A Kind of Loving

by Stan Barstow

  ‘Well, there’s a couple who’ve certainly had a good time,’ Miller says, and Mrs Miller asks if they’ve been courting long.

  ‘I didn’t even know they were friendly,’ Miller says.

  ‘I don’t think they’ve spoken more than two words to one another before tonight,’ Ingrid says.

  ‘Like that, is it?’ Miller says. ‘You can’t deny the Party brings the Staff together.’

  He drives on for a bit.

  ‘What about you two?’

  ‘If you turn down at the next traffic lights you can drop me right at the door,’ I tell him.

  ‘And you, Ingrid?’

  ‘I’ll show you when we’ve dropped Vic.’

  ‘I’m sure I never meant you to come so far out of your way, Jack,’ I tell Miller.

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ he says. ‘There’ll be a small deduction from salary on Friday.’

  As he turns into our street I pull Ingrid over to me, again and kiss her. ‘Friday night, then?’

  ‘All right.’

  The car stops and I get out. I bend down to say good night.

  ‘Thanks for the lift, Jack. Very good of you. Goo’night, Ingrid. Goo’night, Mrs Miller.’

  I watch them go, the exhaust smoke pink in the tail lights, and then I feel for my key and go up the path. There’s a big ball of fluttering excitement in me at the thought of seeing Ingrid on Friday night. I remember how I felt after last time, but somehow it seems different now, and I can’t think about that. All I can think about is seeing her again, and after can take care of itself.

  III

  One day about a fortnight after the Party Conroy doesn’t turn in and nobody knows why he’s away. The next day he comes as usual and about half-ten he goes into Hassop’s office and spends a good half-hour in there chewing the fat about something. Young Colin Laisterdyke takes Hassop his morning cuppa and comes out and tells us he’s heard him say to Conroy that he doesn’t suppose he can make him change his mind if he’s made it up; and it doesn’t take a genius to reckon up from this that Conroy’s handing his notice in. There’s nothing official and Conroy doesn’t say a dicky bird, but on Friday of the week after this Jeff Lewis goes round the office with a box and a sheet of paper collecting money for Conroy’s leaving present. It’s a good collection to say Conroy’s not everybody’s best friend, and even old Hassop coughs up half a quid. We all say it wouldn’t have been more than two bob, like all the rest of us put in, though, if Lewis hadn’t been crafty enough to have this sheet of foolscap with all the names signed on it and how much they’ve given.

  A week after this Conroy leaves. He spends nearly all afternoon walking round the Works saying so long to all the blokes he knows down there, and then about five we have a little ceremony up by Hassop’s office and Conroy’s presented with a matching fountain pen and propelling pencil set. Hassop makes a little speech about how much Conroy’s going to be missed and everybody’s embarrassed and wishing he’d belt up because we know he doesn’t mean a word of it. There’s Conroy’s name in gold letters on the pen and pencil and it seems to touch him when he gets them. He swallows a time or two and then manages to say, ‘Thanks very much, lads. Bloody good of you.’

  And that’s all. Five minutes later he’s got all his books and drawing tackle in a little attache case and he’s ready for off. He comes and holds his hand out to me.

  ‘So long, then, young Browny.’

  ‘So long, Conroy. All the best.’

  ‘Watch out for the women, lad; and go easy on the beer.’

  ‘I’ll see to it.’

  ‘That’s the ticket. And Nil illegitimum.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nil illegitimum carborundum,’ Conroy says. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’

  I’m laughing. ‘I’ll watch it.’

  And then he’s away, and the queerest thing is this lump in my throat like a bird’s egg seeing him go out of the door. I’ve only just got to know Conroy, the other Conroy under the brag and bluster, and I think we might have been good mates. I sit on my buffet and look at his empty board. I look at Lewis and Rawly and Whymper and the rest. It’s not going to be the same without old Conroy. Somehow it hasn’t been the same lately anyway. I fiddle about with my scale. I can’t concentrate any more today. I’m a bit fed-up all round and I wonder if a change of job mightn’t do me good.

  IV

  In the meantime there’s this business of Ingrid. I’ve seen her three or four times since the Party and every time I leave her I think that’s the last time and I don’t care if I never set eyes on her again. Then one day I’ll look at her and get this feeling and we’re off again. There’s no love in it as far as I’m concerned and I can think that I don’t much like her even when I’m all het up to get her out again. And I feel rotten about it. I feel lousiest when I’ve just left her. I think then I should tell just how it is and I don’t think it’s fair I should take her out like this. But I never do, because just then I don’t want to go deep into things and start explaining. And it’s easy when I’m wanting her to tell myself that she wants me and she’d rather have me this way than not at all. It’s a mess.

  2

  I

  I arrive at the shop one Saturday morning and find Henry standing outside with the door still shut and no sight of Mr Van Huyten.

  ‘I don’t think he was feeling too good yesterday,’ Henry says when I ask him what’s up. ‘He was out in the rain earlier in the week and he thought he’d caught a chill.’

  ‘Who’ll be looking after him?’

  ‘He’ll have to look after himself,’ Henry says. ‘He has a woman coming in to do for him two or three times a week, but he lives on his own.’

  Poor old geezer! I know how it is when you have flu and you want coddling. ‘Why, he could flake out,’ I tell Henry, ‘and nobody ’ud be any the wiser.’

  Henry strikes a match and lights a dokka. ‘That’s what it’s like when you’re old and on your own in the world.’

  Well, I don’t know what to say to this. I can’t remember it happening before. You know Mr Van Huyten’s old but you kind of never think of him falling ill or dying or anything.

  ‘Well what are we goinna do? We can’t stand here all morning. There’ll be customers arriving afore long.’

  Henry gives a nod. ‘And I’ve a couple of sets to deliver…’ He studies a minute, then he says, ‘I’d better go up and see what’s doing.’

  ‘Want me to come?’

  ‘No need. I shan’t be long. I really ought to get them sets delivered, if nothing else.’ He goes over to the van, which he’s had at home overnight.

  ‘Does it mean the shop’ll have to stay shut all day?’

  ‘It did the last time he was badly,’ Henry says. ‘There was nobody else to look after it.’

  ‘Well there is now,’ I tell him. ‘Look, Henry, tell him I can manage. He can’t shut Saturday; it’s his best day. Look at the trade he’ll lose. It might mean thirty or forty quid on records alone.’ I grab Henry’s arm as he’s climbing into the van. ‘Tell him we can manage, Henry. You can demonstrate the sets while I look after the counter. You can always leave the repairs a day.’

  Henry chucks his dog-end away as he gets into the cab. ‘I’ll see what he says.’

  He’s away half an hour and I’m on eggs all the time, walking up and down in front of the shop and thinking he won’t be telling Mr Van Huyten right and I should have gone and talked to him myself. It nigh breaks my heart to think of the shop being shut and all that trade being turned away. Once a middle-aged bloke comes up to the door and tries the handle. ‘Aren’t they open today?’

  ‘In about half an hour,’ I tell him. ‘Mr Van Huyten’s poorly but we’ll be open in about half an hour if you can come back then.’

  He studies a minute. ‘It’s my daughter,’ he says. ‘It’s her birthday next week and she’s mad keen for one o’ these long-playing radiograms. I thought I’d surprise her like… I didn’t know
whether to come here or try Norton’s. Their winder’s full of ’em… televisions an’ all…’

  ‘We can fix you up,’ I tell him. ‘We’ve got a good selection in our inside showroom – H.M.V., K.B., Bush…’ I feel like grabbing his arm and chaining him to the door till Henry gets back. The bloke nods. ‘Aye, well… I’ll just walk up the road and call back later.’

  I can see him slipping away to Norton’s and being roped in by that horrible flash type who waits on there. Just then Henry draws up in the van. I say to the bloke, ‘If you’ll wait just another minute…’ and jump at Henry as he opens the cab door and gets out.

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘He says okay, we’ve to open up an’ do the best we can. He wasn’t too keen on it at first.’

  I’m grinning all over my face. ‘We’ve got a customer already. Gimme the key.’

  I open the door and ease this cove in before he gets any more ideas about going somewhere else. Me and Henry show this bloke the lot, both in the shop and the back room, and when I give Henry the nudge he starts blinding him with gen about input and output and baffles and speakers and I don’t know what else. Neither does this bloke but you can see Henry impresses him and he’s thinking he’s come to a shop where they know what they’re at anyway.

  After about twenty minutes of this the chap settles on an H.M.V. console job with V.H.F. radio, and I start to give him the patter about hire purchase and what not; and this is where I nearly slip up because I’ve weighed this cove up wrong. He just stands there for a minute or two listening and then he brings this dirty great roll of notes out of his pocket and says, ‘I’ll pay cash.’

  Just like that. My hands are trembling so much I can hardly count the money.

  ‘When can you deliver?’ he says when I’ve made his receipt out.

  ‘Any time,’ I tell him.

  ‘Righto.’ He writes something on a bit of paper and gives it to me. ‘You deliver to this address next Wednesday morning. Not before, mind. I want it there on the day.’

  I take a quick butcher’s at the name on the paper. ‘We’ll attend to it, Mr Wainright, don’t worry.’ I come round the counter and walk to the door with him. ‘Thank you very much, sir. Good morning.’

  As soon as the door’s shut I dash into the back place to Henry. He’s got his overall on now and tinkering inside a TV set.

  ‘Seventy-four guineas, Henry. Seventy-four bloody lovely guineas. Just wait till we tell Mr Van Huyten about this. If we only sell a couple of packets of needles all the rest of the day it’s been worth opening for.’

  Henry’s poking a screwdriver into the innards of this set. He nods. ‘Not bad,’ he says. ‘A pity it can’t last.’

  I give up and go back into the shop.

  Course we sell more than a couple of packets of needles. Before long the rush starts and the fans are crowding me at the counter and I’m whipping record boxes down right and left and ringing up the old sales in the till. By the time we shut up and I start off to Mr Van Huyten’s with the key, I’m dog-tired. But happy.

  II

  Mr Van Huyten’s playing Brahms on the gramophone when I get there. He shushes me as he lets me in and I sit down and wait while the music’s finished. I think Brahms is Mr Van Huyten’s favourite composer. He told me once that Brahms might not be the greatest composer who ever lived but nobody ever wrote music that sounded more like great music should sound. It all sounds much of a muchness to me. No beat, no melody, and it goes on and on from now to Kingdom come.

  Well after I’ve been sitting there about three hours this piece finishes and Mr Van reaches out and knocks the gram off. I’ve hardly said a word up to now and he waits for all the news. I ask him how he is first and he says he’s not really poorly on himself but he’s got a chill and he thought it wisest to stay at home today. I tell him about the radiogram we flogged and show him the details of the day’s trade where I’ve written it all down on a bit of paper.

  He says very good, very good, a few times, nodding his head, and I can tell he’s pleased.

  ‘You see it was worth opening for, Mr Van Huyten,’ I say. ‘I was on eggs thinking you’d tell Henry not to bother.’

  He looks at me from where he’s sitting in this big old wing-chair by the fire. ‘It was important to you that the shop should open today, then, Victor?’

  ‘Well, look at all the trade we’d’ve turned away. And you don’t know how many new customers might never have come again if they’d once got to Norton’s.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Mr Van says. ‘You’ve done very well. And this is the first time you’ve attended to the shop on your own for the day. Of course, I knew you were capable or I shouldn’t have given Henry permission to open…’

  I lean back in the chair. I really am dead beat and Mr Van Huyten notices it.

  ‘You wouldn’t be sorry when it was time to close, eh?’ he says, and I grin at him. ‘Can’t say I was. I haven’t had a minute all day.’

  He doesn’t say anything to this and he appears to be thinking about something as he stares into the fire. So we sit there in this big room with the high ceiling and the old furniture and this old-fashioned gramophone with the massive horn sticking out into the room. It’s all shabby and it would give me the creeps to live here. I wonder why Mr Van hangs on to this old gramphone from the year dot, for instance, when he’s got all the latest electric long-playing ones in his shop. Must be sentimental reasons. He rests his elbows on the arms of his chair and puts his finger-ends together. He’s wearing a big wool dressing-gown and a scarf round his neck. He doesn’t look well. You get the feeling you can see through his skin and his face seems thinner than usual.

  ‘How do you like your work, Victor?’ he asks me all of a sudden, and I give a shrug. I hate to admit it but I have to be honest with Mr Van Huyten. ‘Oh, so so.’

  He looks at me over his specs. ‘Only so so?’

  ‘I liked it well enough for the first two or three years,’ I tell him, ‘but now, just lately… I’ve been a bit unsettled, as you might say.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s just a change of scene you need? There comes a time in every man’s life when he feels the need of a change.’

  ‘I don’t think its that, Mr Van Huyten. I’m just tired of the work. I want something different altogether. I feel I want to meet different people…’

  ‘You like it in the shop on Saturdays?’

  ‘I enjoy it. It’s grand.’

  ‘Have you ever considered doing something like that full time?’

  I’m a bit embarrassed at this. ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr Van Huyten, I don’t think the money’s there. In my job a thousand a year’s not too much to hope for. More than that, even, if you get to be a chief draughtsman in charge of an office. And all the time you hear of shop assistants going to work in factories to get more money.’

  He nods. ‘I agree. The money isn’t very good for the ordinary shop assistant. One must have er… an interest in the business for it to be worthwhile.’

  He sits back in his chair and his face goes into the shadows thrown down by the standard lamp behind him. They make the lines on his face look deeper than I’ve ever seen them before.

  ‘I’m an old man, Victor,’ he says. ‘Older than you probably think. I have a sound business which looks as though it will continue to prosper.’ He smiles a bit. ‘Despite Henry’s gloomy prophecies… There’s even room for expansion, but I’m past the age for striking out that way… I’m an old man,’ he says again, ‘and I have no living relatives. I was never fortunate enough to have children.’ He lifts his hand. ‘I may have a few cousins or half-cousins in Holland, but I don’t know them and they don’t know me.’ He stops for a minute. ‘I don’t want to say too much, Victor, because you’re still a very young man, not yet of age… But I will say in all honesty that I’m very fond of you and have every faith in your character and ability.’

  This gets me. I’m touched, and when I remember the dates with lngrid I’m a
bit ashamed as well.

  ‘You’ve become rapidly familiar with the business even though you spend only one day a week with us…’

  I’m wondering what he’s driving at. Is he trying to tell me he wants to leave me the shop? I begin to feel excited, and a bit scared at the same time. He sits up in his chair and blows his nose with a loud noise. I catch the smell of the eucalyptus stuff he has on his hanky.

  ‘The immediate problem, Victor, is that I’m going to be compelled to take on a full-time assistant in the shop. I want someone whom I can like and trust, someone to whom eventually, when I decide to retire and take things more easily, in a few years’ time, I can hand over the day-to-day running of the business.’

  Now I see he’s taking thought for the time when he won’t be around any more, and I don’t know what to say to him. Here it is – here’s how loneliness gets you in the end. You think if you find your dream, the person you’re looking for, it’ll be the end of loneliness for ever. And then, at the end, it creeps up on you again and finds you sitting in an old wing-chair in a gloomy old house, on your own, with everybody gone, and nothing to do but wait for the end. And maybe this is the worst loneliness of all, because you’ve got no hope of anything else.

  Mr Van Huyten coughs and says, real delicate like, ‘What are your present wages, Victor, if I might ask?’

  I tell him I’m on seven-ten a week at present. ‘If they come through with union rate when I’m twenty-one it’ll be nearer ten pound.’

  ‘You think they will give you the union rate?’

  ‘I think it’s practically certain. We’ve a pretty strong union membership at Whittaker’s and all the older chaps get the rate.’

  ‘And in future years? Does it rise any more?’

  ‘Till you’re twenty-five. It’s about fourteen-ten then.’

  Mr Van lifts his eyebrows. ‘Fourteen-ten. And after that, what happens?’

  ‘Well as far as the union’s concerned, that’s it. If the firm thinks you’re worth a bit more they might give it to you. Like I said, there are jobs going that carry a thousand a year.’