Give Us This Day (69 page)

“No, I don’t, but I’ll try, once she gets over the shock.”

“There’ll be an inquest. I’m going up for it. Would you or Robert like to come?”

Denzil shook his head. “No, neither of us. We’re busy here, dawn to dusk. You can’t leave livestock same as you can motors. Besides, what purpose would it serve, seein’ the boy’s dead?”

He sat down heavily as Robert came clumping down. “Dolly’ll stay with her while I take the mare and ride for Doctor Fowler. Maybe he’ll come, or maybe he’ll give us something to quieten her. Meantime you’d best take a gill, Dad. You, too, Uncle George.” He went over to a cupboard in the big dresser and took out a bottle and two cups, pouring into the cups and adding water from the iron kettle beside the hearth. “I’ll be back in less than an hour, providing he don’t keep me waitin’.”

His father raised his head. “Watch out for ice on that footbridge. Don’t try and ride over, get off and lead. We’ve had trouble enough for one night.”

“I’ll mind the ice. You drink up. You, too, Uncle George.”

He went out, a big, strong, very capable man, ideal to have around in a crisis. Something about his gait reminded George vividly of the Adam he remembered from childhood. He thought wretchedly,
They’ve all got more Swann than Fawcett about ‘em. That must be because Stella’s the dominant partner…
Slowly he reached out for the liquor and lifted it to his lips. It was sloe gin, judging by the taste, and well matured. The cloying stuff warmed his belly and soothed his throat, still irritated by the whiff of gunpowder. The big clock, inevitable as doom, ticked on. The collie’s tail maintained its steady, friendly whisk. He said, finally, “We’d best keep this to ourselves—the gunshot, I mean. It could lead to her being put away somewhere. The old folks must never hear about it. I can’t face them right now. Debbie is going to cope with telling them in the morning…” He heaved himself up. “I’ll keep you informed, Denzil. And be sure the newspapers are kept from her. Come to that, I wouldn’t read them myself if I were you. They’ll play it up, if I know ‘em.”

He felt drained and useless. All his striving since he had recoiled from that June balance sheet had amounted to this, a favourite nephew burned to a cinder. His own sister trying to blow his head off with a twelve-bore. He went out, reversed the Daimler down the lane, and straightened her out on the river road. He let in the clutch and drove off into the frosty night.

2

Down the years, good and bad, the Swanns had demonstrated that they could ride out the buffets. Hugo’s blindness. Stella’s disastrous first marriage. The death of Giles’s wife in a street riot. These sombre events had been absorbed into the mainstream of life. Not forgotten, of course, but shelved, like bills that were inconvenient to pay on demand, and never featuring in the conversational traffic of a family as large and gregarious as the Swanns of Tryst.

So it might have been with the death of Martin Fawcett, and that despite the furore in the press, had the boy’s mother been seen to mourn the boy with dignity, to divorce the tragic incident from her long-standing grudge against George concerning the nature of his work and his involvement with George’s concerns rather than his father’s. But the shattering report of that gunshot seemed to have released tensions within her that no one suspected were there, least of all her easygoing husband, and her big, capable son, known about Dewponds as Young Master. Her physical prostration lasted no more than forty-eight hours, and in the days that followed, at least to the farmhands and villagers, she seemed to potter about her chores much as usual. But those close to her could not fail to note an abrupt change in her manner and a marked increase in her taciturnity that had passed for matter-of-factness since she had renounced the role of county belle for that of farm wife on a three-hundred-acre holding.

She was not seen at the funeral in Twyforde Churchyard a few days after the tragedy, but then no women were present inside the family. There was no occasion for display when, at the very moment of interment, the leader writer of
The Times, and his opposite number in Northcliffe’s Mail, were at war with on
e another on the vexed question of heavy road traffic. The one declared that the appearance on the nation’s highways of motorized giants represented a menace that almost justified reintroduction of the Red Flag Act; the other held that an occasional mishap of this kind was a small price to pay for the dramatic spurt Britain’s motor engineers had achieved since that idiotic piece of legislation had been repealed, enabling the country to regain its lost lead over Continental competitors.

George watched the controversy from the touchlines, resisting, on the advice of the editor of the Swann broadsheet, the temptation to contribute a letter pointing out that the accident could never have occurred had the master and hunt servants involved shown a little common sense, or made an allowance for Martin’s difficulties in braking a heavy vehicle on an icy gradient.

He growled, when he ran his eye over the spate of letters from the hunting shires. “Here’s proof, if we wanted it, that the English value the life of an animal at twice that of a man earning his living. If Martin had run clear through that damned pack, and killed a dozen or more, you would have heard baying from Channel to Border. As it is, seeing the kid sacrificed his life for them, they vent their spleen on the vehicle! In the name of God, what do they imagine keeps the nation fed? Trade, or the entrails of foxes?”

But Milton Jeffs said, quietly, “Let it ride, George. No one can stop the motor now. There was the same uproar when the railways carved up the fox-hunting country. Ask Adam if you want confirmation of that.”

He was sometimes tempted, indeed, to consult his father on the current turn of affairs, and more particularly on his own inclinations as regards further development of the Fawcett trailer, but he held back. The old people had taken a series of hard knocks lately, what with Romayne’s death and the moonlight flit of young Edward’s giddy wife, and at their age they would lack the resilience for which both had been noted in the past. So he kept clear of Tryst, waiting for the press controversy to die down and be replaced by another, the public hazard of lowflying aeroplanes over cities. But the unease at Dewponds persisted, as he learned from Debbie who was often over there, trying to coax Stella out of the doldrums. She said, early in the new year, “Poor Denzil’s worried half out of his wits. He says she’s so tetchy he hardly dares open his mouth, and they both seem to be sleeping badly. Did you know Stella was abnormally scared of fire?”

“Not until the night I was there. Denzil told me then. He said she has him up going the rounds every time she smells a bonfire. It’s understandable, I suppose, seeing that Dewponds once was burned to the ground, and old Fawcett lost his life in the outbreak.”

“Well, it’s gone beyond that according to him. He tells me she has him out of bed as often as three times a night, and when he’s hard to rouse she goes on the prowl herself. I got the doctor in again and he prescribed for her, but Denzil says no one can lead Stella to medicine. Most of it goes down the sink according to him.” She paused, regarding him sympathetically. “There’s another thing, too. She knows the full circumstances of Martin’s death. One of the farmhands blurted it out and was sacked for his pains. How do you feel about calling in and asking Giles to talk to her?”

It was an old Swann nostrum. When the medical profession had had its fling, they usually sent for Giles, the family wiseacre. He had a knack of coaxing secrets from closed minds and finding unsuspected paths out of an impasse, but he had no luck as regards Stella. After an unresponsive hour with her, he told Denzil, “I can’t reach her. Not yet, anyway, for I daresay that doctor’s right. The shock came at a bad time for her, when most women of her age are finding it difficult to cope. However, I’ll prescribe for you if you’ll heed me.”

He looked shrewdly at his brother-in-law, not liking his haggard features and the sag in his belted belly. He had lost, at a guess, upwards of twenty pounds in the last few months, and it was obvious that interrupted sleep was taking its toll. “Get her into a nursing home for a month or so, and I’m not talking about an asylum. It’s more of a retreat, a place I know at Broadstairs. They just sit about and are cosseted during convalescence. It’s expensive but she can afford it. She’s never touched that money of Grandfather Sam’s, has she?”

He admitted this was true. There had been times, Denzil said, when they could have used her private capital, but he had never asked her for it, not even during the severe agricultural depression of the ‘nineties.

“Why not, Denzil?”

“I had my reasons. She come to me when she was in bad trouble. I never dreamed she would but she did, forsaking your lot for this, and a hard and toilsome life mostly. I wanted her. By God, I wanted her, ever since I was a boy, but I never wanted her father’s money, or her grandfather’s, come to that. We’ve made do and rubbed along happily enough until now, and we’ll come through this I daresay, without packing her off anywhere.”

He looked around the yard. “She rebuilt this place with her own hands. You woulden know about that, being no more’n a boy at the time but she did, or the pair of us did. Laid every beam, every brick, and every tile. You take her from here, and she’ll get worse instead of better.”

“I’m not thinking so much of her. You put in a fourteen-hour day and you need your sleep, man.”

“Aye, I do,” Denzil said, “but there are times when a man must go short of it and this is one of them. She’s been a wonderful wife to me and a fine mother to the boys. What sort of man would I be to pack her off to some kind of hospital at the first sign of trouble? She never had a day’s illness in her life until now.”

“But this is a different illness, Denzil, a mental illness. Temporary almost surely, but something you can’t expect to handle alone. Why don’t you think about it?”

“I’ll think on it,” Denzil said, but Giles knew he would not. Brood, possibly, but not think, for he was not equipped for that kind of thinking, any more than was the village practitioner who brought her bottles of medicine from time to time. Giles said nothing of what was uppermost in his mind, that brief murderous attack that he had dragged from George the last time they discussed Stella’s plight. Among them all, however, he came nearer to understanding his sister’s dependence on this three hundred acres tucked in a fold of the Weald. It had saved her reason once, a long time ago, and perhaps it could do so again. Spring was on the doorstep, the busiest season of the year for people living off the land. It was possible, indeed likely to his way of thinking, that the demands of a lifetime, grafted on to the very bones of their existence, would reassert themselves as soon as the longer days came round. Hard routine work, as he knew by bitter experience, was the only real anodyne. Providing one had faith in what one was about.

* * *

They had entered into a conspiracy to keep it from the old people, soft-pedalling whenever the subject arose and one or other of them paid a call at Tryst. When Henrietta asked a direct question, they would reply with half-truths. Stella was slow to shake off her depression and reassert herself as mistress about the place. Denzil had taken it more philosophically, helped no doubt by the confidence he reposed in his first-born, Robert, and that cheerful village girl Robert had married a year ago. Dolly, they added, was expecting her first child in early spring and the presence of a grandson or granddaughter about the farm would prove a compensatory factor—it often did, in these cases, Debbie argued, wondering how much a man as shrewd as Adam was taken in by this kind of prattle.

Debbie had less misgivings as regards Henrietta. Martin, gone from these parts several years now, had never been as close to her as most of the grandchildren, boys like his brother Robert, the first of them, or Gisela’s tribe, who had grown up down at the old millhouse at the foot of the drive. Or perhaps she reserved her deepest sympathy for George, whose habitual grin was rarely seen these days.

But Deborah was in error as regards the impact Martin’s tragic death had made upon the woman she had long ago accepted as a mother. Henrietta had never learned to ride the buffets fate had in store for everyone. For so long a stretch, all through her young and middle years, she had walked in sunlight and had come to expect it as the right of the circumspect. True, Hugo’s blindness, and a sonin-law’s violent death in distant China, might have counselled wariness in these matters, but these sombre occurrences, sad as they were to contemplate, had taken place far across the sea and Henrietta’s world was local and enclosed.

The death of young Martin was something else. She saw it not only as a shocking waste of a young life, but as a kind of culmination to the swarm of tribulations that had beset the family of late, an unlooked-for plague at her time of life. They had begun with that shameful abdication of Edward’s wife, a blow not only to his pride but to hers, for it seemed monstrous that any girl should seek to exchange a lifetime as a Swann vicereine, in Henrietta’s eyes the most envied future available to a woman, for a career as an actress. Then followed the death of a daughter-inlaw in a vulgar street riot, and while Henrietta could not help but feel this was a likely outcome of trespassing on male preserves, she was not insensitive to the misery it inflicted upon the most sensitive of the brood, even though she had long abandoned any attempt to understand what went on in the overstocked head of a genius. For that is how she had thought of Giles since he was a child.

Hard on the heels of all this came news that the firm was going through a very bad patch, and in a way this information disturbed Henrietta more profoundly than the wounds inflicted on Edward or Giles, for these were of a personal nature. Adam’s admission that Swann-on-Wheels was in rough water was like a hint that the British Empire itself was in jeopardy, or that the Bank of England was expected to close its doors in a week or so. In a way it cast doubts upon Adam Swann’s infallibility, and this struck at the very roots of her faith in the stability of life. It was symptomatic, too, of all she witnessed, and more that she sensed, about the times, so different, so very different from those of her middle years, after Adam had been miraculously restored to her and his affairs had been seen to prosper to a degree that put him alongside enterprises like Pears’ soap, Lipton’s, and all the other businesses she saw advertised on hoardings and public transport.