The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (35 page)

So he exaggerated his calm, and it was only when he was on the train, the briefcase on his lap, that he relaxed. The delicate lines about his deep-set eyes became lines of humour; the lips curved. He smiled, a tired, elderly office worker oblivious of the crowd, his eyes fixed unseeing on the insurance poster.

After dinner that evening, when he was filling his pipe and Margaret was knitting, in light of painful dullness (she was sensitive to harsh light), he said, ‘I believe they’ll be wanting me at Head Office.’

The words meant little to her. And she simply said, ‘That’s very nice, Doggie.’

He fell silent. She did not notice it, so it did not develop into one of their silences. However, he resolved to tell her nothing more.

*

Old Harry—as he was known to those who did not know him, but Sir Harry to those whom he admitted to converse which they hoped to suggest was intimate—was a terrifying figure. In the eyes of their wives, men like Mr Stone and Tomlinson and Tomlinson’s friends had their forbidding public image as well. But whereas they dropped the public mask in private, Old Harry, such was his importance, dropped his public mask in public. He wrote letters to
The Times.
He wrote on the number of pins in new shirts, the number of matches in matchboxes; he wrote on concrete lamp-standards. He never entered the first cuckoo competition, but he made important contributions to ‘The Habits of the No. 11 Bus’ and initiated the correspondence on the London Transport bus ticket. (‘The smudged curling scrap of paper with which I am presented neither looks nor feels like an omnibus ticket, which is after all a certificate of travel, however humdrum. It is scarcely suitable for tucking into the hatband, like any respectable ticket. Rather, its flimsiness and general disreputable appearance encourage one heedlessly to crumple it into a ball or, in more creative moments, neatly to fold it into a miniature accordion,
both ball and accordion vanishing at the moment when the omnibus inspector makes a request for their appearance.’) Transport was in fact his special subject, and he had built up a reputation, nowhere more formidable than at Excal, for his knowledge of the country’s railway system. (What he said to Miss Menzies at the garden party was famous. ‘So you live in Streatham? But that’s where the main line trains branch off for Portsmouth.’) Every letter Old Harry wrote to
The Times
was cut out by Miss Menzies together with the correspondence contents column, which made the title of the writer plain, pasted on to a sheet of thin white paper and circulated round the department, returning from its round impressively initialled in a variety of handwritings, inks and pencils. The effect of these frivolous letters over the years was to turn Old Harry into a figure of awe. With every letter he receded; his occasional references to himself as ‘a member of the travelling public’ were shattering; and the impression of grandeur and inaccessibility was completed by his reported left-wing leanings.

So Mr Stone’s departure for his interview with Old Harry at Head Office, for a reason neither Evans nor anyone else in the department knew, was in the nature of a solemn send-off. He was in his best Simpson’s suit; Margaret, with an appreciation of Sir Harry rather than the occasion, had chosen his tie. For a moment Mr Stone felt it was like going to a wedding, and the feeling was encouraged by the tearful appearance in the library of one of the typists, a broad-framed young slattern whose main topic of conversation was the refusal of the LCC to put her down on their housing list (in fact she and her husband ran a car). She had had a difficult morning; she had been ‘reprimanded’ by Evans; and now she said almost angrily to Mr Stone, ‘It’s people like you who make it hard for the rest of us.’

He paid no attention and, walking down the middle of the corridor, not at the side, as he had done in the past to escape detection, and carrying no papers in his hand, went out of the office, in the middle of the workday morning.

*

He had hardly sat down in his chair in the library that afternoon when Keenan came tiptoeing in.

‘Well, what did Old Harry have to say?’ Keenan’s knees were twitching; his hands, in his pockets, appeared to be fondling his private parts; and the concern in his whispered question was belied by the delight in his eyes, his lips, his moustache.

‘Sir Harry and I,’ Mr Stone said, ‘discussed a project I had put up for the creation of a new department.’

And again Mr Stone had the delicious sensation of flying in his chair. Keenan’s reaction was a caricature of astonishment and incredulity. For seconds he held himself in his conspiratorial stoop, held his smile. Then he straightened, his hands and knees went still, his smile grew empty and disappeared, and it was as if the distance between the two men had become unbridgeable. Keenan’s joviality vanished. The lines of good humour in his face became fussy lines of worry and suppressed hysteria. In his thin, shapeless trousers, his broken spectacles, he appeared, beside Mr Stone in his Simpson’s suit, quite abject and mean. The almost immediate return of his restless jollity did not efface that moment.

Another relationship had been adjusted, changed. But Mr Stone flew. For the rest of that afternoon, for the rest of that week, he walked about the corridors of the office as one who sat in his chair and flew.

At the end of the month Mr Stone was moved to Welfare, to a new office in a new building, where the furniture was brand-new from Heal’s and where there was no Miss Menzies to signal the passing of the days by her costume. His salary was raised to £1,500 a year. His transfer but not his salary was mentioned in the house magazine; there was also a photograph. And it was the house magazine that he casually showed Margaret on the day of its publication (some half a dozen copies in his briefcase), saying, ‘Something about me here.’

Around him the world was awakening to green and sun. The tree in the school grounds at the back became flecked, then brushed, with green. And this was no mere measuring of time. He was at one with the tree, for with it he developed from day to day, and every day there were new and inspiring things to do. At Welfare there were the long sessions with Whymper, the young PRO who had been assigned to the new department. The idea, Whymper said, was good, very good. He was ‘excited’ by it, but it had to be ‘licked into shape’. These last words he spoke with almost physical relish, passing a thick tongue over his top lip, tapping a cigarette in his own manner on his silver cigarette case. Whymper saw himself as a processor of raw material. He spoke as one whose chief delight lay in sifting, cleaning, removing impurities. He said he made nothing. ‘But,’ he added, ‘I make something out of nothing.’

For someone who took pride in his ability to refine, his appearance was strangely coarse, and Mr Stone’s first impressions were not good. The squarish jaws were slack and a little too fleshy, the lips bruised-looking with rims like welts (having tapped his cigarette in that way of which he was so proud, he rolled it between these lips, and sometimes the cigarette came out wet at the end); the eyes were soft and brown and unreliable, as of someone made uncertain by suffering. He was of medium height and average physique. For such men ready-to-wear suits are made by the hundred thousand, but nothing Whymper wore appeared to fit. His clothes had the slackness of his jaw; they suggested that the flesh below was soft, never exposed, unhardened. His jacket, always awry, made him look round-shouldered and sometimes even humped. And his fancy waistcoats—for Whymper was interested in clothes—were only startling and ridiculous.

Mr Stone did not like being told that his idea had to be licked into shape. And his displeasure grew when at their first meeting in Welfare Whymper abruptly said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying so, Stone, but I find the way you tap a cigarette profoundly irritating.’

Cigarette in hand, Mr Stone paused.

‘Go on,’ Whymper said. ‘Let’s see you tap it.’

Mr Stone held the cigarette between forefinger and thumb and struck.

This, Whymper said, was wrong. The correct way was to let the cigarette drop from a height of half an inch, so that it bounced back into the grip of forefinger and thumb.

For two or three minutes they tapped cigarettes, Whymper the instructor, Mr Stone the pupil.

Distaste for Whymper was, however, quickly replaced by pleasure in the man’s quick mind, his capacity for hard work and above all his enthusiasm, which Mr Stone took as a compliment to himself, though it very soon became clear that Whymper’s ‘excitement’ differed from his own.

‘How about this?’ Whymper said. ‘Our pensioners visit the pensioners of clients. Take them a little gift from the company and so on. It wouldn’t break Excal. And look. Word will get around. “Our relationships are more than business relationships. They are relationships between friends”.’ He spoke the words as if they were already a slogan. ‘That sort of thing will do a lot more good than all those Christmas cards. Nobody likes a PRO. You don’t have to tell me. But who will suspect these old boys? And think. Men working for Excal even after they retire. A whole army of Excal old boys on the march, in every corner of the country.’

Mr Stone allowed himself to play with the idea. He gave the pensioners of his fantasy long white beards, thick, knotted sticks and Chelsea Hospital uniforms. He saw them tramping about country lanes, advancing shakily through gardens in full bloom, and knocking on the doors of thatched cottages.

‘Thousands of unpaid PROs,’ Whymper was saying. ‘Welcome wherever they go. One in every village.’

‘Unrealistic.’

Always there was this difference in their approaches, Whymper talking of benefits to Excal, Mr Stone having to conceal that his plan
had not been devised to spread the fame of Excal, but simply for the protection of the old.

And in Whymper’s attitude lay this especial irritant, that he seemed not to acknowledge the concern and fear out of which the plan had arisen, or the passion which had supported Mr Stone during its elaboration, going up night after night to his study. Whymper did not acknowledge this; Mr Stone was unwilling to state it. And as they endlessly discussed modifications and alternatives Mr Stone found that he was beginning, however slightly, to adopt Whymper’s position that the venture was one of public relations.

‘I am excited by this thing,’ Whymper said every day during their discussions. ‘I feel that something big can be made of it.’

He was full of ideas. It amused him to exercise his inventiveness, and he described even the wildest idea at length, with much tangential detail. When these ideas ran down or were otherwise disposed of, he returned to the duplicated memorandum that lay before him and asked Mr Stone to outline his scheme afresh.

‘We write to our pensioners,’ Mr Stone said. ‘We invite those who want to do so to become Visitors or Companions. In this way we sort out the active from the inactive. We send our Visitors or Companions or whatever we call them details of the people they have to visit. The inactive. Age, department, date of retirement, length of service and so on.’

‘That’s where we’ll need staff,’ Whymper said.

‘Our Visitors report cases of special need. We investigate those. But for the normal visit nothing more is required than the Visitor’s travelling expenses and a refund for the small gift—flowers or chocolate—that he takes. In this way we organize our pensioners into a self-sufficient, self-help unit. All we provide is the administration.’

Always they came back like this to Mr Stone’s original points, so that it seemed that by ‘licking into shape’ Whymper meant only wandering away from a point before returning to it.

This perversity of Whymper’s encouraged Mr Stone to speak
with increasing enthusiasm. Fear of being too explicit about his motives led him to vagueness. But he steadily revealed more of what he truly felt, and to his surprise Whymper neither derided nor looked puzzled.

‘This is interesting,’ Whymper would say intently; his eyes narrowing. ‘You are holding me. This is what I want.’

Mr Stone expanded. He had solved some of the problems of old age. He rescued men from inactivity; he protected them from cruelty. He preserved for men the comradeship of the office, which released them from the confinement of family relationships. He kept alive loyalty to the company. And he did all this at almost no cost: his scheme would cost Excal no more than £20,000 a year.

‘A society,’ Whymper said, ‘for the protection of the impotent male.’

Whymper’s talk was full of sexual references like this. Mr Stone had learned to ignore them, but at this remark he could not hide his embarrassment and disgust.

Whymper was delighted. ‘This is what I want,’ he said. ‘You’ve got me interested. Go on.’

More and more, in the process of licking into shape, Whymper placed Mr Stone in the position of the defender, the explainer, until at length, passion exhausted, Mr Stone was driven to make easy statements which were like insincerities. But these impressed Whymper no less.

Once, towards the end of the week, Mr Stone heard himself saying, ‘It is a way, you see, of helping the poor old people.’

It was ridiculous and cheap, and far from what he felt. But Whymper only said in an earnest, matter-of-fact way, ‘The treatment of the old in this country is scandalous.’

And it was at this level that their discussions remained, as though they had both decided not to open their minds fully and had tacitly agreed not to point this out to one another.

They came to discuss the name of the project.

‘We want something really inspiring,’ Whymper said.
‘Something that will actually get the old boys out on the road and up to the various front doors.’

Mr Stone had not thought of a name at all. And now, sitting at the desk with Whymper, Whymper tapping his cigarette and rolling it between his lips, he felt he did not want to think of a name. He feared a further cheapening of his idea.

‘Luncheon Vouchers are big business,’ Whymper said. ‘And you know why? The name. Luncheon voucher. In those words you have lunch, crunch, munch, mouth, rich. You even have belch. Why, the words are like a rich meal. That’s what we want. Something that would explain. Something that would inspire. Something memorable.’