The Pritchett Century (47 page)

Mr Fulmino loved whatever had not happened yet. His forecasts
were always wrong. I left the library years ago and never fulfilled the future he had planned for me. Obviously Hilda did not remember me. Thirteen years before, when she married Mr Singh and left home, I was no more than a boy.

“Well, I’ll kiss him too,” she said. “And another for your brother.”

That was the first thing to happen, the first of many signs of how her life had had no contact with ourselves.

“He was killed in the war, dear,” said Mrs Fulmino.

“She couldn’t know,” said Constance.

“I’m sorry,” said Hilda.

We all stood silent, and Hilda turned to hold on to her mother, little Mrs Johnson, whose face was coquettish with tears and who came only up to Hilda’s shoulder. The old lady was bewildered. She was trembling as though she were going to shake to pieces like a tree in the autumn. Hilda stood still, touching her tinted brown hair which was done in a tight high style and still unloosened, despite all the hugs and kissings. Her arms looked as dry as sand, her breasts were full in her green, flowered dress and she was gazing over our heads now from large yellow eyes which had almost closed into two blind, blissful curving lines. Her eyebrows seemed to be lacquered. How Oriental she looked on that first day! She was looking above our heads at old Mrs Draper’s shabby room and going over the odd things she remembered, and while she stood like that, the women were studying her clothes. A boy’s memory is all wrong. Naturally, when I was a boy I had thought of her as tall. She was really short. But I did remember her bold nose—it was like her mother’s and old Mrs Draper’s; those two were sisters. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known her. And that is what Mr Fulmino said when we were all silent and incredulous again. We had Hilda back. Not just “back” either, but “back from the dead,” reborn.

“She was in the last coach of the train, wasn’t she, Mother?” Mr Fulmino said to Mrs Johnson. He called her “mother” for the occasion, celebrating her joy.

“Yes,” said Mrs Johnson. “Yes.” Her voice scraped and trembled.

“In the last coach, next the van. We went right up the platform, we
thought we’d missed her, didn’t we? She was,” he exclaimed with acquisitive pride, “in the First Class.”

“Like you missed me coming from Penzance,” said Mrs Fulmino swelling powerfully and going that thundery violet colour which old wrongs gave her.

“Posh!” said Hilda. And we all smiled in a sickly way.

“Don’t you ever do it again, my girl! Don’t you ever do it again,” said her mother, old Mrs Johnson, clinging to her daughter’s arm and shaking it as if it were a bellrope.

“I was keeping an eye on my luggage,” Hilda laughed.

Ah! That was a point! There was not only Hilda, there was her luggage. Some of it was in the room, but the bigger things were outside on the landing, piled up, looking very new, with the fantastic labels of hotels in Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York on it, and a beautiful jewel box in white leather on top like a crown. Old Mrs Draper did not like the luggage being outside the room in case it was in the way of the people upstairs. Constance went out and fetched the jewel box in. We had all seen it. We were as astonished by all these cases as we were by Hilda herself. After thirteen years, six of them war, we recognised that the poor ruined woman we had prepared for had not arrived. She shone with money. Later on, one after the other of us, except old Mrs Draper who could not walk far, went out and looked at the luggage and came back to study Hilda in a new way.

We had all had a shock. She had been nearly two years coming home from Tokyo. Before that there was the occupation, before that the war itself. Before that there were the years in Bombay and Singapore, when she was married to an Indian they always called Mr Singh. All those years were lost to us. None of us had been to India. What happened there to Mr Singh? We knew he had died—but how? Even if we had known, we couldn’t have imagined it. None of us had been to Singapore, none of us to Japan. People from streets like Hincham Street do go to such places—it is not past belief. Knock on the doors of half the houses in London and you will find people with relations all over the world—but none of us had. Mention these places to us, we look at our grey skies and see boiling sun. Our one certainty about Hilda was what, in fact, the newspaper said the next day, with her photograph
and the headline:
A Mother’s Faith. Four Years in Japanese Torture Camp. London Girl’s Ordeal
. Hilda was a terrible item of news, a gash in our lives, and we looked for the signs of it on her body, in the way she stood, in the lines on her face, as if we were expecting a scream from her mouth like the screams we were told Bill Williams gave out at night in his sleep, after he had been flown back home when the war ended. We had had to wait and wait for Hilda. At one time—there was a postcard from Hawaii—she was pinned like a butterfly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; soon after there was a letter from Tokyo saying she couldn’t get a passage. Confusing. She was travelling backwards. Letters from Tokyo were still coming after her letters from San Francisco.

We were still standing, waiting for Constance to bring in the teapot for the tea was already laid. The trolley buses go down Hincham Street. It is a mere one hundred and fifty yards of a few little houses and a few little shops, which has a sudden charmed importance because the main road has petered out at our end by the Lord Nelson and an enormous public lavatory, and the trolley buses have to run down Hincham Street before picking up the main road again, after a sharp turn at the convent. Hincham Street is less a street than an interval, a disheartened connection. While we stood in one of those silences that follow excitement, a trolley bus came by and Hilda exclaimed:

“You’ve still got the old trams. Bump! Bump! Bump!” Hilda was ecstatic about the sound. “Do you remember I used to be frightened the spark from the pole would set the lace curtains on fire when I was little?”

For, as the buses turned, the trolley arms would come swooping with two or three loud bumps and a spit of blue electricity, almost hitting Mrs Draper’s sitting-room window which was on the first floor.

“It’s trolleys now, my girl,” said old Mrs Draper, whose voice was like the voice of time itself chewing away at life. “The trams went years ago, before the war.”

Old Mrs Draper had sat down in her chair again by the fire which always burned winter and summer in this room; she could not stand for long. It was the first remark that had given us any sense of what was
bewildering all of us, the passing of time, the growing of a soft girl into a grown, hard-hipped woman. For old Mrs Draper’s mind was detached from events around her and moved only among the signal facts and conclusions of history.

Presently we were, as the saying is, “at our teas.” Mr Fulmino, less puzzled than the rest of us, expanded in his chair with the contentment of one who had personally operated a deeply British miracle. It was he who had got Hilda home.

“We’ve got all the correspondence, haven’t we, Harry?” he said. “We kept it—the War Office, Red Cross, Prisoner of War Commission, everything, Hilda. I’ll show it to you.”

His task had transformed him and his language. Identification, registration, accommodation, communication, rehabilitation, hospitalisation, administration, investigation, transportation—well we had all dreamed of Hilda in our different ways.

“They always said the same thing,” Mrs Fulmino said reproachfully. “No one of the name of Mrs Singh on the lists.”

“I wrote to Bombay,” said Mr Fulmino.

“He wrote to Singapore,” said Mrs Fulmino.

Mr Fulmino drank some tea, wiped his lips and became geography.

“All British subjects were rounded up, they said,” Mrs Fulmino said.

We nodded. We had made our stand, of course, on the law. Mrs Fulmino was authority.

“But Hilda was married to an Indian,” said Constance.

We glanced with a tolerance we did not usually feel for Constance. She was always trying to drag politics in.

“She’s a British subject by birth,” said Mrs Fulmino firmly.

“Mum,” Hilda whispered, squeezing her mother’s arm hard, and then looked up to listen, as if she were listening to talk about a faraway stranger.

“I was in Tokyo when the war started,” she said. “Not Singapore.”

“Oh Tokyo!” exclaimed Mr Fulmino, feeling in his waistcoat for a pencil to make a note of it and, suddenly, realising that his note-taking days were over.

“Whatever the girl has done she has been punished for it,” came old Mrs Draper’s mournful voice from the chair by the fire, but in the clatter
no one heard her, except old Mrs Johnson, who squeezed her daughter’s arm and said:

“My girl is a jewel.”

Still, Hilda’s words surprised us. We had worked it out that after she and Mr Singh were married and went to Bombay he had heard of a better job in the state railway medical service and had gone to Singapore where the war had caught her. Mrs Fulmino looked affronted. If Mr Fulmino expanded into geography and the language of state—he worked for the Borough Council—Mrs Fulmino liked a fact to be a fact.

“We got the postcards,” said Mrs Fulmino sticking to chronology.

“Hawaii,” Mr Fulmino said. “How’d you get there? Swim, I suppose.” He added, “A sweet spot, it looks, suit us for a holiday—palms.”

“Coconuts,” said young Jack Draper, who worked in a pipe factory, speaking for the first time.

“Be quiet,” said his wife.

“It’s an American base now,” said Constance with her politically sugared smile.

We hesitated but let her observation pass. It was simple to ignore her. We were happy.

“I suppose they paid your fare,” said Jack Draper’s wife, a north-country woman.

“Accommodation, transportation,” said Mr Fulmino. “Food, clothing. Everything. Financed by the international commission.”

This remark made old Mrs Johnson cry a little. In those years none of us had deeply believed that Hilda was alive. The silence was too long; too much time had gone by. Others had come home by the thousand with stories of thousands who had died. Only old Mrs Johnson had been convinced that Hilda was safe. The landlord at the Lord Nelson, the butcher, anyone who met old Mrs Johnson as she walked by like a poor, decent ghost with her sewing bundles, in those last two years, all said in war-staled voices:

“It’s a mother’s faith, that’s what it is. A mother’s faith’s a funny thing.”

She would walk along, with a cough like someone driving tacks. Her chest had sunk and under her brown coat her shoulder blades seemed
to have sharpened into a single hump. Her faith gave her a bright, yet also a sly, dishonest look.

“I’m taking this sewing up to Mrs Tracy’s. She wants it in a hurry,” she might say.

“You ought to rest, Mrs Johnson, like the doctor said.”

“I want a bit of money for when my girl comes home,” she said. “She’ll want feeding up.”

And she would look around perhaps, for a clock, in case she ought, by this time, to have put a pot on the stove.

She had been too ill, in hospital, during the war, to speak about what might have happened to Hilda. Her own pain and fear of dying deafened her to what could be guessed. Mrs Johnson’s faith had been born out of pain, out of the inability—within her prison of aching bones and crushed breathing—to identify herself with her daughter. Her faith grew out of her very self-centredness. And when she came out from the post office every week, where she put her savings, she looked demure, holy and secretive. If people were too kind and too sympathetic with her, she shuffled and looked mockingly. Seven hospitals, she said, had not killed
her
.

Now, when she heard Mr Fulmino’s words about the fare, the clothes, the food, the expense of it all, she was troubled. What had she worked for—even at one time scrubbing in a canteen—but to save Hilda from a charity so vast in its humiliation, from so blank a herding mercy. Hilda was hers, not theirs. Hilda kept her arm on her mother’s waist and while Mr Fulmino carried on with the marvels of international organisation (which moved Mrs Fulmino to say hungrily, “It takes a war to bring it out”), Hilda ignored them and whispered to comfort her mother. At last the old lady dried her eyes and smiled at her daughter. The smile grew to a small laugh, she gave a proud jerk to her head, conveying that she and her Hil were not going to kowtow in gratitude to anyone, and Hilda, at last, said out loud to her mother what, no doubt, she had been whispering:

“He wouldn’t let me pay anything, Mum. Faulkner his name was. Very highly educated. He came from California. We had a fancy dress dance on the ship and he made me go as a geisha … He gave me these …” And she raised her hand to show her mother the bracelets on it.

Mrs Johnson laughed wickedly.

“Did he …? Was he …?” said Mrs Johnson.

“No. Well, I don’t know,” said Hilda. “But I kept his address.”

Mrs Johnson smiled round at all of us, to show that in spite of all, being the poorest in the family and the ones that had suffered most, she and Hilda knew how to look after themselves.

This was the moment when there was that knock on the door. Everyone was startled and looked at it.

“A knock!” said Mr Fulmino.

“A knock, Constance,” said young Mrs Draper who had busy north-country ears.

“A knock,” several said.

Old Mrs Draper made one of her fundamental utterances again, one of her growls from the belly of the history of human indignation.

“We are,” she said, “in the middle of our teas. Constance, go and see and tell them.”

But before Constance got to the door, two young men, one with a camera, came right into the room, without asking. Some of us lowered our heads and then, just as one young man said, “I’m from the
News,
” the other clicked his camera.

Jack Draper said, nearly choking:

“He’s taken a snap of us eating.”

While we were all staring at them, old Mrs Draper chewed out grandly:

“Who may they be?”

But Hilda stood up and got her mother to her feet, too. “Stand up all of us,” she said eagerly. “It’s for the papers.”

It was the Press. We were in confusion. Mrs Fulmino pushed Mr Fulmino forward towards the reporter and then pulled him back. The reporter stood asking questions and everyone answered at once. The photographer kept on taking photographs and, when he was not doing that, started picking up vases and putting them down and one moment was trying the drawer of a little table by the window. They pushed Hilda and her mother into a corner and took a picture of them, Hilda calling to us all to “come in” and Mr Fulmino explaining to the reporters. Then they went, leaving a cigarette burning on one of old Mrs Draper’s lace doyleys under the fern and two more butts on the floor.
“What did they say? What did they say?” we all asked one another, but no one could remember. We were all talking at once, arguing about who had heard the knock first. Young Mrs Draper said her tea was spoiled and Constance opened the window to let the cigarette smoke out and then got the kettle. Mr Fulmino put his hand on his wife’s knee because she was upset and she shook it off. When we had calmed down Hilda said: