Long Summer Day (3 page)

‘I don’t joke about money!’ the Austrian said, sharply. ‘As to the estate, I based Joshua’s share of the business on half our last offer to sell, a little over fifteen thousand; the rest is in hard cash, or readily saleable assets, and you are the sole beneficiary. That was something I insisted on when I witnessed the will.’

He began to forage in his case but Craddock checked him, saying, ‘Never mind the documents, Mr Zorndorff! I should much prefer you to explain, and as simply as you can! Am I to understand that the whole of this sum, including a half-share in the business, comes to me and that I can do as I wish with it?’

‘By no means,’ Zorndorff said. ‘Your father remained an artisan all his life but he was no fool. We talked it over and agreed that you should inherit a third share of the business and the whole of the capital sum, but you won’t receive more than five thousand until you are twenty-eight. That last provision was no suggestion of mine!’

Because Paul still appeared bemused the Jew became a little impatient. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘even you must realise that the coarse metal trade prospers in wartime. We were doing well enough on sub-contracts before the war, but three years ago, when army contracts were put about, we forged ahead in relation to the blunders the generals made over there! I was optimistic from the start but I must confess that even I hardly expected a three-year war. The point is, we seem to be set fair indefinitely for the Kaiser has obliged the trade by entering the naval race. If you applied yourself I daresay you could soon convert your thirty thousand working capital into two hundred thousand.’

Paul, who had heard nothing but the last few words, said slowly, ‘What the devil do I know of the scrap metal business? Or any business?’

‘I would be prepared to teach you,’ the Jew said, earnestly now, and without a trace of patronage. ‘Joshua was the only friend I ever had and I have every intention of paying my debt to him, whether you like it or not, my friend!’

‘Then you must find some other way of paying it,’ Paul said, ‘I may be half a cripple, but I’m damned if I intend to devote my life to scrap metal, Mr Zorndorff!’

The Jew did not seem surprised or disappointed. He looked thoughtful for a moment, drawing his brows together and contemplating his beautifully manicured hands. ‘With that capital you could do almost anything you liked,’ he said, at length. ‘Have you any preferences? Or is it something you would prefer to think about during the time you remain here?’

Paul said, briefly, ‘First I intend to learn to walk, Mr Zorndorff; properly, without sticks; like any other person, you understand? I think they have exaggerated my disability. In the meantime, would you care to buy me out at any figure you considered fair?’

The naïveté of the offer stirred Zorndorff. His head shot up and his eyes sparkled as he said, crisply, ‘Be satisfied with your loose change and oblige me by allowing me to fulfil my obligations any way I choose!’ and he stood up so suddenly that Paul made sure he was deeply offended but he was not, for his smile betrayed him and somehow, because of it, Paul was convinced of the man’s fundamental honesty, and of the genuineness of the obligation he felt for the son of the man who had once stood between him and ruin. He said, half apologetically, ‘I know you have my interests at heart, Mr Zorndorff, you have proved that already. I daresay I should have croaked in the general ward without first-class attention but the truth is I never expected this kind of opportunity and it alters everything. I had some idea of farming, in a small way, in one of the Dominions perhaps, but it’s something I need to think about very deeply. I don’t imagine I shall be out of here for a month or more. May I come to you then? Or write, if I form any decision?’

‘By all means, by all means,’ Zorndorff said, expansive and avuncular again, and without any gesture of farewell except a vague pat on the shoulder he picked up his case, strolled along the terrace and went down the steps to the carriage park behind the forecourt.

Paul watched him go, thinking ‘Whatever he does is part of a charade. What could he and a dull dog like my father have had in common? Were they the complement of one another? And was my mother somehow involved in the improbable association?’ His involvement with the dapper, enigmatic Austrian was to endure for another forty years but this was something he never discovered.

III

A
s the weeks passed and the sun continued to beat on the baking façade of the great house, there were many things he discovered about himself and not the least important of them was the durability of the bright crystals of thought left in the recesses of his brain by the long, exhausting fever duel between the static army on the ceiling and the serenity of the view of the park and downland, seen through the windows of the two wards he had occupied. Somehow the latter came to represent his future, and all that was pleasant and rewarding in life, and he saw it not simply as a pleasing vista of fields, woods and browsing cattle, but as a vision of the England he had remembered and yearned for out there on the scorching veldt. And this, in itself, was strange, for he was city born and bred, and although he had never shared the Cockney’s pride in the capital neither had he been conscious, as a boy, of a closer affinity with the woods and hedgerows of the farmland on the Kent-Surrey border, where he had spent his childhood and boyhood. Yet the pull existed now, and it was a very strong pull, as though he owed his life to nectar sucked from the flowers growing wild out there across the dreaming fields near the rim of the woods, and with this half-certainty came another—that it was in a setting like this that he must let the years rescued for him unwind, yielding some kind of fulfilment or purpose. He had never had thoughts like this before and it occurred to him that pain, and a prolonged flirtation with death, had matured him in a way that had been leap-frogged by the other convalescents, many of whom had had more shattering experiences in the field. Some the war had left cynical and a few, among them the permanently maimed, bitter, but all the regular officers seemed to have emerged from the war with their prejudices intact and talked of little else but sport, women, and the military lessons learned from the campaigns. They continued, Paul thought, to regard England as a jumping-off ground for an eternal summer holiday in the sun among lesser breeds, looking to them and the Empire for protection and economic stability, but had little or no sense of kinship with the sun-drenched fields beyond the terrace, or the chawbacons seen toiling there, taking advantage of the Coronation weather to cut and stack the long grass. He began to keep very much to himself, reading and browsing through the long afternoons on the terrace, and it was here, about a fortnight after Zorndorff’s visit, that he came across the two-page advertisement in the
Illustrated London News
that gave him at least a glimmering of an idea concerning his future.

It was a detailed announcement of the forthcoming sale by auction of a thirteen hundred acre Westcountry estate, owned by a family called Lovell, that seemed to have been very hard-hit by Boer marksmanship, for the heir, Hubert Lovell, had been killed at Modder River after winning a Victoria Cross, and his brother, Ralph, in a skirmish outside Pretoria. Their father, Sir George Lovell, had been a considerable landowner, with other and larger estates in Cumberland and Scotland, and the Devon manor-house, the home farm and five tenant farms, together with areas of surrounding woodland and common, were destined to come under the hammer at the end of the month unless disposed of, either as whole or in parcels, by private treaties.

It was an impressive and, he would judge, an expensive advertisement, for there were pictures of the house and the three dead Lovells, and a potted history of the family. The house looked impressive but neglected, a sprawling, porticoed building, built on the shallow ledge of a long slope crowned by woods, and seemed to Paul to be mainly Tudor, with Carolean or Georgian extensions east and west. It was approached by a sharply curving tree-lined drive and had clusters of spiralling chimneys that he associated with Elizabethan buildings. It looked squat, comfortable, weatherbeaten and commodious but it was not, in the first instance, the house that attracted his attention, so much as descriptions of the outlying farms, each of between four hundred and two hundred acres. The agents handling the sale announced that they would be open to separate sales of these properties, each of which had its own farmhouse and farm-buildings, and their names read like an Arcadian rent-roll—Four Winds, The Hermitage, Deepdene, High Coombe and Low Coombe.

The oval portraits of the three Lovells interested him. The old man, Sir George, was a bearded, heavy-featured man, with bulging eyes and, Paul would judge, a sensual, bullying mouth. He looked more like an evangelist than a country squire. His elder son, Hubert, was handsome in an unremarkable and slightly effeminate way, with a smooth face and rather vacuous expression, whereas Ralph, the younger boy, was an almost comic caricature of a Regency rake, with his sulky mouth, mop of dark, unruly hair, and an expression that suggested wilfulness and a certain amount of dash.

He mulled over the advertisement all the afternoon, wondering how much one of the larger farms would cost, and whether, in fact, a serious bid could be made in advance. Four hundred acres, he felt, was a large enough bite to begin with, and at length, almost on impulse, he tore the two pages from the magazine and enclosed them in a brief, tentative letter to Zorndorff. He would be discharged, they said, in time to accept Zorndorff’s invitation to watch the Coronation procession from a private stand rented by the Austrian, and in his note he suggested that they might discuss the matter on that occasion if, in the meantime, his father’s solicitors could extract some relevant information from the agents of the sale. He was still only half-serious and wondered, as he sealed the letter, if Zorndorff would pour scorn on the notion, and employ arguments to launch him as a more genteel farmer in Malay or Africa, but after the letter had gone he felt curiously elated, as though at last he had done something positive to convert his fever dreams into reality. He watched the post eagerly during the week but all that arrived from Zorndorff was a telegram bearing the cryptic message, ‘Letter received; will discuss later; expecting you midday, Club, 24th instant,’ proving that Zorndorff, for all his apparent neglect, knew rather more regarding his immediate future than he knew himself. The Austrian’s club was an establishment in St James’ and the address was on one of the cards he had left with the sheaf of documents that Paul had read with wandering attention. He thought, laying the telegram aside, ‘Damn the man, why does he have to go out of his way to dominate everybody?’ and then he thought he knew the answer in his case. He had, after all, been baulked by the flat rejection of the offer to launch his old friend’s son on a money-making career in the metal trade and was still, in his insufferable arrogance, determined to have his way in the matter. ‘And I daresay the little devil will in the end!’ Paul thought, glumly, ‘for he seems to have acquired the knack of making everyone bow the knee to him!’ He had, at that stage, a great deal to learn about Franz Zorndorff’s way of doing business.

IV

T
he newsvendor’s cry reached the cab as a continuous high-pitched whine, at the junction of the Strand and Waterloo Bridge Road, and Paul leaned out to wave so that the man dived into the traffic and seemed almost to come at the cab from under the bellies of two enormous horses dragging a brewer’s dray. The headline, in the heaviest black type, confirmed the rumour he had heard in the train; the new King was seriously ill, and the Coronation had been postponed indefinitely.

Craddock read the news unemotionally. The King was well over sixty and at that age any exalted man who took his pleasures as strenuously as Teddy might well be taken ill, might even die and be buried in Westminster Abbey. The cab swung into Trafalgar Square, merging into the solid stream of traffic debouching from the Mall, Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue, and here, over the Admiralty Arch, hung two huge portraits, framed in gilt ovals, of Edward and Alexandra, gazing out over chestfuls of decorations and diamonds at the traffic below. Craddock glanced up at them, remembering the barrack-room jokes he had heard about the King’s philanderings. He was, they said, the most persistent royal woman-chaser since Charles II, but she was a woman whose regality made jokes about them seem in bad taste. He had waited, Paul reflected, forty years to mount the throne and now, at the very last minute, he was lying in bed awaiting a chancy operation. All the stands and scaffolding, the tinsel and bunting, were ready but now there would be no procession, no cheering crowds and no military bands but in their stead an orgy of impersonal grief for a bearded, corpulent man, fighting for his life and a chance to justify himself as man and monarch. Paul studied the faces of the people on the pavements but found there little indication of a national catastrophe, only the stress of scurrying through a whipped-up sea of horse traffic, pounding along to the accompaniment of a low-pitched roar. The sun continued to blaze overhead and the stink of fresh manure, blending with clouds of thick white dust, made Craddock’s nostrils twitch. They shook free of the mêlée about half-way down Pall Mall and turned into St James’ Street, where Zorndorff awaited him at his Club.

‘I suppose you’ve heard the news,’ Paul said, as he paid off the cabby, and the man grinned. ‘Couldn’t ’elp it, could I, Sir? Been screaming their ’eds orf since first light! D’you reckon he’ll make it, Sir?’

‘Why not?’ Craddock heard himself say, ‘he’s Vicky’s son; that ought to help!’

The cabby nodded eagerly and Paul noticed that he was no longer grinning. As he pocketed Craddock’s tip he said, ‘Funny thing, can’t seem to get used to the idea of a king. Kind o’ permanent she was, like the Palace over there, or Nelson back in the square! You keep forgettin’, gov’nor—you know, when they play “God Save the Queen—King”!’ and he saluted, flicked his whip and bowled away towards Piccadilly.