The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  "Thou great softie!" he said, delighted; and he wiped her cheeks with the kerchief on which he had cleaned his fingers after eating the pie. She could smell the pork fat and pastry on her skin.

  "Anyway," he said, "the future's not holding back. Look at this." And he passed her the list he had been looking at when she entered.

  It was in his own hand and read:

  "These will put up the value of my land," she said.

  And then it struck her: She had no land! The moment embarrassed them both to silence.

  "Or the bit of land where I was born," she added lamely.

  He did not look directly at her. "You realize there's the best part of four million pounds in those contracts—most of it still to be paid to us."

  "We'll certainly need it," she said.

  There was an odd, plaintive note in his voice.

  "Perhaps we'd have been all right anyway," he added. Again there was that note—defensive and hesitant.

  "Of course, darling!" She took his hand in both of hers. "Of course we would have! All I did was"—she thought hurriedly—"I merely made it possible for you to come back to me the sooner."

  Let him believe it if it helped. He must know it was not true. He must know it was not how much they earned that was important—not when they were insolvent—it was when they earned it that counted. Still, if it helped to restore his own estimation of himself, let him think otherwise.

  With a contented smile he fished deep among his papers, using his free hand. "You can have this now," he said. "It really won't bite."

  It was her power of attorney.

  She could not stifle a slight truculence as she took it. "And what may I practise on?" she asked.

  Now he looked at her steadily. "I'd like to treat the money you won from Wyatt as a loan to the firm," he said. "As all this money comes in"—he pointed to his list of contracts due for completion—"you could progressively withdraw that money and…er, 'practise' with it."

  She had actually thought of asking for no less than John now proposed; so why did it feel like a slap in the face? John was going to make his comforting fiction—that she had not really saved the firm, merely secured it a little earlier than the normal contracts would have saved it anyway—he was going to make it true, by (in effect) doctoring the books. In six months, her winnings, which had saved the firm, would have degenerated into a mere loan. That is what the books would show: "Per loan to Mrs. J. Stevenson—£100,000." In red ink.

  She realized that she had some confusions of her own that needed sorting out. Now that the single overriding goal had been removed from their lives, what did each of them really want? How close were they really, in matters other than their mutual love? Worst of all, would their money once more drive them into a tolerant and easy separation?

  He broke into these thoughts with a forgotten piece of news. "It's your brother Daniel," he began.

  "I know," she told him. "Sam wrote to me. He's to be pardoned."

  "He's been pardoned. I've heard he's already back in England." He could not read her face. "What'll you do, love?" he prompted.

  "If Daniel knocked on that door now, dying with the cold, I'd not so much as cross the room."

  The intensity of her hate made him quail. "By God!" he said. "I hope I may never make an enemy of thee!"

  That morning at breakfast—a rather late breakfast—a messenger came with a letter from Lord Wyatt. He was staying a few miles away, with the Earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard, and he would be hunting that day with the Lord Middleton's. Perhaps, he suggested, she could arrange to go out riding and for her path to cross his? He would have a further communication for her then.

  "He's going to humiliate you," John warned. "Why else does he want you and the hunt to cross paths? That hunt in particular."

  She agreed it was possible but was too intrigued by the note of challenge in the invitation to stay at home. "They're hunting Burythorpe way today," she said—Nora, who claimed to take not the slightest interest in anything the Lord Middleton's did! "We could at least ride that way and see what's what."

  "As long as we're back in time for Livings's visit," John said.

  Livings was their architect for the iron foundry at Stockton, which John now had ideas of enlarging.

  That afternoon they both went riding out along the ridge of the wold toward Burythorpe. John was on Hermes; Nora was trying out a new three-year-old she had just bought—a dun-coloured filly with white stockings, a little undersized but very sturdy and, the dealer said, "a double-tit of great stamina." She had been ridiculously cheap because of a few slight zebra markings.

  Some early rain had completely cleared and the higher parts of the road had even started to dry by the time they set off. They rode almost due north, making for Birdsall Brow and facing into a gusty northwesterly breeze. Patches of sun and shade of varying density swept toward them over the fields and hedges. The treetops thrashed violently in a wind that seemed to spend its force before it touched the ground.

  "That'll shake out the cobwebs," Nora said, drawing in great lungsful of the breeze, until she shivered.

  "Let's canter," he said.

  And for more than a mile they threaded their way around the standing pools that reached from the verges out into the drying roadway. Hermes cantered slowly but Tessa, Nora's filly, was close to a gallop. Yet when they returned to the trot, Hermes was the more winded of the two.

  "You've not hunted him much," John said. "You could at least let the lad take him down and back, even if you don't use him."

  "Aye," she said. "I think I will."

  At the edge of the brow, they turned eastward along the bridle path to Burdale. Almost at once they heard the music of the hunt—the pack and the leaders, running crosswind a furlong or so downhill from the path. Both their horses became restive at once.

  "We'd better pull aside," John said. "We can wait for them here on the highway."

  Nora squared her shoulders. "I don't see why. We've as much right to ride as they have." And she rode on down the path into the teeth of the arrogant crowd who had blackballed John's and her application for membership.

  She pretended a greater surprise than she felt that the leader of those upon the bridle path was Lord Wyatt. He was smiling but with such grimness that she began to regret her rash decision to come. If he were going to humiliate her, he could not have picked a better opportunity. The whole "quality" of the East Riding was behind him.

  "Mrs. Stevenson!" he called, with a surprise to match her own. He halted, forcing the rest of the field to bunch up behind him, a captive audience to all they said. "How very well met!"

  "Lord Wyatt! How good of you to say so. May I present Mr. Stevenson."

  The two men nodded warily at each other.

  "Yes," Wyatt went on. "I rode out today of a purpose to meet you. England's foremost huntswoman, what!" He was oblivious of the sounds of well-bred impatience arising from behind. "But they tell me you don't hunt with them."

  "That's very true," Nora said. "Ain't it odd! I may hunt with my lords Fitzwilliam and Forester and Hawke, but here in the East Riding, they still have standards to maintain."

  She heard John draw a sharp breath beside her but she spoke with a brighteyed defiance, not to Lord Wyatt but at the crowd behind him, noting with pleasure their discomfiture and annoyance. Both reactions intensified when Lord Wyatt looked around, surveying what was to him a motley collection of petty gentry, squires, and baronets.

  "Extraordinary!" he said and turned back to her. Then he produced a letter from his tunic. "We have our standards too, what! From my cousin Meredith. Handsome enough, I hope."

  She took it, smiling, and thanked him.

  "Jove!" he said. "What a ride you had, eh? What ever put such an idea into your head?"

  "I had a sort of wager," she said simply, amused at the alarm that now crept into his face. "A private wager with myself, you understand—that it would turn hostility into friendship."

  Her look
included the rest of the field.

  Wyatt laughed then. "Ye didn't lose," he said to her. "Ye didn't fail. I for one will swear to that!" He spurred onward a good few yards before he turned and shouted back over his shoulder: "You're always welcome with the Puckeridge at least!"

  Like royalty on a saluting base, they watched the rest of the field troop past; not an eye met theirs.

  "Now wasn't that kindness itself," Nora said.

  John at last breathed out his relief. "You do take chances," he said.

  "Oh no, love. As long as we are sitting on God knows how many million cubic yards of best gravel at Maran Hill, I think we shall have a very kindly and attentive neighbour in Lord Wyatt."

  Chapter 29

  Bernard Livings, architect, with an academy diploma to back the claim, was an ambitious, easygoing, round-faced, sharp-nosed, curly-haired, straight-bearded, young thirty-eight-year-old. He was a devout Methodist, a devoted husband and father, and—though John would not believe it—an ardent womanizer.

  "You don't understand the word," John would say. "Thornton's a womanizer. This man Livings is altogether different."

  "It's you that doesn't understand," she told him. "Thornton's no womanizer. His interest begins eight inches north of the knee; go twenty inches above that and he's already starting to yawn. Faces and names mean naught there. He'll take it any place, any time, free, bought, or bribed. But Livings wants everything— except the details between calling the banns and cutting the wedding cake; he'll forgo them."

  John could not really grasp the distinction.

  Later, in the business room, with the site maps spread out before them, John explained his new ideas. They would use more land, beyond the first twenty acres, on both sides of the little Billingham Beck. On one side—the side of the twenty acres—they would build the mill, with its attendant wharfs and railways. On the other side they would lay out a little town, using the river as a division. It was to have a small park, with a stand where a German band could play, a church and dissenting chapels, a hospital and dispensary, a school, an evening institute and library, a gasworks, waterworks, and a sewage outfall works. Also almshouses. The gasworks and waterworks would, of course, serve the mill as well. There would be no public houses, but markets and shops would all be in the plan.

  As he spoke, he deliberately failed to notice Nora's increasing bewilderment and anxiety, until he thought she would burst. Then he turned to her. "We'll not build it all at once, but we'll allow space for it. We'll plan it, d'ye see. We'll not be building any more than we intended for this year—well, a house or two more, maybe, but nothing beyond. But we'll be building it in such a way as lets us add without making a pig's breakfast of it. If"—he remembered the architect at last—"Livings here says it may be done."

  Livings, who had come to Thorpe expecting a host of small, annoying revisions, could not believe his luck. But, being a thorough architect, his first instinct was to find an objection to his client's scheme. "It's a splendid idea, sir," he said. "Truly magnificent. The town presents no insuperable difficulty. But"—sigh— "your manufactory. Now that will be a problem. How big might it finally be?"

  "Let's say it will cover all twenty acres. It occurred to me that you might plan it as one great central shed with bays let off it on each side. D'ye see? Like a spider. The original works can be one of those bays. A spider's leg. What d'you think?"

  He nodded, and his eyes said it was feasible; but his voice said: "It isn't necessarily that easy. The proportions…" he began vaguely, and then thought of a better line. "The bays would impede each other's light."

  "We want twenty foot between them, for two rail roads. And the overshadowing would matter less if the roof were made of glass."

  "Glass!" Nora and Livings exclaimed together.

  "Yes." He was amused. "We make a simple flat triangular truss of iron, like a railway station roof, and we glaze it direct. I was looking at Euston the other day and thinking how much lighter it would be if they had glass instead of that wood and flashing. But"—he gripped Livings's arm—"these are just crude ideas for you to work on. It's to be your design. I want that firmly understood." He smiled. "If you still want to, of course."

  The client's coup de grâce.

  "Indeed. Indeed!" Livings said. "I welcome the challenge, sir. But in the space of a single weekend—I fear…"

  "No no, no, no," John assured him. "This weekend I want you to design three grades of house—for a labourer, for a mechanic, and for an overseer. I want each unit costed before we even start to plan the town."

  Nora was relieved at this return of monetary caution; it supplied the motif she had missed in all the previous talk.

  "What's this new town to be called?" Nora asked.

  "We had a competition for a name in the London office last week. Chambers suggested Learlington, as an anagram of Nora Telling. One of the clerks thought of Middleton, since it's midway between Middlesborough and Stockton. But I won the prize."

  "What was your suggestion?"

  "Stevenstown. People will find that much easier to remember."

  Livings took a bare two hours' sleep that night. By the following morning, he had rough-planned all three houses and produced elegant little water colours to show their appearance. "Theme and variations," he said proudly.

  It was certainly most elegant. For the labourers he had produced, on a twentyseven by twenty-four-foot ground plan, a unit containing a lobby, living room, scullery, indoor w.c., and one large and two small bedrooms. These units were grouped in blocks of four, two down and two up, with a central entranceway. And each four-unit block stood on a quarter-acre plot, allowing each family a seventy-five-by-thirty-foot vegetable patch.

  The mechanics had basically the same but with an extra hundred-square-foot room at the back.

  The overseers had exactly twice the labourers' allowance, having both the upstairs unit and the one downstairs. Their gardens too were twice as big as the labourers'.

  "You see," Livings said, "they all have part of what is basically the same building. Labourers get a quarter-building; overseers have a half-building; mechanics get a quarter building with an extra room. It's easy to convert any one to any other. For instance, if that's an overseer's house and you extend the town and want to turn it into two labourers' houses, all you do is add a w.c. upstairs, change the stair entry, and remove the coloured-tile decoration from the balcony and cornice."

  They were very impressed. John could see some trivial improvements but deferred any mention of them. "Any idea of cost?" he asked.

  "About five hundred and sixty pounds per building. That includes builder's profit of fifty. For each labourer's unit it comes to one hundred and fifty with the land."

  John rolled his eyes as he did a rough calculation. "Two shillings a week rent. It sounds marvellous."

  "Wait, wait, wait," Nora called. "Sewerage? Water? Repairs? Insurance? Share of civic provisions? Roads?" John drew breath to speak, but she continued: "It's no answer to say the company will bear part of the cost. We've got to know the size of the millstone before we hang it around someone's neck."

  "It's a good point. I'm persuaded."

  "It's your visiting manufacturer you have to convince. If you can tell him the whole town pays for itself, that's far more impressive than…"

  "I agree. I've said it. Just work it out."

  Livings's head went left, right, left, right.

  Ten minutes later Nora said: "With two thousand dwellings, the weekly rent would be four shillings for a labourer, four and tenpence for a mechanic, and eight shillings for an overseer."

  "Still very cheap," Livings said. "What are you allowing on the civic side?"

  Nora looked back at her figures. "Roads, park, dispensary, institute, and so on—a hundred and twenty thousand pounds; repairs and upkeep, recurring, four thousand…" And so on through all the elements that make for the running of a town, ending with the caution that it was "all very round-figurey."

  "I
t sounds of the right order," John said. "I can't believe the rents are so low."

  Nora checked a sample of them again. "Well, they are," she confirmed. She was feeling quite excited now. On her properties, she usually thought only of leasehold for the most superior housing, as at Alderley Edge, where the houses had between one and five acres each. She wondered that she had never done the calculations for renting humbler and more close-packed estates. Of course, there was the cost of building and repairing, the cost of collecting rents, bad debts, quick turnover of tenancies, property empty. No, it was not for her. Not yet, anyway.

  "How much more would it be," John asked, "if you added a modest profit to us on those outlays?"