Darkness Visible by William Golding

convulsive efforts to save itself. It did not shake off its honourable commitment to the elderly gentlemen who had stood so long and sold so little. But in a first convulsion, it bundled an unimaginable load of oddments away from one loft to another and opened a showroom upstairs! Here was to be seen cutlery and glass; and as all the elderly gentlemen were busy behind their counters, new blood had to be imported. At the time there was none of the right age or cheapness available, so with an air of coming clean and bursting out into the twentieth century, the shop hired—the word “employ” had a masculine dignity—hired a woman. In this long upstairs showroom the electric light—and what is more, with more powerful bulbs than anywhere else in the building—was not turned off, no matter how bright the day, until the front doors had been shut at six. The very way up to this glittering room betokened a basic frivolity that was suited to the goods on display and the sex of their guardian. It was a drumheaded, plaster-moulded survival from the late seventeenth century and there was no way of discovering how anything like that had found itself indoors rather than out. After a short while, to the cutlery and tumblers were added decanters, wine glasses, china, table mats, napkin rings, candlesticks, salt cellars and ashtrays in onyx. It was a shop within as well as above a shop. Yet it seemed a flighty thing, that lighted, drumheaded entrance with the carpeted stairs, the rugs and polished floor, the flash of glass or silver under the wastefully bright lights. Below it the broomsticks remained, the galvanized iron buckets, the rows of wooden-hafted tools. It did not accord well with the pigeon-holes of stained and broken wood, that were filled with nails or pins or tacks or iron or brass screws and bolts.
    The old men ignored it. They must have known that it would fail, since the shop, as they were, was in the rip of something uncontrollable, an inevitable decline. Even so, after the upstairs showroom, plastics burst in and would not be denied. Plastics committed enormities in the way of silent buckets and washing-up bowls, sink-baskets, watering cans and trays all of blinding colour. Plastics went even further after that and blossomed as a range of artificial flowers. These all grouped themselves as a kind of bower in the centre of the downstairs showrooms. The bower flung out an annexe of plastic screens and trellises that demanded whimsical garden furniture. Once more, it was a feminine place.Once more, a female was its guardian; and not just a female, but a girl at that. She had a till like everyone else. She experimented with coloured lights and hid herself inside a fantasy grove.
    It was into this complex disorder of ancient and modern, this image in little of the society at large, that Matty was projected by the headmaster. His status was ambiguous. Mr Arthur explained that the boy had better come until they found out what use they could make of him.
    “I think,” said Mr Arthur, “we might make use of him in Deliveries.”
    “What about the future?” asked the headmaster “—his future, I mean.”
    “If he does well enough he can go into Despatch,” said Mr Arthur, with, as it were, a far-off glance at Napoleon. “Then if his head for figures is good enough, he might even move up to Accounts.”
    “I don’t conceal from you that the boy seems to have little ability. But he mustn’t stay at school.”
    “He can start in Deliveries.”
    Frankley’s delivered for ten miles round and gave credit. They had a boy with a bicycle for parcels in Greenfield and two vans for longer or heavier journeys. The second of these vans had a driver and a porter, as he was called. The driver was so crippled with arthritis that he had to be inserted in his seat and left there as long as he could stand it and sometimes longer. This was another of Mr Arthur’s unimaginative kindnesses. It kept a man in a job that was a constant