God Is an Englishman (103 page)

“Why should you think that might offend me, Miss Wadsworth?”

“I haven’t finished yet. Whoever takes his place and holds the thing together is going to earn his lifelong gratitude. That person should be you not me, Mrs. Swann.”

She heard the clock in the corner ticking the seconds away and its plangency seemed to fill the room, reducing the summer sounds outside to an infinite distance. She heard Henrietta say, in what seemed an incurious tone, “You’re in love with Adam?” and then, as though debating a point with herself, “You must be, otherwise you would have made a very different proposal.” She stood up and the scrape of the chair brought Edith round, so that they faced one an other. “Is he…is he in love with you?”

She could answer this truthfully, thank God, and did with a direct ness tinged with bitterness. “No, and never was, Mrs. Swann, tho’ there were times when he might have imagined he was!”

“Recently?”

“A long time ago.”

“Ah, yes, when we had that trouble here. When the boy was killed?”

“Yes, but nothing happened. Nothing that belittled you in any way. You, his children, this home you’ve made for him, always kept pace with the network. I was a long way behind, even in those days. Since things have changed for him I’ve dropped right out of sight. You must believe that, Mrs. Swann. For all our sakes.” She was not afraid to look at her now. Her assumption, she sup posed, was logical enough and neither of them, so far as she could see, had much to lose. Only GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 553

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he could lose, lying trussed up in bed with a stump where his leg had been and his life in ruins. All they were doing was to try and salvage some of the pieces.

She moved to the door and turned, one band on the knob. “You’ll want time to think it over, no doubt.”

Henrietta’s swift movement surprised her. She seemed to flit across the room like a random shadow and materialise on the threshold. She said, pushing the door shut, “No, Miss Wadsworth! I don’t need time. I’ve been all kinds of a fool concerning Adam in my time but I stopped being one some time ago. I understand that what you say is true, how much that business means to him, and how impor tant it is that it should be there to come home to. I understand what it means to you too, not only for your own sake but for his.”

“You’ll do it? You’ll try?”

“If I didn’t then you’d have to and I’d deserve all that followed. I love Adam very much. I always have, although I didn’t find loving him easy until lately, until just before this awful thing happened to us.” A tiny gleam of humour showed in her eyes. “He isn’t the easiest husband for someone like me, without much to go on except instinct.”

“There’s nothing wrong with instinct, Mrs. Swann. Certainly not your instinct.”

“No, but more was needed, a lot more. You realised that a long time ago.” She stopped, her hand to her mouth, and again Edith saw her as a child but a child from whom a sense of dread had been lifted. “My manners…! I haven’t even offered you tea…” She flung open the door and called into the hall. “Deborah!

Tell Agnes to bring tea. Not here, in the sewing-room,” and turned back into the room. “How would I go about it? Where would I begin?”

“From here until he left for Switzerland. I could send papers and maps and specimen contracts. It would help you to pass the time and stop thinking. And I could spend Sundays here until I went back to my patch. When does the surgeon think he’ll be fit to travel?”

“By the end of the month, if he continues to progress,” her fingers twiddled with the tassel of her belt. “You think I should tell him? Suppose, as he gets better, he begins worrying? Won’t that be bad for him?”

“It’s something we can guard against.”

“How?”

“I’ll send him the monthly returns. It doesn’t matter whether they’re accurate or not.”

“Miss Wadsworth?”

“Yes?”

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Conspiracy
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“What’s your Christian name?”

“Edith.”

“I’ll tell you something nobody else knows, Edith.
Two
things. You might know one of them but I think not.”

“Well?”

“Years ago, before we married, when he was helping me to run away from home, I did make a contribution to that business. I in vented the name and trademark. I think he’s forgotten that and I’ve never liked to remind him. It seemed like giving a present, then tell ing him how much it cost.” She found she could smile at that and did, sharing a little in the excitement that had revitalised her and brought colour to her cheeks. “I see. And the other thing?”

“We’d none of us be alive if it hadn’t been for him. He was half-blind with blood, and more hurt than any of us, but he kept his head somehow. He held the children up to that poor man Blubb, the one Mr. Dickens wrote about, and after that—I still can’t imagine how—he dragged me across the carriage and lifted me high enough for them to reach.”

“Why did you keep all that to yourself?”

“It was something to hold on to. Can you understand that?” She understood perfectly. If he had died, she supposed, it would have been in all the newspapers, but knowing him as Henrietta did it was something she would not dare to broadcast while there was the slightest chance of being called to account for it. A man who had renounced heroics would fight shy of that kind of publicity. She said, “Keep it secret. Most men would enjoy basking in that kind of sunshine but Adam isn’t among them.”

She would have preferred then to have driven away and been alone with her thoughts but this was not possible. She had to stay and be introduced to the children and Phoebe Fraser, to sip tea in the sewing-room with Henrietta and Avery’s child, and all the time the un expected success of her stratagem dragged at her. It was not that she regretted it, or was daunted by the problems and risks it presented, only that, in a sense, it slammed a door that had remained open ever since that day he ambushed her beside the Swale.

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Five

viceReine

1

Time was the element that eluded him. He was aware of many things, odd, unrelated things, the fact that it was summer, that he was help less, that he was in unfamiliar surroundings guarded by friendly gaolers. He had a sense too of having been involved in some kind of catastrophe associated with falling, with water and the smell of bruised grass, indicating a subsidence of some kind, a landslide, a flood, or something of that nature. Beyond that no conclusive indication of why he was here, watched over and trussed like a fowl.

There were pointers but they did not lead him anywhere. The pun gent whiff of disinfectant, the occasional appearance of the man he took to be his chief gaoler, a long-jawed, gold-spectacled busybody with a Hebraic nose, who smelled of camphor, a succession of bowls held to his lips, lips that were clothed in bristles and whispered when his fingers passed across them. But time, in relation to phases in his remembered past, eluded him, so that presently he surrendered to it and let it swirl him along like a slow current.

Once he had adjusted to the sense of drift he could focus on land marks of one kind or another. The Cumberland fells were a con stantly recurring background, and so was the Addiscombe riding school, where “Circus” Howard would entertain them with his acrobatics, and Roberts, grave and serious-minded, would be looking on, his face stiff with disapproval. Roberts was a fairly constant travel ling companion, sometimes riding beside him through sweltering heat to Cawnpore, or putting his case concerning the ethics of their profession, but then, less probably, so was that bewhiskered ass Car digan, justifying the destruction of a brigade in a valley between two ranges of hills, and the logic of his dream rejected this for he had never exchanged one word with Cardigan.

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Vicereine
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Sometimes the images telescoped and then proliferated. Henrietta would appear in that cageless green crinoline she had worn in their ride over the Pennines and at other times—the image was very vivid on these occasions—she wore a dove-grey dress and a severe poke bonnet that made her look sad and remote.

Once or twice she appeared from nowhere wearing no clothes at all, so that he could study her as she moved unconcernedly across his line of vision giving him time to appraise the symmetry of her shoulders, thighs, and buttocks, and the slow, sensual ripple of her heavy copper ringlets. Other, more shadowy figures hailed him and were lost—Hamlet Ratcliffe, driving a frigate at a furious pace, Catesby reading a letter from his son, Bryn Lovell, swarmed over by piccaninnies, and Edith, tall, swaying, and immensely dignified as she picked her way through a maze of waggons, all of which seemed to be driven by Blubb.

It was Blubb who became his first, fixed point, a moonfaced fami liar he could use as a kind of base, and presently he saw him con stantly in the same incongruous frame, a railway carriage window through which he stared and stared, with an expression of outrage in his eyes and his slack mouth agape. He became very irritated with Blubb’s immobility and understood, for the first time, why Tybalt and Keate disapproved of him and never mentioned his name with out frowning. Then, one stifling afternoon, Blubb withdrew from the window and was replaced by the long-jawed gaoler who smelled of camphor, and for once he could comprehend what the man was say ing and recognise kindly concern in his serious eyes. He said, apropos of nothing, “Well, now, that’s rather better.

You won’t have much to show for it. Just a seam, like a crease in a sheet.” And then, more jocularly, “You’ve still kept your tan. You’ll never win sym pathy as an invalid, Swann, but don’t let that concern you. You won’t be one much longer.” There was more talk of this kind before he slipped away again, and he could not have said how long passed before he opened his eyes again and saw, of all people, old Sir Nevil Cook, the evangelist M.P., who was said to own twenty-three biscuit factories and had been so intrigued by that story of Luke Dobbs, the chimney sweep. He saw and heard Sir Nevil quite clearly and could even demand to know how he came to be there, and what, in the name of God, had happened to himself and everybody else over such a long period of lunatic confusion. The magnate said, anxiously, “Er…how much do you recall, Swann? Sir John thinks that is important.”

“Sir John who?”

“Sir John Levy. The surgeon. He’s been looking after you, for weeks now.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 557

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“
Weeks?
What the devil happened to me?”

“You don’t know?”

“I remember some kind of fall! Did I take a bad toss from a horse?” The old fellow looked uncertain at this but presently, blowing out his pink cheeks, he said, carefully, “You were in a bad railway accident at Staplehurst. You and your family. It happened close by, on the 9th June. Your wife and children were with you…”

“Henrietta…the children…?”

“They were unscathed, I’m happy to say. You were hurt.” He digested this. Then he said, thoughtfully, “A railway accident. I remember vaguely. The boat-train—what’s the date now? How long…?”

“It doesn’t matter, old chap. It’s of no consequence at all.”

“Tel me, and tel me where I am and how badly I was injured.” And when the old fellow hesitated, “I’ve served through two wars. I’ve seen everything in my time.”

“Very well, it’s mid-July. The seventeenth, and you’re at my coun try house, Rising Hill. We brought you over here from Tonbridge shortly after it happened.

As to your injuries, you had a very bad gash on your face but that’s healed up splendidly, a dislocated shoulder and a broken wrist, both responding well to treatment, severe concussion…and…er…severe injuries to your leg. Your left leg.”

“How severe?”

The old man looked as if he was being threatened with a pistol. He said, “Sir John can explain, Swann.”

“You explain, Sir Nevil. Come, I’m not a child.”

“Very well. As you say, you’ve seen active service and may take it better than some. Sir John had to amputate. Since then you’ve been on the mend.”

“You took off my leg?”

Sir Nevil nodded and instinctively Adam tried to rise and stare down the length of the bed, but he was unable to do more than raise his head an inch or two, and all he saw was a wicker cradle, half-screened by a stiffly-starched sheet. It looked, he thought, like a new, canopied pinnace just delivered from Blunderstone.

For perhaps two minutes he fought the shock. He had known a great number of men who had suffered amputations, both in India and Scutari. They had survived, or most of them, and some had been fitted with very serviceable artificial legs. At least one had retained his commission and converted his disability into a mess-room joke, like that cavalry general of Napoleon’s…what was his name…? Latour something, Latour-Maubourg, who told his orderly to stop blubbering and remind himself that he would now have only one riding-boot to polish every morning.

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Vicereine
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He lay there staking himself against successive shock waves, trying with all his might to remember the name of the man who had con tinued to serve the John Company with one leg. A lancer or a hussar…with a red face and two enormous moustaches, of which he was very vain.
Jack
Something. Whittall, Wyndale, Wisbey…
Wickett!
Jack Wickett. “Jolly Jack” Wickett his squadron came to call him after his return, and the sudden visual memory of him, limping across the parade ground at Meerut, was immensely comforting so that he saw him not as a fellow messmate of years ago but a buoy thrown to him on a line just as he was on the point of drowning. A very odd-looking buoy with a red face painted on it and a pair of enormous moustaches fixed to its widest point. He caught and held on for his life and presently, knowing that he would not drown, he saw the anxious face of Sir Nevil blur and merge into the folds of the green silk screen against which he was standing. And after that he slept, this time dreamlessly.