It May Never Happen

by V. S. Pritchett

  “There he was—and independent mind you, he had money—going downhill as fast as I have ever seen a man go—a gentleman, paralyzed, hypnotized, you might call it. I told him straight what was the matter with him. I saw it at once—he had to get away from that mother. I told her, ‘You’re a mother. You don’t know nothing about your son.’”

  His voice now became merry. “It’s marvellous, reely,” he said. “Marvellous the way things work out. I just went down there to look around.”

  Uncle Belton saw those two provincial people with their neat lifeless little business. He saw in them a temporary gold-mine. But there was more in my uncle’s passion than acquisitiveness. He had a horror of drink; he had a greater horror of spiritual disasters. He stepped back from the catastrophic crashes of the inner life. His remedy lay in that part of the Protestant tradition which deals with the conflicts of the inner life by annihilating the inner life altogether. When Uncle Belton and Mr. Phillimore left Somerset to start the firm of Belton & Phillimore their departure was like an elopement.

  “It has been an experience for me, knowing your uncle,” said Mr. Phillimore to me again and again. He had borrowed the word “experience” from Mr. Belton. His voice rose into the treble. “What drive, Vernon, Vincent—which is it? Vincent! What drive!”

  My day’s work at the office was monotonous, like family life. For if my new Uncle Belton and Mr. Phillimore were husband and wife, I was the only child who strays listlessly from room to room trying to find something to do. I stuck on stamps, I copied letters. I put clean water in the flower-bowl which Mr. Phillimore kept filled. They were a love-offering. I took messages. I went across the road to buy buns for the typist, or my uncle would send me out to collect a shirt from a shop or to buy a bottle of hair-cream at his barbers. My uncle had thick glossy hair as still as glass on his head. We lived in all the intensity of domestic life. Uncle was always willing to stop his work and address a manly mid-week sermon to Mr. Phillimore. Mr. Phillimore was always willing to stop what he was doing and talk to me. He would follow me ravenously about open mouthed as if he would graze on my hair. We had been brought up on the myth of the unapproach ability of Mr. Phillimore: the myth had a germ of truth: it was he, who, continuously, made the approaches.

  “Ah youth, youth, golden-headed youth,” he would say as he passed me in the workshop. I had thick black hair not unlike my uncle’s and I was trying to make it look glossy. Through the window in the partition Miss Croft, the typist, kept her little eyes on all of us. One of my anxieties was to make Miss Croft smile, but she was in her wooden teens, and her lips set firmly when I stood in the room with her. She looked at me with the swollen face of an elder sister. It was a long time before I saw that she was piqued because once she had been the only child in this family and that I had supplanted her. A woman’s life is swayed by her feelings, but Miss Croft was not yet a woman: she was learning about her feelings, how to use them, like a young girl who is learning to play scales on the piano, and she was still awkward with them.

  Mr. Phillimore would often stand at the door of her room talking to me and as he did so, his look would pop anxiously, intimately, apologetically in Miss Croft’s direction. Mr. Phillimore’s eyes seemed to say, “In my life I need all the help I can get from everyone. Don’t be jealous and hurt!” One could see what had happened. Miss Croft silently reproached him.

  “You are wasting Mr. Phillimore’s time. That poor man is run off his feet,” she said abruptly to me.

  “He started talking to me,” I said.

  Miss Croft sat back from her typewriter.

  “He is the brains of this firm,” Miss Croft said. “I have been here from the beginning. I’ve seen it all. That man,” she was developing her simple possessive instinct as if she were doing arm exercises, “tells me everything.” She always called him “that man”.

  Yes, and now Mr. Phillimore had started telling me everything.

  Miss Croft gave her head a short upward jerk. She put a lump in her chin by running her tongue round her lower gum, and began typing again with her big red fingers. I loved watching the quickness of her fingers. There were two or three other things about her that were pretty; her little starry violet eyes and her small waist; the curve of her legs was becoming lovely. And she had a lisping childlike voice. But she was changing; what was pretty one week became plain the next. She was like a creature in a chrysalis.

  “One thing,” she said complacently, “that man won’t be here long. I ‘can see things.”

  When she saw how astonished and impressed I was by this remark, Miss Croft was very satisfied.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  There were things, she said primly to me, that were confidential.

  My Uncle Belton was a man who was unaware of the little situations that were simmering all day long around him. He lived juicily, like an orange, within the containing rind of his objects in life. He was out two or three times a week seeing customers and walking in his dream of making the business larger and getting larger premises. When he wasn’t tapping his pencil on columns of figures or abusing someone on the telephone, he was gazing vehemently at the plans of new premises he had seen. One afternoon he came back in a hearty mood and sent me to tell Mr. Phillimore he had brought him a present.

  “A present,” cried Mr. Phillimore, who was working on the frame of a sofa. Up he jumped. “How exciting,” he said.

  We had a foreman with bloodshot eyes, who always winked at me when I came with a message for Mr. Phillimore. He winked now.

  “You’ve got a present for me!” cried Mr. Phillimore, almost running to Uncle Belton’s office. “What a thrill.”

  My uncle did not give Mr. Phillimore the parcel. He wanted some of the surprise for himself. He wanted a part of everything for himself; it was not greed but part of his gregarious generosity. He would have eaten your lunch for you so that you and he could feel more genially at one. We watched Uncle undo the parcel. It contained a small framed picture. He stood it on the desk and turned it to face Mr. Phillimore.

  “Just made for you, Phillimore,” he said. The picture was simply a text done in poker work. The words were: “Don’t Worry—It May Never Happen.”

  “Don’t worry—it may never happen,” Phillimore read with delight and he rubbed his hands together.

  “Don’t Worry—it may never happen,” ruminated my uncle in his deep, golden, optimistic voice.

  “Wonderful,” cried Phillimore. “Oh, good.” Like a boy clapping a catch at cricket. Then he looked serious. He shook his head. “Very true. Very true,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I’ll tell you what—we’ll hang it on the wall.”

  “That’s an idea,” said uncle.

  “Over the mantelpiece? Or over the desk, do you think?” said Mr. Phillimore.

  He danced about holding the picture now in this place and now in the other. Uncle helped him. They were like a newly married couple hanging up a picture.

  “Over the mantelpiece, where you can see it,” said Mr. Belton.

  “Here, do you think?”

  “No—a little higher. There! No, a bit to the left.” Yes, it was a marriage. Mr. Phillimore and Mr. Belton sat down exhausted gazing at the picture now hanging on the wall. Phillimore read it aloud again.

  “True,” he said. “Very true.

  “Yes,” he sighed, shaking his head. “It’s just made for me. Why worry? There’s no need to. One’s desires, one’s wishes, one’s hopes—they won’t come off. Nothing changes.”

  “Here,” cried my uncle. “It doesn’t say that. It says don’t be held back by your fears, the thing you’re afraid of just won’t occur. You’re not afraid of what you want coming true, are you? That would be ridiculous.”

  “My dear Vincent,” said Mr. Phillimore, getting my name right for once, “that only shows how different Mr. B. is from the rest of us.”

  “Good godfathers,” cried my uncle. “Phillimore, you’re morbid.”

  �
��Yes, yes, I know,” said Mr. Phillimore with a primness and secretiveness I had never noticed before. “But one preserves one’s integrity.”

  And Phillimore lifted his nose and one could hear a hissing intake of air like a gas escape. It was a little terrifying. Uncle scowled playfully but he was put out. For a few seconds the two men considered each other and my uncle, being by far the shorter and stouter, had the advantage of weight. Many men who were taller than my new Uncle Belton were intimidated by his vehement shortness. He seemed to be shooting upwards at one like a howitzer.

  After his expeditions to the warm and buzzing platters of the world, Belton was often irritable; when he came back, he was obliged to return to earth where he found an order had been delayed, or some timber had a flaw in it, or they were short of cloth because Phillimore had advised Belton to go easy on the buying. And now after the difference over the meaning of the picture, Belton went irritably off to the workroom.

  “I hope,” said Mr. Phillimore, “dear Mr. B. won’t upset the hands. I shall feel it is my fault.” And then turning to me, begging for support, he said, “Yet how frightful, how terrifying it would be, Vincent, if what one wished came true. How futile life would be if one’s fears were not realized. Don’t you think?” He watched me.

  “I should die!” he cried and his hands hung limply from the wrist like wet leaves.

  This kind of conversation was beyond me. And he often spoke like this in front of the workers who winked at me all the time. On the other hand, I could not be sure that Mr. Phillimore wasn’t mocking me. And then I suppose in our family—my own and my uncle’s—we were stamped with a reserve about our personal lives. We had no private lives. We simply had secret lives, like secret drinkers. We were the natural opponents of private life. We regarded ourselves as units of will or energy directed upon our various purposes Mr. Belton saw himself (for he was religious) as a new kind of fusion of science and religion, a successful sperm, fertilizing the Christian endeavour. Contact with a man like Phillimore who appeared to put feebleness, illness, fright, incapacity and failure in life first, was bewildering. Phillimore’s eagerness to cut a bad figure was like an indecent physical exposure. He was the sperm which fails.

  So when Mr. Phillimore cried out “I should die”, I saw something new in his expression, something watchful, crystalline, and with the madman’s order, in his eye. For a second or two I had the impression that Mr. Phillimore was not a fool; that he was cunning and obstinate, and longsighted. The impression dissolved and indeed I forgot about it or he made me forget it by a sudden change of his mood. He was as limp as a willow. What I would call his good-bye air appeared. I mean that after some gust of confidence, some anxious tail-wagging spaniel-like prance of intimacy, Mr. Phillimore would draw back and fade. He would gradually back to the door and stand there getting dimmer. It was like being in a train which is moving out and Mr. Phillimore stood on the platform stammering about how lucky you were to be going away, while he was left behind. The weak hands seemed to wave. It was his vanity to be left behind.

  “Ah well, Vernon,” he said (I was beginning to think he got my name wrong out of malice), “where shall we all be in ten years’ time? You—I see you—rich, successful, in the arms of some superb mistress—Miss Croft, shall we say, but in a tiger skin. And I … alas, in my solitary room …”

  He had gone.

  Every firm has its Devil, that is to say, its chief competitor. And this Devil is always a firm of the same size or perhaps a little more important. Belton and Phillimore were not afraid of their big competitors: the huge furniture manufacturers and upholsterers who devoured the trade like ranging wolves. Belton and Phillimore admired these great firms. They were afraid of the little ones and especially of one little one.

  If my uncle wanted to give Mr. Phillimore a fright he would say:

  “Salter’s on the move again. He’s cut his prices.” Or, holding up a letter: “Look at this. Salter’s giving six months’ credit.”

  My uncle would look bitter and belligerent. One was warring against Sin. Salter, my uncle conveyed, was a cheat, a fraud, a sinister figure who was plotting against their lives. Salter copied our designs and cheapened them. He stole our customers. He would try and get hold of our workers. Like a highwayman, he preyed on our labour. He wanted to strangle us. My uncle was not eloquent about this; he was as curt, as stubborn as a soldier. Salter might have been outside on the street sniping at him.

  “We can’t fight that,” my uncle would say, meaning, of course, the opposite.

  “That defeats us,” Phillimore eagerly agreed. He put down his ruler and his pencil, leaned back in his chair and made a noise in his throat like the death-rattle—a noise natural to him. He also had an irritating habit of whistling through the gap in his front teeth, a whistle of surrender. It was he, at these times, who appeared to be “saving” my uncle; one saw the emergence of Phillimore’s hatred of success, the trembling of compassion in his nature. An expression of one lying blissfully in hospital came on Phillimore’s face. He would have done anything for Belton at that moment, and if Belton had observed the character of his partner—which, of course, he had not; he did not believe in any one’s character but his own—he would have chosen this moment to say to Mr. Phillimore:

  “Go down to your mother, tell her we are on the edge of bankruptcy, get her to give us this extra capital we need. Tell her it is a terrible risk, that we may very likely to lose it. Tell her it’s desperate. Tell her we may not last another month. Go out and get drunk, it’s the only thing to do.”

  The prospect of ruin would have been irresistible to Mr. Phillimore. He would have done in this mood, what in a more confident one, he would have resisted. Alas, Belton was no reader of the heart. He turned and attacked Phillimore.

  “Defeat us,” he said, setting his chin. “I don’t understand the meaning of the word, Phillimore. There is no defeat. What’s Salter? A draper”—Uncle’s lowest word of contempt—“a draper, Phillimore. Give me the price list. Get me Dobson’s on the ’phone. Miss Croft, come and take these letters. Boy, take this note up to the bank …”

  The crisis of sacrifice, loss, abandonment was passed. Like a wife who sees her husband recover and so free himself from helpless reliance on her, Phillimore saw his compassion scattered. Phillimore would have liked to rock my uncle like a baby—and indeed Belton often looked like one. But optimism had won. And when my uncle did raise the question of getting more capital, Mr. Phillimore became evasive. The “good-bye” look came back. He admired my uncle’s resilience, but the admiration itself exhausted him and left him—how shall I say it? I can remember only his appearance, the open mouth, the choking open mouth under the dropping teeth—it left him in a condition of—nausea. And one heard the sound, the sinister air rushing up his nostrils, like a preparation for suicide.

  About this time I used to go out to lunch with Mr. Phillimore and one day I saw this Devil who haunted our firm and planned our destruction. Phillimore and I were in a teashop.

  “Oh dear,” said Phillimore, “there’s that poor wretch, Salter.” My heart jumped. The devilries of Salter had so impressed me that I was ready to run out of the place.

  “Has he seen us?” I said trying to look undisturbed. I ought not to have been surprised by the self-possession of Phillimore: Salter meant disaster.

  “That man might have ruined us,” said Phillimore sadly. “But for your wonderful uncle, Vernon, we should be in Queer Street, up the spout, right in the middle of the puree.”

  Phillimore sighed and shook his head. He gazed in Salter’s direction with affection. He gazed, I now suspect, with nostalgia. And I, gazing there too, saw a stringy and dejected man, bald but not sufficiently so, with pince-nez like a dismal pair of birds on either side of his nose, and a grey moustache, damp with tea. The teashop was under a railway arch and we could hear the trains rumbling over our heads like rollers. They seemed to flatten and crush the figure of Mr. Salter in his old raincoat. I suppose he kn
ew us, for he looked at us miserably and I have never seen a figure which conveyed more resignation to injustice, more passive disquiet. To judge by the look he gave us this hypocrite Salter was muttering aloud that we were cheating and ruining him. We were copying his designs, undercutting his prices, stealing his customers. He got up and went to pay his bill listlessly just as I was putting a spoonful of Queen’s pudding into my mouth. I was relieved when he gave an accusing nod to Phillimore as he passed our table. He did not speak. We saw him stand on the step of the restaurant for a moment, looking at the traffic; and when he at last chose to cross the road and walked northward, I tried to work out which of our customers he was going to steal. But Phillimore said:

  “Salter has an ulcerated stomach through living on tinned food on a hospital ship in the war. He was in the Middle East.”

  Phillimore said this in a subdued enthusiastic voice. The illness, the cheatings, the plots of Salter excited Phillimore’s imagination. To my uncle he talked about nothing else for days.

  The year passed and another year began. I found myself growing. I spent more time in the workroom now working with my hands. I would check the timber or the cloth or help with the packing or sort certain kinds of hair and down. I was not penned in the little glass room with Miss Croft. I was free to walk about. I liked the workroom because it had a glass roof and through that one sometimes saw the white clouds smoking in the sky and I would think of the country you would be able to see if you could lie on top of one of those clouds. I liked to think that fields and woods existed, but that I too existed and was working. I wished I was in love and the wish itself was delightful, for there was no pain nor melancholy in it, no emptiness and defeat. I was in love already. I had fallen in love with myself, a lover as close as my own skin.

  One morning in May the firm was delivering some chairs in the West End, and I was sent in a hired van with them, riding high up with the driver, to see that the chairs were delivered without damage, to an important special customer. I did not go straight back to the office. I left the van. Up till then I had never been in a restaurant north of the Thames, but now I decided to try a place in some narrow alley of the city. One after the other I rejected. The thoughtless traveller wanders in circles. I was delighted to wander and, in fact, wandered so long that I found myself near the office and in the teashop under the arches. There I saw a most remarkable person. No, not Salter. I saw Miss Croft.