by Phillip Rock
It was pointless, Martin supposed. English boardingschool courtesy, drilled into the young like a multiplication table. He was a fine boy and he certainly could not fault him for being polite. Ivy would have been proud. She had only seen him when he was a babe in arms and now he was nearly six feet tall, captain of his school’s cricket team—of the “eleven” as he called it—and had just completed the interviews and tests that would ensure him a scholarship at Oxford.
Mrs. Bromley, his cook-housekeeper, brought coffee, toast, and the newspapers. He gave Albert the sporting section of the Daily Post which he scanned eagerly.
“Oh, blast!”
“Anything the matter, Albert?”
“Rangers, sir. They lost to United . . . three to two. That’s knocked them out of cup play.”
“Sorry to hear it.” He had no interest in English soccer—or any other English sport for that matter. He sipped his coffee and read the leaders. The London Naval Conference winding down with a few concessions being made. Some limits on submarines and new battleship construction. Tonnage and gun calibers. All meaningless. Ramsay MacDonald to pay a visit to slump-devastated Yorkshire—to do no more, he felt certain, than show his handsome, kindly face to the unemployed. He put the paper aside and opened the Paris edition of the New York Tribune—which he received every morning, if a day late. He searched for the baseball scores.
“Bob Giffrow retired. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“A friend of yours, sir?”
“In a manner of speaking. He was a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs for eighteen seasons.”
That thought made him wince and feel old. He had seen the man’s debut . . . Cubs versus Giants . . . the spring of 1912. Now he was stepping from the mound, his wicked, twisting “slew bobber” to confound batters no more. The Cubs still had Hack Wilson, who could slam them out of the park. And they had taken the pennant last year even if they had lost to Philadelphia in the series. But it had been Giffrow who had gotten them there, pitching with pain, his mighty arm like a gnarled and twisted oak. The great “Dutchman” walking away forever into the long shadows of a Chicago summer day. It didn’t seem possible. He folded the newspaper with a sigh and shoved it behind the coffee pot.
“Now there’s a game for you.”
“What game is that, sir?”
“Baseball.”
“Rather like our rounders, I believe.”
“No, Albert,” he said patiently, “it isn’t anything at all like rounders.”
“It’s played with a round bat and a ball, sir.”
“The similarity ends there. Believe me.” Not that he could explain the difference. How could he describe to the uninitiated the poetry of Jimmie Foxx? Tinker to Evers to Chance? Rogers Hornsby batting .424 for the 1924 season? The Babe . . . Lefty Grove . . . Walter “Big Train” Johnson . . . Ty Cobb sliding into second with his spikes glinting through the dust as deadly as a tiger’s fangs? Impossible. ‘‘I’ll take you to a baseball game one day.”
“Where, sir?”
“Why, in the States of course. Next summer when you leave school.”
“To America, sir? Do you mean it?”
“Sure I do.”
“Oh, I say, how super!”
“It’ll be a good experience for you before you go on to Oxford.”
Albert’s ecstatic expression paled. “I’m trying not to think about Oxford actually.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“The scholarship and all that.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s more than a year away. Plenty of time to get used to the idea.” He looked at his watch. “Better get your bag while I whistle down a taxi.”
Albert said nothing in the taxi until they rounded Hyde Park Corner and headed toward Oxford Street.
“My going to university means a great deal to Ned. That’s natural, I suppose. I mean to say, he wants the best for his baby brother . . . all the things he didn’t have.”
“He wants what’s best for you,” Martin said. “As do I.”
“Balliol will be horribly expensive even with the scholarship, and you’ve given so much already.”
“I can afford it.”
“Perhaps. I’m rather wondering if I can.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“What I mean is . . . well, some of the chaps at school look at things the way I do. This slump. Your American stock-market crash. A worldwide financial collapse. Did you know that thirty percent of the men in Birmingham are unemployed?”
“I’m aware of it,” he said dryly.
“Yes, of course. I mean, after all, as a journalist . . .”
“What are you trying to say, Albert?”
“That I don’t want to study for a First in Greats. It seems so . . . pointless and esoteric somehow. Fiddling while Rome burns. Nothing practical. I could earn a degree and then do nothing more with it than teach Greek or Latin at some place like Morborne. I want more out of life than that.” He turned on the seat to face Martin. ‘‘I’d like to live the way you do. Travel about the world . . . witness and write about important happenings. I speak French . . . my German’s coming along nicely . . . I seem to have a good ear for languages. I know I can write. I’m always top boy in school at composition.”
Martin smiled ruefully. “A newspaper man. Heaven help you.”
“It’s made you rich and famous—although it’s not money I’m thinking about. It’s doing something worthwhile . . . something important.”
“I would say you’ve given a good deal of thought to this.”
“Yes, I have. I could go to the University of London . . . and I could get a job. Copyboy or something like that . . . on the Daily Post, say. Mr. Golden would hire me if you asked him. Don’t you think?”
“Jacob would hire you if you asked him. He was very fond of Ivy. Best man at our wedding.”
“Work . . . take a few classes . . . share digs with a couple of chaps. I could do it on my own.”
‘‘I’m sure you could, at that.” He gave Albert’s knee a pat. “But let’s not discuss it now. You still have a year to go at Morborne. If you feel the same way then . . .”
“Oh, I will, sir . . . I know I will.”
“. . . I’ll talk to Jacob. I’m sure he can do better for you than a copyboy job. Perhaps a cub reporter . . . on sports. You probably know more about cricket and soccer than any kid alive.”
It was the decision Ivy would have made, he thought as he watched Albert hurry down the platform toward his train. It was uncanny how much he resembled his sister. Not just in looks, the black hair and almost violet eyes, but in his zest for life. Ivy’s education had been limited, but she had read everything she could get her hands on. Geography had been her passion. She had wanted to visit every dot on the globe. There were so many exotic lands and yet she was to see only France and a tiny, shell-torn strip of Flanders before she died.
The taxi had waited for him, meter ticking, the driver reading a paper and ignoring swarms of commuters anxious to hop in the back and be taken to their offices. Martin ran a gauntlet of dark-clothed men bearing tightly furled umbrellas and clenched briefcases, turned a deaf ear to pleas to share the ride and climbed into the cab. The driver folded his newspaper and placed it behind the meter.
“Where to, guv’nor?”
“Forty-seven Russell Street.”
He sat back and lit a cigar as the taxi clattered away from the station and along Euston Road. Turning down Gower Street he could see the soot-grimed buildings of London University looming over the tree-shaded streets and squares of Bloomsbury. A fine, no-nonsense school. If Albert was sincere about wanting to become a journalist he could not choose a better place to learn. But it was not Balliol, with all the prestige an Oxford education implied. His not going up to Oxford would disappoint his brother. No doubt of that. Ned Thaxton, fifteen years older than Albert, had set his heart on it. Ned had been bright enough as a boy to have won a scholarship—had he been kept in school long e
nough to try for one. The poverty of his family had ruled against that. He had left school at fourteen to work in a Norwich shoe factory as an oiler of stitching machines. A self-taught man, studying at night, he had become at eighteen a junior clerk in a solicitor’s office. Eventually, with Martin’s financial help, he had become a lawyer and was now a partner in a Birmingham firm.
He drew thoughtfully on his cigar. It was impossible to tell if Albert really wanted to be a newspaperman or was just momentarily dazzled by the profession. He knew so little about the boy. He had only seen him two or three times over the years and then only briefly. This was the first time they had spent any time together and had gotten to know each other—in a tentative sort of way. Difficult, he imagined, for Albert to think of him as a brother-in-law and not some sort of distant uncle. Thus the sir all the time and not Martin. And no doubt he had impressed the lad a bit too much. He had told him about his time as a foreign correspondent for A. P. and European bureau chief of the International News Agency . . . and then of his six years in America as a radio commentator. All exciting stuff to a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. And he had taken him to lunch at Whipple’s, that haunt of Fleet Street journalists for over a century. They had been joined at the table by Jacob Golden and a man who had just come back from China, covering the Far East for the Daily Post. His stories of Chinese warlords, gunfights in Shanghai between Kuomintang secret police and communist agents had kept Albert open-mouthed. Gathering news might not always be exciting, but it was certainly more so than teaching Latin or Greek.
There was no question that he had influenced Albert, but then his impact on the Thaxton family as a whole had been profound. He had never met any of them until long after Ivy’s death in 1917. It had been the summer of 1921 when he had finally managed to get back to England and had driven to the village near Norwich where his wife had been born, the eldest of John and Rose Thaxton’s six children. It had been a painfully formal meeting. Almost incomprehensible to the elder Thaxtons that “their Ivy” had married a rich American. All that they had known of it had been contained in a letter from Ivy dated December 1916, informing them that she had married a war correspondent from Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. Not a church wedding, either. In front of the mayor of a French town called St. Germainen-Laye. That in itself had seemed peculiar to them and they had worried over the legality of it. The whole world gone topsy-turvy and no mistake. Their firstborn off at the age of seventeen to be a housemaid and ending up in a foreign country, an army nurse, marrying a Yank. A queer sort of business, John Thaxton had remarked.
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Also by Phillip Rock
The Extraordinary Seaman
The Dead in Guanajuato
Flickers
The Passing Bells
A Future Arrived
Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover image © by Richard Jenkins
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpt from A Future Arrived © 1985 by Phillip Rock.
CIRCLES OF TIME. Copyright © 1981 by Phillip Rock. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This book was originally published in 1981 by Seaview Books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK PUBLISHED 2013.
ISBN 978-0-06-222933-5
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062229342
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