Bellman & Black

by Diane Setterfield

  How did he do it? By watching the clock. Washing, dressing, and breakfasting might take an ordinary man an hour, but Bellman did it in thirty-five minutes. The manager of Pope’s, which was the closest thing Bellman & Black had to a competitor, spent an hour every day with his secretary, but Bellman got through the agenda in fifteen minutes. He said “Good morning” and “How are you?” but during these profitless seconds his mind was noting, thinking, planning.

  When the shop closed and Bellman could at last settle down to his paperwork, he glanced at the clock. The workload he had resolved to accomplish would be half a day’s worth to another man, but he glanced at the clock before he started and again at the end, and only an hour had passed. Those that knew this facility of his wondered at it.

  “Never let time be your master,” Bellman told Verney when he asked about it. “If you want to do something, take it on. Time will always make itself.”

  But what he really felt about the matter was that he had discovered—or been given—the key to chronometry. He could open up the case of time when he chose, apply weight to the pendulum and slow its movement. He could take the hours apart, find the extra minutes that were going to waste in them, make them his own.

  Years ago at the mill someone had once suggested that Bellman might one day work out how to make the sun shine all day and all night. Those that knew him at the emporium would have agreed: it was not so impossible as it might seem.

  Verney tried to emulate his boss. By his watch, though, a minute was only ever a minute; he could never get a second more out of it.

  When Bellman lost time—by someone else’s miscalculation or mishap as a rule—he spent the afternoons in an intensity of effort to catch up. If necessary he would sit up late, stealing from sleep to finish what he had set out to do. Always he went to bed the victor. He never felt tired, though he must have been, for sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. When this happened for the third and fourth time he took action.

  Fox was in Scotland, but when he received the letter he returned directly to London. He found the same vigorous handshake, the same brevity of greeting.

  “You are well? Good, good,” Bellman said, leaving him no time for a reply, no time to say how fine the houses were in Edinburgh, how surprisingly mild the weather. Immediately they were straight to the matter at hand.

  “Divide the space.” Bellman knew what he wanted. “As far as here, see, and put in a wall.”

  “It can be done.” Fox frowned. “It will be a tight fit. You could borrow some space from your secretary’s office. It makes it a bigger job, but you’d have greater comfort . . .”

  Fox was aware of speaking fast, leaving no pauses between his sentences. The old ways came back to him instantly. To think he had lived every day for two years at this Bellman pace!

  When Fox had first left Bellman’s employ, he spent a fortnight astonished at the slowness of the rest of the world. Twenty, thirty times a day, you understood someone’s meaning after the first sentence but had to stand and wait while they meandered through until they had exhausted the stock of words and seconds they had put aside for it. He answered in a few taut words, and people stared at him. The meaning had come at them all at once, bullet fast; stunned by the detonation his listener had to ask him to repeat himself. It exhausted his patience, he thought he would never get used to it, but quite soon he adjusted himself to the slower pace, and before long he actually liked it. He had rediscovered the spaces in between words and tasks and thoughts, and they were surprisingly fruitful. He had met a young woman. He thought he might marry her.

  “Space?” Bellman was saying. “For what? All I need is a bed here, against the wall, and a cupboard here for a few things.”

  “A wardrobe?”

  “A hook behind the door will do.”

  Fox thought of the bedroom he had made for his client at the white stucco house, its grand scale, the majestic bed, the art, furniture, mirrors . . .

  “It will be far from spacious. In fact—” He paced out the area Bellman had indicated. “Yes. It’s more or less the dimensions of the seamstresses’ rooms we put in upstairs.”

  It seemed to him then that Bellman did pause, for the briefest instant. Then, “When can it be done?”

  “If you’re really satisfied to have something so modest, it can be done in a day.”

  “Overnight?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Tonight?”

  How did I do it? Fox marveled at himself. For two whole years he had lived at this speed . . . It had seemed natural to him then. The way to get on. The way to make himself. He had all sorts of projects lined up now, work enough for years, a lifetime. Bellman & Black had done that for him.

  He smiled. “I’ll see to it.”

  The next day Bellman came in to find his office a little smaller, and behind the new wall, a seamstress’s bedroom with tongue-and-groove panels, a narrow bed against the wall, and a cupboard. He stood in it, and an emotion stirred in him, but he didn’t stop to put a name to it. He had things to do.

  · · ·

  “Come in!” he called, without lifting his eyes from the letter he was drafting.

  “Sir, Miss Chalcraft sent me.” The voice was hesitant, female, familiar.

  He looked up. It was her.

  “. . . with your suit.”

  “It’s Lizzie, yes?”

  “Yes, sir. Should I hang it somewhere?” She looked round, but there was nowhere in his office to put it.

  She blushed. Was she thinking of the night in the backstreets? The night they had met so surprisingly, when he had slept in her bed and crept away at first light, tied his tongue. It had happened only three weeks ago, but he had forgotten it as wholly as if it were an event in the distant past. Now it filled the room.

  “Behind that door, there. You’ll find a hook.”

  If she was surprised at seeing how similar his bedroom was to her own, nothing in her face gave it away. The blood still high in her cheeks, she murmured a good-bye and exited the room as quietly as she had come.

  Bellman’s hand returned to his page and for a second or two he failed to remember what it was he had meant to write. He hadn’t got to the bottom of that Black business. Next time he saw her, he would ask her about it again. Then he picked up the thread and applied his pen to the paper as before.

  · · ·

  It was the end of the first month. He and Verney had double counted the day’s takings, separating the coins into stacks of like with like, and putting them into red felt bags. Every penny was accounted for. The figures were in. After Verney left, Bellman locked the money in the safe and then, smiling to himself, took his pen and dipped it in the black ink. At a point well above the target he had marked on his graph four weeks ago, he touched his nib to the paper at the level of sales actually achieved. The wet ink shone at him, like a beady black eye, and Bellman smiled contentedly at it.

  Now, what about this coming month? Ordinarily in retail you might expect novelty to inflate the first month’s takings artificially. Your second month’s takings would conceivably be less than the first. But mourning goods had their own laws, and in this, as in so much else, they were the exception to the rule. Quite naturally people felt a repugnance at the idea of having mourning wear ready and waiting in the home. Why, it was the equivalent of opening your front door to death, inviting him in, and lining up your family for him to eye over. Certainly some of the people milling about the shop on opening day had had no reason other than curiosity to be there, but they had not purchased. Every sale this first month was authentic. The figures could be counted on as an accurate reflection of real deaths that had occurred in the world beyond the walls of Bellman & Black. They were a reliable indicator of future expectations. So what should next month’s target be?

  The bead of black ink was dry, and besides, now that Bellman had drawn from it all the information he needed, it was no longer important. He dipped a clean pen into the blue ink and prepared to ma
rk the coming month’s target. The nib neared the paper, rose a little, and touched a dot a little higher than he meant.

  That again! He considered the ink. It winked at him. Well, why not?

  Having fixed his target he must make it happen. Bellman took his notebook from his pocket and opened it up. The Spanish gloves weren’t selling: he must see Drewer about reducing the price and reorder from the Italians; he must get to the bottom of the reason why the gunpowder velvet was doing so well; he must . . .

  His eye fell on a task he had listed yesterday. Paintbrushes.

  Dora!

  He was supposed to go to Whittingford tomorrow. Once a month, he had promised. An overnight visit. She had written and asked him to bring particular paintbrushes, narrow ones that she couldn’t get in Oxford.

  Bellman thought of everything he had to do. It wasn’t the best time to be away, not even for a single night. He would write and explain. A messenger would run out tomorrow and get the brushes for him, dispatch would wrap them. They might even be sending the brougham that way in the next few days, you never knew, otherwise he would get someone to deliver them. He would go when he could afford the time, and stay for longer. Write to Dora, he added to his list.

  Once, a long time ago, he had opened a book like this one and found in it, in childish handwriting, Kiss Dora. How he would like it if she were here to be kissed now!

  But this was wasting time. All these things to do!

  He selected half a dozen pen and paper tasks and settled at his desk. It was twenty to eight. Let’s see if he couldn’t complete these things by . . . nine? No: he wouldn’t need that long. A quarter to nine. That would do it.

  He set to.

  · · ·

  At the top of the shop the atrium glass gazed blankly up at the black sky and down into the well of the shop. Looking either way could make you feel dizzy, so the seamstresses avoided glancing up or down as they scurried along the walkway to the room where they were allowed to congregate in the evenings and heat milk or water on the little stove.

  “Who is Mr. Black?” Lily was saying. “Does no one ever see him?”

  She was a skinny thing, all knuckles and elbows, but what really distinguished her was that she was the new girl. Of course in a way they were all new girls, but Lily was the newest of the new, brought in to replace a seamstress who had not turned up. Her arrival was significant because the others, in telling her the hundred and one things she didn’t know and they did, began to feel established.

  “See him? Whatever do you mean? Have you not seen Mr. Black, then?” her neighbor, Sally, began to tease.

  “Never.”

  Sally laughed. “Of course you’ve seen him. You saw him only today!”

  Lily frowned. “I never did.”

  “But he spoke to you!”

  Lily shook her head. “That was Mr. Bellman.”

  “It was Mr. Black.” Some of the girls giggled, but others nodded their heads gravely at Lily in support of Sally’s words. Lily looked from one face to the next, trying to decide what was true.

  A girl leaned forward. “Mr. Bellman and Mr. Black are as like as the two pins that you keep in your cuff.”

  “Twins?” Lily was amazed.

  Susan, an older girl who enjoyed a reputation for knowledge that extended beyond the fact, shook her head. “Don’t tease her. Lily, think about it. How could two men be twins and yet have different names? Only brothers can be twins. No, Mr. Black is a sleeping partner.”

  The girls exchanged uncertain glances. A sleeping partner? What on earth was that?

  When Susan had enjoyed her knowledge in private long enough she enlightened them. “It means he has invested in the shop, put some money in to get it going, and now leaves the running of it to Mr. Bellman but takes his share of the profit.”

  “Well,” said Lily. “You learn something new every day.”

  Leaning in the doorway, Lizzie listened sleepily to the conversation while she looked out of the room and up to the glass ceiling.

  Sleeping partners. What a peculiar expression. An image rose in her mind: Mr. Bellman and Mr. Black tucked up, one at each end of a narrow bed just like hers, in matching nightcaps, as like as two pins. It made her smile.

  She had thought Mr. Bellman was Mr. Black the first time she had seen him.

  And now she remembered that Mr. Bellman had spoken of Mr. Black the night she had met him in Back Lane . . . As if he thought she knew him! But he had been unwell, and people said strange things when they were ill.

  Beyond the glass ceiling, high in the night sky, a star disappeared momentarily then came back. A bird probably, passing over the shop in the dark.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Dora opened the parcel first because she already knew what the letter would say. Her father was not coming home, he was too busy.

  The brushes were exactly what she wanted. The artists’ supplies shop in Broad Street in Oxford had most things she wanted, but these finest brushes, a sparse half-dozen goat hairs in each, were hard to come by, and for the detailing of feathers, no broader brush would do. She had tried to improvise. Rob Armstrong, the son of Fred from the bakery, generally delivered the bread for the mill breakfasts and he had the strongest, straightest hair of anyone she knew. He had agreed—abashedly—to sacrifice a lock to her experiment. She had glued a few hairs to the end of an old brush, wound them round with string, trimmed them to length, then attempted to paint. The result was laughable. Human hairs did not pick up color adequately, they had not the right flexibility, and neither glue nor string were enough to hold them in place. Gradually they fell away, into the paint or the water; one dried into the picture itself. Dora gave the painting—a thrush, she was actually quite pleased with it, all but the feathers—to Rob as a thank-you gift for his contribution to the experiment. He ran his finger over the wing that concealed his own hair, felt it with his fingertip, and laughed.

  Now that she had the new brushes she could do better. She rose to go to her studio, then remembered the letter.

  She read.

  It was just as she thought. He wasn’t coming.

  She could not honestly say she was disappointed. She had not been expecting him to come, and in truth, they had little to say to each other. In the old days, when her mother, brothers, and sister were alive, the house had been filled with talk, but now that they were the only ones left, she had little to say to her father, and he had little to say to her. In his presence she could not speak what was on her mind—he did not like to be reminded of the old days, discouraged brooding—nor do the things that interested her. Her binoculars and her paint had to be put aside, along with the distraction and comfort they brought her. All in all—she looked the fact full in the face—she was not sorry he was not coming.

  Gathering her paints together she looked forward to losing herself for a few hours in the pleasure of painting. It removed you from yourself. She could forget all about grief and sorrow while she was intent on reproducing a certain visual effect on paper. Remembering was all very well—and there had been years when it was all she wanted to do—but these days it was a relief to forget. Forget sorrow, forget the past, forget what was lost . . . It took something engrossing to enable her to do that, and painting was the one thing she could rely on.

  When did her father’s mind ever fall still? He never read a book. Not for pleasure, not a novel or verse. He was not particularly fond of music, despite his fine voice. Did he never daydream? she asked herself. Never allow his mind to roam at will, surprising him with what it came up with?

  She supposed that he must find respite from himself in his work. And so, since he was always at work, did this mean that he was never quite himself?

  It was a terrible thought, and most young women would have turned away from it, but Dora was used to terrible thoughts. When your mother is dead and your brothers and sister are dead and your pretty hair has fallen out so no one will ever marry you, dread loses its power over you. Dora thought dreadful
things all the time and had quite lost her fear of them. She turned this one over, examined it carefully, curiously, from all angles. It was clear to her that a person might lose his sense of himself in his concentration on graphs and lists and calculations. You could lose your bearings if you spent excessively long periods engaged on a single project at the expense of rest and friendship and the peaceful contemplation of life’s mysteries. Was it feasible that a man might do this for so long that he slipped his moorings altogether? Was lost to himself for good?

  Perhaps it was so and her father had mislaid himself permanently.

  Dora’s list of sorrows was so long already that, relatively speaking, the addition of this new one was no great burden.

  She saw a time coming when she would be polite to her father and as kindly as ever, but would expect less of him. Their relations would be more superficial and simpler. There need be no disappointment.

  Everything was ready. Dora took up her binoculars and looked from the window. A dunnock was flitting from tree to earth, where Mary had scattered stale bread crumbs. Her hand moved quickly over the page, capturing the balance of the bird’s head, the set of its body, the angle of its legs. She worked rapidly, happily, with concentration.

  By the time the picture was finished the afternoon was drawing to its end. Before long the rooks would be going over.

  She waited to see them pass, a long skein of them, cawing and laughing in their habitual friendly fashion. She got up close to them with her binoculars, admired the purposeful ease of their flight. Twisting her body, she followed their passage overhead until they became blurred, gray specks and at last disappeared into an indeterminate whiteness beyond the edge of her vision. Even then, she watched a little longer.

  “Where is it that you are going?” she murmured aloud.

  She gathered her drawing things together and put them in her bag with her binoculars. The bag across her body on its strap, the folding chair under one arm, and her walking stick in the other hand, she jerked and hobbled over the grass and back to the house.