The Rich Are with You Always (45 page)

Read The Rich Are with You Always Online

Authors: Malcolm Macdonald

  They watched it chew its faultless way through several plates. John marvelled at the way it seemed to be thinking for itself.
  They left then, to be able to talk without having to shout over the noise. The tide was ebbing, and they went down on the steeply shelving bed of the Conway. They walked over the firm mud, among the seaweed, cuttlefish bones, and the jetsam of the sea below and of the mountains above. A pack of stray dogs on the far bank tore at the sodden carcase of a dead sheep.
  "Will that machine pay for itself?" John asked.
  Stephenson looked at him cannily. "It might, just," he said. "Why?"
  "I could make you an offer for it when this is over. It's ideal for boiler plate."
  "Ah. When this is over, it will go down the line to Menai. I want this bridge to be in every way a dress rehearsal for that. I'd be obliged, Stevenson, if you'd see to it that as many people as possible, and certainly all your chief people who take part in making this Conway bridge, will be at Menai afterwards. The lessons we learn here will be invaluable."
  "I will indeed, sir," John said.
  "As to that machine paying for itself, let me tell you that one side of one tube alone has thirty-nine thousand rivets to be inserted. Seventy-eight thousand holes. If you count the holes for nuts and bolts too, there's not far short of seven hundred thousand in the entire structure. I think it'll pay for itself all right!"
  They were approaching the open riverside yard where the giant square tubes were being assembled on pontoons that floated with each spring tide. The base of one tube, four hundred and twelve feet long, was already complete, and the side panels of wrought iron were being added. It looked huge—far greater than the empty space between the foundations of the towers suggested. When all the plates were riveted together, the structure would form a square tube fourteen feet wide and about twenty-five feet high overall—big enough for a train to pass through. Several much smaller tubes, also square, would run at the top and bottom to strengthen it. The whole would, in effect, form a gigantic hollow girder supported only at its ends. Two such girders—one for the up line, one for the down—were to be made here at the riverside and floated on the tide, to be fitted into niches in the masonry piers. Then they would be lifted by hydraulic machinery from above, while masons filled the niches with stone beneath each as it was raised.
  "Does it not tie your stomach in knots to look at it?" John asked. "To think of that vast length of tube supported only at its ends and a whole train running through it."
  "Think of Menai then," Stephenson said lightly. "The same tubes, but fortyeight feet longer—and a hundred feet up, not twenty. However, none of the models we built failed, so I don't see why these should."
  They watched several rivets being hammered home. Then Stephenson went forward and tried to force thin metal gauges between the plates. None would penetrate, which seemed to satisfy him. He returned to John, and they strolled back toward the castle and the site of the railway bridge. The old road suspension bridge, built by Thomas Telford twenty-four years earlier, spanned the river just downstream of the rail line; its fake medieval towers looked incongruously new against the castle behind it.
  "The city fathers are still determined to have battlements and arrow slits on the rail bridge," Stephenson said. "I am composing a poem, which begins: 'Sir Walter Scott, Ought to be shot…' and I want to work in something about hits and arrow slits, but I'm not ingenious enough."
  John laughed. "Why not, on the opening day, conceal in the tube of the bridge a little band of knights in armour on horseback and longbow-men and varlets with pikes and that sort of thing. Imagine it! The engine steams slowly in at one end. Everyone's eyes turn to the other to await its reappearance. And—what? what I say!—it seemingly flushes out a long-lost medieval army!"
  Stephenson roared and howled with laughter, slapping his thigh and stamping in the mud. "How I wish I dared! Oh, would it not be a superb revenge! Stevenson, you're a cure for dull aches, you really are."

Day followed day and no letter, no word-of-mouth message, came from John. Nora's anger, so hot in Ireland, turned cold and hard. She was damned if she was going to make the first conciliatory move; it would blunt the point of all she had done in Waterford. But news was meanwhile piling up, news that she would ordinarily have passed immediately to him. Eventually the accumulation of it forced her to break the silence.

  "If your taste for the dull business of railroad contracting has reawakened…" she began. Then she tore up the sheet.
  Just facts, she told herself, and began again: "(i) We have an invitation from Spain to tender for the line Locke has surveyed between Barcelona and Mataro. (ii) Also several from Italy and Austria, less well advanced. (iii) I assume you know of the English tenders that are invited—including Scotch. (iv) I now know Rodet's true manufacturing costs. (v) We must let them know when we shall visit La Gracieuse this summer. Tentatively, I have told them June. (vi) Do you need any further information touching any of the foregoing? (vii) When do you return to Thorpe again? (viii) Maran Hill is now ours for life. Sir George will move back to Co. Durham in May. We shall take up residence in autumn, not later, for I am to have another child close to Christmas, I believe. Dutifully, Nora."
  She read it through, added the word "yours," and sent it to him. She liked the way she had not openly offered reconciliation yet had managed to imply that forgiveness would not be unreasonably withheld.
  It did not please John at all. Yet he realized it was the best he was likely to get from Nora and that, on balance, he would do well to think of it as "Nora's apology," accept it as such, and hope that these aberrations in her behaviour would die away.

Chapter 32

This year, Sam was at La Gracieuse before them. He had, in fact, come over three days earlier and gone straight to Paris. There he spent two days alone before coming back to Normandy, arriving an hour before the Stevensons and Sarah. He stood at Rodie's side while she made the courtyard ring with her eerie yodelling welcome.
  Nora closed her eyes on tears of joy. "That noise!" she said. "All the way over I've been trying to remember it. Dear Rodie!"
  And then there were long minutes of crying and embracing and mangled French-English before they even moved indoors. In the midst of it, Nora's "Hello, Sam love," and his "Nora luv!" and their warm (but English-warm) embrace seemed like an ice chip.
  Only an English eye could have discerned the warmth in the handshake and the "Mrs. Cornelius"—"Mr. Telling" that Sam and Sarah exchanged. Rodie was disappointed. "Oh," she said severely, "you must kiss the hand, Monsieur Sam. But you shall tonight, you see." She turned to Sarah. "You are going in a bowl."
  "Really?" Sarah was bewildered. Sam's smile showed he knew what was meant.
  "Oh, yes! All." She threw wide her arms. "All of we are going in a bowl. But it's for the youngs—the youth." She narrowed her compass to just Sarah and Sam. "The quadrille," she said into the face of Sarah's bewilderment. "Kiss the hand."
  "A ball!" Sarah said.
"Un bal, hein?"

  
"Oui.
What I say.
Très grand!"
  "Not," Nora said to Sarah when Rodie was out of earshot, "a wedge-foot bowl, you see."

The ball was a very grand affair at the château of Monsieur Tallien, the man whose name had led John to tell the Rodets that Nora's maiden name was Telling. Someone said they had two thousand candles lighted that evening, and two servants working full time to replenish them. Everything else was on the same scale—an orchestra of sixty players to dance to, eight large buffets with four tiers on each so laden with food that hardly an inch of rosewood or mahogany showed, a winter garden where gentlemen could smoke their cigars, and a long terrace where perspiring dancers could escape the candle fumes and wander in the warm, starlit twilight. But all the wealth and all the lands of the Talliens could not provide the one element that Nora sought: the fragrance of the oaks—the smell of Normandy in spring; for spring was gone for another year.

  She danced several dances with John, who then excused himself and went off to talk business with Rodet. She stood watching him, wishing fiercely that she could go too. Then something, a movement to her right, caused her to turn that way. It was only a couple coming in from the terrace, and she was about to look away again when she caught sight of a tall, stooping man standing outside and peering lugubriously at her through the glass. He smiled and came in from the terrace. She smiled back and looked away; she was sure they had not been introduced.
  "May I present myself, Mrs. Stevenson, since I am unable to find Madame Rodet to do me the honour?" He was foreign but not French. Dutch or German perhaps. He spoke in English to her.
  "You know Madame Rodet?"
  "A very dear friend. I am Julius Wolff. Of Hamburg."
  The name awakened her interest. "There is a firm of bankers in Hamburg…" she began.
  "Gebrüder Wolff," the man said. "The same."
  Nora gave him her hand at that. "But, then, we are hardly strangers."
  He kissed it and murmured,
"Gnädige Frau."
As he leaned forward, she noticed that his lower eyelids, which were loose and wrinkled, fell free of his eyeballs, like loose pockets. He had the face of a starved pug with little pearly beads of fat just under the skin; a whole cluster of them, like a family of yellow ticks, were stuck between his left upper eyelid and his nose. Yet his smile was inviting and friendly, promising more. She thought him to be about sixty. "The family name is Wolff-Dietrich," he added. "It's the old name for the leader of the werewolf pack." He grinned to show that he was joking; the effect was ghastly.
  "You act as Chambers's agent in Hamburg," she said.
  "And the whole of Holstein."
  "Ah. We have bought and sold a lot of paper through you."
  He chuckled. "Much. And more in the future, I hope."
  She smiled.
  "Against—pesetas, perhaps?"
  "If the arbitrated rate is good, we will buy and sell against cowrie shells from the Spice Islands."
  He laughed. "You give nothing away, madame." He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed water from his eyes; the loose lower eyelids kept filling like cisterns.
  They danced two dances together—or, rather, one and a half, for in the middle of the second, a waltz, he complained of feeling hot and giddy and she took him to sit out at the side. She asked a footman to get him a brandy, for he was trembling. He smiled at her and apologized. "I did not eat," he said. "Stupid."
  The brandy steadied him but now he began to sweat. "Come outside," she said, "where it is cool. I will support you, see."
  But he was firm as a rock—so firm that she began to suspect that the whole episode was a ruse.
  "You like France, Mrs. Stevenson?" he asked.
  "What I know of it, Herr Wolff-Dietrich. Only Normandy. But I have such a good friend here in Madame Rodet."
  "I too share that good fortune. Please—'Wolff' is enough. In fact, I think we meet there tomorrow. At the Rodets'."
  "I look forward to that—and so, I know, will Mr. Stevenson when I tell him."
  Wolff seemed on the point of saying something; he hesitated, looked at her, then looked away, and breathed out.
  They leaned against the heavy stone balustrade of the terrace, gazing out over the gardens, dark and mysterious. The stone harboured the heat of the day's sun. She wondered if Wolff and his brother were good bankers; Stevenson's had used them only as agents for buying and selling foreign exchange. Would it be etiquette to talk of his business? Continentals were sometimes very funny about that.

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