It May Never Happen Page 6

  The man is a saint, I thought. As saintly as any of those gold-leaf figures in the churches of Sicily. Golden he sat in the punt; golden he sat for the next hour as I paddled him down the river. Golden and bored. Golden as we landed at the town and as we walked up the street back to my uncle’s house. There he refused to change his clothes or to sit by a fire. He kept an eye on the time for his train back to London. By no word did he acknowledge the disasters or the beauties of the world. If they were printed upon him, they were printed upon a husk.

  Sixteen years have passed since I dropped Mr. Timberlake in the river and since the sight of his pant loops destroyed my faith. I have not seen him since, and to-day I heard that he was dead. He was fifty-seven. His mother, a very old lady with whom he had lived all his life, went into his bedroom when he was getting ready for church and found him lying on the floor in his shirt-sleeves. A stiff collar with the tie half inserted was in one hand. Five minutes before, she told the doctor, she had been speaking to him.

  The doctor who looked at the heavy body lying on the single bed saw a middle-aged man, wide rather than stout and with an extraordinarily box-like thick-jawed face. He had got fat, my uncle told me, in later years. The heavy liver coloured cheeks were like the chaps of a hound. Heart disease, it was plain, was the cause of the death of Mr. Timberlake. In death the face was lax, even coarse and degenerate. It was a miracle, the doctor said, that he had lived as long. Any time during the last twenty years the smallest shock might have killed him.

  I thought of our afternoon on the river. I thought of him hanging from the tree. I thought of him, indifferent and golden in the meadow. I understood why he had made for himself a protective, sedentary blandness, an automatic smile, a collection of phrases. He kept them on like the coat after his ducking. And I understood why—though I had feared it all the time we were on the river—I understood why he did not talk to me about the origin of evil. He was honest. The ape was with us. The ape that merely followed me was already inside Mr. Timberlake eating out his heart.

  IT MAY NEVER HAPPEN

  I shall not forget the fingers that fastened me into the stiff collar. Or how I was clamped down under the bowler-hat which spread my rather large ears outwards and how my nose full of the shop smell of new suit, I went off for the first time to earn my living.

  “You are beginning life,” they said.

  “You have your foot on the first rung of the ladder,” they said.

  “Excelsior,” my new Uncle Belton said.

  I was going to work in the office of one of my uncles, a new uncle, the second husband of my mother’s sister, who had just married into the family. His name was Belton, a man of 44 with a tight, bumptious little business in the upholstery trade, a business that sounded so full of possibilities that it would blow up and burst, out of sheer merit. The push of Mr. Belton, the designing of Mr. Phillimore, his partner, made it irresistible. The name of the firm was Belton and Phillimore.

  On my first day I met Mr. Belton outside our railway station. I watched a horse eating and I read all the hoardings while I waited. Mr. Belton was half an hour late. He was one of those cheerful, self-centred men whose tempers shorten when they are in the wrong. They put themselves right by sailing out into general reflections.

  “Punctuality, Vincent, is everything,” said Mr. Belton, bitterly. “How long have you been here?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Why have you been here half an hour?”

  Mr. Belton was looked upon as a sharp-shooter, a raider in our family. He had been around his new relations trying to raise capital for his business, he had carried off my mother’s sister, in marriage, he was carrying me off to his office. He was a small, round, dominant and smartly dressed man, who usually wore brown. His black hair was parted in the middle and when he arrived anywhere he arrived with aplomb, bouncing down as hard as a new football on asphalt and very nearly on one’s toes.

  A new business, a new marriage, a new outlook on life—my brand new uncle looked as though he had come straight out of a shop-window. He had been hardly more than quarter of an hour in our house before we thought our paint looked shabby and the rooms small. The very curtains seemed to shrink like the poor as he talked largely of exports, imports, agencies, overheads, discounts, rebates, cut prices and debentures. And when he had done with these he was getting at what we paid for meat, where we got our coal and how much at a time, telling us, too, where to buy carpets and clothes, gas-fires, art pottery and electric irons. He even gave us the name of a new furniture polish. It sounded like one of the books of the Old Testament. He walked about the house touching things, fingering picture-frames, turning chairs round, looking under tables, tapping his toes thoughtfully on the linoleum. Then he sat down and lifting his foot restfully to his knee and exposing the striking pattern of his socks, he seemed to be working out how much we would get if we sold up house and home. The message “Sell up and begin again” flashed on and off in the smiles of his shining new face like morse.

  “I can get all these things,” he said, “in the trade.”

  When he and I sat in the train that morning I thought Mr. Belton looked larger.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m lecturing you, boy,” he said, “but there are many boys who would give their right hand to walk straight into this business as you are doing.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” I said.

  “A little thing—you must call me ‘sir’.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” I said, “sir”.

  “And you must call Mr. Phillimore ‘sir’.”

  I had forgotten all about Mr. Belton’s partner.

  “But for Mr. Phillimore you would not have this chance,” Mr. Belton said, detecting at once that I had forgotten. “It’s a very remarkable thing, it’s really wonderful, some people would think more than wonderful, that Mr. Phillimore agreed to it. He’s a very busy man. A man with a great deal on his mind. There are people in the trade who would be glad to pay for the privilege of consulting Mr. Phillimore. His word is law in the firm and I want you to be most respectful to him. Don’t forget to say ‘Good morning, sir’ to him when you see him, and if he should offer to shake hands you must, of course, shake hands with him. I think he may offer to shake hands, but he may not. If he rings his bell or asks you to do anything you must do it at once. Be quick and mind your manners. If he is going out of the room, open the door for him. Mr. Phillimore notices everything.”

  Naturally, Mr. Belton had seemed all-powerful to me, and it awed me to hear that behind this god was yet another god to whom even he deferred.

  It distressed me that there were other people in the compartment who might hear this conversation. The day was damp and a low smoke from the train blew along the window as though we were travelling through cloud into another universe.

  My face must have looked strained and pale. I had eaten very little for breakfast and my head ached where the bowler-hat pressed a red mark on my forehead. My uncle relaxed a little. At the next station two girls got out and we were alone in the compartment.

  “I shall always remember the first time I stayed with Mr. Phillimore and his mother.” So far my uncle had been hectoring and glum; but now a luminous gravity of expression came on his big experienced face and covered it like the skin on a balloon. He looked curiously light, as if he had been inflated with hydrogen and would rise from the seat of the empty railway carriage and blow away out of the window. He had what is called a common accent, none too certain about aitches and double negatives, but his voice was musical and now became rarified when he spoke of his partner.

  “In Mr. Phillimore’s ’ouse—ahem, house, the gentlemen give up their chairs to the ladies when they come into the room. And when the ladies leave the room you have to let them walk in front of you,” my uncle said. He stared at this picture in his memory with wonder. He seemed to hang in the higher air and then gradually he subsided and became himself again, a shade coarser than he had been before. His brown eyes looked unsteadily
, a thick smile began nervously by his nose and slowly spread over his face, and a twist of deprecation came to the corners of his lips.

  “You see Mr. Phillimore is a gentleman. It may seem peculiar to you and me,” he said.

  “But people are peculiar,” he said. And the smile slowly deepened as it will on the face of a baby until he began to look fondly and sentimentally at me.

  “I’ll give you a little tip, boy,” he said, putting his hand on my knee, a touch that sent an uncomfortable thrill through my body and flushed me with all the shyness of my age. “Do you mind if I give you a little piece of advice, something helpful?”

  “No, Uncle,” I murmured. “Sir.”

  “You needn’t call me sir, now,” he said kindly. “If Mr. Phillimore should ring for you,” he said, “just remember the infant Samuel. You remember how when our Lord called Samuel the boy said, ‘Speak Lord, Thy Servant heareth’. Well, just pause and say that, just quietly to yourself, before you go and see what Mr. Phillimore wants. Don’t hang around, of course. Sharp’s the word. But say it.”

  My throat pinched, my tongue went dry. I should have said that Mr. Belton was a religious man. His expression became dreamy.

  “I think there’d be no harm in your saying it if I ring, too,” he said. Even he looked surprised after making this suggestion.

  The office and workshops of Belton and Phillimore, makers of Butifix furniture and especially of the Butifix armchair and sofa, were at No. 7, in a row of old stained houses standing behind railings. The street was flogged by trams and drayhorses. Dust flew into one’s eyes from the vans. The doorstep of No. 7 was the only whitened one in the street.

  “Step over it,” Mr. Belton said. I nearly fell over it. From Mr. Belton’s manner, from his militant walk, I had imagined I was going to work in a large factory, where hundreds of workers were frizzling under acres of glass roof. But Belton and Phillimore occupied only the ground floor of this old house whose window-sills slanted and gave a leer of depression to its aspect. A number of small businesses—a tailor or two, a lamp-shade manufacturer, and agents for pulleys, gloves and shop-fittings worked in single rooms above. A smell of glue hung like a dead animal about the doorway and there were packing-cases stored in the hall. A notice which was never taken down all the time I was there, said “Young Improvers Wanted. Apply Schenk.” Someone had written “April 26 Holborn Baths” in pencil underneath. On my uncle’s floor there was first a small room, made by new glass partitions, where a typist sat. She was a large-boned, round-shouldered girl of seventeen with fine yellow hair, who worked in a green overcoat. Her office smelled of gas, paint and tea. Next door was the room occupied by Mr. Belton and Mr. Phillimore and beyond, down the passage, was the large workroom under a top light where one could hear the sound of a turning machine, the swish of a plane and the noise of hammering. Patterns of cloth, samples of hair, capock and down were on the large desk where the two partners sat in their office, and there I waited alone listening to the typewriter—an old-fashioned one—clumping up and down like the police. My uncle had changed into a white dust-coat and marched out to find Mr. Phillimore. Before he went he leant down and smelled a bowl of flowers on the table. “Colour,” he smiled patriotically, “we’re colourful people.”

  “Speak Lord …” I gabbled, but I was too afraid to get to the end of the sentence. I had had many daydreams about Mr. Phillimore. He was a myth in our family. No one had ever seen him; but it was agreed that he had been the making of my uncle. Indeed, people said, he had been my uncle’s salvation. I foresaw a tall, clean, sarcastic man with a deep stiff collar, as clean as a doctor. Or perhaps one of those bullying, morally overweighted figures from the north of England whose minds pass like soft steam-rollers over you, suffocating rather than flattening you with the eiderdown gospel of work and righteousness. The door opened. I was startled by a high-pitched, eager feminine giggle; a small man stumbled towards me.

  “Er—er—hullo, ’llo, my dear,” the voice said. I saw a white dust-coat. I saw a pair of agonized yellow-blue eyes popping with an expression of helplessness out of a badly pimpled face. Really, Mr. Phillimore looked raw and bleeding. Then I saw his untidy wheat-coloured hair, with a pink scalp showing through it; and after that, loose lips drawn back, rabbit fashion, from a set of protruding teeth, each tooth shooting out in a different direction. It was a mouth which looked ravenous and could not close; and saliva, therefore, fizzed out of it, when he was excited. He was young, no more than thirty-five, and my first sight of Mr. Phillimore suggested the frantic, yelping disorganized expression of a copulating dog.

  Before he got to me Mr. Phillimore caught the pocket of his white dust-coat on the door-handle, dropped a ruler from his pocket and trod on a pencil.

  “Oh dear, oh dear!” cried Mr. Phillimore, going down on his knees with a sigh of inexpressible fatigue.

  “Pick it up,” said my uncle to me bitterly, giving me a push.

  “Oh no, no, my dear!” said Mr. Phillimore from the floor. “My fault, Mr. B. I’m most frightfully sorry. How are you? At last, after all these months! Are you quite recovered from your illness?” He was on his feet now, a weak damp hand clung will-lessly to mine and he gazed eagerly into my eyes.

  “I haven’t been ill, sir,” I said.

  “You don’t look well,” he said doubtfully. Then his spirit rose again: “The moment I heard of you I longed for you to come. We’ve been waiting for you for months. We’re simply killed with work, my dear, you’ve no idea.”

  Mr. Phillimore sat down at the partner’s desk and looked at me reproachfully. He looked congenitally exhausted.

  “Ah Vernon,” he said.

  “Vincent, sir,” I murmured.

  “Vincent,” he said. “You and I have not the energy, the decision of the remarkable Mr. B. He is a remarkable man, Vernon, he has been my salvation. Vincent, I mean, I’m so sorry.”

  My uncle, who had sat down at his desk and was tapping a sheet of figures with a pencil, glanced up at this remark and smiled mechanically. My confusion was natural. I had always gathered Mr. Phillimore was the saviour; now I heard the rôles reversed. I blinked. The two men were saving each other.

  “With two more machines, Phillimore,” my uncle said, ignoring the worship of his partner and acting a part, “we could treble these figures.” And he brought his soft fist down like a sponge on the desk, not heavily, but strongly enough to make Phillimore strain to attention.

  Though I had been only a few minutes in the office I felt already (when I heard those words) the swirl of urgency and importance in the affairs of Belton and Phillimore. I stared at Mr. Phillimore until he must have thought I was trying to get instructions from him by hypnosis. To my disappointment a look of despair and appeal came into Mr. Phillimore’s face. The telephone bell rang and, with a shudder, Mr. Phillimore took up the telephone, saying before he answered it:

  “P’please, Mr. B, don’t expand the business any more for a moment.” Then, mastering his stammer, dropping his voice into his throat, Mr. Phillimore concentrated on answering the telephone efficiently. Copying and practising Uncle Belton’s gesture, Phillimore weakly hammered the air with his fists as he talked, glancing at my uncle nervously as he did so. When he had finished his telephone conversation and had told my uncle about it, Mr. Phillimore looked at me and said:

  “It is true. I’m not exaggerating.” He nodded towards my uncle, who was still tapping his pencil on the figures. “He saved my life.” Then he smiled and said to my uncle: “Do you like the flowers I brought for us?”

  “I’d sooner you brought me an order, Phillimore,” said my uncle.

  Nothing happens in an office. One day is like another. When I look back upon that year the only thing I see is a love-affair—the love-affair of Mr. Belton and Mr. Phillimore. They sat in their office like husband and wife in a sittingroom. It was not really a love-affair, but a salvation affair. Mr. Belton had the rippling mind of the natural salesman and, strengthening it, was a powerful
evangelical notion that he must save people from their own undoing. He did not sell: he saved. He saved people, when he was travelling in towels or electric irons or cretonne for example, from the sadness of not having these things. When he was in the stocking business, he rescued people from the misery of not having so many hundreds of dozens of stockings. The world needed to be saved from its parsimony, its uncreative caution. Mr. Belton pumped salvation into the world, rescued men from the Slough of Despond. Giant Despair—I have heard him say to customers—is man’s greatest enemy. And when he came to have businesses or agencies of his own after he had married my mother’s sister, and his relations put money into these enterprises, he was rescuing them. He was rescuing their savings from the ignominy of 2½ per cent. or whatever it was, in some prim nibbling bank.

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said, cocking his dark eyebrow. And if things went wrong the eyebrow would straighten.

  “It was an experience,” he would rebuke his critics. “I had to buy mine.”

  It was my new Uncle Belton’s gift of salvation which had captured Mr. Phillimore.

  Now that I had seen Mr. Phillimore, Uncle Belton modified the Phillimore myth and said to me when I went home with him in the tobacco smoke of the train:

  “Mr. Phillimore is peculiar. We all have our peculiarities. He is really an artist. He does our designs. When I met Mr. Phillimore three years ago he had a tiny chair-making, arts and craft shop in Somerset. He was living under his mother’s thumb. Imagine a man of thirty-five who can’t go out in the evening without his mother’s permission. Terrible.”

  Uncle Belton scowled.

  “The poor devil was drinking himself to death,” he said. “He shut himself in his room and drank whisky out of a hot-water bottle.”

  Uncle Belton’s face went pale as lichen.

  “It might have led to women—anything,” he said. Then he blinked. He had evidently been struck by the thought that he ought not to have said this to me about his partner. His voice became bland and expansive.