Eric Newby - Something Wholesale

‘No, Maureen! … No, dear!’ said the disembodied voice. ‘No, I don’t want to! … No … No … No, I don’t mind that . I think he’s ever such a nice colour … sort of bronze … I just don’t like the way he … Well, he said that the last time … No! … No! The other one’s worse than he is … I had to have it cleaned – And my leg it was all bruised. Mum was ever so cross!’

As I listened fascinated to this recital a long, silky-looking leg slid sinuously round the door. Nylons were still in their infancy in Britain at that time or, in the jargon of the day, ‘in short supply’. The owner of this leg had obviously overcome these difficulties. Attached to it was a foot wanton enough, as Balzac wrote, to damn an archangel, partially enclosed in a sandal with a four-inch heel. Half-mesmerised, as a snake charmer who has allowed one of his charges to gain control of the situation, I watched the leg in which muscles rippled as sleek and powerful as a boa-constrictor’s. I could see nothing wrong with it. Either this was not the one that was ‘all bruised’ or else the scars of battle had already healed. I began to experience that morbid sensation known to psychoanalyists as The Death Wish. For the moment I could think of nothing more delectable than being crushed to pulp by this and its attendant member.

Now the instep began to arch itself with infinite slowness, just like the head of a cobra when it is about to strike … Tearing myself away from this disturbing sight I went down the hall.

Suddenly a door opened that was almost invisible in the panelling. ‘’ERE!’ said a great voice that made me jump. ‘Is that Mr Eric? Mr Eric! Where you bin? Your Dad’s been asking for you!’

The owner of the voice was Miss Gatling, Head of the Counting House and Company Secretary. In the official hierarchy at Lane and Newby’s she filled a similar position to that occupied by a Regimental Sergeant-Major. Ever since the time when I had been taken round from one department to another as a small boy and asked by various imposing ladies whether I liked school I had been terrified of Miss Gatling. And I still was terrified of her.

‘Welcome to Lane and Newby’s,’ she said, baring her teeth with a sudden accession of bonhomie that was most alarming. ‘There’s a lot to learn. You’ve probably left it too late,’ she added, encouragingly. ‘I should get up them stairs and see your Dad … AND LOLA,’ she shouted down the hall, ‘WILL YOU GET OFF THAT TELEPHONE! YOU’VE BEEN ON IT TEN MINUTES.’

‘She’ll come to a sticky end that girl. You’ll see,’ she confided to me, gloomily. ‘Only thinks of men. You watch your step!’

My father’s office was on the first floor. It was at the back of the house overlooking what had been the garden until Mr Lane in an orgy of expansion had had it built over to provide more space for the business. It was a tall, narrow, rather gloomy chamber like a drawing by Phiz in A Christmas Carol . Originally it had probably been a dressing-room; leading off it was a powder closet to which one descended by a pair of steps. In the window seat there was a concealed wash basin made of lead, with brass taps that had been polished by so many generations of charwomen that they bore only a vestigial resemblance to taps at all.

In one corner was what my father described as ‘my portable desk’. It was really a mahogany chest with brass-bound corners which could be opened out into a sloping desk. It was portable in the sense that it had probably been made originally to be carried on some African’s noddle on safari. In it he kept old fixture cards which showed the breadth of his sporting interests before he took up rowing: Rugby football, cross-country running, boxing, swimming, wrestling and, of course, weight-lifting.

There were three pictures on the walls. One, a photograph of Lord Roberts of Kandahar, ‘Bobs’ as my father called him, wearing a funny hat without a brim and looking angry on the rifle ranges at Bisley; the second a coloured reproduction of a rococo interior with a riot of cardinals at table ‘Drinking the Health of the Chef in Moët et Chandon’; and the third, framed instructions for ‘The Prevention of Fire in Private Residences’, with an injunction under the heading GAS, ‘In the event of a leak send for the gas fitter and watch him carefully as he will sometimes seek for an escape with a light – and may find it at the risk of blowing up the building and all it contains!’

There was little room to move in my father’s room, except to the window with its wash basin and to the roll-topped desk at which my father sat, for the whole floor was piled deep with newspapers. He kept every copy of the Observer and the Morning Post as they were published. In the cellars below they were piled high in the transepts, going back with their prophecies of doom and their sudden fits of optimism that were invariably wrong to a period infinitely remote, before 1914. What hedged him in here in his office were the editions of the last five years or so. ‘I remember reading something about it,’ he used to say when confronted with some topic that interested him and in the succeeding weeks he could be found, bent double, grunting as he untied the careful knot with which he had secured a bundle twenty years before, in search of the quotation in question. To my knowledge he never succeeded in finding what he was looking for, but at any rate he always found something else of interest that tended to deflect him from his original course.

Now he was sitting behind the large, shiny roll-top desk which he had occupied since the triumphant departure of Mr Lane. As always, on top of his desk there was a large jug of barley water.

My father was now seventy-five years old. A serious operation of a sort from which few people ever recover had reduced him to a shadow of his former self. He had undergone it in an East End Hospital while the bombs were raining down, but he spoke remotely of the dangers to which he had been exposed. His former pugnacity had largely evaporated. Previously he had been a man of impressive physique; he was now extremely thin and fragile, like a piece of very old porcelain. But he was still exceptionally handsome and dressed as I saw him now, in a suit of thick flannel, with a rose in his buttonhole and his fresh complexion, he looked like a small boy who had been given leave from his preparatory school to attend the wedding of an elder brother.

‘You’ll have to get here a little earlier than this, you know!’ he said, putting on his glasses and looking at me over the tops of them. ‘You have to set an example. I’ve arranged for you to start in the Coat Department – there’s a lot of cutting off to be done. It’s too much for Miss Webb; she’s not as young as she was. None of us are. We need some new blood. Have some barley water.’

‘Everything’s changing so rapidly nowadays,’ he went on, ‘I was having a yarn with old Brown in the silk trade.’ There followed a long anecdote about what old Brown had told him.

‘But I mustn’t keep you,’ he went on. ‘I’ve got to get down to Hammersmith – I’m having a new set of sculls made for my best boat. Shan’t be able to use them much myself but you may find them useful. I haven’t been at all well you know,’ he said, as if this was something of which I was ignorant.

‘Well you’d better get on,’ he said, rolling down the top of his desk with a gesture of dismissal. ‘Oh, by the way; you know that shaving brush I sent you when you were in that camp in Czechoslovakia. Can I have it back?’

‘I’m afraid it wasn’t very strong, father. It fell to pieces.’

‘You young chaps!’ he said, seriously. ‘You don’t know how to look after things. That was a good brush.’