I trod on the gas, and the old car whizzed up and down the little hills, and the cows and elm trees and fields of wheat rushed past till the engine was pretty nearly red-hot. I felt in much the same mood as I’d felt that day in January when I was coming down the Strand, the day I got my new false teeth. It was as though the power of prophecy had been given me. It seemed to me that I could see the whole of England, and all the people in it, and all the things that’ll happen to all of them. Sometimes, of course, even then, I had a doubt or two. The world is very large, that’s a thing you notice when you’re driving about in a car, and in a way it’s reassuring. Think of the enormous stretches of land you pass over when you cross a corner of a single English county. It’s like Siberia. And the fields and beech spinneys and farmhouses and churches, and the villages with their little grocers’ shops and the parish hall and the ducks walking across the green. Surely it’s too big to be changed? Bound to remain more or less the same. And presently I struck into outer London and followed the Uxbridge Road as far as Southall.
Miles and miles of ugly houses, with people living dull decent lives inside them. And beyond it London stretching on and on, streets, squares, back-alleys, tenements, blocks of flats, pubs, fried-fish shops, picture-houses, on and on for twenty miles, and all the eight million people with their little private lives which they don’t want to have altered. The bombs aren’t made that could smash it out of existence. And the chaos of it! The privateness of all those lives! John Smith cutting out the football coupons, Bill Williams swapping stories in the barber’s. Mrs Jones coming home with the supper beer. Eight million of them! Surely they’ll manage somehow, bombs or no bombs, to keep on with the life that they’ve been used to?
Illusion! Baloney! It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, they’re all for it. The bad times are coming, and the streamlined men are coming too. What’s coming afterwards I don’t know, it hardly even interests me. I only know that if there’s anything you care a curse about, better say good-bye to it now, because everything you’ve ever known is going down, down, into the muck, with the machine-guns rattling all the time.
But when I got back to the suburb my mood suddenly changed.
It suddenly struck me–and it hadn’t even crossed my mind till that moment–that Hilda might really be ill after all.
That’s the effect of environment, you see. In Lower Binfield I’d taken it absolutely for granted that she wasn’t ill and was merely shamming in order to get me home. It had seemed natural at the time, I don’t know why. But as I drove into West Bletchley and the Hesperides Estate closed round me like a kind of red-brick prison, which is what it is, the ordinary habits of thought came back. I had this kind of Monday morning feeling when everything seems bleak and sensible.
I saw what bloody rot it was, this business that I’d wasted the last five days on. Sneaking off to Lower Binfield to try and recover the past, and then, in the car coming home, thinking a lot of prophetic baloney about the future. The future! What’s the future got to do with chaps like you and me? Holding down our jobs–that’s our future. As for Hilda, even when the bombs are dropping she’ll be still thinking about the price of butter.
And suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to think she’d do a thing like that. Of course the S.O.S. wasn’t a fake! As though she’d have the imagination! It was just the plain cold truth. She wasn’t shamming at all, she was really ill. And Gosh! at this moment she might be lying somewhere in ghastly pain, or even dead, for all I knew. The thought sent a most horrible pang of fright through me, a sort of dreadful cold feeling in my guts. I whizzed down Ellesmere Road at nearly forty miles an hour, and instead of taking the car to the lock-up garage as usual I stopped outside the house and jumped out.
So I’m fond of Hilda after all, you say! I don’t know exactly what you mean by fond. Are you fond of your own face? Probably not, but you can’t imagine yourself without it. It’s part of you. Well, that’s how I felt about Hilda. When things are going well I can’t stick the sight of her, but the thought that she might be dead or even in pain sent the shivers through me.
I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit me.
‘Hilda!’ I yelled. ‘Hilda!’
No answer. For a moment I was yelling ‘Hilda! Hilda!’ into utter silence, and some cold sweat started out on my backbone. Maybe they carted her away to hospital already–maybe there was a corpse lying upstairs in the empty house.
I started to dash up the stairs, but at the same moment the two kids, in their pyjamas, came out of their rooms on either side of the landing. It was eight or nine o’clock, I suppose–at any rate the light was just beginning to fail. Lorna hung over the banisters.
‘Oo, Daddy! Oo, it’s Daddy! Why have you come back today? Mummy said you weren’t coming till Friday.’
‘Where’s your mother?’ I said.
‘Mummy’s out. She went out with Mrs Wheeler. Why have you come home today, Daddy?’
‘Then your mother hasn’t been ill?’
‘No. Who said she’d been ill? Daddy! Have you been in Birmingham?’
‘Yes. Get back to bed, now. You’ll be catching cold.’
‘But where’s our presents, Daddy?’
‘What presents?’
‘The presents you’ve bought us from Birmingham.’
‘You’ll see them in the morning,’ I said.
‘Oo, Daddy! Can’t we see them tonight?’
‘No. Dry up. Get back to bed or I’ll wallop the pair of you.’
So she wasn’t ill after all. She had been shamming. And really I hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry. I turned back to the front door, which I’d left open, and there, as large as life, was Hilda coming up the garden path.
I looked at her as she came towards me in the last of the evening light. It was queer to think that less than three minutes earlier I’d been in the devil of a stew, with actual cold sweat on my backbone, at the thought that she might be dead. Well, she wasn’t dead, she was just as usual. Old Hilda with her thin shoulders and her anxious face, and the gas bill and the school-fees, and the mackintoshy smell and the office on Monday–all the bedrock facts that you invariably come back to, the eternal verities as old Porteous calls them. I could see that Hilda wasn’t in too good a temper. She darted me a little quick look, like she does sometimes when she’s got something on her mind, the kind of look some little thin animal, a weasel for instance, might give you. She didn’t seem surprised to see me back, however.
‘Oh, so you’re back already, are you?’ she said.
It seemed pretty obvious that I was back, and I didn’t answer. She didn’t make any move to kiss me.
‘There’s nothing for your supper,’ she went on promptly. That’s Hilda all over. Always manages to say something depressing the instant you set foot inside the house. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. You’ll just have to have bread and cheese–but I don’t think we’ve got any cheese.’
I followed her indoors, into the smell of mackintoshes. We went into the sitting-room. I shut the door and switched on the light. I meant to get my say in first, and I knew it would make things better if I took a strong line from the start.
‘Now’, I said, ‘what the bloody hell do you mean by playing that trick on me?’
She’d just laid her bag down on top of the radio, and for a moment she looked genuinely surprised.
‘What trick? What do you mean?’
‘Sending out that S.O.S.!’
‘What S.O.S.? What are you talking about, George?’
‘Are you trying to tell me you didn’t get them to send out an S.O.S. saying you were seriously ill?’
‘Of course I didn’t! How could I? I wasn’t ill. What would I do a thing like that for?’
I began to explain, but almost before I began I saw what had happened. It was all a mistake. I’d only heard the last few words of the S.O.S. and obviously it was some other Hilda Bowling. I suppose there’d be scores of Hilda Bowlings if you looked the name up in the directory. It just was the kind of dull stupid mistake that’s always happening. Hilda hadn’t even showed that little bit of imagination I’d credited her with. The sole interest in the whole affair had been the five minutes or so when I thought she was dead, and found that I
