Essential Stories (21 page)

“Not having a pension hasn’t hurt her,” said Mrs. Draper.

“Not a tear,” said Mrs. Fulmino.

Jack and Mr. Fulmino glanced at each other. It was a glance of surreptitious gratitude: tears—they had escaped that.

Mr. Fulmino said: “The Japanese don’t cry.”

Mrs. Fulmino stepped out, a bad sign; her temper was rising.

“Who was the letter to?” she asked me. “Was the name Gloster?”

“I didn’t look,” I said.

Mrs. Fulmino looked at her husband and me and rolled her eyes. Another of our blunders!

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

But Mrs. Fulmino
did
believe it. We all believed and disbelieved everything at once.

I said I would come to the report in the
News.
It was in thick lettering like mourning, with Hilda’s picture: A Mother’s Faith. Four Years in Japanese Torture Camp. London Girl’s Ordeal. And then an account of how Hilda had starved and suffered and been brain-washed by questioners. Even Hilda was awed when she read it, feeling herself drain away, perhaps, and being replaced by this fantasy; and for the rest of us, we had become used to living in a period when events reduced us to beings so trivial that we had no strong feeling of our own existence in relation to the world around us. We had been bashed first one way, then the other, by propaganda, until we were indifferent. At one time people like my parents or old Mrs. Draper could at least trust the sky and feel that it was certain and before it they could have at least the importance of being something in the eye of heaven.

Constance read the newspaper report and it fulfilled her.

“Propaganda,” she said. “Press lies.”

“All lies,” Mr. Fulmino agreed with wonder. The notion that the untrue was as effective as the true opened to him vast areas to his powers. It was like a temptation.

It did not occur to us that we might be in a difficult situation in the neighbourhood when the truth came out, until we heard Constance and Bill Williams had gone over to the Lord Nelson with the paper and Constance had said, “You can’t believe a word you read in the capitalist press.”

Alfred Levy, the proprietor and a strong Tory, agreed with her. But was Hilda criticised for marrying an enemy? The hatred of the Japanese was strong at this time. She was not. Constance may not have had the best motives for spreading the news, we said, but it did no harm at all. That habit of double vision affected every one publicly. We lived in the true and the untrue, comfortably and without trouble. People picked up the paper, looked at her picture and said, “That’s a shocking thing. A British subject,” and even when they knew, even from Hilda’s own lips the true story, they said, congratulating themselves on their cunning, “The papers make it all up.”

Of course, we were all in that stage where the forces of life, the desire to live, were coming back, and although it was not yet openly expressed, we felt that curiosity about the enemy that ex-soldiers like Jack Draper felt when he wondered if some Japanese or some Germans were as fed up as he was on Saturdays by missing a day’s fishing. When people shook Hilda’s hand they felt they gave her life. I do not say there were not one or two mutterings afterwards, for people always went off from the Lord Nelson when it closed in a state of moralisation: beer must talk; the louts singing and the couples saying this or that “wasn’t right.” But this gossip came to nothing because, sooner or later, it came to a closed door in everybody’s conscience. There were the men who had shot off trigger fingers, who had got false medical certificates, deserters, ration frauds, black marketeers, the pilferers of army stores. And the women said a woman is right to stand by her husband and, looking at Hilda’s fine clothes, pointed out to their husbands that that kind of loyalty was sometimes rewarded; indeed, Mrs. Fulmino asserted, by law.

We had been waiting for Hilda; now, by a strange turn, we were waiting for Hilda’s Mr. Gloster. We waited for a fortnight and it ran on into three weeks. George Hartman Gloster. I looked up the name on our cards at the library, but we had no books of his. I looked up one or two catalogues. Still nothing. It was not surprising. He was an American who was not published in this country. Constance came in and looked too.

“It is one of those names the Americans don’t list,” she said. Constance smiled with the cool air of keeping a world of meaningful secrets on ice.

“They don’t list everything,” she said.

She brought Bill Williams with her. I don’t think he had ever been in a public library before, because his knowing manner went and he was overawed. He said to me:

“Have you read all these books? Do you buy them secondhand? What’s this lot worth?”

He was a man always on the look-out for a deal; it was typical of him that he had come with Constance in his firm’s light-green van. It was not like Constance to travel in that way. “Come on,” he said roughly.

The weather was hot; we had the sun blinds down in the Library. We were in the middle of one of those brassy fortnights of the London summer when English life, as we usually know it, is at a standstill, and everyone changes. A new grinning healthy race with long red necks sticking out of open shirts and blouses appears, and the sun brings out the variety of faces and bodies. Constance might have been some trim nurse marching at the head of an official procession. People looked calm, happy and open. There was hardly ever a cloud in the sky, the slate roofs looked like steel with the sun’s rays hitting them, and the side streets were cool in sharp shadow. It was a pleasant time for walking, especially when the sky went whitish in the distances of the city in the evening and when the streets had a dry pleasant smell and the glass of millions of windows had a motionless but not excluding stare. Even a tailor working late above a closed shop looked pleased to be going on working, while everyone else was out, wearing out their clothes.

Iris and I used to go to the park on some evenings and there every blade of grass had been wire-brushed by sunlight; the trees were heavy with still leaves and when darkness came they gathered into soft black walls and their edges were cut out against the nail varnish of the city’s night. During the day the park was crowded. All over the long sweeps of grass the couples were lying, their legs at careless angles, their bottoms restless as they turned to the horseplay of love in the open. Girls were leaning over the men rumpling their hair, men were tickling the girls’ chins with stalks of grass. Occasionally they would knock the wind out of each other with plunging kisses; and every now and then a girl would sit up and straighten her skirt at the waist, narrowing her eyes in a pretence of looking at some refining sight in the distance, until she was pulled down again and, keeping her knees together, was caught again. Lying down you smelt the grass and listened to the pleasant rumble of the distant traffic going round like a wheel that never stopped.

I was glad to know the Fulminos and to go out with Iris. We had both been gayer before we met each other, but seriousness, glumness, a sadness came over us when we became friends—that eager sadness that begins with thoughts of love. We encouraged and discouraged these thoughts in each other yet were always hinting and the sight of so much love around us turned us naturally away from it to think about it privately the more. She was a beautifully-formed girl as her mother must have once been, but slender. She had a wide laugh that shook the curls of her thick black hair. She was being trained at a typing school.

One day when I was sitting in the park and Iris was lying beside me, we had a quarrel. I asked her if there was any news of Mr. Gloster—for she heard everything. She had said there was none and I said, sucking a piece of grass:

“That’s what I would like to do. Go round the world. Anywhere. America, Africa, China.”

“A chance is a fine thing,” said Iris, day dreaming.

“I could get a job,” I said.

Iris sat up.

“Leave the Library?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “If I stay there I won’t see anything.” I saw Iris’s face change and become very like her mother’s. Mrs. Fulmino could make her face go larger and her mouth go very small. Iris did not answer. I went on talking. I asked her what she thought. She still did not answer.

“Anything the matter?” She was sulking. Then she said, flashing at me:

“You’re potty on that woman too. You all are. Dad is, Jack is; and look at Bill Williams. Round at Hincham Street every day. He’ll be having his breakfast there soon. Fascinated.”

“He goes to see Constance.”

“Have you seen Constance’s face?” she jeered. “Constance could kill her.”

“She came to the Library.”

“Ah,” she turned to me. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“She came in for a book, I told you. For Mr. Gloster’s books. Bill Williams came with her.”

Iris’s sulk changed into satisfaction at this piece of news.

“Mother says if Constance’s going to marry a man like Mr. Williams,” she said, “she’ll be a fool to let him out of her sight.”

“I’ll believe in Mr. Gloster when I see him,” Iris said. It was, of course, what we were all thinking. We made up our quarrel and I took Iris home. Mrs. Fulmino was dressed up, just putting the key in the door of her house. Iris was astonished to see her mother had been out and asked where she had been.

“Out,” said Mrs. Fulmino. “Have I got to stay in and cook and clean for you all day?”

Mrs. Fulmino was even wearing gloves, as if she had been to church. And she was wearing a new pair of shoes. Iris went pale at the sight of them. Mrs. Fulmino put her gloves down on the sitting-room table and said:

“I’ve got a right to live, I suppose?”

We were silenced.

One thing we all agreed on while we waited for Mr. Gloster was that Hilda had the money and knew how to spend it. The first time she asked the Fulminos and young Drapers to the cinema, Mrs. Fulmino said to her husband:

“You go. I’ve got one of my heads.”

“Take Jack,” young Mrs. Draper said. “I’ve got the children.”

They were daring their husbands to go with her. But the second time, there was a party. Hilda took some of them down to Kew. She took old Mrs. Johnson down to Southend—and who should they meet there but Bill Williams who was delivering some goods there, spoiling their day because old Mrs. Johnson did not like his ways. And Hilda had given them all presents. And two or three nights a week she was out at the Lord Nelson.

It was a good time. If anyone asked, “Have you heard from Mr. Gloster yet?” Hilda answered that it was not time yet and, as a dig at Constance that we all admired, she said once: “He has business at the American Embassy.” And old Mrs. Johnson held her head high and nodded.

At the end of three weeks we became restless. We noticed old Mrs. Johnson looked poorly. She said she was tired. Old Mrs. Draper became morose. She had been taught to call Mr. Gloster by his correct name, but now she relapsed.

“Where is this Indian?” she uttered.

And another day, she said, without explanation:

“Three.”

“Three what, Gran?”

“There’ve been two, that’s enough.”

No one liked this, but Mrs. Johnson understood.

“Mr. Gloster’s very well, isn’t he, Hil? You heard from him yesterday?” she said.

“I wasn’t shown the letter,” said old Mrs. Draper. “We don’t want a third.”

“We don’t,” said Mrs. Fulmino. With her joining in “on Gran’s side,” the situation changed. Mrs. Fulmino had a low voice and the sound of it often sank to the floor of any room she was in, travelling under chairs and tables, curling round your feet and filling the place from the bottom as if it were a cistern. Even when the trolley bus went by Mrs. Fulmino’s low voice prevailed. It was an undermining voice, breaking up one’s uppermost thoughts and stirring up what was underneath them. It stirred us all now. Yes, we wanted to say, indeed, we wanted to shout, where is this Mr. Gloster, why hasn’t he come, did you invent him? He’s alive, we hope? Or is he also—as Gran suggests—dead?

Even Mr. Fulmino was worried.

“Have you got his address?” he asked.

“Yes, Uncle dear,” said Hilda. “He’ll be staying at the Savoy. He always does.”

Mr. Fulmino had not taken out his notebook for a long time but he did so now. He wrote down the name.

“Has he made a reservation?” said Mr. Fulmino. “I’ll find out if he’s booked.”

“He hasn’t,” said Bill Williams. “I had a job down there and I asked. Didn’t I, Connie?”

Mrs. Fulmino went a very dark colour. She wished she had thought of doing this. Hilda was not offended, but a small smile clipped her lips as she glanced at Connie:

“I asked Bill to do it,” she said.

And then Hilda in that harsh lazy voice which she had always used for announcements: “If he doesn’t come by Wednesday you’ll have to speak for me at your factory, Mr. Williams. I don’t know why he hasn’t come, but I can’t wait any more.”

“Bill can’t get you a job. You have to register,” said Constance.

“Yes, she’ll have to do that,” said Mr. Fulmino.

“I’ll fix it. Leave it to me,” said Bill Williams.

“I expect,” said young Mrs. Draper, “his business has kept him.” She was sorry for Hilda.

“Perhaps he’s gone fishing,” said Jack Draper, laughing loudly in a kind way. No one joined in.

“Fishing for orders,” said Bill Williams.

Hilda shrugged her shoulders and then she made one of those remarks that Grandma Draper usually made—I suppose the gift really ran through the family.

“Perhaps it was a case,” she said, “of ships that pass in the night.”

“Oh no, dear,” said Mrs. Johnson trembling, “not ships.” We went to the bus stop afterwards with the Fulminos and the young Drapers. Mrs. Fulmino’s calm had gone. She marched out first, her temper rising.

“Ships!” she said. “When you think of what we went through during the war. Did you hear her? Straight out?”

“My brother Herbert’s wife was like that. She’s a widow. Take away the pension and they’ll work like the rest of us. I had to.”

“Job! Work! I know what sort of work she’s been doing. Frank, walk ahead with Iris.”

“Well,” said young Mrs. Draper, “she won’t be able to go to work in those clothes and that’s a fact.”