Give Us This Day (17 page)

“Good heavens, no! Who would buy one?”

“I would. I’d buy this if you’d sell it. It would remind me of growing up here every time I looked at it.”

“Then I’ll give it to you.”

“Oh, no, you won’t. People only value what they pay for. I’ll give you a sovereign for it,” and she took a purse from her dress pocket and extracted the coin.

Miggs said, “But I’d sooner give it to you, Debbie…” But Deborah pressed the coin into her hand and closed her fingers on it.

“At least let me frame it for you. There are plenty of frames in the old Colonel’s cupboard.” Deborah recalled then that the old Colonel, Adam’s father, had spent his old age down here painting, and then she remembered something else that struck her as singular: Henrietta telling her, in an expansive moment, that Margaret had been conceived the night they buried the Colonel in Twyforde Churchyard. Well, maybe it proved something, for who else among the Swanns ever put brush to canvas, and now that she thought about it Margaret was the spit of that French wife of the Colonel’s whose portrait hung in his old room in the east wing.

She had a few minutes before lunch so she went upstairs, moving along the wainscotted gallery to the eastern side of the house, pausing here and there to wonder at all the laughter, loving, and heartache that had gone on between these old walls since that old pirate Conyer built his house on this spot. She remembered a great deal of it herself, since that winter’s day Adam winkled her out of the convent and brought her here to live among his own sons and daughters. What would have happened to her if he hadn’t? Not long after, the place was closed down and the nuns went back to France, and she had never set eyes on her own mother. Adam was, as Henrietta claimed, a very remarkable man.

She moved on into the old Colonel’s room, glancing up at the portrait of Monique d’Auberon, Adam’s Gascon mother, and the old Colonel’s Peninsula and Waterloo trophies. The cavalryman’s busby, with its numerals,
16th Lt. Dragoons.
The field-glasses through which Cornet Swann had looked across the Bidassoa at Marshal Soult. The sabre that killed the cuirassier who lopped two fingers from his hand at Waterloo. Henrietta would never have any of his things moved nor allow the room to be used by any of the children, and Deborah, knowing her so well, could understand why. The old chap had championed her when his son brought her home on the rump of his mare all those years ago, and Henrietta would see him as the sponsor of her marriage and all that emerged from it. It was a pleasant thought and did her credit.

She went out and moved back towards the broad staircase, thinking of all the children she had seen scampering and quarrelling along these waxed oak floors. Stella, Alex, George, and Giles, and the post-accident spread, Joanna, Hugo, Helen, Edward, and Miggs. All but the two youngest were scattered, and although the house was very old and full of ghosts, her recollections of the Swann tribe belonged in that category now, for what did she know of them today apart from scraps of information contained in their occasional letters or comments on the small change of the day? They wrote or said little of their secret hopes, fears, and frustrations, and nothing that singled them out as nine men and women, born in that master bedroom across the gallery. All the same, she experienced the strongest urge to give birth to her own child in this house, for it was a house of high adventure and anyone born in it would be inoculated against dullness and mediocrity. She smiled at the notion and went down to lunch, wondering if Milton would understand why the place exerted such a pull over her at a time like this and whether he would dismiss it as a pregnant woman’s fancy.

2

Deborah’s guesses concerning latterday Swanns had substance. Each of them, in their own way, was an adventurer, with a strong dash of their father’s enterprise and their mother’s tenacity of purpose.

George, at that moment in time, was working against the clock alongside his acolyte, Jock Quirt, a fierce, wholly dedicated man, whose approach to the apparatus of his trade was that of a pilgrim handling fragments of the true cross. They were making rapid progress up here, in the oppressive heat of a Manchester summer. Yet the ten months left to them, before Adam’s ultimatum expired, did not seem long enough to surmount so many hurdles. Once embarked on a project like this there was no knowing how many blind alleys one had to explore for a means to increase power while stripping down overall weight, and grappling with repetitive problems like overheating, friction, warped metals, and technical anticipation of the fearful shaking and jolting inseparable from the passage of a vehicle over roads that had served the coaching era. There was a new mountain to be climbed each day and a desert of speculation crossed after dark, so that he was now very glad indeed that Adam had persuaded him to take Gisela but leave the children behind. Released from them, she could play a woman’s part in the undertaking, appearing at regular intervals with hot food and drink and in between running his errands to every forge and workshop in the city.

It was thus a new Gisela he came to terms with up here, a person as resolved as himself to assemble something practical from this jumble of rods, bolts, brackets, wheels, and cannisters, and when, after a twelve-hour stint, he was ready to peel off his filthy overalls and take a bath, she was always there, even-tempered and giving, so that one night, holding her in his arms, he was moved to say, “I must have been mad to take you for granted all these years…” And she replied, in her modest way, “Hush, George. A man has his work, and his own way of going about it, and I’m a part of it now. It’s something I’ve always hoped to be since the time Grandfather Max found you a purpose… Sleep now.” So he had slept, dreaming of a time when they were skylarking beside the Danube, and he had isolated her from her fun-loving sisters, put his arms about her, and decided that here was a woman who could reveal to him his inner self and nurse such creativity as he had inherited from that ageing Titan beside the Thames.

* * *

Thousands of miles east of George Swann’s North Country workshop, Alexander Swann, who after the Jubilee had been posted to India, wrestled with frustrations that were akin to those of his brother, inasmuch as they were concerned, in the main, with marketing a piece of hardware to his generation. But perhaps Alex’s task was the more formidable, for his circle of activity was that much narrower, one in which prejudice and ridicule were the norm.

For years now, urged on by his wife Lydia, daughter of a military buffoon, Alex had been hard at work convincing his masters that increased fire-power was the only guarantee to success in confrontation with the enemy—with any enemy, be he savage, armed with sword and spear, or with a western rival, who was also busy perfecting his own means of aggression.

Specialising in small-arms, particularly the new Maxim gun adopted by the British army after Alex himself had fired the first prototype on the Wimbledon ranges, he had never ceased to advocate the multiplication of the quota of two guns per battalion, arguing that outmoded weapons like the lance and sword, and the use of cavalry as anything other than reconnaissance troops, were as archaic as Hannibal’s elephants once the Prussians had annihilated the Painted Emperor’s legions at Sedan in 1870.

That was already twenty-seven years ago, but so few professionals above the rank of major appeared to have learned the lesson inherent in the arrival of the breech-loading rifle. They continued, confound their sluggish wits, to think in terms of headlong charges against infantry equipped to mow them down like so many partridges, and most of them did not even think as far as that, seeing an army career as an eternal round of polo matches, pig-sticking forays, and the maintenance of a military etiquette that belonged to the time of the Black Prince. Sometimes it was like battering one’s head against a wall or journeying on through a morass of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, and he was already aware that his unquenchable enthusiasm was regarded as a bore in the messes.

Yet he persisted, not only because he was his father’s son but because, at his elbow throughout all those years of sapping and mining, was the counsel of his wife, Lydia, she who had rescued him from permanent involvement in among those self-same regimental pigstickers. Year after year he persisted, hawking his hardware and his theories from Africa to India, to Egypt and back again, until regimental wags found a derisive soubriquet for him: “The Barker,” the chap who, due to a touch of the sun maybe, had evolved into a travelling salesman trudging from fair to fair with a packload of nostrums and cure-alls on his back. Yet all the time Lydia continued to sustain him, sometimes locating an eccentric colonel, or a major-general, who would at least listen to him, but more often counselling patience with her prophecy that one day he would be seen to be right and could make history as the unsung saviour of the Empire.

* * *

Stella Fawcett, once Stella Swann, was untroubled by opposition. In her own tiny world, bounded by the frontiers of a three-hundred-acre Kentish farm, the word “Mother” (as everybody thought of Stella now) was holy writ. Denzil, titular master of Dewponds, had deferred to her ever since he had installed her as mistress of the farm she had helped him to rebuild and everybody else—the straggle of children, the farmhands, and even the wholesalers who bought Fawcett crops—took their cue from him, so that it became a matter of “We’ll see what Mother has to say about it,” or “Go to Mother and get your orders from her unless you want to do it all over again.”

She was thirty-seven now, as broad in the beam as one of her own butter churns, and with massive freckled arms that could, so they declared, have boxed the ears of a fairground prize-fighter, yet she was not all brawn and maternal majesty. Under her direction, Dewponds, almost alone among local farms, had ridden out the agricultural depression of the early ‘nineties, and the Fawcetts, it was rumoured, had money in the bank as well as the best strain of beef cattle in the Weald. For Stella, too, was her father’s daughter, although she had been late to discover as much and came near to foundering at the time of her marriage to a dissolute wastrel over the Sussex border. Denzil it had been who rescued her from that impasse, and when her marriage was annulled, and Dewponds had been rebuilt brick by brick by the pair of them, he had married her, or, as village gossips preferred, Stella Swann had married him, carrying him off like a prize turnip and using him to sire a spread of blue-eyed children, between their stints of labour on the farm.

Did she ever think, as she waddled between farm-kitchen and henyard, of her brief, inglorious spell as the Honourable Lady Moncton-Price, in a ratty old country seat some twenty miles from here? Did she ever remember being spied upon through a knot-hole by a homosexual husband and his lover? Had she completely erased from her memory that climactic night when old MonctonPrice, her father-in-law, had prodded and pinched her as though she was a horse at a fair, and gone on to propose that she live on as his doxy while maintaining the farce of a marriage with his son? If she did she gave no sign of it, but perhaps the subconscious memory of these terrible humiliations prompted her outward respect for Denzil and the fact that, at intervals of less than two years, she presented him with a lusty son or a rosy-cheeked daughter. Possibly she still saw him as the bearer of that storm-lantern under the lambing copse that had been her beacon light the night she fled from the Moncton-Prices in a tearing southwesterly. It may have been so, but it is open to question. Strong in Swann obstinacy and will power, she was woefully deficient in Swann imagination.

* * *

Far to the northwest, across the breadth of the shires, the mountains, and eighty miles of Irish Sea, Joanna Coles,
née
Joanna Swann, was living in much more ease and comfort than her older sister. Joanna was an essentially lazy woman, who needed a definite stimulus to deflect her thoughts from clothes, race-meetings, fox-hunting, and her husband’s prospects of promotion in the Swann hierarchy. For it was generally assumed the Irish branch was a managerial proving ground.

Clinton, who shared her enthusiasm for race-meetings, had taken her along to the Curragh that afternoon, and she was not much surprised when he excused himself on the grounds of placing a bet on the three-thirty but went instead to pay his respects to the handsome Deirdre Donnelly, this season’s toast of Dublin. Joanna did not resent his devotion. She had long ago taken the measure of Clint Coles (still referred to as “Jack-o’-Lantern” by her father, on account of the elopement nine years before), confident that he was unlikely to compromise himself with a woman like Mrs. Donnelly. For one thing, she was much sought after, and Clint was too sure of himself to compete for favours. For another, she was the wife of one of his best customers, and Clint had his eye on the main chance over here where the branch had thrived under his management.

It was true that Clinton, left to himself, could be dangerously impulsive, and she should know this better than anyone, but Joanna reasoned that impulsive men kept on a tight rein were those most likely to bolt, even if they waited years to do it, and over here it was generally accepted that husbands were free to flirt at all sporting assemblies. Wives, too, if opportunity came their way.

There was no harm, however, in reminding him that she was not stupid and had not been taken in by that excuse for leaving the enclosure. So, after making sure there was no man of her acquaintance in the stand whom she could use as a light foil against Deirdre Donnelly, she scrawled a note on a page of her pocket-book, and tipped a steward to give it to Mr. Clinton Coles on his return. The note told him she could be reclaimed in the mixed refreshment buffet. It would bring him there at a run, she calculated, for although Dublin etiquette was more relaxed than across the water, it was unusual for ladies to enter either of the buffets unescorted.

On the way through, she passed a cheval-glass and caught a glimpse of her reflection, finding it moderately pleasing for a woman of thirty, eight years married and the mother of three children. Her mother had always declared her the flower of the flock as regards looks and elegance, and Joanna noted with satisfaction that her figure had not suffered as a result of her last pregnancy. She did not look more than twenty-five and her best feature, a wealth of soft tawny hair, carefully arranged under a wide picture hat, was as arresting as it had always been. Her complexion was good, too, for the Irish climate suited it, and she gave herself a little nod of encouragement before passing into the pavilion and looking round for a waiter to bring her tea.