Wheels within Wheels Page 11

  “Are you quite certain this is above-board?” he asked.

  “If it wasn’t above-board would I be likely to come to you with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “My dear Major. What do you mean?”

  “If it weren’t above-board you’d want someone who was above-board to put a face on it.”

  “If it weren’t above-board I shouldn’t come to someone with the brains to find me out. I’d go to some old fool who’d suspect nothing.”

  “Ah … yes … yes … why, of course you would. In that case I’ll go, my dear fellow. This afternoon. After I’ve come back from the pictures. And I think after all I’ll go and see Enid this afternoon. It isn’t as though I’d seen Pauline more than that once.”

  • • • • •

  The result of his visit to Messrs. Lowenstein & Kohl, his subsequent inspection of 21, Easton Square and enthusiastic report to the house-agents after his inspection, led to a letter from Messrs. Lowenstein & Kohl telling Mrs. Newton that they were extremely hopeful that they would be able to dispose of her house to Major Sir Martin Fortnum.

  Mrs. Newton handed the letter to her husband.

  “It really looks as though that funny little Major does mean business.”

  “In that case, my dear, I think we’d better go down and have a look at Appleton.”

  • • • • •

  On the following morning they drove down into Surrey to see the house.

  It was one of those days that in early March surprise one with the sense of spring. The sky was of a pale cornflower blue, with occasional smoke-puff clouds drifting leisurely across it. There was warmth in the primrose sunlight, and though the branches were still leafless, the green of the hedgerows made you forget the grey-skied, dripping weeks that had to intervene before the countryside would wear its summer livery. The house with its formal Georgian frontage, stuccoed walls, two straight lines of rectangular windows, trailing ivy, low slate roof, bowed window looking on a lawn, twin yews, smooth green lawns, rough outhouses, wore the bloom of spring.

  There was a paddock with hens astray in it; a couple of cows, their horns pressing against each other; in the fold of a distant hill rose the weather-vane of a church steeple; low in a valley lay the rambling cottages of a small village; the thatched roofs and gables showing indistinctly through a veil of smoke. Between was the stretch of park and woodland in which the golf course lay.

  It was to the golf course that Mrs. Newton insisted on being taken first.

  “Oh, Frank!” she exclaimed and stood, her hands clasped.

  • • • • •

  It was as pretty a course as you could find. The first tee was a terraced lawn protected by a yew hedge, six feet below the level of the house; a hill ran gently down from it towards a stream that was edged on its further side by a low coppice. The green had been cut back into the wood. It lay like a nest, a reasonable brassie shot away. It was as fascinating a hole to play as it was to look at. The wood beyond and the stream in front were both mental and actual hazards.

  “Frank, if it’s all like that.”

  Neither did the house disappoint them. With its bare boards and uncurtained windows, its cold echoing corridors, it was the barrack of a place: but with the mind’s eye, as they walked over it, Frank Newton saw how it could be set in harmony with the garden; planning this room as the drawing-room, this as the library; visualizing in the hall the gilt-framed portraits of his grandparents; in the dining-room the hunting prints; along the main bedroom corridor the coloured bird pictures. A real home, an English home, could be made here.

  Himself, who was past athletics, he would have preferred to spend his last years in London. He would miss his club, the masculine intellectual atmosphere, the dispassionate informed discussions of impersonally held interests. London was the intellectual centre of the world: whatever Paris might claim artistically. The Court was there and parliament was there. Every important Englishman had roots of some kind in London. He would miss all that, here in the seclusion of the country.

  It was, though, the best place, probably, for Daphne. She could still go up to London. He would not want to cut her away from that. But London was a difficult atmosphere for a young girl: too much living on one’s nerves: too hard a pace when one had the wish and capacity to keep up with it. That succession of late hours, smoke, cocktails, jazz music; no time to pause, to think, to take stock. It was very easy to take a mistaken view there. In that atmosphere you had no chance of seeing people as they really were. Not, at least, as they would be to live with. Hard to judge the kind of husbands they would make. Which was what Daphne should be seeing. She had had three years of London. It was time she married. She would be happier married: as every woman in the middle twenties was, who hadn’t a career. It was important that she should be given the best chance of seeing what the men she was interested in were really like.

  Marriages were breaking up on every side of her. He could not bear it if his daughter’s were to go that way: if he had to see her stand in the witness box at the divorce court: or worse still, be cited as the defendant there.

  It would be terrible if that were to happen to Daphne: to his child. Down here she would have more chance of seeing life from a steady angle. You did, after all, know something of a man who had stayed in your father’s house, whose behaviour you had observed not only at carefully selected moments, but at odd times when little things went wrong. It was worth trying.

  “We’ll take this house,” he said.

  • • • • •

  That evening he went over his accounts. The expense of taking a new house was considerable. He would get less for his London house that he would have to pay for Appleton. There would be the cost, hard to assess, of decoration. Appleton could be run more cheaply than Easton Square, but that reduction would not be apparent for some time. The immediate situation demanded a considerable outlay of capital.

  There was no difficulty about finding it. It was simply a question of deciding from what source the money could best be drawn. He consulted the list of his investments. There was ten thousand pounds of Sally Allen’s lying idle. A mortgage had just been paid off. It was waiting reinvestment. In many ways it would be simplest to take that: Sally would gain by the slightly higher interest. He imagined the other trustee would approve.

  He was correct in his assumption.

  In most trusts there is one trustee who does all the work and one who maintains appearances: whose name is put in the will as a tribute to a family friend. It was in this capacity that Horace Swanage figured in the will of Sir Marsham Allen: by which the money was left to the daughter Sally in careful trust till such time as she should marry, when the capital was to be handed over to her unconditionally.

  Sally was a feckless, fluffy kind of girl, with generous instincts, and her father had not intended any man to benefit financially by that generosity till he had signed his name in the marriage register of a church. His caution was proving to have been justified. Sally Allen was now twenty-three years old and was a bright young person on the outer radius of “the bright young world.” She inhabited a converted garage in Queensbury Mews; its windows were covered with oilcloth curtains, its chairs were of rounded steel, its table of black glass. Its bed was vast and low. She gave cocktail parties and had normal tastes, which accounted in that atmosphere for the reasonable decorum of her morals.

  Frank Newton had only seen her once since her father’s funeral, and the impression he had formed of her had made him feel relieved when Daphne had denied all knowledge of her existence. Horace Swanage dined her at Claridge’s two or three times a year, took her to a theatre, and afterwards allowed her to escort him for a night-cap to the Green Grotto.

  “Such a darling,” she would tell her friends. “It’s heaven showing him life. Just how uncles feel when they take a small child to the pantomime: all bright eyes and asking to have everything explained to him.”

  She thought of him as a museum piece; a su
rvival of Edwardian England, when guardsmen took Gaiety chorus girls out to supper and ladies’ names were not mentioned in the coffee room of London clubs. But Horace Swanage was by no means so unsophisticated as his ward imagined.

  He might be an Edwardian: but he was that idolized Edwardian type a “viveur”: short, dapper, worldly, with chambers in the Albany, an unearned income that was liable to supertax, bachelor tastes and bachelor habits; with an old world preference for women who were socially his inferiors; he could be trusted anywhere with his friend’s wife or daughter, but his eye would brighten at the portals of the Galeries Lafayette.

  He believed in keeping things separate. “Women, drink, one’s life and loves.” He considered it a pity that a gentleman should have to earn a living, and that it ill befitted a gentleman to consider the details and spending of an income not his own. He left the investment of his ward’s capital entirely to Frank Newton.

  “You’re a man of affairs. I’m not. It’s far better that the decision should be in one person’s hands. I know nothing about these things. I’m sure it’s a good thing to put Sally’s money out on mortgage if you say so. Have you the papers there for me to sign? I wonder,” he went on as he set his signature to the transference authority, “how soon it’ll be before we sign our name for the last time.”

  “I suppose she’ll be getting married soon.”

  “It’s about time. But these young people are too busy having a good time to bother about getting married. They look on marriage rather as you and I did when we were young: as a settling down: as a rest when the pace has grown too hot. And let me tell you, it’s not only the girls of our own class who do.”

  He paused. There was in his eye a confidential twinkle that was almost salacious but not quite: that trembled on the edge of being unpleasant, but stayed on the right side.

  “Twenty years ago if one took notice of a shopgirl, say, one had to be devilish careful not to get oneself too involved. One was scared stiff of a breach of promise suit. But now.…”

  The smile grew more knowing. But it was still generous and honest, the look of an old campaigner, a sportsman in the lists of gallantry who had kept to the rules, who had played to win but had not cheated, who had not whined or been resentful when the game went wrong.

  “I remember my father saying to me just before he died, ‘Be careful, Horace. You’re fifty. That’s a dangerous age. Don’t let some minx get hold of you.’ But, damn it all, a minx wouldn’t have any use for an old boy like me, not for keeps. A little fun, but no consequences. Suits me well enough.”

  And he recounted an amusing, pertinent and unprintable anecdote.

  He was having unquestionably an amusing life, Frank Newton reflected. He was giving fun and receiving fun, and doing harm to no one. All the same, he was glad he was not leading that kind of life himself; chasing about with girls young enough to be his grandchildren very nearly. Which he very likely might have been, were it not for Daphne. A daughter, he had heard it said, was an insurance policy against an old man’s folly. There was something in that. One had a longing for youth when one was old; for a young woman that one could cherish and pet, take out and give things to. If one hadn’t a daughter, that longing for youth might get involved with other longings: might blow like a wind upon dusty embers, quickening to a last gusty flame the nearly burnt out coal. Better not blow upon those coals. Better let them grow cold quietly. An old man’s love was a tragic thing, so brief, so passionate; with the sure knowledge that there was nothing after it. One’s heart had the need to love. One’s heart went out to youth. It was good when that love went towards a daughter: when one could follow the normal rhythm of man’s life, with its three loves: the mother, the wife, the daughter. Each blending in the next and yielding to the next. Each love fading imperceptibly. His mother was dead. His wife had grown a stranger to him. But there was his daughter. A man needed to have a woman in his life. Some one to work and dream for; that he would be ready to die for, if need were. As he would have died for his mother once, and later for the girl he had married, and now if need were, for Daphne. Life had been charitable to him, to give him a daughter at its close, to love.

  VII

  In New York the receipt of John Shirley’s signature received a welcome more ebullient, but on the whole, less definitive. It did not, that is to say, mean so considerable an acceptance of fresh commitments. Roy Bauer regarded it as one more of his many irons in the fire. He scarcely bothered to read the agreement through. He did not care whether Shirley got five thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars. Money meant millions to him. Or rather, it meant figures. It was not capital: a lump sum on which a dividend would be paid; a dividend that represented an income: on which a way of life was based, so that the loss or acquisition of capital would mean the narrowing or widening of that life. To Roy Bauer income in so far as it existed was the return he received from the directorship of the chain of stores that had provided him with a first intimation of what wealth might mean. He had never had money that was capital. He had transferred shares that he had acquired on margin, acquired a refusal of stocks that he had never owned, in companies that had never been formed. The result of those transactions had been sums of money that he had either spent on flats and furniture: on cars and diamonds and women: or redistributed among other companies, on different stock. Money was a list of figures on his desk.

  When Bergheim explained to him that the deal could go through, but that to Shirley as the owner, five thousand dollars would have to be paid on account of his first share of royalties, Bauer had raised no difficulty.

  “That’ll be all right. You set it against my account. Now tell me about the details.”

  He knew more about finance than Shirley. He knew what questions to ask. There were points on which he was still doubtful. The working capital was to be put up by himself and Bergheim’s other clients. The royalties divided in the proportion of the capital put up. Bergheim was to supervise the issue of the capital in equal measure from the separate accounts. In the event of any one partner wishing to be bought out, a price was to be fixed among the other members of the syndicate in relation to the money already spent.

  “Then there’s no danger of my being rushed into expenses that I can’t meet?” said Bauer.

  “You can always sell out.”

  “Suppose the others don’t want to buy?”

  “I shall look for another speculator to join the syndicate.”

  “Suppose you can’t find one?”

  “That would mean that the oil field wasn’t paying, in which case the company would probably be assumed to be bankrupt: or would, in fact, actually become so.”

  “I see.” Bauer hesitated. “But it’s an investment that you would recommend?”

  “It stands as good a chance as most speculative experiments.”

  “Very well then. Fire.”

  • • • • •

  That afternoon he took the proud news to his mother. He smiled with indulgent fondness at the little old lady with the grey hair, the wrinkled cheeks, the grey puzzled eyes. There was a cake-stand at her side. It had toast, chocolate buns, plum cake, marons glacés, savoury sandwiches. She ate steadily and with relish. Tea was her meal.

  “Maud doesn’t make plum cake as well as she makes seed cake,” she was saying. “I must show her that recipe I saw in last week’s Woman’s Home Companion.”

  “Well, mother, what d’you think I’ve fixed up?” he said.

  His mother looked up with the wondering, puzzled, marvelling expression that was the reward and the inspiration of Roy’s ambition.

  “What have you done, dear?”

  “Not much: only bought an oil field.”

  “Oh, Roy!”

  The surprised exclamation was like wine to him. She thought him marvellous. Gee, but it was wonderful to be thought marvellous. He’d give the old lady a grand time. He’d get her a new radio: and a new car. He’d take her to Atlantic City. He might take her out to Niagara. She’d
never seen the Falls. Perhaps she’d like an autumn cottage in the Adirondacks. She’d only to ask for it and she should have it. Say, but it was grand to be able to do things for one’s mother. And Caroline, she should have her share of it. A larger apartment? No, that would be silly. She’d got as big an apartment as she needed. New clothes, though; and a rope of pearls: so that people would turn round when she strolled negligently into the El Paso. A long, low-bodied Humber that she’d always find a group round when she came out of a roadhouse or country club. He’d give Caroline her share all right. Gee, but it was good.

  “Mother,” he said, “let’s go out to a theatre this evening. Just you and I.”

  • • • • •

  This filial suggestion demanded a change of plan as regards Caroline.

  “Say, honey,” he rang up, “you won’t think it too bad of me, but I just must take my mother out this evening. It’s an anniversary. I’d quite forgotten.”

  If he had expected her to show any disappointment, he was in his own phrase “out of luck.”

  The invariable inflected drawl replied, “O.K.”

  “I hate standing you up like this, but you know how things are. We’ll do it big to-morrow, to make up. Ziegfeld and then Bell Livingston’s.”

  “O.K.”

  She did not particularly mind not going out with Roy. She only wished that he had told her earlier. It was probably too late now for what she had in mind. But it was worth trying.

  She did not have to look up the telephone number in the directory. The number was pencilled in her memory. Every day since the young jeweller had left her she had woken to the thought, “Will it be to-day I’ll be dialing that number? “But evening after evening had seen Roy Bauer bouncing into her apartment shortly after six with his “Say, honey, what’s new?” It was annoying that this one day she should not have known earlier. But it was worth trying.

  She dialed. There was the unengaged buzz: then a voice: