Bellman & Black

by Diane Setterfield

  And later that same day, when Dixon reported smilingly that he had sold three reticules in an afternoon, thanks to the display suggestion that Bellman had made the day before—he had nodded approvingly, what else could he do?—but had he really made that suggestion? It was news to him.

  It was undermining to realize that he must be sleepwalking through his working day, unconscious of three-quarters of his actions while, at night, his mind was painfully alert to every horror of the dark. He wondered whether he had been replaced by a usurper, another Bellman who made surprisingly effective suggestions about pricing and displays and employed his rival’s redundant seamstresses while he, the real Bellman, remained trapped in a dark netherworld, neither awake nor asleep, neither living nor dead.

  Click!

  Click!

  Click!

  The remorseless beads of an abacus.

  Thirty-eight.

  Thirty-nine.

  Forty.

  How many does he owe? How many tens and how many hundreds and how many thousands?

  Click!

  Click!

  Click!

  But there was no abacus, and it was only his heart, adding up his debts, incurring new ones with every beat, and he could only endure helplessly as the tally mounted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Why don’t you have a look?”

  Doctor Sanderson stood back and passed the magnifying glass to Bellman. The father leaned over his child. Her large eye, five inches wide, blinked at him, through the lens. Her finger, skin imprinted with a pink whirl, a shiny white sliver of nail embellishing the fingertip—held open the lid, along which was a row of tiny blisters or beads, like fish roe.

  “Don’t rub or scratch,” the doctor was telling her. “It is good news: your eyelashes are growing back.”

  The eye blinked, then the finger recaptured the lid, and the wide eye was once again offered to the magnifying glass.

  Fascinated, Bellman stared. Dora’s iris, blue as a summer sky, was flecked with dark marks. They appeared to him as a flock of distant birds.

  “Will my hair grow back too?”

  “Give it a few months and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.”

  Bellman accompanied Sanderson to the door.

  “Why now?” he wanted to know. “After all these years?”

  “If I may take the liberty—Miss Bellman seems happier now. Science would scoff at the idea that happiness makes the hair grow, but the heart can work miracles on the body. I have seen it time and again. The opposite too: sorrow makes people sick.”

  Sanderson eyed Bellman with worried curiosity. “I suppose you consult one of the well-known London doctors for yourself?”

  “I? I am never ill, as you know.”

  The doctor looked doubtful. He overcame his hesitation to speak again.

  “You have lost weight though?”

  “I have been meaning to have these suits taken in, yes. I’ve had more important things to do.”

  “Appetite all right? Sleep?”

  It was impossible to describe accurately the horror of his nights. Bellman was loath to admit, I am tormented by dreams. Birds tap at my window in the night with their black beaks, they are trapped inside my lungs and leave me gasping for breath, they feed on my heart, and when I shave in the morning I can see them looking out at me through my own eyes. Of course not.

  “My breathing seems shaky at times. I sometimes wake in the night—quite often actually. And my heart—”

  “Your heart?”

  “Is it normal for it to beat so fast? So hard?”

  In the mild, untroubled voice that doctors adopt when they have not yet made up their mind whether a thing is serious or not, Sanderson asked a series of questions. Bellman answered and Sanderson listened, noting too the red rims of his patient’s eyes and the gray tint to his skin. There was hoarse agitation in his voice and his hands shook. He noticed how verbose strings of words tumbled too fast from Bellman’s lips; he paid attention to the momentary lapses in which Bellman seemed aware of nothing but only stared into space before coming to life again with a jerk.

  “May I check your pulse?”

  They sat and Sanderson held Bellman’s wrist.

  Then Sanderson let go of his wrist, and when he spoke his voice was surprised and relieved. “Well, there’s nothing seriously wrong with you. A good rest will set you right. You have been working too hard. That kind of life is all very well for a young man—you always had prodigious energy—but even you must take account of your age. Take a holiday and when you go back to work you’ll be fit as a fiddle. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t go on for another twenty years, if you take a day off once a week!”

  A holiday? Regular days off? Bellman was astounded.

  “Go on as you have been and it will be the death of you. I’ll give you some sleeping draughts to start you off, but you’ll find you won’t need them long. Once you are in a more rested frame of mind your sleep will take care of itself.”

  · · ·

  Bellman had little faith in sleeping draughts, but he took the laudanum and was surprised. He lay his head down on a feather pillow and opened his eyes to morning. The seven hours he had passed in bed between those two moments were as nothing. No fear, no wakefulness, no thoughts, no dreams. Nothing but blackest unconsciousness. For a week he slept the whole night long and rejoiced in it. The insomnia, he persuaded himself, had been a minor, fleeting thing. Now it was over he would not need the laudanum anymore.

  On his first night without the drug, the full force of the torment returned instantly to him.

  He returned to his nightly dose but needed a little more to achieve the same effect.

  After a little while, though, Bellman began to realize that medicated sleep was not true sleep. It had not the same capacity to restore. For one thing, the very second after he laid down his head to sleep, he was awake again and it was morning. Where were the ebbs and flows, the waves of deeper and lighter sleep of his earlier years? Where the fruitfulness of sleep, where he could close his eyes on a problem and wake in the morning to a solution? All this was gone. The moment he put his head on the pillow he was swallowed, engulfed into a dead blackness from which he woke unrefreshed, lethargic, downcast. The profound unconsciousness did not reassure him. He imagined dark-winged creatures of the night bending over his sleeping body and feasting on his soul while he lay oblivious to the danger, vulnerable as an infant. He was reluctant to go to bed, sat up later and later, afraid of sleep, afraid of wakefulness. To take the sleeping draught or not? He took it sometimes and sometimes not. He slept or he didn’t. When he had no more of Doctor Sanderson’s laudanum he consulted a London doctor. Obtaining more was not difficult, and it could be combined with other potions besides. He became adept in the mixing of different medicines and learned how to poison himself to sleep at will.

  It was not only sleep that was irregular. He was never hungry, except when he was starving. He ate at dawn or midnight or not at all. Time came adrift. The hands of his watch turned always too fast or too slow. He took it to a watchmaker to be checked over; the man insisted it was in good working order. He did not always know whether he had turned the leaves of his desk calendar. Was it today or already tomorrow? Perhaps it was still yesterday. Sundays came at what felt to Bellman like irregular intervals. Even the seasons lost their moorings: more than once he found himself looking from his window at one of those colorless London skies, wondering with acute anguish whether it was April or September.

  Bellman got used to living his life curdled and sour from lack of sleep. Inside he was hollow, but he smiled and shook hands and added and multiplied and divided. None but he knew what it all cost.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Perhaps there was a solution.

  Bellman was not in the habit of asking for help, because for the most part he knew how things ought to be done. But faced with one particular difficulty he felt himself at a loss and sought assistance.
<
br />   “Verney, how would you go about finding a person?”

  “A person?” Verney thought hard. He knew a hundred ways of locating a mislaid shilling, understood the numerous devious ways a decimal point might go astray. He was an expert in restoring overlooked digits to their rightful place in the ledger. But a person . . .

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  At Russells, in conversation, Bellman tried again.

  “There’s someone I want to trace. How do you suppose I might go about it?”

  “Ask at his club. Leave a letter for him there.” The haberdasher made it sound so easy.

  “He’s the solitary type. I don’t believe he has a club.”

  “No club?” The haberdasher’s eyebrows rose. In his world a club was indispensable, and a fellow without one was a peculiar fellow indeed. He scratched his head. “Damned difficult, then.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Anson, when he applied to him for help. “If he banks with us, I’ll send a letter on.”

  To answer that would lead into explanation, and he wasn’t up to explaining anything. Besides, what if Black’s name wasn’t Black at all? The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that he had made a profound mistake.

  On his rounds at Bellman & Black, he dropped the question in here and there.

  “Lawyers look for people, don’t they?” the messenger boy suggested.

  “I’ll keep an eye out,” offered Pentworth, the doorman. “Everybody in the world walks past this door sooner or later. What does he look like?”

  Which is all very well, thought Bellman, if it wasn’t that looking for Black was simply not like looking for anyone else. How to explain, without sounding like a madman, that you are looking for someone whose appearance hovers at the edge of your mind, evading memory? Whose name you cannot be certain of? Who you have not seen for a decade but whose influence you feel in every guinea earned? Whose aura slinks in like a shadow, attached to the feet of every customer at Bellman & Black?

  Tinkering with the printing press, he asked the typesetter the same question.

  “If a man owes you money, you’ll never find him, though you look high and low,” the man remarked, with a sorrowful shake of the head. He spoke from what sounded like sad experience.

  “It’s the opposite way about, really,” Bellman told him.

  The typesetter laughed aloud. “Mr. Bellman, if you owe this man money he will come to you. Mark my words! And he won’t be long about it!”

  And then the driver of the brougham made a suggestion that might be some good. “Go back to where you saw him last. People don’t stray far.”

  · · ·

  “That man . . .” he began.

  “What man?”

  Lizzie frowned, taking pins from the cushion strapped to her wrist and inserting them in his waistcoat. “I only made this waistcoat a few months ago. You are wasting away, Mr. Bellman.”

  “I saw you with him.” His voice was hoarse. “Do you remember? The night before the grand opening.”

  She bent her head, carried out some complicated fiddling with the pins. “I don’t remember any man. I had come from my child’s grave. It was a long time ago.”

  “What street was it?”

  “They called it Back Lane then. It is all gone now.”

  “Gone?”

  “Knocked down and built over. The whole area.”

  “Oh.”

  Her arms encircled his waist briefly to place the tape measure around him. She did not touch him, there was a decorous one-inch gap between her arms and his body. Hold on to me, he wanted to say. He wished that he might rest his head in the crook of her neck. He wished he might weep while she stroked his head. If she would only stay close to him, watch over him, he might sleep at last. True sleep. The real thing.

  Too soon the embrace of her arms was over. She sighed as she noted the new measurement of his waist.

  “Are you eating enough, Mr. Bellman? Have you lost your appetite?”

  The kindness of her question made his eyes dazzle. He blinked and a sudden image came to mind: Turner’s field flooded, the water held at brimming point by the reservoir walls. The surface used to tremble in captivity, he remembered; no one could see it without imagining an overspill. There was Crace of course, who used to release controlled volumes into the millrace as and when necessary. The pent-up field of tears was overfull in Bellman today. What deluge would ensue if he released it now? What corpses float within it?

  There came a firm knocking, and Verney’s face appeared, urgent, in the gap of the door.

  “Forgive the interruption, sir. It is Mr. Critchlow.”

  Bellman turned to Lizzie. “Come back later, will you?” And to Verney, “Show him in.”

  Verney’s eyes widened in shock. “It’s not that, sir. Mr. Critchlow is dead.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Bellman oversaw the arrangements personally.

  “It is,” he told Mrs. Critchlow, “the least I can do.”

  He put Lizzie and another seamstress into the brougham and sent them to the house for three days and nights to stitch the widow and daughters into their crepe; he ran down the stairs to the basement to the printing press to instruct the printer and give him the address. “Caslon? Baskerville?” the typesetter wanted to know. Bellman ran back upstairs to fetch a sample of Critchlow’s letterhead, took it down again. It was neither, it was Clarendon. The order given, he raced back up to his office, barely out of breath, and before ten minutes were out he was back in the stairwell, on his way to collect the catalogue of coffin decoration. He did everything in his power to remove the weight of decision making from the grieving family, planned every detail on their behalf. There was not so much as a fringe or ribbon that was not personally selected by him, and he selected only the most fitting. Earls and dukes might have more costly funerals (though this one was costly enough, and it was Bellman & Black that would foot the bill), but none had been provided with closer personal attention. Everything had to go without a hitch.

  With all these arrangements to be made, there was not a moment to sit and pray by the corpse. This passed without comment. It was a decade since that dinner, and the family had altered their expectations of him since. He was simply Mr. Critchlow’s business partner, and given the nature of his business, they took for granted now that he expressed his sympathy and respects professionally.

  “What am I to do about the business, Mr. Bellman?” Mrs. Critchlow asked in the middle of a conversation about velvet for the coffin cloth. “We have no son to take over my husband’s interests, and my sons-in-law . . .” Her sons-in-law were too grand—she didn’t need to speak the words aloud—for anything so sordid as retail.

  “Don’t worry about it. I will buy you out.”

  “Really? Is it as simple as that?”

  He didn’t even need to see Anson about a loan: the money was ready and waiting in the sleeping account. He called at the Westminster & City on his way back to the shop.

  “Is it the right time to extend your exposure in the marketplace?” Anson wondered aloud.

  “Why ever not?”

  “The way things are going . . . The judge has found in favor of the Welsh doctor, you know. It is not against the law in England to dispose of a body by cremation.”

  “What difference does it make to us whether a body is buried or burned? It is still a funeral. There must still be a coffin, attendants, mourning clothes.”

  “It is change, Bellman, and change never comes singly. Every day more voices are raised against the expense of funerals. Powerful voices too. People are spending less, you must have noticed? This funeral for Critchlow . . .” He didn’t say the words, but what he was thinking was that such a funeral would never be seen again. The days of such lavishness were on the wane.

  But Bellman’s instructions were firm. Anson did the paperwork for the transfer of funds, though he was not happy about it. As for his own capital, well, he h
ad come out of crepe a few months previously and put the money into the new crematorium they were building at Watford.

  As Bellman made these preparations for the funeral, there was an excitation underlying his activity. Energized, renewed, he was his old self once more. The days contained their usual complement of hours, hours were made up of sixty minutes, no more, no less. His thoughts were ordered, he felt hunger at appropriate times, and though his nights were short, he slept without artificial aid. He lived and worked with the expectation that these worries of his were about to be set right. The day and time of the funeral were fixed; the procession would be a fine one; Bellman & Black would make the event as gravely beautiful and as expensively solemn as any earl’s or duke’s, and the example would be an inspiration to all who saw the procession pass.

  More important than all the rest: Black was sure to be there.

  · · ·

  On the day, Bellman was ready early. He joined the procession and walked with a flutter of trepidation in his chest. Today, he told himself, things would be settled once and for all. For good or for ill, he could not say, but there was at least one thing he could count on: no longer would he live in a state of uncertainty.

  The passers-by stopped out of respect to the funeral procession. Some bowed their heads in prayer for the stranger whose death interfered briefly with their day. Others whispered, wanting to know who it was, enclosed in that ebonized box with its brass eternal serpent fittings and ivy engraved plaques. All heard the grateful voice inside that said, It is not I who dies! Some heard it continue, Not today, at any rate. The plumes bobbed and floated impressively above the six black horses, finely turned out and groomed till they shone. The polished hearse, the sober mutes, the blackest crepe . . . Nothing in heaven could be finer, Bellman thought, than this spectacle of death, and the crowd watched it pass with sadness and admiration and sympathy in their eyes—though one or two, Bellman noted, wore another new expression: cool judgment.