God Is an Englishman (93 page)

“You took the only course open to you,” she said. “How is Rook wood bearing up?”

“Surprisingly well.”

“I gather you were sorry for Abbott. Have you heard from him since?”

“He took my advice and put his money in a half-share of a schooner.” She said, thoughtfully, “I was right about you, Adam. When it comes to handling hot potatoes I’ve never met your equal.” She looked him over with embarrassing frankness. “You’ve got what amounts to a feminine intuition but the odd thing is it only serves you with men.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s obvious. You gave Ratcliffe the credit for that excursion idea when we all know it originated with his wife. You had to come to me to be told why your marriage wasn’t successful and how to set it right. And although I’ve shamelessly spelled it out to you, you’ve never really accepted the real reason that prompted me to shoulder a burden like this. Shall I refill your cup? It might stop you fidgeting.”

“I’ve done, thank you,” he said. “What are you trying to tell me, Edith?” She stood up, smoothing the crumbs from her bodice.

“Perhaps I can demonstrate it. Put your arms round me. Go on, no one is likely to come in. Mrs. Sprockett is accustomed to me entertaining gentlemen. Put your arms round me and kiss me, the way you did when we parted on the road to Ripon.” He looked so startled that she laughed and the sound of her laughter eased the tension between them. “If I remember rightly,” he said, “the last time I offered to kiss you you bucked away like a scared filly.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 498

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“Yes, I did. For the simple reason I couldn’t trust myself. But a lot has happened since then, to you and to me. I daresay you’ve al ready assessed your progress. Now I’d like to take stock of mine.”

He stood up and kissed her on the mouth. It was something he had often thought about doing since that encounter beside the Swale, but now that he did it surprised him a little to find her lips friendly but unresponsive.

“You see? It’s worked for both of us. If that had happened the last time we were alone together in that belfry of yours I wouldn’t have made much of a success of what I had in mind at the time. You follow me, I hope?”

“I follow you. But there’s something else. My feelings about you haven’t changed. I still think of you as very desirable, and also as the best friend I’ve got.

But I know that if it came to a choice between me and the Crescents I’d run a damned poor second, and so would any other man in the offing.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Certain of it. So certain that I’ll not waste time inspecting your yard and stables.”

He stood looking down at her thoughtfully, his regard for her en larging itself into gratitude that there was at least one person who understood, in depth, precisely what animated him, and what had absorbed nine-tenths of his nervous energy over the formative years of the enterprise. “What’s more” he added, “the next time we meet we won’t circle one another like gladiators. If I feel disposed to kiss you I’ll do it, by God, without having to be coached.” He picked up his hat and gloves. “There’s a train at five-forty-five. It’ll get me back in time to start sorting out the conclusions I’ve reached on this tour.”

“I hope you won’t commit your Peterborough conclusions to paper,” she said,

“but if you do, send me the duplicate. Tybalt wouldn’t know where to file it. Shall I walk you as far as the station?”

“By all means,” he said, welcoming the laughter in her voice, “but we’ll confine ourselves to business all the way there.”

She went into an adjoining room, re-emerging in seconds wearing her bonnet and pelisse and it seemed to him, quite unaccountably, that she had laid hands on her lost youth in that brief interval. The metamorphosis comforted him, so that he thought, as they emerged into the sultry heat of the street, “It’s hard to believe she was ever in love with me or that poor devil of a sailor. She only fancied she was, until she saw a way to become her own boss, and in that respect we’re as alike as two peas.”

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The old Colonel could not have said when or why the premonition touched him, causing a small, inward shudder. He was not given to premonitions and today, with a June sun flaming in a cloudless sky, was not a day for gloomy thoughts.

And yet the prescience was there, formless but real, and once it had appeared uninvited and unwelcome, it remained, a silent, brooding wraith standing a yard or two behind his right shoulder, refusing to go and yet refusing to leave cover and identify itself as anything more than a shade.

There was no room for trolls of this kind in Tryst nowadays. By a series of imperceptible shifts and adjustments the tempo of the house had settled to the key and rhythm of the enterprise that sus tained it, but he, as a permanent observer, understood that it was not a theme directed by a single conductor, as was the case with the orchestra beside the Thames. In the stone and timber house the first Conyer had built in a suntrap, it was possible to distinguish in dividual themes, his daughter-in-law’s first violin, the governess’s briskly played second fiddle, the incidental harmony contributed by Avery’s child Deborah, the toot of little Stella’s trumpet, and the steady rattle of Alexander’s drum. And that was how the old man saw and heard it, a muted, pleasing, tuneful domestic symphony, accompanying the slow march of the seasons.

He was well-placed to watch and listen, for his observation post, an upended, sliced-through longboat, converted into a weird-looking summerhouse and planted on the spur above the house, overlooked frontage, paddocks, forecourt, and drive. He could sit here taking it all in whilst pretending to paint, and listen and wonder without embarrassing anyone, often without anyone knowing he was there.

On a day like this, when the sun warmed his old bones he would turn the leaves of his memories like an old, well-loved book, some times probing back half-a-century to a time when a stronger sun had flashed on his helmet as he rode along the banks of the Tonnes, the Tagus, and the Ebro with his light dragoons, or to half-forgotten garrison posts in the Caribbean, or set on the edge of some steaming jungle. But he was not a man to do more than savour the distant past much as a chef might savour a sauce before serving it. Mostly he lived in the present or recent past and that was odd for a man of his age and ripeness. It was probably due to the satisfaction he de rived from his situation, doyen of a household populated by young people and children, a position he had never thought to enjoy until “that boy” took it into his head to go into trade and found a family.

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He missed very little. From his elevated position, with his back resting against the old timbers of the upended whaler, his sharp old eyes could probe the landscape as they had once probed Marshal Soult’s position on a distant ridge. It was here that he had first spotted the impact the Avery child was making upon the household, how deftly that prim Scots lass, Phoebe Fraser, had enlisted her as a deputy, how conscientious Henrietta had become concerning her responsibilities as stepmother and how dependent little Stella had become on the older child now that Deborah had been inte grated into the family. He noticed, too, the transition of his daughter-in-law from girl to woman, sometimes wondering if that silly brush with that gunner had not had too sobering an effect upon her, con verting her, almost overnight it seemed, from a lovable, mischievous hoyden into a matriarch. He would have regretted the transforma tion had he not been there to see her change back when Adam’s horse’s hoofbeats were heard on the gravel, for then the way she ran to greet him recalled his own short-lived happiness with the boy’s mother, so that he thought, with a smile, “I daresay he knew what he was about when he threw her across his saddle bow and brought her home like a prize. She only lives for him and his appearances. The rest of us are so much surplus kit she lugs about.” The children intrigued him. They were already talking about what regiment Alexander would enter at seventeen, and even from here he could spot the boy’s qualifications to pick up the Swann tradition where his father had laid it down.

There was a foretaste of the parade ground strut in the little fellow’s movements from porch to paddock, a touch of the cavalryman’s pride in the way he sat his barrel-chested pony at three. There was even a hint of the barrack room in his hectoring approach to Dawson, the gardener, or Stillman, the handyman, and the stuttering questions he put to them, like a young greenhorn making his first tour of stables.

He had his favourites, of course, among them Stella, who often climbed up here to watch him paint. Stella shared his delight in landscapes under rapid-changing conditions of light and shade, and would sometimes challenge his choice of colours when he was trying to capture the green of April, or the russet of October in the copse opposite. Up here they would converse as equals, an old soldier of seventy-five, and a child of five, sharing the pleasures of the long, slow ride from the moment the first daffodils showed on the pad dock, to a time when the chestnut leaves were brittle and autumn sat over the woods like a patient mother waiting to put her noisy family to bed.

He was very happy, happier he supposed, than he had ever been, so that sometimes, when this kind of mood was upon him, he would wonder a little tremulously GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 501

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how long it would last. Not long for him, of course, for he had already celebrated forty-nine Waterloo anni versaries, but away into a brand-new century for most of them, he hoped, although sometimes this seemed to be taking a great deal for granted in a world that was changing at such a stunning pace.

Perhaps it was the pace that bothered him, even though he was a confirmed potterer who never hurried anywhere, and yet he was conscious of it, as though, out there beyond the heat haze, he could hear the grinding roar of the big city, and sniff its stale, second hand air competing with the lilac, mock-orange and cabbage rose, whose scents reached him from the beds between the house and pad dock.

He could not settle to his painting, deciding it was a mish-mash and rested with his hands on his knees, trying to match the perman ence of what he saw and the sense of impermanence that blurred his thoughts. He had a fancy then that it was a premonition of death, introduced, perhaps, by the invitation he had received that same day to attend the Jubilee dinner at Apsley House, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Waterloo. It might well be this and if it was it ought not to bother him, for very few of the originals were above ground now and it was time he thought about shuffling off to join them. He would be sorry, of course, for no one but a fool would wish to be winkled from this particular billet, even though he some times suspected they had all come to look upon him as a museum exhibit, like the Old Duke’s cocked hat, or the voltigeur’s musket-ball that sent Tommy Picton packing all those years ago. Or per haps his unease stemmed from something more definite, a heart murmur, or the stumble that had recently replaced the careful, spur-conscious tread of earlier old age.

He sat very still, his eye on the truncated fingers of his right hand, and it was then, for the first time in many, many years, that he saw again the fierce, moustached face of the big cuirassier who had lopped them, a florid, clumsy fellow, who had looked amazed when his opponent had shifted sabre from right hand to left and lunged before he could correct the body swing that followed his own gigantic slash. Then, as the sabre-point glanced from the rim of his breastplate and entered his neck, he had fallen away without so much as a cry, while the Colonel had reined in, staring down at his bloodied gauntlet.

The clarity of the memory startled him so much that he fancied he sensed pain in fingers that were not there and he thought, wonderingly, “Now why the devil should I recall that on a summer’s day fifty years later? Damn it, it’s almost as though that poor devil of a Frenchman had been looking for me all this time…” and he glanced round the edge of the summerhouse just to satisfy himself that it GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 502

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was not so, and very reassured he was when, instead of a cavalryman’s frown, he looked straight into the laughing face of little Stella, who had stolen up on him through the ferns as she some times did when she tired of Alexander’s demands on her.

The sight of her, with her chestnut curls cascading over her pina fore, and her little mouth puckered in a smile, steadied him for he could see that she was excited and had something to confide. She said, dancing up and down, “Debbie is coming tomorrow to stay until September! Won’t you just love having her here?” and when he consented that he would, and that he supposed Phoebe the governess would be taking her to meet Deborah’s train, she hopped from one chubby leg to the other, squealing, “Oh,
no,
Granddaddy! You’ve got it wrong.

We’re
going to fetch
her!
On the train! All the way to Folkestone—me and Alex and Mamma and Papa, for Papa will be home in time for tea and it’s all arranged.

Isn’t that wonderful? I mean, not just having Debbie, for lessons, and sharing my room and…and everything, but all of us going to the seaside as well?” Then, stepping back and regarding him speculatively, “Why don’t we ask Papa to take you? He would, I’m sure, and you’ve never been in a train, have you?”

“No,” he said, “I never have, and I’m too old to travel in one now. I like trains, at least I like watching the smoke puffs in the distance, but I wouldn’t feel safe nor comfortable rushed along at that pace. No, my love, I’ll stay here with Phoebe and entertain young George while you’re gone.” Alexander came waddling up the path, just as the bell announcing luncheon clanged from below. “We’re g-g-g-going on a t-t-train,” he announced, “to fetch Debbie away from the nuns,” and the old man chuckled for it was obvious that Alexander regarded a convent as an ogre’s castle, where Deborah was held under duress from time to time.