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Many Are Disappointed
Heads down to the wind from the hidden sea, the four men were
cycling up a deserted road in the country. Bert, who was the young-
est, dreamed:
'You get to the pub, and there's a girl at the pub, a dark girl with
bare arms and bare legs in a white frock, the daughter of the house,
or an orphan - maybe it's better she should be an orphan - and
you say something to her, or, better still, you don't say anything to
her — she just comes and puts her arms round you, and you can feel
her skin through her frock and she brings you some beer and the
other chaps aren't there and the people don't say anything except
laugh and go away, because it's all natural and she doesn't have a
baby. Same at the next place, same anywhere, different place, dif-
ferent girl, or same girl - same girl always turning up, always wait-
ing. Dunno how she got there. Just slips along without you know-
ing it and waiting like all those songs . . . '
And there the pub was. It stood on the crown of the long hill,
straight ahead of them, a small red-brick house with out-buildings
and a single chimney trailing out smoke against the strong white
light which seemed to be thrown up by great reflectors from the
hidden sea.
'There's our beer, Mr Blake,' shouted Sid on his pink racing tyres,
who was the first to see it, the first to see everything. The four men
glanced up.
Yes, there's our beer, they said. Our ruddy beer. They had been
thinking about it for miles. A pub at the crossroads, a pub where
the old Roman road crossed this road that went on to the land's
end, a funny place for a pub, but a pub all right, the only pub for
ten miles at Harry's ruddy Roman road, marked on the map which
stuck out of the backside pocket of Harry's breeches. Yes, that was
the pub, and Ted, the oldest and the married one, slacked on the
long hill and said all he hoped was that the Romans had left a drop
in the bottom of the barrel for posterity.
354
V. S. Pritchett
When they had left in the morning there had been little wind.
The skylarks were over the fields, and the sun itself was like one of
their steel wheels flashing in the sky. Sid was the first, but Harry
with the stubborn red neck and the close dull fair curls was the
leader. In the week he sat in the office making the plan. He had this
mania for Roman roads. 'Ask our Mr Newton,' they said, 'the man
with the big head and the brain.' They had passed through the
cream-walled villages and out again to pick up once more the sing-
ing of the larks; and then cloud had covered the sun like a grey
hand, west of Handleyford the country had emptied, and it was
astonishing to hear a bird. Reeds were in the small meadows.
Hedges crawled uncut and there had been no villages, only long
tablelands of common and bald wiry grass for sheep and the iso-
lated farm with no ivy on the brick.
Well, they were there at last. They piled their bicycles against the
wall of the house. They were shy before these country places. They
waited for Ted. He was walking the last thirty yards. They looked
at the four windows with their lace curtains and the varnished
door. There was a chicken in the road and no sound but the whim-
per of the telegraph wire on the hill. In an open barn was a cart
tipped down, its shaft white with the winter's mud, and last year's
swallow nests, now empty, were under the eaves. Then Ted came
and when he had piled his bicycle, they read the black sign over the
door. 'Tavern,' it said. A funny old-fashioned word, Ted said, that
you didn't often see.
'Well,' Sid said, 'a couple of pints all round?'
They looked to Harry. He always opened doors, but this door
was so emphatically closed that he took off his fur gauntlet first
and knocked before he opened it. The four men were surprised to
see a woman standing behind the door, waiting there as if she had
been listening to them. She was a frail, drab woman, not much past
thirty, in a white blouse that drooped low over her chest.
'Good morning,' said Sid. 'This the bar?'
'The bar?' said the woman timidly. She spoke in a flat wondering
voice and not in the singsong of this part of the country.
'Yes, the bar,' Ted said, it says "Tavern,"' he said, nodding up at
the notice.
'Oh yes,' she said, hesitating. 'Come in. Come in here.'
She showed them not into the bar but into a sitting-room. There
was a bowl of tomatoes in the window and a notice said 'Teas'.
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