London (155 page)

Even for Holland Park, however, Colonel Meredith’s house was striking. It stood in Melbury Road and, set in a garden with clipped trees, it looked not so much like a house as a miniature castle. In one corner was a circular tower with a turret. The windows were large, with leaded panes, and the entrance porch was massively heavy. There was something rather magical about it. But what really astonished the visitors was that, instead of the usual butler, the door was opened by a tall and magnificently turbaned Sikh who silently ushered them into the colonel’s library.

On the walls were conventional pictures of his ancestors; in front of the fire, a leather-padded fender on which one could sit, and two wing chairs. But there English tradition ended. Over the fire hung a pair of ivory tusks; on the tables were ivory caskets, Chinese lacquer boxes, a wooden Buddha. By a desk, an elephant’s foot made a waste-paper basket. In one corner was a rack of Indian daggers and a silver ankus, the gift of a friendly maharajah; in another hung some lovely Persian miniatures. Near the fire were a pair of Oriental moccasins with curling toes, which Meredith wore in private. And in the middle of the floor on top of the turkey carpet lay a magnificent tiger skin.

Tea was served at once, a choice of Indian or China, which the colonel insisted on serving himself. He seemed in high good humour and it was not long before, in answer to Mary Anne’s questions, he began to reveal something of his fascinating life.

If Britain’s empire had flourished as a purely commercial affair, the last few decades had seen a subtle shift of emphasis. Recognizing the need to control India, which had seen a mutiny in the 1850s, and to protect the passage of Egypt’s Suez Canal, in which Prime Minister Disraeli had bought a majority share, the merchant island of Britain had been forced to adopt a more imperial, administrative role. They had done it rather well. The Indian Civil Service was of the finest quality. Its highly educated élite had a profound knowledge of the subcontinent. In the army, officers were often proficient in local languages and scholar soldiers like Colonel Meredith were not unknown.

When he remarked that he had never found time to marry, he was partly speaking the truth. He had spent time in India, China and Arabia and his exploits, though he did no more than hint at them, were legendary to his inner circle. The Sikh who served him so faithfully did so because Meredith had saved his life. As for his amorous conquests, he said nothing, but many in India could have told Mary Anne that they too were legendary. Only the wives of his brother officers were sacrosanct. Just. At least a hundred beautiful women, none of whom should, closed their eyes with a secret sigh quite often, and thought of Meredith’s embraces.

For Mary Anne the effect was simple, unexpected, and searing. If she had supposed that the visit might rekindle the sympathetic attraction she had felt all those years ago, by the first cucumber sandwich she was experiencing that same giddying sensation that she had once felt when the balloon rushed her up into the sky. She had to hold on to her china cup firmly to make sure she did not swoon. By the time he served them walnut cake, and sat there quietly watching her, she knew only that she wanted to leave her house, her difficult daughter and her husband and to come to rest, for as long as he would have her, in Meredith’s arms.

To force herself back into the context of her family she remarked: “Violet wants to go to university. What do you think?”

The girl had been rather sulky when they first arrived, but during the course of conversation she had noticed the curious volumes round the walls and asked Meredith about them. Besides the usual English classics, and a sporting section with titles like
Big Game Hunting in Bengal
, they were a fascinating assortment. There were books in Persian, in Arabic, even some strange, thin, concertina-like scrolls of parchment, pressed between wooden boards and tied with string which, Meredith explained, were written in Sanskrit.

“Can you read all those?” Violet had asked. He had admitted that he could. “How many languages do you know?” she had persisted. “Seven, and a few dialects,” he had told her.

Now, in answer to Mary Anne’s question, he looked at Violet and considered for several moments before replying. “I suppose,” he said quietly, “it depends what you want to go to university for.”

“Because I’m bored,” she replied bluntly. “My parents’ world is ludicrous.”

Meredith seemed to take her rudeness in his stride. “Not ludicrous,” he said. “I wouldn’t agree with you there at all. But if you mean that you want wider horizons” – and he glanced round the room and at the bookcases – “university as such won’t do it for you, though I dare say it can help. I never went myself.” He smiled. “It’s really a matter of the spirit. Destiny, I expect.”

This seemed to keep Violet quiet, and Mary Anne was grateful to Meredith for handling it so well. But it seemed that, if she couldn’t succeed in getting the colonel’s support, the girl was still determined to make trouble. Just as they were due to leave, glancing at the moccasins by the fire and noticing a long Indian wooden pipe on a table, she suddenly interrupted:

“Do you wear those moccasins and smoke that pipe every evening, Colonel Meredith?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” he confessed.

“Won’t you show us before we go? I’m sure,” Violet boldly continued, “that my mother would like to see you in your natural state.”

“Really, Violet!” Mary Anne felt herself blushing helplessly.

Meredith, however, seemed to find it rather amusing. “Just wait a moment,” he said, and left the room.

When he returned a couple of minutes later he was wearing a magnificent red dressing-gown of Oriental silk brocade and on his head he wore a red fez. His feet, encased in white silk socks, slipped easily into the moccasins, and he sat down very comfortably in the chair by the fire, expertly filled the pipe, kneading the tobacco into the bowl, lit it, and began to draw.

“Will that do?” he enquired, looking at them both.

But if the sight of Meredith, as her daughter had put it, in his natural state, was disturbing to Mary Anne, it was nothing to the sensation she had when, as they finally left, he took her hand, pressed it discreetly, and said softly:

“I hope we may meet again.”

“It’s a quandary, old girl. There’s no doubt about it.” The Earl of St James shook his head. “The trouble is, you see, the
Cutty Sark
’s never been beaten.”

That was, in fact, only half the trouble. The first and most urgent problem was that two days before, Mr Gorham Dogget had arrived from Boston and declared that, immediately after Christmas, he was taking his wife and daughter away from the damp winter for a three-month cruise on the Nile and the Mediterranean. Whether Nancy and her mother were to return to London afterwards was not decided.

The problem with the
Cutty Sark
was her sturdiness. Her redoubtable captain could put on more canvas than any other master would dare and still the clipper would plough safely on in the roughest seas.

“Barnikel may say he can beat her, and he may be right, but it’s too great a risk,” the earl continued. “We’re out of time.”

Lady Muriel had a box of dried fruit. She was munching thoughtfully.

“There’s nothing for it,” St James concluded. “I’m going round tomorrow to propose.”

There were some people who laughed at Esther Silversleeves behind her back, though this was a little unfair. She certainly meant no harm.

Perhaps she would have been more confident, if only her sisters’ husbands had not been so successful. Jonas and Charlotte Barnikel, though the sea captain had made a small fortune from his many voyages, had remained very comfortably the solid, seafaring tradespeople that they were. The Pennys, on the other hand, being a well-established City family, moved in a far more elevated circle, attended the City livery company dinners and even went to the opera at Covent Garden now and then. As for the Bulls, they had become so rich now that their children were mixing with young ladies and gentlemen on almost equal terms. With Arnold Silversleeves and his wife however, it was rather different. Their house was pleasantly situated, some four miles out from central London on the northern hill of Hampstead, not far from the big open spaces of Hampstead Heath. Many of the houses there were fine, or charming. Theirs – though neither of them realized it – was not. Its tall, awkward gables reminded one of the angular Mr Silversleeves himself. It was spacious however and, thanks to her money, they were never in the slightest want.

Arnold Silversleeves had remained a partner of Grinder and Watson until his recent retirement. His engineering was respected. Yet somehow the projects in which he involved the firm never seemed to be very profitable. Either he chose them for their technical challenge, or his own perfectionism eroded the profit margins. Well before his retirement there was a faint trace of impatience perceptible in the other partners when they addressed him. As for rising in the social scale, it would simply never have occurred to him. The family was respectable and provided for: what more could one want?

He had, however, as all his partners would admit, one of the finest engineering brains in London. And it was undoubtedly for this reason that he had recently been put on retainer by the rich American gentleman whose presence a week before Christmas in her house had caused Esther Silversleeves to go all of a flutter.

If Arnold Silversleeves had dreamed of projects for the betterment of mankind, or at least the Londoners, it gave him some satisfaction that many of them had come to pass. When, in the late fifties, Parliament finally decided on a complete remaking of the London sewers, it did not award the work to his own firm, but to the great engineer Bazalgette. Characteristically, he had at once offered his own drawings of the existing system to the great man, who used them as a check upon his own. “Your plans,” he generously told Silversleeves, “I found to be perfect in every particular.” The resulting Thames Embankment, which now swept along on reclaimed riverside over the new main drains from Westminster to Blackfriars gave the worthy engineer almost as much pleasure as if he had profited from it himself. More directly, he had actually been called in as a consultant on another colossal engineering feat now arising in the Thames. The two huge towers of Tower Bridge were clad in stone and modelled in high Victorian Gothic style to blend with the Tower of London and echo the Houses of Parliament downstream. “But the stone casing is just a disguise,” he told his wife gleefully. “Inside is a great framework and a huge machine all of steel.” It was the great bascules – the massive pair of steel drawbridges that opened to let the tall ships through – for which he had acted as consultant to the engineer Barry; and Brunel, Barry’s partner, had called him in again to check all the complex mathematics of the system that would support and pivot the two mighty hundred-foot spans. His greatest enthusiasm, however, was reserved for the new project for which the American had retained him.

“This will be the way of the future,” he told Esther excitedly. The dream he had always had of a London underground had partly been realized. A system of deep cuts and of tunnels with air vents had already been constructed for steam trains; but it was hot and sooty and without clearing or undermining much housing, it could not be expanded into the more elaborate system London now needed. “But if we went deep down, maybe forty feet, we could safely build a whole network,” he would explain. “The clay down there is easy to cut through. Then we build a tube. The train would run in a tube.” But it would be utterly impossible to run a steam train through a deep tube. “So,” he concluded happily, “the trains will be electric.”

Electricity. To forward-looking Arnold Silversleeves, it was the herald of the modern age. It had been 1860 when Swan invented his electric lamp, but not until ten years ago had the first system of electric lights been installed in London, on the splendid new Thames Embankment. But since then, progress had been rapid. In 1884, the first electrically powered trams began to replace a horse-drawn version in the streets. Five years ago Parsons perfected a steam-turbine to drive a dynamo, opening the way for public power stations. And this very year, work was already under way on a deep tube which would contain an electric train. Silversleeves, who had already built his own dynamo and installed – to Esther’s terror – several electric lights in their house, was all enthusiasm. “The electric train will be clean,” he assured her. “And I calculate that, correctly engineered, it could be amazingly cheap to run. The working man will be able to afford the fares.”

The only problem was finding men bold enough to build and operate them. Governments did not invest in such things, nor had they the money to do so. The tube, like almost everything in Victorian Britain, would be a commercial enterprise, and British investors, so far, were cautious about the new technology. But the Americans were not. And when Mr Gorham Dogget had last visited London he had approached Arnold Silversleeves.

“Electric rails have worked in Chicago,” he told him. “London is the most populous city in the world, with a crying need for more transport. I want you to do me a feasibility study. I’ll find the investors. This thing can be done!” And he had paid him, cash down, the first part of a fee that had made the engineer blink.

Mr Gorham Dogget’s presence in her house had sent Esther Silversleeves into a tizzy. She had asked the Pennys to give her support. The Barnikels, though they were fond of her, were apt to get impatient with her social efforts; the Bulls, though always friendly, had moved apart. But the respectable Pennys could be relied on. They had also brought their son, a bright young man in the City, very smartly dressed she was pleased to see. The gentleman from Boston seemed to find them acceptable company. The food – Arnold only liked plain food, but she had secretly had the cook prepare some puddings that were really rather daring – seemed to be finding favour. The maid’s uniform had been starched twice. The only thing she had been unable to make up her mind about, wondering how and whether to handle it, did not finally come out until the duck was served.