The Key to My Heart

by V. S. Pritchett

  When I got home and told my mother, she was short with me. That was the way to lose customers, she said. I was ruining all the work she and Dad had put into the business. I said if Mrs. Brackett wanted her bills she could come and get them herself. Mother was very shocked.

  She let it go for a day or two, but she had to bring it up again. “What are you sulking about?” she said to me one afternoon. “You upset Rosie this morning. Have you done those bills for Mrs. Brackett yet?”

  I made excuses, and got in the car and went over to the millers and to the people who make our boxes, to get away from the nagging. Once I was out of the town, in the open country, Mrs. Brackett seemed to be somewhere just ahead of me, round a corner, over a hill, beyond a wood. There she was, trying to make me forget she owed us two hundred and twenty-eight pounds fourteen and fourpence. The moment she was in my head, the money went out of it. When I got back, late in the evening, Mother was on to me again. Noisy had been in. She said he had been sent down by his wife to ask why I had not brought the bills.

  “The poor Wing Commander,” my mother said. “Another rumpus up there.” (She always gave him his rank if there was a rumour of another quarrel at Heading.) “She never gives him any peace. He’s just an errand boy. She does what she likes with him.”

  “He’s been offering you the key to his heart, Mother,” I said.

  “I don’t take any stock of him,” Mother said. “Or that pansy sweetheart stuff. Dad was the one and only for me. I don’t believe in second marriages. I’ve no time for jealous women; they’re always up to something, like Mrs. Doubleday thinking I spoke to her husband in the bank and she was caught with the chemist, but you always think the Fairy Prince will turn up— it’s natural.”

  It always took a little time getting at what was in Mother’s mind, yet it was really simple. She was a good churchwoman, and she thought Noisy was not really married to Mrs. Brackett, because he had been divorced by his first wife. She did not blame Noisy for this—in fact, she admired it, in a romantic way—but she blamed Mrs. Brackett, because, by Mother’s theories, Mrs. Brackett was still single. And Mother never knew whether to admire single women for holding out or to suspect them of being on the prowl. One thing she was certain of. “Money talks,” she said. The thing that made Noisy respectable for her, and as good as being married in church, was that he had married Mrs. Brackett for her money.

  She talked like this the night we sat up and did that month’s bills, but the next day—and this was the trouble with Mother—it ended in a row. I sent the bills up to Mrs. Brackett by our delivery van.

  “That is not the way to behave,” Mother said. “You should have taken them yourself.”

  And before the day was out, Mother was in a temper again. Mrs. Brackett had spoken to her on the telephone and said she had been through the bills and that we had charged her for things she hadn’t had, because she’d been in the South of France at the time.

  “I told you to go,” Mother said to me.

  I was angry, too, at being called dishonest. I got out the van and said I was going up at once.

  “Oh, that’s how it is,” said my mother, changing round again. “Her Ladyship snaps her fingers and you go up at once. She’s got you running about for her like Noisy. If I ask you to do anything, you don’t pay any attention to me. But Mrs. Brackett—she’s the Queen of England. Two of you running after her.”

  Mother was just like that with Father when he was alive. He took no notice. Neither did I. I went up to Heading. A maid let me in, and I sat there waiting in the drawing-room. I waited a long time, listening to the bees coming down the chimney, circling lower and lower and then roaring out into the room, like Noisy’s car. I could hear Mrs. Brackett talking on the telephone in her study. I could hear now and then what she was saying. She was a great racing woman, and from words she said here and there I would say she was speaking to a bookmaker. One sentence I remember, because I think it had the name of a horse in it, and when I got back home later I looked up the racing news to see if I could find it. “Tray Pays On,” she said. She came out into the room with the laughter of her telephone call still on her face. I was standing up, with our account book in my hand, and when she saw me the laughter went.

  I was not afraid of her any more. “I hear there is some trouble about the bills,” I said. “If you’ve got them, you can check them with the book. I’ve brought it.”

  Mrs. Brackett was a woman who watched people’s faces. She put on her dutiful, serious, and obedient look, and led me again to the little room where the papers were. She sat down and I stood over her while we compared the bills and the book. I watched the moving of her back as she breathed. I pointed to the items, one by one, and she nodded and ticked the bills with a pencil. We checked for nearly half an hour. The only thing she said was in the middle of it—“You’ve got a double jointed thumb. So have I”—but she went right on.

  “I can see what it is,” I said at the end. “You’ve mistaken 1953 for ’54.”

  She pushed the book away, and leaned back in the chair against my arm, which was resting on it.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said, her small, unsmiling face looking up into mine. “I just wanted you to come up.”

  She gazed at me a long time. I thought of all the work Mother and I had done, and then that Mother was right about Mrs. Brackett. I took my hand from the chair and stepped back.

  “I wanted to ask you one or two things,” she said, confidingly, “about that property next to the shop. I’ll be fair with you. I’m interested in it. Are you? All right, don’t answer. I see you are.”

  My heart jumped. Ever since I could remember, Father and Mother had talked of buying this property. It was their daydream. They simply liked little bits of property everywhere, and now I wanted it so that we could join the shop and the café.

  “I asked because . . .” She hesitated. “I’ll be frank with you. The bank manager was talking about it to me today.”

  My fright died down. I didn’t believe that the bank manager—he was Mr. Pickering’s brother-in-law—would let my mother down and allow the property to go to Mrs. Brackett without giving us the offer first.

  “We want it, of course,” I said. And then I suspected this was one of her tricks. “That is why I have been getting our bills in,” I said.

  “Oh, I didn’t think that was it,” she said. “I thought you were getting married. My husband says you are engaged to the girl you brought up here. He said he thought you were. Has she any money?”

  “Engaged!” I said. “I’m not. Who told him that?”

  “Oh,” she said, and then a thought must have struck her. I could read it at once. In our town, if you cough in the High Street the chemist up at the Town Hall has got a bottle of cough mixture wrapped up and waiting for you; news travels fast. She must have guessed that when Noisy came down dangling the key to his heart, he could have been round the corner all the time, seeing Rosie.

  “I’m glad to hear you’re not engaged,” Mrs. Brackett said tenderly. “I like a man who works. You work like your father did—God, what an attractive man! You’re like him. I’m not flattering you. I saw it when you came up the first time.”

  She asked me a lot of questions about the shop and who did the baking now. I told her I didn’t do it and that I wanted to enlarge the restaurant. “The machine bakeries are getting more and more out into the country,” I said. “And you’ve got to look out.”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t do catering for schools,” she said. “And there’s the Works.” (Her father’s main factory.) “Why don’t you get hold of the catering there?”

  “You can only do that if you have capital. We’re not big enough,” I said, laughing.

  “How much do you want?” she said. “Two thousand? Three? I don’t see why we couldn’t do something.”

  The moment she said “we” I came to my senses. Here’s a funny turnout, I thought. She won’t pay her bills, but first she’s after these shops,
and now she’s waving two thousand pounds in my face. Everyone in our town knew she was artful. I suppose she thought I was green.

  “Not as much as two thousand,” I said. “Just the bill,” I said, nodding at it.

  Mrs. Brackett smiled. “I like you. You’re interested in money. Good. I’ll settle it.” And, taking her cheque book from the top of the desk, she put it in her drawer. “I never pay these accounts by cheque. I pay in cash. I’ll get it tomorrow at the bank. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’ve got a shoe of mine. Bring it up tomorrow evening at, say, half past eight. I’ll be back by then and you can have it.” She paused, and then, getting up, added quickly, “Half tomorrow, half in October.”

  It was like dealing with the gypsies that come to your door.

  “No, Mrs. Brackett,” I said. “I’d like all of it. Now.” We stared at each other. It was like that moment months ago when she had driven at me in her car and I had reversed down the drive with one eye watching her and one on the road as I shot back. That was the time, I think, I first noticed her—when she opened her mouth to shout a word at me and then did not shout. I could have stayed like this, looking into her small, pretty, miser’s blue eyes, at her determined head, her chopped-off fair hair, for half an hour. It was a struggle.

  She was the first to speak, and that was a point gained to me. Her voice shook a little. “I don’t keep that amount of money in the house,” she said.

  I knew that argument. Noisy said she always had two or three hundred pounds in the safe in the wall of her study, and whether this was so or not, I could not help glancing toward it.

  “I don’t like being dictated to,” she said, catching my glance. “I have told you what I will do.”

  “I think you could manage it, Mrs. Brackett,” I said.

  I could see she was on the point of flying into one of her tempers, and as far as I was concerned (I don’t know why), I hoped she would. Her rows with Noisy were so famous that I must have wanted to see one for myself. And I didn’t see why she should get away with it. At the back of my mind, I thought of all the others down in the town and how they would look when I said I had got my money out of Mrs. Brackett.

  Yet I wasn’t really thinking about the money at all, at this moment. I was looking at her pretty shoulders.

  But Mrs. Brackett did not fly into a temper. She considered me, and then she spoke in a quiet voice that took me off my guard. “Actually,” she said, lowering her eyes, “you haven’t been coming up here after money at all, have you?”

  “Well—” I began.

  “Sh-h-h!” she said, jumping up from her chair and putting her hand on my mouth. “Why didn’t you ring me and tell me you were coming? I am often alone.”

  She stepped to the door and bawled out, “Jimmy!” as if he were a long way off. He was—to my surprise, and even more to hers—very near.

  “Yes, ducky?” Noisy called back from the hall.

  “Damn,” she said to me. “You must go.” And, squeezing my hand, she went through the drawing-room into the hall.

  “What time do we get back tomorrow evening?” she said boldly to Noisy. “Half past eight? Come at half past eight,” she said, turning to me, for I had followed her. “I’ll bring back the cash.”

  The sight of Noisy was a relief to me, and the sound of the word “cash” made Noisy brighten.

  “Not lovely little bits of money!” he exclaimed.

  “Not you,” said Mrs. Brackett, glaring at him.

  “How did you work it, old boy?” said Noisy later, giving me one of his most quizzical twitches as he walked with me to my van. When I drove off, I could see him still standing there, watching me out of sight.

  I drove away very slowly. My mind was in confusion. About half a mile off, I stopped the car and lit a cigarette. All the tales I had heard about Mrs. Brackett came back into my mind. It was one thing to look at her, another thing to know about her. The one person I wished I had with me was Noisy. He seemed like a guarantor of safety, a protection. To have had my thoughts read like that by her filled me with fear.

  I finished my cigarette. I decided not to go straight home, and I drove slowly all along the lower sides of the oak woods, so slowly and carelessly that I had to swerve to avoid oncoming cars. I was making, almost without knowing it, for the Green Man, at Mill Cross. There was a girl there I had spoken to once or twice. No one you would know. I went in and asked for a glass of beer. I hardly said a word to her, except about the weather, and then she left the bar to look after a baby in the kitchen at the back. That calmed me. I think the way she gave me my change brought me back to earth and made me feel free of Mrs. Brackett’s spell. At any rate, I put the threepence in my pocket and swallowed my beer. I laughed at myself. Mrs. Brackett had gypped me again.

  * * *

  When I got home, it was late, and my mother was morose. She was wearing a black dress she often wore when she was alone, dressed up and ready to go out, yet not intending to, as if now that my father was dead she was free if someone would invite her. Her best handbag was beside her. She was often waiting like this, sitting on the sofa, doing nothing but listening to the clock tick, and perhaps getting up to give a touch to some flowers on the table and then sitting down again. Her first words shook me.

  “Mrs. Brackett was down here looking for you,” she said sharply. “I thought you were with her. She wants you to be sure to go up tomorrow evening to collect some money when she comes back from Tolton. Where have you been?”

  “Let the old bitch post it or bring it in,” I said.

  Mother was horrified at the idea of Mrs. Brackett soiling her hands with money.

  “You’ll do as I tell you,” she said. “You’ll go up and get it. If you don’t, Noisy will get his hands on it first. You’d think a woman with all that money would go to a decent hairdresser. It’s meanness, I suppose.”

  And then, of course, I saw I was making a lot of fuss about nothing. Noisy would be there when I went up to Heading. Good old Noisy, I thought; thank God for that. And he’ll see I get the money, because she said it in front of him.

  So the next evening I went. I put my car near the garage, and the first person I saw was Noisy, standing beside his own car. He had a suitcase in his hand. I went over to him.

  “Fairy Queen’s been at work,” he said. He nodded at his tyres. They were flat. “I’m doing some quick thinking.”

  At that moment, a top window of the house was opened and someone emptied a suitcase of clothes out of it, and then a shower of cigarettes came down.

  “She’s tidying,” he said. “I’ve got a quarter of an hour to catch the London train. Be a sweetie-pie and run me over there.”

  I had arrived once more in the middle of one of the Brackett rows. Only this time Noisy was leaving it to me. That is how I felt about it. “Hop in,” I said.

  And when we were off and a mile from Heading, he sat up in the seat and looked round. “Nothing on our tail,” he said.

  “Have you ever heard of a horse called Tray?” I asked him. “Tray Pays something? Tray Pays On—that can’t be it.”

  “Tray Pays On?” repeated Noisy. “Is it a French horse?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Bloody peasant? Could be,” said Noisy. “Sounds a bit frog to me.”

  We got to Tolton station. Noisy was looking very white and set with hatred. Not until he was standing in the queue getting his ticket did it occur to me what Noisy was doing.

  “The first time I’ve travelled by train for fifteen years,” he called to me across from the queue. “Damned serious. You can tell her if you see her”—people stared—“the worm has turned. I’m packing it in for good.”

  And as he went off to the train, he called, “I suppose you are going back? No business of mine, but I’ll give you a tip. If you do, you won’t find anything in the kitty, Bob.” He gave me his stare and his final twitch. It was like the crack of a shot. Bang on, as he would have said. A bull’s-eye.

  I
walked slowly away as the London train puffed out. I took his advice. I did not go back to Heading.

  There were rows and rows between the Bracketts, but there was none like this one. It was the last. The others were a chase. This was not. For only Mrs. Brackett was on the road that night. She was seen, we were told, in all the likely places. She had been a dozen times through the town. Soon after ten o’clock she was hooting outside our house. Mother peeped through the curtains, and I went out. Mrs. Brackett got out of her car and marched at me. “Where have you been?” she shouted. “Where is my husband?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “You took him to Tolton, they told me.”

  “I think he’s gone to London,” I said.

  “Don’t be a damn liar,” she said. “How can he have? His car is up there.”

  “By train,” I said.

  “By train,” she repeated. Her anger vanished. She looked at me with astonishment. The rich are very peculiar. Mrs. Brackett had forgotten people travel by train. I could see she was considering the startling fact. She was not a woman to waste time staying in one state of mind for long. Noisy used to say of her, “That little clock never stops ticking.”

  “I see,” she said to me sarcastically, nodding out the words. “That’s what you and Jimmy have been plotting.” She gave a shake to her hair and held her chin up. “You’ve got your money and you don’t care,” she said.

  “What money is that?” I said.

  “What money!” she exclaimed sharply, going over each inch of my face. What she saw surprised her at first. Until then she had been fighting back, but now a sly look came to her; it grew into a smile; the smile got wider and wider, and then her eyes became two curved lines, like crow’s wings in the sky, and she went into shouts of laughter. It sounded all down the empty street. She rocked with it.

  “Oh, no!” she laughed. “Oh, no, that’s too good! That’s a winner. He didn’t give you a penny! He swiped the lot!”

  And she looked up at the sky in admiration of that flying man. She was still grinning at me when she taunted breathlessly, “I mean to say—I mean to say—”