The Hireling (9 page)

But it was another Lady Franklin, not the one he knew, who came tripping down the steps, her face alight with smiles. The smiles were there before they reached him, but when she saw him they multiplied and broadened, as if he, Leadbitter, had called them into being. He felt his own face relaxing as he gave her his best salute. Yes, she was transformed. He could hardly remember her shut-up look; she was full of herself - the glum, dumb parasite that fed upon her spirit, had been banished. How could he have known that all this radiance was not so much for him, as for the gift which had somehow given her back to herself? He didn’t know, but for a moment he watched her narrowly. When she had told him where to go she said:

‘Is everything all right now?’

At this he gave her one of his rare smiles, and said:

Well, it ought to be, my lady. I didn’t know there was so much kindness in the world,’

‘Oh, please don’t speak of it,’ cried Lady Franklin, gratified beyond words. She, the source of the world’s kindness? Oh no, the sin of pride! Think quickly of someone else. ‘And your wife?’ she asked.

Leadbitter looked again at Lady Franklin before he answered, as though to take his cue from her.

‘Oh, she’s all over herself, my lady! You wouldn’t recognize her - it’s all the difference between a long face and a round one. But’ (even at this moment his misogyny got the better of him) ‘you know what women are, she isn’t quite content -‘

‘Of course not,’ Lady Franklin said, as if to be quite content would have been a fault, ‘how could she be? If you get rid of one set of troubles, another takes their place. I’m not quite content either - I’m like your wife in that way, too - though I feel better this morning than I have for years -better in myself, whatever that means ! As if one could be better in someone else! And yet,’ she mused, ‘I suppose one could, I suppose one could! You have done me a lot of good, I don’t know how, but you have! I could almost say I was better in yourself, but that would be nonsense, wouldn’t it? But I know that when I say the word “myself”, or think it, both of which I do all too often, it means something quite different to me now from what it did a week ago! It used to be a terrible bugbear to me, that word, my heart sank when I said it or thought it! Myself! It was like saying my prison, my torture-chamber almost, or does that sound too dramatic? - but something I was condemned to stay in, and never should get out of I But you have never suffered from your nerves, have you?’

‘I should hope not, my lady,’ Leadbitter said, little realizing how much he suffered from them. ‘But I once knew a chap whose nerves stuck out eight inches and were curly at the edges,’

Lady Franklin smiled half-heartedly. ‘Then you won’t understand, and I hope you never will, what it means to be the prisoner of oneself, a self one doesn’t like and that doesn’t like one! One’s self is a blackmailer that can never be paid off. I’m sure you know what I mean. But now I can get away whenever I like - touch wood,’ and Lady Franklin looked for a piece of wood. It seemed to be all painted tin, cold to the touch; but she only laughed. ‘And do you know where I can escape to most easily? It sounds fantastic to say it, and you’ll never believe me, but it’s into your life, the life you’ve been telling me about, your life with your family! Somehow it’s become as real to me as my own, perhaps more real, your trials and triumphs and so on! You’ve done that for me and I’m infinitely grateful!’

‘And I’m very grateful to you, my lady,’ Leadbitter put in, soberly.

‘Oh that, oh well! But what is money? Excuse me, I know it is a great deal, but it isn’t everything, it doesn’t unlock the door of the prison, in fact it sometimes locks it! When you get rich, as I hope you soon will, you may even find that yourself, so be warned,’ (It would take a good deal of money to lock the door on me, thought Leadbitter.) ‘But don’t imagine,’ she went on, perhaps sensing something critical in his thought of her, ‘don’t imagine that just because I can escape … well, to you, as it were, that I’m going to be a permanent visitor, a sort of paying guest, or paying ghost’ (she reddened at the reference to money) ‘in your home circle, just because you’ve made my thoughts at home there! I’m going to inflict myself on my other friends as well. The day after tomorrow I’m going to a party, the first party I’ve been to since my husband died, and I’m really looking forward to it! That’s why I’m going shopping now, to try to make myself a little presentable!’

She broke off, and Leadbitter found that the thought of Lady Franklin going to a party didn’t altogether please him.

‘When will that be, my lady?’ he asked practically. ‘And shall you need the car?’

‘Oh I don’t think so,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘It’s so near I could almost walk. It would do me good to walk,’

Leadbitter didn’t like the idea of Lady Franklin on foot.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to walk now, my lady,’ he said a little crisply, ‘because they won’t let me wait here. You’ll find me in Park Street, but they’ll only let me wait there twenty minutes,’

‘Oh why must people make things so difficult?’ moaned Lady Franklin, pretending despair but really made more radiant by the difficulty. In her new mood, any setback seemed the greatest fun. ‘I won’t be more than twenty minutes, I promise you,’

Leadbitter helped her out and went off to the meeting-place. The twenty minutes passed, the police moved him on, and he began to cruise round the neighbouring streets, a way of killing time that he especially loathed. When, three-quarters of an hour later, he drew up at the kerb where Lady Franklin was standing, smiling ruefully, he didn’t think he would be able to smile back; but found he could.

The days passed and he saw nor hide nor hair of Lady Franklin. What had happened to her? She was doing a round of parties, he supposed. Well let her get on with it; he had plenty of other customers, though he still had gaps in his engagement list which a country jaunt with Lady Franklin would have conveniently and profitably filled.

But he couldn’t put her out of his mind. Had he ‘done anything’, he asked himself, to annoy her? No; in spite of a good deal of provocation, his behaviour when he had taken her out shopping had been, he knew, exemplary. At these parties that she went to, blast them, had she been recommended another driver who pleased her better? Customers were notoriously fickle. Had her butler rung him up when he was out, or when the man he paid to answer the telephone (the clerk was a new departure, made possible by Lady Franklin’s bounty) was off duty? Did she feel she had done enough for him, or too much, and now avoided him because he reminded her of her folly - once bit, twice shy?

The fact of owning his car no longer elated him as once it had, but it did remind him, on and off, of Lady Franklin. It was like a substitute for her in terms of money. Well, what of that? The first time he was alone with her cheque he had felt as clever, as triumphant, as pleased with himself as if he had stolen the car from her - as in a way he had: he had certainly got it out of her on false pretences. The Leadbitter family chronicle! How greedily she had swallowed that bait! And how, for a day or two, he had despised her for it - no, not exactly despised her, but seen in the whole episode a too easy vindication of his cynicism. It had been as simple as falling off a log. So why did he now feel aggrieved with her, as if after making him this handsome present she had no right to remove herself, as if by giving him the car she had actually put herself in his debt and owed him something? Owed him what? Her presence, he supposed, her continued custom. But why on earth -! All the same when he thought of her at those parties, tripping about with this glad new smile on her face (which he would gladly have wiped off) calling and being called darling by a gang of socialites, he felt not only disgusted but hurt. That smile, which he (so she said) had put there, was the beginning of the trouble. Smiling on parade! With that smile she had dismissed him, signified that she had no further use for him. Good-bye, Mr Chips! It haunted him, her smile.

One day he received a telephone call (or rather his man did, Leadbitter was out) asking him to pick up a party at an address in Chelsea, take them out to Richmond, wait while they had dinner, and bring them back. Quite a good job: his clerk had booked it for him.

Leadbitter called for the man first. He was the artist type, tall, young, loosely built, with greenish eyes and auburn locks and a beard. Leadbitter took against him at sight, but he was an impartial judge of a man and he had to admit that as a man, if you cared for that type, this one made the grade. He had a pleasant, musical voice, cultivated without being affected, and an assurance of being liked which showed itself in his movements. He asked Leadbitter to go to an address on Campden Hill, and there he got out, rang the bell, and waited on the doorstep. Here he was joined, as Leadbitter expected, by a woman. She, too, was tall, nearly as tall as he, with bronze hair, wide, high cheekbones and an air of breeding. (Leadbitter prided himself on being able to pick out the blue-blooded ones.) From the moment of their greeting Leadbitter took for granted that the two were lovers of old standing, there was just that amount of passion in their kiss. In the woman’s he detected something maternal; in the man’s an uncertain ardour. She’s older than he is and she wears the pants, he thought, and yet she isn’t too sure of him. Indifferent as he was, in a sense, to human beings Leadbitter had seen so many embraces, so much, face-tasting, as he termed it - that he knew exactly what degree of intimacy each implied. The man gave him the name of a hotel in Richmond. ‘Well,’ said the woman when they were both settled in the back seat, ‘this is a surprise - a delightful surprise, of course. But why the extravagance, Hughie? Why the car? Since when have you become a millionaire?’

Hughie Cantrip was his surname, (Leadbitter remembered) laughed and said:

‘I’ve had a stroke of luck since we last met,’

‘I wondered if you had, but knowing your impulsive temperament -‘

‘Nothing’s too good for you,’ he said.

She sighed. It was a happy sigh but with a touch of impatience in it. Women are never satisfied, thought Leadbitter, who could see the couple in his mirror.

‘I’m not looking the gift-horse in the mouth,’ she answered. ‘It’s sweet of you and I’m not going to scold you. But tell me about this stroke of luck: where did it happen, and how?’

‘It happened at a party,’ Hughie said. ‘As a matter of fact, you were there, too,’

‘Was I?’

‘Yes, Connie, you were,’

‘Don’t call me that awful name, or I shall think you hate me,’

‘Well, Constance, then,’

‘That’s better, but you haven’t told me.’

‘I was coming to it when you interrupted me. It was at the Portingsales, that party that they gave for Ernestine,’

‘To celebrate her return to the world?’

‘Yes,’ said Hughie. ‘That was the idea. You were there, too. You know her, don’t you?’

‘I used to know her a little in the old days, before she became rich, and then I saw her once or twice before her breakdown. I could never take her quite seriously as a person : she never seemed quite real to me. Rich people never do,’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Their problems are not the same as ours, and all that freedom of action - it’s like a fairy-tale.

They float around, they don’t belong - there are not enough of them, now, to make a social unit. They are an anachronism, a vestigial survival, like one’s appendix, or one’s tail, if one had a tail. Besides, thinking of her case, anything to do with nerves is unreal, really,’

‘What do you mean by “unreal, really”?’

‘Darling, you know quite well what I mean. And her name, Ernestine, isn’t a real name, somehow,’

‘It’s real at the bottom of a cheque,’

‘Oh, so you’ve seen it there?’

‘No, not her name but her initial,’

‘Don’t keep me on tenterhooks, please, Hughie.’

‘Well, I was introduced to her,’

‘But I thought you knew her? You spoke of her by her Christian name,’

‘But don’t we all, nowadays? You are old-fashioned, Constance. I was introduced to her and I told her I was a painter,’

‘You said that was your line?’

‘Don’t tease me,’ Hughie said. ‘And she seemed, well … she seemed to take an interest,’

‘I don’t suppose she knows many painters,’

‘She said she didn’t. She said she was quite excited meeting me,’

‘I can’t make any comment on that,’

‘You don’t remember what it was like, to meet me for the first time.’

‘Oh yes, I do,’ said Constance. ‘And then she asked you to paint her?’

‘No, she didn’t,’

‘Wise woman,’

‘How horrid you are, Constance. I’m tired of asking you to let me paint you,’

‘You can do anything you like with me except paint me, Hughie dear. I have to draw the line somewhere. But that’s just what you can’t do - draw a line, I mean. I like you in every way, as you well know, except as a painter. You would have been a good painter if you had never painted - did I invent that?’

‘No,’ said Hughie promptly. ‘You had the help of Tacitus. I could put it into Latin for you: Omnium consensu, capax pingendi, nisi pinxisset.’

‘How clever you are!’ breathed Constance admiringly. ‘What a promising classical scholar was lost in you,’

‘That’s another buried Latin tag - Nero, this time. You’re not very original. Couldn’t you even pretend to like my painting?’

‘I can lie about anything,’ said Constance energetically, ‘but not about Art. There I must speak my mind. But if she didn’t ask you to paint her, why the cheque?’

‘I was coming to that when you started insulting me.’

‘I’m sorry. Please go on - I’m all attention now,’

‘She asked me to paint her husband.’

‘But he’s dead - that’s what all the fuss has been about,’

‘I know, she told me. She seemed rather ashamed of it -the fuss, I mean. She said her friends had been very patient with her. She’s extraordinarily forthcoming, isn’t she, bubbling over, uncontrollably effervescent?’

‘She was once, then she shut up like a clam,’

‘She was most forthcoming with me. Almost embarrassingly so. She seemed quite lightheaded,’