第 5 页

For there in a corner, slumped against the wall, sat the Baron, uninjured but stunned, staring into space, alive only because the conquerors needed someone to be responsible for the prisoners. Wladek went over to him, while the others sat as far away from their master as possible. The two gazed at each other, as they had on the first day they had met. Wladek put his hand out, and as on the first day the Baron took it. Wladek watched the tears course down the Baron's proud face. Neither spoke. They had both lost the one person they had loved most in the world.

6

William Kane grew very quickly, and was considered an adorable child by all who came in contact with him; in the early years of his life these were generally besotted relatives and doting servants.

The top floor of the Kanes' eighteenth-century house in Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill had been converted into nursery quarters, crammed with toys. A further bedroom and a sitting room were made available for the newly acquired nurse. The floor was far enough away from Richard Kane for him to be unaware of problems such as teething, wet nappies and the irregular and undisciplined cries for more food. First sound, first tooth, first step and first word were all recorded in a family book by William's mother along with the progress in his height and weight. Anne was surprised to find that these statistics differed very little from those of any other child with whom she came into contact on Beacon Hill.

The nurse, an import from England, brought the boy up on a regimen that would have gladdened the heart of a Prussian cavalry officer. William's father would visit him each evening at six o'clock. As he refused to address the child in baby language, he ended up not speaking to him at all; the two merely stared at each other. William would grip his father's index finger, the one with which balance sheets were checked, and hold on to it tightly. Richard would allow himself a smile. At the end of the first year the routine was slightly modified and the boy was allowed to come downstairs to see his father. Richard would sit in his highbacked, maroon leather chair watching his first-born weave his way on all fours in and out of the legs of the furniture reappearing when least expected, which led Richard to observe that the child would undoubtedly become a senator.

William took his first steps at thirteen months while clinging on to the tails of his father's topcoat. His first word was 'Dada', which pleased everyone, including Grandmother Kane and Grandmother Cabot, who were regular visitors. They did not actually push the vehicle in which William was perambulated around Boston, but they did deign to walk a pace behind the nurse in the park on Thursday afternoons, glaring at infants with a less disciplined retinue. While other children fed the ducks in the public gardens, William succeeded in channing the swans in the lagoon of Mr. Jack Gardner's extravagant Venetian Palace.

When two years had passed, the grandmothers intimated by hint and innuendo that it was high time for another prodigy, an appropriate sibling for William. Anne obliged them by becoming pregnant and was distressed to find herself feeling and looking progressively off colour as she entered her fourth month.

Doctor MacKenzie ceased to smile as he checked the growing stomach and hopeful mother, and when Anne miscarried at sixteen weeks he was not altogether surprised, but did not allow her to indulge her grief. In his notes he wrote 'pre-eclampsia?' and then told her, 'Anne, my dear, the reason you have not been feeling so well is that your blood pressure was too high, and would probably have become much higher as your pregnancy progressed. I fear doctors haven't found the answer to blood pressure yet, in fact we know very little other than it'sa dangerous condition for anyone, particularly for a pregnant woman.'

Anne held back her tears while considering the implications of a future without more children.

'Surely it won't happen in my next pregnancy?' she asked, phrasing her question to dispose the doctor to a favourable answer.

'I should be very surprised if it did not, my dear. I am sorry to have to say this to you, but I would strongly advise you against becoming pregnant again.'

'But I don't mind feeling off-colour for a few months if it means.'

'I am not talking about feeling off-colour, Anne. I am talking about not taking any unnecessary risks with your life.' It was a terrible blow for Richard and Anne, who themselves had both been only children, largely as a result of their respective fathers' premature deaths. They had both assumed that they would produce a family appropriate to the commanding size of their house and their responsibilities to the next generation. 'What else is there for a young woman to do?' enquired Grandmother Cabot of Grandmother Kane. No one cared to mention the subject again, and William became the centre of everyone's attention.

Richard, who had taken over as the president of Kane and Cabot Bank and Trust Company when his father had died in 1904, had always immersed himself in the work of the bank. The bank, which stood on State Street, a bastion of architectural and fiscal solidity, had offices in New York, London and San Francisco. The last had presented a problem to Richard soon after William's birth when, along with Crocker National Bank, Wells Fargo, and the California Bank, it collapsed to the ground, not financially, but literally, in the great earthquake of 1906. Richard, by nature a cautious man, was comprehensively insured with Lloyd's of London. Gentlemen all, they had paid up to the penny, enabling Richard to rebuild. Nevertheless, Richard spent an uncomfortable year jolting across America on the four-day train journey between Boston and San Francisco, supervising the rebuilding.

He opened the new office in Union Square in October 1907, barely in time to turn his attention to other problems arising on the Eastern seaboard. There was a minor run on the New York banks, and many of the smaller establishments were unable to cope with large withdrawals and started going to the wall. J. P. Morgan, the. legendary chairman of the mighty bank bearing his name, invited Richard to join a consortium to hold firm during the crisis. Richard agreed, the courageous stand worked, and the problem began to dissipate, but not before Richard had had a few sleepless nights,

William, on the other hand, slept soundly, unaware of earthquakes and collapsing banks. After all, there were swans that must be fed and endless trips to and from Milton, Brookline and Beverly to be shown to his distinguished relatives.

Early in the spring of the following year Richard acquired a new toy in return for a cautious investment of capital in a man called Henry Ford, who was claiming he could produce a motor car for the people. The bank entertained Mr. Ford at luncheon, and Richard was coaxed into the acquisition of a Model T for the princely sum of eight hundred and fifty dollars.

Henry Ford assured Richard that if only the bank would back him, the cost could eventually fall to three hundred and fifty dollars within a few years and everyone would be buying his cars, thus ensuring a large profit for his backers. Richard did back him, and it was the first time he had placed good money behind someone who wished his product to halve in price.

Richard was initially apprehensive that his motor car, sornbrely black though it was, might not be regarded as a serious mode of transport for the chairman of a bank, but he was reassured by the admixing glances from the pavements which the machine attracted. At ten miles an hour it was noisier than a horse but it did have the virtue of leaving no mess in the middle of Mount Vernon Street. His only quarrel with Mr. Ford was that the man would not listen to the suggestion that a Model T should be made available in a variety of colours. Mr. Ford insisted that every car should be black in order to keep the price down. Anne, more sensitive than her husband to the approbation of polite society, would not drive in the vehicle until the Cabots had acquired one.

William, on the other hand, adored the 'automobile'. as the press called it, and immediately assumed that the vehicle had been bought for him to replace his now redundant and unmechanised pram. He also preferred the chauffeur - with his goggles and flat hat - to his nurse. Grandmother Kane and Grandmother Cabot claimed that they would never travel in the dreadful machine and never did, although it should be pointed out that Grandmother Kane travelled to her funeral in a motor car, but was never informed.

During the next two years the bank grew in strength and size, as did William. Americans were once again investing for expansion, and large sums of money found their way to Kane and Cabot's to be reinvested in such projects as the expanding Lowell leather factory in Lowell, Massachusetts. Richard watched the growth of his bank and his son with unsurprised satisfaction. On William's fifth birthday, he took the child out of womens' hands by engaging at four hundred and fifty dollars per annum a private tutor, a Mr. Munro, personally selected by Richard from a list of eight applicants who had earlier been screened by his private secretary. Mr. Munro was charged to ensure that William was ready to enter St. Paul's by the age of twelve. William immediately took to Mr. Munro, whom he thought to be very old and very clever. He was, in fact, twenty-three and the possessor of a second-class honours, degree in English from the University of Edinburgh.

William quickly learned to read and write with facility but saved his real enthusiasm for figures. His only complaint was that, of the eight lessons taught every weekday, only one was arithmetic. William was quick to point out to his father that one-eighth of the working day was a small investment of time for someone who would one day be the president of a bank.

To compensate for his tutor's lack of foresight, William dogged the footsteps of his accessible relatives with demands for sums to be executed in his head. Grandmother Cabot, who had never been persuaded that the division of an integer by four would necessarily produce the same answer as its multiplication by one quarter, and indeed in her hands the two operations often did result in two different numbers, found herself speedily outclassed by her grandson, but Grandmother Kane, with some small leaning to cleverness, grappled manfully with vulgar fractions, compound interest and the division of eight cakes among nine children. 'Grandmother,' said William, kindly but firmly, when she had failed to find the answer to his latest conundrum, 'you can buy me a slide-rule; then I won't have to bother you.'

She was astonished at her grandson's precocity, but she bought him one just the same, wondering if he really knew how to use the gadget. It was the first time in her life that Grandmother Kane had been known to take the easy way out of any problem.

Richard's problems began to gravitate eastwards. The chairman of his London branch died at his desk and Richard felt himself required in Lombard Street. He suggested to Anne that, she and William should accompany him to Europe, feeling that the education would not do the boy any harm: he could visit all the places about which Mr. Munro had so often talked. Anne, who had never been to Europe, was excited by the prospect, and filled three steamer trunks with elegant and expensive new clothes in which to confront the Old World. William considered it unfair of his mother not to allow him to take that equally essential aid to travel, his bicycle.

The Kanes travelled to New York by train to join the Aquitania bound for her voyage to Southampton. Anne was appalled by the sight of the immigrant street peddlers pushing their wares, and she was glad to be safely on board and resting in her cabin. William, on the other hand, was amazed by the size of New York; he had, until that moment, always imagined that his father's bank was the biggest building in America, if not the world. He wanted to buy a pink and yellow ice cream from a man all dressed in white and wearing a boater, but his father would not hear of it; in any case, Richard never carried small change.

William adored the great vessel on sight and quickly became friendly with the captain, who showed him all the secrets of the Cunard Steamships' prima donna. Richard and Anne, who naturally sat at the captain's table, felt it necessary, before the ship had long left America, to apologise for the amount of the crew's time that their son was occupying.

'Not at all,' replied the white-bearded skipper. 'William and I are already good friends. I only wish I could answer all his questions about time, speed and distance. I have to be coached each night by the first engineer in the hope of first anticipating and then surviving the next day.'

The Aquitania sailed into the Solent to dock at Southampton after a six-day journey. William was reluctant to leave her, and tears would have been unavoidable had it not been for the magnificent sight of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, waiting at the quayside complete with a chauffeur, ready to whisk them off to London. Richard decided on the spur of the moment that he would have the car transported back to New York at the end of the trip, which was the most out-of-character decision he made during the rest of his life. He informed Anne, rather unconvincingly, that he wanted to show the vehicle to Henry Ford.

The Kane family always stayed at the Ritz in Piccadilly when they were in London, which was convenient for Richard's office in the City. Anne used the time while Richard was occupied at the bank to show William the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and the Changing of the Guard. William thought everything was great except the English accent which he had difficulty in understanding.

'Why don't they talk like us, Mommy?' he demanded and was surprised to be told that the question was more often put the other way around, as 'they' came first. William's favourite pastime was to watch the soldiers in their bright red uniforms with large shiny brass buttons who kept guard duty outside Buckingham Palace. He tried to engage them in conversation but they stared past him into space and never even blinked.

'Can we take one home?' he asked his mother.

'No, darling, they have to stay here and guard the King.'

'But he's got so many of them, can't I have just one?'

As a 'special treat' - Anne's words - Richard allowed himself an afternoon off to take his wife and son to the West End to see a traditional English pantomime called lack and the Bc-anstalk playing at the London Hippodrome.

William loved Jack and immediately wanted to cut down every tree he laid his eyes on, imagining them all to be sheltering a monster. They had tea after the show at Fortnurn and Mason in Piccadilly, and Anne let William have two cream buns and a new-fangled thing called a doughnut. Daily thereafter William had to be escorted back to the tearoom at Fortnum's to consume another 'doughbun', as he called them.