Circles of Time (53 page)

The taxi had waited for him, meter ticking, the driver reading a paper and ignoring swarms of commuters anxious to hop in the back and be taken to their offices. Martin ran a gauntlet of dark-clothed men bearing tightly furled umbrellas and clenched briefcases, turned a deaf ear to pleas to share the ride and climbed into the cab. The driver folded his newspaper and placed it behind the meter.

“Where to, guv'nor?”

“Forty-seven Russell Street.”

He sat back and lit a cigar as the taxi clattered away from the station and along Euston Road. Turning down Gower Street he could see the soot-grimed buildings of London University looming over the tree-shaded streets and squares of Bloomsbury. A fine, no-nonsense school. If Albert was sincere about wanting to become a journalist he could not choose a better place to learn. But it was not Balliol, with all the prestige an Oxford education implied. His not going up to Oxford would disappoint his brother. No doubt of that. Ned Thaxton, fifteen years older than Albert, had set his heart on it. Ned had been bright enough as a boy to have won a scholarship—had he been kept in school long enough to try for one. The poverty of his family had ruled against that. He had left school at fourteen to work in a Norwich shoe factory as an oiler of stitching machines. A self-taught man, studying at night, he had become at eighteen a junior clerk in a solicitor's office. Eventually, with Martin's financial help, he had become a lawyer and was now a partner in a Birmingham firm.

He drew thoughtfully on his cigar. It was impossible to tell if Albert really wanted to be a newspaperman or was just momentarily dazzled by the profession. He knew so little about the boy. He had only seen him two or three times over the years and then only briefly. This was the first time they had spent any time together and had gotten to know each other—in a tentative sort of way. Difficult, he imagined, for Albert to think of him as a brother-in-law and not some sort of distant uncle. Thus the
sir
all the time and not
Martin
. And no doubt he had impressed the lad a bit too much. He had told him about his time as a foreign correspondent for A. P. and European bureau chief of the International News Agency . . . and then of his six years in America as a radio commentator. All exciting stuff to a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. And he had taken him to lunch at Whipple's, that haunt of Fleet Street journalists for over a century. They had been joined at the table by Jacob Golden and a man who had just come back from China, covering the Far East for the Daily Post. His stories of Chinese warlords, gunfights in Shanghai between Kuomintang secret police and communist agents had kept Albert open-mouthed. Gathering news might not always be exciting, but it was certainly more so than teaching Latin or Greek.

There was no question that he had influenced Albert, but then his impact on the Thaxton family as a whole had been profound. He had never met any of them until long after Ivy's death in 1917. It had been the summer of 1921 when he had finally managed to get back to England and had driven to the village near Norwich where his wife had been born, the eldest of John and Rose Thaxton's six children. It had been a painfully formal meeting. Almost incomprehensible to the elder Thaxtons that “their Ivy” had married a rich American. All that they had known of it had been contained in a letter from Ivy dated December 1916, informing them that she had married a war correspondent from Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. Not a church wedding, either. In front of the mayor of a French town called St. Germainen-Laye. That in itself had seemed peculiar to them and they had worried over the legality of it. The whole world gone topsy-turvy and no mistake. Their firstborn off at the age of seventeen to be a housemaid and ending up in a foreign country, an army nurse, marrying a Yank. A queer sort of business, John Thaxton had remarked.

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Cover image © by Richard Jenkins

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpt from
A Future Arrived
© 1985 by Phillip Rock.

CIRCLES OF TIME
. Copyright © 1981 by Phillip Rock. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

This book was originally published in 1981 by Seaview Books.

FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK PUBLISHED
2013.

ISBN 978-0-06-222933-5

EPub Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062229342

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