Bellman & Black, Page 20

  Impossible to see it without thinking of the time when they would want the services of such a place. How soon? they wondered. And for whom? Some already suspected the answer to these questions; they considered their choices in advance of the event and calculated the cost.

  The windows of Bellman & Black reminded their viewers of what they most feared and at one and the same time showed them where to find consolation. Grief and sorrow come to all, but there is consolation in being able to honor your loved ones by saying farewell in a hat secured with a jet hat pin . . .

  Some were there who leaned more heavily on their sticks or felt again the pain that had been troubling them. These knew that they would not be customers of Bellman & Black in person, but that their contribution to the success of the store would be made before too long. They considered the tombstones and rewrote them with their own names.

  The clatter of hooves, then shuffling in the crowd to make way for the carriage that drew up at the main entrance. A fine carriage it was too, and a stir of curiosity broke the rapturous disquiet of the crowd. A uniformed driver jumped down to open the door, and a woman emerged, neatly collared and cuffed in her gray dress. Together they went to great pains to extract the second passenger: a tiny, hunched figure swathed in black silk. Was it a child? She had the size of a child, but she was slow and bent like an old woman. Her veil was so dense she must have been all but blind inside it, but she looked up, nonetheless, at the silver insignia announcing the name of the shop, before being guided step by painful step to the entrance.

  The crowd parted to let the curious pair through. Neither woman appeared to notice the eyes that followed their progress, and they did not utter a word. All onlookers were thinking the same thing, but all held their tongues, waiting for someone else to speak.

  It was a child that said it.

  “It’s not open yet. Eleven o’clock, look.”

  He pointed to the card.

  But there was the sound of a key turning, the door opened just enough, and the two ladies were swallowed up by the shop.

  The key turned again.

  In the crowd strangers murmured and turned astounded faces upon each other.

  The little lad who had spoken pressed his face to the crack between the double doors, but he could see nothing.

  “Eleven o’clock,” he repeated. “That’s what it says on the invitation.”

  · · ·

  Inside there was a feverish circulation of people and goods. Swift feet ran messages; strong arms carried; tidy minds counted and noted; deft hands arranged and displayed. Crates were opened, the contents spilled out. Then, faster than you could believe, all was neatly stacked and ranged, the crate itself disappearing as if by magic, and the same trick was being repeated over and over again in every department.

  Among all these black goods being carried about in all directions, was one distinctive cargo. Sedate and slow, Dora was carried through the shop in a sedan chair. Bellman meant to show her the entire shop. She was introduced to department managers, shook hands, and although she did not speak, said with a look and a smile something that in words would have gone like this: Yes, I know I am peculiar. Think nothing of it.

  Everywhere was something her father wished to point out to her: the uniforms of the various staff, the goods arriving, the fittings of the shop, every last detail was something he had imagined, brought into being, and he laid it all before her, the Italian gloves, the Chinese silk, the Whitby jet, the Parisian collars. She admired, complimented, and approved.

  Bellman led the procession of Dora, sedan, carriers, Mary, from floor to floor. When he had shown all the departments in the sales floors, they visited the offices, the clerks, the cashiers, Bellman’s own office. Next they went up to see the seamstresses’ area. Here again Dora felt herself being spied upon from the corner of eyes, understood that glances were being exchanged behind her back. Again she admired what she was called upon to admire, approved what was to be approved. Don’t mind me, her eyes said to the seamstresses who could not help staring. Be glad of your curls and your limbs and the curves beneath your clothes. Enjoy your good fortune.

  The staircase was too narrow to admit the sedan chair to the top floor. Might one of the porters carry her up? She was relieved when the decision went against. But Dora was not to be released yet. Oh no! For there was the basement still to be seen. She was shown the dispatch room, and the canteen, and the kitchens at the side of the store where the windows opened into a narrow pit that permitted the smell of cooking to escape through a grille at ground level above. “My!” Dora exclaimed.

  “And it’s not over yet!” Bellman exclaimed.

  At floor level, at the back of the shop, next to the goods entrance, were wide double doors that opened onto a coach house. The Bellman & Black brougham was a sight to behold. A graceful black carriage, the B&B insignia in silver on the doors. A fine black horse was stabled nearby so that two seamstresses and a coachman could travel at a moment’s notice anywhere within eighty miles of the capital.

  Bellman opened the door to show the interior. With the air of a conjuror, he opened a compartment under the seat. In the dark it looked empty, and she was bewildered till she realized it was filled with fabric, crepe, the blackest fabric available, so absorbent of light it seemed to be made of darkness itself.

  “And this!” her father exclaimed, opening one of the portable cases with a flourish. Inside were a hundred little compartments, and each one filled: scissors and tape measures and needles and spools of thread and a silver thimble.

  “It’s a miniature Bellman & Black’s!” she marveled.

  “In just two days our traveling seamstresses can provide essential mourning wear for a family; in four days, evening wear too. Give them a week and the servants of the house will be in black, down to the little girl who lights the fire in the mornings.”

  She had run out of words and nodded her weary approbation.

  “And what is more, as it goes through the streets of London our brougham will make a very fine impression. Everyone will turn to see it. When it races through the streets, when it arrives at the finest houses, it will be noticed. When the Earl of This and the Marquess of That call in Bellman & Black everyone will know. It will bring in more business than a hundred—a thousand—advertisements. So, what do you think, eh?”

  He was tense with expectation, rushed through his words, awaited her verdict with obsessive intent. His eyes glittered, his pale face glittered. She hardly recognized her taciturn, frowning father. Bellman & Black had him in its grip.

  Dora was astounded by her father’s creation. Troubled too. It was beautiful, she supposed, in a powerful, uncomfortable way. “A cathedral” someone had called it in the newspaper. She understood what they meant. But she had seen something beneath the feverish activity, the agitation and the rush. The sense of something silent, biding its time. What was it waiting for? The idea of a mausoleum knocked at her mind, and she turned it away.

  Her eyes returned to the seamstresses’ bags. She picked out a silver thimble and held it up to the light. Even this was engraved with the double B motif.

  “It is quite astonishing. You forget nothing, Father. Not even a thimble!”

  They lifted the sedan and carried Dora back to the ground floor. Bellman led the way. He kept turning to tell her one more thing and then another about his grand project. She half listened, drifting in her own thoughts, until a thought struck her, idle but curious enough to make it worth interrupting her father.

  “Father, you have never told me. Who is Black?”

  That name on her lips! He should have thought of that.

  “No one!” he told her, wide-eyed, a fraction too fast. “No one at all.”

  One minute to eleven.

  · · ·

  The doorman stood like a sentry at the gates of heaven. If ever a man had been born to be employed by a mourning emporium, it was Mr. Pentworth. With his downturned mouth incapable of rejoicing and eyes that were full o
f lugubrious sympathy, he was the very embodiment of sorrow. Mr. Dent and Mr. Hayworth smoothed their impeccable gray lapels and positioned themselves behind their counters. Salesgirls stood in orderly fashion, backs straight, hands clasped, meek as children at Sunday school. Upstairs, every pencil lay straight and every needle was in its place. Smiles, coughs, and other fidgets were suppressed. Everywhere was solemnity and composure.

  Behind a column on the first floor, three-quarters concealed, Bellman stood and looked over the railings to watch the door below. As the clock hand moved to eleven and Pentworth opened the door, a heart a hundred times greater than his own jolted to life in his chest. It was the heart of Bellman & Black.

  They came. Curious, fearful, longing, astonished, awestruck, pious, acquisitive, they poured in; and the first, whether they intended it or not, were swept deep into the shop by the sheer pressure of those behind. There was much dazed milling about as, overwhelmed by the scale and the beauty of it, people lost sight of whatever it was they had come in for—for most had invented some reasonable little need in order not to appear to themselves as mere tourists. They could not help it: on seeing the majestic glory of it all, they fell into passive, voluptuous rapture. Women and men, young and old, the bereaved and the unbereaved, all thronged, staring and marveling and whispering.

  For all their awe, it was not long before one soul, hardier than the rest, resolved upon a purchase. One yard of one-inch grosgrain to edge the fraying sleeves of a winter coat.

  It was not the cheapest thing to be had at Bellman & Black, but it was certainly modest. No matter.

  On the second floor a cashier tweaking his cuffs almost jumped out of his skin as the first canister of pennies rattled to a stop in his niche and his hand trembled as he wrote out the ticket, counted out the change, and activated the system to return the canister to the shop floor. Then instantly another!

  It had begun!

  Now the canisters were flying, the coins were rattling into the cash boxes, goods were measured and counted out, items were wrapped and tied with string, orders were listed in elegant cursive script and—yes!—tears were shed, consolation offered and received.

  Bellman & Black was teeming with life and money and death.

  It was a success.

  · · ·

  William Bellman took a deep breath. He did not smile—on the shop floor of Bellman & Black? Whatever next!—but he felt a smile. His fingers tingled with confident power, and the floor was solid beneath his feet.

  Unobtrusively he stepped from his vantage point, slipped among the crowds, and melted into the paneling.

  In his private office one wall had been lined with cork. On it was tacked a large sheet of paper. At present it was mostly blank, with only two lines on it, one vertical and one horizontal, joining in the bottom left-hand corner. Along the horizontal line the names of the months were marked against notches. Figures in pounds were indicated by the notches on the vertical line.

  Bellman remembered his early jottings in the black notebook. Calculations of turnover, predictions of profit. It had looked very promising, though he had arrived at it in a somewhat rough-and-ready fashion, obviously. Then there were the figures—reined in a little—that he had dangled in front of Critchlow and the others to tempt them into investing. All that was a long time ago. Today he knew infinitely more about the business. He could tell you how many yards of black merino was sold annually in the nation, the city of London, the tiny shop two streets from here. He knew why coffins cost what they did and how they could be made cheaper yet be just the same. He had an idea of how much Bellman & Black would make this first month, and it was founded on fact. It was also, he congratulated himself, the same figure that he had come up with two years ago.

  His plan on this chart was to plot predicted takings in blue at the beginning of every month, and the actual takings, in black, once the figures were in. He took up his blue pen and found the spot. At the last minute his hand rose slightly and he inked his blue dot a fraction higher.

  Was it a sixth sense that nudged his hand? Instinct? Call it what you will. Bellman just knew.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dora’s nights of remembering grew less profitable as time passed. She still did it sometimes, but the practice gradually lost its ability to comfort. In part, she told herself, it was because she had worn the memories thin from overuse. Like some of the coins they used to clean, the relief had been worn away.

  There were other reasons. She was changing. The things that had pleased her when she was a girl were not the things that pleased her now. When she thought about her mother these days, it was new conversations she craved. She took to talking to Mrs. Lane about her mother, and these memories, secondhand though they might be, were as precious as her own, for they were adult.

  And then there came another reason for spending less time rehearsing the past.

  Rummaging under the bed for something else entirely, Mary emerged, hair all askew, with a painting.

  “What on earth is this?”

  Dora rubbed the dust off. “My rook!”

  The afternoon sketching in the garden was not part of her repertoire of habitual memories, for it did not involve her mother and brothers and sister. She had not worn it thin with constant repetition. Now it returned to her with a fresh vividness.

  “My uncle taught me how to hold a pencil properly.”

  Mary and Dora went through all the cupboards in the house until they found the old sketchbooks. Then for an entire afternoon the young women sat together turning the pages. One particular image made them pause. A few weeks before the fever Dora had made her first proper attempt at a self-portrait.

  “Is that really what I looked like, then?” she asked.

  “It is a likeness. That can’t be denied. But you were even prettier.”

  Dora judged differently. The portrait was less than confident. The lines were stiff. But she supposed the eyes were good. She recognized herself in them.

  “I look as if I am thinking very hard about something.”

  “You still look like that. Always did.”

  That night Dora sacrificed a night of remembering in order to sit at the mirror. She unpinned the lace that covered her scalp, and by candlelight she studied her new face. What a scarecrow she was. Her features seemed squashed into the lower part of her face, like a baby’s. Her ears jutted out, flaring at the upper curve in an ugly simulacrum of the curls that were missing. The narrowness of her forehead was improved—was that the right word?—by the absence of hair, and her eyes were made striking by the lack of lash and brow, but they were not for all that what anyone would call attractive. It was an interesting face though. The skin of her scalp was smooth to the touch, but the bones beneath had a landscape that her hair had hidden from sight. Her eye studied its lines, found crevices, shallows, ridges, a whole landscape of bone. She turned her head this way and that. A blue vein ran riverlike over one ear. She put her hands to the back of her scalp and read the back of her head with her hands.

  A powerful excitement took possession of her as she held her pencil. She traced a few lines, abandoned them, started again elsewhere on the page, abandoned again. From every disappointment she moved straightaway onto the next attempt. She turned her head from side to side, captured a shape, then tilted her neck and made another rapid sketch. She replaced the candle and carried on drawing till dawn, her scalp, her bones, lines of nose and chin and lip, curls of cartilage, nostrils, cheekbones, temples, planes and angles and light and shade. She drew with as little personal emotion as if she had been drawing a landscape, something as remote from herself as the bones of the planet she lived on.

  Eventually Dora produced something she was satisfied with. It was raw, as ugly and grotesque as she knew herself to be, and it reminded her more than anything of a newly hatched bird, unfeathered, skin as thin as paper, all bone and hunger.

  With a last pencil stroke, she extended the line of her nose into a little beak and was happy.
br />   CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The launch of Bellman & Black created a momentum that carried Bellman with it. He worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, yet he never tired. His schedule was energetic; he toured the shop at ten o’clock, two o’clock, and six o’clock, from basement to the atelier at the top: a word in someone’s ear, encouragement there, even lending a hand where the workload was excessive. Daily meetings (his senior retail men and with Verney from finance), biweekly meetings (Edmonds from dispatch, Stallybrook from deliveries, and Miss Chalcraft). Three hundred and thirty-seven people worked at Bellman & Black’s and before the month was out he knew the name of everyone, from Verney, his right-hand man, to Molly, who washed up for the canteen. The name of Girl No. 9 was Lizzie, and he noted it along with all the others. With prodigious energy he filled every moment with activity, with purpose, with achievement.

  There were appointments with outsiders: Anson from the Westminster & City needed to see him once in a while; sometimes it was a lawyer or a haberdasher who came for an hour in the afternoon to talk business. He purchased a pair of deep-buttoned leather armchairs for these occasions and placed them on each side of the fireplace in his office. He resented their comfort because it led sitters to relax, and after the main business was complete they continued to sit talking of one thing and another while cigar smoke rose lazily to the ceiling. He discouraged it politely.

  After the shop closed and on Sundays he sat down to his paperwork. Letters, reports, accounts, lists. He processed everything with rapid, flawless method, made lists in his calfskin notebook, and drew a firm line through each item as soon as it was done. He now ordered his notebooks in quantities of half a dozen at a time; when one was finished, he dropped it into the bottom drawer of his desk and took the next from the shelf and pressed the front cover back to continue without a pause.