A Man of His Time

by Phyllis Bentley

  Jonathan appeared surprised. ‘Aren’t you a Tory, then, Uncle?’

  ‘No!’ roared Morcar. ‘Good heavens, boy! I was a Liberal before you were born.’

  ‘As Roebuck Ramsden said to Tanner in Man and Superman’ said Jonathan, laughing.

  ‘What does it matter whether Shaw said it or not?’ said Morcar, irritated. Tm saying it now.’

  ‘Tanner’s answer was revealing,’ said Jonathan, irritated in his turn.

  ‘Well, come on, let’s hear it.’

  ‘He replied: “I knew it was a long time ago,”’ said Jonathan. After a moment he went on in a calmer tone: ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Harry. That was damned rude of me. I’m truly sorry. But the generations can’t agree; their ideas are bound to differ. After all, if young people always agreed with their parents, we should all still be wearing woad.’

  ‘And who said that?’ inquired Morcar, who flattered himself he could detect quotation marks in the voice as well as the next man.

  ‘Anthony Trollope.’

  ‘I always thought he was a dyed-in-the-wool church-and-state man.’

  ‘He was a man of sense.’

  ‘I hope I’m that too,’ said Morcar. He put on a cheerful look and spoke in an everyday prosaic tone, partly to cover up the tragedy of his disappointment, for it was his Yorkshire nature so to do, but partly also, he admitted to himself, to dash the high drama which Jonathan was evidently playing. ‘I shan’t try to persuade you, Jonathan. I should think that wrong. If you change your mind, come and tell me. What are you going to do before you try for the House, eh?’

  ‘Teach, I think.’

  Morcar groaned. ‘Teaching’s an awful grind,’ he said.

  ‘Everything’s an awful grind unless you like it, Uncle Harry.’

  ‘And you like teaching better than textiles.’

  ‘I do,’ said Jonathan with fervour.

  ‘Well, the best of British luck to you. Let’s go home.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see the rest of the mill?’

  ‘What’s the use?’ I’ve earned this lad’s living for him all his life, and this is what he gives me in return, thought Morcar. Of course, he admitted, he never asked me to do so. Still … He felt as though some giant hand had dug out his heart with a sharp-pointed grapefruit spoon. He led the way out of the mill and locked the doors. ‘You can drive,’ he said, getting into the passenger seat of his car. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? To go your own way?’

  Jonathan exclaimed, not enjoying this coals-of-fire generosity. He drove out of the yard, stretched out a hand for the mill keys, which Morcar dropped into his palm, and locked the mill gate. Returning to the car and handing back the Ramsgill keys, he did not immediately start the engine.

  ‘Uncle Harry,’ he said, hesitating: ‘Nobody can take it from you, you know.’

  ‘Take what?’

  ‘Your life’s achievement. Your contribution to the textile trade.’

  ‘Oh, come off it!’ cried Morcar impatiently. The words: You’ve dealt me a mortal wound and now you’re applying the best butter to it sprang to his lips, but he managed to suppress them. ‘Don’t worry, lad. I shall get over it, I daresay.’

  ‘Thank you, Uncle Harry,’ said Jonathan.

  After this episode Morcar never called Jonathan by the name of David again.

  9. Old Mill

  That evening jennifer came into Morcar’s den, looking pale and harassed.

  ‘Have you a moment, Uncle Harry?’

  ‘Of course. What’s wrong? Is it about Jonathan not coming into textiles?’

  ‘Yes. He told me this afternoon. It was the first I had heard of his feeling.’

  ‘Well, you don’t care,’ said Morcar out of the soreness of his heart. ‘You’re a Southerner. You don’t care about textiles.’

  ‘David cared,’ said Jennifer quietly.

  ‘Yes. But you don’t. You’d just as soon see him a headmaster.’

  ‘Yes. I would,’ said Jennifer proudly, raising her head.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Morcar, ‘what’s wrong? What have you got to worry about?’

  He thought he knew all too well what was wrong, namely that Jonathan had taken a decision affecting his whole life without consulting his mother, not even mentioning the matter to her until he had settled it with Morcar. It was her son’s lack of confidence in her which distressed Jennifer. Morcar knew it, and knew his pretence not to do so was a lie, but he could not prevent himself from implying this lie, from indeed taking pleasure in doing so.

  ‘I should like to sell my Old Mill shares, Uncle Harry, said Jennifer coldly.

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘To you, of course. I should be grateful if you would buy them.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Jennifer,’ said Morcar irritably. ‘An executor is not allowed in law to purchase any trust property.’

  ‘Even if the estate was all settled long ago? It’s twenty Years since David - was killed.’

  ‘It might be legal after such a lapse of time, but I shouldn’t like to do it - I should feel under a slur. A trustee isn’t allowed to derive any advantage from his position. Wait a minute, though,’ exclaimed Morcar in sudden recollection. ‘I seem to remember—’

  He drew out his keys, opened his wall-safe, and ruffling through the papers in his deed box, drew out his copy of David’s Will.

  ‘Yes, there’s a clause,’ he said reluctantly. He read it aloud: I authorize my trustee the said Henry Morcar notwithstanding that he shall be a trustee of this my will at any time to purchase by private contract all or any part of my shares in Messrs Oldroyd and Mellor Company Limited if my wife at any time after my death desires to sell any of the said shares.

  The sight of David’s clear, firm, highly individual handwriting in the Will’s signature, the thought that David’s hand had actually touched this paper which he now held, struck like a spear into Morcar’s heart. He looked at Jennifer and saw tears in her eyes. There was a pause.

  ‘So you see you are allowed to make the purchase,’ said Jennifer at last.

  ‘Seems so. Why do you want to sell out of Old Mill, Jennifer? David trusted me. Don’t you trust me to earn your living for you there?’

  ‘Of course, Uncle Harry,’ said Jennifer impatiently.

  ‘Why then?’ As she hesitated, he burst out: ‘It’s for Jonathan’s sake, to free him from textiles. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jennifer, weeping.

  ‘To sell Old Mill would have cut David to the heart.’

  ‘I know. But it’s Jonathan I have to think of now. I must look to his future.’

  ‘Leave it a few months, Jennifer,’ urged Morcar. ‘Jonathan may change his mind, you know. He’s young yet. I won’t deny this is a deep grief to me.’

  He felt he simply could not bring himself to make the loss of Jonathan irrevocable.

  Jennifer sighed but acquiesced.

  10. Admission

  For the next few months Morcar was not only exceedingly unhappy, which might have been borne, but also exceedingly uneasy and uncertain. His life was cut away from under his feet, his aims had been thrown back in his face, he simply did not know what he should do with himself. Meanwhile somebody had to look after his large business, his income, Jennifer’s, Jonathan’s, and that of his customers and his five hundred employees; there was nobody to do it but Morcar, so he just had to do it. He therefore continued to work and to follow his established routine. Outwardly, he flattered himself, he behaved exactly as usual; he grinned, joked with fellow textile men, kept a sharp eye on everything that went on in Syke, Daisy, and Old, made good purchases at the Bradford Wool Exchange, argued keenly about the Government’s Beeching policy, drove across Yorkshire to look at the Fylingdales early warning station (’Early! Ha!’ said Morcar) and snorted cynically about the House of Lords recommendation that a peer should be able to renounce his peerage for life. (‘They want to have it both ways, do they?’ he snorted.) But beneath this customary jovial shrew
d personality-mask everything was at first hollow, then presently filled, in self-defence, with anger. If the younger generation, represented by Jonathan, rejected him, then by God he rejected them.

  Accordingly, all those manifestations of contemporary life which he had hitherto observed with an amused but kindly eye, he now allowed himself to resent. The whole of the West Riding was being torn up to make new roads, so that, for instance, Morcar could now hardly find his way about Bradford. Before Jonathan’s defection Morcar, though he felt a nostalgia for the nineteenth-century back streets, the solid Victorian warehouses, which he had known and respected since he was a boy, had admitted that their lighting was often poor, their facilities highly inconvenient, their exteriors dirty, their interiors drab. He had even been able to admire, up to a point, the new soaring, plain, many-windowed buildings. But now he allowed his nostalgia to drown his appreciation.

  ‘The towns are going to become just a swirl of roads with a few buildings allowed to poke their noses in here and there,’ he said with disgust. ‘It’s all nonsense anyway - in fifty years motorcars will be out of date, everyone will use a helicopter.’

  ‘Well, we shan’t be here to see it,’ said someone comfortingly.

  ‘No, thank goodness,’ said Morcar.

  There was the question, too, of fashion. Morcar was still by no means unsusceptible to the charms of women; he always, from professional habit, noted the clothes they wore, and was proud of Jennifer’s quiet elegance. He had been amused by the haute couture racket but knew well how to take advantage of it to his own textile profit. Now suddenly modern fashions seemed unendurably odious to him. These so-called ‘shifts’ deprived women of most of that charming feminine outline which was one of the male pleasures in life, instead making them all look pregnant, so that his eyes almost fell out of his head when he met an elderly lady wearing one. If not in a shift, the younger ones covered themselves - you could hardly call it dressed - in huge roughly knitted clumsy woollen pullovers which hung almost to their knees and deprived them of any outline at all. They thickened their agreeable legs in black ribbed wool stockings, or when dressed up wore hideous shoes with pointed toes and thin heels, balancing on which made their calves swell. Their hair, streaming down in wisps, or piled up in frowsy tangles, looked as if it had not been brushed for a week or washed for a month; their faces were a painter’s palette. As for the young men, while black leather jackets and tight jeans were rather agreeable in Morcar’s opinion, this frightful fashion of long hair and fringes down to the eyebrows struck him as not only ugly and effeminate but also thoroughly unpractical. How could a man see what he was doing, for heaven’s sake, through all that hair? (Even if it was clean.) He gave strict instructions that any employee of his who sported long hair must confine it in a net.

  ‘They may not wish to accept those conditions. Mr Morcar,’ said Nathan timidly.

  ‘Then we’ll do without them,’ barked Morcar. ‘It’s a question of safety, Nathan.’

  Although this was true enough, he knew that to allege it as his main motive was a lie.

  Things went on in this embittered, uneasy, not to say wretched manner for some months, with Morcar at his most caustic, until one spring morning when, looking through a rather long business letter which he had dictated the previous afternoon, he found a mistake in it. He summoned Miss Mellor and pointed out the wrong figure to her.

  ‘You’ve left a nought out,’ he said. ‘That’s ten times an ordinary mistake, you know. Why, and it’s here too. And here. It’s all over the letter. You’ll have to do all three pages again.’

  He took up a soft pencil from his desk, and drew thick crosses over each page. He knew this was a cruel overemphasis of the girl’s mistake, but the action eased his overladen heart. As he drew the third cross, however, he read the last sentence of the letter, and instantly remembered having dictated it - he could hear his voice saying the words. This last sentence contained one of the wrong figures in question. He swung round at once to Miss Mellor, who was standing at his side with bent head.

  ‘It was I who gave you that figure,’ he said. ‘The mistake isn’t yours, it’s mine.’ The girl remaining silent, Morcar exclaimed: ‘Why didn’t you tell me, you silly girl?’

  ‘I have too much respect for you, Mr Morcar,’ returned Miss Mellor.

  Her tone was quiet and sincere, but behind it defiance crackled.

  ‘Well, well!’ said Morcar, rather pleased. ‘Neither you nor I often make mistakes, Miss Mellor.’

  ‘No, sir,’ agreed Miss Mellor primly.

  ‘And neither of us likes admitting them,’ said Morcar.

  ‘No, sir.’ The girl raised her head. Her dark grey eyes sparkled with mingled fun and fury, and she was about to explode into angry comment when Morcar forestalled her.

  ‘Especially when it isn’t our mistake,’ he said.

  The girl laughed. It was a joyous sound. For a moment Morcar felt irritated by her youthful mirth. Then his essential good nature, his belief in fair play, rose up in him. ‘If I can’t laugh with her now I’ve become the kind of oldie young people think we all are,’ he thought. He laughed, and said: ‘Well, I apologize, Miss Mellor. What is your first name, by the way?’

  ‘Ruth.’

  ‘Well, Ruth, let’s go over this letter together and correct my errors. Two heads are better than one.’

  While the letter was being corrected Morcar felt more like himself than he had done for months. But when this was done and Ruth withdrew to retype it, he sank into gloom. If he had begun to make mistakes when dictating letters, he had indeed entered old age. For the first time he was obliged to admit that he had shown himself no wiser than the younger generation. Ruth, an adolescent with long curving hair, had seen his mistake before Morcar. You’d better show the young some indulgence, he thought, because you’re going to need some yourself. He felt defeated, daunted.

  But here his Yorkshire tenacity rose up sternly, saying: well, don’t give in. You’ve always prided yourself on working hard and trying to be fair; well, keep on working hard and trying to be fair. Don’t give in!

  ‘I won’t,’ he said to himself. ‘But it’s going to be a tough job,’ he added grimly.

  His spirits went up and down from day to day according as he succeeded or failed in keeping this decision.

  II. Jonathan’s Mother

  ‘May i come in, Jonathan?’ said Jennifer, tapping on her son’s bedroom door.

  ‘Come in!’

  Jonathan was sitting up in bed, surrounded by an apparatus of textbooks, notebooks, and writing materials.

  ‘You’re looking very dashing, Mum.’

  ‘I’ve been to a musical evening.’

  ‘For some charitable cause, no doubt.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘I like that little black number you’re wearing.’

  ‘Uncle Harry doesn’t; he thinks it shows too much, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, Uncle Harry!’ said Jonathan, and they smiled kindly together.

  ‘I came to ask you a question, Jonathan. Please answer truthfully. I want to consult you before I take a decision.’

  Jonathan coloured a little under the implied reproach in his mother’s phrasing.

  ‘I’m usually fairly truthful, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, you are. It’s this, I received a proposal of marriage tonight.’

  ‘What!’ said Jonathan, crimsoning.

  ‘From Nat Armitage.’

  ‘I remember him vaguely. He’s a sort of connexion of the Oldroyds.’

  ‘Who isn’t, in the West Riding? The connexion’s not near enough to matter.’

  ‘And are you thinking of accepting?’ asked Jonathan drily.

  ‘I’m asking your views on the matter, Jonathan.’

  ‘I’m rather surprised, Mother,’ said Jonathan in a choked tone.

  ‘I shall never really love anyone but your father,’ said Jennifer, looking aside. ‘But one has a life to live. And you don’t need me any more.’<
br />
  ‘Mother!’

  ‘I should deceive myself if I thought you really needed me any more.’

  What was one to say? ‘Well, one grows up,’ muttered Jonathan.

  ‘Exactly. If I thought it would hurt you - deeply,’ proceeded Jennifer, bringing out her words with difficulty, ‘of course I should decline.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Jonathan hotly. ‘To put the decision upon me, that’s not fair. Of course I should be jealous,’ he went on, trying his utmost to be honest, ‘yes, I should be jealous in some degree. But I shouldn’t consider I had any right to - obstruct - the match in any way. He’s just the kind of man I dislike, as it happens,’ he burst out suddenly: ‘Very public school and Tory, and rich, shooting-box and territorials and a big mill and all that. And a widower. But if that’s what you like … At least he has the sense to appreciate you. You’re very beautiful, Mummy,’ he concluded wistfully, gazing at her.

  Jennifer smiled at him rather sadly.

  ‘Thank you, dear.’

  ‘Why has it come to a head now? He’s known you long enough.’

  ‘He has asked me before, but I declined. You don’t need me now, Jonathan.’

  ‘I do, Mother. But don’t let that deter you, of course.’

  ‘If I accept, and we marry, will you come and live with us?’

  ‘No!’ exploded Jonathan. He thought suddenly of the memorials of his father which hung above his head, and felt a burning jealousy on their account. But that’s not the whole truth; I feel jealousy on my own account, he admitted honestly. ‘Mother, I shall soon not be living at home at all,’ he said in his most controlled and courteous tones. ‘When I’ve taken my degree I shall find a teaching post. So don’t consult my—’ He hesitated. Wishes? That implied he disliked the marriage. Convenience? Cold and untrue. He threw away the sentence unfinished - a habit he despised -and went on: ‘You must follow your own’ - again he hesitated, but forced himself to find a word - ‘inclinations. Uncle Harry’s going to be lonely. But of course you mustn’t think of that.’