Sons of Fortune (30 page)

Walter, walking back to the farm after a successful morning’s fishing, was the only one to see John’s coach turn off the main road to Ballyconneely. He did not then know John was inside, but anything more than a farm cart or a customs car had to be headed for Quaker Farm, and he was pleased at the prospect of a lift; the dusty road down the spine of the land was beginning to pall.

“Stevenson!” he cried when he saw John. “We had no message to expect you. How capital!”

“I sent none,” John said. “The truth is, Thornton, dear fellow, I’m not here on pleasure. An unpleasant bit of family business.”

“Oh dear,” Walter held open his bag. “Not a bad catch, eh?” he added, seeing that John was not going to prompt him.

John gave a tolerant shrug. “They soon start to smell, don’t they?”

“They’ll taste all right. You won’t refuse a dish, I’ll wager.”

There was a silence.

“Everyone’s having capital fun here,” Walter said.

“Good.”

Another silence. They drew level with a small, off-the-beach island that only moments earlier had seemed to be much larger and to lie about a mile ahead. Walter, by now familiar with—but still not used to—the Connemara magic, drew John’s attention to it. John merely nodded; for a second his grim, blank face became a grim smiling face.

“Is it something very serious?” Walter asked. “Do you wish us to leave?”

That forced John to laugh, to help dismiss the idea. “Heavens, no! It’s serious, all right, but nothing like so heavy. It’s just Winifred, as a matter of fact. She appears to have applied for a teaching position at some wretched girls’ school.”

“Which one?” Walter asked.

John looked sharply at him, as if that were the least relevant question. But he answered: “Cheltenham.”

“One of the best in the country!” Walter said.

“Good God. Thornton!” John exploded. “I don’t give a fig if it’s just this side of the pearly gates. The point is she’s applied for a
position.
The Honourable Miss Stevenson has been discussing a wage with a headmistress. It’s bound to get out. Lord! You slave all your life for them and they throw it away!”

Now it was Walter who remained silent. John looked shrewdly at him. “I suppose you think it’s my fault, allowing her all that education?”

Walter smiled fondly. “No, Stevenson. Never that. I know you too well. I’ve seen you take the most unpromising people and get pure gold out of them. You couldn’t bear to think of anybody’s potential lying idle. Let alone one of your own children.”

John laughed at the truth of it.

“And the result is impressive, I must say. She and Young John walk around talking Latin and Greek like the best of ‘saps’—which I’m sure they are. But it’s not much use, is it? Except in the classroom, of course.”

“Well done, Thornton,” John chuckled. “A neatly turned argument. But it don’t signify.” He sighed. “Well, I shan’t rant and roar, I promise that. But Winifred must come to see that she can’t behave like some penniless girl with no name, no money, and no obligations.”

***

Winifred knew, as soon as she saw the coach on the peninsula road, that it could only contain her father. She left Boy at once and ran to find her mother. She had hoped her father might wait until the end of this holiday before he talked to her about that letter she had written to Miss Beale. He must be very angry about it for him to have come directly to Connemara like this.

Nora heard her out, then took her by the shoulders and gave one vigorous shake. A gesture of despair. “You goose!” she complained. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why didn’t you discuss it with me first?”

“I was afraid.”

“Of me?”

“No! I was afraid Miss Beale might turn me down.”

“You wouldn’t draw a salary, of course,” Nora said, thinking quickly.

“I intended not to, but I’ve been speaking to Aunt Arabella and I’ve changed my mind.”

“Well, for the love of peace, go back to your first idea: no salary.”

Winifred looked frantic. “I can’t, Mumsie. If people like us don’t set the tone, women will never…”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” Nora interrupted. “If you turn it into a branch line of the Woman Question, you will make no impression on your father. I fear you will make no impression anyway. Is your heart really set on this, popsie?”

The question made Winifred feel deserted. Trapped, she blurted out: “Well, you didn’t do exactly what Papa wanted, either. He wanted you to be the usual sort of society lady.”

Nora smiled absently. Most of her mind was trying to grapple with Winifred’s problem in a losing fight against time. “Your father will always find it in him to forgive success,” she said.

“That’s all I’m asking for,” Winifred said. “The chance to do something that Papa dislikes—and make a success at it, too. Like your salon.”

Nora pointed a finger at her. “Mustn’t be so sharp, dear. That isn’t the way at all. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well…” she said unwillingly, “if Papa really stops me from teaching now, I wouldn’t mind going to university instead.”

“In the land where all the pigs fly, no doubt.”

“No. I could go to Bedford College. I needn’t board—I could stay with you at Hamilton Place. Several of the professors from University College give lectures there. It’s as good as university.”

They could hear the coach slowing for the final bend and the sharp descent to the farm gate. Nora looked at Winifred—handsome, brilliant, careless girl—and clenched her fists in frustration. “You’ve left me so little time! You deserve nothing.”

“I’d still rather go to Cheltenham. I think I already know more than they’d teach at Bedford.”

“Especially if humility’s on the curriculum,” Nora snapped.

“I’ve still got all the humility I inherited,” Winifred told her with a cold-eyed smile, unabashed.

Nora, hard put to avoid smiling back, turned away. “At least I know which battles I can and cannot win. I don’t blindfold myself and blunder onward, telling no one.” She gave a sharp sigh and faced her daughter again. “You must prepare to lose this one, Winifred. Perhaps it could never have been won, but you certainly haven’t helped.”

The coach was in the yard now. They could hear John and Walter talking. John laughed.

“That’s a good sign,” Winifred said.

“Is it? I’d say it means his mind is set and he’s not even rehearsing arguments or looking at alternatives,” Nora answered as she went out to greet him.

Later, however, she was less sure; for John, most uncharacteristically, did not at once come to the point. Instead, he behaved as if this visit were the merest whim, an inspiration for filling a few blank days. He romped on the beach with the younger children and timed their pony races. It was not until after tea that he went out with Nora for a stroll on the firm sand above the falling tide. Winifred, filing a thumbnail with her teeth (“biting her nails without biting them,” she called it), watched them go, half wishing she was beside them, half glad she was not.

Around the headland and all along the sandy straight he spoke of the business, of friends, and of a commission of inquiry he had been asked to conduct in India, which would mean leaving in six weeks’ time and being away for possibly four months. He almost convinced her he had really come down to tell her all these things, even though she would in any case be back in London in five days.

“There’s just one little cloud on the horizon,” he said as they reached the rocks and sat awhile.

“Winifred.”

He looked sharply at her.

“She came running to me the moment she saw your coach,” Nora explained.

John stirred the sand between the rocks with his cane. “I don’t want to make a mistake,” he said. “I’m not very good at judging the females of this family.” He snorted a laugh and she knew he was avoiding her eye. “I made a mistake with you once…insisting you should follow a certain course…and you went your own ways, and proved me wrong.”

Nora thought it odd that they should always talk like people who had once known each other rather well; it was becoming almost comfortable to keep that distance. For three or four years now John had behaved like that; at first it was with a sort of guilty reluctance, but now it seemed second nature.

“But what is a teacher at a girls’ school?” he said. “A sort of public governess, in my view. In Society’s view, too, I’m sure.”

“Like nurses were before Miss Nightingale?” Nora suggested.

John looked at her with a doubt that certainly seemed genuine. “Do you think so?” he asked. “Really? You’re much more sensitive to these movements in opinion than I am. I was sure your salon would be a social disaster. But now…I know half the people who court my acquaintance are really seeking an invitation to…ah…your place. And these are people who would have kept very exclusively to themselves ten years ago. There’s a change. And you were aware of it where I was not. So, what d’you say, love—are teachers and professors about to become acceptable in Society? Shall we all soon be pining for invitations to schoolroom soirées?”

With that final question, his strategy overreached itself. The sardonic joke behind it showed through. She saw that he was trying to win her with flattery and, at the same time, to make her case and Winifred’s as different as possible, so that nobody could argue from the one to the other. She was not going to allow that.

“John,” she answered, “why are you still so obsessed with Society? I mean so
needlessly
obsessed?”

He stood up abruptly, seeing the discussion was not going as he had wished. “All the children must understand—the older ones, anyway,” he said, half to himself.

She rose and set off for home, a pace ahead of him. “It’s very kind of you to say people court you for invitations to Hamilton Place. But the fact is that you are a rich and successful man. You have earned the ear and confidence of people in government, whichever party is in. You are considered a very sound fellow. Society may sneer in general at the new rich and make jokes about us in
Punch
; but they will always court us in the particular.”

“Ah—which particular?” He was reluctant to pursue her argument, unwilling to dance to her tune.

She shrugged, to lay as light a stress as possible on her answer: “Our particulars, dear. Building railways…gathering a salon of all the talents…making money…perhaps—who knows—being headmistress of the best girls’ school in the country.”

It almost persuaded him. She could see that the prospect of pulling it off twice—once with his wife, then with his eldest daughter—was tantalizing him. But it was as she feared when he got down from the coach and laughed with Walter: Nothing would sway him, not even a guarantee from the Clerk of the Future that Winifred would succeed in that way.

“I wish you were right,” he said, “but they aren’t like that. They’ll forgive us, because we’ve come up from nowhere. In a way, it’s expected of us. But if our children are perverse, they’ll say it’s become a bad habit. They’ll know we’re not sound. Our children cannot earn tolerance as we did. They must earn it by being more conventional than convention itself.”

“Too late, love!” she taunted. “They’ve been contaminated.”

“By what?” he asked in the thunderous petulance of a man about to complain that no one ever told him anything.

She stopped and faced him, a cool smile twitching at her mouth. “By us, see thou. By us! We should have boarded them out at birth.”

It took him several seconds to learn how to silence this objection inside himself, though he did not attempt it aloud to her. All he said was: “Nonsense! You’ll see. We brought them up free, and intelligent enough to understand why they must freely choose this path. You’ll see.”

She wished he hadn’t staked so much of his own credit on this demonstration. She wished, too, that he would not insist on making Young John and Caspar attend this humiliation of their eldest sister, under the guise of correcting all their minds on the subject of their respective roles in life.

***

John sat facing them, wishing they hadn’t all automatically—even Nora—put themselves on one side of the room, leaving the other exclusively to him. First he had to bridge that gulf between them. He sighed. His mind chewed on words that did not come easily.

They sat, tensely watching his every gesture.

“We are not a very…usual family,” he said at last. “At the risk of boasting, let me start by reminding you that probably only five or six people in the railway-building business have been so successful that Society has, grudgingly, allowed them inside its ranks. And all of those, like me, had to turn their talents elsewhere, into Parliament or local government—or philanthropy—before even that grudging break was made.

“I’m sure I may justifiably boast of your mother’s achievements. To enter the financial world as she has done, and to run circles around most of the men in it, would, in anyone else, lead to banishment from all company, let alone Society. Yet she has, in the teeth of it, founded a salon in London that is the talk of Europe and America. I was telling her less than an hour ago—people in the very highest ranks of London Society court my acquaintance in the rather touching faith that it will secure them an invitation to her table!”

They relaxed enough to smile. Young John even gave a light laugh.

John was glad of that. He had come here determined to have his way, but not as a tyrant. He wanted them to understand. To be sure, Winifred had been very wrong and would have to be punished, but first she must see why. In that sense her punishment would be voluntary—undertaken gratefully, even.

He allowed himself to relax then, stretching his legs out before him and settling back into his chair. “So…we are not a very usual family. Your upbringing, too, all you children, has been most unnatural.” The word brought the expected stir of surprise and quickened their interest. “Most children are banished behind the baize door. But you, as soon as you could talk reasonably, have sat at our table, shared our conversation, talked with our guests on all but the most formal occasions. Tongues have wagged against us for it. We have ‘spoiled your innocence’ people have said—some people. And, to be honest, we could not answer them with certainty. Because, you see, all that licence we allowed you was like an investment in the future; and until that future becomes reality, people can always say you have made an unwise investment—and, of course, you cannot answer them with any convincing proofs to the contrary. Is my meaning clear so far?”