by A. L. Barker
Number fourteen was a café with the menu painted on the window. A man scraping off one of the items with a bread knife directed Bulow to a side door.
The smell of polish and old damp met him on the stairs sloping up into the dark without a name or an arrow to promise anything at the top. He climbed two flights before he same to a door with a frosted panel and ‘B. Mossman Elmo’ in Gothic letters.
Bulow walked in and found himself facing a woman who had a mirror in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other.
“It’s customary to knock,” she said.
“I want to see Elmo.”
“Have you an appointment?”
“No.”
“You’ll have to wait.” She peered at her chin, tweezers poised. “I’m afraid.”
It was a very small office, a partitioned-off portion of a big room. A door opposite, standing ajar, was labelled ‘Strictly Private’.
“Is he in there?”
“Your name, please.”
He stepped forward but she barred his way. “Your name.”
“Bulow.”
“What do you want to see him about? You can speak freely, I’m his confidential clerk.”
“My business is with Elmo. Get him out or let me in there.”
“Relax,” she said, “you’re in no state to talk business.”
“I’ll count up to five. Then I’m going in. One—two—three—” It was a mistake. She stood in his way and plucked another bristle out of her chin. “Four five—” It was his own courage he was counting out. “Five. Will you stand aside or shall I shift you?”
“You shift me.”
She did not smile, but he felt an invisible audience enjoying the joke. He called to the half-open door, “Why don’t you come out?”
“You’re making yourself ridiculous.”
She hadn’t got all the hairs out of her chin, he was close enough to count them. He felt as if he had strayed into her strong rancorous woman’s smell and would never get it out of his nostrils. He stepped back and she at once sat down at the desk and picked up a pencil.
“Your full name and address, please.”
“I came to ask questions, not answer them.”
“We can do nothing for you, Mr. Bulow, without co-operation.”
The inner door opened and a man came out. “All right, Fenella, I’ll take it.” He turned a neat, triangular face, tricky as a cat’s and finished off with a pencil-like moustache. “Good afternoon. You wished to see me?”
“It’s personal.”
Elmo’s moustache looked too brittle to stand the strain of his smile. “Everything is, isn’t it? Let’s go into my office.”
His office comprised more than two-thirds of the original room. It was carpeted in blue pile and his desk was bigger than Dollomore’s. Leather armchairs stood about and over the fireplace was a picture of Windsor Castle.
When Bulow refused the chair that was offered Elmo shrugged and sat down. “My name’s Mossman Elmo. There are two of us in town, so the Mossman is relevant. We haven’t met before, have we?”
He had polished hair and a scrupulous shine on his shirt collar and cuffs, but not on the dark cloth of his suit. That was new, though discreetly, so was his camel-coloured waistcoat.
“What’s been happening between you and my wife?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How much did she borrow?”
Elmo looked him in the eye without honesty. “I don’t know who your wife is and I wouldn’t betray a client’s confidence, even to her husband.”
“Clients! Is that what you call them?” Bulow leaned over the desk and appreciated how Elmo drew back. “You heard every word that was said out there, you know my name’s Bulow.”
“I have no one of that name on my files.”
“Prove it!”
“How can I?”
“You can show me your files for a start.”
Elmo closed the lid of his cut-glass inkwell. “Now what’s it all about, eh? What’s worrying you? I’ll help any way I can.”
“I don’t want help, I want the truth.”
“You’ve got it, my dear chap.” He mouthed slowly and deliberately, “I do not know your wife.”
“You’re a liar!”
The woman came in to stand at Elmo’s shoulder. “Mr Elmo is not in the practice of lying.”
“He knows my wife all right, he’s been giving her money.”
“Mr Elmo does not give money, except to accredited charities.”
“But he pays for her gin and Italians in the saloon bar at the Saltbox.” Bulow did not miss the lizard-like flick of her eyelid, nor Elmo’s reaction. There was no doubt who answered to who.
“It’s not true, Fenella.”
She said to Bulow, “I believe my husband.”
“Husband?”
“The essence of this business is privacy. We don’t employ staff from outside.”
“And trust,” said Elmo, “privacy and trust.”
Now Bulow could see that he was her talking doll which she washed and brushed and set up every morning, polished his hair and his shoes and his finger-nails; he was her finished product.
“I want to know what you’ve talked my wife into. You got her on your hooks somehow, if it wasn’t done here in this office it was done outside.” Bulow had a glimpse of where this might be taking him. He saw that the woman was on to it too, and she had it in her to break her product to bits just to give herself the job of putting him together again. “So you met her by appointment. Clandestine, and you didn’t even tell your confidential clerk.”
“The jealous husband—can you imagine a more objective witness?” Smiling hard, Elmo worked to draw her into his amusement. “I don’t know Mrs Bulow as a client or in any other capacity—Fenella will bear me out. We have no secrets from each other, it would hardly be practicable when we’re obliged to have so many from other people.”
“Someone’s lying.” Of the three of them—Esther, Elmo and the woman—the only one he could believe was the woman.
“I think you’re confusing confidence with underhandedness,” said Elmo. “There’s nothing crooked about my business. I am a financial executive—negotiator, trustee, adviser, economic expert, one-man bank, and these are all sound, respectable, worthy things.”
“Mossman,” said the woman, “don’t justify yourself.”
*
“What did you say that name was? Brown, Jones Higgins?” He said bitterly, “O’Grady?”
“What name?”
“The name of the man who’s supposed to have given you the money, Camilla’s money.”
“It was Mr Elmo, and there’s no supposed about it.”
“He says he never heard of you.”
“Says? You mean you’ve spoken to him?”
“I went to see him this afternoon.” He had seen it happen before, seen her turn a white side out like a poplar when the wind blew.
“Why?”
“I heard he was a money-lender.”
“Who told you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” If Mrs Elmo’s doll could hoodwink Mrs Elmo, Esther could do the same to him. The lie being technically sound, there was no other reason but wishfulness to question whether she could get her tongue round it.
“You went to check up on me?”
“On him in the first instance. It struck me that you might have borrowed money for that jazzed-up orange box in the front room.” He waited, so did she, until the silence went over to her side and he heard himself say defensively, “He’s a money-lender right enough.”
“I don’t know about that part of his business. He looked after Camilla’s money, I don’t know if he lent her any.”
“The point is, did he lend you any?”
“I told you, Camilla left me something and he arranged for me to get it.”
“He didn’t know your name.”
She said again, patiently, “What name?”
“Isn’t your name
Bulow?”
“He knows me as Esther Munn.”
He could have forgiven her for being triumphant, but he didn’t get the chance. She was hurt, in a withdrawn way, not turning to him for comfort. He said, “I’m sorry—” too soon for it to carry any weight with either of them. He looked at her deliberately, feature by feature because there was more than a face, there was a country, terms for living and a balance of the powerless: with her he made one whole. He looked because if she had not lied he was back in that country, under those terms, and he had to see what he had seen before, neither more nor less. “It was for your own sake I went.”
“You don’t trust me, that’s what I mind.”
He couldn’t be honest and admit that was what he minded too. “I was afraid you’d get into trouble over money. I was afraid you were afraid to tell me—” He was disgusted with his performance. “Oh, let’s forget it!” Esther rubbed the fingers of one hand over the knuckles of the other with a private, easing movement, and the small sound of her skin shamed him. He said gently, “Let’s try, anyway.”
She looked up. “I will try.” She had, of course, got tears in her face, but she was smiling unsteadily through them. “I’ve got something nice to tell you now.”
“Well, that’s fine,” he said heartily.
“You’ll never guess.”
“You found the top of my shaving cream.”
“Better than that!” The tears sparkled on her cheeks. “I’ve invited your Mr Dollomore to supper.”
“You’ve what?”
“I knew you’d be glad. I did it properly, I wrote a note. ‘Dear Mr Dollomore,’ I said, ‘I feel I know you because I’ve heard so much about you. Arthur and I would be delighted if you’d come to supper on Friday next. I would welcome the opportunity of making your acquaintance.’ And he wrote back, it came this morning.”
She handed him a folded paper. Two scrawled lines read: ‘Dear Mrs Bulow, I shall be delighted. Thank you for asking me,’ and the signature was ‘Hervey Dollomore’.
“Why did you do it?”
“It’s a good thing, isn’t it, to make a friend of him? You are glad, aren’t you?”
He could see, as if they were weighed out on the pans of a scales, tears one side and joy on the other and he knew it was up to him which way they tipped. “You won’t make a friend of him by asking him to supper. I told you that, I told you it wouldn’t do any good but it’ll do a lot of bad.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Of course you don’t, you couldn’t unless you’d worked in the factory. Dollomore hasn’t got a right or a wrong side to get on, but there are plenty at Rainbirds who have and they’ll give me a dirty name.”
“But he’s not God, any of them could ask him home.”
The scales were tipping, weren’t they tipped from a long way back, from childhood, towards disappointment, dismay and the wrong end of the stick? “Dollomore’s Management—that’s worse than God.”
“I see how important it is to make a good impression. I will try.” She blinked, breaking fresh tears on her eyelids. “That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?”
She was wide of the mark but he hadn’t the heart to tell her. The moment was a groove and there was something dud about his anger. “You’ll be disappointed, that’s what I’m afraid of.”
He took the evening paper into the front room where the cocktail bar was. The thing swanked at him, splitwood and buttoned plastic outdoing fumed oak and uncut moquette. He spread the newspaper on his knees and did not read it. He thought about her intentions, how wifely they were, and good—for some other wife, some other husband. The situation didn’t even fit where it touched them. But he must hold on to irrelevance: irrelevance was what he had married, if it pleased him then it must please him now. What right had he to grow out of her?
He felt hapless like a dog with tar on its feet—he had no right to that either. If anyone should feel hapless, it was Esther.
Her tears bothered him, childish tears he had always taken them for, but now they seemed so handy. She was not a child, if she was innocent it wouldn’t be like a child. If? He excused himself with a counter thought. Didn’t innocence have an edge? Didn’t it need to harden at some point in its own defence, so that sometimes it seemed more like a practical consideration than a state of mind? Was he asking these questions because he wanted to know or was he talking himself out of something?
He thought of her helplessly assembling and going over her right reasons for the wrong thing she had done, and humbly over his to find logic and some kindness in what he had done to her.
When he heard her coming he didn’t know what he could genuinely say, whether he was ready yet to comfort her, but his hands and feet were conditioned to it. They laid aside the newspaper and stood him up—in any case there was no other way of finishing it.
To his surprise she came in dry-eyed. She said, “I’ll have to have candlesticks for the table,” as if they were halfway through a conversation.
“Candlesticks?”
“Or I suppose I could put them in old green wine-bottles.”
“Put what?”
“Candles. If we had any old green wine-bottles.”
*
Bulow went in dread of someone finding out at the factory, someone who would broadcast it. Any of them would, come to that, and then he’d get a label. Labels stuck at Rainbirds because no one bothered to find out whether they had ever been applicable. And he could whistle, thereafter, for one natural friend or one uncommon enemy: they’d be solid against him.
He avoided mentioning the subject to Esther and he noticed how she chose her moments for mentioning it to him. She thought she was handling him, she thought she was going to handle Dollomore.
There was a likelihood that Dollomore would forget about the invitation, and if he did not, Bulow could either stop the nonsense by putting him off at the last minute—the more blatantly cock-and-bull the excuse the better—or he could refuse to be a party to it and go away to get drunk by himself.
“Everything will be ready by half-past six,” said Esther on Friday morning and she waited until he was going out of the gate before she said it. Bulow expressed himself by closing the gate as if it were spun glass. She might as well keep her illusion till the end.
He did not hear from Dollomore all day, in fact he had not heard from him all the week. There were only the two lines of scrawl to confirm anything. And the signature. Whatever went before that—‘Fee, fi, fo, fum’, or ‘I smell the blood of an Englishman’—‘Hervey Dollomore’ carried the weight of Rainbird Plastics and Bulow could, if he sat at it, winkle the whole evening’s fiasco out of the name.
At a quarter to six he started watching for Dollomore to leave. Perhaps he had left already for his club. He whiled away the time by concocting some last-minute excuses. ‘It won’t be possible to give you supper tonight, Mr Dollomore, my wife is having babies. We thought it would only be one, but it’s turned out to be quads, you know how easy it is to miscalculate that sort of thing.’
At five to six Dollomore rang through and told him to wait in the car park.
Bulow put on his hat and coat and went outside. It was raining, there were a few cars left on the cinders, including Dollomore’s oldish Daimler. Possibly nobody knew yet and if Dollomore did not talk, nobody would know. But that was a forlorn hope because Dollomore might come out with it any time. “Dining with our canteen manager the other evening—”, or in his brandy-brown voice, “Bulow has a nice home, nicer than mine, and a pretty wife—but comparisons are odious—” Anything to start the circus.
Headlights swinging out cut swathes across the rainy dark. Bulow stood well back in one of the loading bays.
Dollomore came last. He called, “Bulow!” and as he ran through the rain he reminded himself of a dog running to heel. He was damp from waiting so long but at least everyone had gone and he would not be seen getting into Dollomore’s car.
They swept through the gates,
then Dollomore sat back with two fingers on the wheel. “It was kind of your wife to ask me to supper.”
“You may think it rather an odd thing to do—”
“May I?”
“The fact is, she was disappointed you didn’t come before—you remember there was talk about having a meeting at my place and—well, she was rather banking on it.”
“I’m looking forward to this evening,” murmured Dollomore.
So far forward, Bulow thought nervously, he seemed already to have arrived and stopped driving. “The fact is, she still takes everything to heart.”
“How kind,” murmured Dollomore, He was in murmuring mood, sleepy and relaxed, too relaxed to be driving a car. Bulow peered at the rods of rain being snatched aside by the headlights.
“We go left here.”
It was a relief when they turned into the unmade road and had to slacken speed. The car swung them gently over the potholes. Bulow thought he saw Esther at the window and it struck him as both sad and comic that she should press her face to the glass for a long look at nothing.
But when she came to the door to greet them he saw that she had been looking neither at the dark nor the rain nor the lights of cars and she wasn’t looking at Dollomore now so much as at Father Christmas.
“Charming, charming,” Dollomore was saying, as if syrup had been poured over them all.
She did look pretty, lit up—in the pure sense—with the colour of her convictions, rosepink convictions because she was so sure the best was going to happen.
“I wanted to know you,” she said, and knowing him was spellbinding her already.
Dollomore, sandwiching her hand between his, asked “Why?”
A plain question at such a fancy moment would have given him the advantage over most women, but she could say plainly, “Because I admire you,” and, before he could speak again, “Everyone admires success.”
“Or a better brand of failure.”
Dollomore dropped her hand and Esther smiled, indulging a great man’s modesty. Bulow helped him off with his coat, he could have told her that Dollomore had never said a truer word.
