The Rich Are with You Always (63 page)

  "It's a good thing you have the Wolffs' money," John said. "It might be what saves us."

  "Oh, no," she said, feeling almost panic-stricken. "That's not its purpose."

  He laughed. "Of course it is. They gave you absolute discretion. You said so. It is still in cash, I hope."

  "At the moment, yes. But I don't feel I have
that
kind of discretion."

  He became angry. "You behave as if you weren't part of the firm."

  "I tell you what I will do," she said, not wanting to cross him so directly. "You raise a cash loan from Chambers. Every pound he lets you have, I will match from the Wolff fund."

  Next day he came home in an ill temper. "Not a penny," he said. "All the years we've banked there! Not a penny. I
made
that man. The ingratitude!"

  "John," she said, trying not to anger him further, "you must know that he wouldn't withhold support gratuitously. We're one of the lucky ones—to get any of our bills discounted. You go and stand in the Salisbury Arms or any tavern and listen to the grumbles. Even Chambers can't conjure money out of air."

  "You talk just like him," John said. "His very words."

  "We should have stored up more cash this spring and summer."

  "We! You mean I."

  She shrugged.

  "You may have forgotten that I had to run the firm singlehanded."

  "Of course that was my fault."

  "No!" He turned his anger on himself now. "No. You know it wasn't. Oh, darling." He put his arms around her, but it was an effort. "I am so afraid now. The City is terrible. You have never seen such gloom on so many faces."

  She was annoyed with him still though, for making her feel such a traitress in not offering the Wolff fund to the firm.

  She felt even worse next day when she went in and told Chambers to buy Exchequer bills with the entire fund. He was to spread the buying and to switch to consols if the rate rose more than twenty points.

He was a bit taken aback. "You know the rate is very low? Thirty-seven under."

  She knew the risk well enough, but she shut out all objection, from him as well as from her own thoughts. She did not even wonder why she was courting disaster like this.

  That evening she told John what she had done. She had expected him to be angry, but he merely looked at her with a cold malevolence she found ten times more frightening.

  "Don't you see," she said, "what with the land I have and the way that is going up in value as it's developed, and with my commission on the Wolff fund in time, there's less and less need for you to keep taking off ten per cent of your profits to put into our trust fund, mine and the children's. So Nathan and I are agreed…"

  "Oh, it's Nathan now!"

  "Listen, will you! Chambers and I are willing to put the trust fund's securities as guarantee to Stevenson's against…"

  "No!" he roared. "Never! It's out of the question."

  "Why, John?" she asked innocently. "Would it not be safe?"

  "Of course it would be safe. But the whole purpose of having such a fund is to secure you and the children against the firm's bankruptcy."

  "What a lovely arrangement!" she mocked. "If Stevenson's goes bankrupt, the children and I have a quarter of a million to play with—money that could have saved the firm. How d'you think that would make us feel?"

  "But you can't use such a fund for such a purpose. It'd be like standing on your own hands and lifting yourself off the ground."

  "Well!" She turned from him and flung her hands up in a hopeless gesture. "There's two completely incompatible ways of looking at the same thing. In fact, there's no way of stopping Chambers and me from putting the fund as guarantee. We could guarantee this month's entire crop of bankrupts if the whim took us."

  He walked across to her and turned her to face him. He was very calm now. "You'd go against my express wishes?" he asked. His voice was completely neutral.

  She thought of many evasions before, and equally calmly, she said, "If your wishes were contrary to your best interests—yes. You should have thought of all this before you made me a joint trustee."

  "I shall tell Chambers that if ever he does such a thing, he'll never see a penny of mine."

  She smiled, trying to rekindle his warmth. "Of course we wouldn't. You provoked me into saying that. I only talked about the trust fund because I knew you'd reject the idea. And I thought you'd understand I had the same reasons for rejecting your use of the Wolffs' fund."

  But he would not now be moved. "The two cases are worlds apart. Well"—he smiled thinly—"if I'm not to have your confidence with the German money, I shall have to use the land you've been buying."

  "Use it?"

  "Sell it. Like we sold it last time."

  "You wouldn't!" If he had hit her, the shock could not have been more violent.

  "What alternative do you give me?"

  "I think it will not be necessary. None of this whole ridiculous conversation is necessary. We have enough cash. You'll see. They'll suspend the Bank Act this week. Then the Bank can issue more money. The drought will end."

  "You have it direct from the governor, I suppose, or the prime minister, perhaps."

  "John!"

  "All the same I'd be obliged for a list of the properties and their present rents."

  "You're bullying me. You've never bullied me in your life."

  "I'm doing what I can to protect Stevenson's. Someone in this house has to."

  She watched him walk from the room and wondered why she felt not the slightest inclination to burst into tears or run after him or plead or win him back to her. He slept that night in his dressing room—which he often did when he had to leave home very early. But that was not his reason now. He had made too big a rift for a few moments of sexual indulgence to bridge.

She did not furnish him with any list of their property, because the very next day the government suspended the Bank Act and the Bank began to discount bills beyond the limit of its own reserves—but for a monstrous eight per cent on even the best and shortest bills. Money was available once more—but at what a price!

  Fortunately Stevenson's could stay out of the market while the most desperate firms took advantage of the issue; and within a month, it was possible to reimpose the Bank Act and bring the rate down. From then on, trade picked up steadily. In December, there were only twenty-six new bankruptcies (
only!
people said when they passed on the news) and by the end of the month, the rate was down to five per cent. In January 1848, it fell to four and even the worst pessimists began to breathe easy.

  The Exchequer bills, which she had bought at 37 discount, now went to 39 premium and she was tempted to take her very big profit. The size of it made her feel weak, for it showed what a colossal gamble it had been. However, she took only half of it that month, in the nailbiting hope they might go even higher in February. As, indeed, they did—to 42 premium on the day she sold. She had turned Wolffs' £180,000 into £326,314 5
s.
2½
d.
after all deductions.

  "I think we now have enough for what I want to do," she said calmly to Chambers—much more calmly than she felt. "And I'll never try anything of that sort again!"

  "You were…more than lucky," he said.

  "Well—with everybody losing, somebody had to benefit. It just happened to be me!"

  But she remembered too how she had once said to Tom and Sarah Cornelius that currency speculation was something "you and me should never meddle in." She could not find the smallest measure of self-congratulation within—only relief and a heartfelt resolve never to risk so much again. She wanted to rush at once to John and tell him of her folly and the lesson it had taught her. But he was not at home. He had gone to make arrangements for the start of work on the Great Northern line from London to York, of which they had been awarded the first 78 ¾ miles—from the temporary terminus at Maiden Lane to Werrington Junction, north of Peterborough.

  He had never apologized for his bullying threat to her but behaved as if it had either never been made or had not really been intended seriously. Their general relief over the Bank's tardy but, in the end, well-judged management made it possible to overlook the affair. It lingered though, in uneasy memory. And Nora could never contemplate "her" land and property now without remembering the threat that had hung over them and might easily do so again. Those few rash words of his marked a permanent new note in their relationship.

  He returned, nonetheless, in good time for her confinement at the end of that February, when, on leap year's day, as she had hoped, she was delivered without trouble of a healthy baby girl. They called her Hester, child of starlight.

  The only thing that astonished her now about Mr. Thornton was that she did not tire of him. Every idea he was willing to impart to her he had already imparted—on the progress of steam (which concerned, in fact, the niche now being carved in some future hall of fame and reserved for one W. Thornton Esq.), on the drainage of Bristol (which was a small scrapbook of letters to the Bristol papers by one "Salubritas," alias W. Thornton Esq.), and the need for a rational money system based on fixed values rather than fluctuating market prices. (Sarah had tried some of these notions out on Nora, as if they were her own spontaneous thoughts; Nora had advised her to go and "wash her mouth out with some Harriet Martineau.")

  Sarah sometimes tried to get him to talk about Arabella, but he would not be drawn very far. He said that the notion of enjoying sexual traffic with one's wife was grotesque; how could they face each other at breakfast and sit beside one another at the theatre and go through all the motions of their public life if the very sight and touch of one another would conjure up their craving? Life was wonderfully arranged in this age so that a man could find comforts and security at home, where all was serene and tranquil, and carnal pleasures abroad, where they could not harm his loved ones. And because this usually involved the passage of money from wealthy men to the otherwise unemployable girls of the surplus classes, it also contributed to the levelling down of inequality and to the pacification of the dangerous and deprived masses.

  She was, in general, relieved that he was not very interested in her opinions on anything—and that he rarely wanted to communicate more to or with her than his all-consuming passion in his own sexuality. And because his fascination was so genuine and so childlike, it became absorbing to her as well. He was by no means the prodigy of virility he had at first seemed. He did not want to lead her on to greater and ever more desperate feats of performance. But he was minutely obsessed with his and her sensations and reactions, and experimented endlessly to find ways of intensifying their pleasure. "What was that like…was it better, was it…tell me about that…what do you remember best from last week…when you imagine us here, what are we doing…what's the most exciting way we ever did it?" He made the apartment resound with those questions.

  At first she had found it irritating to be constantly talking and thinking while acting, but he was so insistent and his joy in it was so infectious that, to her surprise, she began to share his strange combination of an almost detached curiosity and an obsessive love of his and her own carnality. And in a reverse, feminine way, she even understood how he felt about marriage on the one hand and the act of congress on the other. She could not now imagine finding carnal pleasure half so intense with any other man; when she and Mr. Thornton were naked together, whatever they did, she knew it was supreme. But the merest thought of being married to him would make her feel sick in her stomach.