The Fly in the Ointment by VS Pritchett. Part 4.
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Go back to Part 3
“You all right?” his son asked.
“Yes, yes,” said the old man out of breath. “It was only that fly. Do you know, you’re actually more bald at the back than I thought. There’s a patch there as big as my hand. I saw it just then. It gave me quite a shock. You really must do something about it. How are your teeth? Do you have any trouble with your teeth? That may have something to do with it. Hasn’t Alice told you how bald you are?”
“You’ve been doing too much. You’re worried,” said the son, soft with repentance and sympathy. “Sit down. You’ve had a bad time.”
“No, nothing,” said the old man shyly, breathing rather hard. “A bit.
Everyone’s been very nice. They came in and shook hands. The staff came in. They all came in just to shake hands. They said, ‘We wish you good luck’.”
The old man turned his head away. He actually wiped a tear from his eye. A glow of sympathy transported the younger man. He felt as though a sun had risen.
“You know –” the father said uneasily, flitting a glance at the fly on the ceiling as if he wanted the fly as well as his son to listen to what he was going to say – “you know,” he said. The world’s all wrong. I’ve made my mistakes. I was thinking about it before you came. You know where I went wrong? You know where I made my mistake?”
The son’s heart started to a panic of embarrassment. “For heaven’s sake,” he wanted to shout, “don’t! Don’t stir up the whole business. Don’t humiliate yourself before me. Don’t start telling the truth. Don’t oblige me to say we know all about it, that we have known for years the mess you’ve been in, that we’ve seen through the plausible stories you’ve spread, that we’ve known the people you’ve swindled.”
“Money’s been my trouble,” said the old man. “I thought I needed money. That’s one thing it’s taught me. I’ve done with money. Absolutely done and finished with it. I never want to see another penny as long as I live. I don’t want to see or hear of it. If you came in now and offered me a thousand pounds I should laugh at you. We deceive ourselves. We don’t want the stuff. All I want now is just to go to a nice little cottage by the sea,” the old man said. “I feel I need air, sun, life.”
The son was appalled.
“You want money even for that,” the son said irritably. “You want quite a lot of money to do that.”
“Don’t say I want money,” the old man said vehemently. “Don’t say it. When I walk out of this place tonight I’m going to walk into freedom. I am not going to think of money. You never know where it will come from. You may see something. You may meet a man. You never know. Did the children of Israel worry about money? No, they just went out and collected the manna. That’s what I want to do.”
The son was about to speak. The father stopped him. “Money,” the father said, “isn’t necessary at all.”
Now like the harvest moon on full glow the father’s face shone up at his son. “What I came round about was this,” said the son awkwardly and drily. “I’m not rich. None of us is. In fact, with things as they are we’re all pretty shaky and we can’t do anything. I wish I could but I can’t. But” – after the assured beginning he began to stammer and to crinkle his eyes timidly – “but the idea of your being – you know, well short of some immediate necessity, I mean – well, if it is ever a question of – well to be frank, cash, I’d raise it somehow.”
He colored. He hated to admit his own poverty, he hated to offer charity to his father. He hated to sit there knowing the things he knew about him. He was ashamed to think how he, how they all dreaded having the gregarious, optimistic, extravagant, uncontrollable disingenuous old man on their hands. The son hated to feel he was being in some peculiar way which he could not understand mean, cowardly and dishonest.
The father’s sailing eyes came down and looked at his son’s nervous, frowning face and slowly the dreaming look went from the father’s face. Slowly the harvest moon came down from its rosy voyage. The little face suddenly became dominant within the outer folds of skin like a fox looking out of a hole of clay. He leaned forward brusquely on the table and somehow a silver-topped pencil was in his hand preparing to note something briskly on a writing pad.
“Raise it?” said the old man sharply. “Why didn’t you tell me before you could raise money? How can you raise it? Where? By when?”
“I haven’t got it,” stammered the son, taken aback by his father’s sudden ferocity. “I was only thinking that if it were a question of a few pounds… I have a little in the Building Society.”
“Give me the address,” his father said. “Whitehall, do you say? Where is it? What’s the name of the man? Write it down. Have you got a piece of paper? Write it down. Look, Harold, can you go to-morrow? Can you get it out to-morrow? Listen, I can use that money. I can double it in three weeks. I can get twenty per cent. on it.”
The old man’s body was trembling. He leaned further and further over the table, tapping his pencil.
“No,” said the son, standing up, cold with fear. “I can’t do that. I only said if you were in need…”
“In need!” shouted the father, his voice rising. “Am I not in need? A man who has lost everything? Give me the address!”
The son walked out of the office. He began to run down the empty machine-room floor.
“Harold!” shouted the old man, running after him. “Harold! How much did you say you had? Harold!”
Go back to Part 3