Now, what about this coming month? Ordinarily in retail you might expect novelty to inflate the first month’s takings artificially. Your second month’s takings would conceivably be less than the first. But mourning goods had their own laws, and in this, as in so much else, they were the exception to the rule. Quite naturally people felt a repugnance at the idea of having mourning wear ready and waiting in the home. Why, it was the equivalent of opening your front door to death, inviting him in and lining up your family for him to eye over. Certainly some of the people milling about the shop on opening day had had no reason other than curiosity to be there, but they had not purchased. Every sale this first month was authentic. The figures could be counted on as an accurate reflection of real deaths that had occurred in the world beyond the walls of Bellman & Black. They were a reliable indicator of future expectations. So what should next month’s target be?
The bead of black ink was dry, and besides, now that Bellman had drawn from it all the information he needed, it was no longer important. He dipped a clean pen into the blue ink and prepared to mark the coming month’s target. The nib neared the paper, rose a little, and touched a dot a little higher than he meant.
That again! He considered the ink. It winked at him. Well, why not?
Having fixed his target he must make it happen. Bellman took his notebook from his pocket and opened it up. The Spanish gloves weren’t selling: he must see Drewer about reducing the price and reorder from the Italians; he must get to the bottom of the reason why the gunpowder velvet was doing so well; he must . . .
His eye fell on a task he had listed yesterday. Paintbrushes.
Dora!
He was supposed to go to Whittingford tomorrow. Once a month, he had promised. An overnight visit. She had written and asked him to bring particular paintbrushes, narrow ones that she couldn’t get in Oxford.
Bellman thought of everything he had to do. It wasn’t the best time to be away, not even for a single night. He would write and explain. A messenger would run out tomorrow and get the brushes for him, dispatch would wrap them. They might even be sending the brougham that way in the next few days, you never knew, otherwise he would get someone to deliver them. He would go when he could afford the time, and stay for longer. Write to Dora, he added to his list.
Once, a long time ago, he had opened a book like this one and found in it, in childish handwriting, Kiss Dora. How he would like it if she were here to be kissed now!
But this was wasting time. All these things to do!
He selected half a dozen pen and paper tasks and settled at his desk. It was twenty to eight. Let’s see if he couldn’t complete these things by . . . nine? No: he wouldn’t need that long. A quarter to nine. That would do it.
He set to.
***
At the top of the shop the atrium glass gazed blankly up at the black sky and down into the well of the shop. Looking either way could make you feel dizzy, so the seamstresses avoided glancing up or down as they scurried along the walkway to the room where they were allowed to congregate in the evenings and heat milk or water on the little stove.
“Who is Mr. Black?” Lily was saying. “Does no one ever see him?”
She was a skinny thing, all knuckles and elbows, but what really distinguished her was that she was the new girl. Of course in a way they were all new girls, but Lily was the newest of the new, brought in to replace a seamstress who had not turned up. Her arrival was significant because the others, in telling her the hundred and one things she didn’t know and they did, began to feel established.
“See him? Whatever do you mean? Have you not seen Mr. Black, then?” her neighbor, Sally, began to tease.
“Never.”
Sally laughed. “Of course you’ve seen him. You saw him only today!”
Lily frowned. “I never did.”
“But he spoke to you!”
Lily shook her head. “That was Mr. Bellman.”
“It was Mr. Black.” Some of the girls giggled, but others nodded their heads gravely at Lily in support of Sally’s words. Lily looked from one face to the next, trying to decide what was true.
A girl leaned forward. “Mr. Bellman and Mr. Black are as like as the two pins that you keep in your cuff.”
“Twins?” Lily was amazed.
Susan, an older girl who enjoyed a reputation for knowledge that extended beyond the fact, shook her head. “Don’t tease her. Lily, think about it. How could two men be twins and yet have different names? Only brothers can be twins. No, Mr. Black is a sleeping partner.”
The girls exchanged uncertain glances. A sleeping partner? What on earth was that?
When Susan had enjoyed her knowledge in private long enough she enlightened them. “It means he has invested in the shop, put some money in to get it going, and now leaves the running of it to Mr. Bellman but takes his share of the profit.”
“Well,” said Lily. “You learn something new every day.”
Leaning in the doorway, Lizzie listened sleepily to the conversation while she looked out of the room and up to the glass ceiling.
Sleeping partners. What a peculiar expression. An image rose in her mind: Mr. Bellman and Mr. Black tucked up, one at each end of a narrow bed just like hers, in matching nightcaps, as like as two pins. It made her smile.
She had thought Mr. Bellman was Mr. Black the first time she had seen him.
And now she remembered that Mr. Bellman had spoken of Mr. Black the night she had met him in Back Lane . . . As if he thought she knew him! But he had been unwell, and people said strange things when they were ill.
Beyond the glass ceiling, high in the night sky, a star disappeared momentarily then came back. A bird probably, passing over the shop in the dark.
Chapter Seventeen
Dora opened the parcel first because she already knew what the letter would say. Her father was not coming home, he was too busy.
The brushes were exactly what she wanted. The artists’ supplies shop in Broad Street in Oxford had most things she wanted, but these finest brushes, a sparse half-dozen goat hairs in each, were hard to come by, and for the detailing of feathers, no broader brush would do. She had tried to improvise. Rob Armstrong, the son of Fred from the bakery, generally delivered the bread for the mill breakfasts and he had the strongest, straightest hair of anyone she knew. He had agreed—abashedly—to sacrifice a lock to her experiment. She had glued a few hairs to the end of an old brush, wound them round with string, trimmed them to length, then attempted to paint. The result was laughable. Human hairs did not pick up color adequately, they had not the right flexibility, and neither glue nor string were enough to hold them in place. Gradually they fell away, into the paint or the water; one dried into the picture itself. Dora gave the painting—a thrush, she was actually quite pleased with it, all but the feathers—to Rob as a thank-you gift for his contribution to the experiment. He ran his finger over the wing that concealed his own hair, felt it with his fingertip, and laughed.
Now that she had the new brushes she could do better. She rose to go to her studio, then remembered the letter.
She read.
It was just as she thought. He wasn’t coming.
She could not honestly say she was disappointed. She had not been expecting him to come, and in truth, they had little to say to each other. In the old days, when her mother, brothers, and sister were alive, the house had been filled with talk, but now that they were the only ones left, she had little to say to her father, and he had little to say to her. In his presence she could not speak what was on her mind—he did not like to be reminded of the old days, discouraged brooding—nor do the things that interested her. Her binoculars and her paint had to be put aside, along with the distraction and comfort they brought her. All in all—she looked the fact full in the face—she was not sorry he was not coming.
Gathering her paints
together she looked forward to losing herself for a few hours in the pleasure of painting. It removed you from yourself. She could forget all about grief and sorrow while she was intent on reproducing a certain visual effect on paper. Remembering was all very well—and there had been years when it was all she wanted to do—but these days it was a relief to forget. Forget sorrow, forget the past, forget what was lost . . . It took something engrossing to enable her to do that, and painting was the one thing she could rely on.
When did her father’s mind ever fall still? He never read a book. Not for pleasure, not a novel or verse. He was not particularly fond of music, despite his fine voice. Did he never daydream? she asked herself. Never allow his mind to roam at will, surprising him with what it came up with?
She supposed that he must find respite from himself in his work. And so, since he was always at work, did this mean that he was never quite himself?
It was a terrible thought, and most young women would have turned away from it, but Dora was used to terrible thoughts. When your mother is dead and your brothers and sister are dead and your pretty hair has fallen out so no one will ever marry you, dread loses its power over you. Dora thought dreadful things all the time and had quite lost her fear of them. She turned this one over, examined it carefully, curiously, from all angles. It was clear to her that a person might lose his sense of himself in his concentration on graphs and lists and calculations. You could lose your bearings if you spent excessively long periods engaged on a single project at the expense of rest and friendship and the peaceful contemplation of life’s mysteries. Was it feasible that a man might do this for so long that he slipped his moorings altogether? Was lost to himself for good? Could this be what was happening to her father?
Perhaps it was so and her father had mislaid himself permanently.
Dora’s list of sorrows was so long already that, relatively speaking, the addition of this new one was no great burden.
She saw a time coming when she would be polite to her father and as kindly as ever, but would expect less of him. Their relations would be more superficial and simpler. There need be no disappointment.
Or was it that this had happened already?
Everything was ready. Dora took up her binoculars and looked from the window. A dunnock was flitting from tree to earth, where Mary had scattered stale bread crumbs. Her hand moved quickly over the page, capturing the balance of the bird’s head, the set of its body, the angle of its legs. She worked rapidly, happily, with concentration.
By the time the picture was finished the afternoon was drawing to its end. Before long the rooks would be going over.
She waited to see them pass, a long skein of them, cawing and laughing in their habitual friendly fashion. She got up close to them with her binoculars, admired the purposeful ease of their flight. Twisting her body, she followed their passage overhead until they became blurred, gray specks and at last disappeared into an indeterminate whiteness beyond the edge of her vision. Even then, she watched a little longer.
“Where is it that you are going?” she murmured aloud.
She gathered her drawing things together and put them in her bag with her binoculars. The bag across her body on its strap, the folding chair under one arm, and her walking stick in the other hand, she jerked and hobbled over the grass and back to the house.
Chapter Eighteen
“My wife says she sees more of Mr. Black than she does of Mr. Bellman. She’s beginning to wonder whether Mr. Bellman exists at all and taxes me with having invented him.”
Bellman stared at the haberdasher—it was Critchlow—who had one of Bellman’s cigars in one hand and a glass of Bellman’s whiskey in the other.
“It’s a little joke of hers,” the man explained mildly, seeing Bellman’s face.
It was true that Bellman didn’t go out much. Opportunities were numerous: every day the post brought invitations to this ball and that dinner and grand events here, there, and everywhere, but Bellman was a busy man. It was tiresome enough getting round the shop thrice a day without being ambushed into conversation. With an air of sorrowful amiability he saw what he wanted to see, checked what he wanted to check, while avoiding eye contact. In a manner befitting the manager of the shop he bestowed his condolences with a look left and right that encompassed all and singled out no one.
Socializing was impossible to avoid altogether. Often it was the only way to do business, so inefficient though it was, he had more than once made business deals in a box at the theater. The first half of the play he barely attended to: there was generally a great deal of sentiment, outbursts of feeling, and he watched the audience who looked on with stricken faces. During intermission he and the fellow came to an agreement and shook hands. When the second half started, Bellman made his excuses and left.
Once a month Bellman met with his haberdashers in Russells on Piccadilly. Bellman would arrive to find them waiting for him, on their second drink already. He reported the business side of things, they asked questions and commented, and at a point when all were satisfied with Bellman & Black and the talk drifted into more general matters he would rise and ask for his coat, ready to come away.
“Time for another?” someone would ask, but once the business was over he didn’t even finish the drink he had.
“Work to do!” he said, and they weren’t exactly unhappy about it. Sooner have their business assets managed by a man like Bellman than one who lingered over a whiskey by the fireside. The profits spoke for themselves.
These business sorties were the only social events Bellman could be induced to attend. He was a wealthy widower though, handsome and in his prime, and it was only natural that women should be interested in him. The fact that he was known to shun all invitations only increased his value in their eyes. There were daughters and younger sisters in need of husbands, and if Bellman was not snared quickly it stood to reason that some pretty widow going into half-mourning would snatch him up.
The haberdashers were better placed than any to apply pressure.
“You know what women are,” Critchlow said, with a grimace. “Sometimes they just won’t take no for an answer.” He sat in Bellman’s chair, making no indication of leaving, and Bellman understood that, painful though it was to both of them, he meant to stay until Bellman had accepted.
“It’s nothing grand. Family and a few close friends. You’ll be home by eleven.”
Bellman thought he could draw him away from the topic by asking about Woking. The queen’s surgeon had purchased a plot of land there with a view to opening a crematorium, and had induced a few men of means to form a society with him for the promotion of cremation.
“It will never happen,” the haberdasher said. “You take my word for it. How is the good lord to raise us on the Day of Judgment if we are burnt to ashes? That’s how people think. They never think to ask how he will raise them when they have been eaten by worms and their bones are dust, but that’s by the by. No, take my word for it, Bellman. It’ll take more than a few overcrowded cemeteries to bring the English mind round to the idea of burning the dead. We’re not heathens in this country.”
But Bellman’s strategy was ineffective. As the haberdasher rose to go, hand on door handle, he turned back into the room.
“I’ll tell Emily to expect you then,” he said, as if the invitation had been accepted, and before Bellman could protest, Critchlow was gone and it was too late to do anything about it.
***
At the party—for party it was, despite the promises of a small, family meal—Bellman was stunned by the color of it all. From the Prussian yellow hall to the emerald curtains of the dining room, from the sapphire dress of his hostess to the red glass at the table, the color dazzled him. Within ten minutes he felt the beginning of a headache. He was amiable though. He still knew how, though what had once come naturally now cost him a degree of effort. The food was elegant and elab
orate and interminable: it killed his appetite as soon as he set eyes on it, but he smiled and listened to the conversation that went on around him. When he spoke he said just the right kinds of thing. He made himself agreeable in a hundred small ways, and reserved enough of himself for it to be noticed.
“I have a daughter of twenty,” he said, and when he received invitations for Dora to a dance, to tea, to a play—the ladies were conscious that they had sons to marry as well as daughters—he graciously shook his head. “She has not the stamina for London life. She lives quietly in the country.”
“Do tell us, Mr. Bellman—it is the reason we have all been so keen to meet you, and the answer to the mystery all London is talking about—who is the mysterious Mr. Black?”
The young woman down the table smiled at him, pink lips and white teeth, and her blue eyes gleamed with a teasing happiness. Her coloring was different, yet he was reminded of Dora, the way she used to be, and it was a shock to realize that his daughter must be the same age as this girl now, this laughing young woman, happy to have found a husband and wear cornflower blue silk to a dinner and be merry with friends.
“Yes,” others chorused in the room, “Who is Black? We are all so anxious to know!”
All the smiling faces turned expectantly toward him.
“Black? Black is only a word that sounds well with Bellman.”
The ladies were as delighted as if he had said something witty or graceful.
“Only a word!” Mrs. Critchlow exclaimed. “I am glad to know at last!”
“An assonance!” somebody suggested farther down the table.
“An alliteration!”
“A poem!”
They laughed. Bellman laughed. The conversation changed to something else.
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