God Is an Englishman (111 page)

Mrs. Wickstead? There’s cold ham, tongue, and pickles over there. Raspberry tart, too, with custard pie and a bottle of Beaune.”

“Later,” she said, “I don’t think I could do justice to it yet. Could you?”

“No,” he said, “It’s too late for supper and too early for break fast.” He stood up and she saw him whirling his key on his forefinger. “How soon can a man get married if he’s in a prodigious hurry?”

“Three weeks, I believe, since you’ve already established residence in Peterborough.”

“It’s far too long,” he said, tossing the key on the night table, “so I’ll have to trouble you to help me pull off these boots, Mrs. Wick stead. They’re a snug fit.” She skipped out of bed and pushed him into the basket chair, kneel ing and grasping heel and toe as he wiggled his toes, bracing himself against the pull.

They struggled then for a moment and when his boots were off he lifted her back on the bed, saying, “Now do some thing else for me. Loosen your hair,” and she reached up, withdraw ing the fastenings, so that the carefully arranged chignon dissolved and cascaded over her shoulders. He reached behind her, stroking it gratefully. “You’ve never made enough of your hair,” he said. “It’s pretty and strong and plentiful but whenever I’ve seen it it’s been bundled up any old how as though it was a nuisance.”

“Sometimes it is,” she said, “when I’m busy and doing a man’s work.” They might, she reflected, have been man and wife a very long time and gaily celebrating some private occasion of their own, a homecoming or an anniversary.

He ran his hand down her cheek, his fingers moving deliberately and possessively.

“Somebody has been tinkering with your entry in the parish register,” he said.

“Thirty, indeed! We’ll give it as twenty-three. That gives me a five-year start and the necessary authority. Get back to bed, wife,” and crossed to the closet, loosen-ing his cravat.

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epilogue

re-encounter:

1866

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6 0 0 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

1

Diligently and with characteristic tenacity, he went in search of compensation.

His ensign, in the earliest days, was desperation, but later on, when he had adapted to the routine of the clinic, and had been fitted with his leg, his inspiration and talisman was Jolly Jack Wickett, the maimed lancer, so that he began, little by little, to graft humour on to his hurt like a new skin.

Humour, until then, had never been a strong point with Adam Swann. He could see a joke with the next man, and was far from being a solemn man, of the type common enough in the mess and the city, but he had always regarded the antics of clowns like “Circus” Howard and Hamlet Ratcliffe with mild impatience. Later on, when he was waging his own private war, there had been no time for levity, but now, committed to the battle of his life, humour stole upon him like a genial, uninvited guest, and was presently made welcome and accepted as the life and soul of the sorry party.

The hall of mirrors was his playground for here, with reflections cavorting along on four sides of a room adjoining the gymnasium, he could keep track of his progress, from the first lurching stagger to the ultimate sailor’s roll, and glimpses of his profile, as well as his gait, sometimes struck him as droll, so that the transition from the first ironic smile to a full-blooded chuckle was inevitable.

He ac quired the trick of escaping from the bumbling, lopsided creature who moved clumsily between the handrails, and learned to study it from afar, noting its slow, desperately earnest grapple for balance and dignity. And presently, in a strange and secret way, he formed an alliance with it, so that the relationship between them ripened into affection, and the essential Adam Swann would goad it to perform prodigies of enterprise, despite the nag of the tender stump under the pad.

His initiative came to play too, so that he evolved, as time went on, all manner of tricks, subterfuges, and even mechanical adjustments, and had the more conservative of the doctors trying to slow his pace but he ignored their cautionary protests. He knew precisely what he was about and by the turn of the year was virtually his own physician, so that they said of him, among themselves, “Let Swann set his own pace,” and he did, stumping along the gravel paths as far as the lodge gates, and presently, when spring sunshine glittered on the snow-capped peaks across the lake, as far as the lake itself, where he would watch paddle-steamers churning the bilious blue water and test his footing on the slippery planks of the jetty.

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Ultimately, to their collective astonishment, he demanded a horse, and they stood around watching him master the art of mounting from the right and settling himself in the stirrups with his left leather four holes lower than his right, because he still found difficulty in adapt ing to the springs of the kneecap; after that, of all things, he wanted to row and did, learning to offset the stronger pull to starboard in duced by the superior brace of his sound leg. From the first stumbling weeks he had been their star pupil but now, as he worked his way doggedly towards a provisional discharge date, he became a kind of elder statesman in a cabinet of cripples, and they took to consulting him on points involving techniques and new apparatus for patients less equipped for such a struggle. It was, they all decided, a virtuoso performance, and secretly he thought so himself.

Jolly Jack, he decided, would have to look to his laurels if they ever met in the future.

He was not alone in his sense of renewal that spring. Unknown to him, the experience was shared all over the network, from Fraser away in the far north, to Dockett, reining in above Freshwater Bay to watch a full-rigged ship cresting up Channel before a westerly that would soon carry it beyond Beachy Head if the skipper knew his business, and the crew were not as worked over as Dockett felt after such a winter.

A sense of survival permeated the network. Fraser had shifted his main base from Hexham to Berwick, reckoning that at least half his hauls struck north and north-west across the Border, so that his pres ent headquarters might have done duty for the camp of a mediaeval raider planning a big-scale foray as soon as the Cheviot streams were fordable. And this, in a sense, was how Fraser thought of it, as he planned his routes and costed his hauls under the walls of a town Scotsmen had coveted for a thousand years.

Over in Salford, where Catesby’s pinnaces plied in enclaves formed by the most congested rail network in the island outside the metro polis, the man Adam thought of as a visionary, and his father-in-law regarded as a potential Danton or Marat, had his worries, but they were of a private nature. The much-publicised lockout of the Sheffield file trades in February acted as a spur to men like Catesby, who had never lost faith in the dream of a Trades Congress, embrac ing every factory, yard, mine, ropewalk, and distillery in Britain. Now that the winter crises were behind him he could devote time to stump oratory, preaching with the fervour and consistency of Peter the Hermit recruiting for a crusade. Unite!

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unity in every sphere of exploitation of man by man! Oh, hear ye and heed ye, at pithead and foundry! Pass the word among the spinners, the weavers, the colliers, the potters, yes, even among the Swann carters, secure in their minimum wage and maximum working day. For in unity alone at the Sheffield conference, planned for July, could reciprocal agreements pioneered by men like Swann be forced on diehards like his father-in-law, to whom the workshop was still an arena.

Over in the Mountain Square, Bryn Lovell heard echoes of these rumblings, but he paid small heed to them. His reading taught him that justice was not to be sought in platform resolutions but in the observances of certain moral laws, of which keeping faith with the source of one’s bread and cheese was the most important. His industrial philosophy was very simple. One contracted and was there fore obligated, and the dedicated would have dismissed him as a lickspittle, which he was not. Of all Swann’s mandarins in the period that was just behind them only Lovell had never botched a run, or failed to deliver on time. It was on this, inside his own patch, that Swann’s reputation rested, but it was equally characteristic of Bryn Lovell that he worked less overtime than his contemporaries, for he had other matters in train, among them teaching a flock of step children to read and write. As the days lengthened he could have been seen any evening in the garden of his cottage, hard at work with primer and blackboard, and surrounded by his attentive coffee-coloured class, so that passers-by (if they were strangers to the dis trict) might have mistaken him for an usher rather than what he was, the man who earned his bread hauling goods all over the Principality and had won his footing winkling fifty-seven Welshmen from a living tomb.

Far to the west, where the wild daffodils were done but primroses lingered in the high-banked lanes of his enormous beat, Hamlet Ratcliffe embarked on his customary spring tour. He no longer thought of himself as Swann’s emissary but a merchant adventurer in his own right, obligated to keep in personal touch with all his customers and the new holiday centres growing up along the indented coast of the Wedge. He had no need to drum up trade nowadays and did not care to be reminded of a time when he had done it by recapturing a fugitive lion in a North Devon valley. He was a man of substance and prestige, whose waggons could be seen anywhere between Truro and Taunton, but who tended, of late, to identify himself with a re vival of the coaching era. For at any time between Whitsun and mid-September you might encounter one of his three-horse brakes, bearing the Swann insignia and any number of parasols, bowling along the leafy approaches to Torquay, Devonport harbour, Bideford Bay, and sometimes tackling the fearful descent into Lynmouth, and he thought of these excursions as his private GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 602

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Epilogue
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contribution to the enterprise, as indeed they were if you denied his wife credit she never claimed. It was enough for Augusta that “poor ’Amlet was ’ome and dry,” with his string of false starts behind him. He had at last found a calling where his rare and diversified talents could be channelled into a single impressive outlet.

The winter exertions had left their mark on the smooth face of young Rookwood, master of the Southern Square, whose terrain stretched from the Cotswolds to the Channel, from the Bay of a Thousand Wrecks to the roadstead where Nelson’s flagship rode at anchor, reminder of a day when a plump little Corsican had spent himself trying to ruin British trade.

Fraser, Catesby, Lovell, Ratcliffe, and Rookwood. Godsall of the Kentish Triangle and Dockett of Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Vicary in The Bonus, Goodbody and Horncastle of the Crescents; Morris, on his small, profitable patch in the Pickings, and Henrietta at Tryst—all to some extent, warmed themselves in the sunshine of personal achievement, reminding themselves that a leap of six per cent in win ter turnover was something to crow about in the circumstances.

But satisfaction is one thing and exaltation another, and there was at least one zealot among them who did not spare a thought for Swann’s balance sheet that spring. For Edith Wadsworth, styled Edith Wickstead from eight a.m. on a day in the third week of May, Swann’s waggons rolled unheeded, and carters, resigned to having their mani fests challenged and their vehicles turned back at the weighbridge for shoddy loading, suddenly learned the true reason behind a com placency (sometimes amounting to slackness) that had been notice able in the gaffer’s attitude since her unexplained sally into what the company maps defined as Lovell’s territory.

She, for her part, was not in doubt concerning their speculations. Gossip regarding her had been flying up and down the network grapevine for long enough, and it was probable that, within hours of the event, Fraser in the north, and Ratcliffe in the west, would hear about the early morning wedding, performed by a nervous young curate in front of two random witnesses.

2

She had never thought that such happiness was attainable, that such an exquisite harmony of the senses could be achieved. Her state of mind was one of blissful suspension, in which past, present, and future fused so that all her thoughts, assembling like a confused cavalcade, led back to him. And there seemed not to have been a time when it was otherwise.

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They were lying on a deserted strip of shingle a mile north of the lighthouse, she with her back against a groyne, he with his head on her lap and seemingly asleep. They had exchanged no word for some time now and he lay perfectly still, with the sun warming his face and his long limbs in an attitude of graceful relaxation.

The sky up here, as always in East Anglia, seemed much higher and wider than anywhere else, an enormous cavern of blue that shaded off into the sea, relieved, here and there, by little streamers of cloud jockeying for precedence like her thoughts in the stream of time, inconsequent thoughts they were, some of them probing back into her childhood, when she had sat beside her dour father, fishing in a Yorkshire stream. Proud but outdated thoughts, of her determina tion to make a place for herself in this man’s world. Jocund thoughts, of their brief association, beginning with her pursuit of him down to Harwich and ending here on this beach, with his head on her lap. But predominantly sensual thoughts that could make her smile but glow with tenderness as she recalled his light, fleeting touch on her hair as he initiated protracted but infinitely restrained caresses down the full length of her spine, over her buttocks, and between her thighs, so that contemplation of his gentle, possessive handling of her prompted her now to extend her hand as far as it would reach, touching his exposed wrist where it lay beyond the shadow of the groyne, to reach out and stroke it with the tips of her fingers, like a child satisfying itself that a gift had substance and was not part of a Christmas dream.