A Private View (2 page)

He had learned to look after himself from an early age. When his father dropped dead at Kempton Park, and Lilian arrived with a cheque, saying, in a tone which denoted triumph, ‘I suppose George will be getting a job now?’ he had known that his life was doomed. He had left Reading University after only one year, had entered the cardboard box factory as a junior clerk, and had cared for his mother until her death. It was at this point that the voices had first manifested themselves, urging him to run for his life, to sell the house, to request a transfer to the London office (which, in those days of easy employment, had been granted), and to all intents and purposes to disappear from sight, only to reappear some years later as a successful and trusted employee in the enterprise which had begun as a cardboard box factory and was now a prosperous conglomerate, the cardboard boxes having diversified into all forms of packaging, with a subsidiary which specialised in office materials. As these became more sophisticated, both staff and turnover increased, until the firm, known simply as Rogerson’s, after the family that still owned it, was quoted as one of the more conspicuously successful achievements of the new commercially minded Britain.

The day that Putnam had walked in, a spry spare little accountant from Birmingham, the thought had occurred to Bland that they might be friends. He had asked Putnam whether he had found somewhere to live (he had) and whether he would like a quick meal on the way home. Putnam had accepted with alacrity, and over dinner in an Italian restaurant they had discovered numerous points in common. Thereafter life was harmonious. It had seemed that at last he would feel free, no longer obliged to dissemble or to
apologise, and this freedom was to him so intoxicating that he had looked for nothing further, content with his work, his growing comforts, and the friendship of Putnam. In due course it was Putnam’s approval that replaced the voices in his own head, voices which he now regarded as the poor companions of a starveling past, when he was still a prisoner, waiting for his sentence to end, as it had done.

Putnam had been attractive to women and had subjugated the likeliest of the organisation’s female employees, but he was discreet about his adventures, and managed never to give offence, even when he was effecting a changeover from one woman to another. Refreshingly, he conducted his affairs without indulging in confidences, as would have been easy to do, and so no woman had ever come between the two of them. Putnam had had his affairs, and Bland had had his girlfriend Louise, or had done so until she married a doctor and went to live in the New Forest. He had known her since they were both adolescents in Reading; he had loved, and in fact still cherished, her peaceful fastidiousness, qualities almost unknown to him at the time, together with her white blouses and her frequently washed hair. They had pursued their love affair in borrowed flats and later in hotel rooms, finally in his own small flat, Louise’s eternal good nature rising perpetually above the often sordid arrangements. But at the point at which their long-delayed maturity could be assumed and taken for granted, and their love affair already had reached and passed the twenty-year mark, she had told him that she was getting married, still in that placid tone in which she was wont to address him. For a time he had felt alarmed rather than upset; he had relied on Louise to keep him company and eventually to become his wife, although
he had told her repeatedly that he was not ready for marriage. Indeed he was never ready, was still not ready even now. She had got tired of waiting, she had told him uncomplainingly. Her husband was much older than herself and something of a crank, but within a year Louise had had a son, and was thus able to tolerate her husband’s relatively early death with much of her usual equanimity.

Bland had visited her, in Lymington, on hearing of this event; he had in fact read of it in
The Times
and had telephoned her straight away. In the course of his visit, which he had intended to be sympathetic, he had found himself distracted by Louise’s son, then a boy of six, and repelled by the child’s ugliness. Philip was untidy, restless, overpoweringly friendly. His teeth seemed broken, although they were in fact merely irregular; he spoke in a barely comprehensible monotone and laid about him with hot grimy hands. Louise was devoted to the boy; Bland knew that he had lost her, and resolved not to pay another visit. But their lives were too interwoven for one of them to lose the other. And now, many years later, when they were almost old, he telephoned her, or she telephoned him, every Sunday evening. He was still half bored, half comforted by her calm plaintive tone, and paid as much attention to it as he might to a bird outside his window. She gave him news of her son, now a successful marketer of computer games. He did little more than listen. They knew each other so well that conversation was hardly necessary. Once each had ascertained that the other was still alive there seemed to be nothing more to say.

The telephone call went with a certain Sunday evening melancholy, the light fading, only a rare car passing, windows reluctantly springing into bloom as the weekend was,
by unspoken consensus, agreed to be over, and the working week about to encroach on what little liberty was left. But he had loved the working week, loved his large immaculate desk, looked forward to the Monday lunch with Putnam at the club, happy to espouse whatever outrageous proposition Putnam had thought up over the weekend. Holidays were planned, but not very seriously; more seriously was the retirement project envisaged, that long journey to the Far East, by the slowest route they could devise, and all the time in the world to talk it over.

It had never come about. Putnam, the sweat standing out on his forehead, had concluded their last Monday lunch with, ‘I seem to have a pain,’ this said with an air of ghastly hilarity. Bland had taken him in a taxi to the hospital, and when he returned to visit him that evening knew, from the altered cast of Putnam’s features, that he was going to die. ‘Looking after you all right, are they?’ was all that he managed to say on that and subsequent occasions, but he bought him fine cotton pyjamas, arranged for a barber to go in and shave him daily, for Putnam had been immaculate for as long as he had known him. Later there had been bottles of Floris cologne to hide the smells of which Putnam seemed mercifully unaware, and that was the saddest time of all. ‘All right, old chap,’ he had said, laying a soothing hand on Putnam’s forehead. There was nothing more to say. The fact that Putnam refused to believe in his imminent death broke the thread of effortless communication that had sustained their friendship and their life together. Bland felt this keenly: it was the single factor that more than any other brought home to him the fact that he was on his own.

And then Putnam’s heartbreaking will, leaving him the
money he no longer wanted or needed! He had, as his Aunt Lilian would have said, done all right for himself. He had risen through the ranks to become Head of Personnel; he was thought to be good with people, an impression, since confirmed, dating from a tiny incident in his early days with the firm, when he had dealt with Mrs Bertram, Kenneth Rogerson’s personal secretary, who had had something resembling a breakdown and whom he had proficiently escorted home to her large gloomy flat off the Marylebone Road. He had glimpsed an unmade bed through a half open door, and heard an unfed cat mewing angrily in an icy kitchen. He had taken the groceries day after day when his work was over, and, more delicately, had put in train the machinery for her retirement (a respectful word in the right quarter). He had even, in a small way, been responsible for her pension (another respectful word). The memory filled him with shame, as did most of his supposedly good deeds. Oddly enough he had not minded at the time. Kenneth Rogerson had noted his efficacy, and perhaps something more: his dutifulness. It had not seemed out of the way to Bland to perform the same tasks for Kenneth Rogerson himself, after the latter’s stroke. He had visited him weekly, at his flat in St James’s, again with groceries, and with the Sunday papers. Rogerson had been irascible by that stage, but after the man’s death Bland had found himself richer by a respectable portfolio of shares. This too filled him with shame. He remembered in this connection not his own kindness but an initial humiliation, the disastrous occasion when Rogerson, thinking to do him a favour, had arranged for him to have a room in a flat belonging to his niece and nephew, a brother and sister for whom he professed to have no time and little liking.

‘Punch and Alfreda Rogerson, my brother’s children. We don’t get on,’ he had said, apparently without regret.

Bland had still been naïve enough to ask eager questions.

‘Punch? What an unusual name,’ he had said.

‘His name is Peregrine. Naturally he dislikes it. In many ways he has always been problematic. However, that need not trouble you. I’ll telephone him. Perhaps you’ll do the same.’ A piece of paper was handed over.

Bland, newly arrived in London, had accepted the offer eagerly, and that same evening had gone round to the flat in Radnor Place with his suitcase, bought in Reading just prior to leaving Reading for ever. The door had been opened by a very tall, very thin man, with a look of radiant goodwill playing around a weak mouth.

‘Punch Rogerson,’ he had said. ‘My sister will be in later. Come in, come in! Your room’s over here. You’ll have to excuse me; we’ve got a meeting here this evening. Care to join us?’

‘A meeting?’ Bland had queried, his suitcase on the floor beside him.

‘Prayer meeting; my sister Alfreda will fill you in on the details. I’m thinking of joining an order, you see. You are a believer, I take it?’

But before he could answer the front door had opened again, and Alfreda Rogerson, as tall and thin as her brother, came in, followed by three women and two men, all of them talking in rather loud voices. These voices had continued to make themselves heard until long after dark, interspersed with bursts of high-pitched laughter. At some point Punch Rogerson, drunk with his own merriment, and also, it seemed, with whisky, had knocked on the door of Bland’s room and invited him to join them. He had been rapidly
introduced: ‘Jamie, Caroline, Anna, Nigel, Cressida.’ He had nodded, embarrassed. He felt tired and hungry, but found himself with a large glass of whisky in his hand. It was his first contact with the rich. He noticed how well they all looked, as if doctors and dentists had vied with each other to keep Cressida and Nigel, and indeed Anna and Jamie, in perfect condition since childhood.

‘We usually end with silent meditation,’ said Alfreda crossly, ‘but as it’s your first evening … By the way, if you think of joining us, as I hope you will, we can put you in touch with Father Ambrose. Our people will take care of everything.’

‘Everything?’ he had asked, bewildered.

‘That is if you decide to stay,’ she said.

He had left the following morning, having spent most of the night composing a letter telling them of other plans, which he left on a console table in the hall. It was six-thirty; he had walked, with his suitcase, until he had found a workman’s café, near Paddington Station, where he had breakfast. At nine o’clock he was at a local estate agent’s. At nine-thirty he was at the bank arranging a loan. By the end of the week he was in his own tiny flat in a large red-brick building over Baker Street Station. When Rogerson senior enquired how he was getting on he had told him that he had found a place of his own: no further details.

‘Very wise,’ Rogerson had said. ‘You have a mortgage, I suppose? Well, if you are in any need …’

He had not finished the sentence, and Bland had never reminded him of his extremely vague offer. It had taken him years to pay off the loan, years of doing without, of living modestly but uncomplainingly. He sometimes thought that
these years of careful budgeting, careful to the point of sacrifice, had cost him Louise. He had never at any point blamed her for leaving him. By that stage he was too conscious of his real advantages for that. His most precious gain was liberty, a fact of which he was well aware. And in any case Louise’s departure was not rancorous: she was, and had ever since continued to be, thoughtful and loving. He was grateful for this too. It was, all things considered, a creditable relationship. And ever since then he had only to pick up the telephone to hear Louise’s voice, still full of concern for him. She was, he knew, very slightly boring; perhaps that was why he had not married her. But kindness in a woman had always struck him as a precious quality, and she had always been kind. What he felt for her now he would have described as esteem, although they had nothing more to say to each other. They were linked by their long history, two aged siblings who retained a common language, which they tried, with only partial success, to apply to their now separate concerns. If she disappeared, or rather when she disappeared, there would be no one left who knew him as well as he knew himself.

Seated at a café table, in the syrupy warmth of out-of-season Nice, he reviewed his life and found it to be alarmingly empty. It had been built on flight, he saw, flight from an uncomfortable childhood, an unfairly victimised adolescence, an atmosphere of tension and contention, his father drinking too much, his mother ever handy with reproaches. If he had sought liberty, his own liberty, as a method of vindication for those clouded years, then surely he had gone about the only way of achieving it, although his life, by the standards of most normal people, must appear dim, limited.
Who, in these volatile days, stayed in the same organisation for forty years? Who could boast only one long-term—in fact embarrassingly long-term—love affair? Who, at his stage of life, managed without a car, a second home, a flutter on the money markets, or a little property speculation, as did most of the people he read about in his newspaper, and indeed some of the men he had known in the firm, men at the same level of seniority as himself, or even a little lower? Who remained unmarried, or, as they said nowadays, without a partner? Who enjoyed a friendship of rare quality with another man which managed to be entirely sexless? Who was as dull as he was? And was this not the consensus of those who knew him?