A Future Arrived (4 page)

“Balliol will be horribly expensive even with the scholarship, and you've given so much already.”

“I can afford it.”

“Perhaps. I'm rather wondering if I can.”

“I don't follow you.”

“What I mean is … well, some of the chaps at school look at things the way I do. This slump. Your American stock-market crash. A worldwide financial collapse. Did you know that thirty percent of the men in Birmingham are unemployed?”

“I'm aware of it,” he said dryly.

“Yes, of course. I mean, after all, as a journalist …”

“What are you trying to say, Albert?”

“That I don't want to study for a First in Greats. It seems so … pointless and esoteric somehow. Fiddling while Rome burns. Nothing practical. I could earn a degree and then do nothing more with it than teach Greek or Latin at some place like Morborne. I want more out of life than that.” He turned on the seat to face Martin. “I'd like to live the way you do. Travel about the world … witness and write about important happenings. I speak French … my German's coming along nicely … I seem to have a good ear for languages. I
know
I can write. I'm always top boy in school at composition.”

Martin smiled ruefully. “A newspaper man. Heaven help you.”

“It's made you rich and famous—although it's not money I'm thinking about. It's doing something worthwhile … something
important
.”

“I would say you've given a good deal of thought to this.”

“Yes, I have. I could go to the University of London … and I could get a job. Copyboy or something like that … on the
Daily Post
, say. Mr. Golden would hire me if you asked him. Don't you think?”

“Jacob would hire you if
you
asked him. He was very fond of Ivy. Best man at our wedding.”

“Work … take a few classes … share digs with a couple of chaps. I could do it on my own.”

“I'm sure you could, at that.” He gave Albert's knee a pat. “But let's not discuss it now. You still have a year to go at Morborne. If you feel the same way then …”

“Oh, I will, sir … I know I will.”

“… I'll talk to Jacob. I'm sure he can do better for you than a copyboy job. Perhaps a cub reporter … on sports. You probably know more about cricket and soccer than any kid alive.”

It was the decision Ivy would have made, he thought as he watched Albert hurry down the platform toward his train. It was uncanny how much he resembled his sister. Not just in looks, the black hair and almost violet eyes, but in his zest for life. Ivy's education had been limited, but she had read everything she could get her hands on. Geography had been her passion. She had wanted to visit every dot on the globe. There were so many exotic lands and yet she was to see only France and a tiny, shell-torn strip of Flanders before she died.

The taxi had waited for him, meter ticking, the driver reading a paper and ignoring swarms of commuters anxious to hop in the back and be taken to their offices. Martin ran a gauntlet of dark-clothed men bearing tightly furled umbrellas and clenched briefcases, turned a deaf ear to pleas to share the ride and climbed into the cab. The driver folded his newspaper and placed it behind the meter.

“Where to, guv'nor?”

“Forty-seven Russell Street.”

He sat back and lit a cigar as the taxi clattered away from the station and along Euston Road. Turning down Gower Street he could see the soot-grimed buildings of London University looming over the tree-shaded streets and squares of Bloomsbury. A fine, no-nonsense school. If Albert was sincere about wanting to become a journalist he could not choose a better place to learn. But it was not Balliol, with all the prestige an Oxford education implied. His not going up to Oxford would disappoint his brother. No doubt of that. Ned Thaxton, fifteen years older than Albert, had set his heart on it. Ned had been bright enough as a boy to have won a scholarship—had he been kept in school long enough to try for one. The poverty of his family had ruled against that. He had left school at fourteen to work in a Norwich shoe factory as an oiler of stitching machines. A self-taught man, studying at night, he had become at eighteen a junior clerk in a solicitor's office. Eventually, with Martin's financial help, he had become a lawyer and was now a partner in a Birmingham firm.

He drew thoughtfully on his cigar. It was impossible to tell if Albert really wanted to be a newspaperman or was just momentarily dazzled by the profession. He knew so little about the boy. He had only seen him two or three times over the years and then only briefly. This was the first time they had spent any time together and had gotten to know each other—in a tentative sort of way. Difficult, he imagined, for Albert to think of him as a brother-in-law and not some sort of distant uncle. Thus the
sir
all the time and not
Martin
. And no doubt he had impressed the lad a bit too much. He had told him about his time as a foreign correspondent for A. P. and European bureau chief of the International News Agency … and then of his six years in America as a radio commentator. All exciting stuff to a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. And he had taken him to lunch at Whipple's, that haunt of Fleet Street journalists for over a century. They had been joined at the table by Jacob Golden and a man who had just come back from China, covering the Far East for the
Daily Post
. His stories of Chinese warlords, gunfights in Shanghai between Kuomintang secret police and communist agents had kept Albert open-mouthed. Gathering news might not always be exciting, but it was certainly more so than teaching Latin or Greek.

There was no question that he had influenced Albert, but then his impact on the Thaxton family as a whole had been profound. He had never met any of them until long after Ivy's death in 1917. It had been the summer of 1921 when he had finally managed to get back to England and had driven to the village near Norwich where his wife had been born, the eldest of John and Rose Thaxton's six children. It had been a painfully formal meeting. Almost incomprehensible to the elder Thaxtons that “their Ivy” had married a rich American. All that they had known of it had been contained in a letter from Ivy dated December 1916, informing them that she had married a war correspondent from Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. Not a church wedding, either. In front of the mayor of a French town called St. Germain-en-Laye. That in itself had seemed peculiar to them and they had worried over the legality of it. The whole world gone topsy-turvy and no mistake. Their firstborn off at the age of seventeen to be a housemaid and ending up in a foreign country, an army nurse, marrying a Yank. A queer sort of business, John Thaxton had remarked.

After Ivy had been killed near Ypres, they had never expected to hear from her husband (they could not think of him as their son-in-law and would refer to him as “Mr. Rilke” until they died, within three months of each other in 1927) and had been surprised when they had received a letter, on Associated Press letterhead, three weeks after their daughter's death. The letter had come from Paris and had contained, along with Martin Rilke's condolences, a check for two hundred pounds—more money at one time than they had ever seen in their lives. Their welfare, he had written, had always been uppermost in Ivy's thoughts. That letter had been followed in December 1919, by one from a firm of lawyers in London informing them that a trust fund had been established by Martin Rilke, Esq., with monies derived from the rental of a house at No. 23 rue de Bois-Preau, St. Germain-en-Laye, France, for
their comfort and support, and the comfort and support of their children, Ned, Tom, Cissy, and Mary Thaxton and for the future education of their youngest child, Albert Edward Thaxton, in the current amount of five hundred pounds per annum. The dispensation of said sum to be at the discretion of Hiram Galesworth and Sons, Solicitors, of 14 Tooks Court, Cursitor Street, London, E.C.4
.

The enormity of the amount had stunned John Thaxton. Two pounds a week had been the most he had ever made even at the best of times. His only regret had been that the money did not go directly to him for dispensation at
his
discretion, but his wife had silently blessed that provision of the trust, knowing only too well how much brass would have gone to the publican and the bookmaker.

Tom and Ned Thaxton, both in their early twenties, had heard of Martin Rilke and had looked forward on that bright summer day in 1921 to meeting him for the first time. They had read his syndicated articles in the Norfolk
Weekly Examiner
for years and had known that he had been awarded a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the Versailles Treaty. Even seven-year-old Albert Edward had known where Chicago, Illinois, was located. Their parents had known nothing. Simple people, they had felt uncomfortable in the presence of their benefactor and had only half listened as he had explained to them about the house in France. How he had bought it cheaply in 1914 because the owner had believed the German army would win the war in a matter of days. And of how he had given the house to Ivy, if not legally at least spiritually, on their wedding night there. Now the house was rented by the Brazilian ambassador to France.

A house in France? A spiritual wedding gift to their Ivy? A Brazilian ambassador laying out five hundred quid a year in rent? It was all too incomprehensible to grasp. They had been grateful for the money, but this man, this Martin Rilke from Chicago, Illinois, lived in a world too alien to their own. A stranger to them now and forever. After that one brief visit Martin had never seen them again.

There were
FLAT FOR LET
signs on some of the old houses flanking the street. Albert would have no trouble finding a place. A flat to share, or a room of his own in one of the many boardinghouses scattered throughout Bloomsbury and St. Pancras. He had to admire the lad's resolve. The noble art of journalism! He smiled ruefully and tapped cigar ash at his feet. He would find out soon enough that it was not all honors and riches, Pulitzer awards and by-lines, travels to China and whisky-sodas in the mellow atmosphere of Whipple's bar. A summer job as a copyboy might not be such a bad idea. Running his legs off for twelve hours a day in the racketing chaos of a Fleet Street editorial room would soon strip away the glamor of a profession that was, in the words of a long dead editor of the Chicago
Herald
, second only to whoring in age and respect.

The offices of Calthorpe & Crofts were on the third floor of a building facing Bloomsbury Square. They were small but respected publishers of avant-garde novels and poetry, left-wing criticisms of bourgeois mores, and other esoterica of dubious commercial worth. Arnold Calthorpe had been severely wounded during the war while serving as an infantry officer. He was now a passionate exponent of world peace and was president of the United Kingdom branch of the No More War International Society. A great many of the books he now published were on pacifist themes, both fiction and nonfiction. A current title in the latter category was
An End to Castles
by Martin Rilke.

Mrs. James was boiling water for tea on an electric hot plate and Arnold Calthorpe was sorting through the mail when Martin entered the office. Calthorpe, a look of disgust on his heavily scarred face, tossed the stack of envelopes back into the wire basket on his secretary's desk.

“Bills and more bills. How comforting it would be to bring out a book that at least paid its own way.”

“Sorry,” Martin said.

“Not your fault, dear chap.” He peered at Martin over his horn-rimmed eyeglasses. “Up with the lark this morning, are we?”

“I had to take my brother-in-law to King's Cross.”

“Ah, yes. Young Albert. How did it go?”

“Very well. He's bound to get a scholarship, but it seems he doesn't want one. He'd like to learn a trade—journalism of all things.”

“Jolly good for him. The streets are chock-a-block with unemployed, and unemployable, graduates of the hallowed halls of Oxbridge. I told my nephew just the other day to forget about learning to translate Tacitus and take up plumbing instead.”

“Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Rilke?” Mrs. James said.

“I would. Thank you.”

“Bring it into my office, that's the dear,” Calthorpe said. “And put a tot of rum in mine.”

Calthorpe's office was a small, cluttered room with piles of books, manuscripts, and proof sheets taking up most of the available space. The editor searched through a pile of material on his desk and withdrew a square of art board covered with a sheet of tissue paper.

“The cover—as promised.” He folded the tissue back and held up the board for Martin to see. “Well? What do you think?”

Martin studied the artwork. It was an allegorical painting of cannon turning into factory smokestacks and a medieval castle transformed into a Bauhaus-style apartment building. The colors were vivid orange and red with the title of the book in black.

“It looks like a Comintern poster.”

“Precisely! We seek eye-appeal at the factory gate, as it were. We won't sell many copies in the House of Lords, you know. A good proletarian book cover, if you ask me.”

“A bit … garish.”

“The whole point, my dear Rilke. We want the book to fairly scream out to be purchased by those poor souls who bore the brunt of the last war and will no doubt bear the brunt of the next.” He beamed with delight. “We'll sell out the first printing, never fear. I have the highest of hopes for this one, old boy.”