House of Gold

by Natasha Solomons

  Clement noted that his father did not suggest that he should run, something he observed with both sadness and relief. He was entirely unsuited to politics, and yet the quickness with which his father dismissed him wounded him all the same. He daren’t object. Everyone’s tempers were short. The breakfast room of Number One, Park Lane looked straight out onto the yellowed grass of Hyde Park. The Thames was at the lowest level anyone could remember, and it stank of human filth and rotting fish. The capital was motionless. Strikes at the docks had stopped supplies of coal so that the great railway stations were silent, the trains still. A shortage of motor oil meant that omnibus services were suspended; motorised taxis hiked up their prices to levels that even a Goldbaum considered obscene; while the heat had led to an outbreak of mange amongst the horses and, with most of them quarantined, even hansoms were hard to come by. Anyone without a motor car was forced to walk and, Clement thought unhappily, at present that entailed running the gauntlet through buzzing crowds of angry men demanding jobs.

  In the immediate vicinity of the city and Park Lane the family were well known for their generosity; all spare birds from shoots were brought up to town, and no hungry man or woman was ever turned away from the back door of the Goldbaum kitchens. Consequently their motor car was usually greeted with good humour by passers-by, but yesterday Albert and Lord Goldbaum had found themselves set upon in Piccadilly. Young men had drummed on the roof of the car and pummelled it with rotting eggs. Lord Goldbaum proclaimed himself unshaken, merely relieved that the ladies were in the country. Clement was not convinced. The cartoon of Greta was one of the least offensive in that week’s papers. Albert and Clement tried uselessly to conceal from their father those lampooning him. He was painted variously as the Guy Fawkes of greed, a villain against the people and the rapacious financier. Clement knew how this wounded him. The headaches that had plagued Lord Goldbaum as a young man had returned, and in the evening as he sat beside the fire, Clement noticed a tic in his left eye. Soon his tailor must be summoned to take in his suits.

  Lord Goldbaum reached out and clasped his sons’ hands.

  ‘Today I shall vote for a reform I do not believe in, because the consequence of not agreeing to it would be disastrous. Our family arrived here with nothing but a piece of paper and a foreign name. Within three generations, we are peers of the realm. It was my duty to protect England, and I have failed.’

  His sons started to voice their objections, but he held up his hand.

  ‘This is the end. Of precisely what, only time will tell. I hope that when you inherit this title, Clement, it will still mean something. You have a responsibility, even if those you seek to protect abhor you.’

  ‘You have done all that a man could,’ said Albert, his tone measured, implying that in his view his father had done more than he ought.

  ‘We may have to extend our Argentine loans,’ said Albert, trying to change the subject to other business.

  The concerns of the House of Goldbaum Bank were always the greatest salve to their father. Considering the relative profit and risk of a loan, or the organisation of an issue of gilts on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, consoled and relaxed their father more thoroughly than a good night’s sleep. His loyalty was to his family and his country, and while he considered himself to be labouring for the good of both, he was soothed and comforted.

  Albert shifted on his chair, stretching out his long legs beneath the table. ‘A hundred thousand pounds’ worth of Argentine beef is turning green in Bermondsey harbour, with no one to unload the container ships. They want to sell it to the government for the army, but Churchill won’t have it.’

  ‘Of course the government won’t have it. There is never a good moment to poison the army,’ said his father with a grunt.

  ‘We shall take a loss.’

  ‘Then we take a loss. This is not a financial decision, it is a moral one.’ Lord Goldbaum sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps relieved at the opportunity to demonstrate that he was, after all, a good man.

  Albert made a note. ‘Ought we to insure the passenger ship then, Father? I’m being pressed for an answer. I rather think we should. It’s unsinkable. We’d make more than six per cent.’

  Lord Goldbaum shook his head. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t care what they say. The thing is too big to float.’

  Albert and Clement exchanged a look, both exasperated and amused by their father. There was no use in reasoning with him once he’d resolved upon a course of action, however illogical.

  ‘Coutts will make the profit instead,’ said Albert, in one last attempt to change his mind with a reminder of their rival.

  ‘Let them,’ said Lord Goldbaum.

  Lord Goldbaum returned from the vote at the House of Lords at two forty-five in the morning and woke up both his sons, instructing them to join him shortly in the library. It occurred to Lord Goldbaum that in his determination to do his best for his country, he had neglected his own people. The letter from Henri describing the pogroms in Russia weighed heavily in his breast pocket. Distracted by events in the Upper House, he had not given it the attention he ought. Shame prickled across his flesh like a rash. He sighed and swallowed a yawn. It was his duty to show his sons that they had responsibilities beyond England’s shores. They must do better than he. Yet he was so tired, and the hours spent standing for the vote in the House had irritated his piles so that they itched his backside like a scourge of mosquito bites. Patting the letter in his breast pocket, he decided that he deserved such petty discomforts.

  Albert and Clement entered the library, bleary-eyed and wearing their dressing gowns. Their father pressed glasses of brandy upon them, poured from a bottle dating from the days before the French Revolution and reserved for the most significant of occasions.

  Lord Goldbaum raised his glass. ‘We must mark our defeats as well as our victories.’

  Albert and Clement toasted. Albert stifled a shudder. The brandy might be priceless, but it was also unpleasant.

  ‘A great loss is as invigorating as a win. It reminds one of what is at stake,’ said Lord Goldbaum.

  Albert observed that his father’s cheeks were flushed and he suspected that this was not the first brandy of the night.

  ‘What is at stake, Father?’ asked Albert.

  ‘The name of Goldbaum. We shall show them a defeat in the Lords has not dimmed our influence. We shall not be ignored. I’ve asked the Foreign Secretary half a dozen times to voice objections to the pogroms, and Lord Grey prevaricates or sends a letter so feeble that the Russian Ambassador couldn’t possibly discern whether he’s being admonished or invited to tea.’

  ‘Is there anything more to be done?’ asked Albert.

  ‘There’s always something more to be done,’ snapped his father. ‘These wretches in Russia look to us. If we can’t defend the Jews there, no soul on earth will. The British government won’t risk displeasing the Tsar by interfering. But we can always make the Tsar listen. After all we have what he wants.’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘And he shan’t have it, not until the violence against the Jews stops.’

  Lord Goldbaum sat down awkwardly at the library table and scribbled a note, then rang the bell. Stanton, the butler, appeared moments later, fully dressed as though it wasn’t nearly three in the morning.

  ‘Send this to the editor of The Times. And send a bottle of the Chateau Gold ’sixty-three to Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill.’

  Stanton withdrew.

  Later that morning, when Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill gathered for a Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, none of them mentioned the gift they had received from Lord Goldbaum. Each understood it to be not so much a magnanimous gesture upon defeat as a reminder.

  HAMPSHIRE, AUGUST

  On seeing the paper the following morning, Lady Goldbaum telephoned her husband to register her disapproval. She read aloud his letter to the editor of The Times: ‘“Terror from the Tsar and those above may stave off rev
olution, but it will be at the cost of national bankruptcy.” It sounds rather like a threat, dearest.’

  Lord Goldbaum muttered something inaudible.

  ‘Why can’t you lie low and lick your wounds after a defeat?’ continued his wife, profoundly irritated. ‘As if national strikes weren’t enough, now you have to pick an argument with the Tsar of Russia.’

  ‘I ought to have done it before, Adelheid. It’s to my own shame that I didn’t.’

  ‘Wonderful! I shall expect Cossacks in the rose garden by luncheon.’

  ‘I had to do it. The boys need to understand their duty. We are the voice of European Jewry. It’s time we shouted our objections to pogroms and slaughter.’

  ‘So that one day your sons can learn to pick their own fights with emperors?’

  Lord Goldbaum apparently thought it best not to reply.

  ‘You must make things better for the poor souls in Russia, not worse.’

  ‘That I promise you,’ said Lord Goldbaum.

  Lady Goldbaum paused, aware of the operators listening in on the call.

  ‘Good. Remember, a promise witnessed is an oath, dearest.’

  Lord Goldbaum grunted.

  ‘Are you taking the pills for your gout? And how is your digestion?’

  Lord Goldbaum hung up.

  A little later Greta accompanied her mother-in-law to the kitchen gardens. Observing Adelheid’s crossness, she wisely made no remark on Lord Goldbaum’s letter in the morning’s Times. Lady Goldbaum stopped to deadhead a rose, taking out her frustration on the shrub. She always kept a pair of secateurs on her person, holstered to a leather belt like a cowboy’s gun. The two-hundred-yard walk to the kitchen gardens took a considerable time, as Lady Goldbaum paused at every bush. Arthur Stokes had the gardening boys snipping from dawn in preparation for her inevitable inspection. Each time Lady Goldbaum found a desiccating flower or – outrage! – a scarlet hip, she snipped it and retained it in her pocket to present to Arthur in cheerful triumph.

  At last they reached the wooden buildings beside the six acres of kitchen garden and, as they entered, Greta stared at the vegetable cornucopia: every surface was covered with produce – stacks of striped marrows like fat skittle sets, baskets of tomatoes as shiny as Yuletide baubles, veined cabbages, potatoes and rows of brown onions, their white roots dangling off the tables like dirty, uncut hair. Forty gardeners in white cotton gloves diligently packed them into lined crates and sealed them up. Lady Goldbaum took charge.

  ‘It must be packed properly with straw and ice. I won’t have it going bad before it reaches the strikers’ families.’

  ‘Yes, m’lady.’

  ‘Greta, you are to oversee the delivery for the East End and the Synagogue Relief Fund.’

  ‘Yes, Adelheid,’ said Greta, surveying the mountain of boxes.

  Lady Goldbaum was kept as busy by her charities as by her rhododendrons, and if she was not as passionate about good works as good leaf colour, she remained diligent and committed. The heat inside the packing shed was immense and Greta peeled back her sleeves and doused her neck and wrists with iced water, melted from the vast blocks of miniature icebergs that floated in tin baths on the floor. The plans for her own garden had been paused, her newly engaged gardeners all commandeered to assist with the general effort of picking, packing and re-sowing food.

  Greta experienced unease at the pleasure she felt at the task at hand. It was jolly to be part of the gang, and she was relieved to be occupied with something useful. The lurid newspaper descriptions of the squalor in the slums and the misery of the strikers’ children were simply too awful. And yet Greta also harboured the unpleasant feeling that the good she was achieving was mostly to ease her own conscience, and that even if the Goldbaums dispatched every lettuce and each strawberry from their own beds to strikers’ children in Southampton or London or Liverpool, it would make no difference at all. Nothing she could do would secure them the extra three shillings a week they demanded. In the evenings when the men were at home, she heard Lord Goldbaum fret about the new trade unions, lamenting that they were the thin edge of socialism, as Albert attempted to reassure him. All the while, as Greta listened, she knew that the corset rubbing her skin to blisters and forcing her to sit at the edge of her chair like a canary on its perch had cost far more than the seventeen shillings with which a working man must presently feed his family each week.

  There had been power cuts all morning and the house was without electricity and, instead of eating in the darkened grandeur of the dining room, they took lunch on the terrace. Even beneath the shade of the parasols it was sweltering and the scarlet geraniums flopped in their pots, fainting like schoolgirls. They were served spatchcock poussins roosting on a virulent purée of broad beans dotted with little chanterelles foraged from the estate woods, but all Greta wanted was a glass of lemonade and a cool flannel.

  ‘Are you feeling quite well, dearest? You’re looking terribly flushed,’ said Lady Goldbaum.

  ‘I’m only a little warm.’

  ‘Not unwell? Feeling sick?’

  ‘No,’ answered Greta firmly. She knew that they were all watching her for any signs of pregnancy. Well, all of them except Albert.

  ‘Why don’t you go inside and lie down this afternoon? The boxes are packed, and we’ve given orders for the rest.’

  ‘Yes, all right, Adelheid. Thank you.’

  Greta set down her napkin and ambled back to the house. Even when they were alone, out of hearing of the servants, Greta and Adelheid never spoke German. Sometimes Greta longed to speak and hear it, like a marooned seaman longs for fresh water. Perhaps it was for the best. She liked Adelheid more than her own mother; she was endlessly kind towards her, and yet to her surprise Greta found that she missed the Baroness and all her foibles. The Baroness penned letters that were tenderer in Greta’s absence than she’d ever been in person. Occasionally she was even amusing and self-aware, and Greta puzzled over how it was that she’d had to travel so far away to discover this other side to her mother.

  She hurried through the darkened East Gallery, past three hundred ticking clocks starting to proclaim the hour in a clashing Schoenberg of bells, but instead of going upstairs to her rooms, she walked straight out through the furthest doors and back into the gardens, far from Lady Goldbaum on the south terrace. She carried with her a small parcel that had arrived from Otto via the family courier that morning.

  The sun was at its hottest as she reached the edge of the park and the boundary between the Temple Court estate and that of Fontmell Abbey. The managed wilderness of the park turned into scrub and overgrown hedges. Greta shouldered her way along a path lined waist-high with ferocious stinging nettles and brambles, studded here and there with early blackberries. She picked them as she passed, discovering that she was hungry after all. In a few minutes her lips and fingers were stained purple with juice, her skin bleeding from the thorns. The scent of wild honeysuckle mingled with the salt smell of the river.

  Her white blouse was stained with blackberries and she’d torn her sleeve. Her stays chafed against her ribs. She longed to pause and rest, but then, at last, peeking out from above a dark knot of yew, she saw the soot-stained chimneystacks of Fontmell Abbey. Unconsciously she began to hurry, as though the place was already home. The unmade road leading there had been newly paved in preparation for the planned building works, but the hedges remained towering and uncut, the twisted iron gates rusted and broken.

  Opening a small door in the garden wall, she found herself on the south lawn – if it could be called a lawn – the grass long and flowering and filled with cowslips and meadow vetch and fat thistles. The grass swayed with rabbits. A white rambling rose had climbed all the way up a catalpa tree, filling its branches with cascading flowers. She’d visited Fontmell a month earlier with Albert and Lord and Lady Goldbaum to discuss the new house with the family’s preferred architect, a whiskered gentleman who designed new chateaux in high French style. His proposal was to demolish th
e old manor and the remnants of the ancient abbey and build a modern house, comfortable and exquisite. She’d not voiced any objection; in fact, she hadn’t spoken at all.

  Now she looked at the place as if for the first time. She gazed through the wilderness up towards the old house, crouching on a gentle rise above the gardens, its sandstone façade almost entirely covered by a vast and ancient wisteria. Swinging tresses of Clematis montana climbed upwards to the roof. The glass was missing from several of the windows and birds flew in and out unheeded; part of the lead guttering had swung down and dangled dangerously above the door. The manor looked as if it had grown there, as if somehow it had always existed in this fertile bend in the river, with the bindweed and forest of dandelions sprouting up around it. There was little left of the abbey. Most of it had collapsed centuries ago and the stone had been reused in the newer parts of the manor, but to the west of the house survived archways from the cloisters. There was a peace and serenity to the place. It blew through her, catching her off-guard. Perhaps it ought to have felt odd, a Jew contemplating an abbey with a sense of equanimity and pleasure, but God existed in the landscape, she decided.

  ‘I shall not let them knock you down,’ she declared.

  She would dismiss the learned architect and his elaborate plans for three electric lifts, and hire a man who could restore the manor and see it as part of the gardens. The abbey ruins must be allowed to remain in their state of quixotic decay. Nature needed to be pruned, but Greta was determined to preserve the feeling of the meadows spilling in waves up to the house. She wanted to wake to the rattle of sparrows cracking snails for breakfast, not the mechanical whirr of a lift.

  Leaning against the wall, she opened the package from Otto, discarding her gloves and using her nail. Inside were a note and a small pistol, its grip covered in shining mother-of-pearl: