The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  Everyone but Tom.

  There were tears in his eyes as he sat down on the courthouse steps, trying to figure out what to do next. He felt like he’d lost all his motivation. All through the troubled, difficult years he’d kept himself going. All through war. All through prison. Through all the betrayals and poverty and hard work. And now he’d failed. Spectacularly failed. He felt as though he didn’t have the puff to get up and start all over. He felt worse than he knew a man could feel.

  Pipsqueak, a loyal heart in an absurdly small body, gently but insistently forced her head between Tom’s arms, put her face to his, and licked his mouth and eyes. And that was when he heard a voice, a woman’s voice, husky and East European.

  ‘Tom?’ it said. ‘Is that you?’

  PART FIVE

  Speculation’s all the go,

  With rich and poor, both high and low,

  And everybody’s in a boil

  For some Petroleum Oil:

  Love for gold will long increase,

  We hear of raids and talk of peace,

  But best of all, it’s worth your while

  To come where ‘I’ve struck Ile’.

  from ‘I’ve struck Ile’

  by Frank Wilder

  99

  The year is 1929.

  The hit record of the year is ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ and the tune seems to capture the spirit of the age. People have never been so free. The economy has never been so strong. The stockmarket is hitting all-time highs. Life is good.

  But across the world, there are clouds on the horizon. A communist demonstration in Berlin ends with more than thirty dead. The parties of the German far right are increasingly restless. Further east, in Russia, Stalin has eliminated opposition to his rule as the biggest country in the world is passing into one-man dictatorship. There is terrorism in the Balkans, riots in India, unrest in Europe.

  Clouds on the horizon.

  Outside a large white stucco house in Chelsea, a man in a new black suit hesitates. He checks the number of the house against a piece of paper he carries in his hand, then moves to the door and knocks loudly. It is eight fifteen in the morning.

  The butler’s sick and the under-butler’s busy so a maid comes to the door. The tradesmen’s entrance is round the back, and whoever has the impertinence to knock so loudly while the family is at breakfast is in for an earful. The maid has her mouth open ready to remonstrate, but there, on the step, is a gentleman. His face is the colour of a chestnut, and his moustache would make a bank clerk look like a pirate – but, nevertheless, his class is obvious from his dress and the maid says nothing fiercer than, ‘Good morning, sir, may I help you?’

  ‘Indeed you may, lassie,’ says the man, ‘if this is the house of Alan Montague and his good lady.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Ha!’

  The man makes as though to enter. The maid is flustered.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, the family is at breakfast. Perhaps if you’d like to wait in the library? And who should I say … ?’

  ‘No, lassie, no. It’s quite all right. The breakfast room is downstairs, I take it? I don’t think Mr or Mrs Montague will mind an unexpected call from an old ruffian like myself.’

  He winks at the maid and moves down the gleaming hall towards the stairs. The maid runs along after him, excited. Strictly speaking, she ought to stop him, but there’s something unexpectedly kindly in the gentleman’s manner, no matter how brutal his exterior may seem. The man leads the way, the maid hurries along behind.

  East Texas.

  A country of sandy soil, rolling hills covered with sweet gum and pine trees, and in the valleys there are fields of stunted corn and broiling sweet potatoes. It’s difficult land to make a go of, and on a roasting hot day in summer even the chickens look at the horizon, longing for a change of life.

  The village, Overton, is nothing. It’s a whistle stop on the Missouri-Pacific mainline, with not a single paved street to boast of. On the edge of the village – outside the village would be more accurate – there’s a little house standing in the shade of a bois d’arc tree. The house is a poor one, wooden built, just two rooms from the look of it.

  On a washing line behind the house, there are a couple of shirts hanging out to dry. Men’s shirts, not too well washed. You’d guess the house had no woman to keep it, but there are signs that it wasn’t always so. One of the shirts has been mended almost invisibly under the armpit. The stitches are tiny, neat and even. No man ever sewed like that, certainly not the man who washed the shirts.

  And one other thing. There’s a photo that stands on the windowsill. It’s a photo of Tom, but not him alone. There are two other people in the picture: Rebecca Lewi, squinting in the sunshine, and, in her arms, a tiny baby, six months at a guess. Tom has his arm around Rebecca. She has her head back, laughing at something beyond the camera. The snapshot isn’t of terrific quality, and red Texan dust has blown in through the window, covering both frame and photo. All the same, if you look up close enough, you can see Tom’s hand and Rebecca’s too. They’re wearing rings, wedding rings. But the photo speaks of the past. Right now, the shack has a sad feel to it. Sad and alone.

  It looks and smells like a wasted life.

  And Guy?

  What of Guy, the eldest son and heir to Whitcombe House?

  His military career appears to have stalled somewhat. His staff work during the war seemed to have destined him for high things, but peacetime has been less kind. Briefly in charge of a detachment of British troops in one of the African colonies, Guy returned home after an unexpectedly short stint. There were some mutterings in the press about a supposed failure to command the troops in a soldierlike and resolute manner. Guy’s own version of events – insofar as he bothers to give it – blames weak soldiers, poor communications, difficult weather conditions, and a half-dozen other unlucky circumstances. He is now a lieutenant colonel at the military academy at Sandhurst, so perhaps things haven’t turned out too badly.

  As for Guy’s domestic life, he passes it in a way that continually surprises his more strait-laced younger brother. The parties, dances and extravagances continue. Only last year, Guy surprised his entire family by announcing his engagement to an American woman, Dorothy Carter, whom he promptly married three months later. Nobody quite likes to say it, but his new wife seems rather dull, and quite unlike the sort of girl whom Guy has usually fallen for.

  Is Guy happy?

  Well, maybe. Alan isn’t too close to him and Guy doesn’t confide much in his mother or father. In any case, Guy seems to have settled and that much at least must be a good thing.

  100

  The man stopped just before the breakfast room and turned to the maid. He winked at her, held a finger to his lips, then tiptoed silently to the door.

  The door was slightly ajar, and the man could see through it into the room. There was a man, his wife, and two small children, a boy and a girl, aged probably five and six respectively. The father was in animated discussion with the boy about the merits of boiled eggs, and whether or not the things were best enjoyed by being eaten or by being spread over every available surface with the back of the marmalade spoon.

  The man outside watched for a second, then crashed the door open with a terrific bang.

  ‘Good morning, good morning, good morning!’ he boomed. ‘Any kedgeree for your Uncle George?’

  ‘George!’ cried Alan and Lottie simultaneously, both delighted.

  Alan leaped to be the first to embrace him, Lottie moved more slowly, but won out by getting a much longer hug. Her relative lack of speed was explained as she stood up: a pregnant bulge round her belly giving her five months’ worth of reasons for caution.

  ‘Great heavens, George, we weren’t expecting you back for another fortnight at least.’

  ‘Ha, I flew back, would you believe it? No more Red Sea steamers or those blasted Turkish trains. Came straight back: Abadan-Baghdad-Tiberias-Athens-Genoa-Amsterdam-London. Got bac
k last night, in the devil of a rainstorm – pardon me, dear, pardon me – but wasn’t properly home till I’d banged on your door here.’

  Lottie stood up, wanting to see to George’s breakfast, but both men protested vigorously and forced her to sit, and it was Alan who got to call for tea and kedgeree and bacon and kidneys and egg and sausage and kippers and tomato and mushrooms and more toast and more tea and another dish of butter and marmalade, and raspberry jam made with fruit picked from the kitchen garden at Whitcombe House.

  Alan and Lottie delivered their domestic news. Little Eliza was thriving, and was already happy on horseback and a pleasure in the classroom. Little Tommy was a menace to everything within reach of his destructive little hands, but was nevertheless regarded as a jewel and a treasure. The third little treasure was expected within four months; the pregnancy had been a trifle compared with the other two; and in all other ways, their world was as happy and as harmonious as they could possibly want it.

  Then there was a pause. A nurse came in to fetch little Tommy. The nurse shot a disapproving glance at the newcomer. It was strange enough the family taking breakfast together in this way, but to entertain an unannounced arrival over breakfast with the children present was almost disreputable …

  Alan and George looked at each other, and Lottie caught the glance.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly, you two,’ she said. ‘Of course you’re dying to talk business and of course you should get on before the pair of you burst like almighty great balloons. And before you think of retiring to talk oil wells and pipelines and bandits and explosions, then you should jolly well know that I’m going to follow you and listen to every word.’

  The men laughed, and the next three hours were spent over the decaying breakfast table going over every detail of the current state of the company, which Alan had christened Alanto Oil – the name born from its two spiritual founders: ALan ANd TOm.

  The enterprise had expanded beyond recognition since the day, eight years back, when Alan and George had burned their last belongings to bring their boiler to one final, magnificent blaze. Egham Dunlop had been true to his word and his profession. Alan had drawn up careful estimates of how much money was needed. Dunlop had sounded out market sentiment. And then, fingers crossed, they’d gone to the stock-market for the eye-popping sum of two and a half million pounds sterling.

  They’d used the first tranche of money to drill step-out wells a mile or so away from Ameri No. 2. Every well they dug (and they used the most up-to-date American drilling equipment this time, working at speeds unrecognisable to the original pioneers) struck oil. They hadn’t even mapped the full extent of the field, but they knew it was not less than nine miles long and not less than two wide. They threw up vast storage tanks in the mountains to hold the oil they were beginning to pump. Meantime, two dozen road engineers recruited from the army in Britain and India began to survey a pipeline route down from the mountains. They mapped out the route with steel rods and calico flags. Then, as the first sections of pipeline arrived from Glasgow, they purchased eleven thousand mules and hired enough men to work them. The men and mules hauled, dragged, heaved and cursed the nine-inch pipes into position. Muhammad Ameri, leading a troop of Qashqai, generously offered to protect the new line from bandits – that is to say, from himself. Alan and Reynolds negotiated with humour and patience and ended up agreeing to pay two dozen tribesmen with rifles to watch over the pipeline, and (more significantly) to award Muhammad Ameri a three per cent ownership of Alanto Oil, to be held in perpetuity for the benefit of all Qashqai.

  On a more personal note, Alan rode out to Ameri’s tent and handed him a small sculpture of the oil rig, fashioned in gold, and labelled in English and Persian: Muhammad Ameri No. 2.

  The growing company didn’t neglect its other duties. It built schools and hospitals at both ends of the pipeline. In its first year, the hospital at the Shiraz end of the pipeline cured almost six thousand cases of trachoma, carried out two hundred operations to remove cataracts, extracted three and a half thousand tonsils, and began a long programme to wipe out the waterborne diseases of dysentery and cholera. The schools also prospered, teaching basic literacy and numeracy to children, technical skills and hygiene rules to adults. In the school up at Shiraz, the literacy class contained forty-two children under the age of ten – plus Ahmed, who had decided that ‘it’s no bloody use being so goddamn bloody illiterable’.

  A refinery was built on the shore of the Persian Gulf. In the City of London there was resistance to the idea. Although Anglo-Persian had done the same, many people considered it lunatic to site the new company’s most complex and valuable industrial assets in some of Persia’s wildest countryside.

  Alan, the managing director and principal shareholder, listened to all the arguments and dismissed them. As he confided privately to Reynolds, ‘God put the oil in Persia, George, not England. If we can’t give something back to the Persians in exchange, then so much the worse for us.’

  The young company was growing quickly into a great one. They still had their fun, of course. Explosion, flood, plague, riot and fire were all part and parcel of the game. But the oil was flowing now. They’d moved two hundred thousand barrels in their first year, four hundred thousand in their second, and were hoping to shift two million in this, their fifth full year of operation. Already, they were beginning to scout for further sources of oil. Iraq was their best bet. Other countries in the Middle East were also targets.

  Alan and George talked. Lottie sat with some embroidery, dreamily stitching, half listening to her two favourite men, half listening to the tiny life growing inside her belly. The breakfast things were cleared. Tea made way for coffee. The silver cruet set, which the maid had cleared, was brought back so that Reynolds could arrange salt, pepper and mustard pots all over the table to explain certain new complexities in the arrangement of the cooling towers at the refinery.

  Life was good; blissful, in fact. Would it – could it – always stay this way?

  101

  The evening sun was skimming the tops of the pines. In the clearing beyond the derrick, a hog-nosed skunk loped through the brush, took a long and arrogant look at the labouring oilmen, then trotted forwards, confident that whatever the humans were up to, it was nothing to touch the pleasures of being a skunk.

  It was Saturday evening, and the men usually knocked off early. They hauled another section of drill pipe from the well, unscrewed it, stacked it, and looked up. Perfectly on time to meet their gaze, an old Ford motor, a Tin Lizzie, came bumping down the track, its black sides clothed in the brick-red dust of the area. A man got out and approached Tom.

  Tom spat tobacco juice on the ground, wiped his hands, and walked out to meet the man.

  ‘Doin’ OK?’ drawled the man.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Tom. ‘Two hundred and fifty feet this week, pretty good considering the cave-in we had Tuesday.’

  ‘Done better if you didn’t have no cave-in.’

  ‘Done better if we had a rig instead of a rust-heap, and riggers instead of a bunch of cowpokes.’

  ‘Never heard a good driller blame his tools the way you do.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve never even seen a good driller. Wouldn’t know what one looks like. Before me, that is.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you want to go drill for the Rockefellers, you go drill for the Rockefellers. They won’t give you a piece of the action, though.’

  Tom spat again and walked away. He picked up his jacket from the patchy grass beside the rig, shook it free of dust and insects and pine needles and put it on. He gave a whistle, and a scruffy little white dog with an enthusiastic tail came running from wherever it was she’d been sleeping, to greet her master. Tom’s face broke into a broad smile of welcome, as he bent down to accept her licks. The act of smiling made him look younger. He looked more like the man who had stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, less like the man who had failed on Signal Hill.

  The man in the Ford had pulled out
a fat calfskin wallet and a red-bound notebook, and was counting out some money. ‘Hey there, Pipsqueak. You still in charge here? Forty-five bucks.’

  He held out the cash and Tom took it.

  ‘I been trying to find a better boiler for you,’ said the man. ‘Nothing harder than drilling without a good head of pressure.’

  ‘You could try buying some fuel instead. We’ve been stoking it with green wood and the damn stuff smokes but won’t burn.’

  ‘Well, that’s part of the pleasure of independence, ain’t it? I’m meeting a guy in Houston next week. A guy with some interested investors, maybe. Like I say, if we raise some new money, we can get on and sink this hole.’

  ‘How many interests you going to sell, Titch?’ said Tom. ‘You already sold more than a hundred per cent and you sold a lot of them to me.’

  ‘We hit oil, then no one’ll be complaining. Not even you, bud.’

  It should have been the end of the conversation. Tom had his week’s money. Titch Harrelson had the other men to pay. But Harrelson was slow to walk over to the riggers who were waiting for payment. ‘Course, if you wanted to get a lead over them Houston investors, I could let you in ahead of them, make a special rate for you.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Now’s the time to be investing. We shouldn’t be more than a thousand feet or so from the Woodbine. Plenty of oil in the Woodbine, I reckon.’

  ‘Right. Another thousand feet and we’ll hit the Woodbine. Full of saltwater and broken promises.’

  ‘You want to work on a salary the rest of your days, that’s up to you. Like I say, I got investors coming.’