Death of a Salesperson (15 page)

‘Where do we start, then?' asked the young man.

‘I thought in the living-room,' said Bessie Hargreaves. ‘It's where I mostly am, and it
would
be brighter for a coat of paint.'

‘Right you are,' said the boy, and followed her into the
room, where she had already laid a covering of newspapers over the floor. He looked around. ‘No problem here, not if we just tidy up the wallpaper and paint over it.'

‘I thought that's what we should do,' said Bessie, nodding, ‘seeing as you've just got the week. You see, I didn't know about wallpapering, but I did buy a bit of bright, flowery paper for my bedroom. It was
such
a cheerful pattern . . .'

‘I can try,' said the boy. ‘I helped me mam with a bit of papering, just before she took off. It won't be professional, but I'll do the best I can.'

‘That will be nice. Would you like a cup of tea—er, I'm not sure I caught your name.'

‘Brian. Me mates call me Bri.'

Mrs Hargreaves didn't feel quite up to Bri, so she said: ‘Do you take sugar, Brian?'

While they had their tea they got almost friendly, with Brian coming down off his ladder, where he'd been preparing the ceiling, and sipping his sweet, hot brew over by the fireplace.

‘Did your mother leave you, did you say?' asked Mrs Hargreaves, with a shocked expression on her face.

‘That's right. Took off wi' a fancy man. Never seen her in me life sin'.'

‘What happened to you, then?'

‘They put me in an institution. It weren't that bad. Then me auntie took me on.'

‘Do you still live with her?'

‘Yeah. We get on all right. She gets a bit pissed off, what wi' me being around all day, but there's nowt to be done about that. We don't fight that much.'

Mrs Hargreaves was going to say more, perhaps about how grateful he must be to his aunt, but then—was it fancy, or was he really eyeing her lovely silver frame, the one she'd picked up in that junk shop all those years ago for half-a-crown, with that picture of her and Walter at Scarborough in it? No—probably it was her imagination.
On the other hand . . . what did he mean when he said he and his aunt didn't
fight
that much? The boy—young man, really—drank down his tea and bounded up the ladder again, and as he stood there, so high, so masterfully above her, she could not help noticing how broad his shoulders were, and how thick his arms, and when she felt that impression of youth and power a sharp dagger of fear stabbed her. She wouldn't have a chance . . .

Still, they got on all right that day. Brian's interest in that silver frame seemed perfectly natural when, later on, darting down from his ladder to refill his paint tray with matt white for the ceiling, he said casually:

‘That you and your old man?'

‘That's right. When we were young.' Bessie added sadly: ‘He was never anything else. We only had the five years.'

The boy seemed almost touched. Anyway he didn't ask any more questions, but hopped up his ladder and got on with his job. When he had to go out to his little cart of tools and equipment that he'd left by the gate, he always put on and took off his shoes by the back door.

‘I can see you like to keep the place tidy,' he said.

‘Well, I
do,'
Bessie agreed. ‘I've always liked to keep things spick and span, even when I've not had much to
keep
clean. But you can't expect not to get a bit of dirt in when you're decorating.'

The living-room took a good two days' work, and when it was finished Bessie decided the boy had done a good, if rough, job of work. There were places one shouldn't look at too closely, but the general effect was greatly improved. It was really bright, almost cheerful.

The boy himself—well, he didn't improve on acquaintance. And yet, it wasn't quite that. It was just that, as he felt more at home in the house, and with her, he got more relaxed, and more . . . more familiar, unbuttoned, more what she took to be his real brash self. Was he just brash—what
Bessie called to herself ‘lippy'? Or was there something more? Something almost . . . brutal?

On the second evening, when Bessie was pottering around cleaning up newspapers from the floor, Brian went over without so much as a by-your-leave and picked up the other snapshot in the room, from the window-ledge where it was kept.

‘Saw this when I was painting,' he said. ‘Is this your son?'

The face in the photograph was that of a young man, not good-looking but cheerful and sunny-faced, taken in the little scrap of garden in the front, in open-necked shirt and flannels.

‘Oh no,' Bessie said, her face screwed into a troubled expression. ‘We never had no children, Walter and me. We
would
have had, but we never knew there'd be no time. Walter was killed in a pit accident, you see.'

‘Who's this, then?'

‘That was Tom Taylor. He lodged here for a bit. He was an apprentice at Sawley's—you know, the cotton mill.'

‘Looks a jolly chap.'

‘Oh, he was. Always cheery.'

‘Do you keep in touch?'

‘Oh no, no. It wasn't to be expected.'

‘You ought to have. You need some young chap like that to look after you.'

He'd like to move in, Bessie said to herself. He'd like to move in here with me and live off me. I bet his aunt takes most of his dole money, and he thinks I'd be a softer touch.

‘Oh, I can take care of myself, never you mind,' she said. ‘I've had to.'

Before he embarked on the bedroom he painted all the doors in the house a glossy white. He wanted time to think about the papering, remembering how it should be done. The weather had turned hot, and he just wore a T-shirt and jeans under his overalls. There was nothing personal of Mrs Hargreaves's in the hall or the landing, so when they had
tea or coffee, or when he ate the ‘snap' that he brought with him for his lunch, he started talking about himself. If he did want Mrs Hargreaves to take him in, he certainly chose the wrong subjects.

‘Got in a fight down at t'pub last night,' he would say. ‘Supped too much black 'n' tan. So had t'other bugger, come to that. Must've bin barmy, me still being on probation. Still, landlord didn't call the police. He just showed us the door, so there was no harm done.'

‘What were you quarrelling about?' Mrs Hargreaves asked, envisaging a girl, or politics, or some bet or other.

‘Can't rightly remember,' said Brian, scratching his head and grinning ruefully.

Her fear suddenly shot into her mind a picture of this boy, this young thug, breaking her as a child breaks a cheap toy—no, as the cook in the café she had once worked in had quartered a chicken, the brittle bones snapping under her capable knife. She nearly panicked, but she controlled herself enough to collect up the cups.

‘I don't approve of all this violence,' she said.

‘Not likely you would,' said Brian equably. ‘I think it were a bit daft meself.'

But his life of dole and emptiness didn't have many highlights, and getting into ‘a bit of a scrap' was among those few. So that, when he talked to her, it was quite often of that, or scrapes he'd been in at school or the orphanage, or riots at the local football ground at the end of matches.

‘I got in there and I put me boot into one of the Everton supporters,' he would say, ‘then I smashed me fist into the face of another, and I got a third before the police picked me up. It was great!'

Sometimes after these conversations Bessie Hargreaves felt quite sick. It was the sickness of fear.

After the weekend Brian got down to the bedroom. He had had to report to the local police at the time of the local soccer team's match, so he had no violent encounters to
narrate. Before he came on Monday Bessie had removed her little tin box of jewellery from the bedroom, and hidden it in the kitchen cabinet. There was nothing of any great value in it, but most of it had been given her by Walter, and there was the little Christmas brooch from her lodger Tom Taylor that she set an oddly high price on. And apart from the pieces with sentimental value, there
was
that amethyst bracelet that had been Walter's mother's that she was always meaning to take and have valued. So she took the box and hid it away from ‘the young thug's' prying gaze.

Brian, when he came, was not interested in any personal mementoes in the bedroom; he was more taken up by the techniques of wallpapering. Some things he remembered, some he had talked over with his mates during the weekend. He had most of the right ideas, and the problems, when they came up, he solved by an innate practicality. During the morning he discussed them as they arose with Bessie, and this kept him off dangerous subjects. After lunch, as he prepared for the afternoon's work, he talked with the amused condescension of the young about his auntie, and from her he got on to the subject of his mother.

‘It's my belief—thinking it over, like—that she took off because she knew she wouldn't be able to cope wi' me much longer. I were twelve, but I were big. She'd managed up to then, but she knew she couldn't much longer.'

‘You must have been a right handful, if your own mother couldn't manage you,' said Bessie timorously.

‘Aye, I were. Mind you, she'd a quick hand, and she could really sting if she got one in when I weren't looking. But you get used to that, don't you? Mind you, I bet her fancy man gave her a worse time than I ever would've, so that must've served the old duck right.'

‘You shouldn't speak of your mother like that,' said Bessie.

‘What did she ever do for me?' Brian asked, reasonably.

Bessie was appalled by the new view Brian gave her of
family relationships—loveless, antagonistic, cruel. It would never have been like that if she had had a child. What could you expect of a boy who had grown up in that sort of atmosphere? She looked at Brian standing there, a spatula in his powerful right hand, and she looked down in fear, excused herself, and went downstairs.

He really got on fast that day, and since he would finish on the Tuesday, Bessie thought she ought to make some gesture of appreciation. Just before the shops shut she pottered down to the butcher's and got some pork. She'd make one of her pork pies—she hadn't made one in years, not since Tom Taylor was lodging with her. She baked it that evening. The pastry was difficult, because the let-down flap on her kitchen cabinet, on which she kneaded and rolled it, had become very rickety. But even so, when she took it out of the oven it looked a picture, and smelt a dream.

Her bedroom, next day, looked a picture too. Brian had only one wall to do, a long, flat, uncomplicated wall. Bessie had bought a pretty strip of border to put round the room under the picture rail. When everything was done, they stood surveying it together—light, flowery, really pretty.

‘I reckon I could do this for a living,' said Brian.

‘I reckon you could,' said Mrs Hargreaves. ‘You've done a right good job . . . I've baked something for you.'

‘Baked something?'

‘Yes—well, for us. A little thank-you. I thought you deserved one, after all the work you've put in. My pork pies used to be famous.'

‘I like a nice bit o' pork pie,' said Brian.

They sat on the bed eating, and they looked around the room commenting admiringly on what a difference the new wallpaper made. Brian said he had never tasted pork pie like it, and it really knocked the shop jobs into a cocked hat, didn't it?

‘It
is
very nice,' said Bessie, trying not to boast. She'd have felt pretty insulted if he hadn't thought it better than
the shop jobs. ‘It's not quite my best. I haven't made hot-water pastry in years, and the flap on my kitchen cabinet is so rocky that I couldn't really go at the kneading properly.'

‘I've got the afternoon,' said Brian. ‘I'll see if I can fix it for you.'

‘Oh, there's no call,' said Mrs Hargreaves, becoming agitated yet trying to hide it. ‘You've done your jobs, like I agreed with the probation man. And I make so little pastry these days, being on my own.'

‘No trouble,' said Brian, getting up. ‘I'll get it fixed, and have me other bit o' pie when I'm done. I've got a saw and chisel in me barrow.'

‘No, no, really,' Bessie called weakly, but he was down and out to his barrow before she could follow him more slowly down the stairs. By the time she reached the kitchen he was back in there, and taking down the flap of the kitchen cabinet. Bessie stood in the doorway, transfixed by the sight of her little box of trinkets, sitting there on the shelf above the flour and the rice and the cake-mixes.

Brian didn't notice it at all. He had laid a big, threatening saw and a long chisel on the kitchen table, and he was pulling the flap up and down.

‘Aye, it's rocky,' he said. ‘I think it must be the supports underneath.'

Bessie watched, horrified, as her little box jumped up and down on the shelf, and as if in a dream she moved round the kitchen, skirting those terrifying tools on the table, and stood against the draining-board, on which the breadknife still lay among her breakfast washing-up. Brian picked up the big saw and looked at it.

‘I'll not need that,' he said. ‘There's nowt wrong wi' the flap. But I'll get at the supports wi' this.'

He picked up the chisel, and stood there considering, stroking it with his hand. At the sight of the big lad with the threatening tools in his hand Bessie's hand had gone behind her and clutched comfortingly to the breadknife.

‘I'll just take a bit off one o' them supports,' said Brian, still caressing his chisel. Then he took up the flap again and banged it down to establish the provenance of its ricketiness. The box jumped up and down on its shelf, and finally rolled down over the bags of flour and emptied in pathetic profusion on to the flap its contents of trinkets and jewellery.