The Fly in the Ointment by VS Pritchett. Part 1.
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It was the dead hour of a November afternoon. Under the ceiling of level mud-colored cloud, the latest office buildings of the city stood out alarmingly like new tombstones, among the mass of older buildings. And along the streets, the few cars and the few people appeared and disappeared slowly as if they were not following the roadway or the pavement, but some inner, personal route. Along the road to the main station, at intervals of two hundred yards or so, unemployed men and one or two beggars were dribbling slowly past the desert of public buildings to the next patch of shop fronts.
Presently a taxi stopped outside one of the underground stations and a man of thirty-five paid his fare and made off down one of the small streets.
“Better not arrive in a taxi,” he was thinking. “The old man will wonder where I got the money.”
He was going to see his father. It was his father’s last day at his factory, the last day of thirty years’ work and life among these streets, building a business out of nothing, and then, after a few years of prosperity, letting it go to pieces in a chafer of rumor, idleness, quarrels, accusations and, at last, bankruptcy.
Suddenly all the money quarrels of the family, which nagged in the young man’s mind, had been dissolved. His dread of being involved in them vanished. He was overcome by the sadness of his father’s situation. “Thirty years of your life come to an end. I must see him. I must help him.” All the same, knowing his father, he had paid off the taxi and walked the last quarter of a mile.
It was a shock to see the name of the firm, newly painted too, on the sign outside the factory and on the brass of the office entrance, newly polished. He pressed the bell at the office window inside and it was a long time before he heard footsteps cross the empty room and saw a shadow cloud the frosted glass of the window.
“It’s Harold, father,” the young man said. The door was opened.
“Hullo, old chap. This is very nice of you, Harold,” said the old man shyly, stepping back from the door to let his son in, and lowering his pleased, blue eyes for a second’s modesty.
“Naturally I had to come,” said the son, shyly also. And then the father, filled out with assurance again and taking his son’s arm, walked him across the floor of the empty workroom.
“Hardly recognize it, do you? When were you here last?” said the father.
This had been the machine-room, before the machines had gone. Through another door was what had been the showroom where the son remembered seeing his father, then a dark-haired man, talking in a voice he had never heard before, a quick, bland voice, to his customers. Now there were only dust-lines left by the shelves on the white brick walls, and the marks of the showroom cupboards on the floor. The place looked large and light. There was no throb of machines, no hum of voices, no sound at all, now, but the echo of their steps on the empty floors.
Already, though only a month bankrupt, the firm was becoming a ghost.
The two men walked towards the glass door of the office. They were both short. The father was well-dressed in an excellent navy-blue suit. He was a vigorous, broad man with a pleased impish smile. The sunburn shone through the clipped white hair of his head and he had the simple, trim, open-air look of a snow man. The son beside him was round-shouldered and shabby, a keen but anxious fellow in need of a hair cut and going bald.
“Come in, Professor,” said the father. This was an old family joke. He despised his son, who was, in fact, not a professor but a poorly paid lecturer at a provincial university.
“Come in,” said the father, repeating himself, not with the impatience he used to have, but with the habit of age. “Come inside, into my office. If you can call it an office now,” he apologized. “This used to be my room, do you remember, it used to be my office? Take a chair. We’ve still got a chair. The desk’s gone, yes that’s gone, it was sold, fetched a good price – what was I saying?” he turned a bewildered look to his son. “The chair. I was saying they have to leave you a table and a chair. I was just going to have a cup of tea, old boy, but – pardon me,” he apologized again, “I’ve only one cup. Things have been sold for the liquidators and they’ve cleaned out nearly everything. I found this cup and teapot upstairs in the foreman’s room. Of course he’s gone, all the hands have gone, and when I looked around just now to lock up before taking the keys to the agent when I hand over today, I saw this cup.
Go to Part 2