The Balliols (60 page)

“He's over seventy,” he said to Ruth. “His reserves of strength are scanty.”

For thirty-seven hours the fight went on, with sudden spasms of struggle, punctuated by lapses into inertia that grew longer and more frequent.

Most of the day Ruth sat beside him. It was the first time that she had watched the approach of death. It was less terrifying than she had expected. But it was no less sad. It was very like the action of a car that has run out of petrol. There is a period of short, jerky movement. Then suddenly, quite quietly it runs into a standstill. It was in very much that way that the life went out of the old man. He had ceased to struggle. He lay with his eyes closed. He might have been asleep. One moment he was breathing. The next moment he had ceased to breathe.

It was the first time that Ruth had looked upon the face of death. With a wondering reverence she stared down at the calm bloodless mask. Born not so much in an age of doubt, as in an age that accepted as insoluble the problem of an after life, Ruth did not know for certain what she believed and what she disbelieved. Standing at her
father-in-law's side alone, she knew for very certain, fully appreciated for the first time, that the body laid out below her on the bed was not the person she had known; that that person either had ceased to exist or was somewhere else.

Often during the long months when she had paced the gardens and avenues of Tavenham, awaiting the birth of her two children, Ruth had wondered how she would feel when she became its mistress. It was a lot that ninety-nine women in a hundred would envy her. But she was not certain whether at her age she would not find its responsibilities a rather overwhelming burden. It would be an end of freedom; of careless unreflecting action. She would become the kind of person of whom things were expected. Although she was in the early twenties, she would have to behave as though she were a person in the thirties. And she had had so little a time of freedom. That first year of war: that, and no more than that. She would feel cheated if, when the war was over, she was unable to have the irresponsible “good time” that her generation had promised itself.

Victor, she knew, quite frankly looked on his accession to the title as the curtain's fall on what he imagined would appear in retrospect to be the happiest period of his life.

“Now our troubles begin,” he said, as he and Ruth presented themselves at the Chambers in South Square, Gray's Inn, where his father's will was to be read to them, and the conditions of the estate's finances explained.

They had expected the interview to present them with a list of problems; they had not, however, expected it to be opened with the dramatic choice of alternatives that the family solicitor had prepared.

It was the first time that Ruth had met him. He was different from what she had expected. She had pictured a family solicitor in terms of the stage; a prim, precise little man, short-sighted, peering over spectacles, bald-headed, black-coated, with a black bag full of papers among which he fumbled. The guardian of the Tavenham finances was not at all like that. He was large, ample, untidy, with a soft loose collar, a draggled Old Etonian tie, a coat with bulging pockets of a different material from his trousers. The powdering of his waistcoat suggested snuff. His hands in contrast to the remainder of his person, were small and carefully tended. He gesticulated with them as he talked, twiddling the front lock of his hair into a
Mephistophelean peak. He had at moments a boyish look, but was presumably in the latish fifties. His voice was genial but husky.

“Now, before we start looking at these figures, I'd better tell you what the situation as a whole amounts to. Does Tavenham mean so much to you that you are prepared to keep it on at the sacrifice of every other interest you have?”

He proceeded to explain. The estate had been mortgaged heavily when Victor's father had inherited it. As a result very largely of the Budget of 1910 it had become more heavily mortgaged. During the last years increased income tax demands had been met by a further loan on the estate. The estate was solvent during his father's life. But death duties would be very heavy.

“I don't think your father realized how an estate that can pay its way during an owner's life will become insolvent for the heir who has to raise further mortgages to meet death duties. When I tried to explain to him, he asked me how else the money was to be found. It was in its way a perfectly fair question. Under the present system of taxation any large estate is the victim of a process of diminishing returns. There are, at the rate things are going, few estates that could remain solvernt for six generations unless they were substantially added to. The old theory that what a man owns his family can keep, is not accepted in a democratic age. What one man wins returns into the open market unless his heirs can add to it.”

Victor cut him short. He was not prepared to listen to a lecture on the rights of property.

“Let's get down to facts. Are you telling me that I can't afford to keep up the place?”

“No. You can. But if you decide to keep it on, there's nothing much else that you will be able to afford.”

“You mean that every penny I get will have to go on the upkeep of Tavenham?”

“Exactly. It is for you to decide whether or no you think that worth it.”

Ruth and Victor exchanged a glance. They could feel that each was thinking the same thing.

“We've got to keep it on for the boy's sake,” said Victor.

The man of law looked at him reflectively.

“Do you anticipate any substantial addition to your capital?”

“No, how could I?”

“I mean either from your wife.…” He paused, looking across at Ruth; she shook her head.

“My father won't have much over to leave to me, poor pet.”

“Or,” he continued, turning to Victor, “you might be yourself meditating some profitable excursion into finance?”

Victor, in his turn, shook his head.

“I don't see myself as a king of commerce.”

“In that case I think you may assume that your son will never be in a position to make his home at Tavenham. The estate will just stand one instalment of death duties, it certainly cannot stand a second. You have to consider the issue entirely from your own points of view. Do you prefer to spend your lives at Tavenham, or in such places as your fancies under such restrictions as your income imposes, decide?”

He looked from one to the other with a bland, judical indifference.

“It's a question that should need a great deal of thinking over. Shall we proceed with the other business?”

For a week they discussed the matter from every point of view: from their own and from their children's. Whether they would get more fun maintaining the feudal atmosphere of Tavenham, or living as their fancies chose: Monte Carlo in the winter, a furnished house in London for the season, Scotland in the autumn; freedom to travel, to know variety, to be mobile at a time when speed was a religion. As far as they were themselves concerned, they were agreed that they would get more out of life if they were to put Tavenham on the market. If Tavenham were to prevent them from joining in the main currents of life, they might well come to think of it not as a home but as a prison. On the other hand, would the children stand a better chance brought up in the country, in its cleaner air, in touch with country things, learning to ride and shoot, to absorb that kinship with nature that no townsman ever had, in touch with the continuity of their own tradition, aware of their family, as living in a city they could never be? It might be that for their children's sake it would be better to keep on Tavenham.

In the end they decided, even for their children's sake that it would be wiser to let it go. “They won't be able to live there themselves,” he said. “It wouldn't do to let them get too fond of it. Besides, it's best to bring a man up in the atmosphere where he's going to live. Most of us are going to be townsmen in the future. Children should be brought up in the future, not the past. In ten years' time Tavenham and all it stood for may be an anachronism.”

In the directorate of Peel & Hardy the death of Huntercoombe
involved the reconsideration of old arrangements. With profits increasing at an agreeable ratio, with the shareholders content and silent, there had seemed no reason to look ahead. The death of Hunter-coombe meant more than an empty seat upon the Board. It entailed a mental stock-taking. As each deliberated on the best policy to adopt, each in his own way wondered what position he himself would want to occupy when the war was over and the firm resumed its normal activities.

For the first time since he had resigned his position in the firm to join the Inns of Court, Hugh discussed his own future with his father.

“I'll never be able to go back to an office desk after all this. I've got restless. I want movement, variety. I want to be able to use my freedom. If I had to sit at a desk all day, I'd just go mad.”

“My dear fellow, no one's suggesting that you should.”

“There'll be lots of things that I could do: outdoor things; my war record'll be a help. Of course, I'll be able to do a lot of odd work for the firm still. I could go on with the commission side of things.”

“I'd thought of offering you a place upon the Board.”

“That's talking.”

“Of course I'd hoped you'd take my place here as Managing Director. I'll have to sit rather looser in the saddle before very long. But I see that's impossible. You couldn't stand that kind of work. Not after all you've been through. You're entitled to enjoy yourself. You've earned that. We'll see you have it. But there's no reason why you shouldn't help yourself to a share of our excess war profits.”

Prentice, too, took Huntercoombe's death as the signal for his own retirement.

“I've been here long enough,” he said. “I'm over sixty. I want to enjoy my last few years. There's my boy who'll need all the money he can lay his hands on when he's out of khaki. I'll make my shares over to him, nominally. They'll entitle him to a place on the Board. Why shouldn't he have it? He'll be quite useful, or rather, he'll be no more useless than the average director is.”

The suggestion was put forward with that “We're both rogues, aren't we?” look that Balliol never found it easy to resist. He knew what Prentice was thinking. “You want your son on the Board. I want mine; I won't oppose his election if you'll see that my son
gets on too.” How Prentice enjoyed playing to what he considered the baser human motives. How he smacked his lips over the venality of mankind.

It was as much as anything to bring into Prentice's watchful eye that gloating look of a gourmet before a richly-seasoned dish, that he made as a definite proposition what he had intended to put forward as a very tentative and not very serious suggestion.

“I can't help feeling that we should be wise to maintain the family traditions and invite the present Lord Huntercoombe to take his father's place as Chairman of our Board.”

The quick light came into Prentice's grey eyes. Balliol could guess his thoughts. Ah, but this is too rich, first his son, then his son-in-law. Nepotism run riot. Well, I've a card to play which'll show that I recognize the game he's up to.

“In that case I suggest that we should call a shareholders' meeting at the shortest possible notice. When you've anything very radical to put across, it's always best to do it when those who would normally be insurgent are too busy over something else to notice what you're doing. Yes, I think we'd be wise to do that, Balliol.”

The slow smile with which he accompanied his advice was the chuckle with which the villains of melodrama rub their hands while they plot the kidnapping of the heroine. Prentice liked to conduct a conference as though the details of an incredibly shady transaction were being arranged. He could never realize that self-interest might be linked to a general welfare. As a matter of fact, Balliol reflected, an imminently suitable arrangement had just been made; far more likely to prove advantageous to the shareholders than any that could have been devised by the type of person who would have thought: “My son, my son-in-law, my partner's son? But that's impossible. Whatever will people think!”

The shareholders' meeting was held half-way through September. The Board room was rearranged to accommodate a gathering of fifty. The Board table was moved below the window, with barely room for the directors to push back when they took their seats. Across the fireplace were three rows of chairs; each chair bore the printed report, sent to every shareholder, containing the balance sheet, the profit and loss account, the announcement that preference shareholders would receive their stipulated dividend of seven and a half per cent, and that for ordinary shareholders there would be a fifteen per cent, dividend. On the board table was a leather-bound brass-locked volume in which shareholders were invited to sign their names. The meeting was
fixed for three o'clock. Anyone entering the room at half-past two would have imagined the scene set for one of those high dramas of modern commerce with which the novel and the film have familiarized the layman.

By ten past three, four of the chairs were occupied. Three of them by members of the staff who at a time of crisis had been given shares in lieu of a rise of salary and had found the exchange extremely profitable. They sat together self-consciously, aware of the power granted them this once a year to criticize their employers in the very room to which ordinarily they were summoned to answer the charge of their delinquencies. The fourth chair was occupied by a stranger: a nondescript man of nondescript appearance. He might be thirty years old, he might be sixty. He might have an income of three hundred, he might have an income of three thousand.

At a quarter past three Victor rose to his feet.

“As I think that as many shareholders as can be expected to arrive, already have arrived, I will call upon the Managing Director to read you his report.”