Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Well, Caspar,” Nora said, “it seems your school presents no official bar to business, great or small, so long as correspondence is directed elsewhere.”

  This exchange had given the boy time to collect himself. “I’d be jolly interested, Mama. I’d certainly give it a fair dose of the old cogitation, don’t you know.”

  “Such locutions!” Greaves interrupted, eager to re-ravel some of his authority. “Cogitation is ‘measured,’ not ‘dosed’.”

  Caspar accepted the reprimand with a solemn, thoughtful nod. He was glad to have bought back his subordinate position for such a trivial price. “Anyway,” he said, “my mind is too much upon the fives finals today.”

  Nora, who had not hoped even for so much commitment as she had got, was pleased enough. “That’s right, dear,” she said. “You go and win your little game, and, by the time you come back, I may have one or two suggestions for you.”

  “The ladies—God bless ’em,” Greaves said when he and Caspar were on their way to the fives courts. “They don’t understand the importance of sport in a man’s life.”

  “I think, sir,” Caspar said tactfully, “you’ll find Lady Stevenson was merely supporting your timely warning yesterday not to think I must win at all costs.”

  If there was anything in this notion of his mother’s, Greaves had to go away with glowing memories of his days at Hamilton Place. And if it were in some way against school rules—those vague rules that dealt with activities which were “not quite the thing”—it would be useful to have a master as a passive accomplice. Even more so if he were an ex-master. When Caspar arrived at that thought he realized he must already be quite taken with this new idea of his mother’s—if it could turn the bitter blow of Greaves’s impending departure from Fiennes into a possible asset.

  ***

  “I won! I say, Mama, I won.” Caspar began speaking as soon as they came through the garden door.

  Nora, who was cutting a bunch of roses, looked up in delight. She handed the pruning snips and her gloves to the footman and came to greet them. “Well done, dearest!” She kissed him.

  Greaves cleared his throat, as if prompting Caspar.

  “Yes,” Caspar said. “It was something of a fluke, right at the last. Until then it was very close. Touch and go.”

  Greaves beamed approvingly. “Trentham was a worthy opponent.” he said. “You were well matched.”

  “Except that I won, sir,” Caspar could not help adding.

  “Well, Mr. Greaves, you are no doubt pining for your family. I cannot tell you how much we have enjoyed your stay—nor how grateful we are for all you have done for Caspar. Today’s win is more yours than his; I’m sure he’d be the first to agree.”

  “Indeed, sir,” Caspar said. “Without your help I wouldn’t even have got to the first round.”

  “You’re very kind, my boy. But you are a natural player. I have done little but help you to some shortcuts. And as for your kindness, Lady Stevenson, the gratitude, let me assure you, is utterly on my side. This has been one of the most stimulating weeks of my life.”

  “How kind you are, Mr. Greaves. I was about to add that if it any time you happen to be passing down Piccadilly and you notice the candelabra in the windows you would be most welcome within.”

  Greaves, having fired his big guns on the chitchat, could now only stammer his joy and sense of unworthiness.

  “Not at all,” Nora reassured him. “Professor Thomson is not the easiest man to divert. If you found it easy, you have untapped gifts that make you more than welcome here. Now Caspar, come, I have something to show you.”

  “I’ll come and see you off at the station, sir,” Caspar promised over his shoulder.

  “I thought we got rid of him rather well,” Nora said when they were well out of Greaves’s earshot. “I don’t suppose he’ll come down to London too often, do you?”

  Caspar did not know what to say that would not be disloyal to Greaves or that might not unwittingly reveal something (though he could not say what) to his mother.

  The “something” she wanted to show him was a handsome-looking brass and cast-iron bedstead standing rather isolated and forlorn in the ballroom. It was merely the frame. There was no mattress or made-up bed to it.

  “What is it?” Caspar asked. Then, seeing his mother’s surprise, he added, “Well, I know what it is, of course. What’s it there for?”

  “Look at it,” she said.

  “It’s a bedstead.”

  “Well made? Any faults, would you say?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You never will unless you look.”

  Caspar acted the part of a man knowingly inspecting a bedstead, until he felt too foolish. He laughed nervously. “Honestly, Mama. How should I know!”

  “You had better find out, Caspar dear, and quickly, because I rather think that selling bedsteads is going to be your business these coming months.”

  Caspar threw back his head and roared with laughter. Great gusts of it echoed down the room and out into the hall. Mary Coen, who was helping to shroud all the furniture in the public rooms, now that the season was over, heard it and smiled. It was a happy house, this. She was going to like being here.

  “Mama,” he said in ironic sorrow. “Selling beds! Really! Me?”

  Nora nodded an I-thought-so sneer. “Too good for the Honourahle Caspar, is it? All gob and wind, as we used to say. All gob and wind.”

  “But beds!” he continued to protest.

  She rounded on him then, and he saw the anger and disappointment in her eyes. “Hark to me,” she said. “If you had an ounce of the true business spirit in you, you’d sell matches, or…or dried leaves…or horsedung! If the profit was there. You think you’ve got business spirit. The only spirit in you is the spirit of rebellion.”

  He expected her to stalk off then in a temper; but she stood and breathed at him, waiting.

  She’s giving me another chance, he thought. And then the truth dawned. She wants me to do this! She wants me to succeed!

  He smiled at her, as if she had not flared up at all. “Beds, eh?” he said cheerfully. “Well, ain’t that a turn-up!”

  He looked the bed over once more, not acting now, nor feeling so foolish. She wouldn’t risk all this…she wouldn’t risk the hurt to him, if she believed he would fail. “You want me to sell it?” he asked.

  “Aye,” she said, grinning again. “And three hundred and ninety-nine like it.”

  His mouth fell open. “Four hundred!”

  “Oh, you can add up, too! That’ll come in handy. What’ll you give for four hundred, then? What price?”

  “But I have no money—none I may touch, anyway.”

  “That’s always the second thing to worry over. The first is the price. Without a price there’s no market at all.”

  He stared at her and blinked. “You want me to guess?”

  “I want you to find out. Really, Caspar, I’m beginning to doubt your seriousness again.”

  The full implications of this affair were just getting through to him. “I could sell them, couldn’t I! I could sell them entirely through the mail, from school—that’s what you meant—from somewhere in Langstroth. Purse’s place! Slip him a few bob—use his name. But I need a warehouse. Where? Up there? Or down here in London? Lords, there’s a lot to it, isn’t there!”

  Nora came to him and gave him a huge hug. “You’ll do,” she said. Then she dug him lightly in the ribs. “But first the price.”

  “I’ll walk back from King’s Cross,” he said. “I’ll go in every furniture shop in Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. And then I’ll tell you my price.”

  When Caspar had gone, her blood began to boil at John’s arrogance in thinking he knew what was best for the children—without even consulting them, considering their talents, putting them to th
e test, or even putting his own ideas to the same test. Worse still, the very ideas were not his own; just a shallow repetition of a vague formula laid down by a fatuous Society that didn’t give a damn about business anyway. Well, if he thought that bringing up children was a simple matter of applying formulas, like designing bridges or costing earthworks, it was time someone took the contract out of his hands. Her children would never know how much they owed that Charity creature.

  ***

  “I was in twelve shops,” he told her when he had returned. They were eating a light luncheon in the garden. “For three-foot beds like that the price seems to vary from about sixteen to twenty-six shillings. And there’s one make of bed, from France, I saw in three shops at three different prices: seventeen shillings, nineteen and eleven, and twenty-two and six. The same bed. Not unlike mine, either.”

  “Oh, it’s not yours yet!” She laughed. “Was there any difference between the shops to account for the price difference?”

  “I suppose the top-price one was in a more swell place. But…”

  “Swell?” Nora interrupted. “Why an expensive education should produce this love of vulgarisms, I cannot fathom.”

  “A more helegant hemporium,” Caspar mock-quoted impatiently. “The other two were much of a muchness. Or should I say ‘a goodly quantity of a goodly quantityness’?”

  They both laughed. “I can see you are going to be impossible, Caspar,” Nora said. “Especially if you make a success of this.”

  He was serious at once. “Will I, Mama? D’you think I can do it?”

  He saw her eyes soften. He was sure she was on the point of saying that of course he could and other motherly reassurances; and then she withdrew it all and hardened herself. “That, my dear,” she said with asperity, “is the whole point of this exercise—to settle it one way or the other.”

  Chapter 25

  Bernard Basset was the man with the beds. To hear Nora, Bernard Bassett was the man with most things. “My young man of many parts,” she called him, sometimes adding, “most of them downwind of the law.” He had begun life—his commercial life, the only life that mattered to him—as a clerk in Chambers’s bank, where he had infuriated his principal with daily suggestions for the root and branch reform of the entire banking system.

  That was when he had come to Nora’s notice, for she, too, had strong opinions on banking. That was back in 1848, when Nora had begun putting the £325,000-odd Wolff Fund into property, buying about two thousand acres of North London, roughly Camden Town to Holloway, and covering them with middle- and lower-middle-class houses. She had detected a useful greed in young Bassett, coupled with boundless faith in his own astuteness, and a cocky, democratic manner that infuriated all who thought themselves his social superiors—and that included almost all their leaseholders. It was a great advantage. These people would usually agree to anything just to get this chummy, ingratiating, odious fellow to go away.

  It was Bernard Bassett who had managed the job of acquiring the land, clearing it as building demanded, and then administering the growing estate of houses and shops. By 1859 the total value had grown to just under five million pounds; of that sum, three-quarters of a million was Nora’s, and, because of the way the Wolff Fund had been drawn up, it was hers exclusively, independent of any money from Stevenson’s. Moreover, John could not touch a penny of it. Barring disaster, the estate would double its value over the next ten years—Nora’s share, too, of course.

  In Caspar’s estimation “young” Bernard Bassett did not seem at all young. He was at least thirty-five. He also looked mad, with his restless, wet, staring eyes, always seeming on the point of winking, always radiating a spurious reassurance. His lips hung loose, slackly ready to talk, smile, pinch in doubt, round off in wonder, twitch in sympathy—as if they had learned their business in melodrama and could not adjust to everyday life. Even so, Caspar could not dislike him; there was a fascinating awfulness about his transparent insincerity. You wondered how he could bear to be with himself all day.

  Caspar asked him first how he came to own these four hundred beds.

  “Ah,” he said. “A very shrewd question, Mr. Stevenson. At least, in anyone else it would be shrewd, but—knowing your vintage and the vineyard, if I may so put it—then it’s no more than I would expect. How do I come to own four hundred beds, eh? The truth is, I don’t exactly own them—that is, if you want them, I do own them, if you don’t, they all go back to their other owner. Is my meaning clear, Mr. Stevenson?”

  “You’re an agent?” Caspar said. “Or a partner?”

  “Exactly! Though that isn’t quite the case. But exactly put. Yes. Very fair. Yes, I shall have to watch myself with you, sir, I can see.”

  “But how do you come to have four hundred beds, whether as agent or owner or whatever you may be?”

  “I can see you’re no fool, Mr. Stevenson. So I won’t try and beat about the bush. I’ll tell you straight—and it’s something you’ll learn when you go into business yourself. An astute and clever and smart fellow in business—any business—well, you’d be surprised at the offers as come his way. Every day. You’d be astonished, I say. Some I take up; most I ignore. But of the ones I do entertain, you’d be…er…”

  “Amazed?” Caspar suggested, “surprised” and “astonished” having gone before.

  “Quite. Yes. I do make quite a success of most. You’d be amazed.”

  “But not these beds?” Caspar asked, worried—not that he believed Bassett, but he did not like this suggestion of doubt.

  “I would. Oh, I would.” Bassett breathed in deeply, squaring up to his own assertion. Then he paused and looked appraisingly at Caspar. At last he shook his head, like one good-naturedly accepting defeat. “I won’t try and gull you, Mr. Stevenson. I could make a success of this. I could make a very big thing of it. But I’m passing it on to you to please your mother. As a favour, yes. I worship Lady S. I owe that great and gracious lady everything I have in life.” He paraded a sudden alarm. “When I say ‘worship’ I wouldn’t want you to misconstrue me, Mr. Stevenson. I mean in a most platonistical and distant and businesslike way, I do assure you. Yes. Well now, did you have a price in mind?”

  Caspar still looked dubious. He wanted Bassett to offer first.

  Bassett tried but failed to meet Caspar’s gaze. “Lord, but you’re a shrewd one, Mr. Stevenson!” he said. “Yes. I tell you, there’s men in business about me twenty years. God’s truth this—if your dear mother was here, she’d tell you. There’s people know me well who’d have swallowed that one about doing all this to please Lady Stevenson. But not you I can see it, though you’re too polite to say it. Yes. Well now, let me put the real facts straight before you. No waiver this time. The truth is, I’m a bit pressed.” He winked. “Not a word to your mother about this, now. I know I can trust you. Yes. They’re after me—the banks. And…er…other parties. I’m being pressed shocking. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr. Stevenson. You. Would. Not. Believe. It! People who’ve known me all my life, behaving as if I can’t be trusted one more month. They know I’ll pay. Did I ever default? Did you ever hear of it? No. And the favours I’ve done them!” He was near to tears.

  Caspar was embarrassed at the transparency of it all.

  “So, Mr. Stevenson! You’ll gather I’m strapped down and the men with the hammers are all around me. Yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Stevenson, as God is my witness, I’m desperate for a bit of crinkle, I mean the real paper. I’ve got to slip these dogs. Not that I’m trying to appeal to your pity. I wouldn’t insult you, sir. Yes. What I’m saying is that you can really push me hard to a very keen price on this. My back’s to the wall, as your dear mother would be the first to tell you, if she was here—which I thank God she isn’t. I’ll come down ten…twenty”—he gritted his teeth, hating to have to say it—“thirty percent. Just to get a sale. Yes.” His eyes opened in mute appeal.

&
nbsp; “Thirty percent of what?” Caspar asked.

  “Yes!” Bassett said with brave decision. “At least that much. Though it hurts. And that’s gospel. Those beds were going to be a nice, tidy little nest egg to me. They were going to stand me in good. But…” He smiled bravely. “Well, have we a market, Mr. Stevenson?”

  “A hundred and fifty would be a fair price,” Caspar said, unable to make any headway through the persiflage.

  “Oh, you’re very hard, Mr. Stevenson.” He sucked his teeth. “Very hard. Yes. A hundred and fifty. Hmmm.”

  “A fair price I think.”

  “Well…hard but fair, I think I could just squeeze to that.”

  Caspar stood and grinned, holding out his hand. Bassett took it and shook. Caspar did not let go. The fellow’s hands were cool, bone dry, almost scaly. He’d done no sweating at all. It was all smoke. “More than a fair price,” Caspar said. “A good price. And at thirty percent off—a hundred pounds. I’m delighted.”

  Bassett dropped his hand like a hot coal. “Lord, Mr. Stevenson, I’m never shaking on that. What! A mere hundred! Why, that’s less then I gave. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Then you gave too much,” Caspar said coldly. “Anyway, I thought you said you hadn’t given anything yet.”

  “Ah! I speak in ellipsis, Mr. Stevenson, as to that. But my associate would never go so low. In any case, thirty percent off of a hundred and fifty is a hundred and five, unless they’ve changed all the tables since I left Eton.” He gave a wink.

  Caspar laughed at the thought of this cockney rogue at Eton. “A hundred and five’s the highest I’ll go.”

  Bassett, looking highly offended now, stood and shot his lower jaw at Caspar. “I wouldn’t insult my associate with that offer, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “That is your privilege, of course,” Caspar said lightly. “A hundred and five’s my best offer.”

  An extraordinary change came over Bassett. He ran toward Caspar and fell to his knees, clutching Caspar’s jacket. “Oh, please, Mr. Stevenson, sir! I beg of you. Please raise your offer, sir? A hundred and thirty. They’d retail at nineteen and eleven, easy, them beds. Yes. Easy! You’d show a good whack at a hundred and thirty—you know you would. Why, if they didn’t stand you in a hundred and fifty sheer profit, I’ve never done profitable business in my life. Gospel! Please, Mr. Stevenson! You’ve no idea how desperate I am.”