A Company of Swans

7

The letter which Stavely’s young bailiff had brought to Isobel Brandon’s room on the day that the Trumpington Tea Circle ladies were touring the house came from Hathersage and Climpton, the London accountants who had looked after the Brandons’ financial affairs for many years, and accompanied a detailed report, the results of which were unequivocal. As the result of the present owner’s extravagances and speculations, the estate was now encumbered to the point of no return. If bankruptcy and disgrace were to be avoided, Stavely must be sold and sold immediately.

This letter, which drew from Isobel the exclamation that Harriet overheard, was in fact only a copy of the original which reached Henry Brandon in the Toulouse lodgings to which he had retreated in order to avoid his creditors. After which, conventional to the last, he retired to his bedroom, took out his father’s army revolver and blew out his brains.

It was thus as a widow of ten days’ standing that Isobel Brandon sat in front of the mirror in her suite at the Hotel Astor in London, pinning up the rich red braids of her hair. Black suited her, thank heavens, for she would be in mourning for at least a year; the velvet jacket, bought in one of the few shops where her credit still held good, brought out the whiteness of her skin; she was one of those fortunate redheads untroubled by freckles.

But the sight of her reflection was the only thing of comfort in the bleak wilderness that her life had become, for it did not occur to her to find solace in the small, bespectacled child curled up in an arm-chair with his nose, as always, in a book. Henry, with his pale, pinched little face, his unmanly terrors, was not at all the kind of son she had hoped for — and suddenly exasperated by his concentration, his inability to see what she was enduring, she said, ‘Really, Henry, you don’t seem to realise at all what is at stake. It’s your heritage I’m trying to save. Do you want us to go and live in a sordid little hut somewhere?’

With a tremendous effort of will, Henry rose twenty thousand leagues from the bottom of the sea, abandoning brave Captain Nemo who had just sighted a frightful monster with bristling jaws, and considered her question.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’d like that. With a palm-leaf roof. The ubussu palm is best; it keeps the hut cool when the weather’s hot and doesn’t let in the rain at all. I’d go out every day and shoot animals for food. And I’d fish in the river. I’d look after you,’ said Henry to his mother.

‘Oh, God!’

The child’s face fell. He’d got it wrong again; his mother didn’t believe he could provide for her. Harriet would have believed it… Harriet, who had said that spectacles were an advantage…

For a while he waited, wondering if this was the moment to ask what ‘sordid’ meant — was it some kind of hut — but his mother’s face had that closed look again, and with a small sigh Henry sank back and rejoined his companions on the ocean bed.

Why did that plain little son of hers have to inherit the General’s wide grey eyes, thought Isobel — eyes that her husband had missed, but that had so curiously lightened Rom’s vivid dark face. But here she veered away, as always, from the memory of that quicksilver, brilliant boy she had loved so idiotically. It was ten years since anyone had heard from Rom and he might as well be dead.

Had it been such a crime to marry sensibly, thought Isobel, jabbing pins into the fiery coils of her hair? To want Stavely? Land outlasted passion, everybody knew that. Henry, then, had seemed a wise choice. Dear God, to let the mind overrule the heart — was that something she should have paid for with such misery only to be left a pauper at the end?

Who could have foreseen that this prudent marriage would turn out to be the kind of nightmare it had done? That she, who had hardly been able to let Rom out of her sight, would be unable to endure the caresses of his half-brother. And who could have foreseen that Henry, faced with her disgust, would go to the dogs as thoroughly and conventionally as he had formerly played the country gentleman? Even before she had shut him out of her bedroom he had begun to drink, to gamble, and afterwards…

She lifted her hand to the bell in order to ring for the manicurist who usually did her nails but dropped it again, remembering the appraising glance of the maître d’hôtel as he had noted — even while he bent over her hand, murmuring condolences on her loss — that she had come without her maid or a nurse for the child. He knew, as did the rest of London, that the sands were running out for the Brandons. Not that she had actually been refused a room, but there were none of the attentions she was accustomed to when she came to the Astor: no bowls of fruit or baskets of roses… and in the dining-room she had been shown to an obscure table in the corner.

Oh, God, it was impossible, intolerable! There had to be some way out of the trap. And like one of those awful recurring dreams from which one thinks one has awoken, only to find it start again, she recalled the interview she had had with old Mr Hathersage the previous day in his fusty office behind St Paul’s.

‘I’m afraid there is absolutely no help for it, Mrs Brandon. You must know that if there was any other way my accountants would have found it. But the figures are inescapable. You must sell, Mrs Brandon; you must sell for what you can get, and you must do so quickly.’

She finished buffing her nails and rose. ‘We’re going shopping, Henry,’ she said. ‘Come here while I make you tidy.’

‘Could I stay here and read?’

‘No, you couldn’t. We’re going to the dentist afterwards.’

Henry nodded. Shopping and the dentist. A sombre prospect, but not more than he had learned to expect, and he stood patiently while Isobel tugged at his Norfolk jacket with unpractised hands and jammed his cap on his head. The impertinence of that nursemaid, simply walking out without warning just because she had not been paid for a few weeks!

Usually there was nothing Isobel liked better than to shop and her mourning provided an excellent excuse for several new outfits, but there were only a few places now where her credit still held good. To these — little glove shops and hatters in the discreet, quiet streets round St James’s whose owners, accustomed to serving the Brandons, had not learned to defend themselves — she now repaired. If she knew that the exquisite black kid gloves, the jet-beaded reticule and velvet toque she purchased would not be paid for, she concealed any anxiety she might have felt with remarkable success.

It had been hard for Henry to abandon the Nautilus and Captain Nemo, but now he trotted obediently beside his mother studying with scholarly attention the posters on the hoardings, the men digging a hole in the road, the passers-by.

‘Why do they make “Little Liver Pills”?’ Henry wanted to know. ‘If they made them big, wouldn’t people’s livers get better more quickly?’ And: ‘If those men in the road dug and dug and dug, would they be the right way up when they got to Australia, or would they be upside-down?’

‘Oh, Henry, be quiet!’ They had just passed Fort-num’s, in the window of which there was an exquisite ink-dark chenille gown which would have suited her magnificently, but the last time she had tried to charge anything here there had been a most unpleasant scene.

Henry made a heroic effort, forbearing to ask what made the red colour in the glass dome in the chemist’s window and not even suggesting that they stop to give a penny to a beggar on crutches and with a row of medals on his chest. But when two men walked right across the pavement in front of him carrying a big wicker basket into a shop, he found it impossible not to pluck at his mother’s sleeve.

‘Look!’ he said. ‘That’s my name on the basket — one of my names. It’s spelled the same too.’

Isobel looked up, following her son’s pointing finger, and saw on the side of a basket, with its heavy leather straps, the letters R. P. VERNEY.

‘Is something the matter?’ Henry asked anxiously. He had hoped for once to interest his mother, but not to interest her as much as that. She had stopped dead on the pavement, her hand at her throat.

R.P.V.B. Romain Paul Verney Brandon. How often had she seen those initials entwined with her own! Not carved in the bark of trees — Rom allowed no one to despoil his beloved trees — but he had drawn them for her on the clear, fawn sand when they spent a day by the sea; sown them in cress seeds on a bed of earth while the old gardener scratched his head and muttered at the foolishness of the young. If Rom had wanted to forget Stavely — forget her and the Brandons — what more likely than that he had simply dropped his last name — too careless, too arrogant perhaps, to make a more fundamental change?

‘Wait here,’ she said to Henry. ‘I won’t be long. Don’t move and don’t speak to anyone.’

‘Yes,’ said Henry.

There was nothing to be afraid of, Henry told himself as his mother pushed open the door of the shop which was labelled ‘Truscott and Musgrave’: and had windows which were covered up so that one couldn’t see inside.

He knew she wouldn’t forget him; she wouldn’t go out through another door and leave him on the pavement. But nevertheless he began to feel that awful churning in his stomach which meant that soon he was going to be very afraid indeed, which was ridiculous if he wanted to be an explorer. It was more than two years ago when she had told him to wait on a black leather chair in the bank at Harrods, and had gone to meet a friend and left by another door and forgotten him, and it hadn’t really been so bad. When after an hour he had begun to cry — which was silly, but he had been younger then — an old lady had come, and then someone from the shop, and they had fetched a policeman and taken him back to the hotel. And his mother had been very upset and sorry and bought him some marzipan.

Only of course he would rather not be forgotten than have marzipan…

I’ll count up to a hundred, thought Henry, and then another hundred and another and then she’ll come. Sinclair of the Scouts, in the Boy’s Own Paper — he wouldn’t have made a fuss because he had to stand and wait for his mother in the street… and anyway they were going to the dentist. She might forget him but she would not forget the dentist…

Inside the shop Isobel had made an entirely hypothetical enquiry about laundering the damask for Stavely, receiving from the grey-haired and serious Mr Truscott a courteous and considered reply, and taken down some notes. If Mr Truscott was surprised that a woman of quality should attend to these matters herself rather than send her housekeeper, he kept this to himself. Then, as she was putting on her gloves, she said almost casually, ‘I noticed your men bringing in a basket just now and it seemed to me that I knew the name. Verney was a family name of my husband’s and he had a distant cousin named Paul.’

‘It might well be, Mrs Brandon. I have never met Mr Verney myself, but we have dealt with his linen for eight years now. An excellent customer, always very prompt with his payment.’

‘He lives in London, then?’

‘London? Oh dear me, no! Far from it.’ Mr Truscott smiled, for the legend of Mr Verney’s washing did much to brighten the monotony of life in the shop. He paused, enjoying himself, and said, ‘He lives in Brazil. In Manaus, one thousand miles up the River Amazon.’

‘The Amazon!’ Isobel’s heart began to pound, but the implications of what she had just heard were too extraordinary. ‘But he cannot send his washing home from the Amazon! He cannot!’

‘Well, that’s exactly what he does do, Madam. Beautiful linen, quite outstanding workmanship. Every three weeks when the liner docks at Manaus, his servants put a basket on the ship. Then at Liverpool they put it on the train and we send our cart to Euston and return the clean linen. Oh yes, it’s quite an event when Mr Verney’s linen basket comes!’

‘But it must cost a fortune!’

‘Well, not a fortune, Madam, but certainly a fair sum. However, I imagine Mr Verney would have no regard to that. All the gentlemen out there live like princes and he is one of the richest, they say. It’s the rubber, you see.’

He launched into a description of the rubber trade to which Isobel listened absently, her mind racing.

‘And Mrs Verney — does she send her washing home too?’

‘I have not heard of there being a Mrs Verney, Madam. Certainly we don’t get her linen. But of course, we are more of a gentlemen’s service on the whole.’

Isobel thanked him and promised to let him know about the Stavely damask. Enquiries would have to be made, of course, but that should not be difficult; Bertie Freeman worked in the Consulate at Rio and a cable to him should elicit the necessary facts. But if it was Rom — and really she had no doubt of it — then all her troubles were over. If Rom lived and was rich, her future glittered as brightly as a star. Rom would save Stavely — she had never seen in anyone such a feeling for a piece of land — and he would save her! Even if there was a dreary wife somewhere, she would not be able to prevent it. And as she made her way out of the shop, Isobel’s lips curved into the special smile which belonged to her time with that extraordinary and brilliant boy.

Henry was standing obediently where she had left him and when he saw her his face lit up in a way which tugged at her consciousness, absorbed as she was. There was something not unpleasing about Henry — something a little wistful. A man with Rom’s protective instincts might well be moved by the plight of such a fatherless young child.

‘Would you like to go on a journey, Henry?’ she asked now. ‘A long one?’

And Henry said, ‘Yes.’