A Dark and Distant Shore (116 page)

Hell, Gideon, thought. Oh,
hell
!
The newspaper report was littered with words like ‘obscene’, ‘disgusting’, ‘scandalous’, ‘indecent’, and the usual titillating remarks about things the editor considered too offensive to readers’ delicate sensibilities to be stated on the page. But it was perfectly clear that the premises the police had raided the evening before had been a boy brothel. Gideon had visited one once in the course of preparing an exposé of vice in London, when Fanshawe had had a reforming bee in his bonnet. He remembered that the place had been divided into cubicles, with a boy of about fifteen or sixteen in each, his face painted, his mannerisms those of a girl, his ‘professional’ name a female one, and his voice a high, careful falsetto.

The police, last night, hadn’t managed to lay their hands on more than two or three of their quarry. ‘Several of these disgusting young perverts, as well as a number of adults about whose motives for being on the premises there can be little doubt, escaped through a secret exit, but the police have been able to issue descriptions of some of them... Third on the list is a youth known as “Jane”, who is of slender build, fair complexion, and a general delicacy of appearance, if it is possible to use such a word as “delicacy” in connection with such a revolting affair. With all the power of its voice, this newspaper demands of the government that it ceases to conspire in the hushing up of such scandalous offences against public morality...’ Etcetera, etcetera.

Until 1861, the maximum penalty for what the law termed ‘gross indecency’ had been death; now it was life imprisonment, with ten years as a minimum. Gideon could understand why young Jay or ‘Jane’ was anxious to leave the country.

Gideon had always kept a substantial sum of money in the house; more than once it had enabled him to set off on some journalistic mission when he would otherwise have had to wait until the banks were open. Putting a hundred pounds in an envelope, he sent his manservant off with it. Inside, he put a brief note, saying only, ‘Bon voyage, Jay, and let us know as soon as you have an address.’

He didn’t even know what the boy was like nowadays, except that he had been to a good school and had acquitted himself reasonably well. All he remembered was a pale, fair, nervous child, too much surrounded by women.

‘I should have foreseen it!’ he exclaimed to Amy. ‘I should have foreseen
some
thing of the sort.’

‘Why?’ she asked, her eyes on her stitchery.

He knew he shouldn’t be talking to her about such a subject, which no well-bred woman was supposed even to be aware of. But when he had told her about Juliana in ’71, he had been so anxious to show her in the most sympathetic possible light that he had told Amy about Theo, too, and had been almost shocked to discover that Amy was scarcely shocked at all. She had said, ‘I’m not blind, my dear, and it’s hardly a new phenomenon. The Chinese, if I remember from my reading, call it
lung-yang.
’
She was a remarkable woman.

‘Why? Because I’ve been worried ever since Theo was appointed the boy’s guardian. I should have kept an eye on him, on them both.’

‘How could you? With Jay at Glenbraddan or at school, and us in London, it wouldn’t have been possible.’

‘I could have managed it somehow.’ Rising, he wandered over to the window and stood looking out at the street. It was dusk, and the lamplighter was plodding along, propping his ladder against each lamp post in turn, climbing two or three rungs, turning the gas on and lighting it so that it burned blue at first and then a cold greenish-yellow, and then climbing down and shouldering his ladder and plodding on to the next lamp on his round. He had to go through the whole procedure again, in reverse, in the morning. What a placid, unsurprising life it must be, Gideon thought enviously.

‘Even after you quarrelled with Theo?’

He moved, restlessly. ‘Perhaps not.’ And then he burst out with more bitterness than she had ever heard in his voice before, ‘
Damn him!
To take and shape an innocent child, so that it all ends up like this! If I were a violent man, I think I would kill him for it.’

Frowning a little, Amy said, ‘Must it be Theo’s fault? Surely he wouldn’t do such a thing deliberately? What purpose could he have?’

‘It’s hardly the kind of thing he’d be likely to do by mistake! No, the more I think about it, the surer I am. Even while he was married to Juliana, he had a boy on a leash.’ That was something he hadn’t told Amy before. ‘And you can probably include malice in the equation, too. The boy’s father and grandfather were very much holier-than-thou, and I’m sure Theo has derived a good deal of cold-blooded amusement from the whole thing. What I don’t understand is what the poor little devil was doing on his own in London – though I suppose he may have been staying with Harvey – and why the
hell
he should have been sitting there soliciting in a cheap brothel!’

Repressing an urgent desire to rush upstairs and make sure that her own son was safe in his room, studying, Amy murmured, ‘A boyish trick, probably.’

Her husband turned and stared at her, and she went on, eyebrows raised a little, ‘Don’t you think so? Schoolboy mischief that went sour? I could see Steven doing just that.’

‘
God forbid!
’

‘And amen!’ She chuckled. ‘You know very well I didn’t mean
exactly
that. But if he didn’t
have
to be there for – well, for satisfaction, what other reason can there have been?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Dear Lord, what happens now? I’d better let Theo know, in case Harvey doesn’t. He’ll have to arrange to transfer funds. It’s a filthy world, sometimes. I was going to make my peace with Theo at Kinveil in the spring, but I don’t know whether I will even be able to look at him without being sick.’

She said quietly, ‘You want to go rushing up there now to have it out with him, don’t you? But it’s too late, my dear. There’s nothing you can do, and it’s better to wait until you’ve cooled off.’

He crossed to her and, taking the embroidery from her hands and putting it aside, pulled her up to her feet and gently into his arms. His lips buried in her hair, he said, ‘Oh, Amy, what would I do without you? Never have any doubts, my dearest. For I do love you very much.’

After the dangerous shoals, it was a marriage that had come safe to harbour.

The sun was blazing once more out of the blue, and London’s gardens were heavy with roses, white and garnet and lax-petalled pink, when Gideon set out in June for Kinveil and arrived to find a luminous grey veil over the whole wide vault of the sky and the rain falling straight and leaden through the still air. Foliage and grass were tropically lush, richly, virulently, oppressively green, except where the furious magenta of foxgloves and early heathers screamed defiance at yellow hawksbeard and buttercups, and the lingering blue of speedwell.

Gideon and Theo met like two civilized adults, as if there had never been anything amiss between them. Theo was sixty-six years old now, his long neck stringy and his bony chin standing high above the stiffened collar, with its narrow black four-in-hand tie. His hair was white, smoothed back over his forehead but waving over the ears, and he had grown a cavalry moustache which he twirled affectedly when he talked. His eyes, above it, were bright and bird-like.

‘Vilia will join us shortly,’ he said. ‘She likes her nap in the afternoons, and one doesn’t wish to discourage her. It gives everyone an hour or two’s rest from dancing attendance. She’s very demanding now that she can’t get around easily, although since rheumatism is the curse of the glens, she was bound to succumb to it one day. And you will be desolated to know that you won’t see dear Shona for a week or so. She has gone to Glenbraddan. One of the girls is being married next month, and you would think from the high state of tension that prevails that no girl had ever been married before. So tell me, dear boy, how are your charming wife and young Steven?’

Amy, considering that her and Steven’s presence might hamper Gideon in his dealings with Theo, had cried off, and Gideon hadn’t argued. But it was odd how many memories it brought back, finding himself alone with only his mother and brother for company. Odder still to realize that the three of them had never before been alone together at Kinveil, the sturdy little castle on its sea-girt tumble of rocks, that had brooded over all their lives.

He wondered whether Theo was intending to come and live here permanently. ‘You’re giving up the foundry, I hear?’ he said when they were settled in the Long Gallery, with decanters and sandwiches to stay them until dinner.

‘Indeed, indeed. We have grown at such dizzying speed since we became a limited company that the place has lost all its charm for me. It’s too impersonal now, and it would be quite
infra dig
for the senior Mr Lauriston to go and poke his nose into the furnaces, the way he used to do. I think I must have more of our paternal grandfather in me than I realized. “A foundry man at heart,” as old Moultrie used to say, “with a real feeling for a nice iron bar”. But it’s Jermyn who’s the technical genius now, and Peregrine James is handling the administrative side brilliantly, much though it goes against the grain for me to admit it. They don’t need me any more, and, more importantly, I don’t
want
them.’

‘I see.’ He did, too, and better than Theo guessed. Little tin gods never liked having their supremacy whittled away, and with Jermyn’s mechanical machine gun making swift headway against competition from the Gatling, the Gardener, the Nordenfelt and the Lowell, Theo had lost not only his godhood but even his acquaintance with revealed truth. He had never mastered the finer details of gun design. ‘So what next?’ Gideon asked.

‘Here, London, and perhaps some of the travelling I’ve never had time for. Unlike...’

He was interrupted by a bustle outside, and then Vilia stood in the doorway, leaning on two sticks, and with a youngish woman whom Gideon took to be her maid behind her.

‘Really, Theo!’ Her silvery voice was quite unchanged. ‘I cannot imagine why you should be up here instead of in my drawing-room. You know how I dislike these stairs.’ Her eyes switched forbiddingly towards her second son. ‘Ah, Gideon! How very condescending of you to visit me at last. Ten years, I believe?’

He went over and took her by the elbow. ‘Which chair, my dear?’

She sniffed. He was much better-looking than Theo now, she thought. Not so scraggy, and his eyes still had that warmth that had always been his downfall – and everyone else’s. Infinitely kind; infinitely uncommitted. He had shaved off the moustache and beard he had been sporting when he came back from China, and now wore only sidewhiskers. She was pleased to see that his mouth was still firm. It was a nice mouth, neither too thin nor too full. She had always liked men with nice mouths. But that didn’t change the fact that she was annoyed with him. ‘Don’t fuss!’ she exclaimed testily. ‘I’m perfectly capable of finding my way to a chair. It’s only the stairs that trouble me. Now! Where have you been, and why have you not brought Amy and the boy?’

There wasn’t anything wrong with his mother’s tongue, Gideon reflected, reluctantly amused, and nothing wrong with her dress sense, either. Unless he was much mistaken, fashion had caught up with her at last, for 1880 had discovered the Aesthetic mode, and his mother was wearing the latest ‘Pilgrim gown’, a seamless confection in red wool, confined by a cord at the waist, and embellished with a hood that fell, softly draped, over tight-fitting sleeves. She wore no jewellery but the Kinveil ring and, at her throat, Perry Randall’s cravat pin. Gideon knew what that meant now, and his eyes softened a little. For eighty-four, she was a marvel, and although she had painted her lined cheeks, and the green of her eyes was arctically pale, she was still beautiful, in her own brittle, rarefied way. He devoted all his attention to placating her, and after a while even succeeded in making her laugh.

He didn’t rush to bring up with Theo the subject he wanted to have out with him, but listened smilingly as Vilia talked about the estate and Theo about the foundry. Vilia didn’t approve of the armaments business, and neither did Gideon, but Theo said, ‘People who want to fight will always find weapons. They might as well find ours.’ Gideon didn’t argue, because he had long ago resigned himself to the knowledge that there were some things one could do nothing about.

It was four days before he said anything, and then only because Theo gave him the perfect opening. They were standing on the sea wall, looking out over a vista of thick greys and livid greens. The sky was so low that it seemed to be resting on their heads.

‘It absorbs you, doesn’t it?’ Theo said. ‘Soaks you into itself, so that you’re part of it. Drains you; turns your limbs heavy and atrophies your mind. Nothing exists but you and the landscape – fated, doomed, inseparable, now and for ever more.’

Gideon knew what he meant. After a moment, he said, ‘Inseparable? Do you really feel like that about it?’

His brother’s eyes turned towards him, malice rekindling. ‘Of course. It runs in the blood. You feel it too, surely? After all, there have been Camerons at Kinveil for five hundred years.’

A youthful, silvery voice murmured in Gideon’s head, ‘And now no more.’ He repeated it aloud and then, slowly, said, ‘I have to talk to you about Jay.’ He wasn’t angry any more; he had passed that stage. All that possessed him was a tired humiliation; shame for what his brother had done, and shame for his own indifference. ‘Can you tell me how he came to be in that revolting place? How he came to develop such tastes? Because I can’t believe you didn’t have a hand in it, and I hope you won’t try to persuade me otherwise.’

Theo had turned away while Gideon was speaking, so that only his profile was visible, bony but sagging about the jaw, his lower lip pink and protuberant under the white moustache. ‘No, dear boy. Why should I? Our young friend is no concern of yours.’

‘Of course he is. I’m a human being, and he’s related, however distantly. I want to know if he learned his tricks from you.’