HARRY BINGHAM
The Sons of Adam
DEDICATION
To my beloved N,
My writing partner
May this marriage be laughing for ever,
Today, tomorrow and all the hours of Paradise.
Rumi (1207–1273)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Part Two
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Part Three
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Part Four
48
49
50
51
52
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57
58
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62
63
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Part Five
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
Part Six
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
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Part Seven
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
Historical Note
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Somme Battlefield, France, 23 August 1916
A man crawls forward on his belly. He’s covered with mud. It’s night-time.
The man is young, a British lieutenant. Although he moves carefully, there’s urgency in his movements, something breathless, something desperate. It’s a dangerous attitude at the best of times. Out here in no man’s land, just three dozen yards from German lines, the attitude seems almost suicidal.
For almost three minutes, the lieutenant moves in silence. Every now and then there is the crack of a rifle or the whine of bullets. He appears to ignore them. Eventually, he comes to a shallow shellhole and rolls down into it. He catches his breath a moment, then shouts.
‘Tom! Tommy! Tom Creeley!’
For a moment, the night is silent. A scrappy moon plays hide-and-seek. Earth and flint scrape beneath the lieutenant’s boots. In the distance, big guns thump the horizon.
Then a voice answers. It’s no more than a groan, but the lieutenant is instantly alert.
‘Tom? Tommy? Is that you?’
His hope is painfully evident. He climbs quickly out of the shellhole in the direction of the voice. He wriggles forwards, hardly concerned to keep his head and body low.
Within forty seconds, he has covered almost thirty yards. The voice belongs to a young boy, a British infantryman, horribly wounded in legs and belly. The boy is obviously dying.
A look passes across the lieutenant’s face. It’s one of painful disappointment. Whoever this boy is, it isn’t Tom Creeley. But the look passes.
‘All right, sonny,’ says the lieutenant. ‘I’ve come to get you home.’
The boy’s face is shockingly white in the moonlight. ‘I’m hurt pretty bad, sir.’ His voice is a whimper. He is afraid of death.
‘Hurt? Nothing too bad, son. We’ll get you patched up in no time and on a train back to England. How’s that?’
‘Oh, yes, sir! Oh, yes!’
The lieutenant nods. In one hand, he holds a canteen of water to the boy’s mouth. ‘Drink this.’ The boy drinks. As he does so, the lieutenant’s other hand snakes round in the mud, holding a revolver. The boy lowers the canteen. His eyes are grateful.
‘Good lad,’ says the lieutenant. He holds his gun to within an inch of the boy’s head and fires. The boy drops back, dead.
The lieutenant lies low for a minute or so, then briskly searches the boy’s pockets for any personal papers. He takes whatever there is, then, once again, flattens himself against the earth. He lifts his head and shouts.
‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Cree-leeeeeee?’
And this time there’s no answer. No answer at all.
PART ONE
Rise early, work hard … strike oil.
J. Paul Getty
1
Whitcombe House, Hampshire, 23 August 1893
The beginning?
To hell with beginnings. Beginnings are excuses, apologies for failure. If things turned out disastrous – and they did – then that had everything to do with the way three young men chose to behave, nothing to do with the way things started out.
On the other hand, people are only human. Once a ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it. A beginning is a beginning, and on this occasion, the beginning wasn’t just bad.
It was awful.
It happened like this.
A small boy, a seven-year-old, stands in a kitchen. He’s building himself a blackberry pudding as big as his head. The cook stands by, face red in the firelight, managing pots of water boiling on the stove, a newly made pot of coffee steaming to the side. The scene is domestic, quiet, happy.
Upstairs, the little boy’s mother, Lady Pamela Montague, is in labour for the fourth time. Of her first three children, only one – the bl
ackberry-pudding-guzzling Guy – survived more than a few weeks. She and her husband, Sir Adam, are understandably anxious this time, but everything is proceeding normally. The doctor and midwife are in attendance.
So far, so nothing.
No births. No deaths. No hatreds. And best of all: no beginnings.
But, in a second, that changed.
All of a sudden there was a bang at the door, the jiggle of a latch, a blast of cool air. A tiny girl flitted in, as though blown by the wind. A sweep of rain washed the step behind her.
‘Please miss, please sir, please help.’ The tiny girl bobbed and curtsied, desperate with anxiety. ‘My ma’s ill. She’s having a baby, only it’s got stuck, and she says she can’t, and she’s gone as white as anything, and my dad said to run to the big house for help as fast as I could, and please miss, please miss, please miss.’
Mrs White, the cook, brought the girl further into the light.
‘Are you Jack Creeley’s little girl, dear?’
‘Please, miss. Yes, miss. Sally Creeley, and my ma’s having a baby and –’
‘Well, dear, it never rains but it pours. You just pop yourself down while I go and speak to Sir Adam. If you want you can –’
Guy stopped her.
It wasn’t a big interruption, but it was a decisive one. He raised his hand, like a man stopping a horse.
‘No need, Cookie. I shall tell him myself.’ He lifted his pudding, the coffee for his father, then turned to the little girl. ‘You can go back home and when the doctor is no longer wanted here, he can come to you. For the time being, he’s required here.’
He set off up the stairs. As he did so, he muttered to himself, ‘Oh, and it’s five guineas the visit, by the way, and someone to take care of his horse.’
Once upstairs, he set down his trophies. Coffee for his father, blackberry pud for himself. He said nothing about Sally Creeley. He said nothing about the little girl’s mother. In the seven years he’d been alive in the world, Guy Montague had learned that there are two sorts of people: those who can afford doctors and those who can’t. It seemed like a simple lesson, the most obvious thing in the world.
He finished his pudding, concealed a belch, and went to bed.
That night, after a twelve-hour labour, Pamela Montague gave birth to a healthy baby boy, a bawling little bundle with lungs like steam-bellows. The birth proved to be perfectly simple. No complications. No difficulties at all.
The same night, in one of the short rows of cottages that housed the estate workers, a young man, Jack Creeley, was forced to watch as his wife screamed through the night, helped only by a couple of untrained girls from the village. In the end, Creeley himself ran up to the big house and begged to speak to Sir Adam. As soon as Sir Adam heard the man’s story, he sent doctor and midwife racing across to the cottages.
Too late. A simple breech birth, which any doctor or any midwife could have simply and speedily corrected, had exhausted the mother and complicated the baby’s position. The doctor, acting quickly, made the incisions that enabled him to deliver the baby by Caesarean section. The doctor was a good one, skilled and decisive. A baby boy was delivered, healthy and screaming, into the little cottage bedroom.
Healthy but motherless.
Poor Betsy Creeley, just twenty-six years old, was exhausted even before the operation began. She lost too much blood and never recovered consciousness. By the time dawn broke on 24 August, the little boy’s mother was dead.
And there it was.
Two births.
One death.
One selfish act with terrible consequences.
A beginning.
2
Jack Creeley couldn’t keep his son, of course.
He was a single working man with a little girl already dependent on him. In the short term, there were local women happy to help out, but in the longer term, he could see no option other than to ask his sister – now living ninety miles away in Devon – to take both the girl and the baby. His sister would certainly agree, but Devon might as well have been the other side of the world for all that Jack would ever see them. He felt like a man living with the pain of a triple bereavement.
But help was closer than he thought.
Up at the big house, Sir Adam and Lady Pamela had a worry of their own. Their new-born son, Alan, had a cough. Not a big one. In fact, it was quite definitely a minor one. The midwife said the cough was normal. The doctor agreed. Sir Adam agreed. But it was a cough. Pamela had already lost two children under the age of six weeks and she was terrified of losing a third.
Sir Adam spent a day thinking things through before making his suggestion. His wife agreed instantly and Sir Adam went to approach Jack Creeley. His proposal was this.
Jack Greeley’s young boy, christened Thomas after his maternal grandfather, would be taken in by the Montagues. He and the tiny Alan Montague would grow up as brothers. They would share rooms, toys, schooling – everything. In Sir Adam’s words, the infant Tom ‘would grow up as one of our own. He would in all ways be brother to our own son Alan. You, of course, will still be his father. He’ll call you Father and me Uncle. You’ll see Tom whenever you wish, just say the word.’
For Jack Creeley, the offer was far too good to refuse. It meant his son would grow up in sight and sound of his father. It gave the poor man some good thing to snatch from the wreckage his life had so suddenly become. He said yes.
For the Montagues, the new arrangement brought only benefits. There was guilt, of course. Guy’s behaviour had been unforgivable – and he had been well beaten for it. On a more constructive side, offering a home to Tom seemed like the least they could do.
But it was more than that. Pamela loved babies, and the borrowed child went some way to make up for the two she had lost. But what was more, something about Tom’s arrival seemed to work like a charm on the infant Alan. From the moment Tom’s crib arrived in the big house, Alan’s cough went away, never to return. All through the dangerous first years of childhood, neither Alan nor Tom was once affected by any serious illness.
Even better, and from the very first months, it became clear that the two boys were unusually close. As babies, their cribs stood in the same room. If, for any reason, one of the cribs were moved, the other baby would instantly wake up and scream. Likewise, when they were toddlers Tom began to be taken down to his father, Jack’s, cottage for regular visits. At first it was thought that Tom would prefer to go by himself, but any time the experiment was tried, the little boy would turn black in the face and knot his fists until Alan was allowed to come along too.
By the end of the century, the two boys were six and a half years old. They were thriving, happy, and healthy.
Alan had grown a fraction taller, Tom a fraction broader than the other. Alan was pale-haired, with eyebrows so blond you could hardly see them. Tom was already developing dramatic good looks: glossy, dark, curly hair with eyes of a startling blue. The boys were infinitely close. They went everywhere together. Their communication was so close, they often appeared to read each other’s thoughts.
Visitors to the house invariably mistook them for twins (not identical, of course), and after a while the Montagues stopped bothering to correct them. The boys were twins. Born the same night, reared in neighbouring cribs, suckled at the same breasts. The boys were twins. The only difference was that one called Sir Adam ‘Father’, the other referred to him as ‘Uncle’. The difference is a small one, even tiny. But that wasn’t the point.
Even the smallest things can grow big enough to kill.
3
New Year’s Day 1901.
In the newly sanded stable yard, horses and huntsmen milled in impatient circles. Frost glittered from the clock-tower. Hounds pawed the ground, anxious to be off.
Tom Creeley, seven and a half years old, wasn’t yet old enough to ride with the hunt, and he was annoyed. For the last half-hour, he’d hung around the stable yard with Alan. The two boys attempted to scrounge one of the glasses o
f sherry that were being passed amongst the horsemen. They’d stolen hot pastries from the kitchen to feed to the dogs. But Tom was still annoyed. He wanted to ride and wanted to hunt.
‘I’m going in,’ he announced.
On the way back in, he passed close by Guy’s grey mare. The mare bristled at something, and stepped backwards, knocking into Tom.
Guy turned in the saddle. ‘I’m so sor –’ he began, before seeing who it was. ‘Careful, brat,’ he said, flicking his whip so Tom could feel the rush of air above his head.
Tom scowled. There was no love lost between the two boys. Guy was a bully, Tom his target. But Tom was a fighter, who gave as good as he got. On this occasion, Tom dodged away from the whip, braying as he did so. The braying sound was a carefully chosen insult. As a boy, Guy had been nervous of horses and had been taught to ride on a donkey. Tom, as fearless on horseback as he was in most other situations, was already confident on Sir Adam’s sixteen-hand hunters.
‘Stable boy!’
But Guy’s last insult bounced off Tom’s back. Tom was gone to search for new entertainment.
His first trip was down to the kitchen: usually good for warm food and interesting gossip. But today his luck was out. He’d been spotted pinching the pastries and right now he wasn’t welcome. Tom thought about getting Alan and going down together to Tom’s father’s cottage. Jack Creeley had been teaching the two lads how to poach: how to tickle trout, how to set traps for rabbits, how to move silently in the dark. But just as Tom made up his mind to go, he heard a noise from the library. He was puzzled. Sir Adam was with the hunt. So if not him, then who was it in the library? Tom pushed the door open.
The man bending over Sir Adam’s desk wasn’t much to look at. He was a plump, overtailored man, with a walrus moustache and a chalky complexion. He was bent over the telephone apparatus in the corner of the room, shouting down the speaking trumpet, the earpiece jammed hard against his head.
And he was shouting – shouting about money. Business, money, the purchase of rights, company incorporation. Tom’s feelings of restlessness disappeared in a flash. He was rooted to the spot, burning to hear more.
And why? Simply this. In the seven and a half years he’d been alive, he’d never heard a rich man talking about money. He’d heard his father talk about it. He’d heard servants talk about it. But to Uncle Adam and people of that class, the subject seemed to be unmentionable. It was as though, to people who were already rich, money was like air: something that surrounded you, something you didn’t have to think about. And already Tom knew he wasn’t like that. He knew that Guy would one day inherit Whitcombe House and all the surrounding fields and farms. He knew that Alan, somehow, was in the same position: not as lucky as Guy, but still all right. And Tom? He didn’t know. He dressed the same as Alan, he ate the same meals, he studied the same books, he played the same games. But Alan’s father was a gentleman. Tom’s father was not. Seven and a half years old, and Tom didn’t know where he stood.
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