‘I’m not a success in the board-room,’ said James. ‘Incidentally.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t quite know.’
Middle-aged women with drapes on their skirts and men smoking cheroots had stood about together on the hotel lawns in the heat of that August day, laughing and telling anecdotes and occasionally lifting their glasses to wish the young Bolsovers well. ‘We’re running out of fizz,’ one waiter reported to another, and the second waiter cursed because he thought that, that being so, the three bottles he had himself purloined might well be missed. ‘Go!’ cried Eve’s mother, hurrying to the bridal couple with a flushed face. ‘Go for heaven’s sake or you’ll miss whatever it is you’re catching.’ Before that Eve had stood for the bearded photographer, feeling happy on her wedding day, like a character out of an old-fashioned story-book, happy because the man she loved had married her. He had taken her hand and had led her away from the lawns of the hotel, and later they had boarded a train for France.
‘My father is eighty-one this month,’ said James.
‘You act as great an age as that. Your middle years are stifling you.’
‘You see me as a species of a bore? You see me in our house, drinking Hennessy brandy and watching the television, and wonder to yourself why the wretched man doesn’t go out and play a game of tennis? He couldn’t, you say to yourself; he couldn’t do that simple thing to save his life. Well, maybe not. Listen.’ James paused, and leaned closer to her. ‘This is the man who on a wedding anniversary tells his wife that hazel hen is an economical dish, who tells her, as though she cared, that he will now take turtle soup, who sees in a waiter signs of impudence and remarks on it. Is that the picture?’
‘I didn’t say any of that.’
‘I’m busy within myself, growing a stomach like the other men, and pains to go with it. They look the same, you know, sitting round the table: sometimes you can’t tell one from another.’
‘You’re trying to put some argument into my mouth.’
‘I’m saying in the open what’s in your mind anyway. Is there harm in being straightforward? Look, I’ll admit it: I’m dry and boring in my middle age.’
James paused. He saw before him a woman who was disillusioned because once upon a time she had believed in living happily ever after. She had borne him two children and had treated him well. He loved her still as she sat there, dressed in black in the purple surroundings, but he saw her and he saw himself, too, together with her somewhere, moving towards bitterness. ‘The man you married,’ said James, ‘is watching himself now. He’s growing gross, and growing older than a pair of grandfathers, well before his time. He’ll tire quite soon of most of life. He’ll sit in an arm-chair and see the cigarette ash like snow upon his clothes and not raise a hand to help himself. “Bring me Hennessy brandy,” that man shall murmur, but no one shall carry it to him because no one can be bothered to be around in the room. And so he shall rise, and the cigarette ash shall fall about, and he shall mooch hither and thither looking for a glass, and a bottle to go with it.’
‘You’re a successful person,’ said Eve angrily. ‘There’s no need at all to go on in this ridiculous manner.’
‘I’m an astute trader, Eve: I’ve been honoured for it early.’
A waiter came near, murmuring about coffee. When he had gone, James said:
‘The days go by while an old man dies. He’s playing merry hell with nurses.’
Eve sighed. She stirred sugar into her coffee. She had heard some part of this before. James said:
‘The days go by, and at pleasant afternoon meetings the men foam at the mouth, sucking effervescent stomach remedies with their cups of milky tea. After which, they may talk of the central heating in their houses. Sometimes they talk of the wives who are in their houses too, complaining wives, so they say, who never stop. They talk of cameras and of food, of holidays in Spain, and boots they have bought, of trade in Wales. They argue about those central heating systems, the size of pipes and boilers, of gas and electricity, oil and coke. They say they have taken the temperature in their rooms and found the temperature satisfactory. Their systems are trouble-free, they say, and clean, and cheap, and beautiful. They strike their fists upon the red baize of the table, battling about the systems, balancing merit against merit, one outdoing the next in praise and admiration. This is the theatre of my life. I am sorry for myself, and I despise myself for that.’
There was one of the eight men whom he had told her about, a man whose ambition it was to change the metal door-handles in the office building to door-handles that had been there in the past, door-handles of black china. There was another whose wife had not been outside her house for twelve years, who lay on a sofa in Purley; and the wife of the man who wished to change the door-handles was the wife who had become devoted to a monkey: Mrs Clinger. In that mystery place, with men such as these, she imagined her husband walking about the long corridors in his quiet clothes, or strolling into a lift, entering an office and saying something succinct. In spite of what he claimed, did all his soul go into that, she wondered, that he should return by night so strange a creature? That he should watch with fervour the programmes on television and say he could not play a game of tennis?
‘Take any three of them,’ said James, ‘and let’s here and now invite them with their wives to dinner.’ He poured and drank some brandy. ‘Why don’t we do that?’ A tart reply crept to Eve’s mind, but was held there. She said:
‘You’re getting drunk with all that brandy, James. The last thing you want is to do this.’
‘I want to see,’ said James, and rose and went away. When he returned he said that he had telephoned three of the men at random. ‘I invited them to dinner this day week,’ said James. ‘Now, there’s an occasion for you.’
The voice of the out-of-work actor spoke again in the Bolsovers’ sitting-room while Mrs Hoop poured herself more crème de menthe. ‘Happy,’ said the voice, and it said it in Gloucestershire too, in a small room occupied by the nurse whom James Bolsover had employed to see to the needs of his father. On the screen, Lady Dolores smiled her smile, and then went out like a light.
In the pale purple lavatory of the restaurant, grandly embellished with silver-coloured ornament of an ersatz material, Eve looked at her reflection in an oval looking-glass. In her right hand she held a powder-puff, while her left gripped the cool edge of a wash-basin. She thought of her two children sleeping in their beds, and of Mrs Hoop snugly downstairs, charging five shillings an hour. She thought for a moment that she might find some other way out of this restaurant, that she might return to her children and Mrs Hoop, and leave James where he sat, because she could not bring herself to walk across the restaurant floor and take her place with calmness opposite him, while a waiter held her chair for her. He would half rise to his feet to greet her. He would smile and then sit still, the brandy moving around in his glass. He would lick his lips in a businesslike way, and would then begin all over again: about death in Gloucestershire and the living men in London. She remembered old Mr Bolsover standing about, looking lost, on the lawns of the hotel, and disappearing rather early. She remembered Miss Cathcart, who once had taught her music, drawing her aside and wishing her happiness, saying, beneath the influence of heat and champagne, that Eve was the most romantic girl she had ever known. They had wished her happiness, all these people of assorted ages who had stood about on the lawns of the hotel, even the bearded photographer. She had felt the splendour of the occasion and had never quite forgotten it.
What Eve had forgotten, and had forgotten totally and naturally, was an occasion that was far more recent, an incident only six hours old. She had forgotten the face and voice of Septimus Tuam, a voice that had said, ‘Look, aren’t those a match?’ and a face she had hardly looked at. Had she remembered the man now, she would probably have remembered what she had thought at the time: that the man at the button counter who was telling her about some errand for an uncle was a figure of a
bsurdity. He had chattered on, reaching out, fingering the buttons, and in his clumsiness had laddered one of her stockings with the point of his umbrella. ‘Please don’t worry,’ she had said, but the man had gone on sillily, apologizing in a profuse way and saying the stockings must be immediately replaced. ‘I have children to collect from school,’ she said. ‘I must go at once.’ She left the man in the button department and went urgently away, feeling that perhaps she had been rude. As she climbed into her car, she remembered that the girl had said that when the new buttons came in she would personally telephone her. She remembered that and at the same time forgot Septimus Tuam, who had been attempting to offer her a brand of love, although she did not know it. At a party once, a few years after she’d been married, a man had said to her that he and she should get to know one another better. ‘Better?’ she had murmured, and the man had smiled and said they might meet one day and have tea. He smiled with confidence at her, and Eve had frostily replied, ‘I see no reason for that. I’m happily married.’ The man laughed loudly and squeezed her arm, and then had gone away. ‘I don’t believe they make them any more,’ Septimus Tuam had remarked that afternoon, referring to extra-large leather buttons, and had he gone on to suggest that perhaps they might have tea together she would have stared at him in horror and amazement. But she had often since thought of that other man, remembering his height and his smile and wondering what they would have talked about over tea in a café. She believed, though, that not even now, as love grew less in her marriage, would she be seriously tempted to find out. James had once been full of life; he had thrown his head back and carelessly laughed, his eyes had had a vigour in them. Their marriage had been an easy thing then, with pleasure in it. It was hard to part with the past.
Eve left the sumptuously appointed lavatory but did not seek some back way out of the restaurant. She walked instead across a soft purple carpet and sat down again. A waiter moved in to hold her chair, and James half rose to greet her.
5
In the purple restaurant the waiter pushed forward Eve’s chair in his expert way, and as he did so Edward Blakeston-Smith’s father walked into the love department. In military attire, in his son’s dream, he strode through the room in which the typists sat, smiling with confidence and touching his moustache. ‘Oh, cherished Roman!’ said Edward’s father.
He came to where Edward stood, and told him of the sadness he had suffered in the past, when Edward’s mother had died without a word in a maternity home; how Edward, that tiny infant, had looked at the sadness and at the bowed head of a father, and had not cried.
‘Well, then?’ said Edward’s father in the love department.
‘It’s simple,’ replied Edward, eager to explain. ‘It’s a simple thing. I’ll soon be on my feet.’
‘Well, then?’ said his father.
‘Listen, Father. I was learning about the whole panorama: the Goths and the Visigoths, Attila the Hun, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc. Let me tell you the lives of the Popes, Father: listen to me.’
‘Well?’ said Edward’s father.
‘I was a student of history, sir, until I looked up one day and saw the Goths and the Visigoths. The golden barbarians were there on the posters, larger than life. “Go down to St Gregory’s,” they said when I told them.’
‘There are three rooms in this love department,’ said Edward’s father. ‘Room 305, Room 306, Room 307.’
‘Room 307 is the sanctum of Lady Dolores. There are two extra doors in Room 307, but that is not our affair.’
‘Room 307 is the hub of the love business. Don’t forget that, son. Do your work well.’
In the respectable suburb of Wimbledon Edward looked around him in his dream and saw what Lady Dolores had said he would see: the men of business and the wives of those men, and children, and motor-cars, and large red buses moving to and fro. Edward dreamed of the women of Wimbledon and of Septimus Tuam wandering among them, peddling love. ‘I do not live in Wimbledon,’ said the woman called Odette Sweeney. ‘Septimus Tuam is not my problem.’
Edward wandered behind Septimus Tuam, haunting him, tracking him from one end of Wimbledon to the other. ‘This is a respectable suburb,’ said Edward; ‘this man is a scandal to decency.’ He entered the houses of the wives of the men of business and hid behind sofas and hall-stands. Septimus Tuam talked about love and Edward crouched away in a corner, making notes on his blank sheets of paper.
‘You have done a good job,’ said Lady Dolores. ‘You have been your age.’ But as she spoke, two soldiers came into the love department and took Edward by the arms, saying he was for the high jump. ‘It’s the hangman’s noose for you, lad,’ said the soldiers. And then Lady Dolores laughed, and the soldiers laughed, and Edward led Lady Dolores and the soldiers up to the heights of Wimbledon. He showed them all the people, the men and the women and the children, and the four of them walked about Wimbledon for many hours, until they found Septimus Tuam. The soldiers took him and put a rope around his neck, and hanged him from the branch of a tree. ‘It should have been prison bars,’ cried Lady Dolores. ‘No need to hang the poor man.’ But the soldiers only laughed and said that hanging was too good for the likes of that. They took off their helmets and cut down the dead thing from the branch of the tree, lighting cigarettes before they did so. They walked away, with the body slung between them, holding up the traffic in order to cross a road. ‘Look at that!’ cried Edward, and he and Lady Dolores saw the two soldiers and Septimus Tuam climb on to a hoarding and take their places in a poster that advertised tea.
6
On the morning after the Bolsovers’ tenth wedding anniversary, the people of London went about their tasks in a drizzle. They awoke on this first morning of September, in outer suburbs or in the fashionable areas of Kensington and Mayfair, to find the soft rain already falling. They reacted in various ways: sighing, yawning, murmuring, nodding or shaking their heads. Some of them examined weather glasses, confirming the accuracy of their instruments. Only a few of these people, here and there, were surprised to see the drizzle; others said they had felt it in their bones. In his room in Putney Septimus Tuam sneered at the drizzle, and sighed, and spat, and shaved his face with an electric razor. Afterwards, he lay alone on his narrow bed, thinking of nothing and in love with no one, relaxing his muscles and his bones as he once had taught himself.
A man called Lake, who also inhabited a room in Putney but was unknown to Septimus Tuam and a different kettle of fish, did not mind the drizzle one way or the other as he whistled and poached an egg for his breakfast. He was reflecting that he would further his ambition one notch, as it were, during the course of this damp day. He ate his egg, writing speedily in an exercise book, planning the downfall of James Bolsover.
The secretary of James Bolsover, Miss Brown, a young woman of thirty, stood in her underclothes and her glasses, and thought about Lake. She, too, lived in Putney, living there because she wished to be not far from Lake, whom she adored. She closed her eyes and saw him clearly, smiling serenely, coming towards her with his muffler on and his right arm outstretched. He spoke to her and touched her, and she thought while the vision lasted that she must play her full part in the stoking of his ambitions and the achieving of his ends. She muttered unsteadily to herself, and sought about for a suitable jumper to wear.
In Gloucestershire it rained more purposefully, bringing down a weight of water and causing the nurse whose task it was to attend the dying of James Bolsover’s father to do so with the mien of one displeased. ‘Take a packet of seeds, if you would,’ commanded old Mr Bolsover from his bed, ‘and set them down in sieved soil in the west greenhouse. I am concerned lest when the demand comes we are unable to meet it.’ The nurse said quietly that it was raining cats and dogs, and added some more, quite sharply, about the nature of her employment. ‘Put on rubber boots, won’t you?’ cried the old man, causing the nurse to supply him with the information that she had written a further letter to his son because of all this new cantankerousn
ess. She spoke, in fact, the truth; and in the moment that she spoke it, James Bolsover in his Wimbledon villa was perusing that very letter while eating a slice of toast and marmalade.
The Bolsover children were talking of the slaughtering of cattle, while their mother spoke to them in a routine way, drawing their attention to the passing of time, and urging haste if they were not to be late for school. James Bolsover sighed, and thought that he would have to go to Gloucestershire again, to give the nurse more money and his father a talking to.
Edward awoke at half past seven with many images still in his mind: the men of business, well-to-do fellows of varying ages, leaving their houses in the wide area of SW19 and setting the bonnets of their motor-cars towards Mammon and the east; the women working in the houses, talking to charwomen and tradesmen, some of them attending to the needs of children and au pair girls, others ordering food for dinner parties. Edward had seen in the night what Lady Dolores had told him there was to see: the windmill on the common, and the men of business relaxing at the weekends, tinkering with their motor-cars, putting a shine on the paintwork. ‘They have a hard life,’ Lady Dolores had said. ‘They grow unhealthy through work and worry. They buy cheap, maybe, and sell expensively, or organize others to do so: much money is involved; it is quite a responsibility.’
The Love Department Page 5