I Shall Not Want (55 page)

But these were, after all, only the ordinary day by day problems that a retail draper has to face, they were the common round. There was another and far more difficult problem that he had to solve; and that was how to persuade the shareholders of John Marco Ltd., especially those who had put up extra money, that the fact that there would be no dividend this year was simply because nearly five months ago there had been a break in the weather.

ii

For the first time in his life it occurred to John Marco that he was drinking too much; not drinking in wild silly bouts with boisterous companions, but drinking every day in a sober, unecstatic fashion just a little more than was good for him. The vicious circle of the process was already final and complete; there was no gap or loop-hole anywhere. He drank simply because he was tired; and the later into the night he worked, the more he drank. Then, next morning when the elixir that was in the stuff had evaporated and only the dregs remained, silting up his mind inside him, he felt the need sooner and drank earlier.

His eleven o'clock drink when the tour of the shop was over had already become something that was regular and established; he poured the drink out without even thinking about it. And once the back of the morning had been broken he went on working with a glass in his hand, almost unaware of it. In the afternoon it was the same; and in the evening when he finally locked up his desk and hung the key onto his watch chain he was often surprised to notice how low the level of the whiskey in the decanter had become. It was this decanter that provided him with his excuse; and like most drinkers he had felt relieved when he had first thought of the excuse. “If only the decanter were a bottle,” he had said to himself, “I should know when it was finished and not trouble to open another one. As it is, it is always refilled for me and I am drinking
from something that has no beginning and no ending, and so I never know how much I'm taking.”

He had told himself a hundred times that he would have the decanter put away and a bottle set there in its place. But he liked the glittering crystal of the thing and the crisp, hard feel of it beneath his fingers; and somehow the order for its removal was the one order that he never gave.

In a way, too, he did not want to drink any less than he had grown used to: it suited him. Mr. Hackbridge's company in a world without alcohol would have been intolerable; and Mr. Lyman's something not to be contemplated. But with it, he was able to see them both a dozen times a day and forget how tired of each he had become. He suspected, too, that because of it they found him a little easier than they might otherwise have done: it helped to take the sharp edge off his tongue and served to gloss over some of the civilities that were missing.

And without it, probably, he would never have sought again for Mary's friendship, suddenly breaking through the careful, silent reserve with which she had surrounded herself. Perhaps it was, that on that afternoon he had taken a trifle more than usual, had drunk just enough to free himself from the fixed course of things. It was the day of their early closing and the curtains—they were of the new fashionable kind that hung in gay decorative loops—were already down across the windows. Inside the store the assistants were putting the display stuff back into its boxes and hanging white dust-covers over the naked counters.

The public had not been allowed inside the place since one o'clock, and the assistants, if they were fortunate, would be able to leave at about two. The cashiers in the counting house, of course, never enjoyed that particular kind of good fortune; their work on Saturday afternoons went on until three o'clock and sometimes half-past. Long after the aisles and gangways down below had been cleared of people, they were still there checking and crosschecking the innumerable little flimsy sheets of paper with the carbon copy of the order scribbled across it.
Every desk upstairs in the cash-room had a small printed notice just above the cashier's eye level. “MISTAKES IN CHANGE ARE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CASHIER,” it ran. “ANY SHORTAGE WILL BE DEDUCTED FROM WAGES.” And the effect of this notice was to root the girls to their high stools. A missing florin—or something really serious like five shillings or seven-and-sixpence that could not be accounted for—would keep a cashier there until the evening lights came on.

It was about two-thirty in the afternoon as John Marco closed the door of his office and began to wander along the empty corridor. There was nothing to go home for: Louise was having one of her bridge parties and the house would be filled with expensive, pre-occupied women who would all chatter shrilly when it came to tea. The only sign of life in the whole store was in the counting house: he could see the tops of the clerks' heads over the glass partition. He went instinctively towards it. And as he opened the door he felt himself surrounded by the close, hushed atmosphere of many people working. The whole room was a silent, busy temple of double-entry and nice balances. Over on the far side, he saw Mary; so far as the others were concerned she was a part of the counting-house by now. It was probably only a trick of light but, for an instant as he stood there, he saw her hair again pale and golden as he had remembered it; and her shoulders in their black dress were like the shoulders of the young Sabbath School teacher. He crossed over and stood beside her.

“Well, Mary,” he said.

He was standing there, his legs apart, his hands in his pockets smiling down at her. It was the old, familiar smile that was not often seen on his face nowadays.

She looked up at him and, recognising the smile, she smiled back. Even the voice was as she remembered it. And it seemed for a moment as though they had never been separated, as though they had been looking into each other's eyes for a life-time.

“Are you finished for to-day?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I was just going home,” she answered.

“Then I'll take you back there,” he said; “it's a long time since we really talked to each other.”

He was looking hard at her as he spoke and noticed that her colour had mounted a little. “It's almost as if she still blushes when she speaks to me,” he thought.

She paused, pushing back her hair from her forehead with a little gesture that was half weary, half embarrassed.

“I'm in no hurry,” she said. “I've nothing to go home for yet.”

“Well, let's drive round the Park together,” he suggested. “That's the perfect way for talking.”

When she came back to him she was wearing her coat. It was a cheap, thin one, not at all like the coats that Louise had hanging up in her wardrobe. John Marco remembered the heavy rug in the carriage and was glad that it was there to wrap her in.

The air in the Park was cold; and the Park itself had that air of peculiar and even startling sweetness which is to be found in all open spaces in large towns. It was as though, up to its railings, the ordinary grim business of cities went on and then, suddenly, on the other side a new kind of life began, a life in which ladies ride about in carriages, children play together under trees, toy-yachts are sent sailing across ponds, and dogs run barking. John Marco sat back and took his hat off, running his fingers through his hair.

Mary looked towards him.

“You look tired,” she said. “You don't give yourself enough rest.”

“You've noticed that, have you,” he said slowly. “I am tired. Very tired.”

“Then why don't you take things more easily?” she asked. “I've been worrying about you for a long time.”

“You have?”

Somehow, her admission cheered him; simply by telling him, she had made him feel less alone again. And thrusting his hand under the rug he took hold of hers for a moment and held it. Louise, for her part, seemed never to have thought of him as even possibly being tired; she was so rarely tired herself.

They got out of the carriage and began to walk. A faint breeze, that came and went, kept playing across their faces and the sun was almost warm. Overhead the sky was clear, and the flat acres of the Serpentine, seen through the dark trunks of the elms, showed placid and brilliant. They did not talk much as they walked; they went along side by side in silence like old friends. He held out his arm for her and she took it; to his surprise her touch still pleased him. And as they strolled across the sward he kept glancing sideways down at her.

The warmth had gone out of the air by the time they got back to the carriage and John Marco suggested that they should go somewhere for tea; Gunther's was the best place, he told her.

But Mary answered that she must be getting back again; there was tea to be got for the child who would be coming home from school, she explained. And as she said it, his feeling of loneliness suddenly returned to him; he was aware again of a closed and already complete life that was going on apart from him, something that was self-sufficient and shut-in.

He asked for the address where she was living. But, when he was told, the coachman had not heard of it, and Mary had to direct them when they came to the corner of the street. She had asked him to drop her anywhere so that she could make her way home as usual by bus; but John Marco had refused to hear of it.

The street, when they came to it, was not a pretty one. It was of grey brick, and the houses all had the flattened, lifeless look that comes of windows with curtains that have had all the colour and sparkle washed out of them, and front gardens with nothing brighter or more lively
than a privet-hedge inside their borders. It was a street in Paddington and not in Bayswater.

“You will come in, won't you?” Mary asked him as the carriage stopped. “Then I can make us both some tea.”

He got down from the carriage and they went in together. Inside, the hall was dark and narrow. It was close, too, as though the air that was imprisoned in it had been breathed a hundred times.

“It's upstairs,” she told him. “We live on the second floor.”

They mounted the stairs in silence, treading the pattern-less strip of oil cloth that ran up the centre. The paper on the walls was shiny, varnished stuff; it glistened. It had been like that in the house in Chapel Villas where he had been brought up; and perhaps it was because of this, or because he was with Mary again, that his mind began working backwards into the past and old Mrs. Marco was alive once more and he himself was young and keeping up appearances on fifteen shillings a week, and the world was spread out before him.

He started when Mary spoke to him: her voice reached him out of a different level of things.

“This is ours,” she said.

She threw open the door in front of him and the fustiness of the house vanished. The room seemed a small oasis of comfort, of civilisation even, amid those deserts of blind windows and sooty brick. There were flowers on the table and pictures that he remembered on the walls. And as he stood there he suddenly saw again that little pink-and-white drawing-room above the chemist's shop in Harrow Street, and he heard the voice of Mr. Petter's mother asking if he had been her son's friend and if he wanted to go upstairs to see him. Everything in the room was just as it had been then. The chair covers were the same, except that the bright dye that had once been so cheerful-looking had faded out of them, leaving them faint and autumnal; and the carpet that had once been
new had grown thin and hard to the feet. But there was one difference, he realised; and it was a difference that seemed to mark the whole complexion of the change. Here the paint work was dark; it was something that had been inherited from a succession of shadowy, departed tenants; and in the little flat to which Mary had been taken, it had been all white. John Marco remembered the bridal look that there had been to it.

“Sit down while I put the kettle on,” Mary told him. “I shall be back again in a minute.”

He seated himself in one of the easy chairs and stretched his legs in front of him. It was very quiet here—the only sound was that of Mary moving about in the other room—and he felt oddly comfortable and at ease. He thought of the tea-party that was going on in Hyde Park Square, and smiled. The maids there would be going around in their lace caps and aprons offering little sugary tit-bits off a silver cake stand; and here he was in an upper back room in a road that his coachman had never even heard of; and he was preferring it. It seemed suddenly, after all those years, so exactly what he wanted, to be there alone with Mary again.

But as he raised his eyes to the mantelpiece he saw that he was not alone. Thomas Petter was there, too; and he was regarding him. His coloured photograph set slantwise upon the shelf was staring full at him; and the eyes, cunningly touched up by the photographer's assistant had more, not less, than the ordinary sparkle of life about them—they hypnotised. At the same moment, John Marco became aware of how much of this room, that had been transported across a score of streets and up three flights of stairs, still belonged to Thomas Petter. His certificate from the Pharmaceutical Society was hanging on the wall in its narrow gilt frame and another photograph of him as a young man, seated amid an Amosite Bible Class that he had been instructing, was opposite. Even the books were his; his Pharmacopoeia was there in the case beside the fireplace in just the spot
where a tired man who was interested in his work could stretch out his hand and take it up. If his slippers, too, had been down beside the fender it would not have seemed surprising.

John Marco avoided Thomas Petter's bright, unswerving eyes and sank lower into his chair. Through the window, across the double strip of what had once been gardens, he could see the blank, untidy backs of the houses opposite. There was no pretence about them. No matter what façade the fronts supported, the backs were honest and themselves: they were the backs of tenements.

“So this is what she comes back to at night,” he reflected; “this is her life now.” But it had been about
him
that she had said she had been worrying. She had spoken as though
her
existence were the one which was secure and sheltered, and
his
the bleak, arduous one. It was evident that the other life, the streety one that went on around her, had not touched her at all; inside these four walls she was shut away. “Perhaps she can afford to keep alive her memories,” he thought.