God Is an Englishman (66 page)

He told him all then, or nearly all, and was astonished when his son showed no signs of outrage either against his wife or that popin jay of a gunner, but said, equably, “Well, I’m obliged to you for keeping track of her, and it was lucky for all concerned you were there when it happened. But it’s a relief to learn she can handle someone like Manaton at a pinch. In a way, I suppose, I’ve only myself to blame for the scrape and should think myself fortunate she was able to fight her way out of it.” He stood musing a moment. “One on the sconce and another where it hurts most, you say? Well, that saves me the trouble of doing it myself and making bad blood between neighbours. I wouldn’t care to tangle with Henrietta if she was desperate for there’s more of Sam Rawlinson about her than she realises.”

His son’s imperturbability irritated the Colonel, who saw it as yet another indication of the renunciation of values that had been standard currency for centuries. “God damn it, boy,” he burst out, “shouldn’t a man show more concern GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 350

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over someone’s attempt to use his wife as a doxy? Time was when a husband would have called that fellow out, then gone home and given his wife reason to eat her meals standing for a fortnight!” but Adam smiled, blew a smoke ring, and said, easily, “Ah, I don’t doubt it. But times change, and knowing Henrietta as well as I do I can read more and less into this than you can. More, because she’s in desperate need of some thing to absorb her energy—and that’s something I intend to remedy, less because she was telling the truth when she said it was no more than a joke on her part to gammon that young fool Manaton. She might have been married five years and presented me with a couple of children, but she’s really no more than a schoolgirl, and that’s my fault more than hers. I’ve known it long enough but put off thinking about it until that chimney-sweep business. In a way it’s lucky this occurred, for it’ll likely soften the impact.” The old man looked pained, recalling his half-promise to Hen rietta to make light of the business. “You mean you intend to give her the whipping and let that damn Manaton get off scot free?”

“I don’t mean anything of the sort,” Adam said, impatiently. “A man who struts round inviting duels and a husband who knocks his wife about is not only a bully but a damned fool living in the past. I’ve got faults enough but I hope I’ve more brains than to react like someone in one of those trashy tales she feeds on. I won’t tell you what I intend doing, you’ll find out soon enough, but I’ll give you a hint.

I’m going to find her the kind of problems that keep my nose to the grindstone so that I’m not obliged to trot around to Kate Hamilton’s plush establishment to prove myself every so often. Meantime I can only thank you again, and ask you to do one thing more for me. Go on home and send her up here. Michelmore can drive her into Croydon, and I’ll have her met at London Bridge. There’s a train that gets in about five in the afternoon and we shall be putting up at the George, in the Borough High Street, over night.”

“The children are expecting you home,” the old man said, at a loss to know what to make of his son, but Adam said, grimly, “The children can wait. They’ve got the whole of their lives ahead of them. Hustle on back now, and tell her to put on her smartest clothes and pack an evening gown. But don’t plague me with a moun tain of hand luggage.”

“I hope you know what you’re about, boy. It sounds to me as if you were going to indulge her rather than teach her how to behave when your back is turned.”

“I’ve got several surprises for her,” he said, “but I’ve a notion she’ll be dipping into a very mixed Christmas stocking,” and he led the way down the spiral stairway and handed his father into the gig.

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“Take the Peckham route,” he said, “the traffic will be lighter,” and then disappeared into one of the warehouse sheds.

“Damn my eyes, but he’s more of a puzzle than he was as a lad,” the old man reflected, as he gathered the reins and moved off. “There’s more of a French strain in him than there was in his mother and he’s even beginning to sound like a merchant, with his bustling ways and that trick of his of keeping all his important thoughts safe in his head. I wonder how his children will turn out, whether they’ll be Swanns or D’Auberons?” and he let the horse find its way through the traffic, turning right halfway along the Old Kent Road and threading a way through side streets until he could cross Peckham High Street and head south towards Sydenham. He wondered then why he had not caught a train to carry him across this maze in under the hour, telling himself he had been born too long ago to adapt to the nonstop hustle of the age. More and more these days, and not only in the matter of personal relationships, he felt himself a casta way in a world that had died even before the Duke’s funeral carriage went rattling up Ludgate Hill to St. Paul’s.

It was like a recurrence of the sultry summer night when, as a chit of a girl, she had escaped from her father’s house in a green crino line, a fugitive without a destination, at the mercy of any destiny that blew up out of the storm.

So many experiences had come her way since then, but she wondered, settling herself in the first-class compartment and watch ing Michelmore stow her hand-luggage on the rack, whether she had learned very much from them for, if truth were known, she was more scared now than then, and even more dependent upon the whims of the horseman who had come riding over the moor to catch her washing herself in a puddle. She had never made a train journey alone, and reflected that nobody passing up and down the platform would identify her as the mother of two children. She even wondered whether anxiety about the approaching confrontation showed in her face and in her fidgetings with the jet buttons on her jacket bodice, and it was thinking this, and the vast amount of space a smal person like herself occupied, that reminded her of the earlier occasion when she had been similarly encumbered. The only essential difference be tween then and now was that she would at least recognise the man to whom she had been consigned and that the uncertainties attend ing his reception of her were now confined to something definite, that is, what he was likely to make of her involvement with Manaton.

The Colonel had been small help in this respect, notwithstanding her importunities. She still had no clear idea of what Adam had been told, or how much GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 352

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his father had left him to guess. The only reassurance the old man had offered was a hint hidden in the advice he had given her when he kissed her good-bye;

“There now, put a bold face on it. A man doesn’t tell his wife to pack an evening gown if he has it in mind to wallop her. It wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t get off with a finger-wagging.”

For herself, bowling towards him at fifty miles an hour, she wasn’t so sure, and perhaps her doubts had had time to crystallise for even the old man was unaware of what had actually occurred in that dreadful little summerhouse, or how near Manaton had come to condemning her to live out the rest of her life like a felon on ticket-of-leave.

For a day or so she had refused to contemplate what might have happened had her hand not brushed against the projecting edge of that stone. Then news came that Adam was back, and that the Colonel had intercepted him, and she had been obliged to take a closer look at the encounter. It struck her at once that she must have been as innocent as a three-year-old to trust Manaton to the extent that she had, and that she would consider herself fortunate if she was able, in due time, to put it out of mind, in the way she invariably dealt with unpleasant experiences. She had a feeling that this would rest upon Adam’s attitude, and that attitude would depend upon how much he surmised rather than how effectively his father had pleaded her case.

Forebodings of this kind occupied her until the train chuffed out of Sydenham, heading into the golden-brown pall that stood over the city like a giant toad-stool but then, little by little, her anxiety lessened, and she began to feel a small, comforting glow at the pros pect of seeing him again for it seemed that he had been absent much longer than usual. Remembering the original quarrel she gave herself a little shake, calling her scattered thoughts to order, and taking advantage of the fact that she was alone in the compartment, she murmured aloud; “I’ll be myself so long as we’re in public and when he brings it up, as he’s certain to do the moment we’re alone, I’ll burst into tears and bury my head in his shoulder!” It was a promise she knew herself capable of carrying out. She had done it several times in the past over trivial matters and made the discovery that tears muddled his thoughts.

He was not at the London Bridge barrier, a fact that surprised her, but his clerk Mr. Tybalt was there, and lifted his tall hat as she handed in her ticket and broke into a trot in order to keep the porter carrying her hand luggage in view. He called, excitedly, “Mrs. Swann…I’ve a carriage waiting…! I’m to drive you to the yard where Mr. Swann is detained, completing some business!” and she allowed GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 353

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the little man to pilot her to a four-wheeler and watched him make a great show of stowing her luggage and tipping the porter. His air of self-importance amused her, but she helped him indulge it, reflecting that all the men Adam had assembled around him paid him more genuine deference than the millhands had paid her father and that this was odd, because Adam never struck them or swore at them.

It had to do, she supposed, with his army training and it crossed her mind, as the cab passed through the gates of the yard and ran between phalanxes of waggons bearing her trademark, that he was still serving in a kind of army, only now he was the general with the power of life and death over everyone else.

She looked about her with a keener interest than she would have expected, wondering why she had never visited this hub of his life, and deciding that it had more to offer in the way of a spectacle than Sam’s mill that was really no more than a large brick box, enclosing a nonstop racket. Tybalt must have noticed her interest for he began pointing out various features of the place, as though he had been a Beefeater at the Tower of London showing a distinguished visitor the Crown Jewels. “There, Ma’am, straight ahead, that’s the counting house where I spend my time. Those sheds are our transit warehouses, where we stow goods consigned to the docks for ship ment overseas. That’s the weighbridge—

the checker holding the lading bills is weighing the contents of the pinnace—a one-horse van, and people new to the game always want to know how he arrives at a total when the waggon is weighed with the goods. He knows the
unladen
weight of the vehicle you see, and all he has to do is subtract…Ah, there goes the whistle. That means the end of the day shift and two-thirds of the men will leave now, but the late shift will stay until the last waggon comes in from the Triangle or The Bonus. There might even be a long-distance delivery, for if we’re transporting priority goods it’s often quicker to send them the full distance by road on account of the delays in the goods yards, especi ally the London termini.”

Most of his commentary went over her head, but enough made a lodgement to introduce an element of wonder concerning the size and complexity of the undertaking. Not once, in all the time she had been married to him, had this occurred to her, for she had always thought of his obsession as something childish, almost like a boy building a dam in a stream at the bottom of his father’s garden, or a man of fashion slum-visiting in the company of other men of an equally eccentric turn of mind. Now she realised that it was not like that at all, that this was a real place of business, just like Sam’s mill and just like Matt Goldthorpe’s rent-collecting agency, and that all this time he and she and the children and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 354

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everyone else at Tryst had been fed and housed on the proceeds of what was done about here. She said, sombrely, “Where does he…where does Mr. Swann
work
when he’s here in London, Mr. Tybalt?” and Tybalt blink ing, said, “Why right here, ma’am. Here with us. Up there in that little tower, for that’s the hub of the place and always has been!” and as the cab ran down alongside the warehouse and came to a stop he pointed through the window at a square tower that looked like a church lost in a welter of bricks and sheds, as though it represented all that survived of an age of piety.

Tybalt handed her out, telling the cabby to wait for luggage and a fare to the George, and she followed the clerk up a narrow wind ing staircase into an octagonal room with latticed windows over looking the river. Coloured, hand-drawn maps, of a kind she had seen him working on, covered every wall, and between the desk and the door was a strange-looking object like a huge, dress-display stand that moved on a pivot, but she only glimpsed it for he was sitting at the desk working and she noticed at once how fit and tanned he was looking, and also how pleased he was to see her. As he looked up his quick smile made her heart beat in a way that not only surprised her but convinced her there was really nothing much to worry about, for he was clearly in one of his exuberant moods.

He said, leaping up, “Ha, Tybalt, thank you. Train on time?” and Tybalt replied,

“Bang on time, sir. That superintendent at London Bridge has a reputation to maintain,” and then bowed himself out, ostentatiously closing the door so that they were alone in this queer, ecclesiastical-looking room, crammed with the apparatus of his life.

It was absurd, she thought, but she found herself blushing fur iously, as though she was alone in a room with him for the first time, and he was not slow to notice it saying, gaily, “Why, Henrietta, you’re bringing us Tryst roses in your cheeks!” and he moved round the desk and put both hands on her shoulders, holding her off but looking at her very intently, as though searching out traces of Miles Manaton’s kisses. She thought that if he did this a moment longer she would have no need to conjure up tears in order to post pone his cross-examination, so she dropped gloves and reticule on the desk and threw her arms round his neck, kissing him hungrily on the mouth and saying, “Oh, Adam…
dearest!
I’m so glad to
be
here, so glad you asked me! I’ve been very wretched, for such a long time it seems…” and then he embraced her in the way he usually did when they had been parted, and she wished heartily they were anywhere but here, where any one of his acolytes might come tapping at the door and there was nowhere they could sit apart from his swivel chair and a stool under the maps.