Sons of Fortune (26 page)

I’ve spoken to her and it’s all arranged,” Nick Thornton said. He and Boy were walking around the garden at Thorpe Old Manor, waiting for dinner to be called. The Thornton children had come up to spend most of the summer holiday with the Stevensons—a week first in Yorkshire, then the best part of two months in Connemara.

“She’s not too young,” Nick went on. “I don’t know about you, I don’t get on too happily if they’re too young.”

Boy cleared his throat.

“Older ones are—I don’t know—nicer, somehow. Friendlier. Don’t you find?”

“Mmmm…er…”

“Anyway, she said she’d let us both do it for five bob. But only tomorrow afternoon.” He took a half-crown from his pocket and flipped it. The silver coin shimmered through a steep arc before Nick trapped it between palm and fist. He looked at it. “Tails!” he giggled. “That’s appropriate.”

He held the half-crown between thumb and forefinger. “Anyway, there’s my half-kick. Where’s yours?”

“I haven’t got that much money,” Boy said, only just managing to stifle the relief he felt.

Over the last four years he had manfully waged the struggle for which Brockman’s lecture, repeated annually with variations, had armed him. It had not been easy—it still was not easy. Time upon time he had imagined the battle was won, and effortless chastity had seemed within his grasp—only to awaken in the small hours and discover something more substantial there instead. Then, when his intellectual and moral faculties were at their lowest ebb, he would find himself the kidnap victim of his own body, whisked off on a detumescent romp that would last until the dawn came to save him and shame him.

Shame would then bind him at the wheel of carnal slavery for days or weeks while his higher faculties gathered their shattered forces and began their labours again…and yet again. These were always times of fierce desolation within him, times when he remembered as an outcast the great, high days of his near-triumph. He was that rare kind of outcast who knows he has deserved to lose the best of mankind and gain, in exchange, the worst of himself—and so must endlessly dwell on his own abjection.

How he used to hate his own body then. He would go without washing for as long as he could get away with it, rubbing his fingers into stinking crevices of his flesh and sniffing them to fire his own self-disgust. The early saints were said never to have washed. He knew why: the odour of sanctity is the stink of self-made-insufferable—and then suffered voluntarily.

He would walk out on the dales, too, saying his own name to himself—John, John, John…at each step until his mind begged relief from the all-obliterating boredom of it; but he would stop only when he came to some rocky cleft into which he could wedge his head and bear down until the pain made him cry aloud.

And in these ways he would usually elevate himself once again from the depths of sensual sloth to a new season of moral vigour. Always there came a moment when the struggle turned deeply joyful, worthwhile for itself alone. He knew then that before long he would be out of the mire, cleansed again, convinced that this time it was for good.

But there was a corresponding moment at the farther end of that sunny plateau—a moment when the glory began to hurt. Then goodness itself became an obsession, a burden to heap him, a rage. Then he knew that dark forces within were massing for one more assault—that, far from being cleansed, he was merely whited over. Most insidious of all was the cloying siren call of his senses, which became infected with precisely those yearnings he sought above all to suppress. Then anything—quite literally anything: the bark of a dog, paper blowing over the playing field, a merry shout, the smell of horsedung, the sight of his name on a team list—would dry his throat and set his heart a-flutter; a cavernous hollow settled on his guts; his muscles shivered for love. A shrieking for love bore in upon him from every angle of the day and night.

And it was while he stood on the brink of such a descent from the plateau that Nick Thornton had arrived with this loathsome and enticing suggestion. On arrival at York, Nick had slipped away from the rest of his family for long enough to meet this Station Road bedwarmer and arrange tomorrow’s assignation.

“I haven’t got that much money,” Boy said.

“Go on!” Nick laughed. “The eldest son of one of the richest men in England hasn’t got half-a-kick!”

“Honestly! A shilling’s all I could raise—without my mother finding out.”

“How? I don’t believe that.”

Boy shook his head, glad the talk was straying from its starting point. “You know her. If a farthing was to go rolling by on that highway up there”—he nodded toward the road, which was out of sight over the brow of the hill above the house—“she’d get to hear of it somehow.”

“Borrow from one of the servants then. I do that a lot.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. I’ve never done that.”

Nick became agitated. “But you’ve got to! She won’t take me alone for half-a-crown. I tried that. This is a special price for two of us. So you have to. Don’t you want to?”

When Boy stayed silent, Nick gave a crafty smile. “Not scared, are you, Boy? Not that?”

“’Course I want to!” Boy answered angrily. “Look!” He held forth a trembling hand. “That’s how much I want to. But it’s not as simple as that, is it!”

Nick, impressed by Boy’s earnestness, did a stage bow. “I say! Let’s go up the tower and see if we can peep into the girls’ rooms!”

“Not our sisters!”

“No—the servants—fool!”

“Too early for them yet,” Boy said unthinkingly.

“Ha haa!” Nick taunted. “You know their times then!”

Boy blushed—Boy, whose many nightly vigils from the tower top over the last few years had but once been rewarded with a glimpse of what might have been a breast (or a shoulder, a hand, a handkerchief, a bowl of starch…something pale, anyway). In the end the greatest wonder had been the persistence that endured such cold and cramps for so meagre a return. The power that forced him to it was frightening.

Nick skipped up the steps of the old tower. Boy plodded behind him.

“Wouldn’t Caspar loan it you?” Nick asked before Boy was halfway.

Boy just shook his head. He walked past Nick and leaned against the parapet. The land fell gradually from the dry moat at the foot of the tower; then, a field and a half away, it curved over more steeply so that the bottom woods of Painslack Dykes were hidden. The southerly wind carried the gurgling of the brook to them on the parapet. Strangely, it was a sound you could never hear from the house, not even from the upstairs windows, though it was only a hundred yards or so farther up the hill.

“Oh, I say—lace curtains. That’s new,” Nick said, looking at the servant girls’ windows. “Someone must have noticed you’ve begun to shave. D’you know there’s four sets of stairs go up to their quarters?”

Boy laughed wearily. “Don’t you ever think of anything else?”

“Do you?”

Boy punched him playfully.

“And they all creak like pensioners,” Nick added.

“What would your mother say, Nick, if she knew what you were planning for tomorrow?”

Nick laughed uproariously, startling a jackdaw out of the ivy that clad the tower. “She’d throw a fit and die, I’m sure.”

“But don’t her wishes mean anything to you?”

The question left Nick solemnly puzzled. “I don’t exactly seek her consent, you know.”

“But that shouldn’t alter it. You know what she would say.”

“Exactly so. That’s why I don’t distress her by asking.”

“What if you should think of her while doing it, though?”

Nick made the sound of vomit. “Are you quite sane?” he asked. “Why in God’s name should I do
that
?”

Boy stared glumly over the waving corn. He remembered lovely guessing games with his father up here—and Winifred—in the days of his long-dead innocence. The best of his life was out there.

If only he could explain it to Nick the way Brockman would; but he knew that if he even tried it, Nick would laugh him to scorn. “What about yourself?” he asked. “What about what it does to you?”

“It sets me to rights, of course. Good heavens, Boy, you’re like an old woman!”

Boy desperately searched for facts, remembered facts from chief’s annual talks. Surprising how few they were. “Each spending,” he said, recalling one, “is like a shovel of soil on your grave.”

Nick did not laugh; he imitated a deflating balloon. “Tell it to the stud boar!” he sneered. “Ask him who outlives all the rigs! Oh, come on, Boy—it’d be fun. It’s what women are there for. It’s what
we
are for.” He spun the coin again and almost failed to catch it. “It’s what half-crowns are for!”

It would be more than mere fun, Boy thought. It would be one of the greatest adventures ever. It would clear away so many mysteries—what are they like down there? What do they feel like to touch? You could run your hands over a hundred marble statues and never know. It would be crossing the Rubicon.

“Very well—I’ll borrow another bob off of someone and go solo,” Nick said.

“No!” Boy cried, without thinking.

“Ha!” Nick shrieked in delight as the cry of
dinner!
came from the house. “You old fraud!”

***

Their ostensible reason for going down to York was to meet Nick’s father off the mid-afternoon train. Their ostensible reason for going early was that Walter Thornton, being a senior engineer on the Great Western Railway, was apt to borrow engines (on the excuse that they needed a test run) and drive them himself, often arriving earlier than scheduled.

When they reached the station they told Willet, the coachman, to come back at three. Then Boy and Nick told Caspar to wait for them on the platform. “We’re going for a drink, Steamer,” Nick said conspiratorially. “Keep my pater busy if he turns up early.”

Caspar, being a few days short of sixteen, was not thought an adequate companion for this most grown-up of treats.

“He’ll be happier watching the trains,” Boy said as they went out into Station Road. They both laughed at the juvenile amusements of the young ’un.

The whores were cruising up and down Station Road like ships with overcrowded canvas. Normally Boy pretended not to notice them, though for weeks after he had run their gauntlet he would torment himself with the enigma their presence represented. Today he dared to look each briefly in the eye. They were like circus people—accustomed to the mildly curious indifference of passers-by.
Try! Buy!
their faces said for half a second; then they would quench the come-all-you and fix their gaze on a neutral distance, quick as you care.

“Is she one of these?” Boy mumbled.

“Lordy no! Better than this carrion.”

Better! Boy knew she would intimidate him. Even these painted galleons made him feel awkward and clumpish.

“Did you tell your mothers afore you come out?” one of the women asked.

Boy blushed furiously and looked away. But Nick laughed and shouted back over his shoulder, “She’d take the scouring soap to
you
,
so be thankful we didn’t!”

“I’d need it after you, and all,” she shouted back, also laughing.

Boy envied Nick his easy way with them. Of course, Nick was older, but that wasn’t the full explanation. The truth was that Nick didn’t really care. For him this was exactly what he had called it: fun. But for Boy it was going to be one of the great and memorable days of his life—he just knew it. No explorer in Africa, no climber of unscaled mountains, no seeker after uncharted sea passages, could feel half so tense and excited as he now felt. Somewhere very near him there was a woman he didn’t know and had never seen, and he was going to give her this hot, heavy half-crown, and she was going to lie down naked and let him do anything. All those blanks in his fantasies—he could fill them now. It was an amazing day in an amazing world.

Near the end of Station Road, Nick darted into a doorway and pulled Boy swiftly in behind him. “Phew!” he said. “I hate the last few steps before the doorway. I always nearly funk it.”

Boy looked at him in grateful astonishment—astonished that such a fearless man of the world should feel that way, too, and grateful that he confessed it. “I’m in a funk still,” Boy said.

“I mean I get this strange feeling that everyone else in the street knows me and is writing down my name. I’m sure it’s all rubbish, of course.”

“Of course,” Boy said, disappointed that the fear was so parochial. Then the thought hit him like a leaden weight: She was very close now—actually in this house! What was she like? Could he run? He doubted he had strength for that.

“Upstairs,” Nick said.

On the first landing a door opened at the sound of their approach. It framed a dazzlingly pretty girl of their own age—about eighteen, certainly no more than twenty. She was not at all like the fireships outside. Anywhere else you’d have taken her for a modest, charming, lovely young gentlewoman.

Not her, Boy prayed, unable to take his eyes off her, smitten by her beauty. He could never put something so vile as himself against such loveliness.

“’Ello!” she said, smiling. “Two cherries?”

“Cherry ripe!” Nick said, as if it were a very witty reply.

“I’m still ’ere tomorra,” the girl said gently, directly to Boy. She knew exactly the effect she was having on him.

He scurried wordlessly after Nick, his scalp on fire.

“This is the door,” Nick said when they reached the next landing. He gave a knock.

A tall woman in her thirties answered. She saw Nick and grinned. “I only half-believed you,” she said.

Boy felt that her pleasure was more than commercial. She found it somehow flattering that Nick had kept his promise.

“And your friend!” she said. “Hello, Charley.”

Boy held out his hand awkwardly. Surprised, she took it and gave a limp shake. “A gent,” she said, and laughed.

“You should be used to that,” Nick said. “You told me you only go with gents.”

“And so I do!” She was suddenly belligerent, as if she resented Nick’s words. “And gents who pay more’n a dollar, too. So let’s be quick about it!”

She dipped a sponge in soapy water and went to Nick first. Incongruously modest, he turned his back on Boy and dropped his trousers. She washed him and gave him a towel. “That’s a sharp ’un,” she said. “Mind you don’t pierce a hole of your own!” They both laughed. She brought the sponge to Boy.