The boy, Hugh thought. When was Antonia’s boy born?
He would never have been asking this question had he thought more of Caryll or less of Tom. But as it was, perceiving Caryll as afraid of him, he deplored the fact that this timorous mumbler was his brilliant meteor of a brother’s only child. Or was he? Hugh frowned a long time at the paper before he refolded it along its three creases.
Tom whistled. “Quite a hunk!”
The brothers were going over Onyx’s profit and loss sheet in Hugh’s office. The black number at the bottom was very substantial.
“Tom,” Hugh said. “Draw it all out.”
“Are you crazy? I need this—and a damn sight more—to build the English plant.”
The idea of putting up a factory in England had come to Tom a year earlier when Montgomery Edge, who held Onyx’s London franchise, had visited in Detroit. Monty was able, ambitious, and—most important to Tom—deeply knowledgeable in every idiosyncrasy of the internal-combustion engine.
“This isn’t the time to expand,” Hugh said. “This isn’t the time to build factories.”
“You sound like a bookkeeper.”
“If the appeal loses, the court’ll strip Onyx of everything to pay those royalties. Keep this profit. You’ll have a half million to fall back on.”
“I’m not about to fall, Hugh, but if I do, I have a cushion.”
Hugh was aware how uncomfortably thin this cushion was. The New York detectives had found out for him that Tom had less than ten thousand dollars cash, and that in his wife’s name. Hugh marveled that his brother could commit himself so utterly, holding back nothing, though by now he had accepted that this plunging courage as well as Tom’s quirky genius were the raw ingredients of his success.
“I’m going to England with you,” he said.
Tom had been stretching. His arms dropped. “What?”
“I’ll sail with you on the Oceanic.”
“Leave your lair?”
“If you’re crazy enough to go ahead with this, I must,” Hugh said, gazing directly at his brother. “We’ll need a good many dealers, and to check the applicants I have to be there.”
Tom swallowed the subterfuge. “No sacrifice too great for Onyx?” he said, his voice jaunty with pleasure.
“Right.”
“Remember, Hugh? You always talked about traveling in Europe. Maybe we can get a quick boat over to France.”
“Strictly business, Tom, though I know you’re dying for a social companion.”
They both smiled. In the industry Tom was famed for his indifference to the extravagant entertainments of the new automotive royalty—he didn’t even own a dinner suit.
The massive carton of fading blueprints was turned over to the attorneys. There was nothing to do but wait. In November the three judges of the Circuit Court of Appeals would hear the oral arguments, ponder the exhibits, read the briefs, then retire to decide the fate of Ford and Onyx.
November … and this was April.
On the blustery morning of April 11 Tom and Hugh boarded the Wolverine, the first leg of their journey. As they pulled out of the depot Tom was experiencing the taut nerves that he felt at the start of an endurance race—in a way he was challenging those three judges. Hugh huddled in a corner seat of their compartment, wondering about Antonia’s boy. Enmeshed in his schemes, he did not notice the view as the train chugged past the ugly miles of Detroit industry and out onto the windswept farmland.
CHAPTER 10
They had not expected to be greeted at Southampton, but as they emerged from the canvas-covered gangway, Montgomery Edge was waving. When the Englishman had been in Detroit, Hugh had not met him, and during the introduction the recluse gazed stiffly ahead, his face and body remaining rigid as they maneuvered through the bustling, crowded pier sheds. Edge’s chauffeur opened the door, and Hugh climbed in hastily. Tom paused to touch the hood of the Rolls-Royce. The mirror finish came from forty coats of paint—each one hand-rubbed—with a final varnishing in a room sheeted so that no dust could penetrate.
“She’s a corker,” Tom said appreciatively.
“Yes, a decent enough machine, the Silver Ghost,” Montgomery Edge agreed. “Their gift to me when I left them.”
The limousine glided between horsecarts and lorries. Hugh, his nerves still jumpy, glanced covertly at the Englishman next to him. Montgomery Edge. Of medium height, with fresh pink cheeks and a bristle of mustache that matched his sandy hair, Monty looked born to carry 20-gauge sporting shotguns on long hunting weekends. Hugh, though, had run a superior check on him before giving the go-ahead for the crucial London franchise. Born Alfie Edge, son of a Manchester drayman, he had apprenticed at Henry Royce’s electric craneworks long before that alliterative merger with the Honorable Charles S. Rolls. Edge’s name had been enhanced, his accent had undergone a metamorphosis, his thrusting brilliance had learned to conceal itself, and he had taken to wife Edwina, glacial daughter of Nigel Alexander, K.C., a marriage apparently lacking the physical dimension, for Monty had a mistress tucked away in a St. John’s Wood flat.
What Hugh could not know was that the Edges had been set for Tom to stay at their home. When Montgomery Edge heard that Tom’s peculiar brother was accompanying him, he had brought forth a string of drayman’s oaths. He needed time to impress Tom, for he was determined to become commander in chief of the Fiver’s conquest of Britain.
Hugh’s personal secretary, who had gone up on the train with the baggage, was waiting at the Hyde Park Hotel. Though it was after four, Hugh sent the pallid, efficient Harvard graduate out to make contact with the London detective firm.
The following afternoon Hugh received a photograph of the third form at Eddington College School on Wigmore Street. Justin Hutchinson, the third from the left in the back row, was the tallest of the sixteen boys. Hugh peered at the dark-haired oval, and decided that the chemical imprint had caught a brooding depth of eyes that was familiar. He took the picture to a window. Maybe the child had moved. A slightly blurred enigma.
II
Tom and Hugh slipped back into their old bachelor ways, bickering yet close. At breakfast, sniping about some business matter, both seemed to forget they were in a large, comfortable hotel suite with a view of Hyde Park and acted as if they were impoverished boys back in that drab flat. Tom left early each morning with Monty to search for factory sites, and on the two evenings that they returned home in time, the Edges entertained him. Hugh spent his days and evenings poring over dealer applications, Onyx’s local balance sheets, the British advertising. The photograph of the third form was locked in the hotel safe. Craftily Hugh awaited the propitious hour to spring his news: if he spoke too soon, Tom might suspect his sudden willingness to go on this journey.
They had been in London eight days before they dined together. After the dirty dishes were wheeled out, Hugh cracked a pecan, carefully extracting the nutmeat. “I have some news, Tom. Major Stuart is dead.” He spoke without emotion, although inverse grief afflicted him as acutely as ever. “He died of cancer more than a year ago.”
After a long pause Tom said, “I’m not putting on an armband.” His eyes remained on Hugh.
Antonia, they were both thinking. Antonia.
“I’m not in mourning, either,” Hugh said.
“You haven’t finished.”
“She lives here.”
Tom’s face went slack. His pupils expanded. He rose, moving like a sleepwalker to the window, pulling back the heavy drape. A spring shower had broken: streetlamps and the lights of carriages and motorcars were reflected on the shimmering black streets. “You mean London?” he asked finally.
“Yes. Number twenty Rutland Gate. It’s close by.”
“Why here?”
“I don’t know. She married an American. Claude Hutchinson. He’s dead too. She’s a widow.”
“Hutchinson … she knew him before … in Detroit.”
It was Hugh’s turn for surprise. “She did?”
“She said he was nice but stodgy, dull. She married him?”
“Yes.” Hugh poured two brandies. “That’s all I know. That, and she was generous enough to send us the blueprints.”
“She?”
“Yes.” Hugh went to Tom with a snifter.
Tom ignored the drink. “I thought it was the Major.”
“She asked that you not know.”
“Then why are you telling me now?” Tom said.
Hugh did not know what to answer. He had sworn not to tell his brother, and yet here he was, in the most calculating way, blurting out this news. “We’re brothers, aren’t we, Tom? And brothers don’t keep secrets from each other.” He turned away, quickly, knowing that his duplicity would appear obvious to Tom.
But Tom, with a dazed look, was walking stiffly to his bedroom and didn’t even hear Hugh’s reply.
III
The next morning—Saturday—was unseasonably warm: the sun shone in a clear-washed blue sky. In Rutland Gate, an early Victorian square off Hyde Park, tall, creamy houses linked shoulders around an iron-fenced private garden where pruned elms rustled their new leaves above the daffodils swaying in crescent-shaped beds. Tom’s steps seemed to bounce on the glittery pavement, but his smile was dreamy: Hugh’s disclosure quite literally had stunned him, and he was drifting in a moony sea of amorous recollections.
Coming to number twenty, he climbed the steps and halted. The brass nameplate was engraved: Mrs. Claude Hutchinson. At this well-polished reality his dreamy smile faded. This was her name. Not Antonia Dalzell, a vibrant girl in her teens, but Mrs. Claude Hutchinson. And he was a married man, contentedly married to the person in this world that he considered his best friend. He and Antonia were not the two people they had been ten years before. He touched the nameplate, recoiling at the thought of their last scene together. What am I going to say to her? What sort of apologies can I make? He felt a stabbing pain above his eye. It never occurred to him to go back down the freshly washed steps.
Abruptly he raised the mermaid doorknocker.
The door was opened by a short, pear-shaped manservant in an alpaca jacket.
“Is Mrs. Hutchinson home?”
“What’s it in regard to?” the servant replied, looking at Tom without raising his eyelids.
Tom forgot he was undisputed owner of a company capitalized at over twelve million dollars. “I’m a friend of hers,” he said, berating himself for not halting at that florist’s or—better yet—the elegant confectioner’s across from the hotel. “I had business with her late uncle.” He extracted a card from his leather cardcase.
T. K. BRIDGER
ONYX AUTOMOBILE COMPANY
DETROIT, MICHIGAN
The man examined it and then said, “Will you come inside, sir.”
He led Tom up a flight of stairs, leaving him in double reception rooms that ran from the front of the house to the rear: the partitions were folded back, and Tom, alone, stared around. There were no draperies, only lace curtains that curved out in the breeze. On the shining parquet floors, dark and carpetless, rested random chairs and two low sofas slipcovered in pale linen. A copper tub of massed flowers was placed casually near the window. The room had a spareness that deflected the eye to the numerous paintings, and these were brightly colored vistas, rosy family groups, flower gardens, unposed naked women. Naïve paintings drenched in innocent light, rather than dark—and valuable-looking—hues. The drawing room had the happy, transitory charm of a tented summer pavilion.
Tom could not help recalling that even when they were very poor, Maud had saved for heavy, durable furnishings; her motto: Good things are cheaper in the long run because they last. Briefly he wondered about Antonia’s finances, then reminded himself that she kept a butler and lived in an exclusive square off the park.
A child’s laughter rang through the rear windows.
Tom swung around, bewildered. A child? How could he not have taken that possibility into account?
A shriller cry. “No! Justin, no! I want my turn over!”
Children, he amended, going to the long windows.
Below was a small city garden whose walls were hidden by white-blossomed rhododendron bushes. The sunlit part of the lawn was covered by an Oriental rug. And there was Antonia. On her stomach, propped up by her elbows, one leg raised, the pump adangle from her stockinged toes, a pink and white striped skirt falling back to expose a frothy edge of petticoats: from this distance she appeared unchanged by the decade. She faced two children across a gameboard. From his view above and behind the pair, Tom could tell only that the boy had Antonia’s shining black hair and was a good deal older than Caryll, while the girl—almost a baby she was—had hair the unusual clear, molten gold of a California poppy. All three laughed as the tiny girl lunged to wrest the dice cup from the boy, who held her off easily.
Tom had the sensation of looking at yet another artlessly happy painting, one into which he would soon be welcomed.
He heard the doors open below. Antonia, pulling her skirt over her ankles—those pretty, delicate ankles—rolled over, sitting. The servant appeared and handed her a card.
A cannon shot might have exploded in the garden.
Even from this distance Tom could see the terror in her eyes as she glanced up at the window—he was positive she could see him through the Brussels lace. Scrambling to her feet, she pulled the boy to his. He came to her shoulder, and something about the boy’s height momentarily nagged at Tom. Then Antonia swooped at the baby, who kicked with a small white boot in protest at being lifted. A collie rose from the shade, barking around them as they disappeared.
Tom stood motionless, peering down at the empty garden where the gameboard had spilled onto the lawn. He hadn’t been sure what would happen in the way of reconciliation, but the disparity between this cataclysm he had caused and the night’s romantically adolescent maunderings made him physically ill. If she hated him this way, why had she returned his blueprints? The manservant’s heavy tread echoed up the stairs.
“Mrs. Hutchinson is out, sir.”
“But I just saw her in the—”
“I’m sorry. She’s not home.”
“When will she be back?”
“If you’ll follow me.”
Tom wiped his forehead. I’ve managed fine for years without seeing her, he thought as he went down the stairs, so if she still hates me, the hell with her, it doesn’t matter, she’s nothing to me anymore. Yet he was remembering the sweet dower of her naked body against his, seeing her pale, drawn face in his dingy apartment. His thoughts came in violent bursts that had nothing to do with indifference. The hell with her.
IV
He did not tell Hugh of the debacle, nor did he mention Antonia, but she occupied his mind, center stage, tormenting him like a lecherous succubus in nightmares that were the antithesis of his earlier tenderly erotic dreams. She seduced him with unspeakably loathsome degeneracies, she flagellated him with doubts and self-contempt, she caused his intractably foul humor.
He interviewed the candidates Hugh had selected for the Birmingham dealership, rejecting all three. Monty drove him to building sites endowed with every specification he had outlined: he found fault with each.
At the end of the week Monty said in his most offhand tone, “We’re going to the Comstocks’ tomorrow night, a ball, and they’ve asked to meet you.”
A no was on Tom’s tongue, but weary of his own negative despotism, he replied, “Sounds fine to me, Monty.”
The door to the bathroom was open, and Hugh watched his brother rinse one of those new Gillette safety razors. “I wonder how many strings Edwina Edge had to pull to get this invitation.”
“Why see plots everywhere?” Tom said sourly. “You’re a fox, but that doesn’t mean everyone is.”
“The Comstocks are in Court circles, Monty is a drayman’s son, and in this country the twain never meet. The Edges are out to impress you.”
“Why would they want to impress me?” asked Tom.
Hugh stared at his brother. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that Tom, in his way an ascetic man, had never appreciated the silky steel of power. He ignored its enjoyable aspects. He had very little idea that in ruling thousands of lives his whims and moods were catered to and feared. “The way your disposition’s been lately, Edge is positive that British Onyx is a dead issue. Or his part in it, anyway. She’s proving to you that her husband is worthy.”
“Good thing you’ve explained it. Until now I just figured they were dragging me along to a party I didn’t want to go to,” Tom said, and began to dress in his new evening clothes: this morning a tailor had been hastily summoned.
V
Oval mirrors on the broad staircase reflected footmen in crimson livery as well as the ascending guests, who spoke to one another in subdued tones: Edwina Edge maintained her pace a step ahead of Tom and her husband. She was two years older than Monty, and in her drab russet lace, her face marked with furrows from nose to mouth, that intractably cold look in her eyes, she might have been ten years older. Yet her air of unflappable assurance convinced her friends that dowdiness and age were the feminine qualities prized by Montgomery Edge—and indeed, Monty was glancing with proud fondness at his wife’s angular back. Just as Hugh figured, she had maneuvered this invitation: ambition being the bond between the Edges, they worked more closely than most couples.
Across the rear of the second floor stretched the finely proportioned ballroom with its intermingled resplendencies and shabbiness. Black-insulated wiring cut across the beautifully carved rose garlands of the paneling, gilt eroded from the line of fluted columns, and watermarks stained the magnificent, domed ceiling. By and large the guests were less lavishly turned out than their counterparts would have been at a New York dance: some of the men’s clothes were dated, and some of the women’s gowns were by no means elaborate, while much of the jewelry was set in the heavier styles of other eras. The mélange of wealth and carelessness could be carried off only by a long-entrenched aristocracy.
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