The first rap at the door made those within earshot start, for it was surely too early for the boy? Sobriety peered around the door of Mr Hadley’s room, her pale face white in the gloom looking down the stairs toward the door. I, too, tipped my head around the door of the morning room. Mrs Staynes hesitated on her way to the kitchen. Cissy hurried toward the front door, and all heads turned with her movement, as if she had them each by a thread. She opened; there was a short conversation, and she turned with an envelope in her hand. Mrs Staynes continued to the kitchen, but Sobriety glanced quickly back at the patient, and stayed on the landing to watch as I rustled through my door to meet Cissy.
I opened the envelope and took out the letter, bade Cissy rejoin Mrs Staynes, unfolded and read for the space, perhaps, of six ticks of the old clock heard from the drawing room. I looked up at Sobriety.
She again glanced back at Mr Hadley, and then moved to the banister and gripped it, patient for my explanation.
‘Mr Thackeray of The Cornhill Magazine accepts my piece of writing and will send me payment.’ I was almost gasping—which surprised me—as though I were running pell-mell along another tunnel. I was dizzied at the very unlikelihood of it all, and gave a shaky laugh—especially since Mr Thackeray continued to address me as if I were a gentleman. Oh, and how odd and somehow reckless, shocking in its very divergence from respectable life, gratifying and perhaps appalling to be employed thus, and be paid, and all of this in the face of the serried ranks of Gwendolyn, and my brothers, and my sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces… I might perhaps have continued thus in my mind, but for another knock at the door.
And so it was that I, the letter still in one hand, and not Cissy, who opened the door and looked down at my son.
Chapter Twenty-one
For a moment, during that morning’s visit by Inspector Broadford, I wished that burying my face in my hands and counting to three—or perhaps to five to give the magic longer in which to work—would make everybody vanish, save me and Sobriety. We would be left here happy with our reading or our sewing and all would be calm. With none of these…these…meanings washing back and forth!
Toby, quite naturally in the company of visitors, would have been as silent in any case. He would have sat as straight and as still; a good boy, he would not have spoken unless spoken to. Yet to me his face, even while it hardened into something carved and determined not to give animation to his thoughts, nevertheless shouted out the
disturbance in his mind. See how still he is, yet so like an overly stoked engine, alarming all with its restrained energy.
I glanced around at the inspector telling his tale, at Sobriety intent somehow (Lord, here is another story) on the pattern of the rug, though the tale was so evidently being told to her, to Sobriety, as the object of all of the inspector’s smiles and inflections.
I observed it all as if it were a drama heightened unto comedy: here were at least three stories at odds with one another, enacted at one and the same time, running pell-mell in as many different directions, lurching like careering carriages with their possibility of disaster in the midst of exhilaration. Nothing of this was evident in the demeanour of anybody in the room, yet to me the clattering of cross-purposes played before me with dread inevitability, with only myself aware.
Well, perhaps only I am alarmed by Toby.
I looked at my boy’s face once more, at his immature cheeks, downy and undefined, the childish bow to his mouth, sulky while too young yet to suggest surliness; the dandelion wildness to his curls, however much the brush and comb were wielded; his eyes, wide despite himself and with that blankness that children have that comes from inexperience. That innocence that can be cruel with its belief in absolutes.
He sat with a stillness and lack of expression that declared disapproval; for how had it come about that this policeman sat in the Hadley parlour, drinking from the Hadley teacups? How could it be that his mother countenanced it—nay, was gracious in inviting the man in, placed him on the furniture, put tea in his hand, sat listening to his vulgar speech addressed, apparently, to the maid?
Look how lonely he is, without his father beside him to set it all to rights. There is a fear, I am sure of it. And who could blame him?
‘Mr Farquharson,’ Inspector Broadford was saying, ‘for all his lofty station in life, has now much more of our attention than he could possibly want. Indeed we are studying him closely, for not only has he for some time carried on two wholly separate lives, but the man—or should I say men?—he presented to the world in London and Manchester was…’ He laughed and held up a finger to signify that he corrected himself. ‘ …Were of two entirely different types.’
My attention blinked at this (Heavens! What does he mean?), and even Sobriety raised her head and eyebrows at one and the same time. But almost immediately, the inspector responded with his eyes smiling full into Sobriety’s—an urgent secret there that cried out for her sharing of it, all the louder for the small tinklings of teacups and teaspoons and the room’s quiet made heavy with carpet and curtain—whereupon Sobriety ducked her head to concentrate again upon the carpet.
At that moment, I realised Sobriety was steeped in shame and humiliation—felt it as if it were my own. I felt myself pale in
empathy, a spasm of pain beneath my own heart in echo of Sobriety’s. And anger, pure and vivid, reared so suddenly that it flared through all the channels of my blood. She was admired—by this man and, surely, by all who knew her—yet felt herself made ugly and unworthy by shame. My monstrous Mr Hadley, oh monstrous husband…look there, look! I did not for a moment know what to do with all of this stark feeling—I wished vainly to protect Sobriety from that which shook her calm capacities, her very strengths, and left her with such chaos—and, instead, schooled my face and then my limbs, and my hands, and then my heart to show nothing of my turbulence. Shh…shh…shh… I did not look at Sobriety, but I felt her there, wounded when the world thought her whole.
Yet then these thoughts dragged back to my silent Toby, staring by now at the inspector but with an air of someone unsure of where he was.
Last evening, after his arrival, Toby had had command of his voice, had greeted the servants with his portmanteau, his coat, and his gloves and how-d’ye-do for Mrs Staynes and Sobriety. He had stood aloof with his cheek tilted for his mother’s kiss. And I had kissed him, bent over before him—see, I am the minion of some small emperor—while he stood impassive, eyes averted. He had sat for a quarter of an hour with Cook’s fresh biscuits, formal and straight-backed, awaiting each of my questions while I sat before him, hands wrapped about themselves in my lap, the pauses frequent and long.
‘My masters feel I am progressing satisfactorily, especially in mathematics. I particularly like mathematics.’ See how my little emperor boasts.
‘Your father would have been glad to hear this, I am sure.’
Toby had looked at me then, with a small compression about his eyebrows.
‘He will be glad. I shall tell him myself.’ He brushed a crumb from his lap. ‘I would go to him now, Mama.’
He had risen, and I rose with him. Looking down at my boy, I thought his imperiousness absurd, to be sure, yet caught from Toby a current of sadness that he struggled to conceal thereby, even from himself. It makes him look very small indeed.
At Mr Hadley’s door I laid my hand on his arm for a moment so that he must turn to me. ‘You must be prepared, Toby. He will not know you…’
Such a very different conversation from that with the inspector now, who had come, first of all, to advise that young Cissy may be required to testify in a week’s time when Mr Farquharson was taken for his committal proceedings. Witnesses were being gathered together in Manchester, it was true, he said, but circumstances could turn against them and cause delay. There could be illness, or indeed the weather might make travel impossible, so that Cissy would have to be summoned. Cissy was called to be advised
of this, and turned voiceless and pale as a result.
Inspector Broadford was then invited to settle into a comfortable armchair (another of Mama’s, this one full-cushioned and covered in a faded pattern of autumnal leaves) to tell the tale of the Manchester constabulary’s enquiries into their version of Mr Farquharson—Mr Forster that was—and his modest life as a moderately prosperous but unassuming merchant. His family possessed all the stolid virtues as well as the accent of the town, and thought nothing at all of Mr Forster’s—London’s Mr Farquharson’s—frequent trips away for, he told them, the sake of his business.
‘Of course, they have had from me a very different description of the man,’ the inspector said. ‘By telegraph, you understand, and we all a-scratching of our heads over the strangeness of this whole story.’ He chuckled in Sobriety’s direction and sipped at his tea.
‘How alarming that a man could deal so mendaciously with all about him and nobody the wiser,’ I said, especially since—and even though it was she whom the inspector addressed—Sobriety continued as silent as Toby.
Then I felt myself conscious that Inspector Broadford may very well find some slight in my comment (for should not the police and others in authority have been aware of Mr Farquharson’s duplicity?), while Toby was likely all the more perplexed that his mother could be part of such a conversation.
Yet what other surprises can he have, poor boy, than to discover his mother and her maid were, of a sudden, so changed from retiring modesty as to dash about rescuing babies…
Toby’s world at home was now a very different place, to be sure, and this he was coming, at last, to comprehend.
There was, I felt, the smallest tick of hesitation when my boy had stood with his hand on the doorknob of his father’s bedchamber. But then some decision was arrived at behind those childish eyes with their habit of contempt—perhaps that he would not believe me, or that while his father chose not to know me, he would know his only son, or simply that I could not be deemed to be competent to judge Mr Hadley’s illness.
In any case, Toby turned from me and opened the door.
Dropping my hand, I then watched the inevitable shock to my son of the truth: that his father lay crumpled and insensible, much smaller somehow and with all of his power gone. That he who had been tyrant, lord and ally did not, indeed, know Toby at all.
With the boy looking down on what had been his father, I murmured, ‘Kiss him, Toby. I’m sure he would feel this as a comfort somehow, though we may not see it.’ But my voice died away to a whisper, for Toby flinched and retreated from the bed.
There was silence but for Mr Hadley’s breathing, the fainter
disturbance of my own breathing and of Toby’s, and the mantel clock stepping on and on. I tensed with everything that was unsaid. This cannot continue, it must not continue.
‘Mr Hadley,’ I spoke, finally, after several long moments of searching for the solution to this hiatus that did not know what to do with itself. ‘Mr Hadley, here is Toby come to us at Michaelmas.’
Toby’s face was in shadow, for evening had been darkening as we stood, the light at the window losing its colour, the clock blindly tapping out the seconds, and even Mr Hadley in his bed losing shape as if he may not be real after all. My boy said nothing.
‘Toby is doing very well at school, Mr Hadley. Particularly in mathematics.’ I glanced at my child. What drama am I putting voice to? ‘His masters have mentioned this especially. The mathematics.’
Look at him, standing there. I must bring this to a close.
‘I suppose Cook will be nearly ready for the evening meal, Toby. Say goodnight to your father; he will have a drink of water soon, and Albert will settle him for the night.’
I reached then for Toby’s arm and he moved away from the bed, though he said nothing still, either to me or to his father. In the shadows I heard Albert stir, ready to take his place back at Mr Hadley’s bedside. I had forgotten he was there.
And here Toby sits now, listening to this stranger, the inspector, as if it is my boy who is the stranger come wandering into the wrong place, fearing that this, his own place, has melted away while he did his mathematics and parsed his Latin… If I close my eyes, will everything be changed?
For a moment I had a sense of Mr Hadley and Toby standing there fully robust and pink of face and myself ghostly and grey, flitting at the edges of their most important lives…
And so if everything changed, what would it all change into? Toby, Toby, your wish and mine are very different things.
‘Mr Forster, they tell me, prospered in his business and was helped in this by inheriting a sum of money from an uncle—forty thousand pound, they say. He began to be admired for his acumen, so that—’ Inspector Broadford reached for his cup, which must by now be quite tepid. He put it down again. ‘—so that the local businessmen invited him onto the committee of a small finance company and he even became the loyal treasurer for the local Tory Party.’
The inspector’s inflection brought about murmurs from we two, Sobriety and me, like the cooing of pigeons, which he appeared to take as encouragement. Indeed, even Sobriety had by now raised her eyes from the carpet. He smiled and leaned a little forward.
‘Mr Forster had so established himself, it seems, that even when the finance company collapsed he was not linked to any prosecutable activity. He continued to prosper, and took to travelling very frequently, telling his wife and friends that this journeying was for the purpose of his grocery business or on behalf of the Tory party. But we have found out otherwise.’ The inspector looked up. By now all eyes were rounded and fixed upon him, half-empty cups and saucers forgotten in our grip.
‘And so he began his double life, for he was travelling frequently to London and had established, as Mr Farquharson, the Southern
England Credit Foncier and Mobilier, of which you may have heard—’
I nodded. I had not, in fact, heard of this company but did not like to say so. Sobriety glanced at me and then back at the inspector.
‘—which financed the many investments he had begun to promote, such as railways, public utilities and so forth. Indeed, we have begun to look into his accounts and, while much of it appears to be written in cipher and we are still searching for missing ledgers, they do explain some of his other suspected activities—’
I held out the plate of cakes to him—without thinking, I suddenly realised—and now felt it to be something of a non sequitur. The inspector paused in his recitation and a small confusion disturbed his face, but he reached for a slice and I was able to replace the plate. He put his cake on the saucer next to his cup and continued.
‘—activities, which included the hiring of Irish thugs, men desperate for money to send home to their hungry wives and children. He used these men to silence shareholders who had begun to ask questions at meetings.’ Mr Broadford reached for his cake.
‘And he married, of course as we know, the young and only
daughter of a wealthy naval hero. So that he was truly arrived in society and able to influence all with the wink of an eye.’ The inspector sat back, took a bite of his cake with his other hand beneath to catch the crumbs.
‘There you have it, ladies.’
‘Inspector, this is astonishing. This is…’ I could not for the moment think of an adequate epithet. ‘This is appalling.’
‘It is appalling, Mrs Hadley, but it is not, I am sorry to say, astonishing.’ There was a pause, during which Mr Broadford finished his small slice of cake.
‘What a very bad man, with perhaps worse to be discovered,’ Sobriety said.
The inspector looked at her as if she were the cleverest student in class. ‘Perhaps, indeed.’ He smiled at her, while this time she looked away.
Chapter Twenty-two
The inspector was thanked for his visit and his information, a duty he had again travelled unnecessarily far to
fulfil, though we understood well enough why he had done so. There was quiet after he had left, after the thud of doors and Cissy’s receding rustle and patter. My boy and Sobriety gazed into different corners of my morning room, and I looked wordlessly first at one and then the other, unable to speak either with Toby in Sobriety’s presence, or with Sobriety in Toby’s.
Sobriety, finally, rose to her feet. Holding her face—pale still from illness perhaps, but also, I felt, most certainly from the chaos of her thoughts about herself—from my sight, she said, ‘I must go
upstairs…I must go upstairs to, to fetch…something.’
She was gone then, with myself left staring at the closed door, my own unfinished thoughts chaotic as a crowd of kite-ribbons in a contrary wind: What is the answer? George leaves his sin upon Sobriety…who could forgive him? But Sobriety… What does Toby make of all this?
I took a breath and sighed it out, realised as I did so that I had held myself for many hours as clenched as any fist, and turned to Toby. He had not, apparently, paid attention at all to Sobriety’s stammering, and now was instead grasping the publisher’s letter to me, left open since yesterday on the small table.
If I could close my eyes and wish this all away! Would I?
He stood up—Oh, what now?—and drew himself to his full height, although this did not as yet amount to very much. He looked down at his seated mother with a frown that only lacked the steel-and-snow show of his father’s eyebrows to be an exact imitation in miniature. His little chin was raised, his fist on his hip with the flap of his jacket drawn back, the letter held forward like an accusation in his other hand.
Today has been so full of mime.
Thus we regarded each other, and I felt once more that I watched us—Toby and I—doing so, from shadows, like an audience witnessing melodrama. Once again, I felt myself part-audience, part-player, indulging in a constant mental commentary: This is a farce full of misunderstanding, full of overplayed gesture. I made no effort to break the silence, to be the first to make excuses, and it went on overlong until Toby dropped his arm, perhaps because his stance began to seem ridiculous even to him. After all, he is not well practiced in playing the ageing tyrant. Poor mite.
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