Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Freedom at last, after twenty years' hard labour, as you might call it,” said Mr Beluncle gaily. Mrs Truslove was still away.

  “I'm surprised they let you out,” said the manageress.

  Mr Beluncle knew all about her. It was the usual story: the ageing mother, the husband killed in the 1914 War, the understanding “friend” who had “gone away”. Mrs Robinson patently wanted a man. Mr Beluncle saw this. He did not want to be the man; but he liked being the kind of man who knew that women like Mrs Robinson wanted a man. It made him not a “real sport”, but “sporty”. He chaffed her (as he called it) and in a serious voice said what kept him so spry and on top of the world was the Purification.

  Mrs Robinson forgot her girls and customers for two or three minutes and listened, with the greedy gloom of one reading the crimes in a Sunday newspaper, to his stories of the miracles of the Purification.

  A touch of religion always worked wonders in the trade, Mr Beluncle thought, when he went away. People liked it better than a drink. “It brings out private life; once a man shows his hand, you can do business. There's not a man or woman in England who isn't calling out for God.”

  Mr Beluncle had no business with Mrs Robinson; all the same he believed business is what a man should always be doing and he regarded his relations with her as a business affair. Who knew? It might become so.

  The manageress knew all about Mr Beluncle. He told her everything.

  “It's a terrible thing having a partner. But she's been away two months. The difference! I can breathe now. I can see how I was held back, but now I can fill my lungs.”

  It was the wrong thing in life, he said, how people try to hold you back. That was one thing he had learned, he would never hold his own children back as he was held back when he was young. His father to begin with. Then his sister. He had married young and he would not say a word against his wife, but—well, you sometimes wanted to breathe. His partner again—well, if her husband hadn't died, it would have been a different story.

  “What we all need is release,” said Mr Beluncle. “Freedom. If you're down, give yourself a surprise. Surprise yourself.”

  Mr Beluncle talked about his tomb one day. Mrs Robinson became very interested in this subject. If he died, Mr Beluncle said, he would like a simple funeral, no flowers, no show. Mrs Robinson said this was her notion too. She recalled the funerals of two kings. Mr Beluncle let the interruption go and resumed the account of his funeral.

  He wanted to be buried in his native town, Mr Beluncle said, in a simple country chuithyard. A plain stone, he said. And on it, he said, some simple words, such as an epigram, or should he say epitaph?

  “My son Henry, he would tell me. He's quick to take his father up,” he said.

  “Epitaph,” said Mrs Robinson. “What would you have on it?”

  “Reminds me of the story of the man and his wife,” said Mr Beluncle. He told Mrs Robinson this story. She had heard it dozens of times in her life; that was a funereal bond in itself: “If there's room we'll meet in Heaven,” repeated Mr Beluncle. “Eh? Jolly good.

  “No,” said Mr Beluncle, “I haven't much use for the usual run. Too much old theology in them. I've always liked something out of the common. I'd like something that would make people stop and think 'Ah, that fellow thought. He was a surprising man.5 ”

  That, said Mrs Robinson, come to think of it, would make a good epitaph. “He was a surprising man.”

  “I am,” said Mr Beluncle.

  That day when he went out, Mr Beluncle said curtly: “You start surprising yourself.”

  He went away feeling he was full of surprises.

  Mrs Robinson saw that Mr Beluncle was a serious person. She liked a man who moralised. She was impressed by the account of his funeral. She often thought, she said, on later Tuesdays and Thursdays, of what he had said about surprising herself. She had often thought, for example, she said, of starting up on her own in a little place. Mr Beluncle pointed out that that required capital. Mrs Robinson said she had capital. Mr Beluncle quoted a few figures. Mrs Robinson said she had four hundred pounds.

  Mr Beluncle clipped advertisements of shops for sale out of the newspapers and handed them to Mrs Robinson. It turned out that Mrs Robinson was being cautious. She leaned one day on the counter, resting her bosom there, and staring at him shrewdly through her spectacles and going hot under her make-up, she confided that she had nearer a thousand pounds.

  Mr Beluncle put on his glasses when she said this. They leaned together in a sensual trance of self-interest, looking through their heavy windows at each other.

  “You be careful what you do with it,” said Mr Beluncle.

  “You're telling me,” said Mrs Robinson, with a sharp nod.

  They nodded curtly to each other, deeply bound by the confidence, when he picked up his bowler hat and went out.

  “Fancy a woman like that having a thousand pounds,” said Mr Beluncle to his wife. “The world is a wonderful place.'5

  Mr Beluncle increased his visits to the teashop. It was not always possible to talk very much to her, but he could watch her. Or rather he watched her thousand pounds, walking about in high-heeled shoes and in black, creaking satin. He shook hands with her now. If he met her walking across the shop he would give her a surprise; quietly he would take her by the elbow. It was fat and cool, like a soft chin. He looked at her bosom and thought of the thousand pounds it contained. It seemed to give out a warmth. Mr Beluncle refrained from speaking of the thousand pounds. He had sensations of enormous, light-headed innocence.

  When Mr Beluncle talked of his partner whose husband had died, Mrs Robinson talked of her husband who had been killed. Mr Beluncle talked of his friend, Mrs Truslove, who was “away”. Mrs Robinson talked of the “friend” who had “gone away”. A new significance inflected these old stories. Confessing to him that her £400 was really £1,000 had enlarged her interest in Mr Beluncle. She had often said: “In this trade you see a lot of people all the time and yet you see no one.”

  In telling Mr Beluncle she had £1,000 she had relieved herself of a burden, unveiled her beauty to him in all its importance and helplessness.

  Mr Beluncle was disturbed by this change. He heard that she liked the cinema, but she had no one to go with. Wednesday night, she said, she was always free; but, she said, Wednesday came round week after week, and she did nothing. Wednesday was a good night because her mother went out. From a woman of forty-five this seemed momentous. At that age, her eyes clearly said, one does not shillyshally.

  The look in the eyes of the manageress became large, brown, still and brooding. She attended to an occasional customer, she called her girls, she spoke into the speaking-tube to the kitchen, she ordered the men to carry trays of cakes out to the van; but in between these things, she would come for a moment back to Mr Beluncle, lean on the counter and talk to him in a low voice.

  The words she said were desultory and commonplace. “Four pounds ten at Evans's,” or “If you get a woman in they charge you,” or “I go home and mother says 'Your nerves!',” but the mutter gave these words a deeper meaning. He could feel her breath sometimes, and she half smiled. “Well,” she said, “you can't always sit with the same person, can you?” The sea, she said, on a day like this, it's a pity some nice man wasn't driving her to the sea. “They're all married, I suppose,” she said.

  Mr Beluncle walked away in temptation. He knew his manageresses. They liked their money and then, of course, they got afraid; and when they were afraid, if a man happened to be there—well, Mr Beluncle went over cases he knew. He knew Mrs Robinson was afraid. He knew she was on the point of wondering1 if he was going to happen to be there. A sudden blaze of lust, as if he had walked towards a fire, branched in all his veins. He had a blatant lust for the £1,000 of Mrs Robinson: it would help to buy Marbella.

  Or rather, he found himself walking in a vision. If he had been his sister Constance and if Mrs Robinson had been a Mr Robinson, Mr Beluncle knew exactly what would
have happened. Constance would have been in bed with Mr Robinson in no time and would have collected the £1,000. As he walked away into Piccadilly, Mr Beluncle felt himself becoming Constance. It terrified him. Mrs Truslove was away, and he had become quite a different man since her departure. He had breathed. He left his home in the morning and, for the first time, he breathed all day long until he returned home to rest and get ready for the great breathings of the day to come. He could do, he thought, tilting his bowler hat in a shop mirror, and defying his face there, exactly what he liked.

  It had never occurred to him in his life before to do such a thing, perhaps because he knew other men did it: but now the temptation was plain. Mrs Robinson was asking him to be her lover. He had only to go to bed with her and she would be asking him for a safe investment for her £1,000.

  For the first time in his married life, at the age of fifty, Mr Beluncle felt the demand of lust. He was horrified.

  A vegetation of fantasy, tropical and violent, sprouted in Mr Beluncle's mind. It grew a huge mushroom growth of dreams at night. By day he made these dreams as orgiastic as possible. He daubed on the colour of temptation; he daubed it thickly.

  He knew what he was doing. He was pretending to be afraid of his lust; but what he was afraid of, what he was trying to paint out with the heavy colours of his fantasy, was something very different. To feel lust was nothing; but what it had revealed, like lightning playing along a landscape at night, was the outline of his life: “This is what I have always been doing: getting money out of women.”

  That deathly piece of self-knowledge: that he and Constance, whom he thought so wicked, were exactly alike.

  Mr Beluncle went home. His first words when he stood in the hall of his house were:

  “How is Henry? Has he been up today?”

  “He was up for an hour but I made him go back. I wish you'd get the doctor to him,” Ethel said.

  “Now, now!” said Mr Beluncle.

  Mr Beluncle went straight up to his son's room.

  “Please don't shout at him,” begged Mrs Beluncle, on the stairs.

  “Shout? I don't shout! He's my son as well as yours,” said Mr Beluncle, with jealousy.

  “I mean, don't argue about Mrs Parkinson with him,” said Ethel.

  “I don't argue,” said Mr Beluncle.

  “Well, whatever it is,” pleaded Ethel.

  Since Henry had collapsed at the office and had lain in bed gaunt with fever, Mr Beluncle had gone to his room at once when he came home every evening. He arrived there with his hat still on his head and his umbrella in his hand, pushing past his wife, standing embarrassed by the sight of his son. Mr Beluncle did not know what to say. He smiled. Then he said, “Hello, old chap.” Then he murmured “Excuse me” very politely, and respectfully took off his hat. He had told Mrs Robinson how his son had been taken ill. Every time he went to the tea shop she asked him, “How is your son?” “He is very ill,” Mr Beluncle said.

  Mr Beluncle took a deep breath; he could feel passion like an anthem in his blood. He felt passion for his wife, passion for his son and knew their passion too.

  Mr Beluncle talked to Henry about his day and Mrs Beluncle stood there, blinking, nervous, watching her husband, ready to stop him if he talked about the Purification.

  “I don't know what your mother's worrying about,” Mr Beluncle said. It was a way of saying that he loved his son as much as Ethel did. Henry knew this. With the langour of the ill he regarded with detachment the curious bidding of their love. He thought it extraordinary that he could rely on the love of his father.

  “I thought you were going to get up today,” Mr Beluncle teased.

  “I did for an hour,” Henry said, “then I came back.”

  “Back to bed?” said Mr Beluncle incredulously.

  “You can see he's in bed,” snapped Ethel. “He's ill. Can't you use your eyes? The boy's ill, very ill. He needs a doctor. He's as weak as a rat.”

  “All right, all right. I know,” Mr Beluncle said.

  “Leave it,” he wanted to say, “to my passion. I can do anything.”

  “You must get better quickly,” said Mr Beluncle, “if you're going to France.”

  “France?” said Henry.

  “Yes, France, France. Parlez-vous frangais,” said Mr Beluncle gaily.

  “When am I going to France?” said Henry, leaning up on his elbow.

  My God, thought Mr Beluncle, he is ill. Look at his thin cheeks.

  “Get better. I want you to go to France. I suppose you've got money.”

  “Twenty pounds,” said Henry.

  “That's not enough. We shall have to see what your old father can do,5' said Mr Beluncle.

  Henry frowned.

  “You're not going to send him to France,” said Ethel.

  “Listen to your mother,” laughed Mr Beluncle. “Finest experience in the world. Six months, a year in France.”

  Henry looked unbelievingly at his father and reluctantly, cautiously, enquiringly smiled.

  “Look at him,” said Mr Beluncle. “He's well already.”

  Mr Beluncle went downstairs. The decision had come to him in the train: lust had seized his son. This was no new thought to Mr Beluncle; but before, he had fought the love affair of his son on general grounds. Now he could see the true nature of the violent temptation Henry must have had. No wonder this love affair was at the bottom of his illness. The boy was in terrible temptation. Useless to forbid him. One must fight beside him. Send him away, give him his real desire.

  “Henry must be saved,” Mr Beluncle said, “from ever going to that tea shop again.

  “I should say,” Mr Beluncle corrected himself, “bookshop—where Miss Phibbs is.”

  The next day Mr Beluncle left his office in the afternoon, took a taxi, andagain was in the West End. The dream came with him. Since he had woken up in the morning it had been round his arms and legs and his head like invisible strands of wool, and it would not have been surprising if someone had stopped him and said, “Excuse me, look what you are dragging after you.”

  He could not exactly remember the dream; he was beginning to wonder whether the woman had been Mary Phibbs. But he was totally certain that she was not Mrs Robinson and his main impression was that a decision had been made.

  He got out of the taxi in Piccadilly and walked towards the tea shop. He was not a man to run away from anything. He looked at the window and between two large boxes of chocolates he found a gap in the partition. Through that he could see the crowd having tea in the shop, the men sitting up at the counter, and the golden cap of Mrs Robinson's hair. She was giving a twist to a paper bag, taking some money and calling and pointing, to one of her girls in her commanding way.

  He waited. He waited for the electric shock of lust. There was no shock at all.

  Mr Beluncle raised his chin. He had known there would not be one. He marched away with the joy of a Marine Band. His heart trumpeted with delight. He had conquered. He was free.

  “I was mad,” said Mr Beluncle.

  What a potentiality for evil had revealed itself; now it was a potentiality for the good. After the cold mad wave, the spicy breeze, the warm and generous sea. Mr Beluncle felt himself swept along. Now for the good life, now for the Kingdom, now for fidelity.

  Fidelity to Mrs Truslove, of course. He had never been tempted by infidelity to his wife; she had no money. But the money of Mrs Robinson had tempted him to be unfaithful to the money of Mrs Truslove. Here he was, a man who had turned down an openly proferred crime. He owed it to Mrs Truslove to make restitution.

  EPILOGUE

  “I want to speak to Mr Beluncle.”

  Mr Chilly heard Mrs Truslove's voice on the telephone.

  “Mr Beluncle is out,” said Mr Chilly. “I am most awfully sorry. If there is anything I can do, but no, you want to speak to him, oh dear. Where is he? In the West End. Yes, he's at the showroom. Well, we've had such a rush, please don't worry about it. He has put me in charge here and he's
gone straight there. How, if I may enquire, how is your dear sister? Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, how worrying for you.”

  “I can't get away from here,” Mrs Truslove said. “Yes, the sea is nice. I have brought her here. No, he can't telephone to me. There is no telephone in the house. I asked him for the letters. I have had nothing for a fortnight. …;”

  “Oh, don't worry, Mrs Truslove. Please don't get anything on your mind. I am sure you have enough as it is. I will tell Mr Beluncle. I did tell him. He's been so busy with the buil… Oh dear, I oughtn't to have said anything. Oh dear, my tongue. Nothing, nothing, just a little—nothing. Wait a minute, here is Mr Beluncle. Oh no, I'm sorry, I thought it was Mr Beluncle.

  “My dear,” said Mr Chilly, ringing off and speaking to Miss Vanner, “I'm awful. Help me.”

  Miss Vanner struggled.

  “If I can be of any value in rendering assistance,” she wished to say, but Mr Chilly paralysed her word-making faculty.

  “What?” was all she could say.

  “Oh, Miss Vanner,” said Mr Chilly, “you are charm itself. I nearly did it. I nearly told her Mr Beluncle's surprise.”

  Miss Vanner could not express it in this way but what she wished to say was that she understood he was querying in confidence whether by nearly happening to mention the word “builders” on the phone, Mr Chilly had evinced a lack of diplomacy.

  “You mean,” said Miss Vanner, “she's rumbled you.”

  “My dear Miss Vanner,” said Mr Chilly, “that is my horrid dread.

  “But you know, Miss Vanner,” said Mr Chilly, “I have had a terrible thought. You can't imagine what is going on in my mind. Or can you? You know what I think it was, Miss Vanner, made me say 'builders' on that horrible thing.”

  And Mr Chilly pointed to the telephone lying in its coil of wires.

  “The unconscious, my dear,” said Mr Chilly, nodding severely at her. “I mean, my dear, it does seem peculiar, don't you think, Mr Beluncle hasn't told her he's moving the whole office to the West End. I mean, after all, she is a director. I mean, when you're married, your husband will think it odd when he comes home in the evening to find you've moved next door.”