God Is an Englishman (33 page)

That worked. He looked up at her sharply, scrambled to his feet and said,

“You’re feeling well? Doctor Groom is satisfied, isn’t he?”

“Perfectly well,” she said, encouraged by the note of anxiety in his voice, “I never felt better in my life, now that dreadful sickness has stopped.”

“That’s good,” he said, “that’s as it should be,” dismissing the subject with relief, for her pregnancy was the one thing that had the power to interpose between him and his obsession. “Suppose we go for a drive? Would you like that before dinner?”

“I would have liked it very much this morning, when you were shut up for hours on end,” she said, pretending to sulk, “but now I want to talk. I never seem to get the chance any more.”

The protest interested him. She was not, he reflected, the least like the wives and sisters he had squired in India. Nor was she a placid buffer for her husband, like the self-effacing Mrs. Keate. Taken all round she was the same girl he had carried pillion from Seddon Moss to Keswick, a wilful, endearing, bull-headed little bag gage, who never quite abandoned her attempts to achieve some kind of equality, and this at a time when equality between the sexes had never been less fashionable. Not that this displeased him or even ruffled him, for he had never been a man to endure pretensions of this kind. On the whole (but in the wariest way) he applauded her independence, reminding himself that it was this that had attracted him from the outset. Since then, of course, she had enlarged her hold upon his affections, a little every day and night they spent together, but he still had the greatest difficulty in taking her seriously, was still inclined to think of her as a mascot rather than a woman who would present him with a child in a little over two months. She had retained the ability to make him laugh, and he thought of her, he supposed, as a toy but a very engaging toy and one that was, more over, strongly put together. This was just as well for he had never learned the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 171

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art of cosseting women. During those first days with her he had, or so it seemed in retrospect, made some kind of effort to gentle her, but he soon discovered that she had no wish to be gentled, and that deep down in her, held slightly in check by a few second hand notions of propriety, was a generous dash of her father, to which was added, he supposed, the sensuality of the Celt. It made, he felt, for an undemanding marriage, and sometimes, when she was sleeping in his arms, he would congratulate himself on his good sense and good luck. He had neither the leisure nor the inclination to woo a woman, no mind to be steered by one and certainly no stomach to bully one, as it seemed to him most wives were bullied under a cloak of sentimentality.

He said, tolerantly, as he raked in his maps, “What is it you want to talk about?” and she replied, reverting to the child again, “Can’t you guess? Haven’t you the least idea, Adam?”

“I daresay I could but I’m not going to try. Tell me if there’s any thing you want, and there is something, for it didn’t take me long to adapt to your tactics.” She did not resent her bluff being called. Their relationship was like this, jocular, matter-of-fact, not in the least like she had imagined it would be during that period of waiting at Derwentwater.

“You won’t explode?”

“Have I ever exploded?”

“No,” she said, “you’re very kind to me, Adam, and I do appre ciate it, but there
is
something needed to make me—well—the hap piest woman in England.”

“Ah,” he said, still humouring her, “then you don’t need to tell me what this is.

To have me sell up and put on a uniform again.”

“Indeed no,” she said, seriously, “I did want that but it’s very clear you enjoy what you’re doing, and I wouldn’t presume to suggest any thing to the contrary.

I’d like—I’d like a house of my own,
really
my own. An
old
house. A
real
house.

Somewhere I could—well—however can I put it, so that you won’t think me quite stupid? Somewhere to
begin!”

She had certainly succeeded in surprising him now, and the fact that she had gave her a certain inner satisfaction, for he was a man she very rarely surprised.

“Begin what exactly?”

“Why, a family—
your
kind of family, what else?” Suddenly he remembered and remembering he understood. It had to do, he supposed, with this curious obsession she had, not so much with soldiers but with tradition, with belonging to a caste that seemed to her to possess stability and dignity, of a kind lacking in the families clustered round the chimney stacks GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 172

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The Big City
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along the Manchester-Liverpool railroad, a caste of which the archetype was the Colonel, whose ways were predictable and whose watchword was continuity, and perhaps it was not altogether remarkable that the seed of a filibuster like Sam Rawlinson should find the need for roots and permanence and predictability necessary to her peace of mind. To a degree the same urge prompted half the merchants he met in his comings and goings about the city and the industrial belts, as though these men, whom he had at first mistaken for the missionaries of the new iron age, were only innovators by chance. They wanted nothing better, once they were buttressed by wealth, than to sink back into a pastoral England of green fields and lush pastures and petty squires discussing crops and cattle with a race of bucolic peasants. It was an interesting thought for it had, in a way, a direct bearing on his own concerns and made him, in one sense, even more isolated than he had felt in the mess. Hardly one of them, he thought, man or woman, was more than half aware of what was happening around him, or how utterly and finally the impact of men like Stephenson, Brunel, Watt, Crompton, and Arkwright had changed the traditional pattern of the nation’s tapestry.

They had passed through the garden door to the small enclosure at the back of the house. From here the winter fields sloped gently away towards the Kentish border, a patchwork of green and red and russet, studded with clumps of elms and oaks where, in summer, cattle browsed in the shade. On the horizon the long village of Wickham ran along the skyline, and the top of Shirley church spire could be seen to the right. He said, carefully, “If that’s what you want I daresay we could make Trowbridge an offer for this place. I can understand your not caring to put too much of yourself into rented property,” but she said, eagerly, “Oh, no, Adam, you haven’t understood. It’s not just that this place doesn’t belong to us, it’s be cause it’s almost new. When I was a little girl…” and she stopped, biting her lip.

He was sure then that she was going to confirm his thesis and prompted her.

“Go on.”

“Oh it sounds very silly, I suppose, seeing that I was raised in a place like Seddon Moss, and have a dreadful, money-grubbing father like Sam, but it’s there just the same.”

“What’s there? Tell me in your own words if you can.”

“A kind of longing for starting something and—well—being someone who counted, and that means living in a house covered with creeper, with old furniture inside, and drawers that smell of lavender. Oh, you can smile, and I know I’m not putting it very clearly, but it isn’t so different from what you’re so set on doing.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 173

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“Oh, yes, it is. It’s as different as it can be.”

“No, no it isn’t! It’s not wanting to be grand, or anything of that kind, but making something
lasting
out of money instead of…well,
more
money, if you see what I mean.”

Her naïveté touched him even though there was no real bridge between his dreams and hers. He already belonged to an established line, and everything he had done since returning to base had been concerned with the breaking of new ground and identifying with the new century rather than the old. He had never taken pride in his lineage, or in the Swann military tradition, thinking of both as ana chronisms that discouraged a man from meeting the challenges of his own generation. And yet, because of his father and background, he understood its pull, and was prepared to tolerate it in a girl, al though he might well have despised it in a man younger than his father.

He said, putting his hands on her shoulders, and drawing her to him, “Very well, we’ll start looking for such a place when I’m well launched, and providing we can afford it. But that boy of yours, if it is a boy and not a girl as I’m half-persuaded, comes into the busi ness when I feel like putting my feet up. I’ll go part way with you. There’s no sense in creating something if you can’t hope to pass it on to your children. You see, I’ve got my own notions about con tinuity, and they seem to me more realistic than yours. Meantime make the best of this overnight stop, for I’m likely to need every penny I possess until this time next year. You’ll have your child by May, and that’ll give you plenty to think about while I’m away set ting up provincial depots.” She knew him well enough by now to understand that he would keep this half-promise if he could, and although, to some extent, it satisfied her as a first step, she was dismayed by the prospect of him being away again throughout the best months of the year.

“Are you going to be travelling
all
spring and summer?” she de manded, but he was not willing to commit himself about this and only said, bending to kiss the top of her head, “I’ll go wherever I’m needed to safeguard the money I’ve already invested. And it’s not just on my account. I’ve got a responsibility to all the men I employ, and to all those urchins that idiot Keate landed me with,” and when she said, carelessly, “Pooh, I wouldn’t worry my head about them, for if they don’t draw wages from you they’ll have to draw them from somebody,” he realised that there was, after all, a considerable gulf between his outlook and hers. Like Sam, she was unable to think of an employee as anything more than a piece of animated equipment, like one of Sam’s machines, or one of his own carthorses.

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Four

whim oF a

caRRiage-hoRse

1

An old place, with creepercovered walls, and something left behind of long-dead families.

In spite of his initial impatience it insinuated itself and sometimes, between bursts of energy that ate up the last days of winter and early spring, he found himself returning to the fanciful notion. But then, with May Day as the target date for launching the first batch of depots, it was buried under the avalanche of hopes, fears, and figures that attended the approach of the expansion, especially as this seemed likely to coincide (and with maddening exactitude) with the birth of his child. The prospect would almost surely have escaped out of his consciousness had it not been for Dancer, the elderly carriage-horse that he bought for their rig during the last stages of Henrietta’s pregnancy, for he judged the cob rented with the house too inexper ienced for sedate drives along the deep wooded lanes towards Cudham and Westerham and Keston; Dancer, a dappled grey with a long, sad face, an old warrior who had his own notions of country seats, with creeper-clad walls, and his own way of making his passengers aware of them.

Henrietta’s health during the last months had been a source of satis faction to herself and old Doctor Groom who attended her. She had cause enough to pout at her waistline now and sometimes, when she was waddling about the bedroom, she would pause a moment to wonder why she had worried so much on this account in what she already thought of as her “silly days.” She looked, she declared, as thick as one of Farmer Still’s elms, and even a new French crinoline could not disguise the fact, for under stern instructions from both husband and doctor she had laid aside her corsets and some of her petticoats with them, having more than enough weight to drag about the house. Whenever she looked at herself in GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 175

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the mirror she bewailed her lack of inches and smallness of bone, reasoning that a tall, willowy wo man could get through a pregnancy without changing herself into a penguin. It was a relief, she told herself more than once, that Adam was so preoccupied with his work and was, moreover, the kind of hus band who saw nothing shocking in her appearance, and could even joke about it in that rather coarse campfire way of his. His attitude not only made the sacrifice of her figure bearable but also helped to batten the hatches on fear for although in the main she accepted the reassurances of old Doctor Groom, fear was never absent from her mind, not on account of the fact that she would soon bring forth, but because her size surely implied that the child inside her must be enormous, at least ten pounds by her reckoning, and quite definitely male. It might even be twins and sometimes, in her calmer moments, she wondered how she and Adam would view the sudden arrival of a brace of sons, and whether, in that case, they could have one apiece, the elder earmarked for the army, his brother a predestined cygnet on wheels.

During those final weeks he showed her more tenderness than she had expected, even returning home each evening well before dusk, and keeping her near him on Sundays. She appreciated this very much although she did not mention it, and when, one sunny April afternoon, he came home an hour after luncheon, proposing to take her for a drive, she was delighted, for the cob’s unreliability had kept her housebound for almost a month.

He said, “We’ll try that grey, Dancer. He’ll be quiet enough at his age. I bought him at that auction over in Beckenham. They tried to tell me he was twelve, but he’s sixteen if he’s a day, and that’s really why I bid for him. You’ll need something that ambles along when Mandrake takes you and the baby out while I’m away.

He’s called Dancer and the nagsman said he came from somewhere round here.