Dark Places (8 page)

I grew hot with impatience at that little chuckle, and the way he was so pleased with himself: there he was, creeping and creaking around his shop, taking forever to thread a needle, and positively proud of being an old duffer. ‘I am not as young as once I was, sir,' this foolish bent man said, ‘and the arthuritis is shocking some days.'

I was a gentleman, so I could not be entirely blunt, but I hinted, ‘Young Dingle here seems to know his business, for when you hand over to him.' Chapman creaked and threatened to snap, straightening so he could look me in the face. ‘Oh dearie me no sir, I have my old age to think of, and my own lads to see settled before I hand over to anyone.' I saw then that Chapman was choosing to ignore what the laws of life were telling him, and was clinging on like a shrivelled leaf to a branch. Watching myself in his mirror, a fine figure of a man splendid in mourning, I knew I could have no truck with the shrivelled leaves of this world.

On my first day of being Mr Singer Senior, I chose not to use the respectable front door of the Business, as I always had with Father, and the stuffy hall with the tiled floor. I came in as an owner should, invisibly, through the back gate, seeing for myself the life that lay behind the aspidistras and polished brass. Coming in through the big shabby wooden gates of the delivery yard, I felt myself entering the world I had until now been only preparing for.

The figures of those gadflies at the University, and the finicking lecturers in their billowing black, became as wispy as a bit of smoke in the crisp sunlight of this yard, where great lumps of men in blue singlets and braces exchanged shouts as they heaved boxes off drays, and the horses shifted their hooves around their piles of steaming dung. Every sound, every muscle, every hair had a mass about it that I relished: things here took up space, they sat indubitable under this shadowless light.

In Father's presence I had been bewildered by the activity of this organism called the Business—all those minions behind etched-glass windows, men in striped shirts and sleeve-protectors scratching away into ledgers, women carrying bundles of things, vague echoing shouts and thuds from lower regions—and I had been too wary of Father thinking I was a dolt, unfitted to fill his shoes, to ask the questions that might have made it clearer.

Today, Good Old Rundle gushed with too much eagerness, ushered me with too much obsequiousness, so that it verged on the parody, behind Father's desk, into Father's chair, and seemed prepared to exclaim all day on the remarkable fact of
Poor dear Mr Singer having been taken away from us
,
and now you
,
Mr Singer
,
sitting in his place!

But eventually we got down to brass tacks, and he showed me various large books full of figures and lists. Mr Rundle appeared to know everything there was to know about the figures and the lists, and as he flipped through the pages, greasy with use, he remarked several times that poor dear Mr Singer, rest his soul, had left most of this day-to-day operation to him, Rundle, for it was purely of a mechanical nature and not necessary for a gentleman to waste his time on.

Listening to Mr Rundle I began to make out that Father had somewhat misrepresented his function in the business. It was borne in on me that Father had footled along, making money from a business he did not think it quite gentlemanly to understand. He had, I supposed, planned my gradual absorption into
Singer & Son.
Master Singer would have learned the names of his employees, as Father had been proud of doing; Master Singer would have had another mahogany desk like his father's, and learned to purse his lips and nod with an appearance of knowingness while Rundle explained: so that at last there could be a seamless and unremarkable transition from the rule of Mr Singer Senior to the rule of Mr Singer Junior.

But I was no blotter: to absorb was not my way. Listening to Mr Rundle I grew larger within my spirit, for I knew that I could easily follow the intricacies of the business, which was nothing but facts when you boiled it down. ‘And unlike Father, I did not think there was anything vulgar in coming to grips with pounds, shillings and pence.

I did not distrust Rundle: Rundle would have no more robbed his employer than a rug would sit up and bite its owner's leg. But a man had a certain duty to make the most of his opportunities—even the Bible agreed on that—and I was pretty sure that
Singer & Son
could do better.

When Rundle had taken his ledgers away, some person in a black dress, with eyes red from weeping and an unpleasantly adenoidal way of talking through her tears, brought me a cup of tea—‘Your dear father's cup and saucer, Master Singer, Mister Singer I should say, and do you have your tea as your father did, with two lumps?' The tongs were already poised, but I said, ‘No,' rather clearly, so that she looked up in a fright and dropped the sugar lump. ‘No sugar at all, thank you, and that cup is too small for my taste, I will provide you with another.' In fact, I had always had two lumps until this moment, and had never before so much as noticed the cup it came in, but she might as well know from the start that the new Mr Singer was not in any respect to be confused with the old.

I resolved there and then on a posthumous portrait of Father: in a pink jacket and puftaloon pants, perhaps, dressed for the hunt, being handed up a glass of champagne as he sat on a horse with a big bottom. There would be a conspicuous contrast with his up-to-the-minute son at the desk beneath him, with his smart narrow lapels, making large sums at the stroke of a pen!

When I suggested to Rundle that he might like to show me around the place, he seemed surprised, but led the way down into the back regions. Here I was introduced to the dark underbelly of the prim shop I had always known. No one had told me that quite so many clerks would be packed into quite such a low-ceilinged room, scraping away into ledgers; no one had prepared me for the rows of peaky-faced women making up parcels in an airless room that smelt of the privy; no one had told me of the splintered floorboards, the unpainted walls, the pervasive smell of ink and paste, the cockroaches running over the piles of stock. It was a relief to stand again out in the yard, where there was a breath of air, and where the men cranking open boxes with crowbars had some blood in their faces.

But I flinched from none of it: I was determined to impress on all of them—Rundle and the sallow women in Packing, the pinheaded men in Despatch, the pimply clerks in Accounts—my rock-like indifference to mere discomfort, and the fact that, although the new Mr Singer was a gentleman like his father, he was a different kettle of fish altogether.

I had a continuous stream of shrewd questions for Rundle, and did not forget any of the answers. Females in the Packing Department were paid one pound four shillings and threepence a week, they were allowed twelve minutes for a morning-tea break, thirty minutes for lunch, and eight minutes break in the afternoon; the hours were from eight in the morning until seven at night Monday to Saturday, and any breakages were to be paid for from wages. The youngest employee was thirteen, the oldest claimed to be seventy. Smoking was not permitted by staff, nor was spitting, coarse language, or sitting down. In an average year,
Singer & Son
sold forty-three thousand envelopes, one thousand and ten reams of best bond, seven hundred fountain pens, and, in the month of December, one hundred and twenty tooled-leather desk-sets.

I could see various shortcomings in the system, and a good number of my questions related to the prevention of pilfering and other abuses, and I made sure the workers heard me ask Rundle about these things. I wished the word to get around among the workers that the new Mr Singer would not be unfailingly blind and smiling as the old one had been.

In the shop itself, our last port of call, the air was sweet and calm, the various females very pleasing of aspect in their black, and one or two had a glance that I thought a bit on the saucy side as they stood behind their counters waiting to attend on customers, and sizing up the new Mr Singer out of the corners of their eyes. ‘This is where your father spent a great deal of his time, Mr Singer,' Rundle said. ‘He often said he loved to watch all the activity here, the dance of the shop-girls, he called it.'

Apart from the females, the shop interested me much less than those odorous regions behind: with Father I had spent many weary times here as he gazed complacently about at the long wooden counters, the high ceiling supported by nymphs and curlicued pilasters, and the upholstered chairs where customers rested between purchases. This was the sedate world he had enjoyed, the world of the end-product, but to me it was mere decoration, the showy icing: the real cake was behind, where objects were negotiated over and bought from sharp-eyed suppliers, where numbers were added and subtracted, and where unpleasing human types sweated and laboured, and a man such as myself had something to get his teeth into.

For the sake of completeness, though, I strolled between the various counters, and allowed myself to come to rest, in the most natural way, at the counter of the prettiest girl in black. Father had shown good taste in choosing these shop-girls, and I made a mental note to insert a few wood-nymphs into the hunting portrait.

I asked this girl a question or two about the sale of pens, and listened with a tremendous show of interest while she blushed becomingly, and gestured with her dainty hands, and tried to explain to Mr Singer just why a ten-guinea pen was a very much better buy than a one-guinea one. Her answer, in spite of her embarrassment at her public show, was quite satisfactory, at least to my ear, and on the strength of the girl's persuasion I would have bought two of them. ‘Excellent, well done,' I said. ‘And what is your name, dear?' ‘Miss Gibbs, sir, Dora Gibbs,' she said, a bobbed a curtsy behind her counter, and I repeated the name to myself so I would not forget it, and noticed the way she coloured up so charmingly.

I threw myself with pleasure into the business that Father had allowed simply to run itself. There was dead wood, for a start, that had to be removed. I was generous enough to the dead wood, giving out appropriate sums as pensions, and the kinds of trinket people valued—a watch or a silver-plated tray, those kinds of items—but I had my first lesson in the ingratitude of employees when they protested at being let go, and in a few cases actually wheedled me to let them stay on: ‘For old times' sake, sir, for your father's sake, sir.'

Truckling was too ingrained in Rundle for him to be blunt, but I saw all the folds of his face become more pendulous with each of my reforms. ‘I know he is a little slow, Mr Singer, but he has been with the business since he was just a nipper, sir,' he might venture, or, ‘His wife is a sick woman, and there are a lot of kiddies, Mr Singer, it will go hard with him.' I cried out at those lugubrious dewlaps of his, creasing around hard-luck stories, ‘Come along, Rundle, am I a charitable institution?' and then, since Rundle was puckering and creasing all over again and obviously had never heard of the rhetorical question, I went on quickly, ‘You would not wish to see Singer's submerge under such a weight of hangers-on, would you, Rundle?'

Poor old Rundle: he was good at a hearty few words when one of the old chaps got his gold watch and his pension, he was supreme at just the right sort of laboured witticism when one of the girls got herself married; but he waded along through a miasma of woolly-hearted liberal impulses, and he had nothing to say now, only looked at me in an obstinate pleading way, like a faithful old fleabag being teased about a bone.

Once the dead wood was gone I had the satisfaction of seeing the business look altogether sharper. It was astonishing to see the way men in overalls moved so much faster, and how women in black bustled along so much more industriously after a few watches and trays had been given out.

As I set off each morning for business, I knew I was proving more than worthy of my inheritance. It was too late for Father to see, and to regret never having thought I would amount to anything. But I myself knew that I had, after my unpromising start, finally come into my own. Albion Gidley Singer walked tall now: I saw the light glancing off my boots, catching a button of my jacket as the breeze flapped it back, felt my soles ring on the flagstones. I was here, Albion Gidley Singer was fully present, a solid body at last. I stood waiting for the ferry, a man who had taken over the reins, and on fine mornings I felt like a newly hatched king. Water dimpled at my feet, green and so clear it was like something you could cut a slice out of; birds bobbed on the swell and eyed me, and I flung a handful of pebbles and almost laughed aloud, in spite of my serious suit, to see them flap up from the water. The phrase came to me,
The world is my oyster
, and on these winking and glancing mornings with everything shifting and swelling around me, the foolish platitude was plump and full of juice.

PART TWO
A Husband

Eight

NOW THAT I was no longer a mere son, but a man, it seemed only right that I should take a wife. Around me, my schoolmates were forging ahead in their professions, and making appropriate matches, setting up domestic establishments with sheets and maids and wicker hall-stands. I went to several weddings, and because of my reputation as something of a public speaker I was called on to say a few words at these gatherings, but afterwards I continued to see these newly married men at the Club as if, after all, nothing very dramatic had happened.

Since my education at the hands of Valmai and her many successors, the scales had fallen from my eyes. I knew now that the business of men and women was beautifully logical, and nothing a man need be afraid of: it was simply the smooth and cog-like operations of blind Nature, who knew of nothing but copulation, and had no purpose other than that of continuing the species. A man of the scientific age, I could look at the whole business rationally, and after considering all the facts, I came to my conclusions.