The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,28

not be opened. The bank’s premises were old; they had been old in his father-in-law’s time. Jarrold had always been parsimonious; he had limited the windows in this room to one only, and had it fixed in place, in order to avoid the window taxes of the 1720s.

Kemp had not found it necessary to make any changes. London’s skies were fogged by smoke from a thousand chimneys. Lamps would have been needed to work by, in any case, for most of the year. He did not mind spending money where he saw it as necessary, but this was a place of business; he could see no point in trying to make it look like something else. He knew people who were spending considerable sums to make their offices resemble drawing rooms, with sash windows and chintz upholstery and cabinets of porcelain. Such extravagance was enough to ruin a man’s reputation for sober and reliable dealing.

Now, however, he would have liked to have a window he could throw open, to admit more air into the closeness of his office, expel the lingering traces of Van Dillen’s scent and sweat. As he paused in his pacing and stood still in the middle of the room, it seemed to him that this was also the smell of the world outside, that it came seeping through, thickened by stagnant sewage and fecal dust. He was a fastidious man, clean and scrupulous in his person and clothing, outward mark of his need to be beyond reproach in motive and behavior. He had never faltered in the attention he paid to his person, but in the pursuit of money to pay his father’s debts he had sometimes come short on the moral plane, had been obliged to breath a tainted air. He had suffered from this at the time, and continued to do so at the memory.

It was a similar sense of taint, a feeling of being contaminated, that troubled him now. He had been too eager with his explanations to this Dutch interloper, he had lowered himself. As if it mattered a straw whether the fellow appreciated his motives or not.

We generally like to regard ourselves in a good light, but the extent to which this matters varies from person to person. For Erasmus Kemp it mattered very much, and for this reason he had never been much given to any closeness of self-questioning. The answers to such questions will be ambiguous at best; motives will usually reveal themselves to be impure. Kemp had generally found it sufficient to assure himself of needing no one’s endorsement, whether friend or foe, not merely on particular occasions but generally. It was a question of dignity. And now here he was, disgusted with himself at the recollection of his vehemence before that foreigner, whom he had not liked, whose interests were opposed to his own.

A betrayal of himself, no less—and not the first since his return. Lately he had been increasingly subject to impulses to explain himself, justify himself, even with people he did not know well, a thing quite foreign to his usual self-containment, and to what he thought of as his true character. It was as though he were striving to shore up certainties previously held that seemed now in danger of slipping away. In an obscure fashion he was beginning to sense why this might be so. The principle of justice, always strong in him, had been violated by his own failure, since returning home, to find any feeling of happiness or cause for celebration at the success of his expedition to Florida. For great success it had been, there could be no doubt of that. He had hunted down the fugitives, white and black. He had used troops from the garrison at St. Augustine to flush them out. The remnants of the crew lay in prison now, awaiting trial.

A triumph, no other word for it. Why, then, this haunting sense of loss and waste? But it was not new, it had always been there, a companion continually neglected and forgotten, continually demanding to be recognized anew. All the successes of his life were consumed to ash in the fire of achieving, in the realization of his will and intention. Only the energy of planning, the envisaging of success gave him pleasure, only purposes had meaning for him. He had always lived by plans, by vows, by promises made to himself.

He brought to memory now, as if to make his success more real to him,