The Hireling

by L.P. Hartley

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

Emotionally paralyzed by grief at her husband’s death, Lady Franklin, an eligible young widow, unburdens herself to Leadbitter—a gallant, hard-bitten ex-soldier who has invested his savings, and himself, in the car he drives for hire—as he takes her on a series of journeys. He in turn beguiles her with stories of his nonexistent wife and children thereby weaning her from her self-absorption, but creating for himself a dreamlife with Lady Franklin at the heart of it. Half-hoping to make his dream come true, Leadbitter takes a bold step which costs him her company and brings the story to a dramatically unexpected end. The Hireling was made into a 1973 film starring Sarah Miles and Robert Shaw.

Release date: January 1, 2009

Publisher: Capuchin Classics

Print pages: 304

Sample

Chapter 1

The car-hire driver was tall and dark and handsome; he looked the regular soldier he had been when the war broke out. He had had other occupations, for as he would say of himself in expansive moments, ‘I’ve had a very chequered career,’ but it was the Army that had left its mark on his appearance. That it was a striking appearance no one could doubt, least of all himself: but of this his bearing gave no hint whatever. He did not seem to take a pride in it; he guarded it as if it was a piece of public property. He looked smart, expensive, and unapproachable. Most people’s figures have the hazy outline of something seen dimly through short-sighted eyes. His figure looked as if it had been shaved. Aiming at correctness, he somehow achieved style; if the material was plebeian, it had a patrician cut. With an impassive face he opened the car door for his customers; with an impassive face he took their orders when these were not already known to him; with an impassive face he held the door open for his customers to alight. To those who noticed him as a man and not merely as a driver, he was a little formidable, and he meant to be. His manners, which were as faultless as his looks, might have been specially designed to protect his impersonality. When he spoke, which he seldom did except when spoken to, he had the air of unbending. Pompous or supercilious he was not; he did not seem to be taking himself seriously; but somewhere about him, perhaps in his eyes which were steadier than a peaceful occasion warranted, there was a hint of menace. ‘Keep off!’ they seemed to say, ‘Keep off!’

This was the face he turned to the world and the face he saw in the glass when, at whatever hour of the day or night it might be, he put on his business personality. But it was not the face his Maker saw, who had taken some trouble to design it. Behind his face the skull showed, the bony structure, narrow, delicate, and strong. Between his cheek-bones and his temples a hollow was scooped out. His eyes were deep-set but so wide apart that when he turned his head their convex line encroached upon the concave, like the old moon in the new moon’s arms. They were the colour of gun-metal and looked as hard, and the pale gold gleam of gun-metal was in them. His black eyebrows were highly arched and one was slightly tufted; across his forehead, repeating the line of his eyebrows, was graven a deep wrinkle like a bow. His nose was straight and on the long side; below it a thin dark moustache hung like an inverted chevron. Strong vertical planes upheld these drooping crescents; they stretched from his cheekbones to his short, cleft chin, which, roughly triangular in outline, rose to a rounded plateau, divided from his mouth by a deep, downward-curving dent. On the top his black hair, threaded with grey, was thick and wavy; at the back it grew so close to his head that it might have been gummed on. His skin was not particularly dark but the modelling of his face was so clear-cut that even in a direct light it was full of shadows. In repose his expression was sad and brooding; when he laughed, which was seldom, he showed the whites above his eyeballs. Full face he looked older than his years, so much experience had left its imprint on his features, but in profile and from the back, which was the way his customers usually saw him, he looked younger. He did not look quite like an Englishman; he might have had a trace of Pictish blood.

Nature meant his face to be expressive but he did not; for an expression is a give-away and he did not want to give anything away. Personal prestige counted a lot with him; he would take offence in a moment, and often when it was not intended. In his salad days he had been known to get drunk and pick a quarrel. Not to like a man’s face was excuse enough for baiting him, and if blows followed, the driver, who had boxed for his battalion and been the anchorman in many a tug-of-war, could give a good account of himself. Not that he was a bully; in such moods he was ready to fight everybody, and ready, too, to drink with them afterwards; indeed at the conclusion of a scrap he felt more at peace with the world than at any other time. His courage wasn’t perfect, however. He was town-bred; and if, when he was courting, he had to cross a field with cattle in it, his flow of conversation would dry up until the danger passed.

On the parade ground and in the barrack room, if occasion warranted, he had a blistering tongue; but among his compeers and when no trouble was afoot he practised the art of understatement, understatement that was not so much deliberately ironical as an unconscious expression of the fact that he had seen too many examples of the unusual to be impressed by it.

‘Nothing that could happen would surprise me,’ he would say.

As for his philosophy he was, as he himself admitted, a cynic. Without having had any illusions to speak of, he managed to be disillusioned. Sometimes in the privacy of his bathroom he would sing to himself, and one of his songs ran (to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’):

 

‘I do believe, I do believe,

That bugs are bigger than fleas,

For on the wall they play football

And I’m the referee.’

 

That, perhaps, was the extent of his belief. But he didn’t boast about it, for boasting was against his code and he was quick to make fun of it in others. ‘Beating eggs with a big stick,’ he called it, and it brought into his voice the lazy teasing note which was the signal, for those who knew him, to look out. ‘Won’t you say that again,’ he would say; ‘I’d like to hear it.’ But being a cynic, with a cynic’s realism, he held himself well in hand, and few, if any, of his customers would have guessed what was being damped down behind that handsome poker-face. For he studied their personalities and did everything he could to please them, short of gushing; for gushing, he maintained, they didn’t like. He would say ‘my lord’ and ‘my lady’ and even ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ in such a way that these titles conferred peculiar distinction. He was rigorously punctual, which was more than could be said for all his colleagues in the car-hire business; and if circumstances made him late or if, as sometimes happened, he couldn’t do the job himself and had to send another man in his place, he would ring the customer up and apologize – or even write, much as he disliked writing letters. This solicitude, contrasting sharply with his impersonal manner, made a good impression, and his customers recommended him to their friends as a particularly civil, reliable, and obliging man.

For this he thanked them, but he had not a great deal to thank them for. In the nature of things they treated him with less consideration than he treated them. Many a time they kept him waiting till the small hours, at a night-club or a dance, without the offer of a sandwich or a cup of tea; many a time they cancelled a good job at the last moment, without apology or the promise of redress; sometimes they forgot about him altogether. They took his patience under their thoughtlessness for granted; they didn’t seem aware that he had feelings to hurt or interests to injure, and some of them talked together as freely in his presence as if he wasn’t there. He had long ceased to mind this and trained himself to turn a deaf ear to their prattle; but when he overheard it, it sometimes struck him as extremely silly. Some of his customers knew each other, but didn’t know they were employing the same man to drive them. The chiel amang us! Had he been given to gossiping with his customers about each other, which from policy and inclination he was not, he could have caused a load of mischief by repeating these unconsidered trifles. It was often his lot to pick up his customers after they had been lunching or dining with their friends. From the doorway came the babble of effusive thanks, but afterwards, in the car, their criticism of the food, the company, and the hostess, told another tale.

No wonder that his customers were ‘they’ to him, beings of an alien if not hostile race, idle, capricious, prone to change their minds and destinations, wanting him to drive against the traffic in one-way streets. But in congenial society, commenting on their shortcomings, he did not let himself sound angry or personally involved in his own disgust; he sounded as if the only sane man left was making indulgent fun of a mad world.

In spite of this the driver was a staunch Conservative and voted for the very people he made fun of, not only because they were his bread and butter but because with all their faults they represented something that he himself was striving to attain.

Two classes of customers escaped his censure. In one were some of the officers who had served with him in the war, and who employed him to do their driving for them (as he put it). With them he felt at home; talking to them he did not have to adapt himself or assume a protective personality. If he did not always use their words he spoke their language – the language of a shared experience. Narrow as the field of their relationship might be he understood it. He would lean back in his seat and let the stiffness out of his broad shoulders while his customer and he fought their battles over again.

The other class also was a small one, but much more unlikely, for it consisted of a few old ladies who had somehow – he himself could not have told how – won the driver’s esteem. Old ladies were not as a rule popular with car-hire men. They needed helping in and out; their manners, dating from an earlier day, could be as stiff and awkward as their movements; they were apt to make their wants known in clear, confident, emphatic voices which invited a disobliging answer. Most drivers had no patience with them, but this driver had; though he would not have owned up to it, they could rely on him for every courtesy. ‘She was a nice old lady,’ he would sometimes wonderingly remark. From him this commendation meant a lot, for ‘nice’ was not a word that he used lightly – in fact he seldom used it except in connexion with these old ladies.

But there were not many of them and for women as a whole the driver had no use whatever. He had lived with more than one but he regarded them as a disagreeable necessity. Women were cruel, he said; surprisingly that was his main charge against them. How had they contrived to be cruel to a man who seemed such an unpromising subject for cruelty – to be, in fact, cruelty-proof, not cruelty-prone? If there was going to be any cruelty, it should have come from him. But no; women are cruel, he said; they like to make one suffer.

As often as not, when he thought of women, his memory went back to his mother’s shoes. She had two dozen pairs of them. She spent money in other ways as well, but the shoes were the extravagance his father always picked on. Why must she have so many? Why shouldn’t she have them? she would ask tearfully of her eldest son; and he, who was given a lot of responsibility but little else, couldn’t see why she shouldn’t, and cried too. She was sweet as honey to him when his father was angry with her. But not, or very often not, at other times. By turns she petted him and scolded him, he never knew which to expect, but he knew that it didn’t depend on his behaviour, it depended on her mood. She always got her way over the shoes; if one pair was thrown away, two pairs were added. What did it matter, the boy wondered; what was it all about? Growing older he saw; the family was short of money, almost on the rocks; he and the others had only one pair of shoes each, but his mother’s were still there in two long rows. He grew to hate the sight of them, and when she came to him crying it was his father with whom he sympathized, not her. But how could he stand up to her when his father couldn’t? Her purposeful, enveloping, insidious character was too much for them both.

Inured to the climate of hostility, but tired of being a buffer, the boy ran away from home and joined the Army. The Army seemed a paradise of non-combatants, and the band in which he played a cave of harmony. News reached him from home, tentacles stretching out; but the sight of his mother’s handwriting made him tremble and feel sick; not till her letters ceased did he cease to be afraid. For many years afterwards he tried to keep his eyes off women’s shoes and when he saw them, emblems of unabashed femininity, his skin prickled.

The Army appealed to almost every quality in him, his pugnacity, his cynical acceptance of futility so long as it was clothed in the proper forms of discipline, his sixth sense for the strength and weakness of his comrades (he could tell almost at a glance how much a man would be worth in a tight place), his enjoyment of ramps and rackets, his feeling for the whole living organism round him, its conventions, traditions, enmities and friendships. In the Army, he felt, a man was rated at his true value, he had nothing but himself to make him count. Recognition of his own value, by himself and others, was of paramount importance to the car-hire driver.

In the Army he enjoyed that two-fold recognition, and with each stripe he put up it increased. He believed he got it by standing up for himself: it was something he had ‘won’ out of the Army. But it wasn’t, or only in part. He really got out of the Army the reward for what he had put into it, his courage, his patience, his conscientiousness, his loyalty – himself. On this his sense of his own worth depended. But he would not have admitted that it was so; he did not even acknowledge it in his thoughts. He would not have called duty by its name, he would have found a dozen belittling expressions for it, some with obscene prefixes, but he acted up to it and lived by it. The recruits he had to lick into shape would not have called it duty either; they would have called it, as they called him, by many other names. For though he knew his job too well to be a martinet of the old school, he did not spare their feelings or bring them their early-morning tea. On the contrary, he stuck his elbows out and clothed himself with all the awe at his command – in a position that already carried with it more visible, immediate authority than almost any other in the land. He had to be infallible; he had to say the word that stung. But he could also say the word that soothed. The men appreciated this, and later, in civilian life, more than one who had had cause to hate him came up and offered him a drink.

Recruits could, must, be licked into shape, but not so customers. Customers had to be kept sweet; only in the physical sense were they a charge to him. Only by playing up to them could he hope to make them better customers. He did it but it went against the grain, and doing it he lost the sense of value that came from reciprocal obligations. For him these obligations didn’t exist in the civilian world; there it was every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. The delicate adjustments, the imponderable restraints that in the Army regulated the dealings of one man with another, didn’t operate. The Army wasn’t really a microcosm, it was a world to itself, male, collective, and hierarchical; to some it seemed a tyrant, but to the driver its service was perfect freedom.

The Army was his only love but in the end he quarrelled with it, thinking not without cause that it had let him down. Like any lovers’ quarrel it was very bitter: ‘It doesn’t pay to be patriotic,’ he said. Yet leaving the Army cost him more than he thought he had it in him to suffer; it was a day of emptiness and darkness, a day of desolation. With no job to go to and no one to help him find a job, he tried one thing after another, and found it wanting; wanting not in money (which was the reason he gave himself for throwing it up) but in something which he had received, together with a much smaller wage than the one he was now earning, at a deal table between two salutes – something that clothed his spirit against the coldness of the outside world.

After a time he joined the Fire Service. But he did not like the Fire Service. It was never a living entity to him, as the Army had been. And he had come down in the world and must start on the lowest rung of the ladder. The ladders of the Fire Service he was prepared to scale, but he couldn’t take its other promotions seriously. Its easy-going discipline – ‘Come, boys, let’s get together and polish up the brass’ – disgusted him, it seemed like play-acting; and he resented as childish having to slide down a pole from the rest-room to the fire-engine. He wanted to fight men, not fire, fire was too abstract an antagonist; and some of the jobs he was called out to do, such as rescuing frightened cats from trees, or separating fighting swans, struck him as waste of time.

To kill time and earn some extra shillings he did odd jobs for a car-hire firm. Driving, he made some useful contacts. Customers remembered him and sometimes when they ordered a car they asked for him by name, a piece of favouritism that the firm’s regular drivers did not relish. One day a customer said, ‘Why don’t you start in business on your own? I could put you in touch with half a dozen people.’ He didn’t, when the time came; but it was this promise, fertilizing an idea already in the driver’s mind, that made him take the plunge.

He bought a car on the hire-purchase system, and kept it as smart and well-groomed as he kept himself. He did not spare himself; he worked, as he expressed it, all the hours God sent. Sleepless nights made sleepy days, sometimes he could hardly keep himself awake. He lost his healthy colour and hollows deepened in his cheeks; the two suits that had served him for ten years hung loosely on him. With all his evident physical strength he looked a subject for a duodenal ulcer. And in spite of his efforts, five months after starting on his own, with no capital except the war gratuity he had sunk in his car, he was only just making both ends meet. For nearly three more years he must go on paying a crippling monthly instalment before he owned the car – by which time it would be worthless, having done a hundred thousand miles.

In Civvy Street he had no sense of union with his fellows, a sort of hostile apartness chilled his thoughts of them, his very wish to work estranged him from them. No one, he felt, had ever been any help to him, least of all the women in his life. His hand was not against every man’s, it couldn’t afford to be; but it was always ready to give or take a blow. A man of the Ulysses type, a sheer man, but with no Penelope waiting for him.

His thirty-five years on earth had left the driver with but one desire: to work the clock round. He scarcely thought of himself as a man, he thought of himself as ‘Leadbitter’s Garages Ltd, Cars for All Occasions’. As for his Christian name, he never heard it used and had almost forgotten it.

Chapter 10

One day he received a telephone call (or rather his man did, Leadbitter was out) asking him to pick up a party at an address in Chelsea, take them out to Richmond, wait while they had dinner, and bring them back. Quite a good job: his clerk had booked it for him.

Leadbitter called for the man first. He was the artist type, tall, young, loosely built, with greenish eyes and auburn locks and a beard. Leadbitter took against him at sight, but he was an impartial judge of a man and he had to admit that as a man, if you cared for that type, this one made the grade. He had a pleasant, musical voice, cultivated without being affected, and an assurance of being liked which showed itself in his movements. He asked Leadbitter to go to an address on Campden Hill, and there he got out, rang the bell, and waited on the doorstep. Here he was joined, as Leadbitter expected, by a woman. She, too, was tall, nearly as tall as he, with bronze hair, wide, high cheek-bones and an air of breeding. (Leadbitter prided himself on being able to pick out the blue-blooded ones.) From the moment of their greeting Leadbitter took for granted that the two were lovers of old standing, there was just that amount of passion in their kiss. In the woman’s he detected something maternal; in the man’s an uncertain ardour. She’s older than he is and she wears the pants, he thought, and yet she isn’t too sure of him. Indifferent as he was, i. . .