Kitabı oxu: «The Sons of Adam»
HARRY BINGHAM
The Sons of Adam
DEDICATION
To my beloved N,
My writing partner
May this marriage be laughing for ever, Today, tomorrow and all the hours of Paradise.
Rumi (1207–1273)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Part Two
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
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27
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Part Three
33
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Part Four
48
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Part Five
99
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102
103
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108
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119
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Part Six
122
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136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
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Part Seven
148
149
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151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
Historical Note
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Somme Battlefield, France, 23 August 1916
A man crawls forward on his belly. He’s covered with mud. It’s night-time.
The man is young, a British lieutenant. Although he moves carefully, there’s urgency in his movements, something breathless, something desperate. It’s a dangerous attitude at the best of times. Out here in no man’s land, just three dozen yards from German lines, the attitude seems almost suicidal.
For almost three minutes, the lieutenant moves in silence. Every now and then there is the crack of a rifle or the whine of bullets. He appears to ignore them. Eventually, he comes to a shallow shellhole and rolls down into it. He catches his breath a moment, then shouts.
‘Tom! Tommy! Tom Creeley!’
For a moment, the night is silent. A scrappy moon plays hide-and-seek. Earth and flint scrape beneath the lieutenant’s boots. In the distance, big guns thump the horizon.
Then a voice answers. It’s no more than a groan, but the lieutenant is instantly alert.
‘Tom? Tommy? Is that you?’
His hope is painfully evident. He climbs quickly out of the shellhole in the direction of the voice. He wriggles forwards, hardly concerned to keep his head and body low.
Within forty seconds, he has covered almost thirty yards. The voice belongs to a young boy, a British infantryman, horribly wounded in legs and belly. The boy is obviously dying.
A look passes across the lieutenant’s face. It’s one of painful disappointment. Whoever this boy is, it isn’t Tom Creeley. But the look passes.
‘All right, sonny,’ says the lieutenant. ‘I’ve come to get you home.’
The boy’s face is shockingly white in the moonlight. ‘I’m hurt pretty bad, sir.’ His voice is a whimper. He is afraid of death.
‘Hurt? Nothing too bad, son. We’ll get you patched up in no time and on a train back to England. How’s that?’
‘Oh, yes, sir! Oh, yes!’
The lieutenant nods. In one hand, he holds a canteen of water to the boy’s mouth. ‘Drink this.’ The boy drinks. As he does so, the lieutenant’s other hand snakes round in the mud, holding a revolver. The boy lowers the canteen. His eyes are grateful.
‘Good lad,’ says the lieutenant. He holds his gun to within an inch of the boy’s head and fires. The boy drops back, dead.
The lieutenant lies low for a minute or so, then briskly searches the boy’s pockets for any personal papers. He takes whatever there is, then, once again, flattens himself against the earth. He lifts his head and shouts.
‘Tom? Tommy? Tom Cree-leeeeeee?’
And this time there’s no answer. No answer at all.
PART ONE
Rise early, work hard … strike oil.
J. Paul Getty
1
Whitcombe House, Hampshire, 23 August 1893
The beginning?
To hell with beginnings. Beginnings are excuses, apologies for failure. If things turned out disastrous – and they did – then that had everything to do with the way three young men chose to behave, nothing to do with the way things started out.
On the other hand, people are only human. Once a ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it. A beginning is a beginning, and on this occasion, the beginning wasn’t just bad.
It was awful.
It happened like this.
A small boy, a seven-year-old, stands in a kitchen. He’s building himself a blackberry pudding as big as his head. The cook stands by, face red in the firelight, managing pots of water boiling on the stove, a newly made pot of coffee steaming to the side. The scene is domestic, quiet, happy.
Upstairs, the little boy’s mother, Lady Pamela Montague, is in labour for the fourth time. Of her first three children, only one – the blackberry-pudding-guzzling Guy – survived more than a few weeks. She and her husband, Sir Adam, are understandably anxious this time, but everything is proceeding normally. The doctor and midwife are in attendance.
So far, so nothing.
No births. No deaths. No hatreds. And best of all: no beginnings.
But, in a second, that changed.
All of a sudden there was a bang at the door, the jiggle of a latch, a blast of cool air. A tiny girl flitted in, as though blown by the wind. A sweep of rain washed the step behind her.
‘Please miss, please sir, please help.’ The tiny girl bobbed and curtsied, desperate with anxiety. ‘My ma’s ill. She’s having a baby, only it’s got stuck, and she says she can’t, and she’s gone as white as anything, and my dad said to run to the big house for help as fast as I could, and please miss, please miss, please miss.’
Mrs White, the cook, brought the girl further into the light.
‘Are you Jack Creeley’s little girl, dear?’
‘Please, miss. Yes, miss. Sally Creeley, and my ma’s having a baby and –’
‘Well, dear, it never rains but it pours. You just pop yourself down while I go and speak to Sir Adam. If you want you can –’
Guy stopped her.
It wasn’t a big interruption, but it was a decisive one. He raised his hand, like a man stopping a horse.
‘No need, Cookie. I shall tell him myself.’ He lifted his pudding, the coffee for his father, then turned to the little girl. ‘You can go back home and when the doctor is no longer wanted here, he can come to you. For the time being, he’s required here.’
He set off up the stairs. As he did so, he muttered to himself, ‘Oh, and it’s five guineas the visit, by the way, and someone to take care of his horse.’
Once upstairs, he set down his trophies. Coffee for his father, blackberry pud for himself. He said nothing about Sally Creeley. He said nothing about the little girl’s mother. In the seven years he’d been alive in the world, Guy Montague had learned that there are two sorts of people: those who can afford doctors and those who can’t. It seemed like a simple lesson, the most obvious thing in the world.
He finished his pudding, concealed a belch, and went to bed.
That night, after a twelve-hour labour, Pamela Montague gave birth to a healthy baby boy, a bawling little bundle with lungs like steam-bellows. The birth proved to be perfectly simple. No complications. No difficulties at all.
The same night, in one of the short rows of cottages that housed the estate workers, a young man, Jack Creeley, was forced to watch as his wife screamed through the night, helped only by a couple of untrained girls from the village. In the end, Creeley himself ran up to the big house and begged to speak to Sir Adam. As soon as Sir Adam heard the man’s story, he sent doctor and midwife racing across to the cottages.
Too late. A simple breech birth, which any doctor or any midwife could have simply and speedily corrected, had exhausted the mother and complicated the baby’s position. The doctor, acting quickly, made the incisions that enabled him to deliver the baby by Caesarean section. The doctor was a good one, skilled and decisive. A baby boy was delivered, healthy and screaming, into the little cottage bedroom.
Healthy but motherless.
Poor Betsy Creeley, just twenty-six years old, was exhausted even before the operation began. She lost too much blood and never recovered consciousness. By the time dawn broke on 24 August, the little boy’s mother was dead.
And there it was.
Two births.
One death.
One selfish act with terrible consequences.
A beginning.
2
Jack Creeley couldn’t keep his son, of course.
He was a single working man with a little girl already dependent on him. In the short term, there were local women happy to help out, but in the longer term, he could see no option other than to ask his sister – now living ninety miles away in Devon – to take both the girl and the baby. His sister would certainly agree, but Devon might as well have been the other side of the world for all that Jack would ever see them. He felt like a man living with the pain of a triple bereavement.
But help was closer than he thought.
Up at the big house, Sir Adam and Lady Pamela had a worry of their own. Their new-born son, Alan, had a cough. Not a big one. In fact, it was quite definitely a minor one. The midwife said the cough was normal. The doctor agreed. Sir Adam agreed. But it was a cough. Pamela had already lost two children under the age of six weeks and she was terrified of losing a third.
Sir Adam spent a day thinking things through before making his suggestion. His wife agreed instantly and Sir Adam went to approach Jack Creeley. His proposal was this.
Jack Greeley’s young boy, christened Thomas after his maternal grandfather, would be taken in by the Montagues. He and the tiny Alan Montague would grow up as brothers. They would share rooms, toys, schooling – everything. In Sir Adam’s words, the infant Tom ‘would grow up as one of our own. He would in all ways be brother to our own son Alan. You, of course, will still be his father. He’ll call you Father and me Uncle. You’ll see Tom whenever you wish, just say the word.’
For Jack Creeley, the offer was far too good to refuse. It meant his son would grow up in sight and sound of his father. It gave the poor man some good thing to snatch from the wreckage his life had so suddenly become. He said yes.
For the Montagues, the new arrangement brought only benefits. There was guilt, of course. Guy’s behaviour had been unforgivable – and he had been well beaten for it. On a more constructive side, offering a home to Tom seemed like the least they could do.
But it was more than that. Pamela loved babies, and the borrowed child went some way to make up for the two she had lost. But what was more, something about Tom’s arrival seemed to work like a charm on the infant Alan. From the moment Tom’s crib arrived in the big house, Alan’s cough went away, never to return. All through the dangerous first years of childhood, neither Alan nor Tom was once affected by any serious illness.
Even better, and from the very first months, it became clear that the two boys were unusually close. As babies, their cribs stood in the same room. If, for any reason, one of the cribs were moved, the other baby would instantly wake up and scream. Likewise, when they were toddlers Tom began to be taken down to his father, Jack’s, cottage for regular visits. At first it was thought that Tom would prefer to go by himself, but any time the experiment was tried, the little boy would turn black in the face and knot his fists until Alan was allowed to come along too.
By the end of the century, the two boys were six and a half years old. They were thriving, happy, and healthy.
Alan had grown a fraction taller, Tom a fraction broader than the other. Alan was pale-haired, with eyebrows so blond you could hardly see them. Tom was already developing dramatic good looks: glossy, dark, curly hair with eyes of a startling blue. The boys were infinitely close. They went everywhere together. Their communication was so close, they often appeared to read each other’s thoughts.
Visitors to the house invariably mistook them for twins (not identical, of course), and after a while the Montagues stopped bothering to correct them. The boys were twins. Born the same night, reared in neighbouring cribs, suckled at the same breasts. The boys were twins. The only difference was that one called Sir Adam ‘Father’, the other referred to him as ‘Uncle’. The difference is a small one, even tiny. But that wasn’t the point.
Even the smallest things can grow big enough to kill.
3
New Year’s Day 1901.
In the newly sanded stable yard, horses and huntsmen milled in impatient circles. Frost glittered from the clock-tower. Hounds pawed the ground, anxious to be off.
Tom Creeley, seven and a half years old, wasn’t yet old enough to ride with the hunt, and he was annoyed. For the last half-hour, he’d hung around the stable yard with Alan. The two boys attempted to scrounge one of the glasses of sherry that were being passed amongst the horsemen. They’d stolen hot pastries from the kitchen to feed to the dogs. But Tom was still annoyed. He wanted to ride and wanted to hunt.
‘I’m going in,’ he announced.
On the way back in, he passed close by Guy’s grey mare. The mare bristled at something, and stepped backwards, knocking into Tom.
Guy turned in the saddle. ‘I’m so sor –’ he began, before seeing who it was. ‘Careful, brat,’ he said, flicking his whip so Tom could feel the rush of air above his head.
Tom scowled. There was no love lost between the two boys. Guy was a bully, Tom his target. But Tom was a fighter, who gave as good as he got. On this occasion, Tom dodged away from the whip, braying as he did so. The braying sound was a carefully chosen insult. As a boy, Guy had been nervous of horses and had been taught to ride on a donkey. Tom, as fearless on horseback as he was in most other situations, was already confident on Sir Adam’s sixteen-hand hunters.
‘Stable boy!’
But Guy’s last insult bounced off Tom’s back. Tom was gone to search for new entertainment.
His first trip was down to the kitchen: usually good for warm food and interesting gossip. But today his luck was out. He’d been spotted pinching the pastries and right now he wasn’t welcome. Tom thought about getting Alan and going down together to Tom’s father’s cottage. Jack Creeley had been teaching the two lads how to poach: how to tickle trout, how to set traps for rabbits, how to move silently in the dark. But just as Tom made up his mind to go, he heard a noise from the library. He was puzzled. Sir Adam was with the hunt. So if not him, then who was it in the library? Tom pushed the door open.
The man bending over Sir Adam’s desk wasn’t much to look at. He was a plump, overtailored man, with a walrus moustache and a chalky complexion. He was bent over the telephone apparatus in the corner of the room, shouting down the speaking trumpet, the earpiece jammed hard against his head.
And he was shouting – shouting about money. Business, money, the purchase of rights, company incorporation. Tom’s feelings of restlessness disappeared in a flash. He was rooted to the spot, burning to hear more.
And why? Simply this. In the seven and a half years he’d been alive, he’d never heard a rich man talking about money. He’d heard his father talk about it. He’d heard servants talk about it. But to Uncle Adam and people of that class, the subject seemed to be unmentionable. It was as though, to people who were already rich, money was like air: something that surrounded you, something you didn’t have to think about. And already Tom knew he wasn’t like that. He knew that Guy would one day inherit Whitcombe House and all the surrounding fields and farms. He knew that Alan, somehow, was in the same position: not as lucky as Guy, but still all right. And Tom? He didn’t know. He dressed the same as Alan, he ate the same meals, he studied the same books, he played the same games. But Alan’s father was a gentleman. Tom’s father was not. Seven and a half years old, and Tom didn’t know where he stood.
Tom had seen enough. Seen but not heard. He knocked loudly at the already open door and strolled on in. The man looked up.
‘Why, hello!’
‘Hello.’
‘You must be young Alan, I suppose.’
Tom shook his head. ‘I’m Tom.’
‘Oh, Tom! Well, good morning, young man.’
‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s Knox D’Arcy. Robert Knox D’Arcy.’
Tom wrinkled his forehead: the name meant nothing. On the table in front of D’Arcy, maps were spread out, maps traced in wild contours of brown and pink, maps speckled with place names that sounded like something from The Arabian Nights. Tom peered at them curiously.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Persia, Western Persia and Eastern Mesopotamia, to be exact.’ The man smiled at Tom’s blunt interrogation.
‘Why? Are you going there?’
‘No. I’m looking for something.’
‘What?’
‘Oil.’
There was a short silence.
‘What?’
‘Oil.’
Tom wrinkled his forehead again. This time his puzzlement ran deeper. ‘If you need oil, we’ve got plenty in the kitchen.’
The Walrus laughed. ‘Not that sort. The sort you put in your motor-car.’
Tom was about to point out the blindingly obvious, that the village carrier would happily deliver cans of petrol to the door, but the Walrus continued.
‘Not because I need petroleum spirit, but because I want to make some money.’
‘Money?’
The Walrus nodded. ‘Money, young man. I hope to purchase the right to look for oil in Persia. If I find it, I’ll collect it up and bring it in ships back to England. When I get it here, I’ll sell it to anyone with a motor-car – anyone with an engine, in fact.’
Tom’s eyes were as wide as soup bowls. He couldn’t have said why, but he felt he was in the presence of some vastly important truth. He sat down, staring at the maps.
‘In Persia?’ he asked. ‘There’s oil in Persia?’
‘I certainly hope so.’
‘Where in Persia?’
‘Under the ground. Perhaps even one mile down.’
‘Like coal mines?’
‘Yes. A little bit like coal mines.’
‘And money? If you dig up some oil, you can make money?’
‘That’s my intention, young man.’
‘A lot? A lot of money?’
And then the Walrus did something that – just possibly – would change the course of Tom’s life for ever. He hoisted the little lad up onto the desk, then squatted down so their faces were on a level.
‘Young man, do you want to know a secret?’
Tom nodded. ‘Yes, please.’
The Walrus paused a moment. His face was sombre. ‘Oil is the future,’ he said. ‘Oil is the fuel for the new century. Cars will guzzle it. Ships will swallow it. Factories run off it. Whoever can find the oil will be rich. Not simply rich – they’ll be kings of the world.’
That evening, Tom spoke to Sir Adam.
‘Uncle, who is that new man? The friend of yours. Knox somebody.’
‘Knox D’Arcy?’ Sir Adam chuckled. ‘He told me the pair of you had had a chat. Mr D’Arcy is a friend of mine, a businessman.’
‘Does he know a lot about business?’
‘I should say so. He was an ordinary fellow, living out in Australia, when he came across two miners who told him they thought they’d found some gold.’
‘And?’
‘And they had. D’Arcy helped them make a business out of it. A very, very good one. He’s ended up one of the wealthiest men in England. One of the wealthiest men in the entire world.’
Tom’s eyes widened. ‘Uncle, he says that the best way to be rich is to look for oil. Is he right?’
Sir Adam laughed again. ‘If Mr D’Arcy says so, then Mr D’Arcy is almost certainly right.’
4
Right or wrong, D’Arcy was a betting man. Having accumulated one colossal fortune in gold, he was keen to plunge a vast chunk of it into the search for Persian oil.
But things weren’t that simple.
For one thing, no oil had ever been found in Persia. Or rather: there were numerous traces of it in the geology, but no one had ever sent down a drill and come up with oil. Not in Persia. Not in Mesopotamia. Nowhere in the entire peninsula of Arabia.
And there was a second problem. The kingdom of Persia itself. The country was a poor one, squashed between British India on the one hand, Mother Russia on the other. The two giants jostled for control. Obtaining the right to drill wasn’t simply a matter of commerce. It was a question of politics.
Hence Sir Adam.
Before settling back in England, Sir Adam had been a diplomat, rising to become the British ambassador in Tehran. He knew the Shah. He knew the country’s politics. He’d learned who mattered and who didn’t.
And that was why D’Arcy had come to Sir Adam that New Year’s Day. He had a proposition. The proposition was this: Sir Adam would help D’Arcy win an oil concession, giving D’Arcy the right to drill. In exchange, Sir Adam would earn a generous commission. Sir Adam, delighted with the adventure, agreed at once. He went to Tehran. He negotiated skilfully. He bribed the highest officials with gold, he bribed the lowest officials with paper. He even bribed the eunuch who brought the Shah his morning coffee.
Sir Adam did everything he needed to do.
And on 28 May 1901, he got what he wanted. He won the deal.
5
It was two months later. The family was at breakfast. Tom and Alan poked unhappily at their platefuls of porridge.
Then a footman came in with the mail. Normally, the mail would have been taken to Sir Adam’s study to wait for him there, but today Sir Adam was off to town and he couldn’t wait. He read a couple of letters in silence. Tom and Alan fidgeted with their porridge. Guy – who was no longer forced to eat the stuff – made a big show of filling his plate with kippers and scrambled eggs, as a way of annoying Tom. Pamela, who normally breakfasted in bed, came down to take a cup of tea and see her husband off. A little conversation moved in stops and starts. The wind outside creaked a shutter.
Then Sir Adam broke the silence.
‘Hello! Fancy that!’ He flung the letter down. ‘Very handsome of D’Arcy! Very handsome indeed!’
He was begging to be asked the news and Pamela was first to ask it.
‘D’Arcy, dear? What has he … ?’
‘The concession. He’s split off a chunk for us.’ He picked up the letter again. ‘“Delighted with your excellent work … blah, blah … Very happy to make you a small present … Gift … Drilling rights south of a line drawn from Bandar-e Deylam across to Persepolis.” Great heavens!’
But, surprised as Sir Adam might be, his surprise was as nothing compared to Tom’s. Tom was sitting bolt upright, white-lipped, open-eyed.
‘You mean to say we can drill there? By ourselves? We don’t have to ask anyone?’
Sir Adam laughed. ‘Yes, Tom. We have the drilling rights. We don’t have to ask anyone.’
‘Everywhere south of Persepolis? Anywhere we want?’
‘That’s right.’
‘The mountains,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the mountains.’
And he was right. Since his meeting with D’Arcy – and even more so since Sir Adam’s own involvement in Persian oil – Tom had become an oil obsessive and a Persia fanatic. He knew as much about the geography, climate, geology, tribes and politics of Persia as he’d been able to learn from Sir Adam’s library.
‘That’s right. The mountains of the Zagros. The wild country around Shiraz and the Rukna valley. Heavy work to look for oil there, I should think.’
Tom shook his head with an angry little flick. ‘There isn’t much chance of it there. The best places are further north.’
‘Well, you can’t expect the fellow to hand over his crown jewels. After all –’
‘But some.’
‘What?’
‘There is some chance. I didn’t say there wasn’t any chance.’
Sir Adam laughed at the youngster’s intensity. ‘Lord, Tommy! D’Arcy’s pocket is as deep as any, I believe, and I don’t think he’s ready for the expense of drilling there. I shouldn’t think that we –’
‘Can I have it then?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
The silence at the table grew suddenly cavernous. The family of five might as well have been breakfasting alone beneath the dome of St Paul’s.
‘Can I have it? The concession? If you don’t want it.’
Sir Adam smiled. Perhaps he’d been hoping to encourage Tom to drop the directness of his demand. Perhaps he’d been hoping to soothe away the sudden sense of danger that had for some reason arisen. In any case, he smiled.
It was the wrong thing to do. Something flared in Tom’s blue eyes. He pointed at Guy.
‘He gets the house and all the land. Alan gets – I don’t know – money? A farm or something?’
Tom was just about to turn eight and he was piecing together the facts from half-heard servants’ gossip. But he was more right than wrong.
Sir Adam looked stern. ‘Alan will get some money. And yes, there’s a little estate for him outside Marlborough. There’ll be some income from that.’
‘And? What about me? What do I get?’
Sir Adam licked his lips. Tom’s directness often came across as insolence. What was more, it was detestably ill-bred for anyone to talk this bluntly over breakfast – let alone a boy of eight. But, just as he was ready to speak a sharp rebuke, Pamela interrupted.
‘Well?’
She barely whispered the word. She did little more than shape her lips and breathe it. But Sir Adam heard it all right. He exchanged glances with his wife. The issue that Tom had raised was one that the two of them had often enough spoken about in private. Pamela wanted Tom’s share of the estate to be every bit the equal of Alan’s. Sir Adam, on the other hand, knew that his assets weren’t unlimited. Every penny he gave to Tom would have to be cut out of Alan’s or Guy’s inheritance. As he saw it, there was the issue of justice towards his sons. In his heart, he was unable to feel that his adopted son had the same rights as the children of his own flesh and blood.
‘Well?’ said Pamela again. ‘Or are you intending to drill there?’
Tom stared, as though the most important thing in the world had walked into the room and might be lost for ever if his concentration flickered even for a second.
‘Tommy, you wish to be an oilman, do you?’
‘Yes, Uncle.’
‘It’s no easy business.’
‘No, Uncle.’
‘It’s not enough to have a patch of land to drill on, you know. You need money and men and machines and –’
‘I know, Uncle. I know.’
Sir Adam gulped down his tea and stood up. He rumpled Tom’s hair. ‘An oilman, eh?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Well, good for you, Tommy. You’ve a fine piece of land to begin with.’
6
Tom had his concession.
Not legally, of course – the boy was only eight, after all – but his all the same. For the first time in his life, he felt he had something equivalent to what Guy had, to what Alan had, to what Sir Adam had.
And not just equivalent. Better.
Because, young as he was, Tom had understood something from the very start. He couldn’t have put his understanding into words, but he understood it all the same. And he was right.
Because oil isn’t just oil, the way cabbages are only cabbages, or steel is only steel. Oil is more than a liquid. It’s more than another commodity. Oil isn’t precious, the way gold is, because it sparkles nicely and looks pretty on a lady’s neck.
Oil makes the world go round. Even in the opening decade of the twentieth century, its massive power was becoming visible. Cars ran off it. Ships burned it. Factories needed it. On land and sea, the world went oil-crazy. Navies were converted to burn oil. Armies packed their shells full of high explosive made with oil by-products. And every day chemists found new uses for it; speed records were being shattered with it; men dreamed of powered flight with it.
But even that wasn’t the reason why oil mattered.
The reason was this. Man doesn’t make oil; God does. If you’ve got a big enough field and a big enough bank account, you can build yourself an auto factory. Don’t like cars? Then get a bigger field and build yourself an airplane factory. Or start an airline. Build a store. Open a bank.
Oil isn’t like that. Not anyone can start up in the oil business. To start in oil, you’ve got to have some land that sits over an oilfield. No matter how rich you are, if you don’t own the drilling rights, you don’t have squat. And that’s the reason.
Oil isn’t just fuel, though it’s the best fuel in the world.
Oil isn’t just money, though it’s the closest damn thing to money that exists.
Oil is power, because everyone wants it and there’s only so much to go round.
‘Talibus orabat dictis arasque tenebat,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘cum sic orsa loqui vates.’
He walked around the schoolroom at Whitcombe House tapping out the rhythm of the Latin with his hands. Tom and Alan sat with their schoolbooks lying closed in front of them. They would have looked out of the windows, except that the schoolroom windows were pitched deliberately high, revealing nothing except a wide, bare square of sky. Tom yawned.
‘Sate sanguine divum, Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno,’ continued the schoolmaster. ‘Creeley, translate for me, if you please.’
Tom said nothing. He didn’t move to open his books.
‘Creeley, if you please.’
Silence.
The schoolmaster frowned. ‘Montague, then. Translate for me, if you would.’
Alan too sat like a stone, staring down at his desk. Unlike Tom, who actually enjoyed these moments, Alan found them difficult – difficult, but in this case essential.
‘Am I to understand that neither of you has prepared today’s lesson? Creeley? Montague?’
Then Tom spoke. ‘Please, sir, we would prefer to study Persian.’
Six minutes later, the two boys were standing in front of Sir Adam. A cane lay on the table in front of them. The cane was yellow and knobbled all the way along its length. It wasn’t an implement they’d seen used very much, but that didn’t mean it mightn’t be now. Tom and Alan stared at it unhappily.
‘You won’t learn your Latin?’ said Sir Adam.
Tom shook his head, slightly but definitely.
Alan echoed his twin’s gesture, but added, ‘We don’t mind learning Latin, Father, but we think it would be better to learn something useful as well.’
‘Persian? That’s your idea of useful, is it?’
The two boys exchanged glances. So close was their communication, they hardly had to speak to understand each other. It was a fact of life that the adults of the family needed to get used to. Alan nodded slightly to Tom, as though to confirm some invisible agreement.
‘It’s for the oil, you see,’ said Alan reasonably. ‘We’re going to need to speak the language.’
Sir Adam held his hand over his mouth. The two boys looked back at each other, then at the bamboo cane.
‘If you boys want to learn Persian, I suppose that might be arranged,’ said Sir Adam. ‘What I don’t like is the fact that you didn’t prepare your Latin lesson. That’s no way to win an argument.’
‘Oh, but we did,’ said Alan.
‘You did? That’s not what –’
‘Of course we did, Father,’ Alan interrupted, supplying a quick translation from the morning’s lesson. ‘We only said we didn’t because we didn’t think anyone would take notice of us otherwise.’
Sir Adam frowned. ‘You could have asked. If you had –’
‘I did ask,’ said Tom, interrupting. ‘Twice. Two weeks ago at breakfast. Again last week.’ He spoke with a kind of flat stubbornness; not exactly asking for trouble, but quite ready for it if it came. ‘You kept saying maybe.’
‘Very well, then. Persian it is. I shall give you the first few lessons myself, until I can find a schoolmaster to take over.’
‘Thank you, Father.’
It was Alan who spoke, but with the two boys it hardly mattered which of them said the words: each always spoke for them both.
‘Good. Then it’s back to your Latin. At least, I assume so. Unless you have any other ideas I should know about?’
His tone was sarcastic, but sarcasm has a habit of bouncing off eight-year-olds. The two boys exchanged glances again. This time, it was Tom’s turn to speak.
‘Thank you, Uncle, yes. We think it’s high time we learned some geology.’
Tom’s face looked perfectly innocent, but Sir Adam knew that the look concealed a will of steel. The older man was exasperated, but proud. Proud and fond. He rumpled the two boys’ heads.
‘Geology too, eh, Tommy? Very well then, geology too.’
7
For two long years, the drillers drilled.
1902 and 1903 passed away. Knox D’Arcy, by now a family friend, kept Sir Adam closely informed about his progress out in Persia. Sir Adam told Alan and Tom. Conditions were almost intolerable. Heat, dust, insects, equipment failures and disease were turning the search for oil into a nightmare. Costs spiralled wildly upwards. Even a man as rich as D’Arcy began to worry about the impact on his purse.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst was simply this: so far, two years and hundreds of thousands of pounds into the search, no oil had been found.
Tom somehow managed to maintain his enthusiasm, though each new disappointment was like a personal setback. The two boys stuck to their Persian studies, but when Sir Adam suggested that their lessons be reduced from three a week to just one, neither boy objected. Their geological studies continued for a while, then lapsed when their teacher moved abroad. Sir Adam didn’t seek a new teacher. The children didn’t ask that he did.
And then it changed.
One marvellous day, in January 1904, when the two boys were ten years old, a telegram came from Knox D’Arcy in London. ‘GLORIOUS NEWS,’ he cabled, ‘OIL AT LAST.’
Tom went wild.
When he saw the telegram, he let out a yelp of excitement so loud that the dogs were set barking as far away as the stable yard. Together with Alan, he set off on a dance of delight that sent him tearing right through the house, right through the grounds, down to his father’s cottage and then back again. Tom’s joyous energy lasted all that day.
At dinner that night, when Guy happened to admire the new gunroom that Sir Adam had installed, Tom nodded his young head and commented, ‘Yes, Uncle, you’ve done it very well. I shall do it like that in my country house, when I get it.’
8
It was Guy who cracked first.
There was something about Tom’s new-found confidence that he couldn’t stand. The enmity that simmered between the two of them crackled and spat with renewed energy. Boiling point arrived one weekend in early February, when the house was full of guests – including the pretty young daughter of an earl, whom eighteen-year-old Guy was sweet on.
‘Fetch my horse, stable boy!’ said Guy, passing Tom in the hallway and casually reaching out to flick his ear.
Tom stopped dead.
‘Your horse?’
‘You heard me, stable boy. I feel like riding today.’
Tom’s face whitened. The seven-year age gap between the two of them had never held Tom back from a physical confrontation when necessary. He looked Guy up and down, from boots to head and back again. His gaze seemed to assess Guy truthfully for the very first time. Then he dropped his gaze. He shrugged and said, ‘If you like. I don’t mind. I’m going that way anyway.’ He sauntered off.
Guy couldn’t quite believe that Tom was going to do as he’d asked, but didn’t mind waiting to see. A group of house guests emerged from the drawing room and Guy strolled with them to the front of the house. Guy, in riding costume, stood and chatted. The earl’s daughter was there and Guy (slightly plump still, but charming and handsome enough to make up) stood swishing his whip and trying to impress her. She laughed a lot and blushed slightly when she caught his eye.
Then Tom arrived.
He had complied with Guy’s request to the letter – or very nearly. He had gone to the stable yard and saddled a mount. He led the animal in question by its bridle to the spot that Guy had indicated.
But it wasn’t Guy’s grey mare he led. It was the donkey Guy had learned to ride on, a dozen years before. Guy’s saddle and stirrups drooped ridiculously low off the donkey’s back. The animal was old now and nodded its head ludicrously as it walked, as though deliberately setting out to provoke laughter. Tom himself walked with the exaggerated dignity of an expensive manservant. He had even, absurdly, found a pair of white gloves from somewhere and an old footman’s cap.
‘Your horse, sir.’
The assembled house guests laughed and clapped at the spectacle. It seemed like a harmless comic turn, deserving its applause. But Tom hadn’t finished. He brought the horse close to Guy and his girl, before addressing the girl in a confidential whisper.
‘Excuse the donkey, ma’am. He learned to ride on one, you know. Poor chap’s just a little bit yellow.’
Guy was white with anger, but with an audience all around him he was forced to act as though he didn’t care. He laughed and clapped with the rest of them, before taking the donkey and heading back with it to the stables. After hanging around to milk the congratulations, Tom hurried off to join him.
‘I’ll kill you for this, you little brat,’ said Guy, without turning round to look.
‘Like you killed my mother, you mean?’ said Tom, who had long ago heard the story of his birth in the various versions that flew around the servants’ hall.
They had arrived at the stable yard. A couple of stable lads sniggered discreetly as they watched. Guy stopped. He flicked his whip at the stables and the big house beyond.
‘None of this is yours, you know. Not now. Not ever. Got that, garden boy?’
For a short while, that had appeared to be that, but Guy hadn’t forgiven, hadn’t forgotten.
Four days later, Guy was alone with Sir Adam in the billiard room. Sir Adam had just had news from Knox D’Arcy. The oil well in Persia was yielding just a hundred and twenty barrels a day, but there was great expectation of enlarging the strike to something far more lucrative. D’Arcy was already hopeful of finding City investors to share the risks and profits.
‘Must have increased the value of our own little bit of concession,’ remarked Guy.
‘Yes, I should suppose it has. I suppose once they’ve discovered even a little bit of oil, it makes it all the more likely that there’s more to be found.’
Guy, who was a decent billiards player, threw the three balls softly on to the table and began to knock them around with a cue. Sir Adam watched the game, but hardly played any more these days and was happy to drink his brandy and watch his son.
‘What will you do with the concession?’ asked Guy. ‘I suppose if you were going to sell, now would be the time.’
Sir Adam looked up in surprise. ‘Why, that’s hardly a fair question! It’s not really mine to sell. Little Tommy absolutely treasures the thing.’
Guy let out a small puff of laughter as he took his shot. The three balls, trapped on the same bit of baize, clattered round and round against each other. Guy straightened again and chalked his cue.
‘Little Tommy might absolutely treasure one of your paintings, Papa, but if it made commercial sense to sell it, then I dare say you would.’
‘I dare say, but the concession belongs to Tommy.’
‘Legally, Father? I’m surprised.’
‘No, no, no. Of course not legally. Morally. I told him he could have it.’
‘Did you? Really? As I recall, you told him it was a fine patch of land. That’s hardly the same thing.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Guy! I meant he could have it. He knew I meant it. The boy’s besotted with the damn thing.’ Sir Adam spoke sharply. Guy was his elder son and heir, but there were times when his behaviour wasn’t all it should have been. There were times when Sir Adam didn’t entirely like his own son.
‘Yes, Father,’ said Guy, ‘but, with respect, you’re missing the point. You gave him the land because you were certain it was worthless. If you had been sure it had been worth something, you wouldn’t have dreamed of conceding it like that.’
Sir Adam frowned, waving his brandy glass as though to brush his son’s point aside.
‘Well? Would you?’ Guy insisted.
‘No, I suppose I wouldn’t. But that’s hardly –’
‘Father, may I be blunt?’
‘It would seem you’re more than capable of it.’
‘The concession is yours. Legally yours. You let an eight-year-old boy dream about managing it because he clearly wanted to dream and you saw no reason why not. But now, against all probability, the concession may actually have a value. Suppose, sir, a syndicate of investors in London were prepared to pay something for the blasted thing. A hundred thousand pounds, let us say. What then? That would dwarf any settlement you’re able to make for Alan. I don’t think of myself in this matter, but it’s hard to avoid noticing that it would look like a very fine thing if your elder son and heir had barely greater expectations than the boy you rescued from the kitchen garden.’ Guy struck the balls savagely round the table. Again and again, the cue ball slammed the red into the pockets. The red disappeared with an abrupt clack of ivory against wood. ‘I think you have been very generous to young Tommy, Father. I’m not sure you’re holding Alan sufficiently in your thoughts.’
9
From that point on, events ran a hideously predictable course.
Sir Adam, unable to put Guy’s comments out of mind, decided to write in confidence to his London stockbroker, asking him – discreetly – to try to gauge whether there was any value in the Persian concession. Sir Adam told Guy that he had done as much. Guy let a few days pass, then told Tom.
Angrier than he’d ever been in his life, Tom flew to Sir Adam.
‘Uncle?’
‘Tommy! Hello there!’
‘What’s this about the concession?’
Sir Adam liked and admired Tom. The boy had pluck, doggedness, flair and passion. But, in moments of fury, he could also be rude, even violently rude. Sir Adam frowned.
‘What’s what?’ Sir Adam’s voice should have sent a warning, but Tom was unstoppable.
‘What are you doing with my concession?’
‘It’s not your concession, Tom. It’s in my name as your guardian.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘What makes you think I’m doing anything at all?’
‘Guy.’
Sir Adam answered slowly, trying to keep his calm. He nodded. ‘At Guy’s suggestion, which was a good one, I am taking steps to discover if the concession has marketable value. It may well do, seeing as D’Arcy seems on the verge of a major discovery in a region not so very far from our own patch.’
‘My patch. My concession.’
Then Sir Adam got angry. Tom’s impertinence was too much.
‘It is not your concession, Tom, nor is anything else for that matter, unless and until I damned well give it to you.’
‘You did give it. You said.’
‘I said it was a fine patch of land and I hoped you’d have fun dreaming about it. The idea that it might come to be yours – might one day come to be yours – arose when I believed the property in question to be without value.’
Tom almost staggered backwards. He crashed back against a mahogany sideboard.
‘You gave it to me because you thought it was worth nothing?’ Tom half laughed to himself. ‘And you’ve taken it back, at Guy’s suggestion?’ He blinked and looked down at the sideboard, where there stood a vase and, next to it, a framed photograph of the family: Sir Adam, Pamela, Guy, Tom, Alan. ‘Thank you, Uncle. I understand.’
He nodded once as though confirming something to himself, then swept his hand along the sideboard, knocking the photo to the floor. Almost by accident, he also caught the vase and toppled that too. The blue and white china shattered with a hollow boom and littered the floor with its wreckage.
Tom stared briefly and unemotionally at the mess, before walking quickly out of the room.
10
Alan paused at the door to the seed shed.
The building was invisible from the big house and the nearest gardeners were over the far side of the kitchen garden. Alan watched them go about their business, until he was sure that none of them was watching. Then he quickly slipped the catch and entered.
The wooden-built shed was about twenty-five feet long by only eight wide, with a line of windows running down the south side. Now, with winter ending, the workbenches were crammed with trays of compost, ready for the March sowing. The shed had a warm smell of earth and wood and growth and sunlight. A couple of mice scuttled away as Alan closed the door. Apart from the mice, there was total silence inside the shed. Once again, Alan checked he hadn’t been seen, then he raised his arms to one of the roof joists and swung himself up.
The roof space was narrow and only two and a half foot high at its highest. Boards lay loosely along the joists. Apart from some cobwebs and some rusty old garden tools, there was nothing up there. Nothing except Tom.
Alan squirmed forwards to join his twin.
‘Hello,’ said Tom.
Alan produced a paper packet containing bread, ham and cheese. ‘I’ve got apples in my pocket,’ he said.
Tom took the gift in silence. His eye asked a question of Alan and, without needing any further explanation, Alan answered it.
‘There’s an awful fuss,’ he said. ‘They’re looking for you everywhere. Everyone’s sure you’ve gone to your dad’s house. He’s saying not, of course, but I made them think so by pretending to try to get in there when I thought no one was watching. Only they were. I made sure.’
Tom nodded. Alan had done well. It hadn’t needed any secret signal to let Alan know his whereabouts. The two boys had maybe half a dozen favourite hiding places round the house and grounds. Alan had, by instinct, come first to the one where his twin lay hidden.
‘I won’t, you know,’ said Tom. ‘Not until …’
‘Yes, but he’s in an awful stew.’
The two boys’ conversation was always like this: all but incomprehensible to an outsider. Tom meant that he wouldn’t return to Whitcombe House until Sir Adam made the concession over to him properly and for good. Alan doubted that that would happen.
Tom looked at the other and grimaced. ‘I’ll be stuck here for ever then.’
They both laughed.
‘And what about the Donkey?’ Tom made a braying noise and pretended to jump on Alan. They laughed a second time, but Alan was uncomfortable as he answered.
‘Guy got a terrific dressing-down. Father said he’d been told in confidence. Guy said he thought you already knew. I don’t know if Father believed him.’
‘He always does.’
‘Probably.’
They slipped into silence for a while.
‘What’ll you do?’ asked Alan eventually.
‘Oh, I s’pose I’ll stay here for a day or two.’ Tom waved his hand airily round the tiny loft, as though it were an apartment he often rented for the summer.
‘Then what?’
‘It is my concession, you know.’ Tom rolled onto his elbow and looked directly at his twin.
Alan nodded.
‘But it is.’
‘I know. I said yes, didn’t I?’
‘No.’
‘I nodded. That’s the same.’
‘’Tisn’t.’
‘’Tis.’
‘Then say it. Go on then. Say it’s mine.’
‘Look, Father probably will give it in the end. It’s just Guy got him into a stew about it.’
‘There! See? You said he’ll give it in the end. He can’t do that, he’s already given it.’
‘Not with the legal bit as well,’ objected Alan. ‘I meant with the legal bit. I mean, I know it’s yours.’
Tom stared hard at the other, little spots of red appearing high on his cheeks. Then he rolled away, staring out of the tiny cobwebbed pane of glass that was his only window.
‘Then I s’pose I’ll have to go to Dad’s place. I’m old enough now.’
Tom didn’t spell out what he meant, but he didn’t have to. Alan understood. Tom meant that he’d go and live permanently with his father, away from Whitcombe House, away from Alan. The only thing that would stop him would be if Sir Adam backed down and made definite and permanent his gift of the concession.
Alan swallowed. He pretended to be calm, and began poking at the cobwebs with a bit of twig, while kicking his feet against the low roof just above. But he wasn’t calm. Tom was threatening to leave. Tom was implying that a quarrel over property was more important than the two boys’ friendship. He scooped up a bit of cobweb that had an insect caught in it: trapped and dying.
‘Look.’
‘So?’
Alan shrugged and scraped the insect off.
‘You know that vase?’
‘Yes.’
‘Apparently it was worth tons of money. About a thousand guineas, I should think. It didn’t help.’
‘So what? He shouldn’t have –’
‘You could say sorry.’
‘What!?’
‘Just to get him to calm down a bit. I only mean to make him calm down.’
‘You think I ought to say sorry?’
‘Look, he’s probably not going to sell the concession. He probably knows it’s yours really.’
‘Probably? D’you think you’re probably going to get your stupid farm or whatever? Do you think the Donkey is probably going to get everything else?’ Tom’s blood-spots had vanished now, leaving his face pale, and there was extraordinary intensity in his long-lashed blue eyes. As Tom looked at things, every time he challenged Alan to take sides, Alan tried to be nice but ended up taking his family’s cause. Even now, this late in the conversation, Alan hadn’t even said directly that the concession was Tom’s.
‘Anyway,’ cried Alan, ‘what does it matter? If I get the stupid old farm, then you can have half of it. You don’t think I wouldn’t share? Who cares about the stupid concession?’
It was a disastrous thing to say.
Tom stared for a full ten seconds at his twin, then looked away. He put the paper packet of food in his pocket, wriggled backwards to the gap in the boards, then swung the lower half of his body down. With his head still poking through into the roof space, he said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to my dad’s now. I don’t care if they see me. They can’t stop me, can they? Bye.’
And he was gone.
Away from the seed shed, away from the big house, away from the family that had brought him up.
11
For twenty-four hours: stand-off.
In Tom’s eyes, Alan had said the worst thing he could have possibly said. ‘Who cares about the stupid concession?’ As far as Tom was concerned, Alan might as well have said, ‘Who cares if you’re a proper part of the Montague family or not?’
At the same time, as far as Alan was concerned, Tom had also committed the worst crime imaginable. As Alan saw it, Tom had placed a trivial argument about money and land over the best thing in the entire world: their friendship, their twinhood.
And so the quarrel persisted. Tom stayed at his father’s cottage. Alan stayed in the big house. For the first time since they’d been able to talk, they spent an entire day without speaking to each other. For the first time since they’d been able to walk, they spent an entire day without each other’s company.
On the evening of the following day, Alan slipped away early to bed.
To bed, but not to sleep. He opened his bedroom window, climbed quickly across the kitchen roofs, slid down a drainpipe and ran across the lawns and fields to Jack Creeley’s cottage. Once there, he tossed a pebble up at Tom’s window, saw it open, then scrambled quickly up the branching wisteria and tumbled in over the sill.
The room was lit by a single paraffin-wax candle. Tom was sitting on the bed with a boy’s magazine open in front of him. He nodded hello. Alan grinned back: the smile of a would-be peacemaker.
‘Well?’ said Tom.
Alan was momentarily confused. He didn’t know what Tom meant by his ‘Well?’ and he was taken aback by the loss of their normal invisible communication.
‘What do you mean?’ he said stupidly. ‘Well, what?’
‘You know. I mean I s’pose you’ve come to say sorry.’
‘What?!’
‘You heard.’
Alan was temporarily blank with astonishment. He knew perfectly well how remorseless his twin could be: remorseless and even cruel. But he’d never expected to feel the edge of it himself. Alan’s head jerked back.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘As a matter of fact, I came to see if you were sorry yet. Obviously not.’
Alan was still sitting on the ledge of the window and he swung his legs out of it again onto the wisteria branch. But he didn’t drop away out of sight. He hung there, half in, half out of the room, waiting for Tom to say something that would let him come back in. But he was disappointed.
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Obviously not.’
Alan shrugged. The shrug was meant to be a defiant, couldn’t-care-less affair, but the candle’s light was enough to show that his mouth and eyes obviously cared very much indeed.
‘Well then,’ said Alan, still hanging in the window.
‘Well then.’
The two boys stared at each other a few seconds longer. Eventually Tom looked away, back at his magazine. Alan found a lower hold for his feet, wriggled once, then dropped away out of sight.
Alan went straight home, but not to bed.
He climbed up onto the kitchen roof and lay there on his back, looking up at the starlight overhead. He was angry with Tom. As angry as he’d ever been. The two boys quarrelled often enough, but always made up quickly. When they fought, as they often did, their rules were simple.
Never submit.
Never give up.
While Tom was a little stronger, Alan had a longer reach. While Tom could be surprisingly fierce, Alan’s pride and determination always kept him in the fight to the very end. And then, when the fight was over, it was over. The two boys were the best of friends. They could be at each other’s throats one minute and walk away, calmly chatting, the next.
But this was different and Alan knew it. For two and a half hours, he lay on his back watching the stars wheel and turn. He went over everything in his mind. On the one hand, there was Tom’s temper and recklessness, and his stubborn refusal to compromise. On the other hand, there was Guy’s unkindness and Sir Adam’s unfairness. By the end of his long vigil, he’d made up his mind. It was he, Alan, who was going to have to do the impossible. It was he who was going to have to make things right.
Having made up his mind, he went to bed.
In the morning, after breakfast he spoke to Sir Adam.
‘Father, I want to ask you something.’
‘Yes?’
‘I think you should give Tom the concession. Properly. You did give it to him before, you know. I know you didn’t exactly say so, but everyone knew what you meant.’
Sir Adam sighed and bent down so that his face was on a level with his son’s.
‘But see here, Alan,’ Sir Adam said, ‘just suppose the thing turns out to be worth a fortune. It could be worth as much as Whitcombe House and all its land. It’s not that I don’t think that Tommy’s worth that. Of course he is. But there’s you and Guy to consider. How would you feel if Tommy was as rich as Mr D’Arcy and you were stuck with your very little patch in Marlborough?’
‘I shouldn’t care.’
‘Not now, maybe, but perhaps you would. These things do matter more as you grow, you know.’
‘Then give it to us.’ It was an idea of genius – the idea that had come to him last night on the tiles of the kitchen roof.
‘What?’
‘If that’s what you’re so worried about, then give the concession to me and Tom. Both of us. Only then you have to share the Marlborough place between us too. Then we’d be exactly the same, whatever happens.’
‘But …’
Sir Adam swallowed his protests. In the much more likely event that the concession was worthless, he’d be halving the property he’d set aside for his own blood-son. But, however much he felt this, he knew better than to argue the point with a passionate Alan.
‘Because we are the same, aren’t we, Father? Exactly the same.’
Of course you are, only –’
‘Well, there you go. Simple! Can I go and tell him now?’
‘It isn’t that simple. Your mother and I –’
‘Oh, don’t worry about her. I’ll go and talk to her.’
Alan ran off to his mother and argued the case with her. Although she said little, Alan quite correctly sensed that she was on his side.
‘I’ll talk it over with your papa,’ she promised.
She was as good as her word. That morning she spent an hour or two in patient argument with her husband. Sir Adam’s sticking point remained the likelihood that he’d be disinheriting Alan. Sir Adam was prosperous enough, but he certainly wasn’t vastly well off. Alan’s portion was never going to have been large and Sir Adam was anxious not to cut it in half. But Pamela was determined. She had some money of her own that had lain dormant with a City bank for many years. When she looked again at how much she had, it was much more than she’d believed. She insisted on adding her own money to Alan’s portion, but on condition that Sir Adam did as his son wanted.
And in the end he agreed.
By the end of that day, when lessons were finished, Sir Adam called Alan into his library.
‘Well, my boy, I’ve news for you.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve made certain arrangements, the upshot of which is that you and Tommy can share the farm and share the concession. Because of your mother’s generosity, there may even be a little money to go along with it as well.’
Alan stood open-mouthed, hardly daring to believe that he’d won. ‘Really, Father?’
‘Really.’
‘With all the legals and everything?’
Sir Adam smiled. ‘You’re ten and a half, my boy. So is Tommy. There’ll be time enough for the legal side when you’re of age. But if you mean, is my decision final, then yes it is.’
Alan breathed out a sigh of relief. It seemed an eternity since Tom had gone.
‘Thank you!’
‘Now, it’s up to you, young man, but there may be somebody you want to go and tell about this.’
Though it was still only spring, Sir Adam’s window was set half open. Alan paused an instant longer, as though to check that what he’d heard was real, not an illusion. Then he moved. He ran across the room, jumped through the open window, and went streaking across the lawns to find his twin.
He wasn’t disappointed.
Tom wasn’t simply pleased, he was ecstatic. And (from Alan’s point of view) what mattered most was that although Tom was delighted to have won his concession, his joy over the reunion with Alan was greater still. The twins were together again – stronger after the break, it appeared, than before it. With joint ownership of the concession, they became oil fanatics together. Oil was their obsession, the sign of what united them as twins. Whitcombe House welcomed Tom back.
Life resumed its normal course, only better.
That should have been it. Argument over. Done and dusted. Forgotten and forgiven.
And so it was. Almost. But when emotions run so high and for so long, they leave their mark.
Alan had learned a lesson – an almost unconscious one, perhaps, but one so deeply etched that he never forgot it. When Tom’s passions were aroused, he could be dangerous, irresponsible, uncompromising.
And Tom too had learned his lesson. When the chips were down, Alan had proved unreliable. Given the choice between Tom and family, Alan was a compromiser, an evader, an ally of divided loyalties.
The lessons had been learned and would never be forgotten.
And the oil?
Knox D’Arcy’s glorious news looked feebler and less glorious by the week. By the end of May, and despite all the efforts of the drilling team in Persia, the flow of oil dwindled and died. D’Arcy’s expenses continued to mount. The chances of finding oil anywhere – let alone in the twins’ stony stretch of mountains – seemed ever more remote. D’Arcy searched for new investors to share the strain.
It seemed that he had gambled vastly and lost utterly.
The two boys continued to learn their Persian and their geology. They continued to follow D’Arcy’s fortunes at the new drilling site of Masjid-i-Suleiman. Their fascination with the business continued unabated. In fact, if anything, with the oil concession now fairly and squarely shared between the two of them, their determination to explore for oil together was stronger than ever before. But, aged only ten, they’d already learned the most important lesson the oil business had to teach.
You could drill hard. You could drill well. You could drill in a place where oil was literally seeping from the ground.
And you could still fail.
Lose money.
Go broke.
PART TWO
Do you know, brother, that you are a prince?
A son of Adam?
Jalal al-din Rumi (1207–1273)
12
It’s late June 1914.
The summer is a warm one, golden even. The international scene is peaceful. The tensions that have bubbled away in Europe for the last dozen or more years are certainly no worse than they have been and quite probably a good deal better.
Seven British warships have joined the German Imperial High Seas fleet for the Elbe Regatta: a week of racing, dancing, music and fireworks. When finally the British fleet steams away, the British admiral signals to his hosts: ‘Friends in the past and friends for ever.’
In Serbia, an archduke has been killed by an anarchist, but who cares? Serbia is Serbia, and in that part of the world, archdukes are two a penny.
Alan and Tom are grown men now, twenty-one years of age. Their future lies ahead of them, a sparkling ocean on which anything could happen.
Alan has grown into a tall man, pale blond hair, eyes of pale blue, eyebrows so fair you can hardly see them. He has his father’s lean hawkishness, though softened by hints of his mother: her smile, her appearance of mild worry.
Alan is at Oxford, finishing his final examinations. The exams have been gruelling and exhausting, but they’ll soon be over. His degree will be in Natural Science, a subject he has little time for, except that it allows him to specialise in his chosen field of geology.
Because D’Arcy’s adventures in oil hadn’t ended. He’d found his investors, he’d continued to drill. And in 1907, six years from first beginning, he struck oil.
Oil on a huge scale. No trickle this time, but a gush so vast that one of the world’s great companies was in the process of being built upon it. The company, now named Anglo-Persian, has a use for resourceful young geologists, and, as soon as September comes around, Alan will start work on the Persian-Mesopotamian border, scouting for oil. But that’s September. In between now and then, he has two clear months for riding, shooting and fishing in the country, and for balls and parties in London.
Tom, too, is doing well.
He’s shorter than Alan, but stronger, broad in the shoulder, glossy dark hair with a hint of curl. His face is almost picture-book handsome: wide, strong and with a dazzling smile that comes quickly and fades slowly. Unlike Alan, Tom is already highly experienced with the girls. It seems he’s never without them. Alan laughs about it, but also finds it embarrassing. Where Tom is a veteran, Alan is wholly inexperienced.
And there’s another way in which Tom is running ahead of Alan: in business.
Once his schooling was over, Tom rejected a possible scholarship to Oxford and instead won a position with the American giant, Standard Oil, in their London office. He’s doing well. Talented and energetic, he’s already building a name for himself as one of the most able young men in the company. Though Tom works hard, he joins up with Alan every weekend and they spend their time together either dancing and socialising in London, or riding and shooting in the country.
And Guy?
These days, Guy seems altogether less significant. The enmities of childhood appear to have faded. If the old hatreds haven’t exactly disappeared, they don’t make a lot of difference now. Tom is in London. Guy seems to be anywhere but. Guy is a soldier, a major, with a particular aptitude for staff work. Tom and Guy don’t see much of each other, aren’t likely to see each other much in the future. When their paths do cross, they are coldly polite.
But, meantime, summer 1914 is a golden one.
It’s one to be enjoyed, a time when the best thing in the world to be is a young Englishman with the future a sparkling ocean at his feet. Tom and Alan hardly feel the need to signal anything to each other, but if they did, they’d send the same signal as the British admiral in Kiel. ‘Friends in the past and friends for ever.’
The trouble with archdukes is that if you have one and you lose one, you can’t just say to hell with it, we’ll get another. So Austria, who happened to own the archduke in question, sent an ultimatum to Serbia, who stood accused of supporting the anarchists. Roughly speaking, the ultimatum said, ‘We’re very upset about our archduke and we’d like you to do some serious grovelling.’
So Serbia grovelled.
Serbia was little and Austria-Hungary was big, not to mention the fact that the Austrians and the Germans were best of friends and the Germans were well known to fancy a spot of military adventure. So Serbia grovelled. Profusely. Unreservedly. Embarrassingly.
But, unfortunately, if you fancy a spot of military adventure – if you’re all geared up for it, looking forward to it, been promising Auntie Helga a postcard from Belgrade – then a conciliatory reply isn’t necessarily enough to hold you back. So Austria declared war.
Now the trouble with starting wars is that your neighbours are apt to get a little nervous. Russia sat right next to strong Austria and mighty Germany, and it seemed that there was about to be a war on her doorstep. This made Russia a little twitchy, so she mobilised her troops, all six million of them.
Whoops! Here was Austria-Hungary hoping for a nice little war in its back garden, when all of a sudden the biggest country in Europe has mobilised its massive population and placed it on a war footing. Germany called on Russia to demobilise, but, as the Russians looked at it, that was a bit like the fox inviting the chicken to come out of the roost. Russia told the Germans to get lost, and Germany too got ready for war.
Now the trouble with Germany mobilising its army is that the French feel kind of twitchy. The French are a generous race with a well-deserved reputation for hospitality, but when you’ve had a few thousand uninvited guests marching through your capital city only a few decades before, you can be excused for getting nervous. What’s more, France had an alliance with Russia, and the Germans and Russians weren’t looking too friendly these days. Germany asked France to abandon her alliance with Russia, but France said no.
The way Germany saw things, if war was coming then it made a whole lot of sense to stay one step ahead of the game. And, say what you like about the Germans, when they set out to do a thing, by golly they do it thoroughly.
Looking back on it, neither Tom nor Alan nor anybody else could have explained why one more assassination in the assassination capital of the world should have triggered the largest armed conflict in world history. But, explicable or not, that’s precisely what happened.
Needing a quick victory in the west to ensure decisive gains in the east, Germany sent its troops into Belgium, destination Paris. The British – deeply reluctant to go to war, but equally reluctant to hand Europe over to the Germans – asked Germany kindly to leave Belgium alone. The Germans said no, and Britain too was at war.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
