Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  “Number nine,” Miss Chalcraft announced. “Now, I gave her a five generally. She has no experience in a large enterprise like Bellman & Black.”

  Bellman had also given her a five.

  “And her work?”

  “Very neat. But whether she can work at the speed we need . . . “

  Miss Chalcraft’s pen hovered, ready to delete her.

  Bellman noticed that he had failed to give the girl a grade for that elusive quality that would make her right to send into a house of mourning. Someone who would wordlessly emanate the right kind of sympathy. Someone whose presence would comfort—but at least not distress—the recently bereaved. He tried to picture her—chubby girl? Brown curls perhaps?—and couldn’t.

  What he did remember were the half-raised hand, anguish, and her ability to soothe herself.

  “I think we’ll try her out,” he said.

  The excellent Miss Chalcraft did not show her surprise. He was the boss. Her pencil moved to the right-hand side of the page and entered a tick.

  Chapter Twelve

  He blamed Fox. He had wanted a shop for the fifteenth and Fox, unable to resist a challenge, had promised it for the fourteenth. Hence this useless, empty day.

  Bellman was out of sorts. He had felt it, even before he was awake. Now he stood before his mirror, lathering soap with his shaving brush and studying the black points protruding darkly over his face. He applied a beard of white snow to his chin and took up the razor. What was the matter?

  The preparations were complete. Bellman & Black was ready to meet its staff tomorrow. Bellman’s role as constructor-in-chief of a great emporium was over—and his life as manager of a working enterprise had not yet begun. His life was poised between the one thing and the other, and this in-between state was uncomfortable to him. He wished it were tomorrow, when before eight o’clock the side door would open and clerks and shopgirls and department heads and seamstresses and maintenance men and doormen and a coachman and packers and handlers and messengers would come pouring in. Tomorrow he would be at the heart of things, all day long he would be answering queries, smoothing out unforeseen difficulties in the life of the shop. He would be entirely absorbed in it. But that was tomorrow.

  It was today that was the problem.

  No difficulty waited to be smoothed out. All was straight and ready and in order. Every floorboard was hammered down, every lock oiled, every uniform ironed.

  It was all right for Fox. What would he be doing today? Celebrating the end of the job, no doubt. He would be with friends. Family perhaps. Bellman supposed Fox must have some family.

  Bellman met his eyes in the mirror and saw something troubling look back at him out of his own eyes. Quickly he averted his gaze.

  Had he forgotten something? The uneasiness that was disturbing him had that kind of weight and density. But he was not prone to forgetfulness.

  A crimson flower blossomed on the white lather by his nose. He had caught that little mole. Damn.

  Bellman breakfasted. He wrote some unnecessary letters.

  Dora had arrived for a brief London visit, but he did not wish to disturb her: she would be tired after yesterday’s journey.

  He leafed through his notebook. All his lists of recent weeks. Every item with a tick against it. It almost reassured him. But he was restless: it wasn’t a day to sit at a desk.

  When he had word that Dora was up, he went to the drawing room. “I am sorry I have been so busy of late.”

  “You have been busy ever since I was born, Father. I am perfectly used to it.”

  “I will be busy in the coming days too. More than ever.”

  “Naturally.”

  She was occupied with her binoculars, looking into the treetops in the square opposite. It would have been pleasant to stay and talk for a while, but he did not know what to say to his daughter. He had forgotten how to talk of normal things now that the business of death kept him so busy.

  Though spring was edging closer to summer, it was under cloud that he walked to a restaurant for lunch. He read a newspaper. Leisure! What did people see in it? It only put him out of sorts.

  At five o’clock he could resist no longer. He walked to Bellman & Black, inserted the heavy key, and turned it. The smooth function of key in lock satisfied him and went a little way to soothing his irritation. The heavy door opened with a weighty swing, and under the curious eyes of the passers-by, Bellman let himself in.

  All was still. All was hushed. The ground-floor windows were masked, casting an early dusk, and Bellman walked to the atrium in the center where the light fell from the upper floors. He had been inside the building a hundred times before, to oversee, to discuss, to sign off, to solve problems and resolve disputes. Always there had been the noise of tools, voices, equipment. Always he had had some specific objective in mind that caused him to perceive the shop piecemeal. Today, alone and in silence, he took possession of his domain.

  He ascended the staircase. He had already assessed the smoothness of the handrail, already checked the color of the carpet against the sample. Tonight he had only to take delight in these details and marvel at how exactly they matched his intention.

  Bellman continued his tour. Every now and again he nodded, satisfied. Here were display cabinets for the jewelry; here the drawers for gloves; here the mannequin busts, naked, but soon to display mantles and collars and tippets; here the wall racks where fabrics could be compared; here the counters, with a niche in the wall for cash payments and a book in the drawer for orders . . . Here would be the umbrellas and here the shoes . . . Everything was in a perfect state of readiness—all the more strange then, this feeling of having forgotten something.

  Upstairs again. Now he left the public arena behind him. Gone was the mahogany paneling. Gone the high ceilings and grand windows. This was backstage. The realm of paper and ink and of money. One room was the heart of the pneumatic payment system. At each hatch a desk; on each desk ink and blank receipts and blotters.

  The clerks’ room that Bellman had seen almost empty when Miss Chalcraft interviewed the seamstresses was now filled with rows of desks. He sat down at one of them. His eye was drawn to the spot in the paneling where the spyhole was. Nothing was visible.

  Sitting in her place, Bellman raised his hand in the direction of the invisible spot, as the seamstress had done, and studied his fingers, his arm. A reaching out in order to capture—what? The fingers closing on nothing. The hand falling dispirited to his lap. He shook his head in puzzlement and repeated the action, as though it were a mechanism he had not yet got the measure of. After a couple of attempts he shook his head clear, and left the room.

  His own office awaited only him. It was larger than it needed to be. To impress, according to the architect. Bellman had shrugged. He had never relied on a room’s dimension to impress people; he had never been impressed by room dimensions. He might yet divide it. From his own office he looked into the antechamber, where his secretary would work and control access to Bellman. The last room making up the suite of offices contained nothing but a safe, taking up one third of the space. The size of a safe did not impress Bellman either, not while it was empty. He entered the code, opened the door, relocked it.

  Upstairs again. Farther and farther away from the public. Deeper and deeper into the private realm of Bellman & Black. On the third floor was the seamstresses’ workplace. The architect had tried to dissuade him—waste such a view of the city on seamstresses?—but Bellman had insisted. The girls who made the dresses needed every last ray of sunlight to stitch by. Every degree of elevation was worth good money. “A corner of the second floor is all I need,” he’d told the man. “You can count money well enough by gaslight.”

  Bellman was delighted with the seamstresses’ work space. He smiled to himself, remembering the day six months ago when he had interrogated Miss Chalcraft on every aspect of couture.
She had taken him to watch seamstresses at work. He had handled needles, thimbles, scissors, and thread himself. He had learned to thread a needle and, having finally succeeded—it was a hundred times more difficult than he had anticipated—had driven it in and out of a few offcuts of cloth, first by the window, then in shadow. The excellent Miss Chalcraft had failed to hide her astonishment.

  “How else can I know what your girls will need, Miss Chalcraft?” he had asked. “I will give them large windows, because black cloth is harder to stitch than colored when the light starts to fade. And I will give them time to stand and move about and a space to do it in, so that they don’t have to pretend to have run out of thread or lost their needle when their neck hurts from being hunched over their work. And that way, they will want to work for Bellman & Black because we understand what makes their work easy and what hard, and there will be less time wasted and fewer needles lost.”

  Bellman imagined one of the seamstresses—though he did not attend particularly to the fact, it was Girl No. 9 he imagined—arriving for the first time tomorrow in the seamstresses’ workplace and marveling at the precise and practical way in which everything was arranged. Light falling copiously onto the long workbench, which was divided by sloping wooden ridges into individual sewing stations. Each workplace had its own hooks for scissors and pigeonholes for needles and thread and thimbles and drawers for braid and ribbon.

  Yes. He nodded and smiled.

  It was soothing to see how closely the realization of his plans matched the image of it he had carried in his mind for so many months. All the thoughts that had once existed only in his imagination now had material reality. Here was evidence that he was not forgetful. He tried to draw reassurance from it. He tried to put the uncomfortable feeling behind him.

  Upstairs again. Around the light well were arranged the seamstresses’ bedrooms. He turned into one at random; they were all the same. It was a narrow room with sloping walls under the eaves and a tiny window. A bed with a thin mattress was built against the wall. A hook behind the door for a black dress. A chest. A pitcher and a bowl. Was it big enough?

  He pictured a seamstress in the room. Like an obedient marionette, Girl No. 9 stood at the basin and washed her face. She unpinned her hair. Was her hair brown and curly? It was brown and curly now. She sat on the bed to take her shoes off, then laid down.

  Yes, the room was adequate, he judged.

  Girl No. 9 continued to lie on the bed, as if waiting to see whether he required her to stand and undress and hang her black dress on the hook behind the door. She watched his face, attentively. She had—or his mind supplied her with—an attractive shape under her black dress. Her eyes looked tenderly at him. Her lips parted, as though she were about to speak, invite him to—

  And now, abruptly altering, she raised her hand and reached toward him hopelessly, as if to grasp something lost, something forever out of reach. Tears welled in her eyes and her pretty face was disfigured by grief.

  Bellman stepped back and closed the door on Girl No. 9.

  Through an unobtrusive door on the third-floor landing were the very last steps. Rough and wooden, they rose steeply to a space that contained only two things: the hydraulic lever to raise the glass domed ceiling and a hatch to access the roof for maintenance. Bellman climbed, unlocked the padlock and pushed open the hatch. A scattering of raindrops fell on his upturned face as he stepped out onto the roof. In the center of the roof was the broad octagon of plate glass. He crouched at the edge of it to admire the neat setting of the plates into the ridge-and-furrow grid. It had been very nicely done. This rain could patter as long as it liked, it would not get through. Beneath the glass was a vertical drop of hundreds of feet, but in the dark his atrium was not transparent but reflective. No hint of the depths beneath was visible, only the mercurial glitter of raindrops showed against the mirror image of the night sky.

  Bellman stood, turned, and stared upward at the rain, and beyond that, the stars that were beginning to show among the clouds. He took in a deep, contented breath and released it again.

  On a clear day, Fox had told him, you could see as far as Greenwich to the east and Richmond to the west. Bellman could only make out Clerkenwell and Kensington. He squinted, puzzled, and took out his watch. Eight o’clock already! No wonder. What had happened to the time? Still, he could see Primrose Hill rise in the north and to the south he could make out the outline of the new House of Lords. Beyond it, he knew the city continued its sprawl.

  How vast London was. How great the extent of its housing and commerce and population. There was not a living soul in this city, not so far as the eye could see, that would not at some point have need of the goods and services provided by Bellman and Black. He looked out, turning slowly, in all directions. Birds were swooping and diving in the darkening sky, and beneath them, streets of houses stretched in all directions, grand and modest and impoverished. In one of those houses, in Richmond say, a fellow would be sneezing, right at this very moment. Just as in Mayfair someone was shivering. In Spitalfields, a tainted oyster was slipping down someone’s throat, and in Bloomsbury someone was pouring the glass that would prove one glass too many and . . . Oh, it was endless. They would come all right. Sick today, dead tomorrow, and on Thursday Bellman & Black would open its doors to the bereaved. It was an enterprise that could not fail.

  He, William Bellman, had created this great engine. It was his, and tomorrow the staff would be coal to its stoves, water to its wheel, and when the customers came thronging, his machine would start to extract the money from them and disgorge them changed, lighter in the pocket and lighter at heart, as the process took their guineas and replaced them with consolation. He had made it. It was his emporium, Bellman &—

  His hands were shaking. He had forgotten something. Never in his life had he been more certain! A feather stir in his abdomen, a turbulence in his chest: he was on the brink of remembering . . .

  The rain beat harder against his back. As he felt the damp chill bloom across his shoulders, a scene seeped into his mind: there was a spot, down there, opposite the building where he had stood one day a year ago in the rain. He had made architecture out of air and water.

  There had been a stone, was that it?

  A bird? Shimmering purple and green and blue?

  Buried! In the foundations of his emporium!

  A rook had flown up from the foundations, risen on rain-heavy wings through the floors of his shop; he had seen it, that day—

  The construction beneath his feet seemed suddenly insubstantial as mist. The notion came to him that he was suspended high above ground with only rain and air to hold him up.

  London dived and veered around him. Bellman’s hands flew to his head as the city broke like a mirror and the shards flew apart, the roof line sheered off, the roof itself plummeted and him with it, in a breathtaking plunge. Afraid of the building’s edge, afraid of the glass grid, Bellman fell helplessly to his knees. Desperate for a fingerhold his fingers slithered over the wet flat lead as the building tilted violently. He squeezed his eyes shut, but it was no help: a great fall was coming. There was no up and no down, only falling, and he vomited as he fell, and the world spun and tipped wildly around him. He fell and he fell—there was no end to the falling.

  ***

  The sky was black.

  It was still raining.

  Bellman could hear whimpering, and understood it was himself.

  There was a bird, an ancient black bird buried in the foundations of his emporium.

  His fingers ached from holding on, and he wept.

  At some point in the night, Bellman discovered that this would not do. He was ill. He would have to resign. He must go to the haberdashers and tell them that a new manager must be found.

  Tentatively he moved a hand. A foot. He crawled along the roof to the hatch. Descending the wooden steps, trembling and weeping, he was overcome by w
aves of heat and chill. He thought longingly of the beds in the seamstresses’ rooms, but no, first he had to hand in his resignation. Planes of blackness assailed him on the stairs and brought on the vertigo again. More than once he slumped and collapsed, clinging to the banisters before persuading himself back onto his feet and forward. Getting to the ground was as arduous as coming down a mountain, and when he unlocked the door to step out into Regent Street no one would have recognized him as the man who had gone in.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A few souls were about in Regent Street, even this dead hour of the night. They were on their way to work early, or on their way home after a long night, or else one of those who have no work and no home and for whom all hours of the day or night are equally comfortless. Passers-by took Bellman for one of the latter. Hatless, soaked to the skin, smelling sour, he walked as though he didn’t trust the pavement beneath his feet, and once in a while he stopped to lean against a wall and close his eyes. People sped up to pass him, took wide detours, avoided looking him in the eye.

  For an hour Bellman walked unsteadily in a city he did not know. He was aware that strangers were casting sideways looks at him as they passed, knew that with his erratic breathing and his drenched clothes he must look eccentric, alarming even, yet such was his altered state that he felt no embarrassment. No! For he was a man at a great turning point! He was the man who had everything! Everything and more! And he was going to throw it away!

  Why this compulsion to escape from everything he had worked so hard to achieve? He could not precisely say. But he was resolved to do it, and he would do it, and the reason was powerful enough, even if it wasn’t particularly clear.