The Rich Are with You Always (68 page)

  
It'll save whatever's left between us,
Nora thought.

  But later she was less sure. John was not exactly cold with her, but he was punctiliously correct—almost a parody of a husband. She began to long for a blistering argument to clear the air. She thought she'd have it when it turned out that Cubitt's had tendered for just over £146 a house at Camden Town—a mere ten shillings below Stevenson's tender. But John took the news in grim silence, saying only that Cubitt would "do her well."

  Even when he was warm with her and allowed something of his former tenderness to show, it was as if he were making a special effort—almost as if he were trying to remember how such feelings and behaviour had once come to him quite spontaneously. There was nothing she could do. The harder she tried to provoke him to anger, the more apparently forgiving and gentle he became. Even worse, there was nothing she could have done differently. It was not as if she had behaved foolishly or wrongly, so that she might now beg his forgiveness. She would do it all again—withhold the Wolff fund and let the houses go to honest tender. It was so unreasonable of him not to understand that. The more she thought about his unreasonableness, the angrier she grew with him—and the less chance did he give her to vent that anger.

  Then one day, she overheard Flynn and John talking idly about this and that in a neighbouring room. She was paying only scant attention to what they were saying, until she heard the name Bochnia mentioned, followed by a shocked silence. It was actually the silence that focussed her hearing on their talk. Then she distinctly heard Flynn whisper "Sorry!" before their casual chatter resumed.

  "Bochnia" rang a bell, but she had to search through several recent railway papers before she came upon it: Annaburg-Bochnia, proposed railway, first 100 miles, tenders invited. Payment likely in stock.

  There it was then. A hundred miles in Saxony, conveniently close to the Dresden–Prague line. John hadn't been able to resist it. But he knew they could not take on more work for credit. What could he be thinking of?

  There was only one thing, she realized with a sinking heart: her property. How foolish she had been to value it for him! A quarter of a million pounds. Already she knew they would have to mortgage some of it—perhaps most of it—over the coming months, just to meet their present commitments. But if he really was going to build this Annaburg-Bochnia line, they would have no alternative but to sell it. Sell her property! She began to tremble with fury, until she realized that all this was mere supposition. In fairness, she'd have to find out if there was any truth behind it.

  She tackled him directly they were in the carriage and on their way home.

  "Aye," he said evenly. "We put in a bid for eighty miles. It's not accepted yet, of course."

  "We?" she asked.

  "Flynn and my good self. I don't know." He sighed. "Sometimes I think you and I ought to get out of this business. Leave it to men of vision like Flynn. He's the only man left who can still think grand—only one I know, anyway."

  "Am I to know the details?" she had to ask.

  "If you wish." He yawned. "As a matter of fact, we put in two bids. Eight hundred thousand if they pay in stock; a hundred thousand less for cash—in round figures. And the actual cost—which you were no doubt going to ask next—will be just over five hundred thousand, not a word to a soul."

  She kept calm, knowing he was trying hard to provoke her to anger. "Where do we find half a million?"

  "Well, of course, we don't have to find it all at once. Some of the earlier lines will be finished soon and we can sell off the stock. Gensedorf-Pesth in Hungaria will finish before we're halfway. That's a sure hundred thousand for a starter. And there's others. We'll manage."

  "And completion? I mean on the Annaburg-Bochnia?"

  "Eighteen months."

"Then I can tell you, John, we shall fall short by at least two hundred thousand."

  She saw the lower part of his face jerk into and out of the light of a gas lamp as they passed. He was grinning as he said, "We shall manage. Never fear. We can sell our property if necessary."

  Her mouth went dry. He meant it. He might be grinning, but he meant it. "It's mine," she said. "You gave me that money 'to do what I like with' you said. It's me who's turned it into—"

  "You've done what you liked with it," he interrupted. "And no doubt you've had great fun. But playtime is over, Nora. We need it now."

  "We? Is that Flynn and good self again?"

  "No, no!" He was testy. "I was teasing then. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have teased. But I'm serious now. We're not a property firm, love. We're railroad builders. We need that money."

  "But it's mine!" She still could not believe it.

  "Ours, dear. Look, I know how you must feel. Very disappointed. It's only natural. But try and look on the bright side. We lose two—twenty thousand now—or rather, we take it out of property and put it where it belongs—and when the line's finished we get back a clear three hundred thousand. You must see the sense of it. You above all must see that."

  It was unarguable—once you accepted his notion that she had merely been "playing" with the money, "having great fun," as he put it. But she knew that she could never face the sale, however compelling his arguments. She still had hopes of reviving their marriage once they had weathered this present crisis. But if she had to face the sale of her properties for the second time in a few years, all such hopes would vanish.

  Yet she knew too, just from the reasoned way John was speaking, that he would never understand her feeling. They would live out their lives yoked together in a hatred he would not understand and she could not control.

  There had to be some other way. "Leave it with me, love," she said brightly. "We'll mortgage the land by all means. But it may not come to a sale. We must try to find the rest some other way."

  "Oh? How?" He sounded as if he were smiling.

  "I don't know. We'll find it somehow."

  "See?" he said, settling back to doze the rest of the journey away. "It just needed a little encouragement. I'm sure you'll do it."

That Thursday, he left for Berlin to hear about the Annaburg–Bochnia contract. Twenty minutes after seeing him off at London Bridge station she was with Chambers in his renaissance-princely office in Dowgate.

  "You look awful," he said.

  She smiled wanly. "I hope it's your afternoon for truth on all fronts, Nathan."

  He became wary at once.

  "Did Stevenson tell you why he's gone to Berlin?" she asked.

  "The Dresden–Prague line?"

  "And the other? Did he tell you about that? The Annaburg–Bochnia line?"

  Chambers froze where he sat. "No," he said. "You tell me."

  So she told him—exactly what had passed between herself and John that night in the carriage. It left him looking very unhappy. "If he insists on selling your property, Nora, nothing can prevent him, you know."

  "Balls," she said flatly. It shocked him. Wearily, she closed her eyes. "Listen. Nathan. The time is approaching when you must decide where your real loyalty is. To John Stevenson? Or to the firm that bears his name—the firm that puts the meat under your gravy?"

  "Or to you?"

  She laughed coldly. "Oh, no. I have no illusions about that. But I tell you this: If he sells my property, I will finish forever with the firm of Stevenson's."

  He laughed. "You can't be serious!" She said nothing. "Stevenson's without you? Why, it's…" He could find no word strong enough. Then he looked into her eyes and saw she meant it.

  "I'd have the trust fund," she said quietly. "And my share of the Wolff fund is already beyond his grasp. I'm younger than he is. I shall outlast him. I can wait."

  When Chambers breathed out he seemed to shrivel. "How can you talk like that? You would finish him. Just for a bit of money!"

  "It's not a bit of money," she said fiercely. "It's a bit of me! You don't understand it, either of you. All this praise you lavish on me—it's meaningless. It's empty. You understand nothing about me."

  "I understand you to say you'd wreck your own marriage for the sake of a bit of property."

  "Not I. He. He would do that. In any case, he would never believe my departure would finish the firm. He thinks you'll always bail him out. He thinks you've got so much tied up in the firm that you couldn't possibly afford to let him go under."

  That made Chambers's eyebrows shoot up. "Little he knows of banking then."

  "Yet you would be a heavy loser if he did crash."

"I'd survive."

"But the loss would be immense—especially the loss of future business."

  Reluctantly, he accepted the truth of that. It was all she had been waiting for. She smiled at last. "Fortunately, I have thought of a way around the problem. It will not be necessary to put the properties on the market."

  "Ah!" His relief showed how great his misgiving had been, despite his bravado. But she judged that he had not been worried enough to fall in at once with her plan, so all she said was: "I'll tell you if it ever becomes necessary."

  He shrugged, disappointed.

  "Don't you think he's changed a lot lately?" she asked.

  Chambers seemed to weigh her up before he answered. "Has it ever occurred to you that he may be tiring of being a contractor?"

  "Never!"

  "Perhaps he goes for these bigger and bigger contracts as a way of keeping the glory alive? I only say perhaps."

  She realized it was possible. "Has he hinted as much to you?"

  "Well—in a way. He said something to me last year which I thought was just one of his jokes. Or not jokes but oddities. He said, 'When will it happen that we have enough money to say I'm free? Free of all of it?'"

  "What did he mean?"

  "It's an odd question, isn't it? And the more you think about it, the odder it gets.
Free
of it all. You couldn't think of a less likely word for him to use."

  "Yes. But what did he mean?"

  "That's what I asked. And he looked at me a long time. You know how sometimes he looks at you as if he's thinking of twenty things to say and which one is he going to select for you?"

  "I know that look. Very well, lately."

  "He said, 'Chambers, I'd like to go to Scotland or America or somewhere virgin, and take Nora and the children, and an axe and a plough and a shovel and a team of horses and break that land by myself.' Of course, I just sat like this." He mimed astonishment. "'Don't you ever ask yourself,' he said, 'what's the purpose of it all? What am I sitting here for, worrying about the Austrian government's promise and the Aberdeen line and the Board of the Railway Orphans and the bricks for the Welwyn viaduct? And I then think of someone out there where no man ever yet sowed or harvested, who hears nothing but the winds and the rushing waters and the cries of birds and beasts and the voices of his own family. I think of him sitting there at peace with his world, watching the sun set, and then of myself going home in my fine carriage, long after that same sun has set, still churning over those endless questions. And I wonder who is the rich man?'"

  Nora laughed. "What did you say?"

  "I said why not try. He said, 'Because I know damn well it isn't like that. The pioneer, after two years of spirit-breaking toil, ends up with four hundred tree roots that nothing will burn and no team can plough over. And he can't sit anywhere for the flies. And the water's brackish. And the well runs dry. But that doesn't stop the other picture from coming to me.'"

  "Did he mean it? Or was he just talking, the way he often does?"

  "I don't think it's exactly what was in his mind at first, or he wouldn't have said 'enough money to be free,' would he?"

  "Do you think he's forgotten what he wants?" she asked.

  "It did occur to me. Or perhaps he found what he had sought—and it wasn't enough."

  "Wanting, he found it—and found it wanting."

  "Is that what
you
think?"

  She could not reply. And then she said, "How odd I cannot tell you that at once. To be married to a man almost ten years, thinking your goals were identical, knowing you were never alone because of that. Whether he was in Ireland or France or Scotland or Spain or…downstairs or beside me, we were united. That's what has gone. I can't tell you any longer what it is he really wants."

  "What is it that you want, Nora?"

  She smiled, and without hesitation said, "More."

  He looked puzzled.