The Hireling (20 page)

‘That makes it all the odder! But I’m sure you’ll like him when you get to know him - and he’s so talented! I’ve never known a genius before - I’m sure he is one! I’ve no secrets from him, naturally; but shall we keep to ourselves -?’ she stopped.

‘I never talk, my lady,’ Leadbitter said.

‘Well, you do, about your family! At least, I forced you to. But this, this fact of our having known each other, perhaps it’s best -‘

‘I never talk, my lady,’ Leadbitter repeated.

‘He might misunderstand, and he’s so dear to me, I couldn’t bear the smallest cloud -‘

She got no further, for at that moment a voice sharp with impatience, resonant with command, and yet not quite sure of itself, rang out from the hotel doorway:

‘Ernestine!’

‘My lady,’ Leadbitter began.

‘I must go,’ said Lady Franklin, hastily. ‘Good-bye, for the moment, and don’t forget to get yourself a good dinner,’

She hurried off, leaving Leadbitter motionless, still holding the long breath he had taken, until it expired in a sigh.

‘What a long time you have been,’ grumbled Hughie. ‘I thought you must be buying the car. Did you find what you were looking for?’

‘Yes,’ said Ernestine.

‘What was it?’ Hughie said. ‘You don’t seem to be carrying anything extra,’

‘It’s in my bag,’

‘How secretive you are! What was it?’

‘A shilling,’ Ernestine confessed.

‘A shilling! You went back for a shilling! I’ve got plenty of shillings,’

‘But I mustn’t sponge on you,’ said Lady Franklin gaily.

‘My wife she is dying, hurray

My wife she is dying, hurray

My wife she is dying I laugh till I’m crying -‘

Leadbitter broke off. He didn’t feel like laughing, and he didn’t want to be single - he had had quite enough of being single even if his pockets jingled from it.

His pockets did indeed jingle. Business had been increasing steadily and prosperity, which had once seemed such a distant prospect, now seemed within his grasp. At odd times he was still slack; but on some days he had three or four men working for him. Success, as Lady Franklin had foretold, brought its own troubles. He could never quite rely on the men doing the jobs they had promised to do. If the offer of a better job came along they would throw his over. He was prepared for this, and almost counted on it, but it made him constantly anxious. As far as he could he served his most regular and cherished customers himself. They greatly preferred this and would sometimes make a fuss if he sent another man in his place, though it was nothing to the fuss they made if the man failed to turn up. Unreasonable b—s they were, most of them; they didn’t mind how long they kept him waiting, but they raised bloody hell if he kept them waiting. The women were the worst; when they wanted to keep him longer than the prescribed time they couldn’t or wouldn’t understand that he had another job on hand, and if they understood they didn’t care.

This was all part of the day’s work; he was used to it and he accepted it. At least, he had. But increasing prosperity had brought increasing fatigue. He drove himself as unremittingly as he drove his car, and much more relentlessly, for to the car he showed every consideration while to himself he showed none. After every five thousand miles he took the car to be overhauled but he never took himself. He had increased his average daily mileage from ninety miles a day to over a hundred and twenty. He was out at all hours; he never gave himself an evening off and apart from casual encounters his only contact with the outside world - his only unprofessional activity - was listening to the wireless. He took his meals when and where he could, more and more rarely did he eat at home. He couldn’t help knowing that he was tired, for he had the evidence of kind-hearted if misguided customers, who told him. But his general health was so triumphant that he didn’t feel ill, and fatigue was a weakness which he wouldn’t acknowledge. To have done so would have contradicted his conception of himself as tireless and lowered him in his own esteem. He didn’t realize the toll fatigue was taking of his nervous energy or the subterfuges he was adopting in his efforts to ignore it. When he shaved he contrived not to look himself in the face, to be spared the sight of the dark tell-tale circles round his eyes; he concentrated on the rest of him, which still bore out his idea of himself as a fine animal. As for his habit of falling asleep at odd times, he prided himself on it; it was a compensation for his broken nights. ‘I could sleep on a clothes-line,’ he said.

His increasing prosperity nourished something in him that went very deep. Business success is what men respect most in each other, and what they are quickest to find out and comment on; Leadbitter saw his reflected on the faces of his acquaintances and heard it on their tongues: ‘You must be making a fortune!’ And nowhere was its effect more gratifying than in the Bank. Only a few months ago he used to creep into the Bank almost like a criminal; the clerks behind the counter did not raise their heads, or if they did, they showed blank faces. Now all that was changed. He strode in, feeling and looking every inch himself; smiles welcomed him; even the manager, when Leadbitter had occasion to consult him, put on a friendly air - ‘Of course, old chap, of course’ - and almost bowed him out.

This would have happened in any case, Leadbitter told himself; if any man had earned success, he had. He had sacrificed everything to it, and he had got it.

But he wouldn’t have got it for another two years if it hadn’t been for Lady Franklin’s gift. Lady Franklin’s tax-free gift had been worth - well, no matter how much.

Driving kept his thoughts busy; piecing together the jigsaw of his engagements kept them busy too. But during those unaccountable slack periods when he sat alone, or with his secretary facing him across the unlit gas-fire, killing time, watching the telephone and wondering if he would ever get another job, he could not stop thinking about Lady Franklin and he did not try to, for now his thoughts of her were free from bitterness. She had forgiven him, she wished him well; and knowing that, he on his side had forgiven her. In thought their relationship had been re-established at its highest level, the level of the return journey from Winchester before the debacle; higher than that indeed, for being imaginary it was also ideal, untouched by the imperfections, the conflict of wills, that for Leadbitter spoilt every human relationship. Tampering with reality as a day-dreamer must, he pictured her as his wife; sometimes they had children, sometimes not, according as he felt a taste or distaste for a family. The houses in which they were living varied in size, but always the money was his, she was sharing in his mounting prosperity. He had a fleet of six, twelve, twenty cars; he directed it from his offices in the West End; he himself no longer drove, except the Rolls Royce in which he took his wife out. His wife was Lady Franklin now, not Frances. Though his memory for her face was intermittent, it would suddenly flash upon his inner eye more vividly than it ever had in real life, when some veil of diffidence or self assertion or of the animosity which so quickly started up in him, had come between them.

He had forgiven her and he wished her well; to his conviction that most people would be the better for a small, or perhaps a large dose of misfortune, she was the exception. How then could he destroy her happiness by sending her the letter? Like an unexploded bomb which peace has robbed of usefulness he mentally dismantled it. His happiness now lay in the thought of hers - a state of mind that would not only have been unattainable but incomprehensible to him a few months ago, when hostility still ruled his heart. He understood her character, or thought he did. Since he had seen her with Hughie, distasteful as the spectacle was to him in all ways, and disillusioning as it was in some ways (how could she have allowed the pinching episode, and with that little squirt, too?) he had decided that with Hughie lay her best hope of happiness. She loved the fellow. Incredible as it was, she loved him. Her nature was completely unsuspicious, and in spite of her enormous eyes she couldn’t see what was going on under her nose. Had she guessed what he, Leadbitter, felt about her, which any other woman would have guessed? Never for a moment. The chances were that if Hughie was reasonably careful (as his own interest demanded that he should be) she would never find out that he was being unfaithful to her. Where ignorance is bliss - Leadbitter didn’t know the quotation, but he believed implicitly in the saving power of appearances, for with his customers his whole life was spent in keeping them up. Let Lady Franklin remain deceived.

For what good would it do to undeceive her? Good in this sense, abstract good as an aim, was not a thing that Leadbitter cared much about. If he had a principle, it was the average Englishman’s principle of fairness. Apart from his instinctive dislike of Hughie, which was much more sexual than moral, it hadn’t seemed fair that Lady Franklin should be tied to a man who was sharing her with another woman, and using her money to bring off this double event.

It wasn’t fair that he should get away with it. But if Lady Franklin wanted it that way! - She didn’t know, of course, that it was that way; she thought her Hughie was quite true to her; she took his face-tasting at its face value, she liked, no doubt, being tickled by his beard, which even Leadbitter didn’t think was false. But even if she did know about his mistress, was it certain she would mind? She had revealed to him, Leadbitter, the most surprising variations of emotional reaction, from her injured and insulted ‘That will be all, Leadbitter,’ to her declaration of a few nights ago, - ‘I owe to you my confidence in life,’ She might be quite content, as Eastern wives were, as Mormons were, to share her husband. Hughie had sounded her on that point (the cheek of it!) and she had said No, she couldn’t share him; but did she know her own mind?

Leadbitter felt no loyalty towards a past opinion, he was ruled by the emotion of the moment. Be damned to fairness; he only knew that he was happier to think of Lady Franklin happy - and that meant married to Hughie - than unmarried and unhappy, as she would be if he sent the letter.

If he thought of her as unhappy, and through him, his thoughts recoiled from her: he couldn’t think of her: his fantasy broke up. But if he thought of her as happy, no matter what the circumstances, she came to his call, and came in any guise he cared to think of - though they were all variations of one role - his wife. If only he could tell her what she meant to him! It was the one fly in his ointment that he couldn’t tell her. He had had his chance at Richmond, but the words wouldn’t come; and if he got the chance again, they still wouldn’t come.

‘You were dozing, sir,’ His secretary always called him ‘sir’. ‘Was I, Bert? I suppose I do drop off sometimes,’

‘Yes, and a good job too, or you’d be having a breakdown,’

‘Oh, don’t start that,’

I’m only saying what they all say,’

‘Look here, Bert, am I running this business or are you?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’

‘Well, don’t do it again, or if that’s too much to ask, don’t go on doing it. No one rung up, I suppose?’

‘Yes, sir, someone did ring up,’

‘Who was it?’

‘Lady Franklin, sir,’

‘Lady Franklin! What did she want?’

‘She wanted you to drive her to her wedding,’

‘Her wedding? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to wake you, sir,’

‘Oh, cut that out. Was she speaking herself?’

‘Oh yes, at least it was a lady’s voice. I said that you were resting, and she said: “Don’t wake him up.”’

‘I wish to God you had. Did she sound in a hurry?’

‘Oh no, sir. She asked how you were, and wished to be remembered to you. She asked after your family, too,’

‘My family! What did you say?’

‘I said “as well as could be expected”, sir. I thought maybe she was mixing you up with someone else. It doesn’t do to make a customer feel silly,’

‘You’re right there. All the same, I wish you’d woken me. There was something I wanted to say to her,… Did she say when the wedding was to be?’

‘In about a fortnight. She didn’t give a date,’

‘You must have had quite a long crack with her,’

‘Oh yes, and she said she wanted three or four other cars as well as yours,’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said you’d do it, sir,’

‘Well, I suppose I shall. If only she’d given me a date! You’re sure it was Lady Franklin, by the way? Not someone else getting married? Some women make a habit of it,’

‘Oh yes, she said so. She’s a special customer, isn’t she?’

‘She was. … Now cut along, it’s half past six, nearly your bedtime. But thanks for staying, all the same,’

The door closed on his secretary, and Leadbitter was alone.

Between the idea and the fact of Lady Franklin’s marriage, what a difference!

His fantasy could ignore the idea, but the fact (albeit without a date assigned), it couldn’t. Feeling it wither perish in his heart, he tried the desperate expedient known to other lovers: He tried to make his single love suffice for two. Surely it would return to him, reflected from her? But it didn’t; like traffic in a one-way street it didn’t come to meet him.

Nothing is so remote and unrecoverable as a lost fantasy. Deprived of his dream-life, Leadbitter was desolate. His thoughts turned for consolation, as they always did at such moments, to the next best thing, his increasing prosperity. His bank-account at any rate was real; it didn’t depend for its existence on a mood. As he contemplated it - a shadowy entity to which his thoughts could give no shape or appearance, only the quality of size - the familiar feeling of warmth stole into his heart. He felt the area of his influence spreading; he was getting somewhere, he was a power in the world. In the past the fact that he had nothing that he could call his own weighed upon him; to see other people’s possessions all round daunted and dismayed his spirits. Even the room where he sat had this effect on him, for it belonged to someone else. Thinking of his bank-balance changed all this, for even if he did not own anything except his car, he had the means of owning it. Of any building he chose to look at he could, if he wished, possess a window or a balcony or a chimney stack. When he surveyed the streets his thoughts did not return to him empty; they brought with them spoils from a Promised Land. And if this mental exercise of feeling himself part-owner of what he saw was also a habit-forming drug, it didn’t have the reaction that the other had - the fantasy of owning Lady Franklin - for it had truth behind it. To one dream he could give effect, by translating it into action he could make it a reality. But not to the other. Lady Franklin could not be his, she belonged to Hughie.