The Hireling (6 page)

Cathedrals, country houses, beauty spots - Lady Franklin was a passionate and indefatigable sightseer. Not so Leadbitter: to him they were not sights they were objects and if he looked at them it was with a soldier’s eye, wondering whether they should be blown up or allowed to stand. He saw life as a campaign in which there was no real cessation of hostilities; opposition whetted his nature; agreement blunted it. Wherever he might be he wanted to take the next position, he had no interest in the terrain for itself, only in its possibilities for advance. Lady Franklin was one of these possibilities; indeed she had become one of his best customers and as such he studied her with all the care of which he was capable. In a sense he regarded her as an enemy; she did not qualify for the category of old ladies and in a sense ‘they’, his customers, were all enemies. Such a being as the perfect customer did not exist, though some had more faults than others. Unpunctuality was one of the worst, and of this women were particularly guilty. They would make a point of his being there on time and then keep him waiting for an hour; they would expect him to pick up their friends and drop them again in distant places; they would challenge his choice of the route; they would want him to wait in streets where waiting was prohibited; they would ask him to turn round and go back; they would want to keep him long after he was due on another job. They did not or would not understand that time, which was as elastic to them as an accordion-pleated skirt, was a strait-jacket to him.

On the average, male customers were better about time, for like him they generally had an objective and did not dilly-dally making up and unmaking their minds. But a few, mostly businessmen, bent on some dubious deal or giving lavish entertainments on their expense accounts, were worse than any woman: they were capable of keeping him out most of the night, getting more and more sozzled themselves and occasionally wanting him to join them. He had a way with people of this kind and if they did not like it they knew what to do. Leadbitter was master of as many degrees of coldness as a refrigerator, he could modulate from a light hoar frost to a deep freeze. But only with men did he adopt these tactics; women were to some extent non-combatants, and as such outside the arctic circle. Sometimes he said he would like to shoot the lot but in practice he treated his women customers with indulgence and seldom betrayed the irritation that they caused him.

Lady Franklin’s chief fault was that she could not stop talking, asking him damn-fool questions about himself. Sometimes she returned to her own troubles, the grief and remorse she felt about her husband, whom Leadbitter still thought of as a lucky man. Shyly she would ask him for reassurance; did he honestly think she had behaved as badly as she felt she had? To which Leadbitter would reply that he couldn’t see anything wrong in what she had done; after all, a woman had to go out sometimes, even his wife had to go out on occasions, tied though she was to the children and the telephone. Women needed a break, the same as anyone else. Men needed a break too - a break from women’s tongues, he meant, but was too tactful to say so. Sir Philip, or whoever he was, must often have needed a break from Lady Franklin’s.

‘You may be sure, my lady,’ he said, choosing his words, ‘that your husband sometimes wanted, well … time to look round and take stock of things, so to speak: every man does. He wouldn’t be a man if he wanted you to be all the time waiting hand and foot on him. My wife doesn’t, she looks after me, of course, but she’d go potty if I stayed at home all day. She’s often told me so, when I’ve - when I’ve told her I was sorry I had to be out so much. It isn’t nature for a husband and wife to be always together. Of course when a man’s courting a girl he wants to be with her all the time; but when he’s married half an hour a day’s enough. And if anything happened to me, as it easily might, with the kind of drivers there are on the roads, especially some lady-drivers, who don’t even know where the back of their neck is, well, it would be just too bad, but she wouldn’t think she ought to have been waiting at the corner of Piccadilly Circus, or wherever it might be, in case I had a crash, and I certainly shouldn’t want her to. It would be crying over spilt milk, for one thing. Life couldn’t go on if people felt like that.’

‘Yes,’ said Lady Franklin, whose tormenting demon was tireless in finding arguments against her, ‘but the two cases aren’t quite the same, are they? Your profession automatically takes you into danger’ (as she spoke a collision was only narrowly averted by Leadbitter’s watchful eye) ‘and your wife is, I know, a very busy woman. But I hadn’t that excuse. I just went out to a party when I should have been -‘

‘But why should you have been, my lady?’ broke in Leadbitter, heading her off. ‘I’m sure if you could ask your husband, he would say, “I was having a jolly good time in your absence, only it just happened that my heart conked out” - it’s like a car, you can’t tell when it’s going to happen, when the coil gets burnt out, for instance. That’s what I should say to my wife, and she’s just as fond of me as most wives are,’

‘No doubt she’s told you so,’ said Lady Franklin, entering into the deepest shadow of her remorse.

‘Oh yes, she has - but not all the time, you know, I really couldn’t stick it if she did. It makes a man feel bad if a woman tells him she loves him - too often that is. I couldn’t explain why.’

Lady Franklin thought about this. She had considered the incident from every possible angle, she believed, but it was a new idea to her that Philip might not have wanted her to tell him that she loved him. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be true! Her guilt rallied its forces and proclaimed an emphatic denial.

‘Have you told her?’ she murmured.

‘Have I told who, my lady?’ asked Leadbitter who, during Lady Franklin’s self-accusing silence, had lost the thread of the conversation.

‘Told your wife that you … you love her?’ Lady Franklin brought out with an effort.

‘Oh yes, often,’ Leadbitter said glibly. ‘But you know I think she takes it with a grain of salt,’

‘No,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘No,’ she repeated more firmly. ‘Not if I know anything about women. They want to hear that, believe me - it’s the only thing they really want to hear. And in spite of what you say, I think men are the same. Would you be as … as happy as you are, if your wife had never told you that she loved you?’

Leadbitter’s face stiffened a little, while inwardly he prayed for patience.

‘I think I should get over it, my lady,’ he said.

Lady Franklin smiled, and the lip which had begun to pout, spoiling the contour of her profile, slipped back into place.

‘I don’t believe you would,’ she said. ‘Not altogether. I hope you would, of course, if the situation ever arose -which I devoutly hope it won’t. But I beg you, don’t take the risk. If there’s anything you want to say to her - any message of love - any urgent message of that kind - say it at once - don’t wait until it’s too late, or it may spoil your life as it has mine.’

She’s said that before, thought Leadbitter. But what he said was:

‘I won’t forget, my lady,’

Their conversations usually followed the same pattern: beginning with Lady Franklin and her obsession, they ended with Leadbitter and his fictitious home-life. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies; but Lady Franklin asked a great many questions and Leadbitter told her a great many lies. He had no scruples in doing this because it was his principle to give his customers what they wanted. In practice the customer was often wrong, in theory the customer was always right, and theory dictated Leadbitter’s behaviour. Except when ‘they’ annoyed him beyond bearing he himself did not come into it.

But underneath that stern, correct exterior there lurked, unknown to Leadbitter, the temperament and the imagination of an artist. Just as he could anticipate his adversary’s next move, and might have distinguished himself as a boxer if he hadn’t thought that getting knocked about was a mug’s game, so in life he knew how to take advantage of a pressure, however strange and unexpected, that came to him from outside. Lady Franklin wanted to know about his private life, did she? Well, he would tell her. He who had had no emotional life for years, who had felt it an encumbrance and deliberately banished it, as he might have sent off parade a soldier wearing a button-hole, found a perverse delight in inventing a personal life for Lady Franklin’s benefit. Instalment by instalment, as if composing it for the wireless, he built up a serial story of himself and his wife and their children, the story of an ideally happy family. Not that the Leadbitters were always happy; they had their ups and downs, of temper, health, and spirits, and they were chronically hard up. But whatever befell them - and Leadbitter did not shrink from reporting a death on the outer fringes of the family: for a whole week he supplemented the black tie he always wore by a black band on his arm - whatever befell them, it took place in an idyllic atmosphere, an atmosphere of gold and pink, with a never-empty box of chocolates on the table. For the whole fantasy owed its imaginative impulse to his dream - that dream in which someone rather like Lady Franklin was his wife.

By fixing his mind on it at bedtime he tried to make the dream come back. But the dream would not play, would not come to help him out, and the odd thing was that though while he was alone he could remember all the past incidents of the saga, he could not add to them; the traffic of his imagination was jammed, he was, as he would have said, in stuck-street. But no sooner was Lady Franklin by his side than the light turned to green and he glided forward into the world of fantasy.

He did not always talk to her about his home life, however. She had become a habit with him, he had got used to her, and sometimes he forgot she was a customer, forgot the ‘my lady’, forgot the special language and the special tone of voice he kept for customers, and talked to her as if she was a friend; but he didn’t realize that his wish to tell her something was a sign he liked her. He talked of the jobs he had been doing, of his difficulties in being on time, of the drivers he had given work to and who had let him down. The tongue goes to the sore place; without a guard on it Leadbitter’s tended to run on his grievances. Away from home, and the consolation of his family, life was an obstacle race and the world full of awkward, disobliging people, big-heads who were in for a dose of deflation when they encountered him. Lady Franklin was a good listener; she drew him out, she enjoyed the impact on her imagination of a nature which was so unlike hers. It was like watching a battle from a safe distance, hearing the shots fired, seeing the hand-to-hand encounters. In her world the men were as polite to each other as the women were, perhaps more so; the surface of social intercourse was seldom ruffled.’ But in Leadbitter’s world a man had to stand up for himself, always with his tongue and sometimes with his fists. He could not afford to let another man get the better of him verbally; he had to have the last word, and if he couldn’t, something in reserve more forceful than a word. But Leadbitter was too much of a man to vaunt his prowess in the ears of Lady Franklin. She had to be content with such understatements as, ‘I gave him a birthday, my lady’, or, ‘I told him his horoscope’. When these exchanges took place with the driver of a passing car you had to be quickwitted to get in the word that stung. Leadbitter never treated her to an exhibition of his gift for repartee; his conception of correctness would not have allowed it. But using her eyes and ears, observing for herself, drawing aside the curtains that since her husband’s death had shrouded the outside world from her view, Lady Franklin saw for herself that what he said was true. Motorists with set faces seemed bent on mowing down pedestrians. Cab drivers stuck their heads out and yelled at other cab drivers, owners of private cars raised their eyebrows and muttered angrily, bus drivers sneered from Olympian heights; and if time and opportunity offered, these gibes were returned in kind. It was a slanging-match.

‘Are all motorists angry with each other?’ she asked.

‘Small wonder if they were,’ he said, ‘considering how they drive. Some of them would have us up the wall in no time. And the pedestrians! That woman seems to think that if she stands there with her legs apart I can drive between them,’

Was this the outside world?

‘Let’s go back!’ cried Lady Franklin.

‘Back, my lady?’

‘Yes, to South Halkin Street,’

‘Shall I shut the windows, my lady?’

‘No, leave them open a little,’

‘Shall I pull the curtains?’

‘Isn’t it a bit early?’

‘The nights don’t draw out as fast as they draw in, my lady, and there’s a smog coming on,’

‘A smog! But how exciting! I should like to see it. Please leave a chink between the curtains, Simmonds,’

Lady Franklin sat down with a book. She took out the marker, without which she couldn’t find her place. She didn’t read, however. Her eyes strayed to the gaps between the curtains, and her ears listened for sounds in the quiet street.

‘But I thought that grief had quite gone out, with mourning and black-edged writing paper and plumes and mutes and such things. … And it’s so terribly unattractive, too. … No, I suppose people still feel it a little, only nobody shows it, because they think that the deceased would have preferred in that way. Nearly everyone I know who lost relations and others near and dear to them in the war at once put on their nicest clothes and went to a theatre or a party. It was rather like jumping on a horse again when you’ve been thrown, and also to spare their friends embarrassment. And of course not to seem to mind is in the end the surest way of not minding. Two girls I knew lost their best friends in Italy, and you couldn’t have told, you really couldn’t have told, from the way they behaved, that anything had gone wrong at all. They talked about them just as if they were still alive; they laughed at anything there was to laugh at, especially anything to do with death (my dear, one can’t help seeing the funny side of it) and very soon they were as gay as ever___

‘Insensitive? Oh, I don’t mean they didn’t suffer; but if they did they kept it to themselves. The world has to go on, hasn’t it, and a long face and puffy eyelids do no one any good. But of course they weren’t rich like Ernestine. Grief is a luxury of the rich, and in rather bad taste, I think, like having a car when other people can’t. Which of us can afford to put on black at a moment’s notice? - though I own it’s becoming to some people, especially the fair ones, and some of us would welcome the excuse. And about Ernestine I always think it’s difficult to feel sorry for anyone who has enough to live on___