Love and Money (31 page)

This was Cainge's cue.

“And why should we look at them friendly like in the mill?” he shouted, springing to his feet. “Why should we welcome them? They threaten our standard of living which we've built up after countless years of struggle and sacrifice.
What'll happen when the next cycle of unemployment comes? They'll be kept on because they'll be cheap non-Union labour, while we get our cards! They'll take the bread out of the mouths of English workers! Of course the millowners want them over here and want everyone to be kind and nice to them so they'll settle down and stay! You want a pool of surplus labour, that's what you want, so you can keep the rest of us in order! You may have forgotten 1931, when one-third of the adult population of this town was on the dole——”

“Nay, I haven't,” said Morcar in a tone of great feeling.

“Nor I,” said Walter Egmont quietly.

“You seem to have done pretty well out of it all the same,” said Cainge, quivering with fury. “Judging by the looks of you. You like these foreigners in your mills because they'll accept any hours and any wages you offer them— they've no other choice. Cainge, Trades Council,” he added aggressively.

“We all know Councillor Cainge,” said the Mayor, his tone a trifle sardonic.

“I like the E.V.W.s because they work hard,” said Egmont simply, rising. “They don't know English so they don't waste time talking.”

“That's just what I say,” screamed Cainge. “You exploit their need and use their weakness to pull us down.”

“They make piece-work pay well, too, after all,” said Egmont mildly.

“The country needs their labour for the export drive,” interrupted Morcar. “It's export or expire for England today. If they're not in a Union that's the Union's fault. It's certainly not mine. I'm all for them being admitted by the Unions.”

“They're thrifty, too,” continued Egmont, pursuing his own train of thought. “Some of mine are already buying a house through the Building Society.”

“And that's another thing!” shouted Cainge. “These people are buying up slum property and turning it into tenements, perfect rabbit warrens! And some of the property owners in this town are taking advantage of their ignorance to sell them property which has been condemned.”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Egmont with disgust, sitting down.

“Nay, I'm afraid it's not altogether nonsense, Mr. Egmont,” said a long thin tired-looking man, uncoiling himself from his bench. “Boother, Citizens' Advice Bureau. I'm afraid I must agree with Mr. Cainge there. I believe there may have been such sales. If only these people would consult us first, before buying!”

“I believe I can see some of those property-owners here,” cried Cainge, looking about him with grim relish.

It was not true, for he did not in fact know who, if any, were these hypothetical abominable property-owners, but his remark achieved the effect it intended, namely to cause an uproar. Men shouted hotly at each other and at Cainge, women argued shrilly, the E.V.W.s talked among themselves at the top of their voices and quarrels arose between groups who had been, after all, traditional enemies through many centuries. Cainge, his greying ginger hair on end, his green eyes blazing, was in his element. In his grating, aggressive, Yorkshire tones he shouted retorts and accusations in all directions, while Councillor Soskin banged her desk with her clenched fist and cried repeatedly:

“All this is off the point!”

At length the Mayor by using his gavel restored order.

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen! We shall not get far with this way of carrying on,” he said reproachfully. “It's too late for Councillor Cainge to say these E.V.W.s shouldn't have come to England. They've come already, and England's accepted them. Nought remains for us now but to do the best we can for them.”

“Hear, hear,” came from various quarters of the Council Chamber, but not from Cainge.

“We've made a list—a first list—of their most pressing requirements,” went on the Mayor, “and now I suggest we proceed to the election of a committee to see how far these wants can be met. I call for nominations.”

Several names were at once offered to him.

“I'd like to nominate Mr. Cainge,” said Morcar grimly.

At this there was a minor uproar.

“Nomination declined,” snapped Cainge. “Nay! Your point of view should be represented,” said Morcar.

“That's true, Amos,” said Cainge's neighbour. “We ought to have somebody on, to keep an eye on them.”

“Well, I shall have to consult my Council,” said Cainge, vexed.

“Aye, do. And then notify me,” said the Mayor.

The committee was elected, and the meeting closed, in a decorous manner, for the West Riding members had too much unconscious respect for the democratic process to let a meeting get really out of hand, and the strangers in their midst of course followed their example. But nobody felt friendly. They left the Council Chamber in small groups, talking hotly among themselves, repeating the arguments they had used in the meeting, as they flowed down the marble staircase towards the massive pillars and statuary of the main Town Hall entrance. It was raining a little; the Trades Council group paused in the huge echoing porch to turn up their raincoat collars, the employers to get out their car keys and offer lifts to some of the women.

“Excuse please,” said a voice at Cainge's ear.

Cainge started and looked round irritably at Edelmann, who was wearing his sternest air.

“My bicycle,” said Edelmann. He pointed. “There.”

Sure enough, behind a marble frock-coated figure (slightly over life size) representing the first Mayor of Annotsfield, was concealed a bicycle. It was propped by its handlebars against the pedestal on which the Mayor's boots rested. The effect was odd; in the sharp lights and shadows of the porch the boots, the pedestal and the bicycle looked together like one of those preposterous modern pictures the Arts Council sent to the Annotsfield Museum, thought Cainge (who sat on the Libraries and Museums Committee) crossly—surrealist, that was the word. For the bicycle was very old, much and unconventionally mended, and of a shape unfashionable in England for many years.

“An old grid,” thought Cainge with scorn.

Usually he thought nothing of the first Mayor of Annotsfield, in his opinion one of those Victorian hypocrites who built a fortune by grinding the faces of their workers and then had the cheek to call themselves public benefactors because they gave the town a swimming bath, but now he felt positively affronted to see this wretched alien bike scratching the corporation's marble. He stepped back with a gesture conceding the right of way towards the bike to Edelmann, but his gesture was deliberately contemptuous and no smile brightened his angry little face.

“Perhaps one day, Mr. Cainge, you come to see us in our rabbit place, yes?”

Cainge scowled. He moved out of the way of the bicycle's pedals with an insulting, exaggerated care.

“Yes?” pressed Edelmann. “Walker Street, number twenty, is our address.”

He was certainly a very tall handsome fellow, thought Cainge with irritation; just the type to be a boss's pet. He towered above Cainge; his great eyes glowed, his fine nostrils were dilated, perhaps with anger. The long white scar down his cheek was, however, ugly, being curiously puckered.

“Nay—I don't see as it would serve any useful purpose,” said Cainge in his most disagreeable tone.

“Yes—you come,” said Edelmann, nodding. “You see.”

He picked up the bicycle and carried it lightly down the marble stairs with a good deal of adroitness, needing only to say “excuse please” twice when groups unavoidably blocked his way; then mounted the bicycle and rode off with a very swift acceleration through the rain.

Amos Cainge was not a man with a great deal of home life. He had a very quiet, reserved, careworn-looking little wife who was still rather pretty, and three stepchildren whom he had brought up with staunch fierce devotion, but no children of his own. The three stepchildren were now, in
1950, grown up and out of the home; the eldest son was an electrician, well trained, with a good job, married; the second was away doing his military service; the youngest child, a daughter, born in that black year for the West Riding 1931, had done very well at school and was now at a training college in the midlands. All this was a satisfaction to Cainge; but he was not a man who took much pleasure on the domestic hearth; his main interest lay in politics: union, national and local. His life was lived in public meetings. Night after night he trudged out and caught a bus to some part of the West Riding; speaking here and there, fighting his own ward election to the Town Council or those of his colleagues, asking awkward questions at his opponents' meetings, bringing up points of order, haranguing, objecting, accusing; always fiery, always aggressive; indefatigable and full of hate.

By making a slight detéour from the direct route from the Annotsfield bus station to his terrace house, Cainge could pass down Walker Street. On the night after the Town Hall meeting, from angry curiosity he made this detéour. He found that number twenty was an old tall tumbledown smoke-blackened place, wreckage of the Industrial Revolution. But it spilled light from every window, and resounded with a babel of foreign tongues. Cainge scowled and compressed his lips as he passed by on the other side.

On the next night he went that way again. It fed his hate to see the house. He stood for a moment glaring at it, though an icy sleet was dropping on his shoulders.

On the following night he again turned down Walker Street. The meeting he had attended had been disappointing and his mood was particularly grim. The noise from the house was louder than before; there was laughter, music, singing. Bursting with moral indignation against these hated folk who threatened the workers' standard of living and had the impudence to laugh while doing so, Cainge on a sudden impulse ran furiously up the old chipped steps and banged the door-knocker as hard as he could.

Instantly there was silence. Many of the lights went out—
Cainge saw the yellow squares on the pavement turn dark. Then there was a feeling of soft quick movement within the house, a sort of scurrying, and then sounds of whispering behind the door. Cainge lifted the door knocker again and beat a furious tattoo.

The door was flung open. Edelmann stood there, looking extremely tall and stern.

“Come in, please,” he said.

Cainge stepped forward. As he entered the house he from habit took off his hat, and the light from the single electric bulb in the hall fell on his gingery hair and angry face.

“Oh!” cried Edelmann in a great gust of relief, his stern face breaking into smiles: “It is you, Mr. Cainge! Mr.
Councillor
Cainge, excuse please. It is Councillor Cainge!” he called up the staircase. “It is not police!”

Voices and laughter broke out at once upstairs and several lights went on.

“You come to see?” said Edelmann, turning to Cainge again. “Good!” He seized Cainge's hand between his own and wrung it heartily. “Excuse please that I appeared not glad to see you. We not like knocks on door at night—we fear it is police. But it is Councillor Cainge only. No secret police here! You have supper? Yes!”

He shepherded Cainge into a small room where a dark-haired woman, rather handsome in a foreign way, sat with a book on her lap as if she had been reading to a boy of twelve or so who leant against her chair.

“My wife, Maria. My younger son, John. Supper for Councillor Cainge, Maria. Excuse please—I make good fire.”

The embarrassed Cainge found himself sitting at a small rickety baize-covered table in front of a huge blazing fire. Edelmann threw coal on this fire with a recklessness which appalled Cainge, who knew the price of coal, and its relation to Edelmann's wages, very well. He protested about the fire, he declined supper. But what was he to do when dish after dish appeared on the table before him? In his own eyes
Cainge was a just man, and he was abashed by the knowledge that his knock had frightened these people, that they had believed him to belong to some awful Ogpu—or whatever was their latest name. He, Amos Cainge, a member of a secret police! He owed them some apology, he felt, and this was peculiarly irritating when he disliked their presence in his town so much. The most elaborate and odd-looking foods were placed before him, of which he did not even know the names: slices of large sausage patterned like the marble of the Town Hall porch, salads with strange ingredients, potatoes curiously dressed There was so much of this food that Cainge felt he was eating the Edelmanns' provisions for the whole of next week. What made it worse was that other dwellers in the house came in with dishes of food in their hands and laid them before Cainge, smiling and gesticulating and uttering incomprehensible words. A jug of coffee came in this way, and a plate of butter. The bearers of these gifts did not retire when they had offered them, but stood round the walls, beaming and chattering and watching Cainge eat—for he was obliged to eat. All the same he hardened his heart. These people, interlopers, industrial traitors, were the enemies of his class. A little supper and soft soap would not change Amos Cainge's views.

The room was by now quite crowded, and the talk and gesticulation round the walls had become highly animated, when suddenly there came a slight crash, and then a pause. Cainge looked round to see what had fallen.

It was in fact Edelmann's comical old bicycle, which must have been leaning against the wall in a corner, covered by a piece of black velvet, for it now lay, half in half out of velvet folds, with its handlebars turned up at an angle, on the floor. (Velvet over a bicycle! How absurd!) Cainge prepared to receive the bicycle's fall with the acid smile he kept for feeble jokes, when he observed with surprise a look of consternation on every face. All the Estonians stood back from the bicycle and gazed at it in silence, except the young man who had knocked it down, who poured out a great rush of words to Edelmann which even Cainge could see were
meant to be a heartfelt apology. Edelmann put his hand comfortingly on the young man's shoulder, but his face was grave. Nobody seemed to dare to touch the bicycle except Edelmann himself, who stooped down and, handling the old frame with as much tenderness as if it were a baby, gently restored it to an upright position and tested its pedals and chain. Cainge noticed that in spite of its antiquity the bicycle's metalwork gleamed; somebody clearly gave it very regular polishings. Exclamations of relief showed him that the bicycle was unharmed, but the accident had sobered Edelmann's compatriots, and they all now bowed to Cainge and Edelmann and left the room. Mrs. Edelmann took the dishes away and her little son went with her, and Cainge stood up and prepared to take his leave.