The Hireling

L P Hartley-THE HIRELING

Leslie Poles Hartley was born in 1895 and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. Since 1924, when he published his first book, his work attracted the attention of literary critics in Britain, though he published relatively infrequently. His first major success was a novel entitled The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944). His novel Eustace and Hilda in 1947 won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the first of many important literary awards to come his way. The Go-Between (also available in Penguins) was awarded the Heinemann Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of Literature in 1954. He was awarded the CBE in the New Year Honours in 1955. L. P. Hartley died in 1972.

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‘One of the best novels he has produced… at least as good a novel as A Perfect Woman and The Go-Between.

Peter Quennell in the Daily Mail.

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On her husband’s death Lady Franklin dropped her friends and wrapped herself in a penitential garment of grief.

Two years later, on a visit to Canterbury Cathedral, she impulsively began to unburden her soul to the driver of the hired car.

Leadbitter, a lonely, cynical ex-soldier, responded by trying to distract her with tales of his imaginary wife and family.

So begins a dangerous game - a game played by inhabitants of different planets.

The car-hire driver was tall and dark and handsome; he looked the regular soldier he had been when the war broke out. He had had other occupations, for as he would say of himself in expansive moments, I’ve had a very chequered career,’ but it was the Army that had left its mark on his appearance. That it was a striking appearance no one could doubt, least of all himself: but of this his bearing gave no hint whatever. He did not seem to take a pride in it; he guarded it as if it was a piece of public property. He looked smart, expensive, and unapproachable. Most people’s figures have the hazy outline of something seen dimly through short-sighted eyes. His figure looked as if it had been shaved. Aiming at correctness, he somehow achieved style; if the material was plebeian, it had a patrician cut. With an impassive face he opened the car door for his customers; with an impassive face he took their orders when these were not already known to him; with an impassive face he held the door open for his customers to alight. To those who noticed him as a man and not merely as a driver, he was a little formidable, and he meant to be. His manners, which were as faultless as his looks, might have been specially designed to protect his impersonality. When he spoke, which he seldom did except when spoken to, he had the air of unbending. Pompous or supercilious he was not; he did not seem to be taking himself seriously; but somewhere about him, perhaps in his eyes which were steadier than a peaceful occasion warranted, there was a hint of menace. ‘Keep off!’ they seemed to say, ‘Keep off!’

This was the face he turned to the world and the face he saw in the glass when, at whatever hour of the day or night it might be, he put on his business personality. But it was not the face his Maker saw, who had taken some trouble to design it. Behind his face the skull showed, the bony structure, narrow, delicate, and strong. Between his cheek bones and his temples a hollow was scooped out. His eyes were deep-set but so wide apart that when he turned his head their convex line encroached upon the concave, like the old moon in the new moon’s arms. They were the colour of gun-metal and looked as hard, and the pale gold gleam of gun-metal was in them. His black eyebrows were highly arched and one was slightly tufted; across his forehead, repeating the line of his eyebrows, was graven a deep wrinkle like a bow. His nose was straight and on the long side; below it a thin dark moustache hung like an inverted chevron. Strong vertical planes upheld these drooping crescents; they stretched from his cheekbones to his short, cleft chin, which, roughly triangular in outline, rose to a rounded plateau, divided from his mouth by a deep, downward-curving dent. On the top his black hair, threaded with grey, was thick and wavy; at the back it grew so close to his head that it might have been gummed on. His skin was not particularly dark but the modelling of his face was so clear-cut that even in a direct light it was full of shadows. In repose his expression was sad and brooding; when he laughed, which was seldom, he showed the whites above his eyeballs. Full face he looked older than his years, so much experience had left its imprint on his features, but in profile and from the back, which was the way his customers usually saw him, he looked younger. He did not look quite like an Englishman; he might have had a trace of Pictish blood.

Nature meant his face to be expressive but he did not; for an expression is a give-away and he did not want to give anything away. Personal prestige counted a lot with him; he would take offence in a moment, and often when it was not intended. In his salad days he had been known to get drunk and pick a quarrel. Not to like a man’s face was excuse enough for baiting him, and if blows followed, the driver, who had boxed for his battalion and been the anchorman in many a tug-of-war, could give a good account of himself. Not that he was a bully; in such moods he was ready to fight everybody, and ready, too, to drink with them afterwards; indeed at the conclusion of a scrap he felt more at peace with the world than at any other time. His courage wasn’t perfect, however. He was town-bred; and if, when he was courting, he had to cross a field with cattle in it, his flow of conversation would dry up until the danger passed.

On the parade ground and in the barrack room, if occasion warranted, he had a blistering tongue; but among his compeers and when no trouble was afoot he practised the art of understatement, understatement that was not so much deliberately ironical as an unconscious expression of the fact that he had seen too many examples of the unusual to be impressed by it.

‘Nothing that could happen would surprise me,’ he would say.

As for his philosophy he was, as he himself admitted, a cynic. Without having had any illusions to speak of, he managed to be disillusioned. Sometimes in the privacy of his bathroom he would sing to himself, and one of his songs ran (to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’):

‘I do believe, I do believe, That bugs are bigger than fleas, For on the wall they play football And I’m the referee.’

That, perhaps, was the extent of his belief. But he didn’t boast about it, for boasting was against his code and he was quick to make fun of it in others. ‘Beating eggs with a big stick,’ he called it, and it brought into his voice the lazy teasing note which was the signal, for those who knew him, to look out. ‘Won’t you say that again,’ he would say; ‘I’d like to hear it.’ But being a cynic, with a cynic’s realism, he held himself well in hand, and few, if any, of his customers would, have guessed what was being damped down behind that handsome poker-face. For he studied their personalities and did everything he could to please them, short of gushing; for gushing, he maintained, they didn’t like. He would say ‘my lord’ and ‘my lady’ and even ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ in such a way that these titles conferred peculiar distinction. He was rigorously punctual, which was more than could be said for all his colleagues in the car-hire business; and if circumstances made him late or if, as sometimes happened, he couldn’t do the job himself and had to send another man in his place, he would ring the customer up and apologize -or even write, much as he disliked writing letters. This solicitude, contrasting sharply with his impersonal manner, made a good impression, and his customers recommended him to their friends as a particularly civil, reliable, and obliging man.

For this he thanked them, but he had not a great deal to thank them for. In the nature of things they treated him with less consideration than he treated them. Many a time they kept him waiting till the small hours, at a night-club or a dance, without the offer of a sandwich or a cup of tea; many a time they cancelled a good job at the last moment, without apology or the promise of redress; sometimes they forgot about him altogether. They took his patience under their thoughtlessness for granted; they didn’t seem aware that he had feelings to hurt or interests to injure, and some of them talked together as freely in his presence as if he wasn’t there. He had long ceased to mind this and trained himself to turn a deaf ear to their prattle; but when he overheard it, it sometimes struck him as extremely silly. Some of his customers knew each other, but didn’t know they were employing the same man to drive them. The chiel amang us! Had he been given to gossiping with his customers about each other, which from policy and inclination he was not, he could have caused a load of mischief by repeating these unconsidered trifles. It was often his lot to pick up his customers after they had been lunching or dining with their friends. From the doorway came the babble of effusive thanks, but afterwards, in the car, their criticism of the food, the company, and the hostess, told another tale.

No wonder that his customers were ‘they’ to him, beings of an alien if not hostile race, idle, capricious, prone to change their minds and destinations, wanting him to drive against the traffic in one-way streets. But in congenial society, commenting on their shortcomings, he did not let himself sound angry or personally involved in his own disgust; he sounded as if the only sane man left was making indulgent fun of a mad world.

In spite of this the driver was a staunch Conservative and voted for the very people he made fun of, not only because they were his bread and butter but because with all their faults they represented something that he himself was striving to attain.

Two classes of customers escaped his censure. In one were some of the officers who had served with him in the war, and who employed him to do their driving for them (as he put it). With them he felt at home; talking to them he did not have to adapt himself or assume a protective personality. If he did not always use their words he spoke their language - the language of a shared experience. Narrow as the field of their relationship might be he understood it. He would lean back in his seat and let the stiffness out of his broad shoulders while his customer and he fought their battles over again.

The other class also was a small one, but much more unlikely, for it consisted of a few old ladies who had somehow - he himself could not have told how - won the driver’s esteem. Old ladies were not as a rule popular with car-hire men. They needed helping in and out; their manners, dating from an earlier day, could be as stiff and awkward as their movements; they were apt to make their wants known in clear, confident, emphatic voices which invited a disobliging answer. Most drivers had no patience with them, but this driver had; though he would not have owned up to it, they could rely on him for every courtesy. ‘She was a nice old lady,’ he would sometimes wonderingly remark. From him this commendation meant a lot, for ‘nice’ was not a word that he used lightly _ in fact he seldom used it except in connexion with these old ladies.

But there were not many of them and for women as a whole the driver had no use whatever. He had lived with more than one but he regarded them as a disagreeable necessity. Women were cruel, he said; surprisingly that was his main charge against them. How had they contrived to be cruel to a man who seemed such an unpromising subject for cruelty - to be, in fact, cruelty-proof, not cruelty-prone? If there was going to be any cruelty, it should have come from him. But no; women are cruel, he said; they like to make one suffer.

As often as not, when he thought of women, his memory went back to his mother’s shoes. She had two dozen pairs of them. She spent money in other ways as well, but the shoes were the extravagance his father always picked on. Why must she have so many? Why shouldn’t she have them? she would ask tearfully of her eldest son; and he, who was given a lot of responsibility but little else, couldn’t see why she shouldn’t, and cried too. She was sweet as honey to him when his father was angry with her. But not, or very often not, at other times. By turns she petted him and scolded him, he never knew which to expect, but he knew that it didn’t depend on his behaviour, it depended on her mood. She always got her way over the shoes; if one pair was thrown away, two pairs were added. What did it matter, the boy wondered; what was it all about? Growing older he saw; the family was short of money, almost on the rocks; he and the others had only one pair of shoes each, but his mother’s were still there in two long rows. He grew to hate the sight of them, and when she came to him crying it was his father with whom he sympathized, not her. But how could he stand up to her when his father couldn’t? Her purposeful, enveloping, insidious character was too much for them both.

Inured to the climate of hostility, but tired of being a buffer, the boy ran away from home and joined the Army.

The Army seemed a paradise of non-combatants, and the band in which he played a cave of harmony. News reached him from home, tentacles stretching out; but the sight of his mother’s handwriting made him tremble and feel sick; not till her letters ceased did he cease to be afraid. For many years afterwards he tried to keep his eyes off women’s shoes and when he saw them, emblems of unabashed femininity, his skin prickled.