Gilbert did go to the park but only on Saturdays when the crowds came. He liked seeing the picnics, the litter on the grass; he stood still with pleasure when babies screamed or ice-cream dripped. He grinned at boys throwing water from drinking fountains and families trudging, drunks lying asleep, and fat girls lying half on top of their young men and tickling their faces with grass. “The place is a damn bedroom. Why not? Where else can they go? Lucky, boring people. I’ve got a bedroom and no one in it.”
One Saturday, after three days of rain, he took his dog there and—would you believe it?—there the whole crowd was again, still at it, on the wet grass. The trouble with Sonia was that she thought the park was vulgar and would never go there—went once and never again, hadn’t brought the right shoes.
He remarked this to his dog as he let it off its leash. The animal scampered round him in wide circles; came back to him and then raced off again in circles getting wider and wider, until it saw a man with string in his hand trying to fly a kite. The kite was flopping on the ground, rose twenty or thirty feet in the air and then dived again. The dog rushed at the kite, but the man got it up again, higher this time. Gilbert walked towards the man. “Poor devil, can’t get it up,” he said as he walked. He got near the man and watched his struggles.
Then the kite shot up high and Gilbert watched it raving there until suddenly it swept away higher still. Gilbert said: “Good for him.” The boredom of the grey afternoon was sweet. He lit a cigarette and threw the empty packet on the grass and then he found he had lost sight of the dog. When he saw it again it was racing in a straight line towards a group of trees by the lake. It was racing towards another dog. A few yards away from the dog it stopped and pranced. The dog was a terrier and stopped dead, then came forward. They stood sniffing at each other’s tails and then jumped round muzzle to muzzle. They were growling, the terrier barked and then the two dogs flew at each other’s necks. Their play had turned to a war, their jaws were at each other’s necks and ears. Gilbert saw at once it was Rachel’s dog, indeed Rachel was running up shouting, “Sam. Sam.” The fight was savage and Tom had his teeth in.
“Stop them,” Rachel was shouting. “Stop them. They’ll kill each other. He’s got him by the throat.”
And then she saw Gilbert: “You!”
Gilbert was enjoying the fight. He looked around and picked up a stick that had fallen from a tree.
“Stop them,” she shouted.
“Get yours by the collar, I’ll get mine,” he shouted to her.
“I can’t. Sam! Sam! They’re bleeding.”
She was dancing about in terror, trying to catch Sam by the legs.
“Not by the legs. By the collar, like this, woman,” he shouted. “Don’t put your arms round him, you idiot. Like this. Stop dancing about.”
He caught Tom by the collar and lifted him as both dogs hung on to each other.
“You’re strangling him. I can’t, I can’t,” she said. Gilbert brought his stick down hard on the muzzles of the dogs, just as she was trying to grasp Sam again.
“You’ll kill them.”
He brought the stick down hard again. The dogs yelped with pain and separated.
“Get the leash on,” he said, “you fool.”
Somehow she managed it and the two dogs now strained to get at each other. The terrier’s white neck and body were spotted with blood and smears of it were on her hands.
Gilbert wiped their spit off his sleeve.
They pulled their dogs yards apart and she stared at him. It infuriated her that he was laughing at her with pure pleasure. In their stares they saw each other clearly and as they had never seen each other before. To him, in her short skirt and her shoes muddied by the wet grass, her hair disordered and the blood risen to her pale face, she was a woman. The grass had changed her. To her he was not a pitiable arrangement of widower’s tricks, but a man on his own. And the park itself changed him in her eyes; in the park he, like everyone else there, seemed to be human. The dogs gave one more heave to get at each other.
“Lie down, Sam,” Gilbert shouted.
She lifted her chin and was free to hate him for shouting at her animal.
“Look after yours. He’s dangerous,” she called back, angered by the friendliness of his face.
“Damn silly dogs enjoyed it. Good for them. Are you all right? Go up to the kiosk and get a drink—if I may I’ll follow you up—see you’re all right.”
“No, no,” she put out a loud moan—far too loud. “He’s bleeding. I’ll take him home,” and she turned to look at the park. “What a mess people make.” And now walking away shouted a final accusation: “I didn’t know you brought your dog here.”
He watched her go. She turned away and dragged the struggling terrier over the grass uphill from the lake. He watched her walking unsteadily.
“Very attractive figure,” he thought. “Silly cow. Better go home and ring her up.”
He turned and on the way back to his house he could still see her dancing about on the grass and shouting. He went over the scene again and repeated his conclusion. “She’s got legs. Never seen them before. A woman. Must be. Full of life.” She was still dancing about as he put a bowl of water down for the dog. It drank noisily and he gave it another bowl and then he washed the dog’s neck and looked at its ear. “Nothing much wrong with you,” he said. He fed the animal and soon it jumped on the sofa and was instantly snorting, and whimpering and shaking into sleep.
“I must ring her up, yes, that is what I must do.”
But a neighbour answered and said Rachel had gone to the vet and she had come back in a terrible state and had gone to bed with one of her migraines.
“Don’t bother her,” he said. “I just rang to ask how the dog was.”
Rachel was not in bed. She was standing beside the neighbour and when the call was over, she said:
“What did he say?”
“He asked about the dog.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
This flabbergasted her.
In the middle of the night she woke up and when her stupefaction passed she damn well wished he was there so that she could say, “It didn’t occur to you to apologise. I don’t like being called a fool. You assume too much. Don’t think I care a damn about your dog.” She was annoyed to feel a shudder pass through her. She got out of bed and looking out of her window at the black trees, saw herself racing across the park to his house and pulling that dog of his off his bed. The things she said! The language she used! She kicked the dog out of the room and it went howling downstairs. She went back to bed weak and surprised at herself because, before she realised it, Sam became Tom in her hand. She lay there stiff, awake, alone. Which dog had she kicked? Sam or Tom?
In his house Gilbert locked up, poured himself a strong whisky, then a second, then a third. Uncertain of whom he was addressing, Rachel or Sonia, he said, “Silly cow,” and blundered drunkish to bed. He woke up at five very cold. No dog. The bed was empty. He got out of bed and went downstairs. For the first time since Sonia had died the dog was asleep on the sofa. He had forgotten to leave his door open.
In the morning he was startled to hear Sonia’s voice saying to him in her stage voice: “Send her some flowers. Ask her to dinner.”
So he sent the flowers and when Rachel rang to thank him he asked her to dinner—at a restaurant.
“Your house. My house,” he said. “Two dogs.”
There was a long silence and he could hear her breath bristling.
“Yes, I think it has to be somewhere else,” she said. And added: “As you say, we have a problem.”
And after this dinner and the next, she said:
“There are so many problems. I don’t really know you.”
They talked all summer and people who came regularly to the restaurant made up stories about them and were quite put out when in October they stopped coming. All the proprietor had heard was that they had sold their houses—in fact he knew w
hat they’d got for them. The proprietor had bought Sonia’s dog. There was a terrier, too, he said, but he didn’t know what had happened to that.
(1974)
THE MARVELLOUS GIRL
The official ceremony was coming to an end. Under the sugary chandeliers of what had once been the ballroom of the mansion to which the Institute had moved, the faces of the large audience yellowed and aged as they listened to the last speeches and made one more effort of chin and shoulder to live up to the gilt, the brocaded panels of the walls and the ceiling where cherubs, clouds and naked goddesses romped. Oh, to be up there among them, thought the young man sitting at the back, but on the platform the director was passing from the eternal values of art to the “gratifying presence of the Minister,” to “Lady Brigson’s untiring energies,” the “labours of Professor Exeter and his panel” in the Exhibition on the floor below. When he was named the Professor looked with delight at the audience and played with a thin gold chain he had taken from his pocket. The three chandeliers gave a small united flicker as if covering the yawns of the crowd. The young man sitting at the back stared at the platform once more and then, with his hands on his knees, his elbows out and his eye turned to the nearest door got ready to push past the people sitting next to him and to be the first out—to get out before his wife who was on the platform with the speakers. By ill-luck he had run into her before the meeting and had been trapped into sitting for nearly two hours, a spectator of his marriage that had come to an end. His very presence there seemed to him an unsought return to one of those patient suicides he used to commit, day after day, out of drift and habit.
To live alone is to expose oneself to accident. He had been drawing on and off all day in his studio and not until the evening had he realised that he had forgotten to eat. Hunger excited him. He took a bus down to an Italian restaurant. It was one of those places where the proprietor came out from time to time to perform a private ballet. He tossed pancakes almost up to the ceiling and then dropped them into a blaze of brandy in the pan—a diversion that often helped the young man with the girls he now sometimes took there. The proprietor was just at the blazing point when two women came into the restaurant in their winter coats and stood still, looking as if they were on fire. The young man quickly gulped down the last of a few coils of spaghetti and stood up and wiped his mouth. The older, smaller of the two women was his wife and she was wearing a wide hat of black fur that made her look shorter than he remembered her. Free of him, she had become bizarre and smaller. Even her eyes had become smaller and, like mice, saw him at once and gave him an alert and busy smile. With her was the tall, calm girl with dark blue eyes from their office at the Institute, the one she excitedly called “the marvellous girl,” the “only one I have ever been able to get on with.”
More than two years had gone by since he and his wife had lived together. The marriage was one of those prickly friendships that never succeeded—to his astonishment, at any rate—in turning into love, but are kept going by curiosity. It had become at once something called “our situation;” a duet by a pair of annoyed hands. What kept them going was an exasperated interest in each other’s love affairs, but even unhappiness loses its tenderness and fascination. They broke. At first they saw each other occasionally, but now rarely; except at the Institute where his drawings were shown. They were connected only by the telephone wire which ran under the London pavements and worried its way under the window ledge of his studio. She would ring up, usually late at night.
“I hope it’s all right,” she’d say wistfully. “Are you alone?”
But getting nothing out of him on that score, she would become brisk and ask for something out of the debris of their marriage, for if marriages come to an end, paraphernalia hangs on. There were two or three divans, a painted cupboard, some rugs rolled up, boxes of saucepans and frying pans, lamps—useful things stored in the garage under his studio. But, as if to revive an intimacy, she always asked for some damaged object; she had a child’s fidelity to what was broken: a lampshade that was scorched, an antique coal bucket with one loose leg, or a rug that had been stained by her dog Leopold whose paws were always in trouble. Leopold’s limp had come to seem to the young man, the animal’s response to their hopeless marriage. The only sound object she had ever wanted—and got into a temper about it—was a screwdriver that had belonged to her father whom she detested.
Now, in the restaurant, she put up a friendly fight from under the wide-brimmed hat.
“I didn’t know you still came here,” she said.
“I come now and again.”
“You must be going to the opening at the Institute.”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t heard of it.”
“But I sent you a card,” she said. “You must go. Your drawings are in the Exhibition. It’s important.”
“Three drawings,” said the girl warmly.
“Come with us,” his wife said.
“No. I can’t. I’m just going to pay my bill.”
A lie, of course. She peered at his plate as if hoping to read his fortune, to guess at what he was up to. He turned to the girl and said with feeling:
“Are you better now?”
“I haven’t been ill,” said the girl.
“You said she’d been in hospital,” he said to his wife.
“No I didn’t,” she said. “She went to Scotland for a wedding.”
A quite dramatic look of disappointment on the young man’s face made the girl laugh and look curiously at him. He had seen her only two or three times and knew nothing much about her, but she was indeed “marvellous.” She was not in hospital, she was beautiful and alive. Astounding. Even, in a bewildering way, disappointing.
The waiter saved him and moved them away.
“Enjoy yourselves,” said the young man. “I’m going home.”
“Goodbye,” the girl turned to wave to him as she followed his wife to the table.
It was that “goodbye” that did for him. It was a radiant “goodbye,” half laughing, he had seen her tongue and her even teeth as she laughed. Simply seeing him go had brought life to her face. He went out of the restaurant and in the leathery damp of the street he could see the face following him from lamp to lamp. “Goodbye, goodbye,” it was still saying. And that was when he changed his mind. An extraordinary force pulled his scattered mind together; he determined to go to the meeting and to send to her, if he could see her in the crowd, a blinding, laughing, absolute Goodbye for ever, as radiant as hers.
Now, as he sat there in the crowded hall there was no sign of her. He had worn his eyes out looking for her. She was not on the platform with his wife and the speakers of course. The director, whose voice suggested chocolate, was still thanking away when, suddenly, the young man did see her. For the light of the chandeliers quivered again, dimmed to a red cindery glow and then went out, and as people gasped “Oh,” came on strongly again and one or two giggled. In that flash when everyone looked up and around, there was a gap between the ranks of heads and shoulders and he saw her brown hair and her broad pale face with its white rose look, its good-humoured chin and the laugh beginning on it. She turned round and she saw him as he saw her. There are glances that are collisions, scattering the air between like glass. Her expression was headlong in open conniving joy at the sight of things going wrong. She was sitting about ten rows in front of him but he was not quick enough to wave for now, “plonk,” the lights went out for good. The audience dropped en masse into the blackness, the hall sank gurgling to the bottom of the sea and was swamped. Then outside a door banged, a telephone rang, feet shuffled and a slow animal grunting and chattering started everywhere and broke into irreverent squeals of laughter.
Men clicked on their lighters or struck matches and long anarchic shadows shot over the walls. There was the sudden heat of breath, wool, fur and flesh as if the audience had become one body.
“Keep your seats for a moment,” the director said from the darkness, like God.
How wrong I was about my wife’s character, the young man thought. Who would have thought such wistful virginity could become so rampant. The young man said: “Pull yourself together, Duncan. Tell her you won’t stand any more of it. Threaten her with Irmgard …”
Darkness had abolished it all.
It was not the darkness of the night outside. This darkness had no flabby wet sky in it. It was dry. It extinguished everything. It stripped the eyes of sight; even the solid human rows were lumped together invisibly. One was suddenly naked in the dark from the boots upwards. One could feel the hair on one’s body growing and in the chatter one could hear men’s voices grunting, women’s voices fast, breath going in and out, muscles changing, hearts beating. Many people stood up. Surrounded by animals like himself he too stood up, to hunt with the pack, to get out. Where was the girl? Inaccessible, known, near but invisible. Someone had brought a single candle to the desk at which the director stood like a spectre. He said:
The Pritchett Century Page 49