Bellman & Black (25 page)

He read through what he had written, then tore the paper to pieces and dropped them in the wastepaper basket. There would be a better way of wording it. He’d do it tomorrow, when he was fresh.

F
or more than twelve months up to a hundred men a day had been kept busy in the construction of Bellman’s great monster. The skeleton had risen gigantically from the ground, stone by stone. Glaziers, tensely handling vast sheets of glass, fitted eyes in the creature’s gaping sockets. Along the bones of the building ran arteries designed to carry the very lifeblood of the enterprise: money. Canisters containing money could be placed at any sales point into a niche in the wall. Once the door to the niche was closed a pneumatic system would whip the payment swiftly to the accountant’s office at the heart, where a cashier would make out a receipt for the payment, this receipt being returned to the customer the same way. Meanwhile the shop staff would be able to continue their business of sympathy and consolation, activities that did not sit naturally, Bellman considered, with the handling of cash. A second network of veins delivered the gas to illuminate all this. Over the bones and arteries, covering them, joiners applied a skin of fielded mahogany paneling.

Bellman saw all this. He was pleased.

The day came when the shop fitters went in. Theirs was the job of giving the monster the character of a shop: the provision to the retail floors of counters, shelves, cupboards, drawers, display cabinets, and racks; on the second floor the offices with their desks and filing cabinets; on the third floor, the seamstresses’ work stations; in the attics, tiny bedrooms for the seamstresses; in the basement the shelving and
work stations for dispatch, the reception area and storage for incoming stock together with related offices.

This same day there was activity outside the building. A small crowd of passers-by had gathered for the spectacle. All eyes were on the platform over the main entrance. There was an air of expectation, as if it were a sculpture or a monument ready for unveiling—not that there was really any surprise in store, for the top edge of the shop windows already bore the name Bellman & Black.

Eighteen feet up in the air, three men stood on the dais. One was gesturing firmly to his fellows on the ground and calling out “Up! Up! Up! Steady! To me! Steady!” while a weighty form, padded, wrapped, and trussed so that its true shape could only be guessed at, was raised on a hoist. Calmly it swung on its ropes, careless of the height and the nearness of the window glass. Below, men labored at the pulley; above, arms stretched out to steady the weight and guide it onto the projecting ledge. A second padded shape was hoisted into the air, then a third. Next there was a certain amount of business on the platform. Ropes to be untied, sacking covers stripped, packing removed.

Bellman’s neck was aching from looking up. Wishing for something to settle his stomach, he brushed his coat free of the bits of straw that had come to rest on it.

Next to him, Fox was now doing the calling: “Left! Again. Stop!”

And now Fox nudged him: “What do you say? About right?”

Bellman looked. The workmen, dwarfed by the scale of the centerpiece, stepped to the edge of the dais to give them a clear view, and there it was. His initial and Black’s, linked by the sinuous handcuff loop of the ampersand. The silver glittered in the sun, and the crowd burst into applause.

Lighter, they had told him. Less solid.

He was prepared this time.

“Yes,” he said curtly to Fox. “Good.”

Some in the crowd had turned their attention away from the shop front and toward him.

“Mr. Bellman, that is,” he heard someone say. “The man himself.”

And another voice came from the crowd. “And Mr. Black? Where is he?”

Bellman waved an abrupt thank-you in the direction of the men on the dais and strode rapidly in the direction of the entrance.

“You don’t want to oversee the positioning of the garland?” Fox chased after him. At the back of the platform were a number of crates awaiting attention. He had checked them this morning. They were filled with a botanical tangle of silver lilies and garlands of gilded ivy leaves.

“You see to it. I’ll come back when it’s done.”

But the day was a busy one and he didn’t find the time. He couldn’t be everywhere at once. Not that it mattered. The men knew what they were doing, and Fox was there. In any case, there was always tomorrow.

M
en balanced on ladders to fit the gaslights. They hammered nails with not a shred of pity for the ears. They sanded and retouched paintwork where a poorly fitted window had leaked. They heaved mattresses from the basement to the very top of the building so that the seamstresses would have somewhere to sleep. They crouched on the stairs marking the positions for the brackets for carpet rods. Tools and men and materials were everywhere, and no man could find his chisel when he wanted it. Fox was in all places at once, nodding, checking, ticking things off.

Only two weeks remained before the grand opening of Bellman & Black. There were a thousand things to be done before that day, and they were all being done at once.

To add to the chaos, there were girls in the shop. Today was the day of the interviews for the seamstresses. Arriving by the side door, they came into a hall of hammering, banging, measuring, carrying, shouting, and cursing. The smells of paint and varnish were in the air. The girls held their skirts carefully out of the sawdust and away from the paint. A surprising number of obstacles contrived to be in the path of the women—rolled carpet, planks, lengths of architrave—but the men were endlessly willing to grasp them by the waist and lift them over. The mattress carriers winked promises to one girl after another—the softest mattress for you, my lovely—but most of them were too intent on getting a job to flirt back.

One of the girls, as pretty and as well made as any of the others, was pale and hesitant. The noise and the boisterousness of the work seemed to inflict itself on her painfully, and she flinched. Seeing that she had to cross an entire floor of workmen the girl seemed ready to turn tail and leave, but a joiner, paternal and kindhearted, spoke.

“That’s the way, miss. That door over there.”

She thanked the man but was secretly sorry for his kindness: it obliged her to go on.

“They won’t eat you!” he told her, and she thanked him with the ghost of a smile.

In the midst of all this busyness and flirting was Bellman. He strode about the shop, a dark figure in his black suit, and where he went, the circle of his influence moved with him. Men within the reach of his aura labored seriously, with none of the chat and teasing that was going on elsewhere. Even the girls picked up the altered atmosphere that surrounded him. They could not prevent themselves from staring, and their eyes had both admiration and alarm in them.

When he had passed through the first floor and disappeared—through a solid mahogany wall, or so it seemed—the pale girl turned to the man who had helped her.

“Is that Mr. Black?”

“Mr. Bellman that is, sweetheart. We don’t see hide nor hair of Mr. Black here.”

The girl found her way to the suite of offices where the interviews were to be held. The junior clerks’ shared room—still without its desks—had been designated a waiting room. There were no men here, only a tight-lipped woman who asked the name of each newcomer, and checked it on a list. The seamstresses collected themselves. Deft fingers tucked strands of hair under hats. This was serious. Bellman & Black was offering good money.

But then a door opened at the near end of the room, and the whispers ceased as a middle-aged woman with the plainest of hairstyles appeared.
She was dressed with immaculate simplicity, in deep black, unadorned by anything except her neatness, and all the seamstresses understood instantly what would be expected of them.

Her counterpart handed her the sheet of names and she called the first on the list. One of the girls raised a hand.

“Would you come in?”

The door closed behind them, and it had begun.

Bellman took the staff staircase to the second floor. The corridor smelled of fresh paint, and he took care not to brush against the walls. Like the rest of the shop, it was not finished: his desk was there and he had already used it, but it had not found its permanent position; boxes of stationery were piled in a corner; a vast cork notice board was propped against a wall; rectangular objects wrapped in paper and tied with string—prints for the walls?—were marked with the word
FRAGILE
.

The shutters had been fixed in a hurry yesterday evening. Bellman three-quarter closed them. In the semidarkness, he shifted the notice board a foot to one side. He ran his fingers over the mahogany paneling behind, located the picture hook, and tugged. The plug of mahogany came away with no difficulty.

Bellman applied his eye to the spyhole. The table had been angled so that he saw the excellent Miss Chalcraft, his senior seamstress, sideways on and the seamstresses almost full face.

“Where have you worked before?” Miss Chalcraft asked. “How long have you been there? What examples of your work can you show me?”

As the interview was progressing, Bellman took his notebook from his pocket. Girl No. 1, he wrote. He listened to her answers, studied her manner and her appearance, and gave her a 7 to indicate her general aptitude for the job. The third column—for technical ability—he left blank. Miss Chalcraft would be the judge of that. The fourth column was the one that gave him pause for thought. The figure he entered here was to reflect a more elusive quality. His seamstresses would not
always work out of sight upstairs. Sometimes they would be called on to go out to customers’ homes, to measure up and make dresses in situ, to dress a whole family and the servants in mourning wear in just a few days. To properly enter a house of mourning where they would represent the company, some of the girls at least had to have something special, something he already thought of as a particularly Bellman & Black quality. Not every girl would be right to hold a tape measure to bosoms heaving with sorrow, and pinning distressed ladies into crepe required a special kind of tender invisibility. It was hard to define, but Bellman thought he would recognize it when he saw it. Miss Chalcraft had been instructed to ask certain more personal questions, in order to elicit evidence of this vital factor. This is what the last column was to indicate, and Girl No. 1 did not have it. He wrote a plain zero.

Bellman was quick in making his assessments. He did not hesitate. Girl followed girl, and he jotted down his numbers in columns. As he watched and listened the rest of his mind turned over other difficulties: the glazier that Fox had turned off the site after an expensive breakage had taken his revenge by stealing a fellow laborer’s tools away—or so the man said. And the fellow they’d taken on to manage dispatch hadn’t turned up today. What was the matter there? Yes, the building was pretty much under control, it was the people now . . .

Something captured his attention in the interview room.

Girl No. 9 was speaking.

“. . . so sudden. I wasn’t expecting it. Everything was all right, and then—”

She raised her hand, a beseeching gesture, as though to call someone back, or retain something that was drifting out of reach. Although she couldn’t know about the spyhole, it was in that direction that her hand moved, and Bellman had the curious impression that the girl was reaching for him. Her face was naked with yearning, as though even now the person lost might be restored to her. Her fingertips closed on thin air. There was a moment of silence. Then she drew her hand back and
placed it in her lap, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again her sad gaze was reconciled to her loss.

The excellent Miss Chalcraft allowed a perfectly judged pause to convey her kind sympathy before asking, “And what can you show me of your work?”

The two women bent their heads over the items that Girl No. 9 had brought with her.

Bellman made his notes and decided to speak to the man whose tools might have been stolen by himself. It was not unheard of for a worker to sell his tools for drink and claim they had been stolen from him. He would not persist in a lie if Bellman himself was present. When he bent his eye to the spyhole again, Girl No. 10 was sitting down.