Fortune Is a Woman Page 5

  In the late spring I was made a junior partner in Abercrombie & Co. It was too early but there was no arguing with Michael and his father. They told me what I already knew—that more underwriters were putting their business through Abercrombie; and also that brokers—and sometimes even claimants—who had had a claim settled by me asked for me by name when another claim came along. I knew it and was glad to have made the grade. But that was what I was paid for. The rest only followed because they were the sort of generous people they were.

  It was on a serious case of fraud that I met Henry Dane—in the March of that year. Dane was a solicitor who specialized in insurance business and had made a big name for himself as an investigator. Just before the war he’d successfully broken up a ring of crooks who had been defrauding the insurance companies for years, and as a result he had a lot of influence with the companies and at Lloyds.

  We met at first as rivals, and that was often the way; but we soon grew to respect each other and became friends. He was a queer chap, a rough diamond at heart, and perhaps that was a link; a man who looked forty-five and was ten years older; a man who went at everything with his teeth set, whether it was a job of work or a game of golf. I met his wife Gwyneth, who was much younger than he was, and pretty. They both lived twice as energetically as most people.

  A fortnight after the partnership was settled I bumped into Roy Marshall who was over in England for a few weeks, and he told me that the opportunity in New Zealand was still open. If things had been different, he might have been an unsettling influence. But now it was too late. I tried to believe that the partnership was the important factor; but in fact it was Sarah.

  Of course that didn’t make sense any way. The infatuation should have sent me away instead of binding me closer. There wasn’t a chance of its leading anywhere but to futility and useless heart-burning. There wasn’t a chance even if Tracey had never existed.

  In July I was invited down to Lowis Manor for the week-end. It was the first and only time.

  I arrived for dinner on Saturday, and we had it fairly late in the long dining-room where the light faded early. Candles were lit to match the glowing evening outside.

  Mrs. Moreton had just come back from a holiday. It appeared that she went to the Isle of Wight to stay with her sister for the months of May and June every year. Towards the end of the meal she said: ‘‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to excuse me. I promised to be down at the Bancrofts’ by half-past nine.”

  ‘‘What is it this time?’’ Tracey asked.

  ‘‘The old lady’s worse. The district nurse can’t stay, and Mr. Bancroft must get some sleep.”

  ‘‘My mother’s still living in the squirearchy age,’’ Tracey said to me. ‘‘ She won’t grow up. She still imagines herself as the lady of the manor with responsibilities towards her flock.”

  Mrs. Moreton flushed. ‘‘So I have. So we all have, one to another. In any case I’ve known Mrs Bancroft for forty-four years. I suppose one may still be allowed to profess friendship.”

  When she’d gone and we’d sat down again Sarah said: ‘‘You shouldn’t have said that to her, Tracey.”

  ‘‘Well, it astonishes me that within twenty-four hours of her return she should plunge back up to her neck in the life of the countryside. She’ll stay that way for the next ten months. I often wonder what the village does without her in May and June.”

  ‘‘It misses her very much. As everyone does. You don’t alter people by altering the rules, do you, Oliver?’’

  ‘‘Oliver doesn’t know,’’ said Tracey. ‘‘Or if he does he’ll keep it to himself, as he keeps all his feelings to himself. I often used to wonder what a strong silent man was like.”

  ‘‘Don’t talk rot,’’ I said.

  Sarah picked a broken carnation out of the low bowl of flowers on the table, sniffed it casually, delicately. ‘‘I remember Tracey’s mother when Tracey was first reported missing. I was on leave here as it happened. When we got the news she called the servants together—there were more of them then. Elliott was the only man in the house, and she made him read the twenty-third psalm. Then she said some prayers herself, and there wasn’t a tremor in her voice.… Whatever you think of that, it shows courage—and pride. Perhaps in a few years, if there’s another war, there’ll be nobody left who would do that. It’s—something that’s being lost.…”

  ‘‘And all I thought when I was struggling in the water,’’ Tracey said, ‘‘was: well, if this is the temperature of the Mediterranean I’m damned if I’m going to bathe here any more. It shows how the stock has deteriorated in one generation.”

  Over the carnation Sarah made a little expressive face at me, and Tracey caught the glance.

  ‘‘It’s all very well for Oliver,’’ he said. ‘‘He’s one of the up-and-coming. We’re the down-and-going. Heroic gestures, like Mother’s, are out of fashion, and we haven’t yet learned the proper motions of the proletariat.” He lit one of his herbal cigarettes and waved it at me. ‘‘I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m a reactionary. Well, that’s just where you’re mistaken. Mother’s a reactionary—I’m a progressive. I want progress but I don’t want uniformity and stagnation. I don’t want bread and skilly for everyone—in a concentration camp.”

  The pungent smell of the herbal cigarette reached me. Sarah got up and went to the sideboard. Her spaniel Trixie, who had been watching her carefully from a corner, rose at once and shook herself and was ready to be off. ‘‘I believe Tracey thinks you need converting, Oliver. Though if you asked him I don’t suppose he’d be sure what he was trying to convert you to.”

  ‘‘I’m not converting anyone,’’ her husband said, running a finger along his moustache. ‘‘I’m stating what’s slowly becoming self-evident to everyone—only everyone won’t admit it yet. Even Oliver won’t admit it.”

  ‘‘I don’t know what you want me to admit,’’ I said. ‘‘Anyway, it’s all relative, isn’t it? What looks like bread and skilly to one man may seem like milk and honey to another.”

  Sarah straightened her brows at me and smiled. ‘‘Well, I’m sorry this is where I leave the argument. Another outdated convention, don’t you think? And I haven’t even a good deed to go to.”

  Elliott must have heard us stirring, because he came in then. After Sarah had left Tracey said:

  ‘‘D’you remember the character in one of Meredith’s novels who allowed his daughter to be pressed into a distasteful marriage because he couldn’t resist his future son-in-law’s port? We’ve only nine bottles of this left, so I restrict myself to two a year. Gently, Elliott, gently.”

  ‘‘Yes, sir.” Elliott expertly poured out two glasses; then he went off to the kitchen with his head bent and a squeak in one shoe.

  ‘‘If it’s so good,’’ I said, ‘‘ I wonder you waste it on me.”

  He looked at me with a sort of mischievous irony. ‘‘When the tumbrils start rolling, your friendship will be useful to me.”

  ‘‘I’ll get my secretary to make a note of that.”

  There was a thrush or a blackbird chattering just outside the window.

  ‘‘Just sip it,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s better that way. Seriously I sometimes think that the methods of the French Revolution might be preferable to the methods used here. Who was it—a woman—said to some Americans a year or so ago: ‘ We don’t cut off their heads in this country, we cut off their incomes.’ It’s a pretty admission, isn’t it? Or do you agree with her? I might if I’d been in your shoes. But don’t you think the French way is the more logical—as always—and perhaps in the end the kinder? I bitterly resent being an anachronism. How many people in England are there like me, still clinging to the very remnants of their belongings—still keeping up a pretence.…” He gestured impatiently.

  The port glowed in my glass a rich plum purple. ‘‘These—er—remnants …”

  ‘‘Oh, I know. We carry the surface sheen. But it can’t last. There are many for whom it hasn’t
lasted—old people living servantless in corners of big houses watching their gardens overgrow and their floors rot. And others who’ve had to get out in the last years of their lives to finish up in rooms or tiny villas with what they were able to save from the wreck. I’m not up against the reasonable redistribution of wealth. I’m up against the unreasonable destruction of property and all that goes with it; because, once the family life has gone out of a house it’s as good as destroyed, dead, like the socket of an eye. And the country’s the poorer for it—nationally and spiritually the poorer. Only a fool deliberately squanders his assets.”

  I lit a cigarette. ‘‘I used to think I knew some of the answers. I don’t any more. I confess I think your hardships easier to bear than some I’ve seen. But perhaps that’s ignorance and prejudice. Anyway, I wouldn’t wish, you to suffer them.”

  I don’t think Tracey was listening. He had slumped a bit further into his chair, his eyes fixed on his glass. The spark of vitality had gone.

  He said: ‘‘In Victorian days they used to write bad melodramas about the death of the bread-winner, because when the father died it could mean the break-up of the family. Well, the same sort of thing is happening to-day, only it’s happening in a different circle of society. When the head of a big house dies it often means the home has to go too.”

  I didn’t answer, and I don’t think he wanted an answer.

  ‘‘Wasn’t it Bacon or somebody who said: ‘ No people overcharged with tribute is fit for empire’? The question is, what are we fit for? All the other things I care about, the wider things, are being dissipated as well. As the houses come under the hammer the pictures will go—and the libraries—and the furniture—it’s true it’s to America, which isn’t so bad; they’re not being destroyed; it’s one of our dollar exports. But it’s bad enough, and the worst of that’s only just beginning because capital takes time to disperse. And who are the artists of to-morrow to sell to? And what are the architects to design? It’s like the break-up in Italy after the Renaissance.”

  There was silence for a bit. Then he poured me another glass of port.

  He said: ‘‘ Thrush, sing clear, for the spring is here; Sing for the summer is near, is near. My father used to sit in this chair, until he died, with his stiff leg stuck out under the table. He was an old devil, really, but I liked him. We agreed on nothing, and he played me a dirty trick in the end.… And yet … I’m not a sentimental man, but I’ve a strong sense of heredity. More than I let my mother see; because I’m not willing to accept the conventional poses she expects. It’s no good putting on a suit of mail armour to go and stand in the fish queue.”

  I slept in one of the four bedrooms which led out on to the gallery overlooking the hall, a big low room with a four-poster bed and two lattice windows looking over the lawns which ran to the trees of a side lane about two hundred yards away. Elliott was already out cutting the lawn when I woke. A bee droned against one of the panes, and just in front of the windows was an overgrown Irish yew with two starlings chattering in it.

  Tracey wasn’t down to breakfast, but Mrs. Moreton was there before me, as pleasant and as dignified as ever in spite of the fact that she hadn’t got to bed till three. I thought: it would have been queer if my own mother had been like that—or did the corrosions of real poverty make all the difference?—the constant striving after minimum decencies, the constant failure. The floorcloth and the sacking and the oilcloth table, the bare communal stairs, the backyard of rubble and ash.…

  Mrs. Moreton said: ‘‘How many to lunch?’’

  ‘‘Eleven,’’ Sarah said. ‘‘Victor of course—and Clive Fisher is bringing some girl friend. But Mrs. Antrim has her sister in to help so we can leave it to them.”

  ‘‘You haven’t met my second son, have you, Mr. Branwell? Tracey—well, Tracey, I think, has the better brain, but all the success has come to Victor. Very—unfair; but it’s the way things happen. Tracey’s illness, of course.… But in any case Victor gives one the impression of being more capable of meeting life on its own terms. I think you’ll like him.”

  Objective about her own children. That, at least, my mother could never have been. For her, existence had meant being in the arena all the time—and for those who were with her. That was the crux. Always, she had blocked the mind of its fair and rational escape. Or was I being unjust?

  ‘‘Do you ride?’’ Sarah was asking me.

  ‘‘I’ve been on a horse twice. Why?’’

  ‘‘I thought you might like to see a bit of the countryside.”

  ‘‘With you and Tracey?’’

  ‘‘Or with me. I don’t think he … We usually get hacks from the village. They’re very docile. The poor things have had all the life knocked out of them.”

  Carefully casual, I said: ‘‘I should like that very much.”

  Chapter Seven

  It was nearly an hour before we really started. I was in a fever to get off in case Tracey should come down unexpectedly and decide to go with us, or lest one of the other guests should arrive.

  Elliott found a pair of Mr. Victor’s breeches for me, and these fitted fairly well if a bit slack round the waist. All the same I felt very odd, and when I saw the horses they both looked as high as churches, with thin stilts of legs. I realized that Sarah’s idea of a hack was quite different from mine.

  The man who’d brought the horses from the stables held Sarah’s brown horse while she got on, and then waited wooden faced for me to do the same. Fortunately just at the right moment Elliott came out of the house and took his attention, and the first the man knew was the grey horse nearly stepping on him as I lunged on to its back. I grabbed the reins and said, ‘‘Sorry,’’ and followed Sarah through the gate.

  We went out of the main gates and turned left, and left again up the narrow lane that ran along the east boundary of the house. After a few yards Sarah held in her horse until I came wobbling abreast of her.

  ‘‘All right?’’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘‘I feel like a country gentleman in the opening scene of a pantomime.”

  ‘‘All we need is the big bad wolf.”

  ‘‘Will Trixie do? Don’t encourage her to bark, will you, or my damned horse will bolt.”

  ‘‘No, he’s a pet really. You’re holding the reins a bit tight. And try to grip more with your knees. When we get through the farm I’ll show you; that’s if you’ll let me.”

  We followed the lane about a quarter of a mile. Once the grounds of the house were left behind, we passed through wheatfields, and then came to the farm she had spoken of, a low timbered house in a hollow beside a pond. She called a greeting to a red-faced man of fifty odd who was carrying, a bucket across the cobbled yard.

  ‘‘That’s the Home Farm,’’ she said. ‘‘ Lowis Farm. The Spooners have rented it from the Moretons for a hundred and fifty years. It’s the last farm that belongs to us. There used to be eight—and part of the village, of course. It was wretched luck—most of it had to be sold at the worst time, just before property shot up in value. Some of it has been re-sold since at four times more than we were paid.”

  Over in the distance you could hear the church bells. It was a peaceful scene. But the next hour wasn’t peaceful for me at all.

  She seemed to enjoy teaching me and apparently didn’t find anything silly in my clutchings and joltings. The horse was the most perverse devil I’ve ever known, and wanted to do everything the way he thought of it and not the way I did. Yet it didn’t matter. It was queer. I felt different from what I’d ever done in my life—a sense of freedom that ten times outweighed any bumps or bruises. It isn’t until something comes straight that you realize it’s been twisted inside you: a tension goes; you know a new kind of experience, a let-up, a feeling of happiness. I shall never forget that morning because it was the first time it came.

  At length we turned for home and after walking together for a bit, she said: ‘‘D’you mind if I go on, just as far as that wood? I think Firefly would
enjoy a gallop. I’ll wait for you there.”

  I said, no, of course I didn’t mind; and watched her go off across the fields, her blouse rippling and her hair streaming, and Trixie scuttling behind. My grey brute of course wanted to follow, but after checking him twice I thought, hooray, why should I be left behind, and gave him his head.

  I don’t think my hair is long enough to stream, otherwise it certainly would have done. Victor Moreton’s breeches, which had been too slack, now seemed to be staining at every seam. I went through all the symptoms of diving and crash-landing twenty times a minute, and the ground thundered away below like someone trying to rip a carpet from under the horse’s hooves. The trees got nearer. Bits of mud and foam flicked up on to my shirt and I thought, thank God I was in a mechanized war.

  I pulled on the reins and the brute’s wicked head came half up, and we made a semi-circle round Sarah and plunged into the wood.

  Sarah found me among the foxgloves. She got off quickly and said: ‘‘Oliver! are you all right?’’

  I was trying to rub a daub of green lichen off the shoulder of my shirt.

  I said: ‘‘That horse had its intention in its eyes from the minute I got on.”

  We stared at each other intently for a moment, then I lay back and laughed with her. I hadn’t found anything so funny for a long time.

  ‘‘Are you hurt?’’ she asked, sobering up.

  I got up and felt myself in various places. ‘‘I’m hurt. But not injured. Let’s go and find him.”

  We found him grazing peacefully enough at the far side of the copse. He cocked a wary eye, but Sarah caught him all right while I held her horse. We tethered them both and sat on the grass for a rest and a smoke. Trixie came and settled down near us, her nose on her paws.