Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  She wanted to hold him then and to comfort him. Even more, she wanted him to hold her. To comfort her—to more-than-comfort her. The muscles of her thighs and back twitched into rigidity while she longed for him as she had not longed in years.

  But she was too proud and stubborn to make any actual move. And he was too defeated, and too fearful of her, to make himself even more vulnerable.

  She let his weeping pass off and then asked, in a voice much calmer than she herself felt, “What will he do instead?”

  “Go into the army.” He had to clear his throat twice before he could complete the sentence.

  “He told you that?”

  “He wrote to me.”

  “Wrote? That’s not like him.”

  “Isn’t it? I don’t know what’s like him and what’s not like him. I don’t know what any of them are like. Obviously.”

  An evasiveness in his tone and gesture made her feel certain that he had told her very little of what had really passed between himself and their son. Something quite dreadful must have happened for Young John to write to his father instead of saying it, whatever it was, man to man.

  John looked at her wistfully. “You’re being uncharacteristically mild.”

  Nora thought well before she answered. Then, seeing no point in being soft, she said, “Mild? With my eldest daughter in prison, my eldest son run off to India, and my next son vanished God knows where—all because you know what’s best for them. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m mild, John. I’m just praying you’ll know what’s worst for the other six, so that I’ll have some children left me in my old age.”

  John nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “I deserve that.”

  “You deserved it! And more. You’ve ruined our family. It will never recover from what you’ve done.”

  Her ferocity startled even herself. Her fear that she would capitulate to him—beg him to come into her bed—was too deep for her to grasp or to relate to the savagery of her outburst.

  He fell upon her feet, trying to clutch at them through the counterpane. “Don’t,” he begged. “You’re saying nothing I haven’t said to myself a hundred times already this evening, before I came here.”

  She pulled her feet away, leaving him to scrabble at empty material. “Why did you come here, John? Just to snivel and wipe your nose on my bed linen?”

  He sat up and looked at her briefly but could not face her gaze. Eyes downcast, he said, “Don’t, Nora. Please don’t. I came here to…of course…say I was wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong. And to ask you what I must do now to make it right? Or as right as it can be made. Are you sure you don’t know where Caspar is?”

  “Why?”

  “I want him. I need him. I mean, the firm needs him. Did he really make a hundred profit on a hundred you lent him?”

  She smiled, for the first time. “Who told you that?”

  “Young John. This afternoon. He said Caspar told Winifred and she told him.”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “Oh, Caspar! Always making things secret! In fact, he made over five hundred pounds on it. By the most outrageous piece of business: clever, and just a little…” She waved her fingers doubtfully, suggesting that the language had not yet coined the right word for what Caspar had done. She looked at John. “It was exactly what you would have done at his age.”

  John nodded ruefully. “D’you know what he’s doing now? Where he is?” When Nora hesitated, he added, “I only want him back. I want him for Stevenson’s.”

  “He’s somewhere in the Midlands, I think. His last letter to me—and he doesn’t write often—was from Wolverhampton. But, knowing Caspar, I’d say that’s a certain sign he’s nowhere near Wolverhampton in fact, but only went there to post his letter. As to what he’s doing—he’s acquiring those skills that Fiennes seems to have neglected to impart. I hate to lay the curse on him again, but he is very like you.”

  “Can you get in touch with him?”

  “I’ve already been trying. He talked most about going to America—but, of course, with him it’s just as likely to be a sign he has no intention of going there at all. And what about Winifred?”

  “I’ll give you a letter. Will you…go to her?”

  “Tomorrow.” She did not take her eyes off him. Every time he looked up at her he stared directly into those pools of accusation. “Is that all, John?” she asked. “Do your confessions stop there? Is that all you want back? Just Winifred and Caspar?” She could not make it plainer than that.

  He looked at her. He stretched forth his hands. “Nora.”

  She clutched the shawl to her, for fear of obeying that almost overpowering urge to surrender to him. “What, John?”

  “Oh, Nora!”

  “What?”

  Still he held his hands out to her. “It’s not easy…I…”

  She had to shut her eyes. “You are trying to tell me that it’s not easy?”

  He fumbled for her body through the counterpane. “I know what you’ll ask of me. And I can’t!”

  She leaped from the bed and backed on tiptoe against the wall. “Can’t?” she roared in one long rising note.

  He bowed his head and clutched the counterpane to his lips. “I can’t,” he whispered into it.

  “Then either you leave this room, or I will.”

  His eyes sought hers, begging for mercy. “But Sefton…” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve owned him as my son. Never by word or gesture have I suggested…I’ve owned him, Nora.”

  She saw the justice of it. And he caught the hesitation in her gaze. His eyes lit up.

  She shivered. Oh, how delicious it would be to run to him now! To feel his arms about her again—to surrender to all that mountainous strength—to be his. To belong! To belong again.

  She took a step toward him. He smiled. It was going to be all right! It was going to be marvellous! She held her arms forward to him, feeling suddenly shy of his touch. The shawl fell from her. His hands came up to take hers. He was lost in wonder and adoration—he could not believe it.

  “You may support them,” she said in the gentlest, most loving tone. “And her. Provide for her. Make sure they are well launched. But you’ll never see them again, will you?”

  To her horror the light and joy fled from him at once. “You…bitch!” he said. “I told you you’d ask it. And I said I couldn’t. And you pretended you weren’t going to. You trapped me.”

  She backed away, appalled at his words. “You thought I’d ask that!” Her voice rang out. “That? I’ll tell you what I was going to ask. I was going to ask you to throw them into the street. Damn you to hell—I was going to insist you do it!” She had second wind now. Her fury possessed her utterly. “What? You thought you could come creeping into my bed one night a month—and into hers for the other night—or however many it is you can manage these days? Thought I’d just lap that up, did you? Well, if she’s still the whore she was when you found her, I’m surprised your feeble and infrequent little pokes can satisfy her. Are you sure they do, John?”

  He turned and left the room.

  “How many of her bastards did you truly sire?” she shouted after him. “How many do you merely ‘own’?”

  Then she ran to the bed and pulled the pillows over her head so that no one could hear her howling and howling and howling, at the thought of all she had so nearly regained—all that was now forever lost to her.

  Her only comfort—and it did not occur to her for many hours—was the thought of that much greater loss, if she had yielded on what John had imagined were her terms.

  Chapter 47

  When Nora and Winifred took rooms at the Park Avenue Hotel, she knew she had just two hours to find Caspar if she wanted to surprise him. Her portrait was too often in the magazines, and the Great Ship Company (owner of the Great Eastern) was too soli
citous of her welfare as a distinguished passenger for her to hope to slip into Manhattan unnoticed. Within two hours, she estimated, her arrival would be recorded in one newspaper or another. It would be a shame if, having traced him here despite all the attempts he had made to cover his tracks, she was to be cheated of the prize: the look on his face when he saw her.

  She knew that Caspar’s secrecy was not directed specifically against her but was turned against the world in general. He had not tried to cover his tracks—that had been natural to him. On the contrary, to leave an open trail that all could follow would have called for some overpowering reason. All her probings of the London banking system—open and clandestine—had drawn a blank. She had known then that Caspar was using another name. And there the trail ran out, until she had remembered that furniture shop he had dealt with. Mr. Vane had at once supplied the name Aloysius Abercrombie, which, at the end of May, turned up in a London bank as a transferrer of some funds to the Hon. Caspar Stevenson at the National Bank of the Republic in New York, corner of Broadway and Wall Street. Thither she and Winifred were now bound. Their mere nine days under steam had enabled them almost to outstrip Caspar, condemned by the vagaries of windpower to a six-week voyage.

  They spent the first part of the drive, south from Madison Square, like all visitors, looking, absorbing. Nora, from time to time, glanced anxiously at her daughter, who was so quiet since her release from that “school.” Nora had expected anger, she had been prepared for bitterness, she had even thought that Winifred might have gone a little wild and abandoned in celebration of her freedom. This range of expectation was, she wryly reflected, a measure of her ignorance of her own daughter and of the directions in which she had been maturing these last few years. For Winifred had returned to her family with none of these moods upon her; instead there was a cold and calm determination. The object of that determination she had not yet revealed, not even on the voyage out, when there had been nine brisk, warm, leisurely days to expand into, days for both of them to heal their many inner wounds. But there was no mistaking the fact that, beneath that reserved though sunny exterior, Winifred now nursed an aim of such all-consuming importance that it left no room for the shallow and obvious responses of anger or bitterness. She was even warm to her father and managed to suggest that she owed him some debt for having incarcerated her in that place. Nevertheless, Nora did not entirely trust this, to her, unnatural calm; she was still watchful for signs of the outburst she felt sure had to come.

  “Fine houses, Mama,” Winifred said. “If Caspar’s seen these, you’ll have a job to lure him back home.”

  “Six million pounds?” Nora said.

  “And his father’s welcome—don’t leave that aside.”

  “But he detests his father.”

  Winifred’s smile said she knew better.

  “I wonder if you’re right,” Nora said. After a silence, she went on: “Isn’t it strange how you can work for years to make a certain thing happen? And then, when you’re actually in sight of it, you wonder?”

  “Wonder if you’re right?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “You mean about Caspar and Stevenson’s?”

  “D’you think he’s right, popsie?”

  “He’s very different from Papa. I know you think they’re very alike. But I don’t.”

  “He’s practical. He’s avaricious. He’s good with people. He’s out for himself…” Nora’s list petered out into silence. She was provoking no response in Winifred.

  “I like Steamer, Mama,” she said at length, as a kind of insurance against what was coming next. “He is good with people. He is good company. There’s no one I’d rather be shipwrecked like Robinson Crusoe with.” She laughed. “But he couldn’t run away then, could he! He couldn’t desert me and follow his own star. And that’s the point. Papa is good with people, too. But Papa also cares about them. If Papa took up someone, he’d never, never desert them—no matter what it cost him.”

  Nora looked in alarm at her daughter. Did she know? Was she trying to excuse, in this roundabout way, John and The Bitch? One glance showed she was not. In all innocence Winifred had said to Nora the one thing that—give or take a bitter year—might ultimately reconcile her to John’s continued infidelity.

  Winifred went on developing her point: “Steamer isn’t like that. I’m not blaming him any more than I’d blame a man for being colour-blind. It’s not a thing you can develop at will, I think. But Steamer will be the greatest friend to a person as long as there’s utility in it, as well. When that’s gone, or is used up, it’s a brick wall made of smiles and words but nothing more.”

  Nora drew sharp breath. “That’s very harsh, dear.”

  “It would be if he could help it. But, as I say, I think he is just like that. So—to turn your question around—do you think Stevenson’s needs someone like that for its next phase of…growth? Hardly growth…perhaps just to stay where it is. I don’t know. What d’you think yourself?”

  The thought had occurred to Nora even as Winifred was speaking. “It connects,” she said, “with one thing I’ve always thought about him. And that was why I believed he, rather than Young John, should take over. I’ve always felt that, once he became really familiar with the business, he’d be able to do what your father’s never done and what I find I can’t do—which is to say: ‘There is where the business should be ten years from now.’ While you were talking about him it occurred to me that ‘there’ might be a very different place from where the firm is now. So perhaps we do need a man like Caspar—a man who can go on encouraging people, praising them, and so on, for what they’re doing now; and all the while the other half of his mind is preparing to drop them, finish off their work, switch to the new direction or whatever it may be. Someone who truly cared about people, like your father, someone less secretive couldn’t do it.”

  Winifred’s mouth was open and dry. “Isn’t that awful, Mother?”

  “It’s an awful responsibility. Do we want Stevenson’s to go that way? What if all the other, nicer ways lead back down into the pit? Wouldn’t it be better for Stevenson’s to go under rather than turn into that sort of firm? Oh, Winifred! We have two minutes to decide!”

  Winifred closed her eyes as if in prayer. “I wish I were more of a fatalist,” she said. “I wish I believed these things were out of our control…that some great Spirit of History was just wafting us all along like a great river. I wish it didn’t matter who was in charge or what he was like or what he did.”

  “You’re wishing to be a Marxist,” Nora said, amused.

  “Am I? Theirs must be a splendid religion. We could say ‘to hades with it, let Steamer take over, history will sweep him on willy-nilly’.”

  “Instead, what do we say?”

  “I say we don’t really know enough about Steamer to be sure he’d be like that. So we can’t play God with him and the firm.”

  Nora laughed, mostly in relief. “We can’t even play that other god—the Spirit of History.”

  The driver announced that they had arrived.

  On her card, which simply said “The Countess of Wharfedale,” she added in pencil, “the mother of the Hon. Caspar Stevenson,” and sent it in. The head cashier, Mr. Ford, came running out, snatched off his hat and stood bareheaded before the carriage door.

  “Mr. Ford?” Nora asked before he could introduce himself; she had prepared this well before she left. “I have greetings for you from Mr. Bidwell, the Wells, Fargo man in London. And also from Mr. Adams of Chambers’s Bank—who was here last autumn?”

  “Indeed, madam, I recollect the gentleman with…ah…the warmest, that is to say, the most cordial and amicable sentiments. And to be sure, Mr. Bidwell is a colleague these venerable years. Yes, indeed. And may I be permitted to extend to your ladyship and…er…” He waved amicably at the air in Winifred’s direction.

  “Winifred, dear, this is
Mr. Ford, the chief cashier of New York’s most important banking house. Lady Winifred Stevenson, who is the elder sister of that…‘scallawag,’ I believe you would say?”

  “Not if they are successful, ma’am.” Ford’s eye twinkled. “I doubt if we would call the Honourable Caspar by that particular adumbration.”

  “Oh?”

  “Have you not seen his new offices?”

  “New offices, Mr. Ford? But how long has he been here?”

  “Little short of two weeks, ma’am.” He sounded surprised she did not know.

  “Our letters, you see, Mr. Ford, have passed each other on the Atlantic. We cannot find his office. Nor do we know his business. Nor his prospects. Nor his associates…for my part, I believe ‘scallawag’ is a somewhat mild term.”

  Ford glanced nervously around. A copy of Gilbart on Banking, propped against the window from inside, was signal that his sanctum had been tidied, cleaned, and burnished by twenty fevered hands, and it was safe to invite Lady Stevenson and her daughter inside. Which he then did.

  Half an hour later, refreshed with iced lemonade, they left for Caspar’s office, the Uptown Construction Company on Baxter and Canal Streets, firmly in downtown Manhattan.

  “Isn’t that typical of Steamer, Mama!” Winifred said when they were back in the cab. “He even throws people off the scent about where his company is located.”

  During that half hour they had learned all they thought they needed to know about Caspar, the Fourteenth Ward, Joe Delaney, Miss Laney Delaney, and the prospects for a construction company with such connections.

  “I must say,” Nora told Winifred, “I never imagined we’d glean so much so soon. Can you imagine how many weeks it would have taken to find all this out in London!”

  “I wonder if all Americans are as fond of talking about other people. It’s like Ireland, isn’t it?”

  “It’s useful. Caspar will revel in it.”

  “I was just thinking that. And if he’s found a girl, and a good business, and has fallen on his feet the way Ford was saying…well! We won’t see him back in England.”