Bellman & Black

  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.

  After the first dozen interviews were completed, Bellman entered the interview room via the connecting door as arranged. He conferred with Miss Chalcraft and found that they thought alike. They went through the girls in the order they had been seen. Some were quickly rejected; Miss Chalcraft crossed their names through with a firm line. Others were as quickly in. “Yes?” he asked, “Yes,” she answered; a big tick went against the name on the master list and the decision was made. Sometimes there was discussion. Miss Chalcraft had seen the work; he had not. They deliberated, evaluated, compared, and contrasted, and within the space of half a minute the girl was erased or ticked.

  “Number nine,” Miss Chalcraft announced. “Now, I gave her a five generally. She has no experience in a large enterprise like Bellman & Black.”

  Bellman had also given her a five.

  “And her work?”

  “Very neat. But whether she can work at the speed we need . . .”

  Miss Chalcraft’s pen hovered, ready to delete her.

  Bellman noticed that he had failed to give the girl a grade for that elusive quality that would make her right to send into a house of mourning. Someone who would wordlessly emanate the right kind of sympathy. Someone whose presence would comfort—but at least not distress—the recently bereaved. He tried to picture her—chubby girl? Brown curls perhaps?—and couldn’t.

  What he did remember were the half-raised hand, anguish, and her ability to soothe herself.

  “I think we’ll try her out,” he said.

  The excellent Miss Chalcraft did not show her surprise. He was the boss. Her pencil moved to the right
-hand side of the page and entered a tick.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  He blamed Fox. He had wanted a shop for the fifteenth and Fox, unable to resist a challenge, had promised it for the fourteenth. Hence this useless, empty day.

  Bellman was out of sorts. He had felt it, even before he was awake. Now he stood before his mirror, lathering soap with his shaving brush and studying the black points protruding darkly over his face. He applied a beard of white snow to his chin and took up the razor. What was the matter?

  The preparations were complete. Bellman & Black was ready to meet its staff tomorrow. Bellman’s role as constructor-in-chief of a great emporium was over—and his life as manager of a working enterprise had not yet begun. His life was poised between the one thing and the other, and this in-between state was uncomfortable to him. He wished it were tomorrow, when before eight o’clock the side door would open and clerks and shopgirls and department heads and seamstresses and maintenance men and doormen and a coachman and packers and handlers and messengers would come pouring in. Tomorrow he would be at the heart of things, all day long he would be answering queries, smoothing out unforeseen difficulties in the life of the shop. He would be entirely absorbed in it. But that was tomorrow.

  It was today that was the problem.

  No difficulty waited to be smoothed out. All was straight and ready and in order. Every floorboard was hammered down, every lock oiled, every uniform ironed.

  It was all right for Fox. What would he be doing today? Celebrating the end of the job, no doubt. He would be with friends. Family perhaps. Bellman supposed Fox must have some family.

  Bellman met his eyes in the mirror and saw something troubling look back at him out of his own eyes. Quickly he averted his gaze.

  Had he forgotten something? The uneasiness that was disturbing him had that kind of weight and density. But he was not prone to forgetfulness.

  A crimson flower blossomed on the white lather by his nose. He had caught that little mole. Damn.

  Bellman breakfasted. He wrote some unnecessary letters.

  Dora had arrived for a brief London visit, but he did not wish to disturb her: she would be tired after yesterday’s journey.

  He leafed through his notebook. All his lists of recent weeks. Every item with a tick against it. It almost reassured him. But he was restless: it wasn’t a day to sit at a desk.

  When he had word that Dora was up, he went to the drawing room. “I am sorry I have been so busy of late.”

  “You have been busy ever since I was born, Father. I am perfectly used to it.”

  “I will be busy in the coming days too. More than ever.”

  “Naturally.”

  She was occupied with her binoculars, looking into the treetops in the square opposite. It would have been pleasant to stay and talk for a while, but he did not know what to say to his daughter. He had forgotten how to talk of normal things now that the business of death kept him so busy.

  Though spring was edging closer to summer, it was under cloud that he walked to a restaurant for lunch. He read a newspaper. Leisure! What did people see in it? It only put him out of sorts.

  At five o’clock he could resist no longer. He walked to Bellman & Black, inserted the heavy key, and turned it. The smooth function of key in lock satisfied him and went a little way to soothing his irritation. The heavy door opened with a weighty swing, and under the curious eyes of the passers-by, Bellman let himself in.

  All was still. All was hushed. The ground-floor windows were masked, casting an early dusk, and Bellman walked to the atrium in the center where the light fell from the upper floors. He had been inside the building a hundred times before, to oversee, to discuss, to sign off, to solve problems and resolve disputes. Always there had been the noise of tools, voices, equipment. Always he had had some specific objective in mind that caused him to perceive the shop piecemeal. Today, alone and in silence, he took possession of his domain.

  He ascended the staircase. He had already assessed the smoothness of the handrail, already checked the color of the carpet against the sample. Tonight he had only to take delight in these details and marvel at how exactly they matched his intention.

  Bellman continued his tour. Every now and again he nodded, satisfied. Here were display cabinets for the jewelry; here the drawers for gloves; here the mannequin busts, naked, but soon to display mantles and collars and tippets; here the wall racks where fabrics could be compared; here the counters, with a niche in the wall for cash payments and a book in the drawer for orders . . . Here would be the umbrellas and here the shoes . . . Everything was in a perfect state of readiness—all the more strange then, this feeling of having forgotten something.

  Upstairs again. Now he left the public arena behind him. Gone was the mahogany paneling. Gone the high ceilings and grand windows. This was backstage. The realm of paper and ink and of money. One room was the heart of the pneumatic payment system. At each hatch a desk; on each desk ink and blank receipts and blotters.

  The clerks’ room that Bellman had seen almost empty when Miss Chalcraft interviewed the seamstresses was now filled with rows of desks. He sat down at one of them. His eye was drawn to the spot in the paneling where the spyhole was. Nothing was visible.

  Sitting in her place, Bellman raised his hand in the direction of the invisible spot, as the seamstress had done, and studied his fingers, his arm. A reaching out in order to capture—what? The fingers closing on nothing. The hand falling dispirited to his lap. He shook his head in puzzlement and repeated the action, as though it were a mechanism he had not yet got the measure of. After a couple of attempts he shook his head clear and left the room.

  His own office awaited only him. It was larger than it needed to be. To impress, according to the architect. Bellman had shrugged. He had never relied on a room’s dimension to impress people; he had never been impressed by room dimensions. He might yet divide it. From his own office he looked into the antechamber, where his secretary would work and control access to Bellman. The last room making up the suite of offices contained nothing but a safe, taking up one third of the space. The size of a safe did not impress Bellman either, not while it was empty. He entered the code, opened the door, relocked it.

  Upstairs again. Farther and farther away from the public. Deeper and deeper into the private realm of Bellman & Black. On the third floor was the seamstresses’ workplace. The architect had tried to dissuade him—waste such a view of the city on seamstresses?—but Bellman had insisted. The girls who made the dresses needed every last ray of sunlight to stitch by. Every degree of elevation was worth good money. “A corner of the second floor is all I need,” he’d told the man. “You can count money well enough by gaslight.”

  Bellman was delighted with the seamstresses’ work space. He smiled to himself, remembering the day six months ago when he had interrogated Miss Chalcraft on every aspect of couture. She had taken him to watch seamstresses at work. He had handled needles, thimbles, scissors, and thread himself. He had learned to thread a needle and, having finally succeeded—it was a hundred times more difficult than he had anticipated—had driven it in and out of a few offcuts of cloth, first by the window, then in shadow. The excellent Miss Chalcraft had failed to hide her astonishment.

  “How else can I know what your girls will need, Miss Chalcraft?” he had asked. “I will give them large windows, because black cloth is harder to stitch than colored when the light starts to fade. And I will give them time to stand and move about and a space to do it in, so that they don’t have to pretend to have run out of thread or lost their needle when their neck hurts from being hunched over their work. And that way, they will want to work for Bellman & Black because we understand what makes their work easy and what hard, and there will be less time wasted and fewer needles lost.”

  Bellman imagined one of the seamstresses—though he did not attend particularly to the fact, it was Girl No. 9 he imagined—arriving for the first time tomorrow in the seamstresses’ workplace a
nd marveling at the precise and practical way in which everything was arranged. Light falling copiously onto the long workbench, which was divided by sloping wooden ridges into individual sewing stations. Each workplace had its own hooks for scissors and pigeonholes for needles and thread and thimbles and drawers for braid and ribbon.

  Yes. He nodded and smiled.

  It was soothing to see how closely the realization of his plans matched the image of it he had carried in his mind for so many months. All the thoughts that had once existed only in his imagination now had material reality. Here was evidence that he was not forgetful. He tried to draw reassurance from it. He tried to put the uncomfortable feeling behind him.

  Upstairs again. Around the light well were arranged the seamstresses’ bedrooms. He turned into one at random; they were all the same. It was a narrow room with sloping walls under the eaves and a tiny window. A bed with a thin mattress was built against the wall. A hook behind the door for a black dress. A chest. A pitcher and a bowl. Was it big enough?

  He pictured a seamstress in the room. Like an obedient marionette, Girl No. 9 stood at the basin and washed her face. She unpinned her hair. Was her hair brown and curly? It was brown and curly now. She sat on the bed to take her shoes off, then laid down.

  Yes, the room was adequate, he judged.

  Girl No. 9 continued to lie on the bed, as if waiting to see whether he required her to stand and undress and hang her black dress on the hook behind the door. She watched his face, attentively. She had—or his mind supplied her with—an attractive shape under her black dress. Her eyes looked tenderly at him. Her lips parted, as though she were about to speak, invite him to—