Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)

by V. S. Pritchett

  Mocking his mother's voice, he said:

  “I am going to the other woman.” He was nodding to the grandmother's window. “Have you decided where you are going?”

  The boy had the ever-smiling, ridiculing face of an elderly man. He listened to the argument going on in the car.

  “Gome on,” the boy said. “Make your minds up. Which one is it? Uplands? Lyndhurst? Marbella?”

  Very suddenly the car shot forward and swung out of the short road without caution into the middle of the main road.

  XII

  The Beluncles drove ten miles to Marbella.

  “Well,” said Mr Beluncle, getting out of the car with his family, and since they were eager to go into the house, he held them back. They watched him. It appeared to be a meeting between two personages and it was hard to know who was more important: Mr Beluncle or the house.

  Mr Beluncle spoke to it privately.

  “Here we are again. Be a little discreet, will you? This is my wife and there are two of my sons, at the awkward age, as you see. If you don't mind we will not mention I was here yesterday with my partner. My wife is a peculiar woman with peculiar ideas, a recluse really, she has imagination. To mortal sense she is jealous. And let me explain that expression to you. She may not wish to admit it but what does it matter what she wishes to admit? She can't avoid facts. As a matter of fact, we are all made in the image and likeness of God and she therefore carCt be jealous. It is merely the five mortal senses that make her seem so. All the same, if you don't mind, we will say nothing about it. And, by the way, don't mention the price either. Now, if you don't mind, we will go in. If you don't mind my mentioning it,” said Mr Beluncle in a jolly voice, figuratively pinching the fat arm of the house and, on principle, putting it in the wrong, “you have let the creeper get into your gutters, haven't you?”

  And now Mr Beluncle turned to his subdued family and marched them in.

  “There's only one thing wrong with this place,” Mr Beluncle said. “It wants living in.”

  And the navy blue flannel jacket he had changed into during the afternoon came open when he said this for he had raised both arms on the word “wants” as if the house were some large, low-necked widow who was inviting him to shower her with presents. And indeed, as he walked his family round, van-loads of furniture seemed to pour out of his talking mouth. Pictures went up on the walls, gongs sounded, carpets raced up the stairs, curtains hung from the windows, fires were lit and the kitchen hummed.

  Henry and George went to the top floor and looked at the view of the town from the window. Between the tops of the rich trees that stood as thick as crinkled kale in this hilly district, they saw the immense steep roofs of adjacent properties, saw pieces of half-timbered façade, white gates and then, decently below, the monotonous rows of sharp, cheaper roofs, where the houses were like dull trains lying idle in a railway siding.

  “Like Beduins, the Beluncles …” Henry sourly began to ruin the line of his poem that never progressed beyond this line.

  “D'you remember Thatcher Street?” said George, with an ashamed grin, in a law voice.

  “Five b,” replied Henry secretively.

  Every year or two, the Beluncles moved house. They had lived in seedy streets, in slums, in mediocre avenues, in a large number of pinch-faced villas. They were ashamed, in a house like Marbella, of these vicissitudes and were making plans, as they gazed at the town, to assume a manner which would conceal them. Yet, more deeply, they were proud of the insecurity which had entered every crevice of their lives. The boys' eyes exchanged a secret agreement.

  “Let us be snobs,” they suggested.

  They went down to the room which was to be Mrs Beluncle's bedroom; their parents were still downstairs. The first thing George saw was a woman's black glove lying on the floor, curled up like a dead mole. George looked a long time at the glove, then slowly smiled at it; he called Henry and nodded to the glove. George smiled at it.

  “Mrs Truslove's glove,” he said.

  They both smiled now. They listened for sounds of their father's steps. He was still downstairs.

  “How d'you know?” Henry asked.

  “I know it,” said George. It was one of his small pieces of information, one of the sacred secrets. Henry, the elder, knew everything; George knew nothing, except the little he knew, and that was his vanity. That little, that ignorance, was precious to him and he let out only a little at a time.

  George picked up the glove.

  “Show it to me,” said Henry, who took everything.

  “No,” said George, squeezing the glove out of sight in his hand. He put the glove into his pocket.

  “She's been here,” smiled Henry.

  They both laughed privately. Then George let out another small piece of information.

  “Yesterday, they were here.”

  “How d'you know?”

  George would not say for a long time. Then he said:

  “I saw them. Fred brought me this way in his Riley. We saw the car outside.”

  “Good Lord,” said Henry. “Let me see the glove.” He felt a desire to touch it.

  “No,” said George.

  “You'd better give it to me. I'll take it to her at the office.”

  “No,” said George. His importance was growing.

  “What were you going to do with it?”

  “Keep it,” he said simply.

  It was precious because it was a concern of his father's.

  “And then,” said Henry with anger, “he has the hypocrisy to go for me because I was with Mary-while he ruins mother's life and our lives.”

  They broke off, for Mr and Mrs Beluncle were now coming up the stairs. The sun was going down, large and clear in its last bold circle behind blackening firs, and the shadows were moving out fast on the lawns and roads of Sissing and then vanishing into the neutral sunless light of a town evening.

  A bird was singing in the garden of Marbella and Beluncle came into the room eagerly to open the window and to call his wife to listen to it.

  “Listen,” he said. “It is happy. This is its home. It lives here. There's a lesson for you-that bird doesn't worry.”

  Mrs Beluncle hunched her shoulders and looked in a cowed, mistrustful way at the fat bird high on the tree.

  XIII

  “Good afternoon, Mrs Beluncle,” said the newly married woman from next door, looking over the fence. “I have been watching you. How hard you work! I have made a cup of tea. I will bring it in, if I may. I cannot bear to see you working so hard, when I do nothing.”

  Mrs Beluncle answered in a refined voice.

  The two women went into Mrs Beluncle's kitchen, and while this athletic woman with bare legs and strong intellectual-looking toes looking gravely through the straps of her sandals sat talking in the voice of un-numbered Summer Schools, Mrs Beluncle shrank and huddled and blinked her little mousey lashes. To be so bare, so sun-burned, so political! To be so good at badminton, singing, economics and sex! Shyness coloured Mrs Beluncle; how was she going to listen when the woman told her what a wonderful lover her husband was; how was Mrs Beluncle going to avoid telling the woman how many orgasms she had in a week and what, in any case, was an orgasm? Such a shudder of jealousy went through her when she saw the large green eyes of the woman looking over the fence and swallowing up her sons.

  “We often talk about you, Mrs Beluncle,” the young woman said. “You never go out. Your husband comes home late. He looks so important. We think you have a rotten time. We don't think it is right. We think a woman ought to have a better life. I wouldn't stand it. I would rebel.”

  “Fight for yourself; Mrs Beluncle,” said the woman.

  Mrs Beluncle has delighted by this attack on her husband. She wished he were there to hear it.

  “We're socialists,” said the woman, in a grave voice. “I expect you are not.”

  Mrs Beluncle did not know how to answer this.

  “The boys used to bring something like that ba
ck from school,” said Mrs Beluncle. “Socialism, fascism, religion-we get a lot ofthat in the house. I don't listen. I don't understand it. I leave it to father. I was brought up in the poor old Church of England, say what you like about it.”

  “Yesterday we saw you all go out in the car. We're always watching you. 'There go the Beluncles,' we say,” said the woman.

  “People who are in love,” thought Mrs Beluncle, “are like that. Everything interests them.”

  “We were going to see a house,” she said.

  “Oh-you aren't going to move?” said the woman. “Don't do that. We love looking at you.”

  “You could all have a much better life, we think,” said the young woman disinterestedly.

  “Do you know,” said Mrs Beluncle, “I've moved house twelve times. The van comes,” said Mrs Beluncle, rolling her eyes. “Out it all comes. In it all goes. And out it all comes again. There we are. We've moved.”

  Mrs Beluncle sent out a sudden peal of laughter, covered her face with her fingers and looked through them at the surprised woman, who had the air of one carefully filling all the information on a form.

  “You say we interest you. Listen to this,” cried Mrs Beluncle with excitement. “Sometimes we go up. Sometimes we go down. But we move. It's like a scenic railway. Sometimes a cab fetches us, sometimes we walk. Sometimes we have to move. Oh dear!

  “It's because we can't breathe” said Mrs Beluncle. “One day you'll look out of the window and you'll say, 'Where are the Beluncles?' Gone. Yes, we may be moving to Balmoral Castle. I expect the King would move out. Or we may just be floating about in the air. Or we may just stay. But even if we stay, we'll be moving in our heads, as you might say. Don't laugh, it will kill me.”

  The woman smiled reprovingly. Tears of laughter ran down Mrs Beluncle's cheeks.

  “That will teach him,” said Mrs Beluncle to herself, wiping the tears from her face when the neighbour had gone. “It is about time people here knew who we are and what we are. We are a problem and no mistake. What a terrible thing, I could see right up her legs. Well, some women are large and some small. There it is.”

  Now she had said all this to the neighbour, Mrs Beluncle was remorseful. She had exposed her husband and he was not strong enough to be exposed. And she was afraid too: perhaps the grandmother had heard her.

  During the day the old lady had looked several times into the scullery. The two women had quarrelled violently often about the washing and Mrs Beluncle had forced her to remain in her room. This victory had to be paid for. On Mondays, the memory of a lifetime's laundry powerfully rose in the old lady's mind and sometimes-perhaps in vengeance for being prevented from advising and scolding-she opened her window and threw out clothes and parcels on to the lawn.

  “You are sleeping, you old dear,” said Mrs Beluncle, peeping into the old lady's room, and went to lie on her own bed.

  “I oughtn't to have spoken like that to that woman. I could bite my tongue off. He's right. My tongue is my worst enemy. I say things and I don't mean them. …”

  She was lying on her bed, pulling the pins out of her long hair, and her fingers opened with surprise.

  “That's how I got him,” she said, astonished by this thought.

  Poor dad dead, kicked by a horse, and he'd known the horse for years, every day out with it. Herself, a young girl, a young limb, working in the shop. She would see half a dozen shop windows shaken by the trams. Inside, gaslight, the heavy breath of stale gas, a smell like blankets being ironed, and herself behind the counter in the haberdashery. Beedle & Rootes were drapers and outfitters.

  The assistants stood at the counters in the morning and then, from the door of Bespoke Tailoring at the turn of the main stairs, came a warning cough and a clear whisper.

  “Half a dog in a tram,” the voice said. It was the voice of her sister's young man. He was dead now and the sister too. All London rumbling round them.

  Her sister's young man had the gift of saying peoples' names backwards and Half a Dog in a Tram was the shop version of Yerfdog Ni tram: Godfrey Martin, the name of the manager.

  Godfrey Martin was a mere moth, plagued by anxiety, one hand generally under the back of his tail coat to convey, perhaps, an illusion of backbone or an attempt at authority. When the disgusting Mr Boucher caught Mr Godfrey Martin looking up at the ceiling in agony or ecstasy, Mr Boucher said loudly: “He's found it.”

  Some girls laughed outright. Ethel laughed. (She laughed even now remembering it! “I could write a book about the way he laughed.”) Others turned their backs and giggled into the shelves and boxes; some ducked below the counter. Others, like Miss Parkes with the goitre, affected not to hear; and Miss Mulhouse “looked volumes”. Mr Boucher was as bald as a toad with his eyes too high in his head, splayfooted and sunk into the belly-basin of middle age. His nostrils spread like a foot over his face. Every morning he made this joke.

  Mr Martin walked up the shop.

  “Miss Ethel,” he said, “are you tidied and dusted underneath?”

  “Miss Parkes,” he said, “I want to look at your sundries.”

  Remarks that might have passed through one ear and out at the other, but for Mr Boucher. He clasped his thighs, sniggered, danced, ducked and then stood still and winked like a lighthouse. Beedle & Rootes survived-that is to say, its staff survived-because Mr Boucher had discovered that, even on their low level, life had a higher and a lower meaning.

  And then Ethel Carter saw the man who was to be her husband. He flashed in as terse and smart as a swallow and all laughter stopped, all blushes were blotted up, all eyes stared. That was the impression she had: it was the first arresting, painful stroke of love. Life had been light-hearted and endurable at Beedle & Rootes before he came there.

  Beluncle! What a name! A young shop-walker-without a day's experience. He had walked into the shoes of an old man who had walked off somewhere on to the streets, to gutter away without a pension in one of the back rooms of London. Short, country-faced, black-crested, with his small moustache like a butterfly and his eyes killing and indignant, Beluncle whizzed after customers, enfiladed them, waltzed them from counter to counter. If Martin spoke to him Beluncle flicked an imaginary piece of cotton off his sleeve afterwards: Beluncle drove the laughter out of the shop. They saw their damnation. His very coat made Martin's look green and despicable. The staff could not bear this. They hated the poverty of their life to be exposed.

  “How they hated poor dad,” Ethel thought. “Boucher couldn't bear him.”

  “Miss Parkah, forwahd,” Boucher mocked.

  “Miss Turns-evah been had?”

  This Beluncle was clean. His shirts were clean, his collars were clean, his boots were clean. He was superior. He said so himself. Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Beedle & Rootes couldn't bear cleanliness. His food agreed with him, and their afternoons were tortured by indigestion. He walked quickly; they were a flat-footed, shuffling lot. He did not drink on Saturday nights and was never sick on the stairs. He didn't come out in horrible pleasure spots, like Harrison, or smell of girl's scent and thieved cigars, like Boucher.

  “I could be Prime Minister tomorrow if I wanted,” said Beluncle.

  “This is a free countreh. If a mehn has push he can get anywheah.”

  Push, Mrs Beluncle thought. Push he's got, look where he's pushed us now. What were we? Nothing.

  On Sundays he went to chapel and took a Bible class in the afternoon.

  “‘And the Lord said unto Moses.’ I was as bad as the rest,” she thought. “It made you bad, just seeing him.”

  One morning his spats were down the lavatory, his hair oil was spilled on the floor. Glue was put on his chair in the basement kitchen off the stockrooms where the staff had their meals. But the glue was a failure; Beluncle was particular-“Just like his mother. Is she still asleep? I must go and see in a minute and take the old bitch-I mustn't use that word-her tea”—he always dusted a chair before he sat on it. The Lord God Almighty (“Elk Nuleb�
�� was his shop name) takes his seat. Rolls of cloth toppled on him, piles of boxes fell down from shelves as he passed, extra polish was put on the floor at the bottom of the main stairs where he stood viewing his hands from different angles. He was sent on false journeys.

  “You sent for meh, sir.”

  “Naow, I didn't,” Godfrey Martin sneered.

  “No reason to dash,” said Godfrey Martin.

  “Running after next week's salary,” Boucher said.

  “Some of you people haven't earned last yeah's,” said Beluncle.

  Poor dad, they hated him, Ethel remembered. I was as bad as the rest. I was wicked. I was in love. And there came back to her memory, with a shudder of fear still, the afternoon which had decided it all, the awful afternoon when she was in the window “dressing” for Mr Godfrey Martin.

  “Miss Ethel,” said Mr Godfrey Martin, a slave to his disastrous habit, “take off your nightgown.”

  She took the nightgown off the model. It was the slack time after lunch when the day slowed down, when the hands of the watched clock moved slowly like a pair of flies over the face. Beluncle himself was standing in his public way, as if he were footman to himself, and Ethel looked ruinously back at him many times from the window. She asked him afterwards whether he had had an eyeful, staring, staring, nothing but stare, all the afternoon. Was he in love with her already, even at that time? When did he first fall in love with her? Was it before that? No, he said-he liked disappointing people: that was his favourite kind of truthfulness—“as a mattah of fact” he had not “observed hah” in the window. He was looking through her, through the window, to the window of Gamble's Stores on the other side of the street and he was thinking of the future. Beedle & Roote's lace buyer was back from Nottingham and Beluncle admired this man. Even more he admired this man's job. He was estimating how much Lucas earned and whether he made anything out of his expenses. Beluncle was wondering whether he wouldn't march over the road to Gamble's and ask for the manager and apply for that kind of job with Gamble's. That was why he walked thoughtfully towards the window where Mr Martin and Ethel were working.