Sons of Fortune (50 page)

Happy Christmas, darlings! Happy Christmas,” Nora was saying it early this year in the hope that it might come true. Already it had one thing in its favour—it was the first Christmas for years that everyone was home. Today she was meeting Young John and Caspar off the train from Cambridge. While the porters sorted out their boxes, the two young men, not eager to exchange one cramped carriage seat so immediately for another, walked up and down the platform with their mother.

“I have no dinners and no salons for fifteen days,” she said. “How blissful! This is going to be a very family Christmas.”

Her two sons squeezed her arms, making a tight, smiling group.

Fresh snow had fallen in the night and the sun had not yet melted its edges, so the whole world was wonderfully sharp-edged to the eye and crisp to the warm and well-shod foot.

“I say,” Boy cried, hitting and rubbing his gloved hands together, “isn’t this splendid! Let’s walk down the hill—the carriage can catch us up.” Clouds of vapour wreathed his mouth. “D’you feel up to it, mater?”

Nora took jocular offence at his solicitude and stalked off through the station arch. The young men trotted after her. “Catch us up!” Caspar shouted to the coachman.

The station had to be built near the top of the northern ridge of the Maran valley, whose sloping sides were too steep for railway works. Trains soared across it on the mammoth Welwyn Viaduct, whose towering, hundred-foot arches had been put there by John Stevenson in the late forties. The way down to the hamlet of Digswell led through snow-shrouded lanes and fields, but there had already been enough traffic to and from the station on the hill to flatten the snow upon the road.

Nora looked around with more than passing curiosity. “While we’re alone,” she said. Then she paused and began a new sentence. “You know your father has been expecting to be raised from baron to viscount for some time now?”

They nodded.

“Well”—she spoke as if promising great treasure—“he’s done even better than that. Of course, it’s to be kept absolutely…”

“An earl!” Boy said excitedly.

“Sssh!” the other two rounded on him.

“What territory?”

Nora laughed. “Of course he wanted to be the Earl of Yorkshire, but they said ‘too big’; and he couldn’t be Earl of York, because there’s already a duke. So he thinks he’ll settle for ‘Wharfedale.’ I think it sounds quite distinguished—’The Right Honourable, the Earl of Wharfedale,
k.g.b., g.c.s.i
.’—don’t you?”

“That means
I’ll
be Lord Stevenson, now!” Boy said.

“And your sisters will be Lady Winifred, Lady Abigail, and so on.”

“It’s not fair!” Caspar pretended to sulk. “The rest of us just stay Honourables. But seriously—why does he need to take a territorial title? It’s so feudal. He could just be Earl Stevenson. Which would be much more honest.”

“Well, it won’t ever concern you, Steamer,” Boy teased. “You want a title, you’ll have to go and earn one of your own.”

Caspar stalked his brother like a stage villain. “You are shu-hure of living so lo-o-ong?”

Boy ran off in heroically proportioned terror and vaulted a gate into a field. Caspar followed and stood on the near side of the gate, glowering at him. Neither was sure whether to carry the tomfoolery any further. Nora rescued them by telling them to grow up—this minute.

“An earldom!” Boy said when he and Caspar had rejoined her. “I thought he might he raised from baron to viscount—but to go all the way up to earl!”

“Yes, he didn’t expect it,” Nora said. “He’s obviously made himself more useful to Whitehall than he thought.”

“Or than
we
thought,” Caspar said.

“Mmm,” Nora said.

Boy said nothing.

“Is the guvnor home now?” Caspar asked.

“No, he’s coming on Christmas Eve, with some guests. It’s all to be a bit of a surprise. Winifred’s home already.”

“And is she well?” Boy asked. They were just passing the point where the bridle path left the lane.

“Isn’t it glorious!” Nora said. “I’m almost tempted to walk along the bridle path.” She spoke as if she meant it, too.

“Oh, let’s!” Boy said excitedly.

Nora considered it. “No,” she said reluctantly. “I have too much to do.”

Boy looked longingly at the path. “Would you think me terribly discourteous, mater, if I walked home?”

“Not at all, dearest. You, too, Caspar, if you wish.” Unseen by Boy she plucked at Caspar’s sleeve. “I shouldn’t mind in the slightest.”

“I’ll keep you company,” Caspar told his mother.

Boy kissed Nora, said it was going to be a marvellous Christmas, and set off up the bridle path slashing at every twig within reach of his cane. The other two watched him, all that hearty, muscular enthusiasm wrapped in a long coat, topped by a tall, shiny stovepipe of a hat—vigour stark in black and white.

“What do the others say of him?” Nora asked. “I try to imagine what others say about each of you and it’s so hard.”

“That you couldn’t hope for a more steadfast friend. That he’d drive himself to his grave if that were the only way to win. That he’d never do anything underhand or mean or dishonest. He’s the golden boy of St. John’s—as you know, I suppose.”

“But?”

Caspar looked sidelong at her. “What d’you mean: ‘But’?”

She pushed him playfully. “It was the most thunderous unspoken ‘but’ I ever heard!”

He shrugged. “Well—you know Boy! He is just so simple and trusting. He takes the whole of Christianity for gospel. One of the dons said Boy would subscribe to a
hundred
and thirty-nine articles if you asked him kindly.”

“D’you believe that?” She was annoyed that Caspar could so neutrally report this light mockery of her eldest son.

“No. I think you’d also have to tell him everybody else had already done it.”

She breathed out angrily, though her anger was not so much at Caspar as at the probable truth of what he had said. Boy turned and waved back at them just before he passed out of sight into a dip in the path. They waved back.

“Come on, or you’ll get cold,” Caspar told her. They walked the remaining fifty yards or so to the bottom of the hill. “I remember,” he went on, “when I was, oh, nine, I suppose, someone who had pleaded not guilty had been hanged for murder, and I felt wretchedly miserable because this man had said he hadn’t done it, and yet they’d gone and hanged him.” He laughed at his former innocence. “I don’t say Boy is quite as simple-minded as that—but very nearly. D’you know,”—he turned to Nora as if he feared she did not quite believe him—“he told me only the other day that if everybody in the world would only keep the commandments and love his neighbour, all the world’s problems would be solved!”

“Very well, dear,” Nora said testily. “You’ve made your point.”

Caspar laughed a rounding-off laugh. “The trouble is he’s absolutely right—by definition almost. No one can disprove it.”

The carriage, which had taken a different route with a gentler gradient, was waiting just around the corner. As Caspar helped her to board he said, “I noticed when he asked how Winnie was, you didn’t answer. Is she not well? I thought that since the guvnor let her take the post at Cheltenham…”

Nora held up her gloved hand. “It’s not that. She’ll tell you.”

“Serious?” He climbed in behind her.

“It’s growing. She wants to start her own school. In London.”

Caspar laughed in astonishment. “I’ll say one thing for us—we do nothing by halves!”

Nora did not share his mirth. “It’s most inconvenient,” she said. “I thought we could solve the problem of you three piecemeal. I thought she was settled, despite all the argument about taking no salary. I thought, that’s Winifred out of the way. Because, believe me, the problem of you and Young John will have to be resolved very soon now.” She tapped with her fingers on the carriage window sill. “And I’m not ready. And you’re not ready.” She looked sharply at him. “Or are you? What do you really think of Cambridge?”

“Ghastly!”

She smiled in relief. “I know you can’t put much in your letters.”

“Frightful. It’s school all over again, only worse. At school the masters made some attempt to keep their little feuds among themselves; I mean, there was some sort of social division between boys and masters. At college, since almost all the undergraduates are socially superior to the dons, there’s none, so all that petty backbiting is out in the open. The dons are monks really. I feel stifled after one term there. They have this great reputation for wit, and really, you know, it’s all just rudeness, what you and I would call rudeness, dressed up in ecclesiastical trappings. How Boy can stick the course and go back for an extra half I can’t fathom.” He looked out of the window and laughed dourly. “Well—of course, I can.”

“Your father has invited Caroline Sherringham and her aunt to stay for Christmas,” Nora said. “He wrote to tell Young John about it.”

Caspar caught her tone, which warned there was more in it than met the eye. He thought a while. “Dynasties?” he said at last.

“Well…the Sherringhams have no son. But they do have one of the biggest ironworks in the whole of South Wales.”

“Oh, Lord!” Caspar said, feeling sick within. “If he marries the Sherringham girl before he proves he’s not the man for Stevenson’s that would tear up the whole ticket!”

“Only from your point of view,” Nora said.

He looked sharply at her.

“Well, darling, these things have to be faced. I’m not in a conspiracy with you to get you Stevenson’s at all costs. I will only work to get you Stevenson’s if, at the same time, I am saving your brother from the shock of discovering his unsuitability to the world of business. If anything comes of this dynasty thing, he will have to have the firm; and then I shall have to ignore your ambitions and throw all my energies into saving Young John from himself and seeing that we get good managers in where and when they’re needed.”

Caspar sat tensely, biting his lip, deep in thought.

“It may come to nothing,” Nora said, without much hope.

“I was prepared to accept ‘Stevenson Brothers,’” Caspar told her with a sigh. “I would have welcomed just the iron and steel part of the business—which I think are being grossly neglected.” He clenched his fists in frustration. “But if Boy marries the Sherringham girl, that would be out of the question.”

“Then perhaps
you
must dazzle her instead,” Nora suggested.

Caspar stared at her, unable to see whether or not she was joking. “D’you know,” he said, astonished at himself, “I don’t believe I could. The merger of the two businesses is absolutely right, I’d feel it would be wrong to spoil it.”

Nora laughed. “Has it never struck you how very like your father you are. In some ways you think exactly like him!”

***

Boy walked briskly along the snow-bright path, breathing the sharp morning air, thinking he must be just about the happiest person going. As the eldest son of an earl he’d have the courtesy rank and title of viscount—and, of course, he’d take his father’s barony, Baron Cleveland, also as a courtesy title. “Lord Stevenson,” he’d be called—Lord Stevenson, Baron Cleveland. How marvellous! It was the crowning of a very happy year.

He had stayed up at Cambridge not to study but to try to establish a university Rugby football team. With more and more public schools switching to the Rugby version of the game, university football had changed even in the short while he had been up. Men from different schools used to go away to any spare bit of waste ground and scratch together a couple of sides to play their old-school version of the game. By and large they still did, but there was an increasing number of men from other schools which, like Fiennes, had switched to Rugby and it was becoming possible to pick an all-university team to play Oxford.

At least, it would have been possible if the college authorities had been just halfway decent about letting men go away for their matches. In one game Cambridge, away to Oxford, had turned up with eight men out of the fifteen missing; the “Cambridge” team that won that particular match had actually had a majority of Oxford men playing for it! Still, the whole Rugby venture had been eminently worthwhile. He would like to have stayed to see the year out, but the serious world now called.

And when the serious world contained such attractions as, on the one hand, the management of a large railway contract for Stevenson’s, and, on the other, the courting of a lovely girl like Linny Sherringham—with (as his father’s letter had made clear) the blessing of both sets of parents—its call was not too hard to obey.

He was especially glad about the Stevenson contract, which was to build the major part of the Cockermouth, Keswick, & Penrith Railway—through the Lake District, some of the loveliest landscape in the country. He was due to start in January, so he had to get his wooing of Miss Sherringham over and done with this Christmas.

The thought of it didn’t worry him particularly. He knew her well. In fact, they had both been presented at court on the same day, and that always welded a special sort of bond between people. Not many others, he knew, would call her “lovely.” Her face was rather too long, her lips a little too thin, her eyes slightly too close together. But she was a serious and dutiful girl with a great reputation for piety, of a rather low-church kind; and, to Boy, that counted more than physical attraction. He had always been determined to lead as chaste a marriage as was consonant with the need to have children. Now, with so pious a wife as Linny Sherringham to share his life, he was doubly determined to exercise his baser self only when they wanted children. He coloured at the very thought of it but told himself firmly that it would be necessary.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary for a year or two, though. They would need some time to settle down in the enjoyment of each other’s company and tastes, as well as to build up the sort of joint piety their conjugal life would demand. Anyway, he would tell her these things—in a properly reticent fashion—this vacation. It would rest her mind greatly to know she wasn’t going to be yoked for life with the average sensual sort of brute.