Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (3 page)

‘You haven’t heard the half,’ I said. ‘Here’s what I propose to do next, darling.’ And I told him, to his evident and gratifying stupefaction; when I finished his mouth hung open, his pipe cooling, forgotten, in the ashtray.

‘You don’t stand a cat’s chance,’ he said at last.

‘Well, thanks a lot,’ I said, laughing.

‘But seriously, Dan, how do you hope to pull it off? How can you propose to go in and do what amounts to making a fool of a man who is certainly violent and probably raving mad? And why? Why not say you’re a girlhood friend or something?’

All of these were objections I had put to Lollie hours before, but she had answered them and, besides, I had come around to the notions for reasons of my own.

‘He wouldn’t let her have a friend to stay,’ I said. ‘And he won’t take any notice of me. As long as I dress soberly and keep my head down I’ll be fine. And I’ve decided not to attempt too much authenticity. I shall say I’m gently born and recently come down in the world. That should cover any amount of ignorance and unintended slips, don’t you think?’

Alec nodded rather reluctantly.

‘And most important of all,’ I went on, ‘there’s this question of Lollie being followed whenever she goes out and eavesdropped upon whenever she’s in the house. Do you see?’

‘Ah, of course,’ said Alec, who usually does see; it is one of the most comfortable aspects of our collaborations. ‘It must be one of the servants, doing his master’s bidding. Well, all right, you’ve convinced me.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, to be a fly on the wall though, Dandy, when you’re . . . when you’re busy . . . What exactly does a lady’s maid do all day?’

‘Don’t ask me!’ I said, rolling my eyes in not-completely-mock horror. ‘I have tomorrow and Sunday cramming with Grant – and won’t she adore it! – but for now I can’t imagine.’

‘I’m almost tempted to join you just to watch the fun. Would I make a footman?’ Alec stood up and came to offer me the cigarette box, bending over from the waist like a jointed wooden soldier and clicking his heels together with a beaming smile.

‘You look like a
Punch
cartoon of a bad waiter,’ I told him. ‘And anyway, there isn’t another opening. The Balfours, if you please, have twelve servants in their Edinburgh house, and goodness knows how many more in the Highlands.’

‘Twelve?’ said Alec, standing up straight again and frowning. He ran Dunelgar on seven and a few locals for the rough work. ‘What does he do, this Pip? Some kind of merchant or something, is he?’ He sat back down again and knocked out his pipe.

‘Well now,’ I said. ‘
He
doesn’t do anything, but listen to this and tell me if you don’t agree that some earlier Balfour must have sold his soul to the devil.’ I lit my cigarette and sat back to regale him with the history of the Balfours as it had been told to me. (The last thirty minutes of Miss Rossiter’s interview had been taken up with it, almost as though Lollie could diminish the shortcomings of Pip himself by setting them against the triumphs of the Balfours in general.) It was quite a tale.

The first Balfour of any note came to prominence in the early days of the Georgian era, by setting up a bank in his native Edinburgh in 1717: the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank, whose name no one – from the founder, James Balfour himself, to the lowliest copying clerk – could be relied upon to reproduce with any accuracy (the pull of ‘Eastern Scottish’ in place of ‘Scottish Eastern’ being a particularly common pitfall) so that it is chiefly remembered among banking historians for the number of notes and drafts it issued with errors upon them. There is many a curio-cabinet which has, in one of its drawers, a family’s famous ‘bad banknote’ folded up and yellowing but still taken out and shown to visitors.

Inevitably, the merchants of the day made life easier for themselves by dubbing Balfour’s pet enterprise with a more descriptive title, and ‘the Silk and Tobacco’ flourished along with the trades which gave it its name. (There is still a public house in a back street of Edinburgh called the Silken Tab, whose hanging sign depicts a wigged and powdered old gentleman with a long pipe in his mouth, but since the associations have become blurred and the etymologies muddled, the current Balfours do not concern themselves about it.)

James Balfour Jr was a less cautious man than his father had been, a man who liked to be in at the start of things, and so it is unsurprising that in 1769 he was among the first to move down the hill, away from the smells and noise of the medieval Old Town, and into the stark majesty of a town house on Princes Street, with a view of the Castle and – once the draining of the old North Loch had finally been resolved, after many attempts and disappointments – as much fresh air as he, his wife and their seven children could hope for.

There was, however, to be little repose for Mr Balfour in his commodious new rooms, for he could not contain his eagerness to be part of the great expansion; new houses outside one’s own window were simply that much more fun than holds of silk and bales of tobacco leaves half a world away and in 1770, when every other financier in the capital was feeling well cushioned and replete with success, Balfour found himself in company not with them but with the rather more hard-bitten speculative builders, who were poised to see if their fortunes would swell with the city or go like tapers up a newly swept flue. Balfour would never have sailed as close to the wind as to endanger his fortune, but he did what was to his peers even more amazing. He sold up his father’s business: the Bank of Scotland opened its door with cold charity as to a waif on its step and the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank was no more.

So it was that the Balfour family got out of banking on the high tide just before the beginnings of the great long endless collapse and never had to underwrite a penny of it. And of course the New Town was the success story of the age and grew and grew until there was nowhere in his native city for the old man to put any more of his considerable fortune and his son – Robert Balfour – began to spread it around the land, and most notably to send it underground. From the lead mines of the Scottish uplands to the coal mines of the north of England, the Welsh silver mines and all the way to the tin mines of the West Country, Robert Balfour was chipping out of the earth more and more riches for himself and his own, sending the sons of lesser branches of the Balfour family to manage for him so that the name spread all over Britain and grew synonymous with a kind of far-seeing but hard-working massing of solid wealth.

In time, egged on by a son of his own with a taste for travel and adventure, Robert Balfour finally raised his gaze from the mine heads of Britain and looked to the East again, to India and to cotton, and grew richer still.

Now Robert’s grandson, the first Philip Balfour, was as happy sailing back and forth between Bengal and Scotland as his wife was unhappy, whether accompanying him on the voyages or staying put at either end, for she suffered equally badly from the heat, the cold and the most excruciating, mortifying seasickness. Indeed, there was only one place on earth where she could imagine settling and turning her back on gangplanks and portholes for ever and that was the magical, almost mythical, island whither her more glamorous friends regularly sailed in search of fun and fashions and whence they returned with tales of both which made young Mrs Balfour’s eyes and mouth water. Alexandra Balfour did not wish for the impossible: she could live without gold but every time she was forced onto the dusty streets of Calcutta or was carried through the mud of a mountain road in Kashmir on the neck of an elephant she pined anew for Manhattan, where the streets were paved.

In 1857, after a winter crossing which her husband called bracing but which reduced her to a state of such piteous and unrelieved sickness that their expected fourth child – whose arrival was the sole reason for the journey – came early and promptly left again, Alexandra prevailed. Philip was washed in guilt and grief but the spirit of his grandfather was lit in him as he began to ask around about the wonderful new city and the impossible new buildings rising up and up and up there and to write feverish letters to agents to secure for himself a patch of paradise while it was going.

And so it was that the Balfours made their second timely escape, from India this time, just before the Great Uprising which left every Company man with burned fingers and placed a mute in the neck of the jamboree for ever after.

Silk House – for Philip Balfour had a mind to family history – was to be the finest mansion in New York; he employed the newest and most daring of architects to plan its halls and cloisters and fountained courtyards, and the watercolour sketches of it, nestling in a green dip amongst hills with a cornflower-blue sky above and lush trees in the distance, had grown soft and faded from repeated rolling and unrolling, and rather grubby from the fingers of the three little Balfours choosing their bedrooms. Philip suffered one moment of disquiet in every ten of joy when he looked at the green dip and distant trees, for he could not quite make them fit into the other picture in his mind of lit streets and theatres and the vast emporia known as department stores. Once or twice, when he was regaling a chum at the club, he found himself not quite admitting of his half-built mansion that he had never set eyes on the place, and it did not bring him much comfort that – presumably because such a thing would never occur to them – none of the chums ever actually asked him.

They landed in November in 1858, in a gale which fired hailstones up the wide avenues like peas from a shooter and turned every cross-street corner into a maelstrom, and it was clear right away even to the smallest Balfour child that the green dip had been fancy. Alexandra prepared to put a brave face on her dismay: there was certainly paving – there was little else. She paled and felt her eyes fill with tears, however, when she saw their mansion. It was the same familiar block of marble and porticoes from the watercolour drawings, but where the gardens should have been there were not only streets instead of glades but, on all four sides, railways. Their dreamed-of home was set about by railway lines like a pig penned in with hurdles and Alexandra began a bout of weeping which lasted on and off until the spring.

From their quarters in one of the Fifth Avenue apartment hotels, Philip wrote letter after furious letter and stormed the agents’ offices, pored over street plans and maps, and even did his best with what scant volumes of American law he could lay his hands on, trying to find a hole through which he could wriggle. The names of the four railroad companies who owned one each of the hated tracks grew into a kind of bitter chant for him: Hudson, Central, Newhaven, Harlem, he muttered to himself as he scratched out another rage-filled letter. Hudson, Central, Newhaven, Harlem – that was the worst of the difficulty. There were four of the damned things and he was shoved around among them like the hot potato in the party game and could never pin down any one of the four owners or any one of their many managers and state his case fairly.

Actually though, Philip Balfour was not the only one inconvenienced by the four separate railroads passing one another in mid-town; it was becoming intolerable to everyone (except the hansom-men who shuttled passengers back and forth between the lines), but it took a man of immense riches, with an entrepreneurial vision greater even than that of the first James Balfour himself, to set matters straight. Mr Vanderbilt saw what was needed and Silk House, Philip Balfour’s Valhalla, into which so much of the Balfour fortune had been poured, was a mere gnat to be swept away before the building of the Grand Central Terminus could begin.

‘Blimey,’ said Alec. ‘So it’s Vanderbilt money that’s furnished the twelve servants?’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘There’s one more chapter to go. Balfour was still angry enough to drive a flinty bargain with the great man and he did recoup more of his outlay than he could possibly have dreamed of, then – so Lollie told me – they left New York with the laughter of all the Manhattan sophisticates still ringing in their ears and took themselves southwards to what – in April – must have seemed like a soft and balmy land where they could finally start up their life of lotus-eating as planned.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Somewhere in the vast southern territory,’ I replied. ‘Not a state as such.’

‘Chumps,’ said Alec.

‘Indeed. They bought a huge spread with a white Palladian mansion on it, returned to New York to buy everything they needed to make life perfect there and arrived back neck and neck with the first heralds of summer – to wit, a swarm of biting insects of a size and ferocity never known in Calcutta. These were soon joined by things Lollie didn’t know the name of but which sound like flying leeches if you can imagine anything so horrid, and black flies that followed them around in a column above their heads in the open air, and little fat things that flew in battalions all around their heads in the shade. Makes one almost glad of midges.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Alec. ‘What happened next?’

‘Alexandra, exhausted and dejected, refused to leave. She shut the doors on the wildlife and stayed there until she died. Philip travelled around a good bit, doing nothing very useful, and his son – our Philip’s father – stuck it out until both parents were gone, planning to get shot of the place and come home to Scotland, which his mother had always made sound like absolute heaven to him.’

‘So when did they leave?’ Alec asked.

‘1871,’ I said, wondering if he would catch the significance of the date. He did not. ‘Philip and Alexandra died and Alexander, their son, was just getting around to offloading the place when matters became rather more interesting.’ Still Alec said nothing. ‘Can’t you guess? It’s poetic really – an echo of Robert Balfour with all his subterranean adventures.’

‘You’re kidding!’ said Alec. ‘Oil?’ I laughed along with him.

‘The hundreds of thousands of sun-baked, yellow-grassed, insectiferous acres which were no good for anything except getting lost in happened to be smack on top of a perfect magic treacle pot of oil, that’s still gushing out plumes of the stuff every day. So you see, twelve servants in an Edinburgh town house are really nothing.’