The Key to My Heart Read online

  THE KEY TO MY HEART

  A Comedy in Three Parts

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  Contents

  The Key to My Heart

  Noisy Flushes the Birds

  Noisy in the Doghouse

  1

  The Key to My Heart

  When Father dropped dead and Mother and I were left to run the business on our own, I was twenty-four years old. It was the principal bakery in our town, a good little business, and Father had built it up from nothing. Father used to wink at me when Mother talked about their “first wedding”. “How many times have you been married? Who was it that time?” he used to say to her. She was speaking of the time they first ventured out of the bakery into catering for weddings and local dances. For a long time, when I was a child, we lived over the shop; then Mother made Father take a house down the street. Later still, we opened a café next door but two to the shop, and our idea was to buy up the two little places in between. But something went wrong in the last years of Father’s life. Working at night in the heat and getting up at the wrong time of day disorganized him. And then the weddings were his downfall. There is always champagne left over at weddings, and Father got to like it and live on it. And then brandy followed. When Mr. Pickering, the solicitor, went into the will and the accounts, there was muddle everywhere, and bills we had never heard of came in.

  “Father kept it all in his head,” Mother said, very proud of him for that. Mr. Pickering and I had to sort it all out, and one of the things we discovered was that what we owed was nothing to what people owed us. Mother used to serve in the shop and do the books. She did it, we used to say, for the sake of the gossip—to daydream about why the schoolmistress ordered crumpets only on Thursdays, or guessing, if someone ordered more of this kind of cake or that, who was going to eat it with them. She was generally right, and she knew more about what was going on in the town than anyone else. As long as the daily and weekly customers paid their books, she didn’t bother; she hated sending bills, and she was more pleased than upset when Mr. Pickering told her there was a good six hundred pounds owing by people who either hadn’t been asked to pay or who were simply not troubling themselves. In a small business, this was a lot of money. It was the rich and the big pots in the country who were the worst of these debtors. Dad and Mother never minded being owed by the rich. They had both grown up in the days when you were afraid of offending people, and to hear my mother talk you would have thought that by asking the well-off to fork out you were going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, knock the bottom out of society, and let a Labour government in.

  “Think of what they have to pay in taxes,” she would say, pitying them. “And the death duties!” And when I did what Mr. Pickering said, and sent out accounts to these people, saying politely that it had no doubt been overlooked, Mother looked mournful and said getting a commission in the Army had turned my head. The money came in, of course. When Colonel Williams paid up and didn’t dispute it, Mother looked at his cheque as if it were an insult from the old gentleman and, in fact, “lost” it in her apron pocket for a week. Lady Littlebank complained, but she paid all the same. A few did not answer, but when I called at their houses they paid at once. Though the look on Mother’s face was as much as to say I was a son ruining her lifework and destroying her chances of holding her head up in society. At the end of two or three months there was only one large account outstanding—a Mrs. Brackett’s. Mrs. Brackett did not answer, and you can guess Mother made the most of this. Mother spoke highly of Mrs. Brackett, said she was “such a lady”, “came of a wonderful family”, and once even praised her clothes. She was the richest woman in the county, and young. She became my mother’s ideal.

  Mrs. Brackett was married to a pilot and racing motorist known in the town as Noisy Brackett; it was she, as my mother said, nodding her head up and down, who “had the money”. Noisy was given a couple of cars and his pocket money, but, having done that, Mrs. Brackett paid as little as she could, as slowly as she could, to everyone else. When I talked about her account to other shopkeepers in the town, they put on their glasses, had a look at their books, sniffed, and said nothing. Every shopkeeper, my father used to say, woke up in the early hours of the morning thinking of how much she owed him, and dreaming of her fortune. You can work out how long her bill with us had run on when I say it was nearly two hundred and thirty pounds. The exact sum was two hundred and twenty-eight pounds fourteen and fourpence. I shall always remember it.

  The first time I made out Mrs. Brackett’s bill, I gave it to Noisy. He often came into the café to flirt with the girls, or to our shop to see Mother and get her to cash cheques for him. He was a thin little man, straight as a stick and looked as brittle, and covered (they said) with scars and wounds from his crashes. He had the curly shining black hair of a sick gypsy, and the lines of a charmer all over his face. His smiles quickly ended in a sudden, stern twitching of his left cheek and eye, like the crack of a whip, which delighted the women. He was a dandy, and from Mother he had the highest praise she could give to any man. He was, she said, “snobby”.

  When I gave Noisy our bill, he handed it back to me at once. “Be a sweetie-pie,” he said, “and keep it under your hat until the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow’s my payday, and I don’t want the Fairy Queen to get her mind taken off it—d’you follow? Good! Fine! Splendid fellow! Bang on!” And, with a twitch, he was back in his long white Bentley. “Bring it yourself,” he said, looking me up and down. I am a very tall man, and little Noisy had a long way to look. “It’ll do the trick.”

  Noisy did not hide his dependence on his wife. Everyone except the local gentry liked him.

  So on the Thursday, when the shop was closed and I could leave the café to the waitresses—a good pair of girls, and Rosie, the dark one, very pretty—I took the station wagon and drove up to Heading Mount, four miles out of the town. It was June; they were getting the hay in. The land in the valley fetches its price—you wouldn’t believe it if I told you what a farm fetches there. Higher up, the land is poor, where the oak woods begin, and all that stretch that belonged to old Mr. Lucas, Mrs. Brackett’s father, who had made a fortune out of machine tools. The estate was broken up when he died. I came out of the oak woods and turned into the drive, which winds between low stone walls and tall rhododendron bushes, so that it is like a damp, dark sunken lane, and very narrow. Couples often walked up on Sundays in June to see the show of rhododendrons on the slopes at Heading; the bushes were in flower as I drove by. I was speeding to the sharp turn at the end of the drive, before you come to the house, when I had to brake suddenly. Mrs. Brackett’s grey Bentley was drawn broadside across it, blocking the drive completely. I ought to have seen this was a bad omen.

  To leave a car like that, anywhere, was typical of Mrs. Brackett. If there was a traffic jam in the town, or if someone couldn’t get into the market, nine times out of ten Mrs. Brackett’s car was the cause. She just stepped out of it wherever it was, as if she were dropping her coat off for someone else to pick up. The police did nothing. As she got back in, she would smile at them, raise one eyebrow, wag her hips, and let them see as much of her legs as she thought fit for the hour of the day, and drive off with a small wave of her hand that made them swell with apologies and blow up someone else. Sometimes she went green with a rage that was terrifying coming from so small a person.

  As I walked across the lawn, I realized I had missed the back lane to the house, and that I ought to have driven along a wire-fenced road across the fields to the farm and the kitchen, where the housekeeper lived. But I had not been up there for several years, and had forgotten it. As I walked toward the white front door, I kicked a woman’s shoe—a shoe for a very small foot. I picked it u
p. I was a few yards from the door when Mrs. Brackett marched out, stopped on the steps, and then, as sharp as a sergeant, shouted, “Jimmy!” She was looking up at the sky, as though she expected to bring her husband down out of it.

  She was barefooted, wearing a blue-and-white checked shirt and dusty jeans, and her short fair hair untidy, and she was making an ugly mouth, like a boy’s, on her pretty face. I was holding out the shoe as I went forward. There was no answer to her shout. Then she saw me and stared at the shoe.

  “Who are you? What are you doing with that?” she asked. “Put it down.”

  But before I could answer, from the other side of the buildings there was the sound of a car starting and driving off on the back road. Mrs. Brackett heard this. She turned and marched into the house again, but in a few seconds she returned, running past me across the lawn. She jumped into her car, backed—and then she saw mine blocking the drive. She sounded her horn, again and again. A dog barked, and she jumped out and bawled at me. “You bloody fool!” she shouted. “Get that van of yours out of the way!”

  The language that came out of her small mouth was like what you hear in the cattle market on Fridays. I slowly went up and got into my van. I could hear her swearing and the other car tearing off; already it must have turned into the main road. I got into mine, and there we sat, face to face, scowling at each other through our windscreens. I reversed down the long, winding drive, very fast, keeping one eye on her all the time, and turned sharply off the road at the entrance. I don’t mind saying I was showing off. I can reverse a car at speed and put it anywhere to within an inch of where I want to. I saw her face change as she came on, for in her temper she was coming fast down the drive straight at me, radiator to radiator. At the end, she gave one glance of surprise at me, and I think held back a word she had ready as she drove past. At any rate, her mouth was open. Half a dozen cows started from under the trees and went trotting round the field in panic as she went, and the rooks came out of the elms like bits of black paper.

  By bad luck, you see, I had arrived in the middle of one of the regular Brackett rows. They were famous in the neighbourhood. The Bracketts chased each other round the house, things came out of windows—clothes, boots, anything. Our roundsman said he had once seen a portable radio, playing full on, come flying out, and that it had fallen, still playing, in the roses. Servants came down to the town and said they had had enough of it. Money was usually at the bottom of the trouble. There was a tale going round that when a village girl who worked there got married, Mrs. Brackett gave her a three-shilling alarm clock for a wedding present.

  The rows always went the same way. A car would race out of the drive with Noisy in it, and five minutes later Mrs. Brackett would be in her car chasing him, and no one was safe on the roads for twenty miles around. Sometimes it might end quietly in a country pub, with Mrs. Brackett in one bar and Noisy in the other, white-faced and playing hymns on the piano to mock her until she gave in. Other times, it might go on through the night. Noisy, who raced cars, was the better driver, but she was wilder. She would do anything—she once cut through the footpath of the cemetery to catch him on the other side. She sometimes caught him, but more than once her meanness about money would leave her standing. There would be a telephone call to Briggs’s garage: Mrs. Brackett had run out of petrol. She was too mean ever to have much more than a gallon in the tank.

  “Bless her,” Noisy used to say if anyone mentioned these chases to him. “I always rely on the Fairy Queen to run out of gas.”

  Noisy was a woman-hater. His trouble was his habit of saying “Bless you” to the whole female sex.

  “Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” my mother said when I got home. I put Mrs. Brackett’s shoe on the table.

  “I’ve made some progress,” I said.

  My mother looked at the shoe for a long time. Now that I had got something out of Mrs. Brackett, Mother began to think a little less of her. “You’d think a woman with feet like that would dress better,” she said.

  But what annoyed me was that at some stage in the afternoon’s chase Noisy had slipped in and got Mother to cash him a cheque for twenty pounds.

  June is the busy time of the year for us. There are all the June weddings. Noisy and Mrs. Brackett must have settled down again somehow, because I saw them driving through the town once or twice. I said to myself, “You wait till the rush is over.”

  In July, I went up to the Bracketts’ house a second time. Rosie, the dark girl who works in our café, came with me, because she wanted to meet her aunt at the main-line station, three or four miles over the hill beyond Heading Mount, and I was taking her on there after I had spoken to Mrs. Brackett. I drove up to the house. The rhododendrons had died, and there were pods on them already going brown. The sun struck warm in front of the house. It was wonderfully quiet.

  I left the girl in the car, reading a book, and was working out a sentence to say, when I saw Mrs. Brackett kneeling by a goldfish pond, at the far side of the great lawn. She turned and saw me. I did not know whether to go over the lawn to her or to wait where I was. I decided to go over, and she got up and walked to me. Mother was right about her clothes. This time she was wearing a gaudy tomato-coloured cotton dress that looked like someone else’s, and nothing on underneath it. I do not know why it was—whether it was because I was standing on the grass as she was walking over, whether it was my anxiety about how to begin the conversation, or whether it was because of her bare white arms, the dawdling manner of her walk, and the inquisitiveness of her eyes—but I thought I was going to faint.When she was two yards away, my heart jumped, my throat closed, and my head was swimming. Although I had often seen her driving through the town, and though I remembered our last meeting all too well, I had never really looked at her before. She stopped, but I had the feeling that she had not stopped, but was invisibly walking on until she walked clean through me. My arms went weak. She was amused by the effect she had on me.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “You are Mr. Fraser’s son. Do you want to speak to me?”

  I did, but I couldn’t. I forgot all the sentences I had prepared. “I’ve come about our cheque,” I said at last. I shouted it. Mrs. Brackett was as startled by my shout as I was. She blushed at the loudness and shock of it— not a light blush but a dark, red, flooding blush on her face and her neck that confused her and made her lower her head like a child caught stealing. She put her hands behind her back like a child. I blushed, too. She walked up and down a yard or two, her head still down, thinking. Then she walked away to the house.

  “You’d better come inside,” she called back in an offhand way.

  You could have put our house into the hall and sitting-room of Heading Mount. I had been in that room when I was a boy, helping the waitress when my father was there doing the catering for a party. I do not know what you’d have to pay for the furniture there— thousands, I suppose. She led me through the room to a smaller room beyond it, where there was a desk. I felt I was slowly walking miles. I have never seen such a mess of papers and letters. They were even spread on the carpet. She sat down at the desk.

  “Can you see the bill?” she muttered, not looking at me and pointing to the floor.

  “I’ve got it here,” I said, taking the bill out of my pocket. She jerked her head. The flush had gone, and now she looked as keen as needles at me.

  “Well, sit down,” she said.

  She took the bill from me and looked at it. Now I could see that her skin was not white but was really pale and clay-coloured, with scores of little cracks in it, and that she was certainly nearer forty than thirty, as Mother always said.

  “I’ve paid this,” she said, giving the bill a mannish slap. “I pay every quarter.”

  “It has been running for three and a half years,” I said, more at ease now.

  “What?” she said. “Oh, well, I paid something, anyway. This isn’t a bill. It’s a statement.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We have sent you the bil
ls.”

  “Where’s the date? This hasn’t got any date on it.”

  I got up and pointed to the date.

  “It ought to be at the top,” she said.

  My giddiness had gone. Noisy came into the room. “Hullo, Bob,” he said. “I’ve just been talking to that beautiful thing you have got in the car.” He always spoke in an alert, exhausted way about women, like someone at a shoot waiting for the birds to come over. “Have you seen Bob’s girl, darling?” he said to her. “I’ve just offered her the key to my heart.” And he lifted the silk scarf he was wearing in the neck of his canary-coloured pullover, and there was a piece of string round his neck with a heavy old door key hanging from it. Noisy gave a twitch to one side of his face.

  “Oh, God, that old gag,” said Mrs. Brackett.

  “Not appreciated, old boy,” said Noisy to me.

  “Irresistible,” said Mrs. Brackett, with an ugly mouth. She turned and spoke to me again, but glanced shrewdly at Noisy as she did so. “Let me try this one on you,” she said. “You’ve already got my husband’s cheques for this bill. I send him down to pay you, and he just cashes them?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Brackett,” I said. “That wouldn’t be possible.”

  “You can’t get away with that one, my pet,” said Noisy. “Are you ready to go out?” He looked at her dress, admiring her figure. “What a target, Bob,” he said.

  “I don’t think we will ask Mr. Fraser’s opinion,” she said coldly, but very pleased. And she got up and started out of the room, with Noisy behind her.

  “You had better send me the bills,” she called back to me, turning round from the door.

  I felt very, very tired. I left the house and slammed the car door when I got in. “Now she wants the damn bills,” I said to Rosie as I drove her up to Tolton station. I did not speak to her the rest of the way. She irritated me, sitting there.

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