As Far as You Can Go (10 page)

He was less fascinated, though, by the conversation that followed his recital of the fire. After a good deal of “Ooohing” and “Well-I-never” and “Did-you-ever-hear-the-like?”, there was some trenchant criticism of the landlord and some mystical reflection on Mrs Fanshaw’s good fortune in being away at the time of the fire.

“But if you’d been here,” said Harold, “you’d almost
certainly
have been woken sooner than I was, and there might well not have been a fire at all. Those wires had been
smouldering
for some time, the fireman said. You’d have noticed, all right.”

“I doubt it, Mr Barlow,” she said, and as she doubted her head swayed back and forth and her underlip peeled towards him. “I doubt it very much, don’t you, Betty? My aura is very bad to do with fire. Isn’t that right, dear?”

“Oh, yes,” said Betty, applying the handkerchief, “I’d say your aura is one of the worst for fires I’ve ever seen, to tell you the truth. One of the very worst. I don’t honestly
remember
a worse one, to tell you the truth.”

“There you are,” said Mrs Fanshaw triumphantly. “And she’s seen a good many auras in her time, haven’t you, Betty? You know a bad one for fire when you see it, don’t you?”

“To tell you the truth,” said Betty, “I do. And I don’t mind telling you, Mrs F., I’ve never seen one like yours. If I were you, I’d be very careful about fire.”

“Oh, but I am,” said Mrs Fanshaw. “Ever since I got back and saw the mess—it was terrible, Betty, the mess, really terrible—ever since I got back and saw it I’ve been telling myself, Ethel, I’ve been saying, you be careful about fire. You remember what the swami said.”

“I thought swamis were to do with something else,” said Harold. “I mean, not spiritualism.”

“I used to be a theosophist once,” said Betty. Harold wasn’t sure if this was meant as a clarifying remark, or simply as a piece of autobiographical data.

“Yes,” said Mrs Fanshaw, “the swami told me to beware of orange and red. And I always have.”

“That proves it, then,” said Betty. “To tell you the truth, Mrs F., if I was the man from the Pru I wouldn’t let you have one farthing of fire insurance. Not one farthing.”

“No more would I,” said Mrs Fanshaw. She looked thoroughly pleased. “But they couldn’t see an aura if you put it under their noses, those people. No sensitivity at all. Not a mite.”

“What kind of an aura do I have?” said Harold.

“To tell you the truth,” said Betty, “I’ve been watching you, and I’d say you weren’t a believer.”

“Does that mean I don’t have an aura?”

“Oh, no. You’ve got an aura all right. But to tell you the truth, Mr Barlow, it’s not considered right, not in the
profession
, to tell just anyone what their aura is. There’s no use telling people what they won’t put their hearts to
understanding
.”

“No,” said Mrs Fanshaw.

“I’m sorry I asked,” said Harold.

The two women looked at him suspiciously.

“Would you like me to give you a pamphlet?” said Mrs Fanshaw. Her lower lip was out again.

“Well, thank you very much, yes, I would.”

Mrs Fanshaw rose, wrapping her dressing-gown about her,
and disappeared into the bedroom. When she came back she held about twenty small booklets, some no larger than a packet of cigarettes. “I want you to study these, mind, Mr Barlow,” she said. “There’s the secret of life in them, if you know how to find it.”

There was an uncomfortable seriousness in the room, which Betty broke by saying, “How’s the sister, then, Mrs F.?”

Harold rose to leave, but Mrs Fanshaw said, “Oh, don’t go, Mr Barlow, please. The tea will be ready in just a minute.”

He sat and listened as Mrs Fanshaw’s sister’s insides, stitched and stitched again by incompetent surgeons,
amputated
almost to extinction, saved when all hope was gone by plastic and tubes and rubber, weaker and weaker yet ever indomitable, adamantly refused Mrs Fanshaw her “rights”. There were a good many references to her “you know what, Betty”, and still more, with significant lowering of tone, to her “unmentionables” and her “what’s not for us to ask about”, but Harold guessed from the anatomical detail that he did understand that she had had three separate uteruses removed, something he did not altogether believe. There had, too, been simply appalling trouble with stones, and the
gallbladder’s
history would have made even a doctor feel queasy.

“You know,” said Mrs Fanshaw, “it’s a hard thing to say, and I don’t like saying it, but she’s got to die.”

Betty nodded religiously.

“It’s not as though she’s got much to live for, either, except to keep me out of my rights. What with her husband dead in the war—he had cancer, you know, went out to do his duty as an air-raid warden one night, and collapsed at his post on top of Woolworths. They took him straight to the hospital, but it was too far gone. All over everywhere, they said. And then there was only the one child before Iris had to have her you know what removed, and that child, Betty, believe me, she’s a terror. Been had up for shoplifting I don’t know how many times,
and
that’s not the worst of it, not by a long chalk.
It’s a shame, too, them being respectable people, as you may imagine, not riff-raff. And then she had all this trouble with her insides. Of course, she doesn’t speak to Edith—that’s the daughter—not any more. That’s why I’m sure to inherit. It won’t be much, mind you, but every little helps. There’s the bungalow, for one thing. She owns that, I know, and it’s such a waste, her being in and out of hospital all the time. And then my mother left us both a little something, and I don’t
think
she’s spent it all. She did say once that she’d been having a bit of trouble raising the bail for Edith, but I knew she was lying. I could tell by her aura. And one time when she thought she was dying—and there’s been enough times like that, believe me—she did tell me she’d left everything to me, and would I try and look after Edith. I told her straight out, I said, Iris, you’re my sister, and that makes Edith my niece, and for the sake of the family I’ll do what I can, but you know as well as I do, I said, that there’s precious little anyone can do for that girl but marry her to a G.I. and hope she doesn’t come back.”

“You’re right there,” said Betty, with feeling. “The dirty little hussy.”

The kettle had boiled dry, but Harold was not allowed to leave until a new lot of water had been put on. “It won’t be a minute,” said Mrs Fanshaw, confidently.

Then it was Betty’s turn, and she made the most of it. Her trouble was her mother who was funny in the head, but they didn’t like to have her put away, which was what Mrs Fanshaw suggested, no, they didn’t like that idea, her being their own mother, when all was said and done. Harold stopped listening when the tea appeared. Watching them stretch their necks over their cups, he had a sudden vision of how his life would almost certainly be spent. Not with Betty or Mrs Fanshaw, not even with Helen, but with one of the sisterhood, smeared, probably, with a little education and taste, and money, too, with luck, but with the same instinctive
preference for death over life, the same determination to carry on or struggle through or bear up all their lives, and to be decent and British and basically rather admirable, but never to let go, never to let life touch them, keeping it always at arm’s length with lace curtains or privet hedges or brass knockers or “Trespassers will be prosecuted”. It was because Betty and Mrs Fanshaw were so unsuccessful, because their lives were so obviously sad and dismal, that they had any life at all. Deeply ordinary and possibly nice and certainly once respectable, they were now each other’s only prop of self-respect. Given a little more money, a little more luck, they would lack the little eccentricities that made them both intolerable and pitiable. Eaten with jealousy for the kind of life that they imagined should have been theirs, and perhaps once was, the eccentricities had been forced on them. It was because somewhere along the line luck and life had let them down, somewhere and somehow they had been deprived of the husbands with nice little jobs and small cars for the
week-ends
in summer, because they were deprived of what they thought of as their rights, that they were interesting, and worse, funny. And funny only in a pathetic way, without the selfconsciousness which could have made them genuinely funny, the lack of which made them, in fact, almost
contemptible
, so obvious their desires, so trivial their ambitions. They were so ordinary, so English, that Harold felt a wave of dismay, of horror. No, it wouldn’t be Betty or Mrs Fanshaw or Helen Gallagher, not for him, but someone basically the same. His whole life was leading towards marriage with a woman, of a different class, to be sure, but who would, in the last resort, feel the same trivial instincts, want the same security, the same respectability, which only these two middle-aged women’s failure to obtain revealed as nationally characteristic. He saw his mother suddenly sitting in Mrs Fanshaw’s place, Mrs Crawshaw in Betty’s. It was just a matter of luck and money who sat where, and it made no
difference, for they were all the same woman, and they all wanted the same things.

It was in the midst of this vision that Harold looked up to see Mrs Fanshaw standing over him expectantly, the brown tea-pot with its broken spout poised over his cup, saying, “Another little drop, Mr Barlow?”

And he said, “No thank you, Mrs Fanshaw. I’m going to America.”

And here he was, in the Magnolia Motel, and in Mesquite, Nevada, of which he had never heard till sunset the previous evening. Once taken, the decision had seemed right, but he considered it for the whole of his fortnight’s holiday without telling anyone, and then wrote to Dangerfield, saying he was interested. There had been a good deal of manœuvring on both sides: Dangerfield had said he wasn’t sure he was the right man for it, that he was not going to make up his mind till he’d seen several other people, but Dennis said this was all a lie, and that he was secretly pleased, and merely, in his own fashion, testing Harold’s determination. Knowing this, Harold put up quite a good performance of being not
desperate
for the job but quietly confident. By the end of September it was all agreed. Harold was to leave in the new year. This would be fair to Fenway’s, and give him a chance to study the photographs of the portraits. It took him exactly one afternoon to memorize them, but Dangerfield insisted that he study them for an hour each day, and Harold promised to do so. He put them on the walls of his flat and addressed them all by their Christian names. Dangerfield offered him a
substantial
amount of money and a car in America, but Harold, on Dennis’s advice, held out for more.

“He won’t respect you unless you ask for more, Harold.”

“But I shan’t be able to spend what he’s giving me already.”

“Never mind. Anyway, you can always buy a film studio
or something. It is impossible to have too much money. Surely you know that.”

So Harold held out for more, and got half of it. The size of his income actually worried him, and, to Dangerfield’s delight, and on Dennis’s advice, he insisted that a large part of the money should be paid in advance in the form of shares, and be clearly labelled a gift.

“Good boy,” said Dangerfield. “As long as I don’t die for a few years, you’ll be all right, eh?”

Harold found himself beginning to like Dangerfield. He was so devotedly mercenary, and yet so affectedly a man of leisure, that the contradictions in his personality were a
perpetual
source of amusement. Week-ends at Dangerfield House were enjoyable, too.

There was only one embarrassing moment, when Jimmy Scott was invited at the same time as Harold. Fenway, Crocker and Broke were not taking Harold’s departure any too well. When Harold told Crocker that he was leaving, there was a moment of uncontrolled disbelief, during which Crocker’s cigarette fell from his hand to the carpet, followed by the slightly undignified scene of Harold on his knees trying to find the cigarette and bumping his head into Crocker’s as Crocker bent down. By the time they found the cigarette and apologized to each other, the main matter seemed too serious for discussion, and apology was exhausted. Crocker frowned, rubbing the place on his head where Harold bumped him, and Harold stood silently in front of him. Eventually Crocker managed to say,’ “We’ve done pretty well by you here, haven’t we, Barlow?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“Well, we were all hoping you’d stay with us, you know. We definitely had you lined up for a partnership.”

“I’m most grateful for all you’ve done.”

“I do think you’re letting us down, rather.”

The view of the other partners was that Harold was letting
them down very badly indeed. They had given him a very good training, they said, and now he was going off on some unconvincing excuse, and it was really too bad. Harold felt very much like George Calcott after his disastrous marriage. Old Mr Hansett was very grave, and spoke to him of loyalty to the firm, and the flibbertigibbeting of young men today. There was obviously no way you could please the old, Harold decided: either you lacked an adventurous spirit or you weren’t solid enough. They got you either way. The only person who seemed pleased that Harold was leaving was Blackett, who rubbed his hands together for a full five minutes when he heard the news, and used his bifocals with telling effect on the young secretaries, one of whom began to cry after his speech on the moral corruption of the age and the degeneracy of the young. Harold suspected him of trying to seduce her.

Their disapproval did not prevent the partners giving Harold plenty to do, however, during his last few months at Fenway’s, and their attitude mellowed a little around
Christmas,
just before he left. At the staff party Mr Scott said, “No hard feelings, old boy, I hope?” And while Blackett was doing some conjuring tricks Mr Hansett said that he supposed Harold was still young enough to be able to afford a few mistakes, and hoped he would have a good time in America.

“They’re not like us, you know,” he said. “Don’t let the language mislead you. And don’t let them fool you with all their talk about efficiency. They may use more machines than we do, but it takes longer to get something done over there than it does here. You remember that.”