The Hireling (7 page)

‘Yes, but even religious people don’t think you should give way to grief, it isn’t Christian, when you’re going to meet whoever it may be so soon in the next world. It shows such lack of faith. To really Christian people the dead are just as present as the living…. Is Ernestine religious? Well, more superstitious, I should say. No doubt she has sought the consolations of religion; she has tried everything, I believe, including obvious quacks. … But has she ever tried a man? Ah, that I shouldn’t know, my dear; personally I should say not, not even when she was married to her Philip. Of course she’s too loyal to his memory to say so; but look at that large family of his, all those long-nosed Franklins; between them have they ever produced a single child? The baronetcy goes to some distant cousin in Australia, I believe, whom no one has ever seen. No, I think a good man would do her a world of good, and when I say a good man I don’t mean good in the moral sense. But is it likely that any man would dare, when she wears her grief like a ceinture de chastite? It sticks out all over her, and mourning is so middle-class and discouraging, if you know what I mean. No, I know she doesn’t actually wear it, but all the same it’s there….

‘Her mother’s in the bin, of course. You didn’t know?

Oh yes, she is, and that’s what makes us all so anxious about Ernestine. It makes her anxious too, I shouldn’t wonder, although she doesn’t say so, in case she should be going that way herself. For she must know it isn’t normal, at least it isn’t normal nowadays, whatever it may have been in the past. It’s only in the Bible that people refuse to be comforted. And Queen Victoria - but think how bored the public got with her! For who is there that matters all that much? People don’t count in that way now. Who does one want to see for longer than a meal takes - or for as long as some meals take? That’s why so many of us would rather have acquaintances than friends - they aren’t the strain, and they’re more faithful in the long run. No one is irreplaceable. I couldn’t answer for you, darling, but I’m quite sure I’m not, and I shouldn’t like anyone to think I was. I shouldn’t dare to die, if I thought somebody would cry their eyes out for me! Which of us is worth it? Certainly Philip wasn’t. He was rather a stick, between ourselves, and too conscious of being a Franklin, as they all are - even Ernestine, poor sweet, in her grand moments.

‘… No, she doesn’t talk about her trouble as she used to. Perhaps someone told her, or she saw for herself how our eyes glazed with boredom when the record started - for with all the will in the world to help her, what could one say except, “You’ll get over it, my dear, in time”? You might think she didn’t want to get over it, but I’m sure she must,-because of the example of her mother….

‘Don’t think I’m running her down. Ernestine is a darling person really, and we all want her back among us. And there’s only one way to do it, cherchez l’homme! If we could find some nice upstanding fellow, somebody we all know and like, not a rich man, she wouldn’t want that, but somebody she could take pity on. It sounds ridiculous to say it, but I think she married Philip out of pity. Pity is the way to her heart, pity and admiration. Whom do we know who might fill the bill? Jasper is a most deserving case and so is Archie, and even Hughie could be made to seem so, if Constance would speak up for him. … That’s too much to expect? You never know with Constance. She runs him down to his face, but she defends him like a tigress when he isn’t there - though of course he always is there! … Not admire Hughie? Oh, I think one could; he’s good-looking now and he’ll always be promising. … More like a caddish subaltern than a painter? Oh, I don’t think that’s fair; besides, it’s part of his charm. We can’t tell if he is generous; he’s never had the chance to be, poor darling. But how can we get Ernestine to meet him or anyone else, when she never goes out? And when one goes to see her at her mausoleum in South Halkin Street, it’s all so awkward. Lady Franklin’s grief must be respected! We must be tactful, my dear, we must be tactful! We mustn’t refer to it and yet we mustn’t seem to be unconscious of it! It must be always in our thoughts but never on our tongues! Don’t speak too loudly, it might startle her. Don’t speak too softly, it might remind her of his death. Ernestine is a very important person in our lives and very dear to us all. Oh, I’m not alluding to the money Sir Philip left her. What good does it do her? She only uses it to protect her privacy, as a drug to deepen her slumber! Yet it is there, it is there! She has only to open her cheque-book. Her presence among us makes us feel safer. … How safer? Well, safer financially, perhaps. For should anything happen, anything painful or unpleasant happen, Ernestine would … well… she would come to the rescue. That is why we must go and see her, at discreet intervals of course, and ringing up or writing first, to give her the chance to say, “No, no, I cannot receive you, I must be alone with my grief. With my grief I am hardly anything (Ernestine never had a high opinion of herself) but without my grief I am nothing: I exist in my grief.”

‘But all the same she is still one of us: we talk about her and think about her and want to help her to return to circulation. She is frozen, frozen like money in a foreign country. But her money isn’t frozen, of course: it circulates, it’s alive, much more so than she is; we can feel her bank-balance rubbing shoulders with our overdrafts, and it’s a warm and comfortable feeling! So we don’t mean to drop her, or let her drop us! Be an angel now and ring her up, and ask if we may come to tea on Thursday, or better still if she will come to a very small party, just a few friends, that we are having on Thursday week….

‘But she won’t come, of course. Jasper and Archie will come, and Hughie will come, he’s never missed a party; and Constance will come, because she never misses a party that Hughie goes to. But Ernestine won’t come….

‘Is it very awful of me, darling, to talk like this? I thought you were looking down your nose at your old friend - are you ashamed of me? Have I been guilty of bad taste - do I sound what used to be called “common”? Of course I didn’t mean a word of it. Dear, darling Ernestine, she’s a bit wishy-washy but she is such a pet: is there anything wrong in trying to get her safely tied up with some nice man? We can’t leave her to the mercy of the first adventurer who comes along, it must be somebody we know and trust.

‘… Oh no, because she isn’t happy with the Franklin set; they are too up-stage for her, besides, they remind her of the past and she knows they think she neglected their dear Philip - they make her feel guilty…. Of course, if she’d had a child! No, we stand a better chance with her, she hankers after people who do things, and nobody can say we don’t! … But seriously, wouldn’t she be better off with Jasper or Archie or even with Hughie, who at any rate doesn’t know what guilt is, than stewing in her own juice, living a totally unreal life, the life of a gilded cage which might at any moment turn into a padded cell? A romp with Hughie would blow away the cobwebs. … Constance would never let him? Oh, I think she might - good old Connie, but we mustn’t call her that, she hates the Connie-Hughie jingle. She may be tired of him, we don’t know; she may be tired of playing sheep-dog to his gambols. The question is, how are we to bring him and Ernestine together? - and that, I own, defeats me,’

Did these wandering voices, making free with her name, penetrate Lady Franklin’s solitude? No, but a rumour of them did, the feeling if not the sense of them, like the distant buzz of an excited crowd, heard through open windows behind curtains that are not quite drawn. The threat and promise of life! What she saw and heard offended her; it rasped her tender unused sensibility, it blinded her inward-turning vision and shouted down her grief. Its very miscellaneousness confused and worried her; for she was used to seeing what she chose to see, and hearing what had been especially composed and orchestrated for her ears. Shut the windows, draw the curtains, keep the rumour out ! How much safer Lady Franklin felt when this was done.

Among the voices Lady Franklin heard, if she did hear them, was one which spoke in very different accents, accents which were harsh and unrefined, but she was familiar with them and would have recognized them, for they were Leadbitter’s. At what moment it occurred to him that the thought of Lady Franklin’s bank balance was a comforting thought, he couldn’t himself have told; he knew that she lived in Easy Street, but then so did most, if not all, of his customers. He was glad they did, for otherwise they could not have hired him. But in no other way was their wealth of any interest to him; they did not propose to share it with him. Some of them tipped him better than others, and this he remembered in their favour. But when he left the Fire Service, and started on his own - that death-defying leap which they all knew about, for he had both told them personally and circularized them with his Trade Card ‘Leadbitter’s Garages Ltd, Cars for All Occasions’ - had one of them offered to ‘help’ him? Yes, one had, an old lady: with great diffidence and delicacy, she had offered him a pound, and he, with equal diffidence and delicacy, had refused it, because he thought she couldn’t afford it. But none of the others, however rolling in riches, had offered him a penny; they had left him to sink or swim. They might be coated in money, but the money didn’t rub off. On the contrary, quite a number of his customers wrote to him, querying this or that item in their accounts. He had told them that his charges would be less than those of other firms and so they were; but the malcontents professed to find them heavier. Leadbitter didn’t like these letters: his nervous tension showed itself in an exaggerated fear of losing his customers.

But he wasn’t afraid of losing Lady Franklin : he realized that it was not in her nature to take offence, and that even if it had been, she was too much wrapped up in herself to mind what other people said or did to her. Her heart was in the grave. Probably, he thought, she never even checked her monthly account. He did not envy her her indifference to money, but it was a fact, and a fact to be reckoned with.

And yet, indifferent as she was to money and to most other outside circumstances, she wasn’t indifferent to him. Never a drive passed but she asked him for the latest instalment of the Leadbitter saga, she listened like a child and like a child asked questions. What ‘The Archers’ and ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’ were to other people, so was his narrative to Lady Franklin; only to her of course it was true. Nearly all women were interested in people, just as nearly all men (including himself) were interested in money. And as long as she was with him he had no difficulty in making the supply of facts meet the demand.

One showery afternoon in March they were motoring back from Chichester. Lady Franklin still believed that the answer to her problem could be found in a cathedral: its atmosphere always promised relief, there was always a moment when relief seemed to be coming, and though in fact it never came, she went on hoping. Disappointment made her silent and abstracted during the first part of the homeward journey: her lower lip came forward, trembling, and her face wore its shut look. On this occasion, as on others, Leadbitter waited for her distress to spend itself and then he said:

‘I’ve had some bad news since the last time we went out, my lady,’

‘Bad news?’ repeated Lady Franklin from the depth of her brown study, and it might just as well have been good news, by the expressionless way she said it. Then the meaning of the words seemed to penetrate, she shook her head, and turning to Leadbitter said in a very different voice, ‘Bad news? Did you say you had had bad news?’

‘I’m afraid so, my lady,’

Lady Franklin hesitated. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’

‘I dare say I could,’ said Leadbitter, ‘but I don’t want to bother you with my affairs,’

He looked straight ahead of him.

Almost for the first time, it seemed to Lady Franklin, she was brought up against Leadbitter the man. Hitherto he had been her Chaucer, beguiling her with Canterbury tales, tales to be continued in our next, tales that had always had a happy ending. But for that one bereavement, the Leadbitter family had seemed to bear a charmed life. And now misfortune had overtaken them. A chill went through her, a shaft of cold like nothing she had felt for years, piercing the matted wadding of her self-generated emotions. She felt the embarrassment, the slight resentment that we feel when someone whom we have always known on one plane of acquaintance and at the same remove from us, steps out in front of us and blocks our way.

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ she said, and blushed for the inadequacy of the words.

‘Oh no, my lady,’ Leadbitter said. ‘I oughtn’t really to have mentioned it,’

The harshness of his voice seemed to be a measure of the disaster he was up against: from that she gauged its seriousness. She was used to a society in which troubles spread and softened themselves in words; with articulate people of her own sort they reached out and clothed themselves in phrases, emollient phrases to which sympathy could respond. They used a conventional language for calamity which Leadbitter did not know.

Lady Franklin felt utterly at a loss. How much did Leadbitter count with her as a human being? Should she press him to tell her? It seemed inhuman not to; but his trouble, whatever it was, seemed to have cased him in steel. She must be as sincere with him as she had it in her to be, stop thinking about herself, give him her unalloyed attention, as the Good Samaritan did to the traveller who had fallen among thieves.

‘Has it anything to do with your wife?’ she hazarded.

‘It affects all of us,’ he said.

It affects all of us. … This laconic statement moved Lady Franklin strongly. The whole Leadbitter family whom she knew so well, whose life had become so much a part of hers that it was as real to her as anything outside herself could be, was threatened.

‘Please tell me,’ she said. ‘If I can’t do anything to help, I can at least say how sorry I am,’

Leadbitter shook his head.

‘I’m afraid I can’t, my lady. What’s the good of upsetting you? It’s just one of those things,’

Lady Franklin was baffled. Her instinct was to say no more, to intrude no further on the driver’s unhappiness. But that was cowardly. She felt a new respect for Leadbitter; she saw him as a soldier on the battlefield defending himself against overwhelming odds, disdaining help; driving the car, doing his job as though nothing had happened. Whereas she - she had thrown up the sponge, beaten a retreat, let life get her down. She wouldn’t desert him, even if he wanted to be deserted. Besides, she was beginning to feel the prick of curiosity.