Sacred Hunger (55 page)

The turban was removed now and Templeton’s long, nearly naked head stood revealed.

“Bindman is discretion itself,” he said at last.

“He has been with me these five years.”

“He has been with me no more than five minutes but I find it enough,” Kemp said. “I should esteem it a favour.”

‘Very well.” Templeton assumed an air of fatigue. “Bindman, you can go. I will dress myself this morning.”

“Dress yourself, sir?”’ The valet’s attentive bearing was ruffled by solicitude and surprise.

“Yes, yes, yes. Dress myself.

‘Sblood, man, do you think me a puppet with no independent powers of locomotion? Go, sir. And tell Biggs to send away all those who are waiting.

I will have no time for anyone this morning.”

Kemp waited till the servant had withdrawn before resuming. He was telling Templeton what for the most part the latter knew already. The local assembly in Kingston, elected by popular vote in the colony and controlling the purse-strings, was bringing pressure to bear on the Governor, whose salary they also controlled, to authorize policies hostile to the interests of the absentee landlords whom Kemp represented. They were seeking to confiscate tracts of land and to redistribute them among small farmers on the island. These measures, of course, were opposed by His Majesty’s Government…

“Or they should be, sir,” Kemp said. “If they are not, we are abandoning one of the most sacred duties of government, which is the preservation of property. The great end of men’s entering into society in the first place is the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety.”

“That is most certainly true, sir. And this present administration of my Lord Rockingham, in which I have the honour to serve, has ever been dedicated to ensuring it.”

Kemp’s air of nonchalance fell away and he sat forward abruptly. “Then why is this policy allowed to continue unchecked?”’ he demanded. “The legislation is there. Why is it not enforced? Why, above all, are you not more active on our behalf, in view of the sums, the very considerable sums, that you have received? Why am I thus obliged to come in person here and wait on your pleasure and consume my time away? Do you think I find it agreeable, sir? Do you think I find it congenial?

Do you?”’

“Good God!” Templeton was shocked at the blaze of antagonism that had come to the other’s eyes. “How can I answer you?”’ he said. He had an impulse to get up and put the dressing-table between them. It was almost as if the fellow were gathering for a spring, as he said later that day to a crony at White’s: “I tell you, I feared for my person,” he said, “and there was nothing there but the stick with my wigs on, which that wretch Bindman had left behind.”

It had seemed inexplicable, this spasm of fury, quite out of keeping with their conversation, which had been progressing on accustomed lines. Templeton was astute enough, but we never fully succeed in understanding what we cannot feel and so he did not suspect the sense of outrage that had come to Kemp to find himself using the same language, exchanging similar phrases with a man he so despised, as if they were both of the same kidney, as if he had waded through the years only to make an embrace of minds with this depraved fop. If he had suspected anything of this, Templeton would have found it grotesque, in a man who was so strenuously engaged in protecting his own interest. That he did not suspect it was a mark of virtue in a nature not otherwise richly endowed with this commodity. He was venal and corrupt but he did not dignify his motives to himself-only to others.

“It is not so simple,” he said now, in a tone he strove to make conciliatory. “Let me play the adversary for a while and point out to you the arguments on the other side. The plantations you speak of are owned by landlords who do not set foot on the island once in ten years. Their estates are mismanaged by overseers regrettably subject to the corruption of the climate, in other words liquor and whores, sir, and milked by dishonest attorneys, with consequent loss of duty to the Crown at a time when the demand for sugar is rising. Then there is the disproportion in population, with dangers of a slave revolt. There must be found some way of encouraging more Englishmen to settle in the colony—there were barely twenty-five thousand in the last count, against more than a hundred thousand blacks. The Deficiency Laws have failed to restrain the practice of absenteeism, hence the clamour for redistribution of land in the local assembly. There are those in parliament sympathetic to these demands, especially among the followers of Chatham. Need I name ‘em to you?”’

Kemp looked down for a while in silence. His anger had gone, leaving a certain familiar sense of desolation. “No, you need not,” he said. “I know well enough who they are. For us, you see, the issue is simple, in spite of what you say. We are ready to guarantee an income for the Governor, whomever he be, that will make him independent of the assembly. But the real change must come in the workings by which the decisions of the Council are put into effect. The Council has the power, the statutory power, to disallow local legislation even when backed by the Governor. If there is delay, it must be because some person or persons are obstructing the procedure. This is not a question of legislation, it is a question of influence. That is why you were approached in the first place, so that you could use your voice behind the scenes.”

But how strong was this voice? he wondered, looking at the rouged and sorrowful face before him, with its thick eyebrows and slight, incongruous simper.

And how often, and how earnestly, was it being raised?

It had been his private belief for some time now that Templeton was taking bribes from the opposite party too. Men like this, grown old in the practice of chicanery, were difficult to frighten for long; they could not easily believe that the streams which had nourished them so long could dry up. In the purlieus of Westminster bribes were paid like pensions, long after it had been forgotten whose interest was secured by them…

‘We want results,” he said quietly.

“We are tired of waiting. It is possible that you imagine we would rather pay you for nothing than risk your disfavour by ceasing. If so, you had better disabuse yourself. That may have been the case in the time of my predecessor, but I assure you it is not the case now. I take the view that when a man’s friendship has not helped us we have nothing to fear from his enmity.”

He got up, looking squarely at the man before him. “You, on the other hand, have much to fear from ours,” he said. “Put on wisdom with your wig today, Sir William, and ponder my words well.

I trust I make my meaning clear to you?”’

“Abundantly crystalline, sir, curse me, translucent,” Templeton said, meeting the other’s gaze with tolerable firmness.

On this less than cordial note the two men parted. Kemp found his chairmen waiting in the courtyard with the sedan, as instructed; but he paid them and sent them away, feeling the need for air and movement.

He left the Albert Gate on his left and began to walk towards Hyde Park Corner, crossing the Westbourne by the little wooden footbridge. After a while he became aware of a stinging sensation in his right hand and saw that the palm bore shallow lacerations which were bleeding slightly. He could not at first understand this, then he realized that it must have happened during his interview with Templeton: he had clenched his fist so tightly that he had cut himself with his nails. Only the right one, he thought vaguely —he had been holding his cane with the other.

Increasingly these days he found himself becoming aware of overwrought feeling through some discomfort felt later, rather as one is woken by some pain in the night.

He had the wall of the park now on his left.

Across from him, on the opposite side, there was a row of small houses, then the White Horse Inn with Still George’s Hospital beyond it, fronting on to Knightsbridge. He crossed the road and turned off alongside the hospital garden, which ran into Grosvenor Place. This had no buildings at its lower end, giving directly on to the open heathland known as Five Fields. Kemp stood for a while here looking out over the ponds and brick kilns.

It was a quiet corner. The rumble of carts and coaches on the cobbles of Piccadilly and the cries of hawkers came to him, but distantly. A ragged, crippled man was playing a barrel-organ at the Knightsbridge end of the square, dragging one leg and glancing up at the windows for pennies. The music carried to Kemp, softened and distorted, unrecognizable. He could see the gleam of the ponds and gulls wheeling above them and the figures of fishermen. It was early October and the weather had been wet and windy, though today there was some faint sunshine. He could smell the damp leaf mould from the garden behind him.

He recalled with distaste the conversation just past, the posturing and evasions of Templeton. He had nailed the fellow, though, in the end. What steps could have led him to such a man? He could almost believe he had come upon him by some unrepeatable chance, as one might come upon a creature in a labyrinth. But of course it was not by chance… He experienced a slight feeling of nausea at the openness of the sky, the flashes of the gulls’ wings over the pale water, the spaces beyond. London ended here, his London at least. It lay all to the back of him, the precincts of government, the banks and counting-houses; and with it lay all he had achieved in these twelve years: his partnership in Fletcher and Company, his holdings in his father-in-law’s bank, his house in Still James’s, the power and position that had come with his money. He had laboured and denied himself and stopped at nothing, however unworthy. His promise, his father’s memory, had purged everything of wrong. In restoring his father’s name and credit, he had established and consolidated his own. Kemp was a name to be reckoned with again. And he was still some months away from his thirty-fifth birthday.

It was a triumph… He looked again at the solitary fishermen, dark in the distance. There would be pike in those deep ponds. Beyond them, he knew, there was the toll-gate and beyond that the road through the market gardens of Marylebone and the fields where the cowkeepers had their shacks… Something, some nostalgia or desire for completeness, came to him with the strength of a physical impulse, though without aim or direction. The music of the barrel-organ was nearer now. Kemp moved away across the square but after a moment returned to give the man a florin.

For a moment he met the dark eyes, saw marks of hardship on the face, had a fleeting sense of the streets the man would drag through, grinding out the same tunes.

He went down the steps and cut across the park past the keeper’s lodge and came out on Piccadilly, turning off again when he drew opposite the reservoir. His house was on one corner of Still James’s Square, overlooking the railed gardens.

He found his wife at home as he had expected, still in her bedroom. It was past midday now but she had just risen. He knew her movements well: she would spend two hours at least on her toilette, take her tea and leave the house in late afternoon on a round of visits. They would not meet again that day comperh not until this time tomorrow. He wanted to speak to her about her father, Sir Hugo, with whom he was now on rather bad terms because of recent business disagreements and because it was to her father that Margaret complained of him.

The elderly French maid was in the room, clearing away the remains of breakfast. He noted that as soon as he appeared she began to delay. Fritz, his wife’s poodle, yapped when he entered—there was an old enmity between them, unyielding on both sides. Margaret Kemp chided her dog and greeted her husband in more or less the same tones.

Across the top of her head there lay a large round cushion covered with black crepe, over which the hair was combed back and fastened with curlers. She was a martyour to fashion and the fashion now was for a high, piled-up style. Her face was completely covered with white cream.

“Will you ask her to take away the things and leave us alone for a while?”’ Kemp said, receiving in response a snap of black eyes from the maid— Marie shared the poodle’s feelings precisely. tWhy? You know she does not gossip.”

Kemp sighed. It was the second time that morning.

“I know nothing of the sort,” he said. “Can you not exist for ten minutes without her presence in the room?”’

“I am glad I have not a suspicious nature,” his wife said. ‘Go, Marie, I will ring when I need you.”

Kemp waited until the maid had gone, then began to speak to her about her father’s latest passion, which was for speculating in negroes. The old man had somehow become convinced—and how and by whom were among the things Kemp most wanted to know—that the trade in slaves was shortly to be made illegal by Act of Parliament. He had instructed his agents in Barbados and Virginia to buy up as many blacks as possible in order to get compensation from the government when the bill was passed into law.

“He is going mad,” Kemp said. “That is the only possible conclusion. There is no such a bill in prospect. There are not above three members of parliament who take the abolitionist line. I am told reliably that your father is buying up negroes of no quality whatever, with no value on the market. Old, diseased, crippled, it makes no difference. He has got fixed in his mind this absurd notion of compensation. The blacks will all have to be fed and kept alive somehow, at great expense.

Half of them will die on his hands in spite of everything.”

The mask of cream which covered his wife’s face allowed no expression, except what showed in her eyes. These were brown and glistening and full of ill-humour. They were not looking at him.

“Could you not find an occasion to speak to him and dissuade him from this folly?”’ he said.

“Lord, sir,” she said, “you speak with rare feeling. ‘Twas in those very tones you wooed me. I would not have credited you with such tender solicitude for my father’s welfare.”

Kemp said nothing for a while. Pride made him wish to seem indifferent to the sarcasm, with the same indifference he showed towards the irregularities of her conduct, her absences from home, her suspected infidelities. At heart he felt it to be no more than justice. He saw it as he might have seen a balance sheet. The money she had brought had provided substantial investment funds much earlier than he had hoped, at a time of expanding opportunity in the London property market.