THE SIGN up above the door of the business, Singer & Son, Stationers, was like a reproach to me: for the eye that knew, such as my own, was conscious of the space after the word son, and before the comma, which Father had instructed to be left, in the hope of one day adding another ‘s’.
Entering by the ponderous front door, that swung closed behind us, cutting off the light and noise of the street, Father and I were entombed immediately in the aspidistra dimness of a tiled hallway with various appropriate dark-brown paintings on the wall, swallowed up in a stuffiness of rugs and furniture-polish. I had to grin and shake hands with various employees, and did not like the smiles they gave me, at once patronising and meeching, and the way I had to stand there then beside Father, tongue-tied as they spoke in figures and abbreviations I did not understand, ungracious when at last they turned to me with some well-meaning—too transparently well-meaning—question about school, or worst of all, some jovial remark about following in my father’s footsteps.
The large face of Rundle had been known to me since I had first come here in short pants with Father. He had always seemed an old man in my eyes: he was someone it was impossible to imagine young. On my first piping-voiced visits to the business, Rundle was already a stooping coarse-pored personage who remarked wearyingly on how I had shot up, and how someone should put a brick on my head. ‘Thank the Lord for Rundle,’ Father would say when he was in a rare man-to-man mood. ‘He has kept the business from going under more than once, Albion, though naturally I would never worry your mother with such things.’
Rundle was a man with a large sagging face like a dog’s, who wore lumpy tweedy clothes with a suggestion of matted fur about them. His chin was cushioned around with a crescent of fat, but it was not happy fat: his was the awkward bulk of an anxious man, a worrier whose ambition would never rise above being someone else’s right-hand man. He was an old-fashioned faithful sort of Fido, proud of being invited to dinner once a year by his employer, and ignorant of the laughter at the expense of his manner of grasping a knife, and of his yellow-charmeuse-swaddled wife, when they left. When called on to inspect a ledger and to point out some detail or other to Father, he would fumble at his handkerchief-pocket and draw out a pincenez that perched on the end of his thick nose—no one could take seriously a man who wore such things!—and when he put the ledger down on a desk, in order to run a finger down a list of figures and stop at some significant one, the dog’s toenail of his forefinger nail was hideously apparent: a brown curved piece of striated horn instead of a pale fingernail with a pink half-moon. Had he caught it in a mangle in infancy, or had he been born that way, and did his thick clothes conceal other hideous abnormalities?
The silence in Father’s office, when I was installed in a corner with a humbug and a book, while Father and Rundle went over the figures together, had always oppressed me: my ears hummed, my heart beat too fast, and my palms grew cold at the thought of stepping into Father’s shoes eventually, and spending a lifetime here.
Sitting on the hard chair in the corner, while Father and Rundle mumbled away together, I tried to remember who I was. Privately I knew myself to be nothing more than a wisp of unhappiness floating through space. But I reminded myself that in the eyes of the world I was Albion Gidley Singer, son of George Augustus Singer, the prominent and respected man of business. Albion Gidley Singer, I reminded myself, had a definite existence as a conscientious though mediocre student, an adequate medium bowler, and a custodian of a fact or two about almost any subject you could care to name. I ran through a few, like a consoling prayer: the four longest rivers in the world are the Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze and the Niger; Reykjavik is the capital of Iceland; there are twenty-six bones in the human foot.
I was a large lad now, who made the banister shake when I leaned on it, and these days over the leg of mutton the future of Albion Gidley Singer was often discussed. He would be going up to the University before long, and then, naturally, would go into the business under Father.
It was a comfort more consoling than Mother’s fairy-cakes to have Father pass the newspaper across the table to me in the mornings. ‘Here, Albion,’ he would say, ‘this will interest you,’ and I would stare at the smudged coarse lettering and pretend to be so engrossed that Father would not query me on what I was reading, or make comments that would require an intelligent answer. At least I knew that, no matter what penetrating and intelligent questions Kristabel might ask, the newspaper would not be passed to her.
At such times I turned to my old friends, my facts, and occasionally I was able to produce a rare one that would cause Father to look at me with something like approval, though tempered with considerable surprise, and say, ‘My word, Albion, you are a dark horse!’ It was my greatest fear that Father would discover that the accumulation of facts was all I had: my great bank of facts was my capital, on which I drew larger and larger drafts, withdrawing and recklessly spending those hard-won facts.
However bogus I felt my new manliness to be, it seemed that it fooled Father. It was possible, too, that he wished to be fooled; or perhaps he hoped that clothes would succeed in manufacturing a man where one of the top schools, and every advantage, had not. In any case, it was a fact that I had crossed some frontier or other now: I had entered the section of life where fathers discussed the news with their sons, and took them to their tailor’s to be fitted for their first adult suit of clothes.
‘Chapman is a bit of an old woman,’ Father warned me, on the ferry on the way to my first fitting, and I had no idea what he meant, but naturally was not so foolish as to ask. ‘If the truth were known he should have retired years ago, but he would not know what to do with himself, I imagine.’ Father guffawed, and I imitated him in a subdued way, feeling my palms clammy at having Father speak to me in such a natural way, quite as if I were another man, seeming to forget for the moment that I was his disappointing only son.
‘Now, Albion,’ Father said, and glanced around as if to check that no one was close enough to hear. The deckhand, a sharp-faced lad of my own age, stared back from along the deck, and I imagined how this wiry and competent person would despise the soft-handed youth standing there with his prosperous father, a person who could at last parse any sentence from Gibbon, construe any lines of Virgil, but could not have coiled a rope and dropped it neatly round a bollard to save his life.
Father lowered his voice, and moved a little closer. Generally, he was a father who kept his distance, so I felt almost embraced by his nearness now. ‘There are one or two things you should know, now that you are coming on to manhood,’ he said. Father had never spoken to me about anything of a bodily nature, but I was sure that he was about to speak to me now about the peculiarities my body was troubling me with in the most private of ways. Perhaps he would even clarify the mysterious little chats we had had at school from the housemaster on the subject of Purity. I felt a moment’s panic, for I was not ready for any such initiation: the impressive husk of Albion Gidley Singer might have appeared ready, but I myself was not. And why had he chosen here and now, on the ferry, virtually in public, and with this knowing-looking lad, with his coil of filthy rope, staring at us?
But Father had no more wish than I to wax intimate on the subject of the body. As the foam sizzled away from the side of the ferry, he instructed me on the number of buttons a gentleman has on his jacket, the quantity of cuff that a gentleman must show, and the vulgarity of cuff-buttons, which no gentleman would ever wear. ‘You may have my own silver cuff-links, Albion, until we can provide you with your own, they are the ones my own father gave me when I came of age.’ He demonstrated on his own suit of clothes the fact that a gentleman never does up the bottom button of his waistcoat, and never fails to do up all the rest. ‘Now, when Chapman is fitting you, Albion, it is a courtesy to stand quite still, and to make a little chat. A tailor is not the same as a shop-assistant, and will be treated by a gentleman with a certain respect.’
We were nearing the Quay now: the note of the engines changed to a deeper throb. Father drew out his gold double-hunter and checked the time, but absently, and as he put it away I felt myself grow even more self-conscious, for I could see he had something more taxing to say, which would require both of us to be at our most wooden and gentlemanly. ‘Chapman will ask you, Albion, how you dress.’ Father paused here, and coughed, and I felt every pore of my body congest and grow hot with the idea of stripping off (which was what this must mean) before Father, and before Chapman, and had not Father said that Chapman was a woman? I would have to stand shivering before them all, a shameful exhibit of nakedness covered by nothing but goose-pimples, and everyone would see all I had.
‘Yes, Albion, left or right, you must have happened to notice, do you dress to left or right?’ I felt myself consumed with redness now, totally befuddled: had I somehow been getting dressed wrongly all these years? My mind was blocked, Father was staring, waiting for an answer, and I was failing the first test of my manhood.
But Father laughed, a great harsh laugh that made the deckhand stare. ‘By Jove, Albion, I did not know either at your age, and my own father, your grandfather, let me go to the tailor’s not knowing, and I was all of a flummox.’ Was his look at my scarlet face ironic? ‘It makes me laugh to remember, but it was far from funny then, by Jove!’ He laughed again: Father was seldom seen to laugh, and I watched the way his eyes became positively oriental as he did so, and how large and yellow, like a horse’s, his teeth were.
To my relief, Chapman turned out not to be literally an old woman. He was a hunched and wizened dark man, horribly like a monkey, and there were large knobs on the knuckles of his hands such as I had not seen before, and coarse white hairs curling out of his ear-holes. He was clumsy with the pins and tape-measures, so that Dingle, the assistant who hovered close at hand, had to rescue various piles and tins of things several times. Chapman limped a little as he walked, making a great show of wincing at each step, his spectacles continually slid down his nose and had to be poked back up with a forefinger, and readjusted with regard to the bendy ear-pieces—generally he seemed even to the eye of one who had never before seen a tailor at work to be unnaturally slow and awkward, and forgetful as he shuffled through tissue paper and samples of dark cloth—‘Now this was the one, was it not, Master Singer? Or was it the stripe now?’
Father knew the right courtesies with which to fill the occasion, and Chapman replied at considerable length: ‘Oh thanking you Mr Singer sir, the arthuritis is a great trial to me now, but I cannot complain, thanking you sir,’ then going on to enumerate a great number of complaints of a more or less embarrassingly physical nature, so that I blushed as he sighed into my shoulder, chalking me up.
A gentleman’s club, like a gentleman’s tailor, was something that was passed down from a gentleman’s father, and once we had been released from Chapman’s establishment, Father turned to me with over-loud heartiness and said, ‘Lunch at the Club, eh, Albion? High time you knew your way around there.’
Everything in the dining-room seemed misted with the steam of a thousand roasts of beef and Gurney puddings, and there was an almost visible thickness in the air, that made every sound significant: the clink of two spoons on the other side of the room, as the elderly waiter helped someone to brussels sprouts, was an enormous sound, and when someone behind us lit a match for his cigar, the ripping sound almost made me choke on my custard.
In such a hushed and amplifying atmosphere, surrounded by solitary men chewing their way through three courses, it was even more difficult than usual to speak to Father, and all my resolutions— how I would get off on a fresh footing with him, being forthright and man-to-man—wilted, and I was reduced to churlish monosyllables and platitudes, trying to pitch my voice in this dense silence so that it did not ring around the room.
Yes, I agreed with Father, who was trying to do the right thing by his tongue-tied son, I was looking forward to finishing with school, and yes, a few years at the University would stand a man in good stead in any walk of life. How could I, in this greasy hush, punctuated with explosions of silverware, have shared with Father any of my uncertainties?
After lunch we withdrew, like the other gentlemen whose capacious stomachs were labouring to digest it all, to the Reading Room, full of serious men of commerce reading the business news as conscientiously as if taking medicine. Father and I sat down together and Father immediately turned to the stocks and shares page. I tried, but found myself surreptitiously turning back to the less serious pages, the ones in which tight-rope walkers plunged to their deaths, midgets took to Great Danes with carving knives, and babies’ faces were discovered to have been gnawed by rats while they slept.
We sat firm in our leather chairs, which discouraged squirming or too much gesturing because of the rude way they tended to squeak and creak, and Father delivered himself of one or two pieces of advice.
‘The race is to the swift, Albion,’ Father said, and I was surprised to hear him wax poetic. I could see he was in a philosophical mood, and I would have liked to rise to the occasion, but could think of nothing more stimulating to say than, ‘Yes, Father,’ adding to make me seem more involved, ‘I have often thought the same thing.’
Father gave me a look that was not one of admiration, and went on. ‘The fact is,’ he said, and I admired his authoritative way with a fact, ‘that it is a fool’s dream to seek equality in the affairs of men where there is none in nature,’ and I nodded and murmured into my whisky-and-water, my mind quite blank of responses. Away from Father, I could at times come out with a rotund phrase or two myself, and hold my own in a conversation, and I was determined to come out with something or other now: I could not forever be the gormless son!
‘It is a law of nature that the weak go under,’ I said, and was pretty sure this was the right kind of thing, but I made the mistake of accompanying my words with a gesture appropriate to the going-under of the weak, that made the leather of the chair give out an unfortunate noise. Father glanced at me sharply, and an old gentleman with a monocle rattled his paper and cleared his throat, and Father said in a quelling sort of way, ‘Indeed, Albion. Shall we go?’
Father was silent on the ferry on the way back, as if so much fatherly heartiness had wearied him, but as we neared the wharf close to home, and stood up to get off, he tweaked the front of my Norfolk jacket, holding me at arm’s length as if weighing my worth. ‘Yes, Albion,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am sure we will not know you when Chapman has finished with you.’
I was cast down all over again at the note of hope in Father’s voice as he spoke of not knowing me. But I knew that no matter how beautifully Chapman cut and pinned, and no matter how scrupulous I was in the matter of waistcoat-buttons and cuff-links, I would never truly become that unrecognisable Albion he hoped for, the Albion who would have been made into a man.
Mother’s fairy-cakes began to make me gag now: the thick cream was sickening to me, the sugary mouthfuls unmanly and unmanning. ‘No thank you, Mother,’ I began to say to her offerings, peevishly, petulantly. ‘No, really, Mother, I do not want them.’ Mother’s soft brow creased. ‘Are you ill, Albion dearest?’ she asked, and bent over me, all lavender and concern. ‘No, Mother, I am not ill!’ I almost shouted. I could not have said what it was that caused my monstrous impatience with lavender and fairy-cakes, but I wanted to strike this soft jelly of a person, my mother with her weak feminine shape, bending over me solicitously as if I was still an infant.
‘Show me your tongue, Albion,’ Mother said now, in a firmer tone, and sitting back as if she had seen in my eyes the thought that I wished to hit her. ‘Come, Albion, do not be obstinate.’ I stuck out my tongue rudely at her and she looked at it briefly without comment. ‘Very well, Albion,’ she said, and sighed, folding the fairy-cakes into their bag again. ‘Good night, dear boy.’
There were no more fairy-cakes, and after a while, repelled by my chilliness and the way I drew myself away in the bed, there was no longer even a goodnight kiss: there was just her wistful smile, and a gesture of her pale hand over my head, and a smoothing of the counterpane over my feet.
Poor Mother! I was a man now, one who could speak man-to-man with my impatient father, I was no longer a child to be coddled and indulged with babyish sweet things. My mouth watered for the cakes, but I despised them too: they were woman’s fare, children’s fare, and must be put behind me now that I was a man. And that poor mother of mine: she was nothing but a spineless wisp who had to realise that her son no longer belonged to her.