Sons of Fortune (40 page)

“Brockman does not lie,” Boy said gently. Caspar’s evident anger frightened him.

“He lies. He says self-pollution (as he calls it) makes you weak. It saps your judgement and vigour. It weakens your sight. Well”—he looked away and braced himself to say it—“I won the fives finals after three…acts. And in a week of twelve. I won the school junior steeplechase within an hour of two. And look at me—is there a single pimple or blotch on my skin? Am I deaf at all? Are my teeth falling out? Do I stare and stammer? Do my feet shuffle? Do I fail to look people in the eye? Is my mind dull? Am I always scratching at pocket billiards? Eh? Lie upon lie upon lie. He will stop at nothing. And all that two-faced, sanctimonious shit about ‘Truth’!
He
is the Devil.”

Caspar laughed then, having boiled off all his steam. He reached out and took Boy’s arm, exactly as chief was wont to do. His imitation of chief’s voice was also exact. “Give him up, m’boy, I implore you! Give him up while you yet have time!”

Boy had to laugh at that; the tone was precisely caught. But all of Caspar’s contempt for the man was there, too, and, for a moment, Boy was allowed to glimpse his beloved chief directly through Caspar’s eyes. It clashed so violently with the view he had formed over so many years that he was thrown back into confusion.

Caspar, seeing that hesitation, steeled himself to make his final and most unwilling revelation. “I’ll prove it to you,” he promised, “when we get back to the farmhouse.”

When they arrived, he went up to his box and rummaged around for a time. He came down again with something concealed in the palm of his hand. He took Boy out to the turf house and then—still not satisfied with its seclusion—took him down to the centre of the hot, deserted beach. The other children were all out, riding the long circuit past Ballyconneely.

“Here,” Caspar said, at last revealing what was in his hand: a small diary for the year 1857.

Boy recognized it at once. About eighteen months ago he had, to his shame, tried to read Caspar’s diaries and found them all to be in some kind of code, part-mathematical, part-symbolic.

Caspar opened it at random, looked at it, then clasped it to his chest; he was now regretting the impulse that had brought him and his diary to this point. Boy waited.

Caspar took a deep breath. “I’ll show you,” he said. “Easter. Confirmation lecture…that’s the full, guided tour of Inferno, isn’t it?”

Boy nodded.

“See the squiggles?” He pointed to marks just below the dateline for each page, something like a tilde: ~. “Each of those is one of Brockman’s ‘acts of abomination’. One a day for ten days. This is an experiment, you see. And here are things you can measure. P is for ‘pulse’—normal, normal, normal…and so on. Temperature I couldn’t take, but, anyway, no fever. SH is standing on hands, length of time. That tests balance and strength, you see. At least three minutes every day. Could have gone on for hours. W is running up and down Whernside—no staving. And look at the times! I beat Brockman every day. So either he was hard at it himself or he’s lying.”

The next ten days were each marked ~ ~ . “See! No change in anything. V, by the way, is veins in the eye—looking for bloodshot eyes, you see. I forgot that the first week. That’s the number of veins I could count in the lower half of my left eye. Doesn’t change much, does it!”

Now that Caspar was launched into it, he became as proud of these performance records as an engine designer would be of a new locomotive. Grinning, he turned the page. “Then…” he said. Each of the next eight days was distinguished: ~ ~ ~.

He waited until Boy, who stared down at the book in complete impassivity, had absorbed the decorations before he said, “And still no really measurable change!”

“You stopped,” Boy said pointing to the last two visible days.

“I got bored,” Caspar said. “But look.”

Every day of the following week danced with: ~ ~ ~ ~.

“And there’s one of my fastest times ever up and down Whernside. After I had spat in chief’s eye twenty-eight times.” He turned over two pages quickly, and showed Boy a spread devoid of squiggles, though all the other measurements were there. “Here’s where I…”

“Why did you turn over two pages?” Boy asked.

“Nothing,” Caspar said. “It wasn’t part of these tests.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Caspar looked at the sky and, whistling, turned back a page. The early days of the spread bore random assortments of single, double, or treble squiggles. The Friday and Saturday were blank. Sunday was all but obliterated under: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Chee-rist!” Boy said. “That
must
have done something.”

“It gave me blood blisters!”

“More than that.”

“Yes. I can safely say that is over the limit. Fourteen a day would probably produce some of the effects Brockman predicts. But not four. Anyway”—He turned forward to the squiggle-free pages again—“here we are, as virgin as Brockman could wish. And no change—once we’ve recovered from the excesses of that Sunday.”

Boy was disappointed. “No change at all? There must be.”

“Except by here I felt decidedly irritable and shivery. And here”—he turned over and pointed to ~ ~ —“I broke down!” He grinned through lazy, half-closed eyes at the memory. It was bravado, put on for Boy.

“Let’s see the rest,” Boy said.

But Caspar snatched away the book. “No! The rest is not part of those tests. It’s private. And don’t you ever look in these now you know that code. Promise?”

Boy promised.

“But I’ll tell you this, Boy. If every time I spit in Brockman’s eye it’s a shovelful on my grave, and if we’re talking about the navvy shovel, I’ve got twenty-six cubic yards heaped up already!”

He laughed then, suddenly seeing it as a picture. “Hey!” he said. “I’m going to be a
real
pharaoh at this rate!”

***

Boy was not persuaded by Caspar’s demonstration—at least, not completely and not all at once. He had lived too long and too faithfully, despite all his backsliding, by that other code. But at least it put enough doubt in his mind to prevent him from returning to the idea of self-mutilation as a way of relinquishing his burdens. It did not seem impossible that he might, in time, even borrow a little of his brother’s skepticism and try some less ambitious experiments. After all, four or five years ago, before chief’s lectures, it had never seemed to do him much harm. Perhaps when you did it knowing that it harmed you, it really did do so. But what if you did it knowing it was harmless? Like Caspar? Perhaps it really would be harmless. It was an exciting thought.

Of course, he still admired the man who had done so much for Fiennes, who was such a superb sportsman, who had such a great mind, who taught so supremely well, who always had time for any youth with any problem—who was, in short, such an example of moral, mental, and muscular vigour. But Brockman had undoubtedly lied. If what Caspar said was true, and if the other fellows had searched for that place and failed to find it, then Brockman had allowed a lie to go forward in defence of a truth. He had prostituted truth and turned it into a lie.

And so, for Boy, the real and immediate casualty of this affair was his worship of Brockman. The man had ceased to be a god.

When Nora asked Roxby why he had never married, he patted his naked body the way a man pats all his pockets in search of coin. When it produced no apparent discovery, he turned his hands palm outwards and shrugged. “No idea,” he said.

The charade had drawn Nora’s attention to his body. A poor thing compared with John’s. A poor performer, too. “Be serious,” she said.

She was beginning to emerge from the euphoria of her rebellion against John. Fear was creeping in at all sorts of edges. There were things she could wish had been done differently or not at all. Roxby was one. She had spoiled a pleasantly flirtatious relationship—which in ten years, had never strayed beyond propriety—and what had she got in return? A pocketful of dust. A poke full of dust! She doubted she could bear having him in her bed one more time.

“If I were serious, you wouldn’t believe it,” he said.

“Try.”

“Why’ve I never married?”

“Yes.”

“It would be monstrous unfair on the lady.” He looked at her, sizing her up for a swift confession. “I’m too bloody fickle, Nora. Take us. Here I am, wondering how to break it to you that I want to be off…” He sighed.

“And deciding to do it brutally,” Nora said, not showing the faintest trace of her delight.

“You’re not saying you’ve grown to love me!” he was stung into responding.

“I…” she began. And then she had to laugh, unable to keep up her pretence of shock and rejection.

“Thank God for that!” he said and at once got up and began to dress himself.

“One extreme to the other! You don’t have to be quite so swift—now, that
is
brutal.”

He sat down and made a feeble attempt to caress her with one limp hand. She caught it and flung it away petulantly. “Oh, go on then!” she said.

In the end her sense of relief triumphed over all the other stray feelings his going engendered. “But why would it be un
fair
?”
she asked.

“I told you—too fickle. The number of times I’ve lain with Jenny or Minnie or Belle or Joyce…”

“Too boastful!” Nora interrupted. “Never mind fickle.” She rose and began to dress, too.

“Nora, I’m going back over ten years—it’s hardly excessive. My point is that I lie with one and dream of the other—even with you. And I know you’re worth a hundred of any of them.”

At last she saw what he was driving at, and it made her laugh. She could not believe he was so naïve. “Dear boy!” she said. “There’s wives and there’s wives, you know.”

“Meaning?” He had discovered a grease mark on his waistcoat and was trying to shift it with a fingertip loaded with spit.

“I know half a dozen who would be delighted with an inattentive husband.”

“I know a hundred!”

“You don’t.”

“What? Wives? Most of them, I…”

“No! Not wives, you idiot. Would-be wives. Unmarried girls. They’d carry a few children for you and be glad not to see you about the place too often. All they want is to have their own rank instead of one borrowed from their parents. You don’t know anything about Society, do you! You have no idea how girls arc hemmed in and watched over if they’re not married.”

“Young girls?” He was interested now.

“I didn’t say young.”

“Oh! And the expense, too.” He abandoned the grease mark, which was now like a bull’s-eye in a large, wet target.

“There are some who would bring quite a tidy dowry.”

“Who?”

“Dodo Kems, for one.”

“She’s foreign.”

“She was born in England.”

“All her people are foreign.”

“All her people are worth several hundred thousand.”

That silenced him. “Could you invite her to your first dinner next Season?” he asked at length.

“Fickle!” Nora laughed loudly. “You’re as predictable as yesterday!”

She was glad when he was gone. She hoped she would be able to marry him off comfortably to some selfish, understanding, rich girl; it would suit Rocks to have a proper establishment of his own. And she might then be able to resume her former relationship with him; that would be impossible while he remained single.

Then she dismissed him completely from her mind. She had to go back to Maran Hill now and face one of the hardest Friday-to-Mondays of her life. She had to see John, who would be off to India on the Tuesday. For her children’s sake she would have to pretend she knew nothing of The Bitch (as she now called Charity to herself). She wanted Winifred well settled in at college and she wanted Caspar to have fought his way to profit over the obstacles she had engineered. But she wanted these problems settled before John could stand everything on its head. So she had to be her old pleasant, unsuspecting self to him for a few days yet. She would have to ignore that unpleasantness outside the India Office. He certainly would; she was sure of that.

She had a more pressing reason, too, for remaining on terms with John: Young Roxby had been a mite careless once or twice this past week.

***

She covered the twenty-six miles from London by carriage, thinking it would be cooler than the train and more restful. Also she needed a little sleep—something Roxby had eroded deeply, and not altogether pleasurably.

On Highgate Hill she had one last look back at her Wolff properties—serried row upon row of furnished tombs that made her shiver. How could people want to live in them! But they did. And that’s why the houses were there. For herself, she would almost prefer the thatched hovel she grew up in.

She fell asleep soon after and did not wake until Nanette tapped her gently on the knee just as they were approaching the gate lodge at Maran Hill. “Mrs. Bagot’s doing the gate,” she told Nora.

Nora put her head out of the window. “Where’s Bagot?” she asked.

“Took ’is lordship to the station, my lady,” she said.

“Botheration!” Nora said when she was inside the carriage again. “I hate dining alone. I hope he’s not late back.”

Even worse news awaited her when she arrived at the house: a letter left by John to say that he had been called away to the North but would try to be back on Sunday, the day after tomorrow.

Nanette unpacked. Nora ate in lonely silence, read fitfully, slept fitfully, got up early and went for a ride while it was still cool, looked at the household accounts, went through the linen and furnishings with the housekeeper, discussed the management of the coppices and coverts with the gamekeeper, looked over the horses and tack with the head lad, saw two of the farm tenants—who had expected to see John—went over the home farm with the bailiff and decided on sites for two new cottages, fell exhausted into bed and slept right through, barely arriving at church in time for matins. Country life was exhausting.

When she arrived back from church there was still no message from John. The whole of Sunday passed without sign of him.

Sleep did not come so easily that night. Lately John had taken to saying that their congress exhausted him—a man of forty-nine! If they had only the one night together and he was off to India next day, he might pass it in continence with her. He kept talking about the “hush of life” and a lot of phrases that would suit Arabella’s bookshelves better than his lips. Well, she would have to
make
him do it; that was all there was to it.

First thing Monday morning she sent to the station to see if any message had come from him. The stationmaster sent back word that a telegraph had come down from Ingleton to expect Lord Stevenson off the six o’clock train that evening. That was bad—travel was another thing that brought on an attack of “hush of life.” And Ingleton? He must have been to see Dr. Brockman.

By mid-morning the long-heralded break in the weather came. For over a week the blistering sun had shared the sky with ominous piles of cloud, brooding, purple masses that threatened rain but never delivered it. That morning the skies opened and even the greedy, parched gravel of the drive, unable to absorb the torrents, became a shallow strip of lake for a time.

After the heat it was refreshingly cool. Nora stood among the pillars of the portico and luxuriated in it. The smell of the earth, newly wet, was one of life’s great, free pleasures; another was to stand, dry as toast and cool at last, only inches from those sheets of falling water.

If the children were here, they would be out there, standing in it, getting soaked to the skin, holding their faces to the sky and letting it batter them.

Or would they? The younger ones would—even Caspar, who already seemed more mature than Boy. Winifred wouldn’t, though. That serious young woman. Nora tried to think of herself at Winifred’s age. She had married John at eighteen; and in knowledge of the world she had already been middle-aged compared with Winifred. What, in giving so much to their children, had they failed to give them? How could Winifred, for all her cleverness, write a stupid letter like that to Miss Beale and then sit and wait for John to come down on her like a ton of organized fury! And how could Caspar, who had so much native shrewdness and presence of mind, fall for that trick with the beds—making the sample perfect and the rest rubbish? Had he even noticed yet that the sample was different? What was lacking in the children? There was a softness there, which did not come from her, and certainly it didn’t come from John.

Still the rain fell. Would she go out and dance in it? If she weren’t the lady—the tone setter—of this grand house, if all the servants had the day off, would she stand out there and let it beat down on her face and soak her to the skin?

She would! Even worse, she’d take her clothes off and dance in it, if she were all alone out here. There was still that in her. In a way, that’s all Roxby had been to her—a brief, supposedly safe dance in the forbidden. She chuckled at the comparison: He was certainly wet enough!

Her thoughts hopped back to the children. Were they worth her rebellion against John? Or would she poison her relationship with him only to have Winifred and Caspar go sour on it all—Winifred meekly marrying, and Caspar taking to the army with all the gusto he was now putting into selling beds? Caspar must by now have found that the beds were worthless; had it changed his mind about going into business? How she wished he were less secretive…no, not really. If he was to go into business he would need that faculty. What she was really asking for was a mother’s privilege of sharing in every part of her children’s lives; and, to the extent that they were no longer children, she could no longer share.

There was another reason for wanting to share more of Caspar’s present struggle: It was exactly the sort of venture she would have loved. To be utterly honest, she would love it still. She who now controlled nearly ten million pounds’ worth of property and investment, Stevenson’s and Wolffs’, would love to be selling those four hundred beds! She still thought back with a special thrill to those days when she had set up the first Stevenson shop for the navvies on that first railway contract.

That shop had made a thousand pounds profit in its first year. It had been a real thousand, too. She had seen it in the bank—glittering golden piles of it. Now the gross profit on Stevenson’s and Wolffs’ came to more than a thousand a day; and it meant very little. Figures on paper, nothing to the guts. Well…be honest, she thought. It meant being able to stand here in the middle of several hundred acres spanning the loveliest valley in Hertfordshire; it meant being able to hold the best salon in London; it meant wielding an influence that some of the highest ladies in the land envied; it meant all the carriages, horses, clothes, food, hunting, servants, entertainment she wanted. And it meant never having to worry about paying for it all. But it lacked the thrill of standing like David before the Goliath of some money citadel and coming away with the glittering piles—as Caspar would now have to stand. She wanted to do it for him. Failing that, she wanted to live it through him.

Knowing Caspar, she knew she could do neither.

She came back indoors and tried to play at the piano, but found herself unable to concentrate. John’s impending arrival hung over the day. Like rain clouds, she thought. Most of her, she realized, had been glad he was not here on Friday. A whole weekend with him would have been more damping than this rain—a weekend of lectures on the children’s duty to him and Society, his duty to the Empire, her duty to…No, he was too sensible for that, and her social influence was too important to let him antagonize her so directly; but their duty, oh yes—their duty to the firm, to all their people, to the country, to history…It was endless. Good thing they hadn’t made him a duke—he’d have devoted his whole life to achieving his own deathbed canonization.

No, that was unfair. He was more complex than that. Despite all his talk there was a wily, self-serving cynicism at work beneath it. Look at the way he had shut up about her flouting of convention as soon as he realized what influence she was coming to have. And some of the things he did for friends in government would never feature in his biography either! Funny—Young John had inherited the idealism, Caspar the worldliness. Was the one any good without the other? If Caspar did get the business and failed to develop his father’s idealism—that strange, mystical, loving, almost feudal sense of identity he shared with everyone who was a “Stevenson man”—what would become of the firm? What had young Bassett said?—“I wouldn’t like to work for him!”

Perhaps, after all, she was wrong to push so hard for Caspar? “Stevenson men” were different from other men; they were more than just employees. They felt bound to John, and he to them, by a contract that had no legal terms—in fact, that transcended legal terms. For instance, if John was on a site and a new winding bucket was brought into use for winding men up and down a shaft, he would be in the first party to use it. He was the first “Stevenson man” in a diving suit. In the Crimean railway he had worked more under fire than anyone. The same was true of all his deputies—not because John would dismiss them for behaving otherwise, but because that was the spirit they had imbibed. But Caspar? “I wouldn’t like to work for him!” Few men had ever said that about John.

Then again, perhaps she was reading too much into one throwaway remark, spoken half in jest anyway.