Sons of Fortune (29 page)

And that irked him above all. He, who with all the weight of his almost-sixteen years upon him, felt competent enough to take over Stevenson’s tomorrow if anything befell his father, would have to join the colours, while Boy, who had neither interest in nor talent for the firm’s work, would take it over and very probably ruin it.

This business of joining the colours was—like his drifting along with Greaves’s dream of turning him into a mathematician—another of those issues he was shirking. In fact, it had been years now since he had felt the faintest interest in anything military. A good band could still stir the blood, of course, and there was something impressive and awe-inspiring in the sight of a regiment parading its colours and battle honours through the streets; but he knew now that that wasn’t a hundredth part of army life. Almost everything a soldier did was carried through by reference to a manual, or a code, or a law, or a custom. And he just wasn’t that sort of person.

He wanted to battle all right. He wanted life to be a fight. He wanted that little edge of fear every day (which was why he knew he would shun the academic life, too). But he wanted the struggle to be such that his own effort and cunning counted more than anything else. He wanted to be in business.

From the stern of the ship he watched Liverpool and Birkenhead dwindle to mere darkenings of the horizon.

He was on his way below when he saw Winifred leaning on one of the rails, near a dinghy stowed inboard. At first he thought she was out there to capture what little romance the dirty sea and anaemic evening sky afforded, but when he came near she turned and pointed to the curved pieces of the clinker-built dinghy and said, “Steamer, how do they bend wood like that?”

It was such an improbable topic for her to be interested in that he knew she was merely working around to something else. But he told her how they boiled the wood in iron pipes and bent it around the ribs before it could set, and she showed a polite interest.

“Are you going to be seasick?” he asked.

“No!” The question surprised her.

“You’re very quiet.”

“Ah!” she sighed, hinting she had good reason.

He waited and then said, “I’m going below.”

“I think I’ve done something rather foolish,” she said, avoiding his eye.

He leaned against the rail, not looking at her, to make it easy.

“What do you think Papa would say to the idea of my working?” she asked.

“But you do work. Sunday school…charity affairs…all the…”

“I mean employment. A
job
, as they say nowadays!”

Caspar mimed a summary hanging, throat noises and all.

She smiled glumly. “That’s why I didn’t tell him, of course. I knew he’d just say no. Now at least he’ll have to discuss it.”

“Say no to what?” Caspar was excited. Without thinking it through in any detail, he had a feeling that a rebellion from Winifred might somehow blaze a trail for him, even though his own struggle was as yet so vaguely defined. At the very least he would not be alone.

“I wrote to Miss Beale at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She’s the new principal. I asked her for a teaching post.”

Caspar’s eyes went wide; he had never thought of Winnie as anything so grand. He had never thought of Winnie as anything outside the domestic circle. He had just assumed that, being a woman, she’d come out in the usual way, marry, and vanish into her own home and her husband’s life.

“I know it’s not much of a school,” Winifred apologized. “But it could be made something of.”

Caspar smiled, but Winifred, mistaking it for a look of contempt, said, “I’ll bet Fiennes wasn’t much before Brockman came.”

“Nor since actually,” Caspar said. “What does Boy think of your applying?”

Winifred shrugged. “I’ve not asked him.”

Caspar filled with pride. She had asked him, not Boy! It was the first time he could remember it. And she didn’t say “I’ve not asked him yet.” Just that she had not asked him. Caspar knew why, of course, but he had to hear it. “Are you going to?” he asked.

“There are some things you can’t talk about with Boy. He just talks about ‘duty’ and ‘obligation.’ He won’t discuss things. Papa’s the same.”

“Tell Mama. She’d agree with you.”

Winifred smiled conspiratorially, as if to acknowledge it was wrong to be talking about their parents in this way. “I’m saving her,” she said, ambiguously.

“Winnie, d’you think Boy will make as much of the firm as Father has?”

She stared evenly at him, knowing exactly what was in his mind. “That would be asking a lot.”

“D’you think he’d even make a good job of it? He gets so…I don’t know…dedicated to things.”

She laughed. “Who’s talking!”

“I mean he doesn’t know how to come back when the branch he’s on gets too thin. He doesn’t know how to change his mind.”

“Perhaps Father ought to put the firm into management and train all of us to retire into public life,” she teased.

And Caspar, seeing he was going to get no commitment from her, pretended to agree. “It’s what most people would be doing,” he said.

***

In the cabin below, Nora was trying to persuade Arabella to stay longer than a mere ten days.

“How I wish I could!” Arabella said. “But I simply have to go to Paris. It is all arranged through Lady Bear and the Female Rescue Society.” She smiled apologetically. “Besides, it might be very important. They have asked me to make a study of the Continental system. Those
maisons tolérées
, you know.”

Nora nodded. Arabella’s lack of reticence in this area embarrassed her. Or, rather, it was her earnestness, her total lack of humour; in Nora’s own circle it was a subject of deft wit—a light jab and pass on.

“Do you know anything about them?” Arabella asked.

Nora knew her well enough to say, “I have a feeling I’m about to, my dear.”

“Have you
seen
them?” Arabella persisted, with only a fleeting smile.

“I’ve had them pointed out to me, of course. And I know the ones in Trouville are often used by sailors, and others, as a depot for leaving and collecting messages.”

Arabella made an exasperated sound.

“Oh, indeed,” Nora assured her wide-eyed, “they seem as natural and everyday in France as public houses in England.”

“Ah, but a thousand times more pernicious. Believe me! That is precisely what we fear, you see. Once such houses are tolerated and licensed, the girls all listed and recorded, all inspected by government doctors, all given cards of identity, all made official, you see—then vice has made a nest in the very heart of the state.”

“But we have it, too—as if I needed to tell you!”

“Yes! But it is not tolerated.”

Nora’s eyebrows shot up. Everyone knew that it was, in effect, tolerated, and very widely. Whole districts of London and every other city were given over to it; and the police turned a blind eye most of the time.

“Not legalized, I mean,” Arabella said.

“The French say that’s just our hypocrisy. We pretend it does not exist, merely because the law does not recognize it. And the girls’ incomes are not taxed because the money is not income, it is ‘gifts from admirers’! Meanwhile we endure a level of disease that shocks them.”

Arabella raised her hands in despair. “You see! How right our fears are! If you, an intelligent and sensitive intellect, can think along those lines (and you a woman), how long before our glorious legislators (who are all men) start translating such thoughts into law?”

“What has being a man or woman to do with it?” Nora asked. Then, seeing the hidden incongruity of the question, she added: “In the matter of reasoned debate, I mean?”

Arabella visibly fought for control of herself, as if Nora’s mention of reasoned debate were a rebuke.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she allowed. “It’s a red herring. There are two issues here. The fundamental, moral issue is that tolerance of vice must not be written into the system of the state. But there is a practical issue, too—and for us it will be a tactical one, I’m sure. If such a law is ever passed, it will be framed, debated, amended, and voted on by men. It will be applied by men. All charges under it will be prosecuted by men, defended by men, heard by men, judged and sentenced by men. If it provides for inspection of the women, even that most intimate act will be carried out by men. You may be sure that all these arrangements will not be made for female convenience.”

The argument began to interest Nora. “In what way?” she asked.

Arabella, seeing no opposition, now relaxed. “A French woman is inspected once a week. She could be infected at any time and pass on the contagion to dozens of men. The sensible way would be to make each man obtain a bill of health, which he would have to surrender to the woman. And before he could enter the house again he would have to obtain a further bill of health. And if any man were found unfit, he should be put in a prison-hospital, as the women now are.” Nora snorted at the impossibility of it.

“Exactly!” Arabella said. “Men would never stand for it. But they impose far worse conditions on the female parties to the affair—and think it all the most natural thing in the world. Oh, it’s
their
world, true enough.”

Again Nora opened wide her eyes, but this time in astonished admiration. “Dear me, Arabella, what a long journey you have been since last we talked!”

Arabella subsided. “Reluctant step by reluctant step, I do assure you. Still”—she brightened—“that, as I say, is the lesser issue. The main effort must go in ensuring that the state—our state—never provides for vice under the law.”

“Only under the carpet,” Nora teased.

Arabella did not rise to it. “That is what I have to go to France for. To collect evidence on the degradation of the state and of our sex. I am to visit houses and prisons and hospitals—and, of course, refuges like our own. I shall talk with the
Police des Moeurs
and with anyone who will listen to me or tell me anything. Do you know, most of the people working for reform are Protestants like ourselves. Is that not comforting! Ours is such a superior Christianity.”

Nora patted her on the arm encouragingly. “Yes, Arabella dear, do keep that in mind as you watch the Sisters of Mercy at work in the hospitals you will visit!”

Arabella nodded, apparently chastened, seeming to accept the reproof; inwardly she seethed. There were times when Nora’s teasing grew a mite sharp.

Nora wondered if Arabella would come back thinking any differently or if she would simply “discover” everything she was so intent upon finding there.

The moment she returned to her own cabin, however, all thought of Arabella vanished. A far more personal worry replaced them: Boy.

She had looked quickly through the dozen or so books her eldest son had taken on this holiday. The few that were not actually in Greek or Latin might just as well have been, for all they meant to her—books on philosophy and religion for the most part. She never saw him read any of the railway papers, nor the iron and steel journals, nor anything concerning civil engineering. Come to that, he hardly ever looked in an ordinary newspaper.

She just could not fathom him. Once upon a time he had been so interested in all these practical things.

Connemara was where their lives became joyfully simple. Everywhere else she went, Nora felt on show, even on trial, despite all the pleasures her life offered. In Connemara she returned to the uncluttered habits of her young girlhood—at a greater level of security, to be sure, but she was not above rolling up her sleeves and cooking a meal or turning out a room. That was a holiday for her.

Only three servants were kept at Quaker Farm, or Keirvaughan as the estate had always been known locally. John and Nora had bought the place out of Irish railway profits during the famines, over ten years earlier; together with the Quakers they had consolidated the innumerable small holdings and ended the “conacre tenancies” that had kept the people impoverished to such a degree that they actually lived below the reach of the money system, untouched by any possible reward or incentive, living on thin charity between one potato harvest and the next. Some of the men had taken work with Stevenson’s, but most families had accepted John’s offer of £5 and free passage for themselves to America. The tenants who were left now farmed above subsistence level and were actually handling cash for the first time in their lives. (Even so, John had not considered the experiment a success until he heard one of the tenants, a man who had been kept alive by relief work until he was thirty, complain of a levy by the parish union for the indoor relief of paupers!)

All of them, Stevensons and Thorntons, realized that if they imported the sort of life and standards they enjoyed in England to this wild edge of the kingdom, the whole point of coming here would be lost. So they brought only three maids and a footman; the footman, with one of the maids, would go back to England with Walter and Arabella in ten days. Laundry girls and extra grooms for the children’s ponies were taken on locally, from tenants’ families. For the rest the children made their own beds, sorted their own laundry, tidied their rooms, and laid and cleared the tables. It was amazing then how little they found they needed, what lumpy mattresses they could sleep on, how dresses and pinafores might last an entire day, knives and forks serve for two courses, and boots go unblacked until a parent or an older sibling with sufficient authority would drag the offender to the boot locker by an ear or a fistful of hair.

For the older boys this sense of freedom began as soon as they got down from the train in the Galway City terminus. Instead of taking the afternoon horse car to Clifden, the families had decided to stay overnight at Black’s hotel and spend the afternoon and the following morning seeing the city. The older children would then go on the public horse car; the adults and younger ones on a private car coming down from the farm that evening. The two cars, public and private, would travel together and change horses at the same places.

Boy knew exactly which of the city’s sights he wanted to show Nick and his two younger brothers. Ever since the fiasco in York he had been eager to restore his stock with Nick in some way that did not involve his own participation. So as soon as their rather late lunch was over, and everyone was deciding what everyone else would be doing that afternoon, Boy announced that he and the other older chaps would go out along the beach and see what they could add to the shell and coral collection of their museum at home.

“I know a beach where we can get pocketsful in five minutes,” he said as he led them down to the Claddagh, the fishing community to the south of the city—where the attraction was (of course) the women. The Claddagh females were not remarkably beautiful, nor especially available, nor notably willing. The handkerchiefs in which they bound their heads did not add the lustre of a mantilla nor the enticement of a yashmak. The blue mantle and red body-gowns and petticoats they wore were coarse in material and crude in colour; they did not sparkle like silks nor flatter like beige and mauve and tan. What they did do, which made the excursion worth several hours out of the lives of five busy young lads, was finish at the knee—leaving the lower limbs and feet
au naturel
as the guide book put it.

Boy and Caspar, trained by years of watching Barn beatings without being seen to watch, gawped sidelong and beetlebrowed at this permanent and unselfconscious display of calf and ankle; Nick, Thomas, and Albert acquired the skill unawares but fast. Had they been translated into five flies on the wall of the ladies’ bath house, they could not have been happier. All the while, too, one or other of them maintained a lofty and highminded conversation on the quaintness of the low thatched cottages all around, the durability of local customs, the indifference of the inhabitants to external influences—and, to be sure, the quality of the fish on sale at the stalls. They nearly bought more fish in those few hours than their combined families could have eaten in a month of meals; it was a wonder they ended up taking no fish home at all. All five of them dreamed of amazing romps that night with the bare-calved, horny-soled women who, by daylight, had stared at them with the amused incuriosity that all fixed communities reserve for the rootless visitor. Next day their return visit to the Claddagh almost lost them the second and final public car of the day to Clifden.

The lands immediately west of the city had once been prosperous enough to produce the sort of surpluses that interest marauders. In fact, the west gate still bore the ancient legend: “From the fury of the O’Flaherties Good Lord deliver us.” But the neglect of a remote government (the ultimate marauder), the misrule of a local one, and the consequent unrule of the people had combined to produce the ruin that all the fury of all the O’Flaherties had never been able to achieve. The only increase had been in numbers, thanks to the dependable potato and an equally dependable sequence of soft days. The moment the potato became unreliable, especially in the universal failures of 1846 to 1848, that increase had drastically reversed.

When they had started coming here for their holidays, the young Stevensons, unaware of the tragedies that each empty home represented, were enchanted by the little hovels and shanties of turf and rough rock, clay, and furze that lined the roads like semi-natural doll’s houses, inviting play and fantasy. But by now the winds and rains had done their work and few vestiges remained. Within a decade the country appeared—and was—more desolate and uncared-for than it had been in a thousand years.

But the real wildness did not begin until they reached the heart of Connemara late that afternoon, when the Twelve Bens towered over two thousand feet above them to the north of the road. Despite the mathematical promise of the name, none of the children had ever found a map that could actually list more than ten of the “Bens”; moreover, when climbing up to the highest of them, Benbawn, it was possible to count no fewer than twenty-four peaks. These irreconcilables merely added to the magic of the whole area.

It was a land mottled with lakes, littered with vast granite boulders torn by glaciers from Scottish or Norwegian mountains hundreds of miles away—a land barely touched, let alone tamed, by plough or spade; a land whose air came fresh off three thousand miles of ocean, demanding to be breathed in great gulps; a land awash with light. Finally it was the light that held the eye and sealed the memory. Nowhere else on earth did it play such tricks with the land, giving mountain and lake and bog the most temporary appearance. One moment these features would rise or stretch beneath a clear sky, as massive and placid as sunlight could paint them. Moments later they could turn to the thinnest of silhouettes and surfaces, as faint sea wrack drifted between sun and land. And in a short while this new face, too, could dissolve into an infinitely slowed-down version of that shimmering, mystical world found beneath rippling water when the sun strikes through its surface. You could watch this land all day, and in no two periods of ten minutes, taken together or at random, would you find it the same.

On the evening of their arrival this great natural theatre performed magnificently. The last few miles of the road to Clifden, south and finally west of the Twelve Bens, lay under a long carpet of cloud that tailed off with a little southward flourish far over the Atlantic beyond Slyne Head. Above this flick-of-the-tail, rearing into the sun, they could see tower upon tower of cloud, like a stack of cauliflowers. Away to the south the sky was all indeterminate streaks of greys and violets, with the odd patch of muted yellow where clouds emerged from the summer mists. To the north the sky was cool, remote, correct—like the most formal classical painting—pale, thin blue glazes over minutely scumbled white clouds. And above was the fleecy grey of cloud bottom seen slantwise.

But as they drew on beneath it, and the wind carried it inland above them, they began to look directly up into the towers of cumulus, seeing cold gray and warm grey side by side, merging. Between, where the cloud thinned and the sky almost showed, there were patches of a blue that burned. Soon, as the sun began to break beneath the edge of this carpet away to the west, it caught the lowest wisps of cloud and turned them every hot hue from gold to carmine. Then, too, in the thinner towers, the sunlight burned with a lowering, sulphurous yellow that sank beside the blue. It was the sort of scene that makes even those who have never held a paintbrush long to take up painting (and that makes professional painters weep at the unfairness of nature).

To the children it was like paintings that moved. From the oldest to the youngest, they sat silent and spellbound, risking every kind of neck strain and injury as they leaned backward in the jolting cars and marvelled at this infinite panoply of colour and mood, determined to miss no moment of the fleeting drama as the wind whisked it overhead and inland, down into the rising dark.

At Clifden, McGinty, the head of the farm stables, was waiting with a dozen of the sturdy, broad-chested ponies they breed in those parts. This was “the bestest part of the journey,” according to Rosalind, the youngest Stevenson. All the youngsters, except Winifred, who considered herself too old, and Araminta Thornton, whose mother thought her too delicate, mounted their ponies and followed the car all the way out to the farm. Arabella considered that her Letty, now fifteen, ought really to be riding sidesaddle; but since none was provided, she made the girl ride at the back. It was a measure of the charm of the place that only five days later Arabella saw Nora galloping up the beach, riding astride, and she laughed at it and called it “great gas and gaiters.”

The way out to the Keirvaughan peninsula wound south and west over sudden small hills, past a rushing torrent of water penned so long inland and forced to so tortuous a way down to the coast that, now it had reached the final mile, it seemed determined on a white-lathered sprint to the sea. In the gathering darkness its swirling eddies were richly black among the pale glint of the pebbles. All the way the children questioned McGinty mercilessly, determined to discover that the farm had not changed one iota over the past ten months. McGinty, though he was fifty, toothless, and (after his long wait) far from sober, managed to reassure them that nothing had or possibly could be altered.

After a while the road, though still hilly, began to lead more up than down. The trees became sparser, the hedgerows thinner, and before long, they breasted a rise and saw the whole peninsula stretching westward to the last segment of the setting sun, lapped on both its long flanks by the darkling waters of the ocean. All the land between here and the sea was Quaker Farm. The farmhouse was out of sight beneath the farthest headland, nestling at the inner neck of an awkward little stonewalled harbour; but they could see the lighthouse on Inisharone, its light still pale in the afterglow of the sun.

“That’s the nearest point to America on the mainland of Britain,” Caspar said.

A chorus of goodnatured barracking greeted the remark. Everyone knew that Ballyconneely point and Claddaghduff were more westerly. Caspar, when much younger, had hated “his” headland to be so nearly the most westerly and yet to fail by a mere mile or three; he had spent an entire holiday insisting vehemently that the others were undercut by secret channels that really made them islands. Now each year he re-established the point with mock defiance.

And so, babbling rapidly, reliving what they had relived dozens of times before, ravenous for the game pie, the buttered eggs, the rich oaten doorsteps of bread that waited them, they trekked down into the dusk, lost in their own sense of enchantment.

And there, waiting to greet them in the farm door, with the warm lamplight spilling out into the garden around her, was dear Mary Coen. In that position she was a mere silhouette, but as soon as all the handshakes and, with the younger children, the hugs were over, she came with them into the light and they saw again the scars that disfigured one half of her face. Nick could not look at her. Boy remembered his fanciful wish to bear such outward marks of his inward impurity—and cancelled the thought at once. To Winifred and Caspar, to all the others, she was just lovely Mary Coen, whose sunny nature and beautiful voice soon made you forget that ugly half of her head.

Without Mary Coen, Keirvaughan would be just like any other part of Connemara; it would not be special.