The Hireling (12 page)

‘You see what I mean?’ she whispered to Leadbitter. ‘These arches and pillars aren’t made to a pattern like those others in the nave - those are Perpendicular, as I expect you know, and too cold and uniform for my taste. But these don’t repeat themselves, or not exactly. There’s a kind of living relationship between them, if you see what I mean, as there is between human beings, not just structurally, but spiritually as well, the likeness and the unlikeness, which somehow draws us to each other - the contrast you sometimes see between ill-matched couples which helps to make them one,’

She looked up at Leadbitter anxiously, to see if he was following her thought: his head thrown back, he was staring at the massive triforium as if trying to trace in it the emblems of love which Lady Franklin had professed to find there. He looked down at her enigmatically and said:

‘I see they are different, but don’t you think those old monks were trying to make them alike and didn’t know how to?’

‘Oh no,’ Lady Franklin said, decidedly. They could have copied - anyone can copy. No, they liked the feeling of the difference,’

‘Does everyone, my lady?’ Leadbitter asked.

‘Like the feeling of difference? In other people, do you mean?’

‘Well, yes,’

‘I do,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘I like people to be different from me. There’s nothing to find out when they’re just like yourself. No surprises. I like people who give me a surprise. There must be a basis of agreement, of course. That’s chemical, I believe,’

‘Anyone might have it for anyone?’

‘Why, yes,’

‘And doesn’t class make a difference?’

‘Oh dear no,’ said Lady Franklin, horrified by what she thought was in his mind. The titled lady and the chauffeur! ‘No,’ she repeated, ‘class-distinctions add richness to life, I think. They make the kind of difference we were speaking of - the right kind. At least they used to, but there aren’t any now,’

Leadbitter shook his head.

‘Most people wouldn’t say so, my lady,’ he said.

‘Well, I do,’ said Lady Franklin, feeling it was the greatest fun in the world to abolish class. ‘I never know what people mean when they -‘ she stopped. ‘I’ve always had the happiest relations with my -‘ she stopped again and substituted ‘staff’ for ‘servants’. ‘I’ve had a different kind of upbringing from you, I suppose,’ she went on, ‘but I’ve never felt it a barrier and I hope you haven’t,’

‘Can’t say I have, my lady,’ said Leadbitter in a rather thick low voice, which Lady Franklin attributed to a suddenly-remembered reverence for the sacred building.

‘Then may I call you by your Christian name?’

‘Yes, my lady, but hardly anyone does,’

‘Then I shall be one of the privileged few. Stephen…,’ But while she was thinking of something to follow Stephen, something that should be as intimate as his name, a panic seized her, a cold hand gripped her throat. What would the Franklins say? Eyebrows raised, they were all round her. ‘A chauffeur? No, my dear, you mustn’t,’ Resentful, protesting, but inhibited, she struggled with them.

‘Unless you’d rather call me Steve,’ said Leadbitter, suddenly.

‘Steve,’ she repeated, ‘Steve,’ She lingered lovingly upon the name, but couldn’t frame a sentence to go with it. ‘Steve?’ she said again, as if it were a question.

‘Yes, my lady?’

‘Oh, nothing,’

‘Nothing, my lady?’

‘I meant it’s such a nice name,’

‘It sounds nice when you say it,’

But this time the Franklins had won. She knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t say his name, but Leadbitter did not know and from that moment he began to listen for it. Steve … Steve … Who had last called him Steve?

In silence they passed out of the Cathedral.

‘Now we must be thinking about luncheon,’ said Lady Franklin in an open-air voice. ‘And afterwards we’ll come back here for a bit. At least I will, perhaps you would rather be excused,’ She smiled, but Leadbitter to her surprise said:

‘That’s all right, my lady. I’ll come back if you want me to,’

‘That will be very nice,’ said Lady Franklin in her regal manner. ‘Let’s meet at the West door at half past two,’

To Lady Franklin their second visit to the Cathedral was more rewarding than the first, for this time the great building did not seem a barrier between her and Leadbitter, it seemed a bond. It was no longer a piece of hostile territory that he had rather unwillingly to subdue (she was getting used to the military cast of his mind); he had either conquered it or accepted it as friendly. It was still alien to him, that she saw; a survival from the past with no meaning in the present: its enduring religious aspect was quite hidden from him. But the fact of its great age impressed him, and the engineering feats, the ‘grouting’ which the guide told them had saved it from sinking down into the mud. Indeed the application of modern methods to preserve it interested him much more than the spirit that had raised it: he saw it as a problem which posterity for some reason had taken on itself to solve.

There was something touching, something to be grateful for, in the way he gave his mind to a subject which had no natural attraction for him - consenting to appear, in the guide’s eyes, uninstructed and pleased to learn, an attitude which she guessed didn’t come easily to him, for in ordinary circumstances he was far readier to tell than to be told. He is doing this for my sake, she thought - nor was she wrong.

Another smaller thing that touched her was that he had subdued the natural resonance of his voice, which before luncheon might have awakened the dead and ordered them to fall in, to a reverent huskiness, and this did not wear off even when they were in the car and speeding back to London.

Yes, it had been a success, Lady Franklin thought, a definite success, and brought her nearer to him than at any other time in their relationship. Why did she want to be brought nearer to him? Because, she told herself for the hundredth time, he had done something for her that no one else could do: he had saved her from herself. She didn’t realize that she had found herself in giving; she put it all down to Leadbitter’s good-nature, his patience in telling her about himself and his family. During the last weeks, she had heard so many other stories, stories much more scandalous, or intriguing, or amusing, about people of her own set, that the colours of his story had grown somewhat faint: she could not be as excited as she once had been to hear that Don and Pat had just avoided chicken-pox. But this had made her feel more guilty towards him and more anxious to make amends, for how without his story, and the window it opened on reality, would she have ever heard, or wished to hear, these much more entertaining stories that were circulated at the luncheons, cocktail parties, dinner-parties which she had been frequenting? She did not believe - she did not try to believe - that the mere signing of a cheque had paid her debt: she owed him payment in another coin - a currency of the spirit.

She had another reason for wishing to be extra kind to Leadbitter. In future she would not use his car so much, having no need for pious pilgrimages. The patient had been cured and the physician had become redundant. It would be nice to feel that she had parted from him on a note of understanding, of shared experience, with something outside themselves to give the memory substance. But parting from him, no, she wasn’t parting from him, she put that thought away from her, it made her feel guilty, as if she had made herself responsible for him - and how could she have - a man with a wife and family, who was so well able to take care of himself, and them?

Cramped for them both by Steve-suppression, and perhaps by their fear of rubbing the bloom off something, the conversation had been desultory and they were more than half-way to London, when she said, with some idea of making the occasion still more memorable, both to him and to her:

‘You know, St-‘ (she smothered the name as if it had been a stammer) ‘seeing the Cathedral reminded me of a book I once read - I don’t know if you’ve read it - called Mt St Michel and Chartres -

‘I don’t think I have, my lady,’ said Leadbitter, still in his husky voice. ‘I don’t get much time for reading,’

‘Of course you don’t. Well, it’s mostly about the great Cathedral of Chartres, which has the finest stained-glass in the world, and about the other French cathedrals as well, and in it he tells how they came to be built. It wasn’t just a task that people set themselves, as if the Church had ordered a cathedral here and there; they sprang up to supply a kind of need, as cinemas and skating-rinks do nowadays. It wasn’t a question of urging people on to build them, they couldn’t be held back, and all because, he says, it was just then, in the twelfth century, or the thirteenth, that the idea of the Virgin Mary first got hold of people’s minds. You see, till then Christianity had been a good deal a man’s affair - the Trinity is vaguely masculine I think - and terribly serious, martyrs and dogmas, heresies and all that. It hadn’t a softer side, if you see what I mean. Well, suddenly the Virgin Mary came into it - she’d been there all along, of course - and gave it something new. I know you don’t think too well of women -‘

‘Only some women, my lady,’ Leadbitter said. ‘There are exceptions -‘

‘Yes, your wife for one. Well, she was like a wife and a mother and a … a girl-friend to every man, every man could see his ideal woman in her, and every woman wanted to be like her, and look like her, and she brought, or the cult of her did - into religion all sorts of qualities that hadn’t been there, like tenderness and gaiety and earthly love and home-making - you wouldn’t deny those to all women, would you?’

‘No,’ said Leadbitter smiling, ‘not to all.’

‘Well, men’s minds became - I won’t say feminized - it’s such an awful word - but more alive to a feminine element in religion and it took on tremendously and burnt up in their hearts like a flame and so they couldn’t stop themselves from building in her honour - it was a craze, she was like a universal film-star, or pin-up girl, if that doesn’t sound blasphemous,’

‘I’d like to know which film-star,’ Leadbitter said.

‘Well, your favourite, if you have one. And this ideal, working in their minds, sprang up in stone and glass all over France, and England too, and all in praise of us - us women, if I may say so. The greatest compliment we’ve ever had,’

‘That was a long time ago,’ said Leadbitter.

‘And women have changed for the worse since then? Well, perhaps they have. Perhaps we all have. Work is measured by money now, isn’t it? It was then, too, to some extent. Building was always being held up, and given up, for lack of funds. I don’t know how much the cathedrals cost, but Henry Adams, when he wrote, valued them at Ł600 million, just the French ones,’

‘That’s a lot of money,’ Leadbitter admitted, still with a frog in his throat.

‘Yes, and now they would be worth a great deal more. But one doesn’t think of the money - one thinks of all it meant in terms of enthusiasm and the joy of creation - not feelings turning into stone, but stone turning into feelings, and the abstractions of religious thought, which can be so dividing, turning into feelings too: all that surge and up-rush of devotion not spending itself in wrangling or money-getting, but perpetuating itself in things of lasting beauty. Most art is the work of individuals, and often of individuals at odds with their lot: it’s the fruit of loneliness and separation. The cathedrals were a collective effort, a family affair - the result of an epidemic, not a personal, non-infectious illness.’

Lady Franklin laughed to think where the metaphor had landed her, and rather to her surprise, Leadbitter laughed too.

‘I meant to be so cheerful, and I felt so cheerful,’ she apologized, ‘and I’ve ended up with plague and cancer, or something like them. Why are so many metaphors drawn from unpleasant things? What was in my mind when I started on all this, which must have been very boring for you, was that my happiness - which I can’t compare to a cathedral or even the smallest parish church, but still it means a lot to me - was something I couldn’t have achieved by myself: it was the result of our combined effort - I owe it to you,’ She didn’t realize she was repeating what she had often said to Leadbitter; she felt she was surging forward on a great wave of gratitude, foam-crested, translucent. ‘Thank goodness, you don’t know what it means to live in solitary confinement with a single thought and that a painful one. Besides your other customers, who no doubt plague you with their grievances as I do (or perhaps they don’t, perhaps they have more consideration), you have your family, your wife and Don and Pat and Susie, all of whom suck the poison from the wound - for I suppose we all have a wound? I hadn’t anyone to help me, or anyone who did help me -that was part of my trouble - until you came along,’

‘I’m very glad if I’ve been a help to you, my lady,’ Leadbitter said.

‘You have, and more than a help, you’ve been a mental standby, a consoling thought, even when you weren’t with me. I realized that you had been through far more than I had - in the war, and so on - and hadn’t let it affect you: you had made yourself fit for peace as well as war, which isn’t easy for everyone, I know,’

‘I suppose I’m pretty tough,’ said Leadbitter.

‘Yes, that’s what I liked, and somehow you passed it on to me. I felt that here was someone I could rely on absolutely, who responded to the true values of life, whose experience wasn’t spurious and self-induced, like mine. You were real and so was everything about you - your wife, your family, and the way you lived - and gradually they built up in my mind the impression of a reality outside myself, which was what I needed. I got it through your companionship; you gave it me. Loneliness is something you don’t suffer from - how could you? Perhaps it’s just the opposite with you, perhaps you sometimes want to be alone,’

‘I do feel lonely sometimes,’ Leadbitter said, ‘I do feel lonely,’ he repeated.

‘In spite of your busy life and your family all around you, growing up?’

‘Yes, in spite of them,’ said Leadbitter. ‘But you don’t feel lonely any more, my lady?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I do feel lonely but in quite another way. I want companionship now; I didn’t before,’ ‘I want it, too,’ said Leadbitter. ‘In spite of having so much?’