The Scent of Water (13 page)

So few things in life had satisfied him, nothing really except this room and the sea. Children did not so much satisfy as trouble him because he had none, but he hungered for their company just as in the midst of a busy day in the city he longed with a sharp pang for nightfall and this room. The only child Hermione had produced, a son, had died at birth. Something wrong with her. His resentment was still deep. At one time he had had a yacht but it had taken too much time from business and he had had to give it up. Business was what supremely mattered to him, and he was a single-minded man. This room did not distract him from business, for its quietness gave him a power of concentration that even he had hardly known before. Within it he was like a bee sucking at the honey of the gold. The room, its mystery curved about him like the beauty of petals, made no protest. Like the flower it was helpless, and it had sheltered many passions in its day.

Mr. Hepplewhite rapidly added up a column of figures and wrote down the breathtaking total without a tremor. His handwriting was strong and thick and he favored a very black ink. He laid down his pen and sat back in his chair, his large handsome head slightly bowed forward, his dark eyes hooded. Should he do it? It would be the most audacious gamble of his life, and the most risky, both for himself and others. He stood to win or lose the biggest fortune yet.

It was not now the lust for money itself that consumed him, though he liked money, it was the lust for power. The power and the gold were the same. Gold. In his mind he still used the old-fashioned word though there were no sovereigns nowadays. But there had been gold when he was a boy. He’d not seen it when he’d sweated in the basement kitchen but he had seen it when he’d been bellboy, and later a waiter in the club. He’d seen them pay bills with sovereigns, seen them fish up a handful of loose silver from their pockets as though it were no more than a handful of gravel. He had loathed them, loathed the sight, sound and smell of them, sleek, soft-spoken, cigar- and wine-scented, soap-scented. He’d longed to fling the soup in their smooth faces. He’d had his own ways of doing things to them; an extra dusting of pepper in the soup, a crack of open window directing a draft onto a bald head, an obsequious manner verging on the insolent. As a small boy in his kitchen period, in bed at night with his brothers in their basement bedroom, apprehensively eyeing the bugs on the wall, he had planned hideous tortures for them. And bided his time.

And then something happened that changed him. In his early waiter period his father was hanged for murder. Partially crippled by a stroke, and a heavy drinker, his father had for many years been a feeble creature and how he could have summoned the strength to cosh the policeman, even though the drink was in him at the time, only his son Fred understood. His father had driven a hansom cab. He’d driven the lordly ones, received the flung coins from men who’d never bothered to look in his face and thank him, and he had loathed them and bided his time. And then, drink-fuddled, had mistaken the poor devil of a copper for one of them and struck out from the deeps of the vast hatred he’d handed on to his son.

Fred’s ambition was now changed. Not to bide his time while he let the loathing fester, that led to the condemned cell, but to be one of them. Beat them at their own game. Look, sound and smell like them, and coax the gold out of their pockets into his not by force but guile. He had gifts useful for his purpose. From his paternal grandfather, a little Jew who had done well with a secondhand clothes shop in the East End, he had inherited cunning, a good brain and a fine head for figures. From his mother, a gamekeeper’s daughter who had gone into service at the local manor, accompanied her family to their town house for the season and had the misfortune to be beguiled by the black eyes of Fred’s father, he had inherited good looks and stamina. Of himself he possessed keen observation, self-confidence, and somewhere deeply buried in him a childlike belief in the possibility of the impossible, that sublime belief that makes a man of genius and a man of faith, and he set himself to do what he wanted with no doubt at all that he would succeed.

From the moment of his decision his manner toward the lordly ones subtly changed. He studied their individual tastes and served them with considerate care. He never forgot an order and he was always on hand when wanted. He helped the old ones in and out of their coats with infinite gentleness and was the soul of tact with the slightly tipsy. He received his increasingly larger tips, which he saved, with grateful humility. Though the youngest he was soon the most popular waiter in the club. It only needed one of the older members who happened to be staying there, an important old person on the stock exchange, to fall sick and be tended by the solicitous Fred for the upward climb to begin. He became the old gentleman’s valet, employing his free time in educating himself with astounding success. Then he became his employer’s personal secretary and right-hand man and upon his death was left a considerable sum of money. After that he never looked back.

Dolly helped him. He had married her while he was still a waiter. At the time he had been not only in love with her but grateful to her for marrying him, for she was more than a cut above him. She had progressed from her father’s flourishing pub to the halls, and from there to a musical comedy chorus. She was enchantingly pretty and a good actress, with a soprano voice of piercing quality. It was the opinion of all her friends that Dolly could have married a lord, but instead she fell in love with a slim young waiter and on his wedding day he actually felt humble, for the first and last time in his life. She taught him many things; niceties of manner and deportment that she’d picked up from the young men who took her out to supper after the show, small courtesies and graces that had touched and pleased her. She would have taught him other things as well, unconsciously, had he been capable of learning them: honesty, loyalty and long-suffering. But these, so noticeable in her, he did not notice. It was not that he turned from such things but that he simply did not notice them. They had nothing to do with his overwhelming purpose.

He soon fell out of love with her because she rather quickly lost her prettiness. She began to put on weight, to look tired and strained, and the social advantage she had had at the beginning was soon lost. She kept up with him but she was not the actor that he was. Completely self-centered, he had always dramatized himself, but she had not. She had consciously to build up a part. She knew how but the strain of the ceaseless effort told upon her. He did not leave her, for she was useful. She understood his ways and his needs and gave no sign that she was aware of his infidelities. Her love made no claims upon him and he was not incommoded by it. He saw to that.

Should he do it? The fact that it was a nefarious project did not trouble him but he was aware that man may tempt his luck once too often. Yet his flare for a good thing had never let him down yet. Why should it now? Was his nerve failing him? The mere thought, touching him lightly, instantly stiffened him, for failure was not a word that existed in his vocabulary. His jaw set and he reached for the bell that should summon Julie, his secretary and the present object of his affections. Then he checked. Better keep even Julie right out of it. Then he smiled and touched the bell. If he had a weakness it was that while his infatuation for them lasted he trusted these pretty girls too much. And, in Julie’s case, was inclined to underrate her intelligence. He never supposed they understood a word of what he was dictating. And he hated writing a letter as much as he hated telephoning. He liked all such menial tasks to be performed for him. Julie came, cool and slim, her white eyelids obsequiously towered. Her skin was like milk. She was an enchanting creature.

“Take down a couple of letters,” snapped Mr. Hepplewhite. “I want to get them off my mind now. Be done with them. Ready?”

She sat beside him and he dictated the letters. She went into the next room and typed them and brought them back for him to sign. As she turned to leave him again her bare arm brushed his coat sleeve. He did not look up, for he kept his private and professional lives in watertight compartments, but the slight touch tingled through his body. She was a clever girl. The door closed soundlessly behind her but the quiet of the room was subtly disturbed.

He sorted his papers and locked them away in a drawer of his writing table. Raising his head he became aware of a small woodland creature patiently waiting outside the open window. Jeremy was a very ordinary small boy but against the background of lawn and beech wood and flowering shrubs, all caught in that most magic moment of low and level sunlight, he did not seem earthly and Mr. Hepplewhite suffered a profound shock. It pitched him suddenly into another dimension. In the depths of the wood he heard a bird calling and a flowering branch stirred in a breath of wind. The child’s face, that in the moment of shock had seemed to him unreal in its innocence, became more real than anything he had ever looked upon, yet at the same time elusive and lost, himself, yet lost to him. He looked only at natural things, a flowering branch, shadows and sunlight and a boy’s face, yet the experience had a quality unknown to him and he was tossed with sorrow, and yet at the same time aware of danger. The man he had made over so many years was in danger. With an effort he fought back the sorrow. It receded and he was once more within the self and experience that he had willed. He looked down and saw his hands lying on his blotter, his signet ring and fountain pen. He was extremely tired. He was not often tired, for he was a strong man, but the pressure of business had been very great lately, the pressure of this big decision to be made.

He looked up and the child was Jeremy. “Hello, son,” he said. “How long have you been there?”

“I hid in the magnolia tree till you weren’t busy any more,” said Jeremy.

“Come along in,” said Mr. Hepplewhite. Jeremy came to him and he took him on his knee. “What were you wanting, eh? Those pictures of the sailing ships again?” Jeremy nodded and Mr. Hepplewhite set him down while he fetched the books, volumes of illustrations of eighteenth-century merchant vessels and ships of the line, Nelson’s ships among them, that had belonged to the old squire. His own delight when he had found them was still vivid to him but he had not shown the books to anyone except the boy.

“I sailed here,” said Jeremy, when he was once more seated on Mr. Hepplewhite’s knees. “I sailed in my little boat from my big ship to your ship.”

Mr. Hepplewhite accepted this statement as fact and nodded gravely. Sharing with them their belief in the possibility of the impossible, and having proved it true, he never laughed at children’s fantasy. That was why they liked him. He would not have called it fantasy any more than they did. It was as real as their faith. “Good voyage?” he asked.

Jeremy told him about it while Mr. Hepplewhite turned over the printed part of the book before them to find the pictures, but when the pictures were reached he fell breathlessly silent. Such marvelous sails rising one above another like towering white clouds, such splendid figureheads, carved poops, flags flying in the wind, and seas with curling waves like the edges of pastry on a tart. And wonderful names like
Neptune
,
Victory
,
Mermaid
,
Garland
and
Illustrious
. Mr. Hepplewhite told him the names of the sails and explained how they were set to catch the wind. Then he told Jeremy about his own boat. It had been called
The Swan
.

“Did it fly fast?” asked Jeremy.

“With power and beauty,” said Mr. Hepplewhite. He hesitated, then unlocked a drawer and took out a small paperweight, a crystal ship with sails set. It was an expensive little treasure that he had seen in a Bond Street window and bought for himself on the day that he had returned from his first sail in
The Swan
. He had not looked at it since he had sold his boat. It had never been his habit to give many gifts but since he had lived in this house he had frequently found himself doing so, and he gave the ship to Jeremy. “Here you are, son. You can keep it.”

With the exquisite thing sparkling on his grubby palm Jeremy gazed in stillness and silence. The color rushed into his face, then ebbed away. When at last he looked up he was still speechless but that quirk had come at the corner of his mouth. His eyes screwed shut as his fat cheeks creased, then opened full on Mr. Hepplewhite’s face, blazing with adoration.

Watching him, Mr. Hepplewhite was intensely moved. He pinched Jeremy’s ear. “Good boy,” he said. “Now put it in your pocket. Take care of it, mind, and when you are older you can give it to some other boy, as I’ve given it to you. Now let’s get back to the book. Look, here’s the
Agamemnon
. She was one of Nelson’s. Sixty-four guns.”

They bent over the picture and the minutes flew. Mrs. Hepplewhite, passing by in the garden, saw their two heads together and went quietly back into the house to telephone to Joanna that Jeremy was safe and should be returned in due course. There were tears on her cheeks when she had finished and she dabbed at them with her handkerchief.

“What’s the matter, Mrs. Hepplewhite?”

Mrs. Hepplewhite swung around. It was that hussy coming down the stairs. But for the effort of her will Mrs. Hepplewhite’s mind would have used a much stronger word than hussy to describe Julie. But calling names did not alter a situation. Mrs. Hepplewhite did not know how one could alter a situation such as hers, but certainly not by venom. She clutched at her dignity and smiled at Julie, who had the most extraordinary habit of always appearing from nowhere just when she was at her lowest ebb. It couldn’t be done on purpose, because how could Julie know? But perhaps she did know, for hate has its sensibilities as well as love.

“I am tired, I think,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite. “The spring is lovely but tiring. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t feel it so myself but then I am young,” said Julie in her warm husky voice, a voice like chocolate sauce poured over ice cream, a sweetly masking voice. “Poor Mrs. Hepplewhite. You’ll have time to lie down before supper. Shall I take the quilt off your bed?”