The Love Department

by William Trevor

  ‘Oh, James,’ cried Eve, running across the room and putting her arms about the form of her sleeping husband.

  James did not hear, nor did he move. But Eve talked on, speaking of marriage, saying that it was worth an effort. She said he must seek some work of a different order. She said that they must talk together, and she viewed them in her mind, talking together in the future, as once they had. They talked in her future, at breakfast and in the evening. They turned off the television set, saying the programmes had deteriorated, and not meaning that at all. They talked in bed and at the weekends. They sat in silence, knowing that the talk was there.

  ‘Oh, James,’ cried Eve, closing her eyes and feeling her headache. ‘I never understood a thing.’

  She believed at that moment that she had not raised a finger as their marriage had drifted into boredom. ‘No marriage should be kept by children,’ said Eve. ‘We must stand on our own feet.’ But her husband slept on, occasionally murmuring an agreement. Once he had opened his eyes and said, ‘I thought of selling nails to ironmongers.’

  ‘Sell what you will,’ cried Eve. ‘Only for God’s sake, let’s begin this thing all over again.’ But James had returned to sleep.

  Eve said that she knew it could be all right. Why could it not? she demanded, since now they were aware of all the flaws. ‘Sell nails,’ said Eve. ‘We could be poor. Would it matter? Are we rich?’ All their lives they would talk about the night the Clingers had brought their monkey out to dinner. In time they would tell their children about the monkey, about a Mrs Hoop who once had been their charwoman and had been given too much brandy by a Captain Poache, about a doctor who had come by mistake. They would relate the string of peculiar events and laugh over them, and she and James would remember that something of their farce had caused Eve to sense that she and her husband had but to take themselves in hand. Ten years ago they had chosen to marry, which was a fact worth holding on to. ‘We made no mistake,’ said Eve, ‘and we haven’t changed in essence. But marriage is not as easy as it looks.’

  She stood in the centre of her sitting-room, in a black dress and in her stockinged feet, smoking a cigarette and thinking to herself that she would lie awake all night with her headache, considering and planning, allowing for all the flaws.

  ‘I will tell you tomorrow,’ said Eve to her husband, who had slipped by now into a deeper slumber. ‘I will stand in front of you tomorrow evening and tell you that our marriage is in working order. At least as far as I’m concerned. Sell a bag of nails a day, James. Drive a dray. Serve at table. I too would be maddened by central heating and door-handles. We can at least share that.’ Eve went to bed, and, contrary to her expectations, fell asleep at once.

  Lady Dolores strolled about the rooms that Edward Blakeston-Smith had taken so passionately to his heart. She was thinking of Edward, attempting, in fact, to inspire him from a distance. She did not know that earlier that evening Edward had planned to telephone the love department and hand in his resignation but had later taken new heart through his meeting with a sea captain’s wife. Lady Dolores would not have cared to know this kind of detail, the ups and downs of an evening, the lowering of a spirit and its subsequent revival. She was sanguine in the love department that night, which was enough for her.

  She walked soundlessly, regarding without emotion the empty desks of the typists, moving on to eye the Samuel Watson frieze, and passing finally through the arch and into her own modest office. There, with cake and alcohol, she examined a lately arrived letter from Odette Sweeney: I have done what you laid down. I’ve said the girl would be better off in digs, it being an embarrassment to have the daughter by a previous woman under my feet. ‘If she goes, I go,’ he said to me, standing up in his vest. What now? Lady Dolores knew at once that Mrs Sweeney must wait: she must bide her time until a day came when the young girl saw some youth in jeans and preferred him with a fluttering heart to Mrs Sweeney’s husband. That would be that: the girl would pack her traps and bit by bit the Sweeney marriage would take shape again, time being the healer. Yet none of that could be as bluntly put, lest Mrs Sweeney be tempted to offer financial inducement to youths in jeans.

  Although Lady Dolores believed in being direct, she believed as well that the truth must be wisely delivered. She replied to Mrs Sweeney briefly: Muster your patience. Your marriage will ride this storm. Stand firm with faith. Be calm, Mrs Sweeney. It was advice that Lady Dolores often gave. She believed that love returned to marriages, even with Septimus Tuam about; she believed that there was more love available than was at all apparent. She would have found for Eve Bolsover evidence of love in the marriages of the Clingers and the Poaches and the Linderfoots. She would have pointed at small items and said they were enough. But she would have agreed with Eve Bolsover that marriage was not as easy as it looked. It was easier by far for Septimus Tuam to step in and cause all hell to break loose.

  ‘Septimus Tuam,’ said Lady Dolores, speaking his name since his name had come involuntarily into her head. ‘Septimus Tuam.’ She believed she had developed a nervous condition where that name was concerned; and as often as she warned a woman to wait and be calm, she feared the shape of the man entering that woman’s life, urging her not to wait at all but to have a fling instead, offering her more than a box of safety matches. She saw him entering the lives of all the women who were depressed and tired, who felt an ugliness coming on, or who were young and felt that life was dim. Take heart, be calm, wrote Lady Dolores. ‘I love you,’ said Septimus Tuam.

  Lady Dolores stared at the curved handwriting of Odette Sweeney. She whispered to herself that no woman in England received more letters than she did. She told herself that she had built the love department from nothing, that she had increased the circulation of the magazine fourfold. She recalled the letters of appreciation that poured in day by day, letters that need never have been written, that were written out of gratitude and the goodness in people’s hearts. She remembered the gifts of the great embroidery and the embroideries that surrounded it. She remembered women who had clutched at her hands on the street, gabbling in excitement that her wisdom had saved them from a gas oven or a life alone.

  Lady Dolores sat still. Behind her dark-rimmed spectacles her eyelids dropped: she saw a haze, and she moved her lips, practising the words she intended to say.

  A mile or so away, just beyond the river on which London was built, Septimus Tuam slept and did not dream. In his large, bare room no single item was out of place. His umbrella hung from a hook on the back of his door. The cup from which he drank his daily milk and the plate from which he lifted his food lay neatly on a central table, with a knife and a spoon, ready for breakfast. Beneath the mattress of his narrow bed lay the fine corduroy trousers of Septimus Tuam, gaining a crease for the day ahead.

  15

  Mrs Hoop did not arrive at the Bolsovers’ house on the morning after the dinner party. She stayed in her bed, trying to remember details, lifting her head up from time to time to assess the intensity of her headache. She recalled most vividly the antics of the man from Purley: she remembered his mentioning the beauty of her hair, and remembered finding herself being aided across the room by him, then being halted, seemingly, by old Beach. Afterwards, everything had quietened down again: she and Beach and Edward Blakeston-Smith sitting in the kitchen, she sending Beach in to ask Mr Bolsover if they could have a drop of brandy, and Mr Bolsover coming and saying that he would pay for a taxi home for her, and in fact telephoning for one. While they were waiting for it to come the big man from Purley had come into the kitchen to say that old Beach and Blakeston-Smith were to help with the ape in the garden, and as soon as their backs were turned he had said to her that she was an attractive woman. Then old Beach and Blakeston-Smith had returned and said there was no ape in the garden, and the man had announced outright and in front of them that he could fall in love with Mrs Hoop. And when the three of them got into the taxi-cab Beach had banged on the floor of it with his sweeping-brush and said he lov
ed her the more, and the young man talked of love and happiness all the way home. Old Beach had been crying in the end, asking her for a kiss. ‘Love falls like snow-flakes,’ she remembered the young man saying. ‘Forget about that will business and marry Mr Beach.’ She had snorted with laughter at the very idea of it, marrying old Beach.

  Mrs Hoop lay back on her pillows and dropped off to sleep again. She dreamed that old Beach was hitting the Bolsover woman with a sweeping-brush and that she and the man from Purley were getting into bed together. ‘Filthy dirty!’ cried Mrs Hoop in her dream, waking herself up. She turned on her side, and slept again. She dreamed, more to her liking, of the will and its signing, of happy faces in the Hand and Plough, of Edward Blakeston-Smith and Harold shaking her hand as a signal of congratulation. She dreamed of the death of her husband, and of the death of old Beach.

  ‘I rang the bell,’ said Septimus Tuam, ‘just to draw your attention to the fact that the package is in your letter-box. Look here.’ He stepped over the threshold, around the door, and picked from the letter-box Mrs FitzArthur’s Bear Brand stockings, wrapped in Mrs FitzArthur’s gay wrapping paper.

  ‘Oh,’ said Eve, for a moment confused, and then remembering that this was the chattering man from Ely’s who had later telephoned and whose voice had then roamed about her mind. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘This was no trouble to me at all. Why should it be? I was visiting Lord Marchingpass in any case.’

  ‘It’s extremely kind of you,’ said Eve Bolsover.

  Septimus Tuam bowed and said nothing, standing in the hall, looking about it.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ said Eve, thinking that there seemed to be genuine kindness in the man.

  ‘Oh, please don’t bother, Mrs Bolsover.’

  ‘It’s no trouble at all.’

  ‘No, no, I’d best be going.’ He made as though to leave the house, and then heard Eve say:

  ‘I’m making some, anyway.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Septimus Tuam, and closed the door behind him.

  ‘I’m washing up,’ explained Eve, leading the way to the kitchen. ‘Mrs Hoop hasn’t turned up.’

  ‘Your charlady?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She lit the gas and placed a kettle of water on it. ‘Everywhere’s in a mess this morning. I hope you won’t mind.’

  ‘Why should I mind, Mrs Bolsover?’

  ‘Some people might.’

  ‘Might they? I live a simple life.’

  Eve, finding it hard to know what to say to this man who was a stranger to her, began on the subject of the dinner party, since the chaos of the dinner party lay all around them.

  ‘How odd,’ said Septimus Tuam, hearing that guests had come with a young monkey.

  ‘There’s worse than that,’ said Eve, laughing. She felt a warmth within herself. For an hour that morning she had lain awake, regarding the future and seeing that the future need not be grim. At breakfast she had heard her children chattering on in their usual way and had seen her husband’s tired expression. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she had said. ‘It’s going to be all right. It’ll be all right.’ James had moved his head slowly, up and down, his eyes half closed in a bloated face, glazed and watery, the eyes of a heavy drinker.

  ‘There’s worse than that,’ Eve said again, and told of how the animal had leapt about the sitting-room, knocking things down and attacking Mrs Hoop. She told of Mrs Hoop’s friends who had arrived, the old man, and the younger one who had spoken of love. ‘Someone said the young man was the Poaches’ son. He was a strange person, sitting like that and talking to anyone who happened to be around. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘It’s certainly not what you would expect,’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘Did you say these people are your husband’s colleagues?’

  ‘The fat men are. The others, as I say, had to do with Mrs Hoop.’ She measured coffee into a coffee-pot and poured in the boiling water.

  ‘Sugar?’ she said to Septimus Tuam.

  ‘Two,’ he said, thinking that she would get to know that fact well. ‘What an extraordinary occasion it must have been.’

  ‘It was indeed. I’m afraid it wasn’t a success at all.’

  ‘Why did they come, Mrs Bolsover? Why did you have these people come into your house?’

  Eve paused. The explanation was a long one, difficult to present in a few words. Instead of saying that James had rushed away from a restaurant table to invite the three men and their wives, she said for some reason:

  ‘I felt, actually, that I knew very little of my husband’s life. Of what he did all day. Of the whole wilderness, or so it seemed to me, of his business world.’

  ‘But, Mrs Bolsover, the business world is not a wilderness. It is full of palaces. It is a man-made garden of Eden.’

  Septimus Tuam sipped his coffee, pausing only to say that it was very good coffee indeed, beautifully made. He was wearing a tie with the signs of the Zodiac on it, and a dark grey corduroy suit. His shirt was of a sober shade of blue, a shirt that had once belonged to another man who took a size fifteen collar, the husband of a woman whom Septimus Tuam had once known well. He felt quite confident within his clothes, knowing that no unstitched hole was to be seen, that all hints of flamboyance had been thoughtfully eschewed. He said:

  ‘You had forgotten I was coming, Mrs Bolsover?’

  ‘I’m afraid I had forgotten for a moment. All that nonsense last night was enough to put anything out of one’s mind. And then afterwards I came to a few decisions.’ She smiled at the man, and he inclined his head in a grave manner. To her considerable surprise, she heard him say:

  ‘Allow me to help you clear up the awful chaos. Your Mrs Hoop will not materialize today.’

  As he spoke, Septimus Tuam rose elegantly from his chair and stripped off the jacket of his corduroy suit. He moved to the sink and immersed his hands in a basinful of soapy water. Eve laughed. She said:

  ‘Of course not.’

  But Septimus Tuam took no notice at all. He washed and rinsed glasses, saying:

  ‘I know how it is for the housewife. She has a thinnish time of it; husband at work all day, kiddies to think about. I’m a bachelor, Mrs Bolsover: I help whenever I can.’

  ‘But, Mr Tuam, you must have other things to do.’

  ‘I am an idle case today, Mrs Bolsover. I haven’t a thing on my hands at all.’

  ‘Well, it’s most kind of you.’

  ‘I had thought to go down to the law courts to hear a case or two, but I’d as soon stand here talking, washing your dishes. I’m being frank about it.’

  The house seemed quiet to Eve after the uproar of the previous night. Before he left, Mr Linderfoot had read some of the notes he had written down for his wife. ‘I was on the phone to old Beach, see, minding my own business,’ he had said, quoting Mrs Hoop.

  ‘It is ending as it should be ending,’ said Eve, ‘with a strange man washing up the dishes.’

  ‘Not a strange man, Mrs Bolsover. At least not as strange a man as the man once was, when he damaged your stocking in a button department, for instance. We are getting to know one another in a mild way.’

  ‘Are you connected with the law, Mr Tuam?’

  ‘The law?’

  ‘You said that you might have gone to the law courts.’

  ‘I take an intelligent interest in the law, Mrs Bolsover. That and other matters. Though I am not personally qualified to handle a case.’ He lapsed into a meditation. ‘Or indeed much else.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure –’

  ‘Indeed I’m not. I take an interest in sacred things, Mrs Bolsover. I spend part of each day in the Reading Room of the British Museum.’

  ‘How peaceful that must be.’

  ‘It is peaceful indeed. There’s a lot of peace about in the Museum. As the poet has it, it comes dropping still.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in the Reading Room of the British Museum,’ said Eve, dryin
g a soup-plate.

  ‘Today is September the eighth,’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘We met, Mrs Bolsover, on August the thirty-first, at four o’clock in the afternoon. I remember it well.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eve, thinking that the man spoke peculiarly.

  ‘Eight days have passed since then,’ said Septimus Tuam, ‘as simple mathematics proves. And in that time much has occurred. You, for instance, have had a dinner party. Your charlady had acquired a hangover. Men have been murdered, Mrs Bolsover, during that time. Men here and there. In the Near and Far East, in the Middle East, and all over the world. New life has entered the world, and old leaves have withered. A lot can happen in eight days. I myself have been taking it easy, Mrs Bolsover. I was making certain of something in my mind.’

  Eve nodded, not knowing how to comment.

  ‘Time I find important, Mrs Bolsover: I keep a calendar. The passing of time is good to watch, though occasionally it is not so. It all depends, as so much else in life. It is one hundred and eighty-six hours since you and I first met, for instance, in that excellent department store. Do you have children, Mrs Bolsover?’

  The conversation drifted on, its content influenced by the questions and remarks of Septimus Tuam.

  ‘I’m a dab hand with a vacuum cleaner,’ he said when the dishes were done. ‘I’d love to, really.’

  Eve wondered if the man was connected with a domestic agency and would in the end hand her a bill. Odd people penetrated suburban houses these days: Fairy Snow people, the sellers of encyclopedias, women offering dancing lessons, men with brushes made by the blind. It would not surprise her to discover that Mr Tuam had damaged her stocking in a deliberate way and then had telephoned to see the lie of the land and had come with his pair of Bear Brand, which he had said were nine and a half but which were clearly marked as ten. She wondered if the stockings were bought in bulk and if young men like this were working all over London, coming into suburban houses and helping with the chores. She wondered if Mrs Hoop’s friend of the evening before hadn’t been up to some game like this, although he had spoken of love rather than aid with housework. His face came back to her as a round misty blob, lit up by his expressive smile; angelic, she had thought. The face of Mr Tuam was not like that at all. It was stern in its expression, a serious mien. She watched it, five and a half feet from the ground, intent upon the cleaning of her drawing-room carpet, a face that seemed to reflect a total interest in that task; and a face that had become suddenly – as though some switch had been pulled – a thing of beauty.