Give Us This Day (43 page)

The boy pondered, emptying his tankard slowly and all but scowling into it, another trick he had inherited from his Grandfather Sam Rawlinson, who invariably frowned on the prospect of a bargain sale, probably because he had a conviction that this might bring the price down.

“That’s a big bite, George. It’s seventy per cent self-propelled, isn’t it?”

“Around that. There are something like twenty teams at auxiliary depots, east of the high ground and Fens.”

“Would it mean doing young Wickstead out of the job? It’s his beat mostly.”

“No, I’ve got plans for Wickstead. All I’m asking is, do you feel up to it?”

“I could do it.”

He was always, George reflected thankfully, a man of a few words, but those few were almost invariably to the point. And so it was arranged, and Edward, at twenty-seven, found himself responsible for as much territory as veterans like Markby and Rookwood. It was an impressive step up the ladder and meant promotion for others, too. George took his brother’s advice and put Bryn Lovell’s two half-caste stepsons, Enoch and Shad, in joint charge of the Mountain Square. Both were native Welsh, with Welsh prejudices and fluent command of the Welsh language. They seemed to be the logical choice, for each had acquitted himself well as a sub-depot manager.

He took a somewhat similar gamble with less confidence on the eldest Wickstead boy, who had all but succeeded his father in Crescent South and Centre, for Tom Wickstead was ailing now and Edith insisted that he conserved his energy. This territory, largely flat and composed of the Eastern Region and the old river lands that Adam called The Bonus, had been incorporated in The Funnel. But a large new region had now been created to the west under the title West Midlands. Luke Wickstead, son of “Edith-Wadsworth-that-was” (some of the old hands still regarded her as the Old Gaffer’s ex-mistress), had shown an aptitude for motor transport. Out here, where a score of Swann-Maxies served the engineering plants of Birmingham and the Potteries, George reflected that he would have plenty of scope to prove himself.

He found room, in the reorganised network, to advance his own family. Max and Rudi, his two elder sons, were promoted from sub-managerial posts to work under the general supervision of Scottie Quirt in The Polygon, now including the hilly region, The Chain, to the east. Rudi as general manager with the promise of eventual succession, and Max, the more mechanically minded of the two, as improver in the motor plant at Macclesfield. Gisela was delighted, although her maternal pride in the boys prohibited any overt display of pleasure.

“Your grandfather would have approved wholeheartedly of what’s happening clear across the board,” George said to her, chuckling and then, recalling, as he tended to do these days, the many hours they had spent tinkering with that cumbersome ancestor of the Swann fleet. “That was the beginning of it all, Gisela—you and me, the Swann-Maxie, the whole box of tricks, and it doesn’t seem all that time ago. Do you remember jumping out of that tree during a game of hide-and-seek on Lobau, when I was skylarking with your sisters?”

“Why should I forget? It was the first time you acknowledged me as a woman.”

It wasn’t strictly true, of course. His real awareness of her came a little later, when that crafty old Austrian grandfather of hers had despatched her to his room early one morning, in the fervent hope that he would seduce her and marry her in preference to one of her pretty sisters. The plot, if it really was a plot, had succeeded, and they were married within weeks. He would give something, he reflected, to resurrect old Max and discover how much reluctance he had to overcome on Gisela’s part for that little piece of stagecraft, but it was not the kind of thing he cared to discuss with her even after this lapse of time.

The mere memory, however, quickened his appreciation of her that same night, when the house was quiet and he lay in bed watching her prepare for bed, noting her singular neatness and precision in her every movement, in the way she folded her petticoats, brushed her long, chestnut hair, and gravely contemplated the clean nightgown she took from a drawer. The gentle fragrance of lavender reached him as she slipped it over her head and switched off the light, for George, alone among the Swanns, had installed domestic electricity the moment it became available. He thought, as his arms went round her, By
God, I had my head screwed on when I married a Continental! How many English women would have buried the past, the way she buried Barbara Lockerbie? That nonsense is eight years behind us now and she’s never once hinted at it. If Gisela Swann wondered at the display of spirits in the wa
y he handled her, or the genuine affection inherent in his long, contented sigh when, cradled in her arms, he dropped off to sleep, she made no reference to it. She was a very placid woman, with a rare disposition to come to terms with fate, but perhaps her mildness stemmed, in the main, from what she recognised as her extreme good fortune. After all, she had exchanged the dullness and obscurity of village life in her homeland, for partnership with a demigod. It was no wonder, therefore, that she enjoyed a happy relationship with her mother-in-law, Henrietta. Adam would have said that in this respect, if in no other, they were as alike as two peas.

* * *

There were still one or two stray ends to be tidied up before the Swann facelift was complete, by the spring of 1906. Someone had to be found to oversee The Link, a long, narrow strip of territory connecting the Western Wedge with the Southern Square, The Funnel, and the West Midlands. It was an appointment that would call for tact and flexibility, inasmuch as its next-door neighbours included two new boys, Edward and Young Wickstead, and the proud, touchy Rookwood, who would be inclined, George thought, to bully inexperienced younger men operating on his borders.

He finally settled on Coreless, the energetic middle-aged northerner, who had voted with him when a majority had opposed him, and when Coreless called in at Headquarters on his way to take up his post at the new Gloucester depot he said, “Word in your ear, Coreless. Keep a fatherly eye on my kid brother, Edward, and Young Wickstead. You’re round about my age, aren’t you?” When Coreless admitted to forty-four he added, “Just so. I’m forty-two. Old enough to enjoy playing Father Christmas to youngsters like Edward and Wickstead, but young enough to remember that at their age I thought I knew all the answers. They might need guidance from time to time. Give it to them if they ask. Otherwise let ‘em make their own mistakes and learn from them, for I’d sooner them lean on you than on Rookwood.”

“Rookwood’s a top-class man, isn’t he, Mr. Swann?”

“Aye, he is, but he knows it, and is inclined to patronise. Even me if I give him half-a-chance. It’s often that way with those who came up from the bottom rung, as he did.”

Coreless nodded, and the nod told George that he understood him completely. Close co-operation was vital to all of them.

I picked the right chap there, he mused, as Coreless’s hobnailed boots clattere
d on the tower stairway. Maybe I’m developing the Old Man’s knack of deputising
, and it’s time I did… for years now I’ve been disinclined to trust anyone even to lick my stamps. He turned to his two remaining problems, recruitment for trainee
s in the Swann-Maxie depot at Macclesfield, and the more pressing decision concerning the power structure of regional depots, with three disparate sources of income—routine haulage, house-removals, and the ever-expanding demand for hired vehicles for holiday excursions known in the network as “The Beano Trade.”

In consultation with Edward, he had a half-approved solution for the first problem, so he spent a day concentrating on the latter, weighing the pros and cons of separating the three streams and putting them in charge of individual stewards or leaving one man to co-ordinate all three, as in the old days. He finally chose the latter course and when he explained his reasons to Adam the Old Gaffer approved.

“Never saw a battle won by three generals,” Adam said. “Specialists are all very well, but a specialist subordinate, aware that the boss is wholly dependent on him, is inclined to get uppity and you can see where that could lead when it comes to priorities. Let one man run the whole circus. He’s the only chap qualified to decide whether the acrobats, the lion-tamer, or trick cyclists go to the top of the bill. I never did trust that breakdown system you tried after you took over. It looks well enough on paper but it had a fatal defect.” And when George enquired what that defect was Adam said, with a grin, “It puts too much power in the hands of Headquarters, who like to play one man off against another. Saw it happening, but I wasn’t the one to point it out. It’s your show now, yours and Edward’s and all those downy-whiskered colts you’re pushing forward.”

He said nothing to his father or to Henrietta regarding a plan he had to offer jobs to two of the Fawcett boys, having a premonition that it might stir up trouble over at Dewponds. He meant to take the risk, however. There was no harm in presenting his nephews with a unique opportunity, and at the same time enlarging the family’s hold on the firm, for there was no knowing how long he could carry a clear majority with the board. The viceroys had mutinied once. Under the stress of a crisis, or a series of crises, they might do so again.

He walked the two miles separating Tryst and his sister’s farm one blithe May morning, when the Weald looked its best in late spring finery. Even George, not one to appreciate pastoral pleasures that would have gladdened the hearts of his brother Giles, or his youngest sister Margaret, could not fail to benefit from the benediction of his surroundings.

The belt of woodland to the northeast of Tryst was in full leaf after a long spell of mild weather. Larks sang over the paddocks and every hedgerow sported its galaxy of wildflowers, few of which George could have named. It did occur to him, however, to wonder whether boys born and raised in these surroundings would take kindly to working eight hours a day in a North Country machine-shed, with its incessant clatter and reek of oil and tortured metal. He thought,
My intentions are good enough, but I daresay all I’ll get in return is the length of Stella’s tongue
, and he was not so far wrong.

Encountering his sister in the farmyard, where she was superintending the replacement of a worn-out windlass, he noticed the entire absence of sisterly warmth in her greeting. She said, impatiently, “You, George? Wait on a minute, I must see to this first. We can’t do without well-water. The pond is dry after so long without rain.” He stood by, watching her with amusement as she berated two farmhands who were making slow and clumsy work with the fitting.

The abrupt transition in the character of Stella since her second marriage, that had taken place when he was still at school, had always intrigued George. Indeed, he found it difficult to equate the two Stellas for, unlike the younger Swanns, he could remember her as a seventeen-year-old county belle, riding with haughty glance to the local meets, where every buck in the field was a would-be suitor. He recalled her mincing ways and her sharp outbursts of temper when things were not to her liking, and had not been much surprised by her marriage to Lester Moncton-Price when she was eighteen. What had startled him more than somewhat was the dramatic change that the foundered marriage had wrought in her and how, within weeks of taking up with young Denzil Fawcett and helping him rebuild his farm after the fire in which his father was killed, she had adapted to the life. Just as his own viceroys in the regions found no difficulty in switching their allegiance from horse to motor, so Stella had shed all the trappings of a fashionable woman overnight and become a particularly homespun housewife, happy, it seemed, to work a fourteen-hour stint for a reward that one of his junior managers would have regarded as inadequate. She had changed physically, too, putting on at least three stones in weight, and getting her once delicate skin gypsy brown in sun and wind. Her voice, pitched low and rather sweet in her childhood, had taken on a sharp, nagging note, and her exchanges with Denzil and the local farming community had introduced into it traces of a Kentish burr.

He was aware that his mother and old Alex (Alex would not have acknowledged her as a sister at this particular moment) had been bothered by the change, but Henrietta had adjusted to it over the years and Adam, in his wisdom, let well alone. George knew that his own wife, Gisela, was fond of her sister-in-law, but that was predictable. Gisela, too, at heart, still reckoned herself a peasant. What George did not know, and told himself now that he was unlikely to find out, were the underlying factors that had contributed to the change. Watching her now, he pondered them yet again, so deeply indeed that he hardly noticed when his sister was done with her supervision and saying, briefly, “Come into the kitchen then. I can give you a mug of cider if you care for one.” He followed her meekly, entering the big stone room where, summer and winter, a green log smouldered in a fireplace wide enough to roast the traditional ox.

She said, drawing him home-brewed cider from a cask, “Is it a message from mother?” He said no, he had a proposition to put to her and Denzil concerning the boys. “The two middle ones,” he added, hastily. “Martin and John.” They were no longer boys, he reflected, Martin being twenty-three by his reckoning, and John less than two years his junior, but everyone seemed like a boy in his sister’s presence, even Denzil, her husband, who was about forty-six.

“What about my boys?”

“I’ve been wondering… this isn’t a very large farm, and a good deal of your acreage is rough pasture. Robert, your eldest, will take over eventually, I imagine. It seemed to me that you might like to place them.”

Stella looked very surprised and then equally disapproving, squaring up to him, both freckled arms on heavy hips. “
Place
them? How do you mean,
place
them? They have a place, haven’t they? Right here, working for us.”

George said, patiently, “I know that, Stella. I’ve seen them about in the fields, but four sons on a farm this size, doesn’t seem very practical. I’m no farmer, of course, but everybody knows agriculture is in the doldrums. You can buy farms two a penny in some counties since they began bringing in all these refrigerated Australian and New Zealand products, and buying up millions of bushels of wheat from Canada. Ask Denzil if you don’t believe me.”