The Hireling (11 page)

‘Oh yes,’ said Leadbitter lugubriously. ‘She’s as happy as a sandboy,’

‘But don’t you want her to be happy?’ Lady Franklin asked.

‘Of course I do,’ said Leadbitter, who hardly knew what he was saying. In another minute he would give the whole show away. Furtively he stole another look at Lady Franklin, as a schoolboy might at his crib, and at last his imagination began to work. ‘I do want her to be happy,’ he said, ‘but not too happy, if you see what I mean,’ ‘I’m not sure I do see,’ Lady Franklin said. ‘Well, she thinks that because we’ve got this money - I didn’t tell her where it came from, of course -‘

‘I thought you did tell her,’ said Lady Franklin, puzzled.

‘No,’ said Leadbitter firmly. ‘I told her I won it at the football pools,’

‘But why?’

‘Because she might have been jealous,’

‘I see,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ She glanced at Leadbitter to whose appearance one could only deny the word beauty because the soldier in him repudiated it - and realized, perhaps for the first time, that he was a man of whom a wife might well be jealous. Leadbitter waited for her reaction.

‘Perhaps you were right,’ she said. ‘I … I ..,’ her voice faltered and died away. How explain that Mrs Leadbitter the chauffeur’s wife, had no need to be jealous of Lady Franklin? Leadbitter noticed her hesitation, but did not guess its cause.

‘My wife is of a jealous disposition,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t know why. But what I was going to say to you, my lady, was that now we’re so much better off, thanks to you, and not the football pools,’ he added jokingly, ‘she thinks that everything in the garden’s lovely. She’s forgotten about Stuck Street. She’s bought new sprauncy clothes for the children and herself, she calls on the neighbours, she’s out half the time and doesn’t answer the telephone, and when I start cribbing she just laughs - that’s what I mean by being too happy,’

‘I see,’ said Lady Franklin, not seeing that the parable was meant for her but aware of the cloud on Leadbitter’s strong features. ‘I told you, didn’t I - I think we agreed - that money only alters the form of one’s troubles,’

‘Don’t think I’d be without it,’ said Leadbitter, hastily. ‘It’s made all the difference to me, my lady. What I meant was, that being so happy, I can’t do for her what I used to do, she’s grown a bit independent, so to speak. Whatever I feel like, she’s still happy,’

Lady Franklin thought a moment and saw to her dismay that her happiness might not be a boon to others, to Leadbitter, for instance, to whom she owed it. Smitten with contrition, she exclaimed:

‘Oh, but you mustn’t think that! Happiness does make people selfish, I dare say, but so does sorrow. Wasn’t I selfish when you first met me?’

It was the most intimate thing she had ever said to Leadbitter.

‘I wouldn’t say that, my lady,’ he said carefully. ‘You were a bit shut up in yourself, like we all are at times, and I..,’

He paused.

‘Go on,’ said Lady Franklin.

‘I sort of tried to help you out of it,’

‘You did indeed,’ said Lady Franklin, thinking again of Leadbitter the liberator and unaware of the warmth of her words. ‘And now that I am out of it, don’t you like me better?’

‘There’s not so much for me to do, my lady, now. It isn’t quite the same,’

‘But of course it is! I rely on you more than ever I’ cried Lady Franklin, conscience-stricken, feeling she had treated Leadbitter very badly. Just because his feelings seemed so hard to hurt, she was the more afraid of hurting them. ‘I want to hear about everything that has happened to you since … since we were last together,’

Put like that, it sounded very intimate. Again the Leadbitter family history fled from his mind.

‘Where was I?’ he asked gruffly.

‘Don and Pat had just escaped chicken-pox, and Mrs Leadbitter - Frances - was being a little bit more social than you liked,’

‘Oh yes,’ said Leadbitter, in a discouraged voice. ‘Well, after that -‘ he began heavily.

The recital dragged. In spite of, or perhaps because of, Lady Franklin’s nearness, his imagination would not feed his tongue: it halted: and Lady Franklin, though she listened with ardour, prompting him with her eyes, was secretly a little bored.

But all the more did she feel guilty towards him; he was her benefactor and she had neglected him; and when they got to Winchester she said, on a sudden impulse:

‘Now this time, please, you really must come with me into the Cathedral. I insist on it! I shall feel quite hurt if you don’t!’

He took off his peaked cap and dropped it between the front seat and the back seat, out of view. Lady Franklin had not noticed this manoeuvre; as he opened the door she looked up and saw him standing bare-headed.

‘Why!’ she exclaimed staring up into his face, ‘I’ve never seen you without your cap before! I shouldn’t have recognized you! You look quite different !’

‘Do I, my lady?’ Leadbitter fixed on her his riot-quelling eyes. Then with a burst of confidence he said, ‘I’ve worn a peaked cap nearly all my life. As I was going to be with you, I thought -‘

She finished the sentence for him.

‘You’d rather be in mufti?’

He nodded.

‘Well, I must say it suits you!’ Lady Franklin said, not disguising from Leadbitter the man the admiration she owed to Leadbitter, the Perseus, the deliverer. ‘Not that your cap doesn’t suit you, but now -‘ What should she say? - ‘Now I feel I really know you! It’s a great shame,’ she added, ‘when anyone has hair as nice as yours, to cover it up I’

Leadbitter’s dark hair waved naturally and grew down to a peak on his forehead. Like the rest of him, it was subjected to rigorous discipline, and only waved on sufferance.

Still feeling she had hurt his feelings and must somehow make amends, Lady Franklin said:

‘You look quite another person! More, more .. ,’ ‘human’ she was going to say but stopped herself and took another tack. ‘Less, less - as if you had all the cares of the road on you!’ And as they began to walk together along the street she added: ‘How confusing it must be for your wife, to keep your two selves separate, or should I say, keep them together!’

‘I expect she gets used to it, my lady,’

‘You always say that! But hasn’t she ever told you the difference it makes?’

‘Well, she has said something about it once or twice. She did this morning. I think she likes me better like this,’

Lady Franklin studied him again.

‘I think I should, if I were she,’

‘Well, that’s another thing you have in common with her, my lady,’ Leadbitter said smiling.

‘Sometimes I almost feel,’ said Lady Franklin, ‘that we are the same person!’

‘If that’s all right by you, my lady,’ Leadbitter said, ‘it’s all right by me,’

Lady Franklin was going to answer when the vast, sprawling bulk of the Cathedral blocked her view, and awed her into silence.

Winchester was the first cathedral that Lady Franklin had visited since her deliverance. Overwhelmingly it was borne in on her, with that thrilling enlargement of the spirit that the moment of entrance to a cathedral gives, that this visit was different from the others: it was a visit of thanksgiving, not a visit of intercession. But how could she give thanks, with Leadbitter towering over her, on a scale with the Cathedral itself, stiff as a soldier on church parade, and as resentful? He was looking towards the High Altar as if it was an enemy position that he wanted to blow up. Why had she enticed him inside when he would so much rather have stayed outside? A centaur on four wheels, he was utterly out of place in a church. She could not ignore him, or leave him to ramble about by himself; he had not the most elementary notion of sightseeing: he was waiting for orders. If she dropped on her knees to ease her heart of its burden of gratitude and thankfulness, would he follow suit? She could not imagine him kneeling; and how could she pray against his prayerlessness? But there he was, and but for him, she reminded herself, she wouldn’t be free and happy as she now was, in the clear, able to refresh and renew her spirit with every chance impression and emotion that played on it; she would still be her own prisoner, condemned to think only one thought and feel only one feeling. Had Leadbitter been the answer to her prayer? If so, Heaven had chosen a strange agent to rescue her, but what more appropriate than that he should now be at her side?

‘Would you like,’ she asked him timidly in a church voice, ‘to … to take a look round?’

‘Certainly, my lady,’ he answered promptly and loudly. ‘Anywhere you say,’

Thus given the freedom of the whole building she couldn’t think of anywhere to go.

‘Well, this is the nave,’ she said, ‘it’s one of the longest in England, if not the longest. The whole Cathedral is the longest, that I do know___’

The notion of length, how abstract, how geometrical it was. For any idea of beauty or religion it evoked she might have been speaking of a clothes-line.

‘It does look pretty long, my lady,’ Leadbitter said, measuring the great vista with his practised eye. ‘I should give it a couple of hundred yards at least. I’m judging by a running track, of course,’

‘How clever of you to know,’ said Lady Franklin.

‘I could tell you the exact length,’ Leadbitter volunteered.

‘How?’

‘By stepping it,’

Lady Franklin realized that the need for action had become imperative to Leadbitter.

‘Oh do,’ she said.

Off he strode, and she sank down on her knees, nor did she omit Leadbitter from her offering of praise and thanksgiving. Indeed, she might have been praying to him as well as for him; for when after a timeless interval during which her thoughts had wandered in many directions and sometimes faded out altogether, she looked up and saw his tall figure approaching, he seemed to incarnate the mood and intention of her prayer. She rose to her feet guiltily as if it was unseemly to be caught praying in his presence.

‘I make it a hundred and eighty yards, my lady,’ he said. ‘Not bad, considering those old monks had none of the facilities that we have, and it was all done by strong-arm stuff,’

Lady Franklin made a mental note to tell him it was not all done by strong-arm stuff, but in the meantime she must try to initiate him into the joys of sightseeing. The dimensional interest of the building was exhausted: besides, cathedrals are not made to measure, but for the greater glory of God. For the greater glory of God! How that phrase thrilled her! A month ago it would have meant nothing to her: it would have given out the dull, muffled sound that all her thoughts gave. Now each thought had its own value, its special contribution to her happiness. Surely among them was one that she could share with Leadbitter?

‘Jane Austen is buried somewhere here,’ she said, ‘at any rate there is a tablet to her. Shall we go and look for it?’

‘By all means, my lady,’

How accommodating he was!

They searched in vain and had to ask directions from the verger.

‘Oh thank you, thank you,’ Lady Franklin said and after some fumbling, for her money was never quite where she thought it would be, although spread over continents there was so much of it, she pressed a coin into his hand.

‘I expect these chaps do pretty well,’ Leadbitter observed, ‘what with Americans and so on. All the same, if it meant spending all my days in here -‘

‘Really, you are incorrigible!’ Lady Franklin said. ‘Now read me what it says about Jane Austen.’

Putting one hand behind his back, he squared himself in front of the tablet. When he had finished reading, Lady Franklin said:

‘I don’t think she was kind-hearted, do you?’

‘I couldn’t say, my lady,’ Leadbitter said cautiously. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she wasn’t,’

‘Why?’

‘Because with one or two exceptions,’ and his voice faintly underlined the words, ‘ladies aren’t very kind-hearted, in my experience,’

‘Oh, would you say so?’ Lady Franklin said, made thoughtful by the compliment. ‘Perhaps we haven’t a very good name for it,’

‘It makes the others stand out,’ said Leadbitter obliquely.

Lady Franklin couldn’t but lap up this repeated dewdrop.

‘How sweet of you!’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t deserve -But Jane Austen had many qualities more valuable than kind-heartedness. At least, more valuable to posterity,’

‘I expect she was a tartar in her time,’ ventured Leadbitter.

‘Do you rate kind-heartedness very high?’ asked Lady Franklin, and knew that she was fishing for another compliment.

‘I do, my lady. I rate it very high, higher than’ - he looked round for something to compare it with - ‘higher than … well… a cathedral, for instance,’

Lady Franklin shook her head, but saw herself, fleetingly but most agreeably, as something of greater value than Winchester Cathedral or Jane Austen.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to let you off. Let’s go down to the transepts - they’re older than this part - less rigid, freer, grander somehow. I’m sure you would enjoy the transepts,’

‘I’m sure I shall, my lady,’ Leadbitter said. He doesn’t know what transepts are, thought Lady Franklin, as side by side they moved towards the crossing, so how can he enjoy them? But he will know, in a minute, and I mustn’t forget how many things he knows that I don’t know!

The thought that Leadbitter knew more than she did filled her with happiness - such happiness as in her schooldays she had felt when she knew something that the other girls did not know. How is it, she asked herself, that every experience I have now turns to happiness - even this unhopeful one of trying to make Leadbitter enjoy the transepts? Am I entitled to it? Would Philip mind, that I can think of him and not grieve for him? Have I become heartless? Am I wicked? Is this euphoria as groundless as my depression was? - more groundless, since I then had something to feel depressed about and I have nothing, really, to feel happy about? Is it the conviction of wellbeing that sometimes goes before an illness? Experimentally she summoned up her black mood but it would not come: as little could she raise a cloud in her own sky as she could have raised one in the heavens. And now the Norman arches were spreading to right and left.