Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)

by V. S. Pritchett

  The old lady stepped close to her son and felt the cloth of his suit.

  “Good quality,” she said, “the very best. It will last you. Turn round, Philip.”

  Beluncle turned round.

  “Eh, it's good. Your Ethel will not appreciate it,” she said. “It vexes me you should take it to that wicked church; you broke your father's heart following that woman.”

  She was speaking of Mrs Parkinson.

  Beluncle turned round.

  “I follow my conscience, mother, as my father followed his,” said Beluncle, smiling. He was obliged to speak to the deaf woman in a very loud voice, but he liked speaking loudly.

  “I would not follow my conscience to hell-fire,” said his mother, smiling also. The two smiles were the same, they appeared in fixed, hostile circles on the faces of the son and the mother, but his smile was wide and bland and showed his very white false teeth. These had been put in his twenties because they looked smarter than ordinary teeth, because he knew that the idea that he could spend a lot of money would impress his customers. Her smile was still switched on, fixed and burning neither more brightly nor more dimly.

  “There is only one God,” said Beluncle. “Father and I worshipped him in different ways.”

  The old lady did not hear this and looked vacantly.

  “I say,” said Beluncle, “there is only one God.”

  “One,” he said.

  The old lady now understood.

  “Your father did not run after women and worship idols or graven images,” said the old lady.

  Beluncle smiled happily and his mother smiled happily too.

  “Look,” said Beluncle, taking his rose out of his buttonhole. “I have brought you a rose from the garden. It is a red rose like father loved.”

  The old lady took the rose quickly and held it to her nose.

  “Eh, your father loved roses,” she said. “He liked big roses, the best that smell. It brings him back to me, it took away the smell of tobacco.”

  She put the rose on the dressing-table with delight and said in an excited voice:

  “I lay Ethel didn't give your coat a brush. Wait, I will brush you. I can't have you going out with dust. You could never abide dust and dirt when you were a little boy. You cried if you were dirty. Dirty, you said, dirty, mummy. It is the way I brought you up, not like some mothers. I can hear you in the closet, I can, crying out, 'Mummy, mummy, dirty. Dirtee,' until I came to you.” She was looking on her dressing-table for the brush.

  “The brush is not here,” she said blankly.

  “It is in your drawer,” Beluncle said. “Drawer-D-R-A-w-E-R. Oh dear. Over there.”

  “Have you been looking in my drawer?” said the old lady suspiciously, opening the drawer. “No, it isn't here, where is it?”

  “You have forgotten,” said Beluncle. “Put the rose in water.”

  “It is my silver brush. It has a bit of silver on the back,” said the old lady fretfully. “My mother gave it to me when I was married, two brushes with real silver, not for the wide world would I lose it. She bought them in Leeds at Masons and it cost her a five-pound note. …”

  The old lady stopped and turned to her son, standing stiffly with her small fists clenched. Suddenly, without warning, she screamed out:

  “Philip!” she cried. “I have been robbed. I have had the burglars. This house is full of thieves. They have taken my brush to get a few shillings….”

  “Now, mother, calm yourself. No one robs you. I will not have you say there are thieves in my house. You have forgotten where you put your brush.”

  “No, I have been robbed. Robbers have been here. They have been to my wardrobe. I have been counting my sheets. Where are my two double sheets and the six little embroidered towels? They have stolen them.”

  “Who has stolen them? No one. Don't be stupid, mother. No one touches your things,” said Beluncle. “Now be a good girl and be quiet.”

  “Time is getting on,” said Ethel Beluncle in a kind and playful voice, coming into the room. She had been waiting outside the door.

  “Robbers have taken my brush,” said the old lady.

  “You wicked child,” said Ethel Beluncle, her quick temper putting two red marks on her cheeks. “No one robs you in this house.”

  “Ssh! Ssh! Ethel!” said Beluncle. “She was looking for her brush.”

  “Oh, this shouting! I could hear you all over the house. What does she want a brush for? I've got a brush,” said Ethel.

  “Just to brush my suit.”

  “I've done that for you,” said Ethel. “Can't you leave yourself alone. Mother and son, I never saw anything like” it. I don't know what you married for.”

  “Now, now, don't you start,” said Beluncle.

  “No, I am your wife. I will have my say,” said Ethel. “There are no thieves in this house, grandmamma. I was brought up straight, straighter than some. There's your brush on the washstand-I can see it from here.”

  They watched the silenced old lady go slyly like a cat to the washstand.

  “Eh,” said the old lady. “I was testing you. I knew it was there.”

  “Say something, Philip. She's your mother. She's always making her insinuations. Look here, my lady, has anyone been taking your sheets? …”

  “Ethel!” said Beluncle sternly.

  “Or towels? Some missing, I bet.”

  “Mother,” said Beluncle, “you mustn't say that people rob you. Everyone is kind to you in this house. You mustn't say things like that.”

  “Or 'my best embroidered pillow-cases',” mocked Ethel Beluncle.

  “Eh,” said the old lady, “the old are not wanted. Their own children turn on them. I am an old woman and no one wants me except for my money. They want me in my grave.”

  “Oh, her money-what did I tell you?” laughed Ethel Beluncle bitterly.

  “I wish” said Ethel to her husband, “oh, how I wish and I wish, I begged and begged and prayed, but you wouldn't listen. I wish you had never touched her money. Her money, who wants it?”

  Beluncle sighed and looked at his watch and then at his finger-nails. Unlike the dirty, broken, bitten finger-nails of his wife, his were well kept and the moons showed perfectly on each finger. He began tapping his fingers rapidly on the bed knob. When money was mentioned he always straightened his fingers and tapped them very fast on a table or chair or any object that was close to him.

  “You used a funny word there, a peculiar expression,” said Beluncle with pain. “When you say I touched her money, I don't know what idea is in your mind. 'Touch' is a peculiar word. I never, to use your expression, touched her money. I never touched anyone's money. If I hadn't looked after mother's money she would not have had a penny left by now.”

  “Oh, well, I hope there is a penny left,” said Ethel. “She's counting it all up, like her sheets and towels, every night, mark my words. Mother and son, what a pair of squirrels. Your teeth are too sharp. A wife counts for nothing and never has. She got my rose off you, I see, that I picked specially.”

  “You must behave better to Ethel,” said Beluncle, who spoke quietly to his wife and who had to shout loud slow words to his mother. “She is my wife, don't forget that. She does everything for you.”

  The old lady was frightened, but she kept her head steady on its weak neck.

  “No one can bring your father back to me, nay he was good,” she said. “I have no one to stand up for me against my own children.”

  And when Beluncle went, the old lady walked in quick small steps circling about her room, repeating the name of her husband and wailing for him in a frail voice; but soon her thoughts were changed by the sight of her store cupboard.

  Downstairs, Beluncle called the two sons who were going to church with him. They were a little taller than he was, taller, but round-shouldered, and he marched, upright like a drummer, between them to the high gate of the villa. The house stood at the corner of the road, and the solid green gate was wide enough for a car an
d six feet high.

  “Open it for me,” said Beluncle.

  It was opened for him. They marched out as from the gate of a hill fort in troubled country. The group re-formed when the gate was closed and set out, once more, in step. There had been a war in the Beluncles' lifetime, but peace seemed to them the real war. The boys waited for Beluncle to speak. When they turned on to the dazzling Sunday pavement of the empty main road, he began using occasional phrases familiar to followers of Mrs Parkinson.

  “To mortal seeming,” Beluncle said gently, “there are many things that are not harmonious in our home. Your grandmother says things she does not mean, that puts your mother's back up because I do not need to tell you what your mother is like, and she says things she does not mean, too. That is her weakness. That is her, you might say, problem. It is our part not to accept false evidence of the material senses, to dismiss its unreality and to voice the Truth. All the time we should be voicing the Truth.”

  He paused. In the silence the Beluncles were marching like a regiment whose band has stopped, and there was only the sound of their shoes on the pavement. The Truth, they felt, was somewhere, somehow, being voiced, but not by them. A deep breath and the Beluncle band began again on a more musical note.

  “I am afraid,” said Beluncle, “I'm very much afraid your grandmother will not last the year. She is an old woman. Of course, you know and I know, there is no such thing as age. We are all made in the image and likeness of God and so we cannot be either young or old, can we, are you listening? Now, there's a man who has grown some good dahlias. What was I saying?”

  “About grandmamma,” said George.

  “Oh yes,” said Beluncle. “That's right. It would be better if we lived in a larger house where we could all breathe and that, of course, requires money,” said Beluncle.

  “To mortal, sense,” he added apologetically.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Henry.

  “Yes,” George said, “but grandmamma will leave you some.” The two brothers glanced quickly at each other when this was said. “If grandmamma doesn't last, we could move this year.”

  “That's a terrible thing to say; a funny thing, people would say if they heard it said,” said Beluncle.

  “You said,” said George in his innocent voice, “you didn't think she'd last.”

  “Oh, God, God, God,” Henry was saying to himself, but acting the words to an imaginary audience. “I wish my father would talk of something else. A literary subject, for example.”

  A few people were now walking in the streets and the church bells were speaking out. The marrying bells of the Church of England poured out. One or two people passed in the opposite direction on the long walk towards the Roman Catholic bell at the end of the town; other little processions were making towards the Congregational chapel and the chapels of the Baptists, the Wesleyans, the room of the Plymouth Brothers, the disinfected hall of Vogg's Witnesses in Andrews's backyard. Presbyterians there were, and Methodists, Internationalists and the Spiritualists in the room above the Laguna Cafè. All, the Beluncles reflected, mysteriously going to their errors. Mr Beluncle once said: “I want a religion I can breathe in.”

  “I want possibilities,” he said.

  “If I pray,” he said, “I want an answer like when I ring a bell.”

  Now they were in the middle of the town and groups of twenty or thirty cyclists were making for the heap of green country that seemed to be frying in the sun outside the town: they passed with the soft throb of flying birds and Henry's eyes followed them into yesterday. But the Beluncles were making for a long row of cars that stood outside the closed cinema, the cars belonging to the members of Mr Beluncle's church. Down a passage at the side of the cinema, in a little brick hall with a notice saying Dances, was the meeting-place of the society.

  VIII

  The church of the Parkinsonians was a place of flowers and smiles. The Parkinsonians smiled in the hall as they greeted each other. Out in the town they were proud of the ridicule they suffered and their faces reported to each other the week's tale of quiet triumphs. Mr Beluncle frowned in answer to the smiles for he did not care to be anonymous: the two boys followed their father's expressions. He did not like theirs to be different from his own and if he had had his way they would have had one face controlled from a central point; indeed God, as he said, was a radio station. They went to sit beside him in the rush-seated chairs in the middle of the hall.

  The Parkinsonians-their correct name was The Church of the Last Purification, Toronto-were a healthy-looking collection of clean, smiling people, broad and bummy, whether male or female, and with the exception of one or two poor people among them, they dressed expensively. Among the summer dresses, the fine hats-some of them from Bond Street-and the scents, there sat living examples of prayer promptly answered; and the satisfaction of it seemed, in each case, to have added to the weight of the person. People who were converted to the Purification put on weight at once, as if it had been sent down to them by the Central Committee of the party.

  About twelve men and sixty women, most of them middle-aged, sat in the little hall, smelling the flowers that were set in a wide copper bowl in the middle of the speaker's platform, quietly assured that soon they would move into a proper church building of their own when the funds in-creased-which they shortly would: ever-increasing funds were a sign of the Purification-and irked only by the playing of a small, ratty organ which was on evil terms with its player. This was Colonel Johnson, who was thought to play badly because he deviated in the doctrine. The organ thumped and gulped back at him after every two or three chords of Wostenholme and became malevolent when he improvised. A great number of the Purificationists had given up something as their religion took a larger place in their lives, and Colonel Johnson, grown mild after a career of war, wore the expression of one who had given up music.

  Mr Beluncle sat glancing at his wrist-watch for he was always out to catch the leader of the meeting beginning late, and if this lady did so, he would find an opportunity of telling her afterwards in the brotherly manner enjoined by the teachings of the Purification, pointing out, perhaps, that order was the first law of God or that Divine Mind was never late. George Beluncle, in his slow-minded way, was gazing at the pictures round the walls of the hall and remembering which was which. These had been turned round and showed only their backs for they had distracting subjects: tavern scenes repugnant to those who had given up wines and spirits, dancing scenes disturbing to the senses. George Beluncle had resolved to take part in such scenes later on in life. George Beluncle was waiting, too, for the leader to appear from the door at the back of the platform. The door always opened as if by no human touch and presently, indeed, this happened. Lady Roads glided in. She was a large and bold woman, in a royal blue dress, who put on a tragic and exalted face when she came on to the platform. She had reddish-grey hair and large, sad malicious eyes. In a melancholy and shouting voice she announced the hymn, Colonel Johnson punched the organ, the organ hit back at Colonel Johnson, and the congregation rose to sing in voices of deafening refinement.

  “Let us unite in silent prah,” barked Lady Roads. The congregation closed their eyes.

  Henry Beluncle glanced at the closed eyes of his father. He was overcome by the sight of his father praying. To pray in company with his father embarrassed him. He felt that it was hypocritical and unfair to pray. For Henry Beluncle's prayers were radiant, passionate and severe; and if they were answered (as the prayers of those who followed the teachings of the Purification so often were), there would be such a transformation of his father's character that the father would no longer exist in his present physical or even spiritual form. Henry Beluncle's prayers might be compared to exalted and disinterested murder. To this, Henry Beluncle knew, his father would offer a victorious resistance; even so, it seemed deceitful and underhand to try such a thing. And there was not only this side to it: Henry Beluncle himself had no desire sudde
nly to become a child of Divine Love, for he saw that such a change would make him an anomaly in the family. Especially it would call upon him the scorn of his mother whom he deeply loved and who did not subscribe to this religion.

  “No one understands my difficulties”: it was Henry Beluncle's continual thought. If he and his father were reformed, where would Henry Beluncle's freedom go? He would be happy and, though his eyes moistened at the thought of this, he knew he despised happiness.

  After one or two attempts at a prayer that would evade this central issue in his life, Henry Beluncle gave up and through his eyelashes took a cautious forest hunter's view of the congregation. He saw clearly the closed lids, so pale in her tawny face, of Lady Roads, and the freckles of her bosom like grains of cinnamon and milk. Her masterful lips now shrank into thin, short lines of dejection; her mildness and merryness had gone; she was betraying as she never did in her waking life, her unhappy marriage, her mania of sexual disgust. Below her, through a gap in the women's hats, Henry Beluncle could see Colonel Johnson, his chin raised and his eyes closed, no doubt thinking out his tactics with the next hymn. One or two pairs of eyes, when Henry looked round, were restless; Mr Phibbs's were wide open, happily musing. When someone said “Let us pray” the spirit of opposition in Mr Phibbs had replied “I am not a sheep.” And there was modest Miss More, who felt too humble and worried to pray, and the trembling and acid Miss Wix, the white-faced enemy of Lady Roads. In the silence broken only by the sound of traffic on the High Street or the bang of a saucepan in a nearby house, Henry searched the congregation for the red dress and fair hair of Mary Phibbs. He knew she was here because of him, and he because of her. That, for him, was the one certain thing.

  Lady Roads's eyes opened and her melancholy went. She read out the first verse of another hymn, and like many of the hymns of the Purification, it was a conundrum. She read:

  If All is Mind and Mind is All, Man cannot sin and did not fall. Hold to this thought and we shall be At one with Mind in harmony.