The Hireling (5 page)

‘Why, she’s a little like you, my lady, if I may say so,’ he said slyly.

‘Like me?’ said Lady Franklin. ‘Oh, I hope not!’

Leadbitter was not ignorant of the emotions; he was in flight from them, and he realized that Lady Franklin was sincere when she said she hoped that the fictitious Mrs Leadbitter was not like her. All the same she was fishing, the crafty Clara, like any other woman, and he would take his cue from that.

‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘She might be like a lot of worse people,’

Lady Franklin considered.

‘Worse people? I don’t know, I suppose she might,’ No doubt, thought Lady Franklin, there were worse women than she was, but were there many more unhappy? She shook her head impatiently; the idea of being in competition with other unhappy people was distasteful to her. It was an argument that her friends sometimes used, very delicately of course - that other people had more reason for grief than she had. As if grief could be measured by its causes, and not by the victim’s capacity for suffering! And all this publicizing of her feelings, how was she the better for it? It went against her nature to speak of them. Why had she embarked on this shaming revelation?

‘I didn’t really mean that,’ she said. ‘I am glad you think your wife is like me. To look at, I expect you mean?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Leadbitter, feeling his way. ‘But people who look alike generally are alike, in my experience, making allowances for the way they are brought up, of course,’

Lady Franklin took the point. ‘Well, she is lucky to have you,’ she said.

‘Lucky?’ said Leadbitter, slowly. ‘Yes, perhaps. I’m not sure if she thinks so, though, my lady,’

‘Oh come,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘Every woman is happier with a husband,’

Leadbitter thought about this. ‘And is every husband happier with a wife?’ he asked.

Lady Franklin smiled. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I hope you are,’

‘Oh yes, my lady,’ he answered enthusiastically. ‘I couldn’t carry on without one. She … she makes all the difference,’

‘What difference?’ asked Lady Franklin. ‘What difference does a wife make?’

Again Leadbitter was flummoxed. His grievance against all women was so deep-seated, and supported by so many arguments in his mind that he couldn’t, off-hand, think of a single redeeming feature that a wife possessed. The qualities that were supposed to recommend them - that they cooked, washed, mended and so on, he rejected, for what did Lady Franklin know about such things? And again for lack of any woman who would come into his mind he thought of Lady Franklin and tried to imagine what she would be like as a wife.

‘They make a home for one thing,’ he said.

Immediately Lady Franklin applied this to her own case. Had she made a home for Philip? No, he had given her one: all she had done was to occupy it decoratively and then, when he was dying, be away from it. She could not think of one wifely virtue she had displayed, but she knew that other women had them, and no doubt the driver’s wife had.

‘Yes, they can make a home,’ she agreed, without much conviction. ‘At least, some can,’

Leadbitter gave her good marks for this. Lady Franklin was not solid for her sex.

And they can break a home,’ he said.

To this Lady Franklin agreed without reserve, adding: But yours makes a home for you?’

‘Oh yes, my lady,’ Leadbitter said. ‘She has her work cut out, though, what with minding the children and answering the telephone,’

‘How old are your children?’

‘How old?’ echoed Leadbitter. He couldn’t think of any age a child might be. ‘Have you any children yourself, my lady?’ he asked hopefully.

‘No, alas,’

So his couldn’t be the same age … ‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘The youngest’s only two and she’s a proper handful,’

‘And the others?’

‘The boy, he’s the eldest, he’s eleven, and the second, she’s a girl, she’s eight. Very good children they are, though I say it,’

‘What are their names?’ persisted Lady Franklin, determined to make Leadbitter and his family real to herself and incidentally to him, since this further mission was supposed to be part of her cure.

Leadbitter hadn’t reckoned with this question.

‘Why, I shall be forgetting my own name next!’ he apologized. ‘Donald, of course, and Patricia, that’s the middle one, and Susan, that’s the baby. Don and Pat and Susie, we call them,’

‘What nice names I’ said Lady Franklin,’ And what’s your wife’s name?’

‘Frances,’ hazarded Leadbitter. It was the nearest sound to Franklin.

‘Frances,’ mused Lady Franklin, pronouncing it with a hard a, as he had; ‘how strange, it’s one of my names, though not the one I’m called by,’ Did this coincidence make the driver’s wife more real to her? She scarcely knew. But it made her more real to Leadbitter, for it gave her another link with Lady Franklin. Somewhere in his being a chord vibrated. But thinking that Lady Franklin might resent sharing a name with a mere driver’s wife, he added: ‘I don’t call her Frances, though. She wouldn’t know who I was talking to,’

‘What do you call her?’

‘Chips,’

He brought this out quite pat, for it had been his nickname for his mistress: she had so many chips on her shoulder, he declared. But the next moment he regretted it and frowned, for it troubled his image of his wife as Lady Franklin. It troubled Lady Franklin’s image of her too: she could not unite the two names in one person.

‘And what does your wife call you?’ she asked.

Oddly enough it took Leadbitter longer to answer this straightforward question than any of the others. Perhaps the switch from fiction to fact disconcerted him.

‘Well, Stephen is my name,’ he said. ‘She calls me Steve.’ Hoping to get something for nothing, Lady Franklin might say: ‘Oh Steve, would you be kind enough to drop this parcel at Marshall & Snelgrove’s on your way home?’ It wouldn’t be on the way home, of course, but he supposed he would have to. But no one called him Steve, and she never would.

‘What are you going to do with the boy?’ asked Lady Franklin.

‘Put him in the Army,’ Leadbitter answered promptly. ‘I don’t want him hanging about street corners at eleven o’clock at night, wearing a duffel coat,’

Lady Franklin agreed that this would be most undesirable. ‘You don’t like duffel coats?’ she added.

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in one, my lady,’ Leadbitter said. ‘And if my wife saw me wearing one, she would tear me off a strip,’

‘I don’t like duffel coats, either,’ Lady Franklin said. ‘I’m glad we have that in common, besides our names. Can you think of anything else we share?’ And for the first time for years, it seemed, she found herself waiting for an answer, and wanting to compare herself with another human being -to find out something new about herself, to be outside the ring-fence of her grief.

‘I’ll try,’ Leadbitter said. ‘I’ll try, my lady,’

He did try, and to such good effect that by the time they had reached the bottle-neck of Rochester he had thought of quite a number of points in which his wife reminded him of Lady Franklin, as, for example, that she would rather talk to him than listen to the wireless, that she affected the same colours, blue and white, that Lady Franklin wore, that she had rather the same way of walking. Also that she was kind and sympathetic and overlooked his faults of temper - for he supposed he was at times a tartar to live with. Attributing to his wife the good qualities women were said to possess, (though he did not think they did) he also attributed them to Lady Franklin. His imagination was ingenious in discovering these parallels; but he didn’t realize, when every now and then he glanced at Lady Franklin to give him a new lead, that it was her presence that inspired him.

‘But perhaps she isn’t at all like you, my lady, except to look at,’ he wound up, when he had completed the inventory of his wife’s charms and virtues. ‘You see I’m only guessing. I don’t know you, except as I know my customers, but I do know her,’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘I didn’t want to think she was like me, and yet I’m glad to think I am like her,’

In the silence which had become habitual to her, unless she made a deliberate effort to break it, she contemplated the paragon whose image Leadbitter had set up. Was she at all like it? Leadbitter’s guesses had not been wide of the mark; kind, gentle, patient, interested in other people and able to enter into their feelings - she saw how these epithets could, without too much flattery, once have been applied to her, though they did not fit her now. Now they were like the sound of lyres and flutes, or like the memory of a fortune teller’s prophecy (before her marriage she had frequented a fortune-teller), which had seemed plausible at the time, but to which events had given the lie. Yet something stirred in her, some interest that the chauffeur had kindled in her grief-laden, time-dimmed personality, even if it was only the interest of seeing herself mirrored in another woman.

The approaches to London have each their separate character but to Lady Franklin they all seemed alike - a succession of dull streets, often with ugly public houses at the corners, garish with glazed tiles. Automatically she asked herself: Will the traffic lights be green or red? That was the extent of her interest in the route. She did not take in, still less appreciate, the professional skill with which Leadbitter avoided the thronged main roads, steering his way through the ‘back-doubles’, to save time and petrol; and her whereabouts came to her as a surprise when the car pulled up at South Halkin Street.

A half-smile tilting the corners of his mouth, Leadbitter held the door open for her; crouching and ducking and a little dazed, Lady Franklin stumbled out, aided by his hand.

‘It has been very nice,’ she told him rather grandly, ‘very enjoyable indeed. Thank you so much, Mr -‘ she tried to recollect his name, forgot it, and repeated: ‘So much,’ She opened her bag and fumbled.

‘How much will it be?’

‘That’s all right, my lady, I’ll send you an account,’

‘How very kind of you,’ said Lady Franklin, ‘but -‘ Her hand still embedded in the bag, she looked up questioningly and shyly into his face, which had become as rigid and impersonal as that of a stone god about to receive a sacrifice. Don’t forget to put your lunch on the account,’ she said, playing for time. ‘And thank you for the Canterbury Tale,’

Like an automaton he inclined his head. How much did one give a car-hire driver who had been with one - she glanced at her wrist-watch - for nearly seven hours? And whom one had bored with unsolicited information about one’s own private life, and ill-bred curiosity about his? A doctor might have charged her several guineas for the first indulgence, and she might have lost any reputation she had as a talker for the second. She pulled out a pound note - it was green and larger than the brown ones - that was how she distinguished between them. For a moment it overflowed the fingers of her small hand, before it disappeared into the palm of his.

‘Thank you very much, my lady,’ he said, and waited dutifully to see whether she could let herself in with her latch-key - women sometimes bungled it. When the door yielded he saluted Lady Franklin’s unresponsive back and retired into the car. As it slid off he hummed:

‘My wife she is dying, hurray! My wife she is dying, hurray!

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.’

Taking one hand off the wheel, he felt in his pocket. Amid the jingle he heard the subdued crackling of Lady Franklin’s note. All things considered, it hadn’t been a bad day, but God, how that woman had talked! He had two more jobs to do but they were small ones: to pick up a party for the theatre and bring them back. With luck he would be in bed by twelve, not with a wife but with the more agreeable companionship of his telephone. And he sighed with relief, for though he would not have admitted it he was very tired.

That night Leadbitter dreamed that he was married. The dream began with a realization of his married state: it was a nightmare, he was trapped and longed to wake up. The woman, when she came into the dream, was not Lady Franklin but someone rather like her. She was getting him his supper, moving about in an assured, efficient way; he was sitting in an armchair with his feet up. The room was much larger than his own, and had floor lamps and table lamp? dotted about it. ‘How are you feeling, Steve?’ his wife asked him, ‘not too tired, I hope?’

‘Oh no, my lady,’ he was going to say,but realizing that she was his wife and that he needn’t stand on ceremony with her, he grunted something. He was rather pleased that she had asked him if he was feeling tired. ‘The children are in bed,’ she said. ‘Pat has a touch of toothache and been grizzling a bit; I’m taking her to the dentist tomorrow,’ To his surprise he felt a twinge of sympathy for Pat. ‘Poor little devil,’ he said. ‘I’ve promised her some chocolates afterwards,’ said his wife. ‘I’ve got them here: would you like one?’ He said nothing but stretched his hand out and then savoured the sweet taste in his mouth. ‘Give us another,’ he said, and through the dream he again felt surprise, for his waking self never bothered with chocolates. His wife brought the box and put it on a table by his side. ‘Yes, but leave some for her,’ she said, and he laughed, and munched chocolate after chocolate until the upper layer was nearly gone. He thought his wife would scold him and was getting ready to resent it but she only said, half admiringly; ‘I never knew you had such a sweet tooth,’ Relaxed and appeased he decided to have one more, but at that moment there was a terrific commotion which gradually resolved itself into the rasping summons of the telephone. The pleasant sitting-room and his wife dissolved with the chocolate and in another moment, without waiting to switch the light on, he was holding the receiver to his ear. A voice that he recognized said: ‘Is that you, Leadbitter? Look here, we’re stranded at the Lotus Club, my wife and I. Can you drive us home?’

‘I’ve got a small job to do first, sir,’ Leadbitter said, to give himself more time. ‘Then I’ll be with you,’

The room, when it disclosed itself, looked small and bare bristling with angles and sharp edges. It was half past one by Leadbitter’s alarm clock. For night-work he charged more: the job would be a good one and put several pounds into his pocket. He glanced at the tumbled bed-clothes: between four and five he would be back between the sheets. But as he pulled his clothes on, and assembled himself in front of the looking-glass, he didn’t feel his usual exhilaration. His imagination lingered in the pleasaunce of his dream, wife-ridden though it was; and he fancied he could still taste the chocolate’s sweetness on his tongue.