Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  She slipped from under him and leaped into her petticoats. Seeing her breasts tremble as she leaned over to do up the buttons he craved for her all over again. He caught them up in his hands and bore her back onto the tree. She resisted only a fraction of a second, then yielded.

  They kissed, hurting their lips. His heart raced; he could feel hers thumping, too. A little artery in one of her scars flushed, flushed, flushed in time with it.

  When they broke apart he spoke urgently into her ear. “You said you’d do anything,” he reminded her.

  “I will, so I will,” she answered, clinging desperately to him.

  “Then be in love with me!”

  “Boy! Oh…little Boy!” She burst into bitter sobs that would not stop.

  “And stay in love with me…and be with me…and be mine as I am yours and always will be yours.”

  She would not answer—unless the rack of her sobbing was answer. It struck into him with a terminal emptiness. It made him face the prospect of not being with her.

  “Why?” he asked when she was calmer.

  “Sure you know why,” she said, reaching for her shimmy and blouse.

  “Nothing could stop us if you really wanted to.”

  She put her head between her two hands and fought hard not to cry again. Speaking from the safety of not seeing him, she said, “They’d dismiss me without a character. And they’d send you off.”

  “I’d come back.”

  Like her, he began to dress again.

  “If you went good and hard at it, they’d certify you.”

  “My people wouldn’t do that,” he said. Then he thought of his father: He would.

  “What!” She laughed, with little mirth in it. “The eldest son of Lord Stevenson courts a penniless Irish drudge who looks…” She put a hand to her scars. “God, I’d certify you!”

  “We can run away! Now! This week.”

  She shook her head, not denying him, but in pity. “There’s nowhere I could hide.”

  “We’ll get married before they find us.”

  By now the tone of her replies had gone flat. Her voice gathered normality around them. “I’ll not marry outside a Catholic Church.”

  “I’ll become a Catholic,” he blurted out, thinking that was her objection.

  “You don’t know your own father,” she said. “He’s a big fella. And you don’t know the big fellas in our Church, either. They’d annul such a marriage faster than you’d cook an oyster.”

  Boy subsided in bewilderment.

  She smiled sadly and came to him. She put her arms about him, a gesture more friendly than passionate, and said: “Dear Boy, you know so much and understand so little.”

  “I understand I love you.”

  “No one ever said that to me. No one ever wanted to know me. No one ever dared kiss my scars. I’ll learn to be content at that. And so, my darlin’ Boy, so must you.” She managed to say it all without a sob, without even a hesitation.

  Boy held her away and drew breath to speak; but she stopped him with a finger to his lips. “Not another word,” she told him.

  She was almost back at the road before he called: “I must see you again.”

  “If we do, we do,” she answered.

  He glimpsed her fleetingly among the bushes before she vanished, hobbling up the hill. It was the moment in which he learned that love, which he had always held to be the most selfless of passions, was the most selfish, self-absorbed, self-seeking of all. His would not accept her happiness as the slightest comfort or recompense.

  He looked at the leaning tree, or, rather, at the air near it—the air which until so recently had parted to enfold that rare enchantment of her. Everything in this grove, he thought, should be singing, “She was here. We have seen her. She passed this way.”

  At last the loss of her became real. Not a fear for tomorrow to serve. Not an agony he should prepare to face. She was already gone. He had already lost her. Society and his father and the Church and the meek humility that Life had long ago sowed and harvested in her…these had cost him the deepest joy he had ever known. These had cast him into hell.

  Hell is joy denied—but infinitesimally remembered.

  “Hell, hell, hell!” he shouted to the air. He kicked last autumn’s leaves around him in flying clods of mould.

  Boy, who never swore, who would at once leave any group of his fellows in which foul language was so much as breathed aloud, Boy now stormed around the grove shouting: “Shit on people. Shit on Society. Fuck my father! Fuck everything!”

  His rampage brought him to his earth-wife, whom he set about destroying with savage gusto. Then, in mid-kick, he froze. His breathing locked. The part he was about to boot asunder was the part he had been unable to complete. Yet it was complete! In horrendous detail, too.

  For one wild moment he thought this palingenesis had come about of its own accord. Then, realizing the impossibility of it, he stooped to make sure the thing was not some accident of fallen earth or trick of the light. It was not; strong fingers and thumbs had pinched those rilles in the clay; knowing fingers and thumbs had pioneered that fossa into the half-razed tumulus of her belly.

  Savagely he resumed his orgy of destruction, but this time with his bare hands. He scattered her torso by the fistful, then her thighs.

  Before his final assault he paused, somewhat in awe of his own fury. But as he looked down, planning her final dismemberment, a lugworm, three-quarters dead, nosed experimentally out of the remains. He smashed it with his fist.

  His fist sank into a cold, gelid mass concealed beneath the soil. He brushed aside the soil to reveal a couple of handsful of lugworms. Not earthworms. Lugworms. From the beach. They were almost all dead.

  He sat there knowing he had come very close to insanity. He pinched worm after worm in two—and then segments of worms—on and on, not noticing if they were alive or dead; not caring.

  He knew the invisible worms that fly in the night and that had eaten out the minds of those boys in the other academy were even now at work on him. There was no way to deny the leviathan passion for Mary that now so domineered his body. Between these mighty things he would surely be crushed. Passively he waited for insanity to possess him; in a terrible way it would be a kind of release.

  Unheard by him, Nick and Caspar, concealed in the thickets on the far side of the grove, snickered and giggled at this dénouement of their little jape. Then they ran a wide detour through the scrub and galloped and skipped their howling homeward way.

  Unknown to Caspar, Nick then went in search of Mary Coen, who had proved herself such a willing little cleaver.

  Next day Mary Coen had vanished from Quaker Farm.

  Chapter 22

  The schools’ fives games, in which Caspar was a cub competitor, took place in London halfway through that summer holiday. They were held in the grounds of Lord Westcott’s house in Grosvenor Square, only half a mile or so from Nora’s house in Hamilton Place. Westcott had become an enthusiast of fives at Eton and had built the largest set of courts—six—in any private house in the country. He was close enough to the barracks and the gentlemen’s clubs to have a steady supply of fellow players. His courts were rarely idle, except during early August, when rowing, the turf, and shooting combined to deplete the devotees. That was when he had the idea of offering his courts to the schools in a scratch championship for a plate he himself was offering.

  Caspar was not in the running for the plate, however. He qualified for the cub fivers, who had to be under sixteen. By the fourth day of the first match, Thursday, he was into the final, against a fellow called Trentham from Harrow.

  Usually after the matches Caspar and Greaves strolled down through Mayfair to Hamilton Place, where they drank lemonade in the pocket handkerchief of a garden behind the house. Greaves had been knocked out in the second round of the masters’
competition—by (as he was to point out for months to come) the man who eventually won. He stayed on to coach Caspar and two other Fiennes men; for this week he was a guest at Hamilton Place.

  It was a rare honour. The head of a great Oxford or Cambridge college might be accepted in Society, though somewhat patronizingly; but lesser academics were decidedly ineligible. You sometimes saw them, shorn of majesty, standing shyly on the fringes of a Society gathering, being talked to in strained jollity by the kinder-hearted; but you knew they were cadet relatives of someone who was there by right.

  There was one exception. The man whose conversation proved witty, absorbing, or elevated enough to beguile an elite that perpetually hovered at the edge of stifling or boring itself to death could quite easily gain access, however humble his origins. That was the principle on which Nora, at Roxby’s suggestion, had founded her salon. Hers was said to be the only house in London where you might see tenth-generation peers talking at ease or playing cards with writers, artists, eminent surgeons, and men of science and be sure of the finest wines and food; it was one of the few places where the arts mingled so easily with the sciences, too. And, what with the Royal Academy and the Royal Society just up the street, there was always a sprinkling of RAs and FRSs at Hamilton Place.

  Except for musical occasions, these gatherings were without invitation. Nora signalled them in the Russian manner, by placing lighted candelabra in the ballroom windows. Being a mid-eighteenth-century house, Hamilton Place had the most inadequate private rooms. Even the principal bedroom was something less than a modern house would offer an upper servant. So if a guest overindulged, it was not thought seemly to give him one of these cells; he was accommodated in the Russian manner, too—on a pile of blankets in one of the grander corridors. It was all part of the charm of Hamilton Place.

  In Nora’s early days there, some London wits had tried to make a word play on the fact that Kate Hamilton’s notorious nighthouse was at the far end of Piccadilly, in Haymarket. There had been jokes about Nora’s Hamilton Place and Kate Hamilton’s Place—and the likely difficulty in telling one end of Piccadilly from t’other. As jokes they pleased only those with fairly undemanding standards, but Nora had realized they could damage her for all that. So, from the outset, she had insisted that her salon should be exclusively male. On some musical evenings, female performers were, naturally, present but they never mingled with the guests. (There were, after all, ways for women of humble origins, too, to climb to the very top of Society—but those ways were usually called “unmentionable” despite the fact that they were mentioned by other ladies on every possible occasion. Even to perform in public for money bordered on the unmentionable.)

  Dinner parties were quite another thing. There Nora blended the cream of her salon with at most a dozen carefully selected guests of both sexes from the upper reaches of London Society. These were the occasions John had meant when he said people courted his acquaintance in the hope of an entrée to Nora’s table. And this was the world into which Greaves, by accident of his and Caspar’s common interest in the game of fives, had been pitchforked.

  Caspar was soon aware of the subtle shift in relationship between them. Greaves would enthuse over things that Caspar quite took for granted—the fact that, for instance, on almost any evening you could talk with a great painter or poet or one of the foremost physicists of the day. Caspar, in the lazy way of the young, had assumed that almost any decent household could get in such people if it wanted. Through Greaves’s wide-eyed enthusiasm he came to appreciate his mother’s uniqueness. What astonished Greaves most of all was that Lady Stevenson had none of the ostensible qualifications for her role. With men of letters she rarely attempted wit or aphorism; she did not pretend to understand even the most elementary principles of science; she never dashed off even the slimmest water colour or crayon sketch (in fact, a joke had once gone round about Nora’s being “no RA”); she was at best a moderate pianist, nowhere near the league of the performers she hired for musical soirées. Yet among the supreme practitioners of all these professions and skills she was held in something of awe.

  “Of course!” he said on his third day in the house, when the light finally dawned on him. “That’s it! That’s why. She never competes. They trust her. She has that quick, fertile mind that can momentarily follow any line of thought or argument, however abstruse, and, like the stone that is dull, yet make the blade sharper.”

  Caspar, who could not see how a dull stone might follow any line of argument, shrugged. “She says she knows who to steer together and who to keep apart.”

  “Yes. That’s another reason why they trust her. But how does she know? That’s the magic of it. How did she know to steer me toward Professor Thomson last night, whom I have admired for so many years? Did she know we would talk for the best part of an hour and that it would be a conversation I would remember for the rest of my life? Before I leave, by the way, I must tell you what I learned of energy from him. We are very close, it seems, to completing Newton’s work; soon the last mathematical mysteries of matter and the universe will be unlocked and the Creator’s vast handiwork will be plain for all to see—all who can read his language, that is. My boy, we are lucky to be alive at such a time! And twice lucky to be mathematicians.”

  Caspar tried to revert to this subject as they strolled into Grosvenor Square after he had won his semifinal. But Greaves had other things on his mind.

  It was a blistering August afternoon. Nothing stirred unless it had to. The sun poured down on baking cliffs of brick and stucco and then bounced sideways into the streets, so that straw hats were only half a protection against the fiery sky. Everything seemed drained of its colour, reduced to a shimmering neutrality. Cross babies howled from nursery windows. Ill-tempered cooks bawled through open area doors. Pet dogs lay panting in the shade, raising their heads in dumb hope at every stray breeze. Greaves and Caspar strolled very slowly.

  “You go at the game so hard,” Greaves said. It was not a compliment. Caspar had thought the master’s congratulations on his semifinal win were half-hearted.

  “Of course, sir,” Caspar said. “Is that wrong?”

  “You must remember, fives is merely a game.”

  “But I play to win, don’t I?”

  Greaves gathered his thoughts, as if the boy’s question had scattered them. “We must distinguish two purposes. The purpose of the game, and your purpose in playing it. The purpose of the game is as you say—to win. But your purpose is larger. Naturally, it includes the purpose of the game; and to that extent it is to win. But not to the exclusion of the rest. And the rest includes the mastery of your own faculties—speed, strength, judgement, tactical sense, estimation of your opponent, and so on—the evenhanded love of the sport (which would lead you to cheer an opponent’s good play as heartily as you would a friend’s), the honour of your House, or school, or (let us hope one day) your country. And we must never forget the sheer pleasure of the thing. In my view, you go so hard to win that you forget all these other things.”

  Caspar nodded. It was, by and large, true—all that Greaves had said. And he was too hot to put up even a token defence. “I just like to win, sir,” was all he said.

  “Of course you do, my boy. You’re your mother’s son, after all. I suppose neither of you knows how to do a thing without wanting to do it supremely. If you find you are middling at something, you drop it.”

  “I’m middling at Latin and Greek,” Caspar chuckled.

  Greaves treated this as pedantry. “You drop it the moment you are able,” he said. “What are you going to do in life? D’you know?”

  They turned south into Park Street, walking on the western side, where there was some relief in the shade. Caspar debated with himself whether to give some conventional answer or to tell Greaves the full story. (He was so wrapped up in his own view of the problem it did not strike him that Greaves’s very question assumed the long-talked-abo
ut career in mathematics to be a fiction.) He decided there was no one he would rather tell, and no one whose advice he would value more.

  “Lord Stevenson wants me to go into the army,” he answered.

  “But…”

  Caspar could not openly say how rebellious he felt to the idea. “I suppose if he hadn’t got the peerage, it would be easier.”

  “For him? For you? What would be easier?” Greaves hated imprecision.

  “He says it’ll be all right for Boy to take over the family business, but only in a remote way, as a sort of figurehead.”

  “A figurehead with no head for figures!” Greaves laughed.

  Caspar did not even smile. “It’s a joke I can’t share, I’m afraid, sir.”

  Greaves pulled an amused face. “Jealousy?” he asked, thinking it absurd for Caspar to be so solemn, at his tender age. He was surprised at the way the boy bristled.

  “And it’s a joke they won’t share when they are thrown out of work in Stevenstown, either, sir.”

  “No.” Greaves was placatory now. “One can easily forget.”

  “Boy can,” Caspar agreed. “I don’t think a day goes by without my thinking of the tens of thousands who depend on our firm for their livelihood. I doubt if the thought occurs to Boy from one year to the next. If it did, he’d distract himself by translating it into Latin in the style of Suetonius.”

  Greaves laughed uproariously. “What an extraordinary fellow you are!” he said. “So—you want the family business?”

  Caspar halted and looked at Greaves long enough and straight enough for the master to be sure he was hearing something important. “I want my own business, sir. Even if I had the family business, I would make it mine. I would change it.” Then he smiled.

  Greaves drew a deep, thoughtful breath and resumed their stroll. He shook his head. “A hornet’s nest,” he said. “How long have I known you—three…four years? And yet I have never known you.”