God Is an Englishman (109 page)

At first, until she came to know him well, she mistook his reticence for timidity. He was always affectionate but never in the least enter prising and this, she thought, was strange in a man who had lived outside the law most of his life.

Then she understood why he lacked boldness as a lover for he did not see her as an eager, yearning woman but as a fairy-godmother to whom he owed this unlooked-for oppor tunity to develop into the man he undoubtedly was and banish the fugitive society had made of him and this, in turn, inhibited her from behaving as she longed to behave when they were alone and off-duty. For while it was one thing to throw one’s cap at a shy lad who stood in need of a little encouragement it was quite another to risk making him feel he was under a virtual obligation to take her as his mistress. She understood this quite well but understanding it did very little to promote resignation. There were times, when he kissed her good night after one of their decorous walks along the towpath, or a visit to a chophouse or a theatre, when she could have pulled him over the doorstep, slammed the door on the complaisant Mrs. Sprockett in the kitchen, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 586

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and left him in no doubt at all what was expected of him, but she had sufficient self-discipline to resist the impulse. Their relation ship at this stage was still tenuous. She dare not subject it to such a severe jolt for she knew she was unequal to the strain of readjustment if she scared him off and also that his chances of making good without her support were negligible. So she waited and waited, substi tuting gaiety and comradeship for passion, and gaining some slight relief from tension by lying stark naked on her bed after he had walked whistling into the dark and holding imaginary conversations with him until her longing had induced a physical climax and she could go to bed and hope to sleep on an opiate composed of hope, faith in him, and a sense of security that strengthened with every week he stayed in her employ.

She had never felt this way about any man, but she was long past making excuses for herself. There was no need for that now that she knew herself committed and deeply in love. She was aware that the change wrought in her must be obvious to all her associates but, unlike the time when gossip in the network was rife concerning her and Adam Swann, she did not give a damn. She had had a surfeit of independence and virtuous isolation, and saw them for what they were, a couple of sour grapes; and juiceless grapes at that. All the authority and independence in the world was not worth the prospect of entering one’s thirties without a man to care for, cosset, and keep one warm in bed on a winter’s night.

In the meantime, however, there was nothing to be lost by encour aging him at his work, and this was why she welcomed Henrietta’s suggestion to employ him as overseer of the reserve depots that were established in the new year. He was very much astonished that he should be considered for the post and gave her a bad moment when he hinted that she might have engineered it as a neat way of dispos ing of him. This, she decided, was a libel she owed to herself to scotch on the spot, so she handed him the Headquarter’s circular, to which Henrietta’s note was attached. He said, after reading it carefully, “Surely I’m no more than a name on a list to Mrs. Swann, or to any one else down there.”

“No one in this outfit is a name on a list, Tom,” she replied. “Swann didn’t work that way and she’s using his apparatus. The only issue is, do you feel qualified to take a job of that kind? It calls for more initiative than you can exercise here, where I make all the decisions. You haven’t forgotten what I said about responsibility when you decided to give it a trial?”

“I’ve not forgotten anything you said or did on that occasion,” he told her, and she was wondering what to make of this when he added, smiling, “I could do a job like that standing on my head but there’s one aspect you’ve overlooked.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 587

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“And what would that be?”

“That you’re the only one aware of the fact that you’ve got a pro fessional thief on the staff. If Headquarters knew that would my name have been put forward?”

“They don’t have to know. Nobody has to know, and nobody will if I can help it.”

“It’ll leak out sooner or later. You know it and I know it.”

“And suppose it does? Do you think I would profess ignorance?”

“No,” he said, “I flatter myself I know you rather better than that, but it isn’t the same thing, is it? Working here under your supervision, or ranging the whole country in an executive position.”

“I’ll take my chance on that. Why shouldn’t they?”

“You aren’t taking a chance. I wouldn’t steal from you and you know it. But can you guarantee my loyalty to strangers, some of whom aren’t above a bit of pilfering themselves, unless Swann has handpicked four hundred men and I’m quite sure he hasn’t?”

“Loyalty to me amounts to loyalty to Swann, doesn’t it?”

“It might,” he said, “but again you can’t bet on it. If goods went missing, and I was within fingering distance, can you honestly tell me it wouldn’t set you thinking?” It seemed to her a crisis in their relationship and something warned her that he needed very positive reassurance. Because of this she took her time answering and said, at length, “No, I can’t deny that, Tom. It must occur to me, but now you’re overlooking something. Win or lose it wouldn’t make a ha’porth of difference to me. It should, I suppose, but it wouldn’t. I’ve passed that point as far as you’re concerned and if you haven’t realised as much it’s because you’ve been deliber ately looking the other way. Are you going to go on doing that?”

“Not indefinitely,” he said, calmly, “only until I’ve something to offer in exchange.”

It would have been easy, she supposed, to have accepted this as a supreme compliment, of a kind nobody had ever paid her before. Not poor old Matt Hornby, who had been a very uncomplicated soul, and not Adam Swann, who had much to offer but all of it spoken for. But time pressed her so hardly she was tempted to reply,

“What the devil do I care what you bring, apart from yourself, Tom Wickstead?

I’m twenty-nine, and next Mayday I’ll be thirty, so in God’s name, don’t waste any more time proving yourself !” but then she saw she was confusing his needs with hers, and that panic of this kind would help neither one of them, and might even stunt the appreciable growth of the confidence she had nurtured in him. She said, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 588

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with a sigh, “Well and good, lad. That’s progress of a kind, and I was in need of some sort of a sop to my pride. Can I take that as a very qualified proposal?” He looked at her merrily but also, she thought, with a certain caution. “I’ll do my own proposing in my own time, not in Swann’s,” he said, and she thought grimly, “We’ll see about that, lad, now that you’ve let the cat’s head out of the bag,” and dismissed him, address ing herself to the task of studying Henrietta’s scheme to establish reserve depots at selected points throughout the network.

It wasn’t much, perhaps, but the guarded exchange helped to boost them a little, partly by reason of the fact that he was now liable to be out of touch three weeks in four, ranging the triangle between Harrogate in the north, Cheltenham in the west, and the unnamed depot that was to serve the south-east. At the depot discretion was essential. The office was a relatively public place and there were always wag goners coming or going.

Then, in late January he went off, reappearing only occasionally and very briefly, and she missed him intolerably, sometimes cursing Henrietta for creating the post and herself for persuading him to accept it. These were days when she fancied she carried a tick ing clock about with her, and it was no help to remind herself that she could consider herself spoken for and that it was now his prerogative to name the day or the occasion.

It was irrelevant whether she had him as husband or lover. All that was necessary was that she should find release from the most obsessive emotion of her life and it was far more than a predomi nantly physical manifestation, of the kind she had found so disturbing before she had good reason to hope. She yearned, with the whole of her being, to be of real service to him, to prove beyond all doubt that she was able to more than compensate for his hunted, wasted years, but there seemed no immediate prospect of this. On the few occasions they were together there was neither the time nor the opportunity to enlarge their relationship without appearing to harass him, and it sometimes seemed to her it was losing a little of its im petus and would develop into one of those placid

“understand ings,” where a couple mooned along year after year saving money to set up house. She had forgotten, or had never really known, that a deep emotional involvement with a man had its waste areas where the tares of self-doubt took root and because he made no unmistak able sign, or spoke no irrevocable word, she sometimes half-believed she was mistaking gratitude, or at best friendship, for reciprocal love that waited upon pride. Then she would torture herself, putting vari ous interpretations on that admission of his about taking his fun where he found it, and wondering if, during his jaunts up and down England, he solaced GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 589

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himself with some little trollop at an inn, or some wench out of his roystering past to whom he owed nothing and who made no claims on his loyalty.

This kind of torment persisted all through March and well into April, when he was absent for three weeks at a stretch collecting spent teams and distributing them about the country for a period out at pas ture, but he had promised to be back in Peterborough by the end of the month. On the strength of this pledge she had herself fitted for the most expensive walking-out dress she had ever bought, together with a
rotonde
of the same material and a puff bonnet that perched high on the head above a chignon arranged in massed plaits, a daring experiment she had read about in the journals.

The new clothes and daring hairstyle at least occupied her mind for a day or so, until the letter came from Henrietta (whom she had all but forgotten) announcing that her fourth child, a boy, had “pre sented himself with remarkable punctuality,” and that Adam was expected home in a fortnight or so and might be discharged as early as the first week of May.

She could not have said what really decided her, what small inci dent or series of incidents resolved her to jog Time’s elbow and stake everything on a privately mounted sally into his camp. It was prob ably a combination of factors coming together in her mind to form an impulse she was incapable of resisting.

There was the tang of spring, with the old lilac burgeoning in the cottage garden between her office and the yard gate. There was the thought of Henrietta, away to the south, giving her breast to her fourth child and now nursing a couple of surprises, either of which was calculated to overset a man with an artificial leg. There were those swift glimpses of lovers every time she went along the towpath to get the smell of the yard out of her nostrils, but, above all, there was the calendar in her bedroom, reminding her that in a few days she would be thirty and reckoned middle-aged. All this and the bitter disappointment of his note, saying that he could not be there for her birthday after all, for he had new instructions from town that would take him to the Cotswolds, the New Forest, and farms along the eastern frontier of the Mountain Square.

The letter, delivered to the office, brought her to the verge of tears, and after that put her into a fury that would have vented itself on the entire yard had it not been succeeded, almost at once, by a mental vacuum, in which she could stand outside herself and admit that this silly game of catch-as-catch-can was no longer compatible with human dignity, and it was time for a gamble that would resolve things one way or another. Once she accepted this she felt more in com mand of GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 590

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herself than at any time since she had read Adam’s name in the list of casualties at the Staplehurst disaster.

There was, as she saw it, no other course but to confront him and discover precisely where she stood in direct relation to his future, and once she had made up her mind to this she went about her prepara tions with the precision she would have brought to planning a com plicated crosscountry haul for an unpredictable customer. She studied her maps, noting his itinerary over the next fortnight, after wards doing the kind of sums in her head that came very easily to her after so long at the game. The answers told her that on the night of 30th April he was due at a farm a mile or two south of Ludlow, and that the Headquarters’ mail clerk would be forwarding his next moves to an inn called The Garland, at a hamlet near the pasture. The winter ordeals were behind them and the spring rush of business had not yet begun. She told the yard foreman she would be away for two days and expected to be back on 2nd May, and that he was to call for her in a pinnace in time to catch a train that left Peter borough at 9:15 the next morning.

Then, having consulted her Bradshaw again, she locked up, went home, and spent the evening making last-minute adjustments to her new ensemble and after that, having given Mrs. Sprockett instructions to call her at seven o’clock, she packed a night-case and went to bed. One thought only interposed between her and sleep. By this time tomorrow, she told herself, she would be equipped to face life with or without him and that, however it resolved itself, was an improvement on what she had been doing for longer than she cared to recall—hang on a bough hoping that a pass ing male would possess enough gumption to pluck her and sample what she had to offer. It was a desperate and shameless solution, but it had the merit of positivity.