Paddington Green, page 4
‘My dear Gideon, as if you could ever disturb me! It is, as always, a great pleasure to see you. Come and sit down, and Ellie shall bring you some refreshment. Have you dined? Well, never mind. I believe you will still be able to enjoy a little of Ellie’s baked custard. She makes them very well—’
He settled himself in the chair on the other side of the fireplace with an ease clearly born of long familiarity as she rang the bell. Ellie came and took away her tray and returned almost at once with a dish of custard for the visitor, which he accepted with grave appreciation and immediately set to eating with a neat delicacy in his manners but with obvious relish. And as he ate, Abby sat with her head resting back on her armchair, her hand up to shade her cheek from the warmth of the flames leaping in the little fireplace that separated them and looked at him, liking what she saw.
A tall spare young man, Gideon Henriques, with fine long bones and tapering fingers. He was very pale, but his pallor was a healthy one; no hints of sickness showed in those long white cheeks with their equal clefts where once, clearly, there had been dimples in his childhood; his eyes, which were very dark and fringed with thick lashes that were startling in their effect for the lower lashes were equal in length to the uppers, were clear and shining, quite lustrous in their health, and his hair was thick and dark and curly yet shaped to his long and narrow skull in a most elegant and pleasing manner. Altogether he was good to look upon and she judged herself fortunate to call him her friend.
He looked up as if aware of her scrutiny and smiled slightly, so that the corners of his narrow lips seemed to merge with the clefts in his cheeks, giving his whole countenance a certain mocking quality; but this was in no way a reflection of his mind, for, as Abby well knew from the many years they had worked in harmony as business partners, Gideon never mocked. He might be amused, or ill-pleased, or disapproving, but mocking never, for he was far too sensitive about his own feelings ever to inflict such an unkindness on those of another person.
‘And may I ask where you were today that my messenger came back so crestfallen so often?’ he said, as he set aside the empty custard bowl, and settled back in his chair. ‘I suspect, of course, that I know the answer. I cannot imagine young Frederick allowing you to escape so splendid an opportunity for frivolity!’
‘Of course you are right! Where else should we be but admiring the processions?’ Abby said, and laughed. ‘Oh, Gideon, you should have seen him! He did so relish all of it! The driver of the omnibus allowed him to whip up the horses into Town, and what Shillibeer would have said had he discovered, I cannot imagine, and then of course, there were a thousand things the young wretch wanted to do!’
She launched herself into a spirited account of their day, using her hands occasionally to demonstrate some action undertaken by the lively Frederick, and now it was his turn to sit with his head thrown back against the comfortable armchair and to watch her. And he liked what he saw a great deal more than he found quite comfortable.
He liked the squareness of her face. She was far from being a classic beauty, for her mouth was too wide and generous, her eyes a very ordinary grey, though prettily lashed, and her nose most commonplace. But her brow was deep and wide and her hair, softly and naturally dressed above it, had a delicate brownness that he much preferred to the more startling blacks and blondes that were so admired in fashionable women; and her head was set so elegantly on her firm white throat. He liked, too, the animation of her face, the way her thick dark brows lifted and moved and quirked in response to the things she was saying. He liked the way her neat square hands with their blunt fingers moved so crisply and practically; no fluttering swooning nonsense about Abigail Caspar, thank God. Gideon disliked fluttering swooning women above all things, for they much alarmed him with their swimming looks and speaking glances thrown at him over their expensive fans. He met many such in his parents’ drawing room, for he was a more than eligible bachelor of five and twenty and his mother was at some pains to see that he met suitable ladies. But never yet had he seen in that elegant and very costly drawing room any elegant and costly woman who had half as much charm as Abby sitting here in her dull grey stuff gown in her neat and pretty but far from lavishly furnished little sitting room.
‘So, you see,’ she finished, ‘I have just cause to be very fatigued, but you know, now I have eaten my supper I am far from being so! I believe I could work for the rest of the evening to very good effect, and start the day tomorrow as though there had been no enforced holiday at all.’
‘Well, if you feel so, I have no conscience about my calling tonight,’ he said easily. ‘For it is business matters that must be discussed. I am to tell you that I am a little anxious about you, my dear Abby! You have not been showing your usual acumen, I suspect!’
She raised her brows at that. ‘Oh? And what error do you think you have detected in my ledger keeping now?’ and they both laughed at this reference to the time, nine years before, when Gideon, full of the newfound skill of a fresh-from-school accounter, and proud of his status as her prime adviser following his father’s sad illness, had thought he detected a great error in the costings of the medicines. He had argued then with Abby at some length, full of cockiness, only to discover that in fact Abby’s figures were not merely correct, but a most sophisticated solution to the problem of finding ways to sell her products at advantageously cheap prices. He had been sorely embarrassed by his discovery but she had soon coaxed him out of his young shame in a way that had salvaged his pride; and their friendship had deepened from that day and become far more adult. Before that he had been just Nahum’s boy, a gangling, dark-eyed pretty lad in her view. But the dignity with which he had been able to admit his error and the handsomeness of his apology had done much to give him superior status.
Now he smiled again and said, ‘Nothing to do with costings, I do assure you. Indeed, Abby, I check the ledgers only because you insist that I should—’
‘And I always shall so insist,’ she said swiftly. ‘I shall never cease to be grateful to your father for had it not been for his good offices when James and I came here to Paddington Green, I believe we should have foundered completely. And had it not been for his unswerving support and concern for me in the years after James’s death, I know I should have been submerged totally! Without your money, as well as your friendship and guidance I should be nowhere at all. So check those ledgers you shall, for I am determined you shall know of every transaction and charge upon the books that ever comes!’
‘You need not fret about your very small commitment to my father’s firm,’ Gideon said, and though his tone was mild and his voice light and not particularly emotional, there was a faint flush in those white cheeks, and he looked away from her face to the fire; and Abby too, also a little reddened by the emotion she had undoubtedly been displaying, sat silently for a moment or two. But then she stirred herself and said, ‘So! To our affairs. What sin is it that you have discovered me in?’
He smiled at her, glad to recapture the lightness they were usually able to share. ‘It is these payments you have been making on Fridays, once a month. You have entered them under “miscellaneous disbursements”, but they are so regular in payment—the last Friday of each month—that I am puzzled. What are you hiding behind that bland label of “miscellaneous disbursements”? It is not good business, you know, not to enter in every detail the matters upon which you expend your assets! I have no doubt it is some harmless thing, but if you should choose to sell the business there might be difficulty in explaining it—’
‘I shall never sell the business! It is being built up for Frederick, of course!’ Abby said, but she was clearly a little put about for her cheeks, which had lost the redness of her earlier emotion, now flamed again, and her eyes were troubled as she looked at him. ‘Oh dear, Gideon, I find this a little difficult to explain. It is a matter of some embarrassment for me, for it is a private matter, you see, quite personal, not to do with the business at all—’
Now it was Gideon who became pink with mortification. ‘Indeed, then explain you need not! Truly, if it is some matter that does not concern the business, then I wish to know nothing of it! Do remember that I do but examine the books in order to please you, for you will insist upon it, and if I have inadvertently stumbled upon some private matter of your own, I do beg that it remain so! I would not for the world—’
‘Oh, Gideon, do stop getting into such an agony!’ Abby said, and now she was herself again, her embarrassment quite gone in the face of Gideon’s confusion. ‘You dear silly boy! As if it were some dreadful matter! You really must not get in such a pother! Of course I shall tell you—’
‘Oh, please, do not!’ said Gideon earnestly, and leaned forwards to set one hand upon hers as they lay clasped upon her lap. She looked down at the long white fingers, and without moving her own hands looked up into his face, into his eyes very wide and serious as they looked at her, and she smiled almost shyly.
‘Dear Gideon, you should not get in such a pother!’ she repeated. ‘You make a most monstrous mountain out of a minuscule molehill, I do assure you. Now, listen to me! I shall explain about those Friday sums.’
‘I wish you would not,’ Gideon said again, miserably, but he leaned back in his chair again.
‘And I wish that I shall!’ Abby said firmly. ‘It is my brother, do you see!’
‘Your brother?’ he sat up a little straighter. ‘But I understood that your family had quite—that they did not—that—’
‘That they had cast me off when I chose to marry?’ Abby said equably. ‘You are quite right. My father did, deeply to my regret. I have not seen him nor heard from him this past ten years, I am afraid, though I keep aware of what he is doing. It is easy, you see, in the way of business, to know of his affairs, for when Henry goes about on his selling jaunts, he garners as much gossip as he sells drugs! I know my father to be well, and that the hospital is thriving—he has taken a fourth house there in Endell Street, you know, and has several wards; I have heard of other matters too, agreeable and not so agreeable. My younger sister, Mary, succumbed to the cholera epidemic two years ago—’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ Gideon said at once. ‘Allow me to wish you a long life.’
She quirked an inquiring eyebrow at him and he looked confused again.
‘Forgive me. That is the immediate response all persons of the Jewish faith make to those who have been bereaved,’ he said. ‘I did it without thinking. I am indeed sad that this should have happened while you were estranged from your relations.’
‘I too,’ she said soberly. ‘I felt it keenly at the time, but more for myself than I had cause to. It is my other sister, Martha, who must have suffered most, for they were twins, you know, and most attached. However!’
There was a little pause and then she went on in a determinedly cheerful voice, ‘Pleasant matters have happened too. I saw in the Court pages that my brother Barty has wed himself an heiress! I would never have thought it, knowing what a graceless scamp he was in his childhood!’
Her eyes had darkened a little now, and she was not looking at him so much as through him, and he wanted again to put out his hand to hold hers, but he stifled the wish and sat quietly watching her expressive face.
‘Ah well, so be it!’ she said after a moment’s pause and then went on more animatedly. ‘And then, you see, I met my brother Jonah! I was walking in Rotten Row one afternoon, just before Christmas, when the weather cleared at last and gave us a clean frost—you will recall how sadly foggy it had been earlier in the month, and we had all been quite tied to our firesides! Well, there I was with Frederick, and he with his two children! Oh, it was such a delight to see him! His children are quite charming, a most solemn boy of perhaps a year less than my Frederick, and a perfect little bewitcher of a daughter, some two years younger. I was quite taken with them both—’
She sighed sharply then. ‘It is such a pity, you know, for neither he nor I have any contact with our father, or our other brothers and sister. It seems so—so wasteful, do you not agree, Gideon? I do so dislike the absurdity of family disagreements—’
‘Absurd they may be, but powerful they always are,’ Gideon said softly, and she looked up at him sharply, for there was an odd note in his voice. But she could not see his face clearly, for the firelight had dwindled as the flames had sunk to embers, and he had one hand shading his cheek. So she went on after a moment, ‘Well we decided we should at least meet from time to time, for we have no quarrel with each other. And I would have been glad to see his wife—although for my part I must confess it will not be easy for me to be courteous to her, for although she was not herself to be blamed for it, it was her mother who caused my own mother’s tragic suffering—’ She shook her head a little sharply. ‘Well, to draw to an end at last, we met from time to time, he coming here to visit with the children, quietly you know, and I took to giving my niece and nephew an occasional gift, much as you present young Frederick with items from time to time— oh, yes, I know! Never think you are so secret!’ She smiled at his obvious discomfiture. ‘And I also gave Jonah a little cash to purchase items for them. To be honest, Gideon, I received the impression that it is his wife who rules his roost, and that she controls their purse-strings with such energy that leaves the poor man with little control over his own affairs. It is hard on a man, I think, to have to account for all his moneys to his wife, although of course I know it to be far from rare. Well, there it is, my guilty secret is out! The miscellaneous disbursements are my brother Jonah and his children! I arrange it so that they do not fully realize that this is a regular monthly sum, but I prefer to make sure it is an equal amount, and enter it regularly, for I cannot abide disorder in the ledgers, as well you know.’
He was quiet for a moment, and then said softly, ‘You are such a very good woman, Abby, are you not?’
‘Am I?’ she said equably, and stood up to cross the room and raise the flame in the handsome brass oil lamp that stood upon the table in the corner, flooding the room with a new radiance. ‘Not at all, dear Gideon! Hardworking you may call me, and practical, and indeed a little dull, for there is nothing of frivolity about me—but good? I repudiate the suggestion. It sounds too spiritual altogether for one of my bread-and-butter nature! Now, we shall ask Ellie to bring us some tea and to mend the fire, and settle to the ledgers, if you can bear to continue work at so late an hour! There are one or two matters I would so much like to discuss with you. Young Henry, for example. He works so well, you know, that I feel there is a real danger that we may lose him. I suspect, from what I have been told by those apothecaries with which he deals on my behalf, that his sterling virtues have been recognized by outsiders and some unscrupulous wretch will not be above coaxing him away from me with offers of better remuneration! I have an idea that we should offer Henry a different form of payment. Not perhaps a greater salary but a bonus calculated upon the volume of sales he makes above a certain level. This will encourage him to work even harder, will help him feel his attachment to me more closely, and will reward me with higher sales, even if Henry must receive more money. What do you think?’
‘I think you are indeed a most astute woman of business!’ Gideon said, his face alight with good humour as he hurried to help her bring a low table nearer the fire, and set the ledgers upon it. ‘That is a most sensible idea for you to devise, in your situation, and shows a foresight that would do credit to a man twice your age, and twice your monetary holdings. We shall look at his efforts, and calculate what it might cost in hard cash. That of course is the key—’
They settled to their bookwork as Ellie came quietly to set her tea tray beside them and to build the fire high with sea coal, but before plunging completely into the affairs of the business, Gideon said a little diffidently, ‘I would so much like to know your brother, Abby, if I may. Will you perhaps—’
She smiled up at him. ‘Would you, Gideon? Well, why not indeed! You are my friend and business partner, and it is right you should know those of my relations that wish to know me. I shall see what I can contrive.’
He laughed at that. ‘You always say that, do you not, Abby?’
‘Say what?’
‘That you will contrive. I find it most—a charming phrase! I am glad you shall contrive for me to meet this brother of yours. I am most curious to know if he is at all like you!’
She smiled at that, thinking of the way Jonah had stood there in the park the day she had met him, his hat in his hand and his hair blowing in the wind, and his face almost timid as he looked at her, and also remembering the diffident way he had stood here in her sitting room when she had insisted on pressing upon him gifts for his children. ‘Like me?’ she said softly. ‘Indeed, I do not think you will find we are at all alike! But I shall contrive—arrange it when I can!’
But when Gideon went home, sitting in the corner of his cold hackney cab as it went rattling back along the New Road to his parents’ home above the counting house in Lombard Street, still feeling the warmth of that pretty sitting room and the pleasure he found in the company of its occupant, he remembered that wistful little remark about ‘the absurdity of family disagreements’ and felt a heavy sadness begin to form deep in his belly, knotting itself into a cold hard lump that made him far less comfortable than he would have wished to be.
