The Rich Are with You Always (32 page)

  The system was a scandal. Everyone knew it was a scandal. Everyone said it was a scandal. The members of Parliament said it was a scandal; they were still debating it long after the last vulture took his last victim. Then it was easy to decide to do nothing. Most of the members were lawyers themselves.

  "They're as much use as that bishop who could fart Lilliburlero through a keyhole," John said in disgust.

  On the last working day in November, Stevenson's ran out of money.

  The firm still had tens of thousands lodged in provincial banks, but every penny was needed to pay out wages between then and the next large foreseeable piece of income. If they dipped into that, they were knowingly making themselves insolvent.

  They had dreaded reaching this moment. Yet now it had come, now there was no possible turning back, and no alternative path to take, they found it oddly liberating. So that when John suggested they should spend Sunday "watching the fun" down at the Railway Office, it did not seem at all out of key. In any case, as Nora said, it's exactly what they would be doing if they were still in funds; and now, more than ever, they had to keep up their pretence.

  "We'll go up on the roof," John said. "I'll put an awning up there in case it rains, and we can have a coke brazier to roast some chestnuts and heat the chocolate. Sarah can come too. It'll be a pleasant outing for us all."

  It was an easy promise to make, since Stevenson's had the contract to extend the New Treasury Building, which housed the chaotic Railway Office, which, in turn, was a division of the Board of Trade.

  The last day of November 1845 was set by the Board of Trade as the day on which all new railway plans had to be lodged if they were to stand any hope of a parliamentary hearing. At the time of the announcement, it had occurred to no one that the thirtieth was a Sunday; then, rather than admit the error, the Board had to announce further that it would be open for the reception of plans until noon, sabbath or no sabbath.

  This was to be the "fun" that John had promised.

The last fortnight in November was more hectic in railway business than all the other weeks of that mad year put together. Go into the remotest tavern and you would find it filled with tired and perspiring committee men almost buried in survey and legal papers. Go to a printer with some ordinary business and he would refuse you, for he was working double tides—and quadruple rates—on railway maps and prospectuses.

  As the end of the month drew near, the roads and rails leading into London provided scenes that lingered for years in local memory. Coaches and four and post chaises went thundering by in a lather of horses, their occupants cheering and whooping as each milestone was passed. Dozens of "specials" were chartered on the railways. One, on the Great Western, broke down at Maidenhead, coaxed beyond its limit. The party behind, in another special, paid their engineer well enough to drive into the rear coach and smash it—they being rivals with the stranded party to serve the same area with a new railway. Some railways refused to carry parties whose projects clashed with their own. One group of speculators thus thwarted overcame the ban by staging an elaborate funeral, complete with coffin (in which lay all the requisite plans and papers) and mourners. The deceased's name was given as Stafford Lawry I.A. (an anagram of Stafford Railway); the I.A., they say, stood for
in æternum
the whole thus implying "Stafford Railway forever!"

  On any day there was a great advantage in arriving at the Board of Trade early, for people were called up in the order in which they handed in their cards. Often the clerks would accept no more cards after midday, and even then those whose cards were taken in close to that hour were not called up until near midnight. The agents complained fiercely at having to stand twelve hours on Whitehall's pavements in pouring November rain, clutching maps and papers, waiting to be called; but there was no other way to get through the work. One special, coming up very early on the Great Western, with a clear line all the way, made over eighty miles an hour—which even the engineer said was impossible.

  When the final Sunday dawned, John, Nora, and Sarah went to the early service at Saint Martin's Church in Trafalgar Square and walked down Whitehall to the site, arriving just after eleven. It was a clear day, cloudless and cold, with the overnight rain still glistening on the cobbles. The wintry sun, pale yellow and barely warm, hung above the new towers at Westminster, still with their fuzzy outline of scaffolding and looking more like giant columnar trees than a work of man. At the corner of the Privy Garden, some gas engineers were returning a repaired main to service, flaring the gas to make sure no air had entered it during the work. The brilliance of the flame had collected a large crowd of urchins, dancing in the warmth; behind them the cab-men stamped their feet and held forth their hands to the glow.

  Each passing minute brought one, two, or even more cabs and post chaises clattering down the street to great cheers and cries of "In time. In time!" from the crowd. And even if the drivers had never visited London, they would have no excuse for mistaking the building; the throng around it was already twenty or thirty deep, spilling far over the pavement and into the street.

  John took his party in by a back door, using the yard between the Foreign Office and the new building.

  "There'll be murder here before the day is out," the doorman said cheerfully as he let them in.

  He looked so extraordinarily like Tom Cornelius that Nora glanced at once at Sarah to see how she responded. But she appeared not to notice the likeness at all.

  From the roof they had a splendid view, not only of the proceedings below but also over the houses in King Street and Parliament Street, which forked at the end of Whitehall and led into Parliament Square. They could see the Abbey and the new Parliament, where every finial and crocket on every pointed spire showed sharply in the brilliant noonday sun. And beyond was the Thames, curving away at Battersea and Vauxhall; a thin miasma rose from its putrid, oily surface, and the smell of drainage—the smell into which all London smells sooner or later merged—hung over all. The strongest smell on the roof though was of the coke that sang as it burned in the brazier.

  A coach and four came hell-for-leather up King Street and almost collided with a chaise coming down Whitehall. Men poured from both and raced through the cheering crowd, up the steps, to hammer at the door. When it was not immediately opened, one of them began to shout "Too late! I said it!" and set about his colleagues with his fists. Only the doorman's assurance that they were within time reconciled them. In the final quarter of an hour more than forty parties drew up in this same agitation; and the closer they were to the final minute, the wilder their excitement to give in their cards.

  "I don't know about murder," Sarah said, remembering the doorkeeper's words. "There'll surely be heart failure."

  "How many of those gentlemen will be handing out work to us next year?" John wondered aloud. He looked down at their faces—those he could discern in that sea of tall hats and paper, half-lost among the scaffoldng: common faces, glowing with common avarice, indulging the common pleasure of gloating at the latecomers' despair.

  "Here's some gentlemen who won't," Nora said, pointing at a cab coming down Whitehall like a runaway.

  But by a kindly error of the doorman's watch they were just in time. The four gentlemen actually danced a ring-a-rosy when they regained the pavement. They scattered for safety as a coach pulled up; it had begun its final tumultuous dash from Trafalgar Square just as they had hammered at the door. Now the coach party hammered there too; three of them carried a titanic roll of paper, like a stage battering ram.

  When the doorkeeper said "Too late!" a universal cheer went up, from all except the coach party. Now the fun would begin. The leader of the latecomers began a furious argument through the crack in the door, which was now held on its night chain. Odd words carried up clearly to the roof. "Great Missenden time, sir! Great Missenden time!" the man bellowed at the doorkeeper and pointed to his watch.

  It was too good for the Cockney punsters in the crowd to ignore. "Great Missin 'em time!" one of them shouted. And there was a ripple of laughter that grew to a delighted roar as the words
Great Missin 'em time
passed from mouth to mouth. Then for an hour, of course, every bemused latecomer—and there were dozens—was greeted with the same ironical cries and laughter.

  Many of the latecomers, especially as the afternoon wore on, were furious to find the doors locked, not having heard of the noon closure and so thinking they had all day. Whenever the doorkeeper opened up to let in an applicant who had left his card in time a great throng would press forward, hurling their plans through the door like assegais. But always some clerk would gather them up and shower them back from an upper window. It was not long before someone threw a lump of broken paving through a window; a dozen sets of plans followed it in short order.

  John laughed grimly. "Observe," he said, "how the foremost nation in all the world determines the future shape and course of its railroad system! What a model of logic and order!"

  "Oh, yes, dear," Nora said. "Now tell us how marvellously the French arrange these things."

  He pointed down. "You can't defend that."

  "Why ever not?"

  "Suppose among those late plans—which no one will even look at now— there are schemes so much superior to those already submitted that they would save hundreds of thousands in running costs each year?"

  "I don't care if they're
all
like that," Nora said. "I wouldn't trust them to people who've had a year to get ready and still manage to come two hours late. In fact, I'd reject every plan handed in today—on the grounds that we don't want railways operated by skin-of-the-teeth men."

  John shook his head and yawned. "Folly," he said. "If they break any more windows, I think you'd better go. Does anyone want the last hot chestnut?"

  Sarah was still watching the latecomers. She was the only one to show any sadness on their behalf. "What happens to them now?" she asked.

  "Most of them will be ruined," Nora said. "And their subscribers will lose all their deposits. That's the folly."

  For brief moments that day she could almost believe she was talking about third parties.

By the middle of December they had exhausted all their cash— whether it was needed for wages or not. True, with a firm the size of Stevenson's, working on up to fifty contracts for a dozen or so companies, there could never be so dead a reckoning that the final moment could be named with certainty. All Nora could say was that funds in all the banks were exhausted and their known outgoings over the next four weeks exceeded their best estimate of income three-fold. From that moment on, they were trading on nothing more substantial than every banker's memory of their "soundness."

  Even Sarah's money had gone. They kept it intact to the last but both of them knew, without any discussion, that to keep themselves afloat they'd jump on any passing raft.

  On the credit side (if that was the word for it), they had discharged the last of the luckless Beador's debts.

  "He wept," John reported back to Nora. "He could hardly sign the final draft."

  "He'll do more than weep before we see this out," Nora promised. How she wished they could turn him out at once.

  The moment it was free of debt they dissolved the partnership and replaced it by the limited-liability company she had suggested in the first place.

  For the whole of the following week they waited daily for the soft, insistent question or the outraged cry that would begin to crack their flimsy structure. None came.

  "Too soon yet," Nora warned.

  She thought it would be best then if John found some sudden reason for going to France—or to a small line they were doing in Belgium. "They can't arrest me," she said. "You're the one that's in danger. And I've no power of attorney—so any banker can take that as a good and valid reason for waiting until you return."

  Something about this suggestion made him acutely uncomfortable. "It won't do," he said. "If we were in funds, I'd never leave so soon to Christmas unless there was a disaster somewhere. No!" He rallied. "We're safe enough this side Christmas. I'll leave for France on Boxing Day."

  She felt he had some other reason for refusing but he would not admit to it. Anyway, he was right. They were almost certainly safe now until after the holiday.