Something Wholesale (8 page)

^*
Now, I am happy to say, the Headquarters of the Army School of Education.

On the morning following my demobilisation at Woking I left Wanda with my mother, who had taken the day off for what she described as ‘a little talk’, and for the second time reported for duty at 54 Great Marlborough Street.

Once more the doorbell pinged as it closed behind me and once more, although I tip-toed past the door of the Counting House, I encountered Miss Gatling.

‘’ERE!’ she said in her most audible voice after disposing swiftly of the formalities of welcome. ‘You watch your step this time. Just married!’ She managed to make it sound as though I had contracted some unmentionable disease. ‘They say you fall twice as hard and twice as easily when you’re just married.’ A series of titters coming from the Counting House showed that the audience was enjoying the joke, too.

I had had more than enough of the Mantle Stockroom and of Lola. Wanda would make short work of her and I had no desire to be one of the entrées in a Balkan carve-up. Long before returning to England I had decided to ask my father for a transfer.

I found him in rather low spirits but at the sight of me and the problems I presented he soon cheered up. As usual he dealt with these problems in an oblique way.

‘I was delighted at the news of your decoration,’ he said. ‘It’s a splendid thing. By the way, what did you get it for?’

‘I don’t know, I’m afraid. I think it’s probably some kind of mistake.’

‘Do you really? ‘ he said, eagerly. ‘That’s what I thought myself when your mother told me. Bureaucracy gone mad. All those jacks-in-office scribbling away. Do you know, there’s scarcely a decent hotel anywhere that hasn’t got some kind of government department cluttering it up. If you’re too busy I could write to the War Office and ask them what you did get it for. Then you’d know for certain.’

‘I don’t think I should do that, Father.’

‘As you please,’ he said a little reluctantly.
^*
‘Everything’s in such a mess at the moment. Look at India,’ he went on, moving effortlessly to his favourite subject. ‘We’re giving them Self-Rule. Soon the beggars will be murdering one another in thousands. I heard at the Club that there’s a rumour that they’re thinking of giving Mountbatten India.’ (For my father and his contemporaries the world had come to an end in July 1945, with the victory of the Socialists at the polls.)

‘Well, what about you? That’s more to the point,’ said my father, abandoning the horrors of India as being incapable of solution in the time at our disposal. ‘To my mind you should be in the Showroom with Miss Stallybrass. The atmosphere’s far more healthy than in the Stockroom. You’ll meet the customers and if you keep your eyes open you’ll learn a good deal. If you don’t find you’ve got enough to do you can always call on some of the London accounts.

‘Talk to Wilkins about it. You might even go to see X and Y.’
He mentioned the chairmen of two department stores with whom he was on terms of easy familiarity. ‘They’ll be glad to see you and give you some advice. It’s worth while cultivating men like that. You can telephone their secretaries for an appointment.’

My position in the firm was so ill-defined and the problems left over from my earlier service in the Stockroom were proving so difficult to resolve that I welcomed any mission, however unproductive it might seem, providing that it took me out of the building.

‘Would it be a good idea if I got in touch with them right away?’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said my father. ‘Ring ’em up.’ He was so taken aback that I had adopted one of his suggestions without demur that he seemed to find nothing suspicious in my enthusiasm. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, as I rose to go. ‘Your wife seems a decent sort of girl. Pity about her religion. But it can’t be helped. No good crying over spilled milk.’

I thought it an unfortunate metaphor, and said so; but he seemed not to hear. ‘I bought this on the way in this morning. I thought you might like to read it. Wanda might enjoy it, too.’ He handed me a paper-back edition of H. G. Wells’
Crux Ansata
, a violent diatribe against the Roman Church.

‘I’d like it back when you’ve finished with it,’ he said. And, with a hint of menace, ‘I’ve put my name on the flyleaf.’

I turned to the inscription. THIS BOOK BELONGS TO G. A. NEWBY. IT IS NOT YOUR PROPERTY! it read. Under it he had written his home and business addresses and both telephone numbers, rather like a small boy who writes ‘England, Europe, World, Universe’ in a school exercise book.

Of the two chairmen, X and Y, X was leaving for America, which, for an inhabitant of the British Isles in 1946, was the equivalent of a journey to Tibet in 1900. Y, on the other hand, I was told could see me that very morning.

I was surprised by the ease with which I had been able to make the appointment. It was something that my previous experience in the commercial field had not led me to expect. Foolishly I attributed it to the fact that I was older, more a man-of-the-world. I was glad too that I was wearing my new suit, the one that had been made for me by the man who had been blown up in the Burlington Arcade, now re-constructed completely by a patient Italian artisan. ‘
Com’è ridotto il vostro Impero
,’ he had said wonderingly when he first unpacked it and looked with disbelief at the label in the inside pocket of the jacket that was adorned with the coats of arms of two royal houses.

At the vast store Sir Harold’s name acted as a strong tonic on those members of the staff from whom I asked the whereabouts of his office. Vicariously I savoured the pleasures of power.

Even in the lift I was given special treatment. To the inconvenience of other shoppers, most of whom were women wearing hats adorned with regimental badges picked out in diamonds, who wished to stop at intermediate levels, I was whisked to the top floor in one: past China and Glass, Corsetry and Books, Baby Linen and Overdue Accounts, where firm but deferential men stood waiting at the receipt of custom on the thick beige carpet like pelicans on a mudbank.

I arrived on time.

‘Ah! Mr Newby,’ said Sir Harold’s secretary. In these few words she managed to convey the impression that I had done her an infinite kindness by coming at all. Her hair, which was cropped short like a man’s, was dyed a fashionable shade of executive blue. She was the sort of secretary who, unprompted, sends flowers to her employer’s wife and mistresses on a graduated scale of munificence.

I was ushered into the sanctum. The effect that it produced derived not from its contents but from its emptiness. There was
a glass-topped desk, modishly asymmetrical like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier; a full-length portrait in oils of Sir Harold as Master of the Ropetwisters Company, and a very small photograph in a silver frame of Lady Y wearing an expression that I had once seen on the face of a bulldog that had been photographed for a recruiting poster for the Royal Navy, entitled ‘Dogged Does It’. The only other item of furniture, except for a chair which placed the occupant at an immediate disadvantage by lowering his nose to the level of the desk, was an austere iron bedstead covered with an army blanket. On it the great man re-charged his batteries in an afternoon nap in emulation of a far greater one who had hallowed the practice by observing it. The air of the room was redolent of a thousand smoked cigars. That was all. There was not a paper, not a book in sight. It is with this panoply of nothingness that the great intimidate those wretches whose ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays are always bursting at the seams.

‘George how good to see …’ said Sir Harold, half rising from his seat. He and my father had been behind the same counter at a store in Oxford Street before going their separate ways. I was not what he was expecting at all. For a moment he showed his annoyance; then, with a supreme effort, he decided to make the best of it.

‘You must be George’s boy,’ he said, motioning me to the chair. ‘Your father spoke of you,’ there was a perceptible pause, ‘often.’

‘Well, you’ll have to be good to be half as good as your father,’ he went on, as if I was not aware of this already.

‘And what have
you
been doing with yourself?’

I told him in a few words.

‘You’ll have a job to make up for lost time,’ he said, as if I was personally responsible for this state of affairs. ‘You’ve left it late. We’ve got young men here, younger than you. Been through the mill here in the last five years. Been here since they were sixteen – know it all – not quite all, of course,’ he added, hastily, as if
knowing it all in some way detracted from his own position. ‘Night school three times a week. Ripe for management. It’ll take you five years to catch up. You’ll be thirty. They’ll always be that much ahead. Work hard, that’s what you’ll have to do. Jack-of-all-trades, Master-of-None. Doesn’t necessarily apply to you of course,’ he added, conscious that he might have over-stepped the mark.

‘There’s nothing like starting at the bottom,’ said Sir Harold, pointing his great cigar at me. ‘And the world doesn’t owe you a living. Two things to remember. George and I both slept under the counter when we were first apprenticed. He’ll tell you. Only pity is he didn’t get ahead like I did. Otherwise he might have been sitting here instead of me.’ He looked at me complacently.

I suppressed a desire that had been mounting in me to give Sir Harold what my father would have described as ‘a good slosh’.

‘I suppose you want a job?’ he went on.

‘I only came to introduce myself to you, Sir Harold, because my father suggested that I should. I’m learning the wholesale business.’

‘Ah,’ said Sir Harold, obviously relieved. ‘In the wholesale. Well, make your own way. Cardinal rule with me, never interfere with my Buyers. They know the market, or ought to. If they don’t they get out – Sharp. Always remember, if your merchandise is right my Buyers will beat a path to your door. If not you go to the wall. Cardinal rule.’

Naïve as I was, having heard something of the personal habits of Sir Harold’s Buyers, I could scarcely repress a smile. Although they might beat a path to a manufacturer’s door that path had to be sprinkled liberally with gold and champagne.

A buzzer buzzed, so softly that it was barely audible. Sir Harold bent forward over the framed photograph of his helpmeet, patiently awaiting his pleasure in The Green Belt. For a moment I thought that he was going to kiss it in the manner of a sacred
relic, but at the sight of its dumb devotion he frowned with distaste and addressed himself instead to an invisible microphone.

‘Yes, send him in,’ he said. ‘Mr Newby is just leaving.’ And to me, ‘Don’t hesitate to come and see me at any time if I can be of assistance to you. I’ve enjoyed our talk immensely.’

‘What
have
you been up to, Mr Eric?’ said Miss Stallybrass when I returned disconsolate to Lane and Newby’s. ‘Mrs Locke-Smythson has been on the phone. She was absolutely livid. She says that apparently you practically burst into the Chairman’s office and asked him why she hasn’t been doing more business with us. She threatened to close the account. It’s taken me half an hour to calm her down. I’ve got enough to do as it is with that bloody girl away.’

I had nothing to say. There was nothing I could say. From behind the fixture which separated the Showroom from the Mantle Stockroom, where Mr Wilkins had his abode, there came a sound that I already knew extremely well. Something that sounded like ‘Huh, Huh, Huh!’

As if this was not enough I received a letter marked ‘Strictly Private and Confidential’, written in a spidery copperplate with ink that had been diluted with water. Its contents were highly alarming.

Dear Sir,

I have a matter of an extremely delicate nature to discuss with you. As the matter is one that, to coin a phrase, you would not wish to ‘come out’, I suggest that we meet for a quiet talk at Lyons in Oxford Street at four o’clock this afternoon. I shall be identifiable by my bowler hat, which I shall be carrying.

Yours faithfully,      

Ernest Topper.

There are eight Lyons teashops in Oxford Street. I hadn’t realised this until I set out to meet Mr Topper; neither had he. Once I found the right teashop the tryst was not difficult to keep. Mr Topper was readily identifiable. He held his bowler hat in front of him almost at arms’ length, as if it contained some noxious substance. He did not seem put out by the fact that I was more than half an hour late. He had the air of a man who was used to waiting.

Soon we were seated at a table at which there was only one other occupant. Mr Topper now proceeded to reveal his identity. In doing so he quite unconsciously obtained over me a degree of superiority.

‘As you know, I am Lola’s father,’ he said, without preamble. So deftly had Mr Wilkins woven his fantasy that I had forgotten that her maiden name was Topper.

‘As I said in my letter I have come here to acquaint you with a matter of an extremely serious nature.’ His speech was a curious mixture of the jargon used by the doctors of forensic medicine to describe their gruesome finds, and the reports of court proceedings in the
News of the World
.

‘I have reason to believe,’ said Mr Topper, ‘that my daughter is in a certain condition. Furthermore, I am of the belief that a particular person, who is in a position of trust so far as my daughter is concerned, is responsible for having performed certain acts that put her in this condition. I have reason to believe that you, Mr Newby, know who that person is. Who did it.’

Not since the day at my prep school, when I had been beaten by the headmaster for a crime I had not committed, had I experienced such a sensation of awe and doom as I now felt. It was certainly true that I had wanted to ‘do it’ with Lola, but unfortunately her own interest in doing it had proved more academic than real. The ‘certain acts’ referred to by Mr Topper were certainly
not calculated to put anyone in an interesting condition except by schizogenesis.