Railroad Page 13

  But the circumstances were catastrophic. A torn-open letter lay on his father’s uneaten eggs. His father, dressed for the office in grey vest and tailcoat, was pacing the rug, popping with anger, while the ormolu clock on the sideboard chimed the hour at which he should already have been sitting at his desk.

  Collis at least had the diplomacy to keep his head lowered. His father came around to his side of the table from time to time, and bent over him, and raged in his ear, and in the face of that kind of treatment there was very little else he could do.

  ‘I asked you, on your honour, to keep this unfortunate affair to yourself!’ shouted Makepeace. ‘I asked for your word! So what did you promptly do? You went, without consulting me, to one of the lowest financial rats in the whole of America. You went to the very man whose bubble had burst and left me destitute! You revealed my identity to him, and he went straight away to trumpet my disaster around the breadths of Wall Street! My God, Collis, I thought you were a fool, but I didn’t realise you were an idiot!’

  Makepeace wiped his mouth with his napkin. The pause gave Collis the opportunity to say quietly, ‘It was you who lost the money in the first place, Father. And there was no guarantee that you could have found anyone to underwrite you. In fact, there was hardly any chance at all.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned impertinent!’ shouted Makepeace. ‘Until you stuck your oar in, it was nothing more than a temporary setback, a few days’ financial difficulty! But now, I’m finished! I’m going to have to sell the house, and the farm, and the carriages, and every damned painting and ornament we possess!’

  Maude, at that point, burst into tears, her face folding up like a bright-red umbrella. ‘It’s so unfair,’ wept Maude.

  ‘What’s unfair about it?’ asked Collis. ‘We’re all in the same boat.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Maude sobbed. ‘Just because you’ve been thoughtless, I don’t see why I should have to suffer. I don’t know anything about money at all. I simply want to live my life in dignity and grace. Now, I shan’t even be able to do that. I’m so ashamed!’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Collis, ‘perhaps if you ask the Lord, He will provide for you.’

  ‘Don’t blaspheme,’ put in Ida. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself this time, you cruel and inconsiderate boy. And I’m not particularly pleased with you, Makepeace, for putting our happiness and security at risk.’

  ‘If it hadn’t have been for Collis, everything would have worked out perfectly well!’ snapped Makepeace. ‘Now, it’s ruination. I haven’t the least idea what we’re going to do, but this letter from the bank makes it absolutely clear what I can’t do. I can’t touch any of my invested money, I can’t seek loans, I can’t authorise any underwriting of debts. I’m finished, and all because of a son I thought I could trust!’

  Collis stood up. He was the only one who had eaten, and he patted his lips with his napkin. ‘Father,’ he said calmly, ‘if I am to be blamed for this entire disaster, I think it would probably be better for all of you if I packed my bag and left home for a while.’

  The breakfast room was silent. Collis cocked his head to one side, like his father, and gave a faint, regretful smile. Maude sobbed into her wet, screwed-up handkerchief. Makepeace, his face pale and solemn, stood in the far corner of the room, by the heavy net curtains, as motionless as a man carved from ebony and ivory. Ida, in a sudden flurry of skirts and perfume, withdrew from the breakfast table, left the room, and closed the door behind her. They heard a muted mewl, like a cat, as she fled down the hall.

  ‘I think you’d better do as you’ve suggested, and pack your bag,’ fumed Makepeace. ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can tolerate your presence around this house.’

  Collis finished his coffee. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘I was just thinking the very same thing.’

  It was his original intention to stay for a week or two with Henry Browne, until the scandal had blown over; but when he took a cab to Henry’s over on Washington Place, he saw to his dismay that Nathan Hackett was standing on the doorstep, in a smart cream summer coat, and so he reached up and tapped the cabbie on the back with his cane and directed him to carry straight on by. It wasn’t that he was ashamed to face Nathan, eventually. It was simply that he would rather postpone their next meeting until he had enough cash in hand to pay off his debt for that accursed lobster. He could never have dreamed of embarrassing Nathan by offering an IOU – not when Nathan and half of New York already knew that Makepeace Edmonds was flat broke and on suspension from I. P. Woolmer’s Bank. All in all, the recognised etiquette during times of financial stress was to keep one’s head well down and avoid putting one’s friends into uncomfortable corners.

  It was a close, humid day, and even in his light-grey travelling suit he was feeling sweaty and hot. He tugged his tall grey hat over his face as the cab rattled past the elegant black-painted railings of Henry Browne’s house so that Nathan wouldn’t recognise him, and he didn’t sit up straight again until they had passed the trees and classic Greek Revival houses of Washington Square. He looked back through the small oval window in the back of the cab’s hood and saw Nathan stepping inside Henry Browne’s front door. For the first time in his life, he felt excluded, a social outcast. He remembered Senator Stride saying, ‘Poverty is an unpleasant fact of life. I hope you’re well prepared for it.’

  His next call was to Second Avenue. He asked the cab to wait on the corner of Twelfth Street, and he left his leather-and-canvas valise on the seat. Then he stepped up to the door of the Spooners’ brownstone and rapped the polished brass knocker. He felt ridiculously nervous, and he kept tugging and fiddling with his grey gloves. While he waited, the three-piece raggedy band that he had seen on Saturday, the day when he had gone out riding with Delphine and Alice, came slowly shuffling past, playing a sad oom-pah-pah tune, their frayed pants white with dust.

  The mournful footman with the shiny hair answered the door. Collis handed him his card. ‘I’ve come to call on Miss Delphine.’

  The footman took the card, sniffed, and said, ‘Wait, please, sir.’ He closed the door, and Collis heard him calling someone within the house. The band went oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah. The cabbie climbed down from his box and fastened a nosebag to his horse. Before he climbed back up again, he gave Collis a long, inexplicable look; the look that plain working people give to the extraordinary and peculiar rich.

  If only he knew that I am poorer than he, thought Collis.

  It was an interminable three minutes before the footman reopened the door, just enough to hand back Collis’s card, and say, ‘I regret Miss Delphine is indisposed. Good morning.’

  He was about to close the door for good, but Collis thrust his malacca cane into the opening and jammed it.

  ‘Sir, please!’ insisted the footman.

  Collis pushed the door wider. ‘I don’t care whether she’s indisposed or not,’ he hissed. ‘I have to see her. Now, will you go tell her I’m here?’

  ‘My instructions, sir, are simply to –’

  ‘I’m not interested in your instructions. Just go tell her.’

  The footman sighed. ‘Very well, sir. Please wait a little longer.’

  He went back into the house, leaving Collis alone at the door once more. The cab driver, watching him philosophically, lit up a clay pipe and contentedly puffed away at it. If a gentleman was damn fool enough to pay him for sitting here feeding his horse and smoking a fill of tobacco, that was quite all right by him.

  It was Winifred Spooner who came to the door next. She was flustered, and dressed in bright emerald green. Collis bowed, and took her hand to kiss it, which flustered her even more.

  ‘Mr Edmonds. How nice to see you. I’m really afraid that Delphine –’

  Collis squeezed her hand gently. ‘You don’t have to make social excuses, Mrs Spooner. I know quite well what’s happened. But I do ask that you let me speak to Delphine, if only for just a few moments.’

  ‘I regret that my husband –’

&nb
sp; ‘Please, Mrs Spooner. No one need know.’

  Winifred rubbed her hands anxiously and bit at her lips. ‘Well, if you promise to be very brief. No more than a few minutes. My husband was quite adamant that you weren’t to be let into the house, you see. On no account, he said.’

  Collis followed her into the small anteroom where he had waited before. It was very close and warm in there, and he took out his handkerchief to dab the perspiration from his forehead. He supposed there was something to be said for being poor; he wouldn’t have to wear a high collar and a vest any more, and spend all his time in suffocating drawing-rooms.

  Winifred invited him to sit down, but he was too nervous to do so for long. After she had left to fetch Delphine, he circled the room, measuring the rug as he went, stopping every now and then to pick up an ornament or a book, and put it down again. For a while, he examined himself in the gilded mirror over the fireplace, and he thought how expressionless he looked, compared with how torn and damaged he felt. His white wing collar was immaculate, his grey silk cravat perfect. Perhaps the very perfection of his image was what was wrong. When you were wealthy, when you were confident, you didn’t need to look as if you’d stepped from a fashion plate in a quarterly magazine.

  He was still staring at himself when a soft voice said, ‘Collis,’ and he turned around to see Delphine standing at the door. Her dark curls were hanging loose around her shoulders, and she was dressed in a plain day gown of pale-blue silk, decorated only with embroidered flowers around the bodice. The gown was cut quite low, so that the swell of her rounded breasts was showing; and between them, in her cleavage, was resting a small cross of pearls and amethysts.

  Collis didn’t move. He didn’t know whether to embrace her or not. Maybe she felt the same way her father did, that he was a pauper now, and not suitable for a girl like her. After all, he had no way of knowing what Senator Stride had actually told George Spooner, or what unpleasant embellishments he might have added to the tale.

  ‘Thank you for coming down,’ said Collis quietly. ‘I was afraid for a moment that you wouldn’t want to see me.’

  She came across the room and stood close to him. Her eyes were as wide and as entrancing as the day he had first met her in Taylor’s, and the gown, charged with its own static electricity, clung to the curves of her figure. She reached out her hand and held the grey sleeve of his coat, as if he were a possession that she didn’t want to relinquish. ‘I heard what happened,’ she said, almost inaudibly. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else I can say.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Collis. ‘It wasn’t even Alice’s fault. In any case, everyone seems so determined to blame me that it doesn’t matter whose fault it was.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was going to stay with a friend of mine, but I’m not sure about it now. When you’re flat busted broke, you suddenly realise that you’re an imposition on your old friends.’

  ‘Isn’t that what friends are for?’ she asked him.

  He took her hand between his, pressing it gently. ‘There are some good things in life which I would rather not put to the test.’

  ‘Sit down for a moment,’ she said. ‘Just here, on the chaise longue. Don’t worry about Mother. We’re having the Cheesmans for dinner tonight, and she’s flapping about in the dining-room.’

  Collis, awkwardly, sat; and Delphine sat beside him, her knee pressed against his. She took his hand again, and stroked each finger as she spoke, her own little fingers caressing the knuckles, the joints, and the dark hairs that grew around his rings. She kept her eyes lowered as she spoke to him, so quietly that he had to lean forward, until his cheek was almost touching her curly hair, so that he could hear. On the wall behind her, a very pompous-looking portrait of her father in a blue military-style coat looked down at her with unceasing disapproval.

  ‘Are you going to leave New York?’ Delphine asked him.

  ‘I’m not sure. I suppose I’ll have to.’

  ‘I’m going to miss you, you know. I’ve been dreaming about you every night.’

  He touched her hand.

  She gave a small, wistful smile. ‘I suppose it’s a punishment for both of us. Most of these terrible things are. I’ve been too forward and you’ve been too reckless, and the Lord has seen fit to separate us. But I want you to know that I’ll wait for you, Collis. However long it takes you to get over this scandal, I’ll wait.’

  He didn’t say anything for a long, breathless minute. Then he told her, ‘You mustn’t. You hardly know me. And I could be away for years.’

  She raised her head. Her eyes were misted with tears. ‘If years is what it takes, then years it is.’

  ‘But you hardly know me. And I hardly know you.’

  Delphine shook her head. ‘Don’t deceive yourself, Collis. You knew me well the first time you met me. Just as I knew you. We’re two people of the same kind. We’re the sort of lovers who can’t help but fall in love, because it was ordained by fate, and by whatever it is that makes people what they are. We come alive when we’re together, like flour and sugar when you mix them with water. It’s yeast, bubbling, living yeast.’

  ‘Delphine …’

  She raised the tips of her fingers to his lips. ‘I know what you’re going to say, but don’t say it. Don’t protest. I love you, Collis, I love you very dearly, and no argument will ever make me change my mind. I’m going to wait for you as long as I can, and even if you say you don’t love me, I won’t mind, because I know that you’re only trying to be kind, and spare me my sadness. I love you, and you love me, and nothing on earth, not money nor politics nor years of separation, will ever alter that.’

  Collis felt a crushing misery that almost made it impossible for him to breathe. He leaned forward and kissed Delphine on the forehead, then on her lips, and the tears slid from her eyes and mingled with their kiss. She stroked his cheek, so gently and lovingly, and when he sat back and looked at her, he couldn’t speak for the lump in his throat.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ she whispered. ‘I know how you feel.’

  ‘Do you?’ he asked her. ‘Do you know what it’s like to have to leave you? It’s the most terrible agony I’ve ever had to face.’

  ‘You’ll come back.’

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘Yes, I suppose I will. Though God knows how I’m ever going to raise enough money to get myself together again. I’ve been so used to collecting my allowance, and spending it, and going back for more when I’ve run out.’

  ‘Your father made himself a fortune,’ said Delphine. ‘So can you.’

  ‘For you, I’ll knock down mountains,’ said Collis.

  The clock chimed, and Delphine said, ‘I have to get back to help Mother. I promised I would only stay for two or three minutes. Oh, Collis. Oh, my darling.’

  She took his face between her hands and lavished him with kisses. He felt as if he couldn’t stand this parting moment any longer, as if the sad ecstasy of it was too much, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to push her away from him. He closed his eyes and kissed her, and prayed that this one second would go on for ever, and that he would never have to open his eyes and realise that the time had actually come to say goodbye.

  ‘Oh, Collis,’ she panted. ‘Oh, Collis, oh my God, I can’t bear to see you go. Oh, Collis, my love.’

  ‘Delphine,’ he murmured. ‘My beautiful Delphine.’

  She kissed him more fiercely now, until he could taste blood in his mouth along with the tears and the tantalising perfume she wore. She pressed closer, and her hand worked its way under his vest, so that she could caress him through his thin silk shirt and his cotton underwear.

  ‘Delphine,’ he said, trying to push her away. ‘Delphine, you mustn’t.’

  ‘Mustn’t what, my darling? Mustn’t what?’

  ‘Your mother – she’s bound to come see what you’re doing –’

  ‘Nonsense. She’s too busy with
that stupid cook of ours. Oh, Collis, you’re delicious. You taste like nothing I ever tasted before.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Delphine, this is more than I can bear.’

  Her eyes closed, she took his hand in hers and raised her gown at the side, right above the top of her blue-gartered stockings, until Collis could see the pale skin of her bare thigh. She pressed his hand against it, so that he could feel the soft warmth of her flesh, and she wouldn’t let him go. Her neck was arched back now, and she was breathing in soft gasps through her pink, parted lips.

  Collis was beyond caring whether Winifred was going to return from the kitchen or not. His blood felt as if it were roaring through his veins, around and around, in a vivifying rush, until his cheeks burned. All he was aware of was Delphine, soft and alive, kissing him as no lady nor whore had ever kissed him before. All he was aware of was her slippery, electrified gown, the warmth of her body, and her perfumed hair. Her pearl and amethyst cross blurred brightly in front of his eyes, as if he were dreaming, and waking, and then dreaming again.

  Panting softly, she pulled his captive hand still further, into the warmth between her thighs. He couldn’t resist now. He was caught, hypnotised by her rhythmic breathing. The sensation was overwhelming. He couldn’t have released himself even if he’d wanted to.

  ‘Collis, my lover,’ she said, and her voice shook.

  From the doorway, if anyone had seen them, it would have appeared as if they were sitting quietly together, waiting for Winifred to return from the kitchen. But a particularly observant spectator would have seen Delphine close her eyes now and again for no apparent reason, and Collis occasionally reaching out with his right hand as if he were about to take something invisible from out of the air. The morning sunlight faded and then brightened again, casting patterns across the floor and misty aureoles around the lovers’ faces. Delphine’s eyes looked bright, but blind, as if she was concentrating every ounce of attention on the suppressed explosion that was growing in her mind.

  It could have lasted no time at all, or for ever. But then Delphine gripped his thigh so hard that it hurt and she gasped: ‘My God. My God, Collis, my God,’ and her face was flushed and congested. He caressed her even deeper, until she made a sound like a sniff, and then sat with her eyes screwed up tight and quaked and quaked.