Mr Chilly stared at her.
“Or not?” said Mr Chilly.
“Oh, I do wish Henry were here,” sighed Mr Chilly. “I have such haunting doubts.”
“Yes,” said Miss Vanner, giving up the struggle with her vocabulary and made angry by Mr Chilly's longing for Henry.
“Where's the money coming from? Who's got the dibs? Someone's,” said Miss Vanner, making a very ugly mouth, “a sucker. A girl can see a lot. More than some.”
Another day and Mr Beluncle telephoned. The partitions were down, he said.
“The partitions,” said Mr Chilly to Miss Vanner, ringing off, “are down.”
Miss Vanner's eyes were frightened when she looked at the eyes of Mr Chilly.
At the end of the week, another call from Mr Beluncle.
“The painting has begun,” Mr Chilly said.
He sat down and seemed to hang a weak hand for her to gaze at. She put her own hand on the desk.
“Off white,” he said. His voice appeared to come from a crypt.
Miss Vanner's eyes widened with increasing fear at the information of Mr Chilly.
“In a week we shall expect to have the Turkey carpet fitted,” said Mr Chilly.
A day slid by, a night closed down upon Mrs Truslove and her sister in a room looking on to the sea at Bexhill, a new day came and Mr Chilly put down the telephone and said to Miss Vanner:
“What furniture would you suggest? I mean, I am sure you are always thinking of your________” He paused. (Was Mr Chilly ill? Why did a hiss come so often into his voice? “Of your nest” hissed Mr Chilly.
“We've got our three—piece. It's at mother's,” said Miss Vanner rapidly, taken off her guard.
“I mean,” said Mr Chilly, “suppose you were moving your offices to the West End at a time when owing to world conditions, the possibility of a general conflagration …” (Mr Chilly tipped his eyes back and Miss Vanner filled hers to bursting.) “I mean, trade was ebbing, in fact, had ebbed; and—just a moment—owing to the unforeseen absence of your partner due to an unfortunate family illness, you had been unable to deal with one or two letters with a rather legal turn of phrase …;”
“Don't,” said Miss Vanner, putting both hands to her hair. “Don't! I shall scream.”
“I mean, would you choose real Chippendale?” said Mr Chilly. “At the price? I mean—it's a question, isn't it? I begin to ask myself where does God get all this stuff from?”
Miss Vanner narrowed her eyes:
“Mr Beluncle's barmy, he's nuts,” she said.
“That's what worries me!” exclaimed Mr Chilly. “You have put your finger on it, you delightful girl—is he barmy? Or is he … well, d'you see what I mean?”
The telephone rang again.
“It's Mrs Truslove!” said Mr Chilly, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. “Oh God! I can't bear this kind of thing. I shall die. I know I shall say something… ”
“Hullo, Mrs Truslove. Good morning. My dear, no reply from the showroom? There was. He wasn't there! Oh, but he must be. Yes, I am quite sure. They can't have cut the telephone. I mean, he must have been at the back in the Board Room.”
Mr Chilly clapped his hand to the mouthpiece.
“Damn!” he said. “Did you hear that? I said it. What shall I do? I couldn't say lavatory, could I?
“Hullo, Mrs Truslove,” said Mr Chilly. “How is your sister this morning? Oh, I'm so sorry, how worrying. What does the doctor say? Oh, my dear Mrs Truslove. …;”
Mr Beluncle stepped back from the builders' ladders and boards to let the man and boy who had laid the Turkey carpet go by. Alone now, he went into the room at the back which they had left.
He had been thinking of something unpleasant; well, not unpleasant, but about human nature. It rather shocked him. He had been stopped in the street that morning by Miss Wix.
“I want to speak to you, Mr Beluncle/5 she said.
“Conversation is free,” Mr Beluncle had said.
“About your son,” she said. “Your son has broken that poor girl's heart. You know I am referring to Mary Phibbs.”
“I am not aware,” Mr Beluncle had begun. He told Miss Wix a number of things he was not aware of. She was wheeling a bicycle. He did not object to her wheeling a bicycle, but one would have thought that a prominent member of the Church of the Last Purification would have been able, after all these years, to have “cleared her thought of what was holding her back” and to have had a car, A small point, he thought, but significant.
But that was not the unpleasant thing. There was a split in Mrs Parkinson's Group. Lady Roads had gone too far, Miss Wix said. To make the lame to walk was good—but not if, like Lady Roads, you did it by the wicked power of animal magnetism and personality which could be summed up in two words: Rome and Witchcraft.
A terrible thing human nature, Mr Beluncle had been thinking. Miss Wix and forty members (Mr Phibbs, of course, among them) had marched out of the Boystone Church. They were meeting over Dorman's Restaurant.
But now the hammering had stopped in the showroom and the men had gone, he dismissed the matter from his mind.
He opened the door and looked at the room. It was excellent. The walls were painted pale green. Heavy cream curtains hung over the two frosted windows. He switched on the lights and drew the curtains and the light brought richness to the Turkey carpet, the huge table, and brought out the winy lustre of the Chippendale chairs. Four clocks—he had not yet decided which one to buy; he really wanted all of them—chattered on the mantelpiece. He picked up a small shaving from the carpet and looked, with his insulting look, at the perfect place. It was the Board Room. His first Board Room and he was fifty years of age.
How (he had asked himself at the end of that unnerving period of his life, less than six weeks gone, when God had helped him to master the terrible temptation of Mrs Robinson in the teashop)—how could he use the great energy which the rejection of sin had left him with? Surely by some spectacular affirmation. Surely by showing Mrs Truslove that he was absolutely faithful to her; surely by offering her concrete evidence of his years of devotion and gratitude.
What were Mrs Truslove and himself? They were directors of a company. What do directors do? They run the company. What is the object of running a company? To make money. How do you make money? By expansion, surely. How does a business expand? What is the sign of expansion? Acquiring new directors. What is needed for new directors? A Board Room. Mr Beluncle had hit upon the fatal deficiency of Bulux Ltd. It had a factory. It had a small showroom in the West End; but it had never had a Board Room. It was buried in a slum. The whole floor in the West End was vacant. Unmistakably the Voice had spoken to him.
Mr Beluncle put the chairs round the table. He saw the crowded scene, the blotters, the blank sheets of paper, himself at the end, rising from his chair.
“Gentlemen,” he was saying.
The telephone rang in the front part of the building. He let it ring. But it rang and rang. In irritation he went back across the disorganised rooms outside where the general offices were going to be and he answered. Mr Chilly, never good on the telephone, was speaking.
“Good evening, sir. I am sorry to trouble you, sir. I hope I do not disturb, sir. It's a telegram, sir.”
“All right, sir. Read it, sir,” said Mr Beluncle, irritated to the point of mockery.
“It is from Mrs Truslove, sir,” the voice of Mr Chilly said. “It was sent—my dear” (Mr Chilly was talking to Miss Vanner), “what does it say at the top?”
Mr Beluncle said, “There is no need to bother about the top. The top of a telegram is nothing. What does it say at the bottom, that's the point.”
“At the bottom, sir, of course. I think,” said Mr Chilly, “I will get Miss Vanner, sir, to read it, sir. She is standing beside me now. Miss Vanner …;”
Miss Vanner read a telegram sent off at 4.15 from Bexhill:
Judy died this afternoon. Tuberculosis. Truslove.
Mr Beluncle went back t
o the Board Room where he had left his hat. He was out of breath and the smell of paint made him feel sick. He drew back the curtains and let air and the noise of the traffic into the room. Even that did not annul the gritty, pointless chatter of the clocks which gossiped forward into featureless years to come where no miracles occurred. Mr Beluncle sat down.
He could guess what was going to happen now. He could foresee exactly the state of mind of Mrs Truslove after this. He could hear what his wife would say. To have died at this moment!
“I thought when I heard it,” Mr Beluncle said, “it was going to be mother.”
Mr Beluncle shut the window and sat down at the end of the Board Room table and closed his eyes to pray.
“I deny it,” he began. “It hasn't happened. I absolutely deny this seeming occurrence. It's a mistake, a dream and— by the way, I'll give you a thought there, where is the dream when you wake up?”
Mr Beluncle opened his eyes. He recognised that in his deep fear he was not praying and that, even worse, he was giving no thought for the grief of Mrs Truslove. What she must have suffered! The stress she must have lived under!
“She won't want this,” he said, looking round at the Board Room. “She'll want,” he said, surprised by his own power of intuition, “a change.”
There came to him the sound of voices, men clearing their throats, settling into chairs. The Board Room was filling up, and, presently, giving a tap on the table, Mr Beluncle rose and began again:
“Gentlemen …”
It was a simple, moving speech. He told the meeting how he had worked for years with the inestimable aid of Mrs Truslove, and how now the time to retire had come. The negotiations just concluded, he said, had been successful. One Or two members might think, had indeed suggested, that the purchase price put on the Company was high. (A voice: “It ought to be higher.3') Well, he would describe it as not unsatisfactory. He only wished …
But here the spokesman of the buyers rose up. No price could really be too high, he said, for a concern once owned by Mr Beluncle and, for years, subsidised by the infinite resources of the Divine Mind. In his own speech Mr Beluncle had spoken of his gratitude to Mrs Truslove and of her need for a rest; but Mr Beluncle must not forget himself. Mr Beluncle needed a rest. A long rest. A voyage abroad, perhaps. Yes, Mr Beluncle ought to go abroad. He had worked; he had made a modest fortune; he had showered benefits on his partner; surely it was his turn now. And let him not confine himself to the South Coast towns. There was the Riviera, there was the Taj Mahal, there was the Nile; and (the speaker added, he would give them a thought there) the point about infinity is that it really is infinite, only we in our benighted belief in money …
Mr Beluncle woke up.
It was the first but it was also the last function to be held by a director of Bulux Ltd. in that room.
At the factory, Mr Chilly was saying to Miss Vanner:
“What is a writ? I mean, one reads of them, of course, one hears of them, but what does it look like?”
Miss Vanner's face became transfigured with importance and fear. She was carried without thought into one of her few successful interchanges with Mr Chilly.
“I have never been in receipt of such a document,” she said. “Oh, don't say we …”
Mr Chilly stopped her from wrecking her perfect sentence:
“My dear,” he said, “do you know, I rather think we shall have one all to ourselves—tomorrow. We shall see.”
“Oh, Mr Chilly, what a dreadful thing. Poor Mrs Trus—love. Her sister—like that,” cried Miss Vanner.
“I fancy it will be from Mrs Truslove,” said Mr Chilly.
Miss Vanner opened her mouth, but no sound came from it.
“Now, my pet,” said Mr Chilly, putting his arm round her, for she was going to the door. “No, my dear,” he said. “Not all over the office. No spreading of the sad news. If you would get your coat and hat, if you would like to toddle with me to some little place—I feel much has been going on which I have not understood and you with your inside knowledge—Henry, you know, never knew a thing. I might have put my money into a mission for all that boy could tell me.”
“One sec. and I'll be outside—round the corner,” said Miss Vanner fiercely. “My God! A mission, you're right!”
“Or a poem?” said Mr Chilly, detaining her. “Hiawatha's bankruptcy. You shall hear how …”
Miss Vanner's mouth stiffened with doubt—even now, just when all her inside knowledge was ready to flow, there was something dubious in Mr Chilly. Was he getting at her? Or was he—oh, but of course, that was what it was: he was a gentleman, he was concealing his feelings, “hiding his ruin,” she was able to quote, “behind the gambler's impassive mask.”
Miss Vanner fetched her coat.
READING GROUP GUIDE
“For Pritchett,” writes Darin Strauss in his introduction, “radical religion (and the rejection of it) was a means to examine hypocrisy self—discovery, the influence of one's parents, the price of nonconformity, and the warped vanity of the outcast.” Discuss.
How would you describe Philip BeluncleVmarriage to Ethel, and how does this compare with the oddly intimate relationship he shares with his business partner, Mrs. Truslove?
“I am in the middle of the family,” thinks George, UI am going to be the bad son; perhaps that will attract their attention. How would you describe the distinctive roles that Henry, George, and Leslie Beluncle serve in the Beluncle family? How do they relate to their parents and grandmother?
According to the writer and scholar John Bayley, “Pritchett had a delicate sense of the way people live inside cliches.” Can you find evidence of this in Mr. Behnckl Which characters seem based on stereotypes, and is Pritchett successful in turning them into unique and compelling individuals?
“If there is one thing I am proud to say of myself,” says Mr. Beluncle, “it is that money has never governed my life. Money has never entered my calculations. I have seen the hell it creates, the lives it wrecks.” Is Mr. Behmcle's self—assessment accurate? How does money, or the lack thereof, serve as a recurring theme in the novel?
Describe the miracle that Mrs. Dykes experiences. What, or who, do you think is responsible for it? How does it change her, and what impact does it have on Mrs. Truslove, Mr. Beluncle, and the community as a whole?
“What the old Hetley hated in the new Hetley was its suburban attempt at perfection and privacy,” writes Pritchett. “People who went in for privacy were trying to rise in the world, to cut themselves off. The Dykeses were an example of this. Postman's daughters and already, shutting themselves off, seeking other society, taking up with a new religion from London, the Dykeses had broken their ties and were claiming to be better than their neighbors.” What do you think of Pritchett's depiction of upward mobility in mid—twentieth—century Britain? Which characters have the highest social standing, and who is on the bottom of this social hierarchy? Where does the Beluncle family fit in?
What is your impression of Pritchett's depiction of love, courtship, and marriage as depicted in this novel? How does he portray motherhood and the relationships between mothers and sons?
According to John Bayley, V. S. Pritchett, in concluding his fictional narratives, “leaves a plurality of existences to run on apart, after they have come together for the duration of his story.” After reading the epilogue, what do you suppose will happen to the principal characters in Mr. Beluncle?
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Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 33