Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “But what is a teacher at a girls’ school?” he said. “A sort of public governess, in my view. In Society’s view, too, I’m sure.”

  “Like nurses were before Miss Nightingale?” Nora suggested.

  John looked at her with a doubt that certainly seemed genuine. “Do you think so?” he asked. “Really? You’re much more sensitive to these movements in opinion than I am. I was sure your salon would be a social disaster. But now…I know half the people who court my acquaintance are really seeking an invitation to…ah…your place. And these are people who would have kept very exclusively to themselves ten years ago. There’s a change. And you were aware of it where I was not. So, what d’you say, love—are teachers and professors about to become acceptable in Society? Shall we all soon be pining for invitations to schoolroom soirées?”

  With that final question, his strategy overreached itself. The sardonic joke behind it showed through. She saw that he was trying to win her with flattery and, at the same time, to make her case and Winifred’s as different as possible, so that nobody could argue from the one to the other. She was not going to allow that.

  “John,” she answered, “why are you still so obsessed with Society? I mean so needlessly obsessed?”

  He stood up abruptly, seeing the discussion was not going as he had wished. “All the children must understand—the older ones, anyway,” he said, half to himself.

  She rose and set off for home, a pace ahead of him. “It’s very kind of you to say people court you for invitations to Hamilton Place. But the fact is that you are a rich and successful man. You have earned the ear and confidence of people in government, whichever party is in. You are considered a very sound fellow. Society may sneer in general at the new rich and make jokes about us in Punch; but they will always court us in the particular.”

  “Ah—which particular?” He was reluctant to pursue her argument, unwilling to dance to her tune.

  She shrugged, to lay as light a stress as possible on her answer: “Our particulars, dear. Building railways…gathering a salon of all the talents…making money…perhaps—who knows—being headmistress of the best girls’ school in the country.”

  It almost persuaded him. She could see that the prospect of pulling it off twice—once with his wife, then with his eldest daughter—was tantalizing him. But it was as she feared when he got down from the coach and laughed with Walter: Nothing would sway him, not even a guarantee from the Clerk of the Future that Winifred would succeed in that way.

  “I wish you were right,” he said, “but they aren’t like that. They’ll forgive us, because we’ve come up from nowhere. In a way, it’s expected of us. But if our children are perverse, they’ll say it’s become a bad habit. They’ll know we’re not sound. Our children cannot earn tolerance as we did. They must earn it by being more conventional than convention itself.”

  “Too late, love!” she taunted. “They’ve been contaminated.”

  “By what?” he asked in the thunderous petulance of a man about to complain that no one ever told him anything.

  She stopped and faced him, a cool smile twitching at her mouth. “By us, see thou. By us! We should have boarded them out at birth.”

  It took him several seconds to learn how to silence this objection inside himself, though he did not attempt it aloud to her. All he said was: “Nonsense! You’ll see. We brought them up free, and intelligent enough to understand why they must freely choose this path. You’ll see.”

  She wished he hadn’t staked so much of his own credit on this demonstration. She wished, too, that he would not insist on making Young John and Caspar attend this humiliation of their eldest sister, under the guise of correcting all their minds on the subject of their respective roles in life.

  ***

  John sat facing them, wishing they hadn’t all automatically—even Nora—put themselves on one side of the room, leaving the other exclusively to him. First he had to bridge that gulf between them. He sighed. His mind chewed on words that did not come easily.

  They sat, tensely watching his every gesture.

  “We are not a very…usual family,” he said at last. “At the risk of boasting, let me start by reminding you that probably only five or six people in the railway-building business have been so successful that Society has, grudgingly, allowed them inside its ranks. And all of those, like me, had to turn their talents elsewhere, into Parliament or local government—or philanthropy—before even that grudging break was made.

  “I’m sure I may justifiably boast of your mother’s achievements. To enter the financial world as she has done, and to run circles around most of the men in it, would, in anyone else, lead to banishment from all company, let alone Society. Yet she has, in the teeth of it, founded a salon in London that is the talk of Europe and America. I was telling her less than an hour ago—people in the very highest ranks of London Society court my acquaintance in the rather touching faith that it will secure them an invitation to her table!”

  They relaxed enough to smile. Young John even gave a light laugh.

  John was glad of that. He had come here determined to have his way, but not as a tyrant. He wanted them to understand. To be sure, Winifred had been very wrong and would have to be punished, but first she must see why. In that sense her punishment would be voluntary—undertaken gratefully, even.

  He allowed himself to relax then, stretching his legs out before him and settling back into his chair. “So…we are not a very usual family. Your upbringing, too, all you children, has been most unnatural.” The word brought the expected stir of surprise and quickened their interest. “Most children are banished behind the baize door. But you, as soon as you could talk reasonably, have sat at our table, shared our conversation, talked with our guests on all but the most formal occasions. Tongues have wagged against us for it. We have ‘spoiled your innocence’ people have said—some people. And, to be honest, we could not answer them with certainty. Because, you see, all that licence we allowed you was like an investment in the future; and until that future becomes reality, people can always say you have made an unwise investment—and, of course, you cannot answer them with any convincing proofs to the contrary. Is my meaning clear so far?”

  They all nodded.

  “Because the time when the wisdom or folly of our investment in you will become clear is now very close for you three eldest. Especially for you, Winifred. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “And Young John?”

  “Certainly, guvnor.”

  “Caspar?”

  Caspar beamed him an admiring smile. “I never realized how special it all was, Pater,” he said.

  John looked at him a long time, debating whether to insist upon a cut-and-dried answer to his question. He decided to press on instead. Nora wiped her lips to conceal a smile at Caspar’s unflagging ability not to give direct answers when he didn’t want to.

  “Our reason, of course,” John continued, “was that you should gain an early understanding of the ways of the world. Since for most of your childhood we were cut out of Society, we thought of it as a way of redressing the disadvantages for you. There is no doubt that people in Society enjoy access to privileged information and powerful mutual assistance that is simply not available to, or extended to, outsiders. I say ‘there is no doubt’—I certainly hope you do not doubt it?” He looked around again. “Winifred?”

  “No, Papa. I know it to be true.”

  “Young John?”

  “Absolutely not, sir.”

  “And you, Caspar?”

  “I often wondered why it was so important, Pater.”

  For once John did not mind the indirect answer. It led precisely to his next point: “I’m glad you see its importance now, my boy. It is of the greatest importance…of cardinal importance to all your separate futures.”

  He rubbed his hands, smi
led around at them, and drew deep breath. “We have created a very big enterprise in Stevenson’s. Yet it is not big enough to sustain all of you and all your children in the style you now enjoy. Unless you are also in Society in your own right. Each one of you. Individually. And you must know that Society does not hand out its benefits willy-nilly. It demands in return a very high, very correct, very precise adherence to certain standards of behaviour. In the end, no one can kick against it. Not even someone of the blood royal. There is one younger son of a duke—whose name you may hear whispered but never spoken aloud—who was caught last year in cheating at cards. He now lives in Normandy, in daily sight of England—a country he can never again visit. Not even when his parents die may he attend their funerals. He will be turned away even then. Even then. Not all the royal blood in his veins can restore him.

  “Now you may think that is most cruel. I may think so. But it matters not one jot what we think. These are facts. Complain against them all you will—they still govern your lives. Like the law of gravity. So just think of the sort of fate that threatens everyone who thinks he—or she”—he looked especially at Winifred—“can flout Society’s conventions. Or even slip past them, hoping to go unnoticed. Now your very liberal, not to say indulgent, upbringing may have led you to think otherwise. And that is no idle speculation on my part. For”—he fished in his pockets—“I have a letter here from a person called”—he consulted the letter—“Miss Beale, who is”—he consulted the letter again—“headmistress, it seems, of some school or other in”—again he looked at the letter—“Cheltenham, who tells me that you, Winifred, have asked for a position there as governess.”

  Boy let out a gasp of horrified incredulity. Winifred stared in open dismay; in those last few overacted and overstated sentences of her father’s he had thrown away all the goodwill his earlier words had achieved. They had been a sham to lull her; the iron-mailed fist could now be heard creaking beneath all that soft velvet. Nora wished on John’s behalf that he could take back that disastrous lead-in to the subject of the letter, after so promising a preamble. It belonged to an earlier, more aggressive version of this homily. Caspar saw his own struggle with his father—even though it still lay years off in the nebulous anything-can-happen—take on clearer outlines. He didn’t so much care about Winnie’s battle for her sake; he wanted her triumph to help him in his.

  “Oh!” Winifred said coolly. “I can’t believe that Miss Beale would lie to you, Father. But if she chooses to, I can’t see why it should be only half a lie. I can’t imagine her being satisfied at any half-measures. Are you sure she didn’t say I wanted to be a scullery maid?”

  “I’m warning you, miss,” John said heatedly, levelling an accusing finger at her. “I’ve been calm and reasonableness itself until now.”

  “Hear, hear!” Nora said.

  Winifred did not take her eyes off his face; hers was as expressionless as she could make it.

  “A schoolteacher in a ladies’ school is nothing but a governess. A public governess,” he said.

  “What was a nurse before Miss Nightingale, Father? What was a lady writer before Fanny Burney? If there are ever such shameless things as women bankers or stockbrokers, whom do you think they will hail as patroness?” She looked at her mother and smiled—creating an unfortunate suggestion of complicity between them, which John did not miss.

  “Now see here, miss. Here’s an end to this. Now I am telling you—you are to put all idea of teaching from you. Now and forever. I say so, and that is that.”

  “So!” Winifred said. “I am to be like those dainty little silver trowels they give the prince to lay foundation stones with. A fake! A toy kept in a glass case and passed around for admiration once in a blue moon.”

  “Winifred!” Nora warned.

  She moderated her tone, but not the argument. “Well, what was all that education for?” She dug her fingers into her breastbone. “What is this feeling in here, that I want above all else in the world to teach? What’s it for?”

  John smiled, a superior, knowing smile that infuriated her still more. “That’s this month,” he said. “Next month…next year…it’ll be a husband you’ll want above all else in the world.”

  Winifred stared at him, forcing herself to be calm, speaking at last in a voice that was both soft and cold. “Reconcile yourself to this, Father: I shall never marry. However you dispose of my life, it shall never be that way.”

  She glanced at Boy, as if she expected his support. He blushed and looked down. These were the things they talked about only in Latin and Greek, things they could never put into plain English, things they had to clothe in the decent obscurity of dead languages: the filthiness of the body, the loathsome notion of shared carnality. They spoke of these things in the tongues of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine.

  John missed the exchange between the two. He was looking at his daughter and remembering how close they once had been, how he had shared so much that passed through her extraordinary mind. Now she had become a stranger. The thought, begun in sadness, suddenly made him angry. She had changed! He looked at the two boys. “Let’s get it all out, then. Are you two nurturing secret ambitions to own a circus or become travelling tinkers?”

  “Hardly the equivalent!” Winifred complained, but he ignored her, looking at Caspar instead, believing him to be more malleable because he was the younger.

  “I don’t know, guvnor,” Caspar said. “I don’t think I’m old enough to know. Not like Winnie. I mean there’s lots of things I want to try at yet.”

  “Dammit, sir!” John cried. “I tell you it is settled. You shall go into the army. Clement into law. And Mather into medicine. And”—he looked intently at Winifred—“all the girls shall marry.”

  “Of course, guvnor,” Boy weighed in with his full support, “there’s a ton of other things I’d rather do than take over Stevenson’s. But I recognize it’ll be my duty, so”—he sighed manfully—“of course I shall.”

  John looked to see if he were joking; but all he saw was the simple goodness and trustworthiness that everyone saw in Boy.

  “Once you tell me all the rules and things for running it, of course,” Boy added, thinking his earlier assertion had been too self-confident.

  John’s hesitation had lost him the chance of any spontaneous reaction. Winifred, knowing her battle to be lost, thought she might as well twist the knife Boy had inadvertently billeted between their father’s shoulderblades.

  “Ah, Boy,” she said, as if admiring someone infinitely superior to herself. “How I wish I could be like you. I daresay you’d even put duty before the survival of the firm.”

  “Of course I would,” Boy said stoutly, and looked for his father’s approval. “Wouldn’t that be right, Father?”

  John could take no more of it. He dared not look at Nora, knowing she would be staring at him in cool mockery. “That’s settled, then,” he said, making for the door.

  Before he closed it Winifred made sure he overheard her say: “He’d do more for Mary Coen than for us.”

  John returned at that. “That’s right, young miss,” he shouted, shivering with anger. “Mary Coen knows her place and makes herself happy in it. You—and you”—he included Caspar—“could learn much from Mary Coen’s example. And I would do more for her than I would for you two ingrates!”

  “John, dear,” Nora said quietly, “I’m sure it’ll do Mary Coen more harm than good to know the intensity of your feelings for her.”

  John looked pure venom at her and slammed the door behind him.

  “Lost?” Winifred asked.

  Nora stood, to follow John. “Thrown away,” she said angrily.

  “I would be right, though, wouldn’t I?” Boy asked the world in general.

  Chapter 21

  How much harm has been done throughout history—certainly in the history of personal relationships—by the telling phras
e! Such a phrase is almost always a metaphor of some kind; and a metaphor, once divested of all the nice, self-serving, metaphorical ways of defining it, comes down to no more than a cunning half-truth, served up among sophisticates in the confident knowledge that everyone can separate the half that is true from the half that is not. But for the literal-minded, the ingénue, the unsophisticate, a metaphor can turn into their Old Man of the Sea—a hump they cannot shake.

  So it was with Boy when he heard Walter’s picturesque but metaphorical division of himself (indeed, of mankind) into man-above-the-waist and man-below-the-waist. So much that had been obscure, half-glimpsed, fugitive, suddenly fell into place to form a logical and internally consistent schema in Boy’s mind.

  The whole trick of life, he now saw with a blinding clarity, is to keep man-below as separate as possible from man-above, in thought and in deed. The hand belonged to the arm belonged to Above; if it started meddling in the affairs of Below, it carried a fatal infection directly to the mind, the heart of Above. That was where all those wretched youths in that nameless academy Brockman kept parading through his lectures went astray. That was why dogs and other animals did not go insane by it—no hands! No short cuts from Below to Above.

  And that was why women were so different from men in their temperament and approach to these matters. Their Below began at the neck, making the separation so much easier. Why had nobody seen it before?

  For a couple of weeks the discovery restored him to the primal happiness that Brockman’s lectures had half killed, and which the York whore had finished off. He even knew how he’d cope with her, now. If she lay the way she did, one foot on the floor, he could stand and fold his arms and concentrate Above on spiritual matters while Below attended to his affairs. But there in Connemara it was not possible to put the whole theory into practice. Below had to rut as fair a channel as possible between belly and mattress, while Above clasped his hands in prayer and sought the elusive beatitudes.