The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,25
then, blabbin’ to big brother,” Walker said. “Blabbin’ and blubberin’.”
Michael had resolved at the outset to keep calm, but the unfairness of this brought the beginning of anger to him. “He dinna blab,” he said.
“He’s nay bleddy use,” Walker said. “He dinna put his back into it. He’s losin’ me a shillin’ a day.”
“He does his best,” Michael said. “A know him better than tha does.”
“Is tha callin’ me a liar?”
“Keep yor hands off him,” Michael said. The anger rose in him, impeding his breathing in that constricted space. “Tha thinks tha owns him. He is smaller than you, he pushes the baskets at yor biddin’, so tha thinks he’s yor property, to kick an’ punch as tha choose. A’ll teach you different.”
“Teachin’, is it?” Walker said. “Sunday mornin’, ten o’clock, at the big field.”
“A’ll be there,” Michael said, and on this they parted.
7
“I had hoped the business might be settled privately between us,” Van Dillen said. “The outcome must be doubtful in law, and if we go to the extent of a hearing there are costs to be thought of. Why should we fatten the lawyers, Mr. Kemp?”
He was not finding the interview easy. He was physically uncomfortable, for one thing; the seat of his chair was too small for a man of his bulk, and the weather was unseasonably hot. The room had only one window, and the morning sun, strong despite the clogging air of London, slanted through it and lay directly on him. He felt overheated in his bob wig and broadcloth suit.
He was at the further disadvantage of being a petitioner, of having solicited this meeting. Some men are dressed in authority wherever they go, but the broker was not of these; he was accustomed to wielding what he had of it in the domestic surroundings of his home in Richmond, his modest premises off the Strand, or free and unbuttoned in his booth at Lloyd’s Coffee House, where most of his day-to-day business was done. This present ground belonged to a man not only younger but very much richer. A wealth not much expressed in display, however, he had noted: plain oak paneling, shelves for ledgers and almanacs, ladder-back chairs.
“We are in high summer before we have had spring,” he said, in the face of the other’s continuing silence. He felt an itch at the side of his neck, some insect crawling there. Conditions, however uncomfortable, will generally be favorable to life of some sort, and the windless days and early heat had produced a plague of small black beetles that flew about blindly, getting tangled in wigs and snared in the corners of eyes, copulating and dying, leaving a scurf of corpses.
The broker took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his neck, turning his head in a way too affectedly elegant, or so Kemp thought, for an honest man. Too many Dutchmen in shipping and insurance these days, too many brokers altogether. He had never had the smallest fellow feeling for opponents; the knowledge of conflicting interests fed an appetite for enmity always keen. “To my mind,” he said, “there is no doubt of the outcome in law, none at all.”
“How? After close on fourteen years and most of the actors in it dead?” Van Dillen looked with affected surprise and genuine curiosity at the man before him. It was not so much the certainty of tone; the broker had much experience of disputed claims, and litigants always professed—at least publicly—an unshakable faith in the justice of their cause. But this man had an air of conviction that came close to ferocity—his eyes blazed with it. A vivid face, not very English, some suggestion of the south in it. From Liverpool, the family, a melting pot of peoples and races …
There was again a silence between them that lasted for some moments. In one corner of the window a fly tumbled and buzzed, caught in some hopeless mania of escape. The din of metal wheels on the cobbles of Cheapside came to them here, but distantly; Kemp’s place of business looked out over the quiet courts south of St. Paul’s. There was the occasional scrape of a stool from the adjacent room, where three clerks worked side by side at a long counter. “What are fourteen years, or forty, if it comes to that?” Kemp said. “What point are you seeking to make? Time can make no smallest difference to the justice of my claims, mine or any other man’s.”