Sons of Fortune (42 page)

“Well we’d better beat you then,” Boy said, as calmly as if he were making the most casual arrangement. “Go and call all out of the Barn.” He and Caspar were alone in the head pharaoh’s study.

Caspar chuckled. “Doesn’t the incongruity of all this strike you?” he asked.

“I don’t see any.”

“After what you and I went through? Is what happened this summer no more real to you than this—this bit of idiocy?”

“You’re not funking it, are you?” Boy was horrified.

Caspar closed his eyes in resignation. “Boy!” he said. “I’m talking about contrasts. I’m talking about the real world and the real rules out there—and this…” No word sufficient to convey the stupidity of it occurred to him.

“These rules are real, too—as you’ll soon find out, my lad,” Boy assured him. He was very impartial—it was exactly the way he would have spoken to a new pot down for his first beating. Boy went to the corner cupboard and selected a cane. He swished it once or twice, not threateningly—just as he would have swished it had he been alone in the room. “Good,” he said. Then, turning again to his brother, asked, “What are you waiting for?”

“The impossible, I suppose,” Caspar said, and he went to call all out of the Barn.

For Caspar it was nothing. Six years of being flogged had taught him almost total indifference to the momentary pain of it. Indeed, he was hard put not to laugh at Boy, who could only be a “Fiennes man,” never a man; who, in the world of men, would always be Boy.

Caspar went straight from the beating to his study, where he wrote to Bernard Bassett, asking him as a favour to get some trade cards and a letterhead printed, saying The Patent Hygienic & Artistic Bed Company and an address of convenience at some small shop near Bassett’s office, and to write back to Caspar on one of the sheets, appointing him agent and asking him to “get wooden corner posts made as we discussed.” He also wrote to his bank asking for a further fifty pounds to be made payable at the West Yorkshire and Dales bank in Langstroth, saying that, after wide discussion with buyers in the trade, he had detected a market for a new design in beds and that, by the happiest chance, the beds he had bought were uniquely suited for adaptation. With the money, he explained, he would be able to adapt a quarter of his stock by the new year—the sale of which would pay off a hundred pounds of his borrowings.

He had no idea that his mother was the Machiavelli behind the entire operation, but he was sure that both Bassett and Chambers reported everything back to her. He didn’t think Chambers, alone, would advance another penny; but these two snippets might just make his mother curious enough to make her tell Chambers to go ahead on her account. That, as he saw it, was his gamble. To his mother he merely wrote that he had had the most marvellous idea for his beds and, although it would delay his selling efforts for a while, it would certainly double his profits in the long (but not so very long) run.

To his father he wrote not at all.

***

Ten days later, with Ingilby’s workshop in full operation and turning out ten to twelve corner posts a day, and with an accommodation for fifty pounds safely lodged at the bank in Langstroth, his plans took further shape. He wrote to Mary Coen, asking her to write back quickly and let him know what changes his mother was making at Hamilton Place in preparation for her winter season. Two days later he had her reply—new furniture from Watson, Bontor…new paperhangings by Trollope & Sons…new lamps from Miller & Co…and so on, all minutely described. Caspar copied it all out and sent it to Mrs. Abercrombie, the lady who wrote for
My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion
and who had given him her card outside Avian’s furniture shop. When his revived beds were ready, he wanted to use her again—getting her to write an article to puff the beds up in some way. A few days later she wrote back an embarrassingly effusive letter saying that she had been at her wit’s end and that he saved her life, quite literally. Caspar was pleased for that. He was even more pleased at the fuss made over these trivia in
My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion.
His mother, in one of her letters, mentioned “these very distressing revelations in that revolting periodical” but it was not until the Christmas holidays that he got to hear what a furore it had caused in Hamilton Place. By then his whole view of the world had undergone a profound transformation.

In the middle of the previous summer term Greaves had instituted a Fiennes Mathematical and Philosophical Society, which had at once become known by the vulgar as “Sapsoc.” Members met twice a week in the evenings to listen to Greaves reading from scientific papers (a special
exeat
from the restrictions of lockup being granted for the purpose); then they would assemble again after Sunday chapel to discuss the notions they had been presented with at the evening meetings.

The summer meetings of Sapsoc had been thinly attended. But autumn had swelled the ranks. There was a new feeling in the air at Fiennes as in the world in general. Science was no longer a mere provider of wonders and curiosities; it was beginning to assemble large systems of thought that explained life and the universe in solid and intellectually satisfying ways.

This was apparent from the very first meeting of the autumn term, when Greaves read Professor Thomson’s papers stating the laws of conservation and dissipation of energy, together with Clasius’s classic statement of the Law of Thermodynamics.

“You see, gentlemen,” he said, “the First Law, as we may call it—Professor Thomson’s law—states that you cannot get something for nothing. Energy cannot be created; it cannot be destroyed. It may only change its form—light may turn into heat, sound may turn into heat, and so on. But no new energy is made. No energy is lost. But wait! ‘Not so,’ says Clasius. ‘Energy may not be lost, but it can become unavailable. We may know it is there, but be unable to get at it, unable to use it.’ Thomson says you can’t get something for nothing. Clasius says you cannot even get back all your investment. After any transaction involving energy, some of it is forever unavailable. It has gone to join a vast pool that will one day be lowest grade—a pool that is ever-growing, a pool that will one day be the entire universe. Yes! The universe
is
running down! Its end is one universal bath of the lowest grade heat evenly spread. No light, no dark. No hotter, no cooler. No moving, no still. No centre, no outside.”

To his hearers it seemed marvellous. Theirs was surely the ultimate privilege, to be sitting drinking cups of tea in a small drawing room in a remote Yorkshire dale, while comprehending—in a sense, overseeing—the (comfortably distant) fate of the universe. Caspar’s contribution to the discussion was to point out that if the natural order was to even out concentrations and rarefactions of energy and make, instead, one level miasma, wearing down the peaks (so to speak) and filling the valleys, then mankind was always working counter to the natural tendency, always making and exploiting bigger concentrations and differentials.

As an example, he took steam engines, which had begun by working only with atmospheric pressure at about fourteen pounds an inch. Now there were engines working at hundreds of pounds an inch. In the future they would have engines working at thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds to the inch. Mankind, working in this way, would, he suggested, turn the world into the one shining exception to this pessimistic rule of universal running down.

Greaves said it was an interesting comment but he did not wish the discussion to take on a purely utilitarian, not to say industrial, tone; he wished them instead to concentrate on the grandeur of the philosophical scheme that linked so many distinct discoveries and ideas into one simple set of universal laws. Caspar privately thought that his own notion of mankind thumbing its nose at universal laws had far more grandeur.

But all these ideas were swept aside in the third week of term when Greaves began serial readings of the newly published
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
, by Mr. Charles Darwin. It stunned his hearers; there was no doubt in any of their minds that they were listening to a profoundly revolutionary text. Being an elite of boys with strong interests in natural history and science, they all knew something of the earth’s history as the geologists had revealed it. They knew the world was vastly older than the six thousand-odd years calculated by Archbishop Ussher. They knew the rocks and sediments and glacial deposits—even the water-eroded caverns that twisted through the limestone under their very feet—were evidence of processes that had consumed tens of millions of years, perhaps even hundreds of millions. They knew the different strata contained fossil relics, evidence not of one universal flood but of thousands of separate extinctions spanning aeons of time. They knew that the sheer number of species was already uncountably vast and, if one added extinct species, too, showed minor variations and similarities that amounted to caprice—a sheer display of virtuoso talent—if one assumed each to be the result of a separate and deliberate act of creation.

But this lumber of knowledge lay about in different attics of their minds, so to speak, half glimpsed and rarely dusted off. Not until Darwin’s words fell upon their ears did they put all these notions together and see that they were but distinct parts of one and the same puzzle. Life had continuously evolved from life. Those fossils were not dead. Their legacy—the first eye, the first bone, the first brain—survived and changed eternally. That one eternal thread of change locked all of life’s myriad forms into a single web of unending endeavour—to survive, to triumph, to multiply.

For Caspar these ideas were a transfiguration. It was suddenly clear to him why life was such a struggle—not his life, everyone’s life: in obedience to universal law. A thousand forms were competing for a hundred places; most of them must lose. And even the winners were not safe, could not rest. Others were waiting, always, to wrest the laurels from them and send them down into that dark limbo into which they once sent their vanquished. Success and failure, riches and poverty, abundance and scarcity, privilege and deprivation…even such imponderables as optimism and pessimism, hope and despair—these were all mere aspects of one universal law of life:
survive!

Throughout history there had been people to rant against these inequalities, advocating their abolition. Suddenly it was brilliantly clear that such abolition was possible only by abolishing life itself. One could pass a law banning shadows but the only way to carry it into effect was to extinguish all the lights.

He did not, however, offer these views to Sapsoc at large. Once bitten was twice shy, and he was not going to have Greaves accusing him of proposing that the modern capitalist was the most advanced form of life on earth (even though, thanks to Darwin, he now considered that to be most probably true).

The great thing about all this, in his view, was that it gave a single frame of reference to everything. From a narrow point of view you could look upon his struggles to make a success of this little business his mother had devised as mere greed at work, or vanity. But take a broader and altogether grander view, and you could see it as the working of a universal law through him. If life had any morality, it had to be derived from life itself, from life’s own operations; it could never be imposed from outside by mere thought or wish. You had to look at what was actually happening—had happened from the beginning until now—and derive all your rules from that.

And the two greatest rules, sanctified by all of history and prehistory?

Survive.

Succeed.

They justified everything. Even (or, perhaps, especially) the impending battle with his own father.

The rest of the family enjoyed their Christmas at Maran Hill. Caspar stayed alone at Hamilton Place, leaving early for the ice-cold barn out in rural Holloway, returning late after fitting out a dozen or so beds with their new wooden corner posts. Even Christmas Day he spent out there. But on the afternoon of Boxing Day the last bit of lapped tubing had been sawn out and the last wooden replacement was in and given its final coat of boiled linseed oil. One hundred of his bedsteads had been transformed.

Weary but by no means exhausted, he threw wide the barn doors and let in a flood of thin December sunshine. It was a revelation, even to him, the author of the transformation. Not only were these beds unique, they were uniquely handsome. If they didn’t sell at between two and three pounds each, he had learned nothing that very first day in the business. He had turned what was mere bravado, in his letter to his mother, into living, gleaming fact. He looked at the hundred he had transformed and could not quite grasp or believe that he had done it. Not even the aching muscles of his back, the ice in his boots; the sensationless fingers stuck onto his painful hands, not all of these together could quite convince him that the achievement was his.

He found a farmer with a hangover in need of fresh air, and persuaded him, for a modest fee, to cart one of the beds in to Hamilton Place. He wanted the story he was about to give to Mrs. Abercrombie to be at least superficially true. By the time they arrived at Hamilton Place, the sun and the farmer’s hair-of-the-dog whisky had restored Caspar to all his vigour.

Mrs. Jarrett was annoyed at having to cope with this single member of the family. Everything was shrouded. The servants were all on board wages. Caspar’s presence, though only from late each night to early each morning, consumed a quite disproportionate amount of the household’s limited resources. And especially on Boxing Day, when there was traditionally a grand ball in the servants’ hall. So she was doubly annoyed when Caspar returned early with a strange bedstead and asked her to arrange for it to be put in his room in place of his present bed.

“What d’you think of it?” he asked her.

It was, she had to allow, a very handsome bed.

Then, suddenly, she didn’t mind his coming home early at all. It answered another of her problems—the ghastly-looking Coen girl, who would have ruined any ball. She could be put to looking after Master Caspar—and if any girl was safe with a young man, it was Coen! Serve him right, too, for interfering in the summer like that. He’d have to look at her awful disfigurement all supper. Anyway, she’d suspected the girl as the source of that monstrous article in the
Companion
,
so it would serve her right to miss the ball. She made Coen carry the bed up and arrange it in Caspar’s room, crippled foot or no; there was no reason why anyone else should stir themselves.

Caspar, to loosen the knotted muscles of his back and shake the farmer’s whisky from the channels of his head, went for a long ride in the park and then back home for a hot bath. In the meantime his room had been transformed. Mary had not only seen to the bed, she had filched decorations from downstairs and decked out the whole room, even hanging little swags of tinfoil around the paraffin-oil lamps. A soft, warm light suffused every corner. Mrs. Jarrett came in and looked at it with a surprising approval. The prettier the room, she went away thinking, the more it’ll show her up.

Mary purloined a lot of edible delicacies from downstairs, too. She put them out while Caspar was behind the screens, taking his bath. His eyes went wide in greedy delight when he came out again and saw the table.

“I’ll never manage all that! You’d better pull up a chair and feed yourself, too, Mary.”

“Merciful hour, sir, I daren’t do that!”

“It’ll be all right if I say so.”

“No, sir. That Mrs. Jarrett, she’d only take it out on me after, so she would. I’ll empty your bath while you eat, and put coals on the fire.”

“You’ll do as you’re bloody well told!” Caspar laughed, making her grin at the naughtiness of it. “I’ve been alone all week and I’ve always liked talking to you. If you’re worried about Mrs. Jarrett, go and shut the door at the end of the passage. When it opens it squeals like a banshee; then she can’t surprise us.”

Mary went and closed the door. Then she sat down opposite him and ate with as much relish as he did, and she told him what a rumpus there’d been in the house after that article in the
Companion
, and how they’d questioned every servant one by one, and how the eyes nearly fell out of her when she saw it—wasn’t everything she’d told him in it! And she was sure Mrs. Jarrett suspected her. And declare to God she’d never help him again! But she laughed when she said it.

They soon finished off the wine that had been intended for him alone, so she went down for more. She came back with two bottles and a dish of chestnuts for roasting. The mood changed. Her mood changed. Before, all the while they had been eating, she had been guardedly effusive, remotely warm. A single squeal of the farther door would have been enough to freeze her back into the proper servant girl.

But now she moved about the room completely at her ease. She put a pan of nuts on the trivet, where they would roast without burning. Then she poured him a glass of wine, then one for herself. All the while she looked at him with an odd, knowing smile.

“Are they having fun down there?” he asked.

“Sure they think they are,” she said, and went to look at the chestnuts. “Soon be done. Wouldn’t you sit by the fire here and I’ll peel them for you?”

He picked up the wine bottle and turned toward the fireplace. “Ah, go on—quench that light,” she said, involuntarily raising a hand to her scars. He almost obeyed but then, feeling very bold, he walked straight to her. She watched him, half smiling, half fearful, until it was too late to back away. Gently he kissed the scarred half of her face as he had wanted to last summer. She stood rigid and shivering, as if it were an initiation.

“Why d’ye do that?” she asked. Her breath made his neck tingle.

“You’re a grand girl, Mary,” he said, not pulling back yet. “I know why Boy fell in love with you. I think I could love you a bit, too. I’m sure any man who got to know you well would do the same—and never even see those things.”

“God love you,” she said.

A chestnut exploded. Then he went and put out the light.

He sat on the chair, she between his knees in the firelight, peeling chestnuts and popping them hot between his lips with her sinuous fingers.

“You eat too,” he told her.

She ate a few, and she drank a lot of wine. “How is Boy?” she asked at last. It seemed natural for her head to fall dreamily to his lap.

Caspar chuckled grimly. “I barely see the fellow. It’s hard to explain. We live in the same house at the same school, and we hardly talk together. He’s the head boy, you see—the quare fella. I’m one of the bad boys.” It seemed natural for his fingers to steal in among her hair and begin caressing her scalp and neck. Girl skin was lovely.

She shivered and buried her face on his thigh. It was some time before he realized she was crying. Her voice fell between his legs and bounced back, strangely altered and remote, from the floor. “God, I love him. I love that fella. I think of him every night and I weep my heart out my eyes till the throat on me hurts like a lodged nail. And where’s the good of it!”

He squeezed her shoulder and said, “No good!”

Her weeping redoubled. “Aren’t I the one that knows it,” she said. “Wasn’t it me told him the same!”

Caspar was crying now, too—not having the faintest idea why. “Let me hold you,” he said. “I can’t bear you to feel so alone.”

She slid herself up into his lap, put her arms around his neck, and lay so still he thought she’d gone to sleep.

It was marvellous to want nothing of her—to feel this pity and to know it was pure pity, to feel protective and not to wonder would it pay well.

“Go on,” she said.

“What?”

“Anything you want.”

He was about to tell her how altruistic his sympathy was when she added, “You’d never know the good it is to me, feeling wanted.”

But when he began to caress her she said, “Will I stay the night?”

“D’you want to?”

“Do you really love me a bit?” she asked. She pulled away from him then, so that she could see his face by the firelight as he answered.

Only the pretty half of her showed. Damp with tears. The rest was black as ink. It changed her, subtly. She was just a pretty girl, not Mary; he knew he did not love either of them. Not this pretty girl. Not Mary. And, though he wanted her, and he wanted her company this night more than anything, he told her the truth.

She breathed an immense sigh of relief. “Then I’ll stay,” she said. Her smile was radiant.

He looked at her in bewilderment. “You mean if I had lied—if I had said I loved you, you wouldn’t have stayed?”

“I would not.” She was serious again.

“Why ever not?”

“Isn’t there enough pain already in it?” she said.

She stood up then and went to his now-cool bath, where she dipped a flannel and partly wrung it out. Then she came back to the fire and undressed—not provocatively but just as if he were not there. She held the flannel until it steamed in the heat of the fire, then she rubbed herself all over with it.

“Servant’s Turkish bath,” she said solemnly.

The sight of her hypnotized him. The delights he had dreamed of all these years, the joys he had so briefly sampled last summer in York…now…here…soon…all night! A terrifying congestion gripped his throat. She was gorgeous.
A woman’s body is a glorious thing,
he thought. He could not rightly grasp each passing second. Everything floated as in a dream.

She refilled her glass and came to sit on his lap, sharing it with him, sip for sip. When it was gone, she said, “Will I go to bed? This is fierce uncomfortable!”

He followed her, shedding everything on him between the chair and the bedside. But when they were in bed—his stupendous new bed—a strange coyness affected them both. They could kiss, clasp, explore each other with their hands and lips, he could lie on her, she on him, they could entwine their limbs about each other…but they both fought shy of that final penetration. Caspar thought it the oddest thing; but he could not speak of it. Their minds had become spectators of bodies that spoke in an urgent, direct, but silent language. And not the obvious animal language, either.

When he spent himself into space it was like that kind of tickling which hovers between the intensest pleasure and pain; he heard his throat chuckling in a suit for mercy. Forked high on his thigh, she said his name again and again and then achieved an ecstasy that filled him with astonishment and envy. It left her limp and bathed in sweat, broken in every joint.

Several times that night they stirred into semi-wakefulness and rediscovered all those preliminary delights while still fighting shy of the final consummation. He knew he felt closer to her then than he would if they had gone all the way.

Just after dawn he awoke to find her dressed and clearing out the ashes.

“Mary?” he said; the word fought for birth through thickets of phlegm.

“I’ll bring you your shaving water in a moment, sir,” she said.

“Mary!” This time it was stronger.

She turned and smiled at him. He was closer to loving her then than at any time. He patted the bed.

She swilled the ash from her hands in his bathwater and, wiping them on her pinny, came and sat beside him. He stroked her bare, damp arms and smiled up at her.

“Aren’t we mad, now,” she said, “to be making such a fuss of love.”

“Are we?”

“When liking’s so warm and love is such pain.”

“I don’t know.” He wanted to hear about love from her, to know not what love was like, but what
her
love was like.

“I’d sooner marry a man I liked than a man I loved,” was all she could say.

He gave her arms the slightest tug, but it was enough to pull her face down to his. He kissed her so softly they barely touched. “I like you, Mary. There’s no one else I feel so nice with as you.”

She laughed and stood up. “Yet!” she said and went back to the grate.

He wanted to ask her then if she would be his mistress. Not now, but when he had left school. He didn’t really want to join that herd of bachelors who swilled around Piccadilly and Soho, getting a taste for the wild oats they would then continue to sow after marriage. Even as he thought it, he realized that was not it, not with her. He wanted her in that way, of course—how could he deny it! But also he could talk to her. He realized with something of a shock that she was the only person he knew with whom he could
talk.
Even from Winnie he had to keep back some things; but with Mary, given time, he knew there was nothing they could not talk about.

Perhaps when he knew her a little better, he could ask her. The act of asking her would itself be something he could look forward to. And the idea that there might be someone in the world he could really talk to was very exciting.

Especially as it had nothing to do with love.