House of Gold

by Natasha Solomons

  Nanny coughed, and Greta saw that she held Benjamin in her arms.

  ‘Are you going to nurse him, madam, or shall I give him a little porridge for his breakfast?’

  Greta settled in the nursing chair and fed Benjamin, stroking the fluffy down on his head. To her shame, she was relieved when he was finished and, after kissing him, handed him back to Nanny and hurried downstairs to dress. She needed to confide her news to someone who would share in her relief.

  A quarter of an hour later Greta was walking up to Temple Court, too impatient even to wait for the car to be brought round. It was not yet nine, but as she cut across the rhododendron walks, the gardeners were already tending their charges. Cool, damp air swaddled the shrubs, and there were flowers popping from their buds in a spangled display of pink, crimson, orange and white. The gardeners were all either aged or terribly young. Come June, Lady Goldbaum had agreed to take on half a dozen of Greta’s women gardeners, on the proviso that they did not wear trousers, but skirts of a proper length. Greta realised that only desperation must have driven Lady Goldbaum to consider such a drastic step; the estate and its gardens were a glorious tapestry that was starting to fray around the edges. As she strode along the paths, she glimpsed trails of cleavers knotting their way around the waxy leaves of the camellia, bindweed reaching up an unwashed statue of Aphrodite as if to stroke a nipple, while a profusion of the red spidery hearts of herb Robert were like an insect infestation along the gravel. Women gardeners, it appeared, were preferable to weeds.

  She hurried up the steps, the great front doors opening to receive her before she had reached the top. The hall was swathed in its usual darkness, the curtains shrouding the treasures against the light. Two maids were busily arranging extravagant floral displays of palms and exotic lilies and forced roses. They bowed to Greta as she passed.

  ‘I’m afraid Lady Goldbaum isn’t yet receiving visitors,’ said the butler, with regret.

  ‘Goodness, is Adelheid still in bed?’ said Greta. ‘My father-in-law must be up.’

  ‘Indeed, Lord Goldbaum is at breakfast. Would you like me to lay you a place, madam?’ asked Stanton.

  Greta realised that she’d been busy all morning without so much as a slice of toast and was, as a consequence, extremely hungry. ‘Yes, please, Stanton. If you would. And some coffee.’

  A footman, the shortest and oldest Greta had ever seen at Temple Court, opened the door to the breakfast room.

  ‘Mrs Albert Goldbaum,’ he announced.

  Lord Goldbaum looked up as she entered, crossing the room, his hands raised in welcome and distress.

  ‘My dear, I am so sorry. I had hoped to tell you the news myself. I had not realised Clement had written to you also.’

  Greta stared at him in confusion. Lord Goldbaum held both her hands and, apparently uncertain of what to do, he kissed one and then the other.

  ‘Your poor brother. He did the best thing he could, by writing a cheque. We at least know where he is, or where he was. The cheque was cashed at a bank near Rovno.’

  Greta took a step back and stared at her father-in-law with growing dread.

  ‘I do not follow, Lord Goldbaum. I came here to talk to you about Henri.’

  Lord Goldbaum frowned and shook his head. ‘I don’t know anything about Henri. No, my dear. Clement wrote to me with news about your brother.’ He hesitated.

  ‘And? What does he say?’

  ‘Otto has been captured by the Russians. He wrote a cheque out to a Russian doctor, so we gather that he is injured, but how badly – or anything else – we do not know.’

  Greta stood quite still, her joy curdling to horror. Lord Goldbaum surveyed her with watery blue eyes. He polished his spectacles on a silken cloth in his waistcoat pocket.

  ‘But Otto isn’t dead,’ she said, clutching at the shred of good news.

  Lord Goldbaum spoke carefully. ‘He was certainly alive when he wrote the cheque in February. The signature matches the one held at the bank in Switzerland. There is no reason to think that anything…’ he reached for the right word, ‘unfortunate has happened since.’

  Greta felt sick and realised she was starting to sweat. Her heart beat in her ears. When she spoke, her voice sounded tight and strange, not quite hers.

  ‘We must hope for more cheques. It is our only way to know if he is alive,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. It is the peculiar circumstance of war that people and goods are subject to borders, but money somehow finds its way through. We will watch for the money.’

  The door opened and Stanton entered, bearing a tray with a pot of fresh coffee. He set it on the sideboard and poured Greta a cup, placing it on the table beside her, along with jugs of milk and cream and bowls of sugar, one of cubed white, one of fine brown. She stared at them in confusion, momentarily unsure what she was supposed to do – what did it matter whether she had coffee with milk or cream or sugar? She closed her eyes and wished she could put out the lights across Europe, plunge the continent into darkness.

  There was nothing she could do. Everyone agreed there was nothing to be done, but Greta couldn’t bear it. She paced the garden walks, deadheading living flowers, or read to the women recovering in their hospital beds, losing her place halfway through a paragraph. Miss Hathaway took pity on her, suggesting that she prepare a box to be sent to Otto via the Red Cross.

  ‘Will it reach him?’ Greta asked, helplessly.

  Miss Hathaway blinked. ‘It won’t if you don’t send it.’

  Relieved to have a task, Greta set about ordering a hamper. Fortnum’s prepared several especially to be sent to the trenches. Most of those were no good – designed to be preserved for only a day or two until reaching France, they contained sides of smoked salmon, apples and fruitcakes. She chose one with tins of foie gras, lobster bisque and caviar, jars of marmalade, half a pound of tea, half a pound of cocoa and a box of shortbread biscuits. When it arrived at Fontmell a few days later, Greta looked at it helplessly. She summoned Miss Hathaway.

  ‘What am I allowed to put in a Red Cross parcel? What if it’s all stolen?’

  Miss Hathaway was silent for a minute, considering.

  ‘Select a few tins, some tea. And let us include a few seeds. Books are permitted. We can slip a packet into the binding. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to grow his own medicine box. Meadowsweet is an excellent painkiller and easy to grow. Lavender is an antiseptic; we’ll include a little dried. He can use what there is, or try to grow some more. Arnica is good for swelling, and chamomile flowers will soothe his nerves.’

  Greta flushed with enthusiasm. ‘I shall write him a letter explaining carefully how to grow and dry each of them.’

  The two women sat in the library, with their packets of seeds spread on the table before them, while Greta wrote in English – hoping it would be viewed by the Russians with less hostility than German – instructions for tending and drying each plant. She knew as she wrote that it was a fantasy, but somehow as her hand moved across the page it became a shared game, like those of summers long ago, when for as long as they pretended, it was real. She did not know what else to write – she could not bear to write of her fears: that she worried he would die and the war would never end, but go on for ever and swallow up the lives of both her children; that she would not see him again and he would never meet Benjamin or Celia. It was easier to write that feverfew grows best in the shade and must not be overwatered; that the chamomile flowers should be brewed in water that was not quite boiling.

  Just before the parcel was sealed and given to the Red Cross, Greta slipped in one last packet of seeds – taken from the edelweiss she had been gathering in the Alps when war was declared. It was a tiny kernel of home – perhaps Otto could grow a seedling and it would comfort him.

  NEW YORK, MAY

  Albert hadn’t realised how exhausted and dreary London had become until he walked through New York. He visited all the sites that his acquaintance said he must: he toured the marvel of Grand Central Station
, a cathedral dedicated to the new gods of modernity and engineering. He paid his respects to the Statue of Liberty, and dutifully admired the Brooklyn Bridge. Yet what he preferred to do was to walk the streets, anonymous and unregarded: a rare treat. The city was a garden of cherry blossoms. It sashayed on every branch, in every shade of pink. He dined with acquaintances and went to the theatre when it would be rude to refuse, but he never quite understood the ribald exuberance of Broadway, and declined all invitations to meet the lady stars – he was wary of actresses, after what happened with Claire. He preferred to walk beneath the cherry-blossom trees. They reminded him of those in the vast glasshouses at Temple Court, forced to flower in winter so that his father could have cherries out of season. Here the trees bloomed in spring, and Albert felt an odd sense of relief at the rightness of it.

  For the first month he stayed with Marcus Ullman at his mansion on the banks of the Hudson. It was a sprawling seventy-two-room palace of pink granite and white limestone, stuffed like a doll’s house with paintings by Botticelli and Velázquez, and planted in the middle of a vast park. Ullman, charmed by Temple Court on a visit to England, had employed the Goldbaum family architect to create a similar French confection. Surveying it, Albert considered that the brief must have been very simple: in the style of the Goldbaum houses, but bigger, much bigger. Albert swam in the indoor pool each morning, waiting for the English valet to pass him a towel and a lemonade. All Ullman’s staff were British; Marcus insisted upon it, he liked to be waited on by the former masters of Empire. Sometimes Albert felt he was another of Ullman’s staff – intended to amuse and to remind the millionaire that here was the scion of one of the richest families in Europe, but he, Marcus Ullman, was richer still.

  Used to the relative simplicity of life at General Staff Headquarters, where it was comfortable rather than opulent, and to Greta’s more modest mode of living at Fontmell, Albert realised he found Riverview oppressive. The priceless paintings were hung closely together to impress the viewer with their quantity, rather than allow one to admire a single picture. And, most disconcerting of all, Marcus had commissioned a dozen of the rooms to be copies of those he admired elsewhere. He slept in a perfect replica of the Sun King’s bedchamber at Versailles, while the dining room was a facsimile of Albert’s parents’ dining salon at Temple Court. He had even obtained a series of original paintings by Watteau, and the walnut table was a precise replica of the one in their home. The sole difference was that the table, like the room itself, was larger. Marcus was unmarried, but Albert almost expected to find a clockwork version of his mother presiding over it all – the same but taller, louder.

  With apologies, and hoping fervently not to cause offence, Albert withdrew to the relative anonymity and parsimony of the newly opened Plaza Hotel. While he missed the pleasure of his morning swim, he took solace in the privacy and simplicity of his new residence. He enjoyed early-morning walks through the park and along the city streets, admiring the American ingenuity that he glimpsed everywhere – from the road-sweepers rigged with water sprinklers, to the advertisements on the back of the New York Tribune for a jaw contraption to prevent off-putting ‘mouth-breathing’ and ‘drooping-chins’. Albert was confident that he suffered from neither, but was nevertheless tempted. While in England they were struggling to import enough cotton, here in America every store window was stuffed with mannequins dressed in a haberdashery of outfits. Quite clearly, Americans needed to find new and inventive ways to spend the money that the British lavished upon them.

  Some evenings Albert attended lectures at the American Museum of Natural History, which provided the only diversion from his task. He sat in the cool of the theatre and listened with great attention to the ‘Creation of the Maned Wolves’ diorama and ‘The Symbiotic Relationship Between Milkweed and the Monarch Butterfly’. He preferred lectures upon nature to those upon man, feeling at present disillusioned with his own species, but to avoid a dinner party he attended the memorial lecture given in honour of a lady scientist, Mary Putnam Jacobi, on female fertility. In the cedar-panelled hall, Albert began to listen with the interest of a husband rather than a scientist. Mrs Jacobi had been an expert on female ovulation, one of the first to insist that women were not like dogs and, unlike canines, were not fertile during menstruation. The present lecturer was not a woman (whether to Albert’s regret or relief, he wasn’t sure), but he quoted Mrs Jacobi at length, and Albert found himself writing copious notes in his pocket diary:

  ‘The woman buds as surely and incessantly as the plant.’ And Mrs Jacobi observes that ovulation is linked to raised blood pressure, increased temperature and pulse.

  Albert began to speculate whether he could persuade Greta to use science for a practical purpose. If she would allow him to take her temperature each morning and record her pulse, they could consider marital relations only on those days signalling ovulation was improbable. He sighed. He could not guarantee its accuracy and he thought it unlikely she would agree.

  Marcus and Albert met every morning at the offices of the Ullman Bank to prepare for the offering of the loan. Albert recognised the same excitement in Marcus that he sensed in his father – Marcus was exhilarated to be involved in the floating of the biggest loan on Wall Street. Yet Albert sensed trouble almost immediately when, despite Marcus’s assurances, they struggled to find other banks to partner with them and underwrite the loan.

  ‘I expected the difficulties to be great, but not stupendous,’ said Albert, reaching in his pocket for the papery sycamore pod gathered on his last morning at home, and brushing it with his fingers like a charm.

  Marcus Ullman grinned. ‘That’s the fun! The more obstacles, the greater the challenge.’

  Seeing Albert was not reassured, Marcus reached an arm around his shoulders.

  ‘I’ll find another partner, my friend. You’re blue. Homesick. You’re coming with me to a party. That’ll soon set you up.’

  Albert dared not refuse. Later that evening he found himself in a cab driving to Union Square. The driver pulled up several blocks away, unable to get any closer due to the volume of the crowd. Albert climbed out and walked the rest of the way, jostled by a ribald and enthusiastic throng. At the edge of Union Square he stopped. There, in the centre of the park, stood a full-size battleship, dominating the entire square and surrounding blocks as though it had run aground, stranded amid the towering offices and apartment buildings. Its massive hull was painted grey and it was fitted out with all the equipment of a modern dreadnought: two cage masts, conning tower and a funnel. Albert counted six wooden replicas of fourteen-inch guns housed in three twin turrets, and five anti-torpedo boat guns. At that moment the one-pound saluting guns fired, echoing around the square and reverberating off the surrounding buildings. The crowd cheered. Albert gazed up at the dreadnought, wedged between the city blocks. It lurked like the Ark, poised and ready for the Flood.

  He pushed his way through the mass of people until he reached the low fence enclosing the ship. Two men stood beside the gate, keeping back the hordes. On seeing Albert in full evening dress, they opened it and ushered him in. Albert followed a new, beautifully attired crowd up the gangway and out onto the upper deck of the battleship. Her masts had been festooned with lights, and a military band played while sailors in blue and white carried trays of canapés, champagne and rum cocktails. Albert stood back from the throng. It was rare for him to be at a party knowing almost no one. The sailors in white moved like spectres amongst guests awash with jewels. A pair of young women, speckled with diamonds, were entreating a sailor to teach them how to salute.

  ‘That’s a miserable face for a party,’ said Marcus Ullman, appearing at Albert’s side and pressing a glass of whisky into his hand. ‘Smile. Tell everyone the war’s going swell, and let’s see if we can’t find ourselves another partner by the end of the night.’

  Albert sipped his whisky and nodded. Marcus was right. All the money in New York was on the deck of the ship, cheering the launch of the USS Re
cruit and her mission to find a new navy. It was his duty as an Englishman to raise as much money as he could. Steeling himself, he allowed Marcus to steer him through the crowd, introducing him to men of industry: fishing and finance, steel and shipping, rubber and timber.

  ‘Captain Goldbaum of the General Staff of His Majesty’s army,’ declared Marcus to everyone in earshot.

  To his embarrassment, Albert found himself thanked vociferously by the men, and petted with great sympathy by the women, who all assumed that since he was no longer serving at the front he must have suffered some grotesque, hidden injury. He longed to admit that the most strenuous part of his war so far had been obtaining partridge and Brie for His Majesty’s visit to headquarters in France. However, he was presently engaged in his most vital mission, and that required accepting with deferential reluctance the approbation of America’s finest.

  ‘No one wants to say no to a hero,’ whispered Marcus, after chiding him for dismissing the gratitude of one of the directors of the House of Morgan with too much vigour.

  A headache born of humiliation began to pulse in Albert’s left temple. Yet his pallor and the way he was forced to rub his head only seemed to reaffirm to his fellow guests that here before them was one of England’s famed officers, his very soul damaged by the catastrophe of war. The ladies confided to Marcus that when the fund floated, they would of course buy stock and persuade their husbands likewise.

  ‘Magnificent,’ whispered Marcus, guiding Albert to the next guests. ‘But they’re small fry. We need a big fish.’

  He cast his eye about the room, his face flushed with the thrill of the chase. Looking at him, Albert saw that Marcus was experiencing the same pleasure of pursuit that he himself felt when striding through the fields with his butterfly net after some rare species of moth. Marcus touched Albert’s elbow.

  ‘Let me introduce you to Senator Morris. He has considerable influence with the Federal Reserve.’