Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Take off your nightgown, Miss Ethel,” Mr Martin said. The nightgown dropped to the floor and Mr Martin bent to pick it up; he backed towards the window entrance as he bent. The striped seat of Mr Martin's trousers gleamed like a divided mind beyond the partition. Ethel pouted her lips and put her head on one side, nodding to the groping figure of Mr Martin. And then Beluncle saw this pretty girl, the youngest, the shyest, the most timid in the shop, make a gesture so bold, so immodest with her hand that he saw he was being challenged. Mr Beluncle was too exuberantly shy himself to resist a challenge. He swung his own hand down hard out of his day-dream and caught Mr Martin a full slap on the backside which sent the manager down head first in the window. Two women passing by outside opened their mouths and pointed.

  “Caught you bending, Lucas,” Beluncle said, thinking he had caught the buyer and not the manager.

  Even now, the terror ofthat scene started Ethel Beluncle's heart. The nerve of it, the wickedness of it! She did not laugh. She was driven back to a primitive terror, a fear which, though it changed its form as the years went by, was always there: the fear, the shame, the horror of losing a job, of getting the sack. And her fear, too, was the measure of her fear of Beluncle and her love of him too: she had lost him his job. Yes, she had begun by ruining him. A woman like Mrs Truslove would never have done a thing like that.

  “Come to my office,” said Mr Martin to Beluncle.

  Half an hour later, Beluncle came down the stairs. He was wearing a hat; he was carrying a bag. He was going. He was sacked. Furtively, frozen, pitying, the assistants watched him pass with consternation.

  “Are you leaving, Mr Beluncle?” cried Miss Parkes, in a small hysterical voice, speaking for them all. Beluncle turned. Freed from his official, shop-walking smirk, Beluncle shook his shoulders, flushed ingenuously, stuck his chin out.

  “My name's Walker,” he said. “Going opposite.”

  Ethel ran from her counter and stood with him at the door.

  “Oh, I'm ever so sorry, Mr Beluncle,” she said.

  “Come to chapel with me on Sunday,” he said, looking down at her small shoulders.

  It was religion from the start, she thought. Wesleyans, or Presbyterians; no, that wasn't it; it must have been Methodists, count your blessings and see Brother Tintack is counting his, pray on Sundays, prey all the week. Hallelujah, thought Ethel, and keep your hands off. One Bank Holiday, at Hampstead Fair, when they were on the roundabouts, he rising up in the air on his horse and she going down beside him on hers, she remembered him saying, “That's the difference. You don't have to pay to worship at the chapel. No pew rents.”

  “No what?” she shouted, because of the thump and skirl of the steam organ.

  “No pew rents,” he yelled. “Nothing to pay. Worship God freely.”

  “Poor old dad,” said Ethel voluptuously, putting a leg off the bed. “He wanted everything free.”

  She walked to the dressing-table and sat down there on the cane-seated chair.

  Mrs Beluncle's bedroom indicated their past. “If that wardrobe could talk,” Mrs Beluncle said.

  They had bought this suite when they had got married two years after the spanking of Godfrey Martin. Beluncle had changed his job three or four times. He was a man relations mistrusted. Within three months he had started a Dyeing and Cleaning business in a bad street. Within six months they were out on the bad street-and-it was the first shock-the suite had “gone back”. Ethel Beluncle discovered that furniture was not furniture to her brisk young husband: it was stock, capital. So was her engagement ring. She had the sensation that Beluncle would have pawned her if he could. He certainly sent her to his mother's while he made another attack upon the world.

  “Where are we moving to?” This became one of the commonest questions. “From me to you. To me. Lower. To you.” The years were marked by the voices of van-men moving the wardrobe.

  “Well, I've kept it nice,” she said of her bedroom. “It was a good thing I did, they wouldn't have taken it back”.

  Some men would have drunk it, some would have put it on horses. Some would have thrown it away on women. Some, also, would have died.

  “I will say that for dad, he's good-living. I know I carry on about Mrs Truslove's, but she's never got him. No, he's true. I just make that up about Mrs Truslove to punish him for the rest,” said Mrs Beluncle. “To annoy him, to annoy her,”

  And now Mrs Beluncle did her hair and as each strand was put into place and her small head looked larger, a pink, flashing, sulky expression settled in her cheeks, and she could not help despising Mrs Truslove and her husband, alone together in that office all day, for being so prim and well behaved. The hypocrites, if they want to, why don't they? If they don't want to, what are they sitting there for? Mrs Beluncle put up the last coil of hair and took the pin out of her mouth. As if she cared! But if they ever did, she would tear them to pieces.

  “Oh, I'm a wicked girl,” Mrs Beluncle obstinately exclaimed to the mirror, for she had just torn Mrs Truslove to pieces all over the floor. “I'm a woman. If gran were alive, she'd knock the life out of me. I've stood in his way.”

  Mrs Beluncle's mind was a kind of cinema in which she sat, watching the extraordinary black-and-white dramas of her life and perfecting them. It was a shock when the reel came to an end and the lights went up; and now she had done her hair and was putting her skirt on, she was surprised and a little disappointed to see there was no one in the room threatening to knock the life out of her. The day without her husband was long.

  “I wonder if the old b. is awake,” she said, going down the passage to the grandmother's room.

  “Eh, I was thinking you had forgotten me,” the old lady said. She had been up for half an hour, washing and dressing, waiting to be fetched.

  “You don't think what I have to do. You just stand there to be waited on,” said Mrs Beluncle, aloud, because she knew the old lady was too deaf to hear.

  “I've come to bring you down to tea,” she shouted in the old lady's ear. “Have you got your shawl?”

  “Eh, I feel hungry,” the old lady said. “I think of those who are in want. The beggars that come to the door.”

  “We get no beggars here,” shouted Ethel kindly. “I say we get no beggars here, you're thinking of the country.”

  “Give once and they think you're soft,” said the old lady. “Once I did to a man that came from Castleton, two slices of bread and butter and a slice of my seed cake, and he came again. 'Eh,' I said.? can't spare my cake for them as don't work.' People came for my cake from far and wide, but we never gave to the miners.”

  “No, you wouldn't. I can hear you,” said Ethel, taking her to the dining-room. “You're a hard lot.”

  When Ethel brought the tea the old lady ate greedily and slipped two buns in her sewing-bag to take back to her room with her. After that she tried to slip a third one in. Ethel Beluncle pretended not to see, but it reminded her of something.

  “Grandma,” said Ethel, “you've been at the window again.”

  “Nay,” said grandmamma, “I've been sleeping.”

  “Don't tell lies,” said Ethel. “You have. What's this?”

  And Ethel put a brown-paper parcel on the table. The parcel was dusty with soil at one end and had torn leaves caught in the string. It was addressed in faint, scratchy writing to Constance Beluncle, The Manor, Snagworth.

  “It was in the flower bed,” said Ethel. “Now, listen, you threw it out of the window, didn't you? You're a naughty girl-if you do that you know what I'll do to you-I'll put you to bed.”

  “Nay, I never,” said the old lady.

  “I'll put you to bed without any supper,” Ethel shouted. “It's silly throwing parcels out of the window, they don't get posted that way,” she shouted; “if you want to send things to Connie, ask me or Philip. We'll do it properly. Connie hasn't been at Snagworth for twenty-five years.”

  The little violet veins showed as the old lady's face went pale.

 
“What is in it?” said Ethel.

  “Eh, poor Connie, I doubt but what she's hungry,” said the old lady.

  “Thirsty more like, if I know her,” said Ethel. And she opened the parcel. Inside was a crumbling muddle of old buns and cakes.

  “You poor old soul. You poor mean old soul,” said Ethel quietly.

  “She's a bad girl. A bad daughter,” shouted the old lady. “A harlot. She won't have no money of mine. She broke my heart and my husband's heart. She sent him to the grave. The shame killed him. I doubt but what she's paying for her sins.”

  “A harlot, that's what you called me when dad brought me to see you, a clean-living London girl, more clean-living than your lot with your Connie carrying on with that man at the Manor, and going off with Thompson at the Mill, churchwarden, too,” said Ethel firmly. “I haven't forgiven you. I'll never forgive you. And now I've got you on my hands-what for? What did your precious son bring you here for. It makes me laugh. I'd have gone on the streets if I had been brought up by you. It must have been a prison, praying all day, making your two children stand up for their meals, thrashing poor dad because he was out after seven at night; I wonder they didn't end in gaol.”

  Then she shouted: “Don't you worry about Connie. She's all right. Why don't you see her? Ask her to come here and forgive her.”

  “Nay, it's her place to ask,” said the old lady.

  “Your husband says it's her place to ask,” the old lady said slyly.

  “What d'you mean my husband says,” asked Ethel.

  “I doubt but what he wants all the money for himself,” said the old lady. “Brother and sister,” wailed the old lady, suddenly crying. “Oh, love of God, take me to Thine arms. My children have broken my heart. Oh, love of God, take me to my husband.”

  Ethel put down her cup and said fiercely:

  “Philip has written her. He has begged her to come. He has been to see her. He doesn't want your money,” she said.

  The old lady went on lamenting.

  “Philip,” declaimed Ethel to herself, “if you don't pay that money back at once, I'll leave you. I'll go anywhere. If you're trying to touch Connie's money, Fll …”

  “Here,” said Ethel, getting up and going to the drawer of a table by the window. She was getting a piece of note-paper and an envelope. There was a fern on the table; behind the fern was the lace curtain of the window and through the curtain Ethel could see the windows of the houses opposite. Like a long row of narrow rebuking faces they looked; faces that, by dint of staring for so many years at her own house, had come closer and closer, peering into her life.

  “Here,” she said. “Pen and paper. Write to Connie. Tell her to come on Saturday. Tell her she's to have your share of the money.”

  “Nay,” said the old lady, “you hypocrite.”

  Mrs Beluncle dropped the paper on the table, which was covered with a grey and blue cloth.

  “What did you call me?” she said.

  “Nay, Ethel, you hypocrite,” said the old lady. “Eh, I knew it when he brought you to me.”

  “How dare you. What d'you mean?” cried Ethel.

  “Eh, what use is it bringing Connie here? He's had the money.”

  “Who has?”

  “Your husband. Eh, I've no doubt you schemed him to it.”

  “Don't tell lies,” cried Ethel. “My husband hasn't touched Connie's money. How dare you say so. You've got the shares and he had only his own share of it.”

  “He's got all of it now,” said the old lady. Her tears had stopped. “He's got Connie's money too.”

  “Philip, Philip, Philip, what have you done now? What have you been up to behind my back?” Ethel cried to herself. “You swore you wouldn't.”

  The room seemed to rock. With sickly slowness the curtains seemed to come down from the windows, the carpets seemed to roll up on the floor, the voices of men moving the furniture could be heard. She saw herself alone in a gradually emptying house, her mother dead, her sisters dead, no one to go to, no one to be with, but this old accusing lady. “Boys,” cried Ethel's heart. “Come home, come near me. Here. George, Henry, Leslie. Look what he has done.”

  “When “ Ethel began by shouting, but she brought a chair-being too giddy to stand-close to the old lady and spoke in a normal voice in her ear. “When did you give him Connie's money? Did you sign something? Did you sign papers?”

  The old lady's mind did not grasp these questions. Since her husband's death she had signed so many things. She was lost among the jogging, confusing pictures of her life and these pictures were captioned by words from the Bible. Above all, the word Harlot, kept returning to her. All women outside her own chapel at Snagworth and some within it were Harlots and many even from other villages; it was her name for women whose clothes she coveted. It had been her mild husband's favourite word when he took the day off from his carpenter's bench and went preaching. It brought the sound of his voice back to her and that she longed for. But one thing the old lady could understand was that her daughter-in-law was distressed and that the younger woman's heart was at her mercy.

  “Eh,” the grandmother said lucidly. “If the money is with Mrs Truslove, it is safe. She is a good woman and a good daughter to her father and mother. She could not wrong me. Eh, she has been the making of Philip.”

  “She has,” said Ethel boldly. “Don't think I don't see your little game.”

  “A better woman never walked,” said the old lady. “Young and good-looking. I had looks when I was young.”

  “You don't catch me like this,” said Ethel. “She has done dad the world of good,” she said for the old lady to hear.

  “Aye,” nodded the old lady, with malice. “If things had been different. But a man's always carried away and what his mother says counts for nothing.”

  “Yes,” said Ethel amiably. “I wish I had taken gran's advice before I got married. I say I wish I had taken gran's advice.”

  The old lady took Ethel's meaning and her satisfaction went. She had failed to rouse Ethel's temper.

  “Oh ah, oh ah,” the old lady moaned like a child, pitying herself.

  “Now then, my girl,” said Ethel sharply, banging the cups on the tray and clearing the table. “None ofthat. You behave yourself. You could make me cry once, but you can't do it now. I know you. I'm going to get Connie down here and then we'll see who's w'ho and what's what, flat on the table.”

  At six Ethel heard the whistle of a train; an hour later Henry came home. Ethel did not ask, but she knew that in that hour the boy had been seeing his girl. Ethel blushed with this knowledge as he stood beside her in the kitchen making jokes about the people in the factory. Everyone was mentioned except Mrs Truslove; the boy was obeying his father—”There is no need to repeat anything Mrs Truslove says. It does not matter, but it will be more harmonious if you don't.“ Ethel laughed at the boy's jokes but she could not hold out for long.

  “Did Mrs Truslove say anything?” she said.

  “No,” said the boy.

  “I thought perhaps she might have,” she wheedled.

  “Oh, do stop about Mrs Truslove, mother,” the boy said angrily. “You're only jealous.”

  “Jealous!” Her eyes sparkled with mockery. “What d'you know about it?”

  “Everything,” said the boy coldly. “You needn't carry on as you do.”

  “Oh,” she laughed. “Fancy you thinking that is jealousy. You'll be thinking you're in love next.”

  She could see she had wounded him. He walked away to the sitting-room, which was kept for his father's use alone.

  “He looks ill. He has gone thin and haggard. It's his age,” she thought with repentance, and when she had settled her cooking she went to see him. He was sitting at the table reading, looking up words in a dictionary, and writing them down.

  “What are you reading?” she said, looking over his shoulder.

  “It's French. You won't understand it,” he said sulkily.

  “What good will that do you, ti
ring yourself out, after your work.”

  “When I go to France,” he said.

  “And leave the business. I thought you liked being there. With Mrs Truslove“—she could never resist it—”so refined.”'

  “It's a trap,” he said. “I can't stand him any longer. I can't stand working with him. I hate furniture.”

  “You mustn't talk about your father like that. He is your father.”

  “You say worse about him.”

  “He's my husband. I love him.”

  “Love him! And all these rows? I'll bet you'll have one tonight. When we were children-nothing but rows and rows.”

  “Pooh,” she said. “You don't understand what love is. You may think you do, just because you kiss some silly girl.”

  “And if you do know,” said Ethel, flushing with suspicion, “if you've been touching a girl, doing what you've no business to do, I don't want anything to do with you.”

  But he wouldn't, I know he wouldn't, he's like his father, she thought. I oughtn't to say that to him and upset his pride. It's what I do to his father, Ethel thought with embarrassment.

  The boy scowled and then smirked. She wished she had not seen this expression on his face and she was in half a mind to put on her hat, rush out and warn this girl of his against him.

  “Ask no questions, hear no lies,” she laughed, when she got back to her kitchen. “It's a trap. What does he know about traps, with hardly a hair on his chin or his body.”

  “What a lot I have got into,” she thought.

  XIV

  “I must try to pay the paper bill again,” said Mrs Trus-love, looking into her bag as she got ready to go. “I've been twice to Vogg's this week.”

  “He's open, I think,” said Miss Dykes from her couch at the window. “He doesn't bother about his bills. Why should you?”

  “I don't like it. It's slack,” said Mrs Truslove. “People who are easygoing about money are always dishonest in the end.”

  “Beluncle,” said Miss Dykes, venturing this information, and then hurriedly covered it with, “I don't know what the Voggs live on.”