It May Never Happen Page 9

  Rogers admitted to himself that he had had a fright. Mr. Pocock had been a man of fifty like himself, as fat as Rogers was, too—they had compared waist measurements once—and he drank heavily: that came home rather close. So close that although Rogers was Mr. Pocock’s only friend in the last months of his life, Rogers could not bring himself to go to the funeral. He put on his black to show willingness, but at the hour of the funeral slipped on the doorstep and twisted his knee and had to be kept in his house. With a sort of penitence or hoping for a last order, Askew, the village publican, went—he followed all his customers to the end—and came back saying:

  “Mr. Pocock, he drank too much. I often tried to stop him.”

  Then it was that Rogers, who had gone down to the pub once the funeral was over and Pocock was set in his grave—then it was that Rogers saw a profound truth:

  “You’re wrong there,” he said.

  “He didn’t drink too much,” he said. “The trouble with Mr. Pocock was that he didn’t drink enough.”

  One thing the death of Mr. Pocock did for Rogers was to make him stay at home. There was nothing to go out for. Outside was the road, the village, the four-eyed faces of the villas called Heart’s Desire Estate which Rogers had built on the flat fields and had sold before anyone had discovered that the site was a water meadow. There was his wooden hut too, where he slept over the typewriter sometimes, and with its Estate Agent’s plate on the door. His wife ran his business now—such as it was. Above all this was the sky. He was inclined to see a hole in things like the street or sky after Pocock’s death, a hole with simply nothing beyond it. Staying at home with his family kept Rogers from seeing the hole. Hearing his wife use the typewriter or telephone in the office, drinking a cup of tea, listening to his two girls, torpidly watching them, his slow mind lay down like a dog in the domestic basket. “Wife and family—you’re lucky, ol’ boy,” Mr. Pocock had said many times in his husky, half-rapacious voice. Rogers brooded. Perhaps he, surviving, was the better man.

  Yet with all his heart and with some plain builder’s shrewdness and village vanity, Rogers had wanted to believe in the singularity of Mr. Pocock. People came down from London and took a house in old age, and when they died, these strangers always turned out to be less than they had at first seemed to be. He was used to that. A handful of dust—often scandalous dust—was all they were against the great tribal burial mound of the village Wilcoxes, Stockses and Rogerses. Pocock had not only looked different but had sounded different and behaved accordingly. Yet the death of Pocock had left in Rogers’s mind some suspicion of fraud—indeterminate yet disturbing, like waking in the night and thinking you smell a carpet smouldering, and yet no coal on it when you get out to look.

  Pocock was a painter. Not only that, he was a well-known painter from London; he knew other painters. Not only other painters, but studios and actresses. He knew the stage. Yet after the ambulance went like a soft clap of low white wings between the hedges of the main road, taking Pocock to the hospital and his end, Rogers said to people who had come to look at property: “We had Pocock here.” They merely said blankly, “What’s that? Never heard of him.” No one at all had heard of Mr. Pocock, the famous painter.

  Rogers and Mr. Pocock had come together not because of their minds or tastes, but because of their bodies. They were drawn will-lessly together by the magnetic force of their phenomenal obesities. There is a loneliness in fat. Atlas met Atlas, astonished to find each saddened by the burden of a world. Rogers was short and had that douce, pleading melancholy of the enormous. His little blue eyes, above the bumps of fat on his cheek-bones, looked like sinking lights at sea; and he had the gentle and bewildered air of a man who watches himself daily getting uncontrollably and hopelessly fatter. His outsize navy blue jacket hung on him like another man’s overcoat. The coarseness and grossness of his appearance, the spread of his nostrils, the crease of his neck, gave him a pathos: there is an inherent delicacy, a dignity and spirituality in pork. He lived in a quiet sedentary fever in which, as his own bounds daily grew, the world seemed farther away to him. His gentleness was like that of the blind, indicating how far he was from other people. There was no one like him in the village. Rogers was a show-piece. His visits to the public-house were a hopeless try for gregariousness, but there were no seats broad enough in the tap, it didn’t “do” for him to go to the bar where his workmen were and, anyway, there were no seats in it. He went instead to the small parlour and was usually there alone, like a human exhibit, with an aspidistra and a picture of Edward VII.

  Rogers’s first impression, as he came into the parlour one night, was that an enormous bull terrier in a black-and-white chessboard jacket had got up on to a chair in the darker corner. Rogers’s perceptions were slow; but at last he saw the figure was a man and not a dog. Between the check suit and check cloth-hat was a face, a raw-meat face which had grown a grey moustache, and under that was a small, furiously proud and querulous mouth. An old dog who would fly out at you if spoken to. The check coat went on to check knickerbockers. There was a rose in Pocock’s buttonhole—the smell of the rose and of Turkish cigarettes in the room—and he had a spotted bow to his collar. But what surprised Rogers, after he had said “good evening” and was leaning forward with the usual difficulty to tap the bell on the table, was the stranger’s voice. Husky, swaggering, full-tempered, it said, daring you to contradict and yet somehow weary: “What are you having, old boy?”

  Deep called unto deep: Rogers saw to his astonishment, not a stranger, but a brother. Not his blood brother, of course, but something closer—a brother in obesity.

  Mr. Pocock’s was a different kind of fatness, tight where Rogers’s was loose, dynamic where Rogers’s was passive and poetic, aggressive where Rogers’s was silkily receptive. Mr. Pocock’s pathos was fiery and bitter. A pair of stiffly inflated balloons seemed to have been placed, one under and one above Mr. Pocock’s waist-line, and the load forced his short legs apart on either side of the chair, like the splayed speckled legs of a frog. And there was another bond. Mr. Pocock, it was evident, was a drinker. A gentleman, too (Rogers observed), as the evening went on, arrogantly free with money. A sportsman also. There were a couple of illustrated papers on the table and one had a photograph of tropical game. A peeress had taken these photographs. One showed a hippopotamus rising like a sofa out of a lake.

  “Damn’ cruel, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock in a grating gasp, having an imaginary row with the aristocracy and Rogers about it. “All these bloody white women following poor defenceless animals around with cameras, old boy. Bloody hippopotamus can’t even drink in peace. Animals much sooner be shot, old boy—what?”

  Yes, Mr. Pocock was a sportsman, a blaspheming sportsman of some elegance, for now Rogers noticed a couple of rings on one hand.

  Yet not a sportsman, after all, for he looked bored when Rogers spoke of the duck and snipe and the teal which float like commas on the meres at the back of the village.

  “Can’t eat it, old boy,” replied Pocock. “Game’s poison to me. Bloody waste of time following birds, if you ask me. Need every ounce of daylight for my work.”

  The bell on the table was tapped again and again. In and out went Askew, the publican. Even he straightened up under the snapping orders of Mr. Pocock.

  And there was no reserve in Mr. Pocock. His talk was free and self-explanatory. “I’ve come down here to see if there is anything,” said Pocock. “If there is, well and good. If not, all right. There may be something.”

  (“What?” wondered Rogers.)

  “I’ve got to, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock. “I’ve got to cut down the overheads. Have another, old boy? With this bloody crisis,” he said with an angry and frightened look in his eyes. “I had my own studio in London and a housekeeper, but with this crisis, and the critics in league against you, the bottom’s gone out of things. There may be something here—I don’t know—Two rooms, a bed, a table, do my own cleaning up and cooking—that’s all I want and no
women about. No,” said Mr. Pocock, “no more women.

  “You married, old boy?” asked Mr. Pocock.

  “Yes,” said Rogers.

  “You’re lucky, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock. “Bloody lucky. Excuse my language, old boy, but woman’s a b …”

  “Oh, fifty-fifty,” said Rogers, not clear whether he meant only half lucky or wholly lucky to have a wife he could share everything with, she doing the office work and looking after his house while he built up his figure and did the drinking. For Rogers had reached the point of saturation in his own life when drinking was work. It never stopped.

  Rogers’s slow mind wanted to explain, but Pocock interrupted.

  “I know, old boy. You can’t tell me anything about women. They’re a bloody question-mark, old boy. There’s two answers to it, one’s right and one’s wrong. When I want what I want, I don’t ask anyone’s opinion, I go and get it.”

  “What?” added Mr. Pocock.

  “You’re right,” said Rogers in his slow, groping voice. “You know the story of the couple who …”

  They didn’t laugh out loud at the story. Rogers shook and shook and his eyes sank out of sight. Mr. Pocock strained in his chair and seemed to fizz with austere pleasure like a bottle of soda-water.

  “It’s nature,” said Mr. Pocock when his head stopped fizzing.

  Rogers was out of his depth here. His head was lolling forward. He had reached the stage when Mr. Pocock had a tendency to rise to the ceiling and then to drift away sideways towards the door in great numbers.

  “Take salmon,” said Rogers heavily, this coming into his mind at the moment.

  “Salmon, old boy? Why bloody salmon?” said Mr. Pocock.

  “They go …” said Rogers. “They go—up fresh water.”

  “Salmon?” said Mr. Pocock. “Salmon? They come from the sea.”

  “They don’t breed in it,” said Rogers uncertainly. He was beginning to forget why he had mentioned them.

  “I know,” said Mr. Pocock peremptorily. “They live in the sea and go up the river when they feel like it.”

  “Feel like it,” repeated Rogers. Somewhere near here was the reason for raising the matter.

  “… I’ve seen ’em, old boy,” continued Mr. Pocock, putting down his glass with a bang.

  “Out of the sea,” insisted Rogers.

  “Don’t be bloody funny, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock, banging his glass again. “We know they do.”

  The landlord called “Time”.

  Rogers and Mr. Pocock got up with common difficulty, exchanging a look of sympathy. Foot by foot, after they had unbent, stopping between paragraphs, they talked and stopped their way out of the public-house and outside its door. Facing the night, surprised by it, they halted again. The moon arrested them. It was a white full moon, the most obese of planets, with its little mouth open in the sad face.

  “Just made for an artist, I should say,” said Rogers, slapped across the face by the cold wind, but warm within in his linings. Yet as a villager he had an obscure feeling that for a London stranger to paint the place insulted it. His feeling was primitive; he did not want the magic of an alien eye upon his home.

  “It used to be pretty, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock. “Till some bastard ran up those bloody villas.”

  “I put them up ten years ago”, said Rogers dispassionately; and he meant that time justified and forgave all things.

  “Good God, old boy. Bloody ugly,” fizzed Mr. Pocock.

  They stared at the villas and grinned, almost sniggered, like boys peeping through a fence at something shocking. It gave Rogers and Mr. Pocock pleasure, they being human, to know the worst about each other. And as they gazed with tenderness upon the raped virgin, the sight started Pocock’s mind on his own affairs and prompted him to the words which were the final thing to bind Rogers to him.

  “I don’t mind telling you, old boy, I’ve been hurt,” Mr. Pocock said. “I’ve had a jerk. I haven’t told a bloody soul so far, but I’ll tell you. Last year I started living on my capital.”

  Rogers turned his back on Mr. Pocock and affected to look up the road for traffic. It was empty. All lights in the village houses were out. He felt a stirring of the bowels. His wife did not know, he hardly let himself know—but he, too, had passed the crest of his life, he, too, was beginning the first harassed footsteps downhill, crumbling away to pieces like a town in a fog, and no one, hitherto, to watch or share the process. Rogers also had started living on his capital.

  After this, day by day, they sought each other out like two dogs. First of all they were halting and suspicious. Rogers said: “Have you been painting, Mr. Pocock?” but this was not, he discovered, a welcome question. Mr. Pocock replied that he was sizing up the situation. Midday, Mr. Pocock could always be found sizing things up at “The Grapes” or “The Waggoner”. He was sizing up and settling in. And, anyway, he hadn’t been feeling too well lately.

  “Been having trouble with my foot,” said Mr. Pocock defiantly at Rogers.

  “It’s the weight you carry,” said Rogers. “I get it myself.”

  Mr. Pocock, as one heavy drinker to another, appreciated the tact of that lie.

  “I keep clear of doctors, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock. “Always have.”

  “They cut you down,” said Rogers, emptying his glass.

  “All wrong, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock. “Want to kill you.”

  At night they met like lovers. They were religious drinkers. Whisky was Mr. Pocock’s religion, beer was the faith of Rogers. An active faith ranges widely. After the public-houses of the village there were two or three on the main road. The headlights of cars howling through the dark to the coast picked out two balloons in coats and trousers, bouncing and blowing down the road. Dramas halted them.

  “What’s that, old boy?”

  “Rabbit.”

  “No, old boy, not a rabbit. It was a fox. I know a fox.”

  “I reckon it was a stoat.”

  The point became intricate under the stars.

  “Bring Mr. Pocock in to supper one evening,” Mrs. Rogers said. She was a plump, practical woman, with hair set like a teacake. She was a one-time nurse, abnormally good-tempered, pleasantly unimaginative. She ate well and enjoyed the anxiety of being the business management of an exhibit like her husband. Incapable herself of his deterioration, hers was the craving, so strong in the orderly and new, for its opposite, the romantic ruin. Rogers, like many men, and especially drinking men, who neglect their wives and are slowly ruining their families, had an ideal picture of his family in his mind, a picture to which his fancy was always putting more delicate touches of reminiscence. For, like all the world beyond his hazy corpulence, his family became remote, a little farther away each day, like a memory or an old master.

  “Bloody funny thing, old boy,” Mr. Pocock said. “When I paint a picture, I get the feeling I have for a woman.”

  It was Rogers’s feeling about his own picture, of his family, that private masterpiece of his. Rogers wasn’t interested in any other pictures; Mr. Pocock wasn’t interested in domestic life. And “The Crown” was placed strategically between their homes.

  About once every couple of months, Mr. Pocock hinted, he “broke out”. He always had. He always would. There was a large manufacturing town with a river, pleasure-boats and a Hippodrome twenty miles away, where life, said Rogers, abounded. He and Mr. Pocock put roses in their buttonholes, cigars in their mouths and went. Rogers explained that he hadn’t seen quite so much life since he was married, but when he was a youngster … Oh, dear. This stirred up memories in Mr. Pocock. They arrived and, to make a start, went to the station buffet. After this the past was vivid. They went to the Hippodrome for the second act of a play about divorce. The seats were narrow and Mr. Pocock said he couldn’t breathe. They left. Mr. Pocock said all this modern stuff was dirty. Nothing but sex. (What’s yours, old boy?) Dirt, like Epstein and Cézanne.

  The last train back was the 12.17. It brought the Hip
podrome people. For a long time the station with its hoardings and iron and glass façade seemed unattainable, but at last, after a long time on the kerb opposite, they rushed it. The train was crowded. Rogers had been sorry to leave the Hippodrome. He smiled, wagging his head, thinking about it, then he began to laugh and nudge his neighbours. They were soon entertained by Rogers. It was like the old days.

  “I’ve been divorced to-day,” Rogers suddenly said; “and he’s my co-respondent.” Mr. Pocock at once offered him a cigarette. Rogers refused.

  “Why do you refuse my cigarettes, old boy?” Mr. Pocock asked abruptly. He was out for a quarrel.

  “Do you think I want your wife?” exclaimed Mr. Pocock angrily. Rogers laughed idiotically.

  “Because you’re a swine if you do,” said Mr. Pocock.

  But they didn’t fight. They got out at their station, helped out by the passengers, and the guard, while the engine-driver watched from the cab. They passed Rogers’s villas.

  “Damned awful, old boy,” said Mr. Pocock.

  “Come in,” said Rogers when they got to his house.

  A look of sobered terror came into Mr. Pocock’s face.

  “Your wife in?” he said.

  “She’s in bed,” Rogers said.

  “Thank God,” said Mr. Pocock. “I’m drunk.”