by Phillip Rock
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? W
hat 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.”
“I hope you’re right, Arnold. Is there any way I can help?”
Calthorpe propped the drawing against the side of the desk. “A speaking tour would do no harm. I was hoping to have you interviewed by John Mugg on the BBC, but he would have none of that. Refused to give you a forum—his word—a forum for disarmament philosophies. Willing to have you on the air if you would promise to confine yourself to a discussion of American wireless news commentators vis-à-vis British news readers. That sort of twaddle. Turned him down flat. A total waste of your valuable time.”
It was nice to know that his time was valuable, as he certainly had enough of it on his hands. He sat in the office until nearly noon discussing one thing or another with Calthorpe and Jeremy Crofts, and then he went with Calthorpe to drop off the cover drawing at a lithography shop near Covent Garden and then on to lunch at Whipple’s.
It was only two thirty as he headed home, the taxi crawling through the traffic on Piccadilly. A long day stretching ahead. Albert would be back at school by now. He would, he suddenly realized, miss him.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, Mr. Rilke,” the housekeeper said, meeting him in the hall as he closed the front door. “Lady Stanmore just rang up. Desperate anxious to talk to you she was. I couldn’t understand half she was telling me … but I wrote it down.” She squinted at a scrap of paper in her hand. “Something about the three-twenty for Waterloo … or … call her if you come in before three—Marylebone seven-nine-eight-six, I think she said.”
The elderly woman was flustered and Martin calmed her down with a pat on the arm.
“That’s all right, Mrs. Bromley. I know the number. I’ll call her right away.”
“Oh, yes, sir, please do. She seemed in such a state.”
He had never called Lady Stanmore’s house without having a servant answer and intone “Stanmore residence,” but it was she who picked up the phone on the first ring with a quavering, “Yes?”
“It’s Martin, Aunt Hanna. Is there anything wrong?”
THE TRAIN CLATTERED through the gray fringe of London—on trestle and embankment through Battersea, Clapham, and Wandsworth: Rows of slate-roofed houses and serpentine streets. The occasional green patch of a playing field, gas works’ small factories, refuse dumps and scrapped cars, and then the city fading into strings of red-brick townlets and open space. Railway cuttings thick with wildflowers, hedgerowed meadows, soft hills, and distant woods, the tower of a Norman church rising above a frieze of elm—Surrey, the most English of England’s counties sweeping past the windows of the train.
“Almost there,” Martin said. “It won’t be long now.”
Hanna Rilke Greville, Countess of Stanmore, said nothing. She stared blindly through the window in a stupor of dread. Her gloved hands rested in her lap, fingers twisting a handkerchief of Belgian lace. She was still a beauty at sixty-one. Her golden hair had grayed and her once voluptuous figure had thickened, but, looking at her radiant skin and vivid blue eyes, it was not difficult to understand how this Chicago heiress had taken London society by storm at nineteen and captured Anthony Greville’s heart. That heart may have stopped forever as far as she knew. The telephone call from Abingdon had been clear enough, but the words had thrown her into such a panic that they had become hopelessly jumbled in her mind—a sudden death … a collapse on a horse … pain … doctors. A litany of tragedies. She was grateful that Martin had called the Pryory and spoken to Charles, and that Martin sat beside her now, but his reassurances and comforts could not still her feeling of impending doom.
“Abingdon station next, Aunt Hanna.” He touched her restless hands. “You must stop tormenting yourself. I’m sure Anthony will be fine.”
“He could be dead.”
“No … no. Some sort of spell or seizure. He’s at home, in his own bed, Charles said. If it had been anything terribly serious they would have taken him to the hospital in Guildford. Now, you know that.”
“There’s death in that house,” she whispered.
He squeezed her hands. “Mr. Coatsworth died. A very old man.”
“Yes … dear Coatsworth … and now my Tony.” She raised her eyes to heaven and cried in anguish: “Wo bist du, Gott?”
She spoke German only when under great stress, the comforting language of her childhood. She had been ten years old before her father had permitted English to be spoken in the house.
Martin answered her in German, holding her tightly. God, he said with quiet emphasis, is always with us. He never deserts anyone. He is with her and Anthony. He was with Mr. Coatsworth when he died … bringing the death that is no more than the natural end of life’s phase. As Heine said in a poem … Men will arise and depart. Only one thing is immortal: The love that is in my heart. “Hold on to that love, Aunt Hanna,” he said in English. “It will sustain you.”
She began to cry softly, pressing the twisted handkerchief against her eyes. When the train pulled into Abingdon she had composed herself and stepped onto the platform dry-eyed and steeled for the worst.
Charles was there to meet them, looking gaunt and pale. She scanned his face, searching for signs.
“Is he … still alive?”
Charles embraced her. “Of course he is, Mother. A fortnight in bed and he’ll be good as new.”
“What did the doctor say?” Martin asked.
“Angina pectoris.”
Hanna gasped. “His heart! I knew it!”
“It sounds worse than it is,” Charles assured her. “More frightening than fatal. He responded instantly to a nitroglycerin tablet. But he must stay in bed. You’ll have to be very firm with him.”
“If I have to tie him down with ropes!”
A chauffeur took Martin’s small pigskin valise, containing just a few items of clothing and shaving gear, and led the way to the venerable Rolls-Royce parked in front of the station.
Charles smiled wryly at his cousin. “It takes a crisis to get you down here for a few days. You will stay through Saturday, won’t you?”
“If you want me to.”
“I’d appreciate it.” He lowered his voice. “Coatsworth’s funeral. I welcome your moral support.”
The chauffeur held the car door open for them and a few moments later the gleaming Silver Ghost was pulling away, as smoothly as a bolt of silk swept along the road.
A village no more, Martin observed as they drove up the High Street. He had first seen Abingdon in the early spring of 1914, a day such as this with great fleecy clouds drifting over the hills and the soft smell of rain on the wind. A quiet place. A cobblestoned main street with one or two automobiles and dozens of horse-drawn carts and wagons. Sheep and cattle being driven in for market day to the pens where the railway station now stood. The nearest station in those days had been Godalming, twelve miles away. Suburbia now. F. W. Woolworth; a Marks & Spencer; an Odeon cinema palace with a garish marquee. And beyond the town, rows of neat little villas with rose bushes, laburnum, greenhouses, and birdbaths.
The houses ended at the edge of Leith Common with its rolling meadows and tangled undergrowth. There were still herds of deer in Leith Wood—King’s deer protected by the Crown—and foxes t
hat were hunted in the winter. The road skirted the common and Abingdon Pryory came into view, its myriad brick and stone chimneys seen above the beeches and evergreens that screened the house. The chauffeur slowed the car in front of ornamental iron gates as one of the groundkeepers swung them open. Beyond the gates, a mile-long gravel drive meandering to the house.
Well, Martin thought, some things did not change: the Pryory in all its stunning magnificence, its limestone façade mellow in the afternoon sun. An oasis of richness and stability in a world reeling into chaos. Only serenity here among formal gardens and clipped lawns, broad stone terraces and gently swaying trees.
Hanna and Charles went upstairs to see Anthony and talk to the doctor. Martin trailed the butler into the library where a drink was offered and not refused.
He slumped into a leather chair, sipped a gin and bitters, and stared morosely at the dusk-tinged windows. He associated the room with Anthony Greville. The silver riding trophies … the decanters of whisky and gin … the myriad leather-bound books, few of which his uncle had ever read … “No time for it, dear lad … no ruddy time for it.” A strong, vital, sporting man. Impossible to think of him struck low.
“Martin Rilke, is it?”
A slender, gray-haired man entered the room carrying a medical bag which he set on a table by the door.
“Yes,” Martin said, half rising from his chair.
“Don’t get up,” the man said, advancing across the room. “Is that pink gin you’re drinking?”
