As Far as You Can Go by Julian Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page B

two. Then buy a set.”
    “Let’s have another drink,” said Harold. He didn’t like the idea of knowing a TV personality. Art and life were better kept apart, he felt. He got up to get more drinks.
    “You don’t know anyone who would like to go to America for a few months, do you?” said Dennis, when Harold got back from the bar.
    “Paid or unpaid?”
    “Oh, very well paid indeed. The trouble is that all young people these days are vaguely liberal, and being vaguely liberal means being rather stridently anti-American. It’s what I am going to call the Compensation for Colonial Guilt one day, if I ever get around to it.”
    “If you make one more journalistic generalization this afternoon I shall leave,” said Harold. “Tell me about the American trip.”
    “I have this uncle,” said Dennis. “More of an aunt, really. She married him, you see. Anyway, he’s called Dangerfield , and he’s very rich, and wants someone to go to America and buy back the family portraits that one of his hard-up ancestors sold to Duveen or someone. You wouldn’t be interested, by any chance?”
    “If you think I’m going to leave Fenway’s now,” said Harold, “after slaving away there for all these years, you’re off your head. Why don’t you go yourself?”
    “I would, if I were still young,” said Dennis. “I’d go like a shot.”
    “But you are young.”
    “Oh, I know I am. But I can’t afford to go on being young. It would ruin me. I almost have a reputation to keep up, you know. If one doesn’t build on one’s own foundations, no one else will.”
    “We are both hamstrung by our futures already,” said Harold theatrically. “Shades of the prison house round the growing middle-aged man.”
    “You’re still young, though,” said Dennis, looking at Harold in a calculating way. “I mean, you can still afford to be thought young, can’t you?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “I think the job is just what you need before you settle down.”
    “You’re wrong,” said Harold. “But if you tell me what it is I may be able to suggest someone suitable.”
    “Ah. You have contacts?”
    “I have a younger brother.”
    Dennis began to explain. His uncle’s family had become somewhat impoverished about the turn of the century, largely because of a hereditary lack of restraint. Granville Dangerfield, the then head of the family, had twelve siblings, eight of whom were girls, to say nothing of eleven children of his own. He also had a passion for the turf, which madehim a popular figure in the circle of the Prince of Wales. All eight of his sisters had managed to marry, with sizeable portions, and Granville’s own seven daughters were approaching marriageable age. Being a man of honour, he wished to give his daughters respectable portions, too, but the continual drain of so much fertility on the family finances made this difficult. To add to the difficulties, the sons all inherited attractive sums on their twenty-fifth birthdays under the terms of a trust set up by Granville’s grandfather.
    (“The whole story illustrates the decline of the gentry,” said Dennis. “The incontinent inevitably end up insolvent.”)
    In an attempt to meet all his obligations, Dangerfield trusted intemperately to luck, and in particular to a filly called Canteloupe which had thrown her jockey at the start of a race at Epsom. It was a considerable expense in postage alone to summon the family from all over England, but Granville felt there was nothing else he could do. To the assembled Dangerfields, he announced the catastrophic news. They took it quite calmly, telling him to sell some of the family heirlooms, making speeches about rash speculation and the judgment of God, and then went home.
    In the negotiations which followed with a well-known transatlantic entrepreneur, Dangerfield found himself being offered more than he expected for the things he least wished to part with, notably the family portraits and a collection of