As Far as You Can Go (3 page)

Douglas’s face took on a look of devotion to duty and he said he was secretary to a military charity and spent his time making sure old soldiers weren’t dying of starvation.

“The trouble is,” he said, “that they’re all so damned proud. You’d be amazed how many of them won’t come and ask for the ten quid which would set them back on their feet again. There’s one old boy, wounded in the Boer War, as a matter of fact, and never been able to work properly since. We have to force the money on the chap, practically. I go and see him once a month. Have to pretend the visit’s purely social or he wouldn’t let me in.”

“I thought the welfare state was supposed to look after people like that.”

“Well, it is,” said Douglas. “But it doesn’t. You try living on a pension and see how you make out.”

“I know the pension is insultingly low,” said Harold, “but surely people aren’t actually starving?”

“Sometimes they are. Or they can’t afford coal. Or the gas bill gets out of hand. There are quite a few little charities about, quietly looking after people.” Douglas looked into his tea. “May be glad of one of them myself before I’m dead.”

Harold thought grimly about his notion that old age might be all right, might make things seem better. He finished his tea and said, “Well, thank you very much for the tea. I feel a bit stronger now. I’d better go and get ready for a day at the office.”

“What do you do, old boy?”

“I work as a bill-broker in the City. It’s money for jam.”

“Good show. Good prospects?”

“Oh, yes. You can’t go wrong, you see, unless you’re a complete fool, and I expect I shall be a partner in a few years. Then the money will come rolling in.”

“Connections, I suppose,” said Douglas. He didn’t sound bitter, he was simply confirming a logical deduction.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“No need to apologize. A string in time pulls nine, I’ve always said. Well, you’ll be wanting to spruce yourself up a bit before you put on your bowler hat. Nice to have met you. Perhaps you’d like to have a pint one evening at the George?”

“That would be very nice,” said Harold. “And I’m most grateful to you for calling the fire brigade.”

“Not at all. That silly girl nearly gave me a heart attack, you know. I’m never too good in the mornings, anyway.”

“One ought to have a telephone,” said Harold.

“It’s useful. Can be quite an expense, though.”

Harold said good-bye and went back to his flat. Mr Blackthorn had a telephone which Harold was allowed to use. He had to write all his calls down in a little green notebook, and Mr Blackthorn charged him fourpence for a local call, as well as glancing meaningfully at his watch all the time Harold was speaking. When he went away Harold had to use the nearest phone box, which was in Broadchurch Street, too far for convenience. But he didn’t intend to stay in Craxton Street for long. He had passed all his examinations last month, and he’d be getting a raise in salary shortly.
Meanwhile
Craxton Street was cheap, and anyway there was the Lambretta to keep up.

The firemen were still mopping up, assisted by some old men who appeared to come from the Salvage Department. They were in no hurry, but they arranged to have the doors and locks mended. Already the water was down to half an inch.

Harold had to shave in cold water as the gas and
electricity
had been turned off. Usually he used an electric razor, and now he cut himself twice, and could not find the styptic pencil. He gloomed to himself about the dangers of
haemophilia
, and felt sore and uncomfortable after the shave. He discovered that the lotion his mother had given him last Christmas, and which he had never used, stung.

Then he began to be practical. He put his shoes near what he hoped would again be hot pipes before long, stuffing them with paper. He kicked the bookcase angrily, then went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, forgetting the power had been cut off. The pot was still dirty from two days ago, and dishes gloated at him from the sink, a rime of scrambled egg in the saucepan, a seeping black and yellow stain on a plate where he had stubbed out a cigarette.

Unable to face the thought of washing-up, he went to the cupboard to look for some instant coffee. There were various remnants of old forgotten meals: half a packet of rice, two eggs in a broken egg-box, some greenish bacon, some
unnaturally
yellow butter, obviously about to turn into whey or cheese, a pot of crusty marmalade, and half a loaf of
iron-hard
brown bread. There were also two saucers and three cups, three forks, one teaspoon, four dessert spoons and eighteen glasses of various sizes.

It was a bachelor’s cupboard, he thought gloomily:
eighteen
glasses and three cups. It was revolting. Eighteen glasses. And the washing-up to do. He must get married at once. But to whom? It could not matter less. Anything, absolutely
anything
would be better than this, the eighteen glasses and the grease-line in the sink and the horrifying paralysis of the will that came over him when he thought about the squalor of his life. To say nothing of the fluff under the bed and the stains on the carpet and the peeling paint in the bathroom.

Men aren’t supposed to do these things, he thought, men are supposed to go and work their guts out to support women
to do the chores for them. People don’t get married for sex, they marry in order not to have to do the washing-up or to make the bed or to keep the place clean. Men feel sick when they see a sink or a broom, they don’t want to know what to do with them. But since they do, in fact, know what a sink is for, they shudder and tremble at the sight of it. Rather than clean up after themselves, men abandon their pretence of freedom and get married. And then the bloody girl goes and has children, and then she’s so busy cleaning up after them that she doesn’t have time to clean up after the man too, so he’s back at the sink before he’s had time to forget what an apron is, and then there are six children, and six times as many dishes, to say nothing of the drool which the baby’s left all over the house, and the sickly smell which permeates a house with a child under three in it, and everything is even more perfect hell than it used to be in the misery of
bachelordom
. No wonder parents hate children, and children get neurotic to spite their parents. Fathers loathe their children because they cost so much and create so much washing-up, and naturally children hate their fathers back. Freud is all nonsense: the secret of neurosis is to be discovered in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse longest to help with the dishes. The sink is the great symbol of the
bloodiness
of family life. All life is bad, but family life is worse.

Feeling better for this aphorism, he took down a tin of Nescafé which had enough in it to make one scant cup of coffee, and tried to put on the kettle. It was then that he remembered that the firemen had turned off the gas.

He went and asked the salvage men how long it would be before he could boil a kettle. At the word “kettle” their faces brightened, and they said it wouldn’t be long. He decided to go out for breakfast. But first he wanted to change his socks. There seemed to be a hole in his shoe, and some of the water that still lay about had got in.

There was a pair of socks hanging on the towel-rack in the
bathroom, and the towel lay where he had left it, sopping wet on the floor. He had never got around to buying a bathmat.

He found a dry spot to change his socks on: they at least were dry, though looking at them reminded him how much he detested washing anything, how soapy his hands felt for hours afterwards, how his skin wrinkled uncomfortably, and detergents set his nails on edge. Once he had got a disgusting rash that lasted for nearly a fortnight after using too much Froth or Ebb or whatever the stuff was called. It was another reason for marrying, really. Being a bachelor was a constant series of terrible minor tasks that had to be done or the place turned at once into a pigsty.

Of course it was different at home, there things were properly organized, with women to do all that sort of thing for you. But Harold didn’t live at home, which was in
Buckinghamshire
, and his father wasn’t rich enough to give him the sort of allowance necessary for riotous living in central London. Things being what they were, intolerably organized, incompetently designed and generally not worth it, marriage was the best solution. Otherwise one lived a slum life in Craxton Street, or stayed in a boarding-house with some awful old woman prying into one’s sex-life all the time and saying, “No girls after eleven, Mr Barlow, and I mean that,” which was as bad as being at home (home not being all good, in spite of the women to do the chores). Or you became enormously rich and lived in an hotel, or, better, in an
enormous
house, with thousands of nannies and parlour-maids and charwomen and butlers to do all the washing-up and wiping-up and general swan-upping that was necessary. And you never had to see or smell your children till they reached a reasonably advanced stage of continence, you just put them in a wing of the house and locked the doors between you and the servants and the noise of washing-up, and got on with whatever it was you wanted to get on with.

As he was leaving for breakfast he thought of Mrs Fanshaw.
He went up to her flat, but the men had mended her door already, and it was locked again. For a moment Harold felt sincerely sorry for her with all the mess to come home to. But then he hardened his heart and remembered that women were supposed to deal with mess, it was their function in life, and they probably enjoyed it, if only they knew it.

The post had arrived by the time he got downstairs, but there was nothing for him.

Just as well, he thought, stifling the usual disappointment. It would only have been a bill.

T
HE FIRM OF
Fenway, Crocker and Broke was extremely respectable and well-established. No one was quite sure what had happened to Mr Fenway, who had founded it in the 1840s, but Mr Crocker’s photograph hung in the
waiting-room
, and it showed a stern bearded man of about forty-five with a high collar and morning coat, leaning against a mantelpiece on which stood three cups. Harold always
assumed
that these were awarded for probity, and that Mr Crocker had won them all outright. Mr Broke’s son was still alive, and occasionally dropped in to see how things were going.

There were seven active partners, one of whom, Mr
Hansett
, was in his sixties and on the verge of retirement. It was for Mr Crocker’s grandson that Harold worked, an amiable and not wholly stupid man of forty-eight, with black straight hair and a paunch that he would rub from time to time,
particularly
after lunch, saying, “Must do something about this before it gets out of control.” He lived near Marlow and played a good deal of golf, but weight lost on the links seemed always to be made up again in the bar. Harold spent most of his time compiling complicated graphs of stock prices, and when he would bring one in to Crocker, who had a Carlton House desk perpetually littered with papers and ashtrays, he was always astonished to find him actually working, usually on the telephone.

He would wave Harold to put the graph on the desk, then make more waving motions to indicate that Harold should wait a moment. After what sounded like intense financial wrangling, he would suddenly and without any change of
tone arrange a lunch with his unseen fellow-negotiator and then end the conversation with inquiries about wife, fishing or hunters. With a salvo of personal regards he would ring off, then turn to Harold and ask him how he was getting on. Then he would examine the graph with great care, ask a few small points which Harold assumed must be to test his
understanding
of the business, and say “Jolly good.” Working for him was pleasant, since he was always jovial in the
mornings
, and came back only briefly after lunch. If Harold made a mistake, Crocker would point it out without making him feel a complete fool.

It was Mr Scott who was Harold’s connection with the firm. He was the most senior partner after Mr Hansett, and was Harold’s uncle’s brother-in-law. When Harold came down from Oxford his father asked him for the hundred thousandth time what he wanted to do. With a
misunderstood
sarcasm Harold said his only ambition was to be very rich, and his uncle, who happened to be staying at the time, approved strongly and suggested he get in touch with Jimmy Scott. Since he genuinely had no idea at all of what he wanted to do, except that he didn’t want to work if he could possibly avoid it, and facing the fact that continued idle lounging around at home would be worse than having a job, what with parental indignation and parental friends, Harold surprised himself by actually going to see Scott, and still more by joining the firm in a very junior capacity to learn the business and pass the necessary exams. He was paid very little, but with the small allowance from his father he was able to afford Craxton Street and an occasional theatre and the tepid embraces of Helen Gallagher and eventually the secondhand Lambretta. And now he was in sight of a very well-paid job and a better flat and even marriage and a secondhand car. The only trouble was that the job was too easy. Being a bill-broker was, as he’d told Mr Douglas, money for jam. Once you’d learnt the basic rules and the
particular complications of the business, all you had to do was lend short and borrow long. You were a vital cog in the financial set-up of England, you made money hand over fist, and you tried not to remember that some countries got on perfectly well without businesses like yours at all.

It was like everything else, thought Harold, edging the Lambretta past an ambassadorial Rolls Royce at a
traffic-light
, perfectly all right in its own way, but never extending one to one’s full capacity. One just chugged along in low throttle, knowing that things would go on going on until the whole world disappeared in a giant toadstool cloud, and if it didn’t, then one would go on going on. Never opening up. Of course, English roads were impossible, anyway.

He accelerated past a bus and turned sharply left off Cheapside to his private parking-place, underneath the
windows
of a royal and ancient livery company. He unstrapped his umbrella and bowler hat from the carrier, dusted down his trousers, squared his shoulders and prepared for another morning’s graph-plotting.

Fenway, Crocker and Broke had recently moved into a new building whose lift frequently stuck. Harold always took it in the hope that it would stick with him in it, thus giving him the opportunity to meditate on life and death instead of sitting at his desk. But it never did. Smoothly but noisily it took him to the twelfth floor. As he stepped out he saw the clock showed nine-twenty which meant that he was ten minutes early. Nine-twenty, and he felt absolutely exhausted already.

He pushed through glass doors into the long low room in which he worked. There were about twenty desks, all covered with telephones and files and papers, and two especially large ones which had a dozen telephones each. Glass ran the length of the room on both sides, giving the occupants a view of an almost identical building on one side and the skeleton of another almost identical building on the other. Since the
City had gone in for reconstruction all new buildings looked the same, or else they were all designed by the same architect who had simply fallen in love with one idea. Harold thought of him maniacally drawing the same plans over and over again, making tiny alterations in the detail to fool the client, while pale and frightened assistants brought him cups of strong tea without milk or sugar. At the end of the day he retired to the penthouse of one of these buildings and gloated over the rooftops at what he had done, counting each hideous lift-machinery hut as a personal triumph. Then, when the light finally failed, he would go home to a suburban villa and amuse himself with his hobby, the imaginary
construction
of neon advertisements in the most prominent positions in the City.

There were, as usual, a few clerks and secretaries already there, standing by the window that overlooked the
scaffolding
of the new building.

“Good morning,” said Blackett, the senior clerk, as Harold joined them. “I don’t see how they ever get a
building
finished at all, do you? Look at them, sitting there
drinking
tea.”

“Oh, but they start earlier than us,” said Sheila, Mr Scott’s secretary.

“Yes,” said Blackett. “I dare say that’s true, Sheila. They arrive here before we do, certainly. But what do they do? They have breakfast. And when breakfast’s over it’s time for the first tea-break, isn’t it?”

Harold said nothing, thinking how nice it must be to lay bricks and carry hods and work cranes and drink tea all day, knowing that when it came to knocking-off time you had at least something physically
there
to show for your efforts. Blackett he had always put down as a
Daily
Telegraph
reader, and possibly even a contributor of letters to the editor about the need for tightening up on the unions, the sort of man who would carry a stopwatch about with him when he retired so
as to report the exact amount of time spent not-working by manual labourers. That sort of thing could easily become an obsession.

Not, of course, that people weren’t idle, anyone with any sense scrounged a few minutes a day from his employer, it gave the dreariness of work a little adventure to see just how much one could get away with. But the sense of moral superiority that the Blacketts of life waved about like the membership card of some exclusive club, or an invitation to a royal garden party, was simply disgusting. And anyway Blackett, with his finicky hands and passion for paper-clips, was one of the things Harold disliked most about Fenway, Crocker and Broke. It wasn’t anything specific that Harold disliked, it was simply the sum of Blackett, the individually harmless characteristics which amounted to a porcupine of irritations. His way of rubbing his hands together, for
instance
, after leaving the lavatory, as though no towel could ever quite get them dry. The bifocals, for another, which he used for such self-conscious effects of eye manœuvre. The careful creases in his shiny trousers, so that one could tell they were pressed every night and probably cleaned only once every six months, and the way his sideboards were trimmed above the ear-pieces of his spectacles, particularly annoyed Harold. And then he had a peculiar snuffling little laugh, like a stifled whinny. But none of these things really depressed Harold in themselves, it was the total effect of assurance and probity and correctness, the undeviating loyalty to the firm, the unfailing catching of trains, all of which shone out of his grey eyes and from his bald head. Mr Hansett always said that Fenway, Crocker and Broke would collapse when Blackett left, and he didn’t know how they would ever get on without him. Blackett’s pigeon chest would swell, stuffed with these crumbs of conventional praise, till Harold wished it would burst.
He
could get on without Blackett perfectly well right now.

He went to his desk and began to prepare a graph. The one thing to be said for this hack work was that it didn’t require any imagination at all, and left Harold plenty of time to think about other things, such as Helen Gallagher. He’d met her almost a year ago at a party, and she had been slightly tight by the time they went home, and allowed him to kiss her with some ardour and to tamper with fair success with her underwear. Encouraged by this Harold had pursued her again, this time to meet a sober indignation.

“But you allowed me to do that last time,” he said, feeling his cheek where she’d slapped him suddenly and hard.

She turned scarlet. “Did I?”

“Yes. And furthermore——”

“Then you must have taken advantage of me. I knew I’d had too much wine cup.”

“Not at all. You actually
helped
me at one moment.”

“What moment?”

“When I was trying to get off——”

“I don’t want to know,” she said, quickly.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Helen.”

“Let’s talk about something quite different.”

Which they did. But a few weeks later Harold had, through sheer persistence, won back all the lost ground and made a few new bridgeheads. And about a month after that he actually got her to go to bed with him. This wasn’t really as interesting as had seemed likely, but then the first time was never too good, it was the follow-up that was most rewarding. But somehow it wasn’t. Although Helen was really rather a nice girl, in a coy way, and had a neat way of dressing and a satisfyingly shaped body, her mind never stopped listening for door-bells or Mrs Fanshaw’s footsteps above, and it was quite obvious that her heart was only in it through a sense of duty. She was, after all, twenty-five, and beginning to worry about the future. The combination of fear and
calculation
which Harold detected in even her warmest embrace
irritated him profoundly. After a time he realized that he didn’t even like her very much. It was much easier to have Helen around than to go out and find someone else, she was quite affectionate and reasonably acquiescent, but the only reason he continued seeing and sleeping with her was that he felt rather guilty about having started the thing in the first place, and was bone idle and probably undersexed. All of which depressed him, but somehow the affair kept going, and they even spent a week together with his parents, who found her very nice, darling, but one should look around when one was young, shouldn’t one? Her parents luckily lived conveniently far from London, so he could avoid
meeting
them. He felt that to be introduced to them might be fatal. Helen was always referring to them in what she imagined was a subtle way, telling him how her sister had already got a son and was expecting another baby soon and how much her parents liked being grandparents (something Harold refused point-blank to believe) and how her father was really quite well off, and what nice things her sister had got as wedding-presents, and how beautiful the wedding had been, and how much her father and mother liked their
son-in-law
, till Harold told her briefly and pointedly that he wasn’t considering marriage for several years, “until he was well established with the firm”. He had quite a good story worked out about how the firm preferred people to wait till they were partners before they married, and he even went so far as to invent an imaginary man called George Calcott who had had a very promising career ruined by marrying against the advice of Mr Hansett. Poor fellow, he had never been made a partner, and was going to shoot himself in despair next time Helen brought the subject up.

As he worked at the graph Harold added a few details to George Calcott’s married life which he had already made pretty unhappy. The Calcotts seemed never to have heard about contraceptives, for one thing. They lived in a miserable
flat in Fulham and the smell of babies was simply
overpowering
. There were four children already, and another on the way, and all were sickly in one way or another, and the cost of preventing them dying was beginning to sap George’s own health. The National Health Service helped, of course, but there were all sorts of things necessary for sick babies for which doctors simply wouldn’t give prescriptions. Jennifer Calcott was a nice girl, too, which made it all so sad, and a couple of years ago, she had been distinctly pretty. But now she never seemed to find the time to wash her hair, even, and what with the number of nappies drying in the kitchen there never seemed to be room for her own and George’s dirty clothes, which were gradually blocking the back door. A man had already been round twice from the local Health people, but there was virtually nothing that could be done, and George hadn’t had a clean shirt for weeks. The strain was beginning to show in his work, which had been getting very careless recently, and Harold was doubtful whether he would be able to keep the job, particularly as Mr Hansett had turned sharply against him since the wedding. The office had given them a silver tray when they married, but that had been sold long ago, of course, and they couldn’t get much for it because their names and the date of the wedding had been engraved on it and jewellers weren’t madly
interested
in having to melt things down. It wasn’t, after all, as though the Calcotts were famous enough to sell their
unwanted
trays at high prices as association pieces. George had spent night after night trying to take his name out of his books with ink eradicator, but you could always tell,
especially
if you were a secondhand bookseller.