Sons of Fortune (38 page)

***

“How many did you sell, dear?” Nora asked at dinner that evening.

“Ah,” Caspar said jovially. “I’m on my way to a very good sale at Avian’s, don’t you know. They say my price is too high. But I think if I stick out, they’ll come up to it.”

“Avian’s!” Nora said delightedly. “If you can sell there, you’ll have the entré at any furnishing shop you wish. Well done! Are you sure your price isn’t too high?”

“I kept your Mr. Bassett down by staying firm. I’m sure they’ll come round, especially as they imagine it’s just a caper on my part, so I don’t need the cash. They’re very keen to get the bed—you can tell that by the way they look at it.”

“Good, dear. I’m so pleased for you. And I don’t think it’ll do any harm if they stew on it a week or so. I want you to go to Connemara and bring Winifred here. I don’t want her to travel unescorted.”

“Winifred?”

“Yes. She’s going to Bedford College for a year or two.”

Caspar was overjoyed. At least one thing was going right—his father must have relented enough to allow Winnie to go to college. “Good for the pater!” he said. “Did you persuade him to have second thoughts?”

Nora smiled sourly. “I shall write to let him know as soon as he has gone to India,” she said.

Her words started the churning inside him all over again. Stevenson had not relented. It was trouble, trouble piling up all around him. How long could he hold out? How long before he would have to go to his mother and confess what a muck he had made of it and ask her to bail him out? In a way, despite his troubles, it would be a relief to get back to Connemara for a week or so. He could enjoy a bit of riding.

You must keep your toes in to the girth more, sir,” McGinty told Boy. “You ride like an infantry adjutant, so you do. And as for you, Master Caspar, the less said the better. Your heart’s not here this while. In love, is it?”

Caspar smirked, as if McGinty had found his secret. He was damned if he’d tell anyone here what his problems really were.

They thanked McGinty and left him to untack their ponies. Winifred, Boy, and Caspar, still in riding clothes, went to walk on the beach before lunch; there was plenty of time to change.

Except for the onshore breeze it would be as hot here as it had been in London all the fortnight he was there. The noon sun poured down on them, making their pace as short as their shadows.

“I think something has happened between the mater and the guvnor,” Caspar said. “She said nothing to you about college before she left here?”

“Nothing,” Winifred confirmed.

“And when did she write to you?”

“It was dated the tenth.”

Caspar pricked his ears. “But that’s the date—” he began.

They stopped because he had stopped, and they waited. Caspar did not know whether to tell them, especially—thump! That lead weight in the gut again. He decided to tell them, out of bravado, if nothing more. Thumbing his nose at fate, while he still had the chance.

“That’s the date on which she told me—or as good as told me—I could go into business if I wished. Instead of the army. If I could prove I was capable. You see, I told Greaves I wasn’t too keen on the army, and he went and blurted it all out to the mater. That’s how it all happened.” He turned to Winnie. “Same day as she wrote to you. So, something must be happening for her to…”

“Go into business!” Boy exploded.

“Why?” Winifred rounded on him. “Why d’you speak as though it’s unthinkable, Boy? That’s just like you. You don’t think; you just respond. It’s only unthinkable because a lot of people who have nothing whatever to do with us, and no concern for us, and no interest in our happiness, because they say so.”

Boy dismissed her outburst with an impatient glance; it wasn’t worth answering.

“I’ll tell you how unthinkable it is, Boy,” Caspar cut in. “Mother has set me a test. Through one of her business associates I have acquired certain goods, wholesale, which I now have to factor at a profit. If I do, if I’m successful, she will support me in whatever business venture I may wish to engage.”

Boy sneered. “What is it? A packet of biscuits? Games?”

“I’m not telling you—or anyone. Except this: I have a loan for over a hundred pounds at…a London clearing bank and over ten tons of…goods, in a warehouse, waiting to be sold.”

Or melted
, he thought.

“Really, Steamer?” Winifred was delighted. “How exciting!”

“I don’t believe it,” Boy said, desperate not to believe it. “Our mother could never be so disloyal—not after what happened last time Papa was here. It would be downright treachery.”

Caspar shrugged. “Believe it or not,” he said. “It’s nothing to me. The interesting thing is that she arranged it on the tenth. The same day as she wrote to Winnie.”

“Yes, Boy,” Winifred said. “You can’t deny the letter. She certainly wrote that.”

“I simply refuse to believe it,” Boy said. “Our mother would never do that.”

“You refuse to believe it!” Winifred sneered. She turned to Caspar. “He’s been impossible ever since he failed to track down Mary Coen.”

“Ah, she’s been found,” Caspar said lightly, not daring to look at Boy. “I forgot to tell you.”

He hadn’t forgotten, but to make a special point of telling Boy could have given the game away; after all, Caspar wasn’t supposed to know anything had taken place between Boy and the girl.

“Where?” Boy asked, taking no trouble to conceal his anxiety. “What happened to her?”

“No one knows what happened to her,” Caspar lied. “She won’t say. She ran away to see the guvnor about something and she fell foul of…I don’t know. Anyway, she’s at Hamilton Place for the moment.”

He was aware what a terribly thin story it sounded. Only Winnie swallowed it at its face value. Boy, he could see, was thunderstruck.

“She’s come to no harm, fortunately,” Caspar added quickly. “And she’s as happy as a lark at Hamilton Place. I think she must lead a charmed life!”

“Have you seen her?” Boy asked, tense to breaking point. “Or is she just down in the sculleries?”

“I saw her. Very briefly.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“About why she went?”

Boy’s nostrils flared. “Of course!” His vehemence belied the calm, patrician anger in his face.

“Not really. She had some vague idea of a land where she’d be beautiful—or be thought beautiful.”

“Oh, poor Mary,” Winifred said.

“I told her we all thought she was beautiful and the land was here. Is here.”

“Is she coming back, then? Here?”

“I doubt it,” Caspar said. “It would be a poor example to the other servants.”

“I see,” Boy said. He appeared genuinely calm now. “Excuse me, you two. I have things to do.”

They watched him out of earshot of low-pitched conversation; then Winifred said, “He’s so moody. Do you understand him, Steamer?”

“He is in love with Mary Coen, you know, Winnie.”

“Balderdash!” Winifred shook her head in vigorous disbelief. She didn’t even want to consider that idea.

“He’ll get over it now he knows she’s safe,” Caspar said with an air of closing the subject.

Winifred bent and picked up a round stone, which she bowled along the beach. It clanged against a wrought-iron gate half sunk in the sand. “Out!” she cried, and laughed. “I haven’t managed all week when it was defended. Isn’t that my luck!”

“What d’you mean?” Caspar hurled another stone overhand at the gate and missed.

“Yah!” Winifred taunted. “That’s our wicket.”

“Wicket!” Caspar laughed. “It’s as wide as a barn, anyone could hit that.” He threw another stone and missed, turning to clap his hand over Winifred’s lips before she could utter a sound. She kicked his shin and made him let go.

“It’s Clement’s new game, called triple cricket—or ‘tricket’. There’s three batsmen at a time instead of one.”

“Say—it’s the old gate from the orchard,” Caspar said. He began a run-up to leap it.

But as he was in mid-air, poised as it seemed above the “wicket,” time came to a stop. He was looking down at the gate and saw that, where one of the stiles was broken, Clement or someone had replaced it with a straight piece of driftwood. It wasn’t the mechanics of the arrangement that caught his eye but the rather beautiful juxtaposition of the wood, polished to a velvet sheen by the sand and bleached pale by sun and salt, against the black of the painted iron.

“Eureka!” he cried as he landed. It was the answer to his problem with the bedsteads. He couldn’t replace the lapped tubing with proper cast tube—not without making a mess or going to an impossible expense. But he could do it in wood!

“Eureka! Eureka!” he cried in ridiculous glee. “Oh, Winnie—you’re a genius! And Clement’s a genius! And I am geniusissimus! I’ll make your fortune, you’ll see.”

“Stop it,” Winifred cried, laughing in delight at her leaping, mad, screaming brother. But when he did stop she picked up her riding habit and shouted, “Can’t catch me!” And she ran along the beach as she hadn’t run for years.

Caspar pretended not to be able to catch her until they were almost where the sand came hard against the rocks. Then he ran easily beyond her and stood, wild-eyed and panting, barring her way. For a while they were both too breathless to speak; then they sat on the rocks, sweating hard and wishing they hadn’t exerted themselves so much.

“I’m going for a swim,” Caspar said. He raced out of his clothes and dashed into the water—not into the sandy part, but into one of the rocky pools to the side of the beach. The lovely taste of the salt, the sting to the eyes, the nose-wrinkling water, the cool of it all—how sweet life was when all your problems were solved. He could turn the wood, and carve it, at Ingilby’s.

Winifred watched him enviously, looking at the farmhouse, then took her clothes off, too, and ran to join him, luxuriating in the sudden cool of the water. She looked down at her body, shivering in a reticule of light cast upon it and the sandy bed of the pool by the restless water, and she saw with shame how brown she had grown this holiday, despite all her care.

Caspar squirted a mouthful of water at her. She splashed back with her hands. The sport petered out and they half-sat, half-lay in the pool, wanting nothing more.

“I’m glad you’re back, Steamer,” she said. “Boy’s been dreadful, like a wet funeral. It’s been frightful since the Thorntons went.”

“I told you, Winnie, he’s in love with Mary Coen.”

“Piffle!”

“No, it’s true. I know it. I saw them kiss.”

“Eurgh!” Winifred said, without thought. “How could he!”

“Her scars, you mean? That wouldn’t worry Boy.”

Winifred hadn’t meant that. She was thinking of all the things Boy had been able to talk about only in Latin and Greek—his disgust at fleshly love and his determination to enjoy only the purest and most spiritual union with his wife, whenever and if ever he got married. And then in a moment of rare insight (rare, for Winifred was a clever and rather literal-minded girl, not overgiven to empathy), she saw that if Boy ever slid back from his own high ideals, it would have to be with some girl as repellent as Mary Coen.

“Have you been in love yet?” she asked Caspar.

“No. I don’t seem to need it.”

“Nor do I. And if Boy’s behaviour these last weeks is anything to go by, I’m glad. I’m going to try never to need it. I’m sure it’s superior not to need it instead of being such a dreadful slave.”

Caspar was unwilling to go all the way with that sentiment. “It could be useful,” he said.

“How? I don’t see how.”

“Well, the guvnor’s busy arranging what we’re all going to do in life. You don’t think he’s going to stop there, do you! When he says ‘All the girls are to marry,’ he’s already standing eligible middle-aged men up in rows in his mind.” And, seeing the alarmed flush in Winnie’s face, he began to warm to this theme. “You’ve got a line of railway-company directors to choose from.” He pretended to introduce them. “Walrus-moustache, stinks of yeast—dipped too often in the beer. Councillor Winterbottom, carries a lot of importance—all of it in front of him, writes you shy poetry but can’t ever manage a good rhyme. Viscount Lushington, chases foxes, can’t string more than three words together unless he’s on horseback; his mother, Countess Broodmare, has to come and swallow the key to the booze cupboard in despair of getting you in foal.”

“Stop!” Winifred shut her eyes tight and put her palms over her ears. Horror and laughter vied with one another throughout Caspar’s fantasy list; but with this last item she felt her gorge rise and heave. She was literally on the point of vomiting.

“That’s when a touch of love could come in handy,” Caspar said happily. She did not hear.

He could part turn the wood and do a bit of carving at the top—vine leaves or something. Then he could split it along the line of the carving, where it wouldn’t show. Then poke one up in the top hole, left by cutting out the rotten bit of lapped tube, and poke the other bit into the bottom hole. Hey presto!

“Promise, no more?” Winifred asked, tentatively lifting one hand off her ear.

“Promise.”

“What was all that eureka about?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He grinned truculently. “Little problem solved, that’s all.”

She looked down at the water, at her breasts floating. “Old Steamer,” she murmured. “He’s all secrets! I think I’ve got cool enough.” She stood in cascades of water and leaped out onto the rocks. Caspar joined her and they walked through the heat in a great arc designed to intersect their clothes the moment they were dry.

“Who’s all secrets?” Caspar asked. “Or, rather, who isn’t?”

“Clement said that the other day—‘Steamer’s all secrets.’”

“So’s Boy. Look at him falling in love like that. And you, with your letter to Cheltenham. We’re all ‘all secrets.’”

“We used not to be.”

“We’re growing up, that’s all.”

“I suppose so.”

They walked on in silence. The sea was no more than a faint lapping of the rocks. The waves, mere inches high, sounded like a distant tap being turned momentarily on-off, on-off at lazy intervals.

He could do the wood turning in mahogany and the carving in lime. That would make the join look deliberate.

“We mustn’t grow apart, though, Steamer. Especially you and me. We are the ones who will mark out the way for the others. Boy won’t. If Papa harasses and dragoons us into toeing his line, Clem and Abbie and the others will have no hope. It’s up to us. Papa must lose.”

“I will never do anything except business,” Caspar said (marvelling to himself, for, only yesterday, a captaincy in a smart regiment would have seemed a wonderful haven from his problems with the bedsteads).

“Even if it means running away from home?”

“Even.”

“And starting with nothing?”

“Mother would help.”

“She might die meanwhile. She might change…make it up with Papa. That’s what I mean, Steamer. We’ve got to promise this in
all
circumstances. Never wavering. Never deviating. You and me against Papa. Implacable, defiant, unwavering, not dreading his very worst! You doing what you want. I what I want. Promise?”

Caspar almost burst into excited laughter, seeing, at one and the same moment, how comic and how earnest it was. Two naked children hatching a plot on an empty beach; two young people, knowing exactly what they wanted in life and for all their lives. Which were they? And which should he do—laugh, or promise.

And bind his life?

“And whoever needs help will always find it from the other? Whatever is asked,” Winifred added. “We shall stint each other nothing.”

She ran before him and faced him, to stop him walking on, as if to say,
Not another pace until this is settled!
He was suddenly too moved by her earnestness to speak. Solemnly he stretched forth his hand and nodded, looking deep into her eyes.