It May Never Happen

by V. S. Pritchett

  And there the pub was. It stood on the crown of the long hill, straight ahead of them, a small red brick house with outbuildings and a single chimney trailing out smoke against the strong white light which seemed to be thrown up by great reflectors from the hidden sea.

  “There’s our beer, Mr. Blake,” shouted Sid on his pink racing tyres, who was the first to see it, the first to see everything. The four men glanced up.

  Yes, there’s our beer, they said. Our ruddy beer. They had been thinking about it for miles. A pub at the cross-roads, a pub where the old Roman road crossed this road that went on to the land’s end, a funny place for a pub but a pub all right, the only pub for ten miles at Harry’s ruddy Roman road, marked on the map which stuck out of the backside pocket of Harry’s breeches. Yes, that was the pub, and Ted, the oldest and the married one, slacked on the long hill and said all he hoped was that the Romans had left a drop in the bottom of the barrel for posterity.

  When they had left in the morning there had been little wind. The skylarks were over the fields and the sun itself was like one of their steel wheels flashing in the sky. Sid was the first, but Harry with the stubborn red neck and the close dull fair curls was the leader. In the week he sat in the office making the plan. He had this mania for Roman roads. “Ask our Mr. Newton,” they said, “the man with the big head and the brain.” They had passed through the cream-walled villages and out again to pick up once more the singing of the larks; and then cloud had covered the sun like a grey hand, west of Handleyford the country had emptied and it was astonishing to hear a bird. Reeds were in the small meadows. Hedges crawled uncut and there had been no villages, only long tablelands of common and bald wiry grass for sheep and the isolated farm with no ivy on the brick.

  Well, they were there at last. They piled their bicycles against the wall of the house. They were shy before these country places. They waited for Ted. He was walking the last thirty yards. They looked at the four windows with their lace curtains and the varnished door. There was a chicken in the road and no sound but the whimper of the telegraph wire on the hill. In an open barn was a cart tipped down, its shaft white with the winter’s mud, and last year’s swallow nests, now empty, were under the eaves. Then Ted came and when he had piled his bicycle, they read the black sign over the door. “Tavern,” it said. A funny old-fashioned word, Ted said, that you didn’t often see.

  “Well,” Sid said, “a couple of pints all round?”

  They looked to Harry. He always opened doors, but this door was so emphatically closed that he took off his fur gauntlet first and knocked before he opened it. The four men were surprised to see a woman standing behind the door, waiting there as if she had been listening to them. She was a frail, drab woman, not much past thirty, in a white blouse that drooped low over her chest.

  “Good morning,” said Sid. “This the bar?”

  “The bar?” said the woman timidly. She spoke in a flat wondering voice and not in the sing song of this part of the country.

  “Yes, the bar,” Ted said, “It says ‘Tavern,’ “he said, nodding up at the notice.

  “Oh yes,” she said, hesitating. “Come in. Come in here.”

  She showed them not into the bar but into a sitting-room. There was a bowl of tomatoes in the window and a notice said “Teas”.

  The four men were tall and large beside her in the little room and she gazed up at them as if she feared they would burst its walls. And yet she was pleased. She was trying to smile.

  “This is on me,” Sid said. “Mild and bitter four times.”

  “O.K., Mr. Blake,” Ted said. “Bring me my beer.”

  “But let’s get into the bar,” said Bert.

  Seeing an armchair Ted sank into it and now the woman was reassured. She succeeded in smiling but she did not go out of the room. Sid looked at her and her smile was vacant and faint like the smile fading on an old photograph. Her hair was short, an impure yellow and the pale skin of her face and her neck and her breast seemed to be moist as if she had just got out of bed. The high strong light of this place drank all colour from her.

  “There isn’t a bar,” she said. “This isn’t a public-house. They call it the Tavern, but it isn’t a tavern by rights.”

  Very anxiously she raised her hands to her blouse.

  “What!” they exclaimed. “Not a pub! Here, Harry, it’s marked on your map.” They were dumbfounded and angry.

  “What you mean, don’t sell beer,” they said.

  Their voices were very loud.

  “Yes,” said Harry. “Here it is. See? Inn.”

  He put the map before her face accusingly.

  “You don’t sell beer?” said Bert. He looked at the pale-blue-veined chest of the woman.

  “No,” she said. She hesitated. “Many are disappointed,” she said, and she spoke like a child reciting a piece without knowing its meaning. He lowered his eyes.

  “You bet they ruddy well are,” said Ted from the chair.

  “Where is the pub?” said Sid.

  She put out her hand and a little girl came into the room and clung close to her mother. Now she felt happier.

  “My little girl,” she said.

  She was a tiny, frail child with yellow hair and pale blue eyes like her mother’s. The four men smiled and spoke more quietly because of the resemblance between the woman and her child.

  “Which way did you come?” she asked, and her hand moving over the child’s hair got courage from the child. “Handley-ford?” she said. “That’s it. It’s ten miles. The Queen’s Arms, Handleyford, the way you came. That’s the nearest pub.”

  “My God!” said Bert. “What a country!”

  “The Queen’s Arms,” said Ted stupefied.

  He remembered it. They were passing through Handleyford. He was the oldest, a flat wide man in loose clothes, loose in the chin too, with watery rings under his eyes and a small golden sun of baldness at the back of his head. “Queen’s Arms” he had called. “Here, what’s the ruddy game?” But the others had grinned back at him. When you drop back to number four on the hills it comes back to you: they’re single, nothing to worry about, you’re married and you’re forty. What’s the hurry? Ease up, take what you can get. “Queen’s Arms“—he remembered looking back. The best things are in the past.

  “Well, that’s that!” said Sid.

  “Queen’s Arms, Harry,” Ted said.

  And Bert looked at the woman. “Let’s go on,” he said fiercely. She was not the woman he had expected. Then he blushed and turned away from the woman.

  She was afraid they were going and in a placating voice she said “I do teas”.

  Sid was sitting on the arm of a chair and the child was gazing at a gold ring he wore on his little finger. He saw the child was gazing and he smiled.

  “What’s wrong with tea?” Sid said.

  “Ask the man with the brain,” said Ted. “Ask the man with the map.”

  Harry said, “If you can’t have beer, you’d better take what you can get, Mr. Richards.”

  “Tea,” nodded Sid to the woman. “Make it strong.”

  The woman looked at Sid as if he had performed a miracle.

  “I’ll get you tea,” she said eagerly. “I always do teas for people.” She spoke with delight as if a bell had suddenly tinkled inside her. Her eyes shone. She would get them tea, she said, and bread and butter, but no eggs, because the man had not been that morning, and no ham. It was too early, she said, for ham. “But there are tomatoes,” she said. And then, like a child, “I put them in the window so as people can see.”

  “O.K.,” Sid said. “Four teas.”

  She did not move at once but still, like a shy child, stood watching them, waiting for them to be settled and fearful that they would not stay. But at last she put out her hand to the child and hurried out to the kitchen.

  “Well, Mr. Blake,” said Ted, “there’s a ruddy sell.”

  “Have a gasper, Mr. Richards,” said Sid.

  “Try my
lighter,” said Ted.

  He clicked the lighter but no flame came.

  “Wrong number,” said Ted. “Dial O and try again.” A steak, said Sid, had been his idea. A couple of pints just to ease the passage and then some real drinking, Ted said. But Bert was drumming on a biscuit tin and was looking inside. There was nothing in it. “Many,” said Bert, “are disappointed.”

  They looked at the room. There were two new treacle-coloured armchairs. There was a sofa with a pattern of black ferns on it. The new plush was damp and sticky to the hands from the air of the hidden sea. There was a gun-metal fender and there was crinkled, green paper in the fireplace. A cupboard with a glass door was empty except for the lowest shelf. On that was a thick book called The Marvels of Science.

  The room was cold. They thought in the winter it must be damn’ cold. They thought of the ten drizzling miles to Handleyford.

  They listened to the cold clatter of the plates in the kitchen and the sound of the woman’s excited voice and the child’s. There was the bare linoleum on the floor and the chill glass of the window. Outside was the road with blown sand at the edges and, beyond a wall, there were rows of cabbages, then a bit of field and the expressionless sky. There was no sound on the road. They—it occurred to them—had been the only sound on that road for hours.

  The woman came in with a cup and then with a plate. The child brought a plate and the woman came in with another cup. She looked in a dazed way at the men, amazed that they were still there. It seemed to Ted, who was married, that she didn’t know how to lay a table. “And now I’ve forgotten the sugar,” she laughed. Every time she came into the room she glanced at Bert timidly and yet pityingly, because he was the youngest and had been the most angry. He lowered his eyes and avoided her look. But to Ted she said, “That’s right, you make yourselves comfortable,” and at Sid she smiled because he had been the kindest. At Harry she did not look at all.

  She was very startled then when he stood at the door and said “Where’s this Roman road?”

  She was in the kitchen She told him the road by the white gate and showed him from the doorway of the house.

  “There he goes,” said Sid at the window. “He’s looking over the gate.”

  They waited. The milk was put on the table. The woman came in at last with the bread and butter and the tea.

  “He’ll miss his tea next,” Ted said.

  “Well,” Ted said, when Harry came back. “See any Romans?”

  “It’s just grass,” Harry said. “Nothing on it.” He stared in his baffled, bull-necked way.

  “No beer and no Romans,” Ted said.

  The woman, who was standing there, smiled. In a faltering voice, wishing to make them happy, she said:

  “We don’t often get no Romans here.”

  “Oh God!” Bert laughed very loudly and Ted shook with laughter too. Harry stared.

  “Don’t take any notice of them, missus,” Sid said. And then to them: “She means gypsies.”

  “That come with brooms,” she said, bewildered by their laughter, wondering what she had done.

  When she had gone and had closed the door, Bert and Ted touched their heads with their fingers and said she was dippy, but Sid told them to speak quietly.

  Noisily they had drawn up their chairs and were eating and drinking. Ted cut up tomatoes, salted them, and put them on his bread. They were good for the blood, he told them, and Harry said they reckoned at home his grandad got the cancer he died of from eating tomatoes day after day. Bert, with his mouth full, said he’d read somewhere that tea was the most dangerous drink on earth. Then the child came in with a paper and said her mother had sent it. Sid looked at the door when it closed again.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “I think I’ve seen that woman before.”.

  That, they said, was Sid’s trouble. He’d seen too many girls before.

  He was a lanky man with a high forehead and a Hitler moustache and his lips lay over his mouth as if they were kissing the air or whispering to it. He was a dark, harsh looking, cocksure man, but with a gentle voice and it was hard to see his eyes under his strong glasses. His lashes were long and his lids often half lowered which gave him an air of seriousness and shyness. But he stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat and stuck out his legs to show his loud check stockings and he had that ring on his finger. “Move that up a couple and he’d be spliced,” they said. “Not me,” he said, “Look at Ted.” A man with no ideals, Bert thought, a man whose life was hidden behind the syrup-thick lens of his glasses. Flash Sid. See the typists draw themselves up, tilt back their heads and get their hands ready to keep him off. Not a man with ideals. See them watch his arms and his hands, see them start tapping hard on the typewriter keys and pretending to be busy when he leant over to tell them a story. And then, when he was gone, see them peep through the Enquiry window to watch where he went, quarrel about him and dawdle in the street when the office closed, hoping to see him.

  “Well,” said Harry when they had cleared the table and got out the map. Sid said:

  “You gen’lemen settle it. I’ll go and fix her up.”

  Sid’s off, they said. First on the road, always leading, getting the first of the air, licking the cream off everything.

  He found her in the kitchen and he had to lower his head because of the ceiling. She was sitting drably at the table which was covered with unwashed plates and the remains of a meal. There were unwashed clothes on the backs of the chairs and there was a man’s waistcoat. The child was reading a comic paper at the table and singing in a high small voice.

  A delicate stalk of neck, he thought, and eyes like the pale wild scabious you see in the ditches.

  Four shillings, she said, would that be too much?

  She put her hand nervously to her breast.

  “That’s all right,” Sid said and put the money in her hand. It was coarsened by work. “We cleared up everything,” he said.

  “Don’t get many people, I expect,” he said.

  “Not this time of year.”

  “A bit lonely,” he said.

  “Some think it is,” she said.

  “How long have you been here?” he said.

  “Only three years. It seems,” she said with her continual wonder, “longer.”

  “I thought it wasn’t long,” Sid said. “I thought I seen you somewhere. You weren’t in … in Horsham, were you?”

  “I come from Ashford,” she said.

  “Ashford,” he said. “I knew you weren’t from these parts.”

  She brightened and she was fascinated because he took off his glasses and she saw the deep serious shadows of his eyes and the pale drooping of the naked lids. The eyes looked tired and as if they had seen many things and she was tired too.

  “I bin ill,” she said. Her story came irresistibly to her lips. “The doctor told us to come here. My husband gave up his job and everything. Things are different here. The money’s not so good …” Her voice quickened, “But I try to make it up with the teas.”

  She paused, trying to read from his face if she should say any more. She seemed to be standing on the edge of another country. The pale blue eyes seemed to be the pale sky of a far away place where she had been living.

  “I nearly died,” she said. She was a little amazed by this fact.

  “You’re O.K. now,” Sid said.

  “I’m better,” she said. “But it seems I get lonely now I’m better.”

  “You want your health but you want a bit of company,” Sid said.

  “My husband says, ‘You got your health what you want company for?’”

  She put this to Sid in case her husband was not right but she picked up her husband’s waistcoat from the chair and looked over its buttons because she felt, timorously, she had been disloyal to her husband.

  “A woman wants company,” said Sid.

  He looked shy now to her, like Bert, the young one; but she was most astonished that someone should agree with her and not her husband.
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  Then she flushed and put out her hand to the little girl who came to her mother’s side, pressing against her. The woman felt safer and raised her eyes and looked more boldly at him.

  “You and your friends going far?”

  He told her. She nodded, counting the miles as if she were coming along with them. And then Sid felt a hand touch his.

  It was the child’s hand touching the ring on his finger.

  “Ha!” laughed Sid. “You saw that before.” He was quick. The child was delighted with his quickness. The woman put the waistcoat down at once. He took off the ring and put it in the palm of his hand and bent down so that his head nearly brushed the woman’s arm. “That’s lucky,” he said. “Here,” he said. He slipped the ring on the child’s little finger. “See,” he said. “Keeps me out of mischief. Keep a ring on your little finger and you’ll be lucky.”

  The child looked at him without belief.

  “Here y’are,” he said, taking back the ring. “Your mother wants it,” he said, winking at the woman. “She’s got her’s on the wrong finger. Little one luck, big one trouble.”

  She laughed and she blushed and her eyes shone. He moved to the door and her pale lips pouted a little. Then, taking the child by the hand she hurried over to him as if both of them would cling to him. Excitedly, avidly, they followed him to the other room.

  “Come on, Mr. Blake,” said Ted. The three others rose to their feet.

  The child clung to her mother’s hand and danced up and down. She was in the midst of them. They zipped up their jackets, stubbed their cigarettes, folded up the map. Harry put on his gauntlets. He stared at the child and then slowly took off his glove and pulled out a sixpence. “No,” murmured Ted, the married man, but the child was too quick.