Give Us This Day (33 page)

It was the evolution of this emergency scheme that established yet another principle in his mind. It was no longer a question of either/or, of retaining or banishing the heaviest of his draught animals and settling for the new at the expense of the old. For here, surely, was an exercise in long-term phasing, of combining horse and mechanical thrust to combat the freakish terrain of the islands. If a haul necessitated the crossing of a frontier, and that frontier ran along a high ridge approached by steep hills on either side, then draught teams could be whistled up in advance to be used in a haulage or braking capacity. But the bulk of the journey, on both sides of such a barrier, could be accomplished at three or four times the speed of an old-style frigate or man-o’-war, and Swann-on-Wheels would thus enjoy the best of both worlds.

His fancy, and a sense of deep indebtedness to Adam, led him to conjure with a spate of nicknames for his newly-defined regions. The Mountain Square, generally speaking impossible terrain for a Maxie, was all but abandoned to the horse. So was the long central spine of England, from the Southern Uplands between Solway and the Cheviots, all the way down to the Peak area, west of Sheffield. He called this Pennine strip The Chain, pencilling in sub-depots at Appleby, Keighley, Penistone, and Bakewell.

In the old Western Wedge he set about similar fragmentation, establishing sub-depots at Barnstaple and Ashburton commanding Exmoor and Dartmoor respectively. Between the Mendips and the Quantocks, where few really formidable slopes interposed between Taunton and the Bristol Channel, he formed a new unit, naming it The Link, for it served this purpose between the far west and easier territory that stretched away as far as the Thames estuary and the Wash where river roads were plentiful and surfaces among the best in the country.

Away to the east, in the old regions Adam had called The Bonus and The Crescents, there were no sub-depots. The land was flat and rivers were wellbridged, all the way up from the capital to the Vale of York, then east again to the Humber and the Naze. In the main, this was ideal Swann-Maxie country, where teams could be freed by the dozen to earn their oats on the gradients further west and north. He named this two-hundred-mile section The Funnel because that, on his new maps, was how its shading appeared to him. Then, and then only, he addressed himself to Scotland, where motor-vehicles could operate without much difficulty in the Lowlands, whereas the horse would likely hold its own for decades north of the Tay. The same, in a sense, applied to Ireland. Broadly speaking Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were open to the Swann-Maxie, but there seemed no profit in sending them into Connaught or down into the far west.

When his maps were completed and neatly redrawn for the brochure he planned, he turned to costing, and after that to compiling a short list of candidates for regional control and the younger cadres who would be given their chance as managers of the sub-depots. He worked from a roll of names sent up on request by Accounts. Some were managers of proven ability, like Rookwood, Higson, Godsall, and Markby, men who already controlled regions of their own, but in the longer list were a score of youngsters in their twenties, whose latent abilities showed up in last year’s bonus slips. Finally he compiled a detailed report for Scottie Quirt, telling him to hold himself in readiness for conference confirmation of a fleet of sixty vehicles, to be put into commission as they emerged from the workshop and sent out to work the day they completed their test-runs.

He did not realise how spent he was until he had despatched the brochure to the printers. On the way down the spiral staircase, he staggered and had to make a grab for the rail. He thought, By God, I need a break and I’ve earned one! I’l
l take it before I put it to the directors’ conference. They’ll need a fortnight to digest it, and I daresay I’ll have to spend myself all over again convincing the doubters. Some of them are getting set in their ways, and I can’t really rely on the backing of more than a few… chaps like Jake Higson up in Scotland, and Godsall, who has always been the most forward-looking of the originals… So he made his decision on the spot. H
e would take Gisela and the children down to Tryst for a few days and try it out on the old dog fox before the day set for the conference. It would be interesting to see how the Gov’nor reacted to a scheme that was, in essence, his cartographical grandchild.

2

In the very earliest days of his venture, Adam Swann had seen himself as an isolated traveller with his eyes fixed on a far distant objective, separated from him by a wide and varied terrain. But the peak, despite distance and haze, had always been there, stark, clear, beckoning, and infinitely desirable.

He did not think of it in fanciful terms, as the Celestial Mountains or El Dorado, for he was not a fanciful man; rather, he was a supreme individualist who, although well-endowed with imagination, had learned how to employ fancy to practical purpose, evidenced by the lighthearted nicknames he bestowed upon his vehicles and territories. He thought of it as The Summit and was not deeply concerned regarding the prospect it might offer him when he arrived there.

Very soon after setting out he was joined by Henrietta, then by his motley crew of privateersmen, and finally, in late middle age, by his grown sons and daughters, all of whom, it seemed, had their eyes fixed on some adjoining peak, but there never had been a time, not even when he journeyed alone, when he regarded his odyssey as a private endeavour. It was one he shared, willy-nilly, with his tribe as a whole, for he always saw himself as a standard-bearer of the era travelling only one step ahead of his fellow-countrymen, the English, and their proven allies, the Scots and the Welsh. He discounted the Irish as a race of by-roads dawdlers, temperamentally unsuited to a haul of this length and complexity.

As time went on he drew appreciably nearer his goal, adjusting his pace somewhat and taking time to look around him as he progressed, but he was still untroubled by what lay beyond the furthest ridge. A man’s life-span did not run to that, he would have argued. Somewhere along the road ahead he would, inevitably, drop out of the line of march, surrendering the vanguard to a seasoned successor, and this successor could only be George, the closest reflection, without his experience, of himself in his early thirties.

Thus it was that he welcomed George when the boy at last emerged from his hibernation period, guessing that what he would have to say would concern, among other things, the march-plan into the future. For George, lucky dog, was young enough and strong enough to concern himself with the prospect beyond the summit.

He heard him out in almost complete silence, interjecting no more than an occasional question and that a shrewd one, for the old man, George noted, still retained his fantastic memory for terrain and regional potential. When George had talked himself out he gave him another ten minutes to concentrate on the maps and was relieved when Adam at last looked up and said, “You came up with this alone? Up in that old belfry? No clerks? No brain-picking discussions with Accounts and Routeing?”

“I daren’t risk that, Gov’nor. I didn’t know the real answers myself until a month ago, and I’ve had my head down ever since. It seemed… well… dangerous to start gossip down in the yard. You know what they are. It would have gone out along the grapevine in a matter of hours. Do you approve of that?”

“I certainly do,” and he gave one of his hard, tight grins, “for whenever I had anything important on hand, I made damned sure I manoeuvred myself into a position to anticipate their tomfool objections. They were a pigheaded bunch in those days. Always had to bully ‘em into trying anything new.”

“Well?”

“Don’t rush me, boy. This is a revolutionary scheme. Far more ambitious than anything I dared to hatch up sitting overlooking that slum. What’s your spot estimate of the cost over a twelve-month period of transition?”

George took a deep breath. “A shade under a hundred thousand. Say the round sum to be on the safe side.”

“Four-fifths of the Reserve Fund?”

“We could scale it down and borrow from the banks.”

“Why do that and pay their interest? The money’s there, waiting to be used, isn’t it?”

“Then you approve?”

“It’s a damned good scheme. It’s got the smell of success about it.” He paused. “Didn’t you expect me to say that?”

“No, I didn’t. I hoped for your approval in principle. No more than that. Will you show up at conference and give it your blessing in public?”

“Not me,” said Adam, fervently. “You’re running the show now. It’s up to you to win ‘em over. If you do, it’s a bunch of feathers in your hat. If you don’t, it’s your funeral.”

“You think I’ll have trouble convincing them?”

“You’ll have trouble, boy, but you’re completely persuaded it’s a practical proposition, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely. I’ve double-checked every figure, every mile of the routes, and even my estimates can’t be more than two to three per cent out.”

“Well, then, you dig your heels in. Damned hard. Don’t budge. And don’t whittle against your better judgment. A hundred thousand, eh? That’ll rattle their teeth. I shall be able to hear their sighs from here.”

“Can I do that? Can I stand by that scheme without compromise if the majority vote against me?”

“Legally yes. The Swann holding is still standing at fifty-one per cent, isn’t it? At a pinch we’ve still got overall control. When I made the network into a private company, and let those rascals invest their own money, I gave them half-a-mile of rein. I didn’t throw the curb away.”

“But it isn’t as simple as that, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. You couldn’t make it work in the face of a really determined opposition.”

“Suppose I do run into opposition on that scale?”

“You hammer away at it, week by week, month by month. And you exploit their rivalries shamelessly. That was my method and I always got my own way in the end.”

“That could take a long time, Gov’nor.”

“Yes, it could take time. A year, maybe two or even five. But I’ll tell you something, boy. You’ll win in the end.”

“Why necessarily?”

“Because you’re my son. Because you’re a natural leader and they’re natural followers, every last one of ‘em. If they hadn’t been they wouldn’t be there, still in the fold. The best of ‘em would have hived off long ago and set up on their own. Even the thrusters like Godsall, and that convert to the kilt, Jake Higson.”

There came to him then a heightened appraisal of his father’s unique talents. Not as businessman, a gambler, and an innovator. These had been apparent to him even as a child. Rather as a superbly accurate judge of potential, especially the potential of men of action, with an ability to distil past experience into a series of considered judgments on any one or any grouping of his associates. It stemmed, he supposed, from the Swann genes, developed over centuries on a thousand battlefields, and in as many embattled siege works. It reached back to the first Swann who had adopted the profession of arms, somewhere around the first years of the fifteenth century or perhaps, unrecorded, long before that; it had been running strongly in the strain ever since, clear across the patchwork of history and Imperial conquest, from the campaigns of Henry V to the plains of India during the year of the Mutiny. It must have revealed itself in colonel and cornet and in foreign fields and in dynastic clashes in English shires, under or opposed to chieftains like Edward IV, Cromwell, Kingmaker Warwick, and Prince Rupert. It had found employment on the Plains of Abraham and in that sorry business when the Anglo-American colonists in buckskins sent Cornwallis’s and Burgoyne’s redcoats packing. It had helped to tip the balance at Salamanca, Vittoria, and Toulouse, and plant the flag on the bloody ramparts of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo. It had made nonsense of Boney’s ultimate bid for Europe on a Brussels plain, where his own grandfather had left two of his fingers. He said, as a kind of admission of his unpaid ancestral debt, “I’d sooner have you behind me than the whole bunch of them, Gov’nor. That’s what I came seeking. Your blessing.”

The old man mused for a moment. Finally he said, with a shrug, “You don’t need anyone back of you, George. Not really. Not when the cards are dealt. Edith Wadsworth, the woman they all thought of as my mistress at one time, once likened ‘em to a bunch of privateers, planning a descent on someone’s coast, and she was about right. But a privateer doesn’t cast off without a captain it can trust, and even the share-and-share alike pirates sailed under a quartermaster. You’ll do, boy. Always thought you would somehow.”

He watched George gather up his papers, throw a knowing wink in his direction, and saunter out, seeing himself forty years ago and feeling glad that his battles were behind him.

3

Of the twelve original managers who bought themselves in when Adam (tiring of having his policies challenged by men who claimed the right to hector him without risking their own cash) made a private company of the concern, only five still sat on as directors. The other seven had either died or been replaced by successors in the regions. George thought of these five as the hard core of Swann-on-Wheels, who had seen it grow to maturity and who regarded their stake, rightly or wrongly, as more than financial.

Godsall, once an army officer, had ruled in the old Kentish Triangle. He now controlled the whole southeastern beat of the network. Young Rookwood (George reckoned his age at fifty-three) was the Dick Whittington of Swann-on-Wheels, having risen from vanboy to the rank of viceroy in what was once known as the Southern Square. His enlarged beat now extended north to the Midlands and west as far as the rural territory of the late Hamlet Ratcliffe, who had died at his post on the eve of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Ratcliffe’s place on the board had been taken by his nephew, Bickford, a shrewd forty-year-old, known throughout the network as Bertieboy Bickford. Scotland was controlled by another ex-vanboy, Jake Higson. The East Midlands were still under the sway of the Wickstead family, the sons of Edith and Tom Wickstead, whose independence was tempered by their devotion to Adam, the only man in the network aware that Tom Wickstead had once been a professional footpad. Tom, ailing now, had been succeeded in the old Crescent lands by his son Luke, a young man who had always seemed to George excessively shy. Further north, between the Yorkshire coast and the Pennines, Markby, a comparative newcomer, had made great strides of late. Markby was an innovator. It was he who had forced through a policy of purpose-built vehicles, and he could usually be relied upon to put forward some constructive propositions at the quarterly conferences. Over in the west, in the old Mountain Square lands embracing all Wales, they had a new viceroy in the person of young Edward Swann, whose coming-of-age present had been a managership and a seat on the board earlier that year. Edward would have to be regarded as a new boy and expected to keep his mouth shut on anything but topics concerning his own beat. Clint Coles, representing Ireland, would also be hamstrung by family ties, although George felt he could rely on his brother-in-law’s vote on a major proposition. Clint (the Swann family still thought of him as Jack-o’-Lantern, a soubriquet he had acquired when he eloped with Joanna Swann) was a fine salesman and a very amiable man, and he and George had always seen eye to eye.