‘Yesterday’s bread,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know what this spread is, but it’s not meat paste.’
‘Tastes all right to me,’ Silas said. ‘Mind you, after two months of fried plantain and curried goat, everything tastes ambrosial.’
‘What’s plantain?’ she said.
‘Bit like a banana, but you wouldn’t want to be eating it raw. It’s not half bad, actually, the first couple of times. By the tenth time, you’re going off it. By the twentieth, you’d rather eat your Panama hat.’
‘Well, fried plantain sounds better than goat. Smelly beasts.’
‘Mmmm. Again, quite palatable in small doses. Are you going to leave that?’
There was an abandoned egg and cress sandwich on her plate. She nodded and pushed it towards him, then picked up a lemon curd tart. She sniffed it cautiously, then nibbled at the pastry. Silas laughed.
‘You eat as if you’re tasting for poison,’ he said.
She put it down. ‘It’s an affliction,’ she said miserably. ‘I can’t enjoy food when I’m out. I always think I could do better at ’ome.’
‘And you most certainly could; which is why, dear Evie, you really should open up next door.’
She took a sip of hot tea. ‘That’s a nice brew, anyroad,’ she said.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Yes, I said I’d think on it, Silas. It’s only been ten minutes.’
‘But it’s perfect. There’s good old Butterfield’s here, with its delusions of grandeur, and Guest’s down the road with their fine groceries. You’d slot in as naturally as the egg in that sandwich.’
‘Thank you, but I don’t see myself as t’egg in anyone’s sandwich.’
‘It’s a pleasant building, currently empty, neither too big nor too small, in a part of town that passes for smart by Barnsley’s standards.’
‘Now watch it,’ she said, wagging a finger at him. ‘No need to be rude.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s all rather parochial, isn’t it?’
She wasn’t at all sure what he meant, but had no intention of showing it. She ignored him, and sipped at her cup of tea.
‘I’ve always thought you should open up in Bristol. Clifton village would welcome one of your establishments with open arms. But I’m a reasonable man; I can see that might be a step too far for the moment. Market Hill, Barnsley, though … Close enough to Netherwood to keep a proper eye on, respectable establishments left and right’ – he picked up her rejected sandwich and waggled it – ‘and an obvious demand for your food. What is there to think about? Apart from all the money you’ll make. Now there’s something to dwell upon, because you can raise your prices here in town, with no more expenditure on ingredients …’
She let him talk. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey, this brother of hers. He talked like a man who was used to being listened to, whether or not what he said was interesting, or even right. Hugh Oliver had told her that Silas held weekly staff meetings at Whittam and Co., assembling the workforce – packers, drivers, clerks, delivery boys, no exceptions – in the warehouse and detailing the week’s profits, losses, triumphs and failures, however small, however large.
‘We’re none of us allowed to speak while he does,’ Hugh had said. ‘Even I have to stand there mute, listening to the oracle. Woe betide you if you have to sneeze. Men have been sacked for less.’
Eve looked at Silas now, still holding forth on the ins and outs of the catering trade, about which he knew next to nothing. Well, he might strike the fear of God into his own employees, but she was his big sister and could still put him in his place.
‘Oh, be quiet,’ she said.
He stopped speaking and stared.
‘I shall finish my tea, then go back and ’ave another look,’ she said. ‘I’m minded to take t’lease, but as and when I do, it’ll be my idea, and not as a result of you blethering on.’
‘Charmed, I’m sure.’
She smiled at him. ‘Do you remember coming here once, years ago? We stood in the doorway, too mucky to step inside?’
He nodded, though he was still affronted. He was out of the habit of being reprimanded; he had lost the knack of bouncing back.
‘We wanted to see t’money whizzing back and forth on t’wires. Do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember.’ It had been a rare trip to Barnsley, he thought. She can’t have been more than eight; he would have been seven. How had they got there? He simply couldn’t recall. He knew, though, that they had no money at all, and he’d wanted to lift a couple of pies from a market stall, but Eve hadn’t let him and then the lady behind the stall, seeing them whey-faced and pitiful, had said, ‘Now then you two, take a pie each, quick, before t’mister gets back,’ and Eve had told him, as they walked off clutching their booty, that God had rewarded them for being good. Silas had thought, what’s the difference? Either way we get a pie. He still thought that, actually; one profits in life by whatever means possible. A stolen pie tastes just as good as a pie gained honestly.
‘Those wires – do you suppose they save time?’
Silas followed her gaze. It was one of the wonders of Barnsley, this overhead network of slender cables carrying metal pots of money at thrillingly high speeds to a hidden cashier. Sent by a shop assistant, they flew across the shop and through a hole in the wall, then emerged a few moments later to hurtle back with a written receipt and the customer’s change.
‘Seems like an unnecessary palaver to me,’ he said. ‘But it’s theatrical, and therein lies its value. I do believe people make purchases simply to watch the drama of the transaction.’ All those years ago they had stood outside, he and his sister, peering in as best they could, to watch the spectacle. They’d been shooed away eventually, and had gone instead to the open doorway of Guest’s to inhale the exotic aroma of coffee beans, tea leaves and cheese. You could feast on that smell if you were hungry enough.
‘Listen to you,’ Eve said. ‘Did you swallow a dictionary?’
She stood, her tea finished and the remains of the food holding no appeal.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take a stroll.’
They’d come to Barnsley together to look at premises, because Eve felt she had something to prove: not to herself, but to Silas. Absalom Blandford’s treachery had festered for a while between them; his reaction, when she told him, had been a fury that was almost visceral in its ferocity. He had raged, not at the bailiff, but at Eve. She was weak. She was stupid. She was afraid of confrontation. She was inept in business matters. She had lost her chance at—
‘At what?’ she’d screamed at last, when she was pushed beyond her limits by his splenetic defamation of her character. ‘Lost my chance at what?’ She was wild-eyed and furious and he had calmed fractionally when, finally, she had matched his vehemence. ‘Lost your chance at real success,’ he had said. ‘Lost your chance at great wealth. Lost your chance to make your mark upon the world.’
‘Well, so be it. What should I do? Put a gun to t’bailiff’s ’ead and force his ’and?’
‘Have you spoken to the earl’s solicitor, at least?’
‘No, I wouldn’t dream of it.’ She was aghast. ‘I have no idea who ’e is or what I’d say.’
‘Evie, for God’s sake, take control of this situation!’
‘Silas, I swear we shall fall out if you keep this up. I wish I’d never told you in t’first place. If Lord Netherwood truly meant for me to have t’business, wouldn’t ’e have written it into ’is will? But ’e didn’t. It was a rash promise, made on my wedding day when ’e was in a sentimental mood. For all we know ’e might have changed ’is mind if ’e’d lived.’
‘What rot. That business, that building should be yours.’
‘No, there’s no “should” about it. There are other ways – better ways – to succeed than being ’anded everything on a plate. And I’ll tell you something else. Absalom Blandford can stew in ’is own juice and watch me triumph without gifts from Lord Netherwoo
d. I’ve ’ad enough favours already. The rest I’ll manage on my own.’
Silas, thwarted and – a novel experience this – temporarily humbled, had fallen into silence. But in the weeks that followed, whenever he reappeared from Bristol, he was like a dog with a bone, returning again and again to the topic. Whichever way he looked at it, it seemed to him that a life-altering chance had slipped through his sister’s fingers and he found he could hardly bear it. His own existence had been transformed by just such a gift from a benefactor; it seemed right, to Silas, that Evie be elevated too. The prospect of it excited him: he and his sister proving to the world that they were as good as many and better than most. Without her knowledge he rooted out the name of the Netherwood estate solicitor in Sheffield, a Mr T. B. Jackson – they never progressed to first-name introductions – who was little inclined to speak to a stranger about the late earl’s wishes, but was prepared to confirm, however, that he had been summoned by Absalom Blandford to the estate offices in October last year, although the meeting had been cancelled by the bailiff soon afterwards. There was nothing untoward or unusual about this, Mr Jackson had said. However, his tone and expression implied that there was something extremely untoward and unusual about Silas Whittam’s questions. Mr Jackson showed him the door; he knew nothing, he said, of the matter to which Silas alluded.
Silas, walking away from the solicitor’s fine Georgian office in Paradise Square, cursed himself for bothering. He was too busy for all this, he thought. There were any number of other matters demanding his attention and here he was, fighting a battle for his sister that she didn’t even want to win. Of course, he knew exactly what had rattled him: the parallel with his own story was too extraordinary to be disregarded. He remembered with perfect clarity the morning that Walter Hollis, facing Silas across the boardroom table, told him that as of this day, he was a very powerful young man. Sir Walter had placed a fountain pen on top of the paperwork, slid it over to him and smiled.
‘Consider it payment for services rendered,’ he had said. ‘Your just rewards for hard work and exceptional loyalty.’ He had spoken as if his protégé might protest at his generosity: far from it. Silas’s signature was on the dotted line before you could say Global Steamship Company, and the ink had barely dried before he was moving forward with his own ambitious plans. Yes, he knew very well what it meant to benefit from a miraculous stroke of great good fortune; and he wanted it for Evie, too. It seemed utterly dreadful to Silas that it had been promised to her then snatched away. And her serene acceptance of this body blow was, to him, inexplicable. They resembled each other in looks alone, he had concluded; inside, they were chalk and cheese.
They walked along Shambles Street then back along Peel Parade and into Peel Square. In the sunshine the town looked bright and prosperous and even Silas, whose prejudices against Barnsley were entrenched, could see a certain gritty charm in the cobbled streets and proud shop fronts. There was an integrity and authenticity to this place and these people, he thought; civic pride was a wonderful phenomenon. At the Central Café in Queen Street Eve made him wait while she watched customers come and go. She studied the menu in the window – sixpence for pikelets and a pot of tea, a shilling for Yorkshire pudding with roast of the day, one and six for ham, egg and chips and a pudding – and she suddenly wished she’d come with Ginger instead of Silas, because she wanted the benefit of her sharp mind and plain speaking. These meals at these prices – they’d be hard to beat. The cost of all the alterations and refurbishment to the place on Market Hill would have to be taken into account, and the rent there would likely be higher than Queen Street. She looked at Silas but he was admiring his own reflection in the plate glass. He caught her eye and smiled without turning.
‘Done?’ he said.
‘I want to go back to Market ’ill,’ she said. ‘But I want to go in this time, so let’s talk to t’agent, see if we can take t’keys.’
She set off walking at a brisk pace, taking him by surprise, so he had to jog along to draw level with her.
‘You’re going to take it, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Might do.’
He grabbed her and kissed her flamboyantly on both cheeks, and a passer-by gave an indulgent smile, taking them for a courting couple. Eve shoved him away.
‘Folk are staring,’ she said.
‘Today, Barnsley,’ he said, too loudly for comfort. ‘Tomorrow, the world!’
Eve said: ‘Don’t be soft,’ though there was something about Silas’s enthusiasm that was catching and she smiled as they walked on, arm in arm in the June sunshine, a handsome couple, turning heads as they went.
Chapter 48
Enoch Wadsworth’s rented room was miserable enough with the lamps lit and a fire burning, but more often than not he forgot to do either. The carpet was worn through to the backing in places, and the horsehair stuffing was emerging like fungus through a hole in the couch. There were antimacassars along its back, which seemed like an unnecessary refinement, given the scarcity of visitors to sit on it and the state of the room in general. A narrow single bed, still unmade from the night before, occupied most of one side of the room and at the other was a drab little desk, textbooks open all around its outside edge, the day’s newspapers spread on the floor at its feet and a ream of paper in the very centre, at which Enoch scribbled furiously with an erratic old fountain pen, which either ran copiously with ink or dried up unexpectedly for a moment before releasing a new flood. But he was used to its habits, and he persisted patiently, stooping close over the paper in the gloaming, the better to see what he’d written. Soon it would be too dark to see anything at all, and then he would remember to light the wick of his oil lamp, giving himself a few more hours at the task in hand before he finally accepted the need to sleep. He had on the shirt, tie and tweed suit that he’d worn all day at work, but had added an oversized woollen cardigan and a scarf, wound twice round his throat, the loose ends thrown over his back to keep them out of his way. His pipe, lit but for the time being forgotten, rested on a saucer on a window ledge that was just within arm’s reach. Soon it would go out, and when he picked it up for a comforting puff, he would find it unresponsive and would have to coax it back into life with a succession of Swan matches. A scattering of them, blackened and spent, already littered the floor around him.
It was an unedifying tableau: the dwelling of a man whose mind was too cluttered with concerns for the outside world to worry about the condition of his own small place in it. He never felt the lack of creature comforts; his own degraded version of the trappings of domesticity was absolutely all he needed. He simply didn’t see the threadbare carpet or the tattered lining of his curtains; if the cold seeped into his bones, he donned another layer of wool and moved the pen a little more vigorously on the page. It was only when others strayed into his domain that its shortcomings became apparent, and even then only fleetingly. He would register their ill-disguised dismay, their furtive glances at the unmade bed or the soot-streaked window, but never for long enough to do anything about it. Anyway, visitors had only ever been very few and far between and these days, apart from the once-weekly knock from his landlord – whose quarters across the landing were no more salubrious than his own, it was really only Amos who had the dubious privilege of crossing the threshold.
So, here was Enoch, at nine o’clock on a Monday night, holed up in his room on Racecommon Road in Barnsley, engaged, to the exclusion of all other activities, in the tireless pursuit of social justice. Always, always, there was work to be done: he was never idle. Often he had letters to write or an article for the Fabians, or a newly published tract to read. Tonight, though, he was writing a speech, and this was what he loved most: putting into Amos’s mouth the best and most powerful combination of words from the infinite supply that he held in his own head.
He saw great possibilities for Amos, possibilities far beyond the constituency boundary of Ardington, but first he had to get him elected. The euphoria following the by-electio
n last year had swiftly evaporated when it became clear that Webster Thorne wasn’t quite the waste of space they’d believed – and hoped – him to be. Thorne had perhaps himself been shaken by the close brush with defeat; he had rented a house on the fringes of the town and, at weekends and during parliamentary recesses, he could often be seen in one of the local inns or at church, singing lustily with the choir. He said all the right things, too: seemed conscious of the realities and difficulties of an ordinary working life. It worried Enoch that the Liberals, particularly the younger branch of the party, were developing an increasingly collectivist platform: that, and a tacit acceptance by the Labour Representation Committee of the practical advantages of co-operation between the two parties. In February, at Caxton Hall in Westminster, the LRC had signed an undertaking not to oppose parliamentary candidates endorsed by the Trades Union Congress, many of whom would be standing on the Lib-Lab ticket. This was a retrograde step, in Enoch’s view, and not one that the Independent Labour Party had any truck with. He’d said as much to Ramsay MacDonald, buttonholing the Labour grandee outside Caxton Hall, undeterred by the man’s powerful bearing and stellar connections. We shouldn’t be playing up to the Liberals, Enoch had said; we shouldn’t be encouraging this kind of reciprocity.
‘Who are you again?’ MacDonald had said. He was secretary of the LRC and was standing for Labour in Leicester, and Enoch could see that he had the look of a winning candidate about him, but it didn’t mean he shouldn’t be kept on his toes.
‘Enoch Wadsworth,’ he had said, and they had shaken hands. ‘I’m with Amos Sykes, your Ardington candidate. And we’re campaigning on a strictly independent Labour platform. This cross-pollination’s a curse and a hindrance.’
‘Hardly cross-pollination,’ MacDonald had said, but he had taken a card from his pocket with his London and Leicester telephone numbers on it, and told Enoch to keep in touch.
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