Free Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks

family and his clients. They were not glorious or exciting, these minutes of solitude, but they enabled him to correct the weight of anxiety and disappointment that were the burden of his days. His wife irritated him and his children were not what he had hoped; they would make no fortunes or conquests, would not become the cynosure of the county or the land. On the other hand, they were alive; the firm of Chas Midwinter laboured on beneath his direction; the house stood, his stomach was full and the dogs slept. In the corner of the room were packages he had wrapped for Christmas, another duty discharged. He shifted, and felt the floor again through the leather soles of his boots. This Richard Prendergast was not the kind of man he liked, and the parents were somehow a disappointment; he had felt no elation when he stood opposite the father after lunch: it had been a little like looking at himself in a dim glass. He told Prendergast the sum that he had put aside to settle on Sonia when she married, an amount his business manager told him he could not, under any circumstances, exceed. After half an hour of bargaining, he had agreed to raise it ten per cent and they shook hands, each with satisfaction Prendergast in the knowledge that he had secured a reluctant increase, Midwinter relieved that the sum was still lower than the figure he had actually resigned himself to losing. Thomas lay nursing his arm, cold and unhappy beneath his blankets. He had one year left of Sonia's company before she would be removed to London by young Mr. Prendergast after their wedding. Much of that year would in any event be spent by Thomas at his boarding school and he felt that the best part of his childhood had been brought to a sudden close by an opportunist family raid. It was not fair on him; nor could it really be fair on poor Sonia, he thought, to ask her to venture into a fragile future with this Prendergast, with her hopeful disposition their only real asset. Thomas knew little of the economics of marriage, but he could not help feeling that his sister had been sold too cheap. For himself, it was time to escape. Torrington without Sonia was unthinkable; he would stay there not a moment longer than was necessary to complete his education; and then... He would shock his parents with the brilliance of his plans; he would dazzle them and make them ponder, sadly, at what they themselves had overlooked. He would, like King Lear, do such things what they were yet he knew not but they should be the terrors of the earth. He clenched his good fist beneath the bedclothes. If they would not let him become a doctor of literature, then perhaps he should accept Sonia's parting present the bride's gift to her bachelor and become a doctor of medicine. Why not bring the labourer, science, to do the mule's work in his greater project? Keats, after all, had been apprenticed to an apothecary and qualified as a surgeon. Thomas's fretful ambitions, once they had blown and raged enough to keep him from sleeping, elicited from him a reluctant smile. Who would listen to an English boy, of no obvious abilities, invisible in the cold and silent countryside? How would they even know that he existed?
    Three
    In the fourth year of her marriage, Sonia accompanied her husband to the recently built French resort of Deauville. Richard Prendergast told her it would be good for his business to be seen mingling with fashionable Parisians, strolling along the sea front and sitting down at the gaming tables of the Trouville casino at night. He assured Sonia that he would gamble only small sums and that when it came to card games he had the luck of the devil. "Anyway," he said, taking her arm, 'a change of air might help your..." He gestured towards the area of her abdomen, then overcame his diffidence as a thought apparently came to him. "Fresh air," he said, 'for a fresh heir." They took rooms in a boarding house some way back from the front, therefore less expensive than the