The Rich Are with You Always (60 page)

  "The people organizing it," John told Nora, "are bankers like Rothschild's, Baring, who bought the relief corn in America in forty-five, Abel Smith, and there's Pim from the Society of Friends. They've asked me for advice on feeding large numbers in out-of-doors circumstances—which is one up to us and one in the eye for the army commissariat."

  "How much have you promised in money?" Her tone was carefully neutral.

  He smiled at her, forcing her to smile too. "That is a problem. We've a little over five thousand waiting to go to the right sort of activity in Ireland. But Rothschild's only given a thousand and the queen's only given two thousand."

  "Only!" Nora said.

  "Well, I agree, yes, it is generous. But it means we must give eight or nine hundred. To give more would make us look—pushing at it. So what I think, if you agree, is for me to go straight to the Friends and propose to them that I should buy up the first convenient bankrupt estate and lend it to them, free, to remodel. And pay for whatever they do. So we'll look for the worst and try to make it the best."

  "It sounds a good idea," she said. "But fancy going out and looking for an estate in the worst possible condition!" She yawned, unconvincingly. It was the nearest she could go toward telling him he had carte blanche with the Irish profits.

  "You see, we have the money—some money—but no time; they have the time but no money."

  "It fits well," she said, pretending to fall into a doze.

  "Trevelyan says we'll need a few more horrifying accounts of the distress before the general English hostility to the Irish is overcome and the subscriptions begin to flow in."

  "Well," Nora said, almost asleep, "they do make such threats against us." It was a speech of abdication. How little it all seemed to matter now.

All next month the news from Ireland dominated the papers. Tales of the mass deaths of whole villages written with incoherent anger by customs men and returning travellers turned Trevelyan's gallows humour into an accurate prediction: Money was flowing into the British Association's coffers.

  The government too was looking for money. The new liberal ministry, appalled at the waste and muddle of earlier relief works, had brought in a new scheme making local ratepayers responsible for funding all relief. The Treasury would advance the money, free of interest, against the promise of the ratepayers to repay over a fixed term of years. "Ireland's property must support Ireland's poverty," was the watchword.

  But once again a remote government and an even remoter Treasury had not the slightest grasp of Irish reality. No ratepayer who valued his life and the lives of his family dared to oppose any scheme that offered employment, no matter how costly or fanciful. Without second thought, they put their names to schemes that would bankrupt themselves twenty times over—knowing full well that in the end the Treasury, unable to take the entire country in pawn, would simply have to write off the debt.

  And that was why the Treasury was coming into the money market for a loan of eight million pounds, just to cover Irish relief work.

  Nora knew none of this; and John, wishing above all to let the wounds of their own private Irish question heal, naturally told her nothing of it. So she sat in the boudoir at Maran Hill reading the newspapers, seeing the gold reserves fall almost by the hour—in one week nearly a million pounds' worth of bullion went to America alone—and wondering if there was one sane man left at the Bank of England. The country was bleeding gold from every seaport.

  
Now it would begin,
she thought.
Not just a few rotten apples falling out of the trees,
but whole boughs would break. Why can I not get better quicker?
she fumed.
Now when
I am needed most of all!

  If anger and impatience could heal, she would have been well by the end of January. But though her general strength and vigour returned slowly, she constantly anticipated that regeneration by pushing herself beyond their present limit. She would ask to see accounts and would herself make mistakes in checking them; her angry letters of reprimand had to be followed by humble apologies to the clerks or seniors concerned. After three such lapses, she came to mistrust herself.

  "I've invented a new mathematics," she said to John. "I call it 'elastic adding.' I add up everything three times and take the average of the three different answers." And then, still laughing at her joke, she burst into tears.

  "I don't know what's wrong with me," she said when he had soothed her back from her hysteria.

  "If only you could forget the business," he said, making a gouging movement, dipping an imaginary spoon into her skull. "How can we remove it for a month or two—all memory of it?"

  She sighed.

  "Perhaps," he said, looking guardedly at her, "this isn't the thing to tell you, but we are managing quite well without you. Nothing like so well as with you, of course. But that's to say we're only twice as good as all our competitors instead of four times as good."

  She wished she could respond to this kindliness of his, but her anger at her own feebleness, and at being kept away from life, overwhelmed that impulse to tenderness. She knew he was keeping things back from her and she resented it—even though she understood his intention. He became the only focus for her anger. And all her knowledge and understanding could not stop her from venting it.

  He too was ashamed to find that something within him resented her illness. He had come to depend on her far more than he realized. In a loose way, he had imagined that she represented part of that "delegation of authority and decision" which was so important to the firm's continued expansion. One point of such delegation was that if any delegatee fell ill or was absent, others, including himself, could cover. He had swiftly found that no one could cover for Nora. They could do the mechanical things—the transfer and management of funds and accounts—all the things he had thought formed her real contribution to the firm. But what they could not supply was that uncanny ability to think about the firm as a whole, not as it might be set out in a prospectus, but as a thriving, bustling entity.

  Something in her mind was like a little working model of their business and the world—far more intricate and rare than any clockwork or machinery. It was, as Chambers said, priceless. As each week passed he missed that faculty more sorely—and disliked himself for the resentment it bred.

  By March she was well enough to go for a few gentle rides around the park with Sarah on their underexercised horses. On one of these trots, Fontana put a foot in a "money hole," as Hertfordshire people called the sudden and unpredictable pits that open in deep gravel, and threw her. She was conscious again by the time they carried her indoors, but she was badly concussed and shaken. Dr. Hales said she ought to go abroad.

  They thought at once of Rodie and Normandy, and within a week it was arranged for her to go on the first of April and to stay until she was fit.

  On the first of April, the Bank put up its minimum rate to five per cent.

For most of that spring she sat in the gardens at La Gracieuse or, on the finest days, down on the sands at Trouville. Once or twice, for the extra encouragement it brought, she and Rodie went and sat in royal isolation on the Deauville side. "One day, Rodie," she said…and she went on to describe the fashionable resort she and Ferrand had planned. There was no harm in it now they had bought all but a couple of acres of the land.

  And Rodie, thinking it a charming fantasy but no more, was delighted to see her darling Stevie's strength returning so well. "It is the oaks," she said. "The fragrance of the oaks of Normandie." She had begun her soup kitchen and clothing depot for the poorer workers. Everyone's doing good works suddenly, Nora thought.

  John assumed a quite disproportionate interest in the Dieppe line, though his deputy there was one of his best. Usually, too, there were small things that needed Nora's decision or advice and he would take a fly up from Rouen to Trouville to see her—though never, she noticed, finding time to stay the night. At the end of May, she threatened to seduce one of Rodie's young gardeners if John didn't stop with her; they resumed relations in a night of loving that left John in bed "with a spring chill" all next day. She felt that to be a particular triumph. Sarah had never left him so drained, she thought. It was also the first time she had ever felt sure, right from the night itself, that she had conceived. Next day she worked forward through the calendar; it might, she realized, be born on leap year's day next year.

  That re-establishment of their marriage marked, in her mind, the last stage of her recovery. She wanted to return to England at once and catch up on all that had been left to look after itself: her children, the stable, her own property, the firm. She needed to be back there in London, putting out her roots into that rich soil, soaking in the information and conjecture that had become her life blood. Here she was too dependent on the papers, and the papers were full of gloom. To the journalists, the most ominous sign of all was now apparent: The weekly totals of notes and coins issued by the Bank of England's lending department had steadily fallen, week by week, from about forty-two million a week in January to less than thirty-two million by mid-May—a period in which it would normally have risen by an equal amount. Not one week had shown an advance on its predecessor.

  But to her mind, there was an even more ominous sign, though no one seemed to remark upon it. All kinds of commodities were beginning to show quite unprecedented leaps. Wheat had almost doubled. Iron was rising even though all ironfounding, except for railways, was in decline. Indigo, tea, coffee, sugar, feathers, rice, rum—all were being to some extent run up. She worried for some time at this new evidence of instability but could find no explanation. Perhaps, she thought, there were firms whose basic unsoundness had been concealed by years of cheap money; now that they could no longer borrow to cover their insolvency, perhaps they were, as a last desperate throw of the dice, trying to speculate in commodities to recover their position.

  In April there were five bankruptcies she considered abnormal—that is, of firms generally thought to be sound. In May, there were six. In June, ten. It was time to go home. The whirlpool was forming.

The first shock, after her return, was to find that the precautions they had adopted against their own crisis in '45 were now being applied in the most slovenly way. The firm was now almost half as big again as it had been then, but at the present rate, they would be less than half as well prepared to face a general panic.

  The preparation of accounts had also got slack, being brought up to date weekly instead of daily. It horrified her. Even the daily accounts were still a week or ten days behind the true state of affairs, because of delays at the workings and in the mails. To add to that delay seemed madness. John did not understand her concern. He preferred the weekly pulling-together of everything, rather than the confusing daily ups and downs.

  She began to feel that her return was resented; they'd all been a lot more comfortable in the easier times when she was absent. But she steeled herself to all protest, took a room at the Adelaide for a fortnight, and restored what she considered to be proper discipline and procedure to the London office—supported by a string of blistering memoranda sent out to the clerks on the workings.

  John had a lot of ruffled feathers to soothe on his visits to their various lines and other contracts, and he came back to tell Nora that she would have to be a bit more diplomatic. She said the time for diplomacy had passed. With the storm now brewing, only the tightest discipline would get them through.