God Is an Englishman (53 page)

She tried, most desperately, to fill her days, without disregarding dear Ellen’s persistent advice as to how the gently born should fill them, and in a way she half-succeeded by romanticising at a remove, that is to say, becoming a devoted subscriber to Mr. Mudie’s Select Library.

Until then she had hardly ever opened a book, for she was not endowed with the ability to sit still for more than ten minutes, but with so much time on her hands books began to play an important part in her life, so that she developed a taste for all Mr. Mudie’s currently popular authoresses, beginning with Miss Charlotte Yonge, and moving thence to Mrs. Henry Wood, Mrs. Oliphant, and Miss Braddon. The book that obsessed her beyond all others was Mrs. Henry GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 279

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Wood’s
East Lynne,
that still had the entire country in tears, although it had been published about the time of her marriage and had since had many imitators.

She also subscribed to a number of popular magazines, including the improving
Monthly Packet,
containing romantic stories by other lady novelists, notably the mysterious “Ouida” (Henrietta was never sure how to pronounce the name) who also wrote for
Bentley’s Miscellany,
and seemed, to Henrietta, to be excessively daring and was said by some to possess a dangerously heated imagination.

It was curious that a young woman like Henrietta, whose ex perience of life was, she would judge, broad by the standards of other young wives she met, should derive such deep satisfaction from the cautious adventures of heroines she would have dismissed as “touch-me-notters” had she met them in person. But she did, for somehow, or so it seemed to her, these women, particularly the newly married among them, were courted and won by far more un predictable males than Adam, inasmuch as one never quite knew, until turning the page, how their menfolk would react to a given set of circumstances. With Adam one did know and that, she thought, was sometimes very tiresome.

The heroine who enslaved Henrietta’s imagination the moment
East Lynne
came into her hands was Lady Isobel, whom she re garded, within certain limits, to be her own parallel, for Mr. Carlyle, Isobel’s husband, obviously loved her dearly but was very much wrapped up in his business and, again like Adam, inclined to leave her to her own devices most of the time. Possibly alone among Mrs. Henry Wood’s subscribers Henrietta Swann was not surprised when Isobel ran away with the wicked Captain Levison. She was clearly at a loss to know what else to do with herself, and sometimes, although not very seriously, Henrietta wished that a less caddish and more timid Captain Levison would make some improper advances to her so that she could experience the satisfaction of being sought after by someone other than her husband, who, notwithstanding the illuminat ing discussions concerning the relative roles of husband and wife, persisted in treating her like an enlarged edition of Stella, his three-year-old daughter.

Sometimes, particularly when she was riding her cob Stocky around the park or down the towpath of the river as far as the village, she would find herself yearning to participate in some tremendous adven ture of the kind that Adam seemed to have had in plenty but to have taken very lightly, but then she would tell herself that she was not so much in need of this kind of stimulus as a boost of a more personal nature, of being the very core, for instance, of some man’s world and for rather longer, she would hope, than it took Adam to satisfy his storming impatience the moment they were alone.

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Not that she had the least quarrel with the demands he made upon her. Indeed, she wished he was on hand to make them more often, although perhaps in a more restrained manner for gradually, under his gay tutelage, she had rid herself of those feelings of guilt she had experienced during moments of intimacy in the past and had learned to accept his boisterous advances as a welcome bonus of marriage to a man who came and went like a Jack-in-a-box.

She had hopes, that spring, of being pregnant again, and produc ing another son who would grow up to join the Navy, and perhaps engage in a friendly rivalry with Alexander of the Household Cavalry, but when it proved a false alarm she felt cheated and was sufficiently self-analytical to understand why. Deep in her conscious ness she still saw her main function in life as the mother of a tribe of big, lusty men, who campaigned in the furthest corners of the globe, and came home loaded with honours and clanking with medals. She was aware that Adam thought this obsession of hers ridiculous but it was not ridiculous to her, remaining the one focal point of her dreams and, as such, the only aspect of her that survived the time when she was a fifteen-year-old, reading stirring tales of the Crimea and the Mutiny in newspapers that Sam brought into the house.

It there fore qualified as nostalgia, and it was very easy to indulge in nostalgic dreams when she was alone so much, and had her being in a place like Tryst, with its whispering stairs, its overgrown coverts, and its subtle garden scents. It gave her a sense of living a life within a life, of identifying not only with the heroines of Miss Yonge and Mrs. Wood, but with all the heroines of poetry, and perhaps the most haunting of these was that unfortunate Lady of Shallott, whose brief, tragic career had been graphically illustrated in one of her maga zines. There was a special reason for this, of course. A mile or so down the river, at a point where the stream broadened after threading its course through a belt of timber, there was a small wooded islet, and whenever she passed it she would glance across just to make sure that Lancelot was not in view, and to satisfy herself that no battlemented tower showed above the willows that grew down to the water’s-edge.

These kinds of fancies, of course, were forgotten the moment Adam returned from his Bermondsey headquarters, or from one of his visits to those areas he called by outlandish names, “The Crescents,” “The Polygon,” “The Western Wedge,” and the like. Then, as though she was deliberately stepping out of the Middle Ages into a life of stir, bustle, and laughter, she would become Henrietta Swann again, or even Henrietta Rawlinson, the girl a real Lancelot had kid-napped, married with a mere pretence of wooing, saddled with a house and a couple of children, and now liked to treat as though she was his toy to be taken GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 281

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from the cupboard and tossed about with a kind of exultant glee, against the time when he had more urgent matters on hand.

It was very disconcerting to sit on such a seesaw, and one morn ing, in March of that year, when the noise of birds in the wisteria outside the window awakened them simultaneously, she opened her heart to him, telling him that she ached with loneliness when he was away, and asking him if it was not possible, now that he was well established, to spend more of his time at home. He was not angry or irritated, as she feared he might be, but sat up in bed, yawned, and looked down at her indulgently.

“Now why tell me that,” he said, tolerantly. “You’re happy here, aren’t you?

You’ve got the house and the children and the Colonel for company, and it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Because if it isn’t and you would sooner move nearer London, we’ll move and the devil take the tail-end of the lease. It was what I originally intended, to live much closer in. If I did I could get home two weeks out of three, and every night when I was in town.” The prospect of being deprived of her foothold in the world of the real gentry dismayed her so that she said, hastily, “Oh no, dearest. I
love
this place, and so does Stella and the Colonel, and so will Alex when he grows a little older. I wouldn’t like to live in a city but…well…it would be
nice
if you were here to enjoy it more often.”

“Enjoy you or the background?” he said, with one of his infuriat ing grins and she said, impatiently, “You know perfectly well what I mean! Why won’t you stop treating me as if I was a ninny?”

“Oh, come now,” he said, though still amiably, “if I talked busi ness to you you’d yawn your pretty head off and I can’t say as I’d blame you. Being immersed in a job like mine is one thing. To have to listen to second-accounts of it, and supply the dutiful ‘Really, dears?’ and ‘How splendids!’ every so often, is quite another.

Be sides,” he continued, passing his hand across her rumpled hair, “it wouldn’t be you, Henrietta. It wouldn’t be the little scapegrace I mar ried. I’m satisfied with you as you are and by now that ought to be obvious to you.”

“But we’re not talking about
your
satisfaction,” she protested, “we began talking about mine, and I don’t mean by that I want more things and clothes and friends, but more of you.”

“That brings us back to the original question,” he said, and she was encouraged to see that he was no longer teasing her but at least moderately interested. “If you enjoy being a wife to me, and you’re still bewitched by the house, what the devil have you got to complain of?” Then, with that knack of his he had for rooting GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 282

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among her secret thoughts, “Are you trying to tell me you were disappointed that you weren’t having a third child? I suppose I understand that if you were.

Children to you are what a new branch is to me, and that isn’t as silly as it sounds.

It’s fulfilling a purpose, creating some thing, and you’ve never made a secret about wanting a thumping great family.” He paused again and she saw that he was now regard ing her with a kind of speculative interest. “That’s unusual too, come to think of it. Most women of your age would only pretend to be pleased if they found themselves pregnant a third time in four years. Did you know that?”

“I often suspected it,” she said, her humour restored by the fact that at least he had stopped talking down to her, “they bill and coo too obviously, and start boasting as soon as the men have left the room.” He laughed at that and she reflected that she invariably made him laugh when she spoke her thoughts aloud. But she had no intention of letting him turn the conversation aside, as he usually did when she was advancing a point of view, and went on, “Honestly, Adam, I’m at a loss to know why you married me at all. Men—or your kind of man—could get along very well without a wife, and you actually did for years. You’ve got your business, and clearly get a tremendous amount of pleasure out of building it up, and well…as for the shameless way you use me up here, there are those other kinds of women, that nobody mentions but anyone with a hap’orth of sense knows about. Of course, you spoil little Stella, but you’re not really a family man. If I had a dozen children I’m sure you would mix up their names when you came back after one of your tours.” She had him interested now and experienced a certain satisfaction at her own cleverness. He said, seriously, “I’ve asked myself that many a time, Henrietta,” and her glow of self-satisfaction faded. “As you say, I’ve done precisely what I set out to do, founded something vital and constantly developing, and I never even thought about marrying until I was turned thirty. But for all that I did, didn’t I?

And without second thought when it came to the crunch.” Her vanity began to steal back, re-entering a room from which it had just been banished and recalled by an indulgent parent. She said, “Well?” and when he said nothing, “Come now, it’s not fair to leave it like that! You’ve often half-told me but never properly, never in a way that I can think about when you aren’t there.”

She touched him then, as she often could with her impish ways and little spurts of rebellion. He kissed her on the mouth and kicking the bedclothes clear with his heels ran his hand the length of her body, so that she knew this promising conversation might as well not have been started. She did not care either, or not GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 283

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that much, for suddenly his towering masculinity impinged itself on her in the way it invari ably did when they were alone in this great bedroom, with its ghosts of innumerable earthy Conyers, none of whom had bothered to de bate the abstracts of marriage. She said, stroking his chin, “Oh, fiddle sticks, you can tell me later. Tell me something else. Why don’t you grow whiskers, like other men? I thought of it when I went to that fete over at Kynaston House, for there wasn’t a man there who wasn’t stroking his mutton-chops, or twirling his moustaches. I said to myself,

‘How horrid it must be to be kissed by someone with hair all over his face.’ Apart from those bristles of yours before you’ve done shaving, of course.” He said, with tremendous emphasis,
“Why, that’s it, Henrietta!
That’s your answer! That’s why I married you.”

She was genuinely astonished. “Because I never complained of your bristles?” He said, laughing, “Good God, no, woman. Because you were a nice shape in and out of corsets; because you were fresh and pretty; because you never could stop being a little rascal ready to run away in the middle of the night if you didn’t get your own way, but mainly, because you can make me laugh without even trying!” and he seized her and emphasised his approval with a powerful smack on her behind that developed into a wrestling match and came near to depositing them on the floor. He said, when they were breath less, “Wait…
wait
…!

You asked me a question and it deserves a serious answer. I don’t grow a beard because everybody else grows one without knowing why. Or if they did they’ve forgotten.”

“How’s that? No, really, I’m interested.”

“It’s to do with this soldier measles that you and everyone else seems to have caught. We were innocent of whiskers, the whole damned lot of us, until the winter before Sebastopol, when shaving in redoubts was a penance. That was the time photography started, re member? Or were you too young? The patriotic gentlemen at home saw pictures of Raglan’s heroes looking like rustics, and suddenly—hey presto—beards were in vogue! Now, of course, they daren’t shave them off for fear of losing their authority. Ask any barber and he’ll tell you the same!” She was kneeling above him now and suddenly, almost involun tarily, she was moved to express her extreme satisfaction with him. “Oh, Adam,” she cried,