Sons of Fortune (31 page)

They all nodded.

“Because the time when the wisdom or folly of our investment in you will become clear is now very close for you three eldest. Especially for you, Winifred. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“And Young John?”

“Certainly, guvnor.”

“Caspar?”

Caspar beamed him an admiring smile. “I never realized how special it all was, Pater,” he said.

John looked at him a long time, debating whether to insist upon a cut-and-dried answer to his question. He decided to press on instead. Nora wiped her lips to conceal a smile at Caspar’s unflagging ability not to give direct answers when he didn’t want to.

“Our reason, of course,” John continued, “was that you should gain an early understanding of the ways of the world. Since for most of your childhood we were cut out of Society, we thought of it as a way of redressing the disadvantages for you. There is no doubt that people in Society enjoy access to privileged information and powerful mutual assistance that is simply not available to, or extended to, outsiders. I say ‘there is no doubt’—I certainly hope you do not doubt it?” He looked around again. “Winifred?”

“No, Papa. I know it to be true.”

“Young John?”

“Absolutely not, sir.”

“And you, Caspar?”

“I often wondered why it was so important, Pater.”

For once John did not mind the indirect answer. It led precisely to his next point: “I’m glad you see its importance now, my boy. It is of the greatest importance…of cardinal importance to all your separate futures.”

He rubbed his hands, smiled around at them, and drew deep breath. “We have created a very big enterprise in Stevenson’s. Yet it is not big enough to sustain all of you and all your children in the style you now enjoy. Unless you are also in Society in your own right. Each one of you. Individually. And you must know that Society does not hand out its benefits willy-nilly. It demands in return a very high, very correct, very precise adherence to certain standards of behaviour. In the end, no one can kick against it. Not even someone of the blood royal. There is one younger son of a duke—whose name you may hear whispered but never spoken aloud—who was caught last year in cheating at cards. He now lives in Normandy, in daily sight of England—a country he can never again visit. Not even when his parents die may he attend their funerals. He will be turned away even then. Even then. Not all the royal blood in his veins can restore him.

“Now you may think that is most cruel. I may think so. But it matters not one jot what we think. These are facts. Complain against them all you will—they still govern your lives. Like the law of gravity. So just think of the sort of fate that threatens everyone who thinks he—or she”—he looked especially at Winifred—“can flout Society’s conventions. Or even slip past them, hoping to go unnoticed. Now your very liberal, not to say indulgent, upbringing may have led you to think otherwise. And that is no idle speculation on my part. For”—he fished in his pockets—“I have a letter here from a person called”—he consulted the letter—“Miss Beale, who is”—he consulted the letter again—“headmistress, it seems, of some school or other in”—again he looked at the letter—“Cheltenham, who tells me that you, Winifred, have asked for a position there as governess.”

Boy let out a gasp of horrified incredulity. Winifred stared in open dismay; in those last few overacted and overstated sentences of her father’s he had thrown away all the goodwill his earlier words had achieved. They had been a sham to lull her; the iron-mailed fist could now be heard creaking beneath all that soft velvet. Nora wished on John’s behalf that he could take back that disastrous lead-in to the subject of the letter, after so promising a preamble. It belonged to an earlier, more aggressive version of this homily. Caspar saw his own struggle with his father—even though it still lay years off in the nebulous anything-can-happen—take on clearer outlines. He didn’t so much care about Winnie’s battle for her sake; he wanted her triumph to help him in his.

“Oh!” Winifred said coolly. “I can’t believe that Miss Beale would lie to you, Father. But if she chooses to, I can’t see why it should be only half a lie. I can’t imagine her being satisfied at any half-measures. Are you sure she didn’t say I wanted to be a scullery maid?”

“I’m warning you, miss,” John said heatedly, levelling an accusing finger at her. “I’ve been calm and reasonableness itself until now.”

“Hear, hear!” Nora said.

Winifred did not take her eyes off his face; hers was as expressionless as she could make it.

“A schoolteacher in a ladies’ school is nothing but a governess. A public governess,” he said.

“What was a nurse before Miss Nightingale, Father? What was a lady writer before Fanny Burney? If there are ever such shameless things as women bankers or stockbrokers, whom do you think they will hail as patroness?” She looked at her mother and smiled—creating an unfortunate suggestion of complicity between them, which John did not miss.

“Now see here, miss. Here’s an end to this. Now I am telling you—you are to put all idea of teaching from you. Now and forever. I say so, and that is that.”

“So!” Winifred said. “I am to be like those dainty little silver trowels they give the prince to lay foundation stones with. A fake! A toy kept in a glass case and passed around for admiration once in a blue moon.”

“Winifred!” Nora warned.

She moderated her tone, but not the argument. “Well, what was all that education for?” She dug her fingers into her breastbone. “What is this feeling in here, that I want above all else in the world to teach? What’s it
for
?”

John smiled, a superior, knowing smile that infuriated her still more. “That’s this month,” he said. “Next month…next year…it’ll be a husband you’ll want above all else in the world.”

Winifred stared at him, forcing herself to be calm, speaking at last in a voice that was both soft and cold. “Reconcile yourself to this, Father: I shall never marry. However you dispose of my life, it shall never be that way.”

She glanced at Boy, as if she expected his support. He blushed and looked down. These were the things they talked about only in Latin and Greek, things they could never put into plain English, things they had to clothe in the decent obscurity of dead languages: the filthiness of the body, the loathsome notion of shared carnality. They spoke of these things in the tongues of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine.

John missed the exchange between the two. He was looking at his daughter and remembering how close they once had been, how he had shared so much that passed through her extraordinary mind. Now she had become a stranger. The thought, begun in sadness, suddenly made him angry. She had changed! He looked at the two boys. “Let’s get it all out, then. Are you two nurturing secret ambitions to own a circus or become travelling tinkers?”

“Hardly the equivalent!” Winifred complained, but he ignored her, looking at Caspar instead, believing him to be more malleable because he was the younger.

“I don’t know, guvnor,” Caspar said. “I don’t think I’m old enough to know. Not like Winnie. I mean there’s lots of things I want to try at yet.”

“Dammit, sir!” John cried. “I tell you it is settled. You shall go into the army. Clement into law. And Mather into medicine. And”—he looked intently at Winifred—“all the girls shall marry.”

“Of course, guvnor,” Boy weighed in with his full support, “there’s a ton of other things I’d rather do than take over Stevenson’s. But I recognize it’ll be my duty, so”—he sighed manfully—“of course I shall.”

John looked to see if he were joking; but all he saw was the simple goodness and trustworthiness that everyone saw in Boy.

“Once you tell me all the rules and things for running it, of course,” Boy added, thinking his earlier assertion had been too self-confident.

John’s hesitation had lost him the chance of any spontaneous reaction. Winifred, knowing her battle to be lost, thought she might as well twist the knife Boy had inadvertently billeted between their father’s shoulderblades.

“Ah, Boy,” she said, as if admiring someone infinitely superior to herself. “How I wish I could be like you. I daresay you’d even put duty before the survival of the firm.”

“Of
course
I would,” Boy said stoutly, and looked for his father’s approval. “Wouldn’t that be right, Father?”

John could take no more of it. He dared not look at Nora, knowing she would be staring at him in cool mockery. “That’s settled, then,” he said, making for the door.

Before he closed it Winifred made sure he overheard her say: “He’d do more for Mary Coen than for us.”

John returned at that. “That’s right, young miss,” he shouted, shivering with anger. “Mary Coen knows her place and makes herself happy in it. You—and you”—he included Caspar—“could learn much from Mary Coen’s example. And I
would
do more for her than I would for you two ingrates!”

“John, dear,” Nora said quietly, “I’m sure it’ll do Mary Coen more harm than good to know the intensity of your feelings for her.”

John looked pure venom at her and slammed the door behind him.

“Lost?” Winifred asked.

Nora stood, to follow John. “Thrown away,” she said angrily.

“I would be right, though, wouldn’t I?” Boy asked the world in general.

How much harm has been done throughout history—certainly in the history of personal relationships—by the telling phrase! Such a phrase is almost always a metaphor of some kind; and a metaphor, once divested of all the nice, self-serving, metaphorical ways of defining it, comes down to no more than a cunning half-truth, served up among sophisticates in the confident knowledge that everyone can separate the half that is true from the half that is not. But for the literal-minded, the ingénue, the
un
sophisticate, a metaphor can turn into their Old Man of the Sea—a hump they cannot shake.

So it was with Boy when he heard Walter’s picturesque but metaphorical division of himself (indeed, of mankind) into man-above-the-waist and man-below-the-waist. So much that had been obscure, half-glimpsed, fugitive, suddenly fell into place to form a logical and internally consistent schema in Boy’s mind.

The whole trick of life, he now saw with a blinding clarity, is to keep man-below as separate as possible from man-above, in thought and in deed. The hand belonged to the arm belonged to Above; if it started meddling in the affairs of Below, it carried a fatal infection directly to the mind, the heart of Above. That was where all those wretched youths in that nameless academy Brockman kept parading through his lectures went astray. That was why dogs and other animals did not go insane by it—no hands! No short cuts from Below to Above.

And that was why women were so different from men in their temperament and approach to these matters. Their Below began at the neck, making the separation so much easier. Why had nobody seen it before?

For a couple of weeks the discovery restored him to the primal happiness that Brockman’s lectures had half killed, and which the York whore had finished off. He even knew how he’d cope with her, now. If she lay the way she did, one foot on the floor, he could stand and fold his arms and concentrate Above on spiritual matters while Below attended to his affairs. But there in Connemara it was not possible to put the whole theory into practice. Below had to rut as fair a channel as possible between belly and mattress, while Above clasped his hands in prayer and sought the elusive beatitudes.

As an application of theory it worked well. As a technique it was laden with disadvantages. It took a long time, so that Above had run out of good things before Below reached any conclusion. It was dangerously noisy. And it left embarrassing marks on the bed and painful blood blisters on Below.

A week after the grown-ups returned to England, Boy found himself (both of himself, in fact) wandering disconsolately in a little wooded dell just off the main road to Clifden, as burdened and shivery as ever. If only it wasn’t so dangerous with the hands!

He leaned against a tree that lay at an obliging oblique. He tried it. It hurt. He lay still, then rubbed his forehead on its cool bark. He opened his eyes and looked down.

For a fleeting instant he saw the green-clad woman lying at his feet. (Nature serves up metaphors, too—in breastworks of cloud, in forked boughways, in folded crannies of earth.) She fled, of course, vanishing in the bosky verdure beneath and all around him.

But it was a matter of moments to resculpt her in the soft, damp earth and leaf mould. He worried at his hands taking part in this activity, and he even tried a few bungling attempts to manage with just his feet; but then he decided that his hands did no more here than they did in making the bed.

There was no point in sculpting arms and head. Common clay could converse with the foul and corrupt Below. But Above could find no adequate companion for his spiritual intercourse there. At the last trembling moment his imagination failed him. His memory did not; but in no circumstances was he going to re-create that horror. He had to find out what she-Below was like before the ceaseless traffic ruined it.

Mary Coen! That was when he thought of Mary Coen. No traffic there! How do you ask? If you wanted to compare the palms of your hands, you’d say: “Mary, can I have a peep at your hand?”

“Mary, can I have a peep up your skirt?” She’d run forever.

“Mary, d’you know about artists?”

She wouldn’t know a thing about artists.

“Mary, would you ever help us win a bet?” Out of character; she’d never believe it.

“Mary, this terrible foot-and-mouth disease has taken a new turn. Would you like me to make certain you’re safe?”

She’d get one of the other girls to look.

“Mary—I’m desperate…please!”

Well, now!

“Mary, for pity’s sake…please?”

“Mary! If you don’t, I think I’ll die. Honestly, I’m desperate. Just look at me. Please—oh, please!”

“Mary, I love you! I’ve always loved you.”

God, it might do the trick! He’d go and try it on her at once.

***

“Indeed I will not!” she said. She did not even stop in her work of trimming the lamp wicks.

“Oh,” Boy said, deflated. Having funked the passion he had opted for the flat request. He stumbled up from the table and went over to the window. A large, hot tear rolled down his cheek. He felt so ashamed.

But, paradoxically, the shame gave him all the boldness his spirit had lacked earlier. He turned and came back to the table, sitting down and drawing his chair as close to her as he could. “Please!” he said. “I’m desperate to know.”

She didn’t look up. “It’s no business of yours,” she said.

From this side, her right side, you couldn’t see any of her hideous burn scars. She was very lovely, with that natural, sharp-lipped, wide-eyed, bright-eyed, green-eyed, freckle-skinned, turned-up-nose, dimple-chinned, flame-haired Irish loveliness. On the other side, though, her head looked like a clot of chewed-up newspaper plastered thinly on a skull that seemed to be on the verge of breaking back through in a dozen places.

“Please!” He choked on the word and gently touched her arm.

She looked at him then, ready to get angry. But when she saw the tear on his cheek, her eyes softened.

His misery, and the hope he still nurtured in the depths of hopelessness, strengthened him to look at her scarred half without flinching.

She tenderly stretched forth a finger and touched his wet cheek, as if she had to feel the reality of it before finding belief. She looked at the tear on her finger. “Does it mean so much?” she asked.

He gulped miserably and nodded, unable to take his eyes off her.

“Why?” she asked, amazed.

“I don’t know,” he lied. “It just does.”

She took the hand that touched her arm and held it. She looked around her in a quandary, shrugging her shoulders. “If I do,” she said at last, “you won’t go giving out about it? No one else will know?”

Boy looked shocked at the very idea. “Of course not,” he said.

“Why me?” she asked then. “Or will any girl please?”

He looked at her in an honest scrutiny that imperceptibly turned to adoration—an adoration that had already (or was it long ago?) filled his body but that only now spilled over into his consciousness. It was true! She alone would do—but not for his original reason. He loved her! He worshipped even her scarred half-face. Without thinking, he moved his lips nearer hers. She took a deep, blissful breath but did not close her eyes—indeed she watched him like a ferret for any sign of flinching in him.

Their lips moved closer. She turned slightly, so that more of her scars faced him. She was infinitely watchful for any sign of rejection.

But he found himself staring at that veined and polished flesh in mute craving. He loved. He loved it. He loved her all. To touch any part of her was ecstasy. He took her head in his trembling hands and turned it so that only her scarred half showed. Reverently, then, he kissed her eyesocket, her hairless scalp, her sharp and crusty ear, the drum-taut skin, the bone. Pure, ineffable love welled out of him and flowed over her, transmuting all it touched.

They kissed then, lips to lips. She, too, seemed on the point of crying. But she pulled away and began to busy herself once more; having come up through a harder school than Boy could ever conceive, she neither trusted nor tempted luck too far.

“I’ll not say yes,” she said. “But you know where the road does come up from the second bridge?”

“By the little wood?” Boy’s heart gave a lurch; it was the wood where his half-formed earth partner lay waiting.

She nodded. “I’m away to Clifden tomorrow evening to take the venison and things off the car. I’ll pass back that way at about four.” In her part of the world, “evening” began at two in the afternoon.

“Won’t they check on your times?”

“Ah, I’ll say I was after meeting Over-the-wall Joyce. He’d tell ye how to build a clock.”

“I love you, Mary,” he said.

Her hand flew to her mouth and then to cover her eyes.

He left her then because he did not know anything else to say.

***

Next morning he was awakened by the sound of her singing in the courtyard below!

Oh were I at the moss-house where all pleasures do dwell

By the streams of Bunclody or some silent place…

She had a clear, vibrant, girlish soprano that suddenly seemed to Boy the essence of everything desirable and feminine; it made him curl and stretch and tingle for joy. Was he not to spend—what? five minutes? an hour?—with her. Mary Mary Mary Mary…She walks in beauty, like…Thou art lovelier far…And sighed his heart toward the Syrian tents…Clasp’d by the golden light of morn, like the sweetheart of the sun…Five minutes with her would seem an eternity of happiness. An hour! He’d die.

How he survived the eternities of that day until four o’clock, he did not know. In fact, he did not wait so long. At half-past-two he thought,
Suppose she comes back early!
His stomach hollow, his heart bursting, he raced up the hill to the main road and then sat sweating and disconsolate for over an hour. She did not come hobbling up the lane until nearly half-past-four.

“I was after meeting Over-the-wall Joyce,” she said.

“I don’t want to…uh…any more,” Boy blurted out, surprising himself, for he had not intended to say any such thing.

“I wasn’t going to let you, anyway.” She rested her baskets and stood four-square to him, a cheeky smile on that half of her face capable of any expression.

“Mary…” he stammered, shuffling half a pace toward her. He reached out, almost overbalancing himself, and took her hand. Once he had re-established contact, it was easier to move closer. “I’ve thought about you all day,” he said.

Her lips curled in a sneer that was half deprecating, half aimed to rebuke him. She had obviously intended to be truculent and hard-to-get at this encounter. But then she looked into Boy’s eyes. Really into them. And all her truculence evaporated; that mournful, meek sincerity vanquished her. Poor Boy was such an obvious victim of this flood of love that she forgot herself entirely. Suddenly it seemed marvellous to her that she, from whom all turned in embarrassment (when they did not accept her as a neutered bit of furniture), could have kindled such adoration and craving in him. She had always thought of him as impossibly beyond her reach.

The sneer turned into a shy smile.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” Boy told her.

“Nor me.”

Awkwardly they moved together until their heads were touching. This time she put her good half against his cheek. He thought she was the softest, most fragrant, most tender thing he’d ever felt. He wanted to kiss her but was afraid to move, afraid to break contact.

“Boy?” she said in a voice lost at the edge of control.

He put his arms around her. The firm, hot fortress of her body strained against him. “Ah God, I love you,” she moaned. “I’d camp in your ear if that’s all the room you had for me.”

“Oh, Mary!” he said, loving the word. “Mary, Mary, Mary…”

“I’ll do anything, Boy. Just you say.”

They kissed. And again. They kissed long enough for Mary to remember they were still on the highway. She broke from him and picked up her baskets.

“Don’t go!” he pleaded.

“I’ll just hang them on the ditch,” she said. “We’ll stroll in there. We can’t stand courtin’ out on the road.”

Her hand was warm and excitingly sinuous as she limped ahead of him.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-three.”

He was surprised. He knew she was older than he was but not by six whole years. The family often called her “little” Mary Coen, even though she was by no means small; to Boy it had always made her seem much younger. He had not yet caught on to the fact that when rich people said “little” they meant someone who’d take less than the going rate.

“Too old for these capers!” She laughed.

His face fell.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“No, no. Nothing’s wrong,” he assured her. He could not tell her that while he had been thinking about her age, she had unwittingly led them to his earth-wife’s grove. Instead he tried to steer her to the farther side.

But she had her eye on the conveniently leaning tree. “Would you look,” she said. “Wasn’t that made for us!”

She turned and leaned against one side of it, unaware that she was standing between the ankles of Boy’s surrogate. “Now!” She waited to be kissed.

He attempted to kiss her while, with his feet, he tried, sweep by sweep, to obliterate the work of his hands.

The magic was not there. She felt it and wondered what was making him shuffle like that. “God, is it ants?” she asked in alarm, trying to remain in a near-kiss while she looked down.

“No!” he cried, equally alarmed, clamping his mouth on hers and bearing her back until leaves and sky and clouds filled her eyes with their shimmering reflections.

He forgot his stupid bit of earth modelling then and lost himself in the glory of being against her. She closed her eyes and sighed as she settled herself deeper upon the tree; in passing, it seemed, she moved her crippled left foot to a more comfortable position on the other side of the trunk. This brought Boy, suddenly, into the firmest possible contact with her,
there.
And it was a contact he could hardly lose, whether he stood up or lay upon her; all movement was Above, all togetherness Below.