God Is an Englishman (67 page)

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Some such thought must have occurred to him for he said, passing his hands over her and finally (reluctantly, she thought) letting them rest on her hips, “I’ve reserved a room at the George. We’ll stay in London a day or two for I want to show you the city. You’ve seen most of the famous places but never this London, the liver and lights of the country, and I should like that because I’ve something to ex plain that concerns you more than it does me.” He bent to retrieve her gloves and reticule and she noticed how young and supple were his movements, as though he had been two and twenty instead of a man approaching middle-age.

She said, knowing it would please him, “Tybalt explained all manner of things as we went along. I had no idea it was so…well, so
organised
,”
and at this one of his booming laughs escaped and he said, “What did you suppose we did up here?

Play skittles? Look, I’ll give you some idea before we have dinner and later on, if you’re interested, I’ll show you the stables, forge, yard, and warehouses, but that can wait on a meal. I don’t know about you but I’m very peckish. I’ve been arguing with lawyers all day.” He led her across to the window that looked directly across a jumble of tile and slate, sliced here and there by narrow threads of traffic moving towards the river that swept in a brown curve both sides of the bridge. To the left she recognised the great dome of St. Paul’s and to the right, a reach down-river, was a dock that seemed to contain all the ships in the world. Straight ahead, on the far bank, was the Tower, crowned by the familiar centrepiece that reminded her of a toy fort owned by David, the younger brother of her onetime friend Sarah Hebditch.

The atmosphere, for a city far larger than Manchester or Liverpool, was relatively clear at this season of the year, but the brown mushroom of smoke she had seen from as far away as Sydenham had now changed into a semi-trans parent pyramid, rose pink and chrysanthemum gold under the westering sky. The smoky smell, that found its way through the upper part of the casement, was much homelier than the reek of Seddon Moss. It wrinkled the nose, and made the eyes smart, but it contained elements other than grime and furnace belch, a whiff or two of cooking and the acrid, not unpleasant smell of horse drop pings churned under wheels.

He said, cheerfully, “Well, there it is, and it’s never the same from one hour to another. Granted it hasn’t the fragrance of the view from our windows at Tryst but it’s a permanent reminder to keep at it, at least, that’s how it always strikes me. I drew these maps in the first weeks I was here, and never a day passes when I don’t study them, and old Frankenstein over there.” He pointed to the nondescript thing she had thought of as a display stand and she saw that it was an encyclopaedia with a hundred faces, made up of well-thumbed wedges of cardboard, scrawled all over with squiggles of the kind one might expect to find GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 356

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on an Egyptian monument, but when she looked closely at a particular section she was aware that the squiggles were really lists of minutely written names, flanked by columns of figures and, here and there, pieces cut from the maps like those used as wallpaper in this mysterious sanctum.

“You surely know I can make nothing whatever of that,” she said, and he told her, smiling, that nobody save him could, now that Frankenstein absorbed the entire network. “Tybalt could make it produce information in its infancy,” he said, “but now he prefers the long way round.” He stood thinking a moment,

“See here, I could give you the idea by a random example. Think of it as a rail way Bradshaw, an atlas, and a trades directory rolled into one. What did you have for breakfast this morning?”

“Two cups of tea and a piece of toast,” she said, unhelpfully, “I was too excited to eat.”

“Well, then, yesterday?”

She pondered, entering into the spirit of the game, for she under stood that it might be important to their relationship at this point. “Eggs and bacon,” she said,

“two rashers, nice and thick.”

He turned to the apparatus and spun it. “Eggs—Bacon, Poultry—Pigs. Eggs we can discount, they come in from all areas by short haul, but bacon means Wiltshire, and a Southern Square bread-and-butter line.
Wiltshire
…” He spun the frame again, his long fingers probing here and there among the cards. “Bacon—

Wiltshire
—Eli Dawson & Son. Eli has a curing depot and a cut-price contract, on account of him being the first pigman we nailed down in the Southern Square.

Calne is five-and-a-half miles south-east of Chippenham, and Chippenham is on the Great Western.” His fingers were flying now, reminding her of a spinner mending broken yarn. “Five-miles-plus is a short haul but bacon is heavy freight so we use frigates—two-horse vans.” He flipped out a card. “Three miles on an unsurfaced road, two miles plus over a macadamised route. In good weather an hour’s run, including loading at the factory and offl oading at Chippenham.” Another card emerged. “A goods train goes out of Chippenham at six-five every week night. Dawson’s bacon is in a London siding by midnight and collected by the whole saler before breakfast. If you like Wiltshire rashers for supper you could be eating them the same evening at Tryst, and you would be putting…wait a minute…three-halfpence per pound in my pocket for getting them there!” She was so delighted that she clapped her hands, bobbing from one small foot to the other. “Why, that’s marvellous! It’s like a magician taking doves out of a hat! Who ever invented that wonder ful machine?” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 357

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“I did,” he said, puffing himself up like a robin in the snow, so that she squealed with laughter and then he laughed too, as much at himself as at her.

They went down the stairway to the four-wheeler where the giant Keate, whom she recognised as an occasional visitor to Tryst, was talking to the cabby.

Keate said, touching his hat, “Good day to you, Mrs. Swann. Forgive me a moment…” and he turned to Adam, saying, “I’ll wait and see Goshen’s haul in from The Bonus, sir. He was due an hour ago. He’s probably caught up in a cart jam the other side of the bridge. Will you be in tomorrow?”

“Not until about this time. I’m hoping to show Mrs. Swann our workshop after taking her to look at the docks.”

“Very good, sir,” he said, just like a sergeant-major, and stepped forward to open the cab door and hand her inside.

It was all rather like playing a stately role in a play, she thought, a military pageant, perhaps, with undertones of comedy in which Adam was a field-marshal surrounded by a swarm of adjutants, each hanging on his commands. The force and the rhythm of his enter prise began to stir in her imagination, and its surge swept her along, as though she was a passenger on one of those expresses that had whirled her south as a bride nearly five years ago. For the first time since she had sat beside him she was conscious of privilege in a way far beyond the conventional sense, for if he was king here then it followed that she was queen, and it was surely something to be queen of an empire that engaged the attention of so many solemn-looking men and so much bustle and precision, even if it was concerned with humdrum things like breakfast rashers of Wiltshire bacon. The thought comforted her, as did the touch of his hand on hers and suddenly she felt very safe and relaxed in his presence, a sensation not entirely unfamiliar to her but one that had never previously made itself felt unless they were alone. She exclaimed, rapturously, “Oh, Adam, I do love you! You’re so good to me, you’ve always been good to me!” and lifted his hand, pressing it against her cheek.

2

She knew very well that he had something important to say but was holding back until they had all but finished their meal and were un likely to be interrupted by the ministrations of the bald, elderly waiter, who looked such a fixture of this great, galleried inn that Adam said had been doing business for three hundred years, and was a local landmark before Queen Elizabeth mounted the throne.

Next door, he told her, was the even more famous Tabard, where pil grims had GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 358

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assembled for their journeys to Canterbury, and not far away was the White Hart, where Mr. Charles Dickens met the original Sam Weller and made him famous all over the world in
Pickwick Papers.
Before the railways, he said, coaches ran from these courtyards to every part of the country, but because they were situated here, in the heart of the capital of the world, they had not suffered the decline that overtook their provincial counterparts. The cuisine was good, and the reputation for service and comfort jealously guarded, and even two disastrous fires had not succeeded in breaking their tradition, for the George (once known as the St.

George) had been rebuilt on its original plan and its galleries, gay with a hundred window-boxes of geranium, lobelia, and nasturtium, were still the favourite haunt of city men who sat here discussing odysseys bound for Batavia, Peru, and the South Sea Islands. His familiarity with the city background impressed her in the way his fieldcraft had at their Pennine bivouacs during that long, pillion-ride across the fells. Somehow, she thought, one was the complement of the other, inasmuch as he seemed to find it so easy to adapt to wherever he happened to be and this, she was sure, was rare in a man, even one trained as a soldier, for what would a fop like Miles Manaton make of the world if he was stripped of his fine coat and red-striped trousers, and turned out to compete with hard-faced merchants? She was pondering this, savouring his superiority as it were, when the waiter suggested serving coffee on the lower tier of the gallery, where the gentleman might like to enjoy a cigar, but Adam said, a trifle sharply, she thought, “Serve it here. I’ll wait for my cigar,” and the old fellow shuffled away, leaving her with a qualm or two, for the dining-room was now almost empty and his preference for privacy surely implied he was about to come to the point and what point could that be if it wasn’t her ridiculous involvement with Miles?

He said, as the thought made her fidget, “Are you comfortable here?” which was his way of giving her a chance to excuse herself, in the way she had after that gigantic supper at Windermere the first night of their marriage, but she said, with forced brightness, “Oh, quite comfortable, dear. It was delicious. I do wish Mrs. Hitchens could make pastry as light as that,” and he replied, with terrifying directness, “I’m going to send Mrs. Hitchens packing the minute I get home.

Along with most of the others.”

It was said in such magisterial contrast to his indulgent mood since he had greeted her in the tower that she gave a little gasp of dismay, saying, “Oh, Adam, you don’t mean to uproot us? We’re not leav ing Tryst, are we?” and to her great relief he shook his head and said, “No, my dear, quite the contrary. I’ve just bought Tryst. That’s what I’ve been doing all day.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 359

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“
Bought
it? You mean it’s
ours?
For always?”

“I think that depends.”

“On the money you make?”

“No, mostly on you. On whether you’re capable of running it as it should be run, without half-a-dozen ignorant women taking the reins out of your hands, and throwing you back on yourself when ever I’m away and unable to keep them to their jobs.”

She was not sure what to make of this. Did it imply that he numbered her among the idle, or was it an indirect reminder that she had recently made fools of them both? She said, carefully, “You mean I’ve been a failure because I’m too stupid to keep accounts and get into such muddles with the bills?” and he said no, he didn’t mean that; keeping accounts was not likely to come naturally to someone who had not been trained in the art of housekeeping, and was something that could easily be remedied, for she wasn’t in the least stupid, simply inclined to let herself be dominated by people like Ellen Michelmore and Mrs. Hitchens the cook, and even Evans, the parlourmaid, and the new governess, who couldn’t be trusted to govern a cat. She understood then what he was driving at and privately admitted that it was true. All the women about the house, and especially Ellen, had been at pains to impress upon her that the mistress of a place as large as Tryst lost caste if she partici pated in domestic chores, or even directed them save at a remove. She saw too that this decree was linked in his mind to the Manaton debacle, and the certainty of this terrified her. She was almost sure then that he was about to make direct reference to Miles’ attempt to convert a flirtation into a rape, and suddenly the shameful mem ory of Manaton’s outrageous attempt to strip her made her shudder so that he jumped to the wrong conclusion. He growled, his face clouding, “You find the prospect of losing Ellen intolerable?

You couldn’t face accepting full responsibility for the place? Not even if I found one reliable woman to replace four scrimshankers, with instructions to teach you everything she knew about running a house?”

She emerged from her panic, recognising in his tone and expres sion the indica-tions of an obvious crossroads, not merely in their relationship as man and wife, but in her personal future within that relationship. Suddenly the alternatives were startlingly clear. She could throw herself at the opportunity he was offering, even at the risk of falling flat on her face, or she could withdraw from the brink and seek temporary shelter behind the skirts of women like Ellen, relying on his physical need of her to hold on to him until she got her second wind. And then she saw, possibly for the first time, how very frail these bonds were, and how GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 360