Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [21]
I got no further with my letter than I had the night before. It now struck me as unnecessary to tell my uncle about my mother’s picture. Beyond suggesting I might have told Jack what I’d done, I doubted he’d give a button. After all, he had enough paintings to fill the Louvre and though irascible was neither grasping nor censorious. He hadn’t the need. Unlike his millionaire associates on Wall Street he’d inherited wealth, not clawed his way up from poverty. It was power that motivated him rather than money, and a belief that he alone could set America straight.
I reckon I was, still am, ambivalent towards my uncle. It would have helped my cause if he had been more of a rogue. True, he was a hypocrite, not least in his shenanigans with women – he had once put a stop to a production of Salomé at the Metropolitan Opera House, on the grounds that the reasons for chopping off the Baptist’s head were downright salacious – but then, he knew he was. A cynic, he was fond of quoting the maxim that a man has two reasons for the things he does, a good one and the real one.
What was more urgent, I realised, as I lolled yawning over the library table, was to figure out a way to tell him what I intended to do with my future. Since I was nineteen my uncle had been trying to fix me up with employment. How often had I heard him thunder that it was the duty of the wealthy to work? A poor man without a job, he held, was less despicable than a rich man who remained idle.
Under pressure I had undergone six months in a merchant bank in Paris, a miserable three weeks in a backwater branch of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, a year in the library run by his one-time secretary and mistress, Bella da Costa Greene, and a further year in the offices of Harland and Wolff. That last momentous year had propelled me towards the crossroads of my life and shown me the path I must take. Unfortunately for my uncle, it led more towards destruction than construction and had nothing whatever to do with draughtsmanship or naval architecture.
It wasn’t the financing of my plans that bothered me. Even if my uncle stopped my allowance, which wasn’t likely, my aunt had money of her own and would chuck me the moon if I asked. It was my conscience that niggled, for I’d been treated with great generosity by one who owed me nothing. We were linked by events, not blood, and he viewed me as if through a microscope, the infusoria of his long-gone past wriggling before his magnified gaze.
I was about to doze off when Hopper and Melchett swept in and dragged me away to the gymnasium. Colonel Astor was there, morose as ever, sitting in the row-boat machine, clad in a white singlet. The boxing gloves were missing but we took turns, bare-knuckled, at the punch-bag. Hopper was terrific at it, taking almighty swings and ending up scarcely puffed. Every time Melchett made a hit he cried out ‘Ouch’ and ran about with his hand tucked under his armpit. Astor never looked up.
Just after noon we tumbled out on deck. The sun shone so brilliantly that a small boy standing only five yards distant dissolved into whiteness, the top he was whipping gyrating at the toes of his all but invisible boots.
Slowly we approached Queenstown, the green fields spreading back from the cliffs. In time I could make out the glint of windows beyond the harbour wall, the white moon of a municipal clock. On Spy Hill a church spire speared the mild sky. Tethered to the quay, bobbing like apples, two squat tugs rode the water. Presently, the screws churning up brown sand, we stopped engines and waited for the pilot to come out.
I thought of the day, three months after my arrival in Belfast, when I’d met Tuohy on my way to the draughtsmen’s huts. It was raining and I’d taken a short cut through the alleyway on Harland Road. It was springtime and the pussy-willows were coming into bud. Ahead of me strode a working man with his tucker box under his arm. All of a sudden he staggered and fell down. Men were often laid off because they’d taken alcohol before the dawn shift, and