Joel Barforth, to ensure punctuality, had locked his factory gates at half-past five every morning, obliging the late-comers to stand outside, patiently or otherwise, until breakfast-time, considering this loss of three hours’earnings to be punishment enough. Nicholas Barforth continued to lock his operatives out, but, finding that the saving of three hours’pay did not compensate him for his loss of production, fined them as well, a practice which improved the time-keeping in his sheds but won him no popularity. Joel Barforth, to some extent, had been approachable, capable of exchanging a word or two with a familiar face in a loom-gate, capable, if reminded in advance, of offering congratulations and an appropriate ribaldry to an overlooker who was to be married. Nicholas Barforth was not concerned with personalities, only with efficiency, did not wish to be acquainted with the private lives of his operatives nor to recognize their faces. He came to his sheds for the sole purpose of work. He paid others to do the same. That was the extent of the relationship between them and he would tolerate no other. He understood the machines. He knew exactly what they could produce and exactly the time needed to produce it. And, if his targets were not met, his shed-managers would be warned no more than once that others were waiting to take their places. Yet, for those who could survive his demands, his tempers, his sarcasm, his refusal to accept any excuses, his apparent conviction that everybody enjoyed hard labour as much as he did, although he gave no praise, no thanks, his financial rewards were good. He wanted value for money, but when value was given he would pay, and it was a constant thorn in his side that the man he valued least was the only one he could not dismiss, and who made sure of paying himself most handsomely.
‘Brother Nick was in good form today—do you know, he’s a year younger than me and I believe he looks ten years older. My poor mother. She’ll have a miserable dinner-time with him tonight, for he’ll plague her half to death about my Russian trip.’
‘Are you going to Russia, Blaize?’
‘Of course I’m going to Russia, darling—a week on Tuesday as it happens—and he’ll growl, I imagine, until I’m back again. Poor mother, and poor Nicky too, because he tried so hard to stop me and couldn’t manage it. We had the whole gala performance—my word, he could have been father, except that father would have stopped me, I suppose. And since we both knew that, and I said so in any case, it hardly improved his temper.’
‘Must you provoke him, Blaize?’
‘Yes, I think I must. It makes him that much more anxious to get rid of me.
‘Can he get rid of you?’
‘He’s not sure. He could buy me out, of course, but the cash for one half of Joel Barforth and Sons is too steep for any man I ever heard of. Even if he did find it, or came up with some scheme to pay me off over a number of years—to give me a good living and nothing to do for it—there’s no guarantee I’d accept. The only thing he can do is to split the business—give me my share and send me on my way, if I’d agree to go. And he’s tempted to ask me. Not that he likes the idea of parting with a fraction of the business, but then, if I’m really such an incompetent fool as he likes to thinks I’ll make a mess of it, won’t I, and might be glad to sell it back to him at a price he can afford. But—and it’s quite a substantial but—he may be well known in Cullingford, but the only face the Remburgers and the Grassmanns know is mine, and it must have crossed his mind that if I leave I’ll be likely to take my customers with me.’
‘Wouldn’t it make your life a little harder, Blaize—if you split?’
‘You mean, wouldn’t I have to go down to the sheds rather more, and stay at home a bit more often? So I would—but darling, don’t join with my brother in underestimating me. I may not understand the machines but I do understand commerce. I can add and subtract and work out my percentages every bit as fast as Nicky.’
‘Then why don’t you try to get on with him?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes. Why indeed? If you can give me a reason, darling, I’d be grateful, for I’m running out of mine.’
He left for Russia even earlier than he’d planned, giving me no exact idea of when I might expect to see him again. I knew I would hear no word from him unless there should be a little task he wished me to perform, or should take it into his head to have me meet him in London or in Paris, where, on arrival, I might discover from some casual comment that he had already spent a week in Berlin or in Rome, with no explanation as to why he had gone there. But, far more likely, I would be taking tea with Aunt Hannah one afternoon and she would say, ‘I understand from Mr. Agbrigg that the Russian trip was worthwhile after all.’ And it would transpire that Blaize had arrived in Cullingford that very day, on the morning train, gone straight to the mill, eaten his luncheon with Mayor Agbrigg at the Old Swan or at Tarn Edge with his mother, and when I unpacked his treasure chests that night there would be something among the trinkets, the luxuries, the costly little toys for Blanche that could not possibly be Russian.
‘Good heavens!—I didn’t realize they had such exquisite glass in Moscow.’
‘No, darling, they don’t. It’s Venetian.’
‘And how was Venice?’
‘Perfectly lovely. Gondolas floating in the moonlight just as one imagines it.’
And I couldn’t suppose for a moment that he had floated in a moonlit gondola alone.
I took tea with Aunt Verity the day he left, finding some slight suggestion of tears about her, an unusual frailty that prompted me to ask her if she was unwell.
‘No—dear. Merely tired. To tell you the truth I have been indulging myself. My husband wrote me very few letters, since, we were rarely apart, but naturally the ones I did receive I have kept—quite curt little notes, some of them, reminding me to do this and that—not love letters at all. But, reading them just now, I could see him scribbling away with not a moment to spare, probably growling out instructions to somebody or other while he was doing it, And—well—I allowed myself to realize that I shall never stop missing him and that there is nothing I can do about it. I began to dwell on the finality, and to frighten myself with the idea that I couldn’t cope—which is nonsense, of course, since one can cope with anything. But I was rescued from my misery—-before it had gone on too long—by Nicholas. He came up from the mill to make sure Gervase had gone to school—which unfortunately he had not—and he spent an hour with me.’
‘Is he well?’
‘No,’ she said gently, ‘I am sure he is not. Oh—his health is good, of course. But I would not say he was well.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes. I believe he is in danger of becoming a very hard man and I shall regret that. People say my husband was hard, and so he was in many ways. But he had areas of great warmth. He loved me, and Caroline, and he loved the boys too—and would have made great sacrifices for any one of us. Nicholas is growing hard in quite another way—a very cold way, and I am afraid that quite soon all that will matter to him is the accumulation not so much of money as of the power it conveys. He tells me he will own the town and then the Valley, and I am ready to believe him. I can even understand it. I have lived all my life surrounded by ambitious men, and I have seen ruthlessness often enough before. I have even appreciated it on occasions, when there was a purpose to be served. But lately Nicholas has shown himself to be ruthless without cause, as if he took pleasure in it for its own sake—and he can do himself no lasting good.’
She paused, looked at me for a moment very reflectively, and then, shaking her head, she sighed.
‘I may as well tell you, Faith, since you will eventually hear it, and in fact it must be of great concern to Prudence. We all know that the Hobhouses have been struggling for a long time to keep their heads above water. Just as we all know that Nicholas has offered several times to buy them out—and has not increased his offer, I might add, after each refusal, but quite the reverse. Well—he has now done something which must surely sink them at last. Oh dear—I don’t know if it is commercial practice or downright bullying or calcul
ated fraud, but whatever one may call it I seem to be caught in the cross-fire and don’t much like it. Some time ago Mr. Hobhouse was—as Mr. Hobhouse often is—quite desperately short of cash. His borrowing from Mr. Rawnsley’s bank had reached its limits. Mr. Oldroyd of Fieldhead—his brother-in-law—is not famous for generosity, and in any case it has always been Hobhouse policy not to upset him, because of his will. Mr. Hobhouse looked around him and saw Nicholas, or Nicholas put himself in Mr. Hobhouse’s way—I don’t know—but what I do know is that when Nicholas advanced him the money he must have been well aware that it could never be repaid. Yes—yes—Mr. Hobhouse is very rash and much too hopeful, I know it. The tide, in his view, is always on the turn—that is his way—we all understand him. I suppose he was relying too much on your sister’s dowry, and since he is kind-hearted himself he felt that Mr. Oldroyd, deep down, must be the same and wouldn’t really abandon him with his back to the wall. Well—my son Nicholas is demanding his money. Mr. Hobhouse cannot pay. Mr. Oldroyd will not oblige. Mrs. Hobhouse came to me in tears, for she has a large family and is a woman I have known all my life. I spoke to Nicholas and I could not reach him. The law is on his side. He wants Nethercoats. He has found not only the way to get it, but the way to get it cheap. He didn’t ask me to admire his cleverness. He simply shrugged his shoulders. It was not easy for me to hear Emma-Jane Hobhouse describe him as heartless and greedy—especially when there was no defence I could make. Yes—I could lend Mrs. Hobhouse the money to repay him. I could easily afford it, as she wasn’t slow to point out. But to do that would be to damage my own relationship with Nicholas—and, whether he values that or not, it is about the only thing he has left.’
‘Aunt Verity—?’
‘Yes, Faith. You know as well as I do that he has no relationship with Georgiana, which is not entirely her fault. I have told him so and he agrees with me. I have told him that if he made the first move she would probably be ready to make the second—glad to make it. He agrees with, that too. Nicholas was very close to me, Faith. All his life he has done things in temper, in stubborn pride, and then regretted it. You have cause to know that, I imagine. Even his temper is different now. It burst out of him, once, quite spontaneously—a true, snarling, red-blooded rage, a true emotion. Now he uses it when he needs it, manufactures it almost to order, which is not at all the same. And gradually, this past year or so, I have felt him moving away even from me. It has been like entering a familiar house and finding that all the doors are closing one by one. Well—I am sorry for that, and even sorrier that he has felt the need to shut out his children in the same fashion. Yes—they have a great deal of Georgiana in them, Venetia even more than Gervase. Nevertheless, they are his children—my grandchildren, like Blanche and Caroline’s boys. And I think I would like to tell you, Faith, that, if I seem to give more of my time and attention to Venetia than I give to Blanche, it is because—well, who else is here to do it?’
‘Aunt Verity, please don’t worry about Blanche.’
‘Oh, but I don’t worry about her, Faith dear. She has you, and if Blaize is something of an absentee father I imagine he gives her good measure when he is at home. And besides, she has enough of Blaize in her to be able to cope with life very well on her own, when the time comes, Venetia is very different—the wildest little girl I have ever known—not wilful and headstrong like Caroline or like Nicholas himself. No—altogether Georgiana’s child. It is Venetia, believe me, who most resembles Peregrine Clevedon, not Gervase, and because she is enchanting and open-hearted at the same time, so eager and hopeful, my heart bleeds for her. Nicholas will always take care of them, of course. He will pay their bills, and very handsomely. They will have the best of everything money can buy, there’s no doubt of that. Quite simply, he doesn’t wish to be personally involved with them. He doesn’t want to know them and he doesn’t want them to know him. It worries me dreadfully.’
The calling-in of the Hobhouse loan became common knowledge soon enough, causing all the resentment my aunt had feared; for, although Mr. Hobhouse had been foolish, and there was usually little sympathy in Cullingford for a man who could not hang on to his money, he was popular, had been with us for a very long time, while Nicholas Barforth, a much younger man, had shown himself too devious, was not much liked in the Piece Hall in any case, where it was felt that he already had too much and had got it both too easily and too soon.
Cullingford, with the exception of Mr. Rawnsley of Rawnsley’s Bank and the astute Mr. Oldroyd, believed that Mr. Hobhouse should be given time to pay. Nicholas Barforth would not make that time available. Mr. Oldroyd was applied to again, Mr. and Mrs. Hobhouse, Freddy, Adolphus and James spending the best part of an afternoon at Fieldhead, reminding him perhaps of his wife, their dear Aunt Lucy, who had come to him from Nethercoats with a considerable dowry in her hands. Mr. Oldroyd was seen in Lawcroft Mill yard the following day, in conversation with Nicholas, and dined with him at the Old Swan that night. The next morning Mr. Oldroyd conveyed his regrets to Nethercoats, declining to throw good money after bad, a decision for which Nicholas Barforth was blamed, since his purchases of Oldroyd-spun yarn were considerable enough to allow him to exercise a little persuasion.
And it was largely to escape the gossip, in which Prudence was inevitably involved, that I packed Blanche’s boxes and mine and went to Galton with Georgiana, looking for quietness and finding instead that I was soon infected by her restlessness, the impulses which drove her on her wild, midnight riding, that caused her suddenly in mid-sentence to take flight, splashing across the Abbey Stream, scrambling up any stony hillside which seemed steep enough, dangerous enough to challenge her reckless spirit, moving so as not to stand still, shouting so as not to listen, running without direction, unless it was towards Julian Flood’s equally restless arms.
I was not sure of it. ‘Julian, darling, I have stones in my shoes’, and, flopping down on to the grass, she would stretch herself full length while he undid her shoe, pulled off her boot, his fingers curving far too easily around her ankle, as if he had done it all too many times before for any outward show of passion. It was not flirtation. They simply touched each other a great deal, jostling and back-slapping in the stable-yard. ‘Help me over this fence, Julian.’ ‘Lift me down from this gate’; and she would lean against him as frank and affectionate as she had been with her brother.
‘You love me at any rate, don’t you, Julian?’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s good—we’re alike, aren’t we, you and I?’ And although she had talked in exactly the same fashion to Perry, Julian Flood was not her brother, and in his case the barrier of comradeship, which had been fragile enough with Perry, could easily be crossed.
‘Faith, darling, I’m going off with Julian this morning—over the hills and faraway—God knows where! You don’t mind seeing to Venetia until I get back, since my nanny is half-witted and yours so supercilious that I daren’t for the life in me ask her myself.’ And, while she roamed the hillsides, the highways and by-ways of her beloved outdoors and of her own nature, I found myself for the first time involved with a girl-child who had no time for my stories and my games of make-believe, a tiny red-haired imp who found nothing to amuse her in my trinket boxes, an agile little creature who did exactly as she pleased and was impossible to catch. One moment she was there, passive, her face, like her mother’s, growing plain with the ebb of her vitality. The next moment she had vanished from the face of the earth, no one had seen her go, no one could find her. Consternation, my pulses fluttering, my mind full of that perilous Abbey stream, the quarry a mile away, the shaft of some ancient, worked-out mine; my sympathy going out to my sister Celia, who experienced this terrible anxiety, needlessly perhaps, but every day. No trace of her anywhere and then, in the very place one had looked a moment ago, she was there, her woodland green eyes blinking in amazement at the fuss, the sorry spectacle of Aunt Faith on the brink of nervous tears.
‘I went outside,’ she would tell
me. ‘Just out—’ And no more than that could I ever discover.
Gervase was with us too, playing truant again from the grammar school, his presence another bond between Georgiana and Julian Flood, for, failing Perry, what better example than the future lord of the manor of Cullingford could she find for the future squire of Galton to follow?
‘Julian, do show him how to load that gun. No—no, darling, you have to really make your horse work to get him over that gate—watch Julian. There, you see, he did it with a yard to spare. No, darling, you’re too stiff in the hips and the knees, sit easy in the saddle, like Julian. And Gervase, look at Julian’s feet—straight forward, darling, not sticking out like yours. Do look, Faith. Isn’t he coming along splendidly?’
One morning, as they were all three riding up and down the stream to accustom Gervase’s nervous animal to the fast-flowing water, and I was leaning on the bridge taking a final breath of Galton air, since I was going on to Listonby that day, I looked up and saw Nicholas walking towards us from the house.
‘Georgiana!’ I called out, conveying, against my will, a warning; and, seeing him too, ‘Damnation,’ she said, and, turning her horse’s head, sent it careering out of the water and up the hillside, turf and stones flying, and was off across the open fields, Julian Flood behind her.
I waited until Gervase got his horse up the bank, and taking his bridle walked him back along the path where Nicholas was waiting.
‘Father,’ he said, very pale, that wild look in his eyes again, clearly expecting to be blamed. But Nicholas merely nodded and told him, ‘Take your horse to the stables and then tell them to clean you up and get your things together. It seems to me you should be at your lessons.’
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