In time, egged on by a son of his own with a taste for travel and adventure, Robert Balfour finally raised his gaze from the mine heads of Britain and looked to the East again, to India and to cotton, and grew richer still.
Now Robert’s grandson, the first Philip Balfour, was as happy sailing back and forth between Bengal and Scotland as his wife was unhappy, whether accompanying him on the voyages or staying put at either end, for she suffered equally badly from the heat, the cold and the most excruciating, mortifying seasickness. Indeed, there was only one place on earth where she could imagine settling and turning her back on gangplanks and portholes for ever and that was the magical, almost mythical, island whither her more glamorous friends regularly sailed in search of fun and fashions and whence they returned with tales of both which made young Mrs Balfour’s eyes and mouth water. Alexandra Balfour did not wish for the impossible: she could live without gold but every time she was forced onto the dusty streets of Calcutta or was carried through the mud of a mountain road in Kashmir on the neck of an elephant she pined anew for Manhattan, where the streets were paved.
In 1857, after a winter crossing which her husband called bracing but which reduced her to a state of such piteous and unrelieved sickness that their expected fourth child – whose arrival was the sole reason for the journey – came early and promptly left again, Alexandra prevailed. Philip was washed in guilt and grief but the spirit of his grandfather was lit in him as he began to ask around about the wonderful new city and the impossible new buildings rising up and up and up there and to write feverish letters to agents to secure for himself a patch of paradise while it was going.
And so it was that the Balfours made their second timely escape, from India this time, just before the Great Uprising which left every Company man with burned fingers and placed a mute in the neck of the jamboree for ever after.
Silk House – for Philip Balfour had a mind to family history – was to be the finest mansion in New York; he employed the newest and most daring of architects to plan its halls and cloisters and fountained courtyards, and the watercolour sketches of it, nestling in a green dip amongst hills with a cornflower-blue sky above and lush trees in the distance, had grown soft and faded from repeated rolling and unrolling, and rather grubby from the fingers of the three little Balfours choosing their bedrooms. Philip suffered one moment of disquiet in every ten of joy when he looked at the green dip and distant trees, for he could not quite make them fit into the other picture in his mind of lit streets and theatres and the vast emporia known as department stores. Once or twice, when he was regaling a chum at the club, he found himself not quite admitting of his half-built mansion that he had never set eyes on the place, and it did not bring him much comfort that – presumably because such a thing would never occur to them – none of the chums ever actually asked him.
They landed in November in 1858, in a gale which fired hailstones up the wide avenues like peas from a shooter and turned every cross-street corner into a maelstrom, and it was clear right away even to the smallest Balfour child that the green dip had been fancy. Alexandra prepared to put a brave face on her dismay: there was certainly paving – there was little else. She paled and felt her eyes fill with tears, however, when she saw their mansion. It was the same familiar block of marble and porticoes from the watercolour drawings, but where the gardens should have been there were not only streets instead of glades but, on all four sides, railways. Their dreamed-of home was set about by railway lines like a pig penned in with hurdles and Alexandra began a bout of weeping which lasted on and off until the spring.
From their quarters in one of the Fifth Avenue apartment hotels, Philip wrote letter after furious letter and stormed the agents’ offices, pored over street plans and maps, and even did his best with what scant volumes of American law he could lay his hands on, trying to find a hole through which he could wriggle. The names of the four railroad companies who owned one each of the hated tracks grew into a kind of bitter chant for him: Hudson, Central, Newhaven, Harlem, he muttered to himself as he scratched out another rage-filled letter. Hudson, Central, Newhaven, Harlem – that was the worst of the difficulty. There were four of the damned things and he was shoved around among them like the hot potato in the party game and could never pin down any one of the four owners or any one of their many managers and state his case fairly.
Actually though, Philip Balfour was not the only one inconvenienced by the four separate railroads passing one another in mid-town; it was becoming intolerable to everyone (except the hansom-men who shuttled passengers back and forth between the lines), but it took a man of immense riches, with an entrepreneurial vision greater even than that of the first James Balfour himself, to set matters straight. Mr Vanderbilt saw what was needed and Silk House, Philip Balfour’s Valhalla, into which so much of the Balfour fortune had been poured, was a mere gnat to be swept away before the building of the Grand Central Terminus could begin.
‘Blimey,’ said Alec. ‘So it’s Vanderbilt money that’s furnished the twelve servants?’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘There’s one more chapter to go. Balfour was still angry enough to drive a flinty bargain with the great man and he did recoup more of his outlay than he could possibly have dreamed of, then – so Lollie told me – they left New York with the laughter of all the Manhattan sophisticates still ringing in their ears and took themselves southwards to what – in April – must have seemed like a soft and balmy land where they could finally start up their life of lotus-eating as planned.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Somewhere in the vast southern territory,’ I replied. ‘Not a state as such.’
‘Chumps,’ said Alec.
‘Indeed. They bought a huge spread with a white Palladian mansion on it, returned to New York to buy everything they needed to make life perfect there and arrived back neck and neck with the first heralds of summer – to wit, a swarm of biting insects of a size and ferocity never known in Calcutta. These were soon joined by things Lollie didn’t know the name of but which sound like flying leeches if you can imagine anything so horrid, and black flies that followed them around in a column above their heads in the open air, and little fat things that flew in battalions all around their heads in the shade. Makes one almost glad of midges.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Alec. ‘What happened next?’
‘Alexandra, exhausted and dejected, refused to leave. She shut the doors on the wildlife and stayed there until she died. Philip travelled around a good bit, doing nothing very useful, and his son – our Philip’s father – stuck it out until both parents were gone, planning to get shot of the place and come home to Scotland, which his mother had always made sound like absolute heaven to him.’
‘So when did they leave?’ Alec asked.
‘1871,’ I said, wondering if he would catch the significance of the date. He did not. ‘Philip and Alexandra died and Alexander, their son, was just getting around to offloading the place when matters became rather more interesting.’ Still Alec said nothing. ‘Can’t you guess? It’s poetic really – an echo of Robert Balfour with all his subterranean adventures.’