The Balliols (65 page)

“Darling boy, I'd no idea that you'd been winning all those prizes.”

“I told you every time.”

“Did you, darling?”

She was not really interested in him. She would not care whether he was a barrister or a salesman, or a professional footballer, “so long as you're happy, dear boy”; leaving him to discover happiness for himself. As for his father, Francis could not picture the issue that he would regard as personal to himself. He took the same detached interest in his son's career as in the composition of the Ryder Cup Team. It was Hugh that he looked on as his chief opponent.

Hugh returned home in a belligerent mood that evening. A number of little things were going wrong. To begin with there had been a rather irritating discussion at Peel & Hardy's that had ended in his relinquishing his office room to Smollett's secretary. The discussion had been conducted in an extremely amiable and pacific manner. It was clear that Smollett must have a secretary. His correspondence was considerable. There was a great deal of routine work that he needed to be spared. It was also essential that she should have a room of her own to work in. Smollett received a number of callers. He needed to be alone with them. There was, however, no obviously available room for her. Room by room the geography of the offices had been considered; until finally Hugh's corridor was reached. Smollett was drawing a diagram. He pointed his pencil at Hugh.

“Now, let me see. At the end there's your room, Balliol.”

“Yes, there's my room.”

There was a pause.

“I suppose you really need that room?”

“How do you mean?”

“I know, of course, that you are frequently interviewing clients, or prospective clients. Your accounts prove that. But I was wondering how much of your work doesn't fit in with your ordinary life. I wondered how often you actually did use that room.”

“Well…” Hugh hesitated. He used his room quite a bit because his club was in Grosvenor Square and it was useful to have a place that you could pop into when you had ten minutes to dawdle away in Piccadilly, and where, for that matter, you could get a buckshee glass of sherry. But he doubted in point of fact if he had used it officially more than twice a month. He suspected that Smollett was aware of this.

“Because,” Smollett was continuing, “I was thinking that if you didn't really use the room as much as you thought you were going to, it might be simpler for a time at any rate to move my secretary in there, than to divide up my own room into two with a partition. We could do that, of course, but it isn't really very convenient. One hears every word through that matchboard, and typing, even with a modern machine, is noisy. I naturally don't want to disturb you in any way, but I was just thinking that if you don't really need that room.…”

“I don't.”

It was said quickly and decisively. His father had looked at him with surprised interrogation. Hugh was very well aware that he could have retained the room, had he even so much as said that it was a convenience to him. Which it was. But definitely it was not a necessity. He would have hated to have kept the room when a man like Smollett was grudging him, and after all with justice, his possession of it; was keeping count of the use he made of it. Ownerships were only pleasant when they could be enjoyed freely, and with propriety. As far, anyhow, as he was concerned.

He gave no sign that he was annoyed.

“I hardly use the room at all,” he had said. “Certainly, you take it.”

“Of course, later on—if you find you do really need it …” Smollett had assured him.

“I'll let you know all right.”

But he had been annoyed. Or rather, the episode of the room had been contributory to a mood of general irritation. There had been other factors. There had been that girl he had met yesterday at lunch. They had sat next each other. She had been gay, debonair. He suspected wilful. He fancied he had been a success with her. “I'd like to see more of her,” he had thought. But when you hadn't a flat it was very difficult without spending a good deal of money to develop an acquaintance. And it was just because he hadn't any money at the moment that he was without a flat. If he had had a flat, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have said, “I've got one or two people dropping in at cocktail time to-morrow. Won't you come?” That would have been easy and informal. They would have had an opportunity of making up their minds about each other. But without a flat he would have to make some rather ample gesture. Arrange a lunch party, or take her to a theatre. And that would be only the beginning. A flat was essential if you were going to conduct a campaign of gallantry; unless you had a great deal of money. In another three months he would have his flat back, and he would have economized enough to have an amusing time with it. But that would be too late; as regards this girl anyhow. You had to strike while the iron was hot. It was maddening to be so broke. Nobody seemed to have the money to lay down cellars nowadays. None of the people he knew, anyway. They drank beer or whisky; or on occasions took a couple of bottles of club champagne back with them from their club. He wasn't making the half of what he'd hoped.

And on top of all that he had woken to one of his bad mornings; a headache, lassitude, no appetite. He didn't get enough exercise, he supposed. But it was hard to keep fit, when doctors denied him the particular forms of training by which Londoners kept well. Before the war he had played squash twice a week during his lunch hour. But squash was considered too violent for him now. It was hard to find golf partners on a week-day, particular in the winter, when the ground was either frozen hard or so soft that the ball stopped when it pitched, and the fairways were thick with worm casts. He had to take his exercise in Turkish Baths. That wasn't the same thing. In cold weather his legs began to hurt. And it was all very Well his friends telling him that he'd feel worse next day if he doctored himself with whisky. They didn't know what it was like to sit through an evening with the whole of one side of one's body throbbing. Never knowing when the throbbing was to be punctuated by the stab of a sudden twinge. In 1917 he had thought himself very lucky to
have his lungs full of mustard gas and his thigh of metal. He was beginning to think that it was the others who had been lucky.

He returned home in no mood to accept with equanimity his younger brother's decision to become a salesman at Selfridge's.

It was in point of fact the vehemence of Hugh's opposition, that, in the last analysis, decided Francis to make good his boast. Hugh returned home at the point where Francis was beginning to waver. His father had brought forward a number of sensible arguments.

“There are a number of points to be considered,” he had said. “I am not saying that you are mistaken in your contention that it is by the big industrialists that the country is going to be governed in the future. I daresay you are right in thinking that those who have begun at the foot of the ladder stand the best chance of climbing to the top. A store such as Selfridge's, which makes a point of training public schoolboys, would certainly give you the best chance. At the same time, there does not seem to me to be as much need for hurry as you suppose. I am not being what in the melodramas of my boyhood was described as ‘the heavy father.' I am not saying that you will think differently in two years' time. But there is a possibility that you may. After all, you feel differently now from the way in which you felt two years ago. If you go into Selfridge's at once, and find two years later that that kind of life is unsympathetic to you, you will be in a difficult position. You will have prejudiced your chances of making a success at Oxford, and will consequently have cut yourself off from all those callings to which a successful career at Oxford is the necessary prelude. If, on the other hand, you finish your time at Fernhurst, go up to Oxford, feel at the end of a year that you are wasting your time, you will still be able to go into Selfridge's, at the loss of only a few months. It seems to me that by going to Oxford for a year you have everything to gain and nothing at all to lose. Very likely you will feel out of touch with Oxford, but I think you should give yourself a chance of seeing what it is like. You have been born with certain material advantages. It would be a mistake to discard those advantages until you know precisely what it is that you are discarding.”

He spoke calmly, reasonably. Francis was half convinced. Then Hugh arrived.

“We are engaged,” his father told him, “on what is popularly described as a family council. Your brother has expressed a wish to leave Fernhurst and graduate at Selfridge's as a salesman.”

“You mean serve shirts behind a counter?”

“Shirts or their equivalent.”

“That's quite impossible.”

He spoke with a vehemence that was more than anything a working out of the irritation to whose sum during the day so many incidents had made their separate contribution.

“You can't do that: stand behind a counter; call people ‘sir'; flatter them; exploit salesmanship, which means trying to trick them into buying something they don't want, or something that's more expensive than they want. That's not a gentleman's job.”

His vehemence counteracted his father's reasonableness, forcing Francis into a position of defiant opposition. These were the arguments that he had expected. A gentleman's job. You could sell wine in an office seated at a desk and remain a gentleman, but you lost caste if you sold socks in a store, standing behind a counter. That was the pre-war attitude; the thing he had to fight. The world was a different place; it was going to become more different. People like Hugh didn't realize it. That's why they couldn't afford to run a flat and had to economize by living at home at the age of thirty. The more fiercely Hugh argued, the more mule-like became Francis's resolve to vindicate his independence.

“I'll show them,” he thought. “I'll stick to my point. They'll have to give way. In a year's time they'll realize they were wrong.”

Francis got his way.

Going to Selfridge's was very much like going back to school. He was posted with a dozen other students to a students' course. He sat at a desk each morning in the Education Office and listened to lectures on salesmanship, on department routine, on store organization. He was detailed for a fortnight to the Despatch Office at Irongate Wharf. In the return room he helped in the opening of parcels that for one reason or another had been returned by the customers. The letters accompanying these parcels brought him in touch with the kind of people with whom, as a salesman, he would have to deal; the kind of mistakes that a salesman was likely to make, the kind of mistake on the part of a customer that a salesman had to rectify. He had never realized that people could be quite so unbusinesslike as the customers who returned goods without giving their addresses, without explaining whether or not the goods had not been sent upon approval, whether they wanted some other article to be sent them in exchange. He had never realized how elaborate a system was required to fulfil the separate needs of each customer; nor through how many hands the parcel that the customers had ordered in Oxford Street that morning would have to pass before it was placed upon the afternoon van and delivered at his London home that evening. He had had no idea that so many different departments were needed in the Despatch Office alone—the Post Mail, Purchase Assembly card, Record, General Packing, Letter Order, Adjustment, Sanction. Each department fulfilled its own necessary function. One day he was sent out with a van, on a drive northward, through Mill Hill to Barnet. He had realized then how much time could be wasted by a salesman's carelessly illegible or inaccurate entering of an address.

Posted back to the main building in Oxford Street he continued in the adjustment office the same kind of store education that had been begun at Irongate. Salesmanship, the actual taking of an order from a customer across a counter was the last step in that education. Before he was allowed to deal with a customer, the student had to know exactly what happened to the parcel that he had wrapped up hastily and handed to the collecting van. He had to know the kind of mistake he was likely to make, the kind of trouble that he was likely to cause, before he was given a chance of making mistakes or causing trouble. For three weeks in the adjustment office he absorbed the system by which delays, mistakes, misunderstandings were put right. He had been a member of the staff three months before he was allowed to make his first sale across a counter.

At the end of his fourth month he received an invitation to lunch from Malcolm.

“And how do you find life in the emporium?” he was asked.

It was a question that Francis found it difficult to answer. He had been interested, he had been excited, seeing his own future clear ahead of him; with the feeling that the probationary period of his life was over, that he had really begun to live.
That
he had expected to feel, before he was enrolled upon the staff. But there was one kind of excitement that he had not expected; the definite pride of being identified with an organization so vast, so powerful, and at the same time so personal, in which he felt that though he was no more than a cog in a machine, he had not been absorbed by that machine, that he had retained his personality, that his own contribution to the store's prosperity was individual and was recognized as individual.

But he did not see how he was to explain that to Malcolm in phrases that would not come priggishly bromidic.

“Oh well, it's all right,” he said.

“And in which particular branch of our activities would you like to emulate, and perhaps eclipse, the example I have set you?”

“Well …” He paused. He had known that he would be given the choice of departments. But he could not say that he would find one department more interesting than another. He was interested in the general processes of salesmanship, but not in any particular commodity. He would be just as happy selling shirts as bicycles. He told Malcolm this. Malcolm pursed his lips.