“Actually,”
said Daniel, leaning against the mantelpiece, “I think I’ll be trying to see
Waterstone in Princeton and Stinstead at Berkeley.”
“Do
I know them?” Becky frowned as she looked up from her flower arranging.
“I
wouldn’t have thought so, Mother. They’re both college professors who teach
maths, or math, as they call it.”
Charlie
laughed.
“Well,
be sure you write to us regularly,” said his mother. “I always like to know
where you are and what you’re up to.”
“Of
course I will, Mother,” said Daniel, trying not to sound exasperated. “If you
promise to remember that I’m now twenty-six years old.”
Becky
looked across at him with a smile. “Are you really, my dear?”
Daniel
resumed to Cambridge that night trying to work out how he could possibly keep
in touch from America while he was in fact traveling to Australia. He disliked
the thought of deceiving his mother, but knew it would have pained her even
more to tell him the truth about Captain Trentham.
Matters
weren’t helped when Charlie sent him a first-class ticket for New York on the
Queen Mary for the exact date he had mentioned. It cost one hundred and three
pounds and included an open-ended return.
Daniel
eventually came up with a solution. He worked out that if he took the Queen
Mary bound for New York the week after term had ended, then continued his
journey on the Twentieth Century Limited and the Super Chief across the States
to San Francisco, he could pick up the SS Aorangz to Sydney with a day to
spare. That would still give him four weeks in Australia before he would have
to repeat the journey south to north, allowing him just enough time to arrive
back in Southampton a few days before the Michaelmas term began.
As
with everything on which Daniel embarked, he spent hours of research and
preparation long before he even set off for Southampton. He allocated three
days to the Australian High Commission Information Department in the Strand,
and made sure he regularly sat next to a certain Dr. Marcus Winters, a visiting
professor from Adelaide, whenever he came to dine at Trinity High Table.
Although the first secretary and deputy librarian at Australia House remained
puzzled by some of Daniel’s questions and Dr. Winters curious as to the motives
of the young mathematician, by the end of the Trinity term Daniel felt
confident that he had reamed enough to ensure that his time wouldn’t be wasted
once he had set foot on the subcontinent. However, he realized the whole
enterprise was still a huge gamble: if the first question he needed to be
answered yielded the reply, “There’s no way of finding that out.”
Four
days after the students had gone down and he had completed his supervision
reports, Daniel was packed and ready. The following morning his mother arrived
at the college to drive him to Southampton. On the journey down to the south
coast he reamed that Charlie had recently applied to the London County Council
for outline planning permission to develop Chelsea Terrace as one gigantic
department store.
“But
what about those bombed-out flats?”
“The
council has given the owners three months to proceed with an application to
rebuild or they have threatened to issue a compulsory purchase order and put
the site up for sale.”
“Pity
we just can’t buy the flats ourselves,” said Daniel, trying out one of his
non-questions in the hope that it might elicit some response from his mother,
but she just continued to drive on down the A30 without offering an opinion.
It
was ironic, Daniel reflected, that if only his mother had felt able to confide
in him the reason Mrs. Trentham wouldn’t cooperate with his father she could
have turnd the car around and taken him back to Cambridge.
He
resumed to safer territory. “So how’s Dad hoping to raise the cash for such a
massive enterprise?”
“He
can’t make up his mind between a bank loan and going public.”
“What
sort of sum are you talking about?”
“Mr.
Merrick estimates around a hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”
Daniel
gave a low whistle.
“The
bank is happy enough to loan us the full amount now that property prices have
shot up,” Becky continued, “but they’re demanding everything we own as
collateral including the property in Chelsea Terrace, the house, our art
collection, and on top of that they want us to sign a personal guarantee and
charge the company four percent on the overdraft.”
“Then
perhaps the answer is to go public.”
“It’s
not quite that easy. If we were to take that route the family might end up with
only fify-one percent of the shares.”
“Fifty-one
percent means you still control the company. “
“Agreed,”
said Becky, “but should we ever need to raise some more capital at a future
date, then further dilution would only mean we could well lose our majoriy
shareholding. In any case, you know only too well how your father feels about
outsiders being given too much of a say, let alone too large a stake. And his
having to report regularly to even more non-executive directors, not to mention
shareholders, could be a recipe for disaster. He’s always run the business on
instinct, while the Bank of England may well prefer a more orthodox approach.”
“How
quickly does the decision have to be made?”
“It
should have been settled one way or the other by the time you get back from
America.”
“What
about the future of Number 1?”
“There’s
a good chance I can knock it into shape. I’ve the right staff and enough
contacts, so if we’re granted the full planning permission we have applied for
I believe we could, in time, give Sotheby’s and Christie’s a run for their
money.”
“Not
if Dad keeps on stealing the best pictures... “
“True.”
Becky smiled. “But if he goes on the way he is now, our private collection will
be worth more than the business as selling my van Gogh back to the Lefevre
Gallery proved only too cruelly. He has the best amateur’s eye I’ve ever come
across but don’t ever tell him I said so.”
Becky
began to concentrate on the signs directing her to the docks and finally
brought the car to a halt alongside the liner, but not quite so close as Daphne
had once managed, if she remembered correctly.
Daniel
sailed out of Southampton on the Queen Mary that evening, with his mother
waving from the dockside.
While
on board the great liner he wrote a long letter to his parents, which he posted
five days later from Fifth Avenue. He then purchased a ticket on the Twentieth
Century Limited for a Pullman to Chicago. The train pulled out of Penn Station
at eight the same night, Daniel having spent a total of six hours in Manhattan,
where his only other purchase was a guidebook of America.
Once
they had reached Chicago, the Pullman carriage was attached to the Super Chief
which took him all the way to San Francisco.
During
the four-day journey across America he began to regret he was going to
Australia at all. As he passed through Kansas City, Newton City, La Junta,
Albuquerque and Barstow, each city appeared more interesting than the last.
Whenever the train pulled into a new station Daniel would leap off, buy a
colorful postcard that indicated exactly where he was, fill in the white space
with yet more information gained from the guidebook before the train reached
the next station. He would then post the filled-in card at the following stop
and repeat the process. By the time the express had arrived at Oakland Station,
San Francisco, he had posted twenty-seven different cards back to his parents
in the Little Boltons.
Once
the bus had dropped him off in St. Francis Square, Daniel booked himself into a
small hotel near the harbor after checking the tariff was well within his
budget. As he still had a thirty-six-hour wait before the SS Aorangi was due to
depart, he traveled out to Berkeley and spent the whole of the second day with
Professor Stinstead. Daniel became so engrossed with Stinstead’s research on
tertiary calculus that he began to regret once again that he would not be
staying longer, as he suspected he might learn far more by remaining at
Berkeley than he would ever discover in Australia.
On
the evening before he was due to sail, Daniel bought twenty more postcards and
sat up until one in the morning filling them in. By the twentieth his
imagination had been stretched to its limit. The following morning, after he
had setded his bill, he asked the head porter to mail one of the postcards
every three days until he returned. He handed over ten dollars and promised the
porter that there would be a further ten when he came back to San Francisco,
but only if the correct number of cards remained, as precisely when he would be
back remained uncertain.
The
senior porter was puzzled but pocketed the ten dollars, commenting in an aside
to his young colleague on the desk that he had been asked to do far stranger
things in the past, for far less.
By
the time Daniel boarded the SS Aorangi his beard was no longer a rough stubble
and his plan was as well prepared as it could be, given that his information
had been gathered from the wrong side of the globe. During the voyage Daniel
found himself seated at a large circular table with an Australian family who
were on their way home from a holiday in the States. Over the next three weeks
they added greatly to his store of knowledge, unaware that he was listening to
every word they had to say with uncommon interest.
Daniel
salted into Sydney on the first Monday of August 1947. He stood out on the deck
and watched the sun set behind Sydney Harbour Bridge as a pilot boat guided the
liner slowly into the harbor. He suddenly felt very homesick and, not for the
first time wished he had never embarked on the trip. An hour later he had left
the ship and booked himself into a guest house which had been recommended to
him by his traveling companions.
The
owner of the guest house, who introduced herself as Mrs. Snell, turned out to
be a big woman, with a big smile and a big laugh, who installed him into what
she described as her deluxe room. Daniel was somewhat relieved that he hadn’t
ended up in one of her ordinary rooms, because when he lay down the double bed
sagged in the center, and when he turned over the springs followed him, dinging
to the small of his back. Both taps in the washbasin produced cold water in
different shades of brown, and the one naked light that hung from the middle of
the room was impossible to read by, unless he stood on a chair directly beneath
it. Mrs. Snell hadn’t supplied a chair.
When
Daniel was asked the next morning, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, potatoes
and fried bread, whether he would be eating in or out, he said firmly “Out,” to
the landlady’s evident disappointment.
The
first and critical call was to be made at the Immigration Office. If they had
no information to assist him, he knew he might as well climb back on board the
SS Aorangi that same evening. Daniel was beginning to feel that if that happened
he wouldn’t be too disappointed.
The
massive brown building on Market Street, which housed the official records of
every person who had arrived in the colony since 1823, opened at ten o’clock.
Although he arrived half an hour early Daniel still had to join one of the
eight queues of people attempting to establish some fact about registered
immigrants, which ensured that he didn’t reach the counter for a further forty
minutes.
When
he eventually did get to the front of the queue he found himself looking at a
ruddy-faced man in an open-necked blue shirt who was slumped behind the
counter.
“I’m
trying to trace an Englishman who came to Australia at some time between 1922
and 1925.”
“Can’t
we do better than that, mate?”
“I
fear not,” said Daniel.
“You
fear not, do you?” said the assistant. “Got a name, have you?”
“Oh,
yes,” said Daniel. “Guy Trentham.”
“Trentham.
How do you spell that?”
Daniel
spelled the name out slowly for him.
“Right,
mate. That’ll be two pounds.” Daniel extracted his wallet from inside his
sports jacket and handed over the cash. “Sign here,” the assistant said,
swiveling a form round and placing his forefinger on the bottom line. “And come
back Thursday.”
“Thursday?
But that’s not for another three days.”
“Glad
they still teach you to count in England,” said the assistant. “Next.”
Daniel
left the building with no information, merely a receipt for his two pounds.
Once back out on the pavement, he picked up a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald
and began to look for a cafe near the harbor at which to have lunch. He
selected a small restaurant that was packed with young people. A waiter led him
across a noisy, crowded room and seated him at a little table in the corner. He
had nearly finished reading the paper by the time a waitress arrived with the
salad he had ordered. He pushed the paper on one side, surprised that there
hadn’t been one piece of news about what was taking place back in England.
As
he munched away at a lettuce leaf and wondered how he could best use the
unscheduled holdup constructively, a girl at the next table leaned across and
asked if she could borrow the sugar.