The Hireling (23 page)

But it was open, and thankfully he bought himself a whisky and sat down. Hardly had he swallowed the first mouthful when his head dropped forward and he fell asleep and dreamed, not of the car but of Lady Franklin. Even his subconscious was too tired to formulate its images; he only knew that she was there, and in her own surroundings, and the emotions he had been feeling about the car had somehow transferred themselves to her, and with a still more penetrating sweetness. The car was there too, though it was not quite like his car, and he was not showing it to her but giving it to her. ‘Won’t you accept it?’ he begged anxiously. ‘After all, it’s more your car than mine,’ At first she wouldn’t and he was terribly upset: it seemed to him of the first importance that she should accept the car. ‘Do take it,’ he pleaded, ‘it’s my wedding-present to you,’ At last she yielded. As she did so an extraordinary sensation of peace came over him, and at the same moment he drew out of his body a long nail, a foot long it must have been, and red and dripping with his blood. He was terrified and thought, ‘Now I’m away’, but to his astonishment he felt no pain at all, only an enormous relief and a still deeper peace; and when he looked at the place it had already healed up, and instead of torn flesh there was a tiny dry scar like a pearl.

He clung to the dream as long as he could, in spite of the noise of voices round him, but at last a particularly loud laugh awoke him, and he heard someone say, ‘Dreaming of his old woman, I shouldn’t wonder,’ He jerked his head up and gave the speaker a straight look and said :

‘Did you want anything?’

The man, a young fellow with a mop of red hair, tittered uncomfortably and said:

‘Can you tell me the right time?’

Leadbitter, who had no idea what the time was, and didn’t care, merely remarked:

‘Next time you go out you’d better put your cap on,’

‘Why?’ asked the young man, unsuspectingly.

‘You might get your block knocked off,’

Now the laugh was against the youth, who flushed and turned his back on Leadbitter. His companions muttered among themselves and screwing round their heads darted in Leadbitter’s direction hostile glances which struck against the shiny visor of his cap and dropped off harmlessly. He would have liked to get up and go, and try to recapture his dream in more congenial surroundings. But the seed of hostility had sprung up in him, and he wasn’t going to turn tail, although he felt too weak to fight, he couldn’t have fought with the skin of a rice pudding. So he bought himself another whisky and sat down again, angry with the world, angry with himself, striving to recover the lost paradise whose soft, sweet airs still lingered in his mind, contending with the rising fumes of anger. After a third whisky he might feel able to take on the redhead and his gang. It wouldn’t matter, he didn’t have to drive, he couldn’t; he had given in his old car, and wouldn’t get the new one till tomorrow. But his swimming head and shaky hand warned him against starting anything. Impotent and frustrated and angrier than ever, he noticed the folded evening paper on his table, picked it up and began to turn the pages. The blurred print swam before his eyes, but he could see what the pictures were about, and of one he could even read the caption, so large was the type in which it had been splashed.

BEARDED PAINTER TO WED HEIRESS

it ran; and he didn’t have to find out who the painter was, or who the heiress, for there was Hughie, very conscious of his beard, holding the lapels of his jacket and looking down with an unbearably smug and possessive expression at Lady Franklin, whose great eyes were turned up to his with as much awe and worship as if he had been not a man but a cathedral. Leadbitter’s heart contracted with disgust and loathing, he felt physically sick and for a moment couldn’t focus the picture. Then he took it to the window and screwing his eyes up read the paragraph below it. ‘The bridegroom’s present to the bride is her own portrait painted by himself,’ it finished up. ‘The wedding will take place at St Mark’s, North Audley Street, on Saturday,’

On Saturday! And she hadn’t let him know! She was too busy thinking of her Hughie. Another drop of bitterness. He couldn’t remember what he had on for Saturday, but whatever it was it must be cancelled. If she had let him down, he wouldn’t let her down.

Sitting at the table with his glass, and trying not to picture the scene, he saw it all too clearly. He had taken many a wedding party to that church and before driving off to stow himself away in some side-street, had watched the guests go in. They were going in now; and who was this among them, a tallish figure, not quite at her ease, judging by the restless movement of her eyes. Why it was Constance! She too had been invited, Hughie had seen to that. The cheek of it! Leadbitter saw her so plainly that he never doubted that she would be there. Rage flared up in him and reversed in one brief moment the decision it had taken days of arguing with himself to reach. And for once rage found an ally in love. How could he love her if he let this mockery of a marriage take place? How long would her fool’s paradise last, before it crashed about her ears?

Today was Tuesday: there was no time to lose. Rising shakily he went to the bar, and with his speech a little slurred, said to the landlord: ‘Could you oblige me with a sheet of notepaper?’ The landlord gave it to him, and an envelope and a stamp as well.

Leadbitter went back to his table and wrote a letter. Many versions of it had been in his head; he took the first that came. It would have been more prudent to use his clerk’s typewriter, but the thing that mattered was to get the letter off, and indeed the whisky he had taken guided his pen so oddly that the sprawling capitals bore little semblance to his real hand. Licking the envelope he gave the landlord a nod of thanks for his help: and the landlord nodded back.

Out in the street he stopped to take his bearings. The mental revolution of those last few minutes had left Leadbitter stone sober. And it had done more - it had banished his fatigue and restored to him - not the elation he had felt over the car, but a clear tranquillity of spirit that he had not known since he was a child; never since those distant days when, on rare occasions, his mother used to tell him he had been a good boy, had he felt so utterly at one with himself. The recovery of lost innocence made him want to cry, and tears were standing in his eyes when he dropped the letter in the box.

When he got back to his flat he found an entry on his pad: ‘Thursday 7 p.m. Mr Cantrip. To Richmond, wait and return,’ His secretary had booked it for him. Well, it meant that he would see her again, and learn from her the arrangements for the wedding. He wouldn’t use the car, he suddenly decided, until Thursday evening: its first trip should be with Lady Franklin.

In Leadbitter’s tired mind, the days ran into each other. Saturday, Saturday at two-thirty was the wedding; Thursday, Thursday at seven o’clock was the date of his engagement with Hughie. About half an hour before, he went round to the garage to fetch his car. It faced him, a nuzzle of shark-like, wind-cheating shapes, that even at rest suggested speed.

This was to be its maiden voyage, as Leadbitter had vowed it should be. But he had nearly broken his vow. The idea of keeping the car for a day and a half unused when he had plenty of orders booked which he would have to put out went against his business principles, while the notion of presenting a virgin car to Lady Franklin which had so attracted him at the outset now seemed too fanciful. It was the clash between an impulse and an instinct, and he had to laugh when he thought what a mug he was being. Yet he stuck to his resolve, and it turned out he was not the loser by it, for the limousine wasn’t ready on the Wednesday, for which it had been promised, so he couldn’t have worked in any case, unless he had gone to the expense of hiring another car.

Wednesday had been a car-less, but not a careless day: it had been a day of two-fold stock-taking - Leadbitter examined his accounts, and he also examined his emotional position.

The accounts were, in one sense, extremely satisfactory. He had extended his business beyond what he had thought possible; if it increased at this rate he might, in a year’s time, be in a position to buy another car and hire a man to drive it. Then he would serve his best customers himself and leave the man the others - the first step to collecting what, in confident moments, he thought of, grandiosely, as a ‘fleet’ of cars. Then, at last, he would be seeing daylight.

On the debit side he had mortgaged his future by acquiring this expensive ‘lim’, on paper he was worse off than he had been even before Lady Franklin’s gift enabled him to buy outright the old car. When he remembered this, and how everything depended on his health, he didn’t feel too easy. He still refused to connect ill-health and tiredness; machinery, he knew, was liable to fatigue, but he regarded himself as a super-machine, capable of unlimited recovery. Yet though he wouldn’t recognize his tiredness, his constitution did; it didn’t welcome a whole day’s driving with its old cheerfulness and after ‘a long drag’ it didn’t get back to normal as quickly as it used to. With his physical ear alert for noises that shouldn’t be there - a creak, a rattle, a knocking - his inner ear couldn’t quite disregard those warning symptoms in himself, much as his conscious mind might discount them.

But, to be practical, the big car was after all an investment: it would bring him new customers, and good customers too, the snobbish type who preferred a large car when a small one would do just as well. And women’s evening dresses were now so voluminous (perhaps to hide the shortness of their legs) that they couldn’t easily get inside a small car. The new one would increase his prestige with himself and with the world.

With himself, there began the second examination. What of himself? Was he in as good shape as his accounts were?

A few weeks ago he would not have distinguished between them. Then he had no existence apart from the money he was making: the phrase ‘I’m doing well’ covered everything about him. But it wasn’t so now. In those few weeks he had developed an emotional life in which, though it was based on money, Lady Franklin’s gift, money didn’t talk. He had been at times very happy, and at times very unhappy, for reasons quite unconnected with money. He didn’t disguise that from himself. Was his emotional life to go on, and if so, what future had it?

Compared with his financial prospects, his emotional future was barren and bleak. Even his financial future was mortgaged. With the help of the h.p. he would pay that mortgage off. But there was no way of buying happiness on the h.p. - monthly instalments of unhappiness would not win happiness in the end: Leadbitter had learnt enough about the feelings to know they didn’t work that way. Or did they? Could he, by an act of renunciation now, insure for himself happiness in the future, or since that seemed too much to ask, insure himself against unhappiness?

He thought of his dream in the pub, and the strange peace of mind that came from offering his new car to Lady Franklin, and the bliss when she accepted it, and he drew the long nail out of his body. It was only a dream, of course, but the sensation was still as vivid and as real as when he experienced it, and it was, he realized, an intensification of what his waking senses felt when he had the idea of presenting the carto Lady Franklin, dedicating it to her. The idea of actually giving it to her, handing over to her his only piece of capital, although she had half paid for it, made him smile - he must be balmy! Yet he toyed with it, and wondered if the car couldn’t be the vehicle of a compromise, have something about it, something detachable which he could really give her, something within his means - the medallion of St Christopher, for instance, which he had transferred from his old car to this one. It had been a present to him from a customer, who had bought it, so the customer told him, in the South of France; it had an inscription printed round the edge, in French: the customer had told him what it meant, but Leadbitter had forgotten. But Leadbitter didn’t want to part with it because he was superstitious about it: he might be parting with his luck. What else was there? Nothing - nothing that would do for a wedding-present - unless, yes there was one thing that might do, and it was a present that in the circumstances only he could give: a poor man’s present, but an appropriate one, for it was something that with all her wealth she couldn’t command. All the tea in China couldn’t buy it! A free drive, that is what he would give her. He would explain to them both, to her and Hughie, when he took them out this evening for their pre-nuptial flight, that he would not charge them for his services at the wedding: he would bear the whole cost himself. If he only told Hughie, Hughie would almost certainly not tell her. He had no wish to spare Hughie’s pocket, the wedding-present was not for him, but in sparing his he would be sparing hers, for it was from hers the money came. Leadbitter did not know the Latin proverb that money doesn’t smell; but he would not have agreed with it, for to him it did smell, and quite strongly: it smelt of whoever paid it. Hughie had paid, but not with his own money; Leadbitter had never seen the colour of Hughie’s money, much less smelt it.

Mentally he tried out on himself the effect - the releasing, liberating effect - of giving Lady Franklin a free drive. It gave him a reaction, certainly, and a pleasant one; but very faint compared with his dream reaction of giving her the car. Yet it was quite a sacrifice - four pounds or so was quite a sacrifice for a man in his position. Perhaps when he came to checking the accounts, and saw the item in red, the red of his own life-stream, that drop of bitterness would make the sweetness sweeter.

Even so, he confessed to a feeling of disappointment. Wasn’t there something else that he could give her? He hadn’t given many presents in his life but instinctively he knew that one was better than two: two presents robbed each other, made excuses for each other. Each hinted at the other’s inadequacy; each seemed an afterthought. Better make a bold plunge with one. Supposing he did give her the St Christopher? At the thought, the clear call of renunciation roused his spirit like a bugle. He didn’t want to part with it for it had befriended him; he owed his safety to it. Well, what matter? He would pass his safety on to her, that would be a gift indeed, and a gift that she might need, although he hoped she wouldn’t. Besides, seeing the medallion in her car she would, she might, remember him; whereas she wouldn’t, no one would, remember a free drive.