God Is an Englishman (10 page)

There was his father, the Colonel, to be placated. There was the reconnaissance he had promised himself of industrial areas, from the shipyards of the north-east, to the cotton belt of Lancashire and the foundries of the Midlands. And there was the disposal of the necklace, without which he could not survive independently for more than a few idle months.

The clipper, they told him, had been diverted to Plymouth, in itself a damnable complication, for he had anticipated landing at Liverpool and disposing of the most important obligation at once. His father lived in retirement at Keswick, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 44

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on the shores of Derwentwater, and Lakeland was a long way from Plymouth for a traveller encumbered with heavy luggage. Bluebooks, and accounts of Parliamentary debates in out-of-date copies of
The Times,
did not tell a man how to get from Plymouth to Derwentwater, but this was the least of his worries.

What concerned him more was the neces sity to confess to an ex–field officer living on half-pay that his only son now possessed means to resign from the Service and take up some kind of commercial career. The old man, he supposed, would be humiliated to discover that a Swann, at the tail of generations of soldiers, was contemplating a break with family tradition at the late age of thirty-one, and was, moreover, proposing to finance it on loot. It was one aspect of the matter, however, that might conceivably be shelved, and he made up his mind that he would spend as brief an interval as was decently possible at home before ranging the country and assessing each opportunity as it presented itself. What he needed more urgently than capital was a confidant who could be trusted, but here the cost of his lost years was again apparent. All his con fidants, save only Roberts, were dead. Where was he to find others in a land he had not seen in years and already seemed more alien to him than Bengal?

2

He had reckoned without the green, the great tide of green spilling down to the water’s edge, and what the prospect could do to a man who had thought himself weatherproofed against sentiment and schoolbook patriotism.

He saw it for the first time a little after dawn, as the clipper short ened sail to double Rame Head and enter the Sound, a belt of green twenty miles wide and having within it a stupendous variety of shades, each capable of enlisting him in an army of a hundred generations of Englishmen making this particular shore. It tugged at his heart so compellingly that his eyes misted. It was not merely a rare and splendid spectacle but a new emotional dimension, with the power to move him as he had not been moved in a very long time. For years his eyes had been staring at landscapes compounded of greys and browns and soldier-scarlet, all under the glare of a white-hot sun. He had almost forgotten the existence of the word “green,” for green was a colour that had slipped away with his boyhood and early youth.

He stood braced in the bows for more than an hour, marvelling and wondering how he could have forgotten this aspect of England. But now that he saw it again it impinged itself as some thing very comforting, and there came to him, uninvited, a convic tion that he would never willingly turn his back on it again.

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That was the first miracle of his immediate return. The second was his encounter with Aaron Walker and to these two experiences he owed his re-entry into the stream of individual existence. He thought it strange, on looking back, that his meeting with Walker should have been prompted by curiosity on his part and suspicion on the part of the depot manager; strange, but laughable when one considered all that came of it, for he never saw the man but once. To Adam Swann the meeting was a key to every door he opened across the years. To Walker the encounter could have been no more than an incident in a busy day, superintending the arrival and departure of passengers at the Great Western terminus.

It was his second day ashore and he had crossed the city from his lodging alongside the boy trundling his trunks on a handbarrow. It was not his intention to stay in the Westcountry longer than it took him to reacclimatise his legs to dry land. Indeed, he only called at the station to despatch his trunks and buy a ticket for the north. The boy offloaded his kit outside a racklined cave labelled

“Left Luggage, Carriage Forward,” and a long-nosed clerk who came forward to receive it read the tags and announced, with gloomy satisfaction, that Keswick (he pronounced it “Kes-wick”) was not in his book. When Adam asked by what route his luggage, and later himself, could be transported there, the clerk consulted his book again and said that he supposed it would be via London, and then by one of the new L. & N.W. expresses, but all he could promise was transportation to Manchester or Liverpool. Then, because Adam’s luggage was cluttering his counter and a small queue was assembling he became truculent, as though depositors had no business asking to be routed to places off the map.

Uncertainty had made Adam edgy. He said, impatiently, “Oh, for God’s sake, man, you’re supposed to run a railway…” but then, at his elbow, a crisp voice said,

“What’s your difficulty, Tapscott?”

The voice had asperity, of the kind men like Havelock and Camp bell would use to unravel a snarl-up in regimental transport, and Adam turned and looked at the towering figure of Aaron Walker, the depot superintendent, impressively authoritative in stovepipe hat, blue frock coat, and fancy waistcoat festooned with a gold watch-chain. The clerk came to attention like a reprimanded private and explained, the superintendent listening patiently and politely. He said, “Get it on the three-fifteen to Fleetwood via Paddington and Manchester. Send the voucher to my office. The gentleman will be there to receive it,” and to Adam, with a friendly nod, “I’ll explain if you can spare a moment, sir. I can do it better with a map. Would you care to step along to my office?” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 46

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Adam followed the tall figure the length of the arcade, noticing as they went that not only employees but passengers made way for them, one or two bewhiskered men even touching their hats, as though hoping to be noticed. The superintendent wore his authority like his stovepipe, securely but without ostentation, and ushered Adam into a large, dingy room, dominated by an enormous desk, closing the door on an orchestra of escaping steam and human out cry. Through a dirty window, Adam noted, the stationmaster could keep watch on his domain, a network of steel rails filling a space of several acres across which locomotives, large and small, coughed and shunted and nudged one another in a metallic ballet. But it was not the man or the view that engaged Adam’s attention so much as an enormous map that covered half the facing wall, and he saw it as the equivalent of a campaign progress chart, of the kind he had seen in regimental headquarters in India during the last eight een months. The man intercepted his glance, smiling a slow proprie tary smile. He said, “I’m obliged to know where my passengers can go and where they can’t. The clerk was right, however. We can’t route you to Keswick, not even indirectly,” and he picked up a ruler, using it as Adam had seen his mathematics tutor use a black board pointer.

The ruler was superfluous. The map spoke for itself. It was at once enormously complicated and excessively simple, with London as the hub of a skein of lines that ran north, north-east, north-west and south, like the warped spokes of a ruined waggon wheel. Every spoke sprouted innumerable spurs and some of the parent spurs smaller spurs. Here and there the hard outlines of the network tapered off into dotted lines representing, Adam assumed, projected railroads or railways in building. Every spoke and most of the spurs had a boldly printed name,
North Kent, London & Brighton, South East ern, Eastern Counties. The Essex

& Suffolk
probed across the flat country to Harwich.
The Great Western
lunged at Bristol.
The
Great Northern
shot off the map into Scotland.
The North Western
and its Midland progeny spilled across the heart of England into the cotton towns and the Wirral peninsula. He said, casually, “Would it be possible to buy a map like that?” and because he was still fac ing the wall he failed to note a hardening of the superintendent’s expression, who said, sharply, “No, sir, I’m afraid not! That map is my stock-in-trade. What would yours be?”

Perhaps Adam’s acceptance of the question, as one put in good faith by someone with little time to waste, disconcerted Walker but only for a second. He shifted his weight and cocked his head, at the same time studying his visitor’s back with more than casual interest. Adam said, innocently, “I have to get to Keswick but not necessarily today. My concern is to get rid of my heavy luggage,” and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 47

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then he turned and met the ironic gaze of the man, his soldier’s instinct tell ing him he was being assessed for other reasons than his ability to pay the fare. He said, uncomfortably, “How far can I go on the
L. & N.W.
? Or do I inquire again at London?”

The superintendent relaxed slightly, but he did not drop his glance lower than Adam’s chin. “I can give you any information they’ll give you at Paddington about routes.” Then, with the kind of jocular emphasis, that again reminded Adam of an usher, “Kes wick? Fleetwood would be the best approach, and after that it would be by post-horse or hired fly, unless you made part of the trip on the new Kendal–Windermere track. Damnably difficult country up there. Too much water and too many mountains. Doesn’t recom mend itself to the stockholders, not even the sporting gentlemen looking for a flutter. No, after Fleetwood, it’ll be a matter of livery stables.”

It was clear then that by asking about the map he had, in some way, offended the man, and this puzzled him for up to the moment of entering the office he had been impressed by the superintendent’s courtesy. He said, “I beg your pardon, Superintendent, I should have had better manners. Fleetwood, you said?

Thank you,” and turned on his heel, but before he had moved a step the man said, with laughter in his voice, “Oh, come, it isn’t your manners that are at fault, it’s your tactics. I find them amateur and a military gentle man, specially selected by foxhunters and their lawyers, shouldn’t want for tactical skill, should he? Sit you down. Have a cheroot. Then tell me who you are representing, and we’ll straighten it out somehow. We usually do, for if money can’t buy a concession money plus stock can in nine cases out of ten.” To any other officer lately in the service of the East India Company Walker’s remarks would have been incomprehensible, but to Adam Swann, primed on the Parliamentary columns of
The Times,
the superintendent’s gibes had significance.

Civilians had their wars and this man was clearly engaged in one somewhere along his routes. Adam turned back into the room, sat down, and accepted the proffered cheroot.

“You’re right about the Service,” he said, “but the fact is I’m a civilian now.

I’m on discharge leave until the end of the month, and I came ashore from the
Bombay City
yesterday.”

Walker’s wary expression did not waver. “You’ll have to prove that,” he said, biting on his cheroot, whereupon Adam took his dis charge papers from one pocket and his ticket stub from another, placing them side by side on the desk and watching the man facing him knit his brows as he examined them.

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“You mean you really are a bona-fide passenger for Keswick? You came in here independently?”

“I came in here at your invitation, Superintendent.” The superintendent threw up his head and laughed, and his hand reached out across the desk, the gesture of a genial extrovert who had never, in his entire life, been embarrassed.

“Damn me, I would have wagered a month’s salary against one of those cigars you were a spy,” he said, blandly. “I even gave those damned lawyers credit for trying a new approach.” Then, suddenly, “But why
did
you want that map? What possible use could it be to you? We issue timetables.”

“It’s a long story,” Adam said, “and I couldn’t put more than half of it into words that would make sense to you.”

“Try. If you succeed I’ll give you the map.”

“You mean that?”

“I scrap it and replace it every week. That one goes into the waste-paper basket the moment tomorrow’s mail comes in with the latest amendments. You’re thinking of investing in railway stock?”

“If I did it would be in my own branch.”

“You came home to
build
a railway?”

“Not necessarily. I came home from a war that made no sense in order to engage in one that did, one in which I was required to use brains as well as brawn. My name is Swann, Adam Swann, and I’m the sixth Swann in line to hold a commission in the armed forces. It has taken me thirteen years to break with family tradition. It’s not an easy thing to accomplish, Mr.…”

“Walker. Aaron Walker, onetime railway architect under Brunel, now shunted into this,” and he spread a hand across the littered desk. “No, that isn’t easy to accomplish, and I ought to know. My father was a parson, the third of his line, and he sum moned the family doctor when I told him I intended to build rail ways. All the same, I wouldn’t apprentice a son of mine to the trade now.

In its heyday it was high adventure, particularly working under a genius like Brunel. Now it’s a carcase torn by jackals. And I took you for one of ’em,” and he laughed his booming laugh again. “Listen, Mr. Swann, I owe you an apology so here it is, plus some advice. Do something more original than build a railway. You look to me the kind of man who might, or why else should you have turned your back on India where the pickings now promise to be legal and substantial?”