God Is an Englishman (36 page)

There was the cubby-hole behind one of the fire places that Phillips said was a priest’s hole, although he did not ex plain how such a feature came to be included in the country seat of a family of militant Protestants and, above all, the Conyer crest GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 186

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in stone over the front porch, a shield bisected by a St. Andrew’s cross with a variety of unidentifiable birds and fishes in the spaces. It was, Mr. Phillips admitted, a rather suspect coat-of-arms, for this branch of the Conyers were never ennobled, but its presence, merging into the mellow brick-work of the long façade, was additional proof of the ex-miller’s enterprise.

Henrietta did not know, of course, that old Collinwood’s sudden death had converted Tryst into an expensive white elephant, for such of the Conyers who possessed the means or inclination to occupy the place were serving in various parts of the colonies and the agent had instructions to find a tenant for a period of five years, after which the situation was to be reviewed. He mentioned this just as he was leaving, saying that he had an appointment with a prospect that very evening. It was this parting remark, perhaps, that made Henrietta very thoughtful over her broth and beefsteak, eaten under the sullen glare of a Jacobite Conyer who had died of drink in Rome after a curious incident Mr. Phillips referred to as “The Fifteen.”

He came about noon the next day, bringing a new day dress she had ordered in anticipation of regaining her normal figure. It was, he thought merrily, a very fetching dress, its tight waistcoat bodice featuring pagoda sleeves finished with what he had been told were known as “engageantes.” The crinoline skirt displayed multiple flounces and there was a trimmed bonnet to match but it was not the new ensemble that engaged her attention when he displayed it on its wire hanger. He said, “I’ve seen Doctor Birtles, and he tells me you can travel home tomorrow. I’ll send Mandrake over to fetch you and the baby early afternoon. Be ready because he’s due to meet me at Croydon before six,” but then noticed that her expression clouded, and that she made that familiar, appealing grimace that he had first noticed when he tried to abandon her at the wayside station of Lea Green during the earliest stage of their escape from Seddon Moss.

He said, “You want to come home, don’t you?” and she replied, devastatingly,

“I
am
home, Adam. I’m more at home here than I’ve ever been anywhere in my life.” Then, as he raised his eyebrows, “Oh, I daresay it sounds silly but it’s true, it’s true, Adam! I
love
this house, and I love this garden. I belong here and I never want to leave it.”

He said, reasonably, “Come now, that’s nonsense, Henrietta. It really is, and you must see that it is. I know that I said you should live in an old house eventually but I didn’t mean now, and I certainly didn’t mean a place of this size. It’s not only the upkeep, it’s the distance from London. Shirley was bad enough, and I hoped GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 187

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to move closer in when the lease ran out, but this is more than twenty miles out and in bad weather it could take me two hours to get into Croy don. Quite apart from that I couldn’t afford to buy Tryst, even if I called off the expansion and pledged every penny I possessed.”

“Oh, but you don’t have to buy it, it’s for rent. Mr. Phillips, the agent, told me so only yesterday. They want a tenant for five years and after that you could almost surely get it renewed if you wanted to.”

“No,” he said, “it’s quite mad!” but she went on, obstinately, “Why is it mad?

Your friend Avery is always telling you to think in guineas and not sixpences, and if I understand that rightly it means pretending to everyone that you’re richer than you are. In the meantime you’d have somewhere peaceful and lovely to come to whenever you were tired, somewhere for your children to grow up and give me what I want and need, a home to love as well as a hus band.” Suddenly she became very earnest. “You’d never ever regret taking it, Adam, I promise you. It isn’t because baby was born here, and everyone has been so friendly and helpful, it…it’s something I feel but can’t properly explain, I mean…how there comes to
be
a house here, and the man who built it, and how like you he was in the way he went about it!”

She paused for a moment trying to assess whether her outburst had made any impression, whether he regarded it as anything more than an exhibition of what people called “post-pregnancy fantods.” He looked astonished but there was no sign of the indulgent smile he sometimes used when she made more modest demands on his pocket and patience. Instead there was a hesitant, rather speculative gleam in his eye as he ranged, hand in pockets, along the façade of the house, looking about him with the air of a man seeking an escape from her importunities.

She held her breath when he stopped, turned, and looked up at the roof and then, pivoting slowly on his heel, took in the full length of the house, from the muniment room in the west to the little gargoyle perched below the twisted chimney pot of the eastern wing where it jutted out, as though it was one of Miles Conyer’s afterthoughts. He came back to her.

“How much do they want per annum? Did you ask Phillips? Or didn’t it occur to you that the old rascal was hard at work selling you something?” She threw up her head as though he had offered a personal insult.

“No, it didn’t and I don’t think he was. He told me because I asked about the history of Tryst. He was just being kind and polite, in a way you couldn’t understand.”

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He said, goodhumouredly, “There now, I don’t want to upset you. You shouldn’t work yourself up in a state at a time like this. Come down off that high horse and don’t resort to snivelling, be cause it doesn’t fool me any more than your other little tricks, although I never seem able to convince you of that, do I?” and he threw his arms around her and kissed her, saying, “Come right out with it if you must. I’ll accept the fact that you’re taken with the place, and that you made up your mind to bully me into taking it the moment you heard it was in the market.

But what’s this nonsense about me and that pirate who built it three centuries ago? What the devil have people like the Conyers and me got in common?”

“A lot more than you think. He was someone else who wouldn’t take no for an answer, who thought he was capable of anything and proved it. That’s why I know Tryst is right for you, apart from what I think about it. You’ll succeed here, far more than if you buy or rent some ordinary little place. Besides,” here she pouted again, “how long do you spend at home anyhow?” A male thought occurred to him. With a place like this on her hands her mind was likely to be so occupied that she would make fewer demands on his time than she had been making of late. There was also something to be said for her theory that it would bring prestige to the enterprise. Every successful city man was a snob, and the more money a man was seen to be making the more emphasis rivals placed on his social background. He could imagine the im pact his tenancy of a grand house like this might make in and around London Bridge, and on the Manchester and Birmingham exchanges. “That Swann feller—the haulier with the strange device. Must be doing well. Bought himself a country estate they tell me. Up and coming man I should say…” and again he thought how much of the father had rubbed off on the daughter.

He said, finally, “Look here, Henrietta, there might be certain advantages but it depends entirely on what Phillips hopes to get in the way of a rental. I’ll not be held to ransom because you see your self as lady of the manor. And it’ll mean me spending more time in London, for I can’t be expected to come back here every night of the week. I should spend half my time travelling. When it comes down to it, it’s a question of asking yourself which you prefer most, a place in the country, or a lodger for a husband.”

“You know that isn’t true,” she said, spiritedly, “and it’s unkind to imply it. Of course I’d sooner have you than a house, any kind of house, but I can have both if all you say about the future of Swann-on-Wheels is true, and not just the kind of talk men use to convince themselves that what they are doing is right. I don’t want this place if you don’t. Why don’t you explore it, as I have? All I’m saying GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 189

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is it’s the kind of place a successful man of business ought to be looking for if he means to raise a family.”

He said, “Don’t threaten me with any more children for a spell. We haven’t even found a name for the first one yet. Have you got any more bright ideas?

That last list sounded pretentious to me, especially “Patience.” Patience, indeed, when she was practically born behind a carriage horse! Put your thinking cap on for she’ll have to be christened in a week or two.” He went off then and she saw by the way he moved that he was embarking on one of his exploratory probes, of the kind that had already taken him from one end of the country to the other. She thought, gleefully, “He’ll have it! That shot about thinking in guineas went home!” and addressed herself to the less important problem of finding a name for the baby.

He explored the outside first, moving up the grassy incline above the Dutch garden and taking the path that led through the rhododen dron clumps until he could look down on the house from the wooded eminence that rose to a height of a hundred feet. When he had seen it in moonlight he had thought of it as an old man, composing him self for sleep, but now it looked very feminine, a cheerful, broad-beamed matron of about forty-five, with a spread of handsome children and a hearty husband who still appreciated what she had to offer on the table and between the sheets. There was vitality down there harnessed to a settled habit of mind, as though something of old Conyer’s restlessness had been built into the place and was still trying to get out after three centuries of sun, rain, and wind. The colours appealed to him, the cider-apple redness of mellowed brick and pantiles, the chocolate brown of the cross-timbers and the yellowish white of the chimneys, with their long, graceful twirls, more like the work of a pastry-cook than a mason. And beyond, where the double row of copper beeches ran down to the lane, there were great patches of bluebells that had been budding the evening he brought her here but were now in flower, as were the primroses under the hedges either side of the drive. Away to the left, half-hidden in a wooded hollow, he could see a blur of buildings that was Twyforde Green, and between here and the village the river ran across level fields and coppices on its way to join a broader stream that would carry it to the Channel nearly forty miles to the south. Behind him, running the whole length of the escarpment that sheltered the house, were trees that had taken root the time the Kentishmen marched on London under Tyler and Ball, some of the older oaks towering to a height of a five-storey building, others gaining in spread what they lost in height.

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The place had a settled, civilised look that recommended itself to him as the end product of centuries of conservation and commonsense. It was planned, ordered, and deeply rooted, and although it promised comfort the pursuit of ease was not its mainspring. The merchant impulse in Henrietta had detected something that he had missed. The house was redolent of achievement and endeavour on the part of a long line of Englishmen, all of whom knew what they wanted and meant to get it, come what may.

He moved over to the balustrade that overlooked the stableyard and went down a flight of shallow terraces to the kitchen quarters. Here was a range large enough to roast a buck, and the ironmongery that would attend the endeavour.

There were several still rooms and pantries floored with blue slate, and an ornate pump beside a stone-lined well covered with an iron grating. Three jerks on the handle brought water gushing into the wooden trough and he thought, “That’s a spring in the slope above and will keep the house bone dry in winter, for the well will drain every gallon that slips through the spread of roots beyond the yard,” and he passed on through rooms with which he was half-familiar until he came to the little sewing chamber off the drawing-room, where the baby lay in a cot under the window.

He looked down at her, surprised at the power she had to enchant now that she looked like a real baby instead of the puckered, squal ling bundle they had shown him the morning he returned here after his night at the mill. The tuft of hair was receding and under it was a glint of gold so that he thought, “She’ll be fair, like her grandfather, not blackpolled like me, and there’s not much of her mother’s mulishness about her so far as I can see. I wouldn’t wonder if she isn’t a withdrawn little thing, who lets her mother put upon her,” and he reached down, lifting the tiny fist and noting the perfect formation of fingernails that reminded him of forget-me-not petals. The fingers uncoiled and made a feint at his thumb and two unwinking blue eyes looked up at him with the solemnity of an old bishop pronouncing a blessing.

He stood there conjuring with names, an avalanche of names but none of them seemed apt. There were the usual biblical names, Judith and Ruth and Rachel and Rebecca, and a string of maiden-aunt names, like those of his father’s sisters, Emma, Harriet, Martha, Ann, and Charlotte. There were fashionable names like Florence, and royal names, like Adelaide and Victoria, and names that were supposed to set the owner an example, like Faith and Charity, and the one Henrietta had suggested, Patience. Patience might have suited her, but now, because of the circumstances of her arrival, it had an ironic ring. He wanted something that GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 191