The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Never saw the place,” he said. The father became a prisoner of the Japanese; the mother took him to India. Rachel tried to be intelligent about India.

  “Don’t remember it,” he said. “The old girl”—his mother sent him home to schools and holiday schools. He spent his boyhood in camps and dormitories, his army-life in Nissen huts. He was twenty when he really “met” his parents. At the sight of him they separated for good.

  No further answers. Life had been doled out to him like spoonfuls of medicine, one at a time; he returned the compliment by doing the same and then erected silences like packs of cards, watching people wait for them to fall down.

  How, Rachel asked, did the raw young man come to be married to Sonia, an actress at the top of the tree, fifteen years older than he? “The old girl knew her,” he said; she was his mother’s friend. Rachel worried away at it. She saw, correctly, a dramatic woman with a clever mouth, a surrogate mother—but a mother astute in acting the part among her scores of grand and famous friends. Rachel had one or two famous friends too, but he snubbed her with his automatic phrase:

  “Never met him.”

  Or

  “Never met her.”

  And then Rachel, again correctly, saw him standing in the doorway of Sonia’s drawing-room or bringing drinks perhaps to the crowd, like an uncouth son; those wrists were the wrists of a growing boy who silently jeered at the guests. She heard Sonia dressing him down for his Nissen hut language and his bad manners—which, however, she encouraged. This was her third marriage and it had to be original. That was the heart of the Gilbert problem; Sonia had invented him; he had no innate right to be what he appeared to be.

  So Rachel, who happened to be writing an article on broken homes, asked him to come round and have a drink. He walked across the park from his house to hers. At the door he spoke his usual phrase:

  “Thank you for inviting me. You did invite me, didn’t you? Well, I thank you. We live on opposite sides of the park. Very convenient. Not too near.”

  He came in.

  “Your house is white and your dog is white,” he said.

  Rachel owned a dog. A very white fox terrier came barking at him on a high, glassy note, showing a ratter’s teeth. Rachel was wearing a long pale blue dress from her throat to the tips of her shoes and led him into the sitting-room. He sank into a soft silky sofa with his knees together and politely inspected her as an interesting collection of bones.

  “Shall I ever get up from this?” he said patting the sofa. “Silly question. Yes I shall, of course. I have come, shortly I shall go.” He was mocking someone’s manners. Perhaps hers. The fox terrier which had followed him into the small and sunny room sniffed long at Gilbert’s shoes and his trouser legs and stiffened when he stroked its head. The dog growled.

  “Pretty head,” he said. “I like dogs’ heads.” He was staring at Rachel’s head. Her hair was smooth, neat and fair.

  “I remarked his feet on the hall floor, tick, tick, tick. Your hall must be tiled. Mine is carpeted.”

  “Don’t be so aggressive, Sam,” said Rachel gravely to the dog.

  “Leave him alone,” said Gilbert. “He can smell Tom, Sonia’s bull terrier. That’s who you can smell isn’t it? He can smell an enemy.”

  “Sam is a problem,” she said. “Everyone in the street hates you, Sam, don’t they? When you get out in the garden you bark and bark, people open their windows and shout at you. You chase cats, you killed the Gregory boy’s rabbit and bit the Jackson child. You drive the doctor mad. He throws flower pots at you.”

  “Stop nagging the poor animal,” said Gilbert. And to the dog he said: “Good for you. Be a nuisance. Be yourself. Everyone needs an enemy. Absolutely.”

  And he said to himself: “She hasn’t forgiven her husband.” In her long dress she had the composure of the completely smoothed over person who might well have nothing on underneath. Gilbert appreciated this, but she became prudish and argumentative.

  “Why do you say ‘absolutely,’ ” she said, seeing a distracting point for discussion here. “Isn’t that relative?”

  “No,” said Gilbert with enjoyment. He loved a row. “I’ve got an enemy at my office. Nasty little creepy fellow. He wants my job. He watches me. There’s a new job going—promotion—and he thinks I want it. So he watches. He sits on the other side of the room and is peeing himself with anxiety every time I move. Peeing himself, yes. If I leave the room he goes to the door to see if I’m going to the director’s office. If I do he sweats. He makes an excuse to go to the director to see if he can find out what we’ve been talking about. When I am working on a scheme he comes over to look at it. If I’m working out costs he stares with agony at the lay-out and the figures. ‘Is that Jameson’s?’ He can’t contain himself. ‘No, I’m doing my income tax,’ I tell him. He’s very shocked at my doing that in office hours and goes away relieved. He’ll report that to the director. Then a suspicion strikes him when he is half-way back to his desk and he turns round and comes over again panting. He doesn’t believe me. ‘I’m turning inches into centimetres,’ I say. He still doesn’t believe me. Poor silly bugger.”

  He laughed.

  “Wasn’t that rather cruel?” she said. “Why centimetres?”

  “Why not? He wants the French job. Boring little man. Boring office. Yes.”

  Gilbert constructed one of his long silences. Rachel saw skyscrapers, pagodas, the Eiffel Tower and little men creeping up them like ants. After a while Gilbert went on and the vision collapsed:

  “He was the only one who came from the office to Sonia’s funeral. He brought his wife—never met her before—and she cried. The only person who did. Yes. He’d never missed a show Sonia was in.”

  “So he isn’t an enemy. Doesn’t that prove my point,” she said solemnly. Gilbert ignored this.

  “They’d never met poor Sonia,” he said. And he blinked very fast.

  “I never met your wife either, you know,” said Rachel earnestly. She hoped he would describe her; but he described her doctors, the lawyers that assemble after death.

  “What a farce,” he said.

  He said: “She had a stroke in the theatre. Her words came out backwards. I wrote to her two husbands. Only one replied. The theatre sent her to hospital in an ambulance—the damn fools. If you go to hospital you die of pneumonia, bloody hospital won’t give you enough pillows, you lie flat and you can’t get your breath. What a farce. Her brother came and talked, one of those fat men. Never liked the fellow.”

  She said how terrible it must have been.

  “Did she recover her speech? They sometimes do.”

  “Asked,” he said, “for the dog. Called it god.”

  He got up suddenly from the sofa.

  “There! I have got up. I am standing on my feet. I am a bore,” he said. “I shall go.”

  As he left the room the terrier came sniffing at his heels.

  “Country dogs. Good ratters. Ought to be on a farm.”

  She plunged into a confidence to make him stay longer.

  “He used to be a country dog. My husband bought him for me when we lived in the country. I know” (she luxuriated in a worry) “how important environment is to animals and I was going to let him stay—but when you are living alone in a city like London—well there are a lot of burglaries here.”

  “Why did you divorce your husband?” he asked as he opened the front door. “I shouldn’t have asked. Bad manners. I apologise. I was rude. Sonia was always on to me about that.”

  “He went off with a girl at his office,” she said staunchly.

  “Silly man,” said Gilbert looking at the dog. “Thank you. Goodbye. Do we shake hands? You invited me, now it is my turn to invite you. That is the right thing, of course it is. We must do the right thing. I shall.”

  Weeks passed before Gilbert invited Rachel. There were difficulties. Whatever he decided by day was destroyed by night. At night Sonia would seem to come flying out of the park saying the house had
belonged to her. She had paid for it. She enumerated the furniture item by item. She had the slow, languid walk of her stage appearances as she went suspiciously from room to room, asking what he had done with her fur coats and where her shoes were. “You’ve given them to some woman.” She said he had a woman in the house. He said he asked only David and Sarah; she said she didn’t trust Sarah. He pleaded he had kept the dog. When he said that, her ghost vanished saying he starved the poor thing. One night he said to her, “I’m going to ask Rachel, but you’ll be there.”

  “I damn well will,” she said. And this became such a dogma that when, at last, he asked Rachel to come, he disliked her.

  His house was not so sedate as hers which had been repainted that year—his not. His windows seemed to him—and to her—to sob. There was grit on the frames. When he opened the door to her she noted the brass knocker had not been polished and inside there was the immediate cold odour of old food. The hall and walls echoed their voices and the air was very still. In the sitting-room the seats of the chairs, one could see, had not been sat on for a long time, there was dust on the theatrical wallpaper. Hearing her, Sonia’s dog, Tom, came scrabbling the stair carpet and rushed into the room hysterically at both of them, skidding on rugs, snuffling, snorting, whimpering and made at once for her skirts, got under her legs and was driven off on to a sofa of green silk, rather like hers, but now frayed where the dog’s claws had caught.

  “Off the sofa, Tom,” said Gilbert. The dog ignored this and snuffled from its squat nose and gazed from wet eyes that were like enormous marbles. Gilbert picked up a rubber bone and threw it to the dog. Down it came and the racing round the room began again. Rachel held her glass in the air for safety’s sake and the dog jumped at it and made her spill whisky on her dress. In this confusion they tried to talk.

  “Sonia liked being photographed with Tom,” he said.

  “I only saw her on the stage once. She was very beautiful,” she said. “It must have been twelve years ago. Gielgud and another actor called Slade were in it. Was it Slade? Oh dear! My memory!”

  “Her second husband,” he said.

  He picked up the dog’s rubber bone. The dog rushed to him and seized it. Man and dog pulled at the bone.

  “You want it. You won’t get it,” said Gilbert while she seemed to hear her husband say: “Why can’t you keep your mouth shut if you can’t remember things?” And Gilbert, grinning in his struggle with the dog said:

  “Sonia always had Tom to sleep on our bed. He still does. Won’t leave it. He’s on it even when I come back from the office.”

  “He sleeps with you?” she said with a shudder.

  “I come home. I want someone to talk to.”

  “What d’you do with him when you go to your office?” The dog pulled and snorted. “The woman who comes in and cleans looks after the dog,” he said. And went on: “Your house has three storeys, mine has two, otherwise the same. I’ve got a basement full of rubbish. I was going to turn it into a flat but Sonia got worse. Futile. Yes, life is futile. Why not sell the damn place. No point. No point in anything. I go to the office, come back, feed the dog and get drunk. Why not? Why go on? Why do you go on? Just habit. No sense in it.”

  “You do go on,” she said.

  “The dog,” he said.

  I must find some people for him to meet. He can’t live like this, she thought. It is ghastly.

  When she left, he stood on the doorstep and said:

  “My house. Your house. They’re worth four times what we gave for them. There it is.”

  She decided to invite him to dinner to meet some people—but who could she ask? He was prickly. She knew dozens of people but, as she thought of them, there seemed, for the first time, to be something wrong with all of them. In the end she invited no one to meet him.

  “On a diet, silly cow,” he thought when she came to the door but he fell back on his usual phrase as he looked about the empty room.

  “Did you invite me? Or shall I go away? You did invite me. Thank you. Thank you.”

  “I’ve been in Vienna with the Fladgates. She is a singer. Friends of David and Sarah.”

  “Fladgates? Never heard of the people,” he said. “Sonia insulted someone in Vienna. I was drunk. Sonia never drank anything—that made her insults worse. Did your husband drink?”

  “Indeed not.”

  He sat down on the sofa. The evening—Sonia’s time. He expected Sonia to fly in and sit there watching this woman with all her “problems” hidden chastely except for one foot which tipped up and down in her shoes under her long dress. But—to his surprise—Sonia did not come. The terrier sat at Rachel’s feet.

  “How is your enemy?” she said as they drank. “The man in the office.”

  “He and his wife asked me to dinner,” he said.

  “That’s kind,” she said.

  “People are kind,” he said. “I’ve remarked that.”

  “Does he still watch you?”

  “Yes. You know what it was? He thinks I drink too much. He thinks I’ve got a bottle in my desk. It wasn’t the job that was worrying him. We are wrong about people. I am. You are. Everyone is.”

  When they went in dinner candles were on the table.

  “Bloody silly having candles,” he said to himself. And when she came in with the soup, he said:

  “We had candles. Poor Sonia threw them out of the window once. She had to do it in a play.”

  The soup was iced and white and there was something in it that he could not make out. But no salt. That’s it, he thought, no salt in this woman. Writing about politics and things all day and forgets the salt. The next course was white too, something chopped or minced with something peculiar, goodness knew what. It got into his teeth. Minced newsprint, he thought.

  “Poor Sonia couldn’t cook at all,” he said, pushing his food about, proud of Sonia. “She put dishes on the floor near the stove, terrible muddle and rushed back to hear what people were saying and then an awful bloody stink came from the kitchen. I used to go down and the potatoes had burned dry and Tom had cleared the plates. Bloody starvation. No dinner.”

  “Oh no!” she said.

  “I live on chops now. Yes,” he said. “One, sometimes two, every day, say ten a week. Am I being a bore? Shall I go?”

  Rachel had a face that had been set for years in the same concerned expression. That expression now fell to pieces from her forehead to her throat. Against her will she laughed. The laugh shook her and was loud; she felt herself being whirled into a helpless state from the toes upwards. Her blood whirled too.

  “You laughed!” he shouted. “You did not protest. You did not write an article. You laughed. I could see your teeth. Very good. I’ve never seen you laugh before.”

  And the dog barked at them.

  “She laughed,” he shouted at the dog.

  She went out to make coffee, very annoyed at being trapped into laughing. While he waited, the dog sat undecided, ears pricked, listening for her and watching him like a sentry.

  “Rats,” whispered Gilbert to the dog. It stood up sharply.

  “Poor bastard. What a life,” he said.

  The dog barked angrily at him and when she came in, he said: “I told your dog he ought to be on a farm.”

  “You said that before,” she said. “Let us have coffee next door.” They moved into the next room and she sat on the sofa while she poured the coffee.

  “Now you are sitting on the sofa. I’m in this armchair,” he said, thinking of life tactically. “Sonia moved about too. I used to watch her going into a room. Where will she sit next? Damned if I ever got it right. The same in restaurants. Let us sit here, she’d say, and then when the waiter came to her chair, she’d say, ‘No, not here. Over there.’ Never knew where she was going to settle. Like a fly. She wanted attention. Of course. That was it. Quite right.”

  “Well,” she said coldly, “she was an actress.”

  “Nothing to do with it,” he said. “Woman.”
>
  “Nonsense,” she said, hating to be called a woman and thought, “It’s my turn now.”

  “My husband,” she said, “travelled the whole time. Moscow, Germany, Copenhagen, South Africa, but when he got home he was never still, posing to the animals on the farm, showing off to barns, fences, talking French and German to birds, pretending to be a country gentleman.”

  “Let the poor man alone,” he said. “Is he still alive?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I won’t bore you with it all.”

  She was astonished to find herself using his word and that the full story of her husband and herself she had planned to tell and which she had told so many people, suddenly lost interest for her. And yet, anyway, she thought, why shouldn’t I tell this man about it? So she started, but she made a muddle of it. She got lost in the details. The evening, she saw, was a failure. He yawned.

  If there was one thing Rachel could honestly say it was that she had not thought of her husband for years. She had not forgotten but he had become a generality in the busyness of her life. But now, after the evening when Gilbert came to dinner, her husband came to life and plagued her. If an aeroplane came down whistling across the wide London sky, she saw him sitting in it—back from Moscow, Capetown, Copenhagen, descending not upon her, but on another woman. If she took the dog for a run in the park, the cuddling couples on the grass became him and that young girl; if babies screamed in their prams they were his children; if a man threw a ball it was he; if men in white flannels were playing cricket, she wondered if he was among them. She imagined sudden, cold meetings and ran through tirades of hot dialogue. One day she saw a procession of dogs tails up and panting, following a bitch, with a foolish grin of wet teeth in their jaws and Sam rushed after them; she went red in the face shouting at him. And yet she had gone to the park in order to calm herself and to be alone. The worst thing that could happen would be to meet Gilbert, the cause of this, but, like all malevolent causes, he never showed his face. She had wished to do her duty and be sorry for him, but not for him to become a man. She feared she might be on the point of talking about this to a woman, not a woman she knew well—that would be disastrous—but, say, to some woman or girl sitting alone on a park seat or some woman in a shop; also a confidence she would regret all her life. She was touchy in these days and had a row with the doctor who threw flower pots at her dog. She petted the animal. “Your head is handsome,” she said, stroking its head, “but why did you go after that silly bitch?” The dog adored her when she said this. “You’re vain,” she said to it.