The Folding Knife (5 page)

Thing? His imagination raced. "Oh," he said, "the veil."

She kicked it. "I'll have to put it back on in a minute," she said, "I'm not supposed to take it off till the meal. But it's horrible and I hate it. It's like when you walk through a spider's web and you get the stuff all over your face and in your hair. Makes my skin crawl."

Funny she should put it like that. "It sounds awful," he said.

"Yes, well, you're not the one who's got to wear it," she replied. "Stop complaining, it's only for one day." She stabbed at it with her toe, and there was a faint tearing sound. "Shit," she said.

He grinned. "I wouldn't worry about it."

"Don't you believe it," she replied. "Mother'll be livid. I think she's planning to make it into curtains for the day room."

He moved a step closer. "The hell with it," he said. "It's your wedding day, the most special day of a young girl's life. If you want to kick holes in your veil, you kick holes in your veil. Anybody's got problems with that, they'll have me to answer to."

She smiled. Actually, she wasn't bad-looking. And she smiled instead of laughing; for some reason, he liked that. "If it was up to me, I'd tear it into little bits and burn it. We'd better be getting back, or we'll be in trouble."

We, she'd said. Ah, he thought, now I understand. "Suppose so," he replied.

"Definitely." She started to bend down, to retrieve the veil, but stopped at approximately twenty degrees. "This dress," she said, "is impossible. There's half a whale's jaw in there somewhere."

He stooped, rather self-consciously, grabbed the veil and straightened up. There was quite a large hole in it. "Give it here," she said, and started winding it round her head, but even he could see it wasn't going on right. "Sod it," she said, "I can't remember how it's supposed to go."

"Let me," he said. "I think I can see..."

He was being rather optimistic, and nearly throttled her before eventually figuring it out. "That'll have to do," she said. "Where's the hole?"

"Round the back," he said. "Nobody's going to see."

"Right." She straightened up, pinched at the skirts of her dress. "You go first. Well, we can't come out together, can we?"

Oh, he thought. "All right," he said. "See you later, then."

"You sure it looks all right? You can't see the hole?"

"It's fine," he reassured her, and walked away.

Much later, he said, "Do you know what to do?"

She glared at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Only," he said quickly, "I don't, so I was sort of hoping you'd--"

She looked at him, another unreadable face, then sighed deeply. "Oh for crying out loud," she said, and explained in detail.

* * *

Some time after that, he said, "I'm sorry for being ugly."

"That's all right," she said, in a sleepy voice. "You can't help it."

He lay still, trying not to think about the darkness. All his life he'd slept with a lamp burning, but there was no lamp in this room and he hadn't sent for one. "Was it...?"

"Yes," she muttered. "You'll get the hang of it. I need to go to sleep now."

On two out of three counts he wasn't sure he believed her. The third was clearly not negotiable. He lay back and tried not to disturb her by moving. He wasn't used to being in bed this early and he didn't feel the least bit tired. Later, when she started to snore, he carefully got out of bed, left the room, felt his way downstairs to the library, where he found a lamp and the book he'd been reading. Obviously he didn't want anybody to find him there, under the circumstances, so he went back upstairs, hugging the lamp close to him to smother the light, and crept through the bedroom into the dressing room. He shut the door, sat down and started to read.

As a wedding present, his father gave him one million shares in the Bank of Charity & Social Justice, and appointed him a general executive trustee. He wasn't sure what that meant. Fairly soon, he found out. It meant he had to go to work.

Work consisted of sitting in the exchequer room. He'd been in there often enough as a child, when he'd been sent to call his father in for dinner. He quite liked it. For one thing, it was quiet, as befitted a place where serious men needed to concentrate. When you first came in, it looked dark, with only one small window, but there were lamps, candles and an open fire, even at midday in summer. One wall was covered from floor to ceiling with ledgers; on the opposite wall hung a huge silver-gilt icon of the Revelation, the tiny smoke-blackened faces of the Elect peering out from under the heavy foil like the noses of rats (Father claimed to like it, but the more likely explanation was that it had ended up there because it had nowhere else to go). Most of all there was the exchequer table itself: a solid square of oak covered with black and white mosaic tiles, like a giant chessboard, piled with heaps of brass and silver counters. He was taught how to use it to make calculations by the chief clerk, a short, elderly Jazygite eunuch by the name of Antigonus Poliorcetes, who'd been given the task of teaching him the basics of his new profession. The clerk was generally considered to be a difficult man, fussy and short-tempered, only kept on because he was indispensable. Basso rather liked him, and tried hard to be a good student. He felt he was making good progress. He quickly got the hang of the exchequer, double-entry bookkeeping, currency conversion and elementary accounting procedures. It was boring, but no more so than literature or philosophy, and unlike those two annoyances of his youth, he could see there was a point to it.

At the end of the second week, Antigonus closed the ledger they'd been working through together, capped the inkwells, washed his hands in the rather fine silver bowl he kept specially for the purpose, dried them on a towel and said, "So, how do you think you're doing?"

It wasn't for Basso to say, surely. "Not bad," he replied.

"You think so." Antigonus frowned. "Let me put it this way. You have a choice. We can go through the motions, like we've been doing, and at the end of the month I can tell your father you've learned everything you need to know, and then you can get out of here back into the sunshine and go hunting or partying or whatever it is you want to do, and everybody will be happy. Or you can make a serious effort to learn what I can teach you. It's entirely up to you, but it'd be helpful if you could decide now. I have a lot of work to do, and this isn't achieving anything."

"Oh," Basso said. "I thought I was doing quite well."

Antigonus shook his head and smiled. "Listen," he said. "When I was five years old, soldiers came to our village. They burned down the houses, separated the men from the women and children, and marched us onto a ship. Later, they cut my bollocks off and taught me to read and write and do arithmetic, and your grandfather bought me and made me a junior clerk." He paused for a moment, looking out of the tiny window behind Basso's head. "Well, you know what they say. What you never had, you never miss. If the soldiers hadn't taken me, I'd be a goatherd. More likely, I'd be dead, because people don't live long enough to get old where I come from, so I'm not complaining. But I got here because I made an effort. Do you understand?"

Basso nodded slowly. "And I'm not."

"Correct." Antigonus got up, crossed the room and shook charcoal from the scuttle onto the fire. Basso was sweating; it was a warm day. "As I said, the choice is yours. Do you want to do this, or not?"

He realised that he didn't know the answer to that question. He also knew that "I'm not sure" would be construed as "No". Later, when he reflected on how he'd come to reach his decision, he realised it was mostly because he liked Antigonus more than most of the other people he knew, though why that should be he wasn't quite sure. Maybe it was because the old man pointed out his mistakes.

"Yes," he said.

The next question was difficult. "Why?"

He took a moment, then said, "Because one day I'll own the Bank, assuming Father doesn't run it into the ground first, and I'd like to know how to manage it." Fortunately, Antigonus believed him, or at any rate accepted the answer, and he wasn't called upon to show how he'd arrived at it, like in a mathematical problem.

Things were different after that. To begin with, they were seriously, horribly worse. Why he'd ever imagined he liked the cruel, sarcastic, hectoring, petty-minded old fool he had no idea. Nothing he did was ever right. Furthermore the work, which had seemed so straightforward not so long ago, turned out to be unbelievably difficult. Everything needed thinking about, and either he didn't understand at all or else he thought he understood and was proved wrong, usually with the maximum possible humiliation. For the first time in his life, he was made painfully aware of the monstrous scope of his ignorance of the world. Everything had to be explained to him: the price of a ton of wheat, and the relation it bore to the price of a loaf of bread; how long it took a ship to sail from the City to the Periplus, and how much shipping cost per mile and per day; what ordinary people did for a living and how much money they had to spend and what they tended to spend it on; how the government worked, in theory and in practice; the difference between one-week credit, three-month credit, a mortgage and a debenture; the advantages and drawbacks of the five main types of joint-venture company; the basic elements of commercial law, and why going to law was almost always a waste of time and money; the principal exports of the Republic and its competitors; mental long division; recent trends in finance and the difference between real money and money of account--

"Why on earth do you need to know all that stuff?" Cilia asked him, as he tried to unravel a tangle in his bootlaces. "That's clerks' stuff, surely. You're there to make major policy decisions, not waste your time on trivia."

He tugged at the knot and made it worse. "Antigonus says--"

"Oh, him."

"Antigonus says I need to know everything about the business, or else I'll be at the mercy of my employees and servants," he said firmly, like a child reciting. "Also, you can't make informed decisions unless you know all the background. You need to know how the system works."

"Fine," she said, nudging him gently out of the way so she could see in the mirror to comb her hair. "If that's what Antigonus says, then obviously that's how it's got to be. Of course, my father's managed perfectly well all these years without having to bother with all that rubbish. I suppose he's just been lucky."

Basso grinned. "My father's never done mental arithmetic in his life and he hasn't got a clue what you'd pay for a quart of anchovies in the market," he said. "And he's nearly ruined this family more times than I care to think about. I sort of get the impression that following his example wouldn't be such a good idea."

"Good point." There was a gentle crack, and she took the comb out of her hair and examined it. "Stupid thing's broken," she said, and he could see where three of the ivory teeth had snapped off. "Get me a proper silver one. I'm always breaking this sort."

He looked away. Cilia was always asking for things, and he didn't have any money. So far the idea of paying him for his work hadn't been discussed; he'd tried to raise the subject with his father, who'd ignored the question, and Antigonus had just laughed. That meant he'd have to talk to Mother, or see if his sister would make him a loan out of her dress allowance. Of course, Cilia wouldn't keep breaking things if she handled them a bit more gently.

"Another thing," she said. "I don't see why you've got to spend all day in that stupid room with that stupid old man. Surely you could at least have afternoons off."

"It's only till I've learned the basics."

Maybe deafness was catching, because quite often she didn't seem to hear things he said. "The whole point of being married," she said, "is not having to stay cooped up indoors all the time. So, how do I spend my days? Cooped up all the time, doing needlework. Playing chess with my halfwit maid. Reading books. For all the good it's done me I might as well have stayed at home."

Maybe she hadn't really meant that. "Once I've finished my lessons with Antigonus there'll be plenty of time," he said. "And then..."

And then. It was just as well he didn't have to finish the sentence. And then what? He wasn't quite sure about that. For some time, he'd suspected that he was falling in love with his wife (which was how it was supposed to be, after all; but he wasn't quite sure he was going about it the right way). At the same time, she was getting on his nerves. There were times, when they were apart, when all he could see was her face and body, and the urge to leave what he was doing and run to find her was almost more than he could bear. When he was with her, though, it wasn't quite the same. It was, he decided, a bit like literature. In literature--epic poems and classic drama and the like--gods and goddesses disguised themselves as mortals, and evil spirits took over people's bodies; and maybe, he rationalised, that's what had happened to her. He found it infuriatingly difficult to reconcile the way she looked with some of the things she said and did. She could be spiteful, petty-minded, incredibly insensitive. No big deal. What he found hardest to cope with was that she was boring to be with. When they were alone together and not making love (the euphemism was particularly inappropriate in this instance), he felt the way he used to feel when his least favourite relatives came to call, the restless, aching boredom that can only be kept in check by playing word games in your head, counting the tiles on the floor, imagining a game of chess, or picturing the inflicter of the boredom being torn apart by wolves. That wasn't love. He was prepared to believe that, in extreme cases, it was marriage, but only after half a century of egregious incompatibility. It's because we're both young, he told himself, immature and self-centred as a pair of drill-chucks. Also, when he tried to be objective, he found it hard to blame her. Her average day consisted of a late breakfast alone, a morning spent sewing or trying on clothes with her maid, lunch with her mother-in-law, followed by more sewing, reading, sketching, practising the lute and harp or exercising some other fatuous accomplishment held suitable for young noblewomen, concluding with family dinner at the long table, an hour sitting with the other women of the household, knowing her place, and finally bed with him, where he expected fiery passion and romantic love. He couldn't help thinking there had to be a better way for a person to live; especially for the wife and daughter of leading citizens of the Republic, and therefore one of the most privileged and fortunate women alive.