Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  Lizzie came to stand in front of him. Shy or embarrassed, she did not meet his eye and fell silent. She took the calico pieces for the front of the waistcoat and laid one on his chest, pinning it at the shoulder to its corresponding back half.

  “Go on with the song. Please.” His voice was gruff to his own ears.

  The red in her cheeks deepened. She was so close he saw the moist inner part of her lips as they opened and closed.

  “Still the bird of night complaineth,

  (Now, indeed, her song is pain)

  Visions of my happy hours

  Do I call and call in vain?—

  Hark! the echoes cry again,

  All in vain!”

  She pressed the other half of the waistcoat front to him, and when her voice broke and missed a word or two, Bellman discovered that he did know the words after all. A song taught by drunks so long ago in the Red Lion and nine-tenths forgotten, now emerged from the past. Words that had evaded him came to his lips one after another, at the exact moment he needed them. Conscious of Verney in the next room, he murmured with as much tune as he could muster under his breath:

  “Cease, oh echoes, mournful echoes!

  Once I loved your voices well;

  Now my heart is sick and weary—

  Days of old, a long farewell!

  Hark! the echoes sad and dreary

  Cry farewell, farewell!”

  Lizzie had finished her pinning. She was watching him sing, as he had watched her, and her hands were clasped at her breast. It would be the easiest thing in the world to take her hands between his own.

  I should ask her about Black, he thought. He had been meaning to do it for—oh! a long while.

  “When I met you before,” he said, “the night before the shop opened,” and his path diverged unexpectedly from his intention, “there was a baby’s crib in your room.”

  He saw her flinch, under the skin. “I had a little girl, once. Her name was Sarah. She—”

  Lizzie halted and swallowed. Her eyes filmed with water; it was held tense, trembled. The tear dropped and glazed her cheek, then another, and her face was brilliant with sorrow, and at the same time—Bellman was utterly dazzled—she smiled. Whatever it was she might have said was quite unnecessary for her face was radiant with the memory of joy and pain, and he was spellbound. The glance she gave him then was a gift, beautiful and frightening, and he longed to accept it.

  Something was brimming in him. He felt a twitch at his lips. What sweet relief there would be in weeping now, with a song to speak for him and a woman to weep with . . . His eyes ached, the pressure behind them increased, and at the moment his vision broke into a brilliant dazzle, he saw—or thought he saw—movement at the window.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “At the window. A bird, was it?”

  “I didn’t see.”

  In the moment of surprise, his hand had found hers.

  There had once been a William Bellman who knew how to kiss a woman. Who knew how to offer and receive and the comfort of an embrace. Who could draw another human being close to him and feel a heart that was not his own beat against his chest.

  But I am with Black now, he thought as he scanned the sky for whatever had interrupted them. The comfort of grief was out of bounds, and it was too late for sorrow.

  He released Lizzie’s hand. She turned away to her sheet of measurements.

  “Will you have the pockets as before, Mr. Bellman?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Be careful of the pins then, as I take it off you.”

  He stood without moving while she edged the pinned pieces down his arms. She folded the model loosely and rested it over her arm. “I can do it by tomorrow. Will lunchtime be soon enough?”

  “There is no rush.”

  Lizzie went back to the sewing room, and Bellman went back to work.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Will!”

  It was so long since anyone had called him by this diminutive—or even by his Christian name come to that—that at first he didn’t realize it was he who was being addressed. He almost walked right by, and it was the expectation in her gaze that slowed him. Then the use of his name caught up with him, and he halted.

  Her face was familiar and unfamiliar. At Bellman & Black he knew everyone, but this was Whittingford high street. He couldn’t think for the life of him how to go about attaching a name to this face that clearly knew him so well. She smiled at him, asked him how he was, and he struggled to reply till he knew who . . .

  “It’s Jeannie Armstrong. Jeannie Aldridge as I used to be . . . What a long time it’s been . . . I can’t blame you for not knowing me. I’ve changed.”

  The Jeannie he used to know was visible in this woman. She was older, fatter, grayer. It wasn’t only time that had changed her though. Some other thing had happened to darken her eyes and line her face.

  He listened to her speaking of her children. Rob, the eldest, who now delivered the bread to the mill and to Mill House. “Thank goodness we have him, that’s what I say. Though he’s still only a lad, he’s taken on the whole running of the bakery, deliveries and the lot, and I don’t know how we’d have coped without him. Your Dora has been a godsend. She has been teaching him the bookkeeping, and more than that, in truth she is doing it for him, till his brother leaves school and can help him more. I can’t be in the bakery and looking after Fred, can I? And now that he needs me more and more, I can hardly leave his side. Our daughter is with him now, while I came out to fetch—”

  From her talk he put together the facts: Fred was sick, Rob the son was moving prematurely into his father’s shoes, his own daughter was helping them out. He faintly recalled one of Ned’s reports, he had an idea he had been told the baker was unwell but that deliveries were being maintained. He seemed to remember learning that Dora had learned bookkeeping from Ned and was making herself useful in the mill office a few mornings a week. The reality of it seemed somehow unexpected.

  Jeannie’s chatter had come to an abrupt halt as she was struck by an idea.

  “Why don’t you come and say hello? I always knew he would make something of himself, that Will Bellman. That’s what Fred always says. Saw it in you, he reckons, when you were boys together. And you gave him that big chance, the bread for the mill breakfasts. It was the making of us, that was. He never forgot that.”

  The blue of her eyes was no longer the cloudless shade it had once been.

  An image came to him out of nowhere: the river, sedges grown to their tallest, Jeannie’s white legs spread on the green of the riverbank, and her black boots still on her feet.

  He saw her remember it too. She saw he had remembered.

  “Come and see him, Will,” she said. “It would mean a lot.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I will.”

  ***

  “So you are working with Ned in the mill office now?” he asked Dora at breakfast.

  “I have been for the last year and a half.”

  He nodded. “Do you like it?”

  “I do.”

  “And the bakery bookkeeping?”

  She nodded more slowly, frowning. “The Armstrongs were thinking of taking young Fred and Billie out of school to help out. I can see why they felt it necessary, but it seemed shortsighted to me. With another year or two of education they can be so much more useful in the future. Rob can manage the bakery side of things in the meanwhile, if he has someone to take care of the paperwork for him.”

  “So you are doing it. Are you being paid?”

  She smiled. “We don’t pay for the household bread. And we have the bakery’s delivery cart for expeditions on Sundays. And when Rob falls asleep at a picnic or in your old chair when he brings the invoices over, I have a model to draw for an hour at
least and he doesn’t move an inch. That seems a fair exchange to me.”

  He nodded. “In any event, it would be a costly annoyance to have to get a new baker for the mill if Armstrong’s went under.”

  “I hear that you are going to see Mr. Armstrong before you leave for London?” Dora asked, looking up from her marmalade. “Rob mentioned it to Mary when he delivered the bread this morning.”

  Bellman suddenly frowned and stared. She was right. He had promised.

  He shook his head. “I would have. But now . . . “ He gestured in the direction of the letter at his side. A letter from Verney, setting out all the numerous and varied issues that had arisen in his short absence, for him to peruse on his journey so that he would arrive fully informed and ready to act. He felt a sudden sense of urgency. It was imperative that he should get back to London at the earliest opportunity.

  “I am needed in London,” he explained

  The need to hurry gripped him now. He rose from his chair, still wiping his mouth with his napkin, all before he had even swallowed his last mouthful of toast.

  “What is the matter with Mr. Armstrong, anyway?”

  Dora’s eye and voice were neutral. “He is dying.”

  “Let them know I’ll go next time,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken, and he dropped his napkin on the floor in his haste to reach the door.

  He opened the door and fled.

  “Next time will be too late,” Dora told the door as it swung shut.

  She took another bite of toast.

  ***

  Bellman made notes in his calfskin notebook and acted upon them. In his next letter to Ned he advised him of his decision to pay for a Bellman & Black funeral for the baker who had provided the mill’s breakfasts for so many years. Would Ned please notify Mrs. Jeannie Armstrong of this, at the necessary time, and also act as intermediary between Mrs. Armstrong and Mr. Latimer, funeral director in chief at Bellman & Black to make the arrangements according to the family’s wishes. He added a note to the same effect in a regular memo to Mr. Latimer.

  A few weeks later, Bellman was processing a pile of papers on his desk in his standard fury of activity. One particular invoice brought him up sharp.

  What was this? An invoice for a funeral provided free of charge by Bellman & Black? Name of Armstrong . . .

  Fred!

  His blood jumped in alarm. His heart made ready to beat faster. Something blocked his throat.

  With a scrawl that was even hastier and less legible than usual he signed the invoice off and moved quickly on to the next item.

  He concentrated hard, very hard on his papers. He worked fast and then faster still. Every minute and every second and every fraction of every second he worked. When the pile of papers he was working on was reduced to nothing, he took up an absorbing piece of analysis from his accountant that he had been meaning to evaluate for some time and sat up with it till the small hours, making notes and listing queries. At the end of it he wrote a full assessment of the argument. Then he found a few other bits and pieces to do. By the time it was morning and Verney came knocking, he had forgotten all about his blood and his heart and his throat, and Fred’s funeral was a detail from the distant past.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Verney placed the month’s accounts summary on his desk together with the related files. There was a touch of hesitancy, reluctance even, in his manner. “And I thought you would want to see this,” he said, placing a printed paper on top.

  Bellman glanced at it: the broadsheet was folded so as to show a letter from one of the literary names of the day, criticizing the excesses of funeral spending.

  “Another one?” Bellman cast his eye over it. “It only serves to dissuade people from going to the charlatans and brings them to our door. All to the good.”

  Verney nodded. “I’ll be off then, if you have no further need of me.”

  They said good night.

  It was the last day of October, and ignoring the bursts of rain against the dark window, Bellman sat down to his desk with relish. Every last Friday of the month his heads of department wrote their accounts of the last four weeks’ trading: the rises and falls in sales of different lines, the factors that had influenced the takings. Most of this was known to him already, from his thrice daily tours of the shop in trading hours; still he enjoyed this hour after closing time alone with the reports. Whether bonnets were up or down, and why; the sudden run on serpent motif jet; stationery takings up and the difficulties with an Italian supplier of gloves—his interest in these bread-and-butter aspects of the business was unflagging. A big funeral—two months ago it had been the funeral of the Earl of Stanford—could boost the profits of almost every department. As he read, questions occurred to him, points of action, things to follow up, so here and there he noted something in the margin: a question mark, an arrow, a word or two. He forgot nothing.

  From the written reports he proceeded to the chief accountant’s figures. He need do little more than glance at the page. If there was an error it would jump out at him, obvious as a statue in the middle of a dance floor. He looked over the rows and columns, everything looked all right. It was only the bottom line that gave him pause for thought. He peered at it more closely, then held the paper a little farther away. He dropped the paper onto his desk and stared at the point where wall met ceiling. What was going on?

  It had been another good month, hadn’t it? An endless stream of customers who grieved, purchased, paid, and left consoled. For every customer who left the store, another entered. For every customer who came out of mourning, another was just entering it. Those that came out of mourning would, as likely as not, one day go into it again. There was a strong feeling—and why discourage it?—that to keep mourning garb “for next time’ was asking for trouble. And when his customers died and could never spend another penny, why even then—especially then—they contributed to the success of Bellman & Black . . . Let the poets and the novelists write what letters they would, let Household Words print a dozen such letters a week, it made no difference. People continued to die, and when they died the bereaved wanted their mutes and their lined coffins and their new black gowns . . .

  Nothing had changed. Boys had used thousands of yards of paper and of string to wrap parcels to send to all corners of the country. Girls had stitched thousands of yards of black thread into black crepe and merino and cashmere. He had seen the invoices for the thread and the string. All was well.

  He picked up the figures and looked again. Level sales. No increase on last month.

  Bellman frowned. Was this leveling off the effect of the market having reached its natural limit? If so, it would be no great disaster. They could go on forever at this level. Was it possibly—his chest contracted—the sign of something else? Was this flat month the precursor to a downward turn?

  Bellman stood by his chart, pen in hand. He rose to ink in his takings and hesitated. It couldn’t be! Verney’s balletic fingers must have made a mistake. A decimal point astray somewhere. A three that wanted correcting to an eight. He would get him to right it tomorrow.

  He put his black pen back in its holder.

  What target should he set for next month? What was happening in London? The temperature was falling. It was cold, and soon it would be colder. People would try and stretch their fuel, and the poor would have to do without it altogether. It would be a choice between logs for the fire and something for the pot. Snow would cut people off in the country. Food would be harder to come by in isolated areas. The well-off were not immune to winter. Even in their furs they would shiver through Sunday services. In icy streets, feet would fly out from under people; bones would be broken; infections would set in. Illness would harness the weakening effect of winter to its own ends.

  Bellman took up his blue pen to fix next month’s target. It hovered over the chart. For the first time he imagined the l
ine extending itself into a downward curve. He tried to wipe the image from his mind and decided that, in any case, it was a job that would be better left till morning, when he and Verney had had a chance to go through it all properly.

  ***

  At some black hour of the night the curve of Bellman & Black’s sales figures etched itself on the darkness and Bellman found himself studying it again. His brain continued making calculations—had never stopped, it seemed. Haberdashery plus millinery plus stationery plus funerals plus . . . March plus April plus May plus June . . . Apoplexy plus influenza plus consumption plus old age plus heart trouble . . . The additions went on and on, he lost his way in the lists of figures, had to go back and start again, because he had lost count—

  But what was it that he had forgotten?

  The curve rose and rose and rose, ever more steeply, July, August, September, every month above and beyond Bellman’s most ambitious predictions. He went to place his sales target on the graph and an invisible hand closed over his, forced it down, beyond where he meant it to go.

  So low? That’s impossible! he thought. But a dark certainty bled into him: the sales would fall and fall again.

  Down and down went the figures, one transaction after another, half a yard of ribbon and a baby’s tombstone, a jet hat pin and two dozen yards of black merino, four servants kitted out in mourning, and mutes, eight, for the funeral of an earl, and—what had he forgotten?

  Down and down, the curve drawn smoothly on the endless sky over Whittingford, down and down, toward the old oak tree—

  Bellman was awake.

  His heart was beating fast, and he had an obscure sense of something unpleasant receding from his mind as sleep retreated.

  The match spat and flared and he was grateful for the company of the little candle. He drank some water. He would get up for a while till he felt better. Perhaps the room was stuffy.

  In his nightshirt and nightcap he stood looking out. All was quiet, all was dark. Beyond the grand facades of Regent Street were other streets, smaller, more modest, with rooms over the shops where butchers and booksellers and tobacconists slept with their wives and their children. And farther out, the densely populated areas where whole families shared a single room and a house might be home to a hundred people. People. Living and dying, it made no difference, they were all customers.