The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 50

  ‘Hullo! Up from the country? What are you doing here?’ Mrs Price was so large that she had to turn her whole body and place her belly in front of everyone who spoke to her.

  ‘Seeing to his teeth,’ she said, nodding at August and, from years of habit, August turned too when his wife turned, in case it was just as well not to miss one of her pronouncements, whatever else he might dodge. One side of August’s jaw was swollen. Then Mrs Price slowly turned her whole body to face Pliny again. They were talking about his mother’s death. Mrs Price was greedy, as one stout woman thinking of another, for a melancholy tour of the late mother’s organs. The face of the girl looked prettily wise and holiday-fied because the heavy curls of her hair hung close to her face. She looked out of the window, restless and longing to get away while her elders went on talking, but she was too listless to do so. Then she would look again at Pliny’s large ears with a childish pleasure in anything strange; they gave him a dog-like appearance and if the Augusts had not been there, I think she would have jumped at him mischievously to touch them, but remembered in time that she had lately grown into a young lady. When she saw him looking at her she turned her back and began writing in the dust on a little table which was standing next to a cabinet; it had a small jug on it. She was writing her name in the dust I S A B … And then stopped. She turned round suddenly because she saw I had been watching.

  ‘Is that old Meissen?’ she called out, pointing to the jug.

  They stopped talking. It was comic to see her pretending, for my benefit, that she knew all about porcelain.

  ‘Cor! Old Meissen!’ said August, pulling his racing newspaper out of his jacket pocket with excitement, and Mrs Price fondly swung her big handbag; all laughed loudly, a laugh of lust and knowledge. They knew, or thought they knew, that Pliny had a genuine Meissen piece somewhere, probably upstairs where he lived. The girl was pleased to have made them laugh at her; she had been noticed.

  Pliny said decently: ‘No, dear. That’s Caughley. Would you like to see it?’

  He walked to the cabinet and took the jug down and put it on a table.

  ‘Got the leopard?’ said August, knowingly. Pliny showed the mark of the leopard on the base of the jug and put it down again. It was a pretty shapely jug with a spray of branches and in the branches a pair of pheasants were perching, done in transfer. The girl scared us all by picking it up in both hands, but it was charming to see her holding it up and studying it.

  ‘Careful,’ said Mrs Price.

  ‘She’s all right,’ said Pliny.

  Then – it alarmed us – she wriggled with laughter.

  ‘What a funny face,’ she said.

  Under the lip of the jug was the small face of an old man with a long nose looking sly and wicked.

  ‘They used to put a face under the lip,’ Pliny said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said August.

  The girl held it out at arm’s length and, looking from the jug to Pliny, she said: ‘It’s like you, Mr Pliny.’

  ‘Isabel!’ said Mrs Price. ‘That’s rude.’

  ‘But it is,’ said Isabel. ‘Isn’t it?’ She was asking me. Pliny grinned. We were all relieved to see him take the jug from her and put it back in the cabinet.

  ‘It belonged to my mother,’ he said. ‘I keep it there,’ Pliny said to me, despising me because I had said nothing and because I was a stranger.

  ‘Go into the back and have a look round if you want to. The light’s on.’

  I left the shop and went down the steps into the long white store-room where the white-washed walls were grey with dust. There was an alligator hanging by a nail near the steps, a couple of cavalry helmets and a dirty drum that must have been there since the Crimean War. I went down into streets of stacked up furniture. I felt I was walking into an inhuman crypt or worse still one of those charnel houses or ossuaries I had seen pictures of in one of my father’s books when I was a boy. Large as the store was, it was lit by a single electric light bulb hanging from a girder in the roof and the yellow light was deathly. The notion of ‘picking up’ anything at Pliny’s depressed me, so that I was left with a horror of the trade I had joined. Yet feelings of this kind are never simple. After half an hour I left the shop. I understood before that day was over and I was back in the room over my own place that what had made me more wretched was the wound of a sharp joy. First, the sight of the girl leaving her name unfinished in the dust had made my heart jump, then when she held the vase in her hands I had felt the thrill of a revelation; until then I had never settled what I should go in for but now I saw it. Why not collect Caughley? That was it. Caughley; it was one of those inspirations that excite one so that every sight in the world changes; even houses, buses and streets and people are transfigured and become unreal as desire carries one away – and then, cruelly, it passes and one is left exhausted. The total impossibility of an impatient young man like myself collecting Caughley which hadn’t been made since 1821 became brutally clear. Too late for Staffordshire, too late for Dresden, too late for Caughley and all the beautiful things. I was savage for lack of money. The following day I went to the Victoria and Albert and then I saw other far more beautiful things enshrined and inaccessible. I gazed with wonder. My longing for possession held me and then I was elevated to a state of worship as if they were idols, holy and never to be touched. Then I remembered the girl’s hands and a violent day dream passed through my head; it lasted only a second or two but in that time I smashed the glass case, grabbed the treasure and bolted with it. It frightened me that such an idea could have occurred to me. I left the museum and I turned sourly against my occupation, against Marbright, Alsop and above all Pliny and August, and it broke my heart to think of that pretty girl living among such people and drifting into the shabbiness of the trade. I S A B – half a name, written by a living finger in dust.

  One has these brief sensations when one is young. They pass and one does nothing about them. There is nothing remarkable about Caughley – except that you can’t get it. I did not collect Caughley for a simple reason; I had to collect my wits. The plain truth is that I was incompetent. I had only to look at my bank account. I had bought too much. At the end of the year I looked like getting into the bankruptcy court unless I had a stroke of luck. Talk of trouble making the trade move; I was Trouble myself, dealers could smell it coming and came sniffing into my shop and at the end of the year I sold up for what I could get. It would have been better if I could have waited for a year or two when the boom began. For some reason I kept the teapot I had bought in Salisbury to remind me of wasted time. In its humble way it was pretty.

  In the next six months I changed. I had to. I pocketed my pride and I got a dull job in an auctioneer’s; at least it took me out of the office when I got out keys and showed people round. The firm dealt in house property and developments. The word ‘develop’ took hold of me. The firm was a large one and sometimes ‘developed’ far outside London. I was told to go and inspect some of the least important bits of property that were coming into the market. One day a row of shops in Steepleton came up for sale. I said I knew them. They were on the London Road opposite the Lion Hotel at the end of the town. My boss was always impressed by topography and the names of hotels and sent me down there. The shops were in the row where August and one or two others had had their business, six of them.

  What a change! The Lion had been re-painted; the little shops seemed to have got smaller. In my time the countryside had begun at the end of the row. Now builders’ scaffolding was standing in the fields beyond. I looked for August’s. A cheap café had taken over his place. He had gone. The mirror man who lived next door was still there but had gone into beads and fancy art jewellery. His window was full of hanging knick-knacks and mobiles.

  ‘It’s the tourist trade now,’ he said. He looked ill.

  ‘What happened to August?’

  He studied me for a moment and said, ‘Closed down’, and I could get no more out of him. I crossed the street to The Lion
. Little by little, a sentence at a time in a long slow suspicious evening I got news of August from the barmaid as she went back and forth serving customers, speaking in a low voice, her eye on the new proprietor in case the next sentence that came out of her might be bad for custom. The sentences were spoken like sentences from a judge summing up, bit by bit. August had got two years for receiving stolen goods; the woman – ‘She wasn’t his wife’ – had been knocked down by a car as she was coming out of the bar at night – ‘not that she drank, not really drank; her weight really’ – and then came the final sentence that brought back to me the alerting heat and fever of its secrets: ‘There was always trouble over there. It started when the girl ran away.’

  ‘Isabel?’ I said.

  ‘I dunno – the girl.’

  I stood outside the hotel and looked to the east and then to the west. It was one of those quarters of an hour on a main road when, for some reason, there is no traffic coming either way. I looked at the now far-off fields where the February wind was scything over the grass, turning it into waves of silver as it passed over them. I thought of Isab … running with a case in her hand, three years ago. Which way? Where do girls run to? Sad.

  I went back to London. There are girls in London too, you know. I grew a beard, reddish: it went with the red car which I had managed to keep. I could afford to take a girl down to the south coast now and then. Sometimes we came back by the Brixton road, sometimes through Camberwell and when we did this I often slowed down at Pliny’s and told the girls, ‘That man’s sitting on a gold mine.’ They never believed it or, at least, only one did. She said: ‘Does he sell rings? Let us have a look.’

  ‘They’re closed,’ I said. ‘They’re always closed.’

  ‘I want to look,’ she said, so we stopped and got out.

  We looked into the dark window – it was Saturday night – and we could see nothing and as we stared we heard a loud noise coming, it seemed, from the place next door or from down the drive-in at the side of Pliny’s shop, a sound like someone beating boxes or bath tubs at first until I got what it was: drums. Someone blew a bugle, a terrible squeaky sound. There was heavy traffic on the street, but the bugle seemed to split it in half.

  ‘Boys’ Brigade, practising for Sunday,’ I said. We stood laughing with our hands to our ears as we stared into the dark. All I could make out was something white on a table at the back of the shop. Slowly I saw it was a set of chessmen. Chess, ivories, August – perhaps Pliny had got August’s chessmen.

  ‘What a din!’ said the girl. I said no more to her for in my mind there was the long forgotten picture of Isabel’s finger on the pieces, at Steepleton.

  When I’ve got time, I thought, I will run over to Pliny’s; perhaps he will know what happened to the girl.

  And I did go there again, one afternoon, on my own. Still closed. I rattled the door handle. There was no answer. I went to a baker’s next door, then to a butcher’s, then to a pub. The same story. ‘He only opens on Sundays,’ or, ‘He’s at a sale.’ Then to a tobacconist’s. I said it was funny to leave a shop empty like that, full of valuable stuff. The tobacconist became suspicious.

  ‘There’s someone there all right. His wife’s there.’

  ‘No she’s not,’ his wife said. ‘They’ve gone off to a sale. I saw them.’

  She took the hint.

  ‘No one in charge to serve customers,’ she said.

  I said I’d seen a chessboard that interested me and the tobacconist said: ‘It’s dying out. I used to play.’

  ‘I didn’t know he got married,’ I said.

  ‘He’s got beautiful things,’ said his wife. ‘Come on Sunday.’

  Pliny married! That made me grin. The only women in his life I had ever heard of were his mother and the gossip about Lal Drake. Perhaps he had made an honest woman of her. I went back for one last look at the chessmen and, sure enough, as the tobacconist’s wife had hinted someone had been left in charge, for I saw a figure pass through the inner door of the shop. The watcher was watched. Almost at once I heard the tap and roll of a kettle drum, I put my ear to the letter box and distinctly heard a boy’s voice shouting orders. Children! All the drumming I had heard on Saturday had come from Pliny’s – a whole family drumming. Think of Pliny married to a widow with kids; he had not had time to get his own. I took back what I had thought of him and Lal Drake. I went off for an hour to inspect a house that was being sold on Camberwell Green, and stopped once more at Pliny’s on the way back. On the chance of catching him, I went to the window: standing in the middle of the shop was Isabel.

  Her shining black hair went to her shoulders. She was wearing a red dress with a schoolgirlish white collar to it. If I had not known her by her heart-shaped face and her full childish lips, I would have known her by her tiptoe way of standing like an actress just about to sing a song or give a dance when she comes forward on the stage. She looked at me daringly. It was the way, I remembered, she had looked at everyone. She did not know me. I went to the door and tipped the handle. It did not open. I saw her watching the handle move. I went on rattling. She straightened and shook her head, pushing back her hair. She did not go away. She was amused by my efforts. I went back to the window of the shop and asked to come in. She could not hear, of course. My mouth was opening and shutting foolishly. That amused her even more. I pointed to something in the window, signalling that I was interested in it. She shook her head again. I tried pointing to other things: a cabinet, an embroidered firescreen, a jar three feet high. At each one she shook her head. It was like a guessing game. I was smiling, even laughing, to persuade her. I put my hands to my chest and pretended to beg like a dog. She laughed at this and looked behind, as if calling to someone. If Pliny wasn’t there, his wife might be, or the children. I pointed upwards and made a movement of my hands, imitating someone turning a key in a lock. I was signalling, ‘Go and get the key from Mrs Pliny,’ and I stepped back and looked up at a window above the shop. When I did this Isabel was frightened; she went away shouting to someone. And that was the end of it; she did not come back.

  I went away thinking, Well, that is a strange thing!

  What ideas people put into your head and you build fancies yourself – that woman in the bar at Steepleton telling me Isabel had run away and I imagining her running in those poor evening shoes I’d once seen, in the rain down the Bath Road, when what was more natural in a trade where they all live with their hands in one another’s pockets – Pliny had married, and they had taken the girl on at the shop. It was a comfort to think of. I hadn’t realised how much I had worried about what would happen to a naïve girl like Isabel when the break up came. Alone in the world! How silly. I thought, one of these Sundays I’ll go up there and hear the whole story. And I did.

  There was no one there except Pliny and his rich Sunday customers. I even went into the store at the back, looked everywhere. No sign of Isabel. The only female was a woman in a shabby black dress and not wearing a hat who was talking to a man who was testing the door of a wardrobe, making it squeak, while the woman looked on without interest, in the manner of a dealer’s wife; obviously the new Mrs Pliny. She turned to make way for another couple who were waiting to look at it. I nearly knocked over a stack of cane chairs as I got past.

  If there was no sign of Isabel, the sight of Pliny shocked me. He had been a dead man, permanently dead as wood, even clumsy in his big servile bones, though shrewd. Now he had come to life in the strangest, excited way, much older to look at, thinner and frantic as he looked about him this way and that. He seemed to be possessed by a demon. He talked loudly to people in the shop and was suspicious when he was not talking. He was frightened, abrupt, rude. Pliny married! Marriage had wrecked him or he was making too much money; he looked like a man expecting to be robbed. He recognised me at once. I had felt him watching me from the steps going down to the store. As I came back to the steps to speak to him he spoke to me first, distinctly in a loud voice:

  ‘I don’t want
any of August’s men here, see?’

  I went red in the face.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘You heard me,’ he said. ‘You know what he got.’

  Wells of Hungerford was standing near, pretending not to listen. Pliny was telling the trade that I was in with August – publicly accusing me of being a fence. I controlled my temper.

  ‘August doesn’t interest me,’ I said. ‘I’m in property. Marsh, Help and Hitchcock. I sold his place, the whole street.’

  And I walked past him looking at a few things as I left.

  I was in a passion. The dirty swine – all right when his mother kept an eye on him, the poor old woman, but now – he’d gone mad. And that poor girl! I went to the tobacconist for the Sunday paper in a dream, put down my money and took it without a word and was almost out of the door when the wife called out:

  ‘Did you find him? Did you get what you wanted?’ A friendly London voice. I tapped the side of my head.