Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Read online

  Mr Beluncle marched back to his own room in a startled frame of mind. He had come down to earth; he was a man tortured, enslaved, tied down and unjustly treated by his own family.

  He was followed into his office by his partner, a woman of forty-five, who was taller than himself, whose dark hair was dry but not yet grey and whose powerful uncoloured lips were crinkled and moved like irritable and exposed muscles.

  “That is not the way to talk to your son,” she said, and she was holding a pair of spectacles open in her hand. She had only lately taken to wearing glasses and was forming the habit of taking them off when she talked of private matters. Mr Beluncle, who had once admired her eyes, now took these sudden removals of the glasses as an uncalled-for reminder of his admiration.

  He swung round to this surprise attack.

  “Where were you?” he said.

  “I was in the office. You didn't notice me,” said Mrs Truslove, speaking as if being conveniently invisible were a role, an achievement which had been painfully and satisfactorily built out of years of complaint. And in her white blouse and her grey coat and skirt, she had the neutrality, the protective colouring of irony and conscience.

  “He is my employee,” said Mr Beluncle.

  “He is your son,” said Mrs Truslove.

  “Don't you start sticking up for him as if you were his mother,” said Mr Beluncle, turning his head sharply over his shoulder as he shot this remark at her. And Mr Beluncle unmistakably conveyed, and meant to convey, that had he wished it, Mrs Truslove could have been the mother of his son; but that he had not so wished.

  Mrs Truslove gave a shrug to one of her shoulders. She had picked up this foreign gesture from an Italian she had once worked for-it was the single feminine affectation in a woman who liked to be thought mannish, and had for Beluncle the irritation of a well-known habit-and she said that it was lucky for Mr Beluncle that she was not the boy's mother. She intended the ambiguity of this sentence.

  And here Mr Beluncle found himself colouring in the large soft ears that stood out rather far from his puddingy head. He had been made, once more, to feel a foolish guilt by this woman who, unlike his wife, always looked him in the eyes.

  “By Jove, that's good, Mrs. T. Ha. Ha!” Mr Beluncle guffawed with a coarsening cloud of laughter intended to cover retreat. He had built up his career, his business, his trade connections on humorousness. “My word, do you know what you jolly nearly suggested. I say … I say.”

  Mrs Truslove did not laugh. Once more Mr Beluncle was familiar with Mrs Truslove's inability to see a joke. He found reluctantly that he had to respect this curious trait in people.

  “I am going to tell the boy to go,” she said. “I won't have you speak to him like that in front of the staff. It is wounding to his pride,” she said, “and it is bad for the firm.”

  Mr Beluncle's mouth stuck open with true astonishment. What he wished to say was “But that is what I intended to do. That is what a father must do; break and harden the boy before the world does. What is wrong with that boy is he's afraid of me.”

  “I'll go and tell him,” Mr Beluncle said. So Mr Beluncle, with the insulting look which he had gathered in his daydreams gone from his face, went back to the office smiling. That is to say he believed he was smiling. He was, in fact, scowling. Mr Beluncle opened the door.

  “You here still? Why haven't you gone?” said Mr Beluncle.

  “You told me not to go,” the boy said.

  “Don't flinch when I speak to you,” said Mr Beluncle. “There is no need to do that. I mean, flinching conveys a bad impression. In fact,” said Mr Beluncle, the idea just occurring to him, as ideas continually did-and feeling it would be rather unfriendly not to mention it—“it might convey to those who don't know you, that you were hiding something.”

  The boy, who was no taller than his father, stared directly at him as if he were hypnotised.

  “That's all,” said Mr Beluncle. “Go now and you won't miss the train.”

  Mr Beluncle returned to his own room strengthened.

  “The damn fool was just sitting there!” he laughed to Mrs Truslove, and he went round to his side of their large desk and began one of his favourite defences against her stare. This defence was to lift a few papers from one side of his desk to the other. If she spoke he would stop; if she was silent he would begin a return game from the other pile.

  “Leave your boy alone,” she said. “He has done nothing wrong. It is only your bad conscience.”

  Mr Beluncle lowered a passing handful of letters to his blotter.

  “Conscience!” he said. “I haven't got nothing on my conscience.”

  “Anything, father,” said Mrs Truslove, correcting his English with quiet, unexpected pleasantness, and Mr Beluncle was too grateful for her change of mood to take up that word “father”. He could have said, it was on the tip of his tongue to say “Why do you always say, 'father' in a certain way, what is the idea?”

  “I am not a father,” he wanted to say. She was his partner's widow, but this did not give her the right to call him “father” in her low, unmusical, ridiculing voice. It was not her business to remind him that Nature, in the form of woman, had taken the initiative from him, and had made him no better than thousands of other damn fools: the supremely ridiculous thing: the father of a family. The annoying thing about Mrs Truslove, during all the years she had been with him in the business since her husband's death, was this habit of telling him what a fortunate man he was, what a valuable and devoted wife, what pleasant children he had.

  “Which way, father?” when she took his arm in the evening as they left the office-he could hear her saying it. When she knew what she did know about his life! When she could see with her own eyes how bad things were, why, for what purpose, did she correct and remind? But she did. She always ended by every day convincing him he had the happiest marriage on earth. He would go home in a dream of happiness-that is to say with the insulting expression on his face -and the first thing that happened when he got to the house was that he flew into a rage at the sight of them all, wished he had never met his wife or begotten his children, and would moan slowly round his lawn like a bee, taking the honey of self-pity from flower after flower, longing to get back to his business again.

  III

  On Saturdays Mr Beluncle and Mrs Truslove had lunch at a restaurant that was too expensive for her economical habit, and talked about the business. Occasionally, if she was pettish, he took her to the cinema. He had his car and he would drop her afterwards at her house and take a cup of tea with her. He would say to his wife, “I took Mrs. Truslove” (she was always spoken of formally)—“to the cinema and dropped her home. She's been difficult. I can't afford to quarrel with her.”

  The Saturday programme had once been a pleasure; it had become a duty and now he feared her. “It's a long story,” he occasionally said.

  For a few years during the Saturday lunches he had been inclined to indulge himself with a day-dream about her. He imagined he was married to her instead of to his lamentable wife. The dream would last through the car ride to her house. There, with a perplexing discretion, it vanished, perhaps because she used to change into shoes with lower heels which made her look shorter and so took away an advantage. An inch off her height made her desirable, for she was a handsome woman too, but the desirable was a quality which repelled him in women. “I am not a fool,” he would think, and there was a positive pleasure in disappointing people, in showing them he was “fly”. He could see through the whole bag of tricks. To be just, there were two other reasons: her sister was there and she was a cripple, and he was put out by the great love the sisters had for each other. It made a third party ridiculous and they were rudely inattentive. The other reason was inexplicable. They kept a canary.

  “Why do you keep a canary,” he often asked. “Why don't you keep a dog? A nice dog. An Aberdeen. That's what you ought to keep-not a canary. A canary can't wait on the mat for you when you come in.”
r />   Two women alone-they would have some silly trilling useless, sexless bird. Something in a cage. The natural cruelty of women. A canary was also, surely, a little common, the kind of thing his wife's horrible relations had; he hoped he had risen above that.

  At one o'clock the last clerk went. His son had now gone. The best minutes of the week fell upon Mr Beluhcle and Mrs Truslove like a spell. There was the simple childish excitement of being alone in the building. It was, in a sense, the marriage moment; not always happy, but always intimate. They took long looks at each other and sat there willing to be deluded by each other. “Avarice,” Mr Beluncle would realise, “is at the bottom of her.” And she, “He is not to be trusted with a penny.” And after that, guiltily, she might come and put her arm round his shoulder or rub her cheek on his hair while he seemed to get pinker, fatter, shorter, as if he were allowing himself playfully to be squashed under her touch. She was a thin woman, but her bones were heavy. Or he might put his arm round her waist: by this peculiar method testing her mood. She could be wooden, she could be evasive, she could be yielding; another man might have been disturbed by her in that mood, but Mr Beluncle was not, or was not aware that he was disturbed. Today she went to the mantelpiece and rubbed her finger along the top of the clock that had belonged to her father.

  “Dust,” she said to him. She knew from long experience of Mr Beluncle that news of uncleanliness always brought him to his feet.

  He went to the clock and said, “I shall have to talk to that woman.” He put his hand on her waist but she moved away.

  “Damn,” said Mr Beluncle to himself. “She's been like this for a month.”

  Mrs Truslove's sulks were very long lasting, so long that he often forgot that they were there all the time. He had the impression that she had been sulking for ten years.

  “After lunch,” he said, “I thought I'd go to Marbella”

  “Where is that?”

  “It isn't a place. It's a house,” he said.

  “Oh, that house,” she said.

  “Would you like to come? You've never seen it.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, “? cannot waste my time. You had better take your wife. I don't suppose the poor woman has ever seen it.”

  “She has seen it several times,” said Beluncle. “And don't call her a poor woman.”

  “Several?” said Mrs Truslove. She was very surprised. “You are not seriously thinking of buying that house? You treat your family very badly.”

  Beluncle took this as a compliment. He liked it to be said that he treated his family badly; that gave him a spacious chance of self-pity. But he was concerned by his partner's lack of perception. Was Mrs Truslove becoming stupid? That was to say, had she stopped listening to him and taking his concerns as her own?

  Surely she knew that he thought of nothing but houses and furnishing them, day and night? Surely she knew he could not breathe where he was living at present, that it was a matter of life and death for him to “get out”. Surely she must have noticed that out of his post in the morning he picked out the letters from the estate agents first, and often did not open his business letters at all; and then at least an hour and a half passed reading The Times advertisements. Surely she did not imagine he was wasting his time reading the news? Surely she was not accusing him of neglecting his business?

  “That is where you and me-you and I? …” he hesitated shyly.

  “You and I,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Where you and I differ. What is a business? It is a place for making and selling things. What sells them? Personality. What is personality? Atmosphere. How can a man have the right personality if he doesn't live in the right atmosphere? It's like artists. An artist has to have a view. If he hasn't got a view, how can he be an artist? I consider it my job in this business to see that atmosphere doesn't dry up. Unless I have atmosphere,” Beluncle said in despair, “I'm finished.”

  “Yes,” Mrs Truslove's cold eye seemed to say, “you're finished.”

  Mr Beluncle thought she was just like his wife: she was ungrateful. In the past ten or fifteen years, he had taken her to dozens of houses within a sixty miles radius of London. He had been to some of these houses half a dozen times. He had invited her to the most intimate consideration of his life, in his talks about them. How he could not sleep on the ground floor, how he must have a bedroom to himself, how squalid it is for a married couple to undress in the same room, how vital is a lavatory downstairs. He thought of these journeys with her as an unguarded invitation to his inner life, a sharing of his imagination with her. The very house he lived in at the moment she had visited before his wife had seen it, and he was proud to think this was so. Mrs Truslove and himself in an empty house together: it was like a cleansing process, before the Beluncles, in all the squalor of living, rolled in and turned it, as he said, into a pigsty.

  “Why shouldn't I be serious?” said Mr Beluncle. And, since being serious was part of the dream, his insulting expression was there.

  “You can't afford it,” said Mrs Truslove.

  “Afford it?” he said. “I can afford what is right. If it is right for me to have that house or any other, nothing on earth”—and here Mr Beluncle made a very large gesture-“can prevent me from having it. And-I'll give you a thought there,” said Mr Beluncle, now smiling so warmly that his brown eyes seemed to buzz like bees in his sunny creasing face, “-in case you are thinking of the price. There is only one price.” Mr Beluncle said this solemnly, pointing a finger at her like an accusing salesman in an advertisement. “You think too much of figures, Mrs T., it's your training, I don't blame you, you're right to think of price; but if I believed every figure I have seen written down on paper in my lifetime”—and the word “life” led Mr Beluncle once more to make a large wide gesture upwards with both arms and to click the fingers of one hand very brilliantly as he did so, “-if I'd taken any notice of figures, where would I be now?”

  “You'd be a rich man and not on the point of bankruptcy,” said Mrs Truslove quietly.

  “What?” said Mr Beluncle, dropping his arms and going as green as a gorgonzola.

  “I said you are on the point of bankruptcy,” said Mrs Truslove.

  “I don't want to hear you use that word,” said Mr Beluncle. “It's a funny word to use.”

  He looked furtively as if he had heard something sexually indecent. Mrs Truslove herself lost some of her boldness after she had spoken, and she looked furtive, too.

  They were both shocked by themselves. They had worked together in intimacy for years and had once or twice quarrelled, but they had never uttered or considered the indecent. And now, for a second or two, they had caught each other unappetisingly half-naked, he despondent, she cringing, their clothes on the floor. It was, for them, as near to a physical revelation as they would ever come.

  Mr Beluncle was the first to recover respectability. His buzzing eyes became small, still and shrewd. His shoulders appeared to thicken and Mrs Truslove, who could usually meet his eyes, looked away with fear. His were shining. The glass of anger was on them when she looked at him again.

  The interruption was sudden. The silence was long. Mr Beluncle walked himself up and down. When he stopped his colour had come back.

  He got behind the defence of his desk again.

  “I have made a great many mistakes in my life,” he said in an elevated and injured manner and he took his glasses off and stretched his eyes.

  “So have I,” said Mrs Truslove. And she turned to the defence of her account books.

  She collected them and put them in the safe. She was a tidy woman. Her side of the common desk was soon bare, except for its blotter, but that, too, she put away in a drawer. Mr Beluncle watched this sight blankly. When he went home his wife would be clearing up under his nose, in her sulking mood, too. He saw himself driving a car between two fits of female clearing-up and sulking.

  At last Mr Beluncle went away to see that the building was locked up, saying the
word “bankruptcy” on every floor and imagining himself in a foreign country. When he came back he was surprised to see Mrs Truslove had put on her hat and had her bag in her hand. They said as little as possible to each other, but she waited, as if she were tied to him, while he washed his hands and brushed his clothes. He spent two or three minutes at the minor and he could see her round-shouldered figure, her face as deadened in its way as his own was now. She was, at any rate, waiting for him. He looked at his watch.

  It would have been a thousand times better (Mr Bel-uncle's thoughts went by in jerky marching tune to the time of his annoyed steps, down the passage, through the warehouse and the factory, and out into the sour chemical smokiness of the grey and gritty London air which had pushed its way like a dry Cockney face into the yard), it would have been a thousand times better if Mrs Truslove had stopped whining about the death of her husband; if she had stopped carrying him about like an unhandy and reproachful statue which she seemed to set down in the corner of the office with her umbrella every day. It would have been a thousand times better if she had married a second time. Marriage would have knocked it out of her, he thought; though what was to be knocked out, he was not sure.

  He led the way into the yard where his car was kept to protect it from the Bermondsey children. It was a dark blue saloon car and he walked all round it to see that it was clean and without a scratch. Mrs Truslove walked round it after him in a determined way. It was his car, but the firm had paid for it after six months of quarrelling about the expense, and Mrs Truslove walked round it like one preserving a right of way. Without her sanction he could not have bought it. She got in beside him.

  Mr Beluncle drove out of the gateway, nearly hitting a barrow which had been left out of sight round the corner. This was a lucky incident, a fortunate distraction for both of them. Until Mr Beluncle nearly hit the barrow he had decided to pay Mrs Truslove out by breaking their Saturday habit of lunching together. He had decided to drive her coldly to her house, leave her there, and go straight home to his family. That would teach everyone a lesson, for his wife and family, who were always complaining that he never came home on Saturday afternoons, would be alarmed and put out, if he did what they wanted. He was sure of a bad reception and would give as good as he got.