God Is an Englishman (101 page)

She saw then how hasty she had been in her estimate of the effects such a deprivation was likely to have on him. She had assumed, and might have gone on assuming, that Adam Swann, short of a leg, would be reduced to a parody of the man she had known, and this was a monstrous assumption to make about someone who had taken such pains to carve a place for himself in competition with ruthless rascals like her father, and old Matthew Goldthorpe, men who only pretended to independence while fattening on the sweat of others.

Drowsiness stole over her and the prospect of sleep, real sleep hovered just out of reach. She said, “Don’t go, Deborah. Stay with me until they send word.

Phoebe told me Sir John promised to let us know by mid-morning.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 542

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She wished then with all her heart that she had the child’s faith. She had never extracted the smallest comfort from religion, thinking of it as she thought of institutions like royalty, or a piece of appar atus like the alphabet or the multiplica-tion tables. Something that deserved occasional lip-service, and possibly a passing thought or two, before being set aside in favour of something more amusing and tangible. She supposed she had been taught to look upon Roman Catholics in the way she regarded foreigners, mis guided, unfortunate people, much given to rituals of a kind not far removed from those practised by savages and heathens. She realised now how utterly stupid and bigoted this was on her part, for Deborah’s God was clearly of far more practical use to her now than the austere Jehovah she had half-accepted as the arbiter of the uni verse, or the more patrician deity who presided over the parish church at Twyforde Green. She would have liked to have asked Deborah to give her more explicit information about her communion with the Virgin, but it seemed an invasion of the child’s privacy so she said, “You’ll say more prayers for him? Special prayers, until he’s well again?”

“Why, yes, of course, and I’ve written to Sister Sophie to help. I did that the first day. I gave Stillman the letter to post and I wrote again today, as soon as I heard about his leg. It’s important as many as possible should help.” Her simplicity was one of the most devastating forces Henrietta had ever encountered for, in a way, it seemed to embrace all the religions in the world, reducing their differences to insignificant proportions, and making nonsense of sect and schism. It was rooted and basic, part of the very structure of society once society was strip ped of all its fads and fashions and prejudices. There were human beings, pulled this way and that by temperament and by circum stance, and there was a majestic source of power that left them to flounder or to make the best of things. As long as things went smoothly, as they had for so long now, she had had no quarrel with the divine plan, but when something like this occurred one needed more than conventional belief in her kind of creator, who was alto gether too remote and impersonal to be used as a buffer. One needed access to somebody near, warm, and sympathetic, of the kind Deb orah enjoyed, and she supposed right of access to such a source could only be acquired by training, of the kind the child had received in that community of nuns, or possibly, by self-discipline, of a kind she was never likely to possess. She remembered, however, that there was a word religious people sometimes used in these circumstances—“Intervention” it was, by which, she supposed, the untrained and the undisciplined were enabled to make their supplications. There was also something in the Bible about the special regard in which children were held GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 543

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by God so that it might follow that Deborah’s presence among them was not an accident at all but part of a plan, arranged long in advance, and readily available to him in this des perate pass.

She said, at length, “I’ve forgotten all the prayers I knew. I could make one up I suppose but that isn’t the same somehow, and there’s no need so long as you’re here. Will you pray for me as well? Will you keep praying, until we hear something one way or the other?”

“All the time,” the child said, and then, “You’re so tired. Try and sleep, Aunt Henrietta, just try, and if you can’t then I’ll go and make tea. I could use the small kettle for the iron one is too heavy. Suppose I made tea first and then you tried?”

“I can sleep,” she said, “providing you stay,” and again the curious reversion in their roles occurred to her as Deborah drew herself half-upright and made a pillow of her shoulder, so that a sense of weightlessness stole over her and she surrendered to it with a gratitude that she could not have expressed in words.

2

It did not take Edith Wadsworth long to decide that the presence of someone in authority at Headquarters was essential to the survival of the firm. She had long known that Swann-on-Wheels was a one-man concern, owing everything to his considerable administrative talents as well as his initiative, but the degree of dependence upon him surprised her, as did the helplessness of experienced men like Keate and Tybalt in this contingency.

She would have thought that, for a week or so, a month even, the network would have run itself, but within forty-eight hours of her arrival she realised that this was not so, and that power was so dis tributed here and in the provinces that no one person, other than himself, was capable of steering the concern.

This was partly due, she imagined, to an essential fault in its structure but it also owed something to the very nature of the business. Although, throughout the territories, responsibility was strictly departmentalised, the movement of goods at short notice from one end of the country to the other necessitated a constant crossing of lines of communication and unless endless duplication of effort and double-tracking was to result, someone equipped with cool judgement and an encyclopaedic memory was needed to devote unwavering attention to the inflow of orders, the limitations of teams and rolling stock, the day-to-day staffing situation at every depot, and a dozen other constantly chang ing factors, not GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 544

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excluding several outside their control, such as weather, and the vagaries of public authorities charged with the re pair of roads and bridges.

She understood now the tremendous amount of thought and pat ience that had gone into the building of the system, and the nature of some of his eccentric apparatus, notably the ready reckoner, part map, part itinerary, part index, that he called “Frankenstein.” She had always thought of Frankenstein as a kind of joke he played upon himself, but now she saw that it was far more than that, that it sym bolised his unique approach to the entire field of road haulage, that is to say, ready access to hard facts and their translation into terms of time and distance, from which emerged two end products, the gross cost of a run and the net profit it represented.

But this was only one discovery she made during that first explora tory period when, with one half of her mind, she was trying to hold the business on an even keel, and with the other steel herself against the near-certainty that the next person through the little door at the top of the staircase would bring her news that he was dead.

Gradually the first preoccupation took precedence over the second, and as she became ever more deeply enmeshed in the task of deputis ing for him, she was able to forget why she was here and whether, in point of fact, all her efforts would prove futile. She had already passed this stage when they brought word of the amputation and the high fever that followed it, but such was the degree of concentration demanded of her that even this could be set aside until the day-shift went off and the clamour in the yard below was stilled. By then, when the heat had gone from the day, and the city lay gasping like a spent old whore supping twopennyworth of gin in the gutter, she was too dazed by the effort she had poured into the task to do more than drag herself to the lodging Keate had found for her, eat her cold supper, and sleep until it was time to clear the pending trays in time for the next avalanche of mail. Then she had reason to be grateful to the impulse that had sent her flying down here to take over in this high-handed manner. Alone among them she could prevent the swift dissolution of all they had worked for and this, she thought, was ironic. With the possible exception of Catesby in the Polygon, she was the only henchman who thought of him as a man rather than an employer.

She soon adjusted to the inadequacies of Keate and Tybalt. The one was no more than a conscientious waggoner and the other an excellent administrator within certain limits but far more equipped to obey orders than to issue them.

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and among their juniors there was only one, an ex-Thameside waif in charge of the warehouse, who could be relied upon to back his judgement without reference to herself. Nobody raised an eyebrow at her usurpation and she soon came to believe that, in the territories at least, her pres ence as his vicereine was accepted as official. In her correspondence with men like Ratcliffe and Fraser she encouraged this fiction for it made for swifter decisions, whereas down here, where all roads met, Keate and Tybalt were only too glad of someone to whom they could look for a lead.

In less dismal circumstances she would have found the challenge exhilarating.

The network was now making over three hundred hauls a day and perhaps half as many deliveries, a total of around two thousand separate movements in a six-day week. Four-fifths of these began and ended within a specified territory, and unless they were complicated by some exceptional factor, such as an insurance claim or a breakdown, the mechanics of each operation did not concern Headquarters, save as a figure on a monthly return sheet. It was the odd fifth that represented the hard work in the way of estimates, ad vice notes, memoranda, the checking of distances, choice of routes, and rapid transfers of reserve teams and waggons, for these involved journeys that crossed from one territory into another and sometimes in as many as four adjoining sectors. Tybalt could give her a good deal of information, and Frankenstein (once she had learned to man ipulate him) gave her more, but there were areas where common-sense and guesswork were the only available tools, and a mistake could be costly, representing the difference between modest profit and heavy loss. Then there were the maps and indexes to be kept up-to-date, new contracts to be vetted, and staffing problems sorted out, so that sometimes it astonished her that he had been able to spend any time at all with that family of his, much less tour the network twice a year.

Her first big decision was the transfer of Godsall from Northern Pickings to the Kentish Triangle, and this was done before the part Blubb played in the Staplehurst disaster was made public by no less a person than Charles Dickens, who wrote a letter to the press entitled “Former Coachman’s Heroic Act.”
She knew that Godsall was earmarked for the Triangle and went a step further, persuading Tybalt that young Skilly rated a more important job than warehouse-keeping, and could replace Godsall in Derbyshire. Keate approved, encour aged by the fact that Skilly was one of his proteges, and that Rookwood, notwithstanding his extreme youth, was making good in the Square, but Tybalt argued that they could not afford to lose a key man in the yard at a time like this. She said, shortly,

“Fill that yard vacancy with a clerk. That’s what he would do,” and it was done.

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She had been there about three weeks when the next crisis came and went and she learned that Adam had a good chance of complete recovery, if he accepted Sir John Levy’s advice and went into a Swiss sanatorium for a protracted course of treatment. The amputa tion had been carried out above the knee and his tough constitution, they said, had enabled him to survive a battering that would have killed most men verging on forty. His other injuries, severe but trivial by comparison, included a dislocated shoulder, severe con cussion, a broken wrist and the long, jagged laceration caused by the splinter under his eye. He was very weak, they said, and bedside visits were prohibited. Even his wife had been kept away until the effects of the concussion wore off. As to a discussion of business concerns, it was out of the question.

She learned all these details from Stock, his lawyer, for whom she developed a high regard, partly because his advice was always help ful but also because she decided he had a profound admiration for Adam as a gambler in a world where men habitually played safe. It was Stock who complimented her on her practical display of loyalty in taking the Headquarters’ tiller and warned her that it was a job liable to keep her in London for another twelve months. She had not thought of it in that light until then and now that she did she hesitated.

“I couldn’t stay here that long without official sanction,” she protested. “I’m not sure I’d want to in any case and even you must see that I can’t appoint myself to the job. I only stepped in as a stopgap and he’ll have to be consulted before he goes abroad.”

He said, smiling, “Oh, I’ve no doubt we can make a tidy legal package of it, Miss Wadsworth, and call a general conference if you insist, but you can rely on my backing, as well as Keate’s and Ty balt’s. Can you think of anyone better qualified for the job?”

That was the point. There was no one else with her grasp of his affairs and it frightened her to realise that Stock, and probably the more discerning of the managers, were well aware of this, but the prospect of moving into his chair more or less permanently scared her. In a way, it was a tacit admission that all those rumours concerning their relationship had substance but how could she explain this to Stock? She said, uneasily, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go down to Tryst and discuss the situation with his wife. After all, she’s his executor, and if this dreadful business had ended as we thought it would she would have been consulted at once.”