Essential Stories by V.S. Pritchett Page A

his meditation was to make him change his scissors for a finer pair.
    “He ought to be dead,” he said.
    “TB,” he said with quiet scorn.
    He looked at me in the mirror.
    “It’s wonderful,” he said, as if to say it was nothing of the sort.
    “It’s wonderful what the doctors can do,” I said.
    “I don’t mean doctors,” he said. “Consumptives! Tuh! They’re wonderful.” As much as to say a sick man can get away with anything—but you try if you’re healthy and see what happens!
    He went on cutting. There was a glint in his pale-blue eyes. He snipped away amusedly as if he were attending to every individual hair at the back of my head.
    “You see his throat?” he said suddenly.
    “What about his throat?” I asked.
    “Didn’t you notice anything? Didn’t you see a mark a bit at the side?” He stood up and looked at me in the mirror.
    “No,” I said.
    He bent down to the back of my neck again. “He cut his throat once,” he said quietly. “Not satisfied with TB,” he said with a grin. It was a small firm, friendly grin. So long, Fred. Cheero, Albert. “Tried to commit suicide.”
    “Wanted everything,” I said.
    “That’s it,” he said.
    “A girl,” the barber said. “He fell in love with a girl.”
    He clipped away.
    “That’s an item,” said the barber absently.
    He fell in love with a local girl who took pity on him when he was in bed, ill. Nursed him. Usual story. Took pity on him but wasn’t interested in him in that way.
    “A very attractive girl,” said the barber.
    “And he got it badly?”
    “They get it badly, consumptives.”
    “Matter of fact,” said the barber, stepping over for the clippers and shooting a hard sideways stare at me. “It was my wife.”
    “Before she was my wife,” he said. There was a touch of quiet, amused resolution in him.
    He’d known that chap since he was a kid. Went to school with him. Used to be his best friend. Still was. Always a lad. Regular nut. Had a milk business, was his own guv’nor till he got ill. Doing well.
    “He knew I was courting her,” he smiled. “That didn’t stop him.” There was a glint in his eye.
    “What did you do?” I asked.
    “I lay low,” he said.
    She had a job in the shop opposite. If you passed that shop you couldn’t help noticing her in the cash desk near the door. “It’s not for me to say—but she was the prettiest girl in this town,” he said. “Still is,” he mused.
    “You’ve seen the river? You came over it by the station,” he said. “Well he used to take her on the river when I was busy. I didn’t mind. I knew my mind. She knew hers. I knew it was all right.”
    “I knew him,” he grinned. “But I knew her. ‘Let him take you on the river,’ I said.”
    I saw the barber’s forehead and his dull blue eyes looking up for a moment over my head in the mirror.
    “Damp river,” he said reflectively. “Damp mists, I mean, on the river. Very flat, low lying, unhealthy,” he said. “That’s where he made his mistake. It started with him taking her on the river.”
    “Double pneumonia once,” he said. “Sixty cigarettes a day, burning the candle at both ends.”
    He grunted.
    “He couldn’t get away with it,” he said.
    When he got ill, the girl used to go and look after him. She used to go and read to him in the afternoons. “I used to turn up in the evenings too when we’d closed.”
    The barber came round to the front and took the brushes lazily. He glanced sardonically at the door as if expecting to see the man standing there. That cocksure irony in the barber seemed to warm up.
    “Know what he used to say to her?” he said sharply and smiled when I was startled. “ ‘Here, Jenny,’ he used to say. ‘Tell Fred to go home and you pop into bed with me. I’m lonely.’ ” The young barber gave a short laugh.
    “In front of me,” he said.
    “What did you say?”
    “I told him to keep quiet or there’d be a funeral. Consumptives want it, they want it