mean. Anyone could read ’em. But, Stephen,’ lowering his voice still farther as they walked up the steps, ‘you need not mention it, unless you see fit, of course.’
Sophie had liked what she had seen of Sam, and although his relationship to her husband was obvious enough she had made no fuss of any kind: the begetting of Sam was indeed so long before her time that she scarcely had much ground for any sense of personal injury, and righteous indignation was not in her style; nevertheless Jack felt profoundly grateful to her. He also felt a corresponding degree of guilt when Sam was fresh in his mind; but these were not obsessive feelings by any means, and at present he was required to grapple with a completely different problem.
By the time he walked into the drawing-room with freshly powdered hair and a fine scarlet coat there was no remaining hint of guilt in his expression or his tone of voice. He glanced at the clock, saw that it would be at least five minutes before the arrival of his guests, and said, ‘Ladies, I am sorry to tell you that our time ashore is cut short. We go aboard tomorrow and sail with the noonday tide.’
They all cried out at once, a shrill and discordant clamour of dissent – certainly he should not go – another six days had always been understood and laid down – how was it possible that their linen should be ready? – had he forgotten that Admiral Schank was to dine on Thursday? – it was the girls’ birthday on the fourth: they would be so disappointed – how could he have overlooked his own daughters’ birthday? Even Mrs Williams, his mother-in-law, whom poverty and age had quite suddenly reduced to a most pitiable figure, hesitant, fearful of giving offence or of not understanding, universally civil, painfully obsequious to Jack and Diana, almost unrecognizable to those who had known her in her strong shrewish confident talking prime, recovered something of her fire and declared that Mr Aubrey could not possibly fly off in that wild manner.
Stephen walked in, and Diana at once went over to him as he stood there in the doorway.
Unlike Sophie she had dressed
rather carelessly, partly because she was not pleased with her husband and partly because as she said ‘women with great bellies had no business with finery’. She plucked his waistcoat straight and said, ‘Stephen, is it true that you sail tomorrow?’
‘With the blessing,’ he said, looking a little doubtfully into her face.
She turned straight out of the room and could be heard running upstairs two at a time, like a boy.
‘Heavens, Sophie, what a magnificent gown you are wearing, to be sure,’ said Stephen.
‘It is the first time I have put it on,’ she replied, with a wan little smile and tears brimming in her eyes. ‘It is the Lyons velvet you were so very kind as to . .
The guests arrived, Edward Smith, a shipmate of Jack’s in three separate commissions and now captain of the Tremendous, 74, together with his pretty wife. Talk, much talk, the hearty talk of old friends, and in the midst of it Diana slipped in, blue silk from head to foot, the shade best calculated to set off the beauty of a woman with black hair, blue eyes, and an immense diamond, bluer still, hanging against her bosom. She had genuinely meant to make a discreet, unnoticed entrance, but conversation stopped dead, and Mrs Smith, a simple country lady who had been holding forth on jellies, gazed open-mouthed and mute at the Blue Peter pendant, which she had never seen before.
In a way this silence was just as well, for Killick, who acted as butler ashore, had recently been polished: he knew he must not jerk his thumb over his shoulder towards the dining-room in the sea-going way and say ‘Wittles is up’, but he was not yet quite sure of the right form: now, coming in just after Diana, he said in a low, hesitant tone that might not have been heard if there had been much of a din, ‘Dinner-is on table sir which I mean ma’am if you please.’
A pretty good dinner in the English way, a dinner of two courses with five removes, but nothing to what Sophie would have ordered if she had known that this was to be Jack’s last at home for an immense space of time. Yet at least the best port the cellar possessed had come up, and when the gorgeously-dressed women left them, the men settled down to it.
‘When they are making good port wine, and the better kinds of claret and burgundy,’ said Stephen, looking at the candle through his glass, ‘men act like rational creatures. In almost all their other activities we see little but foolishness and chaos. Would not you say, sir, that the world was filled with chaos?’
‘Indeed I should, sir,’ said Captain Smith. ‘Except in a well-run man-of-war, we see chaos all around us.’
‘Chaos everywhere. Nothing could be simpler than carrying on a banking-house. You receive money, you write it down; you pay money out, you write it down; and the difference between the two sums is the customer’s balance. But can I induce my bank to tell me my balance, answer my letters, attend to my instructions promptly? I cannot. When I go to expostulate I swim in chaos. The partner I wish to see is fishing for salmons in his native Tweed – papers have been mislaid – papers have not come to hand – nobody in the house can read Portuguese or understand the Portuguese way of doing business – it would be better if I were to make an appointment in a fortnight’s time. I do not say they are dishonest (though there is a fourpence for unexplained sundries that I do not much care for) but I do say they are incompetent, vainly struggling in an amorphous fog. Tell me, sir, do you know of any banker that really understands his business? Some modern Fugger?’
‘Oh, Stephen, if you please,’ cried Jack, for both Edward and Henry Smith, the sons of an Evangelical parson they much admired, were spoken of as Blue Lights in the Navy (prayers every day aboard and twice on Sunday), and although their fighting qualities took away from any sanctimonious implication the words might possess, it was known that they were very strict about coarse words, oaths and impropriety. Both brothers, Blue Lights or not, had been steadily kind and attentive to him in his recent disgrace, at considerable risk to their naval careers, and he did not wish his guest to be offended.
• ‘I refer to the Fuggers, Mr Aubrey,’ said Stephen, looking
coldly at him. ‘The Fuggers, I repeat, an eminent High Dutch family of bankers, the very type of those who understood their business, particularly in the time of Charles V.’
‘Oh? I was not aware – perhaps I mistook your pronunciation. I beg pardon. But in any case Captain Smith is brother to the gentleman I told you about, the gentleman who is setting up a bank just at hand. That is to say another bank, for they have offices all over the county, and one in town of course. You know his other brother too, Henry Smith, who commands Revenge and who married Admiral Piggot’s daughter: a thoroughly naval family. Poor Tom would have been a sailor too, but for his game leg. A most capital bank, I am sure; I am making some pretty considerable transfers, Tom Smith being so conveniently near. But as for your people, Stephen, I did not like to see young Robin lose fifteen thousand guineas in one session at Brooks’s.’
‘I am not to cry up my own family’s bank,’ said Captain Edward Smith, ‘but at least I think I can assert that there is no chaos in Tom’s concern, or as little as can be imagined in sublunar affairs. Letters that come in are answered the same day, fourpences do not pass unnoticed, and Tom’s notes are honoured all over the country, even in Scotland, as readily as those of the Bank of England.’
‘He plays a fine game of cricket, too, in spite of his poor leg,’ said Jack. ‘He has a man to run for him when he bats, and he bowls a most diabolical twister. I have known him since I was a boy.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir, for not recognizing you before,’ said Stephen. ‘I have had the pleasure of seeing your brother quite often on board the Revenge, and if I had not been so bemused I should have made out the likeness directly.’
It was indeed very marked; and in the drawing-room Stephen contemplated upon the possible extent of family likeness: in this case the two brothers were both typical naval officers of the kind Stephen liked best – men with weather-beaten faces, good-looking, capable faces, whose open, friendly expressions quite lacked the self-consciousness, self-satisfaction and morgue sometimes to be seen in soldiers; they were both physically very much alike, and Edward Smith had exactly the same rueful, kindly laugh and movement of his head as Henry.