James Hilton: Collected Novels (20 page)

George could say nothing; to argue without enough in his pocket to pay the bill would have been even more humiliating. In his confusion he somehow found himself leaving the table and being piloted by Mangin into the restaurant lobby.

“So you’re a newspaper man, Boswell?”

George nodded, still inclined to be speechless.

“Know much about advertising?”

“Advertising?…Er…Well, I take in advertising, naturally.”

“Ever
written
ads?”

“Oh yes, my customers often ask me to help them—”

“I mean big stuff—campaign advertising—things like patent medicines—”

“No, I can’t say I—”

Mangin threw a half-crown into the plate on the cloakroom counter and began putting on his overcoat.

“Well, I’ll tell you what…You don’t seem to have had any experience, but I’ll give you a chance…start at six pounds a week for the first three months and we’ll see what happens…But you’ll have to
learn
, Boswell, and learn plenty if you want to stay in the game.”

“But—but—” George was slowly recovering his voice. “But I don’t understand—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m offering you a job, that’s all. In my London office.”

“But I don’t want a job. I’ve got a job already—”

“You mean that newspaper—in—what’s the name of the place—in—”

“Aye, in Browdley. I’m owner and editor of the
Browdley Guardian.
”

“But I thought you wanted to give it up! Wasn’t that the idea…to try somewhere else?”

George suddenly flushed. “There must have been a mistake.”

“
Mistake,
eh? Looks like it…” Mangin smirked as he signaled the doorman for a taxi. “Better have that out with Livia…I’ve got to rush for my train…G’bye.”

George did not go back to the table immediately; he calmed himself first, then discovered (as he had hoped) that the rest of the party was breaking up. He murmured his good-byes, and could not find words to address Livia during the first few hundred yards of their walk together along the pavement from the restaurant. Eventually she broke the silence herself. “Don’t be so angry, George, just because Mr. Mangin paid for the dinner. You know you only asked the other two—and then all those drinks…they wouldn’t have felt free to have what they wanted if they’d thought you were paying for everything.”

“Why not? How do they know what I earn? I’m not poor just because I can’t afford to buy champagne cocktails.”

“That’s it, George, you can’t afford them and Mr. Mangin can—and besides that, you don’t drink yourself—that’s another thing.”

He said, half to himself: “Seems to me there’s a more important matter than the one we’re discussing.”

She answered eagerly: “I hope so. I don’t know what Mr. Mangin said to you outside. I was afraid you hadn’t given him much of an impression of how clever you are—because you
are
clever, George—I know you are—in your own way.”

“Thanks,” he retorted. “And perhaps you’ll tell me why in God’s name you should care
what
impression I make on a man like that?”

“Only because he might find you some work. I thought it was a stroke of luck when I met somebody who knew him—he’s very influential in the newspaper world, so Mrs. Wallington told me. And it would get us out of Browdley—that is, if he
did
say he could find you something.”

George gritted his teeth and replied: “Aye, he said he could. He offered me
six
pounds a week in his London office—provided I learned enough.”

“Oh, but George, that’s—that’s
wonderful
! You don’t make nearly so much out of the
Guardian—not
lately, anyhow.”

“Livia…” He stopped suddenly in the street and faced her. “Do you really mean you’d have me give up my own paper and all the work I do on the Council—just to have a job under a man like that? And what a job—writing patent-medicine ads…Livia, would you
really
have me do that?”

He knew what her answer would have been but for the look on his face, which made her temporize: “Maybe it isn’t exactly the life you’d choose. But
I
don’t choose the life I have, either…And why keep on saying ‘a man like that’? They can’t all be men like you.”

He began walking again. “Livia, let’s not quarrel. You did a silly thing, but I daresay you meant well. You asked this man to find me a job—you made yourself agreeable to him—you were pretending just as you were with Tom Whaley, weren’t you?” His eagerness to think so fanned a warmth between them. “I believe you really thought you were doing the best for me.”

“No…I was thinking about Martin more than you. That was the real reason.”

Then she told him the bare economic facts of his own household (which he had hardly guessed, so preoccupied had he been with the bare economic facts of the whole town)—the fact, for instance, that sometimes lately she hadn’t been able to afford the kind of food and clothing the child most needed, and had had to make do with the second-best. Though this was a condition common all over Browdley, and formed the subject matter of countless speeches he made, he was nevertheless shocked to find it so close to his own personal affairs—not because he thought he ought to have been exempt from what afflicted others, but simply because it had never occurred to him. And once it did, of course, why,
of course
, something must be done about it. But what
could
be done? persisted Livia, coolly stemming his indignation. It was no use her asking for more money because she knew, and none better, that the
Guardian
didn’t make it; she knew also there were no more business economies possible. Nor were there domestic ones; she herself did all the housework, and some of the office work too, now that she knew how careless Will Spivey was. As she very calmly explained: it had become her honest opinion after George’s electoral defeat that it would be a wise thing to leave Browdley, even apart from her own desire to do so.

“But—my Council work, Livia—”

“Where’s it getting you?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve not been defeated in
that
…
yet.
I don’t have all my own way—after all, who does?—but I am
on
the Council, pretty safely on too, judging by my last majority. And the job’s worth doing. I know you’re not interested in it—I don’t ask you to be, but do believe me when I say this—
it’s worth doing…
Livia, don’t hinder me in it—even if you can’t help me…And as for the extra things you need for Martin, you shall have them. Of course you shall—I had no idea you were doing without…I’d rather go without everything myself—”

“But you can’t, George. You don’t drink or smoke—there’s nothing you could give up…except Browdley.
That’s
your hobby, or your luxury—whatever you’d rather call it. And I don’t say you’re not entitled to it—you personally, that is—everyone has his own tastes. But what sort of a place is it for a child to grow up in?”

But that only gave him his own private cue for optimism, as she would have known if she had attended more of his meetings. For he answered, beginning quietly but with rising confidence as he proceeded: “Not such a bad place as it used to be…and I’ll make it better. You wait. You don’t know all the plans I have. And they’re not just dreams—they’re practical. I don’t tell you much—because I know you don’t want to hear about it—I
wish
you did…but never mind that. Mark my words, though. I’ll
do
things with this town. I’ll get the slums off the map. I’ll build schools…and a new hospital…I’ll…well, laugh at me if you like—I don’t care.”

She did not laugh, but she smiled as she took his arm. “I wouldn’t care either, but for Martin. You’d do anything for Browdley—I’d do anything for him.”

“So would I too—I just don’t see any conflict between them. Don’t you think I’m as devoted to the kid as you are?”

He was; but nevertheless in his heart he looked forward to the time when Martin would be a little older—old enough for the friendly father-and-son relationship to develop, old enough also to start the kind of education on which George set so much store. Whereas for Livia every tomorrow seemed a future far enough ahead and complete in itself; it was almost as if she hoarded the days of babyhood, unwilling to lose the separate richness of each one.

She was wrong, though, in saying there was nothing he could give up. There was, and he gave it up. She never knew, because she had never known anything about it at all. The fact was, after his electoral defeat George had gone back to his earlier ambition, the university degree. The long interval he had let pass meant digging over a good deal of old as well as new ground, but he tackled the job, as he did all his chosen jobs, with enthusiasm. Most of the necessary time he put in late at nights, in the room which he had now begun to call his “study”; and without actually telling Livia a direct lie, he allowed her to think he was busy preparing material for the
Guardian.
As she was generally asleep when he came up to bed she did not know how long he worked; sometimes it was half the night. He had a curious unwillingness to let her know what he still hankered after, partly because he was not sure he would ever succeed in winning it, but chiefly out of a sort of embarrassment; he was sure she would smile as at a grown man caught playing with a toy, for book learning to her was something you had forced on you during youth and then were mercifully released from ever afterwards. She might also (a more valid attitude) feel that if he had such time to spare it would be better spent in trying to sustain his own precarious livelihood. Anyhow, he did not tell her, and having not done so, it was easy to give the whole thing up without a word to anyone in the world. There were the examination fees he would now avoid, and he could also sell some of the expensive textbooks he had had to purchase. He did this and gave her everything thus saved, spreading it over a period so that she needed no explanation.

But the habit of reading in his study at night continued—in fact, the whole habit of study continued, for it was something bigger than a mere competitive examination that had inspired George. The fringe of scholarship he had touched had left him with an admiration for learned men all the more passionate because he almost never met them either in business or in politics; and there came to him a constant vision, the memory of the dome-headed spectacled examining professor who had been so indulgent to him about the Pathetic Fallacy.

Perhaps Martin would grow up into a learned man—which was another reason for not discussing the matter with Livia.

One thing, however, became both an immediate and a practical ambition—that the boy should have a vastly different childhood from his own. Not that his own had been cruel or vicious; merely that, in recollecting it, he was aware of how far it had been from the ideal. Perhaps equally far from the worst that it might have been, in Browdley, for George’s father had always had regular employment in a job that set him among the aristocracy of cotton-mill labor—a spinner’s wage being at that time more than twice that of the lowest-paid. And though Mill Street became a byword later, it was no worse during George’s childhood than nine tenths of Browdley; for the Boswells, like many other families, had lived in a four-roomed bathroomless house more because there were no others available than because they could not have afforded

better. Anyhow, Number 24, in which George was born, had been clean and decently furnished, and its occupants, though overcrowded, were never without enough plain food and strong soap and good winter fuel; they were “respectable chapel folk,” moreover, which meant that their children were nagged at without the use of technical bad language; and if the young Boswells feared their father too much, and their father feared his Heavenly Father, it was doubtless on general principles rather than for any more definite reason.

Even George’s early education, which was poor enough, had had a few passable things in it; indeed, at the old-fashioned prisonlike elementary school he was taught reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic far more thoroughly than were the youngsters in the luxurious modern school that George persuaded the Council to build years later. But there was a drawback to the thoroughness, for the teacher, a Mr. Rimington, was dull-witted enough to think history and geography “easy” subjects, and therefore somewhat to be despised. All George learned of the former was that somebody was a “good” king and somebody else a “bad” one, plus a few scraps of information such as that Henry the Second never smiled again and that Oliver Cromwell had a wart on his nose; while geography consisted largely of memorizing “what belongs to England,” and of copying maps—an occupation which Mr. Rimington approved of because it took so long and kept the class quiet. He was also dull-witted enough to think that a boy who turned over a page during a reading lesson without waiting for the order to do so was guilty of a serious breach of discipline. George had been punished for this once or twice, after which he hated and feared Mr. Rimington and formed a self-protective habit of concentrating his attention and disengaging his intelligence whenever he crossed the school threshold. Not till years afterwards when, as Chairman of the Browdley Education Committee, he had the task of choosing applicants for teaching posts, did he realize that Mr. Rimington had made himself thus terrifying because when he first became a teacher the rougher products of Browdley homes had terrified
him.

And now, as the father of the product of another Browdley home, George turned over in his mind his own childhood memories, not without a certain nostalgia, but with a resolute determination that Martin’s early life should contain happier ones. He remembered the crowded house in Mill Street, his mother’s continual nagging (behind which he had failed to diagnose the harassed affection that was really there), his father’s doomful voice at home and from the pulpit; the canal bank where he sneaked off to play when his father was at work and his mother was ill (the only time of real freedom he enjoyed); the elementary school round the corner and Mr. Rimington’s classroom, with its torn maps and dirty walls, the smell of wet clothes and steaming waterpipes in winter, and of sweat in summer; the slabs of dust-laden sunlight into which he so often stared after finishing tasks adjusted to the speed of the stupidest pupil; terrifying Mr. Rimington himself, and the not-quite-so-terrifying headmaster, old “Daddy” Simmons, whose habit, fascinating to all, was to stick his little finger into his ear and waggle furiously; and the paragraph in the tattered reading book that said: “Harrow is one of the great schools of England. Many famous Englishmen went there when they were boys. Some of them carved their names on the school desks, and these names can still be read. You must not carve your name on your school desk, but you can make up your mind to become a famous Englishman when you grow up…”