CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“My wife says she sees more of Mr. Black than she does of Mr. Bellman. She’s beginning to wonder whether Mr. Bellman exists at all and taxes me with having invented him.”
Bellman stared at the haberdasher—it was Critchlow—who had one of Bellman’s cigars in one hand and a glass of Bellman’s whiskey in the other.
“It’s a little joke of hers,” the man explained mildly, seeing Bellman’s face.
It was true that Bellman didn’t go out much. Opportunities were numerous: every day the post brought invitations to this ball and that dinner and grand events here, there, and everywhere, but Bellman was a busy man. It was tiresome enough getting round the shop thrice a day without being ambushed into conversation. With an air of sorrowful amiability he saw what he wanted to see, checked what he wanted to check, while avoiding eye contact. In a manner befitting the manager of the shop he bestowed his condolences with a look left and right that encompassed all and singled out no one.
Socializing was impossible to avoid altogether. Often it was the only way to do business, so inefficient though it was, he had more than once made business deals in a box at the theater. The first half of the play he barely attended to: there was generally a great deal of sentiment, outbursts of feeling, and he watched the audience, who looked on with stricken faces. During intermission he and the fellow came to an agreement and shook hands. When the second half started, Bellman made his excuses and left.
Once a month Bellman met with his haberdashers in Russells on Piccadilly. Bellman would arrive to find them waiting for him, on their second drink already. He reported the business side of things, they asked questions and commented, and at a point when all were satisfied with Bellman & Black and the talk drifted into more general matters he would rise and ask for his coat, ready to come away.
“Time for another?” someone would ask, but once the business was over he didn’t even finish the drink he had.
“Work to do!” he said, and they weren’t exactly unhappy about it. Sooner have their business assets managed by a man like Bellman than one who lingered over a whiskey by the fireside. The profits spoke for themselves.
These business sorties were the only social events Bellman could be induced to attend. He was a wealthy widower though, handsome and in his prime, and it was only natural that women should be interested in him. The fact that he was known to shun all invitations only increased his value in their eyes. There were daughters and younger sisters in need of husbands, and if Bellman was not snared quickly it stood to reason that some pretty widow going into half-mourning would snatch him up.
The haberdashers were better placed than any to apply pressure.
“You know what women are,” Critchlow said, with a grimace. “Sometimes they just won’t take no for an answer.” He sat in Bellman’s chair, making no indication of leaving, and Bellman understood that, painful though it was to both of them, he meant to stay until Bellman had accepted.
“It’s nothing grand. Family and a few close friends. You’ll be home by eleven.”
Bellman thought he could draw him away from the topic by asking about Woking. The queen’s surgeon had purchased a plot of land there with a view to opening a crematorium, and had induced a few men of means to form a society with him for the promotion of cremation.
“It will never happen,” the haberdasher said. “You take my word for it. How is the good lord to raise us on the Day of Judgment if we are burned to ashes? That’s how people think. They never think to ask how he will raise them when they have been eaten by worms and their bones are dust, but that’s by the by. No, take my word for it, Bellman. It’ll take more than a few overcrowded cemeteries to bring the English mind round to the idea of burning the dead. We’re not heathens in this country.”
But Bellman’s strategy was ineffective. As the haberdasher rose to go, hand on door handle, he turned back into the room.
“I’ll tell Emily to expect you then,” he said, as if the invitation had been accepted, and before Bellman could protest, Critchlow was gone and it was too late to do anything about it.
· · ·
At the party—for party it was, despite the promises of a small family meal—Bellman was stunned by the color of it all. From the Prussian yellow hall to the emerald curtains of the dining room, from the sapphire dress of his hostess to the red glass at the table, the color dazzled him. Within ten minutes he felt the beginning of a headache. He was amiable though. He still knew how, though what had once come naturally now cost him a degree of effort. The food was elegant and elaborate and interminable: it killed his appetite as soon as he set eyes on it, but he smiled and listened to the conversation that went on around him. When he spoke he said just the right kinds of thing. He made himself agreeable in a hundred small ways, and reserved enough of himself for it to be noticed.
“I have a daughter of twenty,” he said, and when he received invitations for Dora to a dance, to tea, to a play—the ladies were conscious that they had sons to marry as well as daughters—he graciously shook his head. “She has not the stamina for London life. She lives quietly in the country.”
“Do tell us, Mr. Bellman—it is the reason we have all been so keen to meet you, and the answer to the mystery all London is talking about—who is the mysterious Mr. Black?”
The young woman down the table smiled at him, pink lips and white teeth, and her blue eyes gleamed with a teasing happiness. Her coloring was different, yet he was reminded of Dora, the way she used to be, and it was a shock to realize that his daughter must be the same age as this girl now, this laughing young woman, happy to have found a husband and wear cornflower blue silk to a dinner and be merry with friends.
“Yes,” others chorused in the room, “Who is Black? We are all so anxious to know!”
All the smiling faces turned expectantly toward him.
“Black? Black is only a word that sounds well with Bellman.”
The ladies were as delighted as if he had said something witty or graceful.
“Only a word!” Mrs. Critchlow exclaimed. “I am glad to know at last!”
“An assonance!” somebody suggested farther down the table.
“An alliteration!”
“A poem!”
They laughed. Bellman laughed. The conversation changed to something else.
· · ·
At the end of the evening, brushing out her hair, Mrs. Critchlow could not persuade herself that the dinner had been a success. It should have been the beginning of a friendship. She had wanted Bellman to become a regular at their house. She wished to be instrumental in finding him a wife, and for that wife to be related to her or at least someone who could be useful . . . The evening should have been a prelude to something, but as her guest left, at the moment when she had intended to say “Will we see you again before long, Mr. Bellman?” she had been unable to utter a word—and a glance from him had thanked her for not saying it.
“Is he in mourning?” she asked her husband. “I didn’t feel I could ask.”
“I don’t know.”
“It is four years, surely, since his wife died?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Perhaps he is mourning for another relative?”
“He is always in black when I see him, dear. He wears it at Bellman & Black, and since he is always at the shop or on his way to or from the shop, I have never had the occasion to see him in anything else.”
She plaited her hair. “He didn’t like it when we were joking about the shop name, did he?”
She received no other answer than a snore.
· · ·
Mrs. Critchlow accepted the compliments from her competitors on having caught Bellman at last, but the victory was hollow. She gave the report on her party a hundred times to those who had not been there. What the man had said, what he had done, what he had eaten.
“Charm itself,” she heard herself repeat.
The more she told her story, the m
ore she felt she was describing a phantom, a chimera, a figure from a dream. He had the outward appearance of a man, the weight and the solidity of a man, but there was something exasperatingly insubstantial about him. She couldn’t escape the feeling that the essence of him was elsewhere.
“So—is there a woman, do you suppose?” one of her friends daringly wondered aloud.
Was that it? Did some secret lover hold the key to Bellman’s heart? Was he engaged in a passionate liaison with a woman who was not free to marry? Perhaps his heart was already committed but his love went unrequited? Along with the rest of London she wondered. Might it be that the deceased Mrs. Bellman still lived in her husband’s heart and saw off all newcomers?
The haberdasher’s wife considered these theories, expecting her intuition to alight upon some remembered gesture, comment, or expression of his and illuminate it, giving the key to the man’s heart. Her intuition was silent.
· · ·
Bellman’s staff wondered too. The seamstresses exchanged whispers out of the hearing of Miss Chalcraft, invented more and more unlikely tales about their employer and his women. The shopgirls sat over their mutton stew in the canteen dissecting his attractiveness. There was gossip about a widow who lingered over her purchases and kept a sharp eye open for the manager. It was said that Bellman sent a boy to spy out the land in advance of his daily tours, and if she was in the shop he waited till she was gone. A good many other things were said too, silly stories mostly. His looks were universally agreed to be virile and impressive; it was understandable that girls found romantic interest in his dark brow and his intense gaze. But others preferred a fairer man, and all agreed that a few smiles and a bit of laughter went a long way with a woman. Whatever their romantic preferences, in the light of day and faced with the man in the flesh, flirting seemed out of the question and the fantasy of romance evaporated.
And Girl No. 9? When Lizzie hung up her dress at night on the hook behind her door, she thought of the hook behind Mr. Bellman’s door, and when she got into her bed, she thought of Mr. Bellman getting into his bed in the little bedroom behind the wall of his office. She had reasons of her own for wanting to bury the night of his sudden appearance in her old neighborhood in forgetfulness. Mr. Bellman himself had given no indication that he remembered it; were it not for the money he had left behind—too late for her to take her child to a doctor, and besides it would not have made a difference, not for long—she could almost believe it to be a dream. He behaved as if it had never been, and she was glad. They were a teasing lot, the seamstresses, and she preferred not to draw their attention. Beyond this, she had no other thoughts about Mr. Bellman. Her nighttime thoughts took her elsewhere: to the young man who had abandoned her, and the child she had lost. Sometimes the memories that came to her were happy ones, sometimes not. Both made her cry, but not for long: it was a tiring job, and she couldn’t help falling asleep.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The end of the working day followed a pattern. Upstairs the seamstresses worked for as long as they had the light: longer hours in summer, shorter in winter. The sales floor closed at seven o’clock sharp. Given the abundance of grief, a sentiment that recognized no clock, this was no easy matter and required close and careful management. From half past six the consolers—girls who were employed for the delicacy of their sympathy and their understanding expressions—were gradually withdrawn from the floor, leaving the business to be concluded by those who were supreme at selling. At a quarter to seven, without any discernible alteration in their manner, these girls deferentially placed a distinct choice before the indecisive. In cases where grief still hesitated at five to seven, Mr. Heywood himself would intervene.
“Take your time, madame,” he said, and “a wise decision is always better than a hasty one.” After all—he implied this with a delicate gesture of the fingertips—an hour here or there counts as nothing when compared with the eternity that attends us all one day. Mr. Heywood would not allow anyone to be rushed, he would wait until the end of time for their decision—yet by a minute to seven the decision was invariably made and generally in favor of the more expensive item.
At seven o’clock Pentworth closed the door on the last customer with a gravity that expressed his personal condolences in a most heartfelt way, before turning the great key in the lock.
Now the consolers and the sympathizers puffed their cheeks out in relief at the departure of the customers. They rubbed their aching feet, closed their eyes in exhaustion, and hands on hips, stretched their backs, tired from reaching and fetching and carrying. Tongues remained guarded. The rules of no laughter and no gossip still held after hours, as they held within five hundred yards of the shop, so any exchanges of a more personal nature could be made only by glances or in whispers out of the hearing of the floor managers. This moment of relaxation only lasted a few moments in any case, for then came what was perhaps the busiest hour of the day.
Brooms and wax polish and dusters were produced from concealed cupboards, and there was the flurry and bustle of cleaning. Counters were polished, bolts of fabric and reels of ribbon straightened, stairs were swept, floorboards scrubbed, mirrors and windows polished . . . It was not finished till the girls themselves were ready for inspection as they queued to leave by the side door. “Not a hair out of place” they heard, over and over. So they took turns at the mirrors and pinned stray strands of hair for each other, and when the shop was in perfect order and when they were in perfect order, the side door was opened and they stepped out.
Counting the paces, one, two, three . . . and five hundred yards from Bellman & Black (it was the tobacconist on Regent Street west or the little restaurant on Regent Street east, and on Oxford Street it was either Marcham’s or Greenway’s, depending on your direction) they came to the spot where they were entitled to live again. Zest and relish and delight were let out from where they had been contained all day, laughter was permitted to tweak the mouth, hands that had been meekly folded since nine in the morning were allowed to gesture and articulate. No customer of the angelically compassionate Susannah would have recognized her as she bent double with laughter, almost weeping with mirth at a vulgar tale told her by the man from the warehouse. Even the lugubrious Mr. Pentworth—in practice, you’d have thought, to be doorman at the gates of heaven itself—was transformed into an averagely jolly chap when he met his sons at the King William. Going home from work: it was glorious!
William Bellman did not go home. He had spent so little time there in the first year of Bellman & Black that he had resolved in the end to let it. When the house adjoining it had come up for sale he had bought and let that one too; he owned four London houses now, but he continued to live out of preference at the shop, sleeping in the little narrow bed in the tongue-and-groove paneled room behind his office and standing in an iron tub he filled with a jug to wash. It was less fuss than going home. It was home.
Tonight he just wanted to look over the contract with Reynolds of Gloucester: he had an idea the man was making savings on his raw materials that were not being passed on. And a few minutes perusing jet sales would be time well spent. He was sending his representative up to Whitby again next week, and it wouldn’t hurt to know how the different designs were doing. He spent half an hour pleasantly enough on these and other similar tasks; thought of another little job that was easier done now than tomorrow, which reminded him that . . .
When he looked at his clock he realized with familiar surprise that it was after nine o’clock.
At night, Bellman & Black had an allure all its own. It was a great beast, asleep. Now as he leaned back in his chair, he felt a pulse, and it seemed to him it was the pulse of Bellman & Black, though he knew it was the pulse of his own blood in his own veins. Yet Bellman & Black was like an extension of his own body. With his hand he signed an order and his warehouse was filled with goods; with his voice he ordered that something should be done and it was; he commanded workshops and studios and factories and mills just as
he commanded his legs and his hands. He was the very heart and brain of this enterprise. It belonged to him. And he to it.
He gave in to temptation, lit a lantern, and stepped into the shadows of the shop. His creation was inactive, but he inhabited it like the dream self that breathes in a sleeping body. From counter to counter he went, opening drawers and leafing through order books. He verified stock, centered a mannequin here, tidied a shelf there. In the cavernous darkness of dispatch his lamp illuminated long empty tables. He placed an approving hand on the brown paper and string and labels, replenished in readiness for tomorrow’s work. A single parcel was unsent. He frowned and made a note of the address. Something to follow up tomorrow.
Upstairs, at the clerks’ desks, he pored over the day’s calculations like a headmaster over homework, paid attention to ink blots and handwriting. Upstairs again, in the seamstresses’ workroom, he counted the pairs of scissors, shone his lantern on the stitchwork of the garments waiting to go out, counted the stitches per inch to the new girl’s hemming.
His nocturnal supervision of the work of the shop was interrupted then by a sound.
Voices. Upstairs the seamstresses in their rooms were singing.
Bellman smiled as he listened.
He shone his lamp onto his watch: nearly eleven o’clock. They had been out listening to some café singer, perhaps, and just come back.
He strained his ears to hear the song. Sweet voices conveyed the tune to him, melodic it was, and tender, but he could not catch the words. It was a song from long ago, he thought. He seemed to half-know it . . .
How did it go, now?
He caught a thread of something . . . Plashing fountains, wasn’t it? Ta-dah, te-dee, and Happy hours, something something, Calling voices . . .
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