The Forsyte Saga(9)

He woke. June had gone! James had said he would be lonely. James had always been a poor thing. He recollected with satisfaction that he had bought that house over James’s head. Serve him right for sticking at the price; the only thing the fellow thought of was money. Had he given too much, though? It wanted a lot of doing to – He dared say he would want all his money before he had done with this affair of June’s. He ought never to have allowed the engagement. She had met this Bosinney at the house of Baynes – Baynes and Bildeboy, the architects. He believed that Baynes, whom he knew – a bit of an old woman – was the young man’s uncle by marriage. After that she’d been always running after him; and when she took a thing into her head there was no stopping her. She was continually taking up with ‘lame ducks’ of one sort or another. This fellow had no money, but she must needs become engaged to him – a harum-scarum, unpractical chap, who would get himself into no end of difficulties.

She had come to him one day in her slap-dash way and told him; and, as if it were any consolation, she had added:

‘He’s so splendid; he’s often lived on cocoa for a week!’

‘And he wants you to live on cocoa too?’

‘Oh no; he is getting into the swim now.’

Old Jolyon had taken his cigar from under his white moustache, stained by coffee at the edge, and looked at her, that little slip of a thing who had got such a grip of his heart. He knew more about ‘swims’ than his granddaughter. But she, having clasped her hands on his knees, rubbed her chin against him, making a sound like a purring cat. And, knocking the ash off his cigar, he had exploded in nervous desperation:

‘You’re all alike; you won’t be satisfied till you’ve got what you want. If you must come to grief, you must; I wash my hands of it.’

So, he had washed his hands of it, making the condition that they should not marry until Bosinney had at least four hundred a year.

‘I shan’t be able to give you very much,’ he had said, a formula to which June was not unaccustomed. ‘Perhaps this What’s-his-name will provide the cocoa.’

He had hardly seen anything of her since it began. A bad business! He had no notion of giving her a lot of money to enable a fellow he knew nothing about to live on in idleness. He had seen that sort of thing before; no good ever came of it. Worst of all, he had no hope of shaking her resolution; she was as obstinate as a mule, always had been from a child. He didn’t see where it was to end. They must cut their coat according to their cloth. He would not give way till he saw young Bosinney with an income of his own. That June would have trouble with the fellow was as plain as a pikestaff; he had no more idea of money than a cow. As to this rushing down to Wales to visit the young man’s aunts, he fully expected they were old cats.

And, motionless, old Jolyon stared at the wall; but for his open eyes, he might have been asleep.… The idea of supposing that young cub Soames could give him advice! He had always been a cub, with his nose in the air! He would be setting up as a man of property next, with a place in the country! A man of property! H’mph! Like his father, he was always nosing out bargains, a cold-blooded young beggar!

He rose, and, going to the cabinet, began methodically stocking his cigar-case from a bundle fresh in. They were not bad at the price, but you couldn’t get a good cigar nowadays, nothing to hold a candle to those old Superfinos of Hanson and Bridger’s. That was a cigar!

The thought, like some stealing perfume, carried him back to those wonderful nights at Richmond when after dinner he sat smoking on the terrace of the Crown and Sceptre with Nicholas Treffry and Traquair and Jack Herring and Anthony Thornworthy. How good his cigars were then. Poor old Nick! – dead, and Jack Herring – dead, and Traquair – dead of that wife of his, and Thornworthy – awfully shaky (no wonder, with his appetite).

Of all the company of those days he himself alone seemed left, except Swithin, of course, and he so outrageously big there was no doing anything with him.

Difficult to believe it was so long ago; he felt young still! Of all his thoughts, as he stood there counting his cigars, this was the most poignant, the most bitter. With his white head and his loneliness he had remained young and green at heart. And those Sunday afternoons on Hampstead Heath, when young Jolyon and he went for a stretch along the Spaniards Road to Highgate, to Child’s Hill, and back over the Heath again to dine at Jack Straw’s Castle – how delicious his cigars were then! And such weather! There was no weather now.

When June was a toddler of five, and every other Sunday he took her to the Zoo, away from the society of those two good women, her mother and her grandmother, and at the top of the bear-den baited his umbrella with buns for her favourite bears, how sweet his cigars were then!