The Negro jazz band in the SS
Berengaria's
main salon was playing “There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” In his mind's eye twenty-year-old Adrian Van Ness could see the dancers gyrating across the polished teak dance floor, the men in bright sports coats, the women in beaded dresses, their bobbed hair bouncing, their skirts revealing legs all the way to the knees and occasionally a silk-stockinged thigh.
Adrian wanted to be out there with the dancers. Instead he was standing on the main deck, holding his wife Amanda's hand while she fretted over the future health of a child they had yet to conceive. For a moment Adrian felt bewildered by the way life had catapulted him from carefree youth to husband and prospective father.
“Darling, I assure you England isn't an unhealthy country.”
“Adrian, I can bear it for your sake. But what if the baby has weak lungs? All that dreadful fog and rainâ”
“If the slightest problem develops, I'll quit my job in an instant and we'll take the first ship to California.”
“I dread the thought of asking you that. I love you, Adrian. I'm terrified I'll make you unhappy.”
The jazz band fell silent. It was past midnight. “Why don't you say good night to your mother?” Amanda said.
Adrian threaded his way through the tables to a corner of the salon, where Clarissa Van Ness was chatting with a sleek, gray-haired Italian nobleman. She wore a single strand of pearls around her swan-like neck, long white gloves, and a low-cut beaded black dress by Paul Poiret, the latest rage among Paris couturiers.
“Where's Amanda?” Clarissa said in her silkiest voice. “I was hoping you'd both join me for a nightcap.”
“She's not feeling very well.”
“Poor dear. I hope she gets her sea legs soon.”
Everyone was being marvelously polite. Adrian's excuse avoided saying Amanda wanted to have as little to do with Clarissa Van Ness as possible, a sentiment that Adrian endorsedâand Clarissa ignored. She had blithely insisted on sailing with them to help Adrian launch his career as a merchant banker in London.
Her presence made Adrian uneasy. He wondered if she thought he carried his father's failure with him, like a virus. Did she plan to supervise his office conduct, his business decisions, to make sure he did not repeat Robert Van Ness's blunder?
Adrian had married Amanda in spite of Clarissa's desperate attempts to dissuade him. In fact, he had used her disapproval to wangle this opportunity to make himself a man of substance as rapidly as possible. He let Clarissa lure him to England last summer to renew their ties with Geoffrey Tillotson and other friends.
Tillotson's son Peter had been shot down and killed on the last day of the war. He seemed especially touched by Adrian's sympathy. Before long he was urging him to consider the possibility of coming to work for his family's merchant banking firm, Tillotson Brothers, Ltd., after his graduation from Harvard.
In the next year, Clarissa had mustered all her finesse to make this invitation as attractive as possible. She talked about the power and prestige of London's merchant bankers. She bombarded Adrian with stories from their glory days, when Byron celebrated them as men whose “every loan ⦠seats a Nation or upsets a throne.”
After a deliciously sadistic show of reluctance, Adrian accepted Tillotson's offerâand announced his plans to marry Amanda within a week of his graduation. A stunned Clarissa could only accept it with muted murmurs of regret. The wedding took place in Boston. Amanda's mother's mental condition had worsened, making Casa Felicidad, the family's Orange County home, unsuitable.
The newlyweds honeymooned for a week in Bar Harbor. It did not take Adrian long to realize Amanda had changed. Her father's death, her mother's nervous collapse, had damaged her ebullient trust in the future, which had been one of the most appealing aspects of her innocence. She felt guilty about leaving
her mother to the not very tender care of her half-brother. She had no enthusiasm for further clashes with Clarissa.
A northeast storm engulfed the Maine coast with freezing rain and wind for their entire honeymoon. Although a shivering Amanda offered herself wholeheartedly, even frantically, to Adrian, she kept apologizing for her failure to “let go,” to make him truly happy. She blamed the awful weather and herself for not overruling her penny-pinching brother and insisting on a California wedding. Adrian, for whom self-control was basic, saw no virtue in letting go and could not understand her distress.
Amanda's dislike of Maine in June soon extended to worries about England's fog and rain. Adrian gradually realized she saw this sojourn in London as little more than an extended honeymoon before they moved to California. Adrian soothed her with vague promises and hoped she would like England in spite of her doubts.
Geoffrey Tillotson met the
Berengaria
at Southampton and they drove to London in his yellow Hispano-Suiza Cabriolet. Listening to him talk, Adrian had the heady sense of being at the vital center of the civilized world. Having just won the most stupendous war in history, England was the most powerful nation on the globe. India, South Africa, Iraq, Palestine, Persia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greeceâtheir condition, their fate, rested on decisions made in Parliament and 10 Downing Streetâand in the banks where the financial resources of the empire were mustered.
There were some parts of the world that were not under English control. Adrian was surprised by a note of uneasiness in Tillotson's voice as he discussed Russia, where the Bolsheviks were on their way to winning a civil war and taking charge of the country. He was almost as disturbed by the emergence of an Italian socialist, Benito Mussolini, as a power in Italy.
“Communismâsocialismâthey're both demagogic rotâ,” Tillotson growled.
“I'm not sure that's true,” Amanda said as the chauffeur eased the Hispano-Suiza to a stop in front of the Ritz Hotel. “In California we've seen the evil results of unrestrained capitalism. My father was one of the leaders in the fight against the railroad barons.”
Clarissa's eyes asked Adrian what he thought of his California bride. In their room, Adrian told Amanda to keep her opinions to herself from now on. They went to bed angry, not the best beginning for an extended honeymoon.
The next day Adrian reported for work at Tillotson Brothers, Ltd. His American eyes were dismayed by the company's offices. The redbrick Queen Anne building was two hundred years old and looked it. A barely legible rusty sign next to the entrance was the only evidence of ownership. Inside there was a rabbit warren of extra floors and rooms and cubicles where aging clerks clipped stock coupons or entered mysterious figures in thick red ledgers. Cage-like elevators creaked and clattered.
In the oak-paneled partners' room, cravatted Tillotsons of earlier generations
stared with aplomb from the walls. A half-dozen partners sat at polished mahogany tables, conferring with clients in low tones or reading the
London Times.
The stationery had the firm's address, 16 Old Jewry Lane, and the telephone number on it but not its name. Unobtrusive was the watchword of British merchant banking.
Geoffrey Tillotson helped the newlyweds find a comfortable flat in Mayfair on a tiny street called Islington Mews and proposed Adrian for the Garrick and the Athenaeum clubs. He arranged invitations to weekend parties at a half-dozen country houses. Usually Tillotson and Clarissa came to the same party and Geoffrey introduced Adrian to prospective clients. It was all so low-keyed, so casual, Adrian had no sense of being under examination.
His fear that Clarissa would breathe down his neck soon vanished. But his hope that Amanda would like England evaporated almost as fast. Deprived of her native sunshine, she got one cold after another. She sat around their flat shivering in two sweaters, gulping cough medicine, inserting nose drops. This did not do much for their sex life. The ardor Amanda had promised him in his Harvard days vanished in tearful laments for California.
At work, Adrian filed routine letters from the African loans department. Occasionally, familiar names from Anson days relieved the tedium. Many of his former schoolmates were in the army or the civil service in Nigeria, East Africa, and other outposts. A letter from Kenya was especially welcomeâit was from his Italian friend Ponty, who was running a vast coffee plantation purchased by his family with some help from Tillotson Brothers. He was still in love with flying. He had a French-made Caudron R11 three-seater that he flew all over East Africa.
Adrian lunched with Tillotson several times a month in the partners' top-floor dining room and was told he was doing splendidly. Tillotson talked offhandedly about the firm's recent investments in Chilean copper mines, South African railroads, Canadian lumbering, explaining why each one seemed a good idea. Invariably it came down to knowing that up the road certain events or changes in government policy would make the investment very profitable.
“A merchant banker has to be a bit of a crystal-ball gazer,” Tillotson said. “Forethought. It's the key to success. Of course it helps to know a bit more than the next fellow.”
To acquire this inside information, Tillotson partners crisscrossed the globe, hobnobbing with politicians and business leaders on every continent, sojourning for a year at a time in Hong Kong, Melbourne, Singapore, New York. The firm no longer invested much of its own money. It acted as a middleman, bringing together potential lenders and borrowers. Lately, the emergence of an aggressive Labour Party preaching socialism in England inclined a great many people to look abroad for safe places to put their money. Tillotson thought a bright young American like Adrian Van Ness might be just the man to encourage the worriers to make their investments through Tillotson Brothers, who had a long tradition of successful investing in the United States.
“We put two hundred million pounds into your country during and after the Civil War,” Tillotson said. “We did especially well on the Union Pacific.”
“The railroad?” Adrian said.
“We built the bloody thing,” Tillotson said. “Sent you the Irishmen to do the digging and the money for the rails and locomotives. Your great-grandfather did wonders with the money.”
“My great-grandfather?”
“You Americans are unbelievable. You only remember what happened yesterday. My grandfather, Geoffrey Tillotson the third, advanced most of the money from here. Your great-grandfather, Congressman Oakes Ames, was the man who organized Credit Mobilier. Surely you've heard of that?”
Adrian could only shake his head. He had majored in European history at Harvard. “Hmm,” Tillotson said. “Maybe I'm talking out of turn. Don't mention it to your mother.”
Obviously trying to change the subject, Tillotson said: “What do you know about the airplane business in America?”
“There isn't any, as far as I know.”
“There's bound to be one. Everybody in Europe's building planes and starting airlines. Even the bloody Germans. We've got four airlines flying the Channel and the French have two. We've put money into all of the British lines. Eventually they'll consolidate and we might well control the whole kit. The plane is the machine of the future, my boy. That's been the root of my interest in it from the day I saw one fly.”
For the moment, Tillotson's remarks about Oakes Ames had more impact than his prophecies about the airplane. The historian in Adrian was chagrinned by his ignorance of his mother's family. On the way home from work, he stopped at the London Library and got out a book on Credit Mobilier. He read it with mounting astonishment until midnight.
Credit Mobilier was a holding company that had built the Union Pacific, a railroad that had a decisive impact on the outcome of the Civil War. Mobilier was also a conduit for massive bribes that Adrian's maternal great-grandfather, Congressman Oakes Ames, paid to dozens of congressmen and senators to get the railroad government subsidies and a clear title to its right of way. When one of the promoters, feeling he had not gotten a fair share of the profits, sent a batch of Ames's letters to the
New York Sun,
a stupendous scandal erupted, which ended in 1869 with the House of Representatives voting 182 to 36 to “absolutely condemn the conduct of Oakes Ames.”
In his astonishment, Adrian read quite a lot of this aloud to Amanda. At midnight, he decided he had to discuss it with his mother and rushed from his flat into a classic London fog. As his cab chugged though shrouded Mayfair, he began anticipating the first frank conversation he had ever had with Clarissa Ames Van Ness. Perhaps it would lead to an explanation of his father's ruin. Had he been persecuted because he was Oakes Ames's grandson-in-law?
Adrian bolted across the Ritz's long marbled lobby and rode to the fifth floor
in the elephantine lift. As he charged down the red-carpeted upper hall, a door opened at the far end and a voice, which he recognized as his mother's, said: “Good night, my dearest.”
A man's voice said: “I look forward to the weekend.”
A few doors away was a room-service pantry. Adrian bounded into it and watched from its dark recess as Geoffrey Tillotson walked to the elevator, pressed the button, and departed.