Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  Her eyes returned to the seamstresses’ bags. She picked out a silver thimble and held it up to the light. Even this was engraved with the double B motif.

  “It is quite astonishing. You forget nothing, Father. Not even a thimble!”

  They lifted the sedan and carried Dora back to the ground floor. Bellman led the way. He kept turning to tell her one more thing and then another about his grand project. She half listened, drifting in her own thoughts, until a thought struck her, idle but curious enough to make it worth interrupting her father.

  “Father, you have never told me. Who is Black?”

  That name on her lips! He should have thought of that.

  “No one!” he told her, wide-eyed, a fraction too fast. “No one at all.”

  One minute to eleven.

  The doorman stood like a sentry at the gates of heaven. If ever a man had been born to be employed by a mourning emporium, it was Mr. Pentworth. With his downturned mouth incapable of rejoicing and eyes that were full of lugubrious sympathy, he was the very embodiment of sorrow. Mr. Dent and Mr. Hayworth smoothed their impeccable gray lapels and positioned themselves behind their counters. Salesgirls stood in orderly fashion, backs straight, hands clasped, meek as children at Sunday school. Upstairs every pencil lay straight and every needle was in its place. Smiles, coughs, and other fidgets were suppressed. Everywhere was solemnity and composure.

  Behind a column on the first floor, three-quarters concealed, Bellman stood and looked over the railings to watch the door below. As the clock hand moved to eleven and Pentworth opened the door, a heart a hundred times greater than his own jolted to life in his chest. It was the heart of Bellman & Black.

  They came. Curious, fearful, longing, astonished, awestruck, pious, acquisitive, they poured in; and the first, whether they intended it or not, were swept deep into the shop by the sheer pressure of those behind. There was much dazed milling about as, overwhelmed by the scale and the beauty of it, people lost sight of whatever it was they had come in for—for most had invented some reasonable little need in order not to appear to themselves as mere tourists. They could not help it: on seeing the majestic glory of it all, they fell into passive, voluptuous rapture. Women and men, young and old, the bereaved and the unbereaved, all thronged, staring and marveling and whispering.

  For all their awe, it was not long before one soul, hardier than the rest, resolved upon a purchase. One yard of one-inch grosgrain to edge the fraying sleeves of a winter coat.

  It was not the cheapest thing to be had at Bellman & Black, but it was certainly modest. No matter.

  On the second floor a cashier tweaking his cuffs almost jumped out of his skin as the first canister of pennies rattled to a stop in his niche and his hand trembled as he wrote out the ticket, counted out the change, and activated the system to return the canister to the shop floor. Then instantly another!

  It had begun!

  Now the canisters were flying, the coins were rattling into the cash boxes, goods were measured and counted out, items were wrapped and tied with string, orders were listed in elegant cursive script and—yes!—tears were shed, consolation offered and received.

  Bellman and Black was teeming with life and money and death.

  It was a success.

  ***

  William Bellman took a deep breath. He did not smile—on the shop floor of Bellman & Black? Whatever next!—but he felt a smile. His fingers tingled with confident power, and the floor was solid beneath his feet.

  Unobtrusively he stepped from his vantage point, slipped among the crowds, and melted into the paneling.

  In his private office one wall had been lined with cork. On it was tacked a large sheet of paper. At present it was mostly blank, with only two lines on it, one vertical and one horizontal, joining in the bottom left-hand corner. Along the horizontal line the names of the months were marked against notches. Figures in pounds were indicated by the notches on the vertical line.

  Bellman remembered his early jottings in the black notebook. Calculations of turnover, predictions of profit. It had looked very promising, though he had arrived at it in a somewhat rough-and-ready fashion, obviously. Then there were the figures—reined in a little—that he had dangled in front of Critchlow and the others to tempt them into investing. All that was a long time ago. Today he knew infinitely more about the business. He could tell you how many yards of black merino was sold annually in the nation, the city of London, the tiny shop two streets from here. He knew why coffins cost what they did and how they could be made cheaper yet be just the same. He had an idea of how much Bellman & Black would make this first month, and it was founded on fact. It was also, he congratulated himself, the same figure that he had come up with two years ago.

  His plan on this chart was to plot predicted takings in blue at the beginning of every month, and the actual takings, in black, once the figures were in. He took up his blue pen and found the spot. At the last minute his hand rose slightly and he inked his blue dot a fraction higher.

  Was it a sixth sense that nudged his hand? Instinct? Call it what you will. Bellman just knew.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dora’s nights of remembering grew less profitable as time passed. She still did it sometimes, but the practice gradually lost its ability to comfort. In part, she told herself, it was because she had worn the memories thin from overuse. Like some of the coins they used to clean, the relief had been worn away.

  There were other reasons. She was changing. The things that had pleased her when she was a girl were not the things that pleased her now. When she thought about her mother these days, it was new conversations she craved. She took to talking to Mrs. Lane about her mother, and these memories, secondhand though they might be, were as precious as her own, for they were adult.

  And then there came another reason for spending less time rehearsing the past.

  Rummaging under the bed for something else entirely, Mary emerged, hair all askew, with a painting.

  “What on earth is this?”

  Dora rubbed the dust off. “My rook!”

  The afternoon sketching in the garden was not part of her repertoire of habitual memories, for it did not involve her mother and brothers and sister. She had not worn it thin with constant repetition. Now it returned to her with a fresh vividness.

  “He taught me how to hold a pencil properly.”

  Mary and Dora went through all the cupboards in the house until they found the old sketchbooks. Then for an entire afternoon the young women sat together turning the pages. One particular image made them pause. A few weeks before the fever Dora had made her first proper attempt at a self-portrait.

  “Is that really what I looked like, then?” she asked.

  “It is a likeness. That can’t be denied. But you were even prettier.”

  Dora judged differently. The portrait was less than confident. The lines were stiff. But she supposed the eyes were good. She recognized herself in them.

  “I look as if I am thinking very hard about something.”

  “You still look like that. Always did.”

  That night Dora sacrificed a night of remembering in order to sit at the mirror. She unpinned the lace that covered her scalp, and by candlelight she studied her new face. What a scarecrow she was. Her features seemed squashed into the lower part of her face, like a baby’s. Her ears jutted out, flaring at the upper curve in an ugly simulacrum of the curls that were missing. The narrowness of her forehead was improved—was that the right word?—by the absence of hair, and her eyes were made striking by the lack of lash and brow, but they were not for all that what anyone would call attractive. It was an interesting face though. The skin of her scalp was smooth to the touch, but the bones beneath had a landscape that her hair had hidden from sight. Her eye studied its lines, found crevices, shallows, ridges, a whole landscape of bone. She turned her head this
way and that. A blue vein ran riverlike over one ear. She put her hands to the back of her scalp and read the back of her head with her hands.

  A powerful excitement took possession of her as she held her pencil. She traced a few lines, abandoned them, started again elsewhere on the page, abandoned again. From every disappointment she moved straightaway onto the next attempt. She turned her head from side to side, captured a shape, then tilted her neck and made another rapid sketch. She replaced the candle and carried on drawing till dawn, her scalp, her bones, lines of nose and chin and lip, curls of cartilage, nostrils, cheekbones, temples, planes and angles and light and shade. She drew with as little personal emotion as if she had been drawing a landscape, something as remote from herself as the bones of the planet she lived on.

  Eventually Dora produced something she was satisfied with. It was raw, as ugly and grotesque as she knew herself to be, and it reminded her more than anything of a newly hatched bird, unfeathered, skin as thin as paper, all bone and hunger.

  With a last pencil stroke, she extended the line of her nose into a little beak and was happy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The launch of Bellman & Black created a momentum that carried Bellman with it. He worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, yet he never tired. His schedule wasenergetic; he toured the shop at ten o’clock, two o’clock, and six o’clock, from basement to the atelier at the top: a word in someone’s ear, encouragement there, even lending a hand where the workload was excessive. Daily meetings (his senior retail men and with Verney from finance), biweekly meetings (Edmonds from dispatch, Stallybrook from deliveries, and Miss Chalcraft). Three hundred and thirty-seven people worked at Bellman & Black’s and before the month was out he knew the name of everyone, from Verney, his right-hand man, to Molly, who washed up for the canteen. The name of Girl No. 9 was Lizzie, and he noted it along with all the others. With prodigious energy he filled every moment with activity, with purpose, with achievement.

  There were appointments with outsiders: Anson from the Westminster & City needed to see him once in a while; sometimes it was a lawyer or a haberdasher who came for an hour in the afternoon to talk business. He purchased a pair of deep-buttoned leather armchairs for these occasions and placed them on each side of the fireplace in his office. He resented their comfort because it led sitters to relax and after the main business was complete they continued to sit talking of one thing and another while cigar smoke rose lazily to the ceiling. He discouraged it politely.

  After the shop closed and on Sundays he sat down to his paperwork. Letters, reports, accounts, lists. He processed everything with rapid, flawless method, made lists in his calfskin notebook and drew a firm line through each item as soon as it was done. He now ordered his notebooks in quantities of half a dozen at a time; when one was finished, he dropped it into the bottom drawer of his desk and took the next from the shelf and pressed the front cover back to continue without a pause.

  How did he do it? By watching the clock. Washing, dressing, and breakfasting might take an ordinary man an hour, but Bellman did it in thirty-five minutes. The manager of Pope’s, which was the closest thing Bellman & Black had to a competitor, spent an hour every day with his secretary, but Bellman got through the agenda in fifteen minutes. He said “Good morning’ and “How are you?” but during these profitless seconds his mind was noting, thinking, planning.

  When the shop closed and Bellman could at last settle down to his paperwork, he glanced at the clock. The workload he had resolved to accomplish would be half a day’s worth to another man, but he glanced at the clock before he started and again at the end, and only an hour had passed. Those that knew this facility of his wondered at it.

  “Never let time be your master,” Bellman told Verney when he asked about it. “If you want to do something, take it on. Time will always make itself.”

  But what he really felt about the matter was that he had discovered—or been given—the key to chronometry. He could open up the case of time when he chose, apply weight to the pendulum and slow its movement. He could take the hours apart, find the extra minutes that were going to waste in them, make them his own.

  Years ago at the mill someone had once suggested that Bellman might one day work out how to make the sun shine all day and all night. Those that knew him at the emporium would have agreed: it was not so impossible as it might seem.

  Verney tried to emulate his boss. By his watch though a minute was only ever a minute; he could never get a second more out of it.

  When Bellman lost time—by someone else’s miscalculation or mishap as a rule—he spent the afternoons in an intensity of effort to catch up. If necessary he would sit up late, stealing from sleep to finish what he had set out to do. Always he went to bed the victor. He never felt tired, though he must have been, for sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. When this happened for the third and fourth time he took action.

  Fox was in Scotland, but when he received the letter he returned directly to London. He found the same vigorous handshake, the same brevity of greeting.

  “You are well? Good, good,” Bellman said, leaving him no time for a reply, no time to say how fine the houses were in Edinburgh, how surprisingly mild the weather. Immediately they were straight to the matter at hand.

  “Divide the space.” Bellman knew what he wanted. “As far as here, see, and put in a wall.”

  “It can be done.” Fox frowned. “It will be a tight fit. You could borrow some space from your secretary’s office. It makes it a bigger job, but you’d have greater comfort . . . “

  Fox was aware of speaking fast, leaving no pauses between his sentences. The old ways came back to him instantly. To think he had lived every day for two years at this Bellman pace!

  When Fox had first left Bellman’s employ, he spent a fortnight astonished at the slowness of the rest of the world. Twenty, thirty times a day, you understood someone’s meaning after the first sentence but had to stand and wait while they meandered through until they had exhausted the stock of words and seconds they had put aside for it. He answered in a few taut words, and people stared at him. The meaning had come at them all at once, bullet fast; stunned by the detonation his listener had to ask him to repeat himself. It exhausted his patience, he thought he would never get used to it, but quite soon he adjusted himself to the slower pace, and before long he actually liked it. He had rediscovered the spaces in between words and tasks and thoughts, and they were surprisingly fruitful. He had met a young woman. He thought he might marry her.

  “Space?” Bellman was saying. “For what? All I need is a bed here, against the wall, and a cupboard here for a few things.”

  “A wardrobe?”

  “A hook behind the door will do.”

  Fox thought of the bedroom he had made for his client at the white stucco house, its grand scale, the majestic bed, the art, furniture, mirrors . . .

  “It will be far from spacious. In fact—” He paced out the area Bellman had indicated. “Yes. It’s more or less the dimensions of the seamstresses’ rooms we put in upstairs.”

  It seemed to him then that Bellman did pause, for the briefest instant. Then, “When can it be done?”

  “If you’re really satisfied to have something so modest, it can be done in a day.”

  “Overnight?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Tonight?”

  How did I do it? Fox marveled at himself. For two whole years he had lived at this speed . . . It had seemed natural to him then. The way to get on. The way to make himself. He had all sorts of projects lined up now, work enough for years, a lifetime. Bellman & Black had done that for him.

  He smiled. “I’ll see to it.”

  The next day Bellman came in to find his office a little smaller, and behind the new wall, a seamstress’s bedroom with tongue-and-groove walls, a narrow bed against the wall, and a cupboard. He stoo
d in it, and an emotion stirred in him, but he didn’t stop to put a name to it. He had things to do.

  ***

  “Come in!” he called, without lifting his eyes from the letter he was drafting.

  “Sir, Miss Chalcraft sent me.’ The voice was hesitant, female, familiar.

  He looked up. It was her.

  “. . . with your suit.”

  “It’s Lizzie, yes?”

  “Yes, sir. Should I hang it somewhere?” She looked round, but there was nowhere in his office to put it.

  She blushed. Was she thinking of the night in the backstreets? The night they had met so surprisingly, when he had slept in her bed and crept away at first light, tied his tongue. It had happened only three weeks ago, but he had forgotten it as wholly as if it were an event in the distant past. Now it filled the room.

  “Behind that door, there. You’ll find a hook.”

  If she was surprised at seeing how similar his bedroom was to her own, nothing in her face gave it away. The blood still high in her cheeks, she murmured a good-bye and exited the room as quietly as she had come.

  Bellman’s hand returned to his page and for a second or two he failed to remember what it was he had meant to write. He hadn’t got to the bottom of that Black business. Next time he saw her, he would ask her about it again. Then he picked up the thread and applied his pen to the paper as before.

  ***

  It was the end of the first month. He and Verney had double counted the day’s takings, separating the coins into stacks of like with like, and putting them into red felt bags. Every penny was accounted for. The figures were in. After Verney left, Bellman locked the money in the safe and then, smiling to himself, took his pen and dipped it in the black ink. At a point well above the target he had marked on his graph four weeks ago, he touched his nib to the paper at the level of sales actually achieved. The wet ink shone at him, like a beady black eye, and Bellman smiled contentedly at it.