Business as Usual Read online

  I met a woman in the bus this evening who was teaching with me at Glengyle. She went on to a big advisory post with a firm in Nottingham – she had a First-class degree in Science – a brilliant woman. But they’ve cut down their staff too, and she’s been workless for six months, so desperate that she seriously considered trying the corset job that I turned down. She’s thirty-seven, of course, not twenty-seven. I can fail and start again. And with you to believe in my work, I could.

  Only, now and then, I feel you don’t. Do try to. I mean, think of me as a creature, not just as a possible wife who will persist in doing things that tend to disqualify her. I love you frightfully; but I want your companionship and tolerance and understanding even more than other things. I wonder if you see?

  Good-night, my dear,

  Hilary

  PS – This is an incredibly long letter: all about Me.

  PPS – Still, it is funny, don’t you think? Or don’t you?

  The Minerva

  September 15th

  Basil Dear,

  I was very glad to get your letter. It’s good news that you think you can afford to run a car this year. I’ve always thought it would be worth while, in many ways. As you say, it’ll mean getting to the golf course in a quarter of the usual time. It may sound absurd, but I’m still enjoying buses. I had to stand this morning all the way, because I didn’t use my elbows as well as usual at Lancaster Gate. And I even liked swinging about and watching London from the knees down.

  I admit that it’ll wear off, but just at present I like seeing people scrambling for the Tube Stations and getting in the way of the other people trying to sweep doorstep dust into the gutters and sluice pavements and deliver milk and empty dustbins, and do all the things that are finished with and hushed up when the merely leisured come out of their houses at eleven o’clock.

  I like the wet door-steps and polished door­knobs and piles of newspapers in sheltered corners, and shops with the shutters and grid things half-open and men with bowler hats ducking in and out, and girls in bedroom slippers putting last touches to window displays.

  There seem to be so many more horses about at nine o’clock too. Lots of philosophic, chilly-­looking men on drays refuse to be hurried, and to-day four carts were racing round Marble Arch in front of our bus. They’d come from Covent Garden and their drivers were waving whips and cursing cheerfully. A little man with a cartload of cabbages and a trotting donkey was behind them, taking up most of the fairway. Our conductor leant out, and shouted: ‘Now then, Ben Hur, get off the rails!’21 And the donkey bolted.

  Opposite Bond Street I get off and walk up Manifold Lane to the Staff Entrance. The Lane’s busier than Oxford Street at this time of day. I’ve no idea that so many old women went to work on outside jobs: I met dozens of them, plodding about with string bags or queer parcels. I suppose they’re chars, or dailies22, coming from making other people’s breakfasts; quite unresentfully, most of them, because they’ve done that sort of thing all their lives. And some still older women go from one dust-bin to another with sacks at this time of day: they lift the lids and finger the muddle inside with grey, careful hands that never miss a bottle or a crust.

  

  ‘older women go from one dust-bin to another …’

  Half-way along the Lane I usually begin to run, hypnotised by that clock over the Staff Entrance. After that come the million stairs to the Cloakroom (Women Staff) so that I inevitably arrive on the Book Floor without a breath in my body. While dusting Hopper’s premises my heart returns to normal and my face de-purples itself. I’ve begun to know the geography of the place now, so I’m less bewildered, though I don’t know the people as well as I know the places where they work, on the whole. They still tend to be rather cardboard, except Miss Sparling, who’s something much more malignant, and Mr Simpson, who’s like a wax figure on a warm day instead. In an emergency he’d be liable to melt altogether. He’s continually bullied by Mr Millet, whose efficiency is almost indecent. I suspect Mr Millett of being one of those magnates in the making. Five years ago he was riding an errand bicycle (with his hands in his pockets instead of on the handle-bars, I expect) and twenty-five years hence he may be writing his memoirs. In the meantime he treats me kindly and Shows me the Ropes.

  

  Talking of magnates, there’s one called Grant who runs the firm’s publicity and seems to be making himself generally felt throughout the building. I gather from Hopper that his visits to the Book Floor are cyclonic. She was reverential about his new circular introducing our Rational Reading Service; but I brought one home in case I got depressed. It’s all about his latest library system. Books are to be delivered to subscribers daily at the same time as groceries, shoes, silk underwear, model gowns, or whatever those subscribers have bought at Everyman’s. You see the idea? One department helps another, and the blue vans deliver the lot.

  And, incidentally, every blue van carries a new placard these days. Most sensational:

  Bread for the basket?

  Yes!

  Books for the brain?

  Everyman’s bring them

  And

  Change them again!

  I can foresee some truly marvellous complications. His circular buttonholes the British public:

  We know your trouble. You never have a minute. Yet you love to read. And you are right. Good reading is as essential as good living. But in the fret and fume of modern life how are you to find time to choose, from the multitude of books published every day, yes, almost every hour, the best for your reading? For it must be the best. We know that. May we not help you? Everyman’s will provide your mental food as well as your daily stores. We will send novels with your groceries, biographies with your butcher-meat, plays with your fruit. More. They will be the best. They will be chosen for you, with special reference to your individual and entirely personal taste and views on literature, by our cultured, experienced librarians, whose fingers are ever on the pulse of modern literature.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Hopper, breathing proudly down my neck. I told her that I thought it was lovely, but what I wanted to know most was whether this man Grant has a really reliable sense of humour or just a very earnest, high­-powered commercial mind. What did she think?

  

  She looked rather staggered at that heretical problem, and said that she’d never really thought about it at all, but surely I never thought the circular funny, did I? I changed the subject, and asked her if she chose all the books. She said yes, she did. And Miss Sparling too, of course. It was ever so interesting. I should be able to help her a little, perhaps, when she’d trained me. But until I’d mastered the routine of the business she couldn’t expect me to be much use to her, of course.

  Then I asked her how long she thought it would take me to learn, and she supposed that all depended. But it seems to be a question of years, if not decades. By the look she gave my last batch of labels, I’m afraid she favours the decades. Still, she said that I might begin to learn the card-indexing system in a day or two, if I didn’t get behind with my labels. So I started in at once. After two hours my wrist ached till I thought it would be better if it did drop off, but Hopper counted my labels in a surprised way and promised to show me the card-index to­morrow. Largely, I think, to keep me quiet. I’m afraid she finds me turbulent: too many things upset in my vicinity.

  To-night I walked home across the Park. It was very pleasant; a clear sky with the beginnings of frost. I went very fast, and by the time I got to Beddington Square I was hot and tired, and muddled with mental arithmetic.

  Because, if I could walk home every day and get up a little earlier in the mornings to walk to work I should save fourpence a day. And, taking four days a week – in case it rained once or twice – that would be one and fourpence saved in a week. And five and fourpence a month. Quite a lot can be done with five and fourpence: a Pit23, a day in the country, a shampoo and set. No more buses.

  But when I went upstairs to change
I found a large, potato-shaped hole in each heel.

  In favour of walking, twice daily for one month:   5/4

  Against: one new pair of stockings daily:      5/11

  That’s how life gets you!

  Love,

  Hilary

  Lunch Time

  September 17th

  Well, Darling,

  I’m writing this in a teashop. It’s called Green Corners, I suppose because the tables are painted an unpleasant pea-soup colour. No table­cloths. But one can get an eatable and filling lunch for 1/6. So I shall come here often. They leave you in your corner for long peaceful intervals. Soup … meat … sweet … and /or coffee. Since I’m not in a hurry, it doesn’t drive me mad. I bring a writing pad or a book, and watch people between whiles. I come a little late, to have the long half of the day behind me. Of course my inside is a protesting vacuum during the last hour. But it’s worth it. I emerge, triumphant and ravenous, about half-past one.

  More ravenous than triumphant to-day. It’s been one of those grey mornings with the streets full of cripples. One’s mind see-saws between pity for oneself and for all the people who walk lame or trundle barrel-organs or sit propped up against the railings of the Park with a row of decorated flagstones in front of them. Only a hundred yards of street between Everyman’s Staff Entrance and the teashop, but by the time I’d reached Green Corners I could hardly bear life.

  But the people who come here to lunch every day seem quite pleased with things. There are lots of young women in hip-length fur (or fur-like) coats from offices or the other big shops round about. I’ve never seen anybody from Everyman’s here. I know that lots of them eat at the Canteen. But I didn’t take kindly to the idea. ‘All girls together …’ No thank you. So I race out and compete for the corner tables with the other people who set store by them. There’s one little clerk who glares at me as if I’d done something mortal whenever I get to the window table before he does. And I glare back. But when he gets there first and I glare at him he filters his soup triumphantly through his moustache as if I weren’t on the planet.

  There are lots of unexplained people. I want to know about the two who have a table reserved for them every day. The woman always comes, but sometimes the man doesn’t turn up. Then she waits half an hour and goes away again, without lunch. They’re middle aged, and the man wears spats which shine among the wrinkling socks of Green Corners. They always have a great deal to say as if it were their only opportunity. And there are three spinsters with that look of calculated cheerfulness that’s so dreadfully depressing. They come up from the country once a week or thereabouts and talk about what’s happening to Mary … and Beryl … and Joan … since she left school. There’s one girl who comes occasionally, with a face like a Bellini Madonna and Home Chat24 under her arm.

  I wonder where the men on the Book Floor lunch. On the one occasion I visited the Canteen very few males were there. Do they go to Lyons25? Or to pubs? Or Dining Rooms26? There are some steamy-windowed ones in Manifold Lane which have a fascination for me. I’ve not dared to investigate so far. Tell me about Dining Rooms: can a girl go there? Alone? Or should I have to persuade somebody to take me? I have a feeling that Mr Millett and Mr Salt lunch in a Dining Room. Certainly they go off together, looking odd. Mr Millett’s education was County Council27, Night School28, and a day trip to Cambridge at Whitsun. So he wears grey flannel trousers and a brownish, hairy tweed coat and no hat in the street, because he knows that those are the things that count29. And Mr Salt was a noise in the crowd at Trinity30, so he wears a celluloid collar, bowler hat and striped trousers because he knows that those are the things that count. (Being in Rome …) I believe that they’re great friends. But neither challenges the other’s costume in spite of all the meals they eat together.

  

  ‘They go off together, looking odd.’

  Yesterday Miss Dowland asked me to share her tea-table in the ABC31. (More about meals, Basil. I always seem to be writing at them or about them. But they loom so, when you pay cash.) Anyway, I went to tea with Miss Dowland yesterday. The waitress asked her what she would take. She said:

  ‘Well, I don’t feel just like cake. I think I’ll just have the tea, Mabel.’ And the fat Mabel said:

  ‘Oh, there now, you know you ought to. It keeps the strength up.’

  Miss Dowland wavered.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll have a bun, after all.’ But she looked at the cakes (twopence each) on the cut­glass stand. I asked her if she usually came to that shop. She said: ‘Yes. Fifteen years, off and on it’ll be now.’

  

  And she still counts the days. ‘This is my seven-hundredth-and-fiftieth Monday,’ she told me when I crawled upstairs at the beginning of this week. So she once expected something to happen. And in another twenty years or so something will. She’ll collect her superannuation and her pension and retire. She has a house: ‘So nice, Miss Fane, quite in the country. Out at Harrow. The air’s so fresh, I always say.’ She lives with her friend, who’s been ‘out’ this last six months. ‘We hope she’ll get something – anything almost – soon. It’s a little difficult for the two of us when only one’s earning.’ And I saw her look at my ring. I don’t want to gloat, but I am glad about us, Basil.

  Time’s up. I’ll post this on the way back.

  Love, always,

  Hilary

  Bus

  September 18th

  Pay Day, my lamb. And I’m alive to claim it! No earnings have ever pleased me so much. And I’m fairly certain that the management have seldom spent a salary to less purpose.

  To label-writing: two pounds ten. Well!

  Goodness knows I’m neither deft nor diligent, and even you can’t (always) read my writing.

  But they paid me. In a little, thick, yellow envelope, with the flap so glued down that it defied even the most honest efforts to up-end it. The name of the department was stamped in bright blue letters; my own above was neatly printed in block caps. Inside were two pound notes, two half-crowns, three shillings, a sixpence and three coppers. By rights there should have been the two pounds ten they promised me, but Ill-health and Unemployment have to be considered. They make you contribute to these things. Did you know? I was told on my first day that I must get my Unemployment card at the Labour Exchange in some street or other whose name I instantly forgot, and the Health card at any Post Office. Can you ever find Post Offices at a crisis? I can’t. But they subtract the one and threepence, just the same.

  Anyway, the envelopes were brought round after tea by our Mr Simpson. His boots squeak, but his feet are beautiful on the mountains32 on those occasions, and he knows it. There is a sort of annunciatory33 expression on his flat face which is most suitable. I didn’t know whether one thanked him with all the gratitude one felt or ignored the existence of anything which might give the lie to the Work for Work’s Sake notice which hangs opposite Miss Sparling’s desk in the Library. So I watched the others from my corner. No one said thank you; so I didn’t. Miss Lamb beamed: Miss Hopper pushed her envelope quickly into her bag; but Miss Watts sat back and counted every item with the lovely crackling tweak at the corners of her notes that I’ve envied bank cashiers all my life. There was a new, Friday evening sound in the Department; the semi-surreptitious counting of everybody’s loose change, guardedly, so that other people mightn’t see exactly what was going into each handbag or trousers pocket.

  

  I’d hardly stowed away my share before Mr Sirnpson came up to me again, this time more or less on tip-toe, and asked me whether I would like to start paying in to the Superannuation Fund when I was eligible. That, of course, wouldn’t be for six months yet. I thought it was a charity. But he explained, and it seems that whenever one has been six months in the firm one begins to save against the day when failing eyes, legs and ears force one to leave it. I hedged a little, and he told me that they all did it, even Miss Lamb. (And she’s twenty.) So when he had assured me that I could get it
back ‘in the event of dismissal’ (that seemed to be the only reason for leaving which occurred to him) I promised to contribute.

  Later

  Your letter came in by the last post and I thought I’d add a bit to mine before going to bed. I’m writing in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, comforted by a bath rather more than by your lecture on morbidity. But I’ll give your remarks my attention. I’m quite meek, you know. In essentials.

  Perhaps my last letter was a bit full of pavement artists and indigent spinsters. And, as you say, they probably neither deserve nor want to be pitied. It doesn’t hurt them (as people say when they kill moths). Of course they like crowds. Look at Blackpool. And work, because, as you say, they wouldn’t know what to do with leisure if they had it. Though that does seem such a hoary and suspicious argument – or do I mean specious, by any chance? Of course, I know you’re right up to a point. They’re not unhappy. I was watching Miss Lamb this morning, during a beatific pause in the label-writing due to a failure in the supply of raw material. She was completely absorbed in typing her letter. She never wasted a second or made an unnecessary gesture whipping out one sheet and putting in another. There must be some satisfaction in doing anything, even if it’s mechanical, quite as well as she does. And yet, there’s nothing to show for all her work but her initials sandwiched with those of her principal in the bottom left-hand corner of hundreds, thousands, and perhaps, in twenty years, millions of letters. Which is probably a very sour­grapeish remark. I couldn’t turn out Miss Lamb’s faultlessly typed pages if I tried all my life.

  

  But Miss Lamb doesn’t mean to spend a life­time on hers. She was talking to me about the Future in the cloakroom queue before lunch to­day. She’s got permission to leave early to-night. They allow us an hour off every month, for shopping. Not that she means to shop, she says. But her Boy has got an hour off too. Her Boy has a car, and in the summer she’s going to learn to drive it. He’s in Everyman’s, I believe, though I haven’t tracked him down yet. And he’s just got a rise, says Miss Lamb. So one hopes that he’ll come up to the scratch soon, and marry her. Meanwhile, of course, she pays into the Superannuation Fund, because she’ll get it out when she marries. It’s as good a way of saving as any other. And either way, she’s safe.