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

  Now the barrow received the rage that was intended impartially for his wife and his partner.

  Mr Beluncle was subject to rage. A kind of artillery raised its barrels and spoke up in his soft and heavy body. No person was in sight in this narrow, cobbled back street between factory walls, to receive his attack. He shouted at the walls. He got out and shouted at the barrow. He came back into the car, after locking the factory gates, and turned on Mrs Truslove, telling her that she might have warned him. Mrs Truslove awoke from her sulk and was sarcastic. Cut by this, Mr Beluncle drove off to the top of the street and swung into the main road at a speed which would have been fatal on any day but a Saturday. A dog, a child, a late railway van escaped him in their turns. Mrs Truslove had her hand on his arm begging him to be careful. Physical terror on her part, physical excitement on his, cleared the air between them. Mrs Truslove hurriedly changed her mind and he hurriedly changed his; or rather he noted that like a sensible woman (and as he had known all along she would), she had “dropped all this nonsense” and was coming with him.

  By four o'clock in the afternoon the offended widow of Mr Truslove had been driven for an hour and a half through the weekend traffic of inner and outer London to the suburban town of Sissing. Property was more expensive here than in the suburb of Boystone where Mr Beluncle lived, this being indeed its attraction for him.

  “Smell the air!” he exclaimed to Mrs Truslove, and to him Sissing had the balmy perfume of the Ritz. “You can breathe here. It's bracing,”

  “Nice people,” he said deferentially, nodding to the shopping crowds.

  “Select,” he said. “Exclusive.”

  He blew his horn suddenly and one or two of the exclusive scattered as his car took him up the avenue of the most exclusive part of this exclusive town.

  Marietta was one of those large suburban houses which no family can now afford to occupy. It suggested a personage rather than a house, a minor royalty in flannels. There was so much collar and shirt-front of white balcony. There were top windows like eyes pouched by late rich dining, lower windows like a pair of bellies, the red face whiskered with creepers, the portico enlarged like a drinker's nose.

  Mr Beluncle got out and smiled formally at the place. He would have liked to shake hands with it.

  “I don't wonder your wife will not go in the car with you,” Mrs Truslove said.

  He pulled out the agent's keys and he made his way to his attack upon the house. More circulars were lying on the mat inside the door and one or two bills had been pushed in since Mr Beluncle had been there last time. He opened these bills and stood there lost in speculation about them and the previous owner. He forgot about his companion, who was standing in the dry, stationary, yellow air of the wide hall, watching him. These empty houses had all the same fatal effect upon her. She had resisted this one, hoping to keep to her resolution, hoping to keep the clarity of mind which had at last come to her after years of knowing him.

  “They must have had the plumber,” said Mr Beluncle, with the satisfaction of one who is spying his way into an unknown life. He read the bills with a sly, pettifogging patience, the rustic passion for detail, minuteness and thoroughness and poking his nose into things, which went oddly with the extravagance and violence of his temperament. His warm voice sounded like a bark in the stale and echoing house. He still had not moved from the door. This dazed hold-up at the door was so characteristic of him that she forgot everything except one thing. In this dead place he looked alive and young. She was in love with him. She had been in love with him for twenty years, she had been in love with him (she was now convinced) before she had married.

  “Do you want to kill your wife,” she said, “putting her into a huge house like this?”

  Mr Beluncle walked into each room of the empty house with his usual look of satisfied insult.

  “They'll have to alter that, of course. This must be taken down. They can treat that damp,' he said, and got his knife out to test for dry rot. He was having a row with imaginary builders already.

  The sound of their shoes going upstairs was alarmingly loud and in the passages and bedrooms the echo of his voice was harsher and richer. She followed him and was often a room behind him in the inspection, so that when she went into one he had just left, the stirred-up air seemed to be vibrating with him, and from the one next door where he was, his voice sounded like a choir of men singing. He banged doors that roused in her a kind of prudishness before noise.

  Her lips became bluish with prudery and irony. Large, open-mouthed and expensive houses like this, well beyond his means and hers, started the miser in Mrs Truslove and, slipping the bag which held her cheque book on to her wrist, she took off her gloves, the better to rub her hands together. But she was captivated by one thing in the prospect of the Beluncle family. Self-improvement in every aspect-moral, social, financial, linguistic and aesthetic-was an hourly desire in her character. Like a schoolmistress she liked to rule and see others improved against their wills. To herself the amount of improvement, the amount of virtue, required by Marbella, would have been possible. But the Beluncles? Ethel Beluncle above all! They could never achieve it in the normal human span.

  That was the outrage: that these struggling, bouncing, loquacious common little people should ever consider Marbella. And that was the added outrage: their bumptiousness entangled her. They lived (she reflected in kindly moments) in their imaginations. How she winced at the bounce, the boasting, the acting of Mr Beluncle. “I-I-I-“ he went on. She had often groaned aloud. He heard her and he gave a sharp grin of pleasure in annoying her flat critical nature, for he never missed anything. He had infected her-for she now regarded it as an infection-before her marriage, with the unwilling belief that he could be anything he said he was. He had simply to speak, to let his deep and changeable voice strike not only her ear but her whole body. Her hands themselves seemed to hear him. Her legs would move when he spoke.

  She and her husband used to talk about this electrifying power of Mr Beluncle. Her husband had been just as captivated, just as offended as she was. They talked about him in the secrecy of their engagement. They talked about him all through their honeymoon. Beluncle seemed to lie in bed between them. Mr Truslove had turned out to be a lover of very limited performance, and Mrs Truslove had, after marriage, gone through a period when, listening to her husband's sleeping breath, she found her thoughts going out of the bedroom window, up to London and back to Mr Beluncle's office. And there, sharpened by dissatisfaction, they perceived that Mr Beluncle had really bounced her husband into the partnership; that she had really married Mr Truslove because she was jealous of the attachment of the two men for each other, or-and how often at this point she had turned to her husband in their bed and had put her arms round him-that she had married him in order to protect him and to see that Mr Beluncle never bounced him again.

  In some way, Mr Beluncle had induced imaginary love in her. He was never out of her mind, and by the fatal aid of her prosaic nature she had accepted without protest the fact that he was too full of himself to recognise this love.

  Mrs Truslove was a very honest woman. She knew she was not loved, but she had one tremendous satisfaction. Melancholy had had salt and flavour; she had stirred the jealousy of Mrs Beluncle. There was no reason for this jealousy and this increased Mrs Truslove's self-esteem; she thought that she was entitled to that, or at any rate, that since it had been put her way, she would be foolish not to take it up.

  “Ethel will like the cupboards,” she said as she and Beluncle returned to the larger bedroom at the front of the house. She knew that Ethel would not like the cupboards; that Ethel Beluncle in her slapdash fashion angered her husband by pushing anything into cupboards, out of sight.

  Beluncle was too absorbed to answer.

  “That is new,” he said, pointing to a stain on a wall and affronted as if an intruder had been on his property.

  He was on special and intimate terms with the plumbing. He had turned on the
water at the main immediately they had gone into the house and presently there was the sound of a lavatory flushing, starting all the pipes and cisterns singing like birds. Mr Beluncle was an addicted flusher of lavatories in empty houses, being earnest for action and irked by the silence of these places. He came away, calling to Mrs Truslove with the jubilation of one who has just come from a friend.

  He found her sitting on the sunny window-ledge of the room with her handbag and her gloves beside her.

  “They work,” he said cheerfully, as the pipes sang.

  “When are you moving in?” she said.

  “Trying to be funny?” he said.

  “But what have we come for?” she said. “I thought you had decided.”

  “Who said I had decided?” said Mr Beluncle.

  “No,” said Mr Beluncle spaciously-a spacious “No” being a “Yes” to him. “It's the kind of house I would like. It's the kind of house I need. I need it now. I should like to go round and make an offer for it this minute. I mean, if it's shown to me that it's the right house.”

  “Shown?” said Mrs Truslove.

  “If this is the right house for me then I can have it,” declaimed Mr Beluncle. “If it's the wrong house then I don't want it. I wouldn't take it as a gift. I shall be guided to the right decision.”

  “Guided?” said Mrs Truslove.

  This was an old game between them: the more Mr Beluncle was “shown” and “guided” the more Mrs Truslove asked how and why. It was like a game of cards: Mr Beluncle doubled.

  “I shall know. By knowing” said Mr Beluncle, inflating. “There may, of course, be other houses,” said Mr Beluncle, a little alarmed by the prospect of knowing and attractively shy about it. “I have one or two on my lists. I have seen them. But I feel this is the one. God wants us all to have the right house.”

  Mrs Truslove sighed. In her calculations, she was so prone to forget Mr Beluncle's special relationship with God, who was a joker in his pack.

  “I hope God has given you the money,” she said.

  “God …” Mr Beluncle began to get in touch with the Almighty. But Mrs Truslove interrupted.

  “You owe the bank nine hundred pounds,” she said. “You owe your mother I don't know how much. You owe me three thousand pounds. Last year the business lost money, this year it is going to do the same except“—she said this sarcastically—”Mr Chilly is going to improve things. Have you any belief in Mr Chilly? I haven't. Do you know what you are living on? Your income comes out of your mother's pocket, your sister's pocket.”

  “Not my sister's,” said Mr Beluncle curtly.

  “I'm glad,” said Mrs Truslove. “Then there's mine. You can't get any more money out of me, but there's Mr Chilly, of course, or does his money come from Lady Roads?”

  Mr Beluncle was going to explain this tangled transaction but his partner went on:

  “You will have to pay me back before you buy this house.”

  “The change of life, that's what it is, that has made her like this. Ethel is quite right,” Mr Beluncle was thinking to himself. Aloud he said, keeping his temper, which was rising:

  “So you have been saying for the best part of twelve months. And don't you worry, don't you fret yourself, don't you get worked up, you'll get it back, if I have to go and sing in the streets.”

  Mrs Truslove was sorry she had made Mr Beluncle overdo it, like this.

  “Mr Chilly can pay me,” she said.

  “Mr. Chilly, the traveller,” he said scornfully.

  “No, he will become a director, you see. It will come from him,” said Mrs Truslove with all her malice.

  “Say it,” said Mr Beluncle, who had a rose in his buttonhole and smelled it.

  “Say what?”

  “What you are thinking. Say I'm a fraud. Go on,” said Mr Beluncle, taking the initiative. He was tired. He unbuttoned his blue jacket and sat down at the other end of the window-ledge. He took his brown trilby hat off and wiped the band. Everything (he recalled) was personal with women.

  “You've been jealous of Chilly ever since he came into the firm. It was a mistake getting him in,” he said.

  “A mistake?” she said suspiciously. “Has that money gone too?”

  “You know the money better than I,” he said sharply.

  “There is a far greater mistake than that,” she said. And Mrs Truslove stood up to cry.

  “Oh, God,” said Mr Beluncle. He picked up his hat. There was dust on the crown and he flicked it with a coloured silk handkerchief he kept in his breast pocket.

  Her tears, unlike his wife's, were brief. She was economical in weeping. She had not intended this quarrel.

  She had come to her decision in a business-like way. She had seen solicitors, she had talked with accountants. She had taken advice-Mr Beluncle would not like this and a delicacy made her conceal the fact-from that Mr Cummings who had once worked for Beluncle years ago and who, after a quarrel, had shot up high in the business world and had lately bought one of those “gentlemen's residences” Mr Beluncle coveted. Truslove & Beluncle Ltd. had done well; but the riotous butterfly called Bulux Ltd., that had come out of that prosaic larva after her husband's death, had lived-the truth had to be faced-by going from flower to flower in search of capital. Small businesses survive by economy, meanness, slavery, not by adventure and dreams of greatness. She had been deluded by love; the humiliation was not that love had been denied to her, but the discovery that Mr Beluncle, who had bounced her husband and then herself, was not a great adventurer, not an intoxicating rogue, who went from one sharp deal to the next, building on a flourishing pile of liquidations and calamitous public issues, but a stern and meddling little dreamer. Mr Beluncle-it was the deepest wound-was a failure; he barked before he could bite. But in preparing to break with him, after the shock, she had been so practical, and so business-like, that she had not until then noticed what had happened to her life.

  She had discovered this in the last half-hour as she had stood, frightened by its echoes, in the empty house. She could feel herself lying dead under the boards of it. Her life was like these empty rooms. Just as some family had moved out of this house so the years had moved out of her too.

  Of course, she was jealous of Mr Chilly. That was the last shock and she knew it quite well. In her moralising way she had even argued that this pain was a just punishment for arousing what Mrs Beluncle had felt about her, for Mrs Truslove had a relish for the belief in punishment.

  But the new jealousy had indicated the new desolation. She saw a side of Mr Beluncle she had never seen before; she saw that he had exploited her, that his imagination had drained her. He had destroyed her by inducing her to live virtuously on a delusion.

  “I have just been useful to him and his wife,” she said.

  The filling cisterns sounded their rising, higher and more plaintive note. The sun of this hot summer, which everyone remarked on, and which made everyone smile, put a square of light before the red-tiled and broken fireplace of the room where they were sitting. Mr Beluncle, quick to forget his troubles, was thinking that here there would be a saving: the wallpaper could stay and he was itching to measure the length of the opposite wall. He could contain himself no longer and went to pace out the wall. Half-way, as he counted, and by way of apology, he said:

  “You misjudge me, you know.”

  “Do I?” she said.

  “We all misjudge each other,” he went on. “It's fifteen feet. Yes, that's what we all do, we judge. Judge not, it says. Fifteen by twelve. I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, no one is perfect. If I had my life over again, I'd do different….”

  She gave a small, quick glance of curiosity, in spite of herself. It faded quickly.

  “You know,” he said, “I married too young.”

  “My dear Philip, you have been saying that to me for the last fifteen years,” she said. “I can't think why you say it.”

  But it was the final destroying sentence. For in what shame she now appeared to hers
elf. He had said this before. And she had spent years calculating the rise and fall of its prospect for her.

  She looked at the old, wide, fraying boards of this room with the remains of green linoleum surround which Mr Beluncle spoke of saving, at the wallpaper-a little faded -which was to be left. This (she understood) was to be Ethel Beluncle's room.

  How many times she had wished Ethel Beluncle would drop down dead or fall in love with another man. The divorces she had dreamed. Scores of times she had daydreamed that ön a Saturday afternoon when everyone had gone, he would make love to her; or in her house, when her sister was out at her church; or in hotels when she had been away with him on business. So precise had been these dreams -she had even moved a sofa into his office from the warehouse-that, of course, when the moment could have arrived, the desire vanished; it had been exhausted by the imagination. Only when she was alone did the day-dreams once more put their intolerable paint upon her mind.

  “Yes,” said Mr Beluncle. “If I'd waited, if I hadn't rushed, I might have saved. I would have had capital. A young fellow's a fool to marry till he's turned thirty. You know,” he said, walking into the square of sunlight to warm himself by an imaginary fire. “You know what I would like. I would like to go round the world. On a cruise. I once met a man who said he would like to go up in a balloon. I would. I've done with money. I don't want it. I never want to see another penny. …”

  “If there is nothing more,” she said, “I would like to go.”

  She did not hate him yet; but tomorrow (she thought) that will begin.

  She dropped one of her gloves as they went out of the room and neither of them noticed it.