The Sons of Adam (42 page)

It was time to leave.

Alan felt as though the easy part now lay behind him. He faced the future with foreboding.

At times during the war, Tom had put his hand out to a man, perhaps a soldier lying out in no man’s land, perhaps a man leaning up against the wall of a trench. He’d put his hand out, expecting to find a human being, then the body rolled over, the head had no face, and the skin was as cold as death.

This moment was like that. It was a leap of horror, the touch of a corpse.

The man came running across the dirt. Once his thin-soled shoes slid on some slush-pit mud and sent him sprawling, but he kept on coming. He was bald-headed, spectacled, out-of-place, furious.

Tom climbed slowly down the ladder. Pipsqueak, who’d been hurtling round the field, now threw herself at the man, leaping at his ankles, snapping and growling. The men in the drilling crew stopped their celebrations and fell silent, looking alternately at the newcomer, who was picking his way over a pipeline trench, and at Tom, who was still forty or fifty feet up the ladder.

Slowly Tom descended.

The man arrived at the foot of the rig.

‘What in … ? What in hell’s name … ? Jesus Christ, boys, who gave you permission to drill here?’

The man was panting and out of breath. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. He sat down on a section of well-casing and tried to recover himself. There were now more than a hundred derricks on Signal Hill, and the air resounded with their noise, smoke and stink. The newcomer was clearly unused to it. It was almost as though he was waiting for the noise to stop before coming to the point.

‘This is my land,’ said Tom. ‘That’s to say, the drilling rights are mine. Signed it up with old Ma Hershey. You can take a look at the contract, if you don’t believe me.’

‘Hershey, the old witch! She doesn’t own this land no more. She doesn’t own doodley-squat. She doesn’t even own that little rathole she lives in.’

‘I saw the title deed. It was all in order.’

‘Order, yeah, but in order when? Hershey hasn’t owned this piece of land for fifteen years. Her old man used to run cattle here, or tried to, but he mortgaged the land to pay for his drink, and the drink ended up swallowing the land. Couple of Japs farm it now.’

‘And you’re who?’ Tom’s voice came over all aggressive – needlessly so, since aggression would get him nowhere. He swept an oil-stained hand through his oil-stained hair and did nothing at all to improve his appearance. He checked his voice and added more gently, ‘I mean, who do you represent?’

‘Pardon me – good girl, good girl –’ Pipsqueak had begun pulling angrily at the man’s laces and he tried to shake her off without hurting her. The man’s heart had slowed to a few hundred beats per minute, and he mopped his face with a huge white hanky as he stretched his leg out and surveyed the view. ‘Pardon me, I’m Walter P. Faries, down here from Bakersfield, Bakersfield Thrift Savings Bank … Damnation, is it always this rackety and hot? A man can’t hear himself talk, let alone talk himself think. No, no, I mean a man can’t think himself … Oh hell, you know what I mean.’ He blew out his lips in a long puff as he slowly recovered his breath.

Tom’s face flickered with hope. ‘Of course, I can see you’re no oilman, Mr Faries. Just supposing you can prove title to the land, I’d be most happy just to switch around that contract. Address all those royalty cheques to you instead of Hershey.’

‘Lord, no, I’m no oilman, and don’t want to be one neither. It’s a wonder to me how you boys can stand all this.’

‘I’ve figured it all out. Where to site the wells, where to lay the pipelines, how to get it to the refinery cheap and easy. There’s a lot of pitfalls in this business. It’s not just finding the stuff.’

‘It’s a wonder this hill isn’t pumped dry already.’

‘Not really, Mr Faries. We’ve only just struck today, and we’re ahead of most of these drillers round here. Now we’ve got oil, we can begin to raise some real capital to get new wells sunk. In a town-lot scramble like this one, you need to drill fast and pump furious.’

‘Capital … that’ll be my side of things, I guess.’

‘That’s right, Mr Faries. An oilman and a banker, the ideal partnership, I reckon.’

‘I reckon so. That’s what I been figuring.’

Faries took off his shoes and shook sand and gravel out onto the dirt. His sock was glued to his foot with sweat. He massaged his feet, wiggled his toes, and put his shoes back on with a sigh. A sudden bolt of wind brought the rough heat of a natural gas flare down the hill and a shower of forge-flung soot. He blinked.

‘If you want,’ said Tom, ‘we can go someplace quiet right now. Sort out the paperwork. Have a lawyer look over it. I’ll need to get your land title checked over at the county courthouse. All being well, we can switch the contracts round within a day or two.’

Faries’ gaze had been locked into the middle distance, staring at nothing. Now, at last, he heard Tom speaking to him. His gaze changed, and he focused, blinking, on Tom.

‘No, no, no. I’m sorry. No. God, my brother would knock the hell out of me if I went and did anything like that. He’s an oilman, see? Been in the business thirty-five years, would you credit it? He’s going to drill here. Right here. Got it all figured out, so he says.’

It was a new look Alan Montague that presented himself at the immense black front door to 49 Berkeley Square.

His blond hair had never recovered from the nearly three weeks it had spent beneath a thick shampoo of stinking crude. Reluctantly, he’d had his hair cut to within an eighth of an inch of his scalp at Abadan, and spent many vain moments in front of the mirror hoping that it would grow back fast enough not to embarrass him in time for his return. His moustache and beard he had shaved off, of course, and, though he’d expected to let the moustache grow back, he found that he preferred himself completely smooth-shaven. He’d also washed himself three times daily, until the shades of black had finally left his skin. He’d carved at his nails with a penknife until they looked almost clean and white. He’d bought a suit of clothes with borrowed money – everything was borrowed now – and hoped that European fashions hadn’t long passed him by.

His efforts had been a passable success. He was certainly clean enough. His hair was very short, but it gave him a military appearance that made him look younger and not unattractive. His clothes were newish and reasonably well-fitting, though they’d never have passed muster at Savile Row. He raised his hand to the great brass knocker and brought it crashing down.

He had never been so nervous in all his life.

The door swung open. A butler, as tall and solemn as a column of marble, stood behind it.

‘Sir?’

‘I’m … My name is Alan Montague … I’m hear to see Miss –’

Alan’s nervousness extended to his mouth. He actually found it difficult to find words, let alone say them. He felt as though he must be shaking like a leaf, though in fact he was doing nothing of the sort.

‘Alan Montague to see Miss Dunlop. Yes, sir. If you would like to follow –’

The butler had turned and was beginning to lead Alan down the long cool hallway towards the drawing room when there was a minor explosion. Running feet, the fast light tapping of a woman’s shoes, a rushing of skirts. Alan turned towards the staircase leading from upstairs. It was Lottie. He hardly had time to see her face. She flung herself at him, arms around his neck, lips pressed hard against his.

‘Oh, Alan, darling, darling, dearest Alan, my love,’ she said, when their need for air finally forced them apart. ‘My darling, best, bravest, most favourite oilman.’

‘Lottie, dear, good Lord, how did you … ?’

Slowly and deliciously, in the ponderous old drawing room, they began to reintroduce themselves.

Alan spoke of Persia, the long months of exploration, the sale of his concession, the return to Persia, the first dry hole and a little of the agonies connected with the second. He said nothing of his cholera and nothing of the malaria that had followed.

‘Darling, you were so brave. And what was the climate like? Was it very beastly?’

‘No. Not at all. It was chilly in winter and a little too warm in summer, but not unpleasant. Spring was delightful.’

‘Oh, dearest, now I can’t believe a single word you’ve told me. Daddy is the best of chums with old Charlie Greenaway, who says the weather out there is perfectly frightful.’

‘Well, it was rather trying at times.’

‘Pig.’

For the first ten minutes, Lottie seemed like an exotic bird of the jungle: very wonderful, but very strange. Her beauty was dazzling. Her hair had the colour of a Persian sunset: crimson and gold, seen through a smoky cloud of dust. She wore a simple green frock, but the skirt sat higher up the calf than Alan had ever seen worn by a decent girl. But it wasn’t long before the shock of her newness wore off. When she laughed, the end of her nose bent down as he always remembered it. There was a tiny scar that drew a thin white line across her right-hand eyebrow. She was just the way he’d always remembered her: completely different and exactly the same.

They discussed all the most important topics in turn. Alan’s hair (‘Horrible, darling. You look like a drill sergeant’); the loss of his moustache (‘Don’t even think of growing it back. It was like kissing a hairbrush’); his clothes (‘Those trousers are simply laughable, my dearest. Your legs are like two little pencils. We’ll get you some Oxford bags first thing in the morning’). And then, of course, there was Lottie’s life.

‘Parties, darling, mostly parties. Mummy and Daddy became terribly upset about me being a nurse. As you know, I adored it, but they just couldn’t see how I was ever going to get married if I was knee-deep in bandages all day long. Well, I wasn’t going to be bullied, of course, but then some of my dearest friends among the soldiers died or moved back home and I realised I wasn’t really needed any longer. So I came home. Daddy kept throwing whacking great parties for me, hoping that I was going to get married to one of his dreary City people. I couldn’t tell him that I wouldn’t even think of marrying a banker when I jolly well meant to marry a strapping great oilman.’

Alan swallowed. ‘Lottie, my dear, may I ask you a question?’

‘What a silly thing to ask. Apart from anything else, you just did.’

‘That night we bumped into each other. In Piccadilly. You were with your friends. We said hello and you invited me to join you all for a drink.’

‘Yes?’

Alan swallowed a second time and licked his lips. ‘Look, I thought about that meeting every single night in Persia. I couldn’t see … I couldn’t see that you could still have had any tenderness for me … You seemed so distant, so light. It was almost as if –’

‘You
are
a nitwit. What was I meant to have done? I didn’t know you were going to hit oil, did I? I had to think jolly quickly and I decided the best thing was to pretend I’d forgotten you. I thought that would give you the very best chance of getting over me. And personally, I think I did rather well at it. Pretending that is, not forgetting.’

Alan smiled and stroked her arm. The hairs on her arm were auburn too. It would take a lifetime to get to know her properly, a lifetime he now hoped to have …

‘Oh, darling, I’ve been forgetting,’ she interrupted. ‘Daddy’s here, in his study. He’s raring to meet you. Oil’s
in,
apparently. All the rage in Leadenhall. Oh, and I think this might be a good moment to mention the fact that you’re dying to marry me.’