Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [196]
Kemp sighed. It was the second time that morning. ‘I know nothing of the sort,’ he said. ‘Can you not exist for ten minutes without her presence in the room?’
‘I am glad I have not a suspicious nature,’ his wife said. ‘Go, Marie, I will ring when I need you.’
Kemp waited until the maid had gone, then began to speak to her about her father’s latest passion, which was for speculating in negroes. The old man had somehow become convinced – and how and by whom were among the things Kemp most wanted to know – that the trade in slaves was shortly to be made illegal by Act of Parliament. He had instructed his agents in Barbados and Virginia to buy up as many blacks as possible in order to get compensation from the government when the bill was passed into law.
‘He is going mad,’ Kemp said. ‘That is the only possible conclusion. There is no such a bill in prospect. There are not above three members of parliament who take the abolitionist line. I am told reliably that your father is buying up negroes of no quality whatever, with no value on the market. Old, diseased, crippled, it makes no difference. He has got fixed in his mind this absurd notion of compensation. The blacks will all have to be fed and kept alive somehow, at great expense. Half of them will die on his hands in spite of everything.’
The mask of cream which covered his wife’s face allowed no expression, except what showed in her eyes. These were brown and glistening and full of ill-humour. They were not looking at him.
‘Could you not find an occasion to speak to him and dissuade him from this folly?’ he said.
‘Lord, sir,’ she said, ‘you speak with rare feeling. ’Twas in those very tones you wooed me. I would not have credited you with such tender solicitude for my father’s welfare.’
Kemp said nothing for a while. Pride made him wish to seem indifferent to the sarcasm, with the same indifference he showed towards the irregularities of her conduct, her absences from home, her suspected infidelities. At heart he felt it to be no more than justice. He saw it as he might have seen a balance sheet. The money she had brought had provided substantial investment funds much earlier than he had hoped, at a time of expanding opportunity in the London property market. She had saved him the many years of scheming it would still have taken to pay off his father’s debts. He had protested love in order to get her and since he had not repaid her in that currency, she was free to choose other means of repayment. He kept to his side of things by not reproaching her. And it was this that gave her the greatest offence of all.
He looked at her obscured face, the grotesquely high setting of her hair. Seven years of marriage and he could not remember a time when there had been trust between them. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if you have any regard for him you will disabuse his mind.’ A thought struck him suddenly. ‘Try to discover who is communicating these ideas to him,’ he said.
She had begun to remove the cream from her face with moist pieces of cotton, dropping the used swabs into a little silver dish on the bed beside her. The clear complexion she had possessed when he married her, and which had been her best feature, was gone now; unhappiness had made her sallow and frequent use of cosmetics was clouding the skin.
‘You are asking me, in other words, to spy on my own father,’ she said after a moment.
‘It is for his good and ours, the good of the bank. I am asking from you no more than the duty of a wife.’ Kemp had no sense of irony in saying this and was surprised to see a smile come to his wife’s face. The interests of the bank were paramount in his mind. He took a few steps across the room. ‘I would be interested to know who is spreading these rumours of abolition,’ he said. His movements had brought him too close to the cushion on which the poodle was reclining and it set up a furious yapping, baring its teeth, and shaking the beribboned tufts of its mane at him.
‘Be quiet, you little brute,’ he said.
‘Pray do not disturb poor Fritz.’
‘Poor Fritz, is it?’ Kemp eyed the beast.