. There’s a chop, a bit of bread and cheese, perhaps. And you think, well, if this is all there is in life, you may as well finish it. I’m in a rut down in that place. I’ve got to get away. I can’t breathe there. I’d like to get down to the sea.”

  “I think you ought to go where you have friends,” said his daughter-in-law.

  The old gentleman put his knife and fork down. “Friends?” he said, in a stern voice, raising his chin. “I have no friends. All my friends are dead.” He said this with indignation and contempt.

  “But what about your friend Rogers, in Devonshire?” said his son.

  “Rogers? I was disappointed in Rogers. He’s aged. He’s let himself go. I hadn’t seen him for twenty-five years. When I saw him, I said to him, ‘Why, what’s the matter with you? Trying to pretend you are an old man?’ He looked at me. He’d let his moustache go long and grey. I wouldn’t have known him. And there was something else. A funny thing. It upset me.” The old gentleman’s jolly face shrivelled up again, with horror. “The hairs in his nose had gone grey!” he said. “I couldn’t bear it. He was very kind, and his wife was. We had lunch. Soup of some kind—tomato, or maybe oxtail—and then a piece of lamb, potatoes, and cauliflower. Oh, very nice. I’ve forgotten what the dessert was—some cream, I suppose, they have good cream there—and coffee, of course. Cheese . . . I don’t remember. Afterwards—and this is what upset me about old people—they wanted a rest. Every day, after lunch, they go off and have a sleep—every day. Can you imagine that? I couldn’t stand that. Terrible.”

  “It’s good to have a siesta,” said the son.

  “I couldn’t. I never have. I just can’t,” said the old gentleman, in a panic. “The other afternoon after lunch, I forget what I had, a chop, I think—I couldn’t be bothered to cook vegetables, well, on your own you don’t, that’s the point—I dropped off. I don’t know for how long, and when I woke up it was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know where I was. ‘Where am I?’ I said. ‘What day is it?’ And I reached out for my wife. I thought I was in bed, and I called out, ‘Kitty, Kitty, where are you?’ and then I said, ‘Oh.’ It came back to me. I’m here. In this room. I couldn’t move. I got up and put on the light. I was done up. I poured myself out a small glass of port. I felt I had to. It was shocking. And shocking dreams.”

  He stared and then suddenly he turned to his daughter-in-law and said, in another voice, “Those sandwiches I shan’t forget. Egg, wasn’t it? You remember?” He wagged a finger at Helen. “Helen, your mother is a wonder at egg sandwiches. It was the first time in my life I’d ever eaten them. The day we put Kitty away, you remember she came down and made egg sandwiches. What is the secret of it? She won’t tell. Butter, I suppose? Richard, what is the word I want? You know— ‘smashing,’ I suppose you’d call them.”

  He paused, and his eyes grew vaguer. “No,” he went on, “I don’t know what I’ll do. I think I shall go to the sea and look around. I shall get a list of houses, and put my furniture in store. I could live with your brother John, or you. I know I could, but it would be wrong. You have your own lives. I want my independence. Life is beginning for me— that is what I feel. I feel I would like to go on a cruise round the world. There was a house at Bexhill I saw. They wanted seven thousand for it. I felt it would suit me.”

  “Seven thousand!” said his son, in alarm. “Where would you get seven thousand from?”

  “Oh,” said the old gentleman sharply, “I should raise it.”

  “Raise it!” exclaimed the son. “How?”

  “That’s just it,” said the old gentleman cheerfully. “I don’t know. The way will open up. You perhaps, or John.”

  Husband and wife looked down the table at each other in consternation.

  “Shall we go upstairs and have some coffee?” she said.

  “That son of yours, that Richard—did you see what he ate?” said the old gentleman as he got up from the table. “Marvellous, isn’t it? Of course, things are better than when I was a boy. I feel everything is better. We used to go to school with twopence for a pie. Not every day— twice a week. The other days, we just looked at the shop window. Pies piled up. And once a week—Friday, I expect—it was herrings in the evening. The fisherwoman came calling them in the street, eighteen a shilling, fresh fish out of the sea. Salmon I used to be fond of. D’you ever have salmon?”

  He paused in the doorway and looked at the carpet on the stairs and at the wallpaper. “I like rich things,” he said, nodding to the carpet. “That gravy was good. Luscious grapes, pears, all large fruits I like. Those Christmas displays at the meat market—turkeys and geese by the thousand there used to be. I always used to bring your mother something. A few chops, two or three pairs of kippers. And so forth. I don’t know what.”

  “Upstairs to the sitting-room, Father,” said the son. “I’m coming in a minute with the coffee.”

  The son went into the kitchen, and the whispering began again.

  “Seven thousand!” he said. “Seven million wouldn’t keep him!”

  “Sh-h-h,” said his wife. “It’s a day-dream.”

  “But what are we going to do?”

  In a few minutes, he took the coffee upstairs. The old gentleman was sitting down, with his waistcoat undone and his thumbs twiddling on his stomach.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” the old gentleman said rebukingly. “You’ve lost weight. You don’t eat. You worry too much. My wife used to worry.”

  The son passed a coffee cup to him.

  “Is there a lot of sugar in it? Thank you,” the old man said. He gave it a stir, took a sip, and then held the cup out. “I think I’ll have a couple of spoonfuls more.”

  OUR OLDEST FRIEND

  “Look out!” someone said. “Here comes Saxon.”

  It was too late. Moving off the dance floor and pausing at the door with the blatant long sight of the stalker, Saxon saw us all in our quiet corner of the lounge and came over. He stopped and stood with his hands on his hips and his legs apart, like a goalkeeper. Then he came forward.

  “Ah! This is nice!” he crowed, in the cockerel voice that took us back to the Oxford years. He pulled up a chair and placed it so that none of us could easily get out. It passed through our heads that we had seen that dinner-jacket of his before. He must have had it since the last term at school. It was short, eager and juvenile in the sleeves and now his chest had bolstered it, he seemed to be bursting with buns and toffee. A piece of stiff fair hair stuck up boyishly at the back. He crossed his short legs and squeezed them with satisfaction as his sharp blue eyes looked around our circle over his strong glasses.

  “How awfu
lly nice.” For niceness was everything for him. “Everyone is here,” he said and nodded back to the people on the dance floor. “Jane Fawcett, Sanderson-Brown, Tony Jameson and Eileen—I just missed them in Brussels, they’d just left for Munich—very nice catching them here. With the Williamsons!”

  He ran off a list of names, looking over one lens of the glasses that were not quite straight on his young enthusiastic nose as he spoke them, and marking each name with a sly look of private knowledge. We were the accused—accused not so much of leaving him out of things, as of thinking, by so doing, that he was out of them. His short, trotting legs infallibly took him to old acquaintance. Names from the past, names that we had forgotten from school and then Oxford came out, and made our wives look across at us at first with bewilderment and then set them to whispering and giggling.

  “What are you doing, Saxon?” someone said. “Are you still on the Commission?”

  “In principle yes, in practice,” said Saxon, uttering his favourite words, “I’m the liaison between Ways and Means and the Working Party.”

  “The liaison!” one of the wives said.

  “Yes. It’s awfully nice. It works very well. We have to keep in touch with the sub-committees. I saw the Dustman the other day. He’s a Trustee now, he came in from Arbitration.”

  “The Dustman?” Mrs. Selby said to her husband.

  “Oxford,” said Selby. “Lattersmith. Economist. Very old. He was called the Dustman because he was very dirty.”

  “Tessa’s father,” Saxon said. And as he shot the name of Tessa at us, he grinned at each one of us in turn to see what could be found in our faces. There are things in the past that become geological. Selby’s face became as red as Aberdeen marble; some of us turned to sandstone; one or two to millstone grit or granite; that was how alarm and disclaimer took us.

  “Your oldest friend,” said Mrs. Selby to her husband, grinding out the phrase.

  “In principle yes, in practice no,” said Selby bitterly mocking Saxon’s well-known phrase.

  “My oldest friend, if you please,” said Thomas, always a rescuer.

  “And mine!” two of us said together, backing him up.

  “Is she yours?” said kind Jenny Fox to me.

  “She is the ‘oldest friend’ of all of us.”

  We laughed together loudly, but not in unity of tone. Hargreaves was too loud, Fox was too frivolous, Selby was frightened and two or three laughs were groans. There was something haphazard, hollow, insincere and unlasting about our laughter, but Day saved us by saying in his deep grave voice to Saxon:

  “We ought to settle this. Who is Tessa’s oldest friend? When did you meet Tessa, Saxon?”

  “Selby and I were at school with her, at Asaph’s.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” said Selby’s wife to her husband.

  “I tried to get her to come tonight,” said Saxon. “She’s gone out with the Dustman. He said they might drop in later.”

  Our wives put on stiff faces: one or two picked up their handbags and looked at the door on to the dance floor, as if they were going to search it, and even the building. The incident was one of Saxon’s always unanswerable successes but once more Thomas saved us. He said to Saxon:

  “So you’re her oldest friend.”

  And Selby said grimly: “Yes, you were at Asaph’s a year before me.”

  “Saxon! You’ve been holding out on us,” we said with false jollity.

  One of the ladies nodded at us and said to her neighbour: “They seem to be a club.”

  The pious pretence on the part of our wives that they did not know Tessa Lattersmith was, in its way, brilliant in our embarrassed state. It brought out the hypocrisy in Harry James who said in a light-headed way:

  “She’s married now, I suppose?”

  “Oh no,” said Saxon. “She’s carrying on.” And he meant carrying on, as it were, in the sense of working hard on the joint committee, himself informed because he was, after all, the liaison.

  “You mean,” said Mrs. Selby, “she hasn’t found anyone’s husband willing?”

  “Shame!” said Saxon as at an annual general meeting. “Shame.”

  “Perhaps,” said the kind young Jenny Fox, “she doesn’t want to be married.”

  “She’s very rich,” said James.

  “Very attractive,” said Day.

  “Big gobbling eyes.”

  “Lovely voice.”

  “I don’t agree,” said Fox. “It bodes. It comes creeping into you. It gets under your shirt. It seems to come up from the floor. Expensive clothes, though.”

  “Not like the Dustman’s!” shouted Thomas, rescuing us again. “D’you remember? I used to see him at the station waiting for the Oxford train. He used to walk up to the very last bench on the platform, and flop down. I thought he was a tramp kipping down for the night, the first time. His clothes were creased as though he’d slept in them. He had that old suitcase, made of cardboard I should say, tied with string—and parcels of books tied up. Like Herbert Spencer. You know Herbert Spencer had to have everything tied to him? He sat there looking wretched and worn out, with his mouth open and his thick hair full of dust—a real layabout from the British Museum. He hardly got his feet off the ground when he walked, but sort of trudged, as if he was wading through sand. He must be well past seventy.”

  “No, he’s barely sixty. Tessa’s only thirty-two.”

  “Thirty-seven,” said Mrs. Selby.

  “He’s sixty-two,” said Saxon. “Tessa is a year younger than me.”

  “The Lattersmiths were rich,” said James again. “I mean compared with the rest of us.”

  “The Dustman’s wife had the money,” said Thomas. “She belonged to one of those big shipping families. Did you ever see her? She’s like Tessa—oh, she comes after you with those big solemn eyes.”

  “We went to see her, didn’t we?” Day said to his wife. “She saw Diana’s necklace, her eyes were fixed on it . . .”

  “And my rings!”

  “She just wanted them. Greedy. She couldn’t bear it that Diana had something that she hadn’t got.”

  “She wanted you as well,” said Diana.

  “Oh,” said Tom, the rescuer. “There’s nothing in that. Old Ma Dustman wanted me too, in fact she wanted all of us. ‘I am so worried about Tessa, I wish she’d settle down. I wish she’d find a nice husband—now you, you’re fond of Tessa, I’m sure.’ ”

  “Shame!” called Saxon again.

  We had forgotten about him; he was sweating as he watched us with delight.

  “No, it’s true,” I said to Saxon.

  “And she couldn’t have them, poor things,” one of the wives said and the others joined in laughing at us.

  James once more pushed us into trouble.

  “Did you ever go on a picnic with them? I mean when they came down to School? No? Saxon, didn’t you and Selby? Didn’t you? None of your camp fires with damp sticks, thermos bottles and tea slopping over the tomato sandwiches. Oh no! And it never rained: old Ma Dustman had ordered sun down from Fortnum and Mason’s. They brought the Daimler and the butler came—how did they fit him in, I wonder? I bet he went ahead in the Rolls. He set tables and chairs. Silver teapot, the best Rockingham . . .”

  “Not Rockingham, it can’t have been.”

  “Well old Spode. Something posh. The butler handed round the stuff. I only just knew Tessa then. I had brought a girl called Sadie and Tessa brought a girl called Adelaide with her and Tessa said ‘I want you to meet Harry James. He’s my oldest friend.’ Sadie looked sick.”

  “It had started then?” some of our wives cried out.

  “Long before that,” I said. “In the cradle.”

  “Exactly what she said just before we were married when you introduced me,” said Mrs. Day to her husband.

  “She said it to me at our wedding,” said Mrs. Selby and, glaring at her husband, “I don’t know why.”

  “I don’t get what her fascination for you all
was!” said sly Mrs. James.

  “Oh,” we all said largely, in a variety of voices, “I don’t know . . . She was about . . .”

  “You know, I think it was sex,” said Jenny Fox.

  “Was it sex?” we looked at each other, putting as much impartiality as we could into the enquiry.

  “Sex! Of course it was sex,” said Mrs. Selby, putting her chin up and gripping her handbag on her knee.

  “Not for me,” said Harry James.

  “Nor me.” One wife squeezed her husband’s hand. “Why not?”

  This dumbfounded us. We huddled together. Why had none of us made a pass? Were we frightened?

  “You took her to picture galleries,” said Mrs. Selby.

  “Yes,” said Selby. “She did nothing but talk about a man called Cézanne.”

  “That’s it. A whole party of us went to Parma and she did nothing but talk of a man called Fabrice,” said Tom.

  “Fabrice?”

  “Stendhal,” said Saxon.

  “I had Lawrence in Rome.”

  “There was always another man. Anyone have Picasso? Or Giacometti?” said James.

  “Who did you have, Selby? Russell? Einstein?”

  Selby had had enough. With the treachery of the desperate, he said: “She talked of nothing but you, James.”

  “No,” said Tom the rescuer. “You can’t have had. I had you, James.”

  “I had Tom.”

  “Day was my trouble.”

  “With me it was Bill.”

  “What a lovely daisy chain,” one of the wives said. “The whole distinguished lot of you. Who’s missing?”