The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  They ate a mussel stew, using the shells as scoops and throwing the empties into a tureen on the floor. Then came a dish of beans—just beans on their own—but served with butter and some herbs that made them fit for an individual dish. Then there was a crisp savoury pancake wrapped around a mixture of seafoods and vegetables, shredded fine. Then everybody talked and laughed a lot and ate cheese with little salt biscuits and dry white bread, very soft and crumbly. And afterward came a huge dish of turbot baked in wine and running with butter. And there was all the wine and all the cider they wanted. What did it matter that the table and chairs were of rough, scrubbed oak, only a little cleaner than the floor? Or that the plates and cutlery slid greasily between the fingers? The food was a sybarite's dream.

  "Au poile, madame,'' Cornelius said judiciously, holding thumb and index finger pinched to a nicety and shaking them at her. He teased her about everything except the food; with that, he was like a young priest with the ritual—still reverent. He ate as at a devotion, passing the food carefully around his mouth, provoking Madame's anxiety, chewing, breathing, chewing-and-breathing, smacking his tongue, and then closing his eyes and surrendering to the taste like a voluptuary—while Madame breathed again and beamed at him and clucked her delight at his.

  It had never occurred to Nora that food could be so…more-than-serious. Sacrosanct. A religion. "Eee, ye're partial to a good bite, Mr. Cornelius, I can see," she said.

  "To be sure," he agreed solemnly. "You find me another appetite you may indulge five times daily though ye live to be a hundred, and you may enlist me there too."

  "Where in the West Country are you going, Mr. Cornelius?" John asked.

  Cornelius and Sarah exchanged a knowing smile. "Whose West Country?" he asked. "Normandy's West Country. That's where. South of the Cherbourg thumb."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Never more so. We're buying—have bought—an inn at Coutances, near the sea." He took Sarah's hand.

  "You can look right across to Jersey and Brittany," she said. "It's heavenly."

  "But why?" John asked. "You're a legend in south London. You've made the Tabard. And now you go and give it up."

  Cornelius shook his head. "The writing's on the wall, dear fellow. For them as reads. And it's writ in railway iron. London? It's doomed. Finished. In our lifetime—and we're still young men." He clenched his fists and looked around like a pugilist seeking a challenge. "In our lifetime, London will become insufferable. When I was a lad, before I went to France, a good stiff trot would get any of us out into green fields. There! From Thames bank at London Bridge to green fields. And where's it get you now? I'll tell you. It gets you down the Old Kent Road to Bricklayers Arms, where you can take a train back home for sixpence. Well. I'm going to spend my sixpences on Normandy cider, me. What? I should think so."

  "You were in France as a boy?" Nora asked. "That's why you speak it so well."

  "My father was an inspector of posts in Brittany. Then he quarrelled with everyone. He was a very quarrelsome man. I daren't go back there. And he came back to England as a teacher. His name was Corneille, Yves Corneille. So—you see?"

  "We'll be so much happier here," Sarah said. "Look, where in England could we walk in off the street and find a place like this? And"—she sought for the words—"and…freedom. Relaxation…the ambiance like this. In England we have liberty and no passports, and we work, and we cooperate with the government, and we are orderly and punctual. And it's very nice to live there. But we don't know how to enjoy ourselves. How to relax. Liberty, but no freedom."

  "When I was building the line from here to Amiens, the French people would drive out to watch my lads work. They'd never seen anyone work that hard," John said.

  "And your lads," Sarah asked with a teasing smile, "did they flock into the town squares and little cafés to see how the French enjoyed themselves?"

  "Did they?" John laughed. "With brandy at two bob a gallon! They took to it like lambs on short pasture."

  "Oh, the bounty of this land!" Cornelius was off again. "The yield of it. The wines. The cider. The cheeses. The fruits. I was here last September, with the blackberries ripening. It was like walking through one endless black-and-red mosaic. Also, the taxes are more sensible here. The English income tax is going to drive all the most alert and enterprising people abroad very soon. Mark my word. What? Two shillings in the pound? I should say so."

  "I beg leave to differ from you there, Mr. Cornelius," John said. He spoke quietly, without challenge. "England has more talent and skill than she knows how to use. You have only to look at the four of us. What was I? A navvy, humping prodigies of earth for three bob a day. And Mrs. Stevenson? She tended two looms in hell for ten bob a week. And Mrs. Cornelius? An upstairs maid. No sinecure. And yourself? Son of an immigrant teacher in lodgings. Often no more than two farthings to rub together, I'll wager. And look at us now. We've all been lucky. I give regular work to ten thousand men. It'll be fifty thousand before I'm done. Mrs. Stevenson—I'd back her commercial judgement against the governor of the Bank of England. Yourself—you've built the biggest tavern trade south of the Thames. And ye've picked a wife there with a talent far beyond her station. But do you mean to say you couldn't go now, this minute, back to England and touch some man on the shoulder who lacked nothing but the luck to get where you've gotten? You maybe know half a dozen. I do, I'm sure."

  Cornelius laughed. "I'm sure they'd all come here when they'd made their money. Do you know, there's three thousand English living in Caen alone?"

  "Just along the road from you at Coutances," Nora said. "That won't dent your trade."

  Cornelius looked sharply at her and then grinned. "Yus!" he said. "It does demand something more than luck." He linked his arm in Sarah's. "Oh, yes—a great deal more."

  She giggled and hid her face on his shoulder.

  Nora thought: If they're exporting money over here and we're repatriating money from here, they could draw a French bill on us and we an English bill on them and both save the premium on foreign bills. She almost said it too.

  But their talk turned to other things. Cornelius and Sarah described their inn at Coutances, a straggling, half-timbered place that sounded like a miniature version of the Tabard, which they had just sold. They were both obsessed with it and they bubbled with plans for improving its amenity and making it the place for discerning tourists in western Normandy. There were the views and there was the superb bathing at Granville, only a few miles away.

  "There's no bathing machines yet," Cornelius said. "They carry the ladies out in canvas bags on poles. But if I can induce some enterprising local man to invest in a few bathing machines…"

  If they could combine English standards of hygiene and services with the French standards of cooking and comfort, they would have a gold mine far more lucrative than the Tabard. They were sure of it, as sure as sure.

  "Invite us to your twenty-fifth anniversary," John said.

  Then, no doubt feeling they had hogged the stage, Sarah asked John about the work Stevenson's was doing. They listened, politely at first, and then in fascination as he described the workings, the men, the places, and the difficulties they all involved. They were especially interested in the lines he was planning to build in France and elsewhere abroad.

  "How do you do that?" Cornelius asked. "Do you bring men over? Or use local people?"

  "A bit of both. More and more I tend to use local men, especially in France. But five years ago, when we began out here, there were no local men fit for the work. It took a year or so to build their muscle. A navvy in his prime is a frightening strongman."

  "I suppose it would cost more though," Cornelius said casually. "Foreign work. What with having to take money out of England or bring it back. With bills at three months you lose the one per cent premium if you sell short for cash."

  John smiled at this transparency and nodded toward Nora. "If it's moving money," he said, "you have the world's adept on your right."

 
Cornelius and Sarah both looked at her in astonishment.

  "He means he leaves it to me because it bores him," she said. "But I'll tell you how to get your money across. If that's what you want."

  Cornelius was about to protest that nothing so impolite was in his mind, but he thought better of it and tried hard to look offhand instead.

  "Go on, Tom," Sarah chided and turned to the other two. "It's exercised him for weeks."

  "I'll throw in some advice as well," Nora said, at last seeing a way to talk to a captive John. "It may not have escaped your notice that there's a bubble now building in railways. When that bursts, there's going to be a money panic." She avoided looking at John. "The bigger the bubble, the bigger the panic. In my view, this is going to be a very big bubble. And commerce in general will suffer for years. These are not going to be good times for anyone to put his money into shares."

  "I see," Cornelius said, as if he were simplifying it so that Nora, a mere woman, could grasp it, "bring it all over here. What? Yes—I should think so."

  Nora smiled and looked at the table. "If you think France is safer," she allowed, "by all means. But remember that when London gives a genteel cough, the rest of the world goes down with influenza. As far as Stevenson's is concerned, we are not bringing over one stiver more than we have to."

  "Oh, Tom!" Sarah was deeply worried.

  "Have no fear, Mrs. Cornelius," Nora reassured her. "You've picked the best trade, the best country, and the best part of it. Normandy is going to fill with renegade English levanting on their obligations back home. I envy you the choice—but I'd still bring over only what you need and leave the rest in five-year Treasury stock."

  "I see," Cornelius said. "I see. Yes, I see that." He obviously found it preposterous to be taking this lecture from a woman, but years of enforced courtesy in his trade came to buoy him up. "But…er…how to bring over the needful without dropping one per cent?"

  "What are we talking about?" Nora asked. "Hundreds? Or thousands? Or tens of thousands?"

  "Well…" Cornelius was cautious. "Let's say thousands."

  "Then it's not worth a great deal of effort," she said, enjoying his mildly offended reaction. "All you do is find a firm—as it may be Stevenson's"—she licked her lips and grinned—"with money to repatriate and you draw a bill on them in France and they draw one on you in London, and we can give you a letter to arrange it all with our clerk in London tomorrow if it please you, sir!" she gabbled.

  They all laughed. "It sounds like good sense," Cornelius agreed. "Supposing it had been tens of thousands?"

  "Ah" Nora said, enjoying the attention. "Then it gets a bit more interesting." She looked at John. "May I?"

  John, as proud of her as a hen with one chick—and enjoying Cornelius' amazement—nodded. Cornelius kept looking at him to see if this wasn't all some joke.

  "There's dozens of exchanges in Europe, all with paper to sell. But for big sums you needn't look beyond Amsterdam, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Genoa—and, to be sure, Paris and London. All you need remember is that wherever there's a surplus of paper, you can get it cheap; wherever there's a shortage, you can sell it dear. Naturally. What you're trying to do, in moving the money to France, is to buy where the rate is cheap relative to London and dear relative to Paris."

  "Oh yes," Cornelius laughed dubiously. "It sounds easy."

  "But it is easy," Nora said earnestly. "For instance, we've just bought bills drawn on Frankfurt. We bought them in London, where they are plentiful just now, at a hundred and twenty-one German florins per ten pounds sterling. Now we've sold those same bills in Paris, where they happen to be scarce, at two hundred and twelve francs per hundred florins. Indirectly, you see, we get twenty-five francs and forty-two centimes to the pound. That's twelve centimes better than a direct draft in Paris on London."

  Cornelius rolled his eyes.

  "On every ten thousand pounds it makes a saving of…?" John said and pointed at Nora as a conductor to a soloist.

  "Forty-eight pounds," she said. "It sounds much less when you say nine shillings and sevenpence in a hundred pounds. Pocket money. But it soon mounts."

  John rubbed his hands, delighted at Nora's grasp of the explanation. Cornelius and Sarah looked at her as if seeing her for the first time.

  "You really understand all that?" he asked.

  "And call it easy!" Sarah added.

  "But that is the easy part. The difficult part—which people like you and me should never meddle in—is…" And she went on to explain how you could buy surplus paper cheap now to sell elsewhere when it became scarce and expensive, financing the deal by drawing three-month bills and selling them short. "You lose one per cent by selling short, but you may make twenty or thirty per cent if you guessed the future of the market right. That's where it stops being pocket money and turns into fortunes."

  Cornelius made a pantomime of expiring as she finished; and Sarah stared at her, open-mouthed.

  "Don't confuse things," John said, still delighted. She remembered how she had once had to fight to get these simple precepts adopted in their office. "Fuss, fuss, fuss!" had been John's song then.

  "How do you keep it all in your mind?" Sarah asked.

  "I'm doing it every week," Nora explained. "It's second nature now."

  "Well!" Cornelius seemed winded. "You do amaze me. I would never have thought a woman capable of mastering it. What?"

  "Yet," Nora said, "if I told you we have two clerks at forty pounds a year who spend part of their time grappling with these differences—for naturally I don't do it all, I merely supervise, from afar—you would find that not the least remarkable?"

  Cornelius evaded the point. "I would have thought it a banker's job, in any case."

  John laughed. "No man got rich on a banker's advice. Use a banker by all means; but rely on him and you're as good as dished. Did you go to the parson and ask whom you should marry?"

  Cornelius grinned and Sarah blushed.

  "A parson's a service. And a banker's a service. It's the same thing."

  "Are you sure you didn't muddle the two when you got married?" Cornelius asked.

  They all laughed at that.

  Cornelius paid for their meal; at six francs a head it came to twenty-four francs. "What's that in sterling?" he asked idly.

  "Nineteen and twopence-halfpenny," Nora said.

  Cornelius then extemporized a great pantomime of whether he should pay in bills on Paris or by direct remittance or perhaps he could find some Italian paper that was going to be scarce tomorrow.

  "Come on!" the others shouted.

  "Oh no!" he said. "It's important to Madame Thierry. She is one of the richest ladies in the world." Madame began a giggling protest but Cornelius insisted. An ancestor in Venice, also a Thierry, had left over four hundred million pounds sterling, all in gold. And under Venetian law, it should be divided among all his descendants. And Buonaparte had taken the gold from Venice and then had failed to honour his promise. "That's why Madame goes and spits on the Napoleon Column every day."

  "Ohhh!" Madame protested with outstretched hands and begged the room to ignore this stupidité. Her colossal bulk spun widdershins and deasil in happy embarrassment as they left, profusely thanking and complimenting her.

  "Très très bon, Madame," Nora ventured.

  They walked out into a windless night. The clouds had passed and a myriad of stars shone from a cold sky. The moon, a fat crescent, seemed painfully sharp after the dim, candlelit room.

  "Oh, let's go for a walk on the sands!" Cornelius said. He leaped high in the air and banged his heels together like a ballet dancer; for a moment, he seemed truly to have defied gravity.

  "What a man you are!" John said, laughing and shaking his head.

  "What? A man? I should say so!" Cornelius answered pugnaciously.

  He was still clowning and parodying himself and them when John and Nora said good night and went into the Hôtel des Bains.

  "I'll leave a note at the desk here,
for our chief clerk in London, if you want to do as I suggest. He will draw up all the papers," Nora said.

  He kissed her hand, turning it from a flippant to a sincere gesture halfway through. "I shall endorse it with an invitation to our twenty-fifth anniversary," he promised. "What? I should say so. Yes!"

  Upstairs, before they lighted their lamps, Nora went to the window. "Oh, come and see," she said.