Bellman & Black (32 page)

T
he end of the working day followed a pattern. Upstairs the seamstresses worked for as long as they had the light: longer hours in summer, shorter in winter. The sales floor closed at seven o’clock sharp. Given the abundance of grief, a sentiment that recognized no clock, this was no easy matter and required close and careful management. From half past six the consolers—girls who were employed for the delicacy of their sympathy and their understanding expressions—were gradually withdrawn from the floor, leaving the business to be concluded by those who were supreme at selling. At a quarter to seven, without any discernible alteration in their manner, these girls deferentially placed a distinct choice before the indecisive. In cases where grief still hesitated at five to seven, Mr. Heywood himself would intervene.

“Take your time, madame,” he said, and “a wise decision is always better than a hasty one.” After all—he implied this with a delicate gesture of the fingertips—an hour here or there counts as nothing when compared with the eternity that attends us all one day. Mr. Heywood would not allow anyone to be rushed, he would wait until the end of time for their decision—yet by a minute to seven the decision was invariably made and generally in favor of the more expensive item.

At seven o’clock Pentworth closed the door on the last customer with a gravity that expressed his personal condolences in a most heartfelt way, before turning the great key in the lock.

Now the consolers and the sympathizers puffed their cheeks out in
relief at the departure of the customers. They rubbed their aching feet, closed their eyes in exhaustion, and hands on hips, stretched their backs, tired from reaching and fetching and carrying. Tongues remained guarded. The rules of no laughter and no gossip still held after hours, as they held within five hundred yards of the shop, so any exchanges of a more personal nature could be made only by glances or in whispers out of the hearing of the floor managers. This moment of relaxation only lasted a few moments in any case, for then came what was perhaps the busiest hour of the day.

Brooms and wax polish and dusters were produced from concealed cupboards, and there was the flurry and bustle of cleaning. Counters were polished, bolts of fabric and reels of ribbon straightened, stairs were swept, floorboards scrubbed, mirrors and windows polished . . . It was not finished till the girls themselves were ready for inspection as they queued to leave by the side door. “Not a hair out of place” they heard, over and over. So they took turns at the mirrors and pinned stray strands of hair for each other, and when the shop was in perfect order and when they were in perfect order, the side door was opened and they stepped out.

Counting the paces, one, two, three . . . and five hundred yards from Bellman & Black (it was the tobacconist on Regent Street west or the little restaurant on Regent Street east, and on Oxford Street it was either Marcham’s or Greenway’s, depending on your direction) they came to the spot where they were entitled to live again. Zest and relish and delight were let out from where they had been contained all day, laughter was permitted to tweak the mouth, hands that had been meekly folded since nine in the morning were allowed to gesture and articulate. No customer of the angelically compassionate Susannah would have recognized her as she bent double with laughter, almost weeping with mirth at a vulgar tale told her by the man from the warehouse. Even the lugubrious Mr. Pentworth—in practice, you’d have thought, to be doorman at the gates of heaven itself—was transformed into an averagely
jolly chap when he met his sons at the King William. Going home from work: it was glorious!

William Bellman did not go home. He had spent so little time there in the first year of Bellman & Black that he had resolved in the end to let it. When the house adjoining it had come up for sale he had bought and let that one too; he owned four London houses now, but he continued to live out of preference at the shop, sleeping in the little narrow bed in the tongue-and-groove paneled room behind his office and standing in an iron tub he filled with a jug to wash. It was less fuss than going home. It was home.

Tonight he just wanted to look over the contract with Reynolds of Gloucester: he had an idea the man was making savings on his raw materials that were not being passed on. And a few minutes perusing jet sales would be time well spent. He was sending his representative up to Whitby again next week, and it wouldn’t hurt to know how the different designs were doing. He spent half an hour pleasantly enough on these and other similar tasks; thought of another little job that was easier done now than tomorrow, which reminded him that . . .

When he looked at his clock he realized with familiar surprise that it was after nine o’clock.

At night, Bellman & Black had an allure all its own. It was a great beast, asleep. Now as he leaned back in his chair, he felt a pulse, and it seemed to him it was the pulse of Bellman & Black, though he knew it was the pulse of his own blood in his own veins. Yet Bellman & Black was like an extension of his own body. With his hand he signed an order and his warehouse was filled with goods; with his voice he ordered that something should be done and it was; he commanded workshops and studios and factories and mills just as he commanded his legs and his hands. He was the very heart and brain of this enterprise. It belonged to him. And he to it.

He gave in to temptation, lit a lantern, and stepped into the shadows of the shop. His creation was inactive, but he inhabited it like the
dream self that breathes in a sleeping body. From counter to counter he went, opening drawers and leafing through order books. He verified stock, centered a mannequin here, tidied a shelf there. In the cavernous darkness of dispatch his lamp illuminated long empty tables. He placed an approving hand on the brown paper and string and labels, replenished in readiness for tomorrow’s work. A single parcel was unsent. He frowned and made a note of the address. Something to follow up tomorrow.

Upstairs, at the clerks’ desks, he pored over the day’s calculations like a headmaster over homework, paid attention to ink blots and handwriting. Upstairs again, in the seamstresses’ workroom, he counted the pairs of scissors, shone his lantern on the stitchwork of the garments waiting to go out, counted the stitches per inch to the new girl’s hemming.

His nocturnal supervision of the work of the shop was interrupted then by a sound.

Voices. Upstairs the seamstresses in their rooms were singing.

Bellman smiled as he listened.

He shone his lamp onto his watch: nearly eleven o’clock. They had been out listening to some café singer, perhaps, and just come back.

He strained his ears to hear the song. Sweet voices conveyed the tune to him, melodic it was, and tender, but he could not catch the words. It was a song from long ago, he thought. He seemed to half-know it . . .

How did it go, now?

He caught a thread of something . . .
Plashing fountains,
wasn’t it? Ta-dah, te-dee, and
Happy hours,
something something,
Calling voices . . .

It was a song for girls. Men liked the more robust numbers that could be accompanied by fists banging on the table and where the chorus came in as a great communal roar. A night at an inn began with the popular numbers and got bawdier as the night went on. Sometimes, though, a long night could take hard drinking men, young and old, beyond
lust to sentimentality. Then, at the end of the evening, in husky and wavering voices, they sang songs like this one: tender and yearning. He had known this song once, but it was no good pretending: he did not know the words now. But he hummed as he continued his rounds, and when the girls reached the end of the song and began it again he lingered in the workroom. Their beds were a few feet above his head. He remembered—with some surprise—that he too had been something of a singer once, a long time ago.

The singing came to an end. There was a faint murmur of conversation, then silence.

Everything was just so in the workroom. Bellman left a note of congratulations for Miss Chalcraft and his rounds were complete.

The song, evidently, was not to be repeated.

He wished—

What did he wish for?

He did not know. Unless it was his bed.

Washing his face and undressing, Bellman hummed the tune again. He climbed into bed, blew out the candle, and settled his back securely against the tongue-and-groove paneling. In the second between being awake and being asleep he longed intensely for soft arms around his neck and the breathing of a woman in the crook of his neck. Lizzie’s face, on the edge of his thoughts. And then he was overcome by blackness.

·  ·  ·

The plashing fountains and the happy hours found Bellman’s brain a congenial place and made a permanent encampment there. At times of deep concentration or contentment or tiredness, a few bars of the song would escape his lips and he filled in the gaps with “ta dees” and “ta dums” and other fillers of his own devising. Through the months that followed, it became the pleasant, undemanding companion of his solitary hours. Once or twice he imagined another life for himself in which he was a singer. He stood on the first-floor gallery as if on a stage, and
projected his song so that his voice echoed through the empty theater of his shop. The headless mannequins and half-dummies listened with the appearance of rapt attention, but as the final note died away they did not applaud.

In the silence that followed he wondered how far his voice carried. Had he woken the seamstresses two floors up? He allowed himself to imagine a midnight choir: himself and his seamstresses, their voices raised together in song, then he told himself it was ludicrous and put the thought away.

I
n a narrow back street, in a cold and dingy bedroom in Holborn, an innkeeper turned over in bed one morning to find his wife had died in the night. His neighbors heard the weeping and came running to find him ashen faced, his eight children standing dazed around him. “What must I do?” he asked his neighbor’s wife. “Go to Bellman & Black,” she told him. “They’ll know everything.”

A mother and father in Richmond received news of a riding accident, and minutes later the body of their son was brought into the house. Later they would weep and pray together, but in this first moment their minds responded differently. The father’s mind was stilled by shock. He neither heard nor saw anything. His wife was afforded the distraction of domestic organization. Someone will have to cancel the dinner, she thought. Someone will have to find out whether the horse is found. But before she did either of those things, before the pain possessed her completely, she reached for her ink and writing paper. “I suppose that I had better send for Bellman & Black,” she said.

A young Clapham widow opened her closet and ran her finger over the crepe dresses inside. Two years to the day since her husband had died. A good man. A handsome one. Two years . . . though some nights it felt like yesterday. She wouldn’t be sorry to see the end of this black, though. Gray was decorous. Dignified. There was a particular shade of it, she remembered, that brought out the blue of her eyes and flattered her fair curls. They would be bound to have it at Bellman & Black.

·  ·  ·

The mighty and the meek, the rich and the poor, were equal when faced with death: all dabbed their eyes and thought of Bellman & Black. The safe in the little room behind Bellman’s office grew fuller, and the accounts at the Westminster & City Bank grew richer. The haberdashers married off their daughters and granddaughters, and the guests at the weddings ate and drank lavishly thanks to the spendthrift grief of the bereaved. All was well.

Bellman was a contented man. His wages bill grew every month as he took on more and more staff to cope with the demand. His kitchen cooked more and more lunches to fuel the staff who made the sales. There was a constant flow of deliveries coming in at the back of the shop to replace the goods that were carried out the front door. You could measure the success in any number of ways, right down to the bills for string and brown paper with which to wrap the customers’ orders and the shoe repair bills for the porters who wore down their soles running up and down stairs between customers and dispatch with purchases piled high in their arms. It all came together at the end of every month, when Bellman read his monthly reports, checked the monthly figures, and entered the month’s actual sales on his graph. Over the years the curve had never ceased to rise. Those predictions he had made in his calfskin notebook at the very beginning, and that he had reined in so as not to look overconfident in front of the haberdashers . . . Well, look now! The profits were seven times greater than he had imagined! Seven times!

Bellman chuckled. He had every reason to be pleased.

He had not forgotten Black. There was a time, he remembered, when he had been anxious about him. No longer. Unorthodox their arrangement might be, but it worked. Black’s money was piling up in the second account, it could be withdrawn at a day’s notice whenever the man wanted it. And what a sum! Was Black aware of the success of Bellman & Black, Bellman wondered? Did he keep an eye on it from
afar, biding his time, satisfied at his nice little nest egg? Perhaps sometimes he might walk past, assessing the window display? Perhaps he came in and browsed once in a while, passing himself off as an ordinary customer?