Sons of Fortune (47 page)

He was struck by the way she said “young men of your class,” not “our class.” It reminded him that she had come up from quite humble origins. But how humble? He remembered that dreadful basement in Cleveland Street—what the tobacconist had called the Other Nation. Had her life been that bad? “You never talk much about when you were young, do you, mater,” he said. “I often wonder what it was like. Where you lived, and so on.”

“Best forgotten,” she said. “There’s too much future to think about.”

She called the new baby Sefton without even consulting John. She was making it very clear to him, in every way she could, that the child was not his. But he seemed to realize what she was at and went out of his way to deny her the satisfaction of his anger. She wondered if—as part of the famed “hush of life”—he had become unaccountably weak. Or perhaps he just didn’t care? She’d served all his purposes; now she could go her ways. Neither explanation seemed very likely. The most probable reason, she realized glumly, was that he was playing some sort of deep waiting game. He was still a man to watch, and never to underestimate.

He made one or two attempts at reconciliation, but so frostily that she thought he was really trying her mood. For her part, these attempts merely strengthened her resolve that, until he turned The Bitch out into the streets where he had first found her—and where she belonged—and until their bastards were in the workhouse, there would be no reconciliation. She treated his attempts as that sort of male sentimentality which wants to keep its cake and eat it.

Naturally he would come to some of her salons and dinners, just as before—they would keep up appearances in public. And naturally, too, they would always meet to deal with the business. Too many people—too many thousands of people—depended on Stevenson’s for them to put personal rancour above so much trust. Nora was aware that, for her at least, there was a certain amount of dishonesty in this. She was, in part, using the business to keep a tenuous line between John and herself. And because that line was there and had to be kept intact, she could afford the luxury of rejecting him completely in her private life. Any other wife, not having the business to cushion such indulgence, might have swallowed part of her hurt and responded to his overtures and so, step by step, have hoped to win him back.

Half of her suspected that was what she ought to be doing. But the other half set her jaw stubbornly against it. She was not “any other wife” and if it took twenty years for him to learn that—never mind. Learn it he would! She would never, never go on her knees for him.

In June of that year, when Sefton was just a month old, John had to go to Canada to head a commission whose main purpose was to unruffle a lot of colonial feathers over the debacle of the Grand Trunk Railway. He was an obvious choice since Stevenson’s had refused to have anything to do with the railway from the outset. And now the main contractors, Sir Morton Peto, Tom Brassey, and Edward Betts, were all in deep money troubles over it. John had kept clear of the project as soon as he discovered that the entire railway was to be engineered to English standards—very costly and very permanent works everywhere. English standards were appropriate to England, where lines were short, population dense, traffic high, and return on capital was quick. None of that was true of Canada. What Canada needed was temporary works of a much lower standard—built to last ten years instead of a thousand—whose improvement could then be paid for out of revenue. America had proved it could be done. They even laid track held in place by nails! And generally they worked to standards that would turn an English engineer’s hair white in less than a mile. But the Canadians, being still British, knew better; and they employed English engineers.

Well, they were better. They were also bankrupt. And voters were now being presented with the bill. So Lord Stevenson must preside over a commission to reconcile as many conflicts as possible, as speedily as might be, as tactfully as only he knew how, and as cheaply as the civil servants who accompanied him could manage.

Before he left he said something about time healing the wounds. Nora, determined that no mention of The Bitch would ever pass her lips, said nothing.

***

Caspar’s final remarks of that Easter holiday conversation left a deeper impression on Nora than her response at the time had suggested. Perhaps, she thought, that was the elusive something which was lacking in all her children: a knowledge of their parents’ backgrounds. Not head-knowledge but heart-knowledge. Her experience, and John’s, spanned the whole range of England’s two nations. In the years before they met, she had choked in cotton mills, he down sewers. They had lived during those times in the meanest slums. At the other extreme, they had been at the Palace and had been presented to the queen—as, next autumn, Winifred and Young John would be presented.

The children could not really comprehend it. To them poverty was the standard of life enjoyed by the servants. Well, Caspar didn’t think that any longer. But look what a shock the discovery had been to him. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that the children must see for themselves those places she had known.

She said nothing to them, but that summer on their way to Ireland, instead of travelling straight through Manchester on the loop line between the Manchester & Leeds and the Liverpool & Manchester, they all got out at Victoria and were ushered, bewildered and excited, into two waiting coaches. Sefton, of course, was still with his wet nurse back at Thorpe. The four next youngest, Abigail, nearly fourteen now, Hester, Mather, and Rosalind, now eight, were with the servants in the second coach. Nora and Nanette were with the four older children in the lead: Winifred, nineteen, Boy, Caspar, and—just turned fifteen—Clement.

Abigail was furious at being put with the children.

“Why should I?” she asked fiercely.

The others rounded on her and chanted her eternal complaint: “I can’t help being younger than you four!”

“Well I can’t!” she screamed.

“No,” Clement said, “but you can help behaving younger than the
other
four!”

Everyone laughed except Abigail, who sat glowering in the corner of her coach, breathing stertorously through flared nostrils.

Out they drove, through Chorlton on Medlock, Greenheys, Longsight, Levenshulme, Heaton Chapel, and Cringle Fields to the outskirts of Stockport. What all those names had once meant to her!

“All this was green fields when I was young,” Nora said.

“Mother’s got her property-buying face,” Winifred teased.

“No.” Boy laughed. “It’s got too dirty. She’s going to sell it.”

Nora wondered how to make them understand what these scenes meant to her—and ought to mean to them. Caspar watched her from the dark of the diagonal corner. Winifred returned to her tales of the trivial naughtinesses that passed for wrongdoing in Bedford College. Boy capped each tale with a head-pharaoh’s-eye view of similar peccadilloes at Blenheim. Caspar tried to remember the formula for compound interest, which his mind kept muddling with exponential logarithms. He knew his money had earned £5 8
s.
since December but he could not, in his head, remember how he had arrived at the sum. Anyway, he knew that to collect interest, even at two percent, was better than to pay it. Some time about last November that twelve and a half percent had really made him sweat. In ten years his £460 would be worth £561 15
s.

At Stockport, Nora made the coachman turn left up a winding lane south of the stinking river Tame. “To Brinnington,” she said. It was not far now. How curious, she thought, that Winifred should talk of property buying. The first property she had ever bought, out of the profits on the original Stevenson shop, lay just a few miles farther south at Alderley Edge. A hundred acres for a thousand pounds. If she still had it, the land would now be worth almost forty times that, what with all the fine houses that had been built out there since. But she had been forced to sell it when John’s foolhardiness had nearly bankrupted Stevenson’s (though only she and he knew it was that bad) back in 1849. Even worse, he had offered her back the value of all her properties when the firm was right side up again, and she had refused because (oh, irony of ironies!) the money they represented might drive a wedge between herself and him. Well, John wasn’t the only fool in this family. Over a quarter million that would have been.

The coachman told her they were near Brinnington. She looked out and thought he must be making a mistake. All these mean terraces and hovels? It couldn’t be! True, her family had lived in a hovel hereabouts, but it had been one of a row of only five, near the spring. All the rest was pasture and copse. This terrible sprawl must have obliterated them.

Or had it? She leaned far out of the window, seeking Brinnington Mount.

Relief! It was still too far away. Their hovel—“o’il” they had called it (or “pig coit” when the mud was at its slushiest)—was still some way along this lane.

Winifred was the first to realize what their mother was at. “Mama!” she cried in delight. “Is this where you used to live? When you were poor?”

Nora’s smile was answer enough.

The young people looked out at the dreary townscape with new eyes.

“Good Lord!” Boy said.

Caspar, who had been trying to remember his compound interest sums, had just recalled with satisfaction that if his investment were left untouched for a hundred years, his grandchildren would get about £3,400; the news that these were the famous slums his mother’s family had been reduced to was apposite: if he could go back a century to that profligate old squire, her great-grandfather, and tell him the power of compound interest, what a difference it would have made to his mother’s life! Why were people so shortsighted? If everyone was compelled by law to invest just one pound at two percent, and if it was left untouched for two thousand years, the whole world could retire and live off the interest.

As soon as he arrived at this notion he realized there was something wrong with it. The mathematics? Surely not. But if the mathematics was right, everything else had to be right. Mathematics was the key. That’s what it was for—to help you get everything else right. Some more thought was needed.

“Stop here,” Nora said.

They had left the last straggle of houses behind. The fields were beginning to assume a remembered pattern, though they were all smaller than she had expected. She got down, helped by Caspar, who had leaped ahead of her.

“There were five ‘o’ils’ somewhere here,” she said. “I don’t suppose they’ll be more than little mounds now. Look for some rough, low banks, sort of squarish, in a row. On this side.”

About twenty yards farther along, the straggling hedgerow gave out to a large, weed-strewn patch of unfenced land. “About here?” Winifred asked. She held her mother’s other arm.

“I think it is,” Nora said, trying to put more conviction into it than she felt.

“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.”