Ashenden (15 page)

“For heaven’s sake, James, you are being quite foolish now. Old friends don’t stand on ceremony. And they aren’t extravagant people, as you know. When Beatrice came last to Harley Street, I distinctly recognized her brown merino from Clapham.”

There was the incongruity of giggling and shushing from behind a fauteuil.

“Harley Street is not Ashenden. And an afternoon call is not a visit to a country house lasting days or more.”

She refused to see the distinction. “And Harley Street is not Clapham. What of it?”

“There is too great a difference between us now. They will be uncomfortable and you will be uncomfortable.” And you will regret how they will make you feel, he thought to himself.

“You are saying
you
will be uncomfortable.”

“I shall not be uncomfortable. I am never uncomfortable.”

This was not true, but she let it go by. “Then you can have no objection.”

“It is a mistake. But I shall not forbid it.”

“I should hope not!” she said, with some warmth. She shook her head. “Are these the consequences of wealth? That we should cast off old friends?” She was not prepared to entertain that of herself: she was ever the haberdasher’s daughter and haberdasher’s wife. So she firmly believed, failing to recognize the desire anyone might have to display their fine furnishings, especially to old friends.

Her husband let her have this last word, for there was always the possibility that she might be right. However, he consoled himself with the notion that the possibility was remote. The day lay ahead and he had plans for it.

“Come out, come out, you little heathens!” He reached down and caught hold of John, then Cedric, then Reginald, all wriggling and squealing, for this, too, was part of the game.

“We are taking you prisoner,” said Reginald, who would not let go of his role, or his father.

“What have you here?”

“A bit of kindling.”

“A butter knife,” said Cedric.

John, who was not to be ignored, said that he also had a muskirt.

“You must put them back,” said their father in his most terrible voice. “Or your mother will have something to say. As she does about most things.”

A clatter from the breakfast table answered the rain beating on the windows. One was fortunate to have such a sporting father, thought Reginald, and it was a thought to which he would cling all his life, along with all the happy memories of the house and their childhood in it.

*  *  *

On Sunday a small crowd had gathered by the lych-gate, rather more than usually attended matins. Most were villagers, but there was a fair sprinkling of local gentry.

Philip, the eldest son, peering out of the carriage window, knew the crowd was there to see him. The footmen dismounted from the rear and opened the doors. He made no move to get out.

Instead, his sister Rowena got down first, one hand on her bonnet and the other clutching her basket, followed by his younger sister, Caroline, in her new frock, then his brother Albert, who had grown a fine shading of dark hair on his upper lip in his absence. Afterwards Wilfred, lost in his own world, and finally their father, James Henderson, who rarely went to church but who was making what Philip imagined was a public statement about the return of his eldest son from America. “Come along, Philip,” he said, with a look on his face that equated religious worship with a branch of commerce.

Philip came out of the carriage into a spitting rain that any moment threatened to turn into a downpour. There were so many people who wanted to greet him and he barely knew any of them. You would think he had been gone thirty years, not three. The men wanted to pump his hand or clap him on the back, and the ladies wanted to ask if he had seen many bears, if it had been very cold or hot or savage or heathen, or if he had met George Washington. At first he explained that George Washington had been dead nearly fifty years, that New York and Boston, where he had spent most of his time, were God-fearing places on the whole, if a little rough and unfinished round the edges, and the weather wasn’t so bad once you knew how to dress for
it, although he had never experienced such dreadful mud. After a time, he said, “Very well, thank you,” and “How do you do?” because no one seemed at all interested in his answers, only in their own questions.

They went into their pew, Rowena, Caroline, Albert, Wilfred, himself, and his father. John, whom he hardly knew and who had woken with a cough, was at home with his mother, along with Cedric and Reginald, who were too young for sermons. The family story, and they were a family who were bound to each other by stories, was that before their parents were married, they had discovered a mutual fondness for the works of Sir Walter Scott, particularly
Ivanhoe,
and that in due course they had named their children after its characters. Philip had never seen his father read any book that did not have columns of figures in it, but he supposed the story must have been true, so far as any family stories were true, because he had read the book himself and found them all there, except Caroline, whose name commemorated his father’s first commercial success. (Aside from Rowena, the only other significant female in
Ivanhoe
was Rebecca, which would not have been suitable.) It was just as well, he thought, breathing in the chill prayer-book air, the greenish smell of damp, and the dust that puffed up from the needlepoint hassocks, that so many of them had turned out to be boys. That wry observation would not have occurred to him before he had gone away.

The
Ivanhoe
story was retold every time someone commented on what a pretty and unusual name Rowena was, which was roughly every time one of the family made a new acquaintance. Their chief narrative, however, which needed no retelling because they lived it every day, was the story of his father’s rise from humble beginnings to immense wealth. Ever since Philip had stepped onto the gangplank in New York harbor to begin his journey home, the business, Ashenden, the house in Harley Street, and the art collection had been weighing heavily on his shoulders. (His father’s radical views meant there would probably never be a title, which was one less burden to inherit.)

They stood to sing a hymn, the stone flags rose and fell like the ship’s deck, and when Philip reached out to steady himself against the rolling of his sea legs, his hands met nothing. They were at the front. His father’s wealth would have entitled them to a box pew, such as the one the squire’s family had occupied for the three centuries that Whiteleys had been standing, but his father preferred to be seen as one of the people. Philip dropped his eyes to avoid the importuning stares of the congregation and told himself he would speak to his father tomorrow. It was the same promise he had made to himself the day before, and the week before that when he had landed at Liverpool.

The vicar climbed into the pulpit to deliver the sermon. Reverend Cummings was young, a new incumbent with red pimpled cheeks, and looked like he would be very unhappy if anyone handed him a baby to christen. Philip sat, folded his hands, and prepared himself to listen. Immediately his mind drifted.

Somewhere around Newfoundland the ship had run into fog. The captain explained that it was a common occurrence. For two days they had sailed through a white blur and only the slap of the waves against the side told him they were at sea, not suspended in nothingness between one world and the next. During the remainder of the voyage, which was uneventful, Philip had spent long hours at the rail staring at the water, one minute smooth and marbled so that it looked almost solid, the next dissolved into a spray that made his coat stiff with salt in the morning. On the way out he had been too busy being sick to look at anything except the lurching walls of his cabin. Now he discovered that you could watch water the way you watched flames in a hearth or clouds in the sky and the result was the same. There was something about it that stilled the mind. The day a thin dark line appeared on the horizon and all the other passengers came out to see it, he was sorry.

He did not want to be home. This morning when he had woken up in the unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar room, he had thought he was back at the lake with Prentice and his friend DeWitt. It might have been the way light was swimming on the
ceiling or it might have been the aftermath of dreams, which he never remembered but which often colored his moods well into the day. Now, sitting in the front pew with his family, or kneeling and murmuring “amen,” he could smell the sharp tang of the pines that grew by the lake edge and feel the rasp of granite under his fingers as he lowered himself down into the tipping canoe. The first summer, DeWitt taught him how to paddle as the natives did, and he could still recall the way the blade struck the mud of the lake bed on his first attempt and the vegetable odors that came bubbling up. One winter the three of them had skated through a thin crust of snow past the swaddled men fishing over holes cut in the ridged ice and it had seemed miraculous to him that weather, which he knew as an inconvenience, could be such an elating force.

“Are you all right?” mouthed Rowena, from the far end of the pew.

He nodded. The three years he had been away had not been kind to his sister. At sixteen, there had been the faint promise of prettiness; at nineteen it was gone and did not look likely to return. The letters he had received from her had not prepared him for that, nor for the distance that had inserted itself between them. The few days he had been home he had never seen her without a basket, packed with charity of one form or another. There was one at her feet now, full of books she was delivering after church to a woman who had once been housekeeper at the Park. Buried somewhere at the bottom of it, he felt sure, was her sense of humor.

The service was over. His sister was standing in the porch talking to the vicar about the sermon. “This is my eldest brother, Philip,” said Rowena. He shook the vicar’s hand and was reminded of a mollusk.

“The world traveler,” said the vicar.

“He’s home now,” said Rowena. “Home for good, aren’t you, Philip?”

Philip said yes, he was home now. Then Rowena went off with her basket, and there were more people his father insisted on introducing him to, while Caroline and Wilfred linked arms and whispered,
and Albert, with his shadowed upper lip, stood off to one side with his hands in his pockets, kicking a stone to and fro.

On the way back it began to rain. “Rowena will get wet,” said Caroline, for whom the promise of prettiness was a certainty. The statement carried a hint of satisfaction with it.

“Rowena has an umbrella,” said their father.

Everyone agreed it had been a cold spring. All along the lanes the may was out, but the white flowers might as well have been snow. Philip tilted his head against the misted glass and wondered where all the colors had gone.

*  *  *

Rowena had not returned by luncheon. No one, apart from Philip, seemed to be troubled by this. His mother was occupied with John and his cough upstairs in the nursery, where the younger children had already eaten. The only guest at the table was a Dr. Burgess, apparently a frequent visitor, who had a bulging forehead and no neck, and who had arrived in a gig direct from the bedside of one of his patients soon after the Hendersons had returned from church. Before they sat down to eat, his father told him that Burgess was “sound.” That approval, as far as Philip could tell, was based on the doctor’s willingness to listen to his father’s opinions without voicing any contradictory ones of his own, bobbing in the wake of the great ship like some sort of highly respectful dinghy.

A week ago, when Philip had got down from the Liverpool coach and gone to meet his father at his London offices, he had been shocked at how short, stocky, and ordinary he seemed. Half an hour later, over chops in a chophouse, that fleeting impression vanished and the height, presence, vigor, and sense of purpose he had always associated with his father, and that had loomed over him while he had been away, returned with full force. When they said good-bye, his handshake had a point to make.

A self-made man was a man with a story to tell. The story Philip knew was that his father, James Henderson, a drayman’s son from Somerset, had gone to work at a haberdasher’s warehouse in the
City, married the owner’s daughter, and become a partner. A few years later, watching a state procession among crowds lining the Strand, he had observed that Queen Caroline looked very poorly, bought up all the black stuff on the market, and made his first fortune when the country went into mourning soon after. There was a subsequent business triumph over imported silk, when he had outsmarted the excise men along with his competitors, and later a grand tour of the Continent with their mother, which pleasantly combined the unearthing of trade secrets with cultural education. Now the self-made man sat in the House, dined with reformers and radicals, collected paintings and estates, and expected his eldest son to follow suit.

A gong sounded. “Luncheon.” His father consulted his pocket watch. “Come along, Philip.” Dr. Burgess put down his glass of Madeira and wiped his upper lip.

Luncheon was managed with the competence and attention to detail that characterized all the family’s affairs. It was punctual, it was neat, the linen snowy, the glassware glinting, and the silverware bright. At the head of the long table sat the head of the family, with Philip and Albert on his left facing Dr. Burgess on his right. Receiving instructions with the circumspection of an envoy, a footman in a powdered wig and blue coat with brass buttons cleared away Rowena’s place, muffling the cutlery against the crockery with his spotless gloves.

“Miss Henderson will not be joining us today?” said the doctor.

“It appears not.”

Over deviled kidneys, veal cutlets, and a fruit compote, his father talked about the bank failure in the United States that had been the reason why his eldest son had spent three years in New York and Boston, looking after the Henderson investments under the direction of his American associate, Mr. Ryder. “We’ve seen the worst, thank God,” he said. “I’m happy to say we’re back on a level footing. Now Philip is home, with his experience in the money markets, I expect him to be a valuable asset to our new bank in Moorgate.”