Essential Stories (24 page)

“Hilda’s told me . . .” Mrs. Fulmino said.

“I asked Hilda, not you,” said Mr. Fulmino to his wife, who was so surprised that she went very white instead of her usual purple.

“Hilda, come on. You come round here saying he’s going to kill you. Then they tell me you’ve given your notice up there.”

“She told me that. I think she’s done the right thing.”

“And did you tell her why you gave your notice?” asked Mr. Fulmino.

“She’s given her notice at the factory too,” said Mrs. Fulmino.

“Why?” said Mr. Fulmino.

Hilda did not answer.

“You are going off with Bill Williams, aren’t you?”

“Ted!” Hilda gave one of her rare laughs.

“What’s this?” cried Mrs. Fulmino. “Have you been deceiving me? Deceit I can’t stand, Hilda.”

“Of course she is,” said Mr. Fulmino. “She’s paid her rent. He’s collected her luggage this evening—where is it to be? Monte Carlo? Oh, it’s all right, sit down,” Mr. Fulmino waved Mrs. Fulmino back. “They had a row at the dance this evening.”

But Hilda was on her feet.

“My luggage,” she cried, holding her bag with both hands to her bosom as we had seen her do once before when she was cornered. “Who has touched my luggage?”

I thought she was going to strike Mr. Fulmino.

“The dirty thief. Who let him in? Who let him take it? Where’s he gone?”

She was moving to the door. We were stupefied.

“Bill Williams!” she shouted. Her rage made those artificial eyebrows look comical and I expected her to pick them off and throw them at us. “Bill Williams I’m talking about. Who let that bloody war hero in? That bitch up there . . .”

“Hilda,” said Mr. Fulmino. “We don’t want language.”

“You fool,” said Mrs. Fulmino in her lowest, most floor-pervading voice to her husband. “What have you been and done? You’ve let Bill Williams get away with all those cases, all her clothes, everything. You let that spiv strip her.”

“Go off with Bill Williams!” Hilda laughed. “My husband was an officer.”

“I knew he was after something. I thought it was dollars,” she said suddenly.

She came back from the door and sat down at the table and sobbed.

“Two hundred and fifty pounds, he’s got,” she sobbed. It was a sight to see Hilda weeping. We could not speak.

“It’s all I had,” she said.

We watched Hilda. The painted eyebrows made the grimace of her weeping horrible. There was not one of us who was not shocked. There was in all of us a sympathy we knew how to express but which was halted—as by a fascination—with the sight of her ruin. We could not help contrasting her triumphant arrival with her state at this moment. It was as if we had at last got her with us as we had, months before, expected her to be. Perhaps she read our thoughts. She looked up at us and she had the expression of a person seeing us for the first time. It was like an inspection.

“You’re a mean lot, a mean respectable lot,” she said. “I remember you. I remember when I was a girl. What was it Mr. Singh said, I can’t remember—he was clever—oh well, leave it, leave it. When I saw that little room they put my poor mother in, I could have cried. No sun. No warmth in it. You just wanted someone to pity. I remember it. And your faces. The only thing that was nice was,” she sobbed and laughed for a moment, “was bump, bump, bump, the trolley.” She said loudly: “There’s only one human being in the whole crew—Jack Draper. I don’t wonder he sees more in fish.”

She looked at me scornfully. “Your brother—he was nice,” she said. “Round the park at night! That was love.”

“Hilda,” said Mrs. Fulmino without anger. “We’ve done our best for you. If we’ve made mistakes I hope you haven’t. We haven’t had your life. You talk about ships that pass in the night, I don’t know what you mean, but I can tell you there are no ships in this house. Only Ted.”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Fulmino quietly too. “You’re overwrought.”

“Father,” said Mrs. Fulmino, “hadn’t you better tell the police?”

“Yes, yes, dear,” agreed Mr. Fulmino. “We’d better get in touch with the authorities.”

“Police,” said Hilda, laughing in their faces. “Oh God! Don’t worry about that. You’ve got one in every house in this country.” She picked up her bag, still laughing, and went to the door.

“Police,” she was saying, “that’s ripe.”

“Hilda, you’re not to go out in the street looking like that,” said Mrs. Fulmino.

“I’d better go with her,” said Mr. Fulmino.

“I’ll go,” I said. They were glad to let me.

It is ten years since I walked with Hilda to her lodgings. I shall not forget it, and the warm, dead, rubbery city night. It is frightening to walk with a woman who has been robbed and wronged. Her eyes were half-closed as though she was reckoning as she walked. I had to pull her back on to the pavement or she would have gone flat into a passing car. The only thing she said to me was:

“They took Shinji’s rings as well.”

Her room was on the ground floor. It had a divan and a not very clean dark green cover on it. A pair of shoes were sticking out from under it. There was a plain deal cupboard and she went straight to it. Two dresses were left. The rest had gone. She went to a table and opened the drawer. It was empty except for some letters.

I stood not knowing what to say. She seemed surprised to see me there still.

“He’s cleared the lot,” she said vacantly. Then she seemed to realise that she was staring at me without seeing me for she lowered her angry shoulders.

“We’ll get them back,” I said.

“How?” she said, mocking me, but not unkindly.

“I will,” I said. “Don’t be upset.”

“You!” she said.

“Yes, I will,” I said.

I wanted to say more. I wanted to touch her. But I couldn’t. The ruin had made her untouchable.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m okey-doke. You’re different from your brother. You don’t remember those days. I told Mr. Gloster about him. Come to that, Mr. Faulkner too. They took it naturally. That was a fault of Mr. Singh”—she never called him by his Christian name—“jealousy.”

She kicked off her shoes and sat down on the cheap divan and frowned at the noise it made and she laughed.

“One day in Bombay I got homesick and he asked me what I was thinking about and I was green, I just said ‘Sid Fraser’s neck. It had a mole on it’—you should have seen his face. He wouldn’t talk to me for a week. It’s a funny thing about those countries. Some people might rave about them, I didn’t see anything to them.”

She got up.

“You go now,” she said laughing. “I must have been in love.”

I dreamed about Hilda’s face all night and in the morning I wouldn’t have been surprised to see London had been burned out to a cinder. But the next night her face did not come and I had to think about it. Further and further it went, a little less every day and night, and I did not seem to notice when someone said Bill Williams had been picked up by the police, or when Constance had been found half dead with aspirins, and when, in both cases, Mr. Fulmino told me he had to “give assistance in the identification,” for Hilda had gone. She left the day after I took her to her room. Where she went no one knew. We guessed. We imagined. Across water, I thought, getting further and further away, in very fine clothes and very beautiful. France, Mr. Fulmino thought, or possibly Italy. Africa, even. New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Bombay, Singapore. Where? Even one day six months after she had left when he came to the library and showed me a postcard he had had from her, the first message, it did not say where she was and someone in the post office had pulled off the stamp. It was a picture of Hilda herself on a seat in a park, sitting with Mr. Faulkner and Mr. Gloster. You wouldn’t recognise her.

But Mr. Gloster’s book came out. Oh yes. It wasn’t about Japan or India or anything like that. It was about us.

JUST A LITTLE MORE

They were speaking in low voices in the kitchen.

“How is he? Has he said what he is going to do?” she asked her husband. “Is there any news?”

“None at all,” her husband whispered. “He’s coming down now. He says he just wants a house by the sea, in a place where the air is bracing and the water’s soft and there’s a good variety of fish.”

“Sh-h-h! Why do we whisper like this? Here he comes. Get the plates.”

A moment later, the very old gentleman, her father-in-law, was standing in the doorway, staring and smiling. He was short and very fat, and one of the things he liked to do was to pause in the doorway of a room and look it over from ceiling to floor. In the old days, his family or his workers at the factory used to stiffen nervously when he did this, wondering where his eye would stop.

“Excuse me being rude,” he said at last. “What a lovely smell.”

“Take your father in,” the wife said. “These plates are hot. Go into the dining-room, Grandpa.”

“I’m just looking at your refrigerator, darling,” the old gentleman said. “Very nice. It’s a Pidex, I see. Is that a good make? I mean is it good—does it work well? . . . I’m glad to hear that. Did you get it from the Pidex people? . . . Ah, I thought you did. Good people.”

The son, who was in his fifties, took the old gentleman by the elbow and moved him slowly into the dining-room. The old gentleman blew his nose.

“No. Your mother’s hands were as cold as ice when I got to her,” said the old gentleman, astonished by a memory. “But she had gone. Where do I go? Do I sit here?”

He sat down very suddenly at the table. Although he weighed close to two hundred pounds, his clothes hung loosely on him, for he had once weighed much more. His nostrils had spread and reddened over a skin that was greenish and violet on the cheeks but as pale and stringy as a chicken’s at the neck.

His daughter-in-law and two grandchildren brought in the joint and the vegetables. The grandchildren were called Richard and Helen. They were in their teens. Their mouths watered when they saw the food on the table, and they leaned towards it, but kept their eyes politely on the old man, like elderly listeners.

“I hope you haven’t cooked anything special for me,” the old man said. “I was just saying I talk too much when I come for a week-end here, and I eat too much. It’s living alone—having no one to talk to, and so forth, and you can’t be bothered to eat—that’s the point. What a lovely piece of beef that is! Wonderful. I haven’t seen a joint of beef like that for centuries. A small bit of loin of lamb we might have, but my wife can’t digest it.” He often forgot that his wife was dead. “And it doesn’t keep. I put it in the larder and I forget and it goes wrong.” His big face suddenly crinkled like an apple, with disgust.

“Well, well, I don’t know, I’m sure,” he went on, gazing at the beef his son was now carving. “I suppose it’s all right. What do you call a joint like that?” He pointed across the table to his grandson. “We used to have beef when your father was a boy, Richard. Your father was a boy once. You can’t imagine that, can you? Aitchbone, was it? I can’t remember. I don’t know where your mother used to get it. Bell’s, I suppose. I don’t know what we paid for it. Sixpence a pound, perhaps. We can’t do it now; it’s the price.”

His son passed him a plate. The old man hesitated not knowing whether to pass it on and not wanting to. “If this is for me, don’t give me any more,” he said. “I hardly eat anything nowadays. If I could have just a little fat . . .” Relieved, he kept the plate.

“Pass the vegetables to Grandpa,” said his daughter-in-law to Helen.

“Grandpa, vegetables?” Helen said, looking younger now as she spoke.

“Oh,” said the old gentleman. He had gone into a dream. “I was just watching you carving,” he said to his son. “I was looking at your face. You’ve got just the expression of your great-grandfather Harry. I remember him when I was a little boy. Father took me to see him—it was one morning. He took me down to a warehouse, would it be?—in the docks or harbour—a factory, perhaps—and he lifted me up to a window and I saw him, just his face, it was only a minute. He was slitting up herrings; it was a curing place.”

“Fish! I knew it.” His daughter-in-law laughed.

“The sea is in our blood,” said her husband. Everyone was laughing.

“What is this? What are you laughing at? What have I said?” the old gentleman asked, smiling. “Are you getting at me?”

“That is where you get your taste for kippers,” said his daughter-in-law to her husband.

“Ah, kippers!” said the old gentleman, delighted by his strange success. “How are you for fish in this neighbourhood? Do you get good fish? I sometimes feel like a piece of fish. But there doesn’t seem to be the fish about, these days. I don’t know why that is. No, I went up to the fishmonger on Tuesday and I looked. He came up to me, and I said ‘Good morning,’ ‘Good morning, Mr. Hopkins,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’ ‘Do for me?’ I said. ‘Give me a fortnight in Monte Carlo.’ He exploded. I said, ‘What’s happened to you? What’s wrong?’ ‘What do you mean, Mr. Hopkins?’ he said. ‘I mean, where’s your fish?’ I said. ‘That’s not what I call fish. Not f-i-s-h.’ He knew what I meant. ‘Sole,’ he said. ‘Dover sole,’ I said. ‘Mr. Hopkins,’ he said, ‘I haven’t had a Dover sole for a fortnight. Not one I’d sell
you.
Lemon sole,’ he said, and something—grayling did he say? Well, that’s the way it is. And so we go on.

“No,” the old man said after a moment. “Kitty, your mother, my wife, was very fond of fish. When we were first married, and so forth, we came down from the north—How old are you, my boy? Fifty-seven? You’re not fifty-seven!—it was just before you were born, and my wife said, ‘I’d give anything for an oyster.’ The train didn’t get in till eight, but we were young and reckless in those days. I didn’t care a damn for anyone. I was ready to knock the world over. I was in a good crib, five pounds a week at Weekley’s—before Hollins took them over. All expenses. I thought I was Julius Caesar—marvellous, isn’t it? Do I mean him? And we went across the road and your mother said, ‘Come on—’ ”

The son interrupted, picking up the story. “And a bus driver leaned out of his cab and said, ‘Watch out, lady. Babies are scarce this year.’ Mother told me.”

“I’m sure she didn’t,” said the old gentleman, blushing a little. “Your father’s imagination, Richard!”

“Yes, but what happened?” asked his daughter-in-law.

“And there was a little place, a real old London fish place—sawdust on the floor, I suppose they had in those days. Crossfield . . . Cross . . . Crofty—I forget the name—and we had a dozen oysters each, maybe I had a couple of dozen; I don’t remember now, I couldn’t say. Frederick’s—that was the name of the place. Frederick’s. And I suppose we must have followed it with Dover sole. They used to do a wonderful Welsh rabbit.”

“And that is how I was born,” said the son. “Let me give you some more beef, Father.”

“Me? Oh, no. I don’t eat what I used to. It’s living alone, and these new teeth of mine—I’ve had a lot of trouble with them. Don’t give me any more. I don’t mind a couple of slices—well, just another. And some fat. I like a piece of fat. That’s what I feel. You go home and you get to the house, and it’s dark. And it’s empty. You go in and the boiler’s low—I don’t seem to get the right coke. Do you get good coke here? You look at it all and you look in the larder and you can’t be bothered. There’s a chop, a bit of bread and cheese, perhaps. And you think, well, if this is all there is in life, you may as well finish it. I’m in a rut down in that place. I’ve got to get away. I can’t breathe there. I’d like to get down to the sea.”

“I think you ought to go where you have friends,” said his daughter-in-law.

The old gentleman put his knife and fork down. “Friends?” he said, in a stern voice, raising his chin. “I have no friends. All my friends are dead.” He said this with indignation and contempt.

“But what about your friend Rogers, in Devonshire?” said his son.

“Rogers? I was disappointed in Rogers. He’s aged. He’s let himself go. I hadn’t seen him for twenty-five years. When I saw him, I said to him, ‘Why, what’s the matter with you? Trying to pretend you are an old man?’ He looked at me. He’d let his moustache go long and grey. I wouldn’t have known him. And there was something else. A funny thing. It upset me.” The old gentleman’s jolly face shrivelled up again, with horror. “The hairs in his nose had gone grey!” he said. “I couldn’t bear it. He was very kind, and his wife was. We had lunch. Soup of some kind—tomato, or maybe oxtail—and then a piece of lamb, potatoes, and cauliflower. Oh, very nice. I’ve forgotten what the dessert was—some cream, I suppose, they have good cream there—and coffee, of course. Cheese . . . I don’t remember. Afterwards—and this is what upset me about old people—they wanted a rest. Every day, after lunch, they go off and have a sleep—every day. Can you imagine that? I couldn’t stand that. Terrible.”

“It’s good to have a siesta,” said the son.

“I couldn’t. I never have. I just can’t,” said the old gentleman, in a panic. “The other afternoon after lunch, I forget what I had, a chop, I think—I couldn’t be bothered to cook vegetables, well, on your own you don’t, that’s the point—I dropped off. I don’t know for how long, and when I woke up it was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know where I was. ‘Where am I?’ I said. ‘What day is it?’ And I reached out for my wife. I thought I was in bed, and I called out, ‘Kitty, Kitty, where are you?’ and then I said, ‘Oh.’ It came back to me. I’m here. In this room. I couldn’t move. I got up and put on the light. I was done up. I poured myself out a small glass of port. I felt I had to. It was shocking. And shocking dreams.”

He stared and then suddenly he turned to his daughter-in-law and said, in another voice, “Those sandwiches I shan’t forget. Egg, wasn’t it? You remember?” He wagged a finger at Helen. “Helen, your mother is a wonder at egg sandwiches. It was the first time in my life I’d ever eaten them. The day we put Kitty away, you remember she came down and made egg sandwiches. What is the secret of it? She won’t tell. Butter, I suppose? Richard, what is the word I want? You know— ‘smashing,’ I suppose you’d call them.”

He paused, and his eyes grew vaguer. “No,” he went on, “I don’t know what I’ll do. I think I shall go to the sea and look around. I shall get a list of houses, and put my furniture in store. I could live with your brother John, or you. I know I could, but it would be wrong. You have your own lives. I want my independence. Life is beginning for me— that is what I feel. I feel I would like to go on a cruise round the world. There was a house at Bexhill I saw. They wanted seven thousand for it. I felt it would suit me.”

“Seven thousand!” said his son, in alarm. “Where would you get seven thousand from?”

“Oh,” said the old gentleman sharply, “I should raise it.”

“Raise it!” exclaimed the son. “How?”

“That’s just it,” said the old gentleman cheerfully. “I don’t know. The way will open up. You perhaps, or John.”

Husband and wife looked down the table at each other in consternation.

“Shall we go upstairs and have some coffee?” she said.

“That son of yours, that Richard—did you see what he ate?” said the old gentleman as he got up from the table. “Marvellous, isn’t it? Of course, things are better than when I was a boy. I feel everything is better. We used to go to school with twopence for a pie. Not every day— twice a week. The other days, we just looked at the shop window. Pies piled up. And once a week—Friday, I expect—it was herrings in the evening. The fisherwoman came calling them in the street, eighteen a shilling, fresh fish out of the sea. Salmon I used to be fond of. D’you ever have salmon?”

He paused in the doorway and looked at the carpet on the stairs and at the wallpaper. “I like rich things,” he said, nodding to the carpet. “That gravy was good. Luscious grapes, pears, all large fruits I like. Those Christmas displays at the meat market—turkeys and geese by the thousand there used to be. I always used to bring your mother something. A few chops, two or three pairs of kippers. And so forth. I don’t know what.”

“Upstairs to the sitting-room, Father,” said the son. “I’m coming in a minute with the coffee.”

The son went into the kitchen, and the whispering began again.

“Seven thousand!” he said. “Seven million wouldn’t keep him!”

“Sh-h-h,” said his wife. “It’s a day-dream.”

“But what are we going to do?”

In a few minutes, he took the coffee upstairs. The old gentleman was sitting down, with his waistcoat undone and his thumbs twiddling on his stomach.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” the old gentleman said rebukingly. “You’ve lost weight. You don’t eat. You worry too much. My wife used to worry.”

The son passed a coffee cup to him.

“Is there a lot of sugar in it? Thank you,” the old man said. He gave it a stir, took a sip, and then held the cup out. “I think I’ll have a couple of spoonfuls more.”