It May Never Happen Read online

  “Here’s your money,” I said. “Take the afternoon off.”

  Thompson stepped back from the money.

  “You keep it,” he said, in a panic. “You keep it for me.”

  “You may need it,” I said. “For a glass of beer or cigarettes or something.”

  “If I have it I’ll lose it,” he said. “They’ll pinch it.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “People,” Thompson said. I could not persuade him.

  “All right, I’ll keep it for you,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said eagerly. “If I want a bob I’ll ask you. Money’s temptation,” he said.

  “Well, anyway,” I said “take the afternoon off. It’s the first sunny afternoon we’ve had. I’ll tell you where to go. Turn to the right in the lane …”

  “I don’t like them lanes,” said Thompson, looking suspiciously out of the window. “I’ll stay by you.”

  “Well, take a couple of hours,” I said. “We all need fresh air.”

  He looked at me as if I had suggested he should poison himself; indeed as if I were going to do the poisoning.

  “What if I do an hour?” he began to bargain.

  “No, the afternoon,” I said.

  “Do you half an hour?” he pleaded.

  “All right, I don’t want to force you,” I said. “This is a free country. Go for an hour.”

  It was like an auction.

  “Tell you what,” he said, looking shifty. “I’ll do you twenty minutes.” He thought he had tricked me, but I went back into the kitchen and drove him to it. I had given him an overcoat and shoes, and it was this appeal to his vanity which got him. Out he went for his twenty minutes. He was going straight down the lane to where it met the main road and then straight back; it would take a smart walker about twelve minutes on a winter’s day.

  When an hour passed I was pleased with myself. But when four hours had gone by and darkness came I began to wonder. I went out to the gate. The land and the night had become one thing. I had just gone in again when I heard loud voices and saw the swing of a lamp. There came Thompson with a labourer. The labourer, a little bandy man known as Fleas, stood like a bent bush with a sodden sack on his shoulders, snuffling in the darkness, and he grinned at me with the malevolence of the land.

  “He got astray,” he said, handing Thompson over.

  “Gawd,” exclaimed Thompson, exhausted. His face was the familiar pale suety agony. He was full of explanations. He was sweating like a scared horse and nearly hysterical. He’d been on the wrong course. He didn’t know where to steer. One thing looked like another. Roads and lanes, woods and fields, mixed themselves together.

  “Woods I seen,” he said in horror. “And that common! It played me up proper.”

  “But you weren’t anywhere near the common,” I said.

  “Then what was it?” he said.

  That night he sat by the fire with his head in his hands.

  “I got a mood,” he said.

  The next morning cigarette smoke blew past my window and I heard coughing. The Colonel’s daughter was at the kitchen door talking to Thompson. “Cheero,” I heard her say and then she came to my door and pushed it open. She stood there gravely and her eye winked. She was wearing a yellow jersey and looked as neat as a bird.

  “You’re a swine,” she said.

  “What have I done?”

  “Raping women on the commons,” she said. “Deserting your old friends, aren’t you?”

  “It’s been too wet on the common,” I said.

  “Not for me,” she said. “I’m always hopeful. I came across last night. There was the Minister’s wife screaming in the middle of it. I sat on her head and calmed her down and she said a man had been chasing her. ‘Stop screaming,’ I said. ‘You flatter yourself, dear.’ It was getting dark and I carried her shopping-bag and umbrella for her and took her to her house. I often go and see her in the evenings. I’ve got to do something, haven’t I? I can’t stick alone in that bungalow all day and all night. We sit and talk about her son in China. When you’re old you’ll be lonely too.”

  “What happened on the common?”

  “I think I’m drunk,” said the Colonel’s daughter, “but I believe I’ve been drunk since breakfast. Well, where was I? I’m losing my memory too. Well, we hadn’t gone five minutes before I heard someone panting like a dog behind us and jumping over bushes. Old Mrs. Stour started screaming again. ‘Stand still,’ I said, and I looked and then a man came out of a tree about ten yards away. ‘What the hell do you want?’ I said. A noise came back like a sheep. ‘Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am, ma’am,’ it said.”

  “So that’s where Thompson was,” I said.

  “I thought it was you,” the Colonel’s daughter said. “‘There’s a woman set about me with a stick on the common,’ he said. ‘I didn’t touch her, I was only following her,’ he said. ‘I reckoned if I followed her I’d get home’.

  “When they got to the wood Thompson wouldn’t go into it and she had to take his hand; that was a mistake. He took his hand away and moved off. So she grabbed his coat. He struggled after this, she chased him into the thicket and told him not to be a fool, but he got away and disappeared, running on to the common.

  “You’re a damn swine,” the Colonel’s daughter said to me. “How would you like to be put down in the middle of the sea?”

  She walked away. I watched her go up the path and lean on the gate opposite to stroke the nose of a horse. She climbed into the field and the horses, like hairy yokels, went off. I heard her calling them but they did not come.

  When she was out of sight, the door opened behind me and Thompson came in.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” he said. “That young lady, sir. She’s been round my kitchen door.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He gaped at me and then burst out:

  “I didn’t touch her, straight I didn’t. I didn’t lay a finger on her.”

  “She didn’t say you did. She was trying to help you.”

  He calmed down. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  When he came back into the room to lay the table I could see he was trying to catch my eye.

  “Sir,” he said at last, standing at attention. “Beg pardon, sir, the young lady …”

  His mouth was opening and shutting, trying to shape a sentence.

  “The young lady—she’d had a couple, sir,” he said in a rush.

  “Oh,” I said, “don’t worry about that. She often has.”

  “It’s ruination, sir,” said Thompson evangelically.

  She did not come to the house again for many days, but when she came I heard him lock both kitchen doors.

  Orders at the one extreme, temptation at the other, were the good and evil of Thompson’s life. I no longer suggested that he went out. I invented errands and ordered him to go. I wanted, in that unfortunate way one has, to do good to Thompson. I wanted him to be free and happy. At first he saw that I was not used to giving orders and he tried to dodge. His ulcers were bad, he said. Once or twice he went about barefoot, saying the sole was off one of his boots. But when he saw I meant what I said, he went. I used to watch him go, tilted forward on his toes in his half-running walk, like someone throwing himself blindly upon the mercy of the world. When he came back he was excited. He had the look of someone stupefied by incomprehensible success. It is the feeling a landsman has when he steps off a boat after a voyage. You feel giddy, canny, surprised at your survival after crossing that bridge of deep, loose water. You boast. So did Thompson—morally.

  “There was a couple of tramps on the road,” Thompson said. “I steered clear. I never talked to them,” he said.

  “Someone asked me who I was working for.” He described the man. “I never told him,” he said shrewdly. “I just said ‘A gentleman’. Meaning you,” he said.

  There was a man in an allotment who had asked him for a light and wanted to know his business.

  “I told him I didn’t smoke,” said
Thompson. “You see my meaning—you don’t know what it’s leading up to. There warn’t no harm, but that’s how temptation starts.”

  What was temptation? Almost everything was temptation to Thompson. Pubs, cinemas, allotments, chicken-runs, tobacconists—in these, everywhere, the tempter might be. Temptation, like Othello’s jealousy, was the air itself.

  “I expect you’d like to go to church,” I said. He seemed that kind.

  “I got nothing against religion,” Thompson said. “But best keep clear. They see you in church and the next thing they’re after you.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “People,” he said. “It’s not like a ship.”

  I was like him, he said, I kept myself to myself. I kept out of temptation’s way. He was glad I was like that, he said.

  It was a shock to me that while I observed Thompson, Thompson observed me. At the same time one prides oneself, the moment one’s character is defined by someone else, on defeating the definition. I kept myself to myself? I avoided temptation? That was all Thompson knew! There was the Colonel’s daughter. I might not see her very often; she might be loud, likeable, dreary or alarming by turns, but she was Temptation itself. How did he know I wasn’t tempted? Thompson’s remark made me thrill. I began to see rather more of the Colonel’s daughter.

  And so I discovered how misleading he had been about his habits and how, where temptation was concerned, he made a difference between profession and practice. So strong was Thompson’s feeling about temptation that he was drawn at once to every tempter he saw. He stopped them on the road and was soon talking about it. The postman was told. The shopkeepers heard all his business and mine. He hurried after tramps, he detained cyclists, he sat down on the banks with road-makers and ditchers, telling them the dangers of drink, the caution to be kept before strangers. And after he had done this he always ended by telling them he kept himself to himself, avoided drink, ignored women and, patting his breast pocket, said that was where he kept his money and his papers. He behaved to them exactly as he had behaved with me two months before in the Euston Road. The Colonel’s daughter told me. She picked up all the news in that district.

  “He’s a decent, friendly soul,” muttered the Colonel’s daughter thickly. “You’re a prig. Keep your hair on. You can’t help it. I expect you’re decent, too, but you’re like all my bloody so-called friends.”

  “Oh,” I said hopefully, “are prigs your special line?”

  I found out, too, why Thompson was always late when he came home from his errands. I had always accepted that he was lost. And so he was in a way, but he was lost through wandering about with people, following them to their doorsteps, drifting to their allotments, backyards and, all the time, telling them, as he clung to their company, about the dangers of human intercourse. “I never speak to nobody”—it was untrue, but it was not a lie. It was simply a delusion.

  “He lives in two worlds at once,” I said to the Colonel’s daughter one morning. I had sent Thompson to the town to buy the usual chops, and I was sitting in her bungalow. This was the first time I had ever been in it. The walls were of varnished match-boarding like the inside of a gospel hall and the room was heated by a paraffin stove which smelled like armpits. There were two rexine covered chairs, a rug and a table in the room. She was sorting out gramophone records as I talked and the records she did not like she dropped to the floor and broke. She was listening very little to what I said but walked to the gramophone, put on a record, stopped it after a few turns and then switching it off, threw the record away.

  “Oh, you know a hell of a lot, don’t you?” she said. “I don’t say you’re not an interesting man, but you don’t get on with it, do you?”

  “How old are you? Twenty-five?” I said.

  Her sulking, ironical expression went. She was astonished.

  “Good God!” she exclaimed with a smile of sincerity. “Don’t be a damn fool.” Then she frowned. “Or are you being professionally clever?

  “Here,” she said. “I was damn pretty when I was twenty-five. I’m thirty-nine. I’ve still got a good figure.”

  “I would have put you at twenty-seven at the most,” I said truthfully.

  She walked towards me. I was sitting on the arm-chair and she stood very close. She had never been as close to me before. I had thought her eyes were dark-blue but now I saw they were green and grey, with a moist lascivious haze in them and yet dead and clock-like, like a cat’s on a sunless day. And the skin, which had seemed fresh to me, I saw in its truth for the first time. It was clouded and flushed, clouded with that thickened pimpled ruddiness which the skin of heavy drinkers has and which in middle-age becomes bloated and mottled. I felt: this is why she has always stood the length of the room away before.

  She saw what was in my mind and she sat down on the chair opposite to me. The eye winked.

  “Keep control of yourself,” she said. “I came down here for a rest and now you’ve started coming round.”

  “Only in the mornings,” I said.

  She laughed. She went to a bookshelf and took down a bottle of whisky and poured out half a tumblerful.

  “This is what you’ve done coming in here, early bird,” she said. “Exciting me on an empty stomach. I haven’t touched it for ten days. I had a letter this morning. From my old man.”

  “Your father?”

  I had always tried to imagine the Colonel. She gave a shout of cheerful laughter and it ended in coughing till tears came to her eyes.

  “That’s rich. God, that’s rich. Keen observer of women! No, from my husband, darling. He’s not my husband, damn him, of course, but when you’ve lived with someone for ten years and he pays the rent and keeps you, he is your husband, isn’t he? Or ought to be. Ten years is a long time and his family thought he ought to be married. He thought so too. So he picked up a rich American girl and pushed me down here to take it easy in the country. I’m on the dole like your sailor boy. Well, I said, if he felt that way, he’d better have his head. In six months he’ll tire of the new bitch. So I left him alone. I didn’t want to spoil his fun. Well, now, he writes me, he wants to bring his fiancée down because she’s heard so much about me and adores the country….”

  I was going to say something indignant.

  “He’s nice too,” she said casually. “He sells gas-heaters. You’d like him all the same. But blast that bloody woman,” she said raising her cool voice. “She’s turned him into a snob. I’m just his whore now.

  “Don’t look so embarrassed,” she said. “I’m not going to cry.”

  “For ten years,” she said, “I read books, I learned French, educated myself, learned to say ‘How d’you do’, instead of ‘Pleased to meet you’, and look down my nose at everything in his sort of way. And I let him go about saying my father was in the Army too, but they were such bloody fools they thought he must be a Colonel. They’d never heard of sergeant-majors having children. Even my old man, bless his heart,” she smiled affectionately, “thought or let himself think they did. I was a damn silly little snob.”

  “I don’t know him,” I said. “But he doesn’t sound much good to me.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said sharply. “Just weak, poor kid, that’s all. You don’t know what it is to be ashamed your mother’s a housemaid. I got over it—but he didn’t, that’s all.”

  She paused and the wink gave its signal.

  “This is more embarrassing than I thought,” she said.

  “I am very sorry,” I said. “Actually I am in favour of snobbery, it is a sign of character. It’s a bad thing to have, but it’s a bad thing not to have had. You can’t help having the diseases of your time.”

  “There you go,” she said.

  The suffering of others is incredible. When it is obscure it seems like a lie; when it is garish and raw, it is like boasting. It is a challenge to oneself. I got up from my chair and went towards her. I was going to kiss her.

  “You are the sentimental type,
” she said.

  So I didn’t kiss her.

  Then we heard someone passing the bungalow and she went to the window. Thompson was going by. The lock of black hair was curling over his sweating forehead and he gave a hesitant staggering look at the bungalow. There was a lump of fear on his face.

  “He’d better not know where you’ve been,” she said. She moved her lips to be kissed, but I walked out.

  I was glad of the steady sense of the fresh grey air when I got outside. I was angry and depressed. I stood at the window of my house. Thompson came in and was very talkative. He’d been lost, of course. He’d seen people. He’d seen fields. He’d heard trees. He’d seen roads. I hardly listened. I was used to the jerky wobbling voice. I caught the words “legion” and “temptation”, and thought he was quoting from the Bible. Presently I realized he was talking about the British Legion. The postman had asked him to go to a meeting of the British Legion that night. How simple other people’s problems are! Yet “No” Thompson was saying. He was not going to the British Legion. It was temptation.

  I ought to have made love to her and kissed her I was thinking. She was right, I was a prig.

  “You go,” I said to Thompson, “if you want to. You’d enjoy it.”

  But how disgusting, obvious, stupid, to have made love to her then, I thought.

  “Do as you like,” I said.

  “I’m best alongside you,” said Thompson.

  “You can’t always be by me,” I said. “In a month, perhaps less, as you know, I’ll be leaving here and you’ll have to go.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You tol’ me. You been straight. I’ll be straight with you. I won’t go to the Legion.”

  We ate our meal and I read.

  “In every branch of our spiritual and material civilization we seem to have reached a turning point,” I read. “This spirit shows itself not only in the actual state of public affairs …”

  Well, I thought, I can ask her over to-night. I needn’t be a fool twice. I went out for an hour. When I returned Thompson was fighting Temptation hard. If he went to the Legion how would he get back? No, best not. He took the Legion on in its strength. (She is a type, I thought.) At four he was still at it. At five he asked me for his money. (Well, we are all types, I was thinking.) Very shortly he brought the money back and asked me to keep his pension papers. At half-past six I realized this meant that Thompson was losing and the Legion and all its devils winning. (What is a prig, anyway?) He was looking out at the night. Yet, just when I thought he had lost, he had won. There was the familiar sound of the Wild West monologue in the kitchen. It was half-past eight. The Legion was defeated.