The Hireling (13 page)

‘It isn’t the same,’ he muttered, ‘it isn’t at all the same,’

‘When do you feel lonely?’ Lady Franklin asked.

‘When do I feel lonely?’ Leadbitter repeated. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, my lady, but I feel lonely when you are not there,’

‘Oh, I’m so glad,’ said Lady Franklin, and then, seeing from his face that she had said the wrong thing, she corrected herself, ‘I mean I’m glad that you … well… like me enough to miss me.’

Leadbitter ignored this.

‘I miss you when you are not there,’ he told her, spacing out the words.

‘Oh, but I’m sorry!’ Lady Franklin said, doubling like a hunted hare. ‘I’m glad that you miss me, sorry that you miss me - oh, what do I mean?’ She looked at him despairingly. Accustomed to thinking of herself as missing someone, she could not imagine someone missing her — least of all Leadbitter, the man of many customers, the family man. ‘Don’t you think I ought to miss you?’ he challenged her. Then she knew that something was the matter, but she only knew it from the tone of his voice, and didn’t really link it to his words. So she answered the words rather than the voice.

‘I’m very sorry if you miss me,’ she said, trying to take the me-ness out of ‘me’. ‘We’ve been a lot together, haven’t we? But I thought your wife -‘

‘Forget her.’

‘And your family -‘

‘Forget them, too,’

‘But how can I forget them,’ protested Lady Franklin, ‘when you’ve told me so much about them? You even promised me that I should meet them,’

‘Forget them,’ Leadbitter said, violently. ‘They don’t exist - they’re all ballyhoo,’

‘Don’t exist?’ She didn’t understand him.

‘No, but you and I do,’

A naked, nameless need shone in his eyes. It might have been a cry for help, it was so urgent. It loosed the springs of pity in her; pity loosed her tongue; she cried:

‘Can I do anything for you?’

‘Yes, you can,’

The car slowed down, turned into a side-road and stopped. Leadbitter was no bungler in the arts of love. He tried no cave-man methods, but he well knew how to make a shock delicious, and make deliciousness into a shock. The shock and the delight were there, divinely blended; and Lady Franklin had closed her eyes in rapture before she opened them in outrage.

‘I must get out,’ she said.

Leadbitter didn’t answer.

‘I must get out,’ she repeated. ‘Please let me out, Leadbitter,’

Even in the bewildering tumult of his feelings, the surname struck him like a blow.

‘But you can’t get out here, my lady,’ he said. ‘We’re still ten miles from London,’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lady Franklin said. ‘I can walk, or someone will give me a lift,’

‘At least let me take you to a taxi,’ he said.

‘No, thank you,’ she said, still looking away from him. ‘I’ll find my own way back,’

‘Lady Franklin,’ he said, using her name for the first time, ‘is there nothing I can do?’

‘Nothing,’ she answered, ‘except let me out,’

Awkwardly unfolding his long legs he clambered out of the car, went round behind it so that he should not see her, opened the door and stood beside it, with squared shoulders and a wooden face, staring down the road.

‘Thank you,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘That … that will be all,’ she said.

Dismissed, Leadbitter regained the car, and backed it at a dangerous speed towards the main road. As he turned into it his eyes caught sight of her, moving slowly in his direction. She had nothing in her hand or under her arm; and suddenly he noticed her handbag and paper-bound guide to Winchester Cathedral lying on the seat by his side. For a moment he thought of driving on, so little did he want to encounter her again; but remembering the complications that would follow, if he did not at once return her property, he took it and went back to meet her.

‘You left these in the car, my lady,’ he said.

She looked up at him, startled, startled into a sudden nervous smile ‘So I did, so I did,’ she said, ‘thank you for remembering,’

Saluting her, which he had forgotten to do the first time, he strode off. Then he turned back once more.

‘Sure I can’t take you anywhere?’ he said.

‘No, thank you,’ she answered. ‘I shall be quite all right,’

‘I should be happier if you’d let me take you somewhere,’ he said, forcing out the words.

Not trusting herself to speak, she shook her head and he retreated.

‘My wife she is dying, oh then -

My wife she is dying, oh then -My wife she is dying I laugh till I’m crying

I wish I was single again.

I wish I was single,

My pockets would jingle,

I wish I was single again.’

The song haunted Leadbitter for days, and he sang it in his harsh voice, and deliberately out of tune, for he had an excellent ear, to do dirt on art, to do dirt on his feelings, to do dirt on Lady Franklin. For his first reaction was to be furiously angry with her. She had led him up the garden path, she had given him the soft flannel, and then when it came to the point she had turned him down. She had pinned his ears back for him, she had wrapped the rolling pin round him, and all because he wasn’t her class. She had talked a lot of blah about classlessness, and how it brought people like him and her together, but when it came down to brass tacks, she had disdained the opportunity of non-chastity that he offered, oh no, oh no; ‘unhand me, varlet.’ Well, let her get on with it. He would know another time.

They had deceived each other, but of the two, and at a deeper level than she, he was the more deceived. The wound to his male pride went very deep and there was no one to suck the poison from it. When he thought of the advances which his women customers had sometimes made to him, for which he had given them no excuse whatever, and which he had turned down with the greatest tact and delicacy, to spare their feelings (not to have done so would have been bad for business) he realized what a mug he had been. And a mug was the last thing he wanted to be or to be called: it was the ultimate degradation.

True, there was no one to call him a mug except Lady Franklin: there was no other witness of his discomfiture, he had seen to that. But would she keep it to herself? Would any woman? No, she would tell all her friends that he was a man unsafe to go out with and he would get a black mark and lose half his customers.

But again, would he? His cynicism, struggling to regain its hold, told him that some women would employ him all the more readily: and they should get what was coming to them, by God they should, the bitches! All women were bitches and Lady Franklin was the biggest bitch of all. He hated them in every part of their persons. Most women were so short in the leg that when they stepped off the pavement their bottoms bumped the kerbstone. As for Lady Franklin she was like a pregnant salmon, a pregnant salmon, he repeated to himself, pleased with the comparison, for Lady Franklin’s figure was her weakest point.

Memories of red-light districts came back to him, and the patter of solicitation. ‘Come in quick, you, Lofty! You, you short, low fellow! You, Ginger! You with the two warts under your chin - I know you! You haven’t any money -get away!’

For the first time since his adolescence he was haunted by images of obscenity: the mere thought of Lady Franklin, and she was seldom out of his thoughts, was enough to call them up. Army songs, songs he remembered himself, songs he had picked up from his father, made a ready outlet for his feelings. Once he had sung them with a grown man’s smile of indulgence for their innocent indecency: but now, coupled with the image of Lady Franklin, he sang them with savage relish.

‘I think of everything that I possess The lavatory is the best To sit in gentle bliss -‘

What do you think of that, my lady? Oh, Stephen, wouldn’t you rather we talked about cathedrals? But he wasn’t Stephen any longer to her, he was Leadbitter.

He didn’t blame himself in the least for what had happened, except as one blames oneself for having been a fool. When he remembered that he had started out that very day half meaning to make a pass at her, it didn’t change his view of the situation; indeed it made him feel all the more a mug, to think how the tables had been turned on him. Happiness! Happiness! That word had been for ever on her tongue. ‘You have made me happy, Leadbitter,’ And what had she made him?

It happened that for a day or two after the episode business was rather slack: fewer calls came to him, fewer calls came to his clerk, and some of those that came were cancellations. Lady Franklin, of course! She had been broadcasting his offence: she had been warning all her friends to steer clear of him. When he took up the receiver he could hardly keep the anxiety out of his voice; he adopted a placating, almost servile tone; when he booked an order he felt that it was the first he had ever received, and the last he ever would receive. He would have to go out of car-hire, he decided, and try to get a partnership in a garage. Thanks, Lady Franklin, thanks a lot. He warbled to the tune of Clementine:

‘Fetch the night-pan

Fetch the night-pan

Poor Pa is feeling queer;

Fetch the night-pan

Fetch the night-pan,

His end is very near.’

What do you think of that, my lady? I don’t like it at all, Steve; I think it’s very vulgar and disgusting. I would much rather talk about the great cathedrals of France. Only he wasn’t Steve, he was Leadbitter. ‘That will be all, Leadbitter,’

And it would be all: the last he would hear of her. For of course she wouldn’t pay her latest monthly account. She would snatch at the opportunity not to - what woman wouldn’t? - and how could he write and ask her to pay, still less sue her for it?

‘This man, my lord, made an indecent assault upon me in his car - his car! - my car, since I paid for it,’ (This was the first time since the incident that Leadbitter remembered Lady Franklin’s benefaction.) ‘And now he has the impertinence to suggest that I should pay his bill! I absolutely refuse to, and I hope every decent-minded man or woman who is unlucky enough to be his customer will do the same,’

Leadbitter persuaded himself that Lady Franklin would refuse to pay his bill, and was as angry with her as if she had already refused. He almost persuaded himself that her entire behaviour, from the moment when she first engaged him, had been framed and directed towards one end: to trap him into making love to her so that she might turn him down. He had never tried to stifle his hostile feelings towards anyone and would have thought it wrong to, except for prudential reasons, and he didn’t realize that he was making himself miserable by hating Lady Franklin, and if he had realized he wouldn’t have known why. He was not the first man, or woman, to have mistaken gratitude for love.

‘It was Christmas Day in the workhouse

And the eunuchs all were there Watching the Emperor’s maidens

Combing their pubic hair.’

Isn’t that a nice song, my lady? No, Steve, it isn’t at all a nice song, and I would much rather we talked about the cult of the Virgin Mary. Only of course he wasn’t Steve, he was Leadbitter….

Well, the question of the account would soon be settled one way or the other. March was nearly over. On the 1st of April (April Fool’s Day, as he grimly reminded himself), his secretary sent out Lady Franklin’s bill. She had made little use of Leadbitter’s services in March, very little use, and the bill was a small one, except for the last item: To Winchester, wait and return Ł8 10s. 6d. It was the exact fare: he had not added on anything for the insult. He hadn’t forgotten it, though.

‘And the oars were shining brightly

On the flashing stream,

And the whores were scrapping nightly -‘

‘Don’t you want me to go on, my lady?’

‘No, thank you, Leadbitter, I’ve heard quite enough,’

Two days later arrived an envelope, among the many envelopes, addressed in a handwriting that was strange to him. There was nothing surprising in this: what did surprise him was that the missive came from Lady Franklin, whose previous communications had all been typewritten, presumably by her secretary. In this instance she had, he supposed, addressed the envelope herself. And the cheque was signed not with the initial E, as her habit was, but with her full name, Ernestine Franklin. Comparing the handwriting on the envelope with the handwriting on the cheque, he saw they were the same.

Leadbitter’s first sensation was one of violent relief: he had not lost his money after all. The second was of relief, too, but was more complex. Had her secretary been away? She might have been; he couldn’t tell. But taking the two things together, the envelope and the signature, it didn’t seem like a coincidence. It seemed as if … as if she meant something by it, as if she was trying to tell him something. If so, it could only mean that she didn’t have hard feelings for him.

She had paid, paid on the nail as she always did; and done it graciously. For the first time his feeling about her was softened by regret. Not only was it regret for a lost customer, one of his best, and one that he could ill afford to lose. He could have kicked himself for making that stupid mistake. It wasn’t like him to take such a risk. Had it come off, had she yielded to his embraces, he might have been - who knows? - set up in life. Lady Franklin and her money were soon parted. But she was too inexperienced, as he might have known. The step was too big for her to take. Well, he had staked and lost. Playing for the thousands of her love, he had lost the hundreds of her custom.

Ernestine … Ernestine … He said the name over to himself, first parrot-wise, then with expression, almost as if he was calling her to him. It was an uncommon name, yet he had heard it before, heard it in a conversation between customers in his car. But he had heard so many conversations without paying much attention to them.

‘That will be all,’ Lady Franklin had said. It hadn’t been quite all: here was the cheque. But as he endorsed it, stamping it with the firm’s stamp, he felt the unmistakable sharp click of finality: it was all, now, and what a fool he had been. Women, you couldn’t trust them; they didn’t know what they wanted themselves. Steer clear of any entanglement with them, that was the first rule; and forget about them, that was the second. Leadbitter set about forgetting Lady Franklin. It would be easier to forget her now that he was no longer so angry with her - in fact hardly angry at all.