She had him there.
J. Howard Farthingale III was CEO of eighteen different blue-chip corporations. He had a diverse and formidable business portfolio with interests in fossil fuel exploitation, entertainment, publishing, retail and technology. Nearly all of his companies were ranked in the
Fortune
500. He made decisions every day that involved millions of dollars and affected the lives of a workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands. He habitually negotiated deals with some of the sharpest and hardest-nosed tycoons alive, men and women who would not only sell their own grandmother but charge extra for the dentures and artificial hip. He swam with ultra-rich sharks and was far more often the biter than the bitten.
And he had just been outsmarted and outmanoeuvred by a girl with a chromosomal birth defect and severe learning impairment.
There was no alternative, then, but for him to sit down cross-legged next to Clara and find out what scrapes Felix Fanger and his best pals Dread Ursula and Zebedee the Zany Zombie would be getting into this episode. When Felix let out his trademarked catchphrase cry, “Red juice! Red juiiiice!” Clara chorused it along with him, and Farthingale showed willing by doing so too.
T
HAT ORDEAL OVER
, Farthingale, Clara and Rozetta filed downstairs to the medical suite.
The house, Far Tintagel, was made up of interleaving and overlapping single-storey sections, like a pile of books slotted together with artful casualness. Some of the floors extended out into cantilevered balconies and terraces. Others sheltered beneath shallow pitched roofs with long eaves. A few of them were half buried in the hillside they perched on, protruding from the ground like monolithic tongues. Limestone bricks and slabs of reinforced concrete were the predominant structural materials, their blockish rectangles and right angles softened indoors by plenty of dark wood panelling. In all, the interior of the house covered nearly 10,000 square feet, with broad, banisterless staircases linking the various different levels and light coming in through a combination of skylights and French and clerestory windows.
Far Tintagel had been built three years ago, at a cost of some $20 million, and its design paid homage to Frank Lloyd Wright and in particular Wright’s two masterpieces, Fallingwater and Taliesin. Farthingale was of the belief that the inter-war period had been a golden era for American business and, not uncoincidentally, American architecture. As huge profits were reaped by bankers, brokers and industrialists, even during the Great Depression, so there were significant quantities of private capital going spare, and some of that money went on erecting beautiful buildings that spoke of growth, aspiration and modernity. Of these, Wright’s creations were the epitome. Even his lower-budget suburban ‘Usonian’ homes had a kind of boundless optimistic expansiveness to them.
Now, with the world seemingly slumping into a second Great Depression, it was all the more important for the tradition of vanity property to be carried on. Farthingale was one of the select few who were flourishing while most other people went to the wall, and Far Tintagel was a clear and unambiguous statement of pride and self-esteem. It and the island it perched on were his private fiefdom, separate from the rest of the nation, splendidly and grandly aloof. Nobody came here who was not invited or needed, but all were welcome to view—from a distance.
In the main hall, the little parade of three passed beneath an oil portrait of Josiah Farthingale, J. Howard’s and Clara’s great-great-grandfather. The famous railroad magnate, depicted here with glowering eyebrows and thick muttonchop whiskers, was the first Farthingale to make serious money, obscene amounts rather than merely colossal. He was also a Grand Imperial Wizard in the Klan and a staunch advocate of racial eugenics. It was he who had devised the family motto,
sanguis ordo est
—blood is order—which could be seen in the painting, picked out in brass on the flank of the 19th-century 4-4-0 steam locomotive that raced across the background. Josiah Farthingale had been fanatical about the purity of his own bloodline, to the point where he was adamant that none of his three sons could marry a woman who was not some sort of relative, however distant. J. Howard Farthingale III often wondered if his forebear’s beliefs weren’t ultimately responsible for Clara.
In the medical suite, just off the hall, a pair of steel-frame hospital daybeds stood side by side, with blood transfusion equipment on a trolley nearby. Farthingale and Clara lay down. Farthingale rolled up a shirtsleeve, while Rozetta did the same for Clara, then busied herself unsealing a venous cannula from its wrapper and attaching it to the end of a tube. She fastened a rubber tourniquet round Clara’s upper arm, tapped the crook of her elbow to raise a vein, swabbed her skin with an antiseptic wipe, and expertly inserted the trocar needle. Clara screeched, as usual.
“You always say it’s just a little scratch,” she protested to Rozetta. “But it’s not a little scratch. It’s a big owie one.”
“Clench your fist now, darling,” said Rozetta. “That’s it. And again. Good girl.”
Bright red blood began to nudge its way down the transparent tube, spurting in short bursts into a bag that was suspended off the bed’s side-rail. Once the bag was full it would be hooked on a drip stand, and another cannula would be attached to the outlet tube that ran from its base and the needle installed in Farthingale’s forearm. Gravity would take care of the rest.
It wasn’t just that Farthingale had a rare blood type, although he did, AB Rhesus negative NS HP1, a permutation of proteins and antigens found in a vanishingly small proportion of the population, something like 0.00002%. There were matches available, and with his wealth and resources it wouldn’t have been difficult to ensure the supply of the pint per week that he desired.
Farthingale came from a good family, however. American nobility, a long line of wealth creators who could trace their roots all the way back to the
Mayflower
. He was an unabashed blueblood, and it seemed to him that he could not contaminate what ran in his veins with replacement plasma from just anyone. Not if he didn’t have to, and thanks to Clara he didn’t have to. She was of the same stock as him, with the same breeding, the same basic genetic code. They shared a blood type, but more, they shared parentage and ancestry. Clara was the only person a man like him could reasonably be expected to take donated blood from on a regular basis. Anything else would be unacceptable, unthinkable.
Sanguis ordo est
.
All the doctors he had consulted had told Farthingale that having this weekly transfusion was not necessary. It wouldn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t alleviate his condition in any meaningful way.
But what did they know? It was
his
body,
his
medical problem, and he would tackle it however he saw fit.
He’d first become aware that something was amiss with him a couple of years ago, shortly after Far Tintagel was completed and he and Clara moved in. He’d begun experiencing dizzy spells. They could come on at any time, for no appreciable reason, and go just as mysteriously. Farthingale was no hypochondriac. He’d put it down to overwork, fatigue, and carried on as normal, believing it was a temporary glitch and would pass.
Then bruises started appearing, sizeable purple-black swellings on his hands and legs. They were painless and there was no obvious cause for them. He hadn’t become unusually clumsy all of a sudden. He wasn’t bumping into things without noticing.
Around the same time, he noticed pink streaks in the toothpaste he spat out after brushing. His gums were bleeding. Also, a rash of tiny scarlet spots appeared on the inside of his wrists.
He searched medical websites and found his symptoms all pointed to one terrible, heart-stopping conclusion: leukaemia.
But after his physician put him through an extensive battery of tests, he was referred not to an oncologist, thank God, but to a haematologist, who diagnosed something Farthingale had never heard of, ITP. Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, to give it its full name. An autoimmune blood disorder which manifested as an abnormally low platelet count. Basically, as the incredibly expensive haematologist explained, Farthingale’s immune system had gone haywire. His antibodies were mistakenly identifying his platelets as hostile organisms and were destroying them faster than his bone marrow would produce fresh ones. He was at war with himself, fighting a bogus enemy within, and the result of the severe platelet depletion was that his blood no longer clotted the way it ought to.
The condition was very similar to haemophilia but, the haematologist assured him, far less hazardous to the health and with a much better prognosis. There was a small risk of spontaneous, uncontrollable bleeding in the brain, and Farthingale would need to be more careful now about accidental nicks and cuts, which would heal far more slowly than before. He should also avoid being in a car crash if at all possible and do his best not to get stabbed or shot. “Steer clear of dark alleyways and muggers. Always buckle up. Shave with care.” The haematologist chuckled at his own little joke.
What had brought it on, Farthingale wanted to know.
In answer, the haematologist could only point to the “I” part of “ITP”—idiopathic. The word was doctor-speak, he said, for “nobody knows.” Just one of those things. The human condition.
Which, roughly translated, meant
shit happens, bad luck, get over it
.
There were remedies—a course of steroids, an intravenous immunoglobulin infusion, even a platelet transfusion in extreme circumstances—but they were quick fixes at best, were not at all pleasant, and came with no guarantee of success. There was no surefire, permanent cure. Learning to live with the condition was your best option. ITP was inconvenient but, all things being equal, not life-threatening.
J. Howard Farthingale III, however, was not someone who put up with inconveniences. To him that smacked of compromise, and only weaklings compromised.
The solution lay to hand: Clara. Her blood was wholly compatible with his, perfect in every respect. He had had it tested. Her platelet count was 275,000 per microlitre, well above the median, in fact near the top of the range. It was safe, too. He had checked on that. Down’s was not contagious, not some virus you could catch.
With her blood, Clara could make up for what he lacked.
Sanguis ordo est
.
He looked across at her now. The daybed’s adjustable mattress was propped up at the head end at a 45º angle, and Clara reclined, staring miserably down at the cannula and the nearly full blood bag. “Red juice,” she murmured softly to herself, “red juiiiice.”
His sister was, objectively speaking, a spectacularly ugly creature, yet there were visible hints of the woman she might have been, had fate not so cruelly spiked her DNA. She had splendid blonde hair, same as their mother had had, and her eyes were a deep cerulean blue-green, just like their father’s. But for the presence of an extra 21st chromosome, she would doubtless have become a highly accomplished woman and be a great beauty, wearing her age well as their mother and both grandmothers had. Perhaps she would have been an equestrian, a showjumper or polo player, in early adulthood, or maybe a concert pianist. Certainly she would have had children of her own by now, and her husband would be some respectable ex-Harvard-Law type, senior partner in a top Boston practice, and they would have a large house on Beacon Hill and a beach home in Kennebunkport, or possibly up in Ogunquit, for weekends and the summer. Perhaps, in that case, freed of the burden of Clara, Farthingale himself would have had the opportunity to find a spouse and produce offspring, an heir...
But Farthingale did not like to dwell on might-have-beens. There was no point. What mattered was the here and now, the actual rather than the hypothetical. He had chosen to look after Clara as soon as he was old enough to. He had made it his duty to see that her needs were catered for and her life was a good one. Their parents had never done so, at least not to the same degree. Their mother in particular had scarcely been able to look at Clara without wincing, as if incredulous that
that
could have sprung from
her
. Throughout her childhood and adolescence she had been treated as an embarrassment to the family, something to be ignored, shunned, seldom mentioned. She had been relegated to a set of rooms above the triple garage, rarely allowed to visit the main house, certainly not when guests were over. There’d been caregivers, a stream of well-paid and well-meaning nurses and nannies, but Deborah Martinborough Farthingale had done little actual practical parenting of Clara, and J. Howard Farthingale Junior none at all. The less the two of them saw of their daughter, the happier they were.
Even as an adolescent, Farthingale had known this was wrong, known this was not how it ought to be. Taking Clara under his wing had been his way of making a point. A kind of retaliation, even. That which his mother and father had rejected, he embraced.
The blood bag was full. Rozetta withdrew the needle from Clara’s arm and stuck a plaster and absorbent pad over the tiny entry point. She transferred the bag to the stand and plunged a cannula into Farthingale’s forearm.
It was only fair, Farthingale mused as his sister’s lifestuff flowed into him, that Clara should return the favour he had done her, repay what she owed him in whatever way she could. A reckoning had fallen due, and the fee was all she could afford—blood.