It May Never Happen
Page 19
“I dunno. Kids are nice. I’d like one like that,” Jim said.
“Nobody’s kid. That’s what he is,” Gladys said. When he heard the word kid, the boy seemed to himself to swell and to lean and to topple with importance towards the bathroom door, but some fear of a woman’s hand catching him by the leg or the arm, made him seem to go thin again and lean away, till he crept quickly to the landing. There were two doors. Quietly he opened one door and went into a small room. There was nothing in it at all, no curtains to the windows, no linoleum on the floor, no firegrate either, but only a mousehole. He looked down the mousehole and watched it for a long time but nothing came out of it. There was a smell of mouse which reminded him of his home and he looked out of the window down into three back gardens but no child was there. He wondered where nobody’s kid was, but no child came. So he went to another room, for this was the house he wanted to live in with one room after another, if people would come and live in it and silence the echoes. Quietly he edged out of the room and guiltily looked into the next one. It was in the front of the house and looked on to the street. Each thing in the room seemed to look at him. There was a small carpet on the floor. There was a wardrobe, a dressing table and a large bedstead with a mattress on it, but no sheets or blankets. It was like his mother’s and father’s room, but this one was cold and smelled of the furniture shop. It had the mystery and watchful quietness of an empty bedroom.
“Where are you?” called Gladys. “Where’s the boy gone?”
“He’s round about,” said Jim easily. They were walking towards the room. The boy could not escape. He stood still.
“Ah, there he is,” Gladys cried. And they were both in the room with him.
“Who sleeps in this bed?” said the boy. Gladys went red. Jim winked.
“Gladys, who sleeps here?” Jim said.
“I don’t know,” said Gladys.
“Getcha, she does. She knows,” Jim said. “Ask her.”
“You do,” the boy said, pointing at Gladys. “She does.”
“I don’t,” said Gladys sternly.
“Jim does,” she said sharply.
“He doesn’t,” the boy said. He had seen the lies rolling in their glances at each other.
“I do,” said Jim.
“You don’t,” said the boy. “You’re a night worker.”
“That’s a good one,” said Jim, who never laughed but only smiled at the corner of his lips, and now suddenly shouted with laughter. “That’s it. That’s where I do my work. A night worker, that’s where I do my work. Eh, Glad?”
“Jim, shut up,” said Gladys primly. “Don’t tease.”
“I’m not teasing,” laughed Jim. “I’m a hell of a night-worker.” And he made a grab at Gladys who moved away.
“Jim,” she said, “the neighbours. They can hear everything. These walls are like paper.”
“You and the neighbours,” laughed Jim and he caught up the boy high in the air and sat on the side of the bed. “One, two, three,” he said, and at three he brought the boy down on the bed.
“Come here, Glad,” he said, “you have a go. He’s ticklish.”
The boy called out and kicked.
“Don’t,” said Gladys coming to rescue him.
“Ticklish yourself,” said Jim catching her arm and pulling her on the bed. The boy was free.
“Kiss her. Kiss her,” cried the excited boy.
“Don’t,” said Gladys.
“I’ll neighbour you,” said Jim.
The boy watched them struggling and then he saw Jim was not kissing her but whispering in her ear.
“You are too real, Jim,” she said tenderly. And then they were all lying quiet, Jim in the middle of them, with one arm round Gladys’s neck and one arm round the boy and the boy wishing he could get away.
“Family already,” Jim said. “You must have been on night work, Glad.”
“Oh, give it a rest,” said Glad. “Remember everything is taken back home. Little pigs have big ears.”
“Very nice work too,” said Jim.
“Don’t be so awful,” she pleaded.
“What’s awful about it?”
A sigh came from Gladys.
“Very nice, I was saying,” said Jim. “Sunday morning. Who’s getting up to light the fire?”
“You.”
“Me?—No you.”
“Married life,” said Jim. “Hear that?”
“Who does sleep here truthfully?” said the boy.
“Nobody does,” said Gladys. “But Jim and me are going to when we are married. That satisfy you?”
The boy knew it was true. It was true because it was far beyond his understanding. Jim and Gladys watched him silently, but Jim’s arm tightened on her. They nodded to each other watching the boy.
“And we’ll have you for our little boy,” said Gladys.
He knew this was not true. He did not want to be their little boy. They cuddled and kissed and danced about too much; and then people smiled and laughed at them.
“Leave him alone,” said Jim. And they all lay there silently, but he was aching to move from Jim’s arm and to go. He was thinking of nobody’s child and wishing he could find him, see him, watch him, talk to him.
“First question when I get back,” Gladys said. “Did you put the stair-rods down. They think it’s their house.”
Yes, the boy wanted to get away from this house that wasn’t a house yet, from this bed that was not a bed, and to see Aunt Annie and Uncle Tom who sat still for hours after they had worked. He was going to ask her who nobody’s child was and how big he was, where he lived, to see him, to watch for a long time what he did, to throw something to him to see if he moved, to see if he talked and how his mouth looked when he talked.
“When are we going home?” he said.
A Note on the Author
On both sides of the Atlantic V.S. Pritchett has been acclaimed as one of the great masters of the short story. He is also distinguished as a critic and a traveller. Born in Suffolk in 1900, he left school at the age of sixteen to work in the leather trade in London. In the Twenties in Paris he worked as a shop assistant and as a shellac salesman, and took to journalism, first during the Irish Civil War and later in Spain.
His first book, Marching Spain, the account of a long walk from Badajoz to Vigo, was published in 1928 and from then on travel was his recreation, inspiring evocations of places and peoples in The Spanish Temper (1954) and London Perceived (1962), both published by The Hogarth Press, Foreign Faces (1964), New York Proclaimed (1965) and Dublin (1967). The author of biographies of Balzac and Turgenev, he gave the Clark Lectures on George Meredith in 1969. He was for many years a director of and contributor to the New Statesman. He contributed regularly to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His critical works include The Living Novel (1949), The Myth Makers (1979), The Tale Bearers (1980) and A Man of Letters (1985). His two volumes of autobiography, A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971), are well known in Great Britain and abroad. His novels include Nothing Like Leather (1935), Dead Man Leading (1949) and Mr Beluncle (1959). The first volume of his Collected Stories appeared in 1982 and More Collected Stories in 1983. V.S. Pritchett died in 1997.
Discover books by V.S. Pritchett published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/V.S.Pritchett
A Careless Widow and Other Stories
A Man of Letters
At Home and Abroad
Chekhov
Dead Man Leading
Dublin
Foreign Faces
George Meredith and English Comedy
In My Good Books
It May Never Happen
Lasting Impressions
Marching Spain
The Camberwell Beauty
The Living Novel
The Gentle Barbarian
The Key to My Heart
The Lady from Guatemala
The Other Side of a Frontier
The Spanish
Temper
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1945 by Chatto & Windus
Copyright © 1945 V.S. Pritchett
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eISBN: 9781448210763
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