God Is an Englishman (113 page)

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any peace until you do!” and he seemed to think this was an excellent idea, and Stillman was summoned to cut the ropes, and so many presents emerged that it might have been Christmas again, with the floor strewn with wrapping paper and string, and all of them jig-jogging with glee. Even Deborah, whose greeting had been watered with tears, perked up when he presented her with a musical box that played an Austrian folk tune said to have been written to celebrate the victory over the Turks, in 1663.

Then, at last, she was able to draw him away, whispering that she would like a private word with him, and he nodded and led the way across the hall into her sewing-room, which was not according to plan for in here was irrefutable evidence of her involvement with Swann-on-Wheels, any number of files, folders, maps, and timetables resulting from the regular visits of Keate and Tybalt after her January withdrawal.

It was too late to head him off so she hung on his heels when he stopped on the threshold, staring at the row of trestle tables and then, stumping across, picking up a quarterly return from The Bonus and gazing at it like a man returning home to discover his house has been ransacked.

He said, at last, “All this clutter…stuff from the yard filling the room…Did
I
leave it here? Was I in the middle of something…?” and then she laughed, for she realised that he wasn’t annoyed but merely astounded, and said, unthinkingly, “No, dear, you didn’t leave it. This was my sewing-room but I had to work somewhere…” He spun round. “
You
had to work?
You?
” and she said, faltering a little, “Well, yes…you see, I didn’t mean you to walk in on it in this fashion. I intended to tell you piecemeal, and let you get used to it gradually. However, it’s done now, so it won’t need much explain ing. When it was certain you would be away nearly a year, I took charge. That is, I…well…made it my business to do what I could.

They were in a frightful tizzy up there. Tybalt, and those others are loyal and hardworking, but they’re very short on initiative. Edith was quite right about that.”

“Edith Wadsworth?”

“She came here. The minute she heard about the crash she left Peterborough and went to London to sort things out, and she did it very well—anyone will tell you that. Later on she came to see me and…well…we talked.” She saw him grimace at this and won dered how much she should admit to at this point, but then she re membered it had no longer a bearing on the situation for Edith Wadsworth was now Edith Wickstead, and as cockahoop, judging by her last letter, as a mill girl who had married a duke.

“You talked about the business?”

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“About you too. She was nice. I liked her very much, even though she was quite frank about being in love with you!”

“She owned to that? In this house?”

“Well, not actually, but I got it out of her and it doesn’t matter any more, because she’s married.”

“Great God! Married to whom?”

“To a man called Wickstead she signed on after she left me in charge. I’m afraid it’s all rather complicated. Won’t you sit down while I explain?” He said, taking a deep breath, “Let’s get one thing straight, my love. I’m not an invalid. They stopped treating me as one months ago. I can ride and swim and row with the best of them, and walk too if I take it gently. There now, that’s enough about me. Go on about what happened,” and he propped himself against the door and folded his arms.

“Well,” she said, “it went rather like this. They went to pieces at the yard, so poor Edith did her best to take your place, but then she saw they couldn’t be left, and it was a case of staying on indefinitely or getting someone like Catesby to take command. She came here to see what I thought and then, like I say, one thing led to another and she suggested I have a try at it.”

“What on earth put that into her head?”

“She had a reason. It seemed to me a silly one at the time but now it doesn’t.

It was extremely sensible of her.”

“What was her reason?”

“She said that the business meant everything to you, and you wouldn’t want to come home and find it in ruins, or even losing ground. I said she was the obvious person to take over and I’d get Mr. Stock the lawyer to authorise it but that didn’t suit her at all.”

“I suppose she was in a hurry to get back to this chap Wickstead in Peterborough?”

“Oh, no. He hadn’t appeared then. At least, I don’t think he had.”

“Well?”

“It was because of you. She said whoever held on, you would have good reason to thank, and it ought to be me not her.”

“And then you accused her of being in love with me?”

“It was as plain as a pikestaff and I wasn’t in the least jealous of her. What I mean is, we didn’t quarrel over it. Don’t you under stand?” He understood better than she imagined, finding the gesture was typical of all he knew of Edith Wadsworth, and it humbled him. He said, “I’m absolutely GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 611

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delighted she’s married, and I only hope that chap Wickstead deserves her.” Then, quietly, “There was never any thing but close friendship between us. You believe that, I hope?”

“Of course I do, and I did then. But even if there had been…”

“Well?”

“I’d still be grateful to her. It was a wonderful idea for it got me through a bad time by giving me something else to think about. Sometimes I didn’t have time to worry about you until Fridays.”

“Why Fridays?”

“Well, Friday evening I came back here until Monday mornings.”

“You
stayed
in London? You ran the firm from the premises?”

“Why, of course. How else? It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I sup posed, or not once I’d got into the swing of it. I even learned how to work Frankenstein.” He had never looked at her quite like that before and it made her feel slightly embarrassed, the way she felt the first time he looked at her without her clothes.

But now it was with a different kind of ap proval, as though, in addition to pleasing him as a woman, she had just said something devastatingly clever and original.

She felt herself blushing as he heaved himself away from the door and moved across to the nearest table with that strange, rolling gait he had acquired, and once there he began sifting through files, letting his glance rove over a map of the eastern counties. Then his eye fell on a return from Wickstead, scored over with the tally of horses he had moved in to the reserve depots, and she said, trying to sound casual, “That will be new to you. Sir John said you weren’t to be bothered, so I did what seemed obvious when trouble came down on us.”

“What trouble was that?”

“Weather trouble. We had a dreadful winter, with floods, land slides, broken bridges, all kinds of things. Then snow and more gales right into March.”

“You set up four new bases?”

“Not bases exactly, depots for reserve teams. It cost a great deal but I think it was worth it. Before Christmas they were borrowing each other’s horses and waggons like a lot of crazy bankrupts, and we got into a frightful muddle. So I emptied that reserve account you started, and drew on another fifteen hundred to buy stand-by teams. When the snow came in January we were better placed than any haulier in the country and got a lot of new customers.”

“This was
your
idea?”

“Well, yes. Stock backed me and Keate came round to it, but it frightened poor Tybalt half out of his wits.”

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He laid the sheet of paper with the others and stood thinking a moment, his hands resting on the table. He said, “I’ll take that chair now,” and when she placed one for him he sat heavily on it, his sound leg outstretched, the gammy one bent, with one hand resting on the knee cap. She did not know quite what to make of his posture or his expression and waited, not altogether happily, for somehow she had not expected him to be so overwhelmed and even now she could see that he had not yet accepted the situation. Possibly she underestimated her own achievement. She had no means of knowing that he was busy comparing it with his own of years ago, when he had wrestled with the terrible complexities of the network, sometimes despairing of making a coherent pattern of factors that were now commonplace but were, in those days, so inter-related that it required tremendous concentration to find a loose end and follow where it led. Yet she had mastered this same trick in a matter of months, with out training or experience, relying on an instinct, and wits that he had not even realised she possessed.

The papers on the table told him this much but that admission about the reserve depots told him something more profound. She had discernment that men like Keate and Tybalt would never acquire, not in a lifetime of association with him, the ability to read his mind at a distance, to put herself in his place and make the decision he would make in identical circum stances, and he supposed this derived, in some way, from the act of bearing a man children, as though the habit of physical union be tween a man and a woman over the years gave private access to un spoken thoughts, and this seemed to him a conclusion that he had never read in a book, or heard the wise pronounce upon but was nevertheless valid.

He said, “Come here, Henrietta,” and she stood before him, rather doubtful y, as he raised his hands and placed them on her hips, as though posing her for a picture.

“Sit down. Sit on my knee.”

“Can I?” and he laughed, saying, “It won’t break! See,” and thumped his knee with his fist, producing a dull, metallic sound that made her conscious of the leg as a separate entity, something pecu liarly his yet possessing a very definite individuality. She lowered her self gingerly, and still laughing he threw his arm about her waist

“It doesn’t hurt? Not where it…”

“Where it joins? No, not unless I overdo it. It seems I was cut out for tin legs.

I heal up and harden quicker than most. There’s not much to show for that cut under the eye, is there?”

She looked closely at the scar and saw that it was just as Sir John had predicted, a thin crooked seam, like a premature wrinkle.

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“Now listen carefully,” he said, “for I want you to remember this. You could have sat here thinking up a welcome-home gift for the rest of your life without hitting on something that gave me more satis faction. Don’t ever forget that. From here on I’ll take far more pride in you than I ever did in that network. Later on I’ll want to hear everything, every last detail, from the minute you walked into that belfry to when I saw your bonnet bobbing up and down at the far end of the gangplank today. Not for reasons of idle curiosity either. I’m as rusty as an old lock and I wouldn’t care to make a fool of myself in front of Tybalt and Frankenstein. Meantime, however, the network can go hang. Give me a real kiss and let’s go back to the children. Unless you’ve any other surprises, that is.” It was odd, she thought, that he should have to remind her in that way of the child upstairs. The children and Phoebe had entered into the spirit of the game, and not one of them had so much as hinted what awaited him in the nursery, but somehow his reaction to what she regarded as her secondary surprise packet had put the real one out of mind. She had not given it a thought since following him into the sewing-room and said, with a gasp, “Great heavens! I’d forgot ten!

There
is
another surprise and if this one astonished you I daren’t think…” and she slipped from his knee, seized his hands, and dragged him to his feet. “It’s…it’s upstairs,” she managed to say, “but for goodness sake don’t alert the children, not until you’ve had time to…to get used to it.”

“Can’t it wait on their bedtime?” he said, and she replied, posi tively, “No, it can’t! It’s been waiting far too long already,” and led him up the staircase, out of range of the chatter and laughter that still issued from the drawing-room.

She stopped on the threshold, saying, “Over there, by the window,” and threw wide the door, watching him stump across the waxed floor, the old boards complaining under the impact of his boots. Then he stopped, just short of the cot, his body rigid, a stunned, frozen man, bereft of the power to exclaim, to gesture, even to turn his head and look back at her for confirmation that he was really seeing what he saw.

Until that moment it had been a rich collective joke practised upon him not only by her but by all of them here. But suddenly and un accountably, it ceased to be a joke at all, and took on an entirely different aspect, endowed with any amount of dignity and solemnity, a tangible consummation of every rewarding aspect of the years they had spent together but by no means confined to that.

Simultaneously it was a benediction, exorcising all the pain and anguish that this confrontation represented, so that she was aware of a terrible and compelling pity for him, and a vast wave of gratitude for his presence and for the child’s. It GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 614

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seemed to her then that it would be almost blas phemous not to acknowledge the miraculous aspect of the occasion, the three of them, man, woman, and child, meeting here for the very first time, and she rustled swiftly past him, lifting the baby from its cot and presenting him to the half-comprehending man in what was a kind of symbolic gesture.

He reached out and received the child wordlessly, his glance mov ing down to it, then up again, so that she remembered he had always held babies awkwardly, as though they were sides of Wiltshire bacon his waggons hauled from the Southern Square every day of the week. She had never seen him so stunned, so utterly deprived of the power to adjust to a situation, for his reactions had always been swift, too swift for a person like her, who needed time to make judgements of any kind. And yet now, with him standing there like a mute, the child passive in his arms, she did not seem able to help him by some kindly coaxing remark that would establish a bridge between them, for what she had seen as no more than a piece of mischief had en larged itself into the most majestic moment of her life.