Somebody at the Door

by Raymond Postgate

  But she had ultimately been given something else. Brandon wanted to continue to hang round her: she gave him his congé with serene assurance. His attentions, and her mirror, had assured her of one thing. She was no longer an ugly gawk, a skinny Lizzie, a duck’s-bottom or any of the things that the nursery had called her. She knew now she was a pretty young woman—perhaps more than pretty—she could cut others out, she could charm men, and (she considered) she had experienced all life had to give and found it worthless. Immune from temptation, new in poise and assurance; she would marry for money and remove herself from her father’s home as soon as she could.

  Her fulfilment of that programme had not been as successful as she wished. Two years after Brandon Lee’s exploit she became engaged to, and shortly after married, Councillor Henry Grayling of Croxburn, who was staying for a fortnight’s holiday at the Grand. He was over forty and already established in his habits, which consisted of regular attendance at the office and the Council, with the sole relaxation of bridge with fellow councillors. He wanted a wife who would increase his position in the community, entertain his friends as he wished, and give him children. He picked on Renata because she was very attractive, because she encouraged him openly, and because she had no money and would be in his power. He did not get what he wanted: she would not have children, and was bored with his friends. He was not even able to control her financially to anything like the extent he had expected.

  She on her side wanted a rich husband who would make few demands and would provide her with a comfortable home and the base for a full life. She found she had married a man who was moderately well off only—his salary was not high and his peculations limited—and very parsimonious. His friends were dreary, middle-aged and dull; he disapproved of the books she read, and of the conversations she tried to carry on. He was as narrow and tyrannous as her father; though he did not try to beat her he had other physical rights over her which he exercised according to a punctually kept time-table. She was convinced (being twenty years old, healthy, and a woman) that she had cast from herself all illusions of the flesh and of romance: she was greatly surprised at the annoyance caused her by the continued proximity of this grey, sour husband, smelling perpetually of stale tobacco.

  Her second escapade, which she remembered in humiliation in Paris, was undertaken wholly in revenge on her husband. She found in Cellini’s memoirs a phrase about one of his models whom he rather disliked: “I lay with her to vex her and her family.” Appreciating it, she lay with Richard Grannison (a cheerful, rather greedy reddish-faced man who had entertained her expensively) in order to vex her husband. She never told him of her evening’s occupation; her revenge was private. To her mild surprise, she rather enjoyed the experience, though not sufficiently keenly to wish to repeat it. She found Grannison a very kind and quite unsentimental man: she learnt in one afternoon that a cynical attitude to affairs of the heart was quite compatible with gentleness and (as she thought) a fundamentally civilized behaviour. He talked to her afterwards with the ease of a practised man about town, assuming at the first an equal degree of sophistication in her. “Why, you’re blushing,” he said after a minute. “Let me see. Do you blush all over, or only your face?” She burned even redder and-held down the clothes. “You …” she began to say and stopped. What she really meant was the equivalent of “You are a one!” or “You do say such things!” observations she had abandoned about the age of fifteen; and she felt humiliated that she had advanced no further. She said something, inevitably incoherent, about “broad daylight.”

  He sat upright, and bent over her, his eyes bright with the zeal of the propagandist. “Darling,” he said, “you mustn’t be Victorian. You have got to consider these things practically. Afternoons are the time for seduction. Anatole France proved it long ago.”

  He stood up to deliver his discourse. He picked up his dressing-gown, which was silk, purple with large yellow sunflowers on it, put it on and strode up and down in it. He looked Neronic, and the subject of his oration would have suited the early Roman empire.

  “Consider the whole question in the light of reason,” he adjured her. “The conventional night out. What does it mean? Why, creeping home about five in the morning, very tired and uncomfortable, with none of the buses or trains running, and probably no taxi available. One is unshaven and probably has an unpleasant mouth. If you are a man who runs the usual ménage, you are terrified of making a noise as you come in and facing questions afterwards. You are exhausted and irritable the rest of the day; and what, I ask you, are your last recollections of the girl friend? You saw her in the light of early morning: she was probably half asleep, with her mouth open, and she might be snoring.”

  He stroked her hair with his hand and reflected that there was no point in adding that her make-up might be disturbed. Two small dashes of lipstick were all that Renata needed in those days.

  “And then think of the afternoon” (he resumed). “You get up—you have a cocktail (I am going to order one in a minute). Your last intimate recollection of your friend is of her in complete command of herself, in what the eighteenth-century poets called a sweet disorder. As lovely as you look this moment, my dear. You part about four or five o’clock—bland, cheerful, unchallengeable. Nobody knows that you have been occupied otherwise than innocently. You remember each other as we, I hope, will remember each other. I hope you will think of me as clean and well-shaved, and as cheerful after a large dry Martini. That is what I am going to order, and I have remembered that you like a Clover Club. And I shall certainly remember you as beautiful as you are now, and as chic as you were when you came—and as you will be when you take my arm downstairs. I shall say ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Grayling! It has been a pleasure meeting you,’ and that understatement will end a perfect afternoon.”

  He sent her flowers for two years running on the anniversary and thereafter forgot.

  It was much more her continued association with her husband than her one escapade with Grannison which had made her feel grubby and secondhand in face of Hugh’s adoration. It made her, too, a little frightened—not that Hugh would “find out” in any vulgar sense, for she had told him her history and been listened to without comprehension, but that some time the excitement would pass and he would see in her a not-so-young, cheapened suburban councillor’s wife. Was she deceiving him? No. Was it her duty to prevent him deceiving himself? No. Could she prevent him, if it had been her duty? No. The sequence of question and answer should have been satisfactory; and was not.

  §

  The partner in her bad bargain did not know quite how bad his bargain was, but he too was discontented enough. He was the more consciously, and the more quickly, discontented, because he had from the beginning regarded the marriage as a transaction—as an important step in a career which had consisted in a steady, if slow, acquisition. He had acquired money, a limited amount, but satisfactory according to his standards; power, limited in area but satisfactory in its area; possessions and position of the kind to which he aspired. He had made no serious error before, and if anyone had been worsted in his life it had not been he. This was his first failure.

  He had been an only child, late-born, of hardworking and poor parents. He had been sickly in his youth, a spotty, timid boy in knee-breeches attending a private school which taught him indifferently and had pretensions to snobbery. His education had consumed nearly all his parents’ money; what remained had been just enough to send him to a London commercial college where he was taught “business method,” of which the only valuable part was accountancy. He had taken a junior clerkship at Barrow and Furness’s before 1914. His career was interrupted only a short while by the war. He “attested” early in 1916 to avoid conscription, was passed B1 by an indolent doctor, and broke down in two months. He was invalided out, was taken on again at the bottom of the ladder by his firm, and had never left them since. His progress had been maddeningly slow, not because he was inefficient (he was noticeably neither efficient nor ineff
icient), but because in 1919 the management reinstated such of their old employees as returned from the war. They demoted him to make room for them; he bitterly resented this as an injustice, but dared not protest. He restarted climbing the ladder. One year was like another year; promotion was very slow, salary increases small but regular. He lived with his parents till they died; then he moved to one of the innumerable houses built in the London suburbs which he purchased, as did a thousand neighbours, on a mortgage through a building society. He employed a middle-aged cousin as a housekeeper; it was partly to get rid of her that he married.

  It is not in his emotional but in his financial history that the mainspring of his life could be found. Henry Grayling was honest in private and in business, but publicly dishonest—a system of morals more common than is often realized. He would have regarded it as crazy to attempt to swindle his employers, and as bad policy to cheat his friends; but he had no hesitation in robbing the public. He recognised, indeed, that he had better be careful, just as a man who rides in a train farther than his ticket entitles him to go realizes he had better be careful; but he had no more sense of guilt than the thousands of London tram, tube and bus passengers who override their stage each year. He regarded himself quite honestly as a man with a high standard of morals.

  He did not enter local politics originally with any corrupt intention, but merely as part of his plan for social advancement. He had joined the Conservative Club (from which the local “Ratepayers’ Association” was run), while his parents were still living. When Croxburn was first constituted as Urban District and allowed a Council, he was a candidate at that first almost uncontested election; by the time it achieved the rank of Borough he was so well established that it was unthinkable that he should lose his seat. At most elections he was unopposed; all he had to do was to issue a brief election address, printed locally on shiny paper with a smudgy half-tone of himself (in an oval frame, and taken by a local photographer), assuring the citizens of Croxburn of his continued devotion to their interests.

  Quite possibly he would have been contented with the increase in importance that his new status gave him, if he had not been elected to the Finance and General Purposes Committee, on the grounds that as the cashier of a big firm he would be highly qualified. He watched the proceedings of his colleagues silently for some time: he suspected irregularities and even partially exposed one. Nothing came to the ears of the public on that occasion, nor to those of the District Auditor, but it was understood by fellow councillors that Mr. Grayling’s broad hint was the cause of the resignation of the Deputy Mayor on grounds of ill-health. Taxed with it one evening by an Alderman—P. H. Robbins, a stationer, not very influential—Grayling declined to reply except in general terms. “I don’t,” he said, “claim that for a man to make a reasonable profit out of his knowledge is a serious crime. I have moved about the world; I am a practical man. But what I say is this: municipal finance nowadays is very closely overlooked. If a councillor or official is found out doing what he shouldn’t, it shakes public confidence as well as ruining him. And he is very likely to be found out. As to whether I’ve had any reason to suspect anything recently, and whether I’ve acted on these suspicions—that I ought not to say. All I will say is that, if anything like that occurred, it would be to everyone’s advantage if the person who had been so ill-advised decided of his own will to retire from the scene.”

  Alderman Robbins looked at the Councillor admiringly over the edge of his cup of cocoa and repeated these profound aphorisms during the next week to all who would listen. Grayling’s reputation went up among all municipal politicians of sense: a week later he accepted membership of the small committee which controlled the Croxburn Municipal Gasworks.

  He had had his eye on this committee for some time. It consisted of five: the Town Clerk, the General Manager, who was the Town Clerk’s brother-in-law, Councillor J. G. King (whom Grayling replaced), Alderman Robbins who was insignificant, and Councillor Peter Fairley who was interested in a local tileworks and was believed to have a finger in several other enterprises.

  By opening his eyes and shutting his mouth he noticed reasons to believe that peculation could, and probably did, occur, though direct monkeying with the funds was impossible: the District Auditor made it far too dangerous.

  He spent an enormous amount of time trying to find out what was going on and how he could get in on it. It was for a while the problem of his life, on which he spent more thought and energy than on anything that had come his way—certainly more than on his marriage. He lived with the question—slept with it, ate with it, worked with it. Ultimately he decided there were probably four methods of corruption, and began to make notes on them in a private shorthand. But he was a careful man; it was just possible that some day someone might find his notes and decipher them. He recast them, therefore, heading them “Matters for investigation,” and writing out at length preliminary reflections upon the duty of every councillor to prevent corruption and to check on every possible loophole through which it might creep.

  The first method which occurred to him as probable was the undercharging of favoured customers. He suspected that somehow the Town Clerk and his friends got their gas for something like a third of the fixed price. But how it was done he could not imagine. It irritated him to the extreme. It would be too risky to tamper with the Accounts Department. There would be someone who would notice. The statement would not agree with the meter record; and that could not be explained away. He wrote: “How? How?” in the margin; he was indignant at not being able to see what must be under his nose.

  Still, this was small stuff and risky. A second method seemed, at first sight anyway, to be more hopeful. He noticed, as everyone who has had anything to do with public contracts has been noticing for a good many years, that the competitive character of tenders was pretty bogus. All the large tenders for equipment, coal, and so forth, corresponded almost exactly when they were received in the Council offices. A few shillings difference, indeed, only separated them. In one case the firms in the ring had not even troubled to make that gesture, and the tenders were identical to the last 8s. 6d. Yet one firm had to be preferred to another in the end. How was that firm chosen? The answer did not seem doubtful to Grayling. Bribes. Not a large bribe; perhaps only £20 passed across in a public house. All that the obliging official had to do was to remark to the Committee that all the prices were much the same and so what really mattered was that So-and-So’s service was much better, by past experience. Or perhaps the same amount would be more wisely spent scattered among the councillors. Grayling noted this as a possible source of funds; but he also noted (as obscurely as he could) that it couldn’t be good for long. For, in his opinion, it would soon occur to the contractors that their agents were undoing by these bribes the chief benefit which they had anticipated from forming a ring. They were reintroducing a kind of competition even as if it was only a competition in corruption. Before long, Grayling considered, the firms would go into a fresh huddle and allot the market scientifically. Then, the firm to which Croxburn business was allotted would always enter a tender appreciably below that of other firms. The Committee would have nothing to debate. The Council would find its choice in effect made for it. And there would be no more handouts.

  Grayling did not note down that he was witnessing a fundamental change in economics and the structure of society. He was not inclined for reflexions upon the structure and implications of the late stage of finance-capitalism. All he saw was a system of graft beginning to wither away before he had had a real opportunity to exploit it.

  He noted with more respect a third way of preying on the public funds (the phrase comes from his own notes). This was unnecessary expenditure of a kind which was sure to be for the benefit of one of the gang. He noticed that the amount of re-tiling that the Gasworks had required in the past three years had amounted to almost complete re-equipment. Mr. Fairley had, of course, withdrawn from the Committee when the contracts were discussed. He ha
d indeed only just resumed his seat on it. But his presence had not been necessary. Once it had been decided to re-tile, the thing was in the bag. There was no other firm near which had the equipment and material or employed local labour. Mr. Fairley could show the most complete indifference to the debates; as indeed he did. There were several other, smaller contracts, mainly with builders, which Grayling suspected. But, alas, he owned no firm which could work a similar racket. He had to console himself by marking this practice “Dangerous.”

  Finally, he viewed with cold contempt the stuffing of the payrolls which went on. The clerical staff of the Gasworks was much too large, and very incompetent. The reason was, fairly clearly, the considerable number of otherwise unemployable female relatives of local politicians who were on the staff. Grayling had no relatives to park on the Gasworks, and he was annoyed. The telephone was answered by halfwits; and he disliked having an institution with which he was connected publicly shamed. He felt what might, with gross flattery, be called an embryonic stirring of civic consciousness.

  He had by now a brief Rogue’s Manual of local government, but found only one opening for himself. He decided that the only thing he could do was to push in to the contracts racket while it was still profitable. It needn’t be dangerous. He could just wait until there seemed to be something going through and then obstruct in Committee. Then the others would have to move. They would have to offer him something. They should take the risks; not he.