by Nina Bawden
For a moment Simpson said nothing. His eyes travelled over Johnny with a bright, intransigent stare, taking in the smile, the gentle condescension, the suit that must have cost, he reckoned, at least fifty pounds. ‘Where are you lunching?’ he asked in a mincing voice.
Johnny hesitated, pricked by a faint, undefined doubt. ‘Rules,’ he said.
Simpson took a bite from his sandwich, pushed away his empty glass of milk and gave his concentrated attention to the manuscripts on his desk. His jaws munched steadily. Then he belched.
At the door, Johnny said defensively, ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’
Simpson looked up at him with an affected expression of elaborate surprise as if he had only just discovered his presence.
‘Oh—go and be damned to you,’ he said.
Johnny was seized by a violent, shaking rage. He had a terrible desire to kill Simpson, to put his hands round the stringy, undernourished throat and squeeze—it would be as easy as squeezing an orange. He clenched his fists at his sides and closed his eyes, sickened and appalled.
‘All right,’ he said, controlling himself with an enormous effort. ‘All right, Mr. Simpson. I’ll go for good.’
‘Oh—go to buggery,’ Simpson said.
An antique grandfather clock stood in one corner of the ante-room to the director’s offices. It had a fat, melancholy tick and decorated numbers in green and gold that were difficult to read. Johnny stared at it and realized that it was an hour slow. He wondered who on earth had put it there and then, in the same instant, wondered what he was doing there. A sense of numb unreality descended upon him. He stared bleakly at Lester’s secretary, a plump, nubile girl in a black sweater, when she came to fetch him.
Lester was sitting behind his desk, a polished expanse of good red leather, smiling his bland, welcoming smile. ‘Well Johnny,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’ He sounded a jovial Father Christmas, ready to pull down absolutely any present off the tree.
‘I’ve resigned my job.’ He explained quickly, giving only the bare bones of the quarrel. His anger had retreated a little and he wanted to be fair to Simpson. He saw no reason in the world why he should need to justify his own behaviour.
Lester’s bald face was expressionless. He took a cigar out of his breast pocket and pierced it impatiently.
‘Let me get this straight. You had a disagreement with Simpson because you didn’t do a job to his liking. Right?’
‘Disagreement’s a polite word to use.’
‘I daresay. Simpson’s a tough old bastard.’ Lester gave a short, approving laugh. He turned on Johnny his blue, veiled stare. ‘I suppose you’re not used to being sworn at by someone who isn’t a gentleman?’
The sneer was deliberate. Johnny felt, not anger, but the dull sense of guilt his uncle could still arouse in him. It was something that went back to his boyhood, to the time he had been living in his grandfather’s house and Lester had come home on leave from the Army. He had always been a big, ugly man with a loud, arrogant voice and a thick, hard body that bulged aggressively through his clothes. Johnny had been a little afraid of him, for a reason that was not quite the ordinary young boy’s fear of the strong, domineering male. He had felt, in his uncle’s presence, a kind of haunted, bewildered shame as if he had done something to offend him and did not know what it was.
He said, ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’ Lester’s manner switched, became almost too affable, a form of egregious apology. ‘I can see old Simpson could be fearfully difficult to deal with. Particularly from a subordinate capacity.’ He laughed quite benignly. ‘Actually, to be honest with you,’—he drew on his cigar and squinted at the glowing end—‘we wouldn’t be sorry to pension him off. The Gazette could do with someone a bit less hidebound, y’know? We’d like to attract more advertising, for example, but if you mention new layouts to Simpson his hair stands on end. The trouble is, these old stagers get dug in, built into the foundations, you might say. And they’re just about as easy to shift.’
‘I should think he runs the Gazette competently enough,’ Johnny said with just enough contempt for it to be visible to his uncle. ‘What do you want to advertise in it? Corsets?’
Lester frowned. ‘All r-r-right. Point taken. But tell me this. Apart from this incident, have you any complaints against him?’ He waved a solid white hand. ‘Of course, this is off the record, don’t y’know?’
Johnny felt bemused and a little disgusted at the openness of this invitation. He thought unreasonably, poor old devil, if they pension him off, it’ll break his heart. He said, ‘None. As I said, he’s quite competent. We just didn’t see eye to eye, that’s all.’
‘I see.’ Lester looked at him half-regretfully. ‘Well, I can only say I’m sorry about it. I’m not sure, y’know, that we can fit you in anywhere else at the moment. Unless, of course, Simpson were to leave.…’
‘I don’t think this kind of journalism is really my line.’ Johnny was conscious of an enormous relief as he said this.
Lester sighed. ‘Perhaps it isn’t.’ He paused. ‘What about that advertising job? I know you packed it in, but I daresay something could be worked out if you decided to change your mind. I could have a word with Bill Stanford. We play golf together sometimes. He’s a bit rough, certainly, sometimes he acts like the village idiot,’—he smiled broadly—‘but he’s got a damn good business head. It’s a big firm and a rich one.’
Johnny smiled with deliberate amiability. ‘With hundreds of little Stanfords jostling each other for seats on the board?’ He thought this was the sort of reason likely to impress his uncle.
‘I daresay. But he’ll always find a place for the right man. Naturally, you’d have to sweat it out for a bit.’
Johnny said quickly, ‘I don’t want to spend the rest of my life selling things to people who don’t want them. I’m not a hawker.’
Lester muttered, ‘Well, if you’re so sure you can pick and choose.…’ He looked at Johnny with baffled concern. ‘Have you anything else in mind? Not that I want to pry.’
‘Nothing definite.’ Johnny hesitated, reluctant to leave his uncle with the impression that he would have to peddle himself round on the open market. He said, ‘Julian’s suggested something. I’m not awfully clear about the details, but he’s bought a small import and export concern—or, rather, a controlling interest in it. He wants me to go in with him.’
Lester said heartily, ‘Cloutsham? Oh yes—he’s done well for himself here and there, hasn’t he? I was talking to Harling the other day and he mentioned him.’ A doubtful look came into his eyes suddenly, as if he wasn’t altogether happy about something. He shot out his thick wrist and looked at his watch. ‘What about lunch? Why don’t you come along to my club and talk things over?’ He had slid completely into his role of bluff, kindly uncle: his manner was persuasive, almost excessively genial.
‘It’s awfully nice of you, but I’m lunching already. With Julian, as a matter of fact. I’m pretty late already.’
‘You should have told me.’ Lester stood up energetically, clapped his heavy hand affectionately on Johnny’s shoulder as they walked to the lift. He insisted, at every door, that Johnny should precede him.
In the lift he said, ‘How are Mary and the boy?’
‘Terribly well.’
‘Good. He’s a charming lad.’ He went on with studied vagueness, ‘You haven’t brought him down to Fitchet for a long time. We’d like to see him, y’know. Do him good, too, to get some decent air.’
He pressed the ground-floor button, the whirr of the lift made Johnny’s silence less embarrassing. Lester shouted, ‘I wish you’d let me buy him that pony.’
This was easier to answer. ‘It’s very good of you. But Mary feels he oughtn’t to have things we can’t afford to give him.’ He smiled, not very comfortably, thinking of Mary’s unwillingness to visit Fitchet. Lester was almost certainly aware of it too.
The lift stopped at the grou
nd floor and the doors slid open. They walked across the marble-floored lobby to the entrance. The sun assaulted their eyes with a shock that was almost pain.
‘What a marvellous day,’ Johnny said.
‘It’s been a good summer.’ Lester glared under his brows at a pretty girl tittuping along the pavement in a hobble skirt. Still watching her, he said, ‘I had a letter from your mother the other day. She’ll be upset to hear you’ve decided to leave us. I daresay she’ll blame me.’ He laughed in a rather embarrassed way: he was oddly nervous of his sister. ‘Look—don’t do anything in a hurry. Take a week to think it over, longer if you like. I’ll have a word with Hartshorn. Meanwhile, I shouldn’t say anything at home, if I were you.’
‘But that’s ridiculous.’
‘Is it?’ Lester swivelled his head round and gave Johnny a straight, hard look as if he were sighting him along the barrel of a gun. ‘Mary will worry herself sick, won’t she?’
Johnny said curtly, ‘She worries quite unnecessarily.’ Then he added more gently, ashamed to snub what seemed a quite real concern, ‘You’re right, of course. She’ll probably think we’re bound to end up in the gutter.’
They both laughed indulgently. ‘What does she think you ought to do?’ Lester asked.
‘I think something definite.’ His face lit with an amused tenderness. ‘She’d like me to be a doctor or a solicitor—any profession that you have to pass an exam to be qualified for. She’s got a great respect for little pieces of paper. She’d like me to have gone to a university.’
Lester smiled. ‘That’s hardly much of a qualification, I should think. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can go up to the’Varsity nowadays. Still—she’s very loyal.’ He spoke dryly as if this was not altogether a compliment. ‘All the same, I shouldn’t tell her. Not till you’ve made up your mind.’
He lifted his hand in a half salute and turned on his heel. Johnny watched him walking down the street with a heavy, rolling gait. Then he flagged a taxi, said, ‘Rules, Maiden Lane,’ and jumped in. His face had lightened with relief so that he looked very young—a boy, almost, let out of school.
Chapter Six
Martin had fallen in the playground and cut his cheek open on a broken milk bottle. ‘I want Daddy to come home and see my stitch. Tell him it was an enormous piece of glass,’ he said. He lay on the sofa, his head resting on his grandmother’s arm, one cheek puckered and angry, the other pale and slippery with tears. His eyes, golden like Johnny’s, were bright with exhaustion and pride.
‘I’ll tell him,’ Mary promised. She smiled, over his head, at Johnny’s mother, Christine, and dialled the number of the Gazette. She said, ‘Can I speak to Mr. Prothero, please?’
The line was bad. Above the crackles, the secretary’s voice was light and distant. ‘I’m sorry, he isn’t here any more.’
Mary thought she must have misheard. ‘Perhaps you’ll give him a message, then. This is Mrs. Prothero.’
‘Oh. I see.’ There was a pause. Mary heard her speak to someone else in the room and a man’s voice answering. Then the woman said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs. Prothero. But he left the firm a week ago.’ She breathed in and out in a noisy, agitated way like the hand pump of an old chapel organ. ‘Can I transfer you to Sir Lester? He may know where to get hold of him.’
‘No thank you.’ Mary’s eyes flew nervously to Christine. She had a queer little fear that she might, by some miracle of acoustics, have been able to hear both sides of the conversation, but her head was bent serenely over the comic Martin had demanded she should read to him. Mary put the receiver down with a feeling of guilt. She felt as if she had been caught prying into a room where she had no right to be.
Martin looked up. ‘Is Daddy there?’ he said fretfully.
‘Not at the moment, darling. They’re trying to find him.’
‘I had two stitches.’ He yawned, his fawn’s eyes drifting with tiredness.
‘He’s nearly asleep,’ Christine whispered.
Mary picked him up. He was very light; carrying him into the bedroom the fragility of his bones excited her half-frightened love. She wanted to kiss his beautiful head and hold him close for hours.
He closed his eyes and fell asleep almost at once—too quickly. It would have been better if she could have read to him, sung, anything that would have held back the tide of angry bewilderment rising within her. She moved round the room, closing the curtains, aimlessly picking up his toys. Then she stood still. There seemed to be no sound in the room except her own thudding heart.
She said, half aloud, ‘There must be some mistake,’ and stood, frowning, testing this possibility with a shrinking hopefulness like a swimmer testing icy water with a toe. But the water is always cold; she relinquished the faint hope with a sigh. There was no reason why the secretary should have been mistaken. Johnny had left the firm. If he had simply transferred to another magazine he would have told her. And he had not told her. Thoughts developed slowly in her mind like a photograph coming to life in an acid tank.
She had known the job was not suiting him. When she asked him about it he had shrugged and said it would do until something better turned up. His attitude had shocked her. She had been brought up to believe that every job was to be taken seriously. She had said, irritated, ‘I don’t see what you want,’ and he had smiled at her. ‘Power, love,’ he had said lightly. ‘The moon on toast. What do you think?’
He had made her laugh but she had not understood. Her standards were to some extent still limited to what, in the suburban road she grew up in, were the ultimate ambitions, a nice home, a good job. It was a world in which the new car, the visit to the theatre, the holiday abroad, opened up new and splendid horizons. The notion of power never came into the reckoning. They made laws and wars. Power was what other people had and wielded over you, unquestioned.
Quite simply, she did not see what Johnny had to grumble at. She was still impressed by the climate of his life, his mother’s icy standards—expressed by a passing word, a lift of the eyebrows—the easy way they both talked about money, not as a daily, nagging threat, only, occasionally, as a distant cloud on the horizon. They both spoke, grave-faced, of poverty, but only as they would have talked of love or justice or any other abstraction. It had no connection in their minds with penny-pinching shabbiness or fear. Mary had no idea how much money Christine gave Johnny but she knew they lived in a way no salary of his could entitle them to. Christine paid for Martin’s school, for Johnny’s car, and they lived, rent-free in the basement of the house that had belonged to Sir George and been left to his daughter as her share of the estate.
‘The upkeep must be a great worry to Johnny,’ Christine said when Mary went back into the drawing room. She had been bending to inspect a patch of rising damp that had appeared in the corner of the room. When she straightened up, she gave a little gasp as at a sudden twinge of pain. Mary thought she looked ill but knew that she would hate to be asked what was wrong with her. She was a proud, reserved woman who never used any make-up as if denying that there could be any improvement in her pale, papery skin dried out by years in India; her eyes, sunk deep beneath a high, imperious forehead were a very light, cold blue as if the sun had faded them. She was clever: she got her books not from Boots but from the London Library and she had once written a biography of her great-uncle who had been a governor in some long-relinquished post of Empire. Mary suspected that her reputation for cleverness did not rest on this literary excursion but on her habit of saying quite ordinary things in a very decisive voice. Mary was amused by her and shyly fond of her, though Christine inhibited her natural frankness and sometimes made her feel trivial.
‘It’s the drains,’ she said. ‘They need seeing to.’
Christine looked at her briefly, with her pale, sufficient stare. It was the way she looked at the world, Mary felt, weighing it up and finding it wanting.
‘You must move that bookcase,’ she said. ‘It might be damaged by the damp. It’s a fine piece. It belonged to my
mother.’
She ran her fingers lightly over the veneered surface, not looking for dust, but lovingly. Generations of colonial servants, justly bearing the white man’s burden, had formed her attitudes: she felt it her inherited duty to keep an eye on things. When Mary broke a piece of china Christine had given them, she felt, not simply careless, but as if she had failed on some higher moral plane.
‘Johnny was going to move it last night, but we forgot,’ she said guiltily.
‘You must be very busy,’ Christine said. ‘Running this big flat.…’ There was some lack of conviction in her tone. She came from a long line of female reformers and thought it a sin for women to be idle. They should sit on committees, send telegrams to the Prime Minister.
‘I have nothing else to do,’ Mary said apologetically.
‘I suppose not.’ Christine smiled, one of her rare, unqualified smiles. ‘I don’t know how you manage so beautifully without servants. But you must get bored sometimes. It would be different if you lived in the country.’ She sighed. ‘Johnny is a countryman at heart.’
‘A country squire, you mean.’
‘Perhaps.’ She sighed again: for some reason, her mood was less crisp than usual. ‘My father would have liked, you know, to leave Fitchet to Johnny. It was impossible, of course, but I wish he could have done something for him. My husband’s family were poor as mice and we all expected it. Although, as it turned out, death duties were so enormous.’ Thoughtfully, she traced the pattern on the wood of the bookcase with a claw-like finger. ‘It’s hard to get used to the idea that one’s children will have to scrape a living.’ She spoke with sudden, sad indignation. ‘People should do jobs that interest or fulfil them. Not in order to pay the rent or the greengrocer.’
She stood, head bent, old and delicate as her furniture, and for a moment Mary glimpsed what her world had been, cosy as Cranford, unreal as a fairy tale. Once upon a time, some people had been able to live and think like this. They were good people, they had standards of a sweet, old-fashioned sort, they knew their duty and they carried baskets of soup to the poor man at their gate. As Christine turned towards her and said, ‘Don’t listen to my grumbles. Old people have to get used to the world changing,’ Mary heard behind her words a fading, ghostly ballad and felt, with a stab of pain, the sadness of every autumn.