"I remember how they felt to me. Their bodies. And a lot of faces too, of course. But mostly their—where they were soft or bony or angular or tall or pneumatic, and mobile or still. That sort of thing."
She longed to ask where she ranked in that monstrous galaxy but had too much pride. And he had too little sympathy to tell her without being prompted.
"Did you enjoy them all?" she asked instead.
He pondered that a long time. "There's only one I remember not enjoying. That was an unfinished one on a canal bank, among the reeds, with a girl who was a simpleton and a bit crippled. Mainly because she was kept tied to a chair most days. I didn't enjoy that because I was interrupted in the middle by another man who claimed he'd seen her first."
Sarah clenched her jaw and eyes tight shut, trying not to laugh at the utter, gargantuan selfishness of this man. Yet even in the moment that it shocked her, she realized too that it was precisely the quality that made him right for her purposes. "So whose selfishness was top?"
"Funny you should ask that," he went on. "Usually I have to—worship at the temple, let's say, at least four times a week, otherwise I get so—impossible. But since last week, just knowing this day was coming, and remembering the last one, I haven't even wanted to. So that shows, doesn't it."
"Shows what?"
"There must be something lacking in those other encounters."
She giggled. "I imagined I was obsessed by thoughts of sexual congress. But I see I am still in the nursery."
And then she told him how she was proposing to make one clear day a week in London, so that they could go on meeting. "And we cannot possibly spend twenty to twenty-five pounds a month on this room. We could rent a whole house for that. So you, Mr. Thornton dear, are to look for clean and decent furnished rooms, somewhere quiet and discreet and near the West End and off the paths your friends and mine might tread. And get two sets of keys made. We will share the rent, of course. And we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Carey. Silvia Carey and…Samson Carey."
He laughed. "It will deceive no one."
"It will not have to. It is the form alone that matters. And one more thing. I insist that your…aides-memoire of these encounters of ours should not lie among two thousand seven hundred and fifty others. You are to leave them in our apartment."
"At once, majesty! May I ask why?"
She almost burst out laughing again; of course he needed to ask.
"Because," she said, reaching for the first convenient lie, "if it so happens that you are delayed or unable to visit me—which must happen from time to time—I shall not then be entirely inconsolable."
It pleased him inordinately to hear it.
Chapter 41
The Lady Bear-pronounced-Bere was not at all as Sarah had imagined her—no kindly, distant lady bountiful but a tough, vicious harridan. She wanted it quite clear that she had no time for mere charitable intentions, that she suspected everyone who walked through the doors of prurient curiosity, that she ran the committee and was not particularly upset if no one liked her or what she did. And what extraordinary qualities did Mrs. Cornelius imagine she had to offer the Society?
"Understanding," Sarah said without hesitation. And she was gratified to see that despite all the care her ladyship took to conceal it, the word and Sarah's pugnacity had pricked her curiosity. "You do not know," Sarah went on, "that when my father, who was vicar of Coldharbour in Cheshire, died, and my mother followed him soon after, I was left in dire peril of the fate from which we attempt"—she liked that we—"to rescue our girls in this Society." An imp of mischief prompted her to lean forward and ask, with intense seriousness: "Have you, Lady Bear, ever lain drugged and barely sensible while your undoing is bargained for upon the stair outside?"
Lady Bear was too astonished to reply coherently, but the word "impertinence" and flecks of saliva escaped her moustachioed lips.
"That," Sarah said dramatically, "is what I mean by understanding."
Her ladyship was curious still, despite herself. "You?" she began.
Sarah nodded. "I was rescued in the very nick of time. And taken and placed in virtuous and honest employment where"—her voice fell to its normal tones and she became sincere—"I had the fortune to attract the favourable notice of my employer, Mr. Cornelius."
For the first time Lady Bear smiled. "And now you are…"
"His widow," Sarah said quickly, now hating herself for using the story so, and disliking Lady Bear for having provoked it. What did she care whether she had Lady Bear's approval or not? She had only come here because of the Stevensons' letter. She could easily find some other charity with a weekly committee to suit her needs.
But it was not going to be necessary. She had won Lady Bear's grudging approval and, on handing over the donation of four hundred pounds, won her place on the committee, which met every Thursday morning. The trust John had set up with Tom's money yielded eight hundred and fifty pounds a year, which was hers absolutely. And since John and Nora wouldn't take a penny for her keep, most of the twelve hundred it had yielded so far was still intact.
"Come and see the Refuge out at Hornsey," Lady Bear said. "My carriage is outside."
But Sarah explained she had business in town; would tomorrow be as convenient? After the committee meeting?
"Of course, Mrs. Cornelius. I suppose you may have a reference? Since your parents and husband are all passed over? Please do not be offended; it is the commissioners of charity who insist."
"Not at all. It is most proper. The only friend I remember from those days, a friend of my father's, was the Reverend Doctor Prendergast, who is now Bishop of Manchester. I'm sure he will speak for me. He will remember me as little Sarah Nevill. In fact"—the imp returned—"when you write to him, do say that it was something he told me at our last meeting which awakened me to the perils a girl may face and that has brought me to you, eager to help."
Each week her lust for Thornton grew stronger. Fear had gone completely. So had her simple, ignorant curiosity. The days that led up to each Wednesday and, later, each Thursday, were filled with bodily memories of him, of his hands on her hips and breasts, of his teeth and tongue down her back, of his priapic strength and his glinting, greedy eyes. She found it odd to like him so much, to like his sexual gluttony, his towering selfishness, his total insensitivity to anything that was not part of his finale or of the long and devious road toward it. How could she like these things so warmly, while the thought that anyone could love him made her almost bilious?
If one could not answer that question, there was no point in framing lesser ones. So she asked no questions at all, but accepted the extraordinary things she was doing, the tissue of lies and fantasy she was weaving, as normal. And what made it normal was that she could face the thought of John and Nora being in bed (not now, of course, because Nora was still very poorly, but the memory of them, and the prospect)—she could accept it without envy or self-pity. Now she could admit that, for eighteen months, she had felt both those destructive emotions. And she was not now plagued with stupid, arrested-schoolgirl fantasies of lustful Turks. And she no longer went around feeling like a boiler at the point of bursting. Anything that removed such blemishes could not be utterly wrong. It could not even be very wrong. If Mr. Thornton were a Musselman, he and she and Mrs. Thornton would probably be very happy together.
Chapter 42
In the first week of January 1847, Nora had healed well enough for Dr. Hales to take off the sandbag entirely. "But the fascia will take some time to knit thoroughly. So you must still treat yourself tenderly. No Valsalva's manoeuvre— d'you know what I mean?"
Nora, thinking she did, blushed and agreed. The thought of that had, for once, not crossed her mind. But later she looked it up in the Household Physician and found that it meant no more than straining at stool, straining to cough, or to exhale vigorously. What a strange world doctors lived in, where one did not cough or sneeze but "performed Valsalva's manoeuvre."
Soon she was allowed up brie
fly, each day, to walk around the room and sit in a padded chair by the fire and read. John usually stayed part of the mornings and went to London each afternoon and evening. He told her he was delighted at the way those to whom he had delegated parts of their business were coping. She had private doubts—because nothing in her experience ever went that smoothly—but she pretended to accept all he said.
One thing that did please her was the way John now spoke about the wider world beyond their business. Before, he had always behaved as if railways were the prime force of the times; it mattered little what governments and factions and the Treasury planned, the railways, he said, would sweep everything before them. Human wishes were powerless before the greater might of steam and iron. But now he spoke more often of things people had said in Parliament—not in pity at their blindness but with respect for their wisdom. Lord George Bentinck told his friends he had consulted John on the drafting of the bill for the aid of Irish railways. And since railway legislation in general took up more than a quarter of parlimentary time, John was, one way and another, canvassed and consulted by an increasing number of people in both parties and at the Board of Trade.
Near the end of January, he came back with the news that a new British Association had been formed for the relief of the distress in remote parishes of Ireland and Scotland. There had been serious riots in Scotland, where poor country folk were just as dependent on the potato as were the Irish and where the failure had been equally universal. In Ireland there had been disturbances and a flood of violent talk, but no rioting on any great scale. In fact, where the distress was worst—in the far west of Ireland—whole villages had been quietly dying without a word of protest or the throwing of a single stone. The snows of this winter lay in one unbroken shroud from Cape Clear, right across Ireland, England, Europe, and Russia…all the way to Siberia. It was the hardest winter, not just in memory, but in written record also. People who had half starved for a year and fully starved for another six months were dying in numbers that stirred even the most antipapist conscience. The new British Association was one response.
"The people organizing it," John told Nora, "are bankers like Rothschild's, Baring, who bought the relief corn in America in forty-five, Abel Smith, and there's Pim from the Society of Friends. They've asked me for advice on feeding large numbers in out-of-doors circumstances—which is one up to us and one in the eye for the army commissariat."
"How much have you promised in money?" Her tone was carefully neutral.
He smiled at her, forcing her to smile too. "That is a problem. We've a little over five thousand waiting to go to the right sort of activity in Ireland. But Rothschild's only given a thousand and the queen's only given two thousand."
"Only!" Nora said.
"Well, I agree, yes, it is generous. But it means we must give eight or nine hundred. To give more would make us look—pushing at it. So what I think, if you agree, is for me to go straight to the Friends and propose to them that I should buy up the first convenient bankrupt estate and lend it to them, free, to remodel. And pay for whatever they do. So we'll look for the worst and try to make it the best."
"It sounds a good idea," she said. "But fancy going out and looking for an estate in the worst possible condition!" She yawned, unconvincingly. It was the nearest she could go toward telling him he had carte blanche with the Irish profits.
"You see, we have the money—some money—but no time; they have the time but no money."
"It fits well," she said, pretending to fall into a doze.
"Trevelyan says we'll need a few more horrifying accounts of the distress before the general English hostility to the Irish is overcome and the subscriptions begin to flow in."
"Well," Nora said, almost asleep, "they do make such threats against us." It was a speech of abdication. How little it all seemed to matter now.
All next month the news from Ireland dominated the papers. Tales of the mass deaths of whole villages written with incoherent anger by customs men and returning travellers turned Trevelyan's gallows humour into an accurate prediction: Money was flowing into the British Association's coffers.
The government too was looking for money. The new liberal ministry, appalled at the waste and muddle of earlier relief works, had brought in a new scheme making local ratepayers responsible for funding all relief. The Treasury would advance the money, free of interest, against the promise of the ratepayers to repay over a fixed term of years. "Ireland's property must support Ireland's poverty," was the watchword.
But once again a remote government and an even remoter Treasury had not the slightest grasp of Irish reality. No ratepayer who valued his life and the lives of his family dared to oppose any scheme that offered employment, no matter how costly or fanciful. Without second thought, they put their names to schemes that would bankrupt themselves twenty times over—knowing full well that in the end the Treasury, unable to take the entire country in pawn, would simply have to write off the debt.
And that was why the Treasury was coming into the money market for a loan of eight million pounds, just to cover Irish relief work.
Nora knew none of this; and John, wishing above all to let the wounds of their own private Irish question heal, naturally told her nothing of it. So she sat in the boudoir at Maran Hill reading the newspapers, seeing the gold reserves fall almost by the hour—in one week nearly a million pounds' worth of bullion went to America alone—and wondering if there was one sane man left at the Bank of England. The country was bleeding gold from every seaport.
Now it would begin, she thought. Not just a few rotten apples falling out of the trees, but whole boughs would break. Why can I not get better quicker? she fumed. Now when I am needed most of all!
If anger and impatience could heal, she would have been well by the end of January. But though her general strength and vigour returned slowly, she constantly anticipated that regeneration by pushing herself beyond their present limit. She would ask to see accounts and would herself make mistakes in checking them; her angry letters of reprimand had to be followed by humble apologies to the clerks or seniors concerned. After three such lapses, she came to mistrust herself.
"I've invented a new mathematics," she said to John. "I call it 'elastic adding.' I add up everything three times and take the average of the three different answers." And then, still laughing at her joke, she burst into tears.
"I don't know what's wrong with me," she said when he had soothed her back from her hysteria.
"If only you could forget the business," he said, making a gouging movement, dipping an imaginary spoon into her skull. "How can we remove it for a month or two—all memory of it?"
She sighed.
"Perhaps," he said, looking guardedly at her, "this isn't the thing to tell you, but we are managing quite well without you. Nothing like so well as with you, of course. But that's to say we're only twice as good as all our competitors instead of four times as good."
She wished she could respond to this kindliness of his, but her anger at her own feebleness, and at being kept away from life, overwhelmed that impulse to tenderness. She knew he was keeping things back from her and she resented it—even though she understood his intention. He became the only focus for her anger. And all her knowledge and understanding could not stop her from venting it.
He too was ashamed to find that something within him resented her illness. He had come to depend on her far more than he realized. In a loose way, he had imagined that she represented part of that "delegation of authority and decision" which was so important to the firm's continued expansion. One point of such delegation was that if any delegatee fell ill or was absent, others, including himself, could cover. He had swiftly found that no one could cover for Nora. They could do the mechanical things—the transfer and management of funds and accounts—all the things he had thought formed her real contribution to the firm. But what they could not supply was that uncanny ability to think about the firm as a whole, not as it might be set out in a pro
spectus, but as a thriving, bustling entity.
Something in her mind was like a little working model of their business and the world—far more intricate and rare than any clockwork or machinery. It was, as Chambers said, priceless. As each week passed he missed that faculty more sorely—and disliked himself for the resentment it bred.
By March she was well enough to go for a few gentle rides around the park with Sarah on their underexercised horses. On one of these trots, Fontana put a foot in a "money hole," as Hertfordshire people called the sudden and unpredictable pits that open in deep gravel, and threw her. She was conscious again by the time they carried her indoors, but she was badly concussed and shaken. Dr. Hales said she ought to go abroad.
They thought at once of Rodie and Normandy, and within a week it was arranged for her to go on the first of April and to stay until she was fit.
On the first of April, the Bank put up its minimum rate to five per cent.
For most of that spring she sat in the gardens at La Gracieuse or, on the finest days, down on the sands at Trouville. Once or twice, for the extra encouragement it brought, she and Rodie went and sat in royal isolation on the Deauville side. "One day, Rodie," she said…and she went on to describe the fashionable resort she and Ferrand had planned. There was no harm in it now they had bought all but a couple of acres of the land.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 44