The Love Department Read online

  Miss Brown opened her eyes and saw that Lake still had his back to her and was, in fact, addressing the window. Yet his fingers were real on her flesh, light and soft, and skilful in their touch.

  ‘But it wasn’t to be, now was it?’ said Lake. ‘For I felt no pull at all towards politics. I turned my back on politics, and on the Royal Household too. “I’ll make my packet instead,” I said. Could you blame me?’

  The fingers moved again, and Miss Brown nodded, shivering slightly.

  ‘In small ways, I shall achieve my ends,’ said Lake. ‘In a month or so’s time I shall be sitting in Bolsover’s office with my feet up on his desk, waiting for the call to the board-room. Bolsover is an over-educated man; he has learned not a thing in the school of life. In small ways, I shall topple the poor devil from his perch. And you’ll be there to help me, Brownie.’

  Miss Brown looked at the man she loved and saw a smile of delight splitting his face in half. She saw the gleaming white cuffs of his shirt and the gleam of the white collar and the small knot of his narrow tie. Within that shirt there dwelled the man to whom Miss Brown wished, as a life’s work, to bring love and more love, and further love again. She wished to feel the reciprocation of her love, to feel love like a cocoon snugly around them, Lake and Mrs Lake.

  In London that day there was no love anywhere as great as the love of Miss Brown for Lake. No letter was opened in Lady Dolores’ department that told of a love as deep and as sure. Beach who loved Mrs Hoop with an eager passion, and Mrs FitzArthur who loved Septimus Tuam, and Mr FitzArthur who loved his wife, had none of them love to give as great as this, though their love was generous, and painful enough. Love dwindled in the Bolsovers’ marriage and dwindled elsewhere as well, but the love of Miss Brown increased and gathered strength. He is using your good offices, a woman on a magazine had written. Give this one his marching orders. But Miss Brown only wished that Lake would come to her with the words of a marriage proposal on his lips.

  Whenever he fell asleep in Miss Brown’s bed-sitting-room, he talked and smiled as he did when he was wide awake. He spoke of the past, of a political career and of the Royal Household he might have known; but he did not speak in sadness, because he was a man who did not go in for regret. The future was merry before him and he polished his song for it. He would own a Jaguar motor-car, he whispered from his dreams: he would own a house in a rising place; he would ride on a horse in Richmond Park; he would give away money to charity. Miss Brown, hearing the voice coming out of his sleep, saw herself always by his side, choosing wallpapers and carpets, making their house a good place to live in, cantering behind him in Richmond Park.

  Miss Brown had seen the face of Lady Dolores on the television screen and had wished that she might write to her, because she felt that this aristocratic woman might not be harsh; but it was known that Lady Dolores was concerned only with love within marriage, and marriage at the moment was one of the difficulties.

  ‘I have young blood to offer,’ said Lake to Miss Brown, standing by the window of her office. ‘What can hold back the tide of my business success? I have business acumen of an unparalleled quality.’ And Miss Brown’s heart thumped and tumbled inside her, and her love was greater than it had been a minute before.

  7

  Edward borrowed a bicycle from his landlady and rode on it to Putney in the early morning. Chewing a piece of gum, he watched the house in which Septimus Tuam was said to reside and he discovered only that watching a house can be a dismal business. The women of Wimbledon had called Septimus Tuam beautiful, but no beautiful man emerged from the house, and after twenty minutes Edward decided to ride on to Wimbledon itself and watch instead the house of Mrs FitzArthur.

  He stood on Wimbledon Common and looked to the left and to the right, but could nowhere see a beautiful man who might be Septimus Tuam. Milkmen moved their carriers from door to door, two postmen met at a corner as though by design and walked away together, their empty bags tied to their shoulders with pieces of hairy white string. It was a cool morning; the sky was all cloud.

  Edward sat on the saddle of his landlady’s bicycle and balanced himself there by allowing his toes to touch the ground. Ahead of him, on the other side of a busy main road, he could see the house of Mrs FitzArthur. Buses and lorries, motor-cars, vans, scooters, bicycles, motor-cycles, invalid cars, and a few pedestrians passed before his eyes, but he still saw clearly the house of Mrs FitzArthur, the house that, strictly speaking, was the property of her husband: the curtains were still drawn, a single pint of milk stood upon the step by the front door.

  At five to eleven he observed a man with flowers arrive at the house, and his heart leapt in his chest, as leapt the heart of Mrs FitzArthur when she heard the door-bell. She opened the door, and saw her husband, his moustache freshly clipped, his rotund form darkly suited.

  ‘Come in, do,’ cried Blanche FitzArthur, gesturing with her arm.

  ‘Here are flowers,’ he offered, stepping in, ‘and I have peaches in a bag.’

  Three peaches he had, held close to his chest, their paper container hidden behind dewy roses.

  ‘My dear, how absolutely sweet!’

  Mr FitzArthur handed over the fruit and the flowers, and placed his hat on the chair in the hall that had last been occupied by Septimus Tuam.

  ‘How are you, Harry?’ inquired his wife.

  ‘I have rented a flat. I live on stuff from tins.’

  Mr FitzArthur entered their sitting-room and sat nervously on a sofa that had been manufactured in Denmark. His wife bustled off to the kitchen, to set the peaches on a dish and to place the flowers in water.

  ‘What a sight!’ she said, returning, displaying the roses in a cream-coloured vase.

  ‘Well?’ said Mr FitzArthur.

  Mrs FitzArthur sat down and sighed and reddened. She lit a tipped cigarette and held the lighted match for her guest, who chose a cigarette of his own, an Egyptian Abdullah. She exercised every morning to keep her figure trim; she found her nourishment in the juices of vegetables and fruit. She had a horror of becoming bloated.

  ‘I have thought and thought,’ cried Mrs FitzArthur suddenly. ‘I’ve looked at the thing from every angle. I have cried myself to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t ask much, you know,’ her husband pointed out. ‘Now do I? I’ll accept a yes or a no; I’ll hear you say the suitable thing and then the nastiness is forgotten. But how can I come tramping back to this house if I am uncertain in my mind?’

  ‘I have been unfaithful to you,’ cried Mrs FitzArthur.

  ‘That is what we are talking about. I might never have known. I might yet be returning to this house day by day, none the wiser. I might never have heard the name of Septimus Tuam.’

  ‘I have been unfaithful to you,’ cried Mrs FitzArthur again, ‘and you have shown me only kindness. You are a sweet, dear man –’

  ‘I can be stern, as well you know. I am given to sternness in its place. I’ll not be bamboozled a second time.’

  ‘Have a Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Dear, do.’

  Mr FitzArthur nodded his head in a sideways manner, accepting this offer. Mrs FitzArthur poured two glasses of sherry.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said. How well everything would be, she reflected, if only she could bring herself to perform as she was required to perform. Until the private detective had arrived on the scene, she had had the best of both worlds; and she might have them again.

  ‘Well, here’s a luxury,’ said Mrs FitzArthur nervously, wondering if she dared yet mention New York.

  ‘Luxury?’ he said, shooting up an eyebrow, the fingers of his left hand raised to his moustache. ‘What luxury, Blanche?’

  ‘Sherry in the morning, Bristol Cream at eleven-fifteen. Dear, what pleasanter thing?’ She spoke quickly, running the words together, keeping the other subject at bay.

  ‘I’m at sixes and sevens,’ said Mr FitzArthur. ‘You must see that. I know neither one thing nor the other, except that on your own admission young Tuam has ta
ken himself off. How can I live with a woman who is constantly thinking of afternoons spent with a blackguard? I cannot understand you, Blanche. It is like being lost in an undergrowth.’

  Mrs FitzArthur, genuinely sorry for the plight that her husband found himself in, reached out and grasped his hand. ‘Oh, poor dear fellow,’ she said. ‘An undergrowth.’ She felt a finger that reminded her, as it had in the past reminded her, of a plump stick of chalk. She felt no quiver of response in it, although she knew that a response was there if Mr FitzArthur willed it. She felt it cold in her palm.

  ‘You must see my point,’ said Mr FitzArthur. ‘I must trust you, Blanche. You are my seventh wife and my favourite of all. Yet here you go and insult our marriage and now will not in turn renounce your episode. I had better go.’

  ‘No, no; don’t go,’ cried Mrs FitzArthur. ‘Take another glass. Take a slice of seed cake. Let me fetch some from the kitchen,’

  She moved quickly towards the door, but Mr FitzArthur held up a hand and said he did not desire a slice of seed cake.

  ‘I have arrangements to make,’ he continued. ‘Have you thought of that? There is this house to sell, for I will not live in it without you, and the machinery for divorce to be set in motion. I am tired of that: I thought I had seen the last of decrees and lawyers. I take it your answer is no, Blanche? I am to take it so?’

  Blanche FitzArthur hung her head in silence. Her fair hair, caught in a sun-ray, was pretty beneath it. She said:

  ‘I am a silly woman.’

  Again there was a pause, until he said:

  ‘No, no. No, it is hardly that at all. I shall go now. You are not a silly woman at all.’

  ‘Oh, do not leave me, dear. I am a foolish creature to have made this hash of things with you. It is only that I cannot make up my mind if it is right for me to say what must be said.’

  Mrs FitzArthur spoke the truth. It seemed to her that the deception now required of her was more than she could bring herself to weave; for it seemed that in the web of this deception she would in some way deceive herself as well.

  ‘Let me go to New York,’ cried Mrs FitzArthur. ‘Give me a few extra weeks. Time sets things right.’

  ‘You have had your weeks, Blanche. There is writing on a wall and it is up to me to read it. Someone will be in touch with you.’

  At this, Mrs FitzArthur flung herself upon her husband and held him firmly in her arms, pinning his to his sides. She placed her head upon his breast and wept. Placed thus, she thought of Septimus Tuam. She wondered what he thought of her as he walked away from this house, as he had so many times, to catch a 93 bus. He must see her surely, in that calm moment, as a fluffy, silly thing, mutton dressed as lamb? Thinking of that made her weep the more; and then she reflected that she was fifty-one years old and that soon she could not even claim to be middle-aged. The lines would chase themselves all over her face, her nose would probably redden, her limbs would creak, and exercises become more difficult. ‘Juices?’ some wretched medico would cry. ‘Woman, you need bread with butter on it, eggs, meat and green things.’ And she would protest, and he would laugh, telling her sharply that she was well beyond her prime: what use were juices now?

  All this was going on in Mrs FitzArthur’s mind as she shed tears into her husband’s waistcoat. I shall broaden in the hips, my knees will disappear in fat: she thought those words, and thought, too, that illness might beset her. She saw herself moving slowly, with a black stick to lean on, crying out in pain to strangers on the streets. She would be by herself, she thought, in some small flat, a silly fluffy woman, well past her prime.

  Mrs FitzArthur, a woman who had known men well, raised her tear-stained face and sought to catch with hers the eyes of her husband. Some instinct told her that he would not hold this dishevelled face against her and would not cease to care. Finding his eyes and gripping a handful of his clothes, she opened her mouth to issue the words, but found herself when the moment came unable to issue anything at all. A bell sounded in the distance, chiming from a nearby convent.

  Edward, peering round the edge of a window, could hear the chimes of the bell, but had succeeded in hearing little else. Mrs FitzArthur’s visitor did not at all fit the description he had of Septimus Tuam, in that the visitor could not with accuracy be described as beautiful. Yet Mrs FitzArthur had handed out drink to him and had wept her heart out, restraining his movement by clasping his body within her arms. And in turn the smallish, rather fat man had indeed behaved in the manner of a harsh lover, causing a woman to weep and to plead with gestures. ‘I have no experience of this business,’ said Edward in perplexity to himself, watching the couple in Mrs FitzArthur’s sitting-room. ‘I expected a younger man.’ He saw the man rise to his feet as though about to go. Edward moved too, away from the window and back to where his bicycle lay on the common.

  ‘Oh, why can’t you say it now,’ cried Mr FitzArthur, ‘without all this palaver? Why can’t you tell me a couple of dozen times that if you saw Septimus Tuam this minute you’d tell me to kick him on the backside and laugh to see it done? That’s all that’s necessary: we’d have a good giggle over the blackguard. “He caught you out,” I’d say and you’d reply that Septimus Tuam is a dirty microbe who couldn’t inspire love in a mortal. You’d say it was the change of life that turned your head; you’d confess you must have been unbalanced even to bear the sight of the weedy horror. Why not all that, Blanche? It’s quicker than going to America.’

  ‘I need to be alone. I need to sort things out in my mind. Pan-Am shall find me a seat.’

  Mr FitzArthur sighed again. He felt the warmth of the hands that held his, and he agreed then that his wife should be given the time and the circumstances that she requested. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘and I shall wait.’

  Edward, alert by his bicycle, saw the hall-door open and saw the moustached man place his hat upon his head and take his leave of Mrs FitzArthur. He saw Mrs FitzArthur wave and saw the man nod his head in turn. The door closed; Mr FitzArthur looked about him, and then crossed the busy road and set off briskly across the common. Wheeling his bicycle, Edward followed him, and Septimus Tuam stepped from behind a tree.

  In that same moment Lady Dolores in her love department drew on a lined pad a face that she imagined might be the face of Septimus Tuam. She read a letter from a woman who had known him, and as she read it she realized that she knew the letter by heart. She added an eyebrow, arching it quizzically.

  In Wimbledon Eve Bolsover lifted a cup of coffee to her lips in the house of her friend Sybil Thornton, and heard Sybil Thornton say that marriage was a gamble and always had been.

  Mrs Hoop found Eve Bolsover’s birth certificate in a bureau drawer and decided to put a match to it; Miss Brown sighed; James Bolsover thought again about his father’s process of dying, and his father, still alive, spat out a mouthful of cabbage in Gloucestershire.

  ‘My dear, you shouldn’t have come,’ cried Mrs FitzArthur. ‘The man’s just left.’

  ‘I saw him,’ said Septimus Tuam, ‘from behind a tree.’

  He had stepped off a bus too late to see Edward at his vigil by the window. He had noticed the fresh-faced youth on the common but had not paid him much attention.

  ‘Pan-Am?’ said Mrs FitzArthur into her telephone receiver. ‘Look here, I want a passage to New York.’

  Behind the white, gaunt face of Septimus Tuam the mind that went with it was concerned with details. This woman had not yet mentioned leaving him a little present. He looked at her, to see if he could ascertain any sign of such a gesture in her countenance.

  ‘Oh!’ said Mrs FitzArthur, her eyes falling upon his. ‘Oh, God above!’

  ‘I shall try to be good,’ said Septimus Tuam lightly. ‘I shall do my best.’ He had hoped that that might seem like a hint to her. He had hoped to see her hand reach out for a handbag. Mrs FitzArthur said:

  ‘I feel it as a duty to all three of us.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Septimus Tuam, and he asked her for her handb
ag, saying that he had noticed a looseness of the clasp. ‘You wouldn’t want to lose your cash,’ he murmured, fiddling with the silver fastener.

  ‘Cash!’ cried she. ‘Dear, you must take a gift before I go. Please do, for I know you are often hard put to make your ends meet.’

  ‘How kind you always are,’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘I shall keep an eye on your residence, dear. Let me come in when you’re gone and do a little bit of housework. That woman of yours is useless.’

  ‘Who’s talking of being kind?’ whispered Mrs FitzArthur, looking again at his eyes. ‘I’ve never known such thoughtfulness.’

  ‘I’ll borrow your key,’ said Septimus Tuam.

  8

  Edward Blakeston-Smith pursued the man he took to be Septimus Tuam, wondering where the man was heading for, assuming he was moving on to the house of another woman. He wondered and assumed, and mingled his thoughts with a consideration of Lady Dolores and the odd words that were spoken by the clerks in the love department. ‘She has a forceful personality,’ murmured Edward to himself, remembering how he had wept for the very first time in her presence and how she had thrown a few paper handkerchiefs at him. ‘She is a great lady,’ he said aloud, believing that she was that and more, and he thought that one day, when he knew her better, he would ask her about the words that the clerks so often emitted. ‘That dog on the prowl,’ said Edward, and laughed.