Iain Pears - Stone's Fall

And when I was sitting with Tom Baring, trying to come up with an insurance policy to safeguard my companies in case of accident, the thought came into my mind once more. It would be an appropriate denigration, I thought, to tame my unease by using it so cynically. A block on opening the books so that the great hole in the finances is not revealed to shareholders – not watertight, nothing can be, but enough to enable an ingenious solicitor to tie everything up in knots for as long as is necessary.

My beloved shareholders would be alarmed and panic if all was open. But then shareholders are sheep, which is why they invest in little bits of paper, rather than in something real. Why they whinge and moan if something goes wrong but would never test their own mettle against the markets. Why they congratulate themselves on their acumen if their bits of paper rise in value due to the labour of others. It is the great unspoken passion of all businessmen: they may battle against their workers, criticise bungling governments, try their hardest to bankrupt and ruin their competitors, but they all, invariably, have some respect – if only small – for each of these. But shareholders disgust them, and if they could find a way of ruining them all, they would do so with pleasure and satisfaction. Managers of public companies are like slaves, as much as the workers they in turn employ. They may serve their masters well, be obsequious and conscientious, but deep in their hearts there is loathing. I feel it in myself, and I see it in others. I can detect it in Theodore Xanthos, as resentment and greed take hold of him. He will test himself against me sooner or later. I have expected it for years.

At the moment, I have committed my entire fortune to one extraordinary operation, to build battleships which no one has ordered, for a government which has not enough courage to tell the truth, to safeguard a people which does not want to pay for them. I have calculated that they will change their minds and I am prepared to back my judgement. And if they don't, I can ruin them all. They are corrupt, greedy, little men, and their grasping nature gives me the power to bend them to my will, should they thwart me. It is exciting, what business should be when it rises above mere production and strives for grandeur. Naturally, the shareholders would take fright if they knew what I was doing – although I have long believed that people who are not prepared to risk their money should not be allowed to keep it.

So I would protect myself from my shareholders with my niggling concern. Turn it to my advantage. Show it who was the master. I visited Henderson, had a sentence put into my will: '£250,000 to my child, whom I have never acknowledged . . .' The sum had to be big, so that it would affect all the other legacies, make it impossible to wind up the estate. Unacknowledged because non-existent.

I did not even mention it to Elizabeth, whom I tell most things, because I never considered it would be necessary. Dying has never been something which has struck me as even a remote possibility. That is for others. Even visiting Cort at his last did not make me think that, sooner or later, I would become like him. All I felt when I looked at him on his bed, so thin and weak, hardly able even to speak, was a distant interest. Concern, a little sadness for him, but no identification with his plight. No; in due course the provision would become redundant, the will would be recast. That would be the end of the matter.

Writing down the words did not make me the master of the thought, though. Instead, I found I had given it life. It preyed on me even more. Old memories came back, jumbled and confused, some all too real, some no doubt imaginary. It distracted me, and I hate distractions. I have never sat and waited for a problem to resolve itself on its own. I issued my instructions, began enquiries, and started to jot down these notes, to order the past, sort out what was real and what was not.

The source of my concern lay in Venice – then and now, the city in Europe which has the least interest in anything industrial or commercial, despite the fact that its wealth was built on trade every bit as much as its buildings rest on wooden piles driven deep into the mud of the lagoons. Like a grand English family fallen on hard times, it has turned its back on commerce, preferring genteel decay to a vigorous restoration of its fortunes. At the time I visited it, I almost admired the old lady (if ever a city could be so described, Venice in the late 1860s merited such a title) for her refusal to compromise with the modern world.

I was there on a tour, my first and only holiday until Elizabeth began her futile attempts to convert me to the pleasures of idleness. I had had a certain good fortune a year or so before; my uncle had died, childless and unmarried and, rather than leave his small fortune to my father, whom he utterly despised, he left it to me. Certainly this showed a desire on his part to sow dissent in our family, as my father lived only on a small stipend, and my sisters he pretended did not exist. Not a penny to them, and the entire amount of £4,426 to me, with strict instructions that I was in no way to distribute, give or otherwise alienate any part of the said sum to any other member of my family. Nasty of him, and had my father been less gentle than he was, Uncle Tobias might have had his way and begun a family feud. Possession in this fashion gave me no pleasure, so I resolved to dispose of the money in a way which would have the old man rolling in his grave, gnashing his teeth in rage.

Why did he despise my father so much? That story, like that of so many family disputes, went back a long way. My father had married poorly. Scandalously poorly, in fact, for he had married a woman of no family or wealth. She was, even worse, the daughter of people who had arrived on these shores from somewhere in Spain only a few decades before, and had even been born in Argentina herself. She was (to my eyes) fabulously exotic and (to Uncle Tobias's) totally unacceptable. How he knew this I do not know, as they never met. He refused ever to come anywhere near her. A pity as (old rogue that he was) he could not have failed to be charmed by her.

But she was not English; of that there was no doubt, and to the end of her life spoke with a noticeably foreign accent – although of such a mixture it was impossible to discern what it was. This made her all the more charming to those who liked her, all the more repugnant to those who did not. I am quite well aware that the memory of her predisposed me to Elizabeth when we met.

She also communicated to me a tendency to be different. Because of her, I have never fitted in quite comfortably to this country of mine, much as I love it. I could, I suppose, have become totally conventional in response, but some of the fiery defiance of the mother transferred itself to the child, and I instead did the opposite. I have, in my life, followed my own course, wherever it might lead. And thus have been able to grasp opportunities others have not even noticed.

When I received Uncle Tobias's money, I realised that the usual options available to a young man of small fortune were not open to me. Wine, women and gambling would not do, because Uncle Tobias had dissipated a far greater fortune on such things in his youth, and would have thoroughly approved of my recklessness. It would have meant the triumph of his side of the family. Donating the money to a worthy cause was also out because, although he loathed my father's gentle brand of Christianity, he was a resolute high Tory himself and would have held that, at least, the money was helping to keep the lower classes in their place.

Then, one day in London, lunching with a friend, I hit on the perfect solution. If there was one thing Uncle Tobias hated more than the common people, it was the commercial ones. The traders, the industrialists, the factory owners, the bankers, the upstart new orders, the Jews, with their crassness and breathtaking wealth. Ruining the country with their gaudy vulgarity, their contempt for everything that was proper and decent and ordered. And now taking over the country in politics as in money. It was his defeat at the 1862 election by a Liberal factory owner (if only of gloves) that finished him off. England was ruined, all that was good in the country had been destroyed; there was no point in continuing.