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.
Six months later he expired in the midst of sexual congress with the parlourmaid on a billiard table at the age of seventy-nine, at which point it was discovered that his fortune, net of debts, was very much less than anyone anticipated, and that I was the sole beneficiary.
After a certain amount of thought, I gave all the money to precisely one of these upstarts so they could continue the labour of reducing Uncle Tobias's England to rack and ruin. In brief, a highly speculative and utterly hopeless early venture in imperial mining that was being run by an associate of my mother's family who was not only Jewish but had a reputation for highly doubtful honesty. In this, popular report was only part accurate. Joseph Cardano (whom I knew ever better for a quarter of a century until his death in 1894) was indeed Jewish, but he was also perhaps the most honest person I have ever met. Had I known this about him at the time, of course, I would never have entrusted Uncle Tobias's money to him.
