The Hireling (15 page)

Why had he done it, he sometimes asked himself, for he was not naturally a gambler. He didn’t bet, not even on the football pools. Gambling was a mug’s game, he thought. He didn’t need that kind of stimulus, any more than he needed, beyond a carefully prescribed amount, the stimulus of alcohol. Apart from work, he didn’t need an outside stimulus, except that curious one of picking a quarrel. It was in hostility that his being fulfilled itself. As a soldier should be, he was sudden and fierce in quarrel. In a way it had been a deprivation to him to forgive Lady Franklin: he lived at a lower rate, a slower pace, since he had stopped hating her. But those moments of escape from discipline he had under control: he would never have let them injure his pocket, never let a customer see the demon that lurked in him. Unless rude or drunk or both, the customer was always right ‘They’, the customers, did not impinge on his emotions; he hardly liked one better than another, they were like patients to a doctor, subjects for his professional skill.

Why then had he made a pass at Lady Franklin? He didn’t know, it was just one of those things.

They hadn’t talked about her any more, they had talked about each other and about people he didn’t know. He listened with half an ear. Why weren’t they married? Because there wasn’t enough money, apparently. Constance was some kind of secretary, he gathered, as so many unmarried women were, and married women too, though not the women who employed him; not Lady Franklin, for instance, who was really paying for this jaunt, paying for their dinner, paying for the car. In a wry way the idea that, at one remove, he was still in her employ, amused him, for he could not think of her, or anyone else, out of a business context.

It was when he got home, soon after midnight, that the phenomenon happened. He had been up at half past five to take a party to the airport, and he was very tired. He wouldn’t have admitted this to himself but he knew it, because instinctively he avoided looking at himself in the glass, so as not to see the circles under his eyes. Going from the bathroom into his bed-sitting-room, where by day his secretary sat and where, on the rare occasions when he was at home, his landlady served him with his meals, he switched the light on and saw, only for a second but quite distinctly, the outlines of a scattered group - a woman and three children; the woman was a bit like Lady Franklin, yet not like her. What are they doing here? he wondered, and then the vision dissolved, and he was alone, very much alone in the room with its bright centre light and two armchairs, pale brown in colour, patterned with overlapping rectangles of darker brown. He sat down in one of them and almost before his head had touched it fell asleep. He dreamed, and in his dream his family came back and bustled round him. His wife knew that he was tired and warned the children to be quiet: they tiptoed about, with set expressions as though their very faces might make a noise. Gradually he relaxed and his wife began to recount the day’s events and he listened attentively, for here was something to tell Lady Franklin. But what vexed him was that he couldn’t quite take in what his wife was saying. ‘Say that all over again,’ he said, for he didn’t stand on ceremony with his wife - but still the sense of what she was saying eluded his tired mind, until he was on the point of quarrelling with her. Frustrated and distressed he breasted the ripples on the shores of sleep, and woke, still warm and glowing with the unfulfilled promise of his dream. Then came the chill of reality, and the bitter awareness of being cheated. It was half past two and he still had to undress; but was it worth while going to bed when he had to be up again at five? A bleak decision to take ~ and bleaker taken alone. It was nearly three before he set the alarm-clock and stretched out his long limbs between the sheets.

Thereafter he was haunted by his fantasy and led what was to become a double life, like a novelist who has one existence in the outside world and another in his book. It began, as many fantasies do, in deliberate day-dreaming, in bouts of wishful-thinking which he could start and stop at will; but soon, like other forms of self-indulgence, it got a hold of him; it came before he called it and would not go away when he dismissed it. The times when he was a single man, the most single of single men, absorbed in making money for himself, grew fewer; more and more frequent the times when he was breadwinner to a wife and family whose lives enriched his own, and whose personalities were as clear to him as if he had known them in the flesh.

He wanted to go on with the story, to bring it up to date, but he couldn’t, lacking Lady Franklin’s presence. He knew by heart the history of the Leadbitters down to Don and Pat’s escape from chicken-pox; but there it stuck, the day at Winchester had beheaded it. He could not add to or develop it for only Lady Franklin knew about it, only she wanted to hear it, only she could draw it out of him. It was something shared between them. Imaginatively he lived in a perpetual past that was both intoxicating and frustrating. If only he could see her, and take up his tale again! Or just meet her and say something to her, however trivial. ‘Good morning, my lady!’ But that was out of the question: there could be no communication between them. She had gone out of his life, leaving him a great deal better off, he had to admit, but taking something from him, his flawless independence. Before, he had never been aware of being lonely; now, between his doses of the drug, he was often acutely lonely, so lonely that he didn’t like to go home at night. Even his best pal, the telephone, began to fail him, not as an instrument or a money-getter, for bookings did not fall off, rather the opposite, but as a companion; as a means of keeping up his interest in himself, it was no help at all. And sometimes the drug of which he had become an addict failed him too; the same scenes repeated lost their power to beguile him; the mirage of domestic happiness grew thin and through it he could see the desert of loneliness, barren and featureless.

If only he could see Lady Franklin, if only he could tell her—

One day he thought, ‘Why not get married?’ He had a good laugh over this, but the thought came back and in the end it did not seem a laughing matter.

They, he and the woman he had lived with, whose photograph had once adorned the silver frame which now enshrined his list of the week’s bookings, had had many scenes before the final one. He hadn’t really meant it to be final when he said, ‘Well, so long, Clarice,’

‘It has been long, hasn’t it?’ she answered.

‘A lot too long for me, at any rate.’

‘You took the words out of my mouth,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised - I thought you’d taken everything you could take,’

‘And me?’ she countered. ‘I suppose you’ve given me everything you could give? You wanted me for bed and breakfast. Bed when you felt like it and when you didn’t, well, what? What is it that a woman wants? Your face to look at? It’s not a bad face, I admit, it’s the best part of you or nearly. But what’s behind it? Nothing that is any good to me. You’re hard all through - I liked that once, but I don’t like it now. If it’s true that I have taken things from you, it’s because you wouldn’t give me anything, you’re a skinflint, all that comes off you scrape off like the stubble when you’re shaving, and that you do yourself, and for yourself,’ ‘That’s what I mean,’ he said, ‘I can’t do right. The angel Gabriel himself couldn’t do right. You wouldn’t like me if I didn’t shave, would you? You’d nag at me, you have nagged at me when I haven’t had time to shave. You want me to be different to what I am, you want to mould me. You want to make it so that I’m not happy unless I’m doing something for you, and when I do it’s never the right thing, because you don’t know what you want yourself.’ ‘I do know now,’ she said, ‘I’ve known a long time. I know when I’m fed up - and not from eating, mind you, for you’d let me starve,’ ‘Starve?’ repeated Leadbitter, looking down at the ample figure whose curves, three years ago, had so enchanted him; ‘I don’t know who has let you starve, but I haven’t. You’re remarkably well covered for a starveling. Once round you is twice round the gas-works, as they say,’ Clarice moved her golden head about impatiently. ‘There’s other ways of starving besides one,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t know, because you feed off yourself, like a camel. In the Army, you cleaned your boots and buttons till they shone, and burnished your bayonet with a knitting needle, or so you told me, to be the smartest soldier in the regiment, but did you ever do it for anyone else? Not likely,’

‘You’re wrong for once,’ said Leadbitter. ‘I done it for a score of chaps, and mark you, they said, “Ta, thanking you,” but they didn’t say, “You might have smiled at me as well,” or “You didn’t tell me how I looked this morning on parade” - meaning, “You ought always to be thinking of me.”’

‘Your boy-friends knew you better, I suppose,’ sneered Clarice. ‘I’m not a soldier, worse luck, I’m just a woman that took up with you and now wishes she hadn’t,’

‘Well, that’s O.K. by me,’ said Leadbitter. ‘Let’s call it a day,’

‘Is that all you have to say?’ asked Clarice, after a moment. ‘Well, isn’t it what you wanted me to say, or do you want me to make a scene?’ She didn’t answer this but said, ‘Who’s going to look after you?’

‘Oh, please don’t worry about me,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll try a spell of living on my own. I shall rather look forward to strolling about spare,’

‘You always have,’ she said, ‘that’s just what I complain of, and if you didn’t, there’d be some woman I should feel sorry for, God help her. But still -‘

‘Well, what?’ he said impatiently.

‘Who’s going to darn your socks?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I can do that myself,’ said Leadbitter lightly. ‘And do it a darned sight better than some people I know of,’ He chuckled at the joke, but Clarice didn’t smile.

‘You’re so sharp,’ she said, ‘one day you’ll cut yourself, unless your skin’s so hard it’ll turn the blade,’ The notion of his toughness seemed to soften her, for suddenly her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I shan’t let myself hate you, you’re not worth it,’ The tears overflowed and sat, fat globules, on the supporting contours of her cheeks; swelling, they burst and trickled down the sides of her nose towards the corners of her mouth.

Blackmail! How women always tried it on! ‘If hating me makes you feel any better,’ he said, ‘go ahead. I shan’t notice the difference,’ And when she flashed at him her glistening tear-bright fury,

‘Bye-bye for now,’ he said and turned and went.

That was three years ago. Perhaps Clarice wasn’t such a bad sort after all. One day he might look her up.

Meanwhile, if he happened to pass through South Halkin Street, he slowed down when he came to Lady Franklin’s house, and looked in through the windows. A chandelier, a standard lamp, a mirror stood out in the rich dusky interior; there must also be a sofa with Lady Franklin lying on it, her hands clasped behind her head; but he could not see it or the painter, who would have his back to the light and his eyes fastened on the figure on the sofa. Why not stop, why not peer in? There were no curtains now. But suppose she came to the window for a rest, and saw him? What nonsense ! She wouldn’t want a rest when she was lying down, besides she might not recognize him, she might have forgotten what he looked like. But she might come to the door; she might be going out in another car, with another driver. He felt as if the house had fallen on his spirit and crushed it, and hastened past its shadow into the bright pale spaciousness of Belgrave Square.

Yet even in that least changing of London squares, he did not recover the self that he was used to, the hard impersonal self that the war and Army life had polished into a shell. There was a chink in his armour and under it a self-inflicted wound. Yes, unknowingly he had stabbed himself and with a weapon soft as thistledown - a dream.

Often after that, even if South Halkin Street wasn’t on his route, he would make a detour to go through it, and sometimes look in through the windows, and sometimes drive on without looking.

Call at the studio in Chelsea first, and then pick up the girl-friend on Campden Hill - that used to be the form. But this time, the third time Leadbitter had taken out the couple, it was to be the other way round. As always he was punctual, but Constance was already on the doorstep.

‘Good evening,’ she said. She did not know his name.

‘Good evening, madam,’ said Leadbitter,

‘What a lovely evening,’ Constance said. It wasn’t really a lovely evening but her happiness made it seem so.

The wireless said rain later,’ said Leadbitter, who had been listening in.

‘Oh, but they’re always wrong!’

Again the happy note, as if everything she wished for must come true.

‘They do sometimes make mistakes,’ agreed Leadbitter, who seldom contradicted a customer.

She sat down on the back seat and Leadbitter drove off.

At the studio he pressed the door-bell, but no one came.

‘He isn’t often late,’ said Constance, ‘something must have kept him. He’ll be here in a minute,’

She tried to settle down to wait, squeezing herself further and further into the corner of the car, as though the pressure of its upholstery could restrain her impatience; but after a few minutes impatience got the better of her, and she reached for the door-handle, mistaking it, however, for the handle that regulated the window. Muddled, she tried both in vain. Leadbitter came to her rescue and opened the door for her. She stood on the pavement looking down the street.

‘This is the way he would come, I think,’ she said, more to herself than to Leadbitter. ‘You don’t think anything can have happened to him?’

Leadbitter’s eyes followed hers. He was not fond of Hughie, anything but. Hughie was a heel or a gink or anything you liked to call him. And he had no great regard for Constance, except in so far as she sometimes took the mickey out of Hughie. Moreover he was paid for waiting and it didn’t matter to him how late Hughie was. Once he would not have understood how one human being could set so much store on seeing another, especially when that other was Hughie; but today he found himself sharing Constance’s anxiety, and said as sympathetically as he could: