The Pritchett Century (66 page)

“My clerk says,” said the vice-consul, in his large way, “that you came in at midday the day before yesterday and asked where you could get a girl. He says he knows the airline girl and her sister. He knows the whole family. The father has the barbershop opposite the church and he is a dentist too. He buys up teeth, mostly after funerals.”

The clerk nodded and added a few words.

“He says he fixed him up. He says this man’s got the biggest collection of teeth in the town.”

The clerk’s neck was thin; he was like wood. He opened his mouth wide with pride for McDowell to see. There were five sharp steel teeth and two with gold in them.

The vice-consul went on, “He says he often sells them to missionaries. The Dominicans have a mission here. The poor devils come back from far up in the Indian settlements looking like skeletons after three years and with their teeth dropping out. I told you: no calcium. No fresh vegetables. No milk. The climate …”

The Indian said no more.

McDowell got up and moved towards the clerk suspiciously, setting his chin. “What’s he say about the Dominicans?” said McDowell in a threatening way.

The vice-consul said, “He says you could go down to this man, this barber chap, and you might find your teeth.”

The Indian nodded.

“If you don’t—well, they’ve been snapped up and are being flown up the river. Sorry, McDowell, that’s all we can do. Take my advice and get back double-quick to your ship. Good day.”

The vice-consul picked up some papers and called to McDowell as he left the room, “They’ll be up there, preaching The Word.”

The following day the vice-consul went out to the
Ivanhoe
to have a last drink with the captain and to have a look at the puma, and grinned when it opened its mouth and snarled at him. The captain said
McDowell would be all right once he got to sea, and went on to some tale about a man who claimed to have a cat that backed horses.

It’s the bloody great river that does it, the vice-consul thought as he was put ashore afterwards and as he walked home in the dark and saw all the people whispering in their white cotton clothes, looking like ghosts. He was thinking it was only another year before his leave and that he was the only human being in the town.

(1980)

I checked the greenhouses, saw the hose taps were turned off, fed the Alsatian, and then put the bar on the main gate to the Nursery and left by the side door for my flat. As I changed out of my working clothes I looked down on the rows of labelled fresh green plants. What a pleasure to see such an orderly population of growing things gambling for life—how surprising that twenty years ago the sight of so much husbandry would have bored me.

When I was drying myself in the bathroom I noticed Sally’s bathcap hanging there and I took the thing to the closet in the bedroom, and then in half an hour I picked up Mother at her hotel and drove her to Duggie and Sally’s house, where we were to have dinner. I supposed Mother must have seen Sally’s bathcap, for as we passed the Zoo she said, “I do wish you would get married again and settle down.”

“Dutch elm disease,” I replied, pointing to the crosses on one or two trees in the Park.

The Zoo is my halfway mark when I go to Duggie and Sally’s—what vestiges of embarrassment I feel become irrelevant when I have passed it.

“It worries your father,” Mother said.

Mother is not “failing.” She is in her late seventies and Father was
killed in the war thirty years ago, but he comes to life in a random way, as if time were circular for her. Father seems to be wafted by, and sows the only important guilt I have—I have so little memory of him. Duggie has said once or twice to Sally that though I am in my early forties, there are still signs that I lacked a father’s discipline. Duggie, a speculative man, puts the early whiteness of my hair down to this. Obviously, he says, I was a late child, probably low in vitality.

Several times during this week’s visit I have taken Mother round the shops she likes in London. She moves fast on her thin legs, and if age has shortened her by giving her a small hump on her shoulders, this adds to her sharp-eyed, foraging appearance. She was rude, as usual, to the shop assistants, who seemed to admire this—perhaps because it reminded them of what they had heard of “the good old days.” And she dressed with taste, her makeup was delicate, and if her skin had aged, it was fine as silk; her nose was young, her eyes as neat as violets. The week had been hot, but she was cool and slightly scented.

“Not as hot as we had it in Cairo when your father was alive,” she said in her mannish voice.

Time was restored: Father had returned to his grave.

After being gashed by bombs during the war, the corner of early-Victorian London where Duggie and Sally live has “gone up.” Once a neighbourhood of bed-sitters, now the small houses are expensive and trim; enormous plane trees, fast-growing sycamores, old apple and pear trees bearing uneatable fruit, crowd the large gardens. It was to see the garden and to meet Duggie, who was over from Brussels on one of his monthly trips, that Mother had really come: in the country she is an indefatigable gardener. So is Sally, who opened the door to us. One of the unspoken rules of Sally and myself is that we do not kiss when I go to her house; her eyes were as polite as glass (and without the quiver to the pupils they usually have in them) as she gave her hand to my mother. She had drawn her fair hair severely back.

“Duggie is down in the garden,” Sally said to Mother and made a fuss about the steps that lead down from her sitting-room balcony. “These steps my husband put in are shaky—let me help you.”

“I got used to companionways going to Egypt,” said Mother in her
experienced voice. “We always went by sea, of course. What a lovely garden.”

“Very wild,” said Sally. “There used to be a lawn here. It was no good, so we dug it up.”

“No one can afford lawns nowadays,” said my mother. “We have three. Much better to let nature take its course.”

It is a clever garden of the romantic kind, half of it a green cavern under the large trees where the sun can still flicker in the higher branches. You duck your way under untidy climbing roses; there is a foreground, according to season, of overgrown marguerites, tobacco plants, dahlias, irises, lilies, ferns—a garden of wild, contrived masses. Our progress was slow as Mother paused to botanise until we got to a wide, flagged circle which is shaded by a muscular fig tree. Duggie was standing by the chairs with a drink in his hand, waiting for us. He moved a chair for Mother.

“No, I must see it all first,” Mother said. “Nice little magnolia.”

I was glad she noticed that.

There was a further tour of plants that “do well in the shade”—“Dear Solomon’s-seal,” she said politely, as if the plant were a person. A bird or two darted off into other gardens with the news—and then we returned to the chairs set out on the paved circle. Duggie handed drinks to us, with the small bow of a tall man. He is lazily well-made, a bufferish fellow in his late fifties, his drooping grey moustache is affable—“honourable” is how I would describe the broad road of sunburned baldness going over his head. His nose is just a touch bottled, which gives him the gentlemanly air of an old club servant, or rather of being not one man but a whole club, uttering impressions of this and that. Out of this club his private face will appear, a face that puts on a sudden, fishy-eyed stare, in the middle of one of his long sentences. It is the stare of a man in a brief state of shock who has found himself suspended over a hole that has opened at his feet. His job takes him abroad a good deal and his stare is also that of an Englishman abroad who has sighted another Englishman he cannot quite place. Not being able to get a word in while the two women were talking, he turned this stare on me. “I missed you the last time I was home,” he said.

Again, it is my rule that I don’t go to the house unless he is there.

“How is that chest of yours?”

I gave a small cough and he gave me a dominating look. He likes to worry about my health.

“The best thing your uncle ever did for you was to get you out of the city. You needed an open-air life.”

Duggie, who has had to make his own way, rather admires me for having had a rich uncle.

Was he shooting a barb into me? I don’t think so. We always have this conversation: he was born to repeat himself—one more sign of his honourableness.

Duggie takes pride in a possessive knowledge of my career. He often says to Sally, “He ought to put on weight—white hair at his age—but what do you expect? Jazz bands in Paris and London, hanging round Chelsea bars, playing at all that literary stuff, going into that bank—all that sort of nonsense.” Then he goes on, “Mother’s boy—marrying a woman twelve years older than himself. Sad that she died,” he adds. “Must have done something to him—that breakdown, a year in the sanatorium, he probably gambled. Still, the Nursery has pulled him together. Characteristic, of course, that most of the staff are girls.”

“It’s doing well,” he said in a loud confidential voice, nodding at the fig tree by the south wall, close to us.

“What a lovely tree,” Mother said. “Does it bear? My husband will only eat figs fresh from the tree.”

“One or two little ones. But they turn yellow and drop off in June,” said Sally.

“What it needs,” Duggie said, “is the Mediterranean sun. It ought to be in Turkey, that is where you get the best figs.”

“The sun isn’t enough. The fig needs good drainage and has to be fertilised,” Mother said.

“All fruit needs that,” said Duggie.

“The fig needs two flies—the Blastophaga and, let me see, is it the Sycophaga? I think so—anyway, they are Hymenoptera,” Mother said.

Duggie gazed with admiration at my mother. He loves experts. He had been begging me for years to bring her over to his house.

“Well, we saved its life, didn’t we, Teddy?” he said to me and
boasted on his behalf and mine. “We flagged the area. There was nothing but a lake of muddy water here. How many years ago was that?”

“Four or five,” I said.

“No!” said Duggie. “Only three.”

Was he coming into the open at last and telling me that he knew that this was the time when Sally and I became lovers? I think not. The stare dropped out of his face. His honourable look returned.

Sally and Duggie were what I call “Monday people” at the Nursery. There is a rush of customers on the weekend. They are the instant gardeners who drive in, especially in the spring and autumn, to buy everything, from plants already in bud and flowers, the potted plants, for balconies of flats. The crowd swarms and our girls are busy at the counter we had to install to save costs as the business grew. (The counter was Duggie’s idea: he could not resist seeing the Nursery as one of his colonies.) But on Monday the few fanatic gardeners come, and I first became aware of Sally because she was very early, usually alone, a slight woman in her late thirties with her straw-blond hair drawn back from a high forehead in those days, a severe look of polite, silent impatience which would turn into a wide, fastidious grimace like the yawn of a cat if anyone spoke to her. She would take a short step back and consider one’s voice. She looked almost reckless and younger when she put on glasses to read what was on the sacks and packets of soil, compost, and fertiliser in the store next to the office, happiest in our warm greenhouses, a woman best seen under glass. Her eyebrows were softer, more downily intimate than anything else about her. They reminded me when I first saw her of the disturbing eyebrows of an aunt of mine which used to make me blush when I was a boy. Hair disturbs me.

One day she brought Duggie to the Nursery when I was unloading boxes of plants that came from the growers and I heard her snap at him, “Wait here. If you see the manager, ask about grass seed and stop following me round. You fuss me.”

For the next half-hour she looked round the seedlings or went into the greenhouses while Duggie stood where he was told to stand. I was near him when the lorry drove off.

“Are you being attended to?” I said. “I’ll call a girl.”

He was in his suspended state. “No, I was thinking,” he said in the lazy voice of a man who, home from abroad and with nothing to do, was hoping to find out if there were any fellow thinkers about. “I was thinking, vegetation is a curious thing,” he said with the predatory look of a man who had an interesting empire of subjects to offer. “I mean, one notices when one gets back to London there is more vegetation than brick. Trees,” he said. “Plants and shrubs, creeper, moss, ivy,” he went on, “grass, of course. Why this and not that? Climate, I suppose. You have laurels here, but no oleander, yet it’s all over the Mediterranean and Mexico. You get your fig or your castor-oil plant, but no banana, no ginkgo, no datura. The vine used to swarm in Elizabethan times, but rare now, but I hear they’re making wine again. It must be thin. The climate changed when the Romans cut down the forests.” For a moment he became a Roman and then drifted on, “Or the Normans. We all come down to grass in the end.”