The Pritchett Century (41 page)

A son: a shy, desirous, passionate, protective, disgusted, and incredulous play of feeling made its various marks on his face.

At once Mr. Beluncle marched out of his office, down the short corridor, to the general offices where his son worked with Chilly who was learning the business, and the clerks. Mr. Beluncle was going to tell his son not to wait any more and to go home. “I am not an ordinary employer. I am your father,” he was humming to himself. “Enjoy the sun, the fresh air, go home to your mother. You love her—or you ought to love her—think of her down there longing for you to get back.” The generous impulse was the pleasanter for a sweet flavour of self-pity in it. “At that boy’s age I worked till ten o’clock at night on Saturday,” he said, and the sensation was that Progress had been created by him for others, out of his sufferings.

But in Mr. Beluncle’s dreams there was always a flaw. He opened the door of the general office, where half a dozen people worked. The first person he saw was this son of his, Henry, sitting at a long, high, old-fashioned
mahogany desk that had been left when the office had been refurnished in the slump three or four years before. The boy had turned round from his desk on his high stool and was cleaning his nails with the edge of his season ticket. He was gazing in a sulky, childish, dejected dream at the sunlight on the factory wall which could be seen from this window also. The boy was such a stubborn, unorganized, weak replica of Mr. Beluncle with cheeks so young that one could cry out for care at the thought of a razor going over them. The father stopped short in horror and tenderness. A powerful feeling of anxiety possessed him. He forgot his intention in a shocked attempt to save the boy’s character and life.

“One o’clock is your time,” said Mr. Beluncle. “I don’t like people idling away, watching the clock. The idle steal other people’s time.”

Mr. Beluncle added the moral out of modesty, to escape the fault of random accusation.

The boy blushed and his jaw hardened with quick, young temper. The clerks held their cynical pens for a moment.

“I have nothing to do,” Henry Beluncle said, rudely sticking up for himself.

“If you are working for me,” Mr. Beluncle said, his voice smoothing with a temper that was inexplicable to himself—it seemed to come from the small of his fat back, “it is your business to find something to do.” He was shouting but only as someone shouts for help.

And Mr. Beluncle went out fast banging the door, getting away quickly with the self-effacement of one who has saved a life and does not wish to get a medal for it. Too ashamed to meet the looks of the experienced clerks, the boy opened his stock books again. His neck, his ears, his cheeks had reddened and he sat in a storm of humiliation. With the ingratitude of the rescued he wished he had been left to drown.

Mr. Beluncle marched back to his own room in a startled frame of mind. He had come down to earth; he was a man tortured, enslaved, tied down and unjustly treated by his own family.

He was followed into his office by his partner, a woman of forty-five, who was taller than himself, whose dark hair was dry but not yet grey
and whose powerful uncoloured lips were crinkled and moved like irritable and exposed muscles.

“That is not the way to talk to your son,” she said and she was holding a pair of spectacles open in her hand. She had only lately taken to wearing glasses and was forming the habit of taking them off when she talked of private matters. Mr. Beluncle, who had once admired her eyes, now took these sudden removals of the glasses as an uncalled-for reminder of his admiration.

He swung round to this surprise attack.

“Where were you?” he said.

“I was in the office. You didn’t notice me,” said Mrs. Truslove, speaking as if being conveniently invisible were a role, an achievement which had been painfully and satisfactorily built out of years of complaint. And in her white blouse and her grey coat and skirt, she had the neutrality, the protective colouring of irony and conscience.

“He is my employé,” said Mr. Beluncle.

“He is your son,” said Mrs. Truslove.

“Don’t you start sticking up for him as if you were his mother,” said Mr. Beluncle, turning his head sharply over his shoulder as he shot this remark at her. And Mr. Beluncle unmistakably conveyed, and meant to convey, that had he wished it, Mrs. Truslove could have been the mother of his son; but that he had not so wished.

Mrs. Truslove gave a shrug to one of her shoulders. She had picked up this foreign gesture from an Italian she had once worked for—it was the single feminine affectation in a woman who liked to be thought mannish, and had for Beluncle the irritation of a well-known habit—and she said that it was lucky for Mr. Beluncle that she was
not
the boy’s mother. She intended the ambiguity of this sentence.

And here Mr. Beluncle found himself colouring in the large soft ears that stood out rather far from his puddingy head. He had been made, once more, to feel a foolish guilt by this woman who, unlike his wife, always looked him in the eyes.

“By Jove, that’s good, Mrs. T. Ha! Ha!” Mr. Beluncle guffawed with a coarsening cloud of laughter intended to cover retreat. He had built up his career, his business, his trade connections on humorousness. “My word, do you know what you jolly nearly suggested. I say … I say.”

Mrs. Truslove did not laugh. Once more Mr. Beluncle was familiar with Mrs. Truslove’s inability to see a joke. He found reluctantly that he had to respect this curious trait in people.

“I am going to tell the boy to go,” she said. “I won’t have you speak to him like that in front of the staff, it is wounding to his pride,” she said. “And it is bad for the firm.”

Mr. Beluncle’s mouth stuck open with true astonishment. What he wished to say was “But that is what I
intended
to do. That is what a father must do; break and harden the boy before the world does. What is wrong with that boy is he’s afraid of me.”

“
I’ll
go and tell him,” Mr. Beluncle said. So Mr. Beluncle, with the insulting look which he had gathered in his day-dreams gone from his face, went back to the office smiling. That is to say he believed he was smiling. He was, in fact, scowling. Mr. Beluncle opened the door.

“You here still? Why haven’t you gone?” said Mr. Beluncle.

“You told me not to go,” the boy said.

“Don’t flinch when I speak to you,” said Mr. Beluncle. “There is no need to do that. I mean flinching conveys a bad impression. In fact,” said Mr. Beluncle, the idea just occurring to him, as ideas continually did, and feeling it would be rather unfriendly not to mention it, “it might convey to those who don’t know you, that you were hiding something.”

The boy, who was no taller than his father, stared directly at him as if he were hypnotized.

“That’s all,” said Mr. Beluncle. “Go now and you won’t miss the train.”

Mr. Beluncle returned to his own room strengthened.

“The damn fool was just sitting there!” he laughed to Mrs. Truslove and he went round to his side of their large desk and began one of his favourite defences against her stare. This defence was to lift a few papers from one side of his desk to the other. If she spoke he would stop; if she was silent he would begin a return game from the other pile.

“Leave your boy alone,” she said. “He has done nothing wrong. It is only your bad conscience.”

Mr. Beluncle lowered a passing handful of letters to his blotter.

“Conscience!” he said. “I haven’t got nothing on my conscience.”

“Anything, Father,” said Mrs. Truslove, correcting his English with quiet unexpected pleasantness and Mr. Beluncle was too grateful for her change of mood to take up that word “Father.” He could have said, it was on the tip of his tongue to say, “Why do you always say ‘father’ in a certain way, what is the idea?”

“I am not a father,” he wanted to say. She was his partner’s widow, but this did not give her the right to call him “Father” in her low, unmusical, ridiculing voice. It was not her business to remind him that Nature, in the form of woman, had taken the initiative from him, and had made him no better than thousands of other damn fools: the supremely ridiculous thing: the father of a family. The annoying thing about Mrs. Truslove, during all the years she had been with him in the business since her husband’s death, was this habit of telling him what a fortunate man he was, what a valuable and devoted wife, what pleasant children he had.

“Which way, Father?” when she took his arm in the evening as they left the office—he could hear her saying it. When she knew what she did know about his life! When she could see with her own eyes how bad things were, why, for what purpose, did she correct and remind? But she did. She always ended by every day convincing him he had the happiest marriage on earth. He would go home in a dream of happiness—that is to say with the insulting expression on his face—and the first thing that happened when he got to the house was that he flew into a rage at the sight of them all, wished he had never met his wife or begotten his children, and would moan slowly round his lawn like a bee, taking the honey of self-pity from flower to flower, longing to get back to his business again.

(1951)

It started one Saturday. I was working new ground and I decided I’d stay at the hotel the weekend and put in an appearance at church.

“All alone?” asked the girl in the cash desk.

It had been raining since ten o’clock.

“Mr Good has gone,” she said. “And Mr Straker. He usually stays with us. But he’s gone.”

“That’s where they make their mistake,” I said. “They think they know everything because they’ve been on the road all their lives.”

“You’re a stranger here, aren’t you?” she said.

“I am,” I said. “And so are you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Obvious,” I said. “Way you speak.”

“Let’s have a light,” she said.

“So’s I can see you,” I said.

That was how it started. The rain was pouring down on to the glass roof of the office.

She’d a cup of tea steaming on the register. I said I’d have one, too. What’s it going to be and I’ll tell them, she said, but I said just a cup of tea.

“I’m TT,” I said. “Too many soakers on the road as it is.”

I was staying there the weekend so as to be sharp on the job on Monday morning. What’s more it pays in these small towns to turn up at church on Sundays, Presbyterians in the morning, Methodists in the evening. Say “Good morning” and “Good evening” to them. “Ah!” they say. “Church-goer! Pleased to see that! TT, too.” Makes them have a second look at your lines in the morning. “Did you like our service, Mister—er—er?” “Humphrey’s my name.” “Mr Humphrey.” See? It pays.

“Come into the office, Mr Humphrey,” she said, bringing me a cup. “Listen to that rain.”

I went inside.

“Sugar?” she said.

“Three,” I said. We settled to a very pleasant chat. She told me all about herself, and we got on next to families.

“My father was on the railway,” she said.

“ ‘The engine gave a squeal,’ ” I said. “ ‘The driver took out his pocket-knife and scraped him off the wheel.’ ”

“That’s it,” she said. “And what is your father’s business? You said he had a business.”

“Undertaker,” I said.

“Undertaker?” she said.

“Why not?” I said. “Good business. Seasonable like everything else. High class undertaker,” I said.

She was looking at me all the time wondering what to say and suddenly she went into fits of laughter.

“Undertaker,” she said, covering her face with her hands and went on laughing.

“Here,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Undertaker!” she laughed and laughed. Struck me as being a pretty thin joke.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m Irish.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “That’s it, is it? Got a sense of humour.”

Then the bell rang and a woman called out “Muriel! Muriel!” and there was a motor bike making a row at the front door.

“All right,” the girl called out. “Excuse me a moment, Mr Humphrey,” she said. “Don’t think me rude. That’s my boy friend. He wants the bird turning up like this.”

She went out but there was her boy friend looking over the window ledge into the office. He had come in. He had a cape on, soaked with rain and the rain was in beads in his hair. It was fair hair. It stood up on end. He’d been economising on the brilliantine. He didn’t wear a hat. He gave me a look and I gave him a look. I didn’t like the look of him. And he didn’t like the look of me. A smell of oil and petrol and rain and mackintosh came off him. He had a big mouth with thick lips. They were very red. I recognised him at once as the son of the man who ran the Kounty Garage. I saw this chap when I put my car away. The firm’s car. A lock-up, because of the samples. Took me ten minutes to ram the idea into his head. He looked as though he’d never heard of samples. Slow,—you know the way they are in the provinces. Slow on the job.

“Oh Colin,” says she. “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” the chap said. “I came in to see you.”

“To see me?”

“Just to see you.”

“You came in this morning.”

“That’s right,” he said. He went red. “You was busy,” he said.

“Well, I’m busy now,” she said.

He bit his tongue, and licked his big lips over and took a look at me. Then he started grinning.

“I got the new bike, Muriel,” he said. “I’ve got it outside.”

“It’s just come down from the works,” he said.

“The laddie wants you to look at his bike,” I said. So she went out and had a look at it.

When she came back she had got rid of him.

“Listen to that rain,” she said.

“Lord, I’m fed up with this line,” she said.

“What line?” I said. “The hotel line?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m fed right up to the back teeth with it.”

“And you’ve got good teeth,” I said.

“There’s not the class of person there used to be in it,” she said. “All our family have got good teeth.”

“Not the class?”

“I’ve been in it five years and there’s not the same class at all. You never meet any fellows.”