The Rich Are with You Always (71 page)

  
God, would he do nothing right?
she thought. "It's the other way, Nathan," she said slowly. "We need to
borrow
sixty thou'."

  "Impossible!" he spluttered. He looked back at the lists and saw that she was right. "But I can't do that!"

  "You said you could. This very morning." She was outraged.

  "I meant I could lend twenty, the twenty you wanted, for these…bricks. The Welwyn viaduct bill. Not…" He waved the list of next week's debts like a pennant. "You know I didn't mean all this."

  "You promised!" she spat at him. She stood up. He cowered for a moment as if he feared she might strike him.

  "I did not. You know I did not. You know enough about banking to understand I couldn't possibly have meant to lend you so much."

  She looked at him as if she thought of a hundred things to say; then she let the futility of it all show in her face. Her shoulders slumped. "Then we must try and sell the property as quickly as possible," she said.

  He gnawed his lips. "We'd never do it in time. It's out of the question."

  She walked to the window. Sleet was falling in the twilight outside. The City looked filthy. There was a dead mongrel dog in the gutter opposite; as Nora watched, waiting for the worry to grow and engulf Chambers, a ragged woman stooped and caught up the corpse. She carried it off in triumph. Meat for Christmas somewhere. Steadily, Nora beat her gloved right fist into her gloved left palm, stretching the purple silk at the base of each finger.

  "Oh God!" she heard Chambers say behind her. She searched for his reflection in the glass that covered the framed map of London; in it, she saw him raise his fist and bring it down to smash the desk. Then, as if he remembered how much the desk had cost, he pulled the punch at the last minute. "Oh God!" he said again.

  She spun angrily around, trembling with cornered fury. "Why can't you lend that much? D'you think the land is worthless?"

  He fended off her words with his hands. "Of course not, my dear. Why, they're as good as Treasury stock, these properties—even better in the long term, I'd say." He smiled. He really was trying to be very nice now.

  
The wonderful man!
she thought. She wanted to hug him. After going so wrong earlier, he could not now have gone more right. But none of this delight showed in her face. Instead, she looked at him in a sort of hesitant admiration. "Nathan! You genius! You thoroughbred genius!" She spoke very slowly, as if an idea were just at that moment occurring to her.

  "What?"

"Well, what did you say? As sound as…?"

"Trea-su-ry stock." He tested each syllable for poison.

  She waited, hoping he would see the connection for himself. When he did not, she said, "The Stevenson trust fund. How blind we've been! That's practically al
l
in Treasury stock." He was already shaking his head. But she went on, now even daring to give a light laugh. "I used to sneer at you, remember? 'Who wants all that negotiable stock?' I used to say. Now I know: Stevenson's wants it!"

  He almost shook his head off. "No, Nora. No, no, no. It will not do."

  "What? You yourself said it's as sound as…"

  "No! That's an end now."

  "Give me one good reason."

  "Stevenson."

  She paused and then smiled lightly as she asked, "The man? Or the firm?" But she could see the refusal forming yet again behind his eyes—a refusal even to consider the idea.

  She stood quickly, giving him no chance to utter it. "Very well, Chambers." She swiftly gathered her things and moved to the door. "You had better take due notice. I shall go home now. Tomorrow I shall start to prepare our accounts for a hearing in bankruptcy. I tell you this so that you may take what protective action you can." She reached the door. "At least
we
do not desert
you
."

  Later, she wondered whether she ought to have added that when all the accounts were in they would have enough surplus to settle their debts a hundred times over—and how would that make him look as their banker? But no, she thought; he could work that out for himself.

  Next day, she arrived at the office to find a note from Chambers: "Another piece of Latin for you, from Horace—Virtus post nummos (cash first, virtue afterwards). It is the real motto of banking. I yield to it and to you. Merry Christmas!"

  At least he was yielding with good grace. He had plotted to get her properties liquidated and she had outbluffed him. Just to make sure he understood that, she gave orders that no payments of any kind were to be made the following week; she could put it all straight after Christmas. Then he would see that the list she had furnished him with was as false as the letter he had (or so she suspected) persuaded Collins & Wilcox to write.

  By the end of that day, the Stevenson trust was contracted to buy Nora's properties; the mortgages were being discharged; and the firm's credit was a hundred thousand to the good. Merry Christmas indeed!

  To make all straight with John—to show him that they really had scraped the barrel to its bottom splinters—she decided to sell Fontana, her prize horse, and to mortgage Thorpe Old Manor. She went riding the following day and returned limping, saying she had taken a fall in the Home wood. Dr. Hales came and examined her as best he could through her skirts. He looked dubious.

  "If I might be permitted to see and palpate the limb?" he suggested timidly.

  "Certainly not!" Nora said, outraged. "You may ask Mrs. Cornelius or Mademoiselle Nanette to…'palpate' my limb. They will tell you all you need to know."

  So with the doctor on one side of the screen calling directions to Nanette, and Nora on the other wincing and suppressing louder cries of pain, he arrived at a diagnosis of "traumatic hyperplasia of the acetabulum." Nora thought it sounded a good enough reason for getting rid of a valued horse without causing tattle about their financial state.

  The following morning, she went to York with the deeds of Thorpe Old Manor. She wanted to raise the loan up there rather than in London because Stevenson's had used the York City & County Bank a great deal and had never yet asked a favour; and when she had later to explain these moves to John it would seem the natural thing to have done.

  There was only a small staff then at Thorpe, on board wages; all the principal rooms were shrouded in dust sheets and the shutters drawn against the sunlight. She got the maids to open only the business room and to make up the small bed in the room leading off it. The fire soon took the damp off everything. She was pleased to find it all in order, although her arrival was quite unheralded.

  She had just finished her supper and was going out for a walk in the last of the evening sun when the maid said that Mr. Hudson was calling.

  Her spirits fell. There had recently been one unpleasant railway-company meeting after another, all filled with angry shareholders demanding the dismissal of George Hudson as their chairman. First the Eastern Counties, then the Midland, and on through all the others. Now only his debts connected him to the railway world that had once called him its king. Irregularities amounting to over half a million pounds had been uncovered and he was pledged to pay back every penny—though such losses were a small fraction of the total sustained by his companies in the general decline in trade and business. She and John had written to him expressing their sadness and saying he would always be a welcome guest and so on; but she knew they ought to have been to see him. If things had been easier this year, they would have done so.

  She had no idea what he would be like. There had been such conflicting stories about him. Some said he had all his old arrogance and spirit, others told of how people who had once trembled and walked on tiptoe in his presence had actually spat on him at meetings, and he had behaved ever so meekly in response. "Meek" and "Hudson" had not seemed possible partners, to her way of thinking. He must have heard she'd come off the train at York.
What,
she wondered,
did he want here?

  He was certainly his old wary, genial self in his greeting to her. She told him she had been about to walk in the garden, the air being so mild, and suggested they both should go. He said nothing would delight him more.

  "Someone told me you had a bad hip," he said.

  "Oh it comes and goes. Worst at sunrise, best at sunset. And what a sunset!"

  They basked in its glow and in the retained warmth pouring out of the old brick wall to their left. The December air was alive with it.

  "Have you ever been up the old tower?" she asked. "Would you like to see?"

  He nodded affably. Despite his ponderous bulk, he leaped up the stairs more easily than she could have—even if she had not remembered to limp slightly. At the top, the merest zephyr of a breeze stirred the air.

  "A red sky at night is a shepherd's delight, we used to say in the West Riding," she told him.

  "Here too," Hudson agreed. "But there's an East Riding sign of good weather, as well. Yon cloud, shaped like an ark." He pointed to a squarish cloud that could charitably be seen as a Noah's ark. "It's going over the Humber. That's a sure sign of fair weather in these parts."

  Away to the west, where the sun was gold and huge, the sky around it was a cloudless green. The smell of woodsmoke was strong on the air. The yews and hollies were thick in leaf, like ramparts, their shade already turning black.

  "On such an evening," Hudson said, "even the poor may forget their cares."

  "Aye. On just such an evening Stevenson and I met first," she said, stretching truth by a few months. "We were poor."

  "Imagine!"

  "It seems only yesterday, sometimes. Yet think of all that's happened. Look where he's gotten to."

  "And you. The credit's yours every bit as much as his."

  "Aye. I'd deny that to many, but not to you. You'd not think less of him for it."

  He smiled bravely. "If I'd had such a partner in my line of business…"

  She pushed him in the ribs. "You'd have sacked him in less than a week! He'd never have suited your style."

  She wanted to avoid talking of his troubles except lightly and bravely, otherwise she could not avoid pointing out how foolhardy he had been. Also, there was the undeniable fact that Stevenson's present difficulties were entirely due to the low value of railway securities—and that, in turn, was largely because of the disastrous financial management that had been uncovered in all of Hudson's former companies.

  But he, perhaps sensing her unwillingness, said bluntly: "What was my style, Mrs. Stevenson? I hear and read so much from men who never knew me, and nothing from those who did."

  She looked at him steadily; up there on the battlements, with his squat frame and motionless face, he seemed half-man, half-statue. She wondered how people had ever been afraid of him. But they had. She knew men who would leave any building he entered rather than risk an encounter. And though she had never known him in that light, it struck her as sad that such a man should now be standing atop a ruined tower in a remote parish, not a railway in view, asking a mere passing acquaintance for an honest opinion. But, if he asked, he should get—sad or no.

  "What I've never been able to explain to myself about you, Mr. Hudson," she said, "is how a man who was such a genius at railway politics—and on your greatest days you were a juggler with a million skittles in the air at once, without a mishap—how such a man with such a mind could have failed to grasp the relationships between capital, income, and dividends."

  She thought, once the words were out, they were too harsh, so she added what was also true: "But I must say you had an idea of what railways should be, long before anyone else. When others were merely thinking of individual lines, you had a grand vision of a network, which no one had ever seen before. When all the money's forgotten, that's what folk will remember. But for me it only deepens the mystery."

  "When the money's forgotten!" he echoed. "When will that be?"

  "Well…" Her voice was dubious. "Give it a century."

  He laughed then, as if it was a compliment. "Aye," he agreed complacently. "It was very bad. Shall I tell you a secret—as I've told no one?"

  Nora waited.

  "I never understood it."

  "Money?"

  "Aye. Never understood it."

"I knew that."

  He sniffed. "I understood what it
did
though. If I took some shares and stuffed them in Lord Tomnoddy's back pocket so that he would give my company a wayleave, with no argument—who was I benefiting? Myself? Or my company? Obviously the company; so who should pay for it? Me? I didn't think so. That's why I made the company pay for those shares. They say I paid it out of fresh subscriptions, but that's a lie."

  "What did you do?" Nora asked, knowing the truth very well but wanting to hear what possible gloss he could put on it.

  "All sorts of things."

  "For instance."

  "Well, for instance, we would make provision for a hundred thousand in bad debts, and if there were only, in fact, four thousand, I'd take the remaining ninety-six and use it to buy favours—pay for shares—and so on. But the favours were for the company, never for me. Now they say I must pay it all back. Well, so I will, but I'm still mystified why I have to."

  She smiled to herself. If he really did not understand it, there was little purpose in pursuing the point. "What I find most disgusting," she said, "is the spectacle of those who cheered you to the echo and who profited so vastly during all the years when you were making such money for them, and now they turn around and revile you as if all the ills of the railway world could be laid at just the one doorstep. Other sins may be morally worse, but to me, ingratitude is the least edifying of all. You know there's always a Yorkshire welcome for you wherever Stevenson and I may be."