by H. E. Bates
In his own office the telephone rang.
Answering it, he heard the crackling echo of Miss Montague’s voice. He had already spoken to her once that morning, to convey the regrets of convention. Now he heard her asking if he would go up and see her. He said he would be there in half an hour.
Hot air pressed down on him in a series of dusty waves as he spoke into the antiquated wall mouthpiece. Hanging up the receiver, he made one more effort to open the window, banging it with his fist, so that the office would be fresh when he came back. The window would not budge.
He went downstairs, gave instructions that he would be out till 1.30, and then backed his car out of the cinder-yard running up by the works entrance. He calculated that he could give the man named Brierley twenty minutes and still arrive punctually for Miss Montague.
Denmark Street ran along the old part of the town, by the now culverted river, just before a steep rise in the land. Beyond it short streets rose steeply to the district popularised by the pre-war manufacturers, who had built large red-brick laurel-encompassed houses in what had then been cheap land. Brierley’s house was number eighteen in a row of thirty-six. They were old stone houses rendered over with thin pumice-coloured cement, against the dampness of the river flowing partly underneath them.
Brierley’s door was opened by a young man of twenty-six or more, whose face to Stacey seemed partially familiar. He had a screw-driver and a coil of insulated wire in his hands, and inside the room Stacey could see the man he took to be Brierley, sitting at a table strewn with the parts of a dismantled wireless set.
‘Mr. Brierley?’ Stacey said. ‘I dropped in to tell you that Mr. Montague was dead. Perhaps you heard.’
Brierley got up from the table. He was dressed in engineer’s blue overalls, a big man, with a greasy face and bright grey eyes that were like polished machine bearings. ‘Come in a minute,’ he said, and Stacey stepped straight from the street into the room, telling Brierley, as he automatically wiped his shoes on the door-mat, who he was.
‘I’ve got to get an obituary notice, and a pretty big one, for to-morrow,’ he said. ‘You were with Mr. Montague a long time and I thought perhaps you could tell me something.’
‘Yes,’ Brierley said, ‘I could tell you something.’ He looked at Stacey with eyes that were as bright but as dead as steel. Then suddenly they were alive, angrily set in motion. ‘For a start,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what to write at the top o’ that notice. Write – “A Bloody Good Job”. Write that.’
Stacey became aware again of the aperture of light in his mind. He looked at Brierley’s eyes. He remembered another man he had interviewed, in Madras, after a railway accident in which the young girl he was about to marry had lain for two hours with crushed legs. He saw the same energy of pained fury generated in Brierley’s eyes with the same inability to escape, to spring out of the latent flesh and direct itself. It occurred to him suddenly that the balls of Brierley’s eyes could slot into the pattern made by Rankin’s pins: the two were connected, component, springing from the same hatred.
‘Sit down,’ Brierley said. He looked at the young man. ‘You’d better go and get that detector valve,’ he said. ‘We shan’t get much forrader without it.’
The young man went out, and Stacey, the impression of familiarity still with him, sat looking after him, semi-consciously. Then Brierley sat down and they looked at each other across the litter of tools, screws, wireless parts. Brierley’s eyes were still.
‘Anything else you’d like me to put?’ Stacey said.
‘Yes.’ Brierley said, slowly. ‘Find out the bloody truth and put that in.’
‘I’d like to. But – ’
‘Put that kid in,’ Brierley said. ‘Yes, him. My daughter’s kid. – Montague’s kid. That’s one bit of truth you can put in.’
Stacey sat quiet, his mind clear. ‘And another bit?’
‘Add up,’ Brierley said, ‘the interest on a hundred and twenty-five quid for thirty-six years.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
Brierley said: ‘Montague came here and started in a small way in 1892. In 1899 he was a bit rocky and he asked if I’d lend him some money. I’d just had a hundred and fifty left me by an old uncle up in Sheffield – so I lent him a hundred and twenty-five. Well, I was green and never asked for an agreement and he never suggested it. When I asked for repayment he said, “I’ll make you foreman and give you a ten shilling rise and pay it back that way.” Like a fool I took it. Then he got on a bit and started the paper and I asked him if he’d give my daughter a job. She was eighteen then. Well, he gave her a job in the office – meant late hours, but she liked it. Then you see what happened.’
They looked at each other, the bright machine eyes of Brierley, livid with the furious but directionless power of the revived hatred. ‘But you did something about that?’ Stacey said. ‘Made Montague pay?’
‘No,’ Brierley said. ‘He denied it. Then he half admitted it, but said that if we done anything I should lose my job. Well, there was only one printing works in this town then.’
There was nothing, Stacey felt, that he could say; but in his mind he began to see the small steel balls of one circumstance and another falling into the holes made by the imaginary pattern of Rankin’s words. He picked up his hat and got up to go. Brierley got up also.
‘You know I can’t put it in,’ Stacey said.
‘Yes, I know! And he knew. When you get back to the office you look up the files. Read the bloody editorials. I set every one of ’em up for nearly forty years. Read the council reports, Moral Welfare, every damn thing, also who gets the biscuit every time? Montague, always Montague. He knew there were things you couldn’t print.’
Stacey could not say anything. He shook hands with Brierley. The large heavy-veined hands of the older man were trembling. Then Brierley opened his mouth as though to say something else, but refrained, and Stacey knew that there was still something else, something important and perhaps painful, which had not been said.
He went out into the street, into the hot sunshine. He drove the car up the hill, coming to the Montague house in about five minutes. Set back behind a hedge of laurel and a small plantation of lime and pink may and covered almost entirely with virginia creeper, the house revealed no character. He walked up the gravel drive, pulled the brass door-bell, and was shown finally into the drawing-room, where Miss Montague was waiting for him. The blinds of the room were drawn and the whole effect – the yellowish light, the rarefied silence, the semistale smell of upholstery, all reminded him of the East. He had interviewed many second-rate opera singers, in many such shaded and faded rooms, in Calcutta.
Miss Montague, a straight hipped, thin woman already all in black, with a square gold locket at her neck, looked ill. She struck him as being a woman who had for years concealed the fact that she thought for herself. Her mind was like a prayer book with a safety clasp: tight-shut, secure, hiding something, hiding perhaps the texts of old resolves and ambitions and even desires. She looked hungry, not merely emotionally and mentally, but physically. She looked as if she had lived, for the past twenty years, on sandwiches of india-paper. He remembered Rankin, the half egg for breakfast, the wartime story of meanness. It astonished him to see no meanness in Miss Montague’s face, but only, uppermost, a look of hungry martyrdom.
He felt hungry himself, having breakfasted at his lodgings at eight. The hot sunshine had tired him, and he would have been glad of a cup of coffee.
He sat down on the sofa, carefully, between the geometrically placed cushions of dark plum velvet, and Miss Montague sat in a chair opposite. They had already exchanged the formal regrets over the telephone. Now she simply said:
‘It is very good of you to come. This afternoon I expect the relations. I have been on my feet since half-past four.’
He heard in the voice the same skin-and-bone expression as he saw in her face. For want of something to say, he threw out a large hint about some refreshmen
t.
Much to his surprise she took it. She said: ‘Perhaps that’s what’s the matter with me. I haven’t eaten since last night. I came over faint a few minutes ago. Could you eat something, Mr. Stacey?’
‘I feel so hungry,’ he said, ‘I could eat a plate of fried eggs.’
She looked startled. Fear and temptation, with some kind of hesitant courage, filled and emptied her eyes.
‘You could?’ she said.
‘I could!’
She seemed to think, to weigh the consequences of a decision. Then: ‘I believe I could,’ she said, ‘myself.’
She got up and pulled the porcelain bell-handle by the fireplace, and when the girl answered, said:
‘Oh, Emily. I think I could eat some breakfast now. Mr. Stacey is going to have some with me. We are going to have bacon and eggs. Have we some rashers?’
‘Only two, Miss. It’s Thursday.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I never eat more than one rasher,’ Stacey said.
‘I could do some fried bread, Miss,’ the girl said.
‘Fried bread,’ Miss Montague said. ‘You like fried bread, Mr. Stacey?’
‘I love it.’
‘Could you eat one egg or two?’
‘Well, thank you,’ Stacey said, ‘I think I could eat two eggs.’
‘And some tea, Emily, please,’ Miss Montague said. ‘On the small table in here.’
As they sat waiting for the meal to come, Stacey explained his intentions: how he would devote the two whole middle pages of the paper, suitably black edged, to Mr. Montague, outlining his career, his achievements in spheres of social activity. He explained how he had already sent out his reporters to get, from important local people, tributes to Mr. Montague’s life and work and how he would print these tributes in three or perhaps four columns. He explained how he himself would write the obituary notice, the tribute that would express the loss of a paper, the employees and the community.
‘But,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to do anything you don’t approve. Also there must be many things about Mr. Montague which you could tell me. Things which would help me to write the article.’
She sat looking at the wall with tired, hungry eyes, careful not to look at him. He waited for her to say something, but she sat completely silent. He recalled Rankin, Brierley, who had both spoken so readily. He saw how hard it was, one way or another, for her to say anything at all.
He began to question her, gently, in an impersonal fashion that would not hurt her. He thought he was correct in saying that Mr. Montague was seventy-one?
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘He had come to the town in 1892? I just want to verify these facts.’
‘Yes, in 1892.’
‘He had not been married at all?’
‘No.’
‘Had Mr. Montague any other interests outside the town and the paper? Had he any interests in London?’
‘No,’ she said. Then she altered her mind. ‘Well, if you call it an interest, he used to go up to London every Friday to discuss affairs with an old friend. A Mr. Clarkson.’
‘Do you yourself know Mr. Clarkson?’
‘No,’ Miss Montague said, ‘I never met him.’
Very shortly afterwards the breakfast came. The girl said she had put the fried bread on a separate plate. Miss Montague thanked her and then lifted the covers and began to help Stacey to eggs and bread and bacon. She was looking now at the eggs, and he saw in her eyes again the same ebb and flow of guilt and temptation, pursued by courage, that he had seen before. Something made him say:
‘You know, I don’t think I can eat two eggs, after all, my mother always used to say my eyes were bigger than my’ – he wanted to say ‘belly’, but couldn’t – ‘stomach. You eat the other.’
She hesitated and he saw her lips trembling: he knew she was crying with anxiety, inwardly, frightened. He coaxed her: ‘You haven’t eaten since last night,’ and then, at first slowly, then quickly, in a fashion meant to be quite debonair, she took the egg.
She began to eat. At first she ate daintily, with circumspect rabbit-movements of her thin lips, then more quickly, then quite rapidly, the golden egg-icicles hanging on her fork and lips and dropping down before she could lick them off. He saw the bacon fat shining, forgotten, on her chin, the shine very like the look in her eyes, a look of gleaming, unadulterated pleasure. And he knew that he was watching her, for the first time in her life, eat two eggs off the same plate, at the same time.
They each drank three or four cups of tea. Miss Montague at last sat back with an expression of almost bloated repletion. Two eggs, a rasher and three slices of fried bread, washed down by tea, had puffed, very slightly, the starved bagginess under her eyes. She was full up, blown out, and the effect on her was like that of a small dissipation. She got out her handkerchief and held it to her mouth, and Stacey saw her stifle a series of small belches behind it.
The look of repletion in her flushed eyes reminded him of something, but he could not think what. But suddenly he thought of something else: he realised that she had told him nothing of Mr. Montague himself. So he put another question: ‘What had been Mr. Montague’s relation to the arts? Music, for instance, books, painting?’
‘Music he didn’t care for,’ she said. ‘Nor painting, I think. He read a lot, at night, in bed. Most of his books are in his study upstairs.’
‘You care for music?’ Stacey said.
‘Oh! yes, very much. Very much. I – ’
She stopped. The thought, the sentence and the resolution to tell him something all collapsed. Her mind shut itself up, tight, behind its prayer-book clasp, so that nothing should fall out.
‘I’m afraid I can’t be much help to you,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘He never took me very much into his confidence.’
He was about to ask another question when he remembered something. The remembrance was evoked by the puffed full-stomach look in her eyes. He had it clear, now, what it was he had been trying to remember. It was a recollection of Mr. Montague himself, at the anniversary dinner of the Local Fire Brigade. He saw Mr. Montague eating at the long white table like one of a litter of forty shirt-fronted pigs, sucking the food into his mouth nervously, as though in fear he would be pushed from the trough. The look in and under his eyes, puffed and slightly flushed, was exactly the look on Miss Montague’s face: a look of hunger, in his own case intensified by greed, satisfied at last. He saw the pork gravy rushing down the bony chin, the grease like oil on the moustache ends, the eyes slightly protuberant, as though in an effort to magnify the food on the plate.
He came back to the drawing-room. He knew that he had already asked her enough. He put a last question:
‘May I see Mr. Montague’s books?’
‘They’re mostly under lock and key,’ she said. ‘He prized some of them greatly. But you can go up, of course.’
She led him up the once white but now bone-coloured stairs. Up above, it was silent, and he could feel the presence, like a long-held breath, of the dead man. Except for this, the whole house seemed empty, a house of bone, hollow, from which flesh and marrow had been starved out. In this bare skeleton he pictured Mr. and Miss Montague living, for forty years, on half an egg a day.
She showed him into the study. ‘You just look round the books,’ she said, ‘while I go and speak to the maid. I have so much to do.’
When she had gone he looked round the study, saw the rows of dull books, theological, political, memoirs of London journalists, on the leather-fringed bookshelves. The room held two bureaux, with wooden cupboards on top. In one of the cupboards Stacey saw a key and curiosity made him turn it and open the cupboard and look inside. Again, many books.
Stacey did not touch them. He stood looking at their titles. Not quite astonished, he read: The Symbols of Eroticism, Love and Beauty, The Art of Love, Full Womanhood, Love and Woman, Seventy Art Studies (From Life), Erotica Ancient and Modern. There were others, perhaps a hun
dred or a hundred and twenty volumes. Stacey did not touch them. He locked the cupboard, hesitated about the key, then left it in the lock and went downstairs.
‘He was a great reader,’ Miss Montague said, when she met him at the foot of the stairs.
‘Have you a photograph of him?’ Stacey said.
‘There is a very good one of him, taken at the Church Conference,’ she said.
‘Yes, I think we’ve got a block of that.’
‘I daresay there were others,’ she said.
‘As a young man?’
‘Perhaps I could look something out,’ she said, ‘and send it down to the office?’
He thanked her, said he would see that she saw a proof of his article by eight o’clock on the following morning – the paper would not be on the streets until afternoon – and said good-bye. She looked at him sadly, with the habitual hungriness ingrained into her bones and flesh by years of under-nourishment, of acquiescent and perhaps, he thought, terrorised starvation. Then just as he was going, she smiled. It was the furtive semi-guilty smile of someone who has done something a trifle reckless, in a momentary spasm of abandonment. The yellow splash of egg-yolk had dried vivid on her chin.
Driving down the hill, back to the town, he only just remembered his promise to Rankin. He turned off from the hill and, in about three minutes, came to Lime Street. ‘Mr. Montague owns that property’, he remembered.
He looked at the property. Two rows of dog-kennels ran parallel down a steep slope. A notice prohibiting heavy traffic stood at one end. Kids were playing, snot-nosed, on the street and on the two-feet pavement; shoe hands sat on the door-steps, in the shade, waiting for the afternoon buzzers.
