Sons of Fortune (41 page)

***

When John arrived, “hush of life” was written all over his face, in the very stoop of his walk. It tested Nora’s sense of the ridiculous as she ran through all the repertoire of a grande horizontale to seduce her own husband, the undoubted father of eight of her children and, she hoped, the undoubting father of a possible ninth.

Meat, madeira, music, the melting glance—all her strategy foundered in his “Oh dear!” as, hand in hand, they climbed the stair to bed.

“You wouldn’t leave me six months, comfortless!” she said.

He groaned. “I’ll do my best for you. But don’t expect too much for my part.”

In the early days he had often called their love “a mountain”—meaning something grand and inspiring to dominate the whole land, not this long, weary trudge up an interminable scree.

And not all her wiles could raise him even to the most perfunctory performance. It maddened her because physically he was still the only man for her. Just to lie on him, even when he was impotent like this, and run her lips over his ear and feel his breath on her neck and his marvellous hands caressing her could turn her inside out. She trembled to be united with him once more. But there was nothing to unite with. Just the dead horse you couldn’t flog.

Experience had taught her it was no good trying to arouse an interest that wasn’t there. Her only hope now was to ambush him.

“We have to accept this,” he sighed as she drew away from him. “It’s the legacy of growing old.”

It was possibly true, she thought; but she wished the sigh with which he said it had not been so contented.

In the small hours she awoke to see him standing in his nightshirt looking out of the window. The skies had cleared and it was bright moonlight.

“What?” she asked.

“There’s a vixen yapping out there.” He came back to bed.

She didn’t want him to go straight back to sleep, so she said, “You never told me exactly what this inquiry in India is all about.”

He chuckled, but without humour. “Not the most honourable thing,” he said. “D’you really want to know?”

“It would be an odd wife who didn’t. Whatever it is will deny me your company for six months.”

“During which we’d probably meet a dozen times!”

“Curiously enough, John, I still quite enjoy those times.”

“Can’t think why,” he said mournfully, “when I fail you like this.”

Hope fled from her then and she lay back on her pillow with a sigh.

“It’s not really an inquiry,” he said after a silence. “We all know what’s happened. We have to manage the inquiry so that something quite different appears to have happened.”

“No doubt it’s all tied up with honour,” she said.

“It has everything to do with honour.” Her sneer must have prompted him to explain it all. “The Political Branch has burned its fingers. It played a dangerous game, which, had it succeeded, would have extended English influence to a wide part of the Frontier, would have contained Russia more securely, and would have brought peace and relative prosperity to people who now lead lives that are impoverished, warlike, and rather short. I mean, it was worth doing if it had succeeded.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Quite. And the Political Branch cannot possibly shoulder the blame. In the first place, no one knows (I mean no one can prove) that they were involved. In the second place, the Frontier peoples look upon us as bluff, hearty soldiers—simple souls with little imagination. Good targets for their local idea of sport, which is to hold ambush parties. They have no idea how devious and all-pervading the Political Branch is. And they must never find out—until we have them where we want them.”

“But how will you stop them? I mean, what are you specifically going to do?”

“The Political Branch have selected a ‘bluff, hearty soldier—a simple soul with little imagination’ but an unbounded love for England, and I have to fix the blame upon him.”

“John!” She sat bolt upright. “I think that is the most disgraceful thing I ever…”

“Oh, he will know it—in the end. He is, after all, a full colonel. In the end he will knowingly accept the blame. That will be my second task. First I hold the inquiry, where his protestations of innocence will seem most genuine, being true. Then, when we have found him guilty, on evidence that is at this moment being meticulously fabricated by the Political Branch, I must persuade him that, while most soldiers hope to sacrifice their lives for their country, on some the demands fall even more severely: They are asked to sacrifice their honour and go on living.”

Nora felt quite sick at this flat recitation of treachery. “Why you?” she asked. “I cannot imagine you involved in this vile affair.”

“Nor can anyone else. That is precisely why. I am known for my unflinching honesty. My probity is unassailable.”

“But it could all fall to bits, John. The whole truth could still come out.”

“Then I would be discredited,” he said. “It is not only the simple colonel who is being called upon to make sacrifices for his country. But let us not despair, my love. At least I may certainly hope for a viscountcy out of it in five or so years’ time. The poor colonel may look forward only to disgrace and obscurity.” He laughed coldly. “If heaven did not already exist, we would have to invent it, just to encourage people like him.”

It was small wonder, she thought, that he could not perform. How importunate she must have seemed to him for pressing so; he was a true brick for having tried. She must just hope she was not pregnant, that was all.

***

By the time that she knew beyond doubt that she was, indeed, pregnant again, she no longer cared. In fact, she welcomed it with a satisfaction that was almost savage; she wanted a child that John could be certain was not his. Because, two days after he had left for India, the Brockmans had sent on a parcel containing a pair of socks and some handkerchiefs that John’s man had overlooked. The letter accompanying them had begun: “When Lord Stevenson left here on Saturday afternoon last…”

She didn’t need to guess where he had been from Saturday night to Monday afternoon, nor the true reason for his inability to perform. Even his telegraph from Ingleton had been an arranged bit of duplicity.

She might just have forgiven him if he had spent three nights with her and one with The Bitch; at least, she would have tried to persuade herself to accommodate to it and to preserve a limping sort of love for him. But she would never forgive him the sense of priorities he had revealed. He had spared her the barest polite minimum of his time; and he had arrived so spent out as to make even that seem like a slap in the face.

She wrote to him then, the frostiest letter she could contrive, telling him that Winifred would be staying at Hamilton Place—“
my
Hamilton Place,” she added in her only direct reference to her knowledge of The Bitch’s existence (but it was enough, she thought)—and would be going to college this autumn and for the next two years. She added that she thought all future meetings between them should be by prior arrangement only. She ended by saying that she was enclosing another letter of the kind she might have written in other circumstances.

The other letter told him, in terms that any adoring wife might use, that she was expecting her ninth baby. She relished the deliberate ambiguity of it.
Let him stew six months
, she thought.

Hey—we’re in Upper dorm, Steamer,” Causton said. He made an obscene gesture. Upper dorm belied its name in one respect: it was just six steps above ground-floor level. The other dorms—Incubator, Squint, and Middle—were all one or two floors above. The thing about Upper dorm, so rumour had it, was that you could shin out after lights-out and be away wenching and boozing in the town in minutes. Blenheim, the House in which Boy was the new head pharaoh and Causton and Caspar the newest recruits to the buckdom of Upper dorm, was built on the drained bog that had so recently separated Fiennes from Langstroth. From the windows of Upper dorm Caspar could look out across a small stretch of garden directly into what had been his and Boy’s mess in Purse’s house, four years ago. It was hard now to remember what the bog had looked like; Blenheim and Ramilles and Malplaquet had been there for ages, it seemed.

But that room did not belong entirely to his past. It was from there, he hoped, that he was going to manage to sell his worthless stock of iron bedsteads.

“These look like the only two spare beds,” Caspar said. “Which do you want?”

“Heuargh! The one nearest the window, clod!” He made the obscene gesture again.

“Good old Causton!” Caspar told him. “Say one thing for you—you know how to crack a good joke! And crack it. And crack it…Help!”

Without warning Causton attacked him—what was called a bollock fight: one hand guarding your own jewels, the other plundering your oppo’s. They fought and pushed without resolution until they collapsed; self-conscious that, as bucks, they could no longer be accused of and thrashed for “ragging.”

“
Pax
?”

“
Pax
.”

It was nice to be back at school. The grown-up world was exciting, but it wasn’t fun.

“Moncur was saying on the train that chief is going to give up School football and go in for Rugby football,” Caspar said.

“He would! School football was nice brutal chaos. Chief’ll ruin everything.”

“It’s so we can play other schools.”

“And thrash them!
Bam
!
Bam
!” Causton beat clouds of dust and lint out of his blankets. Suddenly he stopped. “I say, Steamer. I had a pullet this hol.”

“So did I. What was yours like?”

“Most obliging—I said sit and she lay!”

Caspar joined his laughter and together they went out to look at the new crop of roes. Like true veterans they agreed it was a crying shame there was no drumming in anymore. Old School was an already fading memory. The fabric of it was all still there, transformed into the new assembly hall; the old dorms had already been sliced up into classrooms. You could stand in them and say “My bed used to be here,” but it didn’t mean anything. The common room in each of the three new houses was called “the Barn” in sentimental memory, but the sweet disorder of that ancient institution had died with the closing of the Old School: no more Olympic games, no tramp fires, no grilling of chops, no tales of adventure, mystery, and terror around the smoky inglenooks (one of which now housed an organ). Boys could even be heard regretting the passing of the cramped, cold, damp cupboards in which they had done their studies.

None of them could express it precisely but all shared a sense of something lost in their transfer to these cold, healthy barracks; all felt that they were the last of a breed that had known what a school could truly be—when the boys formed one vast, independent camp and the masters a small beleaguered band, set well apart from real school life.

Now, under Brockman, the school was reaching deeper and yet deeper into the boys’ lives. Unsupervised hours had all but vanished. Only divinity and Latin theme were now taught in public school; otherwise classes had shrunk to thirty boys and the masters kept them all at it, not just the saps. Evening hours were passed entirely in supervision, either under masters or under pharaohs. And even the free hours of the day were being insidiously eroded by sports that, while not exactly compulsory, were increasingly “expected.” Cricket and the School’s own football game (soon, as rumour said, to be replaced by Rugby football) had always been there. Now there was an ever-swelling number of newcomers. Fives had been first, then fencing, last spring it had been various Graeco-Roman games. All had begun as private enthusiasms of a master or a small group of boys, and all had swiftly joined that unofficial list of “done things.” If you did not take part, you were vaguely suspect, you were letting something down—the school, the House, yourself. Solitary pleasures like horse riding and carpentry, which had enjoyed if not official encouragement then a warm tolerance at least, were the most suspect of all. They took a boy outside that all-embracing, dawn-to-dusk reach (indeed, dawn-to-dawn reach) of the school’s machinery. “Machinery! Machinery!” Brockman was always saying it.

The dwindling band of Old Scholars, Caspar and Causton among them, of course, pitied the “new pots,” who now could never experience school life as it should be, and who instead must pass under the yoke of saintly hypocrites like Brockman to be cowed, broken, and remoulded in the new Fiennes pattern. It was not a school; it was a factory. Machinery, machinery indeed!

***

“There’s a young man who’s grown!” Mrs. Ingilby called out when she saw Caspar coming down the lane.

“Good evening, Mrs. I. And you’re still bright as a button!” Caspar said. Actually it was not true. The woman had a worried furtive look. He soon discovered why.

Ingilby himself was even worse. Not once did he look Caspar in the eye, pretending to be busy concentrating on a simple tenon joint that could not possibly be occupying more than a quarter of his mind.

“I’m right busy this time, Mr. Caspar. Lord knows when I’ve been busier, see thou. I doubt I s’ll have time nor temper for teaching thee this while.”

Caspar laughed. “I won’t say I’m half your equal, Mr. Ingilby, though that’s my cack-handedness, not your teaching, to blame. Even so, I’m sure I might give you a
hand
.”

It was an old joke between them, but this time it did not even raise a smile.

“They say there’s to be a new carpentry classroom at yon school o’ thine. Happen thou could go there instead.”

“Happen I could!” Caspar sneered. “I prefer here.”

“Nay, I’m too ruined down with work, see thou. We s’ll give it a miss this term, eh?”

“But, Mr. Ingilby…” Caspar was half pleading, half laughing. “I’ve really learned all you can teach—you said as much last term. I’m no make compared to you, but all I need is practice. I’ll work for nothing,” he blurted out, thinking that would surely change Ingilby’s mind. He knew he was worth as much as any average journeyman carpenter.

Ingilby turned away. “Be off now,” he barked.

And nothing Caspar said would make him speak again. When Caspar at last turned to go, he saw Mrs. Ingilby standing at the yard door. “Come inside,” she whispered as he passed.

“What’s happened?” Caspar asked. “I’ve never seen him like this. Is it something I’ve done?”

“It was Lord Stevenson,” she said. “He come up here two weeks back and told Ingilby to have no truck with you. He isn’t to let you cross the threshold of that workshop.”

Caspar was thunderstruck. He could say nothing. Why had his father done this mean thing? Because of that disagreement in Connemara? No—his father was many things, but not vindictive, and certainly not in that petty way.

“Lord Stevenson said as how you was to go in the army and he didn’t want you hand-labouring like this.”

“But why should Mr. Ingilby take any notice of such an absurd request?” Caspar asked indignantly. “He’s a free carpenter—his own master. He’s not a Stevenson man any more.”

“It’s the pension, you see, master. He’d get the pension stopped on us.”

“Never!” Caspar began. Then, seeing the woman’s face, he asked, “Did my father say that?”

She nodded, lowering her eyes.

So! Ingilby had put up some resistance. His father would never have been reduced to making such a despicable threat otherwise. Of all the mean, scabby tricks!

“You rely on the pension?” he asked. “I thought…” He pointed with his eyes toward the workshop.

“The work?” she said wearily. “Nay, there’s little enough o’ that. They want him to teach at this new workshop in school. ‘Demonstrator’ they call it.” She brightened. “Eay—think o’ that! Ingilby a teacher in a great school the like o’ yon! Without that and the Stevenson pension every meal ’ud be cat-collop and chimpings in this house, see thou.”

Caspar was never one to waste time bemoaning a loss. His fury at Lord Stevenson for this piece of meanness would find its scope at the proper time, but that was not now. He had to salvage what he could; and he had to have enough turning and carving to convert a hundred of his beds during the Christmas holidays.

He went back across the yard to the door of Ingilby’s workshop. How inviting and homely it looked now that he was forbidden there! His anger at his father flared again briefly.

“Mr. Ingilby,” he said, “I know what has happened here and I will not ask you to risk angering my father in any way. But I presume he did not forbid you to undertake other work? Outside work?”

Ingilby, relieved that the pressures were off him, came smiling to the door. “Nay. That he did not.”

“It so happens, you see, that I met a man this holiday, a fellow called Bassett, who works for Lady Stevenson. He owns a company by the name of The Patent Hygienic and Artistic Bed Company—have you heard of them?”

Ingilby shook his head. Caspar was tense with amazement at himself; this whole story was occurring to him about half a second before he spoke it, yet his tone suggested it was all stale, tedious background information that had to be trotted out before he could get to the point.

“Well, we were talking about a new bed he has designed. It looks like a cast-iron bedstead—in fact, it is a cast-iron bedstead except for the four corner posts. Now they are to be made in wood—turned and carved, you see?”

Ingilby nodded.

“One of his problems—it happened with his last design: that was for an
all-
wooden bed—one of his problems is that the furniture-making quarter of London is all small and crowded and on top of itself. You can’t keep anything secret there, see. Things get copied overnight. So he was going to have these wooden corner posts made in France. However…” He drew in a deep, proud breath and smiled his broadest. “I said bugger that! London tongues may rattle like Eskimo teeth. A Yorkshireman knows how and when to keep a secret—especially if there’s a goodly bit of clink at the end o’ the road. The short of it is, Mr. Ingilby, my friend Mr. Bassett is willing to commission you to turn and carve four hundred corner posts between now and the first week in December…”

“Nay! I’d never do it!” Ingilby interrupted.

“You and Thomas would.”

Thomas was the eldest boy, the one who had first brought Caspar here.

“Nay. He’s to stay in school and better himself.”

“He wouldn’t be the first bright lad to be taken out of school when the family fortunes demanded it. Thirty pounds, Mr. Ingilby—thirty pounds is what you’re turning away. Plus ten pounds for materials. Between now and December—think! A lot of money.”

He could see Ingilby was thinking furiously. It was a lot of money.

“Have ye a drawing?” he asked.

Caspar took a sheet of paper from his pocket and showed Ingilby the profile he wanted to have turned in mahogany. “And if you’ll open the big door and drag your bench half out here, I’ll carve you the top part as a pattern in half an hour. Just so’s I don’t set foot inside—as Lord S. forbade.”

He shouldn’t have brought up the reminder. Ingilby almost turned the whole idea down then and there. He could see fear in the man’s eyes, fighting with his desperate want of those thirty pounds. As he watched the man’s struggle, Caspar prepared to say: “Remember, Mr. Ingilby, I will one day be running Stevenson’s. What will happen to your pension then if you fail me now!”

Fortunately he did not have to say it. But an hour later, all the way back to school, he kept thinking of those words and turning over with shame the knowledge that he would have said them if it had been necessary. Business can be cruel, he realized; until then he had not been sure he could match its cruelty.

He was late for lockup and had the misfortune to be caught by Brockman, who was just leaving Blenheim, no doubt after some talk with Greaves, Caspar’s housemaster.

“Where have you been, m’boy?” he asked sternly. He always pretended to hold a fair trial before he hanged you.

“I went for a walk, sir, and didn’t notice the time I’m afraid. Is it after lockup?” The empty playing fields alone were an answer.

“Mustn’t turn into a dreamer, m’boy. Your father was here just before he went to India, and asked us to make sure you shape into an alert and zealous man, fit for the queen’s commission. Report yourself to your Head of House. Say I said you were to have six of the best. At once.”

“Sir!” Caspar, sensing that Brockman was about to grip his arm and say something manly and soul-bracing, barked out his acceptance and turned on his heel. He did not see chief staring after him with a worried frown.

The shite!
Caspar was thinking.
He knows Boy is the new Head of House. He could at least have said “your brother.”

Chief had one thing to his credit: He had abolished all bare-bottom swishings. Everyone kept on his trousers now. It was amazing what a cushioning even the thinnest worsted made.

Boy, so lost and pitiful in the formless outer world, was in his element here as Head of House. Every hour of the day and night had its prescribed pattern. Every rule governing behaviour was written down. Now it was not mere spoken tradition that said only pharaohs could wear their shoes laced ladder-fashion, it was House Rule 79…and so on for a hundred and eighty-two other regulations, ranging from expulsion offences, such as wenching, down to the deliberately vague catchall: “A breach of Common Sense is a breach of House Rules.” In this structured world Boy was king. Aloof, unbending, respected, feared—the very best type of Fiennes man.