Give Us This Day (80 page)

* * *

At the precise moment the physicians were probing the fatal wound in an attempt to extract the bullet, Adam Swann, founder of an empire more in tune with the times, opened the first of his Sunday newspapers. There was plenty there to interest him but little he did not expect to find. Joe Chamberlain, unforgiven arch-enemy of the radicals and scapegoat of the whole sorry mess that had emerged from his policy in South Africa, was ill and not expected to live. Repercussions of the master-builders’ lock-out in January were still reverberating round the industrial world. Madame Caillaux, wife of the ex-premier of France and last in the long line of French
femmes fatales
, was to stand trial for the murder of the editor of
Le Figaro
. The wildest speculations were being made as regards Ulster’s threat to fight rather than accept the Home Rule Bill, that had passed its third reading in the Commons a month ago.

He had followed the recurrent Irish crises of the last few months with keen attention, salted with the pinch of cynicism he reserved for Irish affairs. There was not much, he decided, that he didn’t know and couldn’t predict about that particular witches’ brew. In response to the shipment of arms at Larne, or so the Dublin correspondent claimed, Irish Nationalists were now drilling openly in the capital’s parks and public squares. Everybody over there was huffing and puffing and what seemed to him a disproportionate amount of space was devoted to the prospect of civil war. There would be no war in Ireland. Neither, in his view, would the northern Protestants be bludgeoned into accepting the Bill for a united and independent dominion, with freedom to go her own way in all matters but defence, and a small British military presence would be maintained at strategic points. The Ulstermen had too much money and influence behind them and some kind of compromise would be struck in the end. He thought, remembering the music-hall Ireland of his garrison days in the early ‘fifties, The whole damned lot of ‘em are bored stiff without somethin
g to encourage them to strike attitudes and write their maudlin ballads. Wouldn’t surprise me if local blacksmiths in the south weren’t being sounded on the prospect of manufacturing pikes and much good they’d be, facing the Mausers that idiot Carson has shipped into the north.
Impatiently he turned the page devoted to the impassioned pleas of correspondents on both sides of the Ulster border and passed on to scrutinise the latest Stock Exchange quotations.

In many ways he was a sage and prescient judge of other people’s quarrels, but he could be forgiven for having no inkling that one of his children, who had sunned herself on the very spot through lazy summers more than three decades behind her, had squandered her entire inheritance in an attempt to equalise the spurs of the two fighting cocks beyond the Irish Sea.

Ten

Heatwave

R
obert Fawcett was a good weather prophet. “It’ll hold for a spell yet,” he had told Adam, looking at his barley crop ripening under a June sun, and so it did, right on through the succeeding month and into that new phenomenon on the calendar, the seaside holiday season, commencing with Bank Holiday.

Day after day the sun blazed across the Weald, temperatures soaring into the eighties on the Fawcett pastures, where cattle browsed in the shade of the field coppice, tails swishing, heads down to parry the swarm of fat flies. Day after day the heat haze hung over the teeming capitals of the Swann regions—Edinburgh, Cardiff, Dublin, Birmingham, and Manchester—the sun baking the slippery pavements and the water-carts, abroad at first light, doing little or nothing to lay the dust swirls raised by Swann tyres and Swann hooves, so that work in the high population areas became a penance and the viceroys (being of the minority who could anticipate the seasonal rush) slipped away, telling one another and their families that it was wise to take a break while the splendid weather held.

George and Gisela, the youngest of their family long since off their hands, went abroad to visit Gisela’s sisters and brothers-in-law south of Vienna, before moving on into the Tyrol for a breath of mountain air. They were just in time to see the Archducal catafalque leave for Artstettin, surrounded by far less pomp than usually attended the obsequies of a Habsburg. Gisela’s brother-in-law, who stood with them to watch it pass, explained the modesty of the display.

“They’ve never forgiven him for marrying a commoner,” he told George, mildly interested in yet another Balkan furore. “They’re saying here that those anarchists will get a medal from Prince Montenuova, the Lord Chamberlain and a rare stickler for protocol.” And when George, a fluent German speaker, reminded him of the newspaper headlines, he declared, “Oh, there’s talk of bringing Serbia to book for her share in the conspiracy, but it won’t amount to anything. The court party is relieved to see the back of Ferdinand and that woman he would marry, despite all the fuss there was here at the time.”

George, watching the coffins trundle by on their way to the Westbankhof, attended only by such nobility of the realm who chose to defy the Chamberlain’s posthumous snub, thought, I remember old Maximilien Körner telling me tha
t Flunkeydom would choke the Empire in the end, and it seems he was right. These fellows look more like a troupe from a musical comedy than soldiers. He turne
d away to retrace his steps to the hotel, where Gisela was packing for the Tyrolean expedition.

* * *

Mid-July also saw Giles playing truant, despite the backlog of parliamentary business that had accumulated as the summer recess loomed. He had urgent business in the valley, where yet another strike threatened, and when he had done what he could to head it off until tempers cooled, he stole an extra day and used it to drive his new wife, Gwyneth, into Pembroke, that little England beyond Wales, where they walked over the stretch of coastline that had seen the last invasion of England at a time when his grandfather, the old Colonel, was still a boy.

Hand in hand, they explored the Pencaer peninsula jutting from the North Coast and he told her something of the forlorn descent of a few hundred French starvelings in February 1797. He seemed more relaxed these days and the expedition emboldened her to ask a question that had been dormant in her mind ever since their marriage, just a year ago. Reminding him that he still held the lease on his first wife’s house in the mountains at Beddgelert, and that he had not revisited North Wales since Romayne’s death, she said, “Would it distress you, Giles, to take a holiday there with me? I’m as Welsh as a leek, but the truth is I’ve never been to the mountains.”

He replied, with a smile, “I’ve no melancholy memories of Romayne, as she was then, when I met her up there thirty years ago. Nor as the woman she became, when we started from scratch down here in the south. Yes, I’ll take you there during the next recess if you’ve a fancy to see Snowdonia. I’ll show you the very spot where we met at the bridge over the River Glasn when I was eighteen. For the fact is, I don’t really see you as two women in that sense.”

“How then?”

“More as the complement of one another, I suppose. You began where Romayne left off, and I sometimes half-believe that it was meant to happen that way. How else did it come about that our paths recrossed an hour or so before she died?”

She thought about that all the way back to London and it did not strike her as fanciful. She had but two memories of Romayne Swann. One of a spoiled and pettish young madam, standing at her counter just before closing time on a Saturday night and demanding the window display should be half-dismantled in order that she could buy a hat; the other of a wan, waxen little figure in soiled clothes, rushed into her casualty ward after a street riot in Whitehall. A willing sacrifice, she would always think of her, to male intolerance, and the way things were shared in a man’s world, and in a way the impressions fused, especially here in Wales, the ancestral home of both his wives. She supposed something of this kind lay behind his remark. As a champion both of Wales and women, he could not be unaware of the fusion and she thought, gratefully, He’s almost over it now
, and I’ve helped in an odd sort of way. It really does look as if it was planned.

George was home in time to stand in for his son Rudi, viceroy of The Polygon, who decided, in the last week of July, to take his wife and young family on a trip to the Isle of Man. He did this each year and had come to regard it as an extension of his own holiday, for up here, among the shippers and the textile men, he could feel the peripheral pulse of the network better than anywhere outside the capital, The Polygon having been his youthful stamping ground and one of the oldest of the Swann manors.

Young Rudi, a dynamo hereabouts, left his father a string of last-minute instructions, just as if George had been an apprentice to the trade to whom had been granted a little brief authority, but he did not complain. The boy was shaping up well after that furtive marriage of his and he wasn’t surprised when Rudi was back a day before he was due with a new idea and a rumour that a Continental war was brewing.

Rudi, it seems, had run into old Albert Tasker in a Douglas hotel and had learned from him that there was every likelihood of a boom in textiles by the time harvest was in.

“Tasker is one of the biggest shippers about here,” Rudi told him, “and he’s given me good information on foreign markets in the past. ‘If you hold any Continental stocks, unload ‘em, Young Swann,’ he told me. ‘If you don’t the bottom will fall out of ‘em inside a month.’”

But George, recalling his Austrian brother-in-law’s comments on the occasion of the Archduke’s funeral, replied, “My advice to you, Rudi, is stick to hauling and don’t dabble in stocks. If you’ve money to invest, plough it back in the business, as I do. And you can tell old Moneybags Tasker next time you run across him that your father had his ear to the ground on the Continent less than a month ago. There’ll be plenty of huffing and puffing but no more than a skirmish or two, this year or next year. It’s all bluff on Austria’s part, and I daresay the Serbs will call it. What was the other revelation granted to you in the Isle of Man?”

“Oh, that,” said Rudi, grinning. “That’s more in your line. Why have we never opened an Isle of Man depot? The name ‘Swann’ doesn’t mean a row of beans over there and the local hauliers have it all their own way.”

It was true. In the original and successive partitions of Britain, the Isle of Man had been overlooked by both his father and himself. He saw at once what Rudi was angling for; a Polygon concession, based on Douglas, with H.Q.‘s authority to expand.

“What have you in mind? Two or three teams to break the ground?”

“Teams my eye and Betty Martin,” retorted Rudi, using one of the Lancastrian expressions picked up from his wife. “Over there they have a road trial course and no one so much as looks up when a motor passes. Let’s start off with a brace of Swann-Maxies for house removals. I’ve got an option on a depot in Douglas at a hundred a year. A brewery that’s being wound up.”

“Then cost it and send it down by tomorrow’s post. I’ll talk it over with the head clerk.”

“I costed it on the boat,” Rudi said, handing his father three handwritten sheets clipped together. “It’s legible. The crossing was flat calm.”

He took the papers, forbearing to say what came to mind, that Rudi, at twentyseven, was barking at his heels even more impatiently than he, in his own day as heir-apparent, had barked at Adam’s. The boy was cocky enough and needed no further encouragement from him, but it was a story to make the Old Gaffer chuckle the next time he looked in at Tryst.

* * *

Edward Swann was another who succumbed to the lure of the heatwave. On his mother-in-law’s advice, he took Betsy Battersby down to Cornwall for a week. “In order to get to know the girl,” she added, “for you seem very much taken with her and I’ll not have you blaming me for a second fiasco.”

Edward, sharp enough in matters of business, entertained no suspicion at all that she and Betsy had been plotting since the night she absented herself from home leaving Betsy to make the running. Betsy had worked a miracle on him, and he had already asked Edith to write to Gilda in California, telling her she could have her divorce as soon as possible.

They drove down to the West Country in his new Lanchester, travelling as Mr. and Mrs. Swann and exchanging a wink every time they signed the hotel registers. He wondered sometimes what his circumspect mother, and Betsy’s chapel-going family, would make of it if news of the liaison reached them, but the prospect did not bother him much. Somehow, come hell or high water, he intended to marry Betsy Battersby, and neither he nor she was prepared to wait on the law’s delays. As he reminded himself more than once during that hilarious trip, at twenty-eight she was old enough to know her own mind. As for him, life owed him a ration of fun.

* * *

There was one Swann who did not respond to the brilliant weather but sat it out in his private Mount Olympus, scanning bundles of newspapers and occupied, for the most part, with his own sombre reflections.

Adam Swann had never been one for holidays and it would not have occurred to him to uproot himself and travel in a stuffy railway carriage to the coast. Or cross the Channel in search of a change of scene. Up here on his knoll, with every tree in full leaf and the scent of honeysuckle coming out of the woods, he had all the pastoral pleasures on tap, plus his own bed to sleep in at nights. He had, too, all his treasures to hand, and his wife by his side. Indeed, the only thing he did not have to cushion his old age was peace of mind, for, despite everyone’s dismissal of the European crisis as just one more display of Balkan fireworks, he sensed, deep in his heart, that things were drifting in a way that promised trouble. The newspaper editors, it seemed, did not share his sense of unease, but his famous “little man,” who still lived an inch or so above his navel, was agitated. He supposed that Sir Edward Grey was as familiar with the antics of foreign diplomats as he was himself, but there seemed to him a very ominous note in Russia’s championship of the Serbs and Germany’s encouragement of Austria to use the assassination as an excuse to overawe Belgrade. The devil of it was, France was closely involved, too, and seemed likely to exploit the crisis in order to reopen her eternal inquest on the provinces torn from her in 1870, and while he agreed with the wiseacres that no responsible statesman would be such a fool as to use a Balkan assassination to promote a European war, an upset on this scale could play havoc with trade.

And then there was Ireland, where almost everybody was acting the goat, and that solemn ass Balfour, leader of the Opposition, seeing political advantages in backing Ulster, was encouraging army officers to defy a law approved by a majority of nearly a hundred in the House. If they didn’t watch out over there, those crazy Fenian outrages would begin again, followed by repression and an end to all hope of peace.

It was not the slightest use confiding his misgivings to Henrietta (she probably did not know where Serbia was), and everyone else seemed to be off on holiday somewhere. Towards the end of the month he had to take himself to task, reasoning,
Why the devil should I lose any sleep over their concerns at my time of life? I’ve so short a time left!
And so, in the end, he left his newspapers unread and concentrated on his own borders, now a riot of colour and scent and a beanfeast for the bumble bees, whose drone was continuous every time he pottered to and fro about the more regimented sectors of his estate.

He was here, on a morning in late July, admiring some particularly fine clumps of lupins west of the forecourt, when Giles drove up and, without bothering to go into the house, left his motor at the head of the drive and hurried over to him looking, thought Adam, more preoccupied than usual. Adam spared the boy a sympathetic thought, reflecting, He’s the only one among ‘em inclined to shoulde
r everyone’s troubles but his own. But I’m glad he had the sense to marry that woman and start again. As he thought this he did his usual little sum about the age of suc
h sons and daughters who visited him, surprised to realise that the grave-looking, soberly attired “boy” now approaching him was well into his forty-eighth year.

Giles said, “I looked in at The Hermitage on the way up. You’re usually there at this time of day reading your papers, aren’t you?”

“Indeed I am,” Adam said, “but I’ve given myself a holiday from them. To tell the truth I can’t make head or tail of what’s happening any more, can you?”

“Russia’s mobilising,” Giles said, grimly. “That’s official, although it missed the morning papers. I’m very concerned, Father. Things are getting out of hand, and I… well, the truth is I find it helps talking to you. That’s why I drove over. I only got back from the valleys yesterday. Shall we take a turn in the rose-garden before lunch?”