The Pritchett Century (69 page)

The next day she came to me; on the third day she pulled me back as I was getting out of bed and said, “Duggie’s coming home. I have something bad to tell you, something shameful.” She spoke into my shoulder. “Something I tried to tell you when I telephoned, the day you came with the plant, but I couldn’t. Do you remember I telephoned to you?

“I told a lie to Duggie about that young man, I told Duggie he attacked me.” She said, “It wasn’t true. I saw him and his girl at night from my bedroom window going into the garden with their arms round each other, to the end of it, under the trees. They were there a long time. I imagined what they were doing. I could have killed that girl. I was mad with jealousy—I think I was really mad. I went out into the garden many nights to stop them, and in the afternoons I
worked there to provoke him and even peeped into their window. It was terrible. So I told Duggie. I told him the boy had come up behind me and pulled at my clothes and tried to rape me. I tore my blouse to prove it. I sent a cable to Duggie. Poor Duggie, he believed me. He came back. I made Duggie throw the boy out. You know what happened. When the boy was killed I thought I would go out of my mind.”

“I thought you said Duggie was ill,” I said.

“That is what I’m ashamed of,” she said. “But I was mad. You know, I hated you too when Duggie brought you in to do those stones. I really hated anyone being in the garden. That is why I made that scene when you brought the magnolia. When you came to the door I thought for an awful moment it was the boy’s father coming for his things; he did come once.”

I was less shocked than unnerved. I said, “The real trouble was that you were lying to yourself.” I saw myself as the rescuer for a moment.

“Do you think he believed you?” I said.

She put on the distant look she used to have when I first met her, almost a look of polite annoyance at being distracted from her story. Then she said something that was true. “Duggie doesn’t allow himself to believe what he doesn’t want to believe. He never believes what he sees. One day I found him in the sitting-room, and he started to pull a book out of the bookcase and closed it with a bang and wiped his eyes. ‘Dust,’ he said. ‘Bad as Mexico.’ Afterwards I thought, He’s been crying.”

“That was because he knew he was to blame,” I said.

I went to my window and looked at the sky. In the night he would be coming across it.

“What are we going to do?” I said. “When shall I see you? Are you going to tell him?”

She was very surprised. “Of course not,” she said, getting out of bed.

“But we must. If you don’t, I shall.”

She picked up her dress and half covered herself with it. “If you do,” she said, “I’ll never see you again, Colonel Thompson.”

“He’ll find out. I want to marry you.”

“I’ve got a daughter. You forget that. He’s my husband.”

“He’s probably got some girl,” I said lightly.

The gentleness went out of our conversation.

“You’re not to say that,” she said vehemently. We were on the edge of a quarrel.

“I have got to go,” she said. “Judy’s coming home. I’ve got to get his suits from the cleaners and there are some of yours.”

My suits and Duggie’s hanging up on nasty little wire hangers at the cleaners!

We had a crowd of customers at the Nursery and that took my mind off our parting, but when I got back to my flat the air was still and soundless. I walked round my three rooms expecting to see her, but the one or two pictures stared out of my past life. I washed up our empty glasses. Well, there it is, I thought cynically. All over. What do you expect? And I remembered someone saying, “Have an affair with a married woman if you like, but for God’s sake don’t start wanting to marry her.”

It was a help that my secretary was on holiday and I had to do all the paperwork at night. I also had my contract for re-planting the square the council had neglected and did a lot of the digging myself. As I dug I doubted Sally and went over what I knew about her life. How did she and Duggie meet? What did they say? Was Sally flaunting herself before her husband, surprising and enticing him? I was burned by jealousy. Then, at the end of the week, before I left for the square at half past eight, I heard her steps on the stairs to my office. She had a busy smile on her face.

“I’ve brought your suits,” she said. “I’m in a rush.” And she went to hang them in their plastic covers on the door, but I had her in my arms and the suits fell to the floor.

“Is it all right?” I said.

“How do you mean?” she said.

“Duggie,” I said.

“Of course,” she said complacently.

I locked the door. In a few minutes her doubts and mine were gone.
Our quarrel was over. She looked at me with surprise as she straightened her skirt.

Happiness! I took one of our girls with me to the square and stood by lazily watching her get on with her work.

After lunch I was back at the Nursery and I was alarmed to see Duggie’s bald head among the climbing greenery of our hothouse. He was stooping there, striped by sunlight, like some affable tiger. I hoped to slip by unseen, but he heard me and the tiger skin dropped off as he came out, all normality, calling, “Just the man! I’ve been away.”

I gave what must have been the first of the small coughs, the first of a long series with which I would always greet him and which made him put concern into his voice. I came to call it my “perennial hybrid”—a phrase that struck him and which he added to his vocabulary of phrases and even to his reflections on coughs in general, on Arab spitting and Mexican hawking.

“I came over to thank you for that wonderful magnolia. That was very kind. I missed it in flower but Sally says it was wonderful. You don’t know what it did for her. I don’t know whether you have noticed, she’s completely changed. She looks years younger. All her energy has come back.” Then in a louder voice: “She has forgotten all that trouble. You must have seen it. She tells me she has been giving you a hand, your girl’s away.”

“She was very kind. She took my suits to the cleaners.”

He ignored this. We walked together across the Nursery and he waved his hand to the flower beds. Did I say that his daughter was with him? She was then a fat girl of thirteen or fourteen with fair hair like her mother’s.

“Fetched them,” said the pedantic child, and from that time her gaze was like a judgement. I picked a flower for her as they followed me to the door of my office.

“By the way,” he said, “what did you do about that fellow who gets over the wall? Sally told me. Which wall was it?”

Sally seemed to tell him everything.

“He’s stopped. That one over there.”

He stood still and considered it. “What you need is a wire fence,
with a three-inch mesh to it; if it was wider, the fellow could get his toe in. It would be worth the outlay—no need to go in for one of those spiked steel fences we put up round our refineries.” He went on to the general question of fences: he had always been against people who put broken glass on walls. “Unfair,” he said. He looked lofty—“Cruel, too. Chap who did that ought to be sent off the field.

“Come and have a drink with us this evening,” Duggie said.

I could think of no excuse; in fact I felt confident and bold now, but the first person I saw at the house was Duggie wearing a jacket far too small for him. It was my jacket. She had left his suits at my office and taken mine to her own house.

Duggie laughed loudly. “Very fishy, I thought, when I saw this on my bed. Ha-ha! What’s going on? It would be funnier still if you’d worn mine.”

Sally said demurely she saw nothing funny in that. She had only been trying to help.

“Be careful when Sally tries to help.” He was still laughing. The comedy was a bond. And we kept going back to it. Judy, her daughter, enjoyed this so much that she called out, “Why doesn’t Mr Ormerod take our flat?”

Our laughter stopped. Children recklessly bring up past incidents in their parents’ lives. Duggie was about to pour wine into Sally’s glass and he stopped, holding the bottle in the air. Sally gave that passing grimace of hers and Duggie shrank into instant protective concern and to me he seemed to beg us all for silence. But he recovered quickly and laughed again, noisily—too noisily, I thought.

“He has to live near the Nursery, don’t you, Teddy? Colonel Thompson and all that.”

“Of course,” said Sally easily. “Duggie, don’t pour the wine on the carpet, please.”

It was a pleasant evening. We moved to the sitting-room and Sally sat on the sofa with the child, who gazed and gazed at me. Sally put her arm round her.

Three years have passed since that evening when Judy spoke out. When I look back, those years seem to be veiled or to sparkle with the
mists of an October day. How can one describe happiness? In due time Duggie would leave and once more for months on end Sally and I would be free, and despite our bickerings and jealousies, our arguments about whether Duggie knew or did not know, we fell into a routine and made our rules. The stamp of passion was on us, yet there was always in my mind the picture of her sitting on the sofa with her daughter. I came to swear I would do nothing that would trouble her. And she and I seemed able to forget our bodies when we were all together. Perhaps that first comedy had saved us. My notion was that Duggie invented me, as he had invented her. I spend my time, she says, inventing Duggie. She invented neither of us.

Now I have changed my mind. After that evening when the child Judy said, “Why doesn’t Mr Ormerod take our flat?” I am convinced that Duggie
knew
—because of his care for Sally, even because he knew more than either of us about Sally and that tenant of theirs who was so horribly killed on his motorbike. When he turned us into fictions he perhaps thought the fiction would soon end. It did not. He became like a weary, indulgent, and distant emperor when he was home.

But those words of Judy’s were another matter. For Duggie, Judy was not a fiction. She was his daughter, absolutely his, he made her. She was the contradiction of his failure. About her he would not pretend or compromise. I am now sure of this after one or two trivial events that occurred that year. One afternoon the day before he was due home—one of those enamelled misleading October days, indeed—Sally was tidying the bedroom at my flat. I was in the sitting-room putting the drinks away and I happened to glance down at the Nursery. I saw a young woman there, with fair hair, just like Sally’s, shading her eyes from the sun, and waving. For a moment I thought it was Sally who had secretly slipped away to avoid the sad awkwardness of those business-like partings of ours. Then I saw the woman was a young girl—Judy. I stepped back out of sight. I called Sally and she came with a broom in her hand.

“Don’t go near the window like that”—she was not even wearing a bra—“look!”

“It’s Judy! What is she up to? How long has she been there?” she said.

“She’s watching us,” I said. “She knows!”

Sally made that old grimace I now so rarely see.

“The little bitch,” she said. “I left her at home with two of her school friends. She can’t know I’m here.”

“She must do,” I said. “She’s spying.”

Sally said crisply, “Your paranoia is a rotten cover. Do you think I didn’t know that girl’s got a crush on you, my sweetheart? Try not to be such a cute old man.”

“Me? Try?” I said jauntily.

And then, in the practical manner of one secure in the higher air of unruffled love, she said, “Anyway, she can’t see my car from there. She can’t see through walls. Don’t stand there looking at her.”

She went back to tidying the flat and my mind drifted into remembering a time when I was a boy throwing pebbles at the window of the girl next door. What a row there was with her mother!

I forgot Judy’s waving arm. Duggie came home and I was not surprised to see him wandering about the Nursery two days later like a dog on one of his favourite rounds, circling round me from a distance, for I was busy with a customer, waiting for his chance. He had brought Judy with him. She was solemnly studying the girls, who with their order books and pencils were following undecided customers or directing the lost to our self-service counter inside the building. Judy was murmuring to herself as if imagining the words they said. She was admiring the way one of the girls ordered a youth to wheel a trolley-load of chrysanthemums to the main gate.