The Balliols (2 page)

For that matter nothing could have surprised them more than the warning that such a crisis was imminent on that first April afternoon when they walked up the hill from Hendon towards the first pile of cement and mortar, the first rough trench, the first poles of scaffolding that had scared the hill's green flank.

It was a warm day with the sky blue and the sun only intermittently obscured by clouds. The estate agent's clerk who stood watching the Balliols' slow ascent of the steep hill had bicycled three miles from his firm's office. He was tired and he was hot. A film of dust clotted his boots, under the clipped trousers. Drops of sweat glistened between the pimples on his forehead.

He was a young man, in the early twenties, with pretensions to dandiness. A bowler hat was tilted jauntily upon his head. A carefully greased lock of hair curled beneath its brim. He wore a high “choker” collar and a gilt pin set sideways in a stiff silk tie. He had a perky, not unlikeable confidence. He was pleased with himself. He had begun where his parents had left off. He represented progress. Just as the stack of bricks in the roadway represented progress. He was proud of both.

He tilted his hat backwards and patted at his forehead with a bandana handkerchief; his thoughts busied upon the Balliols.

It was after four. They were going to have tea in Golders Hill, he shouldn't wonder; seated on the terrace looking out over the lawn. New bread, fresh butter, water cress, meringues. As a kid he had watched people, seated up there. How he had envied them; how he had wondered when the day would come for him to join them! It hadn't, yet. But it would do. There would come a time when he'd be able to afford things like that. A time when he'd be like this couple here; in a position to buy a house.

He wondered if they were considering such a purchase. Their saunter had dwindled into a dawdle. They had stopped and were looking at the pile of bricks and mortar, the scaffolding, the barrels, the high-heaped clay.

They looked prosperous. The man's clothes made an enviably “band-box” effect. He carried himself with the assured manner of
those who have to work but not to fight for livelihood. His manner fitted comfortably, like his clothes.

The woman was of the kind that may have had to consider pounds but never shillings. He placed her at thirty-two. But she might be more. You could not tell with women of that kind; who could afford nice things, who had not to depend upon their youth to look attractive. She was slim and graceful, her movements supple. Her colouring was fresh, but that might be because she could afford to keep it so. She could afford creams and special kinds of soap. There were women in society who actually made up their faces, he'd been told; put powder on, and rouge, blacked their eyelashes. He hadn't believed it. Decent women wouldn't, surely. Certainly not women of this kind. All the same, as he had said to Alf Turner, “There can't be smoke without fire, if you get me.” Those women did certainly know how to make themselves look young.

Yes: they were the kind of people who might want a house out here.

He moved across to them.

“It's worth looking at,” he said. “The first house to go up on this hill. It won't be the last. You wait. All this business of bricks and mortar doesn't mean just a few more houses, but a different sort of house. This isn't going to be a row of houses; not just another London street. It's going to be like a village. Garden Suburbs their name for it. Half town, half country, if you get me. Every family with a garden of their own that they can sit about in; arranging it the way they like; crazy pavement and all that. Not those miserable little strips you see up West, with a square in the centre that anyone can use. Every one on their own here; private, if you get me. Ten years ago it wouldn't ‘ave been possible. Land in London cost too much. People had to live within three miles of their work. Not now, though, thanks to these tube railways. By June they're going to have one out to here. You wait and see the difference it'll make. A portent, that's what it is, a portent.”

He repeated the word as though to satisfy himself that he was using correctly a word that he had very recently added to his vocabulary. He then proceeded to develop his thesis. People were not going to go on living in hot, narrow, noisy streets when they could get away into clean and quiet air. Town might be all very well for people who wanted to be in the very centre of things and could afford houses in the country that they could go down to for week-ends. It might be all right for
them
. But for the others,
who couldn't afford week-end cottages and country houses, there was only one sane alternative.

“Just think of the difference for a man to have something to look forward to during the day, something to come back to at the end of it. Greenhouse and a potting-shed. A lawn to mow, good exercise; something to show for it, if you get me. Flowers coming up; being able to say ‘These parsnips are from our garden'; pointing to a bowl of flowers, ‘Yes, our roses haven't done so badly this year'; having a place where children can tumble about in old clothes. That's a life worth living.”

He spoke breathlessly, with an enthusiasm that was in part vicarious—his salesman's capacity to reproduce the pictures and phraseology of a prospector—but was in large part personal, lit by his own memories of childhood; the drab gentility of the ‘nineties; the prim starched Sundays; the long winter evenings, with father coming back at seven; the long winter week-ends with father blocking out the fire; the afternoon walks through monotonous hard streets; the drear holidays when he had longed for the next term to start. The occasional treats to which days had been counted on a calendar, which had invariably ended in headaches, exhaustion, frayed nerves, ill-humour. The next generation would be spared all that. His eyes sparkled as he spoke. Whatever the past might have been, the future was rich and full.

“London will be a different place within ten years. A transformation, that's what it'll be, a transformation. You wait!”

He made the assertion with a confidence that was aggressive, but untruculent. He paused; the spokesman of the spirit of new things, wondering what effect his harangue had made. He was not really empowered to negotiate at all. He was just a clerk drawing his thirty-bob a week, who had been sent out as any clerk might be, with a message to a foreman. But he wasn't going to stay a clerk all his life. It was by such an incident as this that people stopped being clerks. They saw an opportunity and seized it. Forced their employers to take notice of them, to recognize them as being out of the rut, worthy of promotion. It was a moment such as this that warranted the cards he had had printed at the cost of a month's cigarettes and beer.

He drew a small envelope from his pocket, extracted from it a card in the corner of which was written the name and address of the agency for which he worked. With what he took to be a flourish he presented it.

“I don't know if you're thinking of buying a property here, but
if you ever do, well, it wouldn't do any harm to be in touch with someone in the know; personal equation, if you get me.”

“That's very nice of you.”

“And if… well, if you cared to let me have your card, I could send you along any prospectus that I thought might interest you.”

Balliol hesitated; then with a smile drew a card case from his waistcoat pocket, and in his turn took a card from it and handed it across. The young man read it: the name, Mr. Edward Balliol, the club in the left-hand corner, the Oxford and Cambridge, the address at the other side, 22 Easton Square. As he had thought, the kind of address his firm wanted on its books.

“And that,” said Balliol, as he and Jane walked on out of earshot, “is the kind of young man for whom I prophesy a quite early and a quite pronounced success. I can picture him in twenty-five years converted into a portly, pompous committee man with a son entered for one of our lesser public schools; a son of whom he will be immensely proud and secretly afraid, whose bills he will settle half a dozen times and who, each time that he accepts a cheque, will contrive to give the impression that he is conferring instead of receiving a favour; who will marry for worldly reasons and whose progeny will arrive in the bankruptcy, by way of the divorce courts. Which is what, my dear, we call progress nowadays.”

Jane made no reply. The long walk had begun to tire her. Her steps were not dragging, her breath was not hurried, her movements had the same smooth rhythm that had attracted the young man's appreciative eye as she began the heightening climb. It had rather the gliding grace of a liner as it swings into harboured water, its engines faintly purring.

Her husband continued his dissertation. “And it is to compete with such a one that we of the upper middle classes are at this moment training our sons at Marlborough, Cheltenham and Fernhurst. It is like training a terrier to be pitted against a wolf. There is our own Hugh at the end of his second year at Fernhurst. His competitive eye has already sorted out his rivals. He has marked the chief obstacle to his captaincy of the eleven, his most redoubtable opponent in the classroom. He fancies, as far as he has concerned himself with the problem, which is I expect to no large extent, that all through the life for which this education is supposed to train him, he will find the graph of his ambition defined by such simple landmarks. He would be astonished were he to be informed that
he will find himself in competition fifteen years from now with someone whose existence at this moment he would not deign to recognize: an alert product of the council schools, attending night-classes at the end of eight hours' manual labour in a factory.”

As always, Balliol talked as though the subject under discussion, in this case his son's education, was not a problem personal to himself, but one aspect of the general, social and economic problem of the hour.

He continued on the same blandly impersonal note.

“The trouble about such a competitor is this: Only one in ten thousand out of what our parents would have called the lower orders is born with sufficient ambition and capacity to enter the lists of such a competition. That one out of ten thousand has, in consequence, so many preliminary obstacles to face, that in passing them he acquires a momentum. He has started from so much farther back that he arrives at the starting post at a pace which within a few yards carries him right ahead of his opponents. He has, in fact, a flying start. In my day, when the masses were uneducated, we were spared such redoubtable opposition. I am convinced that Hugh has no conception of how different life is going to be for him. And I am extremely doubtful whether those who have been set in authority over him have recognized it, either.”

Said Jane, “I think it'll be warm enough to have tea out on the terrace.”

They had reached the brief plateau, before Pitt House, where the hill pauses before starting its final climb to the Spaniards Road. Three youths on bicycles went by abreast. Their machines were not free wheel. They had spread out their feet sideways, so that their pedals could revolve; their caps were pulled tight to their foreheads, back to front, the peaks low upon their shoulders. They screamed excitedly to one another as they reached the top of the steepest hill within a five-mile radius of Piccadilly.

As their machines rushed past, a motor-car with high scarlet bonnet, snorted, rattled, wheezed its way over the crest. It reached the plateau; it checked as though it were pausing to take breath; it groaned; it grunted; there was a grinding screech of tortured metal as the goggled motorist changed gears. Then with an abrupt jerk forward and a series of slight explosions the machine proceeded on its ascent.

Balliol shook his head.

“Dangerous things. They've spoilt the road for bicycling. I should not care to take a machine out now. I am very glad that
what the press now call the cycling era coincided with my own enjoyment of violent exercise.”

The era had framed their courtship. During their decorous Victorian engagement when it was considered improper for women to ride in hansoms, and evening excursions had demanded chaperons, they had ridden out in parties of four or six; he in a knickerbocker suit and belted jacket; she with a high-necked white blouse and straw hat perched forward on her head; scouring northern lanes through long autumn afternoons; looking down from Harrow, Highgate, Hampstead on to the glitter of London's roofs and spires; taking their tea in cottage gardens.

As they turned through the park gates he passed his arm under hers.

“It must be over five years since we came out here,” she said.

They had abandoned such excursions very early in their marriage. Their first child, Lucy, had been born within a year, and during Jane's weeks of indisposition a friend had presented Balliol with a book in which the cycling enthusiast might enter his runs, the distances and times, the average of miles per hour. Within a very short time the fever of figures had bitten Balliol. He was always out to beat his own record. When Jane once again took the road it was to find that the care-free spirit had departed. Her husband no longer cycled for the pleasure of open air and open country; for exercise and the sense of speed; the freedom of being away from bricks and pavements. He cycled with one eye on the clock, the other on the cyclometer. He kept saying, “Now, do you think we could reach Shenley within twenty-three and a half minutes?” He grew resentful of wayside rests at the end of a long pull up a hill. He kept taking out his little book, writing figures, comparing figures. At the end of a day, instead of talking lazily before a fire, he would draw up charts by means of which he would invariably discover that there was some record or other that he had broken, even if it was no more than the speed record for the first twelve minutes after tea.

In such bicycling Jane could take no pleasure. When she found she was again pregnant, fully a year before she had really wanted, she had consoled herself with the thought that anyhow she would not need to bicycle for another year. Perhaps during that time she would have been able to devise an excuse for avoiding their weekend excursions.