Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “There are some remains of earthworks up here,” Boy called from a little way into the common.

  “What a wretched place,” Abigail told the world from the depths of the second coach. “Why have we been brought here, I’d like to know?”

  They picked their way—all except Abigail, who, for the moment, refused to dismount from the coach—to the centre of the rough patch Boy had found. “I thought somehow it was nearer the lane,” Nora said.

  “What did you do all day, Mama?” Hester asked.

  Nora stood in what had, presumably, been their hovel and looked around. What had she done? What had she not done! And how to begin to tell them, these plump, bright-eyed, rich children who looked so alien in this new context. In her mind’s eye she saw her own little brother and sister, Wilfred and Dorrie, “not enough fat on ’em as’d grease a gimlet,” as they used to say—“all skin an’ gursley.” How the old words came back. “Gursley!” She’d call it “gristle” now, but it wasn’t the same. “Gristle” was what you reprimanded the chef for not removing; “gursley” was what you were glad to eat, just as you were glad to eat anything.

  “What did we do?” she repeated aloud, trying to put a little laugh into it. “I used to chase crows for tuppence a day in those fields over—well, in the fields that used to be there. And I remember once, I must have been sixteen, in that terrible winter of thirty-six, when there was no work for forty miles, all of us went out at dead of night and—you see the field up the hill there?” They nodded, following her pointing finger. “That was in turnips. And we went up there to dig some up.”

  “Stealing?” Boy said, aghast.

  She looked at him a long while before she nodded. “Aye,” she said. “Cabbaging, we used to call it.”

  “You said turnips,” Clement said.

  “Never mind; it was just a way of speaking. Anyway, the ground was so hard with the frost that we only got out one before they put the dogs in the field. One frozen turnip between six of us! And it was the only food we’d had in two days.”

  “It was still stealing,” Boy said.

  “When you’ve listened to a two-year-old sister and a three-year-old brother whimpering with hunger for two days, Young John, the voice that tells of property sounds thin and far away.”

  “Mama!” Boy protested. “Do you know what you’re saying!”

  Nora answered very gently, and all the more convincingly for it. “I know exactly what I’m saying, my boy. My purpose in bringing you here is for you to know it, too.”

  Boy was about to reply that stealing could never be right. No circumstances could ever excuse breaking a commandment. But one look at his mother’s face and he kept a troubled silence.

  “We used to wash wool down there, too,” she went on. “Let me see, our dad’s loom would’ve been here, and my brother and me, we’d sit on the floor here and tie and untie the marches and knee shafts when our dad wanted to change the shedding. Of course, he’d be doing the rinks at the same time—up here.” She mimed it until their bewilderment became plain. Then she laughed. “Never mind,” she said. “I suppose all you really wanted to know is if we had time to play. Well—precious little. Everything we did had to be for money.”

  “Just like now,” Abigail said, condescending to join the group. “I think you must have been mad to live here.”

  Nora told them then the one thing she had been determined not to tell them. The fact that the hovel was reduced to such insignificant contours made it easier. “After our dad died,” she said, “I was left to look after the two young ones. Did you see that big mill near where we left the highway? There’s a thousand looms in there and I tended two of them for ten bob a week. If you have difficulty imagining what hell is like…” She did not finish the sentence. “Anyway. The door of this o’il fell away.” She stood where the threshold must have been. “I put a tea chest here. It was stout enough to keep little Wilf and Dorrie in, but it didn’t keep Tom o’ Jones’s boar out. And when I came home from the mill that night, I found Wilf’s arm up here in the rafters. Just the one arm.”

  She went to the place and almost sculpted the arm in the empty air. She had no idea how to go on; she had forgotten, even, why she had begun the story. The most of her was back there, twenty-two years ago, reliving the horror of discovering the arm, which had been shaken up there from the ravening jaws of a hungry boar. She stood with her own arms raised and frozen.

  Boy came forward and gripped her elbow until she relaxed. She returned to them, smiling to show that it was a long time ago. “And little Dorrie,” she said, in the conversational tones of someone winding up a tale, “was bitten by rats the following week, took badly from it, and died.” She pointed at the far corner. “Over there.” She turned to Abigail with a smile. “And that is why, my dear, I shall not apologize if we seem excessively mercenary to you.”

  Abigail tossed her head and stalked away back to the coach. The other children were glad of Nora’s smile; without it the story they had just heard would have been quite insupportable. Nora, now regretting having said anything, decided she would travel back to the station with the younger ones and cheer them up again.

  The coachman looked at the open drain between the land and the common and decided they could not cross it. “Go on farther,” Nora told them. “I think there’s a big open space up the end there where you can turn.”

  “Tell us some of those funny sayings you used to use,” Mather said when she was settled and the carriage was moving down toward the turning place.

  It was a game they hadn’t played for years; she wondered if they would remember the dialect of her youth—the words she had taught them for fun.

  “Down in merlygrubs?” she said.

  “Depressed!” Abigail cried. She had always loved those northern words. The others all smiled in anticipation of her next question.

  Nora was delighted they were taking to it so well; she had at once regretted telling them of Wilf and Dorrie. This would take the taste away.

  “And a cat doesn’t purr, it…what?”

  “It three-thrums!” Abigail giggled.

  “Don’t answer them all, popsie,” Nora cautioned. “What’s a ne’er-do-well?”

  “A shuffletoppin’,” Mather said with glee.

  “I liked ‘glumpy and gloarin,’” Hester said. The memory was coming back to her. “That meant ‘sullen and staring.’”

  She glanced at Abigail and giggled. Abigail pouted and stuck out her tongue.

  “And feeling ‘wemmley and cocklety,’” Mather said. “What did that mean, Mama?”

  “Sick and unsteady,” Abigail said.

  “I didn’t ask you. Mama, tell her I wasn’t asking her.”

  But Nora heard none of them for there, outside the carriage window, was the very hovel she had been telling them about—the last of the row of five. Those mounds in the field must have been something else, some earlier hovels. And another family must have moved into this one and kept it in some sort of repair; although it was now deserted, it still had a recently inhabited look about it. They all did. They were all pretty much as she remembered them.

  A little way farther on they came to the turning place. On the way back she knew she could not simply drive past her old home, not having come all this way.

  “Stop,” she told the coachman when they were once again level with the derelict hovels.

  It was quite a while before the other, leading coachman realized they had stopped. Meanwhile Nora had descended alone and alone had walked into the place that had once been “home” to her and six others. The one-room homes of the very poor are almost interchangeable even when they are occupied. Deserted, only geography distinguishes one from another. The families who had lived here between her departure and this day had left no mark she could swear was not hers or her family’s. It was like stepping back twenty-two years. No! It was like
eliminating those intervening years and having that terrible past come smashing through all the defensive tricks of time and memory.

  The space that had held Wilf’s arm could not be safely mimed in empty, open air; for there was the very rafter where it lodged. Yesterday, as it were. And there was the exact corner in which Dorrie had complained of being “wemmley” and where she had lain, swallowing air and vomiting and turning her eyes up inside her head. Nora was appalled that those terrible images had such power over her still. Of all the regrets in her life, the chances denied to little Wilf and baby Dorrie were the deepest and most searing.

  A hand slipped through her arm, making her start.

  “You mustn’t fret, Mother.” Abigail’s voice. “It was so long ago. And you have all of us now, you know.”

  She heard herself laughing! Not in humour. And certainly not at Abigail’s attempt to comfort her. But out of sheer relief at the truth of what Abigail had said. And how curious, she thought, that, of all her children, those words meant most to her when they came from Abigail’s lips—sharp-tongued, selfish, self-destructive young Abigail, who could yet be softer and more loving than any of them.

  She squeezed her daughter’s hand. “I do,” she said. “Indeed and indeed, I do.”

  They walked back outside. “I’m glad I came,” she added as they went back to the coach. “I’m sure it won’t haunt me now as much as before.”

  Boy came running back along the lane. “I say, are you all right?” he called.

  “I am now,” she shouted back. “Let’s all go and eat.”

  It was a splendid lunch, in the directors’ buffet of the Manchester & Leeds at Hunt’s Bank. During the course of it Caspar told his mother that if all the Stevensons for the next five hundred years left his £460 untouched, it would be worth over ten million pounds and would yield nearly a quarter of a million each year!

  When Nora laughed, as if she thought it were just a nice fancy, he swore to her that he would never touch the money. He would set the first example.

  It was a promise he was to break the very next day.

  Chapter 36

  They met up with the Thornton children—no Walter or Arabella this time—on the quayside at Liverpool. After they had all gone aboard and run along the corridors and up and down the companionways and round the decks, and been in their cabins, and swung the lamps in their gimbals, Nick winked at Caspar and sauntered upon deck. Caspar, of course, followed.

  “Who has a tale to tell-oh?” Caspar said, grinning already with anticipation.

  “I have a tale to tell-oh! A tale of tail.” He pronounced it “tayill” to make the pun clear.

  Caspar rubbed his hands and leaned on the rail. They watched the nets full of luggage being hauled aboard.

  “Tell me, Steamer, d’ye know what a Dipsas is? Or a Manticora? A Wyvern? A Simurgh? Eh?”

  “Female grotesques, aren’t they?” Caspar giggled.

  “Indeed, old son. And your humble servant is here to tell you of them. Oh, and more! You know I was in Paris last Easter.”

  “You sent me a card.”

  “So I did. Well, I think that before a fellow marries and settles down he ought to do those things he won’t be able to do so easily afterwards.”

  “You! Getting married?”

  “Course not. But there’s so many of ‘those things,’ don’t you know.”

  They both laughed heartily.

  The seamen began to lash the canvas over the open mouth of the luggage hold. The officer of the gangway looked at his watch every few moments. At last he called “All ashore that’s going ashore,” and the cry was taken up throughout the ship.

  “Well,” Nick said. “Before I went, didn’t I overhear my mater telling Mrs. Cornelius about this strange house in Paris, in the Cours des Coches, where they keep half a ton of female grotesques. Wait! Having seen them, I revise that: a ton and a half of female grotesques, for gents whose taste for the normal has been dulled by overstimulation.”

  Caspar, on cue, laughed and waited to hear more, begging for it with his eyes and wet lips.

  “’Course that don’t apply to me. But since I don’t think I’ll ever succumb to overstimulation (quite the reverse—can’t get enough!), I thought this year’s as good as nineteen-hundred so why not; I’ll be dead of spermatorrhoea by then, anyway. So along I go to Cours des Coches and lo and behold! There it is. I tell you, my mater could do the best fem guide in Europe. Big, swell place. Lots of plush. Lots of gilt. But—les girls! Christ, you never saw such things. Things! All dressed up like little virgins and brides. One was a nun—well, you’d expect that, wouldn’t you, in a papist heaven like France. But you wouldn’t expect a nun with tusks and a big scaly bump on her forehead, would you! An elephant woman all in black. She couldn’t talk either—only go hneuyrghhneuyrgh, like a peke with asthma.”

  “Did you shag her?” Caspar asked in horrified fascination.

  “You wait!” He was so confident of Caspar’s interest now he did not look at him.

  The last of the non-passengers went ashore and the seamen began to make the crane ropes fast to the gangway. Others went forward and aft to loosen the ropes and hawsers to the quayside bollards.

  “There was one there I didn’t see at first. But when I did, I knew I had to take her. I’d waited too long.” He glanced briefly at Caspar. “Guess.”

  “How can I!” Caspar laughed. “I’ve never been within ten miles of…”

  “But you have of her. It was that slavey of yours at Quaker Farm—the one we watched Boy screwing. You remember! With the ghastly face and the splendid tits.”

  Caspar felt every muscle in him go rigid. The gooseflesh on his arms rose against the material of his shirt. By supreme effort of will he managed to kill every sound or gesture that might distract Nick. Fortunately, Nick was now well launched and needed no question, nor even laugh, to prompt him into further revelation.

  “As soon as I saw that loathsome half-face and remembered that glorious body I knew it had to be her.”

  They tested the knots to the gangplank.

  “She didn’t know me, though. Too drunk. Terrible stink of wine. It was all a bit of a washout, in fact. Too bloody weepy. As soon as I got into her she broke out in tears. The froggy fellow who runs the place said a lot of his clientele adore that and are willing to pay extra for it.”

  The seamen on the quayside signalled that the knots were firm and the men at the steam winch took a bite on the capstan.

  Caspar could stand no more of it. He’d heard all he needed to know. “How much money have you, Nick?”

  “Wait! You haven’t heard how…”

  “How much!” He eyed the coil of rope that had to be wound through before the gangplank lifted. It was dwindling fast.

  “Two quid. But…”

  “Give it me.”

  “I say…”

  “Give it me!”

  Awestruck, Nick handed it over.

  “I’m going to get Mary Coen out of there,” he said, already moving down the companionway. “Tell my mother what you’ve just told me. Twist it to suit yourself. Ask her for your two quid back.”

  The rope was all gone. The strain was on the gangplank now. He wasn’t going to make it!

  Then a cook came out and tapped one of the seamen on the shoulder—one who was holding the rope tightly bitten to the capstan. He let it go partly slack and the rope merely held its place, neither winding nor unwinding. Some kind of argument followed. Caspar leaped down the next companionway in two frog jumps. Then, without pause, he rushed out along the gangplank, which was by now being hauled up again, and jumped the eight-foot gap between the end of it and the quayside, landing in a sprawl.

  “Hey, Steamer!” came Nick’s cry from far above.

  Caspar looked up.

  “She’s not worth it. But the eleph
ant woman is!”

  Caspar hated himself. How, he thought, loving Mary as he did, could he still laugh at Nick?

  ***

  He had only enough cash to travel third to London—a nightmare of a journey on wooden seats. Fortunately third-class carriages were no longer open to the skies.

  He arrived in Hamilton Place at dawn, forced himself to sleep until midday, drew out twenty pounds, caught the lunchtime train to Dover and was in Paris by eleven o’clock that night. Luckily it was at last possible for English people to travel in France without a passport, an item Caspar had, in any case, forgotten in his anxiety.

  He paused long enough to book into a small hôtel garni in the Rue du Helder at fifteen francs, or twelve shillings, a day—which he thought extortionate but had no time to argue down.

  At Hamilton Place he had borrowed his mother’s Murray and had since found Cours des Coches on the map tucked in the back-cover pocket. It was just over half a mile away, a cul-de-sac running west from the Rue de la Madeleine, just north of the Faubourg St. Honoré.

  As he walked down the Boulevard des Italiens, toward La Madeleine, he decided he would have to pretend to be an interested client of this dreadful house. An outraged young lover would probably be left on the pavement. So would an employer seeking a runaway servant. Was 450 francs enough? He ought to have drawn out more perhaps. Too late now.

  For the first time, he began to think of Mary. Mary as he loved her. Mary as she was last Christmas. Until now his mind had shied away from all those particulars; she had been almost an abstract—as if Nick had said “Your country is in danger.” He knew he had not dared to think of the real, particular Mary until he was this close to her.

  And now that he was so close, now that he dared, a terrible foreboding overtook him. He remembered what Nick had said: “drunk…terrible stink of wine…crying all the time…customers like it.”

  What sort of ruins was he going to pick up?

  Did he care? He decided he did not. Whatever had become of Mary he would collect the bits and take her home.