Give Us This Day (44 page)

She continued to eye him, with vague hostility. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. But you haven’t seen me over at Tryst seeking charity, have you?”

“Damn it,” he said, half in mind to tell her and her sons to go to the devil, “I’m not here offering charity! You’ve got a claim on Grandfather Sam’s money, the same as the rest of us, and it’s no secret that the Gov’nor makes you an allowance. I’m not talking about money, but careers for the younger boys. If you don’t care what becomes of them ten years from now, then say so.”

Denzil Fawcett clumped into the kitchen, nodding briefly in George’s direction. George had a swift recollection of Denzil as a youth, walking with long strides and head held high, through a rainstorm to one of his father’s pastures east of Tryst. He now looked like a man in his late fifties, with slumped shoulders and grey, balding head. Farming aged a man, George thought, and it encouraged him to press on. He said, “I’m here to offer apprenticeships to two of your boys, Denzil. They could learn the motor trade up north and get in on the ground floor. Stella doesn’t seem taken with the idea. How about you?”

Denzil glanced at his wife and in that glance, George thought, was the story of their marriage. Lifelong incredulity on Denzil’s part, that he had brought home a prize like Stella from the grand house over the hill, and complete renunciation of her past on Stella’s part, who must, he reasoned, have suffered dismally at the hands of the Moncton-Prices.

“You’m hard agin it, m’dear?”

“Aren’t you? The boys’ place is here, with their family and acres. Helping you as you get older and slower.”

“Arr,” he said, thoughtfully, “that’s so.” But then, to George, he said, “The motor trade? Will that ever amount to anything, George?”

“Good God, of course it will! It’ll practically take over ten years from now. In your trade as well as in mine. Why else would I have invested a hundred thousand pounds in lorries? It’s not a passing fad, man! Why the devil can’t everybody see that by now? I had the same job convincing my managers, but it hasn’t taken them long to decide I was right.”

”A ‘prenticeship,” he said, thoughtfully. “You’d mean, I take it, to learn the trade. But how about after? I mean, who would be likely to employ ‘em in that sort of work?”

“I would, if they showed an aptitude. I’m training drivers and mechanics. We’d teach them all we know. After that it would be up to them. My guess is your boy Martin would take to it like a duck to water. I remember how he used to come over to Tryst when I was working on the old Maximus and watch the wheels go round. It was remembering that that made me think of them.”

There was a heavy silence in the room. The sap in the green log in the grate hissed an accompaniment to the ticking of the grandfather clock. Stella still had her upper lip clamped over the lower, but Denzil, judging by the furrows on his forehead, was thinking hard.

“Would they get paid for larning?”

“Not much. They’d get board and lodging, guaranteed by the firm. And ten shillings a week for pocket money.”

“And afterwards? When they knew what they was about?”

“A driver mechanic in the network earns fifty shillings a week, plus overtime. He can soon double that, however, providing he’s up to his work. We’re expanding all the time. I hope to have two hundred vehicles on the road within two years.”

“It’s still wrong! Wrong and unnatural!”

This from Stella, red in the face now, and having some difficulty in restraining herself, but Denzil looked at her mildly. “Maybe so, maybe not. You say what you think any road.”

“I’ve told you what I think. Time enough, whether or not things pick up here, as they may and should, we won’t be able to keep Ben Gaskell on as a hired hand. And old Trescoe is about finished, what with his rheumatism. What’ll we do then, with none but you and Robert and young Richard to farm four hundred acres?”

He said, without looking at her, “That’s not the point, m’dear. I don’t offen run counter to you, do I? But there’s some sense in what George says, for things coulden be worse for farmers. How can we compete with all this foreign muck they’re dumping on us every day o’ the week? As long as there’s free trade it’ll get worse instead o’ better. Maybe we owe it to the boys, and I reckon I’d like to sleep on it.”

“And talk it over with them if I were you,” George said, although something in him responded to the despair in the man’s voice and manner. It must be hard, he thought, to see a traditional way of life foundering month by month, with markets shrinking and roots, hard down in the land for a thousand years or more, wrenched up by technologies that, to a man of Fawcett’s disposition, must seem as alien as Black Magic. Maybe an answer lay in the adaptation of farms and farmers to the mechanical age, with purpose-built vehicles taking the place of their clumsy ploughs and lumbering, boat-shaped waggons. But this was years ahead, and men who had worked the land with their hands all their lives would be slow to adjust to such a revolution, even slower than would a transport man like Bertieboy Bickford in the far west.

He rose, draining and setting down his cider mug. “Think it over, both of you. The offer is there. All you have to do is to tell me yes or no,” and he went out across the yard, scattering hens who were scavenging there.

Denzil and Stella sat on, silent for above two minutes before Denzil rose and crossed the kitchen, laying his gnarled hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“We can’t stand in their way,” he said. “It woulden be right. Neither of ‘em could ever wed on what I pay ‘em, and I know how I would ha’ felt about that wi’ you in mind. They’m both courtin’, baint they?”

“Farm girls,” Stella said. “Girls reared on good farms over in Lee Valley, but…”

“There’s no ‘buts’ about it then. We’ll have to let ‘em go if they’ve a mind to go.”

He went over to the open window and called Ben Gaskell, still wrestling with the windlass. “Leave that, Ben. Find Martin and John, and zend ‘em to me and mother. And tell ‘em to look sharp about it. I’ve something to zay to ‘em!”

He went back to where Stella sat by the smouldering fire and stood before her. They had ridden out a number of crises over the years, resolving each as partners in accord, but here, for the first time since they had rebuilt the farm together, was something he had to face alone, shouldering her prejudices to one side, and deep in her heart she understood his motives. They would never fail utterly, and sell up as some of their neighbours had done since the agricultural slump set in like a blight. She had savings of her own and access, as George had reminded her, to capital, but this was irrelevant. In their twenty-five years of marriage, he had never once sought help of this kind from her or her family, and she had never offered it, realising that his countryman’s pride was as precious to him as the house they occupied and the acres he and his ancestors had farmed for more than four centuries. She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek, holding it there until she heard the scrape of her sons’ boots in the yard.

Two

Swann Whirligig, 1905–06

A
dam Swann, in a whimsical mood, had once likened his family’s march down the decades as a tribal migration headed for the uplands. More objective observers— and there were many about the city and the big provincial centres, where money and goods changed hands in volume—saw it rather as a spring gushing from the old fox’s enterprise in the ‘fifties, and building rapidly to a broad, swift-flowing river in its progress towards a collective destiny. Or perhaps as a tide, beating on a coastline where, ultimately and given luck, it could change the map.

For the Swanns, confound them, seemed destined to advance on a singularly broad front, and before the new century had got its second wind around the fall of the year 1905, they were recognised as a power in the land. Not only in the field of transport—almost from the beginning they had offered a formidable challenge here—but also in areas where rival trading clans sought no advancement, that of older, more staid professions, like the armed services and administrative spheres, and even out on the periphery of the national scene, where the vanguards of social reform, ranging far ahead of the national conscience, now emerged triumphant at the polls.

As in the flow of all tides and rivers, there were stretches down the years when the thrust of the current lost impetus, spending itself in puny forays mounted by individuals, often at odds with one another. Such a period had been Adam Swann’s recession in the early ‘sixties, when he and his concerns came close to foundering. Or when, in 1865, he was out of action for a year after the Staplehurst rail disaster. But soon a sportive fate would take a hand in affairs, presenting some challenge that taxed the wits and the stamina of the tribe to the utmost. This had happened, after a long, smooth ride, in 1897, when George Swann wandered off course and the hub of the empire went up in smoke, leaving its spokes in disarray.

But the Swanns, it seemed, were seasoned survivors and these occasional setbacks put them on their mettle so that very soon, in no time at all it appeared to observers, they were in the forefront of the battle again, having used the check to marshal their reserves, mount a series of new attacks in unexpected sectors, and push forward as a unit on several fronts.

Then competitors in all their chosen fields acknowledged their merits, numbering among them resilience, original thinking, and above all the obstinacy of the British squares at Waterloo.

The period immediately following George’s display of what mechanicallypropelled vehicles could achieve when handled imaginatively was high noon for the family. Some of George’s will to succeed had been siphoned off and distributed among other members of the clan and retainers. Thus 1905 was a time of triumph in a variety of sectors, beginning with the appearance on British roads of over a hundred power-operated vehicles, the very first of their kind, and ending, in December of that same year, with the arrival of Giles Swann at Westminster as the member for Pontnewydd. But between these two triumphs were a number of smaller victories that could have been grouped under the heading of Domestic Retrenchment.

* * *

The first of these modest victories occurred in the early spring of the year, and its Boadicea, so to speak, was Helen Coles,
née
Swann, widow of a decapitated missionary and unsung heroine of the Peking Siege.

It assumed the form, in the eyes of Joanna, her sister and sponsor, of an enchantment, for nothing less, in her view, could have accomplished such an unlookedfor event. It was as though the malign agency that had reduced Helen to such dependence on her sister when haunted by nightmares of one kind or another had suddenly relented; or, more probably, it had been sent packing by a sentimental genie with a sense of humour. For Helen Coles, the pale, brooding widow of a year or so ago succeeded, against well-nigh impossible odds, in capturing Dublin’s most eligible bachelor.

Joanna was never quite sure how it came about or why Rory Clarke, most turbulent of the Dublin fillibusters in Westminster, should have been bewitched by a woman five years his senior, when he might have taken his pick of the Dublin belles, most of them pretty, and a few of them both pretty and handsomely dowered.

Rory, younger son of Tim Clarke, the vintner Joanna had enlisted as a Swann regular, was a dashing, slightly Byronic man for whom a brilliant political future was forecast, and the two were introduced to one another at one of Clarke père’s soirees. Their conversation on that occasion was confined to the exploitation in South Africa of Chinese coolies, imported as a source of cheap labour; not, one would have thought, a very promising springboard for a romance. It happened, however, that circumstances favoured the encounter. Rory was in search of a new stick to belabour the British Government, and Helen Coles was the only woman in Dublin with first-hand knowledge of Chinese affairs, so that no other woman present could compete for his attention.

The very next day Rory sent his card round to Joanna’s, together with an invitation for a carriage drive the following Sunday. Predictably, Joanna was included in the invitation. Equally predictably, somehow scenting a miracle, she persuaded Helen to go unaccompanied.

From that point on progress was spectacular. Something in Helen’s new-found stillness (and possibly her aura of tragedy) made a direct appeal to Rory Clarke’s Celtic imagination. Bouquets and invitations began to arrive at the house almost daily, and soon Dublin was scouting the possibility that Rory Clarke (the new Parnell, some were already calling him) had succumbed to the charms of a thirtyfour-year-old Englishwoman, who had been romantically involved in a welter of bloodletting on the other side of the world.

At first the neglected matrons and young eligibles of the Irish capital viewed the prospect of a romance with dismay, reflecting that an Irish champion had no business gallivanting with the English, but then certain unseen pressures began to be applied. First by Rory’s soldier brother, who had no patience with the quarrel between the Irish and Dublin Castle, then by old Tim himself, who had taken the trouble to inform himself of Helen Coles two likely sources of income—her father and her father-in-law, the famous pill manufacturer. He also discovered, as a kind of bonus, that Helen, on remarriage, would have access to a trust fund from her maternal grandfather’s fortune, derived from cotton and the Suez Canal shares.

Yet these were not deciding factors in Dublin’s ultimate approval of Helen as the bride-in-waiting of her most promising son. These had their roots in the Irish sporting instinct, for who could fail to respond to the run-up of such an unlikely outsider who had somehow contrived to lead the field in the Clarke matrimonial stakes?

And then, for Joanna, came a miracle within a miracle. Under the sun of Rory Clarke’s tempestuous courtship, Helen not only revived but reflowered, recapturing some of the sparkling good looks and high spirits of her youth at Tryst, to which was added a maturity and dignity that won approving nods from the senior section of society. Her appearance, in Joanna’s view, changed almost overnight. When she had gone to her that night and assessed the damage caused by her marriage and dismal experiences abroad, she had been sallow, hollow-cheeked, and listless in movement and manner. She had never been as pretty as Joanna, but she had large and expressive grey eyes, a good complexion, and, in those days, a trim, athletic figure, moulded by her youthful passion for lawn tennis and cycling. But her best feature had always been her hair, dark brown and thick but very soft in texture.

These starting-out advantages had been sacrificed by her years in the tropics. Hardly a trace of her original sparkle remained when Joanna talked her into a therapeutic frolic with the tipsy Jack-o’-Lantern, and when that sparkle returned in full measure Joanna reasoned that the change could never have been accomplished by a few sweaty moments in Clinton’s embrace. Indeed, no appreciable change was apparent in the interval between that occasion and her first meeting with Rory. Yet, little by little, it became apparent that something had been achieved after all, for when they returned to Dublin Joanna noticed that Helen’s apathy had changed to a kind of stillness, while privately her sister admitted that her recurrent nightmare had ceased and she was now sleeping and eating normally.

The knowledge made the goodhearted Joanna glad, despite a lingering doubt that Clinton had not been hoodwinked, for she sometimes caught him looking across the table at his sister-in-law with a vaguely puzzled expression, as though there was something about her that eluded him. It would, please God, continue to elude him. Men, Joanna was aware, often joked in their coarse way about all women being identical in the dark, but perhaps they deceived themselves in this respect. Perhaps something, smothered under those fumes of alcohol, some awareness of physical unfamiliarity in the woman he had held in his arms so briefly, remained in the morning, when he awakened to find his wife beside him and in an unusually thoughtful mood. If it was so, she did not let it bother her overmuch, or not after the forthcoming wedding of Rory Clarke, M.P., and Mrs. Helen Coles was announced in the Dublin and London papers. One way or another her sistercomrade had been restored to her, whole and healed, and Joanna was never one to quarrel with luck.

2

Adam received the news that his daughter was to take a second husband with reservations. He knew all about the Irish fillibusters at Westminster and was scornful of their tactics. It gave him no confidence that, when, as he predicted, they gained their precious Home Rule, they would govern themselves any better than they had been governed by the British, but he was glad that Henrietta welcomed the match, realising that she had never really ceased worrying about Helen since hearing that story about the girl shooting a man in cold blood and exulting in the deed. She said, “It’s positively the best thing that could have happened, Adam, and it doesn’t matter a dropped stitch if Clarke is the firebrand you say he is. The fact is she’ll be settled again, and it’s not too late for her to hope for a child to take her mind off her troubles.”

That, he reflected with a chuckle, had always been Hetty’s way with difficulties of any kind as far as her daughters were concerned. Children represented continuity, and continuity to Henrietta Swann, daughter of a pushing millhand and a penniless Irish immigrant, was paramount. Also, he supposed, with another chuckle, the act of begetting them, for no woman in this self-righteous day and age could have approached that with more enthusiasm. He contented himself with replying: “Well, they’re an enterprising bunch, I must say, when it comes to choosing partners. Just tally up our in-laws and try and find the common denominator. We’ve got a farmhand, a general’s daughter, an Austrian peasant, a millionaire’s daughter, the son of a pill manufacturer, and that social lioness who gobbled up old Hugo. Now, to add variety, Helen is giving us a ringside seat at Donnybrook Fair. And we’ve still got young Edward and Margaret in reserve. What’s brewing in that direction, I wonder?”

He was not to wonder long. News came via Giles that same season that Margaret, postscript of the tribe (conceived, he recalled, the night they buried the old Colonel, in 1879) had found a cogent reason for prolonging her stay in the Welsh valley and would almost surely, or so Giles predicted, marry a Welshman, “Without,” as he described it, “two halfpence to rub together.”

* * *

Her youngest daughter’s shy but prolonged renunciation of the social scene, her seeming inability to make an impact on any one of the eligible young males her brothers had introduced into the house over the years, had been a source of concern to Henrietta for a long time. She reasoned that Margaret, at twenty-five, was in a fair way to becoming an old maid, totally absorbed in what Henrietta thought of as time-wasting pursuits, of the kind once recommended to young girls to keep them out of mischief until a suitor came knocking at the door. And this, in her view, was quite unnecessary, for Margaret had claims to be considered the prettiest (she was certainly the most feminine) of all the Swann girls. She had the kind of face that would retain its youthfulness into middle-age, perhaps even later; a delicate pink and white complexion, despite hours spent outdoors in all weathers; a gentleness of disposition that none of the other Swanns, male or female, possessed; a low, pleasing voice; an equable temper; a quick, shy smile; and a trim figure, all of which, in her mother’s experience, were qualities young men sought when they came looking for a wife. She had, in addition, two characteristics that were even rarer in girls, especially pretty girls: intelligence and the good sense to conceal it, for it was Henrietta’s experience that young men were frightened off by signs of intelligence in a woman, indicating, as it usually did, that they were bad listeners. And yet, as the years passed, nobody came asking and, what was worse, Margaret showed no disposition whatever to worry about her lack of suitors. She was quite content, it seemed, to enjoy her endless love affair with nature, to woo and be wooed by spring landscapes, cloud movements over the Weald, the song of the wind in the larch coppices bordering Tryst to the north, or the older woods that crowned the spur behind the house. She had a predisposition to wear clothes until they all but disintegrated under the tug of briars and hedgerow, and her shapely hands (hands that her sisters envied) were usually stained with paint when she answered the lunch bell summons.

Adam and Deborah maintained that Margaret had a rare talent for painting pastoral scenes, but Henrietta, whose ideals in painting were battle scenes reproduced in the
Strand Magazine
, was not equipped to evaluate her daughter’s artistic potential. This, she would have said, had nothing to do with the three essentials in a young woman’s life: finding a husband, founding a family, and keeping both contented.

It was her doubts concerning Margaret’s future, indeed, that encouraged Henrietta to persuade Margaret to accept Romayne’s invitation to pay a visit to South Wales and lend a hand with the children. Romayne, who had recently miscarried another child, was in poor health at a time when Giles was fully stretched preparing for the forthcoming General Election.