The Rich Are with You Always (29 page)

377 newly projected lines; and the total capital they now sought was a lunatic £343,010,788. The mad pack was still in full gallop on a drag scent laid by men far less scrupulous even than Hudson. The subscription lists had the names of infants down for thousands, and, beside them, clerks and parsons, servants, sporting men and cooks, dainty ladies and—for all one could tell—their pet dogs. Sir George Beador must indeed be only a small lieutenant in a great legion of numskulls.

  Before, she had watched, as it were, from the sidelines, fearing only the backwash when that idiot legion sank below the waters. Now, willynilly, she and John were yoked to one of its leaders.

  At least she was not now alone in her forebodings.
The Times
was clearing its throat and voicing an ambiguous worry. The railway papers no longer trumpeted the newly announced schemes as if each were the wonder of an age. And even George Hudson was beginning to hint publicly that enough was enough. There was some satisfaction in his belated and cool support for the views she had been laughed at and humoured for expressing; but such comfort in no way matched the deep unease she now felt. If George Hudson, who had once led the pack, was now telling all and sundry that he was winded, things had indeed come to a grim pass.

  Perhaps the bubble would now burst within weeks, not months. Certainly she could no longer stay here, so far from the centre of events. She must return at once to London; Sarah could stay or come as she pleased. At least she seemed to have accepted for the moment that John was to be a sort of unofficial trustee of Cornelius's money—her money now. As long as that persisted, all they need actually give her was mere pocket money.

  Before Nora left, however, there was one more arrangement to make. If she and John ever had to make a run for it, and if they had to start again, they would do it here in Normandy. And they would do it in a line of business she understood—land and property. It would cost them money they could now ill afford, but she would not let that stop her. Never again, she vowed, would she permit John to have an absolute say over their joint affairs.

  The land she wanted lay just across the river, westward along the coast from Trouville. The idea of buying it had occurred to her on her very first outing with Rodie, when the britzka had breasted the hill above Trouville and she had seen the great, flat, deserted beach running for more than a mile to the distant headland. Then she had looked at the fields and coverts that stretched inland along the broad flood-plain of the river, and she had wondered that it was not already a thriving resort, a rival to Trouville itself.

  And so, in the final week of her visit, she spent the best part of an afternoon with a man called Pierre Ferrand, a land agent who had worked for Rodet in the past and who came with Rodie's strong recommendation. Nora already knew, from talking to the farm steward at La Gracieuse, that good land hereabouts went for about 630 francs per hectare, or roughly £10 an acre; more marginal land was about half that. So she was able to come to an arrangement with Ferrand for him to buy up any land that came on the market within half a mile of the foreshore and between the river and the headland. But it was not at all the arrangement she had expected to make.

  She had decided to be quite frank with Ferrand and to offer him some extra percentage on cheap deals to encourage a matching honesty on his part. But she was hardly through her preamble—painting a roseate view of the future of Deauville, as this undeveloped stretch was called—when she saw his face fall.

  "Is something wrong, m'sieu?" she asked.

  He shrugged eloquently.

"Am I perhaps too late?"

  He laughed. "Too early, madame! Five years, ten years too early!" And he went on to describe how for more than a year now his one silent obsession had been the potential of this very same stretch of the coast. Slowly he had assembled thirty hectares—a field here, a paddock there—but it was too slow. His capital was exhausted. And soon the outsiders would come. Here, indeed, was the wife of the great John Stevenson, soon there must be others.

  "Tell me of the Deauville you see, m'sieu," she said, cutting short his threnody.

  And he described the hotels, the spa with its salt-water cures for everything from extended liver to scrofula, the race course, the casino, the winter garden, the ballrooms, the theatre, and…certain houses without which no English gentlemen of quality would come—but very select. He hoped she understood. And there would also be…

  "You are talking about a great deal of capital, m'sieu, far more than I—"

  "Yes, yes," he said, still fervent with his dream of Deauville. "It is important only to
own
the land. To lease the land. The owner of the land dictates the lease and so dictates the character of the…of everything. The leases can get taken up by syndicates of initiative…"

  "Companies."

  "Yes. Also companies. It is not necessary, you see, to gain capital for all buildings. Only for land. It is far more important to possess the land."

  He needed to say no more; she knew she was face to face with a kindred spirit. "I think, Monsieur Ferrand," she said, "we may join forces. I came here intending to ask you to buy land for me. And my main concern, I'll be blunt, was how to stop you from becoming Deauville's most popular patron at my expense."

  He contrived to look shocked and, at the same time, to grin.

  "But if we become partners," she went on, "and you are buying for us, you have every incentive to get the land as cheap as may be." He nodded but said nothing. "What are we talking about—a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty hectares?"

  "In addition to my thirty. Yes."

  "It's my information that seventy to seventy-five thousand francs should secure it?"

  "Easily," he said. "I can do it for less."

  "Over how long?"

  "Three, four years."

  It suited her admirably. They talked for a further hour, about the details of the arrangement. No one was to know their purpose; Ferrand would use every trick he knew to disguise the conveyance of so many small parcels of land to one owner. And their bank would be in Caen, beyond the reach of local tongues and conveniently close to Coutances. The money she paid in could be partly concealed as the takings of the Auberge Clément. And he might hint that she had appointed him agent to buy up a small château and some shooting—"Not shooting," Nora said. "Hunting."

  "Oh? You are perhaps fond of hunting, madame?"

  She laughed. "Perhaps indeed!"

  "Oh, you must come in season. All our French hunts are private, but"—he smirked—"that is no problem. We hunt in the woods. It is very superior to your 'steeplehunting.'"

  "Of course!" Nora said, laughing. "Like everything else in France."

  Ferrand agreed.

  As she drove back over the Touques and then down its right bank to Trouville, she allowed herself a momentary daydream: Deauville! She could already hear the ripe, upper-class voices at work upon that sound: "Goin' to Dawvill this summer," "Italy's all vewy well, but a fwightful journey, d'ye know. Thought of twyin' Deoughveel, what!" and "Duvvle's
the
place nowadays, I heah."

  She would finance the dream by selling off some of "her" properties; and she would tell John only when the deed was done.

Parting with Rodie was, of course, a great wrench—so great, indeed, that having endured the pain of it in the courtyard of La Gracieuse, Rodie decided it was insupportable and, throwing on a cloak and bonnet, jumped into the britzka and came with them to Honfleur. There she played the encore—and came with them to Havre. For one perilous moment it seemed she might even come with them across the Channel to Southampton, but wisdom triumphed and the tears flowed freely and, this time, in earnest. Even Sarah, who had so short an acquaintance with her, was affected. They waved until the quay was out of sight.

  "Unforgettable woman," Sarah said. "She's so alive. I forgot to tell you. We all had strawberries, two or three days ago—when you went to see your Monsieur Ferrand. And you know how here they push them onto the spoon with biscuits?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, that young boy of hers, Arsène, was just beginning to pass among us with a bowl of biscuits when Rodie screamed, 'No, no, the wedge foot' and she turned to me and said '
your
wedge foot.'" Sarah grinned at the memory. "Can you guess what it was?"

  "She said the very same to me once, the night I came. I have no idea."

  "Nor had anyone. But Rodie snatched away the biscuits and vanished into the passage. And then for ages we could hear her opening cupboards, stumping along corridors, clattering up and down stairs. And every so often she'd poke her head in and say, 'You will see. Ah, it's so beautiful and so sharmeeng,' and vanish again. Meanwhile, of course, everyone was going on with their strawberries— using their little fingers and tilting the plate. Second and third helpings too. And then finally, when there were about three strawberries left, she came back with—you'll never guess."

  Smiling, Nora waited.

  "She had all the biscuits in a green
Wedgwood
bowl. Wedgwood, you see? Wedge foot!"

  Nora began to laugh.

  "But the cream of it was," Sarah went on, "that the identical bowl, the very

identical twin, had been put on the table every day, holding the sugar. You remember it? So, having finished our strawberries, we then ate our mouths dry on biscuits." And when their laughter died, she added: "Still, wasn't it pleasant for her to take all that trouble for me to see the bowl? Because it was English and I was English."

  And Nora thought—quite apart from any other consideration—how pleasant it would be to have Sarah share their house. Sarah, she was sure, would be a real confidante and friend. Not since Arabella Thornton, Walter's wife, had moved away from the north and gone to settle in Bristol had Nora known the close company of another woman her own age. And Sarah, like herself, had come up through hardship and challenge; she was no goose, as—one had to admit it—Arabella often was.

  Sarah had gone over to the port side, from where she could watch the coast of lower Normandy vanish in the evening mists. There was barely a swell on the water, just a lazy network of ripples. Toward the setting sun their bow wave stretched a shimmering line of gold and black as far as the horizon, or so it seemed. To starboard, where night was reaching up into the sky, the wave was a muted green band on the darkling water. The writhing effervescence of their wake turned the ocean as black as stout. But it soon calmed, and only a chain's length behind them the sea was a smooth trough of quicksilver. Their little paddle steamer was the only feature in that vast and silent emptiness. Nora, who had glimpsed some of the perils of a seaman's life on her first sea voyage, now, on her second, felt something of its ineffable magic too.

  She and everyone else on board experienced some of its frustrations the following morning when, having steamed past Spithead and through the Solent into Southampton water, they came to dock. Their space at the quayside was taken by a three-masted schooner unable to sail. Half her crew was sick from having taken soured pork, and the other half was in dispute with the master for wishing to sail shorthanded. The ferry had to moor alongside her; but the paddlewheel was in the way, so that although the decks of the two ships were level, they were still several yards apart. And across this large gulf, with deep water beneath, the company had placed a narrow ladder.

  The first man across was a seaman, who, either out of bravado or because he was under orders to make it seem easy, strolled across like a soldier on Sunday. He almost came to grief halfway and finished the journey, slowly and prudently, on all fours. It was in fact the only safe way to cross, especially for the ladies, hampered by their great skirts and shawls. Baby Clement and several young children were swung ashore, like cargo, in a net. It took over an hour for everyone to disembark.

  "For the life of me," Nora said when they were all together again, "I can't understand why the sailors didn't at least put their ship out on an anchorage before they began their dispute."

  The porter, collecting their trunks, smiled to himself.

  "Do you know?" she asked him.

  "Ah," he said. "They say it's because if they slips moorings, a dispute could be called mutiny. But I says, if you asks me, it's because a master must pay more demurrage fast to a wharf nor fast to an anchorage."

  As a particularly English combination of bloody-mindedness, of pig cunning, of official indifference and ill-preparedness, of risk to the innocent public, and of muddling through, it was a fitting welcome to the old country and, though even Nora did not know it, a neat augury of the times that lay ahead.

Ruin was inevitable. One of the penalties of keeping immaculate accounts is that they leave no room for hope—there were no errors in Nora's books to offer the firm a surprise salvation.

  Only John and Nora could see it, for only they knew of the terrible demand that would sooner or later be made on their resources—and it was going to be well over the hundred thousand that John had estimated. His hope of getting rid of at least half of Beador's worthless debt proved far too sanguine; if they unloaded a quarter, they would count themselves fortunate.

  Yet in one way they were fortunate. Everyone could feel the abnormal strains that were now racking the monied world. Everyone knew that a breaking point had to come; and everyone who could took extraordinary measures to protect himself. So the measures that John and Nora now took—to disguise their ruin for as long as possible—could be passed off as acts, not of desperation, but of shrewdness.