There was one thing he noticed that interested him quite a lot. The first time he’d met Mark, Mark had done that freakish thing on the train. Well, there was something of the same sort built right into his mind, and it came out every now and then in his handling of a technical problem. Once or twice, that is to say, Phil was aware of what you might call a brilliant solution of a difficulty that wasn’t there. No harm in it among all these beautifully made working models. But cutting that sort of caper, Phil thought, would have to go when you got commercial.
He said so. Rather surprisingly that made Mark angry – in fact he glowered at Phil rather as if Phil was something particularly irritating on the railways, say the Devonian or the Cathedrals Express. So Phil said it again, adding a bit more chapter and verse. At which Mark calmed down. But Phil noticed Lord Braydon looking a bit thoughtful for a time. He hoped he hadn’t offended this nice old boy by coming down like that on his son.
He found he had another date before he got his dinner that night. Alice, who seemed indignant at Mark’s jokes about her caring for nothing but horses, was determined to prove to Phil that she had command over other means of locomotion. So there at the bottom of a great flight of steps was a car. It was a Rolls-Royce all right, and it looked as if it might have been made when Royce and Rolls were at about the same stage of their inventive careers as Mark Thickthorne and his father were now. But Phil had no doubt that it would have done London to Brighton nicely, and unless Alice was so inexpert that she took them into a tree there didn’t seem to be much risk in going with her round a nobleman’s park. Lord Braydon gave them a casual wave as they went down the drive. It seemed he didn’t think it at all out of the way that this kid should take charge of an affair like a young battleship. But then – Phil thought – you’re thinking of her as more of a kid than she is. They’re different, this lot.
‘There’s a church and a village,’ Alice said rapidly. ‘There’s a Belvedere and a Temple of the Winds and a Gothic Cow House and a Hermit’s Grot. Which first?’
‘The House for Gothic Cows,’ Phil said. ‘They’re my favourites, like. Jerseys or Herefords aren’t a patch on Gothics.’
She turned to look at him suspiciously – so that the Rolls swayed alarmingly about the drive. Her inspection seemed to satisfy her.
‘Funny Man,’ she said witheringly, and drove on.
Phil felt he’d better be serious.
‘What’s a Belvedere?’ he asked.
‘Well – it’s round, and it has pillars.’ She looked at him rather uncertainly this time. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘No – I don’t know much, I don’t. Why’s it called a Belvedere?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know.’ Alice shoved vigorously on the accelerator. ‘You ought to, if you’re at Oxford.’
‘At Oxford? I’m not at Oxford. I’m from Oxford. Don’t you know the difference?’ Phil found it fun, teasing this kid. She was a nice kid.
‘You mean you’re not up?’ She smiled at him as she hazardously swung the wheel. ‘Well – if that isn’t a relief. I can’t bear undergraduates. Aren’t they too bloody superior?’
Phil was a good deal shocked by this freedom of language on the part of the infant sister of a lord. At the same time, he felt that she said something abundantly true.
‘But I got an undergrad friend,’ he said, ‘who says I ought to go up. Only it would take about a couple of years, I reckon. On account of my education being a bit irregular, like.’
‘Two years? That’s what it’s going to take me – if I work disgustingly hard.’ She considered. ‘Phil – what joy. We’d be freshmen together. You’d take me to my first Commem. ball. Oh, what ecstasy!’ She put out a hand and pointed. ‘Look,’ she said gravely. ‘A Gothic cow.’
The Gothic cow was a deer. They had a lot of quite senseless fun, driving about this park together. It was a big park, and here and there it had these buildings – temples and the like – put up just for show. They looked pretty, all right, in a low evening sun. Alice said there were coal-mines under the whole park, and that for generations the Thickthornes had lived on them, which was why her father and Mark thought it would be a good idea to get some sense into English coal now.
‘Squeeze it until it drips, or something,’ Alice said. She didn’t seem scientifically minded. ‘And I expect they’ll manage it. Particularly Mark. He’s got my mother’s brains, they say.’
‘Your mother?’ Phil asked. This was something he’d been wondering about.
‘She died when I was quite young,’ Alice said briefly. ‘The question is whether I’m going to make a life running Thickthorne for Rupert. Rupert’s my elder brother.’
‘He’ll get married, won’t he?’
‘Oh, no. Rupert’s not interested in women. A pity – but there it is. He runs some islands at present. And he does some painting. Mostly of young coffee-coloured divinities. Male.’
‘I see.’ Phil felt it wouldn’t be a good idea for Alice to make a life running things for a chap like that. And he felt a bit held up again by this directness of speech in a school-kid. He wanted to say ‘What about you – are you interested in men?’ But he thought he wouldn’t – not in what you might call this particular conversational context. ‘What’s all that?’ he asked, pointing.
‘That’s the village. We’re going to drive through it.’
‘You got a village inside the park?’ This struck Phil as extremely remarkable. ‘I thought lords kept villages outside. Kind of nestling up against the gates. What do the villagers do – milk the Gothic cows or exercise all your enormous dogs?’
Alice laughed. She had a very generous attitude in estimating wit.
‘They go to church on Sundays. There’s the church, beyond those trees, and there’s the vicarage. During the week they work in the market-gardens and greenhouses. We have all that inside the ring-fence too. In fact, we’re a very self-contained community at Thickthorne. Look at that.’
What they were looking at now was acres of glass-houses. They ran through these and came to a smithy and a saw-mill and a second little village that was mostly the kind of workshops you need, he supposed, about an estate. It all looked fairly prosperous – so that he wondered why it wouldn’t run to a good lick of paint over Thickthorne Court itself. The place needed it. And the whole set-up made Phil thoughtful after a time. It was a little world, all right.
‘Your dad reckon on being a rich man?’ he asked.
‘Oh, no – I’d say not.’ Alice didn’t seem to find this question too fresh. ‘Quite a lot of the people round about have much smaller places, but seem a good deal richer, all the same.’
‘And them with no places at all,’ Phil said, ‘are the richest of the lot. Proletarian drones, coddled by the state.’
But this bit of nonsense rather misfired. Alice had flushed up, and was making the enormous Rolls take a corner viciously.
‘We don’t talk like that. Daddy would call it most frightfully bourgeois.’ She glanced sideways at Phil quite furiously – but as she did so the mischief came again into her eyes. ‘But then I suppose you are that, aren’t you, Phil? A solid middle-class boy? I think it’s marvellous of Mark to have discovered you. Or am I wrong? I’m a sheltered child. I wouldn’t really know.’
Phil made no reply. He just sat back and grinned. This was partly because he was disconcerted. But partly it was because he saw that the kid wouldn’t have gone on to just this joke if they weren’t really friends. He didn’t speak again until they were on their way back to the house.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m a mystery man. Honest.’
And this was true, after all. For he’d realised that these people had no notion he was Prendick’s big winner of the season. If Mark Thickthorne had discovered him, it had been without a clue as to that.
Chapter Nineteen
A very old man appeared at dinner. But he didn’t sit down. He turned out to be the butler. Phil wasn’t sure that this old man wasn’t a shade anxious about
him. Not disapproving – certainly nothing like that – but just keeping alert to see that nothing went too badly wrong. This made Phil conclude that Mark Thickthorne didn’t make a habit of picking up young artisans – even disguised artisans – in railway carriages. Not that he’d really thought that – not even fleetingly until Alice had told him that about her brother Rupert. What Phil really had in common with Mark, perhaps, was a liability suddenly to do fool things. Just at this moment, for instance, he felt a temptation to start eating peas with a knife. It was hard to see how it could be done, but he’d heard of it. He wanted to see if it would produce a kind of armed intervention on the part of the old butler. But of course he didn’t carry out the experiment. It wouldn’t be polite, a kind of fooling like that.
So anyway he knew when not to fool. He wasn’t too sure that Mark did. Or rather it was just that the favourite bees in Mark’s bonnet would get buzzing at any time. This about railways, for instance. There wasn’t too much sense in that.
‘You’d think they were wicked,’ Phil said grinning, ‘to hear you talk, you would. And you’d think coal was wicked, so long as it stayed black and solid. But it’s the same stuff – isn’t it? – after you’ve turned it into a clear liquid in those labs. Molecules moving at a different speed – that’s all. Nothing to get heated about. It’s furnaces and things we’ve got to get heated. But more efficiently by a good margin than by those old boiler nuts. That’s our point. And I’m not confident your margin looks too good. Break down the cost of the solid black stuff at the point of combustion, and you won’t find the rail transport comes to all that. It comes to something – and there’s your chance. But coal’s not wicked, and railways aren’t, either. God don’t think permanent ways any worse than temporary ones. You got to keep that in your head, Mark.’
And Mark got furious again. He banged the table, so that the old butler had to come forward indulgently and mop up a ring of claret.
‘Nonsense!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t tell me it isn’t wicked to waste the shrinking natural resources of this elderly planet. We’ve got to start from there. We’ve got to convince industry and finance of it. See?’
‘That’s all my eye,’ Phil said. ‘I never met industry, and not finance either. But don’t tell me they listen to stuff like that. Line their pockets is what they want.’
‘I’m afraid that’s very true,’ Lord Braydon said. ‘Our proposals are essentially a matter for the legislature. I must make another strong speech in the Lords.’
‘That’s all my eye, too,’ Phil said. He caught the old butler looking at him. ‘Sir,’ he added hastily.
‘You really think so?’ Lord Braydon appeared perfectly willing to be impressed. ‘It’s true that I’ve got no very pronounced response upon previous occasions. Coal, nowadays, is rather a bureaucratic affair. There is this Board, and so on. Keen minds, I have no doubt. But I fear they don’t see the need of revolution. Do you know that most of my neighbours now heat their places on imported oil? If that doesn’t show—’
‘What you heat Thickthorne on?’ Phil asked.
Alice, who was preparing to leave the room, turned round at this.
‘That’s the family skeleton,’ she said. ‘Can’t you hear it rattling in the cellars? You would, in winter. The stuff’s called Thickthorne Particular. It’s quite beautiful. But it’s certainly solid coal – black, black coal.’ She smiled at Phil. ‘This is when I do all those dogs,’ she said. And she went out.
‘And here’s Mark,’ Phil said, ‘talking about tankers and the problem of colonial markets. Right in the clouds, that is. You got to learn to walk before you run, I say.’ If he faintly hesitated, it was from remembering that it wasn’t all that time ago that he’d thought poorly of this proposition as it came from Artie Coutts. ‘And there’s your patents,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to mind your step about those. I’ve heard of chaps got had proper there, I can tell you. You can’t invent anything, it seems, that it don’t pay someone to get from you some mean way and just lock up. You got to look out for crooks pretty well all the time.’ Recent experience helped Phil to give a good deal of weight to this statement. ‘And go ahead on your own.’
‘Go ahead with what?’ Lord Braydon asked. He could be very much to the point at times, could the old boy.
‘A pilot scheme,’ Phil said. And suddenly he was very much excited. ‘Right here inside what Alice calls the ring-fence.’
‘A pilot scheme?’ It seemed Lord Braydon wasn’t familiar with the phrase.
‘Yes. I mean, Yes, sir.’ And Phil banged the table, just as if he was Mark. ‘Not just models and that. Mark’s British Omnigas serving a whole small community. Basic in an economy, like. It doesn’t matter about the coal – where it comes from or what it costs. Assume your basic commodity—see? It’s the figures for your subsequent processes people will be interested in. Make your liquid gas anywhere in the park – in a Gothic Cow House, if you like. Pipe it here, and run the whole place on it. Pipe it to the village, and run that. And to the smithy and the saw-mill. Pipe it to the church and let it run the organ. Everything! And all scaled down—see? Like a miniature railway. And showing that – granted your coal – it’s economic all the time. I got a friend could do the economics. So we’d have the Thickthorne Court Pilot Scheme. We’d have Japs and Germans on our doorstep in no time, making inquiries with their tongues hanging out. They’d have to think about it then – the House of Lords and the Coal Board and all. So why not?’
And Lord Braydon nodded.
‘I can think of one or two why-nots,’ he said. ‘But why not, all the same. Eh, Mark?’
It was only for a second that Mark Thickthorne hung fire. Then he gave a shout of glee.
‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘And within five years there won’t be a ton of solid coal trundling across England.’
‘Not half, there won’t,’ Phil said. And he shook his head at Mark like he might have been an indulgent parent. ‘But we might get a start, all the same.’
After that there were whole days when Phil’s life seemed to run miraculously clear. There were things he’d thought would never leave his mind that he now completely forgot. And he did amazing things. He sent his auntie a telegram with his address, saying he wouldn’t be home yet. He sent another to Beryl while hardly remembering she was a problem – and, after all, she’d herself insisted that his business with Prendick’s lot would take a week. He asked Mark if there was some way he could cash a cheque. And Mark, as usual without a flicker of curiosity, had got his father to ring up his banker. Then Phil had driven the Rolls into Nottingham – and, although the cheque was, he supposed, quite enormous as cheques go, the chap had handed Lord Braydon’s guest the money without a flicker. Phil got back with two suitcases and with a box of chocolates for Alice. Nobody seemed to think anything of all this. He wrote a long letter and addressed it to ‘Mr. Peter Sharples, Oxford University’, and the reply came so quickly that it was clear the Post Office had taken it in their stride. All the rest of the time he helped Mark plot what they called Operation Pilot. And then something happened.
It happened along with his morning tea – which was something that, rather to his confusion, a cheerful boy in a green apron brought to his bedside. One morning this boy wasn’t only cheerful. He was very impressed as well. For there was an enormous bundle of letters for Phil. It was a large-scale forwarding operation which again showed the Oxford postal people as an efficient crowd. Phil’s auntie – Phil was sure – would never have risen to coping with all this. Of course it was the same sort of stuff he’d had on the first day – including a follow-up letter from the titled lady with daughters. It happened she would be passing through Oxford, and she was sure Phil wouldn’t mind if she called. Phil was pleased with the idea of that. He hoped the Griffin kids would manage to ask the daughters how their mum was off for dripping.
A lot of the letters he just didn’t open. It was no longer part of his life, all that. But there was one that caught his eye as he wa
s going to chuck it away. It had the sender’s address in a corner. It was an address that made Phil suddenly shiver as he looked – for it brought into his mind a fountain, and a lot of black glass, and a chap advancing on him carrying an umbrella and gloves. Then it brought up something else as well, so that he felt his heart pounding. He opened the letter. It read:
My dear Tombs,
I was so sorry to miss you when – as my secretary tells me – you were good enough to look in the other day. I don’t know whether I could have given you much useful advice. But I could have assured you again that I take – believe me – a most friendly interest in your fortunes. This is a strange business I find myself connected with. Although it adds, we like to think, a great deal of harmless interest and excitement to the lives of many, I have to confess that I wonder sometimes about the simple good sense of putting such very large sums of money in the hands of – well, a very mixed lot. That’s why it has been such fun to get a sizeable wad of it into young and enterprising hands! Of course the Firm wishes you good luck. But I do too.
The Man Who Won the Pools Page 18
