The Love Department
Page 19
‘Well, hurry up,’ snapped Mr Clinger. ‘We’ll be here all night.’
‘It has now been borne in upon me,’ continued Mr Linderfoot, ‘that Bolsover is under a severe strain. Recently some of us were invited to Bolsover’s house, to share a repast. We saw then, I think, that all was not well. We saw an occasion get out of hand. We witnessed one of our fellow guests attacked by a jungle animal, a development with which Bolsover proved inadequate to deal. Bolsover on this occasion summoned to the house three characters who better belonged on the music-hall stage. Now why did Bolsover do that? Why did Bolsover take it into his head to bring among us an elderly man with a sweeping-brush, a youth who claimed to be the son of the Captain’s, and an unfortunate medical man who didn’t know whether he was coming or going? Why, I say,’ repeated Mr Linderfoot, leaning forward, his hands set firmly on the red baize of the board-room table, ‘why did Bolsover do that?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Linderfoot,’ exclaimed Mr Clinger. ‘Are we to sit here and listen to all this? There’s still this question of the door-handles and these wretched china pans –’
‘I think,’ said Captain Poache, ‘that Linderfoot is going to make a point about Bolsover’s behaviour. Some explanation, maybe. I could be wrong.’
‘Quite wrong,’ snapped Mr Clinger. ‘We have problems enough without adding to them. That woman who interfered with my pet at the Bolsovers’ house was not a guest: she happened to be the charwoman. Linderfoot should get his facts right.’
The men stretched their legs beneath the table, sniffing and whistling while Mr Clinger and Mr Linderfoot argued on. Peace was restored when Mr Clinger produced one of the older door-handles from his pocket and threw it impatiently on to the table for all to see. Ten minutes later Mr Linderfoot rose to his feet again and placed his hands on the red baize. He said:
‘Bolsover, you might think, was having us on again. Bolsover, you might say, was up to more tricks, laughing his head off at his elders and betters. But with what has come to light, I would now report to you that the events fit a pattern. Here is the explanation for the powder on the clothes, the workman with the brush, the youth who was an impostor and the unfortunate medical man; Bolsover has developed a loose slate.’
‘You mean he’s mental?’ said one of the men.
‘I have been informed by those working with Bolsover that he throws unopened business letters into the River Thames. I am told his memory is in a frightful state. They are covering up for Bolsover in his department while our customers complain. His colleagues in their loyalty have come to me with the story that Bolsover needs compassionate leave so that he can pull himself together.’
‘Why to you?’ asked Mr Clinger. ‘Why ever did they come to Linderfoot?’
‘Because they’d get a hearing,’ said Mr Linderfoot with heat, the fat on his body shaking with anger. Clinger was behaving like a cheapjack, he thought, interrupting and trying to make him seem a fool. ‘They came to me because they knew they would find sympathy at home. They would go to some and get a mauling from a jungle beast.’
Mr Clinger protested, but the other board-men took no notice of the disagreeable squabbling between Mr Linderfoot and Mr Clinger. They shook their heads and devoured stomach powders, remarking that it was a bad business. They agreed that whether James Bolsover was playing pranks on them or was of unsound mind, he could not be allowed to continue in his ways, turning their board-room into a bake-house and throwing unopened business letters into the River Thames. ‘We must investigate this more thoroughly,’ one of the board-men suggested. His colleagues agreed with him: they decided to summon Lake to the board-room, for detailed questioning at an early date.
‘Mr Linderfoot was saying to me,’ said Lake, ‘that he has noticed you about the place, Brownie. What d’you think of that?’
Miss Brown thought only that Mr Linderfoot had noticed many a girl around the place and had attempted to pour gin down the throats of as many as were willing to receive it. The sight of Mr Linderfoot’s enormous body heaving along the corridors like a species of elephant had often repelled her, and she was glad that he had never paused near her, or opened his mouth in speech.
‘Mr Linderfoot could do a lot for a girl,’ said Lake. ‘He’s a man of money and influence, Brownie.’
19
The sky, pale blue, was clear of clouds for days on end. Workmen on London’s building sites, West Indians and Irishmen, Londoners and men from Yorkshire and Wales, performed their tasks with greater relish, recalling snow and frosty mornings, and patches of damp on their boots. Edward on his bicycle, riding from Clapham to Putney and on to Wimbledon, passed through SW17, the area that James Bolsover had selected as the one to which he would move when he fell from grace. Now and again, Edward drew his bicycle in to the kerb to observe more easily the workmen high above him on their scaffolds, whistling and seeming from a distance to be idle. Idle, in fact, they were not: more was built that summer and autumn in SW17 than in any other similar period in the history of the district, and more houses of an old-fashioned nature were destroyed. All Jubilee Road was levelled, and Dunfarnham Avenue, and the corner of Crimea Road, and Fetty Crescent, and almost all of Gleethorpe Lane. Edward watched the work of destruction and rebuilding, and felt sad to see it all, although he knew, for he had read it in a newspaper, that new houses were necessary to keep pace with the increasing population. Occasionally, he saw a single wall, all that remained of some old house, with different wallpapers still adhering to the plaster, indicating the rooms that had once been lived in. High up on such a wall there was often a fire-grate with a mantelshelf still above it, seeming strange and surrealist without a floor or a ceiling. After a time, Edward used to look out for those fireplaces, and even developed a fantasy in which he came by night with a ladder and climbed up with kindling and coal. In his bed in Clapham he wandered in his fantasy all over the area of SW17, and Wandsworth and Putney, climbing up the ladders and lighting fires in the fire-grates in the sky, causing a mystery that interested the newspapers and the nation. Before he dropped off to sleep the fires were blazing heartily, throwing a light on to the wallpaper that surrounded them, creating a ghostly cosiness.
The summer flowers faded in the Bolsovers’ garden, and the scene from the french windows became one of fewer contrasts. Roses lingered in their hardy fashion, defying the chills that came in the night. The Bolsover children played less among them, thinking already in terms of winter. Edward in his skulking had seen those children and would have liked to talk to them. He had seen them in Mrs Bolsover’s little motor-car sitting side by side in the back, jumping about and chattering. Once he had ridden past Mrs Hoop and she had called out to him, but he pretended not to hear her. ‘I thought I seen you, Edward,’ she said that evening in the Hand and Plough, ‘riding your bike up Wimbledon way.’ She attempted to elicit an explanation, but Edward had shaken his head and shrugged.
All through the fine warm autumn the clerks of the love department continued to read of sorrows and distress, pursing their lips over the marital tangles that confused the people of England. The clerks murmured on, writing and reciting about dogs that prowled, and death and blood, and whores and codfish, smiling morticians and red mechanics. The clerks sat by day in the love department, with their ball-point pens raised in the air, catching a mood or assisting a flight of thought.
Edward, still longing for a seat at a desk, saw no end to the drama that was playing around him. He saw forever old Beach and Mrs Hoop in the Hand and Plough, buying glasses of beer, Beach living in hope and the charwoman avid beside him. He saw the letters endlessly tumbling out of the large red sacks in the love department, letters that spelt out stories of bruised and broken hearts, pleading for comfort. He saw the dark eyes of Lady Dolores drilling through her thick lenses, and drilling through him as well, guiding his whole existence, like a puppeteer.
‘Tell me about that face now,’ said Lady Dolores, having said it before. ‘Describe his whole face to me.’
‘Are you ailing, Mr Blakeston-Smith, or worrying, is it?’
Edward sighed, and said that he was worrying.
‘Don’t do that, Mr Blakeston-Smith. Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag.’
‘I won’t do anything wrong.’
‘Who’s asking you, Mr Blakeston-Smith? All you have to do is what you’re told.’
Edward wondered how it would come: would he find without explanation a knife or a gun in his pocket? He had read in newspapers of people strangled with women’s stockings or telephone wire, or done to death with cushions and pillows. He had read of a woman who had knocked the life out of her husband by striking him with a metal colander. He watched himself dragging the body of Septimus Tuam across Wimbledon Common and hiding it beneath undergrowth. Dogs found it the following weekend. Pray for me, wrote Edward in his mind to Brother Edmund. Body on Common, said the newspapers.
‘Watch the destruction of this marriage, Mr Blakeston-Smith. Work yourself up on it. Write your notes fully, of this man at his work. We’ll soon strike back.’
‘Strike?’
‘We are hunting dogs waiting, Mr Blakeston-Smith. Going in for a kill.’
‘Oh, Holy Mother!’ cried Edward. ‘Oh God, release me!’
‘What’s up, Mr Blakeston-Smith?’
She had given him as a present a pair of wash-leather gloves with which, she said, he would always be able to remember the love department.
‘I’m not going in for any kill,’ cried Edward Blakeston-Smith, agitatedly on his feet, his fingers sweating in the gloves.
‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ said Lady Dolores, laughing; and Edward came to a decision.
‘Hullo,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘Yes?’
‘Nothing has happened,’ cried a muffled voice. ‘I’ve been reading the daily newspapers. What’s holding you up?’
‘Now then,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘What’s the name, sir?’
‘It’s a female here,’ said the voice, ‘speaking through a layer of wool.’
‘I’ve had you on before,’ said the desk sergeant.
‘Get your finger out,’ cried Mrs Poache. ‘Give protection to Septimus Tuam.’
‘We are extremely busy, sir –’
‘Why crack jokes? Earn your wage, you lazy peasant.’
Eve continued her life as best she could. She telephoned her grocery orders to the shops and later received the goods in cardboard boxes at the door. She made sponge cakes and other confections, prepared stews, risotto, pies, puddings, vegetables; she stewed fruit and scrambled eggs, and put butter on slices of bread. She roasted meat, and grilled it; she cleaned pans and plates and cutlery. She listened to the children talking to one another, she heard of their days at school, or their progress with Miss Fairy and Miss Crouch; she admired their paintings and gave them baths. And while doing all that she felt the presence of Septimus Tuam. ‘How well you’re looking,’ one of the mothers said to her, a mother whose name she didn’t know and didn’t wish to know, a woman in a Volkswagen motor-car. She smiled at this mother, knowing she was looking well because Septimus Tuam had entered her life and desiring for a moment to relate this fact to the woman in the Volkswagen car. She wanted to say that she had found a tonic, in terms of a man who had the look of a priest about him. But she only smiled and said nothing at all, holding a door open for her children, and then driving away, listening to her children talking.
Watching on Wimbledon Common one afternoon, Edward saw Mrs Bolsover ring the door-bell of Mrs FitzArthur’s house and saw Septimus Tuam open the door with a courtly bow of his long head. Mrs Bolsover entered the house, and Edward stood still, plucking up his courage.
Septimus Tuam was wearing his green tie with the signs of the Zodiac on it. In Mrs FitzArthur’s drawing-room he took it off and looked at it. He said:
‘When is your birthday?’
‘June the first.’
‘You’re a Gemini. Queen Victoria was a Gemini.’
Eve felt herself embraced. She closed her eyes, and did not say what she had meant to say.
‘We are in love,’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘We are made for each other. Could we do without it now, having tasted it already?’ He stroked the pale skin of this woman he had come upon after his failure with the woman in the Bluebird Café. He had been lucky that matters had turned out as they had. Had the woman in the tea-shop not cut up so rough he would not be here now, about to mention that he was short of a pound.
Edward squared his shoulders on Wimbledon Common and thought of his father. ‘I’m going straight up to the door,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to say, “My name is Edward Blakeston-Smith.” ’ A lorry carrying a load of cement blocks missed him narrowly as he crossed the busy road; its driver loosed a string of obscenities, but Edward did not hear them. He walked ahead, sniffing the agreeable air.
‘Darling,’ said Eve. ‘I’m thinking about a divorce.’
Septimus Tuam felt a dryness in his mouth that he was not unfamiliar with. Oaths formed in his mind but were not uttered. He said:
‘My dear. A divorce?’
‘I don’t like this deceit.’ Eve heard herself speaking of divorce and deceit and felt more acutely like a figure in a dream. When she was with Septimus Tuam it seemed to her often that he was there almost specifically to dream what must happen to her. And when she wasn’t with him she felt that he was dreaming from afar, causing her to perform her familiar tasks in a different way. When she spoke and made suggestions she was aware of bringing shutters down, as though she wished to close off half her mind and crush a part of reality. She saw him throwing the coloured ball to one of her children and then to the other; she saw him with his grey hat on his head, typing among desert sands. ‘I have lived to become a figment of your imagination,’ she had once exclaimed, but Septimus Tuam replied that he didn’t understand such statements, adding that he possessed, in fact, no imagination to speak of.
Speaking to her now, he agreed that he didn’t like deceit either, but said he could see little alternative. ‘It’s a question of cash, really,’ he explained. ‘A question of having a bit to live on.’ He shook his head dismissively, and changed the tone of his voice. He said, ‘We met, if you remember, on the final day of August. You have known me for approximately nine and a half hundred hours.’
‘I make things in my oven,’ said Eve, ‘and all the time there is you to think about. All the time, no matter what I’m doing. Do you see?’
Her lover nodded sagely, saying that he saw. But he repeated his statement about finance. Vaguely, he mentioned a legacy that was tied up in a legal way. ‘It isn’t long,’ he added, ‘nine and a half hundred hours.’
Eve said:
‘I couldn’t lumber you with my children.’
She had planned that sentence. She paused where she had planned to pause, hoping that Septimus Tuam would shake his head and say that of course she must lumber him with children. But Septimus Tuam said nothing at all, and Eve, her tears beginning, said that maybe they would find a way, adding that she loved her children.
‘The kiddies?’ murmured Septimus Tuam. ‘There’s a bit of a problem there.’
‘You’d like them. And they’d like you. I’m sure of that.’
‘Indeed, of course. Still, let’s not be hasty. Don’t make it too unhappy for yourself, my dear, by mentioning divorce too soon to this husband of yours. Let’s see the lie of the land; let’s plan a few things first.’
What would James do, she wondered, after she had gone? She imagined him sitting in the house in the evenings, watching the television screen. She doubted that he would marry again.
‘I wanted to be married,’ said Eve. ‘And all the things that now are smothering me once upon a time seemed pleasant: to be the wife of a successful man, and mother to his children: what more could I demand, especially since I
loved him? I was an old-fashioned girl.’
Septimus Tuam made a noise with his lips that might have been a sound of agreement, or might have been the opposite. He said:
‘Does James bore you, dear?’
‘He has been bored himself. One is more aware of that than of James.’
‘It is a tale with many women. You can depress yourself thinking about it.’
‘I would be poor with you, and not mind. I would work in a shop. I cannot ever see you being a shadow.’
‘Nor I you. You are too beautiful for shadows.’
James had come back from Gloucestershire and said that he had arranged for the house to be put up for sale. He told Eve about the nurse’s box of seeds in the greenhouse and how the estate agent had screwed his heel into a floor-board and caused the wood to powder away. Then he had announced that what he needed was a stiff brandy, and had poured one out. ‘And how are you?’ he had not said. ‘How have you been, my Eve?’
Edward placed a finger on Mrs FitzArthur’s front door-bell. He pressed it sharply twice.
‘Who’s that?’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t answer it.’ But the bell sounded again and then again, and in the end, with a sigh, Septimus Tuam was obliged to attend to the matter.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Edward. ‘Look, can I come in? My name is Edward Blakeston-Smith.’
‘Go away,’ said Septimus Tuam.
‘It’s better that I come in,’ said Edward. ‘I can tell you something to your advantage, Mr Tuam. I really can.’
‘I have warned you before. Why are you hanging about me?’
‘I’m here to help. I want to talk to you and Mrs Bolsover.’
‘Go to hell!’ said Septimus Tuam in a low voice, not caring at all for the attitude of the visitor. ‘There’s no Bolsover here. This is the house of Mrs FitzArthur.’
‘I know it’s the house of Mrs FitzArthur. Mrs FitzArthur is enjoying herself in America.’
When Edward said that, Septimus Tuam threw his eyes upwards, assuming that the persistent young man was a private detective hired by Mrs FitzArthur to spy on him while she was abroad. Septimus Tuam, well used to detectives, sometimes saw them everywhere.