The Pritchett Century (75 page)

“Watch out,” whispered Benedict. “They’ll follow us.” He was delighted.

The stationmaster took us to the buffet and told the woman there to give us what we asked for and to give the bill to him. He told Benedict his daughter was taking piano lessons. We were put on the 3.44 to Fordhampton, and I felt sad going back.

“It was the Brighton Cliff Murder,” said Benedict. “They thought we were in on it.”

And indeed a youth had taken the hand brake off his parents’ car, jumped out, and left them to go over the cliff. There was a picture of a boy very like Benedict with curly hair. We saw it all when a man got in at one of the stops with the picture on the inside page and a headline saying “
HUNT MOVES TO WEST COUNTRY
.” I muttered to Benedict, “Keep quiet or I’ll strangle you.”

Benedict started bouncing with delight on his seat. He said that
Glan had told him all about the murder. And he started to tell me. The Devil would be in it, I knew.

“Stop it,”
I said. “Not now. You promised me.”

The train was a slow one. The man got out at Stockney. And then I said, “Why did you say you were going to Bath?”

“To see the Roman ruins,” he said.

“But you said London, too, to give a concert,” I said. I couldn’t keep up with him.

“I am going to the College of Music next term,” he said.

I began to tease him. “There was a devil on
this
train—it was you,” I said and gave him a push.

There is nothing to say about our arrival at Fordhampton, except that my mother was talking to Mrs Short, and Benedict was talking all the time to Glan, telling him how he had shown his name tape to the detective. Father was talking to the stationmaster, who was shaking his head.

“I gave the stationmaster at Newford a blowing up,” Father said. “I mean, suppose they’d been troops?”

“It’s the staff, you know what I mean,” said the stationmaster. “Your daughter’s here.”

“Oh,” said my father, astonished to see me. And then he saw Glanville and stiffened. “All present and correct,” he said sarcastically.

In the car driving home I began telling my father and mother what had happened, but Father said, “Wait till we get home.”

Mother said, “You should have pulled the alarm cord.”

Father said, “Costs five pounds. I haven’t got five pounds.”

I didn’t say anything about Benedict’s saying he was running away. Father was already revelling in the war he was now beginning with the railway company. He was going to write to the chairman at once. He was going to get someone at the War Office to blow them up. Mother’s eyes shone.

When I went to school on Monday Benedict was not on the train, but Mrs Figg had heard the story, because Mother had rung the school. Augusta knew, too. Then she told me that once a man had exposed himself in a train when she was there, in a full compartment!

What did she do? “Nothing,” she said grandly. “I turned my head away and looked out of the window.”

That weekend my mother picked me up at my school and Benedict at his and drove us back to the Shorts, and I was invited for tea. Father said it was the least they could do.

Mrs Short was standing by her puzzle when I got there, a new one of a castle.

“It’s a beast,” she said. There were a dozen people at that beautiful table and Benedict was crowing and interrupting his father. Then it was Cocky Olly again and all of us racing around.

(1989)

What do you make of the famous Zut—I mean his stuff in this exhibition? Is he just a newsy collector of human instances jellied in his darkroom, or is he an artist—a Zurbarán, say, a priest searching another priest’s soul? Pearson, one of a crowd of persons, was silently putting these questions to them on a London bus going north.

Last July, Pearson went on, he was at home. The front-door bell rang. “He’s here! On time!” his beautiful wife said. She was scraping the remains of his hair across his scalp. “Wait,” she said, and turning him round, she gave a last sharp brush to his shoulders and sent him dibble-dabbing fast down three flights of stairs to the door. There stood Zut, the photographer, with his back to Pearson and on impatient feet, tall and thin in a suit creased by years of air travel. He was shouting to Mrs Zut, who was lugging two heavy bags of apparatus up the street to the house. She got there and they turned round.

As a writer, in the news too and in another branch of the human-image trade, Pearson depended on seeing people and things as strictly they are not. The notion that Zut and his wife could be a doorstep couple offering to buy old spectacles or discarded false teeth, a London trade, occurred to him, but he recovered and, switching on an eager smile, bowed them into the house. They marched past him down the
hall, briskly, like a pair of surgeons, to the foot of the stairs and looked back at him.

“I hope you had no difficulty in finding this—er—place,” Pearson said, vain of difficulty as a sort of fame.

“None,” said Zut. “She drives. I read the street map.” Mrs Zut had not put down her load. Zut seemed to ask, Are you the body?

Well, said Pearson spaciously, where did they want to “do,” or “take”—he hesitated between saying “it” or “me.” He said this to all photographers, waving a hand, offering the house. Zut looked up at the stairs and the high ceiling.

Pearson said, Ground-floor dining room, tall windows, books? Upstairs by half-landing, a balcony, or would you say patio, flowers, shrubs, greenery, a pair of Chinese dogs in stone, view of neighbouring gardens? Down below, garden seat under tree, could sit there taking the air. And talking of air, have often been done—if that is the word—outside in the street, in overcoat and fur hat by interesting railings, coat buttoned or unbuttoned. No? Or first-floor sitting room. High windows again, fourteen feet in fact, expensive when curtaining, but chairs easy or uneasy, large mirror, peacock feathers on wife’s desk, quite a lot of gilt,
chaise-longue
indeed. Have often been done there, upright or lying full length.
Death of Chatterton
style.

Zut said, “Furniture tells me nothing. Where do you work?”

“Work?” said Pearson.

“Where you write,” said Zut.

“Oh, that,” said Pearson. “You mean the alphabet, sentences? At the top. Three flights up, I’m afraid,” apologising to Mrs Zut. (Writer, writing at desk, rather a cliché for a man like Zut—no?)

Already Zut was taking long steps up the stairs, followed by Mrs Zut, who refused to give up her two rattling bags, Pearson looking at Mrs Zut’s grey hair and peaceful back as he came after them. From flight to flight they went and did not speak until they were under a fanlight at the top. In a pause for breath Pearson said, “Burglar’s entry.”

Zut ignored this and, pointing to a door, “In here?” he said.

“No, used to be children’s bathroom. Other door.” The door was white on the outside, yellowing on the inside. They marched in.

“It smells of—what would you say?—decaying rhubarb, I’m afraid. I smoke a pipe.”

There was the glitter of permafrost in Zut’s hunting eyes as he studied the room. There were two attic windows; the other three walls were blood red but stacked and stuffed with books to the ceiling. They were terraced like a football crowd, in varieties of anoraks, a crowd unstirred by a slow game going on among four tables where more books and manuscripts were in scrimmage.

“That your desk?” said Zut, pointing to the largest table.

“I’m a table man,” said Pearson, apologising, bending to pick up one or two matches and a paper clip from the floor. “I migrate from table to table.” And drew attention to a large capsized photograph of the Albert Memorial propped on a chest of drawers. Accidentally, Zut kicked a metal wastepaper basket as he looked round. It gave a knell.

Yes, Pearson was inclined to say (but did not), this room has a knell. Authors die. Dozens of funerals of unfinished sentences here every day. It is less a study than a—what shall I say?—perhaps a dockyard for damaged syntax? Or, better still, an immigration hall. Papers arrive at a table, migrate to other tables or chairs, and, when they are rubber-stamped, get stuffed into drawers. By the way, outgoing mail on the floor. Observe the corner bookcase, the final catacomb—my file boxes. I like to forget.

Mrs Zut dropped to her knees near a window and was opening the bags.

Now (Pearson was offering his body to Zut), what would you like me to be or do? Stand here? Or there? Sit? Left leg crossed over right leg, right over left? Put on a look? Get a book at random? Open a drawer? Light a pipe? Talk? Think? Put hand on chin? Great Zut, make your wish known.

Talk, Zut. All photographers talk, put client at ease. Ask me questions. Dozens of pictures of me have been taken. I could show you my early slim-subaltern-on-the-Somme-waiting-to-go-over-the-top period. There was my Popular Front look in the Thirties and Forties, the jersey-wearing, all-the-world’s-a-coal-mine period, with close-ups of the pores and scars of the skin and the gleam of sweat. There was the editorial look, when the tailor had to let out the waist of my trousers,
followed by the successful smirk. In the Sixties the plunging neckline, no tie. Then back to collar and tie in my failed-bronze-Olympic period. Today I fascinate archaeologists—you know, the broken pillar of a lost civilisation. Come on, Zut. What do you want?

Zut looked at the largest table. It had a clear space among pots of pencils, ashtrays, paper clips, two piles of folders for the execution block—a large blotter embroidered by pen wipings, and on it was a board with beautiful clean white paper clipped to it.

“There,” said Zut, pointing to the chair in front of it. Zut had swollen veins on his long hands. “Sit,” he said.

Pearson sat. There was a hiss from Mrs Zut’s place on the floor, close to Zut. She had pulled out the steel rods of a whistling tripod. Zut gave a push to her shoulder. Up came a camera. She screwed it on and Zut fiddled with it, calling for more and more little things. What fun you have in your branch of the trade, said Pearson. You have little things to twizzle. Well, I have paper clips, pipe cleaners, scissors, paste. I try out pens, that’s all—to save me from entering the wilderness, the wilderness of vocabulary.

But now Zut was pulling his creased jacket over his head and squinting through the camera at Pearson, who felt a small flake of his face fall off. And at that moment Zut gave Mrs Zut a knock on her arm. “Meter,” he said. Then he let his coat slip back to his shoulders and stepped from the end of the table to where Pearson was sitting and held the meter, with shocking intimacy, close to Pearson’s head. He looked back at the window, muttering a word. Was the word “unclean”? And he turned to squint through the camera and looked up to say, “Take your glasses off.”

My glasses. My only defence. Can’t see a thing. He took them off.

Ah, Zut, I see you don’t talk, because you are after the naked truth, you are a dabbler in the puddles of the mind. As you like, but I warn you I’m wise to that.

“Don’t smile.”

I see, you’re not a smile-please man, muttered Pearson. Oh, Zut, you’ve such a shriven look. If you take me naked, you will miss all the
et cetera
of my life. I am all
et cetera
. But Zut was back under his jacket, spying again, and then he did something presumptuous. He came out
of his jacket, reached across the table, and moved a pot of pencils out of the way. The blue pot, that rather pretty
et cetera
that Pearson’s wife had found in a junk shop next to the butcher’s—now a pizza café—twenty-four years ago on a street not in this district. Zut, you have moved a part of my life to another table, it will hate being there, screamed Pearson’s soul. How dare you move my wife? Anything else?

“Not necessary,” said Zut and, reaching out, gave Mrs Zut a knock on the arm. “Lamp,” he said between his teeth.

Mrs Zut scrabbled in the bag and pulled out a rubbery cord; at the end was a clouded yellow lamp, a small sickly moon. She stood up and held it high.

Zut gave another knock on her arm as he spied into the camera.

“Higher,” he said.

Up went the lamp. Another knock.

“Keep still. You’re letting it droop,” said Zut. Oh, Florence Nightingale, can’t you, after all these years, hold it steady?

“Look straight into the camera,” called Zut from under his jacket.

“Now write,” said Zut.

“Write? Where?”

“On that paper.”

“Pen or pencil?” said Pearson. “Write what?”

“Anything.”

“Like at school.”

Pearson tipped the board on the edge of the table.

“Don’t tip the board. Keep it flat.”

“I can’t write flat. I never write flat,” Pearson said. And I never write in public, if anyone is in the room. I grunt. I make a noise.

I bet you can’t photograph a noise.

Pearson glanced at Zut. Then, sulking, he slid the board back flat on the table and felt the room tip up.

Zut, Pearson murmured. I shall write: Zut keeps on hitting his wife. Zut keeps on hitting his wife. Can’t write that. He might see. Zut, I am going to diddle you. I shall write my address, 56 Hill Road Terrace, with the wrong post code—N6 4DN. Here goes: 56 Hill Road Terrace, 56 Hill Road Terrace …

“Keep on writing,” said Zut.

Pearson continued 56 Hill Road Terrace and then misspelled “terrace.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw the little yellow lamp.

“Now look up at me,” said Zut.

The room tipped higher.

“Like that. Like that. Like that,” hissed Zut. “Go on. Now go on writing.”

Click, click, click, went the shutter of the camera. A little toad in the lens has shot out a long tongue and caught a fly.

“You’re dropping it again,” said Zut, giving Mrs Zut a punch.

“Good,” the passionate Zut called to Pearson, then came out of his jacket.

“My face has gone,” Pearson said.

But how do you know you’ve got
me?
My soul spreads all over my body, even in my feet. My face is nothing. At my age I don’t need it. It is no more than a servant I push around before me. Or a football I kick ahead of me, taking all the blows, in shops, in the streets. It knows nothing. It just collects. I send it to smirk at parties, to give lectures. It has a mouth. I’ve no idea what it says. It calls people by the wrong names. It is an indiscriminate little grinner. It kisses people I’ve never met. The only time my face and I exchange a word is when I shave. Then it sulks.