The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (36 page)

‘Veterans,’ Mr Stone said.

Whymper shook his head tolerantly. ‘Just what we don’t want. The name we want will suggest youth. Youth and comradeship and the protection of the male.’

Mr Stone thought he saw how Whymper processed his raw material.

‘Something like Knights,’ Whymper said.

‘Scarcely for the protection of the male.’

Whymper paid no attention. ‘Knights of the something. Knights of the open road. Knights-errant. That’s just what they’re going to be, aren’t they? Knights-errant.’

Mr Stone thought the suggestion ridiculous. He felt like sweeping the Heal’s table clear of memoranda and paper, saying something offensive to Whymper, and returning to the peace of his library desk.

There was silence, while Mr Stone inwardly raged and Whymper thought. Then, as sometimes happened when he thought, Whymper grew lightheaded.

‘Door-knockers,’ he said. ‘The Company’s Door-Knockers. The Most Worshipful Company of Door-Knockers.’

Mr Stone lit a cigarette, tapping it in his own way and rather hard. But the suggestion went home. He stripped his pensioners of
their red uniforms and gave them elaborate ones in dark brown with yellow stripes; they wore knee breeches and black stockings and knocked on doors with poles carved with some meaningful ancient design.

‘The Knight Visitors,’ Whymper said.

‘That’s another sort of night.’

‘I am not a child, Stone.’

‘You’re behaving like one.’

Whymper’s uncertain eyes went appealing. ‘The Good Companions.’

‘Knight Companions,’ Mr Stone said wearily.

‘Scarcely at their age.’ Whymper gave a little titter.

Mr Stone looked at the window.

‘Knights Companion,’ Whymper said.

Mr Stone was silent.

‘Right in every way,’ Whymper said. ‘Youth in the Knight. The Company in Companion. And then the association with those titles. KCVO and something else. Knight Companion of the something. Suggesting age and dignity. So we have youth and age, dignity and good companionship.
And
the Company. Knights Companion. God! The thing is full of possibilities. Your Knights Companion can form a Knights’ Circle. A Round Table. They can have a dinner every year. They can have competitions. You know, Stone, I believe we’ve licked this thing into shape.’

*

And now Margaret took on a new role, and took it on as easily as she had always taken on new roles. She ceased to be merely the wife who waited for her husband at home; she became the wife who encouraged and inspired her husband in his work. Whereas before the nature of Mr Stone’s employment was scarcely mentioned, a little of the fraudulence of the designation of ‘head librarian’ remaining to remind them both of their spurious attitudes at their first meeting, now they talked about his work incessantly, and the subject of his
retirement receded. Her dress subtly changed: when she welcomed Mr Stone in the evenings she might also without disgrace have received visitors. (And what affection he had begun to feel for her clothes, for the garnets and the red dress of watered silk, once the arresting attributes of a new person, now the familiar, carefully looked-after parts of a limited wardrobe.) She still moulded herself around him, but she expanded, regaining something of her earlier manner. She saw, before Mr Stone did, that her responsibilities had widened, and she spoke of these responsibilities as of a bother which yet had to be squarely faced. She spoke of ‘entertaining’ as of an imminent and awful possibility; and she became graver and more insistent as the references to Mr Stone and the Knights Companion became more frequent, longer and self-congratulatory in the house magazine. Duty called her, called them both; and duty must not be shirked.

So then, like any young couple (as Margaret herself said, laughing to counter ridicule and destroy embarrassment), they discussed the changes that had to be made in the house. They needed new carpets, new pictures, new wallpaper, and Margaret was full of suggestions. Mr Stone listened with only half a mind, saying little, savouring Margaret’s feminine talk in that room with the tigerskin as part of his new situation. His gestures became more leisured; he exaggerated them, acting them out for his own pleasure. The reading of the evening paper was no longer the exercise of a habit which solaced and without which the evening was incomplete. It was with a delicious sense of patronage that he read about the rest of the wonderful world. He was more easily amused and more easily touched. He often read items out to Margaret; and it was a relief, so tight were they with emotion, to laugh or be moved. Every sensation was heightened. They even fabricated little quarrels, which they never, however, allowed to develop into one of their silences.

About the improvements to the house Mr Stone said little. Playfully adopting her attitude, he said that these things were for the woman; just as she, in spite of all Mr Stone’s expositions, pretended
to know little about the Knights Companion and at times even claimed to be slightly bored or irritated by all the talk about them.

So gradually the house began to change again. Gradually, because it was discovered that if the repairs were to be thorough whole areas of the house would have to be rebuilt. Part of the roof had subsided, the attic floor was dangerous, the window frames had buckled. Uncompensated war damage, Mr Stone said—he told her how the planes came over this part of South London every Saturday night—and it roused Margaret to perfect fury against the government. They decided, therefore, to do up only those sections which might be exposed to the view of distinguished guests: the hall, the sitting-room, the dining-room, the bathroom, and those parts of the stairs which were visible from the highest stage of ascent that might reasonably be considered legitimate. The kitchen, on the ground floor, and their own bedroom, on the first, they decided to leave untouched.

Miss Millington was thought to be competent to undertake the redecorating. First of all she painted. Her fussy, ineffectual and inaccurate brush marks were to be seen everywhere. She proclaimed herself thereafter ready for the papering, hinting at the same time at the availability of Eddie and Charley, who, she said, were just finishing the fish shop. And that very afternoon a neat white card—E. Beeching and C. Bryant, Builders and Decorators—came into the letter box. They called that evening. They were elderly but spry. Bryant, round-faced and with spectacles, smiled. Beeching, the cadaverous-faced spokesman, said they were freelances, anxious to build up a reputation. Their prices were high; but Beeching said the prices of the firm they had previously worked for were higher. They were engaged. And gradually, section by section, one patch of building and decorating separated from the other by a week or a fortnight, during which Beeching and Bryant went off to do other jobs and Miss Millington was encouraged to try her hand again, the public areas of the house, or the areas soon to be public, were done.

Margaret had envisaged dinner parties spreading out on to the lawn in summer. It was a small lawn, and in spite of views of the backs of houses might have been suitable, particularly with the openness of the adjacent school grounds. But the neighbours were not co-operative. The keeper of the black cat was no handyman; his fence was in an appalling condition, wobbling and sagging; and his garden was rank, with a few hollyhocks and overgrown rose trees rising out of much bush. The people on the other side went in for desert rather than jungle; they also took in lodgers, and their back garden was strung with clothes lines. Their own back fence, too, was not what it might have been, being steadily forced out of true by the roots of the tree Mr Stone considered every day when shaving.

So the changes that came to the house did not alter its character. To the alien mustiness brought in by Margaret’s possessions, which had now grown familiar, there was added only a gloss. The redecorated portions of the house did not lose their smell of old dirt, rags and polish. And every evening when they climbed up the stairs to their bedroom, to the brown velvet curtains, the tasselled lampshade painted green, the nondescript carpet and linoleum, it was like re-entering the old house, the past.

Change also came to Miss Millington. Whereas before she was an old servant whose inefficiency and physical failings were getting more and more troublesome, now she became precious; she added lustre to the establishment. In how many houses these days were front doors opened by uniformed maids? And now to summon her, who had previously only been shouted or ullulated for, there appeared, on the table in the hall, next to the flowerpot in the brass vase, a brass bell on a brass tray; and to enable her to summon them, there appeared at the same time on the wall a large gong of beaten brass, which the failing old soul managed with great difficulty, compressing her lips, closing her eyes, and striking in a daze with a slow curving gesture until the sound she created penetrated her consciousness and reminded her to stop. So now she existed in the changed house, shuffling steadily in and out of her roles as drudge
and ornament, a pensioner only on Thursdays, when she went to the pensioners’ cinema show to sleep through the afternoon.

*

‘All we provide is the administration,’ Mr Stone had told Whymper, and now they were occupied with the administering of the pilot scheme. So Whymper called it. He had a flair for urgent, important names. It was his suggestion that the Knights Companion Department of Welfare should be called a ‘Unit’. The Unit was conducting an ‘operation’, for which it needed ‘intelligence’. This accumulation of military metaphor, combined with the frequency with which Whymper called him by his name and referred to the large-scale wall-map of the area chosen for the pilot scheme, occasionally led Mr Stone to indulge in the fantasy that they were both in general’s uniform, in a high panelled room such as Mr Stone had seen in some films: they spoke softly, but at their word pensioners deployed all over the country.

He relished Whymper’s words. He relished the urgency Whymper, by his manner, his bulging briefcase and his talk of paperwork as of something tedious but vitally important, gave to the operation. He relished the words ‘administration’ and ‘staff’. And staff was recruited, the word and the concept declining into three typists whose ordinariness and near-illiteracy robbed them of the charm of typists in films and cartoons (which, in spite of his experience, was what he expected), four male clerks whose advanced age diminished and somehow mocked the urgency of the project and whose appearance of unremitting diligence went with a strangely limited output, and a junior accountant from Yorkshire, a young man of ridiculous sartorial and social pretensions.

Letters had to be written, replies sorted. Knights Companion appointed, short biographies of the inactive prepared, machinery set up for the handling of accounts. And in spite of the staff, diligently tapping, diligently turning over pages, bustling about corridors with sheaves of paper, a good deal of this work had to be done by Mr
Stone himself. At the same time a continuous stream of propaganda on behalf of the project had to be maintained. This was Whymper’s job. And Mr Stone was grateful for Whymper. Whymper had flair. All the ideas which had seemed theatrical and cheap were those that caught on.

It was Whymper’s idea that a Knight Companion should be issued with a scroll of appointment on hand-made paper with rough edges. For this words had to be composed, archaic but not whimsical, and authoritative; and Whymper composed them. A special visit had to be made to Sir Harry to get his approval for the use of the Excal seal on the scrolls, and to Mr Stone’s surprise Sir Harry was not annoyed or amused by their play, but enthusiastic and commending. It was Whymper’s idea that Knights Companion should carry in their lapels little silver figures of knights, armoured and visored, charging at full gallop, lances tilted—that and nothing else, no word or letter. It was his further idea, though this was not adopted, that all Excal pensioners should wear little metal roses, of varying colours to indicate their length of service with the Company, to facilitate recognition by other pensioners and by Knights Companion. And so always Whymper’s mind sparked, racing ahead of the Unit’s schedule and occasionally wasting much time thereby (for days, for example, he played with the design of the charging knight, though he was no artist), but always generating enthusiasm.

And by his work of administration, of creating out of an idea—words written on paper in his study—an organization of real people, Mr Stone never ceased to be thrilled. Now his worn, shiny briefcase carried documents that mattered. Now, too, he caught himself looking at briefcases in shop windows, ready to discard the once fraudulent container that had given him so much pleasure in the days when the weeks were to be got through and numbered and hoarded. His talk became exclusively of the Knights Companion. Margaret knew as well as anyone of the problems of staff, and Grace Tomlinson responded with tales of staff problems that Tomlinson had silently endured for years. Now, Grace seemed to say, she could speak:
Margaret and Richard could understand. And Margaret gave a ready retrospective sympathy.

*

The pilot scheme ran into certain difficulties.

A former head of an Excal department, scenting old blood on his appointment as a Knight Companion, took a leisurely tour through Wales, visited eight widely scattered pensioners of his acquaintance, and sent in a bill for £249 17s 5½d, neatly worked out, the bills of expensive hotels enclosed together with restaurant bills, garage bills and receipts for the gifts he had bought. For one pensioner he had bought a radio. He regretted his inability to buy a television set for another, who had gone deaf; and in his letter strongly urged the Unit to do so.

Twenty Knights Companion were on the road. Letters were hastily dispatched to nineteen. And the bill of the former department head, rejected in horror by official after higher official, had to go up to Sir Harry himself. It was decided to refund the sum demanded; but with the cheque went a letter, composed after much labour by Whymper and Mr Stone, outlining the limited scope of the project. A Knight Companion, the letter said, was not expected unduly to exert himself; he was to visit only those pensioners—and they were within easy reach—whose names were supplied to him; and only token gifts were to be made. Energy such as the former department head had displayed was admirable, but for eight visits he was entitled to no more than £4, and they could not hide from him that his request for more than sixty times that sum had gravely embarrassed them with their accountants and threatened the continuance of the scheme itself.