The Debit Account

by Oliver Onions

IV

I began to foresee those inconveniences that afterwards made me hate that house in the Vale of Health as soon as I had signed my contract and got the key. The contract was for a year only, and as for any period less than three years the agents had refused to "do up" the place for me, I became plasterer, painter and plumber myself. I suppose that from the strictly conventional point of view Evie ought to have had no hand in this; indeed, she read me, from the "Etiquette" column of one of her weekly papers, a passage that informed me that between her choice of a house and her going into it as its mistress in the eyes of all the world a bride-elect ought to betray no knowledge of that house's existence; but as she delivered this from over the bib of an enormous apron, holding the journal in one hand, while the fingers of the other rubbed the lumps out of a bucket of whitewash, the knowledge came too late to be of much use. Anyway, there we were, with Miss Angela or an old charwoman or else nobody at all for chaperon, scraping walls, mixing paint, puttying cracks, fixing shelves, dragging at obstinate old nails; and seeing that from the point of view of Etiquette we were already numbered with the lost, we made no bones about walking into a shop in Tottenham Court Road together and brazenly asking to be shown the bedstead department. After that we took tea, with never a human eye upon us, in my lofty room near the Cobden Statue. Doubtless this cut us off finally from that dim eschatological hope when even the devil shall have his respite of a thousand years. Our only solace was that we found ourselves in the company of a good many others who have to square their Etiquette with their opportunities as best they can.

But about those inconveniences. Why, with the whole Heath before them, the children on their way to or from school should make our doorstep their playground I didn't know; but they did, and it needed no gift of prophecy to see that when the schools closed later in the summer they would be an almost hourly nuisance. That was the first thing that struck me. Next, the crown of my head was like to be sore from many bumpings before I had learned to avoid the bathroom floor as I mounted our creaking, turning stairs. Next, ready as I should have been to secure my own garden from overlooking had I had one, I resented that screen of trellis that limited the view from our little balcony to the slope of hillside opposite. Add to these that not a window-sash fitted within half or three-quarters of an inch, that not a door was truly hung, that, wherever I wanted to make good a hinge or fastening, the woodwork was soft as a mushroom with old screwholes, and that I should have ruined a whole shopful of tools had I even attempted to level our splintery old floor, and you will see why I rejoiced to think that our tenancy might not be a very long one. But I need hardly add that, after all, these things weighed but a trifle against my impatience, and that I was careful not to let Evie suppose that I did not think our little nook the most delightful spot imaginable.

As a matter of fact I was compelled to leave a large part of the work to Evie; and capitally she did it. She had forgotten her old smattering of business training so completely that she always found it easier to go through her day's duties than she did to balance her expenditure afterwards in the highly ornamental "Housekeeper's Book" I bought for her; and while I was allowed my way in such unimportant things as where we should put our old-fashioned chests of drawers and Sheffield caddies and those sketches of Billy Izzard's, the department that began with the frying-pan and ended with general cleaning was hers. I had given her a second key, not only of the new house, but also of my own quarters in Camden Town; and sometimes at the F.B.C. I would look up from my work, gaze past the Duke of York's Column with its circling pigeons and away over the Mall, and wonder what she was doing now—taking our new dinner-service from its crates and washing it, peeping down the long cylinder of kitchen linoleum and wishing I was there to cut it to the floor, lighting fires to get rid of the damp, or (strictly against orders) scrubbing out the bath which, later, strive as I would, I could never successfully re-enamel. Then in the evening I would hasten for the Hampstead bus, stride up from the Heath Station, and, arrived at home, throw off my coat, put up shelves, fit carpets, see how my new paint (an ivory white) was drying, and only knock off when, not Etiquette, but the lateness of the hour and the distance I had to take Evie home compelled me.

I liked the daily life at the F.B.C. Our various departments were to a great extent isolated, so that the intermediate clerks like myself could only guess at the relation of their own portion of the work to the whole intricate business; but I have told you how I myself was privately "let in on the ground floor" by Pepper. I had three "Juns. Ex. Con." as my immediate subordinates, and they were first-rate fellows, and amusing company into the bargain. All three, Whitlock, Stonor and Peddie, were younger than I by some years; and as they were all bachelors, and there was plenty of time yet for them to begin to take their work very seriously, they showed not a trace of envy of me. Indeed, being rather "doggish" in their dress, and reckoning the work of the day as little more than a killing of time until the pleasures of the evening should begin, they even made something of a pet of their "Balzac in a dressing-gown"; and as if the nearness of our offices to Piccadilly put on them some responsibility that the character for gaiety of that gay part of London should not suffer through their negligence, they had an air of owning the quarter. They furnished drinks at Epitaux's as a man might in his own house, and introduced their companions at Stone's as if they had been veritable guests. True, funds did not often run to the old Continental over the way; but they knew by sight many of the loungers who entered its portals from four o'clock in the afternoon on, and would exchange intelligent glances over their filing or posting as suède boots, or picture hat, or something that looked as if it had stepped out of Stagg & Mantle's window tripped seductively by.

Pepper, of course, was my own immediate superior, as I was of my three boys; and while our private arrangement put me after office hours straightway on a level with the mandarins of the concern, we strictly kept our respective positions at Waterloo Place. I prepared drafts for him of such matters as Paying Ballast, Railway Digests, the daily postings at Lloyd's and the fluctuations of Insurance Rates; and these he changed into factors of policy in high council with the lords of other departments. His private office was immediately above ours; and twenty times a day his secretary, Miss Levey, descended the broad mosaic staircase or came down in the gilt and upholstered lift, either commanding my attendance, or bringing me instructions. It was a "wheeze" among my three boys to pose as her admirers, but I never thought she was quite so unconscious of their real thoughts as they supposed.

I was going to pass on; but while I am about it I may as well say a little more about this Miss Levey, and my reasons for regarding her as a person to be rather carefully watched. She was short, and a victim to her race's tendency to early stoutness; and as she had no neck, and always wore hats far too large for her, her appearance was top-heavy. Of her too large and prominent features her pot-hook nose was the most prominent. Her manner towards myself was that of one who would have liked to be familiar, but lacked the confidence; and doubtless her perpetual hovering on the confines of a liberty arose out of some slight acquaintance she had had with Evie in the days of her business training. As if Evie's health was as liable to fluctuations as the Export charts and Trade returns on our walls, Miss Levey never omitted to inquire after it each morning, becoming daily more empressée as our engagement proceeded; but so far she had not succeeded in what I divined to be her object, an invitation to renew the old acquaintance. And though I could keep the greater part of our intercourse strictly to business, I could hardly avoid occasional meetings on the stairs, in the lift, or sometimes a walk up Lower Regent Street with her as far as the Circus.

It was during the course of one of these short walks, one lunch-time, that, having obtained from me her daily bulletin, Miss Levey rather put me in a hole by asking me what I thought Evie would like for a wedding present. Secretly I neither wanted a wedding present from Miss Levey nor wished Evie to receive one, but I could hardly give her the slap on the face of telling her so. Instead I answered, a little abruptly, that I really didn't know—that it was awfully kind of her—and that she wasn't to think of it; but she did not take the hint. So, knowing her capacity for swallowing, but not forgetting snubs, and really feeling that perhaps I had gone a little too far, I hastened to repair a possible rudeness. We were approaching the tea-shop near the Circus at which I usually lunched; we reached it, and paused together on the kerb; and then, on the spur of the moment, I suggested that she should lunch with me. With a little demonstration of pleasure she accepted, and we entered and took our places at a small round table in the shadow of the pay-desk.

I knew, of course, that I had been cornered, and that she knew it too; but in these cases the thick-skinned person always has the advantage. I resolved that that advantage should be as slight as possible. And for a time—though probably not for one moment longer than she wished—I succeeded. As she ate her rissole and sipped her chocolate she talked with animation of this and that—the morning's business, the people in the crowded shop, the theatres, and so on; and then she returned to the subject of the wedding present, the date of my marriage, where we were going to live, and the rest of it. I was as reserved as my unwillingly given invitation allowed me to be, but presently I had to promise to ask Evie what form she would like the present to take. With that, Miss Levey went off at score, speaking of Evie as she had known her.