The Love Department Read online

  The men had discussed the events of the evening before, the ones who had not been present protesting that the others were exaggerating, the others denying the charge. They stood witness for each other, repeating the facts one after another: a drunken woman had set about the guests, a pet had been maddened by a road-cleaner with a sweeping-brush. ‘Was it a joke?’ one of the sceptics asked, but the men who had been at the Bolsovers’ dinner party said that it was no joke at all. Mr Linderfoot explained how the drunken woman had attached herself to him, when all he had been doing was trying to help. He said that with an eye on Mr Clinger, fearing that Mr Clinger would recall that the facts had been different; but Mr Clinger, recalling or not recalling, held his peace. ‘Eleven Crannoc Avenue,’ murmured one of the men who had not been there. ‘I must write that down in case I’m ever passing.’

  The men thought variously as they watched James remove his jacket in the board-room. A few of them thought that it was all of a piece, dust on his clothes and the inability to organize a dinner party in a pleasant way. Captain Poache thought that there seemed to be poltergeists in this man’s life.

  James held his jacket in his left hand, brushing it with his right. He saw one of the eight men rise to his feet, which was unusual, for discussion did not demand this formality. He put his jacket on, knowing it was smeared. The man said:

  ‘We do not come into this room in such a manner. We do not even enter this building in the morning in such a manner. Who does, even among the messenger lads? Mr Bolsover is newly elected to this board. I ask you, is he laughing at us?’

  There was a silence around the table. The men thought of the error they had apparently made in inviting James Bolsover to join them on the board. They were prepared to give him every chance, but it seemed as though the eccentricities might go on for ever. He had been a man of outstanding ability, which made it, to the men of the board-room, a sadder thing. ‘I offer no explanation,’ said James. ‘I do not know.’

  The eight men saw James replace his jacket. They sighed and thought of what must surely have been an error, thinking as well, and at the same time, of glasses of gin and tonic water, with pieces of lemon floating on top, and cubes of ice. They sighed once more and spoke of other matters; Mr Clinger mentioned door-handles.

  James heard and did not say much. They noted that he did not say much, and wondered idly about that too, assuming that he was less interested than they in the organization and affairs of the firm. James could feel them assuming that and wished they would hold their peace no more. He imagined the future again: the basement flat in s.w.17, the man with the spreading Air Force moustache, the ironmongers’ shops, and the cards of samples that he drew from a leather case, a case that was not a brief-case. He was aware of the voice of Miss Brown in his ear. He turned his head and saw her face and noted a sadness in her eyes. His father, she was saying, was dead.

  ‘Turn left here,’ said Septimus Tuam, ‘and then absolutely straight.’

  He had known, in similar circumstances, many kinds of houses: his senses had occasionally been offended by their interiors, but more often he had not noticed, because it wasn’t his place to notice, or so he considered. He had become well used to admiring houses utterly without reservation, that being the easier course to adopt. In his pocket now was the key to the house of Mrs FitzArthur, a place he admired, most genuinely, in many ways. ‘Who fancies the cheery voice of your Mrs Hoop all of a sudden?’ he had said to Eve in her sitting-room, and had added that he would like to conduct her to a house that was half a mile away. ‘I’m care-taking for a relative,’ he said. ‘I’d like to show you the garden.’ And he had led the way to the car in which they now sat side by side.

  ‘It’s like a dream,’ said Eve, ‘in which a woman goes out of her wits. I feel I’m suffering from something.’

  Her companion did not comment on this. He drew the corners of his mouth down. He said:

  ‘These are super little cars, so nippy in the traffic. I have never owned a car. I’ve never had the money.’

  The small red car cut among the traffic, outwitting ones that had to be careful of their long, luxurious bodywork.

  ‘What did you think,’ said Eve, ‘that day in Ely’s?’

  ‘I thought a simple thing, as others have before: that I had never seen anyone so beautiful.’

  ‘While I,’ said Eve in a womanly way, ‘I’m afraid I hardly noticed you.’

  Septimus Tuam, who was used to everything, did not take offence at this statement. Why should he take offence, he considered, since she would notice him now, and notice no one else, for a time to come?

  ‘Have you taken offence?’ cried Eve, removing her eyes from the road to glance at him.

  ‘Look where you’re going,’ he said. ‘Who fancies an accident?’

  ‘Aren’t you offended?’

  ‘I am offended,’ he said in a sulky tone. ‘I am offended beyond measure.’

  The car passed along Cannizaro Road, and turned a corner sharply at the Rimini Hotel.

  ‘Look out,’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘You nearly had that fellow off his bike.’ He looked over his shoulder through the window by his left side to see that all was well with the cyclist. He saw a young man with red cheeks, arrested in his tracks; annoyed, apparently, that he had been stopped so abruptly in his progress by the swerving of the red Mini Minor.

  ‘It was his fault,’ said Septimus Tuam, shrill with anger, for this, he recognized, was one he had noticed before: the red-cheeked oddity who had been hanging about the rooming-house.

  The traffic halted and Eve’s car halted with it. The young man on his bicycle, with more room to manoeuvre, continued to progress. He looked ahead when he could move no farther forward and saw that a set of lights was the cause of this delay. To steady himself he reached out his right arm and placed a hand on the roof of the small red car that a moment ago had almost struck him. As he did so, he was aware of a rapping on the window of this car and, glancing down, beheld an angry face.

  ‘What an ugly-looking fellow,’ said Edward to himself, and then he saw, and recognized, the head of Eve Bolsover. He tried to attract her attention; he smiled through the glass. ‘Go away,’ said Septimus Tuam, waving with his hand. Edward looked into the deep dark eyes of the man with Mrs Bolsover. ‘Hullo,’ he heard a voice say, and saw that Eve Bolsover had recognized him in turn. What’s she doing out in a Mini Minor with a chap like that? thought Edward. Why isn’t she making something for her children’s tea? Edward put a hand on the roof of the car again. The window was at once lowered and the man with Eve Bolsover again said:

  ‘Go away.’

  The man turned to Mrs Bolsover and reported: ‘He has put his hand on the roof of your car. This one’s a public nuisance. What do you mean,’ said Septimus Tuam to Edward, ‘by hanging around, staring at the house I live in? Take your hand off this car at once.’

  ‘The house you live in? What do you mean?’

  ‘You know well what I mean. You’re a public nuisance, standing around with that woman’s bicycle.’

  ‘You’re never Septimus Tuam?’ whispered Edward in a frightened voice. ‘You’re never, are you?’

  ‘You know quite well who I am,’ said Septimus Tuam furiously.

  ‘He arrived in my house last night,’ said Eve. ‘It’s really all right, I think: he’s apparently a friend of Mrs Hoop’s.’ She smiled, trying to keep the peace. The lights changed to amber and then to green. Septimus Tuam wound up the glass of the window, and the red car moved on.

  ‘There’s Septimus Tuam,’ said Edward aloud to himself. ‘There’s the man I’m scheduled to kill.’

  ‘Bolsover’ll be away a day or two,’ said Lake. ‘Burials take a bit of time. Now is our hour.’

  Lake probed the future and witnessed himself in his elastic-sided boots and sharply-cut suit, stepping into James Bolsover’s office and sitting down behind his desk. While he did so, the men in the board-room were turning one to another and saying that Lake had better
join them since Lake was rising so steadily within the firm and increasingly made so valuable a contribution. ‘What if he left us?’ he heard one board-man cry. ‘My God!’ cried out another, and there was a murmur around the table. ‘Send for Lake,’ the demand went up, and a moment later he rose from behind the desk once occupied by Bolsover and walked along the corridors until he arrived at the important room. He entered it, and displayed commendable calmness when the proposition was put to him.

  Lake smiled more effusively as he thought of that, but then, with a familiar kind of nagging, he thought, What of Brownie? He thought for a while longer, in a most severely practical vein, and he believed when he had finished that Brownie would surely understand if he put the difficulty to her in a delicate way. He nodded briskly, and probed the future once more: he saw himself with a rising young starlet, strolling about a night-club frequented by royalty and sporting people.

  ‘I am right for that,’ said Lake, speaking to Miss Brown without explanation. ‘I could take it in my stride, eh?’

  Lady Dolores licked chocolate icing from her thumb, and asked Edward what the matter was. She remarked that he was flushed.

  ‘Lady Dolores, I’d like once for all to be taken off the outside jobs. I am far from suited to the work.’

  ‘Why not? You come here looking for work, Mr Blakeston-Smith, and all the time you’re saying you’re not suited. What’s up?’

  ‘I don’t get on with people,’ said Edward. ‘I have a way of putting myself across them. I mistook a man for Septimus Tuam and ordered him to a rehabilitation centre. Another hit me, an East End butcher. I’ve had no success at all.’

  Lady Dolores raised her eyebrows. She took her glasses off and rubbed them with a tissue, and then replaced them. Edward said:

  ‘As for that list of women, I couldn’t go up to their doors for all the rice in China.’

  ‘Rice, Mr Blakeston-Smith?’

  ‘It’s a saying. It’s vernacular speech.’

  ‘I know it’s a saying, old fellow.’ She paused. She pressed a cigarette into her holder and applied a pink-tipped match to it. ‘So you couldn’t go up to the doors for all the rice in China?’

  Edward shook his head, and then hung it down.

  ‘Not even as the gas man? Or a window-cleaner, or a bloke with beauty aids? Someone must read the meters, you know. Someone must. And someone must clean the windows. Don’t tell me that all the windows out there are left dirty. Don’t tell me that, Mr Blakeston-Smith, for I won’t believe you.’

  ‘I’m not telling you that.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘I’m not capable of any of it. I wouldn’t have the stuffing for that kind of thing. I’d be afraid, Lady Dolores.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Afraid of the women, is that it? You’d be afraid to go up to a door and ring a bell and ask to read the gas meter.’

  ‘Am I dismissed?’

  ‘As you wish now.’

  Edward experienced relief. He experienced sadness, too, for he would go now and not ever again see the love department. He’d never again smell the mingled scent or hear the words. But he wouldn’t have to kill Septimus Tuam. He rose and moved towards the door, feeling the tears that Lady Dolores had first of all inspired in him. He thought he could probably go and work in Foyle’s. He said:

  ‘Goodbye then, Lady Dolores. I’m sorry I was no good.’

  Lady Dolores sat still, her cigarette-holder in the centre of her mouth, smoke coming from her nostrils. She watched the young man trying to go away, feeling his embarrassment as she had often in the past felt the embarrassment of other young men. They walked from her office when they had not been a success, and walked through the larger office in which they had sat at a desk. They heard for the last time the clerks murmuring their words, and they said goodbye beneath their breath, trying not to draw attention to themselves. They passed through the typists’ room; they closed that third door behind them and left the love department for ever.

  Lady Dolores took the cigarette-holder from the centre of her mouth and knocked some ash from the point of her cigarette on to the floor. She had not ceased to watch the young man. She said:

  ‘Where are you going, Mr Blakeston-Smith?’

  ‘I might get a job in Foyle’s,’ he said.

  ‘Foyle’s wouldn’t give you a job,’ said Lady Dolores, ‘not for all the rice in China. Didn’t you know that?’

  Edward said he hadn’t known that, and Lady Dolores said:

  ‘Tell the truth, Mr Blakeston-Smith. Tell the truth and shame the devil. You’ve done a good day’s work. You are frightened by worldly matters; you are frightened by success. Be your age, old chap: tell me the lie of the land.’

  ‘I’m speaking through a layer of wool,’ said the voice in the desk sergeant’s ear, ‘since I do not wish to be mixed up in anything. Why then do you imagine I’d tell you what my name is?’

  ‘What is your name, please?’ repeated the desk sergeant.

  ‘Who cares about my name,’ cried the voice, ‘when a man is about to be murdered?’

  ‘Well, we do, sir,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘Actually, we care very much.’

  ‘Septimus Tuam is to be killed by an assassin. Act on that, can’t you?’

  ‘Come now,’ began the desk sergeant.

  ‘I’ve had a visit from an agent.’

  ‘Now,’ began the desk sergeant again, but as he spoke the telephone was replaced at the other end and he heard only a blankness on the line. The desk sergeant jerked his head and sighed. He pulled a mug of tea towards him and drank a mouthful before returning to a list of motor-car registration numbers.

  ‘They’ll move in fast,’ murmured Mrs Poache, taking one of the Captain’s socks from the mouthpiece of the telephone. She imagined the police cars surrounding Septimus Tuam’s place, waiting for the young man to ride up on his bicycle with a weapon hidden beneath his clothes. She imagined them moving in on the young man, seizing him as she saw men seized daily on her television screen.

  18

  James saw before him the nurse who had written him so many letters and to whom he had talked at length on the telephone. He thanked her for all she had done. ‘I was going to come down the week-end after next,’ he said. ‘I know,’ replied the nurse.

  She gathered all her things together, talking as she did so. She walked about the house with James, making certain that she had left nothing behind.

  ‘I have left nothing,’ she said, ‘except my patient.’

  His father would have said that this was the most significant nurse of all who had attended him because she was the one in whose care he had died. ‘He said he saw the marble ledge before he went,’ she said. ‘And his wife sitting on it.’

  ‘You did what you could,’ said James. ‘It wasn’t easy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know how to take cuttings of nasturtiums. I told him it was the wrong time of year, but he said who cared about that? In the end I went down to the greenhouses and put in a packet of seeds.’

  She took James to the garden and showed him her handiwork. She had shovelled soil into a wooden tomato box and had sprinkled on top of it a packet of antirrhinum seeds. ‘He was there in the bed,’ said the nurse, ‘and he hardly saw a soul. You’d feel sorry for him.’

  James looked round the ruined greenhouse. Bits of flower-pots were everywhere, and white enamel pails with patches of rust and broken handles, and lengths of wood. He remembered the place in its heyday. The nurse said:

  ‘I came into his room wearing an old pair of Wellington boots with leaves and mud all over them. “Where’ve you been?” he said to me and I told him I’d been out in the greenhouses planting snapdragons for him. He hadn’t another bad thing to say, Mr Bolsover.’

  James shook hands with the nurse and helped her to tie her suitcase on to the carrier of her bicycle. She said she’d borrowed a book by Jeffery Farnol and that she’d post it back, but James said not to bother about posting a
nything.

  ‘I was cross with him often,’ she said before she cycled away, ‘but he died attended by love, Mr Bolsover. I’ll promise you that.’

  James waved after her, but she was looking ahead of her and couldn’t see him. She had softened in her loneliness in the ugly old house. She had stepped out of her brisk manner because she had been moved in the end by the decay and the smell of death. She had carried a tomato box to a greenhouse to perform an action that she considered absurd. Others, who might have been less brisk in the beginning, might have been satisfied to make a kindly pretence by announcing that the action had been safely done.

  The funeral took place in misty afternoon sunshine. A coffin slipped into its narrow slit, earth dropped on to it, words were spoken. James saw before him his father holding up a bag of burnt chestnuts on Christmas Eve, 1934, and heard his mother tartly say that the fare was unsuitable for children at seven o’clock in the evening. He remembered then the purple restaurant in which he and Eve had celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary, and the bruciate briachi that had stirred the memory in his mind, where it had lingered, apparently, ever since.

  He walked from the graveside, nodding to people, recalling how he had gone on drearily that evening about the eight men in the board-room and the fact of his father’s dying. Eve had been bored to tears, and really, he thought, he couldn’t blame her. ‘How about the garden, sir?’ a man said to him. ‘Will you be taking an interest, then?’ James smiled, shaking his head. The man said he had once been employed in the garden, and simply wondered: he had been fond, he said, of Mr Bolsover, and had known Mrs Bolsover too. James remembered his parents working together in their industrious way, planning and purchasing, and talking about the vagaries of weather. He remembered the heart going out of his father when his mother had died; his sloping away on the day that he and Eve had been married, leaving the lawns of the hotel without a word to anyone.

  The house would have to be tidied up and sold. There’d be an auction and his father’s clothes would have to be got out of the way first, handed on to a charitable cause. As he walked about, passing from one high-ceilinged room to another and depressed simply to be there, James wondered who’d want a house like this nowadays. Who’d want a house with bad wiring and no modern kitchen arrangements of any kind, a place without central heating, that hadn’t been painted or papered for thirty years? Who’d want a house with two staircases, and attic rooms that were full of damp, and rambling acres of garden wilderness? He wondered if workmen would ever come and set up the long greenhouses that he had played in as a child, if their shelves would ever again be covered in pots of flowers. Perhaps, he thought, the house might make a preparatory school or a lunatic asylum, and he visualized both sets of inmates.