It May Never Happen

by V. S. Pritchett

“Come in,” said Rogers.

  “She’d hear my language,” said Mr. Pocock. Rogers opened the door and led the way into the sitting-room.

  Mr. Pocock sat down while Rogers went to the whisky-bottle.

  “It’s empty, old man,” Rogers said, looking blankly at Mr. Pocock.

  “Thank God, old boy.” Mr. Pocock stood appalled, like a man who had never been in an inhabited house before. He looked shocked. He saw with horror the cretonne-covered sofa, the photographs, the slim silver vases with maidenhair fern in them.

  “She’s taken the other one away and put this one here.”

  “Women,” said Mr. Pocock.

  They stared at each other.

  “Come round to my place,” said Mr. Pocock.

  Still talking, they went out, leaving the door open. A woman’s head appeared at the window.

  “Alfred!” the voice called.

  Rogers stopped and stared at Mr. Pocock. Mr. Pocock stared back like a fierce dog at Rogers.

  “Better answer, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock, banging his stick on the ground.

  “Yes,” called Rogers.

  “Had a good time?” said the woman’s voice. They could not see her in the darkness, but Mr. Pocock raised his hat.

  “Better go,” he whispered.

  He went off alone. Rogers followed him at last. Mr. Pocock’s house was the last of a row of labourer’s cottages, one room and the scullery downstairs and two little rooms up. Now Rogers was shocked by what he saw. In the downstairs room was an old bit of carpet laid to the edge of a cooking range, and the carpet was stained with grease. Tins and the remains of a meal were on the table. Mr. Pocock used only one of the rooms upstairs. They went up. Its boards were bare. There was a suitcase on the floor and there was an iron bed and a chair. The place smelled of mice and also of the smoking candle stuck on the mantelpiece. They sat down.

  “That’s what I ought to have done—got married,” said Mr. Pocock. His face looked greenish in the candlelight. “Bloody lonely without a woman, old boy.”

  “There’s a woman,” Mr. Pocock exclaimed violently. There were canvases stacked against the dirty wall. He turned one round. He filled his glass. What Rogers saw shocked him. It was the picture of a thin, dark-haired woman sitting on a bed, naked. Not lascivious, not beautiful, not enticing, just naked and seeming to say, “It don’t feel natural, I mean having nothing on.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” was all Rogers could say. He went hot. It was the painting of the bed that shocked him. Mr. Pocock seemed to him a monster.

  Mr. Pocock began to boast and Rogers hardly listened. There was a bottle of whisky. Rogers’s eye kept going with astonishment to the picture. A dancer, Mr. Pocock said. He knew all the stage crowd, he said. Could have had her, he said. Words and words came out of Mr. Pocock, gobbling and strutting like a blown-out turkey in the room, words making an ever-softening roar in the set, cold silence of the cottage where no clock ticked.

  Suddenly Rogers had a shock. It was daylight. He had been asleep on the floor and the sun was shining on him. He gaped. There was Mr. Pocock on the bed. Still holding his cane, the rings shining on his podgy fingers which had grey hair at the knuckles, Mr. Pocock lay. He was snoring. His body heaved up and down in the loud suit, like a marquee with the wind loose in it. Remote in sleep with his picture above him, Mr. Pocock looked sacred and innocent, in the bare room.

  The spring came with its glassy winds, its air going warm and cold and the lengthening light becoming frail in the evenings. Rogers and Mr. Pocock were both ill. Rogers received illness as part of his burden; he was more aware of his wife and of his children when he was ill. But Mr. Pocock was an aggressive invalid. He saw conspiracy. He was terrified and he blustered to conceal this and made war on the doctor. He would not stay in bed.

  “Kimble thinks he’s got me, old boy. Knocked off my beer and cut me down to two whiskies a day. It isn’t right! It isn’t human! He’s got to be fair.”

  When Rogers got up they met in the pub.

  “I’ve had seven, old boy,” Mr. Pocock said. “But if Kimble says anything to you about what I drink—it’s two. I’ve treated him fairly. I’ve been reasonable. That man wants to kill me. But not a word to him! You’ve got to deal with these doctors.”

  First of all when he had come to the village Mr. Pocock had a charwoman to clean and wash up for him, but he was hardly ever in his cottage and he ate at any time. He had got rid of the charwoman and looked after himself. He had brought his bed downstairs when he was first ill because he had been frightened in the upstairs room. One night he felt tired and low. A bus-ride had upset him. He went to bed early. In the middle of the night he woke up in black terror. He felt sick and he was fainting, and he was sure he was in London. He reached for his stick and knocked on the floor to make the woman come up to him, the woman whose portrait Rogers had seen and who lived downstairs. All the night sleeping and waking he dreamed he was knocking to make himself heard on the floor. For the model, then for Mrs. Rogers, then for his mother.

  In the morning he could hardly move. Then he remembered he was on the ground floor and had been knocking on the carpet which covered the flags, which covered the earth. He had been knocking on the hard crust of the earth. All he could do was to crawl from his bed to the cupboard where the whisky-bottle was and then crawl back. But he called no one; he stiffened with anger if there were any signs of anyone coming to the door. He was not going to be caught like this. He was not going to admit anything. He cursed the doctor.

  It was two days before Mr. Pocock’s illness was discovered.

  “Mr. Pocock’s ill,” Rogers’s wife brought the news. She knew all the illnesses of the village.

  Rogers sat up, alert. He was at once frightened for himself. He did not want to see Mr. Pocock before the doctor had been. Rogers sat in his chair, unable to move. He wanted to do something for Mr. Pocock, but he was paralysed. He sat in a stupor of inertia and incompetence. He looked appealingly at his wife. She got a car and had Mr. Pocock brought to the house.

  “It’s the bloody sugar, old boy,” murmured Mr. Pocock with a regal weariness as three men carried him upstairs.

  Mrs. Rogers was glad when the ambulance came that, for once in his life, Mr. Pocock had had a real home with a woman to look after him.

  That was the last of him.

  A dealer came down to look at the pictures after the funeral, but he would not take them. One or two others came hoping for frames. But the twenty-odd canvases there had no frames on them. A brother came down to clear up Mr. Pocock’s affairs.

  “We never corresponded,” said the brother. Of all things he was a clergyman.

  Two fair and tall young men in suède shoes and pull-overs, so alike they looked like a pair of tap dancers, turned up at the same time. They were tap-dancers.

  “Terrible,” they said. They were looking at the pictures; but Rogers supposed they referred to the death, the poverty of the house—or perhaps the clergyman. Rogers had been told by Mr. Pocock that in reward for his kindness he might have one of the pictures, but he did not know which to choose. The only picture he felt anything about was the picture on the bedroom wall, the nude. He detested it.

  “Women,” he thought, “that must have been Mr. Pocock’s trouble. Not drink. Oh dear, not drink, women.” So when everyone had gone, he took the small picture, wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a shed in his garden. That picture, and a corkscrew which he stuffed in his pocket, because a corkscrew was useful. He took the picture because, without knowing it, he felt it symbolized the incomprehensibility of the existence of other people. The corkscrew was the man he knew, the picture the man he did not know at all. He thought that one day he had better destroy the picture—in case a bad impression of his friend was formed.

  And so, slipping out of the funeral, keeping in the background afterwards, staying in his own house, Rogers eluded the memory of Mr. Pocock. Rogers was forgetting everything as he grew larger. He forgot yesterday, last we
ek, last year—he dreamed through time like an idle whale, with its mouth open, letting what would come into it. He contemplated through a haze his own work of art—his family. He watched his wife’s second chin when she gave her practical laugh. His two girls swam up to him like fish. They were an extra pair of eyes and ears for him. They saw things quickly. They laughed at things long before he heard them. On Saturdays he took them to the cinema. Every Saturday. A year passed, and then two years. He never said now: “We had Mr. Pocock, the painter, here.” He had learned his lesson.

  And then came the most extraordinary fortnight of Rogers’s life. He was with his daughters in the cinema. They were watching a gangster film. A film four years old: they only got the old films in these country towns. Two men were going quietly up the stairs of an hotel and then along a corridor. It was at night. They were making for the room where a Mexican, behind closed doors, was covering a girl with a gun. But they were not sure of the room. They hesitated at doors. It was trying for Rogers, because his mind was still in the pillared lounge below, reminded by it that he was living on his capital. How had the Mexican got the girl in the room? Then the two men stopped. One said “O.K.”, and they pushed open a door marked 13 and switched on the light. Rogers’s daughters jumped in their seats and a shout of laughter came from the audience. A large, round-faced man with a huge stomach was lying on a bed in check suit and knickerbockers, asleep and snoring, with a bottle, rolled on its side, near by.

  “Mr. Pocock!” the girls shouted.

  It was. Rogers’s heart went small in his chest and seemed to shoot like a stone in his throat. The gangsters rolled their eyes ironically. The audience laughed. One of the gangsters picked up the bottle and made to prod Mr. Pocock with it. The audience sent up blast after blast of laughter; especially shrill laughter went up first from the children in front. The other gangster touched his friend’s arm, raised his eyes to the ceiling and said: “R.I.P.”. Wave after wave of laughter passed by as the snores stopped and then began again like a car toiling and missing up hill.

  “It’s Mr. Pocock, Mr. Pocock, Dad,” Rogers’s daughters cried, jumping on their seats. And the laughter went on. For the achievement of Mr. Pocock was that he did nothing, nothing at all. He just lay and snored, the human balloon.

  Rogers couldn’t believe it.

  It became urgent for him after this to decide the matter. Films in the town moved down the road, ten or twenty miles to the next place in the week. Four times he followed that film in a fortnight. Four times he saw that scene. It was unmistakably Pocock. And each place the audience roared until one night at the Hippodrome where it was the big picture, he heard a packed house shout out with enthusiasm at Pocock’s sublime unconsciousness. He had three minutes of the film, but those three minutes brought the house down.

  It terrified Rogers. Pocock was lying exactly as Rogers had seen him that morning after the binge when he had woken up in Pocock’s cottage. He dreaded that the eyes would open, the voice speak. And then, after the sixth time of seeing the film, as he walked home down the village street he longed to meet that preposterous figure, to slap him on the back and tell him. He longed for him to wake up on the screen and hear that helpless applause, to see those wide open laughing mouths. “He kept it quiet,” thought Rogers. And the drowning soul saw no irony in it all; but rather felt that life was incomprehensible no more. Something had been settled.

  When he took the picture from his garden shed and burned it on the rubbish heap soon after, Rogers heard in the husky roar of the flame the sound of a soul set free, all stain removed.

  THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

  “Good morning, Mr. P,” said Mr. Pollfax, rinsing and drying his hands after the last patient. “How’s Mr. P.?” I was always Mr. P. until I sat in the chair and he switched the lamp on and had my mouth open. Then I got a peerage.

  “That’s fine, my lord,” said Mr. Pollfax having a look inside.

  Dogged, with its slight suggestion of doggish, was the word for Mr. Pollfax. He was a short man, jaunty, hair going thin with jaunty buttocks and a sway to his walk. He had two lines, from habitual grinning, cut deep from the nostrils, and scores of lesser lines like the fine hair of a bird’s nest round his egg-blue eyes. There was something innocent, heroic and determined about Mr. Pollfax, something of the English Tommy in tin hat and full pack going up the line. He suggested in a quiet way—war.

  He was the best dentist I ever had. He got you into the chair, turned on the light, tapped around a bit with a thing like a spoon and then, dropping his white-coated arm to his side, told you a story. Several more stories followed in his flat Somerset voice, when he had your mouth jacked up. And then removing the towel and with a final “Rinse that lot out”, he finished with the strangest story of all and let you go. A month or so later the bill came in. Mr. Pollfax presents his compliments and across the bottom of it, in his hand, “Be good”. I have never known a dentist like Mr. Pollfax.

  “Open, my lord,” said Mr. Pollfax. Let’s see what sort of life his lordship has been leading. Still smoking that filthy pipe, I see. I shall have to do some cleaning up.”

  He tapped around and then dropped his arm. A look of anxiety came on his face. “Did I tell you that one about the girl who went to the Punch and Judy show? No? Nor the one about the engine-driver who was put on sentry duty in Syria? You’re sure? When did I see you last? What was the last one I told you? That sounds like last April? Lord, you have been letting things go. Well,” said Mr. Pollfax, tipping back my head and squirting something on to a tooth, “we’ll have a go at that root at the back. It’s not doing you any good. It was like this. There was a girl sitting on the beach at Barmouth with her young man watching a Punch and Judy show …” (Closer and closer came Mr. Pollfax’s head, lower and lower went his voice.)

  He took an instrument and began chipping his way through the tooth and the tale.

  “Not bad, eh?” he said, stepping back with a sudden shout of laughter.

  “Ah,” I mouthed.

  “All right, my lord,” said Mr. Pollfax, withdrawing the instrument and relapsing into his dead professional manner. “Spit that lot out.”

  He began again.

  There was just that root, Mr. Pollfax was saying. It was no good there. There was nothing else wrong; he’d have it out in a couple of shakes.

  “Though, my lord,” he said, “you did grow it about as far back in your throat as you could, didn’t you, trying to make it as difficult as you could for Mr. Pollfax? What we’ll do first of all is to give it a dose of something.”

  He swivelled the dish of instruments towards me and gave a tilt to the lamp. I remembered that lamp because once the bulb had exploded, sending glass all over the room. It was fortunate, Mr. Pollfax said at the time, that it had blown the other way and none of it had hit me, for someone might have brought a case for damages against someone—which reminded him of the story of the honeymoon couple who went to a small hotel in Aberdeen….

  “Now,” said Mr. Pollfax, dipping things in little pots and coming to me with an injection needle; “open wide, keep dead still. I was reading Freud the other day. There’s a man. Oedipus complex? Ever read about that? Don’t move, don’t breathe, you’ll feel a prick, but for God’s sake don’t jump. I don’t want it to break in your gum. I’ve never had one break yet, touch wood, but they’re thin, and if it broke off you’d be in a nursing home three weeks and Mr. Pollfax would be down your throat looking for it. The trouble about these little bits of wire is they move a bit farther into the system every time you swallow.”

  “There now,” said Mr. Pollfax.

  “Feel anything? Feel it prick?” he said. “Fine.”

  He went to a cupboard and picked out the instrument of extraction and then stood, working it up and down like a gardener’s secateurs in his hand. He studied my face. He was a clean-shaven man and looked like a priest in his white coat.

  “Some of the stories you hear!” exclaimed Mr. Pollfax. “And some of the songs. I
mean where I come from. ‘The Lot that Lily Lost in the Lottery’—know that one? Is your skin beginning to tingle, do you feel it on the tip of your tongue yet? That’s fine, my lord. I’ll sing it to you.”

  Mr. Pollfax began to sing. He’d give it another minute, he said, when he’d done with Lily; he’d just give me the chorus of “The Night Uncle’s Waistcoat Caught Fire.”

  “Tra la la,” sang Mr. Pollfax.

  “I bet,” said Mr. Pollfax sadistically, “one side of his lordship’s face has gone dead and his tongue feels like a pin cushion.”

  “Blah,” I said.

  “I think,” he said, “we’ll begin.”

  So Mr. Pollfax moved round to the side of me, got a grip on my shoulders and began to press on the instrument in my mouth. Pressing and drawing firmly he worked upon the root. Then he paused and increased the pressure. He seemed to be hanging from a crowbar fixed to my jaw. Nothing happened. He withdrew.

  “The Great Flood begins,” said Mr. Pollfax putting a tube in my mouth and taking another weapon from the tray.

  The operation began again. Mr. Pollfax now seemed to hang and swing on the crowbar. It was not successful.

  “Dug himself in, has he?” muttered Mr. Pollfax. He had a look at his instruments. “You can spit, my lord,” he said.

  Mr. Pollfax now seized me with great determination, hung, swung, pressed and tugged with increased energy.

  “It’s no good you thinking you’re going to stay in,” said Mr. Pollfax in mid-air, muttering to the root. But the instrument slipped and a piece of tooth broke off as he spoke.

  “So that’s the game is it?” said Mr. Pollfax withdrawing. “Good rinse, my lord, while Mr. Pollfax considers the position.”

  He was breathing hard.

  Oh well, he said, there were more ways than one of killing a cat. He’d get the drill on it. There were two Jews standing outside Buckingham Palace when a policeman came by, he said, coming at me with the drill which made a whistling noise like a fishing line as he drew it through. The tube gurgled in my mouth. I was looking, as I always did at Mr. Pollfax’s, at the cowls busily twirling on the chimneys opposite. Wind or no wind these cowls always seemed to be twirling round. Two metal cowls on two yellow chimneys. I always remember them.