The Hireling (2 page)

The Army appealed to almost every quality in him, his pugnacity, his cynical acceptance of futility so long as it was clothed in the proper forms of discipline, his sixth sense for the strength and weakness of his comrades (he could tell almost at a glance how much a man would be worth in a tight place), his enjoyment of ramps and rackets, his feeling for the whole living organism round him, its conventions, traditions, enmities and friendships. In the Army, he felt, a man was rated at his true value, he had nothing but himself to make him count. Recognition of his own value, by himself and others, was of paramount importance to the car-hire driver.

In the Army he enjoyed that two-fold recognition, and with each stripe he put up it increased. He believed he got it by standing up for himself: it was something he had ‘won’ out of the Army. But it wasn’t, or only in part. He really got out of the Army the reward for what he had put into it, his courage, his patience, his conscientiousness, his loyalty - himself. On this his sense of his own worth depended. But he would not have admitted that it was so; he did not even acknowledge it in his thoughts. He would not have called duty by its name, he would have found a dozen belittling expressions for it, some with obscene prefixes, but he acted up to it and lived by it. The recruits he had to lick into shape would not have called it duty either; they would have called it, as they called him, by many other names. For though he knew his job too well to be a martinet of the old school, he did not spare their feelings or bring them their early-morning tea. On the contrary, he stuck his elbows out and clothed himself with all the awe at his command - in a position that already carried with it more visible, immediate authority than almost any other in the land. He had to be infallible; he had to say the word that stung. But he could also say the word that soothed. The men appreciated this, and later, in civilian life, more than one who had had cause to hate him came up and offered him a drink.

Recruits could, must, be licked into shape, but not so customers. Customers had to be kept sweet; only in the physical sense were they a charge to him. Only by playing up to them could he hope to make them better customers. He did it but it went against the grain, and doing it he lost the sense of value that came from reciprocal obligations. For him these obligations didn’t exist in the civilian world; there it was every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. The delicate adjustments, the imponderable restraints that in the Army regulated the dealings of one man with another, didn’t operate. The Army wasn’t really a microcosm, it was a world to itself, male, collective, and hierarchical; to some it seemed a tyrant, but to the driver its service was perfect freedom.

The Army was his only love but in the end he quarrelled with it, thinking not without cause that it had let him down. Like any lovers’ quarrel it was very bitter: ‘It doesn’t pay to be patriotic,’ he said. Yet leaving the Army cost him more than he thought he had it in him to suffer; it was a day of emptiness and darkness, a day of desolation. With no job to go to and no one to help him find a job, he tried one thing after another, and found it wanting; wanting not in money (which was the reason he gave himself for throwing it up) but in something which he had received, together with a much smaller wage than the one he was now earning, at a deal table between two salutes - something that clothed his spirit against the coldness of the outside world.

After a time he joined the Fire Service. But he did not like the Fire Service. It was never a living entity to him, as the Army had been. And he had come down in the world and must start on the lowest rung of the ladder. The ladders of the Fire Service he was prepared to scale, but he couldn’t take its other promotions seriously. Its easy-going discipline - ‘Come, boys, let’s get together and polish up the brass’ -disgusted him, it seemed like play-acting; and he resented as childish having to slide down a pole from the rest-room to the fire-engine. He wanted to fight men, not fire, fire was too abstract an antagonist; and some of the jobs he was called out to do, such as rescuing frightened cats from trees, or separating fighting swans, struck him as waste of time.

To kill time and earn some extra shillings he did odd jobs for a car-hire firm. Driving, he made some useful contacts. Customers remembered him and sometimes when they ordered a car they asked for him by name, a piece of favouritism that the firm’s regular drivers did not relish. One day a customer said, ‘Why don’t you start in business on your own? I could put you in touch with half a dozen people.’ He didn’t, when the time came; but it was this promise, fertilizing an idea already in the driver’s mind, that made him take the plunge.

He bought a car on the hire-purchase system, and kept it as smart and well-groomed as he kept himself. He did not spare himself; he worked, as he expressed it, all the hours God sent. Sleepless nights made sleepy days, sometimes he could hardly keep himself awake. He lost his healthy colour and hollows deepened in his cheeks; the two suits that had served him for ten years hung loosely on him. With all his evident physical strength he looked a subject for a duodenal ulcer. And in spite of his efforts, five months after starting on his own, with no capital except the war gratuity he had sunk in his car, he was only just making both ends meet. For nearly three more years he must go on paying a crippling monthly instalment before he owned the car - by which time it would be worthless, having done a hundred thousand miles.

In Civvy Street he had no sense of union with his fellows, a sort of hostile apartness chilled his thoughts of them, his very wish to work estranged him from them. No one, he felt, had ever been any help to him, least of all the women in his life. His hand was not against every man’s, it couldn’t afford to be; but it was always ready to give or take a blow. A man of the Ulysses type, a sheer man, but with no Penelope waiting for him.

His thirty-five years on earth had left the driver with but one desire: to work the clock round. He scarcely thought of himself as a man, he thought of himself as ‘Leadbitter’s Garages Ltd, Cars for All Occasions’. As for his Christian name, he never heard it used and had almost forgotten it.

Next to his car, the telephone was the most important thing in Leadbitter’s life, and perhaps his greatest friend; of all the sounds he heard, mechanical or human, its summons was the one he welcomed most. He sat in his furnished bed-sitting-room with his ear glued to it, and he sometimes lay awake at night, hoping to hear it ring. However tired he might be, and often he was very tired, his face relaxed when he took off the receiver and his voice, announcing his number, glowed with warmth. Even when it woke him up at night, or in the cat-naps that he snatched by day, he felt no animosity towards it, and he would smile into it, to the voice which spoke to him, smiles that the owner of the voice seldom if ever saw. If the voice was one he recognized he was pleased, if it was strange to him he was still more pleased, for it meant another customer.

One morning when he was shaving, a ritual he performed meticulously, sometimes twice a day, for to be better shaved than other men was part of his defence against the world as well as a commercial asset, the telephone bell rang. Almost the only time that he resented being rung up was when he was shaving. It was a moment of deep relaxation; it brought him in touch with an aspect of himself that rightly he prized highly, his physical appearance. He was something of a narcissist; he liked to watch the muscles of his arm swelling under the light pressure of the razor on his cheek and know that after several years of sedentary life he was still as good as ever. If the ritual was disturbed and he had to begin again, it was never quite the same - to say nothing of the waste of time. So his voice was a shade less cordial than usual when he took up the receiver and announced his number: ‘Hopewell 4126’.

‘This is Lady Franklin’s butler speaking,’ he was told. ‘Her ladyship wishes to know if you can take her ladyship to Canterbury on Thursday, February 10th. Her ladyship would be starting at 10.30 in the morning and would be returning in the late afternoon.’

What a lot of ladyships, Leadbitter thought. He glanced at his engagement list which he kept in a large, florid silver photograph frame beside the telephone. It had once enshrined the picture of the woman with whom he had lived longest, and was almost the only memento of his past life that he allowed himself.

‘Yes, I can do that. Where shall I pick her up?’

‘Pick her ladyship up?’ The butler sounded shocked. ‘Will you call for her at her residence, 39 South Halkin Street.’

‘Right,’ said the driver, scribbling on his pad. It was really an unnecessary precaution; he had a phenomenal memory for names, addresses, dates, and destinations and seldom needed telling twice.

‘You won’t be late, will you? You car-hire drivers are sometimes late,’ the butler said. ‘You try to fit in too many jobs. You won’t be late, will you?’

‘Not on your life!’ said Leadbitter and put down the receiver. You wouldn’t be alive, he thought, if I could get at you. It took him several minutes of communion with his own face to recover from the insult.

Punctually on the appointed day but not a minute too soon, for he did not believe in sacrificing time he was not paid for, Leadbitter drew up at the door of Lady Franklin’s house. It was a good house, he could tell that by the gloss on the front door, by the state of the paint and brickwork, and by an indefinable but unmistakable air of wealth derived from the forms and shadows of objects within, that came through the net curtains: he was seldom wrong about those things. But he had been out most of the night, he had already done a job that morning, and before he had time to take in further impressions he fell asleep.

When, ten minutes later, the butler opened the front door for Lady Franklin, they saw the driver with his chin propped on the rim of the wheel and his peaked cap, a little awry, overhanging it. ‘Good heavens!’ said Lady Franklin. ‘Is he dead?’ ‘More likely drunk, my lady,’ said the butler, eyeing Leadbitter with disfavour.

‘Surely not at this time of day?’ said Lady Franklin. ‘Besides, someone, I can’t think who, spoke of him most highly.’

‘I will go and investigate, my lady,’ said the butler, and with cautious tread, as though about to arrest a criminal, he descended the steps on to the pavement. Edging round the bonnet of the car, he peered in through the window. ‘He appears to be asleep, my lady.’

By now Lady Franklin too was on the pavement, looking at Leadbitter through the opposite window of the car.

‘Asleep?’ she said, wonderingly. ‘Yes, I believe you’re right - he is asleep, poor fellow. What can we do about it, Simmonds?’ ‘Well, wake him up, my lady.’

‘Oh no, I shouldn’t like to do that, it would be too unkind. We must let him have his sleep out. I can wait.’

‘Indeed, you can’t, my lady,’ said the butler, ‘if you’re going to be in Canterbury for luncheon. It’s already a little late,’ he added with a shade of reproach. ‘I think you ought to start. But it’s not a very good beginning, is it? - I mean, he might drop off while he is driving, and then where would you be? But I suppose I’d better rouse him,’ and before Lady Franklin had time to protest, he put his hand through the open window and touched Leadbitter, none too gently, on the shoulder.

Slowly Leadbitter raised his head, an expression of ineffable weariness and disgust crossed his features, as if the return to consciousness was too much to be borne; this was succeeded by a look of fury, as if every quality he had always disliked in butlers was concentrated in this one. But hardly had Simmonds recoiled before the threat in his eyes than they changed; the look he kept for customers damped down their fierceness, he pulled his cap straight, jumped out of the car, and said:

‘I’m sorry, my lady, I just lost myself for a moment.’

He held the door open for her to get in. She looked up into his face, a small woman in her late twenties. Under her fur coat, which in her hurry she had left unfastened, she was plainly dressed in dark blue with touches of white, which picked up the colours of her candid, innocent, over-large blue eyes. Her manner had an eager, fluttering sweetness, into which, as though she felt she ought to, she sometimes injected a faint accent of authority, like a private person who has, all unexpectedly, succeeded to a throne.

‘You lost yourself?’ she said. ‘How I envy you! But it was a shame to wake you, wasn’t it?’

She seemed to expect him to answer, but he didn’t; he stood holding the car door in his hand, looking down at her as though to say, ‘However long you keep me waiting I shan’t get impatient.’ But she, following her own train of thought, said suddenly:

‘I’d rather go in front with you, if I may.’

Leadbitter’s face registered nothing, but a shadow crossed the butler’s as Lady Franklin took the seat beside the driver.

‘I shall be back about tea-time, Simmonds, I expect,’ she said. ‘There’s no one coming for dinner.’

‘Any orders for tomorrow, my lady?’

Lady Franklin made an effort to recollect herself.

‘I shall be alone as usual.’

The butler stood respectfully on the kerbstone, his eyes fixed on the retreating car.

‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he said.

Leadbitter had been surprised when Lady Franklin elected to sit beside him. Some of his male customers took this liberty when they were alone, but women hardly ever. He thought it was a little forward of her, and as an individual she sank in his esteem to a point below the already lowly position occupied by women as a class. Though he would not have admitted it to himself, he was very tired, and to have been caught napping had irritated him and hurt his pride. A new customer, and titled, too, at that. He despised the whole race of butlers and this one had twice insulted him, first on the telephone and then by shoving him. He’s lucky not to have his eye in a sling, he thought. As for Lady Franklin, she had annoyed him too with her glib professions of pity, meaningless from a woman who probably spent twelve hours out of the twenty-four in bed. Now he would have to talk to her. He was ready and able to do this, for conversation was part of his stock in trade; some customers expected it of him, just as others expected silence; and as far as he could he humoured them, for business came first. This morning he felt less than usual in the mood to talk; but at any rate it was for her, not him, to start the ball rolling.