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Many Are Disappointed
357
'Well, Mr Blake,' said Ted, 'there's a ruddy sell.'
'Have a gasper, Mr Richards,' said Sid.
'Try my lighter,' said Ted.
He clicked the lighter, but no flame came.
'Wrong number,' said Ted. 'Dial O and try again.' A steak, said
Sid, had been his idea. A couple of pints just to ease the passage
and then some real drinking, Ted said. But Bert was drumming on
a biscuit tin and was looking inside. There was nothing in it.
'Many,' said Bert, 'are disappointed.'
They looked at the room. There were two new treacle-coloured
armchairs. There was a sofa with a pattern of black ferns on it. The
new plush was damp and sticky to the hands from the air of the
hidden sea. There was a gun-metal fender and there was crinkled,
green paper in the fireplace. A cupboard with a glass door was
empty except for the lowest shelf. On that was a thick book called
The Marvels of Science.
The room was cold. They thought in the winter it must be damn
cold. They thought of the ten drizzling miles to Handleyford.
They listened to the cold clatter of the plates in the kitchen and
the sound of the woman's excited voice and the child's. There was
the bare linoleum on the floor and the chill glass of the window.
Outside was the road with blown sand at the edges and, beyond a
wall, there were rows of cabbages, then a bit of field and the
expressionless sky. There was no sound on the road. They - it oc-
curred to them — had been the only sound on that road for hours.
The woman came in with a cup and then with a plate. The child
brought a plate and the woman came in with another cup. She
looked in a dazed way at the men, amazed that they were still there.
It seemed to Ted, who was married, that she didn't know how to
lay a table. 'And now I've forgotten the sugar,' she laughed. Every
time she came into the room she glanced at Bert timidly and yet
pityingly, because he was the youngest and had been the most
angry. He lowered his eyes and avoided her look. But to Ted she
said: 'That's right, you make yourselves comfortable,' and at Sid
she smiled because he had been the kindest. At Harry she did not
look at all.
She was very startled then when he stood at the door and said:
'Where's this Roman road?'
She was in the kitchen. She told him the road by the white gate
and showed him from the doorway of the house.
358
V. S. Pritchett
'There he goes,' said Sid at the window. 'He's looking over the
gate.'
They waited. The milk was put on the table. The woman came
in at last with the bread and butter and the tea.
'He'll miss his tea next,' Ted said.
'Well,' Ted said, when Harry came back. 'See any Romans?'
it's just grass,' Harry said. 'Nothing on it.' He stared in his baf-
fled, bull-necked way.
'No beer and no Romans,' Ted said.
The woman, who was standing there, smiled. In a faltering voice,
wishing to make them happy, she said:
'We don't often get no Romans here.'
'Oh God!' Bert laughed very loudly and Ted shook with laughter
too. Harry stared.
'Don't take any notice of them, missus,' Sid said. And then to
them: 'She means gypsies.'
'That come with brooms,' she said, bewildered by their laughter,
wondering what she had done.
When she had gone and had closed the door, Bert and Ted
touched their heads with their fingers and said she was dippy, but
Sid told them to speak quietly.
Noisily they had drawn up their chairs and were eating and
drinking. Ted cut up tomatoes, salted them, and put them on his
bread. They were good for the blood, he told them, and Harry said
they reckoned at home his granddad got the cancer he died of from
eating tomatoes day after day. Bert, with his mouth full, said he'd
read somewhere that tea was the most dangerous drink on earth.
Then the child came in with a paper and said her mother had sent
it. Sid looked at the door when it closed again.
'Funny thing,' he said. 'I think I've seen that woman before.'
That, they said, was Sid's trouble. He'd seen too many girls be-
fore.
He was a lanky man with a high forehead and a Hitler mous-
tache and his lips lay over his mouth as if they were kissing the air
or whispering to it. He was a dark, harsh-looking, cocksure man,
but with a gentle voice and it was hard to see his eyes under his
strong glasses. His lashes were long and his lids often half-lowered,
which gave him an air of seriousness and shyness. But he stuck his
thumbs in his waistcoat and stuck out his legs to show his loud
check stockings and he had that ring on his finger. 'Move that up a
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