Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 6

  IV

  Henry Beluncle was sitting in the front room of the station-master's house at Boystone. The railways of England are the oldest bureaucracy in the country and Mr Phibbs had the detachment of those belonging to an old culture which has reached the phase of contemplation.

  Mr Phibbs's daughter was upstairs, changing the dress she wore in the chemist's library where she worked. The station-master, with the expression of one saying the word “mere” on his face, was talking to Henry. Mr Phibbs had “mere” sandy curls, creeper-like, in his hair, mere violet eyes, a merely ruddy complexion, and a blue serge suit that merely wanted brushing. His large friendly mouth seemed to be full of saliva when he talked lazily.

  Mr Phibbs wore rimless glasses. His manner was idle, obstinate, not wishing to be disturbed. His large mouth pronounced the word “Yes” contemptuously (for he was essentially a “No” man), as “Cherss”.

  “Do you think it will keep fine this afternoon?” Henry asked.

  Mr Phibbs's glance took a long time to cross the room and consider the sky.

  “Cherss,” he said. “June is always fine.”

  And by this he meant, to judge by his manner, “No” would be just as good an answer. If you were a reasonable young man, instead of being, quite naturally, a lunatic in love with my daughter, you would understand that it does not matter whether it is wet or fine. But, as a matter of plain sense, the world could become a reasonable place. War is unreasonable, cruelty is unreasonable, capitalism is unreasonable and so on.

  He often dropped opinions like these before Henry Beluncle, like someone throwing crumbs to ducks on a pond. He had become used to the fact that, so often, the bread floated there sodden and untouched. Mr Phibbs asked Henry a few questions which he morally parsed, as he went along, into the reasonable and the unreasonable.

  “What time did you leave?“—reasonable, all men want to leave their work—”your father's office”: unreasonable, no man ought to be a capitalist or enjoy the capitalist succession.

  “I caught the one-ten,” Henry said.

  “The twelve-thirty is better. It is a fast,” said Mr Phibbs.

  Mr Phibbs would not eat meat. He disputed with his Trades Union. He had a romantic love of strikes in the abstract, refused to strike when called upon to do so, joined societies in order to annoy them, was the plague of Mrs Parkinson's Group. He disturbed the members. Choosing a table top or a wall, he would give it a hard knock and say, scornfully, “There are people who actually believe that is real.” When a train came into his station Mr Phibbs stood as if he were saying the same thing. Heresy and contradiction were Mr Phibbs's vanity. It was his wish to be the only heretic and the wish sprang from a beatific idleness and friendliness of mind.

  Mr Phibbs had heard from his daughter Mary that it would not do for Mr Beluncle to know that his son had become friends with her. Mr Phibbs could see that love between the daughter of an official of the railway company and the son of a passenger had ideological dangers. Mr Beluncle was a small capitalist, the railway company would (he was sure) soon be nationalised. Mr Phibbs regarded the ideological difference as a kind of impassable Sahara, but he was willing to cross if he was sure Mr Beluncle would not.

  “Cherss,” Mr Phibbs was saying to Henry, “I like to see boys and girls going out together.”

  Mr Phibbs's glasses moved with a flash of instinctive opposition.

  “Cherss,” said Mr Phibbs, in the “no” sense, “but look at it another way. Take the railways. You are free to go to Inverness, or to Hetley”the next station to Boystone on the London side; it was where Mrs Truslove lived and Henry was a little chilled whenever this place was mentioned-“but, don't forget, trains run on rails….”

  Mr Phibbs shifted happily in his chair and glittered with dialectical insinuation.

  “There are time-tables,' he went on. “The passenger is limited in his freedom….”

  The door opened and a large-boned girl of twenty-five, with reddish curls like her father's and a large mouth that was controlling a laugh or a scream, looked in.

  “She won't be long,” she said, looking at Henry from head to foot, as if she owned some part of him but had agreed to let her sister have the first choice.

  Henry blushed.

  She was followed by a sharp, dark girl who stood in the doorway and said:

  “Whereabouts are you going?”

  “Oh, I don't know,” said Henry.

  “All right,” the girl said, “it's your business.”

  The girl giggled and also went. This girl was called Sis. Henry was sad that Mary Phibbs had sisters. He was horrified to think they talked about him when he was not there. He felt the dreaded beginning of those snobbish feelings which the Phibbs family awoke in him.

  Mr Phibbs was continuing.

  There were not only the time-tables, there were the signals, he was pointing out. A train is controlled by its signals. It would be unreasonable to find all the signals down.

  “Yes,” said Henry.

  Mr Phibbs suspected this agreement.

  “They can be up or down,” he reasoned, but seeing no further opportunities of difference here, he went on to a favourite analogy.

  “And then there are the points,” he said, “People forget the points. They think of a train as something that goes straight on to its destination. It doesn't. A train can be switched.”

  “In love,” said Mr Phibbs suddenly, as his youngest daughter came into the small sitting-room, “people are generally switched.”

  Mary Phibbs's young face blushed. She turned self-consciously to the window, showing the tip of one white tooth in the middle of her lips. The tip of this tooth was like a crystal of snow on her lips; or to Henry it seemed like the white key which had sounded the high small untrue note of her voice, for the Phibbs family inherited from their father a voice that came from a mouth with too large a tongue in it. She was a tall, fair girl with a small waist and hard, long, growing hips and she swayed to captivate him.

  Mr Phibbs stood up with the mild resentment of the lazy, put his hands in his pockets, and went off like some tired engine out of the room.

  Mary Phibbs said carefully and clearly: “Dadda is always tackful,” and looked with more love at the closing door than at Henry, who was jealous. She stood on the far side of the dining-room table. Henry walked round the table and put his arm round Mary's waist. For a long time Mary had not allowed this, but he had worked his way through a phase of long handshakes, moving to the hand squeeze, the hand on her knee, the light hold on the forearm, and now he was at last allowed to put his arm round her waist, he felt it a duty to do this as often as possible. In doing this he had become aware that under her dress she wore other clothes; he had felt tucks, elastic, silk floating on a heavier material beneath. His growing knowledge of her clothes was a distress.

  When he put his arm round her, Mary quickly turned, affecting to be surprised and tried to form her light eyebrows into a pleased frown. She pushed his shoulders gently and then with an “Oh you!” allowed herself to be given a short and awkward kiss on the lips. When he kissed her, Mary's small violet eyes had the distant studious look of her father's, for she was training herself to show Henry that she could read what was in his mind. “You can always tell by a boy's eyes,” her sister had told her. Henry was watching the door in fear of the two sisters.

  After this Mary smiled with nervous pride and the beautiful white tip of the tooth showed. They separated and Mary gave Henry a book.

  “I have finished this one,” she said. It was Browning's The Ring and the Book.

  “The one I gave you on Tuesday,” he exclaimed. “You've read it all?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did you like it?” he said.

  “It was a beautiful book. It was deeper than Tennyson. Was it Tennyson you gave me last week?-no, it was Milton,” she said.

  “I can't read as fast as that,” he said.

  “I'm quick,” said Miss Phibbs. “That is w
hat Mr Turner says.” (Mr Turner was the manager of the Lending Library where Miss Phibbs worked every day.) “ 'Miss Phibbs,' he says-he calls the other girls by their Christian names but I don't like that-'Miss Phibbs, you're quick.' And,” Mary added, “I am.”

  Henry frowned at the name of Mr Turner.

  “I have brought you this,” he said. “More's Utopia”

  “Thank you,” said Mary. “ 'The books you read, Miss Phibbs,' Mr Turner says. He sounds quite surprised.”

  “Which part of The Ring and the Book did you like best?” asked Henry.

  “What is that book?” said Mary.

  “The one you've just given me,” said Henry sternly.

  “Oh, all of it, it was lovely,” said Mary.

  The door opened and the red-haired sister looked in again.

  “You do lend Mary some books,” said the sister. “She can't read them.”

  “Oh you!” said Mary, flushing and stamping her foot. “I read every page.”

  “In your sleep,” said the sister. “It's bad for her eyes. Anyway, when are you two going out, spooning in here.”

  “Let us go,” said Henry.

  They fetched their bicycles from the back of the house and began their ride past the thousands of houses lying in the flat part of the town. This was the worst part of the journey for Henry.

  Mary Phibbs always chattered during the first mile, trying to keep up with him, for he was going as fast as he could to get out of the neighbourhood. She was also struggling to keep her skirt from blowing. She had two subjects; the first was the goodness of her father. Mr Phibbs's three daughters were always expounding him. Her other subject was Mr Turner. Mr Phibbs's virtues were matched by Mr Turner's vices. Girls had been kissed by Mr Turner in the packing-room. They had been invited to the cinema. They had been asked to his flat in the evening. One girl had thrown Pear's Encyclopedia at him.

  Mr Turner had invited her to his flat. Some noisy traffic passed at this point in Mary's story and Henry had to fall behind and then catch up in agony, to hear whether she had accepted.

  “I'll go and tell him where he gets off!” said Henry. Mary said it was unnecessary. She had told Dadda about it.

  Henry was now as jealous of Dadda as he was of Mr Turner. But Dadda had not acted. He had said, as far as Henry could see, that under private monopoly capitalism, the managers of chain stores suffered from a moral corruption that was bourgeois. It would vanish when they were nationalised.

  The last allotments had been passed, the first hedges came up and the fields rolled to them, and almost human elms and oaks, with their imploring branches and stark trunks, shaded the road. Beyond Boystone Common the tarred road hung between heavy hills of deep bracken. A fine fair moustache of sweat had come to Mary's lip, her face was pink with energy. A steep hill forced them to get off their bicycles. They stood in the silence of the blue afternoon. They smiled and were delighted with each other. There were people walking across the common; otherwise they might have stopped there.

  At the top of the hill they got on their bicycles again and the greenness of the country seemed to fill them so that they felt they were all the things they saw and every mile was like a long drink of new life. They came into country where there were village houses and farms, where countrified people were in their gardens or sitting at small windows and where the trees and the fields belonged to a world that made them laugh with pleasure, for it seemed to be dreaming itself. Other cyclists from London passed them, heads down, bare burned legs twinkling, drunk with the strong air, in the same holiday trance.

  Shyness prevented Mary and Henry from stopping for many miles, but at last their hints became open. They stopped at a gate and went along the side of a field to a warm and nibbled bank.

  “Here's a good place,” said Henry.

  Mary put on an air of unconcern, copying his, avoiding his eyes. They sat down a little apart; Henry pulled out a book of poetry. He had brought it many times before and it was still unread. They both smiled at its green cover with respectful hypocrisy. The book made Henry think highly of Mary and to Mary it was a guarantee of good behaviour.

  When Henry came nearer to her and put his arm round her, and trembled at the heat of her skin, Mary studied the golden ants that crawled on the clay near their feet.

  “Now he's looking for the other one. He can't find his hole. See what he'll do if I put a stick in his way. There you are, he's going round it,” said Mary.

  Henry's arm became tighter. She turned her head to look softly at him for a long time. Then she twisted away and taking him in both her arms pulled his head to her lap and kissed him. This afternoon she allowed him to undo the buttons of her blouse and she laughed at his disappointed face. Her large warm hand took his and took it to her breast and then she looked with pride on his hand.

  “You are a funny boy,” she said.

  The pain of desire could not be borne. He got up and walked across the field to see what was in the next one and when he came back she had done up her blouse.

  He could still feel in his hand her small cool breast and the nipple that was like a soft pink crumb in his fingers, and he saw her mouth alter with the helplessness of physical love and her tongue show when this time he kissed her.

  “I have been thinking about you,” she said.

  “When?”

  “As you walked across the field.”

  “What?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “You looked sad. And you look proud.”

  They had to go before Henry's father came home and the green afternoon flew through them as they went back fast.

  At Boystone when they said “Goodbye,” his cheeks were burned by the sun. They leaned on their bicycles.

  “Well,” she said, pouting, “from what you say I don't see what call your father has to make a row with you. What about him and this Mrs Truslove?”

  V

  Hetley was three miles of streets and trees from Boystone. Some evenings George Beluncle got on his bicycle and waited at Boystone East for his father, or his brother; some evenings he went to Hetley. His father sometimes drove through Hetley when he took Mrs Truslove home and stopped at the garage which is on the Boystone Road after the roundabout.

  One of his brothers was working; the other was still at school. George did not know how to occupy himself. He helped his mother with housework, he dug in the garden, he watched people go by in the street. In the middle of the morning he went out to the Public Library.

  In the long hot reading-room men with nothing to do were sitting at the tables or standing in groups by the newspaper stands. A smell of the municipality, the generic varnish of official oak, mixed with something rubbery, of town halls and the elementary schools to which George and his brother had been when they were young boys, closed the air of the Library.

  “Don't wait for your father,” his mother said. “Get a pen and answer an advertisement.”

  George lined up with the men at the newspaper stands, waiting his turn, but when it came he was bewildered by the print, and after staring for a short time, was soon pushed out of the way and ended with the hopeless ones, sitting at the yellow tables dozing over the magazines. To the smell of government they brought a sleepy human rankness, and George was soon overcome by it. It was not long before he was dozing.

  In the afternoon Leslie, his younger brother, came home from school.

  “Have you done that gardening I gave you to do?” Leslie said, mimicking his father's voice. “Here I afri sweating my life out for you boys, and you lounge about all day doing nothing, you're getting round-shouldered.”

  George moved away from these sarcasms.

  “I am going out,” he called.

  “Why,” asked the baiting schoolboy, “doesn't he go on the dole? That is what I would do. Too snobbish, I suppose.”

  George went to Boystone station. The slowness of the afternoon lay like a hot unclimbable Alp between one hour and the next. He dawdled through the town, shop window b
y shop window, reading all the prices and notices, going over the contents so well known to him-the containers of sultanas and currants at the grocer's, the hairdresser's pictures, the ironmonger's tools and cans, and so on-sometimes following a man or some motherly woman. He stood on the kerb of the station yard, listening to the taxi drivers. An hour must pass before his father came. Every ten minutes or so a train came to the station and George watched the early city people come back. If they were laughing as they came out, he half laughed; if they grimaced, he grimaced; if they swung an umbrella, he walked a few steps swinging his arm. An argument started between two taxi drivers and George's face copied the changing expressions of their faces. He watched them over the neck of an eating horse.

  After a time he went into the booking hall, buzzing in the web of his day-dreams, smiling at the people. He was wearing no hat. His fair hair was heavily greased, his trousers and his jacket were too short for him. He was not aware of the time going by, nor of boredom, for sometimes he was the first officer on a ship, sometimes a gentleman farmer, a pilot, a lorry driver, a financier, a police inspector, an engineer, a cabinet maker, a commercial traveller with a fast car. On the whole, he preferred a rank of some kind: to be a captain or major; or to have one of those prefixes that occur in newspaper headlines like ex-officer, ex-clubman, ex-manager, ex-chairman, vice-consul. He saw himself as a laddie, a chappie, a bloke, a type, one of those who fit perfectly into contemporary life by putting a touch of recalcitrance, a swagger without meaning into their characters.

  A sportingly dressed young man in a canary-coloured pullover and loud jacket came in with a couple of dogs. The young man was soon loudly drawling to a fair, fluffy girl as straight as a straw who hung on his arm and did dance steps as they looked at the magazines on the bookstall. George reached an exquisite torture of happiness.

  “Ex-Army,” thought George. “Abominable bloke. Hellish accent. Abominable!”

  “Hellish” and “abominable” were words of praise for George.

  The trains came, but no Mr Beluncle. George went back to his home sadly. He had been so certain he would meet his father and the failure had made him crave for him. He took Leslie's bicycle and went to Hetley and after cycling past Mrs Truslove's house there and seeing no car outside he went to Fred's garage.