God Is an Englishman (114 page)

He said, at last, “I don’t understand…when…?” and she re plied, “Ten weeks ago. It was meant…I thought…” and stopped, wondering if words existed that could explain her original purpose in withholding the news from him all this time, for now she saw it as part of an unconsciously pursued policy on her part that might have been inspired by that talk she had with his surgeon, when he had told her Adam was diverting every ounce of his nervous energy into re-equipping himself to play an active role in life. She supposed, after that, she had done all she could to shield him from worries of this kind for how would it have been possible for him to apply himself exclusively to such demanding work if, with half his mind, he had been wondering how she was managing with three children dragging at her skirts and a fourth in her womb?

The thought fed confidence to her, so that she could say, unequi vocally, “What would have been gained by telling you? I was fit and well all the time I carried him, but would you have believed that if I had put it on paper and posted it to Switzerland? You needed isola tion, all the isolation we could give you, and it worked, Adam. It worked quite splendidly, for I watched you mount those stairs a moment since, and if I hadn’t known…” but there was no need to argue her case further. She sensed that some part of the revelation she was experiencing had passed to him and the blank, wooden look lifted from his face as he carried the child to the window and stood there, looking down on the paddock where the sun threw long, slant ing shadows across buildings that had once been Michelmore’s mill. She had another thought then. In a way they had come full GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 615

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circle, for when all was said and done their marriage had not really begun in Keswick Church, or at that lakeside hotel where they spent their first night together, or even in that rented house, where he had dumped her like excess baggage while he addressed himself to the task of launch ing his precious enterprise.

It had been founded right here one April evening when old Dancer, the homing carriage horse, had rattled them along that lane and come close to upsetting them both on the doorstep. And from here it had been as ordered as one of those com plicated crosscountry hauls they had worked out in time of flood, frost, and used-up teams. Everything that had contributed to their partnership had happened in this place where all their children had been born, where all their mutual adjustments had been made, where she had found maturity facing any number of demands on her pati ence and ingenuity. All their real loving had been done here and down in that thin belt of woodland he was looking at the first book of their marriage had been closed and a new one opened.

He said, addressing the child, “‘Ten weeks,’ she says. And here I am, not knowing whether you’re son or daughter,” and he turned in a half-circle so that she could see he was smiling because he had suddenly recalled the significance of that wood at the foot of the drive.

“You can’t guess?”

“If I had to I’d say a boy.”

“You’d be right.”

They were silent for a moment. Then he said, “Is he christened, or were you waiting for me?”

“We were waiting.”

“Ten weeks and not even a name!”

She hesitated, wondering if it was possible to convey to him the communion she had established with the child without sounding like one of those heroines of Mrs. Henry Wood or Miss Braddon.

“I thought we’d call him Edward, after your father. Unless you had a preference. I think of him as Friday, Man Friday. I even call him that when we’re alone.” Suddenly she felt closer to him in every way than at any time in the past, and this had nothing to do with that clutter downstairs in the sewing-room, but everything to do with the child he was holding. She said, “It isn’t easy to explain, Adam, not even to myself. But it isn’t fanciful either. Stella, Alex, even George who seemed to represent something special between us, didn’t really exist for me until they were born, but he did. He was always a person—no, person isn’t what I mean—a
presence.
Could a man under stand that, I wonder?” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 616

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Epilogue
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“I daresay this man could if he put his mind to it.”

“Well, then, suppose I put it like this. When we knew you stood a chance, and afterwards, when it was clear you would be away almost a year, everyone helped, particularly Deborah, who was a tremend ous comfort, so much so that I can never look on her as anyone else’s child. But with him it was more than that. We were never separated you see and we did everything together, and that meant I was never really separated from you, not for a single moment. I don’t have to tell you where and when he was conceived. You were remember ing it a moment ago, but perhaps you’ve forgotten that that day, when I met you on the edge of the copse, everything changed between us, and I suppose this had a lot to do with how I felt about what came of it.”

She stopped, wondering if she was making sense to him.

“Go on,” he said, prompting her, “there’s far more to it than that.”

“Yes, there is. He wasn’t just
you
in the physical sense, but in every way. That’s what I mean when I say he was a person months before he was born. Up at the yard, and through all the worrying times when your letters didn’t mean much and there was so much to see to he
was
you. We sorted things out together and waited and hoped as one person. There, I can’t do better than that, no matter how hard I try.”

“You’ve done very well,” he said. “I doubt if that chap Dickens could do much better. There’s one thing, however. You asked if I had any preference for a name and I have, in view of what you’ve just told me. Call him Giles.”

“Giles.” She savoured the name and found it crisp and pleasing. “I like that. Yes, I like that very much. It suits him.”

“You can be sure as to that,” he said. “Giles is the patron saint of cripples.”

“Nobody will ever think of you as a cripple.”

“No,” he said, cheerfully, “I’ll make sure of that. But I think you might have, if it hadn’t been for him,” and he lifted the child and kissed it. The salutation had a proud and possessive element she had never witnessed in greeting his other children. There was nothing more to be said and even Giles acknowledged this for he began to whimper, so that she reached up for him, saying, “Give him to me. Any other child would have been bawling his head off long since but even Father Confessors have to be fed,” and she sat and settled the child on her lap and unbuttoned her blouse.

He stood there musing, his back to the light, and although she was absorbed with the child she knew that his mind was occupied assemb ling the pieces of the new pattern of their lives, and that whatever he might make of the task it would GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 617

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bring him infinitely more fulfilment than he had derived from the years behind them. He said, as she freed the top tapes of her corset and shrugged herself half out of her che mise, “Would it embarrass you if I watched?” and she replied,

“That’s a silly question coming from you. Especially in the circum stances.” She lifted the child to her full rounded breast and then, without being aware of her absorption, settled herself more comfort ably and forgot him.

She would have been interested, however, had she happened to glance up, for he was looking at her more objectively than he had ever looked at anyone.

He would have said, an hour ago, that she could never hope to surprise him much, not if they shared another half-century as man and wife, and yet she had and that very dramati cally, and he wondered how he could have been so blind and deaf to her potentialities, for until then he had always thought of himself as more discerning than most. He told himself that all her best qualities had been latent, awaiting a time to emerge and proclaim themselves, but he knew this was a makeshift excuse. He had hints over the years but had ignored them and wryly, half-reluctantly, he acknowledged why. Obsessed with her physically he had never deployed her as he might have done, to the advantage of both of them.

It had taken circumstances that would have crushed most women to establish beyond doubt that the role she had played in his life up to this moment had been no more than adequate, and the fault for this omis sion lay with him not with her, for what had he ever demanded of her but functions that could have been performed by a middling-to-good housekeeper, and one of those forlorn girls in Kate Hamilton’s establishment? He thought, “Well, I’ve had my lesson, and I’m not likely to forget it in a long time,” and he bent over her, brushing her hair with his lips. Then he stumped across the room and out into the corridor as she called, gaily, “We’ll have supper at seven. Take them all outside, I’ll be down in thirty minutes!” and he lifted his hand in acknowledgment as he closed the door.

He could not trust himself to speak.

4

At this season of the year it was light on the flat lands of The Bonus a few minutes to five and if the sky was clear, as it was today, the first rays of the sun went exploring up the estuaries of the rivers, skim ming over the surface of slow-moving currents and under bridges that Vicary, Swann’s adjutant hereabouts, had hauled timber to re build after the spates of the winter. The river levels were very low now after a month without so much as a shower, and Vicary’s teams, still GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 618

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on charter to the bridge builders, could cross at a dozen points, saving as much as a mile in a five-mile haul, but Vicary never har ried his carters. Working for municipalities he was acquiring muni cipal habits and took his time about things.

He could not be chivvied, as his colleagues in the Crescents further north had been chivvied by that hustler in petticoats at Peterborough.

At precisely twenty-nine minutes past seven, therefore, when the sun was already high, Vicary lit his pipe, gave the yard porter a nod, and watched him draw back the bolts to let the first frigate through. Then, pondering the morning’s mail, he returned to his office, glanc ing anew at the round robin Tybalt had distributed with a view to collecting for a staff presentation to the Gaffer, now back at his post after an absence of almost twelve months. Vicary, an amiable, un ambitious man, wondered if the loss of a leg would slow Swann down and hoped, without malice, that it would.

To Vicary’s mind there was altogether too much bustle about the world these days and for himself he could not see where it was leading or what it achieved. Settling himself in his chair he waited for his kettle to boil on the spirit stove that a grateful Harwich skipper had given him when he had delivered a spare sail days ahead of schedule. There would be time enough to go through the day’s invoices and begin the day’s route-plotting when he had finished reading what his newspaper had to say about the defeat of Mr. Gladstone’s reform bill, and the current shindig brewing between Austrians, Prussians, and Italians. Vicary took a mild interest in world politics, but it was the kind of attention a man at home in bed might pay to a gale that was rattling his windows.

Up-to-date as regards what was happening at Headquarters, in Westminster and the Chancellories of Europe, Vicary was out-of-date as regards affairs on his doorstep. His sympathy for Goodbody and Horncastle, deputy managers of the Crescents Central and North, was wasted for, by now, they were both aware that a happy set of circumstances had shifted them beyond the range of Edith Wadsworth’s goad, and each approved heartily of Edith’s successor, a very amiable young fellow called Tom Wickstead, who had appeared from nowhere and succeeded, to everyone’s astonishment, in belling the cat. He had not only prised the Wadsworth lass from the seat of power along the East Coast but had unaccountably married her and given her something to think about apart from goods consigned for Grimsby that somehow found their way to Hull. For Wickstead, it was decided in territory reaching from Spalding to Redcar, was a coaxer not a chivvier, and men like Goodbody and Horncastle were relieved to get their orders from a man again. They had conceded Edith Wadsworth’s ability, initiative, and diabolically accurate memory but both, at one time or another, had cowered GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 619

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under the lash of her tongue. Now, with male arrogance, they were satisfied that they could identify the source of the Wadsworth woman’s tire some pursuit of perfection. She had not been Swann’s mistress after all, it seemed. All she had wanted, when it came to bedrock, was someone—anyone—to tuck her up at nights and someone, thank God, had volunteered for the job. Throughout the whole network that season a period of unwonted somnolence succeeded the ardours of a long, hard winter, but nowhere was the respite more noticeable than in the Swann provinces reaching from the north bank of the Thames to the south bank of the Tees, where Wickstead shared the credit with the June weather.

There was, in fact, a grain of truth in this, for once Wickstead’s appointment was confirmed Edith was seldom seen about the yard but could be sought more profitably in the market, where her familiarity with wholesale prices enabled her to fill a shopping basket at half the cost demanded of the average housewife.

Cooking and house-scouring kept her busy during the day, but in the evenings she had leisure to address herself to a more familiar task and might be said to have adopted the role of governess between supper and bedtime. Anyone passing the Wicksteads’ un curtained downstairs window at this time of day could have seen her putting her pupil through his paces with a day book, a Bradshaw, various ordnance maps, and other primers. The exchange of conversa tion on these occasions was not what one might expect between newlyweds, home from a three-day honeymoon at Cromer, but was concerned, in the main, with haulage rates, weight capacities, dis tances between points A and B, and the integrity of a thousand and one local merchants who used Swann-on-Wheels to shift goods from warehouse to customer.