God Is an Englishman (115 page)

Perhaps it was these evening lessons that enabled Tom Wickstead to surprise old hands like Goodbody and Horncastle that summer and later, when the quarterly returns were sent in, to confound Ty balt, who remarked to his friend Keate,

“That new chap, Wickstead, the one who married Miss Wadsworth. We were mighty lucky to find him. For a Johnny Raw he seems to me to have an astonishing grasp of essentials!”

The early morning sun that probed the sluggish rivers of Bonus country never caught Fraser by surprise. Often, by the time it had touched the eastern folds of the Cheviots, or the long slopes of the Pennines where they fed the Tees, Tyne, and Tweed, it would light on a load of plate glass he was hauling inland from the coastal indus trial complex, flashing a heliographic message across the heedless dales. Fraser was now indifferent to who ruled at Headquarters, being obsessed GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 620

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with a personal ambition, or rather two ambitions. He meant, before he put his feet up, to win the Swann accolade for the highest annual turnover, and was in fact already lying third to Catesby in the Polygon, and Godsall in the Kentish Triangle. He reckoned on doing this within two years, when he would be sixty but in the meantime his sights were set on another target. Week by week he was slowly enlarging his Scottish bridgehead, and if this luck held he would soon be hauling as far north as the Tay, and perhaps even beyond, into the heartlands of his ancestors. The time would come, perhaps, when Swann would open a Scottish depot, and if he did who was better qualified for the post of gaffer up here? He would sit pondering this under the walls of Berwick during his rare slack periods.

It would be very pleasant, he told himself, to return home after a lapse of two centuries with a title of Viceroy bestowed on him by the English.

West of the Pennines, in the rich agricultural districts where Catesby could sometimes be found roving the triangle between the cotton belt, the north-western coalfield, and the pastoral country watched over by Skipton Castle, the men of the Polygon were forgetting there had been a four-year famine, due to a bloody family quarrel on the far side of the Atlantic. But Catesby did not forget.

Whenever he came out here—to give his lungs a spring-clean as he put it—he would reflect upon the tendency of Lancastrians to cram all their eggs in one basket. To the north and east, over the fells and the backbone of England, the sky was washed clean, but to the south the pall of a resurrected King Cotton hung like a saffron banner over a score of cities, all within artillery range of Manchester, and it would occur to him that the Belt might not survive a second beating like the one administered by the war between the states. He did not mourn his son Tarn now, having satisfied himself that the boy had died in a bonny cause, but he would have preferred to see mill owners like Rawlinson learn something useful from the long ordeal, if only for the sake of the men and the lasses who looked to them for wages. For of all Swann’s managers, Catesby was the only one who understood the real reasons for his employer’s spectacular success. First Swann had won the confidence of his employees by letting it be seen that he did not regard them as surly beasts, or expendable machines. Secondly, he made sure that the net he threw across England was so finely meshed that it could trap anything from a pin to a blast fur nace, and this, to Catesby’s way of thinking, was proof of a pres cient mind. Lancashire would do well to follow Swann’s example and diversify while there was still time, for who could say when some other calamity halfway across the world would bring every loom in the country to a standstill?

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It had happened once and it could hap pen again, but next time, please God, it would not find the workers defenceless. A way must be found to divert some of the wealth accumulating to the few to the many, and the only way this could be achieved short of revolution was by instituting a system of collective bargaining.

It seemed to Catesby that there was more chance of squeezing this kind of concession from a variety of trades than from the closely knit, brass-knuckled association of master-spinners, who ruled Lancashire like a consortium of feudal barons. The war in the States was over, but it would be a long time, he supposed, before the bugles blew the cease-fire up here, or in the mines, or in the Black Country beyond the southern skyline.

Bryn Lovell was the last manager to hear that Adam Swann was back at work.

When Tybalt’s round robin reached the Mountain Square Lovell was not at his headquarters. He was enjoying his first holiday in ten years. The day his mulatto wife opened the Headquarters’ letter marked “urgent” Bryn was in the far north-western corner of his domain, having made up his mind that it was time his coffee-coloured stepsons learned something of their national heritage. Nobody was likely to mistake Bryn’s stepsons for Welshmen, but they were Welsh for all that, having been born and raised in the Principality, and it did not seem right to Lovell that they should grow to manhood unaware of the privilege conferred upon them in this respect.

He took advantage of the warm weather and a long, cross-country haul to Llanberis quarries, packing them all into a frigate as super numerary teamsters, even though the eldest was not yet twelve, and the youngest, a merry little fellow called Shadrach, only six. Sleeping in the waggon, and cooking meals by the roadside, they crossed Wales from south-east to north-west, and while the waggons were load ing Bryn accompanied them on an ascent of Snowdon by the Beddgelert track.

They made an improbable picture climbing the steep, tussocky path in single file, and occasionally disappearing into streamers of mist that drifted across the mountain buttresses like bonfire smoke. With Bryn in the van, and his four dark-skinned boys in his wake, anyone could have taken the procession for a safari that had strayed ten thousand miles off course and when at last they reached the sum mit and the mist lifted, as Bryn had promised it would, there below was half Wales, “the real Wales” as Bryn was careful to explain, adding that they were looking down on it from 3,560 feet, the highest vantage point in the land.

“Except Pen Nebblis,” prompted Enoch, the eldest and most pro mising of Bryn’s geography class.

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“Ben Nevis,” said Bryn, gently, “and that’s in Scotland, Enoch.” They gazed at the unimaginably beautiful vista of lake, peak, and forest, elated by the view but even more by their achievement in get ting here.

“There’s another thing,” Bryn said, solemnly, “that as Welshmen you must never forget. The English took the plain from us and built their castles there, but they never reached us here, you understand? And now let’s eat our snap and go down again, for they’ll have finished loading and we’ll have to go part way home by train or your mother will wonder what has happened to us.” They sat under the lee of a great boulder and ate their sandwiches, one spare, greying man, and four copper-coloured, woolly-headed boys, munching, gazing, and wondering, and it crossed Bryn Lovell’s mind that a day like this was worth a lifetime of book-reading and that he was fortunate to have discovered this before it was too late and the years had nothing to offer but a lonely dotage.

Down in the Western Wedge and across the Dorset border to the Southern Square, two other adjutants of Adam Swann had no such thoughts. Hamlet Ratcliffe, fearful of diverting Augusta’s attention from himself, had never wished for children, whereas young Rookwood would not be thinking of them until some weeks from now, after he walked out of a Salisbury Methodist Chapel with his landlady’s pretty daughter on his arm. Both, however, wished Adam well when news reached them that the Gaffer was back among them and that the days of petticoat government were over.

Reading the Headquarters’ circular aloud over his boiled eggs that morning, Hamlet gave expression to this relief, saying, “Us’ll be able to put our veet up now, midear, for although I alwus reckoned Swann was a rare one fer stirring us up yereabouts, his missus, an’ that fancy woman of his, could best him at it, as you’ll own after the winter us had wi’ the pair of ’em hounding us up hill an’

down bliddy dale.”

Augusta (who nursed a secret admiration for Mrs. Swann but dare not admit to it) said that no doubt Henrietta would be glad to get back to her kitchen, and that nothing was to be feared from Edith Wadsworth now she had a kitchen of her own, to which Hamlet replied, “Arr, an’ time enough too. For if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a woman outside one. You can’t never tell what mischief they’ll be at if they get where they’m no bliddy bizness to be!” He said this so emphatically that Augusta interpreted it as a rebuke. “Baint your eggs hard enough, my love?” she asked, timidly, and Hamlet, who was never loath to proclaim himself champion wife-spotter of all England, patted the back of GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 623

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her freckled hand as he said, “They’m just right, midear. And I wasn’t implying nothing personal. Why, damme, youm a woman in a millyon, Gussie, and it baint the virst time I’ve said zo, be it?”

“No, it baint, my love,” said Augusta, and blushed, as she always did when he paid her one of his rare compliments.

The very last man in the network to learn that Headquarters was drumming up subscriptions for a welcome-home gift to Adam Swann was its youngest, and probably its most conscientious manager, Rookwood of Southern Square. The letter arrived at Salisbury in early May but Rookwood inadvertently pigeon-holed it, together with a number of other directives, and this was uncharacteristic of him, as indeed was his state of mind at the time. For the fact was Rook wood was not himself these days and might be said to have been be witched, all his faculties having treacherously deserted him in a matter of seconds after intercepting a single smile across the break fast table on the day after his landlady’s daughter Hetty, eighteen, pert, dark-haired, and devastatingly pretty, had arrived home for good from her Ladies’ Academy in Torquay, whither she had been sent three years before to be trained in grace, dancing, music, sew ing, drawing, and deportment.

He remembered Hetty vaguely, a giggling schoolgirl with long, coal-black plaits and a merry mouth, scampering about the house in the days when he was learning his trade under Abbott, but since then (although she had visited from time to time) he had been so busy that he had no opportunity to learn how a young man might armour himself against the shattering impact of a carefully calculated glance, directed by a pair of brown eyes veiled in long, curling lashes.

Rookwood, man and boy, had come a long way since Keate had prised him out of the Rotherhithe mud and Adam Swann, prince of gamblers, had casually promoted him to the position of manager over one of the largest segments of the network. All in all he had responded well to the opportunity the chance had offered him, and the territory, under his earnest and attentive direction, had main tained its initial start over its nearest rivals gained by Abbott in the first days of the expansion. He had overcome the handicap of youth by strict attention to duty, by long hours of study, and by a tendency to watch the pennies that was a legacy of his vagrant days on the banks of the Thames. In addition, he had at last, by dint of endless coaxing and the application of several jars of Howarth’s Graded Moustache Oil, succeeded in growing an impressive pair of whiskers that would not have disgraced a young Sicilian bandit, and these, rein forced by a wary expression and a permanently outthrust jaw, had aged him by a decade, so GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 624

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that carters had ceased to refer to him as “young Rookwood” and knew him as

“Young Gaffer,” which could be regarded as promotion.

For all that he was still young inside, still very much inclined to doubt his potential and still morbidly sensitive about his obscure origins, so much so that he had commissioned his landlord, in the capacity of a lawyer’s clerk, to trace his ancestry. No documentary evidence had emerged proving that Rookwood was the missing heir to a ducal inheritance or even that he was the byblow of a raffish earl out of an obliging chambermaid. He remained what he had al ways been, and what he had always thought himself, a piece of flotsam on the bosom of the Thames that had drifted in on the tide, or pos sibly downstream from Westminster, to mingle with other flotsam near Brunel’s Tunnel.

The failure of Mr. Gilroy’s inquiries had not worried Rookwood at the time.

By now he had a modest pride in himself, as well as money in the bank, and an assured future in the firm. And yet, to Rookwood’s disciplined mind, there was something missing, and he was uncomfortably aware of this the moment he intercepted Hetty Gilroy’s frank, tender smile. For how was he to know that Mrs. Gilroy had acquainted her pretty daughter with every relevant detail of her lodger’s past, or that she had been enjoined, by both father and mother, “to go out of her way to be nice to that dear boy and treat him like a brother.” Hetty, an excessively amiable young lady, was perfectly prepared to do this, particularly as the dear boy was in possession of good looks and was also, according to her father, put ting money by at a prodigious rate and already earning twice as much as, say, the music master at the Torquay Finishing School.

Pondering these facts on her first day out of school, she looked and she smiled over her morning porridge, unaware that this mild show of courtesy would have a calamitous effect upon the time schedules of Swann-on-Wheels all the way from the Solent to the Cotswolds, or that Rookwood, a victim of love at first sight, would be thrown into a turmoil of self-doubt that ruined his appetite, reduced his sleep to a few fitful hours a night, and set him contemplating the terrible disadvantages of not knowing who he was, where he came from, or even if his name was more than a label attached to him by some for gotten circumstance in the days when he had slept out under tarpau lins opposite the dock where they had once hanged pirates.