The Hireling (17 page)

‘Not a difference, and you married to Ernestine?’

‘It needn’t make a difference to us,’ said Hughie. There was a pause, and Leadbitter could hear Constance catching her breath.

‘Oh no, Hughie,’ she said at last. ‘I think there must be a difference. It was sweet of you to say there needn’t be. But no, no, no, there must be,’

‘Why can’t we go on as we are?’ said Hughie, his voice driving home the words like a soft hammer. ‘Why can’t we go on as we are, Constance? I mean, what’s to prevent us?’

‘What’s to prevent us?’ Constance repeated dully. ‘What’s to prevent us? Do you really want me to try to answer that?’

‘If you can,’ Hughie said.

‘I can’t in any way that would convince you. Please, Hughie, please, let me go home - we can’t be far from home now,’

‘Will it be home without me?’ Hughie asked.

‘It might be, I can’t tell,’

‘Do you want it to be?’

‘I don’t know what I want. You’ve upset me, as the gardener said,’

‘What gardener?’

‘Oh, it’s an old story that my father used to tell. The gardener was upset, so he gave in his notice,’

‘Is that what you are going to do?’ asked Hughie.

‘I rather thought you’d given me notice,’ Constance said.

‘I’m getting mixed,’ said Hughie, ‘with all this gardener stuff. Couldn’t a mistress have two gardeners, or a gardener have two mistresses?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by mistress,’

‘Well, try to think,’

‘A little while ago,’ Constance said, ‘you told me I was being unfair to Ernestine. Now I think you are being unfair to her, that’s all,’

‘It doesn’t matter so much about Ernestine. Am I being unfair to you? That’s the question,’

‘Yes, no… Of course you have a perfect right to marry,’

‘And haven’t I a right -?’

‘No, I don’t think you have,’

‘Not even the right to make you happy?’ Hughie asked.

‘Why do you think it would make me happy to share you with another woman?’

‘You’ve shared me with another woman before,’

‘I know. I know you sometimes strayed. But that was different,’

‘Why was it different?’

‘Oh, Hughie, you’re like a child, always asking questions. If you can’t see it’s different, you’re not fit to be a married man. Now don’t say any more till I get home,’

‘Why are you so cruel to me, Constance?’ said Hughie, his voice roughening. ‘Why do you want to punish me? You said you wish me luck: well, what luck should I have without you? You are my luck. I’m not in love with Ernestine and never should be! I’m in love with you. Darling, please, please be reasonable. Don’t deprive us both of what we both want. Or even if you no longer want it, don’t deprive me,’

Constance didn’t answer for a moment, then she said, in another voice, and as if she was changing the subject:

‘I don’t know Ernestine well, she’s really only an acquaintance. I knew her before she was married and got rich, and she kept up with me a little until … until she had her breakdown and saw no one. She’s always been a little unreal to me: I told you that. I don’t know how she thinks and feels; she’s carried away by her enthusiasms; you’re the latest, Hughie. Perhaps she doesn’t feel much, in a direct human way of feeling; you wouldn’t know that. But I don’t suppose she ever thinks about me, unless she’s sending out a card. She’s not like us - she can have all the friends she wants, a whole new set tomorrow. She’s privileged and protected like a minor royalty. She has so much it doesn’t seem quite fair - but that’s no reason. The reason is, the reason is, that I can’t do without you. Oh, Hughie -‘

‘Look, Constance!’

‘No, I mustn’t look, don’t let me look, and don’t look at me. I can’t bear to be looked at,’

‘Well, then,’

The kiss brought down on each its cloak of invisibility. They did not see, nor were they seen, save by Leadbitter, when a street-lamp or a passing car shone on his mirror. Nor did they emerge into the light of each other’s eyes: they shrank from such awareness; only their hands still kept in touch.

‘Where are we?’ asked Constance. ‘Do you know where we are, Hughie? I haven’t the least idea - we might be anywhere,’

Hughie didn’t answer, but Leadbitter said:

‘About five minutes from Campden Hill now, madam,’

‘Good heavens! Campden Hill!’ said Hughie. ‘Why are we going there? You don’t want to go there, do you, Constance?’

‘Not specially,’ said Constance.

‘Well, what about going back, going back to Richmond?’

‘I’ve nothing against it,’

‘But of course. Leadbitter, we have changed our minds. My friend doesn’t want to go home, after all. Will you go back to Richmond?’

‘Very good, sir,’

‘I am so terribly hungry,’ Hughie said.

‘Yes, so am I,’ said Constance. ‘Ravenous,’

Slowly their spirits rose: the hotel when at last they reached it, seemed a paradise: a paradise regained. All that they thought they had lost was given back to them. Their eyes regained their boldness; they feasted on each other, lingeringly, unashamedly, while they were waiting for their further feast. It was as if they had not seen each other for years - for years, or never before.

Half-way through dinner the porter came to their table and said to Hughie:

‘Are you Mr Cantrip?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Hughie, proudly, as if to be Mr Cantrip was the greatest distinction in the world.

‘Your chauffeur would like to speak to you,’

Hughie got up and went out. When he came back he said:

‘It’s nothing serious. He’s had to go home, his wife’s not well.’

They laughed immoderately at this, not out of heartlessness or because the mere idea of a sick wife was funny, but because they were in a mood to laugh at anything.

‘But how are we to get home?’ asked Constance.

‘He’s arranged to send another car,’

‘Well, that was good staff-work,’ Making an effort, she jerked her mind to someone else’s problems: they seemed unreal and very distant from her.

‘How did he know his wife was ill?’

‘He always telephones to her, apparently, when he’s out on a job for any length of time,’

‘What an ideal husband! I hope you’ll be as devoted as he is, Hughie,’

‘You bet I shall be,’

Lady Franklin, Madam,

It has reached the ears of a well-wisher that the man you intend to marry is unworthy of you. He already has a woman in tow and he intends to go on living with her after he is married to you. I thought you would like to know this.

Leadbitter stared at the letter. Like many, perhaps most, anonymous letters, it wasn’t the first draft; quite a number of earlier attempts had found their way down the w.c. It was laborious and frustrating, printing the message out in capital letters, always hoping it would be the final version, the fair copy, and finding that it wasn’t. He wasn’t satisfied with this one either, substituted ‘I thought you ought to know’ for ‘I thought you would like to know’ and wrote it all out again. She wouldn’t like to know perhaps, but she ought to know, of that he was sure.

Or was he?

Since that evening, not many evenings back, when he had surprised himself by leaving the loving couple guzzling at their hotel in Richmond, thereby costing himself two quid at least for the other car, he had undergone so many changes of feeling that he hardly recognized himself. He hadn’t forgotten Lady Franklin of course, though he had tried to. She was like one of those items on a balance sheet, which can appear as a profit, or a loss, according to the taste and fancy of the accountant. In the past, she had been a profit, certainly; incomparably the largest single profit he had known. Yet he couldn’t think of her as a profit: he thought of her as a lost customer who, but for his mishandling, would have been worth far more in the future than she had been in the past. As such he had succeeded in keeping her separate from Frances, his wife who was her substitute; Frances was all profit, she was what Lady Franklin might have been had all gone well; she was Lady Franklin shorn of Lady Franklin’s shortcomings: his fantasy of Frances had helped to keep at bay the real Lady Franklin.

But the conversation in the car broke down that frail distinction, and long before Hughie and Constance had had their talk out the two women had united in one image. In vain he tried to recover his old cynicism by remembering the snub she had given him. Serve her right, serve her right, he had told himself; she asked for it. She led me on, she played with fire, but she wouldn’t have me, because I’m not her class. But at any rate I hadn’t got another woman tucked away on the back seat; I wasn’t going to use her money to keep a mistress with. She would have had me to herself, such as I am.

At that a wave of tenderness broke over him, almost as painful physically as if it had been tears, so many adhesions were washed away by it. As though awakening from an anaesthetic, he could not remember how he had felt before or find his way back to his old self. Discipline had prevented him from telling the couple what he thought of them, discipline made him drive them back to Richmond; but then it failed him. He could not face the thought of listening to what they would say on the way home; he could not trust himself to listen to it.

Driving home alone he let his fancy loose on Lady Franklin. For the first time he thought of her out of a business context, and remote from actuality: she was his in any way he liked to think of her, nothing could come between them. Their freedom was not earth-bound. But since fantasy requires a scene, a local habitation, and a kind of verisimilitude, he began to recall the places where they had been together. At first it was a vision of a door, the door of his car, opening and closing as she crossed and re-crossed the threshold of his presence; and always there had been in him a pocket of resistance to her effect on him; it was something which he felt he must not yield to, it challenged his attitude to life. Why had he armed himself against her, why had he felt that like all women she was threatening him, encroaching on his freedom? Now, in his fantasy, this resistance melted; he acknowledged her kindness to him, which before he would not admit, attributing it to many other causes - caprice, ostentation, sexual attraction, never to what it was - a generalized benevolence which had found its outlet in him. He would not have welcomed this explanation, perhaps no one would have; he thought that her benevolence was for him alone, for something she had seen in him that others could not see. He had glimpses of it in his fantasies of family life; but obsessive though they were he knew that they were make-believe, variations on a theme while this was the theme itself. Lady Franklin was a real person; Frances and Don and Pat and Sue were figments.

He did not analyse how it had come about that his thoughts of Lady Franklin were now full of sweetness. Like a traveller benighted in a wood, who comes out at dawn into the sunlight and is filled with a sense of thankfulness and blessing, he dismissed from his mind the mazy wanderings of the night, not realizing that they had brought him to his goal. But if the stranger, love, now occupied his heart, there was another, older tenant who, strange to say, agreed with the newcomer. Hostility was natural to Leadbitter; his being thrived on it. It did not thrive on hatred, for hatred was too personal an emotion; he would not flatter anyone by hating him. In war he did not hate the enemy, but his hostility never wavered, just as his loyalty to his own side never wavered. He did not love his own side; quite often he was far from loving it, but he was loyal to it. In the civilian world his trouble was that he had no side to be loyal to. Now he had one. Lady Franklin was threatened and he must save her.

In war, beyond a certain point you did not count the cost. You had to be prepared for losses or you could not hope to win. You might have to proceed regardless. You must take risks for yourself; you must take risks for your side and without consulting them. The men understood that you did not always tell them what the risks were when such and such a position had to be taken; you took the risk on their behalf and yours. If there were casualties it was just too bad, but they did not matter if the operation was successful.

Lady Franklin would be upset when she got the letter; she would be very upset, she would cry, perhaps. In war soldiers themselves sometimes cried, and their relations cried quite often. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. It was better to have a good cry than to marry a man who was keeping another woman with your money. That was as clear as clear. And if Lady Franklin ever came to know whose hand had struck the blow that freed her, she would thank him.

There was a risk, of course, that she would find out, but it was a small risk and a risk that had to be taken. Leadbitter had been brought up in a world where tale-bearing was not unknown but where no one ever asked ‘Who told you?’ -for it wouldn’t have been etiquette. Lady Franklin would never trace the letter to him; he did not think she would mention it to Hughie. The poison would work in secret. And if she taxed Hughie with its message, what then? Would Hughie guess who had sent it? No, because he had no idea that Leadbitter knew Lady Franklin.

If Hughie did seek him out and cut up rough, well that would just suit Leadbitter, who would only be too glad to show him where he got off.

Why then did he hesitate to send the letter?

Because somehow, in his total vision of Lady Franklin, the letter was out of place. It didn’t fit in. This matter of her marrying or not marrying Hughie was only one aspect of what she meant to Leadbitter; an ugly aspect, and therefore foreign to her. He could not associate her with an anonymous letter. It was an anomaly, like a gasometer built on to a cathedral. She was much more than someone who is to be the victim of skulduggery; it didn’t touch her, somehow.

In all the images he associated with Lady Franklin, a cathedral was the one that occurred to him most often. There it rose - a monument to something. To what? Perhaps to the Virgin Mary; perhaps like the French cathedrals she had talked about, it was a product of the cult for her. A great deal of money had gone to building it, it was impersonal, no one’s property, and yet it was his because she had shown it to him, he saw it through her eyes. It couldn’t be seen as a whole because there were too many viewpoints, too many ways of looking at it; he himself added a new one every day. Yet it had an entity, a self, and that self was his: to admire, to adore, to add to at his pleasure. At times she filled his mind so completely that he couldn’t remember what she looked like. If he tried a more familiar, and a more tormenting approach, and imagined her on the couch, the day-bed as they called it, with her hands clasped behind her head, he couldn’t see her face, it was a blur. But as a cathedral, though the qualities he looked for on the bed were absent, she satisfied his spiritual needs. For he had them, more urgently perhaps than physical needs, of which he took a hygienic, narrow and belittling view. They were the complement of what his mirror showed him, the necessary counterpart to his self-admiration, whereas in the cathedral he could lose himself.