God Is an Englishman (80 page)

“You don’t approve of me bringing the child here without con sulting you!” and she burst out, “Of course I do! It’s not that at all! No one with a heart could GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 427

3/27/09 5:14:45 PM

4 2 8 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

have left her there and gone back when Christmas was over with another bribe wrapped in brown paper. I should have done exactly as you did but that isn’t the point, that isn’t the point at all, Adam!”

For the first time since the now historic confrontation at the George he was face to face with the fruits of the dramatic change that he, circumstances, and possibly that encounter with Miles Manaton, had wrought in her. He had accepted the fact that she had made great advances in the role of housekeeper, that her judgements were maturing with every day that passed, that she was no longer at the mercy of mood and impulse but he had not made nearly enough allowance for the injection of pride that had attended all those changes and the assumption of responsibilities she had consistently evaded over the last five years. He remembered the periods when she had been carrying Stella and Alexander, when she had sometimes been tetchy and sometimes pitiful, scuttling away from even trivial decisions and content to leave everything to him. Now all was changed, as though the night spent in his arms after that unlikely re union had enabled her to break out of the shell of youth and take on an entirely new personality. And here it was confronting him, a woman intensely jealous of her rights and responsibilities, who found it humiliating to share them with anyone, even him. He understood this and marvelled at it, for it seemed to him something as elemental as birth or death, and brought him face to face with the realisa tion that he would never again see her as the laughing girl he had met on a moor, courted (if that was the word), and saddled with three children and this great barn of a house.

That girl was a ghost and if there was a part of him that mourned her gaiety he had no one but himself and Edith Wadsworth to blame.

He said, coming to terms with the situation, “What is it you want, Henrietta?

Not simply in respect of Avery’s child, but from me. From all of us here?” She had no difficulty in finding the answer. A year ago she would have floundered, an inarticulate child seeking to justify a stand dic tated by instinct, but now words found their way to her with the same facility as she had acquired the apparatus of authority. She said, “That’s easy to explain. What I want is to be
seen
as someone who matters. To be able and expected to
decide
things,
all
things, just as we agreed and just as you said you wanted.” He gave this the contemplation it deserved. They had negotiated one impasse but here was another, entirely unforeseen one. Perhaps it was not so much a matter of what she wanted but what he preferred, the girl-wife of the first years of their association, or this indomitable little woman, who not only rejected patronage but saw the least tres pass upon her preserves as a threat to her stewardship. He GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 428

3/27/09 5:14:45 PM

Byblow
4 2 9

made up his mind on the spot. People, he supposed, had to expand and de velop, and this was as true of a wife as it was of a business. Having encouraged growth why should he complain if the pace dazzled him? The real answer lay not in expediency but in humour that had always resided in their relationship. He had gone looking for an efficient deputy to manage his domestic life while he spent his nervous energy elsewhere, and by God he seemed to have found one capable of surprising him. He crossed the room and took her face between his hands, tilting it and studying it with amusement and affection. He said, gently, “You’re a very remarkable person, Henrietta. I must have reminded myself of it at least once a week ever since I winkled you out of that hut on the moor. But a man doesn’t really expect to rediscover his own wife when she’s seven months gone with his third child, and that’s what I seem to be doing at this moment. You were right to flare up in that way. How Deborah Avery is to be received here is your concern, not mine, or Phoebe’s, or even Avery’s, and I’ll not make that mistake again. Others maybe, for I can’t promise I can adapt to you without a wobble or two, but one thing you should know. From here on, as far as parish pump politics are concerned, I abdicate. Go out to that child and do what’s best for her. I’d back you against a dozen governesses,” and he kissed her, reached over her shoulder, and opened the door on the hall.

She went out without another word and, watching her sail across the hall towards the kitchen quarters, another thought struck him con cerning her singularity. She had never, in the course of three preg nancies, shown a flicker of embarrassment, and this despite the fact that her stature made concealment impossible the moment her figure began to thicken. He thought, as she disappeared, “She parades a pregnancy like that father of hers parades his power and moneybags,” and he reminded himself again how much the two had in common and that, to Henrietta, her womb was the equivalent of Sam’s mill.

Safe in his study, that no one in the house entered without an invi tation, he ran his eye over Avery’s letter, savouring the cool impu dence of the man who went his own way in the certainty that others, endowed with a conscience, would pick up the pieces he left in his wake. “
You can repose complete trust in Mr. Swann
…
he has
my entire confidence
…
a man of strict integrity
…
noted for high principle
…
my daughter
must be encouraged to defer to him as she would to me…
”
and so on, three whole pages of it, most of it blarney.

He put the letter aside and cocked his head, listening, with half an ear, to the tinkle of a carol trickling from one of his daughter’s musi cal boxes that she collected as other children collect dolls and marbles. There was not much doubt in GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 429

3/27/09 5:14:45 PM

4 3 0 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

his mind that, from here on, Deborah Avery was virtually his child; his, and seemingly, Hen rietta’s too if he had drawn the right conclusions from that scene in the drawing-room just now. He wondered what she would make of the child, with her curious blend of stillness and amiability, sensiti vity and self-containment, her solemn prattle about coal seams in Wales and towers in Pisa. Probably they would circle one another for a spell, taking one another’s measure like a couple of gladiators, and then, no doubt, arrive at a compromise that would almost certainly involve him. For, sooner or later, everything seemed to revert to him and the older and busier he became the more numerous and complicated were the day-to-day problems he was set to solve. He thought back for a moment to the time when his problems had been few, and confined to a choice of two courses, to kill or be killed, to run out ahead in pursuit of glory and promotion, or to stay under cover and hope nobody would notice. That was all that was required of a man content to cut his swathe with a sword and all the Swanns of the past had sought in the way of a destiny. It was not that simple, however, when a man threw away his sword and taught himself to use more sophisticated tools. Before one realised as much every facet of life reflected alternatives and every personal relationship became infinitely complex, demanding all manner of shifts and adjustments. People moved in and stayed like the Keates, the Tybalts, and the Blubbs, and others, the Averys, the Ellen Michelmores, and the Miles Manatons, collided and bumped away out of sight and sound. Predictability he had once had and spurned, and only a fool would look for it in business or marriage, certainly not in marriage to a woman like Henrietta Rawlinson. The phrase “natural selection” returned to him and what else could have dictated that casual deci sion of his the day Sam Rawlinson came blustering into his father’s house on Derwentwater, demanding the return of his daughter? Money hadn’t entered into it, for Sam had disowned her on the spot, or wisdom either, for Henrietta, at that particular time, and for a long time afterwards, had shown no evidence of possessing the sense she was born with. And yet, looking back on it all, he regretted nothing and told himself, as he refolded and resealed Avery’s letter, that if he was beginning all over again there wasn’t a single short-cut he would take from the moment he opened his eyes outside Jhansi and saw cobras’ eyes reposing in a shattered casket.

Above him, leaking uncertainly through the chinks and cavities of the old timbers, the nursery serenade continued and for a moment he gave it his undi-vided attention. “God rest you, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…” an appropriate jingle, he thought, for his mood and the day that had provoked it.

GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 430

3/27/09 5:14:45 PM

Three

valentine’s Day

bReakout

1

It was said of George Swann in his middle years, that he had been born laughing, and the story, no doubt, originated from his father, who had been impressed on the occasion of their introduction.

Henrietta was sleeping then and Adam accepted the midwife’s invi tation to “take a peep at the nipper” wondering, as he did so, whether any of the women who came running at the whisper of a birth, could have been persuaded that a male animal actually participated in the process of procreation. This one, Nurse Hoxton, rushed in from Bromley the day before, was particularly patronising, apportion ing to herself the lion’s share of credit for the presence of a sturdy eight pound boy, as bald as a coot and evidently something of a night hawk, for he was wide awake and taking the keenest interest in everything that went on around him. George, it seemed, had other ideas about the allocation of credit, for he stared Adam full in the face, cleared his throat, flexed his chubby knuckles, put out his tongue, and (Adam would later swear to this) winked. Then, with drawing his tongue, he burped twice and the sound must have pleased him, for the corners of his mouth turned up so that Adam laughed with him and then returned to the dining-room to drink the boy’s health and with it his own for, all in all, the day that had just ended would surely rank as one of the most rewarding of his life.

In the years ahead there were to be many such days, occa sions when circumstances and the Royal Mail combined to shower him with opportunities, but never a day quite like this so that al though he was bad on birthdays he never forgot George’s. St. Valentine’s day, 1864, a day when anything might happen and whatever did could be turned to account.

It was for the same reason that he later came to associate George with luck as well as laughter, and this may have prepared the ground for the subsequent GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 431

3/27/09 5:14:46 PM

4 3 2 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

understanding between father and son that iso lated George from all his other children, not as a favourite but more as a pledge that Swann-on-Wheels, now under full press of sail, was under orders to proceed anywhere at all with safety and dispatch. Somehow George represented these certainties, together with one other that his father, warming his behind at the fire, found exhilarat ing. Already, in his mind at least, George Swann stood four-square for commerce. Nobody would make a drill-ground dummy of some one who could wink within twelve hours of birth.

The day began ordinarily enough. Doctor Birtles had looked in the previous afternoon expressing an opinion that Henrietta might expect her third child early next week, and Adam, privately deciding on a dash north-west before the event, drove off to Croydon before the morning mists had dissolved, catching a train that set him down at London Bridge a few minutes before nine. He bought his
Times
and
Morning Post
at the station exit and was sifting through the mail in his tower when the clock struck the hour and a wintry sun played on the trailers along the margins of the river and then went to work on the brass fittings of a wherry moving downstream at the head of a string of pregnant barges.

The post limited his contemplation of the panorama to a glance. Sometimes, when the mail was commonplace, he would pay the Thames the compliment of an absorbed scrutiny, wondering what the tarpaulins of the barges concealed, and how the devil that dare devil Norman priest Ralph Flambard, had managed his midnight des cent by rope ladder from the White Tower opposite in A.D. 1100, but Dockett’s letter put these idle thoughts out of mind, for Dockett had not only made good his boast concerning the establishment of a near-monopoly in house-removals on Tom Tiddler’s Ground, but had set the seal upon his achievement by inventing a slogan and transferring it to his waggons, without troubling himself to seek head quarters’ approval for such a breach of protocol. For so, it seemed, Tybalt had regarded it, having pencilled an exclamation mark, fol lowed by a row of asterisks. Seeing them Adam grinned, as he often did at Tybalt’s notations. They called to mind Phillip of Spain’s marginal comments on official reports from Spanish governors who had been hustled by Drake and he would not have been much sur prised had Tybalt written “
Ojo, ojo, Dockett!
” on the back of the photograph the Isle of Wight manager had taken of his new box-van, harnessed to four Clydesdales, and on the point of making its maiden run.

Adam studied the photograph closely, instantly approving the innovation.

Below the swan insignia, stencilled on the side of the enor mous waggon, were the words, “Swann’s House Removals. From Drawer to Drawer.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 432

3/27/09 5:14:46 PM

Valentine’s Day Breakout
4 3 3

“By God, that’s eye-catching!” Adam exclaimed to his friend Frankenstein. “I would have bet a sovereign Dockett didn’t have that much originality in him,” and then he remembered that it was Dockett who had broken the ice at the December conference, con vincing everybody that there was money in house-removals, and that this had led to him being given the first box-waggon delivered by Blunderstone a fortnight ago.