Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Nora sighed. There were some things about the male animal she would never understand. “Where is this other paragon of a college?” she asked.

  “Not too far south of here,” he said.

  She thumped his arm in her frustration. “Can you never answer a question! Secrets—always secrets!”

  He laughed. “Sheffield Wesley College. I’ll tell you another thing—it’s an extension of London University. I could go and take a degree from there. I was thinking of paying my own fees if the guvnor didn’t agree.”

  “You mean move there? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your hundred pounds won’t last too long.”

  Caspar cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, it’s four hundred. Over.”

  And then he told her the full story of The Patent Hygienic & Artistic Bed Company. They reached the house before he had finished.

  “Do you remember Tip and Puck?” she interrupted him. “I still expect them to come dashing out to meet me, barking away. D’you remember? Dear old things!”

  He saw a tear trembling in her eye and patted her arm comfortingly.

  She made him come into her business room, on the ground floor, where she had had a bed made up to save the fatigue of the stairs. There he finished the full tale of last December’s commercial triumph.

  She thought a long time and then looked at him, almost in fear. “You have the money, then. You also have a head for business—well I always thought as much. But you probably have a better head than anybody in this family.”

  His smile almost split his cheeks.

  “I’m not telling you that in order to swell it,” she said, still solemn. “But to get you to see why it might be a disaster for you to go to this Sheffield College. I can see the short-term attractions, of course. And I don’t belittle them. But you would be doing your father’s work for him. You would be cutting yourself off without a penny.”

  He drew breath to speak; then the thought got home to him.

  Nora went on, hoping she was saying what he had been about to say. “You may not mind. You could probably start from nothing and build something even bigger than Stevenson’s now is. You might not—because everyone in business needs luck. We’ve seen some very astute people ruined and no fault of their own. But, given luck, I’m sure you’d do well. Yet just think, Caspar—Stevenson’s has a book value of four million. As a going concern, goodwill included, it must be worth all of six. Think what you could do with that! You would start as the richest man in England.”

  Caspar giggled almost in terror—these were seditious thoughts he had never dared embrace so openly. “I wouldn’t own it, surely?” he asked.

  “Who cares!” she said. “I don’t own the Wolff Fund, but I control it, absolutely. I don’t care if the man in the moon owns it as long as I have unfettered control. Don’t you see!”

  He saw. His heart raced. “What about Boy, though?”

  She looked away. “Why d’you think I’m saying all this to you? It’s for Young John’s sake, too, you know. I’m very worried. In my view he would be one unholy tragedy for the firm—and for himself, if he took charge.” She seemed about to say more, but no words came.

  “Convince the guv’nor!” he said.

  “You and I will never do that. Your father is hourly expecting to turn into Julius Caesar—or the North Star.” She studied his reaction and smiled as if his calm response had confirmed something for her. “But you might persuade Young John.”

  He tried to sound as if the idea was just occurring to him. “I think Boy should not go up to University, you know. I think he should be given one contract to manage from start to finish. I believe he would then persuade himself.”

  Nora, smiling, shook her head. “He must be over twenty-one, or Stevenson will find every excuse under the sun for him. So he must go to Cambridge. And then he must be allowed to persuade himself. And above all, you must be there to pick up the pieces. If you have meanwhile shunted yourself onto the Sheffield branch line…no hope.”

  He nodded, too grateful to her for words.

  “You know why I am doing this for you, I hope,” she said. “It is not because I love you or admire you more than I do Young John. Never let yourself think that. I do this for his sake, too, as I said. He has a far stronger sense of duty than you have—in fact. I don’t believe you have any. But he would quite literally kill himself before he’d admit defeat. So don’t think I’m your ally and his enemy. Ever.”

  She saw him biting his lip, hating himself for having thought it. Touched, she added: “I’m also doing this because I believe you have something even your father and I don’t have. The ability to think ahead. Your father can think two months ahead if he’s forced to it. I can think two years, with difficulty. I believe (and it may be no more than a mother’s touching faith in her son) but I believe that anyone who can keep secrets the way you can must be able to think very far ahead. I hope so, anyway—because that’s half of what all this is about.”

  He rose to go then, saying he hoped it was true. He didn’t want to hear any more.

  “Oh, you can prove it,” she said, springing the trap. “You can go back to school and leave it in two years’ time with every honour and prize and exhibition going. You can please your father in every way. You can turn into the golden boy of the family. Because, Caspar, five years from now—or whenever it may be—you will need all that goodwill capital in his bank. You will need to draw it all.”

  He laughed, thinking he could surely go now, but she pressed on: “Have you told me everything about your poor performance last term? There was no other reason?”

  He faced her uncertainly. “If you were speaking Latin, mater, I’m sure that would be what they call a ‘question expecting the answer no.’ ” He knew she had been far too offhand when she had discussed Mary’s dismissal with him that time.

  “And you would be right,” Nora said.

  “Mrs. Jarrett told you, then? I mean, told you more than you said she did?”

  “Oh, Caspar! You have this trick of saying and not—saying. What ‘more’ did Mrs. Jarrett tell me?”

  “About Mary Coen.”

  “And…? And…? I’ll strangle you one day!”

  “And me.”

  Nora sighed out a vast relief. “At last!” she said. And she waited.

  Caspar told her, then. Everything. It hurt much less than he had feared. He even showed his mother Mary’s letter. He could see she was close to tears by the time he had finished. “You aren’t angry?” he asked in surprise.

  “I am,” she said, without sounding it. “Of course I am. But I’m glad she meant so much to you. A lot of young men of your class simply forget that servant girls are people. They use them quite shamelessly. I would be—I would be more than angry, I would be heartbroken if any son of mine behaved like that. Never forget, even if they are not servants of ours or of the company, they are all people. Your father never forgets it. I try not to. And so must you.”

  He was struck by the way she said “young men of your class,” not “our class.” It reminded him that she had come up from quite humble origins. But how humble? He remembered that dreadful basement in Cleveland Street—what the tobacconist had called the Other Nation. Had her life been that bad? “You never talk much about when you were young, do you, mater,” he said. “I often wonder what it was like. Where you lived, and so on.”

  “Best forgotten,” she said. “There’s too much future to think about.”

  Chapter 35

  She called the new baby Sefton without even consulting John. She was making it very clear to him, in every way she could, that the child was not his. But he seemed to realize what she was at and went out of his way to deny her the satisfaction of his anger. She wondered if—as part of the famed “hush of life”—he had become unaccountably weak. Or perhaps he just didn’t care?
She’d served all his purposes; now she could go her ways. Neither explanation seemed very likely. The most probable reason, she realized glumly, was that he was playing some sort of deep waiting game. He was still a man to watch, and never to underestimate.

  He made one or two attempts at reconciliation, but so frostily that she thought he was really trying her mood. For her part, these attempts merely strengthened her resolve that, until he turned The Bitch out into the streets where he had first found her—and where she belonged—and until their bastards were in the workhouse, there would be no reconciliation. She treated his attempts as that sort of male sentimentality which wants to keep its cake and eat it.

  Naturally he would come to some of her salons and dinners, just as before—they would keep up appearances in public. And naturally, too, they would always meet to deal with the business. Too many people—too many thousands of people—depended on Stevenson’s for them to put personal rancour above so much trust. Nora was aware that, for her at least, there was a certain amount of dishonesty in this. She was, in part, using the business to keep a tenuous line between John and herself. And because that line was there and had to be kept intact, she could afford the luxury of rejecting him completely in her private life. Any other wife, not having the business to cushion such indulgence, might have swallowed part of her hurt and responded to his overtures and so, step by step, have hoped to win him back.

  Half of her suspected that was what she ought to be doing. But the other half set her jaw stubbornly against it. She was not “any other wife” and if it took twenty years for him to learn that—never mind. Learn it he would! She would never, never go on her knees for him.

  In June of that year, when Sefton was just a month old, John had to go to Canada to head a commission whose main purpose was to unruffle a lot of colonial feathers over the debacle of the Grand Trunk Railway. He was an obvious choice since Stevenson’s had refused to have anything to do with the railway from the outset. And now the main contractors, Sir Morton Peto, Tom Brassey, and Edward Betts, were all in deep money troubles over it. John had kept clear of the project as soon as he discovered that the entire railway was to be engineered to English standards—very costly and very permanent works everywhere. English standards were appropriate to England, where lines were short, population dense, traffic high, and return on capital was quick. None of that was true of Canada. What Canada needed was temporary works of a much lower standard—built to last ten years instead of a thousand—whose improvement could then be paid for out of revenue. America had proved it could be done. They even laid track held in place by nails! And generally they worked to standards that would turn an English engineer’s hair white in less than a mile. But the Canadians, being still British, knew better; and they employed English engineers.

  Well, they were better. They were also bankrupt. And voters were now being presented with the bill. So Lord Stevenson must preside over a commission to reconcile as many conflicts as possible, as speedily as might be, as tactfully as only he knew how, and as cheaply as the civil servants who accompanied him could manage.

  Before he left he said something about time healing the wounds. Nora, determined that no mention of The Bitch would ever pass her lips, said nothing.

  ***

  Caspar’s final remarks of that Easter holiday conversation left a deeper impression on Nora than her response at the time had suggested. Perhaps, she thought, that was the elusive something which was lacking in all her children: a knowledge of their parents’ backgrounds. Not head-knowledge but heart-knowledge. Her experience, and John’s, spanned the whole range of England’s two nations. In the years before they met, she had choked in cotton mills, he down sewers. They had lived during those times in the meanest slums. At the other extreme, they had been at the Palace and had been presented to the queen—as, next autumn, Winifred and Young John would be presented.

  The children could not really comprehend it. To them poverty was the standard of life enjoyed by the servants. Well, Caspar didn’t think that any longer. But look what a shock the discovery had been to him. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that the children must see for themselves those places she had known.

  She said nothing to them, but that summer on their way to Ireland, instead of travelling straight through Manchester on the loop line between the Manchester & Leeds and the Liverpool & Manchester, they all got out at Victoria and were ushered, bewildered and excited, into two waiting coaches. Sefton, of course, was still with his wet nurse back at Thorpe. The four next youngest, Abigail, nearly fourteen now, Hester, Mather, and Rosalind, now eight, were with the servants in the second coach. Nora and Nanette were with the four older children in the lead: Winifred, nineteen, Boy, Caspar, and—just turned fifteen—Clement.

  Abigail was furious at being put with the children.

  “Why should I?” she asked fiercely.

  The others rounded on her and chanted her eternal complaint: “I can’t help being younger than you four!”

  “Well I can’t!” she screamed.

  “No,” Clement said, “but you can help behaving younger than the other four!”

  Everyone laughed except Abigail, who sat glowering in the corner of her coach, breathing stertorously through flared nostrils.

  Out they drove, through Chorlton on Medlock, Greenheys, Longsight, Levenshulme, Heaton Chapel, and Cringle Fields to the outskirts of Stockport. What all those names had once meant to her!

  “All this was green fields when I was young,” Nora said.

  “Mother’s got her property-buying face,” Winifred teased.

  “No.” Boy laughed. “It’s got too dirty. She’s going to sell it.”

  Nora wondered how to make them understand what these scenes meant to her—and ought to mean to them. Caspar watched her from the dark of the diagonal corner. Winifred returned to her tales of the trivial naughtinesses that passed for wrongdoing in Bedford College. Boy capped each tale with a head-pharaoh’s-eye view of similar peccadilloes at Blenheim. Caspar tried to remember the formula for compound interest, which his mind kept muddling with exponential logarithms. He knew his money had earned £5 8s. since December but he could not, in his head, remember how he had arrived at the sum. Anyway, he knew that to collect interest, even at two percent, was better than to pay it. Some time about last November that twelve and a half percent had really made him sweat. In ten years his £460 would be worth £561 15s.

  At Stockport, Nora made the coachman turn left up a winding lane south of the stinking river Tame. “To Brinnington,” she said. It was not far now. How curious, she thought, that Winifred should talk of property buying. The first property she had ever bought, out of the profits on the original Stevenson shop, lay just a few miles farther south at Alderley Edge. A hundred acres for a thousand pounds. If she still had it, the land would now be worth almost forty times that, what with all the fine houses that had been built out there since. But she had been forced to sell it when John’s foolhardiness had nearly bankrupted Stevenson’s (though only she and he knew it was that bad) back in 1849. Even worse, he had offered her back the value of all her properties when the firm was right side up again, and she had refused because (oh, irony of ironies!) the money they represented might drive a wedge between herself and him. Well, John wasn’t the only fool in this family. Over a quarter million that would have been.

  The coachman told her they were near Brinnington. She looked out and thought he must be making a mistake. All these mean terraces and hovels? It couldn’t be! True, her family had lived in a hovel hereabouts, but it had been one of a row of only five, near the spring. All the rest was pasture and copse. This terrible sprawl must have obliterated them.

  Or had it? She leaned far out of the window, seeking Brinnington Mount.

  Relief! It was still too far away. Their hovel—“o’il” they had called it (or “pig coit” when the mud was at its slushiest)�
�was still some way along this lane.

  Winifred was the first to realize what their mother was at. “Mama!” she cried in delight. “Is this where you used to live? When you were poor?”

  Nora’s smile was answer enough.

  The young people looked out at the dreary townscape with new eyes.

  “Good Lord!” Boy said.

  Caspar, who had been trying to remember his compound interest sums, had just recalled with satisfaction that if his investment were left untouched for a hundred years, his grandchildren would get about £3,400; the news that these were the famous slums his mother’s family had been reduced to was apposite: if he could go back a century to that profligate old squire, her great-grandfather, and tell him the power of compound interest, what a difference it would have made to his mother’s life! Why were people so shortsighted? If everyone was compelled by law to invest just one pound at two percent, and if it was left untouched for two thousand years, the whole world could retire and live off the interest.

  As soon as he arrived at this notion he realized there was something wrong with it. The mathematics? Surely not. But if the mathematics was right, everything else had to be right. Mathematics was the key. That’s what it was for—to help you get everything else right. Some more thought was needed.

  “Stop here,” Nora said.

  They had left the last straggle of houses behind. The fields were beginning to assume a remembered pattern, though they were all smaller than she had expected. She got down, helped by Caspar, who had leaped ahead of her.

  “There were five ‘o’ils’ somewhere here,” she said. “I don’t suppose they’ll be more than little mounds now. Look for some rough, low banks, sort of squarish, in a row. On this side.”

  About twenty yards farther along, the straggling hedgerow gave out to a large, weed-strewn patch of unfenced land. “About here?” Winifred asked. She held her mother’s other arm.

  “I think it is,” Nora said, trying to put more conviction into it than she felt.