Bellman & Black (39 page)

Outside the window a rook flapped ragged and unsettled over the rooftops of Regent Street. Bellman turned his back on it and, resigned to the task, stood before his chart, pen in hand. With the black pen he entered a black cross to mark the month’s sales. The parabola had a quality to it that he recognized. I could have predicted this degree of drop, he thought, and then corrected himself. How on earth could that be the case? But it was true. He had seen this curve before.

He switched to the blue ink. Next month. What were people dying of now? There was Critchlow, dead of old age. There were thousands like him. He thought of Fred, dead of having lived and loved and made bread for—what? Fifty years? How many like him? A good many.

Fred was the same age that he was, wasn’t he? Staring at the curve on the wall, he suddenly realized that he and Fred were almost exactly the same age. They had birthdays in the same month. Fancy thinking of that, now! His cousin Charles too. Poor Charles. And that other boy . . . Luke. Whom he himself had . . . So long ago.

He blinked.

He could see the whole trajectory of the arc. The apex of the curve. The exact spot where it loses velocity. He could foresee the terminal point. He entered his cross with certitude. He knew. He had seen it before.

A sudden anxiety made him wonder about the rook he had seen over the rooftops a moment ago. What was it doing now? He moved urgently to the window. The sky was deep blue, not yet so dark that he would not see the outline of a rook against it. But it is too late for a rook, he thought. I can’t have seen it. They will all be gone to their treetops by now. Scanning the roofline for the silhouette of a rook, he felt it. A tingle at the back of the neck, the stirring of the bone marrow when someone has their eye on you . . .

He turned and spoke in the same moment: “There you are!”

Seated comfortably in the armchair by the fireside, Black looked pleased to see him. Even in shadow, the mild amiability of his smile did not fade in the face of Bellman’s startled vexation.

“What kept you? I’ve been looking everywhere!”

“Me? I’ve been here all along.”

“All along?” Bellman wondered whether he had misheard.

Black inclined his head with grace, without explanation.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’re here now.”

Black was peaceable, at ease. His curious gaze settled on Bellman as if he was expecting him to take the lead. Flustered, Bellman seemed to have forgotten all his negotiating skill. “I have drawn up a contract for you,” he began, somewhat flustered. “It’s here, somewhere.” He opened a drawer and rummaged. How many years ago had he written it? He extracted a sheaf of papers that dated from the right period, fanned them out on his desk, but the contract wasn’t immediately obvious. Blast! Why hadn’t he kept it separately somewhere? His hands trembled as he grasped another bundle of papers. “I know it’s here! I can find it, if you give me a few minutes. It’s just a question of time.”

“Of course.”

Bellman glanced up. With an easy gesture, Black seemed to indicate that he was not in any great hurry.

“Perhaps you would like to see the ledgers while you are waiting?”
Bellman took them two at a time from the shelf to make an armful. “You’ll find the records are up to date, very complete, nothing forgotten!”

“Nothing forgotten?” Was there a touch of irony in Black’s voice?

Crossing the room to place the ledgers on the side table within reach of Black, he had the odd sensation that Black’s silhouette grew darker the closer he got.

“Not a thing! It’s all there! Bank statements too, if you want! They’re here, look.” He was already at the shelf where the bank documents were archived, pulling out box files when he stopped. “Forgotten what? What kind of thing do you mean?”

And before Black could answer, Bellman, suddenly suspicious, asked another question: “Who let you in? Verney?”

Black shifted in his chair. His face was in shadow.

“The safe . . .” Bellman said, with a mouth so dry the words were as feathers in his mouth. “I can advance you part of your share as soon as you like. Tonight. Here and now.”

The safe’s dial was stiff; the effort of turning it helped calm his quaking hands. The door swung open on the day’s takings, counted out in a heap of felt bags. He spilled money from the felt bags onto the desk, talking ten to the dozen all the while. “Sales have dropped a little lately. It is nothing to be concerned about. The public sentiment is wavering in the matter of death ritual. In a little while habits will reassert themselves, and we shall know where we are again. Death never goes out of fashion. It is the one sure thing!”

He was talking too much, he knew it, his jollity smacked of overconfidence; no one but a novice would be persuaded. But Black’s silence was full of questions that he did not know the answer to and preferred not to hear, so on he babbled. The new cremations, exchanging one style of ritual for another. “There is always the same need for consolation, you see! Some things never change!”

In a great hurry he emptied bag after bag on the desk. The money
made a small mountain, so that the topmost coins began to slide down the heap to the edges. Some rolled off the edge to the floor. “Look! Even with this decline—temporary, of course—we are doing well. It can’t be said the business is failing. Far from it.”

The coins on the floor had their own velocity. They rolled in all directions, under the cupboard, toward the door, under the chair.

“Twenty-five percent, that’s what I envisaged. It will make you a wealthy man. But that’s open to negotiation, of course. It’s just a starting point. We can talk it all through. I’m not an unreasonable man. I want to see your contribution amply recognized. If fifty percent seems more appropriate, make your case. I’m more than happy to listen.”

Black said nothing. Bellman’s heart was beating so fast he could barely get his breath.

“Fifty percent it is, then. I told you I was prepared to be generous, didn’t I? Shall we agree to that?”

He sat and dipped a nib in the ink. “I can rewrite this contract here and now, as we speak—” and he could too, except that there was nowhere to put the paper to write. He swept an arm across the table to clear a space. More coins fell streaming from the desk. Some of them rolled in Black’s direction. One came to rest at his feet and his cloaked arm reached down from his chair to retrieve it from the carpet. Bellman felt a small relief at the knowledge that some part of his debt at least was in the hands of his debtor. It was a start.

But as Bellman started to write, out of the corner of his eye he saw Black place the runaway coin indifferently on the unconsulted ledgers.

So far as he could make out in the thickening gloom, Black looked bemused. Or sad. Or else was smiling kindly at him, as though he, Bellman, was a young boy who had failed to understand something.

“Seventy-five percent,” he proposed, gabbling. “It’s not as if I need the money myself. I’m quite wealthy enough . . .”

When he got no response his nerve failed him. “Eighty?” It seemed
a lot, but he sensed the beginning of the relief that would come from having the matter at last settled. It would be worth it, for Dora’s sake. Worth more, even.

“Or ninety? You were the one who recognized the opportunity, after all.”

Ink was leaking from his pen. The contract was nothing more than an ink blot, a shape that could have been anything.

“The opportunity?” Black queried, gently.

“Of course!” Bellman stared. “That night when we entered into partnership. Bellman & Black! You must remember!”

There came a soft rustling and a movement that Bellman interpreted as a shrug. “I thought it was your idea.”

“ ‘I see an opportunity!’ That’s what you said!”

Black was looking into the fireplace. “And you thought I meant this.”

“What did you mean, then?”

Bellman could see almost nothing of Black in the shadows. He appeared only as a darkly shrouded form. The faint gleam of his garments suggested there was light somewhere to be reflected, but where it was coming from Bellman couldn’t say. And there was too the gleam of his black eyes, intelligent, not unkind exactly, but intransigent. Never had Bellman felt himself so keenly seen.

“I will transfer ownership entirely to you,” he said. “For that I will need your full name.”

The silence told him he had gone astray somewhere. He was on the wrong track. He placed his pen on his desk.

“Why have you come? I should have made it clear at the time, I realize that now, but Dora—” He felt foolish and ignorant, as he hadn’t felt in years.

“This is not about your daughter.”

“No?” Bellman tried to make sense of it. So Black didn’t want Dora. He looked around the room. There was money everywhere. Black didn’t
want money either. It was no good, he felt more bewildered than relieved. What on earth
did
Black want?

“I’ve come to say good-bye.”

Bellman rose from his desk. “But where are you going? And why? I’ve hardly even got to know you! If anything I knew you better in the old days at Whittingford. Why is it that I know you so little? I had hopes at one time that we might be friends . . .”

“We’ve not got long.”

Bellman had crossed the room toward the fireplace. He placed a hand on the back of the second armchair. Should he sit down or not? He had the obscure feeling that he ought to wait to be invited.

“Time is short, eh? But if there’s one thing I have learned it’s that there is always more time than you think. And I could learn a lot from a man like you. All this time I’ve been waiting for you to come, and now, at last—”

“I’ve been here all along.”

“Did I hear you right? All along, you say?”

Black nodded. “Right behind you.”

Bellman paused. He peered doubtfully into the shadows. “Was it Verney who let you in?”

Black let the question pass.

“I offered you an opportunity. I’m not talking about Bellman & Black. That was your idea. What I was offering you in your bereavement was an opportunity of another kind. I offer it to you again now. Before it is too late.”

“Too late for what?”

As Bellman spoke, the silhouette of his visitor seemed to darken, and an answer—astonishing, obvious—occurred to him.

“Oh,” he said. “I never thought . . .”

Weariness suddenly overwhelmed him and he sat down. He put his head in his hands while the world seemed to spin, and when it came to a stop he discovered a clarity that had been missing before.

“So there is no deal then?”

“There is no deal.”

“And the money . . .” He gestured helplessly at the coins.

Black shook his head.

“So this opportunity . . . ?”

“Thought.”

“Thought? Is that it?”

“And memory.”

Bellman nodded. Thought and memory. Time slowed while he applied himself. Here at Bellman & Black, he had thought of nothing but death for the last decade. Yet he had failed to devote a single moment to the thought of his own mortality. It was—almost—ludicrous. However had he come to forget such an important thing?

He tried to remember. Turning his mind’s eye to his past, he could see only darkness. It was something he recognized from his dreams and filled with menace. “I can’t remember,” he said, shaking his head. He looked into the darkness again and it shifted and altered to make shapes that figured the horrors he had lived. His wife, racked by illness, appeared to him, and he trembled painfully. His sons calling for him, bewildered by his inability to lift them out of their agony. His baby daughter crying with rage and incomprehension at the first incursion of suffering into her short life.

The pain of contemplating such pain and loss was hard to endure. “But what good can come of memory?” he asked Black. “It is more than I can bear.”

“Remember!”

The blackness contained more. Luke’s head of copper hair bright on snow. Charles, lost far away and never mourned. Fred—he should have gone to see him! Why hadn’t he gone?

He twisted his face. “Don’t make me do it . . .”

“Remember!”

There was an image he had buried for years, and it returned to him
now: his uncle, dead but bolt upright in his study chair. “I can’t!” he cried, for it terrified him now as it had terrified him then.

“Remember!”

The Misses Young and a white china bowl stained with blackberry juice. That damned grave. That damned coffin. That damned Reverend Porritt speaking his mother’s name . . .

Memories of all his unmourned dead pierced him. The grief of an entire lifetime entered his heart in a single moment. He thought he would collapse. He thought the pain would crush him. He thought he would die of it. But it was not yet the end of him.

“Remember,” Black told him softly.

“I am.”

“There is more.”

Fearful of what might await him, Bellman looked once more into his past. He saw—he seemed to see—a curving line. A parabola. Marked out on the graph paper, traced on the sky over Whittingford, a perfect curve with a boy and a catapult at one end of it—and a young rook on a branch at the other.

He was beyond trembling now.

The stone traced its perfect curve in the sky, and his tongue thick in his mouth, he wished only to cry out, to startle the bird into taking off. There was time, still time, for it to release its grip on the branch and rise up, laughing into the sky . . .

The stone completed its trajectory.

The bird fell.

William had done that. By skill and application and intelligence he had done what ought not to have been possible. He had killed.

William dared not look at Black. He felt, more than saw, Black rise.

“I am afraid,” he whispered.

“Remember!” he heard.

“I have remembered all. All!”

“Remember!”

“There is nothing more!”

“Remember!”

When Bellman looked up, it was so dark he could see nothing at all, until a shimmer of purple and blue and green shifted and radiated through the darkness.

Now all kinds of things emerged from the darkness of his buried past. Children’s faces grave with responsibility, pouring vinegar over a bowl of coins and mixing the contents, a cow in a ditch, wet boots, and a grinning girl with a gap in her teeth, a good piece of cheese and a dish of stewed plums, Uncle Paul plucking a rose from his mother’s hat with a penknife, Poll at the Red Lion stroking his hair as if he were a pet dog and pulling up her nightdress, the joy to the eye of a field gashed with crimson cloth, two boys in his lap laughing at their father, a seamstress singing a sad song, her face illuminated with joy and memory . . .