The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “You’ve still got the old trams. Bump! Bump! Bump!” Hilda was ecstatic about the sound. “Do you remember I used to be frightened the spark from the pole would set the lace curtains on fire when I was little?”

  For, as the buses turned, the trolley arms would come swooping with two or three loud bumps and a spit of blue electricity, almost hitting Mrs Draper’s sitting-room window which was on the first floor.

  “It’s trolleys now, my girl,” said old Mrs Draper, whose voice was like the voice of time itself chewing away at life. “The trams went years ago, before the war.”

  Old Mrs Draper had sat down in her chair again by the fire which always burned winter and summer in this room; she could not stand for long. It was the first remark that had given us any sense of what was bewildering all of us, the passing of time, the growing of a soft girl into a grown, hard-hipped woman. For old Mrs Draper’s mind was detached from events around her and moved only among the signal facts and conclusions of history.

  Presently we were, as the saying is, “at our teas.” Mr Fulmino, less puzzled than the rest of us, expanded in his chair with the contentment of one who had personally operated a deeply British miracle. It was he who had got Hilda home.

  “We’ve got all the correspondence, haven’t we, Harry?” he said. “We kept it—the War Office, Red Cross, Prisoner of War Commission, everything, Hilda. I’ll show it to you.”

  His task had transformed him and his language. Identification, registration, accommodation, communication, rehabilitation, hospitalisation, administration, investigation, transportation—well we had all dreamed of Hilda in our different ways.

  “They always said the same thing,” Mrs Fulmino said reproachfully. “No one of the name of Mrs Singh on the lists.”

  “I wrote to Bombay,” said Mr Fulmino.

  “He wrote to Singapore,” said Mrs Fulmino.

  Mr Fulmino drank some tea, wiped his lips and became geography.

  “All British subjects were rounded up, they said,” Mrs Fulmino said.

  We nodded. We had made our stand, of course, on the law. Mrs Fulmino was authority.

  “But Hilda was married to an Indian,” said Constance.

  We glanced with a tolerance we did not usually feel for Constance. She was always trying to drag politics in.

  “She’s a British subject by birth,” said Mrs Fulmino firmly.

  “Mum,” Hilda whispered, squeezing her mother’s arm hard, and then looked up to listen, as if she were listening to talk about a faraway stranger.

  “I was in Tokyo when the war started,” she said. “Not Singapore.”

  “Oh Tokyo!” exclaimed Mr Fulmino, feeling in his waistcoat for a pencil to make a note of it and, suddenly, realising that his note-taking days were over.

  “Whatever the girl has done she has been punished for it,” came old Mrs Draper’s mournful voice from the chair by the fire, but in the clatter no one heard her, except old Mrs Johnson, who squeezed her daughter’s arm and said:

  “My girl is a jewel.”

  Still, Hilda’s words surprised us. We had worked it out that after she and Mr Singh were married and went to Bombay he had heard of a better job in the state railway medical service and had gone to Singapore where the war had caught her. Mrs Fulmino looked affronted. If Mr Fulmino expanded into geography and the language of state—he worked for the Borough Council—Mrs Fulmino liked a fact to be a fact.

  “We got the postcards,” said Mrs Fulmino sticking to chronology.

  “Hawaii,” Mr Fulmino said. “How’d you get there? Swim, I suppose.” He added, “A sweet spot, it looks, suit us for a holiday—palms.”

  “Coconuts,” said young Jack Draper, who worked in a pipe factory, speaking for the first time.

  “Be quiet,” said his wife.

  “It’s an American base now,” said Constance with her politically sugared smile.

  We hesitated but let her observation pass. It was simple to ignore her. We were happy.

  “I suppose they paid your fare,” said Jack Draper’s wife, a north-country woman.

  “Accommodation, transportation,” said Mr Fulmino. “Food, clothing. Everything. Financed by the international commission.”

  This remark made old Mrs Johnson cry a little. In those years none of us had deeply believed that Hilda was alive. The silence was too long; too much time had gone by. Others had come home by the thousand with stories of thousands who had died. Only old Mrs Johnson had been convinced that Hilda was safe. The landlord at the Lord Nelson, the butcher, anyone who met old Mrs Johnson as she walked by like a poor, decent ghost with her sewing bundles, in those last two years, all said in war-staled voices:

  “It’s a mother’s faith, that’s what it is. A mother’s faith’s a funny thing.”

  She would walk along, with a cough like someone driving tacks. Her chest had sunk and under her brown coat her shoulder blades seemed to have sharpened into a single hump. Her faith gave her a bright, yet also a sly, dishonest look.

  “I’m taking this sewing up to Mrs Tracy’s. She wants it in a hurry,” she might say.

  “You ought to rest, Mrs Johnson, like the doctor said.”

  “I want a bit of money for when my girl comes home,” she said. “She’ll want feeding up.”

  And she would look around perhaps, for a clock, in case she ought, by this time, to have put a pot on the stove.

  She had been too ill, in hospital, during the war, to speak about what might have happened to Hilda. Her own pain and fear of dying deafened her to what could be guessed. Mrs Johnson’s faith had been born out of pain, out of the inability—within her prison of aching bones and crushed breathing—to identify herself with her daughter. Her faith grew out of her very self-centredness. And when she came out from the post office every week, where she put her savings, she looked demure, holy and secretive. If people were too kind and too sympathetic with her, she shuffled and looked mockingly. Seven hospitals, she said, had not killed her.

  Now, when she heard Mr Fulmino’s words about the fare, the clothes, the food, the expense of it all, she was troubled. What had she worked for—even at one time scrubbing in a canteen—but to save Hilda from a charity so vast in its humiliation, from so blank a herding mercy. Hilda was hers, not theirs. Hilda kept her arm on her mother’s waist and while Mr Fulmino carried on with the marvels of international organisation (which moved Mrs Fulmino to say hungrily, “It takes a war to bring it out”), Hilda ignored them and whispered to comfort her mother. At last the old lady dried her eyes and smiled at her daughter. The smile grew to a small laugh, she gave a proud jerk to her head, conveying that she and her Hil were not going to kowtow in gratitude to anyone, and Hilda, at last, said out loud to her mother what, no doubt, she had been whispering:

  “He wouldn’t let me pay anything, Mum. Faulkner his name was. Very highly educated. He came from California. We had a fancy dress dance on the ship and he made me go as a geisha … He gave me these …” And she raised her hand to show her mother the bracelets on it.

  Mrs Johnson laughed wickedly.

  “Did he …? Was he …?” said Mrs Johnson.

  “No. Well, I don’t know,” said Hilda. “But I kept his address.”

  Mrs Johnson smiled round at all of us, to show that in spite of all, being the poorest in the family and the ones that had suffered most, she and Hilda knew how to look after themselves.

  This was the moment when there was that knock on the door. Everyone was startled and looked at it.

  “A knock!” said Mr Fulmino.

  “A knock, Constance,” said young Mrs Draper who had busy north-country ears.

  “A knock,” several said.

  Old Mrs Draper made one of her fundamental utterances again, one of her growls from the belly of the history of human indignation.

  “We are,” she said, “in the middle of our teas. Constance, go and see and tell them.”

  But before Constance got to the door, two young men, one with a camera,
came right into the room, without asking. Some of us lowered our heads and then, just as one young man said, “I’m from the News,” the other clicked his camera.

  Jack Draper said, nearly choking:

  “He’s taken a snap of us eating.”

  While we were all staring at them, old Mrs Draper chewed out grandly:

  “Who may they be?”

  But Hilda stood up and got her mother to her feet, too. “Stand up all of us,” she said eagerly. “It’s for the papers.”

  It was the Press. We were in confusion. Mrs Fulmino pushed Mr Fulmino forward towards the reporter and then pulled him back. The reporter stood asking questions and everyone answered at once. The photographer kept on taking photographs and, when he was not doing that, started picking up vases and putting them down and one moment was trying the drawer of a little table by the window. They pushed Hilda and her mother into a corner and took a picture of them, Hilda calling to us all to “come in” and Mr Fulmino explaining to the reporters. Then they went, leaving a cigarette burning on one of old Mrs Draper’s lace doyleys under the fern and two more butts on the floor. “What did they say? What did they say?” we all asked one another, but no one could remember. We were all talking at once, arguing about who had heard the knock first. Young Mrs Draper said her tea was spoiled and Constance opened the window to let the cigarette smoke out and then got the kettle. Mr Fulmino put his hand on his wife’s knee because she was upset and she shook it off. When we had calmed down Hilda said:

  “The young one was a nice-looking boy, wasn’t he, Mum?” and Mr Fulmino, who almost never voiced the common opinion about anything but who had perhaps noticed how the eyes of all the women went larger at this remark, laughed loudly and said:

  “We’ve got the old Hilda back!”

  I mention this because of the item in the papers next day: A Mother’s Faith. Four Years in a Japanese Torture Camp. London Girl’s Ordeal.

  Wonderful, as Mr Fulmino said. To be truthful, I felt uncomfortable at old Mrs Draper’s. They were not my family. I had been dragged there by Mr Fulmino, and by a look now and then from young Mrs Draper and from Constance I had the feeling that they thought it was indecent for me to be there when I had only been going with Iris, Mr Fulmino’s daughter, for two or three months. I had to be tolerated as one more example of Mr Fulmino’s uncontrollable gifts—the gift for colonising.

  Mr Fulmino had shot up from nothing during the war. It had given him personality. He was a short, talkative, heavy man of forty-five with a wet gold tooth and glossy black hair that streamlined back across his head from an arrow point, getting thin in front. His eyes were anxious, overworked and puddled, indeed if you had not known him you would have thought he had had a couple of black eyes that had never got right. He bowled along as he walked like someone absorbed by fondness for his own body. He had been in many things before he got to work for the Council—the Army (but not a fighting soldier) in the war, in auctions and the bar of a club. He was very active, confiding and enquiring.

  When I first met him I was working at the counter of the Public Library, during the war, and one day he came over from the Council Offices and said, importantly:

  “Friend, we’ve got a bit of a headache. We’ve got an enquiry from the War Office. Have you got anything about Malaya—with maps?”

  In the next breath he was deflating himself:

  “It’s a personal thing. They never tell you anything. I’ve got a niece out there.”

  Honesty made him sound underhand. His manner suggested that his niece was a secret fortification somewhere east of Suez. Soon he was showing me the questionnaire from the Red Cross. Then he was telling me that his wife, like the rest of the Drapers, was very handsome—“a lovely woman” in more ways, his manner suggested, than one—but that since Hilda had gone, she had become a different woman. The transition from handsome to different was, he suggested, a catastrophe which he was obliged to share with the public. He would come in from fire-watching, he said, and find her demented. In bed, he would add. He and I found ourselves fire-watching together, and from that time he started facetiously calling me “my secretary.”

  “I asked my secretary to get the sand and shovel out,” he would say about our correspondence. “And he wrote the letter.”

  So I was half a stranger at Hilda’s homecoming. I looked round the room or out at the shops opposite and, when I looked back at the family several times, I caught Hilda’s eyes wandering too. She also was out of it. I studied her. I hadn’t expected her to come back in rags, as old Mrs Draper had, but it was a surprise to see she was the best-dressed woman in the room and the only one who looked as if she had ever been to a hairdresser. And there was another way in which I could not match her with the person Mr Fulmino and I had conjured. When we thought of everything that must have happened to her it was strange to see that her strong face was smooth and blank. Except for the few minutes of arrival and the time the reporters came, her face was vacant and plain. It was as vacant as a stone that has been smoothed for centuries in the sand of some hot country. It was the face of someone to whom nothing had happened; or, perhaps, so much had happened to her that each event wiped out what had happened before. I was disturbed by something in her—the lack of history, I think. We were worm-eaten by it. And that suddenly brought her back to me as she had been when she was a schoolgirl and when my older brother got into trouble for chasing after her. She was now sharper in the shoulders and elbows, no longer the swollen schoolgirl but, even as a girl, her face had the same quality of having been fixed and unchangeable between its high cheek bones. It was disturbing, in a face so anonymous, to see the eyes move, especially since she blinked very little; and if she smiled it was less a smile than an alteration of the two lines at the corners of her lips.

  The party did not settle down quite in the same way after the reporters had been and there was talk of not tiring Hilda after her long journey. The family would all be meeting tomorrow, the Sunday, as they always did, when young Mrs Jack Draper brought her children. Jack Draper was thinking of the pub which was open now and asking if anyone was going over. And then, something happened. Hilda walked over to the window to Mr Fulmino and said, just as if she had not been there at the time:

  “Ted—what did that man from the News ask you—about the food?”

  “No,” said Mr Fulmino widening to a splendid chance of not giving the facts. “No—he said something about starving the prisoners. I was telling him that in my opinion the deterioration in conditions was inevitable after the disorganisation in the camps resulting from air operations …”

  “Oh, I thought you said we starved. We had enough.”

  “What?” said Mr Fulmino.

  “Bill Williams was a skeleton when he came back. Nothing but a bowl of rice a day. Rice!” said Mrs Fulmino. “And torture.”

  “Bill Williams must have been in one of those labour camps,” said Hilda. “Being Japanese I was all right.”

  “Japanese!” said Mr Fulmino. “You?”

  “Shinji was a Japanese,” said Hilda. “He was in the army.”

  “You married a Japanese!” said Mrs Fulmino, marching forward.

  “That’s why I was put in the American camp, when they came. They questioned every one, not only me. That’s what I said to the reporter. It wasn’t the food, it was the questions. What was his regiment? When did you hear from him? What was his number? They kept on. Didn’t they, Mum?”

  She turned to her mother who had taken the chance to cut herself another piece of cake and was about to slip it into her handkerchief, I think, to carry to her own room. We were all flabbergasted. A trolley bus went by and took a swipe at the wall. Young Mrs Draper murmured something and her young husband Jack said loudly, hearing his wife:

  “Hilda married a Nip!”

  And he looked at Hilda with astonishment. He had very blue eyes.

  “You weren’t a prisoner!” said Mrs Fulmino.

  “Not of the Japanese,” said Hilda.
“They couldn’t touch me. My husband was Japanese.”

  “I’m not stupid. I can hear,” said young Mrs Draper to her husband. She was a plain-spoken woman from the Yorkshire coalfields, one of a family of twelve.

  “I’ve nowt to say about who you married, but where is he? Haven’t you brought him?” she said.

  “You were married to Mr Singh,” said Mrs Fulmino.

  “They’re both dead,” said Hilda, her vacant yellow eyes becoming suddenly brilliant like a cat’s at night. An animal sound, like the noise of an old dog at a bone, came out of old Mrs Draper by the fire.

  “Two,” she moaned.

  No more than that. Simply, again: “Two.”

  Hilda was holding her handbag and she lifted it in both hands and covered her bosom with it. Perhaps she thought we were going to hit her. Perhaps she was going to open the bag and get out something extraordinary—documents, letters, or a handkerchief to weep into. But no—she held it there very tight. It was an American handbag—we hadn’t seen one like that before, cream-coloured, like the luggage. Old Mrs Johnson hesitated at the table, tipped the piece of cake back out of her handkerchief on to a plate, and stepped to Hilda’s side and stood, very straight for once, beside her, the old blue lips very still.

  “Ted,” accused Hilda. “Didn’t you get my letters? Mother,” she stepped away from her mother, “didn’t you tell them?”

  “What, dear?” said old Mrs Johnson.

  “About Shinji. I wrote you. Did Mum tell you?” Hilda appealed to us and now looked fiercely at her mother.

  Mrs Johnson smiled and retired into her look of faith and modesty. She feigned deafness.

  “I put it all in the post office,” she said. “Every week,” she said. “Until my girl comes home, I said. She’ll need it.”

  “Mother!” said Hilda, giving the old lady a small shake. “I wrote to you. I told you. Didn’t you tell them?”