Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)

by V. S. Pritchett

  Now he understood. His mother intended to throw herself into the lake. It was a relief knowing this. He knew he could stop her. And he also knew, in the same moment, she would attempt nothing of the kind. They would follow the rail—he would make her follow the rail—round and round they would go. He could see the small curved concrete edge of the artificial lake and the sly, flat face of the London water, with its long, dirty mackerel ripples like his father's city smile.

  Now he had got her to the far side and had slowed her down, because this place always enchanted them. There was a little island and its two small bays. There the swans dipped their coarse and smutty necks and drew them out like hawsers. The path out of the park was by the island and it was simple to take her out and to the wretched, humiliated, walk home. He looked at her face. There was no change in it, except that it was reddened by the cold, damp walk; she did not show a sign of defeat. They walked to their door. Mr Beluncle, thoughtfully, had left it open.

  XXIX

  “Your poor mother,” said Mary.

  “She didn't mean to drown herself. Just acting,” he said. Now he wished he had not told her.

  “D'you know what they did? They fried fish. All the rows in our house end up in frying plaice. QUANtities of it.”

  The bluish savorous smoke of frying fish clouding in the house was really what he remembered; and the feeling of gentleness, softness and delicious languor after violence. Yet happiness, love, serenity, trust and truth were less after violence too. Another rock crumbled off the island on which one tried to live.

  Mary looked at him, woodenly and with disapproval. He had laughed, or his eyes had laughed, through the last part of the story.

  “We must go,” he said.

  “You know,” he said, to punish her for not laughing with him, “I'm going to clear out of this country. When I'm twenty-one. I'm going. They can't stop me.”

  He was standing up.

  “Abroad,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, in an offended voice, “you speak as if you didn't like Boystone.”

  “Good Lord,” he said, “I hate it. Don't you?”

  “I love it. I never want to leave it,” she said. “Dadda does too.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you don't love me, you say you love me, do you know what love is?”

  “I do love you,” he said.

  And then, with one of his sharp, sudden violent changes of mood, he embraced her softly while she sulked. And he whispered to her.

  She moved away and would not speak and he feared he had offended her. They walked slowly away from the place and he said, “I am sorry.”

  “You must not say things like that,” she said, looking away from him. “It is wrong.” And when he did not answer she said, “I am not beautiful.”

  “You do not trust me,” he said.

  “I trust you,” she said. “Don't look angry or sad. I would like to.”

  This utterly silenced them until she laughed.

  Mary repeated, “You look sad, you look angry or sad. I want to,” she said. “Look, we've flattened the grass. You remember when we went to the Common we found the grass still flattened. You said, 'Perhaps we have had lodgers.' ”

  “No one could have found that place,” he said eagerly.

  They brushed the grass from their clothes and her small eyes were brilliant in her coloured face. “A button seems to have undone itself,” she said. When she tidied her hair, raising both her arms to it, she knew she looked five years older, a grown woman and beautiful. They walked away and two people with a child passed them. Henry and Mary put on an air of unconcern. “They might have caught us,” she said. And, looking round, hoping the other couple were watching them, she took Henry's arm. The other couple did turn and she felt proud.

  “I like people to see us,” she said.

  Henry hated it. He hated her to say it and to show that he was in her possession, folded up and put away and taken out again, like his grandmother's linen.

  “It's a lovely sky, I like the red in it,” she said, putting her head on one side and putting some of the sky away too. “Sunsets make me feel sad and yet I'm happy. We used to come up here with mother on Sunday evenings but the rabbits have gone with all this building.”

  “We sometimes go out in the car,” Henry said, “never walk.”

  “Oh, that car! It makes me cross, really it makes me cross,” said Mary petulantly. “I wouldn't want one. It's materialistic. It's what's wrong with the church, Dadda says.”

  And Mary held her head high and primly. The field gates clicked, shutting the evening away behind them, and then click and click behind them again as the other slow couples took the well-known path, letting them into the fields.

  “They're all going where we've been,” said Mary, squeezing his hand with deep pleasure.

  “Yes,” said Henry, squeezing in return, but his spirits sank. That was, he thought, the hell of Boystone.

  Upon the hard pavement of Deans Road, Henry said “Lights” and squares of yellow were chequered at different levels in the avenue. “I must hurry.” The houses stood like trains.

  Henry's heart thumped and then started to race. He was trying to bring himself to say what had been in his mind all the evening, what he had been thinking as he walked, head down, to meet her at the railway bridge.

  “I've stopped believing in the Purification,” he said.

  Mary took her hand from his arm and stopped dead to look at him.

  “Henry,” she said.

  “I have. It isn't true. I know it isn't. I can't go on with it. It isn't honest. When that man called out last night 'Lies', you know—I knew he was right.”

  “Oh, Henry, you haven't?”

  She looked at his head, his body, his hands and feet; for the first time, she seemed to be looking at the whole of him.

  “I have,” he said.

  “You can't,” she said.

  The unhappiness, the desolation in her voice shocked him and he went to take her hand, but she stepped away, fearing to be touched by his unbelief.

  “You have stopped loving me,” she said. “Henry, you have. That is what you are trying to say. You have stopped.”

  The appalled, deserted look on her face, the anguish in it, the incredulous dread, made him aware for the first time that she was not an extension of himself, but another human being. It was she, now, who was distant from him, not he alone distant from her.

  “I haven't,” he said. “I'm talking about the Purification. I can't believe it. Please, I love you.”

  Anger, so uncommon in her, filled her cheeks. There were tears in her eyes. She snapped at him:

  “Telling me like this, at the last moment, after what you said to me, when you asked, it's not you. It's like a coward,” she said. And she started to walk fast away from him. He hurried after her. He tried to explain.

  “It's your father. That is what the teaching of Lady Roads does. Miss Wix always said so. She drives everyone out of the movement. I have heard her say it in our house,” Mary said. And she stopped again.

  “Henry, it isn't true?” she said.

  “It is,55 he said, and he could not control a small hysterical smile of vanity.

  “Oh,” she said, taking both his hands, “you must be unhappy, poor boy.”

  “I'm not,” he said. “I feel free.”

  “Free!” she said, horrified by him and looking at him with fear. “How can you be free? You don't know what you're saying.”

  They started to move on again.

  “Please see Miss Wix,” she said. “Please talk to her. I will. Talk to Dadda. Oh, Henry, this is a terrible thing. Say you will try to get back your faith. I will pray. I will do anything.”

  The sky had jumped darkly over the thousands of trivial chimneys of the pink town, and then hung like the sheet of a circus tent over the pool of lights by the bridge where they stopped. He tried once more to explain, but she looked away up and down the road nervously.

  “You mus
t go,” she said, thinking of him.

  “If you have stopped loving meat will break my heart,” she said. “Oh, you have made me unhappy, saying it like this, at the last moment. When we cannot talk. It is a terrible thing you've done.” She took her hand away and, not wishing to look at him, hurried away. She did not look back.

  Henry watched her in the dusk, in consternation and with remorse.

  XXX

  Sis said, speaking to the flowered wallpaper, “Tom was terrible. He said I had the loveliest body of any woman, like Venus. When we were down at Worthing by the sea. Of course. Well, I mean! But one day,” Sis said, “accidentally —it was quite an accident—I left the door of the room open and—oh, Mary, I could die when I think—he saw! But Tom was like that, all eyes. Your Henry wouldn't want to, he'd be too deep in a book, that's what's so soft about him. Though I expect all men are alike—if Henry is a man, Mary, I mean you say he's a man,” she laughed, “but you can't prove it. You're up in the clouds, you're so pious, so pure, thinking of heaven all the time, higher things. And you're right, Mary. Henry's got a good job. Have you seen those houses going up in the Avenue? I was thinking 'One of those would do for Henry and Mary.' Why don't you take him round that way? Boys don't think, Mary, they're funny. Women have got to make them, they'd just drag on for years and you're too quiet and patient. Not like me; well, look at me and Tom. It wasn't that I didn't like him, but you could see what he was like, stick to nothing. I'm like that too.”

  “Sis,” said Mary, “Henry wants to go abroad. To learn.”

  “Learn what?” said Sis. “Is he? What's he going abroad for?

  “Here, Mary—oh, you're crying. Mary dear, don't. Here, Mary, you haven't been playing the little hypocrite with us all, have you? You haven't…”

  “No,” sobbed Mary. “It will break my heart. I shall die if he goes. I shall kill myself, Sis.”

  “Now then, Mary, don't be silly. You won't. Look, Mary, you're too good, you're too in the air, in the clouds. You know what I think. You've made him suffer, that's what it is. Men are funny, they suffer with it and girls are cruel without meaning. I don't say they haven't got to look after themselves. I see it now. I was like you. I made Tom suffer. That's why he went. Oh, Mary, I could kill myself now, I was a fool. There now, I've told you something I didn't mean to. I don't mean you ought to give in to a man, no girl ought to do that; but as long as you keep your self-respect, that's the important thing, Mary, and if it happens then it's no one's fault and a decent man will stand by you. Henry's a decent boy, he's got his religion. I know it tells us not to, I used to pray about it. 'If it's right,' I used to pray. Tom used to say, 'It's either me or the religion. I'm a man.' And he was. Still, I don't suppose Henry suffers like Tom did. I tortured Tom, Mary, I see it now, I tortured him.”

  “I would not do a thing like that, Sis,” said Mary. “It would be wrong. It would be wicked. I wouldn't trap Henry.”

  “Trap Henry,” Sis laughed. “You've got a chance, you silly fool. He'll be on the boat to Timbuctoo, before you wake up. Who's talking about trapping? All I'm saying,” said Sis, “only you don't listen, get Dadda to ask his intentions. I suppose you've got a right to know that—or perhaps you like being trodden on by a lousy bookworm.”

  “Sis, I hate you. I hate you.”

  “Stop it, Mary, you're tearing my night-gown.”

  “Oh, Sis, I'm sorry. I think I'm out of my mind. It isn't true what I told you. He said he loved me. Tonight he said it. I know it was love.”

  They lay silently listening to the alarm clock and watching the flash of the electric trains.

  “Sis,” Mary said, “Henry's stopped the Purification. He says it's lies. He's saying terrible things about it. I'm so upset. That's what upset me.”

  “Girl, don't worry about that. That's nothing. Tom was like that. He just made fun of it all the time. Henry'U get over it. I often don't believe it myself.”

  “Oh, Sis!”

  “Well, I go hot and cold. Once you're married he'll come back to it. A wife has power. He's young.”

  “He's stopped everything, Sis.”

  “You speak to Miss Wix about it, Mary. A woman can do anything, Mary, don't you forget that, she has her ways. Boys are fools. I could see that with Tom. I'd only got to look at him and his hands were everywhere. Next time you see Henry when you're out, in some shady nook, Mary, if you see, it'll all come back if you make it. I mean for his sake you can make it. I wouldn't let Tom, that's where I was a fool, but Tom hadn't got it to lose, not faith, I mean; but Henry—well, it wouldn't be wrong. If you love someone and it's just that would bring his faith back …”

  “Stop it, Sis,” Mary said.

  “Well, they want it,” said Sis bitterly. “I know how I lost Tom and Tom hadn't got faith.”

  Mary's head ached.

  “Oh,” she thought, “if I could get his faith back I would. I would do anything. I will pray.”

  And, as Sis heavily slept, Mary lay trying to pray.

  XXXI

  Mrs Beluncle was happy. She was going over a few funerals with her youngest son: her father's funeral, her sister's, her mother's; visiting their cemeteries. Then she went on to the dead pets of her childhood. There was, for example, a marmoset called Dick. What Leslie wanted to know was whether any of the relations left any money and what they did with it. Were there any misers among them?

  “I admire misers,” Leslie said in his frosty middle-aged way.

  “Dick, our marmoset, didn't leave a penny,” said Mrs Beluncle, a little afraid of the boy's shrewd look.

  “Pity,” he said. “There's money in marmosets, I bet, if you know how to go about it. I made a lot out of those rabbits George gave me, you remember, years ago; silly fool, I'd have bought them from him and still made a profit.”

  “Well, you're a cure,” said Mrs Beluncle.

  “I'm going to leave a lot of money,” said Leslie, “if I live till I'm fifty. I might not see fifty. By the way, has Dad insured us? I suppose not. Short-sighted. He never realises anything about life. When I think of you all, I think you are wasting my time.”

  Mrs Beluncle did not know whether to laugh at her youngest son.

  There was a knock at the door and Mrs Beluncle dropped the spoon out of her saucer.

  “My nerves,” said Leslie, turning into an actor at once. “You know I suffer from nerves something chronic.”

  He got up.

  “Don't go,” said Mrs Beluncle, in a panic. “Wait. I can't bear a knock. That means you didn't lock the gate like your father said.”

  “Aunt Connie again?” said Leslie.

  “You wicked boy. What d'you mean?” said Mrs Beluncle.

  “The harlot,” said Leslie, rolling his eyes.

  They were sitting in the front room and Mrs Beluncle had edged to the window and was looking through the curtain.

  “It's a man,” said Mrs Beluncle.

  “It's all right,” said Leslie, “he's going. It's old Repent-Ye Vogg. Wages of Sin. A boy at school pinched his banner last term. I could have bought it, but where would you sell a thing like that?”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs Beluncle, going back to her tea, “I hope your father is all right. I'm always so frightened that it's something for your father. People used to come. The High Street—but they wouldn't come now, would they? I mean it's a long time ago. Isn't it?”

  “Was I born then?”

  “You were a baby in arms,” said Mrs Beluncle.

  “All the best things happened before I was born,” said Leslie. “Was that when we had the writ for the piano?”

  “Stop it,” said Mrs Beluncle. “There was trouble.”

  “I ought,” said Leslie, “to have been born first. I could have saved you a lot. I can't understand why dad never had a fire. It would have given him a decent start.”

  “You're a deedy one,” said Mrs Beluncle.

  XXXII

  David Vogg walked away from the Beluncles' and went next door and then
worked his way up the short street. It was his first day out after the meeting.

  He had quarrelled with the old man when they came out of the hall.

  “You didn't stir yourself much,” he had said. “I must be deaf. I didn't hear you. Who was it bore the Witness, eh? Go on, who? Eh?”

  The old man, when the moment came, had sat fast in his chair and had not called out. It was Vogg alone who had shouted.

  “It was these boots. You was going to get me a pair of your dad's,” the old man whined. “They're like irons, these 'ere. They weighed me down like Satan under the floor. Once I'm down I can't get up.”

  “You don't speak with your feet,” Vogg said.

  The old man cringed.

  “I was too full of the glory,” he said sheepishly. “The glory came down on me. I couldn't open my mouth.” He said to himself: “It's youth. If she had been alive, I would have done it. With no one in the house I've got so as I can't talk.”

  Vogg was ill immediately after his shouting. He was always wonderful for a couple of hours and then knives started to cut him up inside. All the bloody ships he had sailed in ripping him up. He came home and washed himself at the sink and retched. He was at sea and the house rolled. The pain had started like a rat under the ribs.

  His mother had wanted him to get a doctor. Why doctors? he said. Doctors practise medicine, medicine is knowledge, knowledge comes from the Tree. Like the churches, the schools, the temples of learning, the factories, the palaces of the rich, the parliaments, the banks, the hospitals too would come rolling down into the fire, the slates and the glass pouring down like marbles, the walls swelling out to burst like drowned women and crushing the rich, the educated, the popes, the bishops and the Parkinsonians in their cars, beneath them; and in the bloody darkness, with the heavens on fire, the poor and oppressed would arise and swarm like dungworms in their millions to the throne of grace.

  Millions? He had lain on his bed with the pain scissoring in his stomach and that was the thought he came back to. Would it be millions? It might only be thousands. How many would be saved? Whom had God chosen? That was an argument he used to have with the old man sometimes. There were all the prophets to add up, and then there was the old man's wife and Vogg; under a hundred they made it. As he lay there the numbers lessened. Very few would be left. Only a handful out of the millions of dead since the earth began. The faces of specific sinners, faces jacked open by screams, ridged and furry with iniquity, appeared to him like faces on playing cards. Starting with the street: Mrs Haxted, the grocer: adultery in the top room on Tuesdays. Galton: drunkenness. Faber: hypocrisy—he was in the Salvation Army. Mrs Truslove: adultery three evenings a week between six and eight and on Saturday afternoons. Mr Beiuncle, gluttony and adultery. Mrs Johnson, the housekeeper: lewdness. Miss Dykes …