God Is an Englishman (40 page)

She did not learn this, of course, by any means other than trial and error, but she learned it well and in this respect at least—or so she told herself—she was probably unique among the married women of her acquaintance.

A staging-post in their relationship was reached one damp Sep tember evening, about six months after they had settled at Tryst when he appeared late at night, after she had abandoned hope of his return and gone upstairs to bed. She had only partially undressed when it occurred to her to try on her newest day dress, in which she hoped to set tongues clacking at the next of Mrs. Roydon’s At Homes, for it was the very latest fashion, known as the “Corsage Postillion,” with buttons down the front as far as the hemline, two short basques at the back, and sashed at one with the bodice. The bow was enor mous and had to be carefully fluffed out, leaving trailing ends when tied at the back.

He came stamping in out of the wet and she was not even aware of his arrival until he burst into the bedroom, reached over her shoulders as she stood before the mirror and pulled her against his mud-splashed topcoat so that she reacted with a squeak of protest, shouting,
“Mind,
Adam!
Please,
my bow…!” and was dismayed by the dramatic change in his expression and the way he skipped back, locking his hands behind him and looking just like her father in one of his moods when things were going badly at the mill.

He said, in a tone of voice he had never used before, not even when he was ordering Sam out of the house, “Listen to me! I don’t give a damn what sort of airs you give
yourself downstairs in my absence, but don’t ape the lady of the manor in the bedroom, do you hear?”

She said, momentarily at a loss for words, “Adam, I didn’t mean…I only said…

well, you’re muddy and I…I didn’t ex pect you!”

“What the devil has that got to do with it? Is it too much to ex pect you to show you’re pleased to see me?” and went past her into his dressing room, slamming the door.

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to make her feel sick. Suddenly she decided that she looked at least thirty in the dress and fumbled impatiently at the buttons, shrugging herself out of it and standing beside the great Conyer fourposter in her shift, with a finger in her mouth, like a child deprived of a lollipop and hovering on the edge of tears.

Through the closed door she could hear him hurling his boots about and presently, listening very carefully, the steady rasp of his razor on the day’s bristles.

She sat on the edge of the bed thinking hard, trying with all her might to equate his flash of ill-humour with the breezy affection he had demonstrated when he entered the room, and in the contrast she thought she discerned one of the really basic characteristics of the male animal, not merely a craving to be ack nowledged as a superior being, for whom all clocks were expected to stop, but a creature likely to become unmanageable if the most casual overture on his part had to await its turn in the appointed routines of life. And then this thought carried her deeper into the male mind, so that she remembered other times he had returned after a brief absence, and demonstrated a kind of impatience that made normal communication between them almost impossible until he had her to himself up here and spreadeagled in that bed. After that, she reflected, he was always the excessively amiable man she had married, who would tease her and bring out some trinket he had bought on his travels and then, for a spell, everything would go smoothly and predictably until he rode away again towards that saucer of dark sky to the north-east.

It was very odd, she thought, that physical contact was of such tremendous importance to men. Women could communicate in all kinds of other ways, with glances and smiles and tosses of the head, with rustlings and hints from the armoury of artifice, but a man, especially a big, vigorous, decisive man like him, had to be granted that romp between the sheets before he could be expected to behave like a civilised being and not a servant under notice.

She got up, nodded encouragement at her reflection in the mirror, tapped on his door, and said, very softly, “Adam?
Dearest?
I’m very sorry. I do apologise. Will you come out now?”

The door opened at once and revealed him standing on the threshold, still scowling but with his glumness half-concealed under a coating of lather. She held out her arms and with a mere pretence of reluctance he laid aside his razor, wiped one half of his face, and strode back into the room, taking her in what began as a very re strained embrace but soon enlarged itself, so that blobs of soap transferred themselves to her cheek and ear. He said, with a grin, “Here, let me wipe that off,” but she clung to him, saying, “No, no, don’t bother! First
tell
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something, something I ought to know by now, for you surely couldn’t imagine I wasn’t pleased to see you and to have you hold me like this again?”

“You didn’t show much enthusiasm,” he said, and then. “Was it because of the mud? Or because I surprised you?”

“It wasn’t for either reason, not really,” she said, “and that brings me to what I’ve always wanted to know but…well…could never bring myself to find out.

People who love one another, people like you and me, is it right that…well…

that the man should always begin it, and the woman just…well…wait?” The question both amused and interested him, as abstract lines of inquiry on her part often did. He said, chuckling, “Well, now, the man is usually reckoned the hunter, and I believe most men are embarrassed if the role is reversed.” She was encouraged by this to be more precise. “I’m not concerned with most men. How is it with
you?
”

“That depends entirely on you,” he said, “as I’ve told you before, the first night we shared a bed if I remember rightly. A good marriage should be mutually rewarding. It’s just a European fashion to pre tend otherwise.”

“Then it’s wrong to…well…to pretend not to take pleasure in it;
your
sort of pleasure I mean?”

He came as close to blushing as she had ever seen and then he laughed at himself and ran his hand over her head. But she wasn’t in the least embarrassed now, for her curiosity had reached a point where it had to be satisfied and she was not even prepared to make a concession to his dignity.

“Well?”

“I’m not at all sure how to answer that. You use the word ‘pre tend.’ How much have you ‘pretended’ in that respect since that first occasion at Windermere?” She said, calmly, “I’ve always pretended, Adam. In spite of all you said that night.”

He looked baffled then and his arm dropped from her shoulder. “You’re saying all that’s happened between us has been the perfor mance of a duty on your part?”

“Oh, no!” she said, emphatically, “I don’t mean that in the least! I’ve often tried to forget all I heard on the subject of loving before I married, but it isn’t easy. It really isn’t, Adam. What I mean is, a person like me can’t help feeling that to…

well…to join in turns her into a certain sort of woman and that would be quite dreadful wouldn’t it?”

He said, reaching up to brush the soapflakes from her cheek, “I’ll tell you something, Hetty, something I should have made very clear a long time ago. I’ve GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 210

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always half-realised I didn’t succeed in remov ing all those tomfool prejudices they pump into so-called civilised women when they’re about to be married, so that many brides find themselves pregnant without really understanding why. I should have given it more thought, I suppose, but it’s not too late, particularly as you’ve been honest enough to raise the subject. A man’s pleasure in a woman is regulated to a very great extent by the pleasure she derives from him. At least, that’s what they think in the East and that’s how it seems to me. It’s for that reason, I suppose, that I never cared very much for what you call ‘a certain sort of woman.’ Your instinct isn’t at fault, either. You put me out of temper a moment since but thank God you’ve got a damned sight more commonsense than the majority of women seem to have over here. A man and wife ought to be able to talk freely to one another, the way we’re doing now. That’s surely one of the rare privileges of mar riage, and as for that sense of shame you feel when I run my hands over you, peel it off with that shift and behave just as your pretty little body tells you to and I’ll love you the better for it. Do you follow me, or would you like me to be more explicit?”

She said, levelly, “I understand perfectly, and thank you for listening and explaining. I’m sure most husbands wouldn’t,” and he replied, chuckling, “I’m sure they wouldn’t. Some would have given you a sound spanking themselves, and others would have sent you back to your father for one. However, that’s their loss. They should have taken as much time as I did looking for the right kind of wife!” and with that he took her in his arms and covered her face with kisses, after which, without any assistance from her, he pulled her shift over her head and extended the range of his embrace to every area of her body. Finally, seeming to begrudge the brief interval it occupied him to tumble out of his own clothes, he took possession of her with a wholeheartedness that made all his previous demands experimental, for there was a new element present and in a way she only half-comprehended while she composed herself to sleep within his embrace, she saw herself for the first time as a wife rather than a junior consort.

She never made the same mistake again. Whenever she had warn ing of his return after more than a day’s absence, she would slip out of the house without telling anyone where she was going and make her way up the rhododendron path to the top of the wooded hillock behind the house as though in performance of a rite. Here, she would slough off her dignity like a petticoat, and consciously think herself into the kind of woman she knew he expected to greet him as soon as he crossed the threshold, and once they were alone there was no necessity to think GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 211

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about anything at all but enjoy to the full the licence he had bestowed upon her and this, she discovered, offered a secret bonus. In the mood she was able to induce he was never able to deny her anything, however fanciful.

She had made all manner of discoveries about herself since the day he came jogging over the rim of the moor south of Seddon Moss, but this was by far the most important of them.

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Six

Death oF a geRman

1

Adam Swann could never recall a time, not even as a schoolboy, when food held more than a passing interest for him. Having inherited an excellent digestion from forebears conditioned to hard tack and whatever they could freeboot from the alien fields they traversed over the centuries, he seldom noticed what he was eating and would sometimes forget to eat regularly, making do on whatever came to hand in a local eating-house or tavern. Tybalt, cursed with a delicate digestion, envied his employer’s supreme indifference to victuals, but would shake his head and prophesy internal troubles in middle age when, during the midday break, Adam would refuse to stop work and dismiss the clerk while he spent the interval in his eyrie. When this happened the faithful Tybalt would perform one of his daily rituals, laying
The Times,
the
Morning Post
,
and other newspapers on Adam’s desk before seeking his own meal. For this was the hour that Mr. Swann was known to study the day’s news, fortified, more often than not, by a tankard of porter and a cheroot.

He had learned, over the last three years, how vital it was to keep a close watch on the home newsfront, and in the closely printed columns of the London journals he would often detect trends that had a direct or indirect bearing on his business. A new foundry was being opened here, a new railway spur there.

The last wooden battleship was being laid up, the first ironclad launched. The

“Great Eastern,” Brunel’s masterpiece, looked like a costly failure. An Anglo-French trade treaty had been signed. There had been severe flooding again in the Severn Valley. Canal barges were lowering their rates in the never-ending battle with the railroads. Dickens was denouncing pirate publishers in the United States for reprinting his stories and paying him no royalties. The painter Millais, having finally deprived that pompous chap Ruskin of his beautiful wife, was now put-GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 213

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ting Effie on canvas and exhibiting her at the Academy, to the delight of every tittle-tattler in town.

He had a retentive memory for this kind of trivia and it made him welcome in mixed company, and yet, for a man who had travelled halfway across the world and back again, he took little interest in foreign affairs, for he was one of those Englishmen who found it dif ficult to take a serious view of anything the foreigners did or said, subconsciously equating their public occasions with the cries of children at play. This was how he thought of Garibaldi’s much-trumpeted liberation of Italy that autumn, and later the succession of the dour old Wilhelm I to the throne of Prussia. It did not and could not concern him or, for that matter, his country, for more than ever nowadays he had a sense of being in the swim of London affairs, whereas he continued to think of Germans, Frenchmen, Turks, and Spaniards as splashing about in the shallows. It was an insular con ceit, no doubt, but not a singular one. His views were shared by most of the men he met and trafficked with in the city, or during his regular forays into the provinces, and were based, perhaps, on the evidence of his eyes. From his belfry he could watch the vast volume of ship ping coming and going on the Thames tideway, and the forest of masts in the adjacent docks.
The Times
told him that Britain was now carrying three-quarters of the world’s seaborne trade, and his own business went booming along like one of the tall East Indiamen breaking its own record in the grain race from the far side of the world. It was thus not surprising that he took no note of the secession of South Carolina from the American Union in the last days of the old year, or raised an eyebrow over the decision of five other southern states to follow her example in the first month of 1861. There was no reason why he should. He carried little or no cotton in his waggons, and the significance of what was happening in America entirely es caped him until it was pushed under his nose by no other person than his father-in-law, Sam Rawlinson, now of Rochdale, and in a bigger way of business than he had been when they last exchanged views.