Sons of Fortune (37 page)

Caspar was delighted with himself. He had got his four hundred beds at a knock-down price of a hundred and ten and he had his loan at twelve and a half percent. Neither negotiation had been easy but he had persevered and triumphed. And now he was on his way to Avian’s, the swell shop in Oxford Street, where he hoped to sell his first beds for sixteen-to-seventeen bob apiece—a gross return of two hundred percent!

All right—suppose he didn’t sell them for sixteen. Say he did abysmally badly and only sold them at about eleven bob each. That was still a hundred percent profit. He had no idea business was so easy and such fun. Perhaps he could astonish his mother, if he sold the lot to Mr. Avian or his buyer! Suppose he pretended to be foolish and let them go at only ten bob; wouldn’t Mr. Avian see it as the chance of a lifetime and snap up the lot, so that he could sell them off at their true price of about seventeen, wholesale? Just see her face then!

Twitching with excitement, he told his porters to wait around the side while he went in to see whoever did the buying. The first person he saw was the man he had spoken to on his fact-finding visit the previous day.

“Good morning, sir! May I inquire if you’ve made up your mind?” the man said. He seemed very pleased to see Caspar again.

Caspar seethed with excitement. “I have! I have indeed. Would you kindly direct me to your buyer.”

“Er—byre, sir? I’m afraid I…”

“Your buyer. You know—the chappie who buys furniture.”

The man’s smile grew thin. “Er…we don’t buy furniture, sir. We sell it.”

Caspar’s face fell. “Oh. You mean you make it all yourselves?”

“Well…no, sir. In fact, not. Naturally we buy through the trade. There are certain suppliers…but all of the very highest…”

“Yes.” Caspar was happy again. “That’s what I mean. The person who buys from the trade. I wish to speak to him.”

The man was now quite confused. “You are speaking to him, sir. That is…er…I happen to be…in beds, that is. Beds are…er…my…er…”

“Then,” Caspar spoke like a magician promising marvels, “I have a bed to show you!” He walked to the side entrance, poked his head out, and beckoned his porters to bring the bed in. “Your name, pray?” he asked the man.

“Ah…that…ah…Vane, sir. Mister Alfred Vane. At your service.” In bewilderment he watched the porters march in and begin to assemble the bedstead.

“There, Mister Vane,” Caspar said. “Cast your eyes over that, if you will. Have you ever seen its like?”

Vane pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger; he was beginning to collect his wits. He smiled. “Is this a joke, sir? Some jest you and your good brothers and sisters have devised to beguile these hot days?” He appeared ready to join the joke and share a good laugh.

“Not at all,” Caspar said. “I happen to be sole British agent—a great stroke of luck really—for this new French bed. You know my family has connections in the French iron business, I suppose?”

The man’s smile broadened. “I’m sorry, sir.” He chuckled. “I’d like to go along with this. But, you see, I happen to know where that particular bed was made, and it was about eighty miles from the French coast.”

“As I said,” Caspar cut in, desperately trying to recapture the initiative—and trying to smother the terrible feeling that the whole scheme was coming badly unstuck. “France, you see.”

“No, sir! Eighty miles
this
side of the French coast. Shoreditch, in fact. Just down the road here, as you might say. Bankrupt stock, that is. And deservedly so in my opinion.” He looked more closely at the bedstead. “Oh, yes—this is an old friend!”

Caspar’s stomach fell out of him. His heart gave a painful thump. He was suddenly at a loss for words.

Mr. Vane smiled conspiratorially. “What is it, sir? A wager? I’ll play along if you’ll see me all right at the end of the day. You want me to buy it off you?”

“What d’you mean—‘see you all right’?” Caspar asked. All his confidence had gone, but he did not know why.

The man laughed and shrugged and put his head on one side and waved contemptuously at the bedstead. “Well, sir, I can’t sell rubbish like that; but if your porters will carry it off to the scrap merchant and you want me to pretend I’ve bought it, and if you’ll see my books balance at the end of the week…well, I’ve no objection to playing along. Lady Stevenson is a most esteemed customer of ours.”

“But what’s wrong with it?” Caspar pleaded. “It looks a jolly good bed to me.”

Vane’s patience showed the first signs of unravelling. He spoke much more briskly, with little deference to Caspar’s social rank. “For a start, sir, these tubes.” He gripped one of the uprights that marked the four corners of the bed and pointed to the other three. “They should be cast and they’re not. They’re lapped. It’s rubbish.”

Caspar knew the terms and their meanings but the man assumed he did not. “There should be no seam in them. That’s just thin folded sheet lapped on itself in a tube, the way you’d make a tube out of a sheet of paper.”

“It’s strong enough, though, isn’t it?” Caspar asked, running his finger up and down the joint. It did feel rough, come to think of it now.

Vane watched. A slow grin spread over his face. “Yes!” he said. “I see you can feel it.”

“But I can file that off and repaint it.”

Vane was already shaking his head. “When that left the foundry—or, rather, the tinker’s back yard, for that’s where it was made—it was as smooth as a baby’s…ah…” He suddenly remembered who Caspar was. “I don’t know what they used for brazing compound, but it was badly adulterated. With phosphorus, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Is that bad, Mr. Vane?” Caspar asked.

“As bad as can be, sir. Those corner posts will ‘bloom’ like that—as we call it—until it’s all powder. Then they’ll fall apart. No, sir. That bedstead’s not fit for more than simple scrap. That’s why I can’t buy it from you.”

“Very well,” Caspar said, trying to recover some face. “I shall find another buyer.”

Vane merely laughed. “Not in this trade you won’t, sir! Those beds have been hawked all over London this year and more past. Try Timbuctoo.” But when he saw Caspar’s face he took pity on the lad. “What is your interest, sir, if I may be so bold as to inquire?”

So Caspar told him. Everything. From the moment his mother showed him the sample bed to the moment he walked into Avian’s shop. “Is it really so hopeless, Mr. Vane?” he asked. “Is it all rubbish, or just those four tubes at the corners? The brass bits look fine and the other smaller bars aren’t rough.”

Vane looked at the bed again. “I don’t think it was all made in the same place,” he said, feeling it critically. “That’s solid bar, so you’ve no problem there. And the brass is good,” he allowed reluctantly. “That’d have some scrap value, I’d think. A shilling, perhaps.”

“So,” Caspar said, his hope rekindling, “if I could cut those corner posts out and replace them I’d have quite a good…”

“Not a hope, sir,” Vane interjected. “Believe me, if it could have been done economically, it would already have been done. No, sir…if you’ll pardon my saying so—this bears out the old adage that Society and Trade shouldn’t mingle. If I may make so bold, my advice would be, cut your losses and stick to your own side of things.”

Caspar held his temper against this impertinence. He even managed a smile. “Believe me, Mr. Vane, I intend to solve this problem. And I intend to sell these bedsteads and I intend to do it at a profit. Thank you for your help.”

He nodded at his two porters and began to leave the shop.

Whether from genuine admiration or from a long eye on his own self-interest, Vane walked after him and halted him in the doorway. “In that case, sir, may I he even bolder and tender one more piece of advice?”

Caspar smiled. “I am already too much in your debt in that direction I fear, Mr. Vane, but…please?”

“If you are going to sell, sir, yourself I mean, in person, you cannot do it as the Honourable Caspar Stevenson. A buyer has to look down on a salesman, if you take my meaning, sir. That’ll be your difficulty, sir. A gentleman can never disguise he’s a gentleman.” He stood back and became the deferential shop servant again. “Thank you for your custom, Mr. Stevenson, sir,” he said aloud.

Moments later, out in the street, Caspar heard a female voice calling his name: “Mr. Stevenson? Mr. Stevenson, sir?”

He turned to see a lady in her middle years walking awkwardly behind him. Her whole attitude declared that she was ready to be snubbed. He thought he recognized her and took off his hat. “I apologize, madam,” he said. “You have the better of me, though I seem to recollect…er…” Her clothes were good but almost threadbare.

She made a little curtsy. “No, you do not know me, sir. I was waiting in Avian’s to see Mr. Vane. Then I heard him say your name and he assures me you are Lady Stevenson’s son?”

“That is correct. And how may I be of service?”

“Please! Put up your hat, sir.” Her hand rose to her throat. “Oh dear! I’m all a-flutter!” Her gloves were much darned. She was genteel but obviously in poverty. How ironical, he thought, if she were about to touch him for money—she who probably had some minuscule income, and he over a hundred pounds down the hole, as it now seemed.

“You are a customer of Avian’s, Mrs.…?”

“Mrs. Abercrombie, sir. Oh no, not I! The truth is I do a little writing for
My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion.
Do you know the journal, sir?”

“Ah…” Caspar wondered how rude it would be to admit he didn’t.

She rescued him. “Of course not! It is not written
for
your sort of household but
about
it. In brief, we seek to tell people of middle rank how their betters live…what they eat, what books they read, what colours they are wearing this season, the decorations they are applying to their homes…and”—she looked over her shoulder at Avian’s—“their furnishings.”

“You ask shop assistants!” Caspar said, both amused and intrigued.

“Oh!” she said, all eager to dissociate herself from that class of person. “They are so vain—no pun intended—but they cannot help prattling on about the importance of their customers.” She smiled. “Most useful to me, of course.”

The idea of it fascinated Caspar. This day had lifted the cover on a world whose existence he had, until then, only lazily perceived: the working world. The myriads of things people found to do! The odd ways they got their money. What an idea—to flatter shop assistants into gabbling about customers and then write it all down and sell it to an editor! And then think of all the other people who lived off it—the chappies who set up the type and turned the printing presses, the porters and carters who got the magazine to the railway station…the railways themselves…the newsagent who sold it…and the rag-and-bone man who collected the waste paper…even the rag sorters who supplied the papermakers. How much would it come to altogether? A hundred pounds, perhaps! So if his mother put pink chintz on all her chairs next spring, say, this whole vast machine would leap into action and it would be like sprinkling a hundred pounds over all those people! How much of it fell on Mrs. Abercrombie? he wondered. Precious little by the look of her.

“And you think I may help you in that way?” Caspar asked.

“I…oh dear!” she stammered, and looked about her, as if for a hole to dart into. “You see…it is so hard to get
reliable
information. And one does so hate to print lies. Especially about people one admires. But ten words about Lady Stevenson would be worth pages on almost anybody else except the queen.”

She still looked as if she wished the ground would absorb her, but the mind at work beneath it all was in no way so flustered. He could see that. Something very tough and enduring was driving her.

He laughed self-deprecatingly, to put her more at ease. “I’d be very little use, I’m afraid, Mrs. Abercrombie,” he said. “I just don’t notice such things. If they spilled red paint all over the room, I might just twig it after a week or two.”

“Ah, quite.” She obviously thought he was letting her down lightly. She prepared to go.

“But give me your card,” he said. “You never know.”

She still thought he was letting her down lightly, but she gave him her card and thanked him most effusively.

Caspar watched her go, marvelling at the way that being-in-business could change a fellow. Normally he’d have sent her away very sharply for such impertinence. But now? You never knew. So you kept everything open and vague—and vaguely, superficially nice—until you did know. In fact, his feelings toward the woman were no more cordial now than if he had been sharper with her.

All she had done was to distract him from his own troubles for a moment. When he got hack to the barn he had hired from his mother and saw all four hundred bedsteads ranged there—four hundred heads, four hundred feet, eight hundred frame sides, and four hundred wire mats—his heart dropped to his boots.

What on earth was he to do with all that rubbish? “Worth a few shillings each,” he remembered Vane’s words. “Old friends…try Timbuctoo…fall to bits!” He kicked at the nearest frame. It scattered a few of its neighbours, like falling dominoes; but their inertia soon halted the movement. Inertia! God, how could he ever move this lot! And a hundred pounds—a hundred and five pounds, ticking away at twelve and a half percent. If he bought nothing else all year, his pocket money would just about pay the interest. Why had he not tried to beat Chambers down to eight per cent? Because he was so damn sure he could get rid of all the beds in a week, that’s why. He’d even have agreed to fifteen percent. What a fool he had been.

His stomach churned over and over and over. It was like knowing you were due a chief beating, a House beating, and a Barn beating, one after the other. The fact that, at the moment, you were unscathed and comfortable—no pain, no between-strokes terror—it counted for nothing. Because you knew. You were already strapped down and the men with the hammers were all around you—as Bassett said.

Bassett!
For a moment he thought of going to confront that fellow. How he must be laughing! He’d got shot of twenty quids’ worth of rubbish at five times its price. But then he thought, why give that gobshite the satisfaction? No, he’d get out of this somehow. He looked again at his stockpile of garbage—all eleven tons of it—and thought again of the clock ticking away at twelve and a half percent. And he had not the faintest notion how to do it.