I Shall Not Want (50 page)

As he stood there, his own hand outstretched, he was aware, suddenly aware, of a new truth that dismayed him. It was a truth that cut his life in two. Mary herself, he now realised, was a part of the old life, the other life; she was another figure from the shadows.

There was a mirror behind the chair in which she was sitting and he saw the image of himself in front of him. That was not a young man, either, who was standing there. It was a man whose face beneath the greying hair was lined and heavy. The eyes were still deep and powerful; but the skin beneath them had already puckered into tiny pouches. It was the face of a man in which the spirit is just a little stronger than the flesh; and at that moment John Marco, the unrisen counter-jumper, seemed the happier man.

But Mary was speaking to him and he turned away from the portrait in the mirror.

“I expect you wonder why I've come here,” she was saying.

“I told you you could always come,” he answered. “I'm glad you remembered.”

The words sounded dull and stupid; they were not like real words at all. It wasn't in this way that he talked to Mary.

“There wasn't anything else to do,” she said wearily. She paused for a moment as if hesitating to go on any longer and then added suddenly: “I've tried, but it's no use. I can't go on any longer.”

He drew another chair up alongside her.

“Tell me,” he said.

It was all so pathetic and so obvious when she told him; it was what anyone but a woman must have known would happen. Mr. Petter had left behind him in the bank the round sum of eighty-five pounds as a legacy to his wife and child; and when the manufacturers had been paid and the undertakers had claimed their share of the riches, there remained some twenty-two pounds on which, with the help of Mr. Kent, to face the world. And the twenty-two pounds had vanished, squandered in odd shillings and half crowns to make life more cheerful. And even Mr. Kent at last had been unable to assist any longer. With his eye-sight half gone—he had frittered it away fiddling about with his beloved clockwork in the evenings—he could now do little more than sit behind the counter of his shop waiting for a customer to come in and buy something. But there were no buyers any longer for guinea watches with Swiss movements that wound up with a key, when the market was full of five shilling bits of machinery from America; and the jewellery that he sold was heavy, old-fashioned stuff of the kind that no one wore nowadays. He was going to shut up altogether, Mary said, if things didn't improve somehow.

John Marco leant forward when she had finished. “Don't worry,” he said, “I'll help you.”

“You're very good,” she answered. “I knew I could rely on you.”

“Ask for anything you want,” he said.

His voice was kind, but as he said it in his heart he was impatient. He wanted the whole transaction to be over, wanted to be able to forget again. The sight of her aroused anger within him as well as pity. This grim, respectable poverty was the price of folly. If she had come to him, when he had offered himself, he could have saved everything. It would have been her house that they were sitting in; her bedroom that looked down on the trees and gardens of the Square.

“I don't want you to give me money,” Mary answered. “I want some work to do.”

“Work?” he asked. “But you haven't been trained for anything.”

“I could serve in the shop,” she said. “I'd be careful.”

To serve in the shop: to have her by him all day as a reproach! That, least of all, was what he wanted. Besides, people in shops liked the assistants to be young; all the girls in John Marco's were young. A widow with half her mind on her child all the time wasn't the kind of person they employed there.

“No,” he said. “I'll pay you what the others get. But I don't want you to have to work for it.”

Mary paused.

“It's generous of you and it's kind,” she said. “But I couldn't accept it. Thomas wouldn't have liked me to.”

The mention of Mr. Petter—it was as though even in death he still stood between them—disturbed him. “So she did love him,” he said inside his mind. “She did really love him.”

He shook his head.

“There's nothing in the shop,” he said. “There won't be anything now until Christmas.”

“I see,” she replied.

And from the way she said it he knew how often in the past months she had received that kind of answer.

She got up and slowly began buttoning up the neck of her coat.

“If you hear of anything,” she said, “will you please tell me?”

John Marco stood there looking at her. It was her hand in particular that he was watching. She was holding her bag—it was a small, cheap one—but her little finger was cocked enchantingly in the air as it had been on that afternoon so long ago now when they had both been young, and both in love, and she had poured tea from her mother's silver tea-pot.

“Don't go,” he said under his breath. “I'll find something for you.”

“You will?”

For a second her face lit up again as he had known it: her smile had not grown tired like the rest of her.

“Come round to the shop in the morning,” he said. “I'll tell Mr. Lyman to find a job for you.”

“Thank you, John ...” she began, but she was interrupted.

The door opened and Louise stood there. She had a new gown on and she looked cool and handsome and well-cared for.

“John,” she said, “we've all been waiting.”

But when she saw that he was not alone she withdrew again.

“I'm sorry, my dear,” she added. “I didn't know you had a visitor.”

Mary had gone away again; she had slipped out quietly, scarcely stopping to say good-bye to him. And the guests had gone too by now: it was late. John Marco was standing in the big drawing-room alone with Louise.

“Who was she?” she asked suddenly.

John Marco started.

“Only someone who wanted a job in the shop,” he answered.

“And did you give it to her?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

She came over and sat on the arm of his chair.

“That's all right,” she said lightly. “You needn't worry: I'm not jealous. I had a look at her.”

The Two Little boys in primrose-coloured uniform had at last outgrown their fancy dress and been replaced by two other little boys; and they in turn had been transferred to the packing-room along with their predecessors, and there were now two others who stood there. But in a sense they were still the same little boys: they were simply ageless twins, two diminutive dwarfs dressed like toy soldiers, who stood at attention and opened the big swing doors and bowed when they were spoken to, and defied Time.

And the shop assistants were magically the same, too; they were all of them still young, with gleaming hair and small waists and pretty faces, even though the original ones had long since left to get married, or had gone back to keep house for their fathers, or had fallen out with Mr. Hackbridge. They seemed a separate species, these girls, everlasting and impersonal; a new race of women who never grew any older than twenty-five.

It was John Marco who had altered. In the mornings, the long climb from the front door up the broad, circular staircase to his room, left him panting and exhausted; he now travelled up in the hydraulic lift instead. They were still novelties these lifts; frivolous shoppers used to go up and down in them simply for the prodigious attraction of the thing.

Tired or not, however, John Marco had never for a single day neglected that ritual tour of inspection of his. But he spent less time on it now. He had entirely given up the old, hated business of going behind the counters and seeing whether the boxes themselves were being kept tidy. It was enough, he considered, that the assistants should be reminded that he, the pivot and governing
intelligence of everything, was still about among them. And so, every day, the heavy figure of John Marco still went marching through the rooms every forenoon, a symbol to all the truly ambitious young men in the business of the kind of greatness that retail drapery holds in store for its few and chosen.

His hours at the business were still as long as ever. And while the assistants were passing out light-heartedly down the staff-staircase at the back, the light in that row of windows at the corner of the building was there to remind them that, for one man at least the day's work was not yet over, and the real running of the business was still going on.

There had been a time when the work that John Marco did alone with Mr. Lyman after the others had gone had seemed the most pleasant hours of the day: those columns of figures from the Counting House which every month grew larger and fatter and more complicated, had once appeared to him the reward for the whole day's labours. All his cleverest moves, his best buying, his most astute manoeuvres of salesmanship had been made when the rest of the shop was in darkness. But lately a kind of stale-ness had settled down on him. And when the door opened to admit Mr. Lyman with his charts and ledgers, and he looked across at the corner of his desk and saw the top-heavy trayful of papers all to be read and decided upon and replied to, his heart failed him.

It seemed that in creating this teeming business with its brilliant windows and its brigade of polite assistants and its loaded warehouse, he had somehow built a cage from which escape was impossible. And he was the one man in the whole firm who was trapped in it; that was the nice irony of it all. Anyone else could put his hat on his head and take up his gloves and umbrella and walk out of the front door, singing. But he couldn't do that. He was stuck there forever, getting steadily older and richer and more tired.

On those evenings when he worked late, really late that is, Louise no longer sat at home waiting for him as she had done in the early months of their household. They had been together for more than five years now and the silence and absence of company on these evenings had got on her nerves; she had explained that she was one of those people who must have others around her all the time for her to feel really happy. But now that they had plenty of friends, it was all so easy, so simple. There was a Colonel Carbeth and his wife—he had married an actress from the States—and they kept open, noisy house over on Campden Hill; and the Coughlins who had made all their money in tin and now lived in bright, metallic splendour in Lancaster Gate; and the Burnhams who were Jews and were very busy already getting their money out of theatres and putting it into cinemas; and the Hansells and the Clyde-Dawkins and the Henriques. There were also the various smooth-faced young men with glossy manners—John Marco could never remember their names and even wondered, as they were so much alike, whether they actually had any—who came to the house when they were entertaining and sometimes asked his permission to take Louise out to the theatre—and then on to supper somewhere afterwards. He always let them do it (though he had his suspicions that, with one or two of them at least, it was Louise who generally paid); and in a way he felt rather obliged towards them for their attentions. It was the sort of life that Louise liked and he was not a man who could spend his evenings, even if they were free, sitting night after night in a stall at the theatre.

This evening, in particular, he felt relieved that Louise had someone to occupy her; he had told her earlier in the week how late he would be, and she had simply shrugged her shoulders and said that in that case she supposed that she might as well accept someone-or-other's invitation to take her out to supper. He had asked her who it was, he remembered, and then could not have listened when she
told him. But there he was, this anonymous young man, risen up from nowhere to entertain her just when he was wanted.

John Marco had got into the habit of calling the board-meetings in the evening so that the directors could get on with their work by day. At first, when he had started them, Mr. Hackbridge and Mr. Lyman and even Mr. Skewin had raised vague, apologetic objections, saying that their wives and families wanted them at home. But John Marco had brushed that kind of talk aside. And Mr. Hackbridge, and Mr. Skewin, and Mr, Lyman had now put aside all thoughts of whist and music halls and pleasant hours at the fireside, and had agreed to give up the last remaining portion of their leisure.

It was while he was waiting for the other directors to come filing in that John Marco walked across to the big cabinet in the corner and drew out the heavy decanter that he kept there. Strange how reassuring it was simply to feel the hard surface of the glass under his hand and see the shining amber surface of the whiskey ripple and break as he moved it. He knew now as he held the decanter in his hand what he had doubted earlier, that he would be able to sit there for two or three hours longer as the evening unfolded itself, listening to the timid suggestions of Mr. Skewin, and the warnings and cautions of Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge's forced helpfulness. And he knew, too, that he would as usual be cleverer than the others, turning their pitiful little ideas inside out for them, showing them how business was slipping through their very fingers simply because they weren't smart enough to close on it, putting up his own brilliant proposals.

Mr. Hackbridge was the first to arrive and John Marco observed with irritation that the man looked tired. His whitish, straggling hair was brushed the wrong way and his tie had not been straightened since the afternoon. What was the use, John Marco asked himself, of being inspiring to a man who looked in need of forty-eight hours uninterrupted sleep? He liked people round him to look
fresh and energetic, no matter how tired he himself was feeling. But Mr. Hackbridge's fatigue—and, poor man, he had been on those flat shambling feet of his ever since nine o'clock in the morning—was not the least of the evening's irritations. It was Mr. Lyman who was the sore. He entered with one of his stultifying account books under his arm and said in his thin, decayed voice, as soon as they were all seated, that he was afraid the money situation was no better.